“An Illegitimate Power Structure”: To Defeat GOP’s Restrictive Voting Laws, Debunk ‘Voter Fraud’
Growing up in Jim Crow Arkansas, Bill Clinton saw how the state’s dominant political and racial elite maintained power by suppressing the rights of minority voters who threatened their authority – and as a young activist worked to bring down that illegitimate power structure. So when Clinton says “There is no greater assault on our core values than the rampant efforts to restrict the right to vote” – as he does in a new video released by the Democratic National Committee – the former president knows of what he speaks.
In the segregationist South of Clinton’s youth, the enemies of the universal franchise were Democrats, but times have changed. Not just below the Mason-Dixon line but across the country, it is Republicans who have sought to limit ballot access and discourage participation by minorities, the poor, the young, and anyone else who might vote for a Democratic candidate.
No doubt that is why, at long last, the Democratic Party has launched a national organizing project, spearheaded by Clinton, to educate voters, demand reforms, and push back against restrictive laws. Returning to his role as the nation’s “explainer-in-chief,” Clinton may be able to draw public attention to the travesty of voter ID requirements and all the other tactics of suppression used by Republicans to shrink the electorate.
His first task is to debunk the claims of “voter fraud” fabricated by Republican legislators and right-wing media outlets as the rationale for restrictive laws. Lent a spurious credibility by the legendary abuses of old-time political machines, those claims make voter suppression seem respectable and even virtuous.
Some years ago the Brennan Center for Justice, based at New York University and led by former Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman, issued a 45-page report on voter fraud that remains definitive. “There have been a handful of substantiated cases of individual ineligible voters attempting to defraud the election system,” the report noted. “But by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” And because fraud is so unusual, GOP counter-measures such as voter ID do much more harm than good.
As the Brennan Center study noted, even some Republicans know that their leaders have exaggerated stories of fraud for partisan advantage. In 2007, the Houston Chronicle quoted Royal Masset, the former political director of the Texas Republican Party, who observed that among Republicans it is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections.” Masset admitted that suspicion is false, but said he believed that requiring voters to provide photo ID could sufficiently reduce participation by legitimate Democratic voters to add three percent to Republican tallies.
More recently one of the dimmer lights in the Pennsylvania Republican Party – the majority leader of the state House of Representatives, in fact – boasted that the voter ID statute he had rammed through the legislature would “allow Governor Romney to win the election” in November 2012. Although Mike Turzai later insisted that “there has been a history of voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” the state government conceded in court that it could cite no evidence showing that “in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere.”
Clinton can also consult the President’s Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan panel appointed by President Obama to improve the country’s voting systems. In its final report issued last January, the commission forthrightly acknowledged that true voter fraud is “rare.” It was a singular admission by a group whose co-chairs included Benjamin Ginsberg, an aggressive Republican election attorney who bears the burden of responsibility for the outcome of Bush-Gore 2000.
If he is in a bipartisan mood, as he often is, Clinton would surely find the commission’s report uplifting – especially its recommendations to make voting more modern, more efficient, and above all more accessible. For both parties to improve and expand the democratic rights of citizens would be uplifting indeed.
But Clinton is more likely to find himself feeling less kindly toward the Republicans, as they continue to promote outrageous suppression while feigning outrage over “fraud.” The Democrats may be equally motivated by partisan self-interest – but so long as they defend the rights of the intimidated and the disenfranchised, their moral force will be undiminished.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 28, 2014
“The GOP’s Ted Nugent Problem”: Torn Between Expanding Its Base And Appealing To Loyalists
The Republican Party in the era of the Tea Party and the “autopsy” can’t make up its mind. Torn between expanding its base so that it can survive in the long term and appeasing its loyalists so it can survive in the short term, the party doesn’t know where to go. The choice boils down to winning a few more seats in November and writing off the future of the party. Oddly, November seems to be winning every time.
For Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott the choice seems easy. He chose Ted Nugent, the physical embodiment of the off-the-rails toxicity that Republicans just don’t know how to quit. Abbott certainly had to know the stir he’d cause when he invited Nugent to join him on the campaign trail last week.
Ted Nugent is not just a former rocker who happens to be a Republican. Nugent’s infamous “subhuman mongrel” slur is just a representative sample of the bile he produces on a regular basis. He has threatened the president, saying, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun,” told an audience to “keep a fucking gun in your hand, boys” in response to the Obama administration, implied the president is like a coyote who needs to be shot, and said before the 2012 election that if the “vile, evil America-hating” Obama were to be reelected, Nugent would be “either dead or in jail by this time next year.”(For the record, Nugent is still very much alive and free to make statements like the above.)
