“Overturning Elections Has Consequences”: Perry v. Lehmberg And The Veto That Illuminated An Unsettling Trend
A truism: Almost nobody looks good in his booking photo.
That said, the 47th governor of Texas, one James Richard Perry, certainly gave it his best shot when he faced the camera at the Travis County Courthouse last week. The resultant image is … not terrible. Perry is caught somewhere between a tight smile and an outright grimace, his mien taut with confidence and seriousness of purpose.
Gazing on that photo, one cannot help but suspect that a transparently political indictment designed by his Democratic opponents to cripple this presumed presidential aspirant might actually help him instead. One is not usually disposed to think of Texas’ swaggering governor as a victim, but darn if this indictment hasn’t turned the trick.
Of course, if Democrats in Texas have done the Republican governor an inadvertent favor, they sure haven’t done the country one. What is this thing lately of political parties using the courts as weapons of political destruction, trying to win judicially what they could not win at the ballot box?
A few words of definition before we proceed. The reference here is not simply to lawsuits and prosecutions with political import. Obviously there has been no shortage of those. But the sins and alleged sins of Rod Blagojevich, William Jefferson, Larry Craig, Bob McDonnell, Tom DeLay and others — money-laundering, corruption, disorderly conduct — are at least recognizable as crimes.
By contrast, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is suing President Obama for issuing an executive order. Faced with mulish obstructionism from the GOP, Obama chose that route to make a technical change in a law — the Affordable Care Act — Boehner’s party hates. Now here’s Perry, indicted on felony abuse of power charges that could theoretically send him to prison for over a century. His crime? He issued a veto.
Here is the backstory: The district attorney of Travis County, Democrat Rosemary Lehmberg, was arrested last year for drunk driving. Video captured her being belligerent toward police. Perry called on Lehmberg, who oversees the state public integrity unit, to resign, perhaps so that he might appoint a friendly Republican successor to head an agency that has been a thorn in his backside. Lehmberg refused, so Perry vetoed $7.5 million in state funding for the integrity unit.
Neither principal in this sordid episode emerges covered with glory. Lehmberg’s behavior suggests the opposite of public integrity; she should have resigned. And Perry’s veto smacks of scorched earth, bully-boy politics, which is not pretty. It is also not a crime.
Things were not always thus. Once upon a time, the losing party felt itself bound to accept the will of the electorate with some modicum of grace. You weren’t happy about it, but you embraced the role of loyal opposition and bided your time until the next election in hopes your fortunes might change.
But that’s so 20th century.
For six years, the GOP has been trying to undo the election of 2008; Boehner’s lawsuit is only the latest of their many loopy schemes. Now, if Travis County is any bellwether, at least some Democrats are doing the selfsame thing.
It is behavior that should give all fair-minded Americans pause, regardless of party affiliation, for it illustrates with stark clarity the sheer brokenness of our political system. Flooded with corporate money, gerrymandered beyond any semblance of reason, it limps along prodded by those whose devotion to the “game” far outweighs any devotion they might have to that quaint relic we once called the public good. Now there is this misuse of the courts for political payback, this attempt to criminalize ordinary political activity.
The public should take note. Elections have consequences, folks used to say.
Overturning them does, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, August 25, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Trick”: Big Emphasis On Middle-Class Voters At The Expense Of Po’ Folks
Mike Gerson pulls off a nice two-cushion shot in a WaPo column on GOP minority outreach. First off, he spanks reformicons for their big-emphasis on middle-class voters, arguably at the expense of po’ folks:
They consistently pitch their approach toward the middle class — in part to distinguish it from previous iterations of compassionate or “bleeding heart” (Kemp’s phrase) conservatism. The cover of the reform-conservative manifesto — “Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class” — features a lawn mower on fresh-cut grass. The conservative rebirth will evidently spring from suburban yards on a lazy Saturday morning….
A party that does not forthrightly address the largest source of division in U.S. history and American life — now dramatized in the tear gas haze of Ferguson, Mo. — is not morally or intellectually serious. And even as a political matter, women voters, Catholic voters and younger voters would prefer a chief executive who seeks the interests of all Americans, including those unlikely to vote for him or her. A commitment to national unity is an indicator of public character. The Kemp project has never been more urgent for Republicans.
So Gerson should be pleased by Rand Paul, with his particular focus on African-American outreach, right? No, not so much. He considers Paul’s ability to come up with selective libertarianish positions that sound attractive to non-government-haters a “trick.”
Paul has risen to prominence by employing a political trick, which is already growing old. He emphasizes the sliver of his libertarianism that gets nods of agreement (say, rolling back police excesses) while ignoring the immense, discrediting baggage of his ideology (say, discomfort with federal civil rights law or belief in a minimal state incapable of addressing poverty and stalled mobility).
