“John Boehner Is A Ridiculous Man”: Lacking Political Courage, The Republican Establishment Has A Problem
As soon as I saw what John Boehner had done, I knew that the folks at Red State would lose their minds. While speaking at the Middletown, Ohio, Rotary Club, Speaker Boehner dismissed the possibility of truly repealing ObamaCare and mocked his colleagues in the House who lack the political courage to pass some kind of immigration reform.
On ObamaCare, Boehner said repeal wasn’t even the goal. The goal was to “repeal and replace.” But, as soon as he began to describe what replacing would mean, he made it clear that much of what had been done could not be undone:
“The challenge is that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is there and it has driven all types of changes in our health care delivery system. You can’t recreate an insurance market over night.
“Secondly, you’ve got the big hospital organizations buying up doctor’s groups because hospitals get reimbursed two or three times doctor’s do for the same procedure just because it’s a hospital. Those kinds of changes can’t be redone.
“So the biggest challenge we are going to have is — I do think at some point we’ll get there — is the transition of Obamacare back to a system that empowers patients and doctors to make choices that are good for their own health as opposed to doing what the government is dictating they should do.”
In other words, repeal is out of the question and “replace” means “tinker.”
Over at Red State, Daniel Horowitz is apoplectic:
Which means that he has no intention to repeal it.
It’s funny how we warned those who opposed the effort to defund Obamacare that they would never repeal it at a later date. They denied the charge at the time; now they are embracing it.
Maybe even more troubling to the base is Boehner’s attitude about immigration reform.
“Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner whined before a luncheon crowd at Brown’s Run County Club in Madison Township.
“We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”
Boehner said he’s been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform.
“I’ve had every brick and bat and arrow shot at me over this issue just because I wanted to deal with it. I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” he said.
Of course, a majority in the House wants to pass immigration reform, so Boehner could do it tomorrow if he was willing to put up with the grumbling in his own party. If he thinks it would cost him his leadership position, then he’s lacking political courage, too.
Here’s Horowitz’s response:
Yes, Mr. Boehner. We actually want to solve the immigration problem.
We want to deal with the problem of criminals being let out of jail.
We want to deal with the problem of Obama suspending deportations.
We want to deal with birthright citizenship and other magnets that allow foreigners to violate our sovereignty and take advantage of the welfare state.
We want to make immigration work for the American people, not for your donors.
Sadly, you have no interest in joining us in combating the President’s malfeasance. You are the one who is too scared to make hard decisions. It’s a lot easier to go along with the political class and cowardly hide behind the misleading canard of “reform” just for the purpose of pushing the same failed amnesty that has engendered endless cycles of illegal immigration and that is already spawning a new wave. It’s akin to saying conservatives are cowards for not dealing with “healthcare reform” because they don’t support Obamacare.
In the aftermath of the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee did a study to figure out why they lost and what they needed to do differently to win in the future. They basically concluded that they lost because they sounded too much like Red State. They couldn’t ignore the need for immigration reform anymore. They couldn’t continue to oppose gay equality. The New York Times’ Tom Edsall described the problem this way:
There is at least one crucial problem that the authors, all members of the establishment wing of the party, address only peripherally and with kid gloves: the extreme conservatism of the party’s primary and caucus voters — the people who actually pick nominees. For over three decades, these voters have episodically shown an inclination to go off the deep end and nominate general election losers in House and Senate races — or, in the case of very conservative states and districts, general election winners who push the party in the House and Senate to become an instrument of obstruction.
Ironically, it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who conceived of the Party of No strategy that the GOP has followed with almost psychotic glee. President Obama’s reelection did not alter that strategy one iota. Somehow, the folks at Red State took the strategy seriously, as if it were about principle instead of a failed attempt to destroy Obama’s presidency.
So, now the Republican Establishment has a problem. They cannot govern according to their own lights. They literally cannot lead their own caucuses. When they whine about the results, they invite nothing more than simple ridicule.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly, Ten Miles Square, April 25, 2014
“And They Didn’t See It Coming?”: The Kochs’ AFP Starts Scrubbing Its Bundy Support
It was just two weeks ago that affiliates of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political operation financed by Charles and David Koch, decided to extend support to Cliven Bundy. Despite the Nevada rancher’s defiance of the law and court orders, and despite the fact that he denied the legitimacy of the United States government, AFP helped promote Bundy’s cause and mock the Bureau of Land Management for trying to enforce federal law.
Then Bundy started speculating about whether African Americans were “better off as slaves,” at which point the AFP apparently decided to join the stampede away from the radical Nevadan.
