“U.S. Chamber Carrying The Tea Party Label”: The Tea Party and Wall Street Are Even Closer Than We Thought
Ever since the Tea Party Republicans arrived on the scene in Washington, I’ve cast a wary eye at the notion of them as grass-roots insurgents disconnected from the party’s big business and Wall Street base. Heck, when I went looking for one Tea Party tribune, Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia, the night of the August 2011 vote to resolve that summer’s debt-ceiling showdown, I found him at a fundraiser in AT&T’s box at National Stadium.
But even I, with my lack of illusions on this score, was startled to see just how tight the business lobby-Tea Party bond has been, as revealed in today’s Washington Post by Tom Hamburger and Jia Lynn Yang, with help from the Center for Responsive Politics. They report:
The American Bankers Association gave more money over the past two election cycles to GOP lawmakers who in effect voted to allow the United States to default on its debt than those who voted against that scenario. The ABA contributed $2.2 million to lawmakers who ultimately ignored the group’s warnings, second only to the Club for Growth and just ahead of Koch Industries, both of which are leading sources of funds for conservative candidates…
At financial services firms, including hedge funds and major banks, contributions totaled more than $26 million over the past two election cycles to the Republican lawmakers who voted against a deal to reopen the government and avoid a first-ever debt default. Employees and the political action committee of Goldman Sachs, which didn’t comment for this article, gave $1.06 million from 2009 to 2012 to the group of GOP lawmakers who voted against the deal. At Bank of America, which also declined to comment, contributions totaled $1.03 million. Hedge funds gave $1.7 million….
Employees and political action committees at Honeywell, the manufacturing conglomerate [whose CEO David Cote was among the Fortune 500 types warning against the shutdown] contributed nearly $2.1 million to last week’s naysayers while providing slightly less to yes-voting Republicans. At AT&T, contributions reached $1.9 million for no-voting members and $2.1 million for those voting “yes.”
Even the proud leader of the defund-Obamacare government-shutdown movement got the business lucre:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whose 21-hour floor speech helped spark the crisis and who voted against the debt-ceiling deal, received $786,157 from financial services companies — more than the $705,657 he received from the Club for Growth. Cruz’s wife works at Goldman Sachs, whose PAC gave $5,000 to her husband in 2012.
The question now, of course, is whether big business and Wall Street keep shoveling money toward those in the congressional suicide caucus. There are already signs of a rethinking underway, with talk of non-lunatic business-backed challengers in Michigan and Utah, and with some donors holding off on writing the usual checks to the GOP. Still, the Post’s report reminds us that we should not be surprised if this shift is marginal at best. The fact is, Ted Cruz and his ilk were making no bones at all about what they planned to do in Washington, and got plenty of backing from supposedly sober business types nonetheless. Why? Because their interests overlap more than the new talk of a rift acknowledges, on everything from taxes to organized labor to government regulations. What was the final demand that many in the shutdown caucus were making? The elimination of a tax on some of the highest-margin companies in the country—not exactly a typical pitchfork-wielding cause. Make no mistake: The great Shutdown Debacle of 2013 may have carried the Tea Party label, but it was made in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the C-suite.
Addendum, 5:30 p.m. Wednesday: It’s worth noting that Ted Cruz is not just getting big financial support from Wall Street. He’s also on its health plan.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, October 23, 2013
“Rule And Ruin Party Crashers”: The Tea Party’s Drive For Ideological Purity
In the late nineteen-sixties, Mitch McConnell came to Washington to work as an aide to Senator Marlow Cook, a Kentucky Republican. Cook backed clean-air standards and limits on strip mining. It was a time of political diversity among Republicans: in 1970, Senate Republicans endorsed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. McConnell was briefly a fellow-traveller of those who regarded government as a source of public protection. He once called the Nixon Administration “at worst, completely reactionary.”
In 1984, McConnell was elected to the Senate, on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide reëlection. By then, a movement of Southern and evangelical conservatives was rising within the Party. McConnell tacked right periodically, saluting the new Republican leaders. During the Administration of George W. Bush, he backed the President by voting, with Ted Kennedy, to enact No Child Left Behind and the expansion of the Medicare drug benefit. By 2009, after Wall Street melted down, McConnell had risen to Minority Leader, and he forged a deal with Democrats to bail out big banks.
Then the Tea Party rose up in fury, and McConnell moved right again, in an effort to reinvent himself as an anti-government insurgent. It wasn’t easy; he was sixty-nine, and his long jowls and round eyeglasses gave him the look of a Taft Administration clerk. Nonetheless, in 2011, he led the Senate Republicans through a ruthless, extortionate campaign to threaten default on the national debt. It succeeded. President Obama wobbled and accepted budget cuts. Afterward, McConnell called the national debt “a hostage worth ransoming.”
This autumn, he supported the Tea Party radicals’ second threat to default on the debt and a sixteen-day shutdown of the federal government. This time, though, Obama held firm, and, in the end, McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner were forced to choose between Tea Party principles and the viability of the world economy. McConnell negotiated his party’s late-hour capitulation, and, within days, Tea Party groups called for his ouster. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a PAC founded by Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has bankrolled Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, and other highly conservative candidates, announced that it would finance a Republican primary challenge against the Minority Leader next year, because he “has a liberal record and refuses to fight for conservative principles.”
Other veteran Republicans who joined McConnell on the debt-ceiling vote are facing similar challenges from Tea Party-backed candidates. Those targeted include Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who was elected to the Senate in 1978; Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee. In 2012, such primary challenges weakened the Party’s competitive position, and allowed the Democrats to win an eight-seat majority in the Senate. Even now, the insurgents seem less interested in victory than in purification. “We know which senators fought for liberty, and which ones caved to Obama,” Lee Bright, the South Carolina state senator who is challenging Graham, told Slate recently. “We’ve got a list.” The Tea Party’s approval ratings have plummeted since the shutdown ended. Business lobbies and their PACs, appalled by the shutdown’s estimated twenty-four-billion-dollar cost to the economy, are signalling that they may pull back from uncompromising candidates. But the fact that PACs like the Senate Conservatives Fund are willing to force incumbents into expensive, distracting primary fights makes it even less probable that the Republicans can retake control of the Senate.
Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opinion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already enshrined in law a portion of the movement’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical thinking among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the others systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.
This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street analysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an actual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confederate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today.
The Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism reflects a longer, deeper decline in the Republican Party’s ability to tolerate a diversity of ideas and public-policy strategies, and to adapt to American multiculturalism. Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Latino voters in 2012 helped insure Barack Obama’s reëlection. Republican leaders, chastened and without any other obvious way to increase their vote base before 2016, pledged earlier this year to revive a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Yet party leaders, in part because they have been tied down since July by the debt confrontation, haven’t found a way to move legislation past the nativist caucus in the House.
As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed a similar bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaservice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.
McConnell’s would-be usurper is Matt Bevin, a businessman who owns a bell company; his campaign slogan is “Let Freedom Ring.” He told Glenn Beck recently, “We have got to wean people from this idea of free lunches.” (He might start with fellow Kentuckians; their state pays sixty-six cents in federal taxes for every dollar of federal spending it takes in.) Bevin pleaded, “What we need to tell the American people is that the party’s over.” Presumably, he didn’t mean the Grand Old Party, but the American people may be forgiven for thinking that he did.
By: Steve Coll, The New Yorker, November 4, 2013
“No Country For Old Moderates”: In The GOP, One Side Is Fighting, The Other Side Is Rolling Over
The more I think about this Republican “civil war,” the less it looks like war to me. It often gives the appearance of being war because these Tea Party people march into the arena with a lot of fire, brimstone, and kindred pyrotechnics that suggest conflict. But what, really, in hard policy terms, are these two sides arguing about? Practically nothing. It’s a disagreement chiefly over tactics and intensity. That’s a crucial point, and so much of the media don’t understand it. But I’m here to tell you, whenever you read an article that makes a lot of hay about this “war” and then goes on to describe the Republican factions as “moderate” and “conservative,” turn the page or click away. You are either in the hands of an idiot or someone intentionally misleading you.
What’s going on presents many of the outward signs of political warfare. Insurgent radical extremists are challenging already very conservative incumbents whose thought and deed crimes are that they are conservative only 80- or 90-something percent of the time instead of 100 (or 110, preferably). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), American Conservative Union 2012 rating of 92, being challenged? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell? He got 100 percent in 2012! Hey, I was joking about that 110!
So sure, running primaries against people like this can be called warlike acts. But a real war has two sides who believe different things and are willing to fight to the death for them. In this war, that description applies only to one side.
