“Seniors Take Note”: Republicans Effectively Confessed To Having Mislead Conservative Members Who Now Must Be Mollified
I’m not sure House Republicans realized how large an error they made by kidnapping and then releasing the debt limit earlier this year. By admitting their bluff, they effectively confessed to having misled conservative members, and those members needed to be mollified.
That created a new problem: How could they appease conservatives while lacking the power to satisfy any of their substantive demands? So they offered up grandiose symbolism: A raincheck on the brinksmanship (the current fight over the sequester) and a promise to pass a budget that would wipe out the deficit in 10 years if enacted.
But it’s not clear that they counted their votes, or considered the budget math when they made that promise.
“We are saying a 10-year balance — that’s tougher than the last [Paul] Ryan budget,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), a former Budget Committee member told Politico.
“There could be a significant number of Republicans that say, ‘I’m not going there because it would be too dramatic.’ I have said to my constituents, nobody is talking about changing Social Security and Medicare if you’re 55 years or over.’ I’ve been selling it for three or four years that way. So have many other members. Well, to balance in 10, that 55 years is going to move up to 58, 59, 60. It makes us look like we’re going back on what we were telling people when we were trying to sell this.
We haven’t seen Ryan’s latest budget, so we don’t know what precise ratio of funny math and concessions to reality he’ll use to make the numbers work. And until he’s written it he won’t offer many hints.
But we do know a couple things. First, given Republicans’ famous preference for never increasing taxes or cutting defense spending, we know that it’s probably impossible for them to draft a budget that balances in 10 years without eating into entitlement benefits for people older than 55. Second, per above, we know that GOP leaders promised conservatives a budget that balances over 10 years to win their support for increasing the debt limit. So either Ryan will produce a budget that relies on sleight of hand more than his previous budgets did, or he’ll have to admit that the GOP’s pledge to leave retirement programs untouched for people over 55 was neither sincere nor sustainable.
As Simpson’s quote suggests, that’ll make it harder for Republicans to pass a budget at all; and if they do, it’ll come at a potentially enormous cost with their voting base.
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, TPM Editor’s Blog, February 15, 2013
“Highlighting GOP Duplicity And Hypocrisy”: How President Obama Should Open The Debt-Ceiling Negotiations
In the last few days, a number of outlets have started giving serious thought to the “platinum coin” option in the debt ceiling fight. In short, thanks to a loophole, the Treasury could mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to temporarily pay down the national debt until the debt-ceiling standoff has passed.
Defenders of this idea, including Bloomberg’s Josh Barro and my Post colleague Greg Sargent, point out that it is not as absurd as threatening default on the nation’s debts to force policy changes. But they also admit that, fundamentally, this is a gimmick; while the White House might be wise to be ready to mint the coin if absolutely necessary, it would look silly publicly threatening to do so. (And it would hand lovers of “pox on both houses” punditry an easy way out of chiding only Republicans.)
But that doesn’t mean the White House is helpless when it comes to framing the debate — far from it. The best idea remains one that Post columnist Matt Miller proposed last month: Raise the debt ceiling “just by the amount it would take to accommodate the debt Republicans voted for in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget last year — $6 trillion over the next decade.”
As Miller wrote during the “fiscal cliff” standoff, the idea that Republicans actually care about the deficit is “demonstrably, laughably, even shockingly false.” The party showed absolutely no interest in controlling deficits during its six years in control of Congress and the White House. Several GOP moves since then have only confirmed that Republicans are interested only in using the national debt to try and scare people into adopting their unpopular policies.
After all, the failure of John Boehner’s “Plan B” tax proposal showed House Republicans’ determination to vote down debt solutions that didn’t conform to their tax ideology. The GOP has clung to pushing “chained CPI” as its favorite Social Security reform in this round of negotiations, since it cuts benefits without the politically dangerous headlines of “GOP cuts benefits,” but the Congressional Budget Office has found it’s actually one of the least effective policy options for extending Social Security’s solvency. And on Medicare, Republicans’ (and, unfortunately, some Democrats’) idea of raising the eligibility age would only lead to minimal savings, while hurting minorities hardest.
