The Republican House-engineered government shutdown has now unleashed passions and unwise political comments on both sides as it moves into a dangerous phase: coming close to the day when America could default on its debts. The lingering question, often unmentioned question is now becoming: could the U.S. be faced with a situation where the government has shut down AND defaults on its debts? And how will American democracy be altered — perhaps forever — if the executive branch gives in to what some pundits consider authentic extortion by another branch of government.
If you want a sign of how well the political class is handling this, here’s a small taste of some of the testy and political unwise columns now burning up the Internet and giving bloggers on each side lots to (what else?) beat their chests and declare it an outrage. Put your ideological and partisan preferences aside and let these sink in:
***Senate Leader Harry Reid on House Speaker John Boehner:
Politico reported Friday morning that Reid’s frustration with Boehner’s private push for Hill health care subsidies has boiled over.
“He’s a coward,” Reid said, according to Politico. “He’s a coward!”
***A White House official to The Wall Street Journal:
Said a senior administration official: “We are winning…It doesn’t really matter to us” how long the shutdown lasts “because what matters is the end result.”
After Boehner blasted that comment President Barack Obama told reporters “no one is winning” in the shutdown (don’t expect to see that quote in many conservative accounts of the original statement.)
***Republican Representative Martin Stutzman of Indiana to the Washington Examiner in comments he later tried to walk back (always trust the FIRST VERSION in situations such as this):
“We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
What’s at stake? Not just the economy but the way American democracy has been set up. Salon’s Brian Beutler:
The whole point of Obama’s refusal to negotiate is that what Republicans are actually demanding is to fundamentally alter the power balance between the legislative and executive branches of government. If Obama caves and offers concessions to Republicans in exchange for a debt limit increase, it will clearly weaken the presidency. By contrast, if Republicans “cave” and increase the debt limit cleanly, Congress will lose none of its fundamental power.
Moreover, senior administration officials are confident that if Obama establishes the precedent that the president should yield concessions to the opposition on a threat of default, eventually the opposition will demand something so impossible that a default will happen anyhow. Taking a hard line now is the only way to prevent that.
This is why the term “extortion” is appropriate. If Obama were to veto debt limit increases until Congress appended a tax increase and a universal gun background check rider, he’d be guilty of the same. But to the frustration of some liberals he’s not. And in this case it’s not because he’s weak or a bad negotiator.
As this shutdown proves, once parties start making demands they can be very, very difficult to back away from.
To paraphrase one Republican, it’s easier to get into a shutdown than to get out of one. The same dynamic applies to a default. But the consequences of a default are much more dire.
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall makes a convincing argument that Republican arguments about how this is the White House and the Democrat’s fault won’t sell with the public at large. He notes that GOPers (which would mean most assuredly talk show hosts, conservative Internet writers, and to the press Boehner) are seizing on the White House source’s comment about the “game.” The problem here is: in doing so Republicans are falling into the same trap they did during the election: of getting caught up listening to their own echo chamber. Here’s Marshall’s analysis:
Back during the first modern government shutdown in 95/96, Republicans started by saying they were going to break Bill Clinton by shutting down the government. (This is actually why, aside from length, the 95/96 shutdowns became so iconic and toxic, despite the fact that a number of mini-shutdowns – aka ‘spending gaps’ – had occurred in the 70s and 80s.) But when that didn’t work, they slowly turned to saying that Clinton was enjoying the government shutdown and finally that Clinton himself had actually shut down the government. By the late 90s it had become a staple of Republican thinking that the failure of the shutdown gambit was rooted in Clinton’s ability to convince the media and thus the public that Republicans shut down the government rather than him.
House Republicans are now reduced to arguing that Obama’s supposed cynicism in willingly letting the GOP swirl down the drain is bad news for the President. Other arms of the GOP express confidence that they’re winning. Yet it’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that they’re furious with the people who dragged them into the fight.
What it all comes down to is that we have the same pattern: Republicans shut down the government and then go into a days or weeks run of testing out different arguments about why it’s actually the president who shut the government down. And the urge intensifies as the public gets more and more upset. But the essential calculus remains the same. The Republicans forced a government shutdown. The public understands that. So intense unhappiness over the shutdown inevitably redounds on them.
To put it more succinctly, reality is a bitch.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky sounds grim as he looks at the deadlocked political landscape:
So, Obama isn’t bending. And he shouldn’t. If this were a debate about spending levels, he probably would (remember, by the way, that the Democratic resolution, the one passed by the Senate, accepts spending going forward at Republican levels!). But it’s about a group trying to derail legislation that was passed by Congress, upheld by the Supreme Court, and went into effect this very week with 7 million Americans trying to sign up for coverage in just its first two days. Obama can’t compromise on that. Neither can he compromise on the principle that raising the debt limit—which is Congress paying the bills it approved, not the bills Obama approved—must happen without strings. He made that error in 2011. Not again.
