Monthly Archives: October 2013

Quacks

October 28, 2013 – 1:16 pm

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

— George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak“

This week’s featured posts: “A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression” and “The Method of Madness“.

Everybody has been talking about the shutdown aftermath

There’s no question that President Obama won this showdown, though it was mainly a defensive victory: Republicans failed to destroy his main achievement, the Affordable Care Act. (More about this in “The Method of Madness“.)

Along the way, Republicans also trashed their public image and tanked their poll numbers. Control of the House may be up for grabs in 2014.

So why did they do it? Everyone — even conservatives like Charles Krauthammer — told the Tea Party radicals exactly what would happen, so it couldn’t have been a surprise or a miscalculation. Why, then?

Part of the answer is the usual right-wing hucksterism. The shutdown was a great fund-raising tactic in general, and Ted Cruz specifically vaulted himself into being the early front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

But the deeper reason may have been to complete the radicalization of the Republican Party. Erick Erickson explained this clearly:

those of us who were in this fight against Obamacare, have been quite open that we knew there were side benefits. This fight would expose conservative activists to the frauds they have funded.

Men like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and others have preached a great sermon against Obamacare, but now conservatives who supported them see that these men have refused to actually practice what they’ve been preaching. They’ve refused to stand and fight with the rest of us.

… So we must advance. Two Republicans in the Senate caused this fight that their colleagues would have surrendered on more quickly but for them. Imagine a Senate filled with more. We have an opportunity to replace Mitch McConnell in Kentucky with a better conservative. We should do that. We have the opportunity to send a strong conservative from North Carolina and we should do that. Same in Colorado. Kansas looks to be in play. Chris McDaniel will declare his candidacy for the Senate in Mississippi. Conservatives will rally to him quickly. Tennessee could be in play too.

Imagine a Senate where far-right Republicans like Mississippi’s Thad Cochran were replaced — not by people who are more conservative philosophically, that’s barely possible — but by Republicans willing to take the government hostage and blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. Most of the senators on Erickson’s hit list — McConnell, Cochran, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, and Kansas’ Pat Roberts — are Republicans whose conservativism was not in question only a few years ago.

The game here appears to be longer than 2014 or even 2016. And increasingly, it looks to me like the point is not to win a majority. It’s to make the country ungovernable, so that some kind of right-wing minority rule starts to seem like a reasonable alternative.

The real question, as we look forward to the extended deadline for a budget/debt-ceiling deal, is what non-Tea-Party Republicans learned from this last crisis. Until now, most of the Republican establishment has been trying to appease the Tea Party revolutionaries; just don’t set them off, and hope they go after somebody else. I hope they’ve learned now that appeasement is impossible if you retain any loyalty to democracy and the government of the United States of America.

You will be targeted. You will have to fight. Better you should fight sooner than later.

About that guy waving a confederate flag in front of the White House during that bizarre Cruz/Palin rally protesting their own government shutdown. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has it exactly right: The problem isn’t that one guy. “Lone idiots are often drawn to protest actions.”

The problem is the crowd that treated him like a normal person. The problem is when leaders like Ted Cruz get hold of the microphone and don’t say something like, “You need to put that away; you’re not helping us.”

That’s the Tea Party/racism problem in a nutshell. Tea Partiers get apoplectic when they’re accused of racism. But since the Goldwater/Nixon years, the Republican Party has made itself a place where racists can be comfortable. You don’t have to be racist to be a Republican. But if you are, that’s OK.

and HealthCare.gov

There’s been a lot of spin and sloppy coverage here: What’s being presented as “problems with ObamaCare” are usually just problems with HealthCare.gov, the web site that is one of the ways you can sign up for some of the new health-insurance options created by the Affordable Care Act. (An exception is Ezra Klein, who explains how problems with HealthCare.gov could eventually create problems with the insurance risk pool if they persist.)

An analogy might help put this in perspective: If something went wrong with the ticket-selling page on Denver Broncos’ web site, that would be a nuisance for ticket-seeking Broncos fans, who might have to call the box office or show up in person. But the Broncos’ season-ticket holders would be completely unaffected by the online difficulties, just as people who already have health insurance through their employers or Medicare or some other government program are unaffected by the problems at HealthCare.gov.

None of that would constitute “problems with the Denver Broncos”. Peyton Manning is doing fine.

ObamaCare is not just the health-insurance exchanges, and the exchanges are not just HealthCare.gov. ObamaCare is a system for achieving near-universal healthcare coverage. It works like this:

  • The majority of Americans already had adequate coverage through their employers, or through the government via Medicare, Medicaid, or the Veterans Administration. They would keep their coverage, with the additional security that they couldn’t lose coverage through pre-existing conditions or exceeding some lifetime cap.
  • Lower-income working people who aren’t covered some other way and previously made too much money to qualify for Medicaid would be covered by expanded Medicaid. (This is the part the Supreme Court messed up by allowing states to opt out. States like Texas are opting out so that their governors can win Republican primaries. The Corpus Christi Caller writes: “According to one esteemed estimate, the annual unnecessary death toll for continuing to leave a fourth of Texans uninsured is 9,000.”)
  • Middle-class people who aren’t covered some other way and don’t qualify for expanded Medicaid could buy health insurance from private insurance companies (not the government) through their state’s health-insurance exchange. The law encouraged states to set up and run their own exchanges, which most states controlled by Democrats have done. (Many of those seem to be working fine.) But in states that refused to set up their own exchanges (i.e., red states) the federal government would do so. Depending on your income, your insurance premiums might be partially subsidized by the federal government through a tax credit. (Unless another Republican court challenge gets rid of the subsidies for states that didn’t open their own exchanges.)
  • Rich people can do whatever, as always. No “government takeover of healthcare” or “death panels” prevent them from buying whatever services they want.

So if your job doesn’t already provide health insurance, and if you want to purchase it through your state health insurance exchange, and if your state didn’t set up its own program with its own web site, then you are inconvenienced by the problems at HealthCare.gov. If the federal government can’t fix the site, you might have to apply for health insurance over the phone or by showing up in person somewhere.

As for what kind of health insurance you will get if you do and what it will cost you, that’s looking pretty good. It’s looking so good that when Sean Hannity wanted to show his audience real-life examples of people harmed by ObamaCare, he had to deceive them. Salon’s Eric Stern fact-checked Hannity by tracking down the people he showcased, and discovered that none of them had actually been harmed by anything other than their own stubbornness.

Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, 63 percent less than their current bill.

