“The Character Of The Caucus”: Thanks To Republican Intrasigence, It’s All About 2016 Now
It wasn’t the House Republicans’ refusal to take up the president’s jobs plan before the last election. Or their reckless games with the debt ceiling when Paul Ryan’s budget called for trillions in fresh debt itself. Or House intransigence when it comes to the Senate’s bipartisan immigration fix. Or even its recent call to nix high, common school standards.
Not that these steps weren’t awful. But somehow they could be put down to “normal” petty politics. The “out” party never wants the jobs picture to improve before an election. The debt ceiling is one of a handful of “forcing devices” that pols of all stripes seize on in a town where nothing really has to happen. One can argue that immigration reform isn’t as urgent as, say, jobs. And stoking phony fears of a federal school takeover is the oldest slander in the book (never mind that these “common core” standards were adopted by states voluntarily, and that the world’s top-performing school systems all have something like them).
No, what finally made me lose it was House Republicans’ warped obsession with Obamacare. This fixation showcases so many noxious traits simultaneously that it reveals the ultimate character of the caucus.
At bottom, Obamacare is a moral assertion that it is wrong when a wealthy nation has 50 million people without health insurance, when medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy for families and when millions of luckless souls are unable to get coverage because they have preexisting conditions. The House GOP today says these are not real problems.
Obamacare addressed these problems with precisely the mechanism that conservative thinkers and Republican policymakers favored (subsidies to buy insurance from competing private carriers with a requirement that everyone be in the insurance pool). Yet the House GOP effectively has said: Even if you adopt the approach our party favors for a problem we used to say was real — a problem that our presidential nominee addressed successfully in his state — we still can’t be with you. We have to damn you as un-American. We have to deceive the public about your aims and methods. We have to do everything in our power to stop you from using our preferred approach to bring a measure of security to the middle class.
It’s the most perverse, irredeemable bait-and-switch since Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. Even Lucy didn’t do it 39 times.
I’ve long been a critic of the House GOP. But something in their poisonous Obamacare stance has made me snap. It’s one thing to think you can’t do business with these people. It’s another to realize these people aren’t operating in the same moral and economic universe.
So here we are. The only question for those seeking American renewal is what will break this gridlock. The only certain answer is that the president’s speech Wednesday will not. Obama is calling for an economy built from the “middle out” (hats off to progressive activists Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, who pushed this smart messaging so relentlessly for two years that it’s become the official Democratic creed).
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 24, 2013
“Rush Limbaugh Is Finished”: With Or Without Cumulus, His Political Power Is Much Diminished
Cumulus Media, the second-largest broadcast radio station owner in the country, may drop Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from its stations, according to Politico’s Dylan Byers. Limbaugh and Hannity are the two highest-rated right-wing talk radio hosts in the country. Byers says they currently air on “more than 40″ Cumulus-owned channels (in markets that include New York City). Limbaugh is highly rated but maybe not that profitable, especially since the boycott took off.
This would be something of a blow to Limbaugh, especially if it meant losing his “flagship” station, New York’s WABC. On the other hand, the show is syndicated by a company owned by the largest owner of radio stations in the country. They’ll likely be able to find a home for him in the most of the markets he’d lose if Cumulus ended his contract.
Of course, while Byers reports that Cumulus has decided not to renew Rush Limbaugh’s contract, reports today describe Limbaugh as ditching Cumulus for WOR, a company owned by Clear Channel.
Whether Limbaugh ends up parting ways with Cumulus or whether this entire Politico article is part of one side’s negotiating tactics almost makes no difference. Limbaugh will remain on the radio in most of the country, with millions of listeners. In a month he may still announce that his contract with Cumulus has been renewed. But however this shakes out, it will still be the case that the Limbaugh Era is over.
