“An Emotionally Abusive Relationship”: Tea Partyers Love The Constitution So Much — They Want To Blow It Up
Sometimes I think tea partyers are in an emotionally abusive relationship with the Constitution.
One day, they proclaim its inerrancy and say it must be loved, honored and obeyed in all its original perfection. The next day, they call for a constitutional convention, arguing that it’s broken, outdated and desperately in need of a facelift.
In other words: I love you, you’re perfect, now change.
This pure, pristine document is so fervently adored by people of the parchment that some carry it around with them at all times — sometimes in their breast pockets, close to their hearts, perhaps to protect them from a stray Second Amendment-protected bullet. They cite it as they might scripture (that is, often incorrectly, and for their own purposes).
They believe that anyone who questions the Constitution’s decrees must be verbally flogged or even impeached. The United States’ sacred scroll must be feared, fetishized and followed to the letter — down to the comma, even — in its original, strictly constructed form.
Indeed, above all other national concerns, this founding document must be preserved as is.
But now a line of thinking has emerged that the best way to preserve the Constitution is to revamp it completely.
Consider Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), a tea party darling, who wants to convene a constitutional convention to amend this precious political heirloom.
And not to push through just a single amendment, but nine.
These amendments include: allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court decision; prohibiting Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state; and requiring a seven-justice supermajority for Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law. Abbott also demands a balanced-budget amendment, which almost certainly would have been opposed by Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who was the most prolific defender of the Constitution.
These are not minor copy edits.
In a 92-page document defending his proposals, Abbott laments widespread ignorance of the Constitution and argues that his plan is “not so much a vision to alter the Constitution as it is a call to restore the rule of our current one.”
“The Constitution itself is not broken,” Abbott writes in italics. “What is broken is our Nation’s willingness to obey the Constitution and to hold our leaders accountable to it.”
In other words, the Constitution says what Abbott thinks it says, not what it actually says, or what the Supreme Court decides it says — so now we just need to rewrite it so that the text fits what’s in his head.
Abbott is not the only right-wing Constitution-thumper to call for reframing the Founding Fathers’ allegedly perfect handiwork.
Marco Rubio, apparently trying to capture more of his party’s fringe, recently announced that on his “first day in office” as commander in chief, he would “put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states.” Its agenda would be to impose term limits on federal legislators and judges, as well as a balanced-budget amendment.
Rubio assured Americans that delegates to such a convention “won’t be able to touch our important constitutional rights.”
Who determines which parts of the Constitution are important and therefore untouchable, and which are unimportant and touchable? Rubio, apparently.
Then there’s Donald Trump, who, along with others, wants to roll back the 14th Amendment to quash birthright citizenship . (In the meantime, he’ll settle for casting aspersions on his political enemies’ birthplaces.)
And Ben Carson — author of a book subtitled “What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties” — has argued that U.S. law is not subject to judicial review from the Supreme Court, contra Marbury v. Madison. (Carson has also expressed other funny ideas about what’s in the Constitution and who wrote it.) Like Rubio, Carson has supported the idea of a constitutional convention, along with fellow Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and John Kasich.
Then there’s Ted Cruz, who devotes a whole section on his campaign website to his pledge to “defend the Constitution” and “restore the Constitution as our standard.”
Cruz, too, has decided that the best way to “restore” the Constitution is by altering it. He supports amendments to require a balanced budget, let state legislatures define marriage and subject Supreme Court justices to periodic retention elections.
These and “many more” unspecified amendments are needed, he told reporters, “because the federal government and the courts have gotten so far away from the original text and the original understanding of our Constitution.”
Because, obviously, the best way to honor that cherished, perfect, original text is by getting rid of it.
By: Catherine Rample, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 14, 2015
“No Recipe For Addressing Economic Inequality”: The Republican Candidates Can’t Say How Obama Wrecked The Economy
One of the most striking and mystifying aspects of the Republican presidential primary has been the candidates’ inability—or unwillingness—to offer up any kind of coherent economic prescription for the country. That didn’t change on Thursday night. On the Fox Business debate stage in South Carolina, the remaining GOP field had the floor to rebut President Barack Obama’s rosy picture of the American economy during this week’s State of the Union.
Instead, they pivoted to fear-mongering on foreign policy.
The tone was set with the debate’s very first question, posed to Senator Ted Cruz. Fox Business moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him to respond to Obama’s declaration earlier this week: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
That should have been a softball, ready for the surging candidate to hit out of the park. Instead, Cruz launched into a prepared digression on the American soldiers captured and released by Iran before addressing the actual question—with another digression. “The president tried to paint a rosy picture of jobs,” he said. “And you know, he’s right. If you’re a Washington lobbyist, if you make your money in and around Washington, things are doing great. The millionaires and billionaires are doing great under Obama.”
