“No Country For Old Moderates”: In The GOP, One Side Is Fighting, The Other Side Is Rolling Over
The more I think about this Republican “civil war,” the less it looks like war to me. It often gives the appearance of being war because these Tea Party people march into the arena with a lot of fire, brimstone, and kindred pyrotechnics that suggest conflict. But what, really, in hard policy terms, are these two sides arguing about? Practically nothing. It’s a disagreement chiefly over tactics and intensity. That’s a crucial point, and so much of the media don’t understand it. But I’m here to tell you, whenever you read an article that makes a lot of hay about this “war” and then goes on to describe the Republican factions as “moderate” and “conservative,” turn the page or click away. You are either in the hands of an idiot or someone intentionally misleading you.
What’s going on presents many of the outward signs of political warfare. Insurgent radical extremists are challenging already very conservative incumbents whose thought and deed crimes are that they are conservative only 80- or 90-something percent of the time instead of 100 (or 110, preferably). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), American Conservative Union 2012 rating of 92, being challenged? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell? He got 100 percent in 2012! Hey, I was joking about that 110!
So sure, running primaries against people like this can be called warlike acts. But a real war has two sides who believe different things and are willing to fight to the death for them. In this war, that description applies only to one side.
This…skirmish, let’s call it, is between radicals and conservatives. (It certainly doesn’t involve moderates; there are roughly four moderate Republicans in Congress, depending on how you count, out of 278.) The conservatives, the more traditional conservatives such as John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and many others in the Senate, and House Speaker John Boehner, could be a force if they wanted to. But by and large, they’ve refused to be. If the GOP had two warring factions, then you might expect that on all major high-profile legislative votes, the schism would evince itself in the roll calls. But when you look back over the list of high-profile measures that have come before them while Barack Obama has been president, the conservatives and the radicals only really split on two occasions.
One was the fiscal cliff deal as 2013 started. In the House, 85 Republicans backed that deal and 151 voted against it. In the Senate, the vote was 89-8; 40 Republicans backed and five opposed. (Three Democrats opposed it because the tax-increase threshold went too high, from the expected $250,000 per household to $400,000.) The second was the vote we just had to reopen the government and raise the debt limit. That, of course, passed the House by a comfortable margin, with the support of 87 Republicans, while 144 opposed. The vote in the Senate was 81-18, with 27 Republicans voting aye and 18 nay.
That’s it. Interestingly, those two votes show us a radical caucus in the Senate that grew in 10 months from five to 18, while in the House, the radicals have outnumbered the conservatives in a remarkably consistent way. But those are the only diversions from party unity. On all other major matters, matters of policy—Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, cap and trade in the House—there is no disagreement. Everyone, or nearly everyone, votes no. The only really important votes on which these two sides disagree are the votes that threaten fiscal calamity. So that’s all the conservatives stand for. Elect me, and at five minutes ’til midnight, I’ll stand courageously against global economic cataclysm!
One could add one more basis of disagreement. Occasionally, the conservatives cast votes conceding that the government ought to be able to function as designed; you know, with agencies having people run them. But that happens only once about every two years.
Now is the time for them to stand up and say “enough.” An October 7 Washington Post-ABC poll found that just 52 percent of Republicans approved of how Republicans were handling the budget negotiations. That’s margin of error to 50-50. So half of the Republicans in the country disapprove of what the GOP just did.
But they might as well be zero, for they effectively have no representation. The regular conservatives—most conspicuously the craven Boehner, but all the others, too—did nothing to represent these people until the last possible second, and until the radicals demonstrated conclusively that they couldn’t pull off defunding Obamacare.
