Yes, the tea party Republicans should hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner across the House of Representatives. They could flank it with large portraits of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who ousted John Boehner as speaker of the House in an unacknowledged coup. The right-wing extremists got exactly what they wanted. Now, what will the country do about it?
In blundering into a shutdown, Boehner has lost any claim to authority. Helpfully, the Speaker-in-Name-Only underscored this fact himself on the House floor when he mocked the way President Obama talked. Does anyone remember a real speaker going to the well of the House and making fun of a president of the United States? Can anyone now doubt who is responsible for Washington’s dysfunction? The Republican right still does not accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. That is why the government shut down.
The issue here is not that Congress failed to reach a “compromise.” The Democrats already have compromised, lopping some $70 billion [this number has been updated from an earlier version] off their budget proposal, to the dismay of many liberals. That was meaningless to a tea party crowd that seems to care not a whit about the deficit, despite its fulsome talk. It will be satisfied only if Congress denies heath-care coverage to some 25 million Americans, which is what “repealing Obamacare” really means.
It needs to be said over and over as long as this stupid and artificial crisis brewed by the tea party continues: Financing the government in a normal way and avoiding a shutdown should not be seen as a “concession.” Making sure the government pays its debt is not a “concession.” It’s what we expect from a normal, well-functioning, constitutional system. It’s what we expect from responsible stewards of our great experiment. The extremists who have taken over the House do not believe in a normal, constitutional system. They believe only in power.
There’s a profound irony here, since no one talks more about the Constitution than the tea party. Before the Civil War, John C. Calhoun and a variety of nullifiers and future secessionists spoke incessantly about the Constitution, too. We know where that led.
In the normal course of things in a constitutional and democratic republic, parties win elections on the issues that matter to them. They pass laws or repeal them by majority vote. The tea party could not muster such a majority to repeal the Affordable Care Act because Democrats held the White House and the Senate in the 2012 elections. Lacking a majority, the extremists chose force. “Do what we want,” they said, “or we will render the country ungovernable.”
That’s what they have done. Everyone says Boehner knew better and did not want this outcome. But he was so fearful for his job that he let it happen.
My conservative colleague Michael Gerson had it exactly right this morning: “We are no longer seeing a revolt against the Republican leadership, or even against the Republican ‘establishment’; this revolt is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality.”
I would only add: This is also revolt against anyone who accepts majority rule and constitutional constraints.
The burden now is on Republicans who know how profoundly radical and, indeed, crazy the tea party has become. These genuine, non-radical conservatives know how irresponsible this shutdown is. They know that playing around with the debt ceiling later this month would be a profoundly un-patriotic act. “It’s a dead end,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of the shutdown strategy. King, along with Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), had the courage to stand up against the lunacy by voting against Boehner’s last in a series of craven proposals Monday night. Dent told CNN that as many as 200 Republicans were secretly hoping that there would be a vote on the Senate’s continuing resolution so the government could stay open. But if those Republicans exist, they are paralyzed, unwilling to stand up to the far right.
There is only one way for this to end: Republicans who know better need to tell the far right, “Enough.” They need to overcome their abject fear of Republicans who are under Cruz-control and their cheerleaders in Rush Limbaugh’s world. They need to exit the boulevard of self-inflicted wounds.
We now know where the tea party’s political experiment ends. If this shutdown does not end the tea party’s reign of intimidation, we will face one unnecessary crisis after another as the extremists keep ripping up the roots of our great constitutional system.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 1, 2013
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Tea Party | Affordable Care Act, Charlie Dent, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Peter King, Republicans, Ted Cruz |
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To Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and all the Republican hostage-takers who brought us the government shutdown, I offer a salutation: Happy Obamacare Day!
Smithsonian museums, national parks and the IRS may be closed, but the Obamacare health care exchanges are open for business starting today. The Affordable Care Act now begins to be implemented in earnest, mostly with funding in the “mandatory” category that last night’s insanity leaves untouched. Yes, the genius tacticians of the Tea Party, I mean the GOP, have managed to shut down everything except the program they were targeting.
To reach this point, the House majority made a travesty of the legislative process, throwing non-starter after non-starter against the wall in an absurd and vain attempt to get Obamacare defunded, delayed or defenestrated. Boehner looked miserable as he tried to lead his caucus of loose cannons.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) summed it up with twisted grammar: ”The situation has been somewhat lost control of.”
