“How The Movie Ends”: Three Stories That Prove The GOP Is Screwed For Years To Come
We are in the doggiest of the dog days of summer. Congress is currently in the sleep spindles stage of a five-week nap that the public doesn’t think it deserves. Meanwhile, the political media—because TV and the Internet and even the printing presses never stop—must continue to bark and pant. So anything you hear or read—including here—must be approached with appropriate skepticism. But three stories published online over the past 24 hours show what kind of media narrative we can expect in September, once our elected officials finally wake up and swipe the drool from their slack jaws.
1. The Hill reports Friday morning that “House conservatives say grassroots support is building for their effort to risk a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare.” Those House conservatives, specifically, are Indiana’s Marlin Stutzman and Texas’ Michael Burgess, who say there’s been overwhelming support at town hall meetings for doing anything, even shutting down our very necessary government, to defund Obamacare (a law that, it bears reminding, is a law—lawfully passed by Congress, signed by a lawfully elected president, and being lawfully enacted as we speak).
Burgess told The Hill that the decision to exempt lawmakers and staff from Obamacare is “driving people into a froth,” adding, “I’m hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt.” Well, of course he’s hearing that! These town meetings are not exactly how people with moderate opinions prefer to spend their evenings. But Burgess and Stutzman—unlike GOP representatives Tom Cole and Steve Womack, who are quoted as being opposed to a shutdown, no matter what they hear from constituents—are going to assume that a few dozen town hall attendees represent the thousands of voters who elected them.
Takeaway: House conservatives will likely return from vacation not only well rested, but emboldened to threaten a shutdown.
2. The New York Times reported Thursday that a “Puzzle Awaits the Capital: How to Solve 3 Fiscal Rifts,” the lead sentence of which declares that only one thing is “clear” about the endgame of this showdown: “President Obama thinks Republicans cannot risk another debt crisis or government shutdown, and Republican leaders agree.” The Times even goes so far as to call it a “consensus,” concluding that “the odds of an economy-damaging stalemate are relatively low, despite rising jitters in the capital.”
Takeaway: Republican leaders think they can prevent these emboldened, well-rested House conservatives from shutting down the government. Let’s hope the House leadership has learned how to count votes since June.
3. Neither The Hill nor The New York Times, though, come out and say what this really means. Enter Politico. According to Mike Allen and Jim VandeHai’s latest interpretation of our nation’s political theater, we are on the “Eve of Destruction.” “It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be,” they report. “Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it.”
The “blown opportunities and self-inflicted wounds” include House opposition to broad immigration reform, alienating Latinos; narrowing voting laws and saying dumb things about the Trayvon Martin case, alienating blacks; and continuing to believe that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, alienating gays.
Takeaway (via Politico, natch): “This probably doesn’t matter for 2014, because off-year elections are notoriously low-turnout affairs where older whites show up in disproportionate numbers. But elite Republican strategists and donors tell us they are increasingly worried the past nine months make 2016 look very bleak—unless elected GOP officials in Washington change course, and fast.”
So. Come September, you can expect hourly reports on threats to shut down the government, the likelihood of said shutdown, and finally the imminence of said shutdown, with websites featuring running counters of the days, hours, and minutes until the first deadline, and then the second deadline, and then the third deadline. Riveting stuff! As Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told the Times, “Even those of us quite close to it have a hard time saying how the movie ends.”
That statement is offensive to anyone who has ever made a movie. Also, we know how it ends: with a Democrat in the White House in 2017.
By: Brian Kearney, The New Republic, August 17, 2013
“Marginalized By Louder Fringe Voices”: Barely A Blip On The National Radar, The Tea Party Is Losing August
August 2009 was the month of the Tea Party town hall.
We were just eight months into the Obama presidency, and Democratic congressmen headed home for recess only to get ambushed by mobs chanting their opposition to ObamaCare. As The New York Times reported at the time, “members of Congress have been shouted down, hanged in effigy, and taunted by crowds.” The August 2009 town halls certainly created obstacles on the road to health care reform, and in many ways, gave birth to the national Tea Party movement.
Now here we are in August 2013, when some observers thought that Tea Party groups would actually derail the tenuous legislative push for immigration reform. The anti-immigration group NumbersUSA is certainly trying, posting “Town Hall Talking Points” along with lists of congressional events at which to reel them off.
But midway through August, the Tea Party is barely a blip on the national radar. What happened?
1. The anti-immigration Tea Party crowd is being out-crazied
Despite the heroic efforts of Rep. Steve “Cantaloupe Calves” King, the anti-immigration faction of the Tea Party is being crowded out by voices even farther out on the fringe.
