rising Democratic majority

Is the Rising Democratic Majority Doomed? by Jonathan Chait

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart April 23, 2014

Great rant at about the 8:00 minute mark.

Washington Post Discovers Worksharing by Dean Baker

Obama's 2013

What Obama Is Really Trying to Do in the State of the Union Address by Jonathan Chait

...What, then, has the administration done with the last year? The first thing it did was wage a political war to assert, or reassert, the basic legitimacy of the executive branch. In my preview of Obama’s second term, I wrote, “The necessary predicate [for a successful second term] is for Republicans to accept Obama as a legitimate president.” 

In 2013, Republicans were not prepared to make that concession. The congressional GOP undertook a campaign to strip Obama of the normal presidential powers, in two ways. One was by using the threats of a government shutdown and a debt default as “leverage,” which could force the president to surrender policy concessions to Congress without any policy trades. The second was an unprecedented move to blockade any appointment at all to vacant executive branch and judicial positions. Much of the drama of 2013 was consumed with Obama and his Democratic allies successfully beating back this ambitious Republican effort to reshape the power dynamic between the branches of government. 

The end results — new limits on the filibuster, and the crushing of the hostage-taking strategy — were not preordained. (Indeed, most pundits predicted Obama’s counterattack would fail. Here’s Chris Cillizza predicting last summer that Senate Democrats would never limit the filibuster; here are various pundits predicting Obama would have to pay a debt-ceiling ransom.) But if Obama had not beaten back the assault on the presidency, he would now be in no position to carry out the work his administration is undertaking. 

For instance, having managed to install a chairman of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the administration has finalized key rules in the Dodd-Frank law. Those regulations have received little attention, but the end result is that even many liberal skeptics now say the law is far tougher on Wall Street than they originally believed. And having filled the vacancies on the crucial D.C. Circuit Court, the administration is much better positioned to defend itself from the inevitable legal attacks on its regulations on the environment and elsewhere. 

The other major implementation project of 2013 was the Obamacare rollout. That, of course, was an utter debacle of such a scale that even mentioning the administration’s successes alongside it has a mordant, pitiful ring of “Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” The shoddy website helped launch a wave of disastrous news coverage, spreading out to other, more predictable transition problems, like people who received cancellation notices. The failed Obamacare launch has dragged the president’s approval ratings into anomalously low territory, threatening to turn the midterm elections, which already favored the GOP, into a chance to hand Republicans control of the Senate.

Those low approval ratings provide the impetus for Obama’s splashy new message. Everything about Obama’s messaging — the image of vigorous unilateral action, the laser focus on jobs, the small but popular policy initiatives attached to it — serve the goal of patching up the president’s standing and framing the Washington story in the most favorable terms possible. The State of the Union address is not an effort to fundamentally reorient the administration’s strategy. It’s a campaign to mend the political damage from the botched Obamacare launch.

debt ceiling clown show - theater of the absurd

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell Issue Least Frightening Hostage Threat Ever by Jonathan Chait

Last Sunday, when Paul Ryan announced on Fox News Sunday that Republicans would again demand policy concessions in return for lifting the debt ceiling, I paid little attention, in part because the host, Chris Wallace, appeared to push Ryan into it (WALLACE: Sir, I understand, but the question is, are you going to demand more in return for raising the deficit? RYAN: We as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit. We don't want nothing out of this debt limit.) But now Mitch McConnell, too, says he “can’t imagine” passing a clean debt-ceiling hike.

Are the Republicans really going to try this again? 

Unlike the last debt-ceiling hostage crisis, which resulted from explicable (though disturbing) internal party dynamics, the prospect of a new round of threats seems bizarre. We tested this threat a couple of months ago. Republicans swore up and down they would refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless they got concessions, and President Obama swore up and down he wouldn’t give concessions.

The result was in no way ambiguous. There were no concessions. Not a future commission, not a show vote, not handwritten letters. Zip. Obama tested the Republican willingness to trigger a worldwide economic meltdown to obtain concessions, and it turned out, they won’t pull the trigger. How on Earth they think they can try this bluff again, I can’t imagine. 

