By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 2, 2011
Grover Norquist “Is Paralyzing Congress”
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) is one of just six Republican in Congress who haven’t signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. On the House floor Tuesday, he attacked Norquist for single-handedly enforcing this hard line within the GOP, creating a destructive impasse in the legislative process. “Everything must be on the table and I believe how the ‘pledge’ is interpreted and enforced by Mr. Norquist is a roadblock to realistically reforming our tax code,” Wolf said. “Have we really reached a point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralyzing Congress to the point that even a discussion of tax reform is viewed as breaking a no-tax pledge?”
Wolf also attacked Norquist personally, claiming that he has “deep ties to supporters of Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” as well as to Jack Abramoff and other “unsavory groups and people.” Norquist fired back by accusing Wolf of racism. “I’m married to a woman who’s Muslim, and it’s sad and it’s disgusting,” Norquist told Yahoo News. “He’s going to spend a lot of time apologizing for getting into the gutter and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry.” Norquist claims Wolf is targeting him because he’s been unable to persuade his colleagues to budge on their anti-tax pledge.
Americans for Tax Reform continued the counterattack on Wolf in a series of e-mail blasts on Tuesday evening. “Frank Wolf Admits He Supports Trillions in Tax Hikes,” ATR titled one e-mail, calling the congressman’s support for the Bowles-Simpson commission’s recommendations an endorsement of a “net tax increase of $1-3 trillion over ten years.” (In fact, Bowles-Simpson raises $2.3 trillion in revenue by lowering rates but eliminating deductions and exclusions.) ATR also accused Wolf of borrowing the “Obama/DCCC Playbook to Craft Lies About the Tax Pledge,” saying that the pledge allows for the elimination of tax breaks so long as overall level of taxation doesn’t increase.
Wolf’s hit on Norquist was an unusually open attack by a conservative against the anti-tax absolutism that Congressional Republicans have almost uniformly embraced. But there have been earlier signs of this rift within the GOP. Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), a staunch fiscal conservative, pitted himself against Norquist by proposing to eliminate tax breaks for ethanol. Norquist insisted that ending such subsidies would only be acceptable if the revenue was used to pay for more tax cuts.
Wolf, in fact, referred to Coburn’s feud in his denunciation on the House floor yesterday: “When Senator Tom Coburn recently called for eliminating the special interest ethanol tax subsidy, who led the opposition? Mr. Norquist.” The question is whether other Congressional Republicans will join Wolf and Coburn in openly pushing back against the Norquist, anti-tax orthodoxy that has been at the heart of the bipartisan struggle to reduce the deficit.
Update: Another Republican is pushing now back against Norquist. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), who signed the ATR anti-tax pledge, suggested that such pledges could be broken to achieve broad-based tax reform in a Wednesday interview with MSNBC.
By: Suzy Khimm, The Washington Post, October 5, 2011
They Don’t Like You, Mitt. They Really Don’t Like You
Republican moneymen and pundits are starting to flock to the Mitt Romney banner, sending forth the word that it is time to bow to the inevitable. But the Republican voters just do not like Mitt Romney.
The depth the of the base’s resistance to falling in behind next-in-line Romney has continuously shocked observers, resulting first in the rise of Donald Trump, then Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry. Now Perry is swooning, and his support has gone to … Herman Cain!
In the latest Washington Post poll, Perry’s support has halved over the last month, but Romney remains stuck at 25 percent. Cain has risen to 16 percent. The new CBS poll has Cain tied, at 17 percent, for first place with Romney. PPP polled Republicans in North Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia, and found Cain leading in all three states.
I don’t think Cain can win the nomination, and I’m not sure he really wants it (as opposed to a nice Fox News gig.) Saying you might vote for Herman Cain for president — of the United States, not of a pizza chain — can only be read as a cry of protest.
I don’t see how Republicans could be making this any more plain. They do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.
His problem is summed up neatly by today’s The Wall Street Journal editorial:
The main question about Mr. Romney is whether his political character matches the country’s huge current challenges. The former Bain Capital CEO is above all a technocrat, a man who believes in expertise as the highest political virtue. The details of his RomneyCare program in Massachusetts were misguided enough, but the larger flaw it revealed is Mr. Romney’s faith that he can solve any problem, and split any difference, if he can only get the smartest people in the room. …Republicans need a nominee who can make the opposing case on practical and moral grounds, not shrink from it out of guilt or excess political caution.
This encapsulates the main difference between the two parties. I’ve made this point many times before, but I think it’s pretty fundamental. The conservative movement is committed to a series of strong philosophical principles about government. They believe in a smaller government that takes less from the rich on moral grounds, as the Journal says. The Democratic Party does not have the same kind of deeper philosophical commitment, and is much more comfortable with technocracy.
