“Bursting At The Seams”: No Tent Is Big Enough For The GOP’s Crazy Wing
The problem with a big tent is that it takes just a couple of people inside to ruin everyone’s afternoon by misbehaving, yelling or refusing the bathe ahead of time. And that is the very problem the Republican party is facing as it seeks to placate the crazy wing of the party while trying to present a more serious and dignified conservative front.
Both major parties have their share of malcontents and blowhards. Both have people who make outrageous comments or comparisons to get attention (Democrat Alan Grayson recently compared the tea party movement to the Ku Klux Klan, which seems an especially provocative comment given that we have an African-American president who might not see the tea party’s rogue actions as being quite on the level of lynching and hanging black men).
But when that element starts to define the party, then it’s trouble.
The people who think not raising the debt ceiling will not cause a default, or that a default on the nation’s debt would not create a massive global economic problem are not conservatives. Nor do they reflect anything in the Republican Party platform. They are either ill-informed about basic economics or are simply ready to win a war by dropping the fiscal equivalent of an atomic bomb. There is nothing conservative about that, and it’s an insult to the genuine conservatives on the Hill to characterize it as such.
Then we have folks like Don Yelton, the (now former) precinct chair of Buncombe County in North Carolina. Yelton gave an interview for The Daily Show in which he defended North Carolina’s new voter ID law – not because it won’t disenfranchise voters, Yelton suggested, but because he simply doesn’t care about the people who might not be able to vote. He told the Comedy Central show:
The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids too lazy to get up off their bohonkas and go get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.
The North Carolina GOP, to its credit, asked for Yelton to step down, calling his comments “completely inappropriate and highly offensive.” Yelton did resign.
The GOP can’t ask tea party members to step down (nor should it – it’s up to the voters who gets elected to office). But the party can make it clear that racism or serial intransigence or failure to recognize economic reality are not conservative values. No tent needs to be big enough for people like Yelton.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 25, 2013
“The Republicans’ Food Stamp Fraud”: Telling Poor Children The Fourth Box Of Macaroni And Cheese Is Excessive Is Indecent
What’s the single worst thing the Obama-era Republicans have done? Tough one, I know.
But spare me a moment here—plus a thousand words down the page—and I think maybe you’ll agree with me that the single worst thing the Obama-era Republicans have done is try to push through a $40 billion cut to the food-stamps program. It’s just unspeakably cruel. They usually say publicly that it’s about saving money. But sometimes someone—one congressman in particular—lets slip the real reason: They want to punish poor people. The farm bill, which includes the food-stamp program, goes to conference committee next week. That’s where, the cliché has it, the two sides are supposed to “iron out their differences.” The only thing the Democrats on this committee should do with an iron is run it across the Republicans’ scowling faces.
The basic facts on the program. Its size fluctuates with the economy—when more people are working, the number of those on food stamps goes down. This, of course, isn’t one of those times. So right now the SNAP program, as it’s called, is serving nearly 48 million people in 23 million households. The average monthly individual benefit is $133, or about $4.50 a day. In 2011, 45 percent of recipients were children. Forty-one percent live in households where at least one person works. More than 900,000 are veterans. Large numbers are elderly or disabled or both.
It’s costing about $80 billion a year. Senate Democrats proposed a cut to the program. A small cut, but a cut all the same: $4 billion over 10 years. The Republicans in the House sought a cut of $20.5 billion over 10 years. But then the farm bill failed to pass. Remember that? When John Boehner didn’t have enough votes to pass his own bill? After that debacle, the House took the farm bill and split it into two parts—the subsidies for the large growers of rice and cotton and so forth, and the food-stamp program. Two separate bills. And this time, Eric Cantor doubled the cut: $40 billion over 10 years. This number, if it became law, would boot 3.8 million people—presumably, nearly half of them children—off the program in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
These would come on top of cuts to the program that kick in Nov. 1. The 2009 stimulus bill included extra food-stamp money because unemployment was so high after the financial meltdown that legislators knew more people would be applying for SNAP assistance. So there was a “stimulus bump” in food-stamp spending, but that is now ending. A family of four would see a $46 cut each month.
