Shutdown – Page 17

Why Would The Tea Partiers Back Down?

Reihan sighs:

Basically, I think we’re screwed, at least for now. We need members of the defund caucus to step back from the brink. But they have every reason to believe that their stance will redound to their political benefit in their districts. The Republican leadership has few if any tools with which to discipline members of the defund caucus, as individual members have their own fundraising networks and there are no earmarks to be parceled out. The only way out of this trap appears to be a long, slow learning process.

Robert Costa echoes:

When you hear members talk candidly about their biggest victory, it wasn’t winning the House in 2010. It was winning the state legislatures in 2010 because they were able to redraw their districts so they had many more conservative voters. The members get heat from the press but they don’t get heat from back home.

Mark Schmitt goes into more detail:

[T]he modern Republican Party is not strong. It’s something more like a loose association of independent forces, including Tea Party–backed members, those with their own sources of campaign money from ideological backers, many with seats so safe that they can happily ignore all their non-conservative constituents, and outside agents like Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who Businessweek recently described as the de facto Speaker of the House. Many of its politicians have deliberately cut themselves off from all the incentives that traditionally moderate and stabilize politics—earmarks, constituent service (many offices say they won’t help constituents maneuver the ACA), and infrastructure spending. With safe seats, and hearing little dissent at home, they are able to do so. Cutting themselves off from the incentive to build and maintain a strong and viable party is part of the same story.

How Painful Should The Shutdown Be?

Congress gets paid during a shutdown, while staffers don't. Here's why. http://t.co/LSXI7EysvB
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 2, 2013

A reader writes:

I saw some faux rage on HuffPo about the fact that Fox News call the shutdown a slimdown. Now, while the motives of Fox News are known, they are not incorrect. Yes, 800,000 people have been sent home. But 1.3 million are still at work. And on top of that, the count of active military is about 1.5 million. So, only about a fifth of all government employees have been sent home. That is not a shutdown, even if the effects will be very annoying, especially over time.

The problem is that, once again, the government has exempted itself largely from feeling the effects from shutting down.

Congress gets paid. The judiciary power, including the Supreme Court, is largely open. I understand we can’t close down national defense, but why do we need 1.3 million people on active duty? Congress did pass a quick law to keep them paid. With the government down, can’t that shrink down to much, much less – basically only base protection?

And then the government has made weird choices on what is “essential'” Apparently, the FAA and TSA are essential. But curing cancer patients is not. So, members of Congress can fly home, while they do not have to turn patients away from the NIH. All national parks are closed, they say. But not the “highway” parks in DC such as the BW Parkway and the GW Parkway, even though the park parts of those parks are closed. Nor is the White House, which is technically a National Park, closed. DC gets to declare itself essential. You can even wonder why combat troops are essential. In the old days, wars were lost because there was no pay.

Now, it is understandable that honorable civil servants want to minimize the damage by the shutdown. But on the other hand, isn’t it the point of a shutdown to cause hurt? And isn’t the damage supposed to put pressure on Congress to get its act together? So shouldn’t the pain be pointed at Congress the most?

But “essential” employees, even though they must go to work, aren’t paid until the shutdown ends. Yglesias points out that this can’t last forever:

Walking around today you might notice that despite the shutdown hype, life is basically going on as normal. That’s because all those essential workers are still on the job. But they’re not getting paid. If you’re not essential, you aren’t allowed to work even if you’re willing to work without pay. If you are essential, you have to work even though you won’t be paid.

… These are patriotic people who will keep doing their jobs, but they obviously can’t work for free forever. Realistically, as a shutdown drags on there will be political pressure to appropriate funds to pay certain people. The president already signed an ad hoc bill that assures soldiers will get paid. Given a long enough shutdown, FBI agents and the people feeding the animals at the National Zoo might also get special bills for them. In practice, though, a fall 2013 government shutdown has a rather short potential lifespan. That’s because even with the government shut down we’re still going to breach the statutory debt ceiling around Oct. 17-20 at which point the lack of discretionary appropriations will be subsumed by a larger and more cataclysmic issue.

Through The Looking Glass

The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, just called executive enforcement of the law – which is part of any president’s constitutional duty – a felony:

If this health care law is forced upon this country, the young men and women in this audience are the ones who are really going to pay the price. And that, I will suggest to you, reaches to the point of being a felony toward them and their future. That is a criminal act, from my perspective, to put that type of burden on them, to mortgage their future like that. America cannot stand that. America cannot accept that.

At its core, the current GOP is a truly revolutionary movement, dedicated to the eradication of the very things it preposterously claims to care about. Look at this sentence and its Orwellian surrealism. It’s a crime to enforce a duly-enacted, Supreme Court-approved law? Why are we even treating these people as if they are anything but know-nothing constitutional vandals?

