Who Can Take Republicans Seriously?

May 12, 2013

It is time for President Obama to abandon his hopes of reaching a grand budget bargain with Republicans.

At every opportunity since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have made it clear that they have no interest in reaching a compromise with the White House. For two years, they held sham negotiations with Democrats that only dragged down the economy with cuts; this year, they are refusing even to sit down at the table.

Mr. Obama hasn’t given up inviting the Republicans to join him in making the hard choices of governing, but he has been rebuffed each time. This year, in hopes of getting some support for modest tax increases on the rich, he even proposed a reduction in the cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients.

The events of the last few weeks should make it clear to him why that offer should be pulled from the table immediately. Consider:

·       Shortly after Mr. Obama presented this idea to Republicans, more than a half-dozen of them began trashing it as too “draconian” and a “shocking attack on seniors.” For years, the party has demanded entitlement cuts, but the moment the president actually offered one, he was attacked. Then last Tuesday, Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, said that no grand bargain is possible because Democrats aren’t willing to make significant cuts to spending and entitlement programs. The Social Security cost-of-living change, he said, did not go far enough.

·       Senate and House Republicans are refusing to meet with Democrats to negotiate over the budgets passed by each chamber. Four times in the last two weeks, Senate leaders have proposed beginning a conference committee to hash out a federal budget; four times they have been blocked by Republicans. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said they were afraid the committee might reach an agreement to raise both taxes on the rich and the debt ceiling, which are, of course, the Democrats’ stated goals. Knowing that their positions would be deeply unpopular among the public if their stubbornness were exposed in an open committee, Republicans would simply prefer not to talk at all.

·       Instead of negotiation, Republicans cling to their strategy of extorting budget demands by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. On Thursday, the House passed a stunningly dangerous bill that would allow foreign and domestic bondholders to be paid if Republicans forced a government default, while cutting off all other government payments except Social Security benefits. The bill has no possibility of becoming law, but its passage was a deliberate thumb in the eye to Mr. Obama, business leaders and those who say the debt ceiling should not be used for political leverage.

 

Republican lawmakers have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration, even if the ideas were ones that they themselves once welcomed. Under the circumstances, Mr. Obama would be best advised to stop making peace offerings. Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.

Republicans Are Impeding U.S. Economic Recovery

There is no longer debate in Washington D.C. about a fiscal policy that will speed the nation's economy from it's anemic Great Recession recovery. Private sector bankers, investors and economists who normally disagree about everything agree on what is inhibiting economic growth. Recent economic data reinforces their position.

The nation’s unemployment rate would likely be a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth about two points higher this year if politicians had not cut spending and raised taxes as they have since 2011.

Following two years of battle between President Obama and Congressional Republicans, the two sides have fought to a draw over their practically diametrically opposed approaches to job creation and budget deficits. The consensus among those whose political ideology is divorced from their jobs to advise those who wish to increase wealth is as unanimous as it is clear: immediate deficit reduction is a drag on full economic recovery.

We are speaking about those people who advise others daily on the latest signs of economic growth, whether it's in housing, consumer spending or business investment. The ones who belong to the color of money is green political party. What they are saying is tax increases and especially spending cuts take money from an economy that still needs stimulus and is getting stimulus only through the expansionary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, which is far too little to make much of a difference.

A chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomic Advisors recently wrote to his clients that, “fiscal tightening is hurting.” Referring to government economic policy as “ongoing fiscal mismanagement,” he noted that while the recovery and expansion would be four years old next month, reduced government spending “has detracted from growth in five of past seven quarters.”

That period coincides with when the Republicans took control of the House in 2011, promising an immediate $100 billion in spending cuts. While they didn't cut as much as they sought at the time, a subsequent series of budget compromises with the President — while not as great as they wanted — will soon reduce annual discretionary spending for domestic and military programs to the lowest level in fifty years.

On the revenue side, President Obama was able to force Republicans to acquiesce in January to higher taxes from the "wealthiest" Americans, albeit not quite as many of the wealthy as he had planned.

However, worse in the macroeconomists’ view, both parties agreed not to extend a two-year-old cut in Americans’ payroll taxes for Social Security, reducing the amount of money in circulation and inhibiting spending.

From the beginning, the President has fought unsuccessfully to combine deficit reduction, including spending cuts and tax increases, with spending increases and targeted tax cuts for job-creation initiatives in areas like infrastructure, manufacturing, research and education. The President's formula reflects the recommendations of private sector analysts, investors and economists. Nevertheless, Republicans, traditionally the party of banks and businesses, have insisted on spending cuts alone and smaller government as the key to economic growth.

