“Only Division Is Over Tactics, Not Policy”: The Tea Party And Big Business Want The Same Things
Dave Weigel patiently explains today that there isn’t actually a brewing war between “the Tea Party” and Wall Street and “the business community.” There is, really, just the same fruitful alliance that birthed the Tea Party. Because as long as “the Tea Party” means “Republicans in control of the House,” that means “Democrats not in control of the House.” Which is good for business! (In a very dumb and short-sighted way, mostly.) As Weigel says: “No one’s looking to primary the average Class of 2010 Republican because he’s trying to repeal Dodd-Frank or challenge EPA rules or prevent any changes in tax law that would anger the donors.”
And “big business,” in the form of the Chamber of Commerce and other business-backed groups, has spent and will continue to spend a small fortune electing Republicans, including “Tea Party” Republicans, in order to help Republicans, including “Tea Party” Republicans, maintain control of the House and possibly take over the Senate. The shutdown and the default showdown didn’t stop that. There is still one party that is very committed to rolling back environmental and other regulations, preventing meaningful financial reform, and, most importantly, keeping taxes as low as possible on very wealthy people and corporations. The Tea Party is not opposed to any of those things.
There are really only two issues dividing “the business community” from “the Tea Party.” They are a) tactics and b) immigration. “The business community” wants the Republican Party to be competitive in national races — they’re also be fine with the Republicans trying to win elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression — while “the Tea Party” prioritizes purity over electability. (In fact most of them don’t see conservative purity as any sort of obstacle to electability, but they are wrong.) The backlash to Ted Cruz and the House “suicide caucus” was mainly a reaction to tactics, not a blow-up over policy.
Conservatives simply differed over the best way to force Democrats into accepting the roll-back of the ACA and/or a tax-cutting, social insurance-cutting long-term budget deal. Plenty of “establishment” Republicans still believe it is perfectly appropriate to use the debt ceiling, and the implicit threat of default, to extract policy concessions. Where Republicans split was on the wisdom of actually shutting the government down or merely threatening to, and on what precisely to demand in exchange for reopening the government. Grover Norquist attacked Ted Cruz for demanding the unachievable, but he doesn’t actually oppose defunding Obamacare. He just thought Paul Ryan had a better strategy for actually winning concessions. (Grover Norquist is right, by the way.)
Where there could actually be a break of some kind is in next year’s primaries, when Tea Party groups will fund some less-electable candidates against perfectly conservative members with more realistic grasps of the achievable. But if the Tea Party groups win those primaries, big business will still support their candidates. (The Chamber of Commerce donated to Mike Lee and Allen West in 2012.)
The biggest problem with the moderate fantasy of a new Moderate Republican rising from the ashes of Ted Cruz is that “big business” isn’t going to force the “Tea Party” to moderate its positions, it’s going to fight to get them to fight for their positions more effectively. People opposed to the goals of the Tea Party movement should be even more opposed of the business community reasserting control over the party. The end result of the “grown-ups” stepping in to squash the Tea Party would be more power to people like… Mitch McConnell, the man who’s done more than anyone else to block Barack Obama’s agenda. The actual policies being fought for, with few exceptions, wouldn’t change.
The one major issue where there is actually tension between the bottom-line priorities of the donor class and the desires of the activist movement is immigration. There are many obvious reasons why big business would prefer looser immigration restrictions, more guest-workers and visas for “highly skilled” immigrants. But for a popular movement still fueled by the tribal panic of aging whites, “more immigrants” is not a winning message. (It’s also true that “the donor class” is much more socially liberal than the grassroots activists, but same-sex marriage isn’t enough of a profit-booster to make it a fight worth having outside the “blue states” where it’s already popular.) Even on immigration, smart representatives of the donor class seem to be suggesting that they believe it’s better to let activist conservatives have their way than to create a genuine split in the party. Because what’s good for Republicans is good for rich people.
That will still be true in 2014 and in 2016. And that’s why when the next presidential election rolls around, the conservative grassroots and the money will fall in line behind whichever guy the GOP nominates, even if they disagree about him at first.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, October 21, 2013
“Obamacare Horror Stories Aren’t So Horrible”: Republicans Struggling To Find Real-World Victims Of The Health Care Law
There are real and substantial problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website, serious enough to warrant remarks this morning from President Obama and “tech surge” at HHS. But for the law’s critics, there’s still an underlying problem: websites can be fixed. The merits of “Obamacare” are unaffected by online snafus, however meaningful they may be.
And with this in mind, the right realizes it can’t just jump up and down about a website that will get better; conservatives still need to go after the health care system itself.
That’s proving to be difficult. We talked last week about a recent Fox News segment, hosted by Sean Hannity, featuring three real-world couples who presented themselves as victims of the Affordable Care Act. As Eric Stern reported in Salon, the problem with the segment was that none of the claims made by the couples stood up to any scrutiny. One of the horror stories was apparently entirely fictitious.
