“It’s Still Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion”: Republicans Are Fighting For The Future Blackmail
We have two interesting theories today about what’s happening in the House. One is from Neil Irwin, who posits that it’s all about a sunk costs fallacy — Republicans are mistakenly continuing to ask for things they can’t get because that’s the only way to justify what they’ve already given up by following their current strategy. The other theory, well-articulated by Greg Sargent, Jonathan Chait and Danny Vinik, is that Republicans are still fighting for the principle of extortion.
I strongly agree with the latter theory — way back in May, I argued that radical Republicans were fighting over the principle of extortion for the sake of extortion:
[I]t’s not really about Republicans demanding debt reduction and using the best leverage they have available to get it. Nor is it about Republicans demanding tax reform — their other possible demand — and using the best leverage they have to get it.
No, it’s the other way around. The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It shows up all the time. For example, today Speaker John Boehner has pulled a delay of the medical-device tax from his latest attempt to put together a package, because the radicals weren’t happy with it. Yes, they have a plausible reason. But my guess is that Democrats have indicated they really wouldn’t mind eliminating that tax, and so it’s no longer a ransom worth asking; asking for something the Democrats only mildly oppose (or don’t oppose at all) misses the whole point of why they’re doing what they’re doing. “Extortion for the sake of extortion” certainly seems to fit with the wild GOP swings from Obamacare, to spending, to contraception, to who knows next as the next reason for the shutdown and debt limit threat.
The reason all of this matters, still, is because if it’s just a sunk costs error then the costs for Democrats in bailing them out are limited to whatever it is they give up.
However, if it’s extortion, then any perceived success establishes an incentive for future use.
The key, by the way, is perceived success. So it matters a lot whether Republicans believe that they actually are getting something whenever the final deal happens — much more than whether, in some objective sense, they actually did get anything.
It’s hard to read exactly who is thinking what while these things are going on. But if it really is extortion for the sake of extortion, at least for the radicals, then there’s a very strong incentive to Democrats to hang very tough.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
“John Boehner’s Last Stand”: His Hostage Taking Tactics Remain As Dangerous As Ever
The nature of Speaker John Boehner’s final battle with the White House on the budget crisis is now clear: It doesn’t matter what House Republicans win in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and re-opening government, as long as they win something.
Gone is the big talk about “defunding Obamacare.” Gone are the demands for delaying the health law, or delaying the individual mandate, or delaying the medical device tax. The final stand, according to the latest reports, is simply this: remove the health insurance subsidies for members of Congress, some executive branch officials, and some of their staffs. (Those staff members are furious about the potential cut to their incomes, and many have threatened to quit.)
If that seems a paltry prize to win for causing this destructive, embarrassing crisis, that’s because it is. But this fight really has nothing to do with the subsidies. It’s all about not walking away empty handed, about Mr. Boehner persuading his Republican members that they forced President Obama to give something up in exchange for not wreaking havoc on the economy.
And that’s precisely why the president can’t agree to it, even though the impact (for all but Congressional staffers) would be minimal.
For the sake of the rest of his presidency, and the presidents to come, he has to make it clear that no chamber of Congress can back the White House into a corner by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States. Even a small concession, like ending the Congressional subsidies, would betray that principle.
Of course that position is irreconcilable with the hard-right faction of the House that sees the debt ceiling as the only leverage that can turn them into a real political force. But the unprecedented use of that leverage has to be stopped here, even at a terrible cost, because the long-term cost would be so much worse.
Once Senate Republicans and Democrats began cobbling together their own plan, Mr. Boehner could have ended the crisis by standing back and letting momentum for the Senate plan build. Instead, he chose to sabotage it, because he and the Tea Party faction clearly want to use the power of hostage-taking again.
One of the provisions in the House’s latest plan is a demand that the Treasury not use any special measures to prevent default the next time the debt hits the ceiling — a provision, in other words, that would make default an even more likely possibility the next time than it will be on Thursday, when the Treasury runs out of borrowing authority. (The actual default will probably occur later this month.)
