“Republicans Desire To Claim A Scalp”: Why A Congressman Would Say, ‘This Interview Didn’t Happen’
By now, the basic outline of this week’s Planned Parenthood controversy is probably familiar to most news consumers. A right-wing group released a sting video – as right-wing groups are wont to do – featuring a Planned Parenthood official talking candidly about fetal tissue, which prompted a conservative uproar.
Soon after, we came to realize that the right-wing group edited the video in a misleading way– as right-wing groups are wont to do – and the “controversy” didn’t amount to much of anything. It’s not clear why the Washington Post put the story literally on the front page, since there are no credible allegations of wrongdoing. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum called it a “nothingburger,” adding, “In the end, this is just another sad attempt at a sting video that goes nowhere once you get beyond the deceptive editing.”
Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards officially responded to the story yesterday, explaining that the organization did nothing wrong, though she acknowledged that the Planned Parenthood official featured in the sting video spoke with a “tone” that was “unacceptable.”
In theory, that should effectively end the controversy, such as it was, and since my wife works for Planned Parenthood – her work is completely unrelated to fetal tissue and she played no role in this report – I was prepared to look past it altogether. But a Roll Call article yesterday pushed the story in an unexpected direction: some congressional Republicans have known about the video for weeks.
Rep. Tim Murphy, a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus and chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee looking into the video, said at a Wednesday news conference he’d seen the clip weeks before.
Asked afterward why he and others waited until this week to take action, Murphy struggled for an answer before abruptly ending the interview with CQ Roll Call, saying he should not be quoted and remarking, “This interview didn’t happen.”
Well, actually, it did happen, and members of Congress can’t talk to reporters, then retroactively pretend they didn’t.
In this case, Roll Call asked why the story, if it’s as scandalous as Republicans are now claiming, didn’t break immediately. If GOP lawmakers consider the revelations an outrage, why did some members say nothing for nearly a month?
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), before pretending the interview “didn’t happen,” said, “Um, I don’t know why. All I know is I saw it and he said he was going to post it eventually, so that’s all I know.”
Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), one of Congress’ most strident opponents of reproductive rights, also said he first saw the video about a month ago, but also said nothing. “The hope was to have as much information as possible so that the authorities could be notified effectively before the media,” Franks argued yesterday.
It’s a curious argument. Republicans have spent the week characterizing this as a potentially criminal scandal, but when some far-right lawmakers saw the video weeks ago, they didn’t feel the need to do much of anything – they didn’t run to the GOP leadership to demand action; they didn’t call allies in conservative media; they didn’t hold a press conference to express outrage. If they genuinely saw the video as proof of illegal Planned Parenthood activities, notifying the “authorities” could have happened immediately.
But it didn’t. So what is this really all about? Consider this Politico report published overnight:
Republicans on Capitol Hill are betting the secretly filmed Planned Parenthood video — depicting an executive allegedly discussing the sale of fetal organs from terminated pregnancies — will give them cover to more aggressively push abortion issues without the political ramifications that have haunted the party in the past. […]
[Iowa Republican Steve King] was one of the first lawmakers to urge the defunding of low-income housing group ACORN, which went belly up following similar undercover videos suggesting criminal activity.
To this day, he keeps a tiny acorn in his pocket to remember his crusade. Now, he’s got his eyes on another organization. “This represents ACORN’s scalp,” King said off the House floor Thursday, pulling the acorn out of his pocket. “Ask me after the appropriations cycle and see if I have a talisman in my pocket for Planned Parenthood’s.”
Ah, there it is. Republicans don’t have proof of Planned Parenthood wrongdoing, but rather, have a desire to claim a “scalp.” When the GOP went after women’s healthcare in 2012, it backfired on the party, so Republicans hope a misleading video will offer new opportunities to try the same move again.
That’s the point of the GOP calls for investigations, hearings, and probes. That’s why Republicans are trying to use this story to raise money and advance their personal ambitions.
Those who were inclined to take the story seriously should probably adjust their perspective accordingly.
