“On Orders From God And The Founding Fathers”: What Ted Cruz Means When He Says He Mistrusts Both Parties
Okay, class, here’s what should be an easy assignment:
What does it mean when Sen. Ted Cruz says the following on budget negotiations (per TPM’s Sahil Kapur)?
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday defended his objection to initiating House-Senate budget negotiations unless Democrats take a debt limit increase off the table, saying he doesn’t trust his party to hold the line.
“The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans. Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans,” Cruz said. “And I don’t trust the Democrats.”
On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) scolded Republicans for blocking negotiations. He was backed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).
“Unfortunately,” Cruz said, “one of the reasons we got into this mess is because a lot of Republicans were complicit in this spending spree and that’s why so many Americans are disgusted with both sides of this house. … And every Republican who stands against holding the line here is really saying, let’s give the Democrats a blank check to borrow any money they want with no reforms, no leadership to fix the problem.”
Does it mean, as political reporters often blandly repeat, that “Tea Party” pols like Cruz are hardy independents who care about principle rather than about the GOP, and represent a constituency that is up in the air?
No, and I might add: Hell no! Cruz specifically and Tea Party members generally, for all their independent posturing, are the most rigid of partisans, and are about as likely to vote with or for Democrats as a three-toed sloth is likely to win a Gold Medal in the 100-meter dash. Yes, they often threaten to form a Third Party, but never do (why should they when their power in one of the two major parties is overwhelming and still growing?), and even more often threaten to “stay home” during elections, but in fact tend to vote more than just about any other sizable bloc of Americans.
So what’s with their inveterate Republican-bashing, if they usually vote and almost always vote Republican?
There are two interconnected explanations. The first is that they want to make it clear that for them the GOP is not a tradition, or a roughly coherent set of attitudes, or a mechanism for civic participation and ultimately the shaping of public policies through democratic competition and cooperation: it’s a vehicle for the advancement of a fixed and eternal set of policies, mostly revolving around absolute property rights and pre-late-twentieth century cultural arrangements. Those who view the GOP as anything other or less than this sort of vehicle are deemed RINOs or “establishment Republicans,” and presumed to be in charge of the party, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
So when Tea Party champions or “true conservatives” or “constitutional conservatives” (three terms for the same people) say they’re not willing to sacrifice their principles to win elections, do they really mean it, and is that the difference between them and those “establishment Republicans” like John McCain that they are always attacking? No, not really. They want to win elections, too, but only in order to impose a governing order that they believe should be immune to any future election, immune from contrary popular majorities generally, and immune to any other of those “changing circumstances” that gutless RINOs always cite in the process of selling out “the base.” And that’s why they are willing to use anti-majoritarian tactics when they are in the minority, and anti-minority tactics when they are in the majority: the only thing that matters is bringing back the only legitimately conservative, the only legitimately American policies and enshrining them as powerfully as is possible.
So from that perspective, sure, they’re conservatives first and Republicans second. But this isn’t a “revolt” against the GOP, but a takeover bid, executed through primaries (e.g., Ted Cruz’s victory over “establishment Republican” David Dewhurst) and the power of money and ultimately sheer intimidation. Ted Cruz won’t “trust Republicans” until they’re all taking orders from people like him, who are in turn simply taking orders from God Almighty and the Founding Fathers.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 22, 2013
“Tied At The Hip”: E.W. Jackson Throws A Wrench Into The Ken Cuccinelli Plan
Ken Cuccinelli’s plan for winning the Virginia gubernatorial race is straightforward. Avoid outspoken statements on social issues—the same ones that alienate most Virginians but excite his rightwing base—and focus the campaign on jobs and growth.
So far, he’s done exactly that. Of his three television advertisements, for example none mention abortion or same-sex marriage. Instead, the first—narrated by his wife—presents Cuccinelli as a defender of the vulnerable, highlighting his time working in homeless shelters and prosecuting human traffickers. The second is a straightforward ad on the economy—where he touts his Ryan-esque tax plan of cuts—and the third is meant to humanize Cuccinelli, and features the widow of a slain Fairfax County police officer, who endorses the attorney general.
E.W. Jackson, the newly-minted GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, throws a huge wrench in this strategy.
Jackson is known for his outspoken social conservatism. He routinely denounces LGBT equality—calling gay Americans “sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally”—and has compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan, accusing them of engineering the mass slaughter of black children through their support for abortion rights. Indeed, this rhetoric is the whole reason for his popularity among Virginia conservatives and the reason he was able to win the nomination.
