“Full Speed Ahead”: Republican Overreach Is Coming Soon
A number of people have asked whether the Republicans will overreach in their reaction to the current collection of scandal-ish controversies (by the way, someone really needs to come up with a name that encompasses them all). The answer to that question is, of course they will. Try to remember who we’re talking about here. Overreaching is their thing. Congress will be going home this weekend, and I’ll bet the Republicans are going to come back from their recess reassured that their constituents really, really want them to pursue Barack Obama to the ends of the earth. I’ll explain why in a moment, but in the meantime the National Journal has details on their strategy:
Congressional Republicans head into next week’s Memorial Day recess armed with a strategy designed to keep the controversies that have consumed Washington in the news back home.
Both House and Senate Republicans will focus on the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as well as the still-open questions about Benghazi. And more and more, they’ll try to tie them together into a made-for-2014 narrative of an unaccountable and out-of-control government.
In interviews on local television and radio programs and with newspapers, Senate Republicans plan to talk about the Obama administration’s “credibility gap.” They’ll throw into the mix Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s request that health industry officials help fund “Obamacare,” a move Republicans call a “shakedown” of the companies she regulates, according to a Senate GOP leadership aide.
Lawmakers will argue that a “lack of details, stonewalling,” and what they call an “ever-changing White House narrative” on both Benghazi and the IRS have led to a trust deficit with the public, a sentiment reflected in recent polls, the aide said.
Part of the aim is to get voters to question how they can trust the administration, and the IRS more specifically, to enforce key provisions of Obama’s health care law after improperly targeting Americans.
This fits into Republicans’ emerging scandal-riding midterm election strategy—one that the GOP’s congressional campaign committees think can blend easily into their anti-Obamacare message to help the party take the Senate in 2014.
When they return from this recess, Republicans are going to be more sure than ever that they’re doing the right thing. Think about what a member of Congress does when he’s home. He’ll be doing those media interviews with friendly talk-radio hosts, for whom outrage is the bread and butter of their programming. He might do a couple of town meetings, and who comes to those? People who like him already (i.e. the Republican base, who will tell him to keep up the scandal-mongering) and people who are pissed off about something. But right now, the people who think the scandal thing is going too far aren’t really pissed off, they’re just kind of disappointed. So they won’t be so inclined to show up. And then the representative will just go around town talking to folks, and once again the ones he’s most likely to hear from are his supporters who want to tell him to stick it to that no-good socialist in the White House.
After a few days of that, he’ll come back to Washington thinking, “Wow, my constituents are really fired up about this stuff. Full speed ahead!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 14, 2013
“The (c) Stands For Cha-Ching”: The IRS Went After Small Fish, But Let The Big Ones Get Away
“Please provide copies of all your current web pages, including your blog posts. Please provide copies of all your newsletters, bulletins, flyers or any other media or literature you have disseminated to your members or others. Please provide copies of stories and articles that have been published about you.”
That’s the Internal Revenue Service calling.
Or, more precisely, sending questionnaires. They went out to scores of Tea Party groups that were seeking tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organizations.
The organizations were targeted for special scrutiny because they had the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their titles. Some questionnaires even requested the names of all donors and the amounts of each contribution.
It was a political abuse of power aimed, ironically, at groups who are pretending not to be political just to get a juicy tax break.
IRS supervisors were wrong to single out local Tea Parties when there’s a host of flagrant, big-time violators controlled by supporters of both major political parties.
The gimmick of choice is Section 501(c)(4) of the revenue code. Groups receiving that golden designation are allowed to collect unlimited contributions without paying taxes.
They’re not banned from political involvement, but by law they’re supposed to be “primarily engaged” in activities promoting “social welfare” and “the common good” — not partisan politics.
It’s a total farce.
Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS spent untold millions of dollars on behalf of Republican candidates while attacking Democrats during the last election cycle. On the other side, Priorities USA spent a fortune helping Democratic candidates while trashing Republicans.
Both rabidly partisan organizations enjoy tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4). They claim to run strictly “issue” advertisements that aren’t really political, which is a hoot.
What’s not so hilarious is that the IRS sidestepped these heavyweight scammers to go after small-time outfits such as the Liberty Township Tea Party in Ohio.
