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Partisanship: Blame Grover Norquist, Not The Founders

Everyone recognizes that Washington is not working the way it should. This  has led some on the left, like Harold Meyerson, to question whether the Founders “screwed  up.”

Many on the right, meanwhile, are promoting radical changes to our  constitutional system. They talk about a version  of a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would require a super-majority for most  changes in financial policy. This would enshrine in our Constitution the right’s  do-little government philosophy.

But the Constitution is not the problem. If we want to get  Washington working again, we should listen to the Founders — not blame them for  problems of our own making or change the ground rules of the system of  government they bequeathed to us.

True, the Founders established a deliberative democracy, with a series of  checks and balances designed to prevent the majority from running roughshod over  the rights of political minorities. But these checks and balances have served  our nation well.

The problem is not the democratic system bestowed upon us by George  Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The problem is the additional  obstacles to action – the filibuster, hyper-partisanship,  and special  interest pledges – that our Founders would have found abhorrent.

Our Founders struck a delicate balance  between the promotion of majority rule – the essential predicate for a  democratic government of “We the People” – and the desire to protect minority  rights and prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” The Constitution is designed  to delay and temper majority rule while allowing a long-standing majority to get  its way.

So, for example, the Constitution staggers the election of senators so that  only one third of the Senate can change hands in any one election. As a result,  it usually takes more than one election for any one party to gain a governing  majority.

Modern politicians have placed layer after layer of lard on this deliberative  system of government, ultimately producing the gridlock now plaguing Washington.  The Senate Republicans now use the filibuster rule as a virtual requirement.  Every piece of legislation must enjoy a super-majority of 60 votes in the Senate — meaning a determined minority can permanently stop the majority from getting  its way.

President George Washington, in his farewell  address to the nation, warned about just such “alterations” to our  constitutional system. He said this would “impair the energy of the system.”

Washington also decried political parties. He passionately warned the nation  against any effort “to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the  will of a party.”

While political parties were forming and solidifying even as Washington  uttered these words, our modern politicians have enshrined hyper-partisanship  through tricks like the “majority of the majority” rule, whereby the House  speaker will only bring to the House floor legislation that has the support of  the majority of his political party.

It is hard to imagine a more powerful example of the precise  party-over-country danger Washington warned us about.

Washington may have had the likes of Grover Norquist in mind when he warned  that some men “will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp  for themselves the reins of government.”

Even anti-tax Republicans, like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep, Frank  Wolf, have now decried the oversized role Norquist’s no new taxes pledge played  in forcing the debt ceiling showdown and helping to prevent any solution that  would have included new revenues. Coburn and others have warned their colleagues  against putting Norquist’s “no–tax” pledge over their oath to support the  Constitution and to serve “we the people” – not Norquist or any other special  interests.

Washington today has serious problems, but we should not blame the city’s  namesake for them. Rather, politicians of both parties should support a reform  agenda designed to remove from our political system the modern procedural  obstacles that have produced our current gridlock.

Maybe even in these divided political times we can all agree that when  casting blame for what ails Washington, the fault it not with George Washington  and our other Founding Fathers. It’s with the causes of our current gridlock – including figures like Norquist and his no-tax pledge.

By: Doug Kendall, Opinion Contributor, Politico, October 22, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Democrats, Elections, Equal Rights, GOP, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Lobbyists, Middle Class, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Angry And Unstable”, The Birthers Eat Their Own

Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.

The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.

Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.

The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.

When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.

“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”

This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?

The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way—most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21/2 years before Castro came to power.

But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal.

Similarly, few of the Republican presidential candidates have condemned the spectators at the presidential debates who applauded the death penalty, the idea that those without health insurance should be left to die and the sentiment that the jobless are to blame for being unemployed. And it seems doubtful that we’ll hear from Republican leaders about Tea Party Nation’s new effort to get business leaders to pledge not to hire people until the Democrats’ “war against business” ends.

Of course, extremism isn’t a uniquely Republican problem. My colleague Jennifer Rubin, noting a number of anti-Semitic messages seen at Occupy Wall Street events, asked last week: “Respectable politicians and media outlets, where is the outrage?” There’s no evidence that the demonstrators blaming Jewish bankers for the nation’s troubles are anything but a small minority. But that doesn’t excuse public figures from an obligation to push back against the extremes.

The higher prominence of loons of all stripes is a natural consequence of a political system that has lost every last vestige of a political center. But in the Obama age, this is particularly a problem for Republican lawmakers who are cowed into silence by the fear that any criticism of the crazies will invite a primary challenge. Now that the birthers have begun to eat their own brightest prospects, perhaps Republican lawmakers will finally feel compelled to say something.

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Bigotry, Birthers, Conservatives, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, Media, Racism, Right Wing | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The GOP’s Latest Tax Gimmickry: Soak The Poor

It’s one of the strangest things in our politics: The only “big” ideas Republicans and conservatives seem to offer these days revolve around novel and sometimes bizarre ways of cutting taxes on rich people.

