John Nichols | The Nation

(AP/Pablo Martinez)

If the federal government shuts down because of the shenanigans of John Boehner and his congressional minions, most American cities will muddle through. They control their own budgets and have the power to tax and spend at sufficient levels to manage even when federal officials cannot seem to do so.

But it's different for Washington.

The residents of the capital city of the United States are not merely denied elected representation in the United States Congress—creating a classic “taxation without representation” circumstance. They are denied the sort of budget autonomy that would allow the district’s elected officials to easily -- without controversy or even comment -- access funds and resources needed to maintain local services.

“The city is an innocent bystander in this federal fight, but a local D.C. shutdown will amount to a great deal more than collateral damage,” says Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the veteran civil rights activist who represents the District of Columbia as a non-voting delegate.

DC officials have emergency plans to maintain services—with Mayor Vincent Gray declaring all government operations essential and DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson developing legislation to pay the 32,000 municipal employees from the district’s contingency cash reserve fund. Gray says that “everything the District government does—protecting the health, safety and welfare of our residents and visitors—is essential.”

This is a strategy that relies on creative reading of the federal Antideficiency Act. It may work, at least in part because, as Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney notes, there is no history of prosecuting local officials under the act and it’s unlikely the Obama administration’s Department of Justice “would decide to start charging people now.”

“President Obama, along with practically all Democrats and many Republicans, supports extending to the District the right enjoyed by the 50 states to spend money without waiting for Congress’s approval,” observes McCartney. “It hasn’t happened because other Republicans are worried about giving up their power to use the District budget to push cherished causes, such as blocking abortion funding or helping people get guns.”

That tendency to play games with regard to the District of Columbia creates lingering concerns, however.

So Norton has been scrambling to get House and Senate leaders to agree to a deal—like the one she arranged out with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich during the federal government shutdown of late 1995 and early 1996—that would allow Washington’s city government to maintain operations if Congress cannot reach a broader agreement on a continuing resolution.

“The Republican CR containing Obamacare may have a point to make, but shutting down the D.C. government is pointlessly destructive to the nation’s capital,” says Norton. “No member has ever indicated he or she wanted D.C. to shut down, many members are unaware that our local budget even comes to Congress, and most members do not know that the city government would be caught up in a federal shutdown. With the multiple steps we are taking, our goal is to convince the Congress that D.C. does not even rise to the rank of a hostage in this struggle between the administration and the Republican Congress. The city is irrelevant to any solution that might be needed. Since none of the parties has anything to gain, the least the city is entitled to is being allowed to remain open for all of the 2014 fiscal year.”

Norton is right, and she’s found sympathy for her arguments even among some key Republicans, such as House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Darrell Issa, R-California. But as a shutdown looms, tensions are rising since, as Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chair Tom Carper, D-Delaware, even a short government shutdown would have a “swift and severe” impact on the district.

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Ultimately, this crisis within a crisis provides a reminder of the absurd circumstance of the District of Columbia.

Residents of Washington are taxed. They are subject to federal laws. They serve in America’s wars.

Yet, they have limited control over their own affairs and—despite Norton’s best efforts—a constrained voice in Congress.

The remedy is not complicated.

The District of Columbia should become an American state.

According to the latest Census estimates, the district has a larger population than two states—Vermont and Wyoming—and a larger level of economic activity than 16 states.

More than 40 years ago, then President Richard Nixon urged Congress to address the district’s circumstance, saying, “it should offend the democratic sense of this nation” that the residents of the nation’s capital city were then denied a voice in Congress and control over their own affairs.

The passage of time only makes the offense more severe and—as US politics grows more petty and petulant—more threatening to the taxed-but-not-represented residents of the District of Columbia.

Read Greg Mitchell on the “Disgrace” of shutdown media coverage.

Paul Ryan promotes his budget plan in 2011. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Was there a presidential election in 2012? Yes.

Who won? Barack Obama.

Who was elected vice president? Joe Biden.

