“Cantor Running Scared”: Facing A Hard-Right Challenger, He Wants No Part Of Immigration Reform
In the latest round of Republican excuses for inaction on immigration reform, there’s a new culprit: Eric Cantor’s actually struggling in his re-election primary. Here’s how Juan Williams puts it at The Hill:
When Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) was recently asked why he has failed to get an immigration bill to the floor, he reacted by saying “Me?” Boehner appeared to be passing the buck to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), who sets the schedule for floor votes….
At the moment, Cantor wants no part of anything that can be labeled “amnesty.” He started backtracking on support for reform during his fight to win Tuesday’s GOP primary in his congressional district. Cantor is facing a hard-right challenger, Dave Brat, who opposes any citizenship or legal status for illegal immigrants as “amnesty.”
Some of you may recall that last month Cantor was humiliated at his own 7th district GOP convention when he was booed lustily by many delegates just before his hand-picked candidate for district chairman was rejected. Tomorrow he faces conservative economics professor Dave Brat at the polls, and though Cantor is heavily favored, it’s not a slam dunk. On Friday a poll commissioned by the Daily Caller showed the incumbent well below 50% in committed supporters, and only leading 52-39 with leaners added in. The poll didn’t show immigration as a red-hot issue, but did show that about a third of GOP voters in Cantor’s district have really hard-core, round-em-all-up views about undocumented workers:
Only 9 percent of respondents in the poll said immigration was their top-most issue. Cantor’s team has flooded mailboxes with flyers that says he has blocked the Senate’s June 2013 rewrite of immigration laws, and that he opposes amnesty for illegals.
The poll shows that Cantor’s primary voters strongly oppose illegal immigration. Sixty-four percent said government should focus on blocking illegal immigration, while only 26 percent said the focus should be to “deal with the immigrants who are currently in the U.S. illegally.”
Only 23 percent said “there needs to be a humane way for immigrants to come out of the shadows and gain legal status.” In contrast, 33 percent support deporting “every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally.” Forty-four percent want “something in between” legalization and complete deportation, said the poll.
So if the primary explains Cantor’s lassitude towards action on immigration in the House, will he spring back to life after the votes are in tomorrow (assuming, of course, that he wins)? I dunno. Nothing would give more impetus to a challenge to Cantor next cycle than that sort of screw-you gesture to the conservatives of his district. And Cantor also has to pay attention to keeping a majority of House Republicans in his camp for his presumed ascension to the top House job when John Boehner hangs it up. With each day the odds of any action on immigration reform erodes a bit more. What’s mainly interesting at the moment is when and how House GOP leaders officially throw in the towel.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 9, 2014
“McCain Just Can’t Seem To Help Himself”: One Of These Days, The Beltway Will Stop Looking To McCain As An Expert
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran into a little trouble last week. The Republican senator, a little too eager to condemn the Obama White House, complained about the prisoner swap that freed an American POW despite having already endorsed the exact same plan a few months prior. After getting caught, McCain falsely accused his critics of “lying.”
Making matters slightly worse, the Arizona lawmaker, himself a former POW, complained to the media that he hadn’t learned anything from a classified briefing on Bowe Bergdahl’s release, neglecting to mention that he’d left in the middle of it.
Despite – or perhaps, because of – these embarrassments, McCain scored another Sunday-show invitation, where he somehow managed to add insult to injury.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday called the five Guantanamo detainees released in a prisoner swap for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl “hardcore military jihadists who are responsible for 9/11” and said he expects them to return to fighting against the U.S.
In context, looking at the full transcript, it’s hard to say whether McCain believes these five detainees were “responsible for 9/11” or whether he believes all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were “responsible for 9/11,” but either way, the senator is plainly wrong.
McCain added, in reference to the Bergdahl prisoner-swap, “I wouldn’t release these men, not these men. They were evaluated and judged as too great a risk to release.”
That’s wrong, too. In fact, the former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay told msnbc’s Alex Witt over the weekend that at first he didn’t even recognize these detainees’ names. “To trade five of them for a U.S. service member, in my estimation, and I’m often critical of President [Barack] Obama, I think they struck a pretty good deal,” retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis said.
What’s more, just a few months ago, McCain personally endorsed the plan to transfer these exact same Taliban prisoners. When he says he wouldn’t have completed the swap for “these men,” he’s neglecting to mention that he’d already expressed public support for swapping “these men.”
And all of this led to the creme de la crème:
“I believe that there are other prisoners, some of whom we have already released, that we could have released that – in exchange,” McCain argued.
If someone could explain what this means, I’d appreciate it. Putting aside the fact that McCain already endorsed the plan to swap these exact same prisoners before he changed his mind and denied changing his mind, it’s not at all clear how U.S. officials could have swapped prisoners “whom we have already released.”
