“Let’s Impeach Congress”: Failure To Pay Debt Is ‘Unconstitutional’
In what has become an annoying and unnecessary annual ritual, Congressional Republicans and the White House have staked out their political ground as we approach this year’s Season of the Witch—the time when any remaining shred of reason in government is retired in favor of political posturing over the debt ceiling.
Appearing this morning on ABC’s “This Week”, Obama made clear that he has no interest whatsoever in cooperating with Speaker John Boehner’s demand for budget cuts in trade for House GOPers permitting the government to pay the debts it has already incurred.
Speaking in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, the President stated:
“Never in history have we used just making sure that the U.S. government is paying its bills as a lever to radically cut government at the kind of scale that they’re talking about,” he said. “It’s never happened before. There’ve been negotiations around the corners, because nobody had ever presumed that you’d actually threaten the United States to default.”
Speaker Boehner would beg to differ, noting earlier this week—
“For decades, the White House, the Congress have used the debt limit to find bipartisan solutions on the deficit and the debt,” Boehner said. “So President Obama is going to have to deal with this as well.”
While there may be a small element of truth in Boehner’s words regarding the use of the annual debt ceiling as a tool to manage deficit and debt in previous days, that doesn’t mean that many participants in either the Congress or the Administration, prior to 2011, have ever viewed such an effort as a legitimate means of negotiating the annual budget nor perceived the threat of default as something to be followed through upon.
Nor does it mean that prior occupants of the White House ever found the threat of default to be a particularly useful exercise.
Indeed, were we to go back to President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s perspective on such an action, we find that The Gipper didn’t much care for the approach—
“Unfortunately, Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veteran’s benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in the financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility—two things that set us apart from much of the world.”
Despite these words offered up by Ronald Reagan—the golden calf worshipped by true-believing Republicans everywhere—the Congressional Republicans appear to, once again, hope that the American public will forget—or simply fail to grasp—that it was Congress who authorized the very expenditures that now require a raise in the debt ceiling if these bills are to be paid.
Obama also offered one more, rather tantalizing thought in his Stephanopoulos interview when he noted that Congress’ constant efforts to use the the debt ceiling as leverage “changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely.”
Could the President be telegraphing that he may now be willing to use Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling without Congress in the event of an unfortunate vote—something that Obama has previously been unwilling to do?
The fact that Congress, including House Republicans, authorized these expenditures is of no consequence to those who seek to reap what they perceive as the political benefits of agreeing to spend on items that the public wants and then shift the blame onto the White House every year when it comes time to pay for Congress’ actions.
And while Boehner takes liberties with history in an effort to make himself look tough—a rather comical effort given that exactly nobody believes that the Speaker is in control of much of anything these days—what is genuinely scary is the fact that it is Speaker Boehner who passes for “reasonable’ among today’s House Republicans.
Increasingly, the House of Representatives is under the control of the extremists who are pushing hard to both default on the debt and shut down the entire government if Obama refuses to cave to their desire to defund the President’s landmark legislation, Obamacare.
Still worse, these extremists continue to hold a grudge over the previous failures to shut down the government and default on our obligations at debt ceiling time and are just itching to make it happen this year.
While I would truly enjoy the opportunity to egg these people on in the firm belief that a government shut-down at the hands of Republican extremists could be just the thing to rid ourselves of this scourge once and for all, I admit that some restraint is required when considering who would be left to suffer the consequences.
What would a government shutdown mean to Americans?
As it happens, we’ve had some experience with this so let’s take a look at what happened when the House Republicans shut down the government in 1995-96:
- More than 400,000 veterans saw their disability benefits and pension claims delayed.
- Educational benefits were delayed for 170,000 veterans
- Instead of providing benefits to veterans, a number of VA hospitals were forced to set up food banks for their employees who were going without pay checks.
- Approximately $3 billion in U.S. exports couldn’t leave the country because the Commerce Department couldn’t issue export licenses.
- For the first time in the federal unemployment program’s 60-year history, six states ran out of federal funds to pay unemployment benefits.
- Processing and deportation of illegal immigrants stopped, and employers were unable to verify job applicants’ immigration status.
- 10,000 new Medicare applications and 212,000 Social Security requests were delayed.
- Tens of thousands of Americans could not purchase a home because the Federal Housing Administration was unable to insure single family home loans.
- EPA’s enforcement activities were stopped and toxic waste clean-up at more than 600 sites slowed or came to a halt.
