A rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program is at risk because many lawmakers, urged on by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, are insisting that Congress impose tougher economic sanctions, perhaps next week as an amendment to the defense bill.
WOW: This is a great, quick way to shop for your ACA health insurance. http://t.co/6oHFUhNNtRI gave this a whirl, putting in my zip code, ages for my wife and me, and various income estimates. It works. There are no plan details (other than plan type -- HMO or EPO or POS), and I haven't called the insurers whose plans are quoted [update - see next post], but I would assume that they will send plan details if asked. [Update: per below, another site, ValuePenguin, appears to give more accurate price quotes, at least in New Jersey -- as well as plan details. Most insurers' websites do, too.]
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) November 10, 2013
6...Democrats are well aware of the limitations and problems with the Affordable Care Act. Some are so troubling that the administration is considering some interesting proposals that would require Congress to act. Point being, there is leverage for some negotiation on some aspects of the law. And, crucially, some of the things Capretta has proposed fit within the structure of the ACA, such as allowing Medicaid enrollees to buy exchange plans (see Arkansas), capping the employer-sponsored insurance tax subsidy (see the Cadillac tax), or making exchange plans more catastrophic. But that brings me to …
is using all the powers of his administration to sell Obamacare, marshaling millions of dollars for branding and market research, heartwarming television spots and eye-catching bus ads. A hired army of true believers have held meetings across the state, spreading the word and rebutting misconceptions.
Contrary to the reporting of NBC, the administration’s commentary in the Federal Register did not only refer to the individual market, but also the market for employer-sponsored health insurance.
True, perhaps -- though the politics will also be defined by the reactions of those eligible for the subsidies, and those shut out of the current market by preexisting conditions or age (the ACA limits age-related price differentials to 3-to-1; currently they're as high as 6-to-1), or, to a lesser extent, by those newly eligible for Medicaid (who are less likely to be politically vocal and perhaps less likely to recognize that their new benefits are a product of the ACA).With some grandfathered exceptions, Obamacare makes those kinds of plans illegal. The out-of-pocket limit for individuals is capped at $6,500 a year, preventive services are fully covered, and various “essential benefits” as well.If we ever get beyond the follies of HealthCare.gov, the politics of the rollout will probably be defined by how (and how vocally) middle-class Americans just above the subsidy threshold react to this “pay more, get more, subsidize other people” deal.
One of our panelists, Leslie Berlin, a historian of business at Stanford, organized her nominations not as an overall list but grouped into functional categories. From our panelists’ nominations, a similar but slightly broader set of categories emerges. Here is my adaptation of Berlin’s useful scheme.Fallows' categories are as follows: innovations that 1) expand the human intellect; 2) are integral to the infrastructure of the modern world; 3) enabled the industrial revolution; 4) extend life; 5) allow real-time communication out of voice range; 6) enhance transportation; 7) enable organizational breakthroughs (clocks, calendars, alphabetization); and 7) facilitate killing.
"The adults in the room" -- except with respect to one little issue that is the focus of Taft's historical analogy:As I write, a photograph of my grandfather, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, looks across at me from the wall of my office. He led the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1940s and early 1950s, ran for the Republican nomination for president three times and was known as “Mr. Republican.” If he were alive today, I can assure you he wouldn’t even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff — seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge.
Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.
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.
No, the problem is the Republican Party, which has developed a weird and dysfunctional set of incentives along with the legacy of a handful of role models they would be better off without. There’s the race to be the True Conservative, which requires staking out ever-more-crazy positions in order to differentiate from RINOs and squishes – and the reaction by mainstream conservatives who are terrified at losing their conservative credentials and therefore cling as close as possible to the nuttiest radicals out there. There’s the lucrative conservative marketplace, which thrives on incivility and conflict – that’s one set of perverse incentives – and which also thrives when Democrats are in office, which is another set of perverse incentives. There’s the conservative closed information feedback loop, with Republican Party actors and politicians failing to see the U.S. that the rest of the nation sees.
President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.
But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.
All his relatives at home, and his friends in New Mexico, had expected that the old Archbishop would spend his closing years in France, probably in Clermont, where he could occupy a chair in his old college. That seemed the natural thing to do, and he had given it grave consideration. He had half expected to make some such arrangement the last time he was in Auvergne, just before his retirement from his duties as Archbishop. But in the Old World he found himself homesick for the New. It was a feeling he could not explain; a feeling that old age did not weigh so heavily upon a man in New Mexico as in the Puy-de-Dôme.
