“Netanyahu Directly Challenges Official U.S. Policy”: Republicans Are Approaching A Very Dangerous Line On This One
Under the leadership of President Obama, the official United States position is to attempt to negotiate an agreement with Iran to stop their development of nuclear weapons. We are currently engaged in those negotiations in concert with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France) plus Germany.
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu recently said this at his weekly Cabinet Meeting:
We will do everything and will take any action to foil this bad and dangerous agreement.
As the elected leader of Israel, it is his right to take that position. But it puts him at direct odds with official U.S. policy and members of the Security Council. In the above statement, he is being perfectly clear about that – regardless of the outcome of the negotiations.
It is in light of that position that we should view, not just the recent Republican invitation for Netanyahu to address the members of Congress, but this statement from Sen. John Cornyn.
Senate Republicans on Thursday moved to officially welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. ahead of his planned speech to Congress next month, the latest development in a saga that has roiled politics in both countries.
Almost all GOP senators were listed as co-sponsors of a resolution by Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) saying the Senate “eagerly awaits the address of Prime Minister Netanyahu before a joint session of the United States Congress” and reaffirms the U.S. commitment to standby Israel in “times of uncertainty.”
“During this time of such great instability and danger in the Middle East, the United States should be unequivocal about our commitment to one of our closest and most important allies,” Mr. Cornyn said in a statement.
When the Prime Minister of Israel publicly promises to do anything he can to foil the official policy of the United States, it is our duty to be equivocal in our support of him. Republicans are approaching a very dangerous line on this one.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 14, 2015
“A Lesson Not Learned”: There’s Another Shutdown Fight In Washington. Republicans Will Lose This One, Too
Congressional Republicans are in a tough spot. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expires on February 27, but conservatives are demanding that any DHS funding bill also block President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. That’s unacceptable to Senate Democrats, who filibustered the legislation three times last week.
And now we’re stuck. Some Republican senators are urging their House colleagues to accept a “clean” funding bill that doesn’t block Obama’s unilateral actions, but that’s unacceptable to House Republicans. “The House did its job,” Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday. “Now it’s time for the Senate to do their work.” No one is quite sure how this will end. “I guess the lesson learned is don’t put yourself in a box you can’t figure out a way to get out of,” Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito said.
The exact outcome may be unpredictable, but this impasse wasn’t.
Think back two months ago, when Congress needed to reach an agreement to fund the entire government. Conservatives were still seething at the president for taking executive action on immigration and wanted to use the government funding deadline as leverage to enact concessions from Obama. Republican leadership, on the other hand, was terrified that another government shutdown would be a political disaster for the GOP, just as they regained full control over Congress. And, they argued, Republicans would have more leverage in the 114th Congress, having won the Senate in November. The compromise was to fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year—with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security, which was funded only until February 27.
Conservatives weren’t happy with the deal, but Boehner’s job was safe. More importantly, the Republican leadership had limited the political downside of a potential shutdown. Now, it wouldn’t be a full government shutdown, just one department. Given the Tea Party’s fury at Obama, that was a huge victory for Boehner.
But even though the current impasse was the best case scenario for Republicans, they still are in a tough position. The practical effects of a DHS shutdown are relatively minor, since most of DHS’s employees are classified as essential and thus would continue to work in the case of a shutdown. But the political implications of it are much worse. Obama can criticize the GOP for putting the U.S.’s national security at risk. “I can think of few more effective ways for Republicans to re-surrender national security as an issue to Obama than by taking the Department of Homeland Security hostage like this,” The New Republic’s Brian Beutler wrote in December. And that’s exactly what Obama has done in recent weeks. As February 27 approaches, Obama and other Democrats will only amplify that message.
Republicans are already trying to avoid blame for a DHS shutdown. “If there’s a shutdown, it wouldn’t be because of us,” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said Tuesday. “The Democrats are filibustering it. I don’t know how we get blamed for that this time.” Hatch is right—Democrats did filibuster the House-passed legislation on three separate occasions. But Republicans will probably take the blame. That’s how the politics of the filibuster work. The minority uses it to obstruct legislation and the majority takes the blame. Americans know that Republicans control both chambers of Congress. They aren’t paying attention to parliamentarian rules.
In all likelihood, this will end the same way every funding fight ends these days: Republican leadership will eventually bring up a clean bill and it will pass with mostly Democratic votes. That’s long been the GOP game plan. It’s also possible that Republican leadership will see this fight, with its relatively small stakes, as a good opportunity to build credibility with the Tea Party by standing up to Obama and refusing to pass a clean bill.
Neither of those outcomes are good for the GOP. But this is what happens when one ideological group has outsized control over a party and wants to pick funding fights that they are certain to lose.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, February 12, 2015
“Efforts To Reposition Themselves”: Can Republicans Create Their Own Credible Economic Populism In Time For 2016?
