Tag: Shutdown

When “Conservatives” Boo The Cops

You realize they are not conservative in any way at all. Yelling at police doing their job maintaining security at the White House, calling them “brownshirts,” “stasi” and saying that one unit “looks like something out of Kenya”: can we dispense with any illusions that these are patriotic political actors, respecting those who serve our country in the military or police force? They are delusional, racist fanatics.

And I should add: the composure and restraint of these public servants in the face of these yahoos and morons is remarkable.

Reality Check

Here’s the poll of polls for the state of the 2014 national Congressional race (at the most sensitive level) from April of this year to today:

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None of this really tells us much about 2014, but it sure tells us something about broad public reaction to the self-induced crisis of the last two weeks. I just hope the Democrats don’t fall into the illusion that these kinds of numbers drive the Tea Party. They are driven by much deeper, less rational, more emotional forces than self-interest. Many of them want to destroy the GOP as well.

Is Palin Invoking Locke’s Right Of Rebellion?

Of course, she’s never heard of John Locke, but the person who made the flag above her sure did. A reader writes:

Note the white sign with the green arrow, pointing up with the text “Appeal to Heaven.” I would suspect that most casual observers, perhaps even most reporters, would assume that meant something like, “Let’s pray about all this” or “Let’s pray to God to change Obama’s mind” or something other prayer-centered interpretation of what that sign might mean.

However, that exact phrase appears, as I’m sure you will recall, in Ch. 14 of Locke’s Second Treatise, which describes the nature and extent of executive power, especially the executive’s “prerogative,” i.e. discretionary power. Here’s the relevant passage, in which “appeal to heaven” is used in the context of unjust or abusive uses of prerogative power:

The people have no other remedy in this, as in all other cases where they have no judge on earth, but to appeal to heaven: for the rulers, in such attempts, exercising a power the people never put into their hands, (who can never be supposed to consent that any body should rule over them for their harm) do that which they have not a right to do. And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.

It is clear that “appeal to heaven” in the text means revolution or rebellion. When the usual, political channels – i.e. earthly channels – are exhausted, then you can revolt in the name of the “laws of nature” or the “rights” we all possess and which no “government” can take away. I’ll spare you a lengthy exegesis of these sentences; my point is that “appeal to heaven” is not a random phrase, but one from the history of political thought that clearly means revolution or rebellion – and one the people take into their own hands, even.

I don’t think we can ignore the fact that many on the Republican right now believe themselves to be in open, non-violent rebellion against the government of the United States. Having the lost the appeal to the majority of Americans, they will soon be invoking an appeal to a higher power – against the president.

Update from a reader:

Your reader who identified Locke in the context of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag is correct in getting the reference, but wrong in thinking the flag is anything new. It’s the flag of Washington’s Cruisers, one of the flags of the American Revolution. That’s not a “green arrow”; it’s a pine tree. Alas, just like the Gadsden flag and it’s famous “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, it has now been appropriated by the Tea Party movement. I am a liberal Democrat who used to regularly fly those historic flags outside my home on the Fourth of July to commemorate the American Revolution – when there was a real, not imagined and hysterical, reason for revolt – but now I’m afraid I have to confine them to the closet. The idea that my neighbors might affiliate me with these crazies is too much to bear.

A Rolling Coup

How else do you explain this amendment to the following rule passed by the House just before it shut down the government:

Here’s the rule in question:

  • When the stage of disagreement has been reached on a bill or resolution with House or Senate amendments, a motion to dispose of any amendment shall be privileged.

In other words, if the House and Senate are gridlocked as they were on the eve of the shutdown, any motion from any member to end that gridlock should be allowed to proceed. Like, for example, a motion to vote on the Senate bill. That’s how House Democrats read it. But the House Rules Committee voted the night of Sept. 30 to change that rule for this specific bill. They added language dictating that any motion “may be offered only by the majority Leader or his designee.” So unless House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted the Senate spending bill to come to the floor, it wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t.

So, in advance, the GOP changed parliamentary procedure to ensure that no clean resolution, based on a Senate budget agreement, could get on the floor of the House for a general vote. The hostage-takers made it impossible to defuse the bomb they have attached to our system of government without their consent – even against a majority of House members of both parties.

These people are deadly serious. Since they lost an election, they decided to start a cold civil war.

This Is Where We Are

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This is a fascinating speech from today’s rally at the World War II veterans’ memorial. It’s fascinating because it’s a riveting, candid insight into the forces that are behind the government shut-down and the debt-ceiling blackmail of the country and the world. They do not believe this president is a legitimate president. It is beyond their understanding that he was re-elected handily, or that he commands, even during this assault on our system of government, far more support than the Tea Party. Let’s not be mealy-mouthed. This speaker, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, accuses the president of treason in this speech, of deliberately pursuing policies to kill members of the armed services, because he is an Islamist, and allegedly “bows to Allah”. What he is saying is the president is a deliberate mole of foreign agents determined to destroy the American way of life. And there is no pushback from the crowd and no pushback from GOP leaders.

