“Delusional, Savvy Or Selfish?: The House GOP Is About To Crack Up
Lots of people think John Boehner has lost control of the House Republican caucus. Apparently John Boehner does, too.
On Wednesday, the speaker and his lieutenants had to stage yet another embarrassing retreat—this time, by postponing a vote on a “continuing resolution” that would fund government operations past September 30, when the current CR expires. Figuring out a way to pass such a bill has been one of Boehner’s biggest challenges for the last few weeks. And primarily that’s because the Republican Party’s right wing insists on linking a CR to Obamacare. Both in the House and in the Senate, Tea Party Republicans and their allies want the president’s health care law off the books or, at the very least, delayed and defunded. If they don’t get their way, they say, they won’t vote for any CR—even if that means the federal government shuts down.
Most members of the Republican establishment think this strategy is nuts. Senate Democrats would never agree to undermine Obamacare, they note. And even if a few Senate Democrats went along, enough to get such a measure through the chamber, President Obama would never sign such a bill. It’s his signature accomplishment and, for liberals, the biggest achievement since the Great Society. The shutdown that ensued would be bad for the country and, if the polls are right, most voters would blame the Republicans.
As of a few days ago, House leadership thought they’d come up with a solution: They’d pass a CR and include a provision to defund or delay Obamacare, but in a way that allowed the Senate to remove the Obamacare provision. The president would get a “clean” CR to sign, while congressional Republicans could tell their constituents and supporters they’d voted to get rid of Obamacare. Just to sweeten the deal, House leaders made sure the new CR would lock in lower levels of discretionary spending while bumping up defense spending—a position Obama and the Democrats oppose, but probably not enough to block such a proposal. House leaders also promised to stage a real, no-surrender fight on Obamacare later in October, when the federal government would need new authority to keep borrowing money.
Alas, the ploy failed—miserably. Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action, called the leadership plan a “legislative gimmick” and warned, darkly, “it is our expectation that no conservative in Congress will try to deceive their constituents by going along with this cynical ploy.” Over in the Senate, Texas Republican and conservative agitator Ted Cruz was equally hostile to the idea: “If House Republicans go along with this strategy, they will be complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare.”
House Republican leadership didn’t appreciate the pressure, particularly from their Senate counterparts. And they didn’t hide their dismay to reporters. “They’re screwing us,” a House Republican aide told Burgess Everett of Politico. Another aide responded to an inquiry from Kate Nocera, of Buzzfeed, with a video of Will Ferrell talking about “crazy pills.” Yet another Republican staffer suggested to Roll Call‘s Matt Fuller that “Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals.”
Neanderthals? Yes. Irrelevant? Not really. By Wednesday morning, according to National Review‘s Jonathan Strong, Boehner and his colleagues had tallied just 200 “yes” votes in their internal counts. With House Democrats refusing to support a plan with such low spending levles, the leaders had no quick and easy way to get 217. And while aides assured reporters that the leadership just needed more time, an anecdote from Politico‘s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan suggests Boehner was less confident:
A reporter asked [Boehner] whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
He’s probably right. And it makes you wonder why the right wing is making Boehner’s life so difficult. Their explicit goal, getting rid of Obamacare, would seem to be out of reach. The political cost of pursuing that goal would seem to be high. Why keep at it?
Three theories come quickly to mind:
They are delusional. If you sincerely believe Obamacare will bankrupt the country, violate personal liberty, raise costs or ruin insurance for most Americans, and generally destroy American health care, then it’s easy to believe that it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country demands repeal—forcing both Senate Democrats and the president to go along. It’s particularly easy to believe this if you live in the right-wing media bubble, where all of the reports about Obamacare focus on the law’s shortcomings and failures—insurance premiums going up, people losing coverage, part-time workers losing hours, and so on.
These stories offer a distorted picture of reality. While some are true, most are exaggerated and some are flat-out false. For the vast majority of people, Obamacare will change very little; and among those most directly affected, the presently uninsured and those who buy coverage on their own, there are going to be many more winners than losers. But you’d never know that if your primary sources of information are Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
They are savvy. Maybe conservatives realize they can’t dislodge Obamacare and are simply hoping for leverage. At some point, Congress is going to pass a CR. And, at some point, Congress is going to raise the debt ceiling. Perhaps the Tea Party wing figures that, by holding out until the last possible minute, they increase the likelihood the final deal for each debate is more to their liking. Most likely, as Brian Beutler has explained at Salon, that would mean agreements that cut non-defense spending and increases defense spending more than Democrats would like.