Postscript: The video released by the Center for Medical Progress doesn’t show Planned Parenthood doing anything illegal, but whether the video itself was recorded illegally is a separate matter.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 17, 2015
“GOP Gives Up On ‘Dump Trump'”: Republicans Have Started To Accept That Cleveland Will Be The Donald Show Debate
Republican grief over Donald Trump’s all but assured presence on the debate stage next month seems to be entering it’s final stage: acceptance.
Whether it’s the winery-owning mega donor, or the Koch-backed Hispanic outreach group or the former head of the American Conservative Union, there is a distaste for the abrasive reality television star and businessman.
But although there was preliminary chatter about finding a way to marginalize Trump or keep him off the debate stage in Cleveland, Ohio, the unhappiness with his recent insulting comments about Hispanics has yielded to mere condemnation and an unhappy acquiescence to his presence in the race.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said recently.
John Jordan, the multi-millionaire winery owner and the third-largest donor to super PACs in the country in 2013, had originally contemplated gathering signatures to keep Trump off the debate stage.
“Someone in the party ought to start some sort of petition saying, ‘If Trump’s going to be on the stage, I’m not going to be on there with him,’” Jordan told the Associated Press last week. “I’m toying with the idea of it.”
But several days later, Jordan was thinking differently. He told The Daily Beast that he would not be putting together a petition effort.
“I’m content right to let the process play out, that is for the party and the candidates to figure out,” Jordan said. “I have one concern, and one concern only, and that is next November. I want to make sure that the nominee has the possible chance to win.”
Al Cardenas, the former chairman of the American Conservative Union and Florida’s first Hispanic GOP state chairman, said he hoped the primary process would naturally weed out Trump’s candidacy, rather than a top-down effort to push Trump out.
“[A]s distasteful as his comments have been to me, we should let the process play out. Hopefully, it’s the rejection by the voters, not a group of party leaders, that should determine his fate as a presidential candidate,” Cardenas said. “I respect the feelings of a number of our colleagues who feel differently—and strongly—about this and argue that his continuation in the race is detrimental to our party and to our brand. And they may be right, but the end does not justify the means in this case.”
“It’s a mild form of censorship to say that because we disagree with his tone or comments about the immigrant community, [he] should leave the race,” added Daniel Garza of the Koch-backed Libre Initiative, which seeks to appeal to Hispanic voters. “You allow him to mouth off… He has the right to speak, and we have the right to disagree with him… Calls to have him leave the race are ludicrous.”
Alfonso Aguilar, the head of the conservative American Principles Project’s Latino Partnership, views Trump’s “insulting and baseless” comments as creating pressure on other presidential candidates to step up their Hispanic outreach.
“Instead of seeing him as a problem, I see it as an opportunity—but one that requires strong leadership,” he told the Beast. “He’s a lunatic, but we’ve had other lunatics run for president. The problem is not that he’s on stage—it’s if you don’t respond and rebuke him.”
“He has shaken up the primary in a way that might not be welcome. But now that you have it, if you’re smart and astute, maybe you can use it in your favor,” agreed Garza. “Obviously you have to draw the contrast. If Donald Trump is showing how not to do Latino outreach, you show the way to do it effective.”
As for the Republican National Committee, it wants no part in any effort to sideline Trump. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus had called Trump to preach civility after the businessman’s controversial comments—then got mired into a he-said, he-said with The Donald over the contents of the call.
Asked about whether Republicans or big-dollar donors were making an effort to keep Trump off the debate stage, an RNC official merely said that, per Federal Election Commission guidelines, the networks and debate sponsors were responsible for setting up the guidelines for the presidential debates.
Meanwhile, a small plurality of Republican voters are favoring Trump. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released this week, Trump leads the field with 17%. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is close behind him with 14%.
Two polls out last week showed him leading the field of Republican 2016 candidates, receiving 15 percent in an Economist/YouGov poll and 16 percent in a PPP poll.
Aguilar, who was in Arizona to counter-message an event Trump was having with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, said the key to convincing Republican primary voters to steer clear of Trump was to point out the businessman’s prior positions like Trump’s praise of Bill Clinton and his donation to the Clinton Foundation.
