Why The Tea Party Should Stop Fearing Compromise
Among tea party voters, there is a belief that the right is always getting sold out by the political establishment. In their telling, Reagan-era conservatives agreed to an amnesty for illegal immigrants on the condition that the law would be enforced going forward, then deeply regretted having done so. George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge. The Contract with America failed to deliver on many of its promises. George W. Bush joined forces with Ted Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, changed positions on campaign finance reform, and closed out his presidency by bailing out undeserving Wall Street firms. In all this, he was abetted by GOP legislators.
These tea party voters are sometimes justified in feeling betrayed. Other times, they misinterpret what happened. Right or wrong, however, they’re powerfully averse to compromise. Mere mention of the word aggrieves them. They don’t think of it as a means of bringing about a mutually beneficial change in the status quo, where one of their priorities is addressed in return for giving up something on an issue they care less about. When they hear the word compromise, the knee-jerk reaction is to oppose it. In their experience, going along with compromise is tantamount to getting screwed. The insistence that pols “stand on principle” is a defense mechanism.
This attitude helps explain why tea partiers are so frequently attracted to relatively inexperienced politicians like Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, and Michele Bachmann. More experienced pols have been forced to compromise as the price of achieving something, just as a President Palin, Rubio or Bachmann would be forced to compromise in order to pass the parts of their agenda most important to them. Having gotten so little of substance done in their careers, however, they haven’t yet had to give up anything significant, so they can maintain the fiction that they never would. As Daniel Larison puts it, “Bachmann’s lack of achievements is in some ways a blessing for her, because it is proof that she has never compromised. In today’s GOP, that is very valuable, and she doesn’t have many competitors in the race who can say the same.”
The tea party movement should know better. The Founding Fathers engaged in an endless series of compromises. Abraham Lincoln compromised. Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised. So did Ronald Reagan. Every consequential leader in the history of the United States has had to compromise.
It defies common sense to think the next Republican president will be different. So why are tea party voters asking themselves, “Which of these presidential candidates is least likely to compromise?” They ought to be pondering different questions, such as: “What style of negotiation and compromise does this candidate employ? How much have they gotten in the past for what they gave up?”
“Do the issues they’ve treated as most important align with my priorities?”
Viewed in that light, Mitch Daniels’ talk of a truce on social issues in order to focus on the budget deficit should’ve appealed to a large faction of tea partiers. He laid out his priorities. They aligned perfectly with tea party rhetoric: it is a movement focused on economic issues and individual liberty far more than social conservatism if you trust what its typical adherents themselves assert. But even tea partiers who shared Daniels’ priorities didn’t like that he talked of compromise.
They got self-righteous about it.
Tea partiers would be better off accepting that every politician cares about some things more than others, that there is no such thing as successfully governing America as an uncompromising social, economic and national security conservative, and that pretending otherwise results in choosing candidates who are marginally less likely to choose the best compromises.
Another way to put this is that if tea party voters were less naive about the centrality of compromise to politics — and more willing to believe that a principled person can compromise — they’d feel less victimized by an unchangeable fact of democracy. They’d also be more frequently empowered to bring about policy outcomes that better align with what they care about most.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, July 15, 2011
A Fear Of Breaking “The Pledge”: Are Republicans And The Tea Party Serious?
This is not the Congress where I worked in the ’70s and ’80s. This is not the same caliber of leader, especially on the Republican side, that our country has been accustomed to over decades. In the past, people like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann were marginalized. They were not respected by their own party, let alone rewarded; they were relegated to the back bench.
It would have been a joke if someone predicted that a cable queen like Bachmann could raise $14 million for a House race or that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson could raise over $2 million in a matter of weeks as an obscure member, after screaming at the president, “You lie!” at a State of the Union address. The notion that someone such as Bachmann would be so popular in polls and be in a position to win Iowa would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.
But more important than these personalities and their extreme positions is what they have done to the Republican party.
We have a unique opportunity to truly turn this nation around. President Obama, and it appears Speaker of the House John Boehner, were ready to truly change the direction of the country. In the past, I believe we could have made it work—with a Reagan, an O’Neill, a Mansfield, a Baker, a Dirksen. It is a long list.
But, sadly, the absolutism of no revenues—every tax cut, even temporary—is now permanent. Taxes can only go down… sort of like housing prices can only go up! Pledges to Grover Norquist are absurd, shortsighted, and counterproductive.
I truly wonder whether the extreme wing of the Republican Party wants to solve our problem or just play politics with it; is this just beat Obama and the democrats at all costs, the country be damned? Or is it an adherence to an ideology that is inflexible, a fear of breaking some “pledge?”