Of course, the strategy could backfire. The more Boehner must rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill, the more concessions on spending he must make. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the rest of the Democratic leadership have made that very clear. But if you’re a Tea Party Republican, maybe you take your chances, figuring that even less extreme members of your caucus won’t support bills that tilt too far toward the Democrats—and Boehner won’t pass a bill without at least some Republican support.
They are selfish. Fiscal extortion may be bad for the Republican brand and it is certainly bad for the country. But is it bad for the likes of Ted Cruz and Heritage Action? I’m not so sure.
Every time they force leadership to change plans, they appear more powerful. Every time they rant about Obamacare, their supporters get more excited. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle—and also, I imagine, a profitable one. If you have watched cable television news lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen some of the anti-Obamacare ads. They’re everywhere. These ads don’t simply spread conservative propaganda; they also gin up the base. It’s no coincidence that many of the advertisements—a majority of them, as best as I can tell—end not with a plea to call your congressman but with an appeal for donations.
If you’re one of the people producing these advertisements, it’s really a no-lose proposition. No matter what eventually happens with the budget and Obamacare, you get more visibility and more money. The rest of your party may come to hate you. (Note the recent anonymous quotes describing these groups as “Neanderthals.”) And if things get out of hand, the country could really suffer. But none of that diminishes your standing with the base. If anything, it will probably enhance it.
Which theory best explains the right’s behavior? Who knows. Probably all three have some truth. But the end result is the same. Conservatives seem determined to provoke a crisis, whether it’s over funding the government past September 30 or increasing the Treasury’s borrowing limit. If that happens, Boehner will face a choice. He can stand by while government services and the economy suffer—or, as Greg Sargent recently suggested, he can “cut the Tea Party loose, and suffer the consequences.” Yes, the consequences might include Boehner losing his job as speaker. Those are the kinds of risks real leaders take, in order to serve the public.
By: Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor, The New Republic, September 12, 2013
“It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”: In The End However, History Will Remember Where We End Up
In a political environment that stays thirsty for clear winners and losers and operates on a stopwatch, the Syrian debate hasn’t satisfied, and is unlikely to.
This debate is too serious to be subjected to the rules of Washington’s game, even as it must be conducted by its gamesmen.
It has broken down the normal tribalism of left-right, liberal-conservative constructs, and mixed folks into maddeningly contradictory coalitions.
On one side are some of President Obama’s staunchest supporters, who are always convinced that he’s the smartest man in the room, that he’s always playing chess when others are playing checkers.
As someone tweeted to me on Tuesday night, “I support my President and ANY decisions he makes.” She continued, “we elected him to do a job so we must pray for his discernment and allow him to do it.”
For many like this woman, their faith in Obama is resolute and unshakable. But, they have found kinship with conservative, hard-line war hawks who see an opportunity to alter the Syrian civil war and place another imperial imprint on the region. Their thirst for intervention will never be sated. Their trigger finger is always itchy. Their appetite for expansion knows no bounds.
This is the might-makes-right crowd.
On this side are also those who are simply convinced of the administration’s argument: that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people and that he should be punished, not only for moral reasons but to ensure our own national security.
And then there are people who generally support the president’s policies but feel, as a matter of principle — and perhaps provincial interest — that they simply cannot support his call to arms.
For them, this is not about an opposition to Obama the man, but to a military instinct.
And many of them seem to have reconciled their support for the president with their resistance to this action. That may help to explain why opposition to military action in Syria is overwhelming but, according to a Gallup report released Tuesday, Obama’s personal approval rating, as well as approval of his foreign affairs policies, remain relatively unchanged.
The truly anti-war-inclined, many of them true liberals, are so exhausted by our current and recent forays that they can’t even fathom another.
And they have real concerns. Would a United States military action be legal without a United Nations resolution? How do we ensure that dropping bombs won’t be tantamount to whacking the hornets’ nest, setting in motion painful repercussions that we cannot foresee? What to make of this Goldilocks bombing strategy of not-too-little, not-too-much but just enough? How is such a thing calibrated? And why bomb at all if we plan to leave Bashar Assad in power?
This genuine anti-war-in-Syria crowd finds itself in the odd company of the pro-war-on-Obama crowd. The latter will never be satisfied with anything this president does or how he does it. The president’s very presence irritates like a rock in a shoe.
For many of these folks, everything is a bargaining chip and all roads lead to Benghazi.
On Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said:
“One of the problems with all of this focus on Syria is it’s missing the ball from what we should be focused on, which is the grave threat from radical Islamic terrorism. I mean, just this week is the one-year anniversary of the attack on Benghazi.”
With Benghazi, Republicans are like a dog with a bone.
