GOP Clown Car Crashes, Again

By Joe Conason, The National Memo

03 January 12

bserving the Congressional Republicans repeatedly stumble in and out of their caucus clown car, blowing loud kazoos and muttering angry threats, should be painful, embarrassing, and highly instructive to any American voter with the patience to watch. When their latest performance concluded late Tuesday night with a 257 to 187 vote passing the stopgap fiscal deal negotiated by the Senate and the White House, an unavoidable question lingered: What is wrong with those people?

The simple explanation is that the House of Representatives has increasingly been dominated over the past two decades by a coterie of tantrum-prone extremists, who lack the probity and steadiness required for democratic self-government. Their diminished capacity is reflected in the low quality of leadership they have chosen during this long twilight, from Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, even as their politics have grown more and more extreme.

Under the stress of their incoherence, the Republican caucus is unable to escape one humiliating mess after another. The damage they routinely inflict on the country's economy and future is reaching incalculable levels - and is almost certain to grow worse when they again hold the debt ceiling hostage next month.

By the end of the current episode - which is only an interlude rather than a true resolution - the top Republicans in the House had split, with Boehner casting a rare vote in favor, and House Budget Committee chair and former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan (R-WI) voting yes, along with 84 fellow Republicans and almost all of the House Democrats, while House Majority Leader and would-be Speaker Eric Cantor (R-VA) voted no. On the floor, House Ways and Means chair Dave Camp (R-MI) tried to claim that this bill is "the largest tax cut in history," although he might have difficulty explaining why more than 150 Republicans voted against it.

The Republicans' incompetence in government is inextricably connected with their ideological extremism, as the latest events demonstrate. Hogtied by the craziness of the ultra-right Tea Party faction, the House GOP leadership cannot even cooperate with other Republicans in the Senate - who overwhelmingly voted for the "cliff" deal negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden - let alone conduct serious discussions with the White House.

Having refused to support the leadership's "Plan B" scheme to raise taxes only on households making $1 million or more annually - despite confident claims by Boehner and Cantor that they had counted the necessary votes - the Republican caucus made both themselves and their leaders look ridiculous. It was a dreadful right-wing plan, but still much too liberal for too many of them. Tacitly acknowledging that he could no longer manage his restless wingnuts, Boehner insisted that the Senate and White House should come up with an emergency measure on their own.

Yet when the Senate leadership, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, offered a bill negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden - just as Boehner had urged - the House Republicans descended into crisis. Their leaders couldn't endorse the bill, fearing that the GOP caucus crazies would defenestrate them. But they could hardly employ their usual partisan tactics to keep the bill off the House floor, after the Senate had passed it by a vote of 89-8, with only five Republican defections. They might have noticed as well their declining numbers in every public poll, with the latest Republican-leaning Rasmussen survey showing a Democratic lead in the generic congressional contest of 11 points and climbing.

Astonishingly, they nevertheless wasted several hours debating whether to amend the bill with new spending cuts and then send it back to the Senate, where leaders of both parties would have surely and justly rejected such tardy handiwork. Consistent only in their ineptitude, the House Republicans were reportedly unable to agree among themselves on exactly how to change the bill, in any case.

Finally, they folded - or at least their leaders did - and proclaimed that they were girding themselves for the battles to come over the budget and the debt ceiling, which have now been postponed for another month or so.

The deal itself is not a bad one, from the Democratic perspective, raising significant new revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers and excluding any "grand bargain" (or raw deal) to weaken Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Its specific provisions are still far too generous to the highest-income taxpayers and will not, in the long run, raise enough revenue to sustain decent government, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, and prepare for the future.

The struggle over what government should do and how to pay for its functions continues, almost immediately. And perhaps soon the president and his party will explain, without hesitation, what this brief tumble over the "cliff" has shown us, and what we may hope they have finally learned: That there is no negotiating partner among the House Republicans, who must be defeated if progress is to be possible.

A Confederacy of Madmen

Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

02 January 13

The fiscal-cliff impasse had its roots in - where else? - the old South, with its lunatic blend of obstructionism and greed at the public trough, writes Michael Tomasky.

hile most liberals were stewing at Barack Obama yesterday for his “capitulation” on tax rates, I confess that I was feeling philosophical about it, and even mildly defensive of him. He is negotiating with madmen, and you can’t negotiate with madmen, because they’re, well, mad. I also spent part of yesterday morning re-reading a little history and reminding myself that rascality like this fiscal-cliff business has been going on since the beginning of the republic. So now I’d like to remind you. It’s always the reactionaries holding up the progressives - and usually, needless to say, it’s been the South holding up the North - and always with the same demagogic and dishonest arguments about a tyrannical central government. We’ll never be rid of these paranoid bloviators, and if no other president could stop them I don’t really see why Obama ought to be able to.

