No Way for GOPers to Get Centered

On the whole, I think that the deal worked out this week between the White House and Congress to raise the national debt ceiling--really, the resolution of a hostage crisis cooked up by the GOP--was not a favorable one to Democrats. However, The New Republic’s Ed Kilgore finds a silver lining in it:

The big debt limit vote in Congress, it is increasingly obvious, is just an appetizer for the divisive, voter-alienating struggles it has built into the schedule at key points during the 2012 presidential campaign, making an eventual GOP presidential nominee’s efforts to “pivot to the center” an athletic feat, at best. And as Tea Party activists and other conservatives have made clear in their reactions to the deal just signed, their efforts to force everyone in the GOP to join in future hostage-taking exercises aimed at middle-class entitlements and other targets beloved of voters have just begun. ...

This rocky road ahead raises a very fundamental question about the long-range strategy of the Republican presidential nominee. It is often asserted that presidential candidates “play to the base” during contested primary contests and then “pivot to the center” once they are playing on the expanded field of a general election. This desideratum is more important these days for Republicans than for Democrats, since the GOP is without a doubt the more ideological of the two major parties ...

How much harder might the “pivot to the center” be for the 2012 GOP nominee, who will head up a party convinced its recommitment to conservative principles and its partisan militancy won the 2010 midterm elections and now has Democrats on the run? Moreover, in a year where the last cycle’s “true conservative” candidate Mitt Romney has moved significantly to the right but is now considered dangerously moderate, the distance such a “pivot” would have to span appears daunting, if not downright impossible.

You’ll find the whole of Kilgore’s essay here.

Default Lines

After trying and failing twice yesterday, majority Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives this afternoon finally managed to pass--if by a squeaker vote--a baldly partisan bill raising the nation’s debt ceiling, but tying it to $22 billion in cuts from next year’s spending and the passage of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. In other words, it’s a bill that has no chance of being approved by the Democratic Senate or ever being signed into law by President Barack Obama.

So the Tea Party yahoos and other Republican ideologues in the lower chamber once more wasted their time and tens of thousands of our taxpayer dollars in a symbolic gesture that accomplishes nothing. The final resolution to this GOP-created financial crisis, if there is to be one before next Tuesday’s deadline for raising the debt ceiling and avoiding default, will have to be worked out between the Senate and the White House, with hateful Republican obstructionists in the House ultimately relegated to the sidelines, having either to accept a compromise or provoke further financial disaster.

The Senate is expected to take up the bill later tonight, and quickly kill the thing. Its members will then have to work over the weekend to come up with a more balanced substitute that can gain not just Republican votes, but a majority of Democratic ones as well. Many investors, however, recognizing the intransigence of GOP ideologues on this matter, aren’t confident that such an agreement can be struck--which is why they’re pulling their money out of the stock and mutual-fund markets in advance of the August 2 deadline.

No matter what happens between now and Tuesday, it’s clear that the House has marginalized itself to the crazy zone. Even Americans who haven’t been paying close attention to the insanity of right-wingers trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid through this debt-ceiling fight, have to recognize in these final days the sheer incompetence of House Republicans and their inability to govern.

The cavernous divisions between veteran politicians on Capitol Hill, willing to compromise, and fire-breathing, my-way-or-the-highway Tea Partiers bent on destroying the government’s ability to help Americans in any manner have been striking over the last couple of months. It has fallen, at long last, to the “adults” in Washington, D.C.--President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), and whatever non-ideologues remain on the Republican side of the Senate--to save the United States from self-inflicted catastrophe. People such as Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who was unable to convince House Republicans to go along with less-strident versions of a debt-ceiling increase, are the big losers in all of this; Boehner--never trusted by the wacko Tea Party crowd--can probably start counting down his last days in his present office, though who will succeed him, nobody knows yet. The sad thing is, it might be someone, like Eric Cantor (R-Virginia), who’s even less sensible and willing to negotiate with his opponents.

