End the Magical Balance Fairy Shutdown Myth

Let's go straight to the video tape.

Breaking News

That's from This Week With George Stephanopoulos this past weekend (10/04/2013) - starting around the 3 minute mark.

The transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But Mr. Speaker, he says -- and he said it publicly on many occasions, that you came to him back in July and offered to pass a clean government funding resolution, no Obamacare amendments, that was $70 billion below what the Senate wanted. They accepted it. And now, you've reneged on that offer.

BOEHNER: No, clearly there was a conversation about doing this.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Several conversations.

BOEHNER: Several. But--

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you offered a clean resolution.

BOEHNER: But I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Did you decide it or was it decided for you?

BOEHNER: I, working with my members, decided to do this in a unified way. George, I have 233 Republicans in the House. And you've never seen a more dedicated group of people who are thoroughly concerned about the future of our country. They believe that Obamacare, all these regulations coming out of the administration, are threatening the future for our kids and our grandkids. It is time for us to stand and fight.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But Mr. Speaker, this is clearly not what you want. I want to go back to several points you've made about this over the last few -- here you were right after the election with Diane Sawyer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOEHNER: It's pretty clear that the president was re-elected. Obamacare is the law of the land.

If we were to put Obamacare into the CR and send it over to the Senate, we were risking shutting down the government. That is not our goal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: So right there, you say that's not your goal. You don't want to put Obamacare on the CR. You did it.

BOEHNER: George, I have made it clear to my colleagues. I don't want to shut the government down. We voted to keep the government open.

Clearly, the Speaker admits that he had the opportunity to pass a budget, but refused because he and the rest of the Republicans decided to make it about defunding/delaying/destroying Obamacare. They had more than 40 attempts at repealing it, and failed on every single one, so their strategy became to tie the defund/delay/destroy to the annual appropriations cycle.

And it's time for all the media to quit playing that this is something that both sides made happen, or that the President and the Senate are responsible for this. The Speaker gave the game away and admits for all the world to see that the House GOP blew up a deal on a budget over Obamacare.

The Speaker has tied his legacy to the extremists in his party. He has become one of them by allowing them to dictate the terms of a deal that would end the shutdown. He has the power to end the shutdown by opening up the floor to a clean vote.

He refuses to do so, claiming that the votes aren't there.

If that's the case, then he has nothing to lose by letting the Democrats expend political capital in a failed effort to have a vote that wouldn't succeed. He'd gain politically by knowing that the count doesn't work in his favor, except that he, and everyone else, knows that this isn't true.

The math doesn't work in his favor. The votes are there, but the votes would undermine his ability to lead a fractured Republican caucus. So he's doing all he can to cast Democrats as the problem even though he clearly acknowledges that a deal was in hand but for the Republican insistence on destroying Obamacare as a precondition to a deal.

It's the poison pill provisions that the Republicans have offered up that have led us to this critical moment.

It's a clarifying moment - exposing the GOP extremism and extortion for what it is. It's an attempt to rewrite how government does business outside the regular legislative and electoral process.

Republicans will only agree to have these negotiations in a context where a government shutdown and the threat of default do give them that added leverage. This is an objective statement of the GOP position. Dems have offered Republicans the negotiations they want, once those conditions are lifted. Republicans have refused. Therefore, their position is that conditions which continue to threaten widespread destruction, giving them leverage, must remain for any talks to proceed.

The key tell is that Cantor and Ryan don't directly defend this position. They elide it. To be sure, both repeat the claim there have been negotiations attached to debt ceiling hikes in the past. But as Jonathan Chait explains, that isn't the same as dangling the actual threat of default and untold economic havoc as a way to extract massive one-sided concessions. Republicans cannot defend this tactic because they will not acknowledge they are actually employing it. John Boehner already allowed in March that the debt ceiling will and must be raised, because: "I'm not going to risk the full faith and credit of the federal government." But on ABC on Sunday, when Boehner was pressed on whether he'd actually allow default if Dems didn't give him what he wants, he repeatedly fudged, saying he would not allow a vote on a "clean" debt limit bill. What happens if default is the only other option? We just don't know.

Either Republicans are actually prepared to allow default and to use this frightening prospect as a weapon with which to get what they want, in which case such tactics cannot be rewarded, because they will all but ensure extensive destruction later. Or Republicans are not prepared to allow default, in which case the very notion that they have leverage here is a sham. Republicans are trying to use this ambiguity to their advantage. On the one hand, the uncertainty it creates is supposed to force Dems to give in to their demands. On the other, it is meant to obscure their actual intentions and thus shield them from politically potent charges that they are actually willing to place the country at grave risk to extract concessions they couldn't get through conventional channels.