Which means he’s unlikely to abandon it on the campaign trail. Cuccinelli is a deft politician, but not so deft that he’s able to distance himself from someone who—ostensibly—is his running mate. And so, at a campaign stop in Abdingdon—in the southwest corner of the state—Cuccinelli told supporters that he’s “glad” Jackson is on the ticket. Why? Because the lieutenant governor cast the tie-breaking vote in the Virginia Senate, and at the moment, the senate has an even split between Democrats and Republicans. Here’s more from the Virginian Pilot:
“I don’t need to know what the subject matter that’s going to tie up 20–20 that the LG can vote on will be. I’m confident that we’re going to get the right vote every single time out of E.W. Jackson,” Cuccinelli said of the Chesapeake-based minister. “So I’m glad he’s on this ticket, too.”
Expect this quote to be circulated around the state by Virginia Democrats. And for good reason. Given their demographic challenges, Democrats—and Terry McAuliffe in particular—have to convince Virginians that the GOP is too extreme to trust. With Cuccinelli now tied to someone further to the right than he is, that task has become much, much easier.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 22, 2013
“Can The President Create A ‘Culture’?”: What Matters Isn’t About Culture, It’s People And Politics
As you may have noticed, the biggest problem with the IRS scandal (from the perspective of Republicans) is that it remains stubbornly removed from the President himself. It’s all well and good to get a couple of scalps from mid-level managers, but for it to be a real presidential scandal you need to implicate the guy in the Oval Office in the wrongdoing. Confronted with Obama’s non-involvement, conservatives have turned to vague and airy accusations about the “culture” Obama has created. Mitch McConnell, for instance, is warning darkly that Obama may be not too far removed from Tony Soprano: “I think what we know for sure is that there is a culture of intimidation across this administration—the president demonizing his enemies, attempting to shut people up. There is certainly a culture of intimidation.”
The idea that Barack Obama—whom Republicans regularly accuse of being a foreign-born anti-American socialist communist marxist who is slowly carrying out a plan to destroy America—is the one “demonizing” his opponents is pretty laughable. But the nice thing about the “culture” argument is that to make it, you don’t have to point to any particular thing any particular person has done. It’s just a culture, out there in the ether.
Conservatives are also alleging that the IRS employees who gave extra scrutiny to 501(c)(4) applications of Tea Party groups were in fact acting on Obama’s instructions. It was just that the instructions came in the form of him going out on the campaign trail and lamenting the Citizens United decision and the way it opened the door for all kinds of “dark money” to be injected into campaigns. Once again, it’s a way of ascribing guilt without having any evidence of guilt, but the problem is, it fails from both ends. Lots of people, even many Republicans, joined Obama in lamenting the rise of the new super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. It was an issue when Republicans were using them against each other in the 2012 presidential primaries. And if the IRS employees were trying to help Obama, they were going about it all wrong. As Ed Kilgore says, “The ultimate howler here is that we are supposed to believe that IRS bureaucrats, in obedience to the “dog whistle” of the president’s demonization of conservative groups’ involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign, chose to ignore the groups that were involved in the campaign in a significant way, and instead go after small fry Tea Party organizations.”
But can a president create a “culture” within the government that has consequences for the behavior of bureaucrats down the line, even to the point of sanctioning wrongdoing? The easy answer is, well, sure. Every boss creates an atmosphere that can affect the behavior of the people who work for her. But when you get beyond the people who work in the president’s immediate orbit, what matters isn’t culture, it’s people and policies. For instance, the Bush administration didn’t torture prisoners because Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and said that to fight terrorism we’d have to go to “the dark side, if you will,” and then folks just got the message and started waterboarding prisoners. It happened because the administration made torture its official policy, and had in place the personnel who were eager to do it.
The United States government is a gigantic entity; even excluding uniformed military, there are 2.7 million federal employees spread around the country. No one, not even the president, can with a few words on the campaign trail create a “culture” that allows misbehavior to happen. I realize that many conservatives believe that Obama and anyone who would ever consider working for him are so corrupt that their immorality must naturally spread through the government like the hantavirus. But that’s not how it works.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 22, 2013
“The GOP Has Learned Nothing”: A Party Letting Its Base Lead Where The Rest Of America Dares Not To Follow
You’d think the conservative base would have learned its lesson in 2010, when, in a fever pitch of epic magnitude, it nominated Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller to run for the U.S. Senate. Suddenly, what looked like a prime opportunity for Republicans to flip the upper chamber and send Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., packing turned into an example of a party letting its base lead where the rest of America dared not follow. Or perhaps in 2012, when Indiana Senate nominee Richard Mourdock was sunk by an extremely ill-advised and incorrect rape comment.
However, one look at the gubernatorial ticket in Virginia shows that the tea party’s dream is alive and kicking. Not only has the party nominated Ken Cuccinelli for governor – who believes that the entire social safety net is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation“– but it has added Rev. E.W. Jackson to run for Lieutenant Governor.
Amongst Jackson’s greatest hits are calling gay and lesbian Americans “sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally”; claiming that the infamous 3/5ths clause of the Constitution was “anti-slavery”; saying that Planned Parenthood is akin to the Ku Klux Klan; and claiming that the agenda of the Democratic party is “worthy of the Antichrist.”
This was not supposed to be the plan. Though Cuccinelli is an avowed culture warrior and tea party darling, he has been staying away from those issues on the campaign trail, instead focusing on jobs and the economy. But as Jamelle Bouie explains at the American Prospect, Jackson’s inclusion on the ticket is going to make that strategy a lot harder to pull off:
Ken Cuccinelli’s plan for winning the Virginia gubernatorial race is straightforward. Avoid outspoken statements on social issues—the same ones that alienate most Virginians but excite his rightwing base—and focus the campaign on jobs and growth.
So far, he’s done exactly that. Of his three television advertisements, for example none mention abortion or same-sex marriage … E.W. Jackson, the newly-minted GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, throws a huge wrench in this strategy.
As Tim Murphy detailed at Mother Jones, Jackson was able to grab the nomination because Virginia’s GOP eschews a traditional primary in favor of “a one-day nominating convention packed with grassroots activists.” And those activists, as they have across the country, clearly have little regard for such parochial concerns as electability in a state that voted for President Barack Obama twice and is represented in the Senate by two Democrats. “These kinds of comments are simply not appropriate, especially not from someone who wants to be a standard bearer for our party and hold the second highest elected office in our state,” said the current Republican Lt. Gov., Bill Bolling, when asked about Jackson. “They feed the image of extremism, and that’s not where the Republican Party needs to be.”
Of course, Cuccinelli and Jackson may very well win. (They are running against Terry McAuliffe, after all, who doesn’t inspire much in the way of excitement.) Stranger things have certainly happened.
But in the long run, consistently nominating extreme social warriors, when the country is shown to be consistently going the other way on social issues, is only going to hurt the GOP’s actual policy goals. For proof of that, go say hello to Majority Leader Reid or google how the repeal of Obamacare is going.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, May 22, 2013
“Resonance Resistant”: Republicans Racing Off The Cliff In Their Supercharged Outrage Machine
Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.
According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:
CREDIBILITY People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.
And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.
Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”
COMPLEXITY Where is Benghazi? Seriously, folks, quickly point it out on a map. Thought so. Now, to the controversy: the talking points — what they said, and the machination of how that was altered, and whether Al Qaeda should have been immediately blamed, and whether the word “terror” should have had an “-ist” or an “-ism.” Seeking to find the killers of four dead Americans is honorable; endless testimony about a fussed-over script used to explain the tragedy is mind-numbing.
UNPOPULARITY It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.
As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé.
The policy issue is a different story, as The Washington Post pointed out this week: “In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark ‘Citizens United’ decision cleared the way for corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money, and register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).”
That decision was extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released nearly a month after the decision was handed down found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it.
So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.
ZEALOTRY The Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder, Michele Bachmann, who never misses a chance to say something asinine, suggested to the conservative site wnd.com that it was “reasonable” to worry that the I.R.S. might use Obamacare to kill conservatives.
The article reads, in part:
“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”
“Reasonable” and “Bachmann” don’t even belong in the same conversation, let alone the same sentence, and yet she remains one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement.
Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Republicans against overreaching. In an NPR interview that aired Friday, Gingrich, referring to the impeachment of President Clinton, said, “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”
He continued, advising his party to be “calm and factual.” Ha! That’s too rich, and too late. Republicans are already invoking the I-word.
Republicans are their own worst enemies at times like these, unable to leave well-enough alone, and missing chances to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 17, 2013
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