James Fallows writes:
…there is no precedent for serious threats not to honor federal debt — as opposed to symbolic anti-Administration protest votes, which both parties have cast over the years. Nor for demanding the reversal of major legislation as a condition for routine government operations.
At Volokh, Jonathan Adler responds:
There’s never been a “serious threat” to refuse to increase the debt ceiling? Glenn Kessler’s already shredded that claim.
Adler is mistaken. Kessler was addressing President Obama’s claim that never before have non-budget items been attacked to the debt ceiling. Obama either misspoke or was just plain wrong, but Fallows is making a different claim than Obama – that previous threats not to honor federal debt were symbolic, not serious. That claim isn’t refuted by Kessler.
Adler goes on:
As this paper documents, “the use of the debt ceiling vote as a vehicle for other legislative matters,” had become a “pattern” in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Indeed, as Kessler notes, “Congress has used the debt limit to repeal a key legislative priority of a president,” and liberal lions like Senators Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale sought to attach substantive legislation to a debt ceiling increase in the 1970s.
Fallows is right, and the academic paper Alder links to refute Fallows, written by Linda Kowalcky and Lance LeLoup, shows that Fallows is right. That paper makes it clear that those past votes against the debt ceiling being raised were symbolic (emphasis added by me):
A substantial number of legislators in both houses may speak and vote against the debt limit with the knowledge that it will ultimately pass.
But no one thinks it’s certain that Republicans will allow the debt ceiling to be raised. That’s why the US recently had its credit rating lowered, and that’s why the current situation is unprecedented.
The paper Alder links documents that in the past, the pattern has been that the majority party accepts that it has a responsibility to protect America’s credit rating (and the world economy) by gritting its teeth and raising the debt ceiling, while the minority party has traditionally taken the opportunity to grandstand, safe in the knowledge that the minority party would be outvoted, and the debt ceiling would be raised.
Another method used to symbolically oppose the debt ceiling (while still making sure it would pass) was allowing moderate party members to vote as they please, so that a coalition of minority and majority party members pass the debt ceiling while other members cast symbolic votes against it. That’s what the House GOP did under Reagan. Although there was plenty of exciting grandstanding (filibusters, even!), the members of Congress were still certain that the debt ceiling would be raised.
In the House right now, however, it is the majority party that is threatening to push the US into default, and it appears that the GOP leadership intends to not allow centrist Republicans to vote with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. As a result, the US actually appears to be heading into default.
This is indeed a new and unprecidented situation – at least, during the decades documented by the paper Alder linked to.
And it’s irresponsible to credibly threaten to tank the world economy, and the nation’s economy and credit rating, in order to achieve a legislative victory that could in principle be achieved by more responsible means (i.e., winning elections).
EDITED TO ADD:
Two points:
1) I think that even a symbolic vote to default – such as many congressfolks have cast, including Obama when he was in the Senate – is also irresponsible. It’s not nearly as irresponsible as a credible threat to refuse to pay the US’s bills is, but it’s still irresponsible. The best thing to do is to simply get rid of the debt ceiling altogether (as has been done in the past).
2) Although I wrote this post, I also think the question of precedent is largely irrelevant. A credible threat to put the US into default is inexcusable and irresponsible regardless of if it’s precedented. Whether there’s precedent or not isn’t what’s important.
If I go outside and kick the crap out of the neighbor dog, I won’t be the first person ever to abuse a dog, but that won’t make what I’m doing right.
Hat tip: Ethics Alarms.
I thought you were in the camp that believed the national debt didn’t matter.
The debt matters to a much smaller degree than people say it does, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all.
That said, this post isn’t about the debt; it’s about defaulting on the debt. Defaulting would matter MUCH more than the debt does in and of itself.
I’m glad we have a constitutional amendment against default.
Why is a default so bad? Most debt is owned by banks and bought with bailout money they never should have been given. Screw them.
@4 is exactly why we can’t have nice things/have a credible threat to default.
And just ‘cuz I know you like to be appreciated for your attention to detail for this type of thing . . . great image!
alex.
Default would resease an international economic s**tstorm, probably way worse than 2008. Countries and people all over that planet would be hurting. The US creditrating would drop making it harder to finance your lifestyle etc. The US standing in the world would lessen. And all that for no good reason at all. It is all very avoidable.
“to finance your lifestyle”
Well, I guess there are some things like Federal roads and infrastructure and defense which are dependent on debt financing to continue existing…but for the most part I finance my lifestyle with a job.
I agree that the default can easily be avoided. How interesting, then, it will be to see who decides to give in and avoid it.
There’s no reason any of this should lead to a default. There’s plenty of revenue available to service the debt regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised.
As for the broader issue, I don’t understand why it’s considered somehow illegitimate for the elected majority of the House of Representatives to use the powers conferred on it by the Constitution to withhold funding for Obamacare. When was it decided that Congress was required to rubber-stamp a president’s spending/policy decisions?
Conrad, everything you say is mistaken, to the point that it’s hard to know where to begin.It’s true that there are things we can do to keep things going with relatively little impact even after we hit the debt ceiling. We hit the debt ceiling, technically speaking, back in May, and ever since then the Treasury has been doing what it can to keep all the bills paid. But that can’t go on forever – according to the Treasury, it can’t even go on another month. To go much further than they already have would probably be illegal.
According to Morgan Stanley’s FAQ on the debt ceiling:
Conrad writes:
But it’s not withholding funding for Obamacare. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve shut the government down – but Obamacare is still funded, and still going (in a glitchy, first-week sort of way, admittedly).
The decision to spend on Obamacare was made by Congress, not by the President. Congress passes the bills, the President signs them.
[10] I believe there is dispute as to the accuracy of that blurb from the Treasury Dept. The 14th Amendment provides authority for paying the public debt of the U.S. over any other obligations. There is clearly enough money coming into the treasury on an ongoing basis to service the debt. Hence, there is no need for the government to default.
Entitlement payments are not public debt within the meaning of the 14th Amendment.
Moreover, I find it laughable that the same administration that has no problem flouting the law and Constitution* when it serves Obama’s purposes suddenly portrays itself as being handcuffed by the legal constraints in this particular context.
*E.g.: Unilaterally extending the commencement date for the employer mandate until 2014, refusing to enforce immigration laws against entire categories of violators, threatening to raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval, and making “recess” appointments when Congress is in session.
And let’s face it: Obama routinely tries to use alarmist, “the-sky-is-falling” rhetoric to try to get his way on policy issues. Remember what a disaster sequestration was going to be? Remember when we had to go war against Syria because Assad used chemical weapons? Remember how this current 17% “shutdown” was going to cripple the country? I don’t find it remotely credible, coming from this administration, that the U.S. government will HAVE to default on public debt come October 17.
“But it’s not withholding funding for Obamacare. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve shut the government down – but Obamacare is still funded, and still going (in a glitchy, first-week sort of way, admittedly).”
I believe the House passed a CR that carves out funding for Obamacare. I believe that’s the genesis of the current “crisis.” Obama and the Senate refuse to keep the government funded and avert default if that means Obamacare is left unfunded.
[11] “The decision to spend on Obamacare was made by Congress, not by the President. Congress passes the bills, the President signs them.”
Fine, but now Congress (or one house, at least) is saying that it DOESN’T want to spend on Obamacare. And that’s the legislative prerogative of that body. It’s no less legitimate for the House to vote “no” on Obamacare funding than it is for the Senate and the President to say “yes.” The suggestion that the House is somehow acting lawlessly in all of this is constitutionally illiterate.
Remember how this current 17% “shutdown” was going to cripple the country?
Other than the military, no government workers are getting paid right now. The ones who aren’t furloughed are going to work now because they believe they’ll be paid eventually for their work. But if you think it’s OK to have the government shut down indefinitely, then I hope you don’t mind having the borders closed to legitimate trade and travel, while simultaneously having no one to intercept illegal border crossings. (To use just one example.)
Closetpuritan, why are the military getting paid?
Correct – because Democrats realized that declining to pay the troops was political suicide, and so went along with the Republican’s bill to fund the troops.
