Boehner’s Weakness Doesn’t Make Him Ineffective

September 30, 2013Danny Vinik 2 Comments

John Boehner has not been a mean machine as speaker.

One of the most common adjectives used to describe Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is weak. A quick google search will find you numerous examples of different pundits from both sides of the aisle criticizing Boehner for not having control of his caucus. The problem is that all of these pundits are conflating “weakness” with “ineffectiveness.” Boehner is a weak speaker, but that doesn’t make him ineffective. On the contrary, a weak speaker is exactly what Republicans need right now.

To understand this, imagine the counterfactual where Boehner is a strong speaker, ruling his caucus with an iron grip and dealing out strict punishments for breaking ranks within the party. Disloyal members receive crappy committee assignments and no money from the party in their next campaign. How do you imagine this would play out with the far right? Do you think they would fall in line and become loyal soldiers? Of course not! These members believe they were sent to Washington to stop “business as usual.” The more that they buck the party, the more that they believe they are listening to their constituents. Being ostracized from is a great way to attract conservative donors and produces great talking points in a potential primary. These members take great pleasure in defying him and it’s often good politics for them to do so.

This mindset has eliminated all of Boehner’s weapons. That doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have still punished disloyal members, but that would have created an even deeper divide within the GOP. It would’ve openly and publicly pitted Boehner and the House leadership versus a small, but substantial and vocal group of Republican Congressmen. It would have been a mess for the party. FreedomWorks and Club for Growth would almost certainly have sided with the intransigents and Boehner would have likely had to turn to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for support to keep his speakership.

That’s what would’ve happened if Boehner attempted to be a strong speaker. The House would have accomplished as little as it has today and budget battles would have been even more intense with a full-out civil war in the Republican party undermining trust and disrupting any negotiations. A battle over who would be speaker would have complicated things as well.

Instead, Boehner has chosen to be weak. It’s pretty clear that Boehner would have failed mightily if he had attempted to be a strong speaker, but that doesn’t mean the choice was easy. The media coverage Boehner has received has been almost universally negative. Being weak has meant being ineffective. But all of that coverage fails to take into account the larger political context that Boehner is working within. Nevertheless, Boehner has accepted it all and continued to balance the crazy demands of hard-line conservatives with the political reality that Americans blame the Republican party for these fiscal crises. On top of that, he knows that each of these crises is damaging the economy and reduces American confidence in their elected officials. It’s an almost impossible situation to deal with, but Boehner has navigated it so far by allowing himself to be weak. Don’t confuse that with him being ineffective and don’t ignore the larger realities of our current political system. It’s unfair to judge him by doing so.

Wall Street Isn’t Falling For The GOP’s False Debt Ceiling Premise

September 27, 2013Danny Vinik 7 Comments

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has a great post today on the inherent contradiction of the Republican Party’s debt ceiling position. On the one hand, Republican leadership has said that the debt ceiling must be raised. The U.S. cannot default. On the other hand, they are demanding concessions from the president for doing something they know they have to do. As Sargent said on Twitter, “if Rs concede debt limit MUST go up to avert econ disaster for all, why are they entitled to something in return for it?” The answer is that they aren’t entitled to something in return. Here’s Sargent:

The second argument made by Republican sympathizers is that, okay, Republicans will raise the debt limit in the end, but they don’t want to, so it’s still a concession on their part. But why don’t they want to raise it, if they know it must happen to avert economic disaster? The only conceivable answer is that staking out a posture of reluctance to raise it gives them leverage to extract concessions.

This gets to the core truth about this debate: As long as it’s an open question whether Republicans are prepared to allow default, the claim that Republicans are threatening to do extensive harm to the country in order to extort concessions from Dems that a radical faction of their party is demanding is 100 percent right.

On the other hand, if it is not an open question that Republicans are prepared to allow default — that in the end, John Boehner will definitely raise the debt limit with support from Democrats when it comes down to it, because he knows it must happen — then why are we even having this discussion at all?

These are very important points. The media is fueling Boehner’s negotiating strategy by buying into the premise that Republicans are actually willing to breach the debt ceiling. It’s unclear how many House Republicans fall into that camp, but we know that Boehner isn’t one of them. As the speaker of the House, he can bring a bill to the floor that will raise the debt ceiling and it will pass with plenty of Democratic support. If Boehner holds true to what he said, there is no story here. The House will raise the debt ceiling. Period. Any talk about concessions or negotiations supports the House Republican’s false premise that we could actually breach the debt ceiling.

While the media may be falling for Boehner’s trick here, Wall Street isn’t. There’s been a lot of reporting on the fact that the bond markets are calm and investors don’t seem particularly worried about a default. That’s because they understand that Boehner will raise the debt ceiling. They read the coverage of the debt ceiling. They see Ezra Klein write that he’s “scared of the debt ceiling” and Jonathan Chait say that the “debt-ceiling showdown is the fight of Obama’s life.” They see congressmen worry that they don’t know how this will end. They see and read all of this.

And they don’t care.

They know there won’t be any negotiations and that Boehner will raise the debt ceiling eventually. There isn’t a freak out in the markets, because there is nothing to freak out about. Unlike the media, the market isn’t buying into this false Republican premise.

A Few Republicans Are Crazy But Consistent

September 26, 2013Danny Vinik 1 Comment

When I read National Review reporter Jonathan Strong’s piece this morning that some House Republicans weren’t happy with their first offer to President Obama in return for raising the debt ceiling, I was shocked. The offer is basically everything House Republicans could ever want and they weren’t happy with it?! But as I’ve thought it over, it actually makes a bit of sense. From Strong’s article:

“It definitely has a lot of goodies in it – things that arguably would grow the economy and arguably would generate revenue. But still you have to address the spending problem,” said Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama.

“The reason that we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we have deficits. The reason that we have deficits is because we spend a whole lot more money than we bring in in revenue. And this debt-ceiling package does not fix the underlying cause of the problem, which are the deficits,” he added.

Other House Republicans expressed similar sentiments. This is actually consistent with what House Republicans have been screaming about for years: more spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. Now, our deficits are falling fast and the long-term debt has decreased significantly so it’s absurd to be cutting spending more. But this makes more logical sense then the christmas tree list of demands in the Republicans first offer.

The ironic thing is (and always has been) that by having the U.S. risk default, it actually drives up our borrowing cost and increases our debt. If we were to breach the debt ceiling, it would likely increase our long-term interest payments by nearly a trillion dollars. So it makes absolutely no sense to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract spending cuts or anything else from the president. It’s a crazy, irresponsible tactic. The debt ceiling should be forever abolished.

But at least some House Republicans haven’t lost sight of the fact that their original reason for using the debt ceiling as an extortion device was because of the long-term debt. Business Insider’s Josh Barro wrote today that all of this shows that “the pretense that debt limit fights are about the public debt is over.” For most Republicans, that is certainly the case. But Strong’s article demonstrates that there are some who are still sticking to that principle. They are reckless, rash and stupid for holding the debt ceiling hostage, but unlike the rest of their colleagues, they are also consistent.