“The Burden Of Governing”: Boehner Tantrum Does The GOP Cause No Favors
If House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) tantrum yesterday was intended to get headlines, it was a striking success. News outlets everywhere were eager to tell the public that the Republican leader wants Senate Democrats “to get off their ass and do something.”
At issue, of course, is the dispute between the Republican-led House and the Republican-led Senate over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. When the Speaker, who still has no legislative accomplishments to his name, says he wants Dems to “get off their ass,” it’s little more than gibberish – Democrats aren’t being lazy; the congressional minority simply remains opposed to the anti-immigrant scheme cooked up by the majority.
Funny, Boehner thought filibusters were great when it was his party in the minority.
Nevertheless, the Speaker’s cursing notwithstanding, we’re left with a dispute that pits the Senate GOP against the House GOP, with each insisting the other has to do something before Homeland Security runs out of money in two weeks.
And if Boehner thought his whining yesterday might turn the tide, he was likely disappointed by the end of the day.
Republican Sen. Mark Kirk said Wednesday that his party made a mistake by picking a fight over President Barack Obama’s immigration actions, and said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) should bring up a “clean” bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded.
“I generally agree with the Democratic position here. I think we should have never fought this battle on DHS funding,” the Illinois senator told a few reporters in the Capitol.
The Illinois Republican added, “I don’t think we should have ever attached these issues to DHS funding. I always thought the burden of being in the majority is the burden of governing.” This is, of course, the polar opposite of what Kirk told reporters literally the day before.
But even putting Kirk’s contradictions aside, the larger point to keep in mind is that there are growing cracks in the GOP’s facade.
While Kirk was telling reporters that his fellow Republicans should just give up and pass a clean bill, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) also broke ranks, adding, “Using a spending bill to poke a finger in the president’s eye is not a good move.”
At least one House Republican also wants his party to throw in the towel and end the nonsense.
“From a political perspective, in my view, you’re better off passing a clean Homeland Security appropriations bill because it makes a lot of important changes many of us on the Republican side wanted – more detention beds and all sorts of improvements to border control,” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) told reporters.
“I think it’s better politically to vote for a clean appropriations bill,” he added. “That’s better on a policy basis as well as on a political basis. I’m going to urge that we do the DHS bill and not a CR, but a CR is better than a shutdown.”
House Republican leaders have worked from a bizarre assumption: as the deadline neared, Democrats would give in, reward the GOP with everything it wants, and abandon millions of immigrants in order to make the far-right happy. As long as Republicans kept the pressure on and refused to budge, Boehner and Co. thought, Democrats would magically move to the right.
As became clear yesterday, it’s actually Republicans who are giving up on this gambit and endorsing the Democratic position.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, February 12, 2015
“McConnell Decries ‘Obstructionism’, Irony Dies”: How Perspectives Can Change When One Moves From The Minority To The Majority
On literally the first day of the new Congress, Politico asked Don Stewart, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) spokesperson, what McConnell sees as his biggest challenge. “Democrat obstruction,” Stewart replied.
Putting aside the fact that he probably meant “Democratic obstruction,” the response was striking in its irony. McConnell, arguably more than any senator in the nation’s history, mastered the art of obstructionism, taking it to levels with no precedent in the American experiment. For his office to suddenly decry McConnell’s own practices was a reminder of just how much perspectives can change when one moves from the minority to the majority.
A month later, the posturing is almost amusing.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) accused Democrats Wednesday of knee-jerk obstructionist tactics, flipping a script that Democrats used many times in recent years.
McConnell criticized Democrats for filibustering a motion to debate a House-passed bill funding the Department of Homeland Security that contained language blocking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
“And now Americans are wondering: What could possibly lead Democrats to filibuster Homeland Security funding?” he said on the Senate floor.
I suspect Americans aren’t really wondering that at all – the question is actually pretty easy to answer, as the Majority Leader probably realizes – but it’s the broader context that’s truly amazing.
