quote:Originally posted by scifibum: They will also attack any other choice Obama makes. If, as some on the right are saying, there's enough revenue to service the debt without raising the debt limit, but overall budget exceeds revenue, and no more borrowing is possible, there will have to be something else that doesn't get funding. And if Obama has any say in that, the GOP will attack him, painting it as one more way that he is pushing his own agenda.
I don't think this is going to work, but I can see how some of the nuts thought it was a perfect trap.
Speaking for myself, I'm nearly at the point where before I'm willing to take any self-named conservative or Republican seriously, or at least regard them politically without contempt, just about anything short of unqualified denunciation of these hostage-taking jackasses is required.
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Did anyone see the protests today? There were some veterans protesting and Sarah Palin came up and started talking, turning it into an anti-Obama rally. Someone yelled out over the crowd "You're an idiot!" and she paused to listen, but then rolled her eyes and kept talking. The whole time she was babbling on, I couldn't help but think, He's right, you know.Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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If you don't have time to watch it, it basically shows one congressman detailing why the government can't just be reopened without the Republican leader's go-ahead, which is only possible due to a recent thing that was passed. I think this is especially interesting because if it just comes down to one man, doesn't that essentially mean we've entered a state of dictatorship, at least to some small degree? I mean, one guy is basically holding the cards and isn't being checked by anyone else.
quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.: Has anyone seen this video yet? It seems to be making its way around the net. What do you guys think of it?
If you don't have time to watch it, it basically shows one congressman detailing why the government can't just be reopened without the Republican leader's go-ahead, which is only possible due to a recent thing that was passed. I think this is especially interesting because if it just comes down to one man, doesn't that essentially mean we've entered a state of dictatorship, at least to some small degree? I mean, one guy is basically holding the cards and isn't being checked by anyone else.
Is this legal?
Yeah we were just talking about this on the last page.
Is it legal? I don't know. On the face of it, sure, it's a procedural rule and the House can make their own rules.
But it sure as hell doesn't sound right.
Why the Dems aren't screaming bloody murder about this is beyond me. If the roles were reversed, you better believe they'd have pictures of Steny Hoyer all over the news with a crown and a "King Hoyer" label.
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It's certainly legal enough in the sense that they got away with it.
We've already watched them engage in unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the senate, fundamentally changing how government works in order to preserve the interests of their party. That they would engage in a similar (if oddly converse) abuse in the house in obvious premeditation of holding the nation and even the world economy hostage to get what they want ... should be unsurprising.
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It's certainly legal enough in the sense that they got away with it.
We've already watched them engage in unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the senate, fundamentally changing how government works in order to preserve the interests of their party. That they would engage in a similar (if oddly converse) abuse in the house in obvious premeditation of holding the nation and even the world economy hostage to get what they want ... should be unsurprising.
"Legal," when you talk about how Congress works with its own rulebook is a bit of a misnomer of a concept. There are no hard and fast rules (rules that Congress can't change itself, effectively making them fluid) on the structure of the congress itself outside of the Constitution, except for a selected set of enumerated powers and limits.
And while the constitution doesn't specifically say that, for example, the procedural rules of the house must not to be altered to not allow the proposition of bills by house members, it may be that there are other sections of the constitution that limit congresses' ability to do so:
From Article 1 Section 8: Enumerated Powers of Congress
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
Now there may be some wiggle room on "necessary and proper." It may be effectively argued that an effective end of parliamentary democracy is NOT necessary and proper. I would lend some weight to that argument.
Then there is the 14th Ammendment
Selected Quotation:
quote: 4. The 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. (...) 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 4 and 5 are at question here. Now, Congress may have enacted a rule which interferes with its own constitutional duty to protect the public interest by the service of debt. Section 5 specifically states that congress SHALL have the power to legislate provisions for this article, and the enumeration of that duty in section 4 indicates that servicing the debt is a duty that congress has. Now, if Congress's internal rules limit legislator's ability to engage in parliamentary democracy, I would say that the constitutionality of that situation is in question.