“Before he was friends with Hillary, now he’s friends with Joe Arpaio,” he said. “Are you really sure he’s conservative?”
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, July 15, 2015
“Why Are The GOP Presidential Candidates Afraid Of Donald Trump?”: Living In Abject Fear Of The Biting Family Dog
Donald Trump now seems to be leading the GOP presidential field, and even if no one expects that situation to be permanent, most sentient Republicans agree that it’s terrible for the party. Apart from making the party look bad with his enthusiastic buffoonery, Trump finds new ways to alienate Latinos almost every day, and there is simply no way for Republicans to win the White House if they don’t improve their performance among Latino voters.
Yet the other GOP candidates can’t seem to bring themselves to utter a word of criticism toward Trump. Not only that, they’re barely criticizing each other. What’s going on here?
Let’s deal with Trump first. You might think a candidate spewing bile at the minority group the party needs most would produce some strong push-back from his opponents, but no. “I salute Donald Trump for focusing on the need to address illegal immigration,” said Ted Cruz after Trump went on his diatribe about Mexican rapists and drug dealers. While Trump has attacked Marco Rubio directly, saying he’s weak on immigration, Rubio’s response has been mostly that the media is focusing on Trump to distract from the real issues. When Scott Walker got asked this week what he thinks about Trump’s inflammatory comments, he replied, “While he might have some appeal because he’s speaking out boldly on issues, I think what they really want is people who can get things done.” Settle down there, governor.
The one candidate who has criticized Trump with any sincerity is Jeb Bush. “On our side, there are people that prey on people’s fears and their angst,” he said Tuesday in Iowa. “And whether it’s Donald Trump or Barack Obama, their rhetoric of divisiveness is wrong. A Republican will never win by striking fear in people’s hearts.” OK, so lumping someone in with Barack Obama is as mean as a Republican can get, but what’s most notable about Bush’s criticism is that in a field of 17 candidates, he’s the only one making it.
So what are they all afraid of? It’s true that Trump’s popularity has spiked among Republicans since he started making his beliefs about immigrants clear: in the Post’s latest poll, 57 percent of Republicans say they have a favorable view of him, a dramatic change from a poll in late may when 65 percent of Republicans had a negative view. But would a Republican candidate who engaged in some standard campaign criticism really forever forfeit any chance of winning over a voter who likes Trump today? It’s hard to imagine he would.
I think there’s something going on here that goes beyond Trump, and beyond the issue of immigration (on which all the Republican candidates have essentially the same position). It’s been said before that Democrats hate their base while Republicans fear their base, and the second part seems to be more true now than ever. The Tea Party experience of the last six years, which helped them win off-year elections and also produced rebellions against incumbent Republicans, has left them living in abject terror of their own voters.
It’s as though the GOP got itself a vicious dog because it was having an argument with its neighbor, only to find that the dog kept biting members of its own family. And now it finds itself tiptoeing around the house, paralyzed by the fear that it might startle the dog and get a set of jaws clamped around its ankle.
While I haven’t yet seen any detailed analysis of who’s supporting Trump, it’s probably safe to assume that the typical Trump supporter is a tea partier — not just extremely conservative, but extremely angry as well, not to mention contemptuous of elected Republicans who are too timid to really tell it like it is. Kevin Williamson of the National Review recently described these voters as “captive of the populist Right’s master narrative, which is the tragic tale of the holy, holy base, the victory of which would be entirely assured if not for the machinations of the perfidious Establishment.” Like the People’s Front of Judea, they know that the real enemy is the one on their own side. It’s somewhat ironic that the response of Republican politicians to these voters’ disgust with timidity is to be inordinately timid about offending them.
It’s possible that also has something to do with why the race has been so generally well-mannered. The candidates aren’t just worried about offending Trump’s supporters, they’re worried about offending anybody on their side of the aisle. Far be it from me to demand that the race get more negative, but by now you’d think there would be barbs flying back and forth in all directions. Most of those 17 candidates (once John Kasich and Jim Gilmore formally enter) are separated by just a few points in the polls. The debates will be starting in a couple of weeks, and if only 10 candidates are allowed in each one, all but the top few candidates are in serious danger of being shut out, which could be disastrous for them. That should give them a strong incentive to do something dramatic. And yet, the race could hardly be more civil.
