Wednesday, October 02, 2013 5:11:14 AM
Ted Cruz’s phony Obamacare filibuster was really about . . . Ted Cruz
Video [embedded]
Ted Cruz reads Dr. Seuss — During his “fauxlibuster”.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/opinions/ted-cruz-reads-dr-seuss/2013/09/25/482c76a4-2601-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_video.html
By Dana Milbank, Published September 25, 2013
John McCain said more in 10 minutes on the Senate floor than Ted Cruz did in 21 hours.
The Texas hothead had just completed his impressive bladderbuster, in which he discussed Ashton Kutcher and Toby Keith, did a Darth Vader impression, recited passages from Ayn Rand, read “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters at home, and spoke directly to his “sweetheart” via C-SPAN. At the end, he thanked dozens of people for their contributions to his marathon, as if rolling the credits on the heroic film of his life.
To the extent that Cruz’s phony filibuster had a point (it didn’t delay any vote) it was to shame his fellow Republicans into joining his crusade to shut down the government if Obamacare isn’t defunded; those who disagreed, he said, were like “Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis.’”
Half an hour after Cruz yielded the floor — “by force,” he claimed, even though he had declined an offer from Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to speak for an additional hour — McCain delivered a few words that could have taught his young colleague something about honor.
“I resoundingly reject that allegation,” the Arizona Republican said after reading Cruz’s words aloud. “To allege that there are people today who are like those who, prior to World War II, didn’t stand up and oppose the atrocities that were taking place in Europe, because I have an open and honest disagreement with the process .?.?. is an inappropriate place for debate on the floor of the United States Senate.”
McCain said Cruz’s words belittled those who served in the war, including his father and grandfather. He then used the rest of his brief speech to defend his record in opposition to Obamacare, which shouldn’t have been necessary: Nobody fought harder against the health-care reforms.
The difference between the two men has nothing to do with who hates Obamacare more. Rather, their difference is one of character. McCain exhorts his colleagues to serve a cause greater than self, as he did as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Cruz acts as though the greatest cause is himself.
A casual observer of Cruz’s antics could see what his colleagues had been grumbling about privately: that his time on the Senate floor was an exercise in self-promotion. Cruz must have been sensitive about this, for he felt the need to protest sometime around hour 17, “I would be perfectly happy if not a single story coming out of this ever mentioned my name.”
This is the same man who spoke at great length about his father’s cooking, an auto accident his wife had had and what views he might have in common with Kutcher. He demonstrated his regard for the institution by working in the phrase “give a flying flip” and kissed up to Rush Limbaugh by reading something written by the radio host’s father.
Cruz’s colleagues voted with their feet. Earlier this year, 16 senators — including a Democrat — were on the floor to support a filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) protesting drone warfare. Cruz’s droning was eight hours longer than Paul’s, and his topic had much broader appeal to Republicans, yet I counted only 10 participants in support, including Cruz.
In the end, Cruz joined the 99 other senators in voting to proceed with the debate on the legislation Cruz seeks to block. He said he would take his stand on the next vote, but that probably won’t go much better for him — in no small part because of colleagues’ disdain for him, which McCain gave voice to after the freshman senator finished his bladderbuster.
McCain ridiculed the “extended oratory” and then recounted his own opposition to the legislation. “We fought as hard as we could in a fair and honest manner and we lost,” he said. In 2012, he went on, “I campaigned all over America for two months, everywhere I could, and in every single campaign rally I said and we have to repeal and replace Obamacare. Well, the people spoke. .?.?. That doesn’t mean that we give up our efforts to try to replace and repair Obamacare. But it does mean that elections have consequences.”
While McCain spoke of honoring the will of the electorate, Cruz was moving on to give Limbaugh an interview in which he said he was honoring the will of the broadcaster’s listeners. “We’re listening to the same bosses and trying to respond to the same people who are frustrated,” Cruz said.
Maybe it was the fatigue, but Cruz made a surprisingly frank admission to Limbaugh. “In many ways,” he said, “the central issue that we were trying to focus on in the filibuster was not the continuing resolution. It wasn’t even Obamacare.”
Right. It was narcissism.
© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ted-cruzs-phony-obamacare-filibuster-was-really-about--ted-cruz/2013/09/25/b8f273a8-2632-11e3-b3e9-d97fb087acd6_story.html [with comments]
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Healthcare Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Wednesday September 25, 2013
Texas Senator Ted Cruz casts himself as Churchill to Obama's Chamberlain in the great fight against Hitler's healthcare exchanges.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-25-2013/healthcare-bill---ted-s-excellent-adventure [with comments] [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Skewers Ted Cruz's 21-Hour Obamacare Speech: 'You're F*cking With Us, Right?'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/26/jon-stewart-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3995175.html (with comments)]
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Healthcare Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - The Bore-ax
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Wednesday September 25, 2013
To express his opposition to Obamacare, Ted Cruz cites a children's book about a stubborn jerk who decides he hates something before he's tried it.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-25-2013/healthcare-bill---ted-s-excellent-adventure---the-bore-ax [with comments] [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Skewers Ted Cruz's 21-Hour Obamacare Speech: 'You're F*cking With Us, Right?'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/26/jon-stewart-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3995175.html (with comments)]
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Where the G.O.P.'s Suicide Caucus Lives
The geography of Congress’s so-called suicide caucus.
Posted by Ryan Lizza
September 26, 2013
On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner [ http://meadows.house.gov/uploads/Meadows_DefundLetter.pdf ]. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.
Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out.
Back home in Meadows’s congressional district, the idea was quite popular. North Carolina’s Eleventh District had been gerrymandered after the 2010 census to become the most Republican district in his state. Meadows won his election last November by fifteen points. The Presidential contest there was an even bigger blowout. Romney won the district by twenty-three points, sixty-one per cent to thirty-eight per cent. While the big story of the 2012 election was about demographics and a growing non-white population that is increasingly Democratic, that was not the story in the Meadows race. His district is eighty-seven per cent white, five per cent Latino, and three per cent black.
Before Meadows sent off his letter to Boehner, he circulated it among his colleagues, and with the help of the conservative group FreedomWorks [ http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/jwithrow/does-your-senator-stand-with-mike-lee-against-obam ], as well as some heavy campaigning by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, seventy-nine like-minded House Republicans from districts very similar to Meadows’s added their signatures.
“Since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect,” the letter said, “we urge you to affirmatively de-fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”
They ended the letter with a stirring reference to Madison:
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon … for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We look forward to collaborating to defund one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.
Not everyone thought it was a terrific idea or one worthy of comparison to the brilliance of the Founders. Noting the strategic ineptness of threatening a government shutdown over a policy that neither the Democratically controlled Senate nor the President himself would ever support, Karl Rove railed against the idea in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed the eighty Republicans the “suicide caucus.”
And yet, a few weeks later, Boehner adopted the course demanded by Meadows and his colleagues.
The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity. It’s especially strange when you consider some of the numbers behind the suicide caucus. As we approach a likely government shutdown this month and then a more perilous fight over raising the debt ceiling in October, it’s worth considering the demographics and geography of the eighty districts whose members have steered national policy over the past few weeks.
As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/cook-report/the-gop-keeps-getting-whiter-20130314 ], a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.
The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).
The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.
As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.
Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.
© 2013 Condé Nast (emphasis in original)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html [no comments yet]
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Jim DeMint, Congressional Republicans' Shadow Speaker
Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
By Joshua Green
September 26, 2013
When Congress adjourned for its August recess this year, most members avoided the town hall meetings that were once the standard venue for hearing from constituents. They were too afraid. Ever since activists opposed to President Obama’s health-care bill ambushed lawmakers in August 2009, few members are willing to risk a confrontation being immortalized on YouTube (GOOG)—or, worse, Fox News (FOXA). Trips home are now carefully choreographed affairs that limit spontaneous voter contact.
But neither the anger nor the town hall format has gone away; they’re just under new management. In mid-August, Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who quit the Senate in January to become president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank, set off on a nine-city Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour. DeMint, 62, is a courtly, polished Southerner who used to own a marketing business. These days he’s selling the idea that it’s not too late to kill the health-care law. In each city, hundreds and sometimes thousands of true believers crammed into hotel ballrooms to hear him explain how, with enough pressure on legislators, Congress could be persuaded to withhold funding for the law and thereby halt it before public enrollment begins on Oct. 1. “The House holds the purse strings,” DeMint told his crowds. If Republicans keep them cinched, he promised, the law would fail.
DeMint’s idea was initially dismissed as quixotic. For one thing, the Affordable Care Act is mostly paid for by mandatory funds that can’t be blocked. For another, Democrats control the White House and Senate. Even so, the defund push has caught fire in Washington because activists have made it into a crusade. “We needed someone out there arguing for what is the right thing to do and putting the flag in the right place,” DeMint says over breakfast the morning after he’s addressed 900 people in Columbus, Ohio. “This little effort, with a paltry amount of money, has drawn thousands of people, almost tearfully, to come out in support.”
DeMint assumes that Republicans have leverage because funding for the federal government will run out on Sept. 30, and if Congress doesn’t pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open, it will shut down the next day. That’s an outcome neither party wants, but one DeMint calculates Obama would do almost anything to avoid—including making concessions on his signature law. So in August, as the defund tour wended its way through the country, DeMint was pitching the idea of a continuing resolution that funds everything except Obamacare. Scores of Republican congressmen and senators signed on, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who joined DeMint onstage in Dallas to endorse the idea. “There is a paradigm shift under way in American politics, which is the rise of the grass roots,” says Cruz, the leading defund promoter in the Senate. “It’s changing the way political decisions are made in Washington.”
Many Republicans looked on in horror as the defund movement gained steam. If the government shuts down, polls suggest blame will fall most heavily on the GOP. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr calls DeMint’s plan “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” Representative Tom Cole, a veteran Oklahoma Republican, has likened the shutdown threat to “putting the gun to your own head. You’re basically saying, do what I want or I’ll shoot.” DeMint doesn’t see why his ploy should hurt Republicans. “Democrats will be shutting down the government to protect Obamacare,” he insists. As DeMint sees it, if Republicans would just toughen up and start singing from the same hymnal, public opinion might swing to their side. And if they won’t, he plans to turn his legions of supporters inside and outside of government against them.
On Sept. 20, House Speaker John Boehner, who badly wants to avert a shutdown, succumbed to the uprising in his caucus and held a vote on a funding bill that excludes Obamacare. All but one Republican supported it. (Through his staff, Boehner declined to be interviewed.) This could soon bring about the very crisis Boehner has tried to prevent, because the Democratic Senate will strip the defund provision and then—well, it’s not clear.
When most Americans look at Washington, they see a broken Congress, riven by partisanship and lurching from crisis to crisis. While the hostility between Republicans and Democrats is indeed severe, it isn’t the real reason the engine of government keeps seizing up. What’s causing the malfunction is a battle within the GOP over how to return the party to its former glory after two consecutive losses to Obama and setbacks in the House and Senate. It’s a fight that pits uncompromising, Heritage-style conservatives against more cautious Republican elders. What makes it so contentious is that both sides have radically different—and mutually exclusive—ideas about how to move forward.
This struggle heats up each time a major budget deadline approaches, and two huge ones loom in the days ahead: There’s the Sept. 30 government funding deadline and then, sometime in late October, the Department of the Treasury will reach the limit of its borrowing capacity and default unless Congress raises the debt ceiling. In crises precipitated by similar deadlines, Republican leaders have always managed to keep their party together—or at least keep it from coming apart.
That will be much harder this time. While Boehner and the GOP leadership want mainly to navigate safe passage through the budget deadlines, DeMint and his cohort see the deadlines as crucial tests of party resolve and a key to the Republican resurgence they envision. DeMint views the impulse to avoid confrontation as the root of Republican woes: Only by engineering grand clashes and then standing resolutely on the side of small government can Republicans win this existential struggle.
“If I were speaker, I’d tell the president, ‘Mr. President, we funded the government, but we’re not going to fund your bill,’?” says DeMint, who likes to make his point by acting out imagined confrontations. “?‘We are not going to give in—one month, two months, three months. We are never going to give in. It’s just that important.’ And if the president wants to put the country through that to save a law that isn’t ready to go, well, then that’s a battle we have to have.”
When DeMint quit the Senate mid-term, it came as something of a shock in Washington, because a high-profile senator is presumed to have more power than a think tank president. There was plenty of snickering that he was cashing in: Heritage paid his predecessor more than $1 million last year. (The group won’t comment on DeMint’s salary.)
DeMint says he was just fed up. When he was first elected to Congress in 1998, insurrection wasn’t his goal. “I came to Washington as a businessman,” he says, “served six years in the House as a team player. Didn’t cause trouble. I was a policy nerd, introduced Social Security reform, tax reforms, all kinds of health-care reforms.” In 2005 he moved up to the Senate, where he began to lose patience with what he viewed as his party’s lack of commitment to first principles. “We had a lot of people who were great pretenders, talked real big about being conservatives,” he says. “But behind closed doors, they were driving the ball in the opposite direction.”
For a while he thought he could change this by attracting a stauncher breed of Republican to the Capitol. In 2010 he formed a political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to elect like-minded Republicans. He violated Senate protocol by backing challengers to establishment candidates, as when he endorsed Rand Paul for Kentucky’s open Senate seat in 2010 over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked choice. DeMint helped to elect many of the most influential rising conservatives, including Cruz and Marco Rubio of Florida. “I wouldn’t be in the Senate without Jim DeMint,” Cruz says.
Yet he also championed fringe Tea Party figures such as Sharron Angle, who tried to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell, whose defeats cost the party seats—and possibly control of the Senate. DeMint didn’t care. He enraged many in his party when he said he’d rather have 30 Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters, a slap at the moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania who later switched to the Democrats. DeMint became McConnell’s tormenter and the leading voice of dissent among Senate Republicans.
“What Jim loved most was letting his imagination run loose about what conservatism could do,” says Tim Chapman, who worked for DeMint while he was in Congress and is now chief operating officer of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. “But the Senate can be a lonely place. His frustration was less with the fact that he was getting beat up left and right by his colleagues—he’s got thick skin—than that he wasn’t able to talk about big ideas.”
So DeMint gave up trying to purify the party from within. “I recognized that, even after working to elect candidates the party really didn’t want, the only way to change Washington is to go directly to the people,” he says. “You have to win the debate on the outside to shape the culture.”
DeMint thought the Heritage Foundation could provide a platform that the Senate had not. The foundation was the favorite think tank of the Reagan administration, and although its influence has waned, its scholars still staff Republican administrations and congressional offices. Over the years, the Heritage brand has been sullied by the impression that many of its experts are more concerned with politics than scholarship. Selecting an outspoken partisan like DeMint to be president only deepens this impression. Someone as impatient for a Republican revolution as DeMint, though, would see plenty to like about the job, not least its connection to Heritage Action, a 501(c)(4) organization created in 2010 that can run television ads, lobby members of Congress, organize activists, and otherwise advocate for political causes, which the Heritage Foundation itself, as a nonprofit, is forbidden from doing.
While ethics laws bar DeMint from lobbying his former colleagues until he has been out of the Senate for two years, the organizations he oversees and the PAC he founded in the Senate are all pushing his agenda. The Heritage Foundation has produced studies questioning the benefits of immigration reform; Heritage Action has put the defund movement center stage; and the Senate Conservatives Fund, though DeMint is no longer formally affiliated, has been running attack ads calling McConnell a “turncoat” who “surrendered to Barack Obama” in the health-care fight.
The widespread assumption after the 2012 election was that Obama’s victory had settled most of the big fights contested in the campaign, Obamacare in particular. The Republican National Committee, reeling from Mitt Romney’s defeat, conducted an autopsy of what went wrong and concluded that the party needed to broaden its appeal to immigrants, young people, and minorities and move beyond its image of implacable hostility. Boehner was among the first to embrace this message. “It’s pretty clear that the president was reelected,” he said on Nov. 8. “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Since then two things have become apparent: Conservative activists have rejected this call for moderation, and Boehner has lost control of the House. The second has everything to do with the first and explains why we’re careening toward shutdown. DeMint, Cruz, and all those trying to defund Obamacare drew precisely the opposite lesson from the last election than just about everyone else did. “Republicans were told, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t be the issue. Don’t stand for anything. Make it about Obama,’?” DeMint says. “What happened in 2012 was that there was a void of any inspiration, any attempt to lead. It certainly wasn’t because the party was too conservative—it was because there was no conservative leadership at all!”
DeMint thinks the election results don’t accurately reflect national sentiment and therefore can’t be used to argue against his desire to move the party to the right. True conservatism never got a hearing—particularly not in regard to Obamacare, which was, after all, modeled after a Massachusetts law signed by Romney. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” he says. Essentially, DeMint is declaring a mistrial. His side can still prevail, he says, but only by awakening the angry, alienated masses who were put off by Romney’s tepid impersonation of a conservative.
“The world changes when you run a real campaign,” says Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, an ally in the defund push. “Heritage was out there working during the break. Constituents were talking to their members. Now members are pressing leadership, saying, ‘Look, we know this law is not ready. It should not be shoved on Americans.’?” The Sept. 20 House vote to defund was celebrated as a milestone by Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, and other conservative groups that had agitated for it.
