Republicans are threatening to make life difficult for Democrats if they try to push health care reform through the Senate using the budget reconciliation process.
That’s probably the funniest thing you’ll read all day. Until, that is, you read Joe Lieberman’s deep thought on the subject:
It will make it a partisan and less productive place than it’s been, I’m afraid.
By CreatureI have no problem with the House using this procedure. Weary House members can use whatever cover they can get (and Nancy Pelosi is doing right by them by giving them some). Republicans having a temper tantrum over it is nothing new. It’s wh…
Writing in The Hill, Jordan Fabian catches an interesting reaction to Jim DeMint’s admission that he’s “less confident” than he once was about the GOP’s ability to stop health care reform.
Even though DeMint said he was “less confident” a Republican aide appeared unfazed.
“Yet another helpful attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” was how he described the quote.
Once health care reform passes, we’re going to see a lot more of this kind of bitter sniping.
After all these months we finally learn the real reason Republicans, to a man, oppose health care reform … self-esteem:
Discuss.
Stories like this ought to give pause to those who make the argument that the Republican Party has finally regained its mojo and is back on track to attaining majority status:
Et tu, Rob Portman? Ye of sensibility and rectitude? Ye of maturity and political resolve? Despite inquires from Cincinnati Enquirer and Plain Dealer, Portman’s campaign won’t directly answer the question of whether the candidate believes that President Obama is a citizen. (Obma is.) So now, we’re up to five Republican Senate candidates — major ones, not including J.D. Hayworth in Arizona for the moment — who have flirted with Birtherism.
Several of these candidates have later corrected their initial hesitation, but it precisely that initial hesitation that contains so much information about what Republican candidates fear right now.
In the (slightly less than) fourteen months of the Obama Presidency, there’s no question that Republicans have improved their national standing to some extent. But it’s important to remember that they’ve gained ground amidst the worst job market in more than fifty years, and they’ve done so while engaging nonstop in political warfare against a majority party that has been more preoccupied with the actual (and messy) process of governing than it has in playing politics.
Still, Republicans — despite having the political advantage of a terrible economy and having been mostly ignored by their opponents — have at best begun to approach parity in public opinion polls.
Now that we’re getting closer to the election, no longer will Republican attacks go unanswered. Democrats are going to start firing back at Republicans with increasing regularity. There will be less intraparty fighting. The economy will continue its path of recovery. And in all likelihood the signature accomplishment of health care reform will have been achieved.
And so as we head into the beginning stages of the 2010 midterm elections, you have a Democratic Party that will start to unify after having successfully implemented major reforms. More importantly, you have a Democratic Party base that will see that the party was in fact able to deliver on important pieces of its agenda, giving them confidence that the long list of things to be done can be achieved.
Meanwhile, you have a completely ineffective Republican Party that has no new ideas, and is almost entirely animated by its hatred of President Obama — hatred that is so extreme that its own U.S. Senate candidates can’t even repudiate the wildly insane notion that President Obama is not in fact a natural born American citizen.
The notion that this GOP is anywhere near regaining majority status is almost as crazy as the birthers who are bringing it down.
Add this to the list of things no one could have anticipated:
When the House voted on health care in November, one Republican, Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, supported it. If the House passes health care reform a second time, House Minority Leader John Boehner says, it will be without any support from Republicans.
Note to the Democratic leadership: as we move down the legislative road, can we drop the pretense that there is any way to work with the obstructionists on the other side of the aisle? Let’s avoid any more quests for non-existent bipartisanship. Just do the job we hired you for.
The Party of No finally found something to say yes to:
The House passed legislation Wednesday that would ban misleading mailings designed to appear they’re from the Census Bureau, following criticism that Republican groups were sending fundraising letters using the census name. [...]
The legislation passed 416-0 …
It looks like 170 House Republicans were willing to shelve their obstructionism for one day to stick it to Michael Steele, given that the bill came about because of:
… a fundraising mailing from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele … The fundraising letter comes in the form of a “survey,” a frequently used device for partisan fundraising, but this one has a twist: calling itself the “Congressional District Census,” the letter comes in an envelope starkly printed with the words, “DO NOT DESTROY OFFICIAL DOCUMENT” and describes itself, on the outside of the envelope, as a “census document.”
