“Crazy Is as Crazy Does”: Congress Is Off To Suck Up To Its Lunatic Tea Party Constituents
Four years ago, Democratic representatives went home for the August recess and found themselves under assault from angry Tea Partiers, who took over town meetings with shouting and fist-shaking over the Affordable Care Act in particular, and more generally, the theft of their country by the foreign Muslim usurper Barack Obama. This August, however, it’s Republicans who are under attack by some of those same people.
At one town meeting after another, hard-right Republican House members are being confronted by constituents accusing them of not being quite doctrinaire and reckless enough (see here, or here, or here). Once again the immediate topic is Obamacare, but now the question isn’t whether the law should pass, but whether Republicans should shut down the government in a futile attempt to defund it. The members catching the most heat are those who argue that shutting down the government is useless, because Barack Obama is never going to sign a budget that defunds his greatest domestic accomplishment, so the only thing a shutdown would do is create more political headaches for the GOP.
This outbreak of relative pragmatism on the part of some Republican members of Congress is of course seen by Tea Partiers as little more than weak-kneed appeasement. It suggests that there’s a shift underway among the Republican base, from simply favoring the threatening of a government shutdown as a way to extract concessions, to supporting a shutdown of the government even with the knowledge that doing so will produce no concessions from Democrats.
As many a Republican politician will tell you (ask Marco Rubio, for one), convincing the Tea Party that you’re sufficiently conservative and that you hate Barack Obama enough isn’t just a full-time job, it’s a game that almost everyone will eventually lose. At some point you’ll take some position or express some opinion that is interpreted as less than maximal anti-Obamaism, and all it takes is one slip to be declared a traitor forevermore. So as crazy as Republican politicians sometimes seem, don’t forget that they’re under constant pressure from a base that is even crazier.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 8, 2013
“Purifying The Republican Party”: The Destructive Rise Of The No-Government Conservatives
Nine months after a decisive loss in the 2012 elections, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party—or whatever’s left of it—has begun.
I’m not talking about a battle between moderates and conservatives. The conservatives won that fight a long time ago. Our children may never believe that moderate Republicans once roamed the Earth, advocating policies that would limit carbon pollution and invest in scientific research, reform our schools and build new roads, promote national service, reduce the influence of money in politics, and require individuals who can afford health insurance to take responsibility for buying it. Soon enough, these politicians will exist only in the minds of ’90s-era pundits and Aaron Sorkin’s writing staff.
The conservatives have finally purified the Republican Party, dispatching moderate infidels in primary after primary, demanding fealty to their agenda of huge tax cuts and drastically lower spending. They have used their sizable numbers in Congress to help realize that agenda, with periodic assists from a president who has always been more fiscally responsible than his enemies would admit.
Today the tax burden on the vast majority of families is lower than it’s been in decades. Domestic spending outside of Medicare and Medicaid is the lowest it’s been in more than half a century. A public sector that has grown under the last four presidents has significantly contracted under Barack Obama. And deficits are falling at the fastest pace in 60 years.
Conservatives remain unsatisfied. They want more tax cuts. More spending cuts. And I’m picking up signals that they’re not entirely thrilled with the Affordable Care Act.
But here, a new divide has emerged within the Republican Party. On one side are the traditional small-government conservatives, who have a rough acquaintance with the rules of politics and basic math. They may want to reduce the size of government further, but they also want to preserve the institutions of government, understanding that a functional democracy is necessary to provide for the common defense, promote a common prosperity, and tackle problems we can only solve together, as a nation.
These are Republicans like Chris Christie, who has witnessed the vital importance of robust federal aid in the wake of a terrible storm. These are Republicans like Jeb Bush, who has tried to reform public education without completely dismantling it. These are Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the handful of senators who have sought compromise with Democrats over issues such as immigration reform and finally ended the historically exceptional blockade of perfectly qualified executive-branch nominees so that the president can fill the jobs his administration is required to perform.
