Top Tea Party Republican Admits To GOP Hostage Strategy
GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa is one of the leading spokespeople for the Tea Party wing of the House GOP. With the national press continually asking King whether he’ll be making an endorsement in the Iowa caucuses, he has been built up into something of an important GOP figure.
So it’s good to see that King is candidly admitting that the House Tea Party wing has been employing the threat of a government shutdown as nothing more than a deliberate hostage strategy designed to wring maximum concessions from Democrats.
King made the concession in an interview with Laura Ingraham. Dems are highlighting the interview because King bashes House Speaker John Boehner for his weak leadership, but the bolded portion below is the real news here:
KING: We have not lead in a clear way. American people don’t know what House Republicans believe in, and they surely don’t know what we’re willing to fight for. And I am as disappointed as the public is…
It’s clear to me that Speaker Boehner made a decision, either before, but I am convinced it was at least shortly after the election last November, a year ago last November, that we would not be in a position where we would be blamed for shutting down the government … that’s the only place where you bring the leverage to this Congress, to take on Harry Reid and Barack Obama, is you have to be willing to face a shutdown and you have to have the debate among the American people.
INGRAHAM: You think that would have helped the Republican Party and you guys would be in a better position today if the government had been shut down?
KING: The shutdown isn’t the point so much as, I don’t want the shutdown either. But if you are afraid of the shutdown you can’t have the confrontation and you lose every negotiation along the way.
And there you have it! During each impasse — the first government shutdown fight; the debt ceiling debacle; the payroll tax cut showdown — we keep being told that Tea Partyers really are crazy enough to allow the worst to happen. During the government shutdown fight, we were even told that Tea Partyers viewed that outcome as a positive. Their willingness to take us over a cliff is why Dems simply must make the concessions they’re demanding.
But now a top Tea Party leader has given away the game, admitting that not even Tea Partyers want a shutdown. Creating the impression that they’re willing to let it happen is only about winning maximum concessions in negotiations. Let’s hope Dems keep this in mind the next dozen times this happens.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, January 3, 2011
New Year’s Resolutions: New Rules For The New Year
NEW YEAR’S resolutions are the original New Rules. Except that resolutions are usually self-oriented: I am going to lose weight this year. My New Year’s resolution, by the way, is to do the ones from ’75; I made a lot of good ones that year. I was 19, and thought I could polish them off by age 20. Alas, I’m a little behind.
Also, New Rules are bigger, broader and grander. I don’t tell you what I’m going to eat; I tell you how the world should work. Here’s what 2011 prompts me to decree for 2012:
New Rule Now that we have no money, and all our soldiers have come home from Iraq and they’ve all got experience building infrastructure, and no jobs … we must immediately solve all of our problems by declaring war on the United States.
New Rule If you were a Republican in 2011, and you liked Donald Trump, and then you liked Michele Bachmann, and then you liked Rick Perry, and then you liked Herman Cain, and then you liked Newt Gingrich … you can still hate Mitt Romney, but you can’t say it’s because he’s always changing his mind.
New Rule Starting next year, any politician caught in a scandal can’t go before the press, offer a lame excuse and then say, “Period. End of Story.” Here’s how you indicate a “period” and the end of a story: shut up.
New Rule The press must stop saying that each debate is “make or break” for Rick Perry and call them what they really are: “break.”
New Rule You can’t be against same-sex marriage and for Newt Gingrich. No man has ever loved another man as much as Newt Gingrich loves Newt Gingrich.
New Rule Internet headlines have to be more like newspaper headlines. That means they have to tell me something instead of just tricking me into clicking on them. If you write the headline, “She Wore That?” you have to go to your journalism school and give your degree back.
New Rule Let’s stop scheduling the presidential election in the same year as the Summer Olympics. I get so exhausted watching those robotic, emotionally stunted, artificial-looking creatures with no real lives striving to do the one thing they’re trained to do that I barely have energy left to watch the Olympics.
New Rule No more holiday-themed movies with a cast of thousands unless at least half of them get killed by a natural disaster. Fair’s fair — if I have to watch Katherine Heigl and Zac Efron as singles who can’t find love, I also get to see them swallowed up by the earth.
New Rule Jon Huntsman must get a sex change. The only way he’s going to get any press coverage is by turning into a white woman and disappearing.
New Rule Starting this year, every appliance doesn’t need a clock on it. My stove, my dishwasher, my microwave, my VCR — all have clocks on them. If I really cared that much about what time it was (or what year it was), would I still have a VCR?
