The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”-Abraham Lincoln, June 17, 1858

Lincoln didn’t mean it in this context, but we are at a point where the Speaker of the House does not have the ability to bring his caucus along to make any compromises on the budget.

In his Washington Post column last Sunday, E.J. Dionne said:  

This is very similar to what Eric Hoffer wrote in his book, The True Believer, in 1951. Hoffer says:

To assess the lay of the land for the continuing fiscal negotiations in Washington, Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly thinks we need to understand what the Tea types really want.

In the summer of 2011, Speaker Boehner quashed efforts by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to rally support around the Tea Party’s preferred “Cut, Cap and Balance” proposal in the
debt ceiling debate. Instead, Boehner signed onto the deal that led to the present “fiscal cliff” impasse while the Tea Party bore the burden of blame.

What did the “Cut, Cap and Balance” proposal say?

1. Cut – Make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.

2. Cap – Create statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.

3. Balance – Send the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.

So, What’s Wrong?

The “Cut, Cap and Balance” Pledge was signed by 12 senators and endorsed by the viable GOP presidential candidates in 2012, including Mitt Romney. It made all three elements a condition precedent to support for any debt limit increase.

By the way, it requires constitutional amendments to pass both houses of Congress. A constitutional amendment isn’t happening unless and until a few more 2010-style GOP landslides occur.

So these guys are not simply for a temporary “hostage-taking” involving the debt limit, but the kind where the hostages are resettled in another country. In the context of hostage taking, consider the impact of another impasse about the debt ceiling increase: It probably leads to another downgrade in our credit rating. If it does, we should be questioning Republicans’ patriotism. This time, they know the damage they are doing to the country, so they could be branded economic terrorists.

The Political Reality of the Teas:

The Teas aren’t simply trying to push the country towards their policy priorities. The whole idea and rationale for the revolutionary trappings and rhetoric is the permanent repeal of much of the domestic policy legacy of the twentieth century.

For the most part, they have little to fear from voters back home. There is no price to be paid for intransigence, though in
most cases there is a big price paid for exhibiting reasonableness.

So that’s who and what we are dealing with. And there are enough of them in the House to keep Boehner from showing much reasonableness either. As Nate Silver at the 538 blog says, the next Congress will not make a fiscal cliff deal easy for Mr. Boehner:

Silver says in a more recent blog:

In this environment, Congressional Republicans have little need to build coalitions with colleagues with different political preferences or values. Twenty years ago, coalitions
mattered. Today, few members of Congress are conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues, or vice versa.

 

Given the policy
of the Republicans to hang tough and refuse cooperation with Democrats or allow
any modification of its core ideology, there is no way out of paralysis in
Washington that doesn’t involve surrender by one party as a sort of
patriotic sacrifice. The alternative is that one side or the other, achieves enough power to make bipartisanship efforts largely unnecessary.

 

What “enough power” means depends heavily
on whether filibuster reform is undertaken and achieved in the Senate and if
the Hastert rule is suspended in the House.

 

Otherwise,
we are an ungovernable country. Only one thing fixes the polarization: A real
governing majority in 2014.

 

A
few final observations:

 

The number of seats
in the US House was increased in nearly every census until 1910 and has not
been increased since. Along the way, the average population per district has grown by
three times.

 

So,
we now have large geographic congressional districts with large populations. Large
districts require expensive campaigns, making Citizens United indispensable to congressional candidates.

 

We should consider making
the districts smaller by adding more seats in The House.

 

There
are no post postmortems of disasters where
the major cause of the disaster is a failure of imagination.

 

This
current crisis in our American democracy ends only if those with the ability to
do something about it (that means you, voters) have the imagination to recognize these Republicans and fellow-traveling
conservatives for what they are:

 

 

A marriage
of dominionist evangelical Christians, John Birch holdovers, Libertarians and Dead
Enders who have wrapped themselves up in a constitution they haven’t read,
mouthing economic theory they do not understand.