“Be Careful What You Wish For”: Citizens United Created A Path For A Legislative Strategy Of The GOP’s Most Aggressive Funders
It’s no secret that the corporate class is being eclipsed by Tea Party libertarians and is increasingly unable to exert influence on the Republican Party, despite the generous donations the top 1 percent has long showered on Republicans.
But isn’t the Republican Party in the business of serving Big Business? And didn’t the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United open the floodgates of corporate campaign cash? How is all that corporate campaign cash failing to buy Big Business sway over the GOP?
Well, here’s the thing: Citizens United didn’t save the Republican Party. Citizens United broke the Republican Party.
Yes, Citizens United was what Republicans and their corporate patrons wanted. Corporations are people. Money is speech. Spend what you want, and no one needs to know who wrote the check.
But as conservative columnist Tim Carney explains in a criminally overlooked Washington Examiner column from last month, what Citizens United meant in practice is this: It “spawned super PACs that offset the power of the political parties and K Street.”
Carney specifically credits the newly created Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups for using the new post–Citizens United rules to fund right-wing challengers who have triumphed over Republican establishment favorites, whipping up conservative grassroots fervor behind extremist positions and forcefully shaming any Republican who hints at compromise. They have their own informal “whip operation” that robs Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of their traditional institutional power. And they have been squarely behind the plot to defund ObamaCare by forcing a government shutdown.
Carney says this Citizens United–fueled dynamic has led to a “Republican leadership vacuum.” I would go a step further: It has broken the Republican Party in two.
Both the ascendant Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups are financially backed by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, leaders of a single corporation that appears to be trying to surpass the Chamber of Commerce as the dominant funder and power center of the Republican Party.
In the 2012 elections, the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity each spent roughly $35 million. But since then, the Kochs have used another group they created, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, to spend $200 million supporting an array of organizations determined to destroy ObamaCare.
According to Open Secrets, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce spending now “dwarfs” the old Chamber, which has been urging Republicans to keep the government open and increase the debt limit, to no avail. The establishment Chamber has become so frustrated with being ignored, it is preparing an effort to donate money to Republican congresspeople who face primary challenges from the right, a direct challenge to the Senate Conservatives Fund and its allies.
The Republican Party is stuck with two major corporate funders vying for influence and pulling the party apart. Yet the organization with the broader business base and more rational political outlook is being out-organized and out-spent by a narrow band of ideological extremists who have figured out how to best exploit a Citizens United world. Recent research has found that Citizens United did not entice corporate America en masse to increase its election spending, but as The New York Times’s Eduardo Porter noted, “Big, frequent donors are particularly extreme.”
The end result is a party compelled to carry out a doomed legislative strategy concocted by the party’s most aggressive funders. If fully carried out to its apocalyptic conclusion, the strategy risks obliterating the Republican Party’s brand for a generation.
Just one year ago, Democrats were terrified that Citizens United would not only drown Barack Obama in a flood of GOP-friendly corporate cash, but also make it impossible for liberal Democrats to ever have a chance at winning national elections.
But the reverse may end up being Citizens United‘s true political legacy.
Obama used the specter of freshly legalized super PACs to rev up his donor base, and raised more money than any presidential candidate in history, neutralizing the Republican super PACs. He kept his party unified, turned out his base, and won decisively. In the election’s aftermath, well-funded but strategically inept right-wing super PACs are financing deep intraparty discord, threatening the ability of Republicans to be competitive in national elections.
Turns out the upholding of the Affordable Care Act isn’t the only gift Chief Justice John Roberts gave to President Obama.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 11, 2013
“A Concerted Right Wing Effort”: We Are The Ones Who Shut The Government Down
There are still some dead-enders on the right, who go through the motions and pretend Democrats should be blamed for the government shutdown, but it’s awfully difficult to take them seriously. At times, it doesn’t even seem as if those repeating the talking points believe their own rhetoric.
