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Tag: speaker boehner

5 Reasons The GOP Caved On The Debt Limit

John Boehner

RIP, debt ceiling crises.

It’s obvious that Republicans have lost their old passion for holding the global economy hostage. Their final demands would have required Democrats to agree to increase spending in the near term in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

In 2011, the GOP introduced the “Boehner rule,” which required — for the first time — that any raise of the debt limit be matched by cuts to the deficit. Their resolve triggered a small financial panic and the party won the automatic cuts in the sequester.

The GOP quickly folded on raising the limit in early 2013, but during the government shutdown it offered an insane menu of demands to the president in exchange for agreeing to pay the bills Congress already voted to run up. Republican leaders caved and set themselves up for another standoff in early 2014, which led to the most recent cave.

“We don’t have 218 votes,” Boehner said in a press conference on Tuesday. “When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing.”

The Speaker announced that he will vote for a clean debt limit raise that will last until 2015, well after the midterm elections. And he would try to find enough Republicans to help him pass the bill.

He then left the press conference singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Within minutes, a conservative group was already calling for Boehner to be replaced.

It’s a wonderful day for Democrats, who have broken the GOP’s willingness to resort to extraordinary levels of brinksmanship.

Here are five reasons the GOP caved.

AFP Photo/Jim Watson

President Obama Refused To Negotiate

Obama

The president’s regret over the first debt limit crisis has shaped his second term. While he has shown that he’s willing to deal with the right and strike deals that do not please his base, he has refused to negotiate “with a gun to his head.”

This tactic revealed that Republicans were holding the gun to their own heads, with the public prepared to blame them if a default actually happened.

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

Speaker Boehner Doesn’t Have 218 Votes For Anything

Michelle Bachmann

The Speaker has said again and again that he would not bring any bill to the floor that did not have a majority of his caucus supporting it. And again and again, he’s brought bills to the floor that did not have the majority of his caucus supporting them.

His allies say that the problem isn’t his leadership, but a group of House Republicans who only fear primary challenges from a wing of their own party — Tea Party, evangelical or business establishment — they don’t represent.

“Right now, Jesus himself couldn’t be the Speaker and get 218 Republicans behind something, so I think Speaker Boehner is trying his best to come up with a plan that can get close to that,” Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi (R-OH) recently said.

Boehner faced down a minor coup to maintain his speakership in early 2013. If he doesn’t have 218 votes for any debt limit deal, will he still have his job in 2015? And since he knows his party probably needs immigration reform to survive, why not just put the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill up for a vote and actually accomplish something in his tenure?

AFP Photo/Chip Somodevilla

The Deficit Has Been Cut In Half

Budget deficit

President Obama’s re-election also complicated the GOP’s plans in that he was able to end some of the Bush tax breaks for the richest. This combined with economic growth and some cuts has the deficit falling, possibly at the fastest pace ever. With the media unable to swell the right’s arguments with reports of exploding trillion-dollar deficits, Republicans have lost the momentum it takes to threaten another global economic disaster — even if 85 percent of the people who watch Fox News have no idea the deficit is actually shrinking.

Graph source: Sunlight Foundation, White House Office of Management and Budget

Graph credit: Alyson Hurt and Tamara Keith/NPR

Republicans Want To Make This Election About Obamacare

Obamacare Jobs

Republicans are confident that they are headed for control of the Senate and gains in the House because Obamacare is, in their minds, falling apart. Forget that vast majorities support keeping the law and fixing it. Forget that Republican alternatives have nearly all the problems that they’ve been complaining about in the president’s health law. Forget that a recent Congressional Budget Report showed the law lowers the deficit and the unemployment rate, and will get 13 million insured this year. According to the GOP, it’s bound to destroy Democrats.

The party’s strategists are sure the reason the government shutdown was a bad thing was because it took the focus off Obamacare. Now even Tea Partiers agree, 2014 will be about the Affordable Care Act — because that worked so well in 2012.