If we were to create some kind of electronic mechanism to measure hypocrisy on a dial, and we had the machine analyze Team McConnell’s whining, the box would have very likely caught on fire yesterday.
To be sure, when it comes to filibuster hypocrisy, there’s plenty of bipartisan chiding to go around. When a party is in the majority, its members discover the remarkable value of majority rule, a sacrosanct principle that senators ignore at the nation’s peril. When that same party is in the minority, its members magically conclude that tyranny of the majority is a scourge that must be tempered with overuse of “cooling saucer” metaphors.
It’s therefore quite easy to dig up quotes from Democrats and Republicans contradicting themselves quite brazenly as they transition between minority, majority, and back.
But McConnell is nevertheless a special case. In recent years, specifically after President Obama took office, the Kentucky Republican turned obstructionism into an art form. He abused institutional norms and rules in ways his predecessors never even considered, filibustering everything he could, as often as he could. McConnell operated with a simple principle: If a bill can be blocked, it must be blocked.
Following his lead, Senate Republicans not only spent six years refusing to compromise or accept any concessions on any issue, it also imposed filibusters on every key piece of legislation to reach the floor. Before the so-called “nuclear option,” the GOP minority even routinely filibustered nominees they actually supported.
It was all part of a deliberate (and occasionally successful) strategy in which McConnell would obstruct everything he could, making Democratic governance as impossible as he could make it, without regard for the consequences.
Some reflexive complaining from McConnell and his allies is to be expected – their own medicine apparently has a bitter taste – but self-awareness is an under-appreciated quality. If the Majority Leader wants to be taken at all seriously, he can either avoid complaints about “obstructionism” or he can hope for mass amnesia to sweep the political world.
I’d recommend the former over the latter.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, February 6, 2015
“Ted Cruz, House Republicans, And Their Many Secret Meetings”: House GOP Members Don’t Much Care For Their Own Leaders
It’s not too uncommon for Republican leaders from the House and Senate to occasionally meet, trade notes, and work out bicameral strategies, but as a rule, rank-and-file members tend to stick with colleagues from the same chamber. When they have ideas or grand plans, GOP lawmakers usually turn to their chamber’s leadership or committee chairs.
Which is why it’s odd to see House Republicans huddle so frequently with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Last September, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) presented a plan to avoid a government shutdown. Cruz met directly with House Republicans, urged them to ignore their own leader’s plan, and GOP House members followed his advice. The result was an embarrassing and unnecessary shutdown.
A month later, Cruz held another meeting with House Republicans, this time in a private room at a Capitol Hill restaurant. In April, the Texas senator again gathered House Republicans, this time for a private meeting in his office. Cruz’s office shared very few details with reporters, except to note that the 90-minute session “included candy bars, crackers and soda.”
And then last week, less than an hour after House Republicans elected a new leadership team, guess who had an invitation for them?
At 4 p.m., immediately following the leadership elections, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) – who has repeatedly encouraged House conservatives to defy their leaders – sent an e-mail to a large group of conservative House Republicans.
Cruz invited them to meet with him June 24 for an “off-the-record gathering” and “an evening of discussion and fellowship.”
Pizza, Cruz told them, will be served.
I’m sure it was delightful, but I can’t help but wonder about the purpose of all of these meetings.
Some of this, I suspect, is the result of an unusual leadership dynamic. Cruz can’t do much in his chamber – Senate Republicans don’t seem to like him, and Senate Democrats consider him a dangerous demagogue – so he’s reaching out to House Republicans, who at least have a majority. GOP House members, meanwhile, don’t much care for their own leaders, and they apparently find value in Cruz’s counsel.
It’s a match made in … somewhere unpleasant.
But since Congress can no longer pass meaningful legislation of any kind, what is it, exactly, that these far-right lawmakers are talking about? We can only speculate, of course, but maybe it’s ideas like these.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a resolution on Thursday calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal – and if he doesn’t do so, Cruz thinks he should be impeached.
“If attorney general Eric Holder continues to refuse to appoint a special prosecutor, he should be impeached,” Cruz said on the Senate floor.
