Month: October 2013

Hmmm. GOP Grand Bargain? What’s that?

by digby

House Republicans tell me Speaker John Boehner wants to craft a “grand bargain” on fiscal issues as part of the debt-limit deliberations, and during a series of meetings on Wednesday, he urged colleagues to stick with him.

The revelation came quietly. Boehner called groups of members to his Capitol office all day, taking their temperature on the shutdown and the debt limit. It became clear, members say, that Boehner’s chief goal is conference unity as the debt limit nears, and he’s looking at potentially blending a government-spending deal and debt-limit agreement into a larger budget package.

“It’s the return of the grand bargain,” says one House Republican, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There weren’t a lot of specifics discussed, and the meetings were mostly about just checking in. But he’s looking hard at the debt limit as a place where we can do something big.”Beyond Boehner’s office, the leadership is sending out a similar message through its emissaries. The House GOP’s top fiscal strategists, Dave Camp and Paul Ryan, are reassuring nervous members that the shutdown may be painful in the short term, but a budget deal is in the works.

During Wednesday huddles, Ryan and Camp, along with members who met with Boehner, talked about what kind of concessions they could potentially win from Democrats on the debt limit, should Republicans hang together. Per sources, entitlement reform, an elimination of the medical-device tax, and delays to parts of Obamacare are all on the table.

Ryan and his allies believe Democrats want a delay of aspects of sequestration and, of course, a clean CR and debt-limit extension. Instead of making separate deals on each front, Ryan, and now, it seems, Boehner are looking at combining the different issues into a single pact.

It’s very hard to know exactly what this means, but whatever it is if it includes the Chained-CPI it’s bad.

Keep in mind that the president said this just two weeks ago:

If we wanna do more deficit reduction, I’ve already– put out a budget that says, “Let’s do it.” I’m willing to reform entitlements. I’m willing to– you know, cut out additional waste that may be there. And I’m spending time, even without pressure from Congress, trying to figure out how we can cut out waste in the system.

He did say that he thought there should be some corporate taxes too. But I’m hearing that Democrats would be willing to deal if they can reverse some of the sequester cuts. No mention of tax hikes — which would be the one poison pill that would kill the Grand Bargain for the Republicans (again.)

So…game on.

If they do this I’m sure everyone will be lauded as grown-ups. So there’s that.

Update:  More from Politico

Most House Republicans privately concede they’re fighting a battle they’re unlikely to win, and to avoid a prolonged shutdown and a disastrous debt default, Washington has to create a package so big that lifting the borrowing limit and funding the government is merely a sideshow.
[…]
“I want to get a budget agreement,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told POLITICO on Wednesday. “That’s what we’ve been about all along. So yeah, we think the issues are converging — [the continuing resolution] and debt limit — and from the get-go, we wanted to get a budget agreement to grow this economy and get this debt under control, especially before the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates. I think it’s in our nation’s interest to do that. And that’s one of the things we’re fighting for in addition to relief from Obamacare — or fairness from Obamacare.”
[…]
White House officials remain deeply skeptical that a grand bargain can be reached as long as Republicans refuse to raise tax revenue. But there are fresh signs Republicans would consider new revenue if they are not raising tax rates, and key Republicans told POLITICO that they would be interested in some of the items discussed by Boehner and Obama in 2011.The collision of a number of factors has sparked renewed talk of a grand bargain.
[…]
So with government shut down and the debt ceiling rapidly approaching in the next two weeks a large number of Republicans see a grand deficit compromise as the only plausible way out.
Members throughout the House Republican Conference are sounding a new tune on a potential deal. Republican Rep. Steve Stivers, a close Boehner ally from the Columbus, Ohio, area, said “guys like me” would consider revenue in a potential deal.

“We’re getting closer to the point that everything’s intertwined — government funding, the debt ceiling and spending — and so the best way out, I believe, and the only way for everybody to find an acceptable long-term solution is a big negotiation of everything that includes something on entitlements, tax reform, something on a spending level and wrap it in one box,” Stivers told POLITICO.

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The conservative “negotiating” principle that dare not say its name

by David Atkins

As a local activist I often find myself dealing with local Republicans and the talking points they get filtered down through the conservative media apparatus. The most frequent one over the last few days has been that Democrats “just won’t compromise.” It hardly needs to be spelled out how ridiculous that is, but Greg Sargent does a very good job today as the government shutdown appears to be careening toward both a shutdown and debt default crisis:

But what about Democrats? Aren’t they planning to use the debt limit as leverage, too?

