“Why Everyone Hates Congress”: Republicans Are Still Incapable Of Governing
If you want a demonstration on why it’s so easy for regular folks to despise politicians, look no further than the shenanigans that went on in the U.S. House of Representatives, yesterday. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), who is openly gay, has been attaching a LGBT rights amendment to Republican bills. He’s able to do this because Speaker Ryan has decided to allow for a much more open amendments process than his predecessors, but that comes with a cost. The cost is that the opposition finds it much easier to mess with you by offering amendments that drive wedges into your caucus.
Gay rights is one of those wedge issues. First, Rep. Maloney attached his amendment to a military construction bill. It provided “that nothing in the underlying spending bill can undermine President Obama’s executive order barring discrimination by government contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
When it became clear that the amendment would pass, the House leadership held the vote open until they could whip enough votes to defeat it, 212-213. That was last week.
On Wednesday night, Rep. Maloney attached the amendment to an energy spending bill and it passed 223-195, with 43 Republicans and all the Democrats supporting it.
Isn’t it amazing that the same body of 435 representatives could have such a different opinion of an amendment depending on whether it was attached to a military construction bill or an energy bill?
In truth, those 43 Republicans don’t object to the amendment. They didn’t want to go on the record opposing it the first time.
But, fine, they eventually exercised their independent judgment and passed it, right?
What happened then?
The victory was short-lived, however, as the amendment proved to be a poison pill that led scores of Republicans to oppose the underlying energy bill, which suffered a crushing 112-305 defeat on the floor Thursday. One hundred and thirty Republicans voted against the package, while just six Democrats supported it.
The Republicans voted against gay rights before they voted for them before they voted against them again?
Of course, they blamed the Democrats for not supporting the energy bill, but the energy bill wasn’t crafted to win Democratic support. What actually happened is that gay-hating Republicans who supported the energy appropriations decided to vote against them once the funds became attached to an anti-discrimination provision.
This is, of course, Speaker Ryan’s fault because he decided to let the Democrats offer these types of amendments to bills they have no intention of supporting. And that allows the Democrats to have a good old time exposing the Republicans’ divisions and horrible record on gay rights.
It’s another demonstration that the GOP is not capable of acting as a cohesive governing coalition. They cannot fund the government. And they couldn’t fund it even before they opened the door for the Democrats to shiv them at every opportunity.
The average citizen doesn’t understand all the procedural and strategic maneuvering here. All they see is a bunch of politicians who shift their votes with no regard for principle, who are more interested in embarrassing each other than in getting things done, and who simply cannot preform even the most basic elements of their jobs.
I’m not making a moral equivalency argument here. The Democrats are right on the merits and, given a majority, would have no problems figuring out how to fund the government. But that’s difficult to see. What’s easy to see is why everyone now seems to hate Congress.
By: Martin Longman, Web Editor, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 27, 2016
“Another Terri Schiavo Moment”: Are Republicans Falling Into A Democratic Trap On Transgender Bathrooms?
I first began to suspect Democrats of throwing chum into troubled waters on transgender-bathroom labeling upon reading reports that conservatives were determined to launch a platform fight at the Republican convention to make sure “bathrooms” were an important part of the GOP agenda. Yeah, bathrooms. Ridiculous, right? Not if you are a conservative religious activist who believes LGBT rights opened the gates of hell and are ushering in the End Times. I’m sure more than a few Christian Right folk heard about criticisms of the North Carolina bathroom access law and thought: This is what we’ve been talking about all these years.
So suddenly there’s a new issue on the horizon that has not only caused some problems between the presumptive presidential nominee of the GOP and its most important constituency group, but that is distracting Republicans into a fight most of them — and certainly Donald Trump — probably don’t want to participate in.
The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent takes a look today at the Obama administration’s directive to schools across the country to let transgendered students decide which bathroom to use, and discussion of the issue by other liberals, and concludes that Democrats are “leaning in” on the issue. Sure looks that way to me, too. Yes, the schools directive was bland and bureaucratic, and not really mandatory, but was nonetheless designed to set cultural conservatives off like a rocket, partly because of the subject matter and partly because it was an example of federal “meddling” with local control of schools, which a lot of these folks deplore as Big Secular Government getting between godly parents and their impressionable children.
