“The GOP Is Still Swallowing The Tea”: The Tea Party’s Extremism And Obstructionism Live On
What’s happening in the Republican primaries is less a defeat for the tea party than a surrender by the GOP establishment, which is winning key races by accepting the tea party’s radical anti-government philosophy.
Anyone who hopes the party has finally come to its senses will be disappointed. Republicans have pragmatically decided not to concede Senate elections by nominating eccentrics and crackpots. But in persuading the party’s activist base to come along, establishment leaders have pledged fealty to eccentric, crackpot ideas.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, who easily won his primary this month against a weak tea party challenger, said Tuesday that there isn’t “that big a difference between what you all call the tea party and your average conservative Republican. We’re against Obamacare, we think taxes are too high, we think the government’s too big.”
That doesn’t sound so crazy. But is it reasonable for Republicans to keep voting to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act — more than 50 times, so far — knowing full well that they have zero chance of success? Does it make sense, if taxes are excessive, to refuse President Obama’s invitation to begin serious talks about tax reform?
If Boehner wanted to be honest, he’d have said that his party is in favor of posturing and is opposed to reality.
As for the “government’s too big” part, this traditional GOP mantra has become — thanks to the tea party — a weapon of spite, not a statement of policy. No to extended benefits for the unemployed. No to struggling families who need food stamps. No to underprivileged kids who need Head Start. No to a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. No to undocumented immigrants who want to contribute more fully to our society. No to sorely needed infrastructure projects that would make the U.S. economy more productive and competitive.
The victories by establishment-backed Republicans in Senate primaries hold no promise that the party is ready to stop throwing tantrums and begin governing. They do ensure, however, that Democrats will have few, if any, “gimme” races this fall. None of the GOP contenders nominated thus far is likely to self-immolate in the manner of, say, Christine O’Donnell, a tea party favorite in Delaware who memorably had to run a campaign ad in 2010 clarifying that “I’m not a witch.”
Well, maybe one candidate has the potential for a pratfall: Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon who had establishment support in winning Oregon’s Senate primary this week, was accused of physically attacking her ex-husband in 2007 during a messy divorce. She faces incumbent Democrat Jeff Merkley in November.
Elsewhere, the potential for GOP looniness has been minimized. In Georgia, the tea party’s favored candidates, Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, were both dispatched Tuesday. The establishment’s favorites, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, will square off in a July 22 runoff. Either will present a tough challenge for Democrat Michelle Nunn, who still has a fighting chance, polls indicate, to steal a seat from the Republican column.
Polls also show Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a surprisingly close race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell handily defeated Matt Bevin, a challenger with tea party support, in Tuesday’s primary. But in what devolved into a contest of more-conservative-than-thou boasting, McConnell — by nature a dealmaker — promised, essentially, no deals with Obama.
The tea party is claiming a victory in college president Ben Sasse’s victory over Shane Osborn in the Senate primary in Nebraska. But there was no discernible difference between the candidates’ positions on the issues — they fought mostly over who was more determined to waste time and energy trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And Sasse, despite his protestations to the contrary, is actually a polished Washington insider.
Nothing I’ve seen in the primary results so far suggests that the Republican Party is tempering its views or weakening its implacable opposition to anything the Obama administration proposes. To the contrary, the GOP slate promises to display a remarkable degree of far-right ideological purity. Republican candidates simply cannot risk being called “moderate.”
Democrats can, though. The Republican Party’s move to the right opens political space for Democratic incumbents and challengers trying to win in red states. Candidates such as Grimes and Nunn can emphasize local issues while maintaining some distance from Washington — and, in the process, make Republicans play defense.
Democrats must not let voters be fooled. Yes, tea party candidates are going down. But the tea party’s extremism and obstructionism live on.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 22, 2014
“He’s Not Alone”: Florida’s Yoho Connects Voting Rights, Property Ownership
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) has already made quite a name for himself after just 17 months in Congress, but yesterday, Right Wing Watch published arguably the most striking quote yet for the Tea Party congressman’s greatest-hits list.
Recently unearthed footage of Rep. Ted Yoho speaking at Berean Baptist Church in Ocala, Florida, during his candidacy for Congress in the 2012 election cycle shows the Republican politician suggesting that only property owners should have the right to vote.
