Is The Republican Coalition Against Gingrich Insurmountable?
In his most recent appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio show, New Yorker staff writer Ryan Lizza talked about the Republican establishment’s disdain for Newt Gingrich — and Hewitt pointed out that the coalition against the former House Speaker’s candidacy goes well beyond them.
Here’s the transcript:
LIZZA: one thing about Gingrich that has just sort of shocked me, and maybe I should have realized this, but the level of hostility towards this guy from frankly the Washington Republican establishment, is off the charts. I’ve been, I don’t get out much. I have two small kids. But I’ve been going to a few holiday parties here in D.C., and all the conversations, of course, are about Gingrich. And I mean, there are Republicans in this town who are saying that they would vote for Obama before they would vote for Newt Gingrich in a general election.
HEWITT: Yeah.
LIZZA: And so this may be something you can help me understand. There’s a major mismatch here between, for lack of better words, the Republican establishment and the people who are telling pollsters that they like Newt better than Romney.
HEWITT: What’s interesting, Ryan, I think there are two camps. They’re, you know, Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn, neither of whom fit the term Washington insider…
LIZZA: Right, right.
HEWITT: Both has lacerated Newt Gingrich on ideas. Then, there is that great silence from everyone who served with him in Congress. I guess John Boehner broke that silence with Mike Allen today. I haven’t read it, yet. I was told by Chris Cillizza that Boehner damned with faint praise today. So there is a Beltway hostility, but there is a public intellectual hostility that I think goes to his ideas, which are not, in the final analysis, conservative.
LIZZA: And a lot of conservative intellectuals don’t respect him, and think he’s been all over the place, and he latches onto whatever the hot, new thing is, and then drops it two seconds later, and doesn’t have an attention span.
It is difficult to imagine Gingrich winning the GOP nomination with a coalition this diverse arrayed against him. And even less so when he’s widely thought to be the weaker general election candidate.
As Lizza put it later in the same conversation:
You can’t find a Democrat in Washington who thinks that Newt Gingrich would be a better candidate, would be more likely to beat Obama than Romney. I mean, it’s just, I’ve searched for these people. I’ve searched for the counter argument here, the sort of person who’s thinking outside the box and says oh, wait a second, actually Gingrich would be tougher to beat.
You can’t find that person.
Also hard to find: prominent champions of the proposition that Gingrich should be president. Absent that, I don’t think he can win.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 19, 2011
What Happens To The Economy If The Payroll Tax Cut Expires?
Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) threw cold water on a temporary extension of the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut that had passed overwhelmingly in the Senate on Friday. “Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill,” Boehner said, despite the fact that on Friday he had called it a “good deal” and a “victory.”
House Republicans intend to vote down the Senate’s bill tonight, leaving the issue unresolved. But what happens if the payroll tax cut is allowed to expire? According to several economic analysts, it would severely affect growth and job creation next year:
– According to Macroeconomic Advisers, allowing the payroll tax cut to lapse “would reduce GDP growth by 0.5 percent and cost the economy 400,000 jobs.”
– Barclay’s estimated that letting the cut expire would knock 1.5 percent off of first quarter growth next year.
Meanwhile:
– Ameriprise Financial Services estimated that extending the cut “is likely to add between 750,000 to 1 million jobs.”
– Susan Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, calculated that the payroll tax cut “would add 1 percentage point to economic growth and create 1 million jobs next year.”
– Regional Economic Models Inc. estimated that the cut would pump “$120 billion into U.S. households in 2012.”
“If the Europe mess weren’t there, there would be a good case for letting taxes go back up,” said Joel Prakken, the chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers. “But a combination of a big tax increase plus the threat from Europe, when the economy is still in the doldrums — why take that risk?” If the House does vote down the Senate’s bill, the Senate will have to come back into session in order to craft a final agreement.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, December 19, 2011
The Pointlessness Of Being A Republican House Speaker
It appears that the House will vote later today on a plan to extend payroll tax cuts for two more months that breezed through the Senate by an 89-10 margin over the weekend. But there’s no suspense: Speaker John Boehner even says it’s going to fail. So why go ahead with the vote? There are some technical and procedural reasons, but it probably has more to do with an attempt at face-saving on the speaker’s part.
The problem for Boehner, as has been amply demonstrated this year, is that he’s a speaker who lacks the muscle typically associated with his title. This really isn’t his fault. The GOP’s House membership can roughly be divided into two groups: 1) Conservative true believers (many of whom won their seats in 2010) who embody the Tea Party’s anti-Washington, anti-Obama, anti-compromise absolutism; and 2) conservatives who have some pragmatic instincts but who are terrified of acting on them in the Obama era, lest it prompt a primary challenge from a Tea Party purist.
Now consider what Boehner, an 11-term House incumbent who led the GOP in the lower chamber during the final few years of the Bush presidency, represents to the average Tea Party activist: the exact sort of entrenched D.C. insider who spent the Bush years signing off on W’s big government agenda and giving conservatism a bad name, thereby abetting the rise of Obama in 2008. He managed to secure the speaker’s gavel for the 112th Congress mainly by being in the right place at the right time, but he’s had to wield it with the knowledge that scores of his members (along with the conservative activists and media personalities who have credibility with the Tea Party base) are ready to punish him the minute he sells them out. Add in the presence of an ambitious No. 2 House GOP leader who isn’t very fond of Boehner and who enjoys far more trust from the Tea Party crowd, Eric Cantor, and it becomes clear that Boehner is essentially a speaker-in-name-only.
