“Leading By Weather Vane”: Mitch McConnell Sticks His Finger In The Wind, Makes Up His Mind
In August, as Senate Republicans argued among themselves over budget strategies, their ostensible leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell (R), stayed on the sidelines. Worried that bold stands might hurt his re-election chances, the Senate Minority Leader was too afraid to take a stand.
In September, as GOP lawmakers have argued among themselves over U.S. policy in Syria, McConnell has again been afraid to lead. Yesterday, the Minority Leader didn’t even want to be on the Senate floor for fear he might have to take a position on the issue of the day.
This morning, after carefully waiting for his pollsters to tell him what to say pondering the issue for three weeks, McConnell spoke up.
Breaking his silence on Syria, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell revealed Tuesday that he will oppose a resolution giving President Barack Obama the authority to unleash military strikes.
“I will be voting against this resolution — a vital national security risk is clearly not at play” McConnell said in a speech prepared for delivery on the Senate floor that painted the White House strategy as muddled and rife with “unintended consequences.
McConnell added, “It’s not exactly a state secret that I’m no fan of this president’s foreign policy.”
That’s certainly true, though it’s also not exactly a state secret that McConnell has spent his congressional career as a hawk, broadly supportive of using force abroad and backing military intervention to address national security crises.
So what changed? In case it’s not obvious, McConnell is terrified of losing.
He has a credible primary opponent, an equal credible general-election challenger, and poll numbers that suggest McConnell is one of the least popular senators in the nation. It made for an easy calculus — the Minority Leader will abandon his foreign policy principles because neither the president nor intervention in Syria are popular. Sure, it’s craven to approach U.S. foreign policy this way, but McConnell apparently doesn’t care.
This also, incidentally, creates an unexpected intra-party division — the top two House Republicans (Boehner and Cantor) support the president’s position, while the top two Senate Republicans (McConnell and Cornyn) do not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, Deptember 10, 2013
“If The President Is For It”: After White House Briefing And Asking No Questions, John Cornyn’s Convenient Change Of Heart
In March Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) appeared at an event in Atlanta, and publicly endorsed U.S. intervention in Syria. Then President Obama expressed support for military strikes in Syria, at which point Cornyn reconsidered.
Indeed, in a curious twist, the Texas Republican said this week “many questions are still left unanswered,” which led to a meeting with the president in the White House in which Cornyn asked no questions.
All of which leads us to now.
A Cornyn aide said Thursday that the senator currently opposes the Syria resolution, which will be debated on the Senate floor next week.
“If the vote were held today, Sen. Cornyn would vote no,” said Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cornyn.
The immediate significance of this is that Cornyn is the first leading congressional Republican to express opposition to authorizing the use of force. In the House, the top two GOP leaders — House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor — endorsed the resolution earlier this week, while in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is too afraid to say much of anything.
But it’s the larger context of announcements like these that stand out.
Kevin Drum had a gem on this yesterday.
There’s obviously a bit of hypocrisy on both sides in this affair, but I have to say that watching Republican pols and conservative pundits get on their high horses about Syria has been pretty nauseating. These are guys who mostly have never met a war they didn’t like, and until a few months ago were practically baying at the moon to demand that President Obama stop diddling around and get serious about aiding the rebels and taking out the monstrous Bashar al-Assad. But now? Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths as they talk piously about the value of multilateral support; the need to give diplomacy a chance; the perils of regional blowback; the lessons of Iraq; and the fear of escalation if Assad retaliates. You’d think they’d all just returned from a Save the Whales conference in Marin County.
There are some Republicans who are perfectly serious about their desire not to get entangled in yet another Middle Eastern conflict. But most of them couldn’t care less. Obama is for it, so they’re against it. It’s pretty hard to take.
Bill Kristol published an interesting item this morning, urging his party follow the president’s lead on Syria. “The fact is that Obama is the only president we have,” Kristol wrote. “We can’t abdicate our position in the world for the next three years. So Republicans will have to resist the temptation to weaken him when the cost is weakening the country. A party that for at least two generations has held high the banner of American leadership and strength should not cast a vote that obviously risks a damaging erosion of this country’s stature and credibility abroad.”
Now, as a skeptic of U.S. intervention, I’m not at all convinced that restraint in Syria will “weaken the country.” But what’s interesting to me is that Kristol seems to believe congressional Republicans, en masse, can separate their political instincts from their foreign policy worldview.
