Jonathan Cohn highlights two quotes. The first is from Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who recounted his recent conversation with the president at the White House.
Graham says at one point he told Obama that he can’t expect Congress to surrender its constitutional authority on spending matters.
“I understand where you’re coming from, protecting the presidency,” Graham says, characterizing his remarks to Obama, “but you can’t tell the Congress, ‘You will reopen the government, you will pass a continuing resolution and you will pass the debt ceiling, and then I will talk to you.’”
“As a body, we can’t give that authority away. We can’t be told by the executive branch of the government that ‘you have to do what I say when it comes to how you fund the government and raising the debt ceiling.’ That’s not healthy for future Congresses. The whole check and balance situation will be undermined there,” Graham adds.
Here, the important thing is that actually the president can and has told Congress to reopen the government, pass a continuing resolution, and pass the debt ceiling.
The second quote comes from David Drucker of the Washington Examiner, who explains the psychology of the House Republicans.
The issue isn’t whether House Republicans should accept a bad deal to raise the federal borrowing limit and ensure the U.S. does not default on its $16.7 trillion debt. Republicans are concerned that the refusal of President Obama and Senate Democrats to negotiate those issues with Republicans would establish a precedent making it impossible to haggle over future debt limit increases or to use them as leverage in other policy negotiations.
That has only reaffirmed to House Republican leaders — who wanted to avoid a government shutdown — that they have no choice but to stand their ground on the debt ceiling. Surrounded by a hostile White House and Senate, and with few legislative avenues beyond borrowing and spending bills to impose their agenda, Republicans said capitulating to Obama would cede to Democrats the only institutional authority Republicans possess.
Here, the issue is that this establishment of a precedent making it impossible to haggle over future debt limit increases and this elimination of the only institutional authority that the Republicans possess is the entire point of this confrontation from the Democrats’ point of view. The only quibble I have is that defaulting on our debts is not an “institutional authority.” But, otherwise, this battle has always been about taking the Republicans’ hostage-taking strategy away from them. It’s been about killing the precedent that the Republicans can win by acting like kidnappers.
Everyone who hasn’t put this simple idea foremost in their mind has probably misunderstood everything Harry Reid and President Obama have done and said.
The Republicans obviously don’t like this situation, but they are not going to default on our debts because of it. I have used a variety of terms to describe the Republicans’ actions during this crisis, including “leading with their chin” and “wingnuts roasting on an open fire,” but I think I will go back to driftglass’s construction: “they waddled into the threshing blades.”
Before I sign off to go enjoy what may be the final weekend of the country as we know it, let me say I hope you are right.
Once I saw the Koch Brothers, Heritage, the Club for Growth and the other GOP bagmen run away from the threshing blades this week, I became much more sanguine about the outcome here. To keep their fingertips dug into the side of the cliff they’re on, Republicans in Congress would need a ton of strafing fire from the usual big-money suspects, followed by a major bombing campaign.
Instead, the weaponry will remain housed, and now the Republicans are getting calls from CEO’s, bond traders and financiers who are delivering their personal version of the Ned Beatty speech from “Network”. And then there’s their ordinary constituents who are being hurt and endangered by their insanity. They’re outgunned and will become unable to hold their trench.
Enjoy your weekend. Breathe easy.
There are so many moving parts and different interpretations of what’s going on that it’s difficult to know where we are. Is Obama open to Collins’ proposal, which would seem to be horse trading for the debt ceiling and funding the government? If it’s all about timing, which is what has been reported, claiming that hostage taking has been defeated will be a hard sell. Senate and House R’s are on such different pages, seems like it’s gonna take Dems in the House to pass anything. So offering any meager concessions to move the ball – I don’t get it.
This is a revealing and crucial part of Drucker’s representation of the House GOP’ers:
“Surrounded by a hostile White House and Senate, and with few legislative avenues beyond borrowing and spending bills to impose their agenda, Republicans said capitulating to Obama would cede to Democrats the only institutional authority Republicans possess.”
That projects such a profound weakness, doesn’t it? They scream “WE ARE REPRESENTING THE WILL OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!!”, but their desperate need to hang onto their Debt Ceiling binkie reveals that House GOP’ers do not believe they can persuade the majority of the American people, the Senate or their President based on the merit of their policy priorities. Only desperate procedural levers can deliver them.
Being out of power sucks. I remember living through Bush’s administration feeling powerless as they took the country into an insane war and passed the Bush tax cuts. You can’t always get what you want. Even when Democrats controlled the Presidency and both houses, we had to compromise as the Senate turned into an institution that required 60 votes to pass anything. The Republican party has been unwilling to live with this simple truth.