Meanwhile, Republican obstructionists in D.C. have become laughingstocks, not merely within U.S. borders, but in the rest of the world. The German tabloid Bild opines that “What America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics and the whole world is being held hostage ... Most importantly, the Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

READ MORE: “A Balanced-budget Amendment: Bad Idea, for Many Reasons,” by Robert J. Samuelson (The Washington Post); “Friday’s Vote Made Boehner’s Job Harder, Not Easier,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “Senate Quickly Tables Boehner Debt Plan,” by Josiah Ryan and Alexander Bolton (The Hill).

Trading One Crisis for Another?

This piece from The Washington Post seems to offer a fairly cogent analysis of why President Obama resists employing the so-called 14th Amendment Option to resolve the present partisan impasse over raising the U.S. debt ceiling.

I would add that, if the president invokes this option to maintain the country’s credit rating and avoid an economic collapse, it will almost surely result in right-wing ideologues in Congress initiating impeachment proceedings against him. And how easy a time will he have running for re-election in the midst of such proceedings? Then again, President Clinton enjoyed a significant boost in public polling after he stood up to Republican obstructionists in the mid-1990s.

Clearly, we’re entering unknown political territory here.

READ MORE: “How Would the Supreme Court Rule on Obama Raising the Debt Ceiling Himself?,” by Jeffrey Rosen (The New Republic).

Can Republicans Agree on ANYTHING?

Jonathan Bernstein of The Washington Post today lays out what he defines as the paramount difficulty in solving the Republican-created debt-ceiling crisis:

The bottom line in the debt limit showdown, the ultimate reason for the impasse and the impending apocalypse, is this: John Boehner and the Tea Partiers in the House of Representatives have not passed, and apparently cannot pass, anything at all.

The United States Government reached statutory debt limit in May. We’re now a week away from exhausting every way around that, at least according to the Treasury Department. And the House of Representatives has not passed a debt limit extension. They haven’t passed a clean one, and they haven’t passed one with conditions. It seems highly unlikely to me that Speaker Boehner’s plan to raise the debt limit in stages will pass the House. Indeed, after months of wrangling, there still doesn’t seem to be any plan that can pass the House.

So far, the closest they’ve come was in passing their Cut, Cap, and Balance scheme, but that did not include a debt limit increase; it only contained a commitment to do so if, among other things, Congress sent a specific Balanced Budget Amendment to the states. And yet CCB passed by a slim partisan margin, not even getting close--in the GOP-controlled House!--to the two-thirds needed to pass an Amendment and send it on to the states.

The bottom line is this: even if the House constituted the sole branch of government, it’s really not clear that the Republicans who run it could figure out a way to get the debt limit increased. Too many House Republicans either have no idea what they’re doing or actively welcome a default. And without them Republicans must appeal to at least some Democrats just to get anything through the House--which is a problem for those Republicans who are terrified of being labeled RINOs if they cut any deal with Dems at all, ever, regardless of what they get in return.

Bernstein’s full column is here.

READ MORE: “Boehner’s Truth Allergy,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “Tea Party Warns GOP: A Vote for Boehner’s Debt Plan Violates Our Pledge,” by Jennifer Bendery (The Huffington Post); “Boehner’s Debt Ceiling Plan Found Insufficient by Wall Street: Bank of America Report,” by Sam Stein (The Huffington Post); “Democrats’ Game Plan: Split GOP,” by Alexander Bolton (The Hill); “Behind a Deficit Façade Burns a Dream of Secular Government Collapse,” by Rmuse (Politicus USA).

President Obama on Solving the Republican-Manufactured Debt-Ceiling Crisis

The full text of the president’s speech can be found here.

READ MORE: “Ratings Agency Source: Boehner Plan Would Lead to Downgrade of U.S. Debt, Reid Plan Would Preserve AAA Rating” (Think Progress); “Flashback: In February, Geithner Rightly Warned Against Negotiating Over Raising the Debt Ceiling,” by Pat Garofalo and Faiz Shakir (Think Progress).

Calling the Republicans’ Bluff

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has put forth a deal that would raise the U.S. debt ceiling by $2.7 trillion and offset that with $2.7 trillion in spending cuts. However, Republicans in the U.S. House quickly dismissed this offer, because it doesn’t meet their unstated goals: to undermine Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and take tax increases off the table. The fact that President Barack Obama cites Reid’s plan as “a responsible compromise that cuts spending in a way that protects critical investments and does not harm the economic recovery” may also kill it; Republican ideologues on Capitol Hill, after all, are reflexively opposed to anything the Democratic president likes, even when it adopts some of their own ideas. Today’s GOP may be unsatisfied with anything less than undoing the social and political advances of the 20th century.