Americans for Prosperity Nevada, the state affiliate of the Koch Brothers-backed group, appears to have hastily deleted social media posts expressing support for Cliven Bundy, the renegade rancher who exposed himself as a racist in recent press conferences.
A tweet sent by AFP Nevada on April 10 urging followers to read more about the #BundyBattle, which involves Bundy’s refusal to pay fines for allowing his cattle to graze on public land, has been deleted. A Facebook graphic that the group posted criticizing the Bureau of Land Management for enforcing grazing laws against Bundy has similarly disappeared.
The instinct to run away is understandable, and it’s hard to blame AFP officials for waking up yesterday and wondering what in the world they’d gotten themselves into.
But the scrubbing is of limited utility given that screen-grabs and caches exist. Media Matters, for example, still has the content online that AFP is trying to take offline.
And all of this only serves to reinforce the question: what was the right thinking?
If you missed last night’s A block, it’s worth your time.
“[L]et us all pray that it is out of ignorance that the National Review comparing him to Gandhi and the right-wing activists comparing him to Rosa Parks, and the Fox News channel booking him and his family over and over and over and over and over again as heroes, and the Republican senator calling his armed supporters pointing guns at federal law enforcement officers ‘patriots’ – let us pray that that was happening under a veil of ignorance. Let us pray that they had no idea that there is a long-standing fairly violent right-wing movement in this country that is born in the defense of slavery and that causes people to say weird stuff about sheriffs being the supreme authority and the federal government not existing.
“Let us pray that the right and these Republican senators made a hero out of this guy in bloody ignorance of where he was really coming from.
“But it is a choice as to whether or not you do your homework before you try to mainstream a guy like this. The turn today to ‘let me tell you another thing I know about the Negro,’ that was telegraphed way, way, way in advance here. Anybody who chose not to see it coming now has this mess all over themselves.”
And as of today, the AFP’s solution is to clean up this mess by pretending it never said what it very clearly said.
As for Bundy, he apparently keeps talking, and is now attempting to invoke the legacies of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in his defense.
The far-right movement really knows how to pick ‘em.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 25, 2014
“The Piketty Panic”: Out Of Ideas, Conservatives Are Terrified
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”
Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.
I’ll come back to the name-calling in a moment. First, let’s talk about why “Capital” is having such an impact.
Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while.
No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.
For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”
But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?
What Mr. Piketty shows is that these are not idle questions. Western societies before World War I were indeed dominated by an oligarchy of inherited wealth — and his book makes a compelling case that we’re well on our way back toward that state.
So what’s a conservative, fearing that this diagnosis might be used to justify higher taxes on the wealthy, to do? He could try to refute Mr. Piketty in a substantive way, but, so far, I’ve seen no sign of that happening. Instead, as I said, it has been all about name-calling.
I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve been involved in debates over inequality for more than two decades, and have yet to see conservative “experts” manage to dispute the numbers without tripping over their own intellectual shoelaces. Why, it’s almost as if the facts are fundamentally not on their side. At the same time, red-baiting anyone who questions any aspect of free-market dogma has been standard right-wing operating procedure ever since the likes of William F. Buckley tried to block the teaching of Keynesian economics, not by showing that it was wrong, but by denouncing it as “collectivist.”
Still, it has been amazing to watch conservatives, one after another, denounce Mr. Piketty as a Marxist. Even Mr. Pethokoukis, who is more sophisticated than the rest, calls “Capital” a work of “soft Marxism,” which only makes sense if the mere mention of unequal wealth makes you a Marxist. (And maybe that’s how they see it: recently former Senator Rick Santorum denounced the term “middle class” as “Marxism talk,” because, you see, we don’t have classes in America.)
And The Wall Street Journal’s review, predictably, goes the whole distance, somehow segueing from Mr. Piketty’s call for progressive taxation as a way to limit the concentration of wealth — a remedy as American as apple pie, once advocated not just by leading economists but by mainstream politicians, up to and including Teddy Roosevelt — to the evils of Stalinism. Is that really the best The Journal can do? The answer, apparently, is yes.
Now, the fact that apologists for America’s oligarchs are evidently at a loss for coherent arguments doesn’t mean that they are on the run politically. Money still talks — indeed, thanks in part to the Roberts court, it talks louder than ever. Still, ideas matter too, shaping both how we talk about society and, eventually, what we do. And the Piketty panic shows that the right has run out of ideas.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 24, 2014
“The Sagebrush Provocateur”: Racist Liberal Media Invent More White Racism
Wouldn’t you figure it would be Adam Nagourney of the New York Times who would ruin the splendid living theater of patriotism being acted out in Nevada by quoting everybody’s hero Cliven Bundy as having views about black folks that might embarrass your local Grand Dragon:
[I]f the federal government has moved on, Mr. Bundy — a father of 14 and a registered Republican — has not.
