“Hoping For The Best”: In The Race For The Future, Virginia Foxx And House Republicans Are Willing To Tolerate Defeat
There’s been a fair amount of talk on Capitol Hill recently about student loans and interest rates, which led to an unsatisfying compromise in the Senate. But as part of the larger discussion, a notable lawmaker said something interesting that stood out for me.
Getting American kids into college without saddling them with massive debt shouldn’t be the government’s job, according to a prominent House Republican and possible 2014 Senate candidate. “It is not the role of the Congress to make college affordable and accessible,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said Wednesday morning during a committee markup of legislation that would halt federal officials from regulating for-profit educational institutions.
Foxx likened federal standards for things like the definition of a credit-hour to totalitarianism.
Well, sure, of course she did. She’s Virginia Foxx.
But it’s worth noting that there’s nothing inherently incorrect about her views on the federal role in higher education. It’s an inherently subjective question — some people believe federal policymakers have a role in making college affordable and accessible, some don’t. Foxx has her opinions on the matter, I have mine.
I’ve long hoped, however, that this generates a larger conversation about the future of the United States as a global superpower. There’s a spirited competition underway, and we have real rivals who’d be delighted to see us settle for second place. To remain on top, we’re going to need an educated workforce and electorate, and with this in mind, it makes sense if Americans were represented by a Congress that prioritized access to affordable higher-ed.
Or perhaps the nation prefers Foxx’s vision: some states will help young people get degrees; some won’t; Congress doesn’t care. Under this approach, education is of relative importance, but it’s just not a national priority.
Long-time readers have no doubt seen me mention this before, but I often think about some specific remarks President Obama made in 2009. He’d just returned from a trip to East Asia, and Obama shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the then-president of South Korea.
“I was interested in education policy — they’ve grown enormously over the last 40 years. And I asked him, what are the biggest challenges in your education policy? He said, ‘The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.’ He said, ‘Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.’ He said, ‘I’ve had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they’re all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.’ That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.
“And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they’ve got 25 million people in this one city. He said, ‘We don’t have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions.’
“That gives you a sense of what’s happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about.”
Right. The United States used to be about a lot of things.
But as we discussed in April, many American policymakers have shifted their focus away from insisting on excellence and towards, well, a Virginia Foxx-like attitude. Countries like South Korea and China can have their hunger for knowledge; we’ll just keep cutting education spending and hope for the best.
We’re the wealthiest country on the planet by an order of magnitude, so maybe we can just coast for a while, neglecting key priorities. Maybe we can stop looking at areas like education, energy, health care, and transportation as national problems — the way our competitors do — and can instead hope states figure something out. Someday. With some elusive resources.
Put it this way: while some countries are insisting on excellence in education, our country shrugs its shoulders while kids get thrown out of pre-schools because of budget cuts and young adults get priced out of college. Which side of the ocean is preparing for the future?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 26, 2013
“Beneath Any Reasonable Standards Of Elected Officials”: The Unprecedented And Contemptible Attempts To Sabotage Obamacare
When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans’ No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety.
I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare—Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.
It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription drug plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill—it passed the Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes—while along the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference committee deliberations.
The implementation of that bill was a huge challenge, and had many rocky moments. It required educating millions of seniors, most not computer-literate, about the often complicated choices they had to create or change their prescription coverage. Imagine if Democrats had gone all out to block or disrupt the implementation—using filibusters to deny funding, sending threatening letters to companies or outside interests who mobilized to educate Medicare recipients, putting on major campaigns to convince seniors that this was a plot to deny them Medicare, comparing it to the ill-fated Medicare reform plan that passed in 1989 and, after a revolt by seniors, was repealed the next year.
Almost certainly, Democrats could have tarnished one of George W. Bush’s signature achievements, causing Republicans major heartburn in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections—and in the process hurting millions of Medicare recipients and their families. Instead, Democrats worked with Republicans, and with Mark McClellan, the Bush administration official in charge of implementation, to smooth out the process and make it work—and it has been a smashing success.
Contrast that with Obamacare. For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04—in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan.
