“An Empty Ritual”: Republicans Ignore Science And The Supreme Court In New Anti-Abortion Bill
Republicans have once again rolled their old war horse out of the barn for another run at the Constitution. This time the anti-abortion crowd has decided the viability of a fetus outside the womb should be twenty weeks, defying scientific evidence and the Supreme Court‘s settled judgment in repeated cases. Never mind, once again House Republicans oblige by passing the measure, this time accompanied by sly little sex jokes about masturbating male fetuses.
And then what? And then nothing. Talk about masturbation—this is an empty ritual the old bulls of the GOP have been performing for forty years, ever since Roe v. Wade. Sometimes they have even gotten a law enacted. But the story ends the same way—rejection by the Supreme Court, conservative though it is. This time there won’t be any new law, since Senate Democrats won’t allow it. Yet the juggernaut cranks up for another run.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of an anti-abortion political action group, called the House vote “historic.” Activists boast that they are winning big at the state level. Fourteen states so far this year have enacted a storm of newly restrictive laws at the state level, suggesting that the anti-abortion cause is cresting anew.
Actually, no. If you look at those fourteen states—from Alabama to Utah—they are pretty much the same states that have been doing this for decades, mostly under-populated and rural. I did a little “back of the envelope” calculation and determined that the fourteen states represent 15 percent of the US population, 47 million out of 308 million.
Many of the states are also from the Deep South. That region has lots of experience defying Supreme Court decisions—the experience of losing in the long run.
By: William Greider, The Nation, June 19, 2013
“Looking At A Time Capsule”: The Tea Party’s Sad, Nostalgic Reunion Tour
Remember way back to 2010? When the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” was tearing up the charts and a hot new upstart political movement called the Tea Party was striking fear into socialists everywhere? What began on Tax Day in 2009 hit a high-water mark just 18 months later with a massive rally on the National Mall organized by Glenn Beck (which later proved to be the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s purpose for existing: massive anti-government rallies of colorful, flag-waving patriots). There’s no question the conservative revival in the GOP has remade the party inside Washington, but the Gadsden flags were rolled up and the tricorn hats put away as the outsider movement honed its insider game.
Until today. For one day only, the Capitol has been consumed by what feels a bit like a single-night stand reunion tour for a band that had one good album that mostly gets played for nostalgic reasons today. The event was billed as “the largest demonstration of Tea Party support since 2010,” and while it may have succeeded on that count, it also underscores how much the movement has slipped since that year of its glory.
Taking in the scene on the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday feels like looking at a time capsule of early 2010. There are hundreds or possibly thousands of (mostly white, mostly older) people decked in “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirts, sitting in folding camping chairs and waving yellow flags. Classic Tea Party signs like “hands off my healthcare” are joined by newcomers like “Waterboard the IRS” and “We Want Truth Benghazi.”
In two separate rallies on either side of the Capitol, one focusing on immigration reform and the other on the IRS, the whole gang got back together. There was Michele Bachmann and Steve King and Louie Gohmert and all the lesser Tea Party lawmakers, radio hosts, activists and hangers-on who became fixtures of the big rallies in the Tea Party’s glory days.
“The two rallies are bigger than the sum of their parts, however. They mark the return of Tea Party activists to the national political stage,” Breitbart’s Mike Flynn promised. “When the Tea Party started in 2009, the idea of government growing out of control was a theory. Today, it is a fact.”
But the main event was Glenn Beck, who helped organize the anti-IRS rally. As skilled an orator as ever, the former Fox News host delivered a sprawling and classically Beckian 35-minute barn-burner that incorporated, among other things, Frederick Douglass, geotagging, the Arab Spring, an allegory about slavery and elephants, Woodstock, Hollywood, “the hippie culture,” MLK, Gandhi, the Bible, Las Vegas, the liberal media, Foxconn, “homosexuals who are being stoned to death in Egypt,” Jews, Jesus, sex trafficking, border security, government spying, and the proclamation: “We are not racist.”
