“A Tragic Waste Of Time”: In The Budget Fight, The GOP Doesn’t Act In The National Interest
Are we really going to do this? Are we going to wade into a struggle we don’t really want to fight? Are we going to mire ourselves in a senseless, grinding conflict whose possible outcomes range from bad to worse?
I’m talking about the upcoming budget battles in Washington, of course. (What, you thought I meant something else?)
Incredibly, Congress seems determined to spend much of the fall demonstrating its boundless talent for dysfunction. House Republicans say they will threaten once again to send the nation into default — and the economy over a cliff — by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, now set at $16.7 trillion. This means that by mid-October, the government would exhaust its borrowing authority and be left without enough money to pay its bills.
“The president doesn’t think this is fair, thinks I’m being difficult to deal with,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week at an Idaho fundraiser. “But I’ll say this: It may be unfair, but what I’m trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices. We’re going to have a whale of a fight.”
In other words, Boehner is looking forward to the opportunity to threaten the nation with grievous harm. Nice little economic recovery you’re working on. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.
President Obama, who has seen this movie before, says there will be no fight because he categorically refuses to negotiate over the debt ceiling. He demands that Congress do its job — which amounts to a routine bit of bookkeeping — without all the needless drama.
Investors around the world still consider U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds to be the ultimate safe haven, especially in times of economic uncertainty. It is unthinkable that our elected officials, supposedly working in the nation’s best interests, would threaten this exalted and immensely beneficial status by intentionally triggering a default.
So who’s going to blink?
Obama certainly has the stronger political position. His approval numbers may be stuck in the 40s, but ratings for Congress are down in the teens — and sinking.
Boehner has almost no room to maneuver. House Republicans are still fuming at having been forced to swallow a modest tax increase for the wealthy as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal earlier this year. The responsible thing would be for Boehner to bring a simple bill raising the debt ceiling to the floor, where it would pass with the votes of Democrats and non-crazy Republicans. But that would probably cost Boehner his job.
You’re depressed already? I’m just getting started.
Before we even get to the debt-ceiling fight, the government will run out of authority to spend money on Sept. 30 — which means no ability to function — unless Congress approves a continuing resolution. Doing so should be another no-brainer, but some Republicans are itching for a government shutdown. Because, you know, that worked so well for Newt Gingrich in the ’90s.
Boehner wants none of that. But in an attempt to get House Republicans to avert a shutdown by passing a short-term funding bill, he promises them a “whale of a fight” later over the debt ceiling. (He treats his caucus as if it were a cage full of rabid wolverines.)
Oh, and there’s another whole dimension to the pointless political snarling and bickering we will have to endure over the next few months: Obamacare.
Some Republicans believe, or say they believe, that they can use the continuing-resolution fight or the debt-ceiling fight, or maybe both, to force Obama to sign legislation nullifying all or part of his health-care reforms. One idea is to take away Obamacare’s funding. Another is to delay the individual health insurance mandate, due to take effect next year.
Do they really believe the president is willing to forsake his most important legislative accomplishment? Before it even comes fully into effect?
This is a tragic waste of time and effort, and the House Republicans are to blame. Remember when Democrats captured the House in 2006? They worked with George W. Bush even though they disagreed with his policies. Most Democrats adamantly opposed the Iraq War, but then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that Bush got the funding he required for the troops.
Boehner and his crew need to act like grown ups. If they don’t, voters need to send them home.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 2, 2013
“How The Movie Ends”: Three Stories That Prove The GOP Is Screwed For Years To Come
We are in the doggiest of the dog days of summer. Congress is currently in the sleep spindles stage of a five-week nap that the public doesn’t think it deserves. Meanwhile, the political media—because TV and the Internet and even the printing presses never stop—must continue to bark and pant. So anything you hear or read—including here—must be approached with appropriate skepticism. But three stories published online over the past 24 hours show what kind of media narrative we can expect in September, once our elected officials finally wake up and swipe the drool from their slack jaws.
1. The Hill reports Friday morning that “House conservatives say grassroots support is building for their effort to risk a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare.” Those House conservatives, specifically, are Indiana’s Marlin Stutzman and Texas’ Michael Burgess, who say there’s been overwhelming support at town hall meetings for doing anything, even shutting down our very necessary government, to defund Obamacare (a law that, it bears reminding, is a law—lawfully passed by Congress, signed by a lawfully elected president, and being lawfully enacted as we speak).
