“Voters Remorse”: The New GOP Congress Americans Do Not ‘Wish They Had’
The man who lost the last (presidential) election round and who goes around talk shows trying to pretend he did not, has some advice for the man who beat him in 2012.
Appearing on Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney told Bob Schieffer, when asked about the possibility of “Obama taking executive action to overhaul immigration policy,” “The president has got to learn that he lost this last election round.”
The man who lost the last (presidential) election round said so after lecturing his nemesis about how to fight ISIL (“what we should have done by now is have — is have American troops staying by in — in Iraq”) and after implying that perhaps the President should just curl up in a fetal position, contrary to David Axelrod’s and most Americans’ expectations. “The President ought to let the Republican Congress, the Republican House and the Republican Senate come together with legislation that they put on his desk which relates to immigration,” the man who lost the last (presidential) election round told Bob Schieffer.
This latest bit of GOP arrogance is very similar to Mitch McConnell’s recent hubris: “We’d like for the president to recognize the reality that he has the government that he has, not the one that he wishes he had, and work with us,” when a “very disturbed” incoming Senate Majority Leader lamented that the president was still the President and was still intending to use his executive powers.
Which, in turn, is very reminiscent of the effrontery of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whose callous response to a soldier asking for better protection for our troops in Iraq was: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Memo to Messrs. Romney and McConnell — and to the GOP:
Midterm elections are not intended to neuter a president. They are midcourse corrections intended to make government work better for the people who elect their representatives; to — in fact — transform the government we have into the government the people wish they have. On November 4, 2014, the American people gave Republicans another chance to stop the obstruction, stop the obfuscation, stop the gridlock, stop the arrogance, stop the raw partisanship and work with a man who is still President of the United States for the common good of all Americans, not just a few.
To do all this, congressional Republicans must disprove the disturbing allegation that they “have been sent to Washington with a mandate not so much to conduct business but rather to collect a bounty, to do what they promised and what their supporters expect: Stop Obama at any cost and at every turn, to erase his name or at least put an asterisk by it.”
Or will they?
By: Dorian de Wind, The Huffington Post Blog, November 17, 2014
“A Backwards Looking Losing Theme”: The GOP Already Has The Wrong Message For 2016
Let’s “restore” America.
This theme has been an undercurrent of Republican politics since the 2008 elections, when President Obama and the Democrats won control of two of the three branches of the U.S. government. It was also an explicit goal of the Tea Party. Now, it looks like Republicans are testing it out as a slogan for the 2016 elections, including the key presidential contest.
If Jeb Bush runs, and wins, the GOP might mean “restore” almost literally, in the dynastic sense. But mostly the message is that the Republican Party is volunteering to clean up the mess those Democrats made, bringing us back to some idyllic time in America (probably the 1980s).
At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart has an entire article dedicated to “the Republican obsession with ‘restoring’ America,” including its many iterations in today’s GOP politics. “Restore” appears in the literature — both press releases and upcoming or recent books — from 2016 GOP hopefuls Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee, for example. It is a word that has inherent appeal for those whose politics are conservative, but it also has vaguely sinister overtones for groups that didn’t exactly have it better in the good old days.
The Week‘s resident linguist, Arika Okrent, notes that along with Rubio’s upcoming campaign book American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, fellow presumptive 2016 presidential hopeful Paul Ryan is “Renewing the American Idea” in his book while Rick Santorum is “Recommitting to an America That Works.” All those “re-” words are “supposed to call up the idea of freshness and new blood,” she muses, “but something about the re- screams ‘do over!'”
The problem with the pledge of restoration is that it is inherently backward-looking. Americans may like the idea of America’s Golden Age — well, some Americans: “older, straight, Anglo, white, and male voters,” in Beinart’s analysis — but what they really want to hear is what a party will do to improve their future.
Democrats learned this lesson in 2004. After trying out a host of campaign themes, presidential nominee John Kerry settled on “Let America Be America Again” in late May. It’s from a 1938 Langston Hughes poem of the same name, and the message to the electorate was that President George W. Bush had broken America, or at least veered it off the right path, and Kerry would resurrect a more idyllic era (probably the 1990s).
Kerry used that line for the rest of the campaign, at times quoting extensively from the poem, and it didn’t work.
