“A Rigged Democracy”: In The House Of Representatives, Deck Stacked For Republicans
As a new Congress convenes, it has become an unquestioned truth among Republicans that their party has as much of a mandate as President Obama because voters returned them to power in the House.
The mantra has been intoned by John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and many other party eminences, and there is a certain logic to saying that the voters, by giving Republicans the House, were asking for divided government.
But the claim to represent the voters’ will doesn’t add up.
The final results from the November election were completed Friday, and they show that Democratic candidates for the House outpolled Republicans nationwide by nearly 1.4 million votes and more than a full percentage point — a greater margin than the preliminary figures showed in November. And that’s just the beginning of it: A new analysis finds that even if Democratic congressional candidates won the popular vote by seven percentage points nationwide, they still would not have gained control of the House.
The analysis, by Ian Millhiser at the liberal Center for American Progress using data compiled by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, finds that even if Democrats were to win the popular vote by a whopping nine percentage points — a political advantage that can’t possibly be maintained year after year — they would have a tenuous eight-seat majority.
In a very real sense, the Republican House majority is impervious to the will of the electorate. Thanks in part to deft redistricting based on the 2010 Census, House Republicans may be protected from the vicissitudes of the voters for the next decade. For Obama and the Democrats, this is an ominous development: The House Republican majority is durable, and it isn’t necessarily sensitive to political pressure and public opinion.
According to the Jan. 4 final tally by Cook’s David Wasserman after all states certified their votes, Democratic House candidates won 59,645,387 votes in November to the Republicans’ 58,283,036, a difference of 1,362,351. On a percentage basis, Democrats won, 49.15 percent to 48.03 percent.
This in itself is an extraordinary result: Only three or four other times in the past century has a party lost the popular vote but won control of the House. But computer-aided gerrymandering is helping to make such undemocratic results the norm — to the decided advantage of Republicans, who controlled state governments in 21 states after the 2010 Census, almost double the 11 for Democrats.
To be sure, Democrats tend to be just as flagrant as Republicans when they have the chance to gerrymander. And the Republican advantage isn’t entirely because of redistricting; Democrats have lopsided majorities in urban clusters, so the overall popular vote overstates their competitiveness in other districts. An analysis by FairVote found that nonpartisan redistricting would only partially close the gap, which comes also from the disappearance of ticket-splitting voters who elected centrist Democrats.
But the 2012 House results show the redrawing of districts to optimize Republican representation clearly had an impact. Consider three states won by Obama in 2012 where Republicans dominated the redistricting: In Pennsylvania, Democrats won just five of 18 House seats; in Virginia, Democrats won three of 11; and in Ohio, Democrats won four of 16.
Using Wasserman’s tally, Millhiser ranked districts by the Republican margin of victory and calculated that for Democrats to have won the 218 seats needed for a House majority they would have had to have added 6.13 percentage points to their popular-vote victory margin of 1.12 points.
To put the Republican advantage in perspective, Democrats could win the House only if they do significantly better than Republicans did in their landslide year of 2010 (when they had a 6.6-point advantage). That’s not impossible — Democrats did it in 2006 and 2008 — but it’s difficult. Republicans don’t have a permanent House majority, but they will go into the next several elections with an automatic head start. For many, the biggest political threat comes not from Democrats but from conservative primary challengers.
In theory, the Supreme Court could decide before then that this rigged system denies Americans fair and effective representation. But this won’t happen anytime soon. For now, Democrats need to recognize that the Republican House majority will respond only sluggishly to the usual levers of democracy.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 4, 2012
“Constitution? What Constitution?”: Paul Ryan Refuses To Provide For The General Welfare
When the members of the 113th Congress of the United States took office this week, they swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
The preamble to that Constitution establishes its purpose: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
The Constitution rests a special responsibility in this regard on the legislative branch of the federal government, declaring that the Congress shall use its powers to tax and spend to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
A good debate can be had about the precise meaning of “the general Welfare of the United States.” The founders had that debate—with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton differing vociferously—and it has continued in the Congress and the courts to this day.
But even in the 1790s, there was broad understanding that providing for the “general welfare” involved the taking of steps to protect the people from “misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil”—and to help them respond to such circumstances. Then, as now, “calamity” was understood to involve epic storms, floods and natural disasters.
It is difficult to imagine a recent crisis that more precisely fits the definition of “calamity” than Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath, which has left hundreds of thousands of Americans with destroyed or damaged homes and made it impossible for thousands of businesses to operate along the East Coast of the United State. Whole communities are struggling simply to return to something resembling normal.
On Friday, mere hours after swearing an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” the House of Representatives faced a simple vote on the most basic federal intervention on behalf of the victims of Superstorm Sandy: a measure to temporarily increase the borrowing authority of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assure that the National Flood Insurance Program could meet its obligations.
One hundred and ninety-one Democrats voted for the first real response by Congress to a disaster that occurred more than two months earlier. They were joined by 161 Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota.
But sixty-seven House members —led by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan—voted “no.” The House Budget Committee chairman termed the maintaining of the existing flood-relief program to be “irresponsible.”
Ryan, as is frequently the case when it comes to matters constitutional, was precisely wrong.
One of his few clearly defined responsibilities, one of the few clearly defined responsibilities of any House member, is “to provide for the general Welfare.” They swear an oath to do so. And, barely hours into the new Congress, Ryan and his compatriots rejected that oath and a fundamental premise of the Constitution it supports.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 5, 2012
“Eric Cantor, Cornered”: Another Of The People Who Needs To Be Replaced
Ever since Eric Cantor became No. 2 to John Boehner four years ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the hyperambitious Cantor would knife his nominal boss in the back as soon as he had the chance. “You know Cantor’s trying to get your job,” President Obama tauntingly told the House speaker during their debt-ceiling talks in 2011. And yet, despite obvious tensions between Cantor and Boehner, the two Republicans always managed to strike a unified public front.
Until last week: On New Year’s Day, Boehner cast his lot with 172 Democrats and only 84 other members of his party and voted for the tax-hiking legislation that ultimately ended the “fiscal cliff” drama; Cantor, saying he couldn’t abide by the bill’s lack of spending cuts, voted against it. It was a shockingly brazen split, and some in Washington believed that with Boehner up for reelection as speaker two days later, it marked the opening volley of the long-awaited Cantor coup. Or as Breitbart.com put it in a headline: “ERIC CANTOR MAKES FIRST MOVE TO UNSEAT BOEHNER IN ‘FISCAL CLIFF’ KABUKI THEATER.” And then … nothing happened. “All is not well in the palace,” says one GOP member, “but it’s clear the prince is not trying to poison the king’s chalice.” Now Cantor loyalists worry that their guy, rather than seizing more power, has shot himself in the foot.
It’s a misconception that Cantor is reckless. Although he became the No. 2 House Republican at the tender age of 45 and clearly has designs on the top job, he is playing a long game. “He wants Boehner to have a successful speakership, which would maintain a Republican majority and give Eric the opportunity to become speaker down the road,” a House Republican close to Cantor explained to me in 2011, when talk of a Cantor coup was especially loud. “And Eric is young enough to wait for that.”
The problem for Cantor is that the longer he has waited, the more he has become identified in his fellow Republicans’ eyes with Boehner, who’s on his way to going down as the least effective speaker in modern political history. During the 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations, when Cantor privately signaled that he wouldn’t abide by any plan negotiated with Obama that raised revenues, he was a hero to the GOP rank and file and a clear alternative to Boehner. But during the fiscal-cliff talks, Cantor voiced strong public support for Boehner’s negotiating strategy while staying largely silent inside the House. When Cantor ultimately voted against the compromise legislation, some fellow Republican members, including those who voted with him, viewed it as a desperate stab at shoring up his future prospects.
“There was no predicate for his ‘no’ vote,” concedes one Cantor friend. “There was no setup to it.” Within the GOP caucus, there are solid supporters of the Virginia congressman, another bloc that would never get behind him for speaker, and a swing group in the middle, and it’s that last camp that is most put off by his move on the fiscal-cliff bill. Indeed, even if Cantor had tried to overthrow Boehner last Thursday, he wouldn’t have had the votes.
Cantor allies fear that by doing too little to differentiate himself from Boehner within the caucus since the fireworks of 2011, he may have missed his moment. “Eric has almost become Boehner Lite” to other GOP members, says the supporter. “The longer that goes on, it becomes increasingly likely that he doesn’t become the heir apparent. Instead, he becomes part of the people who need to be replaced once Boehner decides to walk off into the sunset.”
By: Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine, January 4, 2012
“It’s Really Not That Complicated”: Republicans Are At The Intersection Of Recklessness And Stupidity
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today, explaining why he believes it’s responsible to hold the debt ceiling hostage until President Obama “puts forward a plan” that makes Republicans happy. The piece is filled with errors of fact and judgment, but there was one truly bizarre claim that stood out for me.
“The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington,” the Texas Republican wrote. “It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country.”