House Republicans would willingly say no to mother’s milk for newborns if they could, but they say yes to putting the kibosh on what was described as “among the RNC’s most lucrative fundraising initiatives”?
They must really hate Michael Steele.
By Michael J.W. StickingsFirst, just a couple of weeks ago, it was for voting with the Democrats to move a jobs bill forward, now it’s for announcing he’ll vote to end a Republican filibuster on an unemployment benefits and tax credits bill. It’s for c…
By Michael J.W. StickingsCal. State Senator Roy Ashburn:I am gay. Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long. It is something that is personal, and I don’t believe I felt with my heart that being gay would affect how I do my j…
By Michael J.W. StickingsAccording to Tom DeLay, an indicted felon, “[p]eople are unemployed because they want to be.” That was the question asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley yesterday, and DeLay unleashed the view that is common on the right and among Repu…
By Michael J.W. StickingsAppearing on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said — I kid you not — that using reconciliation for health-care reform would be “catastrophic.”Remember when 9/11 supposedly marked the death of irony,…
The fallout has begun from the offensive, insulting and juvenile fundraising pitch by the GOP at its retreat in Boca Grande. Via Ben Smith at Politico:
A prominent Evangelical figure and Republican donor says he will end his contributions to the organized Republican Party in reaction to the leaked fundraising presentation that advised using “fear” to solicit contributions and displayed an image of President Obama as the Joker from Batman.
Mark DeMoss, who heads a major Christian public relations firm in Atlanta and served as a liaison to the Evangelical community for Mitt Romney in 2008, wrote Chairman Michael Steele yesterday that he was “ashamed” of the presentation, calling depictions of Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority Leader Harry Reid “shameful, immature and uncivil, at best.”
Ben Smith has the full text of DeMoss’ letter, copies of which were enclosed to all Republican Party Committees as well as the Congressional leadership. But here’s the key graf:
While I realize your office made steps to distance you from this presentation I’m afraid the presentation is representative of a culture and mindset within the Republican National Committee; consequently, I will no longer contribute to any fundraising entity of our Party—but will contribute only to individual candidates I choose to support.
The media may be generally unwilling to discuss Republican deficiencies as we approach the 2010 election, but the culture underlying this presentation ought to become a subject for discussion. This modern version of the GOP has shown itself to be an insular and insolent Party that thinks its insulting and degrading message will play well across the country. And the turning tide shows they’re not entirely right.
By Michael J.W. StickingsSen. Gregg of New Hampshire, almost a member of Obama’s Cabinet, has come out swinging against the use of reconciliation, but, speaking on the Senate floor on Thursday, he struck out. From his remarks:Why did they choose that b…
The Sunlight Foundation makes it really easy to understand just why Republicans are, shall we say, disingenuous when they talk about how extraordinary and undemocratic using reconciliation to pass legislation would be.
Click to see the full-sized image.
Lamar Alexander, John Barasso, Bob Bennett, Jim Bunning, Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mike Crapo, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Mike Enzi, Judd Gregg, Orrin Hatch, Mike Johanns, Mitch McConnell, James Risch, Jeff Sessions and John Thune. Those are the guys who decided Tuesday night that Americans limping along on meager unemployment benefits apparently are, in the word chosen by Nevada Rep. Dean Heller, “hobos.” They all voted against extending those benefits.
If you’re drawing such benefits in Tennessee, Kentucky, Wyoming, Utah or Idaho, you have both of your Senators to thank for telling you to get off the dole and get a job ya lazy bum. Yep. Who would want to work instead of enjoying all that these magnificent government checks will buy? It’s such a cush life on the $275 weekly maximum you can draw from unemployment coffers if you live in Tennessee, where the jobless rate is 10.9%. If it’s you, your spouse and a couple of kids in the family, those benefits will put you $8,000 below the federal poverty line.
That is, if you were lucky enough before being laid off to work in a job covered by unemployment insurance in the first place. Only 38% of out-of-work Americans have that option. But whether you’re covered by benefits or are one of the less fortunate 62%, the above 19 members of the Party of No Way, No How have a couple of words for you: Tough shit. Like Jim Bunning riding the Senators-only elevator, they all just keep giving out-of-work Americans the finger. Those exact same 19 Senators plus 19 of their Republican colleagues also voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act a year ago. And most of them were on board to oppose the teensy job-creation bill that passed the Senate last month.
