“The Cycle Of Savagery”: Jim DeMint Is Now Going Too Far, Even For Republicans
After months—years really—of serving as the scourge of any GOPer he deemed too squishy, the über-conservative senator–turned–Heritage Foundation president finally earned a gentle spanking from his former colleagues. Upon Congress’s return from recess next week, Heritage staffers will no longer be welcome at weekly meetings of the conservative Republican Study Committee.
The ban, which ends a decades-long special arrangement between the two groups, reportedly flowed from a dust-up between Heritage and lawmakers over this summer’s Farm Bill negotiations. (Even the stripped-down version that the House passed was insufficiently austere for Heritage’s taste.) But ag policy is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jim DeMint, who has been hammering Republican lawmakers to hold the conservative line on everything from immigration to Obamacare—to the increasing annoyance of even ideologically simpatico members. While banishing Heritage from planning sessions may not have much practical effect, it’s a sign that congressional Republicans are rethinking their willingness to take DeMint’s abuse lying down.
Which is not to say that Hill Republicans didn’t know DeMint was going to be a gigantic pain once he left office. He was, after all, a gigantic pain while in office. Upon leaving the chummy upper chamber and establishing an independent perch at Heritage, of course he was going to escalate the fight.
Just this week, in fact, DeMint is wrapping up arguably his most aggressive assault to date on his own party: a two-week, nine-city town-hall tour spreading the message that Obamacare must be stopped by any means necessary, including shutting down the federal government. Now most Republicans, of course, would be delighted to defund much if not all of the Affordable Care Act. But most also acknowledge that a government shutdown would not only be politically devastating for the GOP, it simply wouldn’t work. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd back home in Kentucky, “I’m for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare.”
This kind of squish talk is like catnip for DeMint. And so, joined by Rafael Cruz, father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (who rose to office with the support of the DeMint-founded Senate Conservatives Fund PAC), DeMint spent a chunk of his recess rallying supporters in Indianapolis, Dallas (where Senator Cruz made an appearance), Tampa, Nashville, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Wilmington, Delaware, and Fayettville, Arkansas, with the battle cry that Republicans unwilling to go to the mattresses over Obamacare are too soft for public service and “need to be replaced.” At stops along the way, he called out particular lawmakers for criticism. (He took a swipe at John Boehner, for instance, while in the speaker’s home state of Ohio.)
Meanwhile, the Senate Conservatives Fund—which DeMint no longer heads but is still run by his former advisers and staffers—is making the fight even more personal. Last week, the group launched a series of radio ads slamming a half-dozen Republican senators who have declined to sign a letter pledging to shut down the government as a way to defund the ACA. Among those on the hit list are McConnell, Arizona conservative Jeff Flake (to whose campaign the SCF contributed richly last year), and DeMint’s former South Carolina colleague, Lindsey Graham. Brushing off the attack, Flake responded by tweeting “Oh, whatever”—which immediately prompted the SCF to release a second ad, urging Republicans to tell Flake “Oh, whatever” the next time he asked for their support.
And so the cycle of internecine savagery accelerates, even as Republicans brace for what is fast becoming an annual game of budget chicken. Members of the party establishment, understandably, are growing increasingly anxious, and sounding the alarm about the possible repercussions of shutdown shenanigans.
“Shutting down the government in an effort to defund is the one way Republicans can turn Obamacare from a major plus to a major minus in the 2014 elections,” warns GOP pollster Whit Ayers—who, as it turns out, has just completed “extensive polling on public opinion regarding a shutdown.” While Ayers declines to unpack the yet-to-be-released results of the survey, his for-God’s-sake-don’t-do-it attitude is a pretty big clue as to what he has heard from voters. In the coming days, Ayers, among others, will be trooping up to the Hill to discuss the issue with GOP players. He tells me, “There’s a great many people hoping that wiser heads will prevail.”
Perhaps they will. Then again, such “wiser heads” are precisely the ones that DeMint is measuring for the political chopping block.
By: Nichelle Cottle, The Daily Beast, August 30, 2013
“An Important Milestone”: In Michigan, A Defeat For The Tea Party And Victory For Common Sense
Obamacare took a big step forward on Tuesday night, when the Michigan Senate approved an expansion of the state’s Medicaid program. The state House is likely to back the same measure, as early as next week. And while the program requires a special federal waiver, the Obama Administration is likely to grant it. Assuming all of that happens, Michigan will become the twenty-fifth state to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. As a result, a few hundred thousand residents are likely to get insurance—and the state will get a much-appreciated infusion of federal funds, while putting up a much smaller share of state money.
For the advocates of making health insurance available to all Americans, it’s a huge victory. But the victory did not come easy—or without some last-minute drama.