One of the ways you might buy tickets isn’t working very well, but the team is winning on the field.

The HealthCare.gov problem is yet another episode in the endless Republican search for “Obama’s Katrina”. The BP oil spill was supposed to be Obama’s Katrina, Hurricane Sandy was supposed to be Obama’s Katrina, and in general the phrase has been bandied about so much that 29% of Louisiana Republicans believe Katrina was Obama’s Katrina.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce points out why this is an over-the-top comparison:

Almost 2,000 people died so that, eight years later, Rich Lowry could have a cheap punchline.

HealthCare.gov still hasn’t killed anybody.

You may have heard that the government spent $600 million building the HealthCare.gov web site, with Fox News claiming the ultimate cost could go over $1 billion.

Media Matters explains where the first number came from. (Fox hasn’t said where they got the second one.) As so often happens inside the conservative media bubble, the figure $600 million appeared in a story about the web site — it’s the total value of all healthcare-related contracts the software company has received — and became the cost of the web site by daisy-chaining references.

Single-payer advocates have been passing around variations on this joke: The Canadian version of HealthCare.gov just says: “This is Canada. You have health care.”

and voter suppression

If you’re the minority party and you don’t want to change your policies to become more popular, you can still win if your voters are very motivated and you make it hard for the majority party’s voters to vote. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act might as well have been an announcement of open season on voting rights at the state level. I review what’s been happening lately in “A State-by-state Update on Voter Suppression“.

Even if you don’t click through to read that link, you really should see The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi interviewing North Carolina Republican official Don Yelton.

and you also might be interested in …

Don’t miss the dialog about journalism between the NYT’s Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald.

In general, I’m Greenwald’s side in this debate. (Though I have criticisms of him as well: I like that he is open about the worldview that shapes his reporting, rather than hiding behind a pretense of objectivity. But too much of his personality makes it into his writing, and I find his personality abrasive and thin-skinned.) I think Keller comes into the discussion determined to fit Greenwald into a box, with the result that he never really listens to what Greenwald says.

Keller never acknowledges Greenwald’s criticism that the Times’ desire to maintain an appearance of impartiality conflicts with a deeper objectivity. Greenwald mentions how the Times changed its usage of the word torture when the Bush administration began claiming (against all prior usage) that waterboarding was not torture. A truly objective newspaper would apply definitions of controversial words impartially, regardless of whether powerful interests object.

To understand what Greenwald means when he describes NYT-like journalism as “nationalistic”, look at Joshua Keating’s “If It Happened There … the Government Shutdown“. How would the American press cover the shutdown if it were happening in another country?

If you think conservatives believe in small government and personal freedom, you must be male. Consider the bizarre case of Alicia Beltran, a 28-year-old woman who has the misfortune to be pregnant in Wisconsin, where “pro-family” fetal-protection laws give the government Orwellian powers over pregnant women.

Because of a prescription-drug problem that she had already overcome (and that no one would have known about if she hadn’t mentioned it to doctors herself), Beltran was prescribed an anti-addiction drug that she couldn’t afford. When she refused, she was arrested and forced to stay in an in-patient facility. During that involuntary absence, she lost her job.

The baby is due in January. You’re welcome, kid.

Birtherism is so hilarious. Funny, I don’t recall Democratic officials making years and years worth of 9-11 Truther jokes about W (rather than jokes about Truthers). Is that just my bad memory?

Even if you’re not usually a football fan, you should watch ESPN’s “The Book of Manning“, which may still be available on demand on some cable systems and is out on DVD. The story of Archie, Peyton, and Eli turns out to be more about family than about football. The Mannings totally cooperated, and Archie made his extensive (and, at times, incredibly cute) home videos available to the film-makers.

Two retired Canadian tourists decide to see the Alamo, and blunder into a protest rally of people carrying loaded assault rifles. “This is totally beyond our comprehension,” Mabel says.

Finally, if you’re wondering what I was doing that kept me from putting a Sift out last week, I was working on this talk.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

The Method of Madness

October 28, 2013 – 12:33 pm

It isn’t that Obama has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe.

In the shutdown/debt-ceiling fight, the Tea Party Republicans put President Obama in a position where compromise was a practical impossibility: They demanded concessions in exchange for a resolving a crisis that they created, and that they could recreate at will. To give them anything at all would invite an endless series of crises that drop-by-drop would bleed the administration dry. The election of 2012 would effectively have been nullified.

So Obama held firm and the non-Tea-Party Republicans blinked. The deal did not resolve the crisis, but it did buy time. The government is funded until January 15 and the debt ceiling is raised until February 7. Obama didn’t win anything in terms of policy; he just got the metaphorical hostages released for a few months.

Now, presumably, we should be negotiating about the budget and other government policies, so that January and February don’t hit us the way October did. But increasingly we face the question: Negotiate about what?

The essence of negotiation is to figure out what you where you would be willing to compromise with the other side and where they might be willing to compromise with you. It presumes a desire on both sides to reach an agreement.

But increasingly, liberals like me are becoming skeptical. For the Tea Party base, the point of this last fight seems to have been the fight itself. It accomplished nothing, and (by one estimate) cost the economy $24 billion, reducing the growth rate in 4th-quarter GDP from 3% to 2.4%. But that leads Ann Coulter to say, “We should be proud. Tea Partiers should be standing tall after the last few weeks.” And Ted Cruz went home to a victory tour, reportedly getting standing ovations of eight minutes and 14 minutes.

What’s up with that?

So often, when you try to grapple with the issues the fight is supposed to be about, they evaporate. The national debt is supposed to be an apocalyptic threat to America. But the fact that the annual deficit is dropping does not seem to mitigate the urgency. The prospect of going back to the tax rates that produced a surplus in the last years of the Clinton administration is off the table. No tax increase of any kind can be part of the solution, no matter what spending cuts it might be coupled with. Not even egregious tax loopholes can be closed, unless that money is used to lower taxes somewhere else.

So we have a problem that is destroying America, but you can’t consider paying any money to solve it?

Some on the Left have begun talking about “post-policy nihilism” — Republican opposition for the sake of opposition, even when Obama offers their own ideas back to them. Or passing a budget whose cuts they themselves won’t vote for when they’re spelled out.

What are we to make of bizarre irrationalities, like Ted Cruz shutting down the government, and then protesting that the national monuments are shut down? With a confederate flag in the audience and sharing the podium with a guy who called on President Obama to

leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

Ryan Cooper comments:

these tea partiers were absolutely incandescent with rage at Obama that the national parks are shut down. This was the plan, don’t you remember? Guys? The only operating principle at work here seems to be “If X is bad, then X is Obama’s fault.”

