“The War On ACORN Must Never Die”: The Nonsense Is Back, Republicans Tackling Imaginary Problems
Remember the community group called ACORN? Rest assured, congressional Republicans do.
As regular readers know, I’ve occasionally marveled at the right’s preoccupation with the organization, which permanently closed its doors several years ago. As recently as two years ago, Public Policy Polling found that nearly half of Republican voters believed President Obama only won re-election because of ACORN’s interference – even though ACORN didn’t exist at the time.
Such paranoia has been especially common in Congress, where Republicans continued to insist on provisions in spending bills that blocked ACORN from receiving public funding, despite its non-existence.
All of that changed, however, over the summer, when GOP lawmakers seemed to realize it was time to move on. House Republicans finally appeared to be “throwing in the towel” in its campaign against the organization, dropping the anti-ACORN language from their spending bills. It was a bright, new, reality-based day.
And now that day is over. Zach Carter reports that the nonsense is back with a vengeance.
Fear not, America. House Republicans have resumed their war on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an anti-poverty nonprofit staffed by low-income people, a scant 4 1/2 years after the organization officially folded. […]
On Tuesday, House negotiators unveiled a bill to fend off a looming government shutdown that included the following ominous provision: “None of the funds made available under this or any other Act, or any prior Appropriations Act, may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, allied organizations, or successors.”
Remember, at present, there is no ACORN. Denying it funding is about as sensible as cutting off unicorn research.
All of which leads to the larger issue of Republicans tackling imaginary problems.
As we talked about over the summer, House Republicans also voted this year to prevent the Department of Energy from blocking offshore-drilling permits, despite the fact that the Department of Energy has nothing to do with offshore-drilling permits.
Last year, House Republicans also approved a measure to block an Obama administration policy on welfare reform that didn’t exist. Some Republicans have taken up measures to prevent the imposition of “Sharia law” on the public, despite the fact that there is no effort to impose such a policy. My personal favorite was the effort to stop the “NAFTA Super-Highway,” which never really existed outside the overheated imaginations of the political fringe and Ron Paul.
But anti-ACORN provisions remain the quintessential example of the phenomenon. When will Republicans move on? At this pace, probably never.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 10, 2014
“The Senate As A Gangster’s Paradise”: Guess Who The Two Republican Senators Are With “Gang” Records As Long As Your Arm?
When I read articles like today’s piece in The Hill with the headline “Senate Republicans feud over whether to keep nuke option,” I feel a quick burst of the cynicism hormone. Aside from confusion over the term “nuclear option” (which means adoption of filibuster rules by a majority-vote rules resolution, not the rules themselves), we’re given the unlikely impression that GOPers are agonizing over showing themselves as hypocritically inclined to reverse the loudly expressed objections they made when Democrats provided for majority-vote approval of executive and non-SCOTUS judicial nominations:
While many expressed anger over last years’ move by the Democrats and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to unilaterally change the rules through a procedure known as the “nuclear option,” some say the new rules should be kept in case a Republican wins the White House in 2016.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said Republicans will take their time reaching a decision.
“A lot of our guys still feel very strongly about just the wrongness of what [Reid] did and the position it’s put everybody here in the Senate in,” Thune said.
“Now we’re having to go through a fairly lengthy process to figure out, in the majority, how we want to proceed.”
Yeah, well, or you’re trying to display an agonized uncertainty before you do the predictable thing of making life easy for a future Republican president, with the knowledge that during the next two years a Senate Republican majority makes filibustering Obama’s appointees unnecessary.
But this does give me slight pause:
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) both said keeping the new rules would be dangerous
Graham said that, while some Republicans are “salivating” over the possibility of being able to more easily confirm their picks under a Republican president, removing the filibuster destroys incentives “to go across the aisle and pick up a few votes.”
This is code for “removing the filibuster eliminates the need for bipartisan ‘gangs’ to navigate the confirmation process.” Guess who the two Republican senators are with “gang” records as long as your arm? Yep, it’s the Amigos.
Now if you are a believer in bipartisanship as an end in itself, that all sounds fine. But if you think maintaining the filibuster not only makes governing very hard but empowers deal-cutting oligarchs producing logrolling abominations, then maybe you are less happy with the Senate as a Gangster’s Paradise.
In any event, if Republicans are determined to keep the limited majority-vote rules in place, and particularly if they are interested in expanding them, they ought to be able to–ironically, given Graham’s rationalization for keeping the Good Old Rules–“go across the aisle and pick up a few votes” from progressive Democrats committed to eroding the filibuster by any means necessary.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 10, 2014
“A Walmart Christmas For Congress”: The Senate Should Cancel Its Own Christmas And Stay In Session Until 2015
Assuming Democrats and Republicans agree on a bill to fund the government by Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner has told his members that they will recess after that. Despite Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s annual threats to keep the upper chamber in session through the holidays, the Senate is scheduled to do the same. But it shouldn’t. Instead, Reid should keep the Senate in session until Republicans take over next year in order to confirm as many executive branch and judicial nominees as possible.