Cruz played on Obama’s own words on the sources of inequality in his State of the Union. “Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did,” Obama said on Tuesday. “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. It’s sure not the average family watching tonight that avoids paying taxes through offshore accounts.”
Cruz turned that around, pinning the blame exclusively on the president for rising inequality—not on the wealthy. “Median wages have stagnated. And the Obama-Clinton economy has left behind the working men and women of this country,” he said.
It was like that all night: The candidates never took the bait Obama set up for them, to disprove they are doing anything but “peddling fiction” that his agenda—addressing economic inequality, immigration reform, and energy regulations—has left Americans worse off. Instead, the Republicans beat the drum on fear of ISIS and terrorism abroad, but never provided a counter to Obama’s economic claims.
If the GOP debate revealed one thing about these candidates’ views of rising inequality—a hot topic in the Democratic primary—it’s that they can’t quite bring themselves to cast the wealthy in a bad light.
Ohio Governor John Kasich said that Americans shouldn’t hate the rich—that’s just not American. People are “very concerned about” the economy, he said. “And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to—keeping them from getting it. That’s not the America that I’ve ever known. My father used to say, “Johnny, we never—we don’t hate the rich. We just want to be the rich.”’
Ben Carson shot back at Bernie Sanders and Clinton, who he claimed “would say it’s those evil rich people” who are to blame for inequality. Carson said they’re the wrong target; it’s “the evil government that’s putting all these regulations on us.”
Throughout the night, Republicans proved more comfortable playing to their base’s fear of terrorism than directly rebutting the president’s economic victory lap. Maybe that’s because they can’t muster the same strong descriptive language for how Obama has set fire to the economic world as they have for his foreign policy. So much easier to berate the president on his approach to ISIS all night, as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did: “If you’re worried about the world being on fire, you’re worried about how we’re going to use our military, you’re worried about strengthening our military and you’re worried most of all about keeping your homes and your families safe and secure, you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama’s leadership,” he said.
But what about Obama’s leadership on the economy? The answers were more timid—with the exception, not surprisingly, of Donald Trump, who in his usual style promised he’d “make America rich again and make America great again.”
Why were the candidates so quiet about the economy on Thursday night? Simple. The Republicans don’t have a recipe for addressing economic inequality, instead focusing exclusively on tax breaks or highly regressive flat taxes that help the top earners. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has explained, “Bush, Marco Rubio, and Trump have all released tax plans that they are trying to sell as a boon for ordinary families.” That’s a hard sell, to say the least. A conservative estimate of Trump’s plan, for example, would lower the middle 40 to 50 percent of American wage earners’ taxes by 5.3 percent, but the wealthiest would see almost a 22 percent decrease. Carson and Cruz have called for flat taxes—a highly regressive policy.
Because they have such shallow policies to draw on, the GOP finds it easier to play on fears of an uncertain international landscape. That works just fine when they’re pitching themselves to an anxious, unhappy Republican base. But when one of these candidates faces Clinton or Sanders in the general election, the Democratic nominee will easily poke holes through his paper-thin economic message.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, January 15, 2015
“Bearish Outlook On Trump’s Prospects”: Iowa Will Not Be Donald Trump’s Waterloo
The paradox of media coverage of the 2016 GOP presidential race is that the longer Donald Trump dominates the polls, the more insistent pundits are that the maverick candidate is headed for a fall. “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee,” Ross Douthat bluntly stated in a column for The New York Times last week, although he admitted that this flat prediction was becoming more difficult to argue with conviction. As Douthat noted, the conventional wisdom that Trump is doomed to fail is an assertion that increasingly “inspires sympathetic glances, the kind you get when you tell friends that you think your new personal-investment strategy is sure to beat the market.”
Yet Douthat is not alone in thinking that The Donald is going to go bust (politically, that is). A broad spectrum of pundits—ranging from Ezra Klein at Vox to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight to John Fund in National Review—share this bearish outlook on Trump’s prospects. The pundit class has coalesced around the theory that Trump’s seemingly high level of support is a balloon ready to be punctured and that the Iowa caucus—now less than three weeks away—will be the occasion when the Trump campaign meets the pin that will prick its hopes. But these pundits might be underestimating how robust and intense the loyalty of Trump’s fan base is.
In late December, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol predicted that when “Trump loses Iowa, the mystique disappears, [and] he’s just another candidate.” Writing in National Review, John Fund voiced a similar thought in an article titled, “Losing Iowa Could Be Trump’s Kryptonite.”
Yet attempts to explain how a Trump loss in Iowa could lead to the demise of his campaign tend to be cloudy and hand-wave-y. Consider Ezra Klein’s projection at Vox: “But there’s another model of failure. Trump could just … not win. He could lose the Iowa caucuses. He could fall short in New Hampshire. A loss in any early state might lead to a loss in every state. Losing a presidential primary is often like going bankrupt: It happens slowly, then all at once.” As Klein himself admits, “A lot of reporters and politicos believe something like this is going to happen to him. But the prediction is hard to talk through explicitly because it’s so maddeningly vague.”