The total disregard for even the simplest details or logic here, even according to the Republicans’ own frame of reference, underscores again that this crisis has nothing to do with actual policy differences. This is nothing but the politics of reactionary grievance.

Mike the Mad Biologist elaborated by referring to a piece he had previously written about Sarah Palin:

Her policy ignorance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Palin is conceptually and intellectually poor because her politics are not about policies, but a romantic restoration of the ‘real’ America to its rightful place. The primary purpose of politics is not to govern, not to provide services, and not to solve mundane, although often important, problems. For the Palinist, politics first and foremost exists to enable the social restoration of ‘real’ Americans (think about the phrase “red blooded American”) and the emotional and social advantages that restoration would provide to its followers (obviously, if you’re not a ‘real’ American, you might view this as a bad thing…). Practicalities of governance, such as compromise and worrying about reality-based outcomes, actually get in the way.

And that, I think, gets to the heart of it. The root motivation of the Tea Party isn’t the deficit or ObamaCare or any other policy it’s currently focused on. The root motivation is tribal: a feeling that People-Like-Me used to own America, but it is being taken away by People-Like-Them and needs to be taken back.

That’s why nothing Obama can do is right. It isn’t that he has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe. Who that tribe is, exactly, varies from person to person and situation to situation. Sometimes it’s racial and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s cultural — the whole guns-and-religion thing. Sometimes it’s the Makers vs. the Takers. But what unites them all is a sense of tribal grievance. People-Like-Me used to own American and need to take it back.

I am in debt to Jonathan Korman (a.k.a Miniver Cheevy) for making the connection between the Palinist rhetorical style and the “Duckspeak” of 1984. After rendering an apparent word salad into free verse, Korman finds the structureless structure:

You may have trouble following Palin not only because of the way her arguments jump around, but also because they are almost all incomplete. To decode them, you need to know that they are allusions to right-wing talking points. … I submit that this is not just clumsiness. This is a method, if not necessarily a conscious one.

The point is to remind the initiated of feelings and conclusions and frames without providing any actual facts or ideas that could be thought about or disputed. Orwell noted the usefulness of this technique in “The Principles of Newspeak“.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument.

…. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’.

This is a common speech pattern on the Right. You just quack “Benghazi” or “out-of-control spending” or “religious freedom” or “the Constitution” and whole narratives of misinformation click into place. And because they need not be spelled out, they cannot be challenged.

I’m not sure where we can go from here. A group with policy goals can be negotiated with. A aggrieved tribe with identity issues really can’t be.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (4)

A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression

October 28, 2013 – 8:18 am

Since June’s Supreme Court ruling that threw out parts of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has lost its ability to block state laws designed to disenfranchise blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Subsequently, Republican-run states have been eagerly taking advantage of their vote-suppressing opportunities.

Here are the stories I ran across just this month:

North Carolina. The can’t-miss video clip of the week was The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi interviewing North Carolina Republican Executive Committee member Don Yelton. Yelton

  • admitted that the voter-fraud problem in his county was no more than 1 or 2 people out of 60,000
  • used the cliche “One of my best friends is black.”
  • admitted he shared the famous Obama-witch-doctor photo on Facebook
  • admitted that North Carolina’s voter-suppression law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. … If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get off their bohunkus and get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” When Mandvi summed up “and it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat”, Yelton sarcastically said “Gee” as if no one could have possibly foreseen that.
  • justified voter suppression by pointing to people “too stupid” to get a photo ID and asking: “Do you want those people picking your president?”

At one point Yelton’s responses caused Mandvi to say, “You know that we can hear you, right?” Apparently the local Republican Committee chair could hear him too, because he asked for and got Yelton’s resignation.

Virginia. Virginia has a statewide election a week from tomorrow, so of course it’s time for a last-minute purge of the voter rolls. (That’s how Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State — and George W. Bush campaign chair — Katherine Harris won the White House for Jeb’s brother in 2000.) MSNBC reports:

Lawrence Haake III, the registrar of Chesterfield County and a Republican, told MSNBC he received a list from state election officials in August of around 2,200 voters in his county to be struck from the rolls. The state said the names had shown up in a database of voters registered in more than one state.

But when Haake tested a sample of around 1000 names, he found that 174 of them had registered in Virginia more recently than any other state, meaning they were eligible to vote. In an affidavit filed as part of the Democratic challenge to the purge, Haake called the list “clearly inaccurate and unreliable.”

Since there is no evidence that any of the voters on the purge list have voted in multiple states at once (or intend to), the main (and possibly the only) effect on Virginia’s elections will be to disenfranchise voters who believe they are registered legally.

The court challenge to the purge was denied. (Since Haake and a few other local election officials had refused to purge any name they found to be inaccurate, there was no proof that any specific person had been unfairly disenfranchised, despite the fact that other officials appear to have implemented the purge without further investigation.) The purge was defended in court by the Virginia Attorney General’s office. Coincidentally, the AG is Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who is currently trailing in the polls.

The problem here is similar to the one in South Carolina that I discussed in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“: When you assemble lists like this by matching computer databases (in SC they matched voter rolls against death notices) you make mistakes. Taking a voter off the rolls needs to be treated as a serious matter, requiring human oversight. Those humans need time to do their jobs, and the purged voters need to be notified and given time to protest, rather than just being told they can’t vote when they show up at the polls.

Texas. Texas women are discovering an important reason everyone should care about protecting everyone else’s vote: You might be next. The new Texas voter-ID law mandates that the name on your voter registration and the ID you show match exactly, which can be a problem for many women. The new law tripped up Judge Sandra Watts, because her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name (as was standard in 1964 when she got married); her voter registration lists her actual middle name.

KIII TV reports: “Nueces County election officials say it is often a problem for women who use maiden names or hyphenated names.” As for the voter fraud this law supposedly targets, KIII quotes District Attorney Mark Skurka: “I have never seen an issue of that in Nueces County, in all the years that I’ve been here.”