The Limbaugh Era spanned roughly Clinton’s inaugural through Bush’s reelection, with his powers peaking, obviously, at Clinton’s impeachment. This was when Limbaugh could create political stars, sink legislation and nearly take down a president. The mainstream press took notice of him and then became completely obsessed. At that time, his army of listeners was enough people to constitute a formidable electoral coalition.
He still has a lot of listeners. The Limbaugh problem, though, is simply a reflection of the GOP problem: His followers are an aging and, consequently, shrinking group of conservative white people, in a country that is rapidly getting less white. The Limbaugh people are still large in number, but their power is diminishing. (Their power has been diminishing for years, in fact, which is how Limbaugh and his less talented peers came to lead them in the first place.)
The first thing to remember is that no one actually has any clue how many people listen to Limbaugh with any regularity. Limbaugh’s audience certainly sounds massive at 14 million weekly listeners, but that supposedly represents any person who tunes into Limbaugh’s show for any period of time over the course of a week. At any given period in his show, though, an average of three million people are tuned to Limbaugh. That’s not nothing, but it’s close. It wouldn’t crack the top 25 broadcast TV shows. And radio ratings involve even more guesswork and estimation (and spin) than television ratings. Limbaugh said his audience was “20 million” 20 years ago and people have just been repeating that number ever since, but no one actually has any clue.
Regardless of its size, this audience is not being replenished with fresh blood. When the Obama people decided, early in his first term, to basically call as much attention to Limbaugh as possible, as part of an effort to make him seem like the unofficial leader of the modern Republican Party, that was because they knew that Limbaugh is among the least popular human beings in the country, especially with people below the age of 40. The strategy did briefly shove Limbaugh back into relevance, but what exactly did he accomplish with that relevance? After an election year in which he openly, depressingly begged for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination, simply so that he could relive his glory years of Clinton-hating, Limbaugh spent the first months of Obama’s presidency attempting to derail the stimulus for some reason, and he failed. The Tea Party freakout, and subsequently the 2010 elections, had nothing to do with Rush. He hated Romney during the 2012 primaries and his eventual awkward support for the Republican nominee was worth nothing.
Like Matt Drudge, who still drives traffic but not the news cycle itself, Limbaugh is a relic of the ’90s. He’s been finished for years. Unfortunately he and the dying conservative movement are going to do their best to destroy the country as it leaves them behind.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 29, 2013
“The Axis Of The Unhinged”: Why Republicans Want To Shut Down The Government, This Time
Count Texas Sen. Ted Cruz among the growing ranks of Republicans who want to shut down the government – because Republicans always look good when threatening a shutdown – over the party’s Quixotic quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Cruz is in Iowa today laying the groundwork for his presumptive 2016 presidential bid and, according to a Tweet from National Review Online’s Robert Costa (h/t Dave Weigel), told conservatives this morning that he won’t support continued funding of the government without a full defunding of Obamacare. That makes him the third GOP senator this month to push that line, joining Utah conservative Mike Lee and Florida’s Marco Rubio, who told a Weekly Standard breakfast last week that “I will not vote for a continuing resolution unless it defunds Obamacare.” (At the risk of being pedantic: The current continuing resolution runs through the end of the current fiscal year; the next funding fight will be over regular appropriations bills, not another continuing resolution.)
As a group, the three men form a conservative thought leader critical mass. Cruz and Lee can be counted on as reliable barometers of the GOP base’s id. Rubio is desperately scrambling to get back into the party base’s good graces after displaying a dangerous proclivity toward actually trying to constructively legislate – as opposed to confining himself to angry stands on principle – on the immigration issue. That sort of thing (an ability to work with political adversaries to get something done) might play well with swing voters in a general presidential election, but it won’t fly in GOP primaries.
It seems clear that while the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are gearing up for a pro-Obamacare push, we can expect an increasing drumbeat of far-right lawmakers and commentators to talk up the idea of shutting down the government barring an Obamacare defunding. Can it be very long before Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul adds his support, completing the Axis of the Unhinged?
Look, the Affordable Care Act remains unpopular with voters. But the groundswell of support for a defund-or-shutdown stand will be confined to consumers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s shtick and redstate.com. I’d like Cruz, Lee and Rubio to explain how exactly the results of the 2012 presidential election – where a president whose signature accomplishment is Obamacare was re-elected by a comfortable margin – can be interpreted as a mandate to threaten government shutdowns.
On the one hand, the whole thing’s as absurd as the endless Obamacare repeal votes the House insists on taking. There’s no chance of Obamacare getting repealed or defunded this year or next. None. Zero. It won’t pass the Senate and it won’t get by the president’s veto stamp.
But that’s also what makes this flavor of Obamacare Derangement Syndrome irresponsible and dangerous. At least the House repeal votes merely waste Congress’s time. Threatening a shutdown is akin to threatening a debt default: Republicans would be holding out the prospect of deliberately harming the economy (as my colleague Pat Garofalo ably illustrated when there was talk of a shutdown in 2011) unless they get their way on policy. Even sustained talk of a shutdown will further undermine public confidence in the government’s ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And it’s also politically dumb for the GOP, which is already suffering from dismal public approval in polls. Opinion surveys show that the GOP is unpopular and that most of the public wants our political leaders to work together to get things done, valuing that over taking uncompromising stands. People like Lee might try to spin a prospective shutdown as the Democrats’ choice – “If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice” – but voters will see through that. What this talk does is present, again, the GOP’s radical, intransigent side to the public – although that may admittedly be the only side the party has left at this point, talk of a party revamp be damned.
But this is what the GOP has become: a poseur party, where the importance of ideology is matched by the way it is expressed – the more aggressive and uncompromising the better. (That’s basically why Liz Cheney is challenging incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi, Wyo., in a primary – sure they’re both conservative, but she brings Fox News flash to the table.)
Talk of a government shutdown will boost Cruz’s presidential prospects and help rescue Rubio’s with the GOP base. And really, that’s all the party seems to care about these days anyway.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 19, 2013
“An Imaginary Dark Vision Of The Future”: Ted Cruz And His Manufactured Doctrine Of Pretend Paranoia
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has found a new and improved angle with which to push his war against marriage equality in America.
In an interview with Christian Broadcast Network’s David Brody, Cruz raised a full-scale red alert when announcing that gay marriage will put us on the road to placing our First Amendment protections at severe risk.
Seriously. He really said that.
“If you look at other nations that have gone down the road towards gay marriage, that’s the next step of where it gets enforced. It gets enforced against Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages, who speak out and preach biblical truths on marriage and that has been defined elsewhere as hate speech — as inconsistent with the enlightened view of government.”
Fearful that my own support of equal rights under the law for all Americans might lead to the loss of my constitutionally protected opportunity to be as offensive, prejudiced, bigoted and disrespectful in my own speech as humanly possible, I went looking for those ‘nations’ Cruz referred to—nations where same-sex marriage has led to the criminalization of free speech.
Fortunately, Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” was there to show me the way by relaying the sorry tale of Aake Green, a Pentecostal pastor in Sweden who was prosecuted under Swedish law for having some unkind things to say about gay marriage when addressing his congregation.
Writes The Blaze —
“Green’s plight corroborates the worries that Cruz has surrounding America’s current trajectory. In 2003, the preacher (referring to Green) likened homosexuality to cancer during one of his sermons. As a result, he was brought up on charges over these claims — statements that, in America, would currently be protected by the First Amendment… Mr. Green was convicted in June 2004 but allowed to remain free pending appeal.”
Never mind that Pastor Green was acquitted by Sweden’s Supreme Court as a result of a determination that Green’s speech was protected by the European Convention on Human Rights—the superseding law protecting Green’s right to say any ridiculous thing in public he likes. And given that the laws established by the European Convention take precedence over a Swedish law that was in conflict, the Swedish law under which the good pastor was prosecuted was rendered moot and unenforceable leading to no prosecutions of this nature in Sweden since this one, solitary 2005 case.
