“Even If It Worked, I Would Oppose It”: Republicans Too Often Prioritize Partisan And Ideological Goals Over Practical Ones
As hard as it may be to perceive right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson as a credible presidential candidate, he received a very warm welcome at Steve King’s “Iowa Freedom Summit” over the weekend, and Carson arguably delivered one of the more polished presentations of the gathering.
But on the substance of Carson’s remarks, one thing jumped out at me.
On the Affordable Care Act – which Carson has on several occasions compared to slavery – the famous former surgeon said he opposed any government intrusion in health care. “Even if it worked, I would oppose it,” Carson said of Obamacare. “It doesn’t.”
“I don’t believe in taking the most important thing a person has, which is their health and their health care, and putting it in the hands of the government,” he later added….
For a brief argument in a speech, there’s quite a bit to this. We know, for example, that Carson’s mistaken when he says the Affordable Care Act isn’t working; the evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. We also know that when it comes to his preferred model, Carson used to believe largely the opposite of what he’s arguing now.
What’s more, when Carson argues that government shouldn’t have a hand in matters related to health care, it would seem to suggest the Republican candidate is against the VA health care system for active-duty and retired military personnel, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s not too surprising – a guy who draws a parallel between modern American life and Nazis isn’t going to be a moderate – but it’s a pretty extreme position for even today’s GOP.
But the true gem is, in reference to the ACA, “Even if it worked, I would oppose it.”
Regular readers know that I’ve referenced the Republicans’ “post-policy” problem on several occasions, and Carson’s eight-word line seems to summarize the larger issue nicely. While Democrats focus heavily on policy outcomes and the efficacy of policy proposals – as one might expect from a governing party – Republicans too often prioritize partisan and ideological goals over practical ones.
Whether or not tax cuts work, for example, isn’t especially important. Whether the evidence supports climate change doesn’t matter, either. Pick the issue – national security, education, immigration, et al – and for much of today’s GOP, empiricism and efficacy just isn’t that important. What matters instead is an ideological drive to shrink government, regardless of policy outcomes.
I rather doubt Carson intended his comments to be so revealing, but the fact that he’d oppose a Democratic health care reform package built on a Republican model, regardless of whether or not it works, says a great deal.
What’s the basis for a serious policy debate when one side of the argument doesn’t care if policies are effective or not?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 26, 2015
“On And On It Goes”: How The GOP Became A Party Of Ideological Extremism
As America’s two major political parties have evolved in the direction of philosophical purity over the past half century — with the Democrats emerging as the home of ideological progressivism and the Republicans as the font of ideological conservatism — it has become common for each to accuse the other of extremism.
Republicans call the Democrats strident socialists eager to bring about the End of Freedom in America, while Democrats accuse the Republicans of waging a War on Women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and just about anyone else who isn’t a Wealthy White Man. The vacuous centrism of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom then reinforces the pox-on-both-your-houses narrative, treating both sides as equally to blame for every failure to reach consensus and Get Things Done.
The reality is far less fair and balanced.
Over the past six years, Barack Obama has shown himself quite willing to compromise with Republicans, while Republicans have demonstrated over and over again that they have no interest in cutting deals with the president. (Number of Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote for President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill? Zero. Number of House Republicans to vote for the Affordable Care Act? Zero. And so on.)
Whether this is because of the GOP’s principled opposition to Obama’s policies, or its Machiavellian conviction that the president is hurt more than the opposition party by inaction in Washington, or (more likely) some combination of the two, the end result is the same: The Democrats prove themselves to be a pragmatic, centrist party, while the Republicans consistently demonstrate no-holds-barred ideological stridency.
We saw further examples this past weekend, at the Iowa Freedom Summit, where a long list of GOP presidential hopefuls spoke to adoring crowds in Des Moines.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz advocated an ideological litmus test: “Every candidate’s going to come in front of you and say, ‘I’m the most conservative guy to ever live.’” But “talk is cheap,” he insisted. “Show me where you stood up and fought.”