The House has become the locus of the Republican civil war because it embodies the upheaval that has coursed through the party during Obama’s presidency. Almost half the Republican caucus—47 percent—was elected in 2010 or later, which means they swept into Congress on the Tea Party wave that was a backlash against Obamacare and the ineffectual GOP establishment. Owing no allegiance to Boehner, these new members have much more in common with outside groups such as Heritage, whose siege mentality and impatience with party orthodoxy they share. “The rise of extra-congressional powerhouses like DeMint and Heritage has really impeded leadership’s ability to move legislation,” says David Wasserman, a House expert at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
DeMint’s grand plan to shape the party is built on his conviction that most elected Republicans don’t have the guts to cast tough votes, especially to cut entitlement programs, which conventional wisdom holds to be political-career-enders. DeMint cites the example of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s budget as evidence that Republicans are all too often gulled into complacency when they should be fighting for their ideals. In 2008, when Ryan first introduced a budget that sought deep cuts in entitlement spending, he drew only eight co-sponsors. In 2011 the Tea Party uprising persuaded the House to pass Ryan’s budget, and most members survived the next election. To DeMint, this proved that entitlement cuts aren’t an automatic death sentence. It shifted the boundaries of mainstream debate to the right. Over time, he suggests, that vote and others like it will condition Republicans to think much more ambitiously about what they can achieve.
And if they don’t want to, he isn’t going to take no for an answer. “We believe that if you throw them in the deep end of the pool, they’re going to learn to swim,” says Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action. That is, if Republicans can be compelled to take tough votes, the insurgents’ ideas will move from the fringes to the mainstream. Establishment Republicans who mock DeMint and Heritage as “hobbits” and “Neanderthals” will be forced to defend these ideas on TV. Republicans will all finally be rowing in the same direction. (At least one establishment heavyweight seems unpersuaded. Karl Rove calls the defund movement an “ill-considered tactic.”)
Oddly enough, DeMint’s inspiration isn’t Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, but Barack Obama, whose strategy Heritage has begun to mimic. “Instead of making fun of him for community organizing,” DeMint says, “we need to realize that that’s how they’re winning on the left: empowering people on the grass-roots level and getting them organized and informed.” To his way of thinking, liberals banded together to force through an unpopular health-care law and have resolutely stood by it. “You had Democrats who were intent, even courageous, about centralizing health care and risked their political careers to do it.”
One of the few members of Congress to hold a town hall meeting during the August break was Representative Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican from suburban Raleigh elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010. By almost any measure, Ellmers is unimpeachably conservative: She has voted 41 times to repeal Obamacare. But prior to her Sept. 3 town hall she spoke out against the defund-or-shutdown strategy. For this she came under withering assault from Dee Park, a feisty, white-haired, 76-year-old grandmother of 17 and Twitter warrior (@grammydee17) from nearby Pinehurst.
Park is part of Heritage Action’s Sentinel program, which trains activists in the manner of the Obama campaign. Only rather than solicit votes, the 5,000 Sentinels are rigorously briefed so they can parry politicians’ feints and dodges and pin them down on whatever issues Heritage deems urgent. “Every Monday afternoon we get a call with the latest intelligence,” Park explains. “From 5:30 to 6 they give us background, answer our questions, and teach us how to recruit.” Park was dispatched to Ellmers’s town hall because, as she put it, “We were concerned that Renee’s Heritage score was not that good.” Heritage Action, like many political groups, grades members on their voting record. “She was voting in ways that we felt were not conservative.” At the meeting, Park, bedecked in an American-flag rugby shirt and gripping her Heritage literature, peppered Ellmers about why she wouldn’t support the defund plan until the congresswoman seemed ready to burst.
A few days later, Ellmers was still steamed. She had just come from the dentist’s office after having a tooth pulled, yet it was clear that DeMint was the greater irritant. “I don’t understand Heritage coming after Republicans,” she says. “We’re the ones fighting against things like Obamacare being put in place. We’re the ones committed to this effort. Shouldn’t these outside groups be working with us?” Her objection to the defund strategy is shared by many Republicans: namely, that it will do more harm than good and ultimately hand power to Obama. Still, she concedes the tactics were effective. “I don’t take it into account myself,” she says, “but there are members who change their votes if they find out that one of these outside groups is scoring it.”
DeMint makes no apologies. “If members feel criticized,” he says, “it’s probably because their constituents are finding out that they’re not fulfilling a campaign promise.”
The echoes of the Obama campaign were even more unmistakable on the nine-city defund tour. Every evening, Heritage Action CEO Needham would warm up the room by leading the audience in a raucous call-and-response chant that borrowed Obama’s famous slogan from 2008.
“Can we defund Obamacare?” Needham would call out.
“YES WE CAN!” roared the audience in reply.
Instead of building momentum toward Election Day, though, the tour was whipping up activists ahead of Oct. 1. That’s the day people can start signing up for the health-care exchanges and, to foes of Obamacare, a potential point of no return. As with the 2012 election, the Republican establishment seems to have been caught off guard by the level of grass-roots intensity, only this time it’s their own side that’s riled up. “Republican leaders can’t fathom a world in which we’re transmitting an authentic message from the base,” says Chapman of Heritage Action.
The rebellion has been building all year. In June, House conservatives killed the Republican farm bill because it didn’t cut deeply enough into nutrition programs. In July they rejected a Republican transportation and housing bill they considered too generous. In early September, Boehner’s first attempt at funding the government wasn’t so much killed as laughed out of the room. Its provision to defund Obamacare was merely symbolic, an attempt to appease his right flank while also avoiding a shutdown by instructing the Senate to split off the defund vote. Heritage alerted its network, and conservatives quickly made clear they wouldn’t stand for it. All at once, Republican Washington seemed to realize that the ideologues could no longer be brushed aside.
DeMint likes to quote the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek: “Politicians are corks bobbing on the water, but we can direct the current.” Right now, Boehner is caught in a current from which he can’t seem to escape. Appeals to moderation won’t work; the purists see moderation as the problem. To DeMint, the only question is how committed Republicans are to an ideology they all profess to agree on. “There isn’t a Republican in Congress who hasn’t promised to do everything they could to stop Obamacare,” he says. “There’s no intellectual rift. The rift is over is it worth fighting for?”
DeMint’s answer will always be yes. Not even the disastrous 1995 shutdown orchestrated by House Speaker Newt Gingrich can convince him otherwise. Every Republican leader believes it was a costly mistake, never to be repeated. DeMint agrees that it hurt the party, though for an entirely different reason: He thinks Gingrich lost his nerve. “The Republican leadership went into a showdown with [Bill] Clinton and folded when they were three hours from winning,” he says. “So you’ve got this permanent impression that we won’t hold together.” He bases this claim on George Stephanopoulos’s memoir of the Clinton White House (Stephanopoulos writes “our coalition was cracking,” but doesn’t say Clinton was about to fold). Had Gingrich showed more fortitude, DeMint is convinced he could have prevailed; and so, too, can today’s Republicans if they have the stomach to close the government. “I think Americans would side with the people who are fighting against a law they know is unfair,” he says. Even many conservative Republicans don’t buy it. “It will be a political fiasco that could cost us the House,” says Ellmers.
Meanwhile Democrats are ecstatic over what they see as the GOP’s suicidal rightward lurch. “If I had the money, I’d pay for DeMint and Heritage to go to every state in the union,” says Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic strategist and president of the liberal group Americans United for Change, which held counter-rallies in each city along the Heritage tour.
DeMint remains undaunted. He is so certain he’s right that he sees no limit to the transformative power of his brand of conservatism. “Our hope,” he says, “is that by 2016 we will have so cultivated the mindset of America for the right ideas, that we’ll see candidates running on those ideas. Maybe even Democrats.”
However the budget deadlines are resolved, Cruz has already provided a glimpse of how this party feud will grow and intensify. On Sept. 24, as the Senate prepared to take up the House defund bill, he stepped to the floor and announced with solemn self-importance, “I rise today in opposition to Obamacare. . . . I will speak until I am no longer able to stand.” For the next 21 hours, he didn’t let up. Cruz can barely contain his eagerness to run for president, and his talkathon to block a vote on Obamacare was a valentine to the party’s base. Cruz is one of three DeMint protégés expected to jockey for the 2016 Republican nomination (Paul and Rubio are the others). Through them, and through his Heritage army, DeMint will keep channeling the current. And that will either give the Republicans the renaissance he envisions—or sweep them into oblivion.
*
Related
STORY: Republicans Search for Their Next Big Brain
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/republicans-search-for-their-next-big-brain
GRAPHIC: The 113th Congress, by the Numbers
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-10/the-113th-congress-by-the-numbers
VIDEO: Ted Cruz's Marathon Speech: What's the Point?
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2013-09-25/senate-votes-on-spending-as-cruz-defies-leadership
STORY: The Creative Minds Behind the Ghoulish New Anti-Obamacare Ads
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-20/the-creative-minds-behind-the-new-ghoulish-anti-obamacare-ads
BLOG: Would Martin Luther King Jr. Really Have Hated Obamacare?
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-30/would-martin-luther-king-jr-dot-really-have-hated-obamacare
BLOG: Five Things I Learned at the GOP's Summer Rallies
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-29/five-things-i-learned-at-the-gops-summer-rallies
STORY: At Town Halls, Congress Now Steers Clear of Voters
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-29/at-town-halls-congress-now-steers-clear-of-voters
BLOG: Why Immigrants Will Determine John Boehner's Fate
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-24/why-immigrants-will-determine-john-boehners-fate
STORY: Jeb Bush on How Conservatives Can Reform Immigration
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-20/hard-choices-jeb-bush
STORY: The Conservative Campaign to Purge Rand Paul
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-19/the-conservative-campaign-to-purge-rand-paul
STORY: Hidden Hand: Mike Franc, the GOP Whip's Whip
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/hidden-hand-mike-franc-the-gop-whips-whip
VIDEO: Statistical Proof: Least Productive Congress Ever
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2012-12-31/tracking-passed-laws-by-the-do-nothing-congress
STORY: The Lasting Legacy of George W. Bush
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-12/the-lasting-legacy-of-george-w-dot-bush
*
©2013 Bloomberg L.P.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/jim-demint-congressional-republicans-shadow-speaker [with comments]
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President Obama Makes a Statement
Published on Sep 27, 2013 by The White House
President Obama says that he spoke with the President of Iran regarding ongoing efforts to reach an agreement on Iran's nuclear program. September 27, 2013.
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Statement by the President
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
September 27, 2013
3:42 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Before I discuss the situation in Congress, let me say a few things about two important opportunities in our foreign policy.
Just now, I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. I reiterated to President Rouhani what I said in New York -- while there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward, and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution.
I’ve directed Secretary Kerry to continue pursuing this diplomatic effort with the Iranian government. We had constructive discussions yesterday in New York with our partners -- the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China -- together with the Iranian Foreign Minister. Going forward, President Rouhani and I have directed our teams to continue working expeditiously, in cooperation with the P5-plus-1, to pursue an agreement. And throughout this process, we’ll stay in close touch with our friends and allies in the region, including Israel.
We’re mindful of all the challenges ahead. The very fact that this was the first communication between an American and Iranian President since 1979 underscores the deep mistrust between our countries, but it also indicates the prospect of moving beyond that difficult history.
I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution. Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. President Rouhani has indicated that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons. I have made clear that we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy in the context of Iran meeting its obligations. So the test will be meaningful, transparent, and verifiable actions, which can also bring relief from the comprehensive international sanctions that are currently in place.
Resolving this issue, obviously, could also serve as a major step forward in a new relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran -- one based on mutual interests and mutual respect. It would also help facilitate a better relationship between Iran and the international community, as well as others in the region -- one that would help the Iranian people fulfill their extraordinary potential, but also help us to address other concerns that could bring greater peace and stability to the Middle East.
A path to a meaningful agreement will be difficult, and at this point, both sides have significant concerns that will have to be overcome. But I believe we’ve got a responsibility to pursue diplomacy, and that we have a unique opportunity to make progress with the new leadership in Tehran. I also communicated to President Rouhani my deep respect for the Iranian people.
As I said before, this comes on the same day that we can accomplish a major diplomatic breakthrough on Syria, as the United Nations Security Council will vote on a resolution that would require the Assad regime to put its chemical weapons under international control so they can ultimately be destroyed. This binding resolution will ensure that the Assad regime must keep its commitments, or face consequences. We’ll have to be vigilant about following through, but this could be a significant victory for the international community, and demonstrate how strong diplomacy can allow us to secure our country and pursue a better world.
Now, America’s security and leadership don't just depend on our military strength, or our alliances, or our diplomacy. First and foremost, America’s strength depends on a strong economy where our middle class is growing and everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead. So let me say a few words about the situation that’s developed over the past few weeks on Capitol Hill.
Here at home, the United States Congress has two pressing responsibilities: pass a budget on time, and pay our bills on time.
If Congress chooses not to pass a budget by Monday -- the end of the fiscal year -- they will shut down the government, along with many vital services that the American people depend on. The good news is, within the past couple of hours, the United States Senate -- Democrats and Republicans -- acted responsibly by voting to keep our government open and delivering the services the American people expect. Now it’s up to Republicans in the House of Representatives to do the same. I say that because obviously Democrats have a great interest in making sure that these vital services continue to help the American people.
So far, the Republicans in the House of Representatives have refused to move forward. And here’s the thing -- unlike the last time they threatened this course of action, this debate isn’t really about deficits. In fact, our deficits are falling at the fastest pace that they have in 60 years. By the end of this year, we will have cut our deficits by more than half since I took office. So that’s not what this is about. And in fact, if you’ve been following the discussion, the Republicans in the House don't even make a pretense that that’s what this is about.
Instead, the House Republicans are so concerned with appeasing the tea party that they’ve threatened a government shutdown or worse unless I gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act.
I said this yesterday; let me repeat it: That's not going to happen. More than 100 million Americans currently, already have new benefits and protections under the law. On Tuesday, about 40 million more Americans will be able to finally buy quality, affordable health care, just like anybody else. Those marketplaces will be open for business on Tuesday no matter what -- even if there’s a government shutdown. That’s a done deal.
As I’ve said before, if Republicans have specific ideas on how to genuinely improve the law, rather than gut it, rather than delay it, rather than repeal it, I’m happy to work with them on that through the normal democratic processes. But that will not happen under the threat of a shutdown.
So over the next three days, House Republicans will have to decide whether to join the Senate and keep the government open, or shut it down just because they can’t get their way on an issue that has nothing to do with the deficit.
I realize that a lot of what’s taking place right now is political grandstanding. But this grandstanding has real effects on real people. If the government shuts down on Tuesday, military personnel -- including those risking their lives overseas for us right now -- will not get paid on time. Federal loans for rural communities, small business owners, families buying a home will be frozen. I’m already starting to get letters from people worried that this will have an impact on them directly. Critical research into life-saving discoveries will be immediately halted.
The federal government has a large role across the country and touches the lives of millions of people, and those people will be harmed. And even the threat of a shutdown already is probably having a dampening effect on our economy; we saw that the last time these kinds of shenanigans were happening up on Capitol Hill.
So to any Republican in Congress who is currently watching, I’d encourage you to think about who you’re hurting. There are probably young people in your office right now who came here to work for you, without much pay, because they believed that public service was noble. You’re preparing to send them home without a paycheck. You’ve got families with kids back in your districts who serve their country in the federal government, and now they might have to plan how they’re going to get by if you shut the government down.
Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy, and this shutdown would as well. It would throw a wrench into the gears of our economy at a time when those gears have gained some traction. And that’s why many Republican senators and many Republican governors have urged Republicans to knock it off, pass a budget, and move on. Let’s get this done.
This brings me to Congress’s second responsibility. Once they vote to keep the government open, they also have to vote within the next couple of weeks to allow the Treasury to pay the bills for the money that Congress has already spent. I want to repeat: Raising the debt ceiling is simply authorizing the Treasury to pay for what Congress has already authorized.
Failure to meet this responsibility would be far more dangerous than a government shutdown. It would effectively be an economic shutdown, with impacts not just here, but around the world. We don’t fully understand what might happen, the dangers involved, because no Congress has ever actually threatened default. But we know it would have a profound destabilizing effect on the entire economy -- on the world economy, because America is the bedrock of world investment. The dollar is the reserve currency. The debt that is issued by the Treasury is the foundation for our capital markets. That’s why you don’t fool with it.
Now, some Republicans have suggested that unless I agree to an even longer list of demands -- not just gutting the health care law, but cutting taxes for millionaires, or rolling back rules on big banks and polluters, or other pet projects that they’d like to see and they’ve been trying to get passed over the last couple of years -- that they would push the button, throw America into default for the first time in history and risk throwing us back into a recession.
Now, I am willing to work with anybody who wants to have a serious conversation about our fiscal future. I’ve demonstrated that by putting forward serious reforms to tax and entitlement programs that would bring down our long-term deficits. I have said in the past, and I will continue to say, that I’m willing to make a whole bunch of tough decisions -- ones that may not be entirely welcomed by my own party.
But we’re not going to do this under the threat of blowing up the entire economy. I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay the bills that have already been racked up. Voting for the Treasury to pay America’s bills is not a concession to me. That’s not doing me a favor. That’s simply carrying out the solemn responsibilities that come with holding office up there. I don’t know how I can be more clear about this. Nobody gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States just to extract political concessions. No one gets to hurt our economy and millions of innocent people just because there are a couple of laws that you do not like.
It has not been done in the past; we’re not going to start doing it now. I’m not going to start setting a precedent not just for me, but for future Presidents where one chamber in Congress can basically say each time there needs to be a vote to make sure Treasury pays its bills, we’re not going to sign it unless our particular hobbyhorse gets advanced.
Imagine if you had a Republican President and a Democratic Speaker, and the Democratic Speaker said, well, we’re not going to pass a debt ceiling unless we raise corporate taxes by 40 percent; or unless we pass background checks on guns; or whatever other list of agenda items Democrats were interested in. Does anybody actually think that we would be hearing from Republicans that that was acceptable behavior?
That's not how our constitutional system is designed. We are not going to do it. The American people have worked too hard to recover from a bunch of crises -- several of them now over the last couple of years inflicted by some of the same folks in Congress that we’re talking about now -- to see extremists in Congress cause another crisis.
And keep in mind, by the way, this whole thing has to do with keeping the government open for a few months. The continuing resolution -- the bill that's designed to avert a government shutdown -- basically just funds the government for another couple months so we could be doing this all over again. I’m sure the American people are thrilled about that.
And that's why we’ve got to break this cycle. My message to Congress is this: Do not shut down the government. Do not shut down the economy. Pass a budget on time. Pay our bills on time. Refocus on the everyday concerns of the American people.
There will be differences between Democrats and Republicans. We can have all kinds of conversations about how to resolve those differences. There will be areas where we can work together. There will be areas where we disagree. But do not threaten to burn the house down simply because you haven’t gotten 100 percent of your way. That's not how our democracy is supposed to work.
Every day that this goes on is another day that we’re not focused on doing what we need to be focused on, which is rebuilding this great country of ours so that our middle class is growing and everybody has got opportunity if they're willing to work hard. That's what I’m focused on. That's what Congress should be focused on as well.
Thank you very much, everybody.
END
3:57 P.M. EDT
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTI7e-nGME ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/27/statement-president [transcript also at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-sept-27-statement-on-looming-government-shutdown-iran/2013/09/27/54e0ff40-27ab-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html (with comments)]
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Will a Government Shutdown Chill Congressional Republicans Out? No
Optimistic commentators think closure could keep the country from breaching the debt ceiling. But there's no reason a few stubborn House members can't provoke both.
Sep 29 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/will-a-government-shutdown-chill-congressional-republicans-out-no/280091/ [with comments]
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Ted Cruz Was On Meet The Press And Struggled With Brevity, So Here's The Short Version
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 26: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
By Jason Linkins
Posted: 09/29/2013 8:09 pm EDT | Updated: 09/30/2013 10:20 am EDT
As Cruz has demonstrated troubles with prolixity -- and because these troubles make everyone's life a little harder -- I am going to boil his answers in a Sunday "Meet the Press" interview down into their simplest form so that for once, Ted Cruz doesn't have to be such a long-winded pain in the ass of John Boehner or anyone else.
Let's begin:
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're the man in the middle of this whole fight. So here are the stakes: "De-fund or delay," say you and other Republicans. President says, "No way. This law is moving forward." Are you in control of what happens next?
SHORTER CRUZ: Don't know. Somebody else's problem
ACTUAL GREGORY: You keep saying that the Senate and the House should listen to the American people. I looked at polling this week that shows, in a lot of quarters, the bill is unpopular, the law is unpopular. 56% want to uphold this law. So when you say, "Listen to the American people," they're not necessarily with you.
SHORTER CRUZ: Trick poll. So what?
ACTUAL GREGORY: So it's just polling methodology?
SHORTER CRUZ: Dunno. Obamacare bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: We'll get into some of the particulars of Obamacare, because obviously, there's more to that story that advocates would argue. But let's just stick with the here and now. So how does this end? Because, as I understand it, you would only support de-funding of Obamacare. A delay, for you, is not enough.
SHORTER CRUZ: Senate needs to do stuff.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You know, the Senate has acted, the Majority Leader will say, passed a bill to keep the government open, and now we've gone back to trying to delay or de-fund Obamacare. So the Senate is saying, "We're not going to take this up." Should they take up part of it? Should there be votes? Would you filibuster this bill?
SHORTER CRUZ: I am basically opposed to the Democrats in the Senate taking a position and voting according to that. Harry Reid bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: But Senator, even Republicans that I've spoken to, your colleagues, say, "Senator Cruz can't blame Harry Reid for shutting down the government. Senator Reid acted. He passed a bill to keep the government open."
SHORTER CRUZ: No Harry Reid wants shutdown.
ACTUAL GREGORY: It's interesting. Democrats say, "You know, the problem with Senator Cruz's position is that it's a purist position." There are problems with Obamacare. The White House admits that. We talked about polling in some quarters indicating great dissatisfaction with the law, as you're talking about in Town Hall meetings. But you have to engaged in a debate about how they change the law. What you've gone out and said is, "Let's kill the law all together. Let's de-fund it."
SHORTER CRUZ: Your question is dumb. You are dumb. Our offer to destroy Obamacare is a "compromise."
ACTUAL GREGORY: So here's the thing, Senator.
SHORTER CRUZ: Waaah.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You make this argument as if there's no broader context here. Obamacare has been legislated. It has been adjudicated. And it has been tested to the political system. And so let's go through that. We had an election where I heard the standard bearer for the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, say Obamacare should be repealed.
All the Republicans already voted against this thing when it was ultimately passed. The Supreme Court upheld it. And then this summer, you and your colleagues said, "Look, let's have a strategy here of de-funding Obamacare," and you had people who signed a letter. And they said they joined you in that fight.
Well, here you are now, you don't even have the same number of folks who signed the letter who voted with you in this effort. There are not protests in the streets arguing to do away with this law in the way that you'd like. Again, 56%, in one poll of this week, New York Times/CBS said, "Let's uphold the law." So I'm focusing on results. Your goal and results. Where have you moved anything?
SHORTER CRUZ: [holds hands over ears] BLAH BLAH BLAH I DON'T HEAR THAT. Obamacare is bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're a terrific lawyer. You're making an argument. I asked you a specific question based on the facts on the ground. You've made all these arguments. My goodness, you went and spoke for 21 hours to make these arguments. You haven't moved anyone.
SHORTER CRUZ: No one likes Obamacare, this is just facts. Harry Reid is bad. There is only one right answer.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're an opponent of the law. There is, of course, another side to this story, right? Millions of Americans are getting access to health care that they couldn't otherwise afford. Folks who have children, they can now be on it up to 26. Republicans agree with things like not having pre-existing conditions, get in the way of getting insurance.
Utilization is down. I spoke to a hospital administrator in Illinois this week, quite skeptical of the law, who said, "Look, utilization is down. That could ultimately be helpful for health care costs." You can't know what the effect is five years on from this law. And nor can proponents of the law.
But here's one argument. You've made yours. And the president, when he spoke this week, he actually referred to your words, and I want to play a portion of this, suggesting that what you really don't want to happen is for the law to go forward because then people would really start liking it. This is what he said.
BARACK OBAMA: "It's going to prove almost impossible to undo Obamacare." (Laughter.) Right? So in other words, we've got to shut this thing down before people find out that they like it.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You don't think Americans will like it. You don't think that 25% of the state of Texas that's uninsured will actually like the expanded access to get health insurance?
SHORTER CRUZ: No, no it's not working and everyone already agrees that they will never like it, that's just proven science. Obamacare is wrecking everyone's life right now, these are just facts.
ACTUAL GREGORY: There are also benefit administrators, in my research, who indicate there-- that there is no real sign that employers would stop giving health insurance to their employees. It's a major recruitment tool for how to get employees. And aspects of the law have been delayed so that it can work better. And perhaps these problems that you're identifying could be rectified, short of complete de-funding.
I want to go back to where we started for a moment, just to get you clear on this point. A government shutdown under these circumstances, because this doesn't sound like it will be resolved, that's an acceptable outcome to you?
SHORTER CRUZ: Harry Reid bad he want big bad government shutdown why won't he take the awesome compromise? Why is President Obama and Harry Reid holding the military hostage?
ACTUAL GREGORY: But it is an acceptable outcome?
SHORTER CRUZ: No, because Harry Reid is being an absolutist.
gshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh[...]
Oh, wow, sorry everyone. When Ted Cruz called another person an "absolutist," about forty or fifty anvils fell right out of the sky, onto my head and I blacked out for a little bit. Where is the interview? Christ, it is STILL GOING ON.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're talking a lot about Democrats. They're critical of you. But it's hard for them to get a word in edgewise, because it's members of your own party who are so critical of what you've done and how you've done it. You have colleagues who have accused you of putting on a show. That was Senator Corker. Congressman Peter King said you're a fraud, that you're lying to the base, over-promising something that's possible.
George Will, who's been a conservative columnist for The Washington Post and others, has been very supportive of you in the past. But he wrote this, this week. I want to have you respond to it. Because it seems to crystallize some of the opposition. "Those people who are best at deceiving others first deceive themselves," he wrote. "They often do so by allowing their wishes to be fathers of their thoughts, and begin by wishing that everything has changed.
"Republicans now making a moral melodrama over any vote that allows the ACA to be funded should remember Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the leader of Senate Republicans during passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He recalled '40 preachers caught me one afternoon there in that lobby. "I am not a moralist," I told them. "I'm a legislator." It is good to be both. It is sterile to be the former to the exclusion of the latter.'" Are you more moralist than legislator?
SHORTER CRUZ: I obviously don't read George Will columns. When I offer to destory Obamacare, I am actually making a very generous concession to Democrats. Harry Reid is an absolutist
eu/9r.90uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu[...]doijkx
OMG TED CRUZ YOU NEED TO STOP THAT.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Who's the legislator you most admire? Who's your big role model?
SHORTER CRUZ: Phil Gramm.
Okay I'm pretty sure the substantive part of the interview is over.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Do you regret comparing the future of Obamacare to the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany?
SHORTER CRUZ: I never did that.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Do you ride this to the presidential nomination?
SHORTER CRUZ: SIGH, "THIS TOWN," ETC. Harry Reid is bad.
Isn't Cruzmandias kind of okay in that sort of dosage?
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/29/ted-cruz-meet-the-press_n_4014192.html [with comments]
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President Obama Makes a Statement
Published on Sep 30, 2013
President Obama says that if Congress does not fulfill its responsibility to pass a budget today, much of the United States government will be forced to shut down tomorrow. September 30, 2013.
*
Statement by the President
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
September 30, 2013
5:00 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Of all the responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress, two should be fairly simple: pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.
But if the United States Congress does not fulfill its responsibility to pass a budget today, much of the United States government will be forced to shut down tomorrow. And I want to be very clear about what that shutdown would mean -- what will remain open and what will not.
With regard to operations that will continue: If you’re on Social Security, you will keep receiving your checks. If you’re on Medicare, your doctor will still see you. Everyone’s mail will still be delivered. And government operations related to national security or public safety will go on. Our troops will continue to serve with skill, honor, and courage. Air traffic controllers, prison guards, those who are with border control -- our Border Patrol will remain on their posts, but their paychecks will be delayed until the government reopens. NASA will shut down almost entirely, but Mission Control will remain open to support the astronauts serving on the Space Station.
I also want to be very clear about what would change. Office buildings would close. Paychecks would be delayed. Vital services that seniors and veterans, women and children, businesses and our economy depend on would be hamstrung. Business owners would see delays in raising capital, seeking infrastructure permits, or rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for their country will find their support centers unstaffed. Tourists will find every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, immediately closed. And of course, the communities and small businesses that rely on these national treasures for their livelihoods will be out of customers and out of luck.
And in keeping with the broad ramifications of a shutdown, I think it’s important that everybody understand the federal government is America’s largest employer. More than 2 million civilian workers and 1.4 million active-duty military serve in all 50 states and all around the world. In the event of a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of these dedicated public servants who stay on the job will do so without pay -- and several hundred thousand more will be immediately and indefinitely furloughed without pay.
What, of course, will not be furloughed are the bills that they have to pay -- their mortgages, their tuition payments, their car notes. These Americans are our neighbors. Their kids go to our schools. They worship where we do. They serve their country with pride. They are the customers of every business in this country. And they would be hurt greatly, and as a consequence, all of us will be hurt greatly, should Congress choose to shut the people’s government down.
So a shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly. This one would, too. It would throw a wrench into the gears of our economy at a time when those gears have gained some traction.
Five years ago right now, our economy was in meltdown. Today, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs over the past three and a half years. The housing market is healing and our deficits are falling fast. The idea of putting the American people’s hard-earned progress at risk is the height of irresponsibility.
And it doesn’t have to happen. Let me repeat this: It does not have to happen. All of this is entirely preventable if the House chooses to do what the Senate has already done -- and that’s the simple act of funding our government without making extraneous and controversial demands in the process, the same way other Congresses have for more than 200 years.
Unfortunately, right now House Republicans continue to tie funding of the government to ideological demands like limiting a woman’s access to contraception, or delaying the Affordable Care Act, all to save face after making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their party.
So let me be clear about this. An important part of the Affordable Care Act takes effect tomorrow no matter what Congress decides to do today. The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You can’t shut it down. This is a law that passed both houses of Congress; a law that bears my signature; a law that the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional; a law that voters chose not to repeal last November; a law that is already providing benefits to millions of Americans in the form of young people staying on their parents’ plan until they’re 26, seniors getting cheaper prescription drugs, making sure that insurance companies aren't imposing lifetime limits when you already have health insurance, providing rebates for consumers when insurance companies are spending too much money on overhead instead of health care. Those things are already happening.
Starting tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will be able to visit HealthCare.gov to shop for affordable health care coverage. So Americans who’ve lived for years in some cases with the fear that one illness could send them into bankruptcy, Americans who’ve been priced out of the market just because they’ve been sick once, they’ll finally be able to afford coverage -- quality coverage -- many of them for the first time in their lives.
Some of them may be sick as we speak. And this is their best opportunity to get some security and some relief. Tens of thousands of Americans die every single year because they don’t have access to affordable health care. Despite this, Republicans have said that if we lock these Americans out of affordable health care for one more year -- if we sacrifice the health care of millions of Americans -- then they’ll fund the government for a couple more months. Does anybody truly believe that we won’t have this fight again in a couple more months? Even at Christmas?
So here’s the bottom line: I’m always willing to work with anyone of either party to make sure the Affordable Care Act works better, to make sure our government works better. I’m always willing to work with anyone to grow our economy faster, or to create new jobs faster, to get our fiscal house in order for the long run. I’ve demonstrated this time and time again, oftentimes to the consternation of my own party.
But one faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election.
Keeping the people’s government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital services running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you “give” to the other side. It’s our basic responsibility. It’s something that we’re doing for our military, and our businesses, and our economy, and all the hardworking people out there -- the person working for the Agricultural Department out in some rural community who’s out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit for all the hard work they’re putting in. They’re the person working for HUD who’s helping somebody buy a house for the first time. They’re somebody in a VA office who’s counseling one of our vets who’s got PTSD.
That’s who we’re here to serve. That’s why we’re supposed to be carrying out these responsibilities. It’s why we should be avoiding these kinds of constant brinksmanship. It’s something that we do in the ordinary process of this extraordinary system of government that we have. You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job; for doing what you’re supposed to be doing anyway; or just because there’s a law there that you don’t like.
The American people sent us here to govern. They sent us here to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make their lives a little bit better -- to create new jobs, to restore economic security, to rebuild the prospects of upward mobility. That’s what they expect.
And they understand that there are differences between the parties and we’re going to be having some tough fights around those differences. And I respect the fact that the other party is not supposed to agree with me 100 percent of the time, just like I don’t agree with them. But they do also expect that we don’t bring the entire government to a halt or the entire economy to a halt just because of those differences.
That’s what they deserve. They’ve worked too hard, for too long to recover from previous crises just to have folks here in Washington manufacture yet another one that they have to dig themselves out of.
So Congress needs to keep our government open, needs to pay our bills on time, and never, ever threaten the full faith and credit of the United States of America.
And time is running out. My hope and expectation is that in the eleventh hour, once again, that Congress will choose to do the right thing and that the House of Representatives, in particular, will choose the right thing.
Thank you very much.
END
5:12 P.M. EDT
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arVB-3FIRjA ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/30/statement-president
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The Idiocy of the Shutdown, in 3 Acts: Map, Thought Experiment, Speech
"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events." Thus spake a previous Republican president.
James Fallows
Sep 30 2013, 10:33 PM ET
1. Map. What you see above is how the "shiptracker [ http://shiptracker.noaa.gov/Home/Map ]" function of NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations looked earlier today, showing the recent course of some of its oceanic-and-fisheries research vessels. All the tracks shown on that map listed a termination date no later than midnight tonight, September 30, 2013. That is because the boats were ordered back to port in anticipation of the shutdown. Here is the way the map looks just now. The little red and yellow dots near Pascagoula, Mississippi, are two research vessels that have been called back.
As The Blog Aquatic [ http://blog.oceanconservancy.org/2013/09/30/everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-a-government-shutdown-will-affect-the-ocean/ ] says about the shutdown,
Will it halt NOAA’s ocean research?
For the most part, the federal government’s ocean research activities will be shut down. NOAA’s research vessels will all be ordered to return to port, scientific staff will be sent home, and research efforts will be wound down.
Just to rub it in, here is what similar boats have been doing in the past 30 days, according to NOAA data. Now all stopped.
Yeah, nobody's "hurt" by a shutdown or sequester. (Thanks DR.) This is one of ten thousand examples. Even if the showdown is brief, the wasted shut-down and start-up costs ...
2) Thought experiment. Let's suppose it's the fall of 2005. Suppose George W. Bush has been reelected, as he was in real life. Let's suppose, also as in reality, the Senate remained in Republican hands. But then suppose that Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats had already won control of the House, rather than doing so two years later. So suppose that the lineup as of 2005 had been:
• Reelected Republican president;
• The president's Republican party retaining control of the Senate; and
• Democrats controlling only one chamber, the House.
Then suppose further that Pelosi's newly empowered House Democrats announced that unless George W. Bush agreed to reverse the sweeping tax cuts that had been the signature legislative achievement of his first term, they would refuse to pass a budget so that the federal government could operate, and would threaten a default on U.S. sovereign debt. Alternatively, that unless Bush immediately withdrew from Iraq, federal government funding would cease and the debt ceiling would be frozen.
In this imagined world, I contend:
• "respectable" opinion would be all over Pelosi and the Democrats for their "shrill," "extreme" demands, especially given their lack of broad electoral mandate;
• hand-wringing editorials would point out that if you want to change policy, there's an established route to do so, which involves passing new bills and getting them signed into law, rather than issuing "otherwise we blow up the government" ultimatums;
• no one would be saying that the "grownups in the room" had to resolve the crisis by giving away, say, half of the president's tax cuts. (Even though, to my taste, that would have been a positive step.)
The circumstances are the mirror image now. A party that within the past year has:
• lost the presidency by 5 million votes;
• lost the Senate by a total of 10 million votes;
• held onto control of the House through favorable districting, while losing the overall House vote by 1.7 million nationwide
... is nonetheless dictating terms to the rest of the government. This would have been called extreme and unreasonable under an imagined Nancy Pelosi House in 2005. It is extreme and unreasonable now.
3) Speech. I give you the nation's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, in his hallowed Cooper Union address [ http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm ] of 1860. (Thanks RJK.) Worth reading every word:
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. This, plainly stated, is your language…
In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle….
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong...
Ninety minutes to go, here on the East Coast. "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government..." Grrrr.
*
Related
Your False-Equivalence Guide to the Days Ahead
A kind of politics we have not seen for more than 150 years
Sep 27 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/your-false-equivalence-guide-to-the-days-ahead/280062/
Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Breakdown,' in 3 Graphs (and 1 Story)
Tea Party members say they are expressing the public's will. Gee, if only there were some way to judge popular sentiment in a democracy.
Sep 29 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/why-this-is-not-just-washington-breakdown-in-3-graphs-and-1-story/280099/
*
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-idiocy-of-the-shutdown-in-3-acts-map-thought-experiment-speech/280141/
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Devin Nunes Calls GOP Colleagues 'Lemmings With Suicide Vests' As Shutdown Looms
09/30/2013
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sharply criticized his fellow House Republicans [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/09/30/nunes-calls-fellow-house-republicans-lemmings-with-suicide-vests/ ] on Monday, saying [ https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/384802010190462976 ] it's "moronic" for them to let the government shut down over their opposition to Obamacare and calling them "lemmings with suicide vests."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/devin-nunes-government-shutdown_n_4019531.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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GOP came to power seeking government shutdown
The Rachel Maddow Show
September 30, 2013
Rachel Maddow traces the Republican enthusiasm for shutting down the federal government since before they seized the majority in the House in the 2010 election. Senator Charles Schumer joins for further discussion.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53151808 [the above YouTube of all but the first minute-plus of the segment (recapping the then-current situation) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZFUqjLcBF4 ; show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/01/20765358-links-for-the-930-trms (with comments); segment also embedded at "Rachel Maddow On Shutdown: 'Elect Republicans And They Will Burn The Place Down'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/rachel-maddow-shutdown-republicans_n_4021809.html (with comments)]
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Jon Stewart's Rockin' Shutdown Eve
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Monday September 30, 2013
If President Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent mullahs in the world but not with House Republicans, maybe he is not the problem.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-september-30-2013/jon-stewart-s-rockin--shutdown-eve [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Blasts GOP Over Shutdown: When The Giants Lost, They Didn't Shut Down The NFL", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/jon-stewart-on-govt-shutdown_n_4020581.html (with comments)]
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Tea Party tactic hijacked for Obamacare fight
The Rachel Maddow Show
October 1, 2013 [early am live]
Dave Weigel, political reporter for Slate.com, talks with Rachel Maddow about the 2010 and 2012 Republican campaign rhetoric in favor of shutting down the government and how House Republicans have pivoted from a message of fiscal restraint to an expensive, wasteful attack on the Affordable Care Act.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53152693 [show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/01/20765358-links-for-the-930-trms (with comments)]
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President Obama Delivers a Statement on the Government Shutdown
Published on Oct 1, 2013 by The White House
In the Rose Garden at the White House, President Obama delivers a statement to the press on the Affordable Care Act and the Government Shutdown. October 1, 2013.
*
Remarks by the President on the Affordable Care Act and the Government Shutdown
Rose Garden
October 01, 2013
1:01 P.M. EDT
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning, everybody. At midnight last night, for the first time in 17 years, Republicans in Congress chose to shut down the federal government. Let me be more specific: One faction, of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government, shut down major parts of the government -- all because they didn’t like one law.
This Republican shutdown did not have to happen. But I want every American to understand why it did happen. Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to fund the government unless we defunded or dismantled the Affordable Care Act. They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job.
And many representatives, including an increasing number of Republicans, have made it clear that had they been allowed by Speaker Boehner to take a simple up or down vote on keeping the government open, with no partisan strings attached, enough votes from both parties would have kept the American people’s government open and operating.
We may not know the full impact of this Republican shutdown for some time. It will depend on how long it lasts. But we do know a couple of things. We know that the last time Republicans shut down the government in 1996, it hurt our economy. And unlike 1996, our economy is still recovering from the worst recession in generations.
We know that certain services and benefits that America’s seniors and veterans and business owners depend on must be put on hold. Certain offices, along with every national park and monument, must be closed. And while last night, I signed legislation to make sure our 1.4 million active-duty military are paid through the shutdown, hundreds of thousands of civilian workers -- many still on the job, many forced to stay home -- aren’t being paid, even if they have families to support and local businesses that rely on them. And we know that the longer this shutdown continues, the worse the effects will be. More families will be hurt. More businesses will be harmed.
So, once again, I urge House Republicans to reopen the government, restart the services Americans depend on, and allow the public servants who have been sent home to return to work. This is only going to happen when Republicans realize they don’t get to hold the entire economy hostage over ideological demands.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I am prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans to do the things we need to do to grow the economy and create jobs, and get our fiscal house in order over the long run. Although I should add this shutdown isn’t about deficits, or spending, or budgets. After all, our deficits are falling at the fastest pace in 50 years. We’ve cut them in half since I took office. In fact, many of the demands the Republicans are now making would actually raise our deficits.
No, this shutdown is not about deficits, it’s not about budgets. This shutdown is about rolling back our efforts to provide health insurance to folks who don’t have it. It’s all about rolling back the Affordable Care Act. This, more than anything else, seems to be what the Republican Party stands for these days. I know it’s strange that one party would make keeping people uninsured the centerpiece of their agenda, but that apparently is what it is.
And of course, what’s stranger still is that shutting down our government doesn’t accomplish their stated goal. The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House; it passed the Senate. The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It was a central issue in last year’s election. It is settled, and it is here to stay. And because of its funding sources, it’s not impacted by a government shutdown.
And these Americans are here with me today because, even though the government is closed, a big part of the Affordable Care Act is now open for business. And for them, and millions like them, this is a historic day for a good reason. It’s been a long time coming, but today, Americans who have been forced to go without insurance can now visit healthcare.gov and enroll in affordable new plans that offer quality coverage. That starts today.
And people will have six months to sign up. So over the next six months, people are going to have the opportunity -- in many cases, for the first time in their lives -- to get affordable coverage that they desperately need.
Now, of course, if you’re one of the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, you don’t need to do a thing. You’re already benefiting from new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time under this law. But for the 15 percent of Americans who don't have health insurance, this opportunity is life-changing.
Let me just tell folks a few stories that are represented here today. A few years ago, Amanda Barrett left her job in New York to take care of her parents. And for a while, she had temporary insurance that covered her multiple sclerosis. But when it expired, many insurers wouldn’t cover her because of her MS. And she ended up paying $1,200 a month. That’s nowhere near affordable. So starting today, she can get covered for much less, because today’s new plan can’t use your medical history to charge you more than anybody else.
Sky-high premiums once forced Nancy Beigel to choose between paying her rent or paying for health insurance. She’s been uninsured ever since. So she pays all of her medical bills out of pocket, puts some on her credit card, making them even harder to pay. Nancy says, “They talk about those who fall through the cracks. I fell through the cracks 10 years ago and I’ve been stuck there ever since.” Well, starting today, Nancy can get covered just like everybody else.
Trinace Edwards was laid off from her job a year ago today. Six months ago, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She couldn’t afford insurance on the individual market, so she hasn’t received treatment yet. Her daughter Lenace, a student at the University of Maryland, is considering dropping out of school to help pay her mom’s bills. Well, starting today, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Trinace can get covered without forcing her daughter to give up on her dreams.
So if these stories of hardworking Americans sound familiar to you, well, starting today, you and your friends and your family and your coworkers can get covered, too. Just visit healthcare.gov, and there you can compare insurance plans, side by side, the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon. You enter some basic information, you’ll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area, with clear descriptions of what each plan covers, and what it will cost. You’ll find more choices, more competition, and in many cases, lower prices -- most uninsured Americans will find that they can get covered for $100 or less.
And you don't have to take my word for it. Go on the website, healthcare.gov, check it out for yourself. And then show it to your family and your friends and help them get covered, just like mayors and churches and community groups and companies are already fanning out to do across the country.
And there’s a hotline where you can apply over the phone and get help with the application, or just get questions that you have answered by real people, in 150 different languages. So let me give you that number. The number is 1-800-318-2596 -- 1-800-318-2596. Check out healthcare.gov. Call that number. Show your family and friends how to use it. And we can get America covered, once and for all, so that the struggles that these folks have gone through and millions around the country have gone through for years finally get addressed.
And let me just remind people why I think this is so important. I heard a striking statistic yesterday -- if you get cancer, you are 70 percent more likely to live another five years if you have insurance than if you don’t. Think about that. That is what it means to have health insurance.
Set aside the issues of security and finances and how you’re impacted by that, the stress involved in not knowing whether or not you’re going to have health care. This is life-or-death stuff. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year just because they don’t have health insurance. Millions more live with the fear that they’ll go broke if they get sick. And today, we begin to free millions of our fellow Americans from that fear.
Already, millions of young adults have been able to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26. Millions of seniors already have gotten a discount on their prescription medicines. Already millions of families have actually received rebates from insurance companies that didn’t spend enough on their health care. So this law means more choice, more competition, lower costs for millions of Americans.
And this law doesn’t just mean economic security for our families. It means we’re finally addressing the biggest drivers of our long-term deficits. It means a stronger economy.
Remember most Republicans have made a whole bunch of predictions about this law that haven’t come true. There are no “death panels.” Costs haven’t skyrocketed; they’re growing at the slowest rate in 50 years. The last three years since I signed the Affordable Care Act into law are the three slowest rates of health spending growth on record.
And contrary to Republican claims, this law hasn’t “destroyed” our economy. Over the past three and a half years, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs. Just today, we learned that our manufacturers are growing at the fastest rate in two and a half years. They have factored in the Affordable Care Act. They don't think it’s a problem. What’s weighing on the economy is not the Affordable Care Act, but the constant series of crises and the unwillingness to pass a reasonable budget by a faction of the Republican Party.
Now, like every new law, every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site has been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than one million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning.
To put that in context, there were five times more users in the marketplace this morning than have ever been on Medicare.gov at one time. That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that’s a good thing. And we're going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected.
Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads -- or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.
So in that context, I'll work with anybody who’s got a serious idea to make the Affordable Care Act work better. I've said that repeatedly. But as long as I am President, I will not give in to reckless demands by some in the Republican Party to deny affordable health insurance to millions of hardworking Americans.
I want Republicans in Congress to know these are the Americans you’d hurt if you were allowed to dismantle this law. Americans like Amanda, Nancy, and Trinace, who now finally have the opportunity for basic security and peace of mind of health care just like everybody else -- including members of Congress. The notion that you’d make a condition for reopening the government that I make sure these folks don’t have health care -- that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense.
Now, let me make one closing point: This Republican shutdown threatens our economy at a time when millions of Americans are still looking for work, and businesses are starting to get some traction. So the timing is not good. Of course, a lot of the Republicans in the House ran for office two years ago promising to shut down the government, and so, apparently, they've now gotten their wish. But as I've said before, the irony that the House Republicans have to contend with is they've shut down a whole bunch of parts of the government, but the Affordable Care Act is still open for business.
And this may be why you've got many Republican governors and senators and even a growing number of reasonable Republican congressmen who are telling the extreme right of their party to knock it off, pass a budget, move on.
And I want to underscore the fact that Congress doesn’t just have to end this shutdown and reopen the government -- Congress generally has to stop governing by crisis. They have to break this habit. It is a drag on the economy. It is not worthy of this country.
For example, one of the most important things Congress has to do in the next couple weeks is to raise what's called the debt ceiling. And it's important to understand what this is. This is a routine vote. Congress has taken this vote 45 times to raise the debt ceiling since Ronald Reagan took office. It does not cost taxpayers a single dime. It does not grow our deficits by a single dime. It does not authorize anybody to spend any new money whatsoever. All it does is authorize the Treasury to pay the bills on what Congress has already spent.
Think about that. If you buy a car and you’ve got a car note, you do not save money by not paying your car note. You’re just a deadbeat. If you buy a house, you don’t save money by not authorizing yourself to pay the mortgage. You’re just going to be foreclosed on your home. That’s what this is about.
It is routine. It is what they’re supposed to do. This is not a concession to me. It is not some demand that’s unreasonable that I’m making. This is what Congress is supposed to do as a routine matter. And they shouldn’t wait until the last minute to do it. The last time Republicans even threatened this course of action -- many of you remember, back in 2011 -- our economy staggered, our credit rating was downgraded for the first time. If they go through with it this time and force the United States to default on its obligations for the first time in history, it would be far more dangerous than a government shutdown -- as bad as a shutdown is. It would be an economic shutdown.
So I’ll speak more on this in the coming days, but let me repeat: I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay bills it’s already racked up. I’m not going to allow anybody to drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud just to refight a settled election or extract ideological demands. Nobody gets to hurt our economy and millions of hardworking families over a law you don’t like.
There are a whole bunch of things that I’d like to see passed through Congress that the House Republicans haven’t passed yet, and I’m not out there saying, well, I’m not -- I’m going to let America default unless Congress does something that they don’t want to do. That’s not how adults operate. Certainly that’s not how our government should operate. And that’s true whether there’s a Democrat in this office or a Republican in this office. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Democratic House of Representatives or a Republican-controlled House of Representatives -- there are certain rules that everybody abides by because we don’t want to hurt other people just because we have a political disagreement.
So my basic message to Congress is this: Pass a budget. End the government shutdown. Pay your bills. Prevent an economic shutdown. Don’t wait. Don’t delay. Don’t put our economy or our people through this any longer.
I am more than happy to work with them on all kinds of issues. I want to get back to work on the things that the American people sent us here to work on -- creating new jobs, new growth, new security for our middle class.
We’re better than this. Certainly the American people are a lot better than this. And I believe that what we’ve accomplished for Amanda, and Nancy, and Trinace, and tens of millions of their fellow citizens- on this day proves that even when the odds are long and the obstacles are many, we are and always will be a country that can do great things together.
Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. Thank you, all of you, for the great work that you’re doing. And thank you, Kathleen Sebelius, for the outstanding work that she’s doing making sure that millions of Americans can get health insurance.
Thank you.
END
1:21 P.M. EDT
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmRA_tML2tE ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/10/01/remarks-president-affordable-care-act-and-government-shutdown
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This Is Obamacare:
Affordable, accessible care for every American.
Scroll down to see Obamacare in action.
Learn more about how Obamacare will affect you.
http://www.thisisobamacare.com/
--
States of Health
by Atul Gawande
October 7, 2013
Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.
This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health-insurance coverage to millions of people like Sullivan, is slated to go into effect. Republican leaders have described the event in apocalyptic terms, as Republican leaders have described proposals to expand health coverage for three-quarters of a century. In 1946, Senator Robert Taft denounced President Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance as “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan argued that, if Medicare were to be enacted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” And now comes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing the Affordable Care Act as a “monstrosity,” “a disaster,” and the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years.” Lacking the votes to repeal the law, Republican hard-liners want to shut down the federal government unless Democrats agree to halt its implementation.
The law’s actual manifestation, however, is rather anodyne: as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.
How this will unfold, though, depends on where you live. Governors and legislatures in about half the states—from California to New York, Minnesota to Maryland—are working faithfully to implement the law with as few glitches as possible. In the other half—Indiana to Texas, Utah to South Carolina—they are working equally faithfully to obstruct its implementation. Still fundamentally in dispute is whether we as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan. Not only do conservatives not think so; they seem to see providing that protection as a threat to America itself.
Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.
Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.
This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as “pupil placement” reviews, “freedom of choice” plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform. In some states, Paul Sullivan’s fate will become rare. In others, it will remain a reality for an unconscionable number of people. Of some three thousand counties in the nation, a hundred and fourteen account for half of the uninsured. Sixty-two of those counties are in states that have accepted the key elements of Obamacare, including funding to expand Medicaid. Fifty-two are not.
So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured will gain protection they didn’t have. It won’t be the thirty-two million hoped for, and it’s becoming clear that the meaning of the plan’s legacy will be fought over not for a few months but for years. Still, state by state, a new norm is coming into being: if you’re a freelancer, or between jobs, or want to start your own business but have a family member with a serious health issue, or if you become injured or ill, you are entitled to basic protection.
Conservatives keep hoping that they can drive the system to collapse. That won’t happen. Enough people, states, and health-care interests are committed to making it work, just as the Massachusetts version has for the past seven years. And people now have a straightforward way to resist the forces of obstruction: sign up for coverage, if they don’t have it, and help others do so as well.
© 2013 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/07/131007taco_talk_gawande
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Pro-shutdown GOP ignorant to lessons of '95
The Rachel Maddow Show
October 1, 2013
Karen Tumulty, national political reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about House Republicans' repeated, and ultimately successful, attempts to shut down the United States government, and what she describes as "governing by near death experience."
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53162116 [for the moment at least, with part of the audio in the first portion of the segment apparently muted at the source; copyright claim(s)?] [the above YouTube of the first portion of the segment (with good audio all the way through; less the latter portion with Tumulty) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6wHUc_WH70 , also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn13MMJ5pPs , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-Y4MDwuiMA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbsQ304xBU ( http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maddow-takes-down-gop-they-wanted-govt-shutdown-all-along-and-they-were-giddy-about-it/ {with comments}); show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/02/20779802-links-for-the-101-trms (with comments)]
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Michael Savage Suggests Rachel Maddow Should Have A Sex Change and Become A Guy
Published on Oct 1, 2013 by imitator777
Aired on October 1, 2013 - The Savage Nation - Michael Savage Suggests Rachel Maddow Should Have A Sex Change and Become A Guy - http://www.michaelsavage.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tro2ZpwTGbA
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Video [embedded]
Ted Cruz reads Dr. Seuss — During his “fauxlibuster”.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/opinions/ted-cruz-reads-dr-seuss/2013/09/25/482c76a4-2601-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_video.html
By Dana Milbank, Published September 25, 2013
John McCain said more in 10 minutes on the Senate floor than Ted Cruz did in 21 hours.
The Texas hothead had just completed his impressive bladderbuster, in which he discussed Ashton Kutcher and Toby Keith, did a Darth Vader impression, recited passages from Ayn Rand, read “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters at home, and spoke directly to his “sweetheart” via C-SPAN. At the end, he thanked dozens of people for their contributions to his marathon, as if rolling the credits on the heroic film of his life.
To the extent that Cruz’s phony filibuster had a point (it didn’t delay any vote) it was to shame his fellow Republicans into joining his crusade to shut down the government if Obamacare isn’t defunded; those who disagreed, he said, were like “Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis.’”
Half an hour after Cruz yielded the floor — “by force,” he claimed, even though he had declined an offer from Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to speak for an additional hour — McCain delivered a few words that could have taught his young colleague something about honor.
“I resoundingly reject that allegation,” the Arizona Republican said after reading Cruz’s words aloud. “To allege that there are people today who are like those who, prior to World War II, didn’t stand up and oppose the atrocities that were taking place in Europe, because I have an open and honest disagreement with the process .?.?. is an inappropriate place for debate on the floor of the United States Senate.”
McCain said Cruz’s words belittled those who served in the war, including his father and grandfather. He then used the rest of his brief speech to defend his record in opposition to Obamacare, which shouldn’t have been necessary: Nobody fought harder against the health-care reforms.
The difference between the two men has nothing to do with who hates Obamacare more. Rather, their difference is one of character. McCain exhorts his colleagues to serve a cause greater than self, as he did as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Cruz acts as though the greatest cause is himself.
A casual observer of Cruz’s antics could see what his colleagues had been grumbling about privately: that his time on the Senate floor was an exercise in self-promotion. Cruz must have been sensitive about this, for he felt the need to protest sometime around hour 17, “I would be perfectly happy if not a single story coming out of this ever mentioned my name.”
This is the same man who spoke at great length about his father’s cooking, an auto accident his wife had had and what views he might have in common with Kutcher. He demonstrated his regard for the institution by working in the phrase “give a flying flip” and kissed up to Rush Limbaugh by reading something written by the radio host’s father.
Cruz’s colleagues voted with their feet. Earlier this year, 16 senators — including a Democrat — were on the floor to support a filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) protesting drone warfare. Cruz’s droning was eight hours longer than Paul’s, and his topic had much broader appeal to Republicans, yet I counted only 10 participants in support, including Cruz.
In the end, Cruz joined the 99 other senators in voting to proceed with the debate on the legislation Cruz seeks to block. He said he would take his stand on the next vote, but that probably won’t go much better for him — in no small part because of colleagues’ disdain for him, which McCain gave voice to after the freshman senator finished his bladderbuster.
McCain ridiculed the “extended oratory” and then recounted his own opposition to the legislation. “We fought as hard as we could in a fair and honest manner and we lost,” he said. In 2012, he went on, “I campaigned all over America for two months, everywhere I could, and in every single campaign rally I said and we have to repeal and replace Obamacare. Well, the people spoke. .?.?. That doesn’t mean that we give up our efforts to try to replace and repair Obamacare. But it does mean that elections have consequences.”
While McCain spoke of honoring the will of the electorate, Cruz was moving on to give Limbaugh an interview in which he said he was honoring the will of the broadcaster’s listeners. “We’re listening to the same bosses and trying to respond to the same people who are frustrated,” Cruz said.
Maybe it was the fatigue, but Cruz made a surprisingly frank admission to Limbaugh. “In many ways,” he said, “the central issue that we were trying to focus on in the filibuster was not the continuing resolution. It wasn’t even Obamacare.”
Right. It was narcissism.
© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ted-cruzs-phony-obamacare-filibuster-was-really-about--ted-cruz/2013/09/25/b8f273a8-2632-11e3-b3e9-d97fb087acd6_story.html [with comments]
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Healthcare Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Wednesday September 25, 2013
Texas Senator Ted Cruz casts himself as Churchill to Obama's Chamberlain in the great fight against Hitler's healthcare exchanges.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-25-2013/healthcare-bill---ted-s-excellent-adventure [with comments] [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Skewers Ted Cruz's 21-Hour Obamacare Speech: 'You're F*cking With Us, Right?'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/26/jon-stewart-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3995175.html (with comments)]
*
Healthcare Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - The Bore-ax
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Wednesday September 25, 2013
To express his opposition to Obamacare, Ted Cruz cites a children's book about a stubborn jerk who decides he hates something before he's tried it.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-25-2013/healthcare-bill---ted-s-excellent-adventure---the-bore-ax [with comments] [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Skewers Ted Cruz's 21-Hour Obamacare Speech: 'You're F*cking With Us, Right?'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/26/jon-stewart-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3995175.html (with comments)]
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Where the G.O.P.'s Suicide Caucus Lives
The geography of Congress’s so-called suicide caucus.
Posted by Ryan Lizza
September 26, 2013
On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner [ http://meadows.house.gov/uploads/Meadows_DefundLetter.pdf ]. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.
Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out.
Back home in Meadows’s congressional district, the idea was quite popular. North Carolina’s Eleventh District had been gerrymandered after the 2010 census to become the most Republican district in his state. Meadows won his election last November by fifteen points. The Presidential contest there was an even bigger blowout. Romney won the district by twenty-three points, sixty-one per cent to thirty-eight per cent. While the big story of the 2012 election was about demographics and a growing non-white population that is increasingly Democratic, that was not the story in the Meadows race. His district is eighty-seven per cent white, five per cent Latino, and three per cent black.
Before Meadows sent off his letter to Boehner, he circulated it among his colleagues, and with the help of the conservative group FreedomWorks [ http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/jwithrow/does-your-senator-stand-with-mike-lee-against-obam ], as well as some heavy campaigning by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, seventy-nine like-minded House Republicans from districts very similar to Meadows’s added their signatures.
“Since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect,” the letter said, “we urge you to affirmatively de-fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”
They ended the letter with a stirring reference to Madison:
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon … for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We look forward to collaborating to defund one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.
Not everyone thought it was a terrific idea or one worthy of comparison to the brilliance of the Founders. Noting the strategic ineptness of threatening a government shutdown over a policy that neither the Democratically controlled Senate nor the President himself would ever support, Karl Rove railed against the idea in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed the eighty Republicans the “suicide caucus.”
And yet, a few weeks later, Boehner adopted the course demanded by Meadows and his colleagues.
The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity. It’s especially strange when you consider some of the numbers behind the suicide caucus. As we approach a likely government shutdown this month and then a more perilous fight over raising the debt ceiling in October, it’s worth considering the demographics and geography of the eighty districts whose members have steered national policy over the past few weeks.
As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/cook-report/the-gop-keeps-getting-whiter-20130314 ], a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.
The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).
The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.
As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.
Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.
© 2013 Condé Nast (emphasis in original)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html [no comments yet]
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Jim DeMint, Congressional Republicans' Shadow Speaker
Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
By Joshua Green
September 26, 2013
When Congress adjourned for its August recess this year, most members avoided the town hall meetings that were once the standard venue for hearing from constituents. They were too afraid. Ever since activists opposed to President Obama’s health-care bill ambushed lawmakers in August 2009, few members are willing to risk a confrontation being immortalized on YouTube (GOOG)—or, worse, Fox News (FOXA). Trips home are now carefully choreographed affairs that limit spontaneous voter contact.
But neither the anger nor the town hall format has gone away; they’re just under new management. In mid-August, Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who quit the Senate in January to become president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank, set off on a nine-city Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour. DeMint, 62, is a courtly, polished Southerner who used to own a marketing business. These days he’s selling the idea that it’s not too late to kill the health-care law. In each city, hundreds and sometimes thousands of true believers crammed into hotel ballrooms to hear him explain how, with enough pressure on legislators, Congress could be persuaded to withhold funding for the law and thereby halt it before public enrollment begins on Oct. 1. “The House holds the purse strings,” DeMint told his crowds. If Republicans keep them cinched, he promised, the law would fail.
DeMint’s idea was initially dismissed as quixotic. For one thing, the Affordable Care Act is mostly paid for by mandatory funds that can’t be blocked. For another, Democrats control the White House and Senate. Even so, the defund push has caught fire in Washington because activists have made it into a crusade. “We needed someone out there arguing for what is the right thing to do and putting the flag in the right place,” DeMint says over breakfast the morning after he’s addressed 900 people in Columbus, Ohio. “This little effort, with a paltry amount of money, has drawn thousands of people, almost tearfully, to come out in support.”
DeMint assumes that Republicans have leverage because funding for the federal government will run out on Sept. 30, and if Congress doesn’t pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open, it will shut down the next day. That’s an outcome neither party wants, but one DeMint calculates Obama would do almost anything to avoid—including making concessions on his signature law. So in August, as the defund tour wended its way through the country, DeMint was pitching the idea of a continuing resolution that funds everything except Obamacare. Scores of Republican congressmen and senators signed on, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who joined DeMint onstage in Dallas to endorse the idea. “There is a paradigm shift under way in American politics, which is the rise of the grass roots,” says Cruz, the leading defund promoter in the Senate. “It’s changing the way political decisions are made in Washington.”
Many Republicans looked on in horror as the defund movement gained steam. If the government shuts down, polls suggest blame will fall most heavily on the GOP. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr calls DeMint’s plan “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” Representative Tom Cole, a veteran Oklahoma Republican, has likened the shutdown threat to “putting the gun to your own head. You’re basically saying, do what I want or I’ll shoot.” DeMint doesn’t see why his ploy should hurt Republicans. “Democrats will be shutting down the government to protect Obamacare,” he insists. As DeMint sees it, if Republicans would just toughen up and start singing from the same hymnal, public opinion might swing to their side. And if they won’t, he plans to turn his legions of supporters inside and outside of government against them.
On Sept. 20, House Speaker John Boehner, who badly wants to avert a shutdown, succumbed to the uprising in his caucus and held a vote on a funding bill that excludes Obamacare. All but one Republican supported it. (Through his staff, Boehner declined to be interviewed.) This could soon bring about the very crisis Boehner has tried to prevent, because the Democratic Senate will strip the defund provision and then—well, it’s not clear.
When most Americans look at Washington, they see a broken Congress, riven by partisanship and lurching from crisis to crisis. While the hostility between Republicans and Democrats is indeed severe, it isn’t the real reason the engine of government keeps seizing up. What’s causing the malfunction is a battle within the GOP over how to return the party to its former glory after two consecutive losses to Obama and setbacks in the House and Senate. It’s a fight that pits uncompromising, Heritage-style conservatives against more cautious Republican elders. What makes it so contentious is that both sides have radically different—and mutually exclusive—ideas about how to move forward.
This struggle heats up each time a major budget deadline approaches, and two huge ones loom in the days ahead: There’s the Sept. 30 government funding deadline and then, sometime in late October, the Department of the Treasury will reach the limit of its borrowing capacity and default unless Congress raises the debt ceiling. In crises precipitated by similar deadlines, Republican leaders have always managed to keep their party together—or at least keep it from coming apart.
That will be much harder this time. While Boehner and the GOP leadership want mainly to navigate safe passage through the budget deadlines, DeMint and his cohort see the deadlines as crucial tests of party resolve and a key to the Republican resurgence they envision. DeMint views the impulse to avoid confrontation as the root of Republican woes: Only by engineering grand clashes and then standing resolutely on the side of small government can Republicans win this existential struggle.
“If I were speaker, I’d tell the president, ‘Mr. President, we funded the government, but we’re not going to fund your bill,’?” says DeMint, who likes to make his point by acting out imagined confrontations. “?‘We are not going to give in—one month, two months, three months. We are never going to give in. It’s just that important.’ And if the president wants to put the country through that to save a law that isn’t ready to go, well, then that’s a battle we have to have.”
When DeMint quit the Senate mid-term, it came as something of a shock in Washington, because a high-profile senator is presumed to have more power than a think tank president. There was plenty of snickering that he was cashing in: Heritage paid his predecessor more than $1 million last year. (The group won’t comment on DeMint’s salary.)
DeMint says he was just fed up. When he was first elected to Congress in 1998, insurrection wasn’t his goal. “I came to Washington as a businessman,” he says, “served six years in the House as a team player. Didn’t cause trouble. I was a policy nerd, introduced Social Security reform, tax reforms, all kinds of health-care reforms.” In 2005 he moved up to the Senate, where he began to lose patience with what he viewed as his party’s lack of commitment to first principles. “We had a lot of people who were great pretenders, talked real big about being conservatives,” he says. “But behind closed doors, they were driving the ball in the opposite direction.”
For a while he thought he could change this by attracting a stauncher breed of Republican to the Capitol. In 2010 he formed a political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to elect like-minded Republicans. He violated Senate protocol by backing challengers to establishment candidates, as when he endorsed Rand Paul for Kentucky’s open Senate seat in 2010 over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked choice. DeMint helped to elect many of the most influential rising conservatives, including Cruz and Marco Rubio of Florida. “I wouldn’t be in the Senate without Jim DeMint,” Cruz says.
Yet he also championed fringe Tea Party figures such as Sharron Angle, who tried to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell, whose defeats cost the party seats—and possibly control of the Senate. DeMint didn’t care. He enraged many in his party when he said he’d rather have 30 Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters, a slap at the moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania who later switched to the Democrats. DeMint became McConnell’s tormenter and the leading voice of dissent among Senate Republicans.
“What Jim loved most was letting his imagination run loose about what conservatism could do,” says Tim Chapman, who worked for DeMint while he was in Congress and is now chief operating officer of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. “But the Senate can be a lonely place. His frustration was less with the fact that he was getting beat up left and right by his colleagues—he’s got thick skin—than that he wasn’t able to talk about big ideas.”
So DeMint gave up trying to purify the party from within. “I recognized that, even after working to elect candidates the party really didn’t want, the only way to change Washington is to go directly to the people,” he says. “You have to win the debate on the outside to shape the culture.”
DeMint thought the Heritage Foundation could provide a platform that the Senate had not. The foundation was the favorite think tank of the Reagan administration, and although its influence has waned, its scholars still staff Republican administrations and congressional offices. Over the years, the Heritage brand has been sullied by the impression that many of its experts are more concerned with politics than scholarship. Selecting an outspoken partisan like DeMint to be president only deepens this impression. Someone as impatient for a Republican revolution as DeMint, though, would see plenty to like about the job, not least its connection to Heritage Action, a 501(c)(4) organization created in 2010 that can run television ads, lobby members of Congress, organize activists, and otherwise advocate for political causes, which the Heritage Foundation itself, as a nonprofit, is forbidden from doing.
While ethics laws bar DeMint from lobbying his former colleagues until he has been out of the Senate for two years, the organizations he oversees and the PAC he founded in the Senate are all pushing his agenda. The Heritage Foundation has produced studies questioning the benefits of immigration reform; Heritage Action has put the defund movement center stage; and the Senate Conservatives Fund, though DeMint is no longer formally affiliated, has been running attack ads calling McConnell a “turncoat” who “surrendered to Barack Obama” in the health-care fight.
The widespread assumption after the 2012 election was that Obama’s victory had settled most of the big fights contested in the campaign, Obamacare in particular. The Republican National Committee, reeling from Mitt Romney’s defeat, conducted an autopsy of what went wrong and concluded that the party needed to broaden its appeal to immigrants, young people, and minorities and move beyond its image of implacable hostility. Boehner was among the first to embrace this message. “It’s pretty clear that the president was reelected,” he said on Nov. 8. “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Since then two things have become apparent: Conservative activists have rejected this call for moderation, and Boehner has lost control of the House. The second has everything to do with the first and explains why we’re careening toward shutdown. DeMint, Cruz, and all those trying to defund Obamacare drew precisely the opposite lesson from the last election than just about everyone else did. “Republicans were told, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t be the issue. Don’t stand for anything. Make it about Obama,’?” DeMint says. “What happened in 2012 was that there was a void of any inspiration, any attempt to lead. It certainly wasn’t because the party was too conservative—it was because there was no conservative leadership at all!”
DeMint thinks the election results don’t accurately reflect national sentiment and therefore can’t be used to argue against his desire to move the party to the right. True conservatism never got a hearing—particularly not in regard to Obamacare, which was, after all, modeled after a Massachusetts law signed by Romney. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” he says. Essentially, DeMint is declaring a mistrial. His side can still prevail, he says, but only by awakening the angry, alienated masses who were put off by Romney’s tepid impersonation of a conservative.
“The world changes when you run a real campaign,” says Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, an ally in the defund push. “Heritage was out there working during the break. Constituents were talking to their members. Now members are pressing leadership, saying, ‘Look, we know this law is not ready. It should not be shoved on Americans.’?” The Sept. 20 House vote to defund was celebrated as a milestone by Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, and other conservative groups that had agitated for it.
The House has become the locus of the Republican civil war because it embodies the upheaval that has coursed through the party during Obama’s presidency. Almost half the Republican caucus—47 percent—was elected in 2010 or later, which means they swept into Congress on the Tea Party wave that was a backlash against Obamacare and the ineffectual GOP establishment. Owing no allegiance to Boehner, these new members have much more in common with outside groups such as Heritage, whose siege mentality and impatience with party orthodoxy they share. “The rise of extra-congressional powerhouses like DeMint and Heritage has really impeded leadership’s ability to move legislation,” says David Wasserman, a House expert at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
DeMint’s grand plan to shape the party is built on his conviction that most elected Republicans don’t have the guts to cast tough votes, especially to cut entitlement programs, which conventional wisdom holds to be political-career-enders. DeMint cites the example of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s budget as evidence that Republicans are all too often gulled into complacency when they should be fighting for their ideals. In 2008, when Ryan first introduced a budget that sought deep cuts in entitlement spending, he drew only eight co-sponsors. In 2011 the Tea Party uprising persuaded the House to pass Ryan’s budget, and most members survived the next election. To DeMint, this proved that entitlement cuts aren’t an automatic death sentence. It shifted the boundaries of mainstream debate to the right. Over time, he suggests, that vote and others like it will condition Republicans to think much more ambitiously about what they can achieve.
And if they don’t want to, he isn’t going to take no for an answer. “We believe that if you throw them in the deep end of the pool, they’re going to learn to swim,” says Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action. That is, if Republicans can be compelled to take tough votes, the insurgents’ ideas will move from the fringes to the mainstream. Establishment Republicans who mock DeMint and Heritage as “hobbits” and “Neanderthals” will be forced to defend these ideas on TV. Republicans will all finally be rowing in the same direction. (At least one establishment heavyweight seems unpersuaded. Karl Rove calls the defund movement an “ill-considered tactic.”)
Oddly enough, DeMint’s inspiration isn’t Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, but Barack Obama, whose strategy Heritage has begun to mimic. “Instead of making fun of him for community organizing,” DeMint says, “we need to realize that that’s how they’re winning on the left: empowering people on the grass-roots level and getting them organized and informed.” To his way of thinking, liberals banded together to force through an unpopular health-care law and have resolutely stood by it. “You had Democrats who were intent, even courageous, about centralizing health care and risked their political careers to do it.”
One of the few members of Congress to hold a town hall meeting during the August break was Representative Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican from suburban Raleigh elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010. By almost any measure, Ellmers is unimpeachably conservative: She has voted 41 times to repeal Obamacare. But prior to her Sept. 3 town hall she spoke out against the defund-or-shutdown strategy. For this she came under withering assault from Dee Park, a feisty, white-haired, 76-year-old grandmother of 17 and Twitter warrior (@grammydee17) from nearby Pinehurst.
Park is part of Heritage Action’s Sentinel program, which trains activists in the manner of the Obama campaign. Only rather than solicit votes, the 5,000 Sentinels are rigorously briefed so they can parry politicians’ feints and dodges and pin them down on whatever issues Heritage deems urgent. “Every Monday afternoon we get a call with the latest intelligence,” Park explains. “From 5:30 to 6 they give us background, answer our questions, and teach us how to recruit.” Park was dispatched to Ellmers’s town hall because, as she put it, “We were concerned that Renee’s Heritage score was not that good.” Heritage Action, like many political groups, grades members on their voting record. “She was voting in ways that we felt were not conservative.” At the meeting, Park, bedecked in an American-flag rugby shirt and gripping her Heritage literature, peppered Ellmers about why she wouldn’t support the defund plan until the congresswoman seemed ready to burst.
A few days later, Ellmers was still steamed. She had just come from the dentist’s office after having a tooth pulled, yet it was clear that DeMint was the greater irritant. “I don’t understand Heritage coming after Republicans,” she says. “We’re the ones fighting against things like Obamacare being put in place. We’re the ones committed to this effort. Shouldn’t these outside groups be working with us?” Her objection to the defund strategy is shared by many Republicans: namely, that it will do more harm than good and ultimately hand power to Obama. Still, she concedes the tactics were effective. “I don’t take it into account myself,” she says, “but there are members who change their votes if they find out that one of these outside groups is scoring it.”
DeMint makes no apologies. “If members feel criticized,” he says, “it’s probably because their constituents are finding out that they’re not fulfilling a campaign promise.”
The echoes of the Obama campaign were even more unmistakable on the nine-city defund tour. Every evening, Heritage Action CEO Needham would warm up the room by leading the audience in a raucous call-and-response chant that borrowed Obama’s famous slogan from 2008.
“Can we defund Obamacare?” Needham would call out.
“YES WE CAN!” roared the audience in reply.
Instead of building momentum toward Election Day, though, the tour was whipping up activists ahead of Oct. 1. That’s the day people can start signing up for the health-care exchanges and, to foes of Obamacare, a potential point of no return. As with the 2012 election, the Republican establishment seems to have been caught off guard by the level of grass-roots intensity, only this time it’s their own side that’s riled up. “Republican leaders can’t fathom a world in which we’re transmitting an authentic message from the base,” says Chapman of Heritage Action.
The rebellion has been building all year. In June, House conservatives killed the Republican farm bill because it didn’t cut deeply enough into nutrition programs. In July they rejected a Republican transportation and housing bill they considered too generous. In early September, Boehner’s first attempt at funding the government wasn’t so much killed as laughed out of the room. Its provision to defund Obamacare was merely symbolic, an attempt to appease his right flank while also avoiding a shutdown by instructing the Senate to split off the defund vote. Heritage alerted its network, and conservatives quickly made clear they wouldn’t stand for it. All at once, Republican Washington seemed to realize that the ideologues could no longer be brushed aside.
DeMint likes to quote the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek: “Politicians are corks bobbing on the water, but we can direct the current.” Right now, Boehner is caught in a current from which he can’t seem to escape. Appeals to moderation won’t work; the purists see moderation as the problem. To DeMint, the only question is how committed Republicans are to an ideology they all profess to agree on. “There isn’t a Republican in Congress who hasn’t promised to do everything they could to stop Obamacare,” he says. “There’s no intellectual rift. The rift is over is it worth fighting for?”
DeMint’s answer will always be yes. Not even the disastrous 1995 shutdown orchestrated by House Speaker Newt Gingrich can convince him otherwise. Every Republican leader believes it was a costly mistake, never to be repeated. DeMint agrees that it hurt the party, though for an entirely different reason: He thinks Gingrich lost his nerve. “The Republican leadership went into a showdown with [Bill] Clinton and folded when they were three hours from winning,” he says. “So you’ve got this permanent impression that we won’t hold together.” He bases this claim on George Stephanopoulos’s memoir of the Clinton White House (Stephanopoulos writes “our coalition was cracking,” but doesn’t say Clinton was about to fold). Had Gingrich showed more fortitude, DeMint is convinced he could have prevailed; and so, too, can today’s Republicans if they have the stomach to close the government. “I think Americans would side with the people who are fighting against a law they know is unfair,” he says. Even many conservative Republicans don’t buy it. “It will be a political fiasco that could cost us the House,” says Ellmers.
Meanwhile Democrats are ecstatic over what they see as the GOP’s suicidal rightward lurch. “If I had the money, I’d pay for DeMint and Heritage to go to every state in the union,” says Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic strategist and president of the liberal group Americans United for Change, which held counter-rallies in each city along the Heritage tour.
DeMint remains undaunted. He is so certain he’s right that he sees no limit to the transformative power of his brand of conservatism. “Our hope,” he says, “is that by 2016 we will have so cultivated the mindset of America for the right ideas, that we’ll see candidates running on those ideas. Maybe even Democrats.”
However the budget deadlines are resolved, Cruz has already provided a glimpse of how this party feud will grow and intensify. On Sept. 24, as the Senate prepared to take up the House defund bill, he stepped to the floor and announced with solemn self-importance, “I rise today in opposition to Obamacare. . . . I will speak until I am no longer able to stand.” For the next 21 hours, he didn’t let up. Cruz can barely contain his eagerness to run for president, and his talkathon to block a vote on Obamacare was a valentine to the party’s base. Cruz is one of three DeMint protégés expected to jockey for the 2016 Republican nomination (Paul and Rubio are the others). Through them, and through his Heritage army, DeMint will keep channeling the current. And that will either give the Republicans the renaissance he envisions—or sweep them into oblivion.
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©2013 Bloomberg L.P.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/jim-demint-congressional-republicans-shadow-speaker [with comments]
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President Obama Makes a Statement
Published on Sep 27, 2013 by The White House
President Obama says that he spoke with the President of Iran regarding ongoing efforts to reach an agreement on Iran's nuclear program. September 27, 2013.
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Statement by the President
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
September 27, 2013
3:42 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Before I discuss the situation in Congress, let me say a few things about two important opportunities in our foreign policy.
Just now, I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. I reiterated to President Rouhani what I said in New York -- while there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward, and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution.
I’ve directed Secretary Kerry to continue pursuing this diplomatic effort with the Iranian government. We had constructive discussions yesterday in New York with our partners -- the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China -- together with the Iranian Foreign Minister. Going forward, President Rouhani and I have directed our teams to continue working expeditiously, in cooperation with the P5-plus-1, to pursue an agreement. And throughout this process, we’ll stay in close touch with our friends and allies in the region, including Israel.
We’re mindful of all the challenges ahead. The very fact that this was the first communication between an American and Iranian President since 1979 underscores the deep mistrust between our countries, but it also indicates the prospect of moving beyond that difficult history.
I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution. Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. President Rouhani has indicated that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons. I have made clear that we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy in the context of Iran meeting its obligations. So the test will be meaningful, transparent, and verifiable actions, which can also bring relief from the comprehensive international sanctions that are currently in place.
Resolving this issue, obviously, could also serve as a major step forward in a new relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran -- one based on mutual interests and mutual respect. It would also help facilitate a better relationship between Iran and the international community, as well as others in the region -- one that would help the Iranian people fulfill their extraordinary potential, but also help us to address other concerns that could bring greater peace and stability to the Middle East.
A path to a meaningful agreement will be difficult, and at this point, both sides have significant concerns that will have to be overcome. But I believe we’ve got a responsibility to pursue diplomacy, and that we have a unique opportunity to make progress with the new leadership in Tehran. I also communicated to President Rouhani my deep respect for the Iranian people.
As I said before, this comes on the same day that we can accomplish a major diplomatic breakthrough on Syria, as the United Nations Security Council will vote on a resolution that would require the Assad regime to put its chemical weapons under international control so they can ultimately be destroyed. This binding resolution will ensure that the Assad regime must keep its commitments, or face consequences. We’ll have to be vigilant about following through, but this could be a significant victory for the international community, and demonstrate how strong diplomacy can allow us to secure our country and pursue a better world.
Now, America’s security and leadership don't just depend on our military strength, or our alliances, or our diplomacy. First and foremost, America’s strength depends on a strong economy where our middle class is growing and everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead. So let me say a few words about the situation that’s developed over the past few weeks on Capitol Hill.
Here at home, the United States Congress has two pressing responsibilities: pass a budget on time, and pay our bills on time.
If Congress chooses not to pass a budget by Monday -- the end of the fiscal year -- they will shut down the government, along with many vital services that the American people depend on. The good news is, within the past couple of hours, the United States Senate -- Democrats and Republicans -- acted responsibly by voting to keep our government open and delivering the services the American people expect. Now it’s up to Republicans in the House of Representatives to do the same. I say that because obviously Democrats have a great interest in making sure that these vital services continue to help the American people.
So far, the Republicans in the House of Representatives have refused to move forward. And here’s the thing -- unlike the last time they threatened this course of action, this debate isn’t really about deficits. In fact, our deficits are falling at the fastest pace that they have in 60 years. By the end of this year, we will have cut our deficits by more than half since I took office. So that’s not what this is about. And in fact, if you’ve been following the discussion, the Republicans in the House don't even make a pretense that that’s what this is about.
Instead, the House Republicans are so concerned with appeasing the tea party that they’ve threatened a government shutdown or worse unless I gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act.
I said this yesterday; let me repeat it: That's not going to happen. More than 100 million Americans currently, already have new benefits and protections under the law. On Tuesday, about 40 million more Americans will be able to finally buy quality, affordable health care, just like anybody else. Those marketplaces will be open for business on Tuesday no matter what -- even if there’s a government shutdown. That’s a done deal.
As I’ve said before, if Republicans have specific ideas on how to genuinely improve the law, rather than gut it, rather than delay it, rather than repeal it, I’m happy to work with them on that through the normal democratic processes. But that will not happen under the threat of a shutdown.
So over the next three days, House Republicans will have to decide whether to join the Senate and keep the government open, or shut it down just because they can’t get their way on an issue that has nothing to do with the deficit.
I realize that a lot of what’s taking place right now is political grandstanding. But this grandstanding has real effects on real people. If the government shuts down on Tuesday, military personnel -- including those risking their lives overseas for us right now -- will not get paid on time. Federal loans for rural communities, small business owners, families buying a home will be frozen. I’m already starting to get letters from people worried that this will have an impact on them directly. Critical research into life-saving discoveries will be immediately halted.
The federal government has a large role across the country and touches the lives of millions of people, and those people will be harmed. And even the threat of a shutdown already is probably having a dampening effect on our economy; we saw that the last time these kinds of shenanigans were happening up on Capitol Hill.
So to any Republican in Congress who is currently watching, I’d encourage you to think about who you’re hurting. There are probably young people in your office right now who came here to work for you, without much pay, because they believed that public service was noble. You’re preparing to send them home without a paycheck. You’ve got families with kids back in your districts who serve their country in the federal government, and now they might have to plan how they’re going to get by if you shut the government down.
Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy, and this shutdown would as well. It would throw a wrench into the gears of our economy at a time when those gears have gained some traction. And that’s why many Republican senators and many Republican governors have urged Republicans to knock it off, pass a budget, and move on. Let’s get this done.
This brings me to Congress’s second responsibility. Once they vote to keep the government open, they also have to vote within the next couple of weeks to allow the Treasury to pay the bills for the money that Congress has already spent. I want to repeat: Raising the debt ceiling is simply authorizing the Treasury to pay for what Congress has already authorized.
Failure to meet this responsibility would be far more dangerous than a government shutdown. It would effectively be an economic shutdown, with impacts not just here, but around the world. We don’t fully understand what might happen, the dangers involved, because no Congress has ever actually threatened default. But we know it would have a profound destabilizing effect on the entire economy -- on the world economy, because America is the bedrock of world investment. The dollar is the reserve currency. The debt that is issued by the Treasury is the foundation for our capital markets. That’s why you don’t fool with it.
Now, some Republicans have suggested that unless I agree to an even longer list of demands -- not just gutting the health care law, but cutting taxes for millionaires, or rolling back rules on big banks and polluters, or other pet projects that they’d like to see and they’ve been trying to get passed over the last couple of years -- that they would push the button, throw America into default for the first time in history and risk throwing us back into a recession.
Now, I am willing to work with anybody who wants to have a serious conversation about our fiscal future. I’ve demonstrated that by putting forward serious reforms to tax and entitlement programs that would bring down our long-term deficits. I have said in the past, and I will continue to say, that I’m willing to make a whole bunch of tough decisions -- ones that may not be entirely welcomed by my own party.
But we’re not going to do this under the threat of blowing up the entire economy. I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay the bills that have already been racked up. Voting for the Treasury to pay America’s bills is not a concession to me. That’s not doing me a favor. That’s simply carrying out the solemn responsibilities that come with holding office up there. I don’t know how I can be more clear about this. Nobody gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States just to extract political concessions. No one gets to hurt our economy and millions of innocent people just because there are a couple of laws that you do not like.
It has not been done in the past; we’re not going to start doing it now. I’m not going to start setting a precedent not just for me, but for future Presidents where one chamber in Congress can basically say each time there needs to be a vote to make sure Treasury pays its bills, we’re not going to sign it unless our particular hobbyhorse gets advanced.
Imagine if you had a Republican President and a Democratic Speaker, and the Democratic Speaker said, well, we’re not going to pass a debt ceiling unless we raise corporate taxes by 40 percent; or unless we pass background checks on guns; or whatever other list of agenda items Democrats were interested in. Does anybody actually think that we would be hearing from Republicans that that was acceptable behavior?
That's not how our constitutional system is designed. We are not going to do it. The American people have worked too hard to recover from a bunch of crises -- several of them now over the last couple of years inflicted by some of the same folks in Congress that we’re talking about now -- to see extremists in Congress cause another crisis.
And keep in mind, by the way, this whole thing has to do with keeping the government open for a few months. The continuing resolution -- the bill that's designed to avert a government shutdown -- basically just funds the government for another couple months so we could be doing this all over again. I’m sure the American people are thrilled about that.
And that's why we’ve got to break this cycle. My message to Congress is this: Do not shut down the government. Do not shut down the economy. Pass a budget on time. Pay our bills on time. Refocus on the everyday concerns of the American people.
There will be differences between Democrats and Republicans. We can have all kinds of conversations about how to resolve those differences. There will be areas where we can work together. There will be areas where we disagree. But do not threaten to burn the house down simply because you haven’t gotten 100 percent of your way. That's not how our democracy is supposed to work.
Every day that this goes on is another day that we’re not focused on doing what we need to be focused on, which is rebuilding this great country of ours so that our middle class is growing and everybody has got opportunity if they're willing to work hard. That's what I’m focused on. That's what Congress should be focused on as well.
Thank you very much, everybody.
END
3:57 P.M. EDT
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTI7e-nGME ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/27/statement-president [transcript also at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-sept-27-statement-on-looming-government-shutdown-iran/2013/09/27/54e0ff40-27ab-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html (with comments)]
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Will a Government Shutdown Chill Congressional Republicans Out? No
Optimistic commentators think closure could keep the country from breaching the debt ceiling. But there's no reason a few stubborn House members can't provoke both.
Sep 29 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/will-a-government-shutdown-chill-congressional-republicans-out-no/280091/ [with comments]
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Ted Cruz Was On Meet The Press And Struggled With Brevity, So Here's The Short Version
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 26: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
By Jason Linkins
Posted: 09/29/2013 8:09 pm EDT | Updated: 09/30/2013 10:20 am EDT
As Cruz has demonstrated troubles with prolixity -- and because these troubles make everyone's life a little harder -- I am going to boil his answers in a Sunday "Meet the Press" interview down into their simplest form so that for once, Ted Cruz doesn't have to be such a long-winded pain in the ass of John Boehner or anyone else.
Let's begin:
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're the man in the middle of this whole fight. So here are the stakes: "De-fund or delay," say you and other Republicans. President says, "No way. This law is moving forward." Are you in control of what happens next?
SHORTER CRUZ: Don't know. Somebody else's problem
ACTUAL GREGORY: You keep saying that the Senate and the House should listen to the American people. I looked at polling this week that shows, in a lot of quarters, the bill is unpopular, the law is unpopular. 56% want to uphold this law. So when you say, "Listen to the American people," they're not necessarily with you.
SHORTER CRUZ: Trick poll. So what?
ACTUAL GREGORY: So it's just polling methodology?
SHORTER CRUZ: Dunno. Obamacare bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: We'll get into some of the particulars of Obamacare, because obviously, there's more to that story that advocates would argue. But let's just stick with the here and now. So how does this end? Because, as I understand it, you would only support de-funding of Obamacare. A delay, for you, is not enough.
SHORTER CRUZ: Senate needs to do stuff.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You know, the Senate has acted, the Majority Leader will say, passed a bill to keep the government open, and now we've gone back to trying to delay or de-fund Obamacare. So the Senate is saying, "We're not going to take this up." Should they take up part of it? Should there be votes? Would you filibuster this bill?
SHORTER CRUZ: I am basically opposed to the Democrats in the Senate taking a position and voting according to that. Harry Reid bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: But Senator, even Republicans that I've spoken to, your colleagues, say, "Senator Cruz can't blame Harry Reid for shutting down the government. Senator Reid acted. He passed a bill to keep the government open."
SHORTER CRUZ: No Harry Reid wants shutdown.
ACTUAL GREGORY: It's interesting. Democrats say, "You know, the problem with Senator Cruz's position is that it's a purist position." There are problems with Obamacare. The White House admits that. We talked about polling in some quarters indicating great dissatisfaction with the law, as you're talking about in Town Hall meetings. But you have to engaged in a debate about how they change the law. What you've gone out and said is, "Let's kill the law all together. Let's de-fund it."
SHORTER CRUZ: Your question is dumb. You are dumb. Our offer to destroy Obamacare is a "compromise."
ACTUAL GREGORY: So here's the thing, Senator.
SHORTER CRUZ: Waaah.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You make this argument as if there's no broader context here. Obamacare has been legislated. It has been adjudicated. And it has been tested to the political system. And so let's go through that. We had an election where I heard the standard bearer for the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, say Obamacare should be repealed.
All the Republicans already voted against this thing when it was ultimately passed. The Supreme Court upheld it. And then this summer, you and your colleagues said, "Look, let's have a strategy here of de-funding Obamacare," and you had people who signed a letter. And they said they joined you in that fight.
Well, here you are now, you don't even have the same number of folks who signed the letter who voted with you in this effort. There are not protests in the streets arguing to do away with this law in the way that you'd like. Again, 56%, in one poll of this week, New York Times/CBS said, "Let's uphold the law." So I'm focusing on results. Your goal and results. Where have you moved anything?
SHORTER CRUZ: [holds hands over ears] BLAH BLAH BLAH I DON'T HEAR THAT. Obamacare is bad.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're a terrific lawyer. You're making an argument. I asked you a specific question based on the facts on the ground. You've made all these arguments. My goodness, you went and spoke for 21 hours to make these arguments. You haven't moved anyone.
SHORTER CRUZ: No one likes Obamacare, this is just facts. Harry Reid is bad. There is only one right answer.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're an opponent of the law. There is, of course, another side to this story, right? Millions of Americans are getting access to health care that they couldn't otherwise afford. Folks who have children, they can now be on it up to 26. Republicans agree with things like not having pre-existing conditions, get in the way of getting insurance.
Utilization is down. I spoke to a hospital administrator in Illinois this week, quite skeptical of the law, who said, "Look, utilization is down. That could ultimately be helpful for health care costs." You can't know what the effect is five years on from this law. And nor can proponents of the law.
But here's one argument. You've made yours. And the president, when he spoke this week, he actually referred to your words, and I want to play a portion of this, suggesting that what you really don't want to happen is for the law to go forward because then people would really start liking it. This is what he said.
BARACK OBAMA: "It's going to prove almost impossible to undo Obamacare." (Laughter.) Right? So in other words, we've got to shut this thing down before people find out that they like it.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You don't think Americans will like it. You don't think that 25% of the state of Texas that's uninsured will actually like the expanded access to get health insurance?
SHORTER CRUZ: No, no it's not working and everyone already agrees that they will never like it, that's just proven science. Obamacare is wrecking everyone's life right now, these are just facts.
ACTUAL GREGORY: There are also benefit administrators, in my research, who indicate there-- that there is no real sign that employers would stop giving health insurance to their employees. It's a major recruitment tool for how to get employees. And aspects of the law have been delayed so that it can work better. And perhaps these problems that you're identifying could be rectified, short of complete de-funding.
I want to go back to where we started for a moment, just to get you clear on this point. A government shutdown under these circumstances, because this doesn't sound like it will be resolved, that's an acceptable outcome to you?
SHORTER CRUZ: Harry Reid bad he want big bad government shutdown why won't he take the awesome compromise? Why is President Obama and Harry Reid holding the military hostage?
ACTUAL GREGORY: But it is an acceptable outcome?
SHORTER CRUZ: No, because Harry Reid is being an absolutist.
gshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh[...]
Oh, wow, sorry everyone. When Ted Cruz called another person an "absolutist," about forty or fifty anvils fell right out of the sky, onto my head and I blacked out for a little bit. Where is the interview? Christ, it is STILL GOING ON.
ACTUAL GREGORY: You're talking a lot about Democrats. They're critical of you. But it's hard for them to get a word in edgewise, because it's members of your own party who are so critical of what you've done and how you've done it. You have colleagues who have accused you of putting on a show. That was Senator Corker. Congressman Peter King said you're a fraud, that you're lying to the base, over-promising something that's possible.
George Will, who's been a conservative columnist for The Washington Post and others, has been very supportive of you in the past. But he wrote this, this week. I want to have you respond to it. Because it seems to crystallize some of the opposition. "Those people who are best at deceiving others first deceive themselves," he wrote. "They often do so by allowing their wishes to be fathers of their thoughts, and begin by wishing that everything has changed.
"Republicans now making a moral melodrama over any vote that allows the ACA to be funded should remember Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the leader of Senate Republicans during passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He recalled '40 preachers caught me one afternoon there in that lobby. "I am not a moralist," I told them. "I'm a legislator." It is good to be both. It is sterile to be the former to the exclusion of the latter.'" Are you more moralist than legislator?
SHORTER CRUZ: I obviously don't read George Will columns. When I offer to destory Obamacare, I am actually making a very generous concession to Democrats. Harry Reid is an absolutist
eu/9r.90uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu[...]doijkx
OMG TED CRUZ YOU NEED TO STOP THAT.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Who's the legislator you most admire? Who's your big role model?
SHORTER CRUZ: Phil Gramm.
Okay I'm pretty sure the substantive part of the interview is over.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Do you regret comparing the future of Obamacare to the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany?
SHORTER CRUZ: I never did that.
ACTUAL GREGORY: Do you ride this to the presidential nomination?
SHORTER CRUZ: SIGH, "THIS TOWN," ETC. Harry Reid is bad.
Isn't Cruzmandias kind of okay in that sort of dosage?
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/29/ted-cruz-meet-the-press_n_4014192.html [with comments]
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President Obama Makes a Statement
Published on Sep 30, 2013
President Obama says that if Congress does not fulfill its responsibility to pass a budget today, much of the United States government will be forced to shut down tomorrow. September 30, 2013.
*
Statement by the President
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
September 30, 2013
5:00 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Of all the responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress, two should be fairly simple: pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.
But if the United States Congress does not fulfill its responsibility to pass a budget today, much of the United States government will be forced to shut down tomorrow. And I want to be very clear about what that shutdown would mean -- what will remain open and what will not.
With regard to operations that will continue: If you’re on Social Security, you will keep receiving your checks. If you’re on Medicare, your doctor will still see you. Everyone’s mail will still be delivered. And government operations related to national security or public safety will go on. Our troops will continue to serve with skill, honor, and courage. Air traffic controllers, prison guards, those who are with border control -- our Border Patrol will remain on their posts, but their paychecks will be delayed until the government reopens. NASA will shut down almost entirely, but Mission Control will remain open to support the astronauts serving on the Space Station.
I also want to be very clear about what would change. Office buildings would close. Paychecks would be delayed. Vital services that seniors and veterans, women and children, businesses and our economy depend on would be hamstrung. Business owners would see delays in raising capital, seeking infrastructure permits, or rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for their country will find their support centers unstaffed. Tourists will find every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, immediately closed. And of course, the communities and small businesses that rely on these national treasures for their livelihoods will be out of customers and out of luck.
And in keeping with the broad ramifications of a shutdown, I think it’s important that everybody understand the federal government is America’s largest employer. More than 2 million civilian workers and 1.4 million active-duty military serve in all 50 states and all around the world. In the event of a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of these dedicated public servants who stay on the job will do so without pay -- and several hundred thousand more will be immediately and indefinitely furloughed without pay.
What, of course, will not be furloughed are the bills that they have to pay -- their mortgages, their tuition payments, their car notes. These Americans are our neighbors. Their kids go to our schools. They worship where we do. They serve their country with pride. They are the customers of every business in this country. And they would be hurt greatly, and as a consequence, all of us will be hurt greatly, should Congress choose to shut the people’s government down.
So a shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly. This one would, too. It would throw a wrench into the gears of our economy at a time when those gears have gained some traction.
Five years ago right now, our economy was in meltdown. Today, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs over the past three and a half years. The housing market is healing and our deficits are falling fast. The idea of putting the American people’s hard-earned progress at risk is the height of irresponsibility.
And it doesn’t have to happen. Let me repeat this: It does not have to happen. All of this is entirely preventable if the House chooses to do what the Senate has already done -- and that’s the simple act of funding our government without making extraneous and controversial demands in the process, the same way other Congresses have for more than 200 years.
Unfortunately, right now House Republicans continue to tie funding of the government to ideological demands like limiting a woman’s access to contraception, or delaying the Affordable Care Act, all to save face after making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their party.
So let me be clear about this. An important part of the Affordable Care Act takes effect tomorrow no matter what Congress decides to do today. The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You can’t shut it down. This is a law that passed both houses of Congress; a law that bears my signature; a law that the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional; a law that voters chose not to repeal last November; a law that is already providing benefits to millions of Americans in the form of young people staying on their parents’ plan until they’re 26, seniors getting cheaper prescription drugs, making sure that insurance companies aren't imposing lifetime limits when you already have health insurance, providing rebates for consumers when insurance companies are spending too much money on overhead instead of health care. Those things are already happening.
Starting tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will be able to visit HealthCare.gov to shop for affordable health care coverage. So Americans who’ve lived for years in some cases with the fear that one illness could send them into bankruptcy, Americans who’ve been priced out of the market just because they’ve been sick once, they’ll finally be able to afford coverage -- quality coverage -- many of them for the first time in their lives.
Some of them may be sick as we speak. And this is their best opportunity to get some security and some relief. Tens of thousands of Americans die every single year because they don’t have access to affordable health care. Despite this, Republicans have said that if we lock these Americans out of affordable health care for one more year -- if we sacrifice the health care of millions of Americans -- then they’ll fund the government for a couple more months. Does anybody truly believe that we won’t have this fight again in a couple more months? Even at Christmas?
So here’s the bottom line: I’m always willing to work with anyone of either party to make sure the Affordable Care Act works better, to make sure our government works better. I’m always willing to work with anyone to grow our economy faster, or to create new jobs faster, to get our fiscal house in order for the long run. I’ve demonstrated this time and time again, oftentimes to the consternation of my own party.
But one faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election.
Keeping the people’s government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital services running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you “give” to the other side. It’s our basic responsibility. It’s something that we’re doing for our military, and our businesses, and our economy, and all the hardworking people out there -- the person working for the Agricultural Department out in some rural community who’s out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit for all the hard work they’re putting in. They’re the person working for HUD who’s helping somebody buy a house for the first time. They’re somebody in a VA office who’s counseling one of our vets who’s got PTSD.
That’s who we’re here to serve. That’s why we’re supposed to be carrying out these responsibilities. It’s why we should be avoiding these kinds of constant brinksmanship. It’s something that we do in the ordinary process of this extraordinary system of government that we have. You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job; for doing what you’re supposed to be doing anyway; or just because there’s a law there that you don’t like.
The American people sent us here to govern. They sent us here to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make their lives a little bit better -- to create new jobs, to restore economic security, to rebuild the prospects of upward mobility. That’s what they expect.
And they understand that there are differences between the parties and we’re going to be having some tough fights around those differences. And I respect the fact that the other party is not supposed to agree with me 100 percent of the time, just like I don’t agree with them. But they do also expect that we don’t bring the entire government to a halt or the entire economy to a halt just because of those differences.
That’s what they deserve. They’ve worked too hard, for too long to recover from previous crises just to have folks here in Washington manufacture yet another one that they have to dig themselves out of.
So Congress needs to keep our government open, needs to pay our bills on time, and never, ever threaten the full faith and credit of the United States of America.
And time is running out. My hope and expectation is that in the eleventh hour, once again, that Congress will choose to do the right thing and that the House of Representatives, in particular, will choose the right thing.
Thank you very much.
END
5:12 P.M. EDT
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arVB-3FIRjA ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/30/statement-president
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The Idiocy of the Shutdown, in 3 Acts: Map, Thought Experiment, Speech
"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events." Thus spake a previous Republican president.
James Fallows
Sep 30 2013, 10:33 PM ET
1. Map. What you see above is how the "shiptracker [ http://shiptracker.noaa.gov/Home/Map ]" function of NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations looked earlier today, showing the recent course of some of its oceanic-and-fisheries research vessels. All the tracks shown on that map listed a termination date no later than midnight tonight, September 30, 2013. That is because the boats were ordered back to port in anticipation of the shutdown. Here is the way the map looks just now. The little red and yellow dots near Pascagoula, Mississippi, are two research vessels that have been called back.
As The Blog Aquatic [ http://blog.oceanconservancy.org/2013/09/30/everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-a-government-shutdown-will-affect-the-ocean/ ] says about the shutdown,
Will it halt NOAA’s ocean research?
For the most part, the federal government’s ocean research activities will be shut down. NOAA’s research vessels will all be ordered to return to port, scientific staff will be sent home, and research efforts will be wound down.
Just to rub it in, here is what similar boats have been doing in the past 30 days, according to NOAA data. Now all stopped.
Yeah, nobody's "hurt" by a shutdown or sequester. (Thanks DR.) This is one of ten thousand examples. Even if the showdown is brief, the wasted shut-down and start-up costs ...
2) Thought experiment. Let's suppose it's the fall of 2005. Suppose George W. Bush has been reelected, as he was in real life. Let's suppose, also as in reality, the Senate remained in Republican hands. But then suppose that Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats had already won control of the House, rather than doing so two years later. So suppose that the lineup as of 2005 had been:
• Reelected Republican president;
• The president's Republican party retaining control of the Senate; and
• Democrats controlling only one chamber, the House.
Then suppose further that Pelosi's newly empowered House Democrats announced that unless George W. Bush agreed to reverse the sweeping tax cuts that had been the signature legislative achievement of his first term, they would refuse to pass a budget so that the federal government could operate, and would threaten a default on U.S. sovereign debt. Alternatively, that unless Bush immediately withdrew from Iraq, federal government funding would cease and the debt ceiling would be frozen.
In this imagined world, I contend:
• "respectable" opinion would be all over Pelosi and the Democrats for their "shrill," "extreme" demands, especially given their lack of broad electoral mandate;
• hand-wringing editorials would point out that if you want to change policy, there's an established route to do so, which involves passing new bills and getting them signed into law, rather than issuing "otherwise we blow up the government" ultimatums;
• no one would be saying that the "grownups in the room" had to resolve the crisis by giving away, say, half of the president's tax cuts. (Even though, to my taste, that would have been a positive step.)
The circumstances are the mirror image now. A party that within the past year has:
• lost the presidency by 5 million votes;
• lost the Senate by a total of 10 million votes;
• held onto control of the House through favorable districting, while losing the overall House vote by 1.7 million nationwide
... is nonetheless dictating terms to the rest of the government. This would have been called extreme and unreasonable under an imagined Nancy Pelosi House in 2005. It is extreme and unreasonable now.
