Quick thoughts before the bill hits the tape

The Senate iteration of the AHCA is due out in about 40 minutes. A couple of quick thoughts, brought into focus by David Anderson's "how to read the bill" cheat sheet:

1) Back-loaded per capita caps imposed on Medicaid can theoretically be repealed before they kick in. But if the bill's massive tax cuts are not similarly back-loaded (to improve the CBO score), new tax increases would have to be passed in concert with repeal.

2. The more Republicans fiddle around with and publicly fight over individual market subsidies and rules, the easier they'll likely find it to pass the massive cuts to Medicaid that are the bill's core feature.

3.I can't shake the feeling that McConnell has some trick up his sleeve to make the CBO score a positive shock that helps sweep the moderates into the yes column. A "positive shock" might be a forecast of,, say, a reduction of a mere 8 million in the number of people with insurance by 2026, which Republicans can explain away as a result of personal choices (no mandate coercion) or CBO error.

4. What could that shock be? A cap on the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance? Hard to believe. A little coup within CBO? Don't know how that work. Something else? Nothing?

So much for idle speculation....

Master saboteurs

You've got to hand it to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans generally: Basically every aspect of their strategy and execution since Obama was first elected has been effective. Poison public perception of effective legislation like the stimulus and the ACA? Check.  Block all constructive legislation since winning the House, and blame Obama for inaction?  Check. Inhibit economic growth with savage austerity during a demand slump?  Check. Outmaneuver the president on budget issues by proving willing, or seeming willing, to shut down the government, default on the national debt, and pull the trigger on spending cuts beyond what anyone would have dreamed a few years ago? Check.  Depopulate the executive branch by slow-walking all appointments (until the filibuster rule change this year)? Check. Disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic voters with voter suppression measures? Check. Flood the airwaves with dark money supplied by their corporate and ideological masters? Check.

It's all worked. Some say the victories are Pyrrhic and will be short-lived. But if they can keep Obama's approval numbers in the low 40s or worse, and keep economic growth at a steady sputter, they may win control of the only branch and level of government they don't dominate.

Attention, Mitch McConnell: More than half of Kentucky is a high-risk pool

As highlighted in my previous post, in the recent NYT/Kaiser poll of attitudes toward the ACA in four red states, an astounding 57-60% of respondents reported that someone in their household has a pre-existing condition. In Kentucky, the number was 60%.

That fact throws into stark relief Mitch McConnell's response when asked what he would do for terminally ill Kentuckians who would lose their new insurance if the ACA is repealed, as he has demanded it must be:

There are a lot of people like that, of course, who are losing what they had before, who were insured through the high-risk pool, who are losing what they had before.The way that should’ve been handled was state-based high-risk pools. Not at the federal level. Because for every one of those, you’ve got somebody who was insured and through a state-based high-risk pool, who lost their situation because they were wiped out Dec. 31 of 2013. So I’m worried about those people.

As the Louisville Eccentric Observer, an alt-weekly, points out*, the state's high risk pool covered fewer than 4,000 people in 2013 --  less than one hundredth of the 413,000 who obtained insurance this year via Kynect, the state's  ACA exchange. Ah, Mitch might respond, but not all of those 400,000 would need a high-risk pool. True -- just most of them (or else would pay through the nose for private insurance).

The Obamaquester according to Harry

Harry Reid's view of the sequester -- and how we got saddled with it -- has been seeping into the national political narrative in recent weeks. Notwithstanding his alleged renewed bonds and recent successful teamwork with Obama, his view is not a pretty picture for the president.

In Twitter exchanges with Greg Sargent and others -- I think Jonathan Bernstein and Brian Beutler -- I have sought a convincing account and analysis and possibly justification of the Obama administration's thinking at the fiscal cliff -- why Biden, with Obama's backing, cut in on Reid's negotiations with McConnell and settled for half a revenue loaf and only a short-term sequester postponement. I haven't found one. And today's somewhat triumphal narrative by Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of the Democrats' short-term shutdown victory -- a purported tale of renewed harmony and mutual trust -- also provides the opposite of what I've sought: Reid's indictment of Obama's fiscal cliff conduct.

 He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.

