“A Very High Price”: A Lesson For Moderates In The Government Shutdown Denouement
We should never govern ourselves like this again. We cannot create absolutely pointless crises that make our great democracy look foolish around the globe. We cannot give Chinese government propagandists fodder as they call for “a de-Americanized world.” We must not allow the extremist politics of a tea party minority to turn our republic upside down.
Our nation escaped the worst. But there were consequences to the decision of a craven House Republican leadership that knew full well it was picking a fight it could not win. House Speaker John Boehner did the right thing at the very end but only after a series of time-wasting gestures designed to coddle his party’s radical wing. These are the folks who denied the dangers of going past the debt ceiling, see the Affordable Care Act as a Stalinist adventure, compare President Obama to Al Capone and, in many cases, still aren’t sure where our twice-elected president was born or what his religion is.
As long as Boehner permits this lunatic fringe — there’s no other way to describe it — to have a virtual veto power in his caucus, we will descend into chaos again and again. And as long as more middle-of-the-road conservatives hang back because they fear primary challenges, scoldings from Heritage Action or occasional insults from the talk-show barons, the Republican Party will remain in receivership.
Those who genuinely want a more moderate approach to politics must also reflect on what just happened. Obama and an astonishingly unified Democratic Party insisted that there could be no negotiation over raising the debt ceiling. It was time, they said, to stand up against government by intimidation. This made many who chase the political center, no matter how far to the right conservatives might drag it, uneasy. Their critiques took many forms: that Obama should “lead” more, that he should be more “involved,” that refusing to negotiate sounded so ill-tempered.
The irony the centrists must confront is that there is now a larger opening for moderate governance precisely because foes of the far right’s extra-constitutional abuses of the congressional process stood firm. In doing so, they brought a large majority of the American people with them. Republicans paid a very high price for a benighted strategy, which gives the most thoughtful among them at least a chance of pushing their party back to more reasonable ground.
And because the effort to hold the country hostage to right-wing demands failed, a crisis of this kind is less likely in the future. Sen. Ted Cruz and those who joined his doomed crusade against Obamacare find themselves discredited. Cruz acknowledged as much when he slipped away, announcing he would not block a deal of the very sort that, just days earlier, he was denouncing as a shameful sellout.
Obama needs to build on this victory. He must push the national and congressional agendas back toward the issues the nation cares about — above all, shared and more rapid economic growth and lower unemployment. This, in turn, means a real effort over the next two months of budget talks to ease deep sequester cuts that are harming the economy in exchange for the first steps toward longer-term deficit reduction.
To keep the initiative, Obama needs to engage with Congress as he never has before. His recent efforts to build relationships with more level-headed conservatives such as Sen. Bob Corker appear to have paid off in this round, and he could use help from such Republicans again. He should extend his diplomacy to members of his own party who stood with him in this fight and who would be bolstered by expressions of presidential gratitude that they have not always received. His task is to build a broad front against crisis-to-crisis governance by rebuilding confidence in government itself and the role it plays in American life.
But nothing good can happen unless Republicans take on their extremists and unless everyone acknowledges that ,at the moment, there is no equivalent on the left side of American politics to the right-wing radicalism that has just put our country through this wasteful and dangerous exercise.
In condemning the paranoid politics of the John Birch Society in 1962, William F. Buckley Jr. asked his fellow conservatives whether they would “continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false.” This is, alas, a live question again. It must be answered forcefully and fearlessly.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 16, 2013
“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
“200 Years Of Tea Party Paranoia”: From The Civil War Onward, They Always Lose
“It’s easier to fool people,” Mark Twain apparently never said, “than to convince them that they have been fooled.” You can find those words all over the Internet attributed to Twain, but I can locate no credible source.
Too bad, because it’s absolutely correct.
Twain probably did say something similar, because it sounds like an opinion the acerbic author of Huckleberry Finn would have endorsed.
Think of the hilarious episode of The Royal Nonesuch, a mangled Shakespearean farce performed by a pair of riverboat scamps called the King and the Duke for the befuddled citizens of a Mississippi river town.
“The duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare,” Huck says. “What they wanted was low comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned.”
And low comedy they got. The plan was to pocket the cash and float off downriver before the yokels got wise.
I thought of that scene watching Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sarah Palin outside the White House recently, protesting the very government shutdown they’d fiercely championed—a confederate battle flag fluttering in the background, the emblem of disgruntled losers everywhere.
Is there no scam so transparently farcical that millions of American lunkheads won’t fall for it? Evidently not.
As you read here first, anybody with an eighth grader’s understanding of the U.S. Constitution knew that Cruz’s mad quest to destroy the Affordable Care Act could not possibly succeed. And was politically self-destructive as well, if not for Cruz, then for the Republican Party.
Of course millions of gullible voters lack that understanding. Meanwhile, the Texas Senator and his allies continue to bombard the faithful with emails promising imminent victory and soliciting cash. They’re like the most shameless televangelist faith healers.
Except now the enemies list doesn’t feature only Democrats like President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, but prominent Republicans such as Paul Ryan, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.
Anyway, here’s Huck Finn’s daddy, America’s first Tea Party patriot:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had…They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.”
Sound like anybody you know? The professor, I mean.
Try to put Pap’s racism aside; everybody in the novel, set in slave-owning Missouri around 1840, shares it. Among other virtues, Twain was a great reporter. Besides, liberals calling everybody racist are tedious and smug.
Equally striking are Pap Finn’s social anxiety and envy, his anti-intellectualism and paranoia, attitudes which have always run like a dark stain under the surface of American life.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik finds another antecedent to today’s Tea Party in the John Birch Society:
“Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged.
“There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate.”
Same as it ever was.
Then it was H.L. Hunt; today it’s the Koch Brothers.
