“They Had A Choice”: Did Frustrated Mainstream Republicans Help Pull The Nuclear Trigger?
The big mystery of today’s majority-imposed rules change in the Senate is: What happened to the deal-making Republicans?
There’s nothing much to figure out on the Democratic side. It was clear to most observers that the three-seat blockade of the D.C. Circuit Court was solidly over the line separating Democratic senators’ individual preference for maintaining the filibuster and their party interest in seating a Democratic president’s choices for the federal bench. Democrats believed that they had no choice but to proceed.
Republicans, however, certainly did have a choice. After all, in the short run, they’re clearly worse off by this change than they would be had they used the filibuster far more selectively. That was enough to get them to compromise the last time this happened. So why didn’t they hold back again?
One possibility is that they simply miscalculated, believing that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was bluffing. If that was the case, however, they could have backed off at the last second.
A second possibility is that they really wanted to eliminate the filibuster, and that they believed that the cost to the Democrats for pulling the trigger was great enough that it was worth the potential three years of majority-confirmed President Obama nominees. That’s possible, although it’s very hard to believe that voters will care at all, and Republican arguments (court-packing!) did not appear designed to appeal to those who might have been willing to condemn Democrats for a “power-grab.”
So here’s a third possibility. The problem with the summer compromise is that it was horrible for deal-making Republicans. The deal essentially said: Republicans will continue to filibuster nominations, but will supply enough votes for almost all of them so that the filibusters will be defeated. But that meant that in practice a handful of Republicans were forced to tag-team their votes, making sure that Democrats always had 60. What’s more, the shutdown fight — which began right after the Senate deal was struck — revealed that radical Republicans led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) were eager to scapegoat those same deal-making Republicans. That raised the cost of the executive branch nominations agreement for tag-teamers such as Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). In other words, the summer deal might or might not have been stable, but it certainly couldn’t hold in a world in which the majority of Republican senators are looking for ways to separate themselves from mainstream conservatives, and then using that separation to attack them.
Those deal-making Republicans did have another option; They could have just abandoned the radicals. But over what principle? After all, the situation here is that it’s the radicals, not the mainstream conservatives, who want to hold up all these nominations. One way to look at what happened today is that the deal-makers were getting out of the way and allowing the radicals to lose. If the outcome is the same — Obama’s judicial picks get confirmed — then why should the deal-makers ask for the blame for it?
We don’t know yet, and perhaps we won’t, but my guess is that the way Cruz and other Republican radicals acted during the shutdown is what explains the difference between a successful deal in the summer and today’s nuclear action.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, November 21, 2013
“Judicial And Legislative Nullification”: Republicans Have Only Themselves To Blame For Harry Reid’s “Nuclear Option”
If the Founding Fathers could see the Senate after today’s vote by Senate Democrats to prohibit filibusters of most presidential appointments, they would, of course, be appalled. ”What are all these women doing here?” they would ask. But as for the filibuster reform, they’d wonder what all the fuss was about.
There is no mention of the filibuster in the Constitution. Until very recently in U.S. history, filibusters were rarely used. Half of all filibusters of executive-branch nominees have occurred under President Obama, and it was obvious from the first day of his presidency that Republicans would use the tactic to hamstring the government and block Obama.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then, had every right to push for changes to filibuster rules four years ago, when GOP use of the filibuster was already out of control. But instead, Reid offered deal after deal to Senate Republicans. They accepted some. They honored none. Instead, the delaying tactics have continued. Frequently they have been used to block the implementation of laws the Senate had passed — the two-year filibustering of the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, just because Republicans didn’t like the law. And Republicans have paired judicial nullification with legislative nullification, blocking a record number of Obama’s judicial appointees — a power the Constitution actually mentions, unlike the filibuster — for no real reason other than that they were Democratic nominees, not Republican ones. (Democrats were guilty of this under President George W. Bush as well, it must be noted, and deserve criticism for that, even if the number of filibusters was lower.)
The result, as political scientist Gregory Koger summed up nicely for my Post colleague Ezra Klein, has been the solidifying of a new order in the U.S. system of government:
Over the last 50 years, we have added a new veto point in American politics. It used to be the House, the Senate and the president, and now it’s the House, the president, the Senate majority and the Senate minority. Now you need to get past four veto points to pass legislation. That’s a huge change of constitutional priorities. But it’s been done, almost unintentionally, through procedural strategies of party leaders.
This status quo is unacceptable and had to change.
