❄ re ‘Corporations Are People’
US Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) proposes an amendment to the US Constitution to reverse effects of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the Citizen’s United case. Sander’s remarks to the Senate and the full text of proposed Amendment are at
http://sanders.senate.gov/petition/?uid=f1c2660f-54b9-4193-86a4-ec2c39342c6c
NOTES
[Political Design 2011.12.17. Post A35 Preliminary [To be expanded]. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]
❄ Democracy Vouchers
Lawrence Lessig proposes [Note 1] addressing the problem of money in US politics by instituting ‘democracy vouchers’
. Here’s how they would work:
“ ... we could adopt a system of small-dollar public funding for Congress.
“Here’s just one way: almost every voter pays at least $50 in some form of federal taxes. So imagine a system that gave a rebate of that first $50 in the form of a ‘democracy voucher.’ That voucher could then be given to any candidate for Congress who agreed to one simple condition: the only money that candidate would accept to finance his or her campaign would be either ‘democracy vouchers’ or contributions from citizens capped at $100. ... ”
The Question
Lessig’s option addresses the supply question. [Candidates declining the terms for ‘democracy vouchers’ risk being penalized at the polls.] But it doesn’t deal with the demand problem. Candidates would still need money—and loophole-exploiting ‘friends’ or ‘issue-focused’ fronts—to compete. So: good as far as it goes. The next question. How could we, following Lessig’s spirit, wholly suppress big money?
NOTES
[Note 1]: Lawrence Lessig, “More Money Can Beat Big Money,” The New York Times, 17 November 2011.
[Political Design 2011.11.20. Post A34. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]
❄ What We Know [II]:
❄ The Republican Party’s Nullification ProjectBruce D. Larkin❄ PART 1: INTRODUCTIONLinks in this note:
[1] This introduction
[2] A reprise of my post in 2004
[3] Between 2004 and 2011
[4] Links to the eight PLAIN TALK posts of 2011; and
[5] Concluding Remarks.
Footnotes
The Republican Party, over the last twenty years, has fallen on hard times, been captured by garage bands, become a dissonant orchestra, led by mad conductors. John McCain, the Republican standard-bearer of 2008, in 2011 described the right-wing ideological stand during the debt ceiling negotiations as ‘bizarro’. But if you listen carefully, behind the cacophony you can discern some common rhythms. Republican strategy appears orchestrated. To what end?
The Republican aim is nothing less than to capture—and whenever in the minority, to undermine, obstruct and diminish—the US Constitutional system of governance. It is a nullification project. It amounts to an attempted coup d’etat, albeit in the guise of normal politics. In some respects it is a ‘soft coup’, a ‘quiet coup’, in that no physical violence, no military seizure, is contemplated. This is not Seven Days in May. But the object is as thoroughgoing dismantlement of civic politics as was achieved by the once-upon-a-time militaries of banana republics, overthrowing democratic governance by force.
A nullification project. Unlike the lawyerly calls for nullification—states’ declaring Federal laws unconstitutional—in the decades before and after the Civil War, this nullification project takes the form of political war against Federal political institutions. Citizens are the losers. The model for this nullification project is urban guerrilla war. More colorfully (even if the underlying story is apocryphal) it calls to mind workers’ throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the machines of job-threatening industrialisation. Sabotage.
Of course, Republican Party voices would insist that this charge is outrageous. They would point to electoral successes, at the state and federal levels; to the historical legacy of their name; to the American commitment to a two-party system; to their professed dedication to the Constitution; and to declared policy objectives around which they have woven cloaks of plausibility.
Is calling this ‘nullification’ outrageous? In 1998 Hillary Clinton, prompted by tactics used to entangle Bill Clinton in what became an impeachment effort, famously declared that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” afoot. [Note 1] A favorite of the Republican Party, Grover Norquist, champion of the policy of ‘No New Taxes!’, said of government that “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”[Note 2] Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: “the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless.”[Note 3] And as the Great Extortion unfolded in the summer of 2011, Paul Krugman assessed that “In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.”[Note 4] The New York Times came to a similarly pessimistic view, concluding editorially that “this episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest.”[Note 5]
Let me be clear what I am not charging. I don’t believe that there is a secret cabal, meeting in some darkened room or in a boat offshore on one of the Great Lakes. I dislike conspiracy theories, which are almost always far from the mark. To repeat my contention: “The Republican aim is nothing less than to capture—and whenever in the minority, to undermine, obstruct and diminish—the US Constitutional system of governance. It is a nullification project.” Distill Republican initiatives, obstructions, false premises and lies: what is left is an assault on the Republic and on civic politics. That is the sense in which I speak of coup d’etat. They have declared Government the enemy, neglecting that it is the people’s government that they denounce. They seek nullification in a new guise but on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, Republican actions have practical consequences. The Tea Republicans can act in ignorance, recklessly, as their 2011 abuse of the debt ceiling, threatening the stability of both US and global economic performance, keenly illustrates.
Links:
[1] Introduction
[2] A reprise of my post in 2004
[3] Between 2004 and 2011
[4] Links to the eight PLAIN TALK posts of 2011; and
[5] Concluding Remarks.
Footnotes
It is only to keep this note short that I have not incorporated the full texts of the PLAIN TALK posts. Please exercise the links when you come to them in Part 4.
After Writing the Introduction I Saw This New York Times Editorial:
EDITORIAL
Race to the Right
Published: August 6, 2011
It is far too simplistic to blame the loose coalition of Republicans known as the Tea Party for the debt-limit debacle. It was not the Tea Party fringe of the Republican Party that dragged the economy to the brink — it was its center. The party has moved so far to the right that there is little difference between fringe and mainstream.
Through a combination of fear and fervor, Republican leaders in Congress and in the presidential campaign have lined up behind a radical new strategy in which all major decisions are made under threat — to shut the government in April, to implode the economy in July, to cut off money for the Federal Aviation Administration in August. Party leaders have said they will do this again and again, in perpetuity.
The Tea Party did not come up with this strategy. Although several of its elected members said they would never vote to raise the debt ceiling, it was John Boehner, the House speaker, who in May devised the fatal formula that President Obama would have to agree to cut more from spending than the amount of the debt-limit increase. This nonsense finally won the day. (Mr. Boehner was pilloried by Tea Party branches for raising the debt limit at all.)
In the House, there are only 60 members of the Tea Party caucus, and they were hardly a monolithic bloc. Last Monday, 32 of them supported the final debt deal and 28 voted against. To understand the Republican Party in the House, it is better to consider the Republican Study Committee, 176 fiscal hard-liners who make up two-thirds of the entire caucus (including many of the Tea Party members). Its chairman, Jim Jordan of Ohio, was one of the biggest obstacles to a deal and refused to support it.
It is this larger group that Mr. Boehner and his lieutenants fear the most. The Tea Party alone could not topple the speaker. But the Republican core could.
This rightward flood tide has also picked up most of the Republican presidential field. Considering what a clear triumph the final bill was for the Republicans, cutting $2.4 trillion in spending without a dime of new tax revenue, at least a few candidates would logically have supported it. Only Jon Huntsman, however, has spoken up for it. The rest said they found it insufficiently ruthless, fearing a primary loss if they seemed the slightest bit soft.