As a senator, this tactic has worked. But were Paul to become the GOP presidential nominee, the media infatuation would end, and any Democratic opponent would have a field day with Paul’s disturbing history and cramped ideology. On racial issues, the GOP needs a successor to Kemp — and an alternative to Paul.
Get used to these sort of attacks if Paul’s viability grows. At some point, of course, they would vanish altogether if the man gets close to the GOP nomination.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 19, 2014
“Paying Back Campaign Donors”: Whose Presidential Campaign Will Your Pension Finance?
Wall Street is one of the biggest sources of funding for presidential campaigns, and many of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 contenders are governors, from Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. And so, last week, the GOP filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning the pay-to-play law that bars those governors from raising campaign money from Wall Street executives who manage their states’ pension funds.
In the case, New York and Tennessee’s Republican parties are represented by two former Bush administration officials, one of whose firms just won the Supreme Court case invalidating campaign contribution limits on large donors. In their complaint, the parties argue that people managing state pension money have a First Amendment right to make large donations to state officials who award those lucrative money management contracts.
With the $3 trillion public pension system controlled by elected officials now generating billions of dollars worth of annual management fees for Wall Street, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators originally passed the rule to make sure retirees’ money wasn’t being handed out based on politicians’ desire to pay back their campaign donors.
“Elected officials who allow political contributions to play a role in the management of these assets and who use these assets to reward contributors violate the public trust,” says the preamble of the rule, which restricts not only campaign donations directly to state officials, but also contributions to political parties.
In the complaint aiming to overturn that rule, the GOP plaintiffs argue that the SEC does not have the campaign finance expertise to properly enforce the rule. The complaint further argues that the rule itself creates an “impermissible choice” between “exercising a First Amendment right and retaining the ability to engage in professional activities.” The existing rule could limit governors’ ability to raise money from Wall Street in any presidential race.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, a spokesman for one of the Republican plaintiffs suggested that in order to compete for campaign resources, his party’s elected officials need to be able to raise money from the Wall Street managers who receive contracts from those officials.
“We see (the current SEC rule) as something that has been a great detriment to our ability to help out candidates,” said Jason Weingarten of the Republican Party of New York—the state whose pay-to-play pension scandal in 2010 originally prompted the SEC rule.
The suit comes only a few weeks after the SEC issued its first fines under the rule—against a firm whose executives made campaign donations to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat. The company in question was managing Pennsylvania and Philadelphia pension money. In a statement on that case, the SEC promised more enforcement of the pay-to-play rule in the future.
“We will use all available enforcement tools to ensure that public pension funds are protected from any potential corrupting influences,” said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC Enforcement Division. “As we have done with broker-dealers, we will hold investment advisers strictly liable for pay-to-play violations.”
The GOP lawsuit aims to stop that promise from becoming a reality. In predicating that suit on a First Amendment argument, those Republicans are forwarding a disturbing legal theory: Essentially, they are arguing that Wall Street has a constitutional right to influence politicians and the investment decisions those politicians make on behalf of pensioners.
If that theory is upheld by the courts, it will no doubt help Republican presidential candidates raise lots of financial-industry cash—but it could also mean that public pension contracts will now be for sale to the highest bidder.
By: David Sirota, Senior Editor, In These Times, August 15, 2014
“A Conversion On Political Rhetoric”: The Fascinating Political Evolution Of Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan’s new book The Way Forward is meant to be bought, not read.
You buy a book like this because you’re in a conservative book club, or you’re a big Paul Ryan fan, and you feel obliged. It’s like voting, but it costs money. Publishers commission these books hoping to get a big payoff if and when the author is nominated for president and suddenly a much larger share of the country feels obliged to vote, er, buy Ryan.
But there’s more to The Way Forward than that, largely because Ryan is an increasingly important and intriguing figure in Republican politics. His persona evolves — often, it seems — in tandem with the felt-needs of the GOP. Ryan has always been a little further to the right than the average elected Republican. But that didn’t stop him from corralling votes for Medicare Part-D when George W. Bush needed them. Then when the GOP constituents needed someone who looked good under a green eyeshade, he became a much sterner budget watcher, and strenuous fiscal conservative.
The first half of the Ryan book is a biography as starched and colorless as his collars. But the second half of The Way Forward is fascinating. It gives a view of what Ryan wants to be now and over the next two years, possibly as he contemplates a run for the presidency. And make no mistake: Ryan is transformed.
No longer is Paul Ryan the P90X-ripping, budget-slashing devotee of Ayn Rand that Democrats gleefully caricatured as someone who wanted to push grandma off a cliff. Today he’s the geeky white guy dancing badly at a black church, and then biting his lip and nodding to signal how much he is listening, and learning. He’s putting in an effort to expand his horizons personally. He is undergoing a political conversion, or at least a conversion on political rhetoric.
