“Corporate Money Machine Grinds On”: Lobbyist Parties At RNC Narrowly Skirt Ethics Rules
The convention stage may have been empty on Monday, thanks to Hurricane Isaac, but the corporate money machine grinded on as special interests with business before Congress put on swanky gatherings for key lawmakers.
It’s actually against Congressional ethics rules for lobbyists to throw parties for lawmakers at the national conventions—thanks to a 2007 reform bill passed in the wake of the Abramoff scandals—but Monday night showed that the system can easily be gamed.
For example, only about a half-mile from the Tampa Bay Times Forum, a collection of big transportation companies threw a party for transportation “leaders” in Congress. Actually, to be technically accurate, a front group called GOP Convention Strategies sponsored the party—and that’s how everyone involved avoided violating ethics rules. Since GOP Convention Strategies is not a registered lobbyist, it was free to throw a party for whomever it wanted. But it was crystal clear to everyone involved who was paying for the party, and what the goal was.
For $20,000, a corporation could “sponsor” the GOP Convention Strategies event, which would get it prominent placement on all advertising and marketing for the party, as well as twenty-five tickets to the party and a chance to address the crowd personally. This presented any interested transportation company (and its lobbyists) the opportunity to meet and glad-hand key lawmakers from the House and Senate—the exact same thing the 2007 law was trying to outlaw. “In reality, lobbyists are behind this party, but the ethics rules are too porous to recognize the reality,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen.
Outside the event, which was held at Stump’s Supper Club in the Channelside district, there was a prominent sign that said “THANK YOU” above the logos of many major transportation companies, including BNSF Railways, Canadian National Railway, Norfolk Southern, Expedia and several others. (No advertising for GOP Convention Strategies, though).
I spotted Representative John Mica, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, holding court on the patio before the event began. His committee passed out a massive transportation bill this year that was repeatedly slammed as a massive giveaway to special interests. (“This is an earmark for a handful of wealthy people who own these companies. This is a windfall,” a transportation union official told the Huffington Post.) Among many heinous provisions, his committee’s version stripped rail-industry workers of federal minimum wage and overtime protections. Rail companies—the very ones sponsoring this party—often pay workers only the minimum wage, and many employees are forced to work long hours during long-distance hauls.
Senator Jim Inhofe, the ranking member and potential future chair of the Senate Public Works Committee and a key figure in getting that transportation bill through the Senate, was also there. I caught him coming out of the party after about ninety minutes inside, and he amiably said he had a “great” time. I asked who was throwing the party, and he responded “it’s a transportation thing. Transportation industry.” I asked if he spoke with any lobbyists, and Inhofe said “it’s funny, I don’t remember meeting many,” before his staff shooed me away. (And called me a “punk” for good measure).
This is hardly the only party of this nature in Tampa Bay this week. The calendar is full of them, each carefully calibrated to avoid violating ethics rules—the storm may stop the speeches, but won’t stop the all-important cash from flowing.
“A Debris Strewn Mess”: A Storm The GOP Didn’t Expect
The uninvited participation of a hurricane at next week’s Republican convention would be superfluous. Buffeted by powerful internal winds, the party may be flooded with cash, but it’s already kind of a debris-strewn mess.
Who would have imagined that Topic A, in the days before GOP delegates gather in Tampa, would be abortion? Certainly the thought never crossed the minds of the convention planners who intended this four-day infomercial to be a nonstop indictment of President Obama’s performance on the economy. But the old line about the relationship between the political parties and their candidates — “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line” — is so last century.
Party leaders will blame Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) for airing his appalling views about “legitimate rape.” But if you discount Akin’s bizarre notions about female reproduction, he was only stating official Republican policy on abortion as laid out in the platform that delegates will be asked to approve Monday: “The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”
Presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who once was pro-choice, now says he is against abortion except in cases of rape or incest or when the mother’s life is endangered. But his party claims to believe, as Akin does, that there should be no exceptions. Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), agrees with Akin but has switched into “whatever Mitt says” mode.
There is no way to tidy up these contradictions. For decades, since the Ronald Reagan era, the Republican playbook has been to patronize social conservatives in the primaries and the party platform on issues such as abortion — and then, upon taking office, do little or nothing for the cause. But social conservatives turned their frustration into activism and eventually gained a measure of power within the party that the GOP establishment finds highly inconvenient.
Anti-abortion crusaders expect the party to practice what it preaches, even though abortion rights are guaranteed under Roe v. Wade and public opinion is strongly opposed to an absolute ban.
Similarly, evangelicals expect GOP action on their belief that the wall between church and state should be demolished. All right, that’s my phrasing, not theirs. But I don’t know how else to interpret the aim of officeholders such as Akin, who has spent his 12 years in Congress fighting to increase the role of religion in government. “At the heart of liberalism,” he once said, “really is a hatred for God.”
The Republican Party also welcomed the energy, enthusiasm and votes of the tea party movement. Was the GOP establishment ever really serious about staging a “second American revolution” or slashing the federal government back to what it was in 1789? Not on your life. The recent pattern is that government grows much faster under Republican presidents than under Democrats. You can look it up.
Patronizing the tea party and enlisting many of its adherents as candidates helped the GOP win an impressive string of victories in 2010 and take control of the House of Representatives. But Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has been struggling ever since to control unruly freshmen to whom the unthinkable — triggering a catastrophic default on U.S. government debt, for example — sounds like a plan.
