“Insufficiently Conservative”: It Doesn’t Matter Who The Next Speaker Is Because This Is A Permanent Conservative Rebellion
Many Republicans are looking at what’s happening in the House of Representatives right now with something between consternation and horror. The party is tearing itself apart, unable to pick a leader for one of its key institutional bases of power and riven by disagreements that seem unbridgeable.
But you want to know who isn’t upset about all this? The ultra-conservative members who are driving it, not to mention the conservative organizations and media figures who are cheering them on. They’re having a blast.
The most important thing to understand about what’s happening now is that this is a permanent rebellion. It has its demands, both substantive and procedural, but those demands aren’t the point, and if they were met, new ones would be forthcoming. For the people behind the chaos, rebellion itself is the point. It’s about the fight, not about the outcome of that fight. They will never stop rebelling.
That’s why it doesn’t really matter much who actually ends up in the Speaker’s chair. Whoever that Speaker is, he’ll be judged inadequate, not enough of a fighter, too willing to roll over. After all, no matter who he is or what he does (and yes, I’m assuming it will be a man, because there aren’t any viable female candidates at this point), he won’t successfully repeal Obamacare, or send all the illegals away, or slash taxes rates, or outlaw abortion, or pound his gavel until the thunderous vibrations reach down Pennsylvania Avenue and drive that usurper Barack Obama out of the White House and back to Chicago. In the eyes of the rebels, the next Speaker will fail, just like his predecessor did. And the rebellion will have to continue.
Speculation today centers around Paul Ryan, who commands a good deal of respect within the caucus. Though Ryan has said repeatedly that he isn’t interested in being Speaker — he’s now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a powerful position he sought for some time — he is coming under intense pressure from colleagues to accept the post. Here’s how Paul Kane and Robert Costa described the state of affairs this morning:
By mid-afternoon, outgoing speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had spoken to Ryan at least twice, trying to convince the reluctant congressman that he was the only man who could save House Republicans from their self-created chaos.
By day’s end, after hunkering down for two hours in his ceremonial office a few steps from the House floor, after listening to pleas from friends to take the reins of the bitterly divided Republican caucus, he emerged, declining to explicitly state his plans…
As they voted on the House floor late Thursday, Ryan was besieged by his GOP colleagues. As the lawmakers huddled, Ryan aides canceled his fundraising and political events for the next 48 hours, a move interpreted by his friends as a signal that he had gone from a hard “no” to undecided after speaking with Boehner.
The latest statement from Ryan’s office reiterates: “Chairman Ryan appreciates the support he’s getting from his colleagues but is still not running for Speaker.” Of course, this could still change.
The assumption among many is that Ryan could be a unifying figure, the only one who could bring together the fractious caucus. But not only is there no particular reason to think that’s true, his potential candidacy for Speaker is already dividing the party.
Ryan is being promoted by establishment sources like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the National Review, which in itself is being read by the rebels as a reason to reject him. Influential radio host Laura Ingraham tweeted: “Are they talking abt the same Paul Ryan who once lost a VP debate to JOE BIDEN?” She added, “Chaos? Only if you are bought and paid for by the Establishment. Cathartic for most.” “Paul Ryan Is The Absolute Worst Choice For Speaker,” says Brietbart.com, explaining that he’s really a weakling who’ll knuckle under just like John Boehner did.
The House Freedom Caucus, which has become the center of the rebellion, has a document outlining its current demands in the form of a questionnaire for any potential Speaker, which includes things like not raising the debt ceiling without “significant structural entitlement reforms” (i.e. cutting and restructuring Medicare and Social Security); shutting down the government unless they can defund Planned Parenthood, repeal Obamacare, invalidate the Iran deal, and more; and perhaps most importantly, a series of process “reforms” that would take power away from the Speaker to determine how legislation proceeds and distribute it around to all the members of the caucus. They seem to want to ensure not only that the next Speaker is someone disinclined to make compromises with the Senate or the White House, but that he won’t be able to even if he wanted to.
