“Trouble Behind The Lines”: Sam Brownback, A Mad Scientist Whose Lab Has Blown Up
The strangest thing about the battle for the Senate going on this year is how much trouble Republicans are having in states won by Mitt Romney, and not necessarily the ones where they expected trouble. Contests in South Dakota, Kentucky and Georgia have all spent some time panicking Republicans, and none of those states has been put away by the GOP in the interim. But the biggest surprise still has to be Kansas, a profoundly Republican state with multiple struggling statewide Republican campaigns. Playing off Mark Benelli’s fine profile of events in Kansas for Rolling Stone, I discussed the plight of the GOP there at Washington Monthly today:
[Benelli’s] precis of how Sam Brownback made the state an experiment for the discredited fiscal theories of doddering supply-siders is an instant classic:
Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant, sounded like an exiled Marxist theoretician who’d lived to see a junta leader finally turn his words into deeds. “Brownback and his whole group there, it’s an amazing thing they’re doing,” Laffer gushed to The Washington Post that December. “It’s a revolution in a cornfield.” Veteran Kansas political reporter John Gramlich, a more impartial observer, described Brownback as being in pursuit of “what may be the boldest agenda of any governor in the nation,” not only cutting taxes but also slashing spending on education, social services and the arts, and, later, privatizing the entire state Medicaid system. Brownback himself went around the country telling anyone who’d listen that Kansas could be seen as a sort of test case, in which unfettered libertarian economic policy could be held up and compared right alongside the socialistic overreach of the Obama administration, and may the best theory of government win. “We’ll see how it works,” he bragged on Morning Joe in 2012. “We’ll have a real live experiment.”That word, “experiment,” has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his “pro-growth tax policy” would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy,” but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas’ neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he’d enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.
Brownback added political to fiscal risk by securing big bags of money from friends like the Koch Brothers and using it in a 2012 primary purge of moderate Republican state senators who didn’t support his fiscal plans. And it’s all blown up on him this year, with the shock waves potentially engulfing the state’s senior U.S. Senator. Binelli’s portrait of Pat Roberts as an “unloved Beltway mediocrity” who stands by trembling with fatigue as more famous and charismatic conservatives campaign to save his bacon is as acute as his portrayal of Brownback as a mad scientist whose lab has blown up.
Because of the nature of the state and the year and the outside (and inside, from the Kochs Wichita HQ) money flooding Kansas, Brownback and Roberts may survive–Brownback to preside over the damage he’s done to the state’s fiscal standing and schools, and Roberts to return to a final stage of his long nap in the Capitol. But both men have richly earned the trouble they are in.
At a minimum, Browback’s presidential ambitions are now officially laughable, and moderate Republicans have gotten his full attention. But it would be nice to see an object lesson taught in the limits of Republican extremism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly; The Democratic Strategist, October 24, 2015
“Dark Money And Our Looming Oligarchy”: At Some Point Soon, Untraceable ‘Dark Money’ Will Likely Overtake The System
There is something obscene in looking at the raw numbers, is there not? More than $500 million being spent on House races, and north of $300 million on Senate contests. A half-billion dollars! In the House! Where, as of yesterday, the Cook Political Report was counting a mere 17 contests as toss-ups, with 19 others as vaguely competitive. [This paragraph originally said $300 billion, which was incorrect.]
But the gross (double entendre intended) amounts aren’t the money story of this campaign. The money story of this campaign is that undisclosed money is starting to overtake the system and overtake our politics, and that at the heart of this corruption sits a lie peddled to us by the Supreme Court when it handed down the Citizens United decision. Whether it did so naively or cynically, I honestly do not know. But let’s just say that if it was naïve, it was almost too naïve to believe, Steve.
Here’s the situation. Outside spending—that is, the spending not by candidates’ own committees—may possibly surpass total candidate spending, at least in the competitive races, for the first time. And of that outside spending, an increasing amount is the category they call “dark” money, which is money whose sources and donors don’t have to be disclosed. I mean, don’t have to be disclosed. At all. That’s because these aren’t SuperPACs, which at least do have to disclose their donor lists, but are 501c4 “social welfare” (!) groups that don’t have to file anything with the Federal Elections Commission.
You’ve heard a lot about how bad SuperPACs are, and they are, but they’re not even the main problem these days. Most SuperPAC money has to be disclosed. But social welfare money does not. This recent study by the Brennan Center tells the tale. It totaled up the outside money being spent in the nine most competitive Senate races and found that 33 percent of these outside dollars weren’t subject to disclosure requirements. This includes the aforementioned social welfare organizations along with trade associations, the 501c6’s, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is one of 2014’s biggest spenders, possibly spending more this cycle than it did even in the presidential year of 2012.