Yes. But here again, the difference in how each side is using it as leverage again requires Dems not to give ground.

Republicans suggest — again, without saying so outright — that the debt limit gives them leverage because their refusal to raise it threatens a level of harm to the country that Dems will not be able to accept. They suggest (with varying degrees of candor) that because of this, Dems will make unilateral concessions to them that otherwise they wouldn’t have to make. (Remember: In agreeing to raise the debt ceiling — and enabling the U.S. to pay debts already incurred – Republicans would not be conceding anything; they agree it must happen to preserve the country’s full faith and credit.)

By contrast, Democrats say the debt limit gives them leverage in the sense that it will mean Republicans will ultimately have to drop their demand for unilateral Dem concessions. Because Republicans ultimately will not allow widespread harm to the country, goes this reasoning, they will in the end have no choice but to stop asking for a reward in exchange for averting it. Get the difference? One side is dangling the threat of widespread economic harm (again, without clarifying whether they’re actually willing to let it happen) to extract concessions from the other. The other side is evoking that awful prospect in order to rebuff efforts to use it to extract concessions from them.

I’m hardly the first to point out this basic imbalance. Jonathan Chait, Steve Benen, Brian Beutler, James Fallows, and others have all done so at length. And yet, no matter how many times it is outlined, Republicans and their sympathizers, and even some neutral commentators, refuse to acknowledge the basic dimensions of the situation. In the end, the only way to clarify it adequately may be for Dems to simply refuse to give in, no matter what the consequences.

What Republicans are doing isn’t negotiating: it’s hostage taking. Republicans know the government can’t stay shut down for long, and they know that America can’t default on its debt. If this is “negotiating”, it’s a new form of “negotiating” that is largely unprecedented going back to the American Civil War. As Digby noted today, it’s simply the latest in a long line of novel interpretations of political negotiating practiced by Republicans in recent decades.

But endless investigations into nothingburger “scandals” and impeachments over sexual acts are mere politics, if unnervingly brutal. Shutting down the government and defaulting on the full faith and credit of the United States in order to achieve legislative goals are something else entirely.

I hate to use the word because of its consequences, but it must be said that taking the government hostage in this way comes very close to bordering on treason. It’s not all that different from actually holding a gun to the President’s head and demanding legislative ransom. The Republicans would not hesitate to use that word if Democrats were holding the government hostage in order to achieve, say, gun control legislation or Eisenhower-era tax rates on the wealthy from a Republican president.

Again, that’s not to say we should start throwing out terms like this lightly. But it’s hard to fully explain the enormity of what the conservative establishment is doing here without using words that sound like hyperbolic exaggerations.

Republicans know that they cannot achieve their goals through standard democratic means. Their tactics have become more extreme with each passing year. Already “mainstream” pundits are coming to say the same things about the conservative establishment that only dirty hippie progressive bloggers were saying five to ten years ago.

If some of us are starting to use more and more alarmist words to describe what’s going on now, it’s because there’s serious cause for alarm. This isn’t politics as usual: it’s a revolutionary revanchist movement for which the ends clearly justify any means necessary. That sort of thinking is very, very dangerous not just to everyday people and to economies, but to democracy itself.

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Dan Froomkin nails “both sides do it” media coverage of the shutdown

by David Atkins

Dan Froomkin takes on press coverage of the shutdown:

U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a “bitterly divided” Congress that “failed to reach agreement” (Washington Post) or “a bitter budget standoff” left unresolved by “rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers” (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that “Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance…”

But the political media’s aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.

In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party’s outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

It’s hard to see how any of this gets fixed in the next nine years. As long as the districts are adequately gerrymandered, there will be little electoral accountability for the bad behavior of Republicans. If the press actually tells the truth about what is going on, a few more moderate voters will be swayed, but it likely won’t be enough to boot Republicans out of the majority in the House and the right will feel more emboldened to fight against the “liberal media.” Most of the pressure on Republicans will still come from the right, which will descend further and further into its echo chamber with little to no tether to reality.

This is why the parallels to the 1850s and 1860s keeping popping up. In a normal democracy, a delusional 35% of the public shouldn’t be able to hold the other 65% of the country hostage. But if you gerrymander the districts enough, enforce a 60-vote threshold in an unrepresentative body that emphasizes rural states; if you allow enough corporate money in elections; and if you create an entirely separate media echo chamber for that 35% to live in, you just might get it done.

