Sunday, October 06, 2013 2:06:53 AM
The Reign Of Morons Is Here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nvYO68K7iY [embedded]
By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 1, 2013 at 9:10AM
Only the truly naive can be truly surprised [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-s-goal-in-conference-gambit-unilateral-concessions ].
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-cusp-of-shutdown-house-conservatives-excited-say-they-are-doing-the-right-thing/2013/09/28/2a5ab618-285e-11e3-97e6-2e07cad1b77e_story.html ] of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.
Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.
*
FULL COVERAGE OF THE SHUTDOWN FROM CHARLES P. PIERCE…
• THE MORONS: A few profiles of the congresscritters behind the shutdown
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/shutdown-morons#slide-1 [ http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/shutdown-morons ]
• THE DEMOCRATS: The sellouts in the Democratic Party
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/claire-mccaskill-john-boehner-deal-100313
• THE REPUBLICANS: Public Policy Polling's profile of their radical beliefs
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/public-policy-polling-examines-the-republicans-100213
• MARLIN STUTZMAN: And his lonely war
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Endless_Victimhood
• AND SO MUCH MORE…
http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_tag/government%20shutdown/15;1
*
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues [with comments]
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This Is What They Want
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 2, 2013 at 10:00AM
Let's just spitball a bit here. Right now, even if their campaign of public vandalism ended at this very moment, the Republicans would still have three-quarters of a loaf because the status quo ante would be a federal budget at (or beneath) the spending levels mandated by The Sequester. Given that, what possible reason do the Republicans -- or, at least, those Republicans [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/us/politics/a-committed-group-of-conservatives-outflanks-the-house-leadership.html ] who are currently driving the strategy now -- have not to keep the government shut down not only through the upcoming debt ceiling fight, but for most of the rest of Barack Obama's term? (Chris Christie might not be president? Too bad.) There is no serious effort within the party's dwindling Sane People's Caucus to rein these people in -- Peter King? Please. -- and there's no power outside the party structure that's stronger than the combination of safe districts and independent money that has created the monkeyhouse in the first place. Their concern for the general national interest isn't worthy of discussion. They are doing what they want to do. They are getting [ http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/10/01/2706981/gop-congresswoman-and-fox-news-cheer-government-shutdown/ ] what they want.
"You know, I think you may see a partial shutdown for several days. But [Fox and Friend co-host] Steve [Doocy], people are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed," she said, prompting host Brian Kilmeade to add, "it's like the sequester all over."
This is the unspoken subtext of what the vandalism is all about. This is the real motivation behind all the tricornered hats and the incantations about liberty and all the conjuring words that have summoned up the latest crisis in our democracy. Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal -- the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people's only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor's political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they're more than halfway to winning it.
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Deep_Game [with comments]
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It Didn't Start With Ted Cruz
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 30, 2013 at 12:15PM
Molly Ball of The Atlantic is a very good political reporter. (For example, she's exactly right about the pipe dream that wrecking the economy will wring the crazee out of the Republican House.) The only advantage I have is that I'm a lot older than she is, and I've seen enough to know that her piece over the weekend about the intellectual decline [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-fall-of-the-heritage-foundation-and-the-death-of-republican-ideas/279955/ ] of the Heritage Foundation is a little thin on historical memory. To be sure, ever since Jim DeMint took over, Heritage has been less obviously about "ideas" -- and we'll get to those in a minute -- and more about raw, nihilistic wingnut politics. Ball is right about that. However, I also see in Ball's piece an example of what I believe to be an ahistorical effort at the moment to divorce the current conservative gotterdammerung from the historical continuum that made it inevitable. In short, there is absolutely nothing going on in conservative Washington right now that cannot be traced back to Reaganism, and to the forces behind its rise, of which Heritage was an important part.
