Congress and the Constitution

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Janet Yellen has been named Chair of the Federal Reserve. But as for the Great Stupid Impasse in Washington, I can’t say that anything significant has happened over the past 24 hours or so.

I’m glad somebody finally said this — the 14th Amendment applies to Congress. Many have said that the 14th gives the President a means to raise the debt ceiling without Congress, and maybe it does. But more significantly, the public debt clause in the 14th binds Congress to not allow the nation to default. You’d think the baggers who get misty-eyed in reverence for the great founding document, would notice this. More proof they can’t read?

See also the Booman

The Plan as I Understand It

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Harry Reid plans to put a long-term debt increase with no strings attached up for a vote in the Senate this week. He needs just six Republicans to join the Dems for a two-thirds vote, and Reid seems to think he can get that. If not, he will challenge Senate Republicans to kill it with a filibuster, making them own the default. If the bill does pass, it will pressure the House, somehow. Although I’m not sure how. The House appears to be too oblivious to be pressured.

Brian Beutler adds another twist:

Reid will likely use a mechanism to allow the president to increase the debt limit on his own, subject to a veto-able resolution of disapproval by the Congress. In other words, the only way the debt limit won’t increase is if two-thirds of both the House and Senate feel it must be pulled back into the realm of legislative horsetrading — something that will never happen absent bipartisan agreement.

I’ve been bouncing around checking out several news stories about this, and most are hazy on details. I’m not sure if the people writing the news stories quite understand what’s going on, either.

A mess o’ Republicans and their supporters have persuaded themselves that the dire predictions of disaster if the debt ceiling isn’t raised are just scare stories coming from the White House. Power Tool John Hinderaker explains that the United States cannot default on debt, because the 14th Amendment says it can’t, therefore God will send us the magic beans we need to find all kinds of surplus money sluicing around Washington.

All we have to do is prioritize, see. Just cut other stuff, like Medicare and the Marines, and we’ll be fine. Just don’t close war memorials.

In short, House Republicans will not see sense, and most Senate Republicans won’t, either, although maybe enough will to get a two-thirds vote.

Does the U.S. Need an Intervention?

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Well, it seems the damnfools are not going to blink, and Boehner is not going to allow a vote on a clean CR. House baggers and other Republicans are downplaying the risk, and Senator Coburn actually said that the U.S. would not default on debt if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Seriously, he said that.

So the question is, are these people just talking like this for the benefit of the rubes, or do they really believe it? It’s hard to know, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that they are really that stupid.

Krugman today argues that what we’re really looking at is incompetence more than stupidity, and cites something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That’s when you’re so incompetent you don’t recognize you are competent incompetent.

From Psychology Today:

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. … To be clear, the main reason for the Dunning Kruger effect should not be viewed as lying in a person’s general IQ. Much rather the Dunning Kruger effect seems to arise from the general top-down approach in which people estimate their own performances: In evaluating ourselves, we tend to start with preconceived notions about our general skill and then we integrate these notions into how well we think we are doing on a task.

The top-down effect means that people assume themselves to be competent — or knowledgeable, or smart — and then judge their own competence or expertise based on that assumption. For example,

“The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own.”

It’s not clear to me how the situation described in the paragraph above is substantially different from just being stupid, but let’s go on …

Krugman writes that it should have been obvious there was no way President Obama would be blackmailed into abandoning the Affordable Care Act. That so many Republicans could not understand this, and apparently still can’t, certainly speaks to a profound mental incompetence of some sort.

Krugman continues,

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

They actually can’t create policy any more. They don’t seem to grasp that there’s a difference between ideological talking points and actual policy (example).

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.

In other words, there was a time that those who spoke for the Republican Party recognized that their bullshit was bullshit. But those days are gone.

What Did They Think Would Happen?

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One of the most surreal reverberations of the government closure is that the Right is in a snit over the closure of war memorials. They’re dumbfounded that government stuff is actually closed.