Bums with comfy jobs and Cadillac health coverage, their snouts buried to the ears in the public trough, all of them saying no, no, no to the record 6.3 million who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. And yet they dare to show their faces in public.
By Capt. FoggIt’s funny how the things that characterized the United States in its best and most prosperous years are being characterized as bad for the country and a one way valve in the sewer pipe that leads to Marxism, while the days before we ha…
It’s a paradoxical strategy, but Republicans once again spent Sunday betting that their embrace of minority rule will somehow make them the majority party:
Wait…if Republicans get their way and win a majority of seats in Congress, won’t that mean Democrats are still in charge, at least by the GOP’s new rules?
By CreatureIf they really think passing health care reform is a huge electoral mistake for the Dems then they should let it pass (please). When up is down and the GOP is behind up, Dems would be crazy not to choose down.
No, really!
This initial post (plus this correction) reveal a fascinating pattern that emerges from asking self-identified conservatives about the spending cuts they’d want to see.
Longtime conservative bugaboos like “foreign aid” and “welfare” score high marks. But other than that, no single proposal reaches even so much as 25% support for cuts among conservatives. And the next highest-scoring answer was something of a surprise: “war on terrorism.” Well, I’ll be!
After that, the answers show extraordinarily low, and extremely disparate support for cutting anything else in particular, with no other sector or program even rising to 20% support for cuts. And remember, these are self-identified conservatives.
Foreign aid, of course, comprises only about 1% of the annual federal budget. Defining “welfare programs” for the purposes of assessing how much of the budget is spent on them, presents some problems. Are they all “entitlement programs?” That’d be a sizable budget chunk. But how to reconcile even that with the fact that while something like 35% of conservatives say they want to cut “welfare programs,” less than 10% say they’d cut “aid to the poor?” And if “welfare programs” is to include all entitlements, you’re gonna have a problem with the extremely poor support among conservatives for cutting Social Security.
The bottom line is that conservatives — probably like most Americans — say they want at least some spending cut, but can’t cobble together any serious majorities in favor of cutting anything in particular. Even foreign aid comes in below 50%, not that slashing it would help save much money, anyway. And yet, whenever there have to be cuts, the bulk of them by necessity must be those which would be extremely unpopular even among conservatives.
The only answer to that is probably the only thing even less popular with conservatives than cutting these programs, and that’s taxes. And again, taxes are unpopular with pretty much anyone who has to pay them, though it’s also generally said to be the case that the more liberal end of the spectrum is more open to their necessity than the other side. (We’ll have to see if any data is ever produced that will one day call that assumption into question.)
But in lieu of actual answers, what you get from the discordant mewling of loudmouth teabaggers and other conservative screechers is: a collection of complaints about which they cannot even come to a consensus regarding the measure of their suckitude. “Cut… stuff!” is what you’d get if you had to synthesize a message from this mess. Which is not unlike what you’re you actually seeing saw from them today on Thursday, now that they’ve been invited to a summit meeting to share their ideas for health care reform.
Is this truly a party with a coherent philosophy, supposedly poised to wrest back control of the government? It’s often said that Republicans are far better at stating their basic beliefs than Democrats, and they usually do it by making reference to smaller government, lower spending and lower taxes. But the only consensus they’re able to produce for that even among themselves is for lower taxes. Which is kind of how we got where we are with the budget in the first place. And which leaves Republicans in truth as the party that stands for the explosion of the budget, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s capable of remembering that Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus, wrung out of slaying the Reagan deficits.
Again, not unlike what’s what was on display at the summit today the other day. The Republican position on health care, like the Republican position on everything but taxes, is designed only to hold their base together on the fact that they’re angry about something, and want to beat Democrats at the polls in order to prove how angry they really are. What happens after that? Well, who gives a crap? Just cut my taxes.
Why do Republicans believe the government “do comprehensive well?” Because as long as they comprise some part of it, there’s only one thing they care about, and that’s withholding the means by which anything the government does can be paid for. And “bipartisan compromise” with them means finding the “middle ground” between doing something and preventing anything from being done.
It’s a fool’s errand, and all you need to do to quantify the foolishness is to ask them the simple question, “What do you want?”
We’ll see if anybody gets that down at Blair House today.
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