Tag: Shutdown

Blaming @SenTedCruz for collapse of coherence of House GOP like blaming weatherman for the hurricane he accurately predicted.

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) October 16, 2013

Tomasky crouches:

This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.

I loved this quote from Congresswoman Jacqueline Speier:

This is like a pre school that’s gone awry. I’ve been in public office for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’d say that’s putting it mildly. But here’s Brit Hume last night rationalizing the Tea Party’s dead-end strategy at the expense of the nation and the world:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.

And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about. And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.”

On cue, Eric Erickson calls for an even more extreme Republican party:

We only need a few good small businessmen and women to stand up and challenge these Republicans who are caving. If they refuse to fight for us, we must fight them. It is the only way we will finally be able to fight against Obamacare. I am tired of funding Republicans who campaign against Obamacare then refuse to fight. It’s time to find a new batch of Republicans to actually practice what the current crop preaches.

And the beat goes on.

Beutler doubted it. Josh Green isn’t so sure:

In my talks with Cruz allies over the past couple of days, a clear theme emerged: Republicans were losing because those RINOs in the Senate wouldn’t man up and fight. To pin this defeat on others, Cruz will have to do everything he can to heighten this distinction.

In all likelihood, there’s no reason to panic if Cruz decided to keep tilting at windmills. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. wouldn’t risk missing a payment until sometime between Oct. 22 and Oct. 31 if the debt ceiling isn’t lifted, and Cruz couldn’t possibly stall for that long. So any delaying tactic would be a make-believe effort to force default in the same way that Cruz’s 21-hour talkathon before the shutdown was a make-believe filibuster. Afterward, he could declare another make-believe victory, while the rest of us got on with our lives.

Or so it would appear:

Despite the aborted coup that momentarily threatened Boehner’s re-election as Speaker in January, House hardliners have described the past few months as Boehner’s finest. And why not? He gives them every opportunity to take the stands they need to secure re-election, while ultimately cushioning them from the consequences of economic catastrophe. Moreover, there are few credible candidates waiting in the wings—the threat posed by the ambitious Majority Leader Eric Cantor, which hung over the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, has receded—and even fewer who would actually want the job.

Bernstein thinks “it’s extremely likely that most House Republicans blame the radicals, Ted Cruz, and Jim DeMint a lot more than they blame John Boehner.” Again, I have to keep scratching my head. I understand Bernstein’s narrow point about the Congressional GOP, but from the country’s point of view, Boehner has been unable to get even his own caucus to any kind of majority consensus, rendering the House effectively neutered, apart from its ability, now possibly weakened, to blow the whole system and economy apart. Since when does a Speaker who cannot even do that get to carry on in his job?

From the country’s point of view, that means total stalemate for another year, as immigration reform languishes, infrastructure crumbles, and future entitlements and taxes remain untouched. More to the point, Boehner has been exposed as lacking any core convictions himself. He’s not a leader; he’s a rag-doll tossed around by roiling factionalism in his own ranks. He commands no wide public support; and his entire job is essentially keeping his own job. To my mind, that is unacceptable and after this disaster, he should quit, if he has any self-respect.

Jon Cohn is on my side:

[Boehner] may not command the power of his predecessors, who were able to parcel out earmark spending projects. He may have an unusually petulant and impractical caucus on his hands. But he still has some power to push back—to challenge his critics, to rally his own supporters, and to appeal to the public at large. Standing up to his party’s right wing would have meant risking ouster, but sometimes that’s what leaders do—they take controversial stands and dare their followers to undermine them. Boehner didn’t do that. Instead, he accommodated the Tea Party and waited until the very last minute before defying them, in the hopes they would understand he had no choice.

The gambit will probably work for Boehner, just as it has before: He’ll get to keep his job. But the rest of the country is paying a price.

And this is not leadership. It’s simply pathetic.

(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)

Ezra wants recognition of the less obvious damage being done to America:

Spectacular crises aren’t the only way a political system can fail. A Congress that can’t avoid own-goals like sequestration, that can’t routinely legislate to address problems like aging infrastructure, and that misses opportunities like immigration reform will, over time, meaningfully harm the country’s growth prospects. And it will do so in a way that’s hard to notice, and thus hard to fix: People don’t much miss the three-tenths of a percentage point worth of growth they didn’t have that quarter. But compounded over time, it’s a disaster.

