“The Self Delusional Party Of No”: Carrying On As If Whistling Past The Graveyard Were A Plan
Self-delusion is a sad spectacle. Watching Republicans convince themselves that killing immigration reform actually helps the GOP is excruciating, and I wish somebody would make it stop.
House Speaker John Boehner’s unruly caucus has been busy persuading itself not to accept or even modify the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate. Rather, it wants to annihilate it. It’s not that these Republicans want a different kind of comprehensive reform; it’s that they don’t want comprehensive reform at all.
The Obama administration “cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill,” Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership said in a statement. Instead, the idea is supposedly to deal with the tightly woven knot of immigration issues one at a time.
That’s like sitting down with a piece of cake and saying, “First I’m going to eat the flour, then the sugar, then the eggs.”
House Republicans think they can begin with “border security,” which would be laughable if the need for real immigration reform were not so serious. It is ridiculous to think the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico can be made impregnable.
The border, after all, was judged 84 percent secure last year by the Government Accountability Office — meaning that only 16 percent of attempts to enter the country illegally from Mexico were successful. Any improvement, at this point, would necessarily be fairly modest. Perhaps Republicans know of a border somewhere in the world that is 100 percent secure. I don’t.
And never mind that the flow of undocumented migrants is way down from its peak, while apprehensions of would-be migrants are way up. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Senate bill, if enacted, could slash illegal immigration in half. No realistic increase in border security would do as much.
So the House Republicans’ intransigence isn’t really about the border. It’s about avoiding the central question, which is what to do about the 11 million undocumented migrants who are here already.
In the view that has become far-right dogma, giving these people a path to citizenship “rewards bad behavior” and puts them ahead of presumably well-behaved foreigners who are waiting “in line” for admittance. For the most adamant House Republicans, giving the undocumented any legal status and permission to stay would amount to “amnesty.”
No legal status, of course, means no solution. Opponents of comprehensive reform should just come out and say what they mean: Rather than accept measures that studies say would not only reduce illegal immigration but also boost economic growth, House Republicans would prefer to do nothing.
This makes no sense as policy or as politics. Amazingly, however, some conservatives who should know better — magazine editors Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Rich Lowry of National Review — contend that the GOP would actually help itself politically by killing the Senate immigration bill.
This line of argument — I can’t call it reasoning — holds that the Senate bill must be killed because it does not end illegal immigration for all time, it does not fix the legal immigration system for all time and it is really long. The GOP should not waste time and effort chasing after Latino and Asian American votes, according to this view, and instead should concentrate on winning working-class whites with an economic message for the striving middle class.
As for the Senate bill, Kristol and Lowry wrote in a joint editorial that “House Republicans can do the country a service by putting a stake through its heart.”
Some House Republicans worry openly that giving undocumented residents a path to citizenship would eventually add millions of Democratic voters to the rolls. But they should be more concerned about the millions of Latino citizens who are unregistered or do not bother to vote. Democrats are making a concerted play for these people. Republicans are telling them they’d like to deport their relatives and friends.
Most House Republicans have nothing to worry about for the time being; their districts are safe. But the GOP’s fortunes in national contests — and eventually in statewide races — will be increasingly dim. Maybe they’ll wake up when Texas begins to change from red to blue.
In the meantime, it’s sad to see a once great political party carry on as if whistling past the graveyard were a plan.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 11, 2013
“Someone Has To Do It”: Congressional Gridlock Leaves Lawmaking To The Supreme Court
One is the loneliest number and only one in 10 Americans trusts the United States Congress. And who can blame people?
The most visible congressional failure was the Senate vote that killed background checks on people who want to buy guns. It was a perfectly reasonable proposal. No one’s guns would have been taken away and national polls showed that nine in 10 Americans supported the proposal.
But that didn’t matter because the Senate was more responsive to pressure from the National Rifle Association than it was to public opinion. Gridley, damm public opinion, full speed backward!
The same tragedy is about to unfold with immigration reform. The Senate passed a compromise immigration proposal under which undocumented immigrants would have to get over a series of hurdles higher than the border fence to become citizens. To get the measure passed, Democrats agreed to GOP demands to hire 20,000 more border control agents. That’s enough of a force to conquer Mexico and more than enough to guard the border we share with our neighbor to the south.