Now imagine a liberal presidential candidate taunting fellow Democrats, daring them to demonstrate their progressivism and willingness to stand up and fight for it.
Unlikely.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, meanwhile, plans to build a national campaign “on his record of defying teachers’ unions.”
Now imagine a Democrat building a national campaign on a record of defying police unions.
It wouldn’t happen.
Then there was rabble-rousing neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who promised that he would dismantle ObamaCare “even if it worked.”
Now imagine a Democrat showing an equal disdain for pragmatism by promising to prop up a government program “even if it doesn’t work.”
I don’t think so.
On and on it goes, with the GOP’s would-be presidential candidates competing to stake out the ideologically purest, most unambiguously right-wing position. An analogous scramble to the left just doesn’t happen among the Democrats — or at least it hasn’t happened since the time of the Reagan administration.
The question is why.
The answer has nothing to do with the machinations of party leaders or anything else that originates in Washington. On the contrary, the stance of each party reflects above all else the ideological makeup of its most loyal voters. And the fact is that in the United States, right-wing Republicans outnumber left-wing Democrats by a significant margin.
As the Pew Research Center showed last summer in an important report on political polarization, 22 percent of the general public identify as conservative (either socially or economically), while just 15 percent think of themselves as liberal.
Those are the relative sizes of each party’s ideological base.
The gap increases to 27 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal when highlighting registered voters. And it increases even further — to 36 percent conservative and 21 percent liberal — among the most “politically engaged” Americans.
Electorally speaking, Republicans are being pulled to the right by public opinion much more powerfully than Democrats are being pulled to the left.
This is one significant reason why the RealClearPolitics cumulative average of polls currently shows just 16 percent of Democrats supporting left-wing candidates (Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders), while nearly double that percentage of Republicans (30 percent) favor right-wing options (Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, or Rick Perry).
It’s also one important reason why Hillary Clinton — a candidate only a right-wing Republican could consider a radical lefty — currently enjoys 61 percent support among Democrats, while the more moderate Republicans (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio) receive a comparatively lukewarm combined total of 43 percent. (I’ve left Rand Paul, with 6.8 percent, out of both camps because his positions defy tidy ideological categorization.)
The GOP is a party increasingly being steered by its most stridently ideological voters. Which is one reason (among many others) why I won’t be voting for a Republican anytime soon.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 27, 2015
“A Manufactured Crises”: Republicans Want You To Think Social Security Has A Funding Problem. Don’t Believe Them
The ongoing Republican plot to cut Social Security is shaping up to be a major story. As Dylan Scott has documented at Talking Points Memo, through a totally unnecessary change in accounting rules, Republicans are trying to ensure Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) runs short of money in less than two years, which would require a one-fifth cut in benefits.
Most recently, there are hints that Republicans may top up the SSDI fund by merely a little bit, similar to what they have done with the debt ceiling. The point is to create a series of manufactured crises, and each time the SSDI program runs short of money, they can use their leverage to ratchet down Social Security as a whole.
The way Republicans spin all this will be critical. Social Security is very popular, so conservatives will have to avoid the perception that they want to cut it, even though they clearly do. Dispelling their squid-ink nonsense will be crucial in protecting the program.
At National Review, Veronique de Rugy gives us a taste of how conservatives will frame their argument for cuts. “We’re broke,” says the headline. The SSDI fund “will be empty in a year” (no mention why), and “we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.” Regular Social Security “is also on an unsustainable path.”
She links to a report by Chuck Blahous, an argument against patching up the SSDI fund with money from general Social Security funds. Regular Social Security “now faces a bigger shortfall in both absolute and relative terms than [SSDI]” over the next 75 years, he says, concluding it would be irresponsible to transfer money to the less-solvent program.
What he doesn’t mention is that the regular Social Security fund won’t come up short until 2034. Plugging the holes in SSDI would advance that date by only about one year, since SSDI is only a small fraction of the overall program. In this country, having some 18 years of breathing space for a government program counts as nearly miraculous.