It’s still early, and one has to assume that once the actual voting begins (or even before), the knives will come out. But for now, things are unusually quiet. When that does change, it will only be because the candidates have found something else that scares them more than their own voters. Like losing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 15, 2015
“The Hypocrisy Is Really Just The Start”: Republicans Learn The Wrong Lessons From 2012
A few months ago, Politico published a piece about the Republican message machine settling on its preferred 2016 narrative. The headline said the GOP plan is to “turn Hillary into Mitt Romney.”
“A consensus is forming within the Republican Party that the plan of attack against Hillary Clinton should be of a more recent vintage, rooted in her accumulation of wealth and designed to frame her as removed from the concerns of average Americans,” the article explained.
Three months later, the New York Times reports that Republicans are spending “heavily” on focus groups, testing this message.
Inside an office park [in Orlando], about a dozen women gathered to watch a 30-second television spot that opened with Hillary Rodham Clinton looking well-coiffed and aristocratic, toasting champagne with her tuxedoed husband, the former president, against a golden-hued backdrop.
The ad then cut to Mrs. Clinton describing being “dead broke” when she and her husband left the White House, before a narrator intoned that Mrs. Clinton makes more money in a single speech, about $300,000, than an average family earns in five years.
The message hit a nerve. “She’s out of touch,” said one of the women, who works as a laundry attendant.
This gathering was organized by American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC created by Karl Rove, but the party broadly seems to have embraced this message.
And if Clinton is really lucky, they won’t change their minds.
As we talked about in April, there is a certain irony to the entire line of attack. In 2012, when Democrats rolled out the “out-of-touch plutocrat” message against Romney, Republicans spent months in fainting-couch apoplexy. Democrats are engaging in “class warfare,” they said. The divisive rhetoric was “un-American,” voters were told. How dare Democrats “condemn success”?
In 2015, those same Republicans have suddenly discovered they’re not so offended after all. Imagine that.
But the hypocrisy is really just the start. The real issue is the degree to which Republicans are confused about why the line of criticism against Romney was effective.
There’s an over-simplicity to the GOP’s thinking: Romney was rich; Democrats labeled him out of touch, voters believed it, so Romney lost. But that’s not what happened, at least not entirely. Once again, the problem was not that Romney was extremely wealthy; the problem was that Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him.
The Democratic pitch would have fallen flat if they’d simply mocked the candidate’s riches. It resonated, however, because Romney breathed life into the caricature – vowing to give tax breaks to the wealthy, promising to take health care and education benefits away from working families, and expressing contempt for the “47 percent” of Americans Romney saw as parasites.
When Democrats effectively told the American mainstream, “Romney isn’t on your side,” the GOP nominee made it easy for voters to believe it. The car elevators were simply gravy on top of an already effective narrative.
The point is, substance matters. Policy agendas matter. There’s a lengthy history of low-income voters in America voting for very wealthy candidates who are committed to fighting for those voters’ interests. Names like Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Rockefeller are familiar additions to the roster of politicians who’ve championed the needs of families far from their income bracket. Struggling voters didn’t reject them as “out of touch” because they couldn’t personally relate to poverty – rather, these voters rallied behind the wealthy candidates, without regard for their status, because of their policy agenda.
Indeed, as I type, Hillary Clinton is delivering a speech on her economic vision, much of which is focused on investing in working families as a recipe for economic growth.
Republicans are convinced what really matters isn’t the scope of Clinton’s policies, but rather, the size of her bank account. That’s ridiculous.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent talked to David Axelrod, a former top aide to President Obama, who said, “The Republicans may try and make a lifestyle case, but lifestyle is the least of it. It’s what you believe and where you propose to lead.”
It’s baffling that the GOP doesn’t understand this obvious and basic dynamic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 13, 2015
“The Obamacare Resistance Regroups”: Delving Even Deeper Into Denial
The 16th Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing the federal income tax, was ratified in 1913. Still, every once in a while, the news will report the arrest of some right-wing kook who has failed to pay his income tax on the grounds that it’s illegal. Also in 1913, the 17th Amendment, requiring the popular election of senators (who before then were often appointed by state legislatures) took effect. And yet many conservatives still want to repeal it — and not just kooks, or at least influential kooks and not just completely marginal and obscure kooks. And those things happened more than a century ago.