Regardless, the over $4 trillion budget fix is achievable—not popular—but achievable. It takes both parties to accept political responsibility. I wonder, though, if you asked a Tea Party member or a liberal democrat, “Would you sacrifice your seat in Congress to achieve real fiscal responsibility, to turn the nation around?” would they say “yes?” After all, why did they run for office in the first place? To be serious, to accomplish big things, I would hope.
A number of years ago a group of us were with Sen. Paul Sarbanes. He was retiring after a long and distinguished career in the House and Senate. One person asked him what was the biggest change he had seen in his 40 years. Sarbanes said that people come into office now with their minds made up; they are afraid to change or to listen to the other side. He pointed out that when he first came to the Senate, there used to be real debate on the issues of our time and that minds would be changed. There was a different spirit of cooperation and compromise and true listening. Relationships across the aisle were forged. There was give and take. There was an opportunity to come to an agreement without a total win-lose mentality.
If there ever was a time in our nation’s history to return to that spirit, it is now.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
How Can Anyone Take The GOP Seriously: The Dismal Republican Record On Taxes
“In the present weak economic climate,” a group of conservatives, including Newt Gingrich, wrote in an open statement, “we believe that to restore the health of the economy and put Americans back to work, America should follow a course against high taxes and federal spending.”
The White House was unmoved. “Republicans may feel they can’t go to voters after supporting a tax increase,” one administration official told the New York Times. “We’ve got to convince them that the situation won’t be as devastating as it would be if the tax bill is sabotaged.”
The latest moves in the debt ceiling debate? Not quite: The administration was Ronald Reagan’s, and the year was 1982. With his previous year’s landmark tax cuts having exploded the budget deficit, Reagan had reluctantly backed a tax increase to bring it back under control, prompting a minor conservative uprising led by then Rep. Jack Kemp and which included then backbench House member Gingrich. “You can’t have the largest tax cut in history and then turn around and have the largest tax increase in history,” one conservative rebel groused.
Right-wing economists issued dire forecasts. Arthur Laffer, widely described as the father of supply-side economics, warned that the bill would “stifle economic recovery” and “lengthen and deepen the recession.” The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote that the tax hike would “curb the economic recovery everyone wants,” adding: “It will mean a lower cash flow as more businesses pay more taxes, with a depressing effect on stock prices. It will reduce incentives for the increased savings and investment so badly needed to improve productivity and create more jobs.” As Bruce Bartlett, an early supply-sider and Reagan aide who has since recanted the faith, noted last month, “It would be hard to find an economic forecast that was more wrong in every respect.” Real gross domestic product grew at 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984, while unemployment fell from 10.6 percent in December 1982 to 7.1 percent in 1984.
Just about the only thing the conservative rebels got right back in 1982 was Gingrich’s comment to the New York Times that the skirmish was the “opening round of a fight over the soul and future of the Republican Party.” Looking back, the extent to which the conservatives won the fight within the party while losing the war with economic reality is fairly astounding. In the nearly three decades since, the Republican feeling toward tax increases has moved from Reaganesque dislike but acceptance (he signed tax increases into law in seven of his eight years in office) to their current, blindly absolutist position flatly opposing any tax increases at all, even in the face of spiraling deficits and possible economic default.
Witness comments like House Speaker John Boehner’s that “raising taxes is going to destroy jobs.” The rhetoric hasn’t changed much since 1982, but the accumulated evidence against this GOP dogma is overwhelming.
Gingrich was again at the forefront of the fight against taxes in 1993 when he warned that the Clinton budget plan “will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession.” Rep. Dick Armey, who would go on to be House majority leader and now is a Tea Party godfather, warned that “the impact on job creation is going to be devastating.” Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm warned that the budget deal was a “one-way ticket to a recession,” adding that Clinton’s would be one of the jobs killed by the bill. (Gramm would seek Clinton’s job, but couldn’t best Bob Dole; he was last seen being muzzled by John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008 after calling the country a “nation of whiners.”) Laffer warned that “Clinton’s tax bill will do about as much damage to the U.S. economy as could be feasibly done in the current political environment.” Boehner himself dismissed the Clinton plan as “Christmas in August for liberal Democrats: more taxes, more spending, and bigger government.”
He got the Christmas part right. Unemployment, which had been 7.1 percent in January 1993, fell to 5.4 percent by the end of 1994. Real GDP grew from 2.9 percent in 1993 to 4.1 percent in 1994. The final tally of the Clinton years was 23 million new jobs and a budget surplus.
Clinton and his villainous tax hikes were followed by George W. Bush and his cure-all tax cuts. “Tax relief will create new jobs,” Bush argued in April 2001. “Tax relief will generate new wealth.” When the bill was enacted that June, GOP Rep. Mike Pence (now running for governor of Indiana) gushed that they would “stimulate our economy” and “put the ax to the root of the Internal Revenue Code as it wages war on the American dream.”