They’re not going to get all that from the next Speaker, which they surely know. But deep down that’s probably okay with them, because in a way, not getting what they want is exactly what they want. They didn’t come to Washington to write legislation and craft policy. They came to fight — to fight Barack Obama, and just as important (if not more so), to fight their own party’s leadership. Many of them won their seats in the first place by either challenging incumbent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative and confrontational, or besting a field of primary contenders by proving they would fight the establishment with more vigor and venom than anyone else. Every defeat only makes them more sure that the answer is to fight harder. This is their purpose. Fighting is energizing, exciting, and inspiring, much more than sitting in some boring subcommittee hearing.
There’s a reason old rebels keep talking about “the revolution” years and decades after they came out of the jungle and stormed the capital. Nothing about the work of governing can match the righteous thrill of the battle against the oppressors. The innovation the tea partiers brought to Washington was that you could get power, but then not bother to figure out how to use it to achieve the policy goals you claim to hold. Instead, you could just keep fighting, so the rebellion never ends. It’s obvious now that’s precisely what they intend to do, no matter who the next Speaker of the House is.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 9, 2015
“Jindal’s Trumpism-Without-Trump Tax Plan”: His Distinctive Tax “Idea” Is One Of The Dumbest In The Conservative Arsenal
With all the excitement going on this week, I totally missed the fact that my favorite Republican presidential candidate, the Gret Stet of Loosiana’s Bobby Jindal, released a tax plan, or at least a tax-based messaging document. WaPo’s Catherine Rampell informs us it’s everything you’d expect from the candidate who’s offering the GOP Trumpism Without Trump:
Jindal — who once declared that the Republican Party needed to stop being the “stupid party” — decided he, too, wanted to pander to stupidity.
That is, he decided to out-Trump Trump.
In a sprawling, largely detail-free plan released Wednesday, Jindal tried his hand at the tax-cut buzz saw. On a static basis, the Tax Foundation estimates, Jindal’s proposal would cut revenue by $11.3 trillion over the next decade.
That’s in the same ballpark as Trump. Yet rather than denying or trying to draw attention away from the gigantic hole he intends to blow in the budget (as Trump and Bush, respectively, have done), Jindal touts it with pride.
“Governor Jindal’s plan reduces the amount of money the federal government will be able to spend,” his Web site boasts, invoking long-ago disproven “starve the beast” rhetoric. The main effect of previous attempts to “starve the beast” through tax cuts, as Jindal surely knows, has not been spending decreases, but subsequently legislated tax increases.
But here’s the fun part:
Jindal’s plan is also, impressively, even more regressive than Trump’s. While Trump would raise the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent by a mere fifth (21.6 percent), Jindal would increase their incomes by a full quarter (25 percent).
Then, in addition to lowering taxes on the rich, Jindal — but not Trump — would raise taxes on the poor.
Yes, you read that right. Jindal wants to engineer a reverse Robin Hood, taking money from the poor to give to the rich.
As Dylan Matthews explains at Vox, Jindal’s plan would eliminate the child tax credit, the standard deduction, the personal exemption, and the dependent exemption, with the very explicit goal of making everybody, even the poorest Americans, pay income taxes (hey, he does keep the EITC, but maybe that was an oversight!). So in effect his most distinctive tax “idea” is one of the dumbest in the conservative arsenal: going after the “lucky duckies,” the 47% who don’t pay income tax (though they do pay payroll taxes, state and local sales taxes, property taxes, etc. etc.).
At least Bobby’s being consistent: he spent years unsuccessfully trying to get Louisiana to shift from an income tax to a sales tax system for financing state government. Don’t want those job creators to have to pay taxes if they can instead be borne by those proles lucky enough to work for them, right?
Maybe the very conservative voters of Iowa, with whom Jindal is spending most of his time these days, like this approach; you should not underestimate the power of resentment of those people when two or more conservatives gather. But I dunno: as with his efforts to be Mr. Christian Right in a crowded presidential field, I suspect most voters otherwise attracted to Trumpism-Without-Trump would also prefer Jindalism-Without-Jindal.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 9, 2015
“Bush Family’s War On English”: It’s Not That “Stuff Happens”, It’s That “Stuff Happens” Here More Than Anywhere Else
And the Bush family’s War on English continues.