This…skirmish, let’s call it, is between radicals and conservatives. (It certainly doesn’t involve moderates; there are roughly four moderate Republicans in Congress, depending on how you count, out of 278.) The conservatives, the more traditional conservatives such as John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and many others in the Senate, and House Speaker John Boehner, could be a force if they wanted to. But by and large, they’ve refused to be. If the GOP had two warring factions, then you might expect that on all major high-profile legislative votes, the schism would evince itself in the roll calls. But when you look back over the list of high-profile measures that have come before them while Barack Obama has been president, the conservatives and the radicals only really split on two occasions.
One was the fiscal cliff deal as 2013 started. In the House, 85 Republicans backed that deal and 151 voted against it. In the Senate, the vote was 89-8; 40 Republicans backed and five opposed. (Three Democrats opposed it because the tax-increase threshold went too high, from the expected $250,000 per household to $400,000.) The second was the vote we just had to reopen the government and raise the debt limit. That, of course, passed the House by a comfortable margin, with the support of 87 Republicans, while 144 opposed. The vote in the Senate was 81-18, with 27 Republicans voting aye and 18 nay.
That’s it. Interestingly, those two votes show us a radical caucus in the Senate that grew in 10 months from five to 18, while in the House, the radicals have outnumbered the conservatives in a remarkably consistent way. But those are the only diversions from party unity. On all other major matters, matters of policy—Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, cap and trade in the House—there is no disagreement. Everyone, or nearly everyone, votes no. The only really important votes on which these two sides disagree are the votes that threaten fiscal calamity. So that’s all the conservatives stand for. Elect me, and at five minutes ’til midnight, I’ll stand courageously against global economic cataclysm!
One could add one more basis of disagreement. Occasionally, the conservatives cast votes conceding that the government ought to be able to function as designed; you know, with agencies having people run them. But that happens only once about every two years.
Now is the time for them to stand up and say “enough.” An October 7 Washington Post-ABC poll found that just 52 percent of Republicans approved of how Republicans were handling the budget negotiations. That’s margin of error to 50-50. So half of the Republicans in the country disapprove of what the GOP just did.
But they might as well be zero, for they effectively have no representation. The regular conservatives—most conspicuously the craven Boehner, but all the others, too—did nothing to represent these people until the last possible second, and until the radicals demonstrated conclusively that they couldn’t pull off defunding Obamacare.
Think about that. Half of one of our major political parties, constituting many millions of citizens, barely has a voice in Washington. If they did have a voice, none of this late madness would have happened. But the legislators who ostensibly represent them are cowards, kittens, balled up in the corner. The radicals may be fighting a war. But the conservatives are executing a classic rearguard action. At best. And that’s not much of a civil war. And it says a great deal about the character of the Republican Party, and especially of the conservatives. History will remember.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 24, 2013
“The Tea Party’s Suicide Pact”: Hell Bent On Breaking The GOP And Picking Up The Pieces
If Senate Republicans are the surrender caucus and the House GOP is the suicide caucus, then the Democratic House caucus is the victory caucus.
I’m a fan of the Military History Channel and all during the GOP/Tea Party default debacle, I kept thinking of the kamikaze planes crashing into American aircraft carriers off Okinawa. The pilots were brave, but they didn’t stop the U.S. from destroying the empire. Japanese soldiers on Pacific atolls during World War II had to choose between surrender and suicide, and, like the House Republicans, chose to kill themselves to atone to their emperor Ted Cruz for their defeat.
So far, there’s no sign that Emperor Cruz or his minions in the party of tea will give up the fruitless fight. The tea partiers are the GOP’s kamikazes and they are prepared to fight until the last Republican dies. One of the ironies of the battle is that red district tea partiers will survive the 2014 midterms, while the few moderately conservatives Republicans left in Congress will go down in flames in their purple districts.
Why are the tea partiers so suicidal? The tea party is hell bent on breaking the GOP and picking up the pieces.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said last week that “the GOP was going nuts.” King was wrong. The GOP got to nuts more than a year ago and now has reached lunacy. According to national surveys by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, the GOP’s net rating five weeks ago was -43; it was -46 last week. The same polls showed that the net rating of the Affordable Care Act was -13 in September but only -5 last week.
The intent of the tea party was to destroy the ACA and save the GOP from itself. National polls indicate that all the party of tea did was hurt the GOP and save Obamacare from itself. Another way of looking at these numbers is that 38 percent like the ACA but only 22 percent like the GOP.
In the last few days, the Tea Party has made it clear the dead enders will continue the hopeless fight until it finishes off the GOP.
