The prospects for immigration reform just got a lot better. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is reportedly completely committed to getting something passed.
Rubio is planning a media blitz to promote the [immigration reform] bill — which is expected to be released early next week — making the rounds on all of the Sunday political talk shows starting this weekend, wooing skeptical conservative radio hosts and pitching the plan to Spanish-language news outlets. The campaign is aimed at building public support for the far-reaching immigration bill that will dominate Capitol Hill’s attention for much of the year.
Meanwhile, in an article on the prospects of any gun violence bills passing the House, The Hill reports something interesting:
While [GOP] party leaders have made a concerted effort to prepare their rank-and-file for a major immigration push this year, they have not done so on the gun issue.
So, Boehner, Cantor, and Co., have been preparing their caucus for a major push to pass immigration reform. And now Marco Rubio is going to try to sell it to conservatives. It seems to me that these are the prerequisites for getting a bill done. Something similar needs to be done on guns and on fixing the sequester.
Rubio is taking a big chance that he will get credit for leadership rather than blame for either failure or for leading on something that is pretty unpopular with conservative Republicans in Iowa.
I don’t think any 2016 presidential contenders are going to step forward on guns, so we’re not going to get that kind of stature. Rep. Peter King wants to work on passing the Toomey-Manchin background check bill, but he’s warring with the dominant southern wing of the Republican Party over the delay in Superstorm Sandy relief. It will be easy for King to round up some votes from the Mid-Atlantic, California, and parts of the Upper Midwest, but he also needs to convince Boehner to allow a vote. Maybe the Newtown parents can take care of that end of it.
On the sequester, I think the president is working the issue in large part through these dinners he has started to have with Republican senators. When the cameras are off, the senators really hate the sequester on pretty much every level you can hate it. They don’t like the meat-ax nature of it. They don’t like what is says about Congress. They have tons of pissed off constituents, many of whom are quite powerful. The trick is figuring out how to agree to the revenues the president wants. They demanded a good faith demonstration by Obama, and he delivered with the Chained CPI offer in his budget. If this thing is being choreographed correctly, someone on the Republican side (like Tom Coburn) will start talking about the president’s offer like it’s worth talking about. And then others, like McCain-Graham-Ayotte is start talking about military cuts again.
I think there is a little too much in the system right now with the Senate set to work on guns and Rubio about to make his pitch for immigration, there isn’t a lot of oxygen left for talking about the sequester. But the timing wasn’t flexible because the budget was already late.
In any case, there is good movement on immigration in both houses, and on guns in the Senate. The sequester is a little off the radar right now, except as a topic going largely undiscussed as the left plays out its assigned role of pillorying the president for his apostasy on Social Security.
Boo, in terms of the timing of all this, do you think that the increasingly damaging nature of the sequester could cause it to overtake priority over immigration and guns? I think people are starting to notice all the little stories more and more: Head Start lotteries, people turned away cancer clinics, even cancelling Blue Angels flights and White House tours.
Also, I’m assuming you still expect the strategy for House passage of these bills to be a majority of Dems/minority of Repubs voting aye, and continued erosion of the Hastert Rule?
if not for the problem of the debt ceiling, these things would be sequential like planes lining up to take off on the runway. The search for a grand bargain cannot, therefore, be completely put off.
Ah, the Great Lie of 2013.
I love how nobody can actually explain how the president’s budget actually qualifies as a compromise. I suppose it does exist somewhere short of socialism and confiscation, so there is that. But then by that logic, I’d have to give Paul Ryan credit-as-compromiser for achieving something slightly less than fullscale deprivation and fascism.
Seriously, where’s the compromise? Is it the part where he yanks money from drug companies and oil producers? Is it the part where he turns social security into an explicit antipoverty program? Is it the part where he expands the Department of Education’s budget by another 10% and creates an all new pre-K entitlement? Is it the part where he consolidates the progressivity of the tax code by making low-income tax cuts permanent and hikes taxes on the 1% and investment activities?
Barack Obama is a treacherous, hyperliberal snake who Republicans, quite simply, cannot do business with. If he had any intention of governing as a “centrist” or as an economic conservative, he’s had more than enough chances to prove it. He does the opposite every time (note to firebaggers: hint hint). If you think his snake agenda is good news for the country (I do!), you should be ecstatic at his fraudulent centrist propaganda. Be the best darn snake you can be, Mr. President. Snake ’em hard.
If the GOP was smart (they aren’t) or competent (even less so, somehow), they would pocket the sequester with the biggest grin in the world. They got their liberal enemy to panic and sabotage his own fucking government to defuse an artificial crisis and secure his reelection (Note to obots who have never heard of anything that happened in American history before 2007: this is a recurrent presidential phenomenon extending back to a guy named John Adams, who was our second president, and who lost his reelection bid in 1800 to Thomas Jefferson. Don’t worry, I’m not holding it against your guy, he’s got company). You want to know how to know Washington is “unserious” about cutting spending? They accidentally managed to do so in the here and now for a change with the sequester (rather than dumping it on the outyears) and they’re all like “OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE WE DONE?! FIX IT, FIX IT NOW! NATIONAL EMERGENCY!” Fucking state governments have cut spending just constantly, they’ve fired hundreds of thousands of people, and they just kind of did it and moved on. Not our esteemed national pols. So yeah, stomaching the sequester takes sacrifice, but aren’t the Republicans and big businessmen supposed to be hardy patriots? That’s what they’re always telling me. Take one for the cause, dudes.
