“Susana Martinez’s Administration Sounds Familiar”: Tone-Deaf, Exclusionary, And Unnecessarily Ruthless
Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll has a delightful look at the office and personality of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a popular Republican politician and potential presidential or vice-presidential candidate.
Here’s what we learn: Martinez is, to put it charitably, pretty ill-informed about policy and certain aspects of her job. A cutthroat political consultant named Jay McCleskey seems to have a huge amount of influence in her administration, despite having no official job in the governor’s office. He has also used his connections to enrich himself, through his consulting firm and “affiliated entities.” Martinez has been unduly harsh toward her perceived political enemies, punishing them by endorsing opponents and telling fundraisers not to donate. One New Mexico Republican Party elder referred to her administration as “tone-deaf, exclusionary, and unnecessarily ruthless.”
And recorded conversations reveal that Martinez and her team — most especially McCleskey — are vulgar, condescending and not infrequently offensive when talking among themselves about voters, teachers and other politicians. Kroll compares it, accurately, to HBO’s “Veep.” This, for example, sounds especially “Veep”-esque:
During an October 2010 campaign conference call, Martinez said she’d met a woman who worked for the state’s Commission on the Status of Women, a panel created in 1973 to improve health, pay equity, and safety for women.
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know what the fuck they do,” replied her deputy campaign manager, Matt Kennicott.
“What the hell does a commission on women’s cabinet do all day long?” Martinez asked.
“I think [deputy campaign operations director Matt] Stackpole wants to be the director of that so he can study more women,” Kennicott said.
“Well, we have to do what we have to do,” McCleskey chimed in, as Martinez burst out laughing.
It turns out that a bunch of assholes are running New Mexico. And while assholes who surround themselves with other assholes often do well in American politics, one thing that tends to happen is that they also alienate people who are in a position to hurt them.
I do not mean, in any way, to diminish the reporting of Kroll and Mother Jones, but it seems, from the outside, that this piece happened because someone with access to a lot of documents and recordings decided to send those documents and recordings to a venue that would make sure to post them in the most damaging and complete form possible. (The Times, for example, would’ve produced a similarly comprehensive profile with this material, but it would’ve been headlined something like “Unanswered Questions Linger Over Influence of Adviser to New Mexico Governor.”) That right there is a good indication that something is terribly wrong in the office of the governor of New Mexico: Vindictive behavior leads people to do things like leak all your shit to Mother Jones.
The result is, I think, a really enlightening peek into what this sort of administration actually sounds like on the inside. By “this sort of administration,” I mean one run by a bunch of petty assholes who play-act like politics in a Mamet-scripted masculinity contest. It’s easy to imagine that the governorship of George W. Bush wasn’t entirely dissimilar, with a checked-out executive and a powerful political operative running the show. Other recently released internal communications suggest a similar environment in New Jersey.
Probably a lot of state (and city and county) executive offices sound a lot like this, behind closed doors and in email chains. Not all of them, but probably most of the ones you suspect. And not just those darn Republicans. The only difference, in terms of the political culture, between the Susana Martinez administration and the Andrew Cuomo administration is that the Andrew Cuomo administration doesn’t have someone on staff sending reams of damaging internal communications to hostile members of the press. It may be that Cuomo doesn’t need to outsource the position of petty, vindictive, highly politicized vengeance-seeker to a top aide, as Martinez apparently has, but is being more hands-on in that particular position really a plus?
Susana Martinez seems like a bad governor, and she would be a bad president, for most of the same reasons that George W. Bush was a bad president, but she is just another exemplar of America’s long and proud tradition of elevating assholes to high positions because they seem like they get things done.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 16, 2014
“The War Against American Citizens”: Metastasizing Money Drowns Out The Voices Of Actual Americans
In 1971, before becoming a Supreme Court justice, Lewis F. Powell Jr. penned a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a comprehensive strategy in favor of corporate interests. Powell wrote, “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
In last week’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission , the Supreme Court was not a mere instrument so much as a blowtorch, searing a hole in the fabric of our fragile democracy.
This predictable decision from the 1 Percent Court to repeal federal limits on overall individual campaign contributions overturns nearly 40 years of campaign finance law.
It also completes a trifecta of rulings that started in 1976 with Buckley v. Valeo, and the Midas touch of judicial malpractice, turning money into speech. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent to McCutcheon, taken together with the 2010 ruling in Citizens United, “today’s decision eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”
This, foreshadowed in Powell’s decades-old memo, has always been the right’s plan — to shift the system in favor of the wealthy and powerful. Put it this way: If the limit hadn’t existed in 2012, the 1,219 biggest donors could have given more money than over 4 million small donors to the Obama and Romney campaigns — combined.