But Reid never would have used the “nuclear option” without the lemming-like behavior of Senate Republicans. Less ideological GOP members could have voted more frequently to break cloture and force an up-or-down vote, as members of both parties have done, even as filibuster use has increased. They could have stopped the unprecedented number of filibusters of presidential nominations, given that the president has a clearly defined constitutional responsibility to appoint people. They could have stopped blocking duly passed laws. But they didn’t.
So Republicans decrying filibuster reform as “dictatorial” or “a day to be sad” or other hyperbolic claims should look in the mirror. No one forced them to turn filibusters from a rarity to an oft-used tool for nullification and unprecedented obstruction. They have only themselves to blame.
By: James Downie, The Washington Post, November 21, 2013
“Norms And Rules Are For Suckers”: Don’t Believe The Republican Cries Of Vengeance
So now the Democrats have exercised the “nuclear option,” which is not particularly nuclear. They’ve changed existing Senate rules so that judicial nominations can not be filibustered, but can pass with a majority vote. Over the next couple of days you’ll hear Republicans say that this is the most horrifying power grab since the February Revolution of 1917. They will weep and beat their breasts, lamenting the death of fairness and democracy, predicting all manner of horrors, perhaps culminating in a zombie apocalypse, now that a judge nominated by the president can be confirmed with a vote of a majority of senators. But then, their grief will turn to steely determination. “You shall rue this day!”, they will cry. “Revenge shall be ours!”
And that might sound like a reasonable argument for why this rule change was ill-advised. After all, as Iowa senator Chuck Grassley recently threatened, “So if the Democrats are bent on changing the rules, then I say go ahead. There are a lot more Scalias and Thomases that we’d love to put on the bench.” In other words, without the restraint of the filibuster, the next time Republicans have the White House and the Senate, which will happen eventually, they’ll go hog-wild, appointing the most radical conservatives they can find. But there’s one big reason that argument fails: They would have done it anyway.
Let’s not be naive here. The Republican party of today is not only ideologically radical but procedurally radical as well. They’ve taken virtually every opportunity they could to upend whatever rules and norms stood in the way of them getting what they want. Let’s say that it’s 2017 or 2021, and they’ve won the presidency and the Senate. Can anyone believe that if on this day in 2013 the Democrats decided to keep the filibuster for judicial nominations, Republicans would then do the same out of a sense of fair play? This is the party that over the last five years has filibustered literally every bill of greater consequence than renaming a post office. This is the party that got conservatives on the Supreme Court to upend the Voting Rights Act, then literally within days began passing one law after another to make it as hard as possible for minorities, students, and anyone else likely to vote Democratic to cast their ballots. This is the party that shut down the government in its endless quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This is the party that sincerely believes that its opponents are attempting to destroy America, and therefore any tactics are justified in order to stop them.
You can put the start date of this procedural radicalism at the inauguration of Barack Obama, but I’d date it back to the Florida mess in the 2000 election. In case your memory of that episode has faded, the whole election came down to a series of counts and recounts in a state in which the Republican candidate’s brother was the governor and his campaign co-chair was the state’s chief election official. Throughout the weeks that followed, Republicans did things like organize a small riot to intimidate election officials into not counting ballots, and the election was ultimately decided by five members of the Supreme Court who were so shamelessly partisan that they included in their decision an instruction that it could never be used as precedent in a subsequent case. And you know what price the Republicans paid for their ruthlessness? None.
It was then that Republicans realized once and for all that norms and rules are for suckers, and at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not you win. That belief hasn’t changed, even as the party has grown more ideologically extreme over the last five years. You can make an argument that Democrats should have taken the high road and not changed the filibuster rule today. But if you think Republicans wouldn’t have changed the rule to benefit themselves at the first chance they got—no matter what Democrats did—then you haven’t been paying attention.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 21, 2013
“Denying And Ignoring The Realities”: For Some, The Name “Obama” Has Become A Code Word
Racial tensions in the United States have changed since Obama’s election as president, and for the worse. As judicial opinions since 2008 have revealed, both the word “Obama” and the president’s image have become tools for harassing and otherwise discriminating, in the workplace and in places of public accommodation, against blacks and against whites in romantic relationships with blacks.
