“The GOP’s Noticeable Absences In Selma”: Republicans Are Apparently Satisfied With Only Having Its White Base
A wide variety of American political leaders will be in Selma tomorrow to honor the 50th anniversary of the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Among the attendees will be President Obama and former President George W. Bush.
Politico reports, however, that the Republican congressional leadership will not be on hand for the event.
Scores of U.S. lawmakers are converging on tiny Selma, Alabama, for a large commemoration of a civil rights anniversary. But their ranks don’t include a single member of House Republican leadership – a point that isn’t lost on congressional black leaders.
None of the top leaders – House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was once thought likely to attend to atone for reports that he once spoke before a white supremacist group – will be in Selma for the three-day event that commemorates the 1965 march and the violence that protesters faced at the hands of white police officers.
It’s not just the House GOP – Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is also skipping the event.
In fairness, it’s important to note that, as of yesterday, 23 congressional Republicans have said they’ll be in Selma for tomorrow’s ceremony, so it’d be an obvious overstatement to suggest a complete GOP no-show. But the Republican leadership – all of which was invited to attend – plays a unique role in representing the party overall. And yet, these leaders declined.
It’s reminiscent of August 2013, when a massive rally was held at the Lincoln Memorial, honoring the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Organizers encouraged the congressional Republican leadership to participate in the event, but GOP leaders declined those invitations, too.
To be clear, each of the Republican leaders who declined the invitations – both to tomorrow’s event in Selma and to the 2013 commemoration – may have a perfectly good excuse for their absence. There’s no evidence to the contrary.
But at a certain point, the party needs to realize that it has, among other things, a problem with appearances. On the one hand, the GOP sincerely seems to want to expand its outreach to minority communities, building the party beyond its overwhelmingly white base.
On the other hand, Republican leaders declined to participate in the Lincoln Memorial event in 2013; they’ve declined invitations to Selma; they had no public concerns after learning Steve Scalise attended a white-supremacist event; they’re slow walking the first African-American woman to ever be nominated as Attorney General; and they’re blocking a proposed bipartisan fix to the Voting Rights Act while their brethren at the state level impose new voting restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color.
It’s not unreasonable to conclude that the Republican Party simply must do better than this.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 6, 2015
“Just Do It And Move On”: John Boehner Can’t Bring Himself To Rip Off The Band-Aid
Mitch McConnell knows what John Boehner doesn’t, namely that when you have to do something painful, it’s best to get it over with quickly. Rip off the Band-aid, chop the zombie-bite-infected leg off with one blow, just do it and move on. But we’re a day away from a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, and Boehner can’t bring himself to do it.
So here’s the current status. McConnell decided that the Senate would take two votes, one on a “clean” DHS funding bill—i.e., one without a rider reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration—and one addressing just those executive actions. That way DHS stays open, Republicans get to cast their symbolic vote against Obama, and everybody goes home. The funding bill is already moving through. And of course, Tea Partiers are outraged (here’s one colorful post from Erick Erickson entitled “Eunuch Mitch McConnell Squeals Like a Pig“). Which, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t bother McConnell all that much, because he knows what’s in his party’s interest and what isn’t.
Boehner is still saying “nuh-uh!” But to what end? What does dragging this out actually accomplish for him? Here’s a report from Politico:
Boehner is playing a game of political survival. Most of his inner circle knows that the House will be forced to swallow a clean DHS funding bill at some point. But if the speaker wants to keep conservatives from launching a rebellion, it may be too early to capitulate. Boehner is aware of the perilous situation he’s facing—which is why, in private conversations with lawmakers, he’s telling them to “stay tuned” without tipping his hand on his next move.
Speaking to his caucus Wednesday, Boehner said he hadn’t spoken to McConnell in two weeks, an apparent attempt to distance himself from the Senate GOP leader’s plan. It seemed to highlight what will likely be an unfolding dynamic in the coming Congress, particularly over fiscal matters: The Senate will be forced to cut deals on politically toxic issues, and Boehner will ultimately be forced to accept them in order to avoid potential crises.
So the outcome is inevitable, but Boehner seems to be operating on the assumption that if he holds out a while longer, the crazy caucus will be less angry with him. And when has that ever worked? We’ve been through this multiple times now, and at the end of it they dislike him just as much as they did at the beginning.
There are three things Boehner could be thinking. The first is that if there’s a partial shutdown, the administration will give in and undo Obama’s executive actions. No one is dumb enough to believe that. The second is that he or someone else will have an extraordinary flash of insight and devise a clever stratagem that will get the Republicans everything they want. That’s possible in theory, but highly unlikely to say the least. The third is that this shutdown fight will end the same way all the other shutdown fights ended: with Boehner giving in and allowing a vote on a bill to end the crisis, a bill that passes with the support of Democrats. He will be decried as a capitulator and a RINO, and nothing will have changed.
But is Boehner really in a “perilous situation”? The reason he’s still the speaker isn’t that he’s done such a masterful job of keeping Tea Partiers happy. It’s that nobody else wants the job. When he retained the position in January, 25 Republicans voted for somebody else, but the votes were entirely symbolic. There’s no other candidate, there’s no rebellion planned. He’s secure in his miserable position.