The “situation” — a fight, mind you, over a bill that would fund the government for just six measly weeks — didn’t lay a glove on Obamacare but did close the Statue of Liberty. Now Boehner wants a conference with the Senate to work out a compromise. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should say, “Fine — as long as you understand that we’re starting fresh and all bets are off.”
Reid should demand funding for the government at least through the end of the year — and agreement from Cruz to allow a conference on a proper budget, which GOP obstruction has made impossible. He should demand an increase in the debt ceiling that takes us past next year’s election — thus avoiding another hostage-taking showdown later this month when federal borrowing authority runs out. And, while he’s at it, he should demand pre-sequester funding levels for needed programs such as Head Start.
Republicans would scream bloody murder. But there would have to be actual negotiations, actual give and take. And ultimately, the GOP would have to decide how badly it wants to get out of the mess it created.
Such a move by Reid wouldn’t be a power play, it would be an intervention. Republicans need to be forced to realize that not everyone agrees with them and that they can’t always get their way. As things stand now, with their delusions of omnipotence, they can only be considered a danger to themselves and others.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 1, 2013
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down | GOP, Harry Reid, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Peter King, Tea-party, Ted Cruz |
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The House Republicans are like really bad boyfriends in a break-up. The moment is upon us, when the Capitol lantern will be dimmed and dark, with the U.S. government closing down for … who knows how long?
This is what they came here to do, the Class of 2010 House Republicans, which created a new majority overnight. They did not come here to govern or to be part of government. Stone cold crazy, they came to our town of Washington to take it down from within. They came from states like, say, Tennessee. Ever hear of Frog Jump? The tea party has such diversity! They are largely angry white men. They are not legislators or policymakers. They are not respecters of the usual traditions of Congress. They are not much but a band of marauders, an unhappy few.
It doesn’t take many unruly House Republicans to stamp out the spirit of a perfectly nice democracy. Roughly 40 will accomplish what the British did not when they burned down the Capitol in 1814, and what the terrorist hijackers failed to do on 9/11 a dozen years ago.
If I read the tea leaves right, they are going to make a demoralized country even more so. People will start to lose more faith in our national institutions and with the very idea of America: fairness and “playing by the rules,” as Bill Clinton used to say. Our highly skilled and dedicated federal workforce, which has had its pay nearly frozen for years, will feel more disrespected if they are furloughed. The world will be watching in utter disbelief.
And then what happens one minute after midnight Tuesday morning? The light goes out in the dome. The more sensible Senate will not be party to this crime. House Speaker John Boehner will flail about, helpless and humiliated because he can’t control this lawless faction.
Then the babble will start about Obamacare. That’s what they would like us to think this is all about. My fellow Americans, this is not about Obamacare; it’s about President Obama. It’s about taking down his presidency. Attacking Obamacare is just the means to that end. I don’t think Obama sized up their intent and plan to take him down, from the day they arrived in January 2011. Unfortunately, he did not recognize the depth of their hostility when the government debt ceiling hung in the balance in August 2011. He kept trying to be friends with Boehner and the other side.
We have another debt limit deadline hanging over us, which makes this showdown look like a prologue to an even more disastrous event.
Here’s the cruelest cut of all. Never has a landmark piece of legislation, passed by both houses in the usual manner, been subject to this kind of relentless attack well after its passage. Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader of the tea party band, tells anyone who will listen at 4 a.m. that the American people are on their side. That is erroneous, and besides which, it wouldn’t make the tea party plot right. Obamacare passed before many of them got here, back in 2010.
It wasn’t pretty, but Obamacare passed fair and square. President Obama was re-elected handily. So let’s keep the lantern lit. Don’t let 40 angry men undo the results of American democracy.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 30, 2013
October 1, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, Democracy, Government Shut Down | Congress, Debt Ceiling, House Republicans, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Tea-party, Ted Cruz |
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House Republicans are preparing to introduce a new, last minute Continuing Resolution that would fund the operations of government for a few more months in exchange for an agreement by Senate Democrats and the White House to delay the execution of Obamacare for one year.
This newest bid is being presented as a “compromise” as the initial proposal put forward by the House—one that was rejected by the Senate—hinged the funding of government on the full defunding of the Affordable Care Act.
Compromise?