Given all the attention that Herman Cain’s nonsensical and regressive 9-9-9 tax plan has received, the Republican debates should have as their soundtrack that old Beatles song that droned on about the number nine.

Now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry hopes to pump up his campaign with a supposedly bold proposal to institute a flat tax, which would also deliver more money to the well-off. Perry plans to outline his proposal this week, but he has already touted it as a sure-fire way of “scrapping the 3 million words of the current tax code.”

There is absolutely nothing new about this idea, and candidates who pushed flat taxes in the past saw their campaigns flat-line, most prominently businessman Steve Forbes in 1996 and again in 2000. Politically, the idea falls apart rather quickly when middle-income voters realize that its main effect is to cut taxes on the financially privileged while usually raising them on Americans who have more modest incomes.

Note to Perry: Voters are shrewd in figuring out whether tax proposals really benefit them. That’s why raising taxes on millionaires — the exact opposite of what Cain and Perry want to do — wins support from a broad majority.

But the more interesting question is: Why are today’s Republicans so enthralled by tax gimmicks? Their party, after all, was once innovative in thinking about affirmative uses of government. The Grand Old Party instituted the Homestead Act and created land-grant colleges, the interstate highway system, student loans, the Pure Food and Drug Act and even a prescription drug benefit under Medicare.

It was Richard Nixon who supported laws establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In signing the OSHA bill, Nixon called it “one of the most important pieces of legislation, from the standpoint of 55 million people who will be covered by it, ever passed by the Congress of the United States, because it involves their lives.” Yes, government regulations save lives, a view now heretical in the GOP.

Republicans have boxed themselves into a rejection of both their own traditions and the idea that government can do any good. Thus they have confined themselves to endless fiddling with the tax code. Almost everything conservatives suggest these days is built around the single idea that if only government took less money away from the wealthy, all our problems would magically disappear.

There is a history to this. The Republican fixation on taxes dates to the mid-1970s, when supply-side economics began taking hold. The late Jude Wanniski, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal who campaigned indefatigably on behalf of lower marginal tax rates, came up with the “Two Santa Clauses” theory. He argued that if Democrats earned support by giving voters benefits through government programs, Republicans should play Santa by giving people tax cuts.

Wanniski sold his tax ideas to Jack Kemp, one of the most ebullient political figures of his generation, who in turn sold them to Ronald Reagan. Reagan made Kemp’s 30 percent tax cut (co-sponsored with Sen. Bill Roth) a centerpiece of his 1980 campaign. The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams perfectly described the result in a 1981 essay. “After years of learning that ‘you don’t shoot Santa Claus,’ ” he wrote, “the Republicans decided to nominate him.”

But Republicans have a problem now. In the Kemp-Reagan days, they were selling across-the-board tax cuts. Most of their benefits flowed to the rich, but almost everyone got a piece. Today, many Republicans complain resentfully that less prosperous Americans don’t pay enough in taxes — overlooking the fact that citizens who don’t pay income taxes still shell out a significant share of their earnings in payroll, sales and (directly or through their rents) property taxes.

Reagan’s optimism has thus been replaced by crabby put-downs of the less affluent. Perry said it directly in his announcement speech: “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” Considering the other injustices in our society, this seems an odd and mean-spirited obsession.

“Tax the poor” is a lousy political slogan. That’s why Cain’s 9-9-9 plan  and Perry’s flat tax are doomed to fail. Among conservatives, Santa Claus has given way to Scrooge.

By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Corporations, Democrats, Economic Recovery, Elections, GOP, GOP Presidential Candidates, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Income Gap, Middle Class, Right Wing, Taxes, Teaparty, Voters | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Job Creation: Small Isn’t Always Beautiful

I challenge you to find a stump speech by a politician running for any office from dog catcher to president that doesn’t invoke the importance of small businesses.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a hat tip to American entrepreneurialism, evoking images like that of Steve Jobs planting a seed in his garage that grew into an amazing Apple orchard. Besides, don’t most people work for small businesses, and aren’t such businesses the engine of job growth?

Actually, no. In what may be the most misunderstood fact about the job market, although most companies are small — according to 2008 census data, 61 percent are small businesses with fewer than four workers — more than two-thirds of the American work force is employed by companies with more than 100 workers. You can tweak the definitions, but even if you define “small” as fewer than 500 people (as the federal government does, basically), you still find that half the work force is employed by large businesses.

It’s even more stunning when it comes to payrolls: 57 percent of total compensation is paid out by companies of 500 or more employees, with most of that coming from the largest, those with at least 10,000 employees. And new research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses — defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses — account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all.

But don’t small businesses at least fuel job growth? Sort of. It’s not small businesses that matter, but new businesses, which by definition create new jobs. Real job creation, though, doesn’t kick in until those small businesses survive and grow into larger operations. In fact, according to path-breaking work by the economist John C. Haltiwanger and his colleagues, once they accounted for the outsize contributions by new and young companies, they found “no systematic relationship” between net job growth and company size.

