“Entirely Dysfunctional”: The GOP Spirals Deeper And Deeper Into Obstructionism
First Susan Rice. Then Chuck Hagel. Now Jack Lew.
Once upon a time, a norm existed that presidents had the right to choose the people they wanted to staff the executive branch. Once upon a time? I mean — from the beginning of the republic right up to January 2009. Oh, Senators could and did use the nomination to affect policy — both individual Senators and, at times, the partisan opposition would demand specific policy commitments before confirming nominees.
But what’s happened since Barack Obama took office is far, far, off the scale of any of that. And because it’s been accompanied by the use of the filibuster — the sudden demand for a 60 vote Senate on executive branch nominations — it’s entirely dysfunctional.
We now have Jeff Sessions attacking Jack Lew for — get this — lack of “gravitas.” Not drinking too much, or violating obscure laws, but…well, Sessions just doesn’t like the cut of his jib, or something like that. Or, as Kevin Drum figures, it’s just that Lew insists on using real math during budget negotiations.
All this does build the case for Senate reform. As I’ve been saying, there’s just no good reason not to change the rules to have simple majority approval of executive branch nominees. But that won’t solve the problem. After all, imagine if Republicans had done a bit better in the 2010 and 2012 elections, giving them a slim Senate majority today. If so, they would have been able to simply vote down dozens and dozens of nominations. Senate reform, in other words, would not fix the problem of knee-jerk opposition to presidential executive branch nominees.
In other words, the real problem isn’t Senate rules (as much as they should be changed); it’s the Republican Party, busting through norms for the sake of making it very difficult for the government to function well. And alas, although some have done a good job of describing this disease (such as Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein), no one yet has a cure.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, The Plum Line, January 10, 2013
“The Old World Order”: Are We Still Fighting The Civil War?
Politically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true.”
Never mind that author Andrew O’Hehir appears to be one of those overheated writers who use the adverb “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier meaning “figuratively.” Salon supposedly has editors. Elsewhere, O’Hehir concedes that the imagined conflict won’t “involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead.”
So it won’t be a war at all then. As a Yankee long resident in the South, maybe I should be grateful for that. O’Hehir also acknowledges that while today’s “fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension,” they “don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question.”
Um, not quite, no.
But then as O’Hehir also categorizes Michigan as a “border state” for the sin of having a Republican governor, it’s hard to know what Democrats there should do. I suppose fleeing across the border into Ontario would be an option.
Is it possible to publish anything more half-baked and foolish? Oh, absolutely. Here in Arkansas, we had more than our share of cartoon-think before the 2012 election. Three would-be Republican state legislators wrote manifestoes in favor of the old Confederacy.
One Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro delivered himself of a self-published book arguing that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.”
Fellow GOP candidate Charles Fuqua of Batesville—like Jonesboro, a college town—self-produced an e-book entitled God’s Law: The Only Political Solution. In it, he not only called for expelling all Muslims from the United States, but returning to the Biblical practice of stoning disobedient children to death.
Not many stonings, Fuqua thought, would be necessary to restore sexual morality and good table manners among American youth.
Then there was Rep. Loy Mauch of Bismarck. An ardent secessionist, Mauch had written a series of letters to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette arguing that since Jesus never condemned slavery, it had Biblical sanction.
Mauch also condemned Abraham Lincoln as a “fake neurotic Northern war criminal,” frequently likened him to Hitler, and deemed the rebel flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.”
Comparing Hubbard’s views to those of Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed alarm at “the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.”
Ah, but here’s the rest of the story, which Blow barely mentioned: All three “Arkansaw lunkheads,” as Huck Finn might have called them, were not only repudiated by the state Republican Party, but lost badly to Democratic opponents last November in what was otherwise a big year for the GOP here.
Unimpeded by the burdens of office, they can now get back to self-publishing their neo-Confederate hearts out.
The point’s simple: these fools certainly weren’t elected due to their crackpot fulminations, or even in spite of them. Their views were simply unknown. As soon as they became an issue, they became an embarrassment. Now they’re ex-state legislators. The end.
This is not to deny that there’s a strong regional component to the nation’s current political impasse. The New Republic’s John R. Judis did the numbers on the recent “fiscal cliff” vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Altogether, 85 Republicans voted for the Senate’s resolution, 151 against.
Broken down by region, however, the differences were stark. Republicans outside the South actually voted for the bipartisan compromise, 62-36.