You are, by now, familiar with the astonishingly tone-deaf response by Jeb Bush, the nation’s would-be 45th president, to last week’s shooting at a community college in Oregon in which a gunman killed nine people. “Look,” said Bush, “stuff happens.”
Like a stink bomb in the flower bed, the dismissive-sounding words were buried in a longer comment about whether this latest massacre should spur new legislation. Said Bush: “…I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this … I had this challenge as governor, because we had … look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
When a reporter asked about the wording afterward — perhaps trying to spare Bush some grief — the former Florida governor turned attitudinal. “No, it wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “I said exactly what I said. Explain to me what I said wrong.”
“You said, ‘stuff happens,’” said the reporter.
Whereupon, Bush hunkered deeper into his snit. “‘Things’ happen all the time,” he said. “‘Things.’ Is that better?”
Um … no.
And the pasting that followed was entirely predictable. Bush was slammed by Hillary Clinton and President Obama. In Mother Jones, the liberal magazine, his words were called “callous.” In Salon, they were dubbed “tactless, graceless and ham-handed.”
But let’s not miss what’s truly offensive here.
At one level, after all, this is just a new round of the gaffe gotcha game where you strip clumsy language of inconvenient context so as to imply the candidate said or meant something he never said or meant. So let’s be fair: Bush was not being callous toward the Oregon tragedy any more than Barack Obama was denying small businesspersons their due when he said, “You didn’t build that.” Rather, Bush simply offered an inarticulate statement of GOP orthodoxy: There are no legislative responses to mass gun violence.
And while that’s a point some of us would dispute, it is not what makes his words appalling. No, what makes them appalling is the surrender they imply.
“Stuff happens”?
That’s what you say about the hurricane or the earthquake, the hail storm or the flood, natural disasters beyond the power of humankind to prevent. It’s what you say about cancer or Alzheimer’s or dog droppings on the lawn, the major and minor challenges that are an inescapable part of being alive.
To say “stuff happens” about a mass shooting is to suggest that mass shootings are somehow inevitable and unavoidable. But that is simply not true. This “stuff” doesn’t happen everywhere — not with the numbing frequency it does here.
It doesn’t happen like this in Great Britain.
It doesn’t happen like this in Brazil.
It doesn’t happen like this in Israel.
It doesn’t happen like this in Japan, where gun ownership is strictly restricted, nor in Canada, where gun ownership laws are more liberal and there are, by one count, about 10 million firearms in private hands.
Ten million. Yet, you know how many gun homicides there were in Canada in 2013? A hundred and thirty-one.
Even as we mourn this latest mass murder, another is taking shape. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. That’s how predictable this “stuff” has become.
So it would behoove us to try and figure out what other countries know that we do not, what it is about our laws and/or our national character that returns us inevitably to this nexus of tragedy and recrimination week after week. You see, Bush is only half right.
It is not that “stuff happens.”
No, stuff happens here.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, October 7, 2015
“Is Carson Losing His Teflon Shield?”: The Kid-Gloves-Treatment Of Carson Could Be Coming To An End
Up until now, Dr. Ben Carson has had an extraordinarily charmed existence on the presidential campaign trail. Even though his world-view is weird and John Birchie, political reporters either don’t notice it or don’t think it’s important. Fellow GOP candidates give him a wide berth, and conservative activists tend either to adore him or only talk about his positive qualities.
Some of this is undoubtedly a byproduct of the party-wide obsession with bringing Donald Trump down to earth; since Carson seems to have some of the same “outsider” appeal as The Donald, the Republican Establishment is happy to promote him at Trump’s expense. And above all, the mental identification of Carson with Herman Cain–you know, another unqualified African-American conservative who had his 15 minutes of fame before retreating to obscurity–seems to exert a powerful influence on attitudes towards Carson, even though it is extremely unlikely the doctor is going to succumb to a sex scandal.
Anyway, this kid-gloves-treatment of Carson could be coming to an end, if WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin is any indication:
Donald Trump wants to round up 11 million people in two years for deportation. He approves of Russia’s incursion into Syria. He has a tax plan that adds at least $10 trillion to the debt. And with all that, he is not the most ignorant or unfit GOP presidential contender. That distinction goes to Ben Carson.
Wow, how’s that for an opening shot?
