“Calling The Shots”: Who If Not Tea Folk Control GOP Agenda?
We’re now in the less fertile summer plain of primary elections, with no contests this month other than the unfinished business of runoffs in Alabama and North Carolina on July 15 and Georgia on July 22. So it’s a good time to look back on what Republicans in particular hath wrought, and at TPMCafe Harvard’s expert on (among other things) the Tea Party, Theda Skocpol, suggests we should be looking at Congress rather than the primary outcomes for a sense of where things stand inside the GOP.
An obsession with toting up wins and losses in primaries completely misreads how Tea Party forces work, how they have moved the governing agendas of the Republican Party ever further right and maintained a stranglehold on federal government action….
Tea Party clout in and upon Republican officials, officeholders, and candidates is actually maximized by the dynamic interplay of top-down and bottom-up forces, both pushing for absolute opposition to President Barack Obama and obstruction of Congressional action involving compromises with Democrats. Tea Party forces are neither inside nor outside, neither for nor against the Republican Party in any simple sense, because they are sets of organizations and activists seeking leverage over the choices and actions of Republican leaders and candidates.
This dynamic long preceded the inauguration of Obama and the formal launching of the Tea Party Movement, but has surely intensified since 2009.
To see that the Tea Party remains supremely effective, just look at what Congressional Republicans are doing, or not doing. Eric Cantor’s sudden defeat sealed the GOP House’s determination to block immigration reform, but that reform was already effectively dead even before that one primary election happened. Republicans have pulled away from decades-old compromises to fund transportation systems, to support agricultural subsidies along with Food Stamps, to renew the Export-Import Bank that most U.S. business interests want continued. House and Senate Republicans are spending their time mainly on obstruction and media-focused investigations, anything to challenge and humiliate President Obama. In state houses, Tea Party-pushed Republicans are mainly passing anti-abortion restrictions and blocking the expansion of Medicaid favored by hospitals and businesses.
What do primary elections have to do with such effective agenda control? Not nearly as much as the basketball finals approach to tallying total wins and losses implies. In a way, unpredictable and somewhat random victories against fairly safe Republican power-brokers are the most effective outcomes for Tea Party voters and funders. Sure, the big Tea Party funders would like to have gotten a win for Chris McDaniel, their guy in Mississippi, and they are furious that they did not. But backing up and looking at the big picture, does anyone really imagine that nervous GOP officeholders are reassured that the Tea Party is dead or “under control” following a scenario in which old timer Thad Cochran had to raise millions for what should have been a taken-for-granted primary victory, and his allies had to orchestrate an all-out voter mobilization effort that even reached out to some African American Democrats? Cochran’s near-death sends a powerful message that loudly hewing hard-right on policy issues and obstruction is the way to go. Similarly, Eric Cantor’s huge defeat is even more frightening to many Republican politicians because it happened without big-money backing from the likes of Heritage Action.
Another way to put it is to ask whether there’s any issue on which the GOP has decisively pushed back on the Tea Party agenda? Yes, there was the decision to abandon the government shutdown last year, but even the Tea Folk understood that couldn’t go on forever. Other than that, it’s hard to see where and how the alleged “Establishment” primary victories are going to make any actual difference. Look at the Common Core educational standards issue, supposedly a huge priority for the business community that has given so generously to the Establishment cause. Chamber of Commerce beneficiaries Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Jack Kingston of Georgia have all come out against Common Core. Who’s really calling the shots in the GOP, if not the radicalized conservative movement we call the Tea Party?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 4, 2014
“John Boehner Deflects Attention By Suing The President”: How House GOP Circumvents Its Responsibility To Engage In Governing
President Obama was generous on Thursday in referring to Speaker John Boehner’s proposed lawsuit against him as a “stunt,” a word generally used to mean a playful attempt to get attention. In fact, the suit is a mean-spirited attempt to deflect attention — specifically from the House’s refusal to engage in the act of governing.
