“The GOP Insanity Is Not Temporary”: A Radical Vision For America That Goes From Here To Way Back Then
A lot of the talk from progressives (and I plead guilty to doing this myself on occasion) about the government shutdown and/or the impending possibility of a debt default suggests House Republicans are suffering from some sort of temporary insanity, or are indulging some sort of temporary temper tantrum by a faction they cannot ignore but can outlast. This habit flows from the broader sense that the Tea Party movement is some sort of temporary phenomenon–a “fever,” as the president famously put it–that will go away to be replaced by good, stolid, “moderate” conservatism sooner rather than later. You see it in the high hosannas raised every time yet another poll shows the percentage of voters identifying with the Tea Party–as opposed to the Republican Party that has largely internalized Tea Party policies and strategies–declining.
This attitude is perfectly understandable, but risks a major misunderstanding of what conservatives are up to at any given moment. Yes, many of them have a remarkably radical vision for America all right, which involves bringing back the idyllic government of the Coolidge administration and patriarchal culture of the Eisenhower administration. But they are pursuing an entirely rational if risky strategy for getting from here to way back there, based on three overlapping perspectives that are reasonably common in the conservative commentariat:
1) Radicalism on spending is the hand voters have dealt the GOP. The “defunding Obamacare” strategy has always been based on the leverage Republicans had after 2012 in maintaining control of just one congressional chamber. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare or enact the Ryan Budget, but they could refuse to fund the Obama Era welfare state, which meant threatening a government shutdown or a debt default. Obamacare was the natural target for this strategic brinkmanship since it polled worse than, say, Medicare or food stamps.
2) Resisting a new entitlement is easier and more effective than rolling back an established entitlement. For all the conservative talk about the hatred Americans feel for Obamacare, there is a widespread fear on the Right that once the law is in place for a few years, it will become part of the landscape, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the Rx drug prescription before them. And this fear coincides with the “tipping point” argument that the Welfare State is now ensnaring so many Americans that “takers” are outnumbering “makers,” and will defend their theft of “maker” resources fiercely at the polls.
3) In divided government, implacable unity is the winning formula. There is an intense belief among conservatives that Republican back-stabbing–RINOism!–and tactical surrender to liberals explains every defeat for the Right going back for decades. Add in the inevitable “war of nerves” that characterizes politics in an era of divided government, and the conviction that red-state Democrats will side with Republicans if pushed to the wall, and you have an argument against compromise of any sort, at any price.
You can see how these three factors reinforce each other in Ted Cruz’s basic “defund Obamacare” rap as expressed back in August in an interview with the Daily Caller:
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, the most important check we have on an overreaching executive. Now is the best chance we have to exercise this power in order to defund Obamacare. It can be done as part of passing the Continuing Resolution (CR) — a piece of legislation that funds the government and must be renewed by September 30th.
The Continuing Resolution gives us real leverage to defund Obamacare. Fighting this fight won’t be easy, but it’s now or never. President Obama’s strategy is simple: on January 1, the subsidies kick in. President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound. That’s why the administration announced that it won’t enforce eligibility requirements-essentially encouraging fraud and “liar loans”-because that way the most people possible will get addicted to the sugar.
To stop that from happening, the House should pass a new Continuing Resolution to fund the entire federal government except Obamacare. The House should include a rider in that bill that explicitly prohibits any federal dollars – discretionary and mandatory – from being spent on it. Republicans control the House, and have already voted some 40 times to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this.
Then the bill comes to the Senate. Republicans need just 41 votes to prevent Democrats from passing legislation that funds Obamacare – 45 Republicans in the Senate have already voted to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this also.
At that point, we simply have to continue to stand together and not blink. If Republicans are truly against Obamacare, they will not vote to fund it.
Cruz obviously miscalculated that Senate Republicans would block any vote on a continuing resolution that “funded Obamacare,” but his argument still stands that the side that doesn’t “blink” will ultimately win; that it’s now or never for killing Obamacare; and that exploiting the House veto power over spending and debt limit increases is the one point of leverage that Obama’s re-election did not eliminate.