Mitt Romney took a stand, against the bill, only after it was adopted. He complained that it requires a committee that might possibly cut defense spending and recommend higher taxes, though the latter is very unlikely. He did not deny the possibility of a catastrophic default, as Michele Bachmann did, but had no ideas to offer about averting it without this deal. That is what it means to stand at the center of a party that would rather exploit threats than worry about their consequences. [Note 6]
PART 2:
❄ A REPRISE OF POSTS OF 2004
Imagine: It is 2004 and GW Bush is Running for Reelection
In September 2004 I posted an entry on this blog titled “What We Know.”[Note 7] Regrettably, it is prelude to this post. A good way to approach today’s entry would be to click on “What We Know” and read those comments. Many concern the Iraq War, because it was at the heart of Cheney-Bush policy but never convincingly explained. For convenience I’ll recapitulate the headings of “What We Know” here, but only the headings:
❶ 9.11 took place on GW Bush’s watch.
❷
GW Bush has squandered America’s reputation for law, decency, and collaboration with allies, and squandered the sympathetic good will which flowed to America after 9.11.
❸ Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, the White House practiced torture—and may still.
❹; GW Bush won Congress’s 10-11 October 2002 Iraq war authorization by claiming there were threats to the United States which did not exist.
❺ The White House deliberately prevented the UN inspectors from finishing their work in Iraq.
❻ The 19 March 2003 attack on Iraq launched a ‘war of choice’, not a war of necessity.
❼ The GW Bush war on Iraq is an illegal war.
❽ Then—unsound ‘necessity’ and illegality aside—the war launched on 19 March 2003 was misconceived, a grotesque blunder of imagination, driven by senior officials now shown to have had no sense of Iraqi society, no sense how an invader and occupier would be greeted. In short, this was the work of ignorant men, and women, striving to impose their illusions on others in the name of desire.
❾ GW Bush and Cheney-Rumsfeld policies [with respect to Israel and the Middle East] are in salient respects similar to those of Israeli Likudists, crippling any chance that the United States be a credible voice for democracy in the Middle East.
❿ The White House is drawn magnetically to coercion and intimidation and secrecy, in ways and to degrees that threaten American constitutional freedoms and liberties.
These 10 points of 2004 reflect America’s preoccupation at that time with 9.11 and the Iraq War. Five months before “What We Know [I]” was posted the country was rocked by the Abu Ghraib disclosures and the revelation that on 6 August 2001—five weeks before 9.11—GW Bush was shown his Presidential Daily Brief prominently warning of Al Qaeda’s intention to attack US interests [Note 9] ... and did nothing. In this “What We Know [II]” I begin by pointing out that the Republican Party has failed to acknowledge the calamity of its policies under ‘Dick’ Cheney and GW Bush, the effects of which remain as threats to reasoned and accountable governance. The Republican Party machinery—policies and persons—were discredited by their own actions, but Republicans, largely the same figures who offered pablum and lies during the Cheney-Bush era, would now have us believe that they should be serious contenders for national office and the governance of America.
PART 3:
❄ BETWEEN 2004 AND 2011
The Unrenounced Legacies of ‘Dick’ Cheney and GW Bush
So what has become of the understandings of our circumstances in 2004, understandings that dominated our judgment of the Republican Party? In this section I will thicken our sense of what we know today.
❶ The 9.11 attacks.
Since the morning of September 11th, 2001, neither the Cheney-Bush administration nor the Republican Party have acknowledged any responsibility for the failure to prevent the 9.11 attacks. But it was a failure ‘on their watch’. And there are at least three good reasons to believe that they could, and should, have been more alert, alert to the possibility of an outrage emanating from Al Qaeda, and alert to the specific possibility of the seizure of aircraft.
First: In December 2000, during the transition from the Clinton to the Cheney-Bush presidency, Condoleezza Rice was vividly introduced to the threat of terrorism, and by reports took in the seriousness of the threat.[Note 8] Second: We have the 6 August 2001 President’s Daily Brief, with its headline “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”[Note 9]
Why should the White House have known of the possibility that aircraft would be seized? Any person charged with responsibility for counter-terrorism or preventing an attack on US interests would be keenly and intimately familiar with the details of the Manila air plot (‘Bojinka’ plot).[Note 10]
❷ Iraq War.
I’ve posted a chronological survey, with key cite and text references, as the page ‘The United States and the Iraq War 2003’ reachable via http://www.gcdd.net/.[Note 11] Here I’ll just remind ourselves of key Republican Party gifts to the American people.
[1] The Iraq War, an illegal war, was a ‘war of choice’. Iraq posed no threat to the United States. It was a ‘war of aggression’. Within the domain of the ‘legalist paradigm’, as Michael Walzer has explained it,[Note 12] the Iraq war was neither a response to attack nor otherwise justified. Asked by the BBC whether the Iraq War was “illegal”, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said “I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view, and from the Charter point of view it was illegal.”[Note 13]
[2] The Cheney-Bush administration won approval for the war on three grounds: [a] that Iraqi WMD posed a threat to the United States, [b] that Iraq was somehow complicit in the 9.11 attacks, and [c] that the Saddam Hussein government, because it was evil, should be removed (‘regime change’). There was uncertainty and speculation but no evidence of WMD, and no evidence of 9.11 complicity. All the king’s horses could not put this together into UN Security Council assent to war.
[3] Israeli leaders publicly urged the United States to war against Iraq.[Note 14]
[4] The White House obtained Congressional authorization to war against Iraq more than five months before beginning the war. That means that there was five months in which to demand evidence anchoring White House claims, but evidence—as distinguished from unprovable claims—was neither required nor supplied.[Note 15]
[5] Cheney-Bush refused to permit UNSCOM and the IAEA to complete their inspections, which would have shown that the claim of a WMD threat was unfounded.
[6] The war was extraordinarily costly, in lives, in US monies, and to Iraqi society.
❸ Guantanamo.
Holding prisoners in Guantanamo not as prisoners of war, without charges, subject to harassment and interrogation that many judge to have been torture, and for some indefinite duration, contradicted America’s commitment to the rule of law.
Guantanamo was chosen, as it is outside the United States, so that prisoners could not avail themselves of US courts and due process.
Has Guantanamo been ‘unrenounced’ by the Republican leadership? Although they cornered Democrats in Congress by forcing a vote on the issue before the 2008 election, so that opposition to closure has a bipartisan veneer, blocking closure and so denying Obama a political victory is written on Republican cue cards. In the colorful argot of the day the Republican Party ‘owns’ Guantanamo and all it stands for.[Note 16]
❹ Torture, unacknowledged ‘black prisons’ abroad, ‘extraordinary rendition’, extrajudicial assassination.
And the most horrific enormity symbolized by Guantanamo is torture.
Under the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ Cheney-Bush authorized what is widely understood as torture (although that characterization is rejected by Republican Party apologists), some means used at Guantanamo, some elsewhere. Techniques included waterboarding, subjecting prisoners to painful positions, cold, sleep deprivation, threatening with dogs, and strange sexual insults. That US personnel were practicing these measures on prisoners was revealed in spring 2004, as photographs taken by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were made public.[Note 17]
More facts have come out over time, but the classic articles on black prisons and ‘extraordinary rendition’ are those of the journalists who first exposed the practices, especially Dana Priest in the Washington Post.[Note 18] I won’t recapitulate their reports; they make out gruesome practices; and although one might think it an easy and uncomplicated moral choice to regret those practices, those with ties to the Cheney-Bush world have, with few exceptions, failed to make themselves heard.[Note 19] As late as November 2007 Republican presidential candidates Giuliani, Romney and Thompson “embraced some of the more controversial policies on the treatment of those suspected of supporting terrorism, backing harsh interrogation methods and refusing to rule out the use of waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, on detainees.”[Note 20]
❺ The ‘War on Terrorism’, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan.
