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“Tea Party Spawns GOP Nightmare”: How It’s Already Ruining The Party’s ’16 Strategy

If you’re understandably perplexed by the Republican Party’s apparent decision to enter the post-Obama era by nominating either another member of the Bush dynasty, or another version of Mitt Romney, there’s at least one way to think about it that might help explain the seemingly inexplicable. Put simply, the leaders of the GOP, the people who tend to be referred to as “the establishment,” fervently believe that in order to win in 2016, Republicans will have to convince voters that the party is once again what it was for much of the 20th century: safe, staid and, in a word, boring.

Of course, in a perfect world, Republicans would rather their presidential candidate be seen as a charismatic dynamo similar to Barack Obama in 2008 (or Ronald Reagan in the final weeks before Election Day 1980). But Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the party’s de facto chief strategist, would likely consider a GOP nominee who reminds voters of a suburban accountant nearly as good — especially after eight years of tumult under a Democratic president. Thus the appeal of your Jeb Bushes and Mitt Romneys — and thus the establishment’s aversion to more fire-breathing types like Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

The plan is obviously cynical, but it’s also pretty savvy. It’s a testament to not only how much attention the party leaders pay to controlling the media narrative, but also how little they pay to, y’know, actual policy. And if all the GOP had to do between now and November ’16 is keep troublemakers like Paul, Cruz and Mike Huckabee at a distance from the party’s nomination, you’d have to consider it in a strong position to win back the White House, on the strength of voter fatigue with the Democrats, if nothing else.

But here’s the problem: There’s this thing called Congress, which is now the full responsibility of the GOP. And while there are plenty of GOPers in Congress who care deeply about which party holds 1600 Pennsylvania, there are also more than a few who think they were elected to change Washington. They answer to conservative activists who will no longer trim their sails so a RINO can enjoy free flights on Air Force One. And some of the issues these folks want to talk about won’t jibe with that nice accountant-next-door narrative establishment Republicans have been building.

You could make an argument that this barely subterranean point of tension was brought closer to the surface on Day 1 of the new Congress, when the GOP decided to kick off a multi-part plan to manufacture a fiscal crisis for Social Security in order to, ultimately, push through benefit cuts to what is arguably the most popular government program in U.S. history. But you’d be on even firmer ground if you just focused on what the GOP’s been up to in the past week. Take the vote in the House on Thursday to drastically curtail federal funding for abortions (which is already paltry), which passed more or less on a party-line vote, and which the White House has already said it will veto if it ever reaches Obama’s desk. Symbolic and envelope-pushing measures intended to inspire a big fight over the right to choose is the kind of stuff that thrills the Tea Party, needless to say; but it’s not what you’d expect to hear from that nice accountant next door. And that goes double for weird and recurring ontological conversations about the definition of rape.

Or if you’d rather look at the Senate, where the aforementioned McConnell is nominally in control, think about Wednesday’s vote on climate change — namely, whether it exists and, if so, to what degree it’s humanity’s fault. While it’s true that only one senator, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, felt compelled to disagree with the contention that the Earth’s climate is warming, most Republicans voted against a provision that would credit humankind with “significantly” contributing to the problem. That is, needless to say, wildly at odds with scientific consensus across the globe; and dismissing the conclusions of essentially all of the world’s qualified scientists is yet another thing your nice neighbor-accountant would be unlikely to do.

To be fair, the Senate vote on climate change wasn’t something Republicans in the Senate forced on McConnell. Instead, it was an example of the kind of thumb-in-the-eye procedural move that the Senate’s now-minority Democrats will be able to pull off every once in a while that has no legislative significance but can, at its best, make the difference between the parties crystal clear. All the same, whatever short-term damage Democrats were able to inflict on the GOP paled in comparison to that which it brought on itself, in the form of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe’s contention that those who think anthropogenic climate change is a reality are disrespecting God. Which is, again, not the kind of talk the GOP establishment wants to hear during this current, boring-is-best rebrand.

Now, the chances of anyone remembering any of these stories a few years from now are admittedly rather slim. So the point isn’t to say that Republicans won’t be able to succeed in 2016 because of one of the countless nutty things Inhofe’s said. What these stories underline, though, is that GOP leadership is going to find, for the umpteenth time in recent years, that persuading voters who’ve come to associate Republicans with the Tea Party that the days of Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush have returned will be much easier said than done.