I hope you are right and that the Republican House will allow a clean vote to raise the debt limit. The 17th is less than a week away and they haven’t even held a vote to pass it while making irresponsible demands, let alone offering up a clean vote. People will do all sorts of insane things if they can convince themselves it’s a matter of “principle,” which it sounds like they are in the process of doing.
Yep, being out of power has really really gotten to the Republicans. Remember the talk about a GOP permanent majority? They believed deep down in their bones that they had it made and they could do everything they wanted. Then they hitched their wagon to Bush, and between that disaster and demographic change it was bye bye permanent majority.
It’s made them crazy. And desperate.
It’s made them more crazy, perhaps. But we’re talking about operating psychology here, and they, on average, possess the emotional intelligence of toddlers. Science is slowly uncovering the underlying physiological characteristics that place a person on the liberal-conservative spectrum. When thought cannot decouple itself from the ancient emotional brain, a conservative is the result.
That’s why they are so desperate to get a concession — any concession at all. It will give them a reason to try this again.
God! I hope they stand firm and don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
I will really be shocked if they don’t get something for their efforts. I honestly think that if they don’t, they will simply stand in the middle of the tracks, transfixed, while the Debt Limit Train mows them down, right before it crashes headlong into the rest of us.
Let it crash right through the teahadis and their enablers, and let Obama stop it through Executive action. US Debt satisfaction is shown to be a Constitutional duty. Markets relieved, crisis averted.
The Teahadis will impeach Obama, netting the Democrats the House by 2015.
If you run Hillary and make it really count, and get as many real progressives into races as possible, 2016 could break the trend of the past 35 years.
I think the train they’ve been riding should knock them down for a good 20 years or so.
The wilderness will do ’em good.
I hope Hillary will not let us down.
My lunch companion thinks a Clinton-Richardson ticket is unbeatable. I know she is not the Socialist the R’s say she is, but I hope she will focus on employment and income inequality. Both have gotten out of hand. And the banking flaws have not been fixed.
Are you saying Hillary because you really like Hillary? Or because she’s supposedly the most “electable”? One of the consequences of what’s going on now is that she wouldn’t be any more electable than a lot of other possible Democrats, and possibly less so.
I’d prefer a Warren/Grayson ticket, if that gives you any idea of my actual political positions.
The reason why I’d go with Hillary is that
I’ve never listened to an Obama speech because I know he’s a centrist/rightwing Democrat who’d fit comfortably into the 70’s era Republican party, but I voted for Obama over Hillary because I fucking despise feudalism, which is what this country is on track to be. Just look at Bush – Clinton – Bush – Almost Clinton…but that said, at this point nothing changes for the better until the disgusting Fascist Republicans who are leading the charge to feudalism (on behalf of, literally, oligarchs) are totally destroyed as a national party.
Once the Republicans have been wiped clean and this country can get back on track, then we can start working on the progressive party we (or at least I) dream about.
Not a second before the Republicans are destroyed though.
Funny how differently people see things. I like Grayson too, though not as a presidential candidate. I don’t and never have seen Hillary as a progressive, and I am mystified why so many progressives do. (Maybe because she’s a woman? Sory, that’s not enough for me.)
Hillary’s strongest supporters were the PUMAs; she has played quite a bit of footsie with Murdoch and Bush 41. She has strong Neocon ties and all the Clinton baggage is still there.
She was a good (not great) secretary of state, mainly (I think) because she was working for Obama, and an entirely mediocre senator.
Threshing blades. Yes! Cut them! Cut them BAD!
I hope Obama’s smart enough to just blink at Republicans until they open the government. At this point we hold all the cards. They’ve got nothing.
He is.
I want to believe you, but then I read stuff like this and I start pacing nervously.
As much as possible, any agreement must structurally take away these crisis tactics. Newt Gingrich structurally laid the foundation for both tactics in 1995 by repealing the Gephardt Rule and by conducting the first shutdown.
Until then, these sort of parliamentary maneuvers were considered out of bounds — in part because both parties were interested in funding their pet projects, not in stripping funding.
An expanded and updated version of this is appearing at the Washington Monthly.
Getting the Washington Monthly gig. Sweet.
As to Sen. Graham’s lame assertions about “authority” and the like, I would respond that Congress can’t commit to spending money and then decide a couple of years later that they don’t want to follow through on those commitments, because they have to appease a bunch of kooks and knuckleheads they stirred up.
Grow up, Lindsey. Adults keep their word.
As Kristin Roberts reminded us the other day, the 14th Amendment applies to Congress more directly than it does to the president. For the House to decide not to pay the bills is just not a legal option. I’d like to see them try to impeach the president for stepping in to do what they themselves are bound by their oath to do, simply because they refused to do it.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/republicans-are-awfully-close-to-violating-the-constitution-
20131008
I guess it would be redundant to point out that it isn’t the President but the fucking Constitution that tells Congress to fund the government and pay the nation’s debts.