“Pride Goeth Before The Shutdown”: The “Special Role” Of Boehner And The Screaming Tykes
It’s remarkable how much the current crop of House Republican radicals seems bent on repeating the mistakes of their Gingrichian forebears. First, of course, they shut down the government. The ostensible reason was implacable opposition to Obamacare in the name of “ the American people” (even if the American people actually support neither rolling back the Affordable Care Act nor shutting down the government), but as the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman detailed Saturday, that message has gotten muddled in a GOP talking points funhouse mirror where conservatives are suddenly defenders of government and seekers of compromise.
But the most plausible reason enunciated to this point – now openly verbalized by at least two Republican House members – also happens to be the most offensive: pride.
Florida GOP Rep. Dennis Ross told Weisman that the shutdown is imperiling the “significant gains” conservatives have made on cutting spending because – wait for it – “there’s no connection now between the shutdown and the funding of Obamacare.” So what’s going on then? “I think now it’s a lot about pride,” said Ross, a tea party conservative who has elsewhere acknowledged that the GOP has already “lost the [continuing resolution] battle.”
Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman, another denizen of the conservative fringe, told the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker that “we’re not going to be disrespected. … We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
Side note to Congressman Stutzman: While it’s often said “respect must be earned,” that’s actually not the case in Washington. Inside the beltway titles and offices get their due respect – disrespect must be earned. And there’s no surer way to do that than shutting down the government and refusing to reopen it on the grounds that “we have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
In any case, Stutzman later issued a statement trying to walk back his comment, saying that he had “carelessly misrepresented the ongoing budget debate.” But if he was careless it was only in the sense of committing the classic Washington gaffe: telling the truth. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote on Thursday:
Stutzman is right. The fight over the shutdown has become unmoored from any particular policy demands the GOP believes it can secure. It’s become an issue of pride and politics. At this point, Republicans simply need something so they can tell themselves, and their base, that they didn’t lose. They don’t know what that something is, exactly. But it needs to be something.
Decoupled from Obamacare, the shutdown has become about soothing the flustered tea party wing of the GOP. These pols have adopted a kindergarten-esque view of legislating: they deserve some sort of reward just because they tried really hard and because they really, really want it. The government’s been shut down? It’s all good because, in the memorable words of Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time, because we see we are starting to win this dialogue on a national level.” (Given the initial polling of the shutdown, she seems to have a unique definition of winning.)
As I noted yesterday, the Times reported that Boehner and his team know that they’ve got an untenable position but are determined to drag the showdown on long enough wrap the debt ceiling fight into it. They want to minimize the number of tantrums the caucus’s conservative fringe throws over its inability to win on either of its quixotic quests.
This view of shutting down the federal government as some sort of tea party therapy strategy brings us back to the ghosts of 1995. One of the turning points of the first government shutdown came when the New York Daily News (a corporate cousin, as both it and U.S. News & World Report are owned by Mort Zuckerman) published a famous front page portraying then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich as a cry-baby. Gingrich had complained to reporters about feeling slighted after he had been made to sit at the back of Air Force One and exit through the rear door when he flew back with President Clinton from the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “This is petty,” Gingrich said. “I’m going to say up front it’s petty, but I think it’s human.” The public got the basic pettiness of bringing the work of governance to halt over personal pride.
John Boehner, with his endearing crying jags and carefully timed minor profanities isn’t so stupid as to articulate the reasons for shutting the government down in terms of personal or movement pride. But if the Daily News recycles its famous front page some time in the next few days it won’t be a caricature of one giant crybaby but instead one of a hapless Boehner surrounded by dozens of screaming tykes. How long will it be before more members of the tea party fringe, empowered by their unshakable belief in their own special role of spokesperson for “the American people,” follow the lead of Stutzman and Ross?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 6, 2013
“Plan Beats No Plan”: In This Clash, Democrats Deserve The Victory
“Plan beats no plan.”
That was Tim Geithner’s political axiom in internal White House debates as the president’s team worked to mend the financial meltdown. Today his slogan does duty nicely as a preview of the public’s judgment on the shocking Republican choice to shut down the government over Obamacare.
Communications strategy in politics generally involves people in power crafting messages for less knowledgeable people (the press) to transmit to even less knowledgeable people (voters). (If you doubt this, have a look at the brilliant man-on-the-street segment Jimmy Kimmel did asking people whether they prefer “Obamacare” or “The Affordable Care Act.”). The idea in these messaging wars is to convey “values” that resonate with the public and trump your opponent’s.
Consider the current showdown in this context. President Obama championed a plan through which government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of low- and middle-income Americans buy decent private health coverage. As can never be said often enough, Obama’s plan also happens to have been based on a sensible Republican design that Mitt Romney enacted successfully in Massachusetts.