He loved the towering peaks of his native mountains, the comeliness of the villages, the cleanness of the country-side, the beautiful lines and cloisters of his own college. Clermont was beautiful,-- but he found himself sad there; his heart lay like a stone in his breast. There was too much past, perhaps. . . . When the summer wind stirred the lilacs in the old gardens and shook down the blooms of the horse-chestnuts, he sometimes closed his eyes and thought of the high song the wind was singing in the straight, striped pine trees up in the Navajo forests.
Night before shutdown, House changed its rules so that ONLY GOP leadership could bring budget to floor. But it's the "Obama shutdown." Sigh. [Details here] .The language sounded familiar, and seemed to gallop of its own accord as below -- with an assist from Matt Glassman as noted (MG):
If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.With about $4 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years the agreed target, Obama was ready to settle for just $800 billion in new revenue, a roughly 4-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue . But the GOP passed up Brooks' 'deal of the century.' A four-fifths win for the no-new-taxes-ever crowd wasn't good enough for them.
At the beginning of this year Speaker Boehner said, what we want is regular order and a serious budget process. So the Senate should pass a bill and the House should pass a bill, and then a committee comes together and they hash out their differences and they send the bill to the president. Well, that's exactly what Democrats did....it remains unclear what Democrats agreed to (Republican spending levels in a 6-10 week continuing resolution), what they've balked at (a litany and sequence of demands extraneous to that short-term funding), and what Obama is willing to negotiate if/when the threats of government shutdown and debt default are removed (funding for the remaining 9-10 months of FY 2014 and a long-term replacement of the sequester with a mix of more targeted spending cuts, including to entitlements, and revenue-yielding reductions in tax loopholes).
Except somewhere along the way, House Republicans decided they wouldn't appoint people to the committee to try to negotiate, and 19 times they've rejected that. So even after all that, the Democrats in the Senate still passed a budget that effectively reflects Republican priorities at Republican budget levels just to keep the government open, and the House Republicans couldn't do that either.
This is a moment for immediate action to reopen government’s doors, not the beginning of a conversation that Republicans spurned when they lacked the leverage of a shutdown. They have refused to negotiate over the Senate’s budget, they have refused to negotiate over the president’s budget, and they have refused to negotiate to make the health law more efficient, insisting only on its demise.
The fight that we're having right now is not about the healthcare law, it's not about a particular budget— what it has to do with is do we continue with that process where we have elections, the majorities are determined, there's some protections for minorities in the system, but ultimately, you know, we are able to strike compromises and then move forward. And if we can't do that— this country's too diverse, it's too big— you know, what you'll end up seeing is more and more the polarization that you talked about, that's not healthy for our politics.
Most of the conference is well aware of the consequences of default. In fact, over the past few years, the House GOP leadership has actually hosted private meetings for members about what default means and why it shouldn't happen. But, at the same time, Republicans are very eager to get some kind of 2011-esque concession from the White House and Senate Democrats on the budget, when they were able to pass legislation that led to sequestration. Of course, the political climate then was different, due to the GOP having recently won the House, but the GOP is hoping for a similar outcome this time, and you have leaders like Paul Ryan publicly talking about a larger agreement being possible. I'm still skeptical though, since most Republicans are unwilling, at all, to bend on taxes, and Democrats aren't exactly scrambling to cut a big deal with Boehner, who they think is in a weakened position.Costa suggests that the current standoff over a short-term continuing resolution is likely to bleed into debt ceiling negotiations -- which Obama has stated categorically and repeatedly that he won't engage in. He also seems to think that Democrats are likely to waver in their resolve to negotiate neither the CR -- for which there's already agreement (on GOP terms) as to spending levels -- nor the debt ceiling. Here's Obama yesterday on the latter:
I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay the bills that have already been racked up. Voting for the Treasury to pay America’s bills is not a concession to me. That’s not doing me a favor. That’s simply carrying out the solemn responsibilities that come with holding office up there. I don’t know how I can be more clear about this. Nobody gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States just to extract political concessions. No one gets to hurt our economy and millions of innocent people just because there are a couple of laws that you do not like.The continuation, though, rather airbrushed Obama's own history on this question:
Decides, in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic, to impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.Cf. the Framework Agreement:
Syrian President Bashar Assad has disclosed the locations of dozens of poison gas production and storage sites to international inspectors, according to Western officials.The OPCW administers the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Convention stipulates (Article IV, paragraph 4) that once such a declaration is made,
Officials familiar with Assad's disclosure — the first step in complying with an ambitious U.S.-Russian plan to seize and remove or destroy his arsenal of chemical weapons by mid-2014 — described it Tuesday as "a serious document" that comprises scores of pages and is surprisingly thorough.'
