“Encouraging The Clowns”: The Equivalency Formula Works Wonders For Republicans
In using rather extreme language (I suppose “an evil child’s wish list for Santa” is kind of extreme) for Boehner’s debt limit bill, I somehow failed to account for the magic Equivalency Formula whereby all GOP demands are by definition no less unreasonable than Democratic demands. Here’s Ron Fournier’s tweet about the latest debt limit developments:
“Insane:” R/D partisans playing to debt limit brink. No talks. No leadership. All positioning.
This tweet comes with a link to a Greg Sargent piece this morning calling Boehner’s debt limit strategy “insane” and requesting that journalists point that out. Indeed, Greg could have been pointing a finger at Fournier himself:
[S]tory after story portrays this as a battle in which both sides are asking the other to make concessions, and in which it remains to be seen whether a compromise will be reached. But the real ”compromise” position here is one in which Republicans and Dems cooperate to avert economic catastrophe for the country. It is not a “compromise” if Dems unilaterally give up concessions in exchange for Republican cooperation in making it possible to pay debts already incurred and thus averting economic disaster for all of us. In this scenario, Republicans aren’t giving up anything. Only Dems are.
So unsurprisingly, Sargent responded to Fournier’s tweet by saying: “Sigh. I lose.”
At the risk of getting maudlin about it all, I’d say we all lose when respected journalists look at something like Boehner’s debt limit bill and see it as no worse than the President saying we ought to pay our bills and keep that separate from our differences over spending and taxing. The Equivalency Formula makes it impossible to see clown clothes, and thus encourages clowns to cut capers even more.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 26, 2013
“In A State Of Classic Denial”: The GOP Leadership Has Become Completely Delusional
You have to wonder if the GOP leadership has begun to lose touch with political reality.
They are laying out a series of demands that Democrats must meet in order to avoid a shutdown of the government — or an economic disaster that would result if the government defaults on its debts and refuses to pay financial obligations. Everyone acknowledges that either of these events would have dire consequences for the entire country and its economy.
Why do they believe that Democrats have a greater self-interest in avoiding these dire consequences than they do, when they themselves will be blamed? That makes no political sense.
And there is little question they will be blamed. The polling has made it clear for some time that most Americans will blame the GOP if either of these catastrophes ensue — and the focus of that blame will shift to the Republicans more and more as the days pass.
From a purely political point of view, it’s as if your opponent in a war threatens that he will blow his own head off if you do not surrender. What?
Maybe they assume that Democrats care more about the economy of the United States, the jobs of their fellow Americans and the availability of public services than they do — but that is not a message you’d think they would want to send to the voters.
And they are forgetting something else. The political situation has fundamentally changed since the last debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.
In 2011, the Tea Party leadership of the GOP was coming off a big win in the 2010 mid-terms. Last year their positions were once again tested in the General Election, and they were rejected by the voters.
Second, in 2011 President Obama could ill afford a government default that could have destroyed the momentum of the fragile recovery a year before his re-election. Next year the voters will not be deciding whether to re-elect President Obama. They will be deciding who they elect to Congress.
Do the Republicans really want to be held responsible for another financial calamity when it is their turn to face the voters? In fact, many observers believe that such a development would create exactly the kind of wave that could wipe out their already fragile majority in the House and dash their best hope in the foreseeable future to take back the Senate.
This increasing lack of connection to political reality may result in part from classic denial. They are unwilling to accept that their extremist ideological views are massively unpopular with an increasingly progressive electorate.
Last election they simply refused to believe that all of those Hispanics, African Americans, women and young people would come to the polls. Even their pollsters refused to believe that the electorate was changing. They were actually stunned that they lost.
They continue to refuse to believe the fact that with every passing year, the electorate is less and less sympathetic to their extremist views. Polls show that Millenial voters are the most progressive generation in 50 years. Every year a new class of those Millenial voters replaces a group of older, less progressive voters in the electorate. What’s more, every year there are more and more Hispanics and Asian Americans who voted over 70 percent for Obama. And of course — as a recent poll in the Virginia governor’s race makes clear — they persist in driving away more and more women voters with their opposition to women’s reproductive rights, attacks on education, child nutrition and universal background checks on guns.
The Tea Party Republicans appear to have abandoned hope that they can achieve their goals through the established — democratic — political process. After all, virtually all of their demands are extremely unpopular with the broader electorate and they overwhelmingly lost the last election.