None of these actions have endeared the small-government conservatives to their rivals for power, the no-government conservatives. No-government conservatives take their inspiration from Grover Norquist’s famous quote that government should be shrunk to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. These Republicans, who make up most of the House and a healthy portion of the Senate, are on an uncompromising mission to abolish most government services, benefits, regulations, and taxes.
The goals of no-government conservatives are not primarily economic. They will propose more tax cuts in times of surplus and times of deficit. They care little when the nonpartisan experts and economists at the Congressional Budget Office say sequestration will cost up to 1.6 million jobs next year, or that immigration reform will boost our GDP, or that Obamacare will reduce the debt over time. No-government conservatives are not compelled by the evidence that temporary benefits such as food stamps and unemployment insurance put money in the pockets of those most likely to spend it at local businesses that will grow and create jobs as a result. Their only jobs agenda, their only growth agenda, their only deficit agenda is eliminating government, no matter how many people it helps or how big a boost it provides the economy.
Nor are the goals of no-government conservatives primarily political. They have advisers, they can read polls, and most of them probably know that shutting down the government or forcing a default would be, among other catastrophes, highly unpopular. They realize that rampant hostage-taking and filibuster-abuse are the chief contributors to the obstruction and gridlock that Americans of both parties hate.
They just don’t care. Jonathan Chait has written about the recent embrace of “procedural extremism” among many congressional Republicans, who have “evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all.”
But for no-government conservatives, this has been their primary policy goal all along. Their fundamental philosophy is purely ideological—the idea that since government can’t do everything, it should do nothing. So as long as the public continues to see Washington as a dysfunctional circus of petty children, the conservative philosophy of government is vindicated. That is also precisely why no-government conservatives view the successful implementation of Obamacare as an existential threat—because it would prove that limited government intervention in the market can still be an effective force for good. It is why some Republicans are threatening a shutdown unless Obama agrees to defund the Affordable Care Act—a step they know can’t even be achieved through the annual budget process.
In 2016, Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz seem to be the most likely champions of no-government conservatism, with Marco Rubio engaged in a delicate balancing act between purity and sanity. Whether Republican activists will still embrace traditional conservatives like Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and others remains to be seen. But of one thing I am certain: while the single-minded pursuit of a no-government ideology may bring Republicans a fanatical sense of purpose, it will not bring them the 270 electoral votes needed to take back the White House, nor will it help our recovery gain the speed and strength it needs. The sooner the party faithful realize this, the better off the country will be.
By: Jon Favreau, The Daily Beast, July 30, 2013
“Mitch McConnell Is Congress: It’s Hard Out There For An Obstructionist Minority Leader
To many people, a poll released today by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling probably came as a surprise. Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader in the Senate, is shown trailing his challenger, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, by a point. But he’s a Republican in a conservative state, and one of the leaders of his party. How could he be in danger of losing?
For starters, Grimes looks to be a serious opponent. Her father is a well-known former state senator, she’s already won a statewide campaign, and she’s made some terrific videos with her grandmothers, tapping into Kentucky’s substantial pro-grandma vote. But that’s not the real source of McConnell’s problems. While one might think that the more important and influential a senator is in national politics the easier time he’d have winning re-election, the opposite is true, especially at a time like this.
Almost 40 years ago, political scientist Richard Fenno identified a curious phenomenon among voters: they hate Congress, but love their congressman. Congress is seen as corrupt, incompetent, venal, beset by infighting among competing interests each driven by its own bad faith. But Congressman Smith? Why, he’s our boy! He went to the same high school as my cousin. I saw him at the Fourth of July parade. He helped my buddy’s grandma get her Social Security check. He got money for the new bridge over the river. That’s a big reason why even when Congress is incredibly unpopular, almost all incumbents-over 95 percent in some years-get re-elected.
And it isn’t just the personal connections that drive this phenomenon, it’s also the media. A friend of mine wrote his dissertation on the way members of Congress are covered in local media, and what he found is that unless you get embroiled in a scandal, the coverage is almost all positive. The local papers and TV stations will run your picture when you cut the ribbon at the senior center you obtained funding for, or seek out your sage words on whatever the issue of the day is, but they rarely write anything critical about you.
