“Government By A La Carte”: House Republican’s Goal, Shut Down The Government With No Political Repercussions
Plan A was for the House to pass a spending measure that gutted the Affordable Care Act, which the Senate could then clean up and send on to the White House. Plan B was the House bill to go ahead and defund the health care law and dare the Senate to pass it. Plan C was the House bill to delay health care benefits for a year and dare the Senate again.
Plan D was a half-hearted House Republican effort to embrace budget talks that House Republicans spent six months avoiding. And Plan E is, well, kind of silly.
House Republican leaders Tuesday told rank-and-file members that they will attempt to pass several separate bills to reopen the government a few agencies at a time.
A GOP aide confirmed that leaders want next steps to include passage of a series of continuing resolutions that fund individual government programs — an idea floated by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Monday.
Why House Republicans don’t just make Cruz the Speaker and get it over with is unclear.
Regardless, this new plan is hilarious. Republicans could pass a center-right spending bill and end the shutdown, but what they’d prefer to do is break up the federal spending bill into chunks, and slowly turn the lights on piecemeal. Staffers were referring today to “mini-CRs.”
The idea, apparently, is to identify the parts of the Republicans’ shutdown that make the public upset, then pass a spending measure that resolves just that part of the crisis while leaving the rest of the government shut down. Americans are annoyed by closed federal parks? No sweat, Republicans say, they’ll pass a mini-CR that provides funding to reopen the parks — and nothing else.
And then when some other part of the shutdown creates public pressure, presumably Republicans would consider flipping the switch on that, too. The goal, apparently, is to shut down the government without feeling the political repercussions of a wildly unpopular government shutdown.
Sigh.
It didn’t take long for Democratic policymakers to dismiss the nonsense.
“We just decided in there we’re not going to do that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said after leaving Tuesday’s Senate Democratic Conference meeting.
White House spokesman Jay Carney also ripped the idea as “not serious.”
“If they want to open the government, they should open the government,” Carney said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called it “just another whacky idea.” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) asked why opening federal parks is more important than “ensuring seniors, poor mothers, and children have access to meals and critical services?” A senior Senate Democratic aide said the House gimmick has “no chance” of success.
House Republicans can either keep their shutdown going, or they end this fiasco. The time for stunts, gimmicks, and partial pseudo solutions has long since passed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 1, 2013
“Obamacare Sabotage Becomes Murder”: U.S. Federal Government Shuts Down
The United States federal government shut down for the first time in 17 years on Tuesday, as Congress failed to end a bitter budget row after hours of dizzying brinkmanship.
Ten minutes before midnight, the White House budget office issued an order for many government departments to start closing down, triggering 800,000 furloughs of federal workers, and shutting tourists out of monuments like the Statue of Liberty, national parks and museums.
Prospects for a swift resolution were unclear and economists warned that the struggling U.S. economic recovery could suffer if the shutdown drags on for more than just a few days.
Only workers deemed essential will be at their desks from Tuesday onwards, leaving government departments like the White House with skeleton staff.
Vital functions like mail delivery and air traffic control will continue as normal, however.
On a day of dysfunction and ugly rhetoric in the divided U.S. political system, Republicans had repeatedly tied new government funding to attempts to defund, delay or dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
But each time their effort was killed by Obama’s allies in the Democratic-led Senate, leaving the government in limbo when its money ran out at the end of the fiscal year at midnight Monday.
“This is an unnecessary blow to America,” a somber Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor two minutes after the witching hour.
A few hours into the shutdown, Republicans in the House appointed delegates, or conferees, to try to negotiate with the Senate later Tuesday on a spending plan to get the government up and running again.
But if they still want to tinker with Obamacare, the Senate will not negotiate, an aide to Reid said.
“If the House follows through with their current plan, the Senate will vote to table the House’s conference gambit shortly after convening. And we will be back at square one,” the aide said.
Obama, heralding the first government shutdown since 1996, told U.S. troops in a video that they deserved better from Congress, and promised to work to get the government reopened soon.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Obama’s budget director, said agencies should execute plans for an “orderly shutdown”, and urged Congress to swiftly pass bridge financing that would allow the government to open again.
Obama earlier accused Republicans of holding America to ransom with their “extreme” political demands, while his opponents struck back at his party’s supposed arrogance.
House Speaker John Boehner rebuked Obama in a fiery floor speech after an unproductive call with the president.
“I didn’t come here to shut down the government,” Boehner said. “The American people don’t want a shutdown, and neither do I.”