So Cruz’s revolt, into which John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have been dragged because they can’t pass any bill opposed by Democrats without the support of conservatives who agree with his approach, wasn’t some adolescent outburst that will pass like a moment of hormonal rage, but a consistent strategy for using limited leverage on behalf on an extremist agenda. If it’s “insane,” the insanity is not temporary, and won’t just go away.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2013
“See You In Hell Orange Man”: President Obama Should Have A “Come To Jesus” Talk With John Boehner
So at the risk of getting ahead of myself here just a bit, the appropriations crisis is merging with the debt limit crisis. And as everybody’s favorite source for GOP thinking, National Review‘s Robert Costa, tells us today, John Boehner is determined not to relent on what just about everyone is calling an insanely untenable position on the CR because he’s got to keep GOPers together for the real ball game, the debt limit. Why? Kathleen Parker says that’s the rainbow that yielded a pot of gold for Boehner last time it appeared:
What Republicans hope to accomplish by tying demands to the debt ceiling is a grand bargain to include a package of entitlement and tax reform. Sound familiar? The president can refuse to negotiate, but at 3 a.m. when the phone rings and it’s Angela Merkel inquiring just what the hell is going on, it won’t be John Boehner’s phone ringing. It will be President Obama’s. That’s leverage. During the last debt-ceiling battle, Boehner managed to secure more than $2 trillion in cuts and no taxes.
So the conviction that Obama will eventually cave on the debt limit is what is making it possible for Boehner to walk the path Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and their House minions have laid out for him.
Now I don’t know anything about the president’s relationship with Boehner. But it’s becoming a matter of national security for him to find some way to take him aside, maybe give the Speaker a cigarette from his secret stash, and say: “I will see you in Hell before I negotiate over the debt limit. And if you let a default happen, I will devote the rest of my presidency to making sure you, personally, bear the blame, and go down in history with our most despised traitors and criminals. For generations, little school children in Ohio will cross themselves and make hex signs when your name is mentioned. So do not, do not, go back and tell your crazy people they can win if they just stick together.”
This sort of attitude adjustment needs to happen sooner rather than later, before Boehner takes another step down the path he is currently contemplating.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 2, 2013
“When All Else Fails, Just Lie”: Bogus Republican Arguments To Justify A Government Shutdown
The House conservatives who refused to keep the government open without kneecapping ObamaCare seem to believe, now that the government has shut down, they can win the public opinion fight and force Democrats to back down.
But to make the case that their actions and demands were reasonable, Republicans need arguments that are remotely plausible. Instead, they are heading into battle with claims that I would call paper-thin, were that not a grave insult to paper. Here are the five legs on which the Republican position can’t stand.
1. Obama won’t negotiate
Speaker Boehner embraced this argument in a web video with the tag line, “Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria… but not with Congress to address Washington’s spending problem?” That’s a disingenuous reading of the situation. Washington is at an impasse because Republicans have repeatedly snubbed Obama’s offer for a budget compromise that pairs a stingier Social Security cost-of-living formula with corporate tax increases. Republicans refused to negotiate over taxes. They have continually demanded that Democrats scrap President Obama’s biggest legislative achievement in exchange for simply keeping the government operating. Of course Obama won’t negotiate over that. Otherwise, Obama has proved quite willing to negotiate on all aspects of the budget. It’s Republicans who have refused to offer any concession of any sort.
2. Republicans have already compromised
Sen. Ted Cruz tried this one during his Sunday Meet The Press appearance: “My position in this fight was we should defund [ObamaCare], which is different from repeal. And even now what the House of Representatives has done is a step removed from defunding. It’s delaying it. Now that’s the essence of a compromise.” No, the essence of compromise is when each party gives up something. Republicans aren’t proposing to give up anything. They’re just demanding a little bit less than before. Meanwhile, Democrats aren’t asking for any trophies. Keeping the government open and raising the debt limit aren’t ideological prizes, but basic housekeeping.
