I think this Yuval Levin piece is pretty insightful. I don’t agree with him about the unaffordability of the Democrats’ social welfare state and I am fully cognizant that ObamaCare actually improves our balance sheet rather than contributing to our deficit, but other than those two quibbles I see Levin’s landscape as accurate. The Democrats (as opposed to their progressive wing) are pretty much done building the social welfare state. What they want to do is shore it up financially and implement the health care reforms. They know that they need more revenue to accomplish this on a sound basis. And they know that they will never get the needed revenue if they can’t get it now. The Republicans want to deny the Democrats new revenue for precisely these reasons and, as a result, neither side sees compromise as remotely acceptable.
Where I think Mr. Levin is wrong is in thinking that the battle is still ongoing. You can’t keep everything locked in trench warfare when your side only controls one half of Congress and the other side has the presidency. We can’t have four more years of battles over the debt ceiling. We can’t have four more years of total obstruction in the Senate. The Democrats have to be allowed to implement their policies. There is just no way to maintain the status quo. In the end, the Democrats will get their revenues and implement ObamaCare.
I think Mr. Levin has described the current conflict quite accurately and his analysis helps explain why the Republicans seem incapable of accepting reality and cutting their losses. But it doesn’t ultimately matter whether the Republicans get rolled in December or January. They lost the argument when they lost the elections. And they now know that they have no route back to the White House. There is really no possibility that they can win a national election with their current constituencies. If Hillary runs, she wins. She wins two terms. But almost any Democrat will beat almost any Republican as long as the GOP is beholden to a base that is this intolerant of and alienating to the majority of Americans.
They have suffered their own Waterloo, and they don’t even seem to know it.
I hope you’re right. However, I think I’m naturally a more cautious person than you are.
Republicans could well take the Senate in 2014, especially if the health care rollout is a fiasco. Then they will be in a position to make more demands. In the meantime, they may well believe they just have to hold on until the midterm electorate saves them.
And I think Hillary will win the Presidency if she wants it, but I would have said that in Dec 2004 as well. I’m not ready to celebrate the 2016 election yet. 🙂
Isn’t one of the lessons of WW I that you can “keep everything locked in trench warfare” for years beyond what anyone previously imagined?
As long as Republicans are willing to stay in their trenches, the current political “trench warfare” can continue, or so it seems to me.
The problem for Republicans is, as you correctly point out Booman, “they lost the argument when they lost the elections”. And, given current demographic/political trends, they’ll keep losing national elections by widening margins unless and until they do what their grandparents did in the 1950s—recognize the country has changed and they’ve got to change with it if they want to have any power.
Actually the lesson was you needed something new like a tank to defeat outdated tactics and strategy that couldn’t deal with something new and lethal like the machine gun.
So what is the lesson in that for the GOP? I don’t know. Is social media the democratic machine gun and voter suppression the tank? Maybe a badly designed tank. I am pretty sure that the Senate filibuster is the trench though. 🙂
The R’s are screwed and they know it. They will do whatever it takes for them to win the midterms and then 2014. As Booman posted yesterday, they will dilute the influence of blue states and purge Dem voters wherever they can.
I think Rove’s meltdown on Fox election night was that somebody (Anonymous) prevented his results hack from happening. The billionare money was supposed to buy election result hacking but was shut down. It might not happen again next election, especially with Romney family invested in eVoting machines.
They will go down hard, but the own 30 state houses…
Yeah, maybe we here in Hoosierland will see you in about 50 years when Indiana finally catches up to the rest of the 21st century.
I think the important thing for me as a liberal and a member of the Democratic Party to focus on is making sure that we stay focused on what we can do and on keeping the Democrats fairly unified.
I have been frustrated with the part of the progressive coalition that seems to view any changes or reforms to earned benefits as some sort of betrayal. If you believe that government plays a vital role in people’s lives, as I do, than it is essential that you look for ways to improve government performance.