GOP congressmen representing the old Confederacy voted against, 83-10—including unanimous opposition from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. But for Florida, opposition would have been nearly unanimous.
For all the good it did them. Because the Old South is visibly shrinking. Florida and Virginia are already gone; given demographic trends, Texas is on its way. Even Arkansas, which voted for Bill Clinton something like eight times, seems unlikely to become a one-party state.
As for the rest, Mike Tomasky correctly observes that “over time…the South will make itself less relevant and powerful if it keeps behaving this way. As it becomes more of a one-party state [sic] it becomes less of a factor.”
From that perspective, few recent political events have been as telling as the outrage of northeastern Republicans Rep. Peter King and New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the House’s foot-dragging on Hurricane Sandy relief. A few more stunts like that, and the GOP could end up as fragmented and futile as Alabama governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party.
No Civil War necessary.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 9, 2013
“An Inane Idea”: With A Trillion Dollar Coin, President Obama Can Fight Dumb With Silly
A trillion dollar platinum coin? Really? Has our politics really reached a point where such an obviously inane idea is gaining traction? Well, yes. When your capitol has become Clowntown, U.S.A., you sometimes need to fight bad ideas with silly ones.
The idea, if you haven’t heard, is for President Obama to defuse the forthcoming debt ceiling crisis Republicans are busily manufacturing by directing the Treasury to mint a platinum coin worth $1 trillion. With an extra trillion on the books, the debt ceiling would no longer be an issue. While the Federal Reserve ordinarily is in charge of printing money, there’s a law on the books allowing the Treasury secretary to produce platinum coinage of whatever value s/he sees fit.
Sure, the purpose of the law was to permit the Treasury to issue commemorative coins. But so what? The purpose of the debt ceiling wasn’t to give one party the leverage for a global, economic hostage crisis. Were the debt ceiling not raised, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes, “the damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets.” His full article on what happens if we breach the debt ceiling is worth a read.
So when one political party is acting like a political version of a James Bond villain (“Give in to my demands or I will wreck the world economy!”) maybe the answer is for the president to channel his inner Dr. Evil (“One trillion dollars.”)
Again, it all sounds silly but some very serious folks are lining up behind it, including the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel Prize lying around his office. New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler is also a fan. And despite some suggestions that none of this is legal because it’s not what the law was intended for, Philip Diehl, a former director of the Mint, told Klein that it’s perfectly legal.
So is it a silly idea? Yes. But Republican extremists have brought us into an age of political asymmetrical warfare, passing off crazy, dangerous ideas as serious. Why should the president unilaterally disarm on that front?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 9, 2013
“A Pretty Simple Con”: The Conservative Movement Is Still An Elaborate Moneymaking Venture
The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture. As Rick Perlstein explained in the Baffler, some of the largest conservative media organs are essentially massive email lists of suckers rented to snake oil salesmen. The con isn’t limited to a couple of newsletters and websites: The most prominent conservative organizations in the nation are primarily dedicated to separating conservatives from their money.
FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires. And what are people who donate to this grass-roots conservative organization funded mostly by a few very rich people getting for their hard-earned money? In addition to paying Dick Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to stay away, FreedomWorks also apparently spent more than a million dollars paying Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about FreedomWorks, in order to convince listeners to send FreedomWorks money that FreedomWorks would then give to Limbaugh and Beck. It’s a pretty simple con. Beck, meanwhile, also has a subscriber-based media operation, in which people pay his company money for access to programs where Beck expresses opinions that he was paid to hold. He also spent years telling everyone to buy gold from a company that pays him and defrauds consumers.
As Armey admitted to Media Matters, FreedomWorks at this point essentially raises money for the sake of raising money. It exists to bilk “activists.” Armey at least has the courtesy to be embarrassed by this:
“If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that’s one thing,” Armey explained. “If we are using these things to raise money; one, it’s a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does.”
Armey also said the relationship with Beck expanded to include rallies that were co-sponsored by Beck and FreedomWorks, and included appearances by FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe.
Armey said he objected to these events, dubbed FreePACs, because they often charged admission to FreedomWorks activists.
A review of promotional information for the events found $20 was a standard donation requested at some of the locations, while a Dallas, TX., FreePAC last summer charged prices as high as $971.