But with just a week to go before the drop-dead date for hammering out a debt-ceiling compromise in Congress, Reid’s plan may be the most reasonable deal possible.

READ MORE: “Boehner to Dems: I’ll See Your Plan and Raise You Another,” by Steve Benen (Washington Monthly); “The Obvious Compromise Between the Reid and Boehner Plans,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post).

Republicans = Domestic Terrorists?

Believe it or not, that’s the gist of Nicholas D. Kristof’s latest column in The New York Times. His bottom line:

If China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.

Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength--and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.

Good for Kristof, for calling it like it is. The full piece is here.

Who’s Responsible for This Mess?

In a Washington Post column titled “Don’t Blame ‘Both Sides’ for Debt Impasse,” Eugene Robinson writes:

Washington has many lazy habits, and one of the worst is a reflexive tendency to see equivalence where none exists. Hence the nonsense, being peddled by politicians and commentators who should know better, that “both sides” are equally at fault in the deadlocked talks over the debt ceiling.

This is patently false. The truth is that Democrats have made clear they are open to a compromise deal on budget cuts and revenue increases. Republicans have made clear they are not.

Put another way, Democrats reacted to the “grand bargain” proposed by President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner by squawking, complaining and highlighting elements they didn’t like. This is known throughout the world as the way to begin a process of negotiation.

Republicans, by contrast, answered with a definitive “no” and then covered their ears. Given the looming Aug. 2 deadline for default if the debt ceiling is not raised, the proper term for this approach is blackmail.

Yet the “both sides are to blame” narrative somehow gained currency after Boehner announced Saturday that House Republicans would not support any increase in revenue, period. A false equivalence was drawn between the absolute Republican rejection of “revenue-positive” tax reform and the less-than-absolute Democratic opposition to “benefit cuts” in Medicare and Social Security.

The bogus story line is that the radical right-wing base of the GOP and the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party are equally to blame for sinking the deal.

Click here to read Robinson’s full column.

READ MORE: “American Mainstream Rejects GOP Debt Line,” by Steve Benen (Washington Monthly).

The Wrong Horses

In light of recent Republiclown intransigence on raising the federal debt ceiling, Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen asks the question: Which U.S. political party is really “pro-business.”

Under the first two years of the Obama presidency, economic growth was restored, corporate profits soared, the major Wall Street indexes rocketed up, and nearly all of the job creation was limited to the private sector. The Chamber of Commerce crowd, unsatisfied, invested heavily in Republican candidates, hoping they would create a climate even more business friendly.

News flash, business community: you invested in the wrong horses.

Jon Chait noted today that if Republicans block a debt-ceiling increase before August 2, “The business elite will decide that the Republicans are dangerous and must be stopped.”

I think that’s true. I also think the business elite should have thought of this last year.

You can find Benen’s full remarks here.

READ MORE: “Yes, the Tea Party Is Insane,” by Kevin Drum (Mother Jones); “Why Conservatives Can’t Afford Government Default,” by The Opportunity Agenda (MyDD).

And to Hell with Everybody Else

From The Huffington Post:

Republicans are sabotaging economic recovery efforts because it will help them win in 2012, Senate Democratic leaders charged Wednesday.

“Unfortunately our Republican colleagues in the House and Senate are driven by putting one man out of work--President Obama,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) declared at a Capitol Hill press conference called the day after Senate Republicans blocked an economic development bill that they have backed in the past.

Durbin pointed to remarks made by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in which he said the top goal of Republicans should be to make Obama a one-term President.

Steve Benen has more on this matter here.

Shameless!

Facing fierce resistance to their “Kill Medicare” plan from the general public and congressional Democrats, Republicans are now hoping to undermine Medicare during negotiations over the necessary debt-ceiling increase:

“McConnell Puts Medicare Into the Ransom Note,” by Steve Benen (Washington Monthly).