“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote,” he said to applause.
The part about the applause isn’t an exaggeration – there’s video showing exactly that.
A Yoho spokesperson told msnbc yesterday, “The congressman was making a reference to how voting was structured when America was in its infancy (from a historical perspective). He does not believe that this is the way it should be now.”
And while that’s reassuring, listening to Yoho in the 2012 video, his reference connecting property ownership and voting rights didn’t quite sound like criticism, either.
Zachary Roth added:
Yoho’s comments on voting are firmly within the tradition of conservative thinking on the franchise, which sees it less as a right and more as a tool to make an informed decision about government.
Versions of that notion were used to justify restricting the vote to property owners in the republic’s early days, as well as later voting restrictions like literacy requirements. Even in the 21st century, Yoho is far from alone among prominent conservatives in suggesting that voting should be made more difficult in order to produce a better-informed electorate.
In this case, the congressman isn’t even alone among conservatives suggesting voting rights be connected to wealth. In February, Tom Perkins, a very wealthy venture capitalist who compared contemporary American progressives to Nazis, gave a speech that argued along similar lines.
When challenged to say, in 60 seconds, how he would change the world, Perkins made a playfully controversial response. He suggested that, in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson’s voting land owners and Margaret Thatcher’s idea of only allowing taxpayers to vote, “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get the vote if you don’t pay a dollar in taxes. But what I really think is it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes. How’s that?” To which the audience responded with laughter.
It wasn’t long ago that those who expect to be taken seriously in modern American life would avoid rhetoric like this.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 21, 2014
“A Loud And Depressingly Familiar Voice”: The Koch Brothers Kick Detroit While It’s Down
Over the last five months, a deal has come together that would solve some of the most contentious issues in Detroit’s bankruptcy. It would minimize the pension cuts for 30,000 retirees and city workers, save the city’s art collection and give a reasonable amount of money to the city’s bondholders.
As expected, there were some objections from a few big insurance companies that stood to lose heavily. But with the support of Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, the deal seemed to have a shot in the state legislature, which would be required to spend about $195 million of tobacco-settlement money on behalf of Detroit’s pensioners.
And then, a few days ago, a loud and depressingly familiar voice rose in protest. The Koch brothers, through the screeching megaphone they built known as Americans for Prosperity, condemned the deal and announced plans to contact 90,000 conservatives around the state to build up pressure against it. The Associated Press reported that the group threatened to run ads against any Republicans in the legislature who voted for the deal in the coming days.
AFP has already set up a website — “No more bailouts for Detroit!” — that plays on the long-running, sometimes racially inflected resentment of Detroit around Michigan.
“Michigan has rewritten its laws numerous times to give Detroit special treatment and more financial assistance,” the website says. “Unfortunately, all this help has encouraged, rather than corrected, bad behavior. Years of fiscal mismanagement, corruption and cronyism resulted in Detroit’s staggering $18 billion of debt. Yet its leaders continue to blame the State for Detroit’s problems.”
The poor management of the city by its own officials is well-known and stretches back decades, but the state and its residents bear a huge responsibility for Detroit’s plight. State officials allowed fleeing white residents to hide behind suburban boundaries that depleted the city’s tax base while cutting revenue sharing. The think tank Demos found that revenue sharing cuts amounted to a third of the city’s revenue losses between 2011 and 2013.
As Robert Kleine, a former state treasurer, wrote in the Detroit Free Press last August:
“Detroit may have mismanaged finances, but the state’s cuts to revenue sharing doomed the city. One option would have been for the state to restore revenue sharing to previous levels which would have been worth nearly $200 million to Detroit. The state could have afforded to do this if it had not cut business and income taxes in 2000, and then given business another $1.8-billion tax break in 2011.”
Under the circumstances, the proposed state contribution on behalf of vulnerable pensioners is a modest way to make up for Lansing’s decades of abandonment. But it’s too much for the Kochs to stomach. They apparently want city workers and retirees to publicly suffer for the sin of having been union members. They want bondholders and insurance companies at the front of the creditors’ line, and don’t seem to care if the Detroit Institute of Arts has to sell off its paintings and sculptures to put them there.
