“Senator Cheney?”: Just When You Thought The Senate Couldn’t Get Any Worse, Up Pops The Devil’s Daughter
If we were to make a list of competitive Senate races to watch in 2014, Wyoming wouldn’t make the cut. Sen. Mike Enzi is a popular Republican incumbent in a deep-red state — he won re-election in 2008 with more than 75% of the vote — and at age 69, the senator is not yet in a position where he needs to think about retirement. Enzi’s fourth term looks like one of the cycle’s safest bets.
At least, it did. In an era in which even conservative Republican incumbents have to worry about fierce primary challenges, Enzi will apparently have a high-profile foe next year.
A young Dick Cheney began his first campaign for the House in this tiny village [Lusk, Wyoming] — population 1,600 — after the state’s sole Congressional seat finally opened up. But nowadays, his daughter Liz does not seem inclined to wait patiently for such an opening.
Ms. Cheney, 46, is showing up everywhere in the state, from chicken dinners to cattle growers’ meetings, sometimes with her parents in tow. She has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father.
It’s not just idle speculation. Liz Cheney, despite having no meaningful background in the state whatsoever, moved with her family to Wyoming just last year and quickly became a ubiquitous political player. Indeed, the right-wing media personality even called Enzi directly, letting him know she’s likely to run against him in a GOP primary.
The result would probably be an ugly fight within the state Republican Party, pitting a popular three-term incumbent against a powerful family with deep roots in the state.
It’s not altogether clear why Cheney would bother. Her brief tenure in public office — she worked in the Bush/Cheney State Department — didn’t go well, but she remains a fixture in political media, routinely publishing “stark raving mad” pieces and making Sunday show appearances. Cheney’s megaphone is formidable, even if she uses it towards ridiculous ends.
But whatever her motivations, this will probably be one of the cycle’s more noteworthy primary fights. Enzi, assuming he doesn’t retire, would almost certainly have the edge, though he has not yet faced a rival as fierce and unburdened by propriety as Cheney.
On Twitter, @pourmecoffee added, “If ‘Liz Cheney’ is the answer, the question must be ‘How could the U.S. Senate possibly get any worse?'”
Postscript: The NYT piece noted that the former vice president, eager to help his daughter, has also begun traveling more regularly to the state he used to represent. That said, Liz Cheney “has told associates that if she runs, she wants to do so in her own right.”
It was the only sentence in the article that literally made me laugh. Cheney wants to run against a popular incumbent from her own party in a state she’s lived in for a year, and she thinks her candidacy should be unrelated to her last name? C’mon.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 8, 2013
“Money Talks”: A Climate Change Argument That May Even Work On Conservatives
We may find out if Republicans actually do trust the free market.
For years, activists have been touting the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is manmade, hoping that would inspire Republicans — who first advanced the idea of a cap-and-trade system to slow carbon emissions — to break their pledge to the Koch brothers and do something about the coming climate crisis.
It didn’t work.
A recent poll found a majority of Republicans — 58 percent — believe that climate change is a hoax. This explains why the right-wing media regularly laughs at the idea of doing anything to slow carbon emissions.
But there’s one group that seems to believe 100 percent that climate change is real and a serious threat to their existence. It’s the group that has the most to lose if we do nothing: the insurance industry.
The Weekly Standard‘s Eli Lehrer explains:
Indeed, if free-market conservatives really want evidence of climate change, they ought to look towards the insurance markets that would bear much of the cost of catastrophic climate change. All three of the major insurance modeling firms and every global insurance company incorporate human-caused climate change into their projections of current and future weather patterns. The big business that has the most to lose from climate change, and that would reap the biggest rewards if it were somehow solved tomorrow, has universally decided that climate change is a real problem. An insurance company that ignored climate change predictions could, in the short term, make a lot of money by underpricing its competition on a wide range of products. Not a single firm has done this.