I suppose it is if you consider that someone holding a gun to your head and demanding ten million dollars to spare your life becomes a “compromiser” when he suddenly drops the price to seven million after you’ve told your assailer that you can’t or won’t pay.
Or maybe you would consider a foreign power threating our country with thermonuclear destruction unless we surrender to them as being willing to compromise if they modify their demand so as to leave us with everything east of the Mississippi if we are prepared to give up all the territory to the west?
For those who would fool themselves into believing that the latest House offer is some effort to find “middle ground”, ask yourself this question—
Why do these people wish to delay enforcement of the Affordable Care Act for one year?
Does anyone imagine that those who have been seeking to deny funding to government absent the delay or destruction of a law that was passed by Congress, signed into being by the President, and approved by the Supreme Court actually want to hold off the implementation of that law so they can improve it?
At no time—since the blitzkrieg of misinformation and outright lies that have been peddled by Obamacare opponents following the Act’s creation–have the House Republicans so much as once suggested that they would like to improve the law. Having voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund the law, have they ever, since passage, voted on proposed amendments to the law that they claim would improve the healthcare reform act?
Never.
Indeed, they are not even pretending to want to make it better via a delay as not so much as one Republican elected official who has paraded in front of the TV cameras today to pitch defunding or delay has so much as hinted than an extra year would give Congress time to make some ‘fixes’ or ‘changes.’
So, again, why the one year extension?
The better to keep the issue ‘hot’ for Republicans going into the 2014 midterm elections.
After all, nothing is going to change in the next year that would improve the Republicans’ chances of doing away with the law.
Should the GOP hold the House in the 2014 elections and pick up enough seats in the Senate to gain a majority, absolutely nobody believes for a moment that the GOP could gain enough Senate seats so as to grant them the capability of overturning a presidential veto.
And, like it or not, the Democrats will hold the White House through 2016.
And yet, every Republican mug I see on the television screen today tells me that they are doing this for me.
Really?
My premium rates are scheduled to go down rather dramatically upon the opening of the healthcare exchange in my state. So, what exactly are these House Republicans doing for me—and the millions of other Americans who cannot get coverage due to preexisting conditions (like acne) or face using up their lifetime maximums when a serious illness strikes? What exactly are Ted Cruz and his friends doing for those who are denied their paid for coverage after they get sick by insurance companies who don’t want to pay off and can find a spelling error on the insured’s application? What about the millions of Americans who simply have been unable to afford health insurance coverage without the benefit of the government subsidies or those who are married forever to their job—whether they like it or not— because, to leave it, would mean putting their family in jeopardy should someone get sick?
Still, if the GOP continues to feel the need to use healthcare policy to hold up funding of the government, and they are truly doing this for my benefit, I have an additional policy change I’d like Speaker Boehner to add to the new House legislation—things that would truly be for my benefit and the benefit of my family—
I would like the Speaker to make the Continuing Resolution to keep the government’s doors open contingent upon gun control legislation that requires registration of all weapons at the time of purchase. That would be doing something that could truly help me and my family.
And before anyone tries to tell me that this would be unacceptable because—unlike Obamacare where the majority of the country currently opposes the law, the majority of Americans love their guns—I suggest you review the polls revealing that more Americans favor changes in gun registration laws than the number of Americans who oppose the Affordable Care Act.
I could go on with more ransom demands for the Speaker but I’ll settle for just this one. After all, Boehner only plans to fund the government through this December in exchange for destroying the Affordable Care Act so I don’t want to be too greedy as to what I would expect for a three month extension of an operating government.
If the House Republicans are unwilling to link the funding of government to the things that will really be of value to me, then I can only hope that the Senate Democrats and the President hold the line and allow the GOP to get what is coming to them for their behavior.
While I hate to see so many of my fellow Americans suffer the problems and serious inconveniences that are inevitable in a government shut down, I—like so many Americans that the right-wing prefers to pretend do not exist—have had enough of these eighty to one hundred extremists in Congress standing in the way of trying to make life better for so many Americans just so they can be re-elected . These are, after all, elected officials that come from congressional districts where constituents continue to be incapable of grasping that the debt ceiling debate is about paying for debts we’ve already incurred and not some limitation on what government can borrow or spend in the following year.
