The Nation
The Sliming of Josh Freeman
Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Greg Schiano talking to quarterback Josh Freeman at a recent game against the New Orleans Saints. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
Would the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their head coach Greg Schiano leak confidential information that implied one of their own players was on drugs as a way to deflect attention from another wretched season? Schiano says “absolutely not.” But the facts point in the direction of him or his staff, and the facts are ugly as hell.
Quarterback Josh Freeman is officially in “stage one” of the NFL’s drug testing program. That means he voluntarily entered. He did so as a way to show league officials that the one time he tested positive for a banned substance, a prescription medication for ADHD, it was a one-time mistake. By electing for stage one, Freeman’s involvement is supposed to be confidential. So confidential in fact that even his team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is not supposed to know that he had entered the program. It means he had been tested forty-six times over the last eighteen months for every possible substance and passed every time.
But Josh Freeman, in high-profile fashion, is on the outs in Tampa Bay. After a dazzling beginning to his career, Freeman has withered in recent years. Following a 0-3 start in which he didn’t complete 50 percent of his passes, Freeman’s relationship with head coach Schiano would be best described as “cyanogenic.” But it is hard to think of any quarterback, or any human who could mesh with the tyrannical, browbeating former Rutgers coach.
Schiano is the sort of person who thinks heading up a football team means you need to act like an amalgam of General Patton and Chet from Weird Science. He is not only barely holding onto his job. He is barely holding onto a team that has had multiple meetings about how much they hate his style, his play-calling and pretty much everything short of his haircut. Benching Freeman is a way to deflect attention from his own epic failure as coach and be given time to break in Freeman’s backup, a raw rookie third-round draft pick named Mike Glennon.
After his benching, Freeman demanded a trade, and the team clearly wants to oblige and get as much as they can in return. But alas, there is a tension. While upper management wants to maximize Freeman’s value, those in tenuous positions of power on the Bucs—like the gobsmacking twenty-six assistant coaches on staff—have an incentive to make Josh Freeman to look as cancerous as possible. Someone connected to the team released information to ESPN’s “NFL insider” Chris Mortensen, who, in a manner far closer to Judith Miller than Glenn Greenwald, dutifully reported the leak that Freeman was in “stage one” of the drug program, while leaving out that he was reporting confidential information or the nature of the drugs involved. Immediately the rumors started to swirl and the sliming was underway.
This is exactly why sports unions take such pains—despite all the slings and arrows from the media, politicians and owners that they are “soft” on drugs—to protect players from abuses in how drug testing is administered. It is why they fight for ironclad confidentiality clauses for first offenders and an independent appeals process. They do it to protect players from having their reputations tarred from false positives. But even more significantly, they simply do not trust those in management to not use drug testing as a form of leverage against players. In other words, they believe that, left to their own devices, owners and coaches will treat players the way the Bucs are treating Josh Freeman.
I was able to get through to NFL Player’s Association executive director DeMaurice Smith after he visited Tampa Bay in an already scheduled visit as part of the routine rounds of the union. He said, “We always protect player rights with vigilance. A breach of confidentiality is one of those instances where the league should agree with us on a zero tolerance policy.” Smith is clearly challenging NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to treat this as a serious league violation. Goodell, who has liked to present himself as a Eastwood-esque sheriff when dealing with player misconduct, should treat this with the same seriousness. The smart money says he will not. When it comes to players, Goodell is Eastwood. When it comes to disciplining management, he is more like the empty chair.
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As for Josh Freeman, he had to issue a hastily composed comment last night addressing the rumors that he was in some sort of rehab. He describes the vague leaking of confidential information as a case of being “publicly violated.” People should read his full statement. This is someone who has been grievously wronged.
Whether or not you are a fan of Tampa Bay, the Bucs or even football, you should care about this issue. Drug testing and a complete absence of what can now quaintly be called “privacy” has become normalized in the American workplace. The idea that someone with a union contract that guarantees some basic protections can have his confidentiality treated like toilet paper is alarming. The idea that the Bucs could get away with this on the largest possible media platform is enraging. The idea that Greg Schiano can plead ignorance and only say, “I know what I’ve done, and I’m 100% comfortable with my behavior” and when pressed, “I’m not at liberty to comment on that,” is a joke. He should be saying that he will find out who violated his player’s privacy and discipline them. Anything short of that are grounds for dismissal. If the Bucs owners won’t do it, the league should step in. If the league won’t step in, an already angry Bucs team should just walk out. The Tampa Bay organization under Schiano has become the worst kind of laughingstock: the kind that isn’t funny.
