Your Country is Asking for Fifteen of Your Minutes
Getting Over the Presumption of Democracy Will Take a Little Longer
Yeah, we're talking about reading the whole thing, here.
Normally, MeanMesa avoids long articles or tries to excerpt them, but in this case, theexcellent journalism of the New York Times reporting on this topic is so important that Short Current Essays is quite comfortably willing to "take one in the Short" to share this with visitors to this blog. So, find a comfortable place to read and spend a few minutes with the "story behind the story" of the Republican shut down of the US government.
[A MeanMesa note to our international visitors: While it may be amusing to watch the US oligarchs throw this nation crippling temper tantrum, be advised that in your developing economies your own oligarchs are gradually creeping out of the mud, too. They have the same sociopathic avarice and the same out-of-control ambitions that our US plutocrats are showing now.]
US
A Federal Budget Crisis
Months in the Planning
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
"You are here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare. This is a fight we can win." SENATOR TED CRUZ, speaking in August to a Heritage Action gathering in Dallas
Published: October 5, 2013
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a
loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney
General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their
push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long
percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the
health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push
fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off
financing for the entire federal government.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed
to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A.
Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the
Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly
from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a
standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and
unsettled the nation.
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.
With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives
believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say
that shutting down the government was not their objective, the
activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with
members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.
A defunding “tool kit”
created in early September included talking points for the question,
“What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for
it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We
are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the
Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a
well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s
signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots,
Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight,
as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some,
like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed
at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in
2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the
Heritage Foundation.
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 groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of
Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have
burned faux “Obamacare
cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls
to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and
Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.
One sample Twitter offering — “Obamacare is a train wreck” — is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.
As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The Senate Conservatives Fund,
a political action committee dedicated to “electing true
conservatives,” ran radio advertisements against three Republican
incumbents.
Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of
100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North
Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to
take up the defunding cause.
“They’ve been hugely influential,” said David Wasserman, who tracks
House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “When else in our
history has a freshman member of Congress from North Carolina been able
to round up a gang of 80 that’s essentially ground the government to a
halt?”
On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in Tea Party
conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to shut down the
government if they do not get their way on spending issues. This time
they said they were so alarmed by the health law that they were willing
to risk a shutdown over it. (“This is exactly what the public wants,”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea
Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)
Despite Mrs. Bachmann’s comments, not all of the groups have been on
board with the defunding campaign. Some, like the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 million on health care television advertisements
over the past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts
about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to cripple a measure
that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leader of the defunding
effort, has likened to a horror movie.
“We view this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, the president
of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group expected to spend “tens
of millions” of dollars on a “multifront effort” that includes working
to prevent states from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group’s goal is not to defund the law.
“We want to see this law repealed,” Mr. Phillips said.
The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of downtown
Dallas, when Mr. Needham’s group, Heritage Action, arrived on a Tuesday
in August for the second stop on a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall
Tour.” Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear two stars of the Tea
Party movement: Mr. Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina
senator who runs the Heritage Foundation.
“You’re here because now is the single best time we have to defund
Obamacare,” declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to rail against the law
on the Senate floor in September with a monologue that ran for 21 hours.
“This is a fight we can win.”
Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of defunding in
Washington is not. For years, Congress has banned the use of certain
federal money to pay for abortions, except in the case of incest and
rape, by attaching the so-called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.
After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a Republican
congressman from Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He
said he spoke to Mr. Boehner’s staff about the idea while the Supreme
Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the law’s
constitutionality.
“There just wasn’t the appetite for it at the time,” Mr. Tiahrt said in
an interview.
“They thought, we don’t need to worry about it because the
Supreme Court will strike it down.”
But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund an entire
federal program, particularly one as far-reaching as the health care
overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. In an interview, Mr. DeMint,
who left the Senate to join the Heritage Foundation in January, said he
had been thinking about it since the law’s passage, in part because
Republican leaders were not more aggressive.
“They’ve been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,” Mr. DeMint
said, referring to continuing resolutions on spending, “and all the time
there was discussion of ‘O.K., we’re not going to fight the Obamacare
fight, we’ll do it next time.’ The conservatives who ran in 2010
promising to repeal it kept hearing, ‘This is not the right time to
fight this battle.’ ”
Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health law, or his
willingness to do something about it. In the three years since Mr. Obama
signed the health measure, Tea Party-inspired groups have mobilized,
aided by a financing network that continues to grow, both in its
complexity and the sheer amount of money that flows through it.
