“John Boehner Deflects Attention By Suing The President”: How House GOP Circumvents Its Responsibility To Engage In Governing
President Obama was generous on Thursday in referring to Speaker John Boehner’s proposed lawsuit against him as a “stunt,” a word generally used to mean a playful attempt to get attention. In fact, the suit is a mean-spirited attempt to deflect attention — specifically from the House’s refusal to engage in the act of governing.
For the foreseeable future, there will be no action to boost the economy, or help minimum-wage workers, or extend unemployment insurance, or address climate change. Immigration reform is dead. The most basic appropriations bills are likely to get bogged down in Republican attempts to promote coal burning and rein in the Clean Water Act. There is already talk of another in an endless series of stopgap spending bills, the surest sign of a non-functioning Congress. And the Tea Party would love nothing more than another shutdown fight or even impeachment hearings.
Mr. Boehner’s lawsuit, which he said will challenge the president’s use of executive authority, was designed in part to appease the far-right corner. But more substantively, it is part of Mr. Boehner’s long-running strategy to pretend there is a legitimate reason for the years of obstruction.
He can’t very well explain to the public that the real reason there has been no action on immigration reform is because large swaths of the Republican base dislike Hispanic immigrants. And so he had to construct a way to blame Mr. Obama for the inaction.
“Speaker Boehner has been very clear about this: He wants to fix America’s broken immigration system,” his spokesman, Michael Steel, said last month. “But no one trusts the White House to enforce the law as written.” He can’t be trusted because he allowed the children of immigrants who came to this country illegally to remain without fear of deportation, an executive action that may be on the list of particulars in the lawsuit. (Mr. Boehner hasn’t said which actions prompted him to sue.)
Coal-state lawmakers can’t admit they would rather foul the air than hurt the short-term interests of their states’ biggest industries and employers, so they pretend they are angry about a procedural matter: Mr. Obama’s “overreach” in directing environmental regulators to enforce carbon standards without the permission of Congress.
And Republicans care not in the least about the substance of the administration’s actions in delaying parts of the Affordable Care Act; instead they see each administrative action as an opportunity to portray the president as tyrannical. “We didn’t elect a monarch or a king,” Mr. Boehner told the House in a letter on Wednesday outlining his legal plans.
Royalty is a laughable way to describe a president who had to struggle to get his own aides confirmed by the Senate, and was forced to use an experimental legal maneuver to keep entire agencies functioning. Mr. Obama’s attempt to use recess appointments to get around the Republican refusal to confirm any members to the National Labor Relations Board, regardless of qualification, was slapped back by the Supreme Court on Thursday. Republicans immediately claimed the court, too, has become angered by the president’s imperialism, refusing to acknowledge the president had acted out of desperation to get around their own unprecedented level of resistance.
Mr. Boehner’s diversion is the ultimate in frivolous lawsuits — a subject he knows well, since he frequently applies the word “frivolous” to the lawsuits he doesn’t like, including those fighting discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace. But it is likely to fail in both its legal objective and its larger purpose. Americans are pretty good at detecting phony excuses to get out of work.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 27, 2014
“Who Says Obama Can’t Lead?”: While Obama Is Exhibiting Leadership With Finesse, Republicans Have Run Into A Wall
Last week, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found President Obama tying his record low approval rating of 41 percent. NBC’s Chuck Todd, referring to another poll result showing that 54 percent of Americans “no longer feel that he is able to lead the country and get the job done,” told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “Essentially the public is saying, ‘Your presidency is over.’”
Similarly, political analyst Charlie Cook, citing Gallup survey data, wrote in National Journal, “There was a point when voters hit the mute button and stopped listening to George H.W. Bush and then to his son George W. Bush. We now seem to have reached that point with Obama.”
But one morsel from the NBC/WSJ poll didn’t fit that narrative: 67 percent of respondents are in favor of the president’s newly announced regulations “to set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants.” And when the pollsters re-asked the question, after presenting supporting and opposing arguments, including charges of “fewer jobs” and “higher prices,” approval held with a healthy 53 percent to 39 percent margin.