The trust of Beck’s speech was that the people standing before him were engaged in an epic holy war against the people inside the Capitol building behind him, who are trying to “enslave mankind.” “We have chosen sides, and we chose God’s,” Beck said to rapturous applause. “Those who wish to use unrighteous dominion over mankind are not enemies of ours, they are enemies of His. And I have a sneaking suspicion he’s not going to be silent much longer either.”
“The mainstream media will mock me,” Beck said, but we can trace this fight “all the way back to Moses,” via Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. “I am a man and I demand to be treated as such,” he added.
Beck updated his fare for the current times, weaving in references to fears about the surveillance state — “information and data gathering … is evil, it is un-American, it is wrong” — but the message still felt of a 2010 vintage, aspiring for a new conservative dawn that seemed so much within reach a few years ago, only to slip back over the horizon by the end of 2012.
And like a reunion concert, the rally showed all the fraying edges of passing time and spoiled potential, underscoring how the Tea Party has become a shadow of what it was in its more hopeful youth. Some people couldn’t be with us today. Allen West, Joe Walsh, Jim DeMint are all gone from Congress. Bachmann, the Tea Party Caucus chairwoman herself, is retiring. Beck is off of Fox News and is today more of a sideshow than the guy who once struck so much fear into the heart of the Obama White House that they wouldn’t even let a falsely accused USDA employee finish driving home before firing her, for fear of ending up on his blackboard.
Still, there are green shoots for the movement. Sarah Palin is back on Fox. The Obama “scandals” have incited the conservative base. But 2013 feels very different from 2010.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 20, 2013
“He’s Still An Idiot”: Will Rick “Oops” Perry Do It Again?
As soon as Rick Perry uttered his infamous “oops” during the Republican presidential primary, most Americans likely figured the Texas governor’s political career would soon fade to black. Even before he forgot which federal departments he wanted to axe, Perry’s performance had been less than inspiring, and the aftermath only made things worse, culminating with an overtly homophobic ad complaining that “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” I’m guessing once Perry finally suspended his campaign, those outside Texas imagined he’d return to Austin and quietly wait out the rest of his gubernatorial term.
But his latest decisions—including a string of more than two dozen vetoes—seems to only further confirm what most Texas insiders have been saying for months: Perry is paving the way for a second act and a second bid for the White House. And he’s not moving toward the center.
The series of votoes has placed him clearly on the right and in a position to play to a national audience. Republicans dominate the Texas Legislature, and any bill that passes through it by definition has significant Republican support. Among other things, Perry chose to kill a measure meant to stop wage discrimination against women and a bill to require transparency for dark-money groups—both issues Tea Party Republicans at the national level have opposed. (Significantly for state governance, he also vetoed measures to allow the legislature some oversight of the University of Texas Board of Regents, which has been at war with the school’s president, Bill Powers.) Perry also took out his veto pen for smaller line items, like nixing $1.5 million—pocket change in the budget—that would have funded the University of Texas’s Mexican-American Studies Center. In doing so, he could both take a small swipe at the university and also offer a nod to those in his party not so pleased by studies of Mexican history or culture.
Meanwhile, Perry is also burnishing his conservative credentials in other ways. During the regular legislative session, his presence loomed darkly over Medicaid expansion, preventing more moderate Republicans from considering measures that would increase healthcare coverage for low-income residents—one-in-four Texans are uninsured. He brought the legislature back for a special session to task them with passing redistricting maps—hoping to keep a couple Congressional seats in Republicans hands, which could win him some favors in Washington. He added to the agenda a charge to pass an abortion ban for all pregnancies over 20 weeks, which would make Texas among the most restrictive states in the country. Just to keep things interesting he also added a measure to prevent groping from Transportation Security Administration officials at airports—a major focus for Tea Party folks and followers of conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones. All of it puts Perry on the far right, socially and politically.