3. Republicans are just demanding what the people want
Republicans are nominally correct in saying that polling shows a lack of majority support for ObamaCare. But you don’t have to look much deeper in the data to see that doesn’t translate into majority support for threatening government shutdown to defund or delay ObamaCare. Multiple polls show widespread opposition to the Republican strategy linking the funding of government operations to stopping ObamaCare. Sixty-three percent of the electorate says Congress should “provide the funding to keep the government operating and deal with the health care issue separately.” Sixty percent say avoiding a shutdown is more important than “cutting the funds” to implement ObamaCare. Four in five people say threatening shutdown is “not an acceptable way to negotiate.” Even if you take the threat of shutdown out of the question, the Republican position still polls poorly. Only 38 percent support the view that “funding for the 2010 health care law must be cut off as part of any budget agreement,” with 50 percent opposed. Furthermore, the notion of widespread opposition to ObamaCare on conservative grounds is also misplaced. As CNN’s polling has long showed, while support for ObamaCare is below 50 percent, about 10 to 15 percent of that opposition says the program is “not liberal enough.” Support for the Republican view that ObamaCare is “too liberal” is only in the mid-to-upper 30s.
4. Harry Reid is the one who shut down the government
On Meet the Press, Sen. Cruz claimed: “[Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s] position is 100 percent of ObamaCare must be funded in all instances, and, other than that, he’s going to shut the government down.” To translate, Sen. Reid’s position is programs that Congress has already established by law should be properly funded. Reid is not the one who brought these issues together. House Republicans are the ones who made the decision to repeatedly link the suffocation of ObamaCare to legislation that would keep the government open; that was the threat, a threat on which Republicans have now followed through.
5. Since Obama is delaying ObamaCare for his friends, he should for everyone else
Also on this Sunday’s Meet The Press, GOP Rep. Raul Labrador tried to make the case for a one-year delay of the entire Affordable Care Act program because there have been delays regarding certain provisions: “The president has already delayed it for big businesses. They have delayed it for all his friends … all we’re asking for in the House of Representatives is for a one-year delay. Just like the unions are asking for a one-year delay.” That doesn’t make any sense. If Obama’s objective was to go easy on his friends and save them from a bureaucratic disaster, don’t you think the unions that supported his re-election would be getting help before the big businesses that didn’t?
The real story is that the delay for the mandate on employers with 50 or more workers was to give extra time to resolve a specific issue that arose: a concern that the paperwork was going to be unnecessarily burdensome on the vast majority of businesses that already provide insurance. So a delay was issued to provide the time to resolve that specific matter. Soon after, certain unions tried to use the employer mandate delay, not to get a similar temporary delay, but to permanently change a rule that denies ObamaCare subsidies to a particular kind of employer-based insurance utilized by union members. Obama told his union friends, no, there’s no legal basis for giving you those subsidies. The president is not doling out special favors. Nor does he consider the need for a few delays to resolve discrete issues to be cause for junking the entire law. In turn, these unions accepted the president’s answer and continue to support ObamaCare. They did not throw a temper tantrum and call for a general strike that would grind the entire economy to a halt.
Perhaps Republicans can take a lesson from that.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 1, 2013
“The Double Pox Caucus”: With Their Extortion Policy, The GOP Owns This Government Shutdown
There will be, among my media colleagues, an instinct to blame the current government shutdown on both sides. A pox on both their houses is popular because it’s easy – everyone’s to blame for gridlock, so we’re not blaming anyone! – and attracts fewer charges of media bias. The double pox caucus likes to strike a post-partisan pose because it gives them a sense of superior enlightenment; they get the joke of the two party system, they think, in a way that grubby true believers don’t.
Don’t buy it. Both sides aren’t to blame. The GOP – specifically the fringe right that is currently calling the party’s shots – craved this shutdown and owns it.
Here’s a good rule of thumb when adjudicating blame for a government shutdown: Whichever side is using the threat or reality of a shutdown to effect changes to policy or law is responsible for the shutdown. This works for the forthcoming debt ceiling fight as well. When one side is making unilateral demands as the price of doing what they concede should be done anyway, they own the resulting crisis.
In this case the GOP is trying variations on a policy-changing theme: They wanted to defund Obamacare; when that didn’t work they tried to chip away at the law by, among other things, postponing the individual mandate for a year. They are, in other words, trying to win through extortion policy changes they couldn’t convince voters to ratify at the ballot box.
To paraphrase President Obama from last week, the equivalent would be if he vowed to veto any continuing resolution (thus shutting down the government) if it didn’t include universal background checks for gun purchases or a public option for Obamacare.
