“Resolution To Disapprove”: By Voting Against Themselves, Republican’s Hope To Fool The Tea Party
On Tuesday, the Senate held a vote on a “resolution to disapprove” of raising the debt limit. The resolution failed 45-54. The 45 disapprovers were all Republicans. Twenty-seven of the Republicans voting to disapprove of raising the debt limit also voted, just a few weeks ago, to raise the debt limit. Do those 27 Republican senators disapprove of their own votes because raising the debt limit turned out to be a terrible mistake with disastrous consequences? No. They voted to disapprove of their own actions because a group of loud and angry people disapprove of their actions.
The face-saving “resolution to disapprove” measure seems to derive from a a 2011 McConnell idea that would have preserved the debt limit as a grandstanding ploy without actually risking default. In McConnell’s plan, the president would be allowed to increase the debt limit a little bit at a time, and Congress would then vote on whether to disapprove of the raises. It’s actually pretty brilliant politics, as it would have done two things:
- Forced President Obama to raise the debt limit, which is always politically unpopular, three times in one (election) year.
- Allowed every single Republican in Congress to vote against raising the debt limit without worrying that the U.S. would actually default.
Naturally, McConnell’s plan was declared rank RINOism and it went nowhere. This was in part because some conservatives believed that the plan removed the possibility of extracting massive concessions in exchange for raising the limit, but also because there simply are a lot of conservatives who oppose raising the limit at all, ever. The result of not listening to McConnell: Republicans had to vote to raise the debt limit anyway, conservatives now feel betrayed, right-wing Senate primary challenges are more likely, and non-far-right voters have more reason to be scared of allowing Republicans to govern.
Thus the meaningless symbolic vote of disapproval, in both chambers. The sorts of conservatives McConnell is hoping this stunt satisfies may be deluded enough to believe that breaching the debt ceiling wouldn’t be so bad, but they are not dumb enough to be impressed with this gesture. Most important, the people and organizations they get their information and take their cues from will not suddenly start praising these 27 senators, McConnell included, as True Conservatives.
At this point, it’s very easy to get on the wrong side of the activist conservative movement, and once you’re labeled a RINO, there’s almost nothing you can do to clear your name. John Boehner had to let the extremists take the whole country on Mr. Ted’s Wild Ride for a few weeks just to keep his job, and most Tea Party types still hate him. Sen. John Cornyn is in trouble for taking his signature off a petition.
And look at the sad tale of Marco Rubio, who, not long ago, was supposed to be a major contender for the “true conservative” vote in the 2016 Republican primaries. Then Rubio, like an idiot, actually listened to people more concerned with the long-term survival of the GOP than short-term symbolic victories and attached himself to the comprehensive immigration reform project. Activist conservatives hate immigration reform nearly as much as they hate Obamacare. Now, Rubio has abandoned his bill. He’s praised Cruz to the heavens and joined the vote against the deal to reopen the government, but the damage is done. Rubio has been tainted as a cooperator. In March, Rubio came in a close second to Rand Paul in the CPAC straw poll. In October, he received 5 percent — 35 votes out of 762 — in the Values Voters straw poll.
Symbolic gestures, like McConnell’s, and outright flip-flops, like Rubio’s, aren’t going to quiet or stop the conservative revolt. They might at least provide some sort of model for getting through this next year without it doing too much more damage. The government will have to fund itself. The debt ceiling will need to be raised again distressingly soon. The “resolution to disapprove” could be the way Congress passes everything from now on. Pass some sort of minor budget deal, then vote on the resolution disapproving of it. Pass the farm bill, hold the vote disapproving of it. Maybe try immigration reform again with a disapproval vote attached?
None of this will fool Erick Erickson and Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund and Freedomworks, but it might just allow terrified Republicans to convince themselves that it’s OK to take votes leadership wants them to take. You get to have a backsies!
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, October 30, 2013
“No Country For Old Tea Partiers”: Conservatives Who Caused The Shutdown Must Make Peace With Themselves And Modern America
Fareed Zakaria has a very sharp op-ed in the Washington Post this week dissecting conservatism’s longtime “diet of despair” and how conservatism’s traditional rhetoric of “decay, despair and decline” has created an anti-American mentality among the set that very self-consciously claims to love the country more than everyone else.
But one section in particular crystalized something that has been nagging me over the last few weeks, especially when tea party conservatives denounce compromise and deal-making as if they are bad things, when the smug Ted Cruz goes on about waging a “multi-stage, extended battle” to change Washington or, as Zakaria notes, John Boehner utters with exasperation that “the federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”
Zakaria’s reply is spot on:
But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily, destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to astonishingly high standards of living and income. Over the past 60 years, America has built highways and universities, funded science and space research, and – along the way – ushered in the rise of the most productive and powerful private sector the world has ever known.
