“How About The ‘Congress Does It’s Job’ Plan”: In The Midst Of Crises, Chaos Grips Congress
I’d thought about creating some kind of flow chart to capture ongoing developments in Capitol Hill, but quickly gave up. As Jonathan Cohn noted, it would have simply been too messy.
By my count, no less than four separate conversations are taking place right now: The White House is talking to House Republicans and, separately, it to Senate Republicans. In the Senate, moderate Republicans are talking to the Democratic leadership. In the House, Republicans from the party’s extreme wing are talking to Republicans from the not-so-extreme wing, all under the watchful eye of the caucus leaders.
And that’s just the official dialogue. Staff and outside interest groups are talking amongst themselves. The subject of these talks include myriad variations on how to write a bill reopening the government and giving it new borrowing authority, for different durations of time and under different conditions — or no conditions at all.
That ought to clear things up, right?
It’s been nearly two weeks since congressional Republicans shut down the government, and we’re just days from a debt-ceiling calamity, suggesting policymakers should theoretically be working towards some kind of resolution. But while there was a flurry of activity yesterday, it was largely a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
House Republicans, for example, thought they’d presented the White House with a credible offer: Congress would temporarily raise the debt ceiling, the government would remain closed, Democrats would accept Medicare and/or Social Security cuts, and the severity of the sequestration cuts that neither party likes would be eased. President Obama declared this a joke, told House GOP leaders he could probably get a better offer from Senate Republicans, and so dejected House members promptly left Capitol Hill yesterday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, thought she too had come up with a solution: Congress would reopen the government for six months and raise the debt limit for a year. Democrats would have to accept sequestration levels and throw in a two-year delay of the medical-device tax in the Affordable Care Act, and in exchange, Republicans would concede nothing. Yesterday, Democrats rejected this as wholly unacceptable, too.
And as a practical matter, it doesn’t much matter that Dems didn’t like it, since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even vote on the Collins plan — a plan in which Republicans give up nothing except temporary hold on some hostages — even if the Senate approved it and even if House GOP leaders could tolerate it.
So what happens now?
With House members having given up, at least for now, talks are now underway between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). What, if anything, they can expect to accomplish is unclear.
And even if they reached some sort of resolution, it may not matter, since House Republicans still appear to be in a sociopathic mood, and may simply reject anything that emerges from the upper chamber, no matter the consequences.
The anxiety levels are exceedingly high.
For what it’s worth, I remain fond of the “Congress does its job” plan. It goes like this: the government needs to be funded, and since the parties already agree on funding levels, Congress should do its job and reopen the government — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
Similarly, the nation needs to pay its bills, and since the parties already agree that default would be catastrophic, Congress should do its job and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
For reasons that only make sense to them, Republicans consider the “Congress does its job” plan to be wildly offensive and a proposal so outrageous, they’d rather hurt Americans on purpose than vote for it.
Tick tock.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 13, 2013
“An Extreme Miscalculation”: Government Shutdown, The Tea Party’s Last Stand
If the nation is lucky, this October will mark the beginning of the end of the tea party.
The movement is suffering from extreme miscalculation and a foolish misreading of its opponents’ intentions. This, in turn, has created a moment of enlightenment, an opening to see things that were once missed.
Many Republicans, of course, saw the disaster coming in advance of the shutdown. But they were terrified to take on a movement that is fortified by money, energy and the backing of a bloviating brigade of talk-show hosts. The assumption was that the tea party had become invincible inside the GOP.
People who knew better followed Sen. Ted Cruz down a path of confrontation over Obamacare. Yet even before the shutdown began, Republicans stopped talking about an outright repeal of Obamacare, as House Speaker John Boehner’s ever-changing demands demonstrated.
The extent of the rout was then underscored in the hot-microphone incident last week when Sen. Rand Paul was caught plotting strategy with Sen. Mitch McConnell. Paul’s words, spoken after he had finished a television interview, said more than he realized.
“I just did CNN. I just go over and over again: ‘We’re willing to compromise, we’re willing to negotiate,’ ” Paul said, adding this about the Democrats: “I don’t think they’ve poll-tested, ‘We won’t negotiate.’ ”
Tellingly, Paul described the new GOP line this way: “We wanted to defund it, we fought for that, but now we’re willing to compromise on this.”
It’s revealing to hear a politician who is supposed to be all about principle mocking Democrats for failing to do enough poll-testing. It makes you wonder whether Paul poll-tests everything he says. But Paul’s statement raised a more important question: If just days after it began, a shutdown that was about repealing Obamacare is not about repealing Obamacare, then what is it about?
Actually, it’s what even conservatives are calling the Seinfeld Shutdown: It’s about absolutely nothing, at least where substance is concerned. Moreover, Paul and his friends need to explain why, if they are so devoted to “negotiation,” they didn’t negotiate long ago. Why did they relentlessly block negotiations over a Senate Democratic budget whose passage, according to a now-discarded pile of press releases, they once made a condition for discussions?
Only now can we fully grasp that politics on the right has been driven less by issues than by a series of gestures. And they give up on even these as soon as their foes try to take what they say seriously.
What the tea party and Boehner did not reckon with is that Obama and the Democrats are done being intimidated by the use of extra-constitutional means to extort concessions that the right cannot win through normal legislative and electoral methods.
Obama doesn’t just want to get past this crisis. He wants to win. And win he must, because victory is essential to re-establishing constitutional governance, a phrase that the tea party ought to understand.
