“Unable To Win Elections”: They Tried To Break The Federal Government, Now They’re Going After The Courts
The astounding show of Republican recklessness that led to last month’s government shutdown made one thing very clear. The new Republican Party — the one ruled by the Tea Party — isn’t interested in making our government work. They want to break it.
Now, as if shutting down the government of the United States, furloughing hundreds of thousands of government employees, wasting billions of dollars and threatening to wreck America’s economy wasn’t enough, Republicans in Congress have set their sights on a new target: our justice system.
Yesterday, Senate Republicans took their campaign against our government to a whole new level when they blocked the nomination of Nina Pillard to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is widely considered to be the nation’s second-highest court behind the Supreme Court.
Pillard is one of President Obama’s three nominees to fill vacancies on the D.C. Circuit, which is currently operating with nearly one-third of its active judgeships vacant. All three nominees have extraordinary professional qualifications. All three have support from across the ideological spectrum. Yet Senate Republicans are vowing to filibuster all three simply because they were nominated by President Obama.
One of the most basic functions of the U.S. Senate is to provide “advice and consent” to the president on his nominations to executive agencies and to the federal courts. For most of our country’s history, the Senate has generally taken this constitutional order responsibly, using its power to block only nominees whom senators found unqualified or dangerously far out of the mainstream. That is, until now.
The same party that shut down the government in an attempt to nullify a duly-enacted law that it does not like is now trying to prevent a twice-elected president from filling vacancies on an important court — a duty entrusted to him by the Constitution.
There’s a reason Republican obstructionists have targeted the D.C. Circuit. The court has the last word on important federal laws and administrative rules on issues ranging from clean air regulations to workers’ rights to cigarette labeling requirements to presidential recess appointments. Basically, just about any area that we regulate through our federal government is going to be affected by the D.C. Circuit. And it is currently dominated by conservative ideologues: nine of the 14 judges on the court (including “active” judges and senior judges who participate in panel decisions) were nominated by Republican presidents seeking to remake the courts in their ideological image.
Republicans want to keep it this way. President Obama has nominated five people to the court, yet Senate Republicans have allowed only one of these nominees to so much as receive a confirmation vote. By comparison, the Senate confirmed four of George W. Bush’s nominees to the court and eight of Ronald Reagan’s. In fact, the ninth, tenth, and eleventh seats that Republicans today demand remain vacant are ones that they ensured were filled when George W. Bush was president.
To give you an idea of just how conservative this court is as a result, just this month a George W. Bush nominee and a George H.W. Bush nominee ruled that employers who oppose birth control should be able to deny their employees access to affordable contraception through their insurance plans — an absurd twisting of the true meaning of religious liberty. A few months ago, the court ruled that a law requiring employers to display a poster listing employees’ legal rights violates the free speech rights of the employers. No, really!
Unable to win national elections, Republicans are trying to hold on to what power they still have — and that includes control of the powerful D.C. Circuit. Just like they couldn’t accept that the Affordable Care Act was the law of the land, the Tea Party won’t admit that Americans chose President Obama to be the one making picks to the federal courts.
The Tea Party thinks that it has some sort of intellectual property claim on the U.S. Constitution. But sometimes I wonder if its leaders have even read it.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way, Published in The Huffington Post Blog, November 13, 2013
“The GOP Is Driving In Circles”: Like Past Outreach Efforts, “Burning Glass” Is Doomed To Failure
Just days after Republican Ken Cuccinelli discovered that running as the transvaginal ultrasound candidate may have been a mistake in increasingly blue Virginia, three Republican women are launching a new effort to solve the GOP’s serious problem with female voters.
The Republican Party’s outreach to women — to the degree that it reaches out at all — has clearly not been working. Poll after poll shows that women favor the Democratic Party over the Republicans, and recent elections have confirmed it. President Obama topped Mitt Romney by 9 percent among women in 2012, and Terry McAuliffe beat Cuccinelli by an identical amount in Virginia in 2013. Among unmarried women, the gender gap is even more severe.
As Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times, Republican consultants Katie Packer Gage, Ashley O’Connor and Christine Matthews hope to reverse the trend by launching a group called Burning Glass Consulting.
“We want to get smarter about how we communicate the Republican message specifically to women,” Gage told the Times. “Certainly there are challenges with other demographic groups, but women represent 53 percent of the electorate.”
According to the report, “The three strategists will undertake public opinion research, TV ads and general consulting for Republican candidates about how to better reach that majority.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Republican Party has been down this road before. Just eight months ago, the Republican National Committee itself declared its intention to “stop talking to itself,” and improve outreach to minorities, the working class, and the same women that Burning Glass intends to target today.
“Instead of driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac, we need a party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us,” the Republican consultants who wrote the report optimistically suggested.
The suggestion didn’t take. On the contrary, Republicans have managed to move even further out of the mainstream — at a grave cost to their already tattered reputation.
Ultimately, Burning Glass Consultants will encounter the same problem the RNC did. Sure, a more moderate tone couldn’t hurt the Republican Party’s efforts to win over women — it may even help them on the margins. But there is no message fix that could paper over the fact that elected Republicans are devoting their efforts to shuttering women’s health clinics, restricting access to contraception, and trashing the Affordable Care Act’s maternity coverage, among a long, long list of other policies that are genuinely hostile to women.
Yes, the Republican Party would benefit if far-right candidates like Richard Mourdock would stop telling women that they can’t undergo an abortion after being raped, because “God intended” for them to be attacked. But the GOP would be even better off if that wasn’t the party’s official platform.
Burning Glass’ effort to attract female voters is surely well intentioned. But as Republicans are finding out in their unsuccessful push to attract Hispanic voters, actions speak louder than words.
By: Henry Decker, the National Memo, November 12, 2013
“What A Terrible Thing To Do To People”: Republican Attacks On Obamacare Are Turning Into An Argument Against Repeal
If health insurance isn’t important, why would receiving a letter telling you that you need to change your plan be a tragedy that can get you on Fox News nearly immediately?
Republicans have seized on the millions of cancellations of current plans happening as a result of the Affordable Care Act remaking the individual insurance market, which currently offers the worst customer satisfaction of any type of health coverage.
By glorifying these “horror” stories, which have often turned out to be overinflated at worst and actual Affordable Care Act (ACA) success stories at best, Republicans are sending a clear message to Americans: We must defend the sanctity of health insurance.
This powerful theme is extremely opportune, as long as cancellation notices are contradicting a promise the president made, Healthcare.gov is flagging and the ACA’s paid enrollment numbers are low. However, it becomes much more complicated as the site starts working and 2014 begins with millions of people enjoying health care coverage and subsidies that the GOP would be voting to take away.
This would effectively doom the “repeal” strategy Republicans have fixated on for years, argues Salon’s Brian Beutler:
Obamacare is driving policy cancellations right now, but it at least creates a coverage guarantee for those affected. Repeal without replace would impose a greater burden without providing any counterweight.
If they pass the Keep Your Health Plan Act this week, House Republicans will see their stylized sympathy for people whose policies have been canceled come into tension with their explicit desire to take Obamacare benefits away from many of the same people, and millions more.
Becoming the party that opposes all cancellations of insurance policies also completely undermines any Republican “plan” that might be an alternative to the ACA. “Such a starting position would make true market-oriented reform impossible,” explains The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein.
John McCain’s health care plan, one part of his platform conservatives love, would have ended health care tax exemptions for employers and employees. This would have likely resulted in millions and millions of Americans ending up in new plans. The Republican Study Committee has offered a “serious” Obamacare alternative that would try to end the system of employer-based health care, disrupting the current health care system far more than the ACA does.