Quite literally, Paul Ryan experiences a kind of Come-To-Frank-Luntz moment when someone asks him who he is talking about when he refers to some people as “takers.” Ryan had in the past adopted the language of “makers and takers” to describe people who are paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and people who are receiving more benefits than what they pay. Ryan says this language was just in the air at the time he adopted it. And it was. A Nation of Takers was the scorching title to a sobering (and sober) book by Nicholas Eberstadt about the shape of America’s entitlement state. Eberstadt’s book is exactly the kind of doomsday look into the spreadsheets that Ryan was getting into then.
Today, Ryan won’t disavow the math, exactly, but he has discarded the implied insult he attached to it.
[W]hile the problem it depicts is real and worrisome, the phrase “makers and takers” communicated a lot more than just the dilemma I was trying to describe. That day at the fair was the first time I really heard the way it sounded. As I stood there, listening to the guy from the Democrats’ tent lay into me, I thought, “Holy cow. He’s right.” [The Way Forward]
Ryan also talks about his experiences of reaching out to constituencies where there aren’t many Republicans. In what is probably the most substantive political point in the book, Ryan says what many already suspect, that the 2012 election proved that “focusing heavily on simply turning out our traditional coalition is a losing strategy.”
Ryan does what a politician in this position should do — he takes his lumps just by showing up for constituent events among people who are not naturally aligned to him. Black constituents often tell him to his face that they disagree with him. “[A]t least they were telling me, personally, instead of just some pollster canvassing the neighborhood,” he writes. He says that these events communicate that a person who has conservative politics can still care enough to show up and talk to minority constituents.
This is the right thing politically, but it’s also the right thing to do, period. The GOP should follow Ryan’s example. It would be good for the country. Citizens deserve the competition for their votes that gerrymandering and polarization deny. No major party should effectively ignore an entire demographic or geographic group of Americans.
Now, there are no great revelations in this book. It’s filled with easy-to-understand anecdotes about the malfunctioning of the health-care system before and after ObamaCare, and the efficiency of market-oriented solutions. These will be repeated many, many times by Ryan in the medium-term of his political life.
Ryan also repeats Jack Kemp’s name over and over again, almost as much as he does Reagan’s. Kemp was a Republican who worked hard to make GOP principles appealing to urban and minority voters. He was HUD secretary under George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole’s vice presidential candidate. Kemp is an odd figure, combining the supply-side politics of a Dan Quayle with the social idealism of a George Romney. He referred to himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative.”
And a bleeding-heart conservative sounds great in theory. In a way, it’s what George W. Bush attempted with his “compassionate conservative” brand. But Kemp was never really a national figure, and his unique policy ideas never really got purchase among their supposed beneficiaries. He was admired more than followed. He made Republicans feel better about themselves, without winning great victories. Maybe the time is ripe for a return to Kempism. But I have my doubts.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, August 21, 2014
“The 2014 Midterms Do Matter”: McConnell Eyes More Shutdowns Following GOP Gains
It’s tempting to think the 2014 midterms may not matter much. Assuming Republicans keep their House majority, which seems very likely, the legislative process in 2015 and 2016 will probably look an awful lot like the legislative process since 2011 – congressional inaction. GOP lawmakers will continue to reject compromises and negotiations no matter who controls the upper chamber.
As this line of thought goes, the part that enjoys the Senate majority will have the power to watch the other party filibuster, and little more.
But there’s a flaw in these assumptions: if rewarded by voters with their first Senate majority in a decade, Republicans don’t intend to use their new-found congressional power to just spin their wheels. Manu Raju reports today that GOP leaders have a very different kind of plan in mind.
Mitch McConnell has a game plan to confront President Barack Obama with a stark choice next year: Accept bills reining in the administration’s policies or risk a government shutdown.
In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress.
In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency.
McConnell told Politico, “We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy. That’s something [President Obama] won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”
There’s no reason to think this is campaign-season bluster. McConnell is more than comfortable making demonstrably false claims about public policy and his partisan rivals, but when it comes to process and legislative strategy, the Kentucky Republican is one of Capitol Hill’s most candid officials.
The result, however, is a curious pitch: just 76 days before this year’s midterm elections, the Senate’s top GOP leader wants the voting public to know that a vote for Republicans is a vote for government shutdowns.
Indeed, McConnell isn’t even being subtle about it. If his party is rewarded by voters in the fall, GOP senators, working with a Republican House majority, will add measures to spending bills that undo the progress of the last several years. If the White House refuses to go along, Republicans will simply shut down the government – yes, again – until the president gives the new GOP majority what it wants.
In other words, the 2014 midterms do matter. As ridiculous as Congress has become of late, McConnell has mapped out a deliberate strategy to make things considerably worse. The question isn’t whether he’ll follow through on his threats; the question is whether voters will empower him to do so.
Update: I should add that McConnell’s strategy is an interesting departure from four years ago, when GOP leaders suggested that they’d still govern if Republicans took the House majority. At the time, some pundits even believed them. Now, however, McConnell isn’t even bothering with the pretense.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 20, 2014
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