“See You In Hell Orange Man”: President Obama Should Have A “Come To Jesus” Talk With John Boehner
So at the risk of getting ahead of myself here just a bit, the appropriations crisis is merging with the debt limit crisis. And as everybody’s favorite source for GOP thinking, National Review‘s Robert Costa, tells us today, John Boehner is determined not to relent on what just about everyone is calling an insanely untenable position on the CR because he’s got to keep GOPers together for the real ball game, the debt limit. Why? Kathleen Parker says that’s the rainbow that yielded a pot of gold for Boehner last time it appeared:
What Republicans hope to accomplish by tying demands to the debt ceiling is a grand bargain to include a package of entitlement and tax reform. Sound familiar? The president can refuse to negotiate, but at 3 a.m. when the phone rings and it’s Angela Merkel inquiring just what the hell is going on, it won’t be John Boehner’s phone ringing. It will be President Obama’s. That’s leverage. During the last debt-ceiling battle, Boehner managed to secure more than $2 trillion in cuts and no taxes.
So the conviction that Obama will eventually cave on the debt limit is what is making it possible for Boehner to walk the path Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and their House minions have laid out for him.
Now I don’t know anything about the president’s relationship with Boehner. But it’s becoming a matter of national security for him to find some way to take him aside, maybe give the Speaker a cigarette from his secret stash, and say: “I will see you in Hell before I negotiate over the debt limit. And if you let a default happen, I will devote the rest of my presidency to making sure you, personally, bear the blame, and go down in history with our most despised traitors and criminals. For generations, little school children in Ohio will cross themselves and make hex signs when your name is mentioned. So do not, do not, go back and tell your crazy people they can win if they just stick together.”
This sort of attitude adjustment needs to happen sooner rather than later, before Boehner takes another step down the path he is currently contemplating.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 2, 2013
“The Republican Tomacco Dilemma”: The GOP Can’t Have It Both Ways On Obamacare
I have to admit that the conservative narrative regarding Obamacare has got me a little bit confused. The problem is that the critics of the Affordable Care Act keep making contradictory arguments about the law.
So we learned yesterday from former Heritage Foundation chieftain Jim DeMint that, in his view, President Obama’s comfortable re-election can’t be seen as the electorate signaling acceptance of the law. DeMint essentially said voters didn’t know what they were doing when they re-elected Obama. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” DeMint told Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green. Never mind that GOP nominee Mitt Romney talked about repealing Obamacare at virtually every opportunity and even ran ads promising to do so on his first day in office.
No, despite the fact that the entire GOP campaigned against Obamacare and, more broadly, that it was the dominant political issue for most of President Obama’s first term, the case against Obamacare never got a hearing. Or something. Deep down, DeMint is saying, people hate Obamacare – they just don’t know how to properly express it. Thank god the American people have Jim DeMint to tell them what they think.
But wait. Earlier this week we learned from Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz that if there’s one thing everyone in this great country agrees on, it’s that Obamacare is a raging failure which “the American people” want ended at once – but that Cruz bears the burden of being the only person in Washington who listens to the American people. (Truly, he is generous to not only represent the Lone Star State but the entirety of the country.) Here’s what Cruz said in his marathon speech earlier this week:
Everyone in America understands Obamacare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States – it doesn’t matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn’t matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians – Americans understand this thing is not working.
Cruz and DeMint need to get together here because they can’t both be right. Either DeMint is correct that years and years of Republican denunciation of Obamacare, not to mention a $2 billion presidential campaign in which the law played a central role, left the American people uninformed about how they truly feel about the law or they are unanimously and rabidly declaring their hatred for it, in a unified voice that only Ted Cruz can hear. But they can’t be both unconvinced of the conservative case and also vociferously in favor of it. (And yes, I understand that DeMint and Cruz and Cruz’s father did a road show in August, but to suggest that the Heritage Foundation’s traveling circus managed to educate the populace in a way that the entirety of U.S. politics from 2009 until last month failed to strains credulity in ways that even the Heritage Foundation hasn’t heretofore managed.)
The GOP has another inherent contradiction in its case against the law. I call it the “tomacco dilemma.” Tomacco, for those not steeped in “The Simpsons,” is a terrible-tasting, highly addictive, radioactive hybrid between a tomato and tobacco. People can’t stand its taste but eat it compulsively. And conservatives seem to think that Obamacare is tomacco.