The Republicans have offered to fund everything, including government salaries, except for the ACA going forward. The Democrats have declined, fearing (rightly) that if they go along with that, they will be perceived as having lost, the signature accomplishment of Obama will go into the shitter, etc.
So if the shutdown as it exists IS crippling the country, then it is perfectly simple to fix it. Agree to fund those programs.
“But if you think it’s OK to have the government shut down indefinitely, then I hope you don’t mind having the borders closed to legitimate trade and travel, while simultaneously having no one to intercept illegal border crossings. (To use just one example.)”
It’s fundamentally dishonest for the Dems to suggest that, in order to fund ANY government program (e.g., border patrol, meat inspection, etc.), we necessarily have to fund ALL government programs, including Obamacare. That notion is simply untrue as a factual matter: It’s obviously possible to have border guards but not have Obamacare. The Republicans, in fact, have passed a CR that accomplishes exactly that result (i.e., funds everything EXCEPT Obamacare).
Therefore, if the so-called “shutdown” is crippling the country, then it’s the Dems who are responsible for the resulting devastation. It’s only the Dems who are insisting that a de-funding of Obamacare requires that everything else the government does must also cease. THEY’RE the ones who are holding the entire government hostage.
Of course, by now it’s fairly clear that the country ISN’T being crippled by the 17% shutdown — or at least that the partial shutdown isn’t the immediate calamity Obama was warning about. Coming on the heels of the sequestration “crisis,” this episode shows that Obama simply lacks credibility when it comes to explaining the need for having a government this large and this powerful. He’s so invested in preserving his namesake program and in defeating the forces of limited government, he has purposefully deceived the American people. He is not a responsible leader. A responsible leader under these circumstances would acknowledge that this is all about Obamacare — not the funding of things like parks and military cemeteries — and therefore would defend the merits of funding Obamacare. But the can’t do that, apparently, because he knows he can’t convince the American people that Obamacare deserves to go on. So he has to portray it as some kind of all-or-nothing proposition whereby we either have Obamacare or we have literal anarchy.
I was doing to write some comments here, but Conrad @ 12 has saved me the trouble.
However:
Amp:
On that basis the decision to spend on every agency, facility and program the Federal government operates or owns was made by Congress and signed off on my the President, so they should all be operating and this whole issue is moot.
But that’s not how it works. All these things are bought or created by law. But the appropriation to fund them is separate from their creation. Laws like the ACA creates these things, but they do not state how much money is to be spent on them and where. That’s why we need a budget, also known as an appropriation bill.
Here’s what I’d like to know – how is it that those exchanges are functional? How is it that the ACA web sites are up and (very badly) running? I thought we were out of money and were so dysfunctional that the National Park Service is closing off viewing areas on a State highway so that people can’t look at Mount Rushmore and are roping off national monuments so that the considerable expense of permitting people to walk up to them in an open plaza and have a look is avoided. The census.gov site is down, the fcc.gov site is down – which are almost certainly paid for on a basis other than week to week and so could operate – if not be updated – with pretty much no expense.
Agencies created by Congress and signed off on by the President have been killed off multiple times in American history by Congress and the President. The first example of this was the second Bank of America. It was created by Congress and signed off on by the President. Then there was an election. The new President, Andrew Jackson, simply refused to deposit any Federal funds in the Bank and it died off. Guess which party he was the standard bearer of? That’s right – the Democrats. He was their first President.
This is an interesting argument from the left – that somehow once a Federal program has been created the Congress has no power to kill it off by refusing to fund it. I guess it’s consistent with their view of government, but it’s got no actual basis in fact.
Oh, I see a solution to this problem ….
RonF:
Ron, the only relation BOTH parties (neglecting the others for a moment) bear to their roots is their name. They are the same parties now as when they were founded only in the same sense that an axe which has had its handle replaced ten times, and its head replaced three, is “the same axe”, because there is a continuity of existence, even though the head of the axe is now a different shape and color and made of a different steel, and the first handle was hickory while the current handle is yew.
One could, with MORE relevance, point out the many expansions of Federal power and expenditure promulgated by Twentieth-Century Republican presidents, and it would STILL be irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Grace
[@19] I agree with your point that the modern Democratic Party has little or nothing to do with the party of Andrew Jackson. Nevertheless, RonF is right to point out that there’s no guaranty, nor should it be assumed, that a given government program or agency, once created, will continue to exist for all time. That would be a highly un-democratic notion, in fact, because it would mean that voters would be constrained in choosing the level of government they wanted today by decisions made by a bunch of dead Congressmen a hundred years ago.
Beyond being undemocratic, it would also be idiotic from a public policy standpoint to insist on the continued existence of agencies and activities without regard to the question of whether those agencies and activities are worthwhile.
Unfortunately, one of the arguments that seems to have come into vogue for liberals is that we can’t eliminate or cut back on the size of an agency because that would mean a certain number of government employees will lose their jobs. IOW, the agency exists in major part in order to provide public employment. Of course, by that reasoning, the government should hire everybody who isn’t already employed in the private sector and thus eliminate unemployment.
Conrad and Robert: I’m seeing “The shutdown isn’t really a big deal” and “The shutdown is the Dem’s fault” being argued simultaneously by Conrad and Robert. Which kind of makes me wonder if you have a definite opinion on whether the shutdown matters. I didn’t think I had anything new to say on whose fault it is and didn’t address it.* The point I was making was about whether the shutdown is a big deal.
*In a nutshell, I don’t think Congress should have infinite do-overs and think it’s a bad precedent that the party most willing to hurt the country by causing a shutdown or default gets its way. This isn’t just Congress vs. Executive, of course: it’s also House against Senate. Well, even there, only sort of, because if actually brought to a vote a “clean bill” would pass the House.
RonF:
Other than the military, no government workers are getting paid right now. … then I hope you don’t mind … having no one to intercept illegal border crossings.
Oh, I see a solution to this problem ….
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, RonF. We should have open borders? (I thought you were against that?) “Open to wanted fugitives” borders?
Good piece by Matt Yglesias on why prioritization doesn’t work:
We send the military to defend the borders. Problem solved.
Now, let’s consider the original premise of this thread:
It’s also not present. The U.S. would be in a state of default if it refused to pay the interest and designated principal schedules on the debt it owes on Treasury notes and other such instruments. Tax revenues are entirely sufficient to cover those. Would that mean that payments for various Federal programs would have to be withheld? Sure. But that is not “default”. The statement from Morgan Stanley says that there’s no legal basis for the Treasury to prioritize payments. So what? Of course they want to keep government debt flowing – they probably make a good deal of money handling it. Show me the legal basis for saying the Treasury cannot do such a thing, that it must treat all obligations equally. I’ll wager there is no such law.
It is when there’s not enough money to pay them all. It’s going to have to. It already is. We’ve already decided to pay certain people and not others. We’ve already decided to not pay to keep some websites open (census.gov, fcc.gov, and for a while the Amber Alert program) but pay to keep others running (whitehouse.gov, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” website). The government already is deciding what to pay for and what not, and the decisions are clearly not just based on what is (from the home page of fcc.gov) “immediately necessary for the safety of life or the protection of property.” Matthew Iglesias is demonstrably wrong.
If no debt ceiling bill or budget or CR passes and President Obama refuses to direct the Treasury to make payments from the available money such that the U.S. does not go into default – or blocks the Treasury from doing so on it’s own initiative – he should be impeached and removed from office. My guess is that President Biden and the Treasury department will have no problems meeting our debt payments.
Addendum:
I do agree with this:
” If it were, the constitutional order would completely collapse. Obama could just not cut the checks for farm subsidies or missile defense programs he opposes. Then in a few years President Ted Cruz could refuse to pay SNAP benefits.”
The Executive branch has no right to negate legislation by refusing to expend money that the Legislative branch has apportioned for a particular purpose. But that’s not the case here. Here there is no such legislation to negate. In that case there’s no threat to the Constitution to spend money as necessary to support essential functions, and the 14th Amendment makes it pretty clear that the Treasury is supposed to pay Federal notes and bonds.
Closetpuritan, you didn’t say anything at all about blame; you implied it a smidge, maybe, by saying something to the effect that you hoped we wouldn’t mind that [cataclysm here]. I just decided to be forthright about it, and wasn’t intending that to be a “you’re wrong” argument.