Given that Republicans’ priorities are their policies first, the debt a distant second and the health of our economy an even more distant third, Miller’s idea should be at the center of the White House’s strategy on the debt ceiling. Remember, the GOP caucus has repeatedly backed Ryan’s budgets, the latest of which, to repeat, adds $6 trillion in debt over 10 years. By continuously highlighting Republican duplicity and hypocrisy, the White House can give itself the most room to make the best deal for the American people.
By: James Downie, The Washington Post, January 8, 2013
“Good Cop, Bad Cop”: Conservative Think Tanks’ Responses To Default Is Another Reason To Kill The Debt Ceiling
House Republicans are looking to weaponize the debt ceiling again, while the Obama administration is trying to make removing the threat of default part of any agreement.
Here’s one reason why the debt ceiling needs to go: the conservative intellectual infrastructure cheered on a potential default. I had imagined that there would be a good cop/bad cop dynamic to the right. Very conservative political leaders would be the bad cop, saying that they weren’t afraid to default on the debt, while conservative think tanks would play a version of the good cop, warning of the dire consequences of a default for the economy if their bad cop friend didn’t get his way.
For instance, here’s bad cop Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) saying that the markets “would actually accept even a delay in interest payments on the Treasuries,” especially “if it meant that Congress would right this ship, address this fiscal imbalance, and put us on a sustainable path, and that the bond market would rally if it saw we were making real progress towards this.” Missing interest payments is fine; in fact, it is great for the country if it is used to pass the Ryan Plan.
Financial analysts, to put it mildly, disagreed. JP Morgan analysts wrote that “any delay in making a coupon or principal payment by Treasury would almost certainly have large systemic effects with long-term adverse consequences for Treasury finances and the US economy.”
Here’s where the think tanks are fascinating. You could imagine them saying “our partner Toomey is nuts, we can’t control him, and you’d better do what he says or there’s going to be real damage.” But that’s not what they did. It’s best to split the work they did on the debt ceiling in two directions:
1. Technical Default Ain’t No Thang. The first is arguing, like Toomey, that a “technical default” wouldn’t matter, and in fact it could be a great thing if the Ryan Plan passed as a result. How did James Pethokoukis, then of Fortune and now of AEI, deal with a Moody’s report arguing a “short-lived default” would hurt the economy? Pethokoukis: ”I guess I would care more about what Moody’s had to say if a) they hadn’t missed the whole financial crisis, b) didn’t want to see higher taxes as part of any fiscal fix and c) if they made any economic sense.” Default doesn’t matter because Pethokoukis doesn’t want taxes to go up, and there’s no economic sense because of an interview he read in the Wall Street Journal.
Others went even further, arguing that the real defaulters are those who, um, don’t want to default on the debt. Here’s the conservative think tank e21 with a staff editorial arguing that ”policymakers need to stay focused on the real default issue: whether the terms of the debt limit increase this summer will be sufficiently tough to ensure that the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio is stabilized and eventually sharply reduced.” All these people who want a clean debt ceiling increase are causing the real default issue. As someone who used to do a lot of credit risk modeling, this is my favorite: “Indeed, those demanding the toughest concessions today actually have a strong pro-creditor bias.” S&P disagreed with whoever wrote that editorial and increased the credit risk (downgraded) based on the threat of this technical default.
The Heritage Foundation wrote a white paper saying that you could just “hold the debt limit in place, thereby forcing an immediate reduction in non-interest spending averaging about $125 billion each month,” and that “refusing to raise the debt limit would not, in and of itself, cause the United States to default on its public debt.” Dana Milbank noted that these kinds of shuffling plans would still leave the government short and likely cause a recession. Milbank: ”Without borrowing, we’d have to cut Obama’s budget for 2012 by $1.5 trillion. That means even if we shut down the military and stopped writing Social Security checks, the government would still come up about $200 billion short.” The Cato Institute also jumped in with the technical default crowd here.
But that was the reaction from the number-crunching analysts. What about the bosses?
2. Civilization Hangs in the Balance of the Debt Ceiling Fight. Here’s the president of AEI, Arthur C. Brooks, in July 2011: “The battle over the debt ceiling…is not a political fight between Republicans and Democrats; it is a fight against 50-year trends toward statism…No one deserves our political support today unless he or she is willing to work for as long as it takes to win the moral fight to steer our nation back toward enterprise and self-governance.”
Even better, the president of The Heritage Foundation, also in July 2011, compares Democrats to Japan during World War II and then argues: ”We must win this fight. The debate over raising the debt limit seems complicated, but it is really very simple. Look beyond the myriad details of the awkward compromises, and you see an epic struggle between two opposing camps….Congress should not raise the debt limit without getting spending under control.”
