“Chris Christie’s Nightmare Worsens”: Walls Caving In Amid New Revelations And Poll
While reporters pondered the meaning of of former Chris Christie aide Bridget Kelly appearing in court personally to fight subpoenas for her email and documents – Why would Kelly show up at all? Might she eventually talk? Why is she wearing a black cardigan and pearls? — the bad news for Christie continued. A Des Moines Register poll shows that Iowa voters are paying attention to Christie’s bridge scandal woes, with 57 percent disapproving of the way he’s handled it and only 25 percent approving.
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, the damage is even worse. Christie’s approval numbers have flipped in the new Fairleigh Dickinson poll: the man who won reelection in a landslide in November has seen his disapproval ratings spike, and for the first time since his first election, more New Jersey voters disapprove than approve of the job he’s doing as governor. A Rutgers/Eagleton poll also released Tuesday found that trust in Christie has cratered, too: 23 percent of those polled said the word “trustworthy” could be used to describe Christie “very well;” that’s down 20 percent just since October.
In some ways, the Iowa news doesn’t matter much to Christie: it was never going to be a strong Christie state in the 2016 GOP nominating process, since social conservatives dominate its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Christie’s only hope was mobilizing Republican-leaning independents to join the caucuses, a heavy lift in any scenario.
But now even that path seems closed to Christie, as Iowa Independents disapprove of Christie’s bridge-scandal handling 60-20. Among registered Republicans, 47 percent disapprove while 34 percent say he’s doing all right. “If Governor Christie runs, he may choose to follow John McCain and Rudy Giuliani’s path and skip Iowa,” a top Iowa GOP strategist told the Des Moines Register. That worked for McCain, temporarily anyway, but not at all for Giuliani, who was once the towering Christie figure on the GOP horizon – a blue-state Republican tough guy beloved by the media — whose presidential campaign flame-out was a remarkable display of hubris and incompetence.
Still, the most damaging developments for Christie are closer to home. A New York Times investigation published Tuesday shows he’d turned the Port Authority “into a de facto political operation” even before Kelly declared it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Christie used big Port Authority projects to win endorsement from Democrats and union leaders, and in a ghoulish touch, even handed out wreckage from the World Trade Center to reward mayors who backed him. Just last week a WNYC-NJ Spotlight investigation revealed that his administration mishandled $25 million in Hurricane Sandy grants, giving huge awards where there was no storm damage, stiffing places with huge flooding problems while, yes, underpaying the city of Hoboken by about $700,000, as Mayor Dawn Zimmer has alleged.
All of this corruption has been hiding in plain sight, but the bridge scandal suddenly helped people connect the dots.
Christie continues to insist he’s putting the mess behind him. He took his son to watch New York Mets spring training baseball over the weekend, then showed up at another local town hall Tuesday, though he hasn’t taken questions from the media since his two-hour pity party in early January. Christie is still being covered like a top-tier 2016 candidate, which, given his competition, is somewhat defensible, I suppose. So it’s hard to ignore the bad Iowa news for Christie, and yet it’s irrelevant. Christie’s national career is over, and his tenure in Trenton is endangered as well.
Back to Bridget Kelly: She may win this round in court, but only because it’s become clear that she has a reasonable fear of federal prosecution for her role in the bridge lane closures. Until this round, committee counsel Reid Schar had denied that Kelly might be incriminating herself if she shared the documents the committee wants. In court Tuesday, he acknowledged that risk but insisted his subpoena was narrow enough to protect Kelly’s Fifth Amendment rights.
But if state investigators don’t get Kelly’s documents, federal prosecutors are likely to. I read Kelly’s black-cardigan-and-pearls appearance in court today as designed to remind everyone that she sacrificed her personal and professional life for Christie, and her reward to date has been enormous legal bills and lots of time with lawyers. It’s hard for me to imagine Kelly taking the fall for her ex-boss. But either way, voters are holding her ex-boss accountable.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 11, 2014
“Dangerous ‘Intended’ Consequences”: The Laughable Logic Behind Marco Rubio’s Plan To Limit Government Regulation
Republicans like to talk about government in the broadest, most abstract terms—arguing that it’s too big, too intrusive, and too expensive. The argument plays well politically, since the public tends to agree. But it also allows Republicans to avoid talking about real trade-offs—like the fact that government unemployment checks help people pay their bills while they are out of work, or that government guidelines for product safety keep kids safe when they play with toys. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the latest big idea from Republicans is a “national regulatory budget”—a proposal by Senator Marco Rubio that, however sensible sounding, could force government to scale back protections that people very much need.