John Cole wrote yesterday,

Reading report after report that wingnut congressmen and their stooge followers are all pissed off that parks are closed and that the government shutdown has actually shut down the government. What exactly did they think would happen?

The guiding principle of the GOP for decades has been to make government so small you could drown it in the bathtub. We’re not to the drowning part yet, but right now the Republicans are getting the next best thing, which is giving the American people a royal swirly with a shutdown. You’d think this would make them happy- it’s what they wanted, it’s what they fought for, it’s what bill after bill coming out of the house the past few weeks was designed to do, and yet, for some reason, they are pissed they got their way.

The government is shut down, people are suffering. That’s what you all wanted, right?

According to NBC News, yesterday a group of Vietnam vets found the way to the Vietnam Memorial on the Washington DC mall was blocked.

News4’s Mark Segraves said two U.S. Park Service Rangers manning the gate asked that the group respect the government’s shutdown but moved aside.

Segraves described the exchange as pleasant and respectful.

The veterans then moved the barricade and walked down to the wall to pay their respects. But a flood of tourists followed even though the memorial is closed to the general public.

“The consensus among the group of Vietnam veterans was we’re going to go anyway. We’ll go through the barricade,” North Carolina resident Reid Mendenhall said.

U.S. Park Police arrive to the scene, asked everyone to leave and put the barricade back into place.

In the fevered minds of one rightie blogger, the vets stormed the “barrycades,” and then the Park Police came to oppress everyone into order. The Weekly Standard headline is “NBC: Police Remove Vietnam War Veterans at Memorial Wall.”

The Right thinks that President Obama is closing war memorials just to be mean. It’s not like the government is closed or anything. Oh, wait …

What did they think would happen? Most of the park security and custodial staff were sent home. Do the baggers want days and days of trash to accumulate while John Boehner is out looking for his manhood? That could take some time. And if I were a terrorist, I might think this would be a swell time to set a bomb at the Lincoln Memorial, while the few Park Rangers on duty are busy trying to keep the tourists from trashing the monuments. (Note to NSA: I wouldn’t really do this. Honest.)

It’s like they can’t make a connection between action and consequences.

Yes, it’s a damn shame that people planned trips to see Washington, DC, and found so much stuff closed. I’m glad my offspring and I got our trip to Philadelphia in before this happened. But, y’know, that’s what happens when you shut down the government. Real people suffer real disappointments.

What did they think would happen?

Speaking of disappointments, someone I know managed to get admitted to a cancer treatment trial just before the closure. This trial is pretty much his last hope. He was really lucky, because he wasn’t supposed to start until after October 1, but someone else dropped out, so he got in. But I can’t help but think of the people who were counting on that trial to give them, or their loved ones, a chance to survive. And that’s been snatched away from them. And the wingnuts are whining about closed war memorials.

What the bleep did they think would happen?

Down the GOP Rabbit Hole

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From what I can tell the House baggers still think they can get cookies and candy if they keep holding their breath. Yesterday afternoon Robert Costas wrote at NRO:

It hasn’t been announced, and you won’t hear about it today, but the final volley of the fiscal impasse, at least for House Republicans, is already being brokered. And according to my top sources — both members and senior aides — it won’t end with a clean CR, or with a sprawling, 2011-style budget agreement. It’ll end with an offer — a relatively modest mid-October offer that concurrently connects a debt-limit extension, government funding, and a small, but strategically designed menu of conservative demands. …

… What I’m hearing: There will be a “mechanism” for revenue-neutral tax reform, ushered by Ryan and Michigan’s Dave Camp, that will encourage deeper congressional talks in the coming year. There will be entitlement-reform proposals, most likely chained CPI and means testing Medicare; there will also be some health-care provisions, such as a repeal of the medical-device tax, which has bipartisan support in both chambers.

To which Ed Kilgore responded,

You get the feeling Costa’s informants are really proud of themselves for being so very modest in their demands, albeit with some worry that it won’t be enough for the Tea Folk, some of whom would just as soon see a debt default anyway.

