Wednesday, October 2, 2013
The Continuing of the Civil War By Other Means
America’s Long-Simmering, Semi-Civil Civil War
by Lloyd Green Oct 2, 2013 5:45 AM EDT
Is there any hope for a nation so divided it can’t even agree to keep its government running? Lloyd Green on the old, old factions that just won’t die.
Welcome to the latest installment in America’s long-simmering, semi-civil, civil war. Just because General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House doesn’t mean that old grievances have gone away.
These days, the Republican Party is the party of the South; the party of Lincoln is now the party of Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint; and the DeMint-backed Senate Conservatives Fund is bellowing that the “Republicans are the problem right now.” The only thing missing from this tableau is South Carolina’s long-gone Preston Brooks.
Preston Brooks? Yes, Preston Brooks. Back in the day—the day being May 1856, he beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner over the head with a cane in retaliation for a speech Sumner delivered a few weeks earlier, in which Sumner had advocated the abolition of slavery and dissed a Brooks relative.
Still, the reality is that the skirmishes of the last four-plus years are less about race per se, and more about diversity tinged by the brush-strokes of need, and the political demands of the polychromatic poor. As Jonathan Chait acknowledged, “In a few weeks, the United States government, like those of France, or Australia, or Israel, will begin to regard health insurance as something to be handed out to one and all, however poor, lazy, or otherwise undeserving each recipient may be.”
Through this lens, the fights over Obamacare, or even immigration and guns are not simply about the transfer of wealth, government mandates, amnesty, or the text of the Second Amendment. Rather, it is a culture war, a battle over the social fabric itself, in an America which grows ever less monochromatic and where diversity broadly correlates to poverty.
As economist Paul Collier observes in his latest book, Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World, immigration, welfare, and diversity pose a collective challenge to the political eco-system, or as Paul Krugman phrased it, “open immigration can’t exist with a strong social safety net; if you’re going to assure healthcare and a decent income to everyone, you can’t make that offer global.”
Like it or not, there is a tension between mass immigration on the one hand, and the welfare state on the other, and it’s not going away.
Against this sulfurous backdrop, Democrats and Republicans alike feel compelled to man the ramparts for their core constituencies. In the Congress, a Confederate-like hostility to government has found a home in the House of Representatives, where a majority of the majority (translation – a minority) blocks consideration of a clean continuing resolution that would allow government to muddle along, and the stock market to heave a sigh of relief.
For those who worry about these developments—like the high end of the GOP’s donor base—Republican-induced market drops are unwelcome, and could lead to problems for the party down the road. Obama’s tax hikes are despised, but what’s a tax hike compared to a default-triggered portfolio wipe-out?
As a reminder, wealthier voters actually voted Democratic in 2008—a first—as a rebuke to the failings of George W. Bush’s presidency. History could repeat itself in 2014 and 2016 if the Republicans go over a cliff on the upcoming debt ceiling fight. The latest Washington Post poll shows the public blaming the Republicans for the standoff.
But beyond the fight over the budget and the debt, the Republican Party appears ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by America’s changing demographics. It is not just about minorities. The gender gap looms large at the voting booth, as well as among donors. In 2012, women donated 44 cents of every campaign dollar received by the Obama campaign, but less than 30 cents raked in by the Romneyites.
The regional frictions transplanted from England in the seventeenth century are still alive.
Also, there is the issue of geography and the cultural center. Right now, Ted Cruz is the leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and is followed by Kentucky’s Rand Paul. New Jersey’s Chris Christie trails in third. Cruz’s filibuster delighted many conservatives, and powered him to the top of the GOP’s scrum. But beyond that, his appeal and traction appear limited to the party faithful.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton is part of the cultural center. She was once the first lady of Arkansas, and in 2008 she ran well among white working-class voters. Equally as important, she is closer to her party’s center of gravity—unlike Mitt Romney or Governor Christie, who appear to be outliers within their own party, each in his own way. In other words, Clinton would be an easy sell to the Democratic base.
Fortunately, no one has been caned over the head as the national debate continues full bore. Still, old animus dies hard.
The regional frictions transplanted from England in the seventeenth century are still alive. The mindsets of both Cavalier and Puritan took root in the New World, and the experiment launched in 1776 continues. But the folks who settled here were quarrelsome. Less than 100 years after they rebelled against the Crown, they fought each other—just as their ancestors had during the English Civil War.