But it also came clear to me in listening to these officials that they have no leverage over Boehner. There are the facts. There’s corporate and Wall Street pressure. There’s public pressure. Those are meaningful things, but they’re not concrete. And Boehner just keeps talking out of both sides of his mouth, as he has since the day he became speaker. His aides, or someone with his approval, floated the story Thursday afternoon before the shooting that he was prepared to pass a debt-limit increase with mostly Democratic votes. But then his press aide said he would not pass a “clean” increase. But a clean increase is the only kind Democrats will vote for. Boehner knows this. He’s just talking nonsense and probably has no idea what he’s going to do.
And:
Stop and think about this with me. Everybody carries on about the Hastert Rule, which holds that nothing can come up for a vote in the House if it doesn’t have the support of a majority of the majority. That would be 117 Republicans. Along with half of Democrats—100—that number could pass things. But Boehner has now reached the point where he’s way beyond Hastert. There’s now a Boehner Rule, and it’s the Hastert on steroids. He’s trying to make sure all Republicans, right on up to Steve King and Louie Gohmert, the two who out-Bachmann Bachmann, support what he does. Now it’s not just the majority of the majority; it’s pretty much all of the majority that must agree, or he’s not pulling the trigger.
You’re thinking: Oh, these things always get worked out at five minutes ‘til midnight. At the very least, they’re put off again and the crisis the media warn us about never seems to come. Sure, that could happen here.
But there are specific factors that makes this one different. This isn’t about budget numbers, which can always be finessed. This is about a health-care law that is reality and the setting of precedents on executive power. You don’t negotiate those. It’s also about telling extremists that you cannot hold the whole country hostage. That’s the noble part. The scary part is that standing firm means counting on Boehner to see the facts and do the right thing. This isn’t easy for a man who is surrounded by people who clearly live in a fantasy world, where a shutdown is healthy belt-tightening and a default is no big deal. But the officials I spoke with did say that there is no way that Boehner could have left that Oval Office meeting Wednesday night thinking that Obama was bluffing. I hope they’re right. It’s the only hope we’ve got.
Part of understanding the dynamics of the government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, is the acknowledgement of the fact that we are here because of a deliberate strategic decision that the Republicans took early in the year. They demanded that the Democratically-led Senate pass a budget resolution. When the Senate was successful in doing that, the ordinary course would have been for the House and Senate to appoint conferees to hash out the differences between their two respective budget resolutions. But the Republicans refused to appoint any conferees because they said the two parties were too far apart on their numbers to make a compromise possible. In reality, they didn’t want to spell out the cuts their draconian budget would make necessary. Instead, they wanted to force the administration to spell out those unpopular cuts by forcing a crisis that they felt the White House would feel compelled to avoid at all costs. Therefore, the plan all along was to refuse to agree to any budget numbers and use the end of the fiscal year on September 30th, and the need to raise the debt ceiling shortly thereafter, to win cuts they could not get in any other way. And this would allow them to blur the lines of responsibility for the unpopularity of the resulting budget.
In simple terms, this strategy depends on the Republicans being so immensely irresponsible that the administration would feel compelled to give in to avoid the damage they would cause to the country.
…Defeating these tactics now will enable the president to have a productive second term, and that is why offering something face-saving to the Republicans would be counterproductive. They not only need to lose, but they need to learn their lesson.
NBC’s First Read notes that conservatives aren’t backing down:
*** Conservatives aren’t backing down: Here we are in Day 4 of the government shutdown, and after a brief period of comity yesterday (given the violent episode on Capitol Hill), both sides in the stalemate are back into their respective corners. That’s especially true for conservatives. Despite polls showing that more Americans are blaming Republicans than Democrats for the shutdown, and despite establishment Republicans admitting they aren’t winning this fight, conservatives aren’t backing down. In fact, they feel they have survived the fallout from the first few days. Case in point is Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) admission in that hot-mic moment that “We’re gonna win this, I think.” Is that the reality of this standoff? Or it is simply due to the conservative echo chamber? After all, one of the major differences between the last shutdown (in 1995-1996) and now is the rise of FOX News, Drudge, and Breitbart News. As the New York Times recently wrote, “a fervent group of conservatives — bloggers, pundits, activists and even members of Congress — is harnessing the power of the Internet, determined to tell the story of the current budget showdown on its terms.” It explains why conservatives aren’t as convinced as many others are that this will do significant damage to the party.
Jonathan Chait doesn’t see the Tea Party conservatives dropping the unprecedented leverage they are using against the traditional way American democracy has been set up and used:
Herein lies the real cause of the crisis. Tea Party Republicans think they have a right to something—that, because they have the power to stop funding for the government and prevent the Treasury from paying its bills, they can demand major policy concessions. This is a gross violation of governing norms, for reasons Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne reminds us Thursday. Republicans got away with this once, in the summer of 2011. Democrats can’t let it happen twice. If the Tea Party thinks this is a legitimate strategy for changing policy, they’ll try it again. Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi understand this as well as anybody, which is why they’ve been united in their refusal to negotiate over anything but a “clean” bill to fund the government and won’t even discuss concessions in exchange for a higher debt ceiling.
