“The Dystopian Nightmare That Only Republicans Can See”: Incoming! Quick, Everybody Hide Under The Table
It was unexpectedly convenient to have the State of the Union address and a Republican presidential debate occur in the same week, scheduled just 48 hours apart. The bookends offered the public an opportunity, not just to hear two competing visions, but also to confront two entirely different versions of reality.
Because anyone who listened to President Obama on Tuesday night, and then the GOP presidential candidates on Thursday night, might find it hard to believe they all live in the same country at the same time.
The president made an impassioned case that Americans have reason to stand tall. We have the strongest economy on the planet, the strongest military in the history of the planet, and an unrivaled position as a global superpower. Job growth is strong, our enemies are on the run, our civil rights are a model for the world, and our insured rate is the best it’s ever been.
Obama has heard the naysayers, but he believes we’d be wise to ignore their campaign to exploit anxiety to advance their own partisan or ideological goals. We can aim higher – we can even cure cancer! – and make the future our own.
That was Tuesday night. Just two days later, the Republican Party’s national candidates were simply flabbergasted, baffled by the president’s optimism. Jeb Bush, apparently unaware of the state of the nation when his brother left the White House, insisted, “[T]he idea that somehow we’re better off today than the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States is totally an alternative universe.”
And in a way, there’s some truth to that: the president and the Republican presidential field don’t seem to occupy the same place on the space-time continuum. Obama thinks the American dream is alive and well; the GOP thinks it’s dead. The president wants the public to feel hopeful; Republicans want Americans to feel existential dread. “Alternative universes” isn’t a bad summary, all things considered.
The trouble is, Obama’s the one who seems to live in the same reality as the rest of the public.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum noted this morning that it’s “remarkable just how apocalyptic Republicans are this year.” As a public service, he collected the “most ominous” statements from each of the GOP candidates from last night’s debate. The list is worth checking out in its entirety, but some of my personal favorites:
Donald Trump: Our military is a disaster. Our healthcare is a horror show…. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people.
Marco Rubio: This president is undermining the constitutional basis of this government. This president is undermining our military. He is undermining our standing in the world…. The damage he has done to America is extraordinary. Let me tell you, if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.
Chris Christie: When I think about the folks who are out there at home tonight watching….They know that this country is not respected around the world anymore. They know that this country is pushing the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, backwards, and they saw a president who doesn’t understand their pain, and doesn’t have any plan for getting away from it.
Can’t you just feel the sunny, Reagan-esque optimism?
It’s worth emphasizing that nearly every word of these assessments is plainly wrong, and that matters, but the broader point is that Americans saw seven candidates last night who were effectively encouraging us to hide under a table.
I suppose the natural response is to highlight the underlying circumstances: we’re talking about the GOP field running to replace a Democratic president in his eighth year. Of course they’re going to spend time making the case that the status quo is unacceptable. It’s not like they have an electoral incentive to promise more of the same.
The point, however, is how they choose to make this case. Eight years ago at this time, Barack Obama was facing the same situation in reverse – a Democratic candidate running to replace a Republican president in his eighth year – but his message was rooted entirely in optimism. Obama’s entire campaign message was ultimately summarized in one, four-letter word: Hope.
It’s not because Democratic voters were satisfied about the state of the nation in 2008 – they really weren’t – but rather, it was because Obama saw value in being a positive, hopeful, confident candidate.
Eight years later, Republicans’ collectively are pushing a message that also can ultimately be summarized in one, four-letter word: Doom.
Politico’s Michael Grunwald wrote last week, “America is already great, and it’s getting greater. Not everything is awesome, but in general, things are even more awesome than they were a year ago. The rest of the world can only wish it had our problems.”
It’s the kind of uplifting, can-do message that would have been roundly booed in Charleston last night.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 15, 2016
“Is He Is, Or Is He Ain’t”: Will A Birther Lawsuit Derail Ted Cruz?
The “birther” claims against Sen. Ted Cruz are heading to court.
Houston attorney Newton Boris Schwartz, Sr. filed a suit in federal court Thursday seeking a judgement about whether Cruz is eligible to become president. Although Cruz’s mother is an American citizen by birth, Cruz was born in Canada.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Schwartz said he believes he has legal standing to bring the suit as a registered voter in Texas and hopes to [ADD- see] the matter settled before voting begins.
“Why have the uncertainty? Why go through an election or even a primary or a convention if someone’s not eligible?” Schwartz said. “I used to tutor football athletes when they had to forfeit the entire season if they weren’t eligible. The American presidency is a hell of a lot more important than some football team and you want to make sure your players are eligible. All I’m asking the court to do is decide either he is or he is not eligible. That’s the end of it. It’s very simple.”