Just at a surface level, this is ridiculous — to prevent possible trouble in the future, Cornyn intends to cause deliberate trouble now? But even putting that aside, I’m not sure if the senator understands the nature of the controversy. Failing to raise the debt limit — that is, choosing not to pay the bills for money that’s already been spent — doesn’t just “partially shut down the government,” it pushes the nation into default and trashes the full faith and credit of the United States.
Does Cornyn, a member of the Finance and Budget committees, not understand this? Just as importantly, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) equally confused?
“By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, [President Obama] showed what he’s really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” McConnell argued on the Senate floor.
At the risk of being impolite, McConnell’s comments are plainly dumb. As a policy matter, it’s just gibberish, and the fact that the Senate Minority Leader doesn’t seem to know what the debt ceiling even is, after already having threatened default in 2011 and planning an identical scheme in 2013, raises serious questions about how policymakers can expect to resolve a problem they don’t seem to understand at a basic level.
For the record, Congress, by constitutional mandate, has the power of the purse. Unless you’re Ronald Reagan illegally selling weapons to Iran to finance a secret and illegal war in Nicaragua, the executive branch can’t spend money that hasn’t already been authorized by the legislative branch.
If the president had the authority to raise the debt ceiling on his or her own, it would not give the White House the authority to “spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” since any administration would still be dependent on Congress for expenditures. The debt limit has nothing to do with this — spending authority would be unchanged no matter which branch had the power over raising the limit, and whether the ceiling existed or not.
It’s really not that complicated. Congress approves federal spending, the executive branch follows through accordingly. When the legislative branch spends more than it takes in, the executive branch has to borrow the difference.
In the 1930s, Congress came up with the debt ceiling, mandating the White House to get permission to borrow the money that Congress has already spent. If McConnell, Cornyn, and their hostage-taking friends refuse to raise the ceiling, the administration can’t pay the nation’s bills. It’s that simple.
Either GOP lawmakers like McConnell and Cornyn haven’t yet grasped these basic details, or they’re cynically hoping the public is easily misled by bogus rhetoric. Either way, there’s little hope of a sensible public debate if Senate Republican leaders repeat nonsense about a looming national crisis.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 4, 2013
“We’re Dealing With Idiots”: No One Leads Or Controls The GOP House’s Crazy Caucus
By now you’ve probably read one of the stories of the failed attempt by a handful of conservative members of the House GOP caucus to remove John Boehner as speaker of the House. If you haven’t, Joshua Green has a handy summary. Nine members ended up voting against Boehner, eight short of the number that would’ve forced a second ballot, and all involved in the failed ouster humiliated themselves in the most public fashion possible.
One problem was a lack of leadership. If, say, Eric Cantor had actually wanted the job, he could’ve organized the coup and succeeded. But Eric Cantor didn’t want the job. The bigger problem, then, was a lack of intelligence. The crazy caucus failed spectacularly at all aspects of the attempted conspiracy, from planning to execution. They waited until the last minute to approach potential allies, failed to count their own votes correctly, and didn’t even all figure out who they were supposed to vote for instead. Their plan was apparently to embarrass Boehner into resigning, in favor of … someone to be decided later. Candidates voted for by plotters included departing Rep. Allen West and former Comptroller David Walker, who are basically the opposites of one another.
This spectacular display of idiocy is, in microcosm, why negotiating with the House GOP is impossible. Because common negotiation tactics require dealing with an opposition that understands reality. “Leverage” only works against rational people. A large number of House Republicans aren’t just “nihilists,” willing to blow up the economy to get what they want, they’re plain morons who have impossible and horrible goals and no clue whatsoever how to reach them.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., who held an iPad listing the names of would-be anti-Boehner conspirators in full view of a journalist’s camera, is an idiot. He is not just a person whose politics I find distasteful or extremist, he is a dumber-than-average human. Paul Broun and Louie Gohmert are two of the dumbest people on Earth. In a slightly better functioning political world, these three would just do what their smarter leader told them to do. Instead, they and their colleagues have forced their leader to act as if he is as dumb as they are regarding the process of governing. Boehner’s new position is that he will not attempt to negotiate with the party that shares control of the government, which makes no sense as a strategy for achieving conservative policy goals, but makes sense if you think the best way to achieve conservative policy goals is to destroy the country until everyone agrees with you.
As we race to the coming debt ceiling fiasco, please remember that while John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan know that raising the debt ceiling is a thing that just has to be done, there is no indication that the Gohmerts, Huelskamps, Steve Kings and Michele Bachmanns of their caucus agree. You can’t negotiate a compromise with people who are positive they’ll get their way if they refuse to negotiate at all. You can’t avert a catastrophe if you need the assent of people who think the catastrophe is precisely what this country needs to get back on the right track.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 4, 2013
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