Open Thread

Brian Beutler today at Salon:

What happened over the past 48 hours is a direct consequence of Republicans making sport out of misleading the public, and particularly conservatives, about the threat Obamacare poses to the country. It created an incentive for publicity-hungry members to stage more and more elaborate, but ultimately symbolic, anti-Obamacare performances If Republicans really worried that Obamacare is as dangerous as they’ve been claiming for years — if they truly believed it will sap the middle class of ambition and bankrupt the country — then many more of them would have joined Cruz over the past 24 hours. At the very least, they wouldn’t have blown him off and attacked his motives and trashed him anonymously in the press. But the deceptive nature of their opposition campaign created an opening for a false savior like Cruz to outperform them. Republicans are annoyed with Cruz for plenty of reasons — he’s arrogant, he’s lying to primary voters about the limits of GOP power, he’s inching Congress toward a government shutdown most of the party wants to avoid. But a big subtext here is that he’s exposed the simple message that once united the party as a sham. If Obamacare is as perilous as the party claims, why wait until the next election to try and derail it? By swooping in like he did, knowing he couldn’t deliver, he actually exposed both charades — his own and his GOP antagonists’ — and left ACA intact.

So Republicans are liars. This is not news. What is news is that they might, finally, at long last, be paying a price for it.

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.

So Speaker... and I use that term loosely ... Boehner decided this week to have the Republican Party commit suicide. Unfortunately, the suicide plan is to have the country drive towards a cliff and jump off. And since he is the driver and we are all his passengers, and the doors are locked, we have to go with him. So it is more of a non-mutual murder-suicide pact. The government, much of it anyway, will run out of money at the end of the month when the new fiscal year (October 1) starts. Eighteen days after that, the government will run out of borrowing authority when the debt ceiling is reached. So Speaker Boehner had a choice: he could have passed continuing resolutions to fund the government at last year's budget levels for a certain period of time and have that pass the House with Democratic and Republican votes, as he has done before. Or he could surrender to the fringe tea party caucus in the House and demand that any continuing resolution and any debt ceiling increase be paired with a repeal or defunding of Obamacare. This demand is insane and ignorant. It shows how mind blowingly stupid Teabagger Republicans are. For the funding of the Affordable Care Act is pretty much already taken care of when the original law was passed. Indeed, you will have to repeal the entire law to defund it. And as long as President Obama is alive and serving as President, the law will not be repealed. A government shutdown will not stop it. The money has already been spent and insurance premiums are already plunging across the country, meaning that the law is already paying for itself. The Teabaggers, including Jim DeMint and Steven King and Ted Cruz, are all operating under the assumption that the President will cave and repeal his own law. Their entire plan is predicated on that assumption. And that might be a good, thought still very risky, assumption if Obamacare polled badly and the public wanted the Republicans to do everything they can to repeal or defund it. But that is not the case.

Noam Scheiber expects a government shutdown on October 1, and he thinks it will be a good thing since it will sober up the Republicans ahead of the debt ceiling vote.

Fortunately, a shutdown is almost certainly a good thing. Yes, it can slow the economy and wreak temporary havoc on people who rely on government services. But these consequences are nothing alongside the fallout from defaulting on our debt, which will happen if we don’t raise the debt ceiling by mid-October. That's why Boehner's inability to persuade conservatives to postpone their Obamacare demands until the debt-ceiling fight is in fact a hugely welcome development. It gives everyone a chance to sober up before we take on the substantially higher-stakes proposition of avoiding a debt default. In fact, if Boehner and the White House had both been a bit more pro-shutdown back in 2011, when this whole B-movie horror flick started, that year’s debt ceiling fight and the sequester may never have happened, and we might not be in the mess we’re in today. A little bit of shutdown, I’d wager, goes a long way.

Regarding the President's prime time speech last night, I agree that the speech probably should not have been given, but it had to be given to maintain the credible threat of force that is driving the diplomatic negotiations. So the speech itself, in my mind, was less important than reactions to the overall situation. And I think Andrew Sullivan and Booman best describe my thoughts: Andrew Sullivan:

That was one of the clearest, simplest and most moving presidential speeches to the nation I can imagine. It explained and it argued, point after point. Everything the president said extemporaneously at the post-G20 presser was touched on, made terser, more elegant and more persuasive. [...] I’m tired of the eye-rolling and the easy nit-picking of the president’s leadership on this over the last few weeks. The truth is: his threat of war galvanized the world and America, raised the profile of the issue of chemical weapons more powerfully than ever before, ensured that this atrocity would not be easily ignored and fostered a diplomatic initiative to resolve the issue without use of arms. All the objectives he has said he wanted from the get-go are now within reach, and the threat of military force – even if implicit – remains. Yes, it’s been messy. A more cautious president would have ducked it. Knowing full well it could scramble his presidency, Obama nonetheless believed that stopping chemical weapons use is worth it – for the long run, and for Americans as well as Syrians. Putin understands this as well. Those chemical weapons, if uncontrolled, could easily slip into the hands of rebels whose second target, after Assad and the Alawites and the Christians, would be Russia. This emphatically does not solve the Syria implosion. But Obama has never promised to. What it does offer is a nonviolent way toward taking the chemical weapons issue off the table. Just because we cannot solve everything does not mean we cannot solve something. And the core truth is that without Obama’s willingness to go out on a precarious limb, we would not have that opportunity. The money quote for me, apart from the deeply moving passage about poison gas use at the end, was his description of a letter from a service-member who told him, “We should not be the world’s policeman.” President Obama said, quite simply: “I agree.” And those on the far right who are accusing him of ceding the Middle East to Russia are half-right and yet completely wrong. What this remarkable breakthrough has brought about is a possible end to the dynamic in which America is both blamed for all the evils in the world and then also blamed for not stopping all of them. We desperately need to rebuild international cooperation to relieve us of that impossible burden in a cycle that can only hurt us and the West again and again.

Sarah Palin, September 9, 2013.

Enough of this foreign fiasco distraction. Get back to work. It is time to bomb Obamacare.

I will now refer to Sarah Palin as a potential terrorist. Potential Terrorist Sarah Palin said today that she wants to bomb hospitals and medical clinics across the country, and she wants to bomb all those with preexisting conditions who can now get affordable health insurance. Potential Terrorist Sarah Palin wants them all dead. Now, back to that foreign fiasco distraction... So it seems that the Obama Administration has found itself a diplomatic out at the last minute, and it is one that they should take. In fact, come inside to find out why I am now a yes vote.

The Obama Administration has finally gone on record to say while the President believes he has the authority to attack Syria with or without Congressional approval, he does not intend to launch such an attack without the backing of lawmakers:

President Barack Obama isn't likely to launch a military strike on Syria if Congress votes against doing so, a top national security official said Friday. During an interview on NPR's "Morning Edition," Tony Blinken, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said "the president of course has the authority" to take limited military action in Syria with or without the approval of lawmakers, but "it's neither his desire nor intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him."

I would prefer a Shermanesque "He won't," but this is better than nothing. So Congress, vote this thing down and let's all get on with our lives. And if the vote were held today in the House, it would fail.

"In a world in which threats are more diffuse and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace." -- President Obama, in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009. In all this Syria discussion, we kinda forgot that the end of the world is imminent in mid-October. Yeah, remember about the budget deadline (October 1) and debt ceiling deadline (October 15). Republicans all summer were saying that they would shut down the government and default on the debt if President Obama did not repeal Obamacare. For the last two weeks, they have kinda shut up about that, maybe because of a point First Read makes:

"Would a Congress that authorizes military action in Syria shut down the U.S. government and default just a few weeks later?"