“This SCOTUS Destroyed America”: How Citizens United Is Ruining More Than Our Elections
In the years since conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s landmark Citizens United v. FEC decision gave wealthy interests the political power they’d apparently lacked, the media has mostly been interested in how the ruling was affecting elections. On the presidential level, the consensus, at least among political scientists, is that the impact has been marginal. But in less rarefied air, like the grubby environs of Congressional campaigns or the sometimes sordid realm of state and municipal politics, the consequences of the ruling have been substantial. It is quite likely that dozens of state governments in the U.S. will reflect Kennedy’s vision — as well as that of the Koch brothers — for decades to come.
What has gone less-examined, however, is the role that dark money — which is spending by groups that are supposedly devoted to “social welfare,” and that consequently don’t have to reveal their donors — has played since 2010 in the crafting of legislation. This is somewhat odd, in retrospect, since the ostensible point of winning an election, after all, is to legislate. But perhaps the political and media class’s lack of attention to the new reality of sausage-making can be attributed to a campaign-finance version of climate change fatalism. One can gaze up at only so many seemingly insurmountable obstacles before wondering if one’s time would be better spent coming to terms with giving up.
And make no mistake: The reality of lawmaking in post-Citizens United Washington is enough to make even the most stalwart campaign finance reformers wonder if their advocacy and organizing is little more than professionalized windmill tilting. As the Huffington Post showed this week in a lengthy, impressive and profoundly dispiriting report, the walls separating the interests of the wealthy from the legislative process that a century of reformers fought to build have been leveled. They were never as lofty or sturdy as reformers would have wished, of course. But they now exist as little more than rubble and dust.
One of the things the report from HuffPo’s Paul Blumenthal and Ryan Grim makes clear is the way Citizens United’s pernicious effect on lawmaking is at once deliberately opaque and ploddingly simple. To take one of the many examples of now-kosher corruption they detail as a case in point, look at the story of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) and the 2014 election. Blumenthal and Grim note that PCI is lucky enough to have two former aides to Speaker of the House John Boehner on its lobbying team. Even better for PCI, the trade group had the foresight to donate significant chunks of money as of late to pro-Republican outside groups: $185,000 since 2012, they report.
But they weren’t done there. In addition to all of those obviously stringless donations to arms of the GOP machine, PCI also decided to give $75,000 to Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-affiliated “social welfare” nonprofit, and $25,000 to the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a “non-partisan” nonprofit. Both organizations, according to HuffPo, are run by Steven Law, who just so happens to be a member of now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “inner circle.” Incidentally, both groups also happened to spend large amounts of money to support McConnell in his 2014 campaign against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. Outside groups spent $1.3 million in support of Grimes and $16.4 million in opposition, while McConnell got $5.7 million outsider bucks in his favor and $10.5 million going the other way.
For PCI, the pro-McConnell donations ended up being money well spent. McConnell obliterated Grimes after a campaign that had been, for the most part, surprisingly competitive. And because GOP Senate candidates in Iowa and Georgia, who also were supported by outside groups using PCI money, defeated their Democratic opponents, too, McConnell became the new majority leader of the Senate. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the first things the McConnell-run Senate did with the reins of power was to pass a provision rolling back capital standards on insurance companies that were implemented by Dodd-Frank. Believe it or not, this was an act of deregulation that PCI strongly supported.
Now, is this all proof that McConnell engaged in a quid pro quo with PCI and other members of the insurance industry? That the current Senate majority leader told the folks at PCI to make a gesture or two (or three, or 4,000) to show how much they care about supporting a “coalition” to enhance Kentucky’s “opportunity”? No, it’s not. It may be suggestive — and to the jaundiced eye, extremely so — but it’s hardly irrefutable evidence. As defenders of these types of arrangements are quick to note, it’s eminently possible that removing obscure provisions of Dodd-Frank just happens to be an issue on which the Kentucky senator and big insurance fortuitously agree.
But what’s lost in all the fuzziness, which Blumenthal and Grim deftly filter out, is that the world Justice Kennedy’s decision created was, by his own admission, supposed to be one in which even the appearance of corruption was negated. Democracy would suffer no harm, Kennedy assured us, by letting “independent” groups like Crossroads GPS or the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition spend at will with precious little regulation. “[I]ndependent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption,” Kennedy writes in the majority opinion for Citizens United. “That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt,” he assures. “And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.”