Burgess told The Hill that the decision to exempt lawmakers and staff from Obamacare is “driving people into a froth,” adding, “I’m hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt.” Well, of course he’s hearing that! These town meetings are not exactly how people with moderate opinions prefer to spend their evenings. But Burgess and Stutzman—unlike GOP representatives Tom Cole and Steve Womack, who are quoted as being opposed to a shutdown, no matter what they hear from constituents—are going to assume that a few dozen town hall attendees represent the thousands of voters who elected them.
Takeaway: House conservatives will likely return from vacation not only well rested, but emboldened to threaten a shutdown.
2. The New York Times reported Thursday that a “Puzzle Awaits the Capital: How to Solve 3 Fiscal Rifts,” the lead sentence of which declares that only one thing is “clear” about the endgame of this showdown: “President Obama thinks Republicans cannot risk another debt crisis or government shutdown, and Republican leaders agree.” The Times even goes so far as to call it a “consensus,” concluding that “the odds of an economy-damaging stalemate are relatively low, despite rising jitters in the capital.”
Takeaway: Republican leaders think they can prevent these emboldened, well-rested House conservatives from shutting down the government. Let’s hope the House leadership has learned how to count votes since June.
3. Neither The Hill nor The New York Times, though, come out and say what this really means. Enter Politico. According to Mike Allen and Jim VandeHai’s latest interpretation of our nation’s political theater, we are on the “Eve of Destruction.” “It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be,” they report. “Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it.”
The “blown opportunities and self-inflicted wounds” include House opposition to broad immigration reform, alienating Latinos; narrowing voting laws and saying dumb things about the Trayvon Martin case, alienating blacks; and continuing to believe that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, alienating gays.
Takeaway (via Politico, natch): “This probably doesn’t matter for 2014, because off-year elections are notoriously low-turnout affairs where older whites show up in disproportionate numbers. But elite Republican strategists and donors tell us they are increasingly worried the past nine months make 2016 look very bleak—unless elected GOP officials in Washington change course, and fast.”
So. Come September, you can expect hourly reports on threats to shut down the government, the likelihood of said shutdown, and finally the imminence of said shutdown, with websites featuring running counters of the days, hours, and minutes until the first deadline, and then the second deadline, and then the third deadline. Riveting stuff! As Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told the Times, “Even those of us quite close to it have a hard time saying how the movie ends.”
That statement is offensive to anyone who has ever made a movie. Also, we know how it ends: with a Democrat in the White House in 2017.
By: Brian Kearney, The New Republic, August 17, 2013
“You Can’t Fix Stupid”: Reince Priebus Tries To Stop Republicans From Saying More Dumb Things About Immigration
In an effort to reshape the debate over immigration reform, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus harshly criticized Mitt Romney’s self-deportation comments from the 2012 GOP primary while speaking to reporters on Thursday.
Republican leaders have long feared the current dialogue could doom the party with Latino voters in a repeat of the 2007 reform effort, which was shut down by a revolt by the GOP base.
“Using the word ‘self-deportation’ — it’s a horrific comment to make,” Priebus said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with our party. When someone makes those comments, obviously, it hurts us.”
“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here,” Romney said during the Florida debate held shortly after he lost the South Carolina primary to Newt Gingrich. “And so we’re not going to round people up.”
Priebus defended the progress his party has made with Latino voters since the release of the so-called GOP autopsy. He also ripped comments by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who has continually offered comments offensive to Latino voters followed by stern defenses of those comments.
“Well, of course, it’s hurtful,” Priebus said, in reference to King’s comment that for every undocumented valedictorian there were hundreds of drug smugglers with calves the size of cantaloupes. “Of course, it hurts. … Just, not good.”
King is the public face of the war against reform, and he insists he’s speaking for many members who don’t want to come forward, a claim that makes sense as House Republicans overwhelmingly supported his recent bill to deport undocumented young people.
The congressman recently said that a “spell” has been cast over his party on the issue of immigration, which The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent sees as a positive sign for the immigration reform debate.
The Senate passed immigration reform in the spring with more than two-thirds supporting the bill. The House GOP has refused to consider the Senate’s plan and is weighing how to proceed with reform in a way that can get the support of a majority of the Republican caucus, which is Speaker John Boehner’s stated standard for bringing any legislation to the floor.
