“When Will Republicans Learn?”: Jim DeMInt And The Heritage Foundation Simply Do Not Have Their Best Interests At Heart
After congressional Republicans’ total surrender finally ended the government shutdown that they caused, and removed the country from the brink of a calamitous debt default, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) joined MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown on Thursday morning to break down the costly political defeat.
In Hatch’s estimation, the Heritage Foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, deserve a good portion of the blame.
“Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans and helping conservatives and helping us to be able to have the best intellectual conservative ideas,” the seven-term senator explained. “There’s a real question on the minds of many Republicans now…is Heritage going to go so political that it doesn’t amount to anything anymore?”
“Right now I think it’s in danger of losing its clout and its power around Washington, D.C.,” Hatch added.
If Republicans are smart, they should be doing everything possible to make sure that Hatch is proven correct. Arguably no single force has been more destructive to the Republican Party since the 2012 election than Heritage.
After President Barack Obama routed Mitt Romney among Latino voters by an overwhelming 71 to 27 percent margin last November, many Republicans — including the Republican National Committee — accurately diagnosed the GOP’s performance among the rapidly growing demographic as a huge impediment to winning national elections in the future. Most focused on comprehensive immigration reform as the best solution to the problem. And while fixing the broken immigration system would not be the cure-all that many Republicans hope, there’s no question that a sincere effort to solve the crisis would go a long way toward erasing Latino voters’ memories of “self-deportation.”
Ignoring that logic, Heritage stepped in to stop congressional Republicans from helping the nation — and themselves.
As debate over a comprehensive immigration reform bill heated up in Congress, the Heritage Foundation released a report claiming that the bill would cost a minimum of $6.3 trillion over the lifetimes of the 11 million immigrants who could gain legal status as a result. The report utilized a deeply flawed methodology — even many Republicans scoffed at its shoddy accounting — and quickly turned into a public relations nightmare once it was revealed that one of the authors admitted that he hadn’t even read the bill in question, and the other had posted inflammatory articles about Latinos’ inferior intelligence to a “white nationalist” website. In other words, Heritage managed to neatly personify the ignorant bigotry from which the Republican Party was desperately trying to distance itself.
Heritage Action would go on to strongly warn Republicans against passing any serious immigration reforms. And although they were unable to prevent the comprehensive bill’s passage in the Senate — with the support of 14 Republicans — it kept up the pressure on the House of Representatives, which is full of more conservative members with more reason to fear challenges from the right (due to their two-year terms and extremely conservative districts).
Heritage’s efforts have been successful so far; almost four months after the Senate passed the immigration bill, it appears to be dead in the water in the House. Meanwhile, 75 percent of Latinos now disapprove of congressional Republicans. Additionally, by encouraging the right to rise up against immigration reform, Heritage may have dealt a fatal blow to Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) chances of navigating the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, potentially removing a top-tier presidential candidate from the board.
Heritage also damaged the GOP by politicizing the farm bill. Usually the legislation, which contains both subsidies for farmers and food aid for working Americans, is one of few initiatives to gain bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. This year, however, Heritage Action demanded that the bill be split into two sections: a “farm-only bill” containing the agricultural subsidies, and a separate bill dealing with food aid — and mandating sharp cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (more commonly known as food stamps).
Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) put forth an amendment to split the farm bill, as Heritage Action proposed, but it failed to pass. Heritage Action then “keyed” a no vote on the bill, leading 62 House Republicans to oppose it — enough to prevent its passage, due to the opposition of Democrats who were appalled by its harsh cuts to food aid.
The bill’s failure was a tremendous black eye for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and clearly established that he was at the mercy of the right wing of his caucus — a condition that helped lead him into the disastrous shutdown and debt ceiling standoff.
Two weeks later, the House would pass a split bill without any funding for food stamp and nutrition programs — reinforcing the party’s damaging image as a group that does not care about the struggles of everyday Americans. And for their trouble, Heritage Action slammed those Republicans who voted for the bill that it had supported just weeks earlier, now claiming that the legislation “would make permanent farm policies—like the sugar program—that harm consumers and taxpayers alike.”
Heritage Action’s reversal infuriated many Republicans, and even led the influential House Republican Study Committee to ban the group from its meetings. But it ultimately did very little to reduce Heritage’s reach within the party, as the government shutdown would show.
As Time‘s Zeke Miller has reported, nobody did more to cause the shutdown than Heritage Action. Although Republican leadership had hoped to avoid another politically disastrous budget battle, they did not anticipate the right’s commitment to battling over the law — a fervor that was whipped up by Heritage. Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham took a nine-city bus tour with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), demanding that conservatives stand up against Obamacare, whatever the costs. The group spent $550,000 on a digital advertising campaign criticizing Republican congressmembers for perceived weakness on the issue. It keyed votes against any government funding bill that wouldn’t dismantle health care reform. It aggressively used social media to promote Senator Cruz’s 21-hour non-filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. And it assured Republicans that provoking a crisis over the law would not cripple them politically.
