The partisan game

(Mike Thompson)

What will Republicans risk in order to make Barack Obama look bad? How far are they willing to go? Is there any point at which common sense might kick in, causing Republicans to hesitate at sabotaging America, as a friend of mine puts it, just to make Obama's position more difficult?

How about nuclear armageddon? Should Republicans risk that, just for political advantage? After all, the first START treaty was proposed by Ronald Reagan, who's still revered in the GOP. (Yes, I know that Reagan would be far too "moderate" for today's Republican Party.) It was signed five months before the breakup of the Soviet Union, at which point it became even more critical, as a way to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.

START 1 expired in December last year, but the new START treaty was signed by President Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev this past April. The U.S. Senate has already held 18 hearings on the treaty, and Obama worked with Republican negotiators to make sure their concerns were met. Now Republicans want to delay a vote on the treaty, as a way of weakening the president and keeping him from a foreign policy victory. But this is a serious, serious issue - too serious for partisan political games, wouldn't you think?

(Tony Auth)

Here's how Ed Stein puts it:

Once upon a time, the United States and Russia negotiated arms reduction treaties that reduced the threat of nuclear war and helped build a growing trust between the two old Cold War adversaries. Presidents negotiated the terms and Congresses ratified the treaties by the 2/3 majority needed, and all was well. That was then. It has been a year since the last weapons treaty with Russia expired, and with it the regime of verification and inspection that made the thing work. Relations with Russia became increasingly increasingly strained during the Bush years, and one of Obama’s foreign policy objectives was to restore that relationship. President Obama has negotiated a new treaty, called New Start, which calls for steep reductions in warheads and missiles, and a verification system similar to that of the old Start treaty. The White House had counted on at least a dozen Republicans to vote for the new treaty, and discussions with the chief Republican Senate negotiator, Jon Kyl, seemed to indicate that passage was imminent. Then Kyl blindisded the White House, refusing, despite dozens of meetings in which all of his concerns evidently were met, to recommend voting for it. Republican support evaporated, leaving an important treaty in limbo.

We’ve seen this game played repeatedly as Republicans have decided to oppose anything that Obama wants. That is, after all, how they won the election. In the new politics of total obstruction, reducing nuclear stockpiles, restoring relations with Russia, re-engaging an essential partner in the campaign against nuclear proliferation, and making America and our allies safer in the process is, apparently, less important that handing Obama a foreign policy defeat.

And now, the U.S. intelligence community is telling Congress that we'll have to shift spy satellites away from Iraq and Afghanistan to try to cover Russia again, if the treaty remains in limbo.

The treaty, which was signed in April, would restore on-site inspections of Russian nuclear missile silos, bombers and submarines that have stopped since the old START expired in December. The new treaty also bars the Russians from interfering with or jamming spy satellites and restricts where various nuclear weapons can be located.

(Steve Sack)

Of course, this isn't the only place where Republicans are putting partisan political advantage above the needs of our nation. They're desperately trying to keep our economy in a hole for precisely that reason, too.

Having shut off any chance at additional stimulus spending (supposedly out of concern for the deficit, although they have no qualms about hugely increasing the deficit to give tax cuts to the wealthy), they're even attacking the federal reserve as it tries to find some way of boosting our economy.

Here's Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:

What do the government of China, the government of Germany and the Republican Party have in common? They’re all trying to bully the Federal Reserve into calling off its efforts to create jobs. And the motives of all three are highly suspect. ...

It’s no mystery why China and Germany are on the warpath against the Fed. Both nations are accustomed to running huge trade surpluses. But for some countries to run trade surpluses, others must run trade deficits — and, for years, that has meant us. The Fed’s expansionary policies, however, have the side effect of somewhat weakening the dollar, making U.S. goods more competitive, and paving the way for a smaller U.S. deficit. And the Chinese and Germans don’t want to see that happen.

For the Chinese government, by the way, attacking the Fed has the additional benefit of shifting attention away from its own currency manipulation, which keeps China’s currency artificially weak — precisely the sin China falsely accuses America of committing.

But why are Republicans joining in this attack?

Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues seem stunned to find themselves in the cross hairs. They thought they were acting in the spirit of none other than Milton Friedman, who blamed the Fed for not acting more forcefully during the Great Depression — and who, in 1998, called on the Bank of Japan to “buy government bonds on the open market,” exactly what the Fed is now doing. ...

So what’s really motivating the G.O.P. attack on the Fed? Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues were clearly caught by surprise, but the budget expert Stan Collender predicted it all. Back in August, he warned Mr. Bernanke that “with Republican policy makers seeing economic hardship as the path to election glory,” they would be “opposed to any actions taken by the Federal Reserve that would make the economy better.” In short, their real fear is not that Fed actions will be harmful, it is that they might succeed.

(Pat Bagley)

Rex Nutting at MarketWatch makes much the same point:

The Republican Party's leaders, from Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin all the way down to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, escalated their Cold War against the Fed this week, with a not-too-subtle threat to put a tight leash on the Fed's independent economic policy making.

Incredibly, the Republicans are worried that the Fed is putting too much emphasis on attacking unemployment! With the official jobless rate at 9.6% and the underemployment rate at 17%, apparently the Fed has just been too vigilant. These Republicans would like to rewrite the Fed's charter so it doesn't pay any attention to economic growth at all.

Foreign leaders from China and Germany also blasted the Fed's latest moves to keep the U.S. economy growing by buying $600 billion in long-term Treasurys.

While many of the critiques of our central bankers are legitimate and serious disagreements about how effective the policies will be, or what the long-term unintended consequences of them might be, or who'll be the winners and who'll be the losers, much of criticism of the Fed is purely political. It's based on short-term self interest.

China, Germany and the Republican Party each believe they'll be stronger if the American economy is weaker. (They are wrong, but they believe it anyway.) Of course they want the Fed to fail.

Republicans are joining with foreign governments in an attempt to keep America weak. Amazing, isn't it? But it's not personal, of course (or maybe it is personal - personal ambition). They just want to make sure that Obama fails, whatever it does to our country.

(John Sherffius)

Republicans are already willing to risk our nation's economy and our nation's security. So you have to wonder how they'd greet another successful terrorist attack on American soil. Would they be gleeful, seeing just another way to attack Barack Obama? Or would they worry that America might rally around our president, just as we did after 9/11?

Either way, it's hard to imagine that the good of our country would figure into their response at all. Clearly, that's... inconsequential, compared to their political ambitions.

I could be wrong, but every time I think that the Republicans can't possibly go much lower, they continue to surprise me.