Nowhere in the piece, of course, is there any recognition that the president and Harry Reid might mean what they say in stating over and over again that they will not negotiate over a debt limit increase.

Meanwhile Ted Cruz, playing the role of Mad Hatter, said,

“The House began — it is the view of every Republican in this body, and indeed every Republican in the House, that Obamacare should be entirely and completely repealed. Nonetheless, the House started with a compromise of saying not repealing Obamacare but simply that it should be defunded.”

John Boehner is telling the baggers to hang tough, and that they are locked in an epic battle. Boehner is either the Dodo (who suggested a Caucus Race in which everyone just runs in a circle until they stop, without declaring a winner) or the Mock Turtle, who cries a lot.

Ezra Klein writes,

Here is a partial list of bipartisan budget negotiations we’ve had since 2010: The Simpson-Bowles Commission (which, people forget, was the legacy of a 2010 debt-ceiling increase). The Domenici-Rivlin commission. The Cantor-Biden talks. The Obama-Boehner debt-ceiling negotiations. The Gang of Six talks. The “Supercommittee.” The Obama-Boehner fiscal-cliff talks.

All these negotiations have one thing in common: They ultimately failed.

This is the baffling context for Speaker John Boehner’s interest in a conference committee (which, by the way, Republicans have been refusing on the budget for six months) or some kind of tax-reform commission. We have run this play before. We have run it again and again. We have run it using top congressional leaders and President Obama. We have run it using B-string congressional leaders and Vice President Biden. We have run it using retired politicians and wonks. We have run it using various non-leadership members of Congress. We have run it with fast-track authority, and with the threat of sequestration and with the danger of the debt-ceiling. It hasn’t worked.

In fact, it’s worked so poorly that, of late, Republicans have simply refused to be part of these negotiations. After the fiscal cliff, Boehner told his members he was done with backroom negotiations with the president. And Republicans have spent the past six months refusing to enter budget negotiations with Senate Democrats.

Dave Wiegel writes that Dems have been uncommonly tough.

The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. They honestly expected a few of the Democrats to crack—after all, four of them are running for re-election in states that voted for Mitt Romney. …

…Landrieu and Pryor never buckled. They voted with the rest of the party to amend or table every House bill. So did Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan. …

…Why do they stick with Majority Leader Harry Reid—why, when three of them could cast “safe” no votes and Reid could still beat the House bills? Democratic aides say that the red-staters are “scared straight” by the House GOP. They’re not getting the calls from home to defund Obamacare. Their home-state papers aren’t dogging them, either. They’re in no fear of losing an “optics” battle to John Boehner and company.

Neither are the House Democrats. Neither are progressive organizations—not even labor unions like the Teamsters and AFL-CIO, which loudly demanded changes in the law, got cited by Republicans as proof that the Democratic coalition was imploding, then started showing up on the Hill for solidarity marches with furloughed workers. … There’s a new, near-total refusal to compromise….

…“Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things,” said Washington Rep. Jim McDermott after voting no on one of Thursday’s GOP bills. “You can’t deal with ’em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare—affordable health care—in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can’t figure out how to admit it.” Why would House Democrats give away what the Supreme Court and the 2012 electorate didn’t? “You can’t say, OK, you get half of Obamacare—this isn’t a Solomonic decision,” McDermott said. “So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”

The GOP is frantically messaging that it’s really the Dems, not them, who are the “party of no.” Yeah, like that’ll work.

Can There Be an End Game?

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On the optimistic side of things, Brian Beutler thinks that Republican leaders might be realizing they are trapped. However, they’re still hoping to draw the President into some kind of negotiation, which means they aren’t really facing reality yet.

I think Paul Krugman’s assessment is about right —

Just last week we had Paul Ryan blithely assuring National Review that “nobody believes” that Obama will refuse to make concessions over the debt ceiling, and citing examples from the past that anyone who has actually been following the issue knows have no relevance to what’s happening now.