The news out of the town halls has featured Oklahoma’s “Birther Princess” and a Republican congressman casually musing about impeachment. Outside of the town halls, Republicans are publicly feuding with each other over whether to agitate for a government shutdown and conservative talk radio hosts are expending their energies defending the wisdom of turning a Missouri rodeo into a minstrel show.
The right wing’s summer cacophony is muffling the noise of the anti-immigration forces, as well as deepening the Republican image problem among moderates and people of color.
2. The Republican leadership wants no part of Tea Party agitation
For all we know, the Tea Party fizzle may be exactly what the Republican leadership wants. According to Politico, “House Republican leaders have spoken about immigration only when asked during the August recess.” That suggests Speaker John Boehner and his allies are looking to lower the temperature, creating a climate that eventually will allow compromise to win the day.
But it’s not just the formal Republican leadership that is refusing to join the anti-immigration crusade. Tea Party favorites like Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz haven’t been leading the anti-immigration parade either, despite their opposition to the bipartisan Senate bill. The Daily Caller‘s Mickey Kaus lashed out, saying, “If Amnesty Wins, Blame Cruz,” as Cruz is siphoning off conservative grassroots energy for his fight against ObamaCare.
The best NumbersUSA could book for its Stop Amnesty tour is Rep. King. A recent rally led by King, held in the congressional district of the second-highest ranking House Republican, attracted a mere 60 people. Meanwhile 1,500 pro-immigration-reform activists held a Wednesday rally in the heavily Latino congressional district of the third-highest ranking House Republican.
3. Republican money is on the other side
The 2009 town hall outbursts were nationally organized in part by conservative groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which were funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.
But the Kochs support immigration reform, as do Karl Rove and 100 other major Republican donors. As of June, pro-immigration groups had outspent opponents more than 3-to-1.
These three factors are connected. Because the anti-immigration squad is so poorly funded and lacking in leadership, it is vulnerable to being marginalized by louder fringe voices and better organized mainstream voices.
The louder the fringe voices become, the stronger the case mainstream Republicans can make to their leaders to accept immigration reform, on the grounds that the party can’t survive if it remains associated with birthers and bigots. At the same time, since the Tea Party can’t get the conservative grassroots riled up now, they won’t have much of a case to make to incumbent congressmen that they will face fierce primary challenges next year if they agree to a compromise with Democrats.
Score August as a big win for immigration reform.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, August 16, 2013
“Not Conservative Enough”: In The Republican Party, The Hard Right Is Where The Enthusiasm Is
It’s become an article of faith among some Republican elites that the GOP doesn’t have an outreach problem, it has a turnout problem. During a recent interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, for instance, Rush Limbaugh boiled down the argument to its core. It’s not that the GOP has an issue with racial minorities or that most voters—whites included—have no interest in its policies or approach. Its problem is that it isn’t conservative enough. “The people that sat home,” he explained, were “mostly white Republican voters,” who were “dissatisfied with the Republican Party’s rejection of conservatism.”
Now, to most observers, the GOP has done everything but reject conservatism. Mitt Romney may have made his name as a moderate governor of Massachusetts, but his platform as Republican presidential nominee was a grab bag of proposals from the wish lists of conservative activists: large tax cuts for the wealthy, larger cuts to the social-safety net, prohibitions on abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage, and a hardline stance on immigration.
And indeed, in the nine months since Romney lost the presidential election, Republicans have only moved further to the right, falling deeper into the “fever” of intransigence and obstruction. Just this past week, for example, House Republicans had to give up on appropriating funds for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Why? Because their right-wing members demanded massive cuts to key programs, and less doctrinaire Republicans wouldn’t go along.
The problem for potential reformers in the GOP, however, is that the rank and file is on the side of the zealots. According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of self-identified Republicans say the party needs to “address major problems” if it’s going to be competitive in national elections. For them, however, this isn’t a case of being too conservative. Indeed, it’s the opposite: 54 percent of Republicans say the party’s leadership isn’t conservative enough. And 35 percent say that GOP leaders have compromised too much in their dealings with President Obama. Presumably, this minority wanted Republicans to hold out on the debt ceiling and refuse to deal on the fiscal cliff and is pushing for a standoff over funding the government this fall.
This wish for a more conservative Republican Party holds for a variety of issues. Thirty-six percent say that the party should be more conservative on immigration—compared with 17 percent who say it’s “too conservative”—and 46 percent say it should be more conservative on government spending, compared with just 10 percent who say it’s too conservative. Guns are the only area where a majority say the party is in a right place, and recall, the GOP’s position on guns is that regulations—of any sort—are verboten, even when they have support from the vast majority of Americans.