But Armey is basically alone. No major right-wing media figures ever speak out against the widespread practice of constantly bilking credulous old people. Newsmax, a company whose email list is regularly given over to blatant get-rich-quick scheme hucksters, publishes basically every major and minor conservative columnist (and Lanny Davis). Newsmax pays to syndicate their columns, and their stature lends the site credibility. None of them ever complain. No one on the right criticizes the Newsmax business model. It seems to be semi-common knowledge that major conservative media figures sell their endorsements. No one says it’s deceptive. No one says Dick Morris should stop marketing his various ventures on Fox, all the time.
This complete contempt for the audience is unique to the right-wing press — if the Huffington Post made its money selling snake oil, liberals would complain. The recent trickle of complaints about the major nonprofit money-making groups, like FreedomWorks and CrossroadsUSA, has come solely because those groups failed to win the election. If Romney, or even a couple of Senate candidates, had won, no one would mind that the two groups enriched their boards of directors on the backs of tens of thousands of small donors. Right-wing reaction to Armey’s admission to Media Matters has thus far been outrage … that Armey talked to Media Matters.
The problem this presents for the movement, beyond the threat of eventually bankrupting the people who give it power, is that the business of money-making, for consultants and media personalities and Herman Cains, is at this point getting in the way of the business of advancing conservative causes. The groups exert massive influence, and they only ever push the Republican Party to get more extreme. Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary. There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate.
So even if you don’t particularly care that regular conservative Americans are constantly being scammed by their media apparatus, you should still worry about the influence of the scammers. The fact that there is a lot of money to be made in acting like Michele Bachmann is part of why the House seems poised to blow up the U.S. economy. The fact that conservatives have that much contempt for their own true believers neatly explains how they govern when they actually have power.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 7, 2013
“Most Antagonistic Toward Israel?”:That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary, Something Lindsey Graham Should Know
When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned on national television over the weekend that Chuck Hagel “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation’s history,” either his memory served him very poorly — or he was simply lying to smear his former Senate colleague. For whatever Hagel’s perspective on Mideast policy may be, it would be absurd to compare him with the Secretary of Defense whose hardline hostility toward Israel became notorious during the Reagan administration.
That would be the late Caspar W. Weinberger, of course.
Weinberger, a longtime Reagan confidant, ran the Pentagon from 1981 until 1987, when he was forced to resign over his involvement in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair (a ruinous scandal that involved the secret sale of missiles to the Iranian mullahs and the illegal transfer of profits from those sales to the Nicaraguan contra rebels – and that almost sent Weinberger to prison along with more than a dozen administration officials).
In contrast to other members of the Reagan cabinet known for their sympathy toward the Jewish state, including Secretary of State George Shultz and the president himself, Weinberger developed a reputation not only for opposing Israel’s interests directly but for seeking to prevent any action, including counter-terrorist operations, that might upset Arab allies of the United States. Until the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986, Weinberger was perhaps best known for orchestrating the sale of AWACS jets – the highly advanced airborne surveillance, command, and control system built by Boeing – to Saudi Arabia. Opposed by Israel and much of the American Jewish community, the Saudi AWACS deal generated enormous controversy.
Weinberger’s views on the Mideast were often said to derive from his career at Bechtel Corporation, the mammoth international construction firm where, as general counsel, he had approved compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel. Construction in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states was a major source of profits for Bechtel, and the firm’s support of the boycott was so blatant that Edward Levi, a Republican attorney general, filed a civil lawsuit against the California-based company, which led to a consent decree and prolonged litigation.
Among the most outspoken sources on Weinberger’s record was retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, the former Reagan White House aide and intelligence operative who oversaw the Iran-Contra fiasco In his 1992 memoir Under Fire, North explained what everyone in Washington had long known about the former Defense Secretary:
[Weinberger] seemed to go out of his way to oppose Israel on any issue and to blame the Israelis for every problem in the Middle East. In our planning for counterterrorist operations, he apparently feared that if we went after Palestinian terrorists, we would offend and alienate Arab governments – particularly if we acted in cooperation with the Israelis.
Weinberger’s anti-Israel tilt was an underlying current in almost every Mideast issue. Some people explained it by pointing to his years with the Bechtel Corporation…Others believed it was more complicated, and had to do with his sensitivity about his own Jewish ancestry.
As an Episcopalian whose paternal grandparents converted to Christianity — and who later worked at Bechtel, a company with a terrible reputation for anti-Semitism — Weinberger’s personal feelings about Jews and Judaism may well have been “complicated.” But his record as defense secretary was straightforward enough – and considering that Graham is a self-styled expert on Reagan administration foreign policy, the South Carolina senator certainly ought to know it.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 7, 2013
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