For example, the idea of abandoning reason and empirical evidence in favor of apocryphal anecdotes was central to Ronald Reagan's entire public career. Welfare queens and their Cadillacs. Pollution-causing trees. Iranian moderates. It's not a long jump from those to Sarah Palin's death panels, and the complete failure of the press to challenge the triumph of that mythological universe that was crucial to Reagan's own triumph legitimized that kind of thing in our politics forever.
Moreover, a familiar pattern of Republican vandalism was set during the 1980 Reagan campaign. Aides talked openly of crippling government functions of which they disapproved. They would refuse to fund them. They would cut their staffing. They called this "defunding the Left." (Calling it "starving the beast" came later.) Once in office, they not only did what they said they were going to do, but they came up with another bit of trickeration that has survived to this day. They appointed people who hated the functions of the institutions they were picked to lead. This is how we had James Watt as Secretary Of The Interior. This is how we got Anne Gorsuch at the EPA. (Later, this is how we got Elaine Chao as Secretary of Labor.) As the late Walter Karp wrote at the time:
"...Revolutionary, indeed, is the power of a President's clerks to dispense multimillion dollar favors in secret, a tyrant's power, nothing less, grossly abused already, as what tyrant's power is not?..."
This is whence come the notion that the government must be chloroformed until we get everything we want, even if we lose elections, and even if what we're destroying might be both helpful and popular. This is its historical pedigree. What Ted Cruz is doing is pure Reaganism, without the sunny disposition and the increasingly befogged rationalizations. Cruz is its predictable evolutionary product. The electoral success of the "ideas" from what Ball argues was the glory days of the Heritage Foundation produced the Tea Party. Ed Feulner made Jim DeMint more than possible. He made him inevitable. Consider the ideas Ball specifically cites as an example of what Heritage used to be.
The result, called Mandate for Leadership, epitomized the intellectual ambition of the then-rising conservative movement. Its 20 volumes, totaling more than 3,000 pages, included such proposals as income-tax cuts, inner-city "enterprise zones," a presidential line-item veto, and a new Air Force bomber.
What goes unmentioned is the fact that every one of these ideas was either bad on its face, or politically futile. "Enterprise zones," beloved of the late Jack Kemp, were doomed in a conservative ascendancy founded so centrally on the flotsam of American white-supremacy and during a time of increasingly unbridled corporate power, which latter happened as a result of Heritage's notion of regulatory reform. "Enterprise zones" became code for developing maquiladores in American cities. In addition to being an obvious slouch toward authoritarianism, the presidential line-item veto was so nakedly unconstitutional that even William Fking Rehnquist noticed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/supcourt/stories/wp062698.htm ]. It wasn't a policy idea. It was a slogan. And it was Heritage that lathered intellectual respectability onto the economic fairy-tale that was supply-side economics, an "idea" that has done more damage to the American economy than almost any other, and which now is nothing less than Holy Writ to the nihilists in the House who want Paul Ryan's "budget" passed as a condition for the continued operation of the American government. None of this is coincidence.There is a tremendous resistance to the notion of connecting the current Republican dementia to its ultimate source; how many times have we heard how Reagan "wouldn't have a place" in the current Republican party? (The Chris Matthews-led nostalgia for what Digby calls TipnRonnie is a variation on that same theme.) They would know their children when they saw them.
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/molly-ball-heritage-foundation-article-093013 [with comments]
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The Shutdown Prophet
Illustration by Oliver Munday
Washington couldn’t have gone dark without a radicalized Republican Party. Or maybe it was destined to all along.
By Jonathan Chait
Published Oct 4, 2013
In a merciful twist of fate, Juan Linz did not quite live to see his prophecy of the demise of American democracy borne out. Linz, the Spanish political scientist who died last week, argued that the presidential system, with its separate elections for legislature and chief executive, was inherently unstable. In a famous 1990 essay, Linz observed, “All such systems are based on dual democratic legitimacy: No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people.” Presidential systems veered ultimately toward collapse everywhere they were tried, as legislators and executives vied for supremacy. There was only one notable exception: the United States of America.
Linz attributed our puzzling, anomalous stability to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties.” The Republicans had loads of moderates, and conservative whites in the South still clung to the Democratic Party. At the time he wrote that, the two parties were already sorting themselves into more ideologically pure versions, leaving us where we stand today: with one racially and economically polyglot party of center-left technocracy and one ethnically homogenous reactionary party. The latter is currently attempting to impose its program by threat upon the former. The events in Washington have given us a peek into the Linzian nightmare.
Traditionally, when American politics encountered the problem of divided government—when, say, Nixon and Eisenhower encountered Democratic Congresses, or Bill Clinton a Republican one—one of two things happened. Either both sides found enough incentives to work together despite their differences, or there was what we used to recognize as the only alternative: gridlock. Gridlock is what most of us expected after the last election produced a Democratic president and Republican House. Washington would drudge on; it would be hard to get anything done, but also hard to undo anything. Days after the election, John Boehner, no doubt anticipating things would carry on as always, said, “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Instead, to the slowly unfolding horror of the Obama administration and even some segments of the Republican Party, the GOP decided that the alternative to finding common ground with the president did not have to be mere gridlock. It could force the president to enact its agenda. In January, Boehner told his colleagues he’d abandon all policy negotiations with the White House. Later that spring, House Republicans extended the freeze-out to the Democratic-majority Senate, which has since issued (as of press time) eighteen futile pleas for budget negotiations. Their plan has been to carry out their agenda by using what they call “leverage” or “forcing events” to threaten economic and social harm and thereby extract concessions from President Obama without needing to make any policy concessions in return. Paul Ryan offered the most candid admission of his party’s determined use of non-electoral power: “The reason this debt-limit fight is different is we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” he said at the end of September. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”
Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.
The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.
The standoff embroiling Washington represents far more than the specifics of the demands on the table, or even the prospect of economic calamity. It is an incipient constitutional crisis. Obama foolishly set the precedent in 2011 that he would let Congress jack him up for a debt-ceiling hike. He now has to crush the practice completely, lest it become ritualized. Obama not only must refuse to trade concessions for a debt-ceiling hike; he has to make it clear that he will endure default before he submits to ransom. To pay a ransom now, even a tiny one, would ensure an endless succession of debt-ceiling ransoms until, eventually, the two sides fail to agree on the correct size of the ransom and default follows.
This is a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. A single blunder could have unalterable consequences: If Obama buckles his no-ransom stance, the debt-ceiling-hostage genie will be out of the bottle. If Republicans believe he is bluffing, or accept his position but obstinately refuse it, or try to lift the debt ceiling and simply botch the vote count, a second Great Recession could ensue.
When Linz contemplated the sorts of crises endemic to presidential systems, he imagined intractable claims of competing legitimacy—charismatic leaders riding great passionate mobs, insisting they alone represented the will of the people. The present crisis is a variation of that. Republicans insistently point to polls showing disapproval of the Affordable Care Act—a kind of assertion of legitimacy via direct referendum, implicitly rebuking Obama’s counter-argument that the presidential election settled the issue of repealing the Affordable Care Act. But the Republican position rests more heavily on the logic of extortion rather than popular mandate. “No one wants to default, but we are not going to continue to give the president a limitless credit card,” warned Republican representative Jason Chaffetz earlier this year. Obama “will not permit an economic crisis worse than 2008–09,” wrote former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen, and thus “has no choice but to negotiate with GOP leaders.” Republicans argue that Obama bears all responsibility for avoiding a national catastrophe; Obama argues that both sides bear an equal amount every day—and that this particular mess is not his to clean up.
How to settle this dispute? Here is where Linz’s analysis rings chillingly true: “There is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the Constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” This is a fight with no rules. The power struggle will be resolved as a pure contest of willpower.
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.