For the foreseeable future, there will be no action to boost the economy, or help minimum-wage workers, or extend unemployment insurance, or address climate change. Immigration reform is dead. The most basic appropriations bills are likely to get bogged down in Republican attempts to promote coal burning and rein in the Clean Water Act. There is already talk of another in an endless series of stopgap spending bills, the surest sign of a non-functioning Congress. And the Tea Party would love nothing more than another shutdown fight or even impeachment hearings.
Mr. Boehner’s lawsuit, which he said will challenge the president’s use of executive authority, was designed in part to appease the far-right corner. But more substantively, it is part of Mr. Boehner’s long-running strategy to pretend there is a legitimate reason for the years of obstruction.
He can’t very well explain to the public that the real reason there has been no action on immigration reform is because large swaths of the Republican base dislike Hispanic immigrants. And so he had to construct a way to blame Mr. Obama for the inaction.
“Speaker Boehner has been very clear about this: He wants to fix America’s broken immigration system,” his spokesman, Michael Steel, said last month. “But no one trusts the White House to enforce the law as written.” He can’t be trusted because he allowed the children of immigrants who came to this country illegally to remain without fear of deportation, an executive action that may be on the list of particulars in the lawsuit. (Mr. Boehner hasn’t said which actions prompted him to sue.)
Coal-state lawmakers can’t admit they would rather foul the air than hurt the short-term interests of their states’ biggest industries and employers, so they pretend they are angry about a procedural matter: Mr. Obama’s “overreach” in directing environmental regulators to enforce carbon standards without the permission of Congress.
And Republicans care not in the least about the substance of the administration’s actions in delaying parts of the Affordable Care Act; instead they see each administrative action as an opportunity to portray the president as tyrannical. “We didn’t elect a monarch or a king,” Mr. Boehner told the House in a letter on Wednesday outlining his legal plans.
Royalty is a laughable way to describe a president who had to struggle to get his own aides confirmed by the Senate, and was forced to use an experimental legal maneuver to keep entire agencies functioning. Mr. Obama’s attempt to use recess appointments to get around the Republican refusal to confirm any members to the National Labor Relations Board, regardless of qualification, was slapped back by the Supreme Court on Thursday. Republicans immediately claimed the court, too, has become angered by the president’s imperialism, refusing to acknowledge the president had acted out of desperation to get around their own unprecedented level of resistance.
Mr. Boehner’s diversion is the ultimate in frivolous lawsuits — a subject he knows well, since he frequently applies the word “frivolous” to the lawsuits he doesn’t like, including those fighting discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace. But it is likely to fail in both its legal objective and its larger purpose. Americans are pretty good at detecting phony excuses to get out of work.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 27, 2014
“Who Says Obama Can’t Lead?”: While Obama Is Exhibiting Leadership With Finesse, Republicans Have Run Into A Wall
Last week, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found President Obama tying his record low approval rating of 41 percent. NBC’s Chuck Todd, referring to another poll result showing that 54 percent of Americans “no longer feel that he is able to lead the country and get the job done,” told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “Essentially the public is saying, ‘Your presidency is over.’”
Similarly, political analyst Charlie Cook, citing Gallup survey data, wrote in National Journal, “There was a point when voters hit the mute button and stopped listening to George H.W. Bush and then to his son George W. Bush. We now seem to have reached that point with Obama.”
But one morsel from the NBC/WSJ poll didn’t fit that narrative: 67 percent of respondents are in favor of the president’s newly announced regulations “to set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants.” And when the pollsters re-asked the question, after presenting supporting and opposing arguments, including charges of “fewer jobs” and “higher prices,” approval held with a healthy 53 percent to 39 percent margin.
That’s a hell of a lot of support for a major presidential initiative from an electorate supposedly no longer listening to the president.
What did Obama do right?
Adhering to a favorite maxim of U.S. presidents of both parties that it’s remarkable how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit, Obama tapped EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to announce the plan and stump for it in media interviews. By keeping a relatively low-profile, Obama tempered the media’s tendency to polarize everything while dampening conservative backlash, a strategy that previously helped shepherd the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law and the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays and lesbians.