I am excited about some of the Medicare changes that the administration is proposing especially when it comes to instituting best practices, reforming the reimbursement process, etc. These will make the program more cost effective with better outcomes–and hey they are based on data and experience. This is a very good thing!
If you take what is earned, that is theft, pure and simple.
I trust you don’t see it as betrayal when your new employer doesn’t pay you what you agreed to as a salary. Or doesn’t have the health insurance or vacation that he promised you?
The actual situation is more like you worked and paid into an annuity for 50 years, then you don’t get it so that the CEO get get a bigger bonus.
Go post on Redstate.
C’mon, Voice. Don’t get your panties in wad.
This is the standard liberal “the sky will fall if we try to get what we really want” meme. No need to call them names. It’s just the flip side of Yankee knee jerk liberalism.
No big deal. We’ve been dealing with it since the ’50s.
And you just demonstrated perfectly the problem with progressives who, ironically, are just as anti – government as the current Republican party. I am confident that we can have a government that does good work and that is capable of improving.
I didn’t say anything at all about reducing benefits. You read that in all by yourself. Silly me but I look at the difference between the costs and outcomes of the Mayo Clinic and my local hospital as being a reason for changing the Medicare reimbursement schedule so that my local hospital institutes the same best practices as the Mayo clinic. Did you know that Mayo has better outcomes (patients get better results) for less money? I think that promoting best practices is a good thing. I think that if you have years of data and evidence it is foolish not to use what you have learned. The current fee for service scheme does nothing to improve outcomes, lower costs but it does give a lot of money to the manufacturers of big machines and specialists!
Currently the Social Security contribution only comes out of the first 100+K of earnings. What if that were raised? Would that be a bad thing? What if high earners, let’s say 1 million and up, contributed more but received less of a benefit because their need is not as great? Would that be a bad thing?
My point is that if you believe that government has a role to play and that these earned benefits are an important foundation for our society than it is important to believe that they can be improved.
The problem is the same when you try to engage with republicans on Regulation.
There are some regulations that are stupid or burdensome and it would be better to remove or modify them. But if you try to have that conversation Republicans immediately begin trying to junk all regulations so all you do is give them cover to push for it.
We’ve seen that a large number of people in DC, when we want to improve these programs, immediately begin to attempt to cut them under the cover of improvement. So if people are wary, they have good reason to. The 1980s SS agreement was balanced on the backs of the middle-class and lower-class after all.
The 1980s was balanced on the backs of the middle and lower classes because we allowed Reagan and the anti-government Republicans to dominate the message. And they had the White House.
We are actually doing well on messaging about social security and Medicare and we have just successfully extended the life of Medicare by 8 years thanks to the PPACA.
Are you aware that it was the Democrats who controlled Congress throughout the Reagan-Bush I years? They had a solid majority in the House all 12 years, and control of the Senate during the last six. I lived through those years and remember them well. The Democrats had more than enough votes to stop Reagan dead in his tracks on pretty much every issue. The real story of that period, IMHO of course, is not that the Republicans dominated the message or had won any popular mandate, but that the Democrats ceased being any kind of progressive party and became the party of the rich, thoroughly devoted to promoting corporate interests. Which is what they are today, but even more so.
As far as the debt ceiling goes, I live in Venice, California, the bluest of cities in the bluest of states. And I don’t know a single person who thinks we should raise the debt ceiling or not balance the budget. Not one. I got into a discussion about this down at the coffee shop the other day and opinions were unanimous: we need to get the federal budget under control more debt would be suicidal and would be god’s gift to the Republicans. Raising the debt ceiling is promoted by people like Obama, who want to give the military and the corporates a virtual blank check without any fiscal restraints at all and who, above all else, favor it as an alternative to raising taxes on the rich. It’s not something any progressives I know want.
Reform is Republican codespeak for reduction.
You’re right, there’s a lot of ways to make the programs work better. That way more people can take advantage and they last longer for the most people.
