“Pain For The Afflicted, Benefits For The Rich”: The Republican Party’s Top Priority Is To Raise Taxes On The Poor. Literally.
Following their convincing victory in the 2014 elections, everyone is wondering what Republicans will do with their new majority in the Senate and House. Well, their policy agenda is becoming clear. It will be unrestrained class warfare against the poor.
This priority was made apparent over the last week during the negotiation of a colossal tax cut package. Senate Democrats and Republicans had been doing some low-key negotiations to renew a slew of tax cuts for corporations and lower- and middle-income Americans, according to reporting from Brian Faler and Rachel Bade at Politico.
Then President Obama announced his executive action on immigration. Enraged Republicans promptly took vengeance on all the goodies for the working poor (as well as for clean energy), cutting them out of the deal and proposing a raft of permanent tax cuts for corporations alone worth $440 billion over 10 years. Cowed Democrats, led by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), were about ready to go along, prompting a decidedly justified outcry from liberals. Obama then threatened a veto, and the negotiations broke down entirely.
A few takeaways from this. First, it’s yet another reminder that Republicans don’t care about the national debt. Conservative carping about the debt is 100 percent of the time a rhetorical cudgel deployed with utter cynicism against programs they dislike for other reasons. When the topic is food stamps or unemployment insurance, they demand offsets to pay for them. (Because “we’re broke,” as Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put it in a similar context.) But when it comes to dropping planeloads of money on corporations and rich people, Republicans will casually blow a half-trillion hole in the 10-year budget without blinking.
We can safely assume that should Republicans win in 2016, they’ll take all the reduction in the budget deficit accomplished over the Obama years (at great cost and for no benefit, but that’s another story) and do the same thing that George W. Bush did: hand it immediately to the rich.
That’s not all, though. Unlike Bush, who gave his eye-wateringly regressive tax cuts a patina of democratic legitimacy by cutting the non-rich in on a small fraction of the spoils, Republicans are now firmly committed to the idea that poor people don’t pay enough in taxes. The Earned Income Tax Credit was originally a conservative alternative to the welfare state, but increasingly only Democrats support it. Republicans are convinced that the EITC is riddled with fraud, and that voting for it means giving welfare to unauthorized immigrants. (In reality, the EITC results in quite a lot of technically improper payments, but mostly as a result of unnecessary complexity.)
Massive transfers of money to the rich are one half of the Republican economic policy agenda; massive transfers of money away from poor are the other half. And the cuts would be cruel indeed:
For example, a single mother with two children working full time in a nursing home for the minimum wage and earning $14,500 would lose her entire [Child Tax Credit] of $1,725 if the CTC provision expires. [CBPP]
Apparently, cutting the income of a poor working single mother by 12 percent is good and proper conservative policymaking in 2014. Because immigration.
Finally, we see that Republicans are still incapable of the basics of political governance. They can’t maintain any sort of agenda outside of being against what Obama is for. Once the president drives them into a frenzy — which is to say, anytime he does anything at all — any negotiations on deck will be blown up as punishment. These days, divided government means constant high-stakes conflict, as everything, including tax credits for working moms, is weaponized in a naked struggle for power.
But should Republicans ever get the run of things, we now have a very good idea of what’s in store: pain for the afflicted, and benefits for the comfortable.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, December 3, 2014
“A Naïve View Of Politics”: The Poison-The-Well Myth, And How Politics Really Works
There are certainly some serious critiques of President Obama’s new immigration policy. It could encourage more illegal immigration in the long run. It may be another step toward an imperial presidency, detached from Congress. It definitely could have been executed less cynically, given that Mr. Obama all but admitted he delayed the announcement until after the midterms, in an (unsuccessful) effort to help Democrats on the ballot.
But there is also one critique that’s getting a lot of attention and isn’t so serious.
It’s the “poison the well” argument — the notion that Mr. Obama’s executive action to shield as many as five million people from deportation will prevent a bigger immigration bill from passing Congress and maybe prevent a whole bunch of other legislation, too.
John Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the next majority leader, have both used the phrase “poison the well.” A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said the move by Mr. Obama would “ruin the chances for congressional action on this issue and many others.” While maybe we should excuse politicians for trying to score political points, neutral commentators have picked up the argument, too. It’s one of those ideas that has the aura of sober-minded political analysis.
Obviously, we can’t run the final two years of the Obama presidency multiple times under different circumstances and see what happens in each. So it’s impossible to know for certain how any one action affects the course of events. But there are all kinds of reasons to believe that the poison-the-well theory is based on a naïve view of politics. And understanding why it’s wrong helps illuminate how politics really does work.