AFP Photo/David McNew

The Tea Party Is Delusional, Not Irrational

tedcruz

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) did America a favor by taking the Tea Party mentality to the extreme.

He said, “We’re going to shut down the government and President Obama is going to get blamed for it.” Instead, Republicans took the blame and now have a brand even more damaged than when George W. Bush left office.

This slap to the face actually woke up Tea Partiers who — it turns out — aren’t irrational, according to The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber:

The shutdown demonstrated that the Tea Partiers are, for the most part, delusional rather than irrational: They can be forced to reconsider a particular tactic if you persuade them it’s politically catastrophic. It just requires an epic level of public anger to break through their epistemically stunted consciousness. The Tea Partiers had basically believed that the country backed their monomaniacal fixation on repealing Obamacare, and their jihadi plan for getting it done. The shutdown, or at least the endless shutdown-inspired hand-wringing on Fox News, managed to disabuse even them of this belief.

Photo: jbouie via Flickr

Get Ready For More Republican Rumbles Over Immigration Reform

If you want to get a sense of what the rest of 2014 will look like, watch this debate from Fox News Sunday, in which talk-radio host Laura Ingraham gets all talk radio on George F. Will, who makes the establishment GOP argument in favor of immigration reform.

Ingraham’s argument peaks with the absurd “why have borders at all?”

Right-wing fire breathers like Ingraham and Michelle Malkin haven’t been fooled by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) insisting that immigration reform can’t happen unless they trust President Obama.

While many have insisted this means reform is dead for this year, TheWashington Post‘s Greg Sargent points out that this dance is meant to appease the base, which will never tolerate reform. Simultaneously, it signals to those Republicans who know they need reform to be competitive in 2016 and beyond that he’s still working on a proposal that might be able to pass both houses of Congress. But if he can’t, it’s Obama’s fault! #tcot

Republicans’ biggest problem is that Democrats keep saying yes. They said yes to the House disregarding the Senate’s bipartisan bill and yes to doing reform piecemeal. On Sunday, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called Boehner’s bluff and announced Democrats would be willing to delay implementation of the law until after President Obama leaves office.

Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel responded,  “The suggestion is entirely impractical, since it would totally eliminate the president’s incentive to enforce immigration law for the remainder of his term.”

In Republican world, it’s a given that Obama cannot be trusted, says Sargent. And the president’s success at securing the border while carrying out a record number of deportations — to the chagrin of his political allies — just never happened.

But Republican strategists know this denial of reality will work in 2014, and likely never again.

House leaders, already half-pregnant with reform, know they will be blamed if the effort fails. The release of Republican immigration “principles” triggered a flood of backlash from a far right that has mastered the art of backlash by utilizing robocalls and social media to pressure lawmakers and fundraise. Anything resembling finalized legislation will have to wait until after the primary filing deadline when members may be slightly more willing to deal.

Boehner has to decide if he can withstand the heat of a huge chunk of his party that will forever move the goalposts on reform because no deal that will be signed by a Democratic president will ever be acceptable.

Obviously, the Speaker knows this issue is crucial to his party’s future, or he wouldn’t even be dabbling in it. If reform doesn’t happen in 2014, even possibly in a lame-duck session, it will have to be abandoned until after the next election, likely leaving the GOP nominee with a smaller share of the growing Latino vote than Mitt Romney, who got less than John McCain, who got less than George W. Bush.

Or the debate can become part of the 2016 GOP primary, giving Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) his dream opportunity to launch filibuster after filibuster as a telethon for his presidential campaign.

If Republicans could have easily walked away from this issue, they would have already.

For the establishment whose business is pleasing donors and winning elections, reaching out to minority voters through some sort of reform is essential. For talk radio and the far right, bashing the establishment is increasingly profitable.

While a full-out civil war is unlikely — the party always manages to coalesce when it’s time to face an Obama or a Clinton — a full-on rumble is a near-certainty. And both sides cannot win.

