“Diary Of A Legislative Terrorist”: Ted Cruz Goes Nuclear Against His Own Party To Save His Own Skin
After months of attempting to tie the continued funding of the government to his demand that the Affordable Care Act be demolished, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is now coming face to face with what happens to demagogues who write political checks they can never hope to cash—and it isn’t pretty.
With a strategy that is now crumbling beneath his feet, it is all too clear that Ted Cruz made one heck of a miscalculation—one that promises to put an end to a budding political career that many believed would lead all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, how did it happen?
It began with Mr. Cruz placing a populist bet that he could use the August town hall season to change the math on Capitol Hill while enlisting millions to his ultimate cause—his candidacy to become President of the United States in 2016.
As the Texas Senator likely saw it, he could swoop in on the gatherings of like-minded, adoring members of his base and, by using the media to spread his message, convince watching independents that the Affordable Care act was so detrimental to the nation’s future that there was no legislative action—no matter how radical or extreme—that should be avoided in the quest to rid the country of the scourge of healthcare reform.
If Cruz’s efforts somehow succeeded beyond what most would have viewed as a rational expectation and the Senator was able to force enough Republican votes—and maybe even a few Democratic votes—to his way of thinking, Cruz would be portrayed as a great and heroic warrior.
This would be true even if there were, ultimately, insufficient votes for Cruz to win the battle.
And if his fellow Republicans in the Senate chose not to go along with his tactics, the Senator would, at the least, depart the town hall circuit with pockets full of publicity and legions of adoring minions who would henceforth view him as a great leader willing to fall on his own sword while appearing to bravely ignore his own political future if that is what it took to save his country from the evils of Obamacare.
It wasn’t a completely insane gambit.
The problem, however, was that Cruz’s entire strategy was dependent upon his expectation that the majority of Americans who continue to dislike the Affordable Care Act (and they do) would be willing to support a government shutdown brought about by Cruz’s effort to tie the destruction of Obamacare to the continuing operations of government.
That is where it all began to fall apart.
It turns out that, while the majority of Americans may continue to view Obamacare with a jaundiced eye, they are not at all prepared to accept Cruz’s radical, ‘take no prisoners’ approach as a solution.
With right-leaning publications like “Hot Air” screaming headlines like “Republican poll: Public opposed to a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare, including Republicans”, it began to dawn on the Texas Senator that he had made a serious miscalculation and that being credited with causing a shutdown was not going to be the political bonus he had anticipated.
Cruz reacted as might be expected—he began looking for a way to squirm out of his predicament. Immediately, he turned to boldly stating that any government shutdown would not be his fault—but rather the fault of the President.
Why? Because while he had initially perceived getting the credit for a shutdown to be a good thing, the data revealed he had badly judged the intent of the public. Therefore, he had to find a way to continue his plan while pushing the blame of shutdown to the other side—a tall order leaving Cruz to employ a deeply flawed logic that could only appeal to the lowest of low-information voters when attempting to sell us on the idea that this would all be Obama’s fault.
But having discovered the great flaw in his grand design, Cruz really had nowhere else to go.
If you, somehow, remain unclear as to the absurdity of Cruz’s attempt to argue that a shutdown would fall on the shoulders of the White House, consider that this logic would be akin to someone pointing a gun to the head of your puppy before turning to you and demanding that, if you want to save your hapless pooch, you must hand over to him your child’s entire college fund which you have been contributing to for some twenty years.
When you, understandably, refuse to make the trade—despite the fact that you could give the perpetrator the entire fund and deny your child her dreams for the future in order to save the pup—the perpetrator follows through on his terrible deed and then blames you for the death of the poor little puppy. Why? Because he gave you the chance to save the dog’s life and it was within your power to do so, no matter how repugnant. Never mind that the perpetrator had no right to put your dog’s life into the balance in the first place.
Thus, by Cruz’s logic, because the President will not destroy his own law, duly passed by Congress, signed into law by that President and adjudicated legal by the United States Supreme Court, and all because a first term Senator and a few of his friends demand he do so, the fault for the resulting threatened punishment is on the President —not on Cruz himself.
There were additional flaws in Ted Cruz’s grand plan.
Faced with a public that does not favor closing up government in order to extract the end of the President’s signature legislation, the likelihood of persuading Cruz’s fellow Republicans in the Senate to go along with his strategy drops to near zero. While it was always a pipedream to imagine that there would ever have been enough votes in the Senate to make Cruz’s dreams of Obamacare defunding come true—even if a majority of voters supported the notion—without a public hunger for extreme measures, any hope Cruz might have harbored for Senate support were—and are–doomed.