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC
http://nymag.com/news/politics/nationalinterest/government-shutdown-2013-10/ [with comments]
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The latest cover of Esquire Weekly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nvYO68K7iY [embedded]
By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 1, 2013 at 9:10AM
Only the truly naive can be truly surprised [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-s-goal-in-conference-gambit-unilateral-concessions ].
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-cusp-of-shutdown-house-conservatives-excited-say-they-are-doing-the-right-thing/2013/09/28/2a5ab618-285e-11e3-97e6-2e07cad1b77e_story.html ] of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.
Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.
*
FULL COVERAGE OF THE SHUTDOWN FROM CHARLES P. PIERCE…
• THE MORONS: A few profiles of the congresscritters behind the shutdown
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/shutdown-morons#slide-1 [ http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/shutdown-morons ]
• THE DEMOCRATS: The sellouts in the Democratic Party
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/claire-mccaskill-john-boehner-deal-100313
• THE REPUBLICANS: Public Policy Polling's profile of their radical beliefs
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/public-policy-polling-examines-the-republicans-100213
• MARLIN STUTZMAN: And his lonely war
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Endless_Victimhood
• AND SO MUCH MORE…
http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_tag/government%20shutdown/15;1
*
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues [with comments]
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This Is What They Want
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 2, 2013 at 10:00AM
Let's just spitball a bit here. Right now, even if their campaign of public vandalism ended at this very moment, the Republicans would still have three-quarters of a loaf because the status quo ante would be a federal budget at (or beneath) the spending levels mandated by The Sequester. Given that, what possible reason do the Republicans -- or, at least, those Republicans [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/us/politics/a-committed-group-of-conservatives-outflanks-the-house-leadership.html ] who are currently driving the strategy now -- have not to keep the government shut down not only through the upcoming debt ceiling fight, but for most of the rest of Barack Obama's term? (Chris Christie might not be president? Too bad.) There is no serious effort within the party's dwindling Sane People's Caucus to rein these people in -- Peter King? Please. -- and there's no power outside the party structure that's stronger than the combination of safe districts and independent money that has created the monkeyhouse in the first place. Their concern for the general national interest isn't worthy of discussion. They are doing what they want to do. They are getting [ http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/10/01/2706981/gop-congresswoman-and-fox-news-cheer-government-shutdown/ ] what they want.
"You know, I think you may see a partial shutdown for several days. But [Fox and Friend co-host] Steve [Doocy], people are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed," she said, prompting host Brian Kilmeade to add, "it's like the sequester all over."
This is the unspoken subtext of what the vandalism is all about. This is the real motivation behind all the tricornered hats and the incantations about liberty and all the conjuring words that have summoned up the latest crisis in our democracy. Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal -- the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people's only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor's political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they're more than halfway to winning it.
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Deep_Game [with comments]
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It Didn't Start With Ted Cruz
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 30, 2013 at 12:15PM
Molly Ball of The Atlantic is a very good political reporter. (For example, she's exactly right about the pipe dream that wrecking the economy will wring the crazee out of the Republican House.) The only advantage I have is that I'm a lot older than she is, and I've seen enough to know that her piece over the weekend about the intellectual decline [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-fall-of-the-heritage-foundation-and-the-death-of-republican-ideas/279955/ ] of the Heritage Foundation is a little thin on historical memory. To be sure, ever since Jim DeMint took over, Heritage has been less obviously about "ideas" -- and we'll get to those in a minute -- and more about raw, nihilistic wingnut politics. Ball is right about that. However, I also see in Ball's piece an example of what I believe to be an ahistorical effort at the moment to divorce the current conservative gotterdammerung from the historical continuum that made it inevitable. In short, there is absolutely nothing going on in conservative Washington right now that cannot be traced back to Reaganism, and to the forces behind its rise, of which Heritage was an important part.