Dave Zirin looks at how some ill chosen words from Dick Vitale have snowballed into NCAA players taking a stand for change.
Bill de Blasio Hits Back at Joe Lhota’s ‘Commie’ Charge
Left, New York City Republican mayoral hopeful Joe Lhota, and right, Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo)
After more than a week of being painted as a commie and worse, Bill de Blasio hit back yesterday against his opponent in the NYC mayor’s race with: TOP 10 FACTS ABOUT JOE LHOTA’S ICON, EXTREME CONSERVATIVE BARRY GOLDWATER. Those include Goldwater’s infamous vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wanting to use nukes in Vietnam, and his maxim: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” And the de Blasio camp didn’t even get to the John Birch Society championing Sen. Goldwater in his presidential run against LBJ in 1964.
The ugly tit-for-tat began last week, when The New York Times detailed de Blasio’s support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. That spawned an outbreak of innuendo—that he somehow supported the Sandinistas’ alleged anti-Semitism (a charge designed to cut into the Democrat’s Jewish vote), that he was a “bleary, dreary”-eyed druggie in college, that he was an unreconstructed commie symp. “Mr. de Blasio’s class warfare strategy in New York City,” Lhota himself said, “is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.”
It took a while, but yesterday the Times ran a profile of the young Joe Lhota. In college, he spent “nights in the gallery of the United States Senate, where he sat rapt as Mr. Goldwater, his boyhood hero, orated on the floor.” Lhota, the Times noted, was also accepted into “a right-leaning summer boot camp for undergraduates” that was “the brainchild of a group of conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr.”
(De Blasio could as well have run the Top 10 Facts about Buckley, including his support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he called “a prophet,” his admiration for dictators, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and his notion of the “cultural superiority of white over Negro.”)
Yes, this sort of guilt by association is absurd. Because even though Lhota says, “I still am a virulent anti-communist,” and de Blasio still finds elements of democratic socialism appealing, in truth Lhota is no more a Bircher or white supremacist than de Blasio is a fellow traveler or anti-Semite.
And at first de Blasio shunned the whole approach. “It’s 2013. I’d like to note, I’m not going to stoop to Joe Lhota’s level here,” he said. “I am a progressive who believes in an activist approach to government. You can call it whatever the heck you want.”
But de Blasio has been forced to hit back; the media was keeping him on the defense, chasing him, asking did he ever agree with Marxism, why’d he honeymoon in Cuba? Even allies in the press wanted to know, was his support for the Sandinistas merely a “youthful indiscretion,” as someone at a New Yorker lunch asked him. “No, it’s not a youthful indiscretion,” he said, refusing to take the cowardly way out. “The reason I got involved, was because of United States foreign policy.”
But for some reason, the press isn’t on Lhota’s tail to explain his adulation of Goldwater, much less are they grilling him on if we should we nuke Syria or whether he’d vote against the Civil Rights Act (not a far-fetched question given the Supreme Court’s gutting of section 4 of the Voting Rights Act). The Times certainly didn’t ask him such questions, nor would it occur to most reporters to do so.
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This is a case of the media not making false equivalencies but habitually failing to notice actual equivalencies. Politicians’ involvement in left-wing causes stimulates media hormones more than the right-wing ones do. Partly that’s because the center has moved rightward. But even if it hadn’t, America’s red-baiting, McCarthyite past still has the power to taint.
For whatever reason, ventures into lefty world are treated like a dirty bad act, and they produce a kind of slut-shaming. Maybe the body politic needs to believe that it contains something just too awful to fully accept.
De Blasio may become not just NYC’s most progressive mayor but the first big-name pol to break that bleary, dreary mindset.
Read John Nichols’s post on the ideological differences between de Blasio and current mayor Mike Bloomberg.