Even as Republicans are vindictively leaping on any cancellation story, other right-wing groups are trying to spread the idea to people in their 20s to optout of the ACA, even though millions of younger Americans can get coverage for free. One Koch-funded group, Generation Opportunity, brought its scary Uncle Sam and some models to tailgate before the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game to let the students know that opting out of health insurance is, as the kids say, cool.
So health insurance is lame and having it changed in any way whatsoever is the greatest atrocity an American can be expected to suffer.
Republicans have been fine with these kinds of contradictions throughout President Obama’s time in office. The deficit suddenly became a problem on January 21, 2009. Tea Partiers demanded that we get our gubmint hands off their Medicare. The GOP won the House by campaigning against cuts to Medicare that they then included in Paul Ryan’s budget.
But there is evidence that efforts to actually take something away from Americans results in a substantial backlash.
The wave of voting restrictions across the South after the 2010 election was mostly blocked by the federal courts empowered by a Voting Rights Act that had not yet been gutted. But Republicans did successfully restrict early voting in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida. Despite this, or as a result of it, African-American turnout hit an all-time high in the 2012 election.
North Carolina passed some of the most radical voting restrictions on students in the nation and local Republicans specifically attempted to block Elizabeth City State University senior Montravias King from running for city council where he was attending college. Their efforts backfired.
“On October 9, King was elected to the Elizabeth City city council, winning the most votes of any candidate,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman reported. “He’s now the youngest elected official in the state.”
Students must have figured: If voting weren’t important, why would Republicans be doing everything they can to stop me from doing it?
In only 10 states, 444,000 people have already signed up for Medicaid. The fact that the GOP would deny them and about five million more poor people health insurance isn’t big news for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re poor. Second, these people haven’t had anything taken away from them — yet.
But on January 1, the story changes. Suddenly Republicans will be trying to do exactly what they’re accusing President Obama of: taking away health insurance with nothing to replace it. And thanks to the GOP, now it’s clear what a terrible thing that is to do to a person.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 12, 2013
“Medicaid Matters”: Where Is The Outrage Over GOP Governors Cutting Off Lower-Income Americans From Access To Medicaid
E.J. Dionne Jr. raises an argument in his column this morning that’s been getting short shrift by too much of the political world lately: Medicaid expansion matters, and far too many state Republican policymakers are blocking it for no reason.
“President Obama apologized last week after all the criticisms of what’s happening in the individual insurance market,” Dionne explained. “But where is the outrage over governors and legislators flatly cutting off so many lower-income Americans from access to Medicaid? The Urban Institute estimates that 6 million to 7 million people will be deprived of coverage in states that are refusing to accept the expansion.”
The recent disruption in the health care marketplace certainly matters, and the Obama administration has a lot of work to do to put things right. But if we’re going to talk about policymakers who need to apologize and show some semblance of regret, can we at least start to have a conversation about those keeping millions of struggling Americans from having access to coverage, largely out of partisan spite?
Jonathan Cohn published a good piece on this earlier:
Today it’s a few hundred thousand people. By next year, it will be at least a few million. Their health insurance status is changing dramatically: What they have in 2014 and beyond will look nothing like what they had in 2013 and before. For many of these people, the difference will be hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year. In a few cases, it may be the difference between life and death.
You probably think I’m talking about the people getting cancellation notices about their private insurance policies. I’m not. I’m talking about the people getting Medicaid. Both stories are consequences of the Affordable Care Act. But one is getting way, way more attention than the other.
There’s been an obvious preoccupation – on Capitol Hill, with Beltway media, etc. – with website dysfunction and cancelation notices, while Medicaid expansion, which arguably affects a larger group of people, has been routinely overlooked.
Maybe it’s because Washington is “wired” for Republicans and it’s the right’s complaints that have been driving the recent conversation. Perhaps it’s the result of Medicaid beneficiaries lacking the kind of political capital that keeps their plight on the political world’s front-burner. Maybe it’s a matter of timeliness, with implementation disruption seeming “new” in ways Medicaid is not. Perhaps it’s a combination of things.