Most Americans do not support their demand to defund Obamacare — and the law’s popularity will only grow once it goes into effect — as its benefits become clear and the “horrors” predicted by its opponents fail to materialize.
Most Americans simply do not support policies that take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give more tax breaks to millionaires, or gut the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law that rein in Wall Street banks, or privatize Medicare.
So they have resorted to the tactic of choice for small extremist minorities: hostage-taking. They are threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get their way.
And that is precisely why the president and Democrats in Congress are so clear that they will not cede to GOP demands. If Democrats were to allow hostage-taking to work, GOP extremists would try the same tactic again and again. There would be no end to the hostage-taking in order to force the majority of Americans to agree to the positions of a small minority that have been rejected in democratic elections.
And the GOP leadership is ignoring one final factor. When voters cast their ballots they not only ask who is on their side, they also ask who is competent to provide leadership.
Many Republicans in Congress have announced they are willing to risk shutdown or default to avoid the “horrors” of Obamacare, which they say is the worst law ever passed by Congress. Really?
Next time you get into a plane, ask yourself how you would feel about having a delusional pilot so out of touch with reality that he would recklessly risk the well-being of all on board to fly through a tornado because he wants to fly to the mythical land of Oz.
Voters are not generally wild about entrusting leadership to a bunch of reckless adolescents who see nothing wrong with playing chicken racing their cars toward each other to see who will swerve first.
Recklessness, lack of connection with reality, failure to recognize that actions have consequences — those are not the qualities that voters find appealing in candidates for higher office.
One way or another, the GOP will ultimately fold — that is virtually certain. The only question is whether someone in Republicanland who has yet not drunk the Tea Party Kool Aid will grab the yoke and pull the GOP out of this spiral dive — or whether they are forced to surrender as they emerge from a pile of rubble on the canyon floor.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, September 27, 2013
“The Republican Tomacco Dilemma”: The GOP Can’t Have It Both Ways On Obamacare
I have to admit that the conservative narrative regarding Obamacare has got me a little bit confused. The problem is that the critics of the Affordable Care Act keep making contradictory arguments about the law.
So we learned yesterday from former Heritage Foundation chieftain Jim DeMint that, in his view, President Obama’s comfortable re-election can’t be seen as the electorate signaling acceptance of the law. DeMint essentially said voters didn’t know what they were doing when they re-elected Obama. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” DeMint told Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green. Never mind that GOP nominee Mitt Romney talked about repealing Obamacare at virtually every opportunity and even ran ads promising to do so on his first day in office.
No, despite the fact that the entire GOP campaigned against Obamacare and, more broadly, that it was the dominant political issue for most of President Obama’s first term, the case against Obamacare never got a hearing. Or something. Deep down, DeMint is saying, people hate Obamacare – they just don’t know how to properly express it. Thank god the American people have Jim DeMint to tell them what they think.
But wait. Earlier this week we learned from Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz that if there’s one thing everyone in this great country agrees on, it’s that Obamacare is a raging failure which “the American people” want ended at once – but that Cruz bears the burden of being the only person in Washington who listens to the American people. (Truly, he is generous to not only represent the Lone Star State but the entirety of the country.) Here’s what Cruz said in his marathon speech earlier this week:
Everyone in America understands Obamacare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States – it doesn’t matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn’t matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians – Americans understand this thing is not working.
Cruz and DeMint need to get together here because they can’t both be right. Either DeMint is correct that years and years of Republican denunciation of Obamacare, not to mention a $2 billion presidential campaign in which the law played a central role, left the American people uninformed about how they truly feel about the law or they are unanimously and rabidly declaring their hatred for it, in a unified voice that only Ted Cruz can hear. But they can’t be both unconvinced of the conservative case and also vociferously in favor of it. (And yes, I understand that DeMint and Cruz and Cruz’s father did a road show in August, but to suggest that the Heritage Foundation’s traveling circus managed to educate the populace in a way that the entirety of U.S. politics from 2009 until last month failed to strains credulity in ways that even the Heritage Foundation hasn’t heretofore managed.)
The GOP has another inherent contradiction in its case against the law. I call it the “tomacco dilemma.” Tomacco, for those not steeped in “The Simpsons,” is a terrible-tasting, highly addictive, radioactive hybrid between a tomato and tobacco. People can’t stand its taste but eat it compulsively. And conservatives seem to think that Obamacare is tomacco.
