“The Scott Walker Of New Jersey”: Why “Moderate” Chris Christie Is Just As Conservative As The Kochs
Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) is a “moderate” the same way Moe from the Three Stooges was an academic: only in comparison to the other Stooges.
While his amicable embrace of President Obama during Hurricane Sandy and willingness to actually sign a bill related to firearms will give his 2016 GOP primary opponents fodder for attack ads, the governor doesn’t have to inflate his severely conservative credentials.
Christie is the Scott Walker (R-WI) of New Jersey, one of the bluest states in the union. His agenda is nearly indistinguishable from that of Wisconsin’s controversial governor, with a nearly identical dismal performance when it comes to job creation.
“From the time he took office at the beginning of 2010 to March of this year, the state’s performance on the measures tracked by Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States puts it 45th among the states,” Bloomberg‘s Christopher Flavelle reports. Wisconsin is ranked 43rd on the same scale. The Bureau of Labor Statistics currently rates Wisconsin 33rd in job creation. New Jersey is 38th.
The real difference between Walker and Christie isn’t their beliefs or their below-average success at creating jobs. The difference is Christie knows how to pose as a moderate. Walker’s dominant appeal is as an ideologue. Christie’s strength is he’s a politician.
But today’s Republican Party loves ideologues and is suspicious of those like Christie who just want to win.
After being shunned by CPAC and being branded the “King of Bacon” by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), New Jersey’s governor has embarked on an apology tour that began with him endorsing the Koch-loving Republican nominee to replace Frank Lautenberg in the U.S. Senate, Steve Lonegan – who will be trounced by Democrat Cory Booker so hard that Christie wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to make sure he wouldn’t be on the same ballot as Newark’s mayor. Next Christie will meet with some of the party’s biggest funders in the Hamptons.
Here’s five reasons why any questions they have about his loyalty to the conservative agenda can be answered by simply pointing to his record.
War On Unions
“Unions are the problem,” Christie said at a town hall earlier this year. And that’s been the subtext of much of what he’s done since he took office. He’s taken pride in calling his state teachers’ union “thugs” and celebrated his battles with public sector workers by posting them on his You Tube channel.
One of his biggest “accomplishments” as governor was to pair cuts with a suspension of collective bargaining for public sector workers.
Like Walker, he was able to crush resistance to his policies and take what he wanted from workers. And like Walker, the result was downtrodden public servants and a weak economy.
Tax Cuts
As he’s cut public spending, Christie has continually proposed Bush-like tax cuts that would mostly benefit the rich, even though New Jersey’s rich already enjoy a lower tax burden than the state’s working-class families.
He’s done this, even though his tax cut would create a deficit.
The governor also cut $1 billion from education to help pay for $2.3 billion in tax breaks for businesses, more than doubling in one swoop the amount of breaks corporations had received in a decade.
On a federal level, Christie supports the Ryan budget.
“It calls for a reduction in taxes that, if implemented, would likely give a disproportionate share of benefits to the wealthy,” The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn explains. “It calls for radically reducing discretionary spending, so that it is less than 4 percent of gross domestic product by 2050. And it calls for transforming Medicare into a voucher system.”
Starving Infrastructure
Like Scott Walker, Chris Christie immediately made news by canceling a large infrastructure project that would have brought jobs to his state and eventually relieved traffic and pollution.
The governor’s explanation for rejecting the federal funds turned out to be dubious and flawed. The New York Times‘ Kate Zernike explains:
The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.
Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.
Christie’s true goal was to keep the funds the state had allocated for the project in order to prevent an increase on the gasoline tax that would have broken a promise. He also got to publicly reject the president, which is how you get ahead in the Republican Party.
Women’s Health
When people compare a potential Christie candidacy to “Rudy” Giuliani’s 2008 effort, they forget that Christie is avidly anti-choice — the first anti-abortion-rights candidate ever to be elected governor of New Jersey.
As governor, Christie has joined Scott Walker and Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) in an effort to starve Planned Parenthood, the organization that provides basic reproductive health care to millions of women.
Christie demanded $7.5 million in cuts to women’s health care, resulting in clinics treating 33,000 fewer patients in a year, explaining that the money was needed to balance the budget. Democrats have given him several chances to restore the cuts but he’s refused, citing costs.
Of course, spending $12 million on a special election so he wouldn’t be on the same ballot as Booker was no big deal to the cost-cutting governor.
Singlehandedly Stopping Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex couples in New Jersey know there’s only one reason they can’t enjoy the benefits of marriage: Chris Christie.
Not only has he vetoed a bill legalizing equal marriage, he’s vowed to veto any future bill that lands on his desk and called the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act “inappropriate” and “insulting.”