What McConnell could cook up with Reid

Well, the rumors are flying thick and fast this Sunday, and this post probably won't be worth the pixels it's printed on. But based on Mitch McConnell's past dealmaking history, his acknowledged relative lack of leverage this time, and the drop-dead taboos against raising spending levels or taxes that a primary challenge imposes on him, I can't resist a bit of speculation as to what he may be cooking up with Reid (Dick Durbin called the talks between them a "breakthrough" today, though Reid himself has sounded far less sanguine).

Recall that the Budget Control Act negotiated by McConnell in the last days of July 2011 created a mechanism whereby the executive branch could raise the debt ceiling and Congress could register a vote of disapproval -- or override the hike with a two-thirds majority in both houses. That deal was end-stopped by the amount required to raise the debt ceiling high enough to get past the 2012 election; it ran out in March of this year.

Recall too that progressive éminence grise Norm Ornstein has floated an acceptable exception to the Dems' current no-concessions-for-debt-limit-hike stance: trade a single concession to end debt ceiling terrorism forever:

Since you're here, read this

I don't usually post excerpts without comment, but...I feel like Jon Favreau has told basically the whole story of U.S. politics of the last five years with his piece, The GOP is Terrified Obamacare Could be a Success. It lays bare the bad faith, the all-in commitment to misinformation, the callousness and cruelty of today's GOP.  It makes my heart sing, so I'm going to carry my bucket of water to the ocean of Favreau's readership and say: read it:

But here’s my question: if Republicans are so confident Obamacare will end badly, why not just shut up about it? It’s not like they have the votes to repeal the law—a math problem they still haven’t solved after 37 different tries. Their appeal to the Supreme Court ended in defeat at the hands of a conservative chief justice. And now the bulk of the plan will begin to take effect in just a few months.

At this point, why not sit back and wait for this crazy experiment to self-destruct? Why not let President Obama and the Democrats reckon with the millions of angry Americans who will undoubtedly hate their new insurance or their new insurance protections?

Because Republicans are terrified that Obamacare could actually work.

Did the two-year budget war just end with a GOP victory?

[Update 2]: I usually try to avoid the blog-first-ask-questions-later temptation but may have succumbed to it in this case. Important qualification of news on which this post is based from Brian Beutler. The question is whether Obama has announced intention to sign a continuing resolution by March 27 that funds the government through Sept. 30 at levels incorporating the sequestration:

7:01 AM - Mar 2, 2013

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1 it's hard to write about this. My understanding is that he will not sign CR that makes the sequester caps the new top line...

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1however he will sign one that preserves the existing top line, even if sequestration makes him cut beneath it.

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1 Technical but important difference.

xpostfactoid ‏@xpostfactoid1 @brianbeutler yes indeed! Can there really be a "here's the budget but you have to cut below it" provision?

@brianbeutler @xpostfactoid1 that's what we have today under sequestration. The new CR would simply carry the current budget forward, soup to nuts.

 More qualifications in updates at bottom.  So perhaps the answer to the question in the post title is 'not yet,' though I still think that Obama has maneuvered himself into a bad position. Here's the original post.
*     *     *     *
Every time the next budget showdown looms, Dem-side writers always eagerly game out what will happen when Obama refuses to yield and Republicans are forced to propose x, or defend y.

It never happens. Obama always punts, or caves.

The next showdown was to be March 27, when the continuing resolutions funding the government run out, and new funding bills will have to be passed, either at sequestration levels -- or not.  Here, for example, is Brian Beutler on February 26:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.

So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough, then the sequestration fight will become tangled up in the need to renew funding for the federal government at the end of March. If Republicans don’t cave before then, they’ll precipitate a 1995-style government shutdown, public opinion will actually begin to control the outcome, and it’ll be game over.

But what did Obama do on the eve of sequestration? The Times' Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman report:

No, Bob Woodward, the White House did not move the goalposts on the supercommittee's charge

Bob Woodward claims to have proof, in the form of statements by the principals, that the idea of using sequestration as an enforcement mechanism in the Budget Control Act of 2011 originated with the White House. That may be.*

Woodward also asserts that "the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester." He provides no quotes in this article to back that statement up. If there was any such agreement, it was never put in writing and it is not reflected in the legislative language or in official descriptions of the deal immediately following its announcement.

