“Delivering The Promised Conservative Paradise?”: The Supreme Court Is Poised To Deliver Conservatives A String Of Big Victories
The Supreme Court’s new term begins today, and it brings with it a paradox. On one hand, the Court is poised to deliver conservatives a string of sweeping, consequential victories on issues covering a wide swath of American life. On the other, conservatives are up in arms about how they’ve been betrayed by the Court, and particularly by Chief Justice John Roberts, despite the fact that Roberts has in all but a couple of cases been as reliable a conservative vote as they could have hoped for.
Let’s look at what’s coming. Among the cases the Court will be hearing are an affirmative action case involving the University of Texas, a case asking whether congressional districts must adhere to a “one person, one vote” standard, a case testing state restrictions meant to shut down abortion clinics, a case asking whether public-sector unions can require non-members who benefit from their collective bargaining to contribute to those efforts, and yet another lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act’s contraception provision.
While a couple of them may be in doubt, it’s entirely possible that by the time this term ends next June, the Court will have driven the final stake into affirmative action, struck a fatal blow against public-sector unions, enhanced Republican power in legislatures by reducing the representation of areas with large Hispanic populations, given a green light for Republican-run states to make abortions all but impossible to obtain, and undermined the ACA. Even if one or two of those don’t go how Court observers expect, it’s almost certainly going to be a great term for Republicans.
And while they’ve had a couple of recent high-profile defeats at the Court, conservatives have enjoyed a conservative majority for a couple of decades now. Yes, Anthony Kennedy sometimes joins with liberals, as he did in the case legalizing same-sex marriage. But just in the last few years, they’ve seen the doors of campaign finance thrown open to unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires; the Voting Rights Act gutted; affirmative action all but outlawed; an individual right to own guns created for the first time in American history; corporations granted religious rights to exempt themselves from laws they don’t like and sectarian prayer allowed at government meetings; unions undermined and employment discrimination suits made more difficult; and a whole series of less well-known decisions that enhance the power of the powerful, whether it’s the government or corporations.
Nevertheless, when you hear conservatives talk about the Court, they don’t say, “We need to make sure we get more conservative justices to keep winning.” Instead, they say, “We’ve been betrayed!” So what’s going on?
There are a couple of answers. The first is that they’re demanding not just a record of wins, but absolute perfection. They want not justices who will bring a conservative philosophy to the Court, but justices who will never stray from whatever it is the Republican Party wants at a particular time. The recent decision in King v. Burwell is a perfect example: the lawsuit itself was a joke, based on a series of claims about the Affordable Care Act that ran from the clearly false to the laughably ridiculous. When John Roberts sided with the majority to dismiss it — despite a long record of being on the “right” side of all the cases I mentioned above, plus many more — they declared him to be an irredeemable traitor.
The second reason is that narratives of betrayal are central to how conservatives understand history. Whenever events don’t turn out as they would like, whether it’s a foreign war or a lost election or a societal evolution, the story is always the same: We were betrayed, either by our opponents or by the people we thought were our allies. Was the Iraq War a terrible idea? No, we had it won — until Barack Obama betrayed us by pulling out. Why was George W. Bush so unpopular? Because he betrayed conservative principles by not cutting spending more, just like his father betrayed us by raising taxes (while the younger Bush was still president, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie wrote a book entitled “Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big-Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause).” As Digby memorably wrote, “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)” And it goes back as far as you want. Why did the Soviet Union come to dominate Eastern Europe? Because FDR betrayed us at Yalta.
It isn’t that there’s never any truth in this story, particularly when it comes to the Court. David Souter, for instance, turned out to be a genuine liberal, not at all what Republicans expected when he was appointed by George H. W. Bush. But they’ve gotten so used to the betrayal narrative that they place even a single setback into it. Which may explain why conservative opinions of the Court have changed so dramatically in recent years. According to Pew polls, in 2008, 80 percent of Republicans approved of the Supreme Court, compared to 64 percent of Democrats. By 2015, the views of Democrats hadn’t changed — their approval was at 62 percent. But Republican approval had fallen to 33 percent, despite all they had won at the Court over that time. A full 68 percent of conservative Republicans call the Court “liberal,” an idea that is absurd by any objective measure, but one that is regularly fed by conservative media and Republican politicians.
