“One Trick Pony”: Ted Cruz Cements His Position As The GOP’s Master Troll
On the Internet, a troll purposely inflames anyone he can to attract attention to himself, in hopes of wasting everyone’s time and energy. In the Republican Party, a troll does the same thing and he becomes a hero of the far right and a frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced on Monday that he had hired Paul Teller as his deputy chief of staff.
Teller — a favorite of outside conservative groups like Club for Growth — was swiftly fired from his position as executive director of the far-right Republican Study Committee in December after leaking conversations between House members.
Cruz’s new hire immediately won praise from Red State’s Erick Erickson, a leader in the movement to push the Republican Party further to the right by demanding continued standoffs in Congress and supporting primary challenges to incumbents, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) joined McConnell in speaking out against outside conservative groups in December, after several opposed the budget deal Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) negotiated with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). By hiring Teller, Cruz cements his allegiance with the groups who championed his effort to shut down the government over Obamacare, which he was able to pull off with the help of the House GOP’s so-called “suicide caucus,” many of whom are members of the Republican Study Committee.
Cruz’s willingness to spurn his party’s leaders represents just one trick in his impressive arsenal of trolling tactics.
The Harvard-educated lawyer, who argued in front of the Supreme Court nine times, recently published a 10,000-word article in the Harvard Law Review that speaks to one of the darkest fantasies of the Tea Party movement: How the United Nations is coming to take our golf courses.
The Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs points out that Cruz is artfully speaking to the fear of a world government, a fringe idea that’s surprisingly widespread among the Republican base. If he spoke about his concerns about the UN on network television, he would be deemed “wacky” or “wackier.” So instead, he’s presenting them in one of the most prestigious law journals in the world.
The senator’s immense intellect gives him the ability to frame his extremism in acceptable venues. And it also enables him to make convenient arguments against the president that serve his agenda but crumble under scrutiny.
In an attempt to brand Obama as “imperial,” Cruz attacked the president for ignoring federal law in effectively allowing Colorado and Washington state to legalize marijuana.
This critique raised the hackles of Jacob Sullum at Reason.com, who points out that the federal government has virtually never prosecuted personal marijuana use. The Department of Justice has retained the right to crack down at any time, something the senator decided not to point out. But for now, the DOJ has decided to use its “limited investigative and prosecutorial resources to address the most significant threats in the most effective, consistent, and rational way” — as it always has.
But since Cruz lumped his concerns about marijuana legalization in with a screed against Obamacare, he knows that few in the audience he’s trying to reach will parse out what he’s saying.
The shutdown that the senator championed has led to new lows in popularity for the Republican Party.
However, a big chunk of the GOP’s unfavorable rating comes from the party’s base.
In a recent YouGov/Economist tracking poll, 37 percent of Republicans viewed the members of their own party unfavorably, compared to 10 percent of Democrats. Many Republicans believe the party actually gave up too soon in the government shutdown standoff. They want constant, unwavering opposition and charges of lawlessness against the president.
Essentially, they want the party to be made up entirely of Ted Cruzes.
We’ve been telling you about the remarkable descent of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) from Republican savior to Tea Party troll.
But Rubio’s problem is that compared to Cruz, he’ll always be a squish. He’s dabbled in bipartisanship and proposed “amnesty” for “illegals.” Even if the junior senator from Florida ultimately votes against his own bill, he’ll still be the kind of Republican Ted Cruz lives to crush, even if the senators agree on almost every conceivable issue.
This isn’t because Rubio is not intent on being disruptive or contentious or a “walking press release announcing a no vote.” It’s because he’ll always be in the shadow of a true master of the form.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 14, 2014
“Endless Crusades”: Tea Party Delays Spending, Beats Dead Horse
It will only cover three days, but once again next week Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open. The current resolution expires on Wednesday, and even though a budget agreement was reached last month, appropriators in both chambers still haven’t nailed down a plan to tell various agencies what they can spend.
