GOP’s fatal do-nothing problem: Why everything changes once Pubs have to govern

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From Salon:

Wednesday, Oct 29, 2014 10:39 AM EDT

GOP’s fatal do-nothing problem: Why everything changes once Republicans have to govern

Republicans are likely to take the Senate, but even they admit one major problem: they can't get anything done

Simon Maloy


Let’s just go ahead and assume that the Republicans are going to win control the Senate. It’s a safe assumption, given the trajectories of the toss-up races and the fact that Arkansas and Colorado appear to have slipped away from the Democrats. It’s also increasingly clear that reporters and pundits are less and less willing to entertain notions of an unexpected Democratic resurgence. When the writing’s on the wall, people can’t help but read it.

As such, there’s been a glut of stories lately on how, exactly, a Republican-dominated Congress would govern. House majority leader Kevin McCarthy talked to Politico and said that the GOP is going to have to implement some changes when it comes into power and actually work to pass an agenda that has a chance of making it past President Obama’s veto pen. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio talked to the Atlantic’s Molly Ball and said that a Republican majority in the Senate will work to hammer out compromises with the administration: “He mentioned tax reform, a ‘grand bargain’ on the budget, an energy bill—perhaps something that combines Keystone XL pipeline approval with reductions in carbon emissions—and new free-trade agreements.”

Such a lovely vision of bipartisan comity! All it’s missing is any plausible scenario in which it could come to pass.

I’m a pessimist in this regard, in case you couldn’t tell. I don’t doubt that there’s a sincere desire among some factions within the GOP to actually work with the Democrats and the administration to implement policy. The problem is that there are so many other Republican factions that view compromise as heretical, and they make it impossible for the Republicans to actually govern. And that’s not just my assessment; that’s what the Republicans say, too.

The whole question of “can the Republicans govern” has been asked for a long time now, and each time it’s asked the answer that everyone eventually settles on is “no.” Way back in February, the Republicans were contemplating this very question and were angst-ridden over the divisions that plagued the party and the attendant perception that the GOP was too fractious to actually govern. They were concerned that people wouldn’t vote them into power if they couldn’t be trusted to effectively wield that power. They came up with a solution that elegantly resolved the perception issue, but left the underlying problem unresolved: do nothing.

Seriously, their strategy to convince everyone they could govern was to not govern. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa reported at the time on the Republican leadership’s thinking: basically, since everyone correctly assumed that the Republicans wouldn’t be able to muster enough votes from their own caucus pass legislation on any major issues like immigration or healthcare reform, the better option was to just sit on their hands, try not to do anything stupid, and trust that the people would confuse their relative lack of comedic faceplants for legislative competence. “We don’t have 218 votes in the House for the big issues,” Costa quoted Rep. David Nunes as saying, “so what else are we going to do?”

And even the “don’t do anything stupid” strategy was too much to ask. When the child migrant crisis at the southern border exploded over the summer, the House Republicans found themselves forced by circumstances to pass legislation on a major issue – precisely the situation they had hoped to avoid. And they made a complete hash of it. Boehner waited until the very last minute before the August recess to try and pass a bill to address the crisis, only to get hamstrung by Steve King and the conservatives in his own caucus. So he went into extra time to pass a bill that appeased the nativists, but couldn’t pass the Senate (it had already adjourned anyway). And this fiasco, they argued, was the actual proof they could govern.

I don’t really see how this dynamic changes in 2015 and beyond. Conservatives – the people who will have handed the Republicans control of Congress – don’t want compromise. They want the IRS eliminated, Obamacare repealed, Benghazi investigated, and (time permitting) the president impeached. If anything, conservatives are going to be more adamant that the GOP pursue hardline right-wing policies given that 2016 is shaping up to be a rough cycle for the Republicans and control of the Senate could be a short-lived proposition. That means crisis governance and using things like the debt ceiling and government funding to try and force the White House’s hand. Mitch McConnell has already indicated that he will pursue that strategy to force Obama to “move to the center.”

