REBOOBLICANS LOSE BUT REMAIN IN CONTROL.

Ogden, Utah

GEORGE PACKER NEW YORKER

Jenny Brown started working for the Internal Revenue Service right out of high school, in 1985, typing numbers from tax returns into a computer. Her home town, of Ogden, Utah, has not only a large I.R.S. facility but an Air Force base, Hill Field, where Brown’s father worked as a civilian. Her stepfather and her late sister used to work at the base; a brother, a son, and a nephew work there now. Her other son is with the Army in Afghanistan, and two other nephews are in the Air Force. “We’re really just a government family,” Brown said last week, on the second-to-last day of the shutdown. And Ogden is a government town, with twenty-four thousand federal employees. Brown grew up with the belief that a government job was secure, well-paying, and honorable, but, when she told her new doctor recently that she works for the I.R.S., he replied, in all seriousness, “Do you need a prescription for Xanax, or some kind of stress reducer?”

In fact, a lot of Brown’s colleagues, in Ogden and around the country, are taking pills for stress. They haven’t had a raise in three years. Every I.R.S. employee lost three days of pay last summer, owing to furloughs brought on by the blind budget cutting known as sequestration, and during the shutdown ninety per cent of the agency’s employees were sent home without pay. Many of them now live paycheck to paycheck, and some had to turn to food banks during the sixteen days of the shutdown, while the charity at the Ogden local of the National Treasury Employees Union (Brown is the president of Chapter 67) ran low on supplies. Nationally, the agency’s workforce has been cut by almost twenty-five per cent in the past two decades, while the number of individual tax returns filed has grown by an even larger figure.



With the extra workload, face-to-face audits have dropped by half since 1992, as have the odds of being convicted for a tax crime. Frank Clemente, the director of Americans for Tax Fairness, says, “When the I.R.S. doesn’t have the money to do its job, it’s easier for wealthy people and big corporations to cheat the system, especially by hiding profits offshore.” For every dollar added to the I.R.S. budget, the agency is able to collect at least seven dollars in revenue, but in times of austerity that money doesn’t come in—which means that, in recent years, the Treasury has lost billions in taxes, starving government services and increasing the deficit. Another result, Jenny Brown pointed out, is that wait times at the Ogden call center have risen from ten or fifteen minutes a few years ago to an hour or more today. “By the time they get the I.R.S. on the phone, they’re frustrated, and they vent awhile, which takes up more time,” she said
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.The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s, the Tea Party’s brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars—more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth. House Republicans have suffered a huge tactical defeat of their own devising, and their approval ratings are at an all-time low. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.

These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means—gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism—to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. “The whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week.



While House Republicans go home to sift through the debris of their defeat, the sequester remains in place, with deeper cuts ahead. A hiring freeze at United States Attorneys’ offices will continue and they will have to go on using volunteers. There will be no new agents to fill training classes at the F.B.I. Academy, while the bureau’s concrete headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue, crumbles. The loss of government scholarships at the National Health Services Corps will mean fewer doctors in underserved areas. Jenny Brown’s friends and co-workers in Ogden will look for jobs in the private sector. Ms.Tanden said,  “We are living in a time of government withering on the vine.”





GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

So Congress has passed, and Obama has signed, legislation ending the government shutdown and lifting the debt limit. Obama and Dems won. But what, exactly, did they win? Dems won two victories on principle, but their implications for the future remain uncertain.

By holding the line amid tough conditions, Obama and Dems established that they will not negotiate on the terms Republicans are insisting upon — an important victory on principle. As Jonathan Cohn details convincingly, agreement on the importance of this principle is precisely why Obama and Dems were able to maintain unity throughout.

Democrats also won a second victory on principle: They forced Republicans to allow a majority to prevail in the House. The outsized influence the conservative wing wields over the GOP leadership — preventing a vote on something that would pass with Democrats – combined with that bloc’s insistence on threat of destruction to force Dems to accept the unacceptable, caused the paralysis. But the outcome revealed GOP leaders would cast off both under severe political duress, breaking the conservative Republican ”legislative cartel.”

The question is whether this will matter for upcoming budget talks and for the government shutdown and debt limit deadlines next year. That will turn on whether GOP leaders are really prepared to resist the conservative wing’s insistence on more of the same later. I’ve laid out why Dems don’t expect a rerun of debt limit extortion. Brian Beutler also is skeptical of a rerun. But this remains to be seen.
On budget talks, the future will turn on whether this battle has left enough non-Tea Party Republicans so fed up with House GOP chaos governing that they will agree to compromises with Dems that will infuriate the right. Some 87 House Republicans voted with Dems last night.
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There are still no signs even sensible Senate Republicans are ready to give on another core difference between the parties — over the need for new revenues. And the sequester gives Republicans leverage going into the talks. So there’s no telling whether yesterday’s Dem win will translate into a long term thaw. But it was an important victory on principle nonetheless — one that does make future progress more likely, even if it doesn’t guarantee it.

