by Doctor Science
At this point, all Democrats and a sprinkling of Republicans call the House GOP’s threat to not raise the debt ceiling “hostage-taking” or indeed “economic terrorism”. When Obama absolutely refuses to negotiate about the debt ceiling, then, we think “that’s right, we don’t negotiate with terrorists” and nod firmly.
Breaching the debt ceiling would mean defaulting on the US’s obligations. It’s not about refusing to run up more debt, it’s about refusing to pay debts we’re already run up. The results would likely be catastrophic, for the US and for the rest of the world.
Obama *did* negotiate with Republicans to avert a 2011 debt ceiling breach, but it was really ugly. He seems to have hoped that it was a one-time thing, but Republicans clearly didn’t feel that way.:
[Senator (R-KY) Mitch] McConnell said he could imagine doing this again.
“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”
Now the Republicans have taken the same hostage, again — as could have been predicted by anyone who’d ever heard of Danegeld.
The thing is, though we may say “don’t negotiate with terrorists”, that’s complete (and dangerous) bull. If someone takes hostages, *of course* you talk with them. You negotiate because calming the situation and getting the hostages out alive is far more important than “standing firm”.
John Avalon of The Daily Beast talked to Christopher Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, about the current crisis:
“It actually reminds me of a prison siege … The opposition isn’t particularly organized. The smart move is to pick among the leadership on the other side who is the most reasonable. Then you empower them by talking with them and granting some sort of small concession. And they suddenly gain a lot of influence on their side.”
…
He’s looking to the Obama White House to help start the reset: “I would ask them to start saying, ‘I understand that the people on the other side of the table have the best interests of the American people at heart.’ Simply recognize that. Everybody wants to do what’s best for the American public. Those sorts of statements repeated on a regular basis, it’s the start of dialogue. It’s not concession; it’s the beginning of dialogue.”
Voss has seen worse situations defused. “I’ve seen people that were taken hostage in kidnapping situations where the kidnappers hated the person and what they stood for,” he says. “And when the person facing them showed them unrelenting respect and unrelenting courtesy and was completely relentless in it, eventually they began to reciprocate with respect. So if you decide that you can stand to have a chunk taken out of your hide, the scars of disrespect, a few times by being the first one to show respect, it will become contagious. It will work.”
….
So what advice would the professional hostage negotiator give Speaker John Boehner, who has been frequently accused of being held hostage by 40 or so House radicals? “Find a way to declare victory and go home. Start to list the wins that you actually had. Start to recalibrate to where you want to be in the next sequence of moves instead of trying to go the whole distance in one phase.”
And what would Voss tell the White House? “Start using messaging that ‘we’re after what’s in the best interests of the American people.’ You’re challenging other people to engage and that’s a dialogue. At the same time, if they fail to do so, then they’re the ones who look unreasonable. And you have at that point time to reset the game.” [bolds mine]
Basically, Voss’ advice involves *respecting* the Tea Party’s desire “not to be disrespected”, that that desire is a very strong motivator for people who are smarting from defeat.
You can hear how this kind of negotiation works in this raw footage of a 911 call at a school shooting in Decatur, GA, this August:
Antoinette Tuff is the school bookkeeper, but she was also one of three staff members who were trained to deal with hostile situations like this one. That’s one reason she knew what to do and could keep so (apparently) calm under life-or-death stress. But she also, clearly, is a person of literally heroic compassion, who succeeded by showing respect and caring toward a dangerous, mentally-ill stranger who’d fallen off the end of his rope.
I don’t know if a relentless emphasis by Obama on “I understand that the people on the other side of the table have the best interests of the American people at heart” will be enough to move the less-radical Republicans toward releasing the hostages. Among other things, there’s the weekend’s must-read from the NY Times, showing that the current Congressional crisis was essentially engineered by billionaire David Koch, Michael A. Needham of Heritage Action and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, among others. But I bet professional negotiators have faced situations when the hostage-takers have lots of outside support; I wonder what they would suggest?
With all respect, this seems a bit off. There is no hostage, it’s a metaphor for an unprecedented political demand. Negotiating will not save a life, it will overthrow the balance of powers that the U.S. Constitution depends upon. The Republicans have violated these norms because they can; the norms mean little to them. Where is the evidence that they actually do care about the United States? I mean that as a serious question. Why should Obama begin by granting them a veneer of decency that their actions don’t deserve?
But finally, the analysis is flawed, I feel, simply because there is no hostage. This should be obvious from the following equation:
The Democrats want the government funded.
The Republicans want the government funded, and a bunch of other stuff.
If both sides want the government funded, then the funding can’t be a hostage.
If the Republicans want to defund the government, then we have a policy dispute, not a hostage.
Social norms exist to prevent the use of power; the Republicans aren’t bound by them; they have to be dealt with through political power, in this case a united Democratic resolve not to do anything until the government is reopened and the debt limit raised. At least that’s how I see it.
I think you’re making a serious mistake in assuming that all Republican representatives want the government funded:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-ted-yoho-government-shutdown-is-the-tremor-before-the-tsunami/2013/10/04/98b5aa8c-2c3c-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story_1.html
Any sop thrown to Boehner to allow him to declare victory will allow him to declare victory.
And then we’ll have to do the whole thing all over again in a year, because it will have worked. Your Danegeld comparison is dispositive.
It is essential to the future of our government of laws that the radical Republicans in the house not be allowed to save face this time. There must be no way to spin this into a victory for them.
The Democrats want the government funded.
The Republicans want the government funded, and a bunch of other stuff.
If both sides want the government funded, then the funding can’t be a hostage.
If the Republicans want to defund the government, then we have a policy dispute, not a hostage.
It’s fairly clear that while some Republicans want the government funded, a significant number want only select bits of it funded, and that ‘bunch of other stuff’ mainly comprises not funding the other bits.
It’s also clear that quite a few Republican representative don’t know what they want, other than ‘something’, in return for ‘giving in’.
“Give us something, or we’ll pull the plug” is precisely a hostage situation. The world economy is the hostage, even if some of the hostage takers aren’t entirely clear on that.
The one encouraging thing about the situation is that the Democrats are not split. That at least gives some leverage to the White House in forcing/negotiating/call-it-what-you-will a settlement.
While I don’t know that I agree that this is in any way like an actual “hostage situation,” your point about showing respect is a critical one. Among the many causes of our current lack of reasonable dialog is the assumption that the other side is simply evil – that they do not have the best interests of the country at heart.
It’s an attractive belief. It means that you don’t have think very hard, and that you can posture and strut as the knight in shining armor defending the kingdom from the eeeevil dragon.
But at the same time it means that you never understand the other side, and thereby miss the problems that you don’t immediately see.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, It is difficult to get a party to understand something when their electoral fortunes depend on their not understanding it. As long as ignoring reality wins votes, politicians will ignore reality.
Nigel, I’d say you’re spot on with your first point: The “other stuff” they want is less spending, they DON’T want to fund the entire government, because they don’t think it should all be there in the first place. At least the true believers do, they’re not all sincere.
On the second point, I think you’re wrong. The Republican *leadership* are quite clear about what they want, though there are probably a wide universe of things that would satisfy them: They want a way of losing which won’t leave their base knowing they took a dive. They want to lose, AND be thought by their voters to have genuinely tried to win.
That’s been the fundamental continuing problem for the GOP leadership for approaching 20 years now. They spent decades as a powerless minority, and whatever they said in public, they liked it that way, because they could always tell their voters, “We tried, we really did, but we didn’t have the votes.” And they’d be believed, because they genuinely didn’t have the votes.
Then along came the ’94 elections, and suddenly they DID have the votes, and when they set out to lose anyway, their voters could tell that they hadn’t really tried, and got mad. And started setting out to replace them.
Give them a way to lose where their base will think they honestly tried to win, and they’ll take it in an instant. But they don’t dare lose in a way that’s obviously a dive, or their own voters will be after their blood.
FF, another reason why it’s so attractive to think your opponents evil, is that it frees YOU to be evil. What ever evil you want to do, you just have to think your opponent worse, and that it’s needed to fight the opponent, and you’re free to do it with a clear conscience.
Having an evil opponent is wonderfully liberating.
Thoughtful comments all. I just want to reiterate this, from joel hanes:
And then we’ll have to do the whole thing all over again in a year
I have no problem with dealing with the House (R)’s respectfully, I have no problem with granting them the benefit of the doubt of acting with good intent.
But I think the Senate, the President, the House (D)’s — basically everybody OTHER THAN the House (R)’s — cannot give an inch on the use of either the CR or the debt ceiling as a tactic or lever.
Pass a clean CR, extend the debt ceiling, then there can be a discussion. Not before.
If the House (R)’s don’t have the votes without the financial time bomb ticking away, then that says everything there is to say about their position.
This cannot become an accepted practice or tactic for negotiation.
If the Tea Party and House Speaker John Boehner have the ability to force a full default of some kind, the blow to private enterprise would be so colossal it would take us a generation to recover. ~ Simon Johnson
Democrats have a permanent lock on the Presidency and it increasingly appears they will control the Senate for another election cycle. Meanwhile, moderate Reublicans in the House are almost extinct All the Tea Partiers can do is exercise negative leverage (blow things up).
“But I bet professional negotiators have faced situations when the hostage-takers have lots of outside support; I wonder what they would suggest?”
When the terrorists you are dealing with are taking orders from outside leadership, the current SOP seems to be “drone strike the leadership”.
And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of criminal “masterminds”.
Having an evil opponent is wonderfully liberating.
Lies are truth.
War is peace.
Joblessness is a desire for more leisure time.
The poors choose to be poor.
The search for truth can be truncated by pure belief.
The highest expression of social beings is untrammeled individualism.
Unleashing private greed is socially optimal.
Having somebody to hate is dionysian ecstasy.
FREEDOM!
russell,
“Pass a clean CR, extend the debt ceiling, then there can be a discussion. Not before.”
So you think the GOP should first surrender and then hope the Democrats will deign to talk with them? Why should anybody believe that that would work? CRs and debt limits have long been one of the main ways the party not in the WH has used to force negotiations. Giving your opponents everything they want and then trying to get something in return is not an effective negotiating strategy.
jeff:
“Democrats have a permanent lock on the Presidency and it increasingly appears they will control the Senate for another election cycle”
I don’t know about the Senate, but how does two consecutive terms (and 5 of the last 10) imply a “permanent lock”? The two parties have been alternating for some time. The last time any party controlled the WH for more than three terms was sixty years ago.
what FuzzyFace said.
The Obama administration started out being consistently respectful of Republican in Congress and consistently used the message of “We’re all in this together, so let’s talk.”
The Republicans responded with relentless viciousness and dishonestly. Their approach to negotiation has been to demand everything, move the goal posts over and over and to blame. They have never negotiated in good faith. This isn’t the first hostage taking situation they have forced. It’s just the one where Obama decided not to negotiate.
Letting Boehner declare victory and go home might very well work. It’s worth a try.
There are hostages: all of the rest of us. This is particularly true of the threatened default.
In the case of the threatened default, I think the argument most likely to persuade Republican politicians is that the political consequences to themselves of trashing the economy will be devastating. And it would be. That’s the upside of default; the Republican party would become a regional party with very little political power outside of a few states. (Of course I’m not suggesting that that outcome would outweigh the damage to people’s lives. I just mean that one thing Republicans in Congress have shown consistently is a lack of regard for the wellbeing of ordinary Americans but they might care about themselves.)
AS for Republicans wanting to spend less: they have had repeated chances to show what they do when they have a majority and spending less isn’t what they do. They spend differently. They spend on special interests, lobbyists, themselves. And cut taxes for themselves and their class. And they can’t, evidently, do third grade math.
I can understand that faking respect is a valuable technique for defusing situations. If some fake respect for people who don’t deserve it defuses this, then fine.
But in the long term calling things as they really are is healthier for a system. The Republicans in Congress have shown over and over that they have no respect for the legislative process and no willingness to behave appropriately or cooperatively. In the end, in order to have a functional government, the depraved people need to be out of Congress.
There are some signs that some people within the Republican party recognize this: one of the noisiest Teahadists will be facing a primary challenge from a conservative businessman over this situation. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but the district is in Michigan. That’s what really needs to happen: Republicans need to clean house.
FuzzyFace:
CRs and debt limits have long been one of the main ways the party not in the WH has used to force negotiations.
No, they haven’t. In particular, forcing the country and the world up to the brink of default in order to get something you can’t get through the electoral or legislative process is a new and deeply threatening development. Which unfortunately worked in 2011.
Giving your opponents everything they want and then trying to get something in return is not an effective negotiating strategy.
This assumes that the GOP doesn’t *want* to avoid economic disaster.
Again, it all comes back to *respect*, to getting GOP leaders to feel that they haven’t unconditionally surrendered — but also as though treatening the debt limit is off the table, *forever*.
I would argue demographics. Republicans have had success with rebranding the party but not in a positive way. They are losing Wall Street. Voter suppression will not cut it for them.
Doctor Science:
In particular, forcing the country and the world up to the brink of default in order to get something you can’t get through the electoral or legislative process is a new and deeply threatening development. Which unfortunately worked in 2011.
Not according to the Congressional Resource Service, as cited in the Wall Street Journal, a few days ago:
There is nothing new, here.
I wonder during how many of those other times there was a refusal to even vote on a clean increase, if one had any chance of passing. I’d also be curious to know how dirty “dirty” was in those other cases. Not all other stuff that gets attached to legislation is created equal.
what FuzzyFace said.
just for the record, that referred to FF’s 04:38.
“But I bet professional negotiators have faced situations when the hostage-takers have lots of outside support; I wonder what they would suggest?”
Doc’s post is high statesmanship, I’ll say that for it.
First, any reaching out by this President, who is hated from the very bile-inducing gut of this swiftly-evolving, (toward uncompromising ruthlessness) armed velociraptor alien, will be met with a hurled plume of pea-soup vomitus not seen since Father Karras entered Regan’s bedroom to read her a bedtime story.
Here’s what I think the Republican Party, now irretrievably in the clutches of professional non-negotiators whose ground of ideological being is with the Confederacy, the John Birch Society, and the Curtis LeMay school of proactive nuclear terror — and since the statesman among the professional Republicans have not stepped forward yet, I rank them all as dangerous radicals — believe:
“Negotiation” is for New-Age Liberal Appeaser types, like, oh .. Richard Nixon or maybe even Barry Goldwater. Going back since 1913 –let’s review — we “negotiated” away our principles on National Parks and Conservation, Jim Crow and Civil Rights, the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Feminism, Gay Rights, and now even handicapped people have ramps into workplaces …. on the international front, we lost Poland, not once but twice, Cuba, North Korea, China, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Watts.
That said, we do have “stupid” on our side, and at some point I can understand that the slightest conciliatory gesture (let’s offer them re-opened scenic overlooks on the south side of the highway without a view of Mount Rushmore as a teaser, keeping the ones on the north side closed for demolition) might knock John Boehner over with a feather and they’ll fall upon this scrap like a hostage-taker who has missed breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two weeks running.
I doubt it. But here, you go in there and negotiate.
Here, tuck this weapon into your belt just in case.