South Carolina’s Joe Wilson screaming “you lie” at President Obama during a September 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress, as the president declared that health-care reform would not cover illegal immigrants, presaged the fights that would follow – in the same vein as Obama calling out the Supreme Court at his January 2010 State of the Union Address for its decision on campaign finance laws. The fissures of old have not disappeared, and so the question we face is whether America itself is to again become a nation divided by a common language and Constitution.
50 Years of Race Baiting
Tuesday, Oct 1, 2013 10:10 PM UTC
The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting
A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them
By Joan Walsh
On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.
People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.
“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.
I loved Chris Matthews’ book “Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked,” but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with “welfare,” and “welfare” synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.
When Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg studied the voters of Macomb County, a hotbed of so-called Reagan Democrats – the county gave two-thirds of its votes to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the same proportion to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — he found that they no longer saw Democrats as working-class champions. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives,” and they saw government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment,” Greenberg wrote.
So for a lot of Democrat-turned-Republican voters, “government” was all about black people, Reagan knew. You didn’t have to be racist to thrill to Reagan’s declaration that “government is not the solution; government is the problem,” though it didn’t hurt. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained exactly how it worked in a now-infamous 1981 interview that was secret for 30 years. Atwater explained how the GOP dialed down its racial rhetoric for fear of alienating white moderates who might buy the GOP’s anti-government crusade, but be uncomfortable with outright racism.
This is Atwater talking to an academic interviewer in 1981, Year One of the Reagan revolution:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”
And then you say “Defund Obamacare,” and everyone knows why.
* * *
To be fair to Republicans, not everyone is or was comfortable with this strategy. One of the things I remember best from Richard Ben Cramer’s legendary history of the 1988 election, “What It Takes,” was the way both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole grappled with whether and how to reach black voters, in the wake of the Reagan revolution. Each man struggled, in his own way, to understand and accept exactly how party leaders, starting with Goldwater, had actively pushed African-Americans out of the party of Abraham Lincoln. Dole’s discomfort seemed a little deeper and more genuine; in the end, Bush acceded to Atwater and Roger Ailes, one of Richard Nixon’s media henchmen, to produce the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis.
Over and over, that’s how things got worse: Republicans who know better, who probably aren’t “racist” in the old-fashioned sense of believing in black inferiority and opposing the equality and integration of the races, nonetheless pander to those who are, for electoral gain. And when the election of our first black president riled up the racists and launched the Tea Party – supposed deficit hawks who tolerated skyrocketing government spending under George W. Bush — too many Republicans went along.
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they’ve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power. In Michele Bachmann’s words, Obama is a product of Chicago’s scary “gangster government,” or did she say “gangsta”?
Leading Republicans who know better have demeaned the president with a long list of racially coded slurs. Obama is “the food stamp president,” Newt Gingrich told us. He wants to help “black people” (or was it “blah people”?) “by giving them somebody else’s money,” Rick Santorum said. Even his so-called GOP “friend” Sen. Tom Coburn insists Obama is spreading “dependency” on government because “it worked so well for him as an African-American male.”
Where Mitt Romney’s father, George, stood up to the rising tide of racism in his party and marched in fair housing protests in the 1960s, Mitt himself embraced the birther-in-chief Donald Trump during the 2012 campaign. And when things got tough in the fall campaign, he and Paul Ryan doubled down on racial appeals by accusing Obama of weakening welfare reform – he hadn’t – and of giving white seniors’ hard-earned Medicare dollars to Obamacare recipients. And we all know who they are.
Now we have John Boehner, elected House speaker thanks to the Tea Party wave of 2010, shutting down the government over Obamacare. Boehner has the power to open the government by bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor and allowing it to pass with the help of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Should we expect such courage? In one of his first major media appearances after becoming speaker, he refused to rebuke the birthers in his caucus. “It’s not up to me to tell them what to think,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.
Now he’s kowtowing to the roughly 30 House Republicans from bright red districts that also happen to be almost exclusively white, in a country that is more than one-third non-white. They want to shut down the government to torpedo Obamacare, the signature program of our first black president. Obviously, though he’s the leader, Boehner believes it’s not up to him to tell the GOP suicide caucus what to think. Although the speaker told reporters after Obama’s r-election that Obamacare was the law of the land, and that a government shutdown would be bad for the country, he changed his tune when confronted with an insurrection, and the de facto House speaker who happens to be a senator, Ted Cruz. (Cruz’s father, by the way, just joined the ranks of those who seem to believe Obama is a Muslim, telling a Colorado woman who made that claim: “[Sen. John] McCain couldn’t say that because it wasn’t politically correct. It is time we stop being politically correct!”