Under Rubio’s plan, an independent agency would calculate the economic costs of all existing regulations. Congress would then set an upper limit on how much regulations can cost the economy—and use that figure to establish caps for each individual federal agency. What would that mean in practice? Imagine that the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to impose a new regulation on pollution. If the EPA was already at its limit, it would have to rescind an old regulation (or regulations) in order to make room.
“The essence of this proposal is a budget accounting mechanism—a one in requires one out. So one regulation in requires a similar regulation to be repealed,” said Amit Narang, a policy advocate at Public Citizen and an expert on the federal regulatory process. “The premise of the legislation is that we are currently at the perfect level of regulation. We don’t need anymore.”
One of Rubio’s goals is to force regulatory agencies to go back through old regulations and eliminate outdated and costly ones. There’s a strong case for that: Government agencies don’t do this very often and plenty of duplicative, cumbersome regulations exist. But Rubio’s method for forcing agencies to review past regulations is clumsy—and, according to many experts, dangerous. Among other things, the plan requires agencies to eliminate a regulation (or regulations) with the same economic cost as the new one. If the EPA wants to impose a major regulation (such as one on coal-fired power plants), it would have to rollback a significant one in return. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine this kind of budgetary system resulting in, say, the EPA, in order to put forward new chemical regulations—maybe they would have to repeal old lead regulations,” Narang said.
Rubio seems to think that Congress can set an arbitrary cap on the burden of regulations, at the precise level where agencies can ensure public safety without unduly hurting the economy. “This would force federal agencies to enact only those regulations that truly serve an essential role,” Rubio said in a speech at Google’s Washington D.C. headquarters on Monday. “It would put in place and enshrine the cost-benefit analysis and the regulatory framework that we are lacking right now.” Rubio is right that under his plan, federal agencies would have to evaluate their regulations and repeal the ones that had the worst cost-benefit ratio. But Congress could easily set the cap at a level which would force agencies to eliminate regulations whose benefits exceed their costs. That’s a dangerous unintended (or maybe intended) consequence of his proposal.
The ultimate problem with Rubio’s plan is that it actually has nothing to do with cost-benefit analysis. On the contrary, it sets a cap based solely on the economic costs of regulations, regardless of their benefits. Rubio wants agencies to evaluate the current costs and benefits of old regulations (they already do so with new ones), but he wants to ensure that even if the benefits exceed the costs, federal agencies will be forced to do away with many regulations anyway. Rubio says he wants to ensure a rigorous analysis of our regulatory system. What he really wants to do is rig the game.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, March 11, 2014
“Health Care’s Resistors And Adapters”: Why The ‘Bette’ And ‘Boostra’ Stories Fall Apart
You’ll recall that Washington state Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, in delivering one of the 17 GOP State of the Union responses, spoke of “Bette,” the Spokane woman whose premiums were going up under Obamacare by $700 a month. The state’s jackboot, according to McMorris-Rodgers, was planted right on Bette’s throat, and there was nothing she could do about it. Bette would “have no choice” but to pay the extra, socialistic freight. Awful, awful, awful.
But the Spokane newspaper tracked Bette down and got the whole story, which was that her insurer did indeed cancel Bette’s then-current plan, which didn’t meet all the new ACA coverage requirements. When she called, the insurer tried to steer her to a plan that cost around $500 a month more. However, Bette never went to the Washington state web site to check out all the options available to her. If she had, the LA Times reported, she’d have found that in fact many options were available to her, “and with a deductible far lower than the $10,000 she was paying under the old plan and broader coverage, though lacking a provision for four free doctor visits a year provided by her old plan.” But Bette just didn’t want to go on “that Obama web site at all.”
Now, the Detroit News has found another Bette. Julie Boonstra has cancer, and last month she starred in a Koch Brothers-funded ad for one of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate. The ad claimed that Obamacare would make her medication so unaffordable that she might die. The News looked into the details of her new plan and found that she is going to save $1,200 a year. Here’s how the News summarizes the details:
Boonstra’s old plan cost $1,100 a month in premiums or $13,200 a year, she previously told The News. It didn’t include money she spent on co-pays, prescription drugs and other out-of-pocket expenses.
By contrast, the Blues’ plan premium costs $571 a month or $6,852 for the year. Since out-of-pocket costs are capped at $5,100, including deductibles, the maximum Boonstra would pay this year for all of her cancer treatment is $11,952.
Like Bette, Boonstra just isn’t buying it. It “can’t be true” and “I personally don’t believe that.” She’s the ex-wife of a former GOP county chairman who was named by the Republican governor to a seat on the state Court of Appeals, though she told the News she’s never been political.
Maybe not. And she does have cancer, so the point here is not to lay into her. The point is the way people’s views have been set in concrete because of all this hatred and all these lies coming from Republicans and groups like the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.
