House Republican Hostage-Takers Are Unfit to Govern
by Jon Favreau Sep 30, 2013 5:45 AM EDT
They’re threatening an economic shutdown that will cause financial hardship and even ruin for millions of Americans. So let’s call these House Republicans what they are, says Jon Favreau.
The most terrifying speech I ever wrote for President Obama was one he never gave. On July 30, 2011, I began drafting an address to the nation about what would happen if Congress refused to raise the debt limit within 48 hours, thus denying the United States Treasury the ability to pay our country’s bills for the first time in 235 years.
Suddenly, all of the administration’s warnings from the prior few weeks became real. Without enough cash on hand, the government would be forced to delay indefinitely Social Security checks, the ones our grandparents depend on to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads. Veterans who served this country would stop receiving the benefits they earned, and the men and women in uniform risking their lives for us wouldn’t get paychecks.
Every company in America that does business with the federal government, of which there are hundreds of thousands, would not see their contracts paid on schedule, an effect that would ripple down to their employees and their families. With each passing day, making our debt payments to businesses and governments around the world would become more and more difficult. When the world stopped seeing the United States as a safe and reliable place to invest, the cost of borrowing money would skyrocket for every single American—whether it’s a home mortgage or a personal credit card. And those high borrowing costs, coupled with billions in delayed income for seniors, soldiers, small-business owners, and their employees, almost surely would send our economy and the world’s into a crisis even deeper and more dramatic than the Great Recession of 2009.
Fortunately, the draft speech never left my computer screen. The next day, at the last possible moment, the House of Representatives voted to provide the Treasury with the ability to pay our bills. But their decision to negotiate at the brink, under a dark cloud of uncertainty, still led to real economic damage: the stock market had the worst single day since the 2008 financial crisis, plunging 635 points. Billions in higher borrowing costs were added to the national debt. Economic growth slowed. Job growth slowed. And for the very first time, the United States lost its triple-A credit rating.
The obvious lesson from this entirely self-inflicted fiasco is never, ever to treat America’s bill-paying authority as a bargaining chip in political negotiations. The president has learned this lesson. House Republicans have not. And so, incredibly—insanely—we find ourselves a few weeks away from the same self-inflicted fiasco just two years later.
full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/30/house-republican-hostage-takers-are-unfit-to-govern.html
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I've been saying this privately for some time. I no longer believe that the Republican Party is fit to govern the US.
What I am about to say will probably offend some DU'ers, but it needs to be said. I used to be a Republican voter (howbeit not a Republican activist) and I genuinely believed that the Republican Party, as it was constituted 25-30 years ago, was more competent at governing than its Democratic opposite.
I believed that Republicans were realists, both in regard to domestic policy (although that belief was fraying fast during the Reagan years) and international policy (I was a Cold Warrior and voted for Bill Clinton when I realized that the US, like many Native American tribes did before they were conquered by the US, could again have a peace chief instead of a war chief).
I used to believe that Republicans were competent. As much as I hated Richard Nixon's liberal-bashing and paranoia, I felt that many of the people he put in charge of administering LBJ's War on Poverty programs were competent administrators and were not out to destroy those programs and line their pockets the way that Dubya's people were. I'd already begun to question Republican competence during the Reagan years; my belief was already crumpling while George HW Bush was President, and completely disintegrated by the time Dubya took over.
During the Dubya years, despite the fact that I'd already been voting Democratic for some time, I learned to my dismay that not only were Republicans hostile to government intervention even when necessary, they were already dedicated to the practice of hamstringing and sabotaging government so it COULDN'T work.
I could go on. But lest some of the purists of the pure attack me for not being a pure and proper PC progressive, I should point out that I'm here. I have been voting straight Democratic for at least twenty years, and I worked the last two presidential campaigns. I feel far more at home than I did in the Republican Party, even back in the day when Bill Clements governed Texas and many DU'ers were cute little babies keeping their mommies busy.
I used to believe that Republicans would put country over party, that they would put fair-mindedness over ideology, and that they still believed in creating a fair society in which people of talent could advance, and that they would put the interests of most Americans ahead of a small, wealthy oligarchy. I no longer do so.
The Republicans are behaving the way that some of the irresponsible right-wing parties behave in Latin America, not the way that their forebears did.
THROW THE BANANA-REPUBLICANS OUT!