So into this crazy, mixed-up world of odd alliances steps the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, with a proposal — whether serious or not only time will tell — to defuse the situation by creating an even odder alliance: the Russians persuade the Syrians to declare and surrender their chemical weapons to international monitors in order to prevent American military action.
Under this new deal, we’d all be partners of a sort, working toward a common goal. And ironically, such a deal will most likely require boots on the ground in order to guard weapons inspectors and secure weapons, something that President Obama promised wouldn’t happen if Congress gave him authorization to bomb.
Now, personally, I don’t trust Russia’s Putin or Syria’s Assad any further than I could throw them, and the logistics of the Russian plan seem nearly impossible. Though at least America can now say that it has tried to pursue a diplomatic option before having to pursue a military one.
In the end, history will remember where we end up much more than how we got there. But, history takes time.
The fact that immense power should require immense patience seems to satisfy very few. We are an all-or-nothing culture, watching a get-it-over-quick clock. We dislike complexity, or ambiguity, or sophistication.
So, when the president offered no one-line take-away in his address to the nation on Tuesday, many of those already on the fence were left there with a one-word reflection: ambivalence.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 11, 2013
“Contemptible Animals”: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, And Their Craven And Brazen Hypocrisy On Syria
The Republican hypocrisy on Syria is just amazing. Imagine that Mitt Romney were president. Romney took a far more hawkish line than Barack Obama did on Syria during the campaign. He wanted to arm the rebels, supported in-country cover ops, and so on. So if Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons during President Romney’s tenure, there’s every reason to think he’d be pushing for action too. And what, in that case, would Republicans now temporizing or opposing Obama be doing in that case? They’d be breathing fire, of course. There’s a lot of chest thumping talk right now about how a failed vote will destroy Obama’s credibility. I guess that may be to some. But to anyone paying attention, the credibility of these Republicans is what will suffer, and the vote may well come back to haunt some of them in 2016.
Some Republicans are, to their credit, taking the position consistent with their records. John McCain stood up to those people who looked like they were about two feet away from his face at that town hall meeting last week. Lindsey Graham deserves more credit, since he’s facing reelection and is being called “a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood.” On the other side, Rand Paul and the neo-isolationists are probably taking the same position they’d take if Romney were president, although we can’t be completely sure. If Romney were in the White House, by 2016, “was so-and-so tough on Syria?” would probably be a top litmus test (unless, of course, things got really terrible over there). I could easily see Paul declaiming on the unique evil of chemical weapons that just this once required him to break from his noninterventionist views, but as things stand he at least is taking the position with which he is identified.
But most of them? Please. The Gold Weasel Medal goes to Marco Rubio, as others such as Tim Noah have noted. Back in April, Rubio thundered that “the time for passive engagement in this conflict must come to an end. It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal.” Removal! Obama’s not talking about anything close to removal. So that was Rubio’s hard line back when Obama was on the other side. And now that Obama wants action? Rubio voted against the military resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
Ted Cruz? Just in June, Cruz wanted to go into Syria and rough ’em up. “We need to develop a clear, practical plan to go in, locate the weapons, secure or destroy them, and then get out.” Now? Syria is a distraction from, you guessed it, Benghazi. He said last week: “We certainly don’t have a dog in the fight. We should be focused on defending the United States of America. That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to, as you know, serve as al Qaeda’s air force.”
There are many others. These two are worth singling out because they want to be president, and their craven and brazen flip-flopping on one of the most important issues to come before them in their Senate careers is more consequential than the flip-flopping of some time-serving senator no one’s ever heard of. But the whole picture is contemptible.
Can you imagine how these people would be wailing for Assad’s head on a pike if Romney were asking for this resolution? And the Republicans in the House? I suppose a small percentage of them may be opposed. But the radio blowhards, now inveighing against “Obama’s war,” would be whooping up war fever like Hearst, and most in the House would follow suit. And remember, this is the party that voted en masse for a massive Medicare expansion in 2003—that is, a vote that was against everything they stood for, but one they took in the name of party loyalty.
They are out to undermine Obama’s credibility. They don’t care a whit about Assad, Iran, Hezbollah; indeed, on that last point, if any of them knows anything about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, they must admire him. Nasrallah accomplishes with impressive efficiency in Lebanon what they want to accomplish in America—preventing the government from being able to do anything good for the people. All they want to do is make Obama look bad.
In contrast, look at Obama’s explanation of why he went to Congress in the first place. He was asked this question last week while in Russia. What he said is worth reprinting at length, I think: “I did not put this before Congress, you know, just as a political ploy or as symbolism. I put it before Congress because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States. In that situation, obviously, I don’t worry about Congress; we do what we have to do to keep the American people safe.
