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Description: After a lengthy hiatus, Bill returns to the air with an in-depth interview on filibuster reform with David Waldman, a commentary on the issues facing the new Congress, an explanation of the French military campaign in Mali, and a note on the US timetable in Afghanistan. Sasha also chimes in for a discussion of the status of women in American politics at the start of 2013.
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So the House of Representatives passed the New Year’s Fiscal Cliff Deal that the Senate passed in the middle of the night by a large margin, a few weeks after Speaker John Boehner’s unilateral “Plan B” proposal failed abysmally because neither the House Democrats nor his own Republican Majority were interested. So instead of the conservative Republicans getting a pretty good deal, they had to sit and watch in impotent rage as Speaker Boehner, 81 other Republicans, and nearly all the House Democrats held and passed a vote on a pretty damn great deal for the Democratic White House.
Here’s the quick summary of what Democrats got:
It’s a pretty good deal (for us). No changes to entitlement benefits (i.e. Social Security or Medicare), income taxes go back up to Clinton levels for the super-wealthy (individuals making over $400k/yr, couples making over $450k/yr), everyone else’s income taxes remain at the Bush Tax Cuts levels, unemployment insurance benefits are extended after expiring a few days back, all scheduled “sequester” spending cuts are delayed for 2 more months, milk prices are stabilized, and there’s some delay on a Medicare payment restructuring plan with regards to doctor compensation (but I don’t know much about that). The payroll taxes will roll back up to at least 2008 levels (which helps Social Security’s solvency), which was theoretically always supposed to happen eventually, since the cuts were a short-term stimulus. Democrats only conceded about $200 billion over ten years in potential revenues on the marginal incomes between $200k/$250k and $400k/$450k, which is not that big a problem in the grand scheme. I guess this means there’s a new tax bracket, which is fine by me. There’s also no resolution on the next debt ceiling raise that will need to happen in a few months, but that wouldn’t have been likely in an 11th Hour (or 13th Hour?) deal anyway, and it wasn’t urgent.
About those Spending Cuts:
If this were still going to be the ultra-obstructionist, big-Republican-majority 112th Congress we’ve had since January 2011, it would be a big problem that the spending cuts were delayed by 2 months, because it would just manufacture another artificial crisis/showdown in two months. But the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday of this week, and that means a new calculus, even if the Republicans still control the House. I think the 2 month postponement only helps the Democrats, not the Republicans. It’s now more on our turf to decide. Tuesday was the last opportunity for House Republicans to use their big 2010-won majority to shape cuts, and they blew it. Their majority isn’t as big once the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday. If Boehner and the remaining GOP moderates keep caving, Pelosi, Reid, and the White House will be calling the shots on things like spending cuts.
Granted, that’s obviously a big if. So let’s examine whether or not that is likely to happen. The 113th Congress will start with a Republican majority with only a 23 seat edge. I think that’s probably in the neighborhood of the size of the northeast/northern Republicans and the small cadre of people who still back Boehner to the hilt. They won’t vote with the Democrats on a lot of stuff, but they’ll vote with them on quite a few national-scale priorities if Boehner asks them to. Boehner won’t get voted out as speaker, but he has clearly lost all control of his caucus. Previously he could control his caucus to some extent, so he could be obstructionist and fight the White House and still get things. But now he can’t deliver Republican majorities for anyone’s bills. His only power play now — to demonstrate any level of control over the situation and to leave any kind of mark in his tenure as speaker — is to show that he can get some things, or rather any things, through. (Because at the end of the day, he’s still not one of the Burn Everything Down tea party Republicans, and he probably thinks of himself as a statesman.) Those things will from now on be designed by the White House and by the Senate Democratic Leadership, and they will only pass with Democratic help in the House. If the filibuster gets reformed, the Senate Democrats will have an even easier time passing legislation to send to the House. So Boehner will have to choose between trying and repeatedly failing to pass conservative legislation because neither the House Democrats nor the House Republican Conservatives will vote for it or trying to persuade House Democrats to vote with him and two dozen Republicans on centrist policies. And some Republicans will agree to do this either because they are actually moderates or because they realize that they are more likely to retain the Republican majority in 2014 by being able to claim some amount of credit and cooperation on accomplishing some stuff than by preventing anything from getting passed for two years. A lot of the few remaining folks in the Boehner loyalist cadre were veterans of the Gingrich Majority of the 1990s that almost collapsed in the 1998 & 2000 elections due to inability to pass almost anything and get it signed into law. The Republicans already got dinged badly in the 2012 House elections (and would probably have lost their majority were it not for favorable redistricting by the state legislators elected in the 2010 Republican wave) because Americans saw them as uncooperative bordering on saboteurs. Right direction or wrong direction, Americans nearly always prefer action in some direction over action in no direction.