This complicated talk of actuarial shortfalls and inescapable accounting burdens is meant to obscure the fact that this is a question of ideology, nothing more. Social Security, in contrast to the dread Big Government bureaucracies, is a very simple program that takes in money and kicks it back out again. If the revenue source is insufficient, we could find money someplace else.
The actual worry here, just like any spending program, is whether the cost of the program is getting out of line with the productive capacity of the rest of the economy. All retirement programs take from the currently working and give to the non-working, so we might worry that the elderly and disabled are getting more claims on stuff than the economy can churn out.
Fortunately, as Dean Baker always points out, continuing economic growth keeps expanding our capacity to provide benefits. We can easily “afford” to maintain or expand Social Security, if we want to.
It would be easy to find such money. Indeed, we don’t even have to leave the world of retirement policy! We could simply scrap the 401(k) tax credit, which does not work as advertised to increase savings and sends the vast majority of its benefits to the rich. We could then plow the savings into Social Security. The 401(k) credit and similar programs cost something like $100 billion yearly, as compared to the total cost of Social Security of about $820 billion. Hey presto, we’re done.
The underlying reality is that opinions on any spending program inescapably rest on a judgment about whether that spending is worthwhile. I believe Social Security is excellent policy and its benefits should be increased. Conservatives like de Rugy and Blahous believe benefits are too high and should be reduced. It’s as simple as that.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, January 26, 2015
“What Is The GOP Thinking?”: The Nation Will Have To Stand By Until Realists And Ideologues Reach Some Sort Of Understanding
There they go again. Given control of Congress and the chance to frame an economic agenda for the middle class, the first thing Republicans do is tie themselves in knots over . . . abortion and rape.
I’m not kidding. In a week when President Obama used his State of the Union address to issue a progressive manifesto of bread-and-butter policy proposals, GOP leaders responded by taking up the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” — a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. But a vote on the legislation had to be canceled after female GOP House members reportedly balked over the way an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape was limited.
The whole thing was, in sum, your basic 360-degree fiasco.
At least there are some in the party who recognize how much trouble Republicans make for themselves by breaking the armistice in the culture wars and launching battles that cannot be won. It looks as if the nation will have to stand by until GOP realists and ideologues reach some sort of understanding, which may take some time.
It’s important to understand that the “Pain-Capable” bill was never anything more than an act of political fantasy. The only purpose of the planned vote was to create an “event” that the annual antiabortion March for Life, held Thursday in Washington, could celebrate.
You might think the demonstrators already had reason to cheer. The abortion rate is at “historic lows,” having dropped by 13 percent in the decade between 2002 and 2011, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The main reason is that there are fewer unwanted pregnancies, which suggests logically that if Republicans really want to reduce abortion, what they should do is work to increase access to birth control.
More to the point, according to the CDC, only 1.4 percent of abortions take place after 20 weeks. This means the bill, if it somehow became law, would have minimal impact.
But it won’t become law, as everyone in Congress well knows. The White House has announced that Obama would veto the measure, if it ever reached his desk. To get that far, the bill would have to pass the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would have to win over enough Democrats to cross the 60-vote threshold, which is highly unlikely.
Theoretically, though, any reasonable-sounding antiabortion measure should at least be able to make it through the House, with its expanded GOP majority. But even in the context of today’s far-right Republican Party, the “Pain-Capable” bill struck many House members, particularly women, as unreasonable.
At issue, apparently, is that, in making exceptions for abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape, the bill specifies that the rape must have been reported to law enforcement. This restriction cannot help but bring to mind the grief Republicans suffered in 2012 over Senate candidate Todd Akin’s appalling attempt to distinguish between “legitimate rape” and some other kind of rape.
Although the House leadership maintained that all was sweetness and light, reporters heard rumblings Wednesday that the bill was in trouble with moderate Republicans, especially women. Then an unusual number of female GOP House members was seen leaving the offices of the majority whip. Then the bill was pulled and a different antiabortion measure — prohibiting federal funding for abortions — was substituted.
I should note that there is no generally accepted scientific basis for the premise of the “Pain-Capable” bill. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said there is no legitimate research supporting the idea that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.