Why listen to Nugent (as People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch does more often than they would probably like)? Because he doesn’t just shout his rants from the stage at his concerts. He shares the stage with people like Greg Abbott.
In a time when many Republicans are trying to moderate the rhetoric they use to explain their extreme policies, Greg Abbott is just the latest who apparently has no such concerns. He ‘s more than happy to provide a platform for Nugent, an unabashedly violent, and unapologetic racist spokesperson who exults in attacking the president- – when the president is Barack Obama, that is.
Nugent has speculated whether “it would have been best had the South won the Civil War”; suggested banning people who owe no federal income tax from voting; lashed out at “those well-fed motherfucker food stamp cocksuckers”; and blamed Trayvon Martin’s death on the “mindless tendency to violence we see in black communities across America.”
In other words, Nugent’s not the sort of person any reasonable candidate would invite along on the campaign trail. But reason is not the way to prove one’s bona fides to a large share of the Tea Party that has taken over the Grand Old Party. When Nugent said in a campaign appearance that “we don’t have to question Greg Abbott’s courage, because he invited me here today,” he was reassuring the base that “autopsy reports” aside, the GOP has no intention of changing.
And that’s the problem. Ted Nugent isn’t a Greg Abbott gaffe. His presence on the Abbott campaign trail represents a deliberate effort to cultivate the most extreme elements of the Republican base. The party can moderate its positions to attract more voters. Or it can stick with extremism to keep a core of the voters it has. But it can’t have it both ways.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People for The American Way ; The Huffington Post Blog, February 27, 2014
“They’ll Never Rally Behind A Single Plan”: The GOP’s Push To Replace ObamaCare Is Cynical And Doomed
On Friday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is gathering key members of his caucus to work toward coming up with a single, official Republican alternative to the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act (ACA), or ObamaCare. Republican lawmakers have several competing bills to work with, and putting the party’s weight behind one plan or piece of legislation would be great for the country: Finally, America could have a real discussion about the best way to reform America’s health care insurance system.
But an official Republican health care plan would also be great for Democrats — which is reason No. 1 Republicans aren’t going to actually rally behind a single plan.
They will, of course, make a public effort. “GOP leaders have been clear that ahead of the 2014 elections, the conference wants to show what it is for, not simply what it is against,” says Daniel Newhauser at Roll Call. “Similarly, they want to show that they are not in favor of simply returning to the old health care system, which is viewed unfavorably by the electorate.” But any viable plan needs 218 votes from the fractured GOP caucus.
Cantor and his fellow House Republicans have at least three separate House bills to consider — from Reps. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) — and a plan from Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that was unveiled to much fanfare in January. There’s also a bill, from Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), that would raise ObamaCare’s definition of full-time employment to 40 hours a week, from 30. And a George W. Bush administration economist named Edward Lazear is pushing what he calls BushCare.
As they sort through these plans, what criteria will they use? If they can agree on one proposal, says Roll Call‘s Newhauser, it’s “likely to include poll-tested measures that have broad agreement in the GOP conference, including allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines, allowing insurance portability between jobs, expanding access to health savings accounts, and limiting medical malpractice lawsuits.”
Another way of putting that: Republicans are looking for popular talking points that sound different enough from ObamaCare to win support from the more conservative factions of the GOP caucus. The problem, as The Washington Post notes, is that “there are only so many ways to preserve the patient protections that the ACA offers, which Republicans say they want to keep, while maintaining a private insurance market and assisting those who can’t afford coverage.”
Once Republicans hold up a specific plan, the Congressional Budget Office gets to issue its verdict and the public gets to weigh the proposals not just against ObamaCare but also the GOP’s attacks against ObamaCare.
The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.
It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post editors note, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down health care costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo — especially post-ObamaCare — and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.
All of the GOP alternative plans, in other words, have their own drawbacks. Some people will lose, and some people will win. They would reduce the role of the federal government in most cases, but increase the power of insurance companies. Many of the policies are really interesting. Here are some examples of the big ideas from the GOP plans:
Cap or end employer tax breaks for providing health insurance: The idea here is that the insurance market is distorted by the tax incentives for employers to offering their workers insurance. It’s a fair point. But capping the tax breaks, as Coburn-Burr-Hatch does, or eliminating them would almost certainly cause employers to drop their plans. Almost 60 percent of Americans get their health insurance through work.
Provide tax breaks for individuals to buy their own insurance: With no employer-offered health plans, individuals and families would buy their own insurance on the open market. The Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan, for example, offers age-adjusted tax credits to people at up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line: Individuals 18 to 34 would get $1,560 a year, while those 50 to 64 would get $3,720 a year (families would get more than double those figures). Lazear’s BushCare would give all Americans with any type of health insurance $7,500 a year in tax breaks, or $15,000 for families; if people opted to buy low-cost, low-coverage insurance, they’d pocket the difference.