Speaking of McConnell and his hostage-taking strategy, he might want to put in a call to Kevin McCarthy’s office, since the House majority leader told Politico that he wants the Republicans to abandon “cliffs” as a tactic for forcing policy through Congress:

“If we are fortunate to have both majorities, take away any cliff you can have hanging out there,” McCarthy said, sitting in his SUV fiddling with an iPhone and Blackberry. “If you have a cliff, it takes attention away. Why put cliffs up that hold us back from doing bigger policy?”

So can Republicans govern? Well, they’re not even in the majority yet and already they can’t agree on what they should do.
 
I don't think "Why Everything Changes" is an apt description of what will happen with Republican control of both houses of Congress. It is more like "Nothing Changes". Partisan gridlock will persist and we all know it. Perhaps, the gridlock becomes a little bit more overt from Pennsylvania Avenue in the form of veto.

I am hopeful that Richard Tisei captures the MA 6th though. He has a reasonable chance as does Charlie Baker of taking the state house. If only Jean, 'The Cunt' Shaheen would go down in NH. What a lovely day that would be.
 
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I can just imagine the preposterous excuses the RWCJ is dreaming up as we speak. But, but, but...
 
The stimulus and the ACA.

He's also lowered the deficit.

That said, he's still way too far to the right for my tastes... and his support of FISA, warentless wiretapping, drone strikes, and so forth put him at odds with my tastes... However, you'd think that the wingnuts would love him... if only he were white and had an R in front of his name.
 
Also from Salon:

Wednesday, Oct 29, 2014 01:45 PM EDT

Conservatives’ rude awakening: Why GOP senate is about to infuriate its base

Even if it takes the senate, GOP won't be able to achieve much. How will McConnell explain that to conservatives?

Jim Newell


Now’s the point where Republican Senate control seems likely enough — though not guaranteed! — that would-be members of that majority are going to have to start dialing back expectations.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, who may or may not but probably will be leader of that majority, has been vocal about the presumed Republican Senate majority’s desire to repeal Obamacare “root and branch.” (Although Kentucky can keep its Obamacare, since it’s just a “website,” etc etc.) What anyone who has a working knowledge of basic governmental process understands, though, is that Obamacare will not be repealed in the next Congress. A Republican attempt to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would first have to surmount a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, which it wouldn’t, and then override a presidential veto with 67 votes in the Senate and whatever two-thirds of 435 is in the House, which it also wouldn’t. Even in the magical outer-space fairy land where a repeal passed, Republicans would then face all sorts of other problems, like coming up with an alternative for the millions of people who lose their coverage.

Mitch McConnell is, among other things, a person with a working knowledge of basic governmental process. And here’s his message for the Fox News public in these closing days of the campaign:

McConnell said repealing Obamacare remains at the top of his priority list.

“But remember who’s in the White House for two more years. Obviously he’s not going to sign a full repeal, but there are pieces of it that are extremely unpopular with the American public and that the Senate ought to have a chance to vote on,” he said.

McConnell also noted Democrats could filibuster a repeal effort.

“It would take 60 votes in the Senate. No one thinks we’re going to have 60 Republicans, and it would take a presidential signature,” McConnell said. “I’d like to put the Senate Democrats in the position of voting on the most unpopular parts of this law and see if we can put it on the president’s desk.”

Okay, sure. There might be a repeal of, say, the medical device tax that makes its way to the president’s desk. That would still leave thousands of other pages of evil full-communist health law on the books though. What can you do about that? Very little.

Admitting that he won’t be able to get Obamacare repealed in the next two years, though, will be one of the easier parts of McConnell’s expectation-setting. Maybe the Republican base has finally come around to accepting that. But it took years for the simple fact to set in that Republicans can’t achieve any ideological goals with control of only one chamber of Congress. It took years for them to realize that taking government spending bills and debt ceiling hikes hostage were poor gambits with control of only one chamber of Congress. If Republicans get control of both the House and Senate, expectations among the base are going to jump right back to those old, naive levels, even though the basic dynamics of gridlock won’t change beyond the margin.

