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Weekly Address: President Obama – End This Government Shutdown

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From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama said that Republicans in the House of Representatives chose to shut down the government over a health care law they don’t like. He urged the Congress to pass a budget that funds our government, with no partisan strings attached.  The President made clear he will work with anyone of either party on ways to grow this economy, create new jobs, and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul – but not under the shadow of these threats to our economy.

Transcript: Weekly Address: End the Government Shutdown

Good morning.  Earlier this week, the Republican House of Representatives chose to shut down a government they don’t like over a health care law they don’t like.  And I’ve talked a lot about the real-world consequences of this shutdown in recent days – the services disrupted; the benefits delayed; the public servants kicked off the job without pay.

But today, I want to let the Americans dealing with those real-world consequences have their say.  And these are just a few of the many heartbreaking letters I’ve gotten from them in the past couple weeks – including more than 30,000 over the past few days.

Kelly Mumper lives in rural Alabama.  She works in early education, and has three children of her own in the Marines.  Here’s what she wrote to me on Wednesday.

“Our Head Start agency…was forced to stop providing services on October 1st for over 770 children, and 175 staff were furloughed.  I am extremely concerned for the welfare of these children.  There are parents who work and who attend school.  Where are they leaving their children…is it a safe environment…are [they] getting the food that they receive at their Head Start program?”

On the day Julia Pruden’s application to buy a home for her and her special needs children was approved by the USDA’s rural development direct loan program, she wrote me from Minot, North Dakota.

“We put in an offer to purchase a home this weekend, and it was accepted…if funding does not go through, our chances of the American Dream [are] down the drain…We have worked really hard to get our credit to be acceptable to purchase a home…if it weren’t for the direct lending program provided by the USDA, we would not qualify to buy the home we found.”

These are just two of the many letters I’ve received from people who work hard; try to make ends meet; try to do right by their families.  They’re military or military spouses who’ve seen commissaries closed on their bases.  They’re veterans worried the services they’ve earned won’t be there.  They’re business owners who’ve seen their contracts with the government put on hold, worried they’ll have to let people go.  I want them to know, I read the stories you share with me.

These are our fellow Americans.  These are the people who sent us here to serve.  And I know that Republicans in the House of Representatives are hearing the same kinds of stories, too.

As I made clear to them this week, there’s only one way out of this reckless and damaging shutdown: pass a budget that funds our government, with no partisan strings attached.  The Senate has already done this.  And there are enough Republican and Democratic votes in the House of Representatives willing to do the same, and end this shutdown immediately.  But the far right of the Republican Party won’t let Speaker John Boehner give that bill a yes-or-no vote.

Take that vote.  Stop this farce.  End this shutdown now.

The American people don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their job. Neither does Congress. They don’t get to hold our democracy or our economy hostage over a settled law. They don’t get to kick a child out of Head Start if I don’t agree to take her parents’ health insurance away. That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work.

That’s why I won’t pay a ransom in exchange for reopening the government. And I certainly won’t pay a ransom in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. For as reckless as a government shutdown is, an economic shutdown that comes with default would be dramatically worse.

I’ll always work with anyone of either party on ways to grow this economy, create new jobs, and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul. But not under the shadow of these threats to our economy.

Pass a budget. End this government shutdown.

Pay our bills. Prevent an economic shutdown.

These Americans and millions of others are counting on Congress to do the right thing. And I will do everything I can to make sure they do.

Thank you.

Bolding added.

~

Editor’s Note: The President’s Weekly Address diary is also the weekend open news thread. Feel free to leave links to other news items in the comment threads.


Categories: Uncategorized.

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29 comments

  1. JanF

    From USA.gov

    What’s Affected by a Government Shutdown?

    Below, find an overview of some of the government services and operations that will be impacted until Congress passes a budget to fund them again. For detailed information about specific activities at Federal agencies, please see federal government contingency plans.

    • Vital services that ensure seniors and young children have access to healthy food and meals may not have sufficient Federal funds to serve all beneficiaries in an extended lapse.

    • Call centers, hotlines and regional offices that help veterans understand their benefits will close to the public.

