WASHINGTON -- Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was asked on CNN this afternoon about comments by Dick Armey (the former House majority leader turned tea party honcho) bashing Tom Tancredo for his anti-immigrant zeal. Steele not only stuck up for Tancredo -- who recently said "people who could not even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English" had elected President Obama -- but he also garbled a Ronald Reagan quote in the process. Reagan once famously issued an "11th Commandment," barring Republicans from attacking each other; Steele called it the "11th Amendment."
The answer puts Steele at odds with Armey, who has helped organize tea parties for the last year, but it also means he apparently doesn't see much wrong with Tancredo's sentiments. Watch here:
The cash-strapped GOP has been enjoying a bit of free publicity over the last few days. A March Madness-themed ad slamming the healthcare bill was recently featured on both "The Today Show" and the "CBS Evening News." Now, free airtime for political ads is not exactly new in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, but this case has an odd twist.
On "The Today Show," coverage of the ad tells us: "Republicans rolled out a new TV spot attacking what’s in the healthcare bill." When the ad is played on the "CBS Evening News," we learn that "the angry war of words in Washington is echoing over the nation." All this seems to suggest that the ad is actually being aired somewhere -- other than as part of a news program -- right now.
However, as it turns out, not only has the ad not yet run on TV, but the National Republican Congressional Committee, which produced the ad, hasn’t even bought airtime for it. The NRCC says they’ve been calling stations to ask about pricing and availability, but have yet to purchase any spots. The campaign committee is waiting to buy airtime until after the upcoming House vote on healthcare, because it's only planning to run the ad in districts represented by Democrats who voted for the bill. Of course, thanks to NBC and CBS, the spot has already reached a much broader audience than that — and the NRCC didn't have to spend a dime.
This sort of thing isn't uncommon. Campaigns and committees are well aware that they can get a lot mileage from controversial ads without actually spending much money to air them, knowing that these spots will get played for free on the news anyway. But this particular situation is unusual, and the free advertising is especially important for the NRCC this election cycle. According to the latest numbers, the organization just has $6.4 million in the bank compared to its House Democratic counterpart’s whopping $35.4 million.
Democrats got exactly what they wanted with the Congressional Budget Office's scoring of their final healthcare reform package. So Republicans have to find a way of attacking the messenger that doesn't actually require attacking the CBO. They've done that by settling on a message about the still-preliminary nature of the score.
See, for instance, an e-mail sent out by the House Republican Conference Thursday afternoon. The full e-mail, all emphases in the original:
Are House Democrats ready to make a $940 billion gamble on an imprecise estimate?
Democrat spin on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) deficit projections:
Henry Waxman, Chairman, House Energy and Commerce Committee: "‘I think a lot of the undecided members are people who care a lot about the deficit.' Waxman told reporters at the Capitol. ‘And I think this will go a long way to get their support for this.'" (The Hill, "Waxman: CBO numbers ‘go a long way' toward winning undecided votes," 3/18/2010)
What the CBO also said about those deficit numbers:
"CBO has developed a rough outlook for the decade following the 2010-2019 period..."
"The imprecision of that calculation reflects the even greater degree of uncertainty that attends to it, compared with CBO's 10-year budget estimates."
"CBO has not extrapolated estimates further into the future because the uncertainties surrounding them are magnified even more."
"...CBO anticipates that the reconciliation proposal would probably continue to reduce budget deficits relative to those under current law in subsequent decades, assuming that all of its provisions would continue to be fully implemented." (Congressional Budget Office Preliminary Estimate, 3/18/2010)
What the Republicans aren't mentioning, of course, is that these are all basically standard disclaimers from the CBO.
WASHINGTON -- Give House and Senate Republicans credit for one thing, at least -- at this point in the debate, there's no way the Democrats could have pulled off a bicameral meeting on healthcare reform without several members needing some healthcare themselves afterwards.
The GOP, though, seems to have emerged from a joint session with lawmakers from each chamber Thursday morning unscathed and uninjured. Republicans banded together to display unity and pledge to keep fighting the bill all weekend long. "We're going to continue to work closely together to do everything we can do to make sure that this bill never, ever, ever passes," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters after the meeting.
The Republican love-in, though, had a bit of a jarring subtext: On the House side of the Capitol, the GOP is busy demanding a straight up-or-down vote on the healthcare bill. On the Senate side, the GOP has done everything in its power to block an up-or-down vote. In a battle over which parliamentary device is more or less beloved, Republicans have come down very clearly on the side of the filibuster, and against "deem and pass." The GOP loves an up-or-down vote, except when they don't.
"Well, there are legitimate parliamentary devices and there are illegitimate parliamentary devices," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told Salon after the meeting. "This one's illegitimate, it seems to me." The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions said he's got his lawyers looking at whether the House maneuver is constitutional, and whether the GOP should sue to block it.
What makes the "deem and pass" tactic (also known as a "self-executing rule") necessary in the House, of course, is that Republicans won't let Democrats bring a revised version of the legislation back to the Senate. Which means the House can't amend the bill the Senate has already passed; if they did, Republicans would use procedural devices of their own to prevent it from coming to a vote. So the House is trying to wrap their approval of the Senate bill together with a budget reconciliation measure designed to fix it.
