“GOP To Latinos, Drop Dead”: ‘It’s Over, Don’t Call Me And Have A Nice Life’
Breakups are rough — regrets, pain and bitter memories. As Republicans in the House block immigration reform time after time, American Latinos get the message: It’s over, don’t call me. Have a nice life.
Incapable of producing even one GOP vote in favor of the Democrats’ last-ditch gamble at forcing an open vote of the House, the message to Latinos is crystalline. Whatever goodwill the clutch of pro-immigration reform House Republicans won in the last year since the Senate passed its bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill has now evaporated.
What remains are the weekly flip-flops by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the yelps of “amnesty” coming from a seemingly frightened Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the tiny fig leaf provided by Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) seven bills he’s been talking about for a year and the shameful action to deport all Dreamers through the recently unanimous vote of the House Republican caucus’s fantasy bill, the Enforce Act.
Some 15 months after former Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R-Mass.) “self-deportation” turkey handed the Latino vote (not to mention the Asian-American electorate) to the Democrats, Republicans are still incapable of effectively dealing with an issue that commands big majorities of Americans — including Republicans.
Great analyses have been written by Greg Sargent, Charlie Cook, and Juan Williams, among others, about the “paranoia” inherent in the Republican Party’s refusal put forward a coherent immigration reform policy. Setting the political calculus aside, most Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to have no clue about what immigration reform actually represents to Latino voters.
As I’ve written previously, immigration reform is not a policy debate for Hispanics. It stands as a proxy for societal respect — even though most Latinos are either American-born, naturalized citizens or have a green card and will not benefit from any reform. While it’s not fair to judge the GOP based on people like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and his anti-immigrant logorrhea, he and other anti-immigrant Republicans have become the effective spokespeople of the GOP on this issue.
Whatever good intentions may exist in the GOP House to move forward with a bill, the lack of any action by Boehner (not to mention right-wing extremists’ wholesale rejection of a reasonable compromise) is now officially the Republican position.
This is what Latinos think.
On my radio show every day, and on social media 24/7, I am part of a conversation where responsibility for both the failure of comprehensive reform, and the acrid discourse surrounding it, is laid at the feet of Republicans exclusively.
New to American politics, organic groups of American Latinos have formed online with the express purpose of increasing Latino turnout in November and dealing the GOP a blow. No longer tied to the traditional activist organizations, still espousing 1960s tactics and attitudes, these new groups are savvy Facebookers and tweeters that can spread a political message across the country with the click of the mouse — reaching tens of thousands of people in an instant, hundreds of thousands per day.
This political battle is now personal. Just like the tea party fervor of 2010, driven by a single-minded focus to oppose President Obama, these online Latino groups share a similar obsession with throwing Republicans out of office.
One such group, organized primarily through the hashtag #TNTweeters, has attracted thousands of active social media “warriors” that engage in a robust political debate — principally calling for a GOP defeat in November.
Will this new kind of political activists succeed in altering the electoral math in the midterms? No one can say, of course. Latinos have historically sat out non-presidential elections. But history is not always prologue. The level of frustration, even anger, now focused on the GOP, combined with the frictionless power of social media, represents a fundamentally new political dynamic in American politics.
Come this November 4, Republicans may just wake up to the ugly reality that breaking up with American Latinos over immigration was an easily avoidable and ultimately very costly divorce.
By: Fernando Espuelas, The Huffington Post Blog, April 25, 2014
“The GOP Grand Swindle”: “We’re Not Going To Do Anything To Address Health Care”
It’s been nearly three months since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) declared, “This year, we will rally around an alternative to ObamaCare and pass it on the floor of the House.” Last week House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the plan is being delayed “at least a month.” A month from when? He didn’t say.
ThinkProgress reports that Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) is telling his constituents that his party doesn’t intend “to do anything” on this issue for the rest of the year.
CONSTITUENT: You’ve voted to repeal it approximately 50 times. Had zero votes on a replacement. So my question is, why do you think it is so good to deny seniors on Part D to make them pay more, about $4,000 more for medicine, and people with pre-existing conditions get denied insurance, have 26-year-olds have a harder time getting insurance because they can’t get on their parents’? Why do you think those are good ideas?
