“You Take Goodwill Where You Can Find It”: Americans Already Like Boehner More Now That He Is As Tired of Congress As They Are
House Speaker John Boehner still has to cross a few things off his to-do list before he’s allowed to say good-bye to Congress forever: (1) Find replacement. (2) Save economy. However, many Americans already seem to like him better now that they know the Ohio Republican is as sick of dealing with Congress as they are.
According to a new Gallup survey, Boehner’s approval rating has jumped from 23 percent in August — the lowest point it ever reached during his tenure — to 31 percent, heights he hasn’t seen since the beginning of last year. His approval rating remained unchanged among the nation’s Republicans, but independents and Democrats are suddenly much more fond of him.
Now, 45 percent of the country still has an unfavorable opinion of the soon-to-be-retired elected official, but when many of your colleagues have spent months griping about how much they hate you, you take goodwill where you can find it. However, the shiny-happy forgiveness of the American people may not last if Congress fails to raise the debt limit in the upcoming weeks — the last big vote that Boehner will have to force-feed his fractious party before he lets it all go, turning away and slamming the door, realizing that distance makes everything seem small.
If that wasn’t difficult enough on its own, a Cutthroat Kitchen–style handicap has been thrown at Congress. Treasury secretary Jack Lew warned Congress today that the U.S. is set to hit the debt ceiling two days earlier than he expected. Now Congress has only until November 3, taking away valuable time to wait until the last minute before rushing to stave off the “political equivalent of a dumpster fire” that awaits us if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the federal government won’t be able to pay bills, its workers, or soldiers and Social Security checks. Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t give the federal government a thumbs-up to start spending money on new things — it only makes sure that the federal government is able to fulfill its obligations and pay for things it has already approved.
In case that didn’t sound scary enough, Lew wrote a letter to Boehner, who planned on leaving D.C. on October 30, noting that “In the absence of congressional action, Treasury would be unable to satisfy all of these obligations for the first time in the history of the United States.” Or, translated out of bureaucrat-ese, “Dude, this would be a historically bad way to end your career.”
Congress is on recess this week, but Politico reported yesterday that Boehner is planning to quickly do something about the debt limit next week. A few GOP politicians think the debt-limit deadline, growing ever closer, is just the Obama administration’s way of forcing legislators to do what it wants. Senator Susan Collins told Politico, “It is interesting, which is a polite word, that all of a sudden the administration moved up considerably the timing of when the debt limit needs to be extended. What I’ve found over the years is that the date on which the debt limit truly has to be increased seems to be a very squishy date that often changes depending on the political winds.”
Congressional Republicans usually try to get a few spending decreases legislated along with a debt-limit increase, but there may not be time for that this year — which is not going to make his conservative colleagues happy. A Boehner spokesperson told the AP yesterday, “the Speaker has made it clear that he wants to solve some outstanding issues before he leaves. No decisions have been made, but a resolution on the debt ceiling is certainly possible.”
The Wall Street Journal asked 64 economists whether they thought the government was screwed and definitely on the verge of default. “Not enough wackos to do that,” one said, another added, “They are not THAT irresponsible.”
With only a few weeks left for things to be resolved, we’ll see if they’re right.
By: Jaime Fuller, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, October 15, 2015
“To Regulate Or Break Up?”: The Difference Between An Insurrectionist And An Institutionalist
Anyone who has been able to sit through both the Republican and Democratic presidential debates is very well-versed in the chasm that currently exists between the two parties. When all is said and done, the public is going to have a very clear choice between two starkly different directions for our country to embrace in November 2016. That is a good thing – especially for Democrats who seemed intent on watering down the differences in the 2014 midterms.
But Tuesday’s debate also clarified the differences between Clinton and Sanders. Matt Yglesias does a good job of teeing that up.
To Clinton, policy problems require policy solutions, and the more nuanced and narrowly tailored the solution, the better. To Sanders, policy problems stem from a fundamental imbalance of political power..The solution isn’t to pass a smart new law, it’s to spark a “political revolution” that upends the balance of power.
As we know from both the debate and their position statements, Clinton wants to regulate the big financial institutions and Sanders wants to break them up. The argument from the Sanders wing is that we can’t trust the government to be the regulator.
I remember that same argument coming up between liberals during the health care debate. Those who dismissed the ACA in favor of single payer often said that any attempt to regulate health insurance companies was a waste of time. I always found that odd based on the Democratic tradition of embracing government regulation as the means to correct the excesses of capitalism.