If you’re Republican, you pass immigration reform because you have to, you fucked up in 06. You don’t get anything for doing it, because immigrants won’t vote Republican and will instead want all the same liberal spending and benefits any other citizen wants. But it’s clear that overt white supremacy isn’t a very surefire electoral agenda, so you have to suck it up and learn to pander in Spanish for a while. Take the loss. You pass some minor gun bill because sobbing parents. I know they waited out this exact same legislation after Columbine, but the liberal menace is still decades away from its goals of registration and confiscation and bans on manufacture and trafficking, so fuck it. Not a big loss. The country will still be awash in guns and homicides next year. The ability to shoot the jack-booted gubmint thugs is still secured. It takes as little as five likeminded people to screw this all up, but for now, congressional action isn’t a threat to your interests. Pass the background check bill with the same smile Stalin reserved for FDR and Truman. And then proceed with the fundraising.
You pass immigration and guns and whatever to prove you can “still do big things,” give the President not one cent of new taxes to enlarge his treasury and finance his expansionist agenda, keep your House majority in 2014 and then wait the lame duck out. It’s either that or wholesale defeat.
And yeah, to anybody who’s just appalled at the nihilism of this post: we have actual, real enemies in this world. And we are theirs. They aren’t misguided. They aren’t operating under false consciousness. They want very different things from life and country and power. And you can’t talk them out of it. There is no conversation nor potential for redemption. One side has to win through raw political force, and one side will lose. Either that, or the country can stop electing big personalities with even bigger ambitions like the Obamas and Ryans of the world, and elect only Baucuses and Collinses. The partisan acrimony would go away overnight…and also nothing would get done.
The whole country is operating with false consciousness. But no group more so than the folks who marinate the brains with Fox News all day long.
Admittedly, there is a group that sits atop that fortress of idiocy who know what the game is, but their numbers are small and they wield a blunt instrument unsuited for finely-honed operations, like surgery.
The thing about creating an army of BIG DUMB STUPID is that they may march to your drummer but they can’t turn on a dime.
On our side, we do the opposite. We think too hard.
The fiscal effects of the retiring baby boomers are indeed serious and will require action to prevent debt payments overwhelming budgets. But there should be no mistake about Obama’s budget impact on middle class folks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/13/obama-budget-medicare_n_3075556.html
The “left” is not a foil in its opposition to chained cpi and other elements of the budget. Folks who fall under a much broader tent will be impacted. Those living on fixed incomes who have increasing medical costs will face unappealing choices. Rising medical costs need to be addressed – putting more of the burden on future seniors is not the way to go.
When you are in a situation where you have to negotiate with someone who only wants bad things, you have to eventually agree to do some bad things, or you won’t get to do any of the good things that you want to do.
In that kind of scenario, you can try to define the bad things that you agree to as something that you “want to do,” but it’s not really accurate.
I don’t want Chained CPI. I don’t want to give the Republicans any concessions.
But I also don’t want the sequester. I don’t want three more years of constant debt crises. And I do want universal pre-K, and infrastructure investment, and an end to oil subsidies with the money moved to green projects, etc.
As for the left being a foil, I am not saying the criticisms are meritless. The criticisms are accurate, at least in a vacuum.
But the howling of the left serves in this context as permission for the Republicans to deal with the president.
For the record, I am following Robert Greenstein’s advice because I respect and trust his judgment.
That’s bullshit.
You’re quibbling about the public articulation of the whys and whats of the conflict, but the people know damn well what they want and don’t want and fear from their government.
There’s no false consciousness. There’s simply an anti-statist, anti-plural and anti-feminist reactionary sentiment that’s been logically fostered in response to the success (yes, success) of liberalism as a cultural movement. Mitt Romney was correct in his infamous 47% diagnosis. A slim but unshakable majority of voters (and a greater majority of citizens, if you could ever get the disaffected to show the fuck up for a change) want the government to be a positive redistributionary force. They want things, they want all the promise of the world at last. The people who will get elected in this environment are people will be the best at capturing this sentiment and enacting its wishes once in office. Many of these people are members of historical underclasses, not white males.
You can swear up and down that the upset have no reason to fear from this regime change, that their fear is a false consciousness promoted by wealthy con men, but they recognize that their country is changing and they simply do not like it. Their children have been and will be culturally indoctrinated away from them (judging by political and values preferences), their governments will be dominated by people who don’t look like them nor come from where they came from, their religion is fading; you see your hopes and dreams made manifest, they see only grimness and marginalization. The end.
Well, of course there is that sentiment out there that is understandable to a degree. But that doesn’t remove the responsibility people have for how they interact with that sentiment.
I mean, are you going to stoke fear and anxiety for political gain, or are you going to adopt policies that will help alleviate fear and anxiety.
The quotient of angst isn’t constant. Under Bush, we were fed a constant drip, drip, drip of fear that has almost completely cut off by the Obama administration. As a result, the whole country is calmer and more relaxed. Anti-Muslim feeling is lower. People are treating each other better. If not for the economic hardships people are going through, the change would be much more dramatic, but it’s still a huge improvement. We don’t need our government deliberately, constantly stressing us out. But that is pretty much the entire Republican playbook.
Insofar as the country is changing racially and culturally, that may be inducing stress on some people, but politicians can choose not to make it worse. For fifty years, roughly, the GOP has made a living by making it worse.