ROSS: I don’t. And let me tell you, I think one of the most unfortunate things my party did the last three years was not offer an alternative to health care. I’ve always felt that way. I think it’s absurd when I tell people that this isn’t what you should do, but I don’t have an alternative for you…. I wish we had an alternative. For the next six months, we’re going to go into an election knowing that we’re not going to do anything to address health care. Because we’ve gone so far in the last few years saying “no” that we don’t have an alternative to say “yes” to.
It’s not too common to hear House Republicans referring to their own party’s posture on health care as “absurd,” which make Ross’ comments fairly striking on their own.
There’s also the news that Ross is apparently under the impression that his party won’t bother with an ACA alternative at all in 2014, despite literally years of Republican promises to the contrary.
But perhaps most interesting of all was the two-word answer in response to the question from Ross’ constituent: “I don’t.”
The question made a lot of sense: here’s a Republican congressman who voted several dozen times to repeal – either in whole or in part – the Affordable Care Act, including all kinds of popular provisions, benefits, and consumer protections. Why is Ross against them?
He’s not, he says.
It’s part of an increasingly common pitch from congressional Republicans: they share the goals of “Obamacare,” they say, but disagree with how the reform law achieves those goals.
Rhetorically, that’s not a bad idea. Substantively, as Brian Beutler explained, it’s nonsense.
Republicans have replaced an unabashed “full repeal!” mantra with a deluge of weasel words meant to conceal the fact that “repeal” is still the beginning and end of their health-care reform agenda. It’s still the goal – they’re just a little ashamed of it now. And that places an onus on Dems (and reporters and anyone else who believes politicians should own the consequences of their policies) to be extremely explicit about the benefits Obamacare is conferring, and what an unvarnished rendering of GOP health policy would really look like.
This is clearly true of Ross, who went on to tell his constituents how much he likes all kinds of ACA provisions, making it sound as if he were somehow sympathetic to the law he voted to repeal several dozen times.
But real health care policy doesn’t work this way. A policymaker can’t (1) vote to gut the federal health care system; (2) endorse the goals of the federal health care system; (3) talk up the need for a credible alternative; (4) and offer no credible alternative, all at the same time.
It is, as Beutler added, “a grand swindle.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2014
“Bringing The Shutdown Logic Home”: The Government Shutdown Crowd Has A New Target, John Boehner
The long knives are out for John Boehner on the right – again. National Journal’s Tim Alberta has a must-read today on a conservative plot to oust the House speaker next year … or put the squeeze on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor … or something.
According to Alberta, the frustrated right numbers in the “several dozen,” with the ringleaders all hailing from the House Liberty Caucus, from which came the core of the dozen GOP’ers who voted against Boehner for speaker last year. Alberta writes:
The conservatives’ exasperation with leadership is well known. And now, in discreet dinners at the Capitol Hill Club and in winding, hypothetical-laced email chains, they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. Some say it’s enough to coalesce behind — and start whipping votes for — a single conservative leadership candidate. Others want to cut a deal with Majority Leader Eric Cantor: We’ll back you for speaker if you promise to bring aboard a conservative lieutenant.
But there’s a more audacious option on the table, according to conservatives involved in the deliberations. They say between 40 and 50 members have already committed verbally to electing a new speaker. If those numbers hold, organizers say, they could force Boehner to step aside as speaker in late November, when the incoming GOP conference meets for the first time, by showing him that he won’t have the votes to be reelected in January.
They’re not gunning for Boehner alone. They’re pissed at Eric Cantor because he moved the Medicare “doc fix” through on a voice vote a few weeks back, a move which had the pragmatic virtue of passing needed legislation without forcing members to go on the record casting a vote which could have proved potentially troublesome in a primary. In short, Alberta writes, “conservatives find fault with the entire leadership team.”
So what’s the plan? They haven’t found someone to run against Boehner yet (conservatives like Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling and Ohio Rep. Steve Scalise aren’t interested, Alberta reports) and while “privately they define success as vaulting one of their own into any of the top three leadership spots,” they also tell Alberta that scenarios like Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise running for whip – which is, you know, one of the top three leadership spots – “would hardly qualify as the splash conservatives are determined to make.”