Who lost for president? Mitt Romney.

Who lost for vice president? Paul Ryan.

Cool, just wanted to get that straight.

The latest scheme from House Republicans might have confused folks.

House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan are not quite done threatening a government shutdown as part of the “Defund Obamacare” debacle. But they are already on to their next project: holding hostage any agreement to allow the debt-ceiling to rise.

Traditionally, increases in the debt ceiling to pay for spending that has already been agreed to have been approved with little debate and less opposition. This is how the “full faith and credit of the United States” is maintained, and that’s not the sort of thing that serious political leaders on either side of the partisan divide want to turn into a political football.

But no one accuses Boehner and Cantor of being serious about anything but political games. So, in advance of the mid-October date when an adjustment will be required, they are advancing a new plan—already vetted by the lobbyists on K Street—that would exchange a one-year lifting of the debt ceiling for:

• a one-year delay of Obamacare

• means testing of Medicare and other so-called “entitlement reforms”

• sweeping tax reforms

• pro-corporate tort reforms, including limits on medical malpractice lawsuits

• approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline

• approval of offshore drilling

• the undermining of regulations on business

• moves that that likely to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

• elimination of net neutrality protections for a free and open Internet

“The bill the Republicans propose to put on the floor this week is nothing but a wish list of unrelated and partisan policies they know won’t go anywhere. As a result they are taking their country’s credit hostage to their own small agenda,” House Democratic whip Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, explained Wednesday.

What’s notable is that this is not a fresh wish list.

It is, essentially, the program Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on in 2012. Romney’s been sidelined—and even blamed by Heritage Foundation head Jim DeMint for failing (because of the Romneycare precedent) to “litigate the Obamacare issue.” But Ryan, the Republican Party’s “idea guy,” remains in the thick of things, and his fingerprints are all over the Republican debt-ceiling demands—just as they were all over the Republican Party’s 2012 platform.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait mocks the House Republicans with the astute observation that they are advancing “Romney’s agenda on taxes, regulation of the environment, finance and other business, Medicare, tort reform. That’s their opening demand: implement Romney’s economic plan or melt down the economy.”

The key thing to understand, however, is that the House Republicans did not have to open the Romney playbook for a refresher. They simply turned to Romney’s running mate, who remains a definitional player in their caucus.

That brings us to next question: What is Paul Ryan’s mandate?

After the 2012 election, Ryan chirped: “We made this campaign about big ideas and big issues, which is the kind of campaign we wanted to run, so we ran the kind of campaign we wanted to run.”

True. Ryan’s ideas were front-and-center in 2012.

President Obama acknowledged as much.

“Because our budget reflects our values, it’s a reflection of our priorities,” the president declared on election-eve. “And as long as I’m president, I’m not going to kick some poor kids off of Head Start to give me a tax cut.”

“If we’re serious about the deficit, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” Obama explained. “We’ve also got to ask the wealthiest Americans to go back to the tax rates they paid when Bill Clinton was in office.”

Given a clear choice, the voters sent a clear signal.

Ryan and Romney lost the popular vote by 5 million votes.

Ryan and Romney lost the Electoral College by an overwhelming 232-206 margin.

Ryan and Romney lost every swing state except North Carolina.

Despite what Paul Ryan might now choose to imagine, his side lost the battle of budget proposals.

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.

To say otherwise is to deny the results of the 2012 election.

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Paul Ryan can try if he wants.

But he should remember what happened when he peddled a fantasy about the closing of that Janesville General Motors plant.

After Ryan tried to blame President Obama for a closure was put in play during the Bush presidency, and that resulted from trade and economic policies that Ryan supported, his neighbors in Janesville pushed back.

Ryan lost Janesville, as a vice presidential candidate and a candidate for reelection to his congressional seat.

Ryan lost surrounding Rock County, as a vice presidential and a congressional candidate.

Ryan and Romney lost Wisconsin—by such a resounding margin that NBC’s Saturday Night Live made light of the home-state rejection on the weekend after the election.