This wasn’t the only reason that Kerry lost, of course — he was leading Bush for much of the “Let America Be America Again” phase of the campaign, until “Swift Boat” August — but compare Kerry’s theme with Obama’s 2008 mantras of “Our Moment is Now” and “Hope and Change.” Big difference.
In any case, Republicans should already know that “restore America” is a losing theme. Mitt Romney’s 2012 super-PAC was the poetically nonsensical Restore Our Future. The first substantive section of the party’s 2012 platform was entitled “Restoring the American Dream.” And even the GOP’s “Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan, couldn’t unseat fellow Republican Gerald Ford with his 1976 speech “To Restore America.”
Nostalgia is great for selling merchandise and rebooted TV and film franchises, but it’s not a very effective political cri de cœur for a national campaign. Republicans have been telling us what they’re against for the last six years — Obama — and if they want to be viable in 2016, they need to spend the next two telling us what they envision for the future.
By: Peter Weber, Senior Editor, TheWeek.com, November 17, 2014
“Speaking Of Asses”: Senator Complains About ‘Dumbass Liberals’
I actually remember the way Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) used to be, back when he boasted about being a “square peg” – a label he used as a shorthand to say he doesn’t always fit in.
The Utah Republican used to actually see value in cooperating with people with whom he disagreed, working with Democrats, for example, on stem-cell research, the DREAM Act, and S-CHIP.
But then he threw it all away. As Amanda Terkel reported, Hatch’s remarks at the Federalist Society’s annual conference are a reminder of the kind of politician he’s become.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) came out swinging against Democrats Friday, telling a room of conservative lawyers that Republicans were ready to give the other party “a taste of their own medicine.”
“Frankly, I intend to win with our candidate for the presidency in 2016, and we will give them a taste of their own medicine,” said Hatch. “And we’re going to win. We’re going to win. These next two years are extremely important. Maybe the most important two years in our history.”
“I get a big kick out of them using the word ‘progressive,’” the senator said of Democrats. “My gosh, they’re just straight old dumbass liberals anyway.”
Classy.
It wasn’t too long ago that Hatch was positioned to become a rare statesman in Republican politics. But that was before his partisan Memorial Day tantrums, his occasional references to hitting people he doesn’t like, and his juvenile whining about “dumbass liberals.”
Those looking for GOP statesmanship will apparently have to look elsewhere.
On a related note, did you happen to catch Hatch’s remarks about immigration reform?
“Part of it is our fault. We haven’t really seized this problem. Of course, we haven’t been in a position to do it either, with Democrats controlling the Senate. I’m not blaming Republicans. But we really haven’t seized that problem and found solutions for it.” […]
“Frankly, I’d like to see immigration done the right way,” Hatch added. “This president is prone to doing through executive order that which he cannot do by working with the Congress, because he won’t work with us. If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through.”
For goodness sakes, does Orrin Hatch not remember the events of the last two years? With “Democrats controlling the Senate,” a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform bill passed easily, and garnered the support of the business community, labor, law enforcement, immigration advocates, and the religious community. Republicans then killed it.
“I’m not blaming Republicans”? Why not? They’re the ones who chose to reject the legislation. They’re also the ones who promised a more partisan alternative, only to break their word.
“If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through.” President Obama did work with Congress, and helped rally support for a bipartisan bill. GOP lawmakers killed it anyway.
How is it possible Orrin Hatch doesn’t know this? For that matter, given the circumstances, shouldn’t he be slightly more circumspect about throwing around words such as “dumbass”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 17, 2014
“There’s No Line Between Law And Politics”: A Reminder; Our Justices Are Politicians In Robes
Linda Greenhouse, the longtime Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, declared surrender Thursday. For decades, she argued that the Court was a higher form of government, engaged in Law, not just politics. Now she has decided that the justices are politicians in robes.
The straw that broke her faith? The Court’s decision to review King v. Burwell, a case confirming that Obamacare subsidies can go to people in insurance exchanges that the federal government sets up in states that haven’t created the exchanges themselves. Without those subsidies, the worst-case scenario has Obamacare entering a fiscal death spiral. The best case is that it would be another body blow to a law that is managing to work despite design flaws and relentless opposition.
Greenhouse is absolutely right that the Court’s hasty grab at a hot-button case it doesn’t need to decide is unseemly and partisan-feeling. And as Greenhouse is a very smart and sincere person who loves the Court and the law, her crie de coeur is striking.