But McCutcheon was not the only body blow to our democracy, in what was possibly the worst week in the history of campaign finance reform.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) let his proposal for publicly financed statewide elections die after years of promises to restore the public trust. In a state that’s often a laboratory of democracy, the governor has agreed to what is little more than a clinical trial — a single comptroller’s race this year — that some experts claim is “designed to fail.”
The American experiment seems to be run by a smaller and smaller control group as billionaires — like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — get expanding seats at the shrinking political table.
NASCAR drivers wear the corporate logos of their sponsors on their suits. The justices who sided with plutocracy ought to wear sponsorship logos on their robes, too.
Conversations about court rulings and policy proposals can obscure what’s really at stake: the well-being of the American people. The Court and Cuomo gave the 1 percent even more opportunities to, effectively, buy the kind of access to elected officials that most voters and small donors could never dream of. The weakening of campaign finance laws tracks with the widening income gap, as the wealthiest have secured policies, from lower taxes to deregulation — that enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else.
This, to paraphrase Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), is why the system is rigged. Metastasizing money drowns out the voices of actual Americans, and suffocates policies such as raising the minimum wage and equal pay that would benefit workers. It also skews the playing field, not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between male and female candidates.
We live in a world where elected officials care less about checks and balances and more about their checkbooks and balance sheets. Where fundraising is more important than legislating. Where public policy is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
That’s why getting money out of politics is not a partisan issue. According to Gallup, nearly eight out of 10 Americans think campaigns should be limited in what they can raise and spend, while a 2012 CBS poll shows that about two-thirds of Americans believe in limiting individual campaign contributions.
Hopefully, popular outrage will boost the pressure for reform; there has already been a sharp increase in grassroots action. In the hours and days after the ruling, coalitions such as Public Citizen have mobilized thousands of people in 140 demonstrations across 38 states to protest the McCutcheon ruling. Nearly 500 local governments and 16 states and the District have called for a constitutional amendment to wrest our elections back from the elite. Move to Amend, which supports a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and McCutcheon, and end the fiction that corporations are people and money equals speech, already has over 300,000 members.
A resolution from Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) — with a House companion introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) — calling for a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to fully regulate campaign contributions, and to encourage states to regulate and limit campaign spending, already had 29 co-sponsors and picked up 3 more on the day the Roberts Court announced its decision. Citizens in New York, who are furious at Cuomo for failing to enact reform, are renewing the drive to hold him accountable for his actions. And even while pushing for a constitutional amendment — an uphill battle —supporters of clean elections in Congress and outside are fighting for increased disclosure and public financing of elections.
The all-out assault against campaign finance reform, on the heels of the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder , is just one more example of our democratic system in crisis. “Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts,” my Nation colleague Ari Berman recently wrote, “the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.” But the fear of democracy’s premature death doesn’t look like it’s silencing people; instead, it is inspiring a renewed commitment to fight for its survival.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 8, 2014
“Poor Pitiful Persecuted Bullies”: From A Position Of Feigned Weakness, Conservatives Portray Themselves As Victims
On the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, it seems the antichoice movement is focused less on extending its recent state-level gains than on denying their significance as a rollback of basic reproductive rights. Sarah Posner captured their rhetoric nicely at Religion Dispatches yesterday:
What with autopsies and rebrandings, and a new Pope decrying “obsessions,” you would think that tomorrow’s March for Life might not be such a big event. But on the anniversary this week of Roe v. Wade, the Pope is still Catholic, and the GOP is still Republican. The rebranding, if there is one, is to portray anti-abortion absolutism as mainstream, not extreme.
This effort at rhetorical but not substantive repositioning is the GOP’s big message today, notes Posner:
When the RNC convenes for its winter meeting, it will take up a proposed resolution, CNN reports, “urging GOP candidates to speak up about abortion and respond forcefully against Democratic efforts to paint them as anti-woman extremists.” The “Resolution on Republican Pro-Life Strategy” calls on the party to only support candidates “who fight back against Democratic deceptive ‘war on women’ rhetoric by pointing out the extreme positions on abortion held by Democratic opponents.”
Antichoice pols are the victims here, you see. That’s why they’ve seized on comments by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo about the consensus in his state supporting abortion rights as evidence they are poor pitiful refugees against intolerance (an act Charlie Pierce aptly calls “driving nails into their own palms”).
It’s all a shuck, though, as Posner concludes:
The March for Life is still a big deal. One of the nation’s two major parties supports it, and will later in the week that party will consider whether its candidates should be punished for being too weak in response to “deceptive” charges they are waging a war on women. Rebrandings, truces, lamentations about singular obsessions–none of that changes the Republican and the conservative movement commitment to making abortion illegal, and, barring that, to making it inaccessible.
The silly foot-stomping over Cuomo’s comments are from a defensive posture, but it would be a mistake to engage in much schadenfreude about the conservative position being weak. The foot-stomping is strategic: an opportunity to portray themselves as victims strengthens the resolve of their followers. (See, there is no war on women, only an elitist war on conservatives!)
