Back to Iraq, Obama’s way

Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty

PAUL WALDMAN, WASHINGTON POST

We’ve now begun some very limited military action in Iraq, with airstrikes hitting artillery positions of the Islamic State (IS), combined with airdrops of food and water to the group of Yazidis stranded on a mountaintop where they fled from IS. Naturally, the Obama administration’s opponents are saying it isn’t enough.

In a certain sense, they’re right. Unless we significantly scale up our military involvement there, what we do is unlikely to have a dramatic, lasting effect on IS. The point seems to be to find some way to help without putting American personnel at risk or sucking us back into Iraq in a major way (like Michael Corleone, every time Obama thinks he’s out of that benighted place, they pull him back in). This is Obama’s military doctrine in action. It won’t bring us glorious military victories, but it also won’t bring us military disasters.

When he ran for president, Obama promised a new approach to military involvement overseas, one defined by limited actions with clear objectives and exit strategies. It was to be a clean break with the Bush doctrine that had given us the debacle of the Iraq War: no grand military ambitions, no open-ended conflicts, no naïve dreams of remaking countries half a world away.

Of necessity, that means American military action is reactive. Instead of looking around for someone to invade, this administration has tried to help tamp down conflicts when they occur, and use force only when there seems no other option — and when it looks like it might actually accomplish something, and not create more problems than it solves.

But even though it’s designed to avoid huge disasters, this approach carries its own risks, particularly when we confront situations like the one in Iraq where there are few good options. We can take some action to keep IS out of the Kurdish north, but that might leave them just as strong, with their maniacal fundamentalism still threatening the entire region. IS is a truly ghastly bunch, with ambitions that seem unlimited. Obama said he was acting “to prevent a potential act of genocide.” What if it happens anyway, and we could have done more?
On the other hand, we could get sucked bit by bit into a larger military involvement to help the fragile Iraqi government deal with this very real threat, and find ourselves back with a significant presence in Iraq — precisely the situation few Americans, not least the President, want. And for all we know that could produce new problems, both the kind we can anticipate and the kind we can’t.

So a cautious approach contains no guarantees, and no one is likely to find it particularly satisfying. And this may ultimately be the point: When your doctrine is built in part on the idea that some problems have no good solutions, and you have to pick the least base one, there will inevitably be situations where even the best outcome doesn’t look anything like success.
Whether or not the public will accept this remains to be seen. But we do know that Republicans are not prepared to accept it. Many of them plainly hunger for glorious military crusades, where we sweep in with all those fancy toys we spend hundreds of billions on every year, and save the day to the cheers of the oppressed populace. This was the spirit that animated the Bush years, when the same people now criticizing Obama were convinced that we’d be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, then quickly set up a thriving and peaceful state that would spread the light of democracy throughout the region.

The fact that they were so spectacularly wrong about that, and the result was so much death and chaos, doesn’t seem to have diminished their desire for that glory, nor their faith in the ability of American military power to solve problems anywhere and everywhere. Whatever course Obama chooses, in this and every conflict, their position is always the same: we need more. More force, more bombing, more toughness is always the answer. Part of this is just reflexive opposition to this president; if Obama announced tomorrow that he was going to nuke the moon, they’d call him weak for not attacking the sun. But it also reflects a desire that was there during the last Republican presidency and will be there in the next one.
It’s related to the “American exceptionalism” conservatives talk about so rapturously, not only that we’re the strongest and the richest but the best, the world’s most noble people whom God himself has granted dominion over the earth (I exaggerate only slightly). Within this belief lies the conviction that there is almost nothing we can’t do, and nothing our military can’t do.

Barack Obama doesn’t believe that. He knows there are actually many things we can’t do, and the Iraq War is all the proof you need. By shaping his foreign policy around that reality, he has removed from it the potential for glory. “We did what we could, and stopped things from getting worse” isn’t the kind of result you hold a parade to celebrate. But if in the end we can say that, it might be enough.

Republicans Remain Slightly Favored To Take Control Of The Senate

NATE SILVER,FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

If Americans elected an entirely new set of senators every two years — as they elect members of the House of Representatives — this November’s Senate contest would look like a stalemate. President Obama remains unpopular; his approval ratings have ticked down a point or two over the past few months. But the Republican Party remains a poor alternative in the eyes of many voters, which means it may not be able to exploit Obama’s unpopularity as much as it otherwise might. Republicans usually have a turnout advantage, especially in midterm years, and their voters appear to be more enthusiastic about this November’s elections. Still, the gap is not as wide as it was in 2010.

The problem for Democrats is that this year’s Senate races aren’t being fought in neutral territory. Instead, the Class II senators on the ballot this year come from states that gave Obama an average of just 46 percent of the vote in 2012.¹
Democrats hold the majority of Class II seats now, but that’s because they were last contested in 2008, one of the best Democratic years of the past half-century. That year, Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by almost 11 percentage points. Imagine if 2008 had been a neutral partisan environment instead. We can approximate this by applying a uniform swing of 11 percentage points toward Republicans in each Senate race. In that case, Democrats would have lost the races in Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon — and Republicans would already hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate.
It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that we continue to see Republicans as slightly more likely than not to win a net of six seats this November and control of the Senate. A lot of it is simply reversion to the mean.² This may not be a “wave” election as 2010 was, but Republicans don’t need a wave to take over the Senate.

However, I also want to advance a cautionary note. It’s still early, and we should not rule out the possibility that one party could win most or all of the competitive races.
It can be tempting, if you cover politics for a living, to check your calendar, see that it’s already August, and conclude that if there were a wave election coming we would have seen more signs of it by now. But political time is nonlinear and a lot of waves are late-breaking, especially in midterm years. Most forecasts issued at this point in the cycle would have considerably underestimated Republican gains in the House in 1994 or 2010, for instance, or Democratic gains in the Senate in 2006. (These late shifts don’t always work to the benefit of the minority party; in 2012, the Democrats’ standing in Senate races improved considerably after Labor Day.) A late swing toward Republicans this year could result in their winning as many as 10 or 11 Senate seats. Democrats, alternatively, could limit the damage to as few as one or two races. These remain plausible scenarios — not “Black Swan” cases.

GOP Realizes Impeaching Obama Is Impossible, Votes to Sue Him Instead -Meanwhile US Econ At 4% Growth.

Mississippi had the highest unemployment rate in July at 8%. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

The United States economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter of the year, shaking off the negative effects of an unusually harsh winter and stirring hopes that it might finally be establishing a solid enough footing to put the lingering effects of the recession squarely in the past.

The Commerce Department, in its initial estimate for April, May and June, reported on Wednesday that the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 percent, surpassing expectations.



Win McNamee/Getty

 DAILY BEAST

 

On Wednesday, House Republicans gave Speaker John Boehner the approval to go ahead with a lawsuit against President Obama, alleging he overreached his powers in executing the Affordable Care Act. In an almost exact party-line vote, 225 Republicans voted in support and 201 Democrats voted against authorizing the federal suit. Democrats have accused Republicans of using the suit as a first step towards impeaching Obama, though Republicans have refuted this. Earlier Wednesday, Obama denounced the prospective suit as a “political stunt” and told Republicans to “stop just hating all the time.”

 

The lawsuit, which is likely to be thrown out of federal court on procedural grounds, focuses particularly on Obama’s decision to delay the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act.The lawsuit comes as many conservatives have urged House Republicans to begin impeachment proceedings against Obama. Indeed, all five Republicans who voted against the lawsuit, including Paul Broun of Georgia and Steve Stockman of Texas, did so because they believe impeachment is more appropriate. While these calls have been limited mainly to marginal figures on the right such as former reality television star Sarah Palin, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise refused to rule it out in a television appearance Sunday.House Speaker John Boehner and many other leading members of the GOP, however, have opposed the possibility of impeachment, calling it a political misstep.

 

The lawsuit is viewed as an alternative that would appease the GOP’s base without alienating more moderate voters. In 1998, the failed Republican attempt to remove President Clinton from office redounded to the political benefit of Democrats. Impeachment proceedings likely would have the same effect this time, especially with the success that Democratic campaigns have had fundraising off of the specter of impeachment in recent weeks. And with 67 votes required in the Democratic-controlled Senate to convict Obama and remove him from office, successful impeachment proceedings may be impossible. (Even if Obama were somehow removed from office, conservatives probably wouldn’t be thrilled at the prospect of a President Biden). -

Obama To Set Off Immigration Bomb In Middle of Midterms?

GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST

 ...Just how far can [Obama] go unilaterally, particularly when it comes to easing the pace of deportations. This is going to be one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency in substantive, moral, and legal terms, and politically, it could set off a bomb this fall, in the middle of the midterm elections.
I’m told there are currently internal discussions underway among Democrats over whether ambitious action by Obama could be politically harmful in tough races. According to two sources familiar with internal discussions, some top Dems have wondered aloud whether Obama going big would further inflame the GOP base, with little payoff for Dems in red states where Latinos might not be a key factor. I don’t want to overstate this: These are merely discussions, not necessarily worries.

Indeed, some Dems are making the opposite case, and that argument is described well in a new Politico piece. The story notes that Obama has privately told immigration advocates demanding ambitious action that they might not get what they want, telling them: “We need to right-size expectations.” And yet, according to Politico, some advocates still hope for aggressive action and believe Dems see it as in their own political interests:

Adding to the elevated hopes about what Obama will do is the feeling among Democratic strategists that immigration reform is a clear political winner: The people who will be opposed to reform or to the president taking action on his own are already likely prime Republican base voters. But voters whom Obama might be able to activate, both among immigrant communities and progressives overall who see this issue as a touchstone, are exactly the ones that Democrats are hoping will be there to counter a midterm year in which the map and historical trends favor GOP turnout.
In many competitive House districts and several of the Senate races that Democrats need to hold onto to have a chance of retaining the majority — Colorado and Iowa, and to a lesser extent, North Carolina and Arkansas — immigrant communities make up a significant bloc of votes. Done in a way that energizes Latinos and Asians, Obama’s taking the lead on immigration could prove a margin-making move for the midterms.

One place where this is plainly true is Colorado.

 Beyond this, though, my sense of internal discussions currently underway is that no one is really sure how the politics of this will play out. Indeed, to hear one source familiar with those discussions tell it, Dems mostly see this as guesswork, since we’re in largely uncharted political territory here: Yes, Americans support immigration reform and a sensible path to legalization, but no one knows how the public will greet unilateral action to bring about temporary relief from deportation, at least for some.

Indeed, this is probably a a six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation: While aggressive action will provide fodder for Republicans to drive their base into a frenzy with #ObummerTyranny talk, it could also bait Republicans into overreach that alienates swing voters and motivates the Dem base in a year when the midterm dropoff problem is putting control of the Senate in peril.

And that is one reason why, in the end, Obama must make this decision based on what he truly believes the legal constraints on unilateral action are, rather than letting it be dictated by a sense of the political constraints here. Some advocates believe the White House will allow an overly cautious sense of the political constraints to hamstring him beyond what the lawyers actually think is within his authority. Yet others believe that ultimately the decision will be driven by a genuine evaluation of what is legally possible. We’ll find out soon enough, but let’s hope it’s the latter.

President Obama called the influx of Central Americans trying to cross the border into Texas “an urgent humanitarian situation.” Credit Eric Gay/Associated Press        

* REPUBLICANS SAY NO TO OBAMA ON BORDER CRISIS: The Post reports that multiple Republicans are expressing “skepticism” about the White House request for $3.7 billion in funding to expedite removals of minors crossing the border and to provide them more care. Some are demanding a more detailed plan to stanch the crisis, and others claim Obama must secure the entire border before acting on the short term crisis (which, as always, means they want the DREAMers deported).

Now, the question of whether the legal process needs to be changed in some formal way is a legitimate one. But it’s still unclear why, in the short term, Republicans who themselves say they want minors removed more rapidly would say No to funding that would help accomplish that goal.

* SOME REPUBLICANS WANT TRAFFICKING LAW REPEALED: Here’s something to keep an eye on. Some Republicans are calling for doing away with the 2008 trafficking law that mandates legal protections for arriving minors, which is a cause of the crisis. John McCain is calling for repeal, arguing: “The message has to be, ‘If you cross our border illegally, you will be returned immediately.’”
Senator Lindsey Graham is also calling for a similar step. The Obama administration, too, has expressed support for changing the law so children from Guatemala and Honduras can be removed as quickly as Mexicans. So it will be interesting to see if Congress is actually up to the task of legislating constructively.

* CAN OBAMA EXPEDITE REMOVALS BUT KEEP IT HUMANE? Julia Preston reports that the administration is implementing a major change in how immigration courts operate, to speed removals by moving undocumented minors and their parents to the front of the line:

Under the new procedures, those migrants could have their cases resolved and be deported within months…Judges now have only one priority for scheduling hearings: They take cases first of immigrants who are in detention. Under the new policy, unaccompanied minors and families in deportation proceedings — even those who have been released from detention — will also be priorities for judges. 

The question is whether speeding up the process risks undermining legal protections for children who qualify for genuine relief for humanitarian reasons. Says one official: “We are not changing legal standards. We are going to do these cases fast but we will do them right.” We’ll see.

WHY REPUBLICANS WON’T SUPPORT OBAMA BORDER FIX: Kevin Drum, commenting on opposition to Obama’s request for funds to expedite removals (which is coming from Republicans who want expedited removals), spells out the real motive here as clearly as you could want:

Well, of course it won’t happen. The crisis along the border is tailor made for Republicans. It makes their base hopping mad, it juices their campaign fundraising, and anytime the government is unable to address a problem it makes Obama look bad. Why on earth would Republicans want to do anything to change any of this? As long as Obama is president, chaos is good for Republicans. After all, most voters don’t really know who’s at fault when things go wrong, they just know there’s a crisis and Obama doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that on immigration, Republicans are benefiting from the fact that media outlets simply refuse to describe their actual positions accurately.

In Miss., Thad Cochran Wins One for Sanity Over Tea Partier Chris McDaniel

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast

Democrats might have been praying for a McDaniel victory in Mississippi’s Senate runoff—why not make the Republicans look nuttier? Here’s why they should be glad the establishment won.

I know, I know. Fellow liberals, you were rooting for Chris McDaniel to beat Thad Cochran on Tuesday night in Mississippi. I understand. Just a few days ago, I was, too. Put more crazy in the national GOP. Make them look that much more embarrassing. Bring one more nut to Washington who talks about hot Latino babes and all the rest of it.

Chris McDaniel   AP Photo / Timothy D. Easley

Besides which, if McDaniel had won, the Democrat, Travis Childers, would have had a shot. Childers would scarcely qualify as a Democrat in about 17 or 18 states, but the Senate is the Senate, full of weird senators, for better or worse. Every state gets two. Why not have one be a guy who’ll vote (we presume, shakily) to make Harry Reid the majority leader of the Senate?
Nah. First of all, the idea that Childers ever had any kind of chance of winning a Senate seat in Mississippi was a pipe dream. The voters of Mississippi aren’t going to send a Democratic senator to Washington, D.C., in the era of Barack Obama. I don’t care what the circumstances are. Remember that old joke about incumbents being safe as long as they weren’t caught with a live boy or a dead girl? During the Obama presidency, a Mississippi Republican could be caught with a dead Bichon Frise, and the only question he’d be asked is why he favored a dog with such a gay-sounding Frenchie name. Childers wasn’t going to beat McDaniel.

As to whether Democrats would prefer to have Cochran or McDaniel in the Senate, this takes us back to the old Marxist dialectic, “The worse, the better.” That is, the worse things get for our enemies, the more extreme and crazy they get, the better things are for us, because the worse things get for them, the more quickly the public will see that the other side has lost its freaking mind.

This was the stratagem of leftists everywhere for a long, long time. Not that I’m making any direct comparisons here—OK?—but this is what the socialists and communists thought in Germany in 1933. The right, they were sure, is going to discredit itself. And they were correct. But it took 12 years and around 9 million or 10 million dead human beings. That’s enough collateral damage to prove the theorists wrong.

No, sorry. Boring as it may seem, be glad that Cochran eked out his win. Be happy that sane won. Here’s a little political truism for you: Sane is better than insane. We don’t need more Ted Cruzes in the Senate. We don’t need more candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. We just. Don’t. Need. Them. We don’t need one more extremist GOP candidate who is going to make those cowardly Republicans in the Senate conclude that they have to live in fear of losing to some certifiable, fact-bending jelly-head of the extreme right. We really don’t.

Cochran will never vote for anything Obama wants. No minimum wage hike, no carbon tax, no nothing. I understand that. But he’ll be in there, assuming he wins and stays alive, until January 2021. That is, through what might be Hillary Clinton’s first term. If the GOP intra-bloodbath happens in 2017 after she’s won, Cochran, who won’t be running again and just won’t give a shit, might actually vote for one or two things Clinton asks for. McDaniel, obviously, would not.

And consider this. The Tea Party people are furious about this outcome. A very prominent Tea Party activist tweeted Tuesday night: “If Cochran wins this #mssen race, the GOP is done. They teamed up with Dems to steal a race. Kiss the base goodbye.”

So there we are. Be for sanity. Be against insanity. The dialectic never worked, even back in the glory days. Chris McDaniel belongs where he belongs—chasing ambulances in Pascagoula, or wherever it is he’s from. And his election would not hasten the Republican apocalypse. If anything, Cochran’s would. More Tea Party losses in races like this are what’s needed.

The Bowe Bergdahl Story Is Right-Wing Crack

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

I was amazed but not surprised by my Twitter feed Monday. More than 200 tweets from conservatives, I would estimate, calling me a host of names and Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl a menu of worse ones. That’s the most ever in one day, I think, even more than for my most scorching anti-NRA columns, which have heretofore set the gold standard for inspiring drooling right-wing vitriol.

I was not, as I say, surprised. This story has every element right-wingers dream of. Every dark suspicion they harbor about President Obama can be wedged into the narrative conservatives are constructing about how Saturday’s prisoner exchange supposedly went down and what the president’s presumed motivations were. So I knew instantly, when I read Michael Hastings’s 2012 Rolling Stone profile of Bergdahl on Sunday afternoon, that this was going to be the next Benghazi. The story is right-wing crack. And sure enough, Republicans are hitting the pipe big time.

Some of the wilder criticisms of me notwithstanding, my column Monday made two basic points. First, if a Republican president had swapped five Taliban leaders for Bergdahl, all the people howling today would be spinning it positively. And second, while there are legitimate questions here—yes, I wrote that it was “fair to ask whether the price” of Bergdahl’s freedom was “too high”—what we’re about to get is another relentlessly politicized series of investigations that will be aimed not at determining the truth but at trying to turn possible errors of judgment by the White House into high crimes and misdemeanors. That’s the game here. Anyone who denies it is being naively or intentionally delusional.

Time, even the short amount that has passed between then and now, has proved me all too prescient—not that I’m patting myself on the back; it was a painfully easy call. The most notable development Tuesday was that former Romney adviser Richard Grenell was found to be setting up interviews for soldiers in Bergdahl’s battalion who wanted to go public trashing him. It may be, as Grenell’s partner said, that the soldiers found him on Twitter and it just kind of worked out that way. But the bottom line is what it is. These soldiers joining forces with a PR guy who used to work for John Bolton and then for candidate Mitt Romney, a man who is so deeply enmeshed in partisan politics, puts a political coloration on their words whether they mean it to or not.

I’m not defending Bergdahl here, and I didn’t Monday. Somebody on Twitter made a big deal out of the fact that I put the word “deserter” in quotes. You’re fucking-a right I did. He’s not officially a deserter. He is officially a sergeant in good standing. People can believe he is a deserter all they want, and maybe he is. But is the military’s official position worth nothing? That’s an interesting right-wing posture.

The military should investigate whether Bergdahl was a deserter, and it should court-martial him if the evidence supports doing that. In the meantime, what end is served by the character assassinations of him and especially of his father, who’s a citizen with all the usual rights? The creepy bottom line of the right-wing position, mostly unstated but often implied in tweets and comments, is that the U.S. government should have just left Bergdahl to die. That’s an appalling position. Bring him back alive, then let him face whatever justice he must face. But bring him back. That’s what civil societies do. What kind of society and leader lets their captive soldiers die in enemy hands? Recall that the guy who wouldn’t even trade a Nazi general for his own son (who died in German custody) was named Stalin.
That is why John Bellinger, a national-security lawyer in George W. Bush’s administration, said on Fox that he believes the Bush administration would have done exactly the same thing the Obama administration did.

From Think Progress:
Asked about reports that Bergdahl deserted his unit in 2009, Bellinger added that the former hostage “will have to face justice, military justice.” “We don’t leave soldiers on the battlefield under any circumstance unless they have actually joined the enemy army,” he said. “He was a young 20-year-old. Young 20-year-olds make stupid decisions. I don’t think we’ll say if you make a stupid decision we’ll leave you in the hands of the Taliban.”

 Bellinger missed Bergdahl’s age at captivity by three years, but that aside, his is the humane and decent position. Bellinger also noted that the Bush administration—you know, the one that never negotiated with terrorists—released more than 500 prisoners from Guantanamo, returning them to the region. Was Dick Cheney howling about that the way he’s been howling about Bergdahl? I doubt it, since it was his administration.
Allen West, the one-term mistake whom the voters of Florida’s 22nd Congressional District quickly corrected, wants impeachment. Steve King, the multi-term mistake whom Iowans refuse to correct, tweeted that Susan Rice is “working for Al Qaeda.” The pipe, as Richard Pryor once testified, is irresistible and powerful. It comes to own you. The unfortunate thing is that as long as they’re sucking on it, the rest of us can’t escape.

OBAMA TRADES 5 GUANTANAMO TALIBAN PRISONERS FOR ONE AMERICAN POW

Jani and Bob Bergdahl (AP Photo/Times-News, Ashley Smith)

WASHINGTON POST, PAUL WALDMAN

Over the weekend the government announced that it had negotiated a deal for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, the sole American being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In exchange, five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo will be transferred to Qatar, where their movements will be restricted for a year.
Republicans will now attempt to turn this into a liability for President Obama. As Michael Tomasky put it,  this is “the right’s new Benghazi.



MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

So let’s imagine that on Saturday night, the news had emerged not that Bowe Bergdahl was being freed but that he’d been murdered by his Taliban captors. What do you suppose we’d be hearing from Republican legislators? You know exactly what: Barack Obama is the weakest president ever, this is unconscionable. Which, of course, is exactly what we’re hearing from them now that the U.S. Army sergeant, held by the Taliban since 2009, has been freed. And it’s going to get worse. I’m even tempted to say forget Benghazi—Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment hearings they’ve been dreaming of before all this is over.

The Republicans’ audacity here is a bit beyond the usual. Let’s face it: There is no question that if President George W. Bush or a President McCain or President Romney had secured Bergdahl’s release in exchange for five Taliban prisoners at Gitmo, Republicans would be defending the move all the way. That business about notifying Congress? They’d have a dozen excuses for it. We got our prisoner of war home, they’d all be saying. That’s what matters.
But Obama does it, and Bergdahl’s freedom isn’t what matters at all. It’s that we negotiated with terrorists. Well, yes. We’ve been negotiating with the Taliban for a long time now, trying to end the war. See, they’re the people leading the fighting on the other side. When you’re trying to end a war, that’s generally who you negotiate with.

Muhammad Naeem, a representative of the Taliban, speaks during a press conference at the official opening of their office in Doha, Qatar,

The five guys we returned to the Taliban are really bad guys, as Eli Lake and Josh Rogin wrote this weekend, and it’s fair to ask whether the price was too high. We can’t know the answer to that question today.

WASHINGTON POST, PAUL WALDMAN  (Cont'd)

But what exactly does it mean when we talk about these prisoners being “hard core” and posing a risk that is too great for us to take? Do they have some abilities no one else in the Taliban has? Are they particularly clever? Will they change the course of Afghanistan’s future? Do they have super-powers of some sort? From the way Republicans describe them, you’d think we were talking about Magneto and Lex Luthor. But we aren’t.
That isn’t to say the risk in releasing them is zero. The question is whether the risk is acceptably low. The five certainly might end up back in Afghanistan, and they certainly might want to fight the Americans still stationed there (though by the time they’re eligible to go, most of the American force will be gone). But so do thousands of other Afghans. The idea of them walking free might offend us on a moral level, but it’s difficult to argue that they pose a unique security threat to the United States that’s different from any other member of the Taliban.

Bowe Bergdahl prepares for graduation from basic training near Fort Benning in Georgia.

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST  (Cont'd)

But other criticisms are bogus. House intel chairman Mike Rogers said on TV Sunday that in cutting the deal, “you send a message to every al Qaeda group in the world that there is some value in a hostage that it didn’t have before.” That’s ridiculous. So al Qaeda groups didn’t know until this past weekend that taking an American hostage could give them leverage? Guerrilla forces have been taking people hostage since warfare began. We’ve even done lower-level prisoner trades in Afghanistan.

Looking forward, and looking more broadly at this situation, all the ingredients are here for a classic GOP Obama-conspiracy-mongering soap opera that can be dragged out until January 2017. The late combat journalist Mike Hastings wrote a long profile of Bergdahl in Rolling Stone in 2012, and it gets right to the heart of what may be the coming GOP case against him.
First of all, Bergdahl wasn’t any Republican’s idea of a patriot. Yes, he volunteered to join the Army, but only after he’d been turned down by the French Foreign Legion. Once on the ground in Afghanistan, he was a deeply disillusioned soldier. Shortly after his battalion took its first casualty, he emailed his parents a scathing indictment of the military and everything he saw around him.
----
He wandered away from his unit. A Fox News commentator called him a “deserter.” He is officially in good standing in the Army and has even received the promotions due him during his time in captivity, but some consider him a deserter and traitor.

The argument will be made that he wasn’t worth saving, especially given what we had to give up. Hastings cites “White House sources” as telling him that Marc Grossman, Richard Holbrooke’s successor as AfPak coordinator, “was given a direct warning by the president’s opponents in Congress about trading Bowe for five Taliban prisoners during an election year. ‘They keep telling me it’s going to be Obama’s Willie Horton moment,’ Grossman warned the White House.”

Can Republicans make this resonate outside their base? Hard to say. I think to most Americans, this is a feel-good story. We value a life, one American life. Bibi Netanyahu traded one captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, not for five Palestinian prisoners. He traded Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. And there was broad agreement across the spectrum of Israeli politics that bringing Shalit to safety, even at that price, was the right thing to do.
But of course, that doesn’t matter to the right. No one outside their base cares much about Benghazi, but that hasn’t stopped them. They’ll keep pursuing Benghazi mostly to see if they can pin anything on Hillary, but when it comes to wet impeachment dreams, Benghazi may have just been pushed to the back seat. The crazy never stops.

Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said that there was a larger matter at play: The American military does not leave soldiers behind. “When you’re in the Navy, and you go overboard, it doesn’t matter if you were pushed, fell or jumped,” he said. “We’re going to turn the ship around and pick you up.”

DEMS GET ANXIOUS (VERY) OVER OBAMACARE PROBLEMS

Sen.Mary Landrieu (D., La)


N.Y. TIMES  

Anxious congressional Democrats are threatening to abandon President Obama on a central element of his signature health care law, voicing increasing support for proposals that would allow Americans who are losing their health insurance coverage because of the Affordable Care Act to retain it.

The dissent comes as the Obama administration released enrollment figures that fell far short of expectations, [cf. Five Star Final] and as House Republicans continued their sharp criticism of administration officials at congressional hearings examining the performance of the health care website and possible security risks of the online insurance exchanges.

In addition, a vote is scheduled Friday in the Republican-controlled House on a bill that would allow Americans to keep their existing health coverage through 2014 without penalties. The measure, drafted by Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, is opposed by the White House, which argues that it would severely undermine the Affordable Care Act by allowing insurance companies to continue to sell health coverage that does not meet the higher standard of Mr. Obama’s health care law.

 

But a growing number of House Democrats, reflecting a strong political backlash to the rollout of the law, are warning the White House that they may support the measure if the administration does not provide a strong alternative argument. The approaching House vote is shaping up as an important test for both the health measure and the unity that Democratic leaders have so far been able to maintain around it despite a fierce Republican attack.

 

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday of House Democrats and White House officials, tensions flared as several lawmakers upbraided the administration, saying that the president had put Democrats in a tough political position by wrongly promising consumers that they could keep their existing health care plans. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans have received cancellation notices from their insurers because their health care coverage does not meet the minimum standards dictated by the new law.

 

“I think the Upton bill is terrible, but we need something else to vote for in order to keep our word to the American people. We told people in those plans that they were grandfathered in, and if they wanted to stay in them, they could, and we need to honor that.”

A similar proposal, which would allow people to keep their current health insurance permanently, is also drawing support in the Senate under an effort led by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.

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Insurance companies, already deeply worried about the low enrollment in the plans they are offering on the insurance exchanges, say congressional proposals to force them to allow canceled policies to be reissued could be disastrous. Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobby, said insurers “have significant concerns on how it would work operationally.”

But with no alternative proposal from the White House as of Wednesday, Democrats were increasingly critical.

HUFFINGTON POST

 Senator Jeff Merkley — a blue state Dem — surprised Obamacare supporters when he signed on to Mary Landrieu’s fix to the bill, the “Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act,” which would require insurers to continue plans for a year.

Coming from one of the Senate's most notably progressive voices, the Oregon Democrat's announcement was a particularly vivid demonstration of how nervous party members are over the state of the Affordable Care Act. The flawed website, combined with the steady stream of news of insurers forcing people to adopt more comprehensive and at times expensive plans in response to new regulations, had already persuaded five other Democrats to support the Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act, introduced by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Meanwhile, in the House, ...lawmakers in that chamber were, by and large, staying away from the Republican-pushed measure that would allow people to stay on their plans for another year. But top aides were warning of a swarm of potential defections should the Obama administration not introduce its own administrative fix for the issue of canceled health insurance plans by the end of the week.

A Democratic aide said that the case being made against the Upton bill was multilayered. Not only would it allow current policyholders to continue their coverage, opponents argue, but it would allow new applicants to purchase that coverage as well -- all but encouraging healthy individuals to avoid the exchanges in favor of cheaper plans while leaving sick and older Americans in the newly created marketplace. The other major problem with the Upton bill that the aide noted was that it would extend this grandfather provision for just a year, meaning that people would be receiving cancellation notices in October of next year, a month before the 2014 elections. This, the aide noted, would be "problematic."
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Then there is the question whether any of these bills could possibly work. After all, hundreds of thousands of cancellation notices have already gone out from insurers. A law that would essentially nullify those cancellation letters would require a huge administrative undertaking to execute. Insurers would have to send out updated letters, they'd have to ensure that the old plans complied with state regulations, and they'd have to re-enroll individuals who wanted to retain their policies.
"I'm sure the industry would like to do this. Don’t get me wrong. But everyone has to realize it took the insurance industry the better part of the year here to get ready for this," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance industry consultant at Health Policy and Strategy Associates and a skeptic about the ACA. "It is practically impossible to do this. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The insurance industry was ready for Obamacare but the Obama administration is not. When the Obama administration hit the go button, the dominoes were set in motion."  

HARD TIMES FOR OBAMA

MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

There’s a new Pew poll that has him at 41 percent approval, 53 disapproval, which Pew notes ominously is only five percentage points better than George W. Bush’s at this point in his term. (Hurricane Katrina had happened in August of Bush’s fifth year.) Conservative columnists are chuckling and clucking and tweeting to beat the band. Centrist journalist Mark Halperin, on MSNBC yesterday, declared that Obama had lost the media, which was now cheering against the success of the Affordable Care Act and just wants to see… well, people go without insurance, I guess. If everything—everything!—isn’t fixed by Nov. 30, we’re looking at a presidency that is going to collapse into utter disaster. It’s obvious enough why conservatives would be saying this. They’ve wanted Obama to fail from the start, and they’ve certainly wanted the health-care bill to fail from the moment of its passage.

Mark Halperin

Journalists like Halperin say these things not for ideological reasons, but temperamental ones: In this Halperinesque/Politico-esque world view, politics is less about people’s lives than it is about who is displaying mastery of the game and who is being mastered at any given moment (of course, seeing politics so insistently through that lens is a kind of ideology of its own, but we’ll let that pass). To that group of mainstream journalists, how Obama handles the current crisis will determine whether the administration will survive or whether he might as well just resign now.

I don’t deny that the current situation is a crisis, and one of the administration’s own making. Obama misled people. It’s a small percentage of people. They’re at the mercy of the most horrible end of the private-insurance market, and the vast majority of them are going to be better off after everything shakes out and they see that their new plans are largely better than their old ones were. But even so, they’re people, and they’re getting termination notices, and he misled them. Combine it with the website chaos, and it’s bad, there’s no sense in denying it.

What I do deny, vigorously, is that this is a make-or-break moment. Yes, I know that Obamacare is his signature initiative and all that. And I know that if problems persist after Nov. 30, pressure will mount on Harry Reid to let some kind of tinkering legislation be debated. This is a very important three weeks for the administration, and the 30th is an extremely important deadline.

But there’s a certain type of political journalism that so exists in the moment that numerous such moments have been declared to be disasters for Obama, going back to Jeremiah Wright. This kind of hyperventilating approach always turns out to be wrong and overheated. It turned out that all those things were pretty bad, but it also turned out that Obama survived them. And he’ll survive this, too.

What will happen in all likelihood is what usually happens in life and politics—that is, nothing all that dramatic. Nov. 30 will come, and the website will be more or less (though not entirely) fixed up, and life, and Obamacare, will go on. There will be more horror stories, natch, but there will be more success stories too, and sometime between now and next March 31, when the enrollment period ends, the media are going to get a little bored with the whole thing, and it will just go on irresolutely for a while, but eventually it will start becoming clear to the American people that the reform is working pretty well in the states that tried and pretty poorly in the states that didn’t, and people will start to get the point about Republican sabotage.

And then, provided health care survives that initial stage without being altered for the worse by Congress, it’s going to start to work. Well. Resistant insurance companies and even some resistant governors and state legislatures are going to see that it appears to be here to stay, and they will accommodate themselves to that reality.

Obamacare will never be a raging success. This is another error much of journalism is prone to make—looking for it to be an overwhelming success. That won’t happen because at the end of the day we’re still talking about private health insurance, and private health insurance was a pain in the tuchus before Obamacare and will remain one after it. People will always complain about their coverage. But by early 2016, I have little doubt, there will be millions more Americans who’ll be doing the complaining, and they’ll be happy to have the opportunity to do so.

Conservatives are desperate for health care to be Obama’s Katrina. Certain centrist journalists want to see it just for entertainment’s sake or as a test of Obama’s presidential “character.”  I won’t say there’s zero chance of it happening. If Nov. 30 comes and the website is an unmitigated disaster, then maybe that’ll be the case. But I will say that I think the chances of it are very slim indeed. The unfortunate thing is the Republicans have just enough power to gum up the works [italics Esco's] so that even if the administration does fix up everything on its end, the GOP can keep hauling Kathleen Sebelius up to the Hill and taking other steps to make sure things look worse than they are. But Obama will survive, and more importantly, Obamacare will too.

 

A WAR ON THE POOR

Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio said of fellow Republicans in Washington, "I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor."


PAUL KRUGMAN N.Y. TIMES

John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature — controlled by his own party — to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”

Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality.

The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.

still sometimes see pundits claiming that the Tea Party movement is basically driven by concerns about budget deficits. That’s delusional. Read the founding rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC: There’s nary a mention of deficits. Instead, it’s a tirade against the possibility that the government might help “losers” avoid foreclosure. Or read transcripts from Rush Limbaugh or other right-wing talk radio hosts. There’s not much about fiscal responsibility, but there’s a lot about how the government is rewarding the lazy and undeserving.

Republicans in leadership positions try to modulate their language a bit, but it’s a matter more of tone than substance. They’re still clearly passionate about making sure that the poor and unlucky get as little help as possible, that — as Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, put it — the safety net is becoming “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” And Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals involve savage cuts in safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.

 

Rep. Paul Ryan said he doesn't "want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency."

 

 

All of this hostility to the poor has culminated in the truly astonishing refusal of many states to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Bear in mind that the federal government would pay for this expansion, and that the money thus spent would benefit hospitals and the local economy as well as the direct recipients. But a majority of Republican-controlled state governments are, it turns out, willing to pay a large economic and fiscal price in order to ensure that aid doesn’t reach the poor.

The thing is, it wasn’t always this way. Go back for a moment to 1936, when Alf Landon received the Republican nomination for president. In many ways, Landon’s acceptance speech previewed themes taken up by modern conservatives. He lamented the incompleteness of economic recovery and the persistence of high unemployment, and he attributed the economy’s lingering weakness to excessive government intervention and the uncertainty he claimed it created.

But he also said this: “Out of this Depression has come, not only the problem of recovery but also the equally grave problem of caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained. Their relief at all times is a matter of plain duty. We of our Party pledge that this obligation will never be neglected.”

 

Can you imagine a modern Republican nominee saying such a thing? Not in a party committed to the view that unemployed workers have it too easy, that they’re so coddled by unemployment insurance and food stamps that they have no incentive to go out there and get a job.

 

      

So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.

But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.

In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base “very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority” — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks.

So there is indeed a war on the poor, coinciding with and deepening the pain from a troubled economy. And that war is now the central, defining issue of American politics.

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.

RIGHT WING HYSTERIA IN AMERICAN POLITICS

NEW YORKER Jeff Shesol

The paranoid style in American politics, as the historian Richard Hofstadter labeled it, has deep roots. So does what one might call the hysterical style in American politics—in which no analogy (Hitler! Slavery!) is too outrageous, no prediction (Ruin! Death!) too dire, and no personal role model (Churchill! Jesus!) too exalted to deploy. Clearly, we are living through a golden age of American hysteria. The present apoplexy over the Affordable Care Act—the proximate cause of this government shutdown—is, by historical standards of hysteria, really first-rate stuff. The shutdowns of the nineteen-nineties seem half-hearted and tentative compared to this one. We haven’t heard shrieking like this since the nineteen-sixties, or possibly since the thirties, when the Republican Party waged a fierce, if futile, assault on the New Deal. Yet, in contrast to our current crop, that era’s conservatives—whose cries of “socialism” have a modern ring—now look like rational actors, exemplars of sweet reasonableness.

When Congress debated the Social Security bill, in 1935, hysteria on the right ran high. The business lobby, echoed by its Republican allies on Capitol Hill, charged Franklin Roosevelt with a plot to extinguish liberty in America—to establish “socialistic control of life and industry,” as the National Association of Manufacturers put it. “Never in the history of the world,” declared Rep. John Taber, of New York, after what one trusts was a thorough review of the history of the world, “has any measure been … so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery [and] to enslave workers.” To another New York congressman, James W. Wadsworth, Social Security represented “a power so vast” that it threatened to “pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” Still, its opponents in the House, and later the Senate, buckled in the face of popular opinion, swallowed their hatred of Roosevelt, and the Social Security Act passed by wide margins.


 Governor Alf Landon of Kansas

Another wave of panic crested on the eve of the 1936 election—an eleventh-hour attempt to seize on public anxiety about the Social Security payroll tax, slated to take effect on January 1, 1937. The Republican nominee, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, called the program “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed.” He and his campaign raised the specter of mass fingerprinting, of Washington snoops pawing through people’s “life records,” and of a bureaucratic scheme to erase workers’ names and replace them with numbers. This rhetoric reached its crescendo on Halloween, fittingly enough, when John Hamilton, chairman of the Republican National Committee, stood before a crowd of twenty thousand in Boston, clutching a stainless-steel “specimen” tag stamped “Social Security Board”; Hamilton thrust it in the air and insisted that if F.D.R. were reëlected, tags just like it would be “hung around the necks of twenty-seven million” working men and women. The Roosevelt Administration, he asserted, had already sought bids for machines to manufacture the tags. (Hamilton refused to divulge where he’d gotten the sample, but after the rally, he let reporters pass it around and inspect it.)

And then Roosevelt won in a landslide. The payroll tax went into effect two months later, provoking no great outcry, either by the public or, at that point, the Republican Party. Implementation of the Social Security program, despite its unprecedented complexity, was mostly smooth and efficient. And in May, 1937, the Supreme Court—seen by conservatives as “the last thin line” between freedom and totalitarianism—upheld the Act (a surprise decision that I describe in “Supreme Power,” my book on Roosevelt’s Court-packing fight). Thus marked the wholesale defeat (a trifecta—rebuked by all three branches) of the G.O.P. on Social Security, and the beginning of the party’s return to what future Republicans would call the “reality-based community.” It was a slow, grudging, and partial return—the party then, as now, was ideologically riven—but it did signal the G.O.P.’s ability to recalibrate its rhetoric, cut its losses, and draw on its reservoir, however depleted, of common sense. The next dozen years brought a fair amount of sparring and foot-dragging on Capitol Hill anytime the Act required amendment or revision, but this was more a kind of harassment than a serious renewal of hostilities. Conservatives did not learn to love Social Security; they just learned to live with it.




This might bode well for the A.C.A., over the long term, if today’s brand of lunacy were more like that of the thirties—that is, in some measure trumped-up and tactical. It’s not that New Deal-era Republicans didn’t believe what they were saying about the end of liberty; many earnestly did. They hated Roosevelt, too, genuinely and irrationally. But ... the Republican Party of the past century and the Republican Party of our own (especially, but not exclusively, its Tea Party faction): [is] the difference between calculation and obsession, between a hysterical style and an honest-to-goodness, diagnosable hysteria—the collective kind, like the compulsive dancing manias of medieval Europe. “They have lost their minds,” said the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid,—a comment that, on the evidence, seemed less a partisan attack than a simple, regrettable statement of fact.

GAME OVER! REBOOBLICANS LOSE. DEFAULT AVOIDED, GOVT REOPENS

N.Y. TIMES

Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.  The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.  Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it.

The result of the impasse that threatened the nation’s credit rating was a near total defeat for Republican conservatives, who had engineered the budget impasse as a way to strip the new health care law of funding even as registration for benefits opened Oct. 1 or, failing that, to win delays in putting the program into place.

The shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international credibility. Mr. Obama refused to compromise, leaving Republican leaders to beg him to talk, and to fulminate when he refused.

Under the agreement to reopen the government, the House and Senate are directed to hold talks and reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade. Mr. Obama said consistently through the standoff that he was willing to have a wide-ranging budget negotiation once the government was reopened and the debt limit raised.


      

Mr. Boehner and his leadership team had long felt that they needed to allow their restive conference to pitch a battle over the president’s health care law, a fight that had been brewing almost since the law was passed in 2010. Now, they hope the fever has broken, and they can negotiate on issues where they think they have the upper hand, like spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs.       

 

 

But there were no guarantees that Congress would
not be at loggerheads again by mid-January, and there is deep skepticism in both parties that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who will lead the budget negotiations, can bridge the chasm between them.



 
 Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (L) and Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray will co-chair a new joint budget committee conference charged with finding a budget and spending solution by Dec. 13

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who was instrumental in ending the crisis, stressed that under the deal he had negotiated with the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the across-the-board budget cuts [the sequester cuts] extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown remained in place over the objections of some Democrats, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.

For Mr. Boehner, who had failed to unite his conference around a workable plan, Wednesday’s decision to take up the Senate bill proved surprisingly free of conflict. Hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied around the speaker. Mr. Boehner, they said, ...his conference found itself divided among three conflicting factions: moderate Republicans who were simply eager to reopen the government; those who opposed a provision that would have made members of Congress, White House officials and their staffs ineligible for government contributions to their health insurance on the new exchanges; and conservatives who felt the proposal did not go far enough in dismantling the health care law.

Conservatives in the House also remained skeptical that they would gain the upper hand in the near future. [They] said that with the president still unwilling to negotiate in good faith, he thought it was unlikely that Republicans would extract many concessions in any upcoming conference over the budget between the House and the Senate.
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 An aide brings a cart stacked with pizza to the office of Speaker John Boehner


GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

Dems [hope]that the closer to the 2014 elections we get, the harder it will be for Republicans to stage another debt ceiling hostage crisis.

Democrats don’t want such a crisis. They would prefer that Republicans simply agree to extend the debt limit cleanly. But by pushing this [early] into the 2014 election season, they are giving themselves a kind of insurance policy that guarantees that if Republicans do stage another debt limit crisis, Republicans will pay a serious political price for it.

On the one hand, you’d think that this arrangement simply guarantees that the debt limit will hang over the next talks, meaning it will give Republicans leverage. ... But Democrats ...believe Republicans will have capitulated on the debt limit twice in a row — this time, and earlier this year — and that the political fallout from the current crisis has been so bad for Republicans that party establishment types will be eager to avoid the same thing happening again [in] 2014.

It’s true that those who will try to force another debt ceiling crisis are Tea Party conservatives who don’t much care about the overall political health of the GOP. But as this Democratic aide explains to me, this is precisely the point: More pressure from the right for yet another debt limit crisis close to the election will be even worse for the GOP, because it could again divide the party and potentially force 2014 GOP candidates (particularly those involved in primaries) to adopt an extreme position, damaging them for general elections.

“The effect of this fight has been to destroy the Republican brand and put their 2014 candidates behind the eight ball,” the aide tells me. “We are not trying to bait them into another fight. We’d rather put it past the election. But it’s really up to them. If they want to recommit political suicide  [eight] months before an election, that’s going to be their choice. We’re going to make sure that if this happens it has real consequences for them.”

And so, Dems are hoping that Republican leaders will have even more of an incentive next time to squash any demands from the right for another default hostage crisis. In this scenario, Dems effectively  neutralize the debt limit over the long term, in exchange for accepting sequester level spending into December (only one month longer than under a “clean CR,” which Dems were already prepared to accept). If that worked, it wouldn’t be a bad outcome. Or, if the debt limit isn’t neutralized and Republicans do stage another hostage crisis, the GOP again would devolve into chaos, again underscoring the party’s addiction to destructive, intransigent, crisis-to-crisis governing with only months before Election Day 2014.

That’s the idea, anyway.

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WASHINGTON POST

....despite what most see as a debacle for Republicans, a core group of conservatives insisted Tuesday that they are winning their battle to force concessions from Democrats on fiscal issues.

The president, they say, has been forced into a negotiation, even though he has said he will cede nothing in exchange for opening the government and raising the debt ceiling. The nation’s attention has been focused on problems with the health-care law. And, they say, making Boehner move to the right is itself a victory.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said conservatives have succeeded in exposing problems with the health-care law.
“Oh my gosh, we’ve lit up Obama­care for the whole nation,” he said, describing what his wing of the party had won in the shutdown. “Look, the rollout was atrocious, this is a fundamentally flawed plan, and we have made it crystal-clear to the American public that we stand with them on Obamacare.”

That attitude illustrated a split within the GOP that has only grown more profound in the days since the shutdown started: Hard-liners are sure that their position is gaining strength, while moderates and a number of Republican leaders counter that the party has experienced an epic collapse.
“We didn’t get anything. This has been a total waste of time,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), one of the most consistent critics of his party’s most conservative members.




MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

This is a sad and sickening spectacle,...Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they’ve rigged that, too, with their House districts. They’ve rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!”
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This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.