Tag: Shutdown

Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, explains why the Tea Party caucus is immune to compromise:

They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to [Paranoid Style of American Politics author Richard] Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil.

McKay Coppins makes related points:

From its genesis in 2009, the Tea Party movement has been fueled by the rhetoric of revolution. True believers attend rallies unironically dressed in colonial garb.

Their early organizers preached earnestly from Saul Alinsky’s left-wing activist handbook Rules For Radicals — a book that advises just the sort of procedural disruption they’ve imposed this week. And while Nevada Senate candidate Sharon Angle outraged mainstream political observers when she suggested people may start looking for “Second Amendment remedies” to the country’s problems, one recent survey showed that nearly half of Republicans believe armed insurrection might be necessary “in the next few years.”

Data points like those have long been Democrats’ bread and butter as they work to cast the Tea Party as “extreme.” But they also show just how extreme conservatives consider America’s current peril to be. To believe an armed revolution could realistically be on the horizon is to live with the genuine suspicion that your government could, at any point, be overtaken by tyranny. In that context, some temporary furloughs seem like a small price to pay.

Kilgore adds:

71% [of Tea Party conservatives] think Obama is “destroying the country.” Wow. So is it any great surprise that these same people, and the House members who identify with them, are willing to go to dangerous lengths to mess up Obama’s signature policy achievement and force a significant change in the federal government’s direction? Who cares about the risk of destroying the economy if the destruction of the country itself is the current trajectory?

(Photo: Wearing what she calls ‘war paint,’ Susan Clark of Santa Monica, CA rings a bell while demonstrating against Obamacare outside the U.S. Supreme Court on March 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Federally-funded museums receive about 30 percent of their funds from private sources, but as Katherine Boyle notes, the shutdown may cause those donors to be less generous in the future:

This week, the National Gallery of Art turned away the prime minister of Greece, Antonis Samaras, and Adrienne Arsht, the philanthropist who underwrote the gallery’s most recent blockbuster exhibition, “Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.” Samaras was supposed to view a Byzantine art exhibit co-sponsored by groups from his country. Arsht was set to throw a large party for patrons who wanted to visit “Diaghilev” one last time. Both were canceled due to the government shutdown.

And therein lies a lesson about why the shutdown is even worse for Washington’s museum sector than you might think. In short: The Smithsonian and other federally funded museums rely in significant part on private funding – but the shutdown inhibits their ability to raise even the private funds. … One of the big selling points at the Smithsonian and the National Gallery is that these museums are funded by the federal government, and because of that, will always be free and open to visitors who otherwise couldn’t afford an entrance fee of $15 or more. Shutdowns are a reminder that there are drawbacks to federal reliance, and that Smithsonian leadership is beholden to the whims of Congress. Prolonged closure could lead some patrons to send their gifts to the Met or MoMA …

(Photo: Tourists peer into the closed Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on October 5. By Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, a Goldman Sachs paper argues that the Treasury could probably prioritize debt payments and avoid default. Krugman is not reassured:

They don’t sound too confident. But even if they’re right, the government would still go into arrears on many other payments, from contractor bills to medical bills. And it would be forced into savage spending cuts, around 4 percent of GDP, that wouldn’t just cause hardship (Surprise! No Social Security for you this month!) but amount to a severely contractionary fiscal policy, sending us into recession if it lasted any length of time.

I think this is important. Lots of people have been focusing on the possibility of a mega-Lehman event, but even if we somehow avoid that, this will be a catastrophe.

Neil Irwin cautions against finding comfort in the relative calm of the financial markets:

Market sentiment can barely move for a very long time — and then take a dramatic shift all at once.

There were warnings that Lehman Brothers could collapse throughout the summer of 2008, but only after its bankruptcy on Sept. 15 of that year did the financial world come unglued.  In 2011, the warnings that the debt ceiling negotiation could get ugly had been sounded for months — but only turned into an extraordinary bout of volatility about a week before the bill came due for the U.S. government.

Markets are prescient, in other words, except when they’re not.

Ezra’s take:

Analogies between the finances of families and government are typically pretty flawed. But there’s one worth drawing here: That moment when a family realizes it’s broke and stops paying their mortgage, credit card bill, etc? It’s not a good moment for them. It’s a moment that wrecks their credit score and makes it harder for them to be “not-broke” ever again. To try and improve the U.S.’s finances by sharply and permanently increasing its borrowing costs is like trying to prove to your sister that her house is a firetrap by actually setting it on fire.

(Photo: A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on October 7, 2013. As the impasse continues between the Republicans and Democrats in Washington, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq all dropped by nearly 1% Monday. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Should Obama raise the debt ceiling himself, Humphreys expects that the GOP House would attempt to impeach the president and that impeachment proceedings would blow up in the GOP’s face:

[I]f the Tea Partiers impeach President Obama, it will be hard to persuade anyone not suffering from epistemic closure that two Democratic Presidents in a row just happened to deserve impeachment. The public’s attention and attributions would shift to the radicals in the Republican ranks: Why have these people impeached every Democratic President elected in the last 20 years?

… Presidential impeachment would thus, like everything else the Tea Party is currently doing, be popular in their echo chamber but help convince the rest of the country that they are a dangerous and irresponsible force in U.S. politics. It’s not therefore something that Obama should fear. Indeed, he might even welcome it.

