“Redefining Compromise”: The Radicalization Of The GOP
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership and the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, was recently asked about lawmakers’ capacity to compromise. As Robert Schlesinger noted, his response was illustrative.
“Compromising is one thing as long as you’re compromising and moving in the direction of your principles,” the right-wing lawmaker said. “If you’re compromising and moving away from the direction of your principles, I’m not sure it’s a compromise.”
And I’m not sure if Price has access to a dictionary. “Compromise” involves give and take, with concessions on both sides. To reach a resolution, compromise necessarily involves rivals accepting something less than their original goal.
I thought of Price’s recent comments again this morning after hearing the latest from Richard Mourdock, the Republicans’ U.S. Senate nominee in Indiana. He told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd this morning, among other things, “I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Mourdock also told CNN that bipartisanship means “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government,” and he told Fox News, “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
In this guy’s mind, the only acceptable “compromise” is the one in which he gets what he wants.
Remember, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, centrist political scientists with enormous establishment credibility, have explained that American governance is broken because the Republican Party is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
As Mourdock helps demonstrate, the radicalization of the GOP isn’t over. The costs for the nation will likely continue to be severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2012
“A New Pair Of Briefs”: Senate Democrats Plan To Give Mittens A Wedgie
The Hill is reporting that Senate Democrats are planning to bring the Paycheck Fairness Act to the floor this week. The PFA, which is opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and the G.O.P. (and come to think of it, have you ever seen those two institutions in the same place at the same time? just sayin’), would expand the protections enshrined in the Equal Pay Act by, among other things,
allowing employees to compare the pay of male colleagues not only within the same office but also with colleagues in other local offices. A female employee could allege wage discrimination if she is paid less than a male working the same job for the same employer across town.
Unsurprisingly, women’s groups are strongly supportive of the proposed law. It’s a popular piece of legislation, especially among female voters, a group that, in a political season that has been defined by the G.O.P.’s ever-escalating war on women and a widening gender gap between to the two parties, Romney needs to court. So the upcoming vote puts him in a difficult position: he “will either have to split with Republicans and an important business group or take a position that could further erode his support among women.”
The Dems, for once, are playing very smart politics with this. What I don’t understand is why they don’t do this sort of thing more often. One of the signature failures of Harry Reid and the Obama administration has been their reluctance to bring popular legislation to the floor and force Republicans to go on the record opposing it. Using wedge issues to pry apart a political coalition and appeal to swing voters is a tried and true technique. The Bush administration did this kind of thing all to time to Democrats, with great success. Even if there is no possibility that the legislation will pass, political points are scored.
Supporters of the Obama administration certainly have a point when they argue that the President’s effectiveness has been severely hampered by an extraordinarily hostile and recalcitrant Congress. But the President has other powers to move his or her agenda forward, such as appointments, executive orders, and working with Congressional leaders to bring votes to the floor that will put the opposing party on the defensive. My biggest disappointments with the Obama administration have been its failures in these kinds of areas, where the President really does have a lot of control. Which is why I despair when I read about things like this. Or this.
That said, I don’t want to dwell on the negative here. I heartily applaud what the Dems are doing with the Paycheck Fairness Act vote, and I strongly encourage them to wield the wedge a lot more often. Among other things, it help builds morale amongst the base — it’s fun to nail those bastards to the wall and observe their obvious discomfort as they squirm and try to weasel their way out of going on the record. More like this, please!
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 29, 2012
Indulging “Moderate Republicans”: Olympia Snowe Gives President An “F” For Not Paying Enough Attention To Her
Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe has finished grading the president’s report card. President Obama gets an “F” in bipartisanship, where “bipartisanship” is defined as “constantly stroking the fragile egos of self-important Senate moderates.”
Snowe is not seeking reelection because the Republican Party wholly merged with the conservative movement and then began enforcing much stricter party discipline than it had in the past, and she would likely lose a primary election to a more right-wing candidate. But in her high-minded version of what happened, she is leaving because of “partisanship,” an evil spell cast on the formerly fraternal and cooperative United States Senate by comity-hating wizards.
This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn’t called her in almost two years!
If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t spoken to President Obama in nearly two years.
Snowe said that if she had to grade the President on his willingness to work with Republicans, he would “be close to failing on that point.” In fact, Snowe, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, claims that her meetings with President Obama have been less frequent than with any other president.
That’s so weird, that President Obama stopped talking to her around two years ago. I wonder what happened? That wizard probably got him, and now he hates bipartisanship. That is the only explanation I can think of for why Olympia Snowe — a Republican the president could definitely try to work with! — hasn’t heard from Obama for around two years.
