“Looking Back On The Carnage”: How Republicans Won Nothing And Lost Everything In The Government Shutdown
Two and a half weeks into the government shutdown, and with a disastrous debt default mere hours away, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday finally reached for his one escape lever.
The House on Wednesday is expected to vote on a bipartisan Senate-brokered bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. “We fought the good fight, we just didn’t win,” Boehner said in announcing he would bring the bill for a vote, which should pass with support from Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Though Republicans originally demanded a steep ransom, the inexorable path to Wednesday’s deal wrought havoc on the party brand while delivering them absolutely none of the gleaming prizes they wanted. And plenty in the party told them this is exactly how it would end.
First, the terms of the deal are quite favorable to Democrats. The one concession Republicans won in the deal? The implementation of an income verification system in ObamaCare for people seeking federal subsidies.
Except it’s hardly a concession. The health care law originally had similar verification requirements, though the Obama administration in July delayed them to 2015. In short, the GOP will get a minor tweak to the law that was in there in the first place.
At the same time, the deal will force the House and Senate to convene a budget committee to hammer out a new spending agreement. Democrats have been repeatedly asking for just such a committee since at least April.
The GOP’s failure to win any concessions is all the more painful when you consider that a different strategy — to be blunt, a sane strategy — could have put real pressure on Democrats.
Before the shutdown, Republicans had a chance to vote for a clean continuing resolution to fund the government through November 15 at the reduced levels mandated by the 2011 debt-limit deal. Instead, the House balked, repeatedly sending the Senate untenable bills attacking ObamaCare.
Had Republicans approved the original “clean” offer, they would have had a second crack at addressing spending within two months, and an untarnished image as they tried to wield the debt ceiling as leverage. By putting all their chips in an utterly futile plan to defund ObamaCare, they squandered both.
While Republicans gained virtually nothing, they will be bleeding from this battle for a long time to come.
Republicans entered 2013 clamoring for a “rebrand” after losing the 2012 election. The shutdown has set that effort back so far that they might as well have rewound the clock to the eve of Mitt Romney’s defeat.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey midway through the shutdown found that only one-quarter of Americans had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, an all-time low. Other polls showed Democrats opening up wide leads in generic balloting, and suggested they could retake the House in 2014.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) told the Washington Post that the GOP’s huge slide in polls had allowed the party to recruit a handful of stronger candidates who otherwise would have stayed out.
“In a number of districts we had top-tier, all-star potential candidates who several months ago didn’t see a path to victory,” he said. “They reopened the doors.”
Though Democrats’ big polling advantage will likely fade to some degree come 2014, the party is, for now, in good standing heading into the midterm elections, particularly in the Senate, where candidates have to appeal to a wider ideological swathe of voters.
The shutdown fallout could also have an impact next month in Virginia. With the shutdown dragging on, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe pried open a wide lead over Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. McAuliffe aired an ad directly linking his opponent to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the shutdown’s architect. And even Cuccinnelli conceded the shutdown was negatively impacting his campaign.
Meanwhile, Cruz has also exposed a deep rift in the congressional GOP between the establishment and the Tea Party. Though conservative members say they won’t oust Boehner from his leadership post for caving on the debt ceiling, the House caucus has been left more fractured than ever, with outside conservative groups blasting GOP members unwilling to tank the economy as the “surrender caucus.”
That’s not even taking into account the huge gulf opening up between House Republicans and Senate Republicans.
Such divisions could spawn fractious primary fights next year. Business groups, concerned with their waning influence with the GOP, have already said they may help finance primary campaigns against Tea Party lawmakers.
Even Republicans, looking back on the carnage that was the shutdown, have begun to admit it was a costly mistake.
“We took some bread crumbs and left an entire meal on the table,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “This has been a very bad two weeks for the Republican Party.”
