“A Self Righteous Verbal Tick”: Ted Cruz Doesn’t Speak For “The American People”
Can we please leave “the American people” out of the debate over defunding the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare)? I’m not talking about the citizens of this great nation, but rather the politically self-righteous verbal tick our elected officials and commentators employ in an effort to invest in themselves the authority of the electorate.
So for example, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the “defund” ringmaster, said earlier this week that while his grand idea has little chance in the Senate, “House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people.” And on Fox News on Wednesday night, Cruz praised “House leadership for listening to the American people,” adding that, “We’ve got to respond to the American people.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Cruz said, “needs to listen to” – you guessed it! – “the American people.”
Appearing on the same show, Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee declared that “the American people are coming together, and they’re standing together and they’re saying, please defund this law.” He went on to praise House Speaker John Boehner for standing “with the American people. We now need to stand with him and with the people and defund this law.” And so on. (Boehner’s House this morning actually did pass a continuing resolution which would keep the government open through Dec.15 while defunding the Affordable Care Act; the bill stands no chance of passing the Senate.)
It must be bracing to carry a mandate to speak on behalf of the American people … even if, as is the case with Cruz, Lee and their tea party pals, they don’t have anything of the sort. Instead they have the insufferable pretension of one: They alone speak for the people because, well, they say so. Their belief in their own popular righteousness recalls Mr. Dooley’s definition of a fanatic: someone who “does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He knew th’ facts iv th’ case.”
And from whence does their mandate to speak so authoritatively for “the American people” derive? Cruz referenced an Internet petition which garnered 1.3 million signatures. “Look, today’s decision is a victory for the American people,” he said. “Those 1.3 million Americans … that went and signed that petition and spoke out.” That might explain the difference between the American people and Cruz’s “the American people”: He defines the term as people who share his radical agenda.
More broadly Cruz, Lee and company would presumably point to polls showing that Obamacare remains broadly unpopular. But that reflects, charitably, a superficial knowledge of the polling. Take the Pew Research Center/USA Today poll released earlier this week. Fully 53 percent disapprove of the Affordable Care Act as opposed to only 42 percent who approve. (The Real Clear Politics average of polls has 38 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving.) But dig deeper and you’ll find that that 53 percent is split over how to deal with the law they don’t like – more than half of them, 27 percent, want pols to try to make the law work; a lesser number, 23 percent, want to see elected officials try to make it fail. In other words something like one-quarter of the actual American people stand with Cruz, Lee and the rest of the fanatics. Some mandate.
This is not an unusual result. Even a laughably skewed poll which Heritage Action – the activist branch of the Heritage Foundation – commissioned to bolster the “defund” push found that 52 percent of Americans (or more precisely 52 percent of Americans in a selection of 10 GOP-leaning House districts) think that implementation of the law should go forward, while only 44.5 percent favor repeal. This makes intuitive sense: Not everyone who dislikes the law does so because they’re conservative; some portion of the law’s critics is progressives disappointed that it wasn’t more liberal.
But there are a couple of more important points to be made about polls. For one thing, the most authoritative poll taken in the last year occurred in November, at great expense. It had a sample size of more than 125 million and the results were not particularly close: The candidate who campaigned on repealing Obamacare lost by four percentage points – nearly five million votes – to the fellow who signed Obamacare into law. You’d think that if the American people saw stopping Obamacare as a cause worth fighting for “with every ounce of breath we have,” as Cruz put it Thursday, they might have so indicated at the ballot box. And yet Cruz, Lee and their cronies seem to see in this result a mandate from “the American people” (if not the American people) to obstruct the law to the maximum extent, even to the extent of shutting down the government to stop it.
And while the tea party right’s fidelity to the will of “the American people” as expressed by more recent public opinion polls is admirable, it takes on a far more self-serving aspect when considered in light of other polls which left people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee unmoved. 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. Oh, and 71 percent of Americans oppose shutting down the government, according to a poll conducted over the summer for House Republicans. 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?”
The list goes on. The fact is, as I have written over and over and over and over, there are a number of prominent issues where the GOP seems immune to the charms of “the American people.”
