“GOP Establishment Is Beginning To Panic”: Are Republican Voters Going To Come To Their Senses About Donald Trump?
The metaphor most often used about Donald Trump’s candidacy these days is that he’s “defying gravity,” which implies that while a real candidate can rise and then stay high all the way to the nomination, a candidate like Trump is supposed to bounce up and then fall back down to earth. But even as Trump is no longer enjoying the blanket coverage that he did a month or two ago, he’s still leading the Republican field.
Meanwhile, the candidate in second place, Ben Carson, is every bit Trump’s equal when it comes to policy ignorance, appalling statements, and the potential for a disastrous general election. The establishment’s early choice, Jeb Bush, has cratered, while its second choice, Marco Rubio, is creeping up slowly, but so far seems to be generating much more interest from funders and strategists than from actual voters.
So as Byron York reports today, the GOP establishment is beginning to panic, about Trump in particular:
This weekend was an inflection point in the Republican presidential race — a moment in which some significant part of the GOP establishment came out of denial and realized Donald Trump might well become their party’s nominee.
“The Republican establishment, for the first time, is saying, off the record, this guy can win,” noted Joe Scarborough on MSNBC Monday morning. “I’ve heard that from everybody. I don’t hear anybody saying he can’t win the nomination anymore.”
That doesn’t mean Republicans have made their peace with a Trump victory. On the contrary — some are preparing to do whatever it takes to bring him down. Which could lead to an extraordinary scenario in which GOP stalwarts go to war to destroy their own party’s likely nominee.
The trouble is that they don’t have much of a war plan, partly because “the establishment” is far less organized and unified than you might think, and partly because there are only so many tools at their disposal. There’s talk of a large TV ad campaign against Trump, built on “the political insiders’ unshakable faith that negative ads work.” You can also see that faith in this interview with longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who’s running Jeb Bush’s “Right to Rise” Super PAC. Murphy’s argument for why Jeb is still the candidate to beat, despite the fact that his support has fallen to single digits and he’s now in fourth or fifth place in most polls, is essentially that Jeb will win because unlike the other candidates, he has a lot of money to run ads.
Ads can work, in the right context (though they have a short half-life; their effect tends to fade quickly). But they’re not a guarantee of anything, particularly when you have a candidate who has performed as poorly as Jeb, whose latest genius campaign maneuver is getting into an argument with Trump about whether his brother was actually president when the September 11 attacks happened. And the truth is that while Jeb may have raised the most money, some other candidates aren’t doing too badly either, particularly Carson and Ted Cruz.
In any case, the theory underlying not just Jeb’s candidacy but also Rubio’s is that eventually, the voters will come around to someone reasonable. They may need to be pushed in the right direction, but they can’t stick with the likes of Trump and Carson forever. The lower-tier candidates will drop out, the voters will coalesce around a smaller number of alternatives, and the choice will become clear, at which point one of the sane candidates will win.
Which could well happen. But by now, we should be wary of assuming anything about this race. How many people expected Trump to do as well as he has for as long as he has? The establishment and his opponents have tried a series of arguments against Trump, none of which have worked. He’s not a real conservative. He’s erratic. He’s ignorant. He’s killing us with Hispanics. If he was the nominee, we’d lose in a landslide.
All of which is true, but so far it hasn’t mattered. Trump is still leading, as he has from almost the moment he got into the race. As NBC News said this morning, “Donald Trump and Ben Carson are only getting STRONGER as we head into next week’s third GOP debate.” Nobody supporting Trump is unfamiliar with him; it’s getting less and less likely that an opponent will be able to say, “Did you know this about Trump?” and watch his support ebb away. They know who and what he is, and that’s why they’re behind him.
Trump is now putting together an actual campaign organization, with things like ballot-access specialists and ground operatives, which he didn’t have before. As Ron Brownstein points out, “Trump is cementing a strong blue-collar base, while the white-collar voters relatively more resistant to him have yet to unify around any single alternative.” The longer that unification takes, the better position Trump will be in; it isn’t hard to imagine him winning one early state after another and building up an unstoppable momentum.