I mean, Snowe “even tried to work with him on health care.” Hey, that was around two years ago, actually! How hard did she try, again? If I recall correctly, she intentionally delayed the process for months before finally voting against a plan she’d previously voted for, never making a single substantive criticism of the policy of the bill in the fear that her criticism would then be addressed by Democrats and she’d be forced to come up with a new reason to oppose the bill, because it turns out she didn’t actually want to vote for healthcare reform, and she would not have supported any plan to expand coverage to all Americans, no matter how it worked.
So this is the problem. In the popular imagination, and in Barack Obama’s naive pre-2010 fantasies, “bipartisanship” means “working together to accomplish things.” In reality, in the Senate, it means “indulging moderates, forever.” For Olympia Snowe, the act of calling Olympia Snowe is more important than the act of … passing legislation to solve problems.
Snowe is now endorsing Scott Brown, saying Massachusetts residents should vote for him because he is another true believer in independent, party line-crossing bipartisanship. He even supports the Violence Against Women Act! (Why should Massachusetts residents vote for a Republican who is willing to cross party lines sometimes to vote for bills that every Democrat supports, instead of just voting for a Democrat whose support you won’t have to just sort of guess at until he comes out and says it? Because “bipartisanship,” that’s why.) (And the fact that Brown supported allowing employers to deny contraception coverage — a measure Snowe opposed — while his opponents shared Snowe’s position on the issue also doesn’t matter, because being a Republican who sometimes bucks the party line to do the right thing is more Honorable than being a Democrat whose party line is already the right thing.)
Would Olympia Snowe have voted for cap-and-trade if the president had called her more often? Or would she have done exactly what she did during the healthcare reform process, and strung Democrats along for months before voting against it for nakedly political reasons? (She was beginning to play the exact same game as she had before, saying she would maybe bring herself to support a “scaled-back” version of the legislation as long as other Republicans also promised to do so.)
Would Olympia Snowe have supported the “scaled-back,” less ambitious alternative to comprehensive immigration reform that was the DREAM Act, which would have allowed people who came to the U.S. as children and served in the military or went to college to seek citizenship legally? No, she would not have, because if the act had passed, “millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents….”
So instead of cap-and-trade, we got nothing. Instead of the DREAM Act, we got nothing. If healthcare reform had failed, we’d have nothing. If Snowe’s stated goal was to maintain the status quo, because she doesn’t care about immigration and doesn’t believe in climate change, then she’d be totally doing a very good job. But she claims to care about climate change and want to do something about immigration, which leads me to believe that she’s horrible at being a senator. It is the incompetent political maneuvering of “moderates” like Snowe, and not “partisanship,” that leads directly to Senate inaction. If what she needed, in order to be swayed to the side of passing legislation to address problems, was for the president to make a much bigger public show of courting her, then she’s a bizarre and repulsive specimen. Being against everything because people aren’t paying you enough attention is so much worse than being against everything on principle.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 27, 2012
“Enormous Power” Used Badly: Olympia Snowe’s Strange Martyrdom
The retirement of Olympia Snowe, at the young (by senatorial standards) age of 65, has again dramatized the perilous condition of the Senate moderates. They have been scorned, marginalized, and hunted close to extinction. Yet the striking fact about Snowe’s career is that, far from being shunted to the sidelines, she has wielded, or been given the opportunity to wield, enormous power. She has used it, on the whole, quite badly.
When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.
The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.
This may sound sensible, even admirable, if you subscribe to the notion that securing bipartisan support for major bills is inherently valuable. But it’s worth noting that moderates like Snowe and their fans worship bipartisanship for reasons that have nothing to do with good government. A Republican representing a blue state, or a Democrat representing a red state, faces an inherently precarious situation. Often she will find the demands of her party’s national base pitted against those of her home state electorate. Olympia Snowe’s worst nightmare is to have to choose between infuriating Republicans in Washington and moderate voters in Maine. Creating legislation that passes by wide margins is not done out of a desire to bring bills closer into alignment with any abstract standard of good government, but to ensure her vote sits comfortably in the middle of a wide swath of support from both sides. In a farewell op-ed in the Washington Post, Snowe complains that centrism offers no electoral rewards. For her, though, such careful positioning was a matter of political self-preservation.
The New York Times report on her departure cast the central tension of her career as pitting “her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.” This is a common way people think about it – there are two poles, one representing the moderate’s principled convictions, and the other representing party loyalty. The negation of one implies the presence of the other. Snowe’s career proved that it’s entirely possible to steer clear of the party line without upholding any particular notion of the public good.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, March 2, 2012
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