“Rand Paul’s Past Continues To Haunt Him”: He’ll Face The One Thing His Father Never Had To, Attack Ads From Republican Rivals
About four years ago, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) faced booing during debates for the Republican presidential candidates when he said American foreign policy led to the 9/11 attacks. The response – from the audience and the other candidates – made clear that the party has no use for such an argument.
Four years later, it’s Ron Paul’s son who’s now running for president – and he’s said largely the same thing.
Rand Paul said in 2007 interview that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East was at the core of the reasons for terrorism and that the 9/11 Commission showed that the September 11th attacks were made in response to U.S. presence in foreign lands. […]
In the interview, Paul went on to take aim at then-President George W. Bush, calling him “ridiculous” for saying “they hate us for our freedom.” Paul said Americans should try to understand “why they hate us” and what policies create terrorism.
As the BuzzFeed report noted, Rand Paul said in the 2007 interview, “I mean, you have to recognize what policy creates terrorism. Because you can’t kill every Muslim in the world. There’s a billion Muslims. We have to learn to live together to a certain point.”
Is it any wonder the Kentucky Republican is eager to declare his pre-Senate remarks as irrelevant?
This area will only become more problematic for Rand Paul in the coming months. For one thing, he was quite active as a public voice for his father’s agenda and fringe worldview, delivering all kinds of speeches in which he made very controversial remarks. This BuzzFeed report is damaging in the context of the 2016 race, but similar reports will surface – many times – throughout the year.
For another, if Rand Paul is positioned to credibly compete for the GOP nomination, he’ll face the one thing his father never had to worry about: attack ads from Republican rivals. And in light of what he’s given for the ad-makers to work with, those commercials are likely to be pretty brutal.
Finally, as we talked about the other day, if the senator thinks he can dismiss the relevance of this record, he’s likely to be disappointed. Rand Paul has suggested quotes from 2007 to 2009 are out of bounds, as if there’s a statute of limitations that has run out.
But we’re not just talking about youthful indiscretions that seem irrelevant decades later – “Aqua Buddha,” this isn’t – we’re talking about public remarks Paul made as a surrogate for a presidential candidate.
Whether Rand Paul likes it or not, presidential candidates don’t have the luxury of declaring much of their adult lives off-limits to scrutiny. So long as he’s being quoted accurately, his public remarks on major issues of the day matter and deserve consideration as he seeks the nation’s highest office.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 16, 2015
“Searching Her Own Soul”: Hillary Clinton’s Evolution On Marriage Equality Shows How Change Happens, And Why Parties Matter
Over the last few days, Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed has been documenting Hillary Clinton’s evolution on the issue of same-sex marriage, an evolution that may now finally be complete. First Geidner posted some interesting documents from the 1990s showing Clinton and her husband explaining their opposition to marriage rights, then he got the Clinton campaign on record saying that she now hopes the Supreme Court will rule that there is a constitutional right to marriage for all Americans, which is actually a change from what she was saying just a year ago, when her position was that this was an issue best decided state by state.
So does this all tell us that Hillary Clinton is a chameleon willing to shift with the political winds, lacking in any moral core? Not really. Like every politician, she’ll tell you that her shift on this issue was a result of talking to people and searching her own soul, not some political calculation. If that’s true, then it mirrors how millions of Americans have changed their own minds. But even if it isn’t true, it doesn’t matter. She is where she is now, and if she becomes president, her policies will reflect her current position, whether it’s sincere or not. That’s how change happens.
We spend a lot of time in campaigns trying to figure out if politicians are honest or authentic or real, and one of the supposedly important data points in that assessment is whether they’ve changed their positions on any important issues. “Flip-floppers” are supposed to be feared and hated. But most of the time, that judgment is utterly irrelevant to what they would actually do in office.
For instance, few party nominees had in their history the kind of wholesale ideological reinvention that Mitt Romney went through. But what does that actually mean for the kind of president he would have been? Does anyone seriously believe that had he been elected, Romney would have flipped back to becoming a moderate Republican, just because deep down he’s a flip-flopper? Of course he wouldn’t have. Romney changed when his sights moved from liberal Massachusetts to the national stage, which also happened during a period when his party became more conservative. He would have governed as the conservative he became.
When public opinion on an important issue is in flux, politicians are emphatic followers. They figure out what’s happening, particularly within their own party, and then accommodate themselves to that change. It often looks like they’re leading when what they’re actually doing is taking the change in sentiment that has occurred and translating it into policy change. For instance, Barack Obama has taken a number of steps to expand gay rights, like ending the ban on gays serving in the military and pushing the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. But he did all that after public opinion demanded it, not before.
In the end, what’s in a politician’s heart may be interesting to understand, but it doesn’t make much of a practical difference. Does it matter that Lyndon Johnson was personally a racist who spent his early career as a segregationist? No, it doesn’t: When his own party and the American public more broadly moved to support civil rights for African Americans, he passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and became an advocate for equality.
It’s possible that Hillary Clinton believed in marriage equality all along, but didn’t have the courage to advocate it publicly until she finally did so in 2013. Or maybe every shift in her public stance was a perfectly accurate reflection of her views at that moment. Either way, now that the Democratic Party is firmly in support of marriage equality for everyone in every state, that position is going to guide her if she wins.