For example, the idea of abandoning reason and empirical evidence in favor of apocryphal anecdotes was central to Ronald Reagan's entire public career. Welfare queens and their Cadillacs. Pollution-causing trees. Iranian moderates. It's not a long jump from those to Sarah Palin's death panels, and the complete failure of the press to challenge the triumph of that mythological universe that was crucial to Reagan's own triumph legitimized that kind of thing in our politics forever.
Moreover, a familiar pattern of Republican vandalism was set during the 1980 Reagan campaign. Aides talked openly of crippling government functions of which they disapproved. They would refuse to fund them. They would cut their staffing. They called this "defunding the Left." (Calling it "starving the beast" came later.) Once in office, they not only did what they said they were going to do, but they came up with another bit of trickeration that has survived to this day. They appointed people who hated the functions of the institutions they were picked to lead. This is how we had James Watt as Secretary Of The Interior. This is how we got Anne Gorsuch at the EPA. (Later, this is how we got Elaine Chao as Secretary of Labor.) As the late Walter Karp wrote at the time:
"...Revolutionary, indeed, is the power of a President's clerks to dispense multimillion dollar favors in secret, a tyrant's power, nothing less, grossly abused already, as what tyrant's power is not?..."
This is whence come the notion that the government must be chloroformed until we get everything we want, even if we lose elections, and even if what we're destroying might be both helpful and popular. This is its historical pedigree. What Ted Cruz is doing is pure Reaganism, without the sunny disposition and the increasingly befogged rationalizations. Cruz is its predictable evolutionary product. The electoral success of the "ideas" from what Ball argues was the glory days of the Heritage Foundation produced the Tea Party. Ed Feulner made Jim DeMint more than possible. He made him inevitable. Consider the ideas Ball specifically cites as an example of what Heritage used to be.
The result, called Mandate for Leadership, epitomized the intellectual ambition of the then-rising conservative movement. Its 20 volumes, totaling more than 3,000 pages, included such proposals as income-tax cuts, inner-city "enterprise zones," a presidential line-item veto, and a new Air Force bomber.
What goes unmentioned is the fact that every one of these ideas was either bad on its face, or politically futile. "Enterprise zones," beloved of the late Jack Kemp, were doomed in a conservative ascendancy founded so centrally on the flotsam of American white-supremacy and during a time of increasingly unbridled corporate power, which latter happened as a result of Heritage's notion of regulatory reform. "Enterprise zones" became code for developing maquiladores in American cities. In addition to being an obvious slouch toward authoritarianism, the presidential line-item veto was so nakedly unconstitutional that even William Fking Rehnquist noticed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/supcourt/stories/wp062698.htm ]. It wasn't a policy idea. It was a slogan. And it was Heritage that lathered intellectual respectability onto the economic fairy-tale that was supply-side economics, an "idea" that has done more damage to the American economy than almost any other, and which now is nothing less than Holy Writ to the nihilists in the House who want Paul Ryan's "budget" passed as a condition for the continued operation of the American government. None of this is coincidence.There is a tremendous resistance to the notion of connecting the current Republican dementia to its ultimate source; how many times have we heard how Reagan "wouldn't have a place" in the current Republican party? (The Chris Matthews-led nostalgia for what Digby calls TipnRonnie is a variation on that same theme.) They would know their children when they saw them.
©2013 Hearst Communications, Inc.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/molly-ball-heritage-foundation-article-093013 [with comments]
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The Shutdown Prophet
Illustration by Oliver Munday
Washington couldn’t have gone dark without a radicalized Republican Party. Or maybe it was destined to all along.
By Jonathan Chait
Published Oct 4, 2013
In a merciful twist of fate, Juan Linz did not quite live to see his prophecy of the demise of American democracy borne out. Linz, the Spanish political scientist who died last week, argued that the presidential system, with its separate elections for legislature and chief executive, was inherently unstable. In a famous 1990 essay, Linz observed, “All such systems are based on dual democratic legitimacy: No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people.” Presidential systems veered ultimately toward collapse everywhere they were tried, as legislators and executives vied for supremacy. There was only one notable exception: the United States of America.