Because local election officials determined that the name on Judge Watts’ driver’s license was “substantially similar” [definition here] to her voter registration, she did get to vote after signing an additional affidavit. (Not only does this take extra time, but it gives a vote-suppressing local official an opportunity to cut corners on the definition of “substantially similar” or to say menacing things about the penalties for perjury in hopes that the voter will be intimidated and go away.) She could also have voted a provisional ballot, which would only be counted if she came back with “proper identification” within six days. If the problem is a name mismatch, proper ID might have to include a marriage or divorce certificate. (And if you can’t lay your hands on those documents and say “screw it, the election wasn’t decided by one vote anyway”, the vote suppressors win.)

Of course the primary targets of voter suppression are people who don’t drive: primarily the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. If you’re poor, live in a city, and take the bus to work, Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for you to vote.

It’s estimated that 1.4 million Texans who would otherwise be eligible to vote don’t have a driver’s license or other acceptable ID. Supposedly that’s OK, because they can obtain a free state ID card. According to the Dallas Morning News, 41 such cards have been issued.

Again, you need documentation verifying your current name. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, about 1/3 of women can’t meet that standard. Time quotes the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser: “A full 34% of women don’t have documents proving citizenship with their current name on it.”

And this is all supposed to solve the problem of voter impersonation, which the Dallas Morning News describes as “nearly non-existent“. In July I described the attempt of the conservative media to create a different impression in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“.

Kansas and Arizona. Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for registering to vote was thrown out by the Supreme Court in June — it was so bad that the 7-2 majority opinion was written by arch-conservative Justice Scalia — because it violated the federal National Voter Registration Act. But Arizona (and Kansas, which passed a similar law) think they have a way around the Court’s ruling: two-tier voting. Federal elections may be subject to the NVRA, but maybe if a separate registration is required for state and local elections, the citizenship-proof requirement can be applied to them. And if the dual-registration process is time-consuming and confusing for new voters … well, that’s win/win, isn’t it?

If that tactic reminds you of Jim Crow, it should. The Nation’s Ari Berman quotes the ACLU’s Dale Ho:

These dual registration systems have a really ugly racial history. They were set up after Reconstruction alongside poll taxes, literacy tests and all the other devices that were used to disenfranchise African-American voters.

This time Hispanics are the primary target, but they’re also suppressing Arizona’s Native American vote. (The Intertribal Council was the lead plaintiff in the suit against the Arizona law. Native Americans have been specifically targeted in South Dakota and Montana.) (BTW, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly apparently did NOT say Native Americans were illegal immigrants. That rumor is another case of satire jumping the fence into the news pasture.)

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 28, 2013 – 7:26 am

OK, I’m back now. I had a wonderful trip back to my hometown, where I gave this talk. Sorry I neglected to announce in advance that I was canceling the October 21 Sift.

This week, there’s still a lot of shutdown-aftermath to sift through. In particular, since everything played out so precisely as the Tea Party’s critics said it would, we’re left with the question: Why did they do it? As events were unfolding, you could imagine that Cruz & Company were planning some master-stroke that the rest of us just didn’t see coming. But they turned out to have nothing. So what were they thinking?

That’s one of this week’s articles. (I still haven’t titled it.) The other is “A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression”. In one Republican-controlled state after another, voting is getting harder and harder. And then The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi got a North Carolina Republican to explain why.

The weekly summary also covers the uproar about HealthCare.gov, the future-of-journalism dialog between Glenn Greenwald and the NYT’s Bill Keller, the strange case of a Wisconsin woman imprisoned for the sake of her fetus, plus a few other things.

The voter suppression article will come out first, then the Tea Party article, then the weekly summary.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

No Sift This Week

October 21, 2013 – 6:56 pm

Sorry for not putting out an announcement sooner. (I’m on vacation and have been driving all day.) The Weekly Sift will be back next week. Posts will appear on Monday the 28th in the general vicinity of noon (eastern time).

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Apocalyptic Methods

October 14, 2013 – 12:21 pm

WILLARD: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
KURTZ: Are my methods unsound?
WILLARD: I don’t see any method at all, sir.

— Apocalypse Now (1979)
quoted Saturday by Ross Douthat, “The Kurtz Republicans“

This week’s featured post: “Don’t Means-Test Medicare“. Because the first step in gutting a program is to get the rich people out of it.

This week everybody was talking about a possible end to the shutdown/debt-ceiling crisis

Little by little, the Republicans are realizing that the shutdown battle isn’t Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it’s “The Ransom of Red Chief“. The longer this hostage crisis goes on, the more painful it is for them.

Wednesday Gallup showed the Republican Party with a 28% approval rating, down ten points from the previous month, and even lower than the 31% nadir they hit during the Clinton impeachment. Thursday, an NBC/WSJ poll said that the public blames them for the shutdown (53%-31%), while both President Obama and the Affordable Care Act have become more popular. The public says (47%-39%) that it wants to see a Democratic Congress in 2014.  To me, the most damaging result was Question 16. Asked whether President Obama was being a strong leader or putting politics ahead of what’s good for the country, the public was mildly negative (46%-51%). But the same question about congressional Republicans produced a landslide: 70% said Republicans were putting politics first.

The business community has also been weighing in against them. On shutdown eve, a coalition of 251 trade associations (including big Republican donor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) sent a letter to Congress:

It is not in the best interest of the employers, employees or the American people to risk a government shutdown that will be economically disruptive and create even more uncertainties for the U.S. economy.

Likewise, we respectfully urge the Congress to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner and remove any threat to the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Thursday, the head of the American Bankers Association (former Republican governor Frank Keating) framed the debt ceiling issue the way Democrats do:

Failing to raise the debt ceiling in time would be an unprecedented mistake. … To use a credit card analogy, the decision about what to buy on credit tomorrow must take into account the debt we already owe, but that is never an excuse for not paying the current bill on time and in full.

Even the Koch brothers started pulling back (after spending an estimated quarter-billion dollars on groups that promoted this crisis). Wednesday Koch Industries sent a letter to all senators denying that they had a position on the shutdown.

The stock market never did crash, exactly, but the Dow slid from a mid-September high of 15709 to 14727 Wednesday morning. That’s when rumors started that the Republicans were going lower their ransom demands (as Red Chief’s captors did shortly before realizing how bad a situation they were in). Sure enough, defunding ObamaCare wasn’t in the demand list any more. (Aside: Doing the research on this topic is frustrating, because news articles often leave out the most important details, like what was actually proposed.)

But the idea of ransom wasn’t gone. In exchange for a six-week extension on the debt ceiling (and not re-opening the government), Ryan wanted to replace the sequester cuts (which originally were designed to be equally offensive to both parties, but which the Republicans are happier about than the Democrats) with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. So: we’ll let the hostages live another six weeks if you give us something.