Indeed, political conditions for the threat are even less favorable now that the two parties have agreed to a budget. Republicans used to have the substantively crazy but popular-sounding justification that they didn’t want to “write Obama a blank check.” But now the two parties agree on the level of spending this year. Raising the debt limit is needed to authorize the spending Republicans want. (Of course, we could avoid a debt limit hike by jacking up taxes, but obviously they don’t want to do that.) 

Clearly, they’re not going to win. The question is why they’re making a threat when Obama knows they can’t carry it out. Why wind up conservative activists for a new fight that’s doomed to failure? Nothing about this threat makes any sense. 

Update: In a conservative talk radio interview, Ryan elaborates. Ryan really brings the crazy here:

With respect to the debt limit, you and I and our colleagues are going to have to meet early after the holidays to decide what’s the right course going forward in that. We’ve never just done nothing.

"We've never just done nothing"? Never? How about, I don't know, the last time you raised the debt ceiling? 

Ryan continues:

We want to make sure that we’re taking steps in the direction of fiscal conservatism, of fiscal responsibility. I, for one, think we need to do more in the energy sector. I believe we need to approve Keystone Pipeline.

So your steps toward fiscal responsibility involve approving a pipeline? A pipeline with no measurable budgetary impact.

budget deal

Washington Basks in Extremely Tiny Bipartisan Accomplishment by Jonathan Chait

So, for the most part, something White House aides hastily drew up in the summer of 2011 as a trigger has become, for the most part, settled policy. How did a result the administration would have dismissed as a worse-case scenario come to pass? The first reason is that the White House mistakenly took Republican denunciations of the long-term debt at face value. Since Republicans appeared desperate to cut retirement programs, Obama assumed they would trade some form of higher tax revenue to get it. But the GOP’s opposition to higher taxes in any form, even closing loopholes, has trumped its commitment to lower spending for more than three decades. 

Second, the administration failed to grasp that, alongside their aversion to higher taxes, conservatives had turned against policy-making itself. This is a transformation I failed to notice as well when I assumed in 2011 that the parties would find a way to muddle through and avoid the pain. The 2011 debt-ceiling agreement rested on the premise that, if the default was budget cuts deliberately designed to make both parties unhappy, both parties would cut some kind of deal. 

But the conservative movement opposes not just the substance of compromise but the process itself....

It is true that this deal, by itself, never balances the budget. But even if that’s your goal, why should that prevent you from supporting something? The normal standards of evaluating legislation – does this improve things relative to the status quo – have become completely alien on the right. Look at the way Barbara Mikulski, one of the most liberal senators, frames the deal: “I will have to take a $45 billion downgrade from the Senate number, but the House is coming up $45 billion, so I think that’s a rational compromise.” 

Halfway between what one party wants and what the other party wants is her definition of a fair bargain. Now look at how conservatives frame the same thing. Here’s a Heritage Foundation op-ed:

Under the deal, discretionary spending would rise to $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 trillion in 2015, a $63 billion total increase (though it does little to provide a real and sustained fix for President Obama's mismanagement of defense). This is a significant achievement for the president, who believes that government spending is a panacea to America's economic woes.

There’s no sense whatsoever that the other party, which controls one chamber of Congress and the White House, ought to have any say at all. “My party should get everything” is the presumed starting and ending point.

over? until January?

Almost Over by Krugman

Senate Republicans have figured out what to do:





It ain’t over until the tanned man sings, but it looks as if Obama’s Michael Corleone strategy has succeeded.

Senators Near Deal on GOP Surrender by Jonathan Chair

This is a huge win for those Republicans who got into the shutdown to help unions. For those who had other goals, it's basically a total surrender. The policy changes attached to the deal appear to be minor, and reciprocal — each party got something of roughly equal value, so the deal could have occurred without the threat of default or shutdown. Democrats probably will have succeeded in their overall goal of giving Republicans nothing through extortion they could not have gotten through regular legislation.

Republicans are delusional about US spending and deficits by Dean Baker

 John Boehner Is Borrowing a Plan From Homer Simpson by Jonathan Chait

Here’s the best rule for determining what John Boehner will do in any situation: If there is a way for him to delay a moment of confrontation or political risk, he will do it. That’s why Boehner’s current plan is to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks while keeping the government shut down.

