The Republican Armageddon Caucus

Obstruction and outright sabotage are now the main hallmarks of the Republican Party at the national level.  Particularly among some of the worse far right ideologues who naturally are the darlings of the drooling, spittle flecked GOP base.  This group offers nothing in terms of proposed solutions to many pressing problems and needs and instead seek only to destroy government and needed programs  And equally disturbing is the reality that thanks to shameless district gerrymandering, it will be difficult to get rid of these horrid individuals.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this cabal of  lunacy and what it may hold for the nation.  Here are excerpts:

[A]fter three years of congressional dysfunction brought on by the rise of a radicalized brand of conservatism, it’s time to call the core questions:

Will our ability to govern ourselves be held perpetually hostage to an ideology that casts government as little more than dead weight in American life? And will a small minority in Congress be allowed to grind decision-making to a halt?

Congress is supposed to be the venue in which we Americans work our way past divisions that are inevitable in a large and diverse democracy. Yet for some time, Republican congressional leaders have given the most right-wing members of the House and Senate a veto power that impedes compromise, and thus governing itself.

On the few occasions when the far-right veto was lifted, Congress got things done . . . . All these actions had something in common: They were premised on the belief that government can take practical steps to make American life better.

This idea is dismissed by those ready to shut down the government or to use the debt ceiling as a way of forcing the repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act and passing more draconian spending reductions. It needs to be made very clear that these radical Republicans are operating well outside their party’s own constructive traditions.

Before their 2010 election victory, Republicans had never been willing to use the threat of default to achieve their goals.
The very fact that everyone now accepts the term “Obamacare” to refer to a measure designed to get health insurance to many more Americans is a sign of how stupidly partisan we have become.

The health-care exchanges to facilitate the purchase of private insurance were based on a Heritage Foundation proposal, first brought to fruition in Massachusetts by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney. Subsidizing private premiums was always a Republican alternative to extending Medicare to cover everyone, the remedy preferred by many liberals.

But that was then. The right wing’s recent rejection of a significant government role in ending the scandal of “a health-care system that does not even come close to being comprehensive and fails to reach far too many” — the words were spoken 24 years ago by the late Sen. John Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican — tells us why Congress no longer works.

The GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country.

Behind all of the GOP posturing is something else: Greed.  The base of the GOP which constantly blathers about its religiosity and Christian ideals in truth doesn't give a damn about other citizens.  They don't want to pay anything toward the common good and basically hate everyone other than themselves.  They are a scourge on America and the world.

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GOP Elites in Full Blown Panic Mode

The damage being done to the Republican brand continues unabated as the lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party controlled base of the GOP veers further and further off into extremism and what is basically a fantasy world.  A fantasy world that a majority of Americans tethered to reality do not inhabit - and most importantly reject. As a former Republican who left the GOP as it sold its soul to the Christofascists, I will admit that I get some perverse delight in seeing my warnings to former GOP compatriots come true.  Unfortunately, the GOP has now become a threat to America and the party base seemingly would savor destroying the American (and world) economy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the apparent panic gripping those who allowed the lunatic fringe to take over the party grassroots.  Here are excerpts:

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are well sourced among top Republicans. And today they weigh in with a big piece reporting that GOP elites are in full blown panic mode about the party’s drift towards a series of Apocalyptic showdowns this fall.

The most interesting bit is the profound worry about the drift towards a government shutdown over Obamacare. But I think the fundamental problem is still being overlooked. Here’s the key part:

Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they simply cannot govern. Their favorable ratings are terrible and getting worse. But there is broad concern it could go from worse to an unmitigated disaster this fall. Most urgently, according to a slew of key Republicans we interviewed, conservative GOP senators have got to give up their insistence that the party allow the government to shut down after Sept. 30 if they don’t get their way on defunding Obamacare.

The quixotic drive — led by Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee — is part of Rubio’s effort to make up with the conservative base after he was stunned by the backlash over his deal-making on immigration. Pollsters say the funding fight makes Republicans look even more obstructionist, and causes voters to worry about the effect a shutdown would have on their own finances.

Whit Ayres of North Star Opinion Research, who has been drilling down on this issue for the conservative public-opinion group Resurgent Republic, said: “Shutting down the government is the one way that Republicans can turn Obamacare from a political advantage to a political disadvantage in 2014.”

The government shutdown push has focused the attention of GOP elites, because it is probably suicidal politically for the party. At the same time, though, the unspoken premise is that the problem is only one of excessive tactics, rather than something more fundamental. If Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they cannot govern, as top GOPers seem to fear, it’s not clear that this is only because a shutdown has become a real possibility.