And let’s not forget that almost every major Republican politician has gone through their own evolution on this issue as well. The first time it was a major issue in a presidential race, in 2004, Republicans advocated a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage everywhere. Most of them even opposed civil unions. But today, the opinion supported by every presidential contender who has been explicit on the topic is that the decision should be left up to the states, meaning it’s OK with them if some states have marriage equality while others don’t. A few do advocate a constitutional amendment—but not one to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, just one to preserve the ability of individual states to ban it if they choose.
That’s where the Republican Party is now, so that’s what the next Republican president’s policies will reflect. Until they evolve again.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 16, 2015
“Florida’s Rick Scott Files Bizarre New ACA Lawsuit”: Scott Only Wants A Check ‘That Doesn’t Have Obamacare Cooties’
It was just last week when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) completed a rarely seen flip-flop-flip, denouncing Medicaid expansion, then embracing it, and then condemning it. The consequences matter: 800,000 low-income Floridians were poised to have access to medical care, but they’ll now go without.
And while the governor’s decision seemed like the end of the story, it was actually the start of a more ridiculous turn of events.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government for allegedly coercing Florida to expand Medicaid.
“It is appalling that President Obama would cut off federal healthcare dollars to Florida in an effort to force our state further into Obamacare,” Scott said in a statement.
By late yesterday, the far-right governor was reduced to comparing the White House to the mafia. “This is the Sopranos,” Scott said. “[Administration officials] are using bullying tactics to attack our state. It’s wrong. It’s outrageous they are doing this.”
This is actually one of the more amazing political fights in the country right now, and it’s worth appreciating why.
Back in 2006, the Bush/Cheney administration created a Medicaid pilot project intended to provide funds to help hospitals treat the uninsured. The policy was called “Low Income Pools” (LIP) and Florida received some money through the initiative.
Not surprisingly, the Affordable Care Act made the LIP project unnecessary, and began phasing out the policy.
In Florida, Scott seized on this in the most bizarre way possible – if federal officials are willing to scrap LIP funding, the governor said, then maybe they won’t fund Medicaid. The Republican found a convenient excuse to reject billions in federal funds and a lifeline to 800,000 of his struggling constituents.
Yesterday, the governor took this one step further, announcing a lawsuit to force Washington to give Florida federal funds for a program that will no longer exist. Scott wants money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through LIP), but at the same time, he also doesn’t want money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through the ACA).
Joan McCarter joked that Scott only wants a check “that doesn’t have Obamacare cooties.” Greg Sargent added that the governor could very easily clean up this mess by re-embracing Medicaid expansion through the ACA and simply claiming “it isn’t Obamacare.”
Even the Republican president of the Florida state Senate acknowledged yesterday that Scott’s lawsuit doesn’t make any sense
The bottom line in this little farce is that Rick Scott is going to extraordinary lengths – embracing and rejecting money, pitting the GOP-led state House against the GOP-led state Senate, dividing his allies, ignoring the needs of hundreds of thousands of his constituents, undermining his own state budget, even turning down tax cuts – because he finds it necessary to be against “Obamacare.” There’s no real substance to any of this, so much as there’s a partisan principle that the Republican governor is choosing to put at the top of his priority list.
The consequences are predictably absurd.
Brian Beutler’s take on this is exactly right: Scott is “suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2015
“An Attack On Retired Poor And Middle-Class People”: The Real Reason Social Security Is The Third Rail Of American Politics
Chris Christie still harbors hopes of becoming the Republican nominee for president, and in search of a way to convince conservatives that he’s one of them—and reinforce the idea that he’s a bold truth-teller who doesn’t care whose feathers he ruffles, and you might not agree with him but you’ll always know he’s telling it like it is—Christie has announced a plan to cut Social Security benefits. He would do it in two ways. First, he would means-test benefits, reducing them for those who have over $80,000 in income and phasing them out entirely past $200,000 in income. Second, he would raise the retirement age to 69 (it’s currently 66 and will soon rise to 67).
As Matt Yglesias explains, the cut in upper-income benefits is getting most of the attention, which works to Christie’s benefit because it sounds like his plan hurts rich people. But in fact, the number of people affected would be fairly small, while increasing the retirement age would be devastating to people of modest incomes. That’s particularly true of people who do manual labor, which in your late 60s becomes increasingly difficult. So Christie is proposing a plan that is actually an attack on retired poor and middle-class people, but it’s being described as an attack on the rich.
I should point out that even means-testing benefits can be a clever way to undermine the program as a whole. It eliminates the understanding that it’s a program for everyone and instead changes it to a program just for people of modest incomes, which then opens it up to further cuts and changes in the future. This is why most liberals oppose means-testing, even though it sounds like something they would support.
In any case, I want to return to this idea that Chris Christie is willing to tell the hard truths. Every story about Social Security mentions that it is the “third rail of American politics,” meaning you can’t touch it without being zapped. Anyone who would do so naturally deserves praise for their courage and for doing what’s right despite the risk. But why is touching Social Security dangerous?