A CBO statement put out on August 1, 2011, described the supercommittee's task as follows:

Create a Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to propose further deficit reductions, with a stated goal of achieving at least $1.5 trillion in budgetary savings over 10 years

The BCA itself describes the supercommittee task as follows:

GOAL.—The goal of the joint committee  shall be to reduce the deficit by at least $1,500,000,000,000 over the period of fiscal years (Sect 401b, p. 52).

"Reduce the deficit" does not mean "by spending cuts only."

Publicly, from the moment the deal was announced, Republicans insisted that the supercommittee was tasked with considering cuts only, and Democrats insisted that new revenues would be part of the mix.  Announcing the deal on July 31, 2011, Obama said this of the supercommittee (my emphasis):

"Not this time": Obama revises himself

The headline takeaway from Obama's press conference yesterday is that he's talking tough about the debt ceiling. And indeed, he elaborated his case against holding the faith and credit of the nation hostage in new and forceful ways. What also struck me, though, is the extent to which Obama implicitly admitted that the obstacles he is now facing are partly of his own making. In fact, since late in his reelection campaign he has been casting is second term as an edited version of the first.

On the economic front, Obama reiterated three core messages yesterday:1) The debt ceiling is no frame within which to negotiate deficit reduction; 2) deficit reduction is not our chief problem; and 3) Republicans' chief goal is to weaken core government functions and commitments, radically altering the social contract. Each was to some degree a revision of a past stance.

Regarding the debt ceiling, as Ezra Klein pointed out yesterday, Obama has been unequivocal since the election: it is not a negotiating chip in budget battles.  Yesterday he stated this simply, forcefully and repeatedly.  Here is the first iteration, in his opening remarks:

The next debt showdown...I see it!

This snippet from this evening's Plum Line roundup gave me deja vu:

* Steve Kornacki on why Republicans may cave in the end:

Much attention is paid to the way-out-there true-believers who have gained to power to define what conservatism means in the Obama-era. But there are still many Republicans in Congress – and in influential positions outside of Congress – who recognize the catastrophe that would be unleashed by a default. And in the wake of the November election, they may be more assertive in reining in the crazies now than they were during the debt ceiling showdown in 2011.

The flavor of this deja vu might be classed as optimistic preview.  The sentiment: Obama has the leverage: when he stares the GOP down, they'll be forced to... [add consummation to be wished].  As, for example, when Reid and McConnell were negotiating on December 28, three days before the fiscal cliff's edge, and Sargent eagerly anticipated the failure of those talks:

McConnell clears the way for more revenue hikes

Annoying as it is to hear Mitch McConnell declare that Republicans will not agree to any further revenue increases, I am pleased to note him intoning this party line regarding the fiscal cliff deal:

Look, this was not a tax increase,

That's true, insofar as at the time the deal was enacted, the Bush tax cuts had expired, and the deal reinstated about 85% of the cuts. If restoring a portion of the foregone revenue was not a tax increase, then neither is restoring more of it. If you accept all negotiations this year as an adjustment within the frame of the Bush tax cut expiration (which, okay, McConnell and co. don't), that gives Obama and the Democrats another two trillion-plus over ten years in running room for future negotiations.

Uggh, my money is on McConnell

Yesterday, I wondered where Obama thinks he's going to get the leverage to insist that any future spending cuts be paired with further tax hikes. As reflected in today's Politico reporting, Obama and the GOP leadership are living in alternate universes. Obama thinks he's broken a psychological threshold along with the Republican no-new-taxes-taboo and that he can wield public opinion to make his all-spending-cuts-to-be-balanced-with-more revenue rule stick. McConnell & co. think they have Obama over a barrel with the debt ceiling and sequester cuts looming.

My money is on McConnell. Reid might have been a match for him. Obama and Biden weren't.  Agreeing to only a two-month postponement of the sequester cuts, McConnell's main demand, looks like a disaster -- unless Obama is ready to finally go over a cliff. The only precedent for that: he did let the sequester become law in the first place in late 2011, rather than intervene and strike another all-cuts-no-revenue bargain. That's a thin reed of hope.