There are many reasons for that delay — the appropriations committees only had a few weeks after the budget deal to cobble together a massive $1 trillion bill, known as an omnibus. But one of the biggest is that House Republicans from the Tea Party wing have demanded that the bill reflect their ideological goals.
They have insisted, for example, that no money be spent to implement the health care reform law, or that various aspects of the law be cut back so sharply that it would not be workable. They don’t want money spent to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They want sharp reductions in the National Labor Relations Board.
More than 130 of these so-called riders have been filed by lawmakers, many of whom wouldn’t vote for the omnibus even if their provisions were adopted. Some are particularly ridiculous, including:
* Forbidding the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing its rule on the safe removal of lead paint.
* Prohibiting the Fish and Wildlife Service from including the sage grouse on the endangered species list.
* Prohibiting subsidies for any health care plan that includes abortion. (Many states already forbid this, but this rider would make the ban nationwide.)
* Banning the government from requiring federal contractors to disclose their political contributions — one of the Obama administration’s better transparency proposals, which it eventually dropped in the face of business opposition.
Many of these riders have been dropped by the negotiators, but some, including those involving the health care law, have yet to be resolved. (Appropriators think the omnibus bill will be ready by next week.) Republican leaders can’t afford another government shutdown, but apparently they haven’t yet convinced their most radical members to stop their endless crusades.
By: David Firestone, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, January 10, 2014
“Still Playing Games”: House Votes To Undermine ACA, Again
The House of Representatives held its first meaningful floor vote of 2014 this morning, sending a clear signal about the Republican majority’s priorities. Did they vote on unemployment benefits? The farm bill? One of the many other unfinished bills from 2013?
No, the GOP majority is still playing games with health care.
A significant number of Democrats broke party lines to vote on the House’s first anti-Obamacare vote of 2014 on Friday, a blow to party unity and leadership’s advice that rank-and-file members stand strong against GOP “gotcha” bills.
The legislation, which would require victims of security breaches through HealthCare.gov insurance exchanges to be notified within two days, passed 291-122. Sixty-seven Democrats sided with all voting Republicans to hoist the bill over the finish line.
The fact that so many Democratic lawmakers broke ranks wasn’t a huge surprise – it’s now an election year and they seem reluctant to create attack-ad fodder by opposing pointless “messaging” bills.
As we discussed last week, the proposal comes by way of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has a lengthy record of preferring partisan games to actual governing. It also dovetails with a coordinated messaging campaign championed by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
Indeed, today’s vote was unusually vapid. As has been reported many times, there have been no security breaches; literally zero Americans’ personal information has been compromised; administrative security testing for healthcare.gov is constant; and when rare vulnerabilities have popped up, the problems have been identified and resolved quickly and safely.
What’s more, while the bill approved by the House today would require HHS to notify consumers if their personal information is accessed improperly, it’s worth noting (a) HHS is already required to make these notifications, making the legislation unnecessary; and (b) since consumers’ personal information is not actually stored on healthcare.gov, the underlying concern really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So what’s the point of pushing a pointless bill and making it the first proposal voted on in 2014? I found remarks from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, quite compelling.
“Despite all these positive results, Republicans are still obsessed with killing this law. Since they cannot do so legislatively, they have shifted to a different tactic: scaring people away from the website.
“So my second point is this: there have been no successful security breaches of Healthcare.gov. Nobody’s personal information has been maliciously hacked. […]
“These are important facts for the American people to know. But the Republicans disregard them and omit them because they undermine their claims. Many of us would support efforts to strengthen requirements for the entire federal government and private sector to notify consumers of breaches. But today’s bill does not do that. Today’s bill is the latest attempt to attack the Affordable Care Act and deprive millions of Americans of the healthcare they deserve.”
As for actual security threats, Jennifer Bendery makes a point that can’t be emphasized enough: “[T]he most credible threat to the website’s security may be the loudest critic of the website’s security: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 10, 2014
“GOP’s Poverty Scam”: Why Does It Suddenly “Care” About The Poor?
