“Big-Money Manipulators”: Worse Than Citizens United, A Sinister Last Gasp Of Republican Gangerism
The dysfunction in Washington is incredibly dispiriting.
We are constantly being reminded that we are a nation torn seemingly beyond repair, divided into irreconcilable camps, endlessly clashing over diminishing common ground.
And the culpability of big money in our current condition cannot be underplayed.
Rich conservatives are out to bend government to their will or break it in the attempt to discredit this Democratic president and ensure that there won’t be another soon.
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Shaun McCutcheon is an Alabama Republican who wants to give more to his preferred candidates than is currently allowed by law. The Republican National Committee has joined McCutcheon in the case. If the court agrees with them, the already significant influence of big money in our politics would have no limits. The legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article about the case in July for The New Yorker entitled “Another Citizens United — but Worse.”
At the same time that Republicans want to increase the influence of the rich on our elections, they want to decrease the influence of the poor at the ballot box by passing a raft of new voter restrictions.
This is a sinister, last-gasp move of gangsterism: when you’re losing the game, tilt the table.
You must understand this larger plot to fully appreciate the Republicans’ current budget ploy. This is not so much about limiting government as it is about measuring power. Rich Republicans are reaching for the edges so that they can redefine the limits.
As The New York Times pointed out this weekend, Republicans — financed by the billionaire Koch brothers — began plotting this government shutdown over Obamacare soon after the president began his second term.
If they couldn’t win in a fair electoral fight, they’d win in an asymmetric legislative one.
Earlier this year, John Boehner hashed out a deal with Harry Reid — or at least had “several” conversations about a deal — in which the Democrats would accept the Republicans’ budget numbers ($70 billion below what the Democrats wanted) in return for the speaker’s voting on a continuing resolution with no strings attached.
The Republicans had won. But the speaker later reneged. He told George Stephanopoulos this weekend: “I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand.”
To be clear, his far-right members in their bright red districts — and their deep-pocketed backers — forced him to reconsider.
Boehner is fighting his own battle — for his job and his legacy. He wants to appear in control of a caucus that is uncontrollable. The man who said last week of the government shutdown, “this isn’t some damn game,” is playing games. In fact, Politico reported Tuesday that many Republicans believe a massive budget deal is the best way to solve the current crisis, but Boehner has resisted, saying he wants to “put points on the board.”
The president, for his part, has deployed a list of metaphors as long as his arm to describe the Republicans — from hostage takers to deadbeat homeowners — to get more of the public to understand his principle of not negotiating on keeping the government open or paying the government’s bills. He wants to break the crisis cycle while simultaneously defending the Affordable Care Act. He wants to rescue the government from the clutches of the nihilists.
But many Americans are too frustrated to ferret out the details. They see dysfunction in the system as a whole and they’re fed up with it.
According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, a third of Americans now cite dysfunctional government as the most important problem facing America today. That was the highest level ever recorded by Gallup, whose trend on the measure dates back to 1939, and dysfunction now ranks higher than the economy in general or unemployment and jobs in particular.
This is not a “both sides at fault” issue. It is a tremendously partisan one.
And according to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Republicans believe the president should agree to a deal that includes changes in his health care law, and 75 percent of Democrats believe that Republicans should agree to a deal with no health care changes. Independents are nearly evenly divided between the two.
Now the shutdown is beginning to bleed into the debate about whether to raise the debt limit, a debate that has brought out the Republican default deniers to further muddy the waters.
The government shutdown, as costly and futile as it is, would look like child’s play compared with a default.
According to a Tuesday report in Bloomberg/Businessweek, one global market research firm estimates that the government shutdown “cost $1.6 billion last week in lost economic output” and “the office closures are now draining an average of $160 million each workday from the $15.7 trillion economy.”
And if you think this is bad, consider that a default could trigger a full-blown recession. In a Wednesday report, CNN quoted the International Monetary Fund economist Olivier Blanchard as saying: “If there was a problem lifting the debt ceiling, it could well be what is now a recovery would turn into a recession or even worse.”
And yet, a growing number of Republicans are questioning the possibility of default. Unbelievable.