But it wasn’t just Wisconsin, and it wasn’t just the top of the ticket.

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 Ryan, Cantor and Boehner in positions of leadership.

Now, they seek to use those positions to make debt-ceiling threats, with the purpose of implementing an agenda that was rejected by the American people. Which brings us to the final question: What was the point of the 2012 election if the will of the people can be thwarted by the politicians whose “big ideas” failed at the polls?

John Nichols slams Ted Cruz’s “fake-bustering” to defund Obamacare.

(Reuters/Tony Gentile)

Pope Francis says: “I have never been a right-winger…”

And the 266th and current pope of the Catholic Church went a good distance in confirming that sentiment in a remarkable interview with the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the Italian Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica.

Asked about the church’s stance with regard to lesbians and gays, the Pope replied:

In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are “socially wounded” because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro, I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” We must always consider the person.

But the Pope, in the interview that has been published by the New York–based Jesuit journal America, went further, volunteering that

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

As Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of Dignity, a group that advocates for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics, says, the Pope’s words “signaled an entirely new direction for the Catholic Church.”

“To me, it is a clear directive to the bishops of the church to end their antigay campaigns,” says Duddy-Burke. “He is essentially saying, ‘Go back to being pastors, stop being rule-enforcers.’”

Whether that aspiration will become reality, especially in the United States, remains to be seen. But, in the interview, the Pope bluntly declared, “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

That new balance could have significant consequences for American political debates.

During the 2010 debate over health-care reform, the balancing act was a difficult one. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed passage of the Affordable Care Act because of its language on abortion, and created significant pressure on Catholic Democrats to do the same. But its message was countered by a letter from Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, which strongly supported the legislation. Then Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, released a letter signed by leaders of communities and organizations representing tens of thousands of nuns. The letter announced:

The health care bill that has been passed by the Senate and that will be voted on by the House will expand coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans. While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all. It will invest in preventative care. It will bar insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. It will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children. And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments—$250 million—in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.

Network and other Catholic social justice groups have argued, often in the face of significant criticism, that the church must strike a better balance that highlights advocacy on poverty and economic injustice issues.

Network’s ongoing “Nuns on the Bus” tour directly challenged one of the most prominent Catholics in American politics: Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who was Republican nominee for vice president in 2012.

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At the Democratic National Convention last year, Network executive director Sister Simone Campbell, fresh from a high-profile “Nuns on the Bus” tour that visited Ryan’s district, declared that the House Budget Committee chairman’s budget proposal “failed a basic moral test, because it would harm families living in poverty.”

To thunderous applause from delegates, many Catholics who had tears in their eyes, Sister Simone affirmed that “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are correct when they say that each individual should be responsible. But their budget goes astray in not acknowledging that we are responsible not only for ourselves and our immediate families. Rather, our faith strongly affirms that we are all responsible for one another. I am my sister’s keeper. I am my brother’s keeper.”

Sister Simone’s speech recalled the “seamless garment” stance advanced by progressive Catholics such as Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who in the 1980s and 1990s argued that to be “pro-life,” one must be opposed to unjust wars and capital punishment and strongly supportive of social welfare programs.

Recalling the story of a woman named Margaret, who died because she lacked adequate health insurance, Sister Simone told the Democratic convention, “The Affordable Care Act will cover people like Margaret. We all share responsibility to ensure that this vital healthcare reform law is properly implemented and that all governors expand Medicaid coverage so no more Margarets die from lack of care. This is part of my pro-life stance and the right thing to do.”

Sister Simone was arguing for balance there. It was a controversial act, and she was criticized by prominent Catholics. As recently as this year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Catholic church’s doctrinal watchdog, reprimanded the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States, mentioning “serious doctrinal problems.” The doctrinal wrangling is far from finished, and it still too early to make assumptions about how much the church will change under this pope.