Which makes situations like the payroll tax debate painful to watch. The rate is set to rise to 6.2 percent unless an agreement can be reached by the end of the year, and after some intense posturing, it seemed like one had been struck over the weekend, with Senate Democrats and Republicans voting nearly unanimously to extend it through February and to pay for it with a series of small cuts previously agreed to by both parties during deficit reduction talks. To mollify Republicans, a provision was included to force Obama to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline by February. The deal could hardly have been described as a big win for either side. It was what it was: a way to prevent a tax increase on millions of middle class Americans that neither party wants to be blamed for.
Boehner was well aware of this. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell kept him in the loop as he negotiated with Majority Leader Harry Reid, with Boehner saying then: “If the Senate acts, I’m committed to bringing the House back — we can do it within 24 hours — to deal with whatever the Senate does.” But when McConnell and Reid struck their deal and the Senate approved it on Saturday, Boehner took part in a conference call with the House’s GOP members. According to numerous reports, he started out by calling it a “good” deal and expressing his support. But then Cantor and his allies trashed it, and so did numerous other members on the call. A strong speaker, one who isn’t constantly on guard against potential mutinies, might have laid down the law at this point and leaned on his leadership team to twist arms and bring the membership into line. But Boehner was in no position to do that, and he hasn’t been all year.
So that was that. By Sunday, Boehner was on television calling the deal unacceptable, vowing that the House GOP wouldn’t approve it, and raising the possibility that the tax cuts will expire at the end of the year. Which brings us to today’s pointless vote. Asked by Greg Sargent to reconcile Boehner’s eagerness to move on a McConnell-Reid deal last week with his new position, Boehner’s spokesman claimed there was no inconsistency because the speaker had only said that the House would act on it — not that the vote would turn out a certain way.
Believe that if you want, but this sure feels like only the latest episode in which Boehner wanted to protect his party from inflicting political damage on itself but had no standing to do so.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon War Room, December 19, 2011
Tea Party Conservatives Dislike Taxes, But They Dislike President Obama Even More
Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner announced that House Republicans won’t support the Senate’s deal to temporarily extend the payroll tax cut for over 150 million workers. The compromise prompted an uprising among the House GOP’s Tea Party wing.
The opposition from Tea Partyers raises the question: Is denying Obama a victory — one that would help the economy, which could make Obama’s reelection prospects a shade brighter — a higher priority for them than even cutting taxes?
Conservatives have a variety of explanations for opposing the compromise. One is that it’s only two months. But as Ezra Klein and Steve Benen point out, they won’t agree to a clean year-long extension, which is why the shorter-term one had to be negotiated in the first place. Another claim is that the Senate deal isn’t really a compromise, as GOP Rep. Tom Cole put it. But Republicans got their number one priority — the Keystone XL pipeline — included in the deal, while Democrats dropped their number one demand, i.e., that the extension be paid for by a millionaire surtax. Senate Republicans overwhelmingly supported the deal. If this deal isn’t a compromise, then the word has lost all meaning for conservatives, which may be the real story here.
A third reason is that a two-month extension is bad politics for Republicans. On a conference call, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy reportedly argued against the compromise partly because it would allow Obama to again browbeat Republicans into extending the tax cut during his State of the Union address in January. Such balanced priorities!
This latest impasse reveals just how extreme, intransigent, self-indulgent and hostile to basic norms of governing the Tea Party wing has become. It’s as if compromise itself must be opposed, for its own sake, regardless of what any particular compromise contains. This is another case in which the public is seeing with total clarity the disastrous results of giving the Tea Party a seat at the governing table.
The House is set to vote on the measure, and will likely defeat it, Monday night. House Republicans may come up with a new version, but Democrats insist the Senate won’t come back to approve any new version, so the way forward is unclear. For now, Dems insist that returning would be throwing Republicans a lifeline: If the tax cut expires, it will be solely their fault, because the Senate has passed a deal, and the President is ready to sign it.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, December 19, 2011
The Republican Clown Show Rolls On
The payroll tax cut that Speaker of the House John Boehner called “chicken shit” in the GOP House caucus would save the average American $1,000 per year. A grand doesn’t mean much to the speaker or his banker and billionaire buddies but to working families that’s a lot of money. John Boehner’s idea of soaking the rich is to jump in a hot tub with them after 18 holes.
I betchya $10,000 that working families know that former Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t care about their financial problems. Mitt Romney speaks French. Does that make him a cheese-eating surrender monkey?
The GOP flying circus pitched its big top in Iowa last night. It was fun watching Mitt Romney juggle his positions on healthcare; former Speaker Newt Gingrich swallowing a sword inflamed by his own rhetoric, and Gov. Rick Perry driving the clown car.
The Donald jumps off another one of his ships just before it sinks. First, his presidential campaign and then his own debate. Things are really bad for Trump when even the clowns in the GOP presidential race don’t want to be in the same room with him.
Gingrich went to New York City to see The Donald and conveniently Tiffany’s is right next to Trump Tower. While in NYC, Gingrich had breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Tiffany’s. Where do you think Newt will be doing his Christmas shopping this year anyway? By the way President Obama got what he wanted for Christmas. Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich’s campaign is deeply in debt and he was in hock big time to Tiffany’s. And he calls himself a fiscal conservative. Gimme a break! Gingrich doesn’t know much about family values but he did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I watched the Newt Gingrich-Jon Huntsman debate debacle. Do you think anybody will remember their debate 150 years from now? I don’t think so. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas have nothing to worry about.
Rush Limbaugh would rather hug it out with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton than read this post. Bill O’Reilly would rather watch Keith Olbermann. Glenn Beck would rather see a Michael Moore movie than read this. A Tea Party-er would rather hook up with an Occupy-er.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, December 16, 2011
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