What I can't see is Republicans agreeing to further tax hikes, e.g., through Obama's proposed 28% deduction cap for wealthy taxpayers.  They acceded to a very limited tax increase only under extreme duress -- when the only alternative was larger tax hikes. Their "principles" are therefore intact. The notion that a taboo was broken is nonsense.

At cliff's edge, Obama lays down his conciliator chips

President Obama invested a large sum of political capital in his interview with David Gregory on Meet the Press this morning.

All published accounts (1, 2) highlight -- because no one could miss -- the forcefulness with which he rejected false equivalence regarding the causes of his standoff with the GOP and blamed them for taking us to the brink.  What I would stress is that to the extent that you can genuinely credit Obama with playing a long game, this is its locus: convincing the public that he is the reasonable one, the one willing to compromise, the one putting forth centrist, mainstream, "balanced" proposals for deficit reduction.  That self-portrait is now backed by several rounds of negotiations in which he appeared (to supporters at least) to yield too much, always stressing that he was doing the best he could in the face of implacable opposition by ideological fanatics.  Now, when the leverage is on his side, he has a long history backing his claim that he is not the intransigent party.

Political scientists are at pains to demonstrate to us that presidential rhetoric per se does not sway public opinion. But a president's track record does register, I think, and long-term repetition of certain themes in word and deed do sink in. Perhaps more to the point, public opinion is a potent weapon when the public is already on your side, as they essentially always have been for Obama regarding the high-end Bush tax cuts. Polls showed broad public support for the broad outlines Obama's "balanced approach" to deficit reduction in the summer of 2011, and it registered that Republicans would not budge on that front, and that Obama essentially caved in the face of the debt ceiling threat. Likewise, in the fall of 2010, Obama claimed public support for letting the Bush income tax expire for the top two brackets. Compare his language in the December 2010 press conference in which he announced the budget agreement that extended both the Bush cuts and his own middle class tax cuts, along with unemployment insurance (adding the payroll tax cut).  Below, in 2010, he is challenged as to why he could not raise taxes on the top 2% (my emphasis throughout):

The dangers of last-minute dealing

Greg Sargent is salivating at the prospect of Obama daring the Senate GOP to veto a stripped-down fiscal cliff bill that would raise marginal rates on the top two brackets and extend unemployment benefits, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child tax credit.  Jonathan Cohn, while acknowledging the dangers of going over the cliff, is cautiously optimistic that if we do so Obama will be able to a) impose a better deal, and b) blame Republicans for the deadlock:

And then there are the polls, which suggest that the public overwhelmingly blames Republicans, rather than Obama, for inaction. Polls don’t always predict how people will react to actual political developments in real time. But chances are good that, the longer it takes for a deal, the more pressure Republicans will feel from the voters—not to mention their supporters in the business community—to abandon their opposition to tax increases and determination to cut entitlements.

Obama moved 'from hope to hardball' last September

Cheering Obama's turn to partisan combat, Noam Scheiber draws some striking parallels between the political trajectories of the Clinton and Obama presidencies -- starting with a hope for bipartisanship, going through the meat-grinder of passing key legislation with zero Republican support, getting creamed in the midterms. But then he moves to a false -- or rather, distorted -- contrast:

The major difference between the two after the midterms was their posture toward Republicans. Clinton went for the jugular early. By August of 1995, he had launched a major ad campaign attacking the Republican Congress for its designs on Medicare and vowing to defend the program from $270 billion in cuts. Almost daily beginning in late 1995, Clinton and his surrogates repeated their mantra of protecting “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment”—that is, the programs Republicans threatened to decimate. The White House even had a nickname for the refrain: “M2E2.” “It wasn’t elegant—I wouldn’t etch it in marble. But people fucking knew what was at stake,” recalls Paul Begala, a former Clinton strategist. When Bob Dole emerged as the Republican presidential nominee the following spring, he had little hope of separating himself from his party’s government-slashing ethos.

Obama, on the other hand, spent more of his third year striking conciliatory notes as he negotiated with the GOP over the deficit. With the exception of a tough, high-profile speech that April, his White House consciously avoided flaying Republicans over their proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. He didn’t dwell on their anti-government nihilism until a speech in December, and even then he did so in broad strokes.