President Obama wasn’t interested. Then over the weekend the Senate tried to work something out, again with smaller ransom demands. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) proposed to extend the debt ceiling through January and fund the government through March. In exchange she wants some lesser changes to ObamaCare (repealing or delaying the medical device tax, plus making some changes to eligibility which I can’t find spelled out anywhere).

The problem here is that that new sequester cuts go into effect in January. What the Democrats hoped to accomplish in budget negotiations was to avoid some of those cuts. That’s why the continuing resolutions they supported accepted Republican-supported spending levels, but ended before January 1. Senate Democrats view a CR that lasts until March as a concession. And what they get in exchange for that concession is to let the Republicans out of the box they voluntarily got into.

So Senate Democrats rejected that deal and proposed a clean debt-ceiling extension until after the 2014 elections, which the Republicans filibustered. Since then, stuff has been happening behind closed doors and who knows what it means. In general, the Democrats are united while the Republicans are fragmented. That makes the Republicans hard to negotiate with, because who knows what any particular leader can deliver? (The weirdest story I’ve heard is that when Senate Republicans came to the White House, they had to ask Obama what the House Republicans had proposed.)

The stock market seems edgy (down 75 when I last checked) but not panicking. Debt-ceiling disaster is scheduled for Thursday. Conservatives are still telling each other than “Obama will blink” if they push this to the edge.

As has been true from the beginning, the pundits keep telling us something will work out, but they’re not sure what the deal will be and they have no scenario in mind for how it happens. I’m making no predictions. When you push important stuff off to the last minute, sometimes it doesn’t get done, even if you really intended to do it.

The funniest commentary on the shutdown came from The Daily Show’s Jason Jones. He decided to take the ransom metaphor literally and seek advice from a professional hostage negotiator. Why do people take hostages? Jones asks.

Negotiator: In their world, they’ve tried a lot of other things, and everything they’ve tried up to that point has failed. They view themselves as extremely significant people, so they’re mystified that they’re not being followed more. And they’re hurt by it and they feel very abandoned by it.

Jones: You know, I thought calling in a hostage negotiator would kind of be funny, a funny joke, but it’s kind of incredible how this metaphor is lining up.

Negotiator: Even batshit insane has its own rules.

and trying to understand Republicans

Fascinating look at the Republican rank-and-file (summary, full 30-page report — which is worth reading if you’ve got the time). A liberal group, Democracy Corps, ran focus groups of like-minded Republicans of three types: Evangelicals, Tea Partiers, and moderates. (I find this interesting in view of my post The Four Flavors of Republican from January, 2012. Democracy Corps’ groups seem to correspond to my theocrats, libertarians, and corporatists. The NeoCons are nowhere to be found. I wonder whether they are a beltway phenomenon with little grass-roots support, or if DC just didn’t raise foreign-policy issues.)

My takeaways: Tea Partiers and Evangelicals together make a majority of Republicans, and while they disagree on the importance of social issues, they share an apocalyptic feeling that the country may slip away from them for good unless they take drastic action now. They’re scary that way.

The role of race is interesting. The point of like-minded focus groups was to get people saying things they wouldn’t say in mixed circles. So DC expected the occasional racist remark or slur, which didn’t happen; there was no explicit racial hostility. But the America Republicans are nostalgic for and feel in danger of losing is clearly a white America. As an Evangelical man from Roanoke put it:

It’s a little bubble. So everybody – it’s like a Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogenous.

In many of the comments, blacks and Hispanics are not villains so much as pawns in the liberal plot to create pliable voting majorities by extending dependence on government. As Bloomberg’s Francis Wilkinson summarized:

Obama has extended a new entitlement to create a class of lazy, poor voters whose well-being is dependent upon the Democratic Party.

Moderates are about a quarter of Republicans. They know they don’t fit any more but can’t see themselves as Democrats. They’re pro-business and anti-regulation, but they’re also open to gay rights, admiring of science, and convinced that government only works if everyone compromises for the greater good. The current Tea/Evangelical Republican Party embarrasses them. They might well agree with Ross Douthat:

there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever.

A Methodist pastor examines the Dominionist theology that justifies tactics like the shutdown.

Political historian Rick Perlstein has been doing an eye-opening series “Thinking Like a Conservative”. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Whenever an exasperated liberal points out that the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act matches a plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, I feel a stab of exasperation myself—with my side. Theirs is not a clinching argument, or even a good argument. It means nothing to point out to conservatives that Heritage once proposed something like Obamacare. The Heritage plan was a tactic of a moment—a moment that required something to fill in the space to the right of President Clinton’s healthcare plan, an increment toward the real strategic goal of getting the government out of the healthcare business altogether… someday.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ride for the U. S. Constitution was a vision that would put the fear of God into those corrupt left-wing politicians: ten thousand truckers shutting down the Washington beltway for the whole Columbus Day weekend, then delivering their list of demands to a sympathetic congressman, Louis Gohmert of Texas. Or maybe it would be “hundreds of thousands of truckers and millions of citizens“.

They’d convene a citizens’ grand jury (a.k.a. a lynch mob) to indict and arrest “everyone in government who has violated their oath of office” — Obama, certainly, but also Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, among others.

They wouldn’t rely on the lamestream media to spread the word (well, except for Fox News, where Megan Kelly gave them five minutes of air time; independent media magnate Glenn Beck also pushed their cause). They’d do their own viral messaging through Facebook, Twitter, and plain old fliers posted at truck stops. The People would speak so loudly that no one could ignore them!

Of course, in America we have this other way for the People to speak: elections. We just had one last year, and President Obama was re-elected by almost five million votes. It’s not a perfect institution — Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives in spite of getting 1.3  million fewer votes than the Democrats (spreadsheet) — but it’s been working reasonably well ever since it was established in … well, it’s in that Constitution they’re riding for, isn’t it?

But if the People want to speak some other way too, that’s fine with me. (Well, other than that lynch mob thing.) So how many truckers turned out? About 30. I haven’t heard how the arrest of Nancy Pelosi went.

But you can see why We the (dozens of) People would be upset: Government spending is out of control, as this chart clearly shows:

Sorry, wrong chart. Let’s try this one:

Crap! I don’t know what’s wrong with these charts. What if we measure the size of government in employees? Then we’ll really see how out of control the octopus is.

(The peak in 2010 was for temporary census workers.) OK, but the deficit — we know that’s going through the roof. That’s what justifies the Tea Party’s hostage-taking tactics: If we don’t get control of the deficit now, our children will be debt slaves of the Chinese!

Ah, screw the data. We’re just mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more, whatever it is.

As Congress move towards actual budget negotiations, we can expect to hear a lot of hysteria about the national debt. An opening shot was Niall Ferguson’s WSJ op-ed. Economist Brad DeLong explains why Ferguson is peddling complete nonsense.

Voter suppression: The conservative appellate judge who sustained Indiana’s voter-ID law has changed his mind:

the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. Maybe we should have been more imaginative….We weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. … I don’t think we had enough information.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court followed him down that path 6-3.

Meanwhile, Kansas and Arizona are planning a new tactic: second-class voters. A Supreme Court ruling against an Arizona law requiring voters to show proof of citizenship apparently applies only to federal elections. So if states split elections into a federal ballot and a state/local ballot, maybe they could give only the federal ballot to voters who haven’t shown proof of citizenship. At least the Supremes haven’t said otherwise yet, so it’s worth a try.

I explained my take on voter suppression two weeks ago: The Republicans have given up on convincing a majority of the American people to agree with them, and are now focused on tactics that allow them to govern from the minority. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Hastert Rule, blocking a path to citizenship in any immigration reform, the congressional hostage-crisis we’re in the middle of now … it’s all part of the larger plan for minority rule.

The history of the Republican Party in three buttons:

Along the same lines: Listening to NPR’s interview with Bill Minutaglio, author of the new book Dallas, 1963, I was struck by how the extreme Right remains the same from one era to the next. Minutaglio says:

For some reason out in the heartland in the middle of Texas, really powerful people coalesced around this notion that Kennedy was a traitor and in fact was guilty of treason. And these weren’t just folks who were idly thinking these thoughts; they were acting on them and forming organizations and movements to essentially overthrow Kennedy. … He was perceived to be a traitor. He was a socialist, he was on bended knee to so many different entities — communism, socialism and even the pope.

We look back at that now and say, “Those people were crazy.” Today, not even the Tea Party (at least not most of it) claims that JFK was a traitor or a Communist, or that we can’t have a Catholic president because he’ll take orders from the Pope. But they don’t see the connection between that craziness and what they are saying about Obama today.

The L.A. Times has decided it’s only willing to tolerate climate-denier letters up to a point:

I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

Hey, interns: Now you can be sexually harassed while you work for no pay. Is this a great country or what?

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Don’t Means-Test Medicare

October 14, 2013 – 9:57 am

Sooner or later (I hope) Congress will get past self-created problems like the shutdown and the debt ceiling and start talking about something real: the long-term budget and how to pay for expensive-but-necessary programs like Social Security and Medicare. And when that day comes, one idea the Republicans will put forward is means-testing. (It’s already happening: Tuesday 51 Republican congressmen wrote to Speaker Boehner calling for “Means-testing benefits for high-income recipients of Social Security”.)

At first glance, it makes sense: The $15,000 a year that Social Security pays the average retiree may be a lifesaver to people who didn’t manage to save anything when they were working (or who did save but lost it all to fraud, accident, or a health problem), but Warren Buffett probably won’t even notice if his checks stop coming. And how much are janitors and check-out clerks putting into Medicare just so the government can pay for Warren’s cancer treatments?

Back in February, Yuval Levin put the case like this:

Democrats want to close the budget gap by having the government lean more heavily on the wealthy, while Republicans want to close it by having the government spend less money. Both sides should agree at least to spend less money on the wealthy — via means testing. It may surprise some Americans to learn that the United States spends quite a lot on the affluent, especially through the entitlement programs at the heart of the budget fight: Social Security and Medicare. Both programs move money from relatively poorer young people to relatively richer old people, and they are growing ever more expensive. Means-testing — allocating benefits according to need — might offer both sides a way out.

Levin is a conservative who used to work for the Bush administration, edits the right-leaning National Affairs, and occasionally writes for the conservative flagship, National Review. So what does he have against the rich? And why does a liberal like Paul Krugman defend those upper-class benefits?

Part of the issue is technical: When you do the math, means-testing doesn’t save any significant amount of money unless you’re cutting benefits for people considerably closer to the middle class than Warren Buffett. (Conservatives often make that case with regard to tax increases, but it’s much more true here. The top 1% make 19.3% of the national income, but I doubt they account for 19.3% of Medicare spending.)

But that can’t be the heart of it, because every little bit helps, right? Even if we’re not talking about much money, every dollar we don’t spend on wealthy people is one more we don’t have to borrow.

Here’s the heart of it: Means-testing is actually the opening shot in a much longer strategy to cut entitlement benefits for everyone. It relies on a broader principle you can see all around you: If you want to destroy a public program, first get the rich people out of it.

Think about cities with first-class public transportation like San Francisco or Washington. At rush hour on the BART or the Metro you’ll see a lot of three-piece suits, because no matter how much money you make, public transit is just a good way to get to work. But in cities with crappy systems — dirty buses that don’t come very often and don’t go where you want — public transit is mainly for the underclass. Maids and janitors take the bus to work, but bankers don’t.

Now obviously, rich people have options, so they won’t ride a crappy system. But the arrow of causality also points the other way: Systems that rich people don’t ride tend to get crappier and crappier. It’s not hard to understand why: When there’s a budget crunch, the people who decide what to cut are rich, or at least well-to-do politicians who have to answer to rich donors. If they think of public transit as something other (i.e. poorer) people use, it’s easy for them to imagine those people making do with less. But if they use it themselves, they’re going to fight to keep it operating at a high level.

Ditto for schools. In towns where everybody’s kids — rich and poor alike — go to the public high school, you can be sure the school will have a full range of options and amenities. When times are tough, the well-to-do decision-makers may not understand why poor kids need foreign languages or music or calculus. But it’s different if their own kids and grandkids are going to have to do without (and explain that deficiency when they apply to Harvard).

So if you want to kill public schools in your town, start a voucher program that draws the children of the well-to-do to private schools. That way, rich and professional-class parents — people who have the ear of decision-makers and could be articulate spokesmen for all parents — will stop taking public-school issues personally. Debates about public education will be about those people — and what can you really expect out of their kids anyway? Rhetoric about “throwing money down a rat hole” won’t offend anybody who really matters.

Imagine if we means-tested the public libraries or the parks. You could only get in if you could prove that you were too poor to afford your own books or a yard big enough for your kids to play in. I think before long we’d decide that the poor don’t need a lot of books, and if their parks are over-crowded and poorly maintained, well, what do they expect?