Additionally, the Obama administration avoided a united corporate front against the plan by reaching out to industries about to be regulated. While the U.S Chamber of Commerce chose to oppose the plan before it was released, the power plant industry’s main lobby refused to reinforce the attack. Instead, it released a positive statement expressing appreciation for the “range of compliance options” offered by the EPA.
The statement was short of an outright endorsement, leaving room for further negotiation. Days later, McCarthy began that negotiation, meeting with and winning praise from utility executives for “listening to the concerns that we had” and being “willing to have that dialogue.” With the utility industry signaling détente, Republicans couldn’t validate conservatives’ sky-is-falling claims with the voices of those most directly impacted by the proposed regulations.
While Obama was exhibiting leadership with finesse, Republicans decided to run into a wall. Instead of training their fire on the climate proposal in the days following the June 2 release, they obsessed over freed prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl. Whatever one’s opinion of the terms of the prisoner swap with the Taliban, it’s a done deal—and the climate rule is not. Republicans had a moment to redirect the climate debate for the duration of Obama’s presidency away from the losing effort of denying the science and toward the more fertile ground of jobs and prices. Myopically, they used that moment to chase the shiny object of the 24-hour news cycle.
Obama may not have been leading on climate in the conventional sense: preaching from the bully pulpit and rallying the public to pressure Washington to act. But prominent political scientists will tell you that’s not how presidential leadership usually works. As George Washington University professor John Sides explained to Slate, “The idea that presidents accomplish more if they give the right speech is magical thinking.”
Yet, the president has bucked the trend of history and successfully used the bully pulpit to advance another major goal: raising the minimum wage. Anticipating obstinacy from House Republicans, he told the states during his January 2014 State of the Union address, “You don’t have to wait for Congress to act.” He followed up that call with several outside-the-Beltway stump speeches urging states to raise their minimum wage above the federal standard.
The stumping is working. So far this year, eight states have raised their minimums and later this week Massachusetts will make it nine. Others may follow suit as more than 30 state legislatures have been compelled to consider minimum wage measures, and activists in eight states are pursuing November referendums. As with climate, this is not the kind of impact a president makes if the public has “stopped listening.”
But since bully pulpit tactics are not the norm of presidential leadership, it’s not all that important if the public doesn’t “tune in” to hear the president anymore. The test of a president’s leadership is whether he is in-tune enough with the public, and deft enough with the levers of power, to accomplish what is feasible.
If I were a Republican, I would not be savoring Obama’s 41 percent approval rating and presuming his presidency was done. I would be worried about my party’s 29 percent approval rating, its 15 percent level of support among Latinos and Obama’s plans to take executive action on immigration reform if House Republicans don’t act by July 31. If you think Obama isn’t able to lead on immigration, after what he has done on climate and minimum wage, you haven’t been paying attention.
By: Bill Scher, Contributor, Real Clear Politics, June 23, 2014
“Drop These Silly Notions Of False Equivalence”: The Democratic Party Is The Only Home For Centrists
This is a letter to political centrists.
For those of you alarmed that Rep. Eric Cantor was not conservative enough for Republicans in Virginia’s 7th congressional district, I encourage you to read Charles Wheelan’s The Centrist Manifesto
Take a read through Wheelan’s “Manifesto.” It’s a short read, published last year after it became clear that President Obama’s re-election would not bring a new age of bipartisanship to Washington. Wheelan calls for the center to step outside of the two major parties and stand up for itself. In noting that the fastest growing bloc of voters is Independents, Wheelan argues that both the Democratic and Republican parties have driven out moderates by standing only for their political bases — and that the only resolution to this is an organized movement of Independents.
Take a read, because Wheelan is wrong.
Wheelan’s vision may have made sense in 2013, but much has changed in the past year. We are now well past the time for quixotic visions of bipartisanship driven by centrists on both sides of the divide. To read “Manifesto” is to recall a time when Americans could reasonably believe that in spite of bitter partisanship in Washington, Congress could transcend the ideological gap to act on immigration reform, universal background checks, and tax reform. To behave, in short, like statesmen.