That’s a hell of a lot of support for a major presidential initiative from an electorate supposedly no longer listening to the president.
What did Obama do right?
Adhering to a favorite maxim of U.S. presidents of both parties that it’s remarkable how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit, Obama tapped EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to announce the plan and stump for it in media interviews. By keeping a relatively low-profile, Obama tempered the media’s tendency to polarize everything while dampening conservative backlash, a strategy that previously helped shepherd the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law and the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays and lesbians.
Additionally, the Obama administration avoided a united corporate front against the plan by reaching out to industries about to be regulated. While the U.S Chamber of Commerce chose to oppose the plan before it was released, the power plant industry’s main lobby refused to reinforce the attack. Instead, it released a positive statement expressing appreciation for the “range of compliance options” offered by the EPA.
The statement was short of an outright endorsement, leaving room for further negotiation. Days later, McCarthy began that negotiation, meeting with and winning praise from utility executives for “listening to the concerns that we had” and being “willing to have that dialogue.” With the utility industry signaling détente, Republicans couldn’t validate conservatives’ sky-is-falling claims with the voices of those most directly impacted by the proposed regulations.
While Obama was exhibiting leadership with finesse, Republicans decided to run into a wall. Instead of training their fire on the climate proposal in the days following the June 2 release, they obsessed over freed prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl. Whatever one’s opinion of the terms of the prisoner swap with the Taliban, it’s a done deal—and the climate rule is not. Republicans had a moment to redirect the climate debate for the duration of Obama’s presidency away from the losing effort of denying the science and toward the more fertile ground of jobs and prices. Myopically, they used that moment to chase the shiny object of the 24-hour news cycle.
Obama may not have been leading on climate in the conventional sense: preaching from the bully pulpit and rallying the public to pressure Washington to act. But prominent political scientists will tell you that’s not how presidential leadership usually works. As George Washington University professor John Sides explained to Slate, “The idea that presidents accomplish more if they give the right speech is magical thinking.”
Yet, the president has bucked the trend of history and successfully used the bully pulpit to advance another major goal: raising the minimum wage. Anticipating obstinacy from House Republicans, he told the states during his January 2014 State of the Union address, “You don’t have to wait for Congress to act.” He followed up that call with several outside-the-Beltway stump speeches urging states to raise their minimum wage above the federal standard.
The stumping is working. So far this year, eight states have raised their minimums and later this week Massachusetts will make it nine. Others may follow suit as more than 30 state legislatures have been compelled to consider minimum wage measures, and activists in eight states are pursuing November referendums. As with climate, this is not the kind of impact a president makes if the public has “stopped listening.”
But since bully pulpit tactics are not the norm of presidential leadership, it’s not all that important if the public doesn’t “tune in” to hear the president anymore. The test of a president’s leadership is whether he is in-tune enough with the public, and deft enough with the levers of power, to accomplish what is feasible.
If I were a Republican, I would not be savoring Obama’s 41 percent approval rating and presuming his presidency was done. I would be worried about my party’s 29 percent approval rating, its 15 percent level of support among Latinos and Obama’s plans to take executive action on immigration reform if House Republicans don’t act by July 31. If you think Obama isn’t able to lead on immigration, after what he has done on climate and minimum wage, you haven’t been paying attention.
By: Bill Scher, Contributor, Real Clear Politics, June 23, 2014
“The Three Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Poverty”: So Why Do So Many Right-Wing Republicans Tell These Lies?
Rather than confront poverty by extending jobless benefits to the long-term unemployed, endorsing a higher minimum wage, or supporting jobs programs, conservative Republicans are taking a different tack.
They’re peddling three big lies about poverty. To wit:
Lie #1: Economic growth reduces poverty.
“The best anti-poverty program,” wrote Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, in the Wall Street Journal, “is economic growth.”
