“It’s Time For The Nuclear Option”: GOP Madness And Unprecedented Obstructionism Pushes Senate To Breaking Point
In July, with Senate Democrats prepared to execute the “nuclear option,” the chamber reached an agreement that calmed the waters. Indeed, at the time, it seemed like quite a breakthrough for routine governance – the Senate was allowed to hold confirmation votes, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was allowed to function, the EPA was allowed to get a new chief, and the National Labor Relations Board was allowed to go back to work.
It was nice while it lasted.
Today, after a brief respite in the confirmation wars, Senate Republicans re-embraced mindless obstructionism again. In fact, they did so twice.
Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked Rep. Mel Watt’s nomination to serve as one of the nation’s top housing regulators.
The Senate voted 56-42 to end debate on Watt’s (D-N.C.) nomination to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), but 60 votes were needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.
Republicans didn’t have any specific objections to Watt, but since they preferred the current official at FHFA, GOP senators refused to allow the chamber to vote on Watt’s nomination. It’s the first time in 170 years in which a sitting member of the House lost a confirmation vote in the Senate.
Shortly after blocking a qualified African-American man, Senate Republicans then blocked a qualified woman.
Senate Republicans blocked Democrats attempt to vote on whether to confirm Patricia Millett as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the D.C. Circuit, renewing Democratic conversations of possible rule changes.
On Thursday, the Senate voted 55-38 against ending debate on her nomination. Democrats needed at least 60 votes to overcome the Republican filibuster.
Again, Republicans had no substantive objections to Millett whatsoever, but simply don’t want President Obama to fill any of the D.C. Circuit vacancies with anyone.
It’s against this backdrop that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) intends to block a vote on Janet Yellen’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve, and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) intend to block all confirmation votes altogether until someone pays attention to their Benghazi conspiracy theories.
Or put another way, Republican obstructionism has once again gotten completely out of control – there is simply no precedent in American history for tactics like what we’re seeing today – and if Democrats aren’t considering drastic measures, I’d be very surprised.
The status quo, as evidenced today, is a madness. It’s plainly unsustainable.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 31, 2013
“Standing With Mitch”: Is Rand Paul A Secret RINO?
Rand Paul (R-KY) was one of the 18 senators who voted against the deal brokered between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that ended the government shutdown and raised the debt limit — but that deal would likely never have happened if not for Paul’s alliance with McConnell.
Less than four years ago, Paul easily defeated Secretary of State Trey Grayson, McConnell’s choice to replace Senator Jim Bunning, in a GOP primary. The minority leader quickly moved to make amends with Paul as the Tea Party favorite cruised to a win in the general election.
Since 2010, the two men have formed a relationship of equals that’s worked to the advantage of both. “You know, I think when we call people a ‘mentor,’ I think that overstates,” Paul said when asked about the nature of their bond earlier this year. “We are colleagues, and I do respect him.”
McConnell backed Paul’s “drone” filibuster of future CIA director John Brennan. Paul has not only endorsed McConnell’s re-election, he’s lent out his campaign manager Jesse Benton to the senator. A hot mic caught the two senators discussing tactics for how to avoid blame for the government shutdown.
It’s impossible to imagine McConnell being able to swoop in at the last moment to negotiate a deal if he weren’t leading his primary opponent — Tea Partier Matt Bevin — by as much as 40 percent. And it’s impossible to imagine McConnell crushing a hardline opponent so handily if Paul had decided to back said hardline opponent.
In the wake of the McConnell-Reid compromise, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has gotten most of the grief from the Tea Party. You can get a sampling of the vile things he’s being called on his Facebook page from this Tea Party Insult Generator. The Speaker is much more deserving of grief because he let the shutdown happen and refused to even hold a vote on the “clean” continuing resolution that McConnell let pass the Senate.
However, Sarah Palin said on Thursday that she’s ready to fight in Kentucky in order to “shake things up in 2014.”
McConnell has already said there will not be another shutdown over Obamacare. He also refused to comment on the ascent of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). To those who have embraced the junior senator from Texas as the new leader of the conservative movement, this makes the minority leader a member of the “Surrender Caucus.”
It used to be a big deal when a former member of a national Republican ticket threatened to support a primary challenge to the GOP’s leader in the Senate. But that was back when Republican congressmen didn’t accuse former GOP standard-bearers of being in league with al Qaeda.