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, October 16, 2013
“A De-Americanized World”: GOP Antics Are Making The United States Look Pretty Insane Right Now
When there’s a global economic crisis, investors from around the world have spent the last several generations doing one thing: they buy U.S. treasuries. The reasoning, of course, is that there is no safer investment, anywhere on the planet, than the United States of America — which has the strongest and largest economy on the planet, and which always pays its bills.
All of these assumptions, of course, were cultivated over generations, and pre-date the radicalization of the Republican Party.
But what happens when U.S. treasuries are no longer considered safe, Americans can no longer be counted on to pay its bills, and the nation’s most powerful economy chooses to default on purpose? The world starts reevaluating old assumptions, that’s what.
In Britain, Jon Cunliffe, who will become deputy governor of the Bank of England next month, told members of Parliament that banks should be developing contingency plans to deal with an American default if one happens.
And Chinese leaders called on a “befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.” In a commentary on Sunday, the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua blamed “cyclical stagnation in Washington” for leaving the dollar-based assets of many nations in jeopardy. It said the “international community is highly agonized.”
I know I’ve been pushing this thesis in recent weeks, but it’s important to remember the unique role the United States plays in global leadership and the extent to which Republican antics in Congress will change the dynamic that’s been stable for the better part of the last century.
No major western power has defaulted since Hitler’s Germany, so this week may add some history to the potentially catastrophic economic consequences, and the world is watching closely.
Indeed, try to imagine explaining this ongoing crisis to a foreign observer who doesn’t fully appreciate the nuances of domestic politics. “Yes, we have the largest economy on the planet. Yes, we want to maintain global credibility. Yes, the process of extending our borrowing authority is incredibly easy and could be completed in about 10 minutes. No, some members of our legislative branch have decided they no longer want the United States to honor its obligations and pay for the things they’ve already bought.”
I suspect global observers would find this truly inexplicable. As it happens, I’d agree with them.
Ezra Klein added yesterday that to the rest of the world, “the United States looks insane right now.”
They’re dealing with real problems that their political systems are struggling to solve. The United States’ political system is creating fake problems that it may choose to leave unsolved.
“The United States was the one bright spot in the world recovery,” says OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria. “It was leading the recovery! Leading the creation of jobs! This unfortunate situation with the budget and debt happens at the moment it was looking good.” […]
At best, the United States is slowing its recovery — and that of the rest of the world. At worst, it’s going to trigger another global crisis. That’s why, Gurria says, his concern isn’t that the United States’ economy is weak, but that its political system is.
It’s heartbreaking that so much of the world is now laughing at us, not because we have crises we can’t solve, but because members of one party — the one that lost the most recent national elections — insist on manufacturing new crises to advance their unpopular agenda.
To reiterate what we discussed last week, there’s a global competition underway for power and influence in the 21st century. Americans have rivals who are playing for keeps. We can either be at the top of our game or we can watch others catch up.
And it’s against this backdrop that House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican colleagues shut down the government, threaten default, fight tooth and nail to strip Americans of their health care benefits, and keep spending levels so low we’re kicking children out of Head Start centers while our global competitors invest heavily in education.
It’s as if some have a vision in which we no longer lead and we aim for second place on purpose.
Great nations can’t function the way we’re struggling to function now. The United States can either be a 21st-century superpower or it can tolerate Republicans abandoning the governing process and subjecting Americans to a series of self-imposed extortion crises.
It cannot do both.
China is talking about “a de-Americanized world.” It’s time for Republicans to decide whether they intend to help them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 15, 2013
“It’s Still Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion”: Republicans Are Fighting For The Future Blackmail
We have two interesting theories today about what’s happening in the House. One is from Neil Irwin, who posits that it’s all about a sunk costs fallacy — Republicans are mistakenly continuing to ask for things they can’t get because that’s the only way to justify what they’ve already given up by following their current strategy. The other theory, well-articulated by Greg Sargent, Jonathan Chait and Danny Vinik, is that Republicans are still fighting for the principle of extortion.