Those who have been observing politics for a long time — whether you’re talking about journalists or the insiders now trying to figure out how to stop Trump — still have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that he could really win. They now acknowledge that it’s possible, but it still seems crazy. Which it certainly is. But it’s looking like the establishment is going to have to do more than wait for primary voters to come to their senses if they want to stop him.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, October 20, 2015
“Chaos Is The GOP’s New Normal”: Trembling And Moaning, Republicans Now Saying “Make It Stop, Make It Stop, Make It Stop”
At this point, I worry we’re going to start finding members of the Republican establishment curled up in their beds, eyes clenched shut and ears covered with trembling hands, moaning “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”
Pity their suffering, but remember that they brought it on themselves.
The insurrection that propelled billionaire Donald Trump into the lead for the GOP nomination and ultimately made House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) surrender his gavel in frustration rages on unabated. This was no mere summer skirmish. If anything, the rebellion is gaining strength.
It is dawning on the party grandees that their most recent predictions of Trump’s demise, like earlier ones, were wrong. He lost some ground after a lackluster performance in the second debate, to be sure. But he still has a healthy lead, with his slide halted or even reversed, and continues to enjoy — astonishingly — more than double the support of any Republican candidate who has held elective office.
More incredible is that in second and third place are retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, both of whom share Trump’s distinction of never having been elected even dogcatcher. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Trump is at 23 percent, Carson at 17 percent and Fiorina at 10 percent. That adds up to fully half of GOP voters defiantly thumbing their noses at all the senators, governors and former-somebodies who are languishing down there in single-digit limbo. Jeb Bush, for all his money and pedigree, is at 8 percent.
Imagine what assumptions the political cognoscenti would be making if it were Bush, not Trump, who had maintained such an impressive lead since July, both nationally and in the early primary states. The smart money — which seems pretty dumb this year — would surely anoint him the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. Yet it is taken as an article of faith by Republican wise men and women that Trump will surely lose. Somehow.
He might, of course. Running for president is hard, and Trump has already made some rookie mistakes. But after getting where he is on bluster, charisma and personal energy, he is now putting together an organization capable of performing the nuts and bolts work of a viable campaign. He even shows new self-awareness, acknowledging to interviewers that the last debate may not have been his best outing.
And there is a reason for Trump’s success that goes beyond his skill at burnishing his personal brand: He is saying what much of the GOP base wants to hear.
The party establishment has only itself to blame. From the moment President Obama took office, Republicans in Congress have been selling the base a bill of goods. They demonized Obamacare and cynically swore to repeal it, knowing they could not. They balked at sensible immigration reform, deciding instead to do nothing. They engaged in Pyrrhic brinkmanship over the budget and the debt ceiling, fully aware that in the end they would have to back down.
Promising to do the impossible was an effective short-term strategy for raising money and winning midterm elections. But if you keep firing up your supporters and letting them down, they become disillusioned. They begin to think the problem might not be Obama and the Democrats. It might be you.
That same dynamic is happening in the House, where Boehner’s decision to walk away has emboldened, not chastened, the ultraconservative revolutionaries in the GOP ranks. Look at the way they chased out hapless Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who on Thursday abandoned his bid to succeed Boehner because of opposition from the radical Freedom Caucus.
If he chooses, Boehner can use his remaining weeks in office to keep his party from further injuring itself by shutting down the government or playing chicken with the debt ceiling. But it will only be a matter of time before the next speaker has to quell some far-right tantrum.
In the Democratic Party, the conflict is ideological — left vs. center-left. In the GOP, the struggle looks existential.