Romney’s technocratic skills are not only not a plus for him. For many conservatives, they are something close to a disqualification. On many of the largest public issues, the technocratic consensus binds the center-right with the center-left and excludes the Republican position. Technocrats generally agree that we should increase short-term deficits while simultaneously decreasing long-term deficits through a combination of reducing tax expenditures and entitlement spending. There’s a somewhat less strong technocratic consensus that we should find a way to put a price on carbon emissions. These are all policies supported by the Obama administration and fiercely opposed by the GOP because they do violence to conservative anti-government principles.
Conservatives don’t want a president who’s open to different means of achieving ends (ending the recession, controlling health care costs.) They want somebody who’s set in stone on using the right means — less government.
Romney, because of the bizarre succession of real and potential foes removing themselves from consideration, may win the nomination by default. But the mismatch between him and the party he wants to lead is not going away.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Inte, New York Magazine, October 5, 2011
Can The Left Stage A Tea Party?
Why hasn’t there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship?
That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation’s political energy has been monopolized by the right from the beginning of Obama’s term. This has skewed media coverage of almost every issue, created the impression that the president is far more liberal than he is, and turned the nation’s agenda away from progressive reform.
A quiet left has also been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the Tea Party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is a fair fight between the right and the left.
It’s not surprising that Obama’s election unleashed a conservative backlash. Ironically, disillusionment with George W. Bush’s presidency had pushed Republican politics right, not left. Given the public’s negative verdict on Bush, conservatives shrewdly argued that his failures were caused by his lack of fealty to conservative doctrine. He was cast as a big spender (even if a large chunk of the largess went to Iraq). He was called too liberal on immigration and a big-government guy for bailing out the banks, using federal power to reform the schools and championing a Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Conservative funders realized that pumping up the Tea Party movement was the most efficient way to build opposition to Obama’s initiatives. And the media became infatuated with the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, covering its disruptions of congressional town halls with an enthusiasm not visible this summer when many Republicans faced tough questions from their more progressive constituents.
Obama’s victory, in the meantime, partly demobilized the left. With Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent.
The administration was complicit in this, viewing the left’s primary role as supporting whatever the president believed needed to be done. Dissent was discouraged as counterproductive.
This was not entirely foolish. Facing ferocious resistance from the right, Obama needed all the friends he could get. He feared that left-wing criticism would meld in the public mind with right-wing criticism and weaken him overall.
But the absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger. His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.
This week, progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The anti-Wall Street demonstators seem to have that sense, too.
What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.
The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support for him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.
A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is — and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.
Five Reasons Chris Christie Can’t Win The GOP Nomination
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has said over and over again that he isn’t running for president in 2012 — a line he repeated once again just this week. Still, Republicans dissatisfied with their options are turning up the pressure on Christie to jump into the race. The GOP base has gotten its hopes up before — over Donald Trump, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and, most recently, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — only to promptly find fault with each new candidate (or, in Trump’s case, would-be candidate) and resume the search for a savior. Here are five reasons Christie would fare no better:
1. Christie is no hardliner on immigration
“The biggest chink in Rick Perry’s armor so far has been his record on illegal immigration,” says Dan Amira at New York. It’s a problem for Christie, too. He has said being in the country without proper papers is an “administrative matter,” not a crime. And between 2002 and 2007, as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, he prosecuted so few illegal immigration cases that then-CNN host Lou Dobbs said Christie was “an utter embarrassment.”
2. He has a soft spot for gun control
In 1995, when Christie was running for state general assembly, he distributed flyers calling opponents “radical” and “crazy” for supporting repeal of the federal assault-weapons ban, says Daniel Foster at National Review. And he still fights any move to let people carry concealed weapons in New Jersey. In 2009, he told conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity that New Jersey had a “handgun problem,” and that he supports some of the gun-control measures the state uses to contain it. “Bad idea,” Hannity said.
3. Hardliners won’t like his stand on the “ground zero mosque”
Last year, Christie accused politicians on the Left and Right of using the proposed “ground zero mosque” as a “political football,” says Thomas Fitzgerald at The Philadelphia Inquirer, suggesting he thought conservatives were exploiting anti-Muslim emotions stirred up by the 9/11 attacks. This summer, he faced another backlash after appointing Sohail Mohammed, a Muslim lawyer, to be a New Jersey Superior Court judge. Critics were angry that he would appoint a lawyer who had defended a cleric accused of terrorist sympathies. Christie responded: “I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
4. He’s got an uncomfortable Madoff connection
In his days as a lobbyist, Christie once fought for the rights of Wall Street. On his client list: The Securities Industry Association, then led by none other than Bernie Madoff. That, says Abe Sauer at The Awl, is the kind of thing “that’s easy to understand no matter who you are, involves a universally despised villain who has come to represent all the illegality of the 2008 market collapse, and it would be devastating to Christie in much-needed Florida” — a critical presidential swing state where many Madoff victims lived.