In the end, it’s all about Obama. I keep waiting for John Boehner to have his “Take this job and shove it” moment, since he’s not the House leader, he’s being led by Ted Cruz and the House suicide caucus. But I’ve been waiting a long time for Republicans to do the right thing and repudiate their party’s lunatic fringe, particularly its racist fringe. I assume I’ll be waiting a while longer.
The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting
A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them
By Joan Walsh
On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.
People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.
“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.
I loved Chris Matthews’ book “Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked,” but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with “welfare,” and “welfare” synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.
When Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg studied the voters of Macomb County, a hotbed of so-called Reagan Democrats – the county gave two-thirds of its votes to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the same proportion to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — he found that they no longer saw Democrats as working-class champions. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives,” and they saw government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment,” Greenberg wrote.
So for a lot of Democrat-turned-Republican voters, “government” was all about black people, Reagan knew. You didn’t have to be racist to thrill to Reagan’s declaration that “government is not the solution; government is the problem,” though it didn’t hurt. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained exactly how it worked in a now-infamous 1981 interview that was secret for 30 years. Atwater explained how the GOP dialed down its racial rhetoric for fear of alienating white moderates who might buy the GOP’s anti-government crusade, but be uncomfortable with outright racism.
This is Atwater talking to an academic interviewer in 1981, Year One of the Reagan revolution:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”
And then you say “Defund Obamacare,” and everyone knows why.
* * *
To be fair to Republicans, not everyone is or was comfortable with this strategy. One of the things I remember best from Richard Ben Cramer’s legendary history of the 1988 election, “What It Takes,” was the way both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole grappled with whether and how to reach black voters, in the wake of the Reagan revolution. Each man struggled, in his own way, to understand and accept exactly how party leaders, starting with Goldwater, had actively pushed African-Americans out of the party of Abraham Lincoln. Dole’s discomfort seemed a little deeper and more genuine; in the end, Bush acceded to Atwater and Roger Ailes, one of Richard Nixon’s media henchmen, to produce the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis.
Over and over, that’s how things got worse: Republicans who know better, who probably aren’t “racist” in the old-fashioned sense of believing in black inferiority and opposing the equality and integration of the races, nonetheless pander to those who are, for electoral gain. And when the election of our first black president riled up the racists and launched the Tea Party – supposed deficit hawks who tolerated skyrocketing government spending under George W. Bush — too many Republicans went along.
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they’ve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power. In Michele Bachmann’s words, Obama is a product of Chicago’s scary “gangster government,” or did she say “gangsta”?
Leading Republicans who know better have demeaned the president with a long list of racially coded slurs. Obama is “the food stamp president,” Newt Gingrich told us. He wants to help “black people” (or was it “blah people”?) “by giving them somebody else’s money,” Rick Santorum said. Even his so-called GOP “friend” Sen. Tom Coburn insists Obama is spreading “dependency” on government because “it worked so well for him as an African-American male.”
Where Mitt Romney’s father, George, stood up to the rising tide of racism in his party and marched in fair housing protests in the 1960s, Mitt himself embraced the birther-in-chief Donald Trump during the 2012 campaign. And when things got tough in the fall campaign, he and Paul Ryan doubled down on racial appeals by accusing Obama of weakening welfare reform – he hadn’t – and of giving white seniors’ hard-earned Medicare dollars to Obamacare recipients. And we all know who they are.
Now we have John Boehner, elected House speaker thanks to the Tea Party wave of 2010, shutting down the government over Obamacare. Boehner has the power to open the government by bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor and allowing it to pass with the help of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Should we expect such courage? In one of his first major media appearances after becoming speaker, he refused to rebuke the birthers in his caucus. “It’s not up to me to tell them what to think,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.
Now he’s kowtowing to the roughly 30 House Republicans from bright red districts that also happen to be almost exclusively white, in a country that is more than one-third non-white. They want to shut down the government to torpedo Obamacare, the signature program of our first black president. Obviously, though he’s the leader, Boehner believes it’s not up to him to tell the GOP suicide caucus what to think. Although the speaker told reporters after Obama’s r-election that Obamacare was the law of the land, and that a government shutdown would be bad for the country, he changed his tune when confronted with an insurrection, and the de facto House speaker who happens to be a senator, Ted Cruz. (Cruz’s father, by the way, just joined the ranks of those who seem to believe Obama is a Muslim, telling a Colorado woman who made that claim: “[Sen. John] McCain couldn’t say that because it wasn’t politically correct. It is time we stop being politically correct!”
In the end, it’s all about Obama. I keep waiting for John Boehner to have his “Take this job and shove it” moment, since he’s not the House leader, he’s being led by Ted Cruz and the House suicide caucus. But I’ve been waiting a long time for Republicans to do the right thing and repudiate their party’s lunatic fringe, particularly its racist fringe. I assume I’ll be waiting a while longer.
Shutdown Basic Facts
The Two Basic Facts That Should Be in Every Shutdown Story
If Congress could vote on a "clean" bill, it would end the shutdown tonight. So why isn't it allowed to vote?
James Fallows
Oct 1 2013, 7:11 PM ET 6
To people who follow politics these two facts are obvious. But they're not part of most "tragedy of gridlock" false-equivalence stories, and I believe they would come as news to most of the public. The two facts are:
1.If the House of Representatives voted on a "clean" budget bill -- one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program -- that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course it would pass has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, unless the minority dared filibuster it, and would be signed by the president.) For illustrations of the wanton damage, see here and here.
2.So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner's fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place.
These two points are why the normal D.C.-poohbah moanings about the need for compromise do not apply. The Democratic administration, and a sufficient number of Republicans, already agree and are ready enough to compromise to solve this problem. If the normal machinery of democracy were allowed to work, the manufactured crisis would be over. The only reason the senseless damage is being done is that hostage-takers have terrorized members of their own party.
I wish John Boehner were a vainer man. (And I wish that Boehner and vainer didn't rhyme, undercutting the point.) The way he could earn a place in history, admiring chapters in Profiles in Courage-type books, and even a long swing on the university-lecture circuit would be to defy his extremist minority. And maybe eventually he will.
I am reminded of these points by a very good story this evening on NPR. It's this report, by All Things Considered host Melissa Block, based on an interview with Republican Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania (right). Dent has voted for the various defund-Obamacare resolutions that have come down the pike. But in the segment he explains why he thinks it's (obviously) time to return the government to normal functioning and work out health-policy differences through established channels.
One reason to listen to this story: it shows, in contrast even to some other NPR coverage, how you can be "fair" in presenting a story without sinking into the mire of false-equivalence, "everyone's to blame"-ism. The other reason is for a reminder of the two basic points above.
If Congress could vote on a "clean" bill, it would end the shutdown tonight. So why isn't it allowed to vote?
James Fallows
Oct 1 2013, 7:11 PM ET 6
To people who follow politics these two facts are obvious. But they're not part of most "tragedy of gridlock" false-equivalence stories, and I believe they would come as news to most of the public. The two facts are:
1.If the House of Representatives voted on a "clean" budget bill -- one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program -- that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course it would pass has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, unless the minority dared filibuster it, and would be signed by the president.) For illustrations of the wanton damage, see here and here.
2.So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner's fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place.
These two points are why the normal D.C.-poohbah moanings about the need for compromise do not apply. The Democratic administration, and a sufficient number of Republicans, already agree and are ready enough to compromise to solve this problem. If the normal machinery of democracy were allowed to work, the manufactured crisis would be over. The only reason the senseless damage is being done is that hostage-takers have terrorized members of their own party.
I wish John Boehner were a vainer man. (And I wish that Boehner and vainer didn't rhyme, undercutting the point.) The way he could earn a place in history, admiring chapters in Profiles in Courage-type books, and even a long swing on the university-lecture circuit would be to defy his extremist minority. And maybe eventually he will.
I am reminded of these points by a very good story this evening on NPR. It's this report, by All Things Considered host Melissa Block, based on an interview with Republican Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania (right). Dent has voted for the various defund-Obamacare resolutions that have come down the pike. But in the segment he explains why he thinks it's (obviously) time to return the government to normal functioning and work out health-policy differences through established channels.
One reason to listen to this story: it shows, in contrast even to some other NPR coverage, how you can be "fair" in presenting a story without sinking into the mire of false-equivalence, "everyone's to blame"-ism. The other reason is for a reminder of the two basic points above.