It’s tempting to think that, one of these days, the Beltway will stop looking to McCain as an expert on matters related to national security and the military, but I’ve been waiting for that day for quite a while. It never seems to arrive.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 9, 2014
“Troubling Questions”: How Much Does Right-Wing Rhetoric Contribute To Right-Wing Terrorism?
Yesterday, a man and a woman shot two police officers in a Las Vegas restaurant after saying, “this is a revolution.” Then they draped their bodies in a Gadsden flag. According to reports now coming in, the couple (who later killed themselves) appear to have been white supremacists and told neighbors they had gone to join the protests in support of anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy. It was one more incident of right-wing terrorism that, while not exactly an epidemic, has become enough of a trend to raise some troubling questions.
What I’m about to say will raise some hackles, but we need to talk about it. It’s long past time for prominent conservatives and Republicans to do some introspection and ask whether they’re contributing to outbreaks of right-wing violence.
Before I go on, let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Republican members of Congress bear direct responsibility for everything some disturbed person from the same side of the political spectrum as them might do. I’m not saying that they are explicitly encouraging violence. Nor am I saying that you can’t find examples of liberals using hyperbolic, irresponsible words.
But what I am saying is this: there are some particular features of conservative political rhetoric today that help create an atmosphere in which violence and terrorism can germinate.
The most obvious component is the fetishization of firearms and the constant warnings that government will soon be coming to take your guns. But that’s only part of it. Just as meaningful is the conspiracy theorizing that became utterly mainstream once Barack Obama took office. If you tuned into one of many national television and radio programs on the right, you heard over and over that Obama was imposing a totalitarian state upon us. You might hear that FEMA was building secret concentration camps (Glenn Beck, the propagator of that theory, later recanted it, though he has a long history of violent rhetoric), or that Obama is seeding the government with agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. You grandfather probably got an email offering proof that Obama is literally the antichrist.
Meanwhile, conservatives have become prone to taking the political disagreements of the moment and couching them in apocalyptic terms, encouraging people to think that if Democrats have their way on any given debate, that our country, or at the very least our liberty, might literally be destroyed.
To take just one of an innumerable number of examples, when GOP Senator Ron Johnson says that the Affordable Care Act is “the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime,” and hopes that the Supreme Court will intervene to preserve our “last shred of freedom,” is it at all surprising that some people might be tempted to take up arms? After all, if he’s right, and the ACA really means that freedom is being destroyed, then violent revolution seems justified. Johnson might respond by saying, “Well, of course I didn’t mean that literally.” And I’m sure he didn’t — Johnson may be no rocket scientist, but he knows that despite the individual mandate going into effect, there are a few shreds of freedom remaining in America.
But the argument that no sane person could actually believe many of the things conservatives say shouldn’t absolve them of responsibility. When you broadcast every day that the government of the world’s oldest democracy is a totalitarian beast bent on turning America into a prison of oppression and fear, when you glorify lawbreakers like Cliven Bundy, when you say that your opponents would literally destroy the country if they could, you can’t profess surprise when some people decide that violence is the only means of forestalling the disaster you have warned them about.
To my conservative friends tempted to find outrageous things liberals have said in order to argue that both sides are equally to blame, I’d respond this way: Find me all the examples of people who shot up a church after reading books by Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, and then you’ll have a case.
In our recent history, every election of a Democratic president is followed by a rise in conspiracy-obsessed right-wing populism. In the 1960s it was the John Birch Society; in the 1990s it was the militia movement shouting about black UN helicopters, and during the Obama presidency it was the Tea Party. Some of those movements are ultimately harmless, but alongside and around them are people who take their rhetoric seriously and lash out in response. After these killings in Nevada, and the murders at a Jewish community center in Kansas, and the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and multiple murders by members of the “sovereign citizens” movement in the last few years, it’s worth remembering that since 9/11, right-wing terrorism has killed many more Americans than al Qaeda terrorism.
And I promise you, these murders in Nevada will not be the last. It may be going too far to say that conservative politicians and media figures whose rhetoric has fed the deranged fantasies of terrorists and killers have blood on their hands. But they shouldn’t have a clear conscience, either.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line; The Washington Post, June 9, 2014
“Interests, Ideology And Climate”: For Republicans, Overcoming Pride And Willful Ignorance Is Hard
There are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don’t take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn’t be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.
But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?
I’ve been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it’s not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren’t nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else — a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism.
Before I get to that, however, an aside on the economics.
I’ve noted in earlier columns that every even halfway serious study of the economic impact of carbon reductions — including the recent study paid for by the anti-environmental U.S. Chamber of Commerce — finds at most modest costs. Practical experience points in the same direction. Back in the 1980s conservatives claimed that any attempt to limit acid rain would have devastating economic effects; in reality, the cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide was highly successful at minimal cost. The Northeastern states have had a cap-and-trade arrangement for carbon since 2009, and so far have seen emissions drop sharply while their economies grew faster than the rest of the country. Environmentalism is not the enemy of economic growth.
