but does anybody see a Republican endgame in the fiscal cliff negotiations that isn’t about intra-Republican positioning and careerism?
John Boehner looks like he is just trying to muddle through and get the best deal from Obama under conditions where Obama is more popular, more trusted and Republicans are stuck in the tough position trying to prevent tax increases on high earners even if it means middle-class tax increases, disruptive cuts to defense and… the very same high earner tax increases they are trying to prevent. That is a tough position. Actually his position is even tougher than that since getting to a deal with Obama is subordinate to preventing his defenestration from members of his own caucus. He can’t reach a deal if he is ex-Speaker.
The situation for the die hards to Boehner’s nominal “right” isn’t much better. Theirs is the 1990 Gingrich playbook. Oppose the tax increases and position yourself as the authentic conservative alternative to the sellouts in the Republican congressional leadership, and then use your enhanced authenticity appeal among the grassroots to maneuver into the leadership yourself. The problem is that today’s would be Gingriches aren’t just voting against tax increases. Taxes go up if nothing happens. They need positive cooperation from the Democrats to prevent tax increases. Intransigence from the Republican right actually makes the tax increases bigger rather than smaller. This point is unlikely to be lost on the electorate – and that includes the portion of the electorate that votes in Republican primaries. In the meantime, I’m not sure anybody is thinking seriously about the long-term economic interests of the country or the long-term political interests of the Republican party.
A fine mess.
December 28th, 2012 | 2:41 pm
[...] but does anybody see a Republican endgame in the fiscal cliff negotiations that isn’t about intra-Republican positioning and careerism? John Boehner looks like he is just trying to muddle through and Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
December 28th, 2012 | 2:43 pm
Pray for Boehner! His situation is as bad as Pete describes, and he almost alone is trying to do the right thing. The Republicans have lost every major battle since the election.
December 28th, 2012 | 6:59 pm
One way to look at it is that Republicans are losing political fights to Obama. That’s true along one dimension. But maybe along a different dimension the Republicans are stalemated among themselves in an atmosphere of ideological confusion and contempt for the intelligence of their party’s base. Maybe they are in a situation where each of the various factions would prefer to play a larger role in a smaller party and to posture by making maximalist demands even if this serves their alleged principles rather poorly.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:24 pm
The “fiscal cliff” is a fraud, a phony crisis, a complete diversion from any of the real and serious problems facing this great country in the near future, the equivalent of a man with terminal cancer being told he needs to worry NOW about trimming his nose hair, or some such idiocy.
We are no longer a serious people, and certainly are not governed by serious people, but by fools, crooks, and knaves, and get our news spoon-fed to us by boot-licking jackals and vipers.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:41 pm
The Speaker had a proposal ready, but he couldn’t seriously negotiate unless his fellow Republicans supported it. They cut him off at the knees. Obama had a counter-proposal within hailing distance of the Speaker and sufficient backing among the Democrats in Congress, if not from his base.
The speaker and the rest of them are losing the public’s confidence as a center-right party and are hanging the label of intransigent extremists around their own necks. This is a bad idea. However upright their principles, they still have to persuade a majority of voters to support them.
I think it perfectly possible that, despite the numbers in the loss to Obama, they are still laboring under the illusion that they have majority support. This is not just a train wreck, but an asteroid impact in progress.
Rather than invoke the name of Ronald Reagan as an ideal, you should invoke Barry Goldwater as an upright and principled disaster.
I can’t think of anything else for you to do except something like that.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:48 pm
Well life would go on even if the tax increases and cuts happened. That’s for sure. I don’t think it is all that healthy for our political system for the Republicans being the party that is operationally in favor of middle-class tax increases and poorly thought out defense cuts if they fail to extend the current marginal tax rates for high earners. That’s not a serious position either and makes them look like a high earner interest lobby (and an especially vindictive one at that.) Though I have no positive solutions to deal with the politics of the fiscal cliff either. The GOP has worked itself into an amazingly bad situation.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:52 pm
“I think it perfectly possible that, despite the numbers in the loss to Obama, they are still laboring under the illusion that they have majority support.”
Maybe they do think they have majority support. Maybe they don’t think that, but it isn’t about the majority of the electorate and has more to do with intraparty politics.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:58 pm
The tyrant moves with alacrity determined to gain advantage, wreck the economy, and continue to corrupt the republic. If the Commie-Dems seek to copy Hitler and confiscate the arms of the milita then, I’m afraid, they must be resisted. We must never allow them to abjure the 2nd Amendment.