Despite these concessions, House Republicans are doing everything they can to stop reform, and they will probably succeed even though national polls show strong support for citizenship for undocumented people if they meet a long list of requirements.
I could go on and on and on. What happens to a democracy when democratic institutions aren’t democratic anymore? Nothing good.
What if they gave an election and no one came. Well, we almost found out in two recent elections. Turnout was abysmal in the race for mayor in Los Angles and in the special Senate election in Massachusetts to select a replacement for John Kerry. Voters don’t see the point in going out to vote to elect people who can’t or won’t do anything to tackle the challenges facing the nation.
Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the Supreme Court.
When democratic institutions fail, undemocratic institutions step in. When the legislature stops legislating, the unelected Supreme Court rushes in to fill the vacuum. Someone has to make laws, and if Congress doesn’t legislate the federal court system will step in to fix problems. Like it or not, unelected or not, the Supreme Court has filled the vacuum that Congress created.
Historically, the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to void laws passed by the peoples’ elected representatives. But the court did just that on successive days last month. On day one, the high court nullified part of the Voting Rights Act. The next day, the court consigned the Defense of Marriage Act to the dustbin of history where it belonged.
The high court’s message to Congress was do something, just don’t stand there. Standard operating procedure in Congress these days is don’t do anything, just stand there. The world does not come to a grinding halt to accommodate Congress when it can’t get its act together.
When he ran for president in 1996, Ross Perot proposed the idea of having national referendums to make decisions on issues. Americans like the idea. A recent Gallup survey showed that two in three Americans supported it. Somebody has to make decisions. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 11, 2013
“Taking Food Out Of The Mouths Of Babes”: Food Stamps Work, So Why Are We Cutting Them?
Can I tell you a real success story? One we should all be proud of? Great, here goes: The program formerly known as food stamps has kept hunger from exploding along with the number of Americans living in poverty.
“That food insecurity hasn’t increased” since the financial meltdown in 2008, said David Beckmann, president of the Christian anti-hunger group Bread for the World, “is a tremendous testament to the power of SNAP,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that replaced food stamps.
That does not mean that every child in this rich country of ours has enough to eat. On the contrary, Eli Saslow’s recent Post piece on a summer bread bus that takes lunch to kids in rural Tennessee was like something straight out of Angela’s Ashes. The 7-year-old who saves the juice from his fruit cup to feed to his baby sister reminded me of Frank McCourt and his classmates drooling for the apple peels their teacher tossed into the garbage in Limerick in the 1930s.
But government spending has kept the bottom from falling out: “What I see every day is how much food stamp programs mean to people on the edge,” said Monsignor John Enzler, president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Washington. “I tried to live on what food stamps give you for a week last year and I couldn’t do it, but it does make enough of a difference to allow people to stay in their apartments, and pay medical expenses and take care of their children.”
In a still sluggish economy — and compared to the alternative — isn’t that an outcome we should count as a win? You’d think so. Yet on Thursday, the Republican-controlled House passed a farm bill without the nutrition programs normally funded through that legislation.
Why? Well, as Republicans themselves explained on the House floor, it’s because so many on their side of the aisle felt that the $20.5 billion in cuts to food programs in the version of the farm bill that failed last month just weren’t deep enough. “Oh my goodness,” Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas said some colleagues asked him, “why couldn’t you do more?”
Oh my goodness, why should poor kids get to eat free?
Funding such programs through the farm bill “doesn’t serve the needs” of the poor, insisted Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), a fourth-generation farmer who called the bill that passed “the next logical step on the path to real reform.”
If you’re serious about cutting government, Lucas urged members, then vote for the bill. Some conservative groups, meanwhile, opposed it for not going far enough in that regard. (Remember when George W. Bush said he wouldn’t balance his budget on the backs of the poor? His party doesn’t seem to.)
Responding to poverty by paring back nutrition programs is like answering a rise in diabetes by slashing insulin production. And as Pete Gallego (D-Tex.) argued, almost all of the recipients are either children or elderly.