A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and corporate filings
shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and spent
since 2012 by organizations, many of them loosely connected, leading
opposition to the measure.
One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom Partners, a
tax-exempt “business league” that claims more than 200 members, each of
whom pays at least $100,000 in dues. The group’s board is headed by a
longtime executive of Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch
brothers, who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party
movement. The Kochs declined to comment.
While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are pushing to
defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom
Partners has not advocated that. A spokesman for the group, James Davis,
said it was more focused on “educating Americans around the country on
the negative impacts of Obamacare.”
The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash — about $115 million —
was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according to the groups’
latest tax filings. Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs
and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center
appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still
more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association,
both ardent foes of the health care law.
American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of groups calling
themselves the “Repeal Coalition” that sent a letter in August urging
Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist “at a minimum”
in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any
budget deal. Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered
a defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.
In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face well-organized
liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit group allied with the Obama
White House, is waging a campaign to persuade millions of the uninsured
to buy coverage. The law’s supporters are also getting huge assistance
from the insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on
advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.
“It is David versus Goliath,” said Mr. Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.
But conservatives are finding that with relatively small advertising
buys, they can make a splash. Generation Opportunity, the youth-oriented
outfit behind the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads, is spending $750,000 on that
effort, aimed at dissuading young people — a cohort critical to the
success of the health care overhaul — from signing up for insurance
under the new law.
The group receives substantial backing from Freedom Partners and
appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation Opportunity moved into
spacious new offices in Arlington, Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea
chairs and a Ping-Pong table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley
start-up.
Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former Capitol Hill
aide and onetime instructor for a leadership institute founded by
Charles Koch, said there would be more Uncle Sam ads, coupled with
college campus visits, this fall. Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with
its “Burn Your Obamacare Card” protests, and Young Americans for
Liberty, are also running campus events.
“A lot of folks have asked us, ‘Are we trying to sabotage the law?’ ”
Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His answer echoes the
Freedom Partners philosophy: “Our goal is to educate and empower young
people.”
But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.
Mr. Meese’s low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action Project,
which seeks to find common ground among leaders of an array of fiscally
and socially conservative groups, was looking ahead to last Tuesday,
when the new online health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges,
were set to open. If the law took full effect as planned, many
conservatives feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal — even if a
Republican president were elected in 2016.
“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare,
that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,”
Mr. Meese said in an interview. (He has since stepped down as the
coalition’s chairman and has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former
congressman from Indiana.)
The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was “a logical strategy.” The idea
drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives like Chris Chocola, the
president of the Club for Growth, signed on to the blueprint. So did
social and religious conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the
Traditional Values Coalition.
The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing resolution
allowing the government to function was to expire. Its message was
direct: “Conservatives should not approve a C.R. unless it defunds
Obamacare.”
But the March date came and went without a defunding struggle. In the
Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, talked up the
defunding idea, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled
chamber. In the House, Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on
locking in the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and
Tea Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were unhappy
but held their fire.
“We didn’t cause any trouble,” Mr. Chocola said.
Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another temporary
spending bill expiring at the end of September, the groups were done
waiting.
“I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and they said,
‘This didn’t go anywhere,’ ” Mr. Needham recalled. “What all of us felt
at the time was, this was never going to be a strategy that was going to
win inside the Beltway. It was going to be a strategy where, during
August, people would go home and hear from their constituents, saying:
‘You pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will you
defund it?’ ”
Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls sentinels
around the country, sent them to open meetings and other events to
confront their elected representatives. Its “Defund Obamacare Town Hall
Tour,” which began in Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days
later in Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called dontfundobamacare.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund the law.
When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told a reporter
that defunding the law was “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” the fund
bought a radio ad to attack him. Two other Republican senators up for
re-election in 2014, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party challengers.
In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com,
to promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans in
Congress whom Democrats — and a number of fellow Republicans — say are
most responsible for the shutdown.
While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding,
a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority —
57 percent — disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the
law.
Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business and a number
of prominent Republicans complaining that the “Defund Obamacare”
strategy was politically damaging and pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage
Action said he felt good about what the groups had accomplished.
“It really was a groundswell,” he said, “that changed Washington from the outside in.”