Economically, Perry’s making his case by going to enemy territory—liberal states on both coasts—and urging companies, in particular gun manufacturers, to relocate to Texas. He ran television ads in California and Illinois noting why businesses would be better off in Texas, and just yesterday prompted a confrontation with Connecticut’s Governor Dannel Malloy when he started urging gun makers in Connecticut to relocate, after lawmakers passed gun control measures in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting. Perry’s interest in business has always been a big part of his political platform, as he often reels off the companies that move to Texas for its super-business-friendly climate. (If only consumers in the state got such a good deal.)
Plenty in Austin are speculating as to whether Perry plans to make another bid for governor or simply wait to run for president. At the very least, a presidential bid would give Perry a chance remake his national image and be remembered for something other than “oops.” While it’s hard to think of another politician screwing up quite that badly and then seeing national success, plenty of folks have come back from disappointing runs and recreated themselves. A run for president, and showing the country he’s not an idiot, would help Perry regardless of whether he’s actually got a shot at winning or simply angling for a presidential appointment. But Perry’s term is up in 2014, and he’s already held the office longer than anyone else. Another bid for governor is risky at best; Attorney General Greg Abbott, who’s made a name for himself suing the Obama Administration, already has $18 million in the bank and a significant staff ready for the 2014 race. Perry, however, currently commands a huge lead over Abbott in polls. Polls aren’t nearly so nice when it comes to his presidential aspirations. Perry garnered a paltry 10 percent measure of support in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, while Ted Cruz, the state’s newly elected senator and a Tea Party favorite, got a whopping 25 percent. Perry faces choppy waters either way, but there’s no question he’s gearing up for a run for something.
No matter what he chooses, it’s hard to imagine anything will be worse than his last campaign.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, June 18, 2013
“An Incompetent Glory Hound”: Darrell Issa Is Really Terrible At His Job
In case you lost track of the IRS scandal, here’s where it’s at right now: House Oversight Committee members are releasing dueling transcripts of witness testimony to the press. There is a big fight about it. It is maybe kind of boring.
Darrell Issa, Republican chairmain of the committee, has been selectively releasing snippets of testimony to the press, all of it designed to support his contention that the IRS targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny of their nonprofit status was a political maneuver ordered or somehow directed by the White House. There is literally no evidence for that claim and it’s not true but Issa is sort of bad at his job in many important respects. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings asked Issa to please release full transcripts of witness testimony, but Issa refused, so Cummings just did so, with a full transcript of the committee’s interview with an IRS employee who seems to have been the first one to flag a “Tea Party” group’s application for tax-exempt status for further review.
This employee describes himself as “a conservative Republican” and he states outright that there was no political motivation, and certainly no White House responsibility, for the IRS’s actions.
Issa’s response to this is to claim that releasing the testimony will hurt his investigation because it will provide a “road map” for future witnesses wishing to mislead the committee. (Denying that politics had anything to do with it, who else would have independently come up with that?) The right-wing media response has been to basically ignore the content of what Cummings released and to trash him for attempting to defend the White House.
Cummings isn’t trying to sway right-wing bloggers, though. He’s not even trying to sway the public at large. What he’s trying to do is get the press to say outright what everyone in Washington already knows: Issa never has the goods to back up his claims. Cummings is trying to make it possible for the press to challenge Issa’s credibility without violating their own rules of objectivity.
Of course, everyone in the political press knows that Issa is a publicity hound who regularly makes outrageous accusations and insinuations and rarely has any evidence supporting his more outrageous claims. Everyone in the press knows this, but conventions of objective journalism prevent them from saying as much to their audiences, and so 47 percent of Americans believe the White House directly instructed the IRS to target conservative groups.
In that respect the IRS investigations looks like a huge success. But Issa’s record is actually really terrible. He has investigated everything he can think of and nothing went anywhere.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s one job is to get scalps. He is supposed to force embarrassing resignations. He has not yet forced a single one. When Issa took control of the House Oversight Committee in early 2011, he announced plans to investigate WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae, corruption in Afghanistan, the FDA, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and business regulations. He has investigated Solyndra and Fast and Furious and Benghazi and come up with nothing. So far the acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, because the president asked him to. Issa hasn’t managed one single clean hit.
