Get this off my desk

There are a lot of reasons why elected office holders behave the way they do. But one fundamental razor for understanding them I find useful is assume their primary motivating question  with regard to any issue is, "How do we get this off of my desk?"  We're about to find out if Senate Democrats will extend this principle to... well... the entirety of their constitutional mandate. 

But most important, the bill grants an open invitation to Trump and Elon Musk to continue to ignore Congress and toss out disfavored spending. Vice President JD Vance, while selling the deal to House Republicans, stated outright that “Trump would continue cutting federal funding with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative and pursue impoundment—that is, holding back money appropriated by Congress.” This has been reiterated by others in the Trump administration.

In fact, the House Republican bill gives the president more leeway to move money around. It appropriates money for things that Musk has eliminated, meaning that money can operate as a floating slush fund for Trump’s priorities, as long as the courts don’t roll back the illegal impoundments.

Think about what this means. The Trump administration is saying that they will sign a bill appropriating specific funding, and then go about cutting funding anyway. If you’re a member of Congress, you’re being told that your work product doesn’t matter, that the constitutional power of the purse doesn’t matter, and that there’s no guarantee that anything you pass will actually reach the people you serve.

To most modern politicians, that is a tempting offer. With no expectation that your office has any relevance to the work of governing, you are now free to focus on the real work of  raising money and being on TV a lot. This is an especially attractive proposition if you happen to be a member of the "opposition party."  Why bother with performing the frustrations of exerting your limited power when you can scale that back to simply performing. 

So far, only Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has committed to voting yes. But as Josh Marshall has documented at Talking Points Memo, a number of Senate Democrats have stated no position on the bill, leaving their options open. In general, senators have been hedging their bets until forced to make a decision. That time has come.

Credible sources indicate that the most likely Democrats to offer up the remaining seven votes to avoid a shutdown are Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Michael Bennet (D-CO), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Mark Warner (D-VA).

Some Democrats seem to be consumed with Senate brain, worried that they would be blamed for a government shutdown. What they’re not understanding is that the Musk-Trump assault on government has created a kind of permanent government shutdown, where so-called nonessential personnel are fired and operations are deeply circumscribed. Why would any Democrat sign on to a bill making that state of affairs even more likely, out of fear of the same government shutdown that the Trump administration is locking into place anyway?

I'm a little harsher than David Dayen in that article.  I think Democrats understand what's happening perfectly well.  They're being offered a chance to avoid responsibility and are keen on taking it. That's just good political instincts. Your Social Security check didn't come? The bad people must have taken it from you. Meanwhile, now my job doesn't involve looking after Social Security anymore. One less thing I have to do.

It's somewhat slightly possible that the shutdown might end

The stupidest possible way it could happen would be with Trump declaring the much-discussed "national emergency" so the government can open and then we can all wait for the courts to reverse whatever he thinks that accomplishes. But as difficult as it is to bet against the stupidest possible outcome nowadays, I'm still not convinced it will happen exactly that way.

The fact of the matter is, despite whatever wisdom your preferred punditry offers you, the President still has a fair amount of leverage simply because, generally speaking, Republicans don't actually care if stuff gets funded.  What this means is, for the most part, the stories you read every day about the misery of unpaid federal workers, uninspected food, unprocessed home loans, unpaid benefits, etc., most of that matters very little or not at all to the Republicans in power or to the elite sliver of America their party actually represents. Basically, they can do this all day.

It starts to get interesting, though, when the shutdown affects specific choke points in the economy where everybody's money is at least a little bit at stake.  Like, the airports, for example.

On Friday morning, air traffic controllers missed their second paycheck due to the government shutdown. Many called out sick, resulting in delayed flights at some of the nation’s busiest airports, including LaGuardia, Newark, and Hartfield-Jackson in Atlanta. Now, flight attendants may also walk out. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, told New York on Friday afternoon that she “just finished” recording a video message to members urging them to get to the offices of their congressional representatives until the shutdown is resolved.

“We’re mobilizing immediately,” Nelson said. Asked if this meant that flight attendants will not be going to work, she responded, “Showing up to work for what? If air traffic controllers can’t do their jobs, we can’t do ours.”

