“The Grand Old Party Of Nihilists And Cranks”: The Politics Of Destruction With The Values Of Zealots
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, Republican Saxby Chambliss, Georgia’s senior senator, was considered a steadfast conservative. The American Conservative Union has given him a lifetime score of 92, while the Club for Growth has scored him at 83. He earns an A from the National Rifle Association.
But a couple of years ago, Chambliss embarked upon an exercise that would merely have cemented his stature as a power broker as recently as the administration of George W. Bush: He joined Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, to form a bipartisan group of senators working to come up with a deal to whittle down the deficit. In other words, he considered compromise with Democrats.
In our current warped political universe, that was enough to earn Chambliss a potential challenger from the right, and he decided not to seek re-election. Chastened by Chambliss’ experience, none of the Georgia Republicans running for his vacant seat wants to occupy the same ZIP code with the words “compromise” and “bipartisan.”
This is what the Grand Old Party has come to: It’s now led by nihilists whose only politics are those of destruction and whose only values are those of zealots. There may be reasonable Republicans remaining in office, but they’ve been bullied into compliance and cowed into silence.
If you don’t believe that, listen to the growing drumbeat for the impeachment of President Obama — despite the glaring lack of evidence that he has committed impeachable offenses. (Having the temerity to win a second term is not an impeachable crime.) While such talk was once restricted to the nutters — men like U.S. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI), who has said the president’s impeachment would “be a dream come true” — it has leaked into the GOP’s water supply.
Witness the recent off-the-cuff remarks of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who, though a standard-bearer for the hard right, has been considered a thoughtful and rational man. At a recent meeting with constituents, Coburn declared that the president was coming “perilously close” to the standards for impeachment.
Last month, at a tribute in his honor, the retiring Chambliss obliquely urged his party to come to its senses. He didn’t explicitly mention the GOP’s spiral into right-wing madness, but he did speak of the importance of his work with the Gang of Six, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I don’t mind crossing party lines. If Republicans had a patent on all the good ideas, we’d be in power forever. We don’t have a patent on all those good ideas,” he said.
But his intended audience has taken another lesson from Chambliss’ bipartisanship: If you even consider it, you will be labeled a RINO — Republican In Name Only — by the tea party activists who now wield enormous power in the Republican Party. Having chased Chambliss off, they have taken to hectoring Georgia’s junior Republican senator, Johnny Isakson, for his failure to jump with enthusiasm to the idea of shutting down the government over Obamacare.
Tea Party types have also targeted longtime senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee. In a letter urging Alexander to retire, they claimed that “our great nation can no longer afford compromise and bipartisanship, two traits for which you have become famous.”
In response, Alexander penned a remarkable op-ed in The Tennessean defending his record as a politician who has occasionally reached across the aisle. “I know that if you only have 45 votes and you need 60 senators to get something important done like balancing the budget and fixing the debt, then you have to work with other people — that is, IF you really care about solving the problem, IF you really want to get a result, instead of just making a speech,” he wrote.
However, such time-honored traditions of governance have little effect on the white-hot rage of radicals who want to toss out any conservative who remembers the lessons of his middle-school civics classes. They have no respect for the basic give-and-take on which representative democracies thrive, no real interest in improving the nation’s fortunes. So, no, Senator Alexander, they don’t care about solving problems.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 31, 2013
“A Party Full Of Rodeo Clowns”: GOP Flips The Bird To Racial Justice
Republicans haven’t been truly competitive for the African-American vote since Richard Nixon got a third of black voters in 1960 against John F. Kennedy, who spent most of that campaign hedging his bets on civil rights. After that, the party of Lincoln actively drove black people into the ranks of Democrats. The testimony of black Republicans who were sidelined, excluded and even attacked at the 1964 convention in San Francisco, when the party nominated the anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater, is painful to read.
In the post-Reagan years, however, Republicans became more careful about blatantly spurning the support of African-Americans, mainly because an image of racial tolerance, at least, was deemed essential to gaining the support of white moderates and independents; soccer moms, it was said, didn’t like overt racism. Then-Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman’s 2006 speech to the NAACP repudiating the GOP’s ’60s-era “Southern Strategy” wasn’t designed to seriously challenge the Democrats’ lock on black votes, but to give moderates, and maybe even Latinos, a reason to hope the party was evolving on race.