As we now know, that was not the case. The shutdown totally failed to stop the Affordable Care Act’s implementation, but it did send the GOP’s poll numbers into a freefall, and seriously jeopardize the party’s once-bulletproof House majority. And once again, for their troubles, right-wing Republicans who followed Heritage into battle got stabbed in the back almost immediately.
“Everybody understands that we’ll not be able to repeal [Obamacare] until 2017,” Needham said during a Fox News appearance on Wednesday. Apparently “everybody” didn’t include dozens of House Republicans, or Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint. Just as with the farm bill, Heritage led Republicans further and further to the right — then turned on them as soon as it became convenient.
There’s no reason to believe that Heritage will change its pattern any time soon — as long as there is money to be raised from the far right, Heritage has no incentive to stop pressuring Republican politicians to take more extreme positions. Quite simply, that is their business model. It also seems very unlikely that Speaker Boehner will change his pattern of allowing the far right to pressure him into supporting Tea Party-backed plans in exchange for letting him keep the Speaker’s gavel.
Perhaps the business community — which is well represented on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees — will attempt to moderate the group’s political activities, in an effort to counteract their disastrous economic effects. Or perhaps Republican voters will finally run out of patience for Heritage’s preferred brand of governing by self-created crisis.
If not, the Republican Party is in trouble, because the evidence is clear: Heritage simply does not have its best interests at heart.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, October 18, 2013
“The Do Nothing House Of Boehner”: Even Before the Shutdown, House Republicans Couldn’t Get Anything Done
For House Republicans, shutting down government has one distinct upside: It obscures how hapless the party has become at the basic work of governing the country.
In the months before they turned out the lights in Washington, House Republicans were in disarray. Hardliners were threatening Speaker John Boehner’s job over immigration reform. Moderate Republicans were balking the spending cuts that would actually be required to implement Paul Ryan’s budget. Trying to get something – anything – accomplished, GOP leaders went on a fishing expedition for Democratic votes on the Farm Bill. And when that effort collapsed, even the fallback position – intended to unite conservatives – ended up sparking a feud between House extremists and even extreme outside groups like the Heritage Foundation.
Here, a recap of the chaos that reigned in the House of Boehner:
Immigration Reform
In June, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers. It is clear that, were it put to a vote in the House, the reform would pass – with a majority of Democratic votes and a small bloc of Republicans.
These days, House conservatives fetishise the “Hastert Rule” – which is not actually a rule but an often-respected convention that only bills supported by a majority of the Republican conference receive a vote on the floor. Throughout this Congress, however, Boehner has used big, bipartisan votes in the Senate as a get-out-of-Hastert-free-card. Over the objection of a strong majority of GOP members, Boehner steered passage of the Senate’s Fiscal Cliff compromise, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and $50 billion in Hurricane Sandy relief.
Anti-immigration hardliners in the House are determined that the Senate immigration bill, adopted on a vote of 68-to-38 in the upper chamber, not join this list. And they have threatened to topple Boehner if it does. This summer, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) gathered more than 50 signatures to call a “special conference” on immigration. It was a show of force. The same conference procedure is all that’s required to force a new leadership election in the middle of a congress. Boehner got the message: The Speaker soon declared that under no circumstances would an immigration bill opposed by a majority of House Republicans reach the floor.
If King’s parliamentary threat was subtle, Dana Rohrabacher’s anything but. In June, the California Republican said that if Boehner broke the Hastert Rule on immigration “he should be removed as Speaker” for his “betrayal of the Republicans throughout the country.” Rep. Tim Salmon (R-Arizona) echoed that threat – and expanded it to the rest of the leadership team. “There’s a great unrest,” he said. “We’ve already had several pieces of legislation that have gone out of this place with majority Democrats and minority Republicans. There gets to be a proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. A lot of members in the conference,” he said, “would be frustrated to the point of seeking new leaders.”
Transportation Funding
The Paul Ryan budget has long been criticized as a fantasy document. Former Reagan budget director David Stockman, for one, slammed it in an interview with Rolling Stone for proposing “absurd rollbacks in discretionary spending” that House members “would never vote for, on a program-by-program basis.”
The fate of the Transportation Housing and Urban Development spending bill known as THUD proved Stockman’s point. Working to bring the austere spending caps required by Ryan’s budget to reality, the GOP bill slashed transportation funding by $4 billion. The proposal cut development block grants to cities nearly in half, and cut funding to highways, bridges and tunnels by some 15 percent.
