Year: 2013

Erick Erickson announced this week his intention to primary the GOP Senators who didn’t vote to destroy the US and global economy. Even Mitch McConnell. And sure enough, McConnell’s primary opponent now has new backing – from the Senate Conservatives Fund. Larison shoots the stupid-fish in the barrel:

Having a larger number of uncompromising Republicans in the Senate probably wouldn’t have prevented yesterday’s deal, since nearly two-thirds of the Senate GOP voted for it anyway. That’s a lot of “charlatans” to defeat. Nonetheless, if a deal had been prevented thanks to Senate Republican opposition, Republicans would just as surely have “owned” the consequences of breaching the debt ceiling as they “owned” the shutdown. Those consequences would have been significantly worse for the country, and Republicans would have to start worrying about a net loss of seats in the Senate and the House. In case Erickson missed it, this would be the opposite of advancing. In other words, he wants to punish the Republicans that averted even greater disaster for the party than the failed strategy he urged them to follow.

And yet I am unsurprised. Friedersdorf focuses on the Republicans’ allergy to compromise:

Pretending that compromise is what went wrong during the Bush years helps conservatives evade responsibility for supporting an agenda many parts of which they find indefensible in hindsight.

It permits them to blame Democrats and establishment Republicans for events they themselves only rebelled against after the fact, and to delude themselves into thinking that everything will get better if only they vehemently insist on getting their way, sans compromise, all of the time.

Who wouldn’t want to believe that’s all success takes? It’s a pretty lie that talk radio hosts find it easy to tell over and over again, despite contrary evidence, because conservatives want to believe that it’s true. Reality is much harder to face. In order to mount a comeback and wield influence in American politics, conservatives need to face their own flaws, negotiate savvy compromises with President Obama and Democrats, build credibility and momentum with small gains in the short term, persuade people of their ideas and governing vision in the medium term, and implement their agenda by winning elections rather than brinkmanship. But hard truths don’t attract a large enough audience to sustain a talk radio show.

I do think the refusal to pore over the Bush-Cheney fiasco honestly remains a major block to reform on the right. The rational ones must know that Bush’s Medicare D was far more expensive than the Affordable Care Act, and, unlike the ACA, was never budgeted. They must know that domestic spending exploded under Bush, even as he refused, unlike Reagan before him, to budge on his ruinous tax cuts. They know they cannot attack Obama’s allegedly imperial presidency without confronting the much more expansive claims for executive power made by Cheney et al. They also must know somewhere in their heads that the debt we now have was not created by Obama. he just had to manage it in the depths of the worst recession since the 1930s. The debt is a function of tax cuts we couldn’t afford, wars we couldn’t afford, a new entitlement we couldn’t afford and a recession caused by an unregulated Wall Street run amok.

And on current spending, they must know that Obama’s record – partly thanks to them – is of serious deficit reduction, year after year, from over 10 percent of GDP to just over 3 percent predicted in 2016. Because acknowledging this reality means self-criticism, they cannot do it (and I don’t mean criticism of other Republicans, but of your own responsibility for the mess). But until they engage in self-criticism, especially of the Bush-Cheney administration, they cannot get to a place where they don’t need rigid adherence to purist ideology to keep their own worldview afloat. And that’s the only place – a pragmatic, sane, constructive, reality-based place – where they can rebuild their party and their message. The longer the suppression of the truth about Bush the longer the dysfunction will last.

(Photo: Former U.S. President George W. Bush speaks during a immigration naturalization ceremony held at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on July 10, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. By Tom Pennington/Getty Images.)

It is becoming clearer and clearer that one major power-broker in Washington is resisting the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s allegedly devastating report on the torture program run by the Bush-Cheney CIA. That major power-broker is the Obama administration.

You might be surprised by this, given the president’s opposition to torture and abolition of it. But the evidence is at this point irrefutable – and given extra punch by the invaluable Jane Mayer, who caught a fascinating document related to the Senate confirmation this week of Stephen W. Preston, the top lawyer at the CIA., for a new post as the top lawyer for the Pentagon. Senator Mark Udall wanted to get Preston on record about his views on the CIA’s past torture program and the reasons the CIA has given to prevent the public release of the Senate report. And he did in a series of questions you can read here.

Here’s what I got from the document and Jane’s reporting. The CIA’s own current chief counsel believes the CIA lied to and misled the Congress repeatedly about its torture program:

The C.I.A. has defended its record on keeping Congress informed. In contrast, Preston, in his answers to Udall, concedes that, during the Bush years, the C.I.A. “fell well short” of current standards for keeping the congressional oversight committees informed of covert actions, as is required under the 1947 National Security Act.