- 95% of workplace safety activities were halted.
- The Department of Interior stopped inspecting oil and gas well on public lands.
- 760,000 American workers were either furloughed or worked without pay.
- 200,000 U.S. applications for passports went unprocessed.
It stretches the imagination to understand how anyone could view such an action as helpful at a time when the American economy is struggling to recover and when recent wars have left so many veterans in need of the benefits that would stop flowing as a result of a shut-down.
Thus, while the idea of “teaching Obama a lesson” or doing something drastic to get the national debt under control may appeal to many, my suggestion would be that you familiarize yourself with who will directly suffer as a result of your grand plans. If trashing the economy, denying veterans their benefits and slowing down social security payments to your parents works for you, knock yourself out.
If not, you might consider letting your representatives know that you are not in favor of such a ridiculous effort to resolve our problems.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 15, 2013
“Delusional, Savvy Or Selfish?: The House GOP Is About To Crack Up
Lots of people think John Boehner has lost control of the House Republican caucus. Apparently John Boehner does, too.
On Wednesday, the speaker and his lieutenants had to stage yet another embarrassing retreat—this time, by postponing a vote on a “continuing resolution” that would fund government operations past September 30, when the current CR expires. Figuring out a way to pass such a bill has been one of Boehner’s biggest challenges for the last few weeks. And primarily that’s because the Republican Party’s right wing insists on linking a CR to Obamacare. Both in the House and in the Senate, Tea Party Republicans and their allies want the president’s health care law off the books or, at the very least, delayed and defunded. If they don’t get their way, they say, they won’t vote for any CR—even if that means the federal government shuts down.
Most members of the Republican establishment think this strategy is nuts. Senate Democrats would never agree to undermine Obamacare, they note. And even if a few Senate Democrats went along, enough to get such a measure through the chamber, President Obama would never sign such a bill. It’s his signature accomplishment and, for liberals, the biggest achievement since the Great Society. The shutdown that ensued would be bad for the country and, if the polls are right, most voters would blame the Republicans.
As of a few days ago, House leadership thought they’d come up with a solution: They’d pass a CR and include a provision to defund or delay Obamacare, but in a way that allowed the Senate to remove the Obamacare provision. The president would get a “clean” CR to sign, while congressional Republicans could tell their constituents and supporters they’d voted to get rid of Obamacare. Just to sweeten the deal, House leaders made sure the new CR would lock in lower levels of discretionary spending while bumping up defense spending—a position Obama and the Democrats oppose, but probably not enough to block such a proposal. House leaders also promised to stage a real, no-surrender fight on Obamacare later in October, when the federal government would need new authority to keep borrowing money.
Alas, the ploy failed—miserably. Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action, called the leadership plan a “legislative gimmick” and warned, darkly, “it is our expectation that no conservative in Congress will try to deceive their constituents by going along with this cynical ploy.” Over in the Senate, Texas Republican and conservative agitator Ted Cruz was equally hostile to the idea: “If House Republicans go along with this strategy, they will be complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare.”
House Republican leadership didn’t appreciate the pressure, particularly from their Senate counterparts. And they didn’t hide their dismay to reporters. “They’re screwing us,” a House Republican aide told Burgess Everett of Politico. Another aide responded to an inquiry from Kate Nocera, of Buzzfeed, with a video of Will Ferrell talking about “crazy pills.” Yet another Republican staffer suggested to Roll Call‘s Matt Fuller that “Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals.”
Neanderthals? Yes. Irrelevant? Not really. By Wednesday morning, according to National Review‘s Jonathan Strong, Boehner and his colleagues had tallied just 200 “yes” votes in their internal counts. With House Democrats refusing to support a plan with such low spending levles, the leaders had no quick and easy way to get 217. And while aides assured reporters that the leadership just needed more time, an anecdote from Politico‘s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan suggests Boehner was less confident:
A reporter asked [Boehner] whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
He’s probably right. And it makes you wonder why the right wing is making Boehner’s life so difficult. Their explicit goal, getting rid of Obamacare, would seem to be out of reach. The political cost of pursuing that goal would seem to be high. Why keep at it?
