“Yesterday’s Ideological Hero Is Suspect”: Remembering Paul Ryan Before He Became A RINO Squish
A lot of the conservative carping we are hearing about Paul Ryan as he ascends to the House Speakership is interesting, to say the least. As conservative commentator Matt Lewis notes at the Daily Beast today, a lot of the same people were praising him to high heaven when he emerged as the great crafter of right-wing budgets back in 2010 and again in 2012. Since most of the heresies people are now talking about occurred earlier in his congressional career, you have to figure the context has changed more than Ryan has.
Here’s Lewis’ guess:
Much of this boils down to Paul Ryan’s past support for immigration reform—and the fact that this has become the one and only litmus test for populist conservatives.
That could certainly help explain why everybody’s favorite nativist, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has been making negative noises about Ryan’s accession to the Speakership.
As it happens, the day after Mitt Romney announced Ryan as his running-mate in 2012, I was in Waukee, Iowa, at the FAMiLY Leadership Summit, one of the nation’s biggest and most influential Christian Right clambakes. Steve King keynoted the event, and expressed satisfaction with Romney’s choice of Ryan–as did, it seems, the entire assemblage, which erupted in cheers at the first mention of Ryan’s name. But at that point in history, conservatives were most focused on the fact that Ryan was a down-the-line antichoicer who had shown his “guts” by crafting a budget document (actually two of them by then) that messed with Medicare and took a claw hammer to the federal programs benefitting those people.
Nowadays if you are guilty of having ever supported “amnesty” your other heresies will be uncovered, however old they are. The other way to look at it, of course, is that the GOP continues to drift to the Right, making yesterday’s ideological heroes suspect. The message to Paul Ryan is: keep up.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, Octoer 26, 2015
“For The Moment He Feels The Need To Look Like A Moderate”: Is Jeb Bush Actually A Moderate, Or Does The Media Just Think He Is?
In an excellent profile in the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson reviews Jeb Bush’s record in Florida and concludes that, overall, he’s much more conservative than both the national press corps and right-leaning activists think. He posits at the end that Jeb could be “a self-conscious, deep-dyed conservative who for the moment feels the need to look like a moderate, especially before an admiring press and in the company of the wealthy Republicans who these days are his constant companions and marks.”
I’ve been exploring similar territory for a forthcoming piece on Bush’s political history, and there’s definitely a lot of truth to this analysis. What I’d add here, though, is that Bush’s position on immigration reform (which Ferguson doesn’t really get into) doesn’t quite fit into this framework. To see why, check out this video from Bush’s Right to Rise PAC, titled “Conservative” and presenting highlights from Bush’s speech at CPAC: https://youtu.be/nY28BChrCQc
After a litany of standard conservative views, there’s the twist: “There is no plan to deport 11 million people,” the video shows Bush saying. “We should give them a path to legal status where they work, where they don’t receive government benefits, where they don’t break the law, where they learn English, and where they make a contribution to our society.”
The point? Other likely 2016 Republican candidates are contorting themselves on immigration. Recently, Scott Walker stressed his opposition to “amnesty” in public, while privately telling elites that he’d support, at least, a path to legal status. Dara Lind has a good rundown of the controversy here. But Bush is taking the opposite approach, not only playing up his support of legal status in both public and private, but arguing that it is the true conservative position.
So here, Bush’s position-taking isn’t just rhetorical. It’s a genuine attempt to shift his party and its base from their current default view, which is opposition to immigration reform that legalizes the status of unauthorized immigrants.
The upshot is that by challenging his party on one high-profile issue, Bush has to do less to seem moderate elsewhere, in the eyes of both the press and activists, when the general election rolls around. And somewhat fairly so! With the parties as polarized as they are, it is genuinely unusual for a candidate to forthrightly take on the base.
But, as both liberals and conservatives agree, Bush’s overall governing record has very little that’s moderate about it. So, in an interesting sense, Bush’s immigration position lets him have things both ways — it gives the media a peg to hang the moderate label on Bush, but as the right learns more about his record, it lets him tout that he is, otherwise, a down-the-line conservative.
By: Andrew Prokop, Vox, March 28, 2015
“Cantor Running Scared”: Facing A Hard-Right Challenger, He Wants No Part Of Immigration Reform
In the latest round of Republican excuses for inaction on immigration reform, there’s a new culprit: Eric Cantor’s actually struggling in his re-election primary. Here’s how Juan Williams puts it at The Hill:
When Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) was recently asked why he has failed to get an immigration bill to the floor, he reacted by saying “Me?” Boehner appeared to be passing the buck to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), who sets the schedule for floor votes….
At the moment, Cantor wants no part of anything that can be labeled “amnesty.” He started backtracking on support for reform during his fight to win Tuesday’s GOP primary in his congressional district. Cantor is facing a hard-right challenger, Dave Brat, who opposes any citizenship or legal status for illegal immigrants as “amnesty.”
Some of you may recall that last month Cantor was humiliated at his own 7th district GOP convention when he was booed lustily by many delegates just before his hand-picked candidate for district chairman was rejected. Tomorrow he faces conservative economics professor Dave Brat at the polls, and though Cantor is heavily favored, it’s not a slam dunk. On Friday a poll commissioned by the Daily Caller showed the incumbent well below 50% in committed supporters, and only leading 52-39 with leaners added in. The poll didn’t show immigration as a red-hot issue, but did show that about a third of GOP voters in Cantor’s district have really hard-core, round-em-all-up views about undocumented workers:
Only 9 percent of respondents in the poll said immigration was their top-most issue. Cantor’s team has flooded mailboxes with flyers that says he has blocked the Senate’s June 2013 rewrite of immigration laws, and that he opposes amnesty for illegals.