What Issa has managed to do is create a series of very silly graphics hyping his investigations in the style of funny image macros and film posters. He has managed to make conservatives agree with him that Barack Obama is the most corrupt president in history and he has managed to make a large minority of voters feel that the White House is probably hiding something.
In terms of the 2014 elections, he is, so far, probably helping the GOP more than he is hurting it. So Issa’s record, honestly, is mixed. He is quite bad at his job in most respects, but not quite as historically useless as Tea Party mascots like Louie Gohmert. But it does seem to me that Republicans would be better served by not having an incompetent glory hound chairing the most politically useful House committee. I guess they don’t have a lot of great options, considering the rest of the House GOP.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 19, 2013
“The Clueless Caucus”: The GOP Rebranding Is Doomed
When a company or an organization decides to do a rebranding, it does some research, maybe hires consultants, gets input from key employees, and then makes decisions about what the rebranding is going to consist of. This process can at times be excruciating, all the more so if the organization has some commitment to consensus; if you’ve ever suffered through a web redesign, you’ve probably had the experience of wondering, as the debate over the difference between particular shades of blue stretches into its third hour, just how much it would hurt if you plunged a pen through your ear into your brain. But at the end of the process, there’s someone in charge who will have the final say.
But when a political party decides to do a rebranding, things are a lot more difficult. In fact, it may not even be possible to get everyone to agree that the rebranding will actually take place. And once it begins, it can just go on forever, because the influence over the party’s brand is so widely distributed. Even after it’s over, you can’t just say to everyone, “Here’s the new stationary, and this is our new slogan; make sure you use it.” Because if they don’t like it, they won’t.
This is the problem the Republican party now faces. Many people within the party think a rebranding is in order, to cast off the party’s image as a bunch of nativist, misogynistic, rich old white guys and make itself more palatable to young people, women, and minorities. But the party is full of people who have troubling ideas about how a rebranding ought to take place, and people who don’t think there needs to be any rebranding at all. There are so many that Ed Kilgore was able to come up with ten different kinds of Republicans who can sabotage the rebranding effort.
So various members of the party keep causing problems by saying what they think, particularly when it comes to topics like rape, or reproduction, or really anything involving, you know, women. The latest, as you probably heard, was Congressman Michael Burgess, who, in support of a bill outlawing abortion after 20 weeks on the unsupported hypothesis that fetuses at that stage can feel pain, offered his hilarious belief that 15 week-old fetuses must be able to feel pain, since they’re already engaged in a pre-natal festival of onanism. “If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs,” he said, wistfully recalling sonograms he had seen. “If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?” The punch line is that before Burgess became a congressman, you know what he did for a living? He was an OB-GYN.
One way to look at this is, as Politico does, that the rebranding is being undercut by “the clueless caucus of the Republican Party.” But these kinds of things aren’t just coming from the same two or three people. Almost every time we hear some new outrageous statement from a GOP congressman, it’s someone entirely new. That’s because those beliefs are actually held quite widely within the party. There’s an almost endless supply of yahoo congressmen with retrograde beliefs, just waiting to make their dunderheaded debut on the national news.
John Boehner can’t stop these outbursts, because he’s not that kind of boss. This gets back to the difference between politics and other endeavors. Corporate CEOs and generals usually do poorly in politics because the hierarchical environments in which they flourished are so different from electoral campaigns and elected office. When you’re the boss, you can issue orders. That new electric nose-picker we’re releasing next month? The box is going to be blue, and if you’d prefer it to be red, you’re welcome to go find another job. You’ll be taking your unit up that hill, captain, whether you like it or not. But Boehner can’t fire the wingnuts in his caucus. What’s worse, they can fire him, by getting a different Speaker. Even when someone hasn’t been elected yet, it’s extremely hard to push them out of a race; don’t forget, they tried to do that with Todd Akin, and he just decided he didn’t want to leave.
And because the clueless caucus probably encompasses a majority of the party, the rebranding may well be doomed, unless somebody can rebrand the party by force. And the only one who can do that is a presidential candidate. So it may have to wait until 2016.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 20, 2013
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