“That Great Untapped Reservoir”: Phyllis Schlafly Urges GOP To Focus On White Voters
Some important divisions among Republican officials surfaced in the wake of the 2012 elections, but most of the party agrees on one over-arching strategy: Republicans are going to have to do better among non-white voters. It’s an increasingly diverse nation, and the GOP’s core base is overwhelmingly white — a problem that appears to be getting worse, not better.
With this in mind, the Republican National Committee is launching yet another minority outreach campaign, and may even end up grudgingly supporting comprehensive immigration reform. The Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, a long-time leader of the religious right movement and anti-feminist activist, is convinced her party has it all wrong.
[I]n an interview this week with conservative radio program Focus Today, Schlafly just came right out and said it. Calling the GOP’s need to reach out to Latinos a “great myth,” Schlafly said that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election.” Schlafly accused the Republican “establishment” of nominating “a series of losers … who don’t connect with the grassroots.”
Look, this isn’t complicated. White voter turnout rates have been pretty steady over the last few presidential-year election cycles, and both John McCain and Mitt Romney won the support of a majority of white voters. Indeed, it wasn’t especially close — McCain won 55% of the white vote in 2008 (en route to losing the election badly), and Romney did even better, winning 59% of the white vote (en route to losing the election badly).
Schlafly is under the impression that there’s this untapped reservoir of conservative white voters, just sitting at home, waiting for the Republican Party to reach out to them with a message they’ll like, and if Democrats are really lucky, GOP officials will take Schlafly’s advice seriously.
Because as the nation becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, conservative dead-enders who still see an emphasis on white voters as the key to electoral salvation are kidding themselves.
But even if we put these pesky details aside, I have a related question for Schlafly and those who agree with her: exactly what would it look like if Republicans tried even harder to “reach out to … the white votes”? The GOP is already looking an awful lot like the driven snow, so what more can party leaders do, specifically, to make white folks feel even more welcome?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2013
“GOP Opposition Is More About The Man”: The Obamacare Idea Conservatives Should Be Cheering But Aren’t
Obamacare hate is a full-time occupation on the right. But a story from Monday’s New York Times is a reminder that some pieces of the law should have conservatives celebrating, for the same reason they are leaving liberals like me a little queasy.
The story is about Obamacare’s “Cadillac Tax,” which isn’t really a tax so much as a convoluted attempt to undo an existing tax break. To simplify things a bit, the government today doesn’t treat employer health insurance as taxable income. That makes a dollar of insurance worth more than a dollar of wages, giving both employers and employees incentive to load up on insurance.
Most economists think that contributes to rising health care costs, since people with more insurance tend to spend more on medical care. The Cadillac tax would limit the value of the tax break, effectively reducing that incentive and, in theory, reducing health care costs for everybody over the long run. (The mechanism is complicated; read here if you want an explanation of how it works.)
In an ideal world, insurers and employers would respond to the Cadillac tax by finding more efficient ways to pay for care, so that workers would end up with the same access to and quality of medicine. They’d just pay a little less for it. One way to accomplish this would be to switch employees over to a smartly managed care insurance plan—think Kaiser Permanente, where the physicians and nurses coordinate with each other, focusing on the most effective treatments and long-term health of the patient.
In the real world, alas, employers frequently find it easier just to shift costs over to their employees. They change their plan benefits, so that workers pay more for each prescription, hospital visit, and the like. The Times story, by Reed Abelson, suggests employers are doing just that.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how much the Cadillac Tax is responsible for these shifts, given that employers were looking for ways to shift costs long before Obamacare came long. The tax doesn’t start to phase in until 2018. And the Congressional Budget Office, in its most recent revision of projections on Obamacare, said that it now expects fewer plans to hit the tax threshold when it first takes effect. Still, employers are certainly talking about the tax. (I’ve heard the same chatter.) If employers are reducing their coverage in response, then—as Matthew Yglesias notes—it’s working precisely as the economists predicted it would.