Business is freaked out and will be furious with him if he triggers a default. So he’s raising the debt ceiling for long enough to get them off his back. And tea-partiers will be furious if he abandons their quest to defund Obamacare by shutting down the government. So he’s leaving that part in place.

Is there a plausible strategic logic to this plan? None that I can see. The putative reason for delaying the debt limit is to open fiscal negotiations with Democrats. But Republicans have been dodging fiscal negotiations with Democrats for most of the year. Why? Because they don’t want to compromise on the budget. They want unilateral concessions.

Obama won’t give Republicans unilateral concessions. Any deal Boehner strikes with Democrats will have to contain some concessions to Democrats, which will further enrage the tea party. So there’s no deal Boehner can cut on the budget that won’t anger the base, which brings us back to the same stalemate — waiting until the next debt-limit hike, when he needs to prevent catastrophe again.

The Shutdown Prophet by Jonathan Chait 

In our Founders’ defense, it’s hard to design any political system strong enough to withstand a party as ideologically radical and epistemically closed as the contemporary GOP. (Its proximate casus belli—forestalling the onset of universal health insurance—is alien to every other major conservative party in the industrialized world.) The tea-party insurgents turn out to be right that the Obama era has seen a fundamental challenge to the constitutional order of American government. They were wrong about who was waging it.

capitulation on shutdown and debt ceiling simultaneously

From the Times, on John Boehner’s position:

The overarching problem for the man at the center of the budget fight, say allies and opponents, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the fiscal showdown. 

They are only trying to survive another day, Republican strategists say, hoping to maintain unity as long as possible so that when the Republican position collapses, they can capitulate on two issues at once — financing the government and raising the debt ceiling — and head off any internal party backlash. 

(via Krugman)

The Republicans Are Starting to Reek of Desperation by Jonathan Chait

shutdown, no default?

The House GOP’s shutdown plan is great news by Ezra Klein

Spielberg's Lincoln is on cable tonight.

The Debt-Ceiling Showdown Is the Fight of Obama’s Life by Jonathan Chait

The progression of events begins with a dynamic I described in a print piece at the beginning of 2012 – conservatives had come to regard the 2012 race as their last chance to win an election as authentic conservatives against a rising Democratic majority. Since their crushing defeat, they have ignored the task of refurbishing the party’s national appeal for its next national electoral bid, and instead have recommitted themselves to waging increasingly millenarian confrontations from their existing red state power base in Congress.
...
If outsiders have failed to grasp the motivations of the House Republicans, puzzling at their odd redoubling of ideological fervor since November, they have likewise mistaken Obama. Everything I have seen from Obama suggests he understands that he cannot repeat his blunder of 2011, when he mistook the GOP’s debt-ceiling threat for an invitation to engage in normal fiscal bargaining.
...
Yet Obama simply has no alternative but to accept that risk. The stakes are higher than resisting the specific demands Republicans are making, and higher even than the economic havoc of a debt breach. Obama is fighting to save his presidency.

Ted Cruz Now Ruining John Boehner’s Life, Too by Jonathan Chait

(world's smallest violin)

The Republican Party right now most closely resembles a Weatherman gathering from about 1969, with various factions debating the feasibility of immediate communist revolution versus building a working-class movement as a prelude to smashing the state. As such, distinguishing the various gradients of ideological fanaticism has become an increasingly abstruse task.

The agenda has largely been driven by the “Defund Obamacare” faction, led by Ted Cruz, which proposes to shut down the federal government until such time as President Obama agrees to abolish his health-care plan, which would of course be never. That faction has failed in the Senate, which voted today to keep the government open without demanding the defunding of Obamacare. (Twenty-three Republican senators joined all of the Democrats.)

Calgarian candidate

The blame should lie with Boeher, but Cruz gave the not-credible impression that sending the CR defunding Obamacare to the Senate was somehow worthwhile. The other Senate Republicans are saying it's stupid.

Looks like it's a way for the Tea Party to single out Republican Senators who vote for Romneycare.

Knowing When to Worry by Gail Collins

Ted Cruz Turns Obamacare Defunding Plan From Disaster to Utter Fiasco by Jonathan Chait

Step one of this far-fetched scheme was the passage of a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government open, attached to abolishing Obamacare. Now it goes to the Senate. Once that bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, the majority can vote to strip away the provision defunding Obamacare. That vote can’t be filibustered. It’s a simple majority vote, and Democrats have the majority.

