“No Pleasing Some People”: Republicans Mad That The President They Despise, Obstruct, And Lie About Doesn’t Call More Often
Iowa senator Chuck Grassley is something of an odd character. As I’ve said before, he used to be considered a reasonable moderate, but in the last couple of years he has basically turned himself into a Tea Party wingnut, combining the ideological extremism, face palm-inducing stupidity, and general craziness that makes that political movement so charming (although I was recently informed that even a couple of decades ago, before Grassley began publicly yelling at clouds, people in the Senate privately considered him kind of a nut).
Today, The Hill reports that Grassley, who has spent the last five years floating conspiracy theories, impugning Barack Obama’s motives, and telling truly vicious lies about his policies, is upset that Obama doesn’t call him more often. Seriously.
In 2009, Obama basically had Grassley on speed dial, calling him frequently during negotiations over an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system. Grassley at the time was one of three Republicans on the Group of Six, which also included Sen. Mike Enzi (Wyo.) and former Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine).
“During that period of time, the president would call me on my cellphone and talk to me. I don’t know if it was a half a dozen times or a dozen times, but enough so you remember he called you,” Grassley said.
The relationship unraveled after a meeting at the White House in August 2009.
“We had a meeting down at the White House about Aug. 5, 2009 — the six of us — and he asked me this question: ‘Would you be willing to be one or two or three Republicans voting with the Democrats to get a bipartisan bill?’ and I said, ‘No,’ ” Grassley recalled.
“I never had a phone call from him since,” Grassley added.
So Grassley told Obama flat out that he would never vote for a health care bill, no matter what—and Obama stopped bothering to win his support. Amazing! But that’s not even the whole story. At the same time, Grassley was out telling constituents that the Affordable Care Act contained death panels that would “pull the plug on Grandma.” And for some reason, the president no longer found it worthwhile to massage Grassley’s ego.
And it isn’t just Grassley. Other Republicans are upset that Obama has abandoned his “charm offensive” meant at finding bipartisan compromise on things over which Republicans have made clear they will never compromise. Republicans are appalled, appalled I tell you, that Obama is going out and making speeches arguing for the policy changes he’d like to see. “I preferred it when he sat down for dinner with Republicans,” huffs Sen. Lamar Alexander, who presumably is now eating alone, gazing at an 8×10 photo of him and Barack Obama in happier days, their arms around each other’s shoulders as they share a tender moment, just before Alexander joins every other Republican to filibuster every bill the president supports.
You might be able to argue that Republican behavior over Obama’s tenure has been defensible. They dislike him intensely, but more importantly they disagree with his policy priorities, so they very consciously adopted a strategy of total and unwavering opposition to everything he wants to do, not only because they object to the particular goals but because they calculated that by obstructing and hobbling him they could make future political victories more likely. Fair enough. But you can’t choose that path, and then complain that the president isn’t working hard enough to win you over, when you’ve already made it quite clear you won’t be won over. It’s as though a salesman came to your door and asked if you might be interested in buying aluminum siding, and you immediately began screaming in his face that he’s trying to destroy your home and you’d never buy his siding in a million years, and then started swinging a baseball bat at him, and when he retreated, you turned to your spouse and said, “That guy didn’t even try to win me over—what a jerk!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 6, 2013
“Real Guns Vs Virtual Guns”: Curious Conclusions That Overlook The Evidence
It’s been nearly two months since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., and in that time, there’s been quite a bit of debate about gun violence. Some of it, however, has led segments of the population to draw curious conclusions.
Last week, for example, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told MSNBC, “I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.” It was an odd thing for anyone, least of all a sitting senator, to say on national television.
But the sentiment, however strange, appears to reflect the opinions of Alexander’s party.
As Republican leaders insist that the debate over gun violence in America should also address the role of violent entertainment, the latest findings from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling released Thursday showed that the vast majority of GOP voters nationwide believe video games are a bigger threat than guns.
Given the choice between the two, 67 percent of Republican voters said violent video games represent a bigger threat to safety than guns. Fourteen percent said guns are the bigger safety threat.
I’ll gladly concede that societal violence is an extremely complex, multi-faceted problem, and there are cultural factors to consider.
But to think virtual guns pose a more serious threat to the public than actual guns — by a lopsided margin — is to overlook the available evidence.
To reiterate what we discussed last week, even if we put aside the irony of the underlying point — blaming simulated, pixelated guns is fine; blaming actual guns is not — these arguments aren’t new. Plenty of officials have been arguing for years that violent games desensitizes young people to violence and contributes to a larger corrosive effect on the culture.