To be clear, Republicans are right to focus on the Supreme Court during the campaign, and Democrats ought to as well. As I’ve argued before, there may be no single issue more consequential for America’s future in this election than what will happen to the Supreme Court in the next four or eight years. But Republicans aren’t just arguing that it’s important for them to elect a Republican so they can get friendly justices, they’re arguing that even Republican presidents and Republican-appointed justices can’t be trusted not to turn into judicial Benedict Arnolds.
If you’re someone like Ted Cruz, this idea fits in nicely with the rest of your message, at least during the primaries: the real enemy isn’t the Democrats, it’s the feckless and unreliable Republican establishment that has failed to deliver the conservative paradise we were promised. Which is why no one is louder in condemning Roberts than Cruz (who supported Roberts wholeheartedly when he was nominated). But I wonder, will they change their tune when the Court gives them one victory after another over the next nine months?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 6, 2015
“Time For A Second Crusade”: A Fresh Revolt Against That Other Godless RINO Devil-Figure, Mitch McConnell
In the world of objective reality where most of us live, John Boehner’s resignation seems to have bought off just enough of the Crazy to keep the federal government functioning until after Thanksgiving. But over in the fever swamps where the Washington Times is published, veteran reporter Ralph Hallow (who’s been around so long I almost wonder if Halloween was named after him) discerns a fresh revolt against that other godless RINO devil-figure, Mitch McConnell. Seems the Louisiana State GOP Chairman wants him gone.
With John Boehner now departing as House speaker, an influential Republican Party official is now seeking the ouster of another GOP leader who has frustrated conservatives: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“McConnell needs to resign!!” Louisiana GOP Chairman Roger Villere wrote in a Facebook posting….
Mr. Villere was stumped when asked whom he preferred to take over as leader of the Senate Republican majority.
“Honestly, I haven really thought of a replacement,” he said. “We are being so beat up by the base. I just was frustrated.”
Mr. Villere did say what specifically about Mr. McConnell makes his state’s rank-and-file GOP voters so dyspeptic that they want him out as leader — his failure to challenge executive overreach by President Obama or fight to repeal Obamacare and other unpopular measures.
“Mr. McConnell could have suspended consideration of confirmations for all presidential appointees, except for those who are essential to national security, until the president rescinded his unconstitutional executive action on amnesty,” Mr. Villere said.
“This would have been a constitutionally appropriate response to the overreach of the executive branch,” he said. “It would have transformed the political environment, greatly encouraged Republican donors and grass-roots activists, and positioned us to refuse to confirm replacements for any Supreme Court openings that might occur during the remainder of the Obama administration.”
Yeah, right. And it would have been like a slow-moving but long-lasting government shutdown, too.
Villere is the rare Lousiana Republican who is publicly backing Bobby Jindal’s presidential candidacy. As you may have noticed, Bobby the career pol has gone all Outsidery of late, as part of his gambit to offer Republican voters Trumpism Without Trump. His latest tag phrase is that Republicans need to “burn Washington down.” Such a project probably encompasses McConnell losing his gavel, I’d think.
So I’m guessing we’ll soon hear Jindal competing with Ted Cruz in demonizing McConnell on the theory that thunderbolts from Baton Rouge are the equivalent of the Texan’s agitation on the Senate floor. I’m sure ol’ Mitch is just terrified.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, September 28, 2015
“Mode Of Deception”: Carly Fiorina Abuses The Truth Just Like A Teenage Conservative Hoaxer
Comparing female politicians to petulant 13-year-old boys is generally unwise, but in Carly Fiorina’s case it is apt.
CJ Pearson, a black conservative teenager from Georgia, became a sensation on the right this year for denouncing President Barack Obama in homemade YouTube videos, two of which have now been viewed over two million times each. Pearson isn’t the first precocious conservative to become a right-wing celebrity, but he is probably the first to parlay that fame into a campaign gig, specifically as Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s youth-outreach chairman.
Late last week, though, the charismatic kid was revealed as the perpetrator of a number of hoaxes, including a trumped up beef with Facebook for censoring his speech (he was 12 years old at the time, too young to run a Facebook account of his own), and engaging in a Twitter fight with a supposedly racist Obama supporter, who turned out to be Pearson’s own sockpuppet. Most recently, he staged evidence suggesting that Obama had blocked his Twitter account, and got busted by a reporter at Glenn Beck’s conservative website, The Blaze.