Yet, now, the most prominent of all Catholics is suggesting that the church “cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods.”

The Pope’s call for a “new balance” will itself be controversial. But it suggests an opening for the message that Sister Simone and others have—for many years now—been advancing about the importance of dialing up the church’s moral advocacy on behalf of peace and economic justice,

John Nichols explains why the Nuns on a Bus denounced Paul Ryan's austerity budget.

Larry Summers (Reuters/Jason Reed)

When it became clear that members of President Obama’s own party would not support a nomination of Larry Summers to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, something—or someone—had to give.

On Sunday, Summers gave up.

The former Treasury secretary, whose Clinton-era assaults on Glass-Steagall protections and opposition to the regulation of derivatives were blamed by critics for weakening safeguards against financial turbulence, withdrew his name from consideration for Fed’s top job.

Remarkably, the decision came exactly five years after the financial meltdown of September 2008.

Progressive critics of Summers had argued for months that he was not the right candidate to tame the big banks—or to address the fundamental challenges facing the US economy.

But Obama continued to consider the man who served as his director of the National Economic Council.

Now the president must find another nominee.

Obama is said to be considering several candidates. With Summers out, speculation will focus on the possibility that Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen, who has drawn significant support from key Democratic senators, may be chosen to replace outgoing Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke. But former Fed vice chairman Don Kohn is also thought to be in the running. And the president could consider others.

Obama does not have a lot of time, however. The selection must come before Bernanke is set to exit early next year.

The Summers withdrawal was a shocker. But it came for a reason.

Though he had friends in the White House, Summers faced mounting opposition from Democrats in the Senate and from grassroots progressive groups. The prospective nominee was criticized by women’s organizations for controversial statements made during his tenure as president of Harvard. He was criticized for revolving-door Wall Street ties. And in the most dramatic show of anti-Summers sentiment, key Democratic senators began to signal in recent days that they could not confirm a man who has so frequently opposed needed regulation of the financial sector of the US economy.

“The truth is that it was unlikely he would have been confirmed by the Senate,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats. “What the American people want now is a Fed chairman prepared to stand up to the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, not a Wall Street insider whose deregulation efforts helped pave the way for a horrendous financial crisis and the worst economic downturn in the country since the Great Depression.”

Sanders has long argued that the Senate should get more serious about checking and balancing the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is a staggeringly powerful institution, with the resources and influence to define the direction of the US economy, the character of the nation’s “too-big-to-fail” banks and the extent to which unemployment issues are addressed.

Unfortunately, the Fed has a long history of serving Wall Street while neglecting the rest of the country. Be they Democrats or Republicans, be they theorists or doers, past Fed chairs have tended to embrace the thinking of the free-market fundamentalists and free-trade absolutists who have created an economy characterized by declining wages and expanding income inequality.

The trouble is that, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt explained almost eighty years ago, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

At an uncertain moment for the economy of the United States, and more importantly for the great mass of citizens whose depend on that economy, the choice of a new Fed chair took on a higher degree of significance in the eyes of senators from both parties. So critical, for so many Americans, that at least some Democrats began placing principle before party loyalty.

That’s why, as the speculation rose about the prospect that President Obama would select Summers, Democratic senators started announcing that they would vote with Republican critics of the administration to block confirmation of Summers.

As with Supreme Court nominations, nominations to chair the Fed must be confirmed by the Senate. That might not be a problem for many prospective nominees, even in a filibuster-frenzied Capitol. But when a significant number of populist Democrats indicated they would oppose Summers, prospects for getting from nomination to confirmation started to look tougher.

The objections expressed by key Democrats had historical and contemporary roots:

• During Bill Clinton’s second term, Summers worked with then–Fed chair Alan Greenspan and then–Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to block moves by Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to regulate the derivatives market. When that market began to deal in to include the toxic instruments that led to the 2008 financial market crisis.

• A year later, Summers led the fight to gut Glass-Steagall rules, which had provided an additional measure of protection against bank meltdowns.

