GOP Presidential Contenders Compete To Win Over “The Political Army Of The Lord”
Workers remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building after Superior Court Justice Roy Moore refused to take it down in 2003
So you can add another car to the crazy train that is the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest. No, I’m not talking about last week’s sensation, Donald Trump. He’s a pretty conventional figure compared to the latest would-be president, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who is currently barnstorming through Iowa after announcing an exploratory committee.
You may remember Judge Moore as the man who was forced from his judicial post after refusing to remove a gigantic monument to the Ten Commandments from his courthouse. He was also known for abrasive comments from the bench about homosexuality as contrary to God’s will, which in Moore’s opinion was dispositive. A martyr for theocrats everywhere, Moore spent some time hauling his monument around Alabama before launching two notably unsuccessful gubernatorial races — coming in a bad second in 2006’s Republican primary and a bad fourth in 2010 — and becoming a minor fixture at tea party events.
Moore was undoubtedly drawn to Iowa by that state’s furor over same-sex marriage, decreed legal by a 2009 state Supreme Court ruling. Iowa’s powerful Christian Right movement has made overturning that decision Job One, beginning with a successful effort in 2010 to remove three of the seven jurists responsible for it. It’s one of the few places left where Republicans don’t try to ignore the whole issue of gay rights as a divisive loser of an issue (which is why presidential wannabees like Tim Pawlenty have anachronistically come out against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell). For Moore, it must have felt more like “home” than home.
Before writing off Moore as a kook trying to horn in on the spotlight of a presidential race, consider the company he’s keeping on his tour of the first-in-the-nation-caucuses state: former state legislator Danny Carroll. Carroll was co-chairman (with three-time gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats) of Mike Huckabee’s successful 2008 Caucus campaign, and more recently, signed on as a lobbyist for Vander Plaats’ new Christian Right umbrella group, The Family Leader. He’s a reasonably big deal in Iowa GOP circles, and by no means someone who howls at the moon.
For all I know, Carroll sees something in the crusty Alabama judge that others haven’t seen. Or maybe Judge Moore is a convenient stalking horse for Huckabee, designed to keep The Faithful loose and out of anyone else’s camp, in case Huck ultimately decides to run.
Regardless of Carroll’s (or Moore’s) personal motives, it’s likely the national Republican chattering class will dismiss the Judge’s campaign as a joke even worse than Trump’s. Or, it may be said, there is now such a crowd on the far right that opportunities are opening up for more moderate possibilities like Romney, T-Paw or an establishment-backed candidate-yet-to-be-named.
But I’d like to suggest another theory: the Christian/tea party right in Iowa is big enough, powerful enough, and politically sophisticated enough to hold its own caucus-within-a-caucus (well, caucuses, to be technical about it), an intramural contest to determine which candidate will actually represent the cause when Iowa Republicans make their final commitments before Caucus Night. Proven zealots like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and now Moore, will joust with more suspect supplicants like T-Paw, Newt Gingrich — and maybe even Donald Trump! — over the next few months, with someone emerging as the designated favorite of the political army of the Lord. That is arguably what happened in Iowa in 2008, when Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback fought to become the Christian Right alternative to Mitt Romney, with Huckabee becoming The Man only after he out-organized Brownback at the State Party Straw Poll in Ames during the summer.
Moore’s candidacy may not ultimately have any direct influence on what happens next winter in Iowa, when conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics get together to shape the 2012 Republican nominating process.
But he could indeed intensify the competition for Christian Right voters. And just as importantly, he could definitely serve as a symbol of the ideological and psychological gap between rigorous conservative activists and the mainstream political commentariat. Most of the latter think Moore is a crazy person. But most of the Iowa audiences before which Moore speaks will consider him an authentic if polarizing voice expressing the Word of God. That’s a pretty big gulf in perception, but also a pretty good reflection of the real differences Americans experience in how they view their leaders.
By: Ed Kilgore, Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist and Senior Editor, Progressive Policy Institute. Article published in The Atlantic, April 20, 2011: Photo by Tami Chappell (Reuters)
Republicans’ 2012 Slogan: It’s Anything But The Economy, Stupid
The GOP has turned one of the most effective slogans in American political history on its head. The Republican rallying cry for 2012 will be “Anything but the economy, stupid.” Let’s see how that works out for them next year.