Three theories come quickly to mind:
They are delusional. If you sincerely believe Obamacare will bankrupt the country, violate personal liberty, raise costs or ruin insurance for most Americans, and generally destroy American health care, then it’s easy to believe that it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country demands repeal—forcing both Senate Democrats and the president to go along. It’s particularly easy to believe this if you live in the right-wing media bubble, where all of the reports about Obamacare focus on the law’s shortcomings and failures—insurance premiums going up, people losing coverage, part-time workers losing hours, and so on.
These stories offer a distorted picture of reality. While some are true, most are exaggerated and some are flat-out false. For the vast majority of people, Obamacare will change very little; and among those most directly affected, the presently uninsured and those who buy coverage on their own, there are going to be many more winners than losers. But you’d never know that if your primary sources of information are Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
They are savvy. Maybe conservatives realize they can’t dislodge Obamacare and are simply hoping for leverage. At some point, Congress is going to pass a CR. And, at some point, Congress is going to raise the debt ceiling. Perhaps the Tea Party wing figures that, by holding out until the last possible minute, they increase the likelihood the final deal for each debate is more to their liking. Most likely, as Brian Beutler has explained at Salon, that would mean agreements that cut non-defense spending and increases defense spending more than Democrats would like.
Of course, the strategy could backfire. The more Boehner must rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill, the more concessions on spending he must make. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the rest of the Democratic leadership have made that very clear. But if you’re a Tea Party Republican, maybe you take your chances, figuring that even less extreme members of your caucus won’t support bills that tilt too far toward the Democrats—and Boehner won’t pass a bill without at least some Republican support.
They are selfish. Fiscal extortion may be bad for the Republican brand and it is certainly bad for the country. But is it bad for the likes of Ted Cruz and Heritage Action? I’m not so sure.
Every time they force leadership to change plans, they appear more powerful. Every time they rant about Obamacare, their supporters get more excited. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle—and also, I imagine, a profitable one. If you have watched cable television news lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen some of the anti-Obamacare ads. They’re everywhere. These ads don’t simply spread conservative propaganda; they also gin up the base. It’s no coincidence that many of the advertisements—a majority of them, as best as I can tell—end not with a plea to call your congressman but with an appeal for donations.
If you’re one of the people producing these advertisements, it’s really a no-lose proposition. No matter what eventually happens with the budget and Obamacare, you get more visibility and more money. The rest of your party may come to hate you. (Note the recent anonymous quotes describing these groups as “Neanderthals.”) And if things get out of hand, the country could really suffer. But none of that diminishes your standing with the base. If anything, it will probably enhance it.
Which theory best explains the right’s behavior? Who knows. Probably all three have some truth. But the end result is the same. Conservatives seem determined to provoke a crisis, whether it’s over funding the government past September 30 or increasing the Treasury’s borrowing limit. If that happens, Boehner will face a choice. He can stand by while government services and the economy suffer—or, as Greg Sargent recently suggested, he can “cut the Tea Party loose, and suffer the consequences.” Yes, the consequences might include Boehner losing his job as speaker. Those are the kinds of risks real leaders take, in order to serve the public.
By: Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor, The New Republic, September 12, 2013
“There’s Only One Answer”: John Boehner To President Obama, Can I Please Take You Hostage?
House Republicans have spent weeks fending off right-wing demands that they shut down the government unless President Obama agrees to destroy his own health-care reform. They’re currently trying to wriggle out of this demand by promising instead to use the debt ceiling to force Obama to destroy his health-care reform, which is an even more dangerous threat. So how do House Republicans plan to wriggle out of that promise? By getting President Obama to help them. John Boehner is pleading with Obama to combine negotiations over the debt ceiling and the budget. There’s really only one answer Obama can give here: Boehner can go fuck himself.
Boehner is desperately trying to combine two separate issues: negotiating over budget policy and negotiating over whether Congress should trigger a default on the national debt. Why negotiate the two together? Boehner argues:
“I reminded them that for decades, the White House, the Congress, have used the debt limit to find bipartisan solutions on the deficit and the debt. The types of changes were signed into law by Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton and President Obama himself two years ago. So President Obama is going to have to deal with this, as well. It’s really no different. You can’t talk about increasing the debt limit unless you’re willing to make changes and reforms that begin to solve the spending problem that Washington has.”
So we have two arguments here. The first one is that there have been times in the past when Congress has lifted the debt ceiling and also passed changes to fiscal policy. That is true. It can be convenient to wrap up the automatic step of lifting the debt ceiling into bills that change levels of taxes and spending, because a separate vote is unnecessary in the first place.