The Democrats don't need to offer up anything other than a clean budget resolution on the terms they agreed to in July. That was already a concession on $70 billion on spending. The GOP took that offer and tossed it in favor of a political fight they cannot hope to possibly win.

The fight is already wearing down Republican polling and ratings for Congress in general. While Republicans are cheering that the President's approval ratings are at 37%, the Congress rates only 5% approval. The President doesn't face reelection and has a freer hand to use the bully pulpit to attack the Republicans for bringing about this crisis because they are trying to unite the base in opposition to health care reforms that would expand access to health insurance to millions of people.

The GOP has to engage in cognitive dissonance on a massive scale to reconcile its positions - that it wants to end the shutdown, avoid default, and recognizing the economic harms that those actions are having all while advocating for those same things and claiming that the damage is minimal. The GOP has to lie to itself and everyone else to do so, and the public is seeing through the lies.

The video clip above highlights the problems succinctly. Republicans who agree that the default will lead to widespread destruction, yet use this as leverage by refusing to deal unless the GOP demands (preconditions) are met are the worst of the worst in this ongoing saga. They're putting politics and passion over reality, economics, and national security.

Any Republican who hews to this position needs to be run out of office. And that's a list that is significant.

It includes none other than Speaker Boehner himself. He's claiming that he wouldn't let the nation default because of the harm done, and yet he's completely going along with the Tea Party wing in demanding that the Administration and Democrats accept their demands or else.

Or else what? Economic catastrophe if we don't do what the GOP says? It's extortion. And it's economic folly. The Speaker knows it, but by continuing to pander to the extortionists, he's one of them.

The GOP and the Speaker are guilty of target fixation. They've determined that destroying Obamacare is paramount, and are willing to do whatever it takes to destroy it. That might help keep the extremists in the party happy, but it is having tremendous damage to the polity and even greater damage is on the horizon if the debt ceiling is not increased.

It's all part of a larger fight by the GOP to slash and burn government spending at all levels, and it's a fight that the Tea Party relishes because they believe that they have a mandate to chop government spending, even though they are a minority within their own party. The tools that were supposed to get the parties to compromise and come to agreement have instead been used by the Tea Party to institute far harsher cuts and more destructive policies than if a compromise had been worked out.

The sequester is case in point. A refusal to work out a deal that targeted cuts and offer up even the slightest bit of tax increases or reductions in tax credits and incentives was rebuffed and refused. Instead, across the board cuts were instituted, and the GOP won the day. The Senate and the Administration are now working off the sequester figures - accepting the cuts. The GOP won that fight, and that's what's driving them here too. The GOP and Tea Party have flipped the tools and events that should force compromise into ones that bring about the very policies that they endorse - smaller government.

It's a worrying trend, and one that may lead the nation into default. With no reason or intention to compromise, the GOP will take the nation over the cliff. One can only hope that voters realize who's taking them for this dangerous ride.

The GOP.

Cross posted at LGF.

Obamacare Rolls Out Even As GOP Seeks Defund/Delay/Destroy Poison Pill Provisions In Budget and Debt Ceiling Talks

Yesterday marked the beginning of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) health exchange rollout. While some refer to this as Obamacare with derision (and there are polls that indicate that people have a much more favorable view of the term ACA than Obamacare even though they refer to the same program/law), the purpose of the law is to provide access to affordable health insurance for more than 20 to 30 million people.

The rollout yesterday was not without its hiccups. Some people were met with overloaded servers so that they couldn't complete the registration, and there were some bugs in the process.

That is to be expected with any rollout of any major software/website. It shouldn't be a surprise given how the Republicans have sought to defund, delay, and destroy the ACA at every opportunity.

They've attempted to repeal the ACA more than 40 times in the House alone.

Years of litigation over the constitutionality of the law was concluded with a landmark decision that found the central provision, the individual mandate, constitutional. The GOP claimed that this was unconstitutional, even though the GOP and the Heritage Foundation had made the individual mandate a central part of their alternative plan to Hillarycare when that proposal was rolled out in the early 1990s. Republican Mitt Romney made the individual mandate part of the MassCare program.

But, the moment that the Obama Administration made it a central tenet of the ACA, the GOP savaged it as an affront to personal liberty. We'd have to have collective amnesia to follow the Republican argument and logic. We'd have to ignore that the ACA is modeled on the very successful MassCare, which has reduced the number of uninsureds in Massachusetts by expanding access to affordable health insurance.

Then, we get to the claims by the Tea Party extortionists who think that this is some form of socialism or worse.