As they have in so many other areas of public life, two of the country’s wealthiest citizens are using their good fortune to make life far more difficult for those at the bottom of the ladder.
By: David Firestone, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, May 21, 2014
“Gray Matter”: ‘Bush’s Brain’ Short-Circuits
Karl Rove, the most brilliant political strategist of his generation, the man George W. Bush called “the Architect,” the man Stephen Colbert immortalized as “Ham Rove,” the pundit to whom Fox News viewers turn to give them the low-down, stuck his foot in it again. Should anyone really be surprised?
In case you’ve been in the desert on a vision quest, last week Rove implied, with some mangled facts, that Hillary Clinton might have lingering brain damage from the incident in 2012 when she suffered a concussion and had a blood clot removed. Democrats and even some Republicans got really mad, even as all agreed that the health of presidential candidates is a legitimate topic for discussion. Then over the weekend on Fox News Sunday, Rove was on the defensive but refused to back down.
“Look, I’m not questioning her health,” he said, right after questioning her health. “What I’m questioning is, is whether or not it’s a done deal that she’s running. And she would not be human if she were not—if she did not take this into consideration.” Everyone on the panel then agreed that Rove had done harm to the Republican cause, because this attack on Clinton made Rove look cruel and made her look like a victim.
Make no mistake, Karl Rove was an excellent political strategist back in the day, even if he was a particularly diabolical one (if you haven’t read Joshua Green’s great piece on Rove’s early career in Texas, which featured things like spreading rumors that one client’s opponent was a pedophile, do it now). But as a pundit, he’s awful and always has been.
It’s particularly problematic for Republicans, because Rove’s punditry has always been crafted with the purpose of advancing GOP electoral fortunes, even more so than your average “strategist” who goes on TV to spout talking points. Rove always claims to have access to secret information or more insightful analysis than anyone else, yet time after time, he’s just wrong. That’s partly because his supposedly informed assessment is usually that things are going to turn out great for Republicans and terrible for Democrats. And because he holds such an exalted place on the right that when he says something stupid it generates a lot of negative attention. So while listening to Rove makes Fox’s viewers feel informed, in the end he does the right far more harm than good.
Let’s just take a quick review of some highlights:
Just before the 2006 midterm elections, Rove was confident Republicans would retain control of Congress, because he had analyzed all the races. “You may end up with a different math,” he told NPR, “but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to THE math.” Democrats took both houses in a historic sweep.
In late 2011 he predicted that Sarah Palin would enter the presidential race. Four years earlier he predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the Democrats’ 2008 nominee.
He predicted that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election by 3 percentage points while taking Florida, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, all states Obama won. And of course, there was the dramatic on-air meltdown on election night 2012, when he refused to accept the network’s call that Ohio had gone to Obama.
Lots of pundits get things wrong, but Rove manages to combine wrongness with a contempt for those who disagree with him, and a tendency to get bombastic when subtlety is called for. For instance, in that Fox News Sunday discussion, he noted that Bill Clinton’s campaign made some digs at Bob Dole’s age in 1996. Clinton “ran for re-election by savaging Bob Dole. He ran television ad that said, the old ways don’t work…Bob Dole looked like Methuselah in the Clinton TV ads.” That’s fair enough, but when Clinton’s team did that, they at least made an effort to be circumspect about it. Unless I’m forgetting something, no Clinton adviser went on television and said, “You know what Bob Dole’s problem is? The guy’s too old!” If you want to get people talking about a sensitive topic, you don’t bash them over the head with it (so to speak), as Rove did by talking about Clinton’s “traumatic brain injury.” A more clever strategist would realize that just invites a backlash.
I suppose one could argue that Rove’s ham-handed approach to attacking Clinton is refreshingly forthright. But there’s no doubt that he was trying to implement a strategy, and he didn’t want the criticism that ensued, which shifted attention away from Clinton and on to him. Oh, and don’t forget that American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the groups he co-founded to take down Barack Obama and other Democrats, flushed $174 million of their donors’ money down the toilet in 2012. So maybe we can stop considering him such a political genius.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 20, 2014
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