I understand that, for those who believe in their hearts that abortion is murder, there is an imperative to do something, anything, to stop it. Some people have similar moral passion about capital punishment or the thousands of lives lost each year to gun violence.
Given that the Supreme Court has decided abortion is a legally protected right, the antiabortion movement has done what it could — made abortions very difficult to obtain in some states where the pro-life position has sufficient support. Hooting and hollering on Capitol Hill do nothing for abortion opponents except fleece them of campaign contributions.
People, we are in an economic recovery whose fruits are not reaching the middle class. We have a crucial need to address U.S. infrastructure and competitiveness. We face myriad challenges abroad, including Islamic terrorism and global warming.
If a renewal of the culture wars is your answer, Republicans, you totally misheard the question.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 22, 2015
“GOP Wants To Define Rape… Again”: How Lindsey Graham Reawakened The Ghost Of Todd Akin
Ah, Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator who says he’s thinking about running for president no doubt thought he was helping the GOP get beyond its meltdown over its 20-week abortion ban bill, which leadership dropped unexpectedly when some GOP congresswomen balked, by asking antiabortion zealots attending the “March for Life” to help him “find a way out of this definitional problem with rape.”
One major issue with the bill was the way it defined rape: a women would have to have made a police report in order to get an abortion under the bill’s rape exception. (Katie McDonough has the details here.) Most rape victims don’t report the crime.
So Graham went to the “March for Life” today and came clean with the group, which is seething over its betrayal by GOP leadership. There’s going to be some kind of rape exception in the bill, and he needs their input to shape it.
“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” Graham told the marchers, according to Dave Weigel. ”We need to find a consensus position on the rape exception. The rape exception will be part of the bill. We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is. That’s not the cause. We’re not here debating legitimate rape. We’re talking about saving babies at 20 weeks.”
So there it is again, the GOP’s lust for getting into the gritty details of defining rape, to make sure slutty women aren’t using rape exceptions to get around various types of abortion bans. That’s what former Rep. Todd Akin was getting at in 2012, when he talked about women rarely becoming pregnant as a result of “legitimate rape,” because “a woman’s body has a way of shutting that whole thing down.” As you’ll recall, instead, women shut the GOP down that November. Republicans don’t want that to happen again in 2016.
The funny thing is, clearly Graham thinks he’s smarter than Akin: he insists he doesn’t “want to get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is.” But he doesn’t seem to understand that the whole effort to “define” rape, which he’s apparently now spearheading, is precisely about deciding whether a woman’s claim of rape is “legitimate” or not.
At its heart, this Republican project is predicated on the belief that women lie about rape, but Republicans can outsmart them. If some Republican women believe that requiring women to make a police report is draconian, then Graham is searching for another way to define a woman’s rape as legitimately deserving of an exception to their 20-week abortion ban.
Rep. Renee Ellmers, who supported the very same bill in 2013, had second thoughts this time around. “We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,” Ellmers told National Journal. ”The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn’t be on an issue where we know that millennials — social issues just aren’t as important [to them].”
So Ellmers is not exactly the picture of integrity here. She’s not worried about passing a terrible bill that could hurt women; she’s worried about how it looks to millennial voters.
Still, there looks to be a real split between GOP congressional men and women over the issue. Only women came forward to take their names off the bill; then male leadership acquiesced to withdraw it from consideration. Reportedly the party had the votes to pass the bill in the House at least, but Speaker John Boehner and others were concerned about the “optics” of ignoring women in the caucus.
I guess that’s a kind of progress for women’s rights, albeit tiny. But in walks Lindsey Graham to try to mansplain the right way to handle this whole rape “definition,” and even as he thinks he’s helping, he’s making his party’s problems much worse.
I never thought Graham had a prayer of winning the presidency, or even the GOP nomination, but his chances just got a lot worse. Republicans did well in 2014 by avoiding Akin-like controversies over defining rape and holding forth on the intimate workings of women’s bodies generally. It seems they just can’t help themselves, and that’s good for Democrats generally in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 22, 2015
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