I strongly agree with the latter theory — way back in May, I argued that radical Republicans were fighting over the principle of extortion for the sake of extortion:
[I]t’s not really about Republicans demanding debt reduction and using the best leverage they have available to get it. Nor is it about Republicans demanding tax reform — their other possible demand — and using the best leverage they have to get it.
No, it’s the other way around. The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It shows up all the time. For example, today Speaker John Boehner has pulled a delay of the medical-device tax from his latest attempt to put together a package, because the radicals weren’t happy with it. Yes, they have a plausible reason. But my guess is that Democrats have indicated they really wouldn’t mind eliminating that tax, and so it’s no longer a ransom worth asking; asking for something the Democrats only mildly oppose (or don’t oppose at all) misses the whole point of why they’re doing what they’re doing. “Extortion for the sake of extortion” certainly seems to fit with the wild GOP swings from Obamacare, to spending, to contraception, to who knows next as the next reason for the shutdown and debt limit threat.
The reason all of this matters, still, is because if it’s just a sunk costs error then the costs for Democrats in bailing them out are limited to whatever it is they give up.
However, if it’s extortion, then any perceived success establishes an incentive for future use.
The key, by the way, is perceived success. So it matters a lot whether Republicans believe that they actually are getting something whenever the final deal happens — much more than whether, in some objective sense, they actually did get anything.
It’s hard to read exactly who is thinking what while these things are going on. But if it really is extortion for the sake of extortion, at least for the radicals, then there’s a very strong incentive to Democrats to hang very tough.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
“Divided And Uneasy”: There Must Be Some Kind Of Way Out Of Here, Said The Joker To The Thief
In the middle of this last night, the intrepid inside chronicler of the Republican Party’s hostage crisis, National Review‘s Robert Costa, allowed as how GOPers are “divided and uneasy:”
Late Sunday, Republican staffers from both chambers were scrambling to reconcile the competing Republican strategies in the House and Senate, but communication has been sporadic. Senate GOP insiders are unsure of whether Senate Democrats will even negotiate unless Republicans cave on sequestration, and House insiders are unsure of whether Speaker John Boehner can keep his fragile conference united.
If things fall apart, Senator Lindsey Graham tells me he’s going to “object” to any deal that doesn’t include a vote on whether congressional employees should continue to receive federal contributions to their health-care plans. For Graham, the effort would be a final attempt to make Democrats endure an uncomfortable vote, should Republicans stumble.
Meanwhile, GOP enthusiasm for the showdown, from both conservatives and grandees, is waning. Members are spending considerable time calling one another to lament, and they’re worried about fading public support. “We can’t get lower in the polls. We’re down to blood relatives and paid staffers now,” said Senator John McCain on CBS’s Face the Nation. “But we’ve got to turn this around, and the Democrats had better help.”
In case your attention has drifted during this manufactured crisis, House Republicans forced a government shutdown and threatened a debt default in pursuance of a series of demands that changed almost hourly but never failed to smell to high heaven of hubris. Accompanying this attempted stick-up was an equally audacious fallback: a p.r. campaign to convince the public (and many more-than-willing journalists) Democrats were at least equally to blame for the crisis because of their refusal to make immediate concessions. Now that this half-a-loaf strategy seems to have failed, too, GOPers are demanding at least a few concessions so that they don’t have to admit failure to a puzzled and angry “base” that had been told a crushing victory over the evil president and his satanic health care law was in clear sight. And I’m sure we are just hours from a batch of op-eds urging said evil president and his party to show their “wisdom” by throwing John Boehner and Mitch McConnell life-lines to a face-saving “compromise” that will probably include both overall funding concessions plus some Obamacare nicks, and quite likely a fresh opportunity to go through the same extortion effort not too far down the road.