In short conservatives are all riled up and determined to make a splash; they’re eyeing a nuclear option – blocking Boehner from another term as speaker – but don’t have a clear end-game beyond that. But they’re pretty sure one will materialize when their opponents inevitably fold in the face of their show of will. They’re definitely going to make a splash because they’re really, really determined.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should – it’s the government shutdown logic transferred to the Republican civil war. The right wound itself up about Obamacare and then shuttered the government without a clear plan other than that Obama was going to inevitably fold in the face of their Keyzer Soze-like superior show of will. However it turned out, they were going to get something big out of the whole affair because they’d tried really, really hard. (“I don’t think our conference will be amenable for settling for a colletion of things after we’ve fought so hard,” New Jersey GOP Rep. Scott Garrett said at the time.) How’d all that turn out?
The tea party right’s problem here is that they echo chamber themselves into badly overestimating their leverage and end up with little more than egg on their collective faces. See the paltry dozen votes they managed against Boehner last time, for example, or the outcome of the government shutdown.
We’ll see. Maybe the wingers really will be able to produce 50 anti-Boehner votes and shut down the House. Or maybe they’re basting too long in their own tough and angry talk. Again.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 10, 2014
“In Florida, Anything Can Happen”: Vampires, RINOs And Things That Go Bump In The Night
From the state that gave us Katherine Harris and Mark Foley came news this week that a vampire is running for Congress.
This particular bloodsucker — actually, he does role-playing as a vampire after dark — is trying to defeat Rep. Ted Yoho in a Republican primary in central Florida. The fanged contender believes Yoho — a tea party conservative — is a liberal who has “embarrassed” his constituents.
Speaking of embarrassing, the SaintPetersBlog Web site reported that this challenger, 35-year-old attorney Jake Rush, has moonlighted as a participant in a Gothic troupe engaged in “night-to-night struggles ‘against their own bestial natures.’ ” Rush, a former sheriff’s deputy, issued a news release.
“I’ve been blessed with a vivid imagination from playing George Washington in elementary school to dressing up as a super hero last Halloween for trick-or-treaters,” Rush’s statement said, adding that he also is a “practicing Christian” who “played Jesus” in a church play.
Running for office in the Sunshine State poses some unique problems for vampires, not least their difficulty of campaigning in daylight hours. Yoho will probably keep his seat, particularly if he remembers to wear garlic.
But the Rush candidacy reminds us of an important truism in politics: In Florida, anything can happen.
For more evidence of this, consider what is happening next weekend on Amelia Island, not far from where Jake Rush and the other undead play. There, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy will speak at a fundraiser for Republican moderates. In today’s Republican Party, moderates are less popular than vampires, so it is extraordinary that these two young leaders, who have assiduously courted the tea party the past five years, are willing to associate themselves with those the tea partiers deride as RINOs, Republicans in Name Only.
“It’s great news,” says Steve LaTourette, who runs the Republican Main Street Partnership and is a board member of its offshoot political action committee, which is hosting the gathering at the Ritz-Carlton. “The fact that they want to come is very encouraging as a centrist Republican. . . . That they at least want to break bread with us I give them credit for, because they’re certainly getting attacked for it.”
That they are, in the blogosphere, on talk radio and even in fundraising pitches from tea party candidates. “Next weekend, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and 25 other members of Congress are flying to Amelia Island to collaborate with a group dedicated to defeating conservatives in Congress,” conservative pundit Erick Erickson harrumphed.
Actually, House Speaker Boehner has addressed the group before but will be on foreign travel this time. More significant is the first-ever attendance of Cantor, who has been seen as a potential threat to Boehner from the right.
The presence of Cantor and McCarthy shows their increased confidence in defying the purity demands of organizations such as the Club for Growth, Heritage Action and FreedomWorks. You can’t get much more defiant than siding with LaTourette, who, in a Post op-ed in September, likened 30 to 40 conservative Republicans in the House to trained monkeys, writing that “the monkeys are running the zoo.”