When Republicans trooped to Iowa over the weekend for Steve King’s “Freedom Summit,” it was as much of a dash to the right as you would have expected from an event hosted by perhaps the most fervently anti-immigrant member of Congress, in a state whose presidential caucus was won by Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008.
But something else was going on, even there: the search for an economic populist message that might resonate with the general electorate.
Republicans haven’t yet figured out how to present this message, or exactly what policy proposals it ought to be based on. But they’re obviously trying. Here’s part of the New York Times’ report from the event:
A few candidates advanced a concern about income inequality that is percolating within the party, discussing wage stagnation, an issue that has largely belonged to Democrats. Mr. Christie spoke of the anxiety of the middle class. He said that any Republican coalition needed to include the “proud yet underserved and underrepresented working class in this country.”
“The rich are doing just fine,” Mr. Christie said.
Rick Santorum, the winner in the 2012 Iowa caucus, noted that for years Republicans had extolled entrepreneurs and business owners, adding that it made more sense politically to “be the party of the worker.”
“What percentage of American workers own their own businesses?” he asked. “Less than 10.”
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who won the 2008 caucus here, stressed that the falling unemployment rate did not represent an economic recovery for many people. “A lot of people who used to have one good-paying job with benefits now have to work two jobs,” he said.
You may notice that none of these critiques are about Barack Obama, unless you’re arguing that he failed to make things better. That’s because when you start to talk about persistent economic anxiety, you inevitably reach back beyond this administration to problems that developed over decades. Santorum’s message is perhaps the most bracing for Republicans to hear; after years of holding up business owners as the most virtuous and admirable among us, the ones for whose benefit all government policy should be made, it would be awfully difficult for Republicans to decide that bosses aren’t the ones they should be advocating for.
And of course, Democrats are going to do what they can to make any populist turn impossible for Republicans. President Obama and his congressional allies will be releasing a steady stream of executive actions and new proposals on things like paid sick leave, boosting overtime pay, and other measures, which Republicans will inevitably oppose, leaving them arguing against benefits for workers.
Which is why it’s important for Republicans to have their own policy proposals if they’re to convince voters that they’re the ones to trust on economics. Republican arguments used to always be about growth, as though that were all that mattered: cut taxes and regulations, the economy will grow, and we’ll all live happily ever after. But with the economy growing steadily and economic anxiety persisting, they have to argue that growth is not enough.
The current Republican efforts to reposition themselves on economic questions remind me a little of how Democrats used to talk about national security before the Iraq War went south and discredited Republican wisdom on the issue. Democrats were always defensive about it, and when they tried to come up with a new message for whatever campaign was looming, the point was never to win the argument over national security. They just wanted to minimize the damage the issue could do to them, or at best, fight to a draw so that the election would hinge on issues where they were stronger.
If Republicans are to do that now on economics, it isn’t a bad start to say their focus has to shift to what people who aren’t wealthy or business owners (or both) care about. Now they just have to come up with an answer to this question: Okay, so what are you going to do about it?
Many Republicans would probably prefer to stick to a populism without economics, one that uses issues like immigration or the latest culture war flare-up to convince voters that Democrats are part of a hostile “elite,” while the GOP is the party of the common man and woman. This has certainly worked before. But the problem for them is that they are now on the wrong side of majority opinion on many of those cultural issues. Which only means that, when it comes to their new-found economic populism, there will be, if anything, more pressure to get specific.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 27, 2015
“Republican Fear Campaign Running Out Of Steam”: Obama Dares GOP To Help The Middle Class In His State Of The Union
Can you remember a time when the political zeitgeist has ping-ponged the way ours has in just two months? The day after last November’s election, Barack Obama was finished. Now, two positive jobs reports and a 60-odd-cent-per-gallon drop in gasoline prices later, he’s the president again. And the Republicans have just taken power and have run Congress for only two weeks, but suddenly they’re kind of on the defensive.
Of course this isn’t to say that Obama is going to get a single plank of the ambitious agenda he laid out in the State of the Union Address through Congress. The Republicans still hold those cards.
But what’s happened in the last couple of months, and what Obama seized effectively with this speech, is this. The mood has changed. The public is open to ideas it wasn’t open to a year ago; even two months ago.
Politics in this country is really about only one thing at a time, and that one thing favors one party or the other. In 1981 and for a few years thereafter, it was about how oppressive the federal government was. Advantage Republicans. For a short time in the late 1980s, it was about how we’d vanquished the Soviet Union (and won a little side war). Advantage Republicans.
For a while in the 1990s, it was about building a future-oriented economy. Advantage Democrats. After 9/11, it was about security. Advantage Republicans. And so on. It’s a little more complicated than this, because thrown into these cycles we have the scandals and the social changes that all have some impact on how people think about things, but basically, this is how American politics rolls: We go through these eras, and the eras make the majority of people decide that one party or the other is better equipped to do something about the challenges.
