Newt, Inc: “Historical Entrepreneur Of The Year”
Voters haven’t heard much about it, but Newt Gingrich hasn’t exactly held a real job in a very long time. He has, however, overseen a very lucrative enterprise often called “Newt Inc.”
Gingrich, you’ll recall, was forced to resign from Congress in disgrace way back in 1998, after his fellow Republicans decided they no longer had use for his kind of “leadership.” In the 13 years since, the former House Speaker hasn’t held or sought public office at any level.
What’s he been doing? Karen Tumulty and Dan Eggen take a look today at the “business conglomerate” Gingrich put together after his political career was left in shambles.
The power of the Gingrich brand fueled a for-profit collection of enterprises that generated close to $100 million in revenue over the past decade, said his longtime attorney Randy Evans.
Among Gingrich’s moneymaking ventures: a health-care think tank financed by six-figure dues from corporations; a consulting business; a communications firm that handled his speeches of up to $60,000 a pop, media appearances and books; a historical documentary production company; a separate operation to administer the royalties for the historical fiction that Gingrich writes with two co-authors; even an in-house literary agency that has counted among its clients a presidential campaign rival, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).
Separate from all of that was his nonprofit political operation, American Solutions for Winning the Future. Before it disintegrated this summer in Gingrich’s absence, American Solutions generated another $52 million and provided some of the money that allowed the former speaker to travel by private jet and hired limousine.
Along the way, Gingrich has become a wealthy man, earning $2.5 million in personal income last year, according to his financial disclosure form.
It’s not altogether clear what, exactly, Gingrich has done with his days. He’s been paid handsomely for his “strategic advice,” which the disgraced former Speaker insists was not technically lobbying. Gingrich has also given plenty of speeches, made near-constant appearances on television, and adopted a rather luxurious personal lifestyle, but in terms of actual work, the record appears to be pretty thin.
In any case, while the Post’s piece is a good one, the one thing it doesn’t fully convey is just how sketchy — and at times, even sleazy — Gingrich’s operation has been.
As part of his shady financial empire, for example, Gingrich ran a dubious direct-mail scheme, offering to name random businesspeople as “entrepreneur of the year” in exchange for a $5,000 “membership fee” to Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future.
In one rather amusing example, Gingrich offered to name a strip-club owner as “entrepreneur of the year” for $5,000. When the nude-dancing entrepreneur accepted, Gingrich’s embarrassed staff canceled the 2009 award and returned the money — only to hit the exact same strip-club owner up for more cash two years later.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Gingrich has overseen all kinds of entities, all of which have raised a lot of money over the last several years, without much to show for it. Not surprisingly, the whole operation has drawn some quizzical looks.
[C]onsumer advocates and some disgruntled donors have raised questions over the years about Gingrich’s seeming penchant for aggressive tactics, including the heavy use of fundraising polls, blast-faxes and other techniques considered unsavory or even predatory by philanthropy groups. […]
According to complaints on consumer-focused Web sites, some American Solutions calls begin with slanted polling questions before proceeding to a request for money. The tactic, known as “fundraising under the guise of research,” or frugging, is discouraged as unethical by trade groups such as the Marketing Research Association.
American Solutions also has drawn criticism because it spends nearly $2 on fundraising for every $3 it brings in — about twice the figure for many nonprofit groups, experts said.
Given the fact that Gingrich was plagued by ethics scandals during his congressional tenure, coupled with his business ventures over the last 13 years, it’s hard to have much confidence in this guy’s sense of propriety.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, November 27, 2011
“What’s His Name” Romney Still Waiting For The GOP Love
Moderator Wolf Blitzer opened Tuesday’s Republican debate by introducing himself and adding, for some reason, “Yes, that’s my real name.” A few moments later, the party’s most plausible nominee for president said the following: “I’m Mitt Romney, and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”
But it’s not. Mitt is the candidate’s middle name. His first name is Willard.
And people wonder why this guy has an authenticity problem?
The debate, held at Washington’s historic DAR Constitution Hall, was focused on foreign policy. The subject matter seemed to offer Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, the opportunity to highlight his experience and perhaps begin consolidating his sudden front-runner status. But if he expected to dance rings around the others in the minefields of international politics, he was mistaken.