But if you’re Mitch McConnell, you don’t get the benefit of that glowing coverage, because you’re in the news all the time for your role in national issues. The people of Kentucky don’t get a different view of McConnell than people anywhere else, and what they see is a guy who, pretty much by his own admission, is one of the prime forces creating and sustaining congressional gridlock and all other manner of Washington dysfunction. Other voters might have the liberty to hate Congress but love their senator, but Mitch McConnell is Congress.
The truth is that McConnell has never been hugely popular in Kentucky. He’s not a particularly lovable guy, even though he is one of the shrewdest and most ruthless politicians you’ll ever encounter. I’d hesitate to bet against him. But don’t be surprised if he ends up losing next year.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 1, 2013
“Placating The Pyromaniacs”: Don’t Repeal Any Laws, Repeal John Boehner And House Republicans
It would be impossible to name the craziest thing said by a Republican so far this year. This year? This week.
New entrants arrive constantly and the competition is feral. And yet paradoxically they don’t even shock anymore. But one recent Republican remark should arrest you and deserves your contemplation: John Boehner’s statement on Face the Nation Sunday that he and his House Republicans “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
It’s not an outrageous statement in the Obama-wants-to-impose-Sharia vein, but in its way it’s more disturbing. The Republican Party now sees dysfunction as not just an unfortunate consequence of a set of historical factors, something that they might work every now and again to correct. Now, the Republican Party sees dysfunction as its mission.
This, I think you’ll agree, is new. Let’s put it more emphatically. It’s absolutely new in American history. Well, there exists some precedent back in the 1840s and ’50s (also led then by reactionaries who were mostly Southern). But in our modern history, let’s say, since we solved the problem of the peculiar institution and later became the world’s most powerful nation, we’ve been a functioning democracy. There have been many moments of ugliness and sclerosis. But the particular qualities of the American system have generally produced what you could reasonably call governance.
From the start, we were not a parliamentary system, in which loyalty to the party is paramount and demanded. For a range of reasons, individual House members and especially senators have always had more autonomy than legislators in parliamentary systems do. This, along with the facts of our vast geography and diversity of interests, made our parties more flexible and ensured that cross-party ad-hoc coalitions could get laws passed.
We also had a tradition of legislative deference to the president—on foreign policy most of all, but also on domestic issues to some extent. A president’s top few priorities were always given a hearing, and compromise was usually reached. Tip O’Neill didn’t share Ronald Reagan’s priorities by a long shot, but he saw that Reagan won handily and he didn’t use the Rules Committee or any other trick to prevent the new president from enacting his agenda, though of course he did try to alter it. Even Newt Gingrich, after passing as much of his agenda as he could, sat down and talked turkey with Bill Clinton on a range of issues and struck a deal on Social Security and the budget.
I reread the above two paragraphs and I see that I sound a bit like a textbook, and a quaint one at that, one printed long ago. Certainly, the words and sentiments are irrelevant to most of the GOP members of the House. They really don’t care about any of those things. Consider this fascinating, and morbid, little fact: of the 230-odd Republican House members, fully half, 115, have served since only 2010 or 2012. They didn’t come to pass legislation. They came to burn the place down.
Boehner is handing them his trusty Bic lighter. Yes, a man wants to hold on to his job, I understand that. And yes, a speaker shouldn’t necessarily tip his hand on how he feels about an issue—immigration, say—until later in the process. But is Boehner being canny, or a coward? Virtually everything Boehner says publicly is designed to placate the pyromaniacs. And if he’s ever said anything behind closed doors designed to challenge them, they’ve kept it an awfully good secret (which would not happen; it would be leaked within seconds to ensure that he felt the lash of the Tea Partying millions).
They have brought us to a place we’ve never been before: post-governance America. Oh, they have to pass some bills to keep Social Security checks going out, defense contractors being paid, that sort of thing. But passing the minimal number of bills needed to keep the economy from crashing to Middle Earth isn’t the same thing as legislating. Or compromising. Those, they won’t do. As Jonathan Chait notes this week, their “negotiating” position with Obama is this: We’ll raise the debt ceiling for the rest of your term. All you have to do is sign the Ryan budget into law and privatize Medicare. Right.