So really, Mr. Speaker, just rip off the Band-aid. Hold the vote to fund DHS. We all know how this ends.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, February 26, 2015
“Hey, Boehner; Show Some Stones For Once”: The Right Wing Is Toothless And Congress Is Essentially Leaderless
So here’s something I’ve often wondered over the last few years. What exactly would happen if John Boehner bucked the right-wingers in the House? You know—if he gave us one of those heroic Hollywood moments that we so long for in this sail-trimming city and gave a big speech about how he was putting principle ahead of politics and the consequences be damned.
You know what I think would happen? If, say, he followed Mitch McConnell’s lead and allowed a vote on a clean DHS-funding bill? After all the dust settled—nothing. Oh, the dust would fly to the heavens for a few days. Tea Partiers would scream about his betrayal. Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of them would fulminate. There’d be a few breathless stories about how his speakership was in mortal peril. And then, something else would happen in the news cycle, the intoxicating effect of the drug of munity would wear off, and we’d be back to exactly where we were before the dust went skyward.
We have a dysfunctional legislative system, and one of the hallmarks of a dysfunctional system—indeed the main hallmark of a dysfunctional system—is that no one is held accountable for anything they do. And there’s no reason to think Boehner would be held accountable by his right wing.
First of all, they don’t have the votes to oust him. In his last speakership election, 25 Republicans voted against him. That’s a chunk, but it’s a small chunk. And besides, who are they going to replace him with? Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who seems not able to count noses and who isn’t particularly well liked by his GOP colleagues? Majority Whip Steve Scalise, now branded as a white-supremacist sympathizer? One doesn’t expect much of today’s GOP, but I doubt very much that even this hardened assemblage would want to be led by a man with that charge hanging around his neck.
So the whole business is ridiculous. And in fact, if you look closely at the record, you see that Boehner has bucked his right wing. Although “bucked” isn’t really the right word, since to buck means to resist with some show of strength. Boehner never does that. What he does is that he hews to the right-wing line rhetorically for as long as he possibly can, and then, when it’s two minutes til midnight and it’s obvious to everyone that he has to bend, he bends. He did it on the debt ceiling. He does it on budget questions. And there’s always a great deal of sturm and drang, but soon enough, it’s back to business.
Think here about the famous Hastert Rule, that a Republican leader can’t bring anything to the floor that doesn’t have the support of a majority of the Republican majority. This has come up a number of times in the last four years, and always the line is: Oh my God, he can’t break the Hastert Rule! Dare he break the Hastert Rule? His speakership is in grave jeopardy if he breaks the Hastert Rule! No, Lord, not the Hastert Rule!!
Well, he’s broken the Hastert Rule three times. The first time was on the fiscal cliff negotiation at the beginning of 2013. On that one, 85 House Republicans voted for the compromise bill that emerged, and 151 of them voted against it. The second time was on Hurricane Sandy relief, which happened just a couple of weeks after the fiscal cliff vote. That time, 49 GOPers voted for the relief, and 179 against. And the third came a little more than a month later—two years ago tomorrow, in fact—when the House passed a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. That time, 87 Republicans voted aye, and 138 nay.
So look at that record. In two months’ time, Boehner violated the allegedly inviolate Hastert Rule three times. And what happened to him? Well, we’re still calling him Mr. Speaker, last I checked. The right wing has not mutinied. And in fact the dark little psychological secret is that the vast majority of them have no interest whatsoever in mutiny. It’s far better for business for them, back in the home districts, to be able to scream betrayal and present themselves to their rabid constituents, the kind who just might go organize themselves to find a primary challenger to run against them, as the true defenders of liberty against all the sell-outs and ideological harlots they have to contend with on a daily basis, Boehner included. Gower Champion couldn’t choreograph it any better.
If I’m right about all this, and I am, then the question is why Boehner can’t, just once, show some stones and say, at 10 or 15 minutes til midnight rather than the usual two, “Sorry, we’re gonna do the reasonable thing here, and save this other fight for another day?” Well, some have argued that it may be in this case that he doesn’t actually know whether he has the votes. But I think that’s a reach. He’s got 245 Republicans. There are 188 Democrats, presumably all of whom would vote for a clean bill. So he’d need about 30 Republicans to back a clean bill. If he can’t get a mere 15 percent of his caucus to vote for a clean bill, maybe he’s got no business being speaker anyway. That would mean breaking the Hastert Rule, but as we’ve seen, he’s paid no price for that in the past.
And look at what happened in the Senate after McConnell decided to be reasonable. The vote was 98-2! The holdouts were Jim Inhofe and Jeff Sessions. Ted Cruz voted for the clean bill! Mike Lee! Joni Ernst and all the new red-hots. McConnell called the radicals’ bluff, and they folded. I say there’s every reason to think that roughly the same thing would happen in the House.
It’s often said in Washington that Congress is held captive to the hard right. But that’s not it. Boehner could break that hold if he wanted to. So it’s not really the radicals who are to blame, but Boehner’s refusal to be their leader and tell them “this is the way it is.” That’s the one thing, as their leader, he’ll never do. You know—lead.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 27, 2015
“Four Days Til Stupidity Erupts”: Contradicting The Narrative That The GOP Was All Grown Up And Muzzled Its Tea Party Faction
So the expiration of appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security approaches in just four days, and there’s no sign yet that Republicans are going to be able to figure out how to back down from their demands for cancellation of the President’s executive actions on immigration without looking weak to the Almighty Base.
This is all kinds of stupid for a number of reasons, including (a) the conflict with GOP Chicken Little rhetoric over homeland security threats; (b) the fact that the portion of DHS that actually enforces immigration laws would be largely unaffected since it operates on fees rather than appropriations; (c) as of the moment, the