“Standing Wrong”: Old Conservatives Can’t Learn New Tricks
If President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats wanted to maximize the political advantage they’re getting from the shutdown/default crisis, they’d agree to at least one part of the short-term deals Republicans have offered, raising the debt ceiling for only six weeks at a time. Then we’d have one default crisis after another, and the standing of the GOP would keep on its downward trajectory until—let’s just pick a date at random here—November 2014. But Republicans won’t do that; they’re now insisting (and good for them) that the deal has to extend at least a year into the future so we don’t have to keep going through this. If they get that deal, though, the issue will fade and voters could start to forget how reckless Republicans have been.
They could forget, but I’m guessing Republicans won’t let them. It isn’t as though the ultimate conclusion of this crisis is going to result in a chastened GOP, ready to be reasonable and assure the public it can govern responsibly. The Republicans are falling fast, but their problems could be just beginning.
That’s because the people driving this crisis are still going to be the loudest voices in the party even after it ends. They won’t get what they want, and when that happens they’ll make sure everyone knows that they were right all along. It’s critical to understand that for them, tactics and ideology are inseparable. You don’t compromise with Democrats because that means you’ve taken a position that is impure, contaminated with the stench of liberalism. Even a drop is too much, just as you wouldn’t put just a little rancid meat in your stew. And regardless of the substance of any issue, you don’t compromise because compromise is by definition betrayal, and compromise is failure. Taking the maximal position on everything, they sincerely believe, doesn’t just produce the best policy, it produces political victory.
Imagine it’s a few months from now, and a Republican representative running for re-election gets asked by a reporter whether he thinks the shutdown/default crisis of 2013 was a good idea and whether his party ought to use the same tactic again to try to achieve its policy goals. If he says no, there are people just waiting to charge him with being a traitor to the cause of conservatism, with the inevitable primary challenge from the right to follow. If he says yes, he’s just made his general-election opponent’s first television ad.
The Republican Party is in a bad place right now, as a series of polls released last week showed. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the party with a 24 percent favorability rating, an all-time low in that poll. Gallup has it at 28 percent, a record low in that poll as well. A poll from Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has the party at 26 percent. Among independent voters, the numbers are even worse.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in an echo of the “unskewed polls” nonsense from the 2012 election, Senator Ted Cruz has been telling conservatives to ignore it. He assures them that his own private polls show that Republicans are winning and will triumph if they keep “standing strong.” This is just what conservatives want to hear, which is why many of them are likely to believe it. So if and when a deal is struck, almost regardless of what it contains, they’ll still be convinced that complete victory could have been theirs if only their leaders had held out a little longer. You might have thought that unlike previous Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Cruz is no dummy. Yet tactically, he turns out to be just as foolhardy as the rest of them. He told Republicans to jump off a cliff, and they did.
To them, the tactical formula will always be the same. Was shutting down the government a disaster? It would have gone better if we had only been firmer in our demands and held out longer! Did a Democrat win the White House? We would have won if we had nominated a “true” conservative! Did your Senate candidate lose the general election? We’ll win next time if only we nominate someone more conservative!
They can’t learn from their mistakes if they don’t understand them. It isn’t hard to imagine that these activists and voters, who are so incredibly hard to satisfy, could produce a never-ending churn within the party. Believe it or not, the current Republican caucus is even more conservative than the one that swept into Washington in 2010. With a sufficient number of conservative states and congressional districts in no danger of falling to Democrats, the next election inevitably will see a new group of primary winners who are hailed as heroes, then eventually branded as traitors, to be replaced by a new cadre of even more doctrinaire right-wingers. Just look at what happened to Marco Rubio, who swept into the Senate as a Tea Party star but was cast out once he tried to achieve immigration reform. The personnel will keep changing even as the basic dynamic—a GOP establishment cowering in fear of newly minted members of Congress delighting in blowing up the system—remains the same.
A party can evolve in only one of two ways: It changes its people, or its people change. The first doesn’t seem likely. It’s hard to imagine a wave of Republican moderates winning over Tea Party candidates in primary elections. The second doesn’t seem likely either, since the people driving the Republican Party are the truest of true believers.
