Replies to post #210718 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The absurdity of the Hastert Rule

Timothy Noah, @timothynoah1
1:07 PM on 09/27/2013

Why does Dennis Hastert rule the world?

Hastert is the originator of the “Hastert Rule,” which saith that no House Speaker shall bring to the floor any legislation not supported by “the majority of the majority” (i.e., the majority of the Speaker’s caucus).

The current House Speaker, Republican John Boehner, is quaking at the prospect that, to avoid an Oct. 1 government shutdown for which the GOP would almost certainly be blamed, he may have to strip a provision defunding Obamacare (or possibly some other yet-to-be determined .. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303342104579099151237112452.html?mg=id-wsj .. demand) from the pending continuing resolution (i.e., temporary appropriation bill). Should Boehner bring a “clean” CR to the floor, he risks losing a majority of his caucus and relying on enemy Democrats to get the bill passed. Even if Boehner sells House Republicans on averting a government shutdown, he may have to violate the Hastert Rule yet again to raise the debt limit, which his caucus is similarly pressuring him to use as a vehicle to defund Obamacare.

Who was Dennis Hastert, creator of this unbreakable political rule? Some biblical prophet who in ancient times carried his admonition, carved into stone tablets, down from Mount Sinai?

Actually, no. State-of-the-art carbon dating establishes that Congress managed for 215 years to function without any Hastert Rule, until 2004. That’s when then-Speaker Hastert, a Republican, pulled from the House floor the bill creating the position of director of national intelligence .. http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/history .. because it lacked support from a majority of the Republicans he was supposedly leading. Far from being praised for this surrender of authority to the “majority of the majority,” Hastert was criticized .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15423-2004Nov26.html .. for spinelessness. (The bill eventually passed with a few tweaks to appease two grumpy committee chairmen .. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec04/bill_12-6.html .)

Before Hastert, speakers ignored the majority of the majority whenever circumstances warranted it. The Atlantic’s Molly Ball recently noted .. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/even-the-aide-who-coined-the-hastert-rule-says-the-hastert-rule-isnt-working/277961/ .. that Tip O’Neill had no choice but to violate the yet-unwritten Hastert Rule many times because his caucus contained a lot of conservative southern Democrats. (O’Neill’s various triumphs over partisan division are nicely documented in Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked .. http://www.amazon.com/Tip-Gipper-Politics-Worked-ebook/dp/B00BSB2DBO/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1 , by MSNBC host and onetime O’Neill staff aide Chris Matthews, due out next week.)

But O’Neill was hardly unique in this respect. House Speakers are expected to press forward with important legislation even when it’s not supported by a majority of their party. Speaker Tom Foley, a Democrat (1989-1995) violated the Hastert Rule at least six times, as did his successor, Newt Gingrich. Even after Hastert codified his Rule, Nancy Pelosi violated it at least seven times .. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/nancy-pelosi-john-boehner-comments-91311.html .

A New York Times tally .. http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/house/hastert-rule .. last April calculated that the Hastert Rule had been violated 36 times over the previous 22 years. Boehner has already violated it several times himself. At best the Hastert Rule is (to quote ..

.. Bill Murray in Ghostbusters) “more of a guideline than a rule.”

What about Hastert himself? Today he is remembered for being the longest-serving Republican speaker in history (1999-2007), just nosing out “Uncle” Joe Cannon (1903-11). Cannon was the most powerful House speaker in history, and he was eventually ousted in a revolt. Hastert, by contrast, was a onetime gym coach elevated from deputy whip to the speakership as a sort of proxy for Tom DeLay, the powerful House majority whip, who knew he was too controversial to take the top job. During his speakership, Hastert (who now works .. http://www.dicksteinshapiro.com/people/speaker-j-hastert .. as a lobbyist .. http://disclosures.house.gov/ld/pdfform.aspx?id=300406103 ) was regarded as one of the Bush era’s less-consequential political figures. Once when writing a DeLay profile for George magazine, I asked Hastert if he had ever disagreed with DeLay about anything. He said he had but that he couldn’t remember those instances.

But perhaps Hastert had more spine than we give him credit for, because it turns out he violated the Hastert Rule no fewer than 12 times, or more than any speaker in recent memory (except perhaps O’Neill). If Denny Hastert must be elevated to the status of prophet, remember him not for the craven rule he invented, but for his willingness to violate it again and again. Hastert never suffered any notable consequences for these transgressions. Speaker Boehner, take note.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/09/27/the-absurdity-of-the-hastert-rule/

[StephanieVanbryce]

jesus .. I haven't been reading anything . .like duh .... lololol ........you can only tell . .NOW you post this one by one of my favorites .. Chait .. damn! ... I'm going to have to read it ..and I see there's an excellent one in the nyt. .editorial board and my friend Michael Thomasky has another one also being talked about all over everywhere web .. sheeesh. .! .. I guess .. I'll have to get go my glasses ... lolololol ... ;) ...........I mean these guys are the good political writers . .not the junk men . .jmo . .at this particular moment only .. .there are thousands of good political writers out there that are good .. I've just sort of refined some of them for me ... ;) .........o.k ..........sigh .......I'll go get my glasses .. I hope he didn't go over board on the emotional . .I mean by god ... "the fight of his life" .. ? .. .hmmmmmm .. after the last one I decided .. 'they will never be able to upset me that much again " . ! .. and I meant it so .. . truthfully I have been staying mostly away .. and now I see all these GREAT ones popping up .. . whoohooooooooo! ... o.k. ... I give up! I'll read something .. .. ;)

[fuagf]

actually, hookrider, you really did nail it here

F6: That's the way Ted Cruz stalks a Dem Voter.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92470775

as what does a 'stalker' in the human world do but stalk ones who have rejected them .. i'm linking it here as the Chait article really does put the stalking of Cruz and his TeaParty base in real and stark perspective .. excerpt from the one this replies to ..

The progression of events begins with a dynamic I described .. http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/ .. in a print piece at the beginning of 2012 – conservatives had come to regard the 2012 race as their last chance to win an election as authentic conservatives against a rising Democratic majority. Since their crushing defeat, they have ignored the task of refurbishing the party’s national appeal for its next national electoral bid, and instead have recommitted themselves to waging increasingly millenarian confrontations from their existing red state power base in Congress.

Most of us expected, at some level, that the election would cool the right’s apocalyptic fervor. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Paul Ryan candidly explained .. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304795804579097693281265488.html .. the calculation: "The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don't have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves. We are stuck with this government another three years." This is a remarkable confession. Republicans need to compel Obama to accept their agenda, not in spite of the fact that the voters rejected it at the polls but precisely for that reason.

.. link to the one replied to .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92474574

.. lol .. the real depth and meaning of your comment didn't strike me until just now when i read that bit again .. it's actually the way Cruz and his people are stalking the USA .. they feel it's their last chance to avoid, in their mind .. apocalyptic catastrophe ..

Millenarianism (also millenarism), from Latin millenarius "containing a thousand", is the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed. Millenarianism is a concept or theme that exists in many cultures and religions.

[...]

Millennialism is a specific type of Christian millenarianism, and is sometimes
referred to as Chiliasm from the New Testament use of the Greek "chilia" (thousand).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism

.. so in their minds any major changes occurring such as Obamacare, which isn't as major as a fair dinkum universal healthcare system would be, instead of just you might say a common sense better set-up .. a kind of sensible natural evolution sort of thing .. becomes a 'life-and-death' struggle .. it's almost as if Cruz sees himself as some sort of Jesus savior ..

[fuagf]

End Days for the GOP

by Michael Tomasky Sep 27, 2013 5:45 AM EDT

After years of sabotaging government and getting away with it, the GOP has finally
gone too far. America knows it, and so does the party itself. By Michael Tomasky

Watching the GOP convulse these last few days, I sense that we just might finally be on the cusp of an important and long-awaited moment. Up until now during the Obama era, the Republicans’ scorched-earth politics have harmed their party, but they have always harmed the Democrats nearly as much—or, in the long term, even more. It’s a big reason why they do the things they do—they know cynically that if they bring the government to a standstill, most people will just blame both parties, and indeed might even cast more blame on the party of government, the Democrats.


Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

The gig may be about up. The odds are good that by the morning of October 18, one of two (correct) perceptions will be broadly held by the American public: one, that the Republican Party has collapsed into all-out ideological civil war; two, that the Republicans are a party not merely of obstructionists but destructionists, in ways that will be so evident that even those independents devoted to the idea that both sides are to blame will run up the white flag. All the Republicans’ madness of the last five years is finally going to catch up with them.

If I’m right, it will happen because of three events that the American people could simply not witness without at long last reaching some obvious conclusions. The first was Ted Cruz’s talk-athon. So many adjectives can be attached to it that I hardly know where to start, but none of them are good: self-aggrandizing, arrogant, pompous, windy, irrelevant. And don’t forget phony, since he worked the whole thing out with Harry Reid in advance.

But the real impact of Cruz’s stunt is this. He creates one more purity test, one more hoop of fire for conservatives to demand Republicans walk through. I’m sure you’ve noticed how these have popped up every so often, and that senators who were always conservative but used to be kind of sensible at the end the day would suddenly have to adopt these new hard-line positions, which is how we got, say, Charles Grassley tweeting about killing grandma.

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I feel pretty certain that what we’ll see is the GOP back down.
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Well, Cruz has now made himself the “death panel” of 2013, but there’s a difference. Republicans embraced death-panel rhetoric because there was no cost to not doing so. But a lot of them just hate Cruz. They won’t embrace him, and he is going to divide the party and the conservative movement into two increasingly alienated factions. It’ll be hard for them to keep the broader public from noticing this.

The second event will happen this weekend, as the Senate and House cast their votes to keep the government funded. John Boehner might have something profoundly clever up his sleeve that nobody else knows about, so if he does, bully for him. But by most accounts, all he’s going to do with the spending bill the Senate sends him—a “clean” bill that will fund the government and Obamacare—is tinker around its edges.

[ VIDEO 1:41 ] - It's John Boehner vs. President Obama in the fiscal face-off.

The hot idea as of Thursday was that he’d pursue a repeal of the medical-device tax. Wow! Now that’ll really get the fire-breathers manning the barricades! It’s a huge comedown from the prospect of a defunding of the hated law. But even it won’t fly. Harry Reid will block it (the repeal actually has the support of a strong majority in the Senate, but many Democratic senators say they won’t repeal it as a condition of keeping the government operating, which they see as hostage-taking). So Boehner won’t even get that through, in all likelihood.

Then, he’s stuck with the question of what the heck kind of spending resolution he can get 218 votes for. It’s a good question. We’ll learn this weekend. I feel pretty certain that what we’ll see is the GOP back down, because they know that if the government does shut down, they’ll bear the brunt of the blame (not all of it by any means, but more of it, according to most polls). And if the clock runs out Monday with the ball in the House’s court, they’ll look that much worse. All you need to know is how fearful of shutdown Republicans have sounded in their recent remarks. They certainly seem worried that they’ll suffer most of the blowback.

Which brings us to the debt-ceiling fight, which already started yesterday, when the contents of the GOP’s Christmas list were leaked .. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-s-dangerous-debt-limit-demand-a-christmas-tree-of-conservative-goodies . In exchange for raising the debt ceiling, Republicans want a hilarious list of concessions and goodies. Some, inevitably, want even more—more spending cuts, more restrictions on late-term abortions.

The Republicans had already decided, back in August, that while they would put up a bit of a fight on government shutdown, they were basically going to put their eggs in the debt-ceiling basket. I can see why, superficially. A government shutdown is easy for people to understand, and more people will blame the party that doesn’t care about government. Whereas the debt limit is hard to understand and can easily be blamed on overspending by the president.

That may be, but there’s another group of people who understand the debt limit very well, and that’s America’s CEOs and financial titans. In the final 72 hours before the October 17 borrowing deadline, you can be sure that they’ll be calling Boehner and Mitch McConnell frantically, saying, “Are you guys out of your minds?”

They’ll almost certainly cave, just like they did on the fiscal-cliff deal. Or maybe they won’t. They lose either way. In the former case, all their big talk came to nothing. In the latter, they’ve driven the country down the sinkhole. And so, like I said up top, they’ll be seen either as in total disarray, or as complete saboteurs.

You can only set so many houses on fire before people finally figure out that this isn’t happening by accident and you must be an arsonist. The GOP is now flirting with that moment. It can’t come soon enough.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/27/end-days-for-the-gop.html

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House Republicans Should ‘Knock it Off’

September 27, 2013, 4:16 pm 41 Comments

By DAVID FIRESTONE


Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ted Cruz on Sept. 27, 2013.

The health care obsessives in the Senate, led by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, have spent days trying to portray Democrats as out of touch with the public. “The Senate Democrats are not listening to the millions of Americans who are being hurt by Obamacare,” Mr. Cruz said this morning in his last stand in this particular round of the budget battle.

Moments later, however, the vote took place and Mr. Cruz lost badly .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/us/politics/senate-is-expected-to-approve-budget-bill.html . It was clear that all Democrats and a majority of Senate Republicans had in fact listened quite closely to the public — which demanded that Congress not shut down the government, whatever the fate of President Obama’s health law.

[ "they don't listen to the American people" .. how many times did he repeat that lie ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92433377 ]

On the crucial vote to cut off debate over a temporary spending bill to keep the government open, 79 senators, including 25 Republicans, opposed Mr. Cruz’s plea for a filibuster. (All of those Republicans also opposed the final bill, which removed the provision defunding the health law and sent the stopgap bill back to the House, but by then Democrats only needed a simple majority for passage.)

The Republican split in the Senate — 25 against shutdown tactics, 19 in favor — was a pretty clear signal to the House about the political limits of opposition to the health law. Mainstream Republicans will continue to oppose the law, exaggerating every minor glitch and failure, and running against it in next year’s election, but most are not willing to shut down the government to stop it.

They know what will happen if a shutdown occurs at midnight on Tuesday, or even worse, if a default occurs two or three weeks later: television news clips of phones going unanswered at Social Security offices, shuttered national parks, and veterans protesting reduced services. And a plunge in the market in event of a default. What was a political standoff would turn into a picture of dysfunction. Voters would get angry, and Republicans would inevitably (and accurately) get the blame.

The question now is whether a majority of House Republicans will feel the same way as their colleagues in the upper chamber. Answering only to rigidly gerrymandered districts, House members have shown themselves far less interested in the general welfare than senators, and may not react to the same pressures.

The bill now heads back to the House, and if Republicans attach another health care demand to it, that’s it, game over, the government shuts down on Tuesday. The Senate will have to strip it out again, and there won’t be enough time for reconciliation. Speaker John Boehner could agree to a one- or two-week extension, if he can get the votes for a kick-the-can bill, or he could punt, approve the Senate bill, and make his stand on the debt limit increase in the following few days.

But he’ll eventually have to punt on that, too, or risk triggering an economic catastrophe. The only realistic path is a sensible variant on what Mr. Cruz said this morning: Listen to the public and stop governing by crisis. Or as President Obama put it this afternoon: “Knock it off.”

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/house-republicans-should-knock-it-off/

h/t Stephanie .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92475921

[fuagf]

2011-GOP-default-threat-cost American taxpayers 1.3 billion in higher interest rates.

A Republican Ransom Note

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: September 26, 2013 757 Comments

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent the House a very serious warning .. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/26treasury-lewletter.pdf .. that, for the first time, the United States would be unable to pay its bills beginning on Oct. 17 if the debt ceiling is not lifted. House leaders responded on Thursday with one of the least serious negotiating proposals .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/us/politics/house-gop-leaders-list-conditions-for-raising-debt-ceiling.html .. in modern Congressional history: a jaw-dropping list of ransom demands containing more than a dozen discredited Republican policy fantasies.

We’ll refrain from deliberately sabotaging the global economy, Speaker John Boehner and the other leaders said, if President Obama allows more oil drilling on federal lands. And drops regulations on greenhouse gases. And builds the Keystone XL oil pipeline. And stops paying for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And makes it harder to sue for medical malpractice. And, of course, halts health care reform for a year.

The list would be laughable if the threat were not so serious. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a default on government debt, shattering the world’s faith in Treasury bonds as an investment vehicle and almost certainly bringing on another economic downturn. Unlike a government shutdown, a default could leave the Treasury without enough money to pay Social Security benefits or the paychecks of troops.

The full effects remain unknown because no Congress has ever allowed the government to go over the brink before. The Government Accountability Office estimated .. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-701 .. that simply by threatening to default in 2011, Republicans cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in higher interest payments because of that uncertainty. The 10-year cost of those higher-interest bonds is $18.9 billion .. http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Debt%20Limit%20Analysis%20Sept%202013.pdf .

Any sober-minded lawmaker should realize that the danger of trifling with the debt limit is far too high. But Mr. Boehner has been encouraging his members to toss their pet projects — hey, let’s insist on Congressional approval for every major federal regulation .. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/opinion/undermining-the-executive-branch.html ! — onto the towering list of demands.