So how long will the Obamacare resistance live on? A long, long time.
Obamacare has survived when it appeared to be dead in Congress in 2009, then even more dead the next year, and then survived a Supreme Court case, a presidential election, a rollout crisis, and another Supreme Court case. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar has lovingly tended the flickering flame of health-care repeal for years. In 2013, he predicted that barring “an unlikely fourth quarter comeback,” Congressional Democrats would soon join with Republicans to repeal the law over a presidential veto. In the wake of the King v. Burwell verdict, Kraushaar regroups with a new column laying out a path. Kraushaar refers repeatedly to the law’s “unpopularity,” which is … barely correct:
Proceeding from this shaky premise, he argues that, if they win the presidency, enough Senate Democrats might join Republicans to create a filibuster-proof supermajority:
The third group, which Sasse labels the “Replacement Caucus,” would make significant changes to the law after campaigning on a reform-oriented health care agenda in the presidential election. That’s the most tenable approach — and the fact that Sasse, a hard-line Senate conservative, is calling for something other than outright repeal is telling. (Sasse still supports repealing the law but only with a replacement plan in hand.)
If Republicans win the presidency, the political momentum — and votes for rolling back core elements of Obamacare — would be in place. In that scenario, Republicans would have won three out of four elections, and a depleted Democratic Party would be in disarray. Republicans could credibly claim a health care mandate, given how prominently the issue played in recent elections.
Kraushaar allows that these “significant changes” to Obamacare would fall short of repeal, though he does not indicate what those changes would entail. He links to a National Review column by Republican Senator Ben Sasse, which also fails to describe what changes should be implemented. The closest Sasse comes to specifying a proposal is calling for an “understandable, common-sense, patient-centric alternative.” Of course, Republicans have been urging other Republicans to come up with a common-sense, patient-centric health-care plan since the health-care debate began six years ago. They have remained stuck in the same unsolvable problem: Their actual health-care policy ideas are either all less popular than the specific policies in Obamacare, unworkable, or both. When Republicans start naming actual policy changes they would implement, they would do things like let insurance companies deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions, or stop covering popular services like maternity care. That’s why the only specific partial changes Republicans actually want to vote on simply attack the law’s financing provisions. They’re not willing to eliminate Obamacare’s benefits, but they’re happy to stop paying for them. That plan (keep the benefits, oppose the taxes) is pretty much the party’s approach to other established social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. If Republicans win the presidency, they may bite the bullet and repeal Obamacare because their base demands it, but they won’t have Democrats on their side and it won’t be popular.
Even farther into denial is Michael Cannon, a Cato Institute scholar who played a leading role in promoting the King v. Burwell lawsuit. The basis for that lawsuit was seizing on an errant line of text implying that tax credits would be available only for customers using state-established exchanges, ignoring many other parts of the law, as well as massive amounts of evidence before, during, and after the debate implying the opposite. For a while, Cannon, the founder of the anti-Universal Coverage club, nurtured hopes of un-insuring 6 million Americans. He finds himself in the position of a despondent young Montgomery Burns mourning the destruction of his biological weapon (“My germs, my precious germs! They never harmed a soul. They never even had a chance!”)
Cannon, unlike Burns, does not seem to be accepting defeat. His Twitter bio continues to describe him as “the man who could bring down Obamacare,” a now-moot prediction. His new column argues, “Even in defeat, King threatens Obamacare’s survival, because it exposes Obamacare as an illegitimate law.” Cannon bases this claim on the fact that he believes, or purports to believe, that Obamacare is not what the Supreme Court says it is but a chimerical, never-implemented, doomed-to-fail alternative that will live on forever in his dreams. A century from now, right-wingers will emerge from their fortified mountain compounds, clutching Cannon’s writings and claiming to be following the True Obamacare.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, July 10, 2015
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