Shutdown – Page 18

Obama Goes On The Offensive

Saletan registers the change in rhetoric:

This is a political fight, and it will end when the GOP decides to cut its losses. Speaking from the Rose Garden today, Obama signaled that he’s ready to bring the pain … [Obama repeatedly called] the standoff a “Republican shutdown.” That’s language he has never used before. His slam at “what the Republican Party stands for these days” was his broadest indictment of the GOP ever. He’s escalating the pressure on the entire party in a big way.

Waldman observes that the people gathered around Obama had pre-existing conditions and can now get insurance thanks to Obamacare:

Presidents (and other politicians) use the stories of ordinary people to illustrate political points all the time. What’s a little different here is that Obama is presenting these ordinary people as victims of his political opponents. He’s pointing to them and saying, Republicans are trying to hurt Jane here. They’re trying to stop her from getting insurance. It happens to be true. Is it going to be persuasive? It just might be.

Who The Shutdown Will Hurt Most

In list form.

What Shutdown?

Ryan Kearney finds little mention of it in the right-wing press:

[T]he shutdown barely registers on the nation’s top conservative websites. The Weekly Standard is leading with a story about first lady Michelle Obama’s apparently insidious campaign to get Americans to drink more water, The National Review has a piece about how Obama’s agenda is “Transforming America,” and although The Daily Caller’s lead story, “Shutdown Party for Big Democrats,” claims to be on topic, it’s actually about a fundraiser Hillary Clinton hosted Monday night for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. It seems the editors of these websites have read the polls, too, and would just as soon downplay, or outright ignore, that our government is grinding to a halt—lest the GOP be rightly blamed.

Joshua Keating has begun “a regular feature in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries.” The inaugural dispatch covers the lead-up to the shutdown:

The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity. Activity in the legislature ground to a halt last week for a full day as Cruz insisted on performing a time-honored American demonstration of stamina and self-denial, which involved speaking for 21 hours, quoting liberally from science fiction films and children’s books. The gesture drew wide media attention, though its political purpose was unclear to outsiders.

Better still, in my view, is this classic piece by Henry Fairlie way back in 1980:

“Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend.”

The American conservative is being revealed right now as the purest form of political vandalism known in the Western world. It is emphatically not conservative. Conservatives try to reserve constitutional order; today’s Republicans seek to destroy all such restraints and any form of moderation.

How Does The Shutdown End?

Douthat wonders:

[I]f the base has been told true commitment should lead to actual legislative victory (and that this might be the “last chance” to stop Obamacare), then merely threatening a shutdown, or letting one happen for a few days and then cutting a deal, is as likely to disillusion conservative voters heading in to 2014 as it is to mobilize them. And if the G.O.P. doesn’t want to disillusion them, then it doesn’t have an obvious way to back off or quickly make a deal – in which case the party is risking a real debacle with non-base voters, who might forgive a brief shutdown but probably won’t forgive Republicans if it turns into a lurching political and economic crisis.

Waldman predicts that, no matter how long the shutdown lasts, that the base will blame failure on Republicans giving up too soon:

[T]he idea that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed, extends beyond ideology to its tactical extension, eternal and maximal opposition to Barack Obama and everything he wants to do. Fighting Obama is a strategy that can never fail. If failure happens, it can only be because we didn’t fight him hard enough.

Once this is all over, they’ll be telling everyone the same old story. If only the party had been stronger, if only Boehner had stood firm, if only we had kept the government closed for another week or another month, everyone would have seen we were right, Obama would have been crippled for the remainder of his term, we would have won a smashing victory in the 2014 mid-term elections, and the blow that led to Obamacare’s inevitable death would have been struck. But we were betrayed by Boehner and the other cowards and quislings.

Will The GOP Lose The House?

Nate Cohn would be surprised:

That doesn’t mean there aren’t costs to Republican shenanigans. A tea party-led shutdown would reinforce just about every reason why the public doesn’t like the Republican Party—that they’re extreme, unconcerned with real problems, and unwilling to compromise. That may not concern representatives running for reelection in safe districts, but it could matter in the Senate, where the GOP needs to beat Democratic incumbents, not just defend safe seats. The GOP’s image problem will make life more difficult for its eventual 2016 nominee. And with 28 percent of the time between Obama’s reelection and the 2016 Iowa caucuses now in the rearview mirror, the GOP can’t afford to reinforce and deepen its existing problems.

Trende downplays the electoral consequences:

The bottom line is this: The shutdown will probably not be a good thing for the GOP, and there’s a good chance Republicans won’t achieve their intended goal of limiting Obamacare’s reach. But at the same time, a lot of the prophecies of doom for Republicans are heavily overwrought. Unless things get too far out of control, the predictions of heavy GOP losses from a shutdown are likely overstated.

“What Kind Of World Do These People Live In?”

“When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness. I know I’m very much a minority among conservatives in this, but the behavior of Congressional Republicans pushed me out of the party two years ago, even though I almost always vote Republican, or withhold my vote.

I am not a liberal, and do not want to vote for liberals, especially on social policy. But I told a Louisiana conservative friend the other day that the Congressional Republicans are making me consider the previously unthinkable: throwing my vote away by voting for a Democrat in the special election next month to replace my GOP congressman, who just resigned to take another job. The GOP candidates in this local race are hot and heavy to overthrow Obamacare. I think about how poor this district is — 26 percent of the district lives in poverty, making it one of the poorest Congressional districts in America — and how badly we need jobs and economic growth, and I think: What kind of world do these people live in?” – Rod Dreher.