Wrong. Since the late 1970s, the economy has grown 147 percent per capita but almost nothing has trickled down. The typical American worker is earning just about what he or she earned three decades ago, adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans in poverty remains around 15 percent. That’s even higher than it was in the early 1970s.
How can the economy have grown so much while most people’s wages go nowhere and the poor remain poor? Because almost all the gains have gone to the top.
Research by Immanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows that forty years ago the richest 1 percent of Americans got 9 percent of total income. Today they get over 20 percent.
It’s true that redistributing income to the needy is politically easier in a growing economy than in a stagnant one. One reason so many in today’s middle class are reluctant to pay taxes to help the poor is their own incomes are dropping.
But the lesson we should have learned from the past three decades is economic growth by itself doesn’t reduce poverty.
Lie #2: Jobs reduce poverty.
Senator Marco Rubio said poverty is best addressed not by raising the minimum wage or giving the poor more assistance but with “reforms that encourage and reward work.”
This has been the standard Republican line ever since Ronald Reagan declared that the best social program is a job. A number of Democrats have adopted it as well. But it’s wrong.
Surely it’s better to be poor and working than to be poor and unemployed. Evidence suggests jobs are crucial not only to economic well-being but also to self-esteem. Long-term unemployment can even shorten life expectancy.
But simply having a job is no bulwark against poverty. In fact, across America the ranks of the working poor have been growing. Around one-fourth of all American workers are now in jobs paying below what a full-time, full-year worker needs in order to live above the federally defined poverty line for a family of four.
Why are more people working but still poor? First of all, more jobs pay lousy wages.
While low-paying industries such as retail and fast food accounted for 22 percent of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, they’ve generated 44 percent of the jobs added since then, according to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project.
Second, the real value of the minimum wage continues to drop. This has affected female workers more than men because more women are at the minimum wage.
Third, government assistance now typically requires recipients to be working. This hasn’t meant fewer poor people. It’s just meant more poor people have jobs.
Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996 pushed the poor into jobs, but they’ve been mostly low-wage jobs without ladders into the middle class. The Earned Income Tax Credit, a wage subsidy, has been expanded, but you have to be working in order to qualify.
Work requirements haven’t reduced the number or percent of Americans in poverty. They’ve merely increased the number of working poor — a term that should be an oxymoron.
Lie #3: Ambition cures poverty.
Most Republicans, unlike Democrats and independents, believe people are poor mainly because of a lack of effort, according to a Pew Research Center/USA Today survey. It’s a standard riff of the right: If the poor were more ambitious they wouldn’t be poor.
Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there’s no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.
What they really lack is opportunity. It begins with lousy schools.
America is one of only three advanced countries that spends less on the education of poorer children than richer ones, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do schools serving poor neighborhoods have fewer teachers and crowd students into larger classrooms than do schools serving more privileged students. In most countries, it’s just the reverse: Poor neighborhoods get more teachers per student.
And unlike most OECD countries, America doesn’t put better teachers in poorly performing schools,
So why do so many right-wing Republicans tell these three lies? Because they make it almost impossible to focus on what the poor really need – good-paying jobs, adequate safety nets, and excellent schools.
These things cost money. Lies are cheaper.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, June 13, 2 014
“Replacing One Disingenuous Politician With Another”: Dave Brat, Eric Cantor’s Career Killer, Nowhere Near Ready For Prime Time
Dave Brat—the college economics professor who pulled off a stunning primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District—was taking a victory lap through the land of talk TV this morning when he ran into a buzz saw in the guise of MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.
Spending the first part of the interview happily discussing his position as a free-market supporter, all was going according to Brat’s script until Todd dared to ask the Republican nominee some actual questions on national policy.
Chuck began by tossing Professor Brat a softball, asking whether the candidate supported a federally mandated minimum wage.
Bear in mind that this is a candidate, an economics professor, who had spent the majority of the interview up the point of Todd’s question, extolling the virtues of a free market. Yet, when asked for his position on a federal minimum wage he struggled to avoid the question, obviously afraid of angering any voters who might be listening or create any news he felt could be harmful to his chances in November.