Whatever you may think of today’s politicians, they are highly successful people who have climbed to the top of a competitive profession. Most of the time, they make decisions that are in their interests — whether political interests or policy interests. A few notable exceptions aside (like Newt Gingrich’s infamous pique in 1995 over getting a bad seat on Air Force One), they do not make major decisions the way a small child would, based mostly on whether someone else is being nice or mean to them.
If you ask political scientists what they consider to be the biggest misconceptions about politics, you’ll often hear a version of the Nice-Mean Fallacy. The Obama presidency has offered a particularly rich set of examples. It’s true that Mr. Obama and his White House haven’t done a very good job of building relationships with Congress, and it’s true that the administration’s aloofness has probably hurt its effectiveness in some ways.
But consider the recent president whose relationship skills are often contrasted with Mr. Obama’s: Bill Clinton. Many members of Congress really did seem to prefer Mr. Clinton’s personality to Mr. Obama’s. And yet which of the two presidents failed to keep Democrats united on a major health care bill and thus failed to pass one? And which president held onto every single congressional Democrat he needed to pass such a bill?
Were the roles reversed, we no doubt would hear tales about how the gregarious president used his people skills to pass the biggest expansion of the safety net in a generation while the distant, professorial one failed. In truth, congressional Democrats weren’t making decisions based on either Mr. Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s personality. They were making them based on bigger issues.
The Democratic Party of the early 1990s included more conservative Southerners than the 2009-10 version of the party, for example. The 2009-10 Democrats were also more desperate to succeed, remembering the disappointment of the Clinton bill and probably aware that economic inequality had worsened over the intervening decades. The Democrats stuck together because they believed doing so was in their interest.
Republicans have done the same in the Obama presidency. From the beginning, Mr. McConnell has understood that Republicans could veto Mr. Obama’s promise to be a bipartisan bridge-builder. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t,” Mr. McConnell said in 2010, explaining his caucus’s united opposition to the health care bill. No wonder that Republicans didn’t bite when the White House suggested adding medical-malpractice reform to the bill.
Many Republicans voters back this stance. Polls show that most want their leaders to stand on principle rather than to compromise. Democratic voters are fonder of compromise.
The story on an immigration overhaul has been similar. Some Republicans leaders see a bill as in their interests — helping them with Latino voters — and the Senate passed such a bill, 68-32, last year. Yet most House Republicans have philosophical objections and have few Latino voters in their district. House leaders have refused to bring the bill to the floor.
To accept the poison-the-well argument is to believe, first, that Republicans would have passed an immigration bill if Mr. Obama had not acted. This seems unlikely but not totally out of the question: Perhaps more Republicans want to show they can compromise now that they control both chambers, hoping their presidential nominee can win swing voters in 2016. In that case, an immigration bill might be more feasible in 2015 than it was in 2013.
But the poison-the-well theory then requires a second belief, too: That even if an immigration bill were in Republican interests, they would refuse to pass one, out of spite from Mr. Obama’s executive action. This belief seems strangely dismissive of Republicans’ instinct for self-preservation. It also conflicts with the history of both parties.
On the same day in August 1981 that President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire striking air traffic controllers, many Senate Democrats voted for his tax cut, and House Democrats did the same the next day. Mr. Clinton and congressional Republicans, less than a year after impeachment, collaborated on a sprawling bank deregulation bill in 1999. A few years later, many congressional Democrats voted for the Homeland Security Act even as President George W. Bush was calling them soft on terrorism.
In each of these cases, politicians voted with their interests, not their feelings. There is every reason to believe the same will happen over the next two years.
Some of the same Republicans worrying aloud about poisoned wells no doubt understand this reality. But they continue making the point partly because it helps unify the party on a divisive issue. “It’s a way the G.O.P. can achieve consensus,” as Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist and Upshot contributor, says. “They’re internally divided on policy on immigration but agree on a process critique of Obama’s actions.”
Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio may be on one side of some big immigration questions and conservative House Republicans may be on the other, but they can come together on metaphorical well water. Which is to say that politicians generally act in their interests, even when doing so involves pretending otherwise.
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“The ‘Right’ In It’s ‘Wrong’ Mind”: Will The GOP Scrap Obama’s State Of The Union address?
In early 1999, the political environment in Washington, D.C., bordered on surreal. President Clinton had just been impeached. House Speaker Newt Gingrich had just been ousted from his leadership post, forced out by his own members. Gingrich’s apparent successor, Louisiana’s Bob Livingston, was soon after forced to resign in the wake of a sex scandal.
And at the same time, the U.S. Senate was weighing the charges against Clinton, hearing arguments as to whether or not to remove the sitting president from office.