Indeed, it’s a safe bet that the sentiment behind this Thursday quote from Republican congressman Charlie Dent, a relative moderate, will be echoed more than a few times by the GOP establishment between now and the next presidential election: ”Week one, we had a Speaker election that didn’t go as well as a lot of us would have liked. Week two, we spent a lot of time talking about deporting children, a conversation a lot of us didn’t want to have. Week three, we’re debating reportable rape and incest — again, not an issue a lot of us wanted to have a conversation about. I just can’t wait for week four.”

 

By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 23, 2015

January 26, 2015 Posted by | Election 2016, Republicans, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“One Presidential Speech, Many GOP Responses”: There Is No Clear Leadership In The Republican Party

Not too long ago, a president would deliver a State of the Union address… and that was it. Much of the country would see the speech, pundits would talk about it, and either the political world would respond favorably or it wouldn’t.

In the 1960s, Republicans decided it wasn’t entirely fair for a president to have all the fun, and the official State of the Union response was born.

But in the Obama era, as GOP politics went off the deep end, the number of speeches on the big night proliferated. Last year, in addition to President Obama’s actual SOTU, there was an official Republican response, an official Republican Spanish-language response, a Tea Party response, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) self-indulgent response, and a “prebuttal” from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) because, well, why the heck not.

This year, the fact that Republicans tapped Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) for the party’s official response seemingly negated the need for competing conservative voices – Ernst is, after all, one of the most frighteningly right-wing senators in a generation. Why bother with a Tea Party response if the Republican address will be delivered by arguably the most radical voice in the Senate?

Apparently, that didn’t matter.

Rep. Curt Clawson (R-Fla.) will deliver the tea party’s response to President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, the Tea Party Express announced Thursday.

“2015 marks a year of new beginnings for the Tea Party movement,” Tea Party Express executive director Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “These new Tea Party members of Congress are brimming with ideas to make America economically stronger with opportunity for all to realize the American Dream. We are honored to present Florida Congressman Curt Clawson, the first Tea Party Express victory for the 2014 cycle, as someone committed to making Congress deliver for the American people.”

To appreciate what makes the selection interesting, consider the impression Congressman Clawson has made over the course of his brief, seven-month career on Capitol Hill.

As Rachel noted on the show last night, it was Clawson who spoke to senior officials from the U.S. State Department and Commerce Department during a House Foreign Affairs Committee last July. Despite the fact that the officials are Americans representing the Obama administration – they were even introduced as former aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee itself – Clawson assumed the Indian-American witnesses were literally officials from India.

“I’m familiar with your country; I love your country,” the Florida Republican said. When one of the U.S. officials gently tried to explain that they’re Americans working for the U.S. federal government, Clawson ignored the cues and stuck to his faulty assumptions. He later apologized.

Two weeks ago, Clawson raised eyebrows again, casting a vote for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) – yes that Rand Paul – to be Speaker of the House. That the Kentucky senator is not a member of the House apparently didn’t bother the congressman.

And now he’s the guy delivering a response to the State of the Union address, along with Ernst. (Freshman Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) is delivering the Republicans’ Spanish-language response, which will reportedly mirror the substance of Ernst’s speech.)

As we talked about last year at this time, let’s not forget that there used to be one Republican response because the party wouldn’t tolerate any other scenario. GOP lawmakers who deliberately chose to step on – or worse, contradict – their party’s scripted message risked raising the ire of party leaders and insiders. Only one SOTU response was given because no Republican in Congress would dare challenge – or even think to challenge – the party’s message operation.

Those norms have collapsed. “There is no clear leadership in the Republican Party right now, no clear direction or message, and no way to enforce discipline,” Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican strategist, said last year. “And because there’s a vacuum, and no shortage of cameras, there are plenty of actors happy to audition.”

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 21, 2015

January 21, 2015 Posted by | GOP, State of the Union, Tea Party | , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Disingenuous Waste Of Everyone’s Time”: Tea Party’s Constitution Fraud; Why The Movement’s “Devotion” Is A Situational Sham

I’m hardly the first to make this point, but because it’s such a popular rhetorical tactic in our politics, it bears repeating: Policy arguments that focus on form and process instead of substance are, with notably rare exceptions, a disingenuous waste of everyone’s time.

