Tag Archives: Congress

If You’re Trying to Understand John Boehner

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Speaker of the House John Boehner could end the government shutdown and raise the federal debt limit quite easily by allowing the House of Representatives to vote on those two things alone. There are enough “moderate” Republicans to join with Democrats in passing the necessary legislation, which would sail through the Senate and be supported by the President. The Speaker has chosen instead to demand changes to the Affordable Care Act that Senate Democrats and the President won’t (and shouldn’t) accept.

The debt limit won’t be a problem for a week or so, but why is Boehner refusing to allow a “clean” vote on the shutdown?

Two New Yorker writers offer their opinions at the links below. One argues that Boehner is primarily a coward. The other argues that he is primarily a hack (i.e. that he has no personal convictions). A reasonable conclusion is that he is a cowardly hack.

The two New Yorker articles:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/what-is-john-boehner-scared-of.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2013/10/darkness-in-washington.html

You can share your thoughts with the Speaker’s office here:

http://www.speaker.gov/contact 

Professional Journalists Cover the Shutdown

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Journalist Dan Froomkin, who has worked for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, makes an excellent point about the responsibility of the press in situations like the government shutdown. The article is called “Shutdown Coverage Fails Americans”:

The political media’s aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes [in Congress]. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

Trying to be fair and balanced by splitting the difference between Democrats and Republicans when one side is doing something truly extreme is neither fair nor balanced.

Mr. Froomkin’s opinion piece is available at the link below and is definitely worth reading. It’s Al Jazeera America’s website. Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, recently started a news channel on American cable TV. It’s available in our area, but we would have to pay extra to watch it, even though CNN and Fox News are included in the package we already have. Based on the straightforward way they deliver news on their website, I’d rather get information from Al Jazeera America than CNN or Fox.

Note: At the end of his article, Mr. Froomkin puts in a plug for a new website he’s starting called “Fearless Media”, but that’s o.k. Self-promotion is an honorable American tradition.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/1/reporting-governmentshutdowndemocracy.html

It Should Be Unbelievable, But Isn’t

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As reported this afternoon on the NY Times website:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, called House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Wednesday to commit to negotiations on a long-term deficit reduction deal, but only after the House passes the Senate’s bill to reopen the federal government without policy strings attached.

[Reid called Boehner on the phone and also sent this in a letter:]

“Before the House you have the Senate-passed measure to reopen the government, funded at the level that the House chose in its own legislation. I propose that you allow this joint resolution to pass, reopening the government,” Mr. Reid wrote. “And I commit to name conferees to a budget conference, as soon as the government reopens.”

The speaker’s office dismissed it as a surrender demand.

“The entire government is shut down right now because Washington Democrats refuse to even talk about fairness for all Americans under Obamacare,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “Offering to negotiate only after Democrats get everything they want is not much of an offer.”

Wait a minute. “After the Democrats get everything they want”? It’s what the Democrats and the rest of us already have! Except for the federal government being on life support, and presumably most Republicans want that little problem to be fixed too.

The Affordable Care Act has gone into effect. It’s not going away. It’s not something that has to be renegotiated. There was an election. The Supreme Court approved it. People are already signing up (although there is so much interest, the new websites are having trouble keeping up with the demand). 

Get over it, Boehner spokesman, and move on to the next crisis!

Earlier today I read a comment from a Republican at the Boston Herald site. She said that delaying the entire ACA for one year was “reasonable”, since some parts of it have already been delayed. She also said it was o.k. to delay it because the thing doesn’t work anyway (the evidence being that thousands of people who visited the websites yesterday had trouble getting through, because thousands of people were trying to get through).

This is the problem we’re having in this country. There are many among us who live in a different reality and use words like “reasonable” in a different way. “Extortion” becomes “negotiation”. As a result, communication becomes terribly difficult. Ideology can certainly cloud your perception of the world. 

http://www.nytimes.com/news/fiscal-crisis/2013/10/02/reid-says-hell-negotiate-once-house-drops-demands/

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/us_politics/the_lone_republican/2013/10/
day_2_in_obama_holding_federal_government

PS — Someone just left a comment on the previous post asking why it’s bad for the Republicans to want to delay the ACA. That’s their right, of course. The question is how they try to achieve that goal. See the comments on the post below if you’re interested, including a link to another opinion piece.