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio finally gave his much-anticipated speech on poverty, a hot trend among Republicans seeking the presidency. Rubio emerged from the dense thicket of conservative think tank writing on the subject with one actual proposal: wage subsidies. Which, you know, fine, let’s have wage subsidies! They seem like an OK idea. Sure, they might encourage employers to pay low-wage employees less money in order to receive more subsidies, but if the options are nothing versus wage subsidies, I am going with wage subsidies.
Will any other Republican, though? Unlike raising the minimum wage, any wage subsidy program will actually require the government to spend money, and Republicans are unified in their opposition to the government spending money on poor people. Rubio’s support may not do much to convince them to abandon this core principle; he’s not the potential party savior he once looked to be.
Still, points for actually advocating for an actual policy that would actually help people! That’s more than Paul Ryan, Rand Paul or Eric Cantor have done so far in this rhetorical war on poverty. Thus far, their efforts have run up against the brick wall that is the modern conservative movement’s utter inability to craft policy that hasn’t been completely discredited by the last 30+ years of American political and economic history. So, Cantor has come up with “school vouchers” and Paul has tried “economic freedom zones,” which seem to be like “enterprise zones” — already the most popular urban economic revitalization scheme extant, to mostly middling effect — only with even fewer worker protections or environmental regulations. Also a capital gains tax cut. Always a capital gains tax cut. America is just one more capital gains tax cut away from winning the war on poverty!
The recent spike in Republicans suddenly claiming they care about poor people is, honestly, a bit strange. Their voters, for the most part, do not care, and do not care if their politicians say they care. For those wishing to win elections as Republicans in recent years, it has tended to be more effective to loudly denounce the poor, or at least to denounce those who support making the poor less poor. After all, the poor are only poor because they want to be, or are morally deficient, or because of Democrats who keep them poor to maintain a large voting bloc of poor people.
When Republicans called Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” they claimed that they meant that it was a shame that Obama’s policies had devastated the economy so much that so many people now relied on food stamps. Their actual meaning (well, their actual meaning besides just wanting to blow a racist dog whistle) was that liberal policies had fostered a culture of dependency — that is, that living on the dole was so swell that unemployment was a better option than working for a living. This, again, is the blame-the-poor argument that the right has made forever and that the Republican Party has enthusiastically adopted since Reagan.
And it’s not a terribly ineffective political argument! Americans hate the poor, and deeply resent the idea of any of their money going to help them. That’s why Clinton killed welfare, and why food stamps are now at risk. There’s little political upside in promising to help the poor, and for years Democrats have only ever promised to help “all Americans” and “the middle class.”
But Republicans have decided that part of what hurt Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was that time he called nearly half the nation moochers. This was, they are well aware, merely a slightly artless restatement of a core conservative belief, but it turns out that in a nation in the midst of an ongoing, seemingly never-ending employment crisis, this is maybe not a popular position among voters not already deeply committed to the conservative project. So saying “I care about poverty” is one way to help shake the correct impression voters have that Republicans are devoted solely to the further enrichment of the already wealthy.
Poverty is also a subject about which it’s incredibly easy to bamboozle most of the mainstream political press. You can get swell coverage merely for saying you care about the poor, as Paul Ryan recently has. Because political reporters are unable and unwilling to analyze policy, and curiously reluctant to speak to anyone who can, you can also claim any program at all will lessen poverty or help the unemployed. And for Ryan, “caring about the poor” is a good way to reestablish Seriousness: He becomes one of the Few Serious Republicans with plans to help the poor. Poverty is a better subject for this act than most other liberal issues — like, say, the environment — because Republicans are at least allowed to acknowledge that it is bad that some people are poor.
If Ryan talks about the poor to burnish his wonk cred (and remove the stink of his association with Mitt Romney), Paul’s new shtick is clearly “compassionate libertarianism” (not to be confused with bleeding-heart libertarianism). Like compassionate conservatism, it is the same as the non-compassionate version, except its proponent publicly expresses compassion for people who will not benefit from it.