Put another way, it’s not hard to imagine a party in which there’s room for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and you can easily imagine one supporting the other as standard-bearer. But a tent that can hold, say, both Trump’s view on undocumented immigrants — hunt them down and kick them out — and Bush’s support for compassionate reform? That’s not a political party, it’s a food fight.
The Republican establishment may ultimately find some way to drag one of its presidential candidates through the primaries. But chaos, Trump has shown, is the GOP’s new normal.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 8, 2015
“This Is Why The Gun Nuts Win”: An Oregon Sheriff’s Nutty Conspiracy Theories Explains The GOP’s Impotence
Mass shootings and gun-crazed conspiracy theorists: Our country is swimming in an abundance of both, so it was just a matter of time before the two collided, not on the shooter side of the equation but on the law enforcement side.
John Hanlin, the sheriff of Douglas County who has been in charge of the police response and investigation of Thursday’s shooting at Umpqua Community College, has fallen under media scrutiny because he’s left an eyebrow-raising trail of gun nuttery that shades into conspiracy theorist territory. His past behavior calls into question not just his own office’s ability to handle this case responsibly, but tells us a lot about why it’s so hard to even begin to have a reasonable conversation about guns in this country, much less move towards sensible policies to reduce gun violence.
Conservatives aren’t lying when they say they need guns to feel protected. But it’s increasingly clear that they aren’t seeking protection from crime or even from the mythical jackbooted government goons come to kick in your door. No, the real threat is existential. Guns are a totemic shield against the fear that they are losing dominance as the country becomes more liberal and diverse and, well, modern. For liberals, the discussion about guns is about public health and crime prevention. For conservatives, hanging onto guns is a way to symbolically hang onto the cultural dominance they feel slipping from their hands.
This comes across clearly in the letter that Hanlin wrote to Vice President Joe Biden in 2013 where he asked that the administration “NOT tamper with or attempt to amend the 2nd Amendment” and where he threatened ominously, “any federal regulation enacted by Congress or by executive order of the president offending the constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies, nor will I permit the enforcement of any unconstitutional regulations or orders by federal officers within the borders of Douglas County Oregon.”
Despite all the attempts at formal, legalistic language, Hanlin is clearly writing more in a mythical vein than he is actually addressing any real world policy concerns. His absolutist language about the 2nd amendment ignores the fact that there are already federal and state regulations on guns and who can buy them. More disturbingly, his posturing about open rebellion against the federal government evokes the conspiracy theory-mindset of the hard right, the kind of paranoid hysteria about federal power that led to so much violence during the Clinton administration, from shootouts at Waco and Ruby Ridge to the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City. This is not a letter from someone soberly assessing the pros and cons of proposed regulations on firearms. This is the letter of someone wrapped up in childish fantasies of revolution.
In case there is any doubt about this, Hanlin also, at the same time, used his personal Facebook page to promote the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation meant to give cover to the federal government gun grab that right wingers have been warning us for decades is coming any day now.
It’s not just Hanlin. Guns are generally talked about in right-wing circles in these mythical terms. And because a gun isn’t just a gun to conservatives, but a symbol of all they hold dear, having a reasonable conversation about gun control has become impossible. To liberals, it’s about keeping guns out of the hands of people who misuse them. But to conservatives, it’s clearly about stripping away their very sense of identity, which is naturally going to be a touchier subject.
That’s why Republican politicians would rather say the dumbest, most offensive things possible after a mass shooting than even entertain the possibility that guns might need a teeny bit more regulation. Jeb Bush is getting a lot of grief for saying, in the wake of this latest shooting, that “stuff happens, there’s always a crisis,” but there’s not much else he could say without running the risk of losing the primary. To dare suggest that guns, which have become this precious symbol of conservative identity, could be anything but pure and good and wholesome is just bad politics for a Republican. You might as well wipe your shoes with the American flag in their eyes.
