HOUSE GOP ISN'T BLINKING: SHUTDOWN LOOMS

N.Y. TIMES

The federal government barreled toward its first shutdown in 17 years after the Republican-run House, choosing a hard line, voted to attach a one-year delay of President Obama’s health care law and a repeal of a tax to pay for it to legislation to keep the government running.

The votes, just past midnight, followed an often-angry debate, with members shouting one another down on the House floor. Democrats insisted that Republicans refused to accept their losses in 2012, were putting contempt for the president over the good of the country and would bear responsibility for a shutdown. Republicans said they had the public on their side and were acting to protect Americans from a harmful and unpopular law that had already proved a failure.

The House first voted 248-174 to repeal a tax on medical devices, then voted 231-192 to delay the law’s implementation by a year — just days before the uninsured begin enrolling in the law’s insurance exchanges.

But before the House had even voted, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, declared the House bill dead. Senate Democrats are planning to table the Republican measures when they convene on Monday, leaving the House just hours to pass a stand-alone spending bill free of any measures that undermine the health care law.       

The House’s votes early Sunday all but assured that large parts of the government would be shuttered as of 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. More than 800,000 federal workers deemed nonessential faced furloughs; millions more could be working without paychecks. A separate House Republican bill passed unanimously Sunday morning to ensure that military personnel continued to be paid in the event of a government shutdown, an acknowledgment that a shutdown is likely.

 

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio faced a critical decision this weekend: Accept a bill passed by the Senate on Friday to keep the government financed and the health care law intact and risk a conservative revolt that could threaten his speakership, or make one more effort to undermine the president’s signature domestic initiative and hope that a shutdown would not do serious political harm to his party.
With no guarantee that Democrats would help him, he chose the shutdown option. The House’s unruly conservatives had more than enough votes to defeat a spending bill that would [defund the Affordable Care Act for a year] unless Democrats were willing to bail out the speaker. And Democrats showed little inclination to alleviate the Republicans’ intraparty warfare.

“By pandering to the Tea Party minority and trying to delay the benefits of health care reform for millions of seniors and families, House Republicans are now actively pushing for a completely unnecessary government shutdown,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Democrat who leads the Budget Committee.

As provocative as it was, the move by House Republicans was an expression of their most basic political goal since they took control in 2010: doing what they can to derail the biggest legislative achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

 

After the shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, Republicans were roundly blamed. Their approval ratings plunged, and President Bill Clinton sailed to re-election. This time they say they have a strategy that will shield them from political fallout, especially with the bill to keep money flowing to members of the military. According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, if there is a federal government shutdown over Obamacare, Congressional Republicans would bear the brunt of the blame (46 percent).

 

Republicans readily acknowledged that the difficulty is what is next. If the Senate sends back a bill, it will most likely not have a yearlong delay. Then Mr. Boehner must decide whether to put that measure on the floor, which would anger his conservative members.

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

.
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.
------
...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.

GOV'T SHUTDOWN? COULD BE!......WHO KNOWS?

GREG SARGENT & JONATHAN BERNSTEIN WASHINGTON POST


The way is now seemingly clear to avoid a government shutdown: The House passed a “clean” Continuing Resolution that it paired with defunding the Affordable Care Act; the Senate will presumably delete the Obamacare provision and send the clean CR back to the House; and the House will then pass it with mostly Democratic votes, with any sighs of relief drowned out by Tea Party cries of “sell out!”

But, wait — what’s a “clean” CR, anyway? Typically, what that means is that both parties agree to keep the status quo in place for now. “Clean” means no policy changes. And so this clean CR, designed to keep the government operating for the first 10 weeks or so of the fiscal year, locks in sequestration for that long. Liberals noticing that have concluded that conservatives, the Obamacare sideshow aside, have already won, that they might win even more, and that perhaps Barack Obama is pretty much okay with sequestration, anyway.