Republicans have no plan — literally, nothing serious whatsoever — to help more than a handful of the roughly 50 million uninsured Americans get such coverage. Yes, the GOP offers little talking points around the edges so that its team has something to say. But all of its “ideas” — from group purchasing for small business to buying coverage across state lines — are pseudo-plans. Nothing the Republican leadership has offered reaches more than 3 million people.
Once you understand this, you understand how deeply disingenuous Republican messaging has been. House Speaker John Boehner delivered a sound bite Monday night: “ We think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare .” That’s why the GOP wouldn’t budge.
Is Boehner kidding? Is that all they have? By “fairness” Boehner means the law’s individual mandate should be delayed for a year, just like the employer mandate has been put off. To save people from “the harms” of Obamacare, in Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) irritating collegiate debate lingo. Democrats are on the side of big business, you see, while the GOP is fighting for the little guy.
Now, to say that this message is an insult to our intelligence isn’t the end of the discussion, because no one ever lost a political fight by insulting the American public’s intelligence.
But that Republicans are staking the shutdown on this thin gruel is revealing. They’re not saying, “we have a better plan to help Americans achieve health security.” They can’t say that, because the president already enacted the Republican plan. Instead, they’re ginning up a phony “fairness” issue and trying to make it sound real.
But the employer mandate is a sideshow in Obamacare. It’s there for one reason: to keep employer money in the game to reduce the cost on public budgets of extending health-care coverage. Ending the employer role in health-care coverage and shifting these costs to public ledgers would be economically rational — better both for citizens and for businesses. Politically, however, the White House judged this to be untenable.
So let’s stipulate that over time the employer mandate should be scrapped. The individual mandate, by contrast — the “unfairness” the GOP now bemoans — is essential. As conservatives taught us via Romneycare, you can’t move toward universal coverage with private health-insurance plans without requiring everyone to be in the insurance pool (and also without subsidizing folks who need help buying coverage). Without a mandate and subsidies, younger, poorer and healthier folks opt out, making rates spiral. This is Insurance 101.
Trying to equate these mandates as a “fairness” issue is to assume the press and the public are idiots. Crafting a message that works only if people are idiots is a grim way to do politics — and deeply cynical. Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cynical political tactics, but to use cynicism in the service of denying basic health security to millions is morally unattractive, to put it mildly. Not something you want to tell the kids about.
“What did you do today, Daddy?” asks the son of one of these House Republicans in my imagination.
‘Hey, Junior, I twisted truth and logic to make sure millions of poor American workers can still go broke if someone in their family gets seriously ill. . . . Junior, why are you looking at me like that?”
John Boehner may look tanned and rested, but the suave speaker has a Dorian Gray problem. Somewhere in the attic, his likeness in a painting is rotting.
There’s a wonderful poster from World War II in which Churchill exhorts British citizens to “Deserve Victory.”
In this clash, Democrats do.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 2, 2013
“An Insane Defense Of GOP Radical Tactics”: We Have To Do This Because Of The Tea Party
When the it comes to the government shutdown, Democrats are all on the same page — they’ve grudgingly accepted extremely low spending levels; they’re not making any new or extraneous demands; and they see no need to take Americans’ health care benefits away to satisfy a bizarre far-right crusade.
Are Republicans equally unified? Not so much. A fair number of House Republicans see this tantrum as pointless and are ready to end this fiasco; quite a few Senate Republicans have no idea what party leaders are thinking; and no one in the party has any sense at this point of what GOP officials are supposed to do next.
And then there are Republican donors, some of whom are wondering why they should write checks to reward these policymakers. David Freedlander reported yesterday on a recent fundraising event in New York, where Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, fielded questions from wealthy supporters.
Why, they asked, did the GOP seem so in the thrall of its most extremist wing? The donors, banker types who occupy the upper reaches of Wall Street’s towers, couldn’t understand why the Republican Party — their party — seemed close to threatening the nation with a government shutdown, never mind a default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised later this month.
“Listen,” Walden said, according to several people present. “We have to do this because of the Tea Party. If we don’t, these guys are going to get primaried and they are going to lose their primary.”
Remember, this wasn’t a Democrat condemning the Republican Party for having been hijacked by extremists; this was a Republican leader offering a defense for his party’s radical tactics.
GOP lawmakers could be responsible, keep the government open, and tell Tea Partiers to grow up, but Republican members of Congress are too afraid of primaries to do the right thing. So, they allow themselves to be pushed around.
The problem, of course, is there’s a tipping point at which less-unhinged Republican voters decide they’ve seen enough and walk away. Indeed, in this case, Walden’s explanation hasn’t won over skeptical donors at all.
Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based businessman who was a major donor to both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, told the Daily Beast, “I am not writing a check to anyone. That is not working for the American people.” Munr Kazmir, a New Jersey-based businessman and major donor to George W. Bush, added, “I have raised a lot of money, but I am not raising any more for House candidates. I am angry. I am embarrassed to be a Republican sometimes, I tell you.”
For what it’s worth, there’s occasional talk of a moderate GOP rebellion.
As the shutdown stretches on, a bloc of moderate House Republicans could be the key to reopening government.
On Wednesday, Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, held meetings with groups of “pragmatist” lawmakers — as Michael G. Grimm, R-N.Y., described them — who want to pass a policy-rider-free continuing resolution and end the government shutdown as soon as possible. […]
It isn’t fast enough for Rep. Peter T. King of New York, who was one of the most vocal House Republicans criticizing the party’s strategy as the government headed to a shutdown.King wasn’t invited to any of Boehner’s moderate meetings Wednesday, so he held his own. King said he met in his office with roughly 10 members who support a clean CR, and they discussed “what the strategy would be.”
It sounds nice, I suppose, but we appear to be talking about less than 5% of the House Republican caucus, and so far, they’ve demonstrated a complete inability to influence the debate in any way.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
“The GOP Insanity Is Not Temporary”: A Radical Vision For America That Goes From Here To Way Back Then
A lot of the talk from progressives (and I plead guilty to doing this myself on occasion) about the government shutdown and/or the impending possibility of a debt default suggests House Republicans are suffering from some sort of temporary insanity, or are indulging some sort of temporary temper tantrum by a faction they cannot ignore but can outlast. This habit flows from the broader sense that the Tea Party movement is some sort of temporary phenomenon–a “fever,” as the president famously put it–that will go away to be replaced by good, stolid, “moderate” conservatism sooner rather than later. You see it in the high hosannas raised every time yet another poll shows the percentage of voters identifying with the Tea Party–as opposed to the Republican Party that has largely internalized Tea Party policies and strategies–declining.
This attitude is perfectly understandable, but risks a major misunderstanding of what conservatives are up to at any given moment. Yes, many of them have a remarkably radical vision for America all right, which involves bringing back the idyllic government of the Coolidge administration and patriarchal culture of the Eisenhower administration. But they are pursuing an entirely rational if risky strategy for getting from here to way back there, based on three overlapping perspectives that are reasonably common in the conservative commentariat:
1) Radicalism on spending is the hand voters have dealt the GOP. The “defunding Obamacare” strategy has always been based on the leverage Republicans had after 2012 in maintaining control of just one congressional chamber. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare or enact the Ryan Budget, but they could refuse to fund the Obama Era welfare state, which meant threatening a government shutdown or a debt default. Obamacare was the natural target for this strategic brinkmanship since it polled worse than, say, Medicare or food stamps.
2) Resisting a new entitlement is easier and more effective than rolling back an established entitlement. For all the conservative talk about the hatred Americans feel for Obamacare, there is a widespread fear on the Right that once the law is in place for a few years, it will become part of the landscape, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the Rx drug prescription before them. And this fear coincides with the “tipping point” argument that the Welfare State is now ensnaring so many Americans that “takers” are outnumbering “makers,” and will defend their theft of “maker” resources fiercely at the polls.
3) In divided government, implacable unity is the winning formula. There is an intense belief among conservatives that Republican back-stabbing–RINOism!–and tactical surrender to liberals explains every defeat for the Right going back for decades. Add in the inevitable “war of nerves” that characterizes politics in an era of divided government, and the conviction that red-state Democrats will side with Republicans if pushed to the wall, and you have an argument against compromise of any sort, at any price.
You can see how these three factors reinforce each other in Ted Cruz’s basic “defund Obamacare” rap as expressed back in August in an interview with the Daily Caller:
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, the most important check we have on an overreaching executive. Now is the best chance we have to exercise this power in order to defund Obamacare. It can be done as part of passing the Continuing Resolution (CR) — a piece of legislation that funds the government and must be renewed by September 30th.
The Continuing Resolution gives us real leverage to defund Obamacare. Fighting this fight won’t be easy, but it’s now or never. President Obama’s strategy is simple: on January 1, the subsidies kick in. President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound. That’s why the administration announced that it won’t enforce eligibility requirements-essentially encouraging fraud and “liar loans”-because that way the most people possible will get addicted to the sugar.
To stop that from happening, the House should pass a new Continuing Resolution to fund the entire federal government except Obamacare. The House should include a rider in that bill that explicitly prohibits any federal dollars – discretionary and mandatory – from being spent on it. Republicans control the House, and have already voted some 40 times to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this.
Then the bill comes to the Senate. Republicans need just 41 votes to prevent Democrats from passing legislation that funds Obamacare – 45 Republicans in the Senate have already voted to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this also.
At that point, we simply have to continue to stand together and not blink. If Republicans are truly against Obamacare, they will not vote to fund it.