Think about that. Half of one of our major political parties, constituting many millions of citizens, barely has a voice in Washington. If they did have a voice, none of this late madness would have happened. But the legislators who ostensibly represent them are cowards, kittens, balled up in the corner. The radicals may be fighting a war. But the conservatives are executing a classic rearguard action. At best. And that’s not much of a civil war. And it says a great deal about the character of the Republican Party, and especially of the conservatives. History will remember.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 24, 2013
“Debunking GOP And Media Claims”: Reality Is Most Americans Back Obamacare Or Want It Expanded
One of the many disgraceful aspects of the media coverage of Obamacare—and criticism of the ACA, and the Tea Party claims in general—is the rote depiction of the new law as “very unpopular” or “opposed by most Americans according to polls” because it goes too far. Most people are said to be happy with the health care system as is, and so on. In other words, repeating the GOP line.
Now, those who have supported the law have long claimed that the simple bottom line poll numbers are misleading. Yes, those numbers generally show that, say, 51% don’t like the ACA and only 44% approve. Yet, as we know (but many in the media fail to recognize, even beyond Fox News), a lot of Democrats and liberals are unhappy, wisely, because the law doesn’t go far enough, or that President Obama didn’t fight for the public option or single payer or Medicare for all. So how many of them are included in that bottom line number who “oppose” the ACA—but from the left?
Polls have indicated there’s a fair number but now there’s a new one today that CNN actually took the trouble—at the end of its online report, true—to break out. And, lo and behold, it turns out that fully 12% of those opposed feel the law doesn’t so far enough.
So, as they note, that means that instead of just over 50% being against the law because it goes too far—the impression most in the media have left—at least 53% actually back the law or believe it should be expanded. And the poll was taken at the worst possible time—amidst the current widespread complaints about the roll-out of the ACA sign-up provisions.
The other numbers in the poll bear out support for the ACA, as they show that the shutdown has inspired growing unpopularity for the GOP and John Boehner (even among Republicans) but Obama’s standing has remained the same.
This is the first time since the Republicans won back control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections that a majority say their control of the chamber is bad for the country.
Meanwhile, an expert on the ACA has fact-checked a Sean Hannity segment last Friday and exposes the misinformation there—and also suggests, sadly, that many Fox viewers who could save thousands of dollars each year, and gain coverage for pre-existing condition and for their children by embracing Obamacare, probably will not. That’s the true evil of Fox propaganda.
By: Greg Mitchell, The Nation, October 21, 2013
“Common Ground Is Not Always Common”: Beware Of Paul Ryan’s Lose-A-Battle, Win-A-War Strategy
The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans got nothing—except some historic disapproval numbers and a lot of internal backbiting—from the whole shutdown showdown.
But there are different Republicans, with different intentions, and not all of them were frowning as the week of their party’s public shame came to a conclusion.
It is certainly true that Texas Senator Ted Cruz has become a political punch line—the Canadian-born Republican whom Democrats would most like to see the Grand Old Party nominate for president. House Speaker John Boehner’s name is likely to enter the lexicon as an antonym for “leadership.” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is going to be spending an inordinate amount of time discussing the term “Kentucky kickback.” And it may even be dawning on the Tea Partisans that the whole “defund Obamacare” gambit was a charade.
The real point of the exercise in chaos that the country was just dragged through was the chaos itself.
And the beneficiary of it all is the Republican who has suddenly stepped back into the limelight after laying low through most of the shutdown: House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin.
Fully aware that the American people have no taste for a “grand bargain” that might see the implementation of at least some of his Ayn Rand–inspired “survival-of-the-fittest” proposals for means-testing earned-benefit programs, for taking the first steps toward privatization of Social Security, for turning Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs, Ryan has for years been looking for an opening that makes his proposals seem “necessary.”
The 2012 election, when he was his party’s “big ideas” guy, and its nominee for vice president, confirmed that there was no electoral route to advance his agenda. Americans rejected Ryan, overwhelmingly. He could not even carry his home state for the Romney-Ryan ticket, which was defeated by a 5 million popular-vote margin and a 332-206 Electoral College blowout. Ryan knew that it would take more to get his opening. And the crisis of the past several weeks in Washington provided it.