The only risk these Republicans have to avoid is supporting any policy at all that will help poor people, because those policies will then be supported by Democrats. If Rubio’s idea shows any sign of being able to pass in Congress, Democrats will support it, and then it will become a Democratic policy, and Republicans will be forced to hate it forever. Just about the only prominent Republican elected official who has actually done anything that will actually benefit actual poor people, as Alec MacGillis notes, is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who accepted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. That is, he helped Ohio’s impoverished by enacting a Democratic policy. (He may have done so in part because Ohio is just about 50.1 percent Democratic, according to the 2012 presidential election results, and Kasich is up for reelection this year.)
It’s the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, and it’s nice to see various liberals defending it. For years after its dismantling, no one (well, no one taken seriously in the political elite) was allowed to say that big government programs were an effective means of eliminating poverty. Now, finally, old-fashioned economic progressivism has begun to become a position people are allowed to advocate for in public. (Though everyone is still encouraged to couch all such advocacy in conservative, “pro-market” tones, because that is what our deeply conservative elite is most comfortable with.) There’s very little reason to be optimistic that Republicans “discovering” poverty will lead to any serious national effort to eradicate poverty, but maybe (maybe!) it will make conventional liberals less terrified of actually embracing the eradication of poverty as a goal.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 9, 2014
“Sorry, GOP Reformers”: Your Own Party Isn’t Interested
Republican reformers are getting excited. For years, Ross Douthat and David Frum have been stubbornly making the case for a more moderate and economically populist GOP that would speak to and offer solutions for the problems facing struggling Americans. They are no longer voices crying out in the wilderness.
David Brooks has joined them in a column touting several reform-minded articles in the latest issue of National Affairs, a center-right policy journal. This comes in the wake of a recent speech by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and some not-so-recent speeches by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on how the GOP might begin to combat poverty.
Taken together, these columns, articles, and speeches show that the movement for Republican reform has begun to persuade…at least a dozen people.
That’s no doubt an exaggeration on the low end, but it goes a long way toward explaining why I’m skeptical about reform efforts. By all means, such efforts are to be applauded and encouraged. But until Republican voters begin to express their support for them in opinion polls and at the ballot box, reform proposals will remain the impotent pet projects of pundits and politicians.
The fact is that there’s no sign so far that those voters want anything to do with new government initiatives to help the poor — or to do anything else for that matter. “Government is too big!” “Taxes are too high!” “Washington is the problem, not the solution!” Those are the only messages the Republican base wants to hear — and thus the only messages most Republicans dare deliver on the campaign trail or act on in the halls of Congress.
There’s a reason why the first tentative expressions of support for reform have come from senators, who are elected by entire states every six years. That distance from those partisan passions, which have produced a deep right-wing skew in gerrymandered House districts, gives senators more ideological freedom of movement.
Still, Republican senators must deal with irascible primary voters. And in the House there is no such freedom, which is why that chamber’s Republican majority refuses to budge on extending unemployment benefits or reversing cuts to food stamps. It is also why Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) efforts to revive immigration reform is likely to fail as well. Republican voters want none of it, and that’s exactly what they’ll get.
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. He, too, has been trying to rebrand himself as a reformer — talking about the problem of poverty, and reaching a bipartisan deal to pass the bill that temporarily ended gridlock over the budget. All of it is an effort to make himself palatable as a general election presidential candidate. (Nothing inspires donors like “electability.”) But his position is only possible because he established himself as a leading conservative warrior on economic issues, which got the Romney ticket in so much trouble in 2012; indeed, it remains to be seen whether Ryan’s commitment to centrist reform is anything more than PR gloss.
That points to the depth of the GOP’s problem. Its base uncompromisingly demands that party members toe a line that places them far to the right of the median American voter. As long as that continues, Republicans will find themselves out of serious contention for the White House — and unable to follow through on any serious proposals for reform.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 10, 2014
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