Smelling blood in Brat’s lack of a solid response, Todd pushed him for an answer, causing Mr. Brat to reply—
“ I don’t have a well-crafted response to that one.”
Call me crazy but I would have thought that a tenured, 18 year economics professor running for Congress on a free market platform might have given some though to the issue of a federally mandated minimum wage at some point before this morning’s interview.
Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether Professor Brat’s economics students would manage a passing grade in Econ 101 were they to respond to an exam question with “I don’t have a well-crafted response to that one.”—even if that student had not received much sleep the night before the exam (what student ever does?).
Given the reaction by Mr. Brat when facing a question that one would expect a free market expert to have previously pondered, it becomes difficult to avoid the reality that Dave Brat is more of a typical politician than he’s been letting on.
While Brat’s response to an easy question should be distressing to every Virginian who gave him their vote, let alone those who did not, it all got substantially worse when Todd asked Mr. Brat a fairly simple foreign policy question.
“On a foreign policy issue, arming the Syrian rebels. Would you be in favor of that?”
This was, to Mr. Brat’s thinking, going to far. How dare the media quiz a guy favored to enter the House of Representatives in January about his thoughts on a critical foreign policy matter?
For the man who had just toppled the House Majority Leader, a foreign policy question qualified as unfair sandbagging—and Brat wasn’t afraid to say so.
“Hey, Chuck, I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspects,” Brat said. “I’d love to go through all of this but my mind is just— I didn’t get much sleep last night. I love all the policy questions but I just wanted to talk about the victory ahead and I wanted to thank everybody that worked so hard on my campaign. I’m happy to take policy issues at any time, I just wanted to call out a thanks to everybody today.”
Really? Talk about a disingenuous response. Mr. Brat had began his interview by launching into the six tenets of Republican philosophy that he claims to hold so close to his heart—six policy positions he was clearly not too tired to recount. Brat then treated Todd’s audience to a lecture on the wonders of a free market—a recitation and message he managed to find sufficient energy to deliver, despite his stated lack of sleep that rendered him incapable of telling us his position on minimum wage.
As Erik Wemple notes in the Washington Post:
“Chuck Todd is the ultimate issues guy. How can you go on his show and wave off a question on substance?”
And, so we are all clear, MSNBC spokeswoman Lauren Skowronski confirms that “No promises were made to Brat in advance of his interview on The Daily Rundown this morning.”
Here is a tip for Mr. Brat—if you are too tired to answer a few incredibly easy policy questions, get some sleep before showing up for an interview. I can assure Mr. Brat that journalists like Chuck Todd—as well as a great many others who do what we do—also didn’t get much sleep last night. And yet, we find that we are still able to conjure up our thoughts along with a few simple questions for the candidate this morning.
Is it really asking too much of Dave Brat to be reasonably prepared to answer those questions?
After all, nobody was asking Brat to provide a full-on presentation of his policy positions—only that he tell us where he stands on minimum wage. And if Brat was expecting an MSNBC interview to be a simple opportunity to share the joy he is experiencing in his big win, voters in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District should be very concerned, indeed.
Make no mistake—I am truly pleased to see Mr. Cantor sent packing as I have long viewed the Majority Leader as little more than an opportunist who will say or do most anything to gain the support of his party’s many factions while pocketing as many political chits as he can. Cantor’s fealty to Wall Street has been very well documented, often placing the needs of the moneyed interests who fill his offices and his campaign coffers well above the needs of his constituents—something the voters of his congressional district have apparently figured out.
However, the voters of Virginia’s 7th Congressional District now need to ask themselves a question—do they really want to replace one disingenuous elected official with another disingenuous elected official?
When a candidate like Dave Brat suggests that he cannot give a simple ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ when it comes to his position on minimum wage because he didn’t get enough rest last night, how can he be described as anything but another, run-of-the-mill disingenuous politician dodging what should be a no-brainer question?