By: Bi Maher, Author of “The New Rules”, New York Times Opinion, December 30, 2011
“Scaredy Cat’s”: Why Is No One Attacking Mitt Romney?
Mitt Romney’s confidence is brimming. The former Massachusetts governor, now widely seen as the favorite to win Iowa, announced Wednesday he’ll stay in the Hawkeye State the night of the caucus, a clear indication he anticipates a good result. If he does capture Iowa, he’ll head into New Hampshire, long his political stronghold, with a chance to become the first non-incumbent GOP presidential candidate ever to win the first two primary contests — a back-to-back triumph that would all but secure the nomination.
So, naturally, his Republican rivals have spent the last week castigating him on the trail and eviscerating him on TV, all in a desperate attempt to slow down his momentum and keep their own campaigns viable. Right? No — they’ve nearly done the opposite.
In a new radio ad released Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry set his sights not on Romney but on former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who is enjoying his own surge in Iowa. In the ad and on the campaign trail, Perry criticized Santorum’s previous support for earmarks, calling the ex-U.S. senator part of the big-spending Washington establishment. He does not, however, mention Romney.
It’s an old story this primary, where Romney has not faced the kind of withering attacks that normally confront a frontrunner. His rivals have trained their fire on one another instead.
Just examine the Iowa landscape this week as the campaigns make their last desperate push. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are at each other’s throats over the defection of the Minnesota congresswoman’s Iowa state chair.
Paul, meanwhile, has spent most of the last month barraging former House speaker Newt Gingrich with a litany of hard-hitting TV ads. Paul himself has received blistering criticism from Gingrich and Santorum, each of whom has said his isolationist-leaning foreign policy is unacceptable.
As they form a circular firing squad, Romney stepped back. Rather than engage his GOP opponents, as he’s done most of his campaign, he’s focused almost entirely on his No. 1 target, President Obama.
Romney has received cover from the primary’s unprecedented volatility (at least since 1964), which has sent a bushel of candidates to momentary stardom atop the Republican field only to be torn down weeks later. Attacks from rivals and media scrutiny have followed each of these momentary front-runners, who have risen and fallen through the fall, instead of Romney, as he plodded methodically along at 25 percent in most national polls.
And it’s not as though Romney, his past rooted in blue-state Massachusetts, didn’t supply his opponents plenty of ammunition. They have the bullets; they’re just not firing them.
By: Brian Snyder, The Atlantic, December 30, 2011
“The Langoliers Are Coming”: What Boehner Faces In 2012 After Payroll Tax Debacle
In the immediate aftermath of the GOP’s payroll tax debacle, a handful of conservative House Republicans publicly attacked their leaders — particularly Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
“I am disappointed that our Republican leadership in both the House and Senate chose a course of political expediency rather than standing on conservative principle,” said Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) in an official statement.
Others appealed to Fox News, where conservatives and Republicans feel more comfortable expounding on party/movement contretemps.
“He’s (Boehner) got a big problem when he comes back,” one anonymous congressman claimed. “He may have a hard time keeping his Speakership after this.”
“We were hung out to dry by our leadership,” said another unnamed member.
The list goes on. But the holidays calmed the backlash, and with a week’s hindsight a consensus of sorts has emerged among party strategists, aides (current and former) and congressional scholars. Not all agree on the question of how well or poorly Boehner handled the situation. But though Boehner’s 2012 won’t be easy, those House conservatives who were seeing blood last week are likely to be disappointed again.
“I don’t think his leadership is going to be taken away from him over the course of the next year,” said Norm Ornstein — a Congress expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But I’m expecting a pretty difficult year ahead for him next year.”
“Going into next year he has to reassert his authority going into the payroll tax debate, and frankly other debates,” said a former senior House aide. “In addition to that he will most likely take a conference-wide stance on the payroll tax fight and will work to fight and win.”
Boehner’s 2012 depends to a huge extent on how much the GOP conference is still spoiling for a fight. If they’re chastened by the horrendous month they had — and thus resigned to ceding the payroll tax issue to the Democrats — then Boehner will have it pretty easy. The payroll tax cut will be extended through the end of the year, and, in a sense, his original judgment will have been vindicated. His members won’t lead the party astray again. But if a substantial number of Republicans return from recess breathing fire, and try once again to use the expiring payroll tax cut to extract massive concessions from Democrats then Boehner and the rest of the GOP are likely in for a politically costly battle.
“When you start with the Republicans rejecting even a dime of taxes on millionaires and you want to take money out of other programs that benefit the middle class or poor people, you’re going to have a tough time doing this,” Ornstein said. “The other part is the Republicans in the House settled on a narrative to justify their action. They said they want a full year payroll tax cut. The fact is a very substantial share of those Rs don’t want anything. They don’t want any payroll tax cut.”
