“An Election Do-Over?”: Congress Thinks Elections Don’t Matter if They Don’t Like The Outcome
The problem for many years in Washington was that lawmakers were always looking to the next election, holding votes meant to burnish their own conservative or liberal credentials or set their opponents up for an attack ad based on that vote. That was an unproductive approach, but it seems downright quaint compared to now, when lawmakers are still fighting the last three elections.
Democrats note that their candidate won the 2008 election, and achieved an agenda – including the health care law – as a result of that win and the wins of Democrats in Congress. Republicans counter that voters overwhelmingly expressed their disgust with the law in 2010, electing scores of new Republicans to Congress and giving the GOP control of the House. Democrats say that voters had a definitive opportunity in 2012 to undo Obamacare, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform of doing just that. Not only was Romney defeated, but Democrats picked up seats in both the House and Senate.
Elections have consequences, as Obamacare foe John McCain reminded his colleagues recently. But too many lawmakers seem to think that elections are meaningless if they don’t like the result.
The standoff has resulted in a whole new definition of the word “compromise” on Capitol Hill. It was bad enough when the idea of compromise became equivalent to capitulation. That made it nearly impossible to get an agreement on anything, with lawmakers in both parties declaring to constituents that they will “fight” for them – meaning they wouldn’t accept the concerns or needs of any other district. But now, “compromise” has been expanded to re-open settled matters. This was true when Democrats sought (though with much less ferocity than the GOP has displayed with Obamacare) to vitiate the Bush tax cuts for upper-income people before the law’s expiration date. And Republicans are doing it now with Obamacare.
If lawmakers want to undo settled law and free and fair elections, why stop at legislation? Why don’t the Republicans say, OK, we’ll keep the government running, but only if President Obama and the entire cabinet resign. Then they can offer a “compromise” under which they’ll accept the early departures of merely Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
And maybe Democrats could say, sure, we’ll delay Obamacare, but only if every single tea party-affiliated member of Congress resigns immediately, and pledges never to get involved in politics or public policy again. Then, they could “compromise” by accepting the resignations of only the most vociferous of the GOP’s right wing. If you’re going to undo an election, after all, why not go big?
Sports teams and armies have operated under the idea that you fight the battle with the people and the tools you have at that moment. Washington could do the same.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2013
“James Madison For Dummies”: An Obstructionist, Compromised Reputation Among The GOP
The effort to defund Obamacare, culminating in Sen. Ted Cruz’s marathon speech on the Senate floor, has been symbolic in ways its sponsors did not intend.
This, in the end, was the strategy: For procedural reasons, senators needed to vote against a House spending bill defunding Obamacare — in order to force a government shutdown, in order to cut off federal spending unrelated to Obamacare, in order to trigger a wave of public revulsion against Obamacare, in order to force President Obama to trade away his signature legislative accomplishment. And any elected Republican, by the way, who questions the practicality of this approach is a quisling.
It is the fullest expression (so far) of the view of leadership held by the new, anti-establishment conservative establishment: Exploit a legitimate populist cause to demand a counterproductive tactic in an insufferable tone, then use the inevitable failure to discredit opponents in an intra-party struggle. More Pickett’s charges, please. They are emotionally satisfying (and good for fundraising). And the carnage may produce new generals, who are more favorable to future Pickett’s charges.
In the process, the GOP is made to look unserious and incapable of governing. But that is beside the point. The advocates of defunding have bigger ideological fish to fry. They argue that, over the decades, Republican compromisers have been complicit in producing a federal government so overgrown that our constitutional order has collapsed beneath it. “I don’t think what Washington needs,” argues Cruz, “is more compromise.”
In this case, the evidence of GOP compromise is not the acceptance of Obamacare. It is insufficient enthusiasm for an absurd procedural maneuver. But never mind. The real target is the idea of compromise itself, along with all who deal, settle or blink.
In the middle of this unfolding Republican debate comes a timely National Affairs article by Jonathan Rauch. It is titled “Rescuing Compromise,” but it might well have been called “James Madison for Dummies.”
Rauch argues that Madison had two purposes in mind as he designed the Constitution. The first was to set faction against faction as a brake on change and ambition — a role that tea-party leaders have fully embraced. Madison’s second purpose, however, was “to build constant adjustment into the system itself, by requiring constant negotiation among shifting constellations of actors.”
Following the Articles of Confederation, America’s founders wanted a more energetic government. But they made action contingent upon bargaining among the branches of government and within them. “Compromise, then, is not merely a necessary evil,” argues Rauch, “it is a positive good, a balance wheel that keeps government moving forward instead of toppling.”
Compromise, of course, can have good or bad outcomes. But an ideological opposition to the idea of compromise removes an essential cog in the machinery of the constitutional order. “At the end of the day,” says Rauch, “the Madisonian framework asks not that participants like compromising but that they do it — and, above all, that they recognize the legitimacy of a system that makes them do it.”
We are seeing that an anti-compromise ideology can make for bad politics. In our system, Obamacare will not be overturned by one house of Congress. A tea-party shutdown strategy — if implemented — would make securing the other house and the presidency less likely for Republicans. And the political energy consumed by Cruz and crew has not been available to promote incremental limits on Obamacare that might have aided GOP political prospects.
