“Ted Cruz Leads GOP To Disaster (Again)”: Marketing And Posturing To Drive The Base Crazier Than Usual:
Ted Cruz (R-TX), cast in the mold of a spotlight-grabbing Sarah Palin on the way to a reality show, was accurately described by Rachel Maddow as a “brand on legs.” This explains why he has gone after the most uncontroversial program Obama passed unilaterally in wake of the failure of legislation to pass; that is, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
As far as ethics goes, using asylum-seeking children “warehoused” in facilities that look like part Katrina shelter/part dog kennel, as an excuse to attack DACA, falls somewhere between heartlessly passing by the desperate victim robbed in The Good Samaritan, and Frank Underwood sociopathically throwing a reporter in front of a subway car… if both victims were dehydrated little girls desperately trying to escape sex traffickers.
Women and children fleeing violence is nothing new: while some of the stories of how my family came here are likely tall tales, the truth seems to be that my great, great grandmother and great grandfather came here, fleeing Northern Ireland. I had family on both sides of the Ulster Plantation divide, which meant my cousins were likely killing each other in alleys: a condition that would continue for years to come.
When my Protestant great, great grandfather disappeared one day, my Catholic great, great grandmother and my then-12-year-old great grandfather were left to both go through Ellis Island, and find jobs in a New York City that was not happy with it’s current influx of immigrants: they faced openly-bigoted laws and hiring practices. The headwinds they faced, however, seem modest compared to what the border children face today.
The child refugees and asylum-seekers of today, unfortunately, fall perfectly into a difficult, complicated and heated political narrative at a time when everyone is already at each other’s throats: after much delay, Obama finally announced that he would be giving additional unilateral relief around the end of the summer. Everything we see now from Ted Cruz is just marketing and posturing to drive the base crazier than usual:
“The staggering conditions that children are being subjected to are a direct result of the amnesty that President Obama illegally and unilaterally enacted in 2012 [DACA],” said Cruz.
It is hard to believe an Ivy-League Senator would be so ignorant, so I really do think he’s simply knowingly lying: the influx is caused by the highest murder rate in the world in these Central American countries, where people flee areas where gangs murder and rape with impunity; the DACA program will not benefit a single child at the border because you must have been in the country continuously since 2007 to qualify; a president’s administration is not responsible for the lies told by the drug cartels often murdering and raping the desperate children they lure into the desert like a giant windowless van full of candy; they aren’t being drawn by the American Dream, they’re fleeing the Central American nightmare as best they can, and other countries have seen large increases in asylum applications as those fleeing Guatamala, Honduras and El Salvador jump up as much as 700 percent.
While the anger on the Left has been slow in coming, it is still coming: the visuals of children in those horrible shelters aren’t leaving any time soon. The harsh rhetoric around this issue is more of the short-sighted politics we have come to expect of the GOP — they do whatever they can to get through the week, and a lot of it makes absolutely no sense from the outside, i.e. the government shutdown.
The big problem that the GOP either isn’t registering, or it’s very independently-minded characters like Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) don’t care about, is that the GOP brand is being burned to the ground for them to send out another fundraising letter, or for Rick Perry to take another Putin-esque photo op at the border — with many Latinos believing “there but for the grace of God goes me” as the immigration narrative is very much a Latino one, both in popular perceptions as well as in the surge of asylum-seekers, saying things that boil down to “these kennels are too good for these people” isn’t the way to go.
While the course that the Ted Cruz-controlled portion of the GOP is heading down toward is a predictable one, the results are not. During the last big controversy, he led the GOP-controlled House into the street and encouraged them to play in traffic, and I expect more of the same. What kind of car will blindside the more ambitious, less savvy members of the House is anyone’s guess.
By: Ryan Campbell, The Huffington Post Blog, July 28, 2014
“Republicans Are Gonna Be Really Mad!”: Boehner Sues Obama In Order To Implement Health Law Faster
When I learned that House Speaker John Boehner is suing President Barack Obama, I thought about a number of good reasons for something to limit executive actions. Would it be to limit NSA spying on its citizens? Could it have something to do with limiting IRS hazing of liberal and conservative groups (the Tea Party gets most of the attention, but the Congressional panel revealed that all new groups got special scrutiny)?