I’m not responsible for the health of the U.S. economic system, and I can only imagine the pressure the White House is feeling as it watches the minutes tick down to the opening of the New York Stock Exchange this morning after the high expectations on Friday of a quick deal faded over the weekend. You can even make an argument that Democrats need to proactively prevent the humiliation of Boehner and McConnell because their successors would be so much worse. But it remains outrageous that those who resisted this whole unnecessary nightmare have an obligation to reward its chief perpetrators, who will then try to preen and strut before the “base” about how they tricked the godless liberals into surrender.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 14, 2013
“A Winning Hand”: Democrats Up The Ante And Push Back Against GOP Tea Party Bullies
A crazy thing is happening in shuttered, dysfunctional Washington: Democrats are pushing back.
This phenomenon is so novel and disorienting that many Republicans in Congress, especially the tea party bullies, seem unable to grasp what’s going on. They keep expecting President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to fold like a cheap suit because, well, such a thing has happened before. I guess it’s understandable that the GOP might have forgotten the difference between bluffing and actually holding a winning hand.
Late last week, Reid began demanding that Republicans not only reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, but that they also make concessions on the draconian, irrational-by-design budget cuts known as sequestration. In political terms, he is demanding that the GOP pay a price for putting the country through all this needless drama.
Suddenly, Republicans who thought it was fine to hold the government and the economy hostage in order to nullify a duly enacted law — the Affordable Care Act — are shocked that Democrats would even suggest tampering with another duly enacted law: the Budget Control Act of 2011, which established the “sequester” cuts.
Was Reid moving the goal posts? Of course he was. That’s what negotiators do when they have the upper hand.
It seemed clear from the beginning that House Republicans had overreached by shutting down the government in an attempt to block the health-insurance reforms popularly known as Obamacare. For one thing, many of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions were already in force. For another, any residual questions about the law had been thoroughly litigated in last year’s election.
Indeed, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday pronounced a devastating verdict: Fifty-three percent of those surveyed blamed Republicans for the shutdown, as opposed to 31 percent who blamed Obama — a worse pounding for the GOP than the party suffered when Newt Gingrich shut down the government during the Clinton administration. A separate Gallup survey showed the Republican Party with an approval rating of just 28 percent, the lowest the firm has ever measured for either party.
Such stunning numbers not only threaten to dash the GOP’s hopes of winning control of the Senate next year but also challenge the party’s ability to hold its majority in the House.
So there’s no question who’s winning and who’s losing. Still, it’s refreshing to see Democrats act accordingly.
The standard pattern since Republicans captured the House in 2010 goes something like this: House Speaker John Boehner makes outrageous demands. Obama negotiates a “compromise” package heavily weighted toward Republican priorities, but Boehner can’t deliver his caucus. Fearful that tea party vandals might burn down the house, Democrats end up agreeing to a short-term deal that gives the GOP much of what it wants.
It is understandable that the activist Republican base might think victory through blackmail is the natural order of things. It’s not. It’s a distortion of American democracy that weakens the nation, and it has to end.
The fact that the GOP controls the House means that its views cannot be ignored. But the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the White House means that Republicans have no right to expect that they will always get their way. This concept of basic fairness is the sort of thing most of us learned in second grade. Apparently, Sen. Ted Cruz was not paying attention.
Before the tea party tantrum that caused the shutdown, Democrats had already agreed to sequester-level government funding of $986 billion — the number that Republicans had insisted on. Because of sequestration, funding will suffer a further $21 billion cut in January. Last week, as the Senate struggled to clean up the mess that the House majority had made, Reid said hold on a minute.
Senate Democrats now want only a brief extension at the sequester level, along with further negotiations that could raise government funding closer to $1.058 trillion, the number they originally sought.
Republicans reacted with shock and horror, most of it feigned. This is the way politics is supposed to work. Obama and Reid are now in a position to win gracefully by compromising on their new spending demands. Republicans could then portray the outcome as something other than a rout — and hope the focus on spending makes the hyper-caffeinated GOP base forget about that whole Obamacare-is-the-devil thing.
This should be a lesson: When you negotiate from strength, you’re not only helping yourself. You’re helping your adversary, too.
BY: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 14, 2013
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