“Rhetoric Won’t Patch The GOP Up”: It’s Hard To Patch Things Up When You Have Diametrically-Opposed Goals
Over at the National Review Kevin Williamson has penned a column we are all familiar with. It’s a rallying cry for conservatives to get over their differences and rally behind the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, there were countless articles of this type written by pragmatic liberals. All you have to do is reverse the names, and it looks completely familiar.
And though I reject the notion that Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough for true-believing conservatives, let’s say, arguendo, that that was the case. Unless you are ready to give up entirely on the notion of advancing conservative principles through the ballot box, you might consider looking at things this way: Even if you do not think that it matters much whether Republicans win, it matters a great deal that Democrats lose.
Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?
It isn’t.
I don’t think these types of columns are ever very convincing, but that doesn’t mean that they are incorrect. If we were to give this genre a name, it would be Vote-for-the-lesser-evil essays. They don’t exactly get people fired up and ready to go.
And it’s not a great sign that people feel that they are necessary to write because it indicates that there are some rather strong divisions. Back in the 2005-6 period, Democrats became unified, and they did an adequate job of patching things up after the 2008 primaries. The divisions among Republicans are more fundamental. There’s a glaring generation gap on gay rights. There’s a yawning gulf between the businessmen who want comprehensive immigration reform and the nativist base that wants an end to all non-white immigration, whether it is legal or illegal. There’s a growing chasm between the libertarian non-intervention wing of the party and the John McCain bomb-em-first-ask-questions-later wing of the party. There’s also a Main Street/Wall Street divide over tax policy and social/religious issues.
In all these cases, important factions within the GOP simply want different things. It’s hard to patch things up when you have diametrically-opposed goals.
Interestingly, Mr. Williamson says he quit his membership in the Republican Party during the Bush years because he couldn’t abide belonging to the same club as Arlen Specter. He also says that “the Affordable Care Act, [is] the worst domestic defeat for the cause of limited government in a generation,” which is a nice admission. It shows the real reason that conservatives keep bad-mouthing a law that is working very well and is already covering seven million people. We can understand, now, why conservatives have fought the law with so much fury. They believe, correctly, that the mere existence of the law is a tremendous ideological defeat. Whether it works well or not is completely beside the point for these folks.
Going forward, that’s going to be an increasingly suicidal political position to take. There will be divisions on that, too.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 30, 2014
“A Clear Partisan Purpose”: GOP Steps Up Attack On Early Voting In Key Swing States
On Election Night 2012, referring to the long lines in states like Florida and Ohio, Barack Obama declared, “We have to fix that.”
The waits in Florida and Ohio were no accident, but rather the direct consequence of GOP efforts to curtail the number of days and hours that people had to vote. On January 22, 2014, the president’s bipartisan election commission released a comprehensive report detailing how voting could be smoother, faster and more convenient. It urged states to reduce long lines by adopting “measures to improve access to the polls through expansion of the period for voting before the traditional Election Day.”
That would seem like an uncontroversial and common sense suggestion, but too many GOP-controlled states continue to move in the opposite direction, reducing access to the ballot instead of expanding it. The most prominent recent examples are the swing states of Wisconsin and Ohio.
Yesterday Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed legislation eliminating early voting hours on weekends and nights, when it’s most convenient for many voters to go to the polls. When they took over state government in 2011, Wisconsin Republicans reduced the early voting period from three weeks to two weeks and only one weekend. Now they’ve eliminated weekend voting altogether.
Over 250,000 Wisconsinites voted early in 2012, one in twelve overall voters. Cutting early voting has a clear partisan purpose: those who voted early voted for Obama 58 to 41 percent in Wisconsin in 2012, compared to his 51 to 48 percent margin on Election Day. Extended early voting hours were particularly critical with respect to high voter turnout in big cities like Milwaukee and Madison. “It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” said Wisconsin GOP State Senator Dale Schultz, a critic of the legislation.
A month ago, Ohio passed legislation cutting early voting by a week, eliminating same-day voter registration and restricting the availability of absentee ballots while Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a directive doing away with early voting on weeknights and Sundays as well. 600,000 Ohioans, ten percent of the electorate, voted early in 2012. The cuts in Ohio, like Wisconsin, have a clear partisan and racial underpinning—in Cleveland, for example, African-Americans made up 56 percent of those who voted on weekends in 2008.
Republicans are adopting the early voting cuts under the guise of “uniformity”—claiming they want all counties to have the same hours, which punishes large urban counties if small rural counties don’t have the money or manpower for extended early voting hours.
But few believe that’s the only reason why early voting is on the chopping block. Many Republicans are predictably reluctant to admit that the main reason they suddenly disfavor early voting is because too many Democrats are using it or because they actually believe, in the words of Jonah Goldberg, that “voting should be harder, not easier—for everybody.” (See Rick Hasen’s piece “The new conservative assault on early voting.”)