Tuesday’s vote was the product of a long, sustained campaign by Democrats, moderate Republicans, progressive organizers and business leaders. For months, they have made the case for expansion—citing the likely financial and health benefits for Michigan’s uninsured citizens, and the expected boost to Michigan’s economy. The federal government is picking up most of the expansion’s costs, they have argued, and hospitals need the revenue to make up for money they lost on charity care and declining reimbursement from other sources.
Among those assessing the statistical impact were Marianne Udow-Phillips, director at the Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation and a lecturer at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. As she told me on Wednesday,
if you look at all the facts—the fact that the majority of physicians in the state are ready to serve this population; the positive impact on the state budget, on the state’s economy at large, on hospitals, on businesses, on all those who are currently insured (by reducing cost shifting) – not to mention the half a million people who will directly benefit by getting health insurance coverage in a program that has the highest satisfaction of any insurance coverage type in the state – you have to draw the conclusion that the Medicaid expansion is the right thing to do for the state.
Governor Rick Snyder and the state Chamber of Commerce have been among the strongest proponents of expansion. The state’s health care industry, naturally, has lobbied furiously. But Tea Party Republicans and their allies have been dead set againt it, arguing that Medicaid is a wasteful, expensive program that subsidizes the indolent—and that the size of the federal subsidies masked the true impact on the state, which would actually be negative.
Writing this week in the Detroit Free Press, Joseph G. Lehman and Clifford W. Taylor from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy warned that
The state’s main incentive to expand Medicaid is a federal promise to transfer to Michigan $2 billion (increasing to $3 billion) annually for three years if we add 320,000 Michiganders earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level to Medicaid rolls.
After three years our federal subsidy would shrink by $300 million per year, meaning either Michigan taxes increase by that much or lawmakers kick 320,000 people off Medicaid, which seems unlikely.
Expansion supporters have responded that, even after the reduction, the federal government would still be picking up 90 percent of the new cost. They have also tried to accommodate concerns about Medicaid efficiency, by, among other things, proposing that some Medicaid recipients pay a portion of their own costs. The compromises changed a few votes, and in June the state House approved its version of the expansion. But the Senate in June surprised everybody, including the governor, by rejecting the measure. One likely reason: Tea Party groups, and their financial backers, were threatening to support primary challenges to Republicans who voted yes.
The expansion’s supporters spent the remainder of the summer making their case, rallying the public, and lobbying individual members. As of Tuesday morning, they were confident they had 19 senators willing to vote yes. That would produce a tie in the 38-member chamber, with the lieutenant governor prepared to vote yes and break the tie. But when the Senate first voted in early afternoon, only 18 said yes. The chamber quickly voted to reconsider and, after a feverish few hours of lobbying and meeting, tried one more time. This time, the bill passed 20 to 18.
Progressives aren’t thrilled about some of the compromises, particularly those asking Medicaid recipients to pay a larger share of their costs. (Sarah Kliff has more of the details if you want them.) And it’s not out of the question that the federal government will raise objections, because the federal Medicaid law limits the ability of states to change the program. But given political resistance to any expansion, supporters are mostly elated at Tuesday’s outcome. “It’s not perfect, but it’s going to help nearly half a million Michiganders,” Amy Lynn Smith wrote at Electablog, a progressive website based in Michigan.
Michigan’s decision is an important milestone in the effort to make Medicaid available to all low-income Americans—an endeavor that has proven far more difficult than most experts anticipated. Last summer, when the Supreme Court made it easier for states to reject Obamacare’s planned expansion of Medicaid, many of us assumed the vast majority of states would participate anyway. The need for coverage was too great, and the allure of federal money too tempting, for even most Republicans to reject. Quite obviously we were wrong. Conservatives serving either as governor or state legislators have successfully blocked expansion across a wide swath of the country, including the huge states of Florida and Texas, where a few million people would be eligible.
But the Medicaid expansion has gotten support from several other Republican governors, including Jan Brewer in Arizona (where the expansion is already going forward) as well as Rick Scott in Florida and John Kasich in Ohio. Florida looks hopeless, at least for the time being, given the grip extreme conservatives have over the legislature. Ohio is another story: The politics there look a lot like the politics in Michigan. The same goes for Pennsylvania, although that state’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett, doesn’t yet support expansion.
Obamacare’s Medicaid component, in other words, is moving ahead. But progress is taking place in fits and starts, with frequent setbacks, thanks mostly to political opposition that’s strongest in the most conservative parts of the country.
Yeah, you should get used to that pattern.