This is what we’re dealing with. This is not an alternative budget; it is not another way of insuring millions and cutting healthcare costs; it is not a contribution to anything but to the logic of nullification of an election. It is yet another declaration of cold civil war – a call for a nonviolent refusal to be governed by a re-elected president because he is pursuing policies with which an electorally defeated minority disagree. Simply pursuing those policies has rendered Obama a “monarch” who is arguing “his way or the highway.” But all Obama is doing is implementing a campaign promise and settled law, while governing under a continuing resolution that reflects the sequester’s level of spending, a level agreed to by the Republicans. He wants a budget agreement between the House and Senate in a conference that the Republican House has long resisted entering. He has said that he is happy to negotiate with anyone on anything as long as the blackmail of a government shut-down and of a threatened global depression are ended. And his record shows that he has compromised again and again – as his own most fervent supporters look on in dismay.

I’m not privy to the negotiations now going on in the Senate and can only glean from outsiders what the meetings with legislators have been like. But I’m not distorting the raw facts of the situation here, or trying to distract from them. And I’d love a much more expansive Grand Bargain on taxes and entitlements, that could ease our long-term debt (but it would have to be a bargain, not merely a set of Republican demands). But the rank threats of unimaginably radical consequences if a re-elected president doesn’t junk what he was re-elected to do are so foul in their lack of concern about the common good, so poisonous in their slander of a president, and so contemptuous of our orderly system of government, that it is vital the threats do not work and are not accommodated. No president of any party has any right to legitimize such an attack on the American system of government and the way it conducts business – by elections, debates, compromises and budgets, not threats of total government shut-down and the collapse of the dollar if our global credit rating is effectively destroyed overnight.

I hoped we’d be nearing some kind of deal at this point, rather than witnessing this upping of the ante from the forces that truly live on the fringes of the far right, but which, without any resistance, have now defined the Republican party. It is no accident that among those addressing this rally to blackmail the country and the world were Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. I can see a very powerful populist electoral ticket with both of those on it – either of a third Tea Party or of an even more  radicalized GOP. And perhaps that is the only way to expunge this nihilist extremism from our system. Except that it may succeed in expunging the system and the economy before we can test it where in a democracy we are accustomed to test it: in elections, not in the chaos of economic blackmail.

Quote For The Day

“One thing we’re certain around the table, it was that if there is that degree of disruption, that lack of certainty, that lack of trust in the U.S. signature, it would mean massive disruption the world over. And we would be at risk of tipping yet again into a recession. That was the impression around that big table,” – Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, on the fiscal crisis in the US.

The Shutdown’s Smallest Victims

Wistar_rat

Lab animals:

The government shutdown is likely to mean an early death for thousands of mice used in research on diseases such as diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s. Federal research centers including the National Institutes of Health will have to kill some mice to avoid overcrowding, researchers say. Others will die because it is impossible to maintain certain lines of genetically altered mice without constant monitoring by scientists. And most federal scientists have been banned from their own labs since Oct. 1.

Fallows isn’t pleased:

Under shutdown rules, the animals still get food and water and are kept alive. But because most researchers are forbidden to work with them, the crucial moments for tests and measurements may pass; experimental conditions may change; and in other ways projects that had been months or years in preparing may be interrupted or completely ruined.

Yes, I realize that lab animals’ situation is precarious in the best of circumstances. But their lives and deaths have more purpose as part of biomedical discovery than in their current pointless captivity.

A government scientist, interviewed anonymously in Wired, reports that euthanasia is inevitable:

It’s not a matter of feeding the animals and cleaning their cages. These animals used for research are used in intricate experiments, involving treatments and collection of data performed by hundreds of individual scientists with each project. An animal caretaker can’t continue that.

Given that, you can imagine what has to happen. You cannot maintain colonies for no reason. It’s very expensive — and if they’re useless for research, what are you going to do? And mice and rats breed like crazy. An exponential expansion of the population that will rapidly fill all the cages. Every lab I know already works to maximum capacity. You can’t leave animals for somebody to feed and water.

The researcher adds:

We only take the life of an animal if it’s justified to provide new insight that will lead to basic understandings in science, or new treatments in human disease. We understand and appreciate that. We don’t do it lightly. We do it deliberately. There’s a difference between using an animal to obtain knowledge of human disease, and just having to engage in a mercy killing for no outcome, and with an enormous loss to science and to resources. It’s a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of people, a waste of animals.

(Photo: Janet Stephens/National Cancer Institute)

Will Cruz Get His Comeuppance?

Jonathan Bernstein no longer considers Ted Cruz a viable presidential candidate:

It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.

Larison nods:

What may hurt Cruz’s prospects as a presidential candidate most is the fact that he will not or cannot acknowledge that he was wrong in promoting his failed strategy. As if to prove how oblivious to political reality he is, he was at it again today in his speech this morning.

Barro marvels at Cruz’s complete detachment from reality.

Maybe The Shutdown Won’t Be A Turning Point, Ctd

Silver believes that the shutdown is unlikely to significantly impact the midterms. In response, Ezra asks, “If they reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling for six weeks and then they get nothing for it, will they really be able to pass a clean CR and another debt-ceiling increase in late-November?”

If this ends and the negotiations fail, the lesson many in the party will take isn’t that the GOP erred terribly in in employing these extreme and unpopular tactics. It’ll be that they erred terribly in backing down from them, and letting the leadership muck up the clear messaging of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.

Republicans should be very worried about what this episode means for their party in the midterms. But not because the shutdown itself is going to be foremost in voter’s minds 13 months from now. It’s because the shutdown is evidence of a Republican crack-up that is leading the party to pursue doomed, reckless and self-destructive campaigns. And if they keep doing that through the rest of 2013 and much of 2014, that will matter in the elections.