A further 23 percent is subject only to partial disclosure. So more than half of this outside money is now spread around behind either partial or total secrecy. That percentage is assuredly going to grow. Almost all of the Koch Brothers’ money—they earlier announced a goal of spending $300 million on these elections, just $100 million less than they spent in the presidential year of 2012—is dark, and if they succeed, others will surely follow their example.
Oh yes, there are Democratic dark money groups too. Interestingly, the League of Conservation Voters is a big player here. But overall there isn’t as much Democratic dark money coursing around out there. For example, in the nine key Senate races, GOP dark money tops Democratic dark money in eight of nine of them (Louisiana is the exception), and in many cases not by two-to-one but three, six, 10, 12 to one. The disparities are highest in Kentucky and Georgia—not coincidentally, the two races considered most of the year to be the best chances for Democratic pickups, and therefore the two races where someone deemed it vital that the most unaccountable money possible be used to finance attack ads.
Okay. So what’s this mean? Well, it means this. Under the quaint old corrupt system, at least you and I could in theory learn the names of nearly every donor to a candidate or committee. And yes, there were 501c4’s then, and c6’s, but they simply didn’t spend much money on electoral politics back then. Karl Rove and others figured out that there’s nothing stopping a c4 from doing almost pure electoral work (even though the law says it’s not supposed to be its “primary purpose”), and from there it proliferated, because they knew the IRS couldn’t enforce it. (And they went after the IRS, claiming to be victims of Lois Lerner, just to make sure.) And so it’s come to pass that people whose names you and I will never have a chance to know donate vastly more amounts of cash.
Of course, someone knows them: the candidates. If and when Iowa Republican Joni Ernst (roughly $7 million in dark money so far) and David Perdue in Georgia (a little more than Ernst) make it to the United States Senate, we can be sure they’ll remember who wrote the checks.
And now, to the Supreme Court. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, which opened the sluices to corporate money. But as you might recall, Kennedy insisted that there should be no problem with this. Why? Because there would be no more secret money: “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
Kennedy describes a good-government Valhalla here, where campaigns and committees get a check in the mail and instantly scan it and send it along to the FEC, and bam, Bob’s your uncle, it’s there for the whole world to see. Of course, few citizens are going to go poring through FEC tables, but at least they’d be there for timely public review for reporters. That would be…tolerable, maybe.
But that is not remotely where things are headed. One of our parties is against full disclosure. They used to be for it, the Republicans did. But then they saw which way the post-Citizens United wind was blowing and became anti-disclosure. McConnell, the little Satan on his party’s shoulder on these matters, made the switch in 2012.
So that’s what this election marks: The routinization, in all contested races, of undisclosed money coming to dominate these campaigns, and the clear majority of it on the corporate, pro-Republican side. And yep, it can get worse.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 22, 2014
“Layaway Purchase Plan”: GOP Nightmare Reveals Secret Corporate Donors
Some people have myriad recurring nightmares about being publicly embarrassed, such as rising to give a speech and realizing you know nothing about the topic — then realizing you’re naked.
You might be surprised to learn though, that corporations also have such nightmares. OK, corporations aren’t really people, no matter what the Supreme Court fabulists claim, so they can’t dream, but their top executives can, and several recently suffered the same chilling hallucination. Only, it wasn’t a dream… it was real.
Perhaps you think that corporations use their campaign donations to buy privileged access to state and national policymakers. Perhaps you even think that their political money actually buys those politicians — after all, they do deliver the public policies the corporate donors want. Perhaps you think this whole monetized political system is corrupt, anti-democratic, and…well, stinky.
You would, of course, be right about all of the above. As Lily Tomlin has put it, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”
The corporate purchase of Washington, DC is pretty widely reported, but — keep up now — for the kleptocratic stinkiness fast consuming our statehouses as well. The Republican Governors Association has devised a layaway purchase plan allowing brand-name corporations to make secret donations of $100,000 or more a year to the RGA in support of the corporate-friendly agenda of various GOP governors. And a lot of execs have been buying.
These are chieftains of brand-name corporate giants who have secretly funneled millions of their shareholders’ dollars into the “dark money” vault of the Republican Governors Association. In turn, the RGA channels the political cash into the campaigns of assorted right-wing governors. This underground pipeline has been a dream come true for corporations, for it lets them elect anti-consumer, anti-worker, anti-environment governors without having to let their customers or shareholders know they’re doing it.
But — oops! — the RGA made a coding error in its database of dark-money donors. So in September, a mess of the GOP’s secret-money corporations were suddenly exposed, standing buck-naked in front of customers, employees, stockholders and others who were startled and angered to learn that the companies they supported were working against their interests.