A fair number of Republicans, meanwhile, are admitting what is plainly true. Take Rep. Peter King’s (R-N.Y.) comments on “Fox News Sunday.” Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, King said:
“I’ve been against this government shutdown form the start. Now, I disagree with [Georgia Republican Tom Graves], we are the ones who did shut the government down. Charles Krauthammer called it the “suicide caucus.” I mean, Wall Street Journal said they were “kamikazes.” You don’t take the dramatic step of shutting down the government unless you have a real strategy and has a chance of working. It’s never had a chance of working; we’re now almost pushing ‘Obamacare’ to the side and we’re talking about other issues, and people are still out of work and the government is still shut down.”
When prominent Republicans appear on Fox to say Republicans are responsible for the shutdown, it’s safe to say the “maybe we can pin this on Democrats” gambit has run its course.
It’s not just King, either. The American Bridge super PAC put together a collection of Republicans holding their own party responsible for this fiasco. It’s not an especially short list.
What’s more, new reports over the weekend brought into focus how the right shaped its shutdown strategy months ago, and then carefully stuck to the game plan.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire had this report on Saturday.
Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
The piece included a familiar cast of right-wing characters — Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, et al — adding the billionaire Koch brothers “have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”
In other words, it’s time for the nonsense over who bears responsibility for this to end.
A month ago, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wanted to pass a clean spending bill to the White House to avoid a shutdown. At the time, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) pushed the argument — in writing — that a clean CR was a win for Republicans. When they’re being at least a little honest, some House Republicans are willing to admit that Senate Democrats already compromised when they accepted the lower spending levels far-right lawmakers demanded.
And given all of this, those who continue to suggest Democrats deserve the blame are clearly working from the assumption that you and other Americans are easily suckered into believing nonsense.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 7, 2013
“The Boehner Bunglers”: The Truly Incompetent Can’t Even Recognize Their Own Incompetence
The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
To see what I’m talking about, consider the report in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.
This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. — as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.
Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.
It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts denounced the polls as “skewed” and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio — and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama.
Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.
Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 6, 2013
“The Myth Of Obamacare’s Bad Sales Job”: The Complexity Makes It Easy For Republicans To Lie To The Public
When they went forward with their plan to shut down the government in order to undo, defund, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA), conservatives convinced themselves that their plan was going to work because Americans hate Obamacare. If you look at it in an extremely narrow, context-free way, that’s sort of true. If you just ask people whether they approve of the ACA, you get between 35 percent and 45 percent approval. But the closer you look, the more complicated it gets. Some people disapprove of it because they feel it didn’t go far enough; add them with those who say they approve, and you’ll get a majority. Furthermore, and most critical for what I’d like to discuss, the actual components of the law, like giving people subsidies to buy insurance, outlawing denials for pre-existing conditions, and so on, are extremely popular (the one exception is the individual mandate).
One thing’s for sure, though: You can’t say that the ACA as an abstract entity is overwhelmingly popular. That has led a lot of liberals to blame Barack Obama for doing a bad job selling the law. I must have heard or read this from a hundred liberals over the last couple of years. If only he had sold it better! Then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Sometimes, I’ve actually heard people say that he never really tried to sell it.
This argument is complete bunk. Here’s why.
1. Obama did sell it. When somebody says that Obama should have sold the ACA better, you should ask them what, specifically, they think he should have done. I can offer you a stone-cold guarantee that whatever they suggest is something that the administration and its allies did, in fact, do. Take polls to figure out what appeals would be effective? Check. Distribute talking points to their allies to get everyone repeating the same message? Check. Make one speech after another on health care? Check. Run ads touting reform? Check. They did it all. So why didn’t it work?
2. Health insurance is inherently complicated. See if you can answer these questions about your own health insurance. What’s your co-pay for office visits? What’s your deductible? What about cost-sharing for hospital admissions? Your yearly out-of-pocket maximum? Does your policy have a lifetime limit? My guess is you couldn’t answer some or all of these questions, and that only scratches the surface of the contract you signed when you got insurance. Did you read it? You probably skimmed it but didn’t bother to go through it line by line, just like you did the last time you downloaded a piece of software. Health insurance is incredibly complicated. Even people whose job it is to deal with health policy don’t always understand their own insurance.