Consider the actions of Senate Republicans during the past six years. Led by Majority Leader-Elect Mitch McConnell, the GOP used the filibuster to block President Barack Obama’s nominations for key executive branch and judicial positions. In some cases—such as the nomination for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—they refused to confirm any nominee unless Democrats made specific changes to the program. In other words, they used the nomination process as leverage to extract policy changes from Democrats. They often refused to confirm any judicial branch nominees. Sick of these tactics, Democrats changed the rules of the Senate in November 2013 so that all executive branch and non-Supreme Court judicial nominees could not be filibustered. In the 13 months since, Senate Democrats have spent much of their time confirming nominees.
That will end in January as Republicans are expected to clog up—if not seal off altogether—the nominations process. “The difference between 50 Democratic senators (plus a tie-breaking vote by Joe Biden) and 49 Democratic Senators is the difference between two full years of filling the judiciary and two years of likely gridlock,” New York’s Jonathan Chait wrote before the midterms.
Relations between the parties have only worsened since then with Obama’s executive action on immigration. In a pre-buttal to that move, Senator Ted Cruz proposed that Congress “not confirm a single nominee—executive or judicial—outside of vital national security positions, so long as the illegal amnesty persists.” It’s not clear whether Republicans will take up that strategy, or how many nominees are “of vital national security positions,” but pressure from the Texas conservative will not make the nomination process any smoother.
That’s what makes Reid’s decision about whether or not to keep the Senate in session so important. Any time spent in recess between now and when the 114th Congress begins on January 3 is time that could have been used to confirm nominees—nominees that won’t be confirmed otherwise. Lawmakers will likely object to working through the holidays. If Reid must give them a couple of days off around Christmas and New Year’s, to appease them, he should do so. But it is too important for the functioning of the executive branch and the makeup of the courts to spend the entire time on holiday.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, December 8, 2014
“A Conspiracy So Vast, It Now Involves Republicans”: Republicans Turn On Each Other Over Benghazi Conspiracy Theories
Once the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee issued its report on the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, there was a sense of finality to the process. GOP lawmakers on the panel themselves described the findings as “definitive.”
Every possible question has been answered. Every conspiracy theory has been discredited. Every wild-eyed allegation has been proven false. Every House committee, every Senate committee, every State Department investigator, and every inquiry launched by independent news organizations have reached the exact same conclusion. There’s a general feeling, even among many Republicans, that it’s time to just move on.
But that’s not going to happen. Not only is the House on track to spend at last another $1.5 million – of our money – on yet another committee, but many GOP lawmakers have decided to reject the findings of other GOP lawmakers.
Some of the loudest torch-and-pitchfork wielding Benghazi investigation enthusiasts weren’t satisfied. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on CNN he thought the report “is full of crap” and that the House Intelligence Committee had done a “lousy job of policing their own.”
“I’m saying that anybody who has followed Benghazi at all knows that the CIA deputy director did not come forward to tell Congress what role he played in changing the talking points,” Graham said. “And the only way we knew he was involved is when he told a representative at the White House, I’m going to do a hard review of this, a hard rewrite.” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) agreed, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that Graham “is probably right.”
He’s really not.
And while it’s certainly interesting to see Graham and Chaffetz reject the exhaustive findings prepared by their colleagues from their own party, no one seems quite as hostile to the evidence as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), arguably Congress’ most zealous conspiracy theorist.
The Kentucky Republican wrote an op-ed for a right-wing website this week, and I hope readers will take a moment to appreciate Rand Paul’s approach to logic in all its glory.
The Associated Press claims the report debunks, “A series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.”
None of these accusations contain even a modicum of truth?
It’s important to appreciate Paul’s intellectual rigor: there are lots of allegations, and even though the evidence proves the allegations false, maybe, since there are so many of them, one of them is a little true?
As Simon Maloy noted, the Republican senator proceeded to suggest his own GOP allies may be “helping the Obama administration cover-up the truth about Benghazi.”
That’s right, it’s come to this: Republicans have uncovered a conspiracy so vast, it involves Republicans who went looking for evidence of a conspiracy.
I get the feeling that the Beltway media considers Rand Paul so “interesting” that his antics, no matter how ridiculous, simply cannot be disqualifying. But that’s a shame – his approach to Benghazi is itself a cringe-worthy embarrassment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 5, 2014
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