Lots of people seem to think the solution to this crisis is to find some face-saving compromise for Boehner—something he can take to his caucus as a victory, so that they will walk away quietly and he’ll get to remain as speaker. There’s a certain logic to that: It’s how these kind of disputes usually end. Perhaps such a deal could involve some vague nod in the direction of a Grand Bargain or some of its elements, along the lines that Noam suggests. Or perhaps it would involve a trade for something Norm Ornstein suggested in these pages a few ago: An agreement that would forever allow the president to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally.
But in both cases, I think, the Tea Party would need to accept some degree of either defeat or disarmament. They still don’t seem ready to do that, which makes recent developments not only baffling but also a little scary.
Conservative columnist Michael Reagan thinks the shutdown is a political Godsend for the GOP:
Let the crisis continue.
Let the standoff between the Democrats and the Republicans over Obamacare drag on for as many weeks or months as necessary to wake up the American people.
….Republicans with weak knees worry that if they’re blamed for shutting the government down over Obamacare, which the mainstream media will do, they’ll be hurt in 2014.
But I see the Obamacare battle as a blessing for the GOP. For the first time in a long time, America is getting to see the stark difference between the Republican and Democrat parties.
You want “free” socialized medicine and all the coercive strings and stupidities that come with a government bureaucracy? Fine. Vote Democrat in 2014.
You want to get government out of health care, rely on competitive market forces, and be free to choose what level of coverage you get and where you get it? Fine. Vote Republican in 2014.
Voters will have a clear choice next year, and I’m betting the fight over Obamacare is going to backfire for Democrats, not Republicans.
It will help the GOP take the Senate in 2014. And it’ll still help in 2016, when Hillarycare Clinton will find herself swept away by a hurricane of angry voters who’ve finally learned because of Obamacare that there’s a real difference between the two parties.
And then there’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe, which to many centrists, moderates and independents often “nails it” infuriates the conservative entertainment media and conservative writers. Conservative talker Mark Levin calls host Joe Scarborough “The Morning Shmo.”
Mika Brzezinski played a clip of Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Rand Paul (R-KY) discussing their strategy for victory over the course of a shutdown which was captured on a live microphone.
“It’s weird that they don’t seem to get the calendar,” said New York Magazine reporter John Heilemann.
“When they fought this battle the last time in 2011, they were fighting against a president who was in the position of vulnerability,” he continued. “The president is not running for reelection in 2016. It’s a congressional election in 2014. The public opinions are pretty clear. He is winning the battle right now.”
“I said this from the very beginning, as the Wall Street Journal and the litany of conservatives that agree with me,” Joe Scarborough agreed. “It’s irrational.”
“They’re playing a bad hand and they’re playing it badly,” Heilemann added. “It’s just a neutral fact.”
“And one impact may be ensure that Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell, if he gets reelected, remain the minority in the Senate,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson submitted. “The Republican Party could have taken the Senate next year. I think they’re blowing their chance.[Mediaite]
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had some advice for GOPers:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday there is an anti-government strain of the GOP that is causing problems for the whole, calling on Republicans to take back control.
“They have something going on. I say to Republicans, ‘Take back your party,’” Pelosi said on “CBS This Morning.”
She pointed to the fact that a majority of Republicans didn’t support President George W. Bush on TARP and that they didn’t vote for federal aid after Hurricane Sandy as evidence of the issues that are also seen in the current government shutdown.
Pelosi pointed to intraparty fighting on the GOP side as standing in the way of a resolution to the shutdown, in its fourth day Friday.
“It will take some coming together on the Republican side. It’s very hard to negotiate with Republicans when they can’t negotiate with themselves,” Pelosi said. She noted that Democrats have already accepted the GOP’s spending number. “They do not have within their own ranks the ability to take yes for an answer.”
And right now can you declare the clear-cut winner….Iran? The Week’s Peter Weber:
Thanks to the government shutdown, the two programs in charge of overseeing sanctions — the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) and the State Department’s sanctions monitoring agency — have been “completely, virtually, utterly depleted,” Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday. Furloughs at the NSA and CIA are also hampering intelligence on sanctions violations, she said.
The Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin and Eli Lake have some numbers that show the scope of the furloughs: 90 percent of the OFAC’s self-explanatory Office of Terrorist Financing and Intelligence (TFI) are out, and only 30 of the 345 employees of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) survived the furloughs. FinCEN’s network of banks and the OFAC “are two of the most potent tools the U.S. government has used to pressure Iran,” say Rogin and Lake.
So, what might a lapse in sanctions enforcement mean? In broad strokes, says CNN’s Jamie Crawford, the furloughs mean the OFAC “is currently unable to sustain its core functions of issuing new sanctions against individuals and entities deemed to be assisting the governments of Iran or Syria, as well as terrorist organizations, narcotics cartels, or proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.”
Mark Dubowitz of the pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies is more specific, and more alarmist. “At a time where sanctions pressure is the only instrument of U.S. policy that is actually working to persuade the Iranian regime to negotiate over its illicit nuclear program, the Treasury furloughs could not be timed worse,” he tells CNN. “With hyper-partisan politics sidelining Treasury’s G-Men, Iran’s Supreme Leader is getting his sanctions relief without giving up any nuclear concessions.”
Read Weber’s post in full.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.