The government created health exchanges where private insurance companies offer policies that include minimum levels of coverage that protect against catastrophic health costs to the individual that would otherwise bankrupt them or deny them further insurance. Insurance companies were instrumental in shaping the law, which is why the taxes and fees imposed by the act were written the way they were. Insurers wanted to be part of this - and they're going to be key facilitator to the Obamacare's success. Obamacare created an entirely new market that didn't exist before. That's a market capitalism failure. Obamacare sets up a situation where insurers can profit from millions of new insureds and their premiums (including the subsidies that help those who are eligible afford the insurance).

At the same time, insurance companies can no longer deny policies due to preexisting conditions or include lifetime limits. That's key to millions of people across the country who have had diagnoses for mental health issues, cancer, and other chronic conditions. Someone who was diagnosed with cancer as a child or young adult will no longer be denied insurance because of their cancer diagnosis. Someone who was diagnosed with lung or kidney disease that needs ongoing care will no longer be denied insurance.

People who are under the age of 26 can still be covered on their parents' insurance. That eliminates a period of time when many are in college and allow their insurance coverage to lapse (before the ACA, many insurers didn't allow dependents to stay on parents' insurance beyond age 21).

People with small businesses can now find insurance for themselves or their employees because the purchasing power of the exchanges helps reduce the costs to them.

And for those who think insurance costs are going up solely because of ACA have amnesia because health costs have been soaring for years (and this chart goes back decades). This isn't a new trend that began suddenly in 2009. It has been going on for decades as the cost of health care outraced the rate of inflation.

With this as the backdrop, the Tea Party extremists and the GOP have conspired to shut down the government with the extortionist demand that Democrats defund, delay, and ultimately destroy Obamacare in exchange for a short continuing resolution that allows government to continue operating. Thus far, Democrats have been resolute in defeating the GOP efforts, and some in the GOP are realizing that this is a losing hand and that they've screwed themselves and the nation of an opportunity to actually reform some of the problems with the ACA. The GOP's extremism in seeking defunding, delaying, or destroying Obamacare puts Democrats in position of having to defend the entirety of the program. They're willing to do this, even as some parts of the program should be further reformed. But a better situation than before the ACA is not the opposite of the perfect. The GOP claims that ACA needs to be repealed ignores the fact that the health insurance situation in the nation was a disaster and bleeding hospitals dry for indigent care.

Some Republicans are beginning to realize the damage being done to their party. This includes Rep. Peter King, who announced he was running for President, but also suggested that the government shutdown is the result of a cadre of extremists in his party who refuse to view the President as legitimate and are looking to roll back every single one of the President's achievements. They're willing to burn the government to the ground to achieve their ends.

The government shutdown is a minor trifle compared to the fact that the same Republican extremists are pushing poison pill provisions into the debt ceiling argument. They refuse to accept anything less than a defund/delay/destroy Obamacare for raising the debt ceiling, despite the fact that this Congress has already appropriated the funds. It is an incontrovertible fact that granting the hike does not authorize any new spending and failing to grant it does not cut spending.

These facts, and the fact that the polling doesn't favor the GOP, doesn't faze the Tea Party extortionists who think that if they take this to what they think is the logical conclusion that the Democrats will cave and they'll get the delay they seek. The polling suggests otherwise, but the GOP and its leadership are unwilling to confront the Tea Party cadre and put down this nonsense once and for all. In fact, expect the extremists to take the brutal punishment they're getting in newspaper opeds and editorials today as a badge of honor in rattling the mainstream media's cage.

However, House Speaker John Boehner can't or wont take those sensible measures because the Tea Party threatens to primary anyone who isn't sufficiently conservative enough. These extremists think that if only they have enough pure conservatives that they can succeed in taking down President Obama and his signature achievement in health care reform. Heck, there are reports that the Speaker wont allow a clean CR to come up for a vote because of the fear it might pass. That would effectively put Boehner in the extremist camp because he's catering to the very extremists who are shutting down the government.

Yet, he might be pushing this now, because if the debt ceiling isn't increased, it will result in damage that both sides acknowledge - a loss in credit ratings, increased borrowing costs, and tremendous damage to the US economy.

After all, if the leadership in the House drops the Hastert Rule, a bipartisan continuing resolution to fund government would happen today. If they adopt the Gephardt Rule, the nonsensical debt ceiling negotiations would be an afterthought since the budget appropriations process would allow for a concurrent increase in the debt ceiling to cover the contingency of the government spending more than it takes in revenue. In doing both, Speaker Boehner would marginalize the tyranny of the minority TP Extortionist camp, allow Congress to focus on the business of governance, and signal that the TP movement is nothing more than a bunch of nihlists who are willing to torch government in furtherance of a goal of denying access to health insurance for millions of people.

Cross posted at LGF. (Edited to add more link attributions to buttress the argument)