Tag: gang of six

Blowing Up The House

WASHINGTON — Media reports are touting the Senate’s Gang of Six and its new budget outline. But the news that explains why the nation is caught in this debt-ceiling fiasco is the gang warfare inside the Republican Party. We are witnessing the disintegration of Tea Party Republicanism.

The Tea Party’s followers have endangered the nation’s credit rating and the GOP by pushing both House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor away from their own best instincts.

Cantor worked amiably with the negotiating group organized by Vice President Joe Biden and won praise for his focus even from liberal staffers who have no use for his politics.

Yet when the Biden group seemed close to a deal, it was shot down by the Tea Party’s champions. Boehner left Cantor exposed as the frontman in the Biden talks and did little to rescue him.

Then it was Boehner’s turn on the firing line. He came near a bigger budget deal with President Obama but the same right-wing rejectionists blew this up, too. Cantor evened the score by serving as a spokesman for Republicans opposed to any tax increase of any kind.

Think about the underlying dynamic here. The evidence suggests that both Boehner and Cantor understand the peril of the game their Republican colleagues are playing. They know we are closer than we think to having the credit rating of the United States downgraded. This may happen before Aug. 2, the date everyone is using as the deadline for action. We have less time than we think.

Unfortunately, neither of the two House leaders seems in a position to tell the obstreperous right that it is flatly and dangerously wrong when it claims that default is of little consequence. Rarely has a congressional leadership seemed so powerless.

Compare the impasse Boehner and Cantor are in with the aggressive maneuvering of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. He knows how damaging default would be and is working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to concoct a way out.

McConnell can do this because he doesn’t confront the Tea Party problem that so bedevils Boehner and Cantor. Many of the Tea Party’s Senate candidates — Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska — lost in 2010. Boehner and Cantor, by contrast, owe their majority in part to Tea Party supporters. McConnell has a certain freedom to govern that his House leadership colleagues do not.

And this is why Republicans are going to have to shake themselves loose from the Tea Party. Quite simply, the Tea Party’s legions are not interested in governing, at least as governing is normally understood in a democracy with separated powers. They believe that because the Republicans won one house of Congress in one election, they have a mandate to do whatever the right wing wants. A Democratic president and Senate are dismissed as irrelevant nuisances, although they were elected, too.

The Tea Party lives in an intellectual bubble where the answers to every problem lie in books by F.A. Hayek, Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand. Rand’s anti-government writings, regarded by her followers as modern-day scripture — Rand, an atheist, would have bridled at that comparison — are particularly instructive.

When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel “The Fountainhead” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives.

Our country is on the edge. Our capital looks like a lunatic asylum to many of our own citizens and much of the world. We need to act right now to restore certainty by extending the debt ceiling through the end of this Congress.

Boehner and Cantor don’t have time to stretch things out to appease their unappeasable members, and they should settle their issues with each other later. Nor do we have time to work through the ideas from the Gang of Six. The Gang has come forward too late with too little detail. Their suggestions should be debated seriously, not rushed through.

Republicans need to decide whether they want to be responsible conservatives or whether they will let the tea party destroy the House that Lincoln Built in a glorious explosion. Such pyrotechnics may look great to some people on the pages of a novel or in a movie, but they’re rather unpleasant when experienced in real life.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com

Copyright 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

Obama Praises ‘Gang of Six’ Debt Deal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Declaring “11th hour” urgency” to raise the government’s borrowing limit, President Barack Obama on Tuesday hailed a plan by “Gang of Six” senators from both parties to reduce federal deficits as the kind of balanced approach that could break the economy-threatening deadlock. He said it was time for Congress to rally around such a proposal.

“We don’t have any more time to engage in symbolic gestures, we don’t have any more time to posture. It’s time to get down to the business of actually solving this problem,” the president said.

Obama spoke even as House Republicans pushed toward a vote on separate legislation that would require trillions in spending cuts and agreement on a balanced-budget constitutional amendment in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling, which the government says must be raised by Aug. 2 to avoid economic calamity. That House plan, expected to come to a vote Tuesday evening, was unlikely to get through the Senate, and Obama has said he would veto it if it ever arrived at his desk.

Facing the deadline in two weeks, Obama said he would call House Speaker John Boehner after Tuesday’s vote to invite him and other leaders back to the White House for meetings in coming days.

Obama, Boehner and other top leaders met last week for five days straight without reaching agreement, leading to warnings from credit agencies about dire consequences if the U.S. defaults on its obligations for the first time, rendering it unable to pay its bills.

Obama added his own warning Tuesday, saying that while financial markets have shown confidence thus far in Washington, it won’t last much longer if lawmakers fail to act.

But he found cause for optimism in the announcement Tuesday by leaders of a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators that they’re nearing agreement on a major plan to cut the deficit by more than $4 trillion over the coming decade.

“I think it’s a very significant step,” Obama said, calling it “broadly consistent with the approach I’ve urged.”

The Gang of Six plan calls for an immediate $500 billion “down payment” on cutting the deficit as the starting point toward cuts of more than $4 trillion that would be finalized in a second piece of legislation. It would raise revenues by about $1 trillion over 10 years and cut popular benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid — dealing out political pain to Republicans and Democrats.