In fact, a recent report from the Geneva Association, “Warming of the Oceans and Implication for the (Re)insurance Industry,” suggests that climate change is making certain regions — including Florida and the United Kingdom — uninsurable.
Lehrer argues that the free market way to deal with a free market problem is the same solution offered by pioneering climate scientist James Hansen — a carbon tax:
Since carbon emissions do present a real problem, simply repealing the current regulations without replacing them would be both unwise and politically impossible. The least-intrusive and most economically beneficial way to deal with the problem appears to be a carbon tax, particularly a revenue-neutral carbon tax that could be used to offset and/or replace other taxes.
According to that Koch pledge, which has been signed by a majority of Republicans in Congress, any carbon tax would have to be matched by an “equivalent amount of tax cuts,” which would likely violate Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. It’s a predicament that typifies the structural obstruction that binds the modern GOP.
But money talks. Perhaps when they can’t insure their Palm Beach homes, the cost of inaction will be too much for even this Republican Party.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 8, 2013
“Getting Mad For All The Wrong Reasons”: Madness Is Simply The Status Quo For Republicans
Nearly a week later, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents are still furious that the employer-mandate provision that conservatives opposed won’t be implemented on schedule. But there’s a reason that sentence might seem unusual to you — if Republicans don’t like the employer mandate, why are they outraged that the mandate won’t exist until 2015 at the earliest?
The answer is simple, but unsatisfying: Republicans are mad for all the wrong reasons. Brian Beutler had a good piece on this the other day, noting that Obamacare’s detractors are, ironically, disappointed that “a problematic provision won’t be taking effect right away.” Republicans don’t want a health care system that works effectively; they want a system that doesn’t work effectively so they can complain about it. The White House’s decision last week satisfies GOP policy goals, such as they are, but interferes with the GOP’s rhetorical goals, which the right obviously sees as more important.
[I]t doesn’t take much reading between the lines to recognize what’s really going on. Republicans are still committed to the far-fetched objective of repealing Obamacare, and as such have effectively vowed not to work with the administration to fix any of its dysfunctional provisions. To the contrary, the GOP is committed to creating implementation problems where they can, and to making sure existing problems are never fixed, to make the whole program a liability for Democrats.
By delaying the employer mandate, the Obama administration unilaterally sidestepped the GOP’s strategy. And Republicans aren’t happy about it.
Keep in mind, Republican policymakers could, right now, sit down with Democrats to explore scrapping the employer mandate and replacing it with some other policy alternative. But that would require governing, and post-policy nihilists that dominate Republican politics in 2013 aren’t even open to that possibility.
We’re left with a dynamic that the political establishment still finds difficult to fully grasp: GOP officials could make the federal health care system better and more to their liking, but they see no value in that. They’d rather sabotage it, regardless of the real-world consequences. They could help get rid of a mandate they oppose, but they’d rather keep the policy they hate in the hopes it won’t work, people will feel adverse consequences, and there will be new fodder for 30-second attack ads a year from now.
Some people pursue public service to build things, and some pursue public service because they just want to watch the things burn.
This dovetails nicely with news that Republican leaders have urged the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, PGA, and NASCAR not to partner with Washington on informing the public about health care benefits Americans are legally entitled to. Kevin Drum had a terrific rant on this.
But not. Conservatives remain so spittle-flecked angry about [Obamacare] that they can’t even abide the thought of a sports league helping to run a public education campaign that reduces confusion about who’s entitled to what. Even now, they desperately want it to fail. And they’re going to do everything they can to help it fail, even if that means screwing over their own constituents. It’s a temper tantrum possibly unequalled in American political history.
And it’s revolting.
I’ve made a conscious effort to read conservative commentary on this, trying to understand their rationale for such callousness and recklessness. Their argument, in effect, seems to be this: Republicans hate the law, so of course they want it to fail and will continue to do whatever they can to ensure their preferred outcome. If there are elements of Obamacare that need fixing, why should the GOP agree to help clean up the mess? Families may suffer if the system collapses, but it’ll clear the way, eventually, for a superior Republican reform plan.