    • Veterans’ compensation, pension, education, and other benefits could be cut off in the case of an extended  shutdown.

    • Every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, will be immediately closed.

    • New applications for small business loans and loan guarantees will be immediately halted.

    • Research into life-threatening diseases and other areas will stop, and new patients won’t be accepted into clinical  trials at the National Institutes of Health.

    • Work to protect consumers, ranging from child product safety to financial security to the safety of hazardous waste facilities, will cease. The EPA will halt non-essential inspections of chemical facilities and drinking water systems.

    • Permits and reviews for planned energy and transportations projects will stop, preventing companies from working on these projects. Loans to rural communities will be halted.

    • Hundreds of thousands of Federal employees including many charged with protecting us from terrorist threats, defending our borders, inspecting our food, and keeping our skies safe will work without pay until the shutdown  ends.

    • Hundreds of thousands of additional federal workers will be immediately and indefinitely furloughed without pay.

  2. JanF

    They are planning to roll out some fixes soon (I noticed that early this morning it was down for maintenance and it is back up now).

    Why The Administration Isn’t Sweating Obamacare’s Ugly First Week


    “It is way too early. We didn’t really start cranking until the individual mandate was real” a year after the Massachusetts marketplace went live, said Jonathan Gruber, a MIT professor who was on the ground in Massachusetts and advised the Obama administration while Obamacare was being drafted in 2009 and 2010.

    “Really six weeks from now” is when the marketplaces need to be functioning properly, Gruber told TPM in an email. Dec. 15 is the last date that people can sign up for coverage and still have it start on Jan. 1, 2014. “The key enrollment starts in late November,” Gruber said.

    This is a project with lots of moving parts and, based on reports of happy consumers, a lot of people got into the exchanges and bought insurance.  

  3. JanF

    Ellen Fitzpatrick and Theda Skocpol –Worst shutdown in modern U.S. history

    The federal government shutdown is a virtually unprecedented move by a political minority committed to rolling back one of the most significant legislative achievements in recent American history. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed by two houses of Congress after 14 months of debate. Opponents then challenged the law’s constitutionality and lost that battle in the Supreme Court of the United States.

    Less than five months later, American voters re-elected by a 5 million-vote majority margin a president who stood foursquare behind the Affordable Care Act. In so doing, the electorate rejected a GOP presidential candidate who promised its repeal.

    In seeking to trump a lawful vote of both houses of Congress, a Supreme Court ruling and a reaffirming national presidential election, they tread on extremist ground. Their hubris is radical and nothing in modern American history provides a fair counterpart.

    ~

    Eugene Robinson – Let Go of the Car, Mr. Speaker

    Republicans in Congress are like a dog that chases cars and finally catches one. There is a fleeting sense of accomplishment, followed by sheer panic.

    God bless Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., for at least being honest. “We’re not going to be disrespected,” he told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

    How did Boehner get himself into this situation? By calculating, based on experience, that when push came to shove, Obama would fold.

    ~snip~

    Senior administration officials say Obama sees a vital principle at stake. Obamacare and the other policies that far-right House members want to change were debated in Congress and ratified by last year’s election. The president believes that it would weaken American democracy if one faction of one party of one house of Congress were allowed to impose its will through extortion.

    This spectacle of dysfunction will surely damage both sides politically. But Obama never has to face voters again. House Republicans are up for re-election in 13 months.

    Having caught the car, Boehner would be wise to let it go. Even at the expense of a little dignity.

    ~

    Chicago Sun-Times President is right to stand firm

    U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam earlier this week predicted that President Barack Obama is “going to end up negotiating” with Republicans over the government shutdown and the lifting of the federal debt ceiling.

    Three days into the shutdown, we don’t see it.

    And as long this stunt continues, we trust we never will. When one side threatens to trash the American economy to get its way, there can be no negotiations.

    Obama says he will not sit down at the bargaining table until Congress reopens the federal government and allows more federal borrowing.

    “It’s actually not very Obama-like to say, ‘I’m not going to negotiate,’ ” Roskam, a Republican from Wheaton and member of the House leadership, told CNN on Wednesday.