For that matter, I can find no evidence of any such prosecutions anywhere in the world, despite Cruz’s assertion that his paranoiac premonition is based on the examples of multiple nations.
While Senator Cruz was unwilling or unable to follow the Swedish case to its happy ending when forming his fears for a future without First Amendment rights in America as a direct result of gay marriage —happy endings don’t fit well into Cruz’s doctrine of pretend paranoia—one might have thought that this one-time Solicitor General for the State of Texas would have been able to research the law of his own nation before making his dire prediction.
In the famous 2011 Supreme Court case of Snyder v. Phelps, the free speech rights of the despicable Westboro Baptist Church—the church group famous for crashing funerals so that they may scream terrible things about gay people at grieving funeral attendees—were upheld by an 8-1 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts, while referring to the behavior of Westboro Church members as “vile”, stated—
“We cannot react to [Snyder’s] pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
Could the Chief Justice’s statement possibly be more on point when it comes to contradicting Ted Cruz’s dark vision of a future with same-sex marriage?
And yet, Senator Ted Cruz, a man whose job was once to argue cases on behalf of his state before that very same United States Supreme Court, wants us to believe that he fears that gay marriage puts us at risk of forfeiting our right to free speech.
Nobody should be too terribly surprised as this is but the most recent expression of Cruz’s political formula guaranteed to send a warm thrill up the leg of right-wing extremists everywhere.
It is a formula as simple as it is winning.
You take a political issue that rattles the right-wing to its core, draw a line connecting the legalization of that issue to the possible loss of a constitutional right—no matter how ridiculous and far fetched the connection may be— and…presto…you’ve got one great political pitch sure to get the attention of those who thrive on the Doctrine of Pretend Paranoia.
This is not the first time Cruz has played this game.
Recall, if you will, that day on the Senate floor when Cruz’s suggestion that background checks before purchasing guns would place us on a path to a national registry for gun owners, despite the fact that the legislation under debate—the Manchin-Toomey Bill—specifically barred such a federal registry.
If you do not recall this, you might want to take a look at Cruz’s debate with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as Schumer highlights the preposterous nature of Cruz’s paranoiac visions of the future.
Just like his efforts to connect same-sex marriage with the destruction of First Amendment rights, in the instance of gun control, Cruz took a piece of legislation that deeply upset his base, despite being popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, and drew a line to an imaginary consequence.
What happened?
Cruz’s base ate it up and the legislation went down to defeat.
Mr. Cruz’s latest effort to scare the crap out of his right-wing following—no matter how ridiculous the perceived end result of a policy with which Cruz followers disagree with may be—is simply a refinement of the time-honored and highly effective GOP practice of using fear and loathing to inspire votes. All one need do is look at the success of a “death panel” pitch that did so much to skew public opinion against the Affordable Care Act and the effectiveness of this approach is crystal clear.
Of course there was no rational connection between the actual healthcare reform law and the paranoiac prospect of government death panels, but that really did not matter, did it?
Just as Cruz ignored the realities of the Manchin-Toomey background check legislation which specifically barred the national gun registry Cruz claimed to fear, Senator Cruz knew his delusional argument would appeal to the paranoia of his followers; and just as the 2011 Supreme Court case would make Cruz’s paranoid vision of gay marriage leading to the destruction of First Amendment rights nothing short of preposterous, Senator Cruz knows full well that creating fear and loathing, in his own unique style, makes for a reliable game plan as he begins his drive towards the White House.