Christie feigns moderation when he says that marriage should be on the ballot. What’s more cynical than believing that a person’s rights should be up for a vote?
When you’re a far-right Republican who has to win in a blue state, these are the kinds of things you end up saying.
And on this issue, Christie is to the right of David Koch.
Despite this, the governor has the Koch mark of approval.
“Five months ago we met in my New York City office and spoke, just the two of us, for about two hours on his objectives and successes in correcting many of the most serious problems of the New Jersey state government,” David Koch said, at a secret Koch brothers conference in 2011. “At the end of our conversation, I said to myself, ‘I’m really impressed and inspired by this man. He is my kind of guy.’”
By: Jasaon Sattler, The National Memo, August 21, 2013
“Nothing Short Of Radical Inclusiveness”: The Power of Pissed-Off Women United For Equality
I’ve just begun my second four-year term as president of the National Organization for Women. I was reelected — by acclamation, I’m proud to say — at NOW’s 2013 Conference in Chicago over the July 4th weekend.
My vision for the next four years of activism begins with something that’s long overdue — the election of a women president of the United States.
And not just any woman. A feminist woman who will stand up for our issues against those who would turn the clock back to the 1950’s.
Women need to be thinking — and acting — for the long-term, not just for this year’s elections or next year’s. We need to be preparing for the next president, and the ones after that. That’s what our adversaries have been doing.
As the grassroots arm of the women’s movement, NOW is strong and getting stronger. We are focusing our power — the power of a whole lot of pissed-off women — identifying targets and achieving goals.
As we look towards the 2014 elections, we know that the stakes couldn’t be higher. The radical fringe that controls the Republican party is chomping at the bit for a replay of 2010, and this time they mean to take over the Senate as well as the House.
The Supreme Court has just made our job harder by eviscerating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Now dozens of state and local jurisdictions, freed from having to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with the U.S. Department of Justice, will race to erect new barriers against voting by such “undesirable” voters as people of color, seniors, immigrants and younger citizens.
We are committed to restoring the Act, and correcting the Supreme Court’s sordid attempt to enhance the political power of those who already have so much.
Beyond our electoral challenges, NOW is doubling down on fighting for women’s economic security. We support the initiative launched last week by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA), Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD), and House Democratic women to address real economic needs facing women and families: ensuring equal pay for equal work, promoting work and family balance, and providing access to quality, affordable child care.
It’s called When Women Succeed, America Succeeds: An Economic Agenda for Women and Families.
As Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said,
Women are really struggling financially. They are looking for an increase in the minimum wage and equal pay, so they can raise their income, support their families and have a chance for a better life. So today, 165 years after the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, we are launching a woman’s economic agenda to address these severe financial pressures. Raising wages for millions of struggling women is central to ensuring work pays for them and their families. Closing the wage gap, increasing the minimum wage, expanding educational opportunities and supporting women entrepreneurs are crucial to making sure that women — and America — succeed.
Of course, wage security isn’t the only linchpin of economic equality for women. We need access to the full range of reproductive health services, because, as this Valerie Tarico column in the Huffington Post says, “Anybody who says that talking about reproductive rights is a distraction from talking about economics is not running the numbers.”
Unintended pregnancies push women out of the workforce, keep women from earning their full potential as business leaders, contribute to absenteeism and lost wages and throw state and federal budgets out of whack. According to the Guttmacher Institute, every public dollar spent on contraception saves three dollars that would otherwise be spent on Medicaid payments for pregnancy-related and newborn care.
Another enormous economic burden facing women is the crushing cost of student loans. As Elizabeth Warren, the sponsor of the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act has said,
Students owe more than $1 trillion in student loan debt — more than all the credit card debt in the entire country. But they didn’t go on a shopping spree at the mall–they did exactly what we told them to do. They worked hard, they played by the rules, and they got an education.
As I wrote in this column for the Huffington Post, because women are paid less than men are paid after college, student loan repayments eat up a larger part of women’s earnings.
Like a bad penny, economic insecurity follows women through school, in the workplace, at home, and far too often, in what should be a safe and secure retirement.
This year, we are rolling out NOW’s Campaign to Break the Social Security Glass Ceiling to add a good offense to our ongoing defense against cuts in this crucial program.
We are calling for a range of improvements in benefits for women — including a caregiver credit, so women will no longer be penalized in their retirement years for having dropped out of the paid workforce to care for children or family members; a higher minimum benefit for low-wage workers (who are, very disproportionately, women); modernized rules for divorced and widowed spouses; and equal treatment for same-sex couples and their families — and we show how to pay for it by requiring the wealthiest to pay their fair share into the system.