Precedent, as explained to 4-year-olds by a professional negotiator:
“Letter to Winfield Scott (regarding the Maryland State Legislature’s Impending Vote to Leave the Union)
Abraham Lincoln
Washington
April 25, 1861
Lieutenant General Scott
My dear Sir: The Maryland Legislature assembles tomorrow at Anapolis; and, not improbably, will take action to arm the people of that State against the United States. The question has been submitted to, and considered by me, whether it would not be justifiable, upon the ground of necessary defence, for you, as commander in Chief of the United States Army, to arrest, or disperse the members of that body. I think it would not be justifiable; nor, efficient for the desired object.
First, they have a clearly legal right to assemble; and, we can not know in advance, that their action will not be lawful, and peaceful. And if we wait until they shall have acted, their arrest, or dispersion, will not lessen the effect of their action.
Secondly, we can not permanently prevent their action. If we arrest them, we can not long hold them as prisoners; and when liberated, they will immediately re—assemble, and take their action. And, precisely the same if we simply disperse them. They will immediately re—assemble in some other place.
I therefore conclude that it is only left to the commanding general to watch, and await their action, which, if it shall be to arm their people against the United States, he is to adopt the most prompt, and efficient means to counteract, even, if necessary, to the bombardment of their cities–and in the extremest necessity, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.
Your Obedient Servant
Abraham Lincoln”
@hairshirtthedonist:
Those are reasonable questions. The article didn’t detail them, but I presume the data is available from the aforementioned CRS.
Remember when James Carville wanted to grow up to be the bond market:
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20131008&id=16975034
There is nothing new, here…
Tried a few google searches on ‘US debt ceiling crisis’, and other than 2011, only 1995 and 1985 seem to throw up anything of significance (’85 being the year of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, and ’95 that of cheery old Newt Gingrich).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GsnIMERdfU
Skip the effing ad.
Link to the pdf of The Debt Limit: History and Recent Increases from the CRS if anyone is interested. Thanks, FuzzyFace. I’ll dig into it a bit.
Upon further review this appears to be the more relevant one: Votes on Measures to Adjust the Statutory Debt Limit, 1978 to Present.
I have observed that heros do sometimes negotiate with terrorists. They get the hostages freed. And then they either kill the terrorists or at least get them slammed in prison for life. And that last step is not really an option in the current circumstances. (Tempting though it sometimes seems.)
When you don’t have the option of eliminating the terrorists after the hostages are freed, then you don’t negotiate. Because you know that you will just be back in the same situation again, the next time the terrorists want something. If you are going to negotiate in those circumstances, you might just as well formally appoint the terrorists as dictators — that’s what you are essentially doing anyway.
They want a way of losing which won’t leave their base knowing they took a dive. They want to lose, AND be thought by their voters to have genuinely tried to win.
This is good as far as it goes, but it leaves out an important part- the *win* here is an unreachable policy goal, a fiscal vision supported by a minority of the electorate. The leadership wants to keep that vocal minority happy, but they also understand that sabotaging the actual functions of government in pursuit of that *win* 1)does not lead to the win, it just messes up government and 2)would lead to the effective demise of their party (and their power).
They aren’t playing the radicals for suckers because they want power, they’re playing the radicals for suckers because there is no other option. People who tell the GOP base the truth get called RINOs and run out of the party.
I think wj’s point is correct: the analogy to hostage-taking breaks down, because in this case the ‘hostage-takers’ cannot be prevented from re-taking the hostage over and over again. Obama tried negotiating once, and they’ve come back for a second bite.
Now, there are only two courses available: stand firm, or accept an endless series of concessions. And the latter is untenable (and IMO likely as harmful to the country as a debt ceiling default anyway).
So you think the GOP should first surrender and then hope the Democrats will deign to talk with them? Why should anybody believe that that would work?
A clean CR would fund the government for, say, 6 weeks. Long enough to negotiate without continuing the pain of the shutdown. Pain to the American people, not the Democratic Party, I should add. The threat of the shutdown will still be there- so unless the GOP 1)enjoys the shutdown (and there are some quotes suggesting this) or 2)thinks that hurting the American people gets the Dems to the table faster or wrings out more concessions, there’s no reason not to fund at current levels for the duration of the negotiations.
So now the GOP has to shoot the hostage, or surrender. And they don’t like either option. Boo hoo, don’t take hostages next time, spend the six months before the deadline negotiating rather than posturing and pandering to your base’s desire for True Believers.
Also, rolling debt ceiling increases into other bills doesn’t necessarily make them ‘dirty’. I can’t recall any party asking for- let alone receiving- significant concessions in return for an increase in the debt ceiling. Can you maybe present some of the big requests and their outcomes from the past?
It’s fun seeing people defend conservatives using the very same arguments lefties sometimes use when talking about the war on terror–don’t call your foes evil because then you get to do whatever you want in response. Try remembering that when we’re actually discussing the use of actual force and not just venting steam about a bunch of idiots who want to risk plunging the world into another recession.
So you think the GOP should first surrender and then hope the Democrats will deign to talk with them?
Very briefly, yes. Or, more accurately, I don’t care if they surrender or not, IMO the rest of government should not give them an inch *as a quid pro quo for either a clean CR or a debt limit increase*.
Here are a bunch of sources.
On federal shutdowns in general.
A brief history of prior shutdowns.
A good CRS backgrounder on the debt limit.
A good academic article discussing political conflicts around the debt limit.
Votes on debt limit increases.
A couple of things to note.
There were several government shutdowns — i.e., funding gaps — of some length prior to 1980. The date is important, because in 1980 and 1981, AG Civiletti issued opinions requiring that non-essential government operations actually be shut down in event of a funding gap. Prior to that, operations basically continued under the assumption that Congress would sort it out in fairly short order.
Following the Civiletti findings, and until the antics of ’95 and ’96, “shutdowns” were really just brief funding gaps, lasting a day or two, and not resulting in significant disruption of government services.
It has been quite common for the need to raise the debt ceiling to be the occasion for debate and negotiation. Most of the time the debate and negotiation was about the budget per se, and especially the amount of money being borrowed. It has been far less common for policy issues unrelated to the budget to be at issue.
There have definitely been exceptions, see Table 10 in the “monkeycage” link.
What I DO NOT think has been the case is for a major policy initiative that has (a) been passed by both Houses, (b) has survived (and, been modified by) numerous legislative challenges, (c) been a major plank in an unsuccessful Presidential bid, and (d) survived numerous legal challenges including a SCOTUS decision, to be required to be totally defunded as the price for either a CR or a debt ceiling increase.
If you can find a similar case in any of the docs I’ve linked to, or any other place, I’ll be interested to see it.
As far as I can tell, this is an example of a minority who have failed to prevail, repeatedly, to have their way by every other legislative, electoral, and legal means, bringing the operations of government to a halt in order to impose their will.
That isn’t a negotiation, it’s an attempt to undo the result of our political and legal process, by fiat.
So yes, I think the President and the Senate should refuse to negotiate anything until after we have a clean CR and after the debt ceiling issue is settled.
At some point, Mr. Obama and the Democrats will have to throw the speaker a lifeline. As tempted as they may be to see the Republicans blamed for economic disaster, giving the Democrats a chance to recapture the House in 2014, the potential damage to the nation is too great — and Americans could end up blaming everyone who seems to have a hand in this mess. A temporary extension of the debt ceiling, a reopening of the government and a commitment to engage in a process that leads to budget and tax reform: The ingredients of a deal are there.
excuse me for omitting the “” http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
“The ingredients of a deal are there.”
They can have the ashtray, but the paddle-ball and the lamp stay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5fr67YUif4
The terrorists are about to pick vast new sources of funding.
Negotiate that:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/conservative-justices-seek-to-further-gut-campaign-finance-regs
it’s just plain old extortion.
as long as the leverage remains potent, the criminal can tug on it whenever he needs to satisfy his urges.
nice country you got there. shame if anything should happen to it.
Just stopping by to see how the negotiations are going:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNsEK_IIs9U
I think it’ll end up by the bugs removing the dead husk of the Republican Party, within which they were permitted to cocoon, and showing their true selves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYoMIrYZxI
There’s the question of leverage and hostage-taking- what does the debt ceiling buy? Who suffers more if the hostage gets shot?
But there’s another angle, where the GOP *wants* to shoot the hostage.
I think that implicitly (or, in some cases, explicitly), the GOP position is that we are a nation of ‘makers’ and ‘takers’. And that the Federal government is largely about moving money from the former to the latter.
So shutting it down will hurt the takers, but the makers will be fine. Sort of a top-down Galt’s Gulch for everyone- find out if you’re really a maker or a taker folks!
Problem is, that’s pretty far from reality- and when the government *actually* stops doing stuff, the self-proclaimed ‘makers’ find themselves wondering why there sh1t isn’t working any more. And this makes them very angry- obviously, they are really makers and not takers, so if the government shutdown is messing up their sh1t then it must be *intentional* on the part of the government.
Thus we’ve been treated to a three-ring circus of GOPers
1)Blaming Obama for the shutdown and not negotiating
2)Cheering on the shutdown in general as a moral lesson for the takers
3)Screaming about the specific effects of the shutdown as intentional inflictions of pain on the makers
How can it be a “negotiation” or “compromise” if the GOP offers the Dems and/or the President nothing in return?
Obama should respond by letting it be known that any and all bills reaching his desk shall be vetoed until such time at eh 1917 legislation requiring this stupidity is repealed and that the executive has to authority to fund all future shortfalls with borrowing (if revenues fall short) since Congress directed the expenditures to begin with.
When the GOP responds with “ain’t gonna’ happen”, the application of Brett logic will indeed be fascinating.
bobbyp, i would love to that.
Id like a commitment to veto any spending bills that don’t explicitly include attached borrowing authority; to hell with folks agreeing to spending and then suddenly discovering fiscal prudence once the bill comes due.
This *used* to be a nice restaurant before the dine-and-dash crowd started showing up.
The bond market is about to halt all negotiations and kill all of the hostages: us
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum
Count,
Looks like a great to go long short paper if you ask me.
Abject apologies. Please insert “time” after “great” in previous comment.
Good times, great times. That’s the long and short of it.
As noted above, using the debt limit as a bargaining chip is not a negotiation. What are the Republicans offering in order to compromise? They promise to not blow up the country for a few more months?
That is something which kills all negotiations. The Republicans are offering nothing, and expecting to get something in exchange for their position. That is why there is not even a sop to throw to them since they are offering nothing.
Assuming that they need to be offered something in exchange for not blowing up the government is just nuts. You cannot negotiate with someone who refuses to offer anything.
This gorgeous ad from the State Tourism Board of the State of Kerala, India may not seem to be on-topic, even by my standards.
But I can make it so.
Doctor Science, you SHOULD watch it because you are in it, beginning at the 2:15 mark, “showing respect and caring toward a dangerous, mentally-ill stranger”.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/08/creepy-ad-watch-38/
Maybe it WILL work.
I love this quote from a commenter over on Krugman’s site about the debt limit:
“The irony of this is that Republicans are preparing to violate the constitution over an amendment the Republican party passed to prevent Southern secessionists from taking exactly the kind of action that the now Southern dominated Republican party is proposing to take.”
-John from Hartford
“Looks like a great (time) to go long short paper if you ask me.”
All of us already are 100% long that trade, conservatives and liberals alike.
Which ones of you don’t have cash-equivalent instruments called money market funds, savings accounts, certificates of deposit?
No one is on the short side, except Republicans through their hedge-fund accounts, which they have had months to prepare for as they planned financial apocalypse for the rest of us.
Have some cash on hand. But with the Treasury Department shut down, defunded, and unmanned, which window are you going to visit to redeem your dollars?
Buy guns and ammo.
The killing starts very soon.
I’m not sure if this will explain it to my daughter, but it works pretty well for me
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/10/08/applying-government-shutdown-logic-to-the-baseball-playoffs/
That’s good, lj, maybe you win the thread.
If Kingston takes the guy up on it, and the former is one of the dimmest crackers ever elected by barely sentient crackers (I saw him on either Stewart or Colbert several years ago and he had the most priceless look of ‘I’ve heard of such a thing as satire before, could this possibly be it? Nahh), Yasiel Puig and I are going to show up at his next public meeting for a fungo outfield practice with his testicles.
Puig gets physical when I get upset.
…..and a commitment to engage in a process that leads to budget and tax reform.
By far the funniest thing on this thread.
What process would that be, Jeff?
The process by which the Senate sends a budget BACK to the House so the conference committee can convene? The Senate has done that, and the House has refused to name members to the committee.
An agreement to use the criminal sequestration funding levels as a baseline? The Dems have agreed to this.
A small tax increase for the rich in exchange for more gutting of the social safety net? See budget deal, ca 2011.
I’d like to throw Boehner a lifeline, but it would be shaped like a noose, dangling from a conveniently low, but sturdy branch of a tree located near the entrance to one of our now closed national parks (/wishful sarcasm).
Wish I knew. I suck at negotiation and not much for lynching. I’ll go with bobbyp but won’t pose for photos with the corpse.
On Washington Monthly an option was discussed, I don’t know how seriously. The option was for Obama to just override the default and go ahead with paying the nation’s bills. the House could impeach him for it, but so what? That would put the House in the position of where they would be impeaching a President for avoiding an economic meltdown. Is this feasible? Or just a daydream?
but so what?
the “what” is that any the bonds the Treasury tried to sell in order to finance paying the bills would be legally suspect. people might not want to buy them, knowing there’s a chance the courts could decide that those bonds were not legally issued.
I’d like to throw Boehner a lifeline
a lifeline is not going to help boehner. the guys that are busting his chops want everything, with a bow tied on top. there is no lifeline short of that that will satisfy them, and boehner doesn’t have the juice to make them settle for less, or so it appears.
frankly, boehner is fairly close to the bottom of the list of folks i’m concerned about.
Superb editorial on why small business owners who aren’t stupid gets should love Obamacare:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/10/14/131014ta_talk_surowiecki
At some point, Boehner, as he resigns to hand over the Speakership to a velociraptor who has learned to tweet thumblessly, will have a crying fit.
I couldn’t handle Nixon crying either.
There’s something about the tears of not-quite-exceptional American sociopaths that creeps me out.
Luckily, we’re reaching the end of the weeping Republicans, who retain a vestigial conscience.
We’re going to be in the thick of the ones without conscience and tear ducts, the ones for whom Cheney’s hollow-pointed bullets were designed.
the “what” is that any the bonds the Treasury tried to sell in order to finance paying the bills would be legally suspect.
Perhaps. However, couldn’t the Federal Reserve and the Social Security Administration Trust Fund (remember those non-existent bonds sitting in a drawer?) purchase the “suspect” bonds from the Treasury using the massive inventory they hold of “legal” bonds, and the Treasury could sell those?
Janet Yellen is the new Fed Chair.
She’s under suicide watch.
“An agreement to use the criminal sequestration funding levels as a baseline? The Dems have agreed to this.”
Democrats have agreed to use the funding levels for federal prisons as a baseline for federal spending? How did I miss this? That’s great!
There’s a basic, fundamental problem with all this “criminal”, “extortion”, “hostage taking”, “terrorist” language: The House is exercising it’s constitutional authority here, it’s NOT acting illegally. It is, by definition, as a co-equal part of the law making branch, not acting illegally in only producing potential laws it likes.