In recent days, it’s been made abundantly clear that they cannot. Putting aside the merits (or lack thereof) of intervention, most congressional Republicans appear to be approaching this debate the same way they approach every debate — as post-policy partisans who define themselves by their objections to a president they hold in contempt for reasons that are generally incoherent.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 6, 2013
“Beneath Any Reasonable Standards Of Elected Officials”: The Unprecedented And Contemptible Attempts To Sabotage Obamacare
When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans’ No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety.
I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare—Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.
It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription drug plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill—it passed the Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes—while along the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference committee deliberations.
The implementation of that bill was a huge challenge, and had many rocky moments. It required educating millions of seniors, most not computer-literate, about the often complicated choices they had to create or change their prescription coverage. Imagine if Democrats had gone all out to block or disrupt the implementation—using filibusters to deny funding, sending threatening letters to companies or outside interests who mobilized to educate Medicare recipients, putting on major campaigns to convince seniors that this was a plot to deny them Medicare, comparing it to the ill-fated Medicare reform plan that passed in 1989 and, after a revolt by seniors, was repealed the next year.
Almost certainly, Democrats could have tarnished one of George W. Bush’s signature achievements, causing Republicans major heartburn in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections—and in the process hurting millions of Medicare recipients and their families. Instead, Democrats worked with Republicans, and with Mark McClellan, the Bush administration official in charge of implementation, to smooth out the process and make it work—and it has been a smashing success.
Contrast that with Obamacare. For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04—in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan.
I remember being shocked when some congressional Democrats appeared to be rooting for the surge in troops in Iraq to fail—which would mean more casualties among Americans and Iraqis, but a huge embarrassment for Bush, and vindication of their skepticism. But of course they did not try to sabotage the surge by disrupting funding or interfering in the negotiations in Iraq with competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power centers. To do so would have been close to treasonous.
What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. A good example is the letter Senate Republican Leaders Mitch McConnell and Cornyn sent to the NFL, demanding that it not cooperate with the Obama administration in a public-education campaign to tell their fans about what benefits would be available to them and how the plan would work—a letter that clearly implied deleterious consequences if the league went ahead anyhow. McConnell and Cornyn got their desired result. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell quickly capitulated. (When I came to Washington in 1969-70, one of my great pleasures was meeting and getting to know Charles Goodell, the courageous Republican senator from New York who took on his own president on Vietnam and was quietly courageous on many other controversial issues. Roger Goodell is his son—although you would not know it from this craven action.)
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
By: Norm Ornstein, The National Journal, July 24, 2013
“Don’t Poison A Law, Then Claim It’s Sick”: Republicans Doing Everything They Can To Make The Affordable Care Act Fail
One does not usually expect blistering, progressive-minded editorials from USA Today, but this morning’s piece on the Affordable Care Act is a gem. The headline reads, “GOP poisons ObamaCare, then claims it’s sick.”
Regular readers know we’ve been talking quite a bit about Republican efforts to sabotage the federal health care system in the hopes of partisan and ideological gain, and it’s good to see the USA Today editorial board notice. “Having lost in Congress and in court, they’re now using the most cynical of tactics: trying to make the law fail,” the paper explains. “Never mind the public inconvenience and human misery that will result…. There is a distinct line between fighting to turn your ideas into law and trying to wreck a law once it has been passed.”
First, Republicans limited the use of government money to spread the word. Then, when the administration reached out to the NFL and other major sports leagues for help in publicizing the new health care exchanges, the opponents resorted to intimidation.
Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, fired off a letter to the NFL, saying that the league had better not get involved with such a controversial program, as if the league would be taking sides on a debate in Congress, not doing public service announcements for a law soon to affect millions.
In a particularly smarmy warning, McConnell and Cornyn told the NFL to let them know whether the Obama administration retaliated against the league for not cooperating — the clear implication being that if the league did help inform the public about ObamaCare, Senate Republicans had their own methods of retribution. It is an appalling abuse of power, and the NFL meekly yielded.
It’s against this backdrop that Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) falsely argued in his party’s weekly radio address that the law would disrupt people’s cancer care, and GOP governors nationwide block Medicaid expansion for no substantive reason.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but it appears today’s Republican Party knows no other way.
Of course, this isn’t the only thing going on with Obamacare this week.
This story, for example, struck me as almost amusing.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is requesting a new cost estimate for ObamaCare in light of a decision to delay the law’s employer mandate.
Ryan’s staff asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to reevaluate the law’s budget impact after the White House said Tuesday that larger employers will not be required to offer health insurance until 2015.