That means that any comprehensive reform that tried to address the pathologies of the system was going to have a hard time even explaining to people what was wrong with that system. And those pathologies are so numerous that the administration had to discuss multiple things, while the opposition only had to say that Obamacare sucks. We’ll get to that opposition in a moment, but first:
3. The Affordable Care Act was an extremely complicated bill. I discussed this in my column last week, but the ACA is a gigantic kludge, a cobbled-together jumble of features each meant to solve a practical or political problem. The administration decided that the simple thing—Medicare for all—couldn’t succeed politically. They also decided that it was vital to be able to tell people, “If you like your current insurance, you can keep it.” They also had to keep conservative Democrats on board to get above the 60 votes necessary to defeat a Republican filibuster in the Senate. They also decided to co-opt the various interest groups like insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals that benefit from the current system, which required more complexity. They also decided that every penny of it was going to be paid for, which required new taxes and spending cuts. In and of themselves each of those decisions may have been reasonable, but they added up to a complex bill that was going to be difficult to explain, no matter how good their pollsters were and how effective a speaker the President is.
4. The American public is not particularly well informed or sophisticated when it comes to understanding policy. We don’t have to go into all the details here, but anybody who sets out on a project to explain something both new and complex to a public that doesn’t understand these things very well to begin with and doesn’t much care is going to be fighting an uphill battle.
5. They were facing an extraordinarily well-financed, united opposition that would say or do pretty much anything. All that complexity made it easy to just lie to the public about what the ACA does. When people hear about some new horror the ACA allegedly includes, many are ready to believe it, since it contains so many different things they already don’t understand. So conservatives could tell them that there are death panels, or that Obamacare forces doctors to collect information on your sex life, or that the IRS is going to have your medical records, or that Congress “exempted itself from Obamacare,” or whatever else they were able to dream up.
The opposition also had the benefit of being against something, which is always easier than being for something. We’re naturally more attuned to negative information than positive information, which is why it’s so easy to use fear to create opposition to a new policy, and change is always frightening. “You’re going to love this change!” is an inherently more difficult case to make than “Be afraid!”
Furthermore, the alliance opposing the law has virtually limitless resources at its disposal. Yesterday The New York Times published a revealing story on the network of conservative funders and activists that have made it their mission to destroy the ACA, including masterminding the current shutdown. Just one Koch brothers-linked organization no one has ever heard of called Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce distributed an incredible $200 million last year alone to various groups fighting the ACA.
Let me close this discussion with a little historical reminder. In March of 1994, when the Clinton health-care reform was being debated, The Wall Street Journal published an article about polls and focus groups it had conducted on the plan. The article was titled “Many Don’t Realize It’s the Clinton Plan They Like,” and it detailed how, while majorities of the public expressed disapproval of Bill Clinton’s health-care plan, when its features were described to them without saying whose plan it was, majorities expressed approval of it. That’s exactly the same thing we find now with the ACA. The problem wasn’t that Barack Obama didn’t try hard enough to sell it.
Fortunately, the success of the law won’t depend on whether you can get a majority of the public to tell pollsters, “I approve of Obamacare.” Once it’s fully implemented, the only thing that will matter will be whether, in all its different component parts, it works.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 7, 2013
“Incentivizing Harmful Behavior”: Sabotaging Obamacare Is A Lucrative Endeavor For Many Republicans
To gain steam for his initiative to tie funding of the government to defunding Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz appeared at events over the summer with the Tea Party Express, a political action committee. “Either continue funding the government without giving one more dime to Obamacare, or shut down the government,” demands Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer.
The Tea Party Express, in turn, has sponsored fundraising drives to help “elect more leaders like Ted Cruz.”