Would it end executive orders by the executive branch, or terminate signing statements, something done by Obama and George W. Bush (who did both with more frequency)? Might it require less immunity for advisers in the presidential administration?
Actually, it wouldn’t involve any of these good reasons for a lawsuit.
Instead, House Speaker Boehner wants to sue President Obama to implement the health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), sooner.
Huh?
That’s right, Boehner claims that the Obama administration overstepped its legal bounds by delaying the employer mandate for a year. Businesses won’t be mandated to provide health care for their employees for a year.
What’s ironic is that House Republicans, when they weren’t voting to repeal the ACA, they also tried to vote for the exact same delay in the employer mandate.
So the lawsuit clearly isn’t about policy. It is about who has the power.
Boehner claims that the Obama administration shouldn’t have the power to write the law. But isn’t the executive branch allowed to implement the law? Is the timing part of writing a law, or implementing a law?
Actually, there’s a long history of delays in implementing the law, even about health care. And I don’t remember Boehner filing a lawsuit, or even objecting, when President George W. Bush delayed the implementation of his prescription drug law 10 years ago (passed by Congress, of course).
Boehner also claims that the White House has been abusing the executive actions, even though Obama has used the fewest executive actions since Grover Cleveland, according to the Washington Post. Granted, Boehner admitted that he thinks presidents should be allowed to use executive orders, but that the president has been abusing such authority with recess appointments.
If that term sounds familiar, it’s something President George W. Bush would use when making appointments that weren’t approved by Congress. Nobody remembers Boehner suing Bush over these, or even objecting to them.
When making his case for the lawsuit in his op-ed in a CNN article, Boehner didn’t say anything about implementing the health care law sooner, or even that he supported some recess appointments made by Obama’s predecessor. Instead, he cited Senate Democrats and President Obama refusing to pass House Republican jobs bills.
I don’t remember that being unconstitutional.
When Republican voters realize that the lawsuit has nothing to do with illegal immigration, the IRS, the NSA and spying, or repealing the health care law, but making the mandates occur faster, how will they react? I foresee a lot of disappointment in GOP ranks when they read the lawsuit.
By: John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga: The Huffington Post Blog, July 27, 2014
“It’s Funny How That Happens”: GOP Discovers The Virtue Of Unilateral Presidential Action
With less than a week before Congress leaves town for a month-long break, legislative prospects appear bleak. President Obama called weeks ago for action on the border crisis, but there’s now very little hope that lawmakers will get anything done.
Yesterday, as msnbc’s Jane Timm reported, House Speaker John Boehner gave the White House an ultimatum: accept changes to the Bush/Cheney-era human-trafficking law that allows immigrants from non-contiguous countries to seek asylum in the U.S., or House Republicans will refuse to pass a bill.
It’s reached the point at which the same GOP lawmakers who’ve condemned the president for trying to work around Congress are now urging the president to circumvent Congress.
Even as Congress jousts over a legislative response to the influx of child migrants from Central America, [a group of Texas Republican lawmakers] contend the president can take unilateral steps to end the crisis immediately. “You have the authority to stop the surge of illegal entries by immigrant minors today,” the Republicans wrote Thursday in a letter to Obama. […]
The recommendations include empowering local law enforcement agencies to prosecute federal immigration laws; cracking down on immigration fraud; speeding up deportations of the new arrivals; and ending the administration’s deferred action program, which allows some illegal immigrants brought to the country as children to remain and work without fear of deportation.
Apparently, some GOP lawmakers believe unilateral White House actions are evidence of a tyrannical dictatorship, unless Obama is acting unilaterally on an issue they care about, in which case they’re all for executive authority.
It’s funny how that happens.
There is, however, a related question that’s gone largely overlooked lately: if House Republicans support a far-right proposal that deploys the National Guard and changes the 2008 human-trafficking law, why don’t they just pass one? After all, the GOP is in the majority in the House and if they want to approve a conservative plan, they can, right?