‘NYT’ Fingers McClatchy for ‘Terror’ Leak—and Now McClatchy Hits Back
(AP/Mark Lennihan)
Yesterday morning the top story at the New York Times site reported on US analysts feeling that the early-August leak to the media on how Al Qaeda communicates had done more to harm our anti-terrorism effort than anything revealed by Edward Snowden. You remember: we briefly closed some of our embassies, for starters.
And the Times quickly recounted how it refused to publish the names that were key in the information, at the request of the government, and only did so after our security folks had given them clearance—after the McClatchy news outlet went with it.
The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.
McClatchy Newspapers first reported on the conversations between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, the New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders after senior American intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the government became aware of the McClatchy article, it dropped its objections to the Times’s publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug. 5.
This was a rather serious claim against rival McClatchy, so I awaited some kind of response. Now McClatchy hits back at the Times in this report.
For example: “McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher said: ‘We believe that if the Yemenis knew that the United States had intercepted conversations between two al Qaida honchos, Americans should as well.’” More:
Ever since that report, the Times article said, terrorists had stopped using “a major communications channel” that U.S. officials had been monitoring and that intelligence officials “have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaida’s leaders and operatives.”
Asher, in a statement, said that in the nearly two months since McClatchy had published its story, no U.S. agency has contacted the newspaper company about the article or has asked any questions about the origins of the story.
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“Multiple sources inside and outside of the Yemeni government confirmed our reporting and not one of them told us not to publish the facts,” Asher said.
Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and the author of “The Last Refuge,” a book on al Qaida in Yemen, backed Asher’s assessment, saying that he had been told before the McClatchy report that Zawahiri and Wuhayshi were the two men who’d been monitored and that many people in Yemen knew the details of the communication. Johnsen had made a similar statement to McClatchy in early August.
“The idea that the identities of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri are responsible for the difficulties the U.S. is having in tracking al Qaida and AQAP is laughable,” Johnsen said Monday, referring to the Yemen al Qaida affiliate by its initials. “The U.S. publicly closed 19 embassies, the participation of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri was well known in Yemen. I was told about it prior to McClatchy publishing it. And once the leaks start from the U.S. government they can be hard to stop or to control.”
Robert Scheer explores the differences between state-sanctioned leaks and those from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.
Sorry, Putin and Kucinich: Assad Did It
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich speaks at a union-sponsored event in 2011. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
It’s right to be skeptical of American claims about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, given the duplicity of the George W. Bush administration in Iraq. It’s right to be concerned that the United States is planning to bomb Syria, if the current accord over destroying Syria’s chemical weapons stocks breaks down.
But here’s what’s not right: it’s not right to deny the overwhelming evidence that Syria used poison gas in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21. I’m talking to you, Vladimir Putin. And to you, Dennis Kucinich. And to all of those on the left who’ve speculated that the horrific incident on August 21 was the work of Syria’s rebels. It wasn’t. The Syrian government did it. Let’s put that one to rest.
Putin, scrambling to defend an ally and anxious over the possibility that President Obama would carry out what, by all accounts, would be a useless, strategically incompetent, and lethal and dangerous attack, is the leading serial denier of the obvious. In doing so, Putin and his government—including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations—have made themselves look foolish. The same goes for Dennis Kucinich, the liberal former Democratic member of Congress from Ohio who, unaccountably, has joined forces with Fox News and who conducted a sycophantic interview with Assad in Damascus.
Russia has stood firm against an attack on Syria, and Putin and Lavrov have been instrumental in pushing for a Geneva II peace conference in search of a political settlement of the civil war in Syria, which has left tens of thousands dead. But Putin’s absurd whitewashing of the Syrian government for its obvious use of poison gas should not be part of the picture.
Let’s recap: in an op-ed in The New York Times, Putin blithely cited invisible evidence that the rebels were responsible for the gas use, and he even managed to work into his ridiculous defense mention of a threat to Israel:
“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack—this time against Israel—cannot be ignored.”
In a news conference in Russia, Putin went so far as to say that the rebels slyly used old Russian-made artillery shells to disguise its origin:
Speaking at a conference, Putin said “we have every reason to believe that it was a provocation, a sly and ingenious one.” He added, however, that its perpetrators have relied on “primitive” technology, using old Soviet-made ammunition no longer in the Syrian army’s inventory.