There’s just very little evidence to support the claims. Hunches and cultural criticisms notwithstanding, social science research does not bolster the contention that gaming and gun violence are connected. (Adam Lanza was reportedly obsessed with “Dance Dance Revolution” — which is a game, as the name suggests, about moving feet, not shooting weapons.)
For that matter, the United States is not the only country with young people who play a lot of video games, but it is the only country with high rates of gun violence.
Gaming is a huge cultural phenomenon in countries like South Korea, England, Japan, and Canada — and they’re all playing many of the same games Americans enjoy — and yet, none of these countries comes close to the U.S. when it comes to deadly shootings.
And why not? Sociologists can speak to the differences in more detail, but I suspect it has something to do with access to firearms. It may seem tautological, but let’s state it for the record anyway: societies with fewer guns have less gun violence, whether they’re playing “Halo” or not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2013
“From Silly To Ridiculous”: How To Ignore A National Consensus On Gun Violence
There are some fairly dramatic divisions among Americans on the major issues of the day, so when more than 90% of the country supports a proposal, it’s tempting to think policymakers would take notice.
Take universal background checks for gun purchases, for example. A CBS News poll found 92% of Americans support the idea. A CNN poll found 97% of American women favor the proposal. This week, Quinnipiac polled voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and found between 92% and 95% backing for expanded background checks and requiring checks on people buying firearms at gun shows. Hell, before the NRA went berserk, even it supported a system of universal background checks.
This is about as close as we get in this country to a national consensus. And yet, the idea still faces stiff resistance from the usual suspects.
Pursuing even the most popular of measures to curb gun violence would be a step toward destroying Americans’ liberty, Sen. Orrin Hatch argued Thursday.
[For Hatch, this] is a move toward tyranny.
“That’s the way reductions in liberty occur,” Hatch told reporters outside the Senate chamber. “When you start saying people all have to sign up for something, and they have a database where they know exactly who’s who, and where government can persecute people because of the database, that alarms a lot of people in our country, and it flies in the face of liberty.”
Yes, for the senior senator from Utah, background checks could, in his mind, be used as part of a nefarious scheme by the government to persecute citizens. Of course, but Hatch’s logic, the United States should not only leave the gun-show loophole intact, it should also eliminate the existing background-check system altogether.
Hatch isn’t the only one.
Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sounded very skeptical about the idea because it might interfere with “private sales on Sunday between relatives.” This comes a week after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the gun-show loophole” doesn’t exist, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office said the idea is a “thinly-veiled national gun registration scheme” intended to “ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.”
And when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was asked whether he could envision supporting the universal background checks bill, he responded, “You know, I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”
It’s worth emphasizing that there appears to be some divisions among Republicans on the policy, with some prominent GOP policymakers saying publicly that they’re open to the idea and may end up supporting it. But in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, plenty of Republicans have few qualms about rejecting reform, for reasons that range from silly to ridiculous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 1, 2013
“Swapping Old Folks For Poor Folks”: Lamar Alexander’s Senior Moment
I can’t read the whole thing yet, since it’s hiding behind the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, and I’m not about to subscribe. But from the headline and lede, it seems Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has taken a long stroll down memory lane by resurrecting the one-fashionable idea of a “swap” whereby currently shared federal-state governing responsibilities would be divided. In particular, he proposes that Medicaid be taken over by the feds in exchange for total assumption of responsibility for education by the states, and mentions he tried to sell the idea to Ronald Reagan back in the early 1980s.
I don’t know exactly which meetings Alexander is talking about, but as it happens, I was working for the then-chairman of the National Governors’ Association, the late Georgia Democratic Gov. George Busbee, when he was leading “federalism” discussions with the Reagan folk in 1981. Most governors at the time, regardless of party, were interested in what was called a “sorting out” agenda that would federalize some programs and devolve others; this was a favorite topic in particular for Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who like to talk about “states’ rights for liberals.” Babbitt wanted a “grand swap” in which Washington would become responsible for all health care and “welfare” programs in exchange for state assumption of transportation, education and criminal justice, areas in which they were already the major funders and policymakers. My own boss had a similar approach, but was mainly concerned to head off the kind of one-way abandonment of federal responsibility that most conservatives had in mind when they talked about “federalism.”
Whatever they told Alexander, that was pretty much the tendency of the Reaganites of the day. Reagan’s famous OMB director, David Stockman was interested in a “swap” that would have devolved cash income support, food stamps, and health care for the poor in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for the health care needs of seniors who were “dual-enrolled” in Medicaid or obtaining long-term care subsidies. It was basically a “swap” of old folks for poor folks. The governors weren’t buying it, and in any event, the Reagan administration was simultaneously pursuing a budget that would “cap” federal Medicaid payments, basically intitiating the kind of gradual shift in responsibility for the program to the states that Paul Ryan is pursuing in a more comprehensive way with his proposal to turn Medicaid into a “block grant.” As it happened, the Medicaid “cap” was one of the few budget proposals Reagan lost on in 1981.