Tension between idealists and pragmatists is inevitable in politics, but the struggle taking place within today’s Republican Party is extreme. The GOP believes in limited government that stays out of our business and lets us live our lives — but also wants to police every pregnancy in the land. The party says it wants to cut wasteful federal spending — but also insists on showering the Pentagon with billions for weapons systems the generals don’t even want. The party says it wants to balance the budget — but endorses a plan, authored by Ryan, that cuts taxes for the wealthy without specifying the offsetting budget cuts that would be required to keep deficits from ballooning out of control.
Being a “big tent” party is never easy. The GOP, for all of its divisions, is full of energy and passion. What unites the various factions is the task of defeating Obama, and on this point there will be no dissent in Tampa.
But why does the Republican Party seek power? What does it really stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? What kind of America does it envision?
Keep an eye on that storm track as Isaac plows toward Florida. Maybe the elusive answers to those questions are blowin’ in the wind.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 23, 2012
“Limousine Jerks”: The Rise Of The “Drawbridge Republicans”
As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.
Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.
Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.
(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).
Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.
Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”
Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”
Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2012
“Recreating The Great Depression”: Paul Ryan, John Galt, Gold And God
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing.
In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
And Mr. Ryan is one of those devotees. True, in recent years, he has tried to downplay his Randism, calling it an “urban legend.” It’s not hard to see why: Rand’s fervent atheism — not to mention her declaration that “abortion is a moral right” — isn’t what the G.O.P. base wants to hear.
But Mr. Ryan is being disingenuous. In 2005, he told the Atlas Society, which is devoted to promoting Rand’s ideas, that she inspired his political career: “If I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He also declared that Rand’s work was required reading for his staff and interns.
And the Ryan fiscal program clearly reflects Randian notions. As I documented in my last column, Mr. Ryan’s reputation for being serious about the budget deficit is completely undeserved; his policies would actually increase the deficit. But he is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand’s worship of the successful and contempt for “moochers.”
This last point is important. In pushing for draconian cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that aid the needy, Mr. Ryan isn’t just looking for ways to save money. He’s also, quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor — for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
Somehow, I doubt that Americans forced to rely on unemployment benefits and food stamps in a depressed economy feel that they’re living in a comfortable hammock.
But wait, there’s more: “Atlas Shrugged” apparently shaped Mr. Ryan’s views on monetary policy, views that he clings to despite having been repeatedly, completely wrong in his predictions.
In early 2011, Mr. Ryan, newly installed as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, gave Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, a hard time over his expansionary policies. Rising commodity prices and long-term interest rates, he asserted, were harbingers of high inflation to come; “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,” he intoned, “than debase its currency.”
Since then, inflation has remained quiescent while long-term rates have plunged — and the U.S. economy would surely be in much worse shape than it is if Mr. Bernanke had allowed himself to be bullied into monetary tightening. But Mr. Ryan seems undaunted in his monetary views. Why?
Well, it’s right there in that 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he declared that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” when thinking about monetary policy. Who? Never mind. That speech (which clocks in at a mere 23 paragraphs) is a case of hard-money obsession gone ballistic. Not only does the character in question, a Galt sidekick, call for a return to the gold standard, he denounces the notion of paper money and demands a return to gold coins.
For the record, the U.S. currency supply has consisted overwhelmingly of paper money, not gold and silver coins, since the early 1800s. So if Mr. Ryan really thinks that Francisco d’Anconia had it right, he wants to turn the clock back not one but two centuries.
Does any of this matter? Well, if the Republican ticket wins, Mr. Ryan will surely be an influential force in the next administration — and bear in mind, too, that he would, as the cliché goes, be a heartbeat away from the presidency. So it should worry us that Mr. Ryan holds monetary views that would, if put into practice, go a long way toward recreating the Great Depression.
And, beyond that, consider the fact that Mr. Ryan is considered the modern G.O.P.’s big thinker. What does it say about the party when its intellectual leader evidently gets his ideas largely from deeply unrealistic fantasy novels?
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 23, 2012
“The Circle Of Money”: Romney Fund Bankrolled Sheldon Adelson
A fund partially owned by Mitt Romney lent GOP mega donor Sheldon Adelson’s company $3 million, according to hundreds of pages of previously confidential documents obtained by Gawker and published today.
Romney and his wife have millions of dollars invested in a blind trust, which owns dozens of opaque funds and investment vehicles, including one called Sankaty High Yield Partners II LP. The content of the fund and others like it were a mystery before the documents came to light. While there will undoubtedly be more discoveries to come from the cache, one immediate revelation is that Sankaty fund, based in Delaware for tax purposes, lent over $3 million to Las Vegas Sands, the casino company owned by Adelson. The fund made two loans of $2.4 million and $600,000 in 2009 to the Sands. Romney’s IRA held between $250,000 and $500,000 in the partnership, and made $50,000 and $100,000 from it in 2011.
Adelson has become the largest donor to the Republican Party and conservative outside groups, dropping at least $70 million. Adelson initially supported Newt Gingrich in the GOP primary, but switched his allegiance to Romney and has since given $10 million to the main super PAC backing the presumed GOP nominee.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, August 23, 2012
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