That's not to say Democrats have a sterling track record when it comes to grandstanding over process, either; they used the filibuster in the Senate when they were in the minority, and protested the "deem and pass" technique in the House when Republicans were in control there, too. Still, Democratic aides haven't been shy about pointing out the "epic levels" of "hypocrisy and inconsistency" that Republicans have reached during the debate this week.
After all, what's the main reason for all the GOP outrage? Republicans don't really have a very good way of stopping the bill if the House approves it. "Our plan is for it not to come to the Senate," GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. "Our plan is for it to be defeated here in the House in the next few days." So if that means latching on to one parliamentary argument in one chamber and another one in the other, that's just what they'll do.
After a fair amount of delay -- caused by Democrats jiggering and re-jiggering the bill's language to get the best numbers -- the Congressional Budget Office's score of the final healthcare reform package was released Thursday morning.
According to the CBO, the bill will cost $940 billion over the first decade, more than either the original Senate or House bill did. But it will also reduce the deficit more than either of those proposals did -- $130 billion over the first ten years, and $1.2 trillion in the decade after that.
With the score finally out, the clock starts ticking to a vote in the House. That could now come as early as Sunday.
It’s a pretty special thing to get the chance to sit down with the president of the United States, in the White House, and ask him hard questions about his decisions and ideas. But when Fox News’ Bret Baier did it yesterday, he seemed to think he was doing one of those football sideline interviews, or possibly quizzing a tearfully apologetic celebrity burnout. Baier seemed not to be expecting a president who was not only able to answer questions fluidly, but was largely uninterested in the peripheral garbage that obsesses broadcast journalists like himself.
Baier spent his first 10 or so chances to talk trying to get the president to comment on the merits of "deem-and-pass," the procedure now under consideration to pass healthcare reform through the House. "The deem and pass rule, so that Democrats avoid a straight up or down vote on the Senate bill?" The first time, the president tried to explain that a vote for deem-and-pass is really just a vote for healthcare reform. Then Baier asked him again why he supported deem-and-pass, and the president would explain again. Rinse, and repeat.
The reporter leapt in at one point by quoting an e-mail to Fox, which asked, "If the bill is so good for all of us, why all the intimidation, arm twisting, seedy deals, and parliamentary trickery necessary to pass a bill, when you have an overwhelming majority in both houses and the presidency?"
As with each instance, Obama explained that he cared about the substance of the bill, not the procedure by which it passed. This exchange followed.
BAIER: OK, back to the original question.
OBAMA: The key is to make sure that we vote -- we have a vote on whether or not we're going to maintain the status quo, or whether we're going to reform the system.
BAIER: So you support the deem and pass rule?
OBAMA: I am not --
BAIER: You're saying that's that vote.
Here I’m cutting out a lengthy response from Obama, who patiently explains again that, while it’s reasonable to oppose the healthcare bill on the merits, it’s silly to talk so much about House rules. What follows:
BAIER: Monday in Ohio, you called for courage in the health care debate. At the same time, House Speaker Pelosi was saying this to reporters about the deem and pass rule: "I like it, this scenario, because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill." Is that the kind of courage that you're talking about?
This exchange pretty much showcases the tone of the whole interview. Baier refused to let the president pin him down on substance. When Obama tried to talk about the content of the healthcare bill, Baier would cut him off. The president repeatedly had to ask his interviewer to be allowed to finish, but it all seemed a little fruitless. His interviewer just wanted to dance around the edges of the issues at stake.
It's more fun, generally, to make fun of bad journalism than to shake one's head and cluck at it. But Baier really did blow an amazing opportunity. The truth is that it doesn't take a tea partier, or even an opponent of the healthcare reform bill to see that it is indeed riddled with flaws. These should be perfectly identifiable to someone on the right just as well as someone on the left. Baier's inability to move in from Sean Hannity-type canards about healthcare reform toward a genuine conversation is deeply revealing. The guy just doesn't seem interested in what works or doesn’t, or how the law might affect various people. (An exception here might be the conversation he had with the president about carve-outs from Medicare, except that all he was able to do was quote various experts without engaging on the substance.)
Instead, he wanted to talk about how healthcare is "one-sixth of our economy" -- as if the president is organizing a mass-scale collectivization of a major industry like Chairman Mao or Stalin. He chose to air the frequently heard complaints about "special deals," which, whether they are slightly unsavory or not, are fundamentally trivial. He wanted to talk about healthcare, in other words, however he could without talking about healthcare.
But possibly the most revealing moment came in the brief follow-up interview on foreign policy. Amid standard fare about how the U.S. is getting along with Israel, Baier tossed in a question about Iran. But he didn’t ask how the president thought he could prevent nuclear proliferation there, or even the typical, tired questions about whether the president would engage or rule out the use of force. Instead, Baier asked, "If Iran gets a nuclear weapon before the end of your term, will your foreign policy be a failure?"
Get that? The reason Iran is important isn’t geostrategic. It’s not about the security of the United States, or of Israel, or the human rights of people in the country or around the region. It matters because it's another area where the president can be assigned a grade by the pundit class.
Maybe the Fox folks got so used to George W. Bush that they don’t know how to take any president seriously. Or maybe their problem is with the basic format, which they view as a competition, rather than a conversation. As Brit Hume complained afterward about the reporter’s position in presidential interviews in general, "You really can't win."
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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