Most people love the feeling of having their anger and suspicions confirmed. The chance to say “I knew it!” is rare enough in this world, and most people relish it. They relish it on some level even more than being wrong but ending up pleasantly surprised, at least in cases where for whatever reason they’ve developed some kind of emotional commitment to the outcome that confirms their worst fears.
So people were told: Obamacare is going to screw you over. Most people—conservatives, of course, but just general people with a default distrust of government—accepted this as logical. So they looked only for evidence that would support their being screwed over. Evidence to the contrary, even when it benefits them, is dismissed. Bette and Boonstra both do this. Bette wouldn’t even go look at the web site, where she’d have seen she had numerous options. Boonstra, told by newspaper reporters the objective facts of her situation, said she simply doesn’t believe it.
I wrote a piece a couple of months ago for which I went on the recently fixed up ACA web site, pretended to be a married, modest-income guy from Kansas, and found that I was offered a staggering 42 different plans, from very cheap (and really high deductible) ones to quite pricey ones, with lots of stops in between. Most people who bother to look will find the same thing.
But they have to look. The baseline question, as it so often is in politics these days, is about emotional resistance. How long will it take before people who get letters about changes to their insurance just go on the ACA web site and calmly shop around? Some smallish number does that now, but I daresay there are more Bettes and Boonstras. One big determinant of how Obamacare ends up playing in the elections this November will be how many resistors have become adapters.
Meanwhile, it’s comical, but also kind of sick, that the law’s opponents keep producing these lies and can’t find any real victims. I’m sure some are out there, but far, far more people will benefit from the fine print of this law, which is why these stories fall apart.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 11, 2014
“McConnell’s Tea Party Nightmare”: He Can’t Kill Them Because They Run His Party
OK, Sen. Mitch McConnell wasn’t brandishing a rifle at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday in order to shoot Tea Party marauders. The unpopular Senate Minority Leader was just trying to avoid being booed by the crowd, using the most reliable prop on the far right, a gun (President Obama in handcuffs would probably work well too). But the embattled leader did go ballistic this weekend, figuratively, on his party’s restive far-right activists. The Tea Party is not going to be able to knock off GOP senators in red states, McConnell warned.
“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell told the New York Times. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”
Not surprisingly, McConnell is starting with his own Tea Party challenger, Matt Bevin. He released a new ad trashing not only Bevin but the Senate Conservatives Fund that’s backing him, charging the group “solicits money under the guise of advocating for conservative principles but then spends it on a $1.4 million luxury townhouse with a wine cellar and hot tub in Washington, D.C.” Wine and hot tubs, you know what that means – these folks are probably just uppity liberal hypocrites in conservative clothing!
But McConnell’s crusade comes a few years too late. Clearly the Tea Party is already the mainstream of his party. Just last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that Republican voters say a candidate’s Tea Party ties make it more likely they’ll support them, by a margin of nearly 2-1. Unfortunately for the GOP, Tea Party affiliation makes the broader electorate less likely to vote for a candidate by about the same margin.
Even some Republicans who the media oddly place in the “moderate” or pragmatic camp don’t belong there. Wisconsin’s scandal-challenged Gov. Scott Walker has bragged about being “the original Tea Party in Wisconsin.” In a popular CPAC session using Wisconsin as “the model” for union-busting and right-wing coalition politics, the RNC’s Reince Priebus credited “total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The [Glenn Beck-instigated] 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that …everyone was going to run down the tracks together.”
And while it’s true that Congressman Paul Ryan, endorsed in 2012 by the Tea Party Express as “the strong Tea Party candidate for Vice President,” has had tension with Tea Partiers since he partnered with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray to pass a budget, at CPAC Ryan downplayed the notion of a rift between himself and the party’s right, comparing intra-party debates to a “family reunion” among Irish-Americans. (Actually, nobody in my family wants to take lunches away from poor children, not even the Republicans among us.)
Now it is true that Tea Party challengers in three red states – Kentucky, Mississippi and Kansas – are having a hard time getting traction against reliably conservative GOP senate incumbents. One poll has McConnell up 42 points over Bevin; another has his lead at 26 points. Thad Cochran and Pat Roberts are likewise leading their Tea Party challengers.
But oddly, McConnell – and the Times – don’t even mention Georgia, where five extremists have been virtually tied for the lead in the GOP senate primary to succeed retiring Saxby Chambliss, competing for the opportunity to run against Michelle Nunn. The most extreme of the five, U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, just pulled ahead in the last PPP poll. Broun would abolish the IRS, the EPA and the Department of Education, and wants the U.S. to pull out of the United Nations. He’s called evolution and the big bang theory “lies from the pit of hell.” Interestingly though, Broun is the only GOP candidate with a (slight) lead over Nunn in an early head to head match up; the others trail her. Presumably, in a one on one race, Nunn and the Democrats would have a lot to work with battling Broun. He is an early contender to be the Todd Akin of the 2014 cycle.