In other words, GOP leaders fundamentally misjudged the situation (and Obama’s incentives). And now they have backed themselves into a position where they don’t know how to back down — they have to extract concessions or they’ll have been “disrespected,” in a situation where Obama simply can’t make any concessions without destroying his own credibility and betraying the fundamental norms of governance.

Krugman says that as the debt limit date draws near, markets and going to freak out. And it is widely assumed this will cause House Republicans to blink.

But given their behavior so far, why would you believe this? I can easily see Ted Cruz making a speech declaring that the freakout is all Obama’s fault, and that what the markets really fear is socialism or something — and the base believing it.

My bet now is that we actually do go over the line for a day or two. And what ends the immediate crisis is not Republican action but a decision by Obama to declare himself not bound by the debt ceiling. He can’t even hint at this possibility until the thing actually happens, because he has to keep the focus on the Republicans, and he has to make them demonstrate their utter irresponsibility before he can take any extraordinary action.

I think the only way we can avoid passing the default date is if the House Republicans capitulate, and I don’t see them doing that.

Ezra Klein:

To the White House, the shutdown/debt ceiling fight is quite simple, and quite radical: Republicans are trying to create a new, deeply undemocratic pathway through which a minority party that lost the last election can enact an agenda that would never pass the normal legislative process. It’s nothing less than an effort to use the threat of a financial crisis to nullify the results of the last election. And the White House isn’t going to let it happen.

Be Afraid

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The extraordinary and unprecedented events in Washington — in which a minority faction of extremists is somehow holding the nation hostage to nullify a constitutionally enacted law they don’t like — has inspired some smart people to write some smart things about how something like this could happen in America. And, frankly, most of it is pretty depressing.

First, see Thomas Frank, “Reaching for the pillars: The conservative plan is sabotage.” You must read the whole thing. I started to excerpt some of it, but it’s hard to choose any one part. The “reaching for the pillars” is a reference to the biblical story of Sampson, who destroyed his enemies by pulling down the pillars of their temple, which ended Sampson’s life as well. Years ago the Right set out to destroy American society to keep it from moving left, and they’ll keep at it or die trying. They’ve done so much damage already it probably cannot be reversed.

Then read Charles Pierce discussing the Right’s “campaign of pure vandalism.” He’s echoing many of Thomas Frank’s themes. If you have time, read the rest of what Pierce has written today, too.

If you aren’t depressed enough already, see Matt Yglesias, Juan “Linz’s Bad News for America.” The late Juan Linz was a political scientist who argued that republics governed by a “presidential” system, as opposed to a parliamentary one, are inherently less able to resolve intractable conflicts like the one we’re having now. Matt Yglesias writes,

… his analysis has a disturbing message for residents of the contemporary United States. The current atmosphere of political crisis isn’t a passing fad and it isn’t going to get better. In fact, it’s very likely to get worse. Much worse. And lead to a complete breakdown of constitutional government and the democratic order.

Anne Appelbaum notes one other significant difference between America and just about everyone else — even as a destructive faction is trying to break the rule of law, we’re all sitting around waiting for the rule of law to resolve the problem.

A couple of days ago, an Egyptian tweeted that it was “impressive how everyone in #US follows the law even in the face of extreme political vandalism by an irrational fringe. #Egypt.” His intention was ironic, but actually, he was right. In many parts of the world—in, say, Egypt—an “irrational fringe” group of politicians who tried to subvert the entire political system by overturning a law already confirmed by three branches of government would be called “insurgents” or “coup-plotters” and their behavior would lead to arrest, prison, or worse.

But because Americans, even irrational Americans, no longer use violence to achieve their goals, because this process is still just barely taking place within the outer boundaries of those institutions, and because the protagonists still observe the language if not always the spirit of the law, the result is peaceful. That is indeed impressive. But it is a narrow achievement. Americans are paying a high price for the events of this week, though they may not know it. The cost of shutting down the federal government for a few days or even a few weeks pales in comparison with the damage we are doing not only to the credibility of the United States abroad, but to the credibility of democracy itself.