It’s unlikely such findings will change politicians’ speeches trumpeting small businesses. But if we want to get our job market back on track, they should inform our policy thinking. For example, it’s not only the case that start-ups are of particular importance to robust job growth. They’ve been creating fewer jobs over the last decade. Employment at start-ups fell by almost half, and those losses predated the “Great Recession” — probably one reason job growth was so lackluster over the last decade’s expansion.

Economists do not yet have a good answer as to why start-ups and surviving young companies are creating fewer jobs, but it may have something to do with “allocative inefficiency.” Too many resources flowed to financial engineering in the last decade, and too few went to R & D and innovation outside of the financial sector. The decline of American manufacturing plays a role here as well, as the sector has historically accounted for 70 percent of job-creating private-sector R & D, often in partnership with start-ups and small suppliers.

This isn’t to say that public policy should abandon small businesses. Many face distinctive hurdles compared with large businesses: they have tighter profit margins and thus less room for mistakes, they have diminished access to credit markets and, even with creditworthy borrowing records, many say they’re not getting the loans they need. Small manufacturers often have less access to export markets, and, with emerging economies growing a lot faster than advanced economies, that’s a big disadvantage.

Yet the sector’s primary lobbying group — the National Federation of Independent Business — tends to fight less for these pragmatic policies and more for the standard conservative agenda of lower taxes and deregulation. Indeed, the group has become a purely partisan operation, fighting more for Republican electoral victory than small-business growth. For example, it opposed the president’s jobs bill, even though independent analysts estimated it would significantly increase economic demand, and the federation’s own survey shows that “poor sales” — a k a weak demand — is a much bigger problem for its members than taxes or regulations.

The next time a politician tells you how he or she is for small business (which will likely be the next time you hear a politician say anything), be mindful that to the extent that size matters at all for job growth, it’s really about new companies that will start small and, if they survive, perhaps grow large. Everything else is largely noise — and too often, noise that has little to do with what this economy really needs.

By: Jared Bernstein, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 23, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Big Business, Congress, Conservatives, Corporations, GOP, Middle East, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Fox News Is Really Destroying The Republican Party

Would more House Republicans rather have John Boehner‘s job or Sean Hannity’s? How many Republican presidential candidates would rather be in a Fox News studio than the White House? The wave of stunt candidates so far — Donald Trump, Herman Cain — and those who have opted out of the race to keep their TV gigs — Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin — suggests the answer is a non-zero number. Even seemingly serious establishment candidate Tim Pawlenty has reportedly hit up Roger Ailes for a post-campaign contract (Ailes shot him down.) If the GOP‘s presidential circus this year has taught us anything it’s the allure of conservative media over Republican politics, and media seems to be winning.

Tea Partiers have two career tracks: get elected or become a pundit. And it often seems like they’re using one to audition for the other. Louisiana Rep. Tom Graves, whom his local newspaper describes as a guy with “a far noisier, more peppery style, [who has] proven quite adept at drawing free media attention,” is one of the House freshmen who, as we noted earlier, House Speaker John Boehner is having a hard time controlling, largely because the top Republican on Capitol Hill doesn’t have much to offer him. Graves, of course, is a popular guest on Fox.

Donald Trump scored a regular spot on Fox & Friends by claiming his researchers had found evidence Obama might not have been born in America. He’s not a big fundraiser, he’s not a policy wonk, and the majority of Americans don’t like him, but candidate after candidate has lined up to meet with him in Manhattan, not some farm in Iowa. Sarah Palin, too, pretended to run for president for months, only to opt to keep her day job as paid TV analyst, which she said would leave her “unshackled.” Mike Huckabee, who was in the top two in national polls for the first half of the year, decided to stay on the network having just built a nice mansion for himself in Florida. Fox cancelled Rick Santorum‘s Fox contract when he started running for president, but given that Santorum lost his last election in 2006, it might be nice to get that job back once he loses this one too. Michele Bachmann rose to prominence with her many cable news interviews, but in recent months, she’s been undone by her own unscriptedness, implying vaccines cause mental retardation just because a woman walked up to her and told her so. That might be something a conservative talk show host can get away with, but much harder on the campaign trail.

And then there’s Herman Cain. He’s going through a crisis of seriousness despite ascent in the polls, in no small part because he seems more interested in selling books than building a political organization that can win elections. At least, as he told Businessweek‘s Joshua Green, he’s not being greedy about it.  “I’m still doing paid speeches,” Cain told Green, “But I have not raised my prices. This economy’s on life support, so I’m very mindful of those companies that would like to have me come and speak. But I’m not gonna take advantage of my newfound popularity just to put more dollars in my pocket.” Yet!

Is it any wonder why the only guy who seems to want the GOP’s nomination more than he wants a timeslot on Fox News is the one who’s already too rich to care about Roger Ailes’s money?

By: Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, October 20, 2011

October 23, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Corporations, Democracy, Elections, Ideologues, Ideology, Right Wing | , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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