And to be clear, this is not a partisan problem. Pols in both parties are promiscuous with the desires of “the American people,” while none have a monopoly on it. So let’s agree that it’s time to retire “the American people” – or more specifically their demands and expectations – from the political lexicon.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 21, 2013
“We Don’t Make Deals With Bullies”: No Yielding On Obamacare, Debt Ceiling Or Government Shutdown
Republicans in the House are like a bunch of 3-year-olds playing with matches. Their hapless leaders don’t have the sense to scold them and send them to their rooms — which means President Obama has to be the disciplinarian in this dysfunctional family.
Mature adults in the GOP should have explained reality to these tantrum-throwing tykes long ago: It simply is not within their constitutional power to make Obamacare go away. They can scream at the top of their lungs, roll around on the floor, hold their breath until they turn blue, waste everybody’s time with 41 useless votes — whatever. All they can really do is hurt themselves or others.
Yet here we are, with Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) cowed into letting his members threaten to shut down the government unless they are allowed to stay up all night watching television and eating candy. Also, unless the Senate and Obama agree to nullify health-care reform before it fully takes effect.
I happen to believe that Obamacare is a great accomplishment, providing access to medical insurance to millions of Americans who lack it and bringing the nation much closer to universal health care. It’s an imperfect law, to be sure, but it could be made much better with the kind of constructive tinkering that responsible leaders performed on Social Security and Medicare.
Even if Obamacare were tremendously flawed, however, it would be wrong to let a bunch of extremist ideologues hold the country hostage in this manner. If Republicans want to repeal the reforms, they should win the Senate and the presidency. If not, they’re welcome to pout and sulk all they want — but not to use extortion to get their way.
At issue is not just the threat of a federal shutdown, which will happen Oct. 1 unless Congress passes a continuing resolution to fund government operations. The debt ceiling has to be raised before the Treasury hits its borrowing limit, which will happen around Oct. 18. If House Republicans don’t kill or neutralize Obamacare with the funding bill, they are ready to threaten the nation — and the global economy — with a potentially catastrophic default.
The proper response — really, the only response — is to say no. And mean it.
Obama is, by nature, a reasonable and flexible man, but this time he must not yield. Even if you leave aside what delaying or defunding Obamacare would mean for his legacy — erasing his most significant domestic accomplishment — it would be irresponsible for him to bow to the GOP zealots’ demands.
The practical impact of acquiescing would be huge. Individuals who have been uninsured are anticipating access to adequate care. State governments, insurance companies and health-care providers have spent vast amounts of time and money preparing for the law to take effect. To suddenly say “never mind” would be unbelievably reckless.
The political implication of compromising with blackmailers would be an unthinkable surrender of presidential authority. The next time he says “I will do this” or “I will not do that,” why should Congress or the American people take him seriously? How could that possibly enhance Obama’s image on the world stage?
Obama has said he will not accept a budget deal that cripples Obamacare and will never negotiate on the debt ceiling. Even if the Republicans carry through with their threats — and this may happen — the president has no option but to stand his ground.
You don’t deal with bullies by making a deal to keep the peace. That only rewards and encourages them. You have to push back.
The thing is, this showdown is a sure political loser for the GOP — and smart Republicans know it. Boehner doesn’t want this fight and, in fact, should be grateful if Obama hangs tough and shows the crazies the limits of their power. Most Republicans in the Senate don’t want this fight. It’s doubtful that even a majority of House Republicans really, truly want this fight, no matter what they say publicly.
But irresponsible demagogues — I mean you, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — have whipped the GOP base into a frenzy of unrealistic expectations. House members who balk at jumping off the cliff risk being labeled “moderate,” which is the very worst thing you can call a Republican — and the most likely thing to shorten his or her political career.
The way to end this madness is by firmly saying no. If Boehner won’t do it, Obama must.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 20, 2013
“Fraticidal Rage”: Ted Cruz Turns Obamacare Defunding Plan From Disaster To Utter Fiasco
Now that the House of Representatives has passed its bill to keep the government open and rid the world of Obamcare, the full strategic disaster the Republicans have embarked upon is coming into focus. The procedure is a little confusing, but once we disentangle the steps, it quickly becomes clear that the Republicans have started a dumpster fire they have no obvious way to extinguish.
