“The New Three-Party System”: Democrats, Republicans And The De Facto Radical Ted Cruz Party
Why another shutdown? Our government has three parties these days: Democrats, Republicans and the new radical Republicans.
That “radical Republican” label has some history. The old radical Republicans were the Grand Old Party’s progressive wing. They were opposed during the Civil War and through Reconstruction by the party’s liberals and conservatives.
They strongly opposed slavery, demanded harsh policies against ex-Confederates and pushed civil rights and voting rights for newly emancipated slaves. Abraham Lincoln and other moderates sought compromise and unity for the party and the nation. Today’s radical right would probably call Lincoln an appeaser or a “RINO” — Republican in Name Only.
Today’s radical Republicans are quite the opposite in ideology, if not in temperament, of the originals. Today’s Tea Party-era radicals call themselves “conservative” but they radically challenge, block and overturn established laws, policies and traditions that get in the way of their ideological goals — even if it means a federal government shutdown or a possible default on the nation’s debt obligations.
Long-running partisan battles over taxes, spending, deficits, the debt ceiling and other fiscal concerns have come to a head this season in pitched, last-ditch battles by Republicans to block, repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.”
Democrats believe that their hard-won Obamacare law — having survived congressional opposition, the Supreme Court and a presidential election in which it was a central issue — should be given a chance to work.
Republicans like Texas senator Ted Cruz fear that once Obamacare kicks in, as he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in July, it “will never, ever be repealed” after Democrats “get the American people addicted to the sugar.”
In other words, if people get a chance to try Obamacare, they might like it as much as they like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs long decried by conservatives as socialistic.
They have a right to hold objections to programs they don’t like. But conservatives do their country a disservice by holding the normal functions of government hostage to their tests of ideological purity. That’s not just coming from me. It also comes from many of their fellow conservatives.
Some of the party’s best known conservatives have come under attack from the GOP’s Tea Party wing for failure to be conservative enough. The Senate Conservatives Fund, for example, has been running ads that attack Republican senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Their sin: reluctance to support their party’s self-destructive strategy against Obamacare.
“Tell Senate Republicans to stand with Ted Cruz and [Utah senator] Mike Lee,” says the group’s website, “not [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell [of Kentucky] and [Senate Minority Whip] John Cornyn [of Texas].”
Other conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots, For America and Heritage Action have mounted ads attacking Republicans in both houses who don’t rigidly support their efforts to defund Obamacare.
Over on the House side, Cruz has thumbed his nose at traditional protocols by plotting strategy with Tea Party House members — against Speaker John Boehner’s wishes.
But what is Boehner to do? He’s been warned by the Tea Partiers that he’ll be voted out of his speakership if he passes any major legislation with less than a majority of House Republicans. The radical right may be a minority of the House but they appear to leverage a majority of the power against Boehner’s lack of a counter-strategy.
Cruz has taken de facto leadership of the new radical Republican assault on Obamacare, most visibly by speaking for more than 21 hours in a pseudo-filibuster about his objections to the program. This has won soaring support for him in the party’s right wing, setting him up for what most likely will be a presidential run in 2016. One wonders whether he cares more about Republicans or the Ted Cruz Party.
So far, the strident GOP push to overturn Obamacare, even as Americans in need of health care sign up for its state insurance exchanges, shows Republicans to be holding on to the same self-defeating strategy that lost the 2012 presidential race: Talking ceaselessly to themselves.
Worse, they’re arguing among themselves, battling for their party’s political soul instead of real solutions to the problems that voters sent them to Washington to solve.
By: Clarence Page, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 7, 2013
“Confidence Masking Ignorance”: Rand Paul Has A Debt-Ceiling Plan
By now, you’ve probably seen the amazing bit Jimmy Kimmel aired this week, in which he sent out a correspondent to ask folks which they like better: the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. All kinds of people offered spirited opinions on the matter, arguing on behalf of one policy or the other, completely unaware that the two measures are exactly the same thing.
It was funny to watch folks express opinions on a subject they know so little about, though it was also easy to feel kind of bad for people who were made to look foolish on national television. After all, these were just regular Americans, not public officials whose job it is to understand the nuances and details of public policy.
When they say strange things on national television, it’s harder to feel charitable.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) argued Wednesday that there’s no need to raise the debt ceiling because the U.S. can pay the interest on its debt with existing revenue.
“What’s going on is, interestingly, the Democrats are scaring people saying we might not pay [interest on the debt] because Republicans don’t want to raise the debt ceiling,” Paul said on CNN. “If you don’t raise the debt ceiling that means you won’t have a balanced budget, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t pay your bills.”
Paul argued that the House has passed a bill, the Full Faith and Credit law, that mandates payments on debt interest, Social Security, Medicare and soldier’s salaries go out first. He said that if the debt ceiling is breached, other government function wouldn’t get financed, but that no default would occur.
