“Fools On The Hill”: “Nothing” Is Why Some Members Of Congress Went To Washington
We used to have a ship of state, and now we have a ship of fools.
To call what happened on Capitol Hill over the past few days Kabuki is to insult Kabuki. What actually happened was more like ancient farce when actors used to come out and hit each other over the head with socks full of cowpies.
Contrary to what you have heard, we did not face up to a financial or economic or budgetary crisis. All Congress and the White House did was slog through another political crisis.
And the way they did it was comical: a 2 a.m. vote in the Senate followed by an 11 p.m. vote in the House. This is drive-by government.
That the White House was going to win was never in doubt. Barack Obama won reelection in November by nearly 5 million votes. According to CBS News, his approval rating is at 57 percent.
The members of Congress, on the other hand, are close to being put in stocks and pelted with vegetables. According to CBS, congressional job approval is at 11 percent. Any lower than that and Congress might as well move to Canada and try there.
One of the reasons our politicians are held in such low regard is that what they do is so divorced from reality.
What was the No. 1 issue of the last election? What did both sides promise the American people? As I recall, it was jobs, jobs and more jobs. But what did the recent fiscal cliff law do about creating more jobs? Nothing.
Some politicians like nothing. Nothing is why they went to Washington. They want to shrink government, in the famous words of Grover Norquist, “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Why? Because as Mitt Romney said in the campaign, 47 percent of voters “believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
(If you haven’t heard much from Romney since the election, it’s probably because he has been down in the Cayman Islands visiting his money.)
In this view, the government spends far too much on “entitlements” like Medicare. Medicare costs are strangling America, we hear, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, spending for Medicare in 2012 was a very hefty $555 billion.
But Medicare recipients are not exactly rolling in dough. In 2006, the last study my ace research team (Wikipedia) could find, the “average household income of Medicare enrollees was $22,600 compared with a U.S. median income of $48,201.”
Yet these people are viewed as greed-heads sucking up precious dollars that could be better spent on … defense contractors!
The defense budget for 2012 was more than $600 billion, which is nearly twice as much as the rest of the planet combined. We outspend China, the next biggest military power in the world, by about 6-to-1.
Maybe this wild spending would not be so bad if it bought us quick and easy victories over ill-armed opponents. But it doesn’t. We have poured more than a trillion dollars into the war in Afghanistan over the past 11 years — to say nothing of more than 2,000 precious U.S. lives lost — and we are still fighting there.
Some say this is good for the U.S. economy because it means we have to buy more and more bullets and bombs and drones, but personally I’d rather buy more liver transplants for the 47 percent.
Yet nobody in Washington is talking about serious cuts to the defense budget. On the contrary, they are talking about ways to avoid making serious cuts to the defense budget.
In the meantime, the government borrows more and more money, which means it keeps bumping up against the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was invented as a way to keep Congress from spending too much, but it doesn’t work.
So we keep raising the debt ceiling. We raised it 18 times under Ronald Reagan, four times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush and three times, as of August 2011, under Barack Obama.
As Obama points out, the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It merely allows the government to pay the bills Congress has already racked up.
In just a few weeks, we will face another crisis over the debt ceiling. It shouldn’t be a crisis, but politics will make it a crisis.
It’s a broken system. It’s why Americans hate politics.
Late on Jan. 1, President Obama briefly addressed the nation from a nearly empty White House briefing room. “I think, hopefully, in the new year we’ll focus on seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinksmanship, not scare the heck out of folks quite as much,” he said.
A little bit less drama? Drama is what government is about these days. Drama is the only thing our elected leaders seem good at.
So you bring the socks. I’ll bring the cowpies.
By: Roger Simon, Politico, January 3, 2013
“Lives Hang In The Balance”: Americans Must Stop Stigmatizing Mental Illness
Of all the outrages to decency and common sense during National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre press conference following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the most offensive may have been his depiction of America as a dark hell haunted by homicidal maniacs.
“The truth,” LaPierre insisted, “is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”
Monsters, evil, possessed. Demons, for the love of God.