This is also why Mike Huckabee went with the baldly ridiculous route of saying, ““Seven hundred people a year get killed because somebody beats them up with their fist,” as if that’s comparable to the 11,000 people who are murdered by guns a year. The point of this rhetoric is to distract from the fact that guns were invented for the sole purpose of killing. Instead, Huckabee is invoking the framework where the gun is actually a symbol of all that conservatives hold dear instead of what they really are, which is weapons that have no use outside of being weapons.
Squaring the emotional attachment to firearms with the real world fact that guns are weapons that kill innocent people causes too much cognitive dissonance, and so the pleasant fantasy is chosen over the hard reality. For gun victims, however, there is no fantasy, but just the gruesome fact that guns are weapons that can deal death with a minimum amount of effort from aspiring murderers.
By: Amanda Marcotte, Salon, October 5, 2015
“There Is No Such Thing As Settled Law”: If You Liked 10 Years Of The Roberts Court, You’ll Love The Next Republican President
There were plenty of terrifying moments in this month’s Republican presidential debate on CNN, but one of the most terrifying, to me, was when the candidates started to complain that the current U.S. Supreme Court isn’t conservative enough.
Specifically, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz went after Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led what law professor Erwin Chemerinksy has called “the most conservative court since the mid-1930s” but whose appointment the conservative far-right Cruz nonetheless called a “mistake.” What Cruz objected to was Roberts’ two votes to save the Affordable Care Act from frivolous conservative lawsuits. What he didn’t mention is that a less conservative right-wing Court would not have even entertained those politically motivated cases in the first place. In fact, the Court under Roberts has taken a stunning turn to the Right.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day Chief Justice Roberts was sworn in to the Supreme Court. In that decade, aided by the confirmation of fellow George W. Bush nominee Samuel Alito, he has led a Court that has radically reshaped vast swathes of the law, undermining constitutional protections for civil rights and voting rights, reproductive freedom, workplace fairness, the environment, gun violence, consumer fairness and representative democracy as a whole.
As People For the American Way explains in “Judgment Day 2016,” a new analysis of Roberts’ decade at the head of the Supreme Court, under his leadership the Court “has issued more than 165 5-4 decisions, many of which have bent the law and defied logic, seriously harmed the rights of ordinary Americans, promoted the interests of powerful corporations, and damaged our democracy.”
The most infamous of these is probably Citizens United v. FEC, which, along with a set of related cases, gutted the country’s campaign finance system, allowing wealthy individuals and corporate interests almost unchecked influence over American elections. But the Roberts Court’s gifts to Corporate America did not end there. Among the cases decided by the court’s five-justice conservative majority were Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., which undermined women’s ability to seek equal pay for equal work; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which upended religious liberty protections to allow corporations to deny full health insurance coverage to their employees; and AT&T v. Concepcion, which protected corporations that cheat large numbers of customers out of small amounts of money.
The Court’s conservative right-wing bent has extended to civil rights cases, most stunningly its 5-4 ruling gutting the enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, which had allowed the Justice Department to review changes in voting laws in areas with a history of racial discrimination in election practices. In other cases, the court has been just one vote away from wreaking havoc on civil rights laws, including the 5-4 decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four moderate Justices to preserve the ability to effectively enforce the Fair Housing Act, another critical achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.
This Court will rightly be remembered by many as the one that guaranteed gays and lesbians the right to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges. But that landmark case, in which Justice Kennedy joined the moderate Justices, was one bright spot in a very bleak landscape.
It’s important to remember as well that Chief Justice Roberts, whom Republicans are now attacking as too liberal, wrote the conservative justices’ scathing dissent in that case. If conservatives get one more vote on the Supreme Court, Obergefell could be in danger. If there is one thing the Roberts Court has taught us, it is that there is no such thing as settled law. Despite predictions that the Republican Party would just fold up its tent on the marriage issue, its presidential candidates are campaigning with promises to appoint Justices who will overturn the decision.