At the time that the ruling was delivered, Kennedy’s faith that access and influence would not corrupt the system was exceeded in curiousness only by his belief that the American people would feel similarly. But as the years have passed, and as studies showing the U.S. to be a donor-run system akin to oligarchy have gone mainstream, his declaration has begun to make a bit more sense. Just so long as “the electorate” is defined as the lobbying industry and its clients, his prediction looks downright clairvoyant. I bet the fine people at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America — who are probably investing right now in the Jeb Bush-affiliated Right to Rise “social welfare” group — would strongly agree.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, February 28, 2015
“The GOP’s Obsession With Words”: Those Who Suggest Obama Doesn’t Use The Words They Prefer, ‘He’s Not One Of Us’
I am truly fascinated with the GOP’s obsession with words over actions. It actually goes back much further than the recent nonsense about what President Obama calls the members of ISIS.
Does anyone remember this?
Even people who acknowledge George Bush’s failings point to that as one of the great moments of his presidency. But by 2002, here’s what he said at a press conference.
Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.
By that time, President Bush wanted to invade Iraq and wasn’t that interested in the “people who knocked these buildings down.” That task was left to President Obama.
Ten years after 9/11 came the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. Republicans immediately became obsessed with whether or not President Obama had called the perpetrators “terrorists.” It has never mattered much to them that – under this President’s leadership – the U.S. captured the mastermind of that attack.
And now, Republicans have convinced themselves that President Obama doesn’t take the threat from ISIS seriously because he won’t call them “Islamic terrorists.” Recently Peggy Noonan attempted to argue why that is important. She draws her case mostly from an article by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic titled: What ISIS Really Wants. But when Noonan is done quoting what Wood says about the religious beliefs of ISIS, she turns to what he has to say about how to defeat them.
A U.S. invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and failed, it would be a disaster.
The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammed.” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.
Hmmm…that sounds exactly like President Obama’s “degrade and destroy” strategy.
Noonan simply ignores all that and – in the end – suggests that we should be respectful of ISIS.
It is, ironically, disrespectful not to name what they are, and what they are about.
Talk about PC madness!!!!
I have to admit that when I approach all of this from a logical standpoint, my head starts spinning. That’s when I know it’s time to leave the logic aside and go in search of root causes.
Of course part of this is fueled by those who want to suggest that because President Obama doesn’t use the words they prefer – he’s not one of us. That ignites the underlying racist fears of the GOP base.
But it also feeds into the desire for a “holy war” of Christianity vs Islam – the very same thing ISIS wants. That is exactly why President Obama’s words of caution at the National Prayer Breakfast were so important – and why his refusal to buy into this dangerous language is exactly the right call.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 1, 2015
“Obamacare By Any Other Name”: An Unnecessarily Complicated Way To Undo Harm Caused By A Crisis Of Their Own Creation
This is kind of brilliant; it might be the perfect illustration of the state of the modern GOP. The Examiner’s Byron York is reporting that a group of GOP senators is working on a plan to undo the damage that would be done if the Supreme Court rules against the government in King v. Burwell.
For those not familiar with it, the case, which the court will hear next week, turns on the question of whether people who buy health insurance in federal exchanges (in the 34 states that didn’t set up these Obamacare-mandated marketplaces) are eligible for tax subsidies to help pay for health care.
If the court does knock out the subsidies, it could cause havoc in insurance markets – a recent RAND Corporation study estimated that 8 million people could lose their insurance, while the American Academy of Actuaries warned Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell this week that companies could be facing insolvency if the King ruling drives the markets into death spiral territory.
So on the one hand conservatives would come close to achieving their goal of wrecking Obamacare at any cost; on the other hand, they’re starting to realize there would actually be, you know, a cost, both in human and political terms. “We’re worried about ads saying cancer patients are being thrown out of treatment, and Obama will be saying all Congress has to do is fix a typo,” one senior GOP aide told York. (No doubt the actual fact of cancer patients being thrown out of treatment would also be upsetting to this aid.)