Eric Posner reviews the ways Obama could justify unilaterally raising the debt ceiling. Perhaps the most promising option:

[T]he president can declare an emergency and justify borrowing by citing reasons of state. What exactly he should say is a political, not legal, matter. The declaration could be garlanded with quotations from the founders, or festooned with solemn appeals to the examples of Lincoln and FDR who also acted unilaterally in the face of crisis. The president could invoke his “inherent” executive powers under Article II of the Constitution (which vests the president with mostly undefined “executive” powers); he could even cite the 14th Amendment or offer a strained interpretation of the relevant statutes or don whatever other leaves his lawyers pluck from the potted fig trees kept at the ready in the White House Counsel’s office.

But whatever he says, the reality and the implication will be that the law has run out and he is acting in the common good because Congress has plunged the nation into a crisis.

Tomasky makes an important point:

The Senate CR funds the government in the coming weeks at a level of $988 billion. The Democrats wanted $1.058 billion. But they passed a bill at Republican levels. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said late last week: “My caucus really didn’t like that. We took a real hit…So that’s one of the largest compromises since I’ve been in Congress.”

Now why did they pass a bill at the GOP’s preferred levels? Because, Reid said late last week, he had assurances from Boehner that the House speaker wouldn’t attach demands to the Senate CR if Reid brought it in at $988 billion. So this whole thing started with a significant Democratic compromise. But once the Republicans decided that they were going to use both the shutdown and the debt ceiling to try to defund and/or delay Obamacare, they couldn’t even vote for a bill that gave them a major fiscal victory. That’s how dug in and crazy they are.

Benjamin Wittes blames the shutdown on the GOP:

I am, generally speaking, a pox-on-both-houses kind of guy, but I have trouble seeing it that way this time.

It was the House Republicans, after all, who attached these conditions to the continuing resolution, thus putting the President in an impossible situation—one in which he either lets the government shut down or both gives up a signature domestic initiative and, along the way, makes clear the presidency’s vulnerability to the most grotesque types of brinksmanship and extortion. No president worth his salt would negotiate under these circumstances—and the responsibility for the situation is thus not even between the parties. One side, and only one, created this crisis.

Richard Posner – a sane libertarian – agrees:

Republicans are not in a position to repeal or even amend the law by constitutionally authorized means, because repeal or amendment would require a majority vote in both houses of Congress (actually a two-thirds vote in both houses, for given a lesser majority Obama could veto a repeal or amendment without fear of being overridden). The intention, which is contrary to the structure of the federal legislative process ordained by the Constitution, is to coerce Congress to repeal (or by amendments to defang) Obamacare by threatening to precipitate an economic crisis by refusing to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling. If the tactic succeeded, it would mean that a minority in Congress had succeeded in amending a federal statute.

(Chart from the Center For American Progress)

Costa passes along the GOP’s latest offer:

What I’m hearing: There will be a “mechanism” for revenue-neutral tax reform, ushered by Ryan and Michigan’s Dave Camp, that will encourage deeper congressional talks in the coming year. There will be entitlement-reform proposals, most likely chained CPI and means testing Medicare; there will also be some health-care provisions, such as a repeal of the medical-device tax, which has bipartisan support in both chambers. Boehner, sources say, is expected to go as far as he can with his offer. Anything too small will earn conservative ire; anything too big will turn off Democrats.

They still don’t get it, do they?

Look: I favor a more aggressive long-term look at, say, means-testing Medicare and chained CPI. I do not believe the debt is a burden now – it may well be a vital asset for a bit – but I do think getting it down is a top priority for the future. But that kind of big future debt compromise cannot and must not be linked to a threat to blow up the global economy.

Pass a clean CR, get rid of the entire debt ceiling process, and then negotiate a Grand Bargain. Such a Grand Bargain would require a give from both sides. There’s no way Democrats should agree to tax reform without more revenue, for example. That was key to the 1986 reform. As for the lesser items being demanded, like the medical device tax, under normal circumstances, you might think of it as a trade-off worth being part of the negotiations. But, as Drum notes, these are not normal circumstances:

A month ago, Democrats might have shrugged over the device tax. Today, they know perfectly well what it would mean to let it go.

It means that when the debt ceiling deadline comes up, there will be yet another demand. When the 6-week CR is up, there will be yet another. If and when appropriations bills are passed, there will be yet another. We’ve already seen the list. There simply won’t be any end to the hostage taking. As their price for not blowing up the country, there will be an unending succession of short-term CRs and short-term debt limit extensions used as leverage for picking apart Obamacare—and everything else Democrats care about—piece by piece.

Schumer put it well over the weekend:

Someone goes into your house, takes your wife and children hostage and then, says, let’s negotiate over the price of your house.

While trashing it with a party of Miley-level nihilism.

That’s how Chait aptly describes the situation in Washington right now:

The standoff embroiling Washington represents far more than the specifics of the demands on the table, or even the prospect of economic calamity. It is an incipient constitutional crisis. Obama foolishly set the precedent in 2011 that he would let Congress jack him up for a debt-ceiling hike. He now has to crush the practice completely, lest it become ritualized. Obama not only must refuse to trade concessions for a debt-ceiling hike; he has to make it clear that he will endure default before he submits to ransom. To pay a ransom now, even a tiny one, would ensure an endless succession of debt-ceiling ransoms until, eventually, the two sides fail to agree on the correct size of the ransom and default follows.

This is a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. A single blunder could have unalterable consequences: If Obama buckles his no-ransom stance, the debt-ceiling-hostage genie will be out of the bottle. If Republicans believe he is bluffing, or accept his position but obstinately refuse it, or try to lift the debt ceiling and simply botch the vote count, a second Great Recession could ensue.

I’m afraid I agree. And the causes are deeper than can be overcome by a man of Boehner’s limited skills.