Linz attributed our puzzling, anomalous stability to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties.” The Republicans had loads of moderates, and conservative whites in the South still clung to the Democratic Party. At the time he wrote that, the two parties were already sorting themselves into more ideologically pure versions, leaving us where we stand today: with one racially and economically polyglot party of center-left technocracy and one ethnically homogenous reactionary party. The latter is currently attempting to impose its program by threat upon the former. The events in Washington have given us a peek into the Linzian nightmare.
Traditionally, when American politics encountered the problem of divided government—when, say, Nixon and Eisenhower encountered Democratic Congresses, or Bill Clinton a Republican one—one of two things happened. Either both sides found enough incentives to work together despite their differences, or there was what we used to recognize as the only alternative: gridlock. Gridlock is what most of us expected after the last election produced a Democratic president and Republican House. Washington would drudge on; it would be hard to get anything done, but also hard to undo anything. Days after the election, John Boehner, no doubt anticipating things would carry on as always, said, “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Instead, to the slowly unfolding horror of the Obama administration and even some segments of the Republican Party, the GOP decided that the alternative to finding common ground with the president did not have to be mere gridlock. It could force the president to enact its agenda. In January, Boehner told his colleagues he’d abandon all policy negotiations with the White House. Later that spring, House Republicans extended the freeze-out to the Democratic-majority Senate, which has since issued (as of press time) eighteen futile pleas for budget negotiations. Their plan has been to carry out their agenda by using what they call “leverage” or “forcing events” to threaten economic and social harm and thereby extract concessions from President Obama without needing to make any policy concessions in return. Paul Ryan offered the most candid admission of his party’s determined use of non-electoral power: “The reason this debt-limit fight is different is we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” he said at the end of September. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”
Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.
The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.
The standoff embroiling Washington represents far more than the specifics of the demands on the table, or even the prospect of economic calamity. It is an incipient constitutional crisis. Obama foolishly set the precedent in 2011 that he would let Congress jack him up for a debt-ceiling hike. He now has to crush the practice completely, lest it become ritualized. Obama not only must refuse to trade concessions for a debt-ceiling hike; he has to make it clear that he will endure default before he submits to ransom. To pay a ransom now, even a tiny one, would ensure an endless succession of debt-ceiling ransoms until, eventually, the two sides fail to agree on the correct size of the ransom and default follows.
This is a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. A single blunder could have unalterable consequences: If Obama buckles his no-ransom stance, the debt-ceiling-hostage genie will be out of the bottle. If Republicans believe he is bluffing, or accept his position but obstinately refuse it, or try to lift the debt ceiling and simply botch the vote count, a second Great Recession could ensue.
When Linz contemplated the sorts of crises endemic to presidential systems, he imagined intractable claims of competing legitimacy—charismatic leaders riding great passionate mobs, insisting they alone represented the will of the people. The present crisis is a variation of that. Republicans insistently point to polls showing disapproval of the Affordable Care Act—a kind of assertion of legitimacy via direct referendum, implicitly rebuking Obama’s counter-argument that the presidential election settled the issue of repealing the Affordable Care Act. But the Republican position rests more heavily on the logic of extortion rather than popular mandate. “No one wants to default, but we are not going to continue to give the president a limitless credit card,” warned Republican representative Jason Chaffetz earlier this year. Obama “will not permit an economic crisis worse than 2008–09,” wrote former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen, and thus “has no choice but to negotiate with GOP leaders.” Republicans argue that Obama bears all responsibility for avoiding a national catastrophe; Obama argues that both sides bear an equal amount every day—and that this particular mess is not his to clean up.
How to settle this dispute? Here is where Linz’s analysis rings chillingly true: “There is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the Constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” This is a fight with no rules. The power struggle will be resolved as a pure contest of willpower.
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.
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC
http://nymag.com/news/politics/nationalinterest/government-shutdown-2013-10/ [with comments]
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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