Republicans accuse Obama of refusing to negotiate in good faith, but the White House says Obamacare is settled law and says there is no way to stop it from going into force, with a goal of providing affordable health care to all Americans.
The crisis is rooted in the long running campaign by “Tea Party” Republicans in the House to overturn or disable Obamacare — the president’s principal domestic political achievement — key portions of which also come into force on Tuesday.
More broadly, the shutdown is the most serious crisis yet in a series of rolling ideological skirmishes between Democrat Obama and House Republicans over the size of the U.S. government and its role in national life.
“One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to re-fight the results of an election,” Obama said, referring to his own re-election. He spoke in a televised statement from the White House.
Obama warned that a government shutdown could badly damage an economy which has endured a sluggish recovery from the worst recession in decades.
“A shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly,” Obama said.
Consultants Macroeconomic Advisors said it would slow growth, recorded at a 2.5 percent annual pace in the second quarter.
A two-week shutdown would cut 0.3 percentage point off of gross domestic production.
It would also have a painful personal impact on workers affected — leaving them to dip into savings or delay mortgage payments, monthly car loan bills and other spending.
Stocks on Monday retreated as traders braced for the shutdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 128.57 points (0.84 percent) to 15,129.67.
Markets are likely to be even more traumatized if there is no quick solution to the next fast approaching crisis.
Republicans are also demanding Obama make concessions in the health care law to secure a lifting of the current $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, without which the United States would begin to default on its debts for the first time in history by the middle of October.
By: AFP, The National Memo, October 1, 2013
“A Two-Tier Nation”: The GOP’s Citizenship Suppression
Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says he is against creating “a special path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. The path he refers to — which many of his Republican House colleagues also oppose — is the one laid out in the immigration reform bill the Senate passed this summer; it would enable the undocumented, after paying some fines and learning English, to get green cards in 10 years and apply for citizenship three years after that.
But by opposing this special path, House Republicans may create a special category of American: legal but permanently non-citizen. Able to work, required to pay taxes but not able to vote. Subject to taxation without representation. In a word, second-class.
While House Republicans have been busily working on shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt, they have not neglected their duty to screw up immigration reform. Just how much they’ll mangle it remains unclear. Some oppose any legalization at all. Some support extending citizenship to the Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought here as children — but no one else. Goodlatte says he is open to legalizing additional undocumented immigrants, but it’s not clear that he wants a bill that would enable them to become citizens. (This last option was recently endorsed by Tamar Jacoby, who heads a business group, ImmigrationWorks USA, that wants to take employers off the hook for employing undocumented workers but is apparently indifferent to whether those workers can win any political rights and the bargaining power that goes with it.)
By opposing a “special path,” Goodlatte has set himself against the provision in the Senate bill that would enable the law-abiding undocumented to obtain green cards after a 10-year wait. Instead, he is reportedly working on legislation that would put them in the existing line for green cards, where the wait would be closer to a century. With green cards for low- and semi-skilled workers limited to just a few thousand each year, millions of the undocumented would never obtain the cards or the subsequent opportunity to become citizens.
This non-solution solution might have a certain appeal to Republicans. Legalizing the undocumented would relieve businesses that employ immigrants at low wages regardless of their status. Not granting citizenship to the undocumented would limit the number of Latinos and Asians in the electorate, two groups which increasingly back Democrats at the polls. Could there be a more effective form of voter suppression than citizenship suppression?
But therein lies the Republicans’ dilemma. The political imperative behind embracing some kind of immigration reform is the Republicans’ need to convince Latinos that their party holds them in the same regard as other Americans. Carving out a special sub-citizen category for the disproportionately Latino undocumented doesn’t do that. “What makes them think this solves their problem?” one leading immigrant advocate asked me this week. “It just creates a new problem, since it’s deeply insulting to Latinos.”
Still, the immigrant groups see a way that Goodlatte’s approach might work — if it allows for a major increase in the number of green cards the government issues. Their hope is that the House passes something — a Dream Act, or some bill creating at least in theory a path to citizenship — that would go to conference with the Senate, and that a compromise bill emerges that would create a real path to citizenship. Advocates of immigration reform believe that the Republican leadership may discreetly favor such a course, but they also note that House Republican leaders have shown no discernible ability to actually lead their caucus.
Most GOP House members are safely cocooned in lily-white districts, many of which Republican state legislators carved out for them. Nonetheless, so long as Republicans treat Latinos as second-class Americans — whether prohibited from legal status or merely from citizenship — the GOP’s ability to win elections at the state and federal levels will decline with each passing year. To advocate the creation of a two-tier nation is almost surely to incite the enmity of those relegated to the bottom tier, not to mention their friends and relations and lots of stray egalitarians.