    No, it is not. And we like this very unObama-like Obama.

  4. JanF

    As in the last government shutdown, Congress will make the furloughed workers whole … after the government reopens:

    The House unanimously passed Saturday a bill to provide back pay for furloughed federal employees.

    Unlike almost all of the House’s other partial spending bills, which the White House has threatened to veto, the administration said that the president would sign the back pay bill.

    That should help the 800,000 federal workers decide how deeply to get into debt to pay current bills.

    In other news, House “leadership” demands that the president sit with them. Does that mean that President Obama made John Boehner stand during the entire one and a half hour meeting they had at the White House on Wednesday? Or does that mean that the House Republicans need to keep up the charade that they are interested in working with the president and Senate Democrats on a budget?

    The president says “reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling” then he will talk about a budget. The House Republicans say “defund/delay/repeal Obamacare” then we will talk about a budget.

    Impasse.

  5. princesspat

    State’s McMorris Rodgers a fiery leader of GOP shutdown fight

    Of President Obama’s many Republican critics in the House of Representatives, few can match Spokane’s Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in fervor.

    ~snip~

    Even in McMorris Rodgers’ conservative Eastern Washington district, however, her fiery partisanship can go too far.

    Thursday’s editorial in The Spokesman-Review, the 5th District’s largest daily, urged McMorris Rodgers and her fellow Republicans to halt their “demands for ransom.”

    “Moderates of both parties are calling for an end to melodrama so Congress can take up the serious work members were sent to do,” the newspaper wrote. “Time to move on.”

    I hope the voters in her district will remember….

  6. JanF

    From NY Times Email Alert

           In a letter released Saturday, Mr. Hagel said that government lawyers said that under the Pay Our Military Act, the Defense Department could “eliminate furloughs for employees whose responsibilities contribute to the morale, well-being, capabilities and readiness of service members.”        

    I wonder if his lawyers can make the case that service members are sad when they hear about American kids starving and that it is bad for their morale.

  9. JanF

    John C. Calhoun would be proud that his demon spawn are shutting down the government over a nullification battle.

    Calhoun built his reputation as a political theorist by his redefinition of republicanism to include approval of slavery and minority rights-with the Southern States the minority in question. To protect minority rights against majority rule, he called for a “concurrent majority” whereby the minority could sometimes block offensive proposals that a State felt infringed on their sovereign power. [H]is concept of concurrent majority, whereby a minority has the right to object to or even veto hostile legislation directed against it, has been cited by other advocates of the rights of minorities. Calhoun asserted that Southern whites, outnumbered in the United States by voters of the more densely populated Northern states, were one such minority deserving special protection in the legislature.

    Calhoun was vice-president for 7 years, a heartbeat away from the presidency.

  10. JanF

    Arizona To Stop Welfare Checks During Shutdown

    Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s administration announced this week that 5,700 families eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families would not be receiving their checks, which average $207 a month, while the federal government is shut down.

    Federal officials have told state welfare directors that they could use alternative sources of funding during the shutdown to keep assistance programs funded, and they will be reimbursed when the federal government re-opens.

  11. JanF

    Nevada Residents Are Calling Their Obamacare Hotline In Tears, Desperate For Health Coverage

    Kevin Walsh, a senior Xerox official who heads the department that is helping some states maintain their online Obamacare marketplaces and call centers, told Bloomberg Businessweek that many people had contacted Nevada’s Obamacare hotline with “just raw emotion” within the first hour that the marketplace was open on Tuesday. Nevada has an adult uninsurance rate of 27 percent – the fifth highest in the country.

    “They were calling up saying, ‘Can I get my coverage today so I can see my doctor this afternoon?'” said Walsh. “That is in one sense moving but also frustrating because, sure, you can sign up – but the coverage can’t be effective until January 1st.”

  12. JanF

    Semantics of furlough

    “If you stick with the semantics of essential and nonessential, you could easily be offended,” says [Shaun] O’Connell, who has worked for Social Security for 20 years.