And now, we seem to be—seem to be—entering an era in which the chief debate is going to be about expanding prosperity downward from the people who’ve enjoyed the lion’s share of the prosperity of the last 30 years. Not positive about that. But that’s the smell. Look at all those minimum-wage initiatives that passed on ballots last November, passed even by a comparatively conservative electorate. Look at Mitt Romney talking empathetically in recent days about the people he didn’t seem to care much about in 2012. Something has turned.
Obama has helped turn it—with a few speeches over the years, and certainly with some of his policies, like health care, which he defended in an impressively in-your-face way in this speech. But even a president can’t turn it himself. He needs luck. And finally he’s had some—the gas prices, the energy explosion, the jobs reports, all of them culminating in a sunnier public mood.
All that adds up to an atmosphere in which a majority of Americans are finally starting to add two and two and get four. The Republicans didn’t give them much. The Great Recession, most notably. Obama, to most of them, still hasn’t given them all that much either, but at least we’re out of that mess and things are finally looking up.
And when things are looking up, people are less anxious, and they can start thinking about things like free community college. In lousy economic times, free community college sounds to your average person like a bunch of airy-fairy liberal nonsense. Like something they’re going to be stuck paying for. In better economic times, it sounds to your average person like a not-half-bad idea, and something they or someone they know might even benefit from.
It’s all public psychology. We liberals have a hard time accepting this. That’s because of Keynes. Keynes, see, has taught us the concept of counter-cyclical investment: that when the economy is in dire straits, that is exactly when the government should be spending a boatload of money. It makes economic sense, to people who read a lot. But to average people, it doesn’t make any common sense. Common sense tells average people that when the economy is in dire straits, you tighten your belt and spend less. This is right for a family, but wrong for a government, which is the opposite of a family, economically speaking. And Lord did it infuriate liberals when Obama himself played into it. He gave these speeches—what, 2010, maybe—when he likened the government to a family sitting around the kitchen table deciding what expenses it needed to cut out.
No! Wrong, wrong, wrong, in economic terms. But in real-life political terms, he was right at least insofar as you can’t get people to think about longer-term economic goals when they’re out of a job, or underemployed. But once that’s turned, you can.
That is what’s turning now—not turned, but turning. And that is what is about to make our political conversation be about this new one thing: sharing the prosperity. The speech was not a great speech, a speech for the ages; but it did understand that, and it did tap into that. People are now willing to start thinking about longer-term economic goals. A quickie CNN poll found that the speech was extremely well-received: 51 percent very positive, 30 percent somewhat positive, only 18 percent negative.
That really should worry Republicans, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Our politics is becoming about one big thing on which the Republicans have nothing to say. Actually, they do have something to say, and it’s “No!” They looked ridiculous, sitting on their hands, refusing to applaud simple and obvious things that have 60, 65 percent public support. I have a feeling more such moments await them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2015
“Of All The Ridiculous Arguments”: Republicans Remain Terrified That President Obama Will Close Gitmo
Ever since President Obama took office in 2009, Republicans have done everything in their power to stop him from closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Given his recent successes at repatriating detainees and the looming assistance Pope Francis has offered, they are upping those efforts.
Key Senate Republicans on Tuesday unveiled legislation that would effectively block President Barack Obama from fulfilling his pledge to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before he leaves office in two years.
The legislation from Sens. Kelly Ayotte, John McCain, Richard Burr and Lindsey Graham would prohibit for two years the transfer to the United States of detainees designated medium- or high-risk. It would also ban transfers to Yemen, where dozens of the 127 remaining Guantánamo detainees are from.
Of all the ridiculous arguments they’ve made over the years for keeping the prison open, this one takes the cake.
At a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Ayotte argued the administration’s increased clip of transfers was dangerous because it could allow detainees to re-enter the terrorism fight, citing the recent terrorist attacks in Paris.
Given that none of those who have been reported to have been involved in the Paris attack had ever even spent a night at Gitmo, this is nothing but absurd fear-mongering.
Besides, here are the facts about the recidivism of Gitmo detainees who have been released from a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
According to the report, the percentage of freed detainees “reengaging” during the Bush administration was 19 percent, while another 14.3 percent were “suspected of reengaging.” Since Obama took office, however, just 6.8 percent of detainees are confirmed as reengaging, while just 1.1 percent are suspected of returning to the battlefield.
“Nearly half of the former detainees confirmed of reengaging are either dead or in custody, and more than one-third of the former detainees suspected of re-engaging are either dead or in custody,” the official said.
I have no idea what has Senators Ayotte, McCain, Burr and Graham so terrified. But it looks to me like it mostly has to do with witnessing President Obama succeed on a campaign promise while he protects our national security.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 18, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 