Speaker of the House and member of the Republican party, John Boehner, at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC., Oct. 2011. (Photo/Gage Skidmore via Flickr)
As the federal government shutdown enters its second week, the possibility that the stalemate will continue up to and past Oct. 17 — the date set by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as the day the United States will exceed its borrowing capability, rendering the nation incapable of meeting its debt interest payments and forcing the first federal default in the nation’s history — is growing more and more assured.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) seeks concessions from the Democrats regarding social spending and the curbing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Boehner has indicated that he will not bring to the House floor the previous continuing resolution — which made a number of concessions to the Republicans already — without addressing the ACA. He argues he does not have enough Republican votes to pass the clean continuing resolution (CR).
Democrats, on the other hand, feel that with the whole of the House Democratic Caucus behind passing the clean CR, there are enough House Republicans who have indicated publicly a need to end the shutdown and a willingness to give up on curtailing the ACA that passing a clean CR in the House is likely — once Boehner gets out of the way.
“I believe he’s mistaken,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Monday, regarding Boehner’s insistence that there are not enough votes in the House to move a stopgap spending measure to reopen the government with no strings attached. “One sure-fire way to find out if the bill will pass is to have a vote on it.”
Political bullying
The current House Republicans have been seen by many as a bully party: negotiating by threat, causing catastrophic dilemmas to get the Democrats to concede and generally being unreceptive to the notion of compromise. After several past attempts toward negotiations and reaching “grand bargains” — which only emboldened the House Republicans into believing that they can get more from the Democrats — the White House’s current position of no negotiations while the government is closed gives the impression that the Republicans may be grossly overreaching.
This perception is shared by the public. According to a poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center, while no one in Washington comes away looking blameless in this particular fight, more Americans blame the Republicans for the shutdown. Thirty-eight percent of all Americans said Republicans were responsible for the stalemate, while thirty percent said the Obama administration was to blame. Nineteen percent blamed both.
A separate ABC News/Washington Post poll, however, found that 70 percent of all Americans disapproved of the manner in which the congressional Republicans are handling the federal budget shutdown, with only 24 percent approving.
Congressional Democrats received a 61 percent disapproval rating on their handling of the crisis, while the president received a 51 percent disapproval rating.
This is despite the fact that recent revelations show that the Republican Party may have been planning this shutdown for a long time. At the beginning of the shutdown, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) tipped the Republicans’ hand by telling the Washington Post, “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”
“It’s wonderful,” said Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.), also to the Washington Post. “We’re 100 percent united!
“Ulysses S. Grant said, ‘Quit worrying about what Bobby Lee’s doing and let’s focus on what we are doing,’ ” Culberson added. “We are focusing on what we need to do and not worrying about what the other guy is going to do … That’s how Ulysses S. Grant won the war.”
What ‘needed to be done’ turned out to be a well-planned, well-funded attempt toward creating a new forced negotiation point by intentionally shutting down the government. “The Tea Party was planning almost a year and a half before it happened. The issue of Obamacare is almost incidental. The real issue is they have almost a principle that they wanted to shut down the government because they hate it so, and that’s astounding,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“So anyone who thinks this is an accident that, ‘Oh, the president is equally to blame,’ oh no, the Tea Party planned this … very, very, very meticulously and so far successfully executed it, assuming Speaker Boehner would go along with them, which unfortunately was a correct assumption.”
The Meese Plan
As reported by the New York Times, shortly after President Obama won his second term, a coalition of conservative activists met in Washington toward strategizing a plan to repeal the ACA. The Supreme Court had ruled it mostly constitutional, repeat attempts to repeal it had failed and the election of an anti-ACA presidential candidate had fallen flat. This group, headed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, came up with a “blueprint to defunding Obamacare.”