Best as I can recall, this was the high-water mark of national Republican interest in taking over Medicaid, and it obviously was lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut. It’s only gotten worse sice then. It is striking that ol’ Lamar is talking about a federal takeover of Medicaid even as he joins other Republicans in violently opposing ObamaCare, since one major feature of ObamaCare is a significant increase in federal responsibility for Medicaid (via higher match rates for new enrolees), and for the health care needs of low-income families generally.
The bottom line is that Alexander is really living in the distant past if he thinks his party will support federalization of Medicaid (unless they get the idea they can starve or abolish it). The prevailing sentiment in the GOP, as reflected in the Ryan budget, is to move towards devolution of all current federal-state programs to the states, via rapid funding cuts to non-defense discretionary programs and by turning Medicaid and food stamps into block grants (along with big funding cuts). Matter of fact, Alexander voted for the Ryan budget himself. Maybe he explained that little contradiction in the portion of his op-ed still behind the paywall. Or maybe he’s just having a senior moment.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 16, 2012
Flirting With The Fringe: Stop Pretending Michele Bachmann Can Win The Iowa Caucuses
Ever since Michele Bachmann announced her intention to form a presidential exploratory committee, pundits, including Ed Kilgore at TNR, have been making the case that she has a good chance at winning Iowa—or if not winning, then doing well enough to hurt one or more of the stronger candidates. Republican caucus-goers in the state, they argue, are at least half-nuts, and therefore may well support Bachmann or some other candidate who doesn’t pass conventional standards of seriousness.
Certainly, Iowa Republicans are very socially conservative, more so than in some other states. But a closer look at Iowa caucus history shows that their history of supporting fringe candidates is not quite what it’s made out to be.
The case that “wacky Iowans will do anything” essentially comes down to interpreting a handful of episodes from recent decades. The first occurred in 1988 when Pat Robertson stunned everyone by finishing second with 25 percent of the vote, besting George H.W. Bush and Jack Kemp. But Pat Robertson was a social conservative—and no ordinary one at that—in a year in which the frontrunner (George H.W. Bush) was not. Moreover, that example is now over two decades old, and since then Iowa Republicans have had no trouble voting for mainstream candidates with conventional credentials, as long as those candidates—Lamar Alexander, George W. Bush—had solid records on social conservative issues.
That leaves us with three other supposed episodes of Iowan craziness: Pat Buchanan’s second place finish in 1996; the surprising showings of fringe candidates Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer in 2000; and Huckabee’s victory in 2008. Closer inspection of each of these episodes, however, reveals that none were quite as crazy as they appear.
Take Pat Buchannan in 1996. As odd as it might seem now, he was almost a serious candidate at the time: He had already run for president in 1992, and while he was never quite a plausible nominee, he did have some serious claim as a repeat candidate that Bachmann doesn’t have now. Nor was Buchannan’s success in Iowa especially unique. In fact, he proceeded to win the primary in New Hampshire, and wound up beating his Iowa percentage in sixteen states (several of those, to be sure, were after other candidates had dropped out, so the higher percentage was less impressive).
As for Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer in 2000, they certainly were fringe candidates—even more so than Bachmann—and their combined 25 percent was both impressive and anomalous; they combined for only 7 percent in New Hampshire, although Keyes did have some stronger showings in late states after the nomination was decided. However, it’s also the case that they didn’t have a whole lot of competition. John McCain campaigned in Iowa in 2000, but he did not fully commit to the state, and the only other candidate they beat was Orrin Hatch, who hardly ran any campaign at all. And even with their totals combined, Keyes and Bauer finished well back of Steve Forbes for second, and even further behind winner George W. Bush.
Finally, there’s Huckabee’s surprise victory in 2008; but the extent to which his candidacy was in any way similar to Bachmann’s has been vastly overstated. Yes, he won with the support of social issues voters. But Huckabee wasn’t some backbench member of the House; he was a recent former governor, and, in that sense, just as legitimate a candidate as Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.
Compared to Huckabee, Michele Bachmann is an altogether different sort of candidate. Since 1972, no candidate in any way similar has run a competitive campaign. The only three members of the House who had plausible shots at winning—Mo Udall in 1976, Jack Kemp in 1988, and Dick Gephardt in 1988 and 2004—were all senior members with leadership positions, legislative accomplishments, or both. No, Bachmann belongs in a different category, with other sideshow acts who may attract attention but have no real chance to win the nomination. And even in allegedly crazy Iowa, those candidates rarely impress on caucus day.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The New Republic, April 16, 2011
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