That doesn’t mean the change is popular. People don’t like to hear that they’ll have to pay more the next time they go to the doctor. Unions are particularly wary of the change, since many of their members fought hard for the generous financial protection that the Cadillac Tax will curb. But the real danger is for the chronically ill, who run up huge medical bills year after year—and for whom higher out-of-pocket expenses can be a real hardship. The Times article focuses on one such person—a woman with cystic fibrosis who said she had to drop out of school and take a second job, in order to pay the bills from her higher deductibles.
Liberals who support or at least tolerate the Cadillac Tax do so because the economists have convinced us it might truly reduce costs in the long run. We also know that other parts of Obamacare, like tax credits for purchasing insurance and guarantees of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, will help the sick and the poor far more than the Cadillac tax will hurt them.Conservatives can’t stand this kind of spending and regulation, of course. But they should have no such hostility to the Cadillac tax.
On the contrary, writers like James Capretta and Robert Moffit have long called for reducing or eliminating the tax breaks for employer sponsored insurance. They subscribe to the same economic logic that compelled Obamacare’s architects to include the provision in the first place—that, without the favorable tax treatment, employers and insurers will be more thrifty. The only difference is that conservatives think the tax incentives are even more central to the cost issue than liberals do. And, unlike liberals, conservatives don’t seem particularly troubled by the implications for the chronically ill. Either that, or conservatives do a remarkably good job of disguising their anxiety.
The Cadillac Tax will not work as quickly or smoothly as conservatives would prefer. And that’s fair grounds for criticism. But surely the concept deserves a kind word or two somewhere on the right—unless, perhaps, opposition to Obamacare is less about what’s in the law and more about who signed it.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, May 28, 2013
“What She Didn’t Say”: Reading Between The Lines Of Michele Bachmann’s Retirement Speech
She was the first woman to win the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa during her Republican presidential primary bid, but Michele Bachmann’s victory there in August 2011 only wound up calling the legitimacy of the political tradition into question. With her presidential campaign itself now under investigation and facing the prospect of a tough reelection fight, the four-term congresswoman on Wednesday released an eight minute and 40 second video announcing her decision not to seek a fifth term representing Minnesota’s 6th District.
A between-the-lines read:
BACHMANN: “Our Constitution allows for the decision of length of service in Congress to be determined by the congresspeople themselves or by the voter in the district. However, the law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years and in my opinion, well, eight years in also long enough for an individual to serve as a representative of a specific congressional district.”
Bachmann routinely describes herself as a Constitutional Conservative, so it’s not surprising she invokes her constitutional right to not serve as a member of Congress or run for office, even though everyone knows there is no mandate that all elected representatives must keep running for reelection forever. Fittingly, Bachmann also compares herself to a president, which is what she sought unsuccessfully to be and the aim of her only national political bid.
That campaign both elevated her profile and undermined her standing as an elected official. She came in sixth in the Iowa caucuses, transforming her from a high-profile national Tea Party leader into a person who was proven unable to garner more than token support among an ideologically sympathetic population of voters outside her carefully drawn district.
BACHMANN: “Be assured my decision was not in any way influenced by any concerns about my being reelected to Congress.”
Despite the advantages of incumbency and outspending him 12-to-1, Bachmann defeated Democrat Jim Graves by only 1 percentage point in the 2012 election in a heavily Republican district that Mitt Romney won by 15 percent. Graves was at a considerable disadvantage at the time. “We had a very abbreviated campaign. When we announced, we had nobody on the team, so we had to create a team and had to create a field operation and we had to do all those things in a very abbreviated time frame up against a very well-funded candidate,” he has said, explaining his loss. Recent internal polling from the Graves campaign put him slightly ahead of her a year and a half before their rematch.
Bachmann not only faced a tough reelection battle but a long one, and in mid-May she started reelection campaign advertising on Minnesota television. That, at the very least, suggests she had not been planning a resignation announcement for long, or was uncertain about how she wanted to proceed.