Let’s hope that, in the final analysis, American voters will see through Ted Cruz’s fully manufactured and dark vision of America—or at least the pretend vision that the Senator wishes to sell us. There are enough ‘real life’ things in this world to be paranoid about without purposely supporting a candidate dedicated to purveying his pretend brand of paranoia in the hopes of frightening Americans into going down dark roads that don’t actually exist.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 24, 2013
“Breaking Point”: With No Light At The End Of The Tunnel, John Boehner Is Losing Control
Trust between John Boehner and his Republican Caucus members has worn so thin that he’s been forced to swat down rumors (again) this week that he’s retiring, while conservatives worry the speaker is plotting to pull a fast one on them in the immigration reform debate.
Of the 234 Republicans in the House, just 20 percent reliably support the speaker, according to a recent Washington Post analysis. And a new poll shows that among Republican voters overall, just 37 percent think GOP leaders are taking the party in the right direction, while 52 percent say leadership is going the wrong way. Compare that to 72 percent of Democrats who favor their party leadership’s approach. And all this comes on the heels of the Farm Bill debacle, the latest in a string of legislative misjudgments for Boehner and his leadership team.
But nowhere is the divide between leadership and base more apparent than on immigration reform, where conservative House members and outside activists are now worried that Boehner will actively deceive them through procedural trickery to pass his alleged ”amnesty” agenda. Never mind that it’s not even clear Boehner really wants a comprehensive bill passed. He said Sunday that immigration isn’t his top priority (though he also said, “If I come out and say I’m for this and I’m for that, all I’m doing is making my job harder”). And never mind that Boehner has repeatedly pledged to stick to the “Hastert Rule,” the informal rule that nothing be given a vote unless it already has support from a majority of Republicans.
But some House conservatives are convinced that Boehner is planning a secret “gambit to save [the] amnesty agenda,” as the conservative news site TownHall explained yesterday. When the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill, lawmakers meet in a bicameral Conference Committee, where they hash out the differences and produce a single final bill. The Senate has already passed a bill with a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The House has not passed anything, in part because conservatives fear that Boehner will use it as a backdoor way to introduce “amnesty” into the final bill.
TownHall explained that “the worry among Capitol Hill conservatives was that Boehner would take any House-passed bill with the word ‘immigration’ in it and set up a conference that would produce a bill with the trappings of compromise,” but would really be something unacceptable to the right. Conservative firebrands like Rep. Steve Stockman and Steve King have already raised the alarm. Ann Coulter told Fox News, “If they pass a bill that does nothing but enforce e-verify, does nothing but enforce the fence, it will go into conference with the Senate and it will come out an amnesty bill.” “Ann Coulter got it exactly right,” an unnamed senior aide to a conservative lawmaker told Breitbart News. “We are scared to death of what we figure is already Boehner’s end game.”
What these conservatives seem to miss is that the House would still need to pass whatever comes out of the conference committee. And the only way a pathway to citizenship will pass after the conference, as now, is if conservative Republicans allow it, or if Boehner is willing to break the Hastert rule and let it pass with Democratic votes. But he’s already said: “For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House, It’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.”
If Boehner went back on that pledge, he’d face open revolt in his caucus, just as he would if he broke it now to bring the Senate bill up for a vote (which would likely pass with Democratic votes). Boehner has also so far done everything he can to avoid a revolt, considering his speakership would be on the line, and there’s no reason to think he’d be any more willing to risk it in a few months, after a conference committee, than he is now.
Perhaps it’s that conservatives don’t trust themselves to recognize secret “amnesty” in a conference bill. Breitbart’s Matt Boyle warned that the report would only “get a short amount of time for actual review, and votes would be whipped up and sold using talking points just like how the Senate bill passed,” as if talking points are some kind of Jedi mind tricks. But if a conferenced bill contained a pathway to citizenship and they vote for it, that’s on them, especially given their “read the bill” rhetoric.
Worse yet for Boehner, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Immigration reform will come to a head after the August recess, just as the debate ramps up on the debt ceiling, another issue which will inevitably pit Boehner against his rank-and-file. Maybe retirement will start to sound like a pretty good idea.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 23, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 