It’s the standard play from a position of weakness. The strong one, a new President, bends over backwards to be accommodating. And no matter what he does, you say he’s not listening, that you’re not being heard.
It’s too early for this, and the House Republicans need to understand that. Don’t alienate a good faith partner, and don’t dash a good thing.
Boehner says that Democrats are pushing their stimulus package through too fast, with insufficient bipartisan dialogue. It’s a ludicrous claim on its face—not that the Legislature is moving too fast (it is), but rather that the deliberation has been insufficiently bipartisan. Boehner’s been omnipresent, even before Obama was sworn in.
Here’s his argument: We see no evidence that a massive 350 billion dollar influx of cash into the financial system will work. After all, the last massive stimulus they ran through the Congress didn’t seem to do much. They gave it to banks; banks didn’t give it to the people. Bank of America apparently just used it as a promissory note to give Christmas bonuses early. So words of Republican caution and mistrust are well-intentioned and deserved. But what would count as evidence that such a stimulus will work? We are all in uncharted territory, doing what most capitalists apparently have been doing of late: taking enormous risks with enormous sums of money.
What Boehner needs to tell the President, with a modicum of respect the man has earned, is why his Party’s manta-like commitment to tax cuts will work any better. Boehner says that he sees no evidence Obama’s stimulus will really create jobs, whereas his tax cuts will. The burden of proof is on House Republicans, after nearly 30 years of this nonsense policy of cutting taxes and blowing deficits, those tax cuts ever stimulate an a economy, especially in these uncharted fiscal waters.
Boehner Redidivus
It was not merely imprudent when the Democratic leadership in Congress decided to weigh in against the seating of now-Senator Burris from Illinois. It looked like the worst kind of syrupy moralizing, the kind of moralizing that actually sees its way clear to ignore the rule of law. It was embarrassing and even shocking when President-elect Obama briefly entered the fray. It was ironically his great good fortune to have this story buried under the weight of so much more economic bad news.
There is a cautionary tale here for House Republicans: pick your battles wisely. The imprudence (and even impudence) of their current posture was made abundantly clear once again in Senator John Boehner’s (R-OH) interview on “Meet the Press” this Sunday morning. By all accounts, they were warned by the new President in a behind-closed doors meeting on Friday. They were warned that it would be unwise to turn this debate about the stimulus package into a political football—not just because it is politically irresponsible, but because they will lose.
This made it all the more surprising to hear Boehner frame this battle in such patently partisan terms. He continues to insist that this is a classic case of the traditional ideological disagreement between the two parties, and in so saying, he refuses to admit, or else refuses to see, that we are in an unprecedented situation. You know the drill: Republicans are for tax cuts; Democrats are for big government spending. It’s a silly argument on its face; the stimulus package, however conceived, is the biggest government spending program we’ve ever seen or are likely to see in our lifetimes. It is as big a government spending program as the wars, and all three constitute the chief legacy of the latest Republican presidency. So it’s a silly argument on its face, and it is also a particularly ill-conceived fight to pick.
Boehner does not help his case with reckless and simplistic one-liners. Republican tax cuts, he insists, are the way “to keep your money in your own pocket.” Surely the Senator jests. The government takes your money, always. That’s what withholding taxes are all about. The only question is how much it gives you back after April 15th (assuming you are not audited), and after having taken an interest-free loan from you ‘til then. So right away, his alleged concern that Democratic ideas won’t get money out fast enough, but Republican tax cuts will, is simply false. Increases or extensions in unemployment benefits, food stamps and the like, are the most immediate remedy of all. Unlike tax cuts, they don’t need to wait until April 15th or later. Some state and federal public works projects really do seem to be “shovel ready.” And yet there are many others that seem to be at least a year away from feasibility. If they would lose the one-liners and the partisan blinders, then the House Republicans are in a unique position to sharpen and improve the current proposals. I wish them well and I wish they would; we the people need their prudent and reasoned best judgments, precisely because we are in uncharted territory.
(Uncharted how? Tom Friedman offers an interesting suggestion in today’s New York Times. We are witnessing four unique and unprecedented conditions: 1) the unprecedented scale of the collapse; 2) the unprecedented complexity of the investment schemes that are failing now; 3) the unprecedented globalization linking all economies; and 4) the fact that it all started in the US, rather than in Asia or South America. This is all new, and terrifying.)
Boehner was pushed on some of his rhetoric, pressed to see just how partisan he is prepared to be in public. The answer is, Not very. He immediately backed down and admitted that the nation has a terrible crisis at hand, and that it is not about Democratic or Republican solutions, so long as they are real solutions. And we all, Democrat and Republican alike, need this president to succeed.
But that was the one on a predictable litany of differences between Democrats and Republicans—on the economy, on security, on the wars. It culminated in the most remarkable in his scattered garble of one-liners: given the uncertainty of what to do with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, perhaps we should put them on Alcatraz. “But that’s a federal park now,” he was reminded. “But it’s secure,” he replied.
Has it really come to this? Should retrofitting Alcatraz be a part of the new stimulus package?
The Republican leadership needs to take a deep breath and make a very serious decision. This President is extending his hand in a genuinely bipartisan way. It is an invitation to serious dialogue, responsible deliberation, and a new spirit of bipartisan cordiality. But this president does not suffer fools. Pick the wrong battle, or fight stupidly, or fight unfairly, and this hand will not remain extended to you. Perhaps the Senator from Ohio should listen to his own financially battered constituency, before he presumes to know what they think about the stimulus proposals and ideological commitments currently under review.
