“What Does Shinseki’s Resignation Change?”: Disappointing Republican Leaders With Big Plans For This Scandal
One of the more common developments inside the Beltway in recent years is seeing congressional Republicans call for various members of President Obama’s cabinet to resign. It’s become so routine, it’s almost as if GOP lawmakers consider it part of their daily routine: wake up, have breakfast, get dressed, and call for the Secretary of Whatever to step down immediately.
But as the tide turned quickly against Eric Shinseki at the Department of Veterans Affairs, House Republican leaders bit their tongues this week, refusing to call for his ouster. It became pretty odd – many of Obama’s close Democratic allies demanded the secretary’s resignation, even as John Boehner and Eric Cantor did not.
Was this because GOP leaders wanted to give the White House a break? Um, no. Was it the result of Republicans’ deep respect and admiration for Shinseki, a true patriot? That’s a nice thought, but that’s not what happened, either.
Instead, consider the response to Shinseki’s resignation.
House Speaker John Boehner said Friday that the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki “really changes nothing” to fix systemic problems at the department, calling on President Barack Obama to take further action to address system-wide mismanagement.
“One personnel change cannot be used as an excuse to paper over” problems at the VA, he told reporters after President Barack Obama accepted Shinseki’s resignation Friday morning.
As recently as yesterday, the Ohio Republican told reporters, “The question I ask myself: Is him resigning going to get us to the bottom of the problem? Is it going to help us find out what’s really going on? The answer I keep getting is no.”
It’s important to understand Boehner’s likely motivations here.
What Republicans leaders want is to blame President Obama for the controversy. Substantively, that’s not an easy sell – as Mariah Blake makes clear today, much of what plagues the VA started under the Bush/Cheney administration – but there’s an election coming up, and none of the issues GOP officials hoped to run on are going the way Republicans hoped.
What does this have to do with Shinseki’s ouster? Probably everything.
Inside the Beltway, there was an overwhelming demand that Obama “do something” and not let this story linger any longer. Boehner, however, likely wanted the opposite: White House inaction, more delays, and a controversy that lingers indefinitely.
Many on the right may have cheered today’s announcement, but in no way does this advance a partisan goal. The VA system hasn’t been working, so the president is replacing the head of the VA system with someone who’ll hopefully do a better job. This doesn’t help Boehner at all, which is why he was so quick to say the news “really changes nothing” – the Speaker is probably concerned attention will now shift now that the embattled Shinseki is leaving the stage.
And even putting partisan motivations aside, substantively, Boehner arguably has a credible point. The VA mess will be no better this evening than it was this morning. A cabinet secretary is gone, but the problem that forced him out remains.
If the political world decides to move on, it will disappoint Republican leaders with big plans for this scandal, but it will also do a disservice to veterans who continue to wait for a solution.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2014
“McConnell’s Obamacare Policy”: Repeal It, Then Immediately Reinstate The Whole Damn Thing
I think there’s one way, and only one way, to interpret Mitch McConnell’s position on the Medicaid expansion in Kentucky, and last night the Washington Post’s fact checker confirmed it. McConnell wants to repeal the Medicaid expansion (along with the rest of Obamacare) and then let the people who run the state of Kentucky (i.e. people other than him) decide whether to reinstate it, and pay for it out of state coffers.
That’s a difficult position to support, which explains why his campaign obscures it behind a bunch of rambling designed to convince people (including very politically savvy people) that McConnell has come around to supporting the Medicaid expansion.
But it’s actually identical to his position on Kynect—the state’s health insurance exchange—and perhaps he’ll apply it to other integral parts of Obamacare as well. As a general matter it amounts to arguing that Obamacare should be repealed, and then reinstated in full at the state level. But that’s a total fantasy.
When Obamacare is repealed, the funding Kynect relies upon, as well as the health plans and rules that make it a popular and widely used portal, will disappear as well. No biggie, says McConnell. Once they’re gone, the state can decide whether it wants to reinstitute those things on its own.
But of course, as with Medicaid expansion, it’s almost impossible to imagine states riding to the rescue of those harmed by Obamacare’s repeal. Running the exchange is fairly expensive on its own, but its costs would dwarfed by the resources required to recreate the actual market Obamacare has created in Kentucky. Remember, Kentucky flirted with creating Obamacare’s coverage guarantee without creating any incentives for everyone to purchase insurance. No mandate, no subsidies. And the system predictably collapsed. But it’s unlikely that Kentucky could afford to reinstate ACA-style subsidies on its own. And without them, the plans will be too expensive to justify a mandate. And so under McConnell’s policy, Kentucky’s newly insured would be left with nothing.
The idea that ACA politics are gruesome for Democrats is so deeply ingrained in the national media’s belief system that it won’t be shaken loose by McConnell’s dissembling alone. But if it were true, why would Republicans across the country be hiding their true views about Obamacare behind the word “fix”? Why would any Republicans, let alone the Senate GOP leader, be saying they want to get rid of everything Obamacare does except the things it does in their own states?
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, May 30, 2014
“War Rarely Conforms To Slogans”: Obama Outlines A Doctrine Where Restraint Makes Us Stronger
By laying out a long-term foreign policy vision in a speech at West Point on Wednesday, President Obama challenged his critics, at home and abroad, not to speak in vague terms about U.S. “decline” or “weakness” but to answer the question: Exactly what would you do differently?
This is as close as we have gotten to an Obama Doctrine, and here it is : The United States “will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it — when our people are threatened; when our livelihoods are at stake; when the security of our allies is in danger.”
But in other cases, “when issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States . . . we should not go it alone.” Instead, Obama said, “we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action” and “broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law and — if just, necessary and effective — multilateral military action.”
