COVID-19 & Healthcare

The money and planning behind the government shutdown

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by David Safier

Today's NY Times article, A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning, isn't so much news as confirmation of what we already knew. The federal shutdown has been planned for months. It's a heavily funded, last ditch effort to wipe out Obamacare before people begin using it. They know any efforts after January 1 will be too late.

To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

[snip]

The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.

The article is filled with details, including the dual efforts to get young people to refuse to sign up, which would harm the revenue needed to keep the program viable, and to get the elderly — meaning people on Medicare who don't participate in Obamacare — angry enough to turn out for Republican candidates in large numbers.

Colbert King: The modern GOP is the New Confederacy

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In a follow-up to my post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, the Washington Post's Colbert King details today, The rise of the New Confederacy (excerpt):

Confederale SoldiersFederal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New
Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the
Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in
its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a
Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination
of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But
the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New
Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy
was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not
stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full
faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at
home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Its members
are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them,
as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in
flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a
federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a
more humane society that extends justice for all.

The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.

Thomas Mann on the modern GOP

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

As i posted yesterday, one of the high priests of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norman
Ornstein, has been ringing the warning bell about the radicalism of the
modern Republican Party for a couple of years now as well. Ornstein's
latest warning in The Atlantic is The Republican Hardliners Aren’t Conservatives, They’re Radicals.

Ornstein's frequent collaborator and high priest of Beltway centrism, Thomas Mann, writes in a CNN opinion, GOP House can't claim to speak for America:

One talking point frequently used by Republicans to justify shutting
down the government while trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act is
that the House and its Republican majority are more representative of
Americans' views than President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate.

That is preposterous and beside the point.

The ACA is law. End of
story. The House Republicans' attempt to nullify a duly-enacted law
violates the norms of our constitutional system. It is reckless
economically and an egregious affront to our democratic form of
government.

BillHouse Republicans have
every right to press their views in Congress but not to threaten to blow
up the U.S. and global economy by shutting down the government and
threatening public default.

We have elections for all
three key players — the president, the House and the Senate. If
Republicans want to change the law, they must do it the old-fashioned
way: Persuade the others to accept their position or win control of the
White House and Senate.

House Republicans lost
ground in the 2012 elections, lost the national vote for the House by
over a million votes and retained a majority only because of favorable
districting.

Obama won re-election by
3.9 percentage points and got an overwhelming victory in the Electoral
College. Senate Democrats retained their majority despite having to
defend more than twice as many seats as the Republicans.

House Republicans
represent a distinct minority of public sentiment. They carelessly
generalize from the echo chambers of their safe districts to the
national electorate.

Let’s Negotiate!

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Republicans have been demanding negotiations over the government shutdown. A few minutes ago, President Obama gave in to their demand. In a private meeting with House leaders, he said:

Let's negotiate. I understand that you want to repeal Obamacare, or at least delay it for a year. Now let me tell you what I want:

Timothy Egan: GOP on the wrong side of history

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Related to an earlier post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, Timothy Egan at the New York Times writes today, Wrong Side of History:

Screenshot-9In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a
paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of
Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the
National Institutes of Health.

And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a
“slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as
tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying
to say it’s not their fault.

It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so
Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while
breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants
who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today
and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the
government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting
affordable health care.

They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are
not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the
founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in
one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an
established law by extortion. This is not the design of the
Constitution.