Allow insurance to be sold across state lines: This is a perennial GOP proposal to lower health insurance costs. The idea is that if insurers could sell the same policies to any state, regardless of that state’s own insurance regulations, it would increase market competition and drive down prices. A 2005 CBO report estimated those savings to consumers at about 5 percent overall, with the savings skewed toward the young and healthy; the old and sick would pay more. Enacting this option would require scrapping the minimum standards required for all plans under ObamaCare — a selling point for conservatives who argue we use too much health care, anyway.
“The fact that Republicans are coalescing around healthcare reform plans of their own could be very bad news for ObamaCare,” says Sally C. Pipes at Forbes. “Once voters see that the Republican alternative adds up to sensible and affordable health care, ObamaCare’s days will be numbered.”
But the opposite is almost certainly true. And House Republicans know that.
The GOP has gotten a lot of mileage out of its push to repeal ObamaCare — with a big assist, since October, from the Obama administration — but now the law is signing up real people (four million and counting) for real insurance policies. Republicans have to do better than provide plausible-sounding alternatives. They have to come up with a plan that Americans will think is much better than ObamaCare, and worth the disruption of overhauling the health care system again.
Here’s the bottom line: If reforming America’s health care system to provide near-universal affordable coverage were easy, it would have been done 60 years ago — or at any point since. Several Democratic presidents had tried and failed before President Obama. If Republicans had wanted to take their own bite at the apple, they had plenty of chances, too.
This isn’t spitballing. If Republicans want to be relevant voices in the health care debate, they have to come up with something. They should come up with a plan they can try to sell to America.
“One of the unseemly aspects of the last four-plus months is watching some on the right root for ObamaCare to fail,” says Forbes‘ Avik Roy, one of ObamaCare’s wonkiest critics. Among some conservatives, “there has been a kind of intellectual laziness, a belief that there’s no need for critics to come up with better reforms, because Obamacare will ‘collapse under its own weight,’ relieving them of that responsibility.” But it’s clear now that’s not going to happen, he adds. “And that makes the development of a credible, market-oriented health-reform agenda more urgent than ever.”
Well, don’t hold your breath.
The Affordable Care Act was written and enacted by Democrats — with a few exceptions — and that’s one of its main weaknesses: If Republicans had helped shape and pass the law, they probably wouldn’t have spent the last four years attacking and undermining it. They now have at least 10 months left to criticize the law without having to take any serious action to replace it. Don’t expect them to squander the opportunity.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, February 26, 2014
“In Shocker, GOP Proposes Cutting Taxes For The Wealthy”: Don’t Believe The Baloney About Tax Simplification
For some time, I’ve been saying, perhaps naively, that we ought to have a real debate about tax reform, and maybe actually accompish something. Sure, Democrats and Republicans have different goals when it comes to this issue—Democrats would like to see the elimination of loopholes and greater revenue, while Republicans want to reduce taxes on the wealthy—but there may be a few things they could agree on somewhere in there. You never know.
So today, Representative Dave Camp, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, is releasing the latest incarnation of Republican tax reform. And it’s…exactly what you’d expect. Unfortunately.
In fact, though we’re waiting for details, it looks almost exactly like the plan Republicans released two years ago. The centerpiece is an elimination of most tax brackets, leaving only two, at 10 percent and 25 percent. In a total shocker, that means a huge tax break for the wealthy! I know—I too am amazed that Republicans would propose such a thing.
But they’ll make up the revenue, they protest. How? Well as always, Republicans say they’ll eliminate loopholes, but won’t say which ones. The reason for that is simple: everyone hates loopholes that other people benefit from, but everyone wants to keep their own loopholes. As long as you never say which loopholes you’d eliminate, nobody has reason to fight against your plan, since they don’t know whether the ox being gored is theirs or someone else’s. Furthermore, the really big loopholes are ones that lots of people love, like the mortgage interest deduction, a largely middle- and upper-class entitlement that cost the Treasury $82 billion in 2012, or the deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the largest tax expenditure at a whopping $184 billion. Think anyone’s going to eliminate those? Not on your life. But that’s where the real money is.
There is one new thing in this Republican proposal, a surtax on certain incomes over $400,000 a year, which would assumedly recover some of the money we’re losing by cutting those people’s taxes. But there are some devilish details. First, some kinds of high earners, like those in manufacturing, are excluded. And most importantly, it would only apply to wages over $400,000, and not investment income. In other words, as is usually the case with Republican proposals, they reflect a particular value: that work should be taxed at a higher rate than investments. And of course, the higher you go up the income scale, the greater the proportion of their income the wealthy get from their investments.