Granted, they’re not doing what you want. The Senate isn’t doing what Republicans want.
Granted, you think it’s absolutely horrible policy. Republicans, surprise, think Democratic policies are absolutely horrible.
Neither chamber has any legal entitlement that the other produce legislation it likes.
And I won’t even get started on some of the Count’s threats, which escape literally terrorism only by virtue of nobody taking the Count seriously. Just remember you were screaming about bullet points being ‘eliminationist rhetoric’ not so long ago, and now you don’t blink at murder threats.
And I won’t even get started on some of the Count’s threats, which escape literally terrorism only by virtue of nobody taking the Count seriously. Just remember you were screaming about bullet points being ‘eliminationist rhetoric’ not so long ago, and now you don’t blink at murder threats.
There’s that ‘you’ again. Who precisely is that? It sure as hell sounds like it refers to someone, how about letting us in on the referent?
At any rate, you are the one who called the Count delusional, so if you don’t like the way the conversation goes, maybe you ought to rethink your role in all this.
The House is exercising it’s constitutional authority here
“The House” is not a monolith.
How many reps signed the “defund it” letter to Boehner? 30? 40?
It’s time for a vote on a clean CR.
Granted, you think it’s absolutely horrible policy. Republicans, surprise, think Democratic policies are absolutely horrible.
As does most of the rest of the world*.
In contrast, the rest of the world has no particular feelings about Democratic policies such as Obamacare.
*Any fellow rest-of-the-worlders who feel Obamacare is an abomination, please speak up.
And I won’t even get started on some of the Count’s threats
IMO Brett’s point here is reasonable.
I’m as big a fan of the count as anyone here, and hold him in as high regard, and with as much affection, as anyone here.
All of that said, I can easily see that the tone of his posts could make participation here uncomfortable for many folks.
Posting rule #1 is : be reasonably civil. And, the reason for that posting rule was to make it possible for folks from a wide range of points of view to participate.
So, maybe it would be good to dial the volume down a few notches.
Posting rule #2, of course, is no profanity, which will be the point on which I will hoist myself by my own petard, eat my own dog food, and in general make the same request of myself that I make of the count.
There are many, many, many places online where poo flinging is not only permitted but applauded. ObWi has traditionally not been one, which is part of what makes it congenial for a lot of folks.
The House is exercising it’s constitutional authority here, it’s NOT acting illegally.
The Speaker of the House, mostly, who has become beholden to a bunch of nitwits elected by goofballs in districts drawn by charlatans.
And, no, it’s not exactly what a lot of people here would like. By your logic, anything is okay so long as it’s legal and you can manage otherwise to get away with it. I’m sure that’s a form of logic you apply in all circumstances. Maybe you can cheer on a future Democratic House that won’t fund the government without a ban on semi-automatic weapons attached.
Is it in the constitution that the Speaker of the House can prvent floor votes when he does not like the likely outcome, is it a law beloe that level, a simple House rule or just a custom? And on any claim that Democratic speakers are no different from Boehner I say, that to me that does not matter (screw the Dems too, IF true).
It is not the House that blocks the process, it is the Speaker under pressure of one radical part of one party that refuses to allow a vote. If he was sure that the vote would fail (as he claims) then having a vote would strengthen his position. That he does not allow a clean vote to me shows that either he or the people controlling him do not believe their own claims.
And we are talking about a 6 week CR not the budget for a full year.
Again I say, one should switch off electricity, water and gas to the Capitol at any time Congress is not actively debating until this mess ends. Congresscritters can charge their gadgets elsewhere and use flashlights (batteries payed from their own pockets).
Granted, you think it’s absolutely horrible policy.
I just want to return to this for a moment.
The issue here is not that the policies the (R)’s want is horrible. Laws are passed and policies implemented every day that (for instance) I think are horrible.
The underlying issue here is that different constituencies in the US want very different things. We think different things are good, we have different ideas about the proper relationship between us and the government, etc etc etc.
So, any law or policy, created at any time, by virtually any level of government, is going to make a non-trivial number of people really unhappy.
I would even say that a mark of successful legislation and/or policy is that it spreads the unhappiness around fairly evenly. Nobody gets a filet mignon, everybody gets a hamburger on a soggy bun, and we all declare victory and go home.
The salient issue in the case at hand is that the House (R)’s, having failed to win the day through any and every normal means of governance, are now, as a deliberately chosen tactic, preventing the normal operations of government from proceeding unless they get their way.
And in about a week, they are likely to put the US at risk of sovereign default, unless they get their way.
What they want is unreasonable. The way they seek to get what they want is both unreasonable and very harmful.
This is not about “we”, whoever “we” are, not liking what the House (R)’s want.
It is about a threat to representative governance in the US.
The tea partiers are noisy, but they do not represent the majority of the population of the US. Likewise, their reps in the House are full of fire, but they do not, by far, represent a majority in the House.
This could be readily demonstrated with a simple up or down vote on a clean CR, but the Speaker of the House doesn’t have the spine to make that happen.
The folks in the House that are bottling this up are, in fact, holding the government and the financial status of the US hostage to their project. It’s time to make that stop, and the way to make that stop is to give them nothing.
If they get an inch out of this, then this will become the new negotiating standard, each and every year, as Oct 1 rolls around.
Enough.
“”By your logic, anything is okay so long as it’s legal and you can manage otherwise to get away with it.”
By my logic, there’s a lot of space between “legal” and “okay”, and I’m pointing out you’re using the terminology of “illegal” to describe things which are pretty unambigiously LEGAL, just because you don’t like them.
Just say you don’t like them. Your not liking them doesn’t make them crimes.
“Is it in the constitution that the Speaker of the House can prvent floor votes when he does not like the likely outcome,”
Why, yes, Article 1, Section 5, Paragraph 2: “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,”
You call this “screaming”?
I take issue with the word “delusional”, as well.
“Just to the left of Whoopee” would be more accurate, but no matter, neither classification disallows me from purchasing AR-15s and 100-capacity clips from effing whackjobs in camo in our reality-based polity.
For eliminationist rhetoric, tune in to C-Span’s coverage (quiet, levelheaded death threats delivered by blue-suited accountants with flag-lapel pins and armed staff members) of House Republicans as they present their plan to eliminate folks with pre-existing conditions from the insurance rolls or they will shut down the government and default on the debt, thereby killing plenty more folks.
That their eliminationist rhetoric is presented in “bullet points” is apt, at the very least, but I have to say any time folks who brag about how heavily armed they are and their desire to over-water the tree of liberty say “now for my next bullet point, pre-existing melanomas will not be covered, blah, blah, blah”, some people sit up and take notice, perchance to get one last scream in before they shoot first and ask questions later.
That’s O.K, Stalin’s speeches about his policy toward the Ukraine were boring affairs, too.
I could make a case that Doc Science is the truly delusional one (she probably stopped reading this comment by now, so can someone relay this paragraph to her) around these here parts, given her suggestion that we should extend respect and caring toward a dangerous, mentally-ill stranger (this last is wrong; we’re dealing with perfectly rational but murderous carnivores which is why they are triply dangerous), but it would be a weak case, hardly worth screaming about, seeing as how her delusions pale in comparison to those who continue to supply military-style weaponry to dangerous mentally-ill strangers, otherwise known as the human race.
That’s O.K. too, we could view my efforts as bringing together those of diverse points of view into agreement, tra-la-la.
Come together, over me. (You may think I believe everything I scream, but really I live for the opportunities to slip in a Beatle reference)
I’m closing in soon on an internet hiatus (going to have my internet hiatal hernia fixed while I have insurance; no really, even I grow tired of the sound of my own voice and there is Mom to tend to) soon, so there will be an indeterminate break in the discomfort levels to permit the consideration of genocide via republican policies in dulcet tones of mutual respect.
I kid, but I kid you not.
I take comfort in knowing that Brett will be signing on to Medicare in a few years, which will stop me worrying about his pre-existing sedition.
On the other hand, if he forgoes Medicare as the medical problems and medical debt pile up, I’ll take comfort in that as well, knowing that principles have been stalwartly adhered to while all of us pay his hospital bills.
There are two right ways to change a law. One is to take it two the Supreme Court and get it overturned. The other is to make the law an election issue, run on it, get elected, get a majority, and change it.
Those are the right ways. Sulking, pouting, threatening, extortion, treason, those are the wrong ways.
I can tell the Republicans know they are doing wrong because they are denying responsibility, trying to make it look like it’s the Democrats’ shut down or a shut down that happened as a result of the Democrats’ actions. That kind of dodging and weaving is what people do when they want to dodge the consequences of their own decisions.
I agree with the comment up thread that this isn’t a hostage situation since the hostage will not be released. If we negotiate, the hostage will just be held for the next time.
This, he screamed:
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20131009&id=16980179
Why have I been paying put $100,000 death benefits to people who volunteered for the assignment?
I’d like a refund of all previous payments, actually.
I think these payments are bald-faced incentives to decrease living and increase dying.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-searching-for-independent-thinkers-in-the-gop/2013/10/08/fcf63c20-3045-11e3-bbed-a8a60c601153_story.html?hpid=z3
What Republican politicians would do if they had any guts.
These payments encourage dependency on the government.
One could surmise, given generally accepted accounting principles, that the deceased wanted to die and collect, and that their families may have adopted questionable, distorted motives in the entire process.
They might be just like those “lucky duckies” who want to be dependent on welfare, and Medicaid, and Medicare, and now the ACA.
Well, “lucky duckies” might be too strong of a term.
“Something like lucky duckies” is more accurate.
Not that I’m screaming anything like that.
Brett, that’s not ‘in the constitution’, that’s ‘within the limits of what the constitution allows’. At what level is the rule actually fixed?
There’s a basic, fundamental problem with all this “criminal”, “extortion”, “hostage taking”, “terrorist” language: The House is exercising it’s constitutional authority here, it’s NOT acting illegally.
I take it as rhetorical flourishes. Except for the hostage-taking part, that is quite literal. I mean, the WSJ editorial page calls this hostatge taking “You can’t take a hostage you aren’t prepared to shoot.”
Granted, you think it’s absolutely horrible policy. Republicans, surprise, think Democratic policies are absolutely horrible.
I may, but the issue of the day is *process*. I think the process of not negotiating before the shutdown, openly bragging that the shutdown was going to be great leverage for you, and then saying that ending the shutdown has to be balanced with policy concessions is terribly bad process. If Republicans want to end the shutdown, raise the debt ceiling, and then go into conference with the Senate to see what they can negotiate, Im fine with that.
People do modify process requirements when they feel strongly about policy, and to some extent we even recognize this as a part of our public discourse (eg civil disobedience). So I also understand why some commenters point out that not only is this a destabilizing and dangerous process, but it’s done in the name of an ideology they object to. And Id obviously be more sympathetic in general if the Dems were shutting down the government in order to get capital gains treated like other income- but Id still object to the process.
…and I’m pointing out you’re using the terminology of “illegal” to describe things which are pretty unambigiously LEGAL, just because you don’t like them.
There’s that “you” again. I’m the one who wrote this on The explain it to my daughter Friday Open thread:
If you can quote me saying something was illegal, go ahead. I mean, I get you’re particular point about this not being illegal. But it’s the “you just don’t like it, but that doesn’t make it bad” point I was addressing.
Yeah, people don’t like it – no kidding. But there are arguments being made for why it’s wrong and screwed up. Saying, “You just don’t like it” isn’t a counter argument. If it is, anything goes, so long as it’s legal and you can otherwise manage to do it.
frankly, boehner is fairly close to the bottom of the list of folks i’m concerned about.
Yes and no, for me. *Someone* has to occupy the Speakership for the next year and change until the 2014 election. Either 1)the position and process for selecting it are going to change or 2)the next Speaker will be at the mercy of the same pressures. #2 seems more likely, so Im pretty interested in how this is all going to play out post-shutdown (unless, as someone pointed out, we’re out hunting and gathering in the midst of the ruins of our civilization while apes begin their slow rise to power).
It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, who explain their delusions in the perfectly reasonable language of a guy standing in Times Square pants-less handing out business cards to passers-by which refer to him as Napoleon Bonaparte.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/coburn-need-managed-catastrophe-now-to-make-difficult-budget-choices
Actually, Coburn looks exactly like Claude Rains.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYh7C2a5yFc
Legally drunk.
Well, it’s legal, what’s the problem?
Actually, there’s 3) the next Speaker is chose by the current process. But he isn’t at the mercy of the same pressures, because he is a Tea Party true believer.
That’s why I actually have some sympathy for Boehner. He is (I really, really hope) taking all the brickbats being thrown his way, in order to be there to bring the debt ceiling increase bill from the Senate to a floor vote in the House. Doing so will have two results:
– the debt ceiling gets raised
– he gets ousted as Speaker.
But at least we will have had a Speaker who cares about the good of the nation for the critical time.
And then we can go on with the months of shutdown necessary to finally get the House to do something. I suspect that, given the mindsets of the Tea Party Congressmen, and the people in their districts, that will finally get resolved like this: the Republicans who still have their sanity will end up voting with the Democrats for yet another new Speaker. Probably, as a face-saving matter, another Republican. Just one that can’t get a majority of the Republican votes, because he ins’t insane enough.
By my logic, there’s a lot of space between “legal” and “okay”
Fine. We won’t arrest them.
One thing I will say about the count’s rhetorical violence – to my knowledge, he has not openly carried loaded semi-automatic rifles into public discussions of these issues.
Unlike his counterparts who oppose the ACA.
I’m all for toning down the volume on the rhetoric here on ObWi, but I do not and will not forget what’s been both said and done by folks who are my political opposites.
What the tea party contingent in the House are doing now is extraordinary, and is extraordinarily harmful.
It’s not “okay”. It’s the opposite of “okay”.
What makes our system of government feasible is the willingness of all parties to abide by the result of the process, even when they don’t prevail.
If that willingness is not there, it doesn’t work.
That doesn’t appear to be matter to the minority of House (R)’s who are driving this.
As has been pointed out repeatedly in the various threads on this topic, the ACA passed both houses of Congress.
It has been subject to numerous attempts WITH A (R) MAJORITY IN THE HOUSE to repeal and / or amend it. Some of those changes were worthwhile, and in fact some were adopted to address concerns of the (R)’s.
But the program as a whole was affirmed, repeatedly, by Congress.
It was a significant plank in Romney’s campaign for President, and he was defeated, and thoroughly so.
It was challenged in a number of courts, with the appeals going to the SCOTUS, where some aspects of it (the mandate) were upheld, and others (requirement of states to extend Medicaid) were not.
The program will take time to roll out, various proposals to further change it to address various points have been suggested, will no doubt be debated, and some will no doubt be adopted.
All of that is insufficient for the tea party contingent in the House.
The ACA in its entirety must be totally defunded, or else funding for government in its entirety will be shut off. Only essential operations or operations which have their own funding sources will continue, everything else will limp along until its funding runs out, at which point it will cease.
If you think putting cones in front of a scenic overlook at Mt Rushmore is a big deal, you’re in for some entertainment.
The count’s rhetoric here may be overheated, but we all may wish that was all we had to worry about before all is said and done.