Buried in the Post’s overview of the resolution to the crisis is this matter-of-fact tidbit:

Enforcement of the debt limit is suspended until Feb. 7, setting up another confrontation over the national debt sometime in March, independent analysts estimated.

This is key: it signals that the next debt limit deadline is likely to be deeper into 2014 than the February 7th deadline indicates, thanks to Treasury measures (indeed, it’s likely to be later than March). This will only make a confrontation over it harder politically for the GOP.

THE SMOULDERING SOUTHERN RIGHT WING

Jim DeMint

LLOYD GREEN DAILY BEAST

Welcome to the latest installment in America’s long-simmering, semi-civil, civil war. Just because General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House doesn’t mean that old grievances have gone away.

These days, the Republican Party is the party of the South; the party of Lincoln is now the party of Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint; and the DeMint-backed Senate Conservatives Fund is bellowing that the “Republicans are the problem right now.” The only thing missing from this tableau is South Carolina’s long-gone Preston Brooks.

Preston Brooks?  Yes, Preston Brooks. Back in the day—the day being May 1856, he beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner over the head with a cane in retaliation for a speech Sumner delivered a few weeks earlier, in which Sumner had advocated the abolition of slavery and dissed a Brooks relative.

Still, the reality is that the skirmishes of the last four-plus years are less about race per se, and more about diversity tinged by the brush-strokes of need, and the political demands of the polychromatic poor. As Jonathan Chait acknowledged, “In a few weeks, the United States government, like those of France, or Australia, or Israel, will begin to regard health insurance as something to be handed out to one and all, however poor, lazy, or otherwise undeserving each recipient may be.”    

Through this lens, the fights over Obamacare, or even immigration and guns are not simply about the transfer of wealth, government mandates, amnesty, or the text of the Second Amendment. Rather, it is a culture war, a battle over the social fabric itself, in an America which grows ever less monochromatic....

Against this sulfurous backdrop, Democrats and Republicans alike feel compelled to man the ramparts for their core constituencies. In the Congress, a Confederate-like hostility to government has found a home in the House of Representatives, where a majority of the majority (translation – a minority) blocks consideration of a clean continuing resolution that would allow government to muddle along, and the stock market to heave a sigh of relief.

For those who worry about these developments—like the high end of the GOP’s donor base—Republican-induced market drops are unwelcome, and could lead to problems for the party down the road. Obama’s tax hikes are despised, but what’s a tax hike compared to a default-triggered portfolio wipe-out?

As a reminder, wealthier voters actually voted Democratic in 2008—a first—as a rebuke to the failings of George W. Bush’s presidency....But beyond the fight over the budget and the debt, the Republican Party appears ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by America’s changing demographics. It is not just about minorities. The gender gap looms large at the voting booth, as well as among donors. In 2012, women donated 44 cents of every campaign dollar received by the Obama campaign, but less than 30 cents raked in by the Romneyites. 

Also, there is the issue of geography and the cultural center. Right now, Ted Cruz is the leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and is followed by Kentucky’s Rand Paul. New Jersey’s Chris Christie trails in third. Cruz’s filibuster delighted many conservatives, and powered him to the top of the GOP’s scrum. But beyond that, his appeal and traction appear limited to the party faithful.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton is part of the cultural center. She was once the first lady of Arkansas, and in 2008 she ran well among white working-class voters. Equally as important, she is closer to her party’s center of gravity—unlike Mitt Romney or Governor Christie, who appear to be outliers within their own party, each in his own way. In other words, Clinton would be an easy sell to the Democratic base.

 

SENATORS VOTE STRAIGHT ALONG PARTY LINES ON DEFUNDING BILL

Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio

WASHINGTON POST

The Senate voted along party lines Friday to approve a short-term spending bill that restores funding for the new federal health-care law and sends it back to the House, where its fate remains uncertain.

Final passage came at the end of a series of four votes that had senators  end debate on the bill, approve a procedural change regarding spending, add an amendment that restored funding for the health-care law and then decide on final passage. The vote to end debate — formally known as cloture — and the final passage vote were seen as most critical, so here’s our look at what happened:

ON THE CLOTURE VOTE (to end formal debate on the spending bill):
Final tally: 79 to 19.
How many Democrats voted yes?: 54.
How many Republicans voted yes?: 23.
How many Republicans voted no?: 19.
How many Democrats voted no?: 0.
How many senators didn’t vote?: 2

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Which Republicans voted no?: Sens. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Deb Fischer (Neb.), Charles Grassley (Iowa), Dean Heller (Nev.), James Inhofe (Okla.), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Rob Portman (Ohio), James Risch (Idaho), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Richard Shelby (Ala.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), David Vitter (La.).
Which senators didn’t vote?: Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) (who is attending his son’s wedding in Arizona) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).