And if, by some miracle, Cruz could use public sentiment to turn enough Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to his way of thinking, hell would freeze over before the President of the United States would go along with any continuing resolution that includes the destruction of his own, signature legislation.
As Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) put it, “It’s awfully hard to repeal Obamacare when a guy named Obama is President.”
While Senator Cruz certainly would have relished an ultimate victory that included defunding Obamacare, he surely knew this was an unlikely result to his campaign. But his true objective, despite his falsely courageous protestations otherwise, was never to actually pull off the death of Obamacare—rather, his objective was to portray himself as a committed leader who was willing and able to single-handedly shut down the government in a greater cause. Cruz was placing this bet in the belief that were he to earn the credit for a government shutdown over the Obamacare issue, he would become a true hero in the hearts and minds not only of the Republican base—but the millions of independent Americans who both object to Obamacare and would not be personally affected by a shuttering of the government.
Who knew the public would show such disdain for Cruz’s tactics?
Realizing that Cruz had put his penchant for demagoguery ahead of the fortunes of his own party, key Republican leaders, both inside and outside of government, began to speak up and to do so loudly.
Karl Rove published an op-ed taking Cruz—and other Republicans who would favor a shutdown—to task for being willing to inflict the serious political damage such an action would cause the Republican Party. As for the elected ‘insiders’, we’ve learned that Fox Fox News Sunday talk show host Chris Wallace was flooded with reams of opposition research aimed at Cruz as Wallace prepared for yesterday’s show—all of which was provided by Republicans!
Ted Cruz’s response to his massive failure?
Speaking during his appearance on the Fox Sunday show, Cruz said—
“Any vote for cloture, any vote to allow Harry Reid to add funding to Obamacare with just a 51-vote threshold, a vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare. And I think Senate Republicans are going to stand side-by-side with Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans, listening to the people and stopping this train wreck that is Obamacare.”
What that means is that Ted Cruz now plans on taking his party down with him by using a procedural tactic in the Senate that would brand any Republican voting for cloture—thereby agreeing to send the House bill to a vote of the Senate where it will surely be defeated—as a ‘supporter’ of Obamacare.
And if the Senate Republicans were to buckle to Cruz and refuse to vote in favor of cloture, the House Bill will remain stalled in the Senate and the government will shut down with the Republicans clearly taking all the blame.
Either way, Cruz has now created a lose-lose scenario for his Republican colleagues in the Senate that either brings an unwanted government shutdown or invites a never-ending flurry of primary challenges to his GOP cohorts…and all to save whatever credibility Ted Cruz might still be hanging onto with a narrow slice of the GOP base.
All of this brings us to one, inescapable conclusion…Ted Cruz is desperate.
How bad is it?
As one House GOP aide put it, “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.”
Ouch.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 23, 2013
“That Threat Worked”: It’s Critical To Keep The Military Option Alive
For all you innumerable skeptics of President Obama’s calls for military strikes on Syria, consider this:
For decades, Syria has refused to confirm that it has chemical weapons. Now, facing a limited strike, its position abruptly changed to: Oh! We do have them after all! And we want to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention! We want to show them to United Nations inspectors.
In short, the mere flexing of military power worked — initially and tentatively. And while it seems that neither Congress nor the public has any appetite for cruise missile strikes on Syria, it will be critical to keep the military option alive in the coming weeks or Russia and Syria will play us like a yo-yo.
Frankly, I’m skeptical that a deal can be worked out in which Syria hands over its chemical weaponry, and President Obama may have exchanged a losing struggle with Congress with a Sisyphean struggle with Russia. But it’s not impossible. And even if Syria cheated and stalled and eventually handed over only half of its chemical arsenal and none of its biological arsenal, that would still be a huge win for global security.
So here’s a three-track strategy for Syria going forward:
• Negotiate with Moscow on removal of Syrian chemical weapons and insist on conditions to ensure we’re not being played, including immediate disclosure to the United Nations of chemical weapons stockpiles, a binding Security Council resolution confirming the deal, a reference in the resolution to “serious consequences” for noncompliance, and immediate installation of camera monitors on at least a few locations.
• Groundwork in Congress to authorize a limited missile strike if Syria does not comply, partly to retain leverage with Moscow.