Brent Billmore:
There’s a basic, fundamental problem with all this “criminal”, “extortion”, “hostage taking”, “terrorist” language: The House is exercising it’s constitutional authority here, it’s NOT acting illegally.
No one is claiming that it is a criminal act — just that it looks a lot like one. I am sure you understand the distinction.
And you also err by claiming that this is about policy differences. So, the Republican policy position is that the government should be shut down, and the nation default on its debts? That IS what the House seeks to accomplish with its stunt. It resembles extortion since you are basically offering nothing concerning the very real policy debate, and just threatens to wreck stuff if you do not get your way.
I am sure you get this, but are just being deliberately obtuse.
What about these cones?
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20131009&id=16981225
Worldwide slaughter (in slo-mo, which I realize gives the impression that it’s not slaughter) of the world’s poor, let alone poor and sick American citizens, if the United States defaults on its debt.
Nope, I’ve never carried loaded or unloaded weapons anywhere near public discussions, with the exception of the rifle range at my high school where the rifle team, proctored by the shop teacher and on which I excelled, met publicly in a public institution to discuss not leaving our weapons in the boy’s bathroom by accident.
He never showed us how to brandish weaponry at public events featuring ways to insure healthcare, so I, perhaps mistakenly, assumed that such behavior was just not done, being akin, I presume, to shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt as a punishment for not killing uninsured entrepreneurs with pre-existing conditions who might want to start a small business.
As a shop teacher, I will say he knew a dove-tailed joint when he saw one (see Beatle references).
Oddly enough, I received a reprimand and detention for carrying a loaded water pistol in the hallway of the same building, but they hadn’t supplied a shooting range for water pistols, so what’s a kid supposed to do, as I asked the libertarian, free market history teacher/assistant football coach who apprehended me … I wish.
But I have the freedom, provided me by Brett and the Republican Party, to carry loaded semi-automatic weapons in the vicinity of Republican public meetings, so I’m acutely aware of the flexibility permitted me by crazy people who threaten my health, livelihood, and my life on a regular basis.
In Colorado Springs some years ago, I had the freedom, if I so chose, to carry the same into City Council meetings, until the armed Republicans on the various Councils of Government, who set in place the original law permitting the carrying of weapons in government meetings, thought better of it when their diaper bills started to pile up.
Actually, the Republicans can be seen to be offering a very real compromise. They offer to give up something they want (the destruction of the Federal government and the nation’s economy) if the Democrats will give up something they want (Obamacare). No question, that counts as a compromise.
Of course, it requires that the Tea Party folks admit that they really do want to destroy the country. But once they do that, they are on firm ground when saying that they are willing to meet the Democrats half way.
Actually, there’s 3) the next Speaker is chose by the current process. But he isn’t at the mercy of the same pressures, because he is a Tea Party true believer.
I dont see that as likely- if Boehner falls bc of a loss of TP support, then we either get a change in the process (eg as you say, some Dems support a moderate GOPer for Speaker) or we get a vote inside of the GOP caucus. If the latter, I dont think there are enough nutters in the GOP caucus to put forth a Paul Bron- someone like that could drive the GOP into the wilderness for a decade. I just can’t see a reason for moderate GOPers- the ones who will lose their seats if a True Believer gets the Speakership, to facilitate that.
Well, I can see one scenario I guess- the TPers defect, Boehner falls, and then the Dems stand as a block and refuse to vote for a GOPer while the TPers demand one of their own as Speaker.
Then, someone has to blink. If the moderate GOPers blink, then they could get a TP speaker. But I expect the first to blink would be the conservative Dems, they’d *want* to blink in that scenario I think.
I wonder of Brett (or anyone else) would indulge me. It currently seems at least very possible that the Congress will fail to pass an increase in the debt ceiling. And then, at some point this month, the administration will find itself with a choice. It can ignore the debt ceiling law, and just issue more debt to keep the government’s bills paid. Or it can stop paying for things that Congress has mandated by law that it buy.
So my question is this: which of those laws do you propose that the President should violate? The math simply won’t allow both to be followed. So which one should he choose to follow, and which to ignore? And why?
And if you think the debt ceiling is the one he should follow, that brings up a second question. Of the various things that the Congress has mandated the government do, how should the President decide which to do and which to stop?
Note that we are not talking about the President getting a bill on his desk to sign which might contain stuff he has threatened to veto. We are talking about the Congress having failed to pass anything. What does he do, and what is (or should be) the justification for the choices made?
For me, THIS is somewhere between highway cones and killing folks with pre-existing conditions, but YMMV
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20131009&id=16979625
I’m just a little bewildered by the absence of outrage from whomever that a raving, screaming, lunatic liberal like myself would cite so many middle-of-the-road-to-right-of-center business websites in support of his position.
Are there no standards?
Of course, it requires that the Tea Party folks admit that they really do want to destroy the country.
in a way, they do that all the time. they will not stop telling the world that they want to destroy what they feverishly imagine the country has become. they want to destroy the wicked, corrupt, abominable US of today and return it to the pristine idyllic nation that it once was. that’s pretty much a textbook definition of conservatism.
their problem is that they actually like what the government provides. they like National Parks, Social Security, Medicare, safe food, clean water, the FDIC, and all tons of other progressive/liberal programs – even “conservative” politicians are deathly afraid to touch that stuff. what T.P.’s really want is to destroy an imaginary country and replace it with a different imaginary country.
in other words: the GOP is a scam.
You know what I’m getting tired of hearing?
“Obama is trying to make this shutdown as painful as he can!!!”
You know what? SCREW YOU!
Someone missing out on some vacation time is painful? What about the people who’s JOBS are being affected? These complaints aren’t about ‘pain’, they are about inconvenience. A government shutdown inconvenienced you or someone you care about? How will you ever survive? A government shutdown IS PAINFUL! That’s kind of why we think avoiding them is a GOOD idea!
If the government wasn’t shut down then NONE of this ‘pain’ you are complaining about would be HAPPENING! You want the ‘pain’ to stop? Call your Republican House member and tell THEM about it. They are the ones shutting the government down.
And another thing,
For all the complaints about ‘the president’ shut out WWII vets from their memorial and ‘NO other president has done that!’.
When was the last shutdown? ’96 or ’97? I don’t think the WWII memorial EXISTED until 2003 or 2004 right? So why would ANYONE expect previous presidents to have ‘kicked vets out’ of something/somewhere that didn’t even exist yet?
Am I wrong about the dates?
Well, wj, it’s all the Democrats’ fault. Some time ago the idea got floated on the Right to pass a bill that would put the priorities of payment in case of a default into law. Somehow the Left balked at the idea to put China on top and the receivers of entitlements for the needy* at the bottom of that list. They even called it the Pay-China-First bill and made a ruckus using the liberal media to demagogue this textbook example of reasonablness so viciously and so long that the GOP (always the decent party) withdrew the idea. If the Loonie Left had listened to reason then, we would not have gotten into that trouble now and the money could get transfered where it belongs by natural law (following the pronciple of Ostwald ripening).
*the real ones, not Big Agro and Big Oil
I think a point should be made that, just like most ‘previous government shutdowns’ being cited were not actually shutdowns (Becuase until 1980 the government kept operating anyway.), most ‘dirty debt ceiling’ increases were not actually ‘dirty’.
People are acting like those situations are that the debt ceiling was coming up, and that one party or another created a debt ceiling increase and attached a bunch of stuff to it and would only pass that. Uh, no.
What actually happened is that Congress, usually the House, was passing some sort of bill which no one really had a problem with and was expected to pass the other house easily. Especially something like an appropriations bill. At some point someone noticed the debt ceiling was coming up, so said ‘Hey, we’ll just throw that increase onto this bill.’
It might be _lazy_, but it wasn’t ‘negotiating over the debt ceiling’ or a ‘dirty’ increase. It was ‘Here’s some basic government business we all agree to, just throw it on this bill so we don’t have to make a new one.’
That’s not to say there have _never_ been a negotiating strategy which included talking about the debt ceiling increase, but the mere fact it was attached to some other bill does _not_ mean that other bill was the result of a negotiation over said debt ceiling.
And the few negotiations that _did_ talk about the debt ceiling were pretty clearly PR tactics for elections that the other side realized were such things. This (Well, 2011) is pretty much the first time anyone’s actually _believed_ we could reach it. But that’s another issue.
I learned my sense of humor (is it a joke? only my gun manufacturer knows for sure) from these guys:
“There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless,” the guest said. “I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it.”
Cheney himself told one waterboarding joke, the attendees said, which he attributed to Jay Leno. It centered on a one-shot antelope hunting contest in Wyoming in which the loser had to dance with an Indian squaw. Cheney’s shot got caught in the barrel, producing a dispute over whether it counted as a hit or a miss — and Leno, according to Cheney, joked that Cheney wanted to go catch the animal with his bare hands and waterboard it.
Separately, Rumsfeld joked about Cheney waterboarding fish.”
Yet another very recent meeting of murderers I and my Supersoaker missed.
lifted from Sullivan today.
Of course I have to provide a linky linky to the Pay China First:
here
Speaker Cruz anyone?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_10/more_support_for_speaker_cruz047237.php
One may, if one effing wishes, presume that the plurality cited here, who favor Cruz over Boehner therefore agree that Boehner is a Nazi-appeaser and that Dr. Seuss said “I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it”, mistaking green eggs and ham for spinach.”
To be sure, Cruz did not say “anything like” his fellow Republicans are Nazi appeasers”, he actually said it.
I’ll do my best to watch my use of the “f” word and the others.
After all, even a screaming lunatic watches his language while being murdered by aliens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN0-eGTNhq4
More on the Constitution truckers who plan to use unConstitutional tarmac to destroy the U.S. Government.
Note the murder threats, explicitly supported and implicitly threaded throughout the rhetoric.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/constitution-truckers-plan-to-shut-down-d-c-with-protest-convoy
Any news on whether Brett believes that 18-wheelers are just as lethal as guns this go-round?
I wouldn’t mind seeing the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of furloughed federal employees living in the area, driving en masse the other way headed straight for the truckers in their Toyota Tercels armed with identical rhetoric and whatever “legal” instruments they deem necessary to effect that rhetoric should the mothertruckers start trouble by taking lawmakers and Federal employees hostage in their cabs for a little libertarian gang-bang action.
Are there no standards?
We’re heading for this, my friends!
Lest we ignore the problems the ACA websites are experiencing, let’s not underestimate the incompetence, depravity, cheating, and lying of the private sector in this country who win the bid and rarely deliver outsourced product that works, not to mention late and over budget.
This may prove that the private sector can do nothing right, ever, if I were a conservative who takes one particular case and then applies it to a general class, which I’m not.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/09/whats-ailing-healthcare-gov-ctd/
Could there be sabotage as well?
Are the folks who run these companies Republicans?
Don’t tell me Halliburton won this contract too?
“It can ignore the debt ceiling law, and just issue more debt to keep the government’s bills paid. Or it can stop paying for things that Congress has mandated by law that it buy.”
WJ, this, it seems to me, demonstrates a misunderstanding of the debt ceiling. There isn’t any law out there saying “The President may not borrow more than X”, which he would be ignoring by borrowing X+1 dollars. Without a law, the President can’t borrow ANY money.
The debt ceiling is a law saying the President CAN borrow up to X. If he wanted to ignore this law, about the only way to do it would be by refusing to borrow any money.
If he borrows more than X, he’s not ignoring a law, he’s ignoring the Constitution having delegated to Congress the authority to borrow.
So, IMO, the decision to violate spending laws rather that the Constitution’s allocation of powers is forced.
That out of the way, the only constitutional priority on spending when there’s not enough to spend is debt service. After that, it’s up to him to make the choices.
Will I like the choices he makes? Likely not, but he’s the President.
What I object to right now is that he’s been making some of those choices out of sheer spite, actually spending extra money to hurt people. Granted, he’s aimed for mild pain, but he IS deliberately going out of his way to inflict it.
But the “Washington Monument” ploy goes way back, doesn’t it? He’s just being amazingly ham handed about implementing it.
What I object to right now is that he’s been making some of those choices out of sheer spite, actually spending extra money to hurt people.
You brought that up in a previous thread, and I cited (iirc) an OMB memo that said the Feds have to shut down non-essential services *even if keeping them open is cheaper*. They can spend money on shutting down. They cannot spend money maintaining nonessential services.
That makes sense insofar as the power of the Executive to spend lacking Congressional authorization is only extended to the bare minimum necessary to preserve safety etc.
for the love of Caulfield, you, and the rest of your “conservative” kin, are so fncking transparently phoney about this.
do you really think the rest of the country is dumb enough to buy this nonsense?
Ayn Rand, with a flower in her bun and after some astute silence, appears on the Donahue Show.
This is about right:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/today-in-the-reign-of-morons-100913
There’s always a scene wherein the monster reappears as conciliatory good cop, calls off the dogs for a moment, forestalling apocalypse (certainly as reasonable men none of us want to continue on this deadly path, do we?) and offers to deal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcmzHtokiMw
Ride on!
That out of the way, the only constitutional priority on spending when there’s not enough to spend is debt service.
On the one hand, I agree that the President is constrained by the Constitution not to borrow but only by law to spend what Congress has demanded, so the latter loses. And any notion of ‘implied’ authority to borrow is IMO made bogus by the clear debate over explicit authority (unless Congress was implicitly giving authority without knowing it…)
On the other hand, there is still a real danger of a bond payment failure- Federal receipts and expenditures are not smooth or always completely predictable. So one day, if there’s less money in the kitty than is owed on debt interest, the President cannot meet that obligation.
why would “conservatives” care which law Obama breaks, so long as he can be forced to break at least one ?
will of the people!
GOP: destructive, idiotic, hated.
(link to above)
ya know what… maybe a good financial apocalypse would be worth it, if the public decides it’s a good reason to rid this country of Republicanism once and for all.
Without a law, the President can’t borrow ANY money.
But if memory serves (no guarantees there!), absent the debt ceiling law the Congress is/was held to have authorized borrowing to pay the bills for any spending that it has ordered by the act very of ordering the spending. Precisely to avoid the situation where the Congress has ordered money spent but failed to provide the funds.
That out of the way, the only constitutional priority on spending when there’s not enough to spend is debt service. After that, it’s up to him to make the choices.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to here.
NO MONEY gets spent that is not authorized by Congress. In other words, the Congress allocates a certain amount of money to a program, and that and no more than that is what can be spent on that program.
The issue right now is that we don’t have a budget, so no funds have been allocated for this year. When negotiations about the budget go past Oct 1, that’s normally addressed by a continuing resolution. That’s what is lacking at the moment, and that is why we’re in partial shutdown mode.
Further, the government – any branch of government – can not only not spend money that isn’t authorized, it cannot enter into contracts or otherwise oblige the US to pay for goods or services for which funds have not been allocated by Congress. That is not in the Constitution, it’s the Anti-Deficiency act, which goes back to the mid-19th C.
If I understand correctly, the ADA also mandates what programs are, and are not, essential, and which take priority in the absence of allocated funds.
The details of how programs are to be shut down is, I believe, organized by the OMB, which is under the direction of the executive, but I’m not sure how much discretion they have about which things are and are not considered to be essential. They most certainly cannot spend money that has not specifically been authorized for a particular program.