Obama didn’t need to “poll-test” his position because the poll that matters, the 2012 election, showed that the tea party hit its peak long ago, in the summer of 2011, when it seemed to have the president on the defensive.
The slowly building revolt among Republicans against the tea party shutdown is one sign of how quickly the hard-right’s influence is fading. So is the very language they are being required to speak. Having talked incessantly about how useless and destructive government can be, House Republicans are now testifying to their reverence for what government does for veterans, health research, sick children and lovers of national parks, especially war memorials.
Appreciation for government rises when it’s no longer there. By pushing their ideology to its obvious conclusion, members of the Cruz-Paul right forced everyone else to race the other way.
Yes, the tea party will still have its Washington-based groups that raise money by bashing Washington, ginning up the faithful and threatening the less ideologically pure with primary challenges. But no Republican and no attentive citizen of any stripe will forget the mess these right-wing geniuses have left in their wake.
We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama’s election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 6, 2013
“States Of Health”: Obamacare And GOP Obstructionism
Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.
This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health-insurance coverage to millions of people like Sullivan, is slated to go into effect. Republican leaders have described the event in apocalyptic terms, as Republican leaders have described proposals to expand health coverage for three-quarters of a century. In 1946, Senator Robert Taft denounced President Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance as “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan argued that, if Medicare were to be enacted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” And now comes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing the Affordable Care Act as a “monstrosity,” “a disaster,” and the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years.” Lacking the votes to repeal the law, Republican hard-liners want to shut down the federal government unless Democrats agree to halt its implementation.
The law’s actual manifestation, however, is rather anodyne: as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.
How this will unfold, though, depends on where you live. Governors and legislatures in about half the states—from California to New York, Minnesota to Maryland—are working faithfully to implement the law with as few glitches as possible. In the other half—Indiana to Texas, Utah to South Carolina—they are working equally faithfully to obstruct its implementation. Still fundamentally in dispute is whether we as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan. Not only do conservatives not think so; they seem to see providing that protection as a threat to America itself.
Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.
Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.
This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as “pupil placement” reviews, “freedom of choice” plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform. In some states, Paul Sullivan’s fate will become rare. In others, it will remain a reality for an unconscionable number of people. Of some three thousand counties in the nation, a hundred and fourteen account for half of the uninsured. Sixty-two of those counties are in states that have accepted the key elements of Obamacare, including funding to expand Medicaid. Fifty-two are not.
So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured will gain protection they didn’t have. It won’t be the thirty-two million hoped for, and it’s becoming clear that the meaning of the plan’s legacy will be fought over not for a few months but for years. Still, state by state, a new norm is coming into being: if you’re a freelancer, or between jobs, or want to start your own business but have a family member with a serious health issue, or if you become injured or ill, you are entitled to basic protection.
Conservatives keep hoping that they can drive the system to collapse. That won’t happen. Enough people, states, and health-care interests are committed to making it work, just as the Massachusetts version has for the past seven years. And people now have a straightforward way to resist the forces of obstruction: sign up for coverage, if they don’t have it, and help others do so as well.
By: Atul Gawande, MD, The New Yorker, Published September 29, 2013
“Up To His Eyeballs In Alligators:” Mitch McConnell Flirts With The Tea Party Crazies On The Debt Ceiling
Sen. Mitch McConnell is so up to his eyeballs in alligators, he’s long since forgot about cleaning the swamp.
No question the senator hears the steady, galloping horses from the tea party extremists closing fast. To be sure, he faces a tough general election against Kentycky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes – some polls even show him behind. But before he gets to next November he faces the threat of a challenge from within his own party. Wealthy tea party candidate Matt Bevin is definitely nipping at his heals.
Maybe that is why McConnell is showing signs of joining the “crazy caucus” – that large band of Republicans who are ready to see a default on the debt, a shutdown of the government, a continuation of the sequester and the defunding of Obamacare – and by virtue of such insane policies, an economic meltdown.
They profess to be worried about the deficit and spending yet their policies so far, and their future plans, would see drastic reductions in tax revenue as they stall the recovery, put more people out of work and send us back into a recession.
Bad politics, bad economics and bad for America’s middle class.
Yesterday, McConnell expressed the need to use the debt for “leverage” against Obama. “It’s a hostage worth ransoming,” McConnell has said. He embraced the tea party call for not raising the debt limit and watching America default. Sorry – been there, done that, didn’t work.
Maybe the Republicans should follow the example of their hero, President Reagan.
Here is what Ronald Reagan wrote to Congress when it came to raising the debt ceiling in 1983:
The full consequences of a default – or even the serious prospect of default – by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.
Reagan, after all, raised the debt ceiling 18 times.
So, let’s play this out. If McConnell is so intent on joining the tea party in their efforts what is he risking if Obama calls the bluff of the “crazy caucus”? The full weight of responsible economists, editorial writers, business leaders, reasonable elected officials would come crashing down on him. As the minority leader in the Senate he would not be the engineer of a compromise but rather the creator of chaos.
The crazy caucus would become the chaos caucus, led by Mitch McConnell.
In short, he would have drunk the Kool-Aid and end up paying for it at the ballot box. He would be loudly criticized as the man who allowed what Reagan warned against to become a reality. Some legacy.
My guess is that President Obama has had about enough from the threats, the in-your-face tactics of the tea party. He’ll put his foot down, not be intimidated and let the chips fall.
And if I were betting, the Republican “crazy caucus” would morph rather quickly into the “suicide caucus.” And Mitch McConnell would be part of the carnage.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, September 18, 2013
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