“The Anti-Establishment Establishment”: In The GOP, The “Kids” Have Stopped Listening And The “Adults” Are No Longer In Control
To those of us who are perpetually skeptical of the alleged power of the incredibly “adult” and deeply “responsible” Republican Establishment to keep the “constitutional conservatives” in line, a Timothy Carney piece in the Washington Examiner earlier this week was especially interesting. It argued that the ability of said Establishment to kick ass and take names in Congress was being sharply eroded by the loss of a monopoly over money and jobs in Washington:
Cold cash, together with control of institutions, is what makes the Establishment the Establishment. But in the current Republican civil war, the insurgents have secured their own money pipelines, and they control their own institutions – which means the GOP leadership and its allies in the business lobby have a hard fight in front of them.
The firing and hiring of conservative staffer Paul Teller makes it clear that the anti-establishment has built its own establishment.
Teller was a House staffer for more than a decade, and was longtime executive director of the conservative Republican Study Committee. The RSC always exerted a rightward pull on party leadership, but it is nonetheless a subsidiary of the party.
After the 2012 election, the Republican Establishment captured the RSC, in effect, by getting Congressman Steve Scalise elected chairman. Scalise is a conservative, but he is also a close ally of the party leadership – much more so than his predecessors Jim Jordan and Tom Price. Scalise immediately swept out most of the RSC staff.
Last month, Teller was accused of working with outside groups such as Heritage Action to whip RSC members – and Scalise showed Teller the door.
In the old days, this might have been a disaster for Teller. He had lost his job and landed on the wrong side of the party leadership. Anyone who picked up Teller would be spitting in the eye of the Establishment. But this week, Sen. Ted Cruz announced he had hired Teller as deputy chief of staff.
Carney goes on to discuss the rapid rise of alternative sources for campaign money like the Club for Growth and Super-PACs, and the conquest of one important Beltway institution, the Heritage Foundation, by people openly hostile to The Establishment.
Now when you add in the already virtually complete control by hard-core conservatives of basic formulations of GOP ideology and messaging (the best example remains Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, an insanely radical piece of fiscal flimflammery that a long line of Republicans, from Mitt Romney on down, lined up to sign in 2011 and 2012) and the disproportionate strength of conservative activists in the presidential nominating process, it’s increasingly clear the “adults” are not necessarily in control. Indeed, like parents who try to behave like a kid to maintain some influence with their kids, Establishment folk are forever conceding territory to the “activists” they privately call crazy people. And the loss of its monopoly over jobs and money is like a parent’s loss of a teenager’s car keys and allowance. At some point, “the kids” just stop listening.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 16, 2014
“Weight Loss, No Exercise”: Four Years Later, The Second Half Of The Republican “Repeal And Replace” Plan
At his press conference late last week, President Obama chided congressional Republicans for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act several dozen times without offering a credible alternative. “They used to say they had a replacement,” he told reporters. “That never actually arrived, right? I mean, I’ve been hearing about this whole replacement thing for two years — now I just don’t hear about it, because basically they don’t have an agenda to provide health insurance to people at affordable rates.”
Au contraire, Republicans responded.
The 173-member strong Republican Study Committee is on track to roll out legislation this fall that would replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act with a comprehensive alternative, Chairman Steve Scalise told CQ Roll Call on Thursday.
Though it wouldn’t be the first Obamacare repeal-and-replace proposal floated by individual GOP lawmakers in either chamber of Congress, the RSC bill is one that could at least gain traction on the House floor, given the conservative group’s size and influence.
Oh good, it only took four years for House Republicans to come up with a health care plan they like.
So, what’s in it? No one outside the Republican Study Committee actually knows, and even the RSC isn’t altogether sure since the plan isn’t finished. But Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the RSC, insists some of the popular provisions in “Obamacare” will remain intact, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
“We address that to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be discriminated against,” he told Roll Call. But, he promised the bill would not “put in place mandates that increase the costs of health care and push people out of the insurance that they like,” Scalise said.
