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Tag: idiotic

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

House Republicans’ Suicide Pact

As America lurches toward new and unfamiliar status as a nation that defaults its debts, commentators around the world are wondering how the democratic government that was once the most admired in the world – for many reasons – is now so “dysfunctional,” to use the polite term. But the truth is that the entire US government is not dysfunctional. Much of the government functions well enough or better, and even the members of the troubled US Senate seems to be trying, a little late, to deal with the problem before us.

No, dysfunctional is the too-polite term for the House of Representatives, specifically its dominant Tea Party Republicans, who can be described in far less dainty psychological terms. Even the most extreme Republican partisans in the Senate seem to realize that their House colleagues, seized by some combination of ideology, madness, and pig ignorance, are propelling the country and the world toward economic chaos.

Of course, the Tea Party Republicans insist that no such thing will ever happen – the warnings from economists, business leaders, financiers and public officials are merely so much “scare talk.” When President Obama says that he won’t be able to send out Social Security and Veterans Administration checks or meet the nation’s obligations on Treasury debt come August 2, he is just trying to frighten his opponents into giving up their principles. They don’t accept the idea that we have to pay for financial obligations already incurred – or that the rising interest rates caused by default will make future deficits much deeper.

But they don’t have to believe the president to understand that the threat posed by default is real. They could listen to ultra-conservative Senators like Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), members of the Gang of Six/Seven whose own profound ideological hostility to Obama and the Democrats still leaves space for prudence.

Or they could listen to more than 60 business groups, from the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce to the Telecommunications Industry Association and the American Gas Association, all fearful of the consequences of default.

Now those business lobbyists may find out why it isn’t so smart to fund any bozo running for office who claims to support “free enterprise.”

It is revealing to listen to the Congressional freshmen affiliated with the Tea Party as the debt clock ticks down and panic begins to set in. Many of them have repeatedly vowed to vote down any bill to increase the debt limit, but somehow they’re sure that if those checks don’t go out and that debt doesn’t get paid, it will be the president’s fault and not theirs. Some say there is no reason why the Treasury should miss any of its bond payments. Others have sent a letter to the White House, urging Obama to “prioritize” those Social Security checks if worse comes to worst.

Such outbursts prove that the Tea Party is not only against taxes and spending, but is strictly opposed to arithmetic, which like climate science is probably just another socialist plot. They also prove the utter insincerity of these characters, who just voted this week for the “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill that would gut Social Security, along with Medicare, while erecting a constitutional wall around tax breaks for society’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. They want to pose as defenders of the middle-class and the American dream, even as they promote legislation that would destroy the programs and institutions that are the foundation of that way of life.

There is no need to look too far to find the source of our discontent – our “dysfunction,” if you must. It is in the Congress, which the American people mistakenly turned over to fakers and fools last November. Every poll shows that most voters regret that error now, and wish that Congress would tax the wealthy and preserve social insurance. Now those voters had better make their remorse heard, and loudly, if they hope to avert catastrophe.