Whatever issue you care about most in the upcoming election – civil rights, health care, reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, or others – it will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court. And the composition of that Court, and whether it will protect our rights or defer to big corporations and right-wing interests, will depend greatly on whether a Democrat or Republican is elected as our next president.
By the end of the next president’s first term, four of the current Supreme Court Justices will be in their 80s, past modern Justices’ average retirement age of 78. This means that the next president will likely have the power to either turn back the Court’s rightward swing … or preserve or worsen it for decades to come.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People for The American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, September 29, 2015
“Voodoo Never Dies”: Never Forget That What It’s Really About Is Top-Down Class Warfare
So Donald Trump has unveiled his tax plan. It would, it turns out, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
This is in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
For what it’s worth, it looks as if Trump’s plan would make an even bigger hole in the budget than Jeb’s. Jeb justifies his plan by claiming that it would double America’s rate of growth; The Donald, ahem, trumps this by claiming that he would triple the rate of growth. But really, why sweat the details? It’s all voodoo. The interesting question is why every Republican candidate feels compelled to go down this path.
You might think that there was a defensible economic case for the obsession with cutting taxes on the rich. That is, you might think that if you’d spent the past 20 years in a cave (or a conservative think tank). Otherwise, you’d be aware that tax-cut enthusiasts have a remarkable track record: They’ve been wrong about everything, year after year.
Some readers may remember the forecasts of economic doom back in 1993, when Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate. What happened instead was a sustained boom, surpassing the Reagan years by every measure.
Undaunted, the same people predicted great things as a result of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. What happened instead was a sluggish recovery followed by a catastrophic economic crash.
Most recently, the usual suspects once again predicted doom in 2013, when taxes on the 1 percent rose sharply due to the expiration of some of the Bush tax cuts and new taxes that help pay for health reform. What happened instead was job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s.
Then there’s the recent state-level evidence. Kansas slashed taxes, in what its right-wing governor described as a “real live experiment” in economic policy; the state’s growth has lagged ever since. California moved in the opposite direction, raising taxes; it has recently led the nation in job growth.
True, you can find self-proclaimed economic experts claiming to find overall evidence that low tax rates spur economic growth, but such experts invariably turn out to be on the payroll of right-wing pressure groups (and have an interesting habit of getting their numbers wrong). Independent studies of the correlation between tax rates and economic growth, for example by the Congressional Research Service, consistently find no relationship at all. There is no serious economic case for the tax-cut obsession.
Still, tax cuts are politically popular, right? Actually, no, at least when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans believe that upper-income individuals pay too much in taxes, while 61 percent believe that they pay too little. Even among self-identified Republicans, those who say that the rich should pay more outnumber those who say they should pay less by two to one.
Well, consider the trajectory of Marco Rubio, who may at this point be the most likely Republican nominee. Last year he supported a tax-cut plan devised by Senator Mike Lee that purported to be aimed at the poor and the middle class. In reality, its benefits were strongly tilted toward high incomes — but it still drew harsh criticism from the right for giving too much to ordinary families while not cutting taxes on top incomes enough.
So Mr. Rubio came back with a plan that eliminated taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inherited wealth, providing a huge windfall to the very wealthy. And suddenly he was gaining a lot of buzz among Republican donors. The new plan would add trillions to the deficit, which conservatives claim to care about, but never mind.
In other words, it’s straightforward and quite stark: Republicans support big tax cuts for the wealthy because that’s what wealthy donors want. No doubt most of those donors have managed to convince themselves that what’s good for them is good for America. But at root it’s about rich people supporting politicians who will make them richer. Everything else is just rationalization.
Of course, once the Republicans settle on a nominee, an army of hired guns will be mobilized to obscure this stark truth. We’ll see claims that it’s really a middle-class tax cut, that it will too do great things for economic growth, and look over there — emails! And given the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism, this campaign of obfuscation may work.
But never forget that what it’s really about is top-down class warfare. That may sound simplistic, but it’s the way the world works.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 2, 2015
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