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When I'm talking about "legal enough," I'm talking about what practically matters in terms of what they will be able to get away with.
If the GOP is hellbent enough to actually do this to pursue their agenda no matter the detriment to the country (and above the protests of people who still presume good faith or some sense of equivalency with american conservatives, they are), and the government is essentially forced to deal with it and can't stop them from deciding that these are the new rules, then it's effectively "legal."
They've decided on what the law actually is for themselves, and — by extension — the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of both their willingness and ability to effectively end the representational democracy idea of Congress.
Thankfully, their ruin is also a self-inflicted one. This is already accelerating the permanent decline I've talked people's ears off about already.
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posted
I'm just ever so slightly concerned that someone in Congress, not naming names, decides he's a king or at least a king maker out of this. Hitler had the Reichstag set on fire to justify its dissolution (among many other steps).
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'm just ever so slightly concerned that someone in Congress, not naming names, decides he's a king or at least a king maker out of this. Hitler had the Reichstag set on fire to justify its dissolution (among many other steps).
Well, Harry Reid is a real asshole but I don't think he has a shot at king, even if that's his aspiration.
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posted
WHOA GODWIN but yeah the current situation has pretty much fast-tracked us to a shitty situation.
1. a really seriously long stretch of years where it's very possible liberals will have no credible challenge to their power or competition that would nominally inspire them to play straight and not become too indolent, and
2. the legacy of a timeframe in which the conservatives brutally and blatantly abused tools of legislature, courts, and districting that 'protected the minority' or 'prevented the minority from being steamrolled with a simple majority' — which could all but totally result in the end of these potential controls on the majority
3. when the power system switches, the democrats could just as easily inherit and twist these abuses to their own ends. If the Democratic Party was gerrymandered in the way conservatives have gerrymandered themselves in today, it would be an indefinitely untouchable majority (like, they would have the house for as far into the future as you can demographically predict, without challenge) and it would inspire the same horrid dysfunction.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'm just ever so slightly concerned that someone in Congress, not naming names, decides he's a king or at least a king maker out of this. Hitler had the Reichstag set on fire to justify its dissolution (among many other steps).
Well, Harry Reid is a real asshole but I don't think he has a shot at king, even if that's his aspiration.
Hehe, well at least for the time being we don't have to spend time treating your opinion as though it's anything but the tiny minority zealot voice-going by multiple polls and all. I know it's got to just majorly chap your ass, how bad your team is looking and how competitively good they're making democrats look, but seriously best just adjust.
Put another way: it ain't Harry Reid who has decided that the a minority segment of the minority party of one house of one branch of a three branch government should shut down the whole show over a law that's been passed by two elections and both houses of Congress and the executive and the Supreme Court.
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posted
Now, all of that said, yeah the Godwin was silly. Godwins aren't even necessary when the people fueling this shutdown attend rallies with people saying Obama needs to 'put down his Koran'.
Funny thing to note: remember how people have been saying for over four years how dangerous it is to allow this lunatic fringe to gain so much power and respect? How when you hear stuff like Qorans your response shouldn't simply be 'each side has their fringes'? Man, well at least it's gratifying to w shown to be so right.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: WHOA GODWIN but yeah the current situation has pretty much fast-tracked us to a shitty situation.
Godwin applies to participants in a discussion and is in reference a fallacy of argument (ad hominem or association fallacy). This is a valid reference to historical events. Put it back in your pants Sam. Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Now, all of that said, yeah the Godwin was silly. Godwins aren't even necessary when the people fueling this shutdown attend rallies with people saying Obama needs to 'put down his Koran'.
And here I didn't even know that Obama was a Korean. Go figure...
quote: Funny thing to note: remember how people have been saying for over four years how dangerous it is to allow this lunatic fringe to gain so much power and respect? How when you hear stuff like Qorans your response shouldn't simply be 'each side has their fringes'? Man, well at least it's gratifying to w shown to be so right.