As it happens, this larger public-relations scheme is quickly shaping up to be an unsettling pattern. Robin Abcarian reported on a similar problem in the L.A. Times.
Maybe you’ve heard about the beloved local ice cream company that’s been forced to close its doors because of Obamacare?
Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich shared the dreadful news with Sean Hannity on Hannity’s radio show. It’s awful, just awful, the two men agreed, that small businesses are being driven under by the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.
It didn’t take me long to identify the company: Bonnie Doon Ice Cream Corp., an Indiana ice cream maker that also operated a chain of drive-in diners in Mishawaka, South Bend and Elkhart. Or to figure out that the Affordable Care Act probably has nothing to do with the business’s failure.
Now, it is true that Bonnie Doon Ice Cream Corp. is permanently closing its doors. The problem is, Republicans want to blame this on the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, the local Indiana congresswoman representing the business’s headquarters specifically connected the law and the business’ demise on her Facebook page.
Reality, I’m afraid, is pointing in a different direction. For one thing, Bonnie Doon only had around 30 employees, so the law’s mandates didn’t affect it anyway. The employee total increased after it was bought by BD Acquisition, but even then health care mandates wouldn’t kick in until 2015 at the earliest.
“It seems highly, highly implausible that someone would be closing a business now in anticipation of projections around health costs 15 months from now,” Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told Abcarian. “Any business that says it’s shutting down because of Obamacare is likely going out of business anyway.”
The point isn’t just to poke holes in poor anecdotal arguments. Rather, the key takeaway from stories like these is that Republicans are struggling mightily to find any real-world victims of the health care law.
For the right, these victims should be **everywhere**, eager to tell their stories, because that darned “Obamacare” is such a public menace. If so, why do these stories keep falling apart, replaced with nothing?
“Reality Is Not, And Never Was The Point”: The Tea Party’s True Believers Thrive On Rejection
Yay.
Yippee.
Woo hoo, even.
It was a nick-of-time rescue, like when Polly Pureheart is whisked off the railroad tracks right before the train comes barreling through, or the correct wire is snipped and the bomb timer stops counting down with just seconds left.
Last week, hours before a historic default, Congress finally stopped playing chicken with the world’s largest economy and ended the government shutdown.
So . . . hurray, right?
Huzzah, right?
Crisis averted, lessons learned, common sense restored. Everything’s good, is it not?
Well, no. Not even close.
Pardon the pooping of the party, but it’s hard to cheer the aversion of a crisis that:
A) Was entirely manufactured.
B) Will in all likelihood recur very soon.
This is what it has come to in Tea Party America: government of the crisis, by the crisis, for the crisis, government that lurches from emergency to emergency, accomplishing little, resolving less and generally behaving with all the thoughtful reflection of a toddler holding her breath until she gets her way.
Let no one claim this is no big deal because we’ve had shutdowns before. Let no one chirp that this is how things are supposed to work — checks and balances and all. Let none of us act as if it’s anything but bizarre to see a militant faction in one chamber of the legislature bring government to a halt because it doesn’t like a law.
Most of all, let us finally stop pretending this is only about that law, the Affordable Care Act, and the delusional claim that it will usher in socialism, communism and slavery, resurrect Vladimir Lenin and send Nazis marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Obamacare?
No, this is about Obamascare, the terror of what some still regard as alien and their consequent refusal, even five years in, to accept the legitimacy of a president twice elected with nary a hanging chad in sight.
The only good news out of this 16-day debacle is that his refusal to kowtow to these bullyboy tactics suggests that the president does, indeed, have a spine, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding.
Repeat: That’s the only good news. Anyone expecting the even-better news that this closes the book on the Tea Party, given its abject failure to achieve its stated goal of defunding the Affordable Care Act, will be bitterly disappointed. These are true believers. True believers thrive on rejection.
Note that, even as other Republicans were sounding appropriately chastened, Tea Party activists were assailing the party for “surrender” and were disavowing regret. As the shutdown was going down in flames, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a Tea Party stalwart, told CNN, “Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.”
This, as polls show the American people’s esteem for the GOP and the Tea Party at record lows and 62 percent of respondents were telling Gallup they wanted their representatives to compromise so the government could reopen. Gallup also tells us Americans now identify government dysfunction as this country’s biggest problem.
The disconnect between what Cruz says the people are saying and what they are actually saying should surprise no one. The defining characteristic of the Tea People has always been their ability to convince themselves reality is whatever they need it to be.
Reality, after all, is not the point. Ideological purity is.
So we will likely return to this crossroads, or one very much like it. Any hope of avoiding that rests with the dwindling population of adults in the GOP and their ability to make their party realize what should have long ago been obvious.