• Expansion of efforts to arm and support moderate Syrian rebels, accompanied by covert cyberwarfare on the Syrian regime, to try to change the momentum on the ground.
Ultimately, that’s the best hope to coerce President Bashar al-Assad to step down so that all sides can try to reach a cease-fire and power-sharing agreement. Yet if we’re going to sustain the pressure, we have to address these fundamental questions: Can we really promote peace with military force? Is it possible to help a country by bombing it?
Longtime readers know that I adamantly opposed the Iraq war and Afghan surge, oppose strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and tend to think we overinvest in military tools and underinvest in diplomatic ones. So many readers were stunned that I’ve endorsed missile strikes on Syria — and I’m hearing screams of betrayal.
“You can’t kill people to show that it’s wrong to kill people,” Christine protested on my Facebook page.
“When has violence, killing and aggression helped anything,” demanded Jan, also on Facebook.
The answer is: Sierra Leone, Mali, Ivory Coast, Bosnia and Kosovo. In each of those countries, an outside military force intervened at minimal cost and saved large numbers of lives. In several (as Clausewitz would have predicted), war buttressed diplomacy and helped achieve peace agreements.
We think of warfare in binary terms, as if our options are invasions or nothing at all, but that’s misleading. All-out wars have a poor record, but modest interventions of the kind President Obama is talking about in Syria have a more successful (though still mixed) history.
That’s even true in Iraq, although I hate to mention the word because it sends a shudder up every reader’s spine. While the war that began in 2003 was a disaster, two limited interventions succeeded in Iraq. One was President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of Iraqi military sites for a few days (maybe the closest parallel to Obama’s plan for Syria); it may have convinced Saddam Hussein to abandon W.M.D. programs. The other is the no-fly zone over Iraq’s Kurdish areas in the 1990s to prevent a genocide there. They were limited uses of force that proceeded so smoothly that they are hardly remembered.
“War is obviously terrible, but it’s not the ultimate evil,” notes Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Some things are worse, and one is the deliberate slaughter of civilians.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t take a position on a strike on Syria, and Roth notes that military intervention isn’t the first tool to reach for to prevent mass atrocities. Sometimes armed intervention hurts. Sometimes it helps. We’re left to decide on a case-by-case basis.
In Syria, for two-and-a-half years, we’ve given the regime a green light, and the killing has escalated from 5,000 a year to 5,000 a month — and, last month, to a poison gas attack that was perhaps the biggest massacre in the war. Now Obama’s threat of military strikes has turned the light yellow, Syria is scrambling to adjust, and there is some hope of a diplomatic solution.
Let’s not allow the light to go green again.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, September 12, 2013
“Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”: On Syria, Republicans Once Again Are Playing “A Rigged Sports Game”
“I am going to support the president’s call for action,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on Tuesday, in reference to U.S. policy in Syria. “I believe my colleagues should support this call for action.”
In the 48 hours that followed, most of Boehner’s colleagues from his own party — which is to say, the members he ostensibly leads — announced their intention to ignore the Speaker’s suggestion.
By some measures, this might raise doubts about Boehner’s leadership abilities. The Speaker’s office doesn’t see it that way.
Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) office reiterated Friday that it’s President Obama’s responsibility to sway the public on the need to strike Syria and warned that lawmakers will represent their constituents.
“The speaker has consistently said the president has an obligation to make his case for intervention directly to the American people,” said Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck. “Members of Congress represent the views of their constituents, and only a president can convince the public that military action is required.”
Let’s put aside, for now, the notion that members of Congress represent the views of their constituents — an assertion that doesn’t seem to apply to how Republicans approach immigration, gun violence, taxes, job creation, entitlements, civil rights, health care, or education.
Instead, let’s try to fully appreciate the rules as they’ve been laid out for the political establishment, because it seems as if the last few days have been devoted to the political establishment and the chattering class planting some goalposts pretty deep.
If congressional Republicans ignore President Obama, it’s evidence of Obama failing. If congressional Republicans ignore their own party’s leaders, it’s still evidence of Obama failing.
If the president bypasses Congress to pursue his national security strategy, he’s dictatorial. If he seeks congressional authorization for his national security strategy, he’s weak and undermining the stature of his office.
If lawmakers reject a resolution authorizing force in Syria, Obama will struggle to get anything through Congress for the rest of his term. If lawmakers approve a resolution authorizing force in Syria, Obama will struggle to get anything through Congress for the rest of his term.
If the president uses the military to intervene in Syria, Obama will have undermined the credibility of the United States on the global stage. If the president honors a congressional vote against using the military to intervene in Syria, Obama will have undermined the credibility of the United States on the global stage.
I’m starting to think this game is rigged in a heads-I-win; tails-you-lose sort of way.
For what it’s worth, while the ultimate outcome on Capitol Hill is in doubt, I’m not at all convinced this is a make-or-break moment for Obama’s presidency, and he might as well resign if the votes for his Syria policy don’t materialize. Greg Sargent had a compelling piece on the larger context this morning:
If Congress says No, and Obama announces that he will abide by the vote — arguing that the people have spoken, that democracy and the rule of law will prevail, and that our country will be stronger for it — then it’s very possible that the Dem base will rally behind him…. If Obama heeds Congress, the liberal base — and liberal lawmakers — would likely have Obama’s back. Independents, who have tilted strongly against an attack, might be supportive, too.
And so, several questions for the political science egghead types and anyone else who cares to answer. Do voters really perceive situations like these in the same terms pundits and Congressional lawmakers do, i.e., in terms of what they tell us about presidential strength or weakness? Do voters really expect presidents to bend Congress to their will, or do they see Congress as its own animal and don’t hold presidents accountable for its behavior?
I imagine for many political observers, it’s easy to think of political “wins” and “losses” in a sports context — victories are inherently good and defeats are inherently bad. And if the president goes to Congress seeking authorization for a military strike in Syria, and lawmakers reject the appeal, it would be, by definition, a loss for the president.
But it might simultaneously be a win for democracy that leaves the public with the outcome the American mainstream wants. Voters may well react to news organizations obsessing over “Crushing Presidential Defeat on Capitol Hill,” but I’m not convinced the public would reflexively see it that way.
If Congress balks and the White House honors the vote, most Americans would be pleased, not outraged, right?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 6, 2013
“Guess Why”: Republicans Supported Attacking Syria, Now They Don’t
For decades, Republicans have been more supportive than Democrats of an interventionist foreign policy. Surveys conducted earlier this year showed that Republicans were consistently more likely than Democrats to support striking Syria if Assad used chemical weapons. But partisanship is powerful in the age of President Obama, powerful enough to overcome longstanding partisan preferences on international affairs. A new poll shows that the president can’t count on the traditional coalition for the use of force abroad.
This morning, NBC News released a survey showing that only 42 percent supported striking Syria, with 50 percent opposed. Those numbers flip when the question specified that the US would rely on airstrikes and stand-off range weapons, like cruise missiles. Then, 50 percent were on board. That probably means the president doesn’t have to worry too much about public support in determining whether and how to strike Syria.
But even narrow support for strikes is underwhelming compared to earlier surveys from Quinnipiac, CNN, Pew, and The Washington Post, which asked voters hypotheticals about how they would react to a Syrian chemical weapons attack. Those polls suggested that a majority or plurality of voters would support strikes.
So what’s the difference between those earlier survey’s and today’s NBC poll? Republicans. In every previous survey, Republicans were most likely to support attacking Syria. Each poll showed more than 50 percent of Republicans willing to strike Assad if he used chemical weapons. Today’s NBC News poll shows far less Republican support, with just 41 percent in support and 49 percent opposed. That’s 15 points less than April’s Pew Research survey, which found that 56 percent of Republicans would support strikes. In comparison, Democratic support hasn’t declined—46 percent support strikes, just like in April. And so for the first time, more Democrats support intervention than Republicans.
The easiest explanation is partisanship. The president has clearly signaled his intention to strike Syria, Republican leaders have sent mixed signals, and the party rank-and-file has taken the cue. That’s not overly surprising and largely consistent with research by political scientists, although perhaps the extent of the drop should be a bit surprising, given the party’s relatively recent willingness to bomb every country between the Mediterranean and the Karakoram, at one point or another.
The most important question is whether this represents or presages a lasting Republican shift on foreign policy. I’m doubtful, but who knows. It does seem, however, that if the president’s foreign policy gets more ambitious, Republicans might reflexively, if temporarily, embrace a more restrained approach. That would make it easier for a candidate like Rand Paul to run on a reserved foreign policy in the 2016 Republican primaries.
By: Nate Cohn, The New Republic, August 30, 2013
“Edward Snowden Blows It Big Time”: Crossing A Major Line To Further His Own Self-Aggrandizement
While it was inevitable that there would be those who support and those who condemn the initial disclosures of Edward Snowden—the 29 year-old former NSA contractor who disclosed the agency’s telephone and electronic communications surveillance programs—the tide of public opinion may be rapidly turning against Snowden…and with very good reason.
Spilling the beans to his fellow Americans over the depth of surveillance being carried out by the National Security Agency within the borders of the United States is one thing—disclosing the nation’s covert activities involving spying on other nations is something else entirely.
Last week, Snowden turned over documents to the South China Morning Post revealing that the United States has been hacking into Chinese computers—a revelation that came at a particularly embarrassing moment for the U.S. President who was busy castigating his Chinese counterpart for China’s constant intrusions into our own computer banks for various purposes, including the theft of American intellectual property. If that wasn’t enough, the Guardian newspaper followed up with a report provided by Snowden revealing that the Americans and British spied on various delegates attending the G20 conference in 2009, choosing to disclose this bit of information right before the start of this year’s G8 conference held in the U.K.
Anyone think much got accomplished at the G8 after that little gem was brought into the light?
Even more disturbing is what appears to have motivated Snowden to expand his leaking beyond the borders of the United States and into the world of foreign espionage.
Despite making a pretty good living for quite a few years through his employment as a small cog in the gears of government surveillance activities, Snowden declared, during a live chat with the Guardian on Monday, that he believes that “all spying is wrong.” And because it is Snowden’s personal judgment that all spying is wrong, he also believes it appropriate that he reveal our covert activities to affected foreign governments without a shed of concern for what the rest of his fellow Americans might think about this.
I don’t recall there being an election where I voted to assign my proxy to Edward Snowden so that this 29 year-old guy—who I never heard of before two weeks ago—could determine, on my behalf, what this country should or should not be doing when it comes to its covert, overseas spying program.
So, how is it that Mr. Snowden has decided that it is appropriate to appoint himself the arbiter of judgment and morality when it comes to such issues? How is it that Snowden has determined that he is providing me with some patriotic service when I neither asked him to do so nor agree that disclosing information on foreign spying is, in any way, a service to his nation or to me personally?
With his decision to move beyond informing his countrymen of surveillance activities that allow the government to track our telephone calls and emails, Edward Snowden not only crossed a major line but gave us all reason to feel considerable concern about his motives and purposes.
In discussing the rationale for his disclosures on foreign spying, Snowden said:
“When NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries — the majority of them are our allies — but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the ‘consent of the governed’ is meaningless.”
There appears to be no shortage of logic fails in Snowden’s remarks.
If the public knows the details of what our government is doing when it comes to spying on foreign governments—as Snowden suggests is necessary—then it wouldn’t be covert spying activity, now would it? Spying is not particularly effective when everyone knows the target and nature of such a program.
And while Ed Snowden may have decided that all spying is wrong, I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of Americans would very much disagree with his assessment and might appreciate his not complicating our lives in furtherance of his own self-aggrandizement and the soothing of whatever crisis of conscience he may be experiencing.
What should further concern us all is not just that Edward Snowden has decided that we must now live with his judgments and moral determinations when it comes to how we conduct foreign policy, but that those judgments are based on a shocking degree of naiveté as Snowden doesn’t seem capable of grasping that in the world in which we live, our allies are not always our friends.
Snowden also appears to have missed civics class on the day when it was explained that the United States is a Republic where we elect people to make decisions on these matters and then judge the effectiveness of those decisions by deciding who we will keep in office and who we will turn away.
The bottom line here is that I really don’t care if Ed Snowden thinks all spying is wrong and neither do most Americans. This being the case, I have considerable difficulty with his decision to disclose the nation’s secrets to foreign governments just because he could.
I do care what the President thinks about our foreign spying operations just as I care about what Congress and the Judiciary think. It is their opinions and practices that I can either support or reject when I show up to vote. And while I may appreciate Mr. Snowden’s decision to inform his countrymen of surveillance programs involving spying on Americans, there is no claim nor evidence that spying on foreign entities crosses any legal lines and, therefore, it is incredibly wrong for Snowden to reveal data involving our spying programs outside the country .
Until I cast a vote for Edward Snowden to make such determinations for me, I would very much appreciate it if he would shut up and get over whatever psychological complexes are driving him to make these decisions on my behalf. He is doing neither me nor the country any favors.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, June 20, 2013
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