In related news, the Republican Study Committee has a weight-loss plan in which everyone eats all the deserts they want and never exercises.
Look, it’s extremely difficult to craft a health care system that protects people with pre-existing conditions while eliminating mandates, scrapping industry regulations, and keeping costs down. Indeed, it’s why Republicans came up with mandates in the first place — the mandates were seen as the lynchpin that made their larger reform efforts work.
Indeed, it’s partly why Democrats used to push so hard to see the GOP alternative. Dems assumed, correctly, that once Republicans got past their talking points and chest-thumping, they’d see that actually solving the problem required provisions that some folks wouldn’t like.
But let’s not pre-judge, right? Maybe the right-wing members of the Republican Study Committee have figured out a creative way to help those who can’t afford coverage and protect those with pre-existing conditions and reduce health care costs and cut the costs for prescription medication and cover preventive care and cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars — just like the Affordable Care Act does. What’s more, maybe they’ll do all of this without raising taxes and/or including elements in the plan that are unpopular.
I seriously doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.
What seems more likely to me, though, is that the Republican Study Committee will eventually finish and unveil their “Obamacare” alternative and invite side-by-side comparisons between the two approaches — which will in turn make the Affordable Care Act look even better.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
“Are These People On Drugs”: House GOP Apparently Wants To Be Even More Unpopular Than It Already Is
With the July 4 holiday behind them, House members might be expected to take up work on the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate. But they won’t. They’re looking at piecemeal reforms that will be heavier on border enforcement than the Senate bill – which doubled the number of border control agents, after the border control budget already doubled in size in the last decade — and even nuttier ideas.
Instead the House GOP is apparently making big plans for another debt ceiling hostage-taking, and this time they’ve got a strategy to demand big budget cuts from President Obama and the Democrats. According to the National Journal, House leaders are working on a “menu” of budget-slashing offers to Obama in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling for a short, medium or long period of time. Their template is Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – the budget so unjust and biased against the poor that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took time out from restricting women’s rights to criticize the Ryan plan.
House members reluctantly voted to raise the debt ceiling in January promising to come back with a strengthened hand on behalf of budget cuts next time around (which will probably be the end of this year). So House Speaker John Boehner is reportedly meeting with Ryan and other conservatives like Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who boasted about their talks to the National Journal. The key points:
For a long-term deal, one that gives Treasury borrowing authority for three-and-a-half years, Obama would have to agree to premium support. The plan to privatize Medicare, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Ryan budget, is the holy grail for conservatives who say major deficit-reduction can only be achieved by making this type of cut to mandatory spending. “If the president wants to go big, there’s a big idea,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
For a medium-sized increase in the debt-limit, Republicans want Obama to agree to cut spending in the SNAP food stamp program, block-grant Medicaid, or tinker with chained CPI.
For a smaller increase, there is talk of means-testing Social Security, for example, or ending certain agricultural subsidies.
…Even at the smallest end of the spectrum — another months-long extension of debt-limit — there is talk of pushing back the eligibility age for Social Security by an equal number of months.
Are these people on drugs? These are wildly unpopular ideas that have no chance of passing the Senate. (“Republicans are eager to look like they are giving the White House plenty of options, convinced that it is in their interest to appear engaged and flexible at the negotiating table,” the NJ’s Tim Alberta reports, apparently unironically.) Unfortunately, the president himself has come out behind the chained CPI, but given the enormousness of House GOP demands and delusion, he’s unlikely to get much for that concession. So one cheer for House GOP delusion.
Scalise seems to be the main source for the National Journal story, and you can imagine other members wincing at his clueless bluster. Not surprisingly, Scalise starred in another story today about the Obama team’s belief it will see some congressional movement on both immigration reform and the economy this summer. Not so fast, Scalise told the Washington Post: “We’re going to continue to be very aggressive in serving as a check and balance against the Obama administration. That’s what the country said in November. We’re very far apart.”