It was against this backdrop that the White House announced in mid-January that it was time for the annual State of the Union address. TV preacher Pat Robertson, an influential figure in Republican politics at the time, gave his GOP allies some stern advice: don’t let Clinton speak. To give the president an august national platform, Robertson said, would allow Clinton to solidify his support and end the impeachment crusade. Congress isn’t required to host the speech, so there was nothing stopping Republicans from denying Clinton’s request.
GOP leaders on Capitol Hill weren’t prepared to go nearly that far. So, Clinton spoke, he pretended like impeachment hadn’t just happened, and Gallup showed the president’s approval rating reaching 69% soon after.
Nearly 16 years later, another Democratic president, also hated by his Republican attackers, is poised to deliver his penultimate State of the Union address. And like Pat Robertson, the idea of denying the president a SOTU invitation is once again on the right’s mind.
“Yes, there’s a risk to overreacting, but there’s a risk to underreacting as well,” said Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review. “And I fear that’s the way the congressional leadership is leaning.”
Mr. Lowry suggested one way Congress could react. “If I were John Boehner,” he said, referring to the House speaker, “I’d say to the president: ‘Send us your State of the Union in writing. You’re not welcome in our chamber.’”
Lowry may not dictate GOP decision making the way Limbaugh and Fox News do, but it’s important to note that he isn’t the only one publicly pushing the idea.
Politico reported yesterday that congressional Republicans are weighing a variety of tactics to “address” their disgust over Obama’s immigration policy, and “GOP aides and lawmakers” are considering the idea of “refusing to invite the president to give his State of the Union address.”
Late last week, Breitbart News also ran a piece of its own on the subject: “Congress should indicate to President Obama that his presence is not welcome on Capitol Hill as long as his ‘executive amnesty’ remains in place. The gesture would, no doubt, be perceived as rude, but it is appropriate.”
For the record, I rather doubt Republican leaders will go this far. Indeed, if they seriously pursued the idea, GOP officials would risk a backlash that would help, not hurt, the White House.
That said, don’t be too surprised if this talk grows louder between now and the big speech.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 26, 2014
“GOP Anger Cannot Obscure Legal Reality”: On Immigration Policy, The Law And Facts Are On Obama’s Side
There is an adage every young lawyer learns: If you have the law, pound the law; if you have the facts, pound the facts. But if you have neither, pound the table.
The heated Republican rhetoric in response to President Obama’s immigration announcement is unquestionably table-pounding. His opponents have neither the law nor the facts on their side, so they have resorted to name calling and threats. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued a news release referring to “Emperor Obama,” while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused him of being like a monarch and of having a “temper tantrum.” Some conservative legislators have called for censuring the president, or even initiating impeachment proceedings.
As a matter of law, however, it is absolutely clear that Obama has the authority to decide not to prosecute or deport anyone he chooses. Prosecutorial discretion is an inherent part of presidential power. The Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon declared: “The Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.”
No one believes that the federal government has to prosecute every violation of every federal crime or to deport every person who is eligible for deportation. The federal government, for example, long has not prosecuted people caught with small amounts of marijuana even though it violates the federal controlled substance act.
Choices about whether to prosecute are based on a wide array of policy considerations, including how to best allocate scarce prosecutorial resources and whether enforcing a law produces desirable outcomes. Constitutionality is another issue that can be taken into account. It is well established that the president does not have to enforce laws that he believes to be unconstitutional; indeed, to do so would violate his oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Nor does the president have to enforce laws that he believes to be unwise.
All of this is especially clear in the area of immigration policy. The Supreme Court long has recognized that immigration and deportations are closely tied to foreign policy, which is uniquely in the domain of executive power and control. The executive discretion granted by the Constitution certainly includes deciding whether to bring deportation proceedings. Throughout history, the federal government has chosen — for humanitarian concerns or foreign policy reasons — to not try to deport some individuals or classes of individuals, even though they are not lawfully in the United States.
Republican presidents have used this discretion as much as Democratic ones. In 1987, in a decidedly political move by a president who opposed the Sandinista regime, the Reagan administration took executive action to stop deportations of 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, to advance his foreign policy, stopped deportations of Chinese students and in 1991 prevented hundreds of Kuwait citizens who were illegally in the United States from being deported. In 2001, President George W. Bush limited deportation of Salvadoran citizens at the request of the Salvadoran president, ordering that deportation decisions include consideration of factors such as whether a mother was nursing a child or whether an undocumented person was a U.S. military veteran.
All of the Republican anger cannot obscure the legal reality: Obama has the authority to decide to suspend deportations. Likewise, the facts support Obama. A cruel aspect of immigration policy is that it often separates parents, who are in the United States illegally, from their children who are U.S. citizens because they were born in this country.