Votes Notes: Seen through the lens of raw politics, this vote is a new way to measure the ideological and tactical divide among the chamber’s 46 Senate Republicans.
For GOP senators, the cloture vote was less about proceeding to final passage of the bill and more about which camp they chose to join. There’s the camp led by Cruz and Lee that sought to use all procedural means necessary to defund the health-care law, or at least slow consideration of the Senate spending bill. This group also is working closely with conservative House Republicans on what they might be able to do over the weekend to amend the bill and send it back to the Senate.

Then there’s the group led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his deputy, John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who believe it makes more sense to quickly send the spending measure back to the GOP-controlled House, where it can be amended again with changes amenable to Republican lawmakers.
Indications early Friday suggested that the Cruz-Lee camp would earn as many as 20 votes — and that would have happened if Flake had been in Washington.

As The Post’s Paul Kane noted, when you take away the five top-ranking Republican leaders, the rank and file was basically split down the middle. Put another way, Cruz basically fought Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to a draw on this issue.

There was no policy at stake in this vote. It was procedural. And as some Republicans privately argue, had there been actual policy at stake, Cruz would probably have received far less support. But policy is not where his wing of the party’s power is centered. (Just ask yourself what bills DeMint was ever responsible for passing as a senator.) It’s politics where their weight is felt. This vote reinforced that muscle.

All three of the GOP senators most often mentioned as potential 2016 candidates voted “no.” In addition to Cruz, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) each voted against cloture. That’s a pretty hefty cross-section of the potential 2016 field right there.

ON FINAL PASSAGE OF THE SPENDING BILL:
Vote tally: 54 to 44.
How many Democrats voted yes?: 54.
How many Republicans voted yes?: 0.
How many Democrats voted no?: 0.
How many Republicans voted no?: 44.

TED CRUZ AND THE REBOOBLICANS

(J. Scott Applewhite/AP)




MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

The key question facing the Senate this week is not whether Ted Cruz will get his filibuster. He won’t. Oh, he scored some big points with his pseudo-filibuster Tuesday night, which is destined to make him enough of a hero to some Americans to win, oh, up to 180 electoral votes in 2016.

Instead, the interesting and important question at hand here is this: how many Republican senators are going to vote for a “clean” continuing resolution—one that keeps the government running with no strings attached? Many Republican senators have said in recent days or weeks that shutting down the government is unviable and defunding Obamacare is impossible. Well, if they think that, then logic dictates they ought to vote for the clean CR, right? But few will. So I say to you: Watch those numbers, because they’ll tell you the extent to which the extreme wing of the base is running the party right now. And they’ll probably end up telling you that even though Cruz lost his filibuster battle, he’s going to win the war.

Here are the numbers. We have 46 GOP senators, right? Right. And over the course of the last two months, 24 of those, more than half, have put statements on the record saying shutting down the government over Obamacare would be ridiculous.
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...defunding Obamacare at this time and in this way is absolutely the wrong thing to do. They want to save that fight for another day, and they don’t want any part of a government shutdown.

So these 24 should vote for the bill Reid is going to present to them, should they not? After all, his bill will keep the government operating (only until December 15, but at least it’ll keep the lights on). And it will put off the Obamacare fight to another day.

The other 22 Republican senators are probably lost (although there are a couple of anomalies among that 22). But why shouldn’t the 24 vote with the Democrats? The Democratic bill will be their stated position!

But of course, they won’t. Reid and other Democrats, I’m told, are lobbying them hard, trying to get them to cast a bipartisan vote. Think about the rare signal a bipartisan vote would send here, even if it were just 12 Republicans and not 24. It would put more pressure on House Speaker John Boehner to accept the Senate’s clean CR—again, the one these Republicans say they want!—by next Tuesday, and pressure on more House Republicans to vote for it. A bipartisan vote would show that the far-outers really had finally gone too far out this time and what we need is a dose of sanity, however temporary. Instead, I would be shocked if more than four or five Republicans vote for Reid’s bill. It’s the usual list: maybe John McCain, Susan Collins, Mark Kirk, Lisa Murkowski, and so on.

