Just a reminder: John Boehner can end the government shutdown any time he wants to. No, really:
All Boehner has to do is bring a “clean” continuing resolution to the House floor -- that is, a bill to fund the government without any strings attached -- and give it a vote. Most, if not all, Democrats would vote for it, and enough Republicans are publicly now on board to pass it. The Huffington Post has been keeping a running tally of which Republicans have said they support doing this. Privately, more GOP lawmakers have indicated they would as well.
So why won't he? One theory, from the right:
A clean CR has never been an option. Peter King of New York and his allies may want one, but the leadership privately believes it’d almost certainly raise tensions within the ranks and cripple their negotiating position.
Instead, the leadership is digging in for an extended impasse with Senate Democrats. Based on my latest conversations with insiders, their plan isn’t to eventually whip Republicans toward a clean CR and back down after a few days of messaging the shutdown, as some have believed; it’s to keep fighting, and, in the process, preserve the House GOP’s fragile unity — and maybe, if they’re lucky, win a concession from Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
But that unity, more than anything, is critical for Boehner, especially as the debt limit nears. Per his allies, his fear is, if he brings up a clean CR, he’d be seen as conceding to Reid, who’s seen as the villain of villains within the House GOP. Thirty to forty conservatives would likely revolt against such a maneuver, and so would their backers in the conservative movement. In the press, he’d likely be cheered for a profile in courage; within the House, the decision would be seen by his critics on the right as a betrayal of the highest order. There is nothing they detest more than the idea of caving, and Boehner knows that.
In other words, they're high-schoolers at best.
At least not all of the shutdown's unintended consequences were bad.
Sullivan has a scathing piece about the Republicans shutting down the government again. And closer to home, apparently Chicago has phantom El trains that drive themselves right into other trains.
But yesterday's Atlantic Cities piece on bike-share etiquette is much more enjoyable to think about than either of those:
The central ethos is built into the name. "The whole point of it is it’s bike share, it’s not bike rental," says Kim Reynolds, the office and administrative manager in Washington for Alta Bicycle Share, which operates Capital Bikeshare. In Chicago, the network is called Divvy, which literally means "to divide and share." In Minneapolis and St. Paul, their system is called Nice Ride, a play on the notion that bike-share requires a certain quality that Minnesotans in particular possess.
Bad behavior is technically harder to achieve on a bike. You can’t leave trash in it. The bikes themselves are relatively difficult to damage. And penalties for hogging them are built into the price structure: So you want to take that bike and lock it up outside your office all day? That’s fine. You’ll pay $75 or so in most cities for the right. (Here’s how nice they are in Minnesota: If you do this without understanding the system with Nice Ride, customer service will call you up, gently explain they want their bike back, forgive you, and refund the charge the first time.)
See? Much more pleasant than the rest of the day's news. Or giant, deadly hornets. Better than those, too.
I was going to post about the Cubs, who just ended the 2013 season a few hours ago, but then I saw James Fallows' clear and concise takedown of the pernicious notion that the impending shutdown of the U.S. Government is anything other than a Republican Party failure:
In short, we have a faction making historically unprecedented demands -- give us everything, or we stop the government and potentially renege on the national debt. And it is doing so less than a year after its party lost the presidency, lost the Senate (and lost ground there), and held onto the House in part because of rotten-borough distortions.
You can call this a lot of things, but "gridlock" should not be one of them. And you can fault many aspects of the President's response -- when it comes to debt-default, I think he has to stick to the "no negotiations with terrorists" hard line. But you shouldn't pretend that if he been more "reasonable" or charming he could placate a group whose goal is the undoing of his time in office.
We'll see what happens tomorrow. And even if we avoid a government shutdown Tuesday, the Treasury's borrowing authority will run out mid-month unless the House gets itself in order. Fun times, fun times.
No time to post today, so just read this:
What the sheer gob-smacking scale of these demands means is that the GOP effectively wants to nullify the last election entirely (except of course for their gerry-mandered, no-popular vote House majority). The staggering thing about this party as it now exists is that it views the governance of the other party as always effectively illegitimate. Elections do not matter. Only their agenda matters. No compromise is possible, even when this kind of catastrophic default is hanging over our heads. In fact, the danger of catastrophic default is something they relish in order to undo the basic principles of democratic government.
The Republican party's antics have reminded me of Chicken Little recently. On reflection, I thought a closer analogue really is a book I read when I was five: The Monster at the End of this Book. I won't spoil the ending for you—it was so good I think my dad read it to me about a ZILLION times—except to say that the GOP's gloom-and-doom histrionics about the Affordable Care Act feel similar to the premise of the book. The monster at the end of the book really is [SPOILER!] the Republican Party itself.
In any event, rather than being bad for most Americans as the GOP would have you believe, it's looking more like the real reason Republicans don't want the law to take effect is that it will probably work better than expected. This, in turn, could make people wonder what the GOP's real agenda is.
I mean, why would the opposition party want to make most Americans poorer?
In honor of Constitution Day, I'll be spending time at the Cook County Criminal Courts at 26th and California. Jury duty starts at 9am. I couldn't ask for a more...appropriate...day to serve on a jury. (Of course, the part of the Constitution guaranteeing jury trials didn't come about until 1791.)
And I couldn't let such a personally-relevant Constitution Day go by without re-posting this:
Paul Krugman points out, one more time, that we haven't solved the root problems that led to our 5+-year recession:
Suppose you’re a hedge fund manager, getting 2 and 20 — fees of 2 percent of investors’ money, plus 20 percent of profits. What you want to do is load up on as much leverage as possible, and make high-risk, high return investments. This more or less guarantees that your fund will eventually go bust — but in the meantime you’ll have raked in huge personal earnings, and can walk away filthy rich from the wreckage.
What brings this to mind is a new Center for Public Integrity report on the lifestyles of the rich and infamous — finance honchos who brought down their companies and much of the world economy with them. So, Lehman’s Dick Fuld gets to ruminate on what went wrong in his Greenwich mansion or his 40-acre ranch, or maybe his 5-bedroom house in Florida. Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns plays bridge from his $25 million apartment in the Plaza Hotel. And so on down the line.
So it really was heads they win, tails we lose, with all the incentives being to take maximum risks and let the taxpayers clean up the mess.
Luckily, it won’t happen again, because we’ve had comprehensive financial reform. Right? Right?
As one commenter wrote, "The Occupy Wall Street folks were on to something."
Democratic candidate for Minneapolis Mayor Jeff Wagner has a new ad:
It's hathos-inspiring.
If the AP report is true, this is a complete win for the President:
Assad is now agreeing to preserve and strengthen that norm. He’s agreeing to sign the treaty banning chemical weapons — a treaty Syria has been one of the lone holdouts against. He’s creating a situation in which it would be almost impossible for him to use chemical weapons in the future, as doing so would break his promises to the global community, invite an immediate American response, and embarrass Russia.
This is, in many ways, a better outcome than the White House could have hoped for. Punishing Syria may or may not have actually reinforced the norm against chemical weapons — particularly if the strikes went bad and the American people punished members of Congress who voted for them. But Syria joining the treaty against chemical weapons definitely, almost definitionally, reinforces the ban.
This we call "diplomacy." And it's good to see when it works.
Security guru Bruce Schneier has two essays in the Guardian this week. The first explains how the US government betrayed the Internet:
By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.
I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
He followed up today with a guide to staying secure against the NSA:
1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.
2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections – and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols – you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.
There are three other points, all pretty simple.