Rather than admit to the prank, Pearson has continued to insist that his word was good.
“[H]ere’s what the PR folks are saying: say you lied and apologize to avoid backlash,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “But, instead, I choose to stand by my word. While the article will be incriminating, all we have in politics is our word and I stand by it.”
Carly Fiorina’s mode of deception, and her response to being fact-checked, is nearly identical. The main difference, of course, is that Fiorina is a 61-year-old former corporate executive who’s a top contender to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, while Pearson is still going through puberty. The fact that so many conservatives are lining up to defend her is indicative of the degree to which conservatism has become a movement defined by affective rage and imagined victimization by mainstream forces. This toxic brew contributed to the party’s difficulty winning recent national elections. It is already poisoning the party’s campaign for the presidency in 2016.
Two weeks ago, during the second GOP primary debate, Fiorina delivered a crowd-pleasing condemnation of Planned Parenthood for, as she’d have it, delivering children alive to steal their organs and sell them for profit.
“I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these [Planned Parnthood] tapes,” she said. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'”
If the footage she described existed, people might go to jail. But it doesn’t. In fact, basically every factual claim in those two sentences is untrue. Florina’s conservative defenders, and her super PAC, have produced footage unrelated to the Planned Parenthood sting depicting a life-like fetus—but not a verifiably aborted fetus, nor a fetus delivered during a procedure conducted in a Planned Parenthood facility. Nobody performing the procedure said, “we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” either.
Fiorina’s fabricated description of the Planned Parenthood videos wasn’t issued in passing, but in a way that was calculated to dominate cable news highlight reels. She can’t admit to confusion, or to unintentionally blending unrelated footage into a single, imagined scene, because that would amount to telling her new supporters that the thing that attracted them to her wasn’t real.
So, like young CJ Pearson, she’s cooked up extremely weak post hoc defense, hoping that over time the truth and her twisted version of it will bleed together. “That scene absolutely does exist,” she said on Meet the Press this weekend, “and that voice saying what I said they were saying—’We’re gonna keep it alive to harvest its brain’—exists as well.” (It doesn’t.) But while Pearson’s reputation on the right is in free fall, many conservatives are twisting themselves into epistemological knots arguing that Fiorina’s right, even though she’s wrong. In the Los Angeles Times, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg explained that while “the exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos … anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina’s account pretty accurate.”
In a way, that the wagons are circling around Fiorina helps explain why Pearson thought his own fabrications might pay off. Recent history is replete with examples of conservatives racing to defend other conservatives caught peddling stories no less fictional than Pearson’s.
James O’Keefe, a propagandist and agent provocateur with a history of selectively editing his sting footage to make the opposite of reality seem true, is a right-wing celebrity. Republicans in Congress, including Pearson’s boss, Ted Cruz, want to shut down the government over videos that everyone knows have been doctored. In 2012, conservatives dedicated themselves to the fiction that Obama had refused to call an attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi an act of terrorism, when in fact he had called it terrorism the day after it happened, in the White House Rose Garden. When Mitt Romney repeated the myth at the second presidential debate, CNN moderator Candy Crowley famously embarrassed him by interjecting to set the record straight. To this day, conservatives detest Crowley, and insist that she didn’t give Romney a fair shake by telling the truth.
As more interviewers and moderators interject to debunk Fiorina’s story about a video segment that doesn’t exist, Fiorina’s reputation among conservatives isn’t suffering. Instead, the right’s journalist shit-list is growing longer.
Pearson can be forgiven for expecting the conservative media to rush to his aid, rather than orchestrate his demise. He’s coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as subordinate to perception; that will embrace obvious distortions of facts if doing so might move the needle of public opinion, and dissemble and whine, rather than admit error, when the media gets wise. If the stakes were higher—if Pearson were a 61-year-old presidential candidate instead of a 13-year-old kid—he would be climbing in the polls today.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor at The New Republic, September 28, 2015
“The GOP’s Delusions”: Politicians And Voters, Both Pretending Their Party Can Do Things It Can’t
These days, conservatives have to take their victories where they can find them. After all, the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land, gay people are getting married, our noble job creators suffer under the tortuous and unjust burden of high marginal income tax rates, the government continues to provide food stamps to layabouts who think their children ought to eat, immigrants walk amongst us speaking strange and indecipherable tongues, and worst of all, that usurper Barack Obama strolls into the Oval Office every day like he’s the president or something.
In the face of all this horror, even small victories can be cause for celebration. So it was when Marco Rubio told attendees at the Values Voter Summit on Friday that Speaker of the House John Boehner had announced his resignation, and was met with whoops and cheers lasting a full 30 seconds. I couldn’t help wondering: What exactly do they think is going to happen now? Is there any way that Boehner’s departure makes it more likely that any of the things conservatives say they want will actually come to pass?
Today’s Republicans are hardly the first party to spend more time worrying about betrayal from their colleagues than from their opponents on the other side; it’s a dynamic nearly as old as politics itself. But they truly have created not just a politics of anger, but a politics utterly removed from any substance at all. Policy goals may be the nominal justification for all the anger, but in truth nobody bothers figuring out how they might be achieved. The performance is its own end.
Ted Cruz is in many ways the prototypical legislator for this Republican era. On the campaign trail, he tells audiences he has “a proven record” that qualifies him for the presidency. But what is that record? Since he got to Washington two and a half years ago, he has not authored any legislation that passed, or used his position on various committees to some important policy purpose. He’ll tell you a lot about “standing up” — against Obamacare, against increasing the debt ceiling, against Planned Parenthood. And what were the results of all that standing? Did Ted Cruz get the Affordable Care Act repealed, get taxes cut, get government restrained — did he get a single solitary thing that conservatives would look at and say, “Yes, that was one of our goals, and he helped make it happen”?
Of course not. Cruz is not a legislator, he’s a performer, a kind of right-wing version of the Code Pink activists who disrupt Capitol Hill hearings. He doesn’t accomplish anything, but he certainly does stand up. So it’s no accident that many House Republicans look to him as a mentor when they’re considering shutting down the government — another bit of political performance art that inevitably gains conservatives nothing, as long as you’re thinking about the goals they claim to espouse.
You might say it’s not his fault — after all, he’s a first-term senator in the party that doesn’t control the White House. The problem is that Cruz and others like him continually tell their constituents that none of that will matter as long as Republicans despise Obama with sufficient fervor and show sufficient immovability once they do all that “standing up.” And so their voters are inevitably disappointed.
You can blame ignorant voters who expect things they’ll never get, but the greatest responsibility lies with the politicians who keep telling them to expect it. At that same Values Voter Summit, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (Is there anyone who has been more diminished by running for president this year?) got up and told the crowd, “That’s one down and 434 to go,” adding, “Here’s what I say in response to Speaker Boehner stepping down: Mitch McConnell, it is now your turn.”
Yeah, if every member of Congress were ousted, that would…um…I don’t know, but to hell with them! The fact is that no one has done more to thwart Barack Obama over the last seven years than Mitch McConnell has, and there is no Republican in Washington more shrewd. Tea Partiers hate him not because he’s some kind of moderate compromiser, but because he’s realistic about what is and isn’t possible — and because he isn’t shy about expressing his dislike for ultra-conservative members of Congress who couldn’t strategize their way to passing a National Puppy and Kitten Appreciation Week.
Jindal isn’t the only one saying conservatives should turn their unquenchable rage on McConnell now that Boehner is out of the way. And there’s no doubt that the idea that Boehner and McConnell have been ineffectual is driving much of the success of Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson, as they feed the childish and ignorant idea that an outsider president can swoop into Washington and make everything work through the force of his or her will. But to repeat the question I asked earlier, what do they think is going to happen now? If the next speaker of the House is conservative enough, will that mean Barack Obama will suddenly start signing all the ridiculous bills the House passes? Of course he won’t.
Intra-party conflict and tumult can leave a party stronger, as new ideas get tested and fresh approaches find their way to implementation. But it’s awfully hard to look at the GOP today and say that they are going to emerge from this period primed for great policy victories. They’ve got the anger thing down pat though.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, September 27, 2015
“Ill Suited For The Historical Moment”: Was John Boehner A Victim Of Circumstance Or An Incompetent Bumbler?
You can’t fire me, John Boehner just told House Republicans, because I quit!