It’s unlikely a whole lot of swing voters care that much about this issue one way or another, and those who think about it for five minutes probably figure the administration’s approach was a reasonable solution to a small but unavoidable problem. But even as they (and the schools, and the country) move on, conservative activists will remain transfixed, fighting for new bathroom labeling laws in the many states they control, fighting for platform planks, fighting with Republican politicians who are embarrassed by the whole thing, and maybe even fighting with each other on how to fight this new exotic import from Sodom and Gomorrah. This could even become a Terri Schiavo moment, wherein many Americans discover once again that the Christian Right and the political party in its thrall just don’t look at the world the way the rest of us do.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 13, 2016
“Those Who Can’t Afford To Forget”: We Cannot Sleepwalk Through Life; We Cannot Be Ignorant Of History
Recently I linked to an important article by Charles Pierce titled: When We Forget.
The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a triumph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the struggle against power. There is so much that we have forgotten in this country. We’ve forgotten, over and over again, how easily we can be stampeded into action that is contrary to the national interest and to our own individual self-interest…
A country that remembers, a country with an empowered memory that acts as a check on the dangerous excesses of power itself, does not produce a Donald Trump.
While that spoke powerfully to what we are witnessing in the current Republican presidential primary, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something missing. This morning while I was writing about President Obama’s commencement address at Howard University, I finally figure out what that was about. Here is a part of what he said when talking about the unique role of African American leadership:
…even as we each embrace our own beautiful, unique, and valid versions of our blackness, remember the tie that does bind us as African Americans — and that is our particular awareness of injustice and unfairness and struggle. That means we cannot sleepwalk through life. We cannot be ignorant of history.
Think about that for a moment…why can’t African Americans be ignorant of history? It is because any attempt to understand their place in this country today has to be informed by our collective past. For example, African Americans can’t tackle BlackLivesMatter without some understanding of the fact that – throughout our history – they haven’t. White people have the privilege of being able to forget that story…Black people don’t.
Remembering isn’t simply about knowing the history of how things used to be. It is also about remembering the people who fought the battles of the past and the strategies they used in the struggle. That’s what President Obama’s speech at Howard was all about – the Black theory of change.
But it isn’t just African Americans who can’t afford to forget. Finding authenticity as a woman means understanding the history of patriarchy. Native Americans must remember the genocide that nearly obliterated their culture. Asian Americans can never forget the straightjacket foisted upon them by being the “model minority.” LGBT Americans remember everything from Stonewall to Matthew Shepard. And Mexican Americans remember that many of their people were here prior to this country’s settlement by European Americans – who now assume they are the “immigrants.”
I know I’m glossing over centuries of history, but I’m doing so to make the point that there are those who can’t afford to forget because, as Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 9, 2016
“Cruz Brings GOP Nomination Into The Toilet”: The Religious Liberty Issue Is Just A Stalking Horse
Now that Ted Cruz’s last hope for stopping Donald Trump rests on ginning up panic and outrage over transgender women using the ladies room, we can officially say that the Republican nominating process is in the toilet.
Cruz is stoking fear about transgender sexual predators stalking women’s rooms, asserting at a rally last week that Trump (as well as Hillary Clinton) would let “grown men use the little girls’ restroom.” He trotted out his two admittedly adorable daughters in matching pink dresses to make sure that no one misses his point that the country’s little girls are in clear and present danger.
His comments follow Trump’s shrug-off of the transgender restroom controversy following North Carolina’s passage of a law that says people must use the bathroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate. Trump said that allowing transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice hadn’t caused any problems to date and that people should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.”
But beyond Cruz’s craven politicizing of the issue, the transgender bathroom controversy demonstrates what’s really at stake in the larger “religious liberty” debate.
Despite the fact that the only way this could genuinely be said to be a religious liberty issue is if individuals were being prevented from worshipping freely in restrooms, many religious conservatives clearly now see the bathroom debate as a matter of religious freedom, illustrating the relentless creep of the issue.
The North Carolina measure was included in a broader religious liberty bill, while in Pennsylvania conservative groups like the Pennsylvania Family Council are opposing a proposed bill that would provide anti-discrimination protections to LGBT people, including in public restrooms, calling it “one of the most significant threats to religious liberty and privacy rights in the history of the Commonwealth.”