As far as borrowing goes, the Treasury can not borrow beyond the amount authorized by the federal debt limit, period. The POTUS has no ability to change that.
It may be possible to shore up one unfunded program at the expense of another, and those decisions are at least partially at the discretion of the POTUS.
Is that what you’re talking about?
Because other than that, I’m not seeing that Obama has all that much choice about what gets kept open, and what gets shut down.
Let’s make sure we’re clear whether we’re talking about the implications of the debt ceiling not being raised versus the government shutdown. russell, I think you’re responding to Brett’s point about how the President handles no debt ceiling legislation with how the President handles no CR. I think.
“absent the debt ceiling law the Congress is/was held to have authorized borrowing to pay the bills for any spending that it has ordered by the act very of ordering the spending”
Not a fan of that at all; anytime something is conveniently called implicit when it’s already been explicit it smells too much like an excuse. That is, for all these decades we’ve been fussing about debt ceiling bills, and then one day we decide that they were never necessary?
That goes double when Congress is in the very act of debating whether to explicitly authorize that borrowing- if they meant to implicitly authorize it already, why bother? Or did Congress accidentally imply something in a bill that they didnt mean to imply?
That is, for all these decades we’ve been fussing about debt ceiling bills, and then one day we decide that they were never necessary?
I think wj means that, before there was a law requiring a debt ceiling, the borrowing was authorized as required to allow the spending (and that, in the absense of said law, that’s how it would still be).
That these increases are necessary is a matter of law, not functional necessity.
Because other than that, I’m not seeing that Obama has all that much choice about what gets kept open, and what gets shut down.
And I’m sure, if he were allowed, he could keep open things such that everyone would be pleased as punch with him, especially Brett. 😉
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-official-says-she-never-consorted-devil
I hope you all will follow this link.
I don’t think it is possible to negotiate with people like this.
historical footnote:
from 1979 until 1995, a debt limit increase was automatic when the budget increased. it was called the Gephardt Rule. the GOP killed it.
russell, I think you’re responding to Brett’s point about how the President handles no debt ceiling legislation with how the President handles no CR.
I was responding to this, especially the bold (bolds are mine):
Unless I misunderstand the law (entirely possible), the POTUS’ choices about what limited funds can be spent on is fairly narrow.
Certainly, decisions like “keep the national parks open or not” are not in his control.
from 1979 until 1995, a debt limit increase was automatic when the budget increased. it was called the Gephardt Rule. the GOP killed it.
“The rule, which was established by P.L. 96-78 and first applied in calendar year 1980, provides for the automatic engrossment and transmittal to the Senate of a joint resolution changing the public debt limit, upon the adoption by Congress of the budget resolution, thereby avoiding a separate vote in the House on the public debt-limit legislation.” cite
So not the same thing I think- a streamlining/automation of the debt part of the process, rather than spending-is-implicit-borrowing-authority thing.
…..the only constitutional priority on spending when there’s not enough to spend is debt service. After that, it’s up to him to make the choices.
Not true. The Constitutional framework has the legislature enacting laws, subject to executive approval and/or overrride. The legislature funds the costs to execute the laws. Per the Constitution, the executive must obey the law and spend the money. Circa the criminal Nixon administration, we even had a Supreme Court decision on this matter. The assertion that the President can “pick and choose” is simply not the case, and would be a violation of the Constitution as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court, which has the Constitution prerogative to make that interpretation.
russell, I think the question is: once payments on the debt have been made, what gets paid next. Clearly not everything can get paid, but some things can. So what is the basis for deciding between, for example, putting food inspectors to work vs putting EPA inspectors to work. Or paying Social Security vs. veterans pensions? Or paying for things already contracted for and delivered vs. continuing the TSA security theater (I carefully do not include real security expenditures in the comparison).
Yes, some choices will seem easier than others (even though which way they would fall depends on who is making them). But what are the criteria that should be used to make those choices in general?
Clearly not everything can get paid, but some things can. So what is the basis for deciding between, for example, putting food inspectors to work vs putting EPA inspectors to work. Or paying Social Security vs. veterans pensions?
I guess what I’m saying is that at least some of the basis for making those decisions is outside of the control of the POTUS.
Page 7 of this CRS report summarizes the kinds of things that the government can legally spend money in the absence of a specific Congressional allocation.
My specific point in the context of the kinds of examples Brett has offered is that complaining about public parks being closed as some kind of act of spite on the part of Obama is absurd. If the money has not been allocated (and as of Oct 1 it has not), then the expenditure has to fit the criteria outlined by law.
Scenic overlook at Mt Rushmore, or Buddy’s Grand Canyon Campground, or any of the other public parks and/or private concessions operated in public parks, and closed by ACTS OF TYRRANY AND OPPRESSION on Obama’s part likely do not make the cut.
Not Obama’s choice, it’s the law.
And yes, oddly, Obama *is* likely required to spend money to keep people *out* of the parks, as a matter of public safety.
Shutting down government programs is expensive, and is an inefficient and counter-productive use of government resources.
Thank the tea partiers, it’s their show.
I guess I would also note that having a situation where Congress can approve programs, allocate money to them, and then refuse to allow the Treasury to borrow whatever funds are required to operate them, seems like one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
We’ve been living with it for almost 100 years, but still.
No question, it is exceptionally stupid. And, as far as I can tell, we are only living with it because the Congress believes (probably correctly) that its members are incapable of exercising prudence and judgement in deciding what to spend money on and how much. It’s a pathetic commentary on themselves, but they appear to be correct.
I do agree with you that Brett’s (and others’) complaints when the shutdown that they pushed for causes inconvenience to themselves are absurd. Even given the kinds of absurdities that politicians routinely engage in, it ranks pretty high up. But then, we know when they specifically exempted the air traffic controllers (lest their own trips home be impacted), we knew how sincere their reactions were likely to be.
Completely on topic and of a piece, given the economic ideology preached from within its hallowed halls (and stairs and elevators) and its reflection in the savagery of the Republican Party’s policy prescriptions.
http://crookedtimber.org/2013/10/09/upstairs-downstairs-at-the-university-of-chicago/
This is how the lucky duckies (some are even Democrats) treat the unlucky duckies.
The new word on the street:
Default? No biggie.
Or maybe not even default. Burr (R) of NC says:
So, the shutdown funds debt service, and we don’t need to raise the debt ceiling.
Win / win!
Interesting background on the Republican militant tendency:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-republican-suicide-machine-20131009
“And yes, oddly, Obama *is* likely required to spend money to keep people *out* of the parks, as a matter of public safety.”
Strangely, no previous President found himself required to spend money to, say, evict people from their homes along Lake Mead, or shut down private parks on federal land, or close scenic turnoffs on open roads. Even though there HAVE been government shutdowns before.
If you can recognize security theater, is it really so hard to recognize shutdown theater? Rather than telling yourself it’s a matter of safety to close things the government was spending no money to make safe?
interesting link Nigel. I found this point interesting
Boehner never knew what hit him. The speaker would soon suffer two stinging defeats at the hands of Jordan and the RSC. The first came during the 2011 debt-ceiling battle, when Boehner shut out his conference to negotiate with President Obama a $4 trillion “grand bargain” that combined modest tax increases with draconian spending cuts. By any objective standard of Washington deal making, Boehner had extracted extraordinary concessions from a sitting Democratic president.
Believing the old rules of Washington still applied, Boehner was confident that where he led, House Republicans would follow. But Jordan’s RSC simply wouldn’t abide any deal that raised taxes, and more than 170 members were united against the speaker. If Boehner pressed ahead, the Grand Bargain could only pass with a majority of Democratic votes – a scenario that Cantor feared would spark a mutiny. So he spiked Boehner’s deal. “We were preventing the speaker from making a bad mistake for himself and the rest of the leadership team,” a former leadership aide tells Rolling Stone.
The premise that Obama is negotiating with Boehner doesn’t really seem to hold, which seems to undercut the main argument of the OP
If a default would be “no biggie” (as a couple of Republican members of the House have asserted), they how does refusing to raise the debt ceiling provide any leverage? Similarly, if the shutdown is no big deal, how does it provide leverage? And if they provide no leverage, why would anyone think that they could be used to force the Democrats to do things that they don’t want to do?
Somehow, I must be missing something obvious here. Help?
“that combined modest tax increases with draconian spending cuts.”
Now, admittedly my memory is getting worse as time goes by, but I recall that grand bargain being “modest” tax increases now, in return for “draconian” spending cuts in the out years. (Over the course of ten years.)
Which was, if my admittedly fallible memory isn’t playing tricks with me, the chief objection: Opponents thought the spending cuts would never actually happen.
“(Over the course of ten years.)”
Apparently the concept of discounted cash flow analysis is beyond the grasp of the GOP leadership. Do you really think a modest tax hike is fairly balanced by a huge and immediate cut in social programs? Why would anybody in their right mind agree to such terms?
Apparently the concept of heavily discounting concessions by political opponents is beyond your grasp. Why would anybody in their right mind give something away today, to get something tomorrow, when they’re making the deal with somebody they don’t particularly trust?
Somehow, I must be missing something obvious here.
Obviously you missed the part about how all the moochers, the poors, and them who are basically ignored and shat upon in the political realm at all other times, will, at the mere thought of missing any of their ill-gotten incentive destroying boodle, rise up and force their Democrat masters to cave.
Rebublicans, big thinkers!!!
Why would anybody in their right mind give something away today, to get something tomorrow, when they’re making the deal with somebody they don’t particularly trust?
So then insisting on outlandish concessions from opponents not deserving of your trust will surely do the job! Salespeople must love you.
Strangely, no previous President found himself required to spend money to, say, evict people from their homes along Lake Mead, or shut down private parks on federal land, or close scenic turnoffs on open roads.
The national parks closed in ’95.
And, the ’95 shutdown cost the nation a great big pile of money.
Don’t believe me, you can go look it up. And don’t start with Daily Caller or PJ Media, those folks will rot your brain.
Other than ’95, the shutdowns were either one- or two-day jobs with limited consequences, or they occurred before the Civilettis opinion and nothing really shut down.
Your information is bad. Check your sources.
That hobby horse has to be getting tired, no?
That hobby horse has to be getting tired, no?
There are miles and miles and miles left in it. No worries, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
CRS report on the ’95 shutdown.
Hey, this is entertaining:
OBAMA BARRICADES LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNLIKE DURING 1995 SHUTDOWN.
Here is a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, barricaded, with an armed guard, during the 1995 shutdown.
We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
The House should pass a clean CR, then we should extend the debt limit so that we can pay for the stuff Congress already said we were going to pay for.
At some point, we should either get rid of the debt ceiling or reinstate something like the Gephardt rule so that this business of ringing up a big bill and then deciding we don’t want to pay for it can be eliminated.
From here, a very entertaining account of an attempt by the state of AZ to take over the Grand Canyon during the 1995 shutdown:
My bold. Phantom Ranch, of course, is operated by a private concessionaire under agreement with the feds.
How long did it take me to dig this stuff up? Maybe ten minutes.
If I had a few hours, I’m sure I could run down dozens of these stupid turds of misinformation. But, I’m going to go read a book in bed with my wife.
Somebody else can go check out the other crap, if anybody’s interested. Not that it will make a dent, because some folks are True Believers, and mere facts will never cloud their perception of The Truth.
‘night now!
The people Brett is quoting are liars. They deserve to be ignored, if not ridiculed publicly. They are clowns.
The guard was situated at the Lincoln Memorial for fear Lincoln would unseat himself, stride across the Mall, and do a Sherman on the Republican Party.
Otherwise what Russell said.
It’s good and said.
See you folks on the other side of this.
Walking Dead marathon for me. I need to psychologically prepare for the future.
You think maybe, just maybe, the protocols for shutting sh1t down have changed since 1995? Or that instructions sent out to shut sh1t down aren’t always followed to the letter? Or the instructions are open to interpretation and/or vague? Or that folks in the executive branch are erring on the “shut sh1t down” side as criminal penalties are on the table?
Nah, must be Obama sitting in the White House doing things “no previous President found himself required to” do. Comparable sample size of “previous President” being, um, 1.
But, let’s assume Obama is actually making decisions about which scenic overlook to close and shutting down the “popular” parts of government (those that survived the repeated bathtub drowning attempts) while leaving the extremely unpopular parts of government open, like the IRS (oops, wait, that’s closed too, stupid Obama).
What did any of Obama’s opponent’s fncking expect, especially given their opinion of him? Why, in fact, should they even care if the shutdown is Obama’s fault, as is the repeated claim? He will suffer the consequences of making the shutdown even more painful than it has to be! It’s win win for Obama opponents!
And I do like the nice switch from the “people begin to notice they don’t miss the ‘non-essential’ parts of the federal government that are shut down and we can do without them going forward” to the wails about non-essential sh1t being shut down.
Anyway, I’m happy to accept everything Brett says about unprecedented sh1t shutdowns ordered by Obama (and/or his minions) and the wails and howls of protests that have resulted therefrom. Because I guess it turns out people don’t like the federal government shutting sh1t down – even the ever so mocked non-essential parts – after all. Oops.
the resolve of the Republicans is not to be doubted here. they don’t believe in Government other than the Military, for the most part, if i understand them correctly. to expect the Republicans to see Society as valuable is ignorance of what a Republican is.
that Republican have long vowed to undo the Social Contract is a vow I have seen them continually enact, and expect them to keep on dismantling it. their past action simply reinforce their words. funding only parts they like is what they want Obama to agree to today. DUH!!!
this is an issue of values. Republican values are nothing like or in accordance with those of the Left, my take. Republican values appear to abhor and defund any and all social or personal contracts for anything or anyone they dislike.
Thatcher said there is no such thing as Society, only Individuals and Government.
I certainly expect the Republicans to defund any part of Society they disagree with. that is the history of the last 40 years. of course they have had help with Quisling Democrats, these Quislings D’s have helped the Republican do this dirty work. we didn’t get here just by Republican actions alone, though. the Dance in the Destruction of Amerca takes two to tango.
i always remember the indignity Sen Alan Simpson exuded when Bill Maher asked about his “extremist” values on his show. Sen. Simpson implied/inferred his values were beyond question of such ‘ilk’ and other mere mortals. this outright indignity of being called on stances Bill Maher found indefensible was really etched in my mind forever. Sen Simpson told Bill Maher he had no right to ask such things. typical, the Right has never had qualms about such extreme, almost “religious” absolutism. this is a mere tenet of and in their “righteous beliefs”. God is my ultimate source? . You Dare Question Me! Such unmitigated Gall? What Nerve? i was astounded at Sen. Simpson’s moral indignation at the very existence of such a thought by anyone, much less that someone would dare speak such heresy. oh my the infamy, the blasphemy of the ignorant masses!!!
The Right is morally righteous and beyond question. This is how we got to where we are today.
this certainty of their “Right”, this certainty, such a moral absolution in their “beliefs”. no room or tolerance for differences of beliefs. the “My Way or the Highway” as God’s given Truth. no one with integrity would dare to “question” the moral certitude of Republican beliefs. plus, the Commandment of never denigrating another Republican. Party before people, like Profits before people, another Republican tenet.