The plan called for congressional Republicans to push toward eliminating the refundable tax credits for premiums and the cost sharing subsidies for the ACA via an appropriations rider; eliminating enhanced match funding for the Medicaid expansion; cutting funding to guaranteed funding appropriations for the Community Health Center Fund and the Prevention and Public Health Fund; creating an appropriation rider that blocks paying of salaries, rulemaking and enforcement of the ACA; forcing the removal of language that blocks religious organizations from having free control over their employees’ employer-sponsored healthcare coverage and returning all authorized programs back to pre-ACA levels while blocking funding for new discretionary programs.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Republicans, mistakenly feeling that the public was behind them in their opposition to the ACA, ran with this, forcing a shutdown to create a “lesser-of-two-evils” situation for the Democrats: give in to the Republicans’ demands on the ACA or keep the government defunded, which would hurt millions and could destroy the economy. To prepare for this, the Tea Party released a “Defunding Obamacare Toolkit for Activists,” which includes prepared answers to defend continued promotion of a shutdown, such as “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare,” which multiple congressional Republicans have recited verbatim. Boehner regularly uses a sample Twitter offering from the kit — “Obamacare is a train wreck.”
As reported by the New York Times,
“The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
“The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.”
“If you look at what the Koch brothers agenda is, look at what many of the extreme right-wing people believe,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told MSNBC, “Obamacare is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Sanders continued:
“These people want to abolish the concept of the minimum wage. They want to privatize the Veterans Administration. They want to privatize Social Security, end Medicare as we know it, massive cuts in Medicaid, wipe out the EPA. You don’t have an Environmental Protection Agency anymore. Department of Energy, gone. Department of Education, gone. That is their agenda, and many people don’t understand it. [The] Koch brothers have poured hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the Tea Party, and to all other kinds of ancillary organizations to push this agenda. So what you are finding now is a continuation of the class warfare that has been going on this country for the last many years. The rich are getting richer. Poverty, [the] number of people in poverty [is at an] all-time high. [The] middle class [is] disappearing, and these guys using Citizens United and other forms are now banging away and doing everything they can to get more tax breaks for the people on top, and devastating cuts for working families.”
The Republicans’ endgame
While a repeal of the ACA is still a high priority for the Republicans, after the Oct. 1 start of open enrollment, repeal or delay is no longer a simple issue. Despite the White House not releasing ACA enrollment numbers as of yet, the fact that 4.7 million unique visitors visited Healthcare.gov the first day of implementation — despite system glitches — suggests that the Republicans vastly underestimated the appeal of the program. While anti-ACA advocacy groups are gearing up for an attack campaign to dissuade the public away from the ACA, the prospect of affordable health care is drawing parallels to the Republicans’ opposition to Medicare and Medicaid.
As it stands now, killing the ACA would possibly expose Congress to a litany of bad press — particularly, now that millions have signed up for and are expecting health insurance. This places the Republican Party in the unenviable position of being in a fight in which it has no clue what it is fighting about or how to end it.
What the endgame to all of this is, is anyone’s guess. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on his show “The Last Word” Monday speculated that these continued showdowns from the Republicans are an attempt to undo the “imperial presidency,” in which the president is free to pursue agendas and policies outside of congressional approval. O’Donnell argued that since, demographically, the Republicans are unlikely to retake the White House in the foreseeable future, the next best thing would be to strengthen the Congress against the presidency. Forcing the White House to negotiate on issues that were given to the White House to decide on unilaterally under the Nixon administration can be seen as a first step.
While that can’t be debated at this time, what is clear is that this stalemate is causing a great deal of damage to the nation. But it might not be the Democratic-Republican stalemate that must be resolved, but the Tea Party-mainstream Republican stalemate. Mainstream Republicans’ fear of being “primaried” by the Tea Party must be resolved — once and for all — if there is to be any hope of moving past the chaos.
“We are finding a marvelous way to grab defeat from the jaws of victory,” said Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based businessman who was a major donor to both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “The way we are handling this has been a mistake from the beginning. I think we misread where the country was.
“The Tea Party is not looking at the big picture,” he continued. “In the long run it will have deleterious effects on the whole party when we could have taken the high road. There is so much going on right now with Obamacare, and no one is saying a word about it. I am not writing a check to anyone. That is not working for the American people.”
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