    There’s a difference between what’s urgent and what’s important. Like other federal employees, O’Connell understands that what he does isn’t necessarily crucial on a daily basis, like being a trauma surgeon with the Veterans Administration, for instance, or a member of the Capitol Hill police force.[…]

    O’Connell says he was working on disability claims up until the moment he was forced off the clock this past Tuesday. He found several mistakes other officials had made along the way, including an eligibility claim involving a person with kidney failure who is on renal dialysis. That person should be getting a bigger check, but will have to wait until the shutdown is over to see it.

    The terms “exempt” and “not exempt” have officially replaced the terms “essential” and “non-essential” but have not caught on yet. Much of the work that is currently not being done is essential to those who depend on it. But the terms, used in the last shutdown, won’t die because it bolsters right-wing talking points:

    Conservative commentators have seized on the fact that the government is doing without 800,000 workers – including most of those at the Environmental Protection Agency – as proof of waste.

    “According to the federal government, 94 percent of EPA employees are ‘non-essential,” Campaign for Liberty, a group founded by former Texas GOP Rep. Ron Paul. “Seems low.”

    By the way, the work will wait for the workers to return meaning that the shutdown will result in a huge backlog and delays in processing that will probably be felt for some time.

  13. JanF

    World media on the U.S. shutdown

    As the government shutdown stretches to a fourth day, international concern is mounting. The shutdown has not yet impacted world markets, but many commentators around the world are starting to wonder if Congress will apply the same recklessness to the upcoming debt ceiling fight and take down the global economy with it.

    Republicans may be working hard to turn domestic public opinion to their side, but foreign media places the blame squarely on GOP extremists. Below is a sample of how the world is struggling to make sense of the ongoing shutdown.

    “Paralysis” A Le Monde article on Friday wondered if American democracy even works, calling out the Tea Party for blackmail and urging the government to hold firm. “In a democracy, people abolish laws by winning the election, not with the threat of a government shutdown or even a default. It is impossible to govern seriously undergoing this type of blackmail,” writes Martin Wolf.

    More quotes at the ThinkProgress link.

  14. JanF

    Charles Blow, NY Times A Terrible, Tragic Game

    Speaker John Boehner barked Friday about the government shutdown: “This isn’t some damn game.”

    The House leader was responding to an anonymous “senior administration official” who was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, saying: “We are winning. … It doesn’t really matter to us’ how long the shutdown lasts ‘because what matters is the end result.’ ”

    It is most definitely a game, a terrible, tragic game that House Republicans are playing in the People’s House.

    And [Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul ], think they have a winning message: the Democrats refuse to negotiate. They have twisted the president’s narrow argument, that he won’t negotiate over keeping the government open or paying the nation’s bills, into a broader one about global democratic intransigence. […]

    This is a damn game, and the American people are tired of playing it.

    ~

    The Kansas City Star Unreasonable tea party demands drag nation into turmoil

    The government of the people of the United States is partially shut down because a faction of the Republican Party insists on tying further spending to the crippling of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

    This is a new low in our nation’s politics. Americans have every reason to be ashamed of their Congress right now.[…]

    We’re talking about Kevin Yoder and Lynn Jenkins from Kansas and Sam Graves and Vicky Hartzler from Missouri. Not one of them had the foresight or fortitude to stand up and say: “This will hurt the nation. I will not participate.” Unfortunately, House Speaker John Boehner refused to call for the up-or-down vote that would have separated the pragmatists in his party from the ideologues.

  15. JanF

    The rise of the New Confederacy


    The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government …

    Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad – all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

    Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.

    The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious. […]

    But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.

    They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.

  16. JanF

    From Russell Korobkin, a faculty director of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at the UCLA Law School and the author of “Negotiation Theory and Strategy.” in the LA Times:

    Staring down the irrational wing of the GOP

    The author talks about the guy with a knife and “bloodshot eyes” who shows up at your doorstep, demanding money.

    In negotiation, the crazy person wins.

    If your counterpart is willing to act in a way that harms both sides rather than making any concessions, you are outflanked. As a rational individual, you should give in, because doing so will make you better off than you otherwise would be, even though your concession will reward your irrational, uncooperative and completely maddening counterpart.

    There is an important exception, though: if you have to deal with the same person again. He uses an analogy of your 3-year old throwing a tantrum for Skittles:

    “This is why parents should not give in to a 3-year-old willing to throw a temper tantrum in the grocery store check-out line until he gets candy. A single candy purchase won’t hurt him, and buying one beats causing a scene in public any day of the year, even if it might spoil his dinner. The problem is, plunk down a dollar for Skittles and you might not have a pleasant trip to the store for years.”

    It is President Obama’s willingness to negotiate in the past when an impasse would be extremely harmful to our country that has congressional Republicans convinced that he will blink:

    For much of his presidency, Barack Obama has chosen to be the rational grown-up, making concessions to the bloodshot-eyes caucus in Congress in the face of its constant threats to shut down the government, default on the national debt, or both, in the absence of completely unrelated concessions. He can see that their threats are not idle, and he can calculate that the ransom demanded is cheaper for the American people than the cost of a complete impasse.

    What is different now?

    But Obama and his congressional allies have finally come to terms with the fact that you cannot reasonably expect to pay off the bloodshot-eyes caucus only once. Its members will be back to threaten to wreak havoc on the entire country – themselves and their constituents included – again and again.

    The author concludes that “the president has no plausible choice other than to stand firm, whatever the wreckage that ensues”.

    That wreckage could be enormous, as one of those members of the “bloodshot-eyes caucus”, Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush now with the AEI, lays into the GOP for taking the wrong hostage. He believes that the Republicans should be holding the debt-ceiling hike hostage because President Obama will not let the economy crash:

    As former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner explained during the last debt-limit standoff, the effects of default would be “catastrophic,” resulting in the “loss of millions of American jobs,” and would have an economic impact “potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.” Obama will not permit an economic crisis worse than 2008-09 and the “loss of millions of American jobs” on his watch. He has no choice but to negotiate with GOP leaders and cut a deal to avoid a government default.

    THAT shows you the “bloodshot eyes” up close … a national party willing to destroy the economy for its ideological demands.

    The shiver you felt go up your spine was the realization what is at stake when President Obama, as the only adult in the room, finally says “no, you can’t have those Skittles” to the 3-year old tea party.

  17. virginislandsguy

    A pundit suggested that Boehner will do a 2fer. Rather than break the Hastert Rule (that even Hastert is disavowing) twice for first a budget bill and then a debt ceiling bill, that they will stonewall and bluster until just before the October 17th deadline and then pass both bills simultaneously. This would be after a BIG drop in the financial markets on Monday the 14th.

    The only question now is what face-saving (and meaningless) gestures will be made for his TP members.

  18. princesspat

    What I Think Is Happening

    Start with two premises. One: The roots of the current standoff go to the heart of our current political culture, the radicalization of the GOP and extreme polarization of our politics. But the key proximate driver is Speaker John Boehner’s weakness, not only his situational weakness but his characterological weakness as well. Two: the leadership of the House clearly doesn’t want to be in this situation. They actively fought against it before agreeing to follow this approach under duress. That’s led to a lot of erratic or in other cases simply incompetent decision making on the part of the House leadership.

    ~snip~

    I think Boehner plans to take an increasingly hard and bellicose line right up to the day before default becomes unavoidable and then if he feels certain Obama isn’t budging, he’ll fold and allow a clean bill to get a vote in the House. That will pass and then pass the Senate too.

    The key though, again, is that Boehner is personally weak and situationally weak. He’s afraid of what House Tea Partiers will do to him if he relents. So he’s hoping that if he plays for time and takes the country right up to the brink of catastrophe some other option might become available. Maybe Obama caves? Maybe his moderates revolt? Maybe the Tea Party sobers up? Anything … And yet Boehner is weak. The Tea Party’s ability to push him further and further in their direction is testament to that. So at the last moment, does he really assert his power? I think it’s very questionable that he has it in him. The forces he’s trying to ride are much bigger than he is. There’s good chance he simply won’t be able to apply the brakes. It’s just not in him.

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