“We don’t cotton to having a permanent second-class group just here to work,” said Tom Snyder, who manages the immigrant reform campaign for the AFL-CIO. “At least since we abolished slavery, it’s not been the American way.”
By: Harol Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 26, 2013
“The Revised GOP Ransom Note”: House Republicans Now Willing To Fund Government In Exchange For One Year Obamacare Delay
House Republicans are preparing to introduce a new, last minute Continuing Resolution that would fund the operations of government for a few more months in exchange for an agreement by Senate Democrats and the White House to delay the execution of Obamacare for one year.
This newest bid is being presented as a “compromise” as the initial proposal put forward by the House—one that was rejected by the Senate—hinged the funding of government on the full defunding of the Affordable Care Act.
Compromise?
I suppose it is if you consider that someone holding a gun to your head and demanding ten million dollars to spare your life becomes a “compromiser” when he suddenly drops the price to seven million after you’ve told your assailer that you can’t or won’t pay.
Or maybe you would consider a foreign power threating our country with thermonuclear destruction unless we surrender to them as being willing to compromise if they modify their demand so as to leave us with everything east of the Mississippi if we are prepared to give up all the territory to the west?
For those who would fool themselves into believing that the latest House offer is some effort to find “middle ground”, ask yourself this question—
Why do these people wish to delay enforcement of the Affordable Care Act for one year?
Does anyone imagine that those who have been seeking to deny funding to government absent the delay or destruction of a law that was passed by Congress, signed into being by the President, and approved by the Supreme Court actually want to hold off the implementation of that law so they can improve it?
At no time—since the blitzkrieg of misinformation and outright lies that have been peddled by Obamacare opponents following the Act’s creation–have the House Republicans so much as once suggested that they would like to improve the law. Having voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund the law, have they ever, since passage, voted on proposed amendments to the law that they claim would improve the healthcare reform act?
Never.
Indeed, they are not even pretending to want to make it better via a delay as not so much as one Republican elected official who has paraded in front of the TV cameras today to pitch defunding or delay has so much as hinted than an extra year would give Congress time to make some ‘fixes’ or ‘changes.’
So, again, why the one year extension?
The better to keep the issue ‘hot’ for Republicans going into the 2014 midterm elections.
After all, nothing is going to change in the next year that would improve the Republicans’ chances of doing away with the law.
Should the GOP hold the House in the 2014 elections and pick up enough seats in the Senate to gain a majority, absolutely nobody believes for a moment that the GOP could gain enough Senate seats so as to grant them the capability of overturning a presidential veto.
And, like it or not, the Democrats will hold the White House through 2016.
And yet, every Republican mug I see on the television screen today tells me that they are doing this for me.
Really?
My premium rates are scheduled to go down rather dramatically upon the opening of the healthcare exchange in my state. So, what exactly are these House Republicans doing for me—and the millions of other Americans who cannot get coverage due to preexisting conditions (like acne) or face using up their lifetime maximums when a serious illness strikes? What exactly are Ted Cruz and his friends doing for those who are denied their paid for coverage after they get sick by insurance companies who don’t want to pay off and can find a spelling error on the insured’s application? What about the millions of Americans who simply have been unable to afford health insurance coverage without the benefit of the government subsidies or those who are married forever to their job—whether they like it or not— because, to leave it, would mean putting their family in jeopardy should someone get sick?
Still, if the GOP continues to feel the need to use healthcare policy to hold up funding of the government, and they are truly doing this for my benefit, I have an additional policy change I’d like Speaker Boehner to add to the new House legislation—things that would truly be for my benefit and the benefit of my family—
I would like the Speaker to make the Continuing Resolution to keep the government’s doors open contingent upon gun control legislation that requires registration of all weapons at the time of purchase. That would be doing something that could truly help me and my family.
And before anyone tries to tell me that this would be unacceptable because—unlike Obamacare where the majority of the country currently opposes the law, the majority of Americans love their guns—I suggest you review the polls revealing that more Americans favor changes in gun registration laws than the number of Americans who oppose the Affordable Care Act.
I could go on with more ransom demands for the Speaker but I’ll settle for just this one. After all, Boehner only plans to fund the government through this December in exchange for destroying the Affordable Care Act so I don’t want to be too greedy as to what I would expect for a three month extension of an operating government.
If the House Republicans are unwilling to link the funding of government to the things that will really be of value to me, then I can only hope that the Senate Democrats and the President hold the line and allow the GOP to get what is coming to them for their behavior.
While I hate to see so many of my fellow Americans suffer the problems and serious inconveniences that are inevitable in a government shut down, I—like so many Americans that the right-wing prefers to pretend do not exist—have had enough of these eighty to one hundred extremists in Congress standing in the way of trying to make life better for so many Americans just so they can be re-elected . These are, after all, elected officials that come from congressional districts where constituents continue to be incapable of grasping that the debt ceiling debate is about paying for debts we’ve already incurred and not some limitation on what government can borrow or spend in the following year.
I also highlight that these people on the right prefer to pretend I do exist because of their continued suggestion that “Americans” do not want the healthcare reform law. Not so much as one supporter of defunding or delaying Obamacare, who has spoken to the cameras today, has said “some Americans” or “most Americans”. They simply say that this law is a train wreck and Americans don’t want it.
Like it or not, I am an American and I do want this alleged train wreck as do enough of my fellow Americans to constitute at least forty percent of the electorate. So, I would very much appreciate it if Rep. Jeb Henserling and the remaining band of the GOP talking heads haunting the airwaves would stop lumping me in with their political distortions.
The President is flat-out right on this one. If the Republicans want to argue over what should—or should not—be included in the next fiscal year’s budget, I’m all for it. Each branch of Congress can pass their version of a budget and the two can get into the conference committee room and beat each other up until they come to a budget agreement they can send over to the White House for signature.
But if these 100 or so Members of Congress want to screw up people’s lives because they have a fundamental problem with our system of government, we should give them no quarter.
And make no mistake, it is precisely these people’s resentment of how our government was created to operate that drives them to these extremist positions—no matter how much they pretend to be ‘strict constitutionalists’.
Just because GOP legislators like to carry a copy of the Constitution in their suit pocket doesn’t mean they’ve ever read it or could care less what it actually says. It just means they have pockets large enough to hold fat oil company checks and a tiny copy of our founding document at the same time.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 29, 2013
“As Usual, The Public Be Damned”: House Republicans Should Come To Their Senses And Just Knock It Off
The health care obsessives in the Senate, led by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, have spent days trying to portray Democrats as out of touch with the public. “The Senate Democrats are not listening to the millions of Americans who are being hurt by Obamacare,” Mr. Cruz said this morning in his last stand in this particular round of the budget battle.
Moments later, however, the vote took place and Mr. Cruz lost badly. It was clear that all Democrats and a majority of Senate Republicans had in fact listened quite closely to the public — which demanded that Congress not shut down the government, whatever the fate of President Obama’s health law.
On the crucial vote to cut off debate over a temporary spending bill to keep the government open, 79 senators, including 25 Republicans, opposed Mr. Cruz’s plea for a filibuster. (All of those Republicans also opposed the final bill, which removed the provision defunding the health law and sent the stopgap bill back to the House, but by then Democrats only needed a simple majority for passage.)
The Republican split in the Senate — 25 against shutdown tactics, 19 in favor — was a pretty clear signal to the House about the political limits of opposition to the health law. Mainstream Republicans will continue to oppose the law, exaggerating every minor glitch and failure, and running against it in next year’s election, but most are not willing to shut down the government to stop it.
They know what will happen if a shutdown occurs at midnight on Tuesday, or even worse, if a default occurs two or three weeks later: television news clips of phones going unanswered at Social Security offices, shuttered national parks, and veterans protesting reduced services. And a plunge in the market in event of a default. What was a political standoff would turn into a picture of dysfunction. Voters would get angry, and Republicans would inevitably (and accurately) get the blame.
The question now is whether a majority of House Republicans will feel the same way as their colleagues in the upper chamber. Answering only to rigidly gerrymandered districts, House members have shown themselves far less interested in the general welfare than senators, and may not react to the same pressures.
The bill now heads back to the House, and if Republicans attach another health care demand to it, that’s it, game over, the government shuts down on Tuesday. The Senate will have to strip it out again, and there won’t be enough time for reconciliation. Speaker John Boehner could agree to a one- or two-week extension, if he can get the votes for a kick-the-can bill, or he could punt, approve the Senate bill, and make his stand on the debt limit increase in the following few days.
But he’ll eventually have to punt on that, too, or risk triggering an economic catastrophe. The only realistic path is a sensible variant on what Mr. Cruz said this morning: Listen to the public and stop governing by crisis. Or as President Obama put it this afternoon: “Knock it off.”
By: David Firestone, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, September 27, 2013
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