There has been relatively little backlash from the Republican base about reform over the August recess, meanwhile, several House Republicans — including Reps. Jeff Denham (R-CA), Aaron Schock (R-IL) and Dan Webster (R-FL) – have made positive statements for reform that include a “path to citizenship,” which is a key demand of many reform advocates.
Passing immigration reform was the one specific policy recommendation in Priebus’ autopsy. Many of the GOP’s most prominent donors, including Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, want reform. However, most House Republicans — who primarily come from safe, white districts — don’t seem to be feeling the pressure.
By calling out comments of his fellow Republicans, Priebus may not be able to make reform happen. But he’s hoping to keep it from getting ugly — or, at least, uglier.
By: jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 16, 2013
“Holding The Credit Rating Hostage, Again”: The GOP’s Big New Plan To Take Down ObamaCare
With crucial pieces of the Affordable Care Act set to kick in later this year, some conservative lawmakers have been trying to rally support within the party to shut down the government to block the law, or to force President Obama to scrap it.
That threat — a refusal to pass a budget (or in D.C. jargon, a “continuing resolution”) to fund the government until ObamaCare is defeated — hasn’t gained traction with the party at large. Yet now, multiple reports say the thinking inside the GOP is to shift the ObamaCare battle from the budget fight to another looming fall showdown: The debt ceiling. (For a refresher, read the Guardian‘s helpful history of the debt ceiling here.)
From the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll:
House leadership firmly believes that attaching anything “new” to a continuing resolution is politically untenable, while passing a higher debt limit, without attaching anything new, is also politically impossible. Hence the House leadership’s desire to fight ObamaCare through the debt limit, but not the CR.
The plan is to pass a 60-day CR extension that keeps discretionary spending at the existing sequestration levels. Then House leadership wants to combine Democratic desires to roll-back sequestration with conservative desires to delay/defund ObamaCare into the debt limit fight. [Washington Examiner]
A government shutdown, besides failing to actually defund ObamaCare, has the potential to be politically disastrous for the GOP. Republicans bore the brunt of public rage over the government shutdown in 1995 when they refused to bargain with President Clinton, and they would likely suffer the same fate should they go that route again now. No wonder conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer have labeled the strategy “really dumb.”
Though the impact of a debt ceiling standoff is tougher to predict, the fallout would be more economic than political, potentially sparing the GOP on that front. Still, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised — meaning the U.S. couldn’t borrow more money to pay its existing debts, thus threatening the nation’s credit rating — the fiscal consequences for the country could be catastrophic. That’s why this gambit would represent a “massive escalation” in the ObamaCare funding showdown, argues New York‘s Jonathan Chait.
Closing the federal government for a limited period would have mostly political consequences (probably for the Republicans). The substantive effects build up cumulatively and start to really harm the economy after weeks on end, but the two sides could negotiate through a shutdown.
The debt ceiling is another story. The effects of missing the deadline would be immediate and, while unpredictable, potentially very large and irreversible. That’s why Obama now insists, after disastrously allowing himself to be extorted in 2011, he won’t negotiate the debt ceiling, but has never made an analogous pledge about a continuing resolution. [New York Magazine]
Unlike the very vocal threat to shut down the government over ObamaCare, the latest rumored standoff is, for now, merely rumblings from behind closed doors. And there’s at least some reason to believe it will amount to no more than an empty threat in the end.
The Republican leadership has been increasingly under pressure to appease the right wing of the party. Publicly insisting that ObamaCare funding will be fought further down the road would soothe the demand for that fight in the first place, while kicking the can down the road, perhaps indefinitely.
As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent points out, this is exactly what happened with the last debt ceiling fight. In January, Boehner said the upcoming sequester debate, not debt ceiling fight, gave the GOP its best position to push for major budget cuts. Yet the sequester came and went without the GOP winning those deep concessions.
There’s some reason to think the same dynamic is at play here, too. The health care exchanges mandated under the ACA go into effect October 1. If Republicans really try to defund ObamaCare during the debt ceiling talks, they will, in effect, be arguing a settled debate.