I would say that the shutdown is trivial at first and grows more serious with each passing day. There is a positive good from it; people like Amp see that the skyscrapers don’t fall down and the moon leave its orbit because the EPA is short on woodpecker counters for a week, or whatever. There’s another positive good, which is that smaller-government types like me are reminded that there’s important shit in that there list of government jobs, like food inspections and border security. So it gives everybody a little bit of a reality check – that’s handy.
But that benefit hits a cap pretty quick, and we all learn what we can learn, and then after that it’s trouble piled on trouble. We do need a federal government; we don’t need all of the massive polygamous clusterfuck of a government that we have now, but we need something.
I agree with Ron; Morgan Stanley is blowing smoke. Who is going to *stop* the President from directing the appropriate checks be written, and that others stop being written? Damn right – nobody. So if he doesn’t do it, it’s because he refuses to. The Constitutional mandate that the debt be paid overrides business-as-usual at Social Security and the Defense Department. The actual prioritization should be done by the Congress in statutory form. God knows if those knucklehead will be able to get it done.
If I’m not mistaken, the House passed a bill or resolution GIVING Treasury the authority to prioritize, so if that’s power is all that’s lacking in order to avoid default, the solution is for the Senate to approve that measure and for Obama to sign it. The fact they won’t do this means THEY are the ones who would be triggering the default.
I just came across this. Depending on how you define “default”, the US has defaulted before, though not because of political maneuvering or failing to raise the debt ceiling.
I’m not sure how the “use the 14th amendment to avoid default” strategy will play out, but it makes sense to try to avoid having to use a tactic that’s both of uncertain legitimacy and bad for the financial markets. Saying beforehand that you are willing to use it would take the pressure off to come up with another solution, so it’s not surprising that Obama is implying that he rejects it.
Robert, the “you” in my first comment was meant to refer to Conrad specifically–I don’t always remember/bother to write the name of the person I’m quoting, but I was responding to his comment.
“We don’t have the votes to defund Obamacare. You have the votes to pass a clean CR. We will not allow a clean CR to be put to a vote. The shutdown is your fault.”
Got it.
Jake – More than 5,000 bills are presented in Congress every session. Only about 5% make it into law; probably another 5% or so make it to the floor for the vote, but can’t attract enough support to pass.
Ergo, 4,500 bills or so are killed procedurally, sometimes by the Congressional committee to which they are reported, sometimes by the Speaker of the House, and sometimes by the President of the Senate. (The latter’s scheduling veto can, but rarely is, overridden by the members of the chamber.)
I’ve known you for maybe 10 years. Of the approximately 45,000 bills which have been procedurally killed in that time, how many have attracted your ire for whatever cause?
My bad – Congressional sessions run in two-year cycles. So 22,500 bills weeping with forlorn sadness that their cruel fate went unmourned.
@27: The shutdown is the Dems’ fault in that they have chosen to shut down a lot of routine, mainly uncontroversial government activities rather than accept a CR that doesn’t fund Obamacare. The shutdown is only the fault of the GOP if one takes as a premise the idea that the House was obligated to authorize funding of the entire government INCLUDING Obamacare, i.e., that the House of Representatives had somehow waived its constitutional prerogative to approve or disapprove spending decisions.
As for the business about there being enough votes to pass a “clean” CR, I whether or not that’s true (and I don’t believe it is true), it’s irrelevant to the issue of which side caused the shutdown.
From a political standpoint, the conventional wisdom at least was that a shutdown would HURT the GOP while rallying support to Obama and the Dems. Moreover, it is obviously the Dems who have sought to use — and even amplify — the disruptions occasioned by the shutdown in order to gain partisan advantage. It follows, of course, that it’s the Dems who had the stronger motive to shut down the government and the GOP who had the opposite motive.
Let’s also note that all of the histrionics over the shutdown is a distraction from the real issue. Again, the only immediate dispute between the two sides is funding for Obamacare. It would follow that, in a more rational setting, there would be a debate taking place right now as to whether or not Obamacare deserves funding. That is simply not a debate Obama or the Dems are willing to have. They are unwilling to defend the program on its merits. Instead, the “argument” is that unless the House embraces the continued existence and funding of Obamacare, it follows that WWII veterans will have to be barred from entry to unguarded, open-air memorials erected in their honor. That’s not simply idiotic from an intellectual standpoint, it is downright thuggish. It’s the kind of response one would expect from a petty tyrant. It illustrates the difference in mindset between a responsible leader and a street agitator.
Disagree. The shutdown is the fault of the GOP if there are enough votes (in both chambers of Congress) to pass a clean CR and the GOP prevents a vote on that bill. Whatever you believe Congress is obligated to do or not do has nothing to do with it.
Ire? Lot’s of them. However, there’s no ire here. Merely a pointing out of who is to blame. Sure, lots of bills are blocked procedurally. And the blame for those bills that have the votes to pass but are blocked goes to whoever used procedure to block a vote. This case is only different in that the GOP insists, even though that’s the party that has procedurally blocked a vote on a bill that has the votes to pass, that it’s the fault of their opposition.
@ 31: The logic of what you’re saying escapes me. You wrote: “The shutdown is the fault of the GOP if there are enough votes (in both chambers of Congress) to pass a clean CR and the GOP prevents a vote on that bill.” First of all, you don’t know that there are enough votes to pass a clean CR, so I guess it follows that you don’t know whether or not the shutdown is the fault of the GOP.
Beyond this, “clean CR” means “authorization to fund all government operations including Obamacare,” right? The House has already voted to fund everything BUT Obamacare. So the only thing the House has acted to “shut down” is Obamacare. The reason the rest of the 17% of operations are shut down is because the president refuses to accept the House’s constitutional right to de-fund Obamacare through the “power of the purse strings” yielded collectively by its elected membership. Those are the facts and they don’t change on account of your unilateral declaration that IF a majority of the House today would adopt a DIFFERENT position than the one expressed through their actual votes thus far, and thus support Obamacare funding, then that would make the GOP at fault for NOT funding government operations (excluding O’care) across the board — which other funding the House has never objected to in the first place!
Let’s try to make this simple:
What would it take right now to reopen the WWII Memorial and otherwise resume full government operations excluding Obamacare? Answer: The Senate and president would need to approve the funding resolution already passed by the House.
What would it take to fund Obamacare right now? Answer: The House would have to pass some kind of funding resolution that provides funds for Obamacare, which they have not done.
Ergo, the House is responsible for trying to shut down Obamacare, but it’s the Dems who are responsible for keeping the “rest” (17%) of government shut down.
Yes they have. When they passed Obamacare, they authorized funding for it.
Furthermore, the Congress has an explicit constitutional responsibility to not call the validity of the U.S.’s debt into question. The House is now abdicating that responsibility by explicitly holding the US’s creditworthiness hostage.
Yes, let’s do that. Put the clean CR up for a vote and see if it passes the House. Can’t get simpler than that. Once that question is answered, we can see if there are any other questions that need to be answered.
It really is simple. Obamacare is funded. Congress approved that funding. The GOP is trying to extort the Democrats into defunding the ACA by shutting down the government and threatening to default on the national debt rather than by continuing to vote on and fail at passing a bill to defund the ACA. The GOP is to blame for the current shutdown and the forthcoming default. Simple as pie!
Polls seem to show that the US citizenry agrees with me that the GOP is to blame for the shutdown. No amount of obfuscation and outright lies by the GOP has, so far, shifted opinion on responsibility.
You can continue to blame Obama, Reid, other nebulous, nefarious Democratic cabals, etc, but you’ll be wrong.
Authorization and appropriation are not the same thing, gentlemen. I could be mistaken about what has been done – Congress is a complex bugger and I don’t have a lot of time for research today – but my understanding is that the ACAs funding has been authorized (basically, planned to be spent) but not appropriated (actually moving money out of the Treasury/cutting a check).
Congress is under no obligation to appropriate the money that it has authorized. Indeed they fail to do so all the time; it is notorious for Congressmen to vote f0r an authorization but then against the appropriation, so that they can present themselves as being for or against the bill in question, depending on the audience.
