Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

GOP's Tea Party wing bungles Ronald Reagan legacy, dashes hopes for end to debt crisis


Tea Party members convene at a rally at the Texas state capitol in January.
Ben Sklar/Getty


Former President Ronald Reagan
Scott Stewart/AP

BY Matthew Dallek
Wednesday, July 27th 2011, 4:00 AM

One quip now making the rounds is that the Republican Party has moved so far right that even Ronald Reagan couldn't win his party's presidential nomination. That claim is not without merit. The debt ceiling deadlock has made it especially clear: Reagan's actions as President might not have have passed the smell test in today's Tea Party-driven Republican Party.

After all, Reagan signed tax hikes when he was both California governor and President of the United States. He agreed to bipartisan legislation in 1983 that actually strengthened Social Security, one of the pillars of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1986, Reagan agreed to a deal that reformed the tax code, raised the capital gains tax rate and closed tax shelters - in contrast to today's Republican leaders, who refuse to consider any revenue increases in the debt negotiations.

Reagan evinced a pragmatic streak as a sitting governor and President. Yet "pragmatism" is a dirty word in the ranks of today's Tea Party activists.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reportedly had an offer from President Obama that would have included a tax reform package generating some new revenues along with significant cuts in government spending. While Reagan, as President, signed a somewhat similar deal, Boehner, as speaker, has balked - under pressure from his right flank.

But differences aren't the only part of this story. Reagan isn't completely estranged from Tea Party Republicans; in fact, the former President and his successors have more in common with one another than we often acknowledge. Republicans of 2011 have absorbed arguably the most destructive features of Reagan's political legacy. They have taken up his blind allegiance to cutting government spending, sounded his anti-government rhetoric and followed in his deficit-making steps.

Remember, Reagan's policies led to a near-tripling of the national debt during his two terms as President. His administration, according to historian Sean Wilentz, "never submitted a balanced budget" to Congress.

Republicans now - despite repeated attempts to blame Obama for today's deficits - are as responsible for current deficit woes as any other politicians; just as Reagan produced deficits in the 1980s, his heirs have contributed mightily to the 2011 red ink. Take one well-known example: Many of Boehner's rank and file voted in support of President George W. Bush's spending initiatives without identifying ways to pay for these programs. From cutting taxes for the wealthy and adding a Medicare prescription drug benefit to supporting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Reagan's GOP heirs in the past decade helped turn Clinton-era surpluses into Bush-and-Obama-era deficits.

Reagan famously joked, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' " Tea Party activists, often lacking Reagan's sense of humor, brashly attack America's "gangster" government (Michele Bachmann's adjective). Such rhetoric has helped shift the nation's culture to a place where it's hard for almost any major national politician to voice a full-throated defense of federal action as a positive force.

The parallels don't end there. Neither Reagan's presidency nor the Republican-run House of Representatives in 2011 have governed with charity in mind toward those at the bottom of America's economic ladder. Reagan's first budget, for example, cut food stamps, school lunches and student loans. House Republicans in more recent times have endorsed cuts to almost all major government programs, including Medicaid and Medicare - which would disproportionately affect access to health care among the nation's poor and elderly.

And so, the breakdown of the debt talks must be seen both as a Republican rebuke to Reagan and as his revenge: His successors have shown little of his flexibility, but they've been busy channeling his anti-government anger and hard-line ideology. Reagan is still a force to be reckoned with.

Matthew Dallek, an associate academic director at the University of California Washington Center, is the author of "The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics."

© Copyright 2011 NYDailyNews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/07/27/2011-07-27_breakdown_of_debt_talks_can_be_seen_as_republican_rebuke_to_ronald_reagan.html [with comments]


===


By Any Means Possible: Republican Threats and the Debt Ceiling

Geoffrey R. Stone
Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Posted: 7/27/11 12:53 AM ET

A threat is an expression of intention to inflict harm on others unless the target of the threat agrees to do what the person making the threat demands. A threat uses coercion rather than persuasion to effect change. As a general rule, democratic governments do not negotiate with those who threaten their people with harm. The reason is simple: Democracies should not make public policy in response to threats, and those who threaten should not be rewarded for threatening harm to the nation.

This is the dilemma facing President Obama in the current debt ceiling crisis. The debt ceiling has never before been used as a leverage point for partisan political demands. As Mr. Obama observed in his address to the nation on July 25, presidents from Eisenhower to Bush II have regularly raised the debt ceiling without controversy and without facing anything like the current Republican intransigence.

But what makes that intransigence an immoral "threat" rather than an ordinary political disagreement? The answer is that the current controversy really has nothing to do with the debt ceiling. Rather, Republicans who do not have the votes to enact their preferred policies into law are threatening to throw the nation into economic chaos by refusing to increase the debt ceiling unless the President accedes to their demands. By threatening to wreak havoc with the national interest, they are attempting to coerce rather than persuade the nation into doing what they want.

The key point is that this controversy is not about the debt ceiling itself. All the issues about deficits and spending and taxes can be hashed out entirely apart from the debt ceiling issue. But the Republicans are exploiting the need to increase the debt limit in order to hold the nation itself hostage to their demands. It would be no different if the Republicans threatened not to raise the debt limit unless the President agreed to nominate Grover Norquist to the Supreme Court or to repeal of the Civil Rights Act or invade Pakistan or pull out of the United Nations. This is not democratic governance. This is not even political obstructionism. It is blackmail, plain and simple, where the threatened victim is the nation itself.

Of course, the President could temporarily avert disaster by giving in to those who are threatening to bring about chaos. But if he does so, he will invite similarly destructive conduct in the future. As the President warned in his speech to the nation, if he gives in to the Republican demands now, "in six months they'll do this again."

The Republicans have every right to try to get their preferred policies enacted into law and they have every right to refuse to raise the debt ceiling (though that would be calamitously stupid). But what they cannot morally do is to attempt to get their preferred policies enacted into law by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. It is the connection between the two that makes their strategy immoral.

In this sense, their conduct is very much like blackmail. Suppose X says to Y, "If you don't give me $1,000 I will tell your boss that you voted for Obama." X has every right to tell the boss, but it is unlawful for him to threaten to tell the boss in order to coerce Y to give him the $1,000. That is what the Republicans are doing here.

By threatening to destroy the economy if they don't get their way, those Republicans who are pursuing this course may be honoring their pledge not to raise taxes, but they are also dishonoring the very spirit of their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post used the word "terrorism" as metaphor, contrary to our policy of avoiding such characterizations. The author has therefore revised the post to read as it does now.

Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/by-any-means-possible_b_910493.html [with comments]


===


(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65634211 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65624073 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65623659 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=65618814 and preceding and following