Seriously, if most of these whackjobs are re-elected next year without facing any consequences for what they’ve done, the rest of us may have to make some very hard choices. Because the nation cannot go on like this.

And if you still see a ray of hope, see Jonathan Chait, “Why the Shutdown Is Leading to Debt Default; or, What Happens When You Take Hostages Without a Plan.”

On a somewhat lighter note, see Joan Walsh, “Angry right gets mad when you accuse it of race-baiting.”

Upate: Martn Wolf, “America flirts with self-destruction”

Stupid Campaign Tactics

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The Republican running against Mayor Cory Booker for the late, and great, Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat is named Steve Lonegan. I didn’t know much about Lonegan, until now. Now I know Lonegan is an idiot.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the nation’s implementation of Obamacare “a criminal act” as he ended his trip across New Jersey today with a rally for U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan outside a Bergen County diner.

Rick Perry? He invited Rick Perry to New Jersey to campaign with him?

In Bergen County, no less. Bergen is right across the Hudson from Manhattan. I lived there for ten years, before I moved to New York. It’s no hotbed of liberalism, but unless the population recently began to feel the effects of mercury poisoning, or something, it’s not that right wing, either, especially on social issues.

And if there’s one thing I know about New Jerseyites, it’s that the howdy partner cowboy act does not resonate with them. It’s utterly alien, like performing Chinese opera at a Polish wedding.

How Low Can They Go?

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Some children with cancer are now blocked from experimental trials that may have been their parents’ last hope. Nearly 9 million mothers and children under five are in danger of losing WIC vouchers they exchange for food. But the House is hysterical about the closure of … national monuments?

Today’s screaming point is that some World War II vets were barred from the World War II Memorial in Washington. Leaving aside the fact that the World War II memorial looks like something designed by Albert Speer — damn shame about that — did the baggers really think the shutdown would have no effect on real people?

Anyhoo, barricades got moved and the vets charged in. I understand some Republican House members claimed to have moved the barricades. At the very least, somebody should march them back to the mall and insist they pick up the trash and put the barricades back themselves, since there are no employees to do it.

Last night Jon Steward reminds us that awhile back the Faux Nooz crowd was screaming about closing tours of the White House. How low can they go? one cried. But, y’know, it’s possible to live a long and happy life without ever touring the White House. Letting cancer go untreated, not so much.

(Warning to my brother and sister geezers: Do not watch with full bladder.)

Sen. Ted Cruz got the bright idea of funding individual items piecemeal, so yesterday some House baggers proposed appropriations resolutions to fund the District of Columbia, veterans programs and national parks. Hungry children with cancer are not a priority, I guess. But the resolutions were shot down. Nancy Pelosi compared the resolutions to releasing one hostage at a time.

Conventional wisdom among Dems this morning is that a prolonged shutdown will give them leverage on the upcoming debt ceiling fight.

Ed Kilgore writes,

For the past several weeks, of course, John Boenher has been committed to the demand for major, disabling Obamacare changes as a price for either the CR or a debt limit increase (the identify of the hostage has changed constantly). With the president and Democrats refusing to make concessions on ACA in order to secure a CR, and refusing to negotiate over the debt limit at all, it’s not clear what the the parties would be negotiating about if they were in regular talks. It’s also not clear that Boehner has the Republican votes in the House to pursue a different strategy.

So at this point we are looking at a scenario where only a major retreat by one side or the other is going to make any difference. There are some extraordinary remedies the president could take to avoid a debt default (e.g., the one urged on him by Brookings’ Henry Aaron just yesterday). And presumably Wall Street will weigh in with pressure on Boehner and company to the effect that stupid gesturing on Obamacare isn’t worth a major risk to the national and global economies. But I suspect we’ll have to experience a staring match until the Big Blink becomes possible.

Drunk and Derelict

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Being crazy and stupid is bad enough, but Alan Grayson says some House Republicans seem drunk as well. And smell of booze. And he’s not the only one saying this; Politico reporter Ginger Gibson tweeted on Saturday —

See also Joan Walsh and Paul Krugman.