We begin today's roundup with
Eugene Robinson who pulls no punches in his evaluation of John Boehner's performance as Speaker:
House Speaker John Boehner needs to decide whether he wants to be remembered as an effective leader or a befuddled hack. So far, I’m afraid, it’s the latter.
Boehner’s performance last week was a series of comic pratfalls, culminating Friday in a stinging rebuke from the House Republicans he ostensibly leads. Boehner (R-Ohio) wasn’t asking for much: three weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which was hours from shutting down. He came away, humiliated, with just seven days’ worth of operating money for the agency charged with keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks.
By any standard, the whole situation is beyond ridiculous. The government of the world’s leading military and economic power cannot be funded on a week-to-week basis. There’s no earthly excuse for this sorry spectacle — and no one to blame but Boehner.
Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann:
Two months into their control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans have little to show for their majorities -- except for yet another embarrassing failed vote. House Republicans' inability to pass a measure to keep the Department of Homeland Security open for a mere three weeks resulted in a last-minute effort by the Senate and House to extend the funding for one more week, which means we're now back to where we started. As we've written, congressional Republicans have picked as many fights (over immigration, DC's pot legalization, Loretta Lynch's nomination to be U.S. attorney general) as legislation they've passed that has become law (the Clay Hunt SAV Act, terrorism risk insurance reauthorization, and Friday's one-week DHS extension). This isn't the first two months of GOP congressional control that Republicans envisioned or even promised. Governing is never easy, especially during a time of divided government (with Democrats in charge of the executive branch and Republicans the legislative branch. But Republicans so far have taken a hard job and made it even more difficult.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Julian Zelizer at CNN argues that all of this gridlock and disorder is exactly what the Republican Party is used to, since they don’t want to provide any room for President Obama or Democrats to accomplish anything:
from a different perspective, congressional Republicans are achieving their goal. Once again they are using up a valuable chunk of President Obama's political time. Congress has already squandered several months rather than addressing bigger questions, such as economic inequality or climate change, which the White House hoped to put at the center of political debate even if the Republicans refused to do anything about these problems.
While the odds of the president making progress on key issues is extremely slim, President Obama has not even had a chance to introduce issues fully into public debate -- a key function of presidents who hope to build the groundwork for future legislative breakthroughs and shape the national conversation -- or to even to attempt to make progress on issues, like tax reform, where there is potential support for a bipartisan breakthrough.
Using up the legislative clock has been central to the Republican strategy since the 2010 midterm elections, a tactic that the Democrats have found difficult to fight back against.
Turning to healthcare,
Greg Sargent takes on the GOP’s contingency plan (or lack thereof) if the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs in the latest Affordable Care Act challenge:
some Republican lawmakers are working hard to convey the impression that they have a contingency plan for the millions who will likely lose subsidies — and coverage — if the Court rules with the challengers. Senators Orrin Hatch, Lamar Alexander, and John Barrasso have published a Washington Post op ed with an oh-so-reassuring title: “We have a plan for fixing health care.”
The good Senators, amusingly, cast their “plan” as something that will protect people from “the administration’s” actions and from Obamacare itself, not from the consequences of the legal challenge or a Court decision siding with it. The plan vows to “provide financial assistance” for a “transitional period” to those who lose subsidies, while Republicans create a “bridge away from Obamacare.” Of course, anyone who watched last week’s chaos in the House knows Congressional Republicans are unlikely to coalesce around any “transitional” relief for those who lose subsidies (that would require spending federal money to cover people) or any permanent long-term alternative. This chatter appears transparently designed to make it easier for conservative Justices to side with the challengers.
Yet even if this game works on the Justices in the short term, any eventual failure to come through with any contingency plan could saddle Republicans with a political problem, perhaps even among GOP voters.
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal Constitution adds his take:
Once that 18-month “grace period” [in the GOP's alleged post-Burwell "plan"] is established, he proposes that the Republican Party use the time “to unify around a specific set of constructive, longer-term solutions, and then turn the 2016 presidential election into a referendum on two competing visions of health care.”
Theoretically, that too would be nice. But the idea that Republicans could reach such an intraparty consensus — particularly in the middle of a presidential primary season — is ludicrous. In short, a plan that requires Republicans to vote to extend ObamaCare subsidies another 18 months while the party gets its act together is useful mainly as a measure of just how desperate the smarter members of the GOP have become.
David Brodwin at U.S. News writes about privatizations:
Once the right to take from the commons is turned into a tradable commodity, the rights are quickly bought and sold. This almost always means the rights become concentrated in a few corporate hands. This means in turn that the owners of the rights have no stake in the day-to-day production and no stake in the communities where the work is done. Rights to lumber, minerals and fish change hands on Wall Street, not in the forests of the Sierra Nevada or the fisheries of New England.
This commodification and concentration yields greater harvests and sometimes lower costs, but we pay a price for that. The concentration of rights creates an arms race that attracts capital and new technology to extract in ways that are ever more efficient (that’s a good thing), but which are also ever more destructive to the future productivity of the commons. In many cases, it destroys local economies and local communities.
Given our pay-to-play politics, once rights get concentrated, it’s all too easy for the new owners to hijack the regulatory and legislative process. As a result, the rights don’t get scaled back when they need to be. A system of limits that was designed to protect a resource ends up ensuring its slow destruction.
On a final note,
Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post breaks down the GOP's demographic nightmare:
By 2060, 11 of the 15 largest states will be majority-minority -- states that includes electorally critical battlegrounds such as Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. When you consider that Mitt Romney won 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally (13 points worse than George W. Bush did eight years earlier), you begin to see that if things continue in their current direction, Republicans will be hard-pressed to be competitive in national elections in a decade or two.