Some Republicans have never met an inconvenient fact that they weren’t determined to deny. Evolution: didn’t happen. Climate change: not so much. Obama’s faith: doubt it.
In some parts of the Republican universe, facts and fantasy merge, the truth doesn’t surface, it’s shaped, data must be made to conform to doxology, and accepted science borders on the heretical. This is how the money-rich are able to prey on the knowledge-poor.
This denial is sinking in among the Republican rank and file. A Pew Research Center report issued Monday found that most Republicans believe that we can go past the debt limit deadline without major problems.
This is bigger than Obamacare. This is about rich conservatives seeking to exert unlimited influence on our political system, and employing far-right Republicans who are animated, to varying degrees, by an innate hostility to this president, fear of diminishing influence and a disavowal of disagreeable truths.
This is about the fragility of our democracy: the possibility that a government by the people may swiftly give way to a government dominated by dark money and dark motives.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2013
“Be Careful What You Wish For”: Citizens United Created A Path For A Legislative Strategy Of The GOP’s Most Aggressive Funders
It’s no secret that the corporate class is being eclipsed by Tea Party libertarians and is increasingly unable to exert influence on the Republican Party, despite the generous donations the top 1 percent has long showered on Republicans.
But isn’t the Republican Party in the business of serving Big Business? And didn’t the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United open the floodgates of corporate campaign cash? How is all that corporate campaign cash failing to buy Big Business sway over the GOP?
Well, here’s the thing: Citizens United didn’t save the Republican Party. Citizens United broke the Republican Party.
Yes, Citizens United was what Republicans and their corporate patrons wanted. Corporations are people. Money is speech. Spend what you want, and no one needs to know who wrote the check.
But as conservative columnist Tim Carney explains in a criminally overlooked Washington Examiner column from last month, what Citizens United meant in practice is this: It “spawned super PACs that offset the power of the political parties and K Street.”
Carney specifically credits the newly created Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups for using the new post–Citizens United rules to fund right-wing challengers who have triumphed over Republican establishment favorites, whipping up conservative grassroots fervor behind extremist positions and forcefully shaming any Republican who hints at compromise. They have their own informal “whip operation” that robs Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of their traditional institutional power. And they have been squarely behind the plot to defund ObamaCare by forcing a government shutdown.
Carney says this Citizens United–fueled dynamic has led to a “Republican leadership vacuum.” I would go a step further: It has broken the Republican Party in two.
Both the ascendant Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups are financially backed by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, leaders of a single corporation that appears to be trying to surpass the Chamber of Commerce as the dominant funder and power center of the Republican Party.
In the 2012 elections, the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity each spent roughly $35 million. But since then, the Kochs have used another group they created, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, to spend $200 million supporting an array of organizations determined to destroy ObamaCare.
According to Open Secrets, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce spending now “dwarfs” the old Chamber, which has been urging Republicans to keep the government open and increase the debt limit, to no avail. The establishment Chamber has become so frustrated with being ignored, it is preparing an effort to donate money to Republican congresspeople who face primary challenges from the right, a direct challenge to the Senate Conservatives Fund and its allies.
The Republican Party is stuck with two major corporate funders vying for influence and pulling the party apart. Yet the organization with the broader business base and more rational political outlook is being out-organized and out-spent by a narrow band of ideological extremists who have figured out how to best exploit a Citizens United world. Recent research has found that Citizens United did not entice corporate America en masse to increase its election spending, but as The New York Times’s Eduardo Porter noted, “Big, frequent donors are particularly extreme.”
The end result is a party compelled to carry out a doomed legislative strategy concocted by the party’s most aggressive funders. If fully carried out to its apocalyptic conclusion, the strategy risks obliterating the Republican Party’s brand for a generation.
Just one year ago, Democrats were terrified that Citizens United would not only drown Barack Obama in a flood of GOP-friendly corporate cash, but also make it impossible for liberal Democrats to ever have a chance at winning national elections.
But the reverse may end up being Citizens United‘s true political legacy.
Obama used the specter of freshly legalized super PACs to rev up his donor base, and raised more money than any presidential candidate in history, neutralizing the Republican super PACs. He kept his party unified, turned out his base, and won decisively. In the election’s aftermath, well-funded but strategically inept right-wing super PACs are financing deep intraparty discord, threatening the ability of Republicans to be competitive in national elections.