Taking his case even further, Putin suggested—no doubt with a smirk of irony—that the United States might have to consider fighting the rebels when it turns out that it was the opposition who used the gas:
“If it is determined that these rebels used weapons of mass destruction, what will the United States do with the rebels? What will the sponsors of the rebels do? Stop the supply of arms? Will they start fighting against the rebels?”
Many critics pointed out that Putin cited various dubious sources in trying to cast Assad as blameless, including discredited reports in Turkish newspapers and the comments of a Syrian nun loyal to the Assad government.
Kucinich, a valiant crusader against war now weirdly affiliated with Fox, managed to interview Assad in September. Writing on The Huffington Post, Kucinich created a Top Ten list of “Unproven Claims” about Syria’s use of poison gas, drawing on sources both mainstream and conspiratorial. And while his intention may be good—namely, to undermine President Obama’s case for war—nowhere does he cite the weighty evidence that has accumulated that points to the almost certain conclusion that it was, indeed, the Syrian army which used the gas.
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To believe that it was indeed the government of Syria—whether ordered by Assad himself, his brother, a senior military commander or someone else—it isn’t necessary to take on faith the White House intelligence summary that was released on August 30, although that memo makes a convincing case. There’s also the report from Doctors Without Borders, which said that more than 3,600 people were hospitalized in just three hospitals supported by international humanitarian groups, proving that the attack was so massive that it’s highly unlikely that the ragtag oppositionists could have struck with such deadly force. Or the conclusion of Richard Lloyd and Theodore Postol, who studied the rocket attacks and the payloads of those rockets to determine that the rockets held up to fifty liters of gas, a massive payload that suggests only government capabilities.
And, of course, there is the report from the United Nations itself, an annex of which provided important clues about where the rockets came from, as The New York Times noted:
One annex to the report also identified azimuths, or angular measurements, from where rockets had struck, back to their points of origin. When plotted and marked independently on maps by analysts from Human Rights Watch and by The New York Times, the United Nations data from two widely scattered impact sites pointed directly to a Syrian military complex.
None of thus justifies a US attack on Syria. Still, that’s no reason to concoct far-fetched theories with no basis in fact.
Katrina vanden Heuvel looks into Oliver Stone’s documentary series, The Untold History of the United States.
Tell the FCC: Prison Phone Companies Shouldn't Profit Off Indigent Families
Today, The Nation partnering with the ACLU and Beyond Bars—a Brave New Films project—launched a new video series. “Prison Profiteers” profiles the powerful corporations—from telephone companies to private prison corporations—making billions of dollars by exploiting our mass incarceration crisis.
The first video highlights Global Tel* Link, a for-profit telephone company that makes $500 million per year charging prisoners exorbitant rates to keep in touch with their loved ones. Calls through Global Tel* Link can cost as much as $1.17 per minute—that’s $17 for a fifteen-minute phone call.
TO DOThe Federal Communications Commission took an important first step in August by capping the price of prisoner phone calls made from one state to another at twenty-five cents per minute. But most prisoners are serving time in their home state. Tell the FCC to finish the job and end this predatory practice for all prison phone calls.
TO READThe Nation’s Liliana Segura gives an overview of the massive scope of the crisis of companies profiting off of mass incarceration: “With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States,” she writes, “prisons are big business.”
TO WATCHNearly 3 million kids in the United Stats have an incarcerated parent. In our video on Global Tel* Link, 9-year-old Kenny talks about keeping in touch with his incarcerated father.
American Exceptionalism, According to Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone. (Courtesy of Showtime)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Oliver Stone’s 10-hour documentary series, The Untold History of The United States, which first appeared on Showtime in 2012, is about to be rereleased this month on DVD with three new episodes and a post-series conversation between Stone and his frequent collaborator, author and activist Tariq Ali.
The series, which is remarkably free of talking heads and offers a treasure trove of historical footage, kicks off with an alternative narrative of the Cold War. Like many historians, Stone believes that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, he might have avoided the Cold War. If the Democrats had not dumped Vice President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman in 1944, Stone contends, Wallace would have carried on FDR’s policies and “there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race and no cold war.