I can't say I find it that gratifying. The guy you beat has to know you beat him for it to be gratifying. It's the kind of thing winning is all about really: the actual respect of your opponents, in the face of undeniable triumph. There's no respect here. No sense of a game, because there are no rules that they respect- no end to what they'll do.
I don't win if I pull out a gun and shoot the quarterback and run the ball into the endzone. And if I'm the offensive side, I'm not exactly gratified if it turns out those 6 points don't count. My quarterback just got shot.
For me, and man it's hard to say this, politics stopped being fun in the last few years. Because before I always thought everybody was playing the same game: how to win and do it better. Now I see that some people are actually trying to end the game. Like, really just end it. Kick the ball over the fence kind of thing. And so now I look at it all with a lot of dread, and little excitement. What is winning now? Not being cheated? That's not fun- it's not what we should be worrying about.
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But but but, the law had to go to the Supreme Court! That means its unconstitutional. /What a GOP Spokesperson actually said.
Rome is the more congruent example anyways, of grid lock resulting in a dictator.
Comparison is more valid with Hitler when you look at the Nazi Party doing the same tactics the GOP is doing to CAUSE gridlock to get major concessions.
Speaking of, I like the WWI analogy of the GOP being people stuck in the trenches with no way out.
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posted
I've been pretty optimistic that a deal would get done this week and we wouldn't default.
Until today's headline says that the house GOP has their own plan, and it AGAIN tries to mess with Obamacare.
So there goes my hope for avoiding calamity. Goodbye, retirement savings.
Honestly, if we default and the government remains entirely locked down, all sorts of things that seemed unthinkable weeks ago become plausible in my mind. A government that doesn't fulfill its fundamental obligations is a government that gets replaced.
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quote:Lauren Windsor, a reporter for The Young Turks asked Rep. Gohmert if he would support any deal to raise the debt ceiling. He answered, “It just depends on what it is,” he replied. “The word ‘deal’ concerns me… if it’s good for America.” She followed up by asking, “Would you allow us to default on our debt?” Gohmert replied, “No, that would be an impeachable offense by the president.”
ha ha ha ha ha these utter clowns
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posted
Well, to be fair, there are two sides: a side invested in the continued operation of government, and the drooling loonies.
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quote:“We’re not going to be disrespected,” said Congressman Stutzman during an interview with the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
posted
In the senate, I believe there's close door meetings to the effect of the GOP signing the terms of their surrender...
However in the house... It's like the Japanese Imperial Army's hardliners sharpening their katana's.
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posted
Fitch ratings has just stated that our credit rating is now on rating watch negative.
The republicans in the house may just be insane enough to be trying a stall to a last-minute deal to try to say "THIS OR NO DICE" and in so doing try to sell the narrative that it's the democrats who are pushing us over the edge
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On Sunday, a group of conservative radicals held a protest in Washington. Eventually they walked to the White House. One of these radicals felt it was a good idea to wave the flag of slavery, treason, and terrorism in front of the home of America's first black president. Lone idiots are often drawn to protest action. The behavior of such idiots, while alarming, should not necessarily be taken as an indicator of the aims and thrust of the protest. On the contrary, it is not so much the behavior of the lone idiot that matters—but the tenor of the crowd around him.
If, for instance, you witness a march against military action in Syria and see a Nazi flag among the protestors this should disturb you. But you would be heartened to see the protesters snatch the lone idiot in their midst, eject him from their party with great vigor, and give him some blows for good measure. The flag would still disturb you, but perhaps you might be able to see it as a fringe action, and not the heart of the protest itself.
It is the wisdom of the crowd that matters. The wisdom that marked Sunday's crowd was the idea that the president "bows down to Allah" and needs to "put the Qu'ran down." The wisdom that marked Sunday's crowd was the notion that Obama was not the president of "the people" but the president of "his people." The wisdom of Sunday's crowd held that the police, doing their job, looked "like something out of Kenya." It's not so much that a man would fly a Confederate flag, as Jeff Goldberg notes, in front of the home of a black family. It's that a crowd would allow him the comfort of doing it.