What’s at stake, however, isn’t religious liberty but the right of one group, people who hew to conservative, “traditional” views of marriage and sexuality, to impose a form of socioreligious privilege on society at large. Cruz gave it away when he said that he had no problem with a man who “wishes to dress as a woman and use her home bathroom.” However, he said, “people do not have the right to impose their lifestyles on others.”
Social conservatives are offended by seeing transgender people in restrooms because it undermines their traditional, religiously-based view of gender as binary and fixed. Therefore, to protect their religious beliefs, transgender people must be marginalized and the bathroom issue is, to borrow Fred Clarkson’s term, religified.
The issue has taken on special potency regarding school restrooms, with several parents challenging schools who let transgender children use the restroom of their choice, because they don’t want to have to explain to their kids why Brenda is now Johnnie. This upsets the whole applecart about fixed gender identities as well as traditional male and female sexual and culture roles.
It’s not hard to understand how the more public emergence of transgender people is upsetting to more traditionally minded people, especially in areas without a lot of cultural diversity. Until recently, the social marginalization of LGBT people as a way to maintain rules about gender and sexuality was largely unquestioned. As R.R. Reno charges in First Things, these rules about “gender roles and other foundational categories” were what “ordinary people use to orient themselves and make sense out of their lives,” but now the “transgender revolution” is dismantling these rules as part of an effort to “efface the social authority of the male-female difference.”
But this discomfort, no matter how acutely felt or culturally disorienting, does not equal an affront to religious freedom. It’s easy to see, however, how people make the leap. As one Cruz supporter told New York Times, “The Bible says he created them male and female, so therefore that’s what it’s supposed to be.”
And it’s because the religious liberty issue is just a stalking horse for a broad counter-cultural protest about increasingly liberal attitudes about sexuality and gender identity that the Supreme Court’s effort to find a compromise in the Little Sisters of the Poor case is doomed to failure.
What the conservative justices don’t get (besides how health insurance works or how women access contraception) is that the case has been about asserting socioreligious privilege all along, not about finding the right form for the nuns to sign. The Catholic bishops and their allies on the religious right long for the day when shunning transgender people or shaming sexual active single women was OK because, at the end of the day, the maintenance of their paradigm of sexual morality requires that someone, somewhere isn’t allowed to pee in peace.
By: Patricia Miller, Religion Dispatches, May 2, 2016
“Back To The Future, Way Back”: Trump’s Core Supporters Long For A Bygone Era
For nearly a year, Donald Trump has been pitching a vague slogan: Make America Great Again. Even if we put aside the questions about how Trump intends to do that – and how, exactly, the Republican candidate defines “great” – it’s a phrase that inevitably leads a question about when America was great, if it’s not great now.
Margot Sanger-Katz explained in the New York Times today that Trump’s followers don’t necessarily agree on an answer, but they have a few ideas.
The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s – or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.
When asked to select America’s greatest year, Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.
The same Times article flagged a Pew Research Center report from last month in which 75% of Trump supporters said life was better 50 years ago. Most Republicans also endorsed the idea, but it was Trump backers who were the most enthusiastic about it.
I don’t imagine many will find this surprising, but it’s nevertheless a notable validation of a broader thesis. Much of Trump’s core base includes older, white men, who’ve seen generational changes with which they’re generally uncomfortable. Over the last half-century, the United States has grown more diverse; women have made great strides towards overdue equality; and the current role of African Americans and LGBT Americans in society would have been difficult for much of the public to imagine 50 years ago.
It’s hardly shocking that Trump, pushing a nativist nationalism, has supporters who’d prefer to roll back the clock.
As for what Americans in general consider their country’s greatest year, apparently 2000 “was the most popular choice, a preference that cut across political party, candidate preference, gender and age.”
In all candor, without giving it a lot of thought, 2000 was my first choice, too. The economy was booming; there was relative international peace; and the nation’s reputation abroad was sterling and unrivaled. George W. Bush had not yet taken office, which means we’re talking about a time before 9/11, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before the Great Recession, and before the radicalization of Republican politics reached a fever pitch.
There’s plenty of reason to believe we’ve achieved greatness since – marriage equality, the Affordable Care Act, etc. – and have bright days ahead, but is it really that surprising that so many would point to 2000 as the greatest year?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 26, 2016
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