Palin’s threat would be a much bigger problem for the senator if Rand Paul weren’t standing with Mitch. And if you’re wondering where Paul’s loyalty is coming from, ask the man both men have employed — Jesse Benton. If he doesn’t know he’s being recorded, Benton might tell you, “I’m sorta holdin’ my nose for two years, cause what we’re doin’ here is going to be a big benefit for Rand in ’16…”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 17, 2013
“Meet The New Republican Party”: GOP Leaders Recommit To Same Old Far-Right Culture War
Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus accepted the fact that his party’s social conservatism had alienated many young voters, women, and moderates. The party would still adhere to its platform, Priebus said in March, “but it doesn’t mean that we divide and subtract people from our party…. I don’t believe we need to act like Old Testament heretics.”
At the time, this seemed quite sensible. Understanding the Republican Party’s unpopularity is a multi-faceted dynamic, but its economic failures and extremist tactics are only part of the larger problem. The GOP’s support for a far-right culture-war agenda — anti-contraception, anti-gay, anti-reproductive rights, anti-Planned Parenthood — has taken a toll, too.
This support has manifested itself in Republicans’ legislative priorities — the House GOP has been preoccupied this year with votes on abortion and birth control — but it’s not limited to Capitol Hill.
Marriage, abortion and religious liberty are the top cultural topics to be addressed at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit.
Conservative political issues will be a major part of the presentations, but the social-cultural issues “are what define us as an organization,” said retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin of the Family Research Council (FRC), a main sponsor of the annual conference, which is now in its eighth year.
Right Wing Watch highlighted some of the fringe extremists who’ll play prominent roles at the right-wing conference, but the key takeaway is simple: Republican leaders will join these fringe extremists as if they’re mainstream.
Looking over the list of confirmed speakers at the Values Voter Summit, we see several sitting Republican U.S. senators (Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Tim Scott, and Marco Rubio), and many more sitting Republican U.S. House members (Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and Scott Turner of Texas).
The list of confirmed speakers also includes House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who was on his party’s national presidential ticket less than a year ago.
And why are these guests important? Because it’s a reminder that no matter how much damage the Republican Party’s culture war does to the GOP’s reputation, they just can’t help themselves. The religious right movement may not be the powerhouse it once was — remember when the Christian Coalition was a major force in American politics? — but it still is a significant part of the GOP base, even if it helps drive mainstream voters away.
Indeed, for Republicans eyeing national office, this has become something of a rite of passage — if you want to compete for the GOP’s presidential nomination, you’ll have to suck up to the party’s theocratic wing.
A group of longtime Christian conservative activists are holding a private meeting Thursday in Washington to hear informal presentations from two of the most talked-about potential Republican presidential candidates: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
The gathering is being held in conjunction with the Family Research Council’s Values Voters conference, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, but it is not an official part of that event. Rather, it is being staged by a loosely-organized group of Republican leaders that call themselves “Conservatives of Faith.”
The hosts include Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, the former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, the conservative talk show host Janet Parshall and Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer, along with a handful of others from the conservative movement. [Robert Fischer, a South Dakota-based conservative organizer] is the group’s chief organizer.
Meet the new Republican Party. When it comes to social conservatism, it’s entirely indistinguishable from the old Republican Party.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2013
“Driving Through Red Lights”: Extreme Chaos Being Caused By The Unrivaled Republican Gang Of 40
In the 1970s, in its days of hard-line Communist isolation, China was ruled by the extremist “Gang of Four.” Drivers then were sometimes encouraged to proceed at red lights because red was the revolutionary color signifying advance — resulting in a chaos that was emblematic of the times.
In the United States, we always do things in a grand way, so it’s a tribute to American exceptionalism that we have far outperformed China in the field of extremist ideologues. We don’t have some pathetic little foursome, but an unrivaled “Gang of 40.”
That’s my name for the 40 hard-line Republican House members who have forced the shutdown of the federal government and are now flirting with a debt default that could spin the world into recession. In their purported effort to save America money, they’re costing us taxpayers billions of dollars.
Obviously, there are differences — our Gang of 40 disdain Mao suits — but there is a similar sense in which an entire nation is held hostage by a small group of unrepresentative figures who don’t have much of a clue about economics or about where they’re taking the country.
The Gang of 40’s government shutdown has been bad enough, cutting off death benefits to families of service members and ending federal support for rape crisis centers. It’s doubly painful that all this is happening while the House and Senate gyms remain open.
(Bravo to the Washington restaurant that is offering a 10 percent discount to some federal workers, while posting a 10 percent surcharge to members of Congress. Maybe members of the Gang of 40 should also be compelled to wash dishes?)
What’s most troubling about the mess is the way the extremists downplay the risks of running into the debt limit. Astonishingly, Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida veterinarian, says that missing the debt ceiling deadline “would bring stability to world markets.”
Or there’s Senator Rand Paul, who said that not raising the debt limit could be reframed as “a pretty reasonable idea.” Even Senator Tom Coburn says it wouldn’t be so bad to miss the debt-limit deadline and face a “managed catastrophe.”
