That’s what you get from “a rough framework for a deal, but it was all part of a fluid negotiation”? You really consider the “rough framework” inside a “fluid negotiation” to be “a deal”?
I mean no pressure, the only thing riding on your answer is whether I take you seriously.
If this is indeed their goal, is there anything, legally, anyone could possibly do? I’m wondering this as a practical, factual matter: is there a loophole being exploited here, or is this the way the system actually functions and no one’s tried this yet, or…?
It is weak, but what else can a conservative say? No person with reason can rationalize what the Republicans are doing, which is why most of our conservative voices on the SDMB have gone silent on this issue. I suspect they are taking a moment of silence.
The voters can have recall elections in their states and throw the rascals out, but that is a slow, cumbersome process. I do think this is a loophole. The Founders lived in a world where news travelled slowly and and good travelled even more slowly, they had no inkling of the speed of light communications network and economies that turn on a dime that we have now. A government shutdown could go on for months in their time without much affecting the people. Not so nowadays.
Once the facts were established, I don’t need to read spin from the New York Times.
Whether or not Boehner’s reason for not accepting more revenue is because he’s a “weak Speaker” or not are irrelevant. The fact is they had one set of numbers that both agreed on, then Obama asked for more.
Keep arguing from ignorance. It’s very persuasive.
It did actually, then he triumphantly marched from the White House to the U.S. Capitol in his MS riddled body, stopping to talk with tourists on the way. When he arrived the Senate Minority Leader (a Republican) and the Speaker (a Republican) were in a meeting. The Speaker was so shocked that a sitting President had come down to the Capitol in person he frantically tried to strategize how to deal with the President while he was left waiting on a bench outside. They were so indecisive the President eventually just stood up and left.
When the press got wind of it, it was portrayed as the President taking the unprecedented step of coming to the Capitol directly to negotiate with Congress, and the Republicans leaving the POTUS sitting on a bench like an insurance salesman. Public opinion rolled massively in favor of our heroes, and the GOP caved completely, giving Bartlett more spending (initially they wanted to reduce spending by 2%.)
The Republican House isn’t asking for the ACA to be defunded at this point.
At the end of the day power of the purse lies with the legislature which is divided into two chambers. The entire reason this was done is because our Founders knew about the history of the relationship between Parliament and the King. Kings were eventually brought to heel precisely because Parliament had the power of the purse. The monarch had vast legal powers, but without revenue could do very little. So the Parliament could limit and control the monarch’s actions with the power of the purse.
The Founders gave Congress the power of the purse as a limit on the Presidency. It’s funny constitutional scholar Obama seems to posit that it’s Congress’s job to give him funding simply because he demands it. When it is quite obvious they have power of the purse specifically so they can use it as a tool to make recalcitrant Presidents do what they want.
We have a set of checks and balances, but by far the strongest branch on paper is the legislature–by design. It makes sense as it contains the truest body of democracy in Federal politics (the House) and another body that represents all fifty of the States (and in modern times their people at large.) The President is crying because he’s a firm believer in the imperial Presidency, a dangerous concept for all Americans.
This forum is no more about persuasion than listening to MSNBC or NPR radio is about persuasion, this forum is an echo chamber as are 99% of all such internet bodies.
That being said, we can either continue to disagree and I can continue to not find the New York Times article you obviously found oh-so-interesting to be persuasive, or you can address the fact that in this current situation the President is the one who is pretending that as President he is entitled to appropriations and budgets and that Congress should have to give it to him without getting any of their own desires answered. We control half the legislature, you and the President need to recognize that.
You seem to have missed that little point that Congress does not equal the House of Representatives.
I wonder what I meant in post #89 when I said, “we control half the legislature”?
Would you care to address the point that you apparently think the House is continuing to pass resolutions that fund Obamacare, they dropped that tactic on like Sunday.
The President isn’t giving in because he believes divided government should actually function. If he gives in, this is the end of divided government- it just won’t function ever again unless one party controls both houses plus the White House. If one half of Congress can get their way just by threatening shutdown or default, then that’s the end of functioning divided government.
The Democrats DID negotiate in good faith, the current budget is LOWER than the one proposed by Paul Ryan in 2011. They just aren’t willing to let the House Republicans unilaterally repeal the ACA using what amounts to BLACKMAIL. Fuck those Republican blackmailers.
The alternative seems to be the theory underlying these arguments. Where we view the (political) government to basically have three parts: the White House, the Senate, and the House. This theory then goes on if your party controls 2/3, you should always get everything you want, and the 1/3rd should not have any power.
That isn’t the way our government was designed. The President is the executive, he’s supposed to be the chief civil servant, there only to execute the will of the legislature and to run the military and foreign affairs. Instead he believes, and most modern Presidents have believed, it is their job to dictate to the legislature. It is their job to set all of our national priorities and to basically function as elected monarchs. I find it unfortunate our country has gone in that direction, but mostly as a philosophical argument, I recognize the reality and why it happened the way it did.
That being said, despite how our government has evolved we still have a Constitution that requires the President to actually need legislation passed from the legislature before he can just do whatever he wants. We still have a Constitution that requires both Houses of the Congress to agree before it goes to the President.
We can either presume that the government should work by the “2/3rds majority” rule, that you guys espouse (and which is unsupported by the Constitution) or we can presume that since consent of all three (or a strong majority of the House and Senate) is required that even when you only control one of those three parts of the political parts of the Federal government that even controlling just one House of Congress means you get something. It isn’t reasonable to expect to get everything, but also isn’t reasonable to expect that just because we do not control the White House or the Senate it is our responsibility to rubber stamp every budget.