But the Supreme Court has been political since the day it was born. It’s just that the way it is political today is a symptom of the nastiness and futility of our politics.
Cast an eye over the history of the Supreme Court, and you will see no golden age of apolitical judging. Today’s conservative judicial activists—especially the older generation, such as Justices Scalia and Thomas—came onto the Court in reaction against an earlier generation of liberal activists. The liberals had established abortion rights, extended constitutional equality to women, increased the rights of criminal defendants, and briefly declared the death penalty unconstitutional.
The conservatives saw all of this as blatantly political activism. They sought control of the Court to restore the Constitution and protect law from politics—at least as they understood it. Now those conservative restorationists are the partisan activists who have broken Linda Greenhouse’s faith.
And what about those liberal activists who made the young Scalia and Thomas so indignant? They were the children of another revolution. Their predecessors—and some of them—also came onto the Court to restore the Constitution and save the law from politics. Only the activists they overthrew were conservatives: anti-New Deal justices who upheld “economy liberty” and “limited government” by striking down minimum-wage laws and the first wave of Franklin Roosevelt’s legislation.
And so it goes, back through judicial struggles over Reconstruction, slavery, and the now-esoteric bloodletting of the early nineteenth century, which pivoted on questions like the constitutionality of the national bank. Someone has always been trying to save the law from politics and restore the Constitution. But when you look at it clearly, saving the law from politics turns out to be a thoroughly political job.
First you have to convince people to accept your version of the boundary between law and politics. Then you have to get judges onto the bench who agree with you. The history of law is the history of politics, and vice-versa.
So why do so many smart people believe in the difference between law and politics? Why do they sincerely try to restore, or preserve, the line between the two, and get heartbroken when the line fails?
It’s not just naivete. The special role of the American courts, particularly the Supreme Court, is to administer principles that have won so decisively in politics that they get taken off the table.
The triumph of the New Deal brought in a generation of judges who implemented new principles—above all, the legitimacy of the regulatory and welfare state—across the legal system as the shared framework of a national consensus. The era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society led a generation of elite liberals, including many of the current Justices, to embrace broader principles of personal liberty and equality, which they saw as perfecting the American social compact. They were busily implementing these in cases like Roe v. Wade when a right-wing insurgency took them by surprise.
The fight that started then has only become more pitched. There’s no line between law and politics now because our politics is too divided to generate one. We cannot begin to agree which issues should be taken off the table and handed to courts.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court are aligned, intellectually, politically, and institutionally, with lawyers and activists who want to dismantle much of the regulatory and welfare state and stop or reverse the extension of civil rights and liberties.
The liberals are aligned with those who have opposite aims: preserving and extending civil rights and upholding the regulatory state as a legitimate aspect of government. The country is divided, sharply and unrelentingly, over the same questions. What one side tries to take off the table, to turn from “politics” into “law,” the other side is always trying to grab back. With every grab, the idea that law and politics are separate becomes harder for anyone to believe.
Politics gives law its premises, its basic commitments. Law has its own kind of integrity, based in applying principles consistently, integrating competing goals, giving the same words the same meaning in different places and explaining why not when it doesn’t. If you have worked closely with judges who practice this craft, you know it isn’t just politics, any more than architecture is just drawing.
Law, in this sense, is essential work, but its fabric gets torn when the premises change—like ripping a weaving project suddenly into a new kind of garment. It changed in the Civil Rights era, and in the New Deal. And then it stabilized. Now it is not stabilizing, and the constant contest at all levels, from basic premises to craft, means that, increasingly, everything feels partisan. All that is solid melts into fetid air.
We’ve been denied what Americans seem perennially to wish for—a Supreme Court that is better than we are—surer, clearer, wiser and more unified. It turns out that was really a wish to be a better version of ourselves. On the one hand, it’s good to be rid of the illusion and stand on the real ground of democratic politics. On the other hand, what broken and disappointing ground it is.
By: Jedediah Purdy, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law; The Daily Beast, November 13, 2014
“Congratulations Mitch”: The New Cruzians Are Ready To Make Life Hell For Mitch McConnell
Congratulations, Mitch McConnell! You now have the hardest job in Washington.
That dubious distinction used to belong to belong to House Speaker John Boehner, who has struggled since 2011 to manage a GOP majority so unwieldy he called it everything from “frogs in a wheelbarrow” to the “knucklehead” caucus.