There’s now a right-wing echo chamber, shaped by Fox News Channel and Web sites like RedState, that repeats such nonsense until it acquires a patina of plausibility — and thus makes a catastrophe more difficult to avoid. A Pew Research Center poll this month found that 54 percent of Republicans believe that the United States can miss the debt-limit deadline without major problems.
What makes our trajectory dangerous is that the hard-liners are getting positive feedback. The most reliable Republican voters are about twice as likely to say that Congressional Republicans have compromised too much as to say that they haven’t compromised enough.
Hang on to your hat. We may be in for a wild ride.
I’ve often been curious about the wretched political leadership in America in the 1840s and 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War: How could American politicians have been so stubborn as they inched toward cataclysm? Watching today’s obstreperousness, I’m gaining a better insight.
Two features strike me about this moment — and both are echoes of the mistakes in the run-up to the Civil War. One is the obliviousness of central players, especially the Gang of 40, to the risks ahead.
The second is the way politicians seek leverage by brazenly threatening deliberate harm to the nation unless they get their way. The House Republican hard-liners lost their battle against Obamacare in the democratic process, just as President Obama lost his battle for an assault-weapons ban. But instead of accepting their loss as Obama did, members of the Gang of 40 took hostages. Unless Obamacare is defunded, they’ll cause billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.
The G.O.P. claims to be the party particularly concerned by budget deficits. Yet its tantrum caused a government shutdown that cost the country $1.6 billion last week alone.
As for the debt limit, the costs of missing that deadline could be infinitely greater. Already, interest rates are spiking for one-month Treasury bills to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, calculates that the 2011 debt-ceiling confrontation will, over a decade, cost American taxpayers an extra $18.9 billion.
And that was the price tag for a crisis in which the debt-limit deadline was eventually met. If this deadline is missed, the costs in higher interest rates in the years ahead will be billions more.
Members of the Gang of 40 are unwilling to pay for early childhood education, but they’re O.K. with paying untold billions for a government shutdown and debt-limit crisis? That’s not governance, but extremism.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2013
“The Law Of The Land”: The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Stopped Being A “Bill” Several Years Ago
When congressional Republicans condemn the Affordable Care Act, there’s one problematic word in particular they tend to use an awful lot. The Hill did a nice job picking up on the trend.
In floor speeches, TV interviews and town halls, Republicans often refer to President Obama’s signature healthcare law either as “ObamaCare” or a healthcare “bill” — subtly implying that it’s not truly permanent.
“The bill is named after the president. Why wouldn’t the president want to be under the bill?” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) asked in a floor speech earlier this month, making the case that the president should get his healthcare through ObamaCare.
It’s clear that Enzi, who famously admitted that he engaged in health care reform negotiations in bad faith, is confused. The name of the reform law is technically the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “Obamacare,” so it’s not “named after the president.”
But that’s not the important thing. Rather, note that Enzi refers to the law as a “bill.” So does Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said last week that “this bill,” referring to the health care law, is going to hurt people. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said there are “a host of problems [with] this bill.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said “this bill” isn’t working. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) chastised Democrats for supporting “this dog of a bill.”
Keep in mind, all of these quotes come from this month — September 2013 — not from the debate when the law was actually still a bill.
The Hill‘s report added that the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that roughly 40% of Americans don’t know that the Affordable Care Act is, to use John Boehner’s phrase, the law of the land. One possible explanation for such widespread ignorance is the way in which congressional Republicans mislead the public in such a brazen way.
But stepping past the rhetoric, there’s also a substantive significance to this.
If you listened to the House floor debate on Saturday night or watched the Sunday shows, you know the GOP desperately hopes to characterize the current crisis as a “both sides” problem so it won’t receive the bulk of the blame. To hear Republicans tell it, they demand that “Obamacare” be gutted, while Democrats demand that “Obamacare” be implemented. “See?” conservatives say, “both sides are making demands.”
The problem, of course, is that this is almost unimaginably dumb. What Democrats are arguing is that the law is already the law; it’s met constitutional muster according to the U.S. Supreme Court; and it’s up to the president to faithfully execute current laws. If Republicans want to change the law, they can introduce legislation and give it their best shot.
Both sides, in other words, aren’t making comparable “demands” — one side expects existing law to be implemented, the other expects to use extortion to undermine the law they claim to dislike.
It’s very likely why so many Republican U.S. senators, who presumably have some understanding of the differences between a “bill” and a “law,” keep deliberately getting this wrong. If the Affordable Care Act is just a “bill,” then it’s not fully legitimate and Republicans are justified in trying to sabotage it outside the American legislative process.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 30, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 