Mr. Boehner may hope that the diminished nature of his final demand about Congressional subsidies will embarrass Democrats into approving it, but his tactics are as dangerous as ever.
By: David Firestone, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, October 15, 2013
“A Winning Hand”: Democrats Up The Ante And Push Back Against GOP Tea Party Bullies
A crazy thing is happening in shuttered, dysfunctional Washington: Democrats are pushing back.
This phenomenon is so novel and disorienting that many Republicans in Congress, especially the tea party bullies, seem unable to grasp what’s going on. They keep expecting President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to fold like a cheap suit because, well, such a thing has happened before. I guess it’s understandable that the GOP might have forgotten the difference between bluffing and actually holding a winning hand.
Late last week, Reid began demanding that Republicans not only reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, but that they also make concessions on the draconian, irrational-by-design budget cuts known as sequestration. In political terms, he is demanding that the GOP pay a price for putting the country through all this needless drama.
Suddenly, Republicans who thought it was fine to hold the government and the economy hostage in order to nullify a duly enacted law — the Affordable Care Act — are shocked that Democrats would even suggest tampering with another duly enacted law: the Budget Control Act of 2011, which established the “sequester” cuts.
Was Reid moving the goal posts? Of course he was. That’s what negotiators do when they have the upper hand.
It seemed clear from the beginning that House Republicans had overreached by shutting down the government in an attempt to block the health-insurance reforms popularly known as Obamacare. For one thing, many of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions were already in force. For another, any residual questions about the law had been thoroughly litigated in last year’s election.
Indeed, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday pronounced a devastating verdict: Fifty-three percent of those surveyed blamed Republicans for the shutdown, as opposed to 31 percent who blamed Obama — a worse pounding for the GOP than the party suffered when Newt Gingrich shut down the government during the Clinton administration. A separate Gallup survey showed the Republican Party with an approval rating of just 28 percent, the lowest the firm has ever measured for either party.
Such stunning numbers not only threaten to dash the GOP’s hopes of winning control of the Senate next year but also challenge the party’s ability to hold its majority in the House.
So there’s no question who’s winning and who’s losing. Still, it’s refreshing to see Democrats act accordingly.
The standard pattern since Republicans captured the House in 2010 goes something like this: House Speaker John Boehner makes outrageous demands. Obama negotiates a “compromise” package heavily weighted toward Republican priorities, but Boehner can’t deliver his caucus. Fearful that tea party vandals might burn down the house, Democrats end up agreeing to a short-term deal that gives the GOP much of what it wants.
It is understandable that the activist Republican base might think victory through blackmail is the natural order of things. It’s not. It’s a distortion of American democracy that weakens the nation, and it has to end.
The fact that the GOP controls the House means that its views cannot be ignored. But the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the White House means that Republicans have no right to expect that they will always get their way. This concept of basic fairness is the sort of thing most of us learned in second grade. Apparently, Sen. Ted Cruz was not paying attention.
Before the tea party tantrum that caused the shutdown, Democrats had already agreed to sequester-level government funding of $986 billion — the number that Republicans had insisted on. Because of sequestration, funding will suffer a further $21 billion cut in January. Last week, as the Senate struggled to clean up the mess that the House majority had made, Reid said hold on a minute.
Senate Democrats now want only a brief extension at the sequester level, along with further negotiations that could raise government funding closer to $1.058 trillion, the number they originally sought.
Republicans reacted with shock and horror, most of it feigned. This is the way politics is supposed to work. Obama and Reid are now in a position to win gracefully by compromising on their new spending demands. Republicans could then portray the outcome as something other than a rout — and hope the focus on spending makes the hyper-caffeinated GOP base forget about that whole Obamacare-is-the-devil thing.
This should be a lesson: When you negotiate from strength, you’re not only helping yourself. You’re helping your adversary, too.
BY: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 14, 2013
“Lessons Learned”: Why Giving Republican Bullies A Bloody Nose Isn’t Enough
Now is the time to lance the boil of Republican extremism once and for all.
Since Barack Obama became president, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party have escalated their demands every time he’s caved, using the entire government of the United States as their bargaining chit.