For example: Because Republican politicians have so often worked themselves into high dudgeon over the way the Affordable Care Act cleared the U.S. Senate, a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that opposition to reconciliation is a bedrock principle of modern-day conservatism. It is not. But arguing that the other side isn’t playing by the rules is sometimes easier, politically, than engaging in an actual policy debate — especially if your preferred policy is to allow insurers to deny sick children coverage and to renege on guaranteed healthcare for millions.

Confusing the issue is even more of an imperative if your chosen policy on a hot-button issue like immigration is to either maintain an unpopular status quo or to deport more than 11 million. And that, essentially, is the position congressional Republicans find themselves in right now, which was made crystal clear in the House on Wednesday, when the vast majority of GOPers voted to repeal President Obama’s recent unilateral moves to reduce undocumented immigrant deportations. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, to see Speaker John Boehner try to frame the vote as having little to do with immigration policy per se, and everything to do with reversing an “executive overreach [that] is an affront to the rule of law” and a threat to the Constitution.

That said, the vote happened less than 48 hours ago. So, yes, I am a bit taken aback by a report from Politico that shows the Republicans’ facade of Constitution-fetishism and fealty to tradition has already crumbled. But that’s the unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from the article, which offers a preview of the agenda House Tea Partyers plan to unveil to their fellow Republicans during a GOP-only retreat. It’s an agenda that, in two key respects, has the ultimate goal of amending the Constitution.

One of the proposed amendments, Politico reports, would force the federal government to balance the budget, something conservatives have been trying, to no avail, to pass for decades. It’s a terrible idea, but it’s also pretty ho-hum at this point, too. However, their other proposal for how to make a document they usually speak of as nearly biblical in its sanctity even better is newer — and if it were to be accepted by anyone in the party outside its Tea Party fringe, it would represent a significant nativist shift on immigration from the GOP. It’s a proposal to tweak that pesky 14th Amendment in order to combat the phantom menace of “anchor babies” and end the long-standing U.S. practice of birthright citizenship. Needless to say, Steve King, the leader of what pro-immigration reform GOP aides derisively call the “boxcar crowd” (as in, they want to round the nation’s undocumented immigrants into boxcars for eventual deportation), is leading the charge.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of this ambitious plan to literally change the definition of who is and is not an American. But I don’t oppose it because I think the Constitution is sacrosanct or anything like that. (In fact, I’m sympathetic to those who argue that the Constitution could use a serious update.) Instead, the reason I dislike the Tea Party’s plan to amend some amendments is because I disagree with them on the substance. In my mind, the United States’ historically complicated but occasionally liberal approach to immigration is one of the strongest points in its favor; I think we need more immigration, not less. And I believe to change the Constitution so the definition of Americanness becomes more rooted in bloodlines and less rooted in simple geography — to, in effect, make it harder instead of easier to be an American — is the wrong thing to do, both symbolically and on the merits.

Admittedly, as a lefty, I don’t have to shoulder the burden of reconciling my policy preferences with my devotion to tradition and adhering to process for its own sake. The Tea Party and the GOP in general, on the other hand, are not quite as liberated. I seriously doubt that recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of deifying a centuries-old blueprint, while simultaneously urging it to undergo major revision, will disabuse these conservatives of their self-perception as the Constitution’s true friends. If that were to happen, if the right agreed to give up complaints about process arguments and simply argue for policy on its own terms, they’d likely find themselves frequently at a disadvantage. Because just like repealing Obamacare without replacing its most popular elements, booting millions of men, women and children out of the country is a political nonstarter.

 

By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 16, 2015

January 18, 2015 Posted by | Republicans, Tea Party, U. S. Constitution | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“A Growing Fissure Within The Tea Party Movement”: Tea Party Nativists Seething Over Obama’s Immigration Reform Action

Even before President Obama entered the East Room of the White House to give his speech outlining a series of executive actions on immigration reform, some, though not all, national Tea Party factions were whipping up their followers into a nativist frenzy.

“This is by far the most serious communication I have ever sent,” wrote Steve Eichler, executive director of the 1776 Tea Party (aka TeaParty.org), in an email to supporters.  “Everything is at stake. Illegals will bankrupt our social, economic and financial systems. Terrorists will just blow it all to pieces. They’ll all be in our backyards in a matter of weeks, even days, if we don’t step up and demand action,” he warned.

That type of feverish nativism is no surprise coming from Eichler, who is also the executive director of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minuteman Project. His email went on to predict “open rebellion” and “chaos” if Republicans don’t withhold funding for Obama’s executive order.