Cheney-Bush seem to have been bent on the ‘War on Terrorism’, which established Bush as a war president and was used to justify any number of extraordinary measures. It did not matter to the Republican Party that it isn’t possible to conduct a war against a tactic, or a disposition to use force.
Few objected to finding the perpetrators of 9.11 and preventing them from undertaking any further outrage. Oddly, Cheney-Bush chose to shift resources from Afghanistan to Iraq. Iraq was unrelated to the 9.11 attacks. Cheney-Bush had had their eyes on the prospect of war in Iraq from the time they took office in January 2001.
Both wars have seared the 2000s, with malign effects on the US economy, military, and standing.
❻ The Great Recession:
Failure to exercise regulatory authority, leading to near-collapse of the housing market and banking, economic distress, and large-scale unemployment.
A number of economists and financial journalists have already published accounts to explain the onset of the Great Recession. After cutting through the underbrush I find four practices which might not have endangered the system if undertaken on a small scale, but which were instead pursued relentlessly and on a widening scale. Mortgages were written, for sums and on terms that promised growing default. Mortgages were ‘bundled’ into ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs) (and chancy loans were in many cases described as of high quality. New types of bonds were devised, called ‘synthetic CDOs’, of exotic underlying collateral, about which there was limited understanding. Then the buyers of CDOs protected themselves by buying insurance (‘credit default swaps’)—many of which were sold by financial institutions that never expected to be called to make up losses. In short, overextension, ignorance, hidden weakness, speculation, trip-levers and inability to meet obligations when called combined to threaten the entire imaginary structure.
Both Democrats and Republicans must share blame for dismantling the Glass-Steagall barriers to economic breakdown, barriers instituted in response to the Depression of the 1930s [Note 21] and abandoned for ‘deregulation’ in the 1990s. But there remained a regulatory regime, including the Securities and Exchange Commission. Were its powers employed effectively during the Cheney-Bush administration? Evidently not. The gravity of the Great Recession became clear when Lehman Brothers collapsed on 15 September 2008, but its signs had been growing through GW Bush’s last two years. The Great Recession has proven the most consequential of the Cheney-Bush legacies to Barack Obama. By the time the Cheney-Bush White House died, on 20 January 2009, its accounts were deeply in arrears, its house in disorder, and desperate economic futures in store for tens of millions of Americans.
❼ Surveillance and abuse of Fourth Amendment protections against ‘unreasonable search and seizure’.
During the Cheney-Bush residence there was unprecedented expansion of White House power to intercept communications, revealing people’s actions and expressed thoughts. Exactly how far these capabilities were extended, and to what extent they have been carried on or even grown during the Obama Administration, we do not know: there has been no public admission just what is done.
First, recall ‘national security letters’. One among the many provisions of the ‘Patriot Act’ of 2001, passed in Congress in response to 9.11 but bundling law enforcement wish-lists of the previous decade, established ‘national security letters’ enabling the FBI to compel access to ‘papers’ without judicial review, and incorporating (in its initial form) the power to forbid persons to whom the ‘letter’ was directed not to reveal, not to their lawyer, or even to the owner of those papers, that they had been obtained. Subsequent revisions, responding to criticism, have modified the original texts but both ‘national security letters’ and a nondisclosure provision (which critics call a ‘gag order’) remain.
Second, prompted by the language of the Fourth Amendment, is about the test of ‘reasonableness’ in listening to, or reading, the communications of specific targeted individuals. Arguments in this strand often take the form of claiming that a target’s membership in some designated group—non-citizen, being abroad, ‘suspected of terrorism’—exempts the US government from Fourth Amendment obligations, or permits them to be met by some ‘reasonable’ method.
The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Third—the least well understood—is to what extent domestic telephone and Net traffic is subject to routing through US intelligence agencies and, to the extent it is, just what is collected, how it is associated with individuals, to what extent it is shared, and whether and subject to what controls it may be retained. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s 2005 article title implies what was not known, though some suspected: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”[Note 22] Risen later summed it up: “For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the N.S.A. is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale. The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the N.S.A. back into the business of domestic espionage.”[Note 23]
The horrors of 9.11 made it difficult for any advocates of the Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure to successfully resist extensions of authority, which were championed by the White House and the Republican Party.
❽ Refusal to address—or even acknowledge—the threat of climate change. And, more generally, dismissal of evidence and disrespect for scientific method and judgment.
We now know that the Cheney-Bush administration suppressed science-based judgments that were out of tune with its ideological dispositions. How do we know that? See Seth Shulman’s Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration, which draws these threads together with great respect for evidence.[Note 24]
❾ Attempt to shrink Social Security.
The Great Recession had two profound effects for savings—and therefore for the income on which retirees planned to depend. Monies in cash deposits, to earn perhaps 4% or 5% interest, saw interest rates fall toward zero. Monies invested in the stock market vanished: values fell, and in some cases fell precipitately.[Note 25] Retirees’ Social Security and ‘defined benefit’ pensions were largely intact; but retirees dependent on their investments, or on ‘defined contribution’ pensions, were hurt, and if they had made unwise or unlucky investments were savaged. [A ‘defined contribution pension’ is actually just a set-aside, though resultant income may benefit from favorable tax provisions, and the monies could be conservatively invested.] For retirees the consequences were dashed expectations and, for some, financial tragedy.
It’s in this context that Republican efforts to shift retirees’ money from Social Security into privately-held investments must be remembered. Do not forget these claims:
27 February 2001:
[Social Security] must offer personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them.
Social Security now offers workers a return of less than 2 percent on the money they pay into the system. To save the system, we must increase that by allowing younger workers to make safe, sound investments at a higher rate of return.”[Note 26]
28 February 2001:
Personal retirement accounts, which would be voluntary, would enable individuals to build financial wealth and security in a way that the current Social Security system does not. Personal accounts invested in safe private financial markets will earn higher rates of return than the traditional system and help workers enhance their personal savings and their freedom to retire. Ownership of a real financial asset without the political risk of future changes would mean more security for working Americans to build their own retirement assets, and to pass those assets on to their children.
A balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds can, in the long run, yield almost a 5.5 percent real rate of return. Even a portfolio of inflation-adjusted Government bonds yields a 3.0 percent real rate of return. Both are significantly better investments than those implicit in the current Social Security system, which, for many younger workers, could ultimately result in a negative rate of return.
This higher rate of return, through individually controlled investments in private debt and equity markets, is the key to the success of personal accounts.[Note 27]
2 May 2001:
Third, Social Security reform must offer personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them. Today, young workers who pay into Social Security might as well be saving their money in their mattresses. That's how low the return is on their contributions. And the return will only decline further -- maybe even below zero -- if we do not proceed with reform.
Personal savings accounts will transform Social Security from a government IOU into personal property and real assets; property that workers will own in their own names and that they can pass along to their children.[Note 28]
GW Bush pushed for privatization even after his reelection in 2004:
11 December 2004:
A crisis in Social Security can be averted ... we must tap into the power of compound interest, by giving younger workers the option to save some of their payroll taxes in a personal account, a nest egg they can call their own, which government cannot take away.[Note 29]
In 2008 candidate John McCain continued to flog the notion of ‘personal savings accounts’ as part of Social Security reform.[Note 30]
A site noted for non-partisan fact-checking rejected as untrue characterizing the call for ‘personal savings accounts’ as a proposal for privatization, suggesting that the fact-checker would not recognize a camel’s nose if he saw one.[Note 31]
❿ Sarah Palin.