About that Debt Ceiling:
The debt ceiling, untouched in this middle-of-the-night deal, is going to need to be raised again in, I guess, March or thereabouts. I’m not totally sure of the timeline but it’s not all that important here. It’ll be after the spending cuts postponement is up in 2 months. But it’s another point where the 2011 Republicans would have seized the opportunity to create a crisis and force a showdown right up to the brink of disaster. They did that in 2011. But the Republican majority and Speaker Boehner in particular won’t have that kind of leverage anymore.
I think the world-ending showdowns from 2011 and 2012 are probably over for the next two years or will be far, far less frequent. Once again, Boehner’s majority will be a lot smaller starting Thursday (only a 23 seat edge) in the 113th Congress, and he no longer has influence over most of that majority. He and some of his supporters would really prefer not to bring down the government and economy, even if the conservative wing is claiming to be just fine with that outcome. Since he’s never going to reach a deal that could win a Republican majority and Senate and White House passage, and will in fact embarrass himself every time he tries (as happened with the “Plan B” proposal), he no longer has an incentive to futz around trying to get such a deal — and the White House knows that. No leverage for him, now. Likelier scenario is that he bangs his chest a bit and then puts together a deal with the Senate Majority and White House that the House Minority Democrats will back. And then he, his merry band of two or three dozen Republicans who aren’t complete maniacs on the debt ceiling, and the House Democrats will cobble together a slim majority and pass a deal. The White House, I believe, has already said that they will exercise the Amendment 14 Section 4 option (a unilateral raise) if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. They don’t want to do that — it’s still an open question has to whether or not the Courts would accept it and no one really wants to find out the hard way — but they will do it if they have to. So he can negotiate or not negotiate, but the debt ceiling will be raised either way, so it’s in his interest to negotiate the best deal he can get, given that this White House would prefer a deal to that extreme option.
One final unavoidable caveat to all of this:
Never underestimate the power of the current crop of Republicans to cut off their noses to spite their faces. All of what I’m saying could be woefully over-optimistic and naive. They’ve shown on more than a few occasions that they will go to all kinds of unprecedented extremes unseen in the modern era even when it hurts them. They’re a bit fundamentalist in that regard. I’m arguing on a questionable assumption that at least a couple dozen of them (including speaker Boehner) are still acting on a rational self-interest basis. And you know what happens when you assume…
First, this was a deeply upsetting event, and it’s hard to grasp or process mentally. It would be anyway, but it’s especially hard as a native of New England — we have a lot of regional solidarity and closeness. For example, my mother texted me to remind me she and I had stopped right near that school this past May to get lunch while traveling between Delaware and Massachusetts.