Echoing Eichler’s terror hysteria was one of the activists who helped shape the early Tea Party movement. Eric Odom, who now works for the Patriot Action Network, a Tea Party faction, also put forward the notion that executive action on immigration would somehow lead to terrorists destroying America.

What makes it so dangerous is that Obama’s announcement says to all of our enemies that now is the time to invade our nation’s borders. We’re no longer talking about innocent women and children riding trains to our borders then crossing with the hopes of gaining access to our welfare system. We’re talking about ISIS and other evil groups who want to embed individuals here with the plan of doing harm.Essentially, our President just made a proclamation that puts American lives, and the security of our nation, directly at risk. Obama said to the world that if they can get across our borders, we will not send them home. We will not enforce our immigration laws.

Grassfire, parent outfit of the Patriot Action Network, added “With his amnesty announcement in just a few hours, Obama will unilaterally defy the will of the people and Congress –becoming a threat to liberty.”

Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation went even further in denouncing President Obama, arguing that the immigration actions were part of a diabolical plot. In a prebuttal to Obama’s speech, Phillips told Tea Party Nation members, “Today, Barack Obama is going to announce his long-cherished goal of destroying America.”

Phillips, a birther racist and advocate of limiting voting to property owners, isn’t new to nativist extremism. In 2011, his group mourned the falling birth rate of native-born Americans, and warned that “American culture” will soon perish since the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction.”

Eichler, Odom, and Phillips weren’t the only Tea Partiers to adopt an inflammatory pose. Echoing their sentiments was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a favorite among Tea Party nativists, who warned portentously that President Obama’s executive actions and general “lawlessness” on immigration could lead to “ethnic cleansing.”

Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) also joined the fray, contending that President Obama’s immigration executive order is “declaring war on the American people and our democracy.”

“This is truly an emergency. There’s not a moment to lose,” wrote Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin to her group’s members last Wednesday. While other Tea Party groups are busy inflaming nativism sentiment, the Tea Party Patriots are crafting a plan to scuttle any immigration reforms.

Having already primed their members with the October release of the gruesome anti-immigrant video, The Border States of America, Tea Party Patriots are focused now on organizing opposition.

As a first step, they plan to “melt the phones to stop amnesty” by having their members contact Congress en masse to register opposition. The next step is to flood congressional offices with protesters. According to Martin, the group “must deploy our thousands of local affiliates to congressional offices all across the country, demanding that they cut off all funding from this order immediately.” But the Tea Party Patriots do not have the “thousands of local affiliates” as Martin claims; instead they have around 300 remaining active local groups.

They plan to deploy those remaining local groups, however, to pressure the new Congress to defund anything relating to immigration reform. Kevin Broughton, a spokesperson for Tea Party Patriots, noted, “We expect [the new GOP majority] to use the power of the purse to defund amnesty, especially those—and there were many—who ran against it.”

The group is also canvassing its membership base to gauge possible attendance for a noon rally on December 3 in Washington D.C. called by the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, retiring congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The decision to possibly join Rep. Bachmann’s rally came after she declared on Wednesday that executive action on immigration will lead to a flood of “illiterate” voters.

Previous Tea Party Patriots anti-immigration rallies in Washington D.C., such as the muddled Immigration/IRS rally on June 19, 2013 on Capitol Hill have not been well attended, so larger attendance at a December rally would be an indicator of some success for efforts to promote nativism without one of the largest Tea Party factions.

Not all national Tea Party factions are in agreement with the Tea Party Patriots’ plan. Obama’s move on immigration has uncovered a growing fissure within the Tea Party movement over the centrality of nativism. Curiously, while Tea Party Patriots, Patriot Action Network, and the 1776 Tea Party were rushing to sound more and more xenophobic  (and fundraising off the issue), some Tea Party factions tried to dance around the immigration issue, while others stayed conspicuously silent.

Indeed, although many members of the FreedomWorks social network were outraged by the president’s announcement last week, the organization’s leadership chose to duck the issue. FreedomWorks completely sidestepped the topic of immigration, choosing instead to concentrate the organization’s message on tried-and-true Obama bashing.  In a pre-speech press release, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe took a page from the GOP establishment playbook, sticking to the line about the president being an “emperor” and railing against the “expansion of executive power.”

Said Kibbe, “The president’s announcements tonight have nothing to do with immigration. This fight has to do with whether or not we are a country with laws and a separation of powers designed to protect the will of the American people from the arbitrary actions of Washington insiders.”