That’s all behind us. As recently as 2007, I believe, it would have been unthinkable that no major Republican leader would accept an invitation to join Wednesday’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. But that’s what happened this week, even though a delusional Bill O’Reilly claimed last night that “no Republicans and no conservatives were invited” to speak. As usual, O’Reilly is wrong: House Speaker John Boehner was washing his hair; wait, he was visiting Wyoming (the sixth whitest state in the U.S., by the way). Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who traveled to Selma with Rep. John Lewis last year, was likewise otherwise engaged. Both Presidents Bush are recuperating from health troubles. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was invited in his brother and father’s stead, but he had other plans. Sen. John McCain also declined.
“We had a very concerted effort, because this is not a political moment,” said Rep. Leah Daughtry, executive producer of the commemoration. “This was about us coming together as a community, so we wanted to be sure that we had all political representations,” Daughtry said. “We attempted very vigorously to have someone from the GOP participate and unfortunately they were unable to find someone who was able to participate.”
RNC chairman Reince Priebus pointed to the fact that Republicans held their own King commemoration Monday, inviting only blacks who are Republicans. Sounds like a fun time — a separate but equal celebration.
The fact that no leading Republican bothered to attend the 50th anniversary commemoration shows how far to the right they’ve moved on race. It’s not just that they’ve thrown in the towel when it comes to appealing to black voters. They also don’t think it’s worth it to make an extra effort to appeal to white voters who flinch at racism.
Thursday morning’s campaign by some Republicans to make march organizers out to be the real racists, because they didn’t invite South Carolina’s appointed black senator, Tim Scott, represents the usual GOP game of racial tit-for-tat. The fact is, the organizers were reaching out to national GOP leaders, and Scott is not one of them. His hostility to everything the Congressional Black Caucus stands for also makes him an unlikely and provocative choice as speaker.
If Scott asked to speak and was rebuffed, we haven’t heard about it. Nothing stopped him, or any other Republican, from wandering down to the Mall to join the throng. Such a move would have attracted media attention and it would almost certainly have been positive. Reporters are desperate to find signs of moderation and decency in today’s Republican Party.
Unfortunately, Republicans aren’t desperate to display such signs. Right now they’re comfortable with the status quo, in which more than 90 percent of self-described GOP voters are white, in a country that’s barely 60 percent white, and getting less white every day. While MSNBC was broadcasting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech in its entirety, former Sen. Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation was buffoonishly tweeting: “Would MLK have approved of Obamacare?” DeMint couldn’t be bothered to walk to the Mall and talk to any of King’s actual or political heirs. He’s just another rodeo clown in a party that’s teeming with them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 29, 2013
“Threatened By The Armageddon Caucus”: GOP Leaders Have Given Right-Wing Members Veto Power That Impedes Governing
Are you ready for the Big Magilla of American politics? This fall, every important domestic issue could crash into every other: health-care reform, autopilot budget cuts, a government shutdown, even a default on the national debt.
If I were betting, I’d wager that we will somehow avoid a total meltdown. House Speaker John Boehner seems desperate to get around his party’s Armageddon Caucus.
But after three years of congressional dysfunction brought on by the rise of a radicalized brand of conservatism, it’s time to call the core questions:
Will our ability to govern ourselves be held perpetually hostage to an ideology that casts government as little more than dead weight in American life? And will a small minority in Congress be allowed to grind decision-making to a halt?
Congress is supposed to be the venue in which we Americans work our way past divisions that are inevitable in a large and diverse democracy. Yet for some time, Republican congressional leaders have given the most right-wing members of the House and Senate a veto power that impedes compromise, and thus governing itself.
On the few occasions when the far-right veto was lifted, Congress got things done, courtesy of a middle-ground majority that included most Democrats and the more moderately conservative Republicans. That’s how Congress passed the modest tax increases on the well-off that have helped reduce the deficit, as well as the Violence Against Women Act and assistance for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.
All these actions had something in common: They were premised on the belief that government can take practical steps to make American life better.
This idea is dismissed by those ready to shut down the government or to use the debt ceiling as a way of forcing the repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act and passing more draconian spending reductions. It needs to be made very clear that these radical Republicans are operating well outside their party’s own constructive traditions.
Before their 2010 election victory, Republicans had never been willing to use the threat of default to achieve their goals. The GOP tried a government shutdown back in the mid-1990s, but it was a political disaster. Experienced Republicans are trying to steer their party away from the brink, the very place where politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and a group of fourscore or so House members want it to go.
Particularly instructive is the effort to repeal health-care reform. The very fact that everyone now accepts the term “Obamacare” to refer to a measure designed to get health insurance to many more Americans is a sign of how stupidly partisan we have become. We never described Medicare as “Johnsoncare.” We didn’t label Social Security “FDRsecurity.”
