“Scary Cruz Control”: Republican Leaders Don’t Know How To Control The Monster They’ve Created
Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?
The young senator from Texas has been on the job for about 100 days, but he has already turned the Senate’s ancient seniority system upside down and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues. He’s speaking for them on immigration, guns and any other topic that tickles his fancy; Republican leaders are seething at being outshone yet are terrified of challenging him.
Consider his news conference this week to promote the Republican alternative to gun control. With Cruz on the stage in the Senate TV studio: the bill’s primary author, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a 32-year Senate veteran and longtime chairman or ranking member of the finance and judiciary committees; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (10 years in the Senate and eight in the House); and Dan Coats of Indiana (12 years in the Senate and eight in the House).
But Cruz took over the lectern and refused to relinquish it. He spoke 2,924 words for the cameras, more than Grassley (904), Graham (1,376) and Coats (360) — combined. Factoring in his dramatic pauses to convey sincerity and deep thought, Cruz’s dominance was even more lopsided. The others shifted uncomfortably and looked awkwardly around the room. At one point, Graham requested a chance to speak. “Can I?” he asked Cruz.
Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration. Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans. Cruz also wrote in Politico that “Hagel’s nomination has been publicly celebrated by the Iranian government.” He later alleged that Democrats had told the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”
Now Cruz is turning his incendiary allegations against fellow Republicans. On immigration, he has described as amnesty the compromise that Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and three other Republicans negotiated with Democrats. Cruz said such a plan would make “a chump” of legal immigrants. On guns, he said the background checks Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated in a bipartisan compromise would lead to a national gun registry — an outcome the doomed proposal explicitly prohibited.
Democrats see a potential bogeyman in Cruz because of his outrageous pronouncements, and reporters love his inflammatory quotes. Republican leaders, however, don’t know how to control this monster they created.
GOP lawmakers encouraged the rise of the tea party, which now dominates Republican primaries and threatens the same leaders who nurtured it. Cruz’s fellow Texan, John Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, could face a primary challenge next year and therefore can’t afford to cross Cruz, who beat an establishment Republican in the 2012 primary. Likewise, the Senate GOP leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is up for reelection and has to keep on the good side of tea party favorites such as Sen. Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, and Cruz.
I’ve argued before that Cruz is more cunning than ideological. He’s Ivy League-educated and a skilled debater who has perfected a look of faux earnestness that suggests his every pronouncement is the most important oration since Gettysburg. Cruz has correctly calculated that the way to power among Senate Republicans is through attention-grabbing accusations.
On immigration, his Latino credentials have helped him undermine Rubio’s bipartisanship. When Rubio made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows April 14, he was confronted with Cruz’s criticism by both NBC’s David Gregory and ABC’s Jon Karl.
On guns, Cruz’s high profile required Grassley to give the upstart a premium chunk of floor time for his trademark falsehoods. Cruz claimed that his bill was the “result of multiple hearings in the Judiciary Committee.” (It was never brought before the panel.) He claimed the opposing legislation would extend “background checks to private transactions between private individuals.” (The bill applied to only advertised sales.) Off the floor, he made the patently false claim that the “so-called ‘gun show loophole’ ” doesn’t exist.
If Republicans are willing to look the other way when Cruz assaults the facts, they may find it increasingly grating to endure his assaults on their dignity. At their news conference on guns, Grassley was made to stand silently for half an hour while Cruz gave an eight-minute opening statement (more than twice the length of Grassley’s) and fielded six questions before yielding to his senior colleague. “I’m just going to say one thing,” Grassley said, “and then I’m going to have to go.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 19, 2013
“Going On The Attack, Again”: Immigration Opponents See Opportunity In The Boston Bombing Suspects
As soon as it became clear that the two suspects in the Boston bombing were legal immigrants from Dagestan, a mostly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, opponents of comprehensive immigration reform went on the attack.
Purposely outrageous Republican columnist Ann Coulter tweeted, “It’s too bad Suspect # 1 won’t be able to be legalized by Marco Rubio, now.”
Christian conservative radio host Bryan Fischer didn’t bother with nuance: “I think we can safely say that Rubio’s amnesty plan is DOA. And should be. Time to tighten, not loosen, immigration policy.”
And Republican senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), whose vote will help make or break any bill, made it clear that he feels the identity of the suspects should pause the momentum for reform.
“Given the events of this week, it’s important for us to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system,” Grassley said. “While we don’t yet know the immigration status of the people who have terrorized the communities in Massachusetts, when we find out, it will help shed light on the weaknesses of our system.”
“How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?” he continued. “How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the U.S.? How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”
Critics of the bill have been trying to figure out a way to slow or stop reform for months. And the suspects in Boston may have finally given them the opportunity they’ve been hoping for.