In 2010 he agreed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts through the end of 2012. Were they satisfied? Of course not.
In the summer of 2011, goaded by an influx of Tea Partiers, they demanded huge spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. In response, the President offered an overly-generous $4 trillion “Grand Bargain,” including cuts in Social Security and Medicare and whopping cuts in domestic spending (bringing it to its lowest level as a share of gross domestic product in over half a century).
Were Republicans content? No. When they demanded more, Obama agreed to a Super Committee to find bigger cuts, and if the Super Committee failed, a “sequester” that would automatically and indiscriminately slice everything in the federal budget except Social Security and Medicare.
Not even Obama’s re-election put a damper on their increasing demands. By the end of 2012, they insisted that the Bush tax cuts be permanently extended or the nation would go over the “fiscal cliff.” Once again, Obama caved, agreeing to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for incomes up to $400,000.
Early this year, after the sequester went into effect, Republicans demanded even bigger spending cuts. Obama offered more cuts in Medicare and a “chained CPI” to reduce Social Security payments, in exchange for Republican concessions on taxes.
Refusing the offer, and seemingly delirious with their power to hold the nation hostage, they demanded that the Affordable Care Act be repealed as a condition for funding the government and again raising the debt ceiling.
This time, though, Obama didn’t cave — at least, not yet.
The government is shuttered and the nation is on the verge of defaulting on its debts. But public opinion has turned sharply against the Republican Party. And the GOP’s corporate and Wall Street backers are threatening to de-fund it.
Suddenly the Republicans are acting like the school-yard bully who terrorized the playground but finally got punched in the face. They’re in shock. They’re humiliated. They’re trying to come up with ways of saving face.
With bloodied nose, House Republicans are running home. They’ve abruptly turned negotiations over to their Senate colleagues.
And just as suddenly, their demand to repeal or delay the Affordable Care Act has vanished. (An email from the group Tea Party Express says: “Are you like us wondering where the fight against Obamacare went?”) At a lunch meeting in the Capitol, Senator John McCain asked a roomful of Republican senators if they still believed it was possible to reverse parts of the program. According to someone briefed on the meeting, no one raised a hand — not even Ted Cruz.
It appears that negotiations over the federal budget deficit are about to begin once again, and presumably Senate Republicans will insist that Obama and the Democrats give way on taxes and spending in exchange for reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling for at least another year.
But keeping the government running and paying the nation’s bills should never have been bargaining chits in the first place, and the President and Democrats shouldn’t begin to negotiate over future budgets until they’re taken off the table.
The question is how thoroughly President Obama has learned that extortionist demands escalate if you give in to them.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, October 12, 2013
“The Mythical Republican Moderates”: Taking Visibly Moderate Stands While Quietly Siding With Their Party
Until recently, moderate Republicans had succeeded in flying under the radar during the shutdown crisis. Initially, journalists focused on Speaker John Boehner. Journalists have a penchant to personalize, and Boehner is the most prominent Republican. Some commentators described the current impasse as a result of Boehner’s inadequacies. They offered a Not-So-Great Man theory of history.
Political scientists would be skeptical. In a classic study, Joseph Cooper and David Brady argued that effective leadership style among House speakers is a function of the preferences in their party caucuses. A cohesive party will allow a speaker to exercise a lot of authority. A divided one will reduce the most talented speaker to the role of a broker among factions.
More insightful analyses focused less on Boehner’s alleged failings than on a few dozen “Tea Party” representatives in the House Republican Conference. This is a better reading of the situation than a narrow focus on Boehner, but it still leaves out a lot. Boehner’s adherence to “the Hastert Rule” (bringing forward only bills favored by a majority of the majority party) does not explain how a few dozen Tea Party legislators can determine party policy. In fact, the current crisis is not simply a result of the intransigence of a small number of Republicans on the fringe of their party any more than it is a simple product of Boehner’s leadership style. A much larger group of GOP representatives, not identified as Tea Partiers, are loath to challenge that faction.