Anything can happen, of course. The Democratic Party turned to the right with the nomination of Bill Clinton in 1992 and won two presidential elections. On the other hand, Democrats also won control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 while being firmly opposed to an unpopular Republican president; no trimming of ideological sails was necessary. But those Democrats were capable of rationally assessing their political prospects. It’s possible to be ideologically extreme and still be careful about the fights you pick. Today’s conservative Republicans are both ideologically and tactically extremist; indeed, they see them as one and the same.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 15, 2013
“A De-Americanized World”: GOP Antics Are Making The United States Look Pretty Insane Right Now
When there’s a global economic crisis, investors from around the world have spent the last several generations doing one thing: they buy U.S. treasuries. The reasoning, of course, is that there is no safer investment, anywhere on the planet, than the United States of America — which has the strongest and largest economy on the planet, and which always pays its bills.
All of these assumptions, of course, were cultivated over generations, and pre-date the radicalization of the Republican Party.
But what happens when U.S. treasuries are no longer considered safe, Americans can no longer be counted on to pay its bills, and the nation’s most powerful economy chooses to default on purpose? The world starts reevaluating old assumptions, that’s what.
In Britain, Jon Cunliffe, who will become deputy governor of the Bank of England next month, told members of Parliament that banks should be developing contingency plans to deal with an American default if one happens.
And Chinese leaders called on a “befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.” In a commentary on Sunday, the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua blamed “cyclical stagnation in Washington” for leaving the dollar-based assets of many nations in jeopardy. It said the “international community is highly agonized.”
I know I’ve been pushing this thesis in recent weeks, but it’s important to remember the unique role the United States plays in global leadership and the extent to which Republican antics in Congress will change the dynamic that’s been stable for the better part of the last century.
No major western power has defaulted since Hitler’s Germany, so this week may add some history to the potentially catastrophic economic consequences, and the world is watching closely.
Indeed, try to imagine explaining this ongoing crisis to a foreign observer who doesn’t fully appreciate the nuances of domestic politics. “Yes, we have the largest economy on the planet. Yes, we want to maintain global credibility. Yes, the process of extending our borrowing authority is incredibly easy and could be completed in about 10 minutes. No, some members of our legislative branch have decided they no longer want the United States to honor its obligations and pay for the things they’ve already bought.”
I suspect global observers would find this truly inexplicable. As it happens, I’d agree with them.
Ezra Klein added yesterday that to the rest of the world, “the United States looks insane right now.”
They’re dealing with real problems that their political systems are struggling to solve. The United States’ political system is creating fake problems that it may choose to leave unsolved.
“The United States was the one bright spot in the world recovery,” says OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria. “It was leading the recovery! Leading the creation of jobs! This unfortunate situation with the budget and debt happens at the moment it was looking good.” […]
At best, the United States is slowing its recovery — and that of the rest of the world. At worst, it’s going to trigger another global crisis. That’s why, Gurria says, his concern isn’t that the United States’ economy is weak, but that its political system is.
It’s heartbreaking that so much of the world is now laughing at us, not because we have crises we can’t solve, but because members of one party — the one that lost the most recent national elections — insist on manufacturing new crises to advance their unpopular agenda.
To reiterate what we discussed last week, there’s a global competition underway for power and influence in the 21st century. Americans have rivals who are playing for keeps. We can either be at the top of our game or we can watch others catch up.
And it’s against this backdrop that House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican colleagues shut down the government, threaten default, fight tooth and nail to strip Americans of their health care benefits, and keep spending levels so low we’re kicking children out of Head Start centers while our global competitors invest heavily in education.
It’s as if some have a vision in which we no longer lead and we aim for second place on purpose.
Great nations can’t function the way we’re struggling to function now. The United States can either be a 21st-century superpower or it can tolerate Republicans abandoning the governing process and subjecting Americans to a series of self-imposed extortion crises.
It cannot do both.
China is talking about “a de-Americanized world.” It’s time for Republicans to decide whether they intend to help them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 15, 2013
“It’s Still Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion”: Republicans Are Fighting For The Future Blackmail
We have two interesting theories today about what’s happening in the House. One is from Neil Irwin, who posits that it’s all about a sunk costs fallacy — Republicans are mistakenly continuing to ask for things they can’t get because that’s the only way to justify what they’ve already given up by following their current strategy. The other theory, well-articulated by Greg Sargent, Jonathan Chait and Danny Vinik, is that Republicans are still fighting for the principle of extortion.