Second. The bulk of the people who tell us not to “politicize” mass shootings are invariably gun advocates. They are aware that this *is* a political issue, whether in or out of the heat of the moment, and that if they can delay any immediate reaction when momentum in favor would be highest, that it’s even less likely any gun control legislation will be introduced, let alone passed. The rest of people who say not to politicize it are usually sincerely trying to keep the focus where it ideally would be, on the loss of life and the mourning families — but they are, in fact, enabling the other side, by silencing the gun control advocates who have been on the losing side for a decade. Silence is a de facto advantage to the gun lobby, since they are in the dominant position in the American political system. In the past two years, there have been at least a half dozen horrific mass shootings, and the gun lobby has effectively prevented the introduction or consideration of even modest, reasonable measures to tighten up legal acquisition of guns, restrictions on the types of guns sold to civilians, or the extended clips/magazines made legally available. They even managed to force people to stay silent in the aftermath of an attempted assassination of an elected member of Congress, which was quite obviously political, by telling people not to politicize the tragedy. Simply put, our government generally responds to problems only when there is broad public attention on it and a demand for solutions, particularly after crises hit, and gun violence problems are no exception — which makes it *necessary* to discuss this immediately, instead of waiting until everyone not immediately connected to a given tragedy has had time to “forget” till the next incident. It’s amazing seeing the comments about how we “can’t jump to conclusions” or be overly hasty because don’t know all the details yet, as if this weren’t something that was happening every few months, as if we can’t generalize that there’s a problem we need to act on. This isn’t some unprecedented and unforeseeable event, it’s something that keeps happening over and over. Other industrialized nations don’t have this problem (to the same level or frequency, even with the 3 unprecedented major incidents in Europe in 2011) because they have pretty strict controls — so much for the If Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns platitude — as well as a lack of a “gun culture” (and yes better health care systems that help people struggling with mental illnesses get adequate help). Here, this is something that now seems to be accepted as an unavoidable part of our reality, that every few months a dozen or more people will be killed at once inexplicably (or that random gun violence will happen on city street corners daily, or that some number of wives and children will be shot dead in their homes by abusive husbands and fathers). Telling people not to talk about it at the time when something happens is, whether intentional or not, effectively an endorsement of the view that this will be our continued reality and that we should just accept it and shouldn’t do anything about it. If we don’t accept this premise, we *have to* talk about it and we have to talk about policy and political solutions, because this *is* a political issue, like it or not. If it weren’t, the NRA wouldn’t spend so much money each year on elections. Honestly, I don’t really think anything will come of this either, because the gun lobby has secured their position so strongly, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it or be quiet about it or wait until it’s faded from the news cycle. I’m tired of being silenced on gun control because I’m supposed to only be joining the collective mourning. I’m capable of holding more than one thought in my head at a time, and so are the rest of Americans. The gun advocates just don’t want that to happen because then they might actually have a fight on their hands in the halls of power.
American Millennials have had a lot of contradictory views on Uganda this year…
Arsenal for Democracy will be back soon.
My first book, over a year in the making, is now on sale at Amazon for $2.99 for Kindle! Get yourself ready for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions by learning about the importance of American Dream rhetoric in past presidential nomination acceptance speeches.
I Accept Your Nomination: American Dream Rhetoric in Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speeches, 1932-2008: William Humphrey: Amazon.com: Kindle Store
Note: That link goes to the U.S. Kindle store but if you are overseas and search for the title in your country’s Kindle store, you should be able to find it without any trouble.
Since 1932, Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have delivered speeches in person at thirty-seven conventions, accepting their parties’ nominations for that election.
These speeches occur at the official nexus of primary and general election campaigns, and they are delivered to live audiences of supporters and millions of undecided voters from across the spectrum watching at home. They have developed into their own internally consistent and self-referential genre within American political rhetoric, filled with shared motifs, themes, and components.
Despite that, there has been only limited academic research on the speeches so far. This project examined, in particular, representations of the common motif of the American Dream across the genre in an effort to answer part of the question of how American political candidates (specifically presidential nominees in this case) appeal to ideas (such as the American Dream) in the American political culture.
Most references in the speeches to the American Dream, however, are oblique or indirect. I therefore conducted a content analysis and identified seven distinct “vehicles” that the nominees have used to introduce the concept into the speeches and define it. I argue that these references communicate information to voters about ideological positions and disposition of the nominees, which help voters form impressions to use when casting their votes.
It is hoped that this work will have both campaign and academic applications, and I conclude by suggesting some possibilities to that end. It is additionally hoped that this book will be accessible to general audiences.
Bill and Anna start off with a speculative discussion about the relationship between social and economic libertarianism from the 1960s onward (based off Kurt Andersen’s dubious NY Times column), which transitions into a discussion of the money woes of cash-strapped cities selling ads on public services, and then into a report on the tax hikes on the rich that the French Socialist government has just proposed. After the break, they discuss Rep. Joe Walsh’s latest outrageous offense, as well as a story about the border patrol arresting a former governor of Arizona. They close out with a mocking look at the impending fiscal meltdown of the Creationism Museum as the Noah’s Ark project hits the rocks.
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Bill, Kelley, and guest host Anna from ONTD_p discuss the policy implications of a worsening generation gap between Millennials (and the next generation after them) and Baby Boomers, especially now that White births are no longer a majority in the United States. Eventually Bill gets really angry about Harry Reid’s failure to reform the Senate filibuster rules in January 2011 now that Reid has come around to see the wisdom of the “young” Senators who proposed the change.
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