5. A possible clincher: He believes people are causing climate change
Perry delights the Right by saying that climate change is “phony,” says James Oliphant at the Los Angeles Times. Christie says 90 percent of the world’s scientists have concluded that the climate is changing and humans are playing a role, so “it’s time to defer to the experts.” If Republican voters are looking to nominate a hardcore conservative, this is pretty solid proof that Christie “does not fit the mold.”
By: Best Opinion: New York, National Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Published in The Week, September 30, 2011
The GOP Congress Hates (Except When It Loves) Federal Spending
“You saw the House act,” Rep. Eric Cantor snapped to a reporter last Friday. Yeah, act like a petulant 4-year-old!
The majority leader of the GOP-controlled House has long been a whiney ideological brat who stamps his tiny feet in peevish anger whenever he can’t get his way on legislation. In this particular incident, Cantor tried to pretend that the House had approved more federal aid for thousands of Americans who’ve been devastated by natural disasters this summer. However, he had sabotaged his own “act” by slipping a poison pill into it.
You see, “federal aid” is a four-letter word to right-wing ideologues like Eric, so for weeks he had stalled the emergency funding that hard-hit families desperately need. Cantor and his fellow anti-government dogmatists in the House turned a straightforward humanitarian bill into their political football, insisting that any increase in funds must first be wholly paid for by cutting spending on other public needs. His ploy has become known as the “Cantor Doctrine” — budget purity first, people’s needs last.
Actually, his this-for-that demand could’ve easily been met if Cantor had agreed to cut things America definitely does not need, such as the $4-billion-a year subsidy doled out to Big Oil. But — whoa! — in Cantorworld, oil giants are gods that shower manna from heaven on Republican campaigns, so it’s blasphemy even to think of cutting that money.
Instead, Cantor went after Big Oil’s most dreaded nemesis: companies that are making fuel-efficient and clean energy vehicles. Thus, the Cantorites decreed that there’d be no more disaster relief until the federal loan program to foster development of this green industry was slashed by $1.5 billion.
This would have been a political hat trick for the GOP extremists — striking a blow for their anti-government absolutism, doing a favor for a major campaign funder and defunding an Obama-backed program that helps him with voters.
Luckily, Cantor’s nuttiness was so extreme that a bipartisan vote by 79 senators killed his political scheme — this time.
You’d think that aid for storm victims would be beyond politics. But nothing is too far out for right-wing cultists like Cantor.
Well, you might think, at least the leaders of the tea party-infused Republican Congress are consistent in their opposition to big infusions of federal dollars into the economy, right?
Absolutely! Unless you count infusions of taxpayer funds into projects favored by corporations in their districts.
For example, a favorite target of howling Republican ridicule has been President Obama’s effort to stimulate our moribund economy by making government-backed loans to job-creating, green-energy projects. In particular, they’re presently assailing a 2009 loan guarantee of $535 million that the Obamacans awarded to the failed solar-panel maker Solyndra. This loan to a financially shaky company, they wail, is proof that green energy programs are a waste and are just about politics. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell recently sputtered in a rage that “the White House fast-tracked a half-billion dollar loan to a politically connected energy firm.”
Fair enough — the Solyndra deal does stink. However, Mitch’s tirade would’ve had a lot more moral punch if it were not for Zap Motors. In 2009, even as the Kentucky senator was loudly deriding Obama’s original stimulus program, he was quietly making not one, but two personal appeals to Obama’s energy secretary, urging that a quarter-billion-dollar loan guarantee be awarded to Zap for a clean energy plant it wanted to build in McConnell’s state.
Never mind that Zap Motors had its own shaky financial record, it was (as McConnell now says of Solyndra) “a politically-connected energy firm.” Connected directly to him, that is. The senator’s robust support of Zap came after the corporation hired a lobbyist with close ties to Mitch, having been a frequent financial backer of the senator’s campaigns.
The moral of this Republican morality tale is that they hate government spending, except when they love it. For them, political morality is relative — decry federal largesse loudly, but when it serves your own political needs, hug it quietly … and tightly.
By: Jim Hightower, Common Dreams, Originally published by Creators.com, September 28, 2011
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