Had Sarah Palin been elected in 2008 and had McCain then become unable to serve, the Oval Office—the entire Executive Branch—would have been in the hands of an anonymous Republican Regency.
If Reader considers Sarah Palin to be qualified to be President of the United States, I probably cannot help you.
There are more than 233,000,000 adults in the United States.[Note 32] From among how many better-qualified than Sarah Palin could the Republican Party have chosen instead?
And what does choosing Sarah Palin tell us about John McCain’s judgment? And the judgment of the Republican Party cadres? Why do they take Michelle Bachman or Tim Pawlenty seriously? How do they conceive the Presidency and the nature of problems and opportunities that a President must confront?
I’ve previously posted, in my design blog, on ways in which the Republican Party threatens civil governance in the United States.[Note 33]
PART 4:
❄ PLAIN TALK [I-VIII]
[You are now at my rant blog: http://blog.learnworld.com/ The PLAIN TALK posts are in my Political Design blog: http://design.learnworld.com If you open it in another tab of your browser, you will have the complete text of “What We Know [II]” at your fingertips.]
For complete access to the Political Design blog, click on this: http://design.learnworld.com
To go to PLAIN TALK sections, select from the following list. Use your back button to return to the list:
all PLAIN TALK from most recent [VIII] to [I]
PLAIN TALK [I]. OBSTRUCT THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [II]. SUPPRESS THE VOTE
PLAIN TALK [III]. STARVE THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [IV]. PRIVATIZE THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [V]. BUY THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [VI]. SURVEILL THE PEOPLE?
IPLAIN TALK [VII]. IMPOVERISH THE PEOPLE?
PLAIN TALK [VIII]. THE GREAT EXTORTION
PART 5:
❄ CONCLUDING COMMENTHow Do I View the Republican Party?Tea Party, War Party, Grand Old Party
The War Party centers on those who were Party operatives before and during the Cheney-Bush era, or were shaped by that experience. Rove. Cheney himself, or his umbra. Those who succeeded in the 5-4 capture of the Supreme Court: the Federalist Society. Today this is where we could locate Beohner and McConnell.
So they are a War Party in two senses. They were advocates or go-alongs with the Iraq War and Afghanistan War of the Cheney-Bush period. They would cultivate identification with ‘national security’. But they are also at war with the Democratic Party, its base, and all those who benefit from its policies. They are at war with Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. Some advocates for women’s issues charge them with a War on Women, and advocates for the poor with a War on the Poor. They are exclusionists: with cosmetic exceptions, their policies exclude women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, those born abroad, and every person in America who is growing a year older with each passing year.
The New York Times editorial quoted in Part 1 puts its eyes on the Republican Study Committee. The Times observed that
In the House, there are only 60 members of the Tea Party caucus, and they were hardly a monolithic bloc. Last Monday, 32 of them supported the final debt deal and 28 voted against. To understand the Republican Party in the House, it is better to consider the Republican Study Committee, 176 fiscal hard-liners who make up two-thirds of the entire caucus (including many of the Tea Party members).[Note 34]
Those who are not Tea Party members are the group I have in mind when I think of the War Party.[Note 35] But when one looks at the declared purposes of the RSC,[Note 36] it is hard to see where the line lies separating the Tea Party from the other hundred-plus RSC members—if they actually test the bills before them by the criteria the RSC presents. What I see when I read their charter documents is a view of the world devoid of any sense of community, intrusive on the freedom of the individual to work together with friends and neighbors to enhance their own prospects and the life of their their towns and cities, repelled by ‘government’ which they mischaracterize and do not understand, and dedicated to the isolation of individuals and their families in ways which leave them unprotected from economic and institutional predators. Their vague commitment to a “strong national defense” does not tell us much about how they would make hard, realistic choices. They seem to wish a calculated anarchy, one in which the military and the corporations—and perhaps the churches—are the main social forces, and government their servant.
Perhaps they believe that they and their sources of ‘Party capital’ can better capture revenue streams if the citizenry is forced to make payments to private-sector corporations—for insurance, health care, education, transportation, financial transactions, pensions—than to support public goods and public resources. How else can one explain their systematic hostility to Social Security, a system that works and is not hostage to the vagaries of manipulation by financial houses? How else can one explain their rejection of efforts to provide 30,000,000 Americans with affordable health care? Calculated anarchy is not the Republic of free men and women, building community through mutual respect, that I have thought the American adventure was undertaken to pursue.
The Republican Study Committee is a group of 175 House Republicans organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives. The Republican Study Committee is dedicated to:
• a limited and Constitutional role for the federal government,
• a strong national defense,
• the protection of individual and property rights,
• and the preservation of traditional family values.
The RSC reviews each piece of legislation under consideration on the House floor using six guiding principles, printed on our "Conservative Check Card" and listed below:
1. Less Government - Does the bill tend to reduce government regulations, size of government, or eliminate entitlements or unnecessary programs?
2. nbsp;Lower Taxes - Does the bill promote individual responsibility in spending, or reduce taxes or fees?
3. Personal Responsibility - Does the bill encourage responsible behavior by individuals and families and encourage them to provide for their own health, safety, education, moral fortitude, or general welfare?
4. Individual Freedom - Does the bill increase opportunities for individuals or families to decide, without hindrance or coercion from government, how to conduct their own lives and make personal choices?
5. Stronger Families - Does the bill enhance the traditional American family and its power to rear children without excessive interference from the government?
6. Domestic Tranquility, National Defense - Does the bill enhance American security without unduly burdening civil liberty?
The group has played a major role in key policy areas including budget, appropriations, taxes, education, Social Security reform, defense, deregulation, and general government reform. The Republican Study Committee is an independent research arm for House Republicans.[Note 37]
Perhaps the War Party consists of most of the Republicans in the House who are not member of the RSC, and a few who are. The remainder—what is left of the Grand Old Party—could be just a few dozen. Of the Senate, eight Republican senators are seeking reelection in 2012, none a Tea Party adherent; two are retiring. The others—37 by today’s count—will be closely watching whether the Tea Party’s ideology makes for winners or losers. Only three Republican senators attended the first Senate Tea Party caucus: DeMint (South Carolina), Lee (Utah), and libertarian Rand Paul (Kentucky).[Note 38]
The Tea Party draw, its appeal to people’s insecurities and inexperience, their uncertainties about their futures, rests on fear. “The bogeyman’ll get ya, if ya don’t watch out.” The seemingly bland planks of the Tea Party program—personal responsibility, individual freedom, stronger families, domestic tranquility, security—imply that government, ‘big government’, is the enemy. And it is true that unaccountable government can launch monsters, as the Iraq War and claims for the ‘unitary executive’ testify. But the government actions against which the Tea Party inveighs do not threaten to cause the harms they imply. Public schools do not make for weak families, domestic disorder, irresponsibility, or unambitious youths, nor does the Clean Air Act or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What the everyday Tea Party supporter may be grappling with is that it is, in fact, ‘hard to build’: that the real ‘enemy’ they are confronting in their lives is the fact that building families, households, neighborhoods, communities, and complex public and private ventures is hard work, requiring initiative and judgment, and tolerating risk, ambiguity, and failure.