Is this the 21st century, or the 17th? In LaPierre’s mind, like many adepts of the gun cult, it follows that every grown man and woman must equip themselves with an AR-15 semi-automatic killing machine with a 30-round banana clip to keep monsters out of elementary schools. Die Hard: With a Blackboard.
To be fair, polls show that most gun owners support reasonable reforms like closing the “gun show” loophole allowing no-questions-asked sales that evade FBI background checks. It may be politically possible to ban high-capacity magazines and to reinstate something like the assault weapons ban allowed to expire in yet another of President George W. Bush’s many gifts to the nation.
That these actions would have limited short-term effect is no reason not to act. Nobody’s Second Amendment rights would be compromised either. America can’t achieve sensible gun laws without first politically isolating extremists.
But there’s another way that LaPierre’s appalling rhetoric helps make a bad situation worse. Loose talk about possession and demons serves only to deepen the stigma and shame surrounding mental illness and contributes to society’s refusal to deal seriously with its effects.
Newtown mass shooter Adam Lanza hasn’t been, and probably can’t be, diagnosed with any certainty. But all the signs point to paranoid schizophrenia, a devastating brain disease whose victims are no more possessed by demons than are cancer patients or heart attack survivors.
Psychiatrist Paul Steinberg writes that early signs of the disease “may include being a quirky loner—often mistaken for Asperger’s syndrome,” the less-stigmatizing diagnosis Nancy Lanza reportedly told friends accounted for her son’s peculiarities.
Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, resulting in disordered and obsessive thinking, auditory hallucinations and other forms of psychosis. Sufferers often imagine themselves to have a special connection with God or some other powerful figure. It’s when they start hearing command voices telling them to avenge themselves upon imagined enemies that terrible things can happen.
Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr. suffers from schizophrenia; also John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman. More to the point, rampage shooter Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech in 2007, had been in and out of treatment for paranoid schizophrenia, but never hospitalized for long enough to bring him back to reality.
Nobody knew what to do about Jared L. Loughner, who killed six people while attempting to murder Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson. Same disease. After James Holmes began showing signs of advancing psychosis, University of Colorado officials more or less, well, “washed their hands of him” would be a judgmental way to put it. Then he killed 24 strangers attending a Batman movie in Aurora, CO. He reportedly mailed a notebook describing his mad plans to a university psychiatrist, which she received only after the fact.
With the possible exception of Lanza, all of these killers had exhibited overt symptoms of psychosis previous to their explosive criminal acts. They belonged in locked-down psychiatric hospitals under medical treatment — whether voluntarily or not. Nobody in Seung-Hui Cho’s or James Holmes’ state of mind can meaningfully decide these things for themselves.
Properly speaking, psychosis has no rights.
Yet the biggest reason people don’t act is that for practical purposes, ill-considered laws make involuntary commitment somewhere between difficult and impossible. Sources told New York Times columnist Joe Nocera that Connecticut makes it so hard to get somebody committed to a psychiatric hospital against their will that Nancy Lanza probably couldn’t have done anything had she tried. (And risked antagonizing her son in the process.)
“The state and federal rules around mental illness,” Nocera writes “are built upon a delusion: that the sickest among us should always be in control of their own treatment, and that deinstitutionalization is the more humane route.”
A liberal delusion, mainly. The good news is that anti-psychotic medications work; diseased minds can be treated. Putting somebody into a psychiatric ward for 30 days shouldn’t be as simple as a 911 call, but neither should it require the near-equivalent of a criminal trial.
Just as with gun control, lives hang in the balance.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 2, 2012
“A House Divided Against Itself”: The GOP Will Either Become All One Thing, Or All The Other
When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced his opposition to the bipartisan fiscal agreement, it caused quite a stir. Cantor is not only a very influential GOP figure, but his comments came before House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had even taken a position on the bill, and certainly gave the impression that the two were sharply at odds.
As speculation intensified — was this a precursor to Cantor challenging Boehner for the Speaker’s gavel? — the Majority Leader’s office tried to lower the temperature. Cantor’s chief spokesperson insisted that the Virginia Republican “stands with” Boehner, and rumors to the contrary were “silly, non-productive and untrue.”