So why would so many people vote against their own position? First and foremost, of course, because it’s Reid’s position, and by extension Obama’s. Only a few of them have the stones to play with that fire. But second, they also know that giving Reid as few GOP votes as possible strengthens the hand of Boehner and the House Republicans to play games with the CR the Senate sends back to the House. Boehner can attach new conditions that are short of a full defunding but that might delay certain aspects of the law anyway. That’s also why Republican senators started saying on Tuesday afternoon that they want to get the bill back to the House as soon as they possibly can, so the House Republicans have more time to make mischief.

So they’re against a shutdown, these GOP senators, and they’re against trying to defund Obamacare in this way. But they, or most of them, are going to vote against their own stated position to help the rabid House Republicans throw more monkey wrenches into the gears.....

And it basically affirms the Cruz view. Senate Republicans will not back Cruz on his filibuster, but unless I really miss my guess here, all but a handful of them are going to be voting for Cruz’s position, to defund Obamacare. In this sense, they’re still making him their de facto leader. The logic of these things is such that next time, probably December 15, Cruz just might have a little more support for a filibuster, and then a little more, and then a little more. And each time, Cruz attains that much more power.

I doubt most of those 24 senators really want that.

BIDEN'S SMART BLUEPRINT FOR THE DEMOCRATS IN 2014 MIDTERM ELCETIONS.

CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

For Democrats in search of a message that might not only galvanize their party’s base but also persuade independents in what history suggests will be a tough midterm election next November, Joe Biden laid out a blueprint Tuesday night.
Speaking at a fundraiser in D.C. for Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey’s special Senate election campaign, the vice president launched into a lengthy broadside against the current state of the Republican Party.
Here’s the meat of what he said:

“This is not your father’s Republican Party. It really is a fundamentally different party. There’s never been as much distance — at least since I’ve been alive — distance between where the mainstream of the Republican congressional party is and the Democratic Party is. It’s a chasm. It’s a gigantic chasm. … But the last thing in the world we need now is someone who will go down to the United States Senate and support Ted Cruz, support the new senator from Kentucky (Rand Paul) — or the old senator from Kentucky (Mitch McConnell). … Think about this: Have you ever seen a time when two freshman senators are able to cower the bulk of the Republican Party in the Senate? That is not hyperbole.”
 

Biden went on — he’s never at a loss for words — to detail how, in conversations he had with nine Republican senators prior to the votes on President Obama’s gun bill, the most common reason cited for their opposition was a fear of “taking on” Cruz or Paul.



The picture Biden is trying to paint is this: The Republican party is beholden to absolutists like Cruz and Paul who view any compromise as a concession, that a vote for any Republican for Senate — even one like Gabriel Gomez who has worked hard to avoid any connections to the national GOP during his campaign against Markey — is a vote for that sort of my-way-or-the-highway approach that subjugates getting things done to philosophical principles. (Tougher gun background checks, which national polling suggested had widespread support among the American public, is Exhibit A for Biden in making that argument.) [Cruz is a gun-rights supporter. He, along with U.S. Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee led the filibuster against the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, which would require background checks on sales at gun shows. Republicans successfully filibustered the amendment by a vote of 54–46, as 60 votes were needed for cloture.]

<sup>And poll after poll has shown the GOP remains in poorer stead with the American people than the Democratic Party. A recent Post-ABC News poll showed Americans thought Republicans in Congress were more focused on issues that aren’t pertinent to them than those that are by a 60-33 margin. For Democrats, the split was 50 percent non-pertinent and 43 percent pertinent.
It’s obvious why such a message works to rev up a Democratic base that struggled in the 2010 midterms to generate the sort of passion that propelled President Obama to wider-than-expected victories in 2008 and 2012. Cruz, and to a lesser extent Paul, have both emerged as the sort of national bogeymen for Democrats that Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy were once for Republicans. Just mention Cruz or Paul to a base Democratic voter, and their desire to give money and/or show up at the ballot box in 2014 goes up.
The potency of the “just too extreme” message among independents is demonstrated by the success of Democratic Senate candidates in conservative-leaning states like Indiana and Missouri in 2012. There’s no way that Claire McCaskill wins re-election or Joe Donnelly gets elected without winning a large majority of those voters who identify themselves as independents. . The question for Democrats is whether tying Cruz to, say, Rep. Bill Cassidy, the likely nominee against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), can (a) be done and (b) move voters. While political junkies know Cruz and Paul, does the average voter in a state they have never represented or likely even visited know who they are?
What’s not in doubt is that, if the Louisiana race becomes a vote on Obama and national Democrats, Landrieu will lose. Ditto Senate races in South Dakota, West Virginia, North Carolina and Arkansas.

Biden is counseling his party to make 2014 a referendum on Republicans, not Democrats. It’s not an easy sell, but it may well be Democrats’ best bet in what, on paper, should be a very difficult election.</sup>