Cruz obviously miscalculated that Senate Republicans would block any vote on a continuing resolution that “funded Obamacare,” but his argument still stands that the side that doesn’t “blink” will ultimately win; that it’s now or never for killing Obamacare; and that exploiting the House veto power over spending and debt limit increases is the one point of leverage that Obama’s re-election did not eliminate.
So Cruz’s revolt, into which John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have been dragged because they can’t pass any bill opposed by Democrats without the support of conservatives who agree with his approach, wasn’t some adolescent outburst that will pass like a moment of hormonal rage, but a consistent strategy for using limited leverage on behalf on an extremist agenda. If it’s “insane,” the insanity is not temporary, and won’t just go away.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2013
“Government Shutdown Deja Vu”: House Republicans Forgot The Lessons Of The Clinton Shutdowns
Regardless of what you think of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), the Republican effort to derail it through the government shutdown currently underway is miserably poor politics and even worse public relations.
I tried to resist writing about this topic because the partisans are hopelessly locked into their positions and my opinion on the law isn’t of any value to anyone other than my dog, who hangs on my every word. But communications is my business, and I happen to have been a young, Republican congressional chief of staff during the two shutdowns of 1995, and what I see today is worse than what happened then.
The shutdowns of ’95 were part of a budget fight between cocky new Republican majorities in both the House and Senate and a stumbling Democratic president who was about to begin his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Hardly anyone today remembers that the issue then was about getting the president to agree to a plan to balance the budget over the next seven years. In ’95, Newt Gingrich was the first Republican Speaker of the House in half a century, and he had just led a 100-day legislative assault on business as usual that resulted in a series of popular reforms to make government smaller, more responsive and transparent known as the “Contract with America.”
That summer, Republicans were looking for ways to keep the ball rolling and the prospect of using a government shutdown as a cudgel in this struggle between the legislative and executive branches was already on the table. If the government shuts down, Gingrich told Time magazine, President Clinton “can run the parts of the government that are left, or he can run no government. Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?”
By November, the freshmen Republicans in the House were practically chanting “shut it down” in the hallways. Many of them thought this would be popular back home, almost to the degree that the Contract had been.
First came a brief shutdown for a few days in November. And then, when negotiations with the White House broke down, came a shutdown that began on December 15 and which lasted for 21 days.
Guess what happened? People stopped talking about the need for a plan to balance the budget and began talking about all the government services they couldn’t get. Basic services halted. Fears arose about Social Security checks not going out and missing paychecks to members of the military. Thousands of federal workers were forced on furlough days before Christmas.
Republicans had made a fundamental political error – we shifted the debate from the topic on which we really wanted victory (balancing the budget) to one that not only was off-topic, but reminded people that there actually is a lot about government that they like, want and need. Oh, and we scared and hurt a lot people whose confidence and support we were trying to win.
Does this sound familiar?
Here in Central Florida, the front page of my local newspaper features the story of a couple who have been planning a wedding at the Jefferson Memorial for months. Now their plans are in jeopardy. That’s not a story about health care; it’s a story about how politicians are screwing up somebody’s nice event.
A few weeks after the shutdown ended in January 1996, President Clinton masterfully exploited the nation’s mood in his State of the Union Address. Near the end of the speech, standing in the well of the House of Representatives, Clinton turned toward the first lady’s balcony in a move that has been used by every president since Ronald Reagan, and introduced a special guest:
I want to say a special word now to those who work for our federal government. Today our federal government is 200,000 employees smaller than it was the day I took office as President. (Applause.) Our federal government today is the smallest it has been in 30 years, and it’s getting smaller every day. Most of our fellow Americans probably don’t know that. And there’s a good reason — a good reason: The remaining federal work force is composed of hard-working Americans who are now working harder and working smarter than ever before to make sure the quality of our services does not decline. (Applause.)
I’d like to give you one example. His name is Richard Dean. He’s a 49 year-old Vietnam veteran who’s worked for the Social Security Administration for 22 years now. Last year he was hard at work in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City when the blast killed 169 people and brought the rubble down all around him. He reentered that building four times. He saved the lives of three women. He’s here with us this evening, and I want to recognize Richard and applaud both his public service and his extraordinary personal heroism. (Applause.)
But Richard Dean’s story doesn’t end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay.
On behalf of Richard Dean and his family, and all the other people who are out there working every day doing a good job for the American people, I challenge all of you in this Chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again. (Applause.)
Clinton’s State of the Union address ended all talk among Republicans that the shutdowns had been successful.
Around this time, Gingrich was fond of calling for dramatic change by citing the saying that one of the definitions of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
What are we to make of this situation now?
By: Keith Lee Rupp, U. S. News and World Report, October 2, 2013
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