Some analysts were surprised when Ryan voted against the deal to temporarily end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling. They shouldn’t have been. While it’s true that Ryan—an enthusiastic backer of the 2008 bank bailout—is a reliable vote for the agenda of the Wall Street speculators who fund his campaigns, he wasn’t going against his political patrons when he joined 143 other House Republicans in voting “no.” Rather, the Budget Committee chairman—who just reported raising more than $1 million in fresh campaign funds in the third quarter of 2013—was voting to strengthen his own hand as he steps into the ring for the next stage of an inside-the-Beltway fight that is far from finished.
The deal that ended the shutdown set up a high-stakes conference committee on budget issues. If there is to be a “grand bargain,” this is where it will be generated. And Ryan—the most prominent of the fourteen Democrats, fourteen Republicans and two independents on the committee—is in the thick of it.
The Budget Committee chairman says it would be “premature to get into exactly how we’re going to” sort out budget issues.
But no one should have any doubts about the hard bargain he will drive for. In the midst of the shutdown, Ryan jumped the gun by penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed that proposed: “Reforms to entitlement programs and the tax code…”
“Here are just a few ideas to get the conversation started,” Ryan wrote. “We could ask the better off to pay higher premiums for Medicare. We could reform Medigap plans to encourage efficiency and cut costs. And we could ask federal employees to contribute more to their own retirement.”
Translation: Get ready for the radical reshaping of Medicare so that it is no longer a universal program. Make way for more price-gouging by the private companies that sell supplemental insurance. Launch a new assault on public employees who have already been hit with wage freezes and furloughs.
And Ryan will not stop there.
He never does.
That’s why the Democrats on the conference committee—led by Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray, D-Washington—must be exceptionally wary.
“Chairman Ryan knows I’m not going to vote for his budget, and I know he’s not going to vote for mine,” says Murray. “We’re going to find the common ground between our two budgets that we both can vote on and that’s our goal.”
The thing to remember that Ryan is working to get cuts to earned-benefit programs onto that common ground.
Ryan cast his “no” vote on the deal that set up the conference committee in order to begin organizing his troops for a fight that will set up the next shutdown and debt-ceiling struggles. The committee has a deadline of December 13. That makes its report—or the lack of one—the first deadline on a schedule that proceeds toward new continuing resolution and debt-ceiling votes in January and February. That creates tremendous pressure for a deal, and Ryan’s at the ready.
That answer to his supplications must be a firm “No.”
That’s what Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, is proposing. Sanders, one of a member of the conference committee says: “it is imperative that this new budget helps us create the millions of jobs we desperately need and does not balance the budget on the backs of working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor…”
Sanders’ office notes: “The Senate budget protects Medicare while the House version would end Medicare as we know it by providing coupons for private health insurance. Unlike the House budget, the Senate resolution does not repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would prevent more than 20 million Americans from getting health insurance. The House version would eliminate grants for up to 1 million college students while the Senate plan protects Pell grants. The House version would kick up to 24 million Americans off of Medicaid while the Senate budget would protect their benefits. The Senate budget calls for new revenue while the House version would provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks mainly for the wealthiest Americans and profitable corporations offset by increased taxes on the middle class.”
Ryan would be more than happy to settle for a “common ground” agreement that opens the way for a little bit of privatization, a little bit of movement toward vouchers, a little bit of means testing, a little bit of an increase in the retirement age. But if he gets that, the big “blink” that everyone was talking about during the shutdown fight will have happened.
If that is where this thing ends, it might not be the Democrats who get the last laugh.
It might yet be a Republican named Paul Ryan.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 18, 2013
“More Problems Than Just The Tea Party”: Too Much Attention Being Paid To The Gladiator TV Hard Core “Stars” Of The Republican Party
I am not talking about poll numbers. I am not talking about the Republicans’ record unpopularity. I am not talking about declining support for the tea party. I am not even talking about election results.
I am focusing on the following numbers: 85, 49, 87 and 87 again.
