Month: January 2013

ICYMI: Another GOP lawmaker demonstrating that he’s colorblind

by digby

This was sent out on December 28th by a powerful Wisconsin Republican.

Why Must We Still Hear About Kwanzaa?

Madison: Why are hard-core left wingers still trying to talk about Kwanzaa – the supposed African-American holiday celebration between Christmas and New Year’s?

As has been well publicized, Kwanzaa is not some African or African-American tradition. It was invented in 1966 by Ron Karenga, a 1960s radical leader and founder of something called the “US Organization”. This group, often referred to as the “United Slaves” is even more radical than the Black Panthers. The United Slaves killed two Black Panther members and Karenga himself wound up going to prison for assaulting some of his own members.

Karenga was a racist and didn’t like the idea that Christ died for all of our sins,so he felt blacks should have their own holiday – hence, Kwanzaa.

Of course, almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa – just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans. Irresponsible public school districts such as Green Bay and Madison (and who knows how many others, see links below) try to tell a new generation that blacks have a separate holiday than Christians. Waring Fincke, left-wing West Bend lawyer and vice chair of the Washington County Democratic Party, encouraged people to learn more about Kwanzaa in a column in July.

Fortunately, almost all black people ignore Waring Fincke and his ilk and their efforts to divide Americans. But why do they do it? They don’t like America and seek to destroy it by pretending that its values as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, don’t apply to everyone. Mainstream Americans must be more outspoken on this issue. It’s time it’s slapped down once and for all.

With tens of millions of honorable black Americans in our country’s past, we should not let a violent nut like Karenga speak for them. (By the way, after getting out of prison he was hired as a professor at California State Long Beach. When are we going to stop funding left wing nuts at our public universities?) The churches ought to be particularly appalled since Karenga thought Christmas was a white religion and was trying to draw black people from it.

Be on the lookout if a K-12 or college teacher tries to tell your children or grandchildren it’s a real holiday.

People were not amused, needless to say. However:

West Bend Republican Senator Glenn Grothman said Wednesday he refuses to apologize for his beliefs after making comments about the holiday Kwanzaa.

But then he’s never apologized for this either:

Grothman has argued that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should not be a work holiday, calling the day off “an insult to all the other taxpayers around the state”.

Fortunately, racism is dead so we needn’t worry about that, but it is odd that someone who believes so fervently in liberty would seek to stifle people’s freedom to celebrate in whatever way they wish. Why the next thing you know, someone will start a war on Christmas — and then where will he be?

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Red State leadership

by digby

When I read David’s post below about the intransigence of the Confederate rump of the Republican Party, I thought of this tweet from the other night:

Buzzy: @reptomprice told WMAL this morning that GOP needs “red state leadership.” As @larryoconnor notes, that doesn’t include OH, VA, & CA
— Robert Costa (@robertcostaNRO) January 2, 2013

Amazing, no? I’m going to guess that Paul Ryan is also seen as a consrevative who cannot be relied upon (which will undoubtedly give him extra standing among the Villagers to run for president.)

After seeing Lincoln, in which Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner sought to portray Honest Abe as the great negotiator who made cats and dogs lie down together, I could see that the filmmakers had it in their minds that if he could do it then, gosh darn it, we certainly should be able to do it now, right? Well, wrong. The president had just won a bloody civil war, which I think we can agree is a unique moment in history and perhaps not a good one to use as a template for future negotiations.

But, in light of the behavior of the lunatic GOP over the past few days I’ve been thinking once again about what Lincoln said before the war when he was trying to deal with the Southern Democrats over the expansion of slavery. Let’s just say that the problem is a habit of mind, not strategy or ideology.  I’ll just excerpt a small part of the speech, but I think you’ll recognize the dynamic:

And now, if they would listen – as I suppose they will not – I would address a few words to the Southern people.

I would say to them: – You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to “Black Republicans.” In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of “Black Republicanism” as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite – license, so to speak – among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify… 

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another…Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. 

This is why I am convinced that this isn’t a structural problem of governance, at least in terms of process and procedure. It’s a longstanding cultural and sociological divide that’s been with us from the beginning.  It’s no longer strictly regional (although Tom Price’s comment in that tweet above shows that the power and security of the revanchist tribe still resides in Dixie.) It’s a fact of American life that we will divide along these lines. It is who we are. And although it bought us a century of disequilibrium the civil war didn’t really change it.