But as the incoming Senate majority leader, it will now fall to McConnell to receive legislation from the House, shepherd it past his 53-member majority, and deliver completed bills to the president, all while keeping the government open for business.
McConnell’s difficult job will be made enormously more complicated by the makeup of his incoming three-seat majority. It includes at least three senators eyeing a run for president (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul), and 11 new Republican members, three of whom have been pegged by grassroots activists as the conservative cavalry riding in as reinforcements for the Cruz wing of the party.
Those senators—Joni Ernst of Iowa, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Ben Sasse from Nebraska—were all breakout stars for activists in the 2014 cycle. They raked in millions of dollars from outside groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund, and are the three that conservatives like Steve Deace, the nationally syndicated conservative radio host from Iowa, say they expect the most from.
“What I heard from conservatives I talked to around the country during the election was ‘Who is going to go there and help out Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee? Who is going to help out the wacko birds?’” said Deace, referring to the derisive term Sen. John McCain once used to describe Cruz that conservatives now wear as a badge of honor. “Our expectation is that [Ernst, Cotton and Sasse] are going to join the ranks of the wacko birds. That’s our expectation.”
Deace and his listeners won’t be the only ones looking to the trio to for results. So will conservative donors. The Senate Conservatives Fund and its affiliate Senate Conservatives Action, for example, plowed millions into the Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas races. Ernst received nearly $450,000 in bundled contributions and $475,000 in independent expenditures from the groups for her race. Sasse got $487,000 in bundled contributions and more than $835,000 in outside expenditures in his GOP primary. Cotton picked up about $200,000 in bundled SCF money and saw more than $500,000 in outside SCF money in his race against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor.
Another major conservative group, Club for Growth Action, poured more than $800,000 into Cotton’s race against Pryor, about $500,000 against Sasse’s primary opponents, and another $297,151 and $186,587 in bundled donations for Cotton and Sasse, respectively.
The first place conservatives will look to the new freshmen to make their voices heard is on immigration, which Ernst and SCF both call “executive amnesty.” The president has indicated he’ll soon take sweeping unilateral action, a move McConnell said won’t draw him into a government shutdown fight when he takes over the majority.
“There won’t be a government shutdown,” McConnell pledged Thursday, a commitment that left conservatives livid.
“Mitch McConnell is making promises he can’t keep,” Deace said. “Whatever enjoyment McConnell got out of being elected leader, enjoy it. Because from this point forward, power is going to be leaving his hands.”
Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, predicted that McConnell and the Republicans will safely navigate the lame-duck session, but once the new senators are sworn in, “All bets are off.”
“Sen. McConnell has got a whole bunch of people in his caucus, including those up in 2016, who realize the current strategy [of obstruction] is not going to work, and they need to put some legislative points on the scoreboard,” Manley said. “But whether that’s going to play out remains to be seen, in part because there are three Republicans running for president, none of whom care much about the Senate as an institution nor about their other colleagues’ views, quite frankly. And there are a handful of incoming senators who are very, very conservative.”
But Ron Bonjean, who was a senior staffer to Sen. Trent Lott when he was majority leader, said McConnell not only will have to consider the instincts of conservatives during those votes, but also the needs of several Republicans like Pat Toomey, who is up for reelection in 2016 the blue state of Pennsylvania.
“I do think McConnell knows how to manage his caucus,” Bonjean said. “While there will definitely be turbulence because he has more members to deal with, there are also some other dynamics at play for some of these members.”
Bonjean predicted that like Boehner, McConnell will need to have a majority of his majority on board to get a bill to the floor, but also will have to make the bills bipartisan enough to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
“Here’s the problem: Even if McConnell has all 53 Republicans, he’s got to get to 60 votes,” Bonjean said. “That’s very difficult to do, so they’re going to have to go for bipartisan victories to begin with, low-hanging fruit that can move through the Senate to show that they can get the work done.”
But low-hanging, bipartisan bills are exactly what Cruz and the grassroots conservatives backing Ernst, Sasse, and Cotton say they don’t want, especially in the face of an Obama executive order.
“I took an hour of calls yesterday asking what Congress should do if the president acts alone on immigration,” Deace said. “Every call, all over the country, men and women, all said the same thing: Impeach him.”
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, November 17, 2014
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