The Tea Party is just such extremism without the sugar coated “bipartisanship” of yesterday’s Southern Gentlemanly Chivalrous Republican Party. Strom Thurmand, Trent Lott, the Old Guard went down proudly in their history books.
the veneer is off when it comes to today’s version/the Tea Party. we can now see the Republicans for what they are. nowadays there is no need for that Chivalrous BS that was used to cover such amoral and antisocial behavior. ”
or in other words.
“well, i’ve go mine, so you can go F Off.”
or, Well, i’ve got mine. you can go F off!
Hemorrhoids, toenail fungus, dog poop, and cockroaches all might be a little bit gross- but they’re all more popular than Congress. Hemorrhoids beat out Congress 53/31 with bipartisan support. On the other three there’s a partisan split- Republican voters go for Congress while Democrats take the alternative but overall it’s a 47/40 victory for dog poop, a 44/41 one for toenail fungus, and a 44/42 triumph for cockroaches.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/10/congress-losing-out-to-zombies-wall-street-andhipsters.html#more
Well, that headline is obviously true. Obama did not barricade the Lincoln Memorial in 1995.
The Constitution prohibits Congress from doing the very thing it is doing now: Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, dictates that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” The Tea Party seems to think that defaulting would be a reasonable outcome. The American electorate did not vote for a government that would put the economic recovery at risk.
Below cockroaches?
I need new material:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/vermin
The roaches scuttle out of the sewage sumps, identically to their behavior in the 1950’s and 1960’s as they swarmed all over Civil Rights legislation to nullify/contaminate it merely by their foul touch:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obamacare-different-law-red-states-152010876.html
In the interest of not being liars, we should probably take some steps to verify that the Memorial was shut down because of the government shutdown, and not because it was being restored.
Which it was.
Whether it would have been shut down anyway, or not, or whether it was closed for restoration primarily, is another matter altogether. But russell’s link doesn’t say that it was closed due to the government shutdown, only that it was closed during the government shutdown.
I would say that russell’s point is not at present exactly the slam dunk it was intended to be. As it stands, it’s simply a cum hoc argument.
Which it was.
maybe i didn’t read close enough, but where does it say the L.M. was closed for the mural renovation ?
If there has been any unprecedented shutting down of parks or memorials, well…the world’s economy is small potatoes. OH!!! THE PAIN!!!
In the interest of not being liars, we should probably take some steps to verify that the Memorial was shut down because of the government shutdown, and not because it was being restored.
Fair enough. On the matter of the Lincoln Memorial being closed, I stand corrected.
As it stands, it’s simply a cum hoc argument.
In the case of the Lincoln Memorial specifically, that is so.
The argument Brett is presenting is stuff that was open in “all of the previous shutdowns” is closed now, and this demonstrates that Obama, personally, is deliberately picking stuff to close in order to maximize the annoyance factor of the shutdown.
The meaningful set of “all previous shutdowns” includes one previous shutdown.
It’s lightyears from clear that any significant set of things shut down now were open in ’95 and ’96.
The decisions about what gets shut down and what doesn’t are to a large degree mandated by the ADA, and the details are worked out by individual departments based on guidance from the OMB.
For things that are funded by current-year allocations in the general discretionary budget, the overarching rule is “only essential functions”. Parks and public monuments are non-essential.
A non-trivial amount of money is almost surely being spent to implement the shutdown. This was also true in ’95. It’s inevitable. It costs money to close things.
The idea that Obama is personally directing that things at the level of scenic overlooks and Grand Canyon campgrounds be closed to generally piss people off is a logical stretch several orders of magnitude beyond cum hoc.
It’s possible that Obama gave some kind of sub rosa direction to the OMB and/or other high-level executive personnel to make the shutdown as annoying as humanly possible. Many things are possible.
Not all things that are possible are so.
Long story short : the kind of “OBAMA CLOSED THE PARKS TO ANNOY YOU!” garbage that Daily Caller and PJ Media are shopping around is exactly that, garbage.
They are ankle-biting knuckleheads whose goal is to agitate the paranoia of people who see evil tyrannical government plots behind every turn of events.
The reality is not that complicated. The House (R)’s are holding up the budget process. Due to Constitutional and legal requirements, that means some stuff has to close. Due to further legal requirements, that means the things that have to close are things that are non-essential.
Parks and memorials are non-essential.
Some background, for those who may be interested:
White House guidance as of 9/17/13 regarding program shutdowns.
The OMB circular describing how to prepare for a shutdown. Note that this is not dated, my understanding is that it is a standing document.
The Office of Personnel Management website describing who may and who may not continue to work during shutdown.
Or maybe it was just a wee bit ambiguous. Let’s excise the part that was my point-making, leaving out the distracting bits:
I take full responsibility for the misinterpretation, because no one does inadvertent unclarity like Yours Truly.
Thanks for the adjustment, russell. I don’t really think anyone has a good accounting of what was closed then vs. now, because I would guess that nobody thought it would ever matter, or that it would happen again.
I think the tendency to call someone a liar because they’re parading around their latest discovery without learning the whole story should be avoided, in general. The least of the reasons is that sh1t can come around and bite you on the @ss. There are people who are deliberate liars, and there are people who just don’t have all the pieces. The former can’t be persuaded, while with the latter there’s at least a better chance provided we haven’t just called them a liar.
Personally, I think some of the closures happen to be petty and unnecessary, but whether that’s so in some widespread manner is not really clear. Shutting down the WWII memorial in a public park that’s open 24 hours a day was not a smart thing to do, IMO, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not the hill I personally would die on.
Anyone whose Google is not broken can find out that there were some park shutdowns during the 1996 shutdown, though. That shouldn’t be in any kind of dispute.
Republicans who have repeatedly tried to defund the parks aren’t in a good position to whine when the parks are closed due to their shut down of the government.
It seems to me that Republican politicians never take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Probably because their actions are unpopular. Heck even the Koch bros. who helped engineer this shut down are disavowing it! And their ultimate goal is to end public ownership of land, including selling off all of the parks.
That’s the problem with the Republican party: if honest about goals, they lose elections. So they lie, lie, lie to get up to the brink of an action, then have to pull back.
The party is full of true believers of various sorts: Rand assholes, religious fanatics, cut-taxes-and-magic=happens, Social Darwisnists, paranoid schizophrenics. And the biggest true believers of all are the people who vote for them, thinking that they will get responsible fiscally conservative management of government. Yu don’t get milk from under the cow’s tail!
My wife was barred from her workplace and from using her work email during the 1990s shutdown.
So was one of my best friends, as were many others close to me.
My now ex-wife is barred from her workplace and from using her work email during this shutdown.
So is one of my best friends, and many others close to me.
They are monuments closed to the public who would be happy to remain open, though many of them are breaking the law by going into their workplace to keep tabs on ongoing experiments and other work demands, because taxpayer funded projects will be destroyed and redone at taxpayer expense if neglected.
So arrest them.
Those cones and lonesome security guards warding off whiners from scenic overlooks and monuments seem to me to be easily circumvented.
Go get it. Or is the whining the object?
Incidentally, any American citizen may contact any and all specific Federal employees at any time — except now, and then.
In case any of your (anyone reading) inquiries haven’t been answered.
I choose Chris Inglis, 2:45 am.
I think the tendency to call someone a liar because they’re parading around their latest discovery without learning the whole story should be avoided, in general.
That’s good advice, noted.
What I would like to point out, in case it’s not clear, is that I do not consider Brett a liar, and would not call him one.
Daily Caller and PJ Media, different story, and my reasons for my opinion of them go back much further than the current situation.
I think some of the closures happen to be petty and unnecessary
I would be amazed if some of the closures were NOT petty and unnecessary.
There are numerous possible reasons for that.
The government is a very large bureaucracy, and “petty and unnecessary” sort of comes with that territory.
I’m sure there is also a very large CYA factor, because many of the decisions about what was and was not closed will no doubt be subject to scrutiny, and there are real legal penalties for NOT closing things that should have been closed.
It’s also possible that some of “petty and unnecessary” lies in the eye of the beholder.
And, it’s also possible that there are reasons for closing things now that weren’t relevant in ’95. The Lincoln Memorial, frex, was recently vandalized, and Parks may have decided to close it rather than leave it accessible out of an abundance of caution.
Pretty far down the list of likely reasons, IMO, is some kind of micromanagement by the White House of which highway rest stops to close.
What I would take away from all of that is that it’s a really bad idea to force the closure of government operations as way to re-negotiate years’ worth of legislation.
I expect I would hold that opinion regardless of which party was forcing the closure.
This is Chris Inglis’s voice mail. Due to Congress’s inaction on the budget of the United States, I am on indefinite, unpaid furlough. Please leave a message here or contact me via my work email address and I will attend to your inquiries as soon as Hell freezes over.
….static ..
On the QT here, but I’ll try and return your call from my home phone or personal cell number for your convenience during working, albeit, unpaid hours.
Thank you.
What I object to right now is that he’s been making some of those choices out of sheer spite, actually spending extra money to hurt people. Granted, he’s aimed for mild pain, but he IS deliberately going out of his way to inflict it.
Fact free nonsense. The shut down requires all non-essential services be halted. Keeping monuments open cannot possibly qualify as something that should be kept open as allegedly “essential.” There is no evidence to support your belief, and all that it evidences is derangement about all things Obama.
The pain inflicted by the shutdown is exactly what Republicans want. So is whining about it as if Obama is somehow responsible for their decision. Pretending that he could avoid the pain (or is making it worse) is more groundless deflecting of blame for their own choices.
i do so love the simultaneous cries of “the shutdown won’t hurt anything” and “how dare the President shut down this [parking lot | web site | office] !”
it’s like there’s nothing behind either complaint except, as dmbeaster notes, “derangement about all things Obama”.
La cucaracha:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/the-house-gop-s-little-rule-change-that-guaranteed-a-shutdown
“The cockroach, the cockroach / can no longer walk / because he doesn’t have, because he lacks / a hind leg”;
The dynamic this minute between the members of the sadistic, murderous syndicate — Tea Party, Erick Erickson, Jim DeMint, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Less, Rafael Cruz, goodfellas all, looks like its headed for something along these lines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGJkG5qo4r0
…. after they kill plenty of the innocent public.
I can’t decide who the Joe Pesci character is all of this, must it hadda be done.
If you can recognize security theater, is it really so hard to recognize shutdown theater? Rather than telling yourself it’s a matter of safety to close things the government was spending no money to make safe?
Ive pointed out before that 1)the Feds don’t have to have a 24/7 presence in a location to be monitoring it or providing security or maintenance services and 2)they can’t spend that money under the shutdown, but they can spend money to shut things down properly.
Expanding point #1: it makes sense to eg shut a private campground leasing land in a national park if the Feds can’t provide law enforcement, trail maintenance, search and rescue, etc.
Again, *even if* shutting it down costs more than keeping it open, because *that’s the law*. So your complaint appears to be that the President is zealously enforcing the law. Are you really in favor of the President defying the law and choosing which non-essential services he’d like to fund? I suppose politically the answer there would be “yes”- if the President had to pick and choose, then he could be blamed for each individual iota of shutdown pain.
Rather than all of the blame landing on the GOP, who bragging about causing the shutdown and now say they won’t end it without some kind of compensation for their trouble.
Carleton, you might entertain the possibility that yes, that’s exactly what he would like. Because if the President failed to zealously enforce the law, they’d have grounds for impeachment — and getting rid of the President is their highest goal of all.
See Jeb Hensarling’s “formulation”:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/today-in-the-reign-of-morons-101013
I’m proceeding to the “safe house” to clean and oil the toys.
I’m sure there is also a very large CYA factor…
This strikes me as rather commonsensical. Many a lawsuit has been filed for “negligence” due to the absence of “proper oversight”, etc. If nobody is manning the store and there is an accident, who is responsible?
Any risk management folks in the house?
What I object to right now is that he’s been making some of those choices out of sheer spite, actually spending extra money to hurt people. Granted, he’s aimed for mild pain, but he IS deliberately going out of his way to inflict it.
Uh, you have confused the debt ceiling and the shutdown.
The shutdown is a failure to appropriate money, which, under US law, means money can only be spent in _very specific_ ways. There _are_ laws designed to deal with a shutdown. The rules _do not_ have anything to do with how much something costs, they are very very strict about whether or not it endangers people or property, whether it is ‘essential’ or not
Keeping the parks open is not a essential US government function, thus, it _cannot_ be done in a shutdown.
Letting people wander around US parks unsupervised endangers US property, thus the US government is allowed to pay people to stop that.
It doesn’t _matter_ that it costs more to keep people out than it would to have kept them open. The government is _only_ allowed to pay people to keep them out, and is _not_ allowed to pay to allow the normal functioning.
The shutdown is the US government in goddamn Safe Mode. It isn’t _supposed_ to be functioning correctly.
And as for why it didn’t happen under Clinton: They _did_. People who assert otherwise are either lying or misinformed. (Obviously, the WWII memorial wasn’t closed, as it didn’t exist then, but the Lincoln Memorial was.)
The debt ceiling, OTOH, _has_ no rules, as you pointed out. The president can choose to fund anything he wants, you’re mostly correct there. (1) There are no laws designed to deal with this situation.
Which has the potential to be hilarious if Obama decides to get vindictive. Oh, that state’s representative voted against the debt ceiling increase, don’t mail out any social security checks to addresses in it.
1) It’s worth pointing out you’re wrong in that the president can’t normally ‘decide’ not to borrow if the debt ceiling is high enough…he doesn’t have to borrow, but he is required by law to actually operate the government and spend the money he’s been told to spend. So unless he can just magically get money out of nowhere, he has to borrow.
I just posed this question to a Fed scientist/employee buddy of mine who is furloughed and more than eligible to retire (hasn’t yet; he loves his job):
“If you decided to begin the retirement paperwork process today, could you proceed?”
Answer: “No. The entire Personnel staff who would initiate my retirement is furloughed as well and disallowed from doing their jobs.”
It is unclear, as Barack Obama caves to sadistic terrorist cockroaches, how long the furlough would continue and what the disposition of his family health insurance (he and his wife are 60 or thereabouts) payments will be.
I have a pretty good read on the fundamental human decency of the self-proclaimed conservatives who post and comment here.
Is this how YOU would treat your employees, should you have any? Is this how you want YOUR friends and family treated?
Because the entire complexion of how we treat each other in this country is about to go south precipitously.
Any Republican Tea Party lurkers want to chime as well? C’mon Moe, fat boy.
Have at it.
If you want to look me personally in the eye and tell me your cruel, sadistic fever dreams about how this plays out for human beings, leave an email address on this thread and we can set up a meeting for a short conversation and settle it.
Which has the potential to be hilarious if Obama decides to get vindictive. Oh, that state’s representative voted against the debt ceiling increase, don’t mail out any social security checks to addresses in it.
Hilarious probably isn’t the word Id use there, since we’re talking about eg seniors not having money to eat. And personally, if that moment arrives, Id want to see Obama continue to take the high road & handle things in as dignified a way as possible.
Highlight the differences between the parties; otherwise from a distance it just looks like a partisan-on-partisan knife fight.
[And if the GOPers cared about their poorer residents, they’d not be refusing the ACA Medicaid expansion, would they?]
he doesn’t have to borrow, but he is required by law to actually operate the government and spend the money he’s been told to spend. So unless he can just magically get money out of nowhere, he has to borrow.