THUD’s reception in the conference in July was onomatopoetic. For the House GOP’s small bloc of moderate and urban members, the cuts were simply too great to swallow. Facing a “bleak” vote count, leadership was forced to pull the bill.
House Appropriations chair Hal Rogers – an inveterate cigar puffer who runs one of the last smoke-filled back rooms in Washington – slammed his own conference. “With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” he said, adding: “A good number of members who had supported the Ryan budget ideals, when it came time to implement it with specific cuts, were unwilling to support it. They abandoned ship.”
The Farm Bill
The Farm Bill has long been a bastion of bipartisanship in the House. The same legislation funds subsidies for agribusiness as well as the nation’s food stamp program – uniting a strong rural/urban coalition from both parties.
In July, Republican leaders looked to Democrats for help passing a bipartisan bill, and believed they’d rounded up 40 votes – despite nearly $20 billion in cuts to food stamps that would have kicked nearly 2 million Americans out of the program.
The move angered House hardliners who were demanding nearly $40 billion be slashed from nutrition funding. And, in a bit of mischief, extremists who had no intention of supporting the final bill, began voting to lard it up with a slew of amendments – including provisions that would allow states to drug test recipients of food aid and that would require able-bodied food stamp recipients to work – despite an economy that’s not producing jobs.
The measures grew more and more extreme, and finally Democrats bolted en masse – leading to an embarrassing losing vote, 195-to-234, on the House floor. Nancy Pelosi called it “amateur hour.”
Regrouping, House Republicans resolved to pass a farm-only bill. Splitting the farm funding from food stamps had long been a goal of outside groups like the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation. And House conservatives appeared confident that their vote would leave them in the good graces of the group’s much-feared elections scorecard.
But the reason that Heritage advocated the split was to break what Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham calls “the unholy alliance between Republicans from square states and urban Democrats” who vote for the joint bill, which Heritage considers a “bad pile of policy.”
Instead of applying their avowed small-government principles to their new, agriculture-only farm bill, House Republicans actually made it worse. In the failed bipartisan bill, lawmakers were going to create a new price floor for farmers – meaning that if crop prices fall from their historically high prices, taxpayers would be on the hook to make up the difference. In the bipartisan bill, this provision would last only five years. In the Republicans-only bill, it never expired. “It was the same bad farm bill we’d just been against,” says Needham, “but worse because it is permanent law. And we were still opposed to it.”
This was not the message that House hardliners wanted to hear. “We went into battle thinking they were on our side,” South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney fumed to reporters, “and we find out they’re shooting at us.”
Outraged that hardliners were being called to account on their own wasteful Washington spending, the chairman of the caucus of the most conservative members in the House, the Republican Study Committee, barred Heritage from the group’s weekly meetings – which Heritage had attended since the early 1970s.
“Some members,” says Needham, “were very, very upset at us over our opposition to farm pork.”
By: Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 8, 2013
“They Just Can’t Help Themselves”: The House GOP Is Like A Jukebox That Only Plays One Song
The congressional to-do list is daunting. There’s a very real possibility of a government shutdown in two weeks, and a debt-ceiling deadline looms a few weeks after that. As if that weren’t enough, lawmakers need to tackle a farm bill, immigration reform, and a fix to the Voting Rights Act, all while a national security crisis in Syria lingers.
Complicating matters, the House is only scheduled to be in session for five days between now and the end of the month.
So how did the Republican-led chamber spend their afternoon yesterday — the last work day before another four-day weekend they scheduled for themselves? As Rachel noted on the show last night, GOP lawmakers voted for the 41st time to gut the Affordable Care Act.
Joan McCarter summarized the proposal nicely.
In case you care what this one would do, it would stop people from getting subsidies on the health insurance exchanges until the income verification process that is already in the law is replaced with some other income verification process that probably involves elves doing the work in the dead of night. Or maybe unicorns.
But hey, it’s a vote that House Speaker John Boehner could be assured of “winning,” so there’s that.
House Republicans know the bill won’t pass the Senate. They also know it won’t be signed into law by President Obama. And they know they have all kinds of real work that desperately needs to get done.
But they can’t help themselves.
Their irrational, wild-eyed hatred of “Obamacare” has become all consuming. GOP lawmakers can apparently think of little else. Real work is pushed to the backburner so symbolic “message” votes like these can make the right feel better about itself.
Indeed, as we’ll talk about a little later this morning, it’s this mindless contempt for the moderate health care law that’s become all-consuming for congressional Republicans — it’s why a government shutdown is increasingly likely and why the GOP may very well trash the full faith and credit of the United States next month for the first time in American history.
“Obamacare,” in other word, has pushed Republicans to madness, for no legitimate reason.