What’s to become of these nutrition programs now is unclear. But even the Democratic-controlled Senate wants to cut them, by $4 billion, and the White House has said it can live with that number. So the argument our leaders are having really boils down to whether we’re going to cut or gut programs that keep at-risk kids from going without.
Some opponents of the bill practically burst into flames on the House floor, where some of the loudest voices were female: “Mitt Romney was right,” thundered Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) “You all do not care about the 47 percent! Shame on you!”
“Vote no! Vote no! It’s ridiculous what you’re doing to our children!” said Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.)
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wasn’t shouting, but was shaming: To pass the bill, she said, was “to dishonor the God who made us.”
“To take food out of the mouths of babies? What are you thinking?” she asked. “Or are you thinking?”
Female anger is a hot topic right now; I just finished Claire Messud’s not-nice novel “The Woman Upstairs,” about an elementary school teacher who life has turned into a human cauldron and “a ravenous wolf.” Even the Blessed Virgin is fuming in Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary.” And if Democratic women on the House floor on Thursday were no slouches in tearing the roof off, well, sometimes fury is the only rational response.
By: Melinda Henneberger, She The People, The Washington Post, July 11, 2013
“Are These People On Drugs”: House GOP Apparently Wants To Be Even More Unpopular Than It Already Is
With the July 4 holiday behind them, House members might be expected to take up work on the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate. But they won’t. They’re looking at piecemeal reforms that will be heavier on border enforcement than the Senate bill – which doubled the number of border control agents, after the border control budget already doubled in size in the last decade — and even nuttier ideas.
Instead the House GOP is apparently making big plans for another debt ceiling hostage-taking, and this time they’ve got a strategy to demand big budget cuts from President Obama and the Democrats. According to the National Journal, House leaders are working on a “menu” of budget-slashing offers to Obama in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling for a short, medium or long period of time. Their template is Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – the budget so unjust and biased against the poor that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took time out from restricting women’s rights to criticize the Ryan plan.
House members reluctantly voted to raise the debt ceiling in January promising to come back with a strengthened hand on behalf of budget cuts next time around (which will probably be the end of this year). So House Speaker John Boehner is reportedly meeting with Ryan and other conservatives like Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who boasted about their talks to the National Journal. The key points:
For a long-term deal, one that gives Treasury borrowing authority for three-and-a-half years, Obama would have to agree to premium support. The plan to privatize Medicare, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Ryan budget, is the holy grail for conservatives who say major deficit-reduction can only be achieved by making this type of cut to mandatory spending. “If the president wants to go big, there’s a big idea,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
For a medium-sized increase in the debt-limit, Republicans want Obama to agree to cut spending in the SNAP food stamp program, block-grant Medicaid, or tinker with chained CPI.
For a smaller increase, there is talk of means-testing Social Security, for example, or ending certain agricultural subsidies.
…Even at the smallest end of the spectrum — another months-long extension of debt-limit — there is talk of pushing back the eligibility age for Social Security by an equal number of months.
Are these people on drugs? These are wildly unpopular ideas that have no chance of passing the Senate. (“Republicans are eager to look like they are giving the White House plenty of options, convinced that it is in their interest to appear engaged and flexible at the negotiating table,” the NJ’s Tim Alberta reports, apparently unironically.) Unfortunately, the president himself has come out behind the chained CPI, but given the enormousness of House GOP demands and delusion, he’s unlikely to get much for that concession. So one cheer for House GOP delusion.
Scalise seems to be the main source for the National Journal story, and you can imagine other members wincing at his clueless bluster. Not surprisingly, Scalise starred in another story today about the Obama team’s belief it will see some congressional movement on both immigration reform and the economy this summer. Not so fast, Scalise told the Washington Post: “We’re going to continue to be very aggressive in serving as a check and balance against the Obama administration. That’s what the country said in November. We’re very far apart.”
It’s interesting to note that Paul Ryan is key to these debt-ceiling strategy talks, according to the National Journal, when he’s also supposed to be key to comprehensive immigration reform. To his credit, Ryan has come out for something along the lines of the Senate bill, but the question is whether he’ll expend any political capital getting other members to join him. So far, he hasn’t. It looks like another round of debt-ceiling hostage taking is a higher priority for him.