I don’t see any way out of this. We are stuck here for years. In all likelihood, because of the 2010 gerrymandering, the Republicans are going to control the House at least until 2021. That’s eight. More. Years. And Boehner, let us not forget, is the “moderate” among those in the leadership. Say he lets an immigration vote happen and pisses them off, back to Cincinnati (Cincinnati? What am I saying? He’ll become a corporate lobbyist and buy a nice house in Leesburg.) Then we get Speaker Eric Cantor, or Speaker Paul Ryan. I have trouble envisioning what “worse” could be, but it would most certainly get worse under either of those two.
This isn’t a partisan crisis. It’s a historical crisis. And the political system can’t solve it. We need leaders from other walks of life, especially from the various branches of the business world, to stand up and say to the Republicans that dysfunction cannot be your mission. You must govern. Govern conservatively, but govern. And we need, as I’ve said before, big-dollar organizations that can boot some of these people out of office and replace them with a few Dick Lugars. We don’t need to repeal any laws. Repealing a hundred or so people is what we need.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 24, 2013
“Rebranding Failure”: John Boehner Tries To Defend Congress’ Ineptitude, Because Getting Nothing Done Is Exhausting
This Congress is generally perceived as failing miserably when it comes to governing, and a few weeks ago, we learned this perception is quantifiably true: the 113th Congress is on track to pass fewer bills than any since the clerk’s office started keeping track in the mid-1940s.
When a reporter asked House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) late last week about the institution’s “historically unproductive” nature, the Republican balked. “That’s just total nonsense,” he snapped, before the question was even finished.
Over the weekend, however, Boehner reversed course, deciding that his unproductive tenure isn’t something to be denied; it’s something to be celebrated.
House Speaker John Boehner says Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
The Ohio Republican makes the comments on an interview aired Sunday on CBS “Face the Nation.” He was responding to a question about how little Congress is doing these days.
Boehner says Congress “should not be judged by how many new laws we create.”
Let’s appreciate exactly what Boehner is trying to do here. When he and his Republican colleagues sought power, they told the electorate that they would work to find solutions to national problems. After having been unsuccessful, the Speaker of the House has decided to rebrand failure — he wants credit for his record of futility and expects praise for the fact that he and his caucus have made no legislative progress since he took power three years ago.
Instead of finding solutions to ongoing challenges, Boehner believes Congress should be focusing on undoing solutions to previous challenges. By the Speaker’s reasoning, we should probably change the language we use when it comes to Capitol Hill — Boehner and his colleagues aren’t lawmakers, they’re lawenders.
The House Speaker is on his way to establishing an accomplishment-free legacy, and at this point, he’d like you to think that’s great.
Indeed, the closer one looks at Boehner’s argument, the more bizarre it appears.
On the surface, his rhetoric is the epitome of the kind of post-policy nihilism that dominates Republican thought in 2013 — Boehner doesn’t want to build up, he’d rather tear down. Given an opportunity to look forward and make national progress, the Speaker sees value in looking backward and undoing what’s already been done.
And just below the surface, the argument reinforces what has long been suspected: House Republicans not only don’t have a positive policy agenda, they don’t even see the point in pretending to want one.
But then there’s the most problematic angle of all. Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal”? I’m afraid I have bad news for the Speaker: Congress isn’t repealing laws, either. Indeed, in order for lawmakers to repeal laws, Congress has to — wait for it — pass legislation addressing those laws.
In other words, by Boehner’s own standards for evaluating Congress on the merits, he’s failing.
Don’t expect a sudden burst of productivity, either — after taking four weeks off for the August recess, Boehner announced late last week that the Republican-led House only intends to work nine days in the month of September.
Keep in mind, in an election year, we might expect congressional leaders to schedule fewer work days in September because members want to be on the campaign trail, but odd-numbered years are generally supposed to be focused on governing.
It seems getting nothing done is exhausting.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 22, 2013
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