“Republicans Have A Choice”: Their Donors, Their Right-Wingers, Or A Government Shutdown
It looks like the one big(gish) substantive consequence of Eric Cantor’s exit from the House Republican leadership will be the demise of the Export-Import bank. Or at least it looks very likely that John Boehner (who supports the Export-Import bank) will allow its authorization to lapse rather than pick a fight with conservative hardliners in the House.
The fact that the bank’s authorization expires on the same day that federal appropriations expire has analysts wondering whether it will end up at the center of a tug-of-war over funding the government, precipitating a shutdown. And that, in turn, has conservatives salivating over the prospect of “Democrats shut[ting] down the government” to protect corporate welfare.
First, allow me to disclose that I really don’t care very much what happens to the Export-Import bank, which subsidizes U.S. exports with loans and loan guarantees to insure against non-payment by importers. I guess the one convincing argument for reauthorizing it temporarily, or reforming and reauthorizing it, is that it probably is providing a modest boost to the economy at the moment, but generally liberals and hardline conservatives agree, for slightly different reasons, that the bank should go. Establishment Republicans, by contrast, really like the Ex-Im bank, which explains why Democrats are happy to set aside whatever misgivings they might have about it in order to exploit the division within the Republican conference.
That division is also why any talk of Democrats shutting down the government to protect Ex-Im is basically dishonest spin.
I think there’s almost no chance anyone will shut down the government over the Ex-Im bank, but if a shutdown happens, it will come as a consequence of Boehner wimping out, not of anything Democrats might do.
To my mind, there are at least four ways a fight over Ex-Im could play out within a fight over funding the government. Half of them end with the elimination of the Ex-Im bank. Only one ends with a government shutdown, and it would be on House Republicans.
I’ve simplified the processes involved here, for the sake of clarity, but in order of escalating complexity, the scenarios are as follows:
1. The House passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the Senate, where Republicans successfully filibuster any attempt to reauthorize the Ex-Im bank. Harry Reid caves. Result: Ex-Im bank eliminated.
2. The House passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the Senate where Democrats and Republicans tweak it to reauthorize the Ex-Im bank, among other things. It goes back to the House, where Boehner “caves” and puts it on the floor. Result: Ex-Im bank survives.
2a. The House passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the Senate where Democrats and Republicans amend it to reauthorize the Ex-Im bank. It goes back to the House, where Boehner allows a vote on a measure to strip the Ex-Im authorization out of the legislation, but the measure fails thanks to the support of an overwhelming number of Democrats and a large contingent of Republicans. Result: Ex-Im bank survives, Republicans crow disingenuously about how Democrats are the real crony-capitalists.
3. The House passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the Senate where Democrats and Republicans amend it to reauthorize the Ex-Im bank. It goes back to the House, where Boehner can neither muster the nerve to affirmatively strip the authorization (and anger donors) nor the nerve to put the whole bill on the floor (and anger conservatives). So he does nothing. Result: Boehner shuts down the government, Ex-Im bank in limbo.
4. The House passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the Senate where Democrats and Republicans amend it to reauthorize the Ex-Im bank. It goes back to the House, where Boehner chooses his speakership over his big business allies, and rounds up Republican votes to strip the authorization out of the bill. The House sends the bill back to the Senate where Reid caves. Result: Ex-Im bank eliminated.
Note, I have baked into these scenarios an assumption that Senate Democrats won’t refuse to fund the government unless the Ex-Im bank survives because most Democrats a) Don’t really care that much about the bank, b) are mainly just interested in exploiting Republican divisions, c) want to make a point to conservative big business donors about the incredibly bad investment they’ve made in House Republicans, and d) aren’t an inherently reactionary bunch like their counterparts in the House GOP.
For what it’s worth, I think option 2a is the kabuki show we’re most likely to see. I think the GOP leadership’s overweening interest in not shutting down the government will carry here, which means scenario 3 is the least likely. But either way, Boehner and Mitch McConnell will have to make some fairly consequential decisions in the next few months.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, June 27, 2014
“GOP Chases Fake IRS Scandal, But Makes The Real One Worse”: Republicans Need Look No Further Than Their Own Budget Proposals
With the exception of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, no Obama-era controversy has animated Republican imaginations quite like the one surrounding the Internal Revenue Service.