This basically comes down to whether you agree with Sanders when he says that we need a “political revolution that upends the balance of power” or do you agree with Clinton when she said, “it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok.” Peter Beinart calls it the difference between an insurrectionist and an institutionalist.
Depending on where you stand on that question, your solutions will look very different. That helps me understand why I never thought Sanders’ policy proposals were serious. Someone who assumes that the entire system is rigged isn’t going to be that interested in “nuanced and narrowly tailored policies” to fix it.
But in the end, this puts even more of a responsibility on Sanders’ shoulders. If he wants a political revolution to upend a rigged system, he needs to be very precise about what he has in mind as a replacement to that system. Otherwise, he’s simply proposing chaos.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 15, 2015
“Our Current Distemper”: “Asymmetric Polarization” Emanating From The Radicalization Of The Republican Party
As we head towards what will probably be another fiscal crisis in December, perhaps managed by a caretaker Speaker of the House, coinciding with the frenzy of a presidential nominating contest in which nearly all Republicans are running against their own party’s leadership, it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves how we got to this juncture.
In pursuit of perspective, Bloomberg View‘s Francis Wilkinson interviews Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. As you may recall, Ornstein and Mann published a book in 2012 entitled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which broke from the usual “balanced” assessment of blame for the nation’s problems that prevails in the MSM and much of academia and pointed at the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization” emanating from the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Now that the political dysfunction they analyzed has if anything intensified, have Ornstein and Mann changed their minds about any of this? No, as you can quickly see from the interview. But I’d point to a succinct quote from Mann that addresses the preconditions for recovery:
There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not “Washington” or “Congress” or “insiders” or politicians in general.
The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.
Remember how annoyed much of the punditocracy was on Tuesday night when Hillary Clinton listed “Republicans” as among the “enemies” she was proud of earning? That reflexive annoyance, not Clinton’s “partisanship,” is a big part of the problem.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 15, 2015
“A Very Different Dynamic”: The Difference Between Presidential Pride And Embarrassment
At this point in the 2008 presidential race, a relatively crowded field of national Republican candidates was confronted with an unyielding reality: their party’s two-term president was deeply unpopular. According to Gallup, as of mid-October 2007, then-President George W. Bush’s approval rating was a woeful 32% – about 14 points lower than President Obama’s standing now.
And so, GOP candidates were pretty cautious about their associations with the flailing Bush/Cheney administration. The very last thing Republican presidential hopefuls wanted was to be perceived as offering Bush’s “third term.”
Fast forward eight years. Another two-term president is nearing the end of his tenure, but note what happened in last night’s debate when Anderson Cooper offered Hillary Clinton a chance to distance herself from President Obama. From the transcript:
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you not be a third term of President Obama?
CLINTON: Well, I think that’s pretty obvious. I think being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had up until this point, including President Obama.
COOPER: Is there a policy difference?
CLINTON: Well, there’s a lot that I would like to do to build on the successes of President Obama, but also, as I’m laying out, to go beyond.
The response didn’t cause much of a stir, but it was a pretty extraordinary answer given the political world’s general assumptions about Obama, his standing, and the public’s appetite for an entirely different policy agenda.
Given a chance to distance herself from the president – Clinton’s former rival – the Democratic frontrunner made no effort whatsoever to play along.
She wasn’t the only one. Vox had a good piece on this:
The president’s name was invoked 21 times – and largely by Hillary Clinton. She referred to him 13 times, usually in a positive manner, talking about the things “President Obama and I” did. When Lincoln Chafee questioned her judgment because she voted for the Iraq War, she said, “I recall very well being on a debate stage, I think, about 25 times with then-Senator Obama, debating this very issue. After the election, he asked me to become secretary of state.” […]
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Jim Webb referred to Obama twice, Martin O’Malley referred to him three times, and Chafee did once. Words like “admiration,” “affection,” and “support” were thrown around, but Clinton drove home the point that she worked, arm in arm, with the sitting president, who is very popular among Democrats.
That last point is of particular interest. I think the general media narrative is that President Obama is unpopular. I also think that narrative is wrong – Obama is arguably the nation’s most well-liked politician, and among Democrats, his support is generally between 80% and 90%.
Republicans wanted nothing to do with Bush towards the end of his presidency, but we’re looking at a very different dynamic, at least for now, with Democrats in the 2016 race.
It’ll be especially interesting to see how this plays out next year as Election Day approaches. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, think about the national surrogates who’ll be able to hit the trail on her behalf: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, in addition to Clinton and her running mate.