In an attempt to flesh out this “maddeningly vague” sense that Trump will lose steam, Klein’s colleague David Roberts offers a theory of Trump’s supporters. Trump sells himself as a winner, Roberts contends, which makes his popularity brittle because it is subject to disenchantment if he ever loses. Like the proverbial rodents fleeing a sinking ship, Trump supporters will flee him once the stench of failure can be sniffed.
“If your value proposition is that you’re a winner, your value evaporates the minute you’re no longer winning. Losing refutes a winner, and no one wins forever,” Roberts argues. “Trump’s vulnerability (like his strength!) is that his appeal is entirely personal, entirely based on the expectation that he’s a winner who will win.”
There’s a smidgen of truth to this argument: Trump does ceaselessly talk about how he’s a winner. But he does so in the manner of a military leader like Patton or an athlete like Muhammad Ali, as a way of rallying his supporters and his own psyche for combat. Losing individual battles doesn’t refute such boastfulness; it only reinforces a sense that victory must be won.
To say that Trump’s appeal is “entirely personal” ignores the fact that Trump has won an enthusiastic fan base by taking hardline stances on immigration and terrorism. Pat Buchanan was on surer grounds when he told The New York Times that, under Trump’s influence, the Republican Party is likely to become “more nationalist and tribal and more about protecting the border.” Buchanan’s sentiments were backed up by Leo Martin, a 62-year-old machinist who told the Times, “The Republican Party has never done anything for the working man like me, even though we’ve voted Republican for years. … This election is the first in my life where we can change what it means to be a Republican.”
As these remarks make clear, Trump’s support comes not just from who he is, but what he stands for and what he promises to do. As Fund acknowledges, focus-group research shows that Trump’s supporters display “remarkable loyalty to the real-estate mogul and scant interest in other candidates.” This loyalty is best understood as devotion to the nationalist and tribalist policies Trump is putting forward, rather than simple enthusiasm for Trump as a man. And losing a few primaries isn’t likely to make such devotion melt away.
Trump, for his part, has some experience bouncing back from losses outside the political arena. He knows how to craft a comeback story for himself. In the field where he claims to have mastery (business), he’s declared bankruptcy four times, but has turned that into a narrative of his cunning in exploiting existing law. The need to overcome adversity doesn’t necessarily tarnish a winner, but can instead reinforce the idea that he or she is a fighter and a hero. If Trump were to lose in Iowa, there are any number of ways he could turn the narrative to his advantage, either by implying trickery on the part of his enemies or by selling himself as a “comeback kid” if he wins another primary.
On top of all this, it’s uncertain that Trump will lose Iowa, or if he loses whether the loss will be a significant one. Fund, like many others, points out that Trump might be weaker in Iowa because the caucus system, which requires not just casting a ballot but devoting hours to meetings, tends to weed out poorer voters (who lack resources to spend a day caucusing) and those who haven’t participated in the caucus before—both groups that skew toward Trump. But Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, reports that Trump is building a get-out-the-vote machine in Iowa that could overcome such hurdles.
As of right now, the polling we have doesn’t support the idea that Iowa will be the anti-Trump firewall that his opponents are hoping for. According to the aggregation of Real Clear Politics, Cruz has only a narrow lead over Trump: Cruz is at 28 percent and Trump at 26 percent. Marco Rubio stands third at 14 percent. The most likely scenario is a close three-way race as Rubio improves his position. But Trump could easily spin such a narrow race in a way to make himself the winner.
It’s easy to understand why both the Republican establishment and many liberals want to see Trump disappear fast. He’s a toxic presence in American public life. But scenarios of a quick solution to Trump—some silver bullet or Kryptonite to finish him off in Iowa—simply don’t have plausibility.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, January 12, 2016
“Loose Money”: Paul Ryan Just Twisted Himself Into A Knot Trying To Undermine Obama’s Economic Record
It is not surprising that House Speaker Paul Ryan is unimpressed with President Obama’s economic record. What is surprising is who Ryan thinks does deserve credit for helping the recovery: the Federal Reserve.
“I think the Federal Reserve has done more,” the speaker told reporters on Tuesday, after being asked if Obama “deserves any credit at all” for the recovery. “What’s happening is people at the high end are doing pretty darn well because of loose money from the Fed,” he said. This will be news to followers of Ryan’s career. He’s long railed against loose money from the Fed, claiming it will debase the dollar and lead to inflation. (It hasn’t.)