Now journalists’ attention is finally turning to House GOP moderates. For several days, more than two dozen House Republicans have expressed support for a “clean CR,” or continuing resolution without provisions relating to the Affordable Care Act which President Obama and congressional Democrats would accept and which could end the shutdown.
On paper, these moderate Republicans combined with the House Democrats control enough votes to pass such a resolution. Then why doesn’t it happen? Saying Boehner won’t bring up the resolution that moderates claim to support leaves out the fact that these same moderates refuse to sign a “discharge petition” that could bring a continuing resolution to the floor.
Monkey Cage congressional procedure maven Sarah Binder has described the challenges of using the discharge petition procedure in a series of posts. Yet as Josh Barro notes, it’s simply not the case that these Republicans have explored all the procedural options and taken all opportunities to force an end to the shutdown. They have voted against Democratic “motions to recommit” on GOP “mini-bills” that would reopen the government. Effective tactics might involve voting down a rule, or rejecting a ruling of the chair, steps that would be considered quite radical within the partisan context.
And that’s the point, really. Too narrow a focus on rules obscures a more profound political reality; GOP moderates have been unwilling to break from their party on the shutdown issue. In general, Congressional moderates are more closely aligned to their parties than is understood. Often their defections from party ranks occur when it is clear that their party does not need their votes to prevail on a given issue. Moderates frequently represent constituencies in which their parties are not very popular. This gives them a political incentive to create the impression of a certain distance between themselves and their party. Leadership understands this and does not punish legislators for such behavior.
Congressional scholars, including my colleague Frances Lee and Sean Theriault, have shown that legislators are much more likely to stick with their party on “procedural votes” like rules in the House and cloture in the Senate than on up-or-down or “final passage” votes. Procedural votes and discharge petition signatures are harder for voters to understand than final passage votes, but they determine whether a bill ever reaches the final passage stage. For members who want to stay “on the team” the solution is clear: Criticize your party’s extremists, pay lip service to bipartisanship and vote for the eventual compromise when the leadership decides to bring it to the floor. But do not force the leader’s hand or undermine his position.
Why would members engage in this seemingly devious behavior? There are a few reasons. One factor is fear. Even moderates who represent districts in which they see no gain in being identified with the Tea Party brand still fear primary challengers. Recall that Rep. Mike Castle, who had been in office for decades, lost his primary to an opponent who later had to spend the general election denying she was a witch — and not in Utah or in Mississippi, but in Delaware, a state that had voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections. Similarly, the party switch of the late Arlen Specter was based on an understanding that he would lose the impending Republican Senate primary in purple Pennsylvania. Steve Lonergan, the GOP’s current Senate candidate against Cory Booker in deep blue New Jersey, is a Tea Party ally.
In short, GOP primary voters are perfectly capable of nominating Tea Party or other very conservative candidates and unseating more moderate incumbents, even in blue states, and Republican representatives know this. It is unlikely that most of them would lose renomination simply because they broke from their party on the shutdown issue, but it would be a very high-profile defection that would enrage many conservatives, and elected officials are risk-averse.
Secondly, there is substantial pressure within Congress not to break ranks. Some of this is psychological. Members of Congress spend less time mingling across party lines than they used to and “us vs. them” feelings are intense. There is also some price to pay for going against the party leadership. For example, at the end of the last Congress, some Republicans who had bucked the leadership once too often lost committee assignments.
Finally, we should take far more seriously the under-discussed possibility raised by journalists like Matthew Yglesias and Congress scholars like Robert Van Houweling that some of these legislators are not as moderate as they pretend. Most elected officials were once party activists, a group that is much more polarized than the general public. Moderate Republicans who refuse to sign a discharge petition may not be Tea Partiers in their hearts of hearts, but it is likely that deep down they are more conservative than most of their constituents. Taking visibly moderate stands while quietly siding with their party on “procedural matters” that insure that their moderation will not have any impact allows these legislators to reconcile their personal policy preferences with their electoral concerns. Of course, if these tactics were better understood by the voters and the media that informs them, they would be much less effective.
By: David Karol, The Washington Post, The Monkey Cage, October 8, 2013
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