Month: October 2013

So in a battle to save the country from the alleged “catastrophe” of Obamacare, the GOP has decided to risk pushing the country to the unpredictable brink of a real catastrophe, a default, and, in return, get … a punt on the debt ceiling and c0ntinuing funding the government at current levels. But wait! There’s something vital left for them to save face!

What many seek is a provision that would eliminate government contributions to the health plans for members of Congress and their staff members — as well as for the president, vice president and members of the cabinet — who would obtain their insurance through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. The sticking point for many conservatives is the exception for Congressional staff members, as a plan endorsed earlier by House leadership contained. That idea was borrowed from Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, and it passed in the House but was later stripped by the Senate…

Under a wrinkle that dates back to enactment of the law, members of Congress and thousands of their aides are required to get their coverage through the insurance exchanges. The proposal floated by Republicans would eliminate the federal government’s share of the premiums for coverage.

A wrinkle in the healthcare law that affects an infinitesimal number of people, in the grand scheme of things, is apparently a must-have for the GOP. It would make their Democratic colleagues and their aides pay more in premiums under Obamacare.

Or to put it in more explicable terms: “Nyah. Nyah.”

Seriously, this is the level of pettiness involved here, even as the hours tick by before a potentially crippling default on the country’s debt. Plus: we all have to go through another government shutdown just before Christmas, if they don’t let more from this adolescent hostage taking.

Hats off to Robert Costa who seems to have a channel to the GOP deliberations. But, Jesus, check out this quote he just got:

“The leaders are giving us one more chance to get something passed out of the House before the Senate does its thing,” says a veteran House Republican. “I think we’ll get it through, at least that’s my sense of things now. We want to do something that marks our position, so we don’t end up swallowing whatever terrible bait the Senate casts our way. Now, I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile. But believe me, even getting to 218 on this plan will be an achievement.”

“I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile …” Just think about what that says about how this “veteran” of the House views the crazies now holding the country and the world hostage; and what it says about the coherence of the GOP House majority. This is why the world is watching the US right now with a mixture of terror and resignation. This is the way a great power dies, isn’t it?

(Photo: Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) joins other Republican members of Congress while they hold a press conference on the Vitter Amendment as the U.S. legislative body remains gridlocked over legislation to continue funding the federal government on September 30, 2013. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.)

Ezra parses recent polling on the shutdown:

No one involved in this mess is particularly popular. But a two-party political system with first-past-the-post elections is a zero-sum affair. And Republicans are not only less popular than Democrats, their popularity isfalling faster than Democrats’. They are, in other words, losing, and badly.

Sides counters:

[T]he Post’s numbers suggest this: if Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the electorate approved of congressional Republicans as much as Democrats approve of Obama (71% do), congressional Republicans would be no less popular than congressional Democrats are.

Why does this matter? Because the politics of these approval numbers do not suggest that the GOP’s disadvantage would redound to the Democrat’s advantage in the midterm election in any clear zero-sum fashion.  As Lynn Vavreck and I noted in our piece for CNN, party identification predicts the vote in congressional elections very well.  The Republicans who don’t approve of the GOP’s handling of the budget negotiations aren’t likely to go vote for a Democrat.

How Masket understands the political impact of the shutdown:

If you want to do something with a bit lower profile, like changing logging rules or greenhouse gas regulations in order to satisfy some of your activist base, go for it. Most voters will never hear about it, and the people who do already have their mind made up about you anyway. But start a war, try to create or kill a piece of the social safety net, raise taxes, or shut down the government and its major services, and people will definitely notice, and they may punish you for it. That’s way outside of the blind spot, and if you operate there, you’re courting a reprisal. (Another way to operate outside the blind spot is to shrink it by drawing attention to what you’re doing, as Senator Ted Cruz did during his marathon Senate speech.)

But another thing to keep in mind is that voters are notoriously myopic. To the extent that they punish officeholders for their behavior, it’s usually for things that happened very recently. Sam Wang draws upon recent public opinion polls to find that the Democrats’ chances of taking back the U.S. House next year have gone from 13 percent to 50 percent, but that election is still more than a year away. (It’s not a coincidence that this standoff is happening now, and the last debt ceiling standoff occurred in 2011—both off-years for elections.) Lots of other things that voters may care about will happen between now and then. Congressional elections will also be affected somewhat by the economy, but voters will be evaluating an economy that doesn’t yet exist. Basically, they’ll be looking at economic growth in early 2014.

Frum zooms out:

Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum.

These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.

The Medicare population is more than 80 percent white. On the eve of the 2008 recession, the uninsured were 27 percent foreign born. Similar group dynamics are at work in debates over fiscal and monetary stimulus: inflation is a lot more frightening to a retiree who lost a great part of his or her savings in a stock-market crash than to a young family struggling with student loans and a mortgage. And again, America’s retirees are much more likely to be white and native-born than are America’s struggling young families. They are visible again in debates over taxes, where people who earn relatively more feel suddenly intensely vulnerable to the demands and resentment of those who earn less. Those were the feelings Mitt Romney channeled in his notorious crack about the 47 percent.

You don’t have to endorse any of these fears to recognize how they constrain even the best politicians. And not all politicians are best. There will always be people in political life who regard one man’s fear as another man’s opportunity. Such people have enjoyed a very prosperous half-decade.