Let’s put aside for now the fact that there is no IRS “scandal” and the idea of appointing a special prosecutor for no reason is quite dumb. Instead, let’s note that even if Senate Republicans decided they love the idea of impeaching the Attorney General, it’s not their call – impeachment proceedings must begin in the House, not the Senate.
Maybe this is what Cruz mentions over pizza and candy bars?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 27, 2014
“Writing Off The Unemployed”: Republican Imperviousness To Evidence Goes Along With A Stunning Lack Of Compassion
Back in 1987 my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder published a very good book titled “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.” It was, as you might guess, a call for tough-minded but compassionate economic policy. Unfortunately, what we actually got — especially, although not only, from Republicans — was the opposite. And it’s difficult to find a better example of the hardhearted, softheaded nature of today’s G.O.P. than what happened last week, as Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster to block aid to the long-term unemployed.
What do we know about long-term unemployment in America?
First, it’s still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed — those out of work for 27 weeks or more — have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support.
Second, if you think the typical long-term unemployed American is one of Those People — nonwhite, poorly educated, etc. — you’re wrong, according to research by the Urban Institute’s Josh Mitchell. Half of the long-term unemployed are non-Hispanic whites. College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
Third, in a weak job market long-term unemployment tends to be self-perpetuating, because employers in effect discriminate against the jobless. Many people have suspected that this was the case, and last year Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University provided a dramatic confirmation. He sent out thousands of fictitious résumés in response to job ads, and found that potential employers were drastically less likely to respond if the fictitious applicant had been out of work more than six months, even if he or she was better qualified than other applicants.
What all of this suggests is that the long-term unemployed are mainly victims of circumstances — ordinary American workers who had the bad luck to lose their jobs (which can happen to anyone) at a time of extraordinary labor market weakness, with three times as many people seeking jobs as there are job openings. Once that happened, the very fact of their unemployment made it very hard to find a new job.
So how can politicians justify cutting off modest financial aid to their unlucky fellow citizens?
Some Republicans justified last week’s filibuster with the tired old argument that we can’t afford to increase the deficit. Actually, Democrats paired the benefits extension with measures to increase tax receipts. But in any case this is a bizarre objection at a time when federal deficits are not just falling, but clearly falling too fast, holding back economic recovery.
For the most part, however, Republicans justify refusal to help the unemployed by asserting that we have so much long-term unemployment because people aren’t trying hard enough to find jobs, and that extended benefits are part of the reason for that lack of effort.
People who say things like this — people like, for example, Senator Rand Paul — probably imagine that they’re being tough-minded and realistic. In fact, however, they’re peddling a fantasy at odds with all the evidence. For example: if unemployment is high because people are unwilling to work, reducing the supply of labor, why aren’t wages going up?
But evidence has a well-known liberal bias. The more their economic doctrine fails — remember how the Fed’s actions were supposed to produce runaway inflation? — the more fiercely conservatives cling to that doctrine. More than five years after a financial crisis plunged the Western world into what looks increasingly like a quasi-permanent slump, making nonsense of free-market orthodoxy, it’s hard to find a leading Republican who has changed his or her mind on, well, anything.
And this imperviousness to evidence goes along with a stunning lack of compassion.
If you follow debates over unemployment, it’s striking how hard it is to find anyone on the Republican side even hinting at sympathy for the long-term jobless. Being unemployed is always presented as a choice, as something that only happens to losers who don’t really want to work. Indeed, one often gets the sense that contempt for the unemployed comes first, that the supposed justifications for tough policies are after-the-fact rationalizations.
The result is that millions of Americans have in effect been written off — rejected by potential employers, abandoned by politicians whose fuzzy-mindedness is matched only by the hardness of their hearts.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 9, 2014
“A Process At The Breaking Point”: Republicans Are Hijacking The Judicial Nominating Process Without Cause
In June, President Obama nominated three qualified jurists to serve as judges on the D.C. Circuit, generally considered the nation’s second-most important federal bench. Each one of the nominees has excellent credentials, each one of the nominees sailed through the Judiciary Committee without incident, and each one of the nominees enjoys the support of a majority of the U.S. Senate.
And last night, each one of the nominees has been blocked by a Republican filibuster.
Senate Republicans on Monday denied President Obama his third nominee in recent weeks to the nation’s most powerful and prestigious appeals court and insisted they would not back down, inflaming a bitter debate over a president’s right to shape the judiciary.
By a vote of 53 to 38, the Senate failed to break a filibuster of a federal judge, Robert L. Wilkins, who was nominated to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, falling short of the 60 votes needed.
Wilkins technically finished with 53 votes, but he had 54 supporters – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to vote “no” for procedural reasons.
As was the case with last week’s filibuster, it’s important to recognize that the Republican obstructionism had nothing to do with Wilkins, his ideology, his temperament, or his background. On the contrary, just the opposite is true – senators in both parties agreed that Wilkins is a fine nominee.
The problem, rather, is that a minority of the Senate has decided to block every nominee for the D.C. Circuit, regardless of his or her qualifications, because Americans had the audacity to re-elect a Democratic president. Once there’s a Republican in the White House, Republican senators will presumably agree to lift the blockade.
This is important because it has simply never happened before in American history. Senators in both parties have, in a variety of instances, blocked judicial nominees they considered offensive or extreme for one reason or another, but there is nothing in the American tradition that says a minority of the Senate can maintain vacancies on an important federal bench – indefinitely – because they feel like it.
Indeed, perhaps the single most bizarre example of obstructionism run amok is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said just a few months ago that each of Obama’s D.C. Circuit nominees deserve a vote in the Senate. McCain then proceeded to join the filibuster of the nominees he said shouldn’t be filibustered.
After yesterday’s obstructionism, Senate Democratic leaders began “taking the temperature of their caucus on whether to finally go ‘nuclear’ and change the Senate rules,” and by any fair measure, Republicans haven’t left the majority party with much of a choice.
Let’s make this plain: if Senate Democrats don’t force a confrontation over this, they will, for the first time in the institution’s history, have allowed a minority of the Senate to hijack the judicial nominating process without cause.
The status quo is, for lack of a better phrase, a simmering constitutional crisis of sorts. Either Democrats act or a precedent will be set.
What’s unclear is whether Dems will, or even can, proceed with the so-called “nuclear option.” Does the party have the votes to execute the plan? Do they have the intestinal fortitude to accept the blowback from Senate Republicans relying on obstructionist tactics that have never before been tried in the United States?
Last week, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), the Senate Pro Tem and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, “I think we’re at a point where there will have to be a rules change.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) added soon after, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There comes a tipping point, and I’m afraid we’ve reached that tipping point.”
If they were waiting to see what happened with Wilkins, now they know. Yesterday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a leading proponent of Senate reforms, asked, “When will we say enough is enough?”
In the short term, it’s up to Democrats themselves to answer this question. Republicans, whose support is not needed for the nuclear option, have effectively dared the majority party to end the blockade and return the Senate to its earlier traditions. In fact, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), whose antics have been more offensive than most in this debate, dared Democrats just a week ago to restore the original Senate process for judicial nominees.
Senate Republicans, for all intents and purposes, have broken the judicial confirmation process. They know they’re engaged in tactics with no precedent in the American tradition; they know it’s obstructionism on an unsustainable scale; they know it’s wholly at odds with every commitment they made during the Bush/Cheney era; and they just don’t give a darn.
Whether the Democratic majority is prepared to simply tolerate this crisis and allow the process to be hijacked for the indefinite future is unclear.
* Postscript: If you listened to the debate at all, you may have noticed GOP senators justifying their blockade by saying the D.C. Circuit handles fewer cases than the other circuits, and therefore can better tolerate indefinite vacancies. In case anyone was wondering whether the argument has merit, it doesn’t – this nonsense was debunked in September.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 