The proposed GOP cut is such a piddling amount of money, in terms of the whole federal budget and especially when spread out over 10 years. But nearly half of it is quite literally taking food out of the mouths of children. What’s the point? The point really is that Tea Party Republicans think these people don’t deserve the help. That’s some fascinating logic. The economy melts down because of something a bunch of crooked bankers do. The people at the bottom quarter of the economy, who’ve been getting jobbed for 30 years anyway and who always suffer the most in a downturn, start getting laid off in huge numbers. They have children to feed. Probably with no small amount of shame, they go in and sign up for food stamps.
And what do they get? Lectures about being lazy. You may have seen the now-infamous video of Tennessee Congressman Steve Fincher, who told a crowd over the summer that “the Bible says ‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat.’” This while Fincher, a cotton farmer, has enjoyed $3.5 million in federal farm subsidies. This year’s House bill ends “direct payments” to farmers whether they grow any crops or not—except for one kind: cotton farmers.
Religious bloggers have noted that Fincher got his theology wrong and that the relevant passage, from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, wasn’t remotely about punishing people too lazy to work. It was about punishing people who’d stopped working because they thought Jesus was returning any day now. So: mean bastard, hypocrite, and Scripture-mangling idiot to boot. Nice trifecta.
The other argument one sometimes hears concerns the dreadful curse of food-stamp fraud. The actual rate of food-stamp fraud—people selling their coupons for cash—is 1.3 percent, but this of course doesn’t prevent the right from finding a couple of garish anecdotes and making it seem as if they’re the norm. Voter fraud, Medicaid fraud, food-stamp fraud…Somehow, in Republican America, only poor people and blacks commit fraud.
This cut is the fraud, because it’s not really about fraud or austerity. It’s entirely about punishing the alleged 47 percent. The bottom half or third of the alleged 47 percent. It’s absolutely appalling. These folks have done a lot of miserable things in the past four years. But this—the morality of this is so repulsively backward, the indecency so operatically and ostentatiously broadcast, I think it takes the gold going away.
The conference process starts next Wednesday and is going to take maybe a few months. Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has taken the lead on this issue and has been terrific. Ditto Pat Leahy. Max Baucus, I’m told, is a good get to go a little wobbly (surprise). But this is one where the Democrats have to say this won’t stand. It’s one thing to shut down the government for two weeks and take quixotic stabs at Obamacare. Telling poor children that that fourth box of macaroni and cheese is excessive is something very different.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 26, 2013
“GOP Roots For Failure”: With Disturbing Frequency, Republicans Wish For Disaster On “The American People”
In theory, lawmakers should hope that government programs work well, and if they don’t, work to fix them. Elected representatives should hope that government agencies carry out their missions smoothly, and if something goes wrong, try to figure out what happened to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Obviously that’s not how things work in the United States, where one of the two parties doesn’t actually believe in government. Republicans want to shrink government until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub! They think there’s nothing scarier than the prospect of a government employee trying to help! With beliefs like those, it’s perhaps not surprising that — with disturbing frequency — they root for failure in order to score points.
Examples abound. After the attack in Benghazi, G.O.P. lawmakers were far more interested in laying blame and making the Obama administration look bad than in improving security for diplomats. In the midst of the I.R.S. scandal — which turned out not to be much of a scandal at all — Republicans seemed positively gleeful.
Which brings me to today’s House hearing on the bumpy rollout of the federal health insurance marketplace.
The rollout is bumpy, and inexcusably so. It appears that the federal exchange Web site wasn’t fully tested until two weeks before it opened. As today’s Times story put it, the online health insurance marketplace “is still limping along after three weeks.”
Lawmakers can and should hold the administration to account. But given that House Republicans have done everything in their power to try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act — including shutting down the entire government — it’s understandable that House Democrats expressed suspicion about their motives.
“I wish I could believe that this hearing is above board, but it’s not,” said Representative Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey. “The Republicans don’t have clean hands coming here. Their effort is obviously not to make this better, but to use the website glitches as an excuse to defund or repeal Obamacare.”
Taking the same line, Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, said: “We have already documented a record of Republicans attempting to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.” He added, “If we want this law to work, we have to make this right; we’ve got to fix it. Not what the Republicans are trying to do: nix it and repeal it.”