The latter argument was endorsed by Florida GOP State Senator Mike Bennett in 2011, who said: “I wouldn’t have any problem making it harder…I want the people of the state of Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who’s willing to walk 200 miles…This should not be easy.”
That view was widely repudiated in the aftermath of the 2012 election, when even Florida repealed its cutbacks to early voting. A move to significantly reduce early voting recently failed in the Georgia legislature, which can hardly be described as moderate. But Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin are stuck on the disgraced idea that the best way to win an election is to make it harder for your opponents to participate in one.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, March 28, 2014
“Blowing Away The Smoke”: A Democrat-Sponsored Tax Cut Calls The GOP’s Anti-Poverty Bluff
For months now, as congressional Republicans have blocked repeated attempts to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed, as they’ve fought to deny low-income Americans access to health insurance, as they’ve advocated to cut tens of billions from the food stamp program, as they’ve resisted proposals to raise the minimum wage, they have simultaneously professed their commitment to American workers and the poor.
Senator Patty Murray put forth a new test of that commitment on Wednesday, by introducing legislation to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is already one of the largest and most effective anti-poverty programs, rewarding low-wage earners for their work and lightening their tax burden. It’s also one of the very few specific anti-poverty policies Republicans have praised in recent months.
Murray’s bill, the “21st Century Worker Tax Cut Act,” would increase the maximum credit for childless adults and create a new tax deduction for families with two working parents. It’s intended to complement the Democrats’ campaign for a higher minimum wage, and to force Republicans to take a real stand on help for American workers. Given their recent nods towards the EITC, one might reasonably expect Republicans to consider Murray’s proposal seriously. (President Obama also proposed an EITC expansion in his budget for 2015.) Even the tax loopholes Murray proposes closing in order to pay for the expansion have already been singled out for elimination by the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Robert Camp. But these are not reasonable times.
The Republican’s recent expressions of support for expanding the EITC have always seemed more opportunistic than sincere. Rather than actively working to extend the credit to more Americans, the GOP instead uses the EITC as “a protective shield against populist attacks,” as Jonathan Chait put it; specifically, as a counterpoint to calls from the left to raise the minimum wage.
“The minimum wage makes it more expensive for employers to hire low-skilled workers, but the EITC, on the other hand, gives workers a boost—without hurting their prospects,” Representative Paul Ryan said of the EITC in a January speech at the Brookings Institution. “It gives families flexibility—it helps them take ownership of their lives.”
Conservative pundits and academics have taken a similar line. Two economists at the American Enterprise Institute argued last year that “expanding the earned income tax credit is a much more efficient way to fight poverty than increasing the minimum wage.” Steve Moore of the Heritage Foundation argued in favor of a higher EITC in January, as did former Bush advisor Glenn Hubbard. Another former Bush advisor, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, wrote recently that the EITC was “distinctly better” than raising the minimum wage because the costs are born by taxpayers rather than employers.
In his own much-hyped poverty speech in January, Senator Marco Rubio advocated for replacing the EITC with a “federal wage enhancement” subsidy. The vague contours of the alternative he proposed suggested that what he had in mind was nearly identical to the EITC, but with more support for people without kids.
Rubio was right to point out that one of the major shortcomings of the current EITC is that it offers minimal assistance to childless workers. As the program operates now, people without children who are under 25 are ineligible, and the maximum credit for those between 25 and 64 is $487. Families with children receive more substantial benefits. In 2011, their average credit was $2,905.
Murray’s bill addresses Rubio’s professed concern for childless workers by lowering the eligibility age to 21 and raising the maximum credit for childless workers to about $1,400. Those changes would benefit thirteen million people, according to a Treasury Department estimate. The legislation also increases support for families with two working parents by allowing a secondary earner to deduct twenty percent of their income from their federal taxes. This could offset childcare, transportation, and other costs associated with entering the workforce, thus encouraging more stay-at-home parents to find jobs. More than seven million families would benefit from this new deduction, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The bill also doubles the penalties for tax payers who fail to comply with the Internal Revenue Service’s “due diligence” requirement, a reform that addresses Republican concerns about the costs of improper claims.
If Republicans really wanted to use the EITC as a vehicle for boosting low wages, this legislation provides an excellent starting point for negotiation. But they’re unlikely to engage with it seriously, because their lauding of the EITC was never serious to begin with. For example, Rubio’s proposal to expand the credit for childless workers would have been accomplished by taking money away from workers with kids, instead of by increasing the size of the program overall.
Republicans will face a tricky situation if Harry Reid brings Murray’s bill up for a vote in the Senate. “If Republicans aren’t interested in supporting this bill, they’ll need to explain why they are rejecting the alternative that they have often pointed to in order to justify opposing raising the minimum wage,” a senior Democratic aide told The Nation.