In fact, Preston admits outright that, contrary to the C.I.A.’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the Committees included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”

More to the point, Preston flatly disagreed with the CIA’s contention that it’s impossible to know whether intelligence procured through torture could have been achieved through civilized and legal methods. He says, in fact, that it’s perfectly possible to know this – and, indeed, the Senate Report documents the counter-factuals in excruciating, specific detail – the report is over 6,000 pages long. Since the entire legal defense of torture was premised on the idea that traditional, legal methods could not have been proven as equally effective, this point is important. It could show that the entire legal rationale for torturing prisoners was based on something even the CIA’s legal counsel believes is untrue.

Check out Katherine Hawkins’ read of the same just-released document. But for me, the obvious conclusion is that the CIA is stonewalling to prevent the full extent of its responsibility for war crimes from being known. At the head of the CIA is John Brennan, whose fervent opposition to releasing the full report is well known. But Brennan answers to the president, who has urged the release of the report.

So why the hold-up? That is the question.

Why is Obama allowing Brennan to undermine Obama’s own position? Why is the president allowing the CIA to prevent the very transparency he once pledged to uphold? I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is now Obama who is the main obstacle to releasing the Senate Report on Torture. He needs to tell his CIA director to give up his struggle to keep us all in the dark. He needs to stop dithering and tell Brennan to get out of the way of the report’s release – so we can all see, digest and understand what was done, in secret, in our name.

(Photo: Lynndie England demonstrating one of the CIA-approved torture techniques for breaking down the psyches of terror suspects, in US-run Abu Ghraib prison.)

Yuval Levin talked with sources in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency in charge of the federal health insurance exchanges. A key section of his post, which is worth reading in full:

If the problems now plaguing the system are not resolved by mid-November and the flow of enrollments at that point looks like it does now, the prospects for the first year of the exchanges will be in very grave jeopardy. Some large advertising and outreach campaigns are also geared to that crucial six-week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if the sites are not functional, all of that might not happen—or else might be wasted. If that’s what the late fall looks like, the administration might need to consider what one of the people I spoke with described as “unthinkable options” regarding the first year of the exchanges.

All of the CMS people I spoke with thought the state-run exchanges are in far better shape than the federal system under their purview. But the insurers do not seem that much happier with many of those state exchanges.

Back-end data issues seem to be a problem everywhere, and some of the early enrollment figures being released by the states are not matching up with insurance company data about enrollments in those states, which suggests a breakdown in communication that is only beginning to be understood. The insurers believe that only Nevada, Colorado, Washington state, and Kentucky have what could reasonably be described as working systems at this point. Still, there is no question that on the whole the states with state-run exchanges are in better shape than those with federal ones.

Jonathan Cohn tries to look on the bright side:

[I]f these past two weeks appear to reflect poorly on the federal bureaucracy and the Administration managing it, they shouldn’t reflect poorly on health care reform itself—which, after all, has worked in Massachusetts and seems to be working in the states running their own operations. The success of states like Kentucky and New York and Connecticut and California are important for their own sake: By my count, they constitute about a fourth of the national population. But they are also important for what they show about how the law can work, once the technology piece is in place.

Jelani Cobb outlines the GOP’s “Dixiecrat problem”:

Today’s Republican Party, like the Democrats six decades ago, has had to come to terms with a demographic shift—one in which Hispanic voters are a crucial new element. We would be naïve to believe that the opposition to comprehensive immigration reform that features so prominently in current Tea Party politics is incidental to its appeal. (A 2010 survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifty-eight per cent believed the government “paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and minorities”; sixty-four percent said immigrants were “a burden” on the country.) The Tea Party–inspired eruptions that have recurred throughout Obama’s Presidency represent something more complicated than a reactionary backlash to the sight of a black President; they are a product of the way he so tidily represents the disparate strands of social history that brought us to this impasse. The problem isn’t that there’s a black President; it’s that the country has changed in ways that made Obama’s election possible.

Philip Klein wonders:

Obama, no doubt, wants to avoid the political embarrassment of a delay — or even the mere suggestion of one. But what happens if it’s the middle of December and enrollments are nowhere near where they need to be to make the system viable? What if, by necessity, he has to seek a delay?

The operating assumption would be that Republicans would jump at the chance to delay it. But after the past few weeks, can we really be sure that this would be the case?

It’s perfectly conceivable that if such a scenario played out, the position of the Tea Party activists and their allies in Congress would be that delaying the law for a year would be tantamount to a bailout of Obamacare.

Should Healthcare.gov fail to improve, Chait concedes that delaying the individual mandate may be necessary: