If I say that mine is the majority opinion, that makes me correct.
If I clutter a federal argument with local points, I can point fingers at the opposition.
If I claim to confront ‘some actual realities’, and then slander the Founders, that makes me sound cool.
By spinning a ‘demography is destiny’ argument onto ‘Whites’, then I can project a paranoid narrative onto them.
We Holy Progressives gave you a black President to purge your raaaaacist hearts, but, in your fallen Whiteness, you perversely rejected Holy Progress and somehow became more raaaaacist.
Strangely, fear-mongering is an evil weapon only used by conservatives.
If I can build an argument that liberty is against the self-interest of Americans, that will make me sound cool.
No matter how many times I characterize protecting the integrity of the vote as conservatives trying to disenfranchize voters, I still get a chuckle.
The debt ceiling fiasco may be a turning point.
In closing, I must sound a shrill alarm that the end of the Progressive Era nearly makes me wet myself.
If you’ve been reading blogs for the last couple of years, there is an air of predictability as the political theater moves forward.
Via BlogProf, we have the weekly GOP address, where Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) lays everything out in smooth, even tones:
Also trying to sound reasonable, and failing, we have Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books: “What Were They Thinking?” If you want a target for a lengthy fisk, this article affords nearly five thousand words of cherry-picked, reasonably toned finger pointing. A few introductory points:
The President argued that it’s critical to make cuts that will “get our fiscal house in order,” so that the American people and the politicians would accept the idea of new programs leading to growth and more jobs. But there are numerous indications that the public is ready for such programs now, and serious analysts see no reason why he should not also be taking such steps now, even if this increases the deficit in the short run. But that would be at odds with Obama’s current self-portrayal. People who are looking for work, or worried about their unemployment insurance, or getting their kids to college, may not be impressed with the argument that they must be patient while the President adjusts his fiscal image in time for the 2012 election.
So, calling the good President’s bluff, what cuts? There remain substantial differences between three crucial items here: sound waves emitted by the Presidential mouth, budgetary plans available for public scrutiny, and historical events. If we had a dollar for every swell sounding platitude departing the President, the whole country could retire outright. Perhaps his lack of real-world business experience is an impediment.
The Republicans, with Alice in Wonderland logic, termed any elimination of a tax break a tax increase. Moreover, the breaks included in the tax code were there because they had been sponsored by an important member of Congress, or supported by a powerful lobby on behalf of one interest or another. After the President, in a press conference in late June, inveighed against tax breaks for corporate jets, the industry quickly insisted that such a change would cost jobs.
Alice, you see, was actually a plumber in disguise. If the market is a pipe, and economy is some working fluid, then taxation is an orifice that may have some utility, unless it Progressively becomes a clenched sphincter:
Emphasis mine in this next bit:
The Tea Party’s strength was larger than its numbers—about eighty in the House and as few as four in the Senate—because the entire House Republican freshman class and some more senior members were sympathetic to its views, and because the ghost of Bob Bennett now haunts many Republicans. Bennett (still alive), a solid conservative three-term senator from Utah, was, astonishingly, rejected for reelection last year by the Utah Republican caucus for having been insufficiently pure in his conservatism. (His vote in 2006 against a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning was seen as heresy.)
If Bob Bennett could be dumped, no one was safe. Boehner himself was facing a possible primary challenge. Some Tea Party members dug in on the debt ceiling because they, too, feared attacks or challenges, principally from people who would accuse them of not forcing sufficient cuts or of failing to keep their pledge not to raise the debt limit.
Safe from what, precisely? We have a population, from which is drawn a subset of citizens to trudge into Congress and make laws. The 2010 election (and, one prays, the 2012 election as well) formed a strong, Constitutional signal about the will of the people: we want responsible government. A President running amok is at least showing signs of being brought to heel. What is unsafe about the Constitutional design working as intended? Not that this is time for high fives, mind you, but we should be cheered that the exceptional notion of liberty and self government at least affords an appearance of working.
Read the whole thing for a peek into a sadly diseased Progressive mindset.
Also in need of help is Adam Liptak at the NYT. “The 14th Amendment, the Debt Ceiling and a Way Out”:
The provision in question, Section 4 of the amendment, was meant to ensure the payment of Union debts after the Civil War and to disavow Confederate ones. But it was written in broader terms.
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,” the critical sentence says, “shall not be questioned.”
The Supreme Court has said in passing that those words have outlived the historical moment that gave rise to them.
“While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for the court in 1935, “its language indicates a broader connotation.”
In recent weeks, law professors have been trying to puzzle out the meaning and relevance of the provision. Some have joined Mr. Clinton in saying that it allows Mr. Obama to ignore the debt ceiling. Others say it applies only to Congress and only to outright default on existing debts. Still others say that the president may do what he wants in an emergency, with or without the authority of the 14th Amendment.
This is the usual idiotic argument of staring so closely at single clauses as to see whatever you want in them, at the expense of the broader scope of the Constitution. How can anyone seriously argue that the Executive branch can ingore Congress’s power of the purse? Maybe the Supreme Court can poke the Congress, if the Congress is so freaked out as to pass wantonly irresponsible legislation. Recent history has shown that the more likely case is that Congress blows off budgeting entirely, and the Federal Reserve waters down the dollar to taste.
Having said all that, the fundamental rock-scissors-paper arrangement of federal power has got to be inviolate, or we’re just another dictatorship.
Finally, Ezra Klein opens his mouth and justifies not having the WaPo cluttering my driveway. “A small deal won’t cut it”, is his title. That’s what she said. Nancy Pelosi, that is. On the topic of the debt ceiling. No double on-tawdry here. Someone has whispered to Excitable Ezra that there is a market filled with ravenous capitalists who are waiting to eat the U.S. credit rating. Possible side effects include Ezra having to get a real job (just kidding) and some of his patrons looking bad for re-election.
And Congress, unfortunately, has made that job a lot harder. A year ago, the market didn’t question our ability to raise the debt ceiling, nor our ability to come to a deficit deal in some reasonable period of time. Standard & Poor’s didn’t even think we should mix the two issues together. “It’s best practice for governments to enact [deficit] reforms … using the broader and longer-term perspective occasioned by debate on the budget proposal as a whole,” wrote the credit-rating agency. Plus, the debt ceiling had to be raised this year, but the deficit was a long-term problem that we had, at the least, “three to five years” to address.
Again, Ezra is either too witless or too cunning to look at the broader picture. The problem isn’t new. The irresponsibility didn’t grow overnight. The overreach is a bi-partisan product of decades of neglect. Ezra: the old days are gone, man: people in office are going to have to face an informed electorate. Finger-pointing, blaming Congress, Bush, Wall Street, rating agencies, &c is just passé. No one wants to hear it. We want to hear how responsible officials are going to make the budget fit the existing tax receipts.
And, from almost 30 years ago, we have this relic of Stacy’s brief flirtation with Brit pop:
NTTAWWT, mind you; one is pleased that the political will of New Yorkers has been expressed. Whether or not the Almighty will be impressed remains to be seen, but hey: not my problem.
Sprinklerman and BHO, on the other hand, are a two guys making decisions that affect a large number of people. This debt debate really isn’t about either of them. The question of whether an organization should wallow in debt until it collapses really gets at basic notions of integrity and forthrightness.
Over at Alan Colmes’ joint, Karthiks quotes Paul Starr at The American Prospect, who busily wrecks Hamilton’s Federalist #30 argument, emphasis mine:
During the [Constitution] ratification debate, those fiscal powers were at the heart of the Anti-Federalist case against the Constitution—to which Hamilton responded, in “Federalist No. 30,” that limiting those powers would be unwise because there was no telling what demands the government might face in the future.
Hamilton was right. The nation would never have flourished if the Anti-Federalists had gotten their way. Now the Republicans—true heirs to the Anti-Federalists—are trying to entrench the kind of arbitrary fiscal limitations and requirements for congressional supermajorities that the Founders rejected.
Nice throw-away counter-factual, Starr.
Curiously missing from Starr’s analysis is the ~125 year gap between the Constitution and Woodrow Wilson, when things really started going sideways, as a result of the Federal Reserve Act and 16th Amendment.
Those beating a Constitutional drum today are not necessarily anti-Federalist; those debates were held and concluded in Hamilton’s day. Many are anti-Federal-Over-Reachist, decrying the way the vertical separation of powers between local, state and federal government has been substantially erased in the last century.
Maybe Mr. Starr will get some word of this post and follow up on the question of just how much federal government is too much.
The partial FAA shutdown was about as effective as an Obama Administration budget negotiation. Desperate times, lads. My recommendation: up the ante. Load-shed the entire Transportation Safety Administration. That’ll get some attention. We all sort of know it was about as useful as a punctured prophylactic, anyway.
No offense to the sincere people who were doing what they felt paid to do. It’s just time to admit that the TSA dog didn’t hunt.
It’s great to see the issues summarized so succinctly and cleanly. My opinion is that the UN is slightly better than no UN. How, precisely, we articulate a consistent position between Team America, World Police on the one hand and Isolationism on the other extreme is the priceless question.
More subtle than that is the question of how we get along nicely with other cultures whose notion of liberty means submission to an ideology. These paradoxes just don’t generally resolve, alas.
If the magnitude of the debt was not nearly beyond visualization, then listening to BHO bloviate in stark criticism of the current debt crisis might nearly be amusing:
The Republicans have not done what they should have done months ago, which is to find one plan they could all agree on and present it to the president and to the American people. So right now the plans are all over the place.
The Gang of Six, which rose yesterday, already is receding. A lot of people looked at details of it, and the second half, the part where negotiations over six months are supposed to happen when you get the real cuts in entitlements and the tax reform, appear to have a lot of loopholes in them, and it’s very fuzzy.
Kind of amusing to see a professional shrink ‘should-ing’ the Republicans like this. I’m confident that Mr. Krauthammer understands the sheer impossibility of our political system producing that kind of solidarity in an party. ‘One plan’ would have required a credible threat of violence that would have been instantly self-defeating.
What do we know?
The Progressive Era is defunct. The social welfare state is toast. Things must change.
The blame for the change is going to be politically devastating. Blame avoidance is paramount.
Change hurts. ‘Progress’ meant engineering a world where no one loses. Who decides who loses is powerful, but only if the blame is successfully projected elsewhere.
Therefore, we have a game of political musical chairs. There seems scant political leadership of sufficient power to accomplish anything prior to 2012. PREDICTION: The dart-on-calendar choice of 02 August passes without tangible change to the situation. The crisis just staggers along, belying the President’s purported persuasive powers, and becomes his personal albatross for 2012. UNCLEAR: Whether leadership emerges that simultaneously respects liberty, yet concentrates enough political power to go after the overgrown federal government with the necessary chainsaw and machete.
It may not actually compete too heavily with some of Brooks’ or Krugman’s bowel ejections, but, nevertheless, stand by while I pump a few metaphorical rounds into the zombie known as “GOP leaders must free themselves from the Tea Party’s grip”
Dionne
Smitty
Media reports are touting the Senate’s Gang of Six and its new budget outline. But the news that explains why the nation is caught in this debt-ceiling fiasco is the gang warfare inside the Republican Party. We are witnessing the disintegration of Tea Party Republicanism.
Probably a paradox, Dionne. The GOP leadership is substantially Ruling Class; their populist squawks have frequently sounded as sincere as a John McCain speech. ‘Tea Party Republicanism’ is substantially an oxymoron.
The Tea Party’s followers have endangered the nation’s credit rating and the GOP by pushing both House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor away from their own best instincts.
The Tea Party’s followers. Really. You’re sure that the clueless morons who spent beyond the nation’s means for decades had nothing to do with it, Dionne? You’re really so craven as to project all the blame upon those trying to argue for responsibility?
Cantor worked amicably with the negotiating group organized by Vice President Joe Biden and won praise for his focus even from liberal staffers who have no use for his politics.
Yet when the Biden group seemed close to a deal, it was shot down by the Tea Party’s champions. Boehner left Cantor exposed as the frontman in the Biden talks and did little to rescue him.
That probably constitutes one way to characterize the events. Someone else might call the negotiations an abject farce. The Bowles-Simpson Debt Commission last year, for all it tried too hard to polish the Progressive, nanny state turd, was the last semi-mature effort seen from this administration.
Then it was Boehner’s turn on the firing line. He came near a bigger budget deal with President Obama, but the same right-wing rejectionists blew this up, too. Cantor evened the score by serving as a spokesman for Republicans opposed to any tax increase of any kind.
Well, yes. The government continues to steal too much. Our federal government is so fundamentally dishonest as to trim spending growth and then label the trimmings a spending cut. It is almost as though the people inside the beltway are no longer speaking an understandable form of English.
Think about the underlying dynamic here. The evidence suggests that both Boehner and Cantor understand the peril of the game their Republican colleagues are playing. They know we are closer than we think to having the credit rating of the United States downgraded. This may happen before Aug. 2, the date everyone is using as the deadline for action.
Ah, the dynamic. Past the political game of fretting who gets blamed when the ship of state stacks up on the seamount, there is the reality that the Welfare State is toast. Clowns such as yourself, Dionne, continue to argue in some abstract realm, bickering and arguing over who has the deck when the moment of grounding occurs. You’re simply not relevant, and these arguments aren’t meaningful, Dionne. Does that reality do harm an overblown sense of self-importance, Dionne?
Unfortunately, neither of the two House leaders seems in a position to tell the obstreperous right that it is flatly and dangerously wrong when it claims that default is of little consequence. Rarely has a congressional leadership seemed so powerless.
Compare the impasse Boehner and Cantor are in with the aggressive maneuvering of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. He knows how damaging default would be and is working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to concoct a way out.
See, the joke’s on you, Dionne. Despite the last century of harm, the fundamental pattern of having the House turn over in half the time of the Executive is having the desired effect; a reckless Executive is being reminded that the government at least nominally works for the people, not the reverse.
McConnell can do this because he doesn’t confront the Tea Party problem that so bedevils Boehner and Cantor. Many of the Tea Party’s Senate candidates — Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska — lost in 2010. Boehner and Cantor, by contrast, owe their majority in part to Tea Party supporters. McConnell has a certain freedom to govern that his House leadership colleagues do not.
Wow, you really know how to draw the wrong lesson, don’t you, Dionne? It’s true that the unbridled will of the people was less that totally effective against the Ruling Class Overlords. They were able to circle the wagons, and squeeze a couple more years of graft out of the system. But, again, the Progressive Era is hard aground, going nowhere, and taking on water. “McConnell has a certain freedom to govern”. Look at what you wrote. The NRSC has got to know, and I think the fundraising numbers bear me out, that the only way the Ruling Class Overlords could have less respect in the eyes of the Tea Parties would be to, say, legally change their names to Dionne.
And this is why Republicans are going to have to shake themselves loose from the Tea Party. Quite simply, the Tea Party’s legions are not interested in governing, at least as governing is normally understood in a democracy with separated powers. They believe that because the Republicans won one house of Congress in one election, they have a mandate to do whatever the right wing wants. A Democratic president and Senate are dismissed as irrelevant nuisances, although they were elected, too.
It is nearly funny how you raise the ‘separated powers’ point, Dionne. Have you looked at the rot in the Executive? The DoJ? The EPA deciding to implement Cap & Trade? The FCC going after Net Neutrality? So, are you really that ignorant, or blowing sunshine up your readers’ bottoms? I tend to think the latter, and am thankful for an Internet which I can use to record the disgust and contempt that Americans of conscience feel for creepy little propaganda organs of your ilk.
The Tea Party lives in an intellectual bubble where the answers to every problem lie in books by F.A. Hayek, Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand. Rand’s anti-government writings, regarded by her followers as modern-day scripture — Rand, an atheist, would have bridled at that comparison — are particularly instructive.
Really? Instructive? If I thought you actually were grasping anything of Austrian economics, I might be cheered.
When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel, “The Fountainhead,” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives.
Your one-sentence summary of Rand’s novel is so brief as to be useless. And our government has been blown up by the thieving swine whose shoes you shine, not Americans demanding fiscal responsibility. And the Ruling Class Overlords in the House hardly qualify as ‘radical individualists’.
Our country is on the edge. Our capital looks like a lunatic asylum to many of our own citizens and much of the world. We need to act now to restore certainty by extending the debt ceiling through the end of this Congress.
And the guilt is owned by the Ruling Class, Progressive idiots who’ve run the country into the dirt. Take a bow, servant of losers.
Boehner and Cantor don’t have time to stretch things out to appease their unappeasable members, and they should settle their issues with each other later. Nor do we have time to work through the ideas from the Gang of Six. The Gang has come forward too late with too little detail. Their suggestions should be debated seriously, not rushed through.
Let’s just agree it’s a wash, and start to talk about how we run the government when outlays equal receipts. That would be, you know, useful. Reasonable.
Republicans need to decide whether they want to be responsible conservatives or whether they will let the Tea Party destroy the House That Lincoln Built in a glorious explosion. Such pyrotechnics may look great to some people on the pages of a novel or in a movie, but they’re rather unpleasant when experienced in real life.
We need the reckoning, so that dead wood of your sort can be swept aside in favor of something responsible and honest, Dionne.