So I believe that Conrad is correct and you gentlemen are wrong, on this one.
“Furthermore, the Congress has an explicit constitutional responsibility to not call the validity of the U.S.’s debt into question. The House is now abdicating that responsibility by explicitly holding the US’s creditworthiness hostage.”
This is a fundamentally wrong interpretation of the clause in question.
It appears that the President himself has come out and said that he can very well sign off on bills that will authorize paying for some debts and programs but not others, but that he is not doing so in order to put political pressure on the House GOP.
Elections have consequences. In 2010 the House went Republican and they retained it in 2012 in great part by running against the ACA. Now they don’t want to fund it. I agree with the comments above that what should be happening here is that the bills put forward to fund all other operations by the House should be passed and signed off on by the Senate and the President, and we would then have a national debate on the ACA. But as the President notes above, he is holding other programs and funding – and their users and beneficiaries – hostage in order to try to force the House to fund the ACA. Which it has absolutely no requirement to do.
Yes, it’s my fault that my child is dead because I refused to give the kidnappers any ransom at all.
No, the fault would go to the people who did it.
If the ransom was $10, though, your wife is going to leave you and all your friends are going to think you’re an asshole.
@39, Jake Squid:
Your framing implicitly accepts the lumping of all government activities together. Alternative framing: It’s my fault my child is dead because I refused to feed him unless I could do so using only organically grown vegan food which I currently have no way to acquire, and thus refused to take the meat, eggs, and milk which were offered to me.
In this case, though, the ransom is a hell of a lot more than $10. (Although it now looks possible that Republicans are backing away from the Obamacare / Debt Ceiling linkage).
What the Republicans are currently asking for is, because they represent a majority of the House, is
the right to getan enormous concession in exchange for giving up nothing at all that the GOP wants. (The government shutdown isn’t something that the GOP wants for its own sake; it’s merely leverage).If the Democrats give in to this, what motivation will the GOP have to ever compromise on anything, ever? Why should the GOP agree to let any Democratic priority at all continue, if they can get the Senate and President to undo anything at all, in exchange for nothing?
It’s not like you folks are going to release this hostage and that will be the end of it. You’ll put your gun to the hostage’s forehead again and again and again, and demand everything you want in exchange for nothing.
Damn it, I got curious and I wish I hadn’t because what I found is even more curious.
There is $115 billion authorized by the 111th Congress for current spending on the ACA, which is unlikely to be appropriated this year to put it mildly. So I’m right when I say that there’s no obligation to spend that $.
$105.5 billion was appropriated by the 111th Congress, and scheduled for automatic disbursement between now and 2019. $23.6 billion of that is what is being spent right now, on the exchanges and such. So Amp is right when he says that it’s already funded. (He’s wrong that they couldn’t stop that process at all – they could, but an outright revocation of already-appropriated funds is politically difficult and very unlikely.)
What’s odd is that it’s unusual to format appropriations in the seven-year-long format of that $105.5 billion. It’s not that they aren’t allowed to; they can order whatever they want to order. It’s just that future Congresses are under no obligation whatsoever to honor that promise. About the only thing you achieve with setting up the funding is that way is that it then requires an affirmative act of (the future) Congress to un-appropriate it.
Offhand it looks to me as though the Congressional Democrats foresaw at least seven years of continued Republican intransigence on this law, and went to a bit of trouble to give themselves a modest edge in the future years’ battles.
” in exchange for giving up nothing at all that the GOP wants”
Incorrect.
We WANT the ACA nullified.
We’ll ACCEPT the ACA being delayed in its implementation by a year.
Yes, admittedly, so that we have more time to work on nullifying it. But we are giving up something; we knew Jake had $25 in his checking account, but we’re willing to take just the $10 that we need for burritos.
Pressure from their constituents saying “We want you to vote for ‘x’.” Which, in the case of the ACA, is currently going in the direction of “We do NOT want you to vote for the ACA.”
Understand, too, that what we have here is not the Dems vs. the GOP. What we have is what we actually often see in Europe. Right now the House is a 3 party parliament. Boehner isn’t the head of the GOP – he’s a Prime Minister trying to hold together a coalition majority comprised of two parties, one more centrist and one more conservative.
He may well have sufficient members in the centrist party that are willing to throw in their lot with the leftist party to build a majority – but it’ll be a majority that he won’t be the Prime Minister of.
Citation?
I’ve been saying exactly that for weeks. It leaves no question as to what his priorities are.
Actually, if it were a choice between J.B. and a more solidly Tea Party candidate, I suspect that it would be possible to put together a coalition of Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans to keep JB as Speaker.
RonF:
Ampersand: If the Democrats give in to this, what motivation will the GOP have to ever compromise on anything, ever?
RonF: Pressure from their constituents saying “We want you to vote for ‘x’.” Which, in the case of the ACA, is currently going in the direction of “We do NOT want you to vote for the ACA.”
I’m not sure that that would be ‘pressure to compromise’, so much as ‘enlightened self-interest, because Rep wants to keep being a Rep’. But anyway, all the Democrats in Congress have the same motivation/lack thereof. So by that logic, Democrats should refuse to vote for a bill that defunds the ACA, just as Republicans should refuse to vote for a bill that funds the ACA. Most of the time, both sides have to settle for less than their constituents want in order to keep the government working. If both parties felt that way, then no one would ever compromise on anything. We might as well decide that all bills must pass by unanimous agreement of all of Congress.
It appears that the President himself has come out and said that he can very well sign off on bills that will authorize paying for some debts and programs but not others, but that he is not doing so in order to put political pressure on the House GOP.
It kind of sounds like you’re confusing a partial lifting of the shutdown with debt-ceiling-related debt prioritization? I don’t think Obama has ever claimed that he couldn’t approve bills for the partial lifting of the shutdown, but he has said that his lawyers think debt prioritization is legally dubious. Maybe that was not your point and I’m misunderstanding you.
Traditionally, though, this has been done in the form of either having to win lots of elections – so many that you control both houses and the executive – or through give-and-take compromise (“we’ll accept cuts on X, if you’ll accept an increase on Y, and we both walk away having both won something and lost something”). Compromise has been a necessary function because, prior to the present, no minority party has thought that they could rule absolutely by threatening to destroy the economy.
It’s not enough to say “they won’t just continually use the threat of default to get whatever they want because elections.” Nearly every Tea Party Rep comes from a safe district, plus the folks in the Tea Party don’t believe that defaults would actually cause any harm to the economy; that’s just another Obama/MSM lie. (And they’ll consider themselves proven right when a recession fails to appear by October 19th, because their understanding of the issues involved is genuinely that bad).
Right now, the Tea Party’s constituents consider any compromise at all, on anything, to be evil. (Except for the sort of ludicrous non-compromise of “okay, how about Democrats just hand us HALF of what’s in their wallet, and we give up nothing in exchange” that Robert suggested). So elections won’t be a motivation for compromise.
So, again: If the Democrats agree to a “we give up our number one priority in exchange for nothing but the Tea Party agreeing not to shoot the economy” deal, is there any rational reason for the Tea Party to not return to this well again, and again, and again?
“Right now, the Tea Party’s constituents consider any compromise at all, on anything, to be evil. ”
Indeed. My daughter wanted an iPod Touch for her birthday; I suggested an Etch-a-Sketch. She said “let’s compromise, get me a $50 starter Android tablet.” So I shot her.
Look, if I have you by the nuts, then it’s not a situation of each of us putting something on the table and reaching a compromise accord of harmony and sharing. That’s the Iowa school of negotiation; it works great when things are relatively even to start with or when there is great commonality of interest between the parties.
If I have you by the nuts, then me offering to release one of your nuts is not me offering you nothing. Reducing your pain, vs. increasing your pleasure – if you value pain reduction at zero then I’m not likely to bother reducing it.
We have you by the nuts, because civics. Value a one-nut release, because it’s the best thing on the table.
You only have me by the nuts in the sense that we’re handcuffed together and you’re threatening to set off a grenade.
Again, I ask – if I give in to you this time, wouldn’t your most rational response be to keep on demanding everything you want via the grenade, and never offer me anything (other than not setting off the grenade) in return?