How’d that turn out? From 2001 to 2007, jobs grew at one fifth the pace of the 1990s, the slowest rate in the post-World War II era. GDP in those years grew at half the rate of the 1990s. Oh yeah, and the deficit exploded. Fully 10 years after the largest tax cuts in history, the economy had shed 1.1 million jobs. It seems Pence’s ax was put to the root of the American dream itself.
Given the historical and economic record, one has to ask: How can anyone take the GOP seriously, especially when they are playing fast and loose with economic disaster in service to a political philosophy that not even their main icon—Reagan—followed with such monomania?
Decrying the Clinton tax plan in 1993, Boehner recalled the quote: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” He went on, “It very appropriately applies to Congress today.” That’s one piece of rhetoric Boehner really should recycle. And learn from.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
Eric Cantor’s Slick Upper Lip: “I Want What I Want When I Want it”
Eric Cantor has perfected the strategic sneer.
It comes, frequently, when he answers a reporter’s question about something President Obama has said: The House majority leader’s lip curls up on the left side and a look of disgust washes over his face. This week, he has been coupling the sneer with lines such as:
“How in the world can you even accept that notion?”
And, “That is laughable on its face.”
And, “That doesn’t make sense. . . . That again is just nonsensical.”
And, “Come on — let us think about this.”
Cantor, who is establishing himself as the lead GOP negotiator with the White House as the Aug. 2 default deadline approaches, is answering calls for compromise with contempt. He shook his fist during a news conference Tuesday and said that Obama’s thinking is “unfathomable to me.” To Obama’s complaint that the wealthy are not sharing in the budget sacrifice, he scoffed: “There is plenty of so-called shared sacrifice.” Asked about Obama’s belief that people like him should pay more in taxes, Cantor retorts: “You know what? He can write a check any time he wants.”
He draws out the vowels in a style that is part southern, part smarty-pants. Had young Cantor spoken like this at his prep school in Richmond, the bigger boys may well have wiped that sneer off his face. Yet even then, Cantor was accustomed to having things his way. According to Cantor’s hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch, the quotation he chose to accompany his yearbook photo was “I want what I want when I want it.”
What Cantor wants now is power — and he is prepared to risk the full faith and credit of the United States to get it. In a primacy struggle with House Speaker John Boehner, he has done a deft job of aligning himself with Tea Party House members in opposition to any meaningful deal to resolve the debt. If the U.S. government defaults, it will have much to do with Cantor.
He pulled out of debt-limit talks with Vice President Biden. He shot down the outline of a compromise that Boehner attempted to negotiate. Now Cantor has essentially taken over talks with the White House, and he has tamped down any hint of conciliation.
On Monday, Boehner hinted that he could accept a tax-reform deal that brought “additional revenues to the federal government” — and his spokesman confirmed that the proposal would be “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office as increasing tax revenue. But Cantor was having none of it: “We are not raising taxes, so it has to be net revenue neutral.”
Cantor’s aides say he is merely reflecting his caucus. But Cantor, a veteran of a decade in the Capitol, surely knows that he is jettisoning the last chance in the next couple of years to make a serious dent in the national debt. The White House has so far offered up a tantalizing array of concessions — $4 trillion in budget cuts and overhauls of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – but Cantor has yet to offer anything but sneers.
He flashed the trademark facial expression even before taking his seat at a Monday news conference. Asked whether he would offer any concessions, Cantor responded by saying that the cuts he demanded from the White House were in fact concessions by him, too. “Nobody relishes the opportunity to go and cut these programs,” said the creator of the YouCut Web site that made budget-cutting into an online game. Cantor further said that it was a concession merely to avoid a government default.
The search for a Cantor concession continued. “In terms of shared sacrifice across the country, do you see that one as necessary?”
Cantor swung his arm over his chair back and raised his upper lip. “I think behind this notion of ‘We want shared sacrifice’ that they continue to say means, ‘We want to raise taxes,’ ” he said.
Claiming that there have been “concessions made already” by his side, Cantor was pressed to name some of them. “I don’t want to get into specifics now,” he said.
Leaving a House Republican caucus meeting Tuesday morning, Cantor approached the microphones, flashed the cameras a good-morning sneer and demanded to know “why in the world” Obama wants to increase taxes.
NBC’s Luke Russert asked what “sacred cows” Cantor would be willing to sacrifice. Cantor repeated his denunciation of Obama’s tax policy.
“Where do the Republicans feel pain here, though?” Russert persisted.
After a long and contemptuous day, the majority leader probably feels it most in his upper lip.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 12, 2011
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