I remember being shocked when some congressional Democrats appeared to be rooting for the surge in troops in Iraq to fail—which would mean more casualties among Americans and Iraqis, but a huge embarrassment for Bush, and vindication of their skepticism. But of course they did not try to sabotage the surge by disrupting funding or interfering in the negotiations in Iraq with competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power centers. To do so would have been close to treasonous.
What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. A good example is the letter Senate Republican Leaders Mitch McConnell and Cornyn sent to the NFL, demanding that it not cooperate with the Obama administration in a public-education campaign to tell their fans about what benefits would be available to them and how the plan would work—a letter that clearly implied deleterious consequences if the league went ahead anyhow. McConnell and Cornyn got their desired result. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell quickly capitulated. (When I came to Washington in 1969-70, one of my great pleasures was meeting and getting to know Charles Goodell, the courageous Republican senator from New York who took on his own president on Vietnam and was quietly courageous on many other controversial issues. Roger Goodell is his son—although you would not know it from this craven action.)
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
By: Norm Ornstein, The National Journal, July 24, 2013
“The Mitch McConnell Strategy”: The Republican “Just Say No” Approach To Governing
As David Firestone wrote yesterday, the standards for cooperation in Congress have fallen so low that Senators pat themselves on the back whenever they manage to pass legislation. If it seems like an achievement when the Senate does its job — wow! A farm bill! — that’s probably because some of its members are committed to making it as dysfunctional as the House.
Take Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is warming a seat held with distinction by Kay Bailey Hutchison. In about six months in office, Mr. Cruz has devoted himself to opposing everything President Obama wants. (The Mitch McConnell strategy of 2009.)
Mr. Cruz tried to block the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, for example, by demanding that he prove that he wasn’t taking money from America’s enemies. He’s one of several Republicans who’ve tried to nullify agencies they don’t like — such as the National Labor Relations Board or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — by simply refusing to allow votes on Mr. Obama’s nominees.
This week, according to Robert Costa of the National Review, he’s been in Iowa, where he attended a meeting with conservative pastors. “Per pastors/attendees, Cruz told Iowa group this morn that conservatives must not fund the govt — ‘any CR’ — unless O’care ‘fully’ defunded,” Mr. Costa said on Twitter.
In other words, Congress shuts down the government, and presumably defaults on its debts, unless the Democrats agree to kill health care reform.
I presume Mr. Cruz thinks this is a winning strategy — at least among the Tea Party folks and other people on the far right. (Here’s a scary thought: Was he in Iowa because he’s thinking of a presidential run?)
But I’m not sure it’s going to play well with the rest of America, where contempt for Congress, and Congressional Republicans in particular, is evident in every poll. Some staunch conservatives are arguing that “just say no” is not working.
Jennifer Rubin, the right-wing commentator for the Washington Post, wrote on her blog yesterday that the House GOP has to come up with ideas of its own, starting with doing more than trying to delay or repeal “the noxious provisions” of the Affordable Care act:
“Without a GOP alternative to Obamacare, their complaints are empty and their votes unlikely to be taken seriously by voters. It is long, long past the point at which Republicans should have begun crafting and selling their alternative. To be frank, other than the budgets, when it comes to complex legislation (the details of tax reform, health care, education) this House has been weak. Where is the tax plan? Where is the market-based health-care plan? And of course we know they’ve been sitting on the sidelines in the immigration debate.”
Well put.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, July 19, 2013
“Congress’ Pity Party”: Drama Queens Who Choose Not To Solve The Nation’s Problems
This week’s congressional dysfunctional is brought to you by the letter “P.” Forget Democrats and Republicans: The party of the moment is pity.
Yes, yes, Congress is polarized, Republicans aren’t a governing party anymore, Democrats lack spines, everyone is beholden to corporate interests, and the open source world is changing how politicians interact with their constituents.
None of that has anything to do with the theatrics over the filibuster.
Every so often, Congress, frustrated and angry that the public bears them so much ill-will, decides to remind us that their inability to get stuff done is our fault.
We’re the ones who elected them. We’re the ones who keep voting for them. We’re the ones who demand that they sacrifice principles for expediency. Allegedly. But we don’t really pay attention to Congress, because they don’t do much, and when they do, it’s often comical.