I have you by the nuts because your team fucked up in its budget work, and refused to recognize the limit of its admitted fiscal mandate in Obama’s first term. That’s the reason Boehner is holding Constitutional cards right now.
Yes, my rational reaction to an enemy with his nuts hanging out is to grab those nuts. (I’m a dirty, dirty enemy.) So the answer to your forward-looking Democrat’s plea is, don’t leave your nuts hanging out next time.
But by “leaving our nuts hanging out,” what you mean is, pursue any policy the Tea Party disagrees with, ever.
No, by leaving your nuts out, I mean failing to pass a budget for the first time in the modern era, thus leaving all of your appropriations subject to easy-peasy cancellation by a House in the hands of your enemies.
How would passing a budget eliminate the need to have the debt ceiling raised?
Keep in mind that a budget resolution does not outrank laws. It cannot cut programs whose funding was set by congress passing a law. (Congress CAN do that, of course – by passing a new law.) Unless other laws are passed reducing spending, the debt ceiling still has to be raised, regardless of what the budget resolution says.
It doesn’t. The debt ceiling is a sideshow.
The power that John Boehner has right now is that he is under no obligation to bring a bill before the House for a vote. This is a power specific to the Speaker of the House; the Senate Majority Leader (who we *should* be referring to as the President of the Senate pro tempore, but you people are all savages, he sniffed fiercely while holding his cup of tea with the pinkie crooked) has a similar authority but it is easier to override him or her by a simple vote of the Senators.
The House has no such recourse; John Boehner can sit on the Pass This Now Or Everyone Dies In Fire Right Now bill until, well, everyone dies in fire, and nobody can do a Goddamn thing about it.
Well, except for one thing. They can fire his ass. The Speaker of the House can be recalled by an action of the membership, and a Speaker pro tempore named. This has never happened in our nation’s history, when we’ve had Speakers who were (heh heh) unspeakable. So it won’t happen here either. It would take every Republican together in unison, or a big chunk of both parties. There’s probably a big chunk of both parties who would be glad to see him go, but who would have a hard time uniting around a replacement.
So why would any of this be different if, instead of continuing resolutions to fund the government past 10/1, the Congress had previously submitted appropriations bills (12 in all) to formalize a budget?
Technically, procedurally, nothing. Boehner could refuse to bring an appropriations bill to the House for a vote, just as he can refuse to bring a continuing resolution to the floor.
But doing so would piss off every single member of Congress, in both parties. It would also piss off the Beltway establishment, and nebbishy yet strangely sexually magnetic wonky people like myself. Those appropriations bills are massive; they involve complicated dealmaking and are a fuckton of work to put together, and are the culmination of a multistep, multimonth process. And, of course, not voting on them is transparently and obviously an attempt to deliberately put a stop to the government.
CRs, not so much. With CRs, Boehner can credibly and plausibly say that he’s allowed, and the House has passed, CRs that do fund most of the government. He couldn’t throw together, and couldn’t get passed, appropriations bills that were similarly targeted; it’s too much work and takes too much time. But CRs are just a row of ditto marks, basically, keeping things the same as last year. He can write and pass a dozen of them in a minute.
Obama has submitted budgets every year; his 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 budgets have all been laughed off the table. As a result, the appropriations process has stalled or been grossly delayed year after year, and the government has to have continuing resolutions to fund basic operations. And those, he can fuck with; the argument that he’s violating his legitimate range of authority is very weak, and he is in a job whose specific agenda is to advance his party’s laws through Congress, and stop the other party’s laws.
That is why your nuts are on the table.
I feel like this line, and really your entire post, and actually very possibly your entire line of argument for the last ten posts, deserves some sort of award for extraordinary achievement in handwaving.
Maybe sideshow is too strong, but it groks to me like Boehner brought the debt ceiling into it so that he could give it back, i.e., raise the ceiling as seems to be the only choice, and let the Democrats score that as their “win”. They weren’t talking debt ceiling when he first blocked the CR; why bring it up now, other than to distract the Democrats with shiny objects.
But I don’t know that for sure. So think I’m handwaving, am I going to take away your dessert? Go, be happy and believe in the ACA for anothe night.
Let’s negotiate!
Seen in various places on FB:
Oct 2008: “You’ll never get elected and pass healthcare.”
Nov 2008: “We’ll never let you pass healthcare.”
Jan 2009: “We’re gonna shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare.”
July 2009: “We’ll fight to death every attempt you make to pass healthcare.”
Dec 2009: “We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare.”
March 2010: “We can’t believe you just passed healthcare.”
April 2010: “We are going to overturn healthcare.”
Sept 2010: “We are going to repeal healthcare.”
Jan 2011: “We are going to destroy healthcare.”
Feb 2012: “We’re gonna elect a candidate who’ll revoke healthcare NOW.”
June 2012: “We’ll go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare.”
Aug 2012: “American people’ll never re-elect you-they don’t want healthcare.”
Oct 2012: “We can’t wait to win the election and explode healthcare.”
Nov 2012: “We can’t believe you got re-elected & we can’t repeal healthcare.”
Feb 2013: “We’re still going to vote to obliterate healthcare.”
June 2013: “We can’t believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare.”
July 2013: “We’re going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare.”
Sept 2013: “We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare.”
Oct 2013: “WHY AREN’T YOU NEGOTIATING???”
@ Elusis: I honestly don’t understand the point of your comment. This isn’t a case of extortion, as Dems like to imagine. Extortion would involve threatening the use of some wrongful act in order to take something its rightful owner. For the analogy to work, one has to assume that the Dems have a right to see Obamacare go into full effect (funded, etc.). In other words, by virtue of its initial enactment in 2010, Obamacare’s opponents are duty-bound to support it, forever. Sorry, but that’s ludicrous. Republicans never supported Obamacare to begin with and aren’t obliged to stop fighting it.
This is especially true where (a) it is causing premiums to go up, rather than fall, as promised; (b) people are finding they CAN’T keep their existing coverage, as promised; (c) there are still going to be millions of uninsured; (d) it’s going to increase rather than decrease the deficit, as promised; and (e) Obama has asserted the right to unilaterally “amend” the statute as he sees fit, so that the version being implemented isn’t even the same version that was passed in 2010.
The other problem with the analogy is that there’s nothing wrongful in the House’s using its power to say, “We’ll vote to fund x and y, but not z.” This is precisely the role of the House as envisioned by the framers. What the Dems are trying to characterize as some kind of coup d’état is really just the Constitution in action. Sorry if you don’t like it.
As for the issue of compromise, I frankly find it sort of amazing that the side that is open to compromise is the one being characterized as unreasonable.
Of course, compromise in this instance wouldn’t mean that Republicans are going to get behind Obamacare. That would be surrender. A compromise would simply bring an end to the fiscal stalemate without either side giving up its larger strategic objectives.
One could argue that the Dems would be giving up more than the GOP by, for example agreeing to delay implementation of the individual mandate for a year or repealing the medical devices tax, but this overlooks the critical fact that both of those cherished policies are terrible for the American people. The medical devices tax is so awful it doesn’t even enjoy support among Democrats. And delaying the individual mandate is more than justified, on the merits, by the fact that the online system for selling insurance plans is barely usable at this point.
Unfortunately, Obama and Reid only seem to be interested in not losing this partisan showdown. What’s good for the country doesn’t seem to matter.
Elusis – You have to admire our consistency. That said, minor correction: a misplaced equation between the ACA and “healthcare” is you guys’ thing, not ours. We have our own mental tics. We call it Obamacare to rile up the rank and file, and the ACA in more formal situations.
Amp – Told ya.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-debt-ceiling-update-98134.html
Wait a minute. When this all started back in the day I was the one who objected to “Obamacare” and it was Amp insisting that it was the right colloquial term to use. Of course, that’s when people thought it was going to be popular…..
There’s really not that much distinction. Budget/appropriation bills are passed that say “We authorize spending this amount of money for that purpose”. The President can sign them and spend the money, or refuse to sign them and refuse to spend the money. If he refuses to sign it and the bills are passed over his signature, it would be legally dubious for him to still refuse to spend the money – but it wouldn’t be legally dubious to pass the bills and it wouldn’t be legally dubious for him to sign them and spend the money.