By day’s end, many Republican members remained skeptical of the leadership plan. But the House leaders clearly hope the president will take the bait and negotiate on a few items on the list, forcing him to break his promise never to bargain over the debt ceiling. Many items on the list are intended to put vulnerable red-state Democratic senators on the spot should the plan wind up in their chamber. One of them, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, said Thursday he could support a year’s delay on health reform .. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-26/democrat-manchin-breaks-ranks-to-back-mandate-delay.html . If the unified Democratic opposition to the debt-ceiling threat is shattered in the Senate, the pressure on Mr. Obama to come to the table would be intense.

But the absurdity of the list shows just how important it is that Mr. Obama ignore every demand and force the House extremists to decide whether they really want to be responsible for an economic catastrophe. He made a mistake by negotiating in 2011, hoping to reach a grand bargain; that produced the corrosive sequester cuts.

To prevent the House from making every debt-ceiling increase an opportunity to issue extortionist demands for rejected policies they can achieve in no other way, the president has to put an end to the routine creation of emergencies once and for all by simply saying no.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/a-republican-ransom-note.html?ref=editorials

=====

Wonkbook: Democrats to Boehner: There will be no debt-ceiling negotiation. Seriously.

By Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Published: September 23 at 8:28 am 146 Comments


(Photo by Scott Applewhite/AP)

On Friday afternoon, just hours after the House passed a continuing resolution defunding Obamacare, President Obama placed a call to Speaker Boehner.

Surprisingly, Obama didn't want to talk about the CR, or even the possibility of a shutdown. Instead, in a conversation Boehner's aides characterized as "brief," President Obama reiterated that he would not, under any circumstances, negotiate over the debt ceiling.

Today, Senate Democrats will back Obama up. Patty Murray, the chairwoman of the Budget Committee, and Max Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, are sending a "dear colleague" letter .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/09/Murray-Baucus-Memo-September-23-2013.pdf .. stating "President Obama has been clear that he is not going to negotiate over the debt limit, and Congressional Democrats stand behind him strongly."

The letter goes on to note that "since 1960, the debt limit has been raised a total of 78 times, including 49 increases under Republican Presidents and 29 increases under Democratic Presidents. President Ronald Reagan said in 1983 that, 'the full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.'"

If it seems odd that Democrats are spending the week before a possible government shutdown trying to talk Republicans out of potentially breaching the debt ceiling sometime in October or November, it's worth keeping three things in mind:

1) Democrats don't fear a shutdown. They do fear a debt-ceiling breach. Politically, Democrats think Republican brinksmanship is all gravy for them, and many believe some kind of massive Republican misstep would actually be healthy for the political system, as it might lead to a public rejection of the GOP's more extreme tactics. But in terms of actual impact on actual human beings, Democrats aren't particularly concerned about the consequences of a shutdown, while they're horrified by the potential consequences of even a short-lived default.

2) Democrats are worried Boehner is backing himself into a corner. A common criticism of Boehner among both Hill and White House Democrats (not to mention some Republicans) is that he's a short-term strategist who buys time and consensus by making promises to his members that he can't deliver on -- and that end up making future crises worse. This is what they see him doing on the debt ceiling, where he's trying to get his members to keep the government open by promising them an even bigger fight over the debt ceiling.

3) Democrats are trying to convince Boehner that they're serious by backing themselves into a corner. Democrats believe Boehner is going to come to them in a few weeks and say that as much as he agrees the debt ceiling simply has to be raised there's no way he can raise it without concessions given the promises he's made in public and to his members. Democrats are trying to preempt this strategy by making a series of very public statements that they won't negotiate, such that they can reply that their credibility would be endangered by any kind of a deal, and negotiations are simply politically impossible for them.

That leaves us in a situation where Boehner can't raise the debt ceiling without concessions and Democrats can't give Boehner anything in return for raising the debt ceiling.

So how does the country gets out of this mess? The most honest answer is no one really knows, at least not yet. Far and away the scariest facet of reporting on the debt ceiling is that even the participants in the process who are extremely confident that Congress will find a way out don't have any plausible explanation for what that way out might be.

Wonkbook's Numbers of the Day: 83 percent and 2.88 times. The first number .. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-22/demand-strong-as-ever-as-institutions-bid-for-83-of-bond-sales.html .. is the percent of all bids for U.S. Treasuries that came from investors this year. The second is this year's "bid-to-cover ratio" (explainer here .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid-to-cover_ratio ), which is how many times the value of bids exceed the value of Treasuries at auction. The combination of numbers show strong demand for U.S. debt. No debt crisis. No bond vigilantes.

.. much more in Ezra Klein's Wonkbook .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/23/wonkbook-democrats-to-boehner-there-will-be-no-debt-ceiling-negotiation-seriously/ ..

.. here are some tweets mixed in the much more ..

@RBReich: Most fanatical series #Emmy goes to House Republicans' efforts to repeal Obamacare.

@markknoller: Coburn says he agrees with House Republicans objective to shutdown ObamaCare: "if we could do this, we should do it, but we can't."

@ByronYork: Just for record: I believe GOP's last chance to stop Obamacare before implementation was 2012 election.

@JohnJHarwood: As Rs say shutdown/debt threat is to prevent O-care harm, economist Zandi: "I don't see any evidence Obamacare is impacting job market."

.. one other bit from inside ..

KRUGMAN: Free to be hungry. "The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat." Paul Krugman in The New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/opinion/krugman-free-to-be-hungry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss .

[fuagf]

The House GOP’s Legislative Strike

By Jonathan Chait Today at 4:59 AM 134Comments

.. watching C-Span and saw Sen. Bob Menendez table an article he had just read .. i missed which one but he mentioned House Republicans met in January and decided no negotiation .. so guessing this could be the one he tabled ..



In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama’s second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought assurances from their leaders that no further compromises would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which Republicans called “The Williamsburg Accord,” received obsessive .. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/349180/what-exactly-did-boehner-promise-williamsburg-jonathan-strong .. coverage .. http://www.redstate.com/2013/03/14/the-williamsburg-accord-a-conservative-folly/ .. in the conservative media but scant attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase “Williamsburg Accord” has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at all in the New York Times.)

But the decision House Republicans made in January has set the party on the course it has followed since. If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations .. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/275295-boehner-tells-gop-hes-done-with-one-on-one-obama-talks .. with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations .. http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/298223-senate-gop-denies-formation-of-budget-conference-for-third-time .. with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.

Republicans have thrashed this way and that throughout the year. Republicans have fallen out, often sharply, over which hostages to ransom, with the most conservative ones favoring a government shutdown threat and the more pragmatic wing, oddly, endorsing a debt default threat. They have also struggled to define the terms of their ransom. The Williamsburg Accord initially envisioned forcing Obama to sign spending cuts, or some form of the Paul Ryan budget. During the summer, Republicans flirted with making Obama lock in lower marginal tax rates. Recently, Republicans settled on pressuring him to kill his health-care law. But the general contours of the legislative strike, and the plan of obtaining policy victories without offering any policy concessions, has enjoyed general agreement within the party.

The history is important because much of the news coverage and centrist commentary has leaned heavily on the idea that the crises in Washington have come about because of some nebulous failure of bipartisanship. The Washington Post editorial page .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-congresss-dereliction-of-leadership-on-government-shutdown/2013/09/29/8ccb9994-2925-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html?hpid=z3 .. implores both sides to compromise, without explaining why only one party should have to offer policy concessions to keep the government running. Mark Halperin neatly implies ..

Dear Republicans: Saying Harry Reid is an absolutist who wants a shutdown won't change the game.

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) September 29, 2013

.. that the two sides share the blame in equal measure:

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Mark Halperin https://twitter.com/MarkHalperin
@MarkHalperin

Dear Republicans: Saying Harry Reid is an absolutist who wants a shutdown won't change the game.
12:45 AM - 30 Sep 2013
15 Retweets 5 favorites
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Mark Halperin https://twitter.com/MarkHalperin
@MarkHalperin

Dear Democrats: Saying Ted Cruz and House Republicans are absolutists who want a shutdown won't change the game.
12:45 AM - 30 Sep 2013
9 Retweets 3 favorites
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The analytic error here is the assumption by professional pox-on-both-housers that they can take an advocacy position on the government shutdown without siding with one of the parties. If you want to land on the conclusion that both sides are to blame, you need to equivocate on the underlying moral question of whether a shutdown is really a bad thing. If, on the other hand, you want to take a stance against crisis governance, you need to be honest about the fact that one party is pursuing this as a conscious strategy.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/house-gops-legislative-strike.html