Untold History is full of such tantalizing what-ifs. What if Kennedy had lived? Would there have been a Vietnam War? What if George W. Bush had taken the advice of US intelligence operatives more seriously before the 9/11 attacks? Could the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq have been avoided?
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Most historians tend to avoid this “counterfactual” or “what if” history, but these alternative scenarios provide thought exercises that help us consider what might have happened if history had taken a radically different course. They make us more aware of the missed opportunities, the roads not taken. They challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and narrow consensus of our contemporary political debate. And they teach us about the past so that we can learn from it.
Stone has said that in high school and college he was taught a “Disneyfied” version of American history. He resolved to use his talents as a filmmaker to challenge that version. This he has done through popular fictionalized history and political films such as Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and its sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
As he and his collaborator Peter Kuznick wrote, “Historically-challenged students turn into historically-challenged adults who make for unqualified citizens. Our republican system requires a literate, educated, and knowledgeable public.” Unfortunately, today’s students “know very little history. Second, much of what they do learn is extremely partial or flat out wrong.”
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Federal Workers Nationwide Protest Government Shutdown
The US Capitol is photographed through a chain fence in Washington, DC, on September 30, 2013 (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque).
The US government shut down at midnight as the Republican-controlled House continued to demand changes to Obamacare, and in response workers all across the country are protesting the GOP’s actions.
Nearly 100 government employees rallied in downtown Chicago at Federal Plaza on Monday to protest the shutdown, the first in seventeen years, calling Congress’ actions, “political theater of the absurd.”
Fox Chicago reports workers carried signs reading: “Jobs Not Furloughs.”
When asked about the impact of a shutdown, a spokesperson for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office responded vaguely: “I think we all know what that looks like.”
The Chicago Tribune offered some more specifics: “The early prevailing wisdom is that the Chicago area should be able to weather a short-term shutdown largely unscathed but that the impact will become more apparent the longer federal funding is suspended.”
And the Sun-Times reports that if employees considered “non-essential to national health safety and security” are furloughed, it will be “more difficult or impossible” to get a passport, a gun permit, or a new Social Security card.
Chris Black, who workers for the EPA, told CBS that a shutdown would do more than just furlough workers. A shutdown will also affect the jobs they do.
“I’m involved in ongoing cleanups at different hazardous waste sites. They’re long-term cleanup projects and they’re going to be delayed,” said Black.
“We won’t have people inspecting wastewater treatment plants or sewage treatment plants, drinking water plants. We won’t have people out there checking the water quality,” John O’Grady, AFGE Local 704, said.
“It’s going to cost millions of dollars to shut the government down nationwide and then it’s going to cost millions of dollars to get the government up and running,” O’Grady said to ABC.
The shutdown might also disrupt the federal investigators at Monday’s CTA crash that injured forty-eight people.
ABC: “As of midnight tonight—if the government shuts down—they’ll be required to gather the evidence they have, the perishable evidence and fly back to Washington,” said Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois).
“We have dedicated public servants here. They’re basically being used as guinea pigs,” said Mike Mikulka, an environmental engineer and a vice president of the union, to the Sun-Times. “Lawmakers had all summer to do their job and fund the government.”
Mikulka added that with the shutdown looming, he was ordered not to travel to northern Wisconsin to supervise cleanup of an arsenic-laced site. As a result, the work will be delayed, he said.
Sun-Times: “Capt. Dustin Cammack, a public affairs officer for the Illinois National Guard, said about 1,200 employees of the Guard are subject to furlough, most of them military technicians at the bases, the Springfield headquarters or an aviation facility at Midway Airport. The Guard has 10,500 people working in Illinois, he said.”
Brent Barron, president of the union’s Local 648 and a workers’ compensation claims examiner with the US Department of Labor, told the Sun-Times that he falls into a category of workers who would be expected to report but might not get paid. Furthermore, Labor Department aids who compute the unemployment numbers will themselves be jobless, and a long shutdown could affect unemployment compensation checks, which are sent out by states, but involve federal money.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents federal employees in the St. Louis region, will hold an informational picket Tuesday morning to protest the government shutdown.