Gingrich made only one mistake, but potentially it was a big one: He declined to pander on immigration. Instead of parroting the draconian party line, he stated the obvious fact that we’re not going to expel millions of illegal immigrants who have been in this country for years and become pillars of their communities.
You will recall that Rick Perry was leading in the polls when he, too, stumbled by saying reasonable things about immigration. Perry called immigration hard-liners heartless, while Gingrich encouraged the audience to be “humane.”
Romney, as usual, took the right position to appeal to Republican voters. He said Gingrich was wrong because “amnesty is a magnet” that attracts more illegal immigrants.
Ron Paul had smart and important things to say about the Patriot Act, calling the law “unpatriotic because it undermines our liberty” and arguing that “you can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.” Gingrich, by contrast, argued that the Patriot Act might need to be strengthened. Asked which side of this debate she favored, Michele Bachmann said she was “with the American people.” I thought Gingrich and Paul were citizens, but never mind.
Bachmann then pulled the pin on one of the more nonsensical rhetorical grenades that she regularly lobs at President Obama: that he “has essentially handed over our interrogation of terrorists to the ACLU.”
The record shows that Obama does not coddle terrorist suspects with the niceties of liberal jurisprudence. Instead, he blows them to pieces with missiles fired by Predator drones. It’s possible to disagree on whether the administration’s program of targeted assassination is wise or effective, but no one can claim it’s soft.
Rick Santorum argued that we should be profiling Muslims for extra scrutiny at airports and sparing travelers who are deemed to present lower risk. Herman Cain said he favors a policy of “targeted identification” of potential terrorists, a concept so subtle that it defied Cain’s further attempts at explanation.
Romney got it right again, pledging “to protect the life, liberty and property of American citizens and defend them from foes domestic and foreign” without being specific about how this would be accomplished.
Perry had an interesting night. He stood by his promise not to send “one penny, period,” of U.S. aid to Pakistan until officials of that nation demonstrate “that they have America’s best interests in mind.” Bachmann called this position “highly naive,” pointing out that Pakistan is “too nuclear to fail.”
But Perry was undeterred. He went on to show a breathtaking lack of understanding of what’s happening in that part of the world, at one point saying that “we’ve got Afghanistan and India working in concert right now to leverage Pakistan.” That one sentence succinctly captures Pakistani officials’ deepest fear — being sandwiched by two enemies — and why they continue to support Taliban-affiliated militant groups that attack U.S. and Afghan forces.
Go home, Governor. Please.
Jon Huntsman had his best performance of the many debates held thus far, laying out a vision of U.S. foreign policy that was informed, nuanced and reflective of the real world rather than the make-believe world in which the campaign is taking place. Maybe he’ll be the next candidate to see a meteoric rise and fall in his poll numbers. Pretty soon, though, we’re going to run out of meteors.
Which leaves Romney still waiting for his party to show the love. He knows the issues. He says all the right things. So why do Republicans keep getting infatuated with these fire-breathing suitors who always, in the end, break the GOP’s heart?
Maybe voters just wonder about a guy who’s willing to tailor everything to please his audience. Even his name.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 24, 2011
Has Grover Norquist Made Himself Unnecessary?
Republicans don’t need to be threatened into supporting tax cuts for the wealthy.
You should read Tim Dickinson’s long article in Rolling Stone about how the GOP became the party of the one percent. Essentially, the story is that while there was once a real substance to the idea of “fiscal conservatism”—that Republicans really did care about balancing the books and being good stewards of the public’s tax dollars—the last 20 years have brought the Republican Party to a much different place. While they once saw taxes as simply the way to pay for the things government does — they shouldn’t be too high, since conservatives want limited government, but they shouldn’t be so low that we run up deficits — they now see them as an outright evil that really has nothing much at all to do with deficits. Deficits are a handy tool to use when there’s a Democrat in the White House to force spending cuts, but not much more. Dickinson puts Dick Cheney at the center of this story, which one could quibble about, but there’s something here that I think calls for some discussion:
In retrospect, the true victor of the midterm elections last year was not the Tea Party, or even Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was Grover Norquist.