There’s A Big Congressional Majority To Fund The Government

Fallows highlights that fact:

The Democratic administration, and a sufficient number of Republicans, already agree and are ready enough to compromise to solve this problem. If the normal machinery of democracy were allowed to work, the manufactured crisis would be over. The only reason the senseless damage is being done is that hostage-takers have terrorized members of their own party.

Robert Costa reveals Boehner’s thinking:

Boehner is aware that, on paper, potentially more than 100 House Republicans would be open to a clean CR should he bring one to the floor. But the internal chaos such a move could cause could be devastating, and with a major debt-limit battle approaching, he won’t let a CR vote divide his conference.

Bernstein wonders whether defections will force the Speaker’s hand:

Surely if 60 Republicans were to say they wanted to vote for a clean CR, Boehner’s position would be untenable, wouldn’t it? My guess is the line would be some number greater than 25 and fewer than 60.

But again, in what universe are we even talking about this? There’s a majority in the House and the Senate to keep the government open and running, and yet the Speaker will not allow a free vote on it. This is not about the governance of the United States. It is about the crazed shenanigans of something that looks like a religious sect. This is a party not only unfit for government, but also for opposition.

Talking To The Loony Right

Yuval Levin gives a course in the bleeding obvious to his fellow GOPers:

Republicans did not do nearly well enough in the last election to enact legislation that would repeal Obamacare. In order to repeal that law and attempt an effective reform of our health-care system along conservative lines, they will need to do better in the next election and the one to follow. To that end, they can take several kinds of steps with regard to Obamacare in the meantime: steps that would weaken the law (by highlighting its faults or disabling some of its elements) and ultimately make it easier to replace; steps that would weaken the law’s supporters (by further connecting them to the law in the public’s mind and forcing them to defend its least popular elements) and ultimately make them easier to replace; and steps that would strengthen the law’s opponents (by clearly identifying them as opponents of an unpopular measure and champions of a more appealing approach) and help them gain more public support.

In my view (shared with all who would listen to no avail, for what it’s worth) the original defund strategy was not well suited to doing any of these things.

The tone of this piece is its perfection. The studied civility when talking with complete fanatics, the careful reason when interacting with constitutional know-nothings … it’s like reading Ross Douthat, as the excruciating reality keeps surfacing that his party is a disgrace to the very idea of a political party, more extremist than any in the West save Hungary’s neo-fascists, unteachable and proud of it, a nub of Palin’s id quivering in its fervent frisson of pure vandalism.

If only one of the last remaining conservatives with brains would get it over with and simply scream at the top of their lungs what everyone else is thinking: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS?”

(Photo by Thomas Subtil. More of his work here.)

Congress Is Ruining Countless Vacations

Daniel Gross looks at how the shutdown will hurt the travel industry:

[T]he U.S. Travel Organization put out an annual report that estimates the impact of travel generally in the U.S. The report suggests 14.4 million total jobs are supported by travel, or one in every eight in the private sector. For 2013, it forecasts travel spending will be $889.1 billion, up 3.9 percent from $855.4 billion in 2012. New York City alone in 2011 welcomed (or didn’t welcome, as the case may be) 50.9 million tourists.

Of course, most tourists traveling in the U.S. visit sites run by the private sector—like Disney World, or Las Vegas. But federally-run sites are also among the largest attractions.

Mount Rushmore gets three million visitors per year. That’s nearly four times the population of South Dakota. Without government entities, the 17.9 million tourists who visited Washington, D.C. in 2011 would have had little reason to go. An estimated 275 million people visit national parks each year. And without other government operations—the State Department, which processes and grants visas, the airports, customs officials—people wouldn’t be able to enter, exit, and move about the country.

Noam Scheiber watched Fox News’s shutdown coverage yesterday:

[E]very half hour brought another report from a correspondent in the field surveying the landscape of shuddered facilities. The Statue of Liberty. Bunker Hill. My favorite was a group a World War II veterans who’d trekked to Washington to tour the World War II memorial, only to find it barricaded when they got there. Fox played the footage over and over, clearly sensing a prime Kulturkampf opportunity—aging war veterans made to suffer indignities by socialist president. But none of the Foxies narrating the story could quite figure out what to do with the fact that it takes government money to build memorials, and government money to keep them open. And so it just hung out there as an implicit rebuke of Republicans.