I don’t see the mechanism by which any of this improves. The best bet is for activists in contested congressional districts to work their tails off to pick off as many seats as possible, while blue states make Obamacare and other liberal priorities work in order to create contrasts with red states. Over the next nine years, angry progressives need to focus on winning back statehouses so that the gerrymandering can be reversed in 2022 alongside major demographic shifts. We already saw this work in California.

If those things can take place, then we may be in for a very long nine years. But at least we have a hope of waking from the nightmare at the end. The only problem is how much damage the dead enders will be able to do in nine years. An entire generation’s prospects will be ruined, and it will probably be too late by then to reverse catastrophic climate change.

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Journalists: some context please

by digby

Following up on David’s post below, with which I strongly agree, I would just like to point out another problem with the coverage: lack of context. For instance, even among journalists who ostentatiously reject the direct he said-she said, the impulse is to go to some length to qualify it by saying that while this particular crisis is clearly the fault of the Republicans, the larger picture is much more mixed with the Democrats having to take responsibility for their own actions that led to this. In other words, both sides are guilty — the Democrats provoked this by doing whatever. (Passing the ACA without Republican votes, etc.)

This is nonsense. I’m sure it’s true that Democrats have angered the Republicans by using legislative maneuvers to pass their agenda and I’m sure the Republicans are upset that theirs is not getting passed. But you really need to take a step back and look at the big picture. For 20 years the Republicans have openly and energetically been defying political norms. Ever since the Gingrich revolution we have careened from one violation of these norms to the next, from the 95 shutdown to the impeachment to off year redistricting to filibuster abuse to vote suppression and beyond. This is the story, not the fact that Democrats used a sharp maneuver that one time and it made the Republicans really, really mad and they vowed revenge.

The last two decades have been a systematic whittling down of every precedent, regulation and rule that had kept the government running even in times of great political disagreement. It’s vitally important that the media convey this context because when you look at that litany of GOP actions over the years you will see that defaulting on the debt is completely plausible. They could very easily do it. They have adopted a revolutionary posture and they make no bones about it.

As anyone who reads this blog knows very well, I do not let Democrats off the hook. In a million ways they have enabled the GOP and allowed this huge shift to the right over the past few years. But they have not engaged in the destructive, radical usurpation of democratic norms that has become the hallmark of the Republican Party and which has led us to this critical moment. The last 20 years of GOP radicalism is not business as usual.

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Playing the Pickett’s Charge card

by digby

York also says the GOP should declare victory with the Ryan budget levels and go home. (And a sweet victory it is …)

In any case, we are now fully into freakshow mode with a full fledged hissy fit in the making about Democrats hating the troops or some such nonsense:

“The Obama administration has decided they want to make the government shutdown as painful as possible, even taking the unnecessary step of keeping the Greatest Generation away from a monument built in their honor,” Priebus said. “That’s not right, and it’s not fair.”

Veterans from Missouri, Illinois and Michigan entered the closed memorial on Wednesday, Day 2 of the government shutdown. National Park Service spokeswoman Carol Johnson told ABC News that the Honor Flights are being granted access to the memorial “to conduct First Amendment activities.”

“These soldiers gave everything in fighting for our freedom and the thought that they would not be allowed into their memorial because of the partisan divide in Washington is beyond the pale,” said Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who visited with the Illinois veterans at the memorial.

Hopefully, we will not see this morph into General Betrayus levels of hyperbole with Democrats scurrying in all direction over nothing. I doubt it will — this is just too pathetic. But you can never go wrong underestimating the Democrats’ willingness to prostrate themselves before the Republicans the minute “the troops” are mentioned. (Which has put us into a deeply unfair bind, as Dday writes today in Salon.)

Regardless of all that, it would appear that we have gone beyond the obsession with shutting down Obamacare, which I heard someone describe as the Republicans’ desire to have one last “Pickett’s charge” before the law went into effect. And that is pretty stunning, if true:

Pickett’s Charge was an infantry assault ordered by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee against Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Its futility was predicted by the charge’s commander, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, and it was arguably an avoidable mistake from which the Southern war effort never fully recovered psychologically. The farthest point reached by the attack has been referred to as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

You’d think the neo-confederates, if anyone, would be aware of this. But they’ve probably been brainwashed into thinking the Union stole their rightful victory by conning the troops into giving up or something — right along with every other lie they’ve been taught in right wing bizarroworld.

