“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
“From Obsession To Insanity”: The GOP Is Unhinged By Obamacare
Whacking yourself on the head with a ball-peen hammer would be stupid. But doing it again and again — that’s insane.
Welcome to your U.S. House of Representatives, presently led by a pack of Tea Party Republicans. They are so crazed by Obamacare that they repeatedly hammer themselves over the head with it, having voted 46 times (so far) to dismantle, defund, delay, deny, and otherwise destroy this landmark health care bill — all to no avail. They would be hilarious, were they not so pathetic.
But now, their anti-government, anti-Obama obsession has turned into insanity. Acting as though the USA is nothing more substantial than a banana republic, this Tea Party clique of petty potentates has forced a shutdown of our national government. The craziest part of their stunt is the duplicitous claim that finally providing health care for millions of uninsured Americans will have, as one leader of the mad-dog pack put it, “horrific effects.”
Yet, even as they publicly insist that they’re heroes for trying to save the people from the horror of receiving fairly decent health coverage, the GOP hierarchy is quietly warning its members that defeating Obamacare now is essential to their own health. Why? Because they know the program will work, providing better care and nearly universal coverage at a cheaper price. It will become widely popular, and any politico who tries to kill it later will become wildly unpopular. Even the senator from Oz, Ted Cruz, understood that the program had to be aborted before it was born. It will be so loved, Cruz candidly conceded (as he desperately tried to suffocate Obamacare with a painfully-long “filibuster”), that the public will be “hooked” on it for the long haul.
Yes, Sen. Oz, the American people tend to support policies that are beneficial to them. What’s crazy is you and your cohorts thinking they’re crazy for thinking that.
So now, Dr. Hightower offers this advice: Don’t fume about the GOP’s lunatic effort to kill health care reform — just laugh at their farcical show. It won’t affect them, but it can improve your mental health.
For starters, take Ted Cruz’s 21-hour blabathon that he said would stop Obamacare in its tracks. Not only did he fail spectacularly, but senators voted 100 to zero against his crazy ploy. Yes, that means that even he ended up voting against it! What a hoot he is.
A shameful hypocrite, too. While going to extremes to keep millions of Americans from getting vitally needed health coverage, Cruz goes to great lengths to keep the people from being reminded of his own health care, past and present.
Having been born in Calgary, Canada, little Ted’s parents were able to take advantage of the country’s universal health care, or as the Tea Party darlings like to call it, “socialized” medicine. That’s right, for the first four years of Ted’s life in Calgary, he was covered under government subsidized healthcare. I find it absolutely hysterical that little Ted would grow up to throw a 21-hour-long temper tantrum over affordable health care for hardworking American people. Recently, Cruz had been repeatedly refusing to answer whether taxpayers covered his health care. Finally, he piously responded that he was eligible for taxpayer coverage, but had nobly declined.
Such slapstick! It turns out that Ted was fibbing, for he’s covered by his wife’s policy. As a millionaire top executive at Goldman Sachs, she and her family are given gold-plated Cadillac coverage by the Wall Street giant. Goldman pays some $40,000 a year for her and Ted’s policy (more than most families make in a year) — a benefit-cost that the firm passes on to us taxpayers by deducting it from its corporate tax bill. Hilarious, huh?
Then there’s the comic twist that’s included in Congress’ current government shutdown. While more than a million regular government workers are going without a paycheck, the congresscritters who forced the furlough continue to collect their $174,000 in annual pay. Some lawmakers are donating their checks to charity, but four out of five are happily pocketing theirs. “Dang straight,” barked Rep. Lee Terry. “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college,” the Nebraska Republican said. “Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly,” Terry told his constituents.
And that’s your Congress at work. Laugh ’til it hurts.
By: Jim Hightower, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 10, 2013
“The Double Play Game”: Do Republicans Believe In Their Own Crisis?
You would think Republicans would be the ones trying to scare the country about the imminent expiration of the Treasury’s borrowing authority. After all, they’re the ones trying to use the debt ceiling (and the government shutdown) as leverage to get their way on policies that would be laughed out of Washington at any other moment.
The leverage only works if the country is really worried about the potential economic catastrophe that would result from a failure to lift the ceiling. In the Republican fantasy, that would pressure Democrats to end health care reform, cut spending on entitlements and say farewell to all their liberal dreams.
But instead, the reverse is happening. It’s Democrats who are warning the country about the unimaginable consequences of default, and many Republicans who are minimizing it.
This phenomenon could be seen last week at the beginning of the shutdown, when right-wing lawmakers started pooh-poohing the effects of a closed government. Fox News called it a “slimdown,” and several House members said less government might be good for the country. Now, 10 days before (a potential) Default Day, several House members are deriding the notion that it would be a very big deal.
Senator Tom Coburn, flatly contradicting the clear explanation from the Treasury, said the country would continue to pay its interest and redeem bonds, so why worry? Mick Mulvaney, a congressman from South Carolina, repeated the well-known canard that the Treasury could prioritize its payments and that there would be no default.
And Ted Yoho of Florida, who is quickly replacing Steve King and Louie Gohmert as the congressman to whom reporters flock for the jaw-dropping quotes so beloved by Twitter, said that not raising the debt ceiling would actually be beneficial.
“I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke,” Mr. Yoho told the Washington Post. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets.”