Last year Republican leader John Boehner promised Americans that his party’s priority would be fixing the economy and creating jobs if voters gave the GOP control of the House of Representatives. Republican House candidates echoed their leader’s call to focus on the economy like a laser beam. This year, they have done almost everything but. Two of the first three bills introduced by House Republicans at the start of the 112th Congress in January were designed to take away a woman’s right to choose. One of them, H.R. 3, would have allowed abortion only in cases of “forcible” rape. Like there’s some other kind.
Then there was the battle in the first week of April that almost led to the shutdown of the U.S. government and the end of all programs to create jobs. What was the GOP hang-up on waiting till the last hour to avoid the debacle? Concern that the budget wasn’t doing enough to create jobs? No. The issue that the GOP pushed in the negotiations until the very end was defunding programs at Planned Parenthood designed to limit the number of abortions.
But that’s not all Republicans are doing to create jobs. Tuesday, Speaker Boehner hired a lawyer at $520 an hour to defend an unconstitutional law, the Defense of Marriage Act. The law passed in 1994 defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman. President Obama wisely decided not to waste any money defending the law because it’s clearly unconstitutional. The 10th Amendment reserves the power to regulate marriages to the states. So much for wasteful government spending and states’ rights. But at least the GOP has created one good paying job.
Meanwhile, the religious right is busy attacking a conservative potential GOP presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels. He is the governor of Indiana and former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Daniels angered religious conservatives because he had the nerve to say economic issues are more important than social issues. The religious right feels anyone like Daniels who short changes social issues is either a heretic, a lunatic, or both. Yes, the Taliban wing of the Republican Party believes that persecuting gays is more important than creating jobs. Good luck trying to sell that message to the millions of Americans who are one paycheck away from bankruptcy. If they are lucky enough to have a paycheck.
When Republicans go down to ignominious defeat in 2012, they will have only themselves to blame.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and Worl Report, April 21, 2011
Is Grover Norquist’s “Sharia Tax Law” Causing The GOP To Rethink It’s “Pledge”?
Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, has had the good sense to demand an end to the $5 billion annual tax credit to makers of corn ethanol, a wasteful subsidy to farm states that is also dubious environmental policy. For his outspokenness, Senator Coburn was pilloried by anti-government activists of his own party who cannot stand the idea of more revenues flowing into the federal Treasury. But he and a few others in the Senate are holding fast, suggesting that at least some Republicans are willing to break with party orthodoxy to reduce the long-term budget deficit.
The loudest criticism came from Grover Norquist, whose group, Americans for Tax Reform, is the author of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that has become a sacred covenant for virtually anyone wishing to run as a Republican. More than 95 percent of the Republicans in Congress have signed it (including Senator Coburn), as have many Republican governors and state lawmakers.
The pledge is often thought of as an agreement never to vote for raising taxes for any reason, but it goes even further than that. Those who sign it also vow never to eliminate any tax deductions or credits (like the handout to ethanol makers), unless the resulting increase in revenues is offset, dollar for dollar, by further tax cuts.
The pledge is really less about keeping taxes low than it is about holding down government revenues, which prevent the growth of government services. Mr. Norquist has famously said his goal is to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Mr. Norquist can afford to be candid about his fierce aversion to government services, since he does not have to run for office with the votes of people who like those services. The Republican lawmakers who have joined his congregation, however, are less forthright about the effect of their policies. They go around lulling constituents with phony mantras like “Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem,” as if cutting spending is the only conceivable solution to lowering the deficit.
This purity finally ran into a tough-minded pragmatist in Senator Coburn. Though his zeal to eliminate many worthy government programs is still excessive, he is right to see the wastefulness in the ethanol giveaway — and the extremism of Mr. Norquist’s position. Senator Coburn’s spokesman has even described Mr. Norquist as “the chief cleric of Sharia tax law.”
Senator Coburn is also a member of the “gang of six” senators that has been trying to find a bipartisan way to reduce the nation’s debt. He and the two other Republicans in the group, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Michael Crapo of Idaho, say they are opposed to raising tax rates but hope to rewrite the tax code in a way that brings in more revenue by eliminating many unnecessary tax breaks and broadening the tax base.
