What are we to make of the fact that two of the top priorities for the 112th Congress, convening for the first time today, involve an irrelevant charade and an irresponsible threat?
Repealing health care, a pure symbolic activity, is one of the first votes scheduled for next week. House Republicans know their bill will not pass the Senate or clear a presidential veto. Maybe they want to get their irrelevant votes out of the way early. But it gets worse.
The bigger story is the truly bizarre threat to freeze the debt ceiling, which could theoretically place the U.S. in default and spark a larger recession or economic crisis. Alarmingly, the idea is picking up traction among conservative Republicans. And on cue, political reporters have begun speculating that Obama must grant concessions to the fiscal bully wing of the G.O.P.
“Some kind of compromise is the likely end-game here, and almost by definition, that compromise is likely to include cuts to domestic spending programs,” explained a typical article about the standoff this week.
Yet even Obama, the Commander-in-Compromise, must understand the difference between bargaining for a mixed deal and meeting halfway between responsibility and total, deranged lunacy.
The notion that (some) Republicans are increasing their “leverage” by threatening an economic murder-suicide does not make sense, either. If you think the unthinkable, with Congress actually driving the US into another, man-made economic crisis, it would be political suicide. (The 1995 government shutdown famously backfired on Republicans with less at stake. More on that in a moment.) Or if you imagine the more plausible path of Congress merely complaining before folding – the general pattern during recent crises, from the Patriot Act to Iraq to TARP – the fiscal bullies would just look soft to their base, and unserious to everyone else. To that end, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer recently warned Republicans to "be careful" or they could lose this round when Obama "call[s] their bluff." Indeed, the only way for Obama to falter would be to blink first – which would only empower and invite more bullying. “Weakness is provocative,” as the 13th and 21st Secretary of Defense always said.
Obama is starting to get it, though. This weekend, the White House sent Austan Goolsbee on the Sunday shows to push back hard on the “insanity” of these threats, spelling out the catastrophic costs of an unprecedented default on US obligations. Meanwhile, Obama must see it's a new era when supposedly “moderate” bargaining partners like Sen. Lindsay Graham are joining the crazy chorus. Graham is now threatening to freeze the debt ceiling unless he gets to cut Social Security – a dedicated retirement program that is not even linked to the national debt. That is not how Congress is supposed to legislate.
That’s really the bigger point here. The freshman class of Republicans may want to drastically cut the size of government, and restrict its ability to run schools, or build roads, or patrol health insurance companies. Those are legitimate policy preferences.
To extract by threat what cannot be achieved through the democratic legislative process, however, is not legitimate. Indeed, some legal scholars have concluded that it is actually inappropriate for Congress to shut down the executive branch as a bargaining tool over policy disputes. Peter Shane, a law professor and director of the Center for Law, Policy and Social Science, proposed in a paper that the 1995 government shutdown constituted a new breed of “inter-branch aggression” that posed “a special threat to democratic legitimacy.”
The 1994 revolutionaries, however, essentially liked the idea of shutting down the executive branch, and thought, wrongly, that it was also good politics. Today’s Republican revolutionaries are playing a very different game. They are threatening an outcome that no sane person could support, shutting down the entire economy and undermining the U.S.’s global credibility to agitate for policies that even their new majority could not otherwise enact. That is no way to govern.
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Ari Melber is discussing this post with readers on Facebook. Originally published in The Nation.
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This is the story of the Great Depression. Google it. Herbert Hoover is not the hero, FDR is!
Cutting spending in a recession will makes things worse, both deeper and longer.
The government is not a household, or a pizza restaurant, and the people who tell you government must balance revenues and expenditures every year are economically very dangerous people.
If the GOP offers President Obama the A.D. 2008 budget--we've had two years to read it and see what's in it--as the condition for raising the debt limit, he'd better agree than shut down the government.
I say enlist NASA, and their scientists and people with the exotic degrees and supercomputers, to the task of sorting out the money mess this country's in. When in doubt, call in the experts.
Smart people are beginning to say we have 3-4 years at most to get a handle on it. Here's what might happen if we fail:
1. total economic collapse
2. armed groups shooting it out in the streets
3. can't get food or fuel
4. martial law
I have zero confidence in congress to deal with it other than to spend more and create more debt.
Republicans now running the House are about our only hope!
That said, is there a nationwide mandate to repeal health reform or even implement Tea Party politics? As someone writing from California, a state which bucked the GOP tide across the board, it's hard to fathom this mandate. I wasn't present in many of the Congressional districts that turned from Democratic to Republican. I do know that turnout was lower on the whole, and some independents turned against a Congressional House controlled by the Democrats perhaps because those who voted: a) forgot who caused the crash of 2007; b) blamed Obama for TARP; c) blamed Obama for the tepid health reform act passed in 2010; d) or some other (sane or insane) reason. It's comforting to know that many Blue Dogs got wiped out in 2010. And, apart from losing Alan Grayson, I'm happy more or less with what remains. Heath Shuler might be wise to join either the GOP or start his own centrist party.
The only question remaining is how Obama will respond to Party of NO threats to bring down the house by failing to implement an increase in the debt ceiling. To cave, as he did with respect to the Bush tax whacks extension, would be a disaster and surely would elicit a challenger in the 2012 primary.
OR
"After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending,” she said in an address from the speaker’s podium. “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.” Pelosi, 1/4/07
According to the United States Treasury, the National Debt on that day was $8,670,596,242,973.04. As of December 24th, it was $13,866,145,290,604.69. That’s $5,195,549,047,631.65 in new deficit spending in over just under four years.
Now that right there, that's the way to collapse the nation and ruin the world Scooter. And that's NOT a plan. That's a DONE DEAL
Thanks for that BTW smpj
Since the rich already basically have all our money, however, there's not much reason to keep up the charade.
anyone here still stuck in the left vs right paradigm seriously needs to wake up. both parties are corrupt and MSM just want to keep kicking this red vs blue illusion in the hopes that most americans still buy it
Do things need to change, sure but the baggers aren't going to do it.