I asked half-kiddingly the other day why conservatives are trying to convince markets not to invest in the United States (“the markets should be terrified of a country that is trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in debt,” according to Heritage Action’s Michael Needham, for example), but there’s as much truth as humor to the question.
As Zakaria puts it, the conservatives who spurred the recent government shutdown (and, let’s remember, voted against both reopening it and against the U.S. paying its bills) must make peace with modern America:
They are misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic of myth and memory yet passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial, quasi-capitalist democracy that has been around for half a century – a fifth of our country’s history. At some point, will they come to recognize that you cannot love America in theory and hate it in fact?
They may, but it won’t be soon. This is why less than a year after getting beaten soundly in last November’s elections, the conservative fringe shut down the government and threatened to force a national default as part of a quixotic, suicide-run quest to roll back a law it couldn’t stop using the ordinary legislative process. And it had the gall to claim the mantel of “the American people” as they did it.
Think about the animating faction of the GOP in the Obama era – a group conservative in the literal sense of being angry with and afraid of change. These are the people who would show up at Tea Party rallies toting signs about the need to “Take Back America.” For four years they were assured by the conservative entertainment complex that restoring the America they grew up in was a real possibility. The vertiginous changes remaking the land could be ascribed to Barack Obama, an illegitimate fluke of a president who won only because of a one-off surge of young and minority voters powered by excitement about his historic nature and vapid “hopey–changey” rhetoric. He was “Barack the Magic Negro,” in Rush Limbaugh’s formulation. He was, simultaneously, helpless without his teleprompter but also a radical instituting a nefarious plan to sap America of its God-given freedoms.
He was the problem; real America was the solution.
The 2012 elections shattered that illusion. Obama was only a symptom of changes in the country, not the cause. Inexorable demographics have relegated the Tea Party’s America to memory. So ask yourself, how are those voters likely to react? A warm embrace of the new America? Or, faced with an unacceptable reality, will they retrench in their fantasy and double down on crazy and angry?
We’ve seen an initial double-down. Its failure won’t stop more of the same – the question is whether the rest of the GOP will keep indulging the hardliners.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
“You Need This Mr. Speaker”: How To Make John Boehner Cave On Immigration
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) generally adheres to the unwritten Republican rule that bars him from allowing votes on bills opposed by a majority of Republicans, even if they would win a majority of the full House.
But he’s caved four times this year, allowing big bills to pass with mainly Democratic support. They include repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; providing Hurricane Sandy relief; expanding the Violence Against Women act to better cover immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT survivors of abuse; and this week’s bill raising the debt limit and reopening the federal government.
Many presume the Republican House is a black hole sucking President Obama’s second-term agenda into oblivion. But the list of Boehner’s past retreats offers a glimmer of hope, especially to advocates of immigration reform. Though it has languished in the House, an immigration overhaul passed with bipartisan support in the Senate, and was given a fresh push by Obama in the aftermath of the debt limit deal.
The big mystery that immigration advocates need to figure out: What makes Boehner cave? Is there a common thread? Is there a sequence of buttons you can push that forces Boehner to relent?
Two of this year’s caves happened when Boehner was backed up against hard deadlines: The Jan. 1 fiscal cliff and the Oct. 17 debt limit. Failure to concede meant immediate disaster. Reject the bipartisan compromise on rolling back the Bush tax cuts, get blamed for jacking up taxes on every taxpayer. Reject the Senate’s three-month suspension of the debt limit, get blamed for sparking a global depression. Boehner held out until the absolute last minute both times, but he was not willing to risk blowing the deadline.
A third involved the response to an emergency: Hurricane Sandy. Conservative groups were determined to block disaster relief because — as with other federal disaster responses — the $51 billion legislative aid package did not include offsetting spending cuts. Lacking Republican votes, Boehner briefly withdrew the bill from consideration, unleashing fury from New York and New Jersey Republicans, including Gov. Chris Christie. While there wasn’t a hard deadline to meet, disaster relief was a time-sensitive matter, and the pressure from Christie and his allies was unrelenting. Two weeks after pulling the bill, Boehner put it on the floor, allowing it to pass over the objections of 179 Republicans.
The fourth cave occurred in order to further reform and expand a government program: The Violence Against Women Act. The prior version of the law had been expired for over a year, as conservatives in the House resisted the Senate bill in the run-up to the 2012 election. But after Mitt Romney suffered an 18-point gender gap in his loss to Obama, and after the new Senate passed its version again with a strong bipartisan vote, Boehner was unwilling to resist any longer. Two weeks later, the House passed the Senate bill with 138 Republicans opposed.