It’s not crazy to claim, as Ryan did, that the Fed’s policies amounts to “trickle down economics.” But there is nothing in Paul Ryan’s history to suggest he thinks monetary policy can help the economy at all, even if it’s just at the top. Plus, if that’s his critique, there are some progressive money-printing enthusiasts — and even some conservative ones — who would probably like to schedule a chat with the speaker.
To recap: Paul Ryan thinks loose money helped the economy. But Paul Ryan opposes loose money. He also thinks loose money favors the rich too much. But shows no indication of wanting to make loose money favor the poor.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, January 13, 2016
“Critical Role Of Diplomacy”: The GOP Presidential Candidates Really Embarrassed Themselves During The Iran Navy Incident
It was a foreign policy crisis: After an equipment failure rendered their vehicle inoperative, a group of American military personnel had fallen into the hands of an adversarial state far away. How would the president get them back? A daring rescue mission? Threats of military action? Diplomacy? Outright groveling? In the end, he felt he had no choice but to submit to the hostage-takers’ demands, and the government wrote a letter filled with apologetic language (“We are very sorry” for the incident, and “We appreciate” our adversary’s “efforts to see to the well-being of our crew” they held prisoner for 10 days).
You would think that Republicans, who are so committed to the singular importance of “strength” in foreign affairs, would have been outraged and appalled at the weakness shown by the president in this incident. But they weren’t. That’s because the president was George W. Bush, and this was April 2001, when an American spy plane had to make an emergency landing on a Chinese island after a mid-air collision with a Chinese fighter jet. Here’s the letter of apology.
It was hard not to be reminded of that incident 15 years ago when this week two small American naval boats apparently drifted into Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf after engines failed, and the Iranian navy detained them. As soon as the capture of the vessels was reported, Republican politicians stiffened their spines, flexed their pecs, and condemned the wimpy and feckless Obama administration that was obviously going to grovel before the ayatollah, leaving our brave sailors at the mercy of the Iranians for who knows how many days, weeks, or months. “The fact that [the capture] happened is a direct consequence of the weakness of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy,” said Ted Cruz, no doubt thinking wistfully about how if he were in charge, once the boats came up on radar the Iranians would have said, “Let them go where they want — we don’t want to anger President Cruz, who is so strong and resolute.” Joe Scarborough, perhaps caught in the middle of a Charles Atlas workout, tweeted, “Hey Iran, you have exactly 300 days left to push a U.S. president around. Enjoy it while you can. After that, there will be hell to pay.” Jeb Bush, testosterone practically dripping off his iPhone, tweeted, “If our sailors aren’t coming home yet, they need to now. No more bargaining. Obama’s humiliatingly weak Iran policy is exposed again.”
But then something strange happened. Wednesday morning, after only 16 hours, Iran released the sailors back to the United States, along with their boats. And we didn’t even have to bomb anybody.
A few conservatives are currently expressing faux-outrage over photos taken by the Iranians showing the sailors with their hands on their heads during the capture, as though that were some epic humiliation. But what’s important is that the whole matter was settled through a series of phone calls between American and Iranian officials, in which they apparently agreed that nobody was trying to be provocative and it would be best not to blow this out of proportion. Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly made the case that the administration was able to resolve this incident the way it did because of the diplomatic contacts that had been built up during negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. “We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago,” he said. “Today, this kind of issue was able to be peacefully resolved and efficiently resolved, and that is a testament to the critical role that diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure and strong.”
So what do we learn from this? First, diplomacy does work. It’s possible that even if we hadn’t spent a couple of years negotiating with Iran, we would have arrived at the same outcome, but it probably didn’t hurt that our officials and their officials have a better relationship today. And it’s hard to imagine that even the most bellicose of Republican candidates wouldn’t have done the same thing the Obama administration did.
Maybe we’re supposed to believe that if someone like Ted Cruz was president and a couple of small boats got captured, when his secretary of state said, “Mr. President, I’ll call their foreign minister and see if we can’t get this taken care of,” he’ll say, “No, Bob — I’m going to go on TV and tell those jerks that if they don’t release our sailors in 10 minutes, we’re letting the bombs fall!” But I doubt it. In the real world, Republicans do diplomacy when the situation demands it too, and I have trouble believing that any politician would be so reckless as to cause a confrontation when it would have been so unnecessary.
Second, it’s a reminder that reducing every foreign policy question to “strength” is idiotic. There are times when strength matters a lot, and times when you have to be smart and restrained. Complaining about the “weakness” of the Obama administration may play well during primary season, but in real foreign policy a nation doesn’t demonstrate strength by going around provoking everything it sees.
That’s how you act when you’re gripped by insecurity and you need to overcompensate. Candidates can live in their fantasy world, where they’re constantly causing dramatic showdowns they always win because of their steely glare. But fortunately for us (and for those 10 sailors), none of them had the chance to test their theory. At least not this time.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, January 14, 2016
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