If we have learned anything from Eric Cantor’s demise, it’s that the Republican Party is no place for pragmatic centrists. It’s not even a place for relentless partisans who may stray from Republican orthodoxy on an issue or two.
So it’s time to just say it out in the open: The resolution to Washington’s dysfunction is a migration of Independents into the Democratic Party, because there is only one side that seems at all interested in welcoming centrists.
We should first note one of the most fundamental rules of political science: Duverger’s Law. This is the observation, made famous by French sociologist Maurice Duverger, that in winner-take-all two-party systems, voters inevitably gravitate toward one of two major parties. This is because voters do not want to waste their vote on a candidate who will not win. Recall how quickly liberal voters snapped back into the Democratic fold after wasting votes on Ralph Nader in 2000; they know Duverger’s Law well.
Given Duverger’s Law, it would follow that any potential “Centrist Party” would run into institutional obstacles not easily surmounted by even the most popular movement. And even those preaching the gospel of bipartisanship, nonpartisanship, and centrism must accept the reality that the current Republican Party is plainly interested in none of that.
This goes for the 501(c)(4) groups like Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. If you want Congress to move “FWD” on immigration reform, under what circumstance could you expect a GOP-led House to buck the Tea Party and pass a bill that commands broad bipartisan support?
This also goes for moderate voters, whom Wheelan notes comprised 41 percent of the electorate in 2012.
Wheelan correctly observes that any centrist party should not simply meet both sides halfway on each issue, but rather take the best ideas from both sides. A rational observer, for example, would not conclude that climate change is “probably” happening because Democrats are sure it is, and Republicans are sure it’s not.
He also correctly notes that many Democrats have strayed from sensible policies in favor of myopic political interests. But it simply cannot be said that there is no home for centrists in the Democratic Party.
In fact, several prominent Democrats — including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — are on record as supporting school choice. Congress passed free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama in 2011 with large numbers of Democratic votes, and President Obama signed them into law. The Obama administration and many of its congressional allies have supported lowering the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 28 percent.
In other words, Democrats often support centrist policies without reprisal. Such apostasy would never be tolerated in the GOP.
Wheelan examines the U.S. Senate in “Manifesto,” and proposes that if moderate members began asserting themselves as independent from their parties, the cogs of Washington may begin to turn again.
“With a mere four or five U.S. Senate seats, the Centrists can deny either traditional party a majority. At that point, the Centrists would be America’s power brokers…good things can start happening again,” Wheelan writes.
He’s right, but who might these four to five senators be? At the moment, they would almost assuredly be Democrats.
Take a look at the vote scoring of the 112th Senate (which ended after the 2012 election,) done by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. The NOMINATE scale, an abbreviation for Nominal Three-Step Estimation, is immensely complex, and explaining it is well beyond the scope of this piece. Please accept for a moment that -1 on the scale is the score of the most liberal senator imaginable, and 1 is the most conservative. Zero is the perfect middle.
You may note the slight asymmetry of the distribution. I would mark the area between -0.25 and 0.25 as centrist territory. Thirteen of these centrists were Democrats, and only five were Republicans. Of these five, only Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) remain in the 113th Senate. Murkowski, it should be noted, held on to her seat in 2010 only after a miraculous write-in campaign overruled GOP primary voters, who nominated fringe Tea Party candidate Joe Miller.
You might also note that NOMINATE scores President Obama as being as liberal as Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) was conservative. Obama commands the approval of nearly 80 percent of Democrats, while Lugar was dismissed by GOP voters in favor of a man who believed that “God’s intent” was for women to bear the children of their rapists.
A Pew Research Center poll released this week found that 82 percent of “consistently liberal” respondents said they would like elected officials to make compromises; only 14 percent said they would prefer that elected officials stick to their positions. When offered the same dichotomy, “consistently conservative” respondents said they would prefer elected officials hold fast to their views by a 63 to 32 percent margin.
This Republican intransigence left Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, two of the most prominent scholars of the Senate, to place the blame for Washington’s dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
“When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges,” Mann and Ornstein write.