Unfortunately for immigration advocates, there is no prospect of widespread pain if reform isn’t passed. There is no immediate emergency, nor threat of economic collapse.
But there is a deadline of sorts: The 2014 midterm elections.
If we’ve learned anything about Boehner this month, it’s that he’s a party man to the bone. He dragged out the shutdown and debt limit drama for weeks, without gaining a single concession, simply so his most unruly and revolutionary-minded members would believe he fought the good fight and stay in the Republican family. What he won is party unity, at least for the time being.
What Boehner lost for his Republicans is national respectability. Republican Party approval hit a record low in both the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and Gallup poll.
Here’s where immigration advocates have a window of opportunity to appeal to Boehner’s party pragmatism. Their pitch: The best way to put this disaster behind them is for Republicans to score a big political victory. You need this.
A year after the Republican brand was so bloodied that the Republican National Committee had to commission a formal “autopsy,” party approval is the worst it has ever been. You’ve wasted a year. Now is the time to do something that some voters will actually like.
There’s reason to hope he could be swayed. In each of the four cases in which he allowed Democrats to carry the day, he put the short-term political needs of the Republican Party over the ideological demands of right-wing activists.
Boehner will have to do another round of kabuki. He can’t simply swallow the Senate bill in a day. There will have to be a House version that falls short of activists’ expectations, followed by tense House-Senate negotiations. Probably like in the most formulaic of movies, and like the fiscal cliff and debt limit deals, there will have to be an “all-is-lost moment” right before we get to the glorious ending. Boehner will need to given the room to do all this again.
But he won’t do it without a push. A real good push.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 18, 2013
“Standing Wrong”: Old Conservatives Can’t Learn New Tricks
If President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats wanted to maximize the political advantage they’re getting from the shutdown/default crisis, they’d agree to at least one part of the short-term deals Republicans have offered, raising the debt ceiling for only six weeks at a time. Then we’d have one default crisis after another, and the standing of the GOP would keep on its downward trajectory until—let’s just pick a date at random here—November 2014. But Republicans won’t do that; they’re now insisting (and good for them) that the deal has to extend at least a year into the future so we don’t have to keep going through this. If they get that deal, though, the issue will fade and voters could start to forget how reckless Republicans have been.
They could forget, but I’m guessing Republicans won’t let them. It isn’t as though the ultimate conclusion of this crisis is going to result in a chastened GOP, ready to be reasonable and assure the public it can govern responsibly. The Republicans are falling fast, but their problems could be just beginning.
That’s because the people driving this crisis are still going to be the loudest voices in the party even after it ends. They won’t get what they want, and when that happens they’ll make sure everyone knows that they were right all along. It’s critical to understand that for them, tactics and ideology are inseparable. You don’t compromise with Democrats because that means you’ve taken a position that is impure, contaminated with the stench of liberalism. Even a drop is too much, just as you wouldn’t put just a little rancid meat in your stew. And regardless of the substance of any issue, you don’t compromise because compromise is by definition betrayal, and compromise is failure. Taking the maximal position on everything, they sincerely believe, doesn’t just produce the best policy, it produces political victory.
Imagine it’s a few months from now, and a Republican representative running for re-election gets asked by a reporter whether he thinks the shutdown/default crisis of 2013 was a good idea and whether his party ought to use the same tactic again to try to achieve its policy goals. If he says no, there are people just waiting to charge him with being a traitor to the cause of conservatism, with the inevitable primary challenge from the right to follow. If he says yes, he’s just made his general-election opponent’s first television ad.
The Republican Party is in a bad place right now, as a series of polls released last week showed. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the party with a 24 percent favorability rating, an all-time low in that poll. Gallup has it at 28 percent, a record low in that poll as well. A poll from Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has the party at 26 percent. Among independent voters, the numbers are even worse.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in an echo of the “unskewed polls” nonsense from the 2012 election, Senator Ted Cruz has been telling conservatives to ignore it. He assures them that his own private polls show that Republicans are winning and will triumph if they keep “standing strong.” This is just what conservatives want to hear, which is why many of them are likely to believe it. So if and when a deal is struck, almost regardless of what it contains, they’ll still be convinced that complete victory could have been theirs if only their leaders had held out a little longer. You might have thought that unlike previous Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Cruz is no dummy. Yet tactically, he turns out to be just as foolhardy as the rest of them. He told Republicans to jump off a cliff, and they did.
To them, the tactical formula will always be the same. Was shutting down the government a disaster? It would have gone better if we had only been firmer in our demands and held out longer! Did a Democrat win the White House? We would have won if we had nominated a “true” conservative! Did your Senate candidate lose the general election? We’ll win next time if only we nominate someone more conservative!