A lifelong champion of political money reform, Fred Wertheimer, put it this way: “This is a classic example of how corporations are trying to use secret money hidden from the American people to buy influence, and how the Governors Association is selling it,”
Feed the RGA’s political favor meter with $250,000 a year (as Coca-Cola, the Koch brothers, and others do), and the association cynically anoints your corporation with the ironic title of “Statesman,” opening up gubernatorial doors throughout the country. Well, sniff the participants, the money buys nothing but “access” to policymakers. But wait — when was that access put on the auction block? Shouldn’t everyone have access to our public officials? Of course, but call your governor and see if you can even get an office intern to call back.
If you’re an RGA corporate “Statesman,” however, you could get a tête-à-tête with Rick Perry, the recently indicted governor of Texas, or a private breakfast with Bob McDonnell, the now-convicted former governor of Virginia. See, membership in the corrupt club has its privileges.
Now let’s call the roll of some of the privileged corporate dreamers that were pulling the wool over our eyes, hoping we would slumber in ignorance: Aetna, Aflac, Blue Cross, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Exxon Mobil, Hewlett-Packard, Koch Industries, Microsoft, Novartis, Pfizer, Shell Oil, United Health, Verizon, Walgreens and Walmart.
The corporate donors to this previously secret scheme of plutocratic rule says it’s OK, for they also give money to Democrats. Oh, bipartisan corruption — that makes me feel so much better… how about you?
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, October 1, 2014
“Dole, Nazis, And Desperation In Kansas”: Pat Roberts’ Oblique-But-Clear Hitler Comparison
Weren’t politicians supposed to agree that invoking Hitler is usually a bad idea? Somebody better remind Pat Roberts, the Kansas senator on whom the GOP’s hopes of taking over the Senate increasingly depend, that that’s the general bargain. Because lately, the evermore desperate incumbent is going around the Jayhawk State saying things like this:
“There’s a palpable fear among Kansans all across the state that the America that we love and cherish will not be the same America for our kids and grandkids, and that’s wrong. One of the reasons that I’m running is to change that. There’s an easy way to do it. I’ll let you figure it out. But at any rate, we have to change course because our country is headed for national socialism. That’s not right. It’s changing our culture. It’s changing what we’re all about.”
All right, no explicit Hitler mention. But…national socialism? We’ve all heard Obama equals socialism until it’s coming out our ears. But national socialism? That’s Nazism. The National Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party, in case you’d forgotten. And there was only one. Benito Mussolini came out of the more straightforwardly named National Fascist Party. Japan had something called the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
But only Hitler’s Germany had a national socialist party (well, also certain successor offshoots, as in Hungary). So it’s pretty clear what Roberts is saying here. He would deny it, of course, if Kansas reporters tried to ask him. But denying it would be like giving a speech that makes reference to gruesome murders by repeated stabbing and using victims’ blood to write “Helter Skelter” on the walls and then saying goodness no, whatever gave you the idea that I was referring to Charles Manson?
This is not okay. But I would suspect Roberts is going to get away with it, because Greg Orman, the independent challenger who is lately running ahead of him, is not going to stand up in the state of Kansas a few weeks before Election Day and defend Barack Obama on anything, even an oblique-but-clear Hitler comparison.
The more one studies Roberts, the more one concludes that he is the kind of fellow that former Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska had in mind when he famously quipped that mediocre people are entitled to a little representation, too. Mediocre at best, malevolent at worst. It interests me that he’s lately trotted out old Bob Dole to campaign with him. Dole, coming as he does from an earlier time and now a defanged nonagenarian, represents a degree of old-school moderation at this point in his life, so by appearing with Dole while making references to national socialism, Roberts can cleverly have it both ways. But I hope enough Kansans remember what Roberts did to Dole when the latter was counting on him most.
Dole, who suffered a crippling injury in the Big War, had been one of the leading sponsors of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990. He always called it a proud moment. Fast-forward to late 2012, when the Senate was considering approval of an international treaty designed to spur other nations to emulate the United States’ groundbreaking law. Dole was its most famous spokesman. On December 4, 2012, the now-wheelchair-bound ex-senator rolled himself onto the floor of the old chamber to pigeonhole his former colleagues. A heart-rending scene. How could he lose?
Well, one way he could lose was for his old friend Roberts, who was in the House while Dole was in the Senate, to vote against him, which Roberts did. In fact both Kansas senators did—Jerry Moran’s betrayal was even worse, since Moran had committed to the measure publicly, which Roberts hadn’t. The right-wing lobbying machinery got cranked up and warned God-fearing Americans that approval of this treaty would give the United Nations the power to end home-schooling, or something like that. And so the world’s greatest deliberative body voted down a treaty inspired by our own good example because, you know, one-worldism, Obama, national socialism, and so on. And Roberts and Moran were the prime profiles in cowardice.