*York article in the Washington Examiner here.

Local news doing it right

by digby

Honestly, I can never get over this one small fact: the Republicans are having a full blown hysterical meltdown because Democrats passed a law to help people get health care. Health care!

The good news is that unlike the national political media, it appears local news is just reporting reality rather than process mumbo jumbo about the GOP hissy fit:

Think Progress collected the headlines:

I can vouch for the fact that here in Southern California the news coverage has been very straight forward: millions are interested, the rollout has a few glitches, but all in all it’s going very well. The horror, the horror.

Meanwhile,  Michelle Bachman is clinging to 80 year old WWII veterans like a Tiberian bat trying to pretend she is helping them in some way byshutting down the government. Rabbit hole, meet Alice.

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What do they really want, Part XXIV

by digby

Remember when we all assumed that sequestration could never hold and they’d just have to pull the plug and negotiate a reasonable budget when the going got tough? Yeah, that’s worked out for us. I’m going to suggest that we all (myself included) stop assuming that reality must bite and start to figure out where this is actually likely to lead.

Here’s National Review reporter Jonathan Strong’s report on what the right is thinking:

Senior House Republicans are increasingly persuaded the government shutdown could last weeks and will only be resolved in a major bipartisan accord involving a funding bill and a debt-ceiling increase.

On the first day of the shutdown, President Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid only hardened their unwillingness to negotiate with the GOP. For example, Obama threatening to veto rifle-shot funding bills, to keep specific branches of government funded, backed by dozens of Democrats on the House floor.

In the meantime, despite a small bloc of moderates indicating they would happily vote for a “clean” continuing resolution to fund the government without any preconditions, the House GOP conference is remaining steadfast.

At a closed-door conference meeting earlier today, Speaker John Boehner gave a pep-rally-style speech signaling he isn’t about to fold his hand.

“We’re in this fight. This is the moment. We all talk about doing something for our kids and our grandkids. If you want to do something for them, now is the time. We have to work together and win this fight,” Boehner told members, according to a Republican in the room.

“I can’t imagine we’re going to resolve” the shutdown before the upcoming fight on raising the debt ceiling, Representative John Campbell of California says.

“Think about it — if they decided they were ready to talk by next week, you’re not going to negotiate the thing overnight. It’s going to take a little time,” he adds.

“The real problem is, we may have gotten ourselves into a position where we can’t budge on a clean CR and they can’t budge on Obamacare. Then what do you do?” says Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, a top Boehner ally. When I ask how long he expected the shutdown to last, Simpson says “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know.”

Oh, I think there are a lot of things they could extract from Democrats to end the shutdown. Some really, really horrible things. But it isn’t going to be Obamacare.

As I’ve been asking for a while now, what would they settle for if they wake up to the fact that they can’t get their holy grail? I personally think they might settle for cutting social security and medicare without any tax increases, which I would guess will be presented by the Democratic leadership as a small capitulation. After all, they are the ones who offered up the cuts in the first place.

Maybe that’s not good enough for the Republicans anymore. They seem to have convinced themselves that they have super-powers so they’ll hold out for Obama’s resignation. Still, if I had to guess, I’d say that 2011 deal without the revenue is probably going to end up being on offer if this thing drags out.

It looks like I’m not the only one worried about that:

(Washington, D.C.) — Members of the Social Security Works and the Alliance for Retired Americans will join the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday for a Human Chain press conference in opposition to the Chained CPI Social Security benefit cut. The event will take place this Thursday, October 3 at 10 a.m. (EST)at the House Triangle on the east side of the U.S. Capitol.

With the U.S. government shutdown, the President and some members of Congress will see this as an opportunity to press ahead with the chained CPI, a cut to our Social Security benefits in order to re-open the federal government. At age 75, a senior’s benefits would be cut by about $660/year (on average). At age 85, those benefits would be cut by about $1,150/year, and at age 95, by about $1,600/year. For more on what the CPI would do, go to this Social Security Works Fact sheet.

This Human Chain press conference follows the success of nationwide Human Chain events organized by the Alliance for Retired Americans in conjunction with our coalition partners on July 2, 2013. Those events took place in more than 50 cities with support from the labor movement, Social Security Works, and other allies. More than 20 Members of Congress have agreed to participate on October 3, including the Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs: Reps. Keith Ellison (MN) and Raul Grijalva (AZ).