Consider again Cruz’s description of the law: “Everyone in America understands Obamacare is destroying jobs. … All across the country in all 50 States … Americans understand this thing is not working.” And yet it’s vitally important for conservatives that the law be stopped dead in its tracks before the next phase of implementation on October 1, because once Americans get used to it, they will never give it up.
So David Horowitz writes on RedState (which, it’s worth noting, stands firmly behind Cruz’s quixotic defund push):
It’s time we cut through the clutter of this debate and break it down to one central point. Republicans will never have enough power to repeal Obamacare through the front door. The dependency will be immutable long before the possibility that they will win back the Senate and the White House.
By 2016, the next time the GOP could possibly win back the White House and full control of the Senate, he says, “dependency” will be so widespread that the GOP will be powerless to stop it. “Dependency” is in this case another way of saying “popularity.” Think about it: If Obamacare is a job-destroying, economy-shattering, health-benefit-killing disaster now, how is it that within a mere three years it will have taken its place as part of the fabled third rail of American politics? Obamacare can be hated or it can be dangerously popular, but it can’t be both.
It’s no wonder polls show that most Americans don’t understand the law – not even its most vocal critics can agree about what’s wrong with it.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2013
“Elections Don’t Have Consequences”: In His Warped Mind, Jim DeMint Is Essentially Declaring A Mistrial
Remember the 2012 elections? The one in which Republicans ran on a platform of repealing the Affordable Care Act, and then lost?
If you’re Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, helping lead the anti-healthcare crusade, the apparent answer is no.
DeMint thinks the election results don’t accurately reflect national sentiment and therefore can’t be used to argue against his desire to move the party to the right. True conservatism never got a hearing — particularly not in regard to Obamacare, which was, after all, modeled after a Massachusetts law signed by Romney. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” he says. Essentially, DeMint is declaring a mistrial.
So while John McCain and I — there’s a pairing I didn’t expect to write about — agree that elections have consequences, we nevertheless have Jim DeMint sticking up for the “these elections don’t really count” contingent.
And they don’t count, he argues, because that darned Republican presidential candidate just didn’t push the health care issue. Sure, if you have the memory of a fruit fly, you might not recall Romney promising in every speech for a year and a half to repeal the health care law, the ads promising to destroy the law on Romney’s first day in office, or the central role the anti-Obamacare message played in the Republican pitch in 2012.
But for the rest of us, it’s getting increasingly difficult not to just laugh out loud when Jim DeMint starts talking.
In fact, the closer one looks at this, the more hilarious DeMint appears.
I suspect he’d prefer that we forget, but in 2007, DeMint, then a U.S. senator, endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, citing — you guessed it — Romney’s successful health care reform law in Massachusetts.
And yet, at this point, DeMint no longer remembers his affinity for Romney, his support for Romney’s health care plan, or Romney’s platform from last year’s campaign.
This guy’s the head of a once-relevant think tank?
On a related note, Molly Ball has a great new piece in The Atlantic on Heritage’s dwindling credibility under DeMint’s leadership.
[T]here is more at stake in Heritage’s transformation from august policy shop to political hit squad than the reputation of a D.C. think tank or even the careers of a few squishy GOP politicians. It is the intellectual project of the conservative movement itself. Without Heritage, the GOP’s intellectual backbone is severely weakened, and the party’s chance to retake its place as a substantive voice in American policy is in jeopardy.
As the right embraces a post-policy role in American politics, Republicans can thank DeMint for helping lead the way.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 26, 2013
“Selling Un-Reality”: The Right’s Self-Defeating New “Shutdown Obamacare” Business Scheme
Convincing House Republicans to pursue impossible goals with dubious tactics is the conservative movement’s business … and business is good! Seriously, business is really good. Defunding Obamacare has been a boon for funding PACs and nonprofits. The conservative intramural debate over a potential government shutdown is pitting Republican political leadership against conservative organizations, and the organizations won’t be swayed by political arguments. Here’s National Review’s Robert Costa, whose entire piece today is is worth reading:
But these organizations, ensconced in Northern Virginia office parks and elsewhere, aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire. In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social media, donations are pouring in, and e-mail lists are growing.