Initially, the tax agency suggested that the crackdown was an isolated operation by agents in its Cincinnati office. However, in recent days it was revealed that a few IRS officials in Washington were aware of the targeting campaign in early 2010, and that similar inquiries of conservative groups had been conducted in other states.
A Treasury inspector general’s report issued last week criticized IRS managers who didn’t stop employees from focusing on conservative groups that were seeking 501(c)(4) designations.
President Obama said the actions described in the report “are intolerable and inexcusable.” He didn’t use the word “stupid,” but it applies.
There’s no sign that the president knew about the IRS targeting campaign, which began a few years ago while the agency was led by Douglas Shulman, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
Owing his job to a Republican, Shulman seems an unlikely instigator of an IRS campaign against conservative groups. No evidence has surfaced that he was aware of it.
After Shulman completed his term last November, IRS Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller became acting commissioner. Six months earlier, Miller had been briefed about some cases involving increased scrutiny of Tea Party-affiliated groups.
However, in letters to Congress, Miller, who’s been with the tax agency almost 25 years, didn’t mention the existence of the Tea Party cases. He resigned on Wednesday at Obama’s request.
The FBI and Justice Department are rightly investigating to see whether the IRS broke any laws by zeroing in on the tax-exempt applications of conservative groups.
Congress will hold long hearings, brimming with outrage.
No such pious fervor exists for investigating and exposing the fraudulent status of large groups like Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA, which collectively take in hundreds of millions of dollars.
They’re not “social welfare” organizations worthy of a tax exemption. They’re wealthy partisan advocacy machines with purely political missions — to promote their candidates, and to influence voters.
They are prized by both parties as safe and bottomless repositories for huge campaign donations, which is why you don’t see congressional leaders declaring war on the 501(c)(4) charade.
The c stands for “cha-ching.”
By: Carl Hiaasen, The National Memo, May 22, 2013
“Ted Cruz Against The World”: The Supercilious, Arrogant, Crackpot, Con Man Of The GOP
One bonus for Republicans in the trifecta of pseudo-scandals ensnaring the Obama White House this month is that it distracted the party from its looming civil war. It’s even possible that the Senate immigration reform got as far as it did partly because wingnut radio talkers and Tea Party xenophobes were consumed by their hatred of Obama, and paying less attention to GOP immigration sellouts.
But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.
Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.
But Cruz was having none of it, because he insisted sneaky Democrats might use the committee to raise the debt ceiling. He got support from Tea Party allies Mike Lee and Rand Paul, as well as Marco Rubio (trying to claw back the Tea Party credibility he lost by working on immigration reform). McCain reminded Cruz and his friends that their party controls the House. “So we don’t trust the majority party on the other side of the [Capitol] to come to conference and not hold to the fiscal discipline that we want to see happen? Isn’t that a little bit bizarre?”
Here’s where Cruz set himself apart, one man against a corrupt world. He responded to McCain on the Senate floor the next day: “The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans … Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this mess.”
That made the senior senator from Arizona apoplectic. He accused Cruz and friends of trying to “paralyze the process.” He singled out Utah’s Mike Lee, who is not as bright a light as Cruz, for his ignorance of the way Congress works. Lee made the conference committee sound like a political brothel facilitating “backroom deals.” McCain shot back: “How do we reconcile legislation that’s been passed by one body and the other body? That’s what we’ve been doing for a couple hundred years. Perhaps the senator from Utah doesn’t know about that.”
Poor John McCain. He gave the world Sarah Palin, and Palin helped give us Cruz, Lee, Paul and Rubio. Still, Ted Cruz’s self-righteous grandeur puts him in a class by himself. He oozed condescension, openly mocking McCain, declaring that Senate Republicans would side with him on the budget impasse. “I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected,” a reference to McCain calling Cruz, Paul and Justin Amash “wacko birds” earlier this year.
What’s clear is that we’ve reached a new state of warfare in the normally collegial Senate, where increasingly, a minority faction of the minority party has the power to grind everything to a halt. McCain blasted that point of view Thursday: “It’s not the regular order for a number of senators — a small number, a minority within a minority here — to say they will not agree to go to conference. We’re here to vote, not here to block things,” he said.