GOP Strategists: If Republicans Focus On White Voters, They’re Doomed In 2016… And Beyond

GOP Strategists: If Republicans Focus On White Voters, They’re Doomed In 2016… And Beyond

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has given us a preview of what his alibi will be if he can’t lead his caucus through the complicated dance it will take to pass substantive immigration reform:

There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws. And it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.

The Speaker’s problem is that he knows this excuse will work perfectly in 2014, when Republicans in districts built for them face voters whiter, older and more conservative than those who elect the president of the United States. But what works in off-year elections — cutting off unemployment insurance, trimming food stamps, smothering immigration reform — is what kills the GOP in the elections that matter most.

MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin predicted how this excuse will fly:

On a more basic level, a group made up predominantly of white males is letting its distrust of the first black president stop them from any outreach to minority voters — if you take what Boehner is saying at face value. That should be reassuring to non-white voters.

Our Henry Decker points out that immigration reform is just one of the myriad reasons Latinos hate the GOP. However, it is the key issue for many in the Hispanic media and activist community.

Just ask the Walter Cronkite of the genre:

President Obama has pushed for reform, a bill passed the Senate and the president is willing to work with the House on a watered-down version of that bill.

Boehner refused to substantiate why he can’t trust the president. But he’s clearly referencing the executive action Obama took to prevent the deportation of law-abiding immigrants brought to this country as children, which is wildly popular in the activist community. In fact, the community is demanding the president stop all deportations as his administration surpasses in six years the total number the Bush administration exacted in eight.

If reform dies, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the president doesn’t at least tamp down deportations, as his effort to “secure the border” as an argument for reform fails to persuade the GOP.

And when that order comes, likely in the middle of the 2016 GOP presidential primary, it will tear the party apart.

Don’t believe me? Ask GOP some strategists.

“It’s hard to predict the future with great exactitude, but I will tell you this:  If we don’t pass immigration reform this year, we will not win the White House back in 2016, 2020 or 2024,” wrote John Feehery, who spent more than a decade working with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.

Republicans have been dreaming of a new Ronald Reagan for decades, and they would need New Ronnie desperately in 2016.

Commentary‘s Peter Wehner explains:

If minorities reach 30 percent of the vote next time, and the 2016 Democratic nominee again attracts support from roughly 80 percent of them, he or she would need to capture only 37 percent of whites to win a majority of the popular vote. In that scenario, to win a national majority, the GOP would need almost 63 percent of whites. Since 1976, the only Republican who has reached even 60 percent among whites was Reagan (with his 64 percent in 1984). Since Reagan’s peak, the Democratic share of the white vote has varied only between 39 percent (Obama in 2012 and Clinton in the three-way election of 1992), and 43 percent (Obama in 2008 and Clinton in 1996).

Mitt Romney did extraordinarily well with the white vote, winning it by 59 percent, the fourth highest for a Republican ever recorded. But he still lost by 5 million votes.

A new CNN/ORC poll shows 54 percent of all Americans say citizenship should be the priority in reform — a reverse of public opinion in 2011. Romney never even entertained citizenship in his campaign, vowing to veto the DREAM Act for immigrants brought here as kids.

The GOP has moved to the left of its last nominee, as it currently considers some sort of legalization. And though the next Republican nominee will not choose to run on self-deportation, as Romney did, he or she could end up running a campaign vowing to resume actual deportations.

Demography is not destiny, Jamelle Bouie argues in a great essay for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. But demography combined with policy and politics does hint at fate.

Tea Partiers like Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have recently joined progressives seeking sentencing reform for drug crimes, which is a new angle of reaching out to minorities, who disproportionately serve punitive amounts of prison time for non-violent crimes. But will this effort be heard over the din of immigration reform and Republicans pushing for new voting restrictions that have been proven to target minorities?

“We can’t have a conversation with Hispanics and Asians and Africans and Australians until we fix our broken immigration system,” Feehery said.

And if you’re delaying conversation with a terrible excuse, you’d better rethink what you’re saying.

AFP Photo/Jim Watson

Who Will Be Speaker In 2014?

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