But the problems with this view run deeper. A belief that compromise is always favorable to liberalism is historically ill-informed. Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform were the results of bipartisan compromise. So were Clinton’s four budgets that kept federal spending below 20 percent of GDP. And addressing the long-term debt crisis — really a health entitlement crisis — will not be possible without a series of difficult political compromises on benefit restructuring and revenues.
It is a revealing irony that the harshest critics of compromise should call themselves constitutional conservatives. The Constitution itself resulted from an extraordinary series of compromises. And it created the system of government that presupposes the same spirit. “Compromise,” says Rauch, “is the most essential principle of our constitutional system. Those who hammer out painful deals perform the hardest and, often, highest work of politics; they deserve, in general, respect for their willingness to constructively advance their ideals, not condemnation for treachery.”
But such condemnation, it seems, is an easier path to attention.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 27, 2013
“In A State Of Classic Denial”: The GOP Leadership Has Become Completely Delusional
You have to wonder if the GOP leadership has begun to lose touch with political reality.
They are laying out a series of demands that Democrats must meet in order to avoid a shutdown of the government — or an economic disaster that would result if the government defaults on its debts and refuses to pay financial obligations. Everyone acknowledges that either of these events would have dire consequences for the entire country and its economy.
Why do they believe that Democrats have a greater self-interest in avoiding these dire consequences than they do, when they themselves will be blamed? That makes no political sense.
And there is little question they will be blamed. The polling has made it clear for some time that most Americans will blame the GOP if either of these catastrophes ensue — and the focus of that blame will shift to the Republicans more and more as the days pass.
From a purely political point of view, it’s as if your opponent in a war threatens that he will blow his own head off if you do not surrender. What?
Maybe they assume that Democrats care more about the economy of the United States, the jobs of their fellow Americans and the availability of public services than they do — but that is not a message you’d think they would want to send to the voters.
And they are forgetting something else. The political situation has fundamentally changed since the last debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.
In 2011, the Tea Party leadership of the GOP was coming off a big win in the 2010 mid-terms. Last year their positions were once again tested in the General Election, and they were rejected by the voters.
Second, in 2011 President Obama could ill afford a government default that could have destroyed the momentum of the fragile recovery a year before his re-election. Next year the voters will not be deciding whether to re-elect President Obama. They will be deciding who they elect to Congress.
Do the Republicans really want to be held responsible for another financial calamity when it is their turn to face the voters? In fact, many observers believe that such a development would create exactly the kind of wave that could wipe out their already fragile majority in the House and dash their best hope in the foreseeable future to take back the Senate.
This increasing lack of connection to political reality may result in part from classic denial. They are unwilling to accept that their extremist ideological views are massively unpopular with an increasingly progressive electorate.
Last election they simply refused to believe that all of those Hispanics, African Americans, women and young people would come to the polls. Even their pollsters refused to believe that the electorate was changing. They were actually stunned that they lost.
They continue to refuse to believe the fact that with every passing year, the electorate is less and less sympathetic to their extremist views. Polls show that Millenial voters are the most progressive generation in 50 years. Every year a new class of those Millenial voters replaces a group of older, less progressive voters in the electorate. What’s more, every year there are more and more Hispanics and Asian Americans who voted over 70 percent for Obama. And of course — as a recent poll in the Virginia governor’s race makes clear — they persist in driving away more and more women voters with their opposition to women’s reproductive rights, attacks on education, child nutrition and universal background checks on guns.
The Tea Party Republicans appear to have abandoned hope that they can achieve their goals through the established — democratic — political process. After all, virtually all of their demands are extremely unpopular with the broader electorate and they overwhelmingly lost the last election.
Most Americans do not support their demand to defund Obamacare — and the law’s popularity will only grow once it goes into effect — as its benefits become clear and the “horrors” predicted by its opponents fail to materialize.
Most Americans simply do not support policies that take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give more tax breaks to millionaires, or gut the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law that rein in Wall Street banks, or privatize Medicare.
So they have resorted to the tactic of choice for small extremist minorities: hostage-taking. They are threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get their way.
And that is precisely why the president and Democrats in Congress are so clear that they will not cede to GOP demands. If Democrats were to allow hostage-taking to work, GOP extremists would try the same tactic again and again. There would be no end to the hostage-taking in order to force the majority of Americans to agree to the positions of a small minority that have been rejected in democratic elections.
And the GOP leadership is ignoring one final factor. When voters cast their ballots they not only ask who is on their side, they also ask who is competent to provide leadership.
Many Republicans in Congress have announced they are willing to risk shutdown or default to avoid the “horrors” of Obamacare, which they say is the worst law ever passed by Congress. Really?
Next time you get into a plane, ask yourself how you would feel about having a delusional pilot so out of touch with reality that he would recklessly risk the well-being of all on board to fly through a tornado because he wants to fly to the mythical land of Oz.
Voters are not generally wild about entrusting leadership to a bunch of reckless adolescents who see nothing wrong with playing chicken racing their cars toward each other to see who will swerve first.