This is, for lack of a better word, bonkers. Ezra talked with Rachel about this last night, explaining, “The way to think about Rand Paul’s plan is, imagine I said to you that unless you give me what I want, I’m going to burn down the studio. You said to me, ‘That sounds like a very bad idea if you burn the studio, nobody will have a studio.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’ve got a plan. While it’s burning down, I will run in and grab all the things of value amidst the chaos, so that will all be fine.’ That’s basically the theory that he’s come up with here.”
The United States has a series of obligations and debts. For Paul, default is apparently an impossibility — the government will continue to collect a certain amount of revenue, which we can use to pay creditors. Once they’re paid, we can see if there’s money left for Social Security recipients and the military. If we still have a few bucks lying around, we can ignore some obligations and pay the others. Problem solved!
The world would abandon its confidence in the United States, many legal obligations would have to be ignored, and our full faith and credit would become a global punch-line, but isn’t Paul’s wacky idea easier than simply authorizing the Treasury to simply pay for the stuff we already bought?
Why would Rand Paul — a U.S. senator, mind you — say all this stuff out loud and on purpose? Because he thinks he’s saying things that entirely sensible.
This comes up all the time with the junior senator from Kentucky. In August, Paul spoke about the philosophic nature of “rights,” though his opinions on the subject were largely gibberish. The senator says he cares deeply about minority rights, which he struggles to grasp. Paul talks about drone policy, which he flubs badly. He’s expressed a great interest in the Federal Reserve, which he doesn’t understand in the slightest. Paul claims to hate Obamacare, but he fails to appreciate what the policy is and what it does. He says he’s deeply concerned about the deficit, but doesn’t know what the deficit is.
Obviously, no one is an expert in everything, but the key here is that Rand Paul, like the folks in the Jimmy Kimmel video, have strong opinions about subjects he claims to care deeply about, but about which he seems hopelessly confused.
The senator speaks with great confidence about these issues, as if he’s given them a great deal of thought, but the confidence masks a degree of ignorance that Paul seems blissfully unaware of.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
“The GOP’s White Southern Republican Problem”: Following Similar Path Of “Massive Resistance” Taken After Brown V. Board Decision
In 1956, segregationist Southern Democrats outlined a policy of “massive resistance” in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools.
Today, the Republican Party, particularly in the South, is following a similar path of massive resistance when it comes to Obamacare and any other major policy initiative proposed by President Obama. According to The New York Times, twenty-six states—all-but-three controlled by the GOP—have declined the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, thereby denying health insurance coverage to 8 million Americans. “Every state in the Deep South, with the exception of Arkansas, has rejected the expansion,” writes the Times.
The GOP’s obsession with defunding Obamacare has caused them to shut down the government despite the public outcry. Many factors play into the shutdown, but a leading cause is the fact the Republican Party is whiter, more Southern and more conservative than ever before.
Writes Charlie Cook:
Between 2000 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from 69 percent to 64 percent, closely tracking the 5-point drop in the white share of the electorate measured by exit polls between 2004 and 2012. But after the post-census redistricting and the 2012 elections, the non-Hispanic white share of the average Republican House district jumped from 73 percent to 75 percent, and the average Democratic House district declined from 52 percent white to 51 percent white. In other words, while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.
As Congress has become more polarized along party lines, it’s become more racially polarized, too. In 2000, House Republicans represented 59 percent of all white U.S. residents and 40 percent of all nonwhite residents. But today, they represent 63 percent of all whites and just 38 percent of all nonwhites.
Even though House Republicans do not represent the changing face of the country, they have a huge structural advantage when it comes to the makeup of Congress, especially following the 2010 redistricting cycle, when the GOP controlled the process in twenty states compared to seven for Democrats. Writes Cook:
The number of strongly Democratic districts—those with a score of D+5 or greater at the presidential level—decreased from 144 before redistricting to 136 afterward. The number of strongly Republican districts—those with a score of R+5 or greater—increased from 175 to 183. When one party starts out with 47 more very strong districts than the other, the numbers suggest that the fix is in for any election featuring a fairly neutral environment. Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.
This phenomenon is most acute in the South, where the GOP systematically packed as many Democratic voters, particularly African-Americans, into as few districts as possible in order to ensure huge Republicans majorities across the region (see my story “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South”). Here’s the gist:
In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.
After the 1994 elections, white Southern Republicans accounted for sixty-two members of the 230-member House GOP majority. Today, white Southern Republicans account for ninety-seven members out of the 233-member House GOP majority. That’s a pretty remarkable shift and one that is not likely to end any time soon. “In all but one election since 1976, the proportion of Southerners in the House Republican caucus has gone up,” says Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.
Of the fifty-four members of the congressional Tea Party Caucus—which is most vociferously telling John Boehner not to compromise—33 are from Southern states. Of the eighty members of the so-called House GOP “suicide caucus” who urged Boehner to defund Obamacare, “half of these districts are concentrated in the South,” writes Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. As long as ultraconservative Southerners from lily-white districts hold the balance of power in the Congress, we shouldn’t be surprised that obstruction and dysfunction is the result.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 4, 2013
“Health Reform Turns Real”: Even The “Bad News” On Obamacare Start-Up Is Really Good News For The Program’s Future
At this point, the crisis in American governance has taken on a life of its own. Some Republicans are now saying openly that they want concessions in return for reopening the government and avoiding default, not because they have any specific policy goals in mind, but simply because they don’t want to feel “disrespected.” And no endgame is in sight.