The fact of each party having a position doesn’t mean that each has equal validity. To suggest otherwise incentivizes extremism: If the “correct” answer is an even split, then the most extreme position wins by dragging the center as far in its direction as possible. (That’s the core of the House GOP’s effort to move the dispute over funding the government to a conference committee: enshrining the frame of two equal sides at the negotiating table.)
Here’s the thing: Obamacare has been litigated endlessly. It has been at the center of American politics since before it was passed. It played a central role in the 2012 presidential race, with GOP nominee Mitt Romney vowing to repeal it. The Supreme Court weighed in, finding the law constitutional. Then the American people weighed in, voting by a comfortable margin for the pro-Obamacare candidate over the repeal-Obamacare candidate.
Polls tell us a number of things about the American people (or Ted Cruz’s “the American people“) and Obamacare. We know that more Americans dislike the law than like it; we also know that a minority of Americans (but 100 percent of the people in Ted Cruz’s head!) favors repeal or defunding the law while a plurality or majority – depending upon the poll – favors making the law work.
And polls also show that people aren’t wild about the notion of a government shutdown hinging on the debate over the Affordable Care Act. A Quinnipiac survey released just this morning, for example, reiterated all of these trends: While voters split on the law (45 percent in favor, 47 percent opposing), a majority (58-34) oppose defunding it, and that opposition grows more pronounced when contemplating not raising the debt ceiling in order to defund the ACA (64-27 against) or shutting down the government in order to stop the law (72-22 against).
(Poll after poll also shows that Republicans are in line for most of the blame for shuttering the federal government; points to voters for paying attention.)
These figures – along with the aforementioned one poll that counts, from last November – paint a muddled picture of the American electorate’s wishes regarding Obamacare. But they also make one fact crystal clear: Republicans cannot fairly claim to speak for the electorate in foisting this government shutdown upon us.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 1, 2013
“Government By A La Carte”: House Republican’s Goal, Shut Down The Government With No Political Repercussions
Plan A was for the House to pass a spending measure that gutted the Affordable Care Act, which the Senate could then clean up and send on to the White House. Plan B was the House bill to go ahead and defund the health care law and dare the Senate to pass it. Plan C was the House bill to delay health care benefits for a year and dare the Senate again.
Plan D was a half-hearted House Republican effort to embrace budget talks that House Republicans spent six months avoiding. And Plan E is, well, kind of silly.
House Republican leaders Tuesday told rank-and-file members that they will attempt to pass several separate bills to reopen the government a few agencies at a time.
A GOP aide confirmed that leaders want next steps to include passage of a series of continuing resolutions that fund individual government programs — an idea floated by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Monday.
Why House Republicans don’t just make Cruz the Speaker and get it over with is unclear.
Regardless, this new plan is hilarious. Republicans could pass a center-right spending bill and end the shutdown, but what they’d prefer to do is break up the federal spending bill into chunks, and slowly turn the lights on piecemeal. Staffers were referring today to “mini-CRs.”
The idea, apparently, is to identify the parts of the Republicans’ shutdown that make the public upset, then pass a spending measure that resolves just that part of the crisis while leaving the rest of the government shut down. Americans are annoyed by closed federal parks? No sweat, Republicans say, they’ll pass a mini-CR that provides funding to reopen the parks — and nothing else.
And then when some other part of the shutdown creates public pressure, presumably Republicans would consider flipping the switch on that, too. The goal, apparently, is to shut down the government without feeling the political repercussions of a wildly unpopular government shutdown.
Sigh.
It didn’t take long for Democratic policymakers to dismiss the nonsense.
“We just decided in there we’re not going to do that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said after leaving Tuesday’s Senate Democratic Conference meeting.
White House spokesman Jay Carney also ripped the idea as “not serious.”
“If they want to open the government, they should open the government,” Carney said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called it “just another whacky idea.” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) asked why opening federal parks is more important than “ensuring seniors, poor mothers, and children have access to meals and critical services?” A senior Senate Democratic aide said the House gimmick has “no chance” of success.
House Republicans can either keep their shutdown going, or they end this fiasco. The time for stunts, gimmicks, and partial pseudo solutions has long since passed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 1, 2013
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