True Newt, false Newt

Hate-mongering demagogue though he may be, Newt Gingrich spoke one truth and illustrated another in a response to one question from moderator David Gregory in yesterday's GOP debate in New Hampshire:

GREGORY: Speaker Gingrich, if you become President Gingrich and the leader of the Democrats, Harry Reed says he’s going to promise to make you a one term president, how would you propose to work with someone like that in order to achieve results in Washington?

GINGRICH: I think every president who works with the leader of every opposition knows they’re working with someone who wants to make them a one term president. I mean you know that -- that’s the American process. I worked with Ronald Reagan in the early 1990’s. Tip O’Neil was speaker. He wanted to make Reagan a one term president. We had to get one-third of the Democrats to vote for the Reagan tax cuts and we did.

A fair look at Obama, cont.

Yesterday, I wrote a post speculating about why polls show that Americans broadly approve of Obama's economic policies yet give him poor marks for his handling of the economy. Short answer: he's being punished for not executing, or not fighting hard enough. Today, the New York Times devotes its lead editorial to the same apparent anomaly, and comes to a similar conclusion:

He has wasted far too much time trying to puzzle out how he can shave policies down far enough to get the Republicans to cooperate. The answer has long been clear: He can’t. Since he was elected, the Republicans have openly said they would not work with him, and a year ago, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said explicitly that the Republicans’ goal was simply to deny Mr. Obama a second term. The new Times poll showed that Americans do not believe bipartisanship is achievable. Six in 10 Democrats want the president to challenge Republicans more. He should not worry about voters thinking he is being mean. What he should worry about is that he is not showing them that he is fighting all out for their interests.

The debt ceiling stickup as precedent...or not

As the debt ceiling stickup lurched toward its traumatic climax and please-no-one resolution, the laments have been many that a dreadful precedent has been set for government by extortion. Jonathan Chait has been eloquent about this:

The problem is that, even if we get through this crisis with little damage, the debt ceiling is still sitting there, a weapon that will one day explode. Indeed, if there's one good reason to downgrade U.S. debt, it's that House Republicans have discovered a kind of doomsday device that, if not used this time, will probably be used eventually. Any use of the debt ceiling to extort policy concessions will encourage subsequent uses.

And right on cue, once the deal was done, Mitch McConnell heralded the new nuclear norm:

What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order.

Many see in this precedent evidence of U.S. decline. Here's Ezra Klein, commenting on McConnell's boast above (same link):

Nut-cutting time

Those who think that Obama will be placatory forever, let's see how he reacts to this joint statement (h/t E. Klein) from Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl:

“The White House and Democrats are insisting on job-killing tax hikes and new spending. That proposal won’t address our fiscal crisis, our jobs crisis, or protect and reform entitlements. And a bill with new spending and higher taxes would fail with bipartisan opposition — as it should. President Obama needs to decide between his goal of higher taxes, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit. He can’t have both. But we need to hear from him.”

Maybe it's wishful thinking, or the residue from last night's steely Afghanistan speech, or the memory from last November that Obama has absorbed The Clinton Tapes...but I think he's going to win this high stakes round.

Go repeal and replace yourself

Ezra Klein links today to a  rather tortured hypothesis he put forward last fall to explain how politicians induce themselves to believe in policies it's politically expedient for them to endorse:

I don't think we need to get into talmudic arguments over whether, when Mitch McConnell says "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," he's implying a strategy of "deliberate economic sabotage" or simply offering a confused and politically counterproductive pander to his base. For what it's worth, I don't believe he believes he'd do anything to hurt the economy. Political actors are rarely so rationally cynical as that. The problem is subtler: Can McConnell bring himself to support a policy that will help the economy if it also helps President Obama?

On the simplest level, American politics presents us with an incentives problem: McConnell -- like most minority leaders -- is an avowedly reflexive opponent of the president's reelection. The president's reelection campaign depends on an improved economy.

Reading this, the phrase "repeal and replace" came to mind, and it occurred to me that the GOP's marketing slogan for their alleged healthcare reform plans resonates beyond healthcare. It's the perfect expression of their top priority: to "repeal and replace" Obama.  Healthcare is a mere stalking horse.