I strongly agree with the latter theory — way back in May, I argued that radical Republicans were fighting over the principle of extortion for the sake of extortion:
[I]t’s not really about Republicans demanding debt reduction and using the best leverage they have available to get it. Nor is it about Republicans demanding tax reform — their other possible demand — and using the best leverage they have to get it.
No, it’s the other way around. The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It shows up all the time. For example, today Speaker John Boehner has pulled a delay of the medical-device tax from his latest attempt to put together a package, because the radicals weren’t happy with it. Yes, they have a plausible reason. But my guess is that Democrats have indicated they really wouldn’t mind eliminating that tax, and so it’s no longer a ransom worth asking; asking for something the Democrats only mildly oppose (or don’t oppose at all) misses the whole point of why they’re doing what they’re doing. “Extortion for the sake of extortion” certainly seems to fit with the wild GOP swings from Obamacare, to spending, to contraception, to who knows next as the next reason for the shutdown and debt limit threat.
The reason all of this matters, still, is because if it’s just a sunk costs error then the costs for Democrats in bailing them out are limited to whatever it is they give up.
However, if it’s extortion, then any perceived success establishes an incentive for future use.
The key, by the way, is perceived success. So it matters a lot whether Republicans believe that they actually are getting something whenever the final deal happens — much more than whether, in some objective sense, they actually did get anything.
It’s hard to read exactly who is thinking what while these things are going on. But if it really is extortion for the sake of extortion, at least for the radicals, then there’s a very strong incentive to Democrats to hang very tough.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
“A Party At The Crossroads”: GOP In-Fighting With Multiple Axes
In the mid-1970s, the Republican Party had fallen on such hard times, there was a fair amount of talk about it changing its name. The argument was that the Republican brand had been tarnished so badly — it was associated with Watergate, country clubs, and the Great Depression — that it might just be better to start over with some other name.
We now know, of course, that this wasn’t necessary, and by 1981, the party at the national level was thriving once more. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the Republican Party is in even worse shape now.
John Judis has an interesting item in The New Republic today, noting among other things what happened when he reached out to Republican insiders this week to discuss the effects of the shutdown.
The response I got was fear of Republican decline and loathing of the Tea Party: One lobbyist and former Hill staffer lamented the “fall of the national party,” another the rise of “suburban revolutionaries,” and another of “people alienated from business, from everything.” There is a growing fear among Washington Republicans that the party, which has lost two national elections in a row, is headed for history’s dustbin. And I believe that they are right to worry.
The battle over the shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the party. The party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress. The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two decades.
This may seem a little hyperbolic, but given recent developments — in polling, within the party, from outside groups allied with the party — the GOP’s fractures aren’t quite normal.
Indeed, while much of the focus of late has been on a dispute between congressional Republicans and the White House, this only tells part of the story. It’s actually a fight with multiple axes — a Democratic president vs. congressional Republicans, and Republicans against themselves.
Jon Chait had a good piece on this earlier.
Conservative activists and the party’s pro-business Establishment have split more deeply and rapidly than anybody expected. It is startling to see the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses — a group so staunchly partisan and conservative that liberals had to form a competing small business lobby — deliver quotes in public like this: “There clearly are people in the Republican Party at the moment for whom the business community and the interests of the business community — the jobs and members they represent — don’t seem to be their top priority.” The mutual recriminations run in both directions, with figures like the conservative organizer Erick Erickson muttering threats to form a third party.
Intra-party schisms have a long history in American politics. But they are usually rooted in policy — the Republicans splitting half a century ago over progressivism and the role of government, the Democrats slowly rending a half century ago over white supremacy. Mainstream Republicans and the tea party have fallen out almost entirely over political tactics.
If anything, I think Jon’s probably understating the case. There are clearly strategic differences — some Republicans are reluctant to compromise, while other Republicans consider compromise to be a horrible crime that must never be committed — that have led GOP officials to shut down the government and threaten a sovereign debt crisis for reasons they can neither identify nor explain.
But these differences over tactics are compounded by disagreement over policy and direction. Republican policymakers and their allies are divided on immigration and the culture war, for example, and have reached the point at which the party no longer really has a foreign policy consensus anymore.