And as James Fallows’ observations, quoted below, make clear as glass: you cannot, in the same breath, argue against both public debt and public revenue, unless you are an anarchist, deliberately mischievous or seriously confused. Anyone inclined to the Tea Party has an obligation to the rest of us to understand that those two aims are incompatible, irreconcilable, contradictory. The rest of the world understands this. What they cannot understand is how so many Americans have been mesmerized by Tea Party populism.
Exclusion v. Inclusion
Exclusion A dark theme runs through the Republican Party project. I don’t want to leave this note without mentioning it, though it deserves more than these few lines.
One of the most revealing questions to ask about any human project is “does this make for inclusion, or exclusion?” Inclusion in US politics and society would mean: reducing unemployment, welcoming visitors, building an accessible and affordable health care system, granting status and security to immigrants, ensuring access to education, gender equality, respecting people without regard to ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, age, or culture, and—in the longer term—trending to less inequality of income and wealth. The Gates Foundation motto—that “every person deserves the chance to lead a healthy, productive life”[Note 39]—is a well-composed ethical stance.
So we must ask again: what does opposition to Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act mean? What does branding immigrants without status as ‘illegal immigrants’ mean? What do harsh and costly US visa requirements telegraph? What does it mean that the Tea Party and Republican Party fail to clearly reject racist and anti-foreign talk, including thinly-veiled renunciation of Barack Obama (birthplace, madrasa)?
And On a Positive Note
This note has drawn a blunt sketch of the ‘quiet coup d’etat’ being undertaken by the Republican Party. It’s a dismal picture, one which, as I noted at the outset, will be deemed outrageous by Republican agents and those with a romantic attachment to the Republican Party of once-upon-a-time. But how would I respond to the objection that this is ‘just politics’? That political parties always struggle with one another? That I have no alternative to offer?
I would respond that there is an alternative, one practiced day after day in legislative bodies around the world, in towns and villages, inside businesses large and small, and in every successful household in America. It is the alternative that, without romanticising, can be discerned in US politics of previous times. Think of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter. Certainly the Republican Eisenhower and the Democrat Kennedy were not gentle men. Their tactics were often tough and they fought party fights. But we can learn from them and from the Congressional legislators of their times.
How would I do it differently? Here are a few rules of thumb, maxims or guidelines for a fluid and capable political system:
¶ It is hard to build, and easy to destroy.
¶ The central term of politics is negotiation.
¶ The object of political negotiations is to find complementary projects that enable you, and your counterpart, to accomplish aims that each of you could not accomplish alone (as efficiently, as inexpensively, as quickly, as well, or at all).
¶ Quality matters. It is hard to build, and even harder to build well.
¶ Complexity demands collaboration. Big jobs, and modern skills, require working with others.
¶ Purpose matters. Finding others ready to take up a conversation about collaborating will be much easier when your purpose makes sense to them.
¶ If you use a position of advantage to force or induce your counterpart to incorporate, into his project, performances that he would not freely undertake if he were free and able to do so as part of a ‘fair deal’, you are engaged in coercive bargaining, not political negotiation.
¶ You can walk away from a proposal. But if the circumstances require that you and your counterpart come to some agreement—neither of you can simply walk away—then if you cannot come to joint language yourselves you must find an arbitrator and commit to the arbitrator’s judgment.
Afterword
This is not a ‘paper’ in an academic sense. Instead, this documents how and why I consider the Republican Party’s apparent aims and strategies to be a threat to the Republic. It is not my aim to persuade Reader that this is so, but to explain what I have seen as I come to this conclusion, and to suggest that Reader compose his or her own characterization of Republican Party dispositions and strategies. For example, Reader might say that what disturbs Larkin is nothing more than the usual ambition for power, what we should expect from politicians, ‘just politics’.
Why am I interested in this? Certainly I have a liberal interest in participation, purpose, and accountability. I prefer the ‘civic script’, as against the ‘war script’.[Note 40] Since beginning college in 1950 I’ve been a student of the war question, and in the last 30 years have been increasingly focused on the project that nuclear weapons can and should be abolished.[Note 41] There are many within the Republican Party who understand that issue much as I do—they are typically flag-bearers of the Grand Old Party—but the Republican Party as an institution has been captured by others, who by and large do not share my concern that the risks of nuclear weapons in the armories of nations are far too great to be accepted as ‘necessary’. I see their penchant for slogans and ignorance to be dangerous impediments to the denuclearization project and, therefore, a threat to the most fundamental of ‘national interests’.
As I was writing this I was sharply reminded how much some Republicans prize, and seek to protect, retention of nuclear weapons. In the immediate aftermath of the ‘debt ceiling’ crisis at the beginning of August 2011, Michael Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, speaking about the supercommittee that was tasked to find further cuts, said
I am deeply concerned about the debt panel’s ability to make unrestricted cuts. These members will be under intense pressure to find savings in areas other than entitlements. During that process, they may make cuts to essential national security programs … Any additional cuts to [the National Nuclear Security Administration] would jeopardize our nuclear deterrent, and our defense posture.[Note 42]Addendum: White House Infographic “US National Debt”
The White House issued a chart presenting its view how the national debt had grown since 2001,[Note 43] prompting James Fallows to comment: [Note 44]
Yesterday I mentioned the New York Times chart on sources of the budget deficit, which dramatized the contradiction many House Republicans prefer not to face. As the figures demonstrated, the Bush-era tax cuts, extended last year under Obama, were the biggest single policy source of deficit increase over the past ten years. Therefore you can be for reducing deficits, or you can be for preserving the tax cuts, but you cannot rationally be for both. Even though, as I pointed out, insisting on both is the current House Republican view.
Here is another chart to the same effect, released this afternoon by the White House. It is a more comprehensive accounting of the forces that turned the large projected federal surplus as of 2001 into the large structural deficits that are dominating our politics as of 2011. Thus it attempts to explain a $12.7 trillion negative swing in public finance -- from the $2.3 trillion surplus forecast by Bill Clinton ten years ago, to the $10.4 trillion total debt Barack Obama encounters now.
The chart is more comprehensive in including not just policy changes -- deliberate adoption and extension of tax cuts, spending on TARP and other programs -- but also the effects of external pressures and shocks, mainly the recession starting in 2008. See for yourself, and click for a more detailed view.
]
----
NOTES to PART 1:
1 David Maraniss, First Lady Launches Counter-Attack,” The Washington Post, 28 January 1998.
2 This quote is widely attributed to Norquist and not, to my knowledge, denied. For example, Robert Dreyfuss, Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshall’ of the Bush Plan,” The Nation, 14 May 2001.
3 Deval Patrick, “How Grover Norquist hypnotized the GOP,” The Washington Post, 30 June 2011. On Norquist’s pledge, see Americans for Tax Reform, “What is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge?”.
4 Paul Krugman, “The President Surrenders” The New York Times, 1 August 2011 [online 31 July 2011].
5 Editorial, “To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011 (online 31 July 2011).
6 Editorial, The New York Times, 7 August 2011 (online 6 August 2011).
NOTES to PART 2:
7 http://blog.learnworld.com/2004_09_01_archive.html
8 Barton Gellman, “A Strategy’s Cautious Evolution—Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition,” The Washington Post, 20 January 2002.