It’s true that the delay on the employer mandate will likely shrink the deficit reduction of the law by about $4 billion in that first year. In other words, instead of nearly $200 billion in deficit reduction over the first decade of the Affordable Care Act, we’re looking at a figure closer to $196 billion in deficit reduction.
But here’s my follow-up question for Paul Ryan: why do you care? What difference does it make to House Republicans if it’s $200 billion or $196 billion? Does the GOP really intend to run ads saying, “Obamacare is one of the biggest deficit-reduction packages in a generation, but it’s savings are slightly smaller than the CBO estimated last year”?
As for the increasingly common argument among conservatives that the delay in the employer mandate spells implementation trouble for the reform law, Ezra Klein had a good piece explaining that the opposite is true.
Peter Orszag, who helped design Obamacare from his perch as head of the Office of Management and Budget, disagreed with Rubin. “Delaying the employer mandate makes successful implementation more likely, not less likely,” he told me.
Larry Levitt, vice president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, agreed. “There’s nothing about the delay in the employer requirement that suggests Obamacare can’t still be implemented,” he said. “If anything the delay removes some potential administrative complexities from the plates of the implementers, and avoids the problem of some employers reducing the hours of part-time workers to get around the requirement.”
Timothy Jost, a health law expert at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law, was even blunter. “Implementation just got easier rather than harder,” he said…. The Obama administration has decided to accept some bad media coverage now, and some higher costs later, in order to make Obamacare much, much simpler to implement next year.
It seems like a relevant detail that’s been lost amid the chatter of late.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 10, 2013
“So Much For Sacred Obligations”: It’s Open Season On Voting Rights Right Now In America
Immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it was hard not to wonder how long it would take for Republican state lawmakers to begin imposing new voting restrictions on Americans they don’t like. As it turns out, GOP policymakers were apparently already revving their engines, just waiting for the green light that came 24 hours ago.
MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin noted that the Supreme Court’s majority said the Voting Rights Act “probably wasn’t a deterrent against new restrictions.” Sarlin added, “Oops.”
Quite right. Just yesterday, Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas all moved forward, with great enthusiasm, on new election measures intended to make it harder for traditional Democratic voters to participate in their own democracy. It is, as Rachel noted on the show last night, “open season on voting rights right now in America,” thanks to the Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Of course, the responsibility for “fixing” the Voting Rights Act is now in the hands of Congress, where one GOP leader was willing to say … something.
Earlier this year, [House Majority Leader Eric Cantor] participated in the congressional delegation that Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., leads back to Selma, Ala., annually. That pilgrimage visits the sites of the civil rights movement, particularly one where, during a nonviolent demonstration, an explosion of police brutality erupted that left Lewis, then a young activist, with severe injuries.
“My experience with John Lewis in Selma earlier this year was a profound experience that demonstrated the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all,” Cantor said. “I’m hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a reasonable path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected.”
That wouldn’t be especially noteworthy were it not for the fact that Cantor, to his credit, was literally the only member of the House congressional leadership — in either party — to issue a statement in response to the high court ruling. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn all said nothing.
Looking ahead, to put it mildly, this matters.
Indeed, why is it they were so reluctant to say anything at all? One of their colleagues was willing to explain the situation fairly accurately.
Most House Republicans were relatively subdued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to strike parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Conservative Arizona Rep. Trent Franks said that was no accident, but the result of a fear that their remarks would be interpreted as racism.
I suspect that’s a fair summary of the party’s fears, but I hope Republican lawmakers will consider the larger context. If they’re afraid of commenting for fear of looking racist, how do they suppose they’ll look when they reject efforts to “fix” the Voting Rights Act itself?
Boehner, McConnell, and company may not have a plan just yet, and they very likely would have preferred that the Supreme Court not drop this in their laps, but they’re going to have to come up with a strategy very soon.
And while they’re at it, I’d also encourage the Republican National Committee to think long and hard about voting rights in the coming months. Reince Priebus has been on a “listening tour” in recent months, making what appears to be a sincere effort to reach out to minority communities.
But whether the RNC realizes it or not, the party is in an untenable situation — Republicans can’t reach out to minority communities with one hand and wage a war on voting with the other, at least not if they expect their outreach efforts to be taken seriously.
Put it this way: if Republicans think they have a demographic problem now, imagine what it’ll look like after the party refuses to back a revamped Voting Rights Act.
No wonder Boehner and McConnell were feeling shy yesterday.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 26, 2013
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