A shutdown, because of its visibility and destructiveness, is obviously a glaring symbol of an inability to govern, one that voters (as the 1990s showed) easily understand in such terms. But the result of the relentless focus on the shutdown has been to quasi-normalize other opposition to Obamacare. If a shutdown risks conveying a fundamental inability to govern, why do not other efforts to sabotage the law . . . . while offering no alternative also convey the same?

Some Republicans have begun to acknowledge this larger problem in public, albeit in somewhat different terms. But the battle over the shutdown is distracting from the need to focus on that more basic challenge.

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Gingrich to GOP: We’ve Got a Problem

Much of the time Newt Gingrich is a loud mouth blow hard - a demagogue even.  But every once in a while he does get it right.  Such is the case with his criticism of the GOP obsession with obstructing Obamacare while offering nothing in its place. America's health care system is very broken and the least cost effective in its delivery of medical care of any developed nation.  Doing nothing is not an option, particularly if one is serious in reining in health care costs and government spending in programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Gingrich's condemnation of the GOP House and other Cassandras who are advising that things need to change in the GOP mindset.  Here are excerpts:

There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:

“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.”   “We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said, acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”

It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party.

Just two days ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore — whom Dems believe sometimes channels the thinking of GOP leaders — floated the radical idea that Republicans should point to the sequester and the falling deficit to declare victory in the spending wars, instead of provoking a costly and destructive government shutdown fight that would only help Obama and Dems.

And earlier this week, GOP strategists with direct experience of GOP midterm losses in 1998 told the also-well-connected Byron York that Republicans are at real risk of duplicating 1998′s mistakes. The strategists noted that Republicans ran relentlessly against Bill Clinton — even though he wasn’t on the ballot — and that this didn’t work; rather than gain seats, as is customary in the off year of an oppositional president’s second term, Republicans lost seats. York concluded that a similar outcome was possible next year “if Republicans stick to being an opposition party on the attack rather than the alternative party offering an agenda.”

Will the GOP change course?  Probably not given the reality that the party is now the hostage of the Christofascists and Tea Party loons who refuse to change with objective reality.

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Government Shut Down - The GOP Obsession with Obamacare

So far many of the dire warnings of the GOP demagogues about Obamacare have failed to come to fruition and in a number of states it appears that premiums will be less expensive that the doomsday Cassandras predicted.  It seems that other than the Tea Party/Christofascist crowd, the only folks screaming are greedy business owners who view employees as modern day serfs and similarly greedy doctors who claim poverty while living far better than most of the populace (I have yet to meet a poor doctor in my legal practice - I tend to avoid them as clients because most are obnoxious and don't want to pay for services rendered).  So why is the GOP willing to shut down the federal government that will harm vast numbers of individuals and businesses?  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP obsession with destroying Obamacare and throwing millions of Americans back into an uninsured status. Here are highlights:

With the right wing in full-throttle defund-Obamacare mode, everyone seems to be wondering whether the August recess will bring a rerun of the now-mythical Summer of ’09, when the Tea Party came into its own and changed the national conversation on health care. One question seems to be whether the continuing Obamacare obsession will eclipse immigration reform.

But the Asheville Citizen Times of North Carolina offers an account of something else entirely: A GOP Congressman, Patrick McHenry, getting confronted by a constituent — one Skip Edwards — who is upset with his votes to repeal Obamacare, because of his own medical and financial situation. What’s particularly interesting is Rep. McHenry’s claim that he supports parts of the Affordable Care Act, chiefly the bit prohibiting discrimination against people with preexisting conditions:

Edwards and his wife, both 63, had health insurance until he lost his job during the recessio

n and the East Asheville couple found themselves in financial trouble despite staying relatively healthy.

Edwards and others wondered why McHenry would vote against a plan they feel is better than nothing at all. He said he would not vote for something he feels is bad policy.

McHenry floated a few familiar GOP solutions — allowing the buying of insurance across state lines and increasing competition — but Edwards said he wasn’t satisfied.

It’s easy to rail about Obamacare’s evils inside the safe confines of the conservative media echo chamber. But it may not be so easly for GOP lawmakers to explain to their constituents that they support repealing specific provisions in Obamacare, i.e., the ban on discrimination against preexisting conditions. 

[A]s unpopular as Obamacare admittedly remains, the battle over health care in 2014 may also be partly decided by the prosaic question of which side is perceived as genuinely wanting to fix our health care system. It remains to be seen whether suggestions such as those McHenry offered will be enough.