It isn’t, our job is to give consent to a budget we’re comfortable with, and if you are unwilling to negotiate with us to arrive on a budget we’re both comfortable with the fault is entirely on the side that is unwilling to negotiate.
I agreed with the President’s stance that he would not defund or repeal Obamacare just to get a budget. I think that was an overreach, and I think it was a stupid thing for the House to focus on. Boehner and other Republicans wanted a debate over the budget as part of the debt ceiling fight–a tactic I also disagreed with. What I wanted from day one was a debate over the budget as part of the CR, because I think the debt ceiling is too dangerous to fight over and the CR is a more appropriate forum for budget fights.
I won’t pretend the party is doing what I wanted because they’re smart. Instead they let the Tea Party wing lead by Ted Cruz run us off the rails in a stupid attempt to repeal Obamacare. Once they recognized that was an abject failure, they shifted to an attempt at a budget debate, they arrived where I wanted them to ineptly and not out of any greater intelligent or strategy. However, now that we are there, now they need to hold firm and demand budget concessions. Budget concessions are a reasonable negotiating position for the party that controls 1/3rd of the political pillars of government, and if the party that controls the other 2/3rds is wholly unwilling to make any concessions I say bring the house down. Better to burn it down to the ground and lay waste to the Federal credit ratings, wreck the global economy and etc than to abandon the principles laid out over 200 years ago. Principles designed precisely for this purpose–to prevent one faction that controls part of government to unilaterally impose their will.
What’s unfortunate about letting Ted Cruz set the agenda is that once it was easily and predictably defeated it’s left the Democrats feeling they hold all the cards. The President believes he has no reason to negotiate. But he does, as the President he has a strong incentive to negotiate because the House can no more agree to rubber stamp his budgets than he can agree to let them force repeals of key legislation. The President has confused the fact that he clearly won round one and was going to win the battle of public opinion regardless (as any liberal does with a compliant press corps) with actually getting the CR passed or the debt ceiling raised.
The Democrats and the President were going to win the perception battle from day one, that was unavoidable. Yet the Republicans went down this path anyway, the President should question why they did that. While Boehner didn’t really want to fight over Obamacare, there is a reason he allowed the fight to happen. That is because he, and by extension the Republicans in the House, fear “not doing something” more than they fear any danger of a public opinion backlash. By and large this is probably because most of them realize they are in safe districts, that whatever the backlash, 2014 the House remains ours. But they as individuals might lose their seats to a challenge from the right in the primary.
So the House GOP actually doesn’t fear broad public backlash, because in their individual districts they are safe. What they feared initially was a far right primary challenger. That means they actually don’t have the need or even the incentive to “leave the field” now that the battle of public opinion is lost, Obama has confused the battle for public opinion with the battle itself and that could lead to a grave outcome.
I’m certainly on the other side of the aisle as you but I see the logic exactly the same way. This is why we won’t see Republicans signing any discharge petition against their Speaker. They may know that they will lose this fight collectively but none want to lose it individually. So paradoxically they get to dig in deeper even though they know they will lose.
I think it is too soon to tell whether Obama has gotten anything confused. We don’t know when the Republicans will be out of blood. They are definitely still bleeding, so he does not have to be in a hurry to negotiate. Boehner was absolutely right that the fight should have been over the debt ceiling and it should have been to consolidate the massive Republican budgetary victories. Your side is winning on that, but there is definitely still more room for the left to give. But some of that advantage is surely blown. Even if they end up with incremental wins, they will have to go back to their constituents and say that they shut down the government and held up the debt ceiling to roll back the size of government by, I dunno, $50 per American per year. How is this going to play to the folks back home? I live in a left wing district, so I really don’t know.
Negotiation is fine. Negotiation with the threat of default or endless shutdown? Unacceptable. Literally- it can’t be accepted. Those threats must not be bargaining chips. The Republicans have gotten much and would get much by negotiating without these threats- there’s been lots of spending cuts, deficit reduction, etc. But holding a gun to the American economy and expecting to get something? The Democrats have no choice but to say no. It’s not even a hard choice- the Democrats giving in anything to these tactics (perhaps short of some meaningless face-saving measure) means a party that controls one house can stop literally anything by threatening shutdown.
It’s the tactic, not the goal. This tactic is illegitimate, and the continuing functioning of a government that is divided will end if this tactic is seen as legitimate.
Oh. I had thought you were here to persuade or be persuaded. I was wrong. Carry on with whatever else it is you’re doing then.
The Republicans were getting lots of concessions before these threats- this was very far from government by fiat. The President has not gotten more than a moderate portion of what he wants since 2010.
But by using this tactic of threats of shutdown and default, the Republicans are threatening all of this (clunky as it has been) government functioning. If these threats are seen as legitimate and effective, then they will be used again- and either party in Congress can put a halt, not just to legislation, but to everything, including the US paying our bills on things already spent. So the Democrats and the President have no choice. The Republicans lose nothing but looking bad- they will continue to have the House and the power to legislate, and will continue to extract concessions through normal negotiations without these threats. But they painted themselves into this corner. And only one person, Boehner, can actually get us out of it- because there’s only one bill (a clean CR) that will get majority support in the House and Senate plus Obama’s signature. Boehner should bring that bill to the floor.
Not quite getting this.
The budget, such as it is, is to you what the President wants and is not what the Executive Branch (and the American people) are entitled to? And if a President wants to get a budget then he had better be willing to give to the majority of the majority that controls half the legislature (a minority of Congress overall) on other items they want (that they have not already been able to win on by other means)? Congress is, to your understanding, not under any obligation to present a budget to the Executive Branch and any portion of Congress that has the ability to do so should hold it hostage until they get enough of what they want? That is how you believe things work and would be the model to follow in the future?
Seriously I am just trying to understand what it is you are saying you believe.