If voters paid closer attention, and bothered to show up during midterm elections, Republicans would be in quite a bit of trouble right about now, wouldn’t they?
By: Steve Benen, the Maddow Blog, September 13, 2013
“Embracing Their Inner Ebenezer Scrooge”: The GOP’s Mean-Spirited Hostility Towards Food Stamps
For decades now, the Republican Party has been honing its reputation for hostility toward the downtrodden, the poor, the disadvantaged. While a few of its leaders have tried to either shed that image or to dress it up with a more appealing facade — think George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” — lately the GOP has been enthusiastically embracing its inner Ebenezer Scrooge.
Consider its all-out assault on one of the government’s most venerable programs to assist the most vulnerable, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, usually known as “food stamps.” Last month, the GOP-dominated House passed an agriculture bill that omitted funding for the food stamp program — partly because the Republican caucus disagreed over whether cuts to the program should be merely harsh or extremely severe. Congressional conservatives have said they also want to include a work requirement and mandatory drug tests for beneficiaries.
Not so long ago, hardliners sought to cloak this sort of cruelty in the language of the greater good: the need to reduce government spending. But last month’s bill didn’t even attempt that pretense: It included billions in agricultural subsidies for wealthy farming interests, including some Republican members of Congress. It was the first time since 1973 that the House of Representatives omitted the food stamp program from the farm bill.
“It sounds to me like we’re in a downright mean time,” said Bill Bolling, founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, which procured and distributed 45 million pounds of donated food and groceries in the last year. He said that his agency has doubled its distribution over the last four years, since the Great Recession devastated household incomes.
The profile of his client base has changed, too, over the last four years, he said. About 20 percent of beneficiaries report that this is the first time they’ve ever asked for assistance from government or charitable programs. Among them are people who once belonged to the secure middle class; some were formerly donors or volunteers at the food bank.
Moreover, Bolling said, about half the people who seek food assistance have jobs.
“They’re keeping their part of the social contract. They are getting up every day and going to a job, maybe two jobs. If a man gets up and goes to work every day, I don’t care what his job is, he ought to be able to feed his family,” he said.
Conservative critics paint a very different picture. They tend to speak contemptuously of those struggling to make ends meet, to describe a lazy “47 percent” who want nothing but handouts, to dismiss those who can’t make ends meet as responsible for their own hard luck.
Some of that hostility toward struggling Americans can be explained by a racial antagonism that presumes that most of them are black or brown. In Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion, University of Michigan professor Donald Kinder and Vanderbilt professor Cindy Kam explain that means-tested programs such as food stamps have long been associated with the black poor. That makes them more likely to be viewed with suspicion by “ethnocentric” whites — those more likely to be antagonistic toward other racial groups.
Kinder and Kam say that public discourse by political “elites” — especially those on the conservative side of the spectrum — has “racialized” means-tested welfare programs. “Programs like … food stamps are understood by whites to largely benefit shiftless black people,” they write.
Those beliefs have persisted even though the Great Recession laid waste to the finances of many white families, too. They account for about 35.5 percent of food stamp recipients. Black Americans are disproportionately represented, but account for only about 23 percent. Latinos account for about 10 percent of recipients, while other racial groups account for smaller percentages, according to government data. (Eighteen percent of food stamp recipients belong to “race unknown.”)
Not that the facts tend to matter in a debate such as this. Nor do common decency and simple compassion hold much sway. If they did, there would be far fewer parents worrying about how to feed their children tonight.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, September 14, 2013
“Republicans Against Reality”: The GOP Has Fallen Victim To Its Own Con Game
Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about policy substance. I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints, like the fact that you can’t cut overall spending without cutting spending on particular programs, or the fact that voting to repeal legislation doesn’t change the law when the other party controls the Senate and the White House.
Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week.
First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation bill, because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill’s steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal spending — and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as there weren’t any specifics, balked at the details. Don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree.
Then House leaders announced plans to hold a vote on doubling the amount of cuts from the food stamp program — a demand that is likely to sink the already struggling effort to agree with the Senate on a farm bill.
Then they held the pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make themselves feel better. (It’s curious how comforting they find the idea of denying health care to millions of Americans.) And then they went home for recess, even though the end of the fiscal year is looming and hardly any of the legislation needed to run the federal government has passed.
In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk.
How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has always been a magic-asterisk kind of guy — someone who makes big claims about having a plan to slash deficits but refuses to spell out any of the all-important details. Back in 2011 the Congressional Budget Office, in evaluating one of Mr. Ryan’s plans, came close to open sarcasm; it described the extreme spending cuts Mr. Ryan was assuming, then remarked, tersely, “No proposals were specified that would generate that path.”
What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away.
When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.
Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.
At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.
The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing.
What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 4, 2013
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