But Boehner isn’t proposing to attach a perfunctory debt-ceiling hike to “bipartisan solutions,” as has happened in the past. He is proposing that the opposition party extract unacceptable conditions as the price of lifting the debt ceiling. That is an unprecedented demand. Under the Bush presidency, Democrats objected that tax cuts had created un unsustainable fiscal position for the government, but it never even occurred to them to threaten to trigger a debt default to force Bush to repeal his tax cuts. Before 2011, the debt ceiling was an occasion for posturing by the out-party and was sometimes raised in conjunction with mutually agreeable policy changes, but the opposition never used the threat of default as a hostage.
Boehner’s correct that the hostage-taking negotiation he wants to hold again did occur once before in 2011. But that was a white-knuckle experience that very nearly led to default, has put in place an extremely stupid policy, and amounted to a gigantic blunder by Obama that he is rightly determined not to repeat. Enshrining the precedent that the opposition party can use the debt ceiling to extract otherwise unacceptable conditions would create a permanent cycle of crisis, where every fiscal negotiation carries a systemic risk. Democrats would be much better off letting Republicans default on the debt right now than submitting to a new normal whereby they get jacked up for concessions over and over until eventually there’s a default anyway. That is why Obama can’t go along with Boehner’s innocuous-sounding request to combine debt-ceiling negotiations with fiscal-policy negotiations.
Boehner’s last sentence gives the game away. He begins by asserting that “you can’t” lift the debt ceiling without making a separate budget deal. But of course you can. Congress does it all the time. Whether or not you decide to change budget policy is unrelated to whether or not you should trigger an unnecessary debt default.
Boehner ends the sentence by demanding that Obama “solve the spending problem.” That talking point is the Republican way of summarizing the party’s stance on fiscal issues, which holds that the deficit is a huge existential crisis but must be reduced entirely through spending cuts, without reducing any tax deductions.
The two parties don’t agree on that. Obama thinks the long-term deficit should be reduced through a mix of reduced tax deductions and lower spending. Boehner clearly is personally willing to compromise in some way on this but just as clearly cannot get House Republicans to agree to compromise. Not only is Boehner unable to make a long-term budget deal that his members can accept, but he also can’t even figure out how to keep the government open, as The Wall Street Journal reports in a paywalled news story:
In a bipartisan meeting Thursday among House and Senate leaders, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) asked Mr. Boehner what other concession could be made to satisfy conservatives, other than defunding the health-care law. The speaker said there was none, according to Republican and Democratic aides briefed on the meeting.
“Boehner said nothing will appease them but defunding Obamacare,” one aide said.
The debt ceiling is Boehner’s way around this. He wants to combine the debt ceiling with negotiations over the federal budget as a way of luring Obama into a position where Boehner can negotiate budget policy without making policy concessions.
But why on Earth would Obama agree to do that? The fact that Boehner is phrasing this as a request reveals the complete absurdity of the situation. Mr. President, would you mind dropping off your bus so I can strap a bomb to it and then make demands? Uh, no, let’s not do that.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, September 14, 2013
“Nothing Short Of Everything”: The Republican Leaders Vs The GOP’s Neanderthals
House Republicans, perhaps tired after working for four days after a six-week absence, will wrap their work week today around noon, leaving just five more days in September in which the chamber will be in session. And as House members depart this afternoon, they’ll leave increasing odds of a government shutdown in their wake.
Part of the problem is simply a matter of logistics: the government will run out of money on Sept. 30, and House leaders haven’t left themselves much time to get their work done.
But just as important is the fact that Republican leaders have absolutely no idea how they intend to govern. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership team thought they’d worked out a viable solution, which House Republicans rejected less than a day after it was introduced. Party officials are looking for someone to blame.
It’s not hard to find frustration with Heritage Action and the Club for Growth among senior Republicans, who believe the groups’ demand that they include Obamacare defunding language on any spending bill keeping the government open will ultimately empower Democrats in a series of fall battles over spending. They believe it’s part of a pattern of pushing untenable demands that have no chance of becoming law.
“Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals,” one senior GOP aide said.
Neanderthals, of course, is a subjective term — draw your own conclusions — but characterizing the right-wing activist groups as “irrelevant” is plainly incorrect. The House Republican leadership spent weeks carefully crafting a plan to avoid a government shutdown; Boehner & Co. unveiled their scheme on Tuesday; and by Wednesday morning, Heritage Action and Club for Growth had convinced Boehner’s caucus to reject Boehner’s plan out of hand.