The Republican establishment is so sure that immigration reform is necessary for the future of the GOP that they recommended it specifically as part of its “Growth and Opportunity Project” autopsy rebranding. Rubio took the lead and negotiated a compromise with a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that fit the president’s guidelines for reform while emphasizing the border security important to the Republican base.
Monday’s bombings slowed the rollout of the bill but an actual draft of the legislation was released late Tuesday.
Immediately far-right site Breitbart invented “MarcoPhones,” smearing Florida senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) with one of the right’s favorite attacks on President Obama during the 2012 election. It’s a claim as ridiculous and purposely mendacious as the Obamaphone slur — still, misinformation has a way of lingering on the right. Some Republicans criticized the site for cannibalizing one of their most popular politicians for pursuing an essential bill.
Despite the support from the party’s mainstream, Rubio’s attempts to sell the bill to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio talkers didn’t go — to put it mildly — well.
Still most believed that this time was different — until the photos of the Boston bombing suspects led to a robbery and then a continuing manhunt that has the nation on edge.
As Americans winced at the violence, immigration reform’s opponents went on the attack.
One of the bill’s leading Democratic supporters, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), pushed back Friday morning.
“I’d like to ask that all of us not jump to conclusions regarding events in Boston or conflate those events with this legislation,” he said. “In general, we’re a safer country when law enforcement knows who is here, has their fingerprints, photos, etcetera, conducted background checks … Two days ago, as you may recall, there was [sic] widespread erroneous reports of arrests being made. This just emphasizes how important it is to allow the actual facts to come out before jumping to any conclusions.”
The notoriously anti-immigrant Steve King (R-IA) made the case just hours after the blasts that the bombing on Patriots’ Day should halt reforms, surprising no one.
Rubio immediately responded, “We should really be very cautious about using language that links these two things in any way. We know very little about Boston other than that it was obviously an act of terror. We don’t know who carried it out or why they carried it out, and I would caution everyone to be very careful about linking the two.”
Now that the link is more easily made, Rubio doesn’t appear ready to retreat. The junior senator from Florida has launched a site to defend the reforms and his spokesman says that reform should continue despite the events in Boston.
Both he and his opponents recognize that the key moment for immigration reform has arrived. Whoever takes control of the argument now will likely decide the fate of those 11 million people waiting for an answer from Washington.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 19, 2013
“The MarcoPhone”: Marco Rubio’s Life Is About To Get Complicated
Marco Rubio has had a pretty charmed political life. He rose quickly through the ranks in the Florida legislature, won a Senate seat without too much trouble at the tender age of 39, then suddenly found himself the “Republican savior” a mere two years after arriving in Washington. At a time when the GOP is desperate to appeal to Latinos, he’s a young, smart, dynamic Latino who could be their presidential nominee in 2016. What could go wrong?
Immigration reform, that’s what. Many elite Republicans feel, and not without reason, that while supporting comprehensive reform might not win them the votes of Latinos, opposing it will pretty much guarantee that those votes will be lost to them. And Rubio almost has no choice but to be one of the leaders, if not the leader, of the party in that effort. He can’t be the Great Latino Hope if he isn’t. Trouble is, lots and lots of rank-and-file Republicans, particularly the kind who vote in presidential primaries, don’t much like reform the way it’s shaping up. Sure, under the “Gang of 8” plan in the Senate it’ll take 13 years for a current undocumented immigrant to become an American citizen. But for many in the party’s base, that’s about 113 years too quick. Enter the MarcoPhone. Wait, what? Get a load of this:
Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.
Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”
The provision in question doesn’t give phones to undocumented immigrants, it gives phones to people who live on the border so they can call the Border Patrol if they see people crossing from Mexico. But as Ed Kilgore says, “I’m having trouble feeling bad for Rubio getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Tea Party delusion.” It’ll certainly be an interesting test of Rubio’s and his team’s communication skills to see if they can squash this (they’re already trying).
What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.
“Death panels” was the prototypical example. It told people who feared increased government power and control that the Affordable Care Act would literally give heartless Washington bureaucrats the power to decide who lives and dies. It was not just a lie but an absurd lie, an insane lie. But it worked, at least well enough. Gun advocates who wanted to defeat the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal went around saying it included a “national gun registry,” despite the fact that the bill prohibited the government from ever making such a registry, because they knew that would play on the most paranoid fears of gun nuts who think that any moment the jackbooted AFT thugs are going to come busting down their door to confiscate their AR-15s. The MarcoPhone can function the same way. What does it tell people in the anti-immigrant portion of the GOP base? That a bunch if illegals aren’t just getting amnesty, they’re going to be getting freebies, paid for with your tax dollars!