So, here we are. Again.  Still.

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Confederate intransigence

by David Atkins

As we neared impact on the fiscal cliff deal, I noted that even though we all would prefer the President to be a stronger negotiator, the fact that most Republican House members are so comfortably gerrymandered into conservative districts means that common public disfavor and the intimidation of bully pulpit won’t much matter to them.

But it’s important to note that the issue is a little more complicated than which Republican incumbents are safe and which ones are not. The difference between a pliable Republican and an intransigent one is also largely a function of region and culture:

Just 16% of GOP representatives from the South voted for the Senate compromise— Nate Cohn (@electionate) January 2, 2013

And it’s exactly the reverse in the northeast, where just 16% of GOP representatives voted no— Nate Cohn (@electionate) January 2, 2013

At Daily Kos, Greg Dworkin noted the seeming contradiction between my statement that Republicans are not accountable to public opinion, and Chait’s postulate that the President might have been able to count on public opinion to sway Republicans into passing stand-alone middle-class tax cuts.

The resolution lies in which Republicans are under discussion. The power base of the GOP lies in the South and plains states. That’s where most of their representatives are located. It’s entirely likely that a number of Republicans in blue states are amenable to some hard-nosed persuasion. But it’s entirely unlikely that a majority of Republicans are so inclined.

And it’s finally also unlikely that a House Republican majority would often break the Hastert Rule to pass progressive priorities just because 40 or so Republicans felt pressured into voting for them.

None of which means that Democrats shouldn’t take harder negotiating stances and use the bully pulpit while pushing for significant rules changes to disempower the Confederate minority that artificially holds power in the House of Representatives. They should. It’s the only option that doesn’t involve shooting a sequential set of hostages taken by radical Republicans.

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QOTD: Joan McCarter

by digby

Sing it sister:

Will there be a “Democratic civil war” over Social Security and Medicare, if President Obama pushes proposals that would cut benefits or otherwise endanger those programs? There damned well better be.

If I were them, I’d take this battle into the GOP’s districts as well. But that’s just me.

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Austerity for you, and for you, and for you

by David Atkins

One of the things progressives could be grateful for in recent years is that the United States had so far avoided much of the foolish austerity mania that has sent Europe into an economic spiral. No longer:

For years, some American economists have been scolding countries in Europe for engaging in too much austerity during the downturn — that is, enacting tax increases and spending cuts while their economies were still weak.

But after the fiscal cliff deal, the United States is now on pace to engage in at least as much fiscal consolidation in 2013 as many European nations have been doing in recent years — and more than countries like Britain and Spain.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows Congress has enacted roughly $355 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts for the coming year, an austerity package whose total size comes to about 2.1 percent of GDP.

A lot of people like to say that government is run purely for the rich. But that’s not entirely true. It’s not true in many European nations where austerity is being enacted, anyway. And most of the rich don’t actually benefit from a double-dip recession.

What seems more likely is that the current economic, ecological and political system is broken and unsustainable. Globalization creates downward pressure on labor, which pushes wealth upward and depresses wages, which forces policymakers to incentivize asset growth over wage growth while decreasing the cost of goods and increasing consumer debt. That in turn becomes impractical and creates wobbly, crash-prone economies even as middle-classes disappear. Birth rates decline due to lack of economic opportunity and insanely long periods of educational indenture for young people, which causes developed economies to turn to immigration for demographic balance, which in turn causes social unrest. Nation-states are powerless to stop multinational corporations from blackmailing them over “jobs” and buying their governments, and struggle to find coherent ways to deal non-state-actor crises such as international terrorism and climate change. Meanwhile, ecological and crises are abundant, guaranteeing a slowing of economic growth absent some significant paradigm shift.

The answer to all of this in elite circles seems to be for policy makers and their wealthy, comfortable friends to put their heads in the sand and hope it will all work out for the best if we just keep the current system hobbling along for a few more years. They see a looming fiscal crisis, realize it would be a lot more work to try to tax the rich to resolve it rather than take the complex and proactive steps necessary to deal with it, and simply decide to enact austerity measures through broader tax increases and dumb spending cuts. Anyone who doesn’t see it the same way tends to be shunned from the more elite social circles.

Breaking this mold is going to require some revolutionary and proactive thinking about what a sustainable economy for the 21st century would look like.

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The best argument I’ve yet heard for homeschooling*

by digby

Oh my God:

As of Wednesday, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from several states including Ohio, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.

“We knew this would be popular, but the response has exceeded out expectations,” said Jim Irvine, Chairman of the Buckeye Firearms Foundation. “People doubted if we would fill the first class. That happened in hours. This is something many in our schools have been asking about for a long time.” […]

“No one will be forced to be armed if they choose not to. The strategy is the same as ordinary concealed carry. No one will ever know who is or is not armed. Those who seek to do harm in schools should be met with armed resistance, even before law enforcement shows up. Over time, schools will no longer be considered easy, risk-free targets.”

This is literally insane. These are people who want to make teachers work for less pay and more hours and lower the standards in every way. But they want them to be armed around schoolkids.

Via Think Progress, which has more

*Disclaimer: homeschooling is also fine if the parents are actually capable of teaching their kids.

Fasten your seat belts and get ready for a bumpy ride

by digby

I have probably been among those liberals who were slightly less agitated by this fiscal cliff deal simply because I was glad to see that the President didn’t, in the end, succeed in putting SS and medicare on the chopping block. It’s thin gruel, but in this environment a Grand Bargain failure is about he best I ever hope for. I never believed that they would go over the cliff although I kept hope alive. The body language was clear — I’m afraid that nothing scares them more than the market gods and they truly believed that there would be a big reaction if they ended up going over the cliff — which meant massive austerity, even if it was in the short term.

And that is so ironic I can hardly stand it. After all, the whole logic of this ridiculous battle allegedly hinges on our allegedly massive debt and yet the Market Gods know very well that to attempt to deal with it through massive austerity measures will kill their golden goose. It makes your head hurt to think about it.

I was all for making a stand and using the threat of higher taxes to eliminate the debt ceiling hostage taking, but I can’t honestly say I thought the WH or the Democrats would do that. They just don’t have the killer instinct. And the danger was that in search of the vaunted “balanced approach” they’d sell out the future in order to gain in the present and I just couldn’t go along with that.

And anyway, there’s nothing surprising about Grand Bargaining being done in stages. That’s what they’ve been doing from the beginning and we’ve only been moderately successful in keeping needed programs off the chopping block. As long as we have a president and a Democratic leadership that continues to endorse austerity in one way or another, there’s little anyone can do about it except keep trying to push the worst of it to the next phase in the hope that circumstances will be more friendly down the road.

So, fasten your seatbelts. The fight to stop them from giving away the store in the debt ceiling begins today. As Josh Holland wrote (bitterly):

It’s simply a hostage exchange. The Republicans gave up the fiscal cliff, and will now take the debt limit, the federal budget and automatic across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending (the sequester), and have another standoff in 2-3 months time. The deal wouldn’t have gotten 85 GOP votes in the House without the leadership giving right-wingers ironclad guarantees that they’ll have another hostage soon.

What leverage will the White House have at that point? They’ve already rejected the “constitutional option” to avoid the debt ceiling — and won’t mint a big platinum coin. The Bush tax cuts on high earners will be off the table. That leaves cuts to defense — which Republicans hate — and public opinion, to which the GOP doesn’t seem terribly responsive when its base is screaming murder and threatening primaries (which is always). That’s pretty thin gruel given that the “austerity caucus” thinks it has a good shot at cutting Social Security and Medicare as part of a “grand bargain” with Obama.

Other than that, we’ll only have the Democrats’ legendary iron back-bone on which to rely. Nobody’s ever gotten rich betting on that.

Indeed. Meanwhile the White House is dancing all over the TV claiming Grover Norquist has been banished from the beltway and the Republicans are all in on tax increases for a balanced approach. I sure hope they know that’s spin because if they don’t, we’re in worse trouble than I thought. This was a one time deal and the GOP will hold the line in this next round unless the Democrats come after them with everything they have and accuse them of trying to kill senior citizens and sick children. I mean it. They are not going to agree to any more tax increases.

Also too, this. We cannot afford any more cuts. In fact, we can’t afford the cuts we’re already enduring:

The White House continues to maintain that it is investing in the middle class going forward, yet this clearly is not true. This is important to understand as we move toward further budget deals that could make matters worse.

The White House statement on the fiscal deal says: “This agreement will also grow the economy and shrink our deficits in a balanced way – by investing in our middle class, and by asking the wealthy to pay a little more.” And an accompanying fact sheet claims: “this agreement ensures that we can continue to make investments in education, clean energy, and manufacturing that create jobs and strengthen the middle class.”

As my colleague Ethan Pollack has pointed out, this is inconsistent with President Obama’s frequent bragging point that his budget brings the non-security portion of the budget down to record-low levels—“the lowest level since President Eisenhower.” The fact is that if you lower domestic discretionary spending, you necessarily are reducing public investments in education, research and infrastructure. As a reminder, here’s Ethan’s analysis of infrastructure, education and research and development spending in the Obama Fiscal 2013 budget: 

So, if we really want to invest in the middle class—as the president claims to—we will have to increase domestic discretionary spending, not cut it further as his most recent and prior budget requests have done (the president also offered to cut domestic discretionary spending by another $100 billion in the recent negotiations). Fighting to preserve social insurance (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) benefits that the broad middle class depends on and making the public investments we need for growth and equity requires winning the battle over more revenues in the budget negotiations ahead. We should all be clear about that.

So you see what a bind we’ve been put it with this ridiculous austerity fetish? We’re going to be arguing about cutting even larger chucks of the budget at a time when we desperately need to be adding to it.

(Oh, and by the way, it’s not as if the tax hikes they just voted for could be used for any of that. Every penny of it is slated to pay down debt incurred during the time when the Republicans starved the beast and spent like sailors. What a racket.)

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Greatest Hits: On the spirit of partisanship

by digby

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who donated to the Hullabaloo Fundraiser this year.  It was much appreciated.  Ten years is a long time to be doing this, but it’s still fun and I think we’ll keep doing it a while longer.

The events of the last couple of days have been frustrating to say the least. And much handwringing and rending of garments has been taking place about the unique nature of the opposition and their unprecedented obstreperousness and obstructionism.

I think for this last Greatest Hit post I’ll share this one from 2004.

Friday, September 10, 2004

Tooth And Nail, Might And Main

by digby 

As we think about the relentlessness of the Republican machine and its propensity for playing hardball, it pays sometimes to remember that their ruthless tactics are actually a matter of temperament rather than ideology. Conservatives have always been this way. The problem today is that they are operating with a radical agenda, an incompetent president and a country with much too much power to be allowed to run wild with either.

This interesting post takes us back to 1820 and reminds us that brutish conservatives are nothing new:

William Hazlitt explained the nature of it in his 1820 essay, “On the Spirit of Partisanship.”

Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. “They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse.”

The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. “We”—i.e., the liberals, or the “popular cause,” in Hazlitt’s terminology—“stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.

They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high—

“To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!”

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. 

While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. 

They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. 

It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.

It is not fair play, and Hazlitt thinks that liberals who decline to fight fire with fire are fools. “It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisal on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution.”

Hazlitt was right. And never more than today when the stakes are so high. 

As I said, we have been fighting this beast forever. Conservatives are just more inclined to fight and more serious about winning. But, I have seen the Republican agenda change from conservative to radical in the last 30 years and their candidates from steady, stolid leaders to firebrands and incompetents. America is the most powerful nation on earth. 

If the modern GOP boasted prudent, tested leadership and a simple desire to avoid radical change, I would still oppose them but I would not be worried. But, these people want to wildly experiment on a global scale and their track record of the last three years is devastating. History proves that bad things do sometimes happen. Being barely left standing to say “I told you so” will be no compensation.

It should be noted progress does happen, so it can’t be that liberalism never prevails. In fact, in the long run, it always does. But there’s often a backlash and so it’s always two steps forward one step back. And the step back can be a doozy.

We’re in the middle of a doozy. And as you can see it’s nothing new.  They’ve been like this forever to one degree or another and even as recently as 2004 we were stunned by their ruthlessness and wondering if it could get worse. But when I look over the events of the past few days it is clear to me that while the zombie Republicans are relentlessly destructive they also have many weaknesses which can be exploited if the Democrats will use their heads.