I also highlight that these people on the right prefer to pretend I do exist because of their continued suggestion that “Americans” do not want the healthcare reform law. Not so much as one supporter of defunding or delaying Obamacare, who has spoken to the cameras today, has said “some Americans” or “most Americans”. They simply say that this law is a train wreck and Americans don’t want it.
Like it or not, I am an American and I do want this alleged train wreck as do enough of my fellow Americans to constitute at least forty percent of the electorate. So, I would very much appreciate it if Rep. Jeb Henserling and the remaining band of the GOP talking heads haunting the airwaves would stop lumping me in with their political distortions.
The President is flat-out right on this one. If the Republicans want to argue over what should—or should not—be included in the next fiscal year’s budget, I’m all for it. Each branch of Congress can pass their version of a budget and the two can get into the conference committee room and beat each other up until they come to a budget agreement they can send over to the White House for signature.
But if these 100 or so Members of Congress want to screw up people’s lives because they have a fundamental problem with our system of government, we should give them no quarter.
And make no mistake, it is precisely these people’s resentment of how our government was created to operate that drives them to these extremist positions—no matter how much they pretend to be ‘strict constitutionalists’.
Just because GOP legislators like to carry a copy of the Constitution in their suit pocket doesn’t mean they’ve ever read it or could care less what it actually says. It just means they have pockets large enough to hold fat oil company checks and a tiny copy of our founding document at the same time.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 29, 2013
September 30, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, GOP, Government Shut Down | Congress, Health Exchanges, Jeb Henserling, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Senate, Ted Cruz |
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In July, when several far-right lawmakers started pushing a government-shutdown scheme in earnest, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who isn’t exactly a moderate, had the good sense to reject the idea as silly.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Burr said at the time. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”
I mention this, of course, because the North Carolina Republicans’ reasoned, sensible approach to extortion politics has apparently disappeared over the last two months.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who dubbed Cruz’s threat to shut down the government over Obamacare the “dumbest idea” he’d ever heard, said Congress shouldn’t give Obama a debt ceiling increase without attaching strings, and the president “is going to pay some price for it, which is a benefit for the American people.”
“I hope [an Obamacare] delay is either part of the next [continuing resolution] or I hope it’s part of the debt ceiling,” Burr said.
There are a couple of important angles to this. First, if anyone was inclined to give Burr points for being an adult in July, now is the time to kick yourself. What he’s describing is a dangerous extortion scheme in which radicalized lawmakers threaten to hurt the country on purpose unless Americans start losing health care benefits.
The fact that Burr didn’t want to threaten a government shutdown was nice, but the fact that he does want to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States is madness — the severity of a sovereign debt crisis is vastly more serious than a shutdown.
Second, Politico mentioned in passing that the issue here is Congress “giving Obama a debt ceiling increase.” It’s time for the political world to stop thinking this way — raising the statutory debt limit isn’t “giving” the president anything.
Indeed, the political establishment’s understanding of this issue has become more than a little twisted. To see Republicans voting for a debt ceiling increase as some kind of concession is the height of absurdity. For those who rationalize threatening deliberate harm to the nation, and for much of the media, the idea is that we’re witnessing some sort of trade — Democrats get a debt-ceiling increase, Republicans get a laundry list of goodies they can’t pass through the legislative process.
The problem with this is that it’s not sane.
The legislative branch has the power of the purse, and appropriates government spending. When that spending is outpaced by federal receipts, it’s up to the executive branch to borrow the difference. Under a ridiculous quirk in the U.S. system, the executive is only allowed to borrow the difference after Congress, which spent more than it took in, gives its authority to do so.
This is called the debt ceiling. The Obama administration needs to borrow the funds to pay the bills for the stuff Congress already bought. There’s no real reason for the system to work this way — most modern democracies have no use for a statutory debt limit — but for now, this is the messy process we’ve created for ourselves.
The point, of course, is that when Congress raises the debt ceiling, as it must, it’s not doing the White House a favor. It’s not some kind of concession or gesture of goodwill. It’s not increasing the debt or giving Obama a blank check or spending any money. It’s just extending a legal authority to pay the bills lawmakers already racked up. Period. Full stop.
So when it comes to “negotiations,” for Congress to ask the White House, “What do we get for raising the debt limit” is insane because on a substantive level, the question is gibberish.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 26, 2013
September 29, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Republicans | Affordable Care Act, Congress, Conservatives, media, ObamaCare, Richard Burr, Ted Cruz |
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