Nora Sandigo, in Miami, has a sticker in her car that says “Every child is a blessing.” It is a reminder for her as she drives around to pick up yet another child whose parents have been deported. Since 2009, Sandigo has taken legal guardianship of 812 U.S. citizens whose parents have been deported. “La Gran Madre” is what many call her, but she knows her limitations. “All I can do is hold back some of the bleeding. There is no way I can give 812 children the love and attention they need, but … the system is broken.”
It is estimated that there may be as many as 5 million parents in this situation. The irony is that Republican rhetoric for years has emphasized “family values,” but it is Obama who is acting in a profoundly pro-family way.
By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Samuel Kleiner, a fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project; Published in The National Memo, November 24, 2014
“Hollowness Of GOP Arguments”: Where Was Republicans’ Concern for “Political Norms” When They Took The Debt Ceiling Hostage?
Else where on this site, Eric Posner argues that conservatives should celebrate President Obama’s immigration actions because they “may modify political norms that control what the president can do.” The idea, which will be familiar to everyone following the contretemps surrounding Obama’s immigration policy, is that Republicans will eventually be able to marshall the same powers Obama is asserting to more conservative ends.
But near the end of the article, Posner modifies his argument by observing that Obama didn’t actually create any new norms last week at all. Rather, he may have revived a long-dormant conservative inclination to “undermine the regulatory system itself,” from within the executive branch, by pushing the envelope of executive power. We’ve already been down this road before—only before, Republicans were at the wheel.
This is a crucial insight. You can’t understanding the shadowboxing over Obama’s immigration moves if you don’t recognize it as shadowboxing. To nearly a person, the conservatives complaining about the procedural implications of Obama’s actions are expressing substantive or political disapproval through other channels. The conservatives tenting their fingers, anticipating all the discretion a Republican president will use, would likewise have found reasons to support those acts of discretion whether Obama had acted unilaterally on immigration or not.
Two years ago, unilateral suspension of Obamacare requirements sat high on Mitt Romney’s 2012 agenda and Republicans loved it. They never considered it a threat to the right-size of the legislative branch, or worried that Mitt Romney was promising to exercise imperial powers.
Romney didn’t win, and thus his plan to dismantle Obamacare from within the executive branch never came to pass. But we don’t need to refer back to hypotheticals to expose the hollowness of precedential arguments like these. Three years ago, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum identified several real instances in which Republicans ”figured out that old traditions are just that: traditions. There’s no law that says you can’t change them.”
Most of the examples are pretty arcane, and many evince a party committed to purpose, willing to use the rules to their advantage to win elections and shape policy, rather than a party contemptuous of democratic processes.
But the big glaring exception in all this, and the one that really underscores the argument that an abiding concern for traditions doesn’t really drive conservative opposition to Obama’s deportation relief, is the weaponization of the debt limit.
There, the precedent, and the danger to the constitutional order, was actually quite clear. Republicans in 2011 (and again, to less effect, in 2013) attempted to leverage their control over half of the legislature, to impose their substantive preferences on a Democratic president and the majority party in the Senate by using the threat economic calamity as a bargaining chip. To borrow from the right today, we had a situation in which the speaker of the House tried to usurp the Senate’s agenda-setting power and the president’s plenary power to determine which laws to sign and which to veto, by laying out an unprecedented choice between a right-wing vision without popular support, and default on the national debt.
The gambit paid off exquisitely in 2011 with the signing of the Budget Control Act, which brought us the indiscriminate spending controls of sequestration.
I don’t think there’s any way you can argue that Obama would’ve signed the BCA if you take the debt limit hostage-taking out of the equation. Boehner used the lawful powers at his disposal to settle a big fight over federal spending by fiat—remember the Boehner Rule?—except that since the legislature doesn’t enforce laws, the only way he could accomplish this was to threaten immense damage to the national and global economies as the price of non-compliance.
And it worked! It worked so well that he tried it again after Republicans lost the 2012 elections, by which point Obama had learned that Boehner’s leverage was actually illusory.
I think the Budget Control Act is a terrible law, and I think the precedent Boehner wanted to set would’ve been disastrous if it had taken hold. Fortunately, our political system proved resilient enough to prevent Republicans from turning this kind of brinksmanship into a matter of routine, and for that reason we don’t need to relitigate the normative questions Boehner raised over two-plus years of debt limit brinksmanship.
But if you dip into the archives at National Review—where we can now read about Obama’s similarity to Latin American military dictators—or into Ross Douthat’s old New York Times columns, which today center on the question of whether Obama is more like Caesar or a tin-pot caudillo—you’ll find that the right was much, much more concerned about whether Republicans were making wise tactical moves in debt limit negotiations, or whether conservatives would pocket satisfactory substantive concessions, in what was essentially a legislative mugging, than in questions of precedent.
Separation of powers questions almost never creeped in. Because conservatives were basically happy with what Republicans were setting out to accomplish.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, November 24, 2014
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