One problem for Cruz-acolytes hoping to make their way into office? The Tea Party Express PAC has spent nearly every dollar of the $2.1 million it has raised this year on campaign consultants and fundraising fees, but not a dime in transfers to candidates or on independent expenditures. In previous years, the PAC has funneled much of its proceeds to Russo Marsh and Rogers, a Republican consulting firm in Sacramento, California.
The frantic crusade to screw up the launch of the Affordable Care Act is a sad tale in American politics. If conservatives are successful, even with a short-term government shutdown Cruz and his House GOP allies might achieve, patients will suffer. If young people fail to sign up for health insurance—the stated goal of one Koch-backed front group now airing television advertisements—more will drown under crushing debt if they find themselves in need of serious medical care. But Washington, DC, has a bizarre way of incentivizing harmful behavior, and the sabotage Obamacare campaign is not without its winners.
A set of campaign consultants and insurance agents stand to profit from confusing Americans on the eve of the healthcare reform enrollment date.
The conservative media frenzy over the defunding debate has invigorated donors to many PACs, not just Tea Party Express. The Senate Conservative Fund PAC recorded its largest-ever fundraising hauls last month, though it spends way more on candidates and on candidate ads than the Tea Party Express. Still, the Jim DeMint–linked PAC expended nearly half its coffers on administrative, research and fundraising payments this year. FreedomWorks, the RNC and the Club for Growth have hopped on the Cruz campaign to raise funds by advocating the repeal of Obamacare. For a non-federal election year, at least these PACs are doing well.
The rigid anti–healthcare reform politics of the Koch brothers is also having a stimulative effect upon a small circle of Republican consultants. Americans for Prosperity, the largest Koch-owned front, pays the traditional 15 percent commission rate on all their television buys—the latest round going to Target Enterprises, a Sherman Oaks, California-based GOP media company. And with a seemingly endless appetite for anti-Obamacare paid media and anti-Obamacare grassroots organizers, Koch makes good on its claim of being a stellar job-creator, at least for jobs in right-wing political advocacy.
The New York Times rightfully notes in an editorial that many other conservative advocacy groups, like the National Liberty Federation, have latched onto the Obamacare fight, viewing the healthcare reform debate as little more than opportunity to raise a few bucks.
The second and less noticed benefactor of some of the more malicious attacks upon healthcare reform are health insurance brokers. Health insurance brokers make a living by selling health insurance and collecting a commission for every person or group they enroll. With healthcare reform set to provide easy access to health insurance options, free of charge, many in the health insurance agent industry view the Obamacare rollout as a death sentence. In recent months, the broker industry has mobilized to erect obstacles for the dozens of community group “navigators,” organizations tapped to spread the word about how to enroll in the exchanges.
In Georgia, under influence from health insurance agent lobbyists, the state passed a law that prohibits navigators from providing advice “concerning the benefits, terms, and features of a particular health benefit plan.” Other states have thrown up licensing laws in an effort to curtail navigators from being able to do, well, anything.
The Center for Public Integrity’s Nicholas Kusnetz has done some of the most interesting investigative reporting on this side of the story, revealing that the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the National Association of Health Underwriters have orchestrated a multi-pronged attack on Affordable Care Act navigators. The industry, which has secured anti-navigator laws in sixteen states, has poured some $7.5 million into state campaigns since 2010.
While brokers claim they seek only to ensure patients are not scammed by “unlicensed” navigators, in reality, blocking competition seems to be the primary motivation. Last month, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America released a statement endorsing an effort by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) to repeal all of the funding for the navigators programs. Notes from a lobbying association for insurance agents in California warned brokers before a visit to Sacramento: “If we don’t [lobby lawmakers] they will not think it will matter that much when they allow the unlicensed “navigators” to solicit your book of business!!”
Several community groups that had signed up to participate in the navigators program have now backed out, citing political pressure from Republican politicians. The House Oversight Committee, led by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Republican attorneys general have harassed several navigator groups with lengthy questionnaires and other demands.
Some anti–healthcare reform activists are truly motivated by their convictions. But others stand to gain financially from making sure their fellow Americans have problems signing up for health insurance.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, September 25, 2013
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