The Shutdown Reader
Connecting the Dots
Confused About the Shutdown? Debt Limit? Here’s Our Essential Reader
October 1, 2013
by BillMoyers.com
Much of the federal government has shut down and unlike the 1996 version, it may drag on and become a protracted affair.
Then, in two and a half weeks, the government will hit the debt ceiling, and the GOP’s tea party faction is preparing to make a last stand against Obamacare on that hill.
Confused by all this? Unsure how we got here? Wondering what happens to which public services? Wondering what might happen next? Here are some essential reads to help make sense of it all.
What happens now? Brad Plumer has a comprehensive guide to the government shutdown in the Washington Post.
How did we get here? In January, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that he was through negotiating with President Obama and would return to “regular order.”
Meanwhile, Republicans had been lambasting the Democrat-controlled Senate for two years for failing to pass a budget. When the Senate did so, hard-right Republicans prevented Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) from appointing conferees to reconcile the Senate budget with the House budget that had been authored by Paul Ryan (R-WI) — they blocked “regular order.” Eugene Robinson wrote about why they made that move in The Washington Post back in May. In The Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey noted that coming into this latest standoff, the Democrats were prepared to accept a budget pretty close to what House Republicans wanted last spring.
As such, Democrats felt that they were already meeting Republicans more than half way. But as our own Joshua Holland explained last month, Republicans were planning to use the budget process – and the looming debt ceiling – to wage war against what they saw as an almost existential threat to their ideology: Obamacare. This week, he argued that this is a rejection of longstanding norms of governance that have made the separation of powers work.
Civil War… On one level, this is certainly a partisan fight. But that obscures the central dynamic of this story: a civil war between factions of the Republican Party. Heidi Przybyla and Julie Hirschfeld Davis looked at this angle for Bloomberg. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza looked at the districts of the 80 House members who had signed a letter pushing for the defunding campaign, and found that they are completely insulated from the usual political incentives that drive legislators’ decision-making (that one is a must-read).
Time Magazine’s Zeke Miller wrote about the Heritage Action fund’s hand in pushing the tea party caucus to demand a shutdown. In The New York Times, Ashley Parker reported that the right wing was jubilant over the shutdown and sure of the righteousness of their cause. And The Nation’s John Nichols considered why moderate Republicans are unwilling to push back against the conservative wing.
The Politics… Democrats, independents and Republicans who don’t identify as tea partiers all oppose using the budget or the debt ceiling to extract partisan concessions by decent margins. As the National Journal noted, tea partiers alone are overwhelmingly in favor of shutting down the government.
Noam Sheiber at The New Republic thinks the American people are going to punish the Republicans much harder than they did in the shutdowns of the 1990s. At the Daily Beast, Jamelle Bouie thinks it won’t be the hard-right members who take the blame, but rather more mainstream Republicans. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation is telling conservatives that Republicans won’t be hurt at all by shutting down the government.
From budget fight to debt ceiling folly… Moyers & Company’s own John Light offered up a history of debt ceiling politics. Nobody really knows what would happen if we were to breach the debt ceiling. But Slate’s Matt Yglesias offers some scary predictions, as does The Atlantic’s Mathew O’Brien, who says it could result in a “historic calamity.”
Ezra Klein hoped that a shutdown would create a backlash that might make a debt ceiling breach less likely. But Molly Ball writes at The Atlantic that the same group pushing the shutdown strategy has every reason to try again with the debt ceiling. And as The Hill reported this week, it’s unclear whether any debt-limit hike can garner the support of enough Republicans to pass the House without Democratic votes.
Another must-read: Jonathan Chait argues in New York Magazine that this debt ceiling battle will be the most important fight of Obama’s presidency, and one that he must win in order to preserve our constitutional form of government.
Work-arounds? Last December, as we faced the first “fiscal cliff,” The Daily Beast’s Matt Zeitlin explained how a trillion-dollar platinum coin could avert the crisis, if the administration decided to play hardball. Writing in Slate, Eric Posner said that doing so would lead to impeachment.
In 2011, Adam Liptak reported for The New York Times that Obama might simply invoke a rarely-discussed provision of the 14th Amendment to get around the limit. And this week, also in The Times, Henry Aaron explained that breaching the debt limit would require Obama to break one of two laws – he urged the administration to choose the one that wouldn’t result in economic chaos.
This is a developing story, and we’ll continue to update this post as more information becomes available.