That’s clearly Cruz’s plan. Watching the supercilious Cruz mock the sputtering McCain, I was struck by how much he enjoyed preening for the cameras. All senators do, but Cruz stands out, with his proud contempt for Republicans along with Democrats. As he dreams of the White House, with barely five months in the Senate under his belt, look for him to play a leading role in the next debt ceiling battle.
In other news: Michelle Malkin and friends are calling me a racist for referring to Cruz as a “skeezy huckster” on Twitter yesterday as I watched him insult McCain. I admit it wasn’t my most elegant turn of phrase, but I wasn’t aware that “skeezy” or “huckster” were slurs associated with Hispanics/Latinos. Maybe that’s because I don’t travel in the same circles as Malkin. Can you say “projection”?
Still, they weren’t the most artful choice of words. If I had it to do over again, I would call Cruz a “supercilious con man.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 24, 2013
“Focus Should Be On Jobs”: Ben Bernanke Clearly Explained What’s Still Wrong With The Economy
In recent congressional testimony, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke clearly explained what’s still wrong with the economy, outlined the Fed’s thinking on monetary policy and strongly implied that fiscal policy is still off base. His account and policy recommendations reflect mainstream economic thinking – and, thus, run counter to much of the economic doctrine that’s driving Republican budget policies.
Here’s how Bernanke sees the economy: though payroll employment has expanded by about 6 million jobs since its low point and unemployment has dropped by about 2.5 percentage points from its peak, the job market remains weak overall. I couldn’t agree more.
Bernanke points to the same indicators I would. The unemployment rate is still too high, too many of the unemployed have been looking for work for more than six months, too many people have stopped looking at all while job prospects remain dim, and nearly 8 million people are working part time even though they’d prefer full-time work. I’m glad to see him emphasize how “extraordinarily costly” this situation is:
Not only do [high levels of unemployment and underemployment] impose hardships on the affected individuals and their families, they also damage the productive potential of the economy as a whole by eroding workers’ skills and – particularly relevant during this commencement season – by preventing many young people from gaining workplace skills and experience in the first place. The loss of output and earnings associated with high unemployment also reduces government revenues and increases spending on income-support programs, thereby leading to larger budget deficits and higher levels of public debt than would otherwise occur.
While unemployment is still a major concern, inflation isn’t. Therefore, the Fed is appropriately interpreting its “dual mandate” to foster both “maximum employment” and “price stability” as requiring “a highly accommodative monetary policy.” That means keeping its short-term interest rate target as low as possible until unemployment falls closer to normal long-term levels and monitoring its program of purchasing longer-term assets – as long as inflationary expectations remain low. As the Fed notes, this policy carries some risks, but the risks and costs of continuing high unemployment are far greater.
Republicans, in contrast, want to remove “maximum employment” from the Fed’s policy concerns. They seem to see our most pressing problem as the possibility of future inflation, not the reality of current high unemployment. The Republican chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, where Bernanke testified, wants to replace the dual mandate with a single mandate for long-term price stability. Even some conservatives recognize that, during major recessions, that’s a recipe for disaster. An even more extreme policy – a return to a gold standard – made it into the 2012 Republican platform.
On fiscal policy, Bernanke recognizes that recent policy decisions have tilted too far toward short-term budget austerity, while largely ignoring longer-term budget challenges. He neither shared Republicans’ disdain for stimulus policies nor endorsed their flirtation with “expansionary austerity” arguments.
Federal fiscal policy, taking into account both discretionary actions and so-called automatic stabilizers, was, on net, quite expansionary [emphasis added] during the recession and early in the recovery. However, a substantial part of this impetus was offset by spending cuts and tax increases by state and local governments, most of which are subject to balanced-budget requirements, and by subsequent fiscal tightening at the federal level.
While too much fiscal restraint has hampered the economic recovery, policymakers have done little to address longer run fiscal challenges that will begin to reappear later in the decade. Bernanke’s counsel:
Importantly, the objectives of effectively addressing longer-term fiscal imbalances and of minimizing the near-term fiscal headwinds facing the economic recovery are not incompatible. To achieve both goals simultaneously, the Congress and the Administration could consider replacing some of the near-term fiscal restraint now in law with policies that reduce the federal deficit more gradually in the near term but more substantially in the longer run.