I don’t doubt that the right finds this line of thought coherent and persuasive, but their sincerity doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. First, there is no precedent for elected federal American officials acting to deliberately sabotage federal law, hurting millions of people on purpose out of partisan spite. That’s just madness, but it’s currently the status quo.
Second, if GOP policymakers were even remotely serious about governing, they could — get this — achieve policy goals they like. This employer mandate is a terrific example of the sort of provision Democrats would gladly trade away, if only they had someone to trade with. Republicans could, in other words, score policy victories if they just try.
People forget this, but shortly before Obamacare became law, several GOP leaders said they agreed with “80 percent” of the Democratic plan — and that was before the public option was scuttled, which means in the end, Republicans agreed with more than 80 percent of the law. GOP officials could move it even closer to their preferred vision if they’d only take public policy seriously for a short while.
As for someday replacing the Affordable Care Act with a far-right, Republican-friendly alternative, we’ve been waiting for years for a half-way-credible GOP plan, and there’s a good reason one has never materialized: they really don’t give a darn. They saw the old, dysfunctional mess — the one the public demanded be reformed; the one that cost too much and covered too few — and said it was good enough to leave in place indefinitely.
The most generous thing I can say about their approach is that it’s fundamentally unserious about helping anyone. The least generous thing I can say is probably inappropriate for a family-friendly blog.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 8, 2013
“Not That Anyone Really Cares”: Whatever Happened To Little Bobby Jindal?
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is renowned for his policy wonkery and strict Catholicism, not a cutting sense of humor. So when he took the stage a few months ago at Washington’s annual Gridiron dinner, one jab stood out in particular. “The Menendez scandal is disturbing,” Jindal said, referring to reports (later proved untrue) that Senator Robert Menendez had paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. “Soliciting prostitution is completely unacceptable. We would never put up with that in Louisiana.”
The butt of the joke was obvious to everyone in the room. Six years earlier, Louisiana’s junior senator, David Vitter, confessed to “a very serious sin” when his name appeared in the call records of a large D.C. prostitution ring. His political career survived, but not everyone has been as forgiving as Louisiana voters. Jindal’s joke acknowledged what has become an open secret in Louisiana Republican circles: He and Vitter loathe each other.
“You have two teams, two tribes,” one longtime Louisiana political consultant explained. “If you’re not on team Jindal, you want to be on team Vitter.”
Neither Jindal nor Vitter’s offices would discuss their relationship on the record, and few bayou politicos wanted to attach their names to details of the tension between the two most powerful Republicans in their state. But Baton Rouge insiders use a few key euphemisms to characterize the relationship. Sometimes they say that the two men “won’t have a beer together”; other times, that they’re fighting a “cold war.” Occasionally they slip versions of both into the same quote: “It’s kind of a cold war between Vitter and Jindal. They respect each other, but they aren’t having any beers together, I’ll tell you that much,” a Vitter ally who worked on one of his early campaigns told me.
What makes their rivalry particularly noteworthy is that Vitter—who has been the butt of many more and much better jokes than Jindal’s—may now be more popular and influential in the Louisiana Republican Party. This doesn’t just testify to Vitter’s underrated political skills; it also pulls back the curtain on Jindal’s overrated ones. While Jindal was traveling the country, giving speeches on fixing the Republican Party and stoking presidential and vice presidential speculation, Vitter, who once seemed so isolated and politically vulnerable, was quietly and carefully courting influence in the state GOP.
Now, it’s Jindal who is isolated and vulnerable. His approval rating has plummeted after voters revolted against his handling of the state’s budget crisis. Other Republicans in Louisiana describe a governor so cut off from his party that he and his team operate “like a cult.”
Making matters worse, Jindal is term-limited as governor in 2015—and Vitter could be the candidate to replace him. If Jindal’s off-putting style has driven Louisiana Republicans into the arms of a man more famous for his personal peccadilloes than his legislative record, then just imagine what he’ll do for Marco Rubio or Chris Christie as a presidential candidate in 2016.
Most Louisiana politicos date the start of Jindal and Vitter’s contretemps to July 16, 2007, when Vitter called a press conference to fess up to his role in the D.C. madam scandal. It was the same afternoon that Jindal, then a member of Congress, kicked off his second bid for governor.
“I got the sense that every reporter in town was covering Vitter and not Jindal,” says Robert Mann, who worked as communications director for Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, Jindal’s predecessor. While the rest of the Louisiana congressional delegation rushed to Vitter’s defense, Jindal—who represented Vitter’s old district—waited a day longer and said only: “While we are disappointed by Senator Vitter’s actions, [my wife] Supriya and I continue to keep David and his family in our prayers. This is a matter for the senator to address, and it is our hope that this is not used by others for their own political gain.”
Jindal was elected to the governor’s mansion later that year, while the national press excoriated Vitter. But Vitter had already begun laying the groundwork for his ascendance in his home state. In his days as a state legislator, he had successfully pushed for term limits for legislators, forcing many of the lawmakers he had served alongside to give up their seats in 2007. Vitter began recruiting conservative candidates to replace them and helped fund campaigns through the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM), a PAC he had co-founded a couple years earlier. He also personally reached out to Democrats in conservative districts, encouraging them to get ahead of the state’s rightward turn.
The Louisiana legislature didn’t go red in 2007, but, thanks to a successful election cycle and a few high-profile Democratic defections, the House flipped in 2010. A year later, the state Senate followed suit. It was the first time Republicans controlled the legislature since Reconstruction. Scott Hobbs, a Louisiana-based political consultant, estimated that Vitter helped “at least sixty to seventy percent [of Republicans in the legislature] in some way” between 2007 and 2011. Now Baton Rouge is filled with Vitter-friendly pols, sometimes referred to as the “fiscal hawks.” They’ve made Jindal’s life a lot harder, attacking him for using accounting gimmicks to balance the state budget. Vitter has gotten in on the action too, castigating the governor for “kicking the can down the road—the sort of bad spending policy I’m constantly fighting in Washington.”
Vitter, in fact, has frequently questioned Jindal’s judgment. He vocally criticized Jindal’s handling of a high-profile fight between landowners and the oil and gas industry as “very counterproductive.” When Jindal backed a $1.2 billion teaching hospital in New Orleans, Vitter wrote to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development to ask that they reject the state’s application for federal loan insurance and joined forces with the state treasurer and House speaker to come up with their own, cheaper proposal. “That involvement and willingness to address policy issues kind of allowed his allies to rally around knowing there was another power center other than governor who would be supportive,” says one conservative activist involved with the state party.
Many observers of the state’s political scene believe that Vitter’s motivation, however principled, is also at least somewhat personal. In 2010, when Vitter was up for reelection against Democratic Representative Charlie Melancon, Jindal declined to endorse him—though he had traveled out of state to support other candidates. The following year, when Jindal was up for reelection, Vitter publicly endorsed him, but not without a note of passive aggression: Vitter said Louisiana needed a conservative legislature “[t]o help Bobby become as engaged and bold as possible in his second term.” Vitter’s official Twitter account then tweeted an article to his followers: “Gov. Bobby Jindal gets endorsement from senator he refused to endorse last year.”
Flack from Vitter and his allies, drastic cuts to schools and hospitals, and the impression that he cares more about his own political future than the state’s have cost Jindal dearly with Louisiana voters. Slightly over a year after he was reelected with two-thirds of the vote, his approval rating now sits at 38 percent. His stature with lawmakers is hardly better. In May, when The Lens, an investigative reporting outlet based in New Orleans, surveyed lawmakers in the capital about their relationships with the governor, they discovered that “no one in the Capitol can identify any friendships Jindal has developed among lawmakers.”