There may be some things that a Republican Congress could place on the president’s desk and pressure him into signing. A repeal of the medical device tax, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, some other small measure deregulation here or there. But the more ambitious ideological aims that they were not able to achieve with mere possession of the House — an Obamacare repeal, a Paul Ryan-esque budget — will still not be achievable with the additional possession of the Senate.

One thing we’ll be sure to hear from conservatives if Republicans take control of the Senate is that McConnell has a couple of procedural options available to him, if only he has the “spine” to pursue them: invoking a “nuclear option” on legislation — i.e., eliminating the 60-vote cloture requirement altogether — or pursuing party goals through the budget reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to bypass the filibuster on certain budget-related items. If our dear friend George F. Will is to be believed, McConnell would never even consider such aggressive maneuvers, since “restoring dignity to the Senate” is at all times foremost on the Kentuckian’s mind. Uh huh. We’re willing to bet that if either of those moves would help McConnell in any way, then he’d pull the trigger. But they won’t, because President Obama can still veto whatever comes through, and then we’ll be in two-thirds majority territory. And Mitch McConnell knows this.

Mitch McConnell knows a lot of things. He knows that Republicans still won’t be able to enact many significant agenda items even with control of both the House and Senate. He also knows that conservative activists nevertheless will expect him to enact many significant agenda items with control of both the House and Senate. This tension would probably resolve itself through a reliving of recent farcical history: the play-acting of brinksmanship. Things will go right down to the wire, yet again, on government funding measures and debt ceiling hikes, solely so McConnell can say “we tried everything!” and save some face, even though he knows it will all have been a waste of time. The lessons of 2011-2013 will have to be relearned.
 
[shrug] Both were half-assed measures, but we needed the stimulus and we needed some sort of health-care reform.

Evolutionary approaches work best as compromise solutions.

Sure, you'll have scorched-earth chuckleheads like Botany Boy squealing that anything less than single-payer is a failure...

And you'll have morans like Contrifan32 saying that the existing system worked fine and any change would mean The End Of The World As We Know It....

And then you'll have sickos like Julybaby04 and Vettebigot who enjoy the suffering of others...

I think Obamacare was a necessary step (yes, Botany, you can call it a sidestep) to eventual single payer. It's a stopgap measure.

And with the benefit of hindsight, America could have recovered a lot faster had the stimulus been bigger. The stimulus proved beyond the shadow of a a doubt that Keynesian policy absolutely works, and works well, in an economic downturn. Only the most delusional mouthbreathers deny that now.
 
Yes we needed to put health care prices at an all time unaffordable highs for productive people, so that non-productive people could have better plans of their own for free.

Another day, another lie.

#DisgraceToTehUSMC
 
Precisely!

What has he done to raise us up?

63 straight months of economic expansion.

the longest period of private sector job creation in American history.

Unemployment has dropped from 10.1% in October of 2009 to 5.9%

The Dow Jones Industrial averages reached an all-time high of 17,098 in August, 2014

The 2014 deficit is projected to be around $500 billion, the smallest deficit since 2007 and roughly 1/3 of what it was in 2009.

Under President Obama, spending has increased only 1.4% annually, the lowest rate since Eisenhower was president.

For 95% of American taxpayers, income taxes are lower now than just about any time in the previous 50 years

dependence on foreign oil has shrunk due to record domestic oil production and improved fuel efficiency standards.

At least 7 million more Americans now have health insurance than before.

The Medicare trust fund had been on course to run out of money by the end of 2016. But due to cost savings from the Affordable Care Act and lower healthcare expenses, Medicare’s trust fund is now stable until the year 2030 without cutting benefits

Since passage of the Affordable Care Act, we are seeing the slowest rate of increase in healthcare costs since 1960.

We currently have fewer soldiers, sailors and airmen in war zones than any time in over 10 years.

There have been zero successful attacks by al Qaeda on US soil since Obama became president.

We now successfully catch and deport more illegal immigrants than ever before

http://jeff61b.hubpages.com/hub/14-Facts-About-The-Obama-Presidency-That-Most-People-Dont-Know The link contains links to where the numbers come from, including those well known Communists at Forbes
 
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