By contrast, the House Republican budget goes full bore on deficit reduction, starting immediately – jobs be damned.
By: Chad Stone, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2013
“Republican Rebranding”: Recent History Tells Us That Victory Isn’t Born Of Subtle Ideological Repositioning
The Republican “rebranding” effort may be on temporary hiatus as all the party’s factions come together in the vain hope that they may finally have something to impeach Barack Obama over, but as soon as these various non-scandals, faux-scandals, and mini-scandals fade, the GOP will surely get back to bickering over how it can pull itself out of its electoral doldrums. In wondering where they might go, The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball does the logical thing and seeks out some veterans of a prior party rebranding, the Democratic effort of the late 1980s and early 1990s, centered around the Democratic Leadership Council. Their take isn’t too surprising—they think what the GOP needs now is to do what they did then. But I think there’s an important point missing from this discussion and the way we talk about this history. The story everyone tells is that there are two paths to take, one of which leads to failure and one to success, and the argument is over which is which. Should the party be more true to its philosophy and sell that philosophy better, or should it reorient itself to respond to changing times? Here’s how Ball’s article closes:
Watching the GOP’s struggles, former DLCers say they recognize all the old symptoms—the alibis, the search for a procedural panacea, the party committee dominated by diehards. But on the question of whether the Republican Party has just been through its version of 1988, they’re not so sure. As Will Marshall put it: “They know they have a political problem—that’s obvious. But I don’t think they’ve come to grips with the fundamental issue, which is their governing philosophy. I think they’re going to have to lose one more.”
Sounds reasonable enough. But I think the degree to which political success comes from the public agreeing with you on issues is being dramatically overstated. If you look at the ups and downs of the parties over the last 20 years, a couple of other factors—timing, and what your opponents do—matter a whole lot more.
Let’s quickly run over this history, starting with the Democrats’ first revival, with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Was it important that Clinton was a centrist Democrat who sought to neutralize the party’s electoral problems on being seen by white voters as too solicitous of black people and too soft on crime?1 Sure. But had the country not been in a recession in 1992, that wouldn’t have been enough. And if that was a Democratic revival that went beyond one guy getting elected, it didn’t last very long; two years later, Republicans took over both houses of Congress.
That brings us to the opposition factor. After the Gingrich Revolution, voters got to see the new version of the Republican party, and they were completely turned off. In 1996, Clinton ran one ad after another featuring pictures of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich together to taint Dole with the stain of the unpopular House Speaker. But what got him re-elected, more than anything else, was the humming economy. We could argue about how much credit he deserved for it, but the importance it had was undeniable, and it wasn’t a judgment voters were making about his New Democrat philosophy that got him a second term.
Then four years later, despite all that New Democrat repositioning, George W. Bush gets elected and the Democratic Party is back in the toilet. And what brought them back? Was it yet another repositioning? Nope. It was George W. Bush. The abysmal failure of his presidency was what allowed Democrats to win back both houses of Congress in 2006. Then in 2008, Barack Obama got elected because of both a continued rejection of Bush and the economic meltdown.
My point is, all of this back-and-forth happened despite any ideological movement that was going on within each party. Right now the Republicans are indeed grossly out of step with the public on issues. But they were just as out of step in 2010, when they won a huge victory in the midterm elections. It isn’t that issues don’t matter, but a lot of the ideological judgments voters make are relative. The Democratic party is benefiting from the fact that Republicans look like (and are!) a bunch of reckless, irresponsible extremists. Could they benefit from becoming more sane? Sure. But given the right circumstances, they can win even if they get no less crazy than they are right now. If you’re in the opposition and the president’s policies fail, you’ll be rewarded; if they succeed, you’ll be in trouble (which, of course, is why Republicans have worked so hard to make sure Obama’s policies fail). Nobody is going to be hailed as a brilliant party strategist for saying, “We just need to wait for things to turn in our favor, and everything will be OK.” But that’s probably the truth.
1If you’re too young to remember the 1992 campaign, Google “Ricky Ray Rector” and “Sister Souljah” to see what I’m talking about.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2013
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