“What’s Wrong With The GOP’s ‘Hell No’ Faction”: They’re Draining The Vitality From America’s Democracy
Ah, August — that time of year when the going gets tough … and Congress gets going.
On vacation, that is. And, to be fair, maybe Congress needs a vacation. All the stress of not passing laws and constantly thwarting any attempt by President Obama to fix America’s problems seems to be straining their sanity.
For starters, if you thought that, surely, partisan posturing by far-right congresscritters couldn’t get any nuttier, you’d be wrong. Last month, the GOP claimed that all the talk about impeaching President Barack Obama is being led by — guess who? — Barack Obama!
If you’ll recall, the top Republican leader, John Boehner (having discovered that the larger public is appalled that his party would even consider wasting time on such extremist nonsense) tried to do a political backflip. Impeachment talk, he fumed, is “a scam started by Democrats at the White House.” No Republican lawmakers, he barked to the media, are even discussing it.
Boehner, Boehner, Boehner! Apparently he didn’t hear Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who’s No. 2 on his own GOP leadership team, tell Fox News that he refuses to rule out impeachment. Or Rep. Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan exult that “it would be a dream come true” to impeach Obama, and that he has pursued advice from experts on how to proceed. Or Iowa’s Rep. Steve King, saying flatly, “We need to bring impeachment hearings immediately.” How about Randy Weber of Texas, who put it unequivocally: “The president deserves to be impeached, plain and simple.” And Georgia’s Jack Kingston confirmed that: “Not a day goes by when people don’t talk to us about impeachment.”
Still, Boehner did receive some backing on his claim that no one in the GOP has given a moment’s thought to impeachment. The always insightful Tea Party radio ranter Glenn Beck, for example, waded in with this question to his audience on a recent broadcast: “Have you spoken to one person (pushing such an idea)?” he demanded. “No one” has used the “I” word, he snapped. But, in fact, Beck does know one person who has: Himself! Also, Sarah Palin! And at least a dozen other likeminded sparklies on the way-out far-right horizon.
Right up to the time they departed Capitol Hill to enjoy vacations that will stretch through all of this month, much of September, and a good part of October, GOP howlers in Congress were pointing to several emergency issues that needed to be addressed — such as the humanitarian crisis of immigrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and the growing crisis of our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. But … nothing. They simply adjourned and bolted off the job.
OK. They did do one thing. Incapable of legislating, they litigated. Boehner filed a frivolous lawsuit against President Obama, charging that he’s been governing unilaterally by issuing executive orders. But there are big problems with their suit.
One: Obama has issued far fewer executive orders than did his GOP predecessor, George W. Bush. Two: Their suit claims the president defied Congress by inadequately implementing the Obamacare health reform — but, hello? Republicans fought that reform tooth and nail and are still trying to stop it from being implemented, meaning they’re suing him for not doing something they don’t want done (another indicator that Congress does need to take an extended leave for mental health reasons). And three: As they vacated the Capitol, howling House leaders said that, in their absence, Obama should immediately deport the terrorized and traumatized migrant children who fled to the U.S. this summer from the gang violence and implacable poverty they faced in their Central America homes.
Again … Hello? The GOP’s call for deportations was a demand that — get this — the president should act unilaterally, by issuing an executive order.
These ideological zealots are nutty, but they’re clogging the roadway, preventing any of the progress that America desperately needs. As a result, not only is the public fed up with them but voter turnout is plummeting this year as people see that the “hell no” faction has turned democratic participation into a farce — so why bother?
Put away all hope for honesty or seriousness, ye who enter the nuthouse presently known as Boehner’s U.S. House of Representatives. Their antics could be laughed off — except that they’re draining the vitality from America’s democracy.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, August 13, 2014
“None Dare Call It Impeachment”: We Will Look Back On This Moment In Washington As The Week That Irony Died
Let’s talk about something cheerful. How about impeachment?
Hey, it’s been a depressing month for news. If you want to look on the bright side, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.
The possibility of actual impeachment is not something that keeps Barack Obama up at night. Modern history suggests there’s nothing Congress could do that the American public would hate more. Yet impeachment talk has been bounding around the Republican right for ages. The South Dakota Republican Party passed a resolution calling for impeachment at their annual convention this year. (We all know the famous saying: “As South Dakota goes, so goes North Dakota.”) Sarah Palin brings up impeachment virtually every day. Some members of Congress use it to energize the crazy base.
For instance, Representative Ted Yoho of Florida once posted a list of arguments for impeachment on his campaign website. I am mentioning this in part because it’s always fun to write “Ted Yoho.” Also because I don’t think I’ve ever had an opportunity to note that during his previous election season, Ted Yoho told a church group that he wished the right to vote was limited to property owners.
Last week, the Democrats started picking up the impeachment banner in the form of pretending to take the Republican threats seriously. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said it would be “foolish to discount the possibility.” Democratic fund-raisers sent out warnings of impending impeachment danger to their own base and were tickled by the enthusiastic response.
Now, Republican leaders are desperately trying to change the subject. The House speaker, John Boehner, called impeachment talk “a scam started by Democrats at the White House.” Karl Rove claimed Obama was trying to create a “constitutional crisis where none exists.”
“Do you think anyone in Washington in the G.O.P. is serious about impeachment?” demanded the radio host Glenn Beck. “Do you think one person? Have you spoken to one person? No one. So who wants it? The president does.” Actually, as Kendall Breitman pointed out in Politico, Beck had called for impeachment his very own self about a year earlier.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the majority party was busy showing the nation its serious side by voting to sue President Obama for violating the Constitution. Look, everybody has their own way of demonstrating that they’re sticking to the business at hand. Republicans are upset about the president’s attempt to deal with problems by executive order when Congress fails to address them with legislation. Obama’s record when it comes to executive orders is actually rather paltry compared with some of his Republican predecessors. Nevertheless, the Republicans have many, many complaints, all of which involve mention of the founding fathers.
You could not help but suspect that if Speaker Boehner had it to do all over again, he’d never have brought this idea up. Democrats cheerfully urged a really, really long debate on the subject, but the Republican-dominated Rules Committee decided that the whole thing should be dispatched with as quickly as possible. So fast, in fact, that it gave the lawsuit against the president the same debate time as a bill on deregulating pesticides.
The Republicans focused on — yes! — the founding fathers. It was, said Representative Candice Miller of Michigan, a battle against “tyranny, Mr. Speaker. Tyranny.” She is the leader of the Committee on House Administration, the only woman to lead a House committee under the current leadership. We will not dwell on the fact that Miller’s committee is basically in charge of housekeeping.
Meanwhile, the Democrats kept bringing up the I-word. “I sincerely believe that you are trying to set the stage for a despicable impeachment proceeding,” said Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina. Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the House Rules chairman, denied that suing the president was a step on the slippery slope to impeachment. He did that by defending the impeachment of President Clinton, which was, of course, so exceedingly successful that Clinton now is the most popular individual in the nation except perhaps for Boo the World’s Cutest Dog and the hamster that eats tiny burritos.
Rather than suing the president for everything he’s ever done, the Republicans tried to improve their legal prospects by picking a particular executive order. They settled on the one postponing enforcement of part of Obamacare that requires businesses to provide health coverage for their employees. “Are you willing to let any president choose what laws to execute and what laws to change?” demanded Boehner.
“Not a single one of them voted for the Affordable Care Act,” said Louise Slaughter, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. “They spent $ 79 million holding votes to kill it. And now they’re going to sue him for not implementing it fast enough.”
We will look back on this moment in Washington as The Week That Irony Died.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 30, 2014
“Calling It What It Is”: Holder Sees Racism In Obama Opposition — He’s Right
Right-wing pundits are jumping all over Attorney General Eric Holder for daring to suggest on Sunday that “racial animus” plays a role in the “level of vehemence” that’s been directed at President Obama. They’re denouncing him for “playing the race card” and “stoking racial divisions.”
Who do they think they’re fooling?
The rhetoric is what’s hateful. Calling people out for it is not.
The racism Holder described has been obvious since the 2008 campaign, when Obama was portrayed as someone who was not a “real American” — a Muslim, a Kenyan, a communist, even a terrorist sympathizer.
Since then, an entire movement has been built around the thoroughly discredited notion that the president’s birth certificate is a fake. And that’s just the beginning.
Newt Gingrich has called Obama the “food stamp president” and referred to his “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”
Rush Limbaugh has said Obama — and Oprah Winfrey, too, by the way — have reached the pinnacle of their professions only because they’re black. He added this week that “so-called conservative media types” praised Holder’s nomination only because he’s black.
Glenn Beck has said the president, whose mother was white, has a “deep-seated hatred for white people, or white culture.”
Conservative hero and former rock star Ted Nugent, who was invited to campaign with the GOP nominee for Texas governor, called the president a “subhuman mongrel.”
A Confederate flag was waved in front of the White House during last year’s “Million Vet March.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina screamed “You lie!” during the president’s address to Congress in September 2009. When has that happened to a president before?
All manner of overtly racist posters have been seen at tea party rallies, including one depicting the president as a “witch doctor.”
We’ve repeatedly seen stories about conservative politicians sharing racist jokes about Obama.
And, we’ve seen an explosive growth of radical-right groups, including armed militias, since Obama was elected, and repeated threats that violence is needed to “take our country back” from the “tyranny” of Obama. This is part of a backlash to the growing diversity in our country, as symbolized by the presence of a black man in the White House.
I grew up in rural Alabama during the Jim Crow years and lived through the civil rights movement, when white supremacists did everything they could, including committing violent atrocities, to turn back the tide of progress. And I’ve stared across the courtroom at some of America’s most vicious hatemongers — men like neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Cross, who recently killed three people and once targeted me. I know racism when I see it.
No one, of course, is suggesting that merely disagreeing with Obama is evidence of racism. That’s clearly not true.
But we have a political party and a right-wing media machine that pander incessantly to the racist reactionaries in our society, often through code words. It’s been going on since Nixon implemented his “Southern strategy” of appealing to white resentment in the wake of the civil rights movement.
I wish it weren’t so. But it is simply undeniable. We should call it what it is.
By: Morris Dees, Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center; The Huffington Post Blog, July 17, 2014
“Bordering On Heartless”: Protecting Ourselves From The Youngest Of Refugees
Glenn Beck says he has come under fierce attack from some of his fellow conservatives for a grave transgression.
His crime? He announced plans to bring food, water, teddy bears and soccer balls to at least some of the tens of thousands of Central American children who have crossed the border into the United States.
“Through no fault of their own, they are caught in political crossfire,” Beck said. “Anyone, left or right, seeking political gain at the expense of these desperate, vulnerable, poor and suffering people are reprehensible.”
Beck, not averse to a certain grandiosity, let us know that “I’ve never taken a position more deadly to my career than this.” But assume he’s right — and he may well be. It’s one more sign of how the crisis at our border has brought out the very worst in our political system and a degree of plain nastiness that we should not be proud of as a nation.
Let’s stipulate: This is a difficult problem. Unless the United States is willing to open its borders to all comers — a goal of only the purest libertarians and a very few liberals — we will face agonizing choices about whom to let in and whom to turn away.
Moreover, it’s clearly true, as The Post editorialized, that “there is nothing humanitarian in tacitly encouraging tens of thousands of children to risk their lives, often at the hands of cutthroat smugglers, to enter this country illegally.”
But instead of dealing with this problem in a thoughtful way reflecting shared responsibility across party lines, President Obama’s critics quickly turned to the business of — if I may quote Beck — seeking political gain. Last week, the only issue that seemed to matter was whether Obama visited the border.
It’s not just partisan politics, either. It should bother religious people that politicians pay a lot of attention when conservative church leaders speak out against contraception and gay rights but hardly any when religious voices suggest that these children deserve empathy and care.
There are those in our clergy who could usefully consider whether they speak a lot louder when they’re talking about sexuality than when they’re preaching about love. Nonetheless, many religious leaders are condemning callousness toward these kids.
“The church cannot be silent,” the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, wrote in Time magazine, “as angry groups of people stoking the flames of fear yell at buses filled with helpless immigrant children and women.”
And Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the media director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called for “a moral conscience moment” akin to the response during the civil rights era “in the welcoming of children and others escaping the violence in such countries as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.”
It is said, and it’s true, that the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act that swept through Congress and was signed by President George W. Bush in December 2008 has had the unintended consequence of encouraging the Central American children to head north. To protect victims of sex trafficking, the law guaranteed an immigration hearing to unaccompanied minors, except for those from Canada and Mexico.
As the bill was making its way through Congress, members of both parties could not stop congratulating themselves for their compassion. The bill, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) said, arose from “exemplary bipartisan cooperation” and showed how big-hearted we are.
“Together, let us end the nightmare of human trafficking,” he declared, “and lead the world to see, in the poignant words of Alexis de Tocqueville, that America is great because America is good.”
Suddenly, we are far less interested in being “good” than in protecting our borders — even if those we are tring to “protect” ourselves from are the youngest of refugees.
All the pressure now is to change the Wilberforce Act so it would no longer apply to Central American children. There’s a strong logic to this. The law does create a powerful incentive for unaccompanied minors from Central America (which is not that much farther away than Mexico) to seek entry, en masse, to our country.
But there is another logic: that the anti-trafficking law really did embody a “good” instinct by holding that we should, as much as we can, treat immigrant children with special concern. Do we rush to repeal that commitment the moment it becomes inconvenient? Or should we first seek other ways to solve the problem? Yes, policymakers should be mindful of unintended consequences. But all of us should ponder the cost of politically convenient indifference.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 13, 2014
“This President Should Be Able To Do Absolutely Nothing”: In Dramatic Pointless Gesture, Boehner To Sue Obama
Pretty much since the moment Barack Obama finished speaking the oath of office in January 2009, Republicans have been charging that he was abusing his power, exceeding his authority and acting like a tyrant. You might remember that for a time in those early days, conservatives (led by Glenn Beck) were obsessed with the idea that Obama had appointed a group of “czars” who were wielding unaccountable power to implement all sorts of nefarious schemes. They were unable to say how a “czar” differed from “a person who works in the White House,” and that particular iteration of their outrage faded, but the underlying suspicion only grew. In the years since, the list of alleged usurpations of authority has grown daily, the charge that Obama is “lawless” becoming a constant.
At its root is the idea that Barack Obama’s presidency is inherently illegitimate, and whatever he does in that office must be illegal, or nearly so. This often translates into complaints about process, so that even when they lose, Republicans charge that the game was rigged. For instance, conservatives have said thousands of times that the Affordable Care Act, despite being probably the most exhaustively debated piece of legislation in decades, was “rammed through” Congress before anybody realized what was happening. Actions that all presidents undertake, like making recess appointments, signing executive orders, or simply having agencies write regulations, become yet more evidence of Obama’s horrific authoritarian rule.
It’s safe to say that many if not most Republicans would be eager to impeach Obama were such a move not a guaranteed political disaster for them. So John Boehner has decided to pursue a kind of impeachment-lite, announcing that the House of Representatives will be suing the president for abusing his power. “The Constitution makes it clear that the president’s job is to faithfully execute the law,” he said. “In my view, the president has not faithfully executed the law.” It’s impossible to tell at this point whether the suit has any merit, because Boehner didn’t actually cite any specific transgressions the suit will allege.
But my guess is that the suit will throw in every process complaint the Republicans have had over the last five years, because it’s mostly about Boehner’s right flank, both in Congress and in the Republican electorate. Even if the suit gets thrown out of court, Boehner will still be able to say to the eternally angry members to his right, “Hey, I’m the guy who sued Obama! I hate him as much as you do!”
It’s irresistible to charge Republicans with hypocrisy, especially given the fact that they were unconcerned when the Bush administration pushed so vigorously at the limits of presidential power. Bush and his staff regularly ignored laws they preferred not to follow, often with the thinnest of justifications, whether it was claiming executive privilege to ignore congressional subpoenas or issuing 1,200 signing statements declaring the president’s intention to disregard certain parts of duly passed laws. (They pushed the limits of vice presidential power, too—Dick Cheney famously argued that since the vice president is also president of the Senate, he was a member of both the executive and legislative branches, yet actually a member of neither and thus not subject to either’s legal constraints. Seriously, he actually believed that.)
Needless to say, at the time Republicans were perfectly fine with these moves, because when the Bush administration was doing these things, it was in support of policies they favored. And that’s how it goes: Process complaints are almost always a cover for substantive disagreement. A backroom deal made to pass a piece of legislation you agree with is just how the sausage gets made; a deal made for a piece of legislation you disagree with is evidence of deep corruption. A filibuster of a bill you oppose is a principled use of established procedures; a filibuster of a bill you favor is cynical obstructionism. And it’s a little rich to hear congressional Republicans wail that Obama has subverted their will, when their will is that this president should be able to do absolutely nothing.
To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s impossible that there could be any merit to whatever claims Boehner and his colleagues will make. There may have been situations in which Obama pushed presidential prerogatives beyond what the law and the Constitution allow, which the courts will decide. But this question comes up with every president, both because they all want to pursue their goals and try to find every means at their disposal to do so, and because the limits of that power are somewhat vague and complex. As it happens, in numeric terms, Obama has been far more restrained than his predecessor; he has issued fewer executive orders than other recent presidents, and has also used signing statements only occasionally (although recently he cited one of his signing statements as justification for failing to notify Congress 30 days before the release of Taliban prisoners in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl).
The numbers aren’t really the point, though; the question is whether Obama actually ever exceeded his authority. This lawsuit may help us understand whether that occurred, and the result might set a useful precedent to guide future presidents. But I doubt it. More likely, it’ll be an intensely partisan document whose purpose is to shake a fist at the president Republicans so despise, and it’ll get tossed out of court and thrown in the dustbin where it belongs, one more futile, angry gesture from an opposition that has lost the ability to offer anything else.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 26, 2014
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