“We need Congress to do what they were elected to do and pass a budget that allows the federal government to function,” AFGE Local 3354 President Steven Hollis, said in a statement.
According to a statement from the union, under a shutdown, federal employees will be furloughed without pay while contractors who operate outside federal facilities will continue to be paid for their work, a practice the union calls a “double standard” that is “outrageous.”
A similar coalition protested at the Tip O’Neill federal building in Boston on Monday.
Karen Carson, a wheelchair-bound activist, told Boston Magazine that a government shutdown could result in her losing disability checks, missing her rent payment, and not collecting the food stamps she needs in order to survive.
“I have $70 left in my checking account,” she said, sitting alongside protesters on Merimac Street in Boston on Monday, where close to 100 people gathered on the steps of the Massachusetts Republican Party headquarters to protest a possible government shutdown. “I’m fearful of this happening. If federal payments don’t go through, I won’t be able to afford my rent tomorrow.
Another demonstration took place last week as the American Foreign Service Workers Association held a rally on Friday titled, “Don’t Shut Down Diplomacy” in Washington, DC, The Washington Post reports.
“Thousands of Foreign Service employees—diplomats and development experts—will be kept from their posts [in the event of a shutdown],” AFSA president Bob Silverman said in a statement. “In this time of continuing instability in the Middle East and uncertainty around the world, we appeal to members of Congress to allow these men and women to continue doing their jobs.”
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The Oregon Air National Guard base is already feeling the impact of the shutdown. Guard members are still being asked to show up this week for “further guidance,” but there remains the question of whether they’ll be paid.
KOIN:
Critical services—such as the fighter jets and guard fire fighters—will stay online. The government stresses public safety is priority No. 1.
But there will be fewer training flights at the Portland, Ore., base. And the guard’s Starbase program, which teaches advance math and science to Portland school students, has already been cancelled for the week. One of the teachers in the Starbase program, who also works for the airfighter wing, is one who would be furloughed in the event of a federal shut-down.
Amanda Schroder, who represents local federal employees, is organizing a Portland rally Tuesday that is being coordinated through the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2157.
In the midst of these protests, KOIN >notes, Congresspersons will still take home their paychecks of $174,000 a year.
Zoe Carpenter wrote about who would be hurt most from a prolonged government shutdown.
America Gets Primaried
(Courtesy of Flickr user brownpau. Licensed under Creative Commons.)
Very early Tuesday morning, just after the Office of Management and Budget told agencies to begin “the orderly shutdown” of the federal government, a frustrated Harry Reid went to the floor of the United States Senate.
The Senate—with its Democratic majority and its reasonable number of reasonable Republicans—stood ready to take action to prevent the shutdown from moving forward, he said.
But, the Nevada Democrat admitted, there was no indication that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was prepared to join in a serious discussion.
Of the House Republicans, Reid said: “It is embarrassing that these people (who) are elected to represent the country are representing the Tea Party.”
Reid was griping.
But, to the extent that he is using the term “Tea Party” in the broadest sense—to refer to the money-and-media election complex that has developed to “police” Republican primaries—he was also stating the essential fact of the political moment.
There are a good number of reasonable Republicans in the House.
But they are not prepared to be reasonable. Though their party has little chance of prevailing in the quixotic bid to “defund Obamacare” via the government shutdown that began at midnight, it was too much to ask that they speak that “emperor-has-no-clothes” truth at the critical moment.
Why?
It is not because the American people have embraced the Ted Cruz fantasy. While it is true that many retain doubts about the Affordable Care Act, the broader issue of whether to halt its implementation was litigated last year.
The point of the 2012 election was clear enough. In case anyone missed it, the “numbers guy” in the House Republican Caucus, Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, joined the Republican ticket to make everything crystal clear.
“We made this campaign about big ideas and big issues,” said the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate.
He was right.
Republicans offered their alternative to the American people.
And they lost.
Ryan and Romney lost the popular vote by 5 million votes.
Ryan and Romney lost the Electoral College by an overwhelming 332-206 margin.
Ryan and Romney lost every swing state except North Carolina.
Obama got the mandate—a bigger percentage of the popular vote, in fact, than Presidents Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, Carter in 1976, Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Bush in 2000 and 2004.