The Congress certainly has the right to prioritize spending money on one purpose over another – they do it all the time. If it’s an issue of directing the Treasury to pay out interest and principal on Treasury bonds by the Executive in the absence of legislation, I’d be surprised if he couldn’t say “It’s in the national interest” and just give the order. He hasn’t been shy about making changes to things like how the ACA is implemented in the complete absence of any legislation enabling him to do so, and people on here thought that was well within his perogatives.
BTW: my benefits enrollment statement has just been sent out from HR. My health insurance rates are going up a little over 5%. HR says it’s due to taxes imposed on them as a result of the ACA.
At some point, presuming that someone in the GOP has any wits at all, they will pass a bill authorizing the necessary level of expenditures such that Treasury bond principal and interest payments and other such instruments are met on schedule, thus preventing the U.S. from going into default. They’ll then make sure people know this and know that signing it is all that it will take to achieve this aim, and challenge the Senate and the President to pass it and sign it or explain why they will not.
What can they answer? Will they object on procedural grounds that it’s piecemeal budgeting? The GOP answers “So what? It’ll keep us out of default.” Will they insist on a bill for the ACA funding? That law is not all that popular folks, especially among the people who vote for GOP politicians. “So what? You’ll sacrifice the U.S.’s credit rating over Obamacare?”
The question is whether the GOP has sufficient wit and determination to do this. But it would poke a big hole in Pres. Obama’s threats.
Think about it folks. Why did the Founders set up the Constitution so that all bills for revenue and taxes and appropriation had to arise in the House and not the Senate? So that they could do exactly this. This is not a bug, folks, it’s a feature.
O.K., fourth post in a row, which violates the concordat I agreed to some time ago. My apologies. But I found
this quote from James Monroe fascinating, and it ties into my last comment of bug vs. feature, so fix the damn “Edit” function already:
Like I said folks, this is not some unfortunate unanticipated circumstance. This was a deliberate feature of the structure of the Federal government from the beginning.
RonF & Conrad:
This was a deliberate feature of the structure of the Federal government from the beginning.
This is precisely the role of the House as envisioned by the framers.
Was the Senate’s ability to block budgets passed by the House also a deliberate feature envisioned by the framers? Because if so, I think you have to at least go with “the shutdown is both parties’ fault” rather than “Dem’s fault”.
RonF:
There’s really not that much distinction.
Whether or not you believe there’s much distinction, I don’t think there’s evidence that Obama thinks there’s no distinction; this isn’t a case of Obama admitting something that he previously denied.
Conrad:
As for the issue of compromise, I frankly find it sort of amazing that the side that is open to compromise is the one being characterized as unreasonable.
They’re not willing to compromise because they’re not willing to actually give up something they want. “We’ll reverse the Bush tax cuts (which we don’t want) if you’ll delay implementation of Obamacare (which you don’t want)” would be an example of compromise. “We won’t vote for any budget unless the Senate gives us something [defund Obamacare? The stuff in Ryan’s recent op-ed? ‘I don’t even know what that is’?], but we won’t give up anything” is not compromise.
For the analogy to work, one has to assume that the Dems have a right to see Obamacare go into full effect (funded, etc.).
No, for the analogy to work, one merely has to assume that Democrats have a right to expect Republicans to work with them to pass a budget. And that if the Republicans don’t have the votes to pass a budget defunding Obamacare, in both the House and Senate, that they don’t use the shutdown/debt ceiling as a bargaining chip, since neither party actually wants those things.
They are not passing a budget, closetpuritan. They are (working on) passing continuing resolutions precisely because they haven’t passed a budget.
AFAIK the Senate has always had the power to block legislation that comes from the House, and vice-versa; that is one of the main points of a bicameral legislature. I don’t see how the Democratic-controlled Senate declining to go along with a Republican-controlled House’s bills puts more onus on Republicans somehow. The houses are independent; it isn’t the House’s job to get things done in the Senate, although there is a procedure called reconciliation which allows the houses to work together to come up with unified language.
I’m not sure why it’s incumbent on a party in such a negotiation to compromise on what they want. If I egotiate the purchase of a home, I can insist that the seller reduce his price or I’ll walk. I don’t have to offer him my car in exchange for a price reduction.
In any case, it seems pretty clear by now that the Republicans are willing to negotiate for something other than a complete elimination of O’care funding. It’s the prez who is saying that he won’t negotiate with the House. And that is tantamount to saying the House has no say in how the govt spends its money. Obama is saying, “you need to approve all current levels of spending without insisting on any changing since the last time we did this.” That position, however, is at odds with how the framers gave the House the power of the purse strings.
You can also insist that the seller reduce his price or you’ll firebomb the entire town. One of these is negotiation, the other is extortion.
But, fine. If this is the way you want government to work, whatever. I can’t wait to see your reaction when the Dems do this to a Repub POTUS.
It’s clear that there’s a fundamental disagreement between to two sides in this thread. One side sees every day negotiating, the other sees extortion. Never the Mark Twain shall meet in hell.
Conrad:
If I egotiate the purchase of a home, I can insist that the seller reduce his price or I’ll walk.
If you follow that metaphor to its logical conclusion, “I’ll walk” [and not buy that house at all] means “shut down the government” [and never reopen it, or at least not until January 2015, when new “buyers” come along in this metaphor]. And also, the alternatives to buying a house usually are not having a place to live, or buying/renting a different house… but there’s no other “house” in the real world; there’s no alternate-universe-Senate offering to pass a budget that repeals Obamacare. Ever notice how the only ____ in town can jack up its prices and/or sell low-quality goods and services because people can’t just go down the street and get a better deal?
I’m not sure why it’s incumbent on a party in such a negotiation to compromise on what they want.
Because they don’t want America to become a failed state?
Robert:
They are not passing a budget, closetpuritan. They are (working on) passing continuing resolutions precisely because they haven’t passed a budget.
Yeah, I know. I wasn’t sure if, in order to go through a hypothetical compromise procedure, they’d have to actually pass a budget or if they’re still able to go through that process when passing a continuing resolution.
@71: The fact there’s no “other” house to buy actually serves to moderate my negotiating position, doesn’t it ? This GOP House or any future Dem one can only persist in a my-way-or-hwy stance as long as there is reasonable popular support for that position. I don’t think it’s realistic to think (as some have suggested) that to give in to the GOP at all on this particular issue means that the GOP will forever be shutting down the govt over every conceivable disagreement.
We’ve already seen the GOP use threat of default and of shutdown to (successfully) get what it wants, last year. Just as many people predicted, the GOP is back at it this year – and in fact has been deliberately refusing to negotiate so it could wait for the shutdown and debt ceiling deadlines, when it believed it had more leverage. So popular opinion did not prevent that from happening, contrary to what you say.
Obviously, if the GOP doesn’t give in first, that means the heat from public opinion was not more than the GOP was prepared to deal with to get what it wants. Therefore, the only way to keep the GOP from doing this is to not give in to them.
You’re trying to convince us that if the GOP gets what it wants in exchange for giving up nothing at all, it wouldn’t try to do that again. The GOP would, for that to be the case, have to be unbelievably stupid, or to not care about achieving its own goals. I don’t buy that. Until you guys face negative consequences for hostage-taking and fail to get what you want, you’ll do it again and again.
Conrad,
The spending level in the CR that both House and Senate have passed is the spending level in the House budget. At this point, no one is demanding that the House Republicans allow spending at the level Democrats would like (or even at the level that Senate Democrats were able to pass in the Senate budget), they are only demanding that the House Republicans fund the government at the level that House Republicans say they want to fund the government. House Republicans already won on setting funding levels at the level they want.
The framers set up a structure in which the House and Senate negotiate appropriations between them. It was not intended to be one in which the House shuts down the government if it doesn’t get its way on unrelated issues.
@73: “We’ve already seen the GOP use threat of default and of shutdown to (successfully) get what it wants, last year. . . . So popular opinion did not prevent that from happening, contrary to what you say.”
I’m not saying it can never happen that the House would use the CR to assert its right to control spending. I’m saying that the fact the House is answerable to the voters means it can’t force an impasse over every single disagreement over spending.
“You’re trying to convince us that if the GOP gets what it wants in exchange for giving up nothing at all, it wouldn’t try to do that again.”
No, I was simply refuting the suggestion that to compromise in any way in this instance means the GOP will necessarily force a shutdown over every single disagreement with the Dems over every single issue.
@74: “[T]hey are only demanding that the House Republicans fund the government at the level that House Republicans say they want to fund the government. House Republicans already won on setting funding levels at the level they want.”
Clearly, the level of spending we had at the time of the shutdown is not the level House Republicans want.
“The framers set up a structure in which the House and Senate negotiate appropriations between them. It was not intended to be one in which the House shuts down the government if it doesn’t get its way on unrelated issues.”
The framers didn’t envision there would be the mammoth entity that we call government that could be “shut down” (actually so mammoth that a supposed “shutdown” only affects 17% of it!). In the framers’ day, the government consisted of little more than the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Treasury, the Post Office, the diplomatic corps, the Navy, and the AG. None of those core instruments of government are threatened by today’s impasse with the arguable exception of the Navy. However, as to your assertion that the framers did not intend for one house of Congress to be able to exercise de facto veto power over the other, that’s simply not true (except with respect to advise and consent, obviously). There was no assumption that, as to any given bill or resolution, if the House wanted “x” and the Senate wanted “z,” they were both expected to compromise at “y.” That’s utterly contradicted by the way the government was structured and by the statements
of the framers.
Please don’t try to fashion an argument based on the idea that the framers, of all people, envisioned this massive leviathan requiring fifty percent taxation rates and perpetual indebtedness to foreign powers in order to keep it going so that it could transfer wealth from one group of citizens to another and regulate in virtually every area of a person’s life, and expected for the House to go along with all that, forever, rather than assert some restraint.
Conrad:
Conrad:
Yeah, basically, the framers failed to image modern society, big surprise. So I’m not sure why you brought them up as though the power to create the current crisis was an intentional feature rather than an incidental flaw resulting from using something for a purpose it was not originally designed for.
Of course, prior to a 1980 decision, the power to fail to pass appropriations bills was not actually the power to shut down the government, so the idea that this was an intentional feature of the power of the purse is even more doubtful. If the House and Senate pass a bill to fund the government at some level, and it is not vetoed or overcomes a veto, that is the funding authority clearly given in the Constitution. Anything else is gaming flaws in the system.
The level of spending in the CR is the level of spending in the House budget. Why exactly is it clear that the level of spending specified in the budget passed by the Republican controlled House not the level that the House Republicans want?
Yes, the House Republicans want a bunch of things that are not covered by the 2014 appropriations. They want to cut social security and medicare. They want to abolish the ACA (or delay it for a year). None of those are things that are covered by the 2014 appropriations or by the debt ceiling.
Remember the debt ceiling? This was a thread about the debt ceiling.
Hm. Let’s talk a bit about the give and take between the Senate and the House, and what was envisioned by the Founders. This is the next paragraph from what I quoted above. It’s from Federalist Paper #58. Briefly, the Federalist Papers is a series of some 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison about why the Constitution was written the way it was and how it was supposed to work so as to convince the people of New York to approve it’s ratification. Many of them were not inclined to do so as they thought it granted the Federal government in general and the President in particular too much power (they’d had a bad experience with their Royal Governors when they were a colony). James Madison, who wrote #58, is generally considered to be the “Father of the Constitution”.
The first sentence refers to the Senate, as they had the power to approve the Secretary of State, Ambassadors, and others who represent the U.S. to the rest of the world. The House of Commons is a direct analogy to the U.S. House of Representatives. James Madison – and the rest of the Framers – clearly expected that the House of Representatives would be able to use the power of the purse (see the preceding paragraph in my previous post) to force the rest of the government to go along with their will in order to avoid a “dishonorable stagnation in public affairs.” And he notes that in Britian it had never yet happened that an inflexibility on the part of the other parts of the British government (the other house of the legislature or the Executive) such that such a state of affairs had come to pass. He didn’t expect it to happen in the Federal government, either.
In short, he said that the House of Commons in the British government had previously threatened to shut down government over their principles using an appropriations/budget bill; that it was intended that the House could threaten to halt the government’s functioning through the use of a money bill; that the House would threaten to halt the govenment’s functioning through the use of a money bill; and that the Senate and the Executive would be forced into the choice of captitulating.
Charles S:
Because it’s not an incidental flaw. It is an intentional feature.
When we get into discussions of how the Constitution works, it brings to mind a question – how many of you have read the Federalist Papers?
If you want to talk about how the Constitution was intended to work and you have not read them, you simply do not have an opinion informed enough to be worth listening to. They have been cited hundreds of times in Supreme Court briefings in support of an argument on how the Constitution should be applied. If you want to take a particular stance on what a given essay or section thereof means, fine. But if you haven’t read them at all you cannot be considered reasonably well-educated on the subject.
“Because it’s not an incidental flaw. It is an intentional feature.”
And to this I would add: Intentional or incidental, flaw or feature, it’s still the system we have. It’s the Constitution. Amend it if you can, but don’t pretend something is constitutionally illegitimate simply because it presents an inconvenience to the advancement of the liberal agenda.
I don’t think anybody is arguing that. We are arguing that it is ethically illegitimate. We are arguing that the correct response is a refusal to pay the ransom. We are arguing that if this becomes an accepted way for the minority party to act, we’re all fucked. It doesn’t matter who’s extorting – Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Very Silly Party -, this is a big problem if your goal is to have a functional government.
Conrad:
“Because it’s not an incidental flaw. It is an intentional feature.”
And to this I would add: Intentional or incidental, flaw or feature, it’s still the system we have.
Of course, these two views are fundamentally incompatible. It’s fine to present alternate arguments, on the theory that some people may be convinced by one and some by the other, but you can only believe one without being nonsensical. Either Congress can do whatever it wants as long as it’s legally able to do so, or it should do what the Framers intended. Going by Ron’s quote from Madison above, Ron’s view would lead to the conclusion that it isn’t legitimate for the President or Senate to block a budget (CR in this case) passed by the House (or at least that Madison didn’t expect them to do it), but Conrad’s view that as long as something is permitted, it’s fair game, leads to the conclusion that the President and Senate refusing to pass the CR is just fine.
It’s the Constitution. Amend it if you can, but don’t pretend something is constitutionally illegitimate simply because it presents an inconvenience to the advancement of the liberal agenda.
Similar thoughts occur to me whenever I hear the GOP claim that ACA is unconstitutional… Anyway, no, I don’t have any reason to believe that what the GOP is doing is constitutionally illegitimate, and never intended to claim that it was. Similarly to Jake, I oppose this tactic because I believe it’s bad for the country.
RonF: I haven’t read the Federalist papers. I don’t consider myself an expert on intent WRT the Constitution; that’s why I’ve been somewhat cautious in my wording in some of these comments (e.g. “Was the Senate’s ability… envisioned by the framers? Because if so…”)
“Of course, these two views are fundamentally incompatible. It’s fine to present alternate arguments, on the theory that some people may be convinced by one and some by the other, but you can only believe one without being nonsensical. Either Congress can do whatever it wants as long as it’s legally able to do so, or it should do what the Framers intended.”
Not really. Not to get too far off into the weeds, but you can believe both of those things, no problem. Congress ought to behave one way. Congress CAN behave in that way, or another. Where’s the conflict? There are many things that ought to be which aren’t, yet we continue to believe in the ‘ought’ without too much cognitive distress.
(I think we OUGHT to have a government which does not interfere in people’s snack choices; if we have a government which can and does nonetheless, then I think it should ban blueberry Poptarts, because they suck. That I think the government should butt out altogether, does not rob me of the privilege of expressing a preference should they insist on butting in.)
Charles:
“Of course, prior to a 1980 decision, the power to fail to pass appropriations bills was not actually the power to shut down the government, so the idea that this was an intentional feature of the power of the purse is even more doubtful. If the House and Senate pass a bill to fund the government at some level, and it is not vetoed or overcomes a veto, that is the funding authority clearly given in the Constitution. Anything else is gaming flaws in the system.”
