View From The Left: A lesson for moderates in the shutdown

A lesson for moderates in the shutdown

E.J. Dionne writes — We should never govern ourselves like this again. We cannot create absolutely pointless crises that make our great democracy look foolish around the globe. We cannot give Chinese government propagandists fodder as they call for “a de-Americanized world.” We must not allow the extremist politics of a tea-party minority to turn our republic upside down. [He conveniently ignores the Constitution gives the House the power to appropriate.  However, this Child King, would not come hat in hand and ask. So who started this?]

Our nation escaped the worst. But there were consequences to the decision of a craven House Republican leadership that knew full well it was picking a fight it could not win. House Speaker John Boehner did the right thing at the very end, but only after a series of time-wasting gestures designed to coddle his party’s radical wing. These are the folks who denied the dangers of going past the debt ceiling, see the Affordable Care Act as a Stalinist adventure, compare President Barack Obama to Al Capone and, in many cases, still aren’t sure where our twice-elected president was born or what his religion is. [All this ranting while ignoring the GOP is a bunch of extremist, terrorist, bombs strapped to them, Lunatic Fringe etc.  What E.J. would call radical is simply Representatives doing what they told their constituents when they were elected.]

So long as Boehner permits this lunatic fringe – there’s no other way to describe it – to have a virtual veto power in his caucus, we will descend into chaos again and again. And as long as more middle-of-the-road conservatives hang back because they fear primary challenges, scolding's from Heritage Action, or occasional insults from the talk-show barons, the Republican Party will remain in receivership. [The Left simply does not accept or understand principled people.  The behave and do as they promise.  Not act according to polls]

Those who genuinely want a more moderate approach to politics must also reflect on what just happened. [Never forget the Left equate "moderate" with agreement with their view]

Many who chase the political center no matter how far to the right conservatives might drag it were uneasy when Obama and an astonishingly unified Democratic Party insisted there could be no negotiation over raising the debt ceiling. It was time, they said, to stand up against government by intimidation. Critiques of Obama took many forms: that he should “lead” more, that he should be more “involved,” that refusing to negotiate sounded so ill-tempered. [Again making excuses for Obama's lack of leadership ON ANYTHING.  He conveniently forgets that Obamacare received no one Republican vote - with NO attempt to modify Obamacare to get some bi-partisan support]

The irony the centrists must confront is that there is now a larger opening for moderate governance precisely because foes of the far right’s extra-constitutional abuses of the congressional process stood firm.  In doing so, they brought a large majority of the American people with them. Republicans paid a very high price for a benighted strategy, which gives the most thoughtful among them at least a chance of pushing their party back to more reasonable ground. [As pointed out earlier this is a bald faced lie and E.J. must know this.  What has him scared along with others on the Left is they know the House was within their constitutional rights.

Article 1 - The Legislative Branch
Section 8 - Powers of Congress; The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

And because the effort to hold the country hostage to right-wing demands failed, a crisis of this kind is less likely in the future. Sen. Ted Cruz and those who joined his doomed crusade against Obamacare find themselves discredited. Cruz acknowledged as much when he slipped away, announcing he would not block a deal of the very sort that, just days earlier, he was denouncing as a shameful sellout. [Ted Cruz, whatever you think of him, ran on the platform to jettison Obamacare.  His sticking power is stronger than ever.  The Left has to have a villain and Ted is it.  The American people are hungry for someone to stand up for what they believe, E.J.]

Obama needs to build on this victory. He must push the national and congressional agendas back toward the issues the nation cares about – above all, shared and more rapid economic growth, and lower unemployment. This, in turn, means a real effort over the next two months of budget talks to ease deep sequester cuts that are harming the economy, in exchange for the first steps toward longer-term deficit reduction. [Did you catch the "Plausible Lie"? Obama has had five years to boost the economy and jobs.  What did he do?  He rammed ObamaCare  down the throats of all Americans.  No one wanted it; never have.  We wanted and were desperate for a thriving economy and a robust job market.]

To keep the initiative, Obama needs to engage with Congress as he never has before. His recent efforts to build relationships with more levelheaded conservatives such as Sen. Bob Corker appear to have paid off in this round, and he could use help from such Republicans again. He should extend his diplomacy to members of his own party who stood with him in this fight and who would be bolstered by expressions of presidential gratitude that they have not always encountered. His task is to build a broad front against crisis-tocrisis governance by rebuilding confidence in government itself and the role it plays in American life. [The Left would only hope the above would be true.  Obama is incapable of having a relationship with either party.  He is the Child King; lecturing and demanding to get his way.]