This history of legislative hostage-taking begins with the odious three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. That much I trust you know. What you may not know is that the Southern states, backers of the three-fifths rule in this case in order to get greater representation in the House of Representatives, had opposed a different three-fifths rule earlier, back in the Articles of Confederation days. Then, three-fifths of all slaves were going to be counted for purposes of deciding how much federal tax each state owed.

In other words, the South had said, count slaves as part human for the purposes of taxation? Nevah! Count them as part-human for the purposes of representation, however - well, Yankee, now you’re talking. The South is still doing exactly the same thing today, never paying its freight, its cornpone pols inveighing against the evil government while the Southern states are collectively the most dependent on Washington largesse of all states and regions. The hypocrisy has a long pedigree.

Just three years after the three-fifths compromise we had the so-called Great Compromise of 1790, or the “dinner table bargain” mediated by Jefferson between Hamilton and Madison. Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume the states’ debts and establish public credit. Madison was dead set against it, partly on the grounds that his state of Virginia would be a big loser in any such assumption. This was true, but it also put Madison squarely against progress: against the government protecting investment capitalism, against the industrial revolution itself.

Fortunately, Jefferson brought them together, and equally fortunately, Madison was no John Boehner. He agreed not to support but also not to openly oppose Hamilton’s bill, on the condition that a new nation’s capital were built in some agrarian spot, which turned out to be a certain parcel along the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia.

This one sort of worked out, because the men involved were actual statesmen, and each side got something meaningful. But usually, American history is the history of positive developments being prevented from happening, or at least perverted, because of hostagelike demands made by the reactionaries.

Thus could California become a state in 1850, and a free one, but only provided that the Northern states would accept a much strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, which non-slave states had tried to challenge (a reactionary Supreme Court ruled with the South in 1842), and provided that the federal government would assume Texas’s crushing debt. Thus did we get Bleeding Kansas, the little precursor to the Civil War. And so on and so on.

Well, you might say, the North got its revenge with the Civil War and Reconstruction. But Southern and agrarian-reactionary elements continued to find ways to bottle up progress well into the 20th century - somehow managing to persuade northerners that they somehow had the right to chair the major congressional committees, where they made sure (except during the Depression) that very little progressive social legislation could see the light of day. This finally changed in the ’60s and ’70s for a few brief shining moments, when most of the legislation that attempts to make ours a more equitable society was passed (and most of which, contrary to right-wing mythology, was quite successful). Then came Ronald Reagan and eventually Newt Gingrich, the interests of the agrarian reactionaries now cleverly fused to those of the corporate titans ready to spend billions in common cause against progress.

What unites all these movements are pretty much the same motives that drive today’s right wing: hatred of government and taxation, constant (and almost always baseless) fear that a central authority is going to rob their liberty, and so on. They are bound together also by a kind of psychology and mindset, a conviction that they represent the good simple folk while their opponents speak for the shifty and the shiftless.

Mitch McConnell may have cut a deal with Joe Biden. But don’t forget, even though he agreed to something, and even though it went through the Senate, now it goes to the House, where all these historic resentments fester and boil. They are not now limited to the South, but the region remains their locus (think of it this way: if those 11 states of the Confederacy somehow weren’t around, we’d obviously be having no such fights).

So I’m feeling for Obama. A number of presidents have had to deal with this kind of behavior, and most haven’t done it very well. If the House will pass today the deal Obama and Joe Biden worked out last night with the Senate - higher tax rates at $400,000 and up, a higher estate tax rate, an extension of unemployment benefits, and a delay in the sequester - he will have done all right. Liberals who think he should just stand tough because he “holds all the cards” aren’t recognizing two important things.

First, he simply doesn’t hold all the cards. The Republicans control the House, and they have enough to block in the Senate. Where I come from, those are cards, and serious ones. Second, they aren’t remembering that his opponents draw on and are part of this nation’s long and often tragic history of people who represent an obsolescing minority viewpoint but do so all the more tenaciously precisely because they secretly know the viewpoint to be both of those things. We will never be rid of them. Obama is having to cross swords with a particularly intense concentration of the type, and right now, he’s doing alright.