Month: September 2013

Beutler thinks the Republicans’ demands are designed to produce “a bunch of campaign fodder”:

What’s missing [from the GOP’s demands] are the big ticket items they don’t actually want to vote for in a real legislative negotiation. Medicare privatization. Chained CPI. Those didn’t make the cut. Instead, it’s all stuff they want and stuff they know some Democrats have a hard time opposing. If they send a bill like this over to the Senate — there’s reason to believe this bill won’t clear the House — it looks an awful lot like Dems will be able to strip all of the riders using the same majoritarian process they’re currently employing to hive Obamacare defunding off of the government spending bill. That will require asking vulnerable Dems to vote against things that might cause them problems in their states.

Steinglass asks why Republicans taking the economy hostage is more acceptable than Democrats doing so:

If either party can take advantage of this sort of doomsday threat, it should be clear that neither can. To underline that fact, Mr Obama ought to counter the Republican threat not to raise the debt ceiling, with a threat of his own to veto a raise in the debt ceiling. Republicans may demand the postponement of Obamacare in exchange for a debt-ceiling hike. Mr Obama can demand passage of an immigration-reform bill including a path to citizenship in exchange for a debt-ceiling hike. … [T]he whole idea that Mr Obama would threaten to tank America’s credit rating and the global economy in order to achieve his legislative agenda is just nuts. Whereas Republicans, well, you just have to expect them to pull that sort of stunt, because…because why again?

Jon Rauch delivers a reality check:

Playing hardball in politics is not unhealthy. Hardball is often necessary and important, and many who complain about it should pay more attention to getting better at it. Madison’s framework does not require or desire that individuals should all be moderates. But to valorize hardball for its own sake is unhealthy, and even more unhealthy is to veto a compromise simply because it is a compromise. There is no contradiction between compromise and political principle, or at least no necessary contradiction. Nor is compromise at odds with constitutional principle. Just the reverse: Compromise is the most essential principle of our constitutional system. Those who hammer out painful deals perform the hardest and, often, highest work of politics; they deserve, in general, respect for their willingness to constructively advance their ideals, not condemnation for treachery.

No one is saying, of course, that anyone should support anything only because it is a compromise, any more than that he should oppose something only because it is a compromise. The point, rather, is that compromise is a republican virtue. It endows the constitutional order with stability and dynamism. It not only tempers the worst in us; it often brings out the best. It is patriotic, not pathetic, and it deserves to be trumpeted as such.

A reminder of a president the Tea Party would despise if he were currently in office:

The enactment of Reagan’s monumental tax cuts in 1981 caused huge deficits, forcing both parties to scramble to hold them in check. The next year Democratic and Republican negotiators from Congress and the White House reduced deficits by cutting spending and increasing revenue. Democrats urged Reagan to allow a three-month delay in a tax cut scheduled for 1983 as the price of them agreeing to spending cuts. He accepted that, but refused a demand that he reduce the cut from 10% to 5%. Reagan said, “you may make me crap a pineapple, but you won’t make me crap a cactus.”

The final deal was a carefully balanced package of provisions that one side or the other detested. The essence of compromise is giving up something you care about to gain something else more important. Reagan understood this, but he realized that his supporters would understand that in compromising he had not turned his back on his ideals.

(Photo via Wiki: “Referred to as the second of the two “Reagan tax cuts” (the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut of 1981 being the first), the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was also officially sponsored by Democrats, Richard Gephardt of Missouri in the House of Representatives and Bill Bradley of New Jersey in the Senate.)

Justin Hawkins finds constructive Christian engagement with the world to be at the heart of Ronald H. Stone’s new intellectual biography of Reinhold Niehbur and Paul Tillich, who “were far from the bespectacled, portly library-dwellers one might suspect”:

[T]he fact that Christian theology has much to say to the practical affairs of the world is an unmistakable facet of Stone’s narrative.

And though one might reasonably disagree with the substance of either Niebuhr or Tillich’s theological systems, they knew quite acutely that the exigencies of their day required them to plumb the resources of the Christian faith in response. Even more impressively, they did not make religion subservient to previously-determined political convictions, a charge which might legitimately be leveled against many political activists today. As an example, Niebuhr, when convinced that the pacifism required by his Christian socialist party membership was neither wise nor Christian, resigned his membership and his prominent standing there.

Niebuhr and Tillich knew the Christian faith was more than merely a private affair; indeed, one might perhaps even say that they overemphasized the communal, social aspect of the faith (one anecdote hold that H. Richard Niebuhr once had to remind his brother that “Individuals are sinful too, Reinhold!”). But the notion that religion is what one does when alone in one’s room was beyond their comprehension, and that for good reason. If Christ is involved in “making all things new,” then good, faithful Christians might disagree about the substance of that revivification of creation (as Tillich and Niebuhr occasionally did), but they cannot hold that God’s redemption of the world necessarily excludes certain portions of society.