Congressional Republicans’ version of the scandal originally went like this: President Obama ordered the IRS to target right-wing organizations applying for tax-exempt status as non-political “social welfare” groups, leading the agency to harass those on the president’s Nixonian enemies list.
It turns out that none of that ever happened; the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as conservative ones, not a single Tea Party group was denied tax-exempt status (despite overwhelming evidence that many of them were engaged in political activity), and no evidence ever emerged that the White House was involved in any of it. Still, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from escalating the “scandal” in increasingly ridiculous ways.
The current outrage centers around the IRS’ claim that thousands of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed in 2011. Although evidence and logic suggest that this was not part of a massive cover-up, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder unless he appoints a special prosecutor to investigate it, and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Bill Flores (R-TX) have introduced a bill promising a $1 million bounty to anyone who can restore the lost emails, while threatening to cut the salaries of IRS employees by 20 percent unless the emails are recovered.
As it happens, Republicans have already hammered IRS employees with cuts since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011 — and they didn’t even need a “Nixonian” “scandal” to do so.
In a report released Wednesday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates just how badly Congress has constrained the IRS’ ability to do its job. Due to a combination of discretionary budget cuts and sequestration, the IRS has been left with an $11.3 billion budget for 2014. That’s $840 million lower than it was in 2010, amounting to a 14 percent cut when accounting for inflation.
As a result of the cuts, the IRS has been forced to reduce its workforce by 11 percent since 2010, even as the agency’s workload has substantially increased (for example, in addition to the IRS’ new campaign finance responsibilities, CBPP notes that the number of individual tax returns has grown by 1.5 million annually over the past decade).
Furthermore, even as the IRS’ remaining workers have been forced to take on more responsibility, the agency’s training budget has been slashed by an astonishing 87 percent between 2010 and 2013, the most recent year with available data. If Congress wants to know why the IRS struggled so badly at sorting out the glut of groups that applied for tax exemption, there is your answer.
President Obama’s 2015 budget would reverse the rapid slide in the IRS’ funding; it would increase the agency’s budget by $1.2 billion from this year’s level, returning it to roughly its 2010 level (before adjusting for inflation).
The House appropriations subcommittee wants to go further in the other direction, however; it has proposed cutting IRS funding by yet another $340 billion. This is especially illogical considering the GOP majority’s supposed desire to limit the budget deficit. According to the Treasury Department, each $1 spent on the IRS budget yields $4 of revenue.
“Policymakers should give the IRS sufficient resources to carry out its mission,” the CBPP paper concludes. “In particular, policymakers who profess to be concerned or even alarmed about the nation’s current or future fiscal course should provide the IRS with the funding it needs to administer the nation’s tax laws and collect taxes due under the laws of the land.”
CBPP is not the first to sound the alarm over the IRS’ lack of funding; The National Memo’s David Cay Johnston made a similar argument in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” controversy.
Republicans are clearly desperate to uncover a real scandal at the IRS. But if they really want to improve things at the much-maligned agency, they need look no further than their own budget proposals.
By: Henry Decker, The National memo, June 27, 2014
“The Course Republicans Have Chosen”: The GOP Is Now Officially The Party Of “Get The Hell Out”
Exactly one year after the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that built a compromise on an exchange of increased enforcement for legalization for the 11 million, Republicans have now officially abandoned any pretense of a willingness to participate in solving the immigration crisis. Instead, they have committed the party to a course premised on two intertwined notions: There are no apparent circumstances under which they can accept legalization of the 11 million; and as a result, the only broad response to the crisis they can countenance is maximum deportations.
This means it’s now all in Obama’s hands to decide what he can do unilaterally to ease the pace of deportations and address the current unaccompanied migrant crisis.