“I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers,” McConnell told the Times, suggesting defeats in primaries in places like Kentucky and Mississippi would discourage Tea Party insurgents. “If you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going.”
But while McConnell has a big lead over Bevin, he’s trailing his Democratic challenger, secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes. It’s far too early to count McConnell out, but it’s worth asking whether the far-right’s animus towards McConnell will make him the ultimate loser in November.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 10, 2014
“Batter Up”: GOP’s Whack A Mole Addiction
While the Republican presidential contenders were kumbaya-ing at CPAC, evidence continued to mount over which of them gets to suffer the embarrassment of winning 180 electoral votes. A USA Today poll found that 59 percent of respondents said they will or might vote for Clinton. It showed enormous improvements in personal qualities (Is she likeable? Is she honest?, etc.) since the first time she ran for president. Respondents even thought that she was six years younger than she actually is!
What the CPAC goings on tell us, combined with a burst of polls showing Clinton wiping out Chris Christie and just mopping the floor with Jeb Bush, is that as they face 2016, the Republicans are in a situation that has almost no precedent in the party’s modern history. In practically every nomination battle going back to Tom Dewey—I’m not even going to tell you the year, but trust me, that’s going back!—the Republicans have had a chalk candidate. The establishment guy, the early front-runner.
Dewey, Dewey, Eisenhower, Eisenhower, Nixon, Rockefeller, Nixon, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Sr., Dole, Bush Jr., Bush Jr., McCain, Romney. These were the establishment nominees. You could make a case for William Scranton instead of Rocky in ’64, and you might argue, I guess, that at the start of the 1968 cycle, it wasn’t Nixon but George Romney, although he imploded in the pretty early innings. And anyway, I’m not sure Romney ever led Nixon in the polls. So these were the GOP establishment choices. You’ll have noted that only one of the whole bunch of them, Nelson Rockefeller, failed to capture the nomination.
Today? No chalk horse. Wide open. Christie was, but clearly isn’t anymore (by the way, Clinton leads him by 10 points—in New Jersey). Those who think Jeb Bush can step in and play this role are going on name and history, but they obviously aren’t looking at the numbers—Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee do just about as well against Clinton as Bush does. Establishment money might chase Bush if he got in, but there’s no evidence that votes would.
So this time it really could be almost anyone. The CPAC straw poll results suggest as much. It doesn’t mean much that Rand Paul won going away with 31 percent. He’s engineered to win CPAC straw polls. They’ll always overstate his support, although he is certainly among the front rank of aspirants right now. But look at the other numbers: Cruz, 11; Christie, 8; Rick Santorum, 7; Scott Walker, 7; Marco Rubio, 6. It’s a good bet that the nominee is going to be one of these people (counting Paul), and they’re packed in there pretty tight. That’s not a bad number for Rubio, whom the chattering classes have spent the last few weeks writing off (except Ross Douthat, who just yesterday suggested that a Rubio nomination was a distinct possibility.) I remember telling people in 2006 that I thought there was no way the GOP would nominate McCain in 2008, although I also said the opposite the following week.
It’s fascinating that this is happening at the precise time that the GOP establishment looks to be asserting control over the party at the congressional level. After two congressional election cycles during which the insurgent radicals started to take over, the establishment conservatives have said enough and started their own organizations to beat back Tea Party challenges to incumbents (the Times ran a good summary on this Sunday). The early sense is that for the most part, the establishment will succeed at this task. No more Christine O’Donnells on ballots. Most of the GOP incumbent senators being challenged from the right are probably going to end up winning their primaries. All those senators needed to see was what happened in Indiana in 2012, when the Tea Party wingnut beat the establishment Republican and then lost in the general, giving the state a Democratic senator even as Mitt Romney was beating Barack Obama there by 10 points, to conclude finally that they’d better clamp down on can’t-win-in-November extremism.
But it turns out they can’t contain it completely. It’s whack-a-mole, GOP style: They move to solve the problem at the congressional level, but lo and behold the mole pops up out of the presidential hole. If Christie is cleared, maybe matters will revert to normal. But even if he is cleared, he can’t turn back time; his image just isn’t what it was and never will be. He is already not quite Dole/McCain/Romney, the troika calumniated as sellouts by Cruz at his CPAC speech last week.
And thus the odds are strong that the GOP, for only the second time since 1944, is going to nominate an anti-establishment insurgent. Because, you know, they only lost in 2008 and 2012 because they failed to offer voters “a real choice.” Or so some of them say. So let them offer voters that choice. As they did in 1964, the voters will know what choice to make, and she’ll be a fine president.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2014
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