Without getting bogged down in the full spectrum of insanity that surrounds the Republican Party’s behavior and policy toward Planned Parenthood, I am willing to acknowledge that opponents of abortion have an understandable desire to not see federal funding go (however indirectly) to an organization that provides abortions. I may wish that they understood that the organization prevents many, many more abortions than it performs, but I still understand the basic logic that’s driving them. And I can see why they’re frustrated that a Republican Congress and a Republican president can’t find a way to stop “funding” Planned Parenthood.
But I’m at my wit’s end with people, on both poles of the political spectrum, who don’t understand the limitations of what our politicians can do. Ed Kilgore explains today that the anti-choice movement is freaking out because their highest priority legislative ask this year has died along with the plan to repeal Obamacare:
But there’s one important GOP faction that isn’t bowing down before the golden calf of tax cuts: the right-to-life movement, which has seen its major legislative goals thwarted by the health-care fiasco. Every one of the House and Senate Republican health-care bills included language “defunding” Planned Parenthood for a year and prohibiting use of Obamacare tax credits to buy insurance policies covering abortion. So the anti-abortion lobby is viewing the failure to pass any of this legislation as a broken promise to them. They want it redeemed right away, in the budget resolution Republicans are battling to reserve for tax cuts…
And there’s a quote from Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins who says “If this was a priority for leadership, they would have found a way to get this done. This is something we’ve been talking about for many years.”
There’s just one wee little problem. Back in July, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that legislative language in the health care legislation that was moving through the budget resolution/reconciliation process violated the Byrd Rule:
The Senate Republican health care bill has run into another major problem, as key anti-abortion provisions — a major selling point to conservatives — have been ruled to run afoul of Senate rules, endangering them altogether.
The Senate Parliamentarian provided guidance, released Friday by Senate Democrats, that provisions to effectively defund Planned Parenthood for a year and prevent tax credits from being used to buy insurance plans that cover abortion violate Senate budget reconciliation rules, meaning each would require 60 votes to be maintained on the Senate floor.
I have to get wonky here just for a moment. The Byrd Rule would allow for something that impacts spending or revenues, but not if the measure is purely incidental to the underlying legislation.
The rules of reconciliation dictate that provisions within the health care overhaul can’t have just an “incidental” budgetary effect. There was running skepticism that the Planned Parenthood provision would comply with that rule.
The parliamentarian ruled that whatever money Planned Parenthood would be denied didn’t qualify as germane to the object of the health care bill and the goals of budget reconciliation. And that’s why it didn’t matter whether or not the repeal bills passed or not if all you cared about was Planned Parenthood.
I don’t like to defend the Republican leadership, but what are they supposed to do? They can include the provision, but it will be stripped out. They can include the provision again for the new budget, but it will get stripped out again.
For anti-choice lobbyists, demanding that McConnell and Ryan attach this to tax reform is an example of simply not understanding the thing they’re paid to understand.
As Ed points out, they have a fallback plan even if they clearly don’t understand why it will be necessary:
What the RTLers could do, though, is threaten that if their cause isn’t included in the new budget resolution, they’ll think long and hard about taking hostage one of the two big “must-pass” bills coming up in December, the next debt-limit increase and an omnibus appropriations bill. It is unclear whether they might be willing to insist that their congressional allies actually risk a debt default or a government shutdown. But the possibility might strike GOP congressional leaders as more dangerous as just giving the anti-abortion lobby its pound of flesh by incongruously adding its agenda to a tax bill.
Whether it’s dumb or not, if their immediate demand is not met, the anti-choicers could try to take the December calendar hostage. I don’t see why the budget resolution is part of this conversation at this point, but they could conceivably get their way if they’re willing and able to force a government shutdown or credit default over this issue. I mean, it is at least possible in the sense that there’s no rule against it.
Believe me, I sympathize with the average voter who believes a candidate when they promise to do something even though what they’re promising isn’t realistic or likely. But the people who get paid to work in politics or to write about politics really need to do a better job of knowing what they hell they’re talking about.
Since the 1% tolerate, but don’t give a damn about “defunding planned parenthood” it will sit ill with Wall Street and other very important funders if they threaten to crash the US economy over abortion financing.
This is another of those “everybody knows” situations, where they have to do something to avoid easily avoidable catastrophe that would hurl them from power entirely if they failed to avoid it. But, they can’t explain it to their rabid base, because explanations would involve explaining that not destroying the world economy is more important than staging an ultimately futile fight with Democrats over abortion financing.
It’s actually worse for Republican leaders than this, because once again they know Trump will utterly refuse to take any blame whatsoever for having to bite this particular bullet. Trump will say that they had all year to defund Planned Parenthood, and now at the last minute he had to cut another deal with Nancy Pelosi, because “weak” “low energy” leaders like Ryan and McConnell couldn’t do their jobs properly and deliver the votes to keep the economy from crashing.
Of course, their base will side with Trump. He has the bully pulpit and a much bigger megaphone than they do. They will blame the GOP Congress.
We’re seeing this scenario play out over and over. Trump has a choice of doing what Obama and other Presidents have done in the past – take one for the team, absorbing blame from disappointed partisans of the base, while shielding vulnerable Congressmen, while cutting a deal with the opposition that gets them less than what the base unrealistically wants. Obama did this again and again on Obamacare, knowing that ultimately though liberals would be unhappy with him, they would still vote for him in the end, while he was attempting to preserve a Congressional governing majority.