If you think that remark is not only detached from reality but also utterly aberrant, take a look at the Pew Research poll that came out today. It shows that 54 percent of all Republicans (and 64 percent of Tea Partiers) believe the country can go past the debt-limit deadline without causing major problems. In that sense, Mr. Yoho better represents his party than Speaker John Boehner, who claims to believe that default would be terrible, but is nonetheless demanding concessions in exchange for preventing it.
That the very people who are causing the crisis are dismissing it shows the double game that’s being played here. Republicans don’t want the country to understand how big a threat they are posing to its well-being. A growing number of Americans already blame them for the whole mess, as the same poll shows. If people truly understood how bad a default would be — if they understood credit markets and interest rates, and how they would be affected by the global loss of faith in Treasury bonds — the anger would be much greater, and Republican control of the House would be threatened.
In the cynical game of spin and messaging that this crisis has become, the goal is to scare Washington Democrats while keeping ordinary people calm. It’s not working, though — Democrats have correctly refused to be intimidated, while businesses and average Americans are growing increasingly nervous. As they should be.
By: David Firestone, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 7, 2013
“Truly Essential Government Services”: Military Death Benefits, The Shutdown And The Importance Of Government
It gives a tragic new meaning to the term “death tax.” Families whose sons, daughters, husbands, wives and parents lost their lives in Afghanistan are now being denied the benefits traditionally given to defray the cost of funerals and travel costs to retrieve the remains. The funding cutoff, first reported by NBC News, is due to the government shutdown, which has stopped all but “essential” government services.
The House is set to pass a special bill restoring that cash. It’s unclear what the Senate will do. While expenditures involving the troops – especially fallen troops – are sacrosanct to lawmakers in both parties, Democrats have been loath to approve what they view as a GOP policy of releasing one hostage at a time while politicians fight over whether and how to reopen the government.
But the gut-wrenching impact on military families does serve one purpose. It reminds people of what their government does.
The understandable discontent with Washington has ballooned into a disgust with government of any kind, and a rejection of anything that has the word “government” attached to it. And it’s easy to point to government programs that may be bloated or outdated, or regulations that may do more harm than good.
But government programs are not just the big things – Social Security and national defense, for example – or even the smaller, but more controversial things, such as foreign aid or food stamps. It’s stuff like death benefits for families who have lost loved ones in conflicts they had nothing to do with authorizing. It’s things like payment for the Women, Infants and Children program – something that may be a budget item for those lucky enough not to need it, but which represents a life necessity for poor pregnant women and mothers.
We don’t all benefit directly from every single government program. They’re there because they represent who we are – a nation that cares for its own, whether it’s hungry people or a family who needs to bury a servicemember.
Lawmakers can certainly debate the structure or funding level of such programs; that is, of course, their job. But it’s important to remember that much of what government does seems invisible – not because it’s not working, but because it is working.
Give LIHEAP assistance to low-income people who can’t afford to heat their homes, and it can appear to a hardline fiscal conservative like the aid is not doing any good. But take it away, and have an elderly person freeze to death in her home, and suddenly, the program seems useful. The National Transportation Safety Board might seem like just another government bureaucracy. But when a deadly bus crash occurred in Tennessee, and a Metro worker was killed while doing repair work over the weekend in Washington, D.C., the absence of a functioning NTSB becomes more evident. Sometimes, the value of government programs is the absence of disaster and pain. Military families are just one casualty of trying to function with almost no government at all.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 9, 2013
“Defining Default Down”: Conservatives Have An Eccentric Definition Of What Constitutes A “Default”
An important detail to keep in mind when one is trying to reconcile Republicans claims that they won’t allow a debt default but also won’t allow a vote on increasing the debt limit unless Democrats make concessions is this: conservatives tend to have a rather eccentric definition of what constitutes a “default.” National Journal‘s Tim Alberta and Michael Catalini offered a reminder yesterday:
Not only do some conservatives say Oct. 17 is an artificial deadline—”Nobody thinks we’re going to default on Oct. 17th,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.—but they also are attempting to narrowly define what would constitute default.
In interviews with more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, the Republicans rejected the notion that Washington could default on its debt unless a borrowing increase is approved before Oct. 17. For the United States to actually default, these Republicans argue, the Treasury Department would have to stop paying interest on its debts—something GOP lawmakers claim is inconceivable….
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it has been Republicans’ line of attack since their debt-ceiling battle with Obama in the summer of 2011.
Then, as now, the GOP argues it’s not the debt limit that would cause default, it’s Obama. The country would have the funds to pay its creditors if the administration would just delay payments to certain agencies.
This “prioritization” argument, of course, rests on a distinction without a difference in the real world.
“I don’t know any serious person who doesn’t think this will be cataclysmic,” said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and now senior director with the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The assumption that the U.S. will honor all of its debts—and honor them on time—is the foundation for much of the global financial system, Bell argues. So the fundamental problem with the Republican position is that Treasury makes between 3 million and 5 million financial transactions a day, and if the federal government starts to pick and choose which it will honor, it will land the economy in chaos.
In any event, journalists reporting all these “We won’t allow a default” assurances from John Boehner and others need to go to the trouble of insisting on a definition of terms. If the reference is to a narrow, “technical” default along the lines that Republicans often use, the assurances are virtually worthless.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 7, 2013
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