Who: Reps. Keith Ellison (MN); Raul Grijalva (AZ); Mike Honda (CA); Jim McDermott (WA); Steven Horsford (NV); Sheila Jackson Lee (TX); Barbara Lee (CA); John Conyers (MI); Elijah Cummings (MD); Gwen Moore (WI); David Cicilline (RI); Mark Pocan (WI); Louise Slaughter (NY); Cheri Bustos (IL); Jan Schakowsky (IL); Jerrold Nadler (NY); Lois Frankel (FL); Janice Hahn (CA); Paul Tonko (NY); Yvette Clarke (NY); and Judy Chu (CA); Social Security Works, and Members of the Alliance for Retired Americans

When: Thursday, October 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM

Where: House Triangle, U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC

Keep in mind that the president has been saying all along that he’s “eager” for more deficit reduction. And Paul Ryan, who’s the prime mover at this point behind the debt ceiling showdown, knows it:

I asked Ryan if he believes President Obama’s steadfast vows that he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling. His reaction? You’ve got to be kidding me.

“Oh, nobody believes that. Nobody believes that. He himself negotiated Bowles Simpson on the debt limit with Democrats. That was Kent Conrad’s requirement. He himself negotiated the Budget Control Act with the debt limit.

Paul Ryan knows Obamacare isn’t going to be repealed or delayed. They’ve already agreed to use his miserly budget numbers. So, what does he want now?

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Constitutional vandals

by digby

Presidential hopeful Rick Perry:

If this health care law is forced upon this country, the young men and women in this audience are the ones who are really going to pay the price. And that, I will suggest to you, reaches to the point of being a felony toward them and their future. That is a criminal act, from my perspective, to put that type of burden on them, to mortgage their future like that. America cannot stand that. America cannot accept that.

That’s right. A law passed by both houses of congress, signed by the President and upheld by the (conservative) Supreme Court is considered a criminal act — because he doesn’t like it.

Andrew Sullivan has some tart words on the subject:

At its core, the current GOP is a truly revolutionary movement, dedicated to the eradication of the very things it preposterously claims to care about. Look at this sentence and its Orwellian surrealism…Why are we even treating these people as if they are anything but know-nothing constitutional vandals?

No kidding. And let’s be clear: only Republicans are using this kind of radical revolutionary rhetoric. And they aren’t just a bunch of guys in tri-corner hats carrying “don’t tread on me” signs. This isn’t the right wing equivalent of Abbie Hoffman and the yippies, which scared the Democrats so much they turned themselves inside out distancing themselves for over 30 years. This man is the Governor of Texas and is very likely making another run at the presidency. These people have real political power.

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Moment of zen: lemmings

by digby

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., labeled as “lemmings” fellow Republicans who continued to use the threat of a government shutdown to stall Obamacare even after it was clear it wouldn’t work.

Actually he called them “lemmings with suicide vests”

“He loves being a major American political figure”

by digby

Ezra has a great interview up with Robert Costa reporter for National Review and probably the one reporter with his finger on the pulse of Republicans in Washington.

He explains very cogently all the stuff we’ve been talking about in terms of the institution of the Republican Party and why it seems to have gone batshit crazy. It has to do with structural changes in the party and the organization of the House along with gerrymandering, of course as well as a few other things. So, no surprises, but he explains it well. You just have to wonder what in the hell can be done about it.

One thing’s for sure, it doesn’t appear that we can count on John Boehner to put country before party and avert the disaster that seems to be looming on the debt ceiling:

EK: This may be a bit of an odd question, but why does Boehner want to do his job like this under these circumstances? From the outside, it seems like a miserable existence.

RC: I think John Boehner is frustrated by leading the Republicans in the House but I think he very much loves being speaker. To understand him you have to understand that. He gets to the Capitol early. He relishes the job and the position but he doesn’t relish being at odds so often with his members. He loves being a major American political figure, but he’s not a Newt Gingrich-like figure trying to lead the party in a certain direction. He’s just trying to survive and enjoy it while it lasts.

So basically he just likes the perks and the status of being speaker and will do what it takes to remain there regardless of the consequences. If this thing is going to be averted Democrats should probably stop looking at Beohner as the instrument that will get it done.

Which leaves … ????

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