So yeah, let’s remove the rich people from Medicare. Let’s turn it into a welfare program, and make non-participation a status symbol. Then when we cut taxes again and create new deficits, budget-cutters can sharpen their pencils, secure in the knowledge that benefit cuts won’t hurt anybody who lives in their neighborhood. (I mean, seriously, do waitresses really need the latest chemo-therapy drugs? What do those people expect, anyway?)

On the other hand, we could let entitlements be entitlements — care you get not because you’re poor, but because you’re American. Then when future budget-cutters make their proposals, they’ll have to explain why Americans don’t deserve the best.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (3)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 14, 2013 – 8:04 am

I don’t think you need me to tell you that the government is still shut down and we’re getting scarily close to the debt ceiling. Nonetheless, I think there’s some value in trying to sort out where the situation stands. I’ll do that in the weekly summary.

When things do start to happen, they’ll probably happen fast. And those last-second flurries of activity are when bad ideas are most likely to find their way into law. So for one particularly bad idea I’ve decided to get my protest in now, before it’s a done deal. The featured article this week will be: “Don’t Means-Test Medicare”. It should come out shortly. The thesis is simple: If you want to destroy a government service, the first thing you do is get the rich people out of it.

The rest of the weekly summary (called “Apocalyptic Methods” after a lead-in quote from Apocalypse Now) will include

  • a report Democracy Corps wrote after doing focus-groups of like-minded Republicans. It’s fascinating inside-the-locker-room talk that most liberals never hear.
  • reviewing the facts about the growth of government under Obama: spending is flat, the deficit is shrinking, and the number of government employees is down sharply. This comes as a surprise to most people, which tells you something about media bias: If the media were biased in one direction, you’d expect them to create popular misconceptions that slanted that way. So the popular misconceptions about the growth of government point to a conservative media bias.
  • the hilarious story of the Ride for the Constitution, a protest where ten thousand truckers were going to shut down the D.C. beltway all last weekend, demanding the arrest of liberal politicians who have violated their oath of office. It was going to be America’s “Egypt moment”, and millions of people around the country were going to join the protest in all sorts of ways. In reality, about 30 trucks showed up and rode around the beltway for a while, disturbing no one. Conservatives saw the lack of coverage (except for Fox, or course) as more evidence of liberal media bias; I guess because they think Anderson Cooper shows up whenever 30 liberals get together to protest something.
By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Burning Down the House

October 7, 2013 – 1:58 pm

No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin’ yet.
Everything’s stuck together.
I don’t know what you expect staring into the TV set,
fighting fire with fire,
burning down the house.

— Talking Heads

This week’s featured posts both have something to do with the shutdown/debt-ceiling crisis. “Countdown to Augustus” takes the long view, while “7 Key Points About the Shutdown” is more immediate.

This week everybody was talking about (what else?) the shutdown

Usually I try to be the calm voice in the room, and to balance the over-hyped Big Issue that the news networks fixate on by pointing out that other things are happening in the world.

This week, though, I’m probably more obsessed with the government-shutdown/debt-ceiling-default than my readers are, and I keep wondering why everybody isn’t more freaked out. Like, why is the stock market drifting gently downward rather than crashing?

I continue not to see an end to this that doesn’t involve some market-crash or riots-in-the-streets type of disaster. I don’t think the Democrats can give in without setting up more hostage crises down the road. So the only way out is for the Republicans to back down without extorting anything in return. And I don’t think they can do that, because their whole mindset says that re-assessing your position in the face of reality is weakness.

So something external has to force this. It doesn’t end any other way.

Jon Stewart has been amazing through this whole mess. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I think I go with his Rockin’ Shutdown Eve last Monday.

and raids against al Qaeda

The U.S. launched two raids in Africa this weekend. The Libya raid successfully captured Abu Anas al Libi, allegedly a high-ranking al Qaeda guy. And the Sudan raid ran into heavy resistance, but may have killed a guy who may have been connected to last week’s mall shooting in Kenya. So far all we know is what the government is telling us, so wait and see before you draw any conclusions.

and ObamaCare

The web site had problems, as often happens as things roll out. Keep in mind that ObamaCare is fundamentally about health insurance, not about the web. So a problem about the web site is not necessarily a problem with ObamaCare.

Last week I linked to part one of Kurt Eichenwald’s Vanity Fair series on ObamaCare. It covered the lies conservatives have been telling about ObamaCare, and so had a polemic tone. It’s hard to discuss blatant lies calmly and dispassionately.

Part two is much drier: It focuses on the logic of ObamaCare, the problem it’s trying to solve, and what’s in it for you even if you already have insurance. It is full of facts about the uninsured, the cost of providing emergency care for them through our current system, why they die sooner than they should, and the uncomfortable reality that

the vast, vast majority of them are hard-working Americans who simply do not have the same salary and benefit opportunities that others might. And again, no, there are not tens of millions of higher-paying jobs with benefits sitting out there unfilled.

and you also might be interested in

Michele Bachmann claims that her decision not to seek re-election has nothing to do with the ethics charges against her 2012 presidential campaign. But AP reports this about the guy on the other side of the transaction:

Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson … resigned from office Wednesday after investigator Mark Weinhardt concluded Sorenson likely broke ethics rules in receiving $7,500 in monthly income from Bachmann’s political action committee and presidential campaign in exchange for being Bachmann’s state chair in 2011.

The Ron Paul campaign is also implicated. Sorenson switched his allegiance to Paul, allegedly after receiving $75,000 in what AP calls “suspicious payments that may be linked to Paul’s campaign”.

Here’s a consequence of the shutdown that is going to hit people where they live: Notre Dame might have to drop two games out of its football schedule. It’s scheduled to play the Air Force academy on October 26 and Navy on November 2. The academies are currently shut down with the rest of the government. [Tuesday update: Not really. See the comments for a correction.]

A Pro Publica investigation shows that Tylenol is not as harmless as you probably think.

Some straight talk about rape prevention:

If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.

About that IRS scandal … never mind.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Seven Key Points About the Shutdown

October 7, 2013 – 1:10 pm

1. This is not a pox-on-both-your-houses situation. The Republicans planned this shutdown and carried it out.

Last Monday, on the eve of the shutdown, Rachel Maddow showed the tapes of one Republican candidate after another making campaign speeches about shutting down the government and being cheered for it. That never happens on the Democratic side. No Democratic candidate for Congress tells his crowds he’s going to shut down the government and expects to get a cheer. Rachel summarized:

What is happening tonight is happening tonight because this is what Republicans want to do. This is what they promised to do. … Elect Republicans and they will burn the place down and they will laugh while they do it and have a great time.