Consider again Cruz’s description of the law: “Everyone in America understands Obamacare is destroying jobs. … All across the country in all 50 States … Americans understand this thing is not working.” And yet it’s vitally important for conservatives that the law be stopped dead in its tracks before the next phase of implementation on October 1, because once Americans get used to it, they will never give it up.
So David Horowitz writes on RedState (which, it’s worth noting, stands firmly behind Cruz’s quixotic defund push):
It’s time we cut through the clutter of this debate and break it down to one central point. Republicans will never have enough power to repeal Obamacare through the front door. The dependency will be immutable long before the possibility that they will win back the Senate and the White House.
By 2016, the next time the GOP could possibly win back the White House and full control of the Senate, he says, “dependency” will be so widespread that the GOP will be powerless to stop it. “Dependency” is in this case another way of saying “popularity.” Think about it: If Obamacare is a job-destroying, economy-shattering, health-benefit-killing disaster now, how is it that within a mere three years it will have taken its place as part of the fabled third rail of American politics? Obamacare can be hated or it can be dangerously popular, but it can’t be both.
It’s no wonder polls show that most Americans don’t understand the law – not even its most vocal critics can agree about what’s wrong with it.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2013
“Memo To Republicans, You Lost, Now Deal With It”: Third Graders Don’t Get Cupcakes For Threatening To Break Windows And Chairs
Imagine you’re a third-grade teacher, and the school announces that all the classrooms are going to be repainted, and the kids will get to choose the colors. You let your students each make a case for the color they’d like for their classroom, and it comes down to a choice between blue and green. The two sides give cute little speeches to the class about their favorite colors, and then you take a vote. There are 20 kids in the class; 12 choose blue and 8 choose green. Blue it is.
But then the kids who wanted green insist that the color has to be green. They go to the principal’s office and make their case that blue sucks and green rules. The principal tells them that the class chose blue, so the walls are going to be blue. Then the pro-green kids return and say that since there was a new kid who joined the class since the vote, we have to have the vote again. Another vote is held; it’s still blue. Then the pro-green kids announce that because anyone can see that blue is sucky, they’re going to write in green magic marker on any wall that gets painted blue. Then they announce that if the walls get painted blue, they’re going to break the windows in the classroom, smash the chairs, and fling the contents of everybody’s cubby on the floor.
When they’re told they can’t do that, they say, “OK, tell you what: we’ll refrain from breaking the windows and trashing the class, but only if you give us pro-green kids cupcakes every day, excuse us from homework for the rest of the year, and let us choose all the games we play at recess. It’s either that, or we start smashing.” Would you respond to these children, “Well, what if we just give you the cupcakes?” Of course not. You’d say, “Listen, you psychotic little turds. The goddamn walls are going to be blue. YOU LOST. Now suck it up.”
Okay, so if you were a third-grade teacher you wouldn’t actually say that. But you’d think it. And that’s where we are today. Republicans argued against the Affordable Care Act when it was moving through Congress. A vote was held, and they lost. Then they went to the Supreme Court and asked for the law to be overturned. They lost. Then they tried to defeat the president who passed the law and replace him with a guy who promised to repeal it. They lost. Now they’re saying that if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to trash the place.
And now we come to the part about the cupcakes and homework. The latest idea from Republicans is that in exchange for not trashing the American economy with a debt default, just defunding the Affordable Care Act isn’t enough. What they want as the price for standing down is the entire Republican wish list. Get a load of this:
According to a document obtained by CQ Roll Call, that “wish list” contains 20 “additional options” for the debt limit bill, on top of four principles in the “Core Package” — a one year debt limit increase for a one year delay of Obamacare, the agreement of tax reform instructions and the Keystone pipeline.
The 20 additional options, according to the document, are:
Economic Growth
1. Offshore Energy Production
2. Energy Production on Federal Lands
3. Pipeline Permitting Reform
4. Coal Ash
5. Prohibit EPA from Regulating Greenhouse Gases
6. REINS Act
7. Regulatory Process Reforms (APA)
8. Consent Decree Reform
9. Regulatory Flexibility Improvements
10. Block Net Neutrality Regulations
Non-Health Care Reforms:
1. Federal Employee Retirement Reform, which Republicans estimate will save $20 to $84 billion.
2. Eliminate Dodd-Frank Bailout Fund, which they estimate will save $23 billion.
3. Eliminate Mandatory Funding for CFPB, with estimated savings of $5 billion.
4. Require SSN to Receive Child Tax Credit, with estimated savings of $7 billion.
5. Eliminate Social Service Block Grant, with estimated savings of $17 billion.
Health Care Reforms:
1. Increase Medicare Means Testing, which Republicans estimate will save $56 billion.
2. Reduce Medicaid Provider Tax Gimmick, which Republicans estimate will save $11 billion.
3. Medical Liability Reform, with estimated savings of $49 billion.
4. Disproportionate Share Hospitals, with estimated savings of $4 billion.
5. Eliminate Public Health Slush Fund
I’m sure that if you asked them the logical question—Are you people insane?—they’d respond that this is an opening position for negotiations, and we can go from there. Sure, maybe we won’t get everything on the list, but maybe we could bargain it down to, say, delaying the ACA for a year, handcuffing the EPA, the Keystone XL pipeline, and cutting money for public health. In other words, we might be willing to not smash the windows if you give us the cupcakes.
There are some basic notions that undergird the operation of a democracy. When there’s an election, the candidate who gets more votes is the one who takes office. When a bill is passed through Congress and signed by the president, it’s now the law. And when you lose, you don’t get to demand that your agenda be enacted, for no reason other than that you’d prefer it that way. If you want a bunch of policy changes, you have to win an election, then pass that agenda through the legislative process. That’s how it works. Baseball players who strike out don’t get to just demand that they be given a triple or else they’re going to set fire to the stadium. And third graders don’t get cupcakes for threatening to break windows and chairs.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 27, 2013
“A Losing Gambit”: Ted Cruz Is A Wacko Bird Of His Party’s Own Making
For his 21-hour floor speech decrying Obamacare, Ted Cruz is catching heat from a lot of his fellow Republicans. In the Senate, they disdain his not-quite-filibuster as grandstanding. “This is not a situation where you dig your heels in and Obamacare gets defunded,” said Senator Ron Johnson. “[The tea party] just want anybody who offers them a path, whether it’s realistic or not.” Said Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, “To be told we’re not listening by somebody who does not listen is disconcerting.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, usually on board for any assault on Obamacare, blasted Cruz’s maneuver as baldly ineffective.
The sum of all these reactions is yet more widespread Republican exasperation with Cruz. But while the GOP usually has good reason to treat Cruz like a wacko bird, this time, the GOP broadly has plainly laid the groundwork for his gimmicky Obamacare opposition. The Ted Cruz who completed that 21-hour Senate floor marathon is a wacko bird of the party’s own making.
Many of the same conservatives who are now denouncing Cruz’s tactics have strong claims to paternity over the GOP’s destructive obsession with Obamacare. They may see the specific tactic of shutting down the federal government in order to undo the Affordable Care Act for what it is: a losing gambit. And they may recognize that Cruz’s grandiloquent speechifying isn’t going to change minds in the Senate, where lawmakers planned to stripped a provision to defund Obamacare from the House budget as soon as Cruz stopped pleading on behalf of the bill. But odds are they will continue to relentlessly endorse defunding Obamacare, just as they have before.
This, even though the party’s obsession with defeating the president’s signature achievement is laying waste to the GOP’s long-term prospects. As my colleague Noam Scheiber argued in June, the Republican fixation with the Affordable Care Act harms their standing with Latino voters at a historical moment when they need to expand their favorability, and fast. It detracts from their ability to build an economic platform that aims for something besides massive spending and welfare cuts. And despite the GOP’s intentions to make defunding their banner 2014 issue, despite dozens of votes to defund the law and their broad failure to leverage the law in the last election cycle, Obamacare is really, seriously unlikely to go away.
So for someone like Senator Lamar Alexander to imply that Cruz’s grandstanding feeds impressions of the GOP as a do-nothing party is pretty rich. The Tennessee lawmaker has cast 23 purely symbolic votes against Obamacare that now comprise a major plank of his reelection campaign. For the Wall Street Journal editorial board to scoff at Cruz is even more absurd. Their columns have never missed an opportunity to promulgate even the most absurd and fact-free arguments for dismantling Obamacare—a moniker that the board on Monday took credit for inventing. Johnson has called Obamacare “the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.”
With all that hyperbole fueling the modern-day GOP, it’s no wonder Cruz calculated that a day-long verbal assault on Obamacare would be a homerun with his base, and worth the headache that it would cause Republican leaders. Their troubles, after all, began long before Cruz showed up, when they bet their future on their ability to defund Obamacare, no matter the cost.
By: Molly Redden, The New Republic, September 26, 2013
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