On top of this, conservative are putting heavy pressure on GOP lawmakers not just to keep trying to repeal Obamacare, but to shut down the government to force an Apocalyptic stand against the law. If it’s hard to explain repealing certain parts of the law, how will GOP lawmakers explain shutting down the government to defund it?

It also remains to be seen whether such episodes will get anywhere near the play that will likely be lavished on tales of Obamacare implementation going awry. Sure, constituents who don’t want the law’s provisions taken away may not be wearing funny three cornered hats or holding up signs proclaiming that tyranny has arrived on American shores, so they may not get much media attention. But surely they are an important part of the story, too.

Truth be told, the GOP simply doesn't care about a vast portion of the American population.  We're disposable garbage,  especially if we are black, Hispanic, or gay.

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Republicans Against Reality

One of the Republican Party's biggest hurdles in the coming years is overcoming the control of the party grassroots by those who live in an alternate universe from objective reality.  Yes, once again I am talking about the Christofascists and Tea Party nutcases who now make up much of the GOP base.  Science and knowledge continue to advance and the demographic make up of the country continues to change, yet the GOP base wants to return to a 1950 world when minorities were subservient (and segregated in the South), gays were invisible, and unwarranted deference to religion was perhaps at its height.  Paul Krugman looks at this GOP disconnect from reality in a column in the New York Times.  Here are excepts:

Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing. 

I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints . . .

Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week. 

First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation bill, because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill’s steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal spending — and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as there weren’t any specifics, balked at the details.

Then House leaders announced plans to hold a vote cutting spending on food stamps in half — a demand that is likely to sink the already struggling effort to agree with the Senate on a farm bill. 

Then they held the pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make themselves feel better. (It’s curious how comforting they find the idea of denying health care to millions of Americans.)

In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk. 

How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, . . .  What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away. 

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. . . . . For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told. . . . .  And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.

What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.

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The New GOP "Mavericks" - A Threat to America

The GOP always claims that it is the "liberals, communists, and of course, Democrats" who pose a grave threat to America.  In a column which will not sit well with the unwashed Neanderthals of the Tea Party and Christofascists elements of the GOP base, Kathleen Parker suggests that it is instead the new GOP "mavericks" - e.g., Senators. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul - who are the threats to the nation.  One can only assume that Parker did not drink her allotment of Kool-Aid this past week and hence a column that focuses on reality.  Here are some highlights:

Congress went home without doing much of anything. As everyone knows, Republicans are to blame. They are the obstructionists, the just-say-no enemies of women, immigrants, health care for the poor, shoes for the born and equality for gay whales, to mention a few.

This is not to say that the GOP is problem-free. Far from it. The tea party/libertarian express poses a serious threat to the party and, therefore, the nation.

McCain is the GOP grandpa swatting at ankle-biting upstarts such as fellow Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.  They are the new, out-of-the-box mavericks. And the squabbles that threaten to shut down the government come Oct. 1 may be part of a larger generational struggle to redefine the party. Suicide isn’t as catchy as “Winning!” — but, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested, at least it’s a stand.

Cruz and Paul, whom McCain once called “wacko birds,” have threatened to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded.

Obviously, Obama won’t sign off on a budget that defunds his chief achievement. But the alternative of Republicans reforming Obamacare isn’t appealing because they don’t want to help save it. The threatened shutdown, however, is more tilting at windmills than slingshots against giants.

Either Cruz and Paul have sincerely deluded themselves about the political consequences of a shutdown or, plausibly, they don’t really think they can cause a shutdown and would never have to suffer the consequences. Meanwhile, they score political points with the base by blaming the GOP “sellouts” when the establishment adults keep the trains running on time.

Even if these newbie mavericks were successful in their defunding effort, it would only be a temporary “win,” since funding comes up annually. Moreover, such a temporary victory would give Democrats a far-reaching advantage. Thereafter, responsibility for any dissatisfaction with the health care system would shift to the GOP.

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Krauthammer: GOP Shut Down the Government over Obamacare is Nuts

I don't often agree with Charles Krauthammer on many things - he drinks too much of the GOP Kool-Aid typically - but in a Washington Post editorial he assails the GOP threat to shut down the national government as a means to sabotage Obamacare.  As is now the norm for the GOP on almost every issue, the far right faction in the party has no proposed alternative to the Affordable Health Care Act - or the Senate immigration reform bill either.  They'd rather throw millions of Americans on the trash heap with no insurance coverage and keep America with the highest priced, least effectively delivered health care in the world.  Here are excerpts from the editorial:

A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea party insurgents vs. get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: (a) national security and (b) Obamacare.