And the mandate went beyond the presidential race.
Democrats were expected to lose seats in the US Senate. Instead, they added two seats and won the popular vote for contested seats nationally by more than 10 million votes—ending up on the winning side of a 54-42 split.
Democrats also won the popular vote for US House seats by 1.7 million votes. In other words, gerrymandering and electoral processes that do not always produce a clear reflection of popular sentiment kept Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and John Boehner in positions of leadership.
These are the undeniable facts of the 2012 election.
But there is an equally undeniable fact.
The same gerrymandering that helped Republicans to secure control of the House even when they lost the popular vote now defines the chamber. After the Republican wave of 2010, the new governors and legislators of states across the country drew Republican-friendly lines for House districts.
But they did not draw them a little Republican-friendly. They drew them a lot that way.
Contrasts between the Republican Congress of 1995–96, which forced the last government shutdown, and the Republican Congress of today, are stark.
The House Republican majority at the time of the last shutdown was 236. Now, it is a comparable 232.
But that’s where the comparisons stop.
National Journal reminds us that
* Back in 1995, 79 House Republicans represented districts that voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. Today, a mere 17 House Republicans represent districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2012
* Back in 1995, 141 House Republicans represented districts where the Republican presidential vote was at or below the 55 percent level. In effect, these were potential swing districts. Today, just 71 House Republicans represent even potentially swing districts where Mitt Romney attracted less than 55 percent of the 2012 vote.
* According to The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, the average GOP House member represented a district with a 6.6-point Republican electoral advantage. Today, the figure is 11.1 percent.
A misread of those numbers imagines that everyone who represents an overwhelmingly Republican district is a hyper-partisan Tea Party activist who would never entertain the notion of compromise. In fact, many of the districts are represented by senior Republicans who were around for the 1995–96 showdown and embraced the negotiations that settled it—members like Wisconsin’s Tom Petri and Michigan’s Fred Upton.
They would, undoubtedly, do so again. Indeed, there are dozens of Republicans who would be prepared to end the madness of the moment.
But they cannot do so—for fear of being “primaried.”
In overwhelmingly Republican districts, the threat of a general election defeat—at the hands of swing voters infuriated with extremist stances and general dysfunction—is slim. But the threat of a primary challenge, and defeat, is real. With national networks of right-wing donors at the ready to fund runs against so-called “Republican-in-Name-Only” incumbents, the threat is amplified.
Upton, once considered a relative moderate, has faced repeated Republican primary challenges in his southwestern Michigan district. In 2010, the congressman got a wake-up call when his right-wing foe won 43 percent of the Republican primary vote. Upton got the message. He has moved steadily to the right, and that has provided him with some ideological insulation. But were he to emerge now as a supporter of compromise and cooperation, he would be in serious political trouble.
The same goes for Petri in Wisconsin and dozens of other Republican members. As Congressman Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, says, GOP colleagues who know better must embrace the shutdown politics “make it out of a Republican primary.”
The combination of gerrymandering, winner-take-all elections and big-money national politics has done more than establish a political landscape where Republicans have significant advantages in races for control of the House. It has established a landscape where reasonable Republicans are afraid to be reasonable.
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The prospect of being “primaried” matters more than the threat of punishment at the polls in November.
So Republicans who might once have sought common ground now refuse to do so.
They are protecting their political prospects. And it will probably work for them.
They won’t be “primaried.”
Rather, America is being “primaried.”
That’s the root of the crisis. And it provides a reminder that, if Americans want Washington to function, they had best establish election systems that allow the great mass of Americans to have their say—not the tiny percentage of voters who decide primaries in overwhelmingly Republican districts.
Groups like Common Cause and FairVote have for years been shouting out the pathologies creating by gerrymandering and a winner-take-all politics where most Americans are shoved to the sidelines. They’ve always been right. But they have often been dismissed as “good-government types” who are too much concerned with process and too little concerned with immediate political and governing crises.
Now, the pathologies they warned about are the crisis.
John Nichols shows how the government shutdown highlights the need for DC statehood.
The Tea Party Freedom Fighters
Read all of Tom Tomorrow's toons here.