That, at least, represents the beginning of a useful conversation. It could very well mean that the rich would pay more in taxes. Which is why Mr. Norquist, in full grand-inquisitor style, has demanded that Senator Coburn drop out of the gang.
His influence, happily, seems to be on the wane. The three senators have reminded Mr. Norquist that their highest oath is not to him or some abstract pledge, but to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, April 21, 2011
Remember The Health-Care Reform Debate?: How The Landscape Has Changed
As a participant in the great health-care wars of 2010, it’s been — I don’t know: Amusing? Depressing? Annoying? Vindicating? — to watch Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget run over every principle or concern that Republicans considered so life-or-death a mere 400 days ago. A partial list:
Big changes need to be bipartisan changes. “The only bipartisanship we’ve seen on [the health-care] bill is in opposition to it,” said Eric Cantor, now the House majority leader. “When the stakes are this high – reforming 20 percent of the U.S. economy – there must be constructive conversations and negotiations from Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress,” wroteformer representative Tom Davis. The Ryan budget, which is unquestionably a more ambitious document than the Affordable Care Act, passed the House with no Democratic votes and four Republicans voting no. The only thing bipartisan was the opposition, etc. This appears to have given no Republicans anywhere any pause.
Polls matter. In March 2010, John Boehner was very, very upset that Democrats were working to pass a health-care law that a slight plurality opposed in polls. “President Obama made clear he is willing to say and do anything to defy the will of the people and force his job-killing health care plan through Congress,” he thundered. Last week, Speaker Boehner and the Republicans passed Ryan’s budget. How do its elements poll? Much, much worsethan the Affordable Care Act.
The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts will devastate hospitals! Last fall, Ryan’s health-policy guru was saying,“The official Medicare actuaries have determined that approximately 15 percent of hospitals will be driven out of business in less than ten years if these cuts go through and called the cuts ‘clearly unworkable and almost certain to be overridden by Congress.’” Now those same cuts are in Ryan’s budget. C’est la vie, I guess (that’s French for “only Democratic cuts hurt hospitals”).
The Affordable Care Act’s savings don’t begin quickly enough! When the tax on expensive employer-provided insurance plans was pushed back to 2018, conservatives were outraged. “The odds are high that the excise tax will never actually happen,” wrote David Brooks. “There is no reason to think that the Congress of 2018 will be any braver than the Congress of today.” It was a fair argument: Cost savings that begin in the future are less certain than cost savings that begin now. So when does, say, Ryan’s voucherization of Medicare begin? Not 2012. And no, it’s not 2018. It’s 2022.
There’s no reform in the Affordable Care Act. “It would take Sherlock Holmes armed with the latest GPS technology and a pack of bloodhounds to find ‘reform’ in the $2.5 trillion version of the health-care bill we are supposed to vote on in the next few days,” then-Sen. Judd Gregg wrote. But apparently Holmes got his iPhone out, because now the Affordable Care Act is chock-full of reforms. In fact, it’s the model Republicans are following. “It’s exactly like Obamacare,” Sen. John Cornyn saidof the Ryan plan. “It is. It’s exactly like it.” And he meant that as a compliment!
The Congressional Budget Office will score anything you tell it to. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Sen. John McCain said. “Can you really rely on the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office comes out with?” asked Fox’s Steve Doocy. Now, of course, Republicans are touting CBO’s estimates of Ryan’s savings.
First, “do no harm.” That was former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s big applause line. “Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors,” he wrote in The Washington Post. Cantor said the Affordable Care Act would “cut Medicare for our seniors and increase premiums for many Virginians.” Say what you will about Ryan’s budget, but going from paying 25-30 percent of your Medicare costs to 70 percent cuts your Medicare while increasing your premiums. Steele also said that “we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of ‘health-insurance reform.’ ” Instead, it’s getting cut in the name of tax cuts. To be fair, Ramesh Ponnuru saw this one coming, so I can’t say conservatives were denying it at the time.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a couple, but that’s what the comment section is for. The natural next question is whether Democrats have been similarly hypocritical in their opposition to Ryan’s plan. So far as I can tell, we’ve not seen it: Democrats think the plan puts too much of a burden on the backs of seniors and the poor — two things they worried about constantly during the Affordable Care Act — and cuts too many taxes for the rich. They also note that the Congressional Budget Office says privatizing Medicare will make it more expensive — the same finding that led to liberal advocacy for a public option. But if I’m missing something here, I imagine it, too, will come up in comments.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, April 21, 2011
In Politics Of Temper Tantrums, Washington Post As Spineless As GOP In Debt Ceiling Debate
Yesterday, The Washington Post editorial page turned into Springfield, circa 1991. Not Springfield, Illinois or Springfield, Massachusetts. That more famous Springfield. The one that’s home to the Simpsons.