Rubin proceeds to recite the many examples of Carson showing he doesn’t know much about various subjects from the composition of NATO to the history of the Holocaust, and then turns to her fellow Republicans with justified scorn:
Conservatives have a dangerous habit of excusing ignorance or offensive comments so long as they come from someone attacking liberal elites. One does not need to elevate ignoramuses to cultlike status simply because they also happen to attack the media or liberal dogma. In doing so, Republicans wind up getting behind crank candidates and losing elections to mediocre candidates. (Anyone recall the “I-am-not-a-witch” Christine O’Donnell?)
There is a Chauncey Gardner-like quality to Carson. He speaks softly, smiles a lot and lulls his audience into the belief he possess great insights and wisdom. He is an esteemed neurosurgeon and a lovely dinner speaker. He is, however, entirely unfit for the presidency, seemingly oblivious to basic historical facts, constitutional concepts and world events. Surely conservative Republicans, especially some in the right-wing media who have fawned over him, should have figured this out by now.
This kinda makes me wish Rubin would take a similarly jaundiced look at Carly Fiorina. But hell no! She may soon be head of the DC branch of Fiorina’s fan club. Guess somebody else will at the appropriate moment have to point out that this isn’t a candidate anyone would take seriously if she wasn’t useful in bashing the “liberal elites” with a first name of Hillary and a last name of Clinton.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 9, 2015
“Revenge Of The Conservative Pragmatists?”: Willing To Save The GOP From Itself By Doing Common Sense Constructive Things
Even as the uncertainty around who will succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House seemed to grow murkier today, there was also a rare sighting of governing amid all the chaos.
Democrats announced at a press conference today that 218 House members have signed a discharge petition to force a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. Discharge petitions are very rare — the last one that worked came in 2002, forcing a vote on campaign finance legislation some 13 years ago.
The Ex-Im Bank finances deals involving American exports, and its supporters say it is crucial in helping American companies compete with companies abroad for contracts and thus in sustaining U.S. jobs. But it has been a longtime target of conservatives who discern “crony capitalism” afoot.
At the presser today, Nancy Pelosi said:
“This is a very important day, because we have broken through the wall of obstruction in the Congress to get the job done in a bipartisan way. Which is what we all come here to do.”
And Democratic whip Steny Hoyer said:
“What today showed was, when people are allowed to express their will, we had 42 Republicans sign a discharge petition.”
What Pelosi and Hoyer are saying is that the success of today’s discharge petition shows that it is possible for a bipartisan coalition to come together on something if a way can be found to get around the GOP leadership’s refusal to hold a vote on it.
Now, we don’t know if Ex-Im will actually get reauthorized. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is already dumping cold water on the possibility of it getting to the Senate floor. But the question today’s discharge petition raises is whether it could be used to bring together a bipartisan coalition on other things that conservatives will insist that GOP leaders prevent votes upon.
“This suggests another way to go about this,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein tells me. “If you end up with leaders who refuse to bring things to the floor that would pass with a lot of Democrats and that some Republicans want, make the discharge petition a regular tool. Don’t just do it once.”
Ornstein says that many of the House Republicans who signed the discharge petition aren’t necessarily moderates, which are a rarity in today’s GOP, but are better described as “conservative pragmatists.” Ornstein argues that, theoretically at least, many of these Republicans might be willing to sign discharge petitions to accomplish things like more funding for infrastructure and even lifting the debt limit, getting around a protracted standoff that GOP leaders might feel constrained to pursue to prove to conservatives that they are “fighting.”
The question would be whether Republican moderates would be willing to repeatedly defy the leadership, as well as conservatives activists and voters. “How willing are they going to be to say, ‘we’re going to save our party from itself by doing common sense things that are constructive, even if the crazy people say they don’t like it’?” Ornstein says.
All of this of course seems very far fetched. So do other solutions that would require breaking out of partisan patterns, such as Brian Beutler’s suggestion of the election of a coalition Speaker who, supported by Democrats and Republicans, would not have to live in fear of the House Freedom Caucus. But in a way that’s the point: Anything that is going to achieve results seems far fetched right now. Which means everything is worth trying.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 9, 2015
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