Specifically, Schwartz has requested a declaratory judgement about Cruz’s eligibility under Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, specifically the language that requires that the president be a “natural born citizen of the United States.”
Several legal scholars have argued recently that Cruz’s birth in Canada, rather than on American soil, could make him a naturalized citizen, rather than a natural born citizen, as the constitution requires. For example, Mary Brigid McManamon, a constitutional law professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, recently published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that Cruz is not eligible to be president or vice president of the United States. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law, who is a former professor of Cruz’s, made a similar argument in the Boston Globe.
Schwartz himself graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1954 and has since been a trial lawyer in Houston. He currently heads a three-lawyer law firm. He said that he has voted for both Democrats and Republicans, but voted against Cruz for Senate in 2012, and voted for President Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. He said he had never met Cruz and never faced off against him in court.
Cruz himself has dismissed questions about his eligibility for the presidency, including Trump’s questions, as sour grapes as Cruz closed in on Trump in national polls and took the lead in Iowa. “The law is clear and straight forward,” Cruz has said.
A suit similar to Schwartz’s suit was recently filed against Marco Rubio in Florida, which Rubio’s lawyers responded to in detail this week, pointing out that Rubio was born in the United States and therefore is a natural-born U.S. citizen even though his parents were not citizens at the time. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) has said he would file his own suit against Cruz if he were to become the Republican nominee.
The Texas case has been assigned to Judge Gray H. Miller in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas, but Schwartz said he expects it to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, an outcome he thinks would help Cruz, no matter how it is decided.
“Cruz should welcome this suit,” Schwartz said. “He should have filed it himself.”
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, January 15, 2016
“Prophet’s Of Doom”: The GOP Debate Was A Master Class In The Republicans’ Apocalyptic Vision
Every presidential campaign is a choice not just between two paths forward, but also two visions of where the country is right now. If things are going well, the incumbent party says, “You’ve never had it so good!” and the opposition says, “Things could be a whole lot better!” If things aren’t going so well, the opposition says “Everything’s terrible,” and the incumbent party says, “Things could be a lot worse, and they will be if those knuckleheads win!” But it’s hard to recall a campaign where the two parties painted such a starkly different picture of the country’s status than this one.
Earlier this week, Barack Obama offered the Democratic version in his State of the Union address. “The United States of America,” he said, “has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the ’90s; an unemployment rate cut in half.” And it isn’t just the economy: “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.” Even if you can argue that those facts are only part of reality, or that they obscure some deeper problems, you can’t say they aren’t facts.
Or maybe you can.
The Republican candidates hoping to replace Obama met for another debate last night (they’ll have one more before the voting starts in Iowa in two weeks), and they described a nation not just in decline, but one whose decline was already complete. They agreed not only that Obama has been a failure and that Hillary Clinton would be a disaster, but that America right now is the lowest of the low, suffering at home and mocked abroad, a dark pit of misery and shame. Here’s just a taste of what they said:
“Our military is a disaster.” — Donald Trump
“We need to rebuild our military, and this president has let it diminish to a point where tinpot dictators like the mullahs in Iran are taking our Navy ships.” — Chris Christie
“The idea that somehow we’re better off today than the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States is totally an alternative universe. The simple fact is that the world has been torn asunder.” — Jeb Bush
“In this administration, every weapon system has been gutted, in this administration, the force levels are going down to a level where we can’t even project force.” — Jeb Bush
“We have enemies who are obtaining nuclear weapons that they can explode in our exoatmosphere and destroy our electric grid. I mean, just think about a scenario like that. They explode the bomb, we have an electromagnetic pulse. They hit us with a cyberattack simultaneously and dirty bombs. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point? He needs to recognize that those kinds of things are in fact an existential threat to us.” — Ben Carson
“I’m very angry because our country is being run horribly and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger. Our military is a disaster. Our healthcare is a horror show. ObamaCare, we’re going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry.” — Trump
“Let me tell you, if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.” — Marco Rubio
“This country is not respected around the world anymore.” — Christie
“You know, we have to stop this because, you know, if we manage to damage ourselves, and we lose the next election, and a progressive gets in there and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, this nation is over as we know it.” — Carson
“This country is changing. It feels different. We feel like we’re being left behind and left out.” — Rubio
“There’s something going on and it’s bad. And I’m saying we have to get to the bottom of it. That’s all I’m saying.” — Trump
Add it all up, and you have the prism through which the Republican candidates will view any event or development that comes along. Job creation looks excellent? Obama must be cooking the books, because everybody knows the economy stinks. Millions of people have gained health coverage? Nope, it’s a disaster. We still spend over $600 billion a year on the military? Nuh-uh, we couldn’t invade the Bahamas if we wanted to.