Regardless, by my standards, this is a genuine scandal. The administration’s missteps are real, but they’re not deliberate. “Red” states rejecting Medicaid expansion because of some misguided contempt for “Obamacare” are leaving struggling families behind on purpose. The callousness is outrageous.
Cohn concluded, “”Should the president have been more candid about the impact his plan would have on people buying their own coverage? Yes. Should we pay attention to those people, particularly when they must now pay more for equivalent coverage? Definitely. Should this put extra pressure on the administration and some states to fix their websites? You bet. But that’s not the only Obamacare news right now. The law is making life better for a great many people – and would help even more if only Republican lawmakers would relent.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 11, 2013
“Bringing His Own Bile To The Party”: Backwards Moron Richard Cohen Is Not Fooling Anybody
Before we proceed to today in the continuing saga of “What in God’s Name Are You Talking About, Richard Cohen?” here’s a warning — get your gag reflex ready.
In a typically rambling screed about… something, Cohen, who recently became the first man to connect the dots between Miley Cyrus’ MTV Video Music Awards performance and what he likes to call “the so-called Steubenville rape” that happened one full year earlier, Cohen unleashes some choice nonsense thoughts on “Chris Christie’s Tea Party Problem.” In it, he ostensibly looks at the New Jersey’s governor’s political future and declares that “At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans.” He also lets loose a truly outstanding array of bizarre assessments of prominent political figures, calling Sarah Palin “the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona,” Rick Santorum a man who’s “neither cuddly nor moderate” and Christie “too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well.”
But the true kicker of the piece comes near the end, when he swerves away from concern trolling Chris Christie to laughably state “Today’s GOP is not racist” — a declaration that the antics of party members would seem to contradict –and to consider what must be “troubling” the Tea Party right now. “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York,” he writes, “a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.”
Cohen would likely argue he’s just calling it like he sees it – reporting on incredibly offensive ideologies but not engaging in them himself. And hey, you want to suggest that political extremists might have a problem with a high profile mixed family? You might be right. Look how berserkers they went over that Cheerios commercial.
But we all know this isn’t Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” brightly announcing that “I think New York City might be ready for a charismatic biracial family with their own signature, synchronized dance moves.” This is Richard Cohen — a guy who thinks that “conventional” people would have a vomit response to a mixed marriage – and who then parenthetically throws in a little gay panic to boot. Because in his mind, being a backward moron is “conventional.”
This is a man who, let us never forget, has written creepily of the “sexual meritocracy” of older men and declared Clarence Thomas “condemned of being a man.” This is Richard Cohen, the writer who applauded Switzerland for it leniency toward Roman Polanski, who admitted, “There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze” and then proceeded to dismissively refer to that girl as a “victim” in scare quotes. (Note to Cohen: Just like with the Steubenville case, this behavior is called rape.) The same man who, fascinatingly enough, has reportedly been reprimanded for “inappropriate behavior” toward a much younger colleague. This is a man who in July explained that he could “understand why [George] Zimmerman was suspicious” of Trayvon Martin, because the young man was “wearing a uniform we all recognize” and who lamented, “Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?” A man who thinks maybe there’s something to this whole torture thing. One who hasn’t quite worked it out about homosexuals either, who’s decided that prejudice is bad but thinks “Gays don’t get some sort of pass just because they’re gay.”
You can almost understand how a guy like Cohen, who was spent his entire career amply demonstrating that he has a boatload of issues around women, sex and race, really hit the jackpot with Chirlane McCray. My God, look at her, all seemingly normal and living under the same room as a white man. Did I mention she used to be lesbian? Because she totally was. Surely, Cohen wants the world to understand, some people might have a problem with this. Not him, no, he’s just observing. Maybe asking for a friend.
It’s almost sad – almost – to watch a bigot try to cloak himself in the guise of concerned citizen. But rest assured, nobody with a track record like Cohen can use the phrase “gag reflex” without bringing plenty of his own bile to the party. And his transparently ugly shtick is fooling no one.
By: Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, November 12, 2013
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