(a) National security

The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world’s leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone. 

Which rests on the further assumption that international stability — open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquillity — comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion. 

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection the United States thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquillity. You get chaos.

(b) Obamacare

 

The other battle is about defunding Obamacare. Led by Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, the GOP insurgents are threatening to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if the stopgap funding bill contains money for Obamacare.

This is nuts. The president will never sign a bill defunding the singular achievement of his presidency. Especially when he has control of the Senate. Especially when, though a narrow 51 percent majority of Americans disapproves of Obamacare, only 36 percent favors repeal. President Obama so knows he’ll win any shutdown showdown that he’s practically goading the Republicans into trying.

Never make a threat on which you are not prepared to deliver. Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans.

Those who fancy themselves tea party patriots fighting a sold-out cocktail-swilling establishment are demanding yet another cliff dive as a show of principle and manliness. 

But there’s no principle at stake here. This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal.

As for manliness, the real question here is sanity. Nothing could better revive the fortunes of a failing, flailing, fading Democratic administration than a government shutdown where the president is portrayed as standing up to the GOP on honoring our debts and paying our soldiers in the field.

How many times must we learn the lesson? You can’t govern from one house of Congress. You need to win back the Senate and then the presidency. Shutting down the government is the worst possible way to get there. Indeed, it’s Obama’s fondest hope for a Democratic recovery.

Note how he touches on the issue of sanity.  Sanity is what the GOP has lost thanks to the Christofascists and Tea Party which now control the party base like a metastasizing cancer. 

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The GOP Is Terrified of Obamacare Because It Could Work

With all the huge problems facing America at the moment the Congressional Republicans have lots of things that they could be doing.  But their number one obsession is thwarting the Affordable Health Care Act - a/k/a Obamacare - as evidenced by the ridiculous number of votes for its repeal in the GOP controlled House of Representatives.   Why?  First, because these cretins cannot grasp that we are already paying the cost of treating the uninsured through exorbitantly high medical cost which are inflated to recapture all the monies written off by hospitals and other providers.  We have the least efficient and cost effective system of any advanced nation.  Second, and most importantly, they are terrified that Obamacare might actually work and destroy all of their claims and doom saying.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the phenomenon.  Here are story excerpts:

I know, we’re all supposed to think the End Is Nigh because the government has decided to give the 10 percent of large employers who don’t insure their workers another 365 days to do so before levying a small penalty. This could not possibly be a reasonable accommodation to protect jobs and businesses, because as everybody knows, this president hates jobs and businesses.

No, this brief delay must be a sign that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act is destined to result in abject failure. After all, that’s what every Congressional Republican with the ability to hit send on a press release has told us, over and over again, hoping that repeating their prediction enough times will somehow make it true.

But here’s my question: if Republicans are so confident Obamacare will end badly, why not just shut up about it? It’s not like they have the votes to repeal the law—a math problem they still haven’t solved after 37 different tries. Their appeal to the Supreme Court ended in defeat at the hands of a conservative chief justice. And now the bulk of the plan will begin to take effect in just a few months.

At this point, why not sit back and wait for this crazy experiment to self-destruct? Why not let President Obama and the Democrats reckon with the millions of angry Americans who will undoubtedly hate their new insurance or their new insurance protections?

Because Republicans are terrified that Obamacare could actually work. Already, the law has provided 54 million Americans free access to preventive services like check-ups and mammograms. More than six million seniors have saved more than six billion dollars on their prescriptions. Nearly thirteen million consumers have received more than one billion dollars in rebates from insurance companies that had overcharged them. There are more than three million happy young adults who have been allowed to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26. And in California, a state that represents one-fifth of the U.S. economy, we’ve learned that premiums for the law’s new insurance options have come in lower­ than expected.

As these successes build, Republicans are naturally coping with their fear the only way they know how: by scaring the hell out of everyone else.
[T]oday, the anti-government zealots who have taken over the once-proud Republican Party feel they must burn our village to save it. They are actively trying to prevent Americans who have been too poor or sick to get health insurance from knowing that all three branches of their democratically elected government have passed and upheld a law that will finally allow them to see a doctor without going broke.

[T]here is now plenty of evidence that if we as a nation want Obamacare to work, it will work; that if we can extract ourselves from the trench warfare that preceded the passage of the law, we can all start focusing on fixing and improving it over the next year. 

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