“He’s a victim of his own staff,” one conservative activist told me. “His own staff has overprotected him and created this Praetorian guard around him, and therefore he has not been able to engage enough, particularly with legislators and other politicians, and that I think has limited his effectiveness.”
“It’s really, really bad,” said another Louisiana Republican familiar with the relationship. “So essentially Vitter has stepped up to fill that void. Because everyone hates Bobby, David hates Bobby, and presto: The enemy of my enemy is a friend.”
Meanwhile, Vitter hasn’t announced his next move, but recent polls have him neck to neck with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to take Jindal’s job in 2015. That doesn’t mean he’ll waltz into the governor’s mansion. He still hasn’t faced serious criticism over the prostitution scandal, and some Republicans expect it’d be an issue in his run for governor. “It’s not that people haven’t forgiven Vitter. They have,” the Louisiana Republican told me. “But just because you’re there doesn’t mean people need to vote for you.”
Even if he doesn’t make his way to the governor’s mansion, he’s in line to become chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee if Republicans retake the Senate next year—a hugely important committee assignment for Louisiana lawmakers. “No other politician has momentum like he has right now,” said Republican State Representative Lance Harris. “He caught lightning in a bottle.”
Jindal’s future is less clear. “We can all see he’s running for president,” said Mann. “But there’s also the sense that no one thinks that he’s got a chance. Everybody thinks that it’s a fool’s errand. So what does he do once he flames out?” I put that question to my sources, and a few of them mentioned a kind of presidency Jindal might be better suited for, one that would require less strenuous politicking: a think tank presidency.
By: Marin Cogan, The New Republic, July 8, 2013
“A Misleading Pretend Scandal”: It Turns Out IRS Commissioner Did Not Visit The White House 157 Times After All
One of the more enduring legends put forth by those working overtime to stoke the fires of scandal within the walls of the Obama Administration, is the often cited tale of how the now departed IRS Commissioner, Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 158 times during his years serving the Obama Administration.
Surely, as the logic goes, there could be but one credible explanation for an agency boss spending so much time within the epicenter of executive power. If Commissioner Shulman had pitched his tent and made the White House his second home, it could only mean that he was a co-conspirator in a well-coordinated effort on the part of the president and White House staff to influence the 2012 election by putting a beat down on conservative money groups looking to gain tax exempt status and the ability to hide the names of their contributors as they raised millions to defeat the Obama re-election effort.
So compelling is this argument that it has become a ‘go to’ bit of circumstantial evidence in the effort to take the IRS ‘scandal’ to the doorstep of the Oval Office and beyond.
And why not? The story does add up to a fairly decent piece of speculative evidence…or at least it would if the story were true.
Sadly (for the scandal mongers), it turns out that the entire meme falls dramatically short when someone actually takes the trouble to dig just a millimeter under the surface to discover what really happened here.
The ball on this enticing bit of scandal bait got rolling when The Daily Caller, the conservative hatchet rag operated by Tucker Carlson, reported in a May 29th piece that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had racked up more visits to the White House than “even the most trusted members of the president’s cabinet.” The article appeared to be carefully put together, so much so that it came complete with a chart revealing how the second most active visitor to the West Wing, Rebecca Blank, was a very distant second to the tally put up by Commissioner Shulman.
The problem is—in what is becoming something of a tradition for The Daily Caller—the website managed to sort of ‘semi-report’ the story without feeling much of a need or desire to gather or report all of the details and facts as, to do so, would have been highly inconvenient to the intent of the article.
Reacting to the Daily Caller story, Bill O’Reilly immediately demanded that Mr. Shulman “explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.” Considering how odd such an extensive visitation history would be for the boss of a second level government agency, O’Reilly’s request was not an unreasonable one.