Tying the whole thing to Obama disguises the fact that most of the major provisions of the law he fought for had their origins among conservatives and Republicans.
The health-care exchanges to facilitate the purchase of private insurance were based on a Heritage Foundation proposal, first brought to fruition in Massachusetts by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney. Subsidizing private premiums was always a Republican alternative to extending Medicare to cover everyone, the remedy preferred by many liberals.
Conservatives even once favored the individual mandate to buy insurance, as MSNBC columnist Tim Noah pointed out. “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection,” the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler said back in 1989. “Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance.” Since all of us will use health care at some point, Butler argued reasonably, it makes sense to have us all in the insurance pool.
But that was then. The right wing’s recent rejection of a significant government role in ending the scandal of “a health-care system that does not even come close to being comprehensive and fails to reach far too many” — the words were spoken 24 years ago by the late Sen. John Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican — tells us why Congress no longer works.
The GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country.
Ask yourself: If conservatives still believed in what both left and right once saw as a normal approach to government, would they speak so cavalierly about shutting it down or risking its credit? This is what’s at stake in the Big Magilla.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 25, 2013
“The GOP In Fantasyland”: Unhinged, Uncontrollable And Fully Capable Of Knocking Themselves Out
The make-believe crusade by publicity-hound Republicans to somehow stop Obamacare is one of the most cynical political exercises we’ve seen in many years. And that, my friends, is saying something.
Charlatans are peddling the fantasy that somehow they can prevent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from becoming what it already is: the law of the land. Congress passed it, President Obama signed it, the Supreme Court upheld it, many of its provisions are already in force, and others will soon take effect.
No matter how contemptuous they may be about Obamacare, opponents have only two viable options: Repeal it or get over it.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) the Canadian American who appears to be running for president, has grabbed headlines and air time by being the loudest advocate of an alleged third option: Congress could refuse to fund Obamacare, thereby starving it and effectively killing it. This is a ridiculous fantasy, as Cruz, who has brains beneath all that bombast, surely knows.
Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The idea, if you can call it one, is that Republicans can refuse to pass any funding bill that contains money for implementing Obamacare.
Theoretically, Republicans could pull this off in the House, where they hold the majority. But the chance that a bill stripped of money for the Affordable Care Act could make it through the Senate, where Democrats hold power, is precisely zero. The chance that a House-Senate conference would starve Obamacare to death while Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) remains the majority leader is also zero.
And if by some miracle such a bill were to make it to Obama’s desk, the chance he would sign it is way less than zero. To swallow the snake oil that Cruz and some other hard-right conservatives are peddling, you have to believe Obama is willing to nullify the biggest legislative accomplishment of his presidency.
So with the bill vetoed and no authorization to spend money, much of the government would have to shut down.
This gambit damaged the Republican Party back when Newt Gingrich tried it. In today’s toxic political climate, with approval ratings for Congress sinking toward single digits, it could be catastrophic. As things stand, Democrats have an uphill struggle next year to win the 17 House seats they need to regain the majority in that chamber. If the GOP forces a shutdown, however, Democrats’ chances might get better.
The basic elements of Obamacare — including the mandate that compels individuals to buy health insurance or pay a fine — originated in conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation. So it is beyond ironic that Heritage — under its new leader, former senator Jim DeMint — is pushing hard for the defund-Obamacare suicide leap.
DeMint has gone so far as to make a campaign swing through the South and the Midwest, whipping up support among the GOP base. Asked by an audience member in Arkansas why Congress should pass a bill starving Obamacare when everyone knows Obama would never sign it, DeMint replied, “Well, we don’t know that, do we?”
Come on. We know.
And we also know that painting Obamacare as the end of America as we know it is an effective way for DeMint to rebrand Heritage , moving it away from mainstream Republican orthodoxy into tea party la-la land. Noisemaking and fundraising go hand in hand; this crazy exercise promises to be very bad for the GOP, but it might end up being very good for the Heritage Foundation’s coffers.
Similarly, Cruz gets to preen before a national audience and demonstrate the fervor of his opposition to Obama and all that he stands for. “If you have an impasse, you know, one side or the other has to blink,” he said recently. “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink.”
The GOP establishment is blinking like crazy. Trying to defund Obamacare has little support among Republicans in the Senate. “I’m for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said recently, demonstrating a grasp of reality.