3) Speech. I give you the nation's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, in his hallowed Cooper Union address [ http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm ] of 1860. (Thanks RJK.) Worth reading every word:
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. This, plainly stated, is your language…
In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle….
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong...
Ninety minutes to go, here on the East Coast. "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government..." Grrrr.
*
Related
Your False-Equivalence Guide to the Days Ahead
A kind of politics we have not seen for more than 150 years
Sep 27 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/your-false-equivalence-guide-to-the-days-ahead/280062/
Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Breakdown,' in 3 Graphs (and 1 Story)
Tea Party members say they are expressing the public's will. Gee, if only there were some way to judge popular sentiment in a democracy.
Sep 29 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/why-this-is-not-just-washington-breakdown-in-3-graphs-and-1-story/280099/
*
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-idiocy-of-the-shutdown-in-3-acts-map-thought-experiment-speech/280141/
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Devin Nunes Calls GOP Colleagues 'Lemmings With Suicide Vests' As Shutdown Looms
09/30/2013
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sharply criticized his fellow House Republicans [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/09/30/nunes-calls-fellow-house-republicans-lemmings-with-suicide-vests/ ] on Monday, saying [ https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/384802010190462976 ] it's "moronic" for them to let the government shut down over their opposition to Obamacare and calling them "lemmings with suicide vests."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/devin-nunes-government-shutdown_n_4019531.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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GOP came to power seeking government shutdown
The Rachel Maddow Show
September 30, 2013
Rachel Maddow traces the Republican enthusiasm for shutting down the federal government since before they seized the majority in the House in the 2010 election. Senator Charles Schumer joins for further discussion.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53151808 [the above YouTube of all but the first minute-plus of the segment (recapping the then-current situation) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZFUqjLcBF4 ; show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/01/20765358-links-for-the-930-trms (with comments); segment also embedded at "Rachel Maddow On Shutdown: 'Elect Republicans And They Will Burn The Place Down'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/rachel-maddow-shutdown-republicans_n_4021809.html (with comments)]
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Jon Stewart's Rockin' Shutdown Eve
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Monday September 30, 2013
If President Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent mullahs in the world but not with House Republicans, maybe he is not the problem.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-september-30-2013/jon-stewart-s-rockin--shutdown-eve [segment also embedded at "Jon Stewart Blasts GOP Over Shutdown: When The Giants Lost, They Didn't Shut Down The NFL", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/jon-stewart-on-govt-shutdown_n_4020581.html (with comments)]
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Tea Party tactic hijacked for Obamacare fight
The Rachel Maddow Show
October 1, 2013 [early am live]
Dave Weigel, political reporter for Slate.com, talks with Rachel Maddow about the 2010 and 2012 Republican campaign rhetoric in favor of shutting down the government and how House Republicans have pivoted from a message of fiscal restraint to an expensive, wasteful attack on the Affordable Care Act.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53152693 [show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/01/20765358-links-for-the-930-trms (with comments)]
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President Obama Delivers a Statement on the Government Shutdown
Published on Oct 1, 2013 by The White House
In the Rose Garden at the White House, President Obama delivers a statement to the press on the Affordable Care Act and the Government Shutdown. October 1, 2013.
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Remarks by the President on the Affordable Care Act and the Government Shutdown
Rose Garden
October 01, 2013
1:01 P.M. EDT
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning, everybody. At midnight last night, for the first time in 17 years, Republicans in Congress chose to shut down the federal government. Let me be more specific: One faction, of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government, shut down major parts of the government -- all because they didn’t like one law.
This Republican shutdown did not have to happen. But I want every American to understand why it did happen. Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to fund the government unless we defunded or dismantled the Affordable Care Act. They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job.
And many representatives, including an increasing number of Republicans, have made it clear that had they been allowed by Speaker Boehner to take a simple up or down vote on keeping the government open, with no partisan strings attached, enough votes from both parties would have kept the American people’s government open and operating.
We may not know the full impact of this Republican shutdown for some time. It will depend on how long it lasts. But we do know a couple of things. We know that the last time Republicans shut down the government in 1996, it hurt our economy. And unlike 1996, our economy is still recovering from the worst recession in generations.
We know that certain services and benefits that America’s seniors and veterans and business owners depend on must be put on hold. Certain offices, along with every national park and monument, must be closed. And while last night, I signed legislation to make sure our 1.4 million active-duty military are paid through the shutdown, hundreds of thousands of civilian workers -- many still on the job, many forced to stay home -- aren’t being paid, even if they have families to support and local businesses that rely on them. And we know that the longer this shutdown continues, the worse the effects will be. More families will be hurt. More businesses will be harmed.
So, once again, I urge House Republicans to reopen the government, restart the services Americans depend on, and allow the public servants who have been sent home to return to work. This is only going to happen when Republicans realize they don’t get to hold the entire economy hostage over ideological demands.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I am prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans to do the things we need to do to grow the economy and create jobs, and get our fiscal house in order over the long run. Although I should add this shutdown isn’t about deficits, or spending, or budgets. After all, our deficits are falling at the fastest pace in 50 years. We’ve cut them in half since I took office. In fact, many of the demands the Republicans are now making would actually raise our deficits.
No, this shutdown is not about deficits, it’s not about budgets. This shutdown is about rolling back our efforts to provide health insurance to folks who don’t have it. It’s all about rolling back the Affordable Care Act. This, more than anything else, seems to be what the Republican Party stands for these days. I know it’s strange that one party would make keeping people uninsured the centerpiece of their agenda, but that apparently is what it is.
And of course, what’s stranger still is that shutting down our government doesn’t accomplish their stated goal. The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House; it passed the Senate. The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It was a central issue in last year’s election. It is settled, and it is here to stay. And because of its funding sources, it’s not impacted by a government shutdown.
And these Americans are here with me today because, even though the government is closed, a big part of the Affordable Care Act is now open for business. And for them, and millions like them, this is a historic day for a good reason. It’s been a long time coming, but today, Americans who have been forced to go without insurance can now visit healthcare.gov and enroll in affordable new plans that offer quality coverage. That starts today.
And people will have six months to sign up. So over the next six months, people are going to have the opportunity -- in many cases, for the first time in their lives -- to get affordable coverage that they desperately need.
Now, of course, if you’re one of the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, you don’t need to do a thing. You’re already benefiting from new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time under this law. But for the 15 percent of Americans who don't have health insurance, this opportunity is life-changing.
Let me just tell folks a few stories that are represented here today. A few years ago, Amanda Barrett left her job in New York to take care of her parents. And for a while, she had temporary insurance that covered her multiple sclerosis. But when it expired, many insurers wouldn’t cover her because of her MS. And she ended up paying $1,200 a month. That’s nowhere near affordable. So starting today, she can get covered for much less, because today’s new plan can’t use your medical history to charge you more than anybody else.
Sky-high premiums once forced Nancy Beigel to choose between paying her rent or paying for health insurance. She’s been uninsured ever since. So she pays all of her medical bills out of pocket, puts some on her credit card, making them even harder to pay. Nancy says, “They talk about those who fall through the cracks. I fell through the cracks 10 years ago and I’ve been stuck there ever since.” Well, starting today, Nancy can get covered just like everybody else.
Trinace Edwards was laid off from her job a year ago today. Six months ago, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She couldn’t afford insurance on the individual market, so she hasn’t received treatment yet. Her daughter Lenace, a student at the University of Maryland, is considering dropping out of school to help pay her mom’s bills. Well, starting today, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Trinace can get covered without forcing her daughter to give up on her dreams.
So if these stories of hardworking Americans sound familiar to you, well, starting today, you and your friends and your family and your coworkers can get covered, too. Just visit healthcare.gov, and there you can compare insurance plans, side by side, the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon. You enter some basic information, you’ll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area, with clear descriptions of what each plan covers, and what it will cost. You’ll find more choices, more competition, and in many cases, lower prices -- most uninsured Americans will find that they can get covered for $100 or less.
And you don't have to take my word for it. Go on the website, healthcare.gov, check it out for yourself. And then show it to your family and your friends and help them get covered, just like mayors and churches and community groups and companies are already fanning out to do across the country.
And there’s a hotline where you can apply over the phone and get help with the application, or just get questions that you have answered by real people, in 150 different languages. So let me give you that number. The number is 1-800-318-2596 -- 1-800-318-2596. Check out healthcare.gov. Call that number. Show your family and friends how to use it. And we can get America covered, once and for all, so that the struggles that these folks have gone through and millions around the country have gone through for years finally get addressed.
And let me just remind people why I think this is so important. I heard a striking statistic yesterday -- if you get cancer, you are 70 percent more likely to live another five years if you have insurance than if you don’t. Think about that. That is what it means to have health insurance.
Set aside the issues of security and finances and how you’re impacted by that, the stress involved in not knowing whether or not you’re going to have health care. This is life-or-death stuff. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year just because they don’t have health insurance. Millions more live with the fear that they’ll go broke if they get sick. And today, we begin to free millions of our fellow Americans from that fear.
Already, millions of young adults have been able to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26. Millions of seniors already have gotten a discount on their prescription medicines. Already millions of families have actually received rebates from insurance companies that didn’t spend enough on their health care. So this law means more choice, more competition, lower costs for millions of Americans.
And this law doesn’t just mean economic security for our families. It means we’re finally addressing the biggest drivers of our long-term deficits. It means a stronger economy.
Remember most Republicans have made a whole bunch of predictions about this law that haven’t come true. There are no “death panels.” Costs haven’t skyrocketed; they’re growing at the slowest rate in 50 years. The last three years since I signed the Affordable Care Act into law are the three slowest rates of health spending growth on record.
And contrary to Republican claims, this law hasn’t “destroyed” our economy. Over the past three and a half years, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs. Just today, we learned that our manufacturers are growing at the fastest rate in two and a half years. They have factored in the Affordable Care Act. They don't think it’s a problem. What’s weighing on the economy is not the Affordable Care Act, but the constant series of crises and the unwillingness to pass a reasonable budget by a faction of the Republican Party.
Now, like every new law, every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site has been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than one million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning.
To put that in context, there were five times more users in the marketplace this morning than have ever been on Medicare.gov at one time. That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that’s a good thing. And we're going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected.
Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads -- or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.
So in that context, I'll work with anybody who’s got a serious idea to make the Affordable Care Act work better. I've said that repeatedly. But as long as I am President, I will not give in to reckless demands by some in the Republican Party to deny affordable health insurance to millions of hardworking Americans.
I want Republicans in Congress to know these are the Americans you’d hurt if you were allowed to dismantle this law. Americans like Amanda, Nancy, and Trinace, who now finally have the opportunity for basic security and peace of mind of health care just like everybody else -- including members of Congress. The notion that you’d make a condition for reopening the government that I make sure these folks don’t have health care -- that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense.
Now, let me make one closing point: This Republican shutdown threatens our economy at a time when millions of Americans are still looking for work, and businesses are starting to get some traction. So the timing is not good. Of course, a lot of the Republicans in the House ran for office two years ago promising to shut down the government, and so, apparently, they've now gotten their wish. But as I've said before, the irony that the House Republicans have to contend with is they've shut down a whole bunch of parts of the government, but the Affordable Care Act is still open for business.
And this may be why you've got many Republican governors and senators and even a growing number of reasonable Republican congressmen who are telling the extreme right of their party to knock it off, pass a budget, move on.
And I want to underscore the fact that Congress doesn’t just have to end this shutdown and reopen the government -- Congress generally has to stop governing by crisis. They have to break this habit. It is a drag on the economy. It is not worthy of this country.
For example, one of the most important things Congress has to do in the next couple weeks is to raise what's called the debt ceiling. And it's important to understand what this is. This is a routine vote. Congress has taken this vote 45 times to raise the debt ceiling since Ronald Reagan took office. It does not cost taxpayers a single dime. It does not grow our deficits by a single dime. It does not authorize anybody to spend any new money whatsoever. All it does is authorize the Treasury to pay the bills on what Congress has already spent.
Think about that. If you buy a car and you’ve got a car note, you do not save money by not paying your car note. You’re just a deadbeat. If you buy a house, you don’t save money by not authorizing yourself to pay the mortgage. You’re just going to be foreclosed on your home. That’s what this is about.
It is routine. It is what they’re supposed to do. This is not a concession to me. It is not some demand that’s unreasonable that I’m making. This is what Congress is supposed to do as a routine matter. And they shouldn’t wait until the last minute to do it. The last time Republicans even threatened this course of action -- many of you remember, back in 2011 -- our economy staggered, our credit rating was downgraded for the first time. If they go through with it this time and force the United States to default on its obligations for the first time in history, it would be far more dangerous than a government shutdown -- as bad as a shutdown is. It would be an economic shutdown.
So I’ll speak more on this in the coming days, but let me repeat: I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay bills it’s already racked up. I’m not going to allow anybody to drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud just to refight a settled election or extract ideological demands. Nobody gets to hurt our economy and millions of hardworking families over a law you don’t like.
There are a whole bunch of things that I’d like to see passed through Congress that the House Republicans haven’t passed yet, and I’m not out there saying, well, I’m not -- I’m going to let America default unless Congress does something that they don’t want to do. That’s not how adults operate. Certainly that’s not how our government should operate. And that’s true whether there’s a Democrat in this office or a Republican in this office. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Democratic House of Representatives or a Republican-controlled House of Representatives -- there are certain rules that everybody abides by because we don’t want to hurt other people just because we have a political disagreement.
So my basic message to Congress is this: Pass a budget. End the government shutdown. Pay your bills. Prevent an economic shutdown. Don’t wait. Don’t delay. Don’t put our economy or our people through this any longer.
I am more than happy to work with them on all kinds of issues. I want to get back to work on the things that the American people sent us here to work on -- creating new jobs, new growth, new security for our middle class.
We’re better than this. Certainly the American people are a lot better than this. And I believe that what we’ve accomplished for Amanda, and Nancy, and Trinace, and tens of millions of their fellow citizens- on this day proves that even when the odds are long and the obstacles are many, we are and always will be a country that can do great things together.
Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. Thank you, all of you, for the great work that you’re doing. And thank you, Kathleen Sebelius, for the outstanding work that she’s doing making sure that millions of Americans can get health insurance.
Thank you.
END
1:21 P.M. EDT
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmRA_tML2tE ; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/10/01/remarks-president-affordable-care-act-and-government-shutdown
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This Is Obamacare:
Affordable, accessible care for every American.
Scroll down to see Obamacare in action.
Learn more about how Obamacare will affect you.
http://www.thisisobamacare.com/
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States of Health
by Atul Gawande
October 7, 2013
Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.
This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health-insurance coverage to millions of people like Sullivan, is slated to go into effect. Republican leaders have described the event in apocalyptic terms, as Republican leaders have described proposals to expand health coverage for three-quarters of a century. In 1946, Senator Robert Taft denounced President Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance as “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan argued that, if Medicare were to be enacted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” And now comes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing the Affordable Care Act as a “monstrosity,” “a disaster,” and the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years.” Lacking the votes to repeal the law, Republican hard-liners want to shut down the federal government unless Democrats agree to halt its implementation.
The law’s actual manifestation, however, is rather anodyne: as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.
How this will unfold, though, depends on where you live. Governors and legislatures in about half the states—from California to New York, Minnesota to Maryland—are working faithfully to implement the law with as few glitches as possible. In the other half—Indiana to Texas, Utah to South Carolina—they are working equally faithfully to obstruct its implementation. Still fundamentally in dispute is whether we as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan. Not only do conservatives not think so; they seem to see providing that protection as a threat to America itself.
Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.
Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.
This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as “pupil placement” reviews, “freedom of choice” plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform. In some states, Paul Sullivan’s fate will become rare. In others, it will remain a reality for an unconscionable number of people. Of some three thousand counties in the nation, a hundred and fourteen account for half of the uninsured. Sixty-two of those counties are in states that have accepted the key elements of Obamacare, including funding to expand Medicaid. Fifty-two are not.
So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured will gain protection they didn’t have. It won’t be the thirty-two million hoped for, and it’s becoming clear that the meaning of the plan’s legacy will be fought over not for a few months but for years. Still, state by state, a new norm is coming into being: if you’re a freelancer, or between jobs, or want to start your own business but have a family member with a serious health issue, or if you become injured or ill, you are entitled to basic protection.
Conservatives keep hoping that they can drive the system to collapse. That won’t happen. Enough people, states, and health-care interests are committed to making it work, just as the Massachusetts version has for the past seven years. And people now have a straightforward way to resist the forces of obstruction: sign up for coverage, if they don’t have it, and help others do so as well.
© 2013 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/07/131007taco_talk_gawande
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Pro-shutdown GOP ignorant to lessons of '95
The Rachel Maddow Show
October 1, 2013
Karen Tumulty, national political reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about House Republicans' repeated, and ultimately successful, attempts to shut down the United States government, and what she describes as "governing by near death experience."
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53162116 [for the moment at least, with part of the audio in the first portion of the segment apparently muted at the source; copyright claim(s)?] [the above YouTube of the first portion of the segment (with good audio all the way through; less the latter portion with Tumulty) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6wHUc_WH70 , also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn13MMJ5pPs , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-Y4MDwuiMA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbsQ304xBU ( http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maddow-takes-down-gop-they-wanted-govt-shutdown-all-along-and-they-were-giddy-about-it/ {with comments}); show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/02/20779802-links-for-the-101-trms (with comments)]
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Michael Savage Suggests Rachel Maddow Should Have A Sex Change and Become A Guy
Published on Oct 1, 2013 by imitator777
Aired on October 1, 2013 - The Savage Nation - Michael Savage Suggests Rachel Maddow Should Have A Sex Change and Become A Guy - http://www.michaelsavage.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tro2ZpwTGbA
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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