Compromise. We just burn half of it down.
More like: We just burn half of it down this quarter. Next quarter we’ll get the rest. Isn’t that reasonable? What kind of bad-faith negotiating partner are you if you don’t agree to that? Partisan bastard!
Looks like there’s no need to ask. There’s a piece in Politico that says pretty clearly what Amash thinks needs to happen in order to compromise:
Republican leaders see Freedom Caucus members as a bunch of bomb-throwing ideologues with little interest in finding solutions that can pass a divided government.
But that’s a false reading of the group, Amash told his constituents. Their mission isn’t to drag Republican leadership to the right, though many of them would certainly favor more conservative outcomes. It’s simply to force them to follow the institution’s procedures, Amash argued.
That means allowing legislation and amendments to flow through committees in a deliberative way, and giving individual members a chance to offer amendments and to have their ideas voted on on the House floor. Instead of waiting until right before the latest legislative crisis erupts, then twisting members’ arms for votes, they argue, leadership must empower the rank and file on the front end and let the process work its will.
“In some cases, conservative outcomes will succeed. In other cases, liberal outcomes will succeed. And that’s OK,” said Amash, who was reelected overwhelmingly last year after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce backed his Republican primary rival. “We can have a House where different coalitions get together on different bills and pass legislation. And then we present that to the Senate and we present it to the White House.
“The worst scenario,” Amash continued, “is where you have one person or a small group of people dictate to everyone else what the outcome is going to be in advance.”
That sounds refreshingly sane, and jives with what I’ve heard him say before. I’m pretty sure he actually believes it. Having never been in Congress, I don’t really know if there’s any realism behind that belief or not. But regardless, I’m sure that would be his answer to anything along the lines of “where’s the compromise”.
“The worst scenario,” Amash continued, “is where you have one person or a small group of people dictate to everyone else what the outcome is going to be in advance.”
Never mind that the Freedom Caucus has been causing that exact worst scenario since 2011 … and reveling in it …
The problem is that he basically wants to put stuff up to vote, and then send stuff up to the president to get immediately vetoed.
The idea from the far right is that “Hey, make Obama veto it! Then the public will blame HIM for shutting down the government!”
The problem is that they have absolutely no grasp of optics. In such a situation, CONGRESS LOSES. Congress’s approval rating is at 14%, with an 83% disapproval rating. The general public regards them as worse than hair lice, literally. WORSE THAN NICKLEBACK.
When you are worse than Nickleback, you are going to lose any PR fight. If Obama vetos your crazy budget, and the government shuts down, Obama isn’t gonna get blamed for it. YOU will get blamed for it. Or hell, maybe you’ll both get blamed for it, but Obama don’t give a fuck because he’s done anyway. What will clearly not happen is the american people will say, “Oh man, the congress tried to do the right thing any evil obama stopped them, because he’s a muslim!”
I mean, I know that’s what the crazy fuckheads on the far right keep thinking, but they are WRONG. This shit will destroy the republican party.
But screw it, maybe that’s what needs to happen. Maybe it just needs to be destroyed completely so it can rise from the ashes as a non-crazy party.
Oh, that sounded absolutely wonderful. It’s too bad that he’s either lying or schizophrenic. What Amash claims that the Freedom Caucus wants is pretty much the opposite of what their lone “position paper” asks for.
Freedom Caucus doesn’t want a chance to apply their amendments. They want to crush any bill that doesn’t include their amendments and retaliate against any Republican that doesn’t vote for the amendment/bill. There is a huge difference between those two philosophies, and it’s disingenuous to imply that they are following the former rather than the latter.
There is no room for compromise when you’re a zealot.
Robinson:You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?
Robinson: Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.
From Obama’s interview with writer Marilynne Robinson (where Obama interviews her.)
FYI all, today’s Fresh Air interview was mostly with a journalist describing the current Freedom Caucus and the House leadership crisis.
Yeah, sorry for being kind of lazy there. /shame
The Town Hall is over! I wrote a blog post about it. I did have a chance to ask a question, and it was this one:
I wasn’t nearly as eloquent as JeffL, but I got the question across. Here’s what happened, as I wrote on the blog:
I had the chance to ask a question, which I used to bring up one of my least favorite political issues, the federal debt ceiling. I asked Amash why he would vote against raising the debt ceiling, which basically meant refusing to pay money that Congress has already allocated. He contested the point about “already allocated”, saying that if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised, the government would simply have to cut spending from that point onward. The congressman also said that he didn’t believe that a failure to borrow further would be catastrophic, because incoming payments would cover the most essential expenditures (like Social Security and the military). Finally, Amash also said that he sees the debt ceiling as a tool provided from past congressional action to force the government to be fiscally responsible and balance the budget.
Unfortunately the format of the town hall didn’t allow for further debate on the issue, but I don’t agree with any of his responses. “Already allocated” is indeed a reasonable description, as this analysis shows: if nothing changes, the government will be $68 billion short of funds needed to cover already-scheduled expenditures from Nov 10th to 30th. (And it gets worse after that, of course.) I believe relying on incoming payments to cover “essential expenditures” would not work, for two major reasons: first, stopping “less essential” payments would have a major suppressing effect on economic activity; and second, because the Treasury can’t easily choose which bills to pay (as the Washington Post pointed out back in 2013). As for using the debt ceiling as a budget-balancing tool, I can’t speak for the intent of past congressional action, but I do know that the globally connected economies of today do not react well to massive reductions in government spending. One needs only look across the Atlantic to Europe (most notably Greece) to see that, and it would be even worse here if such reduction happens suddenly via a debt crisis.
Oh, so he doesn’t think defaulting is going to be a problem? What a genius. I like how he thinks he gets to choose what the government will continue to fund. Why isn’t furloughing some military people an option in his mind? We can’t postpone orders for planes, tanks, etc.?
It’s not stupidity, it’s deceit. He certainly knows that a failure to raise the debt ceiling wouldn’t be smooth sailing and isn’t a method to gracefully constrain government spending. But the base he’s playing up to there doesn’t know that or doesn’t want to believe otherwise. Telling people what they want to hear is always a great way to win their support.
Shoulda asked the dicks question!
It’s been more than a week since McCarthy took himself out of the running, and still no sign of new Speaker … not even a sign of when a vote might take place. There’s also been no further word from Paul Ryan. Last week his office said he’s not currently running for Speaker - but DC is not taking that as a “never.”
If Ryan really wanted to be completely out of the running, all he needs to do is put out an “if elected, I will not serve” statement.
Likewise, if this was all some sort of Frank Underwood-style three-moves-ahead stratagem by Boehner to make the Freedom Caucus realize how much they need him, then I’d expect pressure to be building to put the Freedom Caucus nominee to a vote quickly, in order to show that the Freedom Caucus can’t do squat on their own.
But instead, silence. Which suggests an ongoing effort to make Ryan work as Speaker. But why the big hold up?
I bet it’s pretty simple: they have no idea who would succeed Ryan as chairman of Ways and Means. Ways and Means is as important as Speaker (or even more so) but it requires a certain amount of responsibility, managerial talent, and mastery of basic math skills.
The Freedom Caucus will obviously demand that whoever heads Ways and Means must meet their standards of conservatism. But the Freedom Caucus doesn’t do responsibility or management, and any time spent crunching icky numbers means less time for them to pontificate about how it’s necessary to destroy government in order to save it. So I bet they simply can’t agree on anyone to fill that slot.
The freedom caucus doesn’t really have any say in who heads comities.
They do when working with Democrats to elect an acceptable candidate is grounds for getting Primaried out by Koch money, and when you do not have enough votes without the idiots true patriots of the Freedom Caucus.
What worries me the most about all this is the Treasury comment a few days ago that they’re out of accounting tricks in about 30 days.
Unless the non-crazy Republicans try to work out some deal with enough Dems to get to 218 and elect a compromise candidate for Speaker, we’re boned, pure and simple. These Freedom Caucus people think they have to “destroy the [country’s economy] in order to save it.”