It isn’t because of some magical incantation that FDR spoke over the bill as he signed it. It’s because, with the possible exception of Medicare, Social Security is the most successful and therefore beloved social program in American history. Before Social Security, aging was almost a guarantee of falling into poverty. If you’re below a certain age, you’ve probably never heard the cliché of old ladies eating cat food to survive, but at one time in America that was an actual thing.
But don’t we need to do something before Social Security goes broke? No. Social Security is not going broke, and if we want to fix the funding problems that we will confront a few decades from now there are relatively easy ways to do it; I discussed that years ago in this piece, and not much has changed since.
But back to Christie: Is it courageous to propose a policy change that would be tremendously cruel to millions of Americans? I guess it is in a way. But that doesn’t make it praiseworthy.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The Merican Prospect, April 16, 2015
“Asking For A Bail Out Of His Self-Made Crisis”: Cut Taxes Or Expand Medicaid?; Florida Governor Rick Scott Is In Quite A Pickle
The Florida state government has been a hotbed of opposition to Obamacare, and has succeeded in resisting the law’s Medicaid expansion, in large part because of the state’s Low Income Pool: a multi-billion dollar, 10-year-old pilot program through which, right now, the federal government subsidizes health care providers who treat the poor.
Also right now, in Florida, Governor Rick Scott wants to enact hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax cuts.
The budget room for those tax cuts, in other words, exists because the federal government is spending money—money that comes with no guarantee—in a way that bolsters Florida’s resistance to Obamacare.
Not keen on financing opposition to itself, the Obama administration is leaning toward ending this sweet arrangement, and phasing out the Low Income Pool, which has in any case grown obsolete in a world where Florida can adopt the Medicaid expansion and provide insurance to nearly a million of its poor citizens.
All of which is to say that if Scott and Florida Republicans want their tax cuts, they will have to use expanded Medicaid to fill the budget hole where the Low Income Pool used to be. But rather than push against that open door, Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government. Specifically, he’s arguing that by rescinding the Low Income Pool, the Obama administration is coercing Florida into participating in Obamacare, so the Low Income Pool must continue. Put another way, he’s asking the courts to force the feds to bail out his tax cut.
This is all playing out against the backdrop of King v. Burwell, in which conservatives have asked the Supreme Court to rescind billions of dollars in Affordable Care Act subsidies in their own states—money they claim is contingent upon them establishing their own exchanges. Like most Republican governors, Rick Scott didn’t establish an exchange, but for some reason he isn’t sounding the coercion alarm over King.
Scott’s argument is transparently frivolous, but it underscores the extent to which the GOP’s deranged resistance to Obamacare is boomeranging on itself. As Greg Sargent notes at the Washington Post, “Scott’s lawsuit is designed to get the administration to fork over federal money for health care—but only if it isn’t part of Obamacare.” Without that money, Scott probably won’t get his tax cuts. Which means that in Florida, the GOP’s commitment to tax cuts is running up against its Massive Resistance to Obamacare. And the tax cuts might lose.
This adamant opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a relatively recent development. Scott claims his opposition stems from the administration’s coolness to the Low Income Pool. If the federal government can just end that program, how can Floridians trust them to commit to their end of the Medicaid expansion? But that doesn’t wash. The Low Income Pool was scheduled to expire, whereas the federal government is obligated by law to fund 90 percent of the Medicaid expansion in perpetuity.
Florida’s Senate president—a Republican—thinks Scott is being ridiculous. He released a statement that refutes Scott’s objection to the Medicaid expansion and undermines the lawsuit:
The federal government has no obligation to provide LIP funding, or to work within our timeframe. While we respect Governor Scott’s authority to protect the state’s interests in the way he sees fit, we have a constitutional responsibility to pass a balanced budget by a specific deadline. From where I sit, it is difficult to understand how suing [the federal government] on day 45 of a 60 day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state. The Senate budget anticipated the potential reduction or elimination of LIP funding and included solutions to provide Floridians access to health care services and coverage. We remain hopeful CMS will approve the Senate proposal.
A likelier explanation for Scott’s change of heart is a combination of anti-Medicaid spending by the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and entrenched Obamacare opposition in the Florida House. Sensing that the Medicaid expansion might be in danger, Scott flipped, rather than be caught on the losing side of it.
But Scott could have solved this problem a long time ago if he’d ever fought for Medicaid expansion earnestly, and could solve it now by teaming up with the Senate to stare down the House.
Instead Scott is suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis. This isn’t an anomaly, but a pattern. Across the country, Republican governors are coping with the consequences of their own Obamacare intransigence—staring into a future where their insurance markets get destroyed by virtue of their refusal to help implement Obamacare and their unwillingness to take on the right as it pursued litigation.
It was inevitable that as Obamacare became more entrenched, Republicans would see their opposition to the law come into tension with their other core interests. This is exactly what’s happened, and to some extent it has exposed weaknesses in the resistance strategy. But that resistance—to the idea of providing health insurance to the poor—remains very strong. Stronger, perhaps, than the allure of tax cuts.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 17, 2017
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