I was in a crowd once. It's been almost 20 years. But I remember most is how emphatically we were drilled, that day, on the politics of respectability. Our wisdom was conservative—too conservative for my tastes, frankly. But I obeyed the edict of the day which held that had any black man who came to the Million Man March and so much as stole candy bar would doom us all. That was our wisdom. It's a good memory. But I fear that it is no match for the wisdom of Sunday's crowd. The blue period is upon us.
MORE: I don't know if I am effectively communicating what is wrong with that picture and why it is deeply infuriating. If a patriot can stand in front of the White House brandishing the Confederate flag, then the word "patriot" has no meaning. The Nazi flag is offensive because it is a marker of centuries of bigotry elevated to industrialized murder.
But the Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible.
posted
just sharing this, bros and girls, in case anyone tries to pull selling this crap here
quote:From reading the Atlantic blog, they are apparently trying to run out the clock so that they can quickly pass a bill, send it to the Senate, and then adjourn so the Senate has to choose between either accepting the bill as written, or forcing a default.
It's "A-ha, its yours, no takebacks!" politicking.
posted
I knew someone once who I played D&D with for a bit who swore up and down the confederate flag was a symbol of states rights and not racism whatsoever oh no.
Though he was quite racist in every other way...
quote: The House proposal also would forbid the Treasury from taking what it calls extraordinary measures to prevent the government from defaulting as cash runs low, in effect requiring hard deadlines to extend the federal debt ceiling.
How can anyone possibly claim that this is "Both sides at fault" when its clear that this is the GOP forcing a default now.
Not to relevant to the thread but holy cow.
quote: Scalia, J., at pg. 41 posted: JUSTICE SCALIA: My goodness, I thought we've -- we've held that the 14th Amendment protects all races. I mean, that was the argument in the early years, that it protected only -- only the blacks. But I thought we rejected that. You -- you say now that we have to proceed as though its purpose is not to protect whites, only to protect minorities?
Can't make this up.
[ October 15, 2013, 08:35 PM: Message edited by: Elison R. Salazar ]
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Hehe, well at least for the time being we don't have to spend time treating your opinion as though it's anything but the tiny minority zealot voice-going by multiple polls and all. I know it's got to just majorly chap your ass, how bad your team is looking and how competitively good they're making democrats look, but seriously best just adjust.
A) You're taking my comment much too seriously. I knew he wasn't referring to Harry Reid. Calm down.
B) No amount of reasonable and honest discussion will stop you from whinging about how I represent some "tiny minority zealot-voice" and yet the more you insist upon that point the more insular your position is revealed to be. You need to reassess the current political spectrum in America.
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posted
The latest Play by Play seems to be that the House can't put something together for the same reason they haven't been able to for weeks. The Republicans are fighting each other, and Democrats will not negotiate over the debt limit, they've learned how much that doesn't work.
So my predictions.
The Senate is probably going to punt us down to January or so, in exchange for a concession on the new tax on medical devices being pushed back a year. But Obamacare being funded. They will send that to the House, Boehner will be embarrassed that the House didn't originate the legislation, and even more when huge numbers of the normally unified GOP vote no. But default will be averted.
But remember only Boehner can initiate a vote on this Senate plan, per their weasel rule change, so he is going to have to go against the Tea Party clique in his party and bring the motion to floor, there may be serious backlash to it. Sure would have been nice to let a Democrat bring it to a vote.
posted
The senate plan based on those dates is a complete defeat for the GOP, quoting from a different forum: " they want the CR to expire before sequester hits so the budget baseline is slightly better for them, and they want both the debt ceiling and the CR to be after Jan 1st so that Republicans can't hold them hostage over Obamacare implementation.
By contrast, Republicans want a longer CR (so that any budget fight is based off of sequester budget cap numbers instead of the current numbers) and a shorter Debt Ceiling (so that they can repeat this trick again before Obamacare Exchange plans take effect on Jan. 1st)."
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The Senate is probably going to punt us down to January or so, in exchange for a concession on the new tax on medical devices being pushed back a year.