The shutdown has also impacted the mortgage and the home construction markets negatively. And the result of the default psycho-drama – by which I mean a drama badly choreographed by psychos – remains tight controls on discretionary spending via the sequester and still no long-term debt relief through any sort of coherent bipartisan bargain on taxes, defense and entitlements. Added to this has been the massive loss of public sector jobs, largely by Republican governors, that prolonged the recession and made Obama’s re-election less likely (see above from Calculated Risk). Beinart makes the point rather tightly:

In early September, a “clean” CR—including sequester cuts—that funded the government into 2014 was considered a Republican victory by both the Republican House Majority Leader and Washington’s most prominent Democratic think tank. Now, just over a month later, the media is describing the exact same deal as Republican “surrender.”

Drum highlights a Macroecomic Advisors report that details the economic consequences of recent US fiscal policy. Drum’s bottom line:

[T]he combined effect of past budget deals + sequester + fiscal cliff + debt ceiling crisis is probably a reduction of about half in our economic growth rate this year.

And one suspects that for some Republicans, that’s the point. Pure, spiteful sabotage of a presidency because they have no viable alternative to offer that could begin to command a majority of Americans.

Despite the continued denialism of Goldberg and Hewitt, there are some glimmers of hope. The Houston Chronicle, for example, has recanted its endorsement of Ted Cruz over Kay Bailey Hutchison [see reader clarification below]. Money quote:

When we endorsed Ted Cruz in last November’s general election, we did so with many reservations and at least one specific recommendation – that he follow Hutchison’s example in his conduct as a senator. Obviously, he has not done so. Cruz has been part of the problem in specific situations where Hutchison would have been part of the solution. We feel certain she would have worked shoulder to shoulder with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in crafting a workable solution that likely would have avoided the government shutdown altogether.

I remain skeptical that a party in this deep an ideological hole – with so many forces still arguing for more digging even up against a national default – is able to climb even slowly out. But this horrible political disaster for them must surely have some impact on purely political animals. Rarely has such a radical move been so definitively quashed (even if at the last minute) – and abhorred so broadly by the American people. That’s why Chait thinks we are making progress:

We can’t be certain Republicans will never hold the debt ceiling hostage again; but Obama has now held firm twice in a row, and if he hasn’t completely crushed the Republican expectation that they can extract a ransom, he has badly damaged it. Threatening to breach the debt ceiling and failing to win a prize is costly behavior for Congress — you anger business and lose face with your supporters when you capitulate. As soon as Republicans come to believe they can’t win, they’ll stop playing.

Allahpundit’s view:

If the point of all this from Democrats’ perspective was to teach the GOP a lesson about not using shutdowns and the debt ceiling as leverage for policy concessions, I’m … pretty sure that that lesson has now been learned.

It might have been learned in different ways — e.g., tea partiers may conclude that what they need is a change of Speaker, not a change of tactics — but right now the thought of another round of brinksmanship and RINO/tea party recriminations makes me feel like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” hearing Beethoven after the Ludovico technique. That is to say, I don’t think Reid needs to worry about sending the wrong message if he accepts a token GOP concession or two in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Everyone knows who lost. Boehner won’t try this again soon.

But Weigel doubts the base will recognize its mistake:

[Y]ou can already see how the conservative base will remember this episode. It won’t be a story of Republicans making a huge strategic error and bumbling into an Obamacare-defunding fight without the votes to ever win. It will be a story of wimpy party leaders selling out. The shutdown would have been winnable if they hadn’t sold out.

I think Weigel has the better grasp of the fundamentalist denialism of the GOP base. And one has to wonder: if this fiasco does not deter them from their fanatical purism, what would? And if that is the case, and they continue to determine the future of the GOP, should the majority of the country not unite to consign that toxic faction to electoral oblivion?

(Photo: Ted Cruz lecturing a bewildered Carl Levin, as Chuck Hagel looks on, last January. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.) Update from a reader:

The Houston Chronicle did not endorse Cruz OVER Hutchinson.  They endorsed him over Paul Sadler, a Democratic state representative, about whom the Chronicle had good things to say. Hutchinson was retiring from the Senate and Cruz had run against Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the Republican primary.  In that race, the Chronicle endorsed Dewhurst over Cruz. Yesterday’s editorial is a paean to Hutchinson, expressing a wish that she had kept her seat. It is not retro-active endorsement of Sadler who was not mentioned.