Exactly!
The debt ceiling threat is really empty when it comes down to it. It had traction in 2011 because the 2010 election weakened Obama’s position (in convention wisdom) so that he had to take it seriously and negotiate.
But Congress is the body that creates the deficit, not the President. It fails to appropriate enough revenue or constrain outlays. Republicans control the purse. Republicans created the deficit through a decade of folly.
It’s not too hard to argue that the debt ceiling is and always has been a phony number used for purely political purposes and often conflicts with what Congress has done on appropriations and taxes.
So when there is a conflict, which does the President obey–my guess is the actual appropriations and taxes, making a good faith effort to hold down expenses through efficient administration.
The other out for the President is coinage. And there are many economists who argue that given the political stalemate, the President should take this route since debt financing of government expenditures has not produced the prudent policy that was promised.
And action before the 2014 election to bust this logjam is preferable so that we can begin to get prosperity again and make the GOP irresponsibility crystal clear even in red states.
Could you expand on this a bit? I’m missing the points. Because if Congress doesn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling we still risk negative reactions from ratings agencies and financial markets, no?
Yeah, the debt ceiling vote is stupid anyway since the debt has already been incurred. It’s a vestigial organ left from earlier times when Congress operated differently. And until last year, both parties accepted the kabuki nature of the debt limit voting. But it doesn’t appear to satisfy the world at large that US finances are being handled by responsible parties if Congress doesn’t raise the limit when necessary.
Sure we can and we will unless the Democrats just roll over and play dead. The battles are a better choice.
Or make the debt ceiling an irrelevant issue.
The 2010 Repub Gerrymander and Citizens United have cemented the House for the next decade, absent some sort of simply unimaginable transformation of the voters in the current Repub districts (which of course could happen, as TarheelD has helpfully reminded us of the history of congressional seats in SC). Booman immediately analyzed the current Repub seats and found less than a half dozen possible flips. I suppose some gerrymandered states could redistrict if Dems ever retook control, but this is a real reach and rarely happens.
So Boner’s Boneheads are effectively unaccountable to the nation, and they have no political sense, nor any real patriotism. None of them–zero–are responsible statesmen. Louie Gohmert is their model rep, Steve King their hero. They are half-insane “conservative” zealots, whose only goal is to destroy every social welfare program and every regulatory agency, while serving the tax cut needs of their plutocrat paymasters. They will use whatever means available to them to do this, from rolling debt ceilings “crises” to serial gub’mint shut downs, and the country won’t be able to do anything about it but watch impotently.
Frankly, from the standpoint of government health and efficiency, the best course of action would be to just let the fiscal cliff occur, and swallow the economic consequences. Boner’s Boneheads have no power or ability to stop it. While politically unpopular, the cliff will actually return the gub’mint to relative solvency, and the scheduled cuts hit the bloated “defense” budget the hardest, which is precisely where any cuts need to be made, but simply cannot as a result of our normal perverted and irrational politics.
But the worthless entrenched Repub Congress is here to stay, and they will not, and cannot, ever govern responsibly. They aren’t ever going to put our nation’s finances on a sound footing. They aren’t ever going to accede to reliably funding the New Deal and/or Obamacare or the enacted regulations of the past 70 years. They can’t. It’s not in their genetic make-up, and they have declared Total War against FDR, LBJ and BHO’s Anti-Amurcan soshalizm. That is what they are, it’s their identity. There’s no reforming them or thinking they will become a responsible body—they won’t, they can’t.
So the sooner the elected leaders of the Dem party start making the case that Boner’s House of Turds is actually an illegitimate body, that exists solely as a result of anti-democratic abuses, the better. This is a long term project that will take years of explanation, which is the exact sort of thing Dems seem unable to do, but it’s the only way forward now. Our present is to watch absolutely dysfunctional gub’mint on a daily basis lurch from budget crisis to crisis, from here on out.