So the the conservative intellectual infrastructure, which consumes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, looked at the possibility of a debt default and determined it was both inconsequential and also the only way to stop statism in our lifetimes. No wonder the time period around the debt ceiling in 2011 was such a disaster for our economy, killing around 250,000 jobs that should have been created. There’s no reason to assume all the same players won’t play an even worse cop this time around.
There’s no good reason for the debt ceiling, and now there are really bad consequences for its existence. Time to end it.
By: Mike Konczal, The National Memo, December 6, 2012
“Troubling To Think What Might Happen”: Why A Romney Win Would Be Bad For America
There’s a strong case against Mitt Romney’s candidacy that has nothing to do with ideology. Which is probably a good thing, because no one really knows where Romney fits on the ideological spectrum, and if he really has any deeply held policy views at all.
My own sense, as I’ve written before, is that Romney’s party label tells us pretty much all we need to know about how he’d govern. He’s the nominee of a party that has adopted a far-right platform, and if he were to win he’d have little choice but to stick to it. Conservatives have long viewed Romney’s ideological credentials with skepticism; under a Romney presidency, they’d be perpetually on-guard for any hint of betrayal. Failure to govern as the conservative he swore he was during the GOP primaries would open a rift in the party and threaten to destroy his presidency.
But part of Romney’s appeal to swing voters is an assumption that he’s faking it – that he said the words he needed to say to win the Republican nomination, but that as president he’d revert to Massachusetts Mitt, the middle-of-the-road pragmatist who shunned culture war politics and wasn’t averse to working with Democrats. I have a hard time seeing this, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it actually is his intent. Even then – and even if you think this would work out OK for the country from a policy standpoint – there’s still a compelling reason to fear a Romney win on November 6.
The basic problem has to do with the behavior of Romney’s party over the past four years – reflexive opposition and obstruction rooted in electoral strategy, not ideology – and the lesson that politicians from both parties would draw if it results in a one-term Obama presidency.
Essentially, Republicans looked around when Obama was sworn-in and saw political opportunity. They had lost the White House and faced steep Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. In a way, this made them weak; they had no power to advance their own agenda. But it also gave them strength; they had considerable power to stall Obama’s agenda, and with economic anxiety rampant, it seemed logical to assume voters would blame the ruling party if things didn’t turn around quickly.
The result is that Republicans devoted themselves not to constructively criticizing Democratic proposals, crafting feasible alternatives, and accepting olive branches from the administration but instead to cranking up the hysteria and treating virtually every Obama initiative as a step toward socialism. They matched this with legislative obstruction, tying up scores nominations, forcing a record number of filibusters, and forcing Democrats to pass their agenda on party-line votes.
The calculation was that Republican cooperation would signal to the public that progress was being made and that Obama was living up to his promise to change Washington. But if they railed against him and his agenda instead, Republicans would create an air of controversy around every Obama proposal and bring his approval rating down that much faster.
Mostly cut out of this equation has been policy. Congressional Republicans bitterly deride the stimulus, even though it was loaded up with tax cuts and infrastructure spending that Republicans had traditionally supported. But where was their viable alternative? Healthcare is even more egregious. Obama spent months cultivating Republican support and adopted a basic framework – an individual mandate that would strengthen private insurers – that originated on the right. Not only did they unanimously oppose it; they’ve still failed to produce their own plan to replace the Affordable Care Act – despite promising to do so for more than two years. And while they did rally around Paul Ryan’s long-term budget blueprint, Republicans have had nothing to say on the country’s immediate jobs crisis, offering only tired rhetoric about high taxes and wasteful government. And, as Jonathan Bernstein points out, they’ve offered nothing substantive on foreign policy, settling instead for fake scandals and symbolism.
If Romney wins in two weeks, Republicans may well find themselves with complete control of Washington again. And they will have achieved it by doing nothing but opposing, attacking and obstructing Obama. As Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann explain in “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” this kind of conduct by an opposition party works in parliamentary democracies like Britain. But our system isn’t designed for it. If Republicans win back power with it, though, there’s no reason to think they won’t behave the same way again the next time Democrats claim power. For that matter, it’s possible Democrats will begin to behave the same way.