Big Business and the Tea Party are at odds, as are libertarians and social conservatives, as are the House GOP and the Senate GOP. It’s a party with no leaders, no elder statesmen (or women), and an older, white base in an increasingly diverse nation.
For generations, parties see their power and popularity ebb and flow, and in a two-party system, it’s hard to imagine Republicans staying down indefinitely. But in the post-Civil War era, we haven’t seen a party quite as radical as today’s GOP, and we haven’t seen many parties with quite so many internal and external crises to deal with all at once.
There are no easy fixes for a catastrophe this severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2013
“Be Careful What You Wish For”: Citizens United Created A Path For A Legislative Strategy Of The GOP’s Most Aggressive Funders
It’s no secret that the corporate class is being eclipsed by Tea Party libertarians and is increasingly unable to exert influence on the Republican Party, despite the generous donations the top 1 percent has long showered on Republicans.
But isn’t the Republican Party in the business of serving Big Business? And didn’t the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United open the floodgates of corporate campaign cash? How is all that corporate campaign cash failing to buy Big Business sway over the GOP?
Well, here’s the thing: Citizens United didn’t save the Republican Party. Citizens United broke the Republican Party.
Yes, Citizens United was what Republicans and their corporate patrons wanted. Corporations are people. Money is speech. Spend what you want, and no one needs to know who wrote the check.
But as conservative columnist Tim Carney explains in a criminally overlooked Washington Examiner column from last month, what Citizens United meant in practice is this: It “spawned super PACs that offset the power of the political parties and K Street.”
Carney specifically credits the newly created Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups for using the new post–Citizens United rules to fund right-wing challengers who have triumphed over Republican establishment favorites, whipping up conservative grassroots fervor behind extremist positions and forcefully shaming any Republican who hints at compromise. They have their own informal “whip operation” that robs Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of their traditional institutional power. And they have been squarely behind the plot to defund ObamaCare by forcing a government shutdown.
Carney says this Citizens United–fueled dynamic has led to a “Republican leadership vacuum.” I would go a step further: It has broken the Republican Party in two.
Both the ascendant Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups are financially backed by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, leaders of a single corporation that appears to be trying to surpass the Chamber of Commerce as the dominant funder and power center of the Republican Party.
In the 2012 elections, the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity each spent roughly $35 million. But since then, the Kochs have used another group they created, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, to spend $200 million supporting an array of organizations determined to destroy ObamaCare.
According to Open Secrets, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce spending now “dwarfs” the old Chamber, which has been urging Republicans to keep the government open and increase the debt limit, to no avail. The establishment Chamber has become so frustrated with being ignored, it is preparing an effort to donate money to Republican congresspeople who face primary challenges from the right, a direct challenge to the Senate Conservatives Fund and its allies.
The Republican Party is stuck with two major corporate funders vying for influence and pulling the party apart. Yet the organization with the broader business base and more rational political outlook is being out-organized and out-spent by a narrow band of ideological extremists who have figured out how to best exploit a Citizens United world. Recent research has found that Citizens United did not entice corporate America en masse to increase its election spending, but as The New York Times’s Eduardo Porter noted, “Big, frequent donors are particularly extreme.”
The end result is a party compelled to carry out a doomed legislative strategy concocted by the party’s most aggressive funders. If fully carried out to its apocalyptic conclusion, the strategy risks obliterating the Republican Party’s brand for a generation.
Just one year ago, Democrats were terrified that Citizens United would not only drown Barack Obama in a flood of GOP-friendly corporate cash, but also make it impossible for liberal Democrats to ever have a chance at winning national elections.
But the reverse may end up being Citizens United‘s true political legacy.
Obama used the specter of freshly legalized super PACs to rev up his donor base, and raised more money than any presidential candidate in history, neutralizing the Republican super PACs. He kept his party unified, turned out his base, and won decisively. In the election’s aftermath, well-funded but strategically inept right-wing super PACs are financing deep intraparty discord, threatening the ability of Republicans to be competitive in national elections.
Turns out the upholding of the Affordable Care Act isn’t the only gift Chief Justice John Roberts gave to President Obama.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 11, 2013
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