“What has happened over the last two years is that Grover now has soldiers in the field,” says [Bruce] Bartlett, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts. “These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders from him.” Indeed, a record 98 percent of House Republicans have now signed Norquist’s anti-tax pledge – which includes a second, little-known provision that played a key role in the debt-ceiling debacle. In addition to vowing not to raise taxes, politicians who sign the pledge promise to use any revenue generated by ending a tax subsidy to immediately finance – that’s right – more tax cuts.
We often use this kind of language when talking about special interests, that members of Congress are “taking orders” from one group or another, but it can be misleading. It’s true that part of the genius of Norquist’s pledge is that it imposes a potential cost on any Republican who either refuses to sign it or votes for a tax increase after they have signed it. That cost is the risk of a well-funded primary campaign from the right, and many Republicans certainly fear it. But more important is that today’s Republicans, particularly the younger ones, believe it. You don’t have to threaten them to get them to keep working to cut rich people’s taxes, because they want nothing more. They came up through the party at a time when tax cuts for the wealthy was moving closer and closer to the center of conservative ideology. Today, there is nothing—not a belligerent foreign policy, not opposition to legal abortion, not support for large military budgets, not support for gun rights—that goes deeper to the core of conservative identity. The Republican Party will tolerate some small measure of dissent on almost anything else (there are still a few pro-choice Republicans hanging around, for instance), but not on tax cuts. If you don’t think the rich should pay less than they do, then you can’t call yourself a conservative in 2011.
Grover Norquist played a very important role in pushing along the evolution in the party that led them there. But at this point, his pledge is almost unnecessary. He acknowledges that himself: “‘It’s a different Republican Party now,’ he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan’s day—those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy—to segregationists. The ‘modern Republican Party,’ he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the ‘modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace.'”
And it’s likely to stay that way for some time. If you’re a young Republican rising through the ranks — let’s say you’ve got your eye on a state rep seat, and you hope to run for Congress in 10 years—you’re marinating in a conservative world where tax cuts for the wealthy are the highest good. You don’t need to be threatened or cajoled into believing it. You’ve been convinced.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, November 17, 2011
The Affordable Care Act And The Text Of The Constitution: Words Still Matter, Even in the Supreme Court
The most powerful line in conservative Judge Laurence Silberman’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act last week is a blunt statement that the law’s opponents “cannot find real support” for their arguments “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”
Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up this case later this year, Silberman’s words are a stern reminder that the text of the Constitution must guide judges’ decisions, especially in politically charged cases, and that Silberman’s fellow conservatives on the Supreme Court must ignore the temptation to place politics over fidelity to the Constitution by striking down the Affordable Care Act.
There can be no question that Silberman is right about what the Constitution has to say about this law. The federal government’s power is not unlimited—the Constitution gives Congress a laundry list of “enumerated powers,” and Congress cannot stray beyond this list—but its authority is quite sweeping when it regulates nationwide commercial markets such as the market for health care services. In the Constitution’s words, Congress may “regulate commerce . . . among the several states.”
The plaintiffs’ primary challenge to the Affordable Care Act is to the provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. In their vision of the Constitution, this provision runs afoul of some unwritten rule against being told what to do. The federal government can regulate how people go about the business they are already engaged in, under this narrow vision, but it is utterly powerless to push people to engage in commerce they would prefer to avoid.
There are many, many problems with this theory of the Constitution. But Silberman’s rebuttal of it is both the most simple and the most elegant response to the plaintiffs’ entirely fabricated legal theory. The Constitution says nothing suggesting that people can immunize themselves from the law simply by remaining passive. It simply provides that the United States may regulate commerce among the several states.
Modern judges do not need to speculate what the founding generation understood these words to mean when they were written into the text of the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall—himself one of the ratifiers of the Constitution—told us what they mean in the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Marshall wrote that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” do not apply to. He said that the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” And he told us that Congress’s power to regulate commerce “among the several states” applies to all trade that “concern[s] more states than one.”
So when Congress passes a nationwide law regulating the entire national health care market, there is simply no question that the law is constitutional. The law regulates a form of trade—trade for health services—and it regulates a health services market that is both pervasive and nationwide. The Affordable Care Act cases are some of the easiest cases to cross the Supreme Court’s bench in a generation, and it is nothing less than shocking that a handful of judges have struck the law down.
Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of judges to review the law have upheld it. Of the four federal appeals courts to consider the Affordable Care Act, only one voted to strike it. That one outlier decision was grounded on a false fear that if the courts were to uphold health reform, it would somehow eliminate all of the existing limits on congressional authority. If Congress is allowed to regulate health care today, the law’s opponents argue, tomorrow they will force everyone to buy broccoli.
Make no mistake: This concern is misguided, and it has no basis in the Supreme Court’s precedents. In its 1995 decision in United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court explained that the power to regulate “commerce” includes sweeping authority over the nation’s economy, but Congress’s authority over noneconomic matters is far more limited. Thus a wide range of noneconomic regulation—including federal laws governing personal and sexual morality or even a federal ban on assault, rape, or murder—clearly exceed Congress’s enumerated powers. Sweeping regulation of the national health care market, by contrast, fits comfortably within the Constitution’s text.
Because the text of the Constitution clearly and obviously supports the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court has an unambiguous duty to uphold it. Judges are not like members of Congress. They are unelected, and they serve for life. As such, they cannot be held accountable to the people through fear of a lost election and can only be checked by their loyalty to our written Constitution. If the federal judiciary has the power to ignore the text of the Constitution then there is literally nothing that they cannot do.
Indeed, if the justices strike down the Affordable Care Act, there is nothing preventing them from forcing every American to buy broccoli.
By: Ian Millhiser, Center For American Progress, November 14, 2011
Voter Fraud: The GOP Search For A Non-existent Problem
Earlier today I dared the Internet to send me examples of voter fraud — particularly of a scale that would justify erecting barriers against whole groups of voters through photo ID requirements and other such pernicious nonsense.
The Internet obliged, weakly.
A few readers reminded me that the conservative columnist Ann Coulter was accused of voter fraud in 2009, for voting by absentee ballot in Connecticut in 2002 and 2004 despite the fact that she was living in New York. The Connecticut Election Commission investigated, but decided to take no further action since Ms. Coulter was a registered voter in the state and did not vote elsewhere. I never imagined defending Ms. Coulter, but this does not seem like a threat to our democratic way of life.
Lots of people on Twitter directed me to posts on the right wing blog Red State, which put together a handy compilation of examples (apparently just for me). First among them was the case of the 2003 Democratic mayoral primary in East Chicago, Indiana, in which campaign workers for the incumbent paid voters to cast absentee ballots. Red State also mentions the investigation of a Troy, NY, city council race, a series of ballot “manufacturing” cases in Alabama, and an alleged plot by three poll workers to throw a 2005 state senate election in Tennessee to the Democratic candidate, Ophelia Ford.
Suspend the elections! Demand genetic fingerprinting at the polls!
If that’s the worst that’s out there, I’m sorry, but I’m still not afraid of voter fraud. Counting all the Alabama incidents separately and throwing in Ann Coulter, that brings us to a grand total of eight cases. That is most certainly not a national crisis requiring action from the government. (It’s an odd reversal, come to think of it: Liberals insisting the government butt out, conservatives demanding it butt in.)
Besides, from what I can tell every one of the Red State incidents revolved around corrupt poll workers or local officials or some other functionary messing with absentee ballots. That’s an age old problem but one that voter ID laws will not fix.
I’m still not seeing evidence of large numbers of individuals impersonating someone else to cast a ballot or voting despite the fact that they don’t meet eligibility requirements. Surely they must be out there, or the anti-voter-fraud lot would not be so up in arms.
So, just for fun, let’s consider an example that my Twitter followers did not cite. As the Times editorial board noted in October, Kansas’ secretary of state, Kris Kobach, pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. But when The Wichita Eagle looked into the cases, it found that they were almost all honest mistakes: “a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed ‘fraud,’ a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote.”
Maybe I’m still missing something really big (and no, not the 1960 elections or whatever LBJ may or may not have got up to in Texas more than 50 years ago). Or maybe voter ID laws, as the saying goes, are a solution in search of a problem.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The Loyal Opposition, Published in The New York Times, November 7, 2011
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