But nothing good can happen unless Republicans take on their extremists and unless everyone acknowledges that at the moment, there is no equivalent on the left side of American politics to the right-wing radicalism that has just put our country through this wasteful and dangerous exercise. [Catch the plausible lie. "there is nothing about the left that is radical or extremist.  Only the views of the right are.  Case in point the (E.J.'s words) the "Solidarity of the Democrats".]

In condemning the paranoid politics of the John Birch Society in 1962, William F. Buckley Jr. asked his fellow conservatives whether they would “continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false.” This is, alas, a live question again. It must be answered forcefully and fearlessly. [Yes, E.J. Buckley was correct and we see what the acquiescence has gotten us!]

Sarah Palin Warns Obama of Impeachment!

Sarah Palin Warns Obama of Impeachment!

By Onan Coca

Isn’t this why we grassroots conservatives love Governor Sarah Palin so much?

For the last few months I have been fielding many of your emails to Eagle Rising, and by far the questions asked most often are: Why isn’t anyone doing anything about (Blank)? Why hasn’t anyone started impeachment proceedings? How is President Obama getting away with all of these illegal actions?

She has her finger on the pulse of the grassroots -- when we get riled up about an issue, she hears us. The media may gloss over thousands of Americans marching on the monuments in D.C., but she understands that our hearts are breaking. She understands that our military veterans are the soul of our nation and that grassroots conservatives guard our veterans jealously. Sarah Palin gets us.

So when I read that she warned the President that he was treading on ground that could get him impeached, I was not surprised. Because all of you, dear readers, have been saying the same thing for months. Here’s what Governor Palin wrote on her Facebook page just a few days ago.

Obama’s Debt Default is on His Shoulders While We Shoulder His Impeachable Offenses Apparently the president thinks he can furlough reality when talking about the debt limit. To suggest that raising the debt limit doesn’t incur more debt is laughably absurd. The very reason why you raise the debt limit is so that you can incur more debt. Otherwise what’s the point? It’s also shameful to see him scaremongering the markets with his talk of default. There is no way we can default if we follow the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4, requires that we service our debt first. We currently collect more than enough tax revenue to service our debt if we do that first. However, we don’t have enough money to continue to finance our ever-growing federal government (with our $17 trillion dollar national debt that has increased over 50% since Obama took office). That’s why President Obama wants to increase the debt limit. He doesn’t want to make the tough decisions to rein in government spending. So, he’s scaremongering the markets about default, just as he tries to scaremonger our senior citizens about their Social Security, which, by the way, is funded by the Social Security Trust Fund and is solvent through 2038. It’s time for the president to be honest with the American people for a change. Defaulting on our national debt is an impeachable offense, and any attempt by President Obama to unilaterally raise the debt limit without Congress is also an impeachable offense. A default would also be a shameful lack of leadership, just as mindlessly increasing our debt without trying to rein in spending is a betrayal of our children and grandchildren who will be stuck with the bill.

The Republican Party elite, the leadership, the moderates, the Beltway Republicans, could learn many things if they’d give Governor Palin a serious thought. However, unlike the grassroots, the Republican Party leaders can’t be bothered to spend any time on Mrs. Palin. They don’t respect her, and they don’t take her wisdom to heart. If the Republican Party had followed her for the last 4-5 years instead of the D.C. moderates, we’d be in a much better place today. Sarah Palin is the Republican Party bell weather. If the people in D.C. want to know what the energized, grassroots base is thinking… they just need to ask her.

Now is the Time to Start Governing and Stop Politicking

Now is the Time to Start Governing and Stop Politicking

Now that Congress and the president have narrowly dodged the latest crisis, we must demand an end to the political gamesmanship and a return to governing.

The agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling is not to be considered a victory for anyone. The 16-day government shutdown cost the economy $24 billion and will slow economic growth, according to an analysis by Standard & Poor’s. That equates to real people who saw their paychecks cut and their businesses hurt.

The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. So we are merely headed toward another crisis in a matter of weeks unless Congress and the president get serious about negotiating a long-term budget deal.

With so little time until the next crisis, it is time to govern, not to continue to play politics. All sides should rediscover the art of Statesmanship that requires true compromise and negotiation, because that’s what any agreement will require.

The country has long-term priorities that aren’t getting addressed as we lurch from one manufactured crisis to the next. These few are acknowledged to be critical to our long-term success:

·        We need to reduce our debt long-term, but that’s not a quick fix; it will take sustained, focused attention.

·        We need to clean up the tax code, another long-term, complicated project.