But this confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.
Wait a minute, some readers are saying. Haven’t many stories so far been of computer glitches, of people confronting screens telling them that servers are busy and that they should try again later? Indeed, they have. But everyone knowledgeable about the process always expected some teething problems, and the nature of this week’s problems has actually been hugely encouraging for supporters of the program.
First, let me say a word about the underlying irrelevance of start-up troubles for new government programs.
Political reporting in America, especially but not only on TV, tends to be focused on the play-by-play. Who won today’s news cycle? And, to be fair, this sort of thing may matter during the final days of an election.
But Obamacare isn’t up for a popular referendum, or a revote of any kind. It’s the law, and it’s going into effect. Its future will depend on how it works over the next few years, not the next few weeks.
To illustrate the point, consider Medicare Part D, the drug benefit, which went into effect in 2006. It had what was widely considered a disastrous start, with seniors unclear on their benefits, pharmacies often refusing to honor valid claims, computer problems, and more. In the end, however, the program delivered lasting benefits, and woe unto any politician proposing that it be rolled back.
So the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected. And this means that one big worry of Obamacare supporters — that not enough people knew about the program, so that many eligible Americans would fail to sign up — is receding fast.
Of course, it’s important that people who want to sign up can actually do so. But the computer problems can and will be fixed. So, by March 31, when enrollment for 2014 closes, we can be reasonably sure that millions of Americans who were previously uninsured will have coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will have become a reality, something people depend on, rather than some fuzzy notion Republicans could demonize. And it will be very hard to take that coverage away.
What we still don’t know, and is crucial for the program’s longer-term success, is who will sign up. Will there be enough young, healthy enrollees to provide a favorable risk pool and keep premiums relatively low? Bear in mind that conservative groups have been spending heavily — and making some seriously creepy ads — in an effort to dissuade young people from signing up for insurance. Nonetheless, insurance companies are betting that young people will, in fact, sign up, as shown by the unexpectedly low premiums they’re offering for next year.
And the insurers are probably right. To see why anti-Obamacare messaging is probably doomed to fail, think about whom we’re talking about here. That is, who are the healthy uninsured individuals the program needs to reach? Well, they’re by and large not affluent, because affluent young people tend to get jobs with health coverage. And they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out Obama voters last year. I have to admit, I find the image of hard-line conservatives defeated by an army of tweeting celebrities highly attractive; but it’s also realistic. Enrollment is probably going to be just fine.
So Obamacare is off to a good start, with even the bad news being really good news for the program’s future. We’re not quite there yet, but more and more, it looks as if health reform is here to stay.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 3, 2013
“A Steady Stream Of Untruths”: Everything You’ve Heard About Obamacare Being A Job-Killer Is Wrong
The U.S. government is now “shut down” thanks in large part to yet another attempt to put the brakes on the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Yet this week, the law’s health care exchanges went on line, promising affordable insurance coverage for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions or jobs that did not previously offer a health plan and to millions of the unemployed. Nevertheless, a steady stream of untruths about the law continues to pop up in newspapers, blogs and Facebook feeds.
One of these tropes is that the ACA is causing employers to cut back on hours for full-time employees so that they will not have to provide coverage (under the ACA, companies with more than 49 employees are required to offer health insurance coverage to those employees working 30 or more hours a week or face penalties). Typically, the evidence for the cutbacks in hours is that someone knows someone else whose hours were cut earlier this year in anticipation of the law taking effect. Many pundits have been even lazier, just stating that employers are cutting back hours without citing concrete examples.
The reality, though, is that there is no widespread trend of employers cutting their workers back to just under 30 hours because of the ACA. In July, my colleagues Dean Baker and Helene Jorgensen analyzed recent data from the Current Population Survey. They found that only 0.64 percent of the workforce was working between 26 and 29 hours a week in the first half of 2013. This number is only slightly higher than it was for the first half of 2012 (0.61 percent).
In other words, there is no evidence of a widespread trend of employers reducing hours to avoid providing coverage. That sentiment was recently echoed by Moody’s Mark Zandi, who said of the supposed trend, “I was expecting to see it. I was looking for it and it’s not there.”
The basic story is that, yes, there are a small number of firms that have cut down on the number of full-time employees recently. And yes, over time, the 30-hour cutoff could have some effect on hours as employers adjust to the law and new businesses open. Of course, some companies may go the opposite route and move part-time workers to full time, as was recently the case at Disney World.
Regardless, the promulgation of the idea that the ACA will transform the U.S. workforce into a part-time workforce and negatively impact employment in the United States is dead wrong.
By: Alan Barber, U. S. News and World Report, October 4, 2013
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