In the meantime, I’m going to watch some soccer.

Responding to the Use of Chemical Weapons (3rd Edition)

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Getting killed or maimed by a chemical weapon isn’t necessarily worse than being killed or maimed by a bullet or high explosive. Being aware of their terrible effects, however, almost all countries have agreed not to use chemical weapons. And despite the fact that we’ve been lied to before by our political leaders (for example, regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Iraq’s weapons program), it seems likely that President Obama is telling the truth and correctly interpreting the evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons — to devastating effect.

Before the President spoke yesterday, I would have bet that he was going to tell the Navy to launch cruise missiles against targets in Syria. Other presidents have made similar decisions, without Congressional approval and certainly without a declaration of war. That can be the right thing for a President to do in extraordinary circumstances. Yet I was hoping that Obama would wait for the report of the U.N. inspectors and also seek approval from Congress. If it’s clear that the Syrian government launched this attack, there should be a response, but that response doesn’t need to be immediate. It should also be a response supported by Congress, since we’re supposed to be a democracy.

Now there will be a debate in Congress. as well as a continuing debate in the media. We’ll hear many good reasons why the United States shouldn’t do anything, and some very good reasons for doing something. Maybe this will be one of those cases in which the “wisdom of crowds” will result in a good decision, even an improvement on what the President wants to do. Unfortunately, Congress, especially this Congress, rarely does anything wise.

This is the third time I’ve written this post, after deleting it twice. There is a strong moral case for doing something to stop the Syrian government and other governments from using chemical weapons, even though that may be a difficult thing to do and there will be unforeseeable consequences. We can’t know yet whether those possible consequences tip the scale toward doing nothing. 

The truth is that I don’t know what I’d do if I were Obama or a member of Congress. What’s happening in Syria (and Egypt, Iraq, etc.) may be so sick and so irrational that there is nothing for the rest of us to do but watch, hoping that these people will get tired of hating and killing each other or that someone will eventually exert control over the situation. One of those things might happen, probably after we’re dead and gone.

How to Fix Congress

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Congress is under the control of Republicans who are terribly afraid of primary challenges from right-wing nuts. So Congressional Republicans behave as if they are right-wing nuts themselves, even if they aren’t (some of them aren’t).

In a column devoted to reactions to President Obama’s recent economic speech, Alex Pareene responds to the idea that Obama needs “bold, new proposals” in order to get the Republicans to cooperate:

I dunno, the only bold new proposal I can think of that will meaningfully break down Republican resistance would be to massively expand the size of the House and institute nationwide nonpartisan redistricting, and somehow do this before the 2014 elections, and then get rid of the filibuster? That would be pretty bold.

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes. (This rightward tilt is made even stronger by the Republicans’ adherence to the so-called “Hastert Rule”: bills don’t get a vote unless they’re supported by a majority of Republicans, i.e. a majority of the majority).

The Senate, of course, was designed to give extra power to small states and the filibuster gives extra power to the minority. It’s a little-known fact that the original rules of both the House and Senate allowed debate to be ended by a majority vote. In 1806, however, Vice President Aaron Burr convinced senators that they didn’t need such a rule; the rule hadn’t been invoked recently so it was just cluttering up the rule book. That change created the possibility of a filibuster, the requirement that a super-majority be required to end debate. The first filibuster occurred 31 years later. Now ordinary business often requires the approval of 60 Senators. So much for majority rule.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that Mr. Parene’s “bold, new ideas” will soon be adopted is approximately zero. It’s true that the Senate might change its rules; that could happen now if some Democratic senators weren’t afraid of the consequences. But it’s highly unlikely that the House will be expanded (although someone is arguing for that to happen: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/). The most we can hope for is that Congressional districts will one day be drawn with little or no political influence — or that whoever carries out the next round of gerrymandering does a better job.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/25/post_pundits_obama_economy_speech_boring_not_grand_bargain_y_enough/