I can appreciate why the Speaker’s office is frustrated, but which side of this equation sounds “irrelevant”?
Regardless, Republican leaders are left with an unsettling set of circumstances, which makes the odds of a government shutdown far more likely than they were 24 hours ago. Indeed, GOP lawmakers oppose their leaders’ plan, and the leaders don’t have a backup plan.
Consider just how brutal this is.
A clearly frustrated Boehner seemed to realize that he leads a conference where no plan is quite good enough. There are frequently about 30 Republicans who oppose leadership’s carefully crafted plans — just enough to mess things up. A reporter asked him whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
That sounds terribly sad, though it also happens to be true. The party is out of control, and its most powerful leader has no power.
A significant, outcome-changing contingent within the House GOP caucus is driven by such irrational hatred of the Affordable Care Act that it won’t accept anything short of everything. Party leaders realize this approach would trigger a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans. But if Boehner crafted a far-right spending measure to make extremists happy, this would quickly be rejected by the Senate and White House, again leading to a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans.
The best way out is for the Speaker to give up on the radical wing of his party and strike a deal with House Democrats by scrapping the destructive sequestration policy. The shutdown would be averted; the economy would get a boost (remember when Congress occasionally thought about the economy?); and the Speaker would win plaudits for bipartisan cooperation and governing.
This, of course, won’t happen.
What’s likely to be the way out is Boehner will promise the extremists that if they support his idea of a temporary spending measure, he’ll hold the debt ceiling hostage over “defunding Obamacare.” The right-wing will probably see this as good enough and the nation will spend the next five or six weeks dealing with yet another Republican-imposed crisis.
Buckle your seat belt.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 12, 2013
“Following The Will Of The People, Sometimes”: For Some Politicians, Public Opinion Only Seems To Matter On Syria
When the Founding Fathers sought to form a country for the people and by the people, one of the central components was to establish a representative government – to create a legislative body that reflected the will and values of the masses.
In today’s technologically advanced, media-frenzied world, tweets, “likes”, emails, texts and sound bites have become the voice of the people. Politicians are left to sift through massive amounts of data points to determine the will and desire of their constituents.
In addition, public opinion polls are conducted on an almost constant basis that seek to demonstrate and frame the public debate in ways that elected officials can fine-tune and adjust their strategy and approach to better anticipate the public’s demand.
So it’s always curious to see whether a politician chooses to reflect the poll’s findings or whether they act counter to its conclusions.
Of late, public polls have suggested that the American people are war fatigued and that they increasingly fear that military action in Syria would engage the United States in another messy, prolonged conflict in the Middle East. Further, there is a serious concern that involvement in Syria would increase the terrorist threat to Americans. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center and USA Today, 63 percent of Americans oppose U.S. air strikes in Syria, a 15-point shift against the involvement in just the last week.
As a result, this overwhelming opposition to the strikes – echoed in town hall meetings, negative phone calls and emails to congressional offices – has shaped the points of view for a majority of House members who pledged their opposition and sought defeat of a proposed resolution for force in Syria.
Kristina Miller, author of Constituency Representation in Congress noted that, “it’s commonplace for politicians to cite opinion among their constituents. When there’s a vote that’s particularly difficult or consequential, it provides them some cover – ‘I was doing what my people wanted me to do.'”
But, when presented with polling that shows overwhelming support for expanded background checks for gun purchases (86 percent support), apparently public opinion becomes less compelling and even dismissed, as House Republicans refuse to debate or take action on any bill addressing this issue.
Similarly, 64 percent of Americans support the immigration reform act passed by the U.S. Senate, but stalled in the House. “The public supports the immigration bill 2-1 and shows unusual agreement given the divisions in the country on many other issues,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “It seems the only group divided on this issue is Congress.” But, efforts for comprehensive immigration reform legislation have been stymied by the GOP in the House and left for another day.
According to the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll, Republican primary voters pose the greatest threat to a GOP incumbent, with 35 percent of those polled saying they would be less inclined to support their re-election if they support a military strike in Syria.
One has to wonder if, when a politician puts their finger in the wind, is he or she really looking to find the pulse of the people, or just convenient political cover? Do our elected officials really care about the will of the people, or are they most interested in casting “safe” votes (or avoiding them altogether), so as to not threaten reelection?
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
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