Now is not the time to grow wobbly, it was much worse during the time of the Christ: the Roman tyrant, foreign occupation (in this country, a southern experience), and corrupt officials both in the church and the state. Yet, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and taught us the truth of everlasting life.
Let us not fear death so much as we love liberty. Death then, is the fate of a political organization that, in mirroring the Nazi’s and the Communists, has codified the slaughter of the innocents and seeks to ‘legally’ slaughter the ‘unproductive’ elderly.
December 28th, 2012 | 9:13 pm
Despite Brian, the “fiscal cliff” is a real problem, even if it is a Congressionally manufactured one. You have to take one thing at a time. Whatever danger the country is in over the long term, that danger is not going to arrive next week.
There are three separate issues involved that everyone keeps confusing: the future of Social Security and Medicare, the amount of already accumulated total US indebtedness, and the renewal of sufficient prosperity generally to address the other two.
It is this last that is in the greatest immediate danger from this self manufactured crisis. How much danger? I candidly am not sure. But I am sure that whatever hardship letting this deadline slip by creates will be hung around the neck of the Republican Party.
Right now, that party is dominant only in the individual Statehouses, and the House. They are in great danger of losing both if this proves to be a big enough disaster. The only reason the Republicans now control the House is that by controlling the Statehouses, they have controlled the redistricting of House seats.
If they lose both in 2014, they are not likely to recover from it for at least the 15 years that separated the disaster of Barry Goldwater from the victory of Ronald Reagan. And maybe even far longer than that.
December 29th, 2012 | 1:13 pm
Oh, and by the way, anyone who refuses to see that light and maneuverable semi-automatic rifles do not contribute to the type of violence we have been seeing need a little adjustment to their mental priorities, if not their moral ones.
Having said that, I sincerely hope that no attempt at an “assault rifle ban” be attempted. The last one failed to control the relevant weapons because any attempt to define an “assault” weapon is simply incoherent.
My personal suggestion would be classifying all semi-automatic center fire rifles as Class II firearms one year from date of passage requiring application and payment of taxes to possess. There is no reason why any sane and honest self-labeled militiaman should be prevented from owning them. But it is about time they put their money where their mouth is.
I also think we should put an end to grey market arms and ammunition sales, prohibiting all transfers of either except through FFA dealers as brokering middlemen.
Failing those, I would suggest the far simpler, if less satisfying ban on private sale of live ammunition in current or future United States military rifle calibers such as the .223. There is certainly enough surplus brass already out there for “militiamen” to reload their own, if they seriously wish to prepare for armed insurrection.
After all, no such insurrection will be successful now that the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act (passed unanimously by both parties) has sanctified unlimited and completely unsupervised government wiretapping. Not to mention the fact that it is now legal for the government to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely without charges or trial, essentially destroying the long standing legal principle of hebus corpus. Nor even to consider the recent court decision that law enforcement agencies have unlimited power to place GPS units on any vehicle they can physically access.
I often wonder why such things seem to bypass those who are so hysterical about any attempt to write laws defining the scope of the Second Amendment. It certainly leaves me with no very good opinion about the intelligence or the alertness of the NRA or any militia out there.
December 29th, 2012 | 5:05 pm
Mr. Marshall: Surely you must be joking. Surely you must realize that freepers and preppers of all sorts on the right are and always have been freaking out about the stuff you’re whining about. (The NRA is concerned about guns–indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, etc., isn’t their bag. If you want to be an activist about this, start your own group.)
It’s the MSM that is curiously silent about these issues now, compared to how AWFUL this stuff was prior to January 2009, and how HORRIBLE it will be on the day a GOP president is ever elected again. But never mind that right now–there’s a FISCAL CLIFF to FREAK OUT about! Oh, WHY oh WHY is that EVIL JOHN BOEHNER going to DESTROY the economy?
P.S. Remember those “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism?” bumper stickers? Seen any lately? Yeah, me neither…
December 29th, 2012 | 5:24 pm
So on this issue I find myself being in the unusual position of sitting on the fence. I’m simpathetic with Boehnor’s position but also understand the othersides point.
To set the table properly lets be clear about one thing. Even if the Republican’s passed Boehnor’s bill it was not going to even be considered by the Democratically dominated Senate. And if it was somehow to have passed the Senate, Obama wasn’t going to sign it. This is based on the democratic leaderships own public statements.
So what this vote was essentially about was trying to force Obama into the position of looking like the obstructionist by forcing him and his democratic leadership in the Senate into the position of voting “no”.