But wouldn’t protecting the environment nonetheless impose costs on some sectors and regions? Yes, it would — but not as much as you think.
Consider, in particular, the much-hyped “war on coal.” It’s true that getting serious about global warming means, above all, cutting back on (and eventually eliminating) coal-fired power, which would hurt regions of the country that depend on coal-mining jobs. What’s rarely pointed out is how few such jobs still exist.
Once upon a time King Coal was indeed a major employer: At the end of the 1970s there were more than 250,000 coal miners in America. Since then, however, coal employment has fallen by two-thirds, not because output is down — it’s up, substantially — but because most coal now comes from strip mines that require very few workers. At this point, coal mining accounts for only one-sixteenth of 1 percent of overall U.S. employment; shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9.
Or put it this way: The real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And coal workers lost.
The owners of coal mines and coal-fired power plants do have a financial interest in blocking environmental policy, but even there the special interests don’t look all that big. So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?
Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.
And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.
The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It’s not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place.
So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science. In some ways this makes the task easier: we do not, in fact, have to force people to accept large monetary losses. But we do have to overcome pride and willful ignorance, which is hard indeed.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 8, 2014
“When A Politician Tells The Truth”: GOP Candidates Are Seeing Obamacare In A Different Light
In an interview with a reporter last month, Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) “accidentally” made complimentary remarks about the Affordable Care Act, routinely known as Obamacare. (His campaign aides claim he misunderstood the question.) Some analysts say those remarks were among the missteps that have left the senator in danger of defeat as he faces a primary runoff against a Tea Party upstart, Chris McDaniel.
It’s possible that Cochran was confused when he told The Washington Post that the ACA “is an example of an important effort by the federal government to help make health care available, accessible and affordable.” It’s also possible that he committed the standard political gaffe as commentator Michael Kinsley defined it years ago: “… when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”
Either way, Cochran’s comments are a reminder of a pronounced shift among Republican politicians discussing Obamacare on the campaign trail. Few of them are delivering feisty denunciations and declarations of repeal, as they did just a few months ago. Even in deeply conservative states, Republicans are muting their rhetoric, acknowledging positive tenets of the ACA and engaging in equivocation — or, in some cases, fabrication — to cover their tracks.
That’s because the political terrain has shifted beneath their feet. In practice, as its proponents have long predicted, the ACA has helped millions of people to obtain health care they would not have been able to afford otherwise. Surely it’s no surprise that few voters want to give up benefits they have just begun to enjoy.
That has meant some less-than-artful dodging by such indefatigable partisan warriors as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In keeping with the GOP script, McConnell has been adamant about repealing the ACA.
But in his home state of Kentucky, Kynect, the state-run exchange that connects residents to Obamacare, is wildly popular, having signed up more than 400,000 people for health insurance. So McConnell takes advantage of voters’ confusion — many don’t understand that Kynect is Obamacare — to suggest he supports the exchange but not that foul law that made it possible. Indeed, he has gone so far as to declare that they are unconnected — a laughable lie, even in the warped reality of a political campaign.
Several other prominent Republicans have found themselves in a similar bind, as many facets of the law prove politically popular. Voters still don’t like “Obamacare,” but they like many of its provisions, including those that outlaw bans on patients who have pre-existing conditions.
Voters also support the provision that prevents lifetime caps on insurance payments — something that benefits those with serious, chronic illnesses — and the one that allows parents to keep their children insured until they are 26 years old. Indeed, the only provision that remains broadly unpopular is the mandate that requires every adult to buy health insurance (a necessary feature of the law, and one that many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, once believed in).
Perhaps the most dramatic shift among GOP pols has concerned Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. The Supreme Court’s ruling affirming the ACA made the Medicaid expansion optional for states, and most Republican governors resisted it. That was foolish and shortsighted, since the federal government pays the overwhelming portion of the additional cost. Those governors — and their GOP colleagues in Congress — were willing to trade better health for some of their poorest residents for the chance to poke Obama in the eye.
But now some of them are seeing the error of that calculation. For one thing, it’s hard to own up to a willingness to shaft the working poor. For another, some rural hospitals can’t afford to stay open unless they receive additional Medicaid funds. Those hard facts have forced GOP Senate candidates such as Michigan’s Terri Lynn Land to back away from their diehard opposition to Obamacare.
And, as more Americans benefit, the resistance will grow weaker still. That was the historical cycle with Medicare — which the GOP establishment fought long and hard — and Obamacare will likely follow that path to broad acceptance.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 7, 2014
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