As other Tea Party groups have dug in for a massive fight around immigration, FreedomWorks appears fixated on getting Congress to let the Export-Import Bank expire. In fact, many in the Tea Party movement have been suspicious of FreedomWorks because of their unwillingness to wholeheartedly embrace nativism.

Unlike all the other factions, Tea Party Express hasn’t uttered a peep about the issue. That could be because the group is hoping not to call attention to the pro-immigration reform stance that Sal Russo, a Tea Party Express co-founder, expressed in an article for Roll Call last spring.

Russo’s commentary, titled “Conservatives Need to Fix the Broken U.S. Immigration System,” called for an approach remarkably similar to that proposed by the president. “We need to make the 11 million people who are here illegally obey the law, pay taxes and come out of the shadows. We have to get them right by the law in exchange for legal status, but not unbridled amnesty,” he wrote.

In the past, these disagreements have caused strains between various organizations in the network that comprises the Tea Party movement. Obama’s executive order is the first major test of these policy differences in years, and Tea Party organizations may well be held to account for their positions.

Expect the caution initially evident among Republican leadership to vanish if the Tea Party successfully mobilizes anti-immigrant sentiment. Given the vitriolic nativist tone already circulating in Tea Party circles, and the fusion of nativism with hatred of the first African-American president, the coming mobilization could make the ugly rancor and racism that erupted during the passage of Obamacare look polite. At the same time, if supporters of human rights stand strong for immigration reform and actively combat nativism, it could protect immigration reform gains for the long term and even split the Tea Party.

 

By: Devin Burghart, The National Memo, November 24, 2014

November 25, 2014 Posted by | Executive Orders, Immigration Reform, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Tea Party’s Ebola Paranoia”: Why GOP’s Fear-Mongering Is Just A Cynical Turnout Strategy

There’s good news in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday night: Most Americans believe the government is ready to handle a possible Ebola outbreak, even as a second Dallas health worker has contracted the disease.  But if you want to understand why the GOP is fear-mongering on the issue, you’ve got to analyze the poll results more closely.

Some 56 percent of Americans say the government is prepared to handle Ebola, including 61 percent of Democrats. But that number is flipped on its head when you ask Tea Party voters: 57 percent of them say the government is not prepared, as do 54 percent of rural voters. So two core components of the GOP red-state base coalition don’t trust the federal government, in the person of President Obama, to keep them safe – and there’s some political opportunity for Republicans in those numbers. When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz continues to insist “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” those are the voters he’s talking to.

The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent makes the excellent point that one big political benefit of Ebola to the GOP is that it gives them a theme with which to nationalize the election and make it about the perceived failures of President Obola – I mean Obama – especially in states like Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, where vulnerable Democrats have kept it close by focusing on local issues and their GOP opponents’ foibles.  That’s why Thom Tillis is insisitng that Sen. Kay Hagan has “failed the people of North Carolina and the nation by not securing our border.”

The poll had more good news than bad for the forces of calm and reason: 49 percent of Americans thought the CDC is doing a good job, compared to 22 percent who said it wasn’t. Other polls have given us a little more to worry about: Last week’s Rutgers-Eagleton survey of New Jersey voters found that 69 percent were at least somewhat concerned about the disease spreading here – and that people who were paying the most attention to TV actually knew the least about the disease, and were the most frightened.

That’s an unusual finding: People who pay the most attention to coverage of a political issue usually know the most about it when polled. But not when it comes to Ebola. “The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding,” the pollster told reporters. No data on whether they were mostly watching Fox, where Bill O’Reilly is calling for the resignation of the respected CDC head Tom Frieden (the sensible Greta Van Susteren called her colleague out here.)

That same NBC/WSJ poll showed Republicans with a generic two point lead over Democrats in the coming midterm elections, 46-44. Again, the best thing I can say about continued polling is: It could be worse for Dems. That same poll had Republicans up by 7 at the same point, and they went on to deliver a “shellacking.” The poll was tied 45-45 in 2012, when President Obama won re-election and Democrats gained seats in Congress.

Even better, Democrats are leading Republicans among registered voters in the top-11 Senate races, 47 percent to 42 percent. So Democrats should expect losses, but it’s still not looking like a wave year. Unless Republicans can use Ebola and ISIS to drive out their voters, and Democratic voters stay home.

 

By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 15, 2014

October 16, 2014 Posted by | Ebola, GOP, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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