None of this would be a huge problem for efforts to move the GOP to the center of American politics if the most moderate Republicans were also the most active. In reality, the opposite is true. The most conservative voters are also most likely to vote in all elections, including primaries. Of the 37 percent of Republicans who agree with the Tea Party, 49 percent say they always vote in nomination contests, compared with 22 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans.
In other words, hard-right conservatism is where the enthusiasm is, and it’s reflected in the broader state of Republican politics. To wit, it’s hard to imagine how Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell could do more to satisfy the conservative base. For the last four years, he has all but led the GOP opposition to Barack Obama, setting Republicans on a path of complete opposition to the president’s priorities and nearly derailing his signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.
From the beginning, he understood—correctly—that Obama’s popularity depends on a broader perception of cooperation and bipartisanship in Washington. By denying that, he harmed the president’s core appeal and helped turn a critical mass of the electorate against the White House, setting the stage for the GOP’s massive win in the 2010 midterm elections.
But despite all this, Mitch McConnell faces a primary challenge. Matt Bevin is a Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite who sees the five-term senator as a patsy and a squish. “McConnell has voted for higher taxes, bailouts, debt-ceiling increases, congressional pay raises, and liberal judges,” said Bevin in his first ad.
Given McConnell’s actual actions, it’s tempting to dismiss Bevin as delusional. The truth of the matter, however, is that he speaks for a large plurality—if not majority—of Republicans who believe that success can only come when the party moves far, far to the right. And at the moment, there’s nothing—not electoral defeat, not public opprobrium—that will disabuse them of that conviction.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, August 5, 2013
“Paranoids Or Problem Solvers”: Can The Republicans Get A Handle On Their Party’s Bigots?
Of the many arguments against comprehensive immigration reform, this from Republican activist Cathie Adams is one of the strangest.
Speaking to right-wing radio host Rick Wiles last week, Adams decried a measure in the Senate immigration bill that would require biometric scanning for non-citizens at airports. “[O]f course, we know in biblical prophecy that that is the End Times,” Adams said of the initiative. “That is going to be the brand either on our foreheads or on the back of our hands. That is demonic through and through. That is End Times prophecy. There is no question about that.”
Except there is. For the large majority of Christians (and Americans, writ large) who don’t hold fundamentalist eschatological views, this is either incomprehensible, misguided, or—at worst—near-heretical. For our purposes, however, it’s simply important to note that this idiosyncratic religious belief forms the basis for Adams’s opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. She has one other problem, too: that the bill would give “amnesty” to Muslims who don’t have the “best intentions” for the United States, which seems to rely on a distorted and prejudiced view of Islam and its adherents.
If Cathie Adams were just one of the countless activists or provocateurs that dominate conservative politics, this would be worth noting, but not commenting on. But she’s the former chairman of the Texas GOP, from 2009 to 2010, and that’s no small thing.
By size and population, Texas is the second largest state in the Union. It contains four of the country’s largest cities and metropolitan areas, and is a major engine of economic growth for the nation.
Texas Republicans don’t just dominate the state’s political landscape—controlling its legislature, 24 of its 36 congressional districts, both of its Senate seats, and all of its statewide offices—but they’re also a powerful force in national politics, and one of the most important wings of the GOP writ large. Not only is Texas the home state of the party’s most successful political dynasty—the Bush family—but its members play influential roles at all levels of politics, from John Cornyn at the Republican National Committee to Karl Rove at American Crossroads. Leading the state party is a big deal; it allows for significant influence over everything from candidate selection and outreach, to fundraising and platform writing.
In other words, Adams is a Texas GOP elite who reflects other, similar elites. There’s Rep. Louie Gohmert, who once warned that “radical Islamists” were “being trained to come in and act Hispanic,” which—for him—was a reason to oppose comprehensive immigration reform. Likewise, there’s Rep. Steve Stockman, who declared immigration reform a Democratic plot to “destroy America,” and Sen. Ted Cruz, whose vocal opposition reflects right-wing anger over the Gang of Eight proposal.
In fairness, it should be said that there are Texas Republicans who support immigration reform, and who are working to bring Latinos into the state Republican Party. This summer, chairman Steve Munisteri announced an effort to hire two dozen new full-time workers, and dedicate them to minority outreach, including Latinos. At the same time, groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas—spearheaded by George P. Bush, son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush—have made heavy investments in Latino candidates for public office. Munisteri has been silent on comprehensive immigration reform, but Bush, like his father, is a supporter.