But, Trump NEVER does this. He pathologically hates to accept any blame or criticism whatsoever, and will instantly shift all blame for doing whatever needs to be done to others. He actually encourages the base to hate and distrust the leadership of their own party.
All a loyal Trumpite can see is the GOP Congress not getting anything they want done, done. No building of the Wall, no deportation of 11 million “illegals” (they have to be satisfied with ICE rounding up 500 aliens in a symbolic middle finger to sanctuary cities). No jobs are coming to middle America. The tax cuts aren’t happening this year either. And to top it off, they couldn’t get rid of Obamacare or ban abortion or defund Planned Parenthood.
It’s a lose, lose, lose proposition, only lightened by Trump’s Twitter storms at black NFL players.
In short, they have every reason to love Trump, who gives them constant symbolic victories, but hate the Congress that is gridlocked and can’t do anything.
This cannot end well for the GOP Congressmen. Trump’s psychological need to avoid blame clashes with his need to maintain the GOP majority in the House to avoid impeachment.
If Mueller drops a bombshell or two on the Administration in 2018, it could be a very grim year for Republicans indeed. And they have only themselves to blame. They always believed “six impossible things before breakfast” every day, and now it’s catching up with them.
. . . GOPer, obviously.
What’s better for me as a devoted anti-choice activist?
Plan A:
Explain to my voters/supporters that defunding PP isn’t possible right now, at least not via reconciliation. Tell them that our representatives are doing a fine job, but it’s just not institutionally possible, and we need to focus either on electing more Senators or defunding PP via a different approach.
If my voters buy this, they’ll think happy thoughts about our representatives, and sad thoughts about what’s institutionally possible. My representatives will be happy that the anti-choice activists are so reasonable, and will rest secure in the knowledge that a mob of fucking whackadoos isn’t stringing them up in effigy.
Plan B:
Tell my voters that the Republican representatives are lying sack of shits if they don’t defund PP. Misinform them about process and whip them into a fury. If the Parliamentarian says no, fire her! Get Alex Jones in as the new Parliamentarian. Burn the place down. Do whatever’s necessary! To the barricades!
If my voters buy this, they’ll hate our backstabbing representatives, and they’ll think livid thoughts of betrayal and revenge. My representatives, on the other hand, will be pissing themselves terrified about the mob of fucking whackadoos stringing them up in effigy.
My representatives will do anything possible to placate this ravening mob. They still can’t do anything about PP via reconciliation, but they will look for every opportunity to show their fealty to the cause. The angrier we get, the more extremely anti-choice they get.
As an anti-choice activist, I’d rather have my representatives wetting themselves than my voters well-informed, no?
Plan b sounds like the Moore senate campaign for the next month.
Plan B is what the GOP has been doing for a while now.
Too bad the object of the politics is not actually about reducing the number of abortions.
Planned Parenthood is a scapegoat in part because of Cicely Richards and her mom. And the fact that despite having the most restrictive “anti-abortion” law in the country, the number of abortions in Texas has not dropped enough for anyone to claim that the “pro-life” lobby has done anything of value in 40 years of political activity.
Have I said that it now should be clear to everyone that the conservative agenda has failed at everything that it claimed to be for — except for getting a lock on public office and reinstituting the spoils system?
After 40 years, you would think that those actually interested in the itty biddy babies would have gotten wise to the con game.
Its the same thing: the GOP demonizes an issue with false claims to rile up voters. Now that they are in charge meeting the demands of their hypnotized base is impossible because they are expected to “fix” something that was never broken to begin with. Still, failing at the fix they claimed was in order or doing nothing about it is not an option.
Not only have they screwed their base and themselves, they’re taking down the ability of the government as constituted to address any real issues through governance.
How many different ways is it possible to prove the Republican base is a rabid, out of control, irrational, anti-democratic, racist, misogynistic, greedy, nasty mob?
Their capacity to create anything from a plurality to a supermajority of their base that believe any prima facie lie from the Laugher curve to creationism to climate change denialism to birtherism to gun confiscation danger to welfare queens in Cadillacs they are without a doubt the worst combination of willful ignorance and actively hateful people since their ideological forefathers in the Confederacy.
I can’t tell if it’s that last throes of white supremacists pulling every last lever to maintain their power at any cost or a cultural change that is still building momentum on fascism.
The lesson of Germany if nothing else is that you don’t need a supermajority of people to inflict policies that were unthinkable less than a generation before. I am not saying the Republicans will engage in genocide, establish an actual dictatorship, or start a world war just to distract from the intellectual void at the center of their worldview. But I am saying there’s an immense amount of damage they can do that falls well short of those policies – Bush/Cheney proved that.
When I look at Michigan, Pennsylvania, and especially Wisconsin, I think that non-rabid Americans underestimate the groundswell of irrationality that has clearly overwhelmed the deep red states already. Alabama is easy to mock – they fit every ugly stereotype of ‘southern ignorance’ imaginable. But Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa are not very far behind.
Democrats really need to up their game and completely shed the complacency and especially the belief that the political balance will regress to the mean.
Unlike the average democratic leader (very much including Obama) they need to realize and act in accordance with the fact that they are the last line of defense against an existential threat of cultural (and therefore political) rot from within. It can happen here, it may in fact be happening here.
. . . curve” intentional, or just a serendipitously apt typo?
Cuz even if the latter, it works, given the cosmic joke of Laffer’s name wrt the “laugher” that is his repeatedly-discredited-by-long-experience “economic theory”.