They can’t learn from their mistakes if they don’t understand them. It isn’t hard to imagine that these activists and voters, who are so incredibly hard to satisfy, could produce a never-ending churn within the party. Believe it or not, the current Republican caucus is even more conservative than the one that swept into Washington in 2010. With a sufficient number of conservative states and congressional districts in no danger of falling to Democrats, the next election inevitably will see a new group of primary winners who are hailed as heroes, then eventually branded as traitors, to be replaced by a new cadre of even more doctrinaire right-wingers. Just look at what happened to Marco Rubio, who swept into the Senate as a Tea Party star but was cast out once he tried to achieve immigration reform. The personnel will keep changing even as the basic dynamic—a GOP establishment cowering in fear of newly minted members of Congress delighting in blowing up the system—remains the same.
A party can evolve in only one of two ways: It changes its people, or its people change. The first doesn’t seem likely. It’s hard to imagine a wave of Republican moderates winning over Tea Party candidates in primary elections. The second doesn’t seem likely either, since the people driving the Republican Party are the truest of true believers.
Anything can happen, of course. The Democratic Party turned to the right with the nomination of Bill Clinton in 1992 and won two presidential elections. On the other hand, Democrats also won control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 while being firmly opposed to an unpopular Republican president; no trimming of ideological sails was necessary. But those Democrats were capable of rationally assessing their political prospects. It’s possible to be ideologically extreme and still be careful about the fights you pick. Today’s conservative Republicans are both ideologically and tactically extremist; indeed, they see them as one and the same.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 15, 2013
“A Party At The Crossroads”: GOP In-Fighting With Multiple Axes
In the mid-1970s, the Republican Party had fallen on such hard times, there was a fair amount of talk about it changing its name. The argument was that the Republican brand had been tarnished so badly — it was associated with Watergate, country clubs, and the Great Depression — that it might just be better to start over with some other name.
We now know, of course, that this wasn’t necessary, and by 1981, the party at the national level was thriving once more. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the Republican Party is in even worse shape now.
John Judis has an interesting item in The New Republic today, noting among other things what happened when he reached out to Republican insiders this week to discuss the effects of the shutdown.
The response I got was fear of Republican decline and loathing of the Tea Party: One lobbyist and former Hill staffer lamented the “fall of the national party,” another the rise of “suburban revolutionaries,” and another of “people alienated from business, from everything.” There is a growing fear among Washington Republicans that the party, which has lost two national elections in a row, is headed for history’s dustbin. And I believe that they are right to worry.
The battle over the shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the party. The party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress. The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two decades.
This may seem a little hyperbolic, but given recent developments — in polling, within the party, from outside groups allied with the party — the GOP’s fractures aren’t quite normal.
Indeed, while much of the focus of late has been on a dispute between congressional Republicans and the White House, this only tells part of the story. It’s actually a fight with multiple axes — a Democratic president vs. congressional Republicans, and Republicans against themselves.
Jon Chait had a good piece on this earlier.
Conservative activists and the party’s pro-business Establishment have split more deeply and rapidly than anybody expected. It is startling to see the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses — a group so staunchly partisan and conservative that liberals had to form a competing small business lobby — deliver quotes in public like this: “There clearly are people in the Republican Party at the moment for whom the business community and the interests of the business community — the jobs and members they represent — don’t seem to be their top priority.” The mutual recriminations run in both directions, with figures like the conservative organizer Erick Erickson muttering threats to form a third party.
Intra-party schisms have a long history in American politics. But they are usually rooted in policy — the Republicans splitting half a century ago over progressivism and the role of government, the Democrats slowly rending a half century ago over white supremacy. Mainstream Republicans and the tea party have fallen out almost entirely over political tactics.
If anything, I think Jon’s probably understating the case. There are clearly strategic differences — some Republicans are reluctant to compromise, while other Republicans consider compromise to be a horrible crime that must never be committed — that have led GOP officials to shut down the government and threaten a sovereign debt crisis for reasons they can neither identify nor explain.
But these differences over tactics are compounded by disagreement over policy and direction. Republican policymakers and their allies are divided on immigration and the culture war, for example, and have reached the point at which the party no longer really has a foreign policy consensus anymore.
Big Business and the Tea Party are at odds, as are libertarians and social conservatives, as are the House GOP and the Senate GOP. It’s a party with no leaders, no elder statesmen (or women), and an older, white base in an increasingly diverse nation.
For generations, parties see their power and popularity ebb and flow, and in a two-party system, it’s hard to imagine Republicans staying down indefinitely. But in the post-Civil War era, we haven’t seen a party quite as radical as today’s GOP, and we haven’t seen many parties with quite so many internal and external crises to deal with all at once.
There are no easy fixes for a catastrophe this severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2013
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