This last point is worth considering for a moment. There’s a school of thought that Democrats will always be open to entreaties from a Republican president, for the simple reason that they believe in an active and robust government. So, for instance, that George W. Bush found Democratic support – sometimes significant Democratic support – during his first term, even though Democrats were still furious over how he’d won the presidency. But if Republicans succeed in making Obama a one-termer, who’s to say how Democrats will react – and if their party base will even allow any cooperation with President Romney? (Again, this is accepting the idea that Romney would even try to reach out.)
Elections shape the behavior of political parties. Recall that Bill Clinton got more cooperation from Republicans as he beat them (first with the 1995 shutdown, then in the 1996 election), to the point that Republicans ultimately went looking for their own Clinton in 2000, keying in on the affable George W. Bush and his compassionate conservatism. The GOP’s post-2008 behavior has not been healthy for our system of government. It’s troubling to think what might happen if it’s rewarded.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, October 22, 2012
“A Stark Choice”: Bipartisanship In A Romney Administration
I’ve probably yelled enough about the mendacity of Mitt Romney’s claims last week that he’d “sit down with Democrats” the day after the election and start charting a bipartisan path for the country. But Paul Ryan was up to it again last night, arguing that he couldn’t tell us how he’d pay for an across-the-board tax cut because that would be up to bipartisan negotiations in Congress (as though they could repeal the laws of mathematics!).
Most readers here are probably familiar with the relentless demonization of bipartisanship as “surrender” throughout the Republican primaries, and the specific pledges Romney made to remain faithful to policies guaranteed never to attract a single Democrat (from a repeal-and-reverse approach to health care, to the cut-cap-balance meta-pledge, to the many promises never to accept a tax increase). The most important pledge Romney made, in my opinion, is to sign Paul Ryan’s budget resolution as is if Republicans manage to whip it through Congress using reconciliation procedures, which would mean revolutionary changes in the structure and purpose of the federal government, adopted swiftly on a party-line vote.
But what happens if Romney wins and Republicans fall short of getting control of the Senate? Would this scenario enable him to break his promises and perhaps unleash that secretly moderate Mitt who’s been lying through his teeth the last five years or so?
I don’t think so. Even if Romney is so inclined (and I see no particular reason to believe he is), he’d be dealing with a highly mutinous House GOP and the bulk of a Senate GOP Caucus that would insist the new president use his leverage not to cut deals but to break skulls. Depending on the margin of Democratic control of the Senate, and the identity of the Democratic Caucus, there would almost definitely be an effort to buy a vote or two to put them in operational control of Congress, and with items like the repeal of Obamacare and the enactment of the Ryan budget on the table, they’d pay a pretty high price for treason. If that didn’t work, the combination of Republican control of the House, the presidential veto, and GOP filibuster power in the Senate would be used to squelch any Democratic legislation on even the most quotidian matter. With the entire bipartisan commentariat and the business community screaming for action to avert a “fiscal cliff,” Republicans would probably get their way on that set of threshold issues simply by way of superior leverage. And even without congressional support, a new administration could probably paralyze implementation of Obamacare via executive action and inaction.
Perhaps that’s as much as they could accomplish, but beyond that, you’d find a powerful sentiment among Republicans to withhold bipartisan action pending the midterm elections of 2014, when a more favorable electorate (in terms of turnout patterns) and another positive landscape for GOP Senate gains would make the final conquest of Congress a solid betting proposition. And on one big priority of the conservative movement–the final reshaping of the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v. Wade–the odds would be very good for a Romney appointment that would survive the Senate on traditional grounds of deference to the president.
More generally, from Romney’s perspective, the certainty of a wholesale uprising by his party’s “base” and its dominant congressional faction in the event of genuine “bipartisanship” would be a much bigger strategic problem than finding ways around a narrow Democratic margin in the Senate. Besides, if Romney does win, it will almost certainly be due to a tilting of the electorate that also makes a Republican Senate more likely than it appears to be today.
In any event, as I’ve said often, Obama and his entire campaign owe it to the country as much as to themselves to demand as many public concessions as possible, in advance, if Mitt and Paul intend to continue right down to Election Day professing their love for bipartisan negotiations. I doubt any real concession will be made, and perhaps it will finally dawn on the media if not the public that there’s really no way around a stark choice between two very different parties and agendas.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 12, 2012
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