BACHMANN: “Rest assured this decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff.”
Inquiries is a mild way of putting it: Bachmann’s former national field coordinator, Peter Waldron, turned on her and in March filed complaints against her presidential campaign organization and political action committee with the Federal Election Commission. The Office of Congressional Ethics is also conducting a probe of her campaign payment arrangements. Also investigating the conduct of the Bachmann presidential campaign are: the FBI’s public integrity section, an Iowa special investigator requested by the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee, and the Urbandale, Iowa, Police Department. That’s a lot of potential headaches for a weak incumbent.
BACHMANN: “Last year, after I ran for president, I gave consideration to not running again for the House seat that I hold. However, given that we were only nine months away from the election, I felt it might be difficult for another Republican candidate to get organized for what might have been a very challenging campaign — and I refused to allow this decision to put this Republican seat in jeopardy. And so I ran. And I won.”
It is not unusual for failed presidential candidates to reconsider their political careers, and Bachmann is right that if she had pulled out late in the game Graves might have surged while the GOP scrambled to find a replacement. This time, the Republicans will have time to find someone who can compete against him more effectively in a district that should favor their party, and Bachmann can step down knowing she’s done her all to keep the seat in Republican hands.
BACHMANN: “Feel confident: Over the next 18 months I will continue to work 100-hour weeks.”
Being a member of Congress is exhausting.
BACHMANN: “Looking forward, after the completion of my term, my future is full, it is limitless and my passions for America will remain. And I want you to be assured that there is no future option or opportunity — be it directly in the political arena or otherwise — that I won’t be giving serious consideration if it can help save and protect our great nation for future generations.”
Translation: I haven’t yet figured out what to do next — please hire me.
By: Grance-Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic, May 29, 2013
“A Fight Worth Having”: A Strategy On Judicial Nominees Takes Shape
For nearly five years, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — aka, the D.C. Circuit — has had seven sitting judges hearing cases, four from judges appointed by Republican presidents and three from Democratic presidents. Last week, President Obama finally saw one of his nominees confirmed to this bench, bringing some parity to the appeals court.
There are, however, three remaining vacancies, which Senate Republicans would love to keep vacant indefinitely. What does the White House plan to do about it? A plan has apparently come together.
President Obama will soon accelerate his efforts to put a lasting imprint on the country’s judiciary by simultaneously nominating three judges to an important federal court, a move that is certain to unleash fierce Republican opposition and could rekindle a broader partisan struggle over Senate rules. […]
White House officials declined to say who Mr. Obama’s choices will be ahead of an announcement that could come this week, but leading contenders for the spots appear to include Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center; David C. Frederick, who often represents consumers and investors at the Supreme Court; and Patricia Ann Millett, a veteran appeals lawyer in Washington. All three are experienced lawyers who would be unlikely to generate controversy individually.
For those hoping for a more progressive federal judiciary, there’s a lot to like in this plan. Indeed, it’s arguably overdue.
It’s a pretty straightforward exercise — Obama has to nominate jurists to fill these vacancies, and he’s apparently focused on three excellent, mainstream choices, who would ordinarily garner broad support. From the White House’s perspective, if Senate Republicans act responsibly, great — the nominees will be confirmed, the D.C. Circuit will be at full strength, and the bench will be less conservative.
If Senate Republicans act irresponsibly and block these nominees out of partisan spite, Democrats will have even more incentive to pursue the “nuclear option” and end this style of obstructionism altogether.
And just to reiterate a relevant detail, filling judicial vacancies is important everywhere, but the D.C. Circuit is of particular significance — not only is it often a proving ground for future Supreme Court justices, but the D.C. Circuit regularly hears regulatory challenges to the Obama administration’s agenda. Indeed, as the NYT report noted, this bench “has overturned major parts of the president’s agenda in the last four years, on regulations covering Wall Street, the environment, tobacco, labor unions and workers’ rights.”
With this in mind, it’s a fight worth watching.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2013
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