But Cantor really didn’t stand with the Speaker, and speculation wasn’t — and isn’t — silly at all.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy broke with Speaker John Boehner Monday night, voting against a multi-trillion tax package designed to avert the fiscal cliff.
The decision to abandon Boehner — which came after Boehner’s leadership team whipped not only rank and file members but even other lower ranking members of leadership — will almost certainly set off a furious round of speculation about the future of his speakership, less than 48 hours before members are scheduled to vote on it.
It’s worth emphasizing, as John Stanton reported, that both Cantor and McCarthy waited to register a vote until the bill had 218 supporters, paying Boehner “the courtesy” of registering a preference without actively trying to bring down the entire bill.
But that doesn’t make up for the fact that when it came time for the biggest House vote in the last year, the Speaker was on one side and his top two lieutenants were on the other. Boehner is regularly ignored by his rank-and-file members, but it’s one thing when backbenchers go their own way on key pieces of legislation; it’s something else when the GOP leadership is split down the middle.
The next question, of course, is the short-term consideration: what happens tomorrow when House Republicans elect their Speaker for the next Congress?
The working assumption, which I’ve generally accepted, was that Boehner was in deep trouble if he passed the fiscal agreement by relying overwhelmingly on Democratic votes. There was no magic number, per se, but if the Speaker relied on 25 to 30 House Republicans to pass the bill, it would amount to a practical vote of no confidence.
But when the dust settled overnight, it was hard to miss the fact that 85 House Republicans voted with Boehner in support of the measure. Sure, the Speaker had to forgo the “Hastert Rule” and rely on a majority of the minority, and 151 House GOP members went the other way, but it’s tough to see 85 votes as a career-ender for Boehner.
Over the weekend, Politico reported, “It’s a truth that fire-breathing conservatives will have to handle: John Boehner isn’t going anywhere as speaker of the House.” To be sure, that was before the Senate agreement was reached and three days before last night’s vote, but it nevertheless seems accurate, barring 11th-hour drama.
The vote, after all, is tomorrow, and as of this minute, Boehner has no opposition. This has been an ugly couple of weeks for the Speaker, but he appears to have survived — weakened, but still standing. This, like the intra-party divisions, won’t help Boehner govern in the next Congress, but it should be enough to help him keep his gavel.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 2, 2012
“Lessons Not Learned”: Republicans Who Put Principle Above Country
A lot of the time, politics is about picking the least worst option. Well, the “fiscal cliff” deal jointly crafted by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was the least worst option, and those who voted against it should not hide behind any phony commitment to principle. This deal or nothing were the two options left after weeks of failed negotiations. Nothing else was possible last night. And while nothing about the deal makes America stronger, the absence of an agreement would make us weaker.
The GOP needs to be the party of low taxes and smaller government. This deal produces the opposite of that. It does nothing to slow spending, reduce the debt or diminish dependency. All it did was avoid a financial shot to the head for millions of U.S. taxpayers.
Of course it is easy to oppose the deal when you don’t consider context, the alternatives and the consequences of doing nothing. It is convenient to believe that, if the GOP had let us go over the cliff, it would have been so bad for so many taxpayers and for the economy that the president and the Democrats in Congress would have agreed to a better deal, including spending reform. In other words, taxpayers were being held hostage and if we would have let them endure a little torture, we could have gotten Obama and the Democrats to cave in to our will.
What a bunch of baloney. The Republicans who voted “no” hid behind the courage of those who recognized that the McConnell-Biden deal was better — at this time — than the consequences of doing nothing.
Obviously, America’s future depends on our ability to rein in spending. Fights over our spending, including the debt-ceiling debate, will be critical. But no Republicans should boast of their opposition to the McConnell-Biden deal and consider themselves more philosophically pure or more courageous than their colleagues who had to vote for the bill. They are the opposite.I hope party leaders will band together and punish any Republican or Republican organization that tries to use this vote against those who voted for it. Nobody should be vulnerable in a future primary because they voted “yes” last night. If anything, the lesson learned for Republicans should be how hard it’s going to be to get our financial house in order and slow the quickening decline of America.