Simultaneously, our national action campaign to Let Them Put a Ring On It expands and deepens NOW’s commitment to achieving equal marriage rights in all states, at all levels of government. We’ll engage NOW’s chapter leaders and activists to press for passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal DOMA including the provisions not struck down by the Supreme Court. And we’ll ramp up our work with coalition partners in key states to reverse anti-marriage measures and pass laws recognizing the full rights of loving, committed same-sex couples.
As NOW feminists, our goal is nothing short of radical inclusiveness, as we work to build an organization, a movement, and a society that values diversity and upholds respect for every single woman and girl, no matter where she comes from, what she looks like, where she works or who she loves. We are stronger together, and united for equality.
By: Terry O’Neill, President, National Organization for Women; The Huffington Post Blog, August 5, 2013
“The GOP’s Limited Appeal”: New Data Shows Why The Next Republican Nominee Is Screwed
Immigration reform isn’t quite dead yet, but the political fall-out of immigration reform’s demise is pretty clear: the GOP rebrand is going to be pretty tough. Despite relatively favorable circumstances, immigration reform advocates weren’t able to drag the party toward the center. And if congressional Republicans can’t advance the rebrand by allowing losing issues—like a pathway to citizenship or background checks on gun purchases—to advance through Congress and depart from consideration in 2016, then the next Republican nominee will be left with the difficult task of broadening the appeal of the GOP.
Today, a new Pew Research survey suggests that Republican presidential candidates won’t find it easy to move toward the center. The poll shows that Republicans recognize the need for change—with 59 percent even suggesting they need to change on the issues. But when it comes to the specifics, most Republicans support maintaining the party’s current positions or even moving further to the right. When asked about the party’s current stance on gay marriage, immigration, government spending, abortion, and guns, at least 60 percent of Republicans said they thought the party was about right or too moderate.
Desire for change was greatest, if still very limited, on cultural conservative issues. On gay marriage, 31 percent of Republicans said they wanted the party to moderate. But 27 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough (do they want a return to sodomy laws?) and another 33 percent were satisfied with the party’s current stance. The numbers were similar on abortion: 25 percent wanted the party to moderate, but 26 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough, and another 41 percent were satisfied with the party’s current position.
On immigration, where the party’s current position is potentially less clear to voters, the Republican rank-and-file isn’t itching to get behind a compromise. 17 percent support moving to the left on immigration, compared to 36 percent who want the party to get more conservative. More generally, 67 percent of Republicans think the party is compromising too much or the right amount with Democrats.
Unfortunately, the poll offered fewer answers on economic issues, the center of much of the discussion of the Republican “rebrand.” The poll only asked about government spending, where Republicans are predictably all but unified—only 10 percent want the party to moderate, compared to 46 percent who want a more conservative stance and another 41 percent who are satisfied with the party’s current position. But the poll offers few answers on other economic issues, like taxes, Wall Street, or the various proposals for making the party more “populist” within its current ideological bounds. The degree of party unity on government spending, however, suggests that there might not be very much space for movement on economic issues.
With little Republican appetite for moderation, it’s not surprising that Rubio’s numbers have dropped. It’s also not surprising that he’s moving to reaffirm his conservative credentials on the push to defund Obamacare and ban abortion after twenty weeks. These numbers suggest that the Republicans won’t be eager to nominate someone pushing the party to moderate, at least on cultural issues and government spending. Chris Christie’s favorability ratings suggest as much: He’s only at plus-17, with 47 percent favorable and a sizable 30 percent holding an unfavorable opinion. That’s worse than Romney ever had, and it’s probably inconsistent with winning the Republican nomination.
The composition of the Republican primary electorate makes the challenge even greater. In the Pew poll, 49 percent of Republicans who participate in every primary support the tea party—just 22 percent consider themselves moderate. In last year’s primaries, evangelical Christians represented more than 40 percent of the electorate in just about every major contest, including relatively moderate Romney states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.
Given today’s numbers and Mitt Romney’s difficulty securing the nomination, it’s highly unclear whether Republicans could nominate a candidate who wants to moderate the party. And if the primary process is unlikely to yield a candidate who can moderate the party, then the Republican House would be wise to preemptively bail out the next Republican candidate, and relieve them of the obligation to oppose a pathway to citizenship, background checks on gun purchases, or whatever else. That doesn’t look like it will happen. Instead, it looks like Republicans will need to count on the appeal of their 2016 presidential candidate and economic fundamentals to overcome the party’s limited appeal.