You see, 20 years ago Lisa Simpson wished for a world in which every nation laid down its arms and there was peace. And it was done. But then two crafty aliens landed in Springfield and took over the earth, armed only with a slingshot and a club.
What does that have to do with The Washington Post? Well, we’re just days into the debate about raising the debt ceiling and they’ve already given up.
Here’s what I mean:
Every politician knows that voting to raise the debt ceiling, particularly in an electoral environment like this one, is dangerous. Large swaths of the electorate are opposed. And the most angry and energized conservatives have made it an article of faith to punish legislators who facilitate more government spending. Voting to raise the debt ceiling is a tough vote–politically.
But on the merits, it’s got to be one of the easiest votes ever. Everyone from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich agrees that we must raise the debt ceiling. That’s true of just about every economist of every political stripe, too. They say that if we don’t it will lead America, and perhaps the global economy, to literal economic ruin. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Democrats are on board. They’re pushing for a “clean” vote on the debt ceiling—an up or down vote on that issue alone. In essence they’re saying: let’s do what needs to be done and get it over with. Then we can move on to the myriad other pressing matters confronting the nation.
Republicans are in a different place. They’re making increasingly belligerent demands to tie various kinds of “reforms” to the debt ceiling vote. Deep spending cuts. A balanced budget amendment. Caps on future spending. All sorts of things that may or may not have merit, but which are also deeply partisan and political. And they say they won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling unless their demands are met—if they vote for it at all.
Their position in a nutshell: I’m a Republican and I’m not going to prevent economic ruin unless I get these other things that I really, really, really want. It’s the politics of temper tantrum. Only this time the baby’s got his finger on the nuclear launch codes.
Cue the media. There’s a reason “freedom of the press” is enshrined in the First Amendment. It’s because the Founding Fathers envisioned a Fourth Estate that held government accountable at times just like these.
Instead, we get this: buried in the sixth paragraph of yesterday’s editorial about Standard and Poor’s, the Post dismisses the idea of a “clean vote” saying it’s “unrealistic as a political matter” because “you couldn’t get enough Republican votes in the House to increase the debt limit without some spending cuts attached.”
Well, I guess that’s that. The Republicans have rattled their slingshot and the Post editorial page has fled for the hills.
What’s even more galling is that you needed look no further than the front page of yesterday’s Post to see just how political the issue has become for Republicans. There, Philip Rucker told the sad story of Arizona freshman Republican Rep. David Schweikert. Schweikert concedes that failing to raise the debt ceiling will cause economic chaos, but then he surveys the angry faces of his Tea Party constituents in town hall after town hall and wrings his hands. Destroying the economy on one hand and lessening my chances for reelection on the other…oh what is a Republican to do!
Here’s an idea: suck it up and do the right thing. Vote for the bill and, if you lose your re-election, well, at least you have the comfort of knowing that you didn’t help ruin the world’s economy. Isn’t that what we say we want from our leaders? To take tough votes and put aside personal, ideological, or political goals when the nation’s interest calls for it?
Of course, as much as I would like to think otherwise, my saying so probably won’t encourage Republicans to do much of anything. If only there were an influential, well-respected, credible voice with a broad reach whose job it was to offer opinions like that… Sigh.
Perhaps not all is lost. In the aforementioned Simpsons episode the aliens are eventually vanquished when Moe the bartender hammers a nail through a board and chases them with it. There are a couple months to go in this debate. There’s still time for the Post to find its spine. Someone get them a nail and a board.
By: Anson Kaye, U.S. News and World Report, April 21, 2011
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