·        Congress needs to monitor Obamacare, not wield it as a political weapon, but to ensure its goals are being met.

·        Social Security and Medicare need change to sustain those programs for future generations and our immigration laws need reforming.

Can we even imagine that these problems will get the smart, serious attention they demand in the current environment?

To his credit, House Speaker John Boehner, finally allowed a vote on the Senate deal to resolve the crisis even though a majority of House Republicans opposed it. But a majority of the full House supported it, and maybe that’s a model for future long-term deals.

Too many in both houses were playing to win, not to win for the country.  It became making the other guy look like the enemy in preparations for 2014.  That looks too much like brinksmanship politics. We can imagine how the stock market would have reacted if no debt ceiling deal had been reached. That represents people’s retirement savings and college accounts that would have been damaged, as well a potential impact on jobs.

What goals did they want to see achieved by letting the debt ceiling pass and keeping the government crippled?  For the few that voted "no", they had a valid point (albeit using the wrong strategy). They voted no because the bill “doesn’t address our nation’s long-term spending problem.” That’s true. But there is time to do that.  And the time is now.

Democrats show their insincerity

Democrats show their insincerity by George Will

Liberals constantly lecture, more in theatrical sorrow than in actual anger, about their eagerness to compromise with Republicans, just not with Republicans who are – liberal moderation expresses itself immoderately – hostage-taking terroristic anarchistic jihadist suicide bombers.

But Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the very model of moderation, spoiled the Democrats’ piety charade by demonstrating its insincerity when she suggested this compromise: Republicans would support a continuing resolution funding the government for six months at the sequester levels of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which was produced by that year’s debt-ceiling negotiations. Republicans would also support raising the debt ceiling to enable the government to borrow enough to finance the substantial deficit spending involved in even sequester-level spending.

(The sequester’s supposed severity does not come close to balancing the budget.) Republicans also would grant agencies greater flexibility in administering the sequester’s cuts.

In exchange, Collins asked for only two things. First, a mere delay, and for just two years, of Obamacare’s medical-device tax, which is so “stupid” – Sen. Harry Reid’s characterization – that bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress favor outright repeal. Second, enforcement of income-verification criteria for those seeking Obamacare’s insurance subsidies – criteria the administration wrote but waived.

Here Collins was asking not for alteration of, but for enforcement of, Obamacare. Just as many Republicans believe the Democrats’ primary goal regarding immigration reform is to turn as many immigrants as possible into voters as quickly as possible, many Republicans also believe the Democrats’ primary goal regarding Obamacare is to turn as many people as possible into subsidy recipients as quickly as possible.

Hence Democrats’ aversion to income criteria to prevent fraud.

Democrats refused Collins’ bargain, giving several reasons but really having only one important one: They loathe the sequester, which prevents them from opening the spending spigot. Their knees ache from genuflecting before they alter a “clean” continuing resolution and a “clean” debt-ceiling increase. They insist it is a sin against good government to attach any conditions to either.

Suddenly, however, they decided that conditions are imperative. They now favor attaching to a government funding or debt-ceiling measure a change in the Budget Control Act intended to weaken the sequester.

Barack Obama, who says you did not see and hear him draw a red line regarding Syrian chemical weapons (“the world” drew it), insists: “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” This neon fib, made during last year’s campaign, matters because the sequester has become the main bone of contention in the shutdown and debt-ceiling dramas.

According to Bob Woodward’s meticulously reported book “The Price of Politics,” in the summer of 2011, with Republicans refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless spending would be cut an equal amount, Obama and his principal economic advisers blundered by not recognizing how the Republican Party has changed. Obama proposed that if Republicans would not agree to tax increases as well as spending cuts, the sequester would take half the cuts from defense. Republicans, Obama and his aides thought, would flinch from this.

Now Obama knows how wrong he was. Liberals, having long reviled Republicans as obsequious servants of big business and the military, are living miserably with the sequester cuts because Republicans now are resistant to business and military entreaties to open the government and raise the debt ceiling without preconditions.

Those House Republicans who dislike the Obama administration but detest Senate Republicans should understand how the moderate Collins has forced Democrats to drop their mask of moderation. And all House Republicans should understand that the victory won in the summer of 2011 – the sequester, achieved by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – still torments Democrats.

As House Speaker John Boehner struggles to manage his turbulent House caucus, he should remember Casey Stengel’s advice about managing a baseball team: “Keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.” No Republicans hate Boehner, but many are undecided about him because they do not understand the hammer – the sequester – he put in their hands.