But you know what? From the Civil War onward, they always lose. It’s powerlessness that makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
And maybe I’m getting soft, because I’m actually starting to feel sorry for them—the Limbaugh and Cruz fans that send me emails calling Democrats “evil.” Not simply because they’re the pigeons in a giant con game, but because they’re so frightened, like children scared of monsters under the bed.
It must be a terribly unhappy way to live.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 16, 2013
“The Religious Right Is A Fraud”: There’s Nothing Christian About Michele Bachmann’s Values
Last week, the nation’s capital was host to Value Voters 2013 Summit, a three-day political conference for predominantly religious conservatives. Among the smattering of social and economic issues at hand, the overall tenor of the Summit focused on eliminating Obamacare, expanding the tangible presence of Christianity through the public arena and military and preventing the proliferation of easily available birth control and abortion. In speeches, lunches and breakout sessions, American’s Christian Right worked out strategies to bring the values of the federal government in line with their preferred Christian ethical dictates, using democracy as their chief tool.
It isn’t unusual for Christians living in democracies to use the vote to express their ethics, and to shape government to do the same. That the moral and ethical preferences of a given society should inform government is a foundational principle of democracy, after all. And American values voters are far from the first Christians to undertake the project of bringing their government’s policies in line with Christian ethics: European Christian parties have aimed to do the same for decades. But between American Christian voters and their European counterparts, a curious departure opens up: while European Christians generally see the anti-poverty mission of Christianity as worthy of political action, the American Christian Right inexplicably cordons off economics from the realm of Christian influence.
By all means, the American Christian Right is willing to leverage government authority to carry out a variety of Christian ethical projects, especially within the arena of family life. Michele Bachmann would make abortion illegal, and Rick Santorum has stated on multiple occasions that he supports laws against homosexual intercourse. But Christian politicians in the United States curtail their interest in making the gospel actionable when it comes to welfare. While the government should see to the moral uprightness of marriage, sex and family, the Value Voters 2013 Summit was notably bereft of talks on living wages, labor rights or basic incomes.
The notable exclusion of poverty from the Christian agenda would doubtlessly puzzle European Christians, whose support of Christian ethical approaches to family life have always been paired with a deep and vigorous concern for the poor. And, unlike their American counterparts, European Christians haven’t been willing to leave poverty up to individual charity or the market to handle. Quite the contrary: Just as public morality is an arena fit for intervention by a Christian-informed government, so too is welfare. Consider the British Christian People’s Alliance 2010 election manifesto, a document intended to explain the imminently Christian party’s policy goals:
“The Christian Peoples Alliance believes that Britain will return to economic prosperity when government chooses instead to put human relationships in right order. This requires power, income and wealth to be redistributed and for greater equality to be achieved. These are deeply spiritual convictions and reflect a Biblical pattern of priorities…By the end of the next Parliament, the CPA will establish the reduction of inequality as a national target, so that the ratios of the incomes of the top 20 per cent are reduced to no more than five and a half times the incomes of the bottom 20 per cent.”
The CPA election manifesto goes on to explain that their aversion to inequality arises from a uniquely Christian concern for the health of human relationships, which suffer under the weight of massive social inequality. Their position on inequality is hardly an anomaly among European Christian parties. In fact, the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM), a confederation of Christian parties from different European nations operating within the European Union, states very similar goals in its own programme:
“Social justice is a fundamental Biblical teaching and Christian-democrat notion. Social justice demands an equal regard for all. That implies a special concern for the needs of the poor, refugees, those who suffer and the powerless. It requires us to oppose exploitation and deprivation. It requires also that appropriate resources and opportunities are available. In this way, we meet the basic requirements of all and each person is able to take part in the life of the community.”
Toward that end, the European Christian Political Foundation, which is the official think tank of the ECPM, recently commissioned a publication entitled ‘After Capitalism’, which is summarized thus:
“‘After Capitalism’ seeks to rethink the foundations of a market economy and argues that the Bible’s central theme of relationships is the key to rebuilding a system that promotes economic well-being, financial stability and social cohesion.”
It is notable that the multitude of parties that make up the EPCM are not necessarily leftist or wholly liberal parties. They do not generally align themselves with openly socialist parties in their home countries, though their policies toward welfare and equality would likely be branded as such by American Christians. And so the question remains: If European Christians feel the anti-poverty mission of Christianity is as worthy of political action as the ethical values relating to family life, why doesn’t the American Christian Right feel the same?
Economic policy seems a strange place to wall off consideration of Christian ethics, but when it comes to policies that would expand welfare programs or extend particular benefits to the poor, the American Christian Right recoils, and tends to fall back on the rhetoric of personal accountability and individual liberty in matters of charity. But as European Christian parties have shown, limiting economic justice to the arena of charity is a political choice. If the government has a moral role — which the American Christian Right certainly believes it does — then why shouldn’t it participate in the same forms of care individual Christians are obligated to?
No principled reason can be given for the distinction the Christian Right draws between harnessing the state to pursue social objectives and harnessing it to pursue economic objectives. It is a uniquely American distinction as far as Christian politicking goes. What the distinction reveals is that so-called values voters are just a particular flavor of right-wing political culture, one that opts for Christian language and rhetoric when communicating its message. But in that case, it is their freestanding political commitments that inform their Christianity, not the other way around.
The answer to this riddle is therefore not so mysterious. Although nominally interested in harnessing the state to pursue Christian social objectives, the American Christian Right is not detached from the culture it has developed within. Their politics is not one that is Christian in origin; rather, it originates from the same place all other right-wing politics originates, but mobilizes Christian rhetoric and meanings post-hoc to justify its goals.
By: Elizabeth Stoker and Matt Bruenig, Salon, 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
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