Turns out the upholding of the Affordable Care Act isn’t the only gift Chief Justice John Roberts gave to President Obama.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 11, 2013
“All Voices Should Be Heard”: The Government Shutdown Shows Contribution Limits Are Needed More Than Ever
The Supreme Court must uphold the overall contribution limit in McCutcheon v. FEC, and certainly should not consider striking the base limits.
The Supreme Court has never struck down a federal contribution limit, maintaining that these limits are valid to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption. Right now, when confidence in Congress is at an all time low, it would be extremely unwise to toss aside that precedent.
The fact is, contribution limits are already too high. Candidates for office are over-reliant on donors with the capabilities to give the most and current federal limits are far higher than what the average American can afford to give. As evidence of this, one need not look further than the 2012 elections, in which House candidates raised 55 percent of their individual contributions in chunks of $1,000 or more from just .06 percent of the population and Senate candidates raked in 64 percent in contributions of that size from about 133,000 individuals.
Striking the aggregate limit would make that problem significantly worse. Only a small handful of individuals comes even close to the aggregate limit. In 2012 only 1,219 people came within 10 percent of the $117,000 limit, which is not at all surprising when you consider that this is more than twice what the average American household earns in a year.
Based on the behavior and the giving capability of those 1,219 donors, U.S. PIRG and Demos project in our new report that absent an overall limit those donors would increase their giving, pumping an estimated $1 billion dollars into the next four federal elections, making candidates more dependent on a small set of people for big money and minimizing the donations of everyday Americans. To play out what that would look like, we estimated that if the limit had not been in place in 2012, the 1,219 donors would likely have given about 150 percent of what President Obama and Governor Romney raised from over four million small donors.
Now in the second week of the shutdown, we are currently feeling the full effect of what happens when a handful of extreme individuals exerts disproportionate power in government. Lifting the overall limit, as McCutcheon is asking the Court to do, would give even more clout to a small set of very wealthy individuals. This is not only inherently anti-democratic but also has real world consequences. New research from Public Campaign shows that these big donors are highly partisan donors indicating that striking the limits would further exacerbate polarization in Washington.
In order for democracy to function every citizen should have meaningful opportunity to influence the actions of government and we must also have faith that our voices will be heard, regardless of whether or not we can afford to make a $9.9 million, $2,500, or even $200 political disbursement. The Supreme Court has long recognized this, emphasizing the importance of protecting against the appearance of corruption. However, it severely miscalculated the effect its decision in Citizens United would have in that arena.
Most Americans do not feel that our voices are being heard on Capitol Hill and who could blame us? In Citizens United the Supreme Court handed a giant megaphone to the wealthiest interests and on Tuesday it will consider turning up the volume even higher. It’s interesting that those who argue that limits threaten free speech seem unconcerned with the speaking ability of the majority of Americans who cannot afford to write a $50,000 check to a political party.
The last thing we need right now is to increase the giving of the donors with the deepest pockets. Rather, we should be increasing the breadth of Americans providing the funds needed to run campaigns. We need policies that encourage more everyday Americans to engage in politics by making small contributions to candidates and causes: low contribution limits, matching public funds, and a tax refund for small dollar gifts. We need the Supreme Court to respect longstanding precedent and to uphold the aggregate and the base contribution limits.
By: Blair Bowie, U. S. News and World Report Debate Club, October 8, 2013
“If Liberals Hate Something, It Must Be Terrific And Effective”: Those Obamacare Rape Ads Are A Scam On Conservatives
I suppose I have to talk about the creepy anti-Obamacare ads that everyone, or at least all the liberal bloggers, are talking about today.
Look, folks: this is a very obvious scam.
This is not about stopping the ACA.
This is about money.
Oh, for the donors, it’s presumably about stopping Obamacare.
But for the people putting together the ads, unless they are incredibly stupid and naive, it’s almost certainly about raising money from those donors. And, perhaps, making a name for themselves (or a bigger name — I’m not looking to see who is responsible) within the conservative movement.
These ads could not be better designed to do one thing: to get condemned by liberals. Thus impressing easily scammed conservative marks, who tend to really believe that if liberals hate something, it must be terrific and effective.
