Friday Open Thread 9.20.13

Paul Krugman: “In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party. I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past.”

In that vein, here is Timothy Egan on the House Republicans voting yesterday to starve 4 million people until they are dead.

A Republican majority that refuses to govern on other issues found the votes to shove nearly 4 million people back into poverty, joining 46.5 million at a desperation line that has failed to improve since the dawn of the Great Recession. It’s a heartless bill, aimed to hurt. Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. They think too many of their fellow citizens are cheats and loafers, dining out on lobster. […]
Republicans have more pain in store for their base in poor white America. Shutting down government, for one, will cause a ripple effect that will be hardest on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. The biggest obsession, the Moby-Dick of the right wing, is making sure millions of people do not have access to affordable health care. This week, Republicans drew the line for any doubters: they will wreck lives to blow up the health care law.

You have to wonder where this animus for those in the economic basement comes from. It’s too easy to say Republicans hate the poor. Limousine liberals can seem just as insensitive. And if Republicans were offering some genuinely creative approaches to helping the 26 million Americans who self-identified as “lower class” in a recent survey, they would deserve a listen. Tax cuts, the party’s solution to everything, do nothing for people who pay no federal income tax.

What’s at work here is the poison of ideology.

Here is Politico on how we avoid a government shutdown:

Here’s the reality: Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will eventually have to bring a funding bill to the House floor that keeps the government — and Obamacare — running. That’s the bill the House will most likely receive from the Senate shortly after Boehner’s chamber resumes work on Wednesday, just days short of an Oct. 1 government shutdown.

That’s because the Senate will not accept the entirety of the three-month $986 billion continuing resolution that Boehner will attempt to pass Friday. The Senate will strip the language that’s meant to defund President Barack Obama’s health care law — strong language that was drafted to appease Boehner’s right wing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), however, can remove that Obamacare provision with a simple majority vote in the upper chamber.

If Reid is successful and the Senate clears the revised continuing resolution, Boehner and House Republicans will then be back in the spotlight. And the speaker may need the support of House Democrats to pass the measure.

It won’t be pretty, but that so-called clean CR could pass the House with roughly 180 Republican votes with the remainder coming from the Democratic side of the aisle, according to senior GOP sources. White House deputy chief of staff Rob Nabors met with the House Democratic Caucus on Wednesday to walk through government funding scenarios. Although some Democrats are pushing to turn off the sequester as part of any CR deal, White House officials believe they can count on between 40 and 50 Democratic votes for a clean CR at the $986 billion level, giving House leaders enough to reach the key 217 vote level.

This has Noam Schreiber a little upset, because he sees having a shutdown as essential in avoiding a debt default.

[A Shutdown] was where we were headed until yesterday, when the White House tipped its hand. According to Politico, the White House is hoping to persuade (or hoping Nancy Pelosi can persuade) 40-50 Democrats to vote for a clean CR if it comes before the House to ensure that it passes. To put it slightly differently: The White House believes Boehner won’t be able to pass the clean CR with House Republican votes alone, thereby putting him on track for the political disaster of a shutdown. In order to avoid this fate, the White House will urge Democrats to provide the margin of passage. (A White House aide tells me the Politico account is a bit overstated—there’s nothing being urged just yet, and certainly no directives issued to Pelosi. But the aide doesn’t deny that this would be the preferred approach should the situation arise. My understanding is that House Democrats, for their part, are more inclined to let the GOP hang itself, or at least demand a higher level of spending in exchange for their votes.) […]

The big problem with this latest twist is that it almost certainly guarantees a disaster when it comes time to raise the debt ceiling in mid-to-late October.

To see this, you have to understand the psychology of the average House Tea Partier. These are people who have spent the last two-and-a-half years demanding an apocalyptic showdown with Obama, only to have their leaders defer it again and again. When the debt limit needed to be raised this past March, for example, Boehner persuaded his loonies that they’d be much better off postponing the confrontation until the government funding fight. Now that the moment of truth is here, Boehner is telling his folks to put the fight off yet again.

Not surprisingly, the Tea Partiers aren’t really going for it. They want to pass legislation that will defund Obamacare, and they want to do it by attaching it to the bill that keeps the government open past September 30. They don’t really believe Boehner when he says he’ll give them their shot a few weeks later, when the debt ceiling needs lifting, if they just hold their fire this one last time. Those suspicions are why Boehner is going to be hard-pressed to pass a clean CR with only Republican votes. The Tea Partiers will see it as the latest in a long history of capitulations.

If Boehner nonetheless manages to pass a clean CR and avoid a shutdown—thereby denying the Tea Partiers the confrontation they crave—he will be 100 percent on the hook for having a confrontation over the debt ceiling. The Tea Partiers simply won’t stand for letting another opportunity pass, especially since Boehner has spent the last few months saying the GOP should make its stand there rather than the government funding fight. But, of course, screwing around with the debt ceiling is much, much more dangerous than screwing around with a shutdown. A shutdown takes a few billion dollars out of the economy each day—not a great idea, particularly in this environment, but hardly calamitous. Failing to raise the debt ceiling will lead to a default on our government debt and trigger a financial crisis that’s potentially worse than the one we’re still recovering from. Our only hope of avoiding this fiasco is to go ahead and have the shutdown, which will allow the public to completely repudiate the GOP before the debt-ceiling comes due. At that point, Boehner will be able to raise the debt ceiling with far less angst, having demonstrated to his colleagues how isolated they are politically.

Noam calls the White House thinking about helping the GOP pass a clean CR a cave. Well, no, it is a not a cave. A cave would be to delay Obamacare. That is what the GOP “compromise” position is. If he agrees to that, the President is caving. What the President has insisted on regarding the budget was a CR that eliminates the sequester. So these are the positions: 1) The GOP wants an Obamacare Repeal for a CR and 2) the President wants a Sequester Repeal for a CR. Passing a clean CR with no repeals is not a cave. It is a compromise.

Booman agrees, and says that the “White House has to at least pretend that it is open to such a scenario, for appearances sake if nothing else.” That’s true. But I do agree with Noam on the actual need for a government shutdown to get this lunacy about the debt ceiling out of the Tea Bagger Brain.

MARYLAND–GOVERNOR–Former lieutenant governor, former RNC chair, former failed GOP Senate nominee and frequent MSNBC guest Michael Steele has decided not to run for Governor in 2014.

Republicans who have launched campaigns include Harford County Executive David R. Craig, Del. Ronald A. George (Anne Arundel) and Charles County businessman Charles Lollar. Larry Hogan, a former Ehrlich Cabinet secretary, has said he is also taking a serious look at the 2014 race.

At least three Democrats are eyeing the governor’s office: Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Del. Heather R. Mizeur (Montgomery).

The Brown-Gansler primary is already heating up.