This is correct — and it’s worth recalling that GOP leaders originally solved that problem by tying the payroll tax cut to the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But they already got that — and now that Republicans have built a consensus for a yearlong payroll tax cut almost by accident, it’s unlikely Democrats are going to be willing to concede much of anything to them.
“He tried to throw in this lever, which was this pipeline. Well, they got it,” Ornstein said. “The incentive for Obama to give in more is pretty much zero.”
Despite the unfavorable dynamic for the GOP, most see the worst-case scenario for him as a leadership challenge … in 2013 (assuming the GOP retains its majority in the 2012 elections).
“[Y]ou’re always going to have squeaky wheel members who are never going to be satisfied,” the senior aide said. “And there may be some members who don’t like Boehner who are using it as a way to complain.” However, if the dissent starts creeping beyond that rump in the next couple weeks, “then he’s got a big problem,” the aide says. “[But] I doubt that’s going to happen.”
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, December 29, 2011
Why Conservative Republicans Keep Rebelling Against John Boehner
The House GOP’s initial decision to reject the extension of the payroll tax cut was a bone-headed move. Indeed, it was impressively masochistic in the way it brazenly violated not only public opinion, but also the will of Republicans in the Senate, the vast majority of whom voted for the bill. But while Congressional Republicans were violating all manner of political common sense, that’s not to say that they weren’t following any sort of political logic at all. It just happens to be a logic of a particularly twisted sort.
One of the dominant factors motivating the decisions of rank-and-file right-wing House Republicans—and not just freshmen—is their lack of trust in Speaker John Boehner. They like him, but they just don’t believe he’s a dependable defender of their interests and beliefs. Those suspicions aren’t entirely groundless. Yes, Boehner has gone out of his way to cultivate the most conservative members of his caucus—every time he has hit an impasse, his first move is to the right, to accommodate them, not to the middle to replace some of them with willing Democrats. But the Speaker has also shown a penchant for compromise that right-wing House members can’t abide.
The first negotiation he conducted with President Obama was over the fiscal 2011 Continuing Resolution, which he billed as a sweeping reduction in spending with nearly $40 billion cut from the year’s collective appropriations. But it turned out in the cold light of day to be something else entirely, with only a fraction of a fraction of the cuts occurring in the remainder of that fiscal year. Next came the Speaker’s negotiations with Obama over a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction as the debt limit approached. No matter that Boehner extracted a range of concessions from the president, including cuts in discretionary spending and on Medicare—the package included a tax increase which conservative Congressmen deemed unacceptable. So when the Speaker appeared to again sign onto a deal laden with compromise—this time over the payroll tax cut that extended it for only two months, while including the main concession conservatives had demanded, action on the Keystone pipeline—those conservatives noisily rebelled.
Boehner’s trust gap is exacerbated by the fact that the rest of the GOP House leadership has been undermining his credibility as a negotiator. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor noisily dropped out of the debt limit negotiations the minute the tax issue was raised, saying it was above his pay grade and had to be carried out by the Speaker and the President—only to immediately disavow the agreement that Boehner and Obama reached. On the payroll tax negotiation, Boehner had no choice but to cave to aggrieved Tea Party members, lest he risk again having Cantor abandon him, leaving him exposed to right-wing attacks.
Ultimately, the root of the problem may lie in the stark lessons that the Republicans elected to Congress in 2010 seem to have drawn from an earlier cohort of conservative Congressmen—those that Newt Gingrich lead into the majority in 1994. Today’s Tea Partiers recognize that they share a similar governing philosophy with their forebears, but they believe almost uniformly that the Gingrichites sold out too quickly, blinking unnecessarily when the political heat got turned up. The conclusion many have drawn is that Gingrich made a huge mistake when he gave in after the disastrous government shutdown at the end of 1995—if Republicans had held out, lashed themselves to the collective mast and weathered the storm of public disapproval, Clinton would have caved and they would have succeeded at rolling back the welfare state.
There is, of course, zero evidence for this thesis, but that doesn’t matter. Some of this group will come back to DC in January believing that Boehner and sellouts like Mitch McConnell and John McCain have just repeated the error of 1995. That will make John Boehner’s task even more difficult as he moves to negotiate a new deal on the year-long extension of the payroll tax cut, and will compound his difficulties as he considers other key decisions, including the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. For Boehner, the nightmare will not only continue, but deepen.
By: Norman Ornstein, Roll Call December 24, 2011
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