The question is whether David Dayen is correct when he writes that “pushing sequestration into FY 2014 will probably cement it for the rest of the year.” And indeed, a while back, I was asking why Democrats weren’t fighting on CR spending levels. At that point, Greg Sargent did some reporting that I remembered today when these posts (and even more Twitter comments) were showing up. Here’s Greg’s reporting:

 Aides have said Senate Dems would probably pass a temporary funding measure at current levels — if House Republicans do. And let’s face it: President Obama has not signaled he wants a fight over temporary funding, so there probably won’t be one. Progressive groups are wary of Dems accepting GOP austerity spending levels. So would it be a cave?
Here’s the answer, as supplied by a Senate Democratic aide. The view from the Dem side is that the House GOP is currently imploding amid potentially irreconcilable divisions over how aggressively to confront Obamacare. If House Republicans pass something temporarily funding the government at current levels, i.e. $988 billion over 10 years, and Senate Dems demand more — say, at the rate of their $1.058 trillion budget  — that ultimately won’t help Dems.



Here’s why. If they demand more, there is no chance Boehner can get such a thing through the House He may not even try. Instead, Republicans can shift some blame for the looming government shutdown on to Democrats. The cause of the shutdown will become the dispute between Dems and Republicans, in which Dems are asking for more spending, instead of the cause merely being GOP intransigence and disarray. In that case the ensuing blame game could be far less advantageous to Dems. Indeed Dems might ultimately have to acquiesce to the lower spending levels. Then the story would be that Republicans held the line; Dems caved; and thus was a shutdown averted.



Dems believe that even if Republican leaders somehow muddle their way through by passing something funding the government at current levels, they’ll be in an even weaker position when the debt limit fight starts up in earnest, because conservatives will have already swallowed a defeat and will be in an even less compromising mood later. And so, at that point, Boehner will be in even greater need of Dem help to avoid disaster — setting up the possibility of a bigger deal that includes a debt limit hike (unofficially; the official position is there’s no negotiating over it) and a longer term replacement (say, one year) for the sequester that includes some new revenues. Would Republicans ever agree to new revenues? Maybe not. But remember, if the sequester replacement deal is only one year, the amount of needed revenues would be relatively small and could be accomplished with relatively easy closings on a handful of tax loopholes. And at that point, with default and economic havoc looming, he’d likely be under extreme pressure from the business community and even some Senate Republicans to reach a deal with Dems.
Anyway, that’s the thinking, as best as I understand it.

It's Govt Shutdown Threat Time Again.

GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

It continues to go overlooked in the Beltway argument over Obamacare, but one of the most fundamental factors shaping the politics of all of this is that disapproval of the Affordable Care Act does not necessarily translate into support for Republican efforts to undermine or sabotage the law.
Republicans and conservatives constantly justify either their repeated votes to repeal the law, or their threats of destructive confrontations to defund or delay it, by citing public dissatisfaction with it as proof the public supports their efforts. Yet there’s little to no polling evidence to suggest one translates into support for the other. Indeed, there’s evidence the opposite is true.
Today’s new Pew Research poll again drives this home with striking clarity. It finds 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, versus only 42 percent who approve. This mirrors a new NBC/WSJ poll finding pluralities think the law is a bad idea and will be more damaging than not. No question: Obamacare polls terribly.

But the Pew poll finds something else that’s just as important: There’s virtually no public support for efforts to undermine the law:

The 53% of the public who disapprove of the law are divided over what they would like elected officials who oppose the law to do now that the law has begun to take effect. About half of disapprovers (27% of the public overall) say these lawmakers “should do what they can to make the law work as well as possible,” but nearly as many (23% of the public) say these officials “should do what they can to make the law fail.”

Yet it is this small minority that is largely shaping the contours of the GOP posture heading into this fall’s fiscal fights. The more “moderate” and “reasonable” Republican position — the one held by GOP leaders — is that there should be no government shutdown to defund Obamacare; that an effort to delay Obamacare should be tied somehow to the debt limit fight; and that Republicans should keep working to repeal the law. Yet even this position represents an effort to placate a small minority of the American people. Republicans are caught in a struggle between two arguments that both are designed, to varying degrees, to minister to this small minority’s obsession.
Meanwhile, large majorities overall either support the law or oppose it but want lawmakers to try to make it work. Simply put, the zeal to prevent the law from functioning as well as possible is well outside the American mainstream. To some degree this mirrors the situation within the House of Representatives itself. A majority of Members would vote tomorrow to fund the government without any defund-Obamacare rider attached, or to raise the debt limit without any Obamacare delay attached. But because House GOP leaders are loathe to allow a vote on anything unless a majority of House Republicans approves of it, the result is that — if today’s Pew poll has it right — the delusional preoccupations of a small minority of the American people are having an outsized
 impact on, well, our entire political situation, with potential economic chaos looming as a result.
------------------------------------------------------------------------


 SEAN SULLIVAN WASHINGTON POST

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: House Republican leaders craft a legislative plan they think can win passage, only to be rebuffed by conservative members expressing outrage at the idea. Then, it’s back to the drawing board.

