Tag Archives: GOP

Send in the Grown-Ups

Don’t bother to send in the clowns. They’re here. What we need are the adults.

For the past twenty years, I’ve been predicting a schism in the Republican party–or at the very least, a “smack down” of the extremists on the right by the establishment-types (aka the “country club” Republicans).

I was so certain the day of reckoning was close that I hung in as the GOP got weirder and wilder–reluctant to leave a party to which I’d given so many years, and unable to make sense of the zealots who’d displaced the rational, prudent folks I had worked with for so long.

But the day of reckoning never came, and in 2000 I left–or more accurately, I acknowledged that the party had left me. I watched from the sidelines as the GOP continued its seemingly inexorable trip into Tea Party fantasyland. I kept expecting the people who occupy reality and care about the party’s long-term prospects–the people whose own interests are tied to the viability of the national organization– to step in and say “enough.”

It never happened.

As Jon Lovett recently wrote in The Atlantic,

The Republican elite caught a ride on the tiger. But the tiger got sick of waiting for the gazelles it was promised, the gazelles that were always one election away. The tiger was hungry and angry and tired of being used and the longer it waited the more appetizing the elite on its back became. So the tiger got a radio station and a news channel. The tiger got organized and mobilized. And finally the tiger realized it didn’t need someone kicking its sides telling it which way to run and who to eat and when to eat and why it wasn’t time to eat and the time to eat would come, don’t worry, you’ll eat soon enough.

So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.

If the recent disastrous behavior of the so-called “suicide caucus” doesn’t finally precipitate the appropriate response by the sane remnant, nothing ever will.

When GOP figures like John McCain and Peter King (Peter King, for heaven’s sake!) place blame for the shutdown and the damage it caused squarely on the crazy caucus–when The Economist (hardly a leftwing organ) profiles Ted Cruz as a pandering “Cruz missile” promising the impossible and doing real damage to his fellow Republicans–when Michelle Bachmann (who welcomes the damage as a sign of the “End Times”) and Louis Gohmert (who threatened to impeach the President if Congress caused default) remain the face of the GOP along with the feckless John Boehner…

Surely it’s time for the grown-ups?

If any grown-ups are left…..

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There Must Be a Pony Here Somewhere

As if the posturing and idiocy of the shutdown weren’t enough, Ed Brayton quotes Ezra Klein on the GOP’s opening debt limit gambit.

The House GOP’s debt limit bill — obtained by the National Review — isn’t a serious governing document. It’s not even a plausible opening bid. It’s a cry for help.

In return for a one-year suspension of the debt ceiling, House Republicans are demanding a yearlong delay of Obamacare, Rep. Paul Ryan’s tax reform plan, the Keystone XL pipeline, more offshore oil drilling, more drilling on federally protected lands, rewriting of ash coal regulations, a suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions, more power over the regulatory process in general, reform of the federal employee retirement program, an overhaul of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget, repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, more means-testing in Medicare, repeal of the Public Health trust fund, and more…

House Republicans are walking into the debt-ceiling negotiations with an opening bid that makes them look ridiculous. This looks like an Onion parody of what the House’s debt-ceiling demands might be. It’s a wonder it’s not written in comic sans.

Words fail.

While there have been recent signs that Boehner may be retreating from the Tea Partiers’ insistence on pushing the world economy into depression if they don’t get their way, this opening demand would seem to prove a point often made by people who object to the “plague on both your houses” or “they all do it” constructions so beloved by the media–the so-called false equivalency.

Perhaps over time, we can count on both political parties to be equally irresponsible, but right now, no one can beat the GOP for sheer lunacy.

At their most idiotic, next to this, Democrats look like statesmen.

It’s Not a Game!

Or is it?

From Talking Points Memo:

The reason Congress is mired in repeated fiscal crises is that Republicans have thwarted budget conference negotiations since April, when the two chambers passed their own deeply divergent budget resolutions. Senate Democrats have requested conference negotiations 18 times and Republicans have denied their request each time.

“After blocking Senate Democrats’ attempts to start a budget conference 18 times over the past six months, Republicans are now scrambling to start a conference committee with mere minutes to go before a government shutdown,” said Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA).

I am so tired of self-important bloviators engaging in PR and theatrics at the expense of governing. I’m furious with self-described “patriots” and “Christians” who pontificate about the Constitution and morality, and then proceed ignore both and to play games with the lives and health of ordinary Americans.

And I’m frustrated that the rest of us can’t seem to do anything about it.

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Politics Trumps Both Compassion and Common Sense

Apparently, common sense is fairly uncommon, and compassion is just a word in the dictionary.

The Dallas News recently reported that Texas’ refusal to expand Medicaid and participate in the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) will cause individual health insurance premiums to rise a whopping 9.3%.

The Texas Observer reports that Texas will not only leave 100 billion dollars “on the table,” but the decision will cause a raise in local property taxes. (The burden of emergency medical care generally falls on property taxpayers in Texas–just as it does in Indiana. When people take Mike Pence’s advice and get their “access to care” through the Emergency Room, property taxpayers pay for that unnecessarily-expensive care. )

Fiscal stupidity is one thing. Essentially telling poor people to f**k off is another.

Nearly 7 million adults ages 19 to 64 would qualify for Medicaid in the 25 states that have not voted to expand it, according to an Urban Institute report. Those 7 million people won’t get Medicaid and they won’t get federal help to buy health insurance.

The refusal to expand Medicaid won’t “defund” the Affordable Care Act, or change any of its provisions. The only “message” it will send to Washington is “we’ll show you–we’ll hurt ourselves!”

The bottom line: Rick Perry, Mike Pence and other Republican governors care more about obstructing Obama than about the health of their economies or their citizens.

That’s politics these days. And it’s not only stupid, it’s despicable.

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Excuse Me While I Hit Myself Repeatedly with a Hammer….

A recent post at Maddowblog began with the following observation:

Since so much of the public has no idea what the debt ceiling is, what default is, what bond markets are, or what the full faith and credit of the United States means, polling on the subject just doesn’t tell us much.

The post went on to describe a different sort of poll that proved the point; it asked about the debt ceiling, but phrased the same question two different ways. When asked simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, respondents were pretty evenly split. The second version asked whether Congress should prevent the government from borrowing money in order to pay its debts;  73% of those responding to the question when it was posed that way said such a step would seriously harm the economy, and opposed it. Only 22% approved.

The American people aren’t stupid. When the question is asked using language citizens understand, they resoundingly offer the right answer. The lesson of this–and multiple other examples–is twofold: (1) the public is generally unfamiliar with the language of its own government, with many equating “raising the debt ceiling” with incurring new debt; and (2) polls that politicians reference to “prove” that the American public is on their side of an issue tend to be worthless and/or deceptive.

Thanks to their own extremism and lack of elementary economic knowledge, the Tea Party zealots who have captured one of America’s major parties and the House of Representatives are poised to do substantial damage to the people they have been elected to represent.

Pundits from both Left and Right (even Karl Rove!) predict that the government crisis they are determined to precipitate will create a backlash that can only hurt the GOP, but those warnings are falling on deaf ears. As a friend of mine used to say, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

The broad, sane middle of the American public will need to batten down the hatches and prepare for a totally unnecessary period of fiscal and economic misery–brought to us by people motivated by one and only one “principle”–ensuring that thirty million Americans currently without health insurance don’t get access to healthcare.

And to make sure they don’t, they’re willing to plunge the country into another recession.

Excuse me while I go hit myself some more with that hammer….

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