And if Mr. Brat hasn’t take a moment to think about our foreign policy, he can only be described as a seriously unprepared candidate engaging in political malpractice.
Either way, as the general election gets underway to fill Eric Cantor’s seat under the glare of a national spotlight, let’s hope that Virginians recognize that replacing one disingenuous politician with another does absolutely nothing to advance either their own interests or the interests of the nation as a whole.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, June 12, 2014
“Republicans Aren’t Pro-Life”: They’re Just Pro-Birth, And There’s A Big Difference
One of the main platforms of the Republicans is that, as a party, they say they are definitively pro-life. But if you really look closely at their stance on weapons, abortion, food stamps, global warming, minimum wage, veterans, prisons, etc… you have to wonder how they can make that claim.
AK47, military-style weapons and large magazine clips are part of the Republican chant. They claim it is their Second Amendment right to bear these arms, but even in Wyatt Earp’s Dodge City, outsiders were told to leave their guns at the city limits. Today Republicans, who are funded and graded by the NRA, want to have guns not only for self-protection, but also for showmanship. They believe it is their right to carry weapons everywhere including family restaurants, bars, classrooms and churches.
On average, three people are killed by a gun every hour and approximately seven are shot. How can anyone who says they are pro-life also be pro-weapon? If the Republican Party truly believes life is sacred, then why do they insist on unrestricted assault weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill — rather than reasonable gun regulations?
I also wonder how, on the one hand, a pro-life Republican demands that pregnant women have their unwanted children. Yet on the other hand, choose to cut food stamps that help feed these women and children. Did they ever consider the financial responsibilities involved in raising a child when they voted to close down small clinics that perform abortions and insurance coverage for birth control?
Currently, the Republicans are suggesting paying for summer lunches but only for rural kids, not urban ones. In other words, they want to provide food for the mostly rural white kids, but not provide food for the mainly minority, inner-city kids. How do these actions match their pro-life philosophy?
If you are pro-life, I would bet that you would vote for the right to breathe… but, a breath free of pollution is becoming more and more difficult these days. Republicans, like Florida’s Marco Rubio, continue to deny man’s role in climate change and denounce any scientific evidence. Is this really a pro-life stance when the impact to our children and grandchildren will be devastating?
The Republicans boast pro-life but also oppose raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to a living income. If they are really for life, then why would they be against paying a living wage that makes it possible for people who work to put food on their table? Not only is voting for the increase in minimum wage the right decision, but it also makes good business sense. Henry Ford, a leading businessman of his time, understood if he didn’t pay his workers enough to buy his product, then he wouldn’t prosper; today’s Republicans like Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz obviously believe otherwise.
Something else to ponder is when you vote for war, but against taking care of the wounded warriors, is that really being pro-life? Sending men and women into battle seems to be easy for Republicans, yet only two Republicans, Sens. Dean Heller and Jerry Moran, voted for a bill that would improve veterans’ healthcare and other benefits.
Republican state governors like Idaho’s Butch Otter and Virginia’s Bob McDonnell don’t want to expand Medicaid, even though it is virtually free to them. Without the federal funds, fewer people can receive healthcare, and many will die. Doesn’t sound much like a pro-life stance to me.
The Republican House voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA yet kept their government funded healthcare. How can they say no to improved healthcare for our war heroes, but accept it for themselves? Do they only believe in pro-life when it’s opportune?
When it comes to the death penalty, the same Republicans stating they are pro-life don’t seem to think twice about having someone put to death in their state — even though many of the accused people who were once on death row have been exonerated. Texas Governor Rick Perry brags about the number of executions that have taken place under his governorship. Do they understand that even if the person is guilty, they are taking someone’s life?
Republicans aren’t pro-life. They are just pro-birth. And there’s a big difference between the two.
By: Gerry Myers, CEO, President and Co-Founder of Advisory Link; The Huffington Post Blog, June 4, 2014
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