The GOP nominee will have … who? George W. Bush probably won’t be headlining many rallies. So the nominee might turn to John McCain? Mitt Romney? Other national figures who lost major races?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 14, 2015
“GOP Bad Faith Legal Mischief”: Democrats Have Every Reason To Save Republicans From An Obamacare “Bloodletting”
Sometime this month, possibly as early as Monday morning, the Supreme Court will issue its ruling in King v. Burwell. If the Court ignores both the text and purpose of the Affordable Care Act, and rules for the challengers, millions of the law’s beneficiaries in 34 states will quickly lose their insurance subsidies and be forced off their health plans. The ensuing chaos would be the consequence not just of the ruling itself, but also of the Republican Party’s expected unwillingness to pass a one-sentence bill clarifying that Obamacare subsidies are available in every state, whether or not each state established its own health insurance exchange.
When King, and similar cases, were first conceived, they quickly became vessels of hope for conservatives, who recognized how difficult and punishing it would be to hobble or eliminate Obamacare through the legislative process. What many of them have come to recognize in the subsequent years is that farming out the job to the judiciary can’t spare them from the subsequent political cost: As decision day approaches, more and more of these conservatives are acknowledging candidly—and typically anonymously—that they will suffer badly if the Supreme Court does the very thing they’ve asked the Supreme Court to do.
“The most likely option is that Congress is unable to pass a fix,” an anonymous Republican Hill staffer told Joel Gehrke of the conservative National Review—a magazine that has beseeched the Court to void the subsidies. “Either Republicans won’t be able to settle on a fix or the president will veto whatever we do come up with. At that point, it will be up to the governors to pass their own laws deeming the national exchange a state exchange. That is the path of least resistance.”
Gehrke looks at the cross-pressures Republicans would face after a ruling for King and wonders whether they “could be in for a bloodletting.” Though they can’t admit it publicly, the promise of a bloodletting—compounded by the fact that every vulnerable Republican senator in cycle next year represents an affected state—is precisely why so many Republicans privately hope the Court will uphold the subsidies.
If the conventional wisdom which took shape after oral arguments—and to which I subscribe—is correct, the government will win, and this painful exercise in bad faith legal mischief will come to nothing. But if the challengers win, and a bloodletting ensues, Democrats won’t be able to stand back while Republicans absorb the political damage. Bloodletting or no, Obamacare will be crippled in most states. It could easily remain crippled indefinitely. Its fate will turn on the question of whether the political consequences for Republicans resemble the consequences of a government shutdown or collision with the debt limit. But either way Democrats will have to play an active role in bringing about a resolution.
The best-case scenario for Democrats is a public outcry so severe and sustained that Republicans cave, and agree to restore the subsidies with a clean fix.
Republicans have tacitly acknowledged that they won’t be able to sit on their hands while state insurance markets collapse. They have introduced legislation in both the House and Senate that would restore subsidies, but only for existing beneficiaries, and only on conditions Democrats could never accept, like the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate.
You can interpret these offers in two ways. The first, as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has noted, is that these bills are designed to be vetoed, allowing Republicans to blame an uncompromising Obama for perpetuating the crisis. But they could also serve as bases for a compromise, or surrender. If the public responds to a ruling for King the way they’ve responded to other GOP-instigated crises, Republicans would have to scale back their demands and eventually agree to reinstate the subsidies, perhaps for a modest price.
Two different forces will push in that direction. Even if sprinkled liberally with poison pills, and even if its proximate purpose is to invite a veto, Republican-sponsored legislation to partially reinstate ACA subsidies probably can’t pass. Democrats aren’t going to vote for an ersatz fix and neither will many rank-and-file conservative members of Congress. “As soon as the messaging is out there saying, ‘Look, a half-a-sentence fix saves millions of people from either losing their coverage or having massive spikes,’ we as a party won’t be able to sustain that pressure very long — certainly not through the August recess,” another Republican aide tells Gehrke.
But that doesn’t mean Democrats will win a standoff outright. Though their case for a clean fix will be compelling, they will also be highly motivated to reinstate the subsidies immediately, even if it means Republicans get to pocket unreciprocated concessions. Those can’t include structural damage to the core of the law, but could include eliminating things like the medical device tax and the employer mandate.
Real danger arises if, per Gehrke’s other source, an adverse King ruling registers somewhere below a government shutdown on the political Richter scale, inflicting damage on the GOP but not enough to make them seek a solution in earnest. Against the backdrop of a paralyzed Congress, Obamacare would begin to unravel in dozens of states, and would continue to do so until at least 2017. A ruling for the challengers would boomerang violently on Republicans, but Democrats have every reason in the world to want them spared from it.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 8, 2015
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