Consider the incident in the Persian Gulf this week, where a small Navy boat lost power and drifted with a second boat into Iranian waters. What could have been a dangerous international incident was instead resolved in a matter of hours, with the American sailors and their vessels returned to us. But to the Republicans, the fact that the sailors put their hands on their heads when boarded by the Iranians — to repeat, in Iranian waters — meant that not only wasn’t the whole episode a triumph of diplomacy, it was a disaster, a humiliation, a defeat so catastrophic that it might literally have been worth bombing Iran over. As Ted Cruz intoned with every ounce of steely resolve he could muster, “any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.” If only there had been some more force and fury!
There’s always an incentive for the opposition party to paint the current president’s record in the worst possible light. You can’t convince voters to make a change if they don’t agree that there are problems that require fixing. But Republicans have taken that natural impulse and, like so many things in this campaign, turned it up to 11. It isn’t enough to say you’ll increase military spending; you have to say that “our military is a disaster.” It isn’t enough to say we face serious foreign policy challenges; you have to say “the world has been torn asunder.” It isn’t enough to say that electing the other party’s candidate would be bad; you have to say that if we do, “there may be no turning back for America.”
Perhaps the Republican candidates have hit on the right formula, and whichever prophet of doom wins the nomination will ride this apocalyptic vision all the way to the White House. But they shouldn’t be surprised if the voters end up saying, “Gee, things don’t seem quite that bad.”
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, January 15, 2016
“An Emotionally Abusive Relationship”: Tea Partyers Love The Constitution So Much — They Want To Blow It Up
Sometimes I think tea partyers are in an emotionally abusive relationship with the Constitution.
One day, they proclaim its inerrancy and say it must be loved, honored and obeyed in all its original perfection. The next day, they call for a constitutional convention, arguing that it’s broken, outdated and desperately in need of a facelift.
In other words: I love you, you’re perfect, now change.
This pure, pristine document is so fervently adored by people of the parchment that some carry it around with them at all times — sometimes in their breast pockets, close to their hearts, perhaps to protect them from a stray Second Amendment-protected bullet. They cite it as they might scripture (that is, often incorrectly, and for their own purposes).
They believe that anyone who questions the Constitution’s decrees must be verbally flogged or even impeached. The United States’ sacred scroll must be feared, fetishized and followed to the letter — down to the comma, even — in its original, strictly constructed form.
Indeed, above all other national concerns, this founding document must be preserved as is.
But now a line of thinking has emerged that the best way to preserve the Constitution is to revamp it completely.
Consider Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), a tea party darling, who wants to convene a constitutional convention to amend this precious political heirloom.
And not to push through just a single amendment, but nine.
These amendments include: allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court decision; prohibiting Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state; and requiring a seven-justice supermajority for Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law. Abbott also demands a balanced-budget amendment, which almost certainly would have been opposed by Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who was the most prolific defender of the Constitution.
These are not minor copy edits.
In a 92-page document defending his proposals, Abbott laments widespread ignorance of the Constitution and argues that his plan is “not so much a vision to alter the Constitution as it is a call to restore the rule of our current one.”
“The Constitution itself is not broken,” Abbott writes in italics. “What is broken is our Nation’s willingness to obey the Constitution and to hold our leaders accountable to it.”
In other words, the Constitution says what Abbott thinks it says, not what it actually says, or what the Supreme Court decides it says — so now we just need to rewrite it so that the text fits what’s in his head.
Abbott is not the only right-wing Constitution-thumper to call for reframing the Founding Fathers’ allegedly perfect handiwork.
Marco Rubio, apparently trying to capture more of his party’s fringe, recently announced that on his “first day in office” as commander in chief, he would “put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states.” Its agenda would be to impose term limits on federal legislators and judges, as well as a balanced-budget amendment.
Rubio assured Americans that delegates to such a convention “won’t be able to touch our important constitutional rights.”
Who determines which parts of the Constitution are important and therefore untouchable, and which are unimportant and touchable? Rubio, apparently.
Then there’s Donald Trump, who, along with others, wants to roll back the 14th Amendment to quash birthright citizenship . (In the meantime, he’ll settle for casting aspersions on his political enemies’ birthplaces.)
And Ben Carson — author of a book subtitled “What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties” — has argued that U.S. law is not subject to judicial review from the Supreme Court, contra Marbury v. Madison. (Carson has also expressed other funny ideas about what’s in the Constitution and who wrote it.) Like Rubio, Carson has supported the idea of a constitutional convention, along with fellow Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and John Kasich.
Then there’s Ted Cruz, who devotes a whole section on his campaign website to his pledge to “defend the Constitution” and “restore the Constitution as our standard.”