9 Declassified and approved for release, 10 April 2004. See full text, below. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf
NOTES to PART 3:
9 Declassified and approved for release, 10 April 2004. See full text, below. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf
10 United States. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report.
“In 1994, KSM accompanied Yousef to the Philippines, and the two of them began planning what is now known as the Manila air or ‘Bojinka’ plot—the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jumbo jets over the Pacific during a two-day span. This marked the first time KSM took part in the actual planning of a terrorist operation.While sharing an apartment in Manila during the summer of 1994, he and Yousef acquired chemicals and other materials necessary to construct bombs and timers.They also cased target flights to Hong Kong and Seoul that would have onward legs to the United States. During this same period, KSM and Yousef also developed plans to assassinate President Clinton during his November 1994 trip to Manila, and to bomb U.S.-bound cargo carriers by smuggling jackets containing nitrocellulose on board. [Footnote 7 of original details sources. Pp. 488-489.]
“KSM left the Philippines in September 1994 and met up with Yousef in Karachi following their casing flights. There they enlisted Wali Khan Amin Shah, also known as Usama Asmurai, in the Manila air plot. During the fall of 1994,Yousef returned to Manila and successfully tested the digital watch timer he had invented, bombing a movie theater and a Philippine Airlines flight en route to Tokyo.The plot unraveled after the Philippine authorities discovered Yousef ’s bomb-making operation in Manila;”
Report, p. 147. http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf
11 http://www.gcdd.net/COURSES/DD.Doc&Study.02.US-IraqWar.pdf The survey contains key phrases and arguments and hot links to full texts.
12 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
13 16 September 2004. UN News Centre. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11953&Cr=iraq&Cr1
14 Evidence on this point: “The Iraq War of 2003 and the Politics of Denulearization,” version of 21 October 2002, pp. 14-15. http://www.gcdd.net/TX=2003/TX.028=2003.11.11.IraqWar.pdf
15 The most elaborate display of claims to justify war was made by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a ballyhooed appearance before the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. After evidence came forward casting doubt on many elements of that speech, Powell was interviewed by Barbara Walters. ABC reported that “He told Walters that he feels ‘terrible’ about the claims he made in that now-infamous address—assertions that later proved to be false. When asked if he feels it has tarnished his reputation, he said, ‘Of course it will. It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.’ ” ”Colin Powell on Iraq, Race, and Hurricane Relief,” 20/20 (ABC News). 8 September 2005. http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Politics/story?id=1105979&page=1
16 For a detailed account, see David D. Kirkpatrick and David M. Herszenhorn, “Guantánamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue, The New York Times, 23 May 2009. Excerpts:
“Senate Democrats, who last week broke with their president to join a 90-to-6 vote against funds to close Guantánamo, faulted the White House for failing to provide political cover by reassuring the public that he had a clear plan for the prisoners. The Democrats left open the possibility of authorizing the money later this year, once Mr. Obama provides a detailed plan. …
“In July 2007, Mr. McConnell forced a vote in which even the fiercest Senate critics sided with Republicans in a 94-to-3 vote to declare that detainees should not be “transferred stateside into facilities in American communities and neighborhoods.” …
“Congressional Republican leaders, many of whom opposed closing Guantánamo all along, began strategizing about how to defeat Mr. Obama on the issue almost as soon as the campaign came to a close.”
17 A big part of the credit for bringing Abu Ghraib to public attention goes to Seymour Hersh. Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,“ The New Yorker, 10 May 2004. Hersh had twenty years earlier revealed the My Lai massacre, a shameful action by US personnel in Vietnam.
18 Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” The Washington Post, 2 November 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html Priest won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on secret prisons and related issues. See also Alan Brinkley, “Black Sites,” The New York Times, 3 August 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Brinkley-t.html , reviewing Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), and Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program, The New Yorker, Feb. 14 & 21, 2005. On ‘extraordinary rendition’, see Dan Bilefsky et al, “European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret,” The New York Times, 27 April 2006; and Raymond Bonner, “The CIA’s Secret Torture,” New York Review of Books, 11 January 2007.
19 On exceptions that testify to the rule, see Alan Brinkley, above, who writes: “Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration—conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies.”
20 Marc Santora, “3 Top Republican Candidates Take a Hard Line on the Interrogation of Detainees,” The New York Times, 3 November 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/us/politics/03torture.html “The only leading Republican candidate to condemn each of the practices outright has been Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war who was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.”
21 The Glass-Steagal Act (properly, the Banking Act of 1933) instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other legal measures against bank speculation and instability.
22 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, The New York Times, 16 December 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/washington/16program.html Risen and Lichtblau were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on this subject.
23 James Bamford, quoting James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006).
24 Seth Shulman, Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
25 “It has been 513 calendar days since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007. Since then, the S.&P. 500 is down 56 percent and the Dow is off 53 percent.” Floyd Norris, Plunging Markets, Then and Now,” The New York Times, 5 March 2009. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/plunging-markets-then-and-now/
26 GW Bush, address before a joint session of the Congress, 27 February 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
27 President’s Budget Plan: “A Blueprint for New Beginnings.” February 28, 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
28 GW Bush, Remarks by the President in Social Security Announcement, 2 May 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
29 GW Bush, President’s Radio Address, 11 December 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
30 Perry Bacon, Jr., “Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security”, The Washington Post, 8 July 2008: “McCain’s aides said he favors a bipartisan approach and is open to working with Congress on finding a solution to the long-term solvency of the New Deal-era program, indicating he could support an array of ideas such as raising the retirement age, reducing scheduled increases in benefits and allowing younger workers to put money they currently pay for Social Security taxes into personal savings accounts. President Bush floated a similar idea for private accounts in 2005, but polls found it had little public support.”
31FactCheck.org. Scaring Seniors”. 19 & 20 September 2008. “The ad also says McCain voted ‘in favor of privatizing Social Security.’ The term ‘privatizing’ could give the wrong impression. McCain does support creating government-managed accounts that would allow individuals to invest some portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in widely diversified stock or bond funds.” http://factcheck.org/2008/09/scaring-seniors/
32 US. Bureau of the Census. 2010 Census. Population 308,745,538 of which 24.3% were under 18. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
33 My blog on Political Design is at http://design.learnworld.com. Each of the posts PLAIN TALK [I] thru [VIII] linked here begins with this notice: ❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄
NOTES to PART 5:
34 see [Note 6]
35 The RSC members are listed at http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/AboutRSC/Members/
36 Republican Study Committee. http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/AboutRSC/WhatIsRSC.htm
37 Ibid
38 David M. Herszenhorn, “THE TEA PARTY. Table Is Set for Three Senators,”The New York Times, 28 January 2011.
39 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Documents/brochure-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation.pdf
40 Bruce D. Larkin, War Stories (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
41 Designing Denuclearization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
42 Nuclear Threat Initiative. Global Security Newswire. Martin Matishak, “Lawmakers Warn Against Cutting Nuclear Arms Modernization Fund,” 5 August 2011. A spokesman for Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) replied to a question from GSN that “Senator Kyl believes that modernization of our nuclear detrrenct should be fully funded.” http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20110805_9870.php
43 White House infographic: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infographics/us-national-debt
44 James Fallows, “Another Chart That Should Accompany All Debt-Ceiling Discussions,” The Atlantic [online], 27 July 2011.
❄ PLAIN TALK [VIII]: THE GREAT EXTORTION
SUNDAY, AUGUST 07, 2011
❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄
There have been three major Republican initiatives since January 2010 to hold Congressional action hostage to Republican extremism. Each concerns steps Congress had to take to fund the government. The first arose from the need to complete budget enactment for Fiscal Year 2011 (1 October 2010 to 30 September 2011). The second sprang from an end-2010 deadline in tax law under which tax cuts would expire. Before Congress had adjourned for the 2010 elections stop-gap approval of spending had been approved, with an expiry date requiring action in January 2011. The third turned on the need to raise the ‘debt ceiling’, the total amount of debt that the US Government is permitted to have outstanding, to fund the deficit and roll over prior debt. As all Readers are well aware, the debt ceiling fiasco culminated in Congressional and Presidential approval of a ‘compromise’ on 2 August 2011.