So Republicans are looking for a way to restore the government expenditures they have worked so hard to eliminate. Well, not the actual expenditures; a totally different set that would perform the same function but – this is important – would be called something else that didn’t have the word “Obamacare” in it. “GOP lawmakers have decided to keep the money flowing,” York wrote. “Maybe the payments won’t be called subsidies, but they will be subsidies. The essence of Obamacare – government subsidizing the purchase of health insurance premiums – will remain intact.”
Of course, the senior GOP aide’s hypothetical Obama would be correct: All Congress would have to do to fix a harmful King decision would be to pass a law saying that people in the federal exchanges are in fact eligible for the subsidies. But the modern GOP isn’t big on taking the most direct route to the conclusion at which they’ll inevitably arrive. (See, for example, the current ritualistic huffing and puffing from House Republicans – yes, we’ve seen this show before – and various fallback positions en route to the inevitable full, clean funding of the Department of Homeland Security.)
This is the apotheosis of the 21st century GOP Congress: It is seeking an unnecessarily complicated way to undo or prevent harm caused by a crisis of its own creation. This is the fiscal cliff, again; this is the shutdown fight, again; this is the debt ceiling fight(s) all over again.
And it’s also important to keep in mind that this effort to undo the GOP’s avowed goal is angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. Five years on, the GOP has yet to produce a plan encompassing the latter half of their “repeal-and-replace” mantra; merely ensuring insurance for 8 million people is presumably an easier lift, but no one should hold their breath waiting for a unified Republican plan. This is especially true given that the party’s activist base will label any such effort as an embrace of Obamacare.
Probably nothing will see the light of day. But if the GOP can produce a bill to fix its problem, you can bet that first we’ll repeat the same kabuki where GOP hardliners dream up the demands they’ll make in exchange for ending ongoing harm to the economy. To borrow a maxim from “Battlestar Galactica,” all of this has happened before, and will happen again.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 27, 2015
“Strength, Toughness & Resolve Is All It Takes”: On Display At CPAC; How The Presidential Primary Makes GOP Candidates Simple-Minded
The Conservative Political Action Conference is always guaranteed to produce head-shaking moments, as one future presidential candidate after another tells the crowd of activists what they want to hear, and then some. It’s a concentrated version of the long Republican primary process, with everything that characterizes contemporary American conservatism cooked down to its viscous essence over the course of a few days.
You may have already heard about Scott Walker’s comments yesterday at the conference, in which he made an analogy between his fight to crush unions in Wisconsin and the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to look at something Marco Rubio said this morning, because they go together in a way that tells us a lot about what we’re going to be hearing from these candidates for the next year and a half.
Speaking from the CPAC stage, Rubio said that “if we wanted to defeat [ISIS] militarily, we could do it.” But we haven’t done that, because President Obama “doesn’t want to upset Iran.” I’m sure many in the crowd nodded their heads. First you have the implication that despite the thousands of air strikes we’ve launched against ISIS, we’re not really trying to defeat them, and that doing so would be simple if only Obama had the backbone. But he won’t, because he’s so solicitous of another of our enemies, Iran. If you know that this president is a Muslim-coddling, terrorist-sympathizing weakling, it makes perfect sense.
But in reality, Iran, a Shiite country, despises the Sunni extremists of ISIS. ISIS threatens the government of Iraq, which is Iran’s ally (or lapdog, depending on how you look at it), which is why Iran has sent troops there to fight the terrorist group. Eliminating ISIS is exactly what Iran wants us to do.
Perhaps Marco Rubio understands that, and if given the chance he’d revise his comments. But doing so wouldn’t play too well with the people whose votes he needs, because it would be an acknowledgement that — guess what — things can get pretty complicated in the Middle East. We can be trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons yet still have shared goals with them when it comes to another issue.
That simplifying impulse is what got Walker in trouble, too. When he said yesterday in answer to a question about ISIS, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” the problem wasn’t, as many people said, that he was comparing Wisconsinites exercising their free speech rights in opposing his efforts to crush unions to brutal terrorists (he clarified later that that isn’t what he meant to say). The problem was that he was arguing that serious problems, whether it’s your own constituents who disagree with you or a terrorist organization, have essentially the same solution: strength, toughness, resolve. That’s all it takes, and he’s got it. He may not know a lot about foreign affairs, but he doesn’t need to know a lot about foreign affairs.