One way to understand what happened here is to trace the evolution of GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a serious party thinker on the issue. Today Politico has a deep dive into the death of reform, reporting that in 2013, House GOP leaders privately told Hispanic leaders that they would try to embrace reform if the August recess that year went smoothly. This happened:
At one point, the Rev. Daniel de Leon, a California pastor, asked…Goodlatte about family reunification — a critical issue for religious communities. The normally reserved Virginia Republican…began to cry and choked up completely, two people inside the room recalled.
About a minute later, Goodlatte regained his composure. Apologizing for the abrupt tears, the former immigration attorney discussed how the issue is a deeply personal one: His wife Maryellen’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland, he explained, and throughout his legal career, Goodlatte helped immigrants from more than 70 nations come to the United States.
Now fast forward to yesterday. Goodlatte effectively declared immigration reform dead as long as Obama is in office, blaming his decision to defer the deportation of DREAMers for the current crisis of unaccompanied migrants crossing.
This tells the entire story. Goodlatte was an early proponent of a form of legalization for the 11 million that could have been the basis for compromise. In this scenario, Republicans could have voted on piecemeal measures that included just legalization — and no citizenship — packaged with concurrent enforcement triggers. Paul Ryan and Mario Diaz-Balart both floated versions of that idea, which is to say, Republicans probably could have passed something like this, though it would have been (shock! horror!) difficult. This could have led to a decent deal for Republicans: In negotiations with the Senate, Dems would drop the special path to citizenship in exchange for Republicans agreeing to legal tweaks making it easier for the legalized to eventually find their way to citizenship through normal channels.
That’s essentially the larger scenario Goodlatte supported as early as last summer, and those who closely follow this debate have long known it was a plausible scenario and an endgame GOP leaders such as John Boehner privately hoped for. But it would have required getting the right angry at some point (which any immigration solution was always going to do). And so, it ran up against an unwillingness by a large bloc of Republicans in the House to do the hard work of figuring out what set of terms and conditions, if any, might enable them to support some form of legal status in the face of the right’s rage. Jeb Bush’s remarks were controversial precisely because he revealed the GOP unwillingness to cross this Rubicon as a moral challenge Republicans could not bring themselves to tackle. Even Boehner — who actually deserves some credit for trying to ease the party towards accepting legalization — essentially admitted this was the real obstacle to reform in a moment of candor earlier this spring.
And that’s where we are now. The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly. But the two main GOP positions — no legalization, plus opposition to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (relief for the DREAMers) — add up inescapably to “get the hell out” as the de facto GOP response to the broader crisis.
This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 27, 2014
“Crashing The White Primary”: Not An Argument Consistent With Broadening The Appeal Of The GOP
Right before the votes started rolling in last night, elements of Team McDaniel started complaining of “illegal Dem votes to steal the election.” As it became obvious that turnout in heavily African-American areas was up sharply from June 3, with Thad Cochran the overwhelming beneficiary, the cry of “theft” grew louder, to the point that McDaniel himself refused to concede after all the experts had declared the incumbent the winner.
Cochran’s win wasn’t all about “crossover” voting; he seems to have beefed up both turnout and his percentage of the vote in Gulf Coast counties where he campaigned personally, reminding voters of the defense contracts he had brought to the area.
It also appears from McDaniel’s enhanced votes in the pineywoods sections of the state that there may have been a backlash to Cochran’s appeals to African-Americans.
In any event, the kvetching from the Right last night sounded an awful lot like southern seggies during the civil rights era complaning about “The Bloc Vote” (though there really never was a Bloc Vote in Mississippi at that time because black people simply weren’t allowed to vote). The unfocused talk of a legal challenge to the outcome either is or isn’t based on documented examples of (a) voting by people who already participated in the Democratic Primary on June 3, which contradicts a lot of anecdotal evidence about people being challenged and excluded on those grounds, or (b) some sort of illegal inducement to vote. If it isn’t, then McDaniel supporters are really going to embarrass themselves and Republicans everywhere if they contest an election on the basis of some ridiculous and patently unconstitutional “intent to support the party in November” law, or some general principle that “crossover” voting is inherently illegitimate.