Cruz said late last week that he will do everything he can to kill Obamacare. The suicide caucus has voted to repeal the ACA 40 times and tried to defund it during the default debacle but it’s still alive. The definition of insanity is, of course, to do the same thing over again and expect a different result
The day after the end of the budget battle, President Obama called on the House to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law. Several House Republicans have said they will fight against immigration reform to the last breath. The tea party might win the congressional battle against immigration reform, but it would lose the electoral war by further alienating the fast growing Latino voting population.
Last week, prominent Republicans like the Lt. Governor of Texas, Dave Dewhurst, called for President Obama’s impeachment. The suicide caucus in the House has the power to impeach the president but it would need 67 Senate votes to remove him from office. There are only 46 Republicans in the Senate, and some of them wouldn’t even vote to kick the president out of the White House.
The suicide caucus’ motto should be “if it feels good do it” even if it leads to electoral disaster. If the tea party does kill off the GOP, the epitaph on the party’s tombstone should either read “With friends like ours, who needed enemies,” or “In the party of Lincoln something was stinking.”
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 23, 2013
“Dick Cheney’s Transcendent Cynicism”: Using The Same Self Serving Game, That’s How He Rolls
Dick Cheney’s cynicism knows no end.
Yet, it still has the power to amaze—especially when Cheney’s political machinations go to extremes.
Consider his current embrace of the Tea Party movement.
At a point when the Republican Party’s favorability ratings have collapsed to the lowest point in the history of Gallup polling, just about everyone who has an interest in the future of the Grand Old Party is fretting about the damage done by a movement so politically tone deaf that it thought the American people would embrace a politics of government shutdown and debt-ceiling brinksmanship in order to advance the impossible dream of “defunding Obamacare.”
But here’s Dick Cheney—taking time out from pitching his new book, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey—to rally to the defense of the movement.
Hailing the Tea Party as a “positive influence” on the Grand Old Party, he announced on NBC’s Today show that “it’s an uprising, in part, and the good thing is it’s taken place within the Republican Party.”
Despite the chaos it has unleashed within and around the party for which the 72-year-old former vice president serves as a grouchy grand old man, Cheney declared: “I don’t see it as a negative. I think it’s much better to have that kind of ferment and turmoil and change in the Republican Party than it would be to have it outside.”
“These are Americans,” he says of the Tea Partisans. “They’re loyal, they’re patriotic and taxpayers, and they’re fed up with what they see happening in Washington. I think it’s a normal, healthy reaction and the fact that the party is having to adjust to it is positive.”
That’s rich coming from Cheney.
No matter what anyone thinks about the Tea Party movement in its current managed and manipulated form, many of its most sincere adherents joined what they thought was a grassroots challenge to the Republican establishment.
And no one says establishment like Dick Cheney: a permanent fixture in and around Republican administrations since Richard Nixon turned the key at the White House. No one has fought harder than this guy has to maintain the crony capitalist project that has made the modern GOP a lobbying agency for Wall Street speculators, bailout-seeking bankers and defense contractors like his own Halliburton.
Cheney’s everything Tea Party activists say they are fighting against.
So what’s the former vice president up to?
The same self-serving gaming of the process in which the man who arranged his own nomination as George W. Bush’s running mate has always engaged.
Asked about Ted Cruz, Cheney declined to criticize the Texas senator who steered the party off the charts when it comes to disapproval among the great mass of voters.
That’s because Cheney doesn’t at this point have any interest in the great mass of American voters. He’s interested in the handful of Wyoming Republican primary voters who will decide the fate of daughter Liz Cheney’s challenge to Republican Senator Mike Enzi.
Enzi is a steady conservative whose only “sin” was to get in the way of Cheney-family ambition. But he is in the way, so Dick Cheney is quite willing to remake himself as the Tea Party’s ardent defender in order to aid Liz Cheney’s campaign.
Indeed, instead of ripping Cruz—as he would have done in his former days as a White House chief of staff, GOP congressional leader, secretary of defense and vice president—Cheney now compares Cruz with daughter Liz.
“I think [Cruz] represents the thinking of an awful lot of people obviously in Texas,” says Dick Cheney. “But my own daughter is running for U.S. Senate in Wyoming partly motivated by the concern that Washington is not working, the system is breaking down and it’s time for new leadership.”
Shameless? Well, yes.
But that’s how Dick Cheney rolls.
The Republican Party is just a vehicle.
The state of Wyoming is just a political playground.
What matters to Cheney is the Cheney brand. And if he has to attach a Tea Party label in order to advance it, why Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney is more than willing to oblige.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 22, 2013
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