“I could not say that it was immediately, directly going to have an impact on our allies. Again, in those situations, I would act right away. This wasn’t even a situation like Libya, where, you know, you’ve got troops rolling towards Benghazi and you have a concern about time, in terms of saving somebody right away. This was an event that happened. My military assured me that we could act today, tomorrow, a month from now, that we could do so proportionally, but meaningfully. And in that situation, I think it is important for us to have a serious debate in the United States about—about these issues, because these—these are going to be the kinds of national security threats that are most likely to recur over the next five, 10 years.”
That’s a candid and thoroughly decent (and by the way, thoroughly constitutional) thought process. Obama couldn’t honestly say to himself that what Assad did represented the kind of direct threat to the American people that would permit the sidestepping of Congress, so he decided to go through all this. Now, of course, one can more cynically say it was the polls, and surely they played a role. But the president’s statement is in line with what we know about virtually all his top aides telling him “Don’t go to Congress” and him resisting that advice.
Obama isn’t a stupid man. He knew a lot of these yahoos would vote no just because it’s him. But he surely hoped that a certain number of them just might cast a vote in line with their worldview, which would slide many of them into the yes column. I’m sure many of my liberal readers are just glad they’re voting no, however cynically they might be doing it. Fine. But you should also leave a little space in your brain for the contemplation of just what a bunch of relentless hypocrites they are, making a decision as weighty as this purely on the basis of their hatred of Obama. And this defeat, if defeat it is, is supposed to destroy his credibility? It would only destroy theirs—that is, if they had any.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2013
“The Cycle Of Savagery”: Jim DeMint Is Now Going Too Far, Even For Republicans
After months—years really—of serving as the scourge of any GOPer he deemed too squishy, the über-conservative senator–turned–Heritage Foundation president finally earned a gentle spanking from his former colleagues. Upon Congress’s return from recess next week, Heritage staffers will no longer be welcome at weekly meetings of the conservative Republican Study Committee.
The ban, which ends a decades-long special arrangement between the two groups, reportedly flowed from a dust-up between Heritage and lawmakers over this summer’s Farm Bill negotiations. (Even the stripped-down version that the House passed was insufficiently austere for Heritage’s taste.) But ag policy is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jim DeMint, who has been hammering Republican lawmakers to hold the conservative line on everything from immigration to Obamacare—to the increasing annoyance of even ideologically simpatico members. While banishing Heritage from planning sessions may not have much practical effect, it’s a sign that congressional Republicans are rethinking their willingness to take DeMint’s abuse lying down.
Which is not to say that Hill Republicans didn’t know DeMint was going to be a gigantic pain once he left office. He was, after all, a gigantic pain while in office. Upon leaving the chummy upper chamber and establishing an independent perch at Heritage, of course he was going to escalate the fight.
Just this week, in fact, DeMint is wrapping up arguably his most aggressive assault to date on his own party: a two-week, nine-city town-hall tour spreading the message that Obamacare must be stopped by any means necessary, including shutting down the federal government. Now most Republicans, of course, would be delighted to defund much if not all of the Affordable Care Act. But most also acknowledge that a government shutdown would not only be politically devastating for the GOP, it simply wouldn’t work. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd back home in Kentucky, “I’m for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare.”
This kind of squish talk is like catnip for DeMint. And so, joined by Rafael Cruz, father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (who rose to office with the support of the DeMint-founded Senate Conservatives Fund PAC), DeMint spent a chunk of his recess rallying supporters in Indianapolis, Dallas (where Senator Cruz made an appearance), Tampa, Nashville, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Wilmington, Delaware, and Fayettville, Arkansas, with the battle cry that Republicans unwilling to go to the mattresses over Obamacare are too soft for public service and “need to be replaced.” At stops along the way, he called out particular lawmakers for criticism. (He took a swipe at John Boehner, for instance, while in the speaker’s home state of Ohio.)
Meanwhile, the Senate Conservatives Fund—which DeMint no longer heads but is still run by his former advisers and staffers—is making the fight even more personal. Last week, the group launched a series of radio ads slamming a half-dozen Republican senators who have declined to sign a letter pledging to shut down the government as a way to defund the ACA. Among those on the hit list are McConnell, Arizona conservative Jeff Flake (to whose campaign the SCF contributed richly last year), and DeMint’s former South Carolina colleague, Lindsey Graham. Brushing off the attack, Flake responded by tweeting “Oh, whatever”—which immediately prompted the SCF to release a second ad, urging Republicans to tell Flake “Oh, whatever” the next time he asked for their support.