For all the talk last night of “liberal Democrats” being allowed to determine a Republican primary, there’s actually no way to know the partisan or ideological identity of voters in a state with no party registration (as David Nir pointedly asked this morning, why hasn’t Chris McDaniel sponsored a bill to change that in his years in the state legislature?). So what these birds are really complaining about is black participation in a “white primary.” This is certainly not an argument consistent with broadening the appeal of the GOP or the conservative movement.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 25, 2014
“Sane Is Better Than Insane”: Thad Cochran Wins One For Sanity Over Tea Partier Chris McDaniel
I know, I know. Fellow liberals, you were rooting for Chris McDaniel to beat Thad Cochran on Tuesday night in Mississippi. I understand. Just a few days ago, I was, too. Put more crazy in the national GOP. Make them look that much more embarrassing. Bring one more nut to Washington who talks about hot Latino babes and all the rest of it.
Besides which, if McDaniel had won, the Democrat, Travis Childers, would have had a shot. Childers would scarcely qualify as a Democrat in about 17 or 18 states, but the Senate is the Senate, full of weird senators, for better or worse. Every state gets two. Why not have one be a guy who’ll vote (we presume, shakily) to make Harry Reid the majority leader of the Senate?
Nah. First of all, the idea that Childers ever had any kind of chance of winning a Senate seat in Mississippi was a pipe dream. The voters of Mississippi aren’t going to send a Democratic senator to Washington, D.C., in the era of Barack Obama. I don’t care what the circumstances are. Remember that old joke about incumbents being safe as long as they weren’t caught with a live boy or a dead girl? During the Obama presidency, a Mississippi Republican could be caught with a dead Bichon Frise, and the only question he’d be asked is why he favored a dog with such a gay-sounding Frenchie name. Childers wasn’t going to beat McDaniel.
As to whether Democrats would prefer to have Cochran or McDaniel in the Senate, this takes us back to the old Marxist dialectic, “The worse, the better.” That is, the worse things get for our enemies, the more extreme and crazy they get, the better things are for us, because the worse things get for them, the more quickly the public will see that the other side has lost its freaking mind.
This was the stratagem of leftists everywhere for a long, long time. Not that I’m making any direct comparisons here—OK?—but this is what the socialists and communists thought in Germany in 1933. The right, they were sure, is going to discredit itself. And they were correct. But it took 12 years and around 9 million or 10 million dead human beings. That’s enough collateral damage to prove the theorists wrong.
No, sorry. Boring as it may seem, be glad that Cochran eked out his win. Be happy that sane won. Here’s a little political truism for you: Sane is better than insane. We don’t need more Ted Cruzes in the Senate. We don’t need more candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. We just. Don’t. Need. Them. We don’t need one more extremist GOP candidate who is going to make those cowardly Republicans in the Senate conclude that they have to live in fear of losing to some certifiable, fact-bending jelly-head of the extreme right. We really don’t.
Cochran will never vote for anything Obama wants. No minimum wage hike, no carbon tax, no nothing. I understand that. But he’ll be in there, assuming he wins and stays alive, until January 2021. That is, through what might be Hillary Clinton’s first term. If the GOP intra-bloodbath happens in 2017 after she’s won, Cochran, who won’t be running again and just won’t give a shit, might actually vote for one or two things Clinton asks for. McDaniel, obviously, would not.
And consider this. The Tea Party people are furious about this outcome. A very prominent Tea Party activist tweeted Tuesday night: “If Cochran wins this #mssen race, the GOP is done. They teamed up with Dems to steal a race. Kiss the base goodbye.”
So there we are. Be for sanity. Be against insanity. The dialectic never worked, even back in the glory days. Chris McDaniel belongs where he belongs—chasing ambulances in Pascagoula, or wherever it is he’s from. And his election would not hasten the Republican apocalypse. If anything, Cochran’s would. More Tea Party losses in races like this are what’s needed.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 25, 2014
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