Cruz, too, has decided that the best way to “restore” the Constitution is by altering it. He supports amendments to require a balanced budget, let state legislatures define marriage and subject Supreme Court justices to periodic retention elections.
These and “many more” unspecified amendments are needed, he told reporters, “because the federal government and the courts have gotten so far away from the original text and the original understanding of our Constitution.”
Because, obviously, the best way to honor that cherished, perfect, original text is by getting rid of it.
By: Catherine Rample, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 14, 2015
“No Recipe For Addressing Economic Inequality”: The Republican Candidates Can’t Say How Obama Wrecked The Economy
One of the most striking and mystifying aspects of the Republican presidential primary has been the candidates’ inability—or unwillingness—to offer up any kind of coherent economic prescription for the country. That didn’t change on Thursday night. On the Fox Business debate stage in South Carolina, the remaining GOP field had the floor to rebut President Barack Obama’s rosy picture of the American economy during this week’s State of the Union.
Instead, they pivoted to fear-mongering on foreign policy.
The tone was set with the debate’s very first question, posed to Senator Ted Cruz. Fox Business moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him to respond to Obama’s declaration earlier this week: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
That should have been a softball, ready for the surging candidate to hit out of the park. Instead, Cruz launched into a prepared digression on the American soldiers captured and released by Iran before addressing the actual question—with another digression. “The president tried to paint a rosy picture of jobs,” he said. “And you know, he’s right. If you’re a Washington lobbyist, if you make your money in and around Washington, things are doing great. The millionaires and billionaires are doing great under Obama.”
Cruz played on Obama’s own words on the sources of inequality in his State of the Union. “Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did,” Obama said on Tuesday. “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. It’s sure not the average family watching tonight that avoids paying taxes through offshore accounts.”
Cruz turned that around, pinning the blame exclusively on the president for rising inequality—not on the wealthy. “Median wages have stagnated. And the Obama-Clinton economy has left behind the working men and women of this country,” he said.
It was like that all night: The candidates never took the bait Obama set up for them, to disprove they are doing anything but “peddling fiction” that his agenda—addressing economic inequality, immigration reform, and energy regulations—has left Americans worse off. Instead, the Republicans beat the drum on fear of ISIS and terrorism abroad, but never provided a counter to Obama’s economic claims.
If the GOP debate revealed one thing about these candidates’ views of rising inequality—a hot topic in the Democratic primary—it’s that they can’t quite bring themselves to cast the wealthy in a bad light.
Ohio Governor John Kasich said that Americans shouldn’t hate the rich—that’s just not American. People are “very concerned about” the economy, he said. “And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to—keeping them from getting it. That’s not the America that I’ve ever known. My father used to say, “Johnny, we never—we don’t hate the rich. We just want to be the rich.”’
Ben Carson shot back at Bernie Sanders and Clinton, who he claimed “would say it’s those evil rich people” who are to blame for inequality. Carson said they’re the wrong target; it’s “the evil government that’s putting all these regulations on us.”
Throughout the night, Republicans proved more comfortable playing to their base’s fear of terrorism than directly rebutting the president’s economic victory lap. Maybe that’s because they can’t muster the same strong descriptive language for how Obama has set fire to the economic world as they have for his foreign policy. So much easier to berate the president on his approach to ISIS all night, as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did: “If you’re worried about the world being on fire, you’re worried about how we’re going to use our military, you’re worried about strengthening our military and you’re worried most of all about keeping your homes and your families safe and secure, you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama’s leadership,” he said.
But what about Obama’s leadership on the economy? The answers were more timid—with the exception, not surprisingly, of Donald Trump, who in his usual style promised he’d “make America rich again and make America great again.”
Why were the candidates so quiet about the economy on Thursday night? Simple. The Republicans don’t have a recipe for addressing economic inequality, instead focusing exclusively on tax breaks or highly regressive flat taxes that help the top earners. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has explained, “Bush, Marco Rubio, and Trump have all released tax plans that they are trying to sell as a boon for ordinary families.” That’s a hard sell, to say the least. A conservative estimate of Trump’s plan, for example, would lower the middle 40 to 50 percent of American wage earners’ taxes by 5.3 percent, but the wealthiest would see almost a 22 percent decrease. Carson and Cruz have called for flat taxes—a highly regressive policy.
Because they have such shallow policies to draw on, the GOP finds it easier to play on fears of an uncertain international landscape. That works just fine when they’re pitching themselves to an anxious, unhappy Republican base. But when one of these candidates faces Clinton or Sanders in the general election, the Democratic nominee will easily poke holes through his paper-thin economic message.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, January 15, 2015
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