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Government Shutdown Will Hit Federal Workers, Poor Americans
The US Capitol in Washington, Saturday, September 28, 2013, with the midnight Monday deadline fast approaching for Congress to break an impasse over funding the government. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Shortly after 2 pm today the Senate stripped several of the House GOP’s amendments from a short-term funding bill and sent the legislation back, making it all but certain that a partial government shutdown will occur at midnight.
The economic impact of a shutdown depends on how long it lasts, but workers and the poor are likely to be hit the hardest. About 800,000 of 2.1 million federal employees will be furloughed, with no guarantee of retroactive pay. “Essential” employees like active-duty service members, scientists posted to the International Space Station, mine inspectors for the Department of Labor, and Secret Service agents will continue to work, many without pay. The members of Congress creating the mess are considered essential, and will receive their paychecks.
Low-income women and children, on the other hand, may not be able to access food and health care. That’s because federal funds will not be available for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides food benefits and clinical services. States may have enough cash to continue operations for a few days, but even federal contingency funds “would not fully mitigate a shortfall for the entire month of October,” according to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program. Food stamp recipients would still receive their benefits through the SNAP program, but other nutritional programs would shut down.
Several Head Start programs, which have already experienced crippling budget cuts under sequestration, would feel immediate effects and may be unable to offer educational services to children. By late October, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs will run out of funds to pay compensation and pension to more than 3.6 million veterans.
The DC area would feel the shutdown most acutely. According to the New York Times the federal government employs about 30 percent of the workers in the District of the Columbia, 20 percent of those in Arlington County, Virginia, and 10 percent in Montgomery County, Maryland. Because of the sequester government workers have already been hit with pay freezes and furloughs, and 330,000 people in the region lost their jobs.
“Our members have already suffered through six days of furloughs this year, we’ve been in a three-year pay freeze and there’s been a constant threat of job loss. It’s been a year of total uncertainty,” said J. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employee union. According to Cox, most of the union’s members make between $35,000 and $40,000 a year. “Federal employees have given enough. We’ve given [billions of] dollars to the federal deficit. It’s time to quit looking to us to be the bargaining chip.”
The District would be legally bound to curtail all of its services, including garbage collection, and to furlough all but essential employees. Frustrated by the lack of budget autonomy in the District, city leaders have made their own plans, which include declaring all workers essential and drafting legislation to pay them with a contingency fund.
Although the shutdown isn’t expected to be catastrophic, as would a default on the national debt (which will happen if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by October 17), failing to fund the government will still cost taxpayers. The shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 cost $1.4 billion, about $2 billion when adjusted for inflation. That figure is probably low, as Ezra Klein points out, because it leaves out the lost value of uncompleted work and revenue lost from actions like shuttering the national parks.
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The immediate effects of a shutdown would also ripple out to businesses and the stock market. “The government plays a huge role in the markets—that’s the case in every advanced economy. If it’s not functioning it’s simply going to hurt many aspects of the everyday economy,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Piling another crisis on top of a feeble economy could shake consumer confidence, which plummeted during the debt ceiling standoff in 2011. Not knowing if they’ll be paid retroactively, furloughed employees are likely to reel in spending. “We’re already dealing with a recovery that’s too weak from that perspective,” Bernstein said.
To avoid a shutdown or to end it the House and the Senate will have to agree on a short-term spending bill that’s likely to maintain funding at current levels. But if the Continuing Resolution lasts only a week or two, Congress will soon be back in the same soup. On the other hand, a longer CR locks in a bad budget, helping to turn post-sequester spending levels into a new normal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, maintaining the sequester’s spending cuts would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs next year, and reduce gross domestic product. “We are very much defining ‘normal’ downwards,” said Bernstein. “In many ways, the solution we’re all hoping for is one that locks in its own version of dysfunction.”
Ultimately, the millions of Americans waiting for a budget that addresses long-term unemployment and wage stagnation, that provides adequate funding for public services and that strengthens the economy as a whole will be hurt by a government shutdown and any other delays in the passage of a long-term spending bill. But instead of governing, the GOP will turn the lights off—and even that won’t stop the Affordable Care Act rollout.
The Justice Department is bringing North Carolina’s voter suppression law to court.
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