Amid yet more talk about a coup by ultra-conservative Republicans looking to replace him with one of their own — talk that has emerged seemingly every few months since he became Speaker of the House after the 2010 election — Boehner has finally decided to pack it in. And he’s not even waiting until his term runs out; instead, he’ll retire from Congress next month, presumably to become a spectacularly well-remunerated lobbyist.
Even Boehner’s most stalwart allies would have trouble arguing that his tenure was anything other than a failure. But the question is, how much of it was Boehner’s fault? Was he in an impossible situation from which no speaker could have wrung much success, or was he just terrible at his job?
The answer, I’d submit, is both. Boehner’s circumstances made success somewhere between unlikely and impossible. But along the way, he proved himself incapable of changing that situation in any way, seeming to make the worst of every crisis and showdown.
Let’s look at Boehner’s accomplishments in his nearly five years as speaker. Well, there’s…um…hmm. Can you think of any?
Conservatives might say that by joining with Mitch McConnell in a strategy of total and complete opposition to this administration, he helped stop Barack Obama from doing some things Obama might otherwise have done. Or I suppose one might argue that he limited the damage members of his own party could do to the country. Despite threatening to shut down the government more times than you can count, there was only one actual shutdown, in 2013. And we didn’t default on our debt by not raising the debt ceiling, which would have been catastrophic.
But that’s not much of a record of success. Boehner can’t say that he achieved any conservative ideological goals. But he did hold 50-odd votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is just about the opposite of a substantive achievement.
Granted, when your party doesn’t hold the White House, you aren’t going to be passing significant legislation to accomplish your own objectives. But you still might work with the other party to get some things done. That has happened in the past — legislative leaders have worked with a president of the other party to do big things like tax reform. But not anymore.
You also might mold your caucus into a unified force of strategic opposition, not just making the president’s life difficult but setting the stage for a successful wave of legislation the next time you do have control of both the legislative and executive branches. That’s what Nancy Pelosi succeeded in doing when George W. Bush was president, in advance of the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. But Boehner couldn’t do that either — his speakership was spent fighting with members of his own party, and each successive crisis only made them look less and less serious.
From the beginning, Boehner may have been ill-suited to the historical moment. He was an old-school pol, the kind who favored hashing out deals over cigars and whiskey, but he was elevated to the speakership in a revolution fueled by anger, resentment, and distrust of party leaders. He spent his time as speaker trying constantly to mollify a group of unreasonable members for whom any compromise was betrayal, and the idea of strategically avoiding a confrontation today to put yourself in a better position tomorrow was just too sophisticated for them to wrap their heads around. They’re a group of bomb-throwers and lectern-pounders, who (like their mentor Ted Cruz) think that “standing up to Obama” is a substantive accomplishment in and of itself to be proud of.
That’s not to mention the fact that the rightward drift of the Republican Party, particularly in Boehner’s House, has made strategic action in the party’s long-term interest virtually impossible. The best example is immigration, where everyone including Boehner acknowledged that the party needed to pass comprehensive reform in order to prove to Hispanic voters that the GOP was not hostile to them. But it couldn’t happen because so many in Boehner’s caucus are ultra-conservative members who hail from conservative districts where they need only fear a challenge from the right. So they don’t want comprehensive reform, and neither do their constituents.
Could a more skilled speaker have found a way out of that conundrum? It’s hard to see how, other than the obvious way: by passing reform using a combination of votes from Democrats and sane Republicans. This was the option Boehner faced again and again on funding the government, and he only took it when things reached the point of crisis. Every time, observers wondered if it would lead to a revolt that would displace him as speaker, but his saving grace turned out to be that the job was so miserable that nobody else wanted it.
It’s still unclear how Boehner’s announcement will affect the current shutdown crisis we’re approaching, but since he no longer has to worry about his job, he may just bring it to a quick conclusion by throwing the conservatives some meaningless bone of a symbolic vote on Planned Parenthood, then putting a clean continuing resolution up to a vote (that seems to be the direction they’re moving). The CR would probably pass with Democratic support, and then doomsday could be avoided for a while, with Boehner’s replacement left to enact the next iteration of this absurd ritual once the CR runs out.
It would, in its way, be a fitting end to the Boehner speakership: a needless crisis driven by ultra-conservative members Boehner can’t control, finally resolved — but only temporarily — in a way that leads those members to call him a traitor and sets the stage for yet another crisis before long.
Can anyone blame him for wanting to get the hell out?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 25, 2015
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