That mixture of cuts and new revenue is the “balanced approach” Obama has urged, though it’s rejected by many Republicans because it would require higher taxes for some.

Rep. Dave Camp, Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the spending cuts and budget mechanisms in the plan could form the basis of a deal but tax increases would be a big problem for him and fellow GOP lawmakers.

“A trillion dollars is a lot, by any measure,” Camp said of the tax increases in the plan.

While praising the broader plan, Obama said it was still important to have a “Plan B” option being worked on by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a fallback. The McConnell-Reid plan would give Obama the ability to raise the debt limit by $2.5 trillion in three installments over the next year without a separate vote by lawmakers. Instead, a panel of House and Senate members would be created to recommend cuts in benefit programs, with their work guaranteed a yes-or-no vote in the House or Senate.

While all that was going on behind the scenes, advocates of the legislation to be voted on in the House on Tuesday said it would cut spending by an estimated $111 billion in the next budget year and then by more than an additional $6 trillion over a decade — and require Congress to send a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification — in exchange for raising the debt limit by $2.4 trillion.

With the measure facing a veto threat from the White House, Boehner said he was exploring other alternatives to avoid government default.

“I do think it’s responsible for us to look at what Plan B would look like,” he said at a news conference a few hours before the opening of debate on the legislation backed by conservative lawmakers.

Said Obama: “The problem we have now is, we’re in the 11th hour, and we don’t have a lot more time left.”

On a day of political theater, a group of House Republicans also boarded a bus for a 16-block ride to deliver a letter asking Obama to disclose his own plan for reducing federal deficits.

No administration officials were present to meet the delegation when the bus rolled to a stop outside the White House gates, and lawmakers gave copies of the letter to reporters.

Democrats said it was urgent that the debt ceiling be raised.

In a closed-door meeting in the Capitol, House Democrats listened to an audio of Republican President Ronald Reagan urging lawmakers in 1987 to raise the debt limit. “This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans’ benefits,” he said then.

Nearly a quarter of a century — and numerous trillions of dollars in debt — later, Obama needs acquiescence from the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate to win another debt ceiling increase. So far, efforts to agree on a package of spending cuts — the price demanded by GOP lawmakers for their votes — have proved futile.

Barring action by Congress to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, the Treasury will be unable to pay all the government’s bills that come due beginning Aug. 3. Administration officials, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and others say the resulting default would inflict serious harm on the economy, which is still struggling to recover from the worst recession in decades.

Reid announced Monday that the Senate would meet each day until the issue was resolved, including weekends.

Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Stephen Ohlemacher, Darlene Superville and David Espo contributed to this article.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Gang of Six Talks Excite Pundits, Dismay Left

The Gang of Six is back:

The president appeared in the White House briefing room hours after the “Gang of Six” briefed senators on its plan to cut the deficit by $3.7 trillion over 10 years, in part by raising $1 trillion in new revenue. Obama’s decision to align himself with the Senate package aims to further marginalize House Republicans, who have resisted any debt plan that includes new revenues.

“We have a Democratic president and administration that is prepared to sign a tough package that includes both spending cuts, modifications to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that would strengthen those systems and allow them to move forward, and would include a revenue component,” Obama said. “We now have a bipartisan group of senators who agree with that balanced approach. And we’ve got the American people who agree with that balanced approach.”

The introduction of a bipartisan deficit-cutting plan, which was negotiated over the past seven months, revived hopes yet again of striking a “grand bargain” ahead of the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt limit.

But with only two weeks remaining, its late entry into the debt negotiations could derail the proposal.

There are reportedly over 50 senators–and perhaps as many as 60–on board with the plan. With Bill Clinton ratcheting up pressure on Republicans Monday evening by implying Obama has the constitutional option available to him, a precious few conservatives may finally be coming around to a sane deal.

President Obama praised the development, calling the plan “a very significant step” toward “the potential for bipartisan consensus,” as the plan is “broadly consistent” with his desire for a package that mixes big spending cuts with revenue raisers without gutting Medicare and Social Security.

But Obama’s very public triangulation–a willingness to, Bill Clinton style, ostentatiously undercut his own party’s priorities–is earning him some (expected) flak from the left:

“While details are sketchy, the “Gang of 6″ proposal appears to ask seniors, the middle class and the poor to bear the burden of deficit reduction, with cuts to Social Security benefits, billions in stealth cuts to be named later, and no real effort to make corporations and millionaires pay their fair share….We cannot allow a minority of Tea Party led Republicans in the House to hold our nation’s economy hostage in order to protect tax breaks for the rich and corporations, while forcing cuts to programs families depend on. The President and Democrats in Congress must stand up for everyday Americans and not give into politicians more interested in protecting their corporate backers than ensuring our economy recovers,” said Justin Ruben, executive director of Moveon.org.

“This terrible plan could cut Medicare and Medicaid to unsustainably low levels and put seniors’ well-being at risk. Anyone who wants to pass it through Congress should remember that more than 70 House Democrats have already pledged their opposition, and more are signing on every day,” intoned co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona.

Watch for a Nancy Pelosi statement on the deal–her House caucus is dominated by the Progressive Caucus to a much greater extent than when Dems had the majority (most of those who lost their reelection bids were conservative Blue Dogs) and many of their votes will be needed for any deal that brings more money into government coffers, even if it does so through a net tax decrease.