Speaker John A. Boehner argued on behalf of the Republicans’ policies Tuesday with reporters. “After four years of mediocre job creation, it’s obvious that we don’t need more tax hikes and more government spending,” he said. “We need smarter policies to make America more competitive and expand opportunities for everyone in our country.”

“We’re the ones pushing this town to do the right thing when it comes to the economy and jobs,” Boehner added.

While Boehner was arguing for more austerity, the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets policy for the central bank, noted minimal signs of improvement in the private sector. It added in a statement, however, "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth,” echoing public comments Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has made for months.

In April, the International Monetary Fund said the United States would achieve further growth “in the face of a very strong, indeed overly strong, fiscal consolidation.”

Now, House Republicans plan to pass a measure that would direct the Treasury to “prioritize” debt payments if Congress and the President fail to agree on increasing the nation’s debt ceiling this year so the Treasury can keep borrowing money to pay all creditors. Under the bill, as tax receipts came in, the first priority would be paying creditors — like China — and only the would be expenditures like Social Security checks. Presumably, the Republican measure will die in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but these days in the Capitol, nothing is certain.

In a sign that the extreme right wing of the Republican Party is now driving policy in the House, the “prioritization” proposal first arose in 2011 from among the most conservative House Republicans. The same "extremists" who were fighting hardest against the White House on raising the debt ceiling and expressing disregard about default have now bullied the mainstream into joining ranks.

Again, private sector financial analysts and economic advisors dismiss the Republican “prioritization” idea as both unworkable and potentially dangerous, and count on Democrats to block it.

Gregory Daco, a senior principal economist at IHS Global Insight said the Republicans’ proposal was the kind that caused his clients to ignore the fiscal policy out of Washington, and rely instead on the Fed to for rational recovery mechanisms.

“Whenever I talk to our customers or clients, they sort of brush off everything that’s related to fiscal policy,” Daco said. “The view is, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’"

“What we try to convey is that it does matter,” he said. “It is important in terms of growth. It’s also important in terms of confidence.”

Daco noted that the economy was much stronger than Europe’s largely because the United States initially opted for stimulus measures and allowed deficits to increase when the recession and financial crisis hit five years ago. European governments pursued austerity policies to cut their debts, further stalling economic activity and in turn inflating deficits.

The more recent austerity policies here are helping to bring annual deficits down, as a new report of the Congressional Budget Office shows, after four years of trillion-dollar shortfalls. Yet, most analysts would prefer that the measures had been timed for when the economy is strong and unemployment below 7 percent – another argument echoed by Obama.

“While I agree that the U.S. must get its fiscal house in order,” Jerry Webman, chief economist at Oppenheimer Funds, wrote, “I join the likes of the I.M.F. in cautioning that too much austerity, too soon, is likely counterproductive.”

 

Excerpts from"Economists See Deficit Emphasis as Impeding Recovery," by Jackie Calmes And Jonathan Weisman, The New York Times, May 8, 2013

        

There Are No ‘Absolute’ Rights

Michael Tomasky 

The Daily Beast

May 5, 2013

Nearly every idea in the Bill of Rights comes with restrictions and limitations. To think that the Second Amendment should be any different is absurd.

Every time I write a column on guns, the howl arises that I am talking about a right that is enshrined in the Constitution, buddy, and I better watch myself. The howl then transmutes into an extended harangue that this right is absolute, and no libtard fascist, whether me or the Satanesque Dianne Feinstein, is going to limit the right in any way. The first soldier to charge across this rhetorical veld is followed by hundreds harrumphing their assent. The only problem is that it’s an ahistorical, afactual, and barbaric argument. No right is absolute. 

In fact, the Second Amendment arguably has fewer restrictions on it these days than many of the other first ten, and there is and should be no guarantee that things are going to stay that way. In fact, if we’re ever going to be serious about trying to stop this mass butchery that we endure every few months, they cannot.

Let’s begin by going down the list and reviewing various limits placed on nearly all the amendments of the Bill of Rights (I thank Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center for helping me out here). 

The First Amendment, of course, guarantees the right to free speech and assembly, and to worship as one pleases. There haven’t been that many restrictions placed on the freedom to worship in the United States, although there is a steady stream of cases involving some local government or school board preventing someone from wearing religious clothing or facial hair or what have you. Sometimes a Christian school or church is denied a zoning permit; but more often it’s the freedom to worship of a minority (Muslim, Sikh, etc) that is threatened.