It’s interesting to note that Paul Ryan is key to these debt-ceiling strategy talks, according to the National Journal, when he’s also supposed to be key to comprehensive immigration reform. To his credit, Ryan has come out for something along the lines of the Senate bill, but the question is whether he’ll expend any political capital getting other members to join him. So far, he hasn’t. It looks like another round of debt-ceiling hostage taking is a higher priority for him.
Ironically, the fact that the deficit is falling faster than at any time since World War II is helping drive the House GOP’s extremism – they have to go for big, slashing cuts, because the deficit is already shrinking. Here’s hoping the extremism of the House GOP’s opening salvo will remind the Obama administration not to waste its time on another attempt at a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 8, 2013
“Unbelievably Dangerous And Blisteringly Stupid”: Republicans Plan To Use The Debt Limit, Yes, As “Leverage”
Americans have seen quite a few congressionally imposed crisis in recent months, from the so-called “fiscal cliff,” to the sequestration cuts that are already hurting the country as planned, to threats of government shutdowns. But there’s still one more storm on the horizon, which happens to be the easiest one to deal with and the one that has the potential to do the most damage.
I’m referring to the next debt-ceiling increase — or for those who watch The Rachel Maddow Show closely, Congressional Storm Gertrude.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) sat down with Politico this week and said, “Let’s use the debt limit, yes, as leverage.” As a practical matter, what he meant was, congressional Republicans should threaten to hurt Americans on purpose unless President Obama agrees to slash public investments. Because the White House won’t want such a catastrophe, Republicans will have “leverage” that Portman wants to see his party “use.”
The Ohio Republican isn’t the only one thinking this way.
House leaders are planning to bring a debt ceiling “prioritization” bill to the House floor before the end of April, bringing the divisive issue to the forefront ahead of the government hitting the ceiling sometime this summer.
The legislation tries to mitigate the damage of the government reaching the debt limit in the event that negotiations to raise it fail. But Democrats have panned the idea, meaning it is unlikely to be taken up by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The bill, introduced by Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, says the government must pay the interest and principal of its debts with incoming tax revenue before any other obligations.
“It removes default as an option,” said Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee.
Well, not exactly. “Default” is a tricky thing, a fact House Republicans may not fully appreciate.
In effect, here’s what this proposal is all about: Republicans are preparing to hold the debt ceiling hostage — again — and are preparing for what happens if Democrats fail to pay the ransom and GOP lawmakers are forced to shoot the hostage.
At that point, because Congress will have blocked the United States’ ability to borrow the funds necessary to meet our legal obligations, these House Republicans are looking to prioritize who’ll get paid first after the debt ceiling is breached. Under the right-wing vision, the nation will start by focusing on our debt payments, paying them in full, and then using whatever money is left over to pay for literally everything else.
And while that might prevent part of a potential default, it would leave open the possibility of another — the United States has passed laws obligating the government to pay for plenty of other things, and we’d almost certainly have to default on those obligations unless the debt ceiling is raised as it always has been.
The fact that House Republicans find this confusing is not at all reassuring.
But even if we put that aside, the fact that this proposal exists at all is a little insane, since it intends to prepare for congressional Republicans to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States, on purpose, in just a few months, for the first time in American history. In other words, while lawmakers should be working on a plan to avert an easily avoidable crisis, House Republicans have decided to spend time working on a plan on what the government should do when the easily avoidable crisis hits.
This is unbelievably dangerous, and so blisteringly stupid that it’s almost hard to believe a group of American elected officials would be willing to think this way. And yet, here we are.
What remains unclear, however, is how much of the bluster and chest-thumping is sincere. Congressional Republicans have been caught bluffing on this issue before, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) conceded just last month, “I’m not going to risk the full faith and credit of the federal government.”
If that’s true, the House GOP’s antics are full of sound and fury signifying nothing. If Boehner wasn’t telling the truth, Americans have cause for alarm, since it’s their economy and world standing Republicans are threatening to deliberately destroy.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 12, 2013
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