• Early in Obama’s presidency, Summers resisted sufficient stimulus spending to jump-start the economy.

• Summers has always been a militant free-trade advocate, and he showed little interest in efforts to renew American manufacturing.

• Summers’s tenure at Harvard has remained a subject of clear controversy, with serious objections being raised with regard to his statements about women. The National Organization for Women complained about “Summers’ own history of misogyny—as president of Harvard he opined that women might lack an ‘intrinsic aptitude’ for science and engineering.”

“In short, Summers is simply the wrong person, male or female, to lead the Fed,” argued NOW.

Like many progressive organizations, NOW expressed discomfort with the approach Summers has taken to core economic questions. “Summers’ deregulatory zeal contributed directly to the Bush-era economic crash. Summers cannot be trusted to lead an institution that can do great good—but also great harm—to the economy overall and to women’s economic security in particular,” read a NOW action alert urging support for Yellen.

Progressive and populist Democrats who were in positions to do something about a possible Summers nomination shared the popular concern that the former Treasury secretary simply had not shown an inclination to steer the fed toward policies that are beneficial to the great mass of working Americans.

A key objection was that Summers defaults toward approaches that simply have not worked.

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“I start from a position of being extraordinarily skeptical that his background is appropriate for the role of the head of the Fed,” said Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat on the Banking Committee. “If you nominate someone who is a life-committed deregulator to be in a regulatory position and if you believe regulation is necessary to prevent fraud, abuse, manipulation and so forth, then there’s a lot of questions to be asked: Why is this person appropriate?”

If a Summers nomination were to come to the Banking Committee, it was expected that Merkley would vote “no.”

Montana Senator Jon Tester, a Democratic committee member, emerged last week as a definite “no.” His office announced that “Senator Tester believes we need a consensus builder to lead the Federal Reserve. He’s concerned about Mr. Summers’ history of helping to deregulate financial markets.”

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a Banking Committee Democrat who circulated a letter praising Yellen and urging the White House to consider nominating her, was also expected to vote “no.” Brown said that his letter—which attracted signatures from top Senate Democrats such as Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer—was pro-Yellen, rather than anti-Summers. “But,” he added, “there is obviously a lot of opposition here to Summers.”

That counted up to three probable “no” votes on a committee where the Democrats have only a two-seat advantage over the Republicans. Some Republicans were likely Summers backers, however. That prospect turned attention toward Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, a committee member who reportedly told the administration that she had “serious concerns” about the prospect of a Summers nomination.

In August, Warren and Sanders circulated a letter that raised questions for whoever is nominated to chair the Fed.

Sanders and Warren argued that “the next Fed chair will have an opportunity to get our economy back on track and to help rebuild America’s middle class. But that will require the right temperament and a willingness to take on Wall Street CEOs when necessary. It is critical that the next Fed chair make a genuine, long-term commitment to supporting those who don’t have armies of lobbyists and lawyers to advance their interests in Washington—working and middle-class families.”

To test that commitment, the senators asked:

1. Do you believe that the Fed’s top priority should be to fulfill its full employment mandate?

2. If you were to be confirmed as chair of the Fed, would you work to break up “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions so that they could no longer pose a catastrophic risk to the economy?

3. Do you believe that the deregulation of Wall Street, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and exempting derivatives from regulation, significantly contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

4. What would you do to divert the $2 trillion in excess reserves that financial institutions have parked at the Fed into more productive purposes, such as helping small- and medium-sized businesses create jobs?

These were (and remain) questions, especially for Summers—who presumably did not to wantr to wrestle with the “repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act” issue raised in Question 3.

He will not have to do so. But it should now be clear that whoever is nominated to replace Bernanke will have to take seriously not just those particular questions but the greater concern about whether the Fed will serve Wall Street or Main Street.

Take Action: Tell President Obama to Break Up the Old Boys’ Club and Appoint Janet Yellen

John Nichols lends advice to the next head of the Fed.