As for free speech, of course it is restricted. Over the past 50 or so years in a series of cases, courts have placed a number of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on free speech. To restrict speech in general, the government must meet four tests. But this is always being revised and negotiated. Here’s one restriction on the Bill of Rights that I’d wager most conservatives would happily approve of. In 1988, the HHS under Reagan promulgated rules prohibiting a family-planning professional at a clinic that received federal dollars from “promoting” (i.e. telling a woman about) abortion. This was challenged partially on free-speech grounds. In Rust v. Sullivan (1991), the Supreme Court held that these rules did not violate the clinicians’ free-speech rights. So far as I can see, this is still law. It’s just one example from many free-speech restrictions that have been imposed over the years, as you can see here. 

Let’s skip the Second Amendment for now. The Third Amendment—my personal favorite—proscribes the private quartering of troops. Not so relevant to life today—in fact, the Supreme Court has apparently never considered a Third Amendment challenge. Onward.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and of course, there are loads of exceptions to this right, the most notable being that whenever an officer of the law has reason to think an imminently dangerous situation exists, s/he may invade a citizen’s privacy. 

Then there’s the question of the “exclusionary rule,” by which evidence deemed to have been improperly obtained could be excluded as evidence. Jurisprudence on this question goes back a hundred years, and this very interesting paper notes that it has been two decades since the Court upheld the application of the exclusionary rule in a search-and-seizure case. Since then, the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have ruled six times—every time for the government, i.e., limiting the constitutional protection. (Funny, isn’t it, how many of these other, non-gun limitations on the Bill of Rights are championed by conservatives?)

The Fifth Amendment most famously protects against self-incrimination. Kendall notes that there have indeed been almost no restrictions placed on this right—inside the trial courtroom. Outside the courtroom, however, limitations are rife, having to do mostly with circumstances of interrogations and confessions made within them.

This amendment also provides for due process, and that means Miranda rights, and again here, we know from recent news stories that not everyone is immediately read them, and we know that it’s conservatives who have always despised Miranda in the first place and seek to limit or overturn it today.

The Sixth Amendment provides the right to counsel and a speedy trial, and here again, our time is witness to a slow watering down of these rights by the Court’s conservative majority, as in 2009’s Montejo v. Louisiana. 

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a trial by jury in civil cases, and this contains a blatant restriction: the Court has never “incorporated” this right to apply to states, where the majority of civil cases are tried, so most civil cases don’t include this right. 

And the Eighth Amendment, against cruel and unusual punishment, has been much contested with respect to issues like juvenile crime. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments don’t enumerate specific rights as such and so aren’t relevant. The idea that any right is unrestricted is totally at odds with history, the law, and reality.

Now, back to the Second Amendment. I’m sure that pro-gun extremists know very well about Scalia’s famous opinion in Heller (2008), which dramatically expanded gun rights. But even in that decision, Scalia himself said that Second Amendment protections could apply only to weapons “in common use at the time.” 

Chris Wallace asked Scalia in 2012 about semiautomatic weapons and extended magazines, and he said: “What the opinion Heller said is that it will have to be decided in future cases. What limitations upon the right to bear arms are permissible. Some undoubtedly are, because there were some that were acknowledged at the time. For example, there was a tort called affrighting, which if you carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head ax or something, that was I believe a misdemeanor. So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed.”

Now I don’t trust him to rule that way as far as I could throw him, but if even Scalia is saying that, then yes, limitations are both possible and reasonable.

Imagine what conservatives would think of a group of liberals who insisted, while threatening an insurrection, on a pure and absolute interpretation of the Fourth or Sixth Amendment—and imagine how ridiculous they would look to average Americans. 

Hunters, sportsmen, collectors, and even defenders of their homes (misguided as they may be, according to the statistics certainly do have rights to keep and bear arms that are reasonable and should not be trampled. But the idea that any right is unrestricted is totally at odds with history, the law and reality. And the idea that a group of Americans possesses an absolute “right” to own and keep weapons that can—and in practice do—kill numerous innocent people in seconds, destroying families and communities and tearing at the nation’s collective soul, is barbaric and psychotic. As the old saying goes: if you want to shoot an assault weapon, go enlist.

For civilians, meanwhile, we’re one Supreme Court justice away from getting some sanity and balance to interpretations of the Second Amendment, and the only thing I can’t decide is whether it would be more delicious for Barack Obama to appoint that judge or for Hillary Clinton to do it.