In 2008, Obama won his party’s nomination and the election as a pragmatic antiwar candidate specifically protesting our intervention in Iraq. He declared in 2002 that he was opposed not to all wars but to “a dumb war.” It was clear Wednesday that it remains a source of pride to him that he has brought what he called “a long season of war” to an end.
And he was unabashed in insisting that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures — without thinking through the consequences.”
Responding, perhaps in frustration, to a wave of reproach that has descended upon him because of his reluctance to use U.S. military power, he offered this riposte: “Tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”
Here was Obama throwing down the gauntlet to his foes. His address should force a reckoning with a key issue: Americans, by all the evidence of the polls, are skeptical of military action abroad. They reached this point not because they have undergone some large philosophical or ideological conversion. Rather, they arrived at a practical judgment after the experience of two long wars that failed — particularly in the instance of Iraq — to produce the results their supporters promised. It was the same after Vietnam: Most Americans now have a much higher bar for when they would be willing to commit lives and treasure overseas.
The war-weariness the country feels is thus not Obama’s creation. His election was itself a response to that weariness. His foreign policy reflects a determination to move the country not to isolation but to the more measured approach to military intervention practiced during the presidencies of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Those in the United States and elsewhere who have faulted Obama won’t be persuaded by the pains he took to locate himself in a middle ground between isolationism and hyper-interventionism. They may like hearing him say that the United States is “the one indispensable nation” that “must always lead on the world stage,” but many of them won’t be convinced that he means it.
The president is right to argue that the United States “has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world” and to take on those who “suggest that America is in decline.” Yet the ghost of declinism haunts the international stage and will not be exorcised easily.
This speech should be an opening bid. Obama’s efforts should be aimed less at moving those domestic opponents who will never be assuaged than at making plain to the rest of the world that the United States really does have a vital interest in promoting the “international norms” the president extolled, and in fostering conditions conducive to a “world of greater freedom and tolerance” that “helps keep us safe.” It also means paying close attention to how policy is implemented, avoiding mixed signals of the sort that characterized last fall’s Syrian crisis.
As for the president’s critics, they have an obligation to answer his challenge. Those who believe that the United States should underwrite a world order friendly to our values and interests need to accept that the promiscuous deployment of U.S. troops abroad is the surest way to undermine support for this mission at home. In calling for restraint and realism — and by insisting on raising the threshold for wars of choice — Obama may yet prove himself to be the best friend American internationalists have.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 28, 2014
“The Origins Of The Modern GOP”: The Party Of Lincoln Is Now The Party Of Voter ID Laws
Dartmouth Professor Randall Balmer argues convincingly that the origin of the religious right as a political force stemmed from opposition to school desegregation rather than opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision. I don’t think it is well known that evangelicals were largely silent about the Roe ruling at the time it was issued, nor that some of the most influential evangelical leaders at the time were supportive of the ruling.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
It was actually a ruling by the DC District Court upholding the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax exemption that convinced evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich to rally the religious right against President Jimmy Carter’s reelection. They could hardly make Bob Jones’ anti-miscegenation their rallying call, however, so the modern-day Republican Party was founded on an evangelical “awakening” on what had formerly been considered an issue only for “papists.”
Today, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen is the party of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich. The party of Lincoln is now the party of voter ID laws.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 28, 2014
“The One Child Left Behind”: Rand Paul Still Doesn’t Understand What He Doesn’t Understand
Last week, in an apparent attempt to embarrass the White House, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) leaked a new detail to the media: as the attack in Benghazi got underway, some Obama administration officials reached out to YouTube to “warn of the ‘ramifications’ of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video.”
There was, however, a problem: Issa’s leak made the White House look better, not worse – the fact that officials contacted YouTube is proof that the administration genuinely believed that the violence was in response to an offensive video. Issa accidentally leaked evidence that bolstered the White House’s case, offering proof the administration’s consistent line was sincere.
But Glenn Kessler reports that despite Republicans inadvertently helping the White House on Benghazi, some on the right tried to exploit the news anyway.
FOX HOST ERIC BOLLING: “So this is kind of startling news that the White House was on the phone with YouTube as the attacks were still taking place that night, saying, Hey, did you see what’s causing this? They were already being political at that moment.”
SEN. RAND PAUL (R-Ky.): “You know, I’m appalled by it. One of the things that’s interesting is that very night, they were still struggling to get reinforcements. We had some more Special Operations forces in Tripoli. They couldn’t find a plane for them. So instead of calling to get a plane or to try to make arrangements to get a plane, they’re on the phone trying to create spin to say that, ‘You know what? This is about a video, which never had anything to do with this attack.’ So you know, it saddens me. Doesn’t surprise me, but does sadden me.”
It’s rather amazing to appreciate just how wrong this is.
To be sure, Bolling’s question appears to be based on some striking confusion – the White House reaching out to YouTube and the role of a YouTube video in contributing to violence is not “being political.” Indeed, it’s the opposite.
But Rand Paul’s response suggests his basic understanding of the relevant details is somehow getting worse, even as he’s presumably exposed to more information.
First, the Republican senator seems to be under the impression that the national security team at the White House only has one telephone – instead of making plane “arrangements,” he said, officials called YouTube. (Note to Rand Paul: the Situation Room has fairly sophisticated communications equipment. They’re capable of making more than one call at a time.)
Second, though it’s really not up to the White House to coordinate Special Operations flights directly, even if it were, when the senator claimed officials didn’t try to find a plane for Special Operations forces, that’s clearly wrong.
In other words, the Kentucky senator is “appalled” and “saddened” by details Rand Paul doesn’t actually understand.
That seems to happen quite a bit with the GOP lawmaker.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2014
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