In my opinion, this appears to be a self evidently feeble justification for passing such a bill. The idea that the scales would suddenly fall from the eyes of the public such that they would see that, indeed, the Democrats are playing Lucy to the Republican’s Charlie Brown, is naive.
Once you see this for what it is, the argument of the Republican’s voting no on this becomes a lot clearer which is this: if the Repubs are going to take the blame anyway, then they should at least go down making a clear statement that the problem the country is facing is a spending problem not a revenue problem, period. Frankly, I have no argument against that position.
I should also note here, that the historical figure that I hear being invoked by this corner of the Republican party is not Reagan, or Goldwater or Gingerich, but Churchill. Specifically Churchill in the 1930′s who was regularly warning about the coming storm of German Imperial ambitions. The logic here is that just like Churchill the Repubs have an opportunity to speak and act clearly on this matter even though they may pay the ultimate political cost in the short term, because, eventually the consequences of not facing the spending problem will materialize and like Churchill in 1938 and 1939, the Repubs can point to their past words and actions forwarning the public about the coming disaster and thereby have the upper ground in the longterm. Or, to use another historical analogy, the Fiscal Hawks are playing Leonidas to Obama’s King Cyrus.
More than likely this will prove to be no less delusional than the Boehnor alternative, but to my mind I see their position as atleast as plausible.
I would be interested in hearing any argument to the contrary.
January 1st, 2013 | 10:48 am
I would suggest that the Churchill of the 1920′s is the relevant one here, The one who put Britain back on the gold standard (a policy of austerity and tight money in response to the debt accumulated in World War I). As always, in the background you hear the refrain, “Austerity is the best policy because it makes us all healthy, wealthy, and wise!”
But it doesn’t work that way, and it didn’t work that way. Compare where Britain stood in 1928-29 with Germany and France.
Britain entered the Great Depression already depressed. And was so continuously through the 1920′s. You had to work really, really hard to remain depressed ten years after World War I.
Before any attempt to address any of the serious problems–the size of our indebtedness, the numbers of people on Medicare and Social Security, the growing strain on the Saftey Net, and so on, we must start acting to revive the economy.
Spending cuts combined with eternally fixed tax revenues simply will not do this. The only thing that will give us leverage to actually solve these problems is a return to general economic health, not the wholesale dumping of Federal employees into the private job market, not the drastic alteration of Social Security and Medicare before the economy can absorb it, and not the release of thousand of already unemployed and underemployed to an immediate future of termination of their utilities, eviction from their home, and malnourishment on the streets.
The time to alter Social Security and Medicare is when we as a people are healthy, not when we are still convalescing. Which we are today. This is because the positive increase of government revenue gives us something to actually work with to change them with the minimum of social disruption.
The reason the argument comparing Churchill “in the wilderness” to the current Republican Party is spurious is very simple.
The immediate solution to the growing problems advocated by the Republican Party is simply plain wrong, just as the solution engineered by Churchill to return Britain to prosperity was simply plain wrong.
And to assert a solution is wrong is NOT the same thing as denying that there is a problem.
January 1st, 2013 | 11:37 am
The notion that the NRA is “only about guns” is a massive part of the problem. The mere fact that self-declared gun toting “militia” are also concerned about FISA and all the rest of it is beside the point. What have they done about it? The NRA is just about the most consistently successful and organized conservative pressure group in this country. It gets results.
What results of conservative political pressure have you seen about FISA lately?
The reason for this is simple. Even as I write this nearly every last semi-automatic “tactical” rifle in America and most boxes of .223 ammunition are being bought up at about the pace of the Oklahoma Land Rush.
Why? Well, not for hunting small game, not for the defense of home or person from criminals, and not for recreational shooting. The people buying them largely already have guns for these.
They are being bought to sit in the gun closet to serve a grandiose fantasy of armed insurrection where all gun owners simply bail out of their homes, get together as an armed crowd, without leadership, planning, organization, or support of any kind besides private “tactical” rifles and a lot of ammunition for them.
This supposedly will fend off any serious attempt by a hostile government with trained military troops and police forces to curtail everybody’s freedom. Nothing more will be needed.
Balls.
The people around the world currently part of real insurrections from Ireland to the Phillipines would laugh uncontrollably at such a mere armed and rudderless mob.
So we have plenty of Americans armed to the teeth with “tactical” weapons and laboring under a totally foolish collective delusion.
People with guns who are delusional in any way, shape, or form is a very bad idea.
And none of this has much to do with anything of what non-gun owners, “liberals”, or the NYT and its cohorts have to say about FISA, about the Connecticut school shooting, or about the fiscal cliff.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact