Bipartisanship For The Sake Of Looking Bipartisan

Democrats are acting like bipartisanship matters in the health care debate, and then the Republicans have a day where they reveal a "plan" with no details, no sense of who would be covered by it and no cost estimates. It's literally a useless four-page outline.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who heads a GOP health task force, said that when the details are drafted in the coming weeks, they would present a plan that “costs far less than the Democrats’ [plan] and provides better results for the American people.”

But Republicans who stayed at the press conference to answer questions — the leaders made statements but didn’t stay — could not answer whether their plan would include a tax increase to pay for such costly items as refundable tax credits for low- and middle-income workers to help pay for insurance.

These are the same people advocating the complete scrappage of the employer tax deduction, who want to criticize Democrats for raising taxes to pay for health care. These are the same people who introduced a bill to deny comparative effectiveness research in Medicare and Medicaid, in the name of fiscal conservatism:

1. Politicians who rail against wasteful government spending are taking action to prevent the government from reining in … wasteful spending.

2. Politicians who warn that the burden of entitlements is killing the federal budget are stepping in to block … the single most painless route to reducing the growth of entitlements.

3. They’re doing it in the name of avoiding “rationing of health care” … but they’re specifically addressing taxpayer-funded care. If you want to go out and buy a medically useless treatment, Medicare won’t stop you.

4. These same politicians are, of course, opposed to efforts to expand coverage. In other words, it’s evil for government to “ration care” by only paying for things that work; it is, however, perfectly OK, indeed virtuous, to ration care by refusing to pay for any care at all.

By the way, the "rationing" talking point is rank nonsense, but you probably knew that, based on who was promoting it.

Hell, these people have even tried to assert that health care reform shouldn't be passed because it promotes walking.

So given all of this, like E.J. Dionne I can't imagine why you would want to engage these people in any meaningful way, when they have time and again proven themselves not to be partners but unilateral adversaries.

Where did we get the idea that the only good health-care bill is a bipartisan bill? Is bipartisanship more important than whether a proposal is practical and effective? And if bipartisanship is a legitimate goal, isn't each party equally responsible for achieving it?

Most Democrats believe that fixing the system will require increased government intervention to guarantee universal coverage and to contain costs. Most Republicans oppose an expansion of government's role and believe an even more market-oriented system would pave the way to health-care nirvana.

Trying to achieve full bipartisanship by squaring those two views is a recipe for incoherence [...]

It's one thing to compromise to pick up votes, which, one hopes, is what Baucus is doing. It's another to compromise in exchange for nothing at all. The first is bipartisanship with a purpose. The second is the bipartisanship of fools.

And so we get idiotic half-measures like Kent Conrad's "throw a dart at a board" health co-ops idea, which simply does not make any reasonable sense as a substitute for the public plan unless the goal is to maintain the status quo for the sake of not angering Republicans who won't vote for the bill anyway. Health co-ops are fine at the margins, but simply could not possibly be scaled up to provide what a public plan could, which is the impetus for insurers to compete on price and quality. This is just a replay of the Bush years:

But is Conrad right about the politics? A reform proposal that doesn’t have a public plan is bound to cost more (or do less), since a public plan can save money--and save money in ways that the Congressional Budget Office will score. Get rid of the plan, and reform’s overall price tag goes up, making it harder to pass. And if reform without a public plan were to pass, it would simply not work as well, or perhaps at all. It would be more likely to run into problems because budget expenditures turn out to be higher, or implementation problems when private insurance doesn’t live up to its promises. That could sink reform before it even gets underway. In other words, maybe there’s a political risk to including a public plan. But there’s also a big political--and policy--risk to excluding it.

Strategically, Conrad’s approach is more like capitulation than compromise. Reconciliation or no reconciliation, the right political path for achieving reform doesn’t run through a minefield of endless preemptive concessions. When President Bush successfully enacted tax cuts in 2001 (through the reconciliation process, it should be noted), the question was simple: tax cuts, yea or nay? Many Democrats eventually signed on, not because they liked what Bush was peddling, but because they didn’t want to be against tax cuts. And tax cuts mostly for the rich weren’t all that popular. By contrast, there’s little question about the popularity of bold action on health care.

Memo to Congressional Dems: You. Cannot. Reason. With. Radical. Republicans. Who. Want. You. To. Fail. So stop trying, already, or else we'll have to conclude that you want no part of progress either.

FL-Sen: Crist Goes To Crazy Base Land

Charlie Crist grabbed the endorsement of the NRSC, and this incensed the insaneosphere on the right, with RedState calling for a boycott of the Senate Republican campaign arm. If the NRSC had any clout over the poltical establishment in Florida, it might be a serious endorsement. But clearly, Crist doesn't think their money and influence will be enough to help him win the primary, because he just went out and signed the Grover Norquist pledge.

In the latest development in the 2010 Florida Senate race, where moderate Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is facing a more conservative opponent in the GOP primary, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, both candidates have signed the anti-tax pledge of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.

In a possible move by Crist to appeal to right-wing voters and activists -- a demographic that might oppose him because of his support for the stimulus bill -- his campaign announced yesterday that he was the first candidate to sign the pledge. Rubio then signed up hours later.

He only needs to do this because Rubio would otherwise attack him hard from the right. But clearly, Crist's willingness to go as far right as possible to win the primary will only hurt him, in the same way that it hurt John McCain, in a general election in Florida. State lawmaker Dan Gelber is the progressive alternative here, and he has a primary of his own against Rep. Kendrick Meek. I'm sure both of them love watching Crist turn into a fundie neocon economic royalist right before their eyes.

Meanwhile, as Howie Klein notes, the NRSC didn't bother to offer the same support for Missouri's Roy Blunt, a member of the House leadership, declining to choose him over his primary opponents. Maybe that's because Robin Carnahan looks ready to beat all comers, and Blunt has enough corruption problems of his own to spook the national GOP.

Roy Blunt Throws McCain Under The Bus

Chaos in the Republican Party.

REP. ROY BLUNT: Clearly, yesterday, his position on that discussion yesterday was one that stopped a deal from finalizing.

The Obama campaign's response:

"Congressman Blunt just confirmed what's been clear since John McCain rode into Washington at the eleventh hour – Senator McCain's political theatrics succeeded only in stopping a bipartisan deal. During the most serious economic crisis of our time, we don't need erratic posturing, we need steady leadership to protect American taxpayers and put our economy back on track," said Obama-Biden spokesman Bill Burton.

The guy is a drama queen. It's all about him.

What an embarrassment.

...Just to add, Republicans certainly want to reconstitute their party, but I don't think they want to do it with John McCain at the helm. We're starting to see rumblings from conservatives feeling uneasy about Sarah Palin and even calling for her to be dropped from the ticket. In many ways they'd be thrilled with McCain voting the other way on this. Republicans are BETTER in the opposition, and it would be a cleaner way for them to reconstitute themselves.

Guess What?

You're not going to believe this, but President Bush and all his top advisors want to keep troops in Iraq longer. This is really a stunner because everyone was waiting with such apprehension to see what the President would do. Would he call for troops to stay until the end of time, or just the end of his term? It's been agony, all the wondering.

President Bush's senior advisers on Iraq have recommended he stand by his current war strategy, and he is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year, administration officials told The Associated Press Tuesday.

The recommendations from the military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker come despite independent government findings Tuesday that Baghdad has not met most of the political, military and economic markers set by Congress.

And guess what, military officials aren't buying the GAO report because they don't like what it says the information is, like, so last month.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) said Pentagon officials had told Republican leaders that the GAO had relied on outdated information. Because the agency was told simply to assess whether the benchmarks had been met, the GAO was set up to deliver a negative report, Blunt said. He added that lawmakers were far more interested in the assessment coming next week from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker [...]

The GAO concluded that all forms of violence remain high in Iraq -- causing senior military officials to complain that the report did not consider statistics for August, when, they said, trends in sectarian violence and the performance of the Iraqi security forces improved.

"They use the end of July as the data and evidentiary cutoff and therefore are not taking into account any gains in any of the benchmarks that may have become more clear throughout August," one official said.

Apparently there was just a rush of political and economic and security progress in August, right around the time that 500 Yazidis were killed in a previously stable area of the country, I'd gather.

Did I mention that the military officials gave no facts to support their argument that they're right and the GAO is wrong?

We see exactly what's going on here. The surge was initially defined as to give breathing space for a political reconciliation. That didn't happen, nor did the surge even curb violence, so the Administration is moving the goalposts and declaring that the surge created "bottom-up reconciliation" which is nothing more than militias and former insurgents arming themselves for the civil struggle to come.

The White House insists that Mr. Bush’s fresh embrace of Sunni leaders simply augments his consistent support of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But some of Mr. Bush’s critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted — that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.

“They have come around to the inevitable,” said Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat whose 2006 book, “The End of Iraq,” argued that Mr. Bush was trying to rebuild a nation that never really existed, because Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had never adopted a common Iraqi identity. “He has finally recognized that fact, and is now trying to work with it,” Mr. Galbraith said Tuesday.

I would argue that he's just looking for anything to prolong the war and save face, so he latched on to the Sunni tribes who will still allow themselves to be seen with him. Indeed, he said, when cameras weren't rolling so it's more credible, that his goal is to force the next President to "stay longer" in Iraq. Keith Olbermann lambasted him for this remark, with good reason.

And there it is, sir. We’ve caught you.

Your goal is not to bring some troops home — maybe — if we let you have your way now;

Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal;

You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Be sure to read that whole thing.

So where do we go from here? If the Democrats weren't so consistently weak it would be simple; you shut down funding for this disaster before it's too late. All you have to do is not fund the war, and take the Feingold-Reid option of a date certain after which no money will be spent (it's big news that Kos finally signed on to this, BTW). But whether or not Democrats have the stones to do that is unclear. What's more likely is that something comes out of this...

Rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, are redoubling efforts to find bipartisan cooperation that could pressure the administration to begin bringing troops home. Six House Republicans and five Democrats released a letter yesterday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio), asking them "to put an end to the political in-fighting over the war in Iraq and allow the House to unite behind a bipartisan strategy to stabilize the country and bring our troops home."

Breaking with the GOP leadership, the Republicans -- Michael N. Castle (Del.), Charlie Dent (Pa.), Phil English (Pa.), Scott Garrett (N.J.), Jim Gerlach (Pa.) and Tom Petri (Wis.) -- said they saw no reason to wait for testimony by Petraeus and Crocker.

"While we are hopeful that their report will show progress, we should not wait any longer to come together in support of a responsible post-surge strategy to safely bring our troops home to their families," the letter said.

...closer to the Lamar Alexander/Ken Salazar "Remember the Iraq Study Group" resolution, which is easily circumvented by the White House and makes everybody feel good for about 10 seconds before they realize it's completely toothless.

Very depressing.

Chutzpah

There was no way that Republicans would simply accept their defeat in the 2006 elections and be put out to pasture. We all knew that they were BETTER from the attack dog position that they were ever at governing. They thrive on being the persecuted minority; it's hard-wired into their worldview. And since they hate government, attacking those in power is a natural fit.

Still, I'm not sure any of us expected them to have the chutzpah* - there's really no other word for it - to attack the Democrats for the very sins they displayed throughout 12 years of rule in the Congress. Yet we should have. Because these are some of the most shameless people who've ever walked the Earth, and what's more they saw a winning formula in 2006, and they co-opted it. Plus, they rely on a low-information electorate who won't pay attention to the total hypocrisy coming out of their mouths when they blather and bluster.

This actually started very early in the Congressional session, when the GOP started whining about being locked out of the legislative process and the Rules Committee. But it's really reached a state of perfection in the past couple weeks. Once they saw Democratic weakness on Iraq they struck - and in the most logically challenged ways possible.

First they assailed the Democrats for - get this - earmarks.

Reps. John Boehner (R-OH), Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Jerry Lewis (R-CA) all actively participated in the extraordinarily irresponsible explosion of congressional earmarking that began shortly after the Republicans gained control of the Congress in 1995 and lasted until the voters tossed them out this past November. But according to their political rule book, making a huge mess doesn’t mean you can’t complain about how someone else is cleaning it up.

In an effort to sidestep those political mine fields they have instead decided that voters are dumb enough to forget who gave us “The Bridge to Nowhere,” who increased earmarking in the Labor, Health and Human Service Education bill from zero to more than a billion dollars a year, who tripled the number of earmarks in the defense bill, and who is currently the target of criminal investigations because of allegations that their earmarking practices were not only wasteful but also corrupt. Why, they ask, should anyone doubt their commitment to reform?

So indignant are they at the slow pace in reforming the abusive conduct they developed into an art form that they are now attempting to stop the movement of all appropriation bills and as a result funding for myriad critical federal programs.

And guess what, this actually worked, as the Democrats agreed to allow members to question individual earmarks dropped into bills in conference reports, and allow for what Roy Blunt - Roy frickin' Blunt! - called "the same rules of transparency passed by Republicans last Congress." That's right, Roy Blunt is taking the moral high ground on corruption. This guy.

Rep. Roy Blunt and the man he wants to succeed as House majority leader, Tom DeLay, shared similar connections to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and to corporate lobbyists.

Blunt, R-Mo., wrote at least three letters helpful to Abramoff clients while collecting money from them. He swapped donations between his and DeLay's political groups, ultimately enriching the Missouri political campaign of his son Matt.

And Blunt's wife and another son, Andrew, lobby for many of the same companies that donate to the lawmaker's political efforts.

The President is getting into this act as well, adamantly huffing that he'll contain runaway spending. The guy that's presided over the largest increase in government since LBJ.

President Bush warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his veto power to stop runaway government spending.

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," Bush said in his radio address.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

The measure — one of several annual spending bills that Congress began to consider this week — exceeds Bush's request for the department by $2.1 billion.

Democrats on Friday defended the extra money in the homeland security bill, noting it contains money to hire 3,000 additional border agents, improve explosive detection at airports and provides money to double the amount of cargo screened on passenger aircraft.

Nowhere in the article does it mention the bloated defense budget or the massive increase in spending under Bush and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress. The he said-she said media is just engaging in stenography, and the American people have to figure out on their own how audacious it is for these serial spenders who've been fattening the pockets of contributors for the past 12 years could suddenly be interested in fiscal restraint.

The GOP is even using the phrase do-nothing Congress, when in fact, they've obstructed this Congress from doing the people's business, and they did next to nothing beyond profit taking for the last 12 years.

Republicans also are tweaking Democrats on other fronts, such as stalled efforts to upgrade health care and reduce the cost of college and energy. (which THEY stalled! -ed.)

They are even adopting the same line Democrats once used against them, calling this "a do-nothing Congress."

"If Democrats fail to reverse course, the dynamics in the 2008 elections may shift significantly, allowing Republicans to run as the party of change ... only two years after Democrats successfully campaigned on that same theme," Senate Republican leaders told their ranks in a letter last week.

There's a certain pathology at work here, for Republicans to try and shed everything they've embodied for the past decade and to turn it around on the opposition. But it's devastatingly effective politically.

Just as it was before last year's elections, polls show most Americans believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction.

"The primary reason is war," said James Thurber of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

But there are other reasons. "People have problems in their lives and they don't see the White House or Congress dealing with it," Thurber said.

A Quinnipiac University poll this month found Congress with an approval rating of just 23 percent. "People voted for change. But they don't think they got it," said Peter Brown, an assistant director of the poll.

A Gallup poll last month put Congress's approval rating at 29 percent. The number had fallen to 21 percent last December, just weeks before Republicans yielded control.