What you can’t escape, however, is that Cathie Adams and her ilk speak for a large number of Republicans—in Texas and nationwide—who oppose immigration reform. And while there is a sensible argument against reform—and the Senate bill in particular—the reality is that the most vocal opponents rely on Adams’s blend of paranoia and prejudice. Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, argues that a path to citizenship will encourage drug runners to enter the country. “For every [immigrant] who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that, they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” said King, doing his best to alienate Latino voters.
But even with people like King in the party, if just some House Republicans got behind an immigration bill, it would pass. And indeed, several GOP lawmakers have either dropped their opposition to citizenship, or announced their flexibility on the issue. For instance, in an interview Thursday, Rep. Dave Reichert of Washington state floated citizenship as a fair trade for greater border security. “I want to get to the point where they have to pay a fine, there are some penalties they have to go through, there are some steps they have to go through. I want to hold them accountable, and then they get citizenship,” he said.
The dilemma for the rest of the party is this: Do they want to stand with Cathie Adams and her ilk? Or do they want to join with Republicans like Reichert, who are trying to solve problems? The Adams contingent holds significant sway in the House of Representatives, but they aren’t all-powerful, and if enough Republicans decided on reform as a project worth pursuing, it would happen.
Beyond the narrow issue of a bill, the choice between Adams and Reichert expands into a broader question: What kind of party does the GOP want to be? Does it want to be one that can reflect a more diverse group of constituents, who may share similar interests but come from different perspectives? Or does it want to remain a redoubt for a shrinking minority of older whites? The GOP’s choice on immigration reform won’t answer the question, but it will push them in one direction or another. For the sake of our novel experiment in broad-based multiracial democracy, I hope they reject the Cathie Adamses of their party.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, August 9, 2013
“The Fever Isn’t Breaking”: Those Most Adamant For Change In The GOP Will Mainly Want A More Feverous Party
After ignoring a couple of useless polls about GOP rank-and-file interest in nonspecific “change,” I was happy to dig into a new Pew survey that shows the rightward pressure on Republican leaders that’s now been part of the landscape since at least 2008.
Now it’s important to note two things about the survey right off the bat. First, it includes Republican “leaners,” who probably boost the number of self-identified “moderates” in the survey, and also the number of those who don’t regularly participate in Republican primaries. And second, when it asks Republicans what direction they want the party to take, it’s not always clear how they perceive the party’s current direction.
If, like me, you think the GOP has been on a fairly steady ideological bender from the moment John McCain started getting heckled on the 2008 campaign trail for not being vicious enough, then the fact that a 54/40 majority of the rank-and-file want their party to “move in a more conservative direction” is more than a little alarming. Similarly, the finding that 35% of Republicans believe party leaders have “compromised too much” with Democrats while another 32% think they have “handled it about right” takes on an entirely different complexion if you feel, as I do, that GOPers in Washington are achieving historic levels of mindless obstructionism. On specific issues, the assumption that current Republicans positions are already pretty extreme means 60% of Republicans want to stay that way or get more extreme on abortion; 75% feel that way about immigration; 87% on government spending; and 79% on guns. But I am sure some pundits will look at the same numbers and say that with the exception of “government spending” and perhaps immigration, roughly equal numbers want the party to move left or right. It’s all about how you view the status quo. On immigration, there is a legitimate reason to wonder which “party leaders” poll respondents have in mind in urging them to become more conservative. Even in the Senate, we sometimes forget, Republicans voted against the Gang of Eight bill by a 32-14 margin.
In any event, there’s not much comfort in this poll for those who are looking for signs that the “fever is breaking.” Yes, there’s less rank-and-file identification with the Tea Party than there was in 2010, but since there is very little actual disagreement (only 11% of Republicans in this poll) with the Tea Folk, that may simply reflect the belief of some that the Tea Party is the Republican Party. Since some observers are already looking at Chris Christie as a potential fever-breaker, it’s notable that in this poll his standing is a lot iffier than that of other named potential ’16ers (a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 47/30, which, as TNR’s Nate Cohn points out, is worse than Mitt Romney ever performed in a similar poll during his high-wire run to the GOP nomination). If, as we have every reason to expect based on turnout patterns and the ’14 landscape, Republicans have a non-disastrous midterm cycle, there’s no reason to believe Republicans are going to demand massive changes in messaging or strategy, and every reason to suspect those most adamant for change will mainly want a more feverous party.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 31, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 