Although some Republicans asked valid and thoughtful questions of the private contractors who’d come to testify, others seemed to prove Mr. Pallone and Mr. Waxman right.
Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, took the opportunity to say he would seek a delay in the individual mandate—exactly what Republicans wanted before there was any word of trouble with the online exchanges. Healthcare.gov is “nothing less than an unmitigated disaster,” Mr. Pitts said. He also wondered aloud if the people behind it were “simply incompetent” or else “lying to the American people.”
“If the Web site glitches are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, “it’s only a matter of time before the law sinks and takes with it those Democrats who wrote it, voted for it and are proud of it.”
Breaking that down: If the glitches indicate deep problems, then health care reform will fall apart, and Republicans will reap the benefits in the next election. In other words, disaster would be good for his party.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Editors Blog, The New York Times, October 24, 2013
“We Got ‘Em Now”: No, Healthcare.gov’s Problems Will Not Offer The GOP Political Deliverance
Today marks the beginning of what will surely be a series of hearings in Congress at which members will fulminate and shake their fists at various people who had responsibility for creating Healthcare.gov. It’s quite something to see some congressman who’s still struggling to figure out how to work the Blackberry his staff gave him asking questions about beta testing and error logs and a bunch of other stuff he doesn’t begin to understand. But maybe the weirdest thing is the feeling one gets from the GOP over the last few days, which can be summarized as, “We got ’em now!” They seem to believe that the website problems are going to provide the deliverance they’ve been waiting for after the political disaster of the government shutdown.
Here’s a little prediction: Feigned Republican outrage over the ACA web site is going to be just as effective in reversing the GOP’s current fortunes as feigned Republican outrage over Benghazi was in undoing Barack Obama’s re-election bid.
Nevertheless, they’ve got a new spring in their step, as The New York Times reports today. “If the Web site glitches are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Representative Greg Walden, who as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee is responsible for making sure his party holds the House in 2014, “it’s only a matter of time before the law sinks and takes with it those Democrats who wrote it, voted for it and are proud of it.” All they have to do is sit back and wait for Obamacare to implode, then reap the political benefits.
I wouldn’t get too excited if I were them. First of all, if you’re arguing about why the website isn’t working, you’ve implicitly accepted the premise that the website ought to work, so people can use it and get insurance. Which is quite different from arguing, as some Republicans have, that people who are now uninsured just shouldn’t bother getting insurance at all. When you stand before the cameras to shout, “I will not rest until these problems are fixed and Obamacare works properly!” and you then turn around and say, “I will not rest until Obamacare is destroyed!”, you’re not exactly convincing the voting public that you’re the one they want running things.
Furthermore, as Greg Sargent reminds us, “when it comes to supplying genuine oversight, previous House GOP probes — into Benghazi and the IRS scandal – devolved into circus stunts. Those investigations got knocked off kilter by lurid and fanciful charges that seemed directed at a hard right audience that remains firmly in the grip of the conservative closed information feedback loop.” In today’s Republican party, efforts at embarrassing the Obama administration quickly get taken over by the the party’s tin foil hat brigade, and even the sane ones end up playing to Sean Hannity’s audience instead of to the country as a whole.
If you’re a Republican member of Congress, this is coming at a critical time, because it’s around now when your potential primary opponents are deciding whether they want to run against you in next year’s election. That gives you an incentive to prove to the folks back home that you’re as conservative as the nuttiest Tea Partier. It isn’t hard to do, really—all that’s necessary is to go on television and tell the Fox News host that you’re deeply concerned that Healthcare.gov was intentionally made to work improperly as a pretext for the socialist Obama administration to collect all our DNA to facilitate herding us into FEMA concentration camps (or something like that). Which helps make your primary challenge less likely, but doesn’t serve the party’s larger purpose of convincing the American public that the GOP is not, in fact, a party of extremists who don’t care about governing.
Hearings like these seldom produce any useful information, but if they increase the pressure on the administration to get things fixed quickly, then that’s all to the good. But if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t get too excited about what they’re going to do for my party.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editro, The American Prospect, October 24, 2013
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