Recklessness, lack of connection with reality, failure to recognize that actions have consequences — those are not the qualities that voters find appealing in candidates for higher office.
One way or another, the GOP will ultimately fold — that is virtually certain. The only question is whether someone in Republicanland who has yet not drunk the Tea Party Kool Aid will grab the yoke and pull the GOP out of this spiral dive — or whether they are forced to surrender as they emerge from a pile of rubble on the canyon floor.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, September 27, 2013
“A Losing Gambit”: Ted Cruz Is A Wacko Bird Of His Party’s Own Making
For his 21-hour floor speech decrying Obamacare, Ted Cruz is catching heat from a lot of his fellow Republicans. In the Senate, they disdain his not-quite-filibuster as grandstanding. “This is not a situation where you dig your heels in and Obamacare gets defunded,” said Senator Ron Johnson. “[The tea party] just want anybody who offers them a path, whether it’s realistic or not.” Said Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, “To be told we’re not listening by somebody who does not listen is disconcerting.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, usually on board for any assault on Obamacare, blasted Cruz’s maneuver as baldly ineffective.
The sum of all these reactions is yet more widespread Republican exasperation with Cruz. But while the GOP usually has good reason to treat Cruz like a wacko bird, this time, the GOP broadly has plainly laid the groundwork for his gimmicky Obamacare opposition. The Ted Cruz who completed that 21-hour Senate floor marathon is a wacko bird of the party’s own making.
Many of the same conservatives who are now denouncing Cruz’s tactics have strong claims to paternity over the GOP’s destructive obsession with Obamacare. They may see the specific tactic of shutting down the federal government in order to undo the Affordable Care Act for what it is: a losing gambit. And they may recognize that Cruz’s grandiloquent speechifying isn’t going to change minds in the Senate, where lawmakers planned to stripped a provision to defund Obamacare from the House budget as soon as Cruz stopped pleading on behalf of the bill. But odds are they will continue to relentlessly endorse defunding Obamacare, just as they have before.
This, even though the party’s obsession with defeating the president’s signature achievement is laying waste to the GOP’s long-term prospects. As my colleague Noam Scheiber argued in June, the Republican fixation with the Affordable Care Act harms their standing with Latino voters at a historical moment when they need to expand their favorability, and fast. It detracts from their ability to build an economic platform that aims for something besides massive spending and welfare cuts. And despite the GOP’s intentions to make defunding their banner 2014 issue, despite dozens of votes to defund the law and their broad failure to leverage the law in the last election cycle, Obamacare is really, seriously unlikely to go away.
So for someone like Senator Lamar Alexander to imply that Cruz’s grandstanding feeds impressions of the GOP as a do-nothing party is pretty rich. The Tennessee lawmaker has cast 23 purely symbolic votes against Obamacare that now comprise a major plank of his reelection campaign. For the Wall Street Journal editorial board to scoff at Cruz is even more absurd. Their columns have never missed an opportunity to promulgate even the most absurd and fact-free arguments for dismantling Obamacare—a moniker that the board on Monday took credit for inventing. Johnson has called Obamacare “the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.”
With all that hyperbole fueling the modern-day GOP, it’s no wonder Cruz calculated that a day-long verbal assault on Obamacare would be a homerun with his base, and worth the headache that it would cause Republican leaders. Their troubles, after all, began long before Cruz showed up, when they bet their future on their ability to defund Obamacare, no matter the cost.
By: Molly Redden, The New Republic, September 26, 2013
“Imaginary Armies Of Voices”: The “American People” Who Only Exist In Ted Cruz’s Head
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz spoke seemingly endlessly about Obamacare yesterday and today, repeatedly demanding that Washington listen to “the American people.” But to which people exactly is Cruz listening? And is he willing to follow his own advice?
I ask because the latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows that an astonishing majority disapproves of the kind of shutdown-showdown tactics the tea party legislator is pushing in his effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. According to the Times:
Eight in 10 Americans find it unacceptable for either President Obama or members of Congress to threaten to shut down the government during budget negotiations in order to achieve their goals, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Fewer than 1 in 5 think the stalemate between Mr. Obama and the Republicans in Congress is acceptable.
These results jibe with a host of other polls showing that Americans want cooperation in Washington and don’t want a government shutdown. But that’s precisely what Cruz and House Republicans are threatening to do with their “defund” stand: shut down the government unless President Obama and Senate Democrats grant them a win by extortion that the American people – the real ones, not Cruz’s imagined armies – denied them at the ballot box less than a year ago.
And it also bears repeating that for all of Cruz’s sanctimonious blather about how Congress should be more attuned to “the American people,” he flatly opposes their will on other critical issues. As I wrote last week:
For example 86 percent of Americans support background checks for people buying guns; on immigration reform, 64 percent of Americans support the comprehensive bill that the Senate passed and 78 percent support a qualified path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. … For those keeping track at home, those figures are more impressive than the 50-something opposed to Obamacare – perhaps no one has told Cruz, Lee et al. about these judgments from “the American people?”
So which “American people” is he talking about exactly? And will he listen to the ones that exist outside of his imagination?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 25, 2013
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