The poll shows that Cantor’s primary voters strongly oppose illegal immigration. Sixty-four percent said government should focus on blocking illegal immigration, while only 26 percent said the focus should be to “deal with the immigrants who are currently in the U.S. illegally.”
Only 23 percent said “there needs to be a humane way for immigrants to come out of the shadows and gain legal status.” In contrast, 33 percent support deporting “every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally.” Forty-four percent want “something in between” legalization and complete deportation, said the poll.
So if the primary explains Cantor’s lassitude towards action on immigration in the House, will he spring back to life after the votes are in tomorrow (assuming, of course, that he wins)? I dunno. Nothing would give more impetus to a challenge to Cantor next cycle than that sort of screw-you gesture to the conservatives of his district. And Cantor also has to pay attention to keeping a majority of House Republicans in his camp for his presumed ascension to the top House job when John Boehner hangs it up. With each day the odds of any action on immigration reform erodes a bit more. What’s mainly interesting at the moment is when and how House GOP leaders officially throw in the towel.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 9, 2014
“Feeling A Bit Of Anxiety”: Cantor’s Cause For Concern In The Commonwealth
The idea that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) would worry at all about his re-election seems hard to believe. The conservative Republican has fared quite well in all of his campaigns; he’s already quite powerful by Capitol Hill standards; and in the not-too-distant future, Cantor might even be well positioned to be Speaker of the House.
And yet, the Majority Leader appears to be feeling quite a bit of anxiety about his future.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is boasting in a new campaign mailer of shutting down a plan to give “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” a strongly worded statement from a Republican leader who’s spoken favorably about acting on immigration.
The flier sent by his re-election campaign comes as Cantor is under pressure ahead of his June 10 GOP primary in Virginia – and as the narrow window for action on immigration legislation in the House is closing fast. Cantor’s flier underscores how vexing the issue is for the GOP.
In the larger context, it’s not helpful for Republicans when the Majority Leader brags about killing a bill that gives “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” while his party tries to maintain a half-hearted pretense that blames President Obama for the demise of immigration reform.
But at this point, Cantor doesn’t appear to care too much about the larger context or message coherence. He’s worried about losing – the rest can be worked out later.
In fact, the degree of Cantor’s anxiety is pretty remarkable. The Majority Leader is up against David Brat, a conservative economist at Randolph-Macon College, who’s eagerly telling primary voters that Cantor isn’t right-wing enough. What was once seen as token opposition, however, has clearly gotten the incumbent’s attention.
Cantor was concerned enough last month to launch a television attack ad, which was followed by Cantor’s anti-immigrant mailing, which culminated in yet another television attack ad that the congressman’s campaign unveiled yesterday.
These are not the actions of a confident incumbent.
As best as I can tell, there are no publicly available polls out of this Virginia district (though it’s safe to say Cantor has invested in some surveys of his own). With that in mind, it’s hard to say with any confidence whether the Majority Leader is overreacting to a pesky annoyance or a credible challenger.
But Jenna Portnoy and Robert Costa reported recently that it’s probably the former, not the latter.
Most Republicans continue to believe Cantor is safe; he won a primary challenge two years ago with nearly 80 percent of the vote. But the prospect of a competitive and bruising challenge to the second-ranking Republican in Congress is embarrassing to Cantor – and is rattling GOP leaders at a time when the party is trying to unify its divided ranks.
We’ll know soon enough just how serious the threat is – the primary is in 13 days – but as the election draws closer, let’s not forget that Cantor was booed and heckled by Republican activists in his own district just two weeks ago.
No wonder he seems so nervous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2014
“When Discredited Nonsense Gets Recycled”: Be On The Lookout For Republicans Touting Heritage Foundation Talking Points Again
In the spring, when it was clear that comprehensive immigration reform would be the year’s biggest legislative fight in Congress, the Heritage Foundation wanted to give far-right lawmakers the ammunition they’d need to kill the bill. The group published a report conservative Republicans could ostensibly use to justify their reflexive opposition to the bipartisan proposal.
The result was a fiasco. First, the report itself was exposed as ridiculous, even by conservatives who often agree with Heritage, relying on lazy and incomplete scholarship. Second, one of the report’s co-authors was a guy by the name of Jason Richwine, who’s spent quite a bit of time arguing that white people are inherently more intelligent than people of color.
Soon after, Richwine resigned from Heritage and fair-minded people dismissed the group’s discredited report as nonsense. And yet, as my MSNBC colleague Benjy Sarlin reported yesterday, Heritage hasn’t given up on its document just yet.
Heritage may have distanced itself from its former scholar’s views on race, but not the study he did for their think tank. In a memo to Congressional staff obtained by msnbc, Heritage legislative strategist Tripp Baird said that while some supporters of reform on the Hill this week are “well meaning” in their concern for immigrants, “they’re being used to advance an amnesty policy that is far from conservative, and will cost trillions to American taxpayers.” Another talking point suggests that evangelical Christians supporting immigration reform “probably aren’t aware of the severe fiscal consequences of amnesty for American taxpayers.”
The “cost trillions” line echoes a report co-authored for Heritage by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine.
Yes, in May, Heritage’s report said immigration reform would cost over $6 trillion – a figure even many on the right found laughable. Soon after, independent analyses, including a report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, found that the reform package would actually save hundreds of billions of dollars.
Stepping back, it appears the Heritage Foundation simply hopes lawmakers have forgotten what transpired six months ago. The group published its report, saw it quickly discredited, and largely stopped talking about it. That is, until now, when Heritage decided enough time has passed that it can start repeating the identical bogus claims all over again.
It’s difficult to imagine even the most craven lawmakers taking this seriously, but you never know. Be on the lookout for members touting Heritage talking points anyway.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 30, 2013
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