Of course, we recently had two years of almost unfettered Democratic control in Washington. Was the record of the 111th Congress, which reigned in 2009 and 2010, perfect? Of course not. But it got things done, including passing a markedly centrist health care bill that has expanded coverage to more than 10 million people to date.
It got done because those four or five senators Wheelan speaks of cooperated. Those senators were all Democrats.
On the issues, I have no apparent disagreements with Wheelan. He’s a brilliant author and public policy expert.
But he, and others, has to drop these silly notions of false equivalence. I too hope for a day when Republicans in Washington are ready to rejoin mainstream political thought. But it does no good to pretend that they exist in that space now. And given the message that GOP voters just sent us from Virginia’s 7th congressional district, they aren’t coming back anytime soon.
Until the GOP is ready to return to rationality, centrists are left with no choice but to organize and vote for Democrats, and work within the Democratic Party to advance centrist goals.
By: Thomas L. Day, an Iraq War veteran and a Defense Council member of the Truman National Security Project; The National Memo, June 17, 2014
“Eric Cantor Rebranded Himself Out Of A Job”: Like A Golden Retriever Who Tried To Run With A Pack Of Coyotes
It should have been Boehner. It’s not hard to imagine that those were the thoughts going through Eric Cantor’s head Wednesday night as he conceded defeat in his Virginia congressional primary to the Tea Party activist David Brat. After all, it was less than three years ago that Cantor was the foremost champion of Tea Party opposition to the fiscal grand bargain President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were trying to hash out during the debt-ceiling fight. And when Cantor, the House majority leader, successfully sabotaged that deal through a series of Machiavellian maneuvers, he appeared poised to capitalize on the Tea Party’s gratitude and take the speakership from the squishy Boehner—if not that very moment, then some time in the not-too-distant future. Even Obama gave voice to that belief. “You know Cantor’s trying to get your job,” the president taunted Boehner during their 2011 debt-ceiling talks.
And yet, Boehner’s job is safe—he easily won his primary last month—and Cantor is now out of his. In a way, Cantor was the victim of his own ambitions. When he was elected to Congress in 2000, he was an Establishment Republican who strongly supported George W. Bush’s agenda. As a member of the House whip team, he helped persuade his fellow Republicans to vote for many of the bills the Tea Party would later decry—most infamously the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug legislation. He was also a staunch and vocal defender of Tom DeLay against corruption charges. But, in 2006, when it looked as if the House GOP leadership was about to lose its majority, Cantor recast himself as a reformer—denouncing the corruption that had consumed his caucus and even swearing off earmarks. Then after Obama’s election in 2008, Cantor, who’d rode his reputation as a reformer to the post of House Minority Whip, began staking out more obstinately conservative positions and became the face of GOP opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he worked to recruit similarly obstinately conservative Republicans to run for the House, ultimately helping to elect 87 of them. It was those House freshmen whose frustrations and grievances Cantor was channeling during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight—and it was those House freshmen, Cantor and his allies assumed, who’d eventually elevate Cantor to speaker. But when Obama was reelected in 2012, Cantor adjusted yet again. The Tea Party had become a liability and Cantor, while not quite going back to his Establishment roots, began striking more moderate notes—especially on immigration, which Brat used to great effect in his primary campaign. In the end, Cantor rebranded himself out of a job.
During his 14 years in Washington, Cantor reinvented himself so many times that I ultimately lost count somewhere around Cantor 6.0. And that was ultimately the reason for Cantor’s downfall. The serial reinventions left Cantor with few allies and myriad enemies. He was the worst thing a politician could be: someone who inspired great passion, but only negative ones. As we’ve seen this year with Boehner and with Senator Mitch McConnell, Establishment Republicans can withstand Tea Party primary challengers. But Cantor couldn’t because, unlike Boehner and McConnell—who despite their opposition to Obama never entirely cozied up to the Tea Party—he attempted to be something he was not. Cantor was like a golden retriever who tried to run with a pack of coyotes. For a while, he was able to rely on their shared canine ancestry and fit in. But eventually, the coyotes recognized him for the domesticated creature he was. Then they ate him.
By: Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, June 11, 2014
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