Ironically, the fact that the deficit is falling faster than at any time since World War II is helping drive the House GOP’s extremism – they have to go for big, slashing cuts, because the deficit is already shrinking. Here’s hoping the extremism of the House GOP’s opening salvo will remind the Obama administration not to waste its time on another attempt at a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 8, 2013
“Listening To The Radicals”: The GOP’s Future, Move Right And Move White
It’s an eternal verity of American politics: the Republicans are the party of big business. Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt have sneered it as a putdown, to which many Republicans respond with no shame, yes, we are, the business of America is business. And business, in Washington, means chiefly the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, the two beefiest business lobbies in the city. But funny thing—the chamber and NAM support the Senate immigration bill that the House Republicans are going to kill. In addition, some prominent evangelical groups are pro-reform, too. Which makes me wonder: if the Republicans are no longer listening to these people, then to whom precisely are they listening, and what does that tell us about what kind of party this is becoming?
The chamber, NAM, and the evangelical groups have been in on the immigration discussions from the start. A great deal of the hard work here was done by congressional negotiators in conjunction with the chamber and the AFL-CIO, working through different categories of workers (high-skill, low-skill, guest) and arriving at language and numbers that suited all the interests at the table. Each of these groups has done the kind of outreach to its members that is vital in the case of big and controversial legislation like this. The Evangelical Immigration Table, a project of World Relief (which is an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals), persuaded pastors across the country to support reform.
There was a time in this country when the linked arms of those three groups would unquestionably have been joined by most Republicans on Capitol Hill. But that was long ago. Now the GOP is a different animal altogether.
And so the Chamber of Commerce—the Chamber of Commerce!—is a bunch of sell-outs. This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the chamber and the GOP have been at odds. The chamber has long supported substantial public spending on infrastructure. You might have thought that the fact that the chamber was for it would bring Republicans along. But these Republicans don’t listen to the chamber.
Instead, they are listening to the Tea Party. Back in 2010, the press tried to tell you that Tea Party people just cared about economics, but that’s dead wrong. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson showed in their book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, immigration is a huge issue to Tea Partiers, and along precisely the immigrants-are-freeloaders lines you’d expect. Remember when Mitt Romney’s attack on Rick Perry over immigration worked so well? This is why.
And more disturbingly they’re listening to the likes of Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer, two crackpot haters of nonwhite immigrants who’ve been at it for a couple of decades now. Now I can’t say for sure of course how many Republicans are reading their unhinged website, where one contributor recently dismissed the Evangelical Immigration Table as “Soros-funded,” an imprecation that in right-wing circles is about as ominous as you get and is meant to be read as “can’t be trusted.” But I can say this: the defeat in the House of immigration reform, on the explicit political grounds that “we” (the GOP) don’t “need” Latinos and can win in the future by just riling up the white vote—which is in fact the argument now—represents a mainstreaming of Brimelow and Sailer that would have been totally unimaginable a decade ago.
Business groups, like everyone I talk to who is pro-reform, hold out hope. But it’s a shaky kind of hope, as evidenced by one conversation I had yesterday with a source close to business groups. This person thought the odds of success in the House were “about 30 to 70.” Later in the conversation, he termed himself “optimistic.” If that counts as optimism, that tells us something. The key thing, this person said of the House Republicans, is “just getting them in the room” with senators in a conference committee.
He did correctly identify the hard part. But getting to the conference stage means that the House has to have passed its own bill, and one containing a path to citizenship that isn’t strewn with poison pills that make it impossible for the other side to support. And that’s the huge if.
What we are watching here is absolutely historic. The process by which the GOP has gone from “we must get right with Latinos” to “who needs ’em” has been … well, not quite astonishing. Depressingly unsurprising, actually. But amazing all the same. If immigration is killed for the reasons stated, then the Republican Party has consciously made the decision to become a quasi-nationalist party. They’ll probably never sink to the level of a Le Pen or a Haider (I added that “probably” upon re-reading; you never quite know with these people). But they will have killed immigration reform twice in six years, opposing not just the usual suspects like La Raza but America’s top corporate interest groups. And they will have staked out their bet for their future: move right and move white. And this will be the year it all took hold.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 3, 2013
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