Good old Civiletti, insisting that things meant what they said. Bless him.
If the House and Senate pass an unvetoed appropriations bill to fund the government, THAT is the funding authority. Authorizations are not appropriations; there is a two-step process for more than one good reason. As RonF notes with his research into the dusty tomes of the dead white guys, situations anticipated explicitly by the guys who wrote the rules, and written into the rules, are not being ‘gamed’ when invoked.
Robert:
Congress ought to behave one way. Congress CAN behave in that way, or another. Where’s the conflict?
I think I was ambiguous. “Can do whatever it wants”=it’s OK to do whatever it wants. Of course I believe, just as much as Conrad, that it is possible for Congress to cause a shutdown or default, because obviously they’re doing it right now. The two views I was talking about were that 1) Congress OUGHT to behave in the way the framers intended 2) Congress OUGHT to do whatever it’s allowed to do in order to further its goals–or at minimum, that in terms of tactics, there’s nothing that it is PERMITTED to do that it OUGHT NOT to do.
Fair enough. Government shutdowns are something the framers intended, so the loss of a year of Antarctic research, deaths of cancer patients who might otherwise have survived via research studies, children going hungry as SNAP breaks down and food pantries lose Federal funding, et fucking cetera is a-okay and really kind of cool (finally, we get to see Federalist Paper #58 play out! Maybe this time the House won’t balk like they did in 1995). I can now see why the 20% in the tricorn hats are the only people who still support the Republican Party.
So, fans of the framers, is a default also what the framers intended?
Possibly – but it doesn’t matter, since whatever their intent was has been explicitly changed by a subsequent generation of statesmen who did the necessary legwork and passed the 14th amendment. I’m told that the odd language of section 4 (“[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”) was intended as a deliberate and immediate check on the South; returning Congressmen from the Confederate states were thought, with justification, to be planning to repudiate the debt incurred over the course of the Civil War. The 14th amendment stonkered them.
It also seems to me, and I think to most sensible observers, to require that US not default on its debt (and its pension agreements) in the absence of a systemic collapse. Which, luckily enough, we’re not at yet. Obama or whomever may have to be a bit knuckle-rapping with a recalcitrant Congress to blow off the usual budget and prioritize Federal outlays so as not to violate the 14th; ironically, if they’re still at the no-appropriation stage, that job will be easier.
Re: dying cancer patients, starving children: Damn. That sucks. Looks like the Republican House already passed bills that fund all those things, though, so hopefully the Senate will see reason and pass them, and the President will live with having his signature legislative accomplishment pushed back another year and see reason and sign them. Starving babies, vs. letting the citizens have the same extra time to adjust that you gave your corporate and union buddies…seems kind of like a no-brainer.
How cute of you, Robert. How cute.
Best feature of the deal raising the debt ceiling?
It grants the President the authority to waive the debt ceiling and requires a veto-able bill from congress to enforce the debt ceiling. So it seems Senate Republicans agreed that the House Republicans could not be trusted with gasoline and matches any more.
Turns out I’m wrong, it is just a one time thing. So the Republicans wanted to be able to pretend they didn’t just authorize the debt required to pay for the spending they previously authorized, so they gave the President the power to waive the debt ceiling just this once.
It’s been clear for a week (at leasT) that the GOP was going to lose this fight pretty badly. I’ve been putting off saying so because I kept on wondering if that might just be my confirmation bias at work.
But no, the GOP has surrendered, and they’ve gained nothing over what they would have if they had never shut the government down or attempted to use the debt ceiling threat.
So the question becomes, in part, what can we expect from them next time? The Democrats – having done quite will on a “no negotiating until the threats stop” posture – will hopefully be emboldened to use that posture again, if necessary. But will it be necessary? Or will the GOP give up on using shutting the government, and defaulting on debt, as threats to get what they want?
I’d actually be interested in hearing from the right-wingers here on this one. Do you perceive the GOP as having lost this particular fight? If not, what do you think the GOP has won? And would you want the GOP to use this tactic again?
I agree with you that this was a no-win fight, and I’m not shocked by the outcome.
But I am very, very pleased.
It is now absolute and categorical that Democrats support the ACA, and Republicans oppose it to the last drop of their political viability.
It’s a good thing for Democrats that it turns out the ACA is a brilliantly-conceived bill, being rolled out with exceptional competence and to widespread public rejoicing as the deep wisdom of requiring people who can’t afford to insure their health, to insure their health, and to take money away from them if they fail to obey becomes ever more manifest. The crippling financial losses of the health insurance industry, many companies of which have gained 50 to 100 percent in equity valuation over the last year, make it clear which elements of society are benefiting from this far-seeing and visionary 2000-page wad of genius.
And you guys own it like Charles Schultz owns Snoopy.
Enjoy the brand! I’ll be over here mourning with the rest of our party at how sad it is that we are now and forever the party that tried to stop Americans from enjoying the deliciousness that is Obamacare.
So your argument is that a month ago, there was some confusion on whether or not Democrats owned Obamacare?
That seems pretty disconnected from reality to me. As I recall, no one from the GOP voted for Obamacare, and nearly everyone from the Dems did. Doesn’t get more clear-cut than that.
I think it’s too early for you to be declaring victory on Obamacare. It’s been a clusterfuck disaster so far – but if it’s working well a year from now, no one will care that the rollout was abysmal. It may be that the GOP’s worst-case scenario – which is poor people having the medical care and security that they need – will yet happen.
I’m pretty sure that if this whole government shutdown hadn’t happened to distract people, then the Republicans would have been in a much better position to highlight all the failings of the ACA’s rollout. At least if one looks at the media, the main thing they really achieved is to draw some of the attention away from that.
@91: I think the GOP lost the battle in the same way that that the colonists lost the Battle of Bunker Hill. At the end of the day, the British controlled the battlefield, so they could claim victory by that criterion. But the Americans had demonstrated they could stand and fight and thus severely dampened the prospects for an ultimate victory for the British.
What Conrad said.
Eytan, the case is made all the stronger by the fact that the Republicans stayed away from it at the beginning. John Boehner tells you about people’s premiums doubling, and you (generic you) say “yeah yeah yeah partisan rubbish”. It’s different, and more compelling, when it’s coming from the media and, deliciously, appalled Democrats.
Amp, it never hurts to be seen fighting to the last man for the cause that turns out to be just. Sure, the guys who retreated judiciously can still claim to have been on the side of right…but they don’t get as many beers bought for them.
The GOP’s worst case scenario…charming. I guess that it is, in the same way that a brilliantly functioning economy is a socialist’s nightmare. Because nobody can want good things for the country or their countrymen, that aren’t delivered the way that a particular ideologue wants to see.
Personally, my worst-case scenario is that a badly flawed health care industry is stressed beyond tolerance by some jackass exercise in raw state power and collapses, and we end up with socially-guaranteed access to the nobody who’s practicing medicine and everyone dies. Your scenario would naturally be number two…why do you think I’m putting in all these late nights hacking away at the ACA websites, making sure that every time an orphan tries to register it disconnects them, and delivers a powerful electric shock?
That one was hard to code.
Amp @91:
That depends on this:
Okay, when will the negotiations begin? Or, were the Democrats lying about that? Because, if the parties don’t begin to negotiate, I predict that, yes, it will likely happen again…and end up being much worse next time, because one would hope, contrary to the Republican’s historical record, “they won’t be fooled again.”
-Jut
Were the democrats lying about what? They said they would negotiate an agreement with the Republicans on ending the shutdown and the threat of default, and once the Republicans stopped posturing about Obamacare, the Democrats started negotiating, and a deal was agreed. What more did they ever promise to do (well, except start the whole process again in a few months once the current deal expires)?
The agreement includes a provision for further negotiations:
I don’t see anything to suggest that such a panel won’t meet and have discussions. (Indeed, the white house has been asking for such a panel for months; the GOP has refused, presumably because they believed they’d have more leverage if they waited until they could threaten a government shutdown and a debt ceiling default). However, just because they meet and have discussions doesn’t mean they’ll come to an agreement, of course.
Thanks – I did miss that.