“So What’s The Point?”: Mandatory ID ‘Isn’t Just For Voting Anymore’
As part of a broader voter-suppression campaign, Republican policymakers in many states now require voters to show a photo ID in order to cast an election ballot. This step, ostensibly intended to combat voter fraud that doesn’t exist, is a hurdle that’s never been necessary before, and which studies show disproportionately affect Democratic constituencies. There’s ample evidence of registered voters already being blocked from voting because of these measures.
But as my msnbc colleague Zack Roth reports, “For Republicans, requiring photo ID isn’t just for voting anymore.” It’s now being applied to recipients of government benefits.
North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature – which last year passed a voter ID requirement as part of the nation’s most restrictive voting law – advanced a bill Thursday that would make recipients of jobless benefits also show a photo ID. It’s expected to pass next week. […]
Other Republican-led states are even moving to require photo ID to buy food. Starting in July, welfare and food stamp recipients in Maine will have to show photo ID, under a program pushed by far-right Republican governor Paul LePage. He said transactions records show food stamp cards were used thousands of times at strip clubs, smoke shops, and bars, which isn’t allowed. Georgia recently passed a similar requirement for food stamp recipients.
Given all of these efforts, one might assume that fraud is rampant and that ID requirements would save money while preventing illegal schemes.
Except, that’s not quite right.
As Zack’s report made clear, fraud does exist when it comes to the distribution of government benefits, but most of the wrongdoing is the result of “concealed-earnings fraud,” which refers to people who have financial resources they mask in order to remain eligible for benefits, cheating the system.
How would forcing these people to show ID prevent this fraud? It wouldn’t.
For that matter, because food-stamp benefits are distributed by way of Electronic Benefits Transfer cards through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, ID requirements wouldn’t reduce fraud here, either.
So what’s the point? Proponents will have to answer these questions themselves, though Zack’s report added a key detail: ”Studies suggest around 11% of Americans – including one in four African-Americans – don’t have a photo ID. Among those who receive government benefits, that number is almost certainly higher.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2014
“The Fix Isn’t In”: Eric Cantor And The Death Of A Movement
How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.
I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.
By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.
To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.
In return for this service, businesses and the wealthy provided both lavish financial support for right-minded (in both senses) politicians and a safety net — “wing-nut welfare” — for loyalists. In particular, there were always comfortable berths waiting for those who left office, voluntarily or otherwise. There were lobbying jobs; there were commentator spots at Fox News and elsewhere (two former Bush speechwriters are now Washington Post columnists); there were “research” positions (after losing his Senate seat, Rick Santorum became director of the “America’s Enemies” program at a think tank supported by the Koch brothers, among others).
The combination of a successful electoral strategy and the safety net made being a conservative loyalist a seemingly low-risk professional path. The cause was radical, but the people it recruited tended increasingly to be apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction.
That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.
It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.
And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry — he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street — the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.
So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.
In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 12, 2014
“All The Usual Suspects”: As Iraq Implodes, Neocons Still Have No Plan Except ‘Blame Obama’
Divided between neoconservative ultra-hawks and libertarian isolationists, today’s Republican Party is hardly a steady influence on American foreign policy. But there is one thing that can be reliably expected from every right-wing faction in Washington: Whenever disaster threatens, they eagerly cast blame on Barack Obama – and utter any falsehood that may be used to castigate him.
As the failed state of Iraq strains under attack from a jihadist force – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – all the usual suspects are popping up on the Senate floor to denounce the president. Ignoring more than a decade of miserable history in which most of them played ignominious parts, these politicians now claim that if only the president had listened to them, the current disaster would have been averted somehow.
“Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right,” said the Arizona senator, praising himself and his South Carolina sidekick. “Our failure to leave forces on Iraq is why Sen. Graham and I predicted this would happen.”
Nobody with a functioning memory can take such arguments seriously.
By the time our troops left Iraq at the end of 2011, the war had inflicted such immense damage on our military and our communities that Americans were in no mood for further misadventures. Not since Vietnam had a ruinous policy come so close to breaking America’s armed forces. The fiscal damage was equally serious – trillions of dollars in current and future costs, mostly borrowed from China. The American people wanted out.