He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Since Nagourney’s story came out late yesterday, you can imagine the consternation in conservative-land, which has for the most part adopted Bundy as a sort of sage-brush counterpart to Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson. What to say? Dean Heller’s staff was smart enough to immediately distance The Boss from Bundy’s racist rant. It took Rand Paul a bit longer to get there. Texas GOP gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott’s people also disavowed an earlier effort to link his cause to Bundy’s. It’s probably a matter of moments before someone accuses Nagourney of inventing the quote about “the Negro,” and it’s probably crossed more than a few minds that Bundy is an agent provocateur. Seems to me the old cowboy really, really wanted to say what he said; he had to understand he was blowing up his own game.
All I know for sure is that the next ten or a hundred conservative gabbers who claim the only racists in America are liberals who play the “race card” are going to have to deal with Bundy’s example. They, not liberals, made the man an icon. Let them explain how his racism is unconnected with all the other reactionary features of his world view, which are pure as ever.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 24, 2014
“Welcome To Groundhog Day”: In 2014, It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again
The New York Times published some new polling yesterday, showing Democrats in better-than-expected shape in U.S. Senate races in the South. Indeed, the results showed Dem incumbents ahead in Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina, and a Dem challenger looking very competitive in Kentucky.
Discouraged Republicans had a few choices. They could argue, for example, that individual polls are less important than larger averages based on multiple surveys. The GOP could also respond that it’s early in the cycle and there are still structural elements in place that still favor Republicans. They could even credibly claim that some of the results may have been an outlier.
But that’s not what happened. Bill Kristol, the Republican National Committee, and conservatives everywhere instead dug into the internals to declare the poll is … skewed. It’s as if 2012 has already escaped their memories.
As a substantive matter, Brian Beutler argued persuasively that the critique is misguided.
The obvious error here is an apples-oranges comparison between Romney’s recorded share of the vote total with this after-the-fact, reported share of the voting-age population. In 2012, just over 30 percent of registered voters in Arkansas and over half of the voting age population didn’t vote in Arkansas. Since the question was asked of all adults, it appears many people who didn’t vote are now actually claiming to have voted for one of the candidates. And many adults, whether they voted or not, are claiming to have voted third party when they actually didn’t. Eight percent of those surveyed say they voted for someone other than Obama or Romney. In reality third party candidates mustered a combined 2.5 percent of the vote (and a much smaller percentage of the voting age population) in Arkansas that year.
And as the Times’ Nate Cohn notes in a strong defense of the poll, “there’s a well-known bias toward the victor in post-election surveys. Respondents who voted for the loser often say that they don’t remember whom they supported, or say they supported someone else.”
In the larger context, though, what matters just as much as the reliability of the data is the right’s instincts – the polling results told Republicans what they didn’t want to hear, so they immediately went with their old standby. Discouraging polls must have a biased sample.
It’s one of several reasons it seems like we’re still stuck in 2012, no matter what the calendar says.
Two years ago, when polls showed Romney trailing, conservatives eagerly pushed the line that news organizations were deliberately skewing the results to bolster the president. Their assumptions were the basis of a remarkable debacle – they were so convinced that the polls were wrong that they were absolutely shocked when Obama won fairly easily.
I thought at the time that the right would have learned a valuable lesson about confirmation bias and public-opinion surveys. I thought wrong. They learned nothing.
But what else happened in 2012?
* State Republican officials launched a nationwide effort to impose voter-suppression policies in key states.
* National Republican officials complained bitterly about contraception access.
* GOP voices raised the specter of the White House using government agencies to publish bogus data for a political advantage.
* Republicans kept pushing ACA repeal, expecting to ride a wave of anti-Obamacare sentiment to electoral success.
* The right pushed all kinds of Benghazi conspiracy theories.
And what’s happening in 2014? Well, we see even more voter-suppression schemes; Republicans still haven’t changed their anti-contraception posture; conservatives are still convinced the White House is “cooking the books” for a political advantage; Republicans refuse to move on from their anti-ACA crusade; and Benghazi is still the conspiracy theory the right just can’t quit.
Welcome to Groundhog Day.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 24, 2014
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