Republican Party = The Confederacy
Shutdown fulfills GOP’s Confederate fantasies
It's a way of acting out a deeply held secessionist dream
By Steven Rosenfeld
The House-led federal government shutdown is more than maddening, but nobody should be surprised by the Republican confederacy behind it. Nor should anyone underestimate this century’s secessionists.
This fight has been seeping inward from the political margins for years, where increasingly ideological Republicans—from Tea Partiers in Congress, to red-state governors, to Chief Justice John Roberts—seek a less perfect union.
They are not the political stepchildren of Ronald Reagan, who, after his day’s political battles, shared a belief in a functioning federal government with his top adversary, Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. They are closer to the GOP activists drawn to Barry Goldwater’s 1960s-era Conscience of A Conservativemanifesto, which counseled killing government and not making it work.
The most apt historical precedent for today’s marauder Republicans is the old Confederacy, where the provocateurs are not merely intent on stopping federal governance, but withdrawing from it or sabotaging it if they can’t get their way. Today’s Tea Party darlings like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and the House right-wingers driving the federal shutdown are cut from the same disunionist cloth as the old Southerners who fomented secession and the Civil War.
They have branded Obamacare as their Tariff of Abominations, which were export taxes imposed by Northern industrial states the South railed against before the Civil War. Fox News is the disunionists’ Charleston Mercury,egging on the rebels, and seeking to convey legitimacy to their crusade to save government not by fixing things, but by blowing it up piece-by-piece.
The Republican confederates don’t want to follow any law or election result they don’t like. Whether it’s Obamacare’s coverage of the poorest of the poor, federalgun control, reproductive choice or even the Voting Rights Act, there’s been a parade of red-state politicians in recent years working to exempt themselves and their states from federal rights, laws and remedies.
This is not a new list or trend, but it is growing and is ominous. At its base, it does not share a belief in national government. It includes the 28 states that sued to overturn Obamacare or not participate in it. It includes the two dozen states that passed so-called firearms freedom legislation, which thumbs its nose at federal gun controls. It includes states that don’t want new voter suppressionlaws subject to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They include states whose public health options do not include family planning.
Writing this week in the Chicago Sun-Times, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. notes that the GOP’s nullification movement revives a very old Southern tactic.
“What is nullification? It’s one of the last-ditch philosophical stands of the slaveholders, the historically disreputable — and thoroughly discredited — concept that a state could “nullify” a federal law by declaring it null and void. The idea of the Slave Power was that the Southern states would “interpose” themselves between the national government and the slaveholders, and prevent our laws from being enforced.”
Jackson notes this legal philosophy was repeatedly struck down by federal courts and was never accepted outside the Confederacy. That may be true historically, but not entirely anymore. Today’s Tea Party, which has never been larger than 20 percent of the electorate—the same cadre of older, whiter, wealthier voters who gravitated to Ross Perot’s grievance-filled 1992 presidential campaign—has never accepted Barack Obama’s presidency.
“They have spent the last five years trying to keep poor and working Americans from getting healthcare,” Jackson writes. “This is wrong, it’s immoral, and it’s very undemocratic, since Barack Obama was re-elected by a large margin.”
But the Republican rebels are not just confined to Congress. At the Supreme Court, the right-wing majority led by the chief justice has ruled that states do not have to implement the parts of Obamacare that would enroll their poor in state-run Medicaid. The court also struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s toughest anti-discrimination provision, prompting a handful of red states to immediately impose old barriers to voting.
This is how federal governance is dismantled.
Meanwhile, GOP opportunists in state legislatures and governor’s mansions have sponsored bills, signed laws and even launched lawsuits to set their states apart from federal oversight on firearms, healthcare reform, reproductive choice, and voting rights.
This is not what a constitutional republic looks like. It is an evolving confederacy rather than more finely tuned federal government. One can wonder aloud which red-state governor will be the first to suggest his state leave the union in 2013. But seriously, the House-triggered federal shutdown is the consequence of the Republican Party’s disunionist fantasies moving into the mainstream.
That’s not just maddening, it needs to be seen and called out for what it is—the outright rejection of national government by a new Republican confederacy.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Jimmy Kimmel Asks Pedestrians If They Prefer Obamacare Or The Affordable Care Act
BY Huffington Post
1 October 2013
It turns out that plenty of people hate Obamacare, but love the Affordable Care Act. What they don't know is that they're the exact. Same. Thing.
1 October 2013
It turns out that plenty of people hate Obamacare, but love the Affordable Care Act. What they don't know is that they're the exact. Same. Thing.
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