For instance, while at a company picnic, one white employee sat down next to his co-workers, held a watermelon slice in his hand, and asserted, “I’m going to sit down to eat my ‘Obama fruit.’” In a different court case, a plaintiff complained that the company’s C.E.O. once said he had a “gift for you for all the Obama people outside” — while handing a rifle to another employee. In yet another case, a white employee derided an African co-worker, calling the co-worker “boy,” threatening his life and telling him he should take Obama back to Africa to vote for him.
For other individuals, President Obama’s election has become a basis for denying and ignoring the realities of racism, both conscious and unconscious, in our country. Soon after Obama’s election, conservatives such as Gregory Coleman, a Texas lawyer, argued that the election demonstrated the obsolescence of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a point reiterated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June decision invalidating a section of the act.
In fact, the results from three experiments by Stanford University researchers suggest that endorsing Obama enables some whites to feel more comfortable in favoring other whites at the expense of blacks. The Stanford researchers contended that, for these whites, supporting Obama seemed to reduce their fears about appearing racially prejudiced, giving them the “moral credentials” to exhibit favoritism toward other whites.
At least one case showed this phenomenon affecting the legal process. After admitting that he based his decision in a criminal matter upon the race of the defendant, a white juror later denied his admission. His decision could not have been racially motivated, he argued. Why he was incapable of racial bias? Because, he said, he voted for Obama.
By: Angela Onwuachi-Willig, The Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, November 20, 2013
“This Is Sabotage, Plain And Simple”: The Unprecedented GOP Efforts To Undermine A Federal Law
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s never been the Affordable Care Act’s biggest fan, appeared on MSNBC yesterday to join the critical chorus. In reference to the Obama administration, the conservative Democrat said, “The bottom line is that they messed up, they messed up royally. There’s no excuse for this.”
The administration’s missteps have been well documented, and officials have earned much of the criticism they’ve received. But to say there’s “no excuse” is to overlook Republican sabotage efforts that have made a real difference.
Todd Purdum recently made the case, for example, that “calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step” is a “less acknowledged cause” of the rollout’s troubles. Jamelle Bouie added this week, “If Republicans have shown anything over the last four years, it’s that they’ll do anything to stop the Affordable Care Act, even if it amounts to legislative sabotage.”
We’ve talked before about the scope of these unprecedented efforts to undermine a federal law, which include blocking necessary resources needed for implementation, public misinformation campaigns, discouraging public-private partnerships, blocking Medicaid expansion, blocking CMS nominees, refusing to create marketplaces, and prohibiting “Navigators” from doing their jobs. But the campaign is arguably intensifying now.
Dana Milbank reports on House Republican leaders who emerged from their weekly meeting yesterday and tried to scare the bejesus out of Americans.
The Republicans’ scary-movie strategy has some logic to it: If they can frighten young and healthy people from joining the health-care exchanges, the exchanges will become expensive and unmanageable. This is sabotage, plain and simple – much like the refusal by red-state governors to participate in setting up the exchanges in the first place.
The quotes from House GOP leaders are rather remarkable. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said health care reform may lead to identity theft; Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) falsely claimed “premiums are going right through the roof”; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that consumers who visit healthcare.gov may become victims of fraud; and Caucus Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said vulnerable constituents may be put “on the casualty list.”
Milbank added, “Let’s hope the new health-care plans have generous coverage for anti-anxiety medication.”
Let’s not forget that the difference between a lie and a falsehood is intent – if you know the truth and say the opposite because your goal is deceit, you’re lying. And for the most part, congressional Republicans, whose interest in helping provide greater health security for Americans is easily trumped by their interested in destroying a Democratic law, have been reducing to lying.
But for saboteurs, honesty and serious policy debate are easily sacrificed for the larger goal. Indeed, they’re a small price to pay.
Also note, we’re looking at quite a one-two punch from the far-right – on the one hand we see the Koch brothers and their allies urge the uninsured to stay that way on purpose, in order to advance conservatives’ ideological goals, and on the other we see congressional Republicans try to terrify the public in the hopes that people who stand to benefit from “Obamacare” steer clear of the system.
President Obama added yesterday, during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that if both parties were “invested in success,” the rollout wouldn’t have been quite so rocky. “One of the problems that we’ve had is that one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure and that makes the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine tuning the law more challenging,” he added.
There’s no denying that the dysfunctional health care website matters, and the administration’s missteps deserve criticism. But Republican sabotage matters, too.
Kevin Drum recently explained, “No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced. This excuses neither the Obama administration’s poor decisions nor its timidity in the face of Republican attacks, but it certainly puts them in the proper perspective.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 20, 2013
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