Interesting, isn’t it, that from this position of feigned weakness the antichoicers are gearing up for another election cycle of bullying Republican politicians into doing their will, all in the broader cause of bullying women to give up control over their reproductive systems.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 22, 2014
“Giving The Rich Even More Influence”: More Money Coming To An Election Near You
After the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which allowed corporations and unions to overwhelm federal elections with unlimited “independent” expenditures, the courts began overturning reasonable state-specific campaign finance rules — in Montana, for instance. Now it is New York’s turn.
A federal appeals court panel on Thursday said New York State’s long standing $150,000 cap on contributions to independent political groups was probably unconstitutional. The ruling came less than two weeks before New York City’s mayoral election on Nov.5. It might be too late for wealthy conservative groups to gin up support for Republican Joe Lhota in his uphill battle against Democrat Bill de Blasio. But the ruling could have a significant impact on elections starting next year.
New York State already has extremely lax campaign financing laws which allow unlimited donations to political parties for “housekeeping” purposes. Other contribution limits are scandalously high and some crafty donors have even found a way around those by creating multiple limited liability corporations that can each give the maximum to a candidate. For example, one real estate developer, Leonard Litwin, has used this dodge to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaigns.
New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will have to decide whether to appeal the decision. But he and others have suggested that there are possible alternatives.
He has argued that if the courts keep getting rid of the ceilings on contributions, one good option for New York State would be to raise the floor. By that he means that Albany’s politicians should create a public campaign financing system much like the one in New York City
For more almost 25 years, New York City has enjoyed the best and fairest campaign financing operation in the country. Candidates receive $6 in public funds for every $1 in contributions up to $175 per person. That matching system means more people can afford to run for office. Donors who write small checks know they can make a bigger difference. And voters have more choices, which might be the reason too many state legislators really oppose this way forward.
States that suddenly find big money flooding into their local elections could also fight back by demanding to know who’s writing those checks.
Shaun McCutcheon, who is at the center of a Supreme Court case challenging limits on campaign donations, issued a statement Thursday that said he is “very pleased that another court has decided to rule in favor of free speech.”
Actually it ruled in favor of giving the rich more influence than they already have over who wins public elections.
By: Eleanor Randolph, Editors Blog, The New York Times, October 25, 2013
“We Snookered The Other Side”: Proof That Congress Is A Captive Of The Extremists
Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey’s (R-PA) bipartisan compromise on expanding gun sale background checks was widely praised by gun safety advocates as an important reform, and slammed by the National Rifle Association as a step in the wrong direction. But at least one major gun group thinks that the conventional wisdom has it backwards.
Daylight Disinfectant has obtained video of Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, bragging that “we snookered the other side” by loading the Manchin-Toomey bill with pro-gun amendments.
“It’s a Christmas tree,” Gottlieb said to a Portland, OR crowd on Friday. “We just hung a million ornaments on it.”
“We’re taking the background check and making it a pro-gun bill,” he continued. “Unfortunately, some of my colleagues haven’t quite figured it out yet because they weren’t sitting in the room writing it. My staff was.”
“If you really read what’s in the Manchin-Toomey bill — man, it’s a godsend. We win rights back like crazy,” he later added. “I think we snookered the other side. They haven’t figured it out yet.”
Gottlieb also suggested that maybe he should have kept his opinion to himself, noting, “If we talk about it too much, the other side’s gonna find out about it and they’re gonna realize we’re gonna win off of this thing.” Video of the speech via Daylight Disinfectant:: http://youtu.be/E9UMox1WoTw
Indeed, although the Manchin-Toomey compromise would represent the most significant gun reform in two decades, it contains many elements that should please the “gun rights” crowd. The bill exempts private, not-for-profit sales from background checks (falling far short of the universal standard sought by many Democrats), allows concealed-carry permits to transfer across state lines, and explicitly bans the creation of a national gun registry, among other provisions. The compromises were enough to lead New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a prominent gun reform advocate, to lament, “This is a Congress that is captive of the extremists and there is no clearer proof of that than this.”
In addition to the Second Amendment Foundation, the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms — which claims to be the nation’s second-largest “gun rights” group, and with which Gottlieb is also closely associated — has also publicly endorsed the bill.
Still, it’s unclear whether this push from gun interest groups will actually make a difference in the final vote. As of now, just four Republican senators — Toomey, Susan Collins (R-ME), John McCain (R-AZ), and Mark Kirk (R-IL) — have signaled their intention to vote for the bill. Several red-state Democrats have also suggested that they will oppose the bill, despite the political cover provided by the gun interest groups. If a bipartisan bill that is so tame that “gun rights” groups hail it as a major victory cannot move through the Senate, then it would be safe to question whether any reform is truly possible.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 15, 2013
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