Keep in mind that these people are fine with throwing the needy on to the streets but voting to allow taxes to rise is the most painful vote these Republicans ever have to make. Yet, only the fringiest of the fringe GOP Senators didn’t vote yes. So we know that even rightwing nightmares like Inhofe are subject to McConnell’s discipline. That big vote, in turn, led to Boehner having cover to keep his freakshow in line. After a little Tea Party kabuki yesterday, the House fell in line as well. And they did — in a big way. They allowed the Senate bill to be voted on with short notice, on an almost unanimous vote, which gave Boehner the ability to bring the vote to the floor. So they too are still subject to some discipline — at least when they know they have a losing hand.

What this means isn’t that they are normal legislators and patriotic believers in good governance. But it is clear that they are still subject to some rational motivations under the right circumstances. They realized that taxes were going up on their precious rich people (and themselves) and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. And they made what amounts to a tactical retreat, from which they will come out fighting, with vengeance on their minds.Take note. The next battle is likely to be extremely bloody — and the outcome isn’t just going to affect a few very well off people who will whine but never suffer.  It’s going to affect millions and millions of voters, many of them Republican voters. The Democrats can win that one if they really want to.

It’s important that we make sure they want to. Because these zombies don’t operate in a vacuum. The other side of the story in that Hazlitt screed, you see,  is the vanity, pusillanimity and pedantry of the liberals.

Update: it’s been brought to my attention that the bill was brought to the floor by unanimous consent which means that none of the Tea party Senators who voted against it really voted against. They could have stopped it if they wanted to. This means that this vote was really unanimous in both houses.

Econ 4: Statement on Healthcare 

by tristero

The latest video from the great liberal economics group, Econ 4, on healthcare. Watch it here.

The worst negotiation failure of the night

by David Atkins

So the deal is done: Cantor’s gambit to take us over the cliff and/or pressure the Senate into a harder bargain, if it was ever anything more than kabuki posturing, failed. Boehner broke the Hastert rule and brought the Senate bill to the floor, allowing it to pass with overwhelming Democratic support plus a GOP minority.

Taken on its own and without context, the deal isn’t that bad. Significant taxes were raised on the wealthy, unemployment benefit extensions were passed, the “milk cliff” was averted, and sundry other positive things were done. There’s some ugly stuff in there, too, of course: not enough increase in the capital gains rate, an indexing of the estate tax to inflation, and a continuation of various corporate tax giveaways among the nastiness. But the biggest problem with the final deal is that we’re now set up for the debt ceiling fight with no leverage whatsoever against the Republican ideological cult if the President doesn’t either take the Constitutional option or mint the $1 trillion platinum coin. As I argued before, little absent going over the cliff completely would have denied the Republicans that leverage, anyway. Still, the thought of this Republican Congress negotiating with Grand Bargain-desperate Obama over the debt ceiling is a terrifying prospect. It’s going to take massive progressive mobilization over the next two months to block the worst from happening.

But perhaps the biggest negotiation failure of the day wasn’t over the fiscal cliff at all, but over Hurricane Sandy relief. To the shock of decent people the world over, Republicans adjourned the House without even taking up a vote on relief funding for the states hardest hit by the hurricane. The outrage from the well of the House was palpable.

Adjourning without even bothering to take a vote on this was a move of epic callousness, though it’s not entirely surprising: the relief would go to blue states, and Republicans don’t give a damn about any part of the country that isn’t backward blood red.

It does raise the question of why Nancy Pelosi allowed it to happen,though. Once House Democrats knew that they would be bailing Republicans out of going over the fiscal cliff and setting themselves up for nightmarish headaches, achieving hurricane relief should have been a contingent part of the deal. There should never have been a vote on the Senate fiscal deal without a prior vote on hurricane relief.

But then again, even thinking in these terms requires one to imagine the Republicans as honest negotiators. Let’s say Pelosi had made such a demand (there’s no way to know at this point whether she did or did not), and Boehner refused it. What then? Would House Dems have refused to vote yes on the Senate deal as well? How would that have been explained to the public?

Once again, we’re confronted with a situation in which Democrats aren’t willing to simply let the country go to hell in a handbasket, while Republicans are. That gives Republicans the advantage in any negotiation going forward until and unless Democrats make the necessary rules changes to prevent Republicans from operating a tyranny of the minority.

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