Well, it’s not quite that simple. In theory, sure, House Republicans can pass anything they please, but in this case, that’s not possible. As Greg Sargent reported this week, far-right lawmakers are pushing to make sure the House approves literally nothing on this issue, in part because they don’t want to address the problem at all and in part because if the lower chamber does pass a bill, it might lead to a compromise with the Senate,
And as we know, Republicans really won’t tolerate compromises.
It’s led to a bizarre scenario: Boehner is whining that Obama isn’t doing enough to push House Democrats to support a Republican bill. Indeed, if House Republicans do absolutely nothing, after complaining for months about the need for action, the Speaker will say it’s the president’s fault for not telling Dems to vote the way Republicans want them to.
No, seriously, that’s the argument. Boehner once again can’t round up Republican votes for a Republican bill, so he’s convinced himself that Obama’s to blame.
It’s also why the very same GOP officials who claim to hate unilateral presidential action have suddenly discovered the virtues of Obama making policy moves irrespective of Congress.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 25, 2014
“The GOP’s 20-Year War On Health Care”: Republicans Are Going To Extraordinary Lengths To See That More Americans Die
Stop the presses: John Boehner admitted Thursday that the Republican Party’s long-awaited alternative to Obamacare needs a little more time in the oven. “You know, the discussions about Obamacare and what the replacement bill would look like continue. We’re trying to build consensus around one plan,” the Speaker told Hill reporters. “Not there yet.”
As if you even needed me to tell you, rest assured: It could be six months from now, a year from now, five years from now, or the day Bibi Netanyahu and Khaled Mashal share a Nobel Peace Prize—they aren’t going to have a plan. Oh, they might have a “plan.” They had a “plan” last year, or at least Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and two others did. For about two days, they were really tooting its horn. Then it dawned on people that paying for it would involve a hefty middle-class tax increase, on higher-end insurance plans. You may have noticed since then that the Coburn “plan” has not exactly become a leading Republican talking point.
As conservatives continue to hail the Halbig decision, some historical context is called for. In my last column, I wrote that conservatives and Republicans are going to extraordinary lengths to see that more Americans die. Not every reader was won over by that opinion, as you might imagine. But I think it’s beyond dispute, as a little discussion of political history should show.
The problem of millions of uninsured has existed in this country since—well, since forever. But as a running news story that the media paid attention to, for the last 25 or 30 years. I remember when the then-horrifying number was 15 million uninsured. Then 20 million, then 30 million, on up to the 46 million figure we often saw bandied about before the Affordable Health Care was enacted (10 million new Americans are insured as a result of it—a very respectable dent, for just one year). So, 30 years, a full generation, tens of millions of people adversely affected. And what, in all that time, has the Grand Old Party proposed to do about it all?
Not. One. Thing. Republican presidents had (if we go back to 1984) 16 years to pass some kind of health-insurance law. But none of the three ever even proposed one. George W. Bush did pass his Medicare law, but that was about adding prescription-drug coverage for seniors; it didn’t insure any previously uninsured citizens. What the GOP did instead, of course, was to fight tooth-and-nail to stop the two Democratic attempts to insure more people, succeeding the first time, failing the second.
And “tooth-and-nail” hardly begins to describe the demented and nearly sociopathic reality of Republican and conservative opposition to trying to make health insurance affordable for working-class people. Opposition to doing so has been one of the four grand accomplishments of the Republican Party of our time, which I would rank as follows, one scratched on each side of the obelisk: one, start disastrous wars and commit torture; two, make people despise the government; three, nearly cause a new Depression; and four, deny health insurance to as many people as possible, as aggressively and nastily as possible. It’s a grim record generally, and with regard to health care specifically, inarguably one that has promoted insalubriousness and suffering and, indeed, deaths that might have been avoided or delayed if people had had insurance.
It is true that some conservative intellectuals have offered up some ideas—as we know, the same individual mandate that the right now calumniates was a conservative idea at first. And John McCain actually had a decent-ish health-care platform plank in 2008. But if McCain had been elected, it’s very unlikely that the constellation of interests and power centers in the GOP would have permitted him ever even thinking about pursuing it. It was just something he felt he had to say to have credibility with middle-of-the-road voters. And in any case he wasn’t elected, and those conservative intellectuals’ ideas were never seriously proposed by elected Republicans, so the historical record is what it is.