(1) The FY2011 ‘Continuing Resolution’ Standoff
The FY2011 budget was to have been enacted by 30 September 2010. Between September 2010 and April 2011 the Congress passed, and the President signed, seven successive ‘continuing resolutions’. Each granted spending at roughly the rate of the FY2010 budget and contained an expiry date. The Republican House leadership called for cuts in the budget, as the price Democrats would have to pay to avoid ‘shutting down the government’ by failing to enact a further grant of time by the deadline. The Perils of Pauline. The standoff did not end until 15 April 2011, when President Obama signed legislation providing funds through the end of September. There had been sharp conflicts right up to the end:
After nightlong negotiations that ended before dawn on Friday yielded no agreement, Senator Reid went on the offensive. He told reporters and said on the Senate floor that Mr. Boehner, the Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama had essentially settled on $38 billion in cuts from current spending, a figure that represented a substantial concession for Democrats.
But he said that Republicans were refusing to abandon a policy provision that would withhold federal financing for family planning and other health services for poor women from Planned Parenthood and other providers.
“This is indefensible, and everyone should be outraged,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “The Republican House leadership have only a couple of hours to look in the mirror, snap out of it and realize how truly shameful they have been.”
In a terse statement of his own to reporters, Mr. Boehner said there was “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet, and that is spending.” He asked, “When will the White House and when will Senate Democrats get serious about cutting spending?” [Note 1]
(2) Tax Relief Expiry: ‘Bush tax cuts for the wealthy’ and ‘middle-class tax cuts’
In a nutshell, Obama wanted extension of unemployment benefits and the ‘middle-class tax cuts’; Republicans were not anxious to extend unemployment benefits, but wanted both tax cuts extended and a more generous position on estate tax. Obama was speaking to a broad constituency in financial distress. The Republicans portrayed failure to extend as a ‘new tax’, as in ‘No New Taxes!” The differences were deep, as CBS News captured in this despatch by Brian Montopoli:
The tax cut package angered liberals in the president’s party due to the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the roughly two percent of highest-earning Americans, which comes at a cost of $120 billion over two years. They were also incensed at the level at which the estate tax was set in the measure, which exempts estates under $10 million for couples and taxes subsequent income at 35 percent.
But the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate and also got through the House, where angry Democrats eventually accepted what came to be seen as inevitable. Still, many complained that the bill was an expensive giveaway to the richest Americans at a time when America could not afford it. Some fiscally conservative Republicans also expressed concerns about the cost of bill, though most GOP lawmakers supported it.
Had Congress not acted to address the expiring Bush-era tax cuts, all Americans would have seen a tax increase on January 1st. (The average tax increase per family, the White House said, would have been $3,000.) Mr. Obama, who had long opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for America’s highest-earners, has argued he had no choice but to agree to GOP demands to do so in order to avoid a tax increase on the middle class.
In his remarks Friday, however, he cast the agreement as evidence that both parties can work together.
“Now, candidly speaking, there are some elements of this legislation that I don't like,” he said. “There are some elements that members of my party don't like. There are some elements that Republicans here today don't like. That's the nature of compromise. Yielding on something each of us cares about to move forward on what all of us care about.” [Note 2]
(3) The ‘Debt Ceiling’: Holding the Economy Hostage
‘Debt ceiling’ holdups are so much a part of Washington’s political mythology that ‘debt ceiling’ provided the stuff of a West Wing episode, long before 2011. [Note 3] But 2011 has been and—as this is written only in August—may remain the most brutal and the most dangerous holdup that has taken place. What makes this different is its severity, Republican implacability, and the use of a threat to wreak economic havoc. Among the Republicans are some who—if their words are to be taken at face value—would bring government to a halt, and to an end.
How much leverage did the Republicans have? Quite a bit, but neither they nor the White House nor the Congressional Democrats wanted to win the prize for defaulting on US debt. All were under pressure to find some agreement. On its face the deal agreed appears to favor Republicans: they won big spending cuts, and agreed to ‘no new taxes’. However, Nate Silver makes a closely reasoned argument that “[t]he fine print is not quite as bad for Democrats as the headline number of $2.5 trillion in spending cuts.”[Note 4] We need to keep in mind that these are speculative cuts over ten years.
So what do we know? We know that threats of US default have an unsettling effect on global markets, and that American political parties playing chicken on the economic highway appears juvenile in foreign capitals. We know there is another way—agreeing to exempt debt ceiling bills from extraneous preconditions and amendments. Barack Obama seemed to understand that, for he called for a ‘clean’ debt ceiling bill—but was refused:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), fresh off the budget talks, told donors this weekend that if Obama wants an up or down vote on the debt ceiling he’s not going to get it.
“The president says I want you to send me a clean bill,” Boehner said. “Well guess what, Mr. President, not a chance you’re going to get a clean bill.”
“There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it,” he continued in a clip of his remarks at a fundraiser that was played during “Face the Nation.”[Note 5]
Boehner’s big stick was that he held enough seats in the House to craft a Republican bill … and the threat to reject any Democratic bill that came from the Senate. But behind him sat, or stood, the Tea Party freshman class. As the final vote in August showed, the Tea Party was substantial but not monolithic. The vote in the House was 269-151. Of 60 Tea Party caucus members, 32 voted ‘yes’ and 28 ‘no’. Altogether, 66 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted ‘no’. Even the deal that Boehner negotiated with Reid was not enough to satisfy all the Tea Partiers, but without their intransigence he would have had a tougher time communicating obstinacy and insistence. Norman Ornstein captured the affair succinctly: “If you hold one-half of one-third of the reins of power in Washington and are willing to use and maintain that kind of discipline even if you will bring the entire temple down around your own head, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to get your way.” [Note 6]
Why is the situation presented by debt ceiling exigencies different from party-to-party trading as substantive bills are negotiated within and between the major parties and between the House and Senate? Because the debt is not—despite Republican efforts to blame it on Democrats—the consequence of one party’s policies or initiatives, but instead the result of Congressional bills enacted into law and signed by presidents of both major parties. It’s a joint responsibility. A polemical but cute graphic was circulated as the immediate crisis reached climax, making the point that all recent presidents have grown the national debt.[Note 7]
Many commentators read the result this way: Republican tactics worked and gave them a victory, giving them budget cuts and wounding President Obama. The most extreme Republicans lamented that they had caved in by accepting only $2.4 trillion in cuts, rather than the $4 trillion they had sought. As we’ve seen, 28 in the House voted ‘no’.
The New York Times published an even more telling graphic [“Policy Changes Under Two Presidents”], showing how much more GW Bush increased the debt, and with what spending, by comparison to Barack Obama’s so far relatively modest use of borrowing.
A most pungent afterview of this episode was offered by New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, whose likening the Republicans to “terrorists” and writing of the “Tea Party Republicans” now able to “put aside their suicide vests,” led him to issue an apology a few days later. What else was it that Nocera had written, and how did he locate his apology? His views are salient as he has proven one of the best-informed students of the Great Recession and its continuing effects. “You know what they say,” Nocera began, “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He continued:
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. …
America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) ...
Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved.[Note 8]
Then, called on to apologize (for pungent language? for colorful but apt figures of speech? for speaking the truth? because anger is forbidden?) Nocera lodged it this way:
Once the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, they began to systemically [sic] undermine the Dodd-Frank reform law, pushing back against new, and mostly sensible, regulations designed to prevent another meltdown. The worst was the way Republicans took a hatchet to Elizabeth Warren as she tried to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Such an agency, had it been in existence prior to 2008, might have prevented millions of Americans, many of them poor and financially unsophisticated, from being gouged by mortgage companies. Watching it all unfold made me angry.
That anger reached its apex on Tuesday, when I wrote a column comparing the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists. The words I chose were intemperate and offensive to many, and I’ve been roundly criticized. I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics. In the cool light of day, I agree with them. I apologize.
I still think it was terribly wrong for the Republicans to use the threat of default to insist on massive spending cuts, though President Obama also deserves blame for playing his hand so poorly. Putting on my pragmatist hat again, I also think Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending. Yes, the country’s enormous debt — and the entitlement programs that are driving the federal deficit — needs to be brought under control. [Note 9]
As Reader must appreciate by now, I think some plain talk is needed to sustain and foster the Republic.
The Next Effort: A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution
The dust had barely settled on the August 2011 debt ceiling when Speaker Boehner called his troops together for the next campaign: to pass a ‘balanced budget’ amendment.[Note 10]
In a meeting with his conference Monday, Speaker John A. Boehner told members that the best thing they could do during the August recess was to sell their constituents on the idea that the amendment — which essentially stipulates that government cannot spend more than it takes in — is necessary and good.
Republican leaders on the Hill have pivoted from railing against Democrats about tax increases to pressing for the amendment, which would require the acquiescence of two-thirds of each chamber of Congress, and three quarters of state legislatures.[Note 11]
The connection to political extortion is this: will the Republicans connect Congress’ passing a ‘balanced budget’ amendment to another must-pass bill, as they linked ‘no new taxes’ to the August 2011 debt ceiling increase? Will they begin pressing for a more draconian measure, but then ‘compromise’ by agreeing to text that contains one or more of the features they have proposed? Will they occupy the Congress and the White House with this issue, a distraction from real tasks?
Of course, there already exist mechanisms by which the Republic can have a ‘balanced budget’ or ‘pay-go’, legislating only as much expenditure as non-partisan referees anticipate from ongoing revenue. Revenue bills must be agreed by the House and Senate, and are subject to Presidential veto.
But ‘balanced budget’ has a homey ring to it. The problem lies in the La Brea tar pit of abused categories, in this case ‘spending’ that does not distinguish smart from dumb. Some ‘government spending’ goes for purposes that have both short-term and longer-term benefits, enhancing people’s lives and building for future economic activity. Other ‘government spending’ goes for naught, for illusions, or is just dumped in the trash. The most difficult budgetary problem for US politics is to distinguish spending for ‘national security’ that begins from a prudent understanding of risks in the world, on the one hand, from illusory or unnecessary increments to military capability that neither enhance lives nor secure the future, on the other. Examples of ‘security’ dollars to the trash are abundant: high-cost procurement, the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and ten thousand ‘minor’ domestic and overseas programs that simply make no sense.[Note 12] Chanting ‘balanced budget’ threatens spending for sound purposes and fails to insist on political judgment.
The Question
How can the Congress, in future, avoid deadline-driven extortion?
Approaches
The simple answer is ‘don’t do it’. At present, the only restraints are voluntary forbearance, and its less altruistic version, being deterred (recognizing that the other guy will retaliate, sometime in future, given the chance). These are both good reasons to forego extortion. A variation may be better: that both major parties agree that any future debt ceiling bill will be kept ‘clean’, free of amendments and poisonous baggage: the House and Senate would vote on the one question whether to raise the ceiling to a stipulated amount.
It would be harder to extend a ‘clean bill’ agreement to other deadline-driven bills, which include all appropriations bills. The Government’s only source of money is Congressional approval. The President may veto a money bill, but cannot create one. The Constitution directly, explicitly requires that “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law;”[Note 13] The threat to ‘shut down the government’, like the threat of ‘default’, is credible only if they are reckless, or prepared to suffer opprobrium. While in politics the present usually trumps the future, career operatives know that they can’t be sure of the future, when the stakes, what they could lose, could be more compelling.
The New York Times proposes editorially [Note 14] that the President should enlist figures ready to educate the public that the ‘debt ceiling’ should be done away with. “If Democrats continuously remind the country how dangerous this path is, Republicans may think twice about repeating it.” Failing that, Obama should invoke the 14th Amendment and declare the ‘debt ceiling’ practice invalid. “President Obama should use every power at his disposal to fend off Republicans’ irresponsible threats and invite them to meet him in court if they want to resist.” Unfortunately, it is in Court that the Republican surge has won unusual victories, from GW Bush’s election to Citizens United, but the courts have been loath to take on issues better left in the political arena. The14th Amendment route should be studied and made ready.[Note 15]
NOTES
1 Carl Hulse, “Budget Deal to Cut $38 Billion Averts Shutdown” The New York Times, 8 April 2011.
2 Brian Montopoli, “Obama Signs Bill To Extend Bush Tax Cuts,” CBS News, 17 December 2010. http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-503544_162-503544.html?tag=hdr
3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5igKuNF1rI
4 Nate Silver, “The Fine Print on the Debt Deal,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011. His column FiveThirtyEight.
5 Politico Live, “GOP Rules Out ‘Clean’ Debt Ceiling Bill,” 10 April 2011.
6 Quoted in Jennifer Steinhauer, “Debt Bill is Signed, Ending a Fractious Battle,“The New York Times, 2 August 2011.
7 Of course, GHW Bush served only one term, and Barack Obama is in the third year of his first term.
8 Joe Nocera, “The Tea Party’s War on America,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011. He explains: “As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.”
9 Joe Nocera, “The Tea Party, Take Two,” The New York Times, 5 August 2011.
10 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Republicans Set Sights on Balanced Budget Amendment,” The New York Times, 4 August 2011. She describes two plans: One would ban spending (not including interest on the national debt) more than revenues in a fiscal year (except by Congressional three-fifths votes in both houses). Under another proposal, tax increases would require a 2/3 vote in each house, and federal spending could exceed 18% of GDP only with the consent of 2/3 in House and Senate. Under both proposals, the debt ceiling could be raised only by vote of 3/5 in House and Senate.
11 Ibid.
12 Who should take responsibility for deciding that the State Police needed to install concrete bollards outside rural state police headquarters? What are the risks that someone would drive a car to or through the front door, laden with explosives? And if there were such a person, is there any reason to believe the building could not be thoroughly destroyed by bringing the explosive-filled panel truck just up to the bollards? Hysteria. And, in all likelihood, Federal money, scattered across the country. And who is paying to equip local police with tasers, and why?
13 Constitution of the United States, Article I, § 9.7.
14 Editorial, “End the Debt Limit,” The New York Times, 4 August 2011. See an op-ed by Michael D. Schear, “Can the Debt Ceiling Genie Be Put Back in the Bottle,” The New York Times, 3 August 2011.
15 See Adam Liptak, “The 14th Amendment, the Debt Ceiling, and a Way Out,” The New York Times, 24 July 2011. Liptak reports Bill Clinton’s “saying he would unilaterally invoke it ‘without hesitation’ to raise the debt ceiling, ‘and force the courts to stop me.’ ”
[Political Design 2011.08.07. Post A33. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]
