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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Ryan Lizza, James Surowiecki, and Evan Osnos on the government shutdown.
00:16:08
Ryan Lizza, James Surowiecki, and Evan Osnos on the government shutdown.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:14]
Ryan Lizza
Hello, you have reached the Executive Office of the President. We apologize, but due to the lapse in federal funding, we are unable to take your call. Once funding has been restored, our operations will resume. Please call back at that time. Thank you.
- [01:30]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive Editor of the New Yorker. It's Thursday, October 3rd, three days into the government shutdown. On Tuesday, President Obama blamed House Republicans for Congress failure to fund the government, and then he warned them about their threats not to raise the debt ceiling.
- [01:51]
Ryan Lizza
If they go through with it this time and force the United States to default on its obligations for the first time in history. It'd be far more dangerous than a government shutdown. As bad as a shutdown is, it would be an economic shutdown.
- [02:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
To talk about how we got here, I'm joined by Ryan, Lissa, James Surowiecki, and our former China correspondent Evan Osnos, who just moved to Washington and will be writing about politics in the US for that reason, I want to begin with you, Evan. The first day on your new beat was Tuesday. What's it been like making the transition from Beijing to the Beltway?
- [02:23]
Ryan Lizza
Well.
- [02:23]
Evan Osnos
Well, I have to say, it is a bit like showing up for spring training on the day that the league goes on strike. I called the White House and got voicemail. I think like a lot of people, which was not an experience I'd imagined. When I used to live in China, we got used to getting emails from friends back in the United States who would sort of see something distressing in the headlines and send a concerned note, just wishing us well amid all this political upheaval and uncertainty. And then this week, I've been getting emails from friends in Beijing wishing us well amid all this political upheaval and uncertainty. I have to say that people who are looking at it from far away, I think, are struck most of all by one thing, which is that most of the time, when a government goes into a shutdown of some kind, it's because of some outside event. It's because of an insurgency, it's because of a natural disaster. And I think people are grappling with how it is that we've done this to ourselves in China. Of course, the newspapers are playing this up and describing this as the perils of excess democracy. This is what happens when you have more than one party.
- [03:25]
Dorothy Wickenden
Ryan, you have been reporting more times than I like to remember about the various budget crises that the country's gone through since Obama took office. You've reported over the years on House Speaker Boehner and on flamethrowers like Senator Ted Cruz. People have blamed both Boehner and President Obama for caving to conservative pressure. Tell us how we got to this fiasco yet again.
- [03:49]
Ryan Lizza
Well, the real reason is that Boehner has this right flank in the House of Representatives. His speakership is based basically been defined by having to mollify this Tea Party Conference and just the sort of backstory to how we got to the shutdown. Boehner knew that the state was approaching, and as it approached over the spring and summer, he laid out his position. He said we should not threaten to shut down the government as a way to try and defund Obamacare. Remember, that was the original argument that got us into this over the summer, really in August, when a lot of folks weren't paying attention to this, there was a political campaign to pressure him to reverse course. This guy named Mark Meadows, a freshman legislator from North Carolina, he got a letter together, and he got 79 other House Republicans to sign it and send it to Boehner. Demanding that they use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obama's health care law. And outside of that, there was the pressure campaign from Ted Cruz. And let's not forget, he hasn't had much attention recently, but Marco Rubio is also a part of that. And then a Utah senator named Mike Lee, a Tea Party senator. So we've got these 80 House Republicans, these three senators, and then you have the conservative pressure groups Heritage Action and Freedom Works, two of the most influential outside groups that a lot of Republicans in Congress sort of live in fear of. These forces together basically made Boehner a reverse course and put that legislation on the floor last week that required Obama to defund his law as a rider to continuing the government funding.
- [05:30]
Dorothy Wickenden
But he had a choice. A lot of people have criticized him for craven failure of leadership.
- [05:35]
Ryan Lizza
Obama or Boehner?
- [05:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
Boehner. Well, Obama, too, for that matter.
- [05:38]
Ryan Lizza
I mean, the thing, you know, what everyone in Washington thinks of Boehner is he's the most tragic figure in Washington, and everyone says he's got the worst job. And who would want that? Well, who would want to have to lead this crazy conference? Which I think is true. And it's not exactly historically unique that a faction of a party pushes a far right or far left agenda right on its leadership. What is new is Boehner has to cave to them at every turn. You know, I think the reason that he's such a weak leader is a lot of the tools that previous speakers had are just no longer available to him. He doesn't have the ability to buy votes. He doesn't have the pork or earmarks that Denny Hastert in the Bush years had. And frankly, a lot of these Republicans are so ideological that they wouldn't accept the bridge in their district in return for a vote anyway. So a lot of the levers that traditionally House speakers had are just sort of gone. And since his margins are so thin, he only has 232 members, and he needs 217 right now for a majority. So a very small group of Republicans can make a lot of trouble, and they can set the whole country on a policy course that every leader in the Republican Party and every strategist in the Republican Party thought was folly. Of course, now that we're in it, all of those same people have readjusted their view of this. And now a lot of them, even the folks who thought the this was a terrible idea on the Republican side, are now in the position of saying, well, now that we're here, we've got to get something for it.
- [07:02]
James Surowiecki
Jim, what Boehner's done is not just give them the chance to vote on the resolution that connected Obamacare and the government shutdown.
- [07:10]
Ryan Lizza
Right.
- [07:10]
James Surowiecki
It's that he won't allow a clean resolution to come to the floor where it presumably could get a majority of.
- [07:16]
Ryan Lizza
The House to vote for it. Right, that's exactly right. The reason he won't do that now is now that they've shut down the government.
- [07:23]
James Surowiecki
Right.
- [07:24]
Ryan Lizza
The view is that they have to get something now. Right, Right. There has to be some policy concession they extract from the president for Boehner to credibly go to his right flank and say, all right, guys, I got this. Now let's fund this government.
- [07:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and meanwhile, Jim, you know, we're moving very quickly to the whole truly disastrous possibility of failing to raise the debt ceiling. Tell us a little bit about that. I saw that the Treasury Department just issued a report with really scary warnings about credit markets freezing, the dollar plumme, interest rates skyrocketing, and possibly another recession that could even be worse than the events of 2008.
- [08:00]
James Surowiecki
Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's the real issue is the debt ceiling, which in theory, I guess, will be breached on October 17th or, you know, somewhere around then. And that's a much, much bigger deal than the shutdown is. And I think that's really the scary thing is that what Ryan has dubbed the suicide caucus in the House seems willing to at least rhetorically hold the debt ceiling hostage in order to get, I don't know, repeal or defunding or a delay, at least in Obamacare. The thing that's so insidious about this is that there is no reason for us to have a debt ceiling. It makes no sense from a legal point of view. It doesn't even make sense, really, from a behavioral point of view. We have no trouble borrowing money. We can borrow money at tremendously low interest rates. The Federal Reserve has a printing machine to print money if we want to use that. And so we really would be basically cutting our head off, essentially to. To, I guess, bite our face, I suppose.
- [08:53]
Dorothy Wickenden
And does Obama have any options here? I mean, could he theoretically just break the law and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling?
- [09:00]
James Surowiecki
The funny thing is, he'll be breaking the law either way because Congress has, in effect, ordered him to spend the money that they have authorized and appropriated already. He would, in effect, be breaking the law by not doing that. But on the other hand, there's also this other law, which is the debt ceiling law. Which says the treasury can't borrow more money above a certain level. So all of this is actually an argument for saying that if it does come to it, what Obama should do is find some way, by executive order, by declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional, because the 14th Amendment says, quite explicitly, public debts shall be honored by the United States government. So you could argue that not raising the debt ceiling is, in effect, violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. I find it a little hard to believe that if we got to that point, they wouldn't just say, screw it. We're going to go ahead and keep doing what we should be doing in the first place.
- [09:53]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Obama summoned congressional leaders to the White House yesterday to talk about all of this. What came of it, if anything, do we know?
- [09:59]
Evan Osnos
Both sides came out essentially reiterating their positions. Harry Reid said that John Boehner refuses to take a yes for an answer, as he put it. And, you know, the truth is, I think, as Ryan has said, John Boehner is in an impossible position right now because there is a realization sort of dawning across the party that they need to get something out of this, but they don't know what that is. And anytime you're in a negotiation with a party that doesn't know what the standard of success is, you're in for the long haul. So there was a feeling yesterday, at least, that this was not a positive indication of anywhere good. You know, I think one thing that I'm struck by is, as Ryan put it the other day when he was describing how this suicide caucus came about, that this group of essentially 80 members of the House for whom they're not subject to the same kinds of pressures politically that the rest of the country is subject to. I mean, what you had was this confluence of events. You had this kind of mutant form of redistricting take hold in 2010 because you had the Republican Party pick up 20 state legislatures, and as a result, they were able to shift the process of redistricting, of gerrymandering, of drawing these districts in such a way as to put. Protect their seats and to make it easier to pick up new seats. That's the remarkable shift between 2010 and today that gets us into the position where you have these members of the House, where when they go back to their districts, they have the reasonable expectation that they will not be punished by the voters for what's happened.
- [11:30]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and this brings me back to a point. I wanted to ask Ryan about gerrymandering, which has in recent years been seen as a boon to the Republican Party, for all the reasons Evan just laid out, but it has led to these white, very white, very conservative districts and a very obstreperous Congress. So, Ryan, the lack of diversity, as we saw in 2012, was a huge handicap to the Republicans. And now with the party unable to control its very extreme minorities, the party is in a real crisis, or so it seems to us. And it's something that John McCain, among others, talked to you about quite openly.
- [12:05]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah. You know, the gerrymandering thing is tricky. It's. It surprises people to hear this, but it's not as big an explanation for what's going on as you often think. And there's been a lot of political science about this, looking at could you draw districts that fairly represent populations in these states and would it really change the makeup of Congress? Believe it or not, it's really hard to do that. And the big reason that is driving some of these trends is where people live.
- [12:36]
James Surowiecki
Sorting, right?
- [12:37]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, is sorting is that we've sort of self sorted ourselves into ideological homogenous places. And so if you really want to draw 50, 50 districts, you will have to gerrymander them. You will have to include lots of Democrats and Republicans and make some sort of odd shapes. States that have just sort of had bipartisan commissions and sort of drawn squares have tried this. And it doesn't really change the polarization in Congress. You know, the question now is, what's the way out? And so Obama's position is no negotiations until you fund the government and raise the debt ceiling. Boehner's position is I need something to do that. And so how do they square that circle? The trick for the White House, and I was talking to folks at the White House this week and was in a background briefing at the Treasury Department last week. And I think what comes out of that is the White House has to find a way to come out of this saying that they did not negotiate over these two issues, but at the same time, they have to be able to give Boehner some face saving way out. That's why today this conversation returns to a bigger deal over Medicare and Social Security and tax reform. Not really the grand bargain we were talking about earlier in Obama's presidency, but something akin to it. An administration source earlier this week, who's been deeply involved with the previous battles, not negotiating on this one, but he was deeply involved in the previous battles, suggested that a bigger deal is a lot more likely of a way to get out of this than a smaller deal. So maybe there's a Way for Obama to promise Boehner after the debt ceiling is raised and after the government is funded. Some sort of policy concession in a budget process that takes place after those two votes are held.
- [14:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
But what would that be that would be tolerable both for the administration and for the Tea Partiers?
- [14:23]
Ryan Lizza
That is the question of the day. Can I say one thing about that?
- [14:26]
James Surowiecki
I was talking, I had a conversation yesterday with a guy who's a negotiations expert, and obviously this is very different from most negotiations in the sense of it's really more like a game of chicken. But one of the things he suggested was maybe thinking about the Cuban Missile crisis, where in the Cuban Missile crisis there was the same thing.
- [14:44]
Ryan Lizza
Right.
- [14:44]
James Surowiecki
The Kennedy administration's position was they could not make any kind of compromise with the fact that the missiles had to be out of Cuba. But there was in effect, a backdoor deal which said, we will take the Atlas missiles out of Turkey. But they did it a year later, and no one knew that there was a connection between the two things. But Khrushchev got a little bit, and we got the missiles out of Cuba. And this Professor Mike Wheeler, was sort of suggesting that this is the kind of thing that you could maybe imagine happening. But I think that the reality is, is that trying to get the Tea Partiers to vote for a continuing resolution seems like a hopeless task. I think the only hope is really to get Boehner to bring some kind of clean resolution to the floor, isn't it? I mean, are there anything.
- [15:25]
Ryan Lizza
One of the things that came out of this meeting yesterday is, you know, they met for almost 80 something minutes and there were no staff in the room.
- [15:32]
James Surowiecki
Right.
- [15:33]
Ryan Lizza
And everyone's sort of leaking a sort of very biased version of the meeting. Everyone saying nothing really happened, but something happened. I mean, they weren't in there 80 minutes just reiterating talking points. And if you look at what came out of it, if you look at Pelosi's comments and read between the lines, you know, Pelosi and Reid are basically saying, you guys got the number you wanted, right? So this continuing resolution, there was a fight over how much, how high the number should be. The Republicans won that battle, which is kind of astonishing that they, you know, the Democrats keep saying they won't take yes for an answer. And Reid sent a letter to Boehner yesterday saying, look, fund the government and we will appoint conferees and we will have a negotiation over any set of issues you want. So I still think that that is the. That is the way out of this. But considering how much the House Republicans hate Obama, and I don't think that's too strong a word, and how they don't trust him and they don't trust Boehner's ability to negotiate in good faith with Obama, I think the Cuban missile analogy is good, except the turkey deal has to be public here, right? Yeah. See, that's the problem. They have to know what they're getting. And that's the big problem for Boehner is what is he publicly going to tell these guys that he's getting? Is it going to be some promise that in a negotiation that takes place in a few weeks, they'll get policy X? That's the tricky part. And that's where the White House needs to be creative.
- [16:50]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thank you all very much. Evan Osnos, Ryan Lissa, and James Surowiecki are staff writers. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [17:00]
Ryan Lizza
You can subscribe to this and other free New Yorker podcasts in the iTunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com subscribers can read the magazine online@newyorker.com and also in the tablet edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire.
- [17:23]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [17:50]
Evan Osnos
I want a shark that that eats.
- [17:52]
Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [17:56]
Evan Osnos
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [18:04]
Katie Drummond
Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:35]
Ryan Lizza
From. PRX.