One side is fighting to win the next election, the other side is collecting valuable signatures. The Senate Conservatives Fund, one group at the heart of the fight, has amassed 1.3 million. The Senate Conservatives fund was founded by Jim DeMint, current president of the Heritage Foundation, a hugely influential right-wing organization that seems to be shifting from think tank (boring!) to PAC and pressure group. Because donors respond much more favorably to attack ads than they do to white papers.
As I’ve said a hundred times before, the conservative movement is essentially a self-perpetuating fundraising machine. This is not to say that Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are insincere in their belief that subsidies and a network of statewide exchanges for the purchase of private health insurance will destroy liberty forever, I’m merely saying that the campaign to convince voters and legislators that Republicans can delay or defeat Obamacare this month is a lucrative one, for many people.
When there isn’t an election going on, these groups need other reasons to convince people to send them money. The Obamacare fight, like the IRS scandal before it, works beautifully. Here’s U.S. News and World Report’s Brian Walsh, a former Republican operative, on the scope of this campaign:
In fact, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action, the political arm of the once well-respected Heritage Foundation, have spent more money so far on attack ads this year against House and Senate Republicans than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee, combined. All the while, virtually every Senate Democrat up for re-election in 2014 – all of whom were the deciding vote on Obamacare – has been given a free pass by these groups.
Once you “sign” a “petition” by calling or clicking, you are invited to donate money to help finance the fight against the tyrannical healthcare law. (And then you may receive either a bumper sticker or a copy of Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny.”) You end up on a list — a list that is worth a great deal of money to the organization — whenever you attend a rally. Participating in calls increases loyalty to the group and drives more donations. Heritage Action had a “nine-city national tour over the summer” and Brent Bozell’s ForAmerica “made over 50,000 phone calls to congressional offices.”
Whether or not the Republicans actually end up causing a government shutdown, these groups have already won. Whether or not Obamacare is delayed or defunded, they’ve already won. Some annoyed Republicans are accusing shutdown-pushers like Ted Cruz of “not dealing in reality,” but Cruz is decidedly reality-based. He’s just selling unreality to his constituents — not just Texas voters, but the entire nationwide network of pissed-off and increasingly delusional conservatives who fund the great right-wing money carousel. He becomes a star, and they get to feel like they’re an integral part of an existential fight for America’s future. (They also get a bumper sticker and a bulk-purchased copy of a conservative media hack’s ghost-written book.)
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 17, 2013
“The Grand Case Against Obamacare”: The Republican Old, Stale, Non-Compeling, Non-Argument
You’d think with the resources he commands as de facto leader of the conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation, rightwing warhorse Jim DeMint would be able to come up with a fresh and compelling argument for why he wants to shut down the federal government and maybe risk a global economic meltdown in order to stop the implementation of a health reform law based largely on a blueprint first devised by his own think tank. But DeMint’s latest ukase on the subject for the Fox News site is as tired as an uninsured diabetic in South Carolina working two shifts at minimum wage.
I won’t quote DeMint directly, but his five big reasons for killing Obamacare are the usual woofers: it may force people in the individual market to change insurance policies (for better ones, with premium subsidies available for those of modest means); it may cause some consumers to choose between the policies and providers they want (just like private insurance policies today); the Medicaid expansion is a fraud because Medicaid’s worse than no insurance at all (tell that to the many millions receiving Medicaid now); Obamacare will slash and maybe kill Medicare (the usual confusion of cost reductions and provider cuts with benefit cuts); and of course, the whole thing will blow up budget deficits (not what the nonpartisan CBO says at all).
But what’s most remarkable is that DeMint doesn’t even mention the tens of millions of people with preexisting conditions who will obtain health insurance they just cannot get right now, and also cannot get under any GOP alternative (though DeMint doesn’t bother to mention any) known to mankind, at least since the GOP abandoned Stuart Butler’s plan hatched at Heritage.
I don’t know why DeMint and his wordsmiths even bother with such “persuasion” efforts, particularly for Fox News readers. Anyone buying his premises has already bought the conclusion.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington MOnthly Politica Animal, September 10, 2013
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