Maybe that makes somebody budge.  Or maybe not.  I keep making the mistake of assuming Trump is dealing from a point of view that incorporates at least some vague understanding of reality.  That's not always the best analytic. 

Feeding time has come and gone

My read on the recent shutdown drama seems to be at variance with much of the punditocracy.  I don't think the GOP "lost" all that much.  Sure they're polling poorly in national approval ratings.  And they're sniping at one another. And, of course, they look pretty stupid on cable news and all.

But the 2010 gerrymander all but guarantees the House will remain safely under Republican control. You can find people willing to argue about that right now but I'm not one of them. Plus the entire exercise sure did raise a lot of money for Republicans. Ted Cruz's PAC took in almost $800,00, for example.  

So there may not be much dignity in Tea Party politics these days, but at least it pays well.  And just to be sure no money is left on the table, Karl Rove has assured Republican leaning donors that they can also spend money on anti-Tea Party conservatism... whatever that might be.

The leading establishment “super PAC” co-founded by Mr. Rove, American Crossroads, has already started a new initiative called the Conservative Victory Project that is quietly working to head off Republican challengers whose victories in primaries, in its determination, would put party seats — or potential party seats — at risk of falling to Democrats in general elections.

Suffice to say the shutdown crisis, whatever the "optics" might be, won't leave the Team R war chest any lighter during the midterms. 

Oh and it's helpful to remember the Republicans didn't "lose" a single thing policywise. For one thing, they've been playing with house money ever since the sequester went into effect.

Because the deal only includes minor concessions, the Beltway consensus is that it represents a resounding defeat for Republicans, who “surrendered” their original demands to defund or delay Obamacare. In the skirmish of opinion polls, that may be true, for now. But in the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

Surrender? Any more “victories” like this and Democrats will end up paying tribute into the GOP’s coffers.

And, of course, they didn't repeal Obamacare. Nobody expected that to happen. What's interesting, though, is that if only they had known just what a stupendous clusterfuck the launch of open enrollment was going to turn out to be, they might have just sat back and let it fall apart all on its own.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is working on legislation to effectively delay Obamacare's individual mandate for one year, his office told TPM on Wednesday.

His spokesman, Jonathan Kott, said Manchin opposes a bill proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to delay the mandate for a more indefinite period of time while problems with the insurance exchanges persist.

But there would have been less campaign money in that so... all's well that ends shitty, I guess. 


 

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives...

We are now less than 72 hours out from a debt default landfall. Write your own cone of error joke.  And maybe fill your bathtub with platinum coins just to be safe. Looks like the Republicans met late last night for tacos and decided to just keep on keeping on.

And in the time it took me to type that, the White House has called the bluff again.  I'm not so sure it's really a bluff, though.  One of the reasons I've thought the conservatives were "winning" this thing the whole time is a debt default is actually a pretty decent outcome as far as they're concerned.  It starves the proverbial beast a little. Opens the door to a whole new host of austerity measures.  Props up the retrograde gold standard argument. Et cetera and so on.
 
I'm not saying this means the Democrats should be "negotiating" with this nonsense. I'm just saying the options were always help the GOP break stuff, or the GOP will break stuff on their own.  So far, the Democrats have, to their credit, opted for the latter. 

Another thing to note is that the idea that there's some distance between the Republican leadership and the Teabaggers is an illusion.  John Boehner could have ended this at any time.  He could have ended it this morning. And yet here we are.

I told myself I wasn't going to stoop to this but... I mean... it's so.. this, right?

Some links for Sunday

• James Gill's column this morning is about ION Chariman Jay Lapeyre and his role in helping Bobby Jindal bring the SLFPA-E to heel.
  

Lapeyre is not just a big shot in Texas. He is most active in his home state of Louisiana where, for instance, he chairs the committee that nominates candidates for seats on the Flood Authority. The committee gives Gov. Bobby Jindal two to choose from when a member’s term expires, which (John) Barry’s has.

Barry was a certainty for reappointment until Jindal lost his rag over the lawsuit. None of the official reasons for the administration’s dudgeon make any sense, but the oil and gas industry has never lacked friends in high places. At Lapeyre’s urging, four members of the committee joined him in voting against Barry. That produced a 5-5 vote, and Barry was a goner.

