“For The Far-Right, It’s One Leader Down, One To Go”: Emblematic Of The Larger Story About GOP Radicalization
There may be 54 Republicans in the Senate, but only one has publicly expressed support for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). That endorsement came from none other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Paul’s grudging home-state partner.
With this support in mind, it was curious to see Kentucky’s junior senator on Fox News this morning, confronted with a simple question: do you support McConnell’s position as majority leader? Three times the Fox host asked Rand Paul for an answer, and as TPM noted this morning, three times the senator dodged.
The furthest Paul was willing to go was this faint praise for his colleague: “Well, there is no election. There is no battle going on.” In other words, Paul supports McConnell insofar as he has no other choice right now.
But for many Capitol Hill conservatives, the fact that there is “no battle going on” is precisely the problem. Far-right members have helped force House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) out of Congress, and Politico reported late last week that many of these same lawmakers are equally eager – if not more so – to change Senate leaders, too.
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), a hardliner who frequently worked at odds with Boehner, was texting Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on Friday morning to make a suggestion: “Next guy in the crosshairs is probably gonna be McConnell.” Lee, who chairs the conservative arm of McConnell’s GOP conference, texted back to doubt that conclusion.
But Salmon and many other House conservatives are unswayed.
“Mitch McConnell is infinitely worse as a leader than Boehner. He surrenders at the sight of battle every time,” Salmon said.
To the extent that reality matters, Mitch McConnell, perhaps more than any Republican in the nation, has been the embodiment of anti-Obama obstructionism. No GOP lawmaker of the Obama era has gone as far as McConnell to reject every White House proposal – regardless of merit, regardless of consequence, regardless of whether or not Republicans actually agreed with the administration.
The Kentucky senator has practically pioneered the art of mindless, knee-jerk obstructionism, relying on tactics with no precedent in the American tradition, undermining governance in ways that seemed impossible in the recent past.
But for far-right lawmakers, this record just isn’t good enough.
Boehner’s resignation “should be an absolute warning sign to McConnell,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) told Politico. He added that conservatives’ focus will now “invariably and should turn to McConnell in the Senate.”
Over the weekend, the chairman of the Republican Party of Louisiana urged McConnell to resign.
The odds of McConnell stepping down anytime soon are roughly zero. Boehner faced growing pressure from a significant faction of his own caucus, but McConnell faces sporadic pressure from Ted Cruz – whom most Senate Republicans are generally inclined to ignore. The qualitative and quantitative differences between the two GOP leaders are striking: McConnell was elected unanimously by his members, for example, while Boehner was not.
The importance of these developments isn’t the practical threat McConnell faces. Rather, the fact that the anti-McConnell push exists at all is emblematic of the larger story about GOP radicalization. The rationale behind the far-right campaign against Boehner is that he failed to beat President Obama – as if that were a credible outcome – which put him at odds with Republican expectations. As the bulls eye shifts from one end of Capitol Hill to the other, McConnell faces the same foolish, misguided complaint, his record of confrontation with the White House notwithstanding.
The Majority Leader’s position is secure, at least for the foreseeable future, but as the GOP base continues to direct its ire at party leaders, it’ll be worth watching to see how many Senate Republicans dodge as clumsily as Rand Paul did this morning.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 28, 2015
“Conservative Con Artists”: Are Republican Elites Ready To Shut Down The Circle Of Scam?
When Mike Huckabee decided to run for president, he surely knew that he’d be subjected to a level of scrutiny that your average Fox News host doesn’t have to worry about. So it was to be expected that commentators would start discussing Huckabee’s colorful history with regard to money, particularly the way he has used his email list to separate gullible conservatives from their funds, with scams like miracle Bible cancer cures. Ron Fournier looks at that today, and it just happens to coincide with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by conservative writer Matt Lewis, who excoriates conservative con artists for the way they prey on the rank-and-file. Instead of convincing conservatives to subscribe to newsletters or buy useless products, the newly loose campaign finance laws now allow them to be targeted for bogus superPACs that are allegedly for political causes but actually seem to be just a way to make money:
There’s no need to pick on one group; PACs using similar tactics are all over the place. Another one with an innocuous-sounding name, Conservative America Now, is raising money to draft Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon to challenge Sen. John McCain. But Mr. Salmon might not run and doesn’t want the help. In February the Hill newspaper reported he was prepping a cease-and-desist letter to the group, which a spokesman for the congressman alleged “appears to intentionally mislead potential donors.”
Last year Fox’s Detroit affiliate WJBK ran an exposé on direct-mail fundraising companies that continue to solicit using the names of past clients, such as former Republican congressional candidate Rocky Raczkowski. One direct-mail firm, the piece noted, “collected $1 million to support Rocky Raczkowski for races he never ran.” The Fox reporter spoke to Mr. Raczkowski, who said he’d had no idea that funds were being raised using his name. Some of the donors went on camera as well, including senior citizens living on fixed incomes, who were aghast when they were told the truth.
John McCain tweeted that Lewis’s piece was a “must-read,” and this is making me wonder if there might be an elite backlash brewing against the longstanding right-wing con industry, whereby gullible (usually elderly) conservatives are targeted for all manner of schemes and scams by operators within the movement. I’ve been writing about this for a while (see here, here, or here), and one of the reasons this stuff can persist is because it often has the involvement or at least tacit approval of Republican elites. But many of those elites dislike Mike Huckabee intensely, both for his occasional forays into economic populism and for the fact that he puts forward exactly the type of image they’re trying to get away from, by writing books with names like God, Guns, Grits and Gravy. Since Huckabee is up to his neck in these kinds of scams, going after the whole little industry would be a great way to undermine him.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, May 8, 2015
“Calling The Great Turtle’s Bluff”: President Obama Should Raise The Debt Ceiling Himself
The budget deal that just averted the supposed fiscal cliff was only a warm up. The next fiscal cliff is the $110 billion in automatic budget cuts (sequesters) that last week’s budget deal deferred only until March. But, as long as we are using topographic metaphors, this is less a cliff than a bluff.
On the Sunday talk shows, Republican leaders were full of bravado and swagger. Representative Matt Salmon of Arizona, on CBS “Face the Nation” said it was about time “for another government shutdown.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, ruled out any further tax increases, declaring that “the tax issue is finished, over, completed.” He insisted, “Now it’s time to pivot and turn to the real issue, which is our spending addiction.”
But is spending really the problem? For most the postwar era, federal tax revenues hovered around 19 percent of GDP, and spending a bit more than that. But for the four years since the financial collapse, federal revenues have been under 16 percent of GDP, thanks to the Bush tax cuts and the weak economy. It’s true that spending is up—it peaked at 25.2 percent of GDP in FY 2009, mainly because of the stimulus. But if it were not for the stimulus, unemployment would be even higher and growth even lower.
The point is that none of these fiscal issues caused the financial collapse, nor are they retarding the recovery. Were Congress to reduce the budget deficit, it would weaken, not strengthen the recovery. That is the real danger of the so-called fiscal cliff.
Spending relative to GDP was as high as 23.5 percent in the Reagan years, a shade above its projected level for this year. So there is no “addiction to spending.” If a free society wants to tax itself more to pay for decent retirement and health benefits, that is a political choice. Even with the slight tax increase of last week’s budget deal, limited to the top one percent, we still have the lowest tax rates of any wealthy country.
Seemingly, the Republicans hold a much stronger hand in the next round of budget talks: If Congress does nothing, the automatic cuts of the sequester take hold.
But Republicans have been blustering on taxes and spending for years. They were never going to raise taxes (Sorry, Grover), but when Obama decided to hang tough they turned around and voted to hike taxes on the richest one percent.
Obama needs to call McConnell’s bluff. On the issue of the debt ceiling, he can invoke his authority under the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that the U.S. government’s debts must be honored. He’d get wide backing.
On the sequester, Obama can keep Social Security and Medicare cuts off the table. There is more than one way to balance accounts going forward. One way is to raise the ceiling on incomes subject to payroll taxes. That would be a lot more popular than cutting benefits.
And does McConnell really want the sequester to bite, with its $60 billion in Pentagon cuts? In the great budget showdowns of the mid-1990s with Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton got the GOP to blink first.
If Clinton could achieve that with the Great Newt, Obama can do no less with the Great Turtle.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, January 7, 2013
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