This campaign is not designed to convince young people to “opt out” of Obamacare. It’s part of a “campus tour” supposedly designed to convince those young people to go without insurance, but that’s transparently a fraud; traditional-aged college students, the ones who are supposedly being targeted, aren’t really the customers that matter (it’s their older brothers and sisters…yes, some traditional-age college students may purchase their own insurance under ACA, more than was the case before, but it must be a fairly small group).
No, there are real efforts to undermine the law — harassing the “navigators,” pressuring the NFL and others not to publicize it, and more — but this campaign isn’t one of them.
Will it have any effect on actual consumer behavior? I doubt it. But it is worth noting that if it does “work” at all, it’s going to work on the people who respond best to the affect evoked by the ads: in other words, people already primed and ready to hate Obama(care), people already primed and ready to hate the government of the United States, people primed and ready to suspect the very worst of the program. And do note: the way it “works” is by convincing them to go without health insurance.
So basically: if you’re a rich conservative who isn’t very smart about how you give your money, this ad is designed to pick your pocket. If you’re a non-rich conservative, you might get duped into some foolish behavior, but that’s just acceptable collateral damage. For everyone else, it’s an occasion for (to be fair, entirely justified) outrage, I suppose, but basically it’ll come and go without any real effects.
Hey, I know: we’re not supposed to question motives. I believe that. So I’ll say again: it’s possible that these ads are not a scam, but a real political campaign undertaken by seriously naive and stupid operatives. Just as it’s possible that the people doing the “defund” campaign sincerely believe that a government shutdown threat would achieve that, as opposed (as Jamelle Bouie and others pointed out) just finding it an effective money-raising tool). I have to admit, however: that’s not what I think is going on.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Washington Monthly, Ten Miles Square, September 20, 2013
“The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways”: FEC Investigation Into Michele Bachmann’s Election Campaign Now Focusing On Marcus
In 2011, Michele Bachmann claimed God spoke to her and told her to run for president. Apparently, the Lord works in mysterious ways. The Minnesota Congresswoman’s presidential campaign was a disaster on the inside even more than on the outside, as evidenced by all the ethics investigations she’s facing. Now Marcus Bachmann, the Congresswoman’s husband, is the subject of a Federal Elections Commission investigation, according to the New York Times.
“The latest is a federal inquiry into whether an outside ‘super PAC’ improperly coordinated strategy with Mrs. Bachmann’s campaign staff, including her husband, in violation of election laws,” the Times reports
In a complaint to the F.E.C. in February, Peter Waldron, a Florida Republican operative hired to enlist evangelical Iowa pastors, described overhearing the president of the super PAC ask Brett O’Donnell, a senior campaign adviser, about radio and TV stations.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Waldron said Mr. O’Donnell had replied, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Election law prohibits substantial coordination, though not all contacts, between campaigns and super PACS, Mr. Ryan said.
Mr. Waldron, who calls himself a whistle-blower, also disclosed an e-mail from Mr. Bachmann describing a phone call Mr. Bachmann made to a donor asking for $7,000. In the e-mail, Mr. Bachmann wrote that the donor had agreed to give the money through the super PAC. He concluded: “Praise the Lord!! Thank you Peter for your servant leadership.”
Mr. Ryan said the call appeared to violate a rule against campaign staff members raising more than $5,000 for a super PAC.
Regular readers of The New Civil Rights Movement are all too familiar with Peter Waldron, Bachmann’s evangelical outreach director who has ties a top advocate of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.
Even the Times notes Waldron “has a controversial past,” and adds:
In 2006 he was jailed briefly in Uganda for possession of assault rifles, according to news reports. In the 1990s he led a Florida youth charity that received more than $600,000 in state and local grants before it collapsed amid questions about its effectiveness, according to The St. Petersburg Times, now The Tampa Bay Times.
But there’s so much more.
Waldron, who one year before the 2012 elections announced that the Holy Ghost had told him Michele Bachmann is the one for president, just published a new book, Bachmannistan: Behind The Lines, that claims Rep. Bachmann fired a staffer who had seven children, and another on the way, on Christmas eve.
Christian family values?
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, September 6, 2013
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