Information in the closely guarded document roughly tracks with U.S. intelligence estimates that Syria has about 45 sites used to produce or store illicit blister agents or neurotoxins...Syria submitted the declaration over the weekend to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the implementation and compliance arm of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
just flip the script for a second and imagine a situation in which a Democratic Speaker said to a Republican President, I’m not going to increase the debt ceiling unless you increase corporate taxes by 20 percent. And if you don't do it, we’ll default on the debt and cause a worldwide financial crisis. Even though that Democratic Speaker didn't have the votes to force through that particular piece of legislation, they would simply say, we will blow the whole thing up unless you do what I want. That can't be a recipe for government.I think it's time that Obama did flip the script. Not in this round, and not by holding the debt ceiling hostage. But by using the leverage his office does afford him.
genre of criticism of Obama..largely focused on the President’s handling and manipulation of process and theatrics, and the consequences that allegedly has had for the president and the country. Into this category fall the arguments, mentioned by Byers above, that Obama’s changes of course during the Syria crisis have been “confusing and contradictory,” that this has made him “appear weak on the international stage,” and that he has failed to muscle a progressive agenda through Congress.
The Manchin-Heitkamp resolution* calls for two primary things. First, it gives the administration 45 days to secure from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a commitment to join those nations who have signed and agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention. If Assad fails to comply, then the Senate gives full authorization to the president to use whatever means possible to respond to the regime's apparent August 21 use of chemical weapons.So now, thanks to the U.S.-Russian agreement on a Framework for the Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons, Assad has already acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention. And he will be required to provide an inventory of Syria's CW arsenal within seven days of ratification by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons of a draft decision to be provided by the U.S. and Russia "within a few days." Once that inventory is provided, the Chemical Weapons Convention forbids moving any weapons, "except to a chemical weapons destruction facility" (Article IV, paragraph 4). Inspections are to begin in November, and the framework, as the FT puts it, "is structured around a series of deadlines which will allow the world to judge whether it is being adhered to or not." The framework also stipulates enforcement under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which authorizes the Security Council to use both non-military and military means.
marked a moment when America signaled an inward turn that leaves the world anchorless.The Times/CBS poll result cited raised my eyebrows too. Specifically, 62% said that the U.S. should not "take the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solves international conflicts," while just 34% said that the U.S. should do so. Perhaps even more striking, when asked, "should the United States try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, OR should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs?" 15% said "try to change," while 72% said "stay out."
The president has reflected the mood in America. Almost two-thirds of people surveyed think the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Principle backed by credible force made the United States the anchor of global security since 1945 and set hundreds of millions of people free. Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.
That's Vladimir Putin in the New York Times. Yes, he does paint too grim a picture, and exaggerate. The Libya intervention was authorized by the Security Council, e.g., by Russia under Medvedev And Obama's proposed strike on Syria has little in common with Bush's invasion of Iraq. But the broad question -- have American military interventions post-9/11 done more good than harm? --is hard to answer in the affirmative.It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
SEN. DURBIN: General Dempsey, we saw these photographs earlier -- these heartbreaking photographs. Page three of The Washington Post this morning, an ad by a group supporting the president's effort has a photograph that's riveted in my mind, as a father and grandfather, of the children on the floor in shrouds, victims of this chemical agent gas attack.
What the administration is asking us for is military authority to launch additional attacks. What have you been charged with in terms of the issue of collateral damage from those attacks as it would affect innocent people and civilians in the nation of Syria?
There are a lot of areas of foreign policy where different paradigms can offer the same policy recommendation, and there are a lot of foreign policy issue areas where presidents can just claim "pragmatism" and not worry about which international relations theory is guiding their actions. I'm increasingly of the view, however, that Syria is one of those areas where Obama is gonna actually have to make a decision about what matters more -- his realist desire to not get too deeply involved, or his liberal desire to punish the violation of a norm. If he doesn't decide, if he tries to half-ass his way through this muddle, I fear he'll arrive at a policy that would actually be worse than either a straightforward realist or a straight liberal approach.Busy work day ahead, so I will keep this short and maybe flesh out later, but I see a balancing act rather than a contradiction.