They can have purity or they can have power. They cannot have both.
By: Leonard Pitts, J., Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2013
“The Original Naysayer”: Obstructionist Mitch McConnell Totally Said No Before Saying No Was Cool
A number of journalists have been casting about desperately for sources of hope, and some of them have settled on moderate Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Paul Kane calls him “perhaps the most accomplished congressional dealmaker of his time.” McConnell hasn’t been shy about portraying himself as a savior, either. “I’ve demonstrated, once again, that when the Congress is in gridlock and the country is at risk, I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch,” he told Robert Costa.
McConnell has no right to say that about himself. He has engaged in as much obstructionism as the worst of them, and his ideas are partly responsible for bringing Republicans to their current state of disarray.
The senator from Kentucky was the original naysayer. Soon after President Obama’s election, McConnell instructed Republicans to oppose Obama at every opportunity. The goal appears to have been to make sure that the country was chaotically governed for four years so that the president would not win a second term. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said. “If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Sen. George Voinovich (R-Oh.) told Mike Grunwald. McConnell “wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
This is the kind of dealmaker McConnell is. He will make a deal or put a halt to legislative action altogether, depending where he believes the political advantage lies.
It also seems that McConnell’s strategy of opposition has seriously damaged his party’s ability to develop and propose their own original ideas. Conservatives do have plenty of good ideas, but when constructive legislating is off the table for electoral reasons, it’s easy to speculate that legislators and their staffs will devote less time and fewer resources to thinking about those ideas — how to implement them and how to include them as part of a complete legislative agenda. It does seem clear that the Republicans in the House are simply taking their cue from McConnell, even though he chides them for their ineffectiveness in his interview with Costa. It was McConnell who first declared uniform opposition to be the mark of loyal conservatism.
When a party has no ideas of its own, negotiations become impossible. The cause of the most recent crisis was that Republicans had no positive demands to offer — no new policies they wanted to see enacted. They could only offer negative ones — existing policies they wanted postponed or terminated, specifically, the health care law — which, of course, Democrats did not accept. Had there been a positive, thoughtful G.O.P. agenda, Democrats could have conceded one or more of its elements, allowing Republicans to save face without engaging in brinksmanship and perhaps even implementing a worthwhile program or two.
McConnell insisted on putting politics before policy, which is exactly the kind of thinking that has crippled his party. He can be credited for rescuing Republicans, but only from his own mistakes.
By: Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2013
“A Revisionist History Mistrial”: Jim DeMint’s Silly Argument On Obamacare Was Soundly Overruled
The Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint – the proto Ted Cruz – has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning where he makes the case against Obamacare and explains why his organization pushed Cruz and the tea party right to shut down the government (and, presumably, why Cruz is threatening to try to do it again). Most of it is pretty standard anti-Obamacare fare, but one section is worth noting for its casual dismissal of last year’s election results.
Responding to the notion that Republicans should lay off Obamacare because the president won and they lost last November, DeMint writes:
… ObamaCare was not the central fight in 2012, much to the disappointment of conservatives. Republicans hoped that negative economic news would sweep them to victory, and exit polls confirmed that the economy, not health care, was the top issue. The best thing is to declare last year’s election a mistrial on ObamaCare.
Sorry, but you don’t get to declare a mistrial on election results because you don’t like them.
First, this raises the obvious question: Would DeMint entertain a similar argument against repealing Obamacare were Mitt Romney president right now? If negative economic news had indeed swept the GOP to victory, would anyone on the right find credible the argument that because the economy, not Obamacare, had been the big issue of the campaign, the GOP had no business trying to roll back the law?
Of course they would not – because the mistrial argument is silly. It’s true that exit polls showed the economy to be overwhelmingly the biggest issue of the campaign, with 59 percent of voters citing it as their top issue and health care a distant second at 18 percent. But there’s a difference between something being the driving issue of the campaign and being the only one. Voters didn’t cast their ballots in an issue void and it’s not like Obamacare was some sub-rosa topic that wasn’t properly litigated. It was the focus of politics for most of President Obama’s first term. Mitt Romney made it a mainstay of his campaign and ran ads on it.
So the fact that voters had bigger concerns isn’t grounds for a mistrial, but instead is a clarifying fact about their priorities. Last November, voters, having had years to digest the Obamacare wars, decided that the law isn’t the existential crisis that DeMint, Cruz and their ilk do and also decided to rehire the fellow who instituted it. Oh, and among the 18 percent of voters who did name health care as their top priority, three-quarters voted for President Obama.
I suppose there is one positive to come out of DeMint’s op-ed. By arguing that elections don’t count when it comes to secondary issues, he’s implicitly saying that elections do have consequences in regard to the top issue. That being the case, I look forward to DeMint and the Heritage Foundation graciously ending their opposition to President Obama’s economic agenda.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
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