Even had we wanted to stay, however, the Iraqis no longer desired our presence – as they had made absolutely clear in their electoral choices and their subsequent negotiations with both the Bush and Obama administrations over keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. It was Bush who signed the Status of Forces Agreement in December 2008 that set a deadline of January 1, 2012 for the departure of all U.S. forces – unless the Iraqis negotiated and ratified a new deal to maintain our troops there.
No such deal was ever made, however, because the Iraqis wanted our troops out – even the tiny force of roughly 3,000 advisors that Obama hoped to provide. He was left with no choice because the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to grant legal immunity from prosecution to any U.S. troops. Imagine what McCain and Graham would have said had Obama decided to leave American officers and troops vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment by local Iraqi warlords – especially when such an incident inevitably occurred.
So when Republican senators leap up and start barking about Obama’s refusal to leave troops on the ground, they either don’t remember what actually happened or – sadly but more likely – hope to deceive this country’s amnesia-addled voters.
Neither McCain nor any of the other trash-talking statesmen on the Republican side has much useful advice to offer the president. They say we shouldn’t have pulled our troops out, but they sure don’t want to send them back in. Drop some bombs on the jihadist camps, they suggest – knowing very well that won’t do much to clean up this horrific mess.
Still they insist on talking about Iraq, loudly and constantly, as if someone else created the mess and they have the answers. They need to be reminded just as loudly that it is their mess and they still have no idea what to do.
Americans should try to remember how this happened – even if the disgraced figures who promoted the invasion of Iraq will never accept responsibility for squandering trillions of American dollars, thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives for what could most charitably be called a massive, irreparable blunder. Never mind the nonsense about the weapons of mass destruction – which nobody has yet found there, by the way. Absolutely none of the predictions about Iraq by the neocons in and around the Bush administration proved accurate. None of their strategies provided real development or security. And all of their grand schemes for regional stability and democracy simply crumbled.
Instead of serving as a sturdy bulwark against extremism, the Shia-dominated government of Iraq immediately allied itself with the neighboring mullah regime in Iran. The curse of sectarian warfare, famously dismissed by William Kristol as a chimera, has exploded into a continuous catastrophic reality that threatens regional security and may create a fresh haven for terrorism.
It is hard not to wonder why anyone still listens to McCain, Kristol, and company — especially on this grave issue. But if they insist on serving up blame, let them step up first to accept their overwhelming share.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 13, 2014
“A Prelude To Betrayal”: Why Republicans Hate Their Leaders, Eric Cantor Edition
There have been a lot of analyses of what Eric Cantor’s Loss Means in the last 36 hours, all of which run the risk of over-generalizing from one off-year primary election in one particular district. But as I’ve said before, the internal conflict within the Republican Party is the defining political dynamic of this period in history, and it’s as good an opportunity as any to assess its latest quivers and quakes. As a liberal, I’m at something of a disadvantage when examining this conflict, because although I can look at what conservatives do and what they say publicly, I don’t have access to the things they say when they talk to each other. So it’s always good to hear from those who do and can remind the rest of us of what conservatives are actually feeling. Sean Trende offers an important perspective:
First, analysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.
And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.
The icing on the cake for conservatives is that these moves were justified through an argument that they were necessary to continue to win elections and take issues off the table for Democrats. Instead, Bush’s presidency was followed in 2008 by the most liberal Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by sizable Democratic House and Senate majorities.
You don’t have to sympathize with this view, but if you don’t understand it, you will never understand the Tea Party.
You may read that and say, “Are they crazy?” The view those of us on the left have of the Bush years is that conservatives got just about everything they wanted. They got huge tax cuts, scaled back environmental and labor regulations, a massive increase in defense spending, a couple of wars, the appointment of a cadre of true-believer judges nurtured by the Federalist Society, and nearly anything else they asked for.
And yes, the deficit ballooned under Bush, which is what happens when you cut taxes and increase spending. But until Barack Obama took office, the goal of shrinking government was something that conservatives always paid lip service to but never actually tried to do much about, which suggests that their commitment to it didn’t go particularly far. Don’t forget that Ronald Reagan, who walked the earth without sin, increased the deficit more than his thirty-nine predecessors combined, and that hasn’t lessened the degree to which the right worships him.