By: Ed Rogers, The Insiders, The Washington Post, January 2, 2012
“Loud Kazoos And Angry Threats”: House GOP Clown Car Crashes Again As Fiscal Deal Passes
Observing the Congressional Republicans repeatedly stumble in and out of their caucus clown car, blowing loud kazoos and muttering angry threats, should be painful, embarrassing, and highly instructive to any American voter with the patience to watch. When their latest performance concluded late Tuesday night with a 257 to 187 vote passing the stopgap fiscal deal negotiated by the Senate and the White House, an unavoidable question lingered: What is wrong with those people?
The simple explanation is that the House of Representatives has increasingly been dominated over the past two decades by a coterie of tantrum-prone extremists, who lack the probity and steadiness required for democratic self-government. Their diminished capacity is reflected in the low quality of leadership they have chosen during this long twilight, from Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, even as their politics have grown more and more extreme.
Under the stress of their incoherence, the Republican caucus is unable to escape one humiliating mess after another. The damage they routinely inflict on the country’s economy and future is reaching incalculable levels – and is almost certain to grow worse when they again hold the debt ceiling hostage next month.
By the end of the current episode – which is only an interlude rather than a true resolution – the top Republicans in the House had split, with Boehner casting a rare vote in favor, and House Budget Committee chair and former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan (R-WI) voting yes, along with 84 fellow Republicans and almost all of the House Democrats, while House Majority Leader and would-be Speaker Eric Cantor (R-VA) voted no. On the floor, House Ways and Means chair Dave Camp (R-MI) tried to claim that this bill is “the largest tax cut in history,” although he might have difficulty explaining why more than 150 Republicans voted against it.
The Republicans’ incompetence in government is inextricably connected with their ideological extremism, as the latest events demonstrate. Hogtied by the craziness of the ultra-right Tea Party faction, the House GOP leadership cannot even cooperate with other Republicans in the Senate – who overwhelmingly voted for the “cliff” deal negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden – let alone conduct serious discussions with the White House.
Having refused to support the leadership’s “Plan B” scheme to raise taxes only on households making $1 million or more annually – despite confident claims by Boehner and Cantor that they had counted the necessary votes — the Republican caucus made both themselves and their leaders look ridiculous. It was a dreadful right-wing plan, but still much too liberal for too many of them. Tacitly acknowledging that he could no longer manage his restless wingnuts, Boehner insisted that the Senate and White House should come up with an emergency measure on their own.
Yet when the Senate leadership, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, offered a bill negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden — just as Boehner had urged — the House Republicans descended into crisis. Their leaders couldn’t endorse the bill, fearing that the GOP caucus crazies would defenestrate them. But they could hardly employ their usual partisan tactics to keep the bill off the House floor, after the Senate had passed it by a vote of 89-8, with only five Republican defections. They might have noticed as well their declining numbers in every public poll, with the latest Republican-leaning Rasmussen survey showing a Democratic lead in the generic congressional contest of 11 points and climbing.
Astonishingly, they nevertheless wasted several hours debating whether to amend the bill with new spending cuts and then send it back to the Senate, where leaders of both parties would have surely and justly rejected such tardy handiwork. Consistent only in their ineptitude, the House Republicans were reportedly unable to agree among themselves on exactly how to change the bill, in any case.
Finally, they folded – or at least their leaders did – and proclaimed that they were girding themselves for the battles to come over the budget and the debt ceiling, which have now been postponed for another month or so.
The deal itself is not a bad one, from the Democratic perspective, raising significant new revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers and excluding any “grand bargain” (or raw deal) to weaken Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Its specific provisions are still far too generous to the highest-income taxpayers and will not, in the long run, raise enough revenue to sustain decent government, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and prepare for the future.
The struggle over what government should do and how to pay for its functions continues, almost immediately. And perhaps soon the president and his party will explain, without hesitation, what this brief tumble over the “cliff” has shown us, and what we may hope they have finally learned: That there is no negotiating partner among the House Republicans, who must be defeated if progress is to be possible.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 2, 2013
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