One final note on this. The part of the plan that will get the most attention is reducing the number of tax brackets to two. This is always offered in the name of “tax simplification,” but the truth is that the number of brackets is just about the least complicated thing about the tax code. Kevin Drum has it right:
I’m not encouraged by the fact that reducing the number of tax brackets is apparently a key feature of this “simplification” plan. That doesn’t simplify things by even an iota. The hard part of calculating your taxes, after all, is figuring out your taxable income. That takes about 99.9 percent of your time. Once that’s all done, the final step is to look up your tax rate and then multiply the rate by your taxable income. That part takes about 30 seconds.
In fact, we ought to have more tax brackets, not fewer, particularly at the high end. There’s no reason that someone making $400,000 a year should pay the same marginal rate as someone making $400 million a year.
Anyhow, the most consequential feature of this Republican tax plan, like those that came before it, is its attempt to relieve the nation’s wealthy of their burden of taxes, so terribly weighed down as they are. Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I can’t recall there ever being a Republican tax plan that didn’t propose precisely that. Ever. And they wonder why Democrats have so much success characterizing them as the party of the rich.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 26, 2014
“Conservatism Is Too Big For Its Own Good”: The Right No Longer Understands The Difference Between The Movement And The Party
There’s a moment every year at the Conservative Political Action Conference when some eminence from the 1970s talks about the good old days at CPAC, hearkening back to the time when Ronald Reagan would show up and speak to a a small room of only about 500 activists. Things have changed. Now there are about 500 journalists who get registered to report on CPAC, which has bloated to some 10,000 participants in the fat years.
Maybe conservatism is just too big for its own good.
The conservative movement has grown large because it aspired to be something greater than a part of the Republican coalition. It wanted to become the entirety of the GOP. Instead of splitting into different interest groups, the conservative movement devises ad-hoc philosophies to integrate single-issue advocates into a larger coalition. You’re not just for low taxes or against abortion, you’re a conservative!
In this sense, the conservative movement has become a kind of parallel institution that drains resources, attention, talent, and energy from the GOP’s own electoral and governing efforts. Conservative Inc. is an enterprise with enough resources and power to be an attractive alternative to America’s official institutions of electoral power.
If you are a Republican politician and don’t have the wherewithal to become president of the United States, perhaps you have enough talent to become president of Conservatism. It’s an unofficial position, but has plenty of benefits. You won’t have the psychic pleasures of representing the electoral will of the American public, but you also won’t be burdened by any real responsibilities either.
Naturally, the idea of being a player without responsibility provides more attractions for charlatans, rabble-rousers, and opportunists.
Shades of this phenomena began in the 1990s presidential primaries. Whereas Pat Buchanan picked a principled fight with his party over issues like trade and foreign policy, candidates like Alan Keyes ran less for president than for publicity: mailing lists filled out, speaking fees increased, and radio shows picked up on more networks.
By the 2012 Republican primaries, it was obvious that there were in fact two competitions happening on the same debate stages. Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and even Newt Gingrich were not running for president in the same way that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry were.
This seems not to happen in the Democratic primaries. Sure, 2004 saw Howard Dean emerge as the leader of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” But there is no parallel universe called Liberalism where he and Mike Gravel could become well-paid industries unto themselves as think leaders, book hawkers, and distinguished dinner guests. Dean became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a political job with actual responsibilities and geared toward winning elections, not just flame wars.
The composition of the Democratic coalition seems stronger precisely because it is more splintered and more issue driven. No one is afraid that Planned Parenthood or the teachers’ unions are going to impose a broad-ranging ideological revolution on the nation. The public assumes that they will simply lobby for their particular, limited interests and that the party to which they belong will have a moderating effect on them.
But the conservative movement really is large enough to exert a destabilizing gravitational force on the entire political culture. Its opponents fear that its size and strength make the GOP immoderate. And they may be right.
In any GOP presidential primary, the candidates who are running to be unofficial head of the conservative movement can do a great deal of damage to the GOP’s eventual nominee. They can pressure the eventual candidate to over-commit to the right in the primary race, essentially handing them more baggage to carry in the general election. Or they can cripple the eventual primary winner by highlighting the nominee’s deviations from the movement, dispiriting the GOP’s base of voters.
When the attendees of CPAC gather in Washington early next month and conduct their presidential straw poll with the self importance of a warning shot, it might profit them to consider whether they intend to elect a new president of their ideological ghetto or one for their nation.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, February 26, 2014
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