(Photo: World War II veteran Russell Tucker of Meridian, Mississippi, stands outside the barricade as he visits the World War II Memorial during a government shutdown on October 1, 2013. The memorial was temporary opened to veteran groups arrived on Honor Flights on a day trip to visit the nation’s capital. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The GOP Defies Its Own Logic

Yesterday, the House GOP proposed funding just the parts of government they like, a ploy that quickly failed. Yglesias is puzzled by the strategy:

The entire premise of shutting the government down over Obamacare is that shutting the government down is bad and has bad consequences. The consequences were supposed to be so bad that Democrats flinch from the horrors being inflicted on the American public and agree to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For that to work, two things need to be the case. The first is that middle-class people must suffer from the absence of government services. The second is that middle-class people must turn their rage against the uninsured and demand the repeal of Obamacare rather than turning their rage against Republicans.

The problem for Republicans is that the shutdown is clearly—obviously and unambiguously—their fault, so the public’s rage is much more likely to turn against them. The small-batch funding idea is supposed to tone that rage down. But absent the rage, there’s no leverage.

A Letter From Afghanistan

A reader writes:

I’ve been reading your blog since the fall of 2002, and today I thought I’d share my perspective on the shutdown. I work as a senior advisor at one of the military commands in Afghanistan. I don’t work for DoD; I work for one of the foreign affairs agencies. I’ve been in one of the more dangerous places in Afghanistan for about 15 months now. We get shelled frequently by the Taliban. I’ve loaded flag-draped caskets containing the bodies of co-workers onto cargo planes. I have a wife and some beautiful children that I don’t get to see very much on account of my work.

Unlike my military colleagues, my agency has not been exempted from the shutdown. I’m deemed essential personnel by virtue of my service in Afghanistan, meaning I’m basically required to go to work, but I’m working for an IOU. In addition, the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that I won’t be able to take leave and see my family any time soon.

I think you’ve covered the utter betrayal of our government by Republican congressmen pretty well. But I think you raise an important point when you say that anyone who sees this as some kind of good faith compromise between two sides is complicit in this shocking turn of events. What gets me as much as the cynical Republican strategy is my supposed friends who enable it. I’ve gotten into more than a few debates with friends who support this – and also go out of their way to thank me for my service.

What I’ve taken to doing is explaining to them the practical effects of the actions they support and then asking them if they’d like to fly out here and join me in volunteering, pro bono, for their country. Suddenly their tone of certainty changes and it’s equivocation time. It’s a complete act of cowardice by people who, by and large, have never done anything for their country.

Is it any surprise that people feel this way? Generations of American politicians have made it into office by tearing down the very government they want to join. When I joined the government over a decade ago, I was amazed at how many competent, dedicated professionals I came across, many of who could have taken much more lucrative jobs in the private sector (and many of whom left such jobs to join the government). These are people who believe in America and believe in service.

But the joke’s on us, because decades of spiteful rhetoric has conditioned Americans to view us as a blight on the landscape, a detractor from (rather than contributor to) this country. And now, with this, I have to say, I feel completely and utterly betrayed by the people elected to represent me. I’ve never had a more disheartening moment in my decade-plus long career in the service of my country, and that includes the time I was living overseas when Abu Ghraib blew up. It’s sickening.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I want to begin with a simple quote, a letter from Abraham Lincoln, facing a very similar constellation of forces as president Obama does with today’s nullification party, and sounding remarkably like his 2008 successor from Illinois:

What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum.

This is the challenge today. Not to out-last these vandals, but to vanquish them. To vanquish them to end this preposterous excuse for a political party, to expose their lack of any constructive alternatives for the challenges we face, to indelibly mark them as vandals of the very constitution they dare to celebrate, and as saboteurs of this constitutional democracy. We have a chance now to show the kind of scorching sunlight on these creatures of ideological certainty and personal hubris that they scurry back to the dark holes from which they have recently emerged and be consigned to the moral margins their rancid racism finds most congenial.

To wit: their callousness; their transparent racism; their assault on reason; their contempt for democracy; and their inversion of conservative virtues.

Today was a traffic stunner with our top post being “The Nullification Party” and the second “What Kind Of World Do These People Live In?”

Oh, and Tina Fey is a genius; and Aaron Paul makes me want to cry.

See you in the morning, if the Republicans allow it.

(Photograph: A U.S. Park Police officer stands guard at the Lincoln Memorial, October 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. The National Mall and all monuments and large sections of the government will close due to government shut down after Congress failed to agree on spending. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Face of The Day

Delegates listen to speeches in the Main Hall of Manchester Central on the third day, and penultimate day, of the Conservative Party Conference on October 1, 2013 in Manchester, England. On the same day that America’s Republicans shut down the entire government to deny millions of uninsured people access to basic healthcare insurance, David Cameron unveiled a new Government pilot scheme for General Practitioner surgeries to open from 8am until 8pm seven days, backed by 50 million GBP of funding. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images. Update from a reader:

Why is Mitch McConnell in Manchester when he’s supposed to be solving our shutdown crisis?