If recent votes on unemployment insurance are any indication, Republicans are far more likely to risk hypocrisy and find reasons to kill the bill than do any real governing, even on policies they profess to support. If a vote doesn’t accomplish much for low-wage workers, it may at least blow away some of the smoke from the GOP’s show.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, March 26, 2014
“Hatred, The New Republican Exceptionalism”: The GOP Just Screwed Ukraine Out Of Billions To Hurt Obama
You know those people who carry on all the time about how the United States looks weak to the world, and how we have to do everything we possibly can to help poor Ukraine stand up to the evil Vladimir Putin? Well, guess what they just did? They just made the United States look weak to the world—and they actually just reduced (yes, reduced) the amount of global aid that can flow to Ukraine to help it stand up to the evil Vladimir Putin.
The deal was this: The Obama administration’s aid package to Ukraine placed before the Senate included some long-sought International Monetary Fund reforms. These reforms, which the administration agreed to in 2010 with the leading nations of Europe, and which those nations have already signed off on, would have helped Ukraine get more money from the IMF after this quick tranche from the United States ran dry. It’s complicated, but in essence, the reforms shifted money from one narrow spending category to a broader one that could be tapped by countries for projects like building and sustaining democracy, of which Ukraine is in rather desperate need. So while there wasn’t a specific dollar figure on the table, the IMF reforms could potentially, a Senate Democratic aide explained to me, have led to several billion more in aid to the country.
What’s to object to? To Republicans, this: The reforms include an increase in the U.S. contribution quota to the IMF of $63 billion. They would also give more voice to emerging nations. Now, these two measures are offset by the facts that 1) the overall U.S. expenditure on the IMF wouldn’t go up, because the U.S. would be allowed to decrease other commitments by a like amount, and 2) the U.S. would still have enough voting shares at IMF meetings to retain the veto power it has currently.
But those points don’t matter on the right, of course. Over there, it all spells a diminution of American power, the hated global governance, like Pat Buchanan’s old warnings about sending our boys out to global hotspots donning light-blue (i.e. United Nations) helmets. John McCain and Bob Corker, to their credit, supported the aid with the IMF reform tacked on. But most Republicans didn’t, and even though the full package easily passed a procedural vote, Democrats were getting the strong sense that an aid deal with the IMF stuff included wasn’t going to make it.
And so, it emerged this week that the Obama administration and Senate Democrats apparently backed off their demand for the Ukraine aid bill on Capitol Hill to include the reforms. On Monday, John Kerry visited Congress and threw in the towel. Better to have whatever we can get now than fight over this and delay matters. Or worse, lose altogether, because there was no chance that the House would ever have passed the IMF-laden version.
Let’s take stock of this. The Crimea/Ukraine crisis broke. Republicans immediately were all over Obama for being weak. The whole thing was his fault. We are all Ukrainians now. We had to stand with Ukraine to send a strong message to the malefactor Putin.
So what happens when the bill reaches them? The Obama administration tries to live up to an agreement it made—with our friends, our closest allies—four years ago at an opportune moment to press the issue, thinking that the idea that the reform would be of use to Ukraine might help matters. But as with everything, opposition to Obama is more important than anything else. If he’s for it, they’re against it. If Ukraine gets less money because of that, well, tough cheese for them.
And so it happens that the people who caterwaul about America being weak in the world become the very people who make it weaker. What does the world think as it watches this? Maybe some think merely that Obama is weak. But I’d wager most don’t. I’d wager most Europeans and others reach the right and reasonable conclusion: That American partisan dysfunction, driven far more by Republicans than by Democrats, now weakens not just our ability to carry out domestic politics but our foreign-policy aims as well.
Nothing like this has happened in decades. Yes Democrats—and several moderate Republicans, let’s remember, like John Sherman Cooper and Jacob Javits—blocked funding for the Vietnam War. But at least they were acting in accord with their long-stated principles and goal of ending that war. Today, Republicans are opposing their own stated principle of helping Ukraine as much as possible. Sen. Ted Cruz even went so far as to say that the proposed IMF reforms weakened the U.S. and strengthened Russia (I asked his spokesman to explain why this was so, and he wrote me back but never delivered an answer). In fact, Russia, Reuters has reported, is on record urging the IMF to adopt the reforms without U.S. support, and small wonder: Doing so would mean the end of the U.S. veto. So the Obama administration position of buying into the reforms is clearly something Russia doesn’t want to see.
Except for the very early days of the Cold War, politics never really quite stopped at the water’s edge. But politics did soften at the water’s edge. Not anymore. The Republicans are dug in, and as a result they are causing the very decline in standing and prestige that they are blaming on Obama. This jumps the shark from hurting the president to hurting the country. Hope they’re proud.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 26, 2014
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