What Senate Republicans can do is filibuster to prevent the bill from coming to a vote at all. That’s the only recourse the Senate defunders have. And Ted Cruz is promising to do just that: “ I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together,” he says, “and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.” A “committed defunder” in the Senate likewise tells David Drucker, “Reid must not be allowed to fund Obamacare with only 51 votes.” 

In other words, the new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting. 

But what if it succeeds? Well, success means the government shuts down because the Senate Republican majority has successfully filibustered a vote on the House bill preventing a shutdown.

Profligate Zombies by Krugman

David Brooks: making stuff up, again by Doug Henwood

Godzilla vs. Bambi, Op-ed edition by Jonathan Chait

Killing the Euro by Krugman

But to close the gap through rising prices in the north, policy makers would have to accept temporarily higher inflation for the euro area as a whole. And they’ve made it clear that they won’t. Last April, in fact, the European Central Bank began raising interest rates, even though it was obvious to most observers that underlying inflation was, if anything, too low.

And it’s probably no coincidence that April was also when the euro crisis entered its new, dire phase. Never mind Greece, whose economy is to Europe roughly as greater Miami is to the United States. At this point, markets have lost faith in the euro as a whole, driving up interest rates even for countries like Austria and Finland, hardly known for profligacy. And it’s not hard to see why. The combination of austerity-for-all and a central bank morbidly obsessed with inflation makes it essentially impossible for indebted countries to escape from their debt trap and is, therefore, a recipe for widespread debt defaults, bank runs and general financial collapse.

I hope, for our sake as well as theirs, that the Europeans will change course before it’s too late. But, to be honest, I don’t believe they will. In fact, what’s much more likely is that we will follow them down the path to ruin.

For in America, as in Europe, the economy is being dragged down by troubled debtors — in our case, mainly homeowners. And here, too, we desperately need expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to support the economy as these debtors struggle back to financial health. Yet, as in Europe, public discourse is dominated by deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.

So the next time you hear someone claiming that if we don’t slash spending we’ll turn into Greece, your answer should be that if we do slash spending while the economy is still in a depression, we’ll turn into Europe. In fact, we’re well on our way.

Jonathan Chait leaving the New Republic

What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama by Jonathan Chait

Jonathan Chait on FDR and Reagan's re-elections.

... That caveat aside, this sounds like pure delusion. Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 had high unemployment, yes. But they also had very rapid economic growth. Here's the picture in 1936:

And 1984:

These were situations where the public could discern rapid improvement from a bad situation. No such thing is likely to be the case next year. 1936 and 1984 are not good lessons. They're counter-examples, like learning how to handle a drought by studying what happened during Hurricane Katrina.

Liberalism's bumper sticker problem by Jonathan Chait

The Achilles Heel Of The Path To Prosperity by Jonathan Chait

And certainly some level of cutting is necessary. But Ryan's level of cutting goes far beyond what's needed to preserve those programs, and it does so in order to clear room for a very large, regressive tax cut. He is making a choice -- not just cut Medicare to save Medicare, but also to cut Medicare in order to cut taxes for the rich.

Ryan does not want to debate that choice, but he ought to be forced to do so. That is exactly what Bill Clinton did to defeat the Republicans in 1995. Indeed, the debate was virtually identical. Republicans insisted the debt constituted an existential threat. They proposed to "save" Medicare by privatizing it. And Clinton pointed out that their plan cut Medicare in order to finance a regressive tax cut. He won the argument because Medicare is highly popular and tax cuts for the rich aren't. 

Indeed, the divide on this issue is so overwhelming that Republicans simply refuse to acknowledge their position.

(via DeLong)

Ryan to 32M Americans: No Insurance for You by Jonathan Cohn

David Brooks Is Excited: Paul Ryans Kicks the Elderly While Protecting the Wealthy by Dean Baker

Countervailing Winds

Jonathan Chait writes:

Ezra Klein has a good column this weekend pointing out that the discussion of federal deficits and the stimulus misses the fact that the federal stimulus has, at best, merely counteracted the anti-stimulus from the states. State governments must balance their budgets, which means that during recessions they cut spending and raise taxes, which in turn deepens the recession.