Here’s Sargent:
So now, under this emerging plan, Republicans would be moving to demand a delay in ObamaCare’s implementation — after the exchanges kick in — in exchange for not allowing the country to go into default, even though Boehner himself has already admitted the debt limit must be raised to avoid putting the full faith and credit of the U.S. at risk?
What all of this comes down to is that GOP leaders need to decide if they are going to level with their base, and acknowledge that blocking ObamaCare by using this fall’s confrontations as leverage is just a nonstarter, period, full stop — whether we’re talking about a government shutdown, the debt limit, or whatever. [Washington Post]
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, August 15, 2013
“Not Conservative Enough”: In The Republican Party, The Hard Right Is Where The Enthusiasm Is
It’s become an article of faith among some Republican elites that the GOP doesn’t have an outreach problem, it has a turnout problem. During a recent interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, for instance, Rush Limbaugh boiled down the argument to its core. It’s not that the GOP has an issue with racial minorities or that most voters—whites included—have no interest in its policies or approach. Its problem is that it isn’t conservative enough. “The people that sat home,” he explained, were “mostly white Republican voters,” who were “dissatisfied with the Republican Party’s rejection of conservatism.”
Now, to most observers, the GOP has done everything but reject conservatism. Mitt Romney may have made his name as a moderate governor of Massachusetts, but his platform as Republican presidential nominee was a grab bag of proposals from the wish lists of conservative activists: large tax cuts for the wealthy, larger cuts to the social-safety net, prohibitions on abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage, and a hardline stance on immigration.
And indeed, in the nine months since Romney lost the presidential election, Republicans have only moved further to the right, falling deeper into the “fever” of intransigence and obstruction. Just this past week, for example, House Republicans had to give up on appropriating funds for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Why? Because their right-wing members demanded massive cuts to key programs, and less doctrinaire Republicans wouldn’t go along.
The problem for potential reformers in the GOP, however, is that the rank and file is on the side of the zealots. According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of self-identified Republicans say the party needs to “address major problems” if it’s going to be competitive in national elections. For them, however, this isn’t a case of being too conservative. Indeed, it’s the opposite: 54 percent of Republicans say the party’s leadership isn’t conservative enough. And 35 percent say that GOP leaders have compromised too much in their dealings with President Obama. Presumably, this minority wanted Republicans to hold out on the debt ceiling and refuse to deal on the fiscal cliff and is pushing for a standoff over funding the government this fall.
This wish for a more conservative Republican Party holds for a variety of issues. Thirty-six percent say that the party should be more conservative on immigration—compared with 17 percent who say it’s “too conservative”—and 46 percent say it should be more conservative on government spending, compared with just 10 percent who say it’s too conservative. Guns are the only area where a majority say the party is in a right place, and recall, the GOP’s position on guns is that regulations—of any sort—are verboten, even when they have support from the vast majority of Americans.
None of this would be a huge problem for efforts to move the GOP to the center of American politics if the most moderate Republicans were also the most active. In reality, the opposite is true. The most conservative voters are also most likely to vote in all elections, including primaries. Of the 37 percent of Republicans who agree with the Tea Party, 49 percent say they always vote in nomination contests, compared with 22 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans.
In other words, hard-right conservatism is where the enthusiasm is, and it’s reflected in the broader state of Republican politics. To wit, it’s hard to imagine how Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell could do more to satisfy the conservative base. For the last four years, he has all but led the GOP opposition to Barack Obama, setting Republicans on a path of complete opposition to the president’s priorities and nearly derailing his signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.
From the beginning, he understood—correctly—that Obama’s popularity depends on a broader perception of cooperation and bipartisanship in Washington. By denying that, he harmed the president’s core appeal and helped turn a critical mass of the electorate against the White House, setting the stage for the GOP’s massive win in the 2010 midterm elections.
But despite all this, Mitch McConnell faces a primary challenge. Matt Bevin is a Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite who sees the five-term senator as a patsy and a squish. “McConnell has voted for higher taxes, bailouts, debt-ceiling increases, congressional pay raises, and liberal judges,” said Bevin in his first ad.
Given McConnell’s actual actions, it’s tempting to dismiss Bevin as delusional. The truth of the matter, however, is that he speaks for a large plurality—if not majority—of Republicans who believe that success can only come when the party moves far, far to the right. And at the moment, there’s nothing—not electoral defeat, not public opprobrium—that will disabuse them of that conviction.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, August 5, 2013
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