LaTourette, a former (moderate) Republican congressman, thinks it’s a sign of things to come. He noted that of the 10 Republican House members targeted for primaries by the Club for Growth’s “primarymycongressman.com” project, nine belong to his organization. “We’re not going to lose anything,” LaTourette predicted. He noted that conservative groups have gone from saying “they’re going to kick our ass” to saying “we’re going to win one.”
It’ll be a long time before the 52 House Republican members of the Main Street group gain any real power, but from Florida anything seems possible. Florida has given us everything from former representative Allen West, the most militant of conservatives, to Rep. Alan Grayson, the most strident of liberals. Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor who lost a Senate bid as a Republican and then as an independent, is running for governor again — as a Democrat — and just might win.
Florida, too, gave us Republican Rep. Trey Radel, who recently resigned after a cocaine arrest, and Democratic Rep. Tim Mahoney, who succeeded Foley after the congressional-page scandal by promising to restore family values; he lost the seat after it was reported that he paid a staffer $121,000 to keep their affair quiet.
Now Florida is giving us vampires, RINOs and other things that go bump in the night. It is fun to believe they might be real.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 4, 2014
“Wealth Over Work”: We’re On The Way Back To “Patrimonial Capitalism”, Where Birth Matters More Than Effort And Talent
It seems safe to say that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade. Mr. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.
To be sure, Mr. Piketty concedes that we aren’t there yet. So far, the rise of America’s 1 percent has mainly been driven by executive salaries and bonuses rather than income from investments, let alone inherited wealth. But six of the 10 wealthiest Americans are already heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs, and the children of today’s economic elite start from a position of immense privilege. As Mr. Piketty notes, “the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism.”
Indeed. And if you want to feel even less optimistic, consider what many U.S. politicians are up to. America’s nascent oligarchy may not yet be fully formed — but one of our two main political parties already seems committed to defending the oligarchy’s interests.
Despite the frantic efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that today’s G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families. I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income from capital, which can be inherited, over wages — the dominance of wealth over work — is what patrimonial capitalism is all about.
To see what I’m talking about, start with actual policies and policy proposals. It’s generally understood that George W. Bush did all he could to cut taxes on the very affluent, that the middle-class cuts he included were essentially political loss leaders. It’s less well understood that the biggest breaks went not to people paid high salaries but to coupon-clippers and heirs to large estates. True, the top tax bracket on earned income fell from 39.6 to 35 percent. But the top rate on dividends fell from 39.6 percent (because they were taxed as ordinary income) to 15 percent — and the estate tax was completely eliminated.
Some of these cuts were reversed under President Obama, but the point is that the great tax-cut push of the Bush years was mainly about reducing taxes on unearned income. And when Republicans retook one house of Congress, they promptly came up with a plan — Representative Paul Ryan’s “road map” — calling for the elimination of taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains and estates. Under this plan, someone living solely off inherited wealth would have owed no federal taxes at all.
This tilt of policy toward the interests of wealth has been mirrored by a tilt in rhetoric; Republicans often seem so intent on exalting “job creators” that they forget to mention American workers. In 2012 Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, famously commemorated Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. More recently, Mr. Cantor reportedly reminded colleagues at a G.O.P. retreat that most Americans work for other people, which is at least one reason attempts to make a big issue out of Mr. Obama’s supposed denigration of businesspeople fell flat. (Another reason was that Mr. Obama did no such thing.)
In fact, not only don’t most Americans own businesses, but business income, and income from capital in general, is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. In 1979 the top 1 percent of households accounted for 17 percent of business income; by 2007 the same group was getting 43 percent of business income, and 75 percent of capital gains. Yet this small elite gets all of the G.O.P.’s love, and most of its policy attention.
Why is this happening? Well, bear in mind that both Koch brothers are numbered among the 10 wealthiest Americans, and so are four Walmart heirs. Great wealth buys great political influence — and not just through campaign contributions. Many conservatives live inside an intellectual bubble of think tanks and captive media that is ultimately financed by a handful of megadonors. Not surprisingly, those inside the bubble tend to assume, instinctively, that what is good for oligarchs is good for America.
As I’ve already suggested, the results can sometimes seem comical. The important point to remember, however, is that the people inside the bubble have a lot of power, which they wield on behalf of their patrons. And the drift toward oligarchy continues.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 24, 2014
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