The ACA is toast without that tax. It's a major funding source. I don't believe postponing it will be in any proposal that passes the senate.
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posted
Are any of you out of a job right because of this? I know several people who are and I recently learned that, being in the military, I can't receive my education benefits until the senate figures all this out.
On a side note, only about 26 hours left on CNN's countdown clock....tick tick tock...
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The Senate plan wasn't a repeal, it was a one or two year push back. And the ACA isn't toast, it's an automatic spending program. If Congress nixes the Medical Device Tax, the money for the ACA still gets spent, it just has to come from somewhere else or needs to be borrowed. It's not a dedicated tax or a sole source of revenue.
I was given to understand that the tax is largely unpopular in Washington and is in trouble regardless of how this goes down. Many Dems want to kill it and replace it with something else.
But given how much Obamacare actually costs, while still a lot of money, it doesn't seem like a killer amount.
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quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.: Are any of you out of a job right because of this? I know several people who are and I recently learned that, being in the military, I can't receive my education benefits until the senate figures all this out.
On a side note, only about 26 hours left on CNN's countdown clock....tick tick tock...
I don't know anyone out of work because of the shutdown, but I know several people who have been warned they may be fired if we breach the debt ceiling.
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posted
Lyrhawn, by "toast" I mean set up to fail. Yes, it would still happen, but it would be operating at a huge deficit, which it's critics would then point to to say "see, it's not sustainable."
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The Senate is probably going to punt us down to January or so, in exchange for a concession on the new tax on medical devices being pushed back a year.
The ACA is toast without that tax. It's a major funding source. I don't believe postponing it will be in any proposal that passes the senate.
I was not aware of that connection. You may be right, though the tax as Lyrhawn said is pretty unpopular among both parties.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: Lyrhawn, by "toast" I mean set up to fail. Yes, it would still happen, but it would be operating at a huge deficit, which it's critics would then point to to say "see, it's not sustainable."
Eh, I'm not convinced of that. Democrats want to axe it, by and large, just as much as Republicans, but they'd never agree to a full on repeal without replacing the revenue.
And even if they did, $20 billion is a rounding error in the budget. Since it's not a dedicated tax, funding for the ACA via the medical device tax is irrelevant. They were packaged together originally to sell it as effectively a neutral cost that wouldn't raise the deficit, but no one would look at the ACA and say it's running a $20 billion deficit because the excise tax was repealed, it's not like Social Security or Medicare where a dedicated tax supports a finite budget. As an entitlement, the ACA simply costs whatever it costs, and that money comes out of the General Fund.
Now, I think that ACA's detractors will have plenty of firepower when it comes to calling it a failure. As it stands, it might bend the cost curve of long term growth in insurance premiums downward, but it does absolutely nothing to address the underlying drivers of health care costs. It's designed to become unsustainably overpriced in time.
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quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.: Are any of you out of a job right because of this? I know several people who are and I recently learned that, being in the military, I can't receive my education benefits until the senate figures all this out.
On a side note, only about 26 hours left on CNN's countdown clock....tick tick tock...
I can't get my new dream job until it ends. Waiting on the coast guard to get back to work so I can get my license.
A friend works for the Defense Department. His division runs out of money Thursday night so if it's not over by then, he will be staying home.
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posted
Note, pushing ACA back one year to get the ceiling raised sets up a continuing pattern--Time to raise the Ceiling? Time to push back ACA. The only way it will be safe from a Republican deconstruction of it, is for people to use it and discover its benefits. If its never used, benefits will never be discovered, so eventually a Republican party can tear it down.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: Nope. It's looking (cross fingers) like the Republicans completely lost this one.
I'm just annoyed that the can has only been kicked a few months down the road. I'm not sure that there's any intention to avoid another round of brinksmanship.
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quote: Right now, with the shutdown, we’ve already reached the point at which the government is breaking very important promises indeed: we promised to pay hundreds of thousands of government employees a certain amount on certain dates, in return for their honest work. We have broken that promise. Indeed, by Treasury’s own definition, it’s reasonable to say that we have already defaulted: surely, by any sensible conception, the salaries of government employees constitute “legal obligations of the US“.