You can tell I’m in the same camp, although I gave up completely on the GOP a decade ago as I saw its craven acquiescence to an imperial presidency, its love of massive, unfunded spending, its dogged support of wars of doomed nation-building, and its Christianist loathing of almost anything vibrant in modernity. But these past few days, by pure accident, I’ve thought about them in a slightly new perspective. I’ve been in Washington, DC, for a bunch of minor medical procedures: my thrice-yearly testosterone implant; my flu shot; a booster pneumonia shot; an HPV vaccine; an impending colonoscopy; an HIV blood test; and last, but by no means least, a repair of an umbilical hernia that has had me immobile since Friday. My compromised immune system requires constant check-ups, and the Dish now pays for my COBRA insurance – which will soon have to be traded in for Obamacare because my options are running out.

A word to Republicans: why would you want to deny someone these basic forms of healthcare? Or force them into bankruptcy because of them?

I could struggle on for a while without them and without my HIV meds. But sooner or later, I’d start running out of money, probably get a bad case of pneumonia, or an uptick in likelihood of cancer if my HIV breaks out again, or a hernia operation that was urgent rather than precautionary, or a debilitating bout of flu likely to make my asthma-ridden lungs even weaker in the future. This is the fragile reality I live in as a spectacularly privileged, if immuno-suppressed inhabitant of one of the most advanced societies on earth. But take any of it away and my well-being and basic health begin to fray.

Are you, Republicans, prepared to say that the countless working Americans who cannot now afford any of this should carry on without it indefinitely? People only have one life, you know. It can erode pretty quickly. On what moral grounds do you consign people to this fate when it is currently unnecessary?

I understand the important arguments about cost control, and any number of arguments about how to construct a system like this. I think I’ve heard them now for close to three decades – and we’ve all benefited from the arguments. But these needs are about as real as any can be. And our system has passed a remedy of sorts. It will need adjustment, reform, cost-cutting, and constructive criticism to make it work as well as it might. But seriously, after all we’ve gone through, you’re prepared to bring our entire system of government to a halt in order to prevent sick people from getting access to this kind of treatment?

What hallucinating, self-serving monsters have you become?

(Photo: Conservative Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Senator Ted Cruz’s partner on defunding Obamacare, after the Senate voted to amend the House’s spending bill by removing language defunding the Affordable Care Act and voted to fund the government at a $986 billion annual level through Nov. 15, on September 27, 2013. By Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

The Country Doesn’t Want A Shutdown

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/385067766849761280

Quinnpiac’s new poll numbers are bad news for Republicans:

American voters are divided on Obamacare, with 45 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed, but they are opposed 58-34 percent to Congress cutting off funding for the health care law to stop its implementation. Republicans support the federal government shutdown by a narrow 49-44 percent margin, but opposition is 90-6 percent among Democrats and 74-19 percent among independent voters.

Tomasky sighs:

[T]hese are devastating numbers for the GOP. If their private polling is close to this, we’ll see a deal soon, probably. Except that…individual right-wing members polling their own right-wing districts will see that locally, their numbers are going up! And that is the problem in a nutshell right there.

The Nullification Party

I’ve been trying to think of something original to say about the absurdity now transpiring in Washington, DC. I’ve said roughly what I think in short; and I defer to Fallows for an important dose of reality against the predictably moronic coverage of the Washington Post.

But there is something more here. How does one party that has lost two presidential elections and a Supreme Court case – as well as two Senate elections – think it has the right to shut down the entire government and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury to get its way on universal healthcare now? I see no quid pro quo even. Just pure blackmail, resting on understandable and predictable public concern whenever a major reform is enacted. But what has to be resisted is any idea that this is government or politics as usual. It is an attack on the governance and the constitutional order of the United States.

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.

Even though the law is almost identical to that of their last presidential nominee’s in Massachusetts, the GOP is prepared to destroy both the American government and the global economy to stop it. They see it, it seems to me, as both some kind of profound attack on the Constitution (something even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts viewed as a step too far) and, in some inchoate way, as a racial hand-out, however preposterous that is. And that is at the core of the recklessness behind this attack on the US – or at least my best attempt to understand something that has long since gone beyond reason. This is the point of no return – a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black).

I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.

Shutdown For How Long?

Plumer passes along a chart on past government shutdowns:

Collender compares the current shutdown to past ones:

1. Most of these lapses were short or happened over a weekend. They were barely noticed at the time and are not memorable now.

2. The lapses were not typically government-wide. Instead, they only happened to one or two agencies or departments.

3. In many ways most important, until Carter Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued memorandums in 1980 and 1981 that set up new rules and standards, agencies and departments that suffered an appropriations lapse were allowed to continue to operate as if there was no lapse at all.

In other words, using today’s terminology, there were shutdowns before 1980, but the agencies and departments didn’t actually shutdown.

Collender expects this shutdown to last at least a week “because it will take that long for the impact of the shutdown to start to be felt and, therefore, to make ending it more politically acceptable.” Beutler wonders whether the shutdown will outlast the debt-limit fight:

Now that furloughs have begun and services are interrupted, the cry from the public to end the shutdown should escalate quickly over the course of the next week or so. And if Republicans don’t yield to that pressure, they’ll soon find themselves staring into an abyss. The debt limit will need to be increased just days later. And though the shutdown will probably reduce the pace of government expenditures enough to buy Congress a very small amount of time, the Treasury will come calling sooner than later. It would constitute another act of bizarreness for Boehner to call Congress back to raise the debt limit and then return to the regularly scheduled shutdown, already in progress.

Tag: Shutdown