The Republican majority in the House, though, is . . . what’s the word? Unpredictable? Uncontrollable? Unhinged? They pay little attention to wise political advice and less attention to their leader, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. And while they can’t lay a glove on Obamacare, they’re fully capable of knocking themselves out.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 22, 2013
“The Pravda-ization Of The Party”: Crazier Than Ever, Republicans Will Not Move To The Center
If you’d asked me six months ago whether the Republican Party would manage to find a few ways to sidle back toward the center between now and 2016, I’d have said yes. But today, on the basis of evidence offered so far this year, I’d have to say a big fat no. With every passing month, the party contrives new ways to go crazier. There’s a lot of time between now and 2016, but it’s hard to watch recent events without concluding that the extreme part of the base is gaining more and more internal control.
Let’s start with this recent party meeting in Boston. As with the previous winter meeting, the Republican National Committee was trying to spin inclusiveness as the theme and goal. But what real news came out of the meeting? Go to the RNC website. Before you even make it to the home page, you’ll be presented with a petition imploring you to “Hold the Liberal Media Accountable!” and “Tell CNN and NBC to drop their planned programming promoting Hillary Clinton or no 2016 debates!” The photo is of She Who Is in Question, smiling all the way to the White House.
You know, I trust, that the petition augments a position adopted at the meeting in protest of the biopics of Clinton planned by those two networks. As an “issue,” this is totally absurd. How many voters are going to walk into the booth on Election Day 2016, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, thinking, “Gee whiz, I never cared that much for Hillary until I saw that wonderful biopic about a year ago, which is what sealed it for me!” Ridiculous. Besides, has anyone stopped to wonder whether Clinton herself wants these movies aired? (Actually, Al Hunt has). A decent argument can be made that her interest in seeing Gennifer and Monica and Tammy Wynette and all those unflattering hairstyles dredged up again is slim indeed.
This is just more symbolic (and shambolic) politics of rage. The driver here is not anger about these Hillary shows. They’re the handy excuse. The driver is hatred of all news organizations that aren’t Fox News, which in turn reflects hatred of reality itself, hatred of the unhappy truth that there are facts in this world that can’t be neatly arranged behind a worldview of rage and racial resentment. Soon enough, the GOPers are going to get themselves to the point where the only debates are on Fox, moderated, as Reince Priebus suggested last week, by the likes of Sean Hannity. The Pravda-ization of the party, a process that’s been under way since Fox first took to the air back in 1996, will be complete. The kinds of questions candidates will likely be asked on Fox, and the kinds of answers they’ll know will be expected of them, will drive the party even further rightward.
So that’s where the heads of the party’s national committee members are. Now let’s turn to Congress. Six months ago, I might have thought the party could roll with immigration reform. In truth, I was a skeptic from day one, let the record show. But there were plenty of days when I doubted myself. Not much doubt today. And now we have the stampede to defund Obamacare (which is impossible) and the looming government shutdown and/or destruction of the country’s creditworthiness (both of which are all too possible). There is dissension inside the GOP on these questions now, but they will, in time—not much time, really, a few weeks—become the new Tea Party litmus tests. The GOP will do the bidding, to whatever it extent it can, of the extremists.
And now, we’re hearing new calls for impeachment. On what grounds, it doesn’t matter. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), asked about the chances of removing Obama from office by a constituent, agreed that “it’s a good question” and answered that the only reason not to was that “you need the votes in the U.S. Senate,” and the GOP doesn’t have them. Not that there are no grounds, which there aren’t. Just that they couldn’t succeed.
And then there’s the random crazy that still pops up around the country on pretty much a daily basis. One might have thought, six months ago, that the party would begin to carve out a little wiggle room for a few people who support same-sex marriage. The issue was a winner for Obama last year, and remember all that postelection yammering about needing young people? Surely the party can tolerate a few midlevel leaders, especially younger ones, meekly supporting the policy.
Well, Stephanie Petelos is one of those young people. She’s the president of the College Republicans at the University of Alabama. Certainly a loyalist, I would aver. Then she told a local news station: “The majority of students don’t derive the premise of their argument for or against gay marriage from religion, because we’re governed by the Constitution and not the Bible.” And now the state Republican Party is advancing a resolution that would boot her from the steering committee.
That’s what’s known in political history as a purge. I see more purges coming. Conservative Myra Adams wrote on the Beast over the weekend that she didn’t see how a Republican could get to 270 electoral votes in 2016. She’s correct about that, but she may be wrong in assuming that most of these people even care anymore if they win. I think many would prefer to win, sure, all things being equal, but only on their narrow terms. And if they don’t, there is great glory in losing because of principle, and then once again purifying the party of its sellouts and squishes like Petelos. How much worse can they get? A lot.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 21, 2013
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