He’s clearly barred by the Constitution from borrowing without authorization. He’s required by law to spend what the law directs him to spend. Train v NYC offers some support for a Constitutional requirement that the President spend what the law directs him to spend, but that case is so different from one where the money is not made available by Congress that it seems like a reach to use it as controlling in this case. Especially when set against much plainer language controlling the authorization of debt.
That is, IMO plain-text Constitutional language trumps a law + Constitutional inference. Plus, politically, I don’t want Obama to use dubious loopholes to try to make this less painful- doing so only helps the GOP by moderating the pain they’re causing and gets Obama’s hands dirty.
Oh, and people talking about that photo and whether or not the Memorial was closed already?
While I can’t find any information about this, it wouldn’t have been. At least, not the entire thing. It’s not needed at all. The murals are way up high in the north and south parts of the memorial, above the second inaugural address and the Gettysburg Address. Here’s an image of one of them, it’s across the top:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Memorial_(south_wall_interior).jpg
There’s absolutely no reason that the entire memorial would have been closed to repair them. You’d need scaffolding, and a fence to keep people back from each particular wall, but the interior of the memorial is fricking 74 feet wide, I think blocking off 10 feet at one end of it would be fine. (In fact, I’d be startled if they blocked off the text below each mural. I bet they built scaffolding that let people still see that.)
More detail?
We can meet on a street corner anywhere in the Continental United States.
You must show up completely naked; I’m not interested in armed vermin wearing wires.
Further, bring a 4-year-old, or Michelle Malkin, along with for the “explaining” part of the meeting. Hold their hand for safety’s sake and because I’m sure you will protect your 4-year-old despite implementing policies to murder untold numbers of other 4-year-olds.
They may be fully dressed, though I’ll request that you frisk them in my presence, because I never trust conservative 4-year-olds.
Stand on one foot (the right one) and with the unopened umbrella you are permitted to carry, point it at your pudenda at a 90 degree angle as a signal of your emasculation.
I’ll be approaching from the South, that would be YOUR South, the Confederacy. I’ll be dressed undercover as the late British actor/comedian Terry Thomas with a gap between my two front teeth and wearing a New York Yankees uniform and spats.
I’ll be carrying a baseball equipment bag, inside of which I will have a laminated maple baseball bat around the barrel of which will be affixed a female garter sporting an illustration of Barack Obama gotten up as an African Witch Doctor.
When I produce the bat, either remove and pocket the garter as a signal of ill-will toward our about-to-commence conversation, or don’t, as a temporary gesture of goodwill, to be continued according to the shape of the words that emerge from your mouth.
If a little old black woman, late of the SNAP program, approaches you as you await, don’t mess with her.
That’ll be me too.
Would he push an armed liberal?
http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Elections
Seems Erick Erickson, a rat-f*cker who threatened the murder of Census workers during the 2010 Census, has “signed off” on the House Rethugs “offer” to hold the hostages for another six weeks in exchange for a group blow-bang with Democrats and the White House on their knees in the giving position.
Why is an unelected internet bureaucrat holding my family’s life and health in his hands?
It must be the murder threats he issued that took him to such a powerful position in the murderous subhuman cesspool of the …. what do you people call it?
I wish him and his ratf*cking wife and children in what’s coming.
I’ve learned one more new thing from the Republican Party, that I had forgotten al Qaeda taught us years ago.
A conservative with no sway among the murderers in the House of Representatives speaks reason, to no avail:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/obamacare-no-big-deal-yet-wesbury-151627321.html
A business guy, otherwise a pinko.
The shutdown is the US government in goddamn Safe Mode. It isn’t _supposed_ to be functioning correctly.
Abso-‘effing-lutely. Well put.
The GOP has begun to cave. Brett can now sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the GOP has ‘betrayed’ the base, just as he predicted.
From the article: “The president has insisted he will not agree to significant reductions in projected Medicare and Medicaid spending — even his own tentative proposals — unless Republicans agree to raise revenues by curbing tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals. And Mr. Boehner in recent days reaffirmed the party’s anti-tax stance, which suggests that future talks could founder.”
Well, gollllllllllie-gee. Ya’ think so? Clearly, one of our political parties is under the delusion that negotiation and abject surrender by the other party are one and the same.
That they appear to be finally* being taught a lesson should come as no surprise.
*This is referring to the nearly infinite political space-time continuum, 2010-present.
I have no idea how to compromise with CrAzY.
Try to maintain HOPE
it is not gonna happening today!
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115134/gop-death-watch-final-days-republican-party
A conservative with no sway among the murderers in the House of Representatives speaks reason, to no avail
From the count’s cite:
See, that is an intelligent comment / criticism / observation about the ACA. I don’t know if I agree with it, but at least it’s thoughtful. It’s not in-freaking-sane.
And what it leads to is a discussion of what we want our society — (there’s that word again!!) — to be like. What our priorities are.
I’m guessing this guy doesn’t have a Gadsden flag tattooed on his butt, and doesn’t bring a loaded AR-15 to public meetings.
I wish he were in Congress. I’d support his opponent, but at least he’s not a Randian Leninist. As far as I can tell, anyway.
I agree it’s not insane, but it is boilerplate and not, in my opinion, thoughtful. An argument can be made that ACA will encourage innovation since now people can risk small business start-ups instead of clinging to jobs they don’t like for the health insurance.
But yes, I’d prefer guys like him in Congress to the ones that believe the ACA is big government involvement in personal decisions, unlike Medicare I suppose.
“Business Groups See Loss of Sway Over House G.O.P.
As the government shutdown grinds toward a potential debt default, some of the country’s most influential business executives have come to a conclusion all but unthinkable a few years ago: Their voices are carrying little weight with the House majority that their millions of dollars in campaign contributions helped build and sustain.
Their frustration has grown so intense in recent days that several trade association officials warned in interviews on Wednesday that they were considering helping wage primary campaigns against Republican lawmakers who had worked to engineer the political standoff in Washington…
Some warned that a default could spur a shift in the relationship between the corporate world and the Republican Party. Long intertwined by mutual self-interest on deregulation and lower taxes, the business lobby and Republicans are diverging not only over the fiscal crisis, but on other major issues like immigration reform, which was favored by business groups and party leaders but stymied in the House by many of the same lawmakers now leading the debt fight.
Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, said, “I’m a Republican by definition and by registration, but the party seems to have split into two factions.”
While both parties have extreme elements, he suggested, only in the G.O.P. did the extreme element exercise real power. “The extreme right has 90 seats in the House,” Mr. Echevarria said. “Occupy Wall Street has no seats.”
The above is a cut and paste from Balloon Juice which as a link to the original article. Two points stand out to me. One is that the businessman quoted in the article understands that it is HIS party that has gone crazy. The particular crazy he minds is the shutdown and the threat of default–evidently global warming denial, the belief that rape won’t cause pregnancy, attempts to deny access to birth control, and belief in the magical effects of tax cuts for the rich didn’t tip him off to the crazy. Well, better late than never, I suppose.
The second thing I noticed is the plan to use the primary process to replace crazy Republicans with those who at least understand the importance of not defaulting. I hope that the challengers are sane on other issues as well, and am mildly optimistic about that at least as far as global warming and birth control. I imagine they will be just as crazy when it comes to tax cut magic.
But, yes, I would very much like to see Republicans take responsibility for cleaning up their party.
If the ACA was a step toward the death of American innovation and growth, what was the status quo ante? I’m pretty sure everyone here thinks the ACA is far less than perfect, at best, but is it actually worse than the clusterfnck it attempted to address? What was so pro-innovation and pro-growth about that?
i don’t get that criticism at all.
how does requiring that people sign up with private insurers affect innovation ?
where, in the domain of being uninsured, are the opportunities for innovation ? are there new ways of being uninsured waiting to be discovered, new ways of going bankrupt when major illness hits ?
are “conservatives” expecting that someone was going to invent a new insurance/provider paradigm ?
jeff:
Hope is nice. Maintain it all you like.
The New Republic article is tripe.
Leaving aside the regretful tones of the business lobby and former Republican staff members (unattributed) regarding the ravening murderous monster they have created reminds me of the last gagging gasps of Dr. Frankenstein’s as his grring bag of stitched-together dead human parts throttled the life out of him.
The Mary Shelley monster at least retained some remnant of empathy, perhaps a vestige secretion of a thymus gland retrieved from the graveyard for the Dr.s project, so by comparison her monster was a MINO — Monster In Name Only.
Screw them. They will be dealt with at a later time.
The article cites the many-cited comparison of today’s Republican Party as in its death throes like the Democratic Party emerging from the fag ends of the 1960s as the violent, heavily armed radical sliver of the Left burnt itself without ever gaining a foothold electorally in this country.
I’ll give you Leonard Bernstein. Dangerous man, that one, with his loaded baton.
Tom Hayden. One former SDS member emerges to serve in the House of Representatives to little effect.
Yes, the Berkeley City Council might have had an influx of hippie twits identified with the Weathermen for awhile.
Yes, didn’t one Black Panther become something or other at Brown University until he disappeared into oblivion, otherwise known as the suburbs.
Eugene McCarthy? If you (as in everyone, not Jeff) think Eugene McCarthy had solidarity with the armed left, forget it.
I don’t believe the Symbionese Liberation ever got around to handing out campaign literature.
Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman? The former ended up on Wall Street in some capacity, and the second neurasthenic addict ended with a sad end — both died early, despite a talent for funny, unarmed street theater.
What do we see today?
We see, what, roughly 60 to 80 self-identified, heavily armed (that’s a plan; what, you think that’s not a plan of a piece with the rest of the agenda; they and their “constituents” aren’t just planning on preventing Michelle Bachmann’s handbag from being lifted on the train running underneath the Capitol) Tea Party Symbionese Pantherite Weatherdeniers “f*cking sh*t up” — the precise words of a former Republican Congressional staffer in the New Republic article — for the mere sake of “f*cking sh*t up”.
We see State and local legislatures and Statehouses infested with heavily-armed radical right revolutionaries wreaking havoc on the financing of governance.
If we had experienced anything similar in the early 1970s from the armed Left — shutting down government and defaulting on the debt in order to levitate the Pentagon, with daily threats from their constituents that their weapons will be used if they don’t get their way, Republicans and Democrats would have united to declare martial law and the menace would have been taken care of.
Not today. That’s too easy.
If this armed Republican Party (I’m still using that name unless any of you former republicans can think of a different one; “The Bretts” has a certain music to it) has a single item of their blackmail and extortion satisfied, that is appeasement with armed terrorists.
If they are denied what they want (they don’t even know what they want, just like those three-year-old Tea Party/NRA kids don’t know precisely what they want when they pick up filth Daddy’s pistol and shoot their five-year-old sister in the eye socket), at whatever cost to the rest of us (I can think of all kinds of shiny lethal toys, sold to me by Tea Party members, that I could afford on a monthly basis if my health insurance is taken from me; I guess I’ll have to bleed out in a hospital emergency room at taxpayer expense), they will be back tomorrow to f*ck more sh*t up.
They have an installed base, unlike the radicals 40-45 years ago.
If they don’t get anything they want, they’ll be back tomorrow to f*ck sh*t up, and their methods will evolve very swiftly into violence, as they and their “constituents” have pledged in their rhetoric every day of the week.
While, of course, receiving their Medicare bennies for their gunshot wounds and their $250 SS benefits to bury their filthy carrion, which will be legion when I’m done, after they start it.
It’ll be the Second Civil War. We will see multiple secessions, states, counties, which will serve as a safehouse like Pakistan does for Taliban and al Qaeda killers.
600,000 dead will look like a child’s tea party. It will be house-to-house slaughter like a small African country or Haiti when stuff goes bad.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115134/gop-death-watch-final-days-republican-party
That’s a link to a really excellent article about how the Republican party went crazy and what non-crazy Republicans are finally beginning to say out loud.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the Republican leaders who invited the crazies into their party, pandered to them for their votes as long as they were only hurting the non-rich, and suddenly started regretting their participation when their craziness became a threat to Wall Street.
I very much hope they are punished with a couple of decades of obscurity.
Not sure I would call it nice but it is all I have left.
The way it’s shaping up, the Republicans are going to get their way on some things. They won’t de-fund the ACA, but they’re going to get spending and/or tax cuts, and that’s on top of the BCA/sequestration that they already got. Then people can blame Obama for the resultant unemployment and economic stagnation. Why so many people worry more about the debt than unemployment is beyond me.
Oh, I agree, the Democrats have never been radical except from the perspective of people who opposed the Civil Rights movement,think women should have to ask their husbands for permission to use birth control, or think we should have killed another million Vietnamese civilians so we could have the vanity of claiming victory in that war. Left wing radicals tend to stand outside of the Democratic party while loudly criticizing it.
However, I am glad that Republicans are finally starting to say out loud that their party has a problem with extremists and I’m glad that the msn is mentioning it as well. Maybe three or four decades slow to notice, but finally getting a clue.
As I said, I’m not too impressed from a moral point of view. The objection to the crazies seems to be that they lose elections and interfere with big business. In other words the Republicans quoted as upset with the Tea party didn’t care abut Medicare being turned into a voucher system and don’t care about voter suppression. They don’t care about the hypocrisy and immorality of cutting Food Stamps while subsidizing corporate farms. In other words the Republicans who now are objecting to the extremists in their party are just as morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest as the extremists. They just aren’t crazy.
But, being not crazy does give the rest of us something to work with when involved in policy discussions with them. I’m not optimistic that the Republican party will ever be more than the party of big business. But a non-crazy big business party might recognize that it is in their interests to support a middle class to be the market for their goods, pay for infrastructure and schools, stay out of crazy religious fantasies about Armageddon, and address global warming.
I’m hoping anyway.
An argument can be made that ACA will encourage innovation since now people can risk small business start-ups instead of clinging to jobs they don’t like for the health insurance.
That’s the argument I’d make.
Did the interstate highway system somehow stunt the nation’s growth? Universal primary school education?
How long of a list do you need?
So, I think the guy’s point is not correct.
All I’m saying is (a) his point is not utterly divorced from reality and (b) he’s not threatening to shoot people or turn the lights off if he doesn’t get his way.
I think he’s wrong, but not armed, insane, and dangerous.
Sadly, that appears to be high praise these days.
If they don’t get anything they want, they’ll be back tomorrow to f*ck sh*t up, and their methods will evolve very swiftly into violence
IMO that’s not impossible, but I don’t think the rest of us are going to stand around and take it without making a commensurate response.
The House (R)’s should knock this crap off, pass a clean CR, raise the debt limit, and try harder next time.
I doubt it will play out that way, they’re going to have to have some kind of bone thrown to them so they don’t have to be all embarrassed about dropping their drawers and crapping in the punch bowl. And I suppose if that’s what it takes to move the rock forward, we’ll all live with it.
But the whole episode is utter BS. These people are spoiled children.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/10/11/2769231/gop-governors-voters-business-interests-distancing-congressional-republicans/
The last paragraph mentions that the shut down is hitting red states harder because of their dependency on federal jobs as central to their economies, a point I tried to make to Marty a long time ago.