“Whew,” the roomful of ION customers would exclaim, “that was a close one! Where would we be without Jay?”

Various civic and educational institutions are represented on the nominating committee, where Lapeyre’s sponsor is the Campaign for a Better Louisiana. Not that much better, though. A blatant conflict of interest is evidently still jake.



• Also from The Advocate,  a front page feature on the still very much in doubt future of Avondale shipyards. Avondale currently employs 1500 of its one time 5,000 strong workforce and is scheduled to close once the final order from its Navy contract runs out next month.

As various players scramble to put together a new strategy for the shipyard, the bulk of the 3,500 displaced workers are still in limbo.


Amid the slowdown, it’s hard to gauge what’s has become of the yard’s nearly 3,500 displaced workers.

Ault said he has had a hard time convincing people to drive or move the 120 miles to Pascagoula, where thousands of openings remain unfilled. He said the union has kept in touch with laid-off members, and many of them have stuck around. “Bringing back people would be a fairly rapid transition,” he said.

Bollinger — who employs about 3,000 people in Louisiana and whose firm typically has hundreds of openings, mostly at its repair facility in Amelia — said he expected to be deluged with resumes when Avondale’s closing was announced. But it didn’t happen, and his company has hired only about 50 former Avondale employees.

Neither going to Pascagoula nor working for Boysie Bollinger seems particularly appealing to these folks for some reason.

Google's plan to turn your every idea or public discussion about anything into an advertisement.

When the new ad policy goes live on Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people. If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album. Such product endorsements, especially from friends and acquaintances, are a powerful lure to brands, replicating word-of-mouth marketing on a broad scale. Social advertising — which includes a wide range of ads, including endorsements — is a $9.5 billion business, according to eMarketer, accounting for 8 percent of digital ad spending.

Related: Here is Thomas Frank writing about the Silicon Valley (which we really should think of as the new Madison Avenue) obsession with monetizing "creativity" whatever that might be.

Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.

That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.

And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?

Here's an amusing stunt by comedian Sam Hyde who passed himself off as a presenter at a TED show. For the uninitiated, TED is kind of a tent revival circuit of motivational talks for middle managers who worship the Creativity consensus thinking Frank describes. Hyde bullshits his way onstage and delivers... well.. this.

Bill Moyers on the House Republican rump:

Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees; they demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline; they demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled and the big bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.

When the president refused to buckle to this extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship.

From Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech:

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

Yesterday, as the shutdown talks moved back to the Senate, Harry Reid kept up the hardball stance.

At an afternoon news conference, Reid said he wanted a shorter period for stopgap funding and a longer extension of the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Reid particularly wants to scale back deep automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, which were passed during the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown and will take effect every January for the next decade, unless Congress amends them.

Exclusive footage of Senate negotiations between Reid and McConnel

Speaking of stomping on the Tea Party, the Saints kickoff in New Engaland in about an hour and a half. This means, among other things, I'm going out for beer. Here, via B&G Review, is a moment of greatness for you to ponder in the meantime.

Tell me again who is "winning" this thing

The Shutdown saga is not about who is "winning and losing" in opinion polls even though, the Republicans are undoubtedly losing there.

Since the shutdown began, and more intensely since initial polling data on the shutdown became available, horse-race junkies have been weighing in on whether it will endanger the GOP’s adamantine House majority. The 2010 gerrymander fortified Republican control of the House against a 7 percentage point loss in the national popular vote. Could the shutdown swing the polling so dramatically?

Polling experts at first said, “Dream on.” If House Democrats only won the national popular vote by 1.5 percent in 2012, it would take more than a GOP shutdown to quintuple that margin in a midterm, base turnout election.

On Tuesday, Princeton’s Sam Wang offered a statistical counterpoint, and Greg Sargent, courtesy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, provided anecdotal evidence that the shutdown will help Democrats recruit competitive candidates in tough GOP-held districts.

I’ll leave polling analysis to the statisticians and campaigning to the parties.

But I would argue that beyond the midterms, the shutdown will be unusually problematic for Republicans as a national party. Earlier this year, when the party reached a crossroads between becoming a more ethnically inclusive, moderate party, and doubling down on its whites-only strategy, it chose the latter. This shutdown fight, intentionally or otherwise stands to rupture the white-white coalition.

I recommend you read through Sargent's and Wang's stuff. There are some worthwhile insights. Wang does indeed point toward the statistical possibility of a Democratic takeover of the House (given today's polling data) but he doesn't mean to imply that this is actually what's going to happen.  

If the election were held today, Democrats would pick up around 30 seats, giving them control of the chamber. I do not expect this to happen. Many things will happen in the coming 12 months, and the current crisis might be a distant memory. But at this point I do expect Democrats to pick up seats next year, an exception to the midterm rule.

Regardless of whether the GOP is in serious danger in the House, (I still think they probably are not) the majority of the hard-line faction isn't going anywhere.  Or at least they believe they are safe which has the same effect on their behavior now.

But, more to the point, the GOP strategy isn't to simply "win" the polling over the shutdown crisis.  Remember they created the shutdown on purpose and in full expectation that they would meet with a degree of public disapproval for having done so.  If they don't believe that present disapproval will translate into electoral defeat (and most hardliners reasonably do not believe it will) then it isn't a problem in the long run.

What they are trying to win is the same package of stuff they're always trying to win.  That means cuts in things that poor to middle class Americans need and like such as Social Security and Medicare 

I was just listening to Wolf Blitzer explain that Republicans realize they're getting killed in the world of public opinion but keeping the government closed and threatening a debt default. But they're worried, he explains, that if they open the government and take the debt default off the table they'll lose a lot of their leverage to force things like repealing Obamacare, cutting Social Security, Medicare and other similar stuff.

Here's a concise description of "other similar stuff."  It's the same stuff they're always concerned about.  The reason we're having this "crisis" in the first place is because the most recent electoral results do not provide the Republicans with the tools to enact their agenda.

But Republicans are well funded, resourceful, and pretty damn good at sticking to that agenda regardless of the circumstances.  And the second that the Democrats agree to "sit down and talk" (which I'm thinking the odds are pretty good that they will) they will have rewarded them for behaving this way.

Can't even go back to killing our brains with beer

The Shutdown just got real.

But the shutdown poses problems for the far smaller craft brewers, who build their businesses by introducing new and unique-tasting seasonal products, said Jay D. Ducote, the Baton Rouge blogger who the state hired to write the tour guide for the Louisiana Brewery Trail that leads tourists on visits to the state’s beer-making operations.

“As long as the government is shut down, there won’t be a way for brewers to get those labels approved and moving forward, which means they can’t release any new beers to retail establishments. They’ll be able to keep rolling on their already-approved products, but new beers will be delayed or postponed,” Ducote wrote Wednesday in an email responding to questions.

Shock doctrine

Pretty much just textbook now.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on Wednesday defended his stance that a debt default would not have a large negative impact on the economy, and may be necessary in order to force the government to enact more budget cuts.

"I'd rather have a managed catastrophe now which I don't think will be there," Coburn told CNN's 'New Day' with Chris Cuomo. "I'm not saying we shouldn't pay our bills. What I’m saying is we should put ourselves in a position where we have to start making hard choices now."

All very deliberate.  

Winning or losing

Here's one thing that keeps bugging me about the shutdown punditry.  Every few days someone trots out a poll that says "The GOP is losing" And that may be technically true in that they are not doing well in national polls which ask "the public" who they blame for the current crisis. (I hesitate to use the word crisis when the whole thing is as contrived as it has been, but I already spent the scare quotes in that sentence on "the public" so... please just note the reservation.)

But picking winners and losers in terms of what policy course actual voters might prefer misses the whole point of the thing.  The entire purpose of this play by the House rump is to subvert the democratic process entirely.  Which is what this does.

Republicans on Tuesday put forth their latest effort to pressure Democrats to come to the table, calling for a bipartisan, bicameral committee to convene to address the impasse over the shutdown and the debt ceiling.

For now, the Democrats are rejecting the super-committee idea on the entirely reasonable grounds that they've already spent the past two years bending the rules in response to these fits. Whether they'll continue in this defiant stance remains to be seen.  Suffice to say, if they agree to another "bipartisan committee" they will have lost on the major point that whether you "win" or "lose" during the legislative process should have some relation to whether you've won or lost in the last round of the electoral process.

But maybe that's an outmoded idea anyway.

Why do they care this time?

Great post here about the Democrats' sudden spine in the latest shutdown standoff.

But where was that realization when everyone was negotiating the sequester just a few months after the election? It's not as if widely read progressive bloggers and even a few traditional columnists haven't been pointing out this dynamic at length for the better part of a decade, and doing so with increasing alarm.

This is going to sound bitter, but it can't be helped. Why is it that the people who realize political realities years too late still get to be the pundits and advisers, while the people who were right all along are still using blogs to shout from the outside looking in?

Unfortunately, we can't attribute this to any sudden wising up or, God forbid, change of heart on the part of the Democrats.  Mostly what's happened is the Republicans have decided to start a pissing contest over something the Dems will actually piss back over.

What has "taken them so long"  is that they actually care about defending Obamacare.  Not because Obamacare is something to be especially proud of.  It's a mincing over-complication designed to benefit the insurance companies... but that's not important right now. They want to defend it because it's their "signature piece of legislation" and they don't want that taken away from them.

The previous round of shutdown shit fit was over real social safety net spending of the sort that Democrats really don't mind giving away anymore.  But they'll defend Obamacare because it's their trophy.

Fun little diversion

I'm trying to remember who came up with this gimmick first.  I know I saw someone write a similar article a few months ago.  Anyway Slate is apparently going to make it a running gag. This is the shutdown story written the way a major US publication would write about a foreign government.

Six years into his rule, Obama’s position can appear confusing, even contradictory. Though the executive retains control of the country’s powerful intelligence service, capable of the extrajudicial execution of the regime’s opponents half a world away, the president’s efforts to govern domestically have been stymied in the legislature by an extremist rump faction of the main opposition party.

Or...

Maybe there are enough Republicans willing to cave after all.

Either way it makes sense.  The hardcore group still gets to say they tried to die on this hill.  It will make them happy and the added bonus is 800,000 people don't get furloughed.  

Rump government

Here's what the gerrymander gets you. Enough safe Republican seats that a shutdown won't engender any serious political consequence. 

Death wish

Every couple of years we walk right up to the ledge and stare over the side longingly.

It has started to feel normal that two or three times a year we have a major state/fiscal crisis and maybe once every 18 months or two years, there is a true breakdown with fairly grave consequences. The last time was in the summer of 2011. We have a very good chance of another next week and something even more catastrophic next month.

Despite the fact that it hasn't occurred since 1996, at this point, given the possibilities on offer, a government shutdown seems almost prosaic. Countless citizens are inconvenienced in ways large and small. But you can start the thing back up again in a week and apart from a mini-shock to the economy probably everything goes back to working fine. The thing with truly catastrophic potential and permanent damage is defaulting on the national debt - the possibility of which is mind-boggling in the absence of actual state bankruptcy, war or civil disorder.

I'm not even sure what to say about it because it's the new normal. We know it. We live it. But this is really unprecedented stuff - deep attacks on the state itself inasmuch as the state requires for it to function a penumbra of norms surrounding the formal mechanisms of government.

And this is just what we do now. Actually Marshall goes on to point out, correctly, that this is specifically what the Republicans do now. As I tried to say last week, they aren't acting this way (only) because they are crazy.  They act this way because there are political and financial incentives for them to keep doing it.

But it bears repeating that this is an incentive to go ahead and blow up the country... or at least come very very close to doing that.. every 2 years or so.  After a few more rounds of this maybe someone will ask just who the blow-up-the-country constituency is and why they have such a loud voice in Washington.

In a related story, the big scary deficit, by the way, is already falling. Although it's also worth noting that that's not even what they're screaming about this time.  This time they're blowing up the country over health insurance.  Oh and now apparently contraception.  Again, why do these people get to demand so much attention?

In a nutshell

Nobody has a clue