It’s important to keep in mind that a government shutdown does not, in and of itself, stop Obamacare from going forward. Most of the money for that law has been appropriated through channels (tax credits, state-based exchanges, etc.) immune to shutdown. The Obamacare-shutdown method relies on the hope that keeping the government shut down proves so annoying to the president that he (or a filibuster-proof majority in both houses) submits to abolishing his health-care reform in return for reopening the government. That is the only way shutting down the government could result in the defunding of Obamacare.
Step one of this far-fetched scheme was the passage of a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government open, attached to abolishing Obamacare. Now it goes to the Senate. Once that bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, the majority can vote to strip away the provision defunding Obamacare. That vote can’t be filibustered. It’s a simple majority vote, and Democrats have the majority.
What Senate Republicans can do is filibuster to prevent the bill from coming to a vote at all. That’s the only recourse the Senate defunders have. And Ted Cruz is promising to do just that: “ I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together,” he says, “and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.” A “committed defunder” in the Senate likewise tells David Drucker, “Reid must not be allowed to fund Obamacare with only 51 votes.”
In other words, the new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.
But what if it succeeds? Well, success means the government shuts down because the Senate Republican majority has successfully filibustered a vote on the House bill preventing a shutdown.
Remember, the whole Republican plan to win the shutdown fight is to pin the blame on Obama. Obama is trying to shut down the government, they are already saying, and we’re trying to keep it open. That message depends on both houses of Congress passing a law that defunds Obamacare, and Obama refusing to sign it. Then they can present themselves as having acted to keep the government open, and Obama refusing to go along merely because he doesn’t want to snatch health insurance away from 20 million people.
It’s a patently disingenuous argument that stands no chance of success. But even that patently disingenuous message relies on establishing the optics of Obama refuses to sign our bill. Now the Republican plan relies instead on maintaining a Republican filibuster in the Senate, in perpetuity, to prevent a vote on a bill to open the government. They have maneuvered themselves into the least tenable position to defend a plan that never stood a chance of succeeding in the first place.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, September 20, 2013
“Terrified That Obamacare Will Succeed”: Why Republicans Are Desperate For A Government Shutdown
The coming battles over budgets, the debt ceiling, a government shutdown and Obamacare are not elements of a large political game. They involve a fundamental showdown over the role of government in stemming rising inequality and making our country a fairer and more decent place.
Anyone who doesn’t see this should be forgiven. The stakes in this battle are almost always buried in news accounts about tactics and obscured by an unquenchable desire across the media to provide the latest take on whether President Obama is growing “weak” and has already become the lamest of lame ducks.
Yes, Obama has work to do in quelling doubts about his leadership. But little of what we’re hearing offers enlightenment as to why this big argument is happening in the first place, and why it matters.
To begin with, this is not just a fight between Republicans and Democrats. The GOP is clearly divided between those who take governing seriously — they still believe in government enough to accept responsibility for keeping it open — and those who see in every issue the “final conflict” that Marxists kept predicting. Stopping Obamacare, in their view, is necessary to prevent the country from reaching the end of the road to serfdom. Compared with this hellish prospect, who cares about shutdowns?
What’s fascinating, and this speaks to the perceived power of the tea party in primaries, is that it has taken only a small minority of House Republicans to push toward Armageddon. The Post’s Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane estimated that roughly 40 conservatives revolted against their leadership’s efforts to keep the government open past Sept. 30. That’s 40 in a 435-member House of Representatives. What’s become of us when less than 10 percent of one chamber of Congress can unleash chaos? What does this say about the House Republican leadership gap?
But it’s also important to understand why the Republican right is so fixated on killing or delaying Obamacare before it goes into effect. Its central worry is not that the program will fail but that it will succeed.
In an interview on Fox News this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) a leader of the stop-Obamacare forces, gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that “Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.”
In other words, Obamacare, like Medicare and Social Security, could work well enough and improve the lives of enough people that voters will get “hooked” on it. For fear of this, the tea party’s champions would shut down the government and risk financial calamity over the debt ceiling? Even the Wall Street Journal’s reliably anti-Obama editorial page on Tuesday upbraided the “kamikazes” of the right.
There is a thread running through the antics of the kamikaze caucus. Almost everything it is doing is designed to keep government from acting against inequality and addressing the stagnation or decline of incomes among both poor and middle-class Americans. Foiling Obamacare, which would relieve economic pressure by getting health insurance to 25 million Americans who wouldn’t have it otherwise, is part of this larger story.
As Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted, this week’s census figures showed the poverty rate “remaining unchanged at a high 15.0 percent in 2012” and median household income “unchanged at $51,017, some 8.3 percent — or $4,600 — below its level in 2007, before the recession.”
Things would be even worse without food stamps which, as Greenstein pointed out, kept 4 million Americans out of poverty last year. And what is the House’s main priority this week? To toss 3.8 million people off the program next year. More generally, conservatives want to keep reducing government spending at a time when the unemployed most need public policy that stimulates growth rather than drags the economy down. Continued cuts will mean more economic sluggishness.
It’s hard to decide which is worse: utter indifference on the right wing to the damage that win-at-all-costs politics could cause the overall economy, or its coldhearted effort to block any attempt to ease the burdens on Americans who are struggling. One way or the other, this is what we should be talking about.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 19, 2013
“Selling Un-Reality”: The Right’s Self-Defeating New “Shutdown Obamacare” Business Scheme
Convincing House Republicans to pursue impossible goals with dubious tactics is the conservative movement’s business … and business is good! Seriously, business is really good. Defunding Obamacare has been a boon for funding PACs and nonprofits. The conservative intramural debate over a potential government shutdown is pitting Republican political leadership against conservative organizations, and the organizations won’t be swayed by political arguments. Here’s National Review’s Robert Costa, whose entire piece today is is worth reading:
But these organizations, ensconced in Northern Virginia office parks and elsewhere, aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire. In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social media, donations are pouring in, and e-mail lists are growing.
One side is fighting to win the next election, the other side is collecting valuable signatures. The Senate Conservatives Fund, one group at the heart of the fight, has amassed 1.3 million. The Senate Conservatives fund was founded by Jim DeMint, current president of the Heritage Foundation, a hugely influential right-wing organization that seems to be shifting from think tank (boring!) to PAC and pressure group. Because donors respond much more favorably to attack ads than they do to white papers.
As I’ve said a hundred times before, the conservative movement is essentially a self-perpetuating fundraising machine. This is not to say that Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are insincere in their belief that subsidies and a network of statewide exchanges for the purchase of private health insurance will destroy liberty forever, I’m merely saying that the campaign to convince voters and legislators that Republicans can delay or defeat Obamacare this month is a lucrative one, for many people.
When there isn’t an election going on, these groups need other reasons to convince people to send them money. The Obamacare fight, like the IRS scandal before it, works beautifully. Here’s U.S. News and World Report’s Brian Walsh, a former Republican operative, on the scope of this campaign:
In fact, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action, the political arm of the once well-respected Heritage Foundation, have spent more money so far on attack ads this year against House and Senate Republicans than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee, combined. All the while, virtually every Senate Democrat up for re-election in 2014 – all of whom were the deciding vote on Obamacare – has been given a free pass by these groups.
Once you “sign” a “petition” by calling or clicking, you are invited to donate money to help finance the fight against the tyrannical healthcare law. (And then you may receive either a bumper sticker or a copy of Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny.”) You end up on a list — a list that is worth a great deal of money to the organization — whenever you attend a rally. Participating in calls increases loyalty to the group and drives more donations. Heritage Action had a “nine-city national tour over the summer” and Brent Bozell’s ForAmerica “made over 50,000 phone calls to congressional offices.”
Whether or not the Republicans actually end up causing a government shutdown, these groups have already won. Whether or not Obamacare is delayed or defunded, they’ve already won. Some annoyed Republicans are accusing shutdown-pushers like Ted Cruz of “not dealing in reality,” but Cruz is decidedly reality-based. He’s just selling unreality to his constituents — not just Texas voters, but the entire nationwide network of pissed-off and increasingly delusional conservatives who fund the great right-wing money carousel. He becomes a star, and they get to feel like they’re an integral part of an existential fight for America’s future. (They also get a bumper sticker and a bulk-purchased copy of a conservative media hack’s ghost-written book.)
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 17, 2013
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