Letter 2 America for October 8, 2013

Dear America,

I watched President Obama speak to the employees of FEMA yesterday during one of those press events he seems to prefer over speeches to the American people at night when everyone is home.  During his informal remarks, The President said, among other things, that he was willing to talk to the Republicans about anything, but that he wouldn't do so under the duress of a government shut-down for failure to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government's operations, or the threat of default on the debt of the United States posed by refusal to raise the debt ceiling either...a fair description of the next manufactured crisis threatened under veil by the Republicans.  Wolf Blitzer of CNN was reporting on Mr. Obama's remarks and in the gratuitous and perfunctory analysis that ineluctably ensued, he asked one of his "political experts" whether The President had evinced new flexibility on the issue of negotiations with his opposition when he said he would discuss anything.  The question puzzled me because I myself have seen footage of The President saying exactly that...that he would discuss anything, but not with a figurative gun to his head...on more than one occasion, often in fact.  So the offer to discuss budget and spending issues was anything but new, and the refusal to do so under duress wasn't new either.  It made me suspect that Blitzer is a closet conservative...or even a Tea Party sympathizer...and that suspicion was augmented when Wolf subsequently commented that President Obama should sit down with Speaker Boehner and "talk and talk."  It was a very Tea Party kind of comment...refusing to acknowledge that such conversations hadn't yielded anything in the past when Boehner has pulled these tactics out of his bag, because compromise isn't what he is after.

In fact, it all sounded like the comments of one Texas congresswoman (you know Texas...the state that Ted Cruz is from) during an interview with CNBC's Chuck Todd a day or two earlier.  She insisted that The Senate had passed a budget but refused to negotiate with The House, and Todd asked her how she could say that when it was The House Republicans who refused to appoint a conference delegation to negotiate with The Senate's conference delegation.  That's the way the two houses of our legislature iron out their differences; they send conflicting bills on the same subject to "conference" for reconciliation.  Todd is a Washington reporter, and a veteran at that.  He knows the history of these events, and for that matter, anyone who pays attention to national politics knows that he is correct about the course of events on the budgets that were passed by the two houses.  In fact, House Republicans seemed to know that they had set a petard by which they were about to be hoist when around midnight just before the government shutdown they named a committee to participate in the reconciliation conference...a bit too late to save their claim of sincerity, I would say.  But when she responded to Todd's observation, she simply said that it wasn't so...the Senate refused to negotiate because their budget included things that she and her party didn't like, though even Time Magazine said that the Republicans had sabotaged (their word, not mine) the budget process. At that point Todd politely terminated the interview with an expression on his face suggesting what I think is the obvious.  The Tea Party can claim to be all-American, but in reality it isn't the American Tea Party.  It is the Mad Hatter's, and I think that even Speaker Boehner has come to that conclusion now.

Within the past day or two, Boehner was interviewed by Dan Harris of ABC News, and The Speaker said that his party was no longer insisting on defunding Obamacare--a rider attached to each of the four CR's previously submitted to, and rejected by, The Senate, including gray headed Republicans.  Now, their demand for passing a CR was just that the Democrats make concessions--he used the word negotiate--over the same issues that have been being discussed for the past six years...over the past thirty for that matter: how much debt is too much, and what are our moral obligations as a nation.  Specifically, he conditioned a CR on entitlement reform and deficit reduction further than what has been mandated by the "sequester," another Republican gift to the nation in the context of refusing to increase the debt ceiling.  (That issue arises in about a week now, incidentally.)  I can almost hear the Red Queen yelling, "Off with their heads!"  Perhaps what is most surprising about all this is that John Boehner didn't call Newt Gingrich when his strategy for keeping his speakership began to crumble...or even earlier when those same gray heads that had sent clean CR's to The House, and even the gray heads in The House, all of whom have been through this before in 1995, 1996 and 2012, kept telling him that it was a really bad idea.  Newt would probably have told Boehner from his current house in the political tulles that you can call blackmail what you want, but everyone knows it when he sees it...including the American people.  But Boehner apparently preferred to wait until his advisors apparently pointed out that his and the Party's figurative nose had grown so long that everyone could see it.  That's why in the last day or two, he finally chose a prudent course and said that sane negotiations were alright with him, though he still isn't going to allow a vote regarding a "clean CR."  The question is, is it too late for him.  It reminds me of the old Bob Dylan lyric.  "When will they ever learn...when will they ever learn."

Your friend,

Mike