This is hardly new in the GOP. In 1964, Ronald Reagan said in a speech supporting Barry Goldwater, “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Republicans have seldom veered from the conviction that in foreign affairs in particular, there are nothing but simple answers.
The trouble is, we’ve seen where that gets you. George W. Bush knew in his gut that every problem had a simple answer. Just as Rubio sees Iran and ISIS in a fictional alliance, Bush thought that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda must have been working together, because they’re all Bad Guys, right? And once we show our strength and resolve, the problems will melt before us. We all know how well that worked out.
Try to imagine a Republican presidential candidate who saw the world as a complicated place where sometimes we have to choose between bad options, being strong only gets you so far, and you have to consider the possibility that your actions could have unintended consequences. Would he be willing to say that to his party’s primary voters? Or would he tell them that actually, the answers are all simple, if only we have the courage to see them clearly and act?
I think we all know the answer to that. Campaigns in both parties are seldom going to be full of nuanced exploration of policy issues. But the GOP primary campaign forces its contenders to be particularly simple-minded, whether that’s who they really are or they’re just pretending.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 27, 2015
“Just Do It And Move On”: John Boehner Can’t Bring Himself To Rip Off The Band-Aid
Mitch McConnell knows what John Boehner doesn’t, namely that when you have to do something painful, it’s best to get it over with quickly. Rip off the Band-aid, chop the zombie-bite-infected leg off with one blow, just do it and move on. But we’re a day away from a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, and Boehner can’t bring himself to do it.
So here’s the current status. McConnell decided that the Senate would take two votes, one on a “clean” DHS funding bill—i.e., one without a rider reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration—and one addressing just those executive actions. That way DHS stays open, Republicans get to cast their symbolic vote against Obama, and everybody goes home. The funding bill is already moving through. And of course, Tea Partiers are outraged (here’s one colorful post from Erick Erickson entitled “Eunuch Mitch McConnell Squeals Like a Pig“). Which, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t bother McConnell all that much, because he knows what’s in his party’s interest and what isn’t.
Boehner is still saying “nuh-uh!” But to what end? What does dragging this out actually accomplish for him? Here’s a report from Politico:
Boehner is playing a game of political survival. Most of his inner circle knows that the House will be forced to swallow a clean DHS funding bill at some point. But if the speaker wants to keep conservatives from launching a rebellion, it may be too early to capitulate. Boehner is aware of the perilous situation he’s facing—which is why, in private conversations with lawmakers, he’s telling them to “stay tuned” without tipping his hand on his next move.
Speaking to his caucus Wednesday, Boehner said he hadn’t spoken to McConnell in two weeks, an apparent attempt to distance himself from the Senate GOP leader’s plan. It seemed to highlight what will likely be an unfolding dynamic in the coming Congress, particularly over fiscal matters: The Senate will be forced to cut deals on politically toxic issues, and Boehner will ultimately be forced to accept them in order to avoid potential crises.
So the outcome is inevitable, but Boehner seems to be operating on the assumption that if he holds out a while longer, the crazy caucus will be less angry with him. And when has that ever worked? We’ve been through this multiple times now, and at the end of it they dislike him just as much as they did at the beginning.
There are three things Boehner could be thinking. The first is that if there’s a partial shutdown, the administration will give in and undo Obama’s executive actions. No one is dumb enough to believe that. The second is that he or someone else will have an extraordinary flash of insight and devise a clever stratagem that will get the Republicans everything they want. That’s possible in theory, but highly unlikely to say the least. The third is that this shutdown fight will end the same way all the other shutdown fights ended: with Boehner giving in and allowing a vote on a bill to end the crisis, a bill that passes with the support of Democrats. He will be decried as a capitulator and a RINO, and nothing will have changed.
But is Boehner really in a “perilous situation”? The reason he’s still the speaker isn’t that he’s done such a masterful job of keeping Tea Partiers happy. It’s that nobody else wants the job. When he retained the position in January, 25 Republicans voted for somebody else, but the votes were entirely symbolic. There’s no other candidate, there’s no rebellion planned. He’s secure in his miserable position.
So really, Mr. Speaker, just rip off the Band-aid. Hold the vote to fund DHS. We all know how this ends.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, February 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 