However, Mr. O’Reilly’s insistent demand turns out be unnecessary as readily available public records have already answered the questions he sought to have answered. All someone need to do is look at these records to know the reason for Shulman’s visits (which turn out to be far, far fewer than 157.)
As reported by Garance Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic —
“And yet the public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing:
Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.”
If you are wondering why the IRS Commissioner would be so actively involved in meetings involving the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, you will want to keep in mind that the Internal Revenue Service is at the center of the action when it comes to enforcing the mandate and penalty provisions of the law. As a result, any serious meeting regarding the execution of the Affordable Care Act would not make much sense without Shulman, or a high-ranking member of his staff attending in his place.
But even this does not tell the entire story.
You see, while the records reveal that Mr. Shulman was cleared for entry into the White House 157 times, these records speak only to the result of the clearance required by the Secret Service for someone seeking entry into the building and do not speak to whether or not Shulman actually attended the meetings for which he was cleared.
As someone who has, myself, been to the White House on a few occasions, I am keenly aware that nobody without a permanent entrance pass (given to those who have their office in the complex) gets in the door of the White House or the Executive Office Building unless specifically cleared for entry on a particular date and time by the Secret Service. Indeed, on one occasion, I had been cleared by the Secret Service to attend an event but, at the last minute, I had to pass on the White House visit when something came up. Yet, using the list relied upon by The Daily Caller, my skipped visit would be counted as an additional visit on my part if someone were counting.
What’s more, Franke-Ruta’s research reveals that the records tracking the time and date that a visitor signs in and out of a White House event suggests that Mr. Shulman signed in for just 11 events during the years 2009 through 2012 and signed out of 6 events during that same time frame.
Given the discrepancy between the ‘sign in’ and ‘sign out’ records noted above, it is certainly possible that Franke-Ruta may have actually been at the White House on additional occasions. However, there is absolutely no record—as claimed—that Mr. Shulman was at the White House 157 times. All we learn is that Shulman was cleared to come into the building for various meetings and events; meetings and events that made all the sense in the world given his key role in implementing Obamacare.
If you are wondering why Mr. Shulman would require Secret Service clearance so many more times than, say, cabinet members, it turns out that there is a very simple and clear explanation for this too—along with some understanding of Shulman’s testimony before Congress when he referenced going to the White House for an Easter Egg Roll.
“But there is no record that Shulman attended a White House Easter Egg Roll under Obama, most likely because large events organized by the East Wing, like that one, don’t always show up in the visitor’s access records. Neither do visits by staffers, journalists covering large events, or people who enter the White House grounds in their pre-cleared cars, like Cabinet members, who do not wait for badge swipes at the gate with the policymaking hoi polloi.
So, how can there be so much confusion when it comes to White House records tracking who comes in and who comes out?
Prior to Obama’s arrival, there were no such records published for the public to review. The decision to do so was a part of Obama’s stated quest for transparency when he first took office. As Franke-Ruta adds, “The real problem with combing through the White House visitor logs is that they were a system designed for Secret Service clearance and White House security, not as comprehensive means of documenting every visitor to the White House, high to low. They miss the top end and some of the social end of people visiting the White House — people who are cleared through separate processes designed to protect presidential security other than getting swiped in at the front gate for an appointment.”
Clearly, there is nothing even close to evidence suggesting that Commissioner Shulman visited the White House anywhere near the number of times suggested by The Daily Caller and immediately seized upon as a juicy bit of supposed evidence of White House involvement in this juicy story perpetuated by Darrell Issa and friends.
The true bottom line, however, is that those trying—and failing miserably—to make these pretend scandals stick should themselves be investigated within an inch of their lives for failing to set forth the true facts and data when the same becomes readily available. Failure to do so—whether on the part of supposed journalists or supposedly concerned Congressional committee chairmen—is malpractice, pure and simple, and a purposeful, malevolent misleading of the American public who would actually like to know what really happened here.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 7, 2013
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