The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander talked to a number of Republican donors from the banking industry, who said Rep. Walden (chair of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which wants their money) told them “We have to do this because of the Tea Party.” (An NRCC spokesman denies Walden said that.)

Jonathan Chait traces the Republicans’ post-2012-defeat strategy to a meeting in January.

If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.

2. This “budget” showdown has nothing to do with the budget. Both sides agree on the spending number that should be in the continuing resolution.

That’s because Democrats agreed to the Republicans’ number. In other words, the only genuine concession in this process has come from the Democrats. John Boehner could have taken that concession, passed a continuing resolution to avoid the shutdown, and then called a press conference to declare victory. Instead he shut down the government.

3. The threat not to raise the debt ceiling is unprecedented, except for when these same Republicans made the same threat in 2011.

Posturing about the debt ceiling is perennial: “Look how profligate the party in power is. They’ve run up so much debt we have to raise the ceiling.” But making a credible threat not to raise the debt ceiling unless your legislative demands are met? No. That is an absolutely new tactic in American politics.

Slate’s David Weigel goes through all the alleged examples of the Democrats threatening the debt ceiling. In 1981, Tip O’Neil tried to get President Reagan to promise that Republicans wouldn’t use a debt-ceiling vote against incumbent Democrats in the next election cycle (i.e., no policy demands), but passed it in plenty of time. In 1984, a Democratic committee chair blocked a debt ceiling bill for one day, seeking defense spending cuts. He was roundly criticized for “brinksmanship” and backed down.

That’s it. Dozens of other times Democratic majorities in Congress have passed debt-ceiling increases proposed by Republican presidents without making an issue of it.

If Democrats accepted the tactic Republicans are using, the September, 2007 debt-ceiling increase would have been an opportunity for Nancy Pelosi to demand deficit-reducing changes like a repeal of the Bush tax cuts or an end to Iraq War. But that didn’t happen, because Democrats don’t operate by extortion.

4. Republicans have redefined he words negotiate and compromise.

ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum summed up the Republican “negotiation”:

Can I burn down your house?
No
Just the 2nd floor?
No
Garage?
No
Let’s talk about what I can burn down.
No
YOU AREN’T COMPROMISING!

In a real compromise, both sides give something and both sides get something. So far, the Democrats have been offered nothing.

In the 2011 crisis, President Obama repeatedly tried to negotiate a “grand bargain” with Speaker Boehner that would knock trillions off the long-term deficit. That failed, and the “supercommitte” negotiations that were supposed to replace the sequester failed, on the same point: Republicans insisted there could be no tax increases in the deficit reduction plan. Zero. During one Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked whether they would accept a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. All said no.

Since April, Harry Reid has been trying to form a conference committee so that the House and Senate can work out a budget compromise. The Republicans have refused to appoint their conferees, preferring to wait until they had the “leverage” of a government shutdown and debt default. The point here is exactly what Chait said above: to extort concessions out of the Democrats without offering any concessions of their own. “OK then, half the ransom” is not a concession, no matter what Ted Cruz says.

5. The principle at stake is majority rule.

I talked about this in detail last week. Speaker Boehner wants to tell the story that the shutdown represents a disagreement between two branches of government that have conflicting popular mandates: The public elected President Obama, but it also elected a Republican House of Representatives.

That’s not what this is about at all. If it were, Boehner could bring the Senate’s clean continuing resolution to the House floor for a vote and defeat it. He can’t do that, because given the chance the people’s representatives would pass it. In blocking that resolution, Boehner does not represent the majority of the House, he only represents “the majority of the majority”, i.e. a minority.

The entire give-us-what-we-want-or-we’ll-burn-the-house-down strategy is against all American ideals of democracy. The constitutional way to pass a law (or repeal a law you don’t like) is to do what the Democrats did to pass ObamaCare in the first place: Win not just a majority in the House, but also a substantial majority in the Senate (to overcome a filibuster, which the Founders never envisioned), and win the White House (to avoid a veto). The Republicans can’t do that, because they are a minority. (Even their House candidates collectively got a million fewer votes than the Democrats in 2012.)

6. Don’t believe the leak that John Boehner won’t allow a debt-ceiling default.

Thursday the NYT quoted multiple anonymous Republican congressmen saying that Boehner had told them he wouldn’t allow a default. But Matt Yglesias points out that Boehner has been saying such things all along, while also saying the opposite.

Boehner’s position, dating back to 2011, has been twofold. On the one hand he says that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be catastrophic and that he favors avoiding catastrophe. On the other hand he says that he requires unrelated public policy concessions in order to agree to a measure that he himself says he supports.

It is, in other words, the classic suicide hostage strategy: Do what I want or I’ll detonate the bomb strapped to my chest. This has always been Boehner’s position.

For example, on Friday Boehner said:

I don’t believe that we should default on our debt. It’s not good for our country. But after 55 years of spending more than what you bring in, something ought to be addressed. I think the American people expect if we’re going to raise the amount of money we can borrow, we ought to do something about our spending problem and the lack of economic growth in our country.

In other words, he wants concessions. And notice: Boehner doesn’t suggest doing something about the deficit, which has a revenue side. He only wants to discuss “our spending problem”. So he’s seeking spending cuts with no tax increases, the same no-compromise position that doomed the budget negotiations in 2011.

And then Sunday he reiterated:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So under no circumstances will you pass a clean debt limit?

BOEHNER: We’re not going down that path.

Stephanopoulos’ question: “So you sit down with the president. What would you offer him in that conversation?” got no answer. And when pushed on the tax issue Boehner said: “Very simple. We’re not raising taxes.”

He described Harry Reid’s proposal to negotiate about the budget after the shutdown and debt ceiling had been dealt with as

My way or the highway. That’s what he’s saying. Complete surrender and then we’ll talk to you.

So he wants concessions and won’t give anything in return. Without his extortion demand, he has nothing to talk about, so giving it up is “complete surrender”.

7. The clearest head in the room belongs to Elizabeth Warren.

The boogeyman government is like the Boogyman under the bed. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. What is real, what does exist are all those specific important things that we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government. In our democracy, government is not some make-believe thing that has an independent will of its own. In our democracy, government is just how we describe the things that We the People have already decided to do together.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (8)