But that’s a liberal’s perspective. Trende is right that, whether reasonable or not and no matter what they felt at the time, the standard view among the conservative base is now that the Bush presidency was a failure. And so they have embraced a permanent revolution, in which it’s necessary to fight not just against Democrats but against Republicans as well, since every GOP leader is little more than a traitor waiting to be revealed.
If you’re a Republican politician you can surf that tide, but it takes a lot of work. And it’s almost impossible to do the things that most politicians try to do in Washington without alienating your base. Not that Eric Cantor was ever particularly sincere about representing the Tea Party, but the very act of joining the Republican leadership is enough to make clear to them that you’re on the wrong side. People in the leadership organize things, try to master the system, and plan legislative strategy. All of that is suspect at best; the only true conservative, true conservatives will tell you, is the one pounding on the gates from the outside. As Brian Beutler wrote yesterday, “The great irony of this year’s primary season, and indeed of conservative politics going back years now, is that the two Republican leaders most responsible for the party’s insurgent-like opposition to the Obama agenda—Cantor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—are the base’s most reviled.”
As far as that activist base is concerned, every Republican politician should be nothing but an agent of chaos and destruction, or at least pretend that’s who he is. It’s not only incompatible with governing, it’s barely compatible with holding office. Anyone who actually tries to accomplish anything is quickly turned from hero to traitor, as Marco Rubio was when he attempted to devise an immigration plan; Tea Partiers who once celebrated Rubio now view him with contempt. The only kind of legislator who can stay in their good graces is one who never bothers legislating, like Ted Cruz. Writing laws is for compromisers and turncoats; what matters is that the revolution continue forever.
Things can always change, but if this sentiment endures, it’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time a Republican is elected president. Because whoever that president is, he will never be able to satisfy this base; indeed, by the very act of taking office and beginning to govern he will have assured them that betrayal is on its way. Their rage will endure. But maybe that’s just how they like it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 12, 2014
“Beware Simple Solutions On Iraq”: Anyone Who Tells You Different Is A Dangerous Fool
With the situation in Iraq growing more grave by the hour, we’re going to be hearing a lot from the gang of cretins who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who will now be emerging to tell us that it was all a splendid American victory until Barack Obama came along and screwed the whole thing up. (I can’t wait to see what Bill Kristol has to say when he appears on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.) More than anyone else, we’ll be hearing endlessly from President McCain, a man so uninformed he is unaware that ISIS, the group now controlling large parts of the country, is not actually the same thing as Al Qaeda. (“Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history,” he said after ISIS raided the bank in Mosul.) But reporters and TV bookers are beating a path to his door, so important is it that the American people hear his wise counsel.
If there’s one thing you should keep in mind as this develops, it’s that anyone who says there’s a simple solution to the problem of Iraq is a dangerous fool. The people who started the war there thought that we didn’t need to understand the complexity of any situation in the Middle East—indeed, that the very desire for understanding was evidence of intolerable weakness. What was necessary was George W. Bush’s “moral clarity,” in which there are good guys and bad guys, and if there’s a bad guy we just have to be strong and go get ‘im.
It was 11 years and one month ago that Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” He went on to say, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.”
It was true that terrorist networks would be unable to acquire weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime. They would also find themselves unable to acquire a unicorn army from the Iraqi regime, or a cache of magic beans. What they would acquire, however, was a breeding ground for their ideology in a place where no amount of American blood and funds could create the thriving, stable democracy Bush and his allies imagined.
I don’t pretend to know how to solve this problem, or even if we can contribute anything but marginally to its solution. (In his statement about it today, President Obama worked hard to tamp down expectations about what we might accomplish.) But what I do know, and what anyone should be able to see, is that the situation in the Middle East today is inordinately complex. (Consider that our most important ally in helping prop up the Maliki government and defeating ISIS is none other than our friends in Tehran.) There will be lots and lots of people assuring the public that no, it’s actually quite simple: We just need to be strong and decisive. You know—like George W. Bush. And we know where that got us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 13, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 