The 20-year war on health care—since their 1993 defeat of the Clinton plan—has been about Republicans’ hatred of government; their view of people who don’t have insurance as lazy or flawed and not worth lifting a finger for; and their fear that if a law is passed and succeeds in bringing health care to millions, they and their whole vision of society will be discredited in the eyes of millions. Of course, these days, all that is shot through with one more element: a heavy dose of Obama hatred.
I was on Hardball Wednesday evening with David Corn, and Chris Matthews showed poll numbers during our segment that surprised even me. The topic was “rooting for failure.” Back in 2006, he said, Democrats were asked in a Fox News poll whether they wanted President Bush’s policies to succeed or fail. Answers: 40 succeed, 51 fail. Not particularly generous. But earlier this year, he said, CNN asked Republicans the same question about President Obama. Answers: 14 succeed, 73 fail.
Think about that. Three-quarters of regular Republicans want Obama to fail. And just one in seven wants him to succeed. We pundits spend most of our time blaming politicians for inaction, but maybe it’s time to start blaming the people. If regular Republicans feel like this, there’s no way the elected officials who represent them are going to do anything that looks remotely like compromise or cooperation.
And no, they’re not going to offer a real health-care plan either. They first promised that in 2010, during the campaign season, so they could say “repeal and replace” instead of just “repeal” and sound like they had a positive side. Then they dropped “and replace,” and now that it’s election time again, it’s back. But it’s not in their DNA to do anything constructive about health care. Or—the VA crisis, the border crisis, the Middle East crisis, the wage-and-inequality crisis, et cetera—about much of anything.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 25, 2014
“When Will You Stop Beating Your Ally?”: Ted Cruz On Protecting And Promoting Israel’s Tourism Industry
I really thought the peculiar use of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a political weapon against Barack Obama had reached its point of diminishing returns back in the 2012 presidential cycle, when the entire field (with the exception, obviously, of Ron Paul) competed to express how abjectly each as president would defer to Israel’s wishes in using American resources and commitments, in sharp contrast to the faithless Muslim-lover in the White House. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t the tribunes of American Exceptionalism eventually see something wrong with their political representatives demanding that the U.S. outsource its foreign policy to another country?
Leave it to Ted Cruz to take it all to another level, accusing the administration of telling the FAA to ban flights into Tel Aviv as part of a pro-Hamas conspiracy:
“Given that some 2,000 rockets have been fired into Israel over the last six weeks, many of them at Tel Aviv, it seems curious to choose yesterday at noon to announce a flight ban, especially as the Obama Administration had to be aware of the punitive nature of this action.
“Tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel, which is in the middle of a summer high season already seriously diminished by the conflict initiated by Hamas. Group tours have been cancelling at a 30% rate. This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers. It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done….
Secretary of State John Kerry issued a veiled threat last February when he encouraged boycotts of Israel [sic] and said that absent serious Israeli concessions at the negotiating table, Israel’s economic prosperity was ‘not sustainable’ and ‘illusory.’ Secretary Kerry unfortunately reprised this theme just this April, when he threatened that Israel risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ if Israel did not submit to his chosen solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis.
“Taken in the context of Secretary Kerry’s comments, yesterday’s action by the FAA raises some serious questions.
So apparently the United States has an obligation, at the potential expense of the safety of its own citizens, to promote the security claims of another country in order to protect said country’s tourism industry. Anything less than that is to side with Israel’s enemies, whose bloody hands Obama is already shaking by continuing humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
How much further can Republicans move the goal posts here? Should we become more militantly pro-Israel than the Israelis themselves?
I know this is a sweet spot for conservatives because it pleases a certain type of evangelical Christian activist and projects bloody-minded “strength” without risking a commitment of U.S. troops, since the Israelis really can take care of themselves from a military point of view. And the Palestinians, of course, are the overseas equivalent of those people here, somehow still held to be responsible for 9/11. But if there is a Republican president any time soon, the GOP isn’t doing him or her any favors by mortgaging half its foreign policy to the interests of a single foreign state, however admirable.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 24, 2014
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