To be more specific, he went on at perhaps unwelcome length, this is the thing the guy said that I thought was interesting:
It’s a concession of maturity potentially leading to, what he calls, a “social welfare state and king of a ‘European’ society.”
IMO the issue of a society “maturing” is a kind of pregnant one, and maybe very relevant for the US right now.
It might be that there is a natural arc to the growth curve, and we may be reaching some kind of inflection point.
If so, it’s something we should recognize, understand, and respond to in an intelligent way. If we can manage to muster that, which is less and less clear.
The alternative might be to blunder on in some kind of nostalgia for our “glory days”, which in fact for many many people might not have been so glorious.
Health insurance aside, there’s a lot in there to unpack and consider.
Where do we want to be in 10, 20, 50 years?
What’s feasible for us in 10, 20, 50 years?
How do we get to our best outcome?
Can we get there gracefully, i.e., without shooting each other?
Questions worth asking.
Westbury:
“Canada, France, Germany, the UK — they all have national health-care systems, and if you look back at the last 20, 30, 40 years, their stock markets are up, their economies have grown,” says Wesbury. The threat isn’t economic direction but ideology and pace of growth. As he sees it, bigger, more burdensome government slows innovation and expansion over the long term.”
In other words, the ACA is not the end of the world akin to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, 1917 Russia, the Long March. A reasonable statement, despite my policy differences with Westbury.
Also, to my knowledge, I don’t think Westbury was packing heat during the interview.
I scratch my head (maybe psoriasis, pre-existing condition, don’t tell anyone) about the claim of stifled innovation as well.
The ACA broadens markets for life-saving medical device and pharmaceutical innovation, by getting more people into the deep end of the insured pool.
I own shares in biotechnology companies and medical device companies.
I’ve done well (I’ve lost in other areas, so don’t think I’m claiming to be wizard; the stock market is very difficult) as their prices have skyrocketed since the Obama bottom in the stock market in early 2009, the passage of the ACA, and now as the ACA goes into operation, despite all of the cries of ruin from the usual suspects.
In fact, as the ACA has become a fact of life, pinko capitalist investors like myself have seen the most gain in recent months in these shares, as Larry Kudlow would tell you if it was ideologically in his interest to do so, which it’s not, and so he continues to be lying, mealy-mouthed, piece of human garbage.
Now, I’m sure Westbury’s claims of stifled innovation might turn out to be true in some respects, which he hasn’t specified.
One aspect might be that some of the provisions in the ACA attempt to “stifle” unnecessary, expensive care, which will affect some companies’ bottom lines.
You see, the private sector could have prevented the government stepping in with the ACA (yeah, it’s complicated; along with all our other American exceptionalism, we are the champs of complication, not because we legislate one-size-fits-all, but because every well-financed whiner in this country gets a piece of satisfaction and an exception (another form of American exceptionalism) in every piece of legislation), by making good insurance affordable for all Americans, by not throwing people off the insurance rolls, either by firing them and laying them off from their jobs, paying them enough at the low end, by not denying those with pre-existing conditions the opportunity to insure themselves or their children, by pricing pharmaceuticals and medical devices below extortion levels in many cases having nothing to do with recouping research costs but to overpay company officers and investors, the latter of which I am one.
You say all of that was beyond the capabilities of the private sector for one reason or another?
Limitations accepted. So step aside.
As an investor, I’ll view the ACA as a trade-off.
Thaak you.
And, thaak YOU.
One of the interpretations of the Tea Party is that the movement is composed of people who are afraid that real Americans like them are losing ground tot he not real Americans like all those other people. Thus the opposition to ACA is that it will help those not real American who will then vote for Democrats who are by definition not real Americans thereby bring an end f the world of real Americans.
The Republican party has been milking that hatred of most Americans by an entitled minority for years. They are the audience for hate talk radio and Faux. And as long as they haters voted R, it was OK with people like the guy whose quote we have been discussing. The patricians liked having their dirt-eating cousins show up to vote.
But when the haters start getting elected and start throwing a big public fit in the patricians’ dining room…that’s a different story.
You say all of that was beyond the capabilities of the private sector for one reason or another?
Limitations accepted. So step aside.
Amen.
No hard feelings, but if you (private sector) are not getting it done, get out of the way.
Clumsy bastards, aren’t they:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gun-mishap-cuts-short-anti-libtard-police-chief-s-disciplinary-hearing
This keeps up, it’ll be a short Civil War, like Granada.
The upside here (I’m always looking on the bright side) is that the limp Republican loser who dropped his weapon didn’t leave it at home for his libertarian kids to shoot their moderate republican siblings.
The downside here is … weapons in the gallery at a judicial hearing?
The guy’s lucky he wasn’t sitting next to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJGaYLhgWLs
For good measures, weaponry makes me frisky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biBzaHpaCgg
If I can go on a bit of a general, philosophical tangent, I’d say some of the disagreements between liberals and conservatives with regard to government involvment in business and industry stem from not being pro-business (conservative) versus being anti-business (liberal), but from differences in what they understand or believe as being good for business, particularly in the longer term.
As an example, let’s take the ACA’s prohibiting excluding people with pre-existing conditions from getting health insurance. Is that bad for insurance companies? Well, it would be really, really bad for an insurance company, were it the only one subject to that prohibition. And it would be bad for insurance companies in general without the individual mandate.
These requirements are attempts to address obvious market failures. (Markets do fail, even without government “interference,” sometimes especially without government “interference.”)
Insurance might not even be the best example, because insurance companies, in some sense, don’t really do anything, other than spread risk to avoid individual financial catastrophies. It’s already a kind of socialistic thing.
In any case, what I often see are rules that prevent bad business practices that are bad for everyone in the long run. Without someone taking the broader view (and governing), there are too many incentives to gain short-term advantage, often at the expense of the long-term health of the economy, market or industry in question.
I assume that most conservatives don’t seem themselves as being opposed to the sorts of things I’m describing (in very, very general terms, of course). But I often see arguments that strike me as stemming from a blinkered way of looking at things, with an atomized, zero-sum mentality.
The meta that flows from that is that I feel like I understand what their arguments are, and I have stated reasons for thinking those arguments are either wrong or irrelevant, but I don’t feel like they understand the arguments I’m making, because their responses continue to ignore those stated reasons and the larger, overarching ideas behind them.
It’s like explaining, say, the paradox of thrift to someone who keeps saying “But saving money is good!” in response.
I know that sounds superior, and I’m sure I sometimes think I understand someone else’s point of view when I really don’t, but that’s how things look from where I sit.
The long and short of it is that I’m not against business or capitalism or whatever it is conservatives tend to think liberals are against (freedom?). It’s that I’m against gaining profit without regard to causing others to suffer in gaining it, and I generally think that gaining profit that way is short-sighted – that’s it’s not even good for profiteer in the long run (quarterly reports be damned!).
HSH, the thing is, the ACA fight we are having isn’t a disagreement between liberals and conservatives. (And to the extent that there is disagreement among them, conservatives recognize that the ACA is a conservative solution. Liberals would have liked a rather different approach.)
No, this is a fight between people who call themselves “conservatives, but are nothing of the kind, and the rest of us. We can argue about whether the accurate label for the folks getting hysterical over the ACA is “radical reactionary” or “extreme right” or “extreme libertarian” or something else. But whatever you call them, the bear no resemblance to real conservatives. And neither do their tactics look like anything a conservative would countenance.
And to the extent that there is disagreement among them, conservatives recognize that the ACA is a conservative solution. Liberals would have liked a rather different approach.
I hear that. Single-payer! And I do understand what you’re saying about “conservatives” (in quotes!) these days. But they’ve managed to take over the brand. It is what it is.
I wish our President success with his diabolic scheme to make the GOP self destruct.
Hope is all I have left…well that, a 1968 Jeep Scrambler and an old delusional dog who thinks I am God. The judge thought the ex should keep the Bushmaster.
The threat isn’t economic direction but ideology and pace of growth. As he sees it, bigger, more burdensome government slows innovation and expansion over the long term.”
This, frankly, is hogwash. Expansion is driven by population growth and productivity. As populations stabilize (a wish any sane person should have) growth will slow, all other things being equal. Is this so bad?
Innovation? Many technological leaders are European or Asian based companies. The US, with its top heavy corporate suites and overweening reliance on securing economic rents is becoming a laggard.
Productivity: European productivity is pretty much the same as ours. Their workers have been able to secure some wage growth and some increase in leisure time. Do you see anything wrong with this? What have we gotten? Longer hours and less pay. How can anybody in their right mind call this paradise?
The same folks who pump out this crap about “stifling innovation” and “eurosclorosis” are the same people who claim, wrongly, that we have an ‘entitlement crisis’.
They are (unprintable).
while the Right may lose this one,not so sure the debt ceiling is a winner for teh Right to prove their fealty to their beliefs, we can be sure they will come back harder and stronger and eff over the rest of America until they get “their” way. Their Koch funded psychotic behavior is not going to change or allowt any diminuation in their quest to “destroy” what they disagree with.
that’s the thing about crazies. their Reality is enduring and never in question. the Loonies do run free ever since Reagan emptied the Mental Hospitals. Reagan really did this country in. lol. if this kind of sick behavior weren’t so devastating to the innocents, it would be just sad, and not dangerous.
what will the Kochs/Wall St. do now? after 40 years of an all out assault on the “other, ” the direction or tactics might be altered, but not the goal. and so many of these loonies have been given carte blanche to “get er done”.
ah to live in interesting times. lol
If we had experienced anything similar in the early 1970s from the armed Left — shutting down government and defaulting on the debt in order to levitate the Pentagon, with daily threats from their constituents that their weapons will be used if they don’t get their way, Republicans and Democrats would have united to declare martial law and the menace would have been taken care of.
Well put, Count. But they in fact did so. You may also be chagrined to know the Pentagon was actually levitated 14 1/2″. It wasn’t a total loss.
You know how well the shutdown is playing when you hear that the reddest state in the union (Utah) is voting to pay out of its own pocket to reopen the national parks there. Just because the economic impact it too much to bear. (Not to mention how it is undoing years of marketing worldwide to get people to come vacation there.)
They don’t even know if the Feds will ever pay them back. But they are that desperate to get that part of the government open again.
the reddest state in the union (Utah) is voting to pay out of its own pocket to reopen the national parks there
always remember, the government has never created a single job.
On the other hand, if I’m forced, I say forced, to wear Mormon underwear at Canyonlands (State) Park and my favorite campground near Bryce Canyon (state) Park is fully fracked and de-Redfordededed, I’m not sure I like the pockets.
Send the bill for this to Ted Cruz:
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/11/the-shutdowns-silent-victims/
I’ll bet Barack Obama personally ordered little orange cones set up between the lab animals and their food and water to spite Bill Brettmore.
from the sullivan link:
It’s a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of people, a waste of animals.
the shutdown, in a nutshell. and you could probably extend the list of things wasted.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/10/11/104059/71
An article entitled “Why Face Saving Won’t Work”.
No interest in Republican face.
Burn if off with acid.
Just in case anyone is newly charmed by John McCain’s latest fake emergence as the “mavericky” speak-truth-to-FOX-power Republican, remember his elevation of subhuman, racist, d*cksucking, sadistic, armed, murderous vermin to the forefront of the Republican Party — Joe … the plumb…. I mean, Joe the subhuman, racist, d*cksucking, sadistic, armed, murderous vermin:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-complete-lack-of-professionalism-of-the-republican-party-apparat-offends-me-at-some-level.html#more
from joe the plumber’s editorial:
Consider that many folks who disagree with our black president express their disagreement by carrying posters of him dressed as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose.
Just keeping it real, right Joe?
I saw “Captain Phillips” with Tom Hanks, tonight.
The Republican Party is just a more dangerous brand of Somali pirates.
What about those presidents that got insulted as n-word lovers and race traitors?
I just had a scary experience. I followed a link that ended at the NRO, an article about how “public land is not government land”. I didn’t read the article because why? The title was intellectually dishonest.
But I skimmed the comments.
I’ve been aware for many years of the hypocrisy and dishonesty and sheer nastiness that lurks in the West in regard to public land which is, of course, federal. One of the very few things conservatives are right about is this: if given a handout long enough people will come to regard the handout as owned to them. For about one hundred and fifty years the people of the rural West have lived off the federal government one way or another and, consequently, many of them want unrestricted access to what is not theirs and hate the hand that has been feeding them all of these years. The thread was full of threats of violence toward National (yes, NATIONAL) Park and National Forest and BLM employees. Comparisons to Hitler abounded. Also comparisons to the land laws of Medieval England.
Subsidized access for their own personal economic benefit isn’t good enough for them.
That’s your Western Republican: living off the federal government, demanding subsidies and benefits for themselves, demanding that someone else’s taxes pay for it, whining and hating when any restrictions are put on their use of what doesn’t belong exclusively to them. Red state parasites.
And when their party shuts the federal government down and they are hit with the fact of their parasitic relationship with the federal government, they respond with death threats.
Granted, the death threats are probably more typical of NRO readers than Westerners in general, but places like Wyoming do elect and re-elect Republicans while demanding special benefits from the FERERAL government for themselves. It’s the Western states that are becoming urbanized and less parasitic that are truing purple.
That’s your Western Republican: living off the federal government, demanding subsidies and benefits for themselves, demanding that someone else’s taxes pay for it, whining and hating when any restrictions are put on their use of what doesn’t belong exclusively to them.
Laura, that’s really unfair. It’s your Southern Republican at least as much.
Nothing like a Confederate Flag raised at the Memorial for The Man Murdered By The Confederacy to protest the shutting down of government the worsethancockroaches wanted shut down:
http://americablog.com/2013/10/sarah-palin-joins-ted-cruz-as-new-face-government-shutdown.html
I would have given anything if the statue of Abe Lincoln (incredibly impressive and very large …. for a Republican) had stirred itself from its stone moorings, stood, opened his fly and pissed on the assembled vermin, washing the lot of them into the reflecting pool for flushing.
Parade. Rained On. Cruz and Death Palin down the tubes.
Think of it, if you dare, 153 years since Abe had the opportunity to water the fascist cockroaches of the Confederacy.
Seeing a very large man about a very large horse.
Word has it that the House, in addition to demanding the starvation and denial of medical care to tens of millions of Americans in exchange for doubling the nuclear arsenal and then bolting on the check, has demanded that monies stolen from Obamacare be used to erect a statue of murderer John Wilkes Booth, godfather and midwife of the Republican Party, shooting the statue of Lincoln in the back of the head with the bullet, one magic loogie, then heading off to murder statues of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and FDR, wherever they may be.
No, we can’t get along.
Ever again.
Well, 148 years.
Still, when a guy’s gotta go …
Meanwhile, Paul Ryan unsuccessfully tried to bring reason to the debate regarding the Nation’s health insurance crisis by holding a hearing on his plan to reform the medical tort industry.
He kept interrupting the witnesses called to testify against his plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31EVZ6yHTro
Mitch McConnell called his friend John Boehner this evening to talk about how the duck hunting has been going over the past two weeks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTmK9NlTN8Y
Ted Cruz, and his lovely assistant Erick Erickson, give America a primer on governance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE
Sarah Death Palin was not available to assist, having suffered a twat-shooting accident earlier in the day.