...
And here’s the problem: we’re already well past the point at which that certainty has been called into question. Fidelity, for instance, has no US debt coming due in October or early November, and neither does Reich & Tang:
While he doesn’t believe the U.S. will default, Tom Nelson, chief investment officer at Reich & Tang, which oversees $35 billion including $17 billion in money-market funds, said that the firm isn’t holding any U.S. securities that pay interest at the end of October through mid-November because if a default does take place, “we’d be criticized for stepping in front of that train.”
The vaseline, in other words, already has sand in it. The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. The mechanism by which catastrophe would arise has already been set into motion. And as a result, economic growth in both the US and the rest of the world will be lower than it should be. Unemployment will be higher. Social unrest will be more destructive. These things aren’t as bad now as they would be if we actually got to a point of payment default. But even a payment default wouldn’t cause mass overnight failures: the catastrophe would be slower and nastier than that, less visible, less spectacular. We’re not talking the final scene of Fight Club, we’re talking more about another global credit crisis — where “credit” means “trust”, and “trust” means “trust in the US government as the one institution which cannot fail”.
quote:Originally posted by MattP: Nope. It's looking (cross fingers) like the Republicans completely lost this one.
I'm just annoyed that the can has only been kicked a few months down the road. I'm not sure that there's any intention to avoid another round of brinksmanship.
I openly and sincerely WELCOME the opportunity for the conservatives to crowbar themselves in the head by trying this stunt again.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: Nope. It's looking (cross fingers) like the Republicans completely lost this one.
I'm just annoyed that the can has only been kicked a few months down the road. I'm not sure that there's any intention to avoid another round of brinksmanship.
I openly and sincerely WELCOME the opportunity for the conservatives to crowbar themselves in the head by trying this stunt again.
I honestly doubt it. The real victory here for Democrats wasn't not giving up concessions in this particular instance, it was in discrediting the entire fiasco as a successful strategy. The Republicans didn't just take a political hit, they took a political hit for zero gain. Why would they repeat the strategy again in 3 months when they know exactly what will happen at the end of it? Dems will stay rocksteady and it'll come down to the wire, markets will get spooked, billions of dollars will be wasted, and they'll get the same result.
There will still be a ton of hemming and hawing, and it might come down to the wire, and it might even mean a one year CR instead of a real new budget, but it'll get done. Boehner finally broke the Hastert Rule on a crucial vote. Does that mean he will continue to do so all the time? No, but I think the lesson a lot of people learned from this is that the Tea Party is a mess.
A couple months ago it looked like hitching the GOP cart to the Tea Party horse was a vehicle to victory, but then Ted Cruz grabbed the reins and led them into a ditch (though he managed to hop off before it hit the ground). Too many moderates were burned by this to let it happen again, especially seeing as how they didn't even get anything out of it. I think the divisions within the GOP will only widen, but I also think moderates will actually be more pressed to compromise on THEIR terms, because the Tea Party is just too extreme for them.
And for that matter, arias will be written and sung about Democratic unity in all this. No one on the right expected the Dems to behave the way they did. And a lot of them complained in the news, without irony, that they couldn't believe the Democrats were being so unreasonable by refusing to compromise. You have to love that. They've convinced themselves that the status quo means Dems giving up and them winning.
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Ted Cruz honestly is an afterthought regarding why the conservatives (and the tea party especially) are completely ignorant and off the rails. It's no one individual. It's the culture of a political party that is straightforwardly deluded. Remember how Romney & Co went into election night expecting victory? The same bubble of misinformation continues unabated.
The Tea Party threw conservatives down this path because they believe what they want to believe and they are part of a cult and a system that actively feeds them nonsense and misinformation — which becomes the basis upon which they make "informed" decisions regarding policy and political strategy.
It allows them to simultaneously have greater control over narratives while simultaneously making their proposals, actions, and ideology more deluded and dangerous. SEE: The Wonk GapPosts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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