And so the cycle of internecine savagery accelerates, even as Republicans brace for what is fast becoming an annual game of budget chicken. Members of the party establishment, understandably, are growing increasingly anxious, and sounding the alarm about the possible repercussions of shutdown shenanigans.
“Shutting down the government in an effort to defund is the one way Republicans can turn Obamacare from a major plus to a major minus in the 2014 elections,” warns GOP pollster Whit Ayers—who, as it turns out, has just completed “extensive polling on public opinion regarding a shutdown.” While Ayers declines to unpack the yet-to-be-released results of the survey, his for-God’s-sake-don’t-do-it attitude is a pretty big clue as to what he has heard from voters. In the coming days, Ayers, among others, will be trooping up to the Hill to discuss the issue with GOP players. He tells me, “There’s a great many people hoping that wiser heads will prevail.”
Perhaps they will. Then again, such “wiser heads” are precisely the ones that DeMint is measuring for the political chopping block.
By: Nichelle Cottle, The Daily Beast, August 30, 2013
“Got To Have One”: Impeachment Is The Right’s New Lost Cause
Sometimes politics is like high-stakes poker. If you look around the table after a few hands and you can’t tell who’s the pigeon, citizen, chances are it’s you: the guy who plunked down $26.95 for a book called Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office.
Yeah, you with the “Impeach Obama” bumpersticker on your car. The guy standing on a freeway overpass waving a “Honk for Impeachment” sign. You may as well go around in a little bird’s nest hat, like Donald Duck’s eccentric friend Gyro Gearloose.
Because it not only ain’t going to happen, but the people peddling this nonsense don’t even want it to happen. Not really. They’re just making a buck off people who can’t count and running a classic misdirection play.
It’s actually a good sign if you think about it.
Basically because the more Republicans you hear talking about impeachment, the closer the party has come to surrender on the big issues they claim to care about.
Like it or not, the possibility of repealing “Obamacare” ended when the Supreme Court found it Constitutional and the president won re-election. You’d think after 40 — count ’em, 40 — fruitless votes to abort the law, that message might start to sink in. We still have majority rule in this country.
But no, it hasn’t sunk in at all. Like a baseball team demanding to play the eighth game of the World Series, GOP hardliners have come up with yet another plan to force the president’s hand. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has called for something he infelicitously called a “grassroots tsunami” to make Obama relent. More rationally consequent party leaders, however, are fearful of the terrible consequences of shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt in a vain attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.
Neither tactic would accomplish the ostensible goal and would doom Republican chances to regain Congress or the White House for the forseeable future. More than 70 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, oppose a government shutdown. A debt default could have catastrophic economic consequences. However, many GOP politicians are equally fearful of the wrath of Tea Party zealots to whom they’ve made undeliverable promises.
Hence the melodramatic appeal of impeachment, a totally unserious threat its sponsors hope hotheads will see as more decisive. So what if it makes the United States look like a Banana Republic? That’s the form of government that fools prefer to democracy, with its tedious committee meetings, quorum calls and compromises. Just think how happy an impeachment battle would make the impresarios and talking heads of cable news.
So far only a couple of largely unknown House Republicans — Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan and Blake Farenthold of Texas — have publicly endorsed the idea of impeaching Obama. But the clamor has also reached more powerful figures.
At a recent town hall meeting in Muskogee, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, ostensibly a personal friend of the president’s, answered a constituent’s question about impeachment by allowing as how “those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. And I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close.”
Campaigning in Texas, Senator Cruz responded to a constituent who asked, “Why don’t we impeach him?” by saying, “It’s a good question.”
Cruz went on to give what he called “the simplest answer: To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate.”
Asked by the National Review if he’d consider changing his mind if Republicans take the House and Senate in 2014, Cruz answered, “that’s not a fight we have a prospect of winning.”
He didn’t say that there’s no remotely plausible evidence against the president, or that Americans settle political disputes through elections rather than show trials. Merely that a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate to remove President Obama from office isn’t feasible right now.
Cruz left the distinct impression that after his dry land political tidal wave fails to sweep the country this fall, he’d be willing to revisit the question. If he’s half as smart as he appears to think he is, the Texas Republican has to know that he’s going to be needing a powerful new issue come 2014.
To the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, “Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success.”
The point, see, wouldn’t be to defeat Obama, but other Republicans. And the key would be establishing himself as the champion of what E.J. Dionne calls the Republican Party’s “Armageddon Caucus.” Impeachment could then become the next lost cause.
They’ve always got to have one.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 28, 2013
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