GOP leadership was forced to put off a vote on a plan offered by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) because it lacked sufficient support from Republicans. The proposal would fund the government through mid-December and contains a provision to defund Obamcare.
But the Democratic-controlled Senate could vote down the Obamacare provision and send the rest of it on to the president for his approval. That alienated enough House Republicans to delay the vote and send leaders, well, back to the drawing board in search of a workable deal.
But what’s workable depends upon whom you ask. Some conservatives see the fall fiscal debates as the last best chance to shred Obamacare. And they’re willing to do it at all costs, even if it means temporarily shuttering the government, which would be the result of passing something the president won’t sign.

A new CNN/ORC International poll shows that 51 percent of Americans say Republicans in Congress would be more responsible for a shutdown, compared to just 33 percent who would hold Obama more accountable. As the face of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, it’s not hard to see why Boehner wants to avoid that scenario.

With the GOP Conference split into factions, key fiscal deadlines looming, and no obvious long-term remedies for the deep divisions, the question is this: How long will leadership continue down the path it is on, trying time and again to walk the fine line between satisfying the political right and coming up with legislation that can pass Congress?
The answer is probably the foreseeable future, because the alternatives look even worse for Boehner.

Boehner could also try to pass legislation with moderate Republican support and the backing of most Democrats. But such a move would trigger an outright revolt among House Republicans degrees more severe that what the speaker currently faces.
-----------------------------------------------------------



JONATHAN BERNSTEIN WASHINGTON POST

Barack Obama pledged again that he “will not negotiate over the full faith and credit of the United States” — that is, over the debt limit. Remember that until Republicans took control of the House in 2011, the debt limit had never been used to force significant substantive changes — because, after all, both sides ultimately support raising the debt limit, so it’s a lousy negotiating chip. On the other hand, it’s long been accepted that the debt limit vote is one that Members of Congress don’t like to take, and so finding some symbolic fig leaf (or bundling it with other legislation) does have a long history.

However, Noam Scheiber makes the case, in a piece generating some chatter today, for why there will be a government shutdown this time. His basic take is that Obama has every incentive to hold the line even if it results in a shutdown, because he no longer has to worry about reelection and the hit to the economy a shutdown it would entail. Scheiber also says John Boehner might have an incentive to allow a shutdown — in order to jar conservative Republicans to their senses and force them to accept the reality of their own limited negotiating leverage.
But make no mistake, the incentives are still heavily for Boehner to cut a deal and avoid a shutdown at all costs.

It’s true that the big change since 2011 and 2012 is that the president, without an upcoming election, is probably more inclined to take the short-term economic hit that a shutdown would cause. On the other hand, while Boehner has been a pretty good Speaker and has successfully helped Republicans avoid their worst impulses, I don’t really agree that this time Boehner’s incentive is to accept a shutdown.
Why? Because the key think to know about a shutdown is that it will end. Maybe after a day; maybe after a month. It will end, and it will end with something that both Boehner (and mainstream conservatives) and Obama (and mainstream liberals) can live with. And at that point, there is nothing more certain in this world than that radical “conservatives” will believe that if only Boehner  and Congressional Republicans had held out a little while longer, Obama would have surrendered and Republicans would have won a total victory.

So a shutdown (or a debt limit breach) has to end with Boehner (supposedly) selling out conservatives, and doing it with far more press coverage and attention than he would get from (again, supposedly) selling them out before a shutdown by cutting a deal. That’s a disaster for him — and, on the other side of the Capitol, for Mitch McConnell — and one he’ll work hard to avoid.

Between Obama being more likely to fight through a shutdown, and more Republicans in Congress who don’t remember 1995-1996, it’s certainly very possible that a shutdown is coming. Or even a debt limit breach. But it’s absolutely in Boehner’s interests to do all he can to avoid either. If either happens, it will be only because Boehner struggled but failed to avert such an outcome. Bottom line: Expect Barack Obama to be a tougher negotiator this time around and expect Boehner to do all he can to cut a deal to avoid disaster.