If it isn’t nipped in the bud, this could be deadly for Rubio. His Tea Party credentials may be impeccable, but if he starts looking soft on the foreign horde to the south, a lot of Republican primary voters will start getting suspicious of him. It’s possible that now that it has been explained to them, people like Ingraham will back off, especially since the guy they’re attacking is one of their own. As long as they still consider him one of their own.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 18, 2013
“Is Anyone Surprised?”: Marco Rubio Pushes For Gun Loophole That Would Weaken Background Checks
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) backed the NRA-supported “concealed carry reciprocity” Sunday morning, an initiative which would require concealed carry permits to be accepted universally across the country, forcing states with tighter permit restrictions to accept permit-holders from states with looser ones.
Rubio took the initiative one step further, saying on Fox News Sunday that if a person has undergone a background check for a concealed carry permit in one state, that person shouldn’t necessarily have to undergo another background check to buy a gun in another state.
RUBIO: If you have a concealed weapons permit, you do a background check. I have no problem with that. But are they going to honor that in all 50 states? If someone goes to another state to buy a gun do I have to undergo another background check, or will my concealed weapons permit be de facto proof that I am not a criminal? These are the sorts of things I hope we’ll talk about.
Rubio’s comments ignore that the requirements for concealed carry permits vary from state to state, and that a person can commit a criminal act after they have received a concealed carry permit. Plus, permit issuers don’t always catch criminals or the mentally unstable — a 2012 investigation that found Rubio’s home state of Florida did not check the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System when issuing concealed carry permits, overlooking the 1.6 million records of Americans with mental illnesses the database contains.
The Senator on Sunday also admitted that though he hadn’t read the Manchin-Toomey gun bill, which will expand background checks to include most gun sales, in its entirety, he was skeptical of it because it would impede on the rights of law-abiding gun owners and would “do nothing to keep criminals from buying” guns. He said focusing on gun control wasn’t the way to prevent future shootings like the one in Newtown — instead, he said the country needed to focus on addressing violence and mental health issues in general, citing the decline of the American family as a reason for increased gun violence in the country.
Rubio’s comments are in line with the NRA’s position on gun control legislation: in a letter to the Senate, NRA Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Chris Cox said Congress needed to “fix our broken mental health system” rather than “infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has also made comments similar to Rubio’s, recently claiming Connecticut’s new gun laws have only made “the lawbooks bigger for the law-abiding people.” But Rubio’s statements aren’t surprising: in March, he joined a group of Republicans that threatened to block gun control legislation in the Senate.
By: Katie Valentine, Think Progress, April 14, 2013
“Don’t Let Senators Off The Hook”: There Is No Logical Way To Argue Expanding Background Checks Infringes On Constitutional Rights
Every Senator who is refusing to support expanded background checks — Republican or Democrat — needs to be asked a simple question: Do you support the current background system, or do you see it as an infringement on the rights of the law-abiding?
Every one of them will answer with a Yes, because they are taking refuge behind the idea that the current law needs to be strengthened in various ways but not expanded. Once they are on record confirming they don’t view the current system as a threat to Constitutional rights, the arguments against expanding it dissolve into incoherence.
The Senators who are threatening to filibuster Obama’s gun proposals (Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee) have said that they will “oppose any legislation that infringes on the American people’s right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to any additional government surveillance.”
But even libertarian Tea Party chieftain Rand Paul has allowed that current background checks “work.” And on the Sunday shows yesterday, other Republican Senators, such as Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, said they could support improving the current system through better data sharing by states on the mentally ill and other such moves, while opposing expanding checks to private sales. As Steve Benen notes, this means “leaving the massive gun show loophole in place.”
That’s true, and I’d add one other point: It means these Senators view the current background check law as constitutional. Which means there is no logical way to argue that expanding background checks is an infringement on Constitutional rights. Here’s why: The compromise background check expansion being negotiated would simply build on current law, which requires gun dealers (who would conduct the checks on private sales) to keep records on those sales; it explicitly forbids the creation of a national registry; and it requires the feds to destroy info collected on legit gun transfers within 24 hours. None of this — none of it — would change. If the current law is not an infringement on constitutional rights, then neither is an expanded one.
To be fair, in their Sunday appearances, Graham and Flake didn’t argue against the proposal on Constitutional grounds, as the four Tea Party Senators have. But they both dissembled about the plan, with Graham falsely suggesting a father-son gun transfer could be targeted (the compromise proposal under discussion exempts family members), and Flake lamenting new “paperwork requirements” (which would be identical to current ones).
All these Senators should be pressed on whether they support the law requiring private citizens who purchase guns from federally licensed dealers to undergo a check. When they confirm that they do, they need to be pressed on why applying that same system to private sales — in which private citizens who buy guns from another private citizen must undergo a check — is objectionable, particularly since for the buyers, nothing changes, and since these Senators themselves concede we need to do a better job preventing criminals and the mentally from buying guns.
Senators holding out against expanded checks need to be pushed hard on this stuff. This is an important proposal, with American lives potentially at stake.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Plum Line, April 1, 2013
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