Those are not Powerball numbers … well, in a sense maybe they are!
What are they? These are the “YES” votes from Republican members of the House of Representatives on four pieces of legislation that Speaker John Boehner brought to the floor of the House, ignoring the Hastert rule. That, of course, is the rather absurd self-imposed rule that says you shouldn’t bring up a bill if it does not have majority support from your caucus.
Here are the bills:
- 85 Republican votes to approve the fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012.
- 49 Republican votes to approve emergency funding for hurricane Sandy.
- 87 Republican votes to approve extending the Violence Against Women Act.
- 87 Republican votes to approve opening the government this week.
Combined with nearly unanimous support from Democrats, all these bills passed.
Now, that meant that 151 votes, 179 votes, 138 votes and 144 votes were cast against these four bills, respectively, by Republican House members.
The point here is that the problem with Republicans is not just several dozen Tea Party activists – it is a caucus that won’t truly stand up to those extreme elements of the party. Too much attention is being paid to the gladiator TV hard core “stars” of the Republican Party such as Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Reps. Raul Labrador, Michele Bachmann, Steve King and a handful of others.
They have somehow convinced the House Republican caucus that the best way to take on Obama and the Democrats is scorched earth.
The real question now is whether the pragmatic, reasoned, responsible gene present in many Republican House members will assert itself. Will they negotiate bills on fiscal matters, immigration reform, entitlements and taxes that lead to progress? Or will they let the tea party members role them over and over again?
The hope for many is that this horrendous shutdown and brinkmanship may have taken many members to the edge – they see the absurdity and suicidal nature of the action – and they are ready to stand up to the extremists within their own party. When we start seeing the numbers switch and more than 100 Republican members begin to accept reasonable legislation then we will know that they are no longer going to kow-tow to the Tea Party. We can all hope for that day.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
“The Vote To Free The Hostages”: Unreasonable Conservatism Remains A Majority Proposition In The House Republican Conference
It was a foregone conclusion that the bill to end the manufactured fiscal crisis would sail through Congress once Ted Cruz foreswore a filibuster and John Boehner abandoned the “Hastert Rule.” The actual votes were anticlimactic, but still interesting.
The eighteen Senate Republicans who voted against the bill were far short of what it would have taken to sustain a filibuster, obviously. But still, the “nays” included all three senators thought to be mulling a 2016 presidential campaign (Cruz, Paul and Rubio), plus one previously mainstream senator facing a right-bent primary challenge (Enzi).
The 285-144 House vote showed why abandonment of the Hastert Rule was necessary. Actually, the 87 Republican votes cast for the bill (as against 144 GOP “nays”) was higher than most people anticipated. But it showed that unreasonable conservatism remains a majority proposition in the House Republican Conference.
The only “yea” vote that surprised me was that of Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. But I’m guessing he really, really wanted to get money fully flowing to the Pentagon. More predictably, all three House members from Georgia running for the Senate voted “nay,” as did the putative GOP Senate candidate from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy. Shelley Moore Capito, the likely GOP Senate nominee from WV, voted for the bill.
At TNR Nate Cohn has some interesting insta-analysis of the GOP vote patterns in the House, noting that it was a lot like the “fiscal cliff” vote in January.
The underlying divisions are similar to the fiscal cliff vote, as well. Last January, commentators marveled at the outlines of a GOP civil war, between north and south, tea party and establishment. Tonight, red state and Southern representatives voted overwhelmingly against the Senate compromise: 27-91 in the red states, 25-88 among Southern representatives. Republicans from the Northeast and Pacific voted “yes” by 30-16 margin; the blue states voted “yes,” 32-17.
Cohn also notes that House GOPers with distinctly less ideologically conservative voting records and those from very marginal districts voted overwhelmingly for the deal. But any way you slice it, the majority of the Conference voted to continue a government shutdown and a debt limit threat that were not working very well for the GOP or for the country.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 17, 2013
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