The only other time in his career that Washington took much notice of Roberts came during the Iraq War, when he walked point for the Bushies in bottling up for more than two years a report on how the administration misused pre-war intelligence. If you followed such things at the time, perhaps the phrase “Phase II report” will snap a synapse or two. Roberts made repeated promises early on that he would release the report, that there was nothing to fear and that he certainly wanted the truth. Then the weasel words crept in and he started to say things like: “I’m perfectly willing to do it, and that’s what we agreed to do, and that door is still open. And I don’t want to quarrel with Jay [Rockefeller], because we both agreed that we would get it done.” He reversed himself and danced all over the floor. The report was eventually released, but long after it would have had any dramatic political impact, which was of course why Roberts delayed in the first place.
So this is the career Roberts is seeking to salvage by dragooning the man he once betrayed into last-minute service and by raising the specter of America’s Nazi future. Roberts is behind right now, and GOP Governor Sam Brownback looks like he’s going to lose, meaning perhaps the top two Republicans in deep-red Kansas might go down in flames. And it would be nice to think that the right-wing extremism of the Obama era would come back to bite them in, of all places, the Koch brothers’ backyard.
UPDATE: I see from Greg Sargent that Roberts was asked about this quote by a reporter yesterday. He said: “I believe that the direction he is heading the country is more like a European socialistic state, yes. You can’t tell me anything that he has not tried to nationalize.” Great. So a United States senator has no idea what “national socialism” means. I guess in this case that qualifies as reassuring.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 26, 2014
“If Money Is Speech And Speech Is Freedom…”: Those With Less Money Get Less Freedom, Less Speech, Less Representation
If money is speech and speech is freedom, then it follows that those who have more money will have more freedom.
This includes the freedom to determine who gets to vote, the freedom to dictate how much workers are paid, and the freedom to impose their agenda regardless of public opinion.
It also follows that those with less money will have less freedom, less speech, and less representation.
These are the basic tautologies in logic that Conservatives refuse to address. By equating freedom with money, the Party That Loves Liberty and Freedom is actually reducing the liberty and freedom of the vast majority of Americans. Yet when the majority of Senators tried to correct this problem, obstructionist Senate Republicans killed the proposal with a filibuster. Conservatives accused the Democrats who supported the proposal of trying “to radically shrink First Amendment protection of political speech.”
Constitutional guarantees of free speech, it turns out, are only available for those who can afford to pay.
Bloviating pundits notwithstanding, speech is not an infinite resource. There are only so many radio and television ads that can be sold; only so many prime time hours; only so many websites. Perhaps the most finite of all resources is the attention span of voters. Once these resources have reached their full capacity, there is no room left. Other voices and ideas are simply unheard, no matter how brilliant, valuable, or vote-worthy they might be. Television stations cannot squeeze in one more commercial. Voters will not sit through another political ad.
In the war of voter attrition, the Koch brothers are winning.
The problem is exacerbated by judges that believe that political ads are not required to tell the truth. Politicians and the PACs that suppport them have the freedom to create a lie and to overpower any opposition to it, including opposing views that are based on actual facts. It’s a perfect propaganda machine.
Voter fatigue translates into skewed election results. Once in office, politicians rewrite election laws, gerrymander Congressional districts, and take other actions to ensure that their donors are rewarded and that they and their party remain in power. Laws that can’t be changed through legislation are manipulated through the budget process. New ideas are allowed to die despite having strong public approval. 92 percent of Americans think that requiring a background check before someone can buy a gun is a good idea. 72 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage. Yet these and other popular ideas are routinely killed by a minority of Senators who represent a minority of voters.
Let’s be honest. Citizens United and the closely related McCutcheon were not about increasing freedom of speech. Both were 5-4 decisions from a Conservative majority and are about ensuring political control in the face of changing voter preferences. Both cases are about drowning out any opposition.
Which brings us to Net Neutrality. If money equals freedom, then startup companies and small businesses that have less money will have less freedom. This means, among other things, less freedom for innovation, less freedom for commerce, and less freedom of speech. The end of the Net Neutrality means a decline in the quality of service for everyone who uses the Internet. Ultimately, it is one step closer to the end of discussion, debate, and democracy.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web portion of the Internet, envisioned and still supports an open and inclusive web. Conservatives are on record as opposing this freedom. Instead, they prefer a “free market approach” that will do to the Internet what Citizens United has done to political campaigns. American media is already dominated by an oligarchy of just six companies. Independent media outlets and commentators already face enormous challenges as they struggle to be heard. Banishing these websites to the slow lane of the Internet would mean less freedom, not more.
Free speech cannot exist when those without money are shut out of the conversation. Democracy, in political ads and on media websites, requires a diversity of legitimate ideas, not simply the repetition of the same biases and misinformation.
Instead of asking why Democrats oppose unchallenged speech for a few, the better question is to ask why so many in Washington seem to oppose freedom for all.
By: Bob Seay, Editor, NewsPrism.com; The Huffington Post Blog, September 15, 2014
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