[UPDATE: guess that's the party line: Kerry echoed it in his testimony this afternoon:Ms. Pelosi said..that she was hopeful the American people “will be persuaded of” military action.“President Obama did not write the red line,” she said. “History wrote the red line decades ago.”
Now, some have tried to suggest that the debate we're having today is about President Obama's red line. I could not more forcefully state that is just plain and simply wrong. This debate is about the world's red line. It's about humanity's red line. And it's a red line that anyone with a conscience ought to draw. ][9/5: Obama said the same in Sweden.]
The U.S. decision to move toward possible strikes appears, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, to be all about reinforcing international norms. It’s not about us; it’s not about “because Obama said so.” It’s about “because international norms say so.”
Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?
What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?
Asked at a news conference in London if there were steps the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, could take to avoid an American-led attack, Mr. Kerry said, “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting.” He immediately dismissed the possibility that Mr. Assad would or could comply, saying, “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”This has that too-good-to-be-true feeling, like the prospect in 2009 that Iran would send its highly enriched nuclear fuel to Russia or Turkey for safekeeping. But for a diplomatic moment I'll indulge sweet hope.
However, in Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who was meeting with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said in response that Russia would join any effort to put Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons under international control and ultimately destroy them.Mr. Lavrov appeared at a previously unscheduled briefing only hours after Mr. Kerry made his statement in London, taking Mr. Kerry’s comments as a way to suggest a possible compromise.“We don’t know whether Syria will agree with this, but if the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in the country will prevent attacks, then we will immediately begin work with Damascus,” Mr. Lavrov said at the Foreign Ministry. “And we call on the Syrian leadership to not only agree to setting the chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also to their subsequent destruction.”Mr. Moallem said later in a statement that his government welcomed the Russian proposal, Russia’s Interfax News Agency reported, in what appeared to be the first acknowledgment by the Syrian government that it even possessed chemical weapons. The Syrian government has historically neither confirmed nor denied possessing such weapons.
The Republican leadership is perfectly aware that a debt default could have explosive implications and that the Obama administration is not willing to negotiate over it. It’s already formulating a line of retreat to back out of this threat. As Politico reports, they want to tie together negotiations over the debt ceiling with negotiations over budget sequestration. Then they can extract concessions from Obama on the budget and sell them to their base as a ransom for lifting the debt ceiling, rather than admit they just gave in on the debt ceiling."Gave in" is a relative term. Extracting further budget cuts beyond sequestration would be a major GOP victory by my lights, if not by the GOP base's. And they may get it. As Chait warns here and has warned before, a debt default (stemming from failure to raise the debt ceiling) is a " vastly more dangerous threat" than a government shutdown. Yet Chait, like Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler, seems to have more faith than I do about what Obama will not yield to if faced with a debt default:
We also all know that the reality [of how democracy in America functions] falls far short of the ideal. Voters are often misinformed, and politicians aren’t reliably truthful. Still, we like to imagine that voters generally get it right in the end, and that politicians are eventually held accountable for what they do.But is even this modified, more realistic vision of democracy in action still relevant? Or has our political system been so degraded by misinformation and disinformation that it can no longer function?
The Republican leadership has been increasingly under pressure to appease the right wing of the party. Publicly insisting that ObamaCare funding will be fought further down the road would soothe the demand for that fight in the first place, while kicking the can down the road, perhaps indefinitely.Come again? The sequester is "major budget cuts." As of now, those cuts are locked in for ten years, a seemingly immovable deadweight on Obama's long-term domestic agenda. Republicans may be ambivalent about their effects, actual and political, and ultimately unable to sustain their will to enact the cuts. But they did not cave -- they decided to embrace the cuts, and they followed through, and the overall ten-year deficit reduction scorecard remains stuck at a 4-to-1 spending-cuts-to-tax-increases ratio. In March it was Obama and the Democrats who caved, balking at forcing a government shutdown to shut off sequestration.
As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out, this is exactly what happened with the last debt ceiling fight. In January, Boehner said the upcoming sequester debate, not debt ceiling fight, gave the GOP its best position to push for major budget cuts. Yet the sequester came and went without the GOP winning those deep concessions.
xpostfactoid