By: Jonathan Cohn, Sebior Editor, The New Republic,
“Got To Have One”: Impeachment Is The Right’s New Lost Cause
Sometimes politics is like high-stakes poker. If you look around the table after a few hands and you can’t tell who’s the pigeon, citizen, chances are it’s you: the guy who plunked down $26.95 for a book called Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office.
Yeah, you with the “Impeach Obama” bumpersticker on your car. The guy standing on a freeway overpass waving a “Honk for Impeachment” sign. You may as well go around in a little bird’s nest hat, like Donald Duck’s eccentric friend Gyro Gearloose.
Because it not only ain’t going to happen, but the people peddling this nonsense don’t even want it to happen. Not really. They’re just making a buck off people who can’t count and running a classic misdirection play.
It’s actually a good sign if you think about it.
Basically because the more Republicans you hear talking about impeachment, the closer the party has come to surrender on the big issues they claim to care about.
Like it or not, the possibility of repealing “Obamacare” ended when the Supreme Court found it Constitutional and the president won re-election. You’d think after 40 — count ’em, 40 — fruitless votes to abort the law, that message might start to sink in. We still have majority rule in this country.
But no, it hasn’t sunk in at all. Like a baseball team demanding to play the eighth game of the World Series, GOP hardliners have come up with yet another plan to force the president’s hand. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has called for something he infelicitously called a “grassroots tsunami” to make Obama relent. More rationally consequent party leaders, however, are fearful of the terrible consequences of shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt in a vain attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.
Neither tactic would accomplish the ostensible goal and would doom Republican chances to regain Congress or the White House for the forseeable future. More than 70 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, oppose a government shutdown. A debt default could have catastrophic economic consequences. However, many GOP politicians are equally fearful of the wrath of Tea Party zealots to whom they’ve made undeliverable promises.
Hence the melodramatic appeal of impeachment, a totally unserious threat its sponsors hope hotheads will see as more decisive. So what if it makes the United States look like a Banana Republic? That’s the form of government that fools prefer to democracy, with its tedious committee meetings, quorum calls and compromises. Just think how happy an impeachment battle would make the impresarios and talking heads of cable news.
So far only a couple of largely unknown House Republicans — Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan and Blake Farenthold of Texas — have publicly endorsed the idea of impeaching Obama. But the clamor has also reached more powerful figures.
At a recent town hall meeting in Muskogee, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, ostensibly a personal friend of the president’s, answered a constituent’s question about impeachment by allowing as how “those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. And I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close.”
Campaigning in Texas, Senator Cruz responded to a constituent who asked, “Why don’t we impeach him?” by saying, “It’s a good question.”
Cruz went on to give what he called “the simplest answer: To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate.”
Asked by the National Review if he’d consider changing his mind if Republicans take the House and Senate in 2014, Cruz answered, “that’s not a fight we have a prospect of winning.”
He didn’t say that there’s no remotely plausible evidence against the president, or that Americans settle political disputes through elections rather than show trials. Merely that a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate to remove President Obama from office isn’t feasible right now.
Cruz left the distinct impression that after his dry land political tidal wave fails to sweep the country this fall, he’d be willing to revisit the question. If he’s half as smart as he appears to think he is, the Texas Republican has to know that he’s going to be needing a powerful new issue come 2014.
To the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, “Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success.”
The point, see, wouldn’t be to defeat Obama, but other Republicans. And the key would be establishing himself as the champion of what E.J. Dionne calls the Republican Party’s “Armageddon Caucus.” Impeachment could then become the next lost cause.
They’ve always got to have one.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 28, 2013
“The Gambler And The Loan Sharks”: John Boehner’s Carefully Planned Escape Hatch Is Closing
Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department warned congressional leaders that we’ll hit the debt ceiling earlier than expected, probably in mid-October. Jonathan already has some smart analysis previewing the fights to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government, but this new timeline will also effect the other big issue awaiting Congress when it returns from the August recess: The effort to defund Obamacare.
GOP leaders know the scheme put forward by Ted Cruz and others to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded is hopeless, but they risk mutiny in their ranks if they don’t at least pay lip service to it.
So, as Jon Chait, Greg and others have pointed out, House Speaker John Boehner has been playing a familiar game of bait and switch with his base by promising to let House Republicans do something crazy in the future in order to get them to stop threatening to do something crazy now. He ”treats his members the same way a gambler treats his loan shark. ‘C’mon, spot me again, I swear I’ll pay up next time!’” Brian Beutler quipped, noting that we’ve seen this same strategy play out again and again in numerous congressional fights.
In the case of Obamacare, House leaders have been trying to talk their members into claiming victory on sequestration cuts and abandoning the effort to defund the health care law. But assuming that won’t appease them (and it won’t), GOP aides have floated using the debt ceiling, instead of the government shutdown, as the bargaining chip. An aide to Eric Cantor told Reuters yesterday that the debt limit provides a good “leverage point” to try to force action on Obamacare.
Swapping the debt ceiling hostage for the government shutdown hostage, while even more dangerous, had the benefit of buying GOP leaders some time — or at least it did until the debt limit deadline got moved up.
Congress comes back into session on Sept. 9. It will have just three weeks to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government before the fiscal year ends on Oct. 1. Most people had expected Treasury to hit the debt limit in mid-November or even December, so Boehner could have played his standard game of kicking the apocalypse can down the road. He’d get the House to pass a continuing resolution by promising to use the debt ceiling to attack Obamacare later, and then he’d get a month or two to figure out how to defuse this newest crisis.
But Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s letter yesterday blows up this whole strategy. As Kevin Drum writes:
Politically, this means that Republicans don’t really have the option of quickly passing a 2014 budget (or a short-term continuing resolution) and then taking some time off to plan for their latest round of debt ceiling hostage-taking at the end of the year. If mid-October really is the drop-dead date, it means that budget negotiations in late September and debt ceiling negotiations in early October pretty much run right into each other.
Now, Boehner can’t keep bluffing to his members. Two weeks is not enough time for them to forget that they just caved on Obamacare, so they’re probably not going to be in the mood to do it again. This was John Boehner’s escape hatch, and now it’s closing
Besides, as Steve Benen notes, all the talk of hostage taking may be moot as the White House is holding the line against negotiations over the debt ceiling. “Let me reiterate what our position is, and it is unequivocal. We will not negotiate with Republicans in Congress over Congress’ responsibility to pay the bills that Congress has racked up, period,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday. “We have never defaulted, and we must never default. That is our position, 100 percent, full stop.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 27, 2013
“Just Don’t Say It Out Loud”: Every Member Of Congress Who Gets Coverage Through An Exchange Will Be Participating In Obamacare
In the very near future, congressional Republicans have some important decisions to make when it comes to health care policy. Will they threaten a government shutdown over funding for the Affordable Care Act? Will they use the issue as the basis for a debt-ceiling crisis?
And perhaps more directly, will they personally sign up for subsidized insurance through an exchange created by the health care law?
As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, the right is heavily invested in the idea that members of Congress are “exempt” from “Obamacare.” The claim is plainly untrue — thanks to a scheme Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) stumbled into, lawmakers will give up their current health care coverage and get coverage through a marketplace where insurers compete for their business.
There are, however, some complications — these exchanges were designed for the uninsured and small-business owners looking to cover their employees, not wealthy federal lawmakers who already have perfectly good coverage. It’s why the Obama administration had to work out a fix for members of Congress and their aides a few weeks ago.
But for Republicans this creates yet another problem: if they sign up for coverage, doesn’t that mean they’re necessarily participating in the health care system they claim to hate? As far-right groups urge the uninsured to stay that way on purpose by staying out of the exchange, won’t those same lobbying efforts apply to lawmakers themselves?
If conservatives genuinely believe that Obamacare is a threat to the country they will extend their campaigns to convince people to skip Obamacare from nameless powerless young people to elected officials and their aides. And if those members and aides have the courage of their convictions they’ll follow suit.
To the extent that none of this happens — that conservative groups keep quiet, and conservative members and aides enroll in the exchanges — it’ll expose the right’s anti-Obamacare activism as a shallow enterprise undertaken by people who are happy to see millions go without insurance, so long as it’s not themselves or their families.
So, what are far-right lawmakers going to do? I’m glad you asked.
As Igor Volsky reported, so far, two current members are prepared to bypass the system on purpose.
[North Carolina Republican Robert Pittenger has] voluntarily withdrawn from health coverage altogether. [North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows] added that his staff has also voluntarily declined the subsidies. And while most members of Congress may be able to afford to forfeit the government contribution — Meadows has a net worth between $1,674,034 to $12,017,998 [and] Pittenger is worth between $18,615,005 to $48,551,997.
Two GOP members out of 233 in the House obviously isn’t a large number, but don’t be surprised if this number grows as right-wing lobbying becomes more intense.
Also note, a lot of these folks have convenient outs — if they have spouses with employer-based coverage of their own, members and staffers can get insurance anyway. For that matter, if you’re a multi-millionaire lawmaker, you can afford to get coverage without a subsidy anyway.
But the underlying point remains the same: every member of Congress, in both parties, who gets coverage in the coming months through an insurance exchange will be participating in “Obamacare,” even conservatives who will be reluctant to say so out loud.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 26, 2013
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