We have an instant-grafitication, short-term memorty culture, combined with a very slow ship of state. That means that the calls for change are almost continuous from one election to the next, and either side can simply borrow the other's clothing and use the same messages to their benefit. The Republicans are very, very good at this. We see it in the Iraq debate. The same people that used any scrap of evidence to claim that the surge was working a couple months ago are now saying that the surge hasn't even started yet and we need to give it more time. You simply cannot expect internal logic from these people. They are absolutely shameless, and it helps them immensely in the political arena, where the media has no use for the past either, and sees politics as professional wrestling, where a sense of shame is not a favorable attribute, but a relentless forward-moving attack is.

This is not only worrisome for the next election cycle, but far into the future, as Republicans clearly will keep using these kinds of logical leaps and get away with them, burying the past and attacking with a straight face. Indeed, those honest conservatives breaking with the President ARE setting up the Democrats for the future.

I think that when the "honest conservatives" reject Bush they're just setting up their assault on the Democratic president they expect to see elected next year. Their way of digging themselves out from under the Bush disaster (and obscuring their own massive role in that disaster) will be to swear that "Never again can an American President be allowed that kind of free hand!" This will justify their fighting the new Democratic President tooth and nail for every inch of ground.

For example, Bush's politicization of the career staff in Justice and elsewhere was a very bad thing, no? And certainly this kind of thing has to stop, no? So we will forbid the new Democratic President to interfere with career personnel, with the result that all of the political hacks Bush put in civil service positions will be untouchable. (When that happens, can we expect the media to understand what's going on? No, of course not. Can we expect the Democrats to understand? Not really, but this is one area where I'd trust Rahm Emmanuel. Send a hack to catch a hack.)

Digby expanded on this, and made the absolutely true point that Republicans have no problem co-opting any message and using it to their advantage, whether it's "stolen elections" (through voter fraud) or "culture of corruption" (the current earmark debate) or whatever.

The question is, how do you deal with it, because the Democrats almost invite this attack by going ballistic and trying to explain precisely how Republicans are being hypocritical here.

One way to deal with this infuriating, sophomoric (yet highly effective) political style is to simply ignore them, as we do trolls, who operate on the same principle. Instead of David Obey coming to the floor of the Senate with steam coming out of his ears, explaining that the Democrats are trying to clean up the carnage left behind by 12 years of Republican rule while John Boehner smugly buffs his fingernails and chants "earmarks, earmarks, earmarks" Obey should just refuse to acknowledge Boehner's ridiculous accusations and move forward with his own argument.

It's very unsatisfying, because you want more than anything to scream in frustration that these hypocritical asses have the unmitigated gall to accuse the Dems of exactly what they've been doing for 12 years! But it's what they want and the Dems shouldn't give it to them.

I think mockery is really the best way. The Republicans look ridiculous making these attacks - but only to those who pay enough attention to know the hypocrisy. To the low-information voter, it simply doesn't come across that way. Unless you present it as a given in the context of a joke. People soak in through osmosis what they are expected to know. It's exactly how Republicans operate.

Picture a video of a Republican standing on the House floor. He's going on and on with a long speech about how the Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for selling out to the lingerie industry. The whole time he's wearing a teddy and being outfitted with garters and boustiers and the like. You can see where this is going. It's hard to explain hypocrisy but easy to visualize it, and the public will very easily pick up on the message. Another example was my idea to literally debate a Republican Memory Loss Act calling for federal funding to help Republicans like Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales get their memories back.

In the meantime, it's something that these high-paid consultants might want to consider. When the Republicans are this full of chutzpah, you have to throw a little chutzpah right back at them. And understand that when they are whining, that means you're winning.

* - For the Yiddish-ly challenged, chutzpah simply means audacity, denoting behavior that is so fantastically dastardly that it's almost breathtaking to watch someone do it. It was also a book by Alan Dershoqitz I read back when Dershowitz wasn't calling for torture warrants.