So they get angry. They create a crisis. They give long, florid floor speeches about the crisis. They appear on television and bemoan. And bemoan and bemoan and bemoan what happened to this great institution, (if in the Senate: This saucer, this leavening chamber), this beacon of democratic representation in the world.
Right now, we’re in the pity stage. You know it because the political tabloids are publishing stories about how relationships between parties are at their lowest point since the last time these tabloids wrote the stories. Or that the majority leader and the minority leader can’t take each other’s phone calls.
Pity clears the room. Pity is such a turn-off because it absolves the bearer of any responsibility to solve his or her own problem.
Truth be told, the Senate can solve its problems. Its members just choose not to. But instead of admitting that manufactured crises are the catalyst for getting anything done, we are instead treated to spectacles that Congress can watch on TV and feel important again.
They negotiate publicly and privately, then create a solution.
Often, the solution sets up further crises, which will allow Congress to once again come back and get everyone’s attention, as they go through the performance and sweep in at the last moment and provide another solution, proving once and for all that Congress actually does work. Then they congratulate themselves on a job well done. Take that, American people.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, July 16, 2013
“Just A Bunch Of Nativists”: Making Laws No Longer Part Of The Lawmaking Process
Reading through some headlines today, I came across one link that began, “House Votes To…” and I realized that no matter what the end of the headline was, you can almost always insert, “…Make Pointless Statement As Sop to Conservative Base” and you’ll be on target. In this case it happened to be a vote to block energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs, but it could have been any of a thousand things. You could argue, as Jonathan Chait does, that Republican lawmakers have basically given up on lawmaking altogether, and you wouldn’t be far off. But it’s more than that. They’ve reimagined the lawmaking process as a kind of extended ideological performance art piece, one that no longer has anything to do with laws in the “I’m Just a Bill” sense. It’s not as though they aren’t legislating, it’s just that laws have become beside the point.
Granted, the lawmaking process has always involved a lot of grandstanding and occasional votes taken more to make a statement than to alter the rules under which American society operates. Congress passes plenty of resolutions that do nothing more than express its sentiments, like saluting the patriotism of the East Burp High students who raised money to buy a new flag for their school, or declaring August to be Plantar Fasciitis Awareness Month. But those things always went alongside with actual lawmaking.
We’re now in a situation where the lawmaking process—you know, bills being written, introduced, voted on, that sort of thing—has, in the House at least, been given over almost entirely to this legislative kabuki, where the point of the exercise isn’t passing laws but making statements and taking positions. The current Congress is on pace to be the least productive in history when you measure by actual laws passed.
And it is really all about the House. Whenever you see someone say that “Congress” or “Washington” is stuck in gridlock or can’t get its act together, the underlying truth is almost always that it’s the Republican House gumming things up. There are more than a few crazy Republicans in the Senate, but as a group they’re willing to legislate, and sometimes even compromise with Democrats. Not so in the House. I think this reached its apogee when they took their 37th vote to repeal Obamacare a couple months back, in part because freshman Tea Party members hadn’t had the chance to perform the ritual. “The guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare,” said South Carolina Representative Mick Mulvaney, with a touching compassion for his colleagues. “Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say.” There was a time when members of Congress would want to go to their constituents and tell them about funding they’d obtained for projects in the district or reforms they’d fought for and passed. These days, Republicans in the House know that none of what they vote for with such enthusiasm will ever even be considered in the Senate, much less voted on, passed, and sent to the president for his signature. But they don’t seem to care.
The kicker to this is that it’s only going to get worse, because the GOP is poised to erect a giant wall around the House of Representatives as its last redoubt of national power. As we’ve been discussing, the party is split between those who worry about their prospects in future presidential elections and therefore want to reach out to growing minority populations and soften the GOP’s hard-earned image as a bunch of nativists, and those who not only can’t stand the immigration reform currently on offer but fear only threats from their right in primary campaigns, since they’re in safe Republican districts. Most everyone in Washington now believes that immigration reform is all but dead, which is bad for the party’s next presidential nominee, but perfectly fine with House Republicans.
Although I’m always wary of assuming that the way things are in politics is the way they’ll remain for too long, we could well see an extended period in which a Democratic president is stymied by a Republican House dominated by legislators who couldn’t care less about legislating. It’s almost enough to make you cynical about politics.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 10, 2013
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