By: Nat Cohn, The New Republic, July 31, 2013
“An Imaginary Dark Vision Of The Future”: Ted Cruz And His Manufactured Doctrine Of Pretend Paranoia
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has found a new and improved angle with which to push his war against marriage equality in America.
In an interview with Christian Broadcast Network’s David Brody, Cruz raised a full-scale red alert when announcing that gay marriage will put us on the road to placing our First Amendment protections at severe risk.
Seriously. He really said that.
“If you look at other nations that have gone down the road towards gay marriage, that’s the next step of where it gets enforced. It gets enforced against Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages, who speak out and preach biblical truths on marriage and that has been defined elsewhere as hate speech — as inconsistent with the enlightened view of government.”
Fearful that my own support of equal rights under the law for all Americans might lead to the loss of my constitutionally protected opportunity to be as offensive, prejudiced, bigoted and disrespectful in my own speech as humanly possible, I went looking for those ‘nations’ Cruz referred to—nations where same-sex marriage has led to the criminalization of free speech.
Fortunately, Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” was there to show me the way by relaying the sorry tale of Aake Green, a Pentecostal pastor in Sweden who was prosecuted under Swedish law for having some unkind things to say about gay marriage when addressing his congregation.
Writes The Blaze —
“Green’s plight corroborates the worries that Cruz has surrounding America’s current trajectory. In 2003, the preacher (referring to Green) likened homosexuality to cancer during one of his sermons. As a result, he was brought up on charges over these claims — statements that, in America, would currently be protected by the First Amendment… Mr. Green was convicted in June 2004 but allowed to remain free pending appeal.”
Never mind that Pastor Green was acquitted by Sweden’s Supreme Court as a result of a determination that Green’s speech was protected by the European Convention on Human Rights—the superseding law protecting Green’s right to say any ridiculous thing in public he likes. And given that the laws established by the European Convention take precedence over a Swedish law that was in conflict, the Swedish law under which the good pastor was prosecuted was rendered moot and unenforceable leading to no prosecutions of this nature in Sweden since this one, solitary 2005 case.
For that matter, I can find no evidence of any such prosecutions anywhere in the world, despite Cruz’s assertion that his paranoiac premonition is based on the examples of multiple nations.
While Senator Cruz was unwilling or unable to follow the Swedish case to its happy ending when forming his fears for a future without First Amendment rights in America as a direct result of gay marriage —happy endings don’t fit well into Cruz’s doctrine of pretend paranoia—one might have thought that this one-time Solicitor General for the State of Texas would have been able to research the law of his own nation before making his dire prediction.
In the famous 2011 Supreme Court case of Snyder v. Phelps, the free speech rights of the despicable Westboro Baptist Church—the church group famous for crashing funerals so that they may scream terrible things about gay people at grieving funeral attendees—were upheld by an 8-1 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts, while referring to the behavior of Westboro Church members as “vile”, stated—
“We cannot react to [Snyder’s] pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
Could the Chief Justice’s statement possibly be more on point when it comes to contradicting Ted Cruz’s dark vision of a future with same-sex marriage?
And yet, Senator Ted Cruz, a man whose job was once to argue cases on behalf of his state before that very same United States Supreme Court, wants us to believe that he fears that gay marriage puts us at risk of forfeiting our right to free speech.
Nobody should be too terribly surprised as this is but the most recent expression of Cruz’s political formula guaranteed to send a warm thrill up the leg of right-wing extremists everywhere.
It is a formula as simple as it is winning.
You take a political issue that rattles the right-wing to its core, draw a line connecting the legalization of that issue to the possible loss of a constitutional right—no matter how ridiculous and far fetched the connection may be— and…presto…you’ve got one great political pitch sure to get the attention of those who thrive on the Doctrine of Pretend Paranoia.
This is not the first time Cruz has played this game.
Recall, if you will, that day on the Senate floor when Cruz’s suggestion that background checks before purchasing guns would place us on a path to a national registry for gun owners, despite the fact that the legislation under debate—the Manchin-Toomey Bill—specifically barred such a federal registry.
If you do not recall this, you might want to take a look at Cruz’s debate with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as Schumer highlights the preposterous nature of Cruz’s paranoiac visions of the future.
Just like his efforts to connect same-sex marriage with the destruction of First Amendment rights, in the instance of gun control, Cruz took a piece of legislation that deeply upset his base, despite being popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, and drew a line to an imaginary consequence.
What happened?
Cruz’s base ate it up and the legislation went down to defeat.
Mr. Cruz’s latest effort to scare the crap out of his right-wing following—no matter how ridiculous the perceived end result of a policy with which Cruz followers disagree with may be—is simply a refinement of the time-honored and highly effective GOP practice of using fear and loathing to inspire votes. All one need do is look at the success of a “death panel” pitch that did so much to skew public opinion against the Affordable Care Act and the effectiveness of this approach is crystal clear.
Of course there was no rational connection between the actual healthcare reform law and the paranoiac prospect of government death panels, but that really did not matter, did it?
Just as Cruz ignored the realities of the Manchin-Toomey background check legislation which specifically barred the national gun registry Cruz claimed to fear, Senator Cruz knew his delusional argument would appeal to the paranoia of his followers; and just as the 2011 Supreme Court case would make Cruz’s paranoid vision of gay marriage leading to the destruction of First Amendment rights nothing short of preposterous, Senator Cruz knows full well that creating fear and loathing, in his own unique style, makes for a reliable game plan as he begins his drive towards the White House.
Let’s hope that, in the final analysis, American voters will see through Ted Cruz’s fully manufactured and dark vision of America—or at least the pretend vision that the Senator wishes to sell us. There are enough ‘real life’ things in this world to be paranoid about without purposely supporting a candidate dedicated to purveying his pretend brand of paranoia in the hopes of frightening Americans into going down dark roads that don’t actually exist.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 24, 2013
“Cold And Unfeeling”: Who Knew, Republicans Don’t Like The Republican Party Either
You know who doesn’t seem to like the Republican Party very much? Republicans.
A couple of new polls were released today which in part detailed voter dissatisfaction with the GOP and its roots. First up is a Washington Post-ABC News poll that asked Republicans and GOP-leaning independents whether the party is on the right or wrong track. An astounding 52 percent of Republicans see their party as being on the wrong track, while only 37 percent see it as on the right one. By contrast, Democrats have a net favorable view of their party, with the favorable/unfavorable split at 72-21.
Similarly, a new survey from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Stan Greenberg and James Carville’s Democracy Corps showed that Democrats are happier with their party than GOPers. The Greenberg poll finds 79 percent of Democrats have a “warm, favorable” feeling about their party as opposed to 11 percent with a “cold, unfavorable feeling,” while 63 percent of Republicans have a warm feeling for their party against 23 percent with a cold feeling. “One of the things that emerges here is how negative Republicans are about their own party,” Greenberg told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning.
Greenberg’s poll sketches out some of the party’s fault lines, identifying key elements of the GOP coalition and repeatedly noting where the sizable chunk of moderate GOP voters (25 percent of the party) is often at odds with the more dominant evangelicals (30 percent) and tea party supporters (22 percent), as well as true independents (people who don’t lean toward one party or the other). So, for example, 85 percent of evangelical Republicans and 93 percent of tea party-supporting Republicans “strongly disapprove” of President Obama, while only 54 percent of moderate Republicans do and 40 percent of independents.
Or while 82 percent of the evangelical Republicans are “strongly” unfavorable of gay marriage, only 37 percent of moderate Republicans and 29 percent of independents feel that way. And while 64 percent of evangelicals and 58 percent of tea party Republicans are “strongly favorable” toward pro-life groups, only 24 percent of moderate Republicans and 17 percent of independents agree. Or while 71 percent of tea party supporting Republicans feel strongly favorable toward the NRA, only 34 percent of moderate GOPers and a like number of independents feel that way.
Perhaps most tellingly, only half of self-described moderate Republicans said that they mostly vote for the GOP, as compared to 82 percent of evangelical Republicans and 90 percent of tea party Republicans.
So it seems fair to assume that some level of the internal GOP dissatisfaction comes from these Republican moderates who are out of step with their party and are a sizable enough chunk for it to register in polls, but not sizable enough to take control.
I think there’s another factor at work, however: Republicans don’t like the party because Republicans don’t like the party. Take the two sides struggling for control over the party’s direction: The very conservative evangelical-tea party faction that seems most intent on enforcing philosophical purity through primaries and the alliance of moderates and conservative pragmatists who look at demographics and look at the gap between swing voters and conservatives and worry about how the GOP is going to win a national election again.
On the one hand you have moderates and pragmatists unhappy with the direction of the party, either because they disagree with the dominant ideology or – in the case of pragmatic conservatives – the way it’s being packaged. On the other hand, you have unreconstructed ideological conservatives who dominate the party but also endlessly warn themselves and their allies about how its “establishment” can’t be trusted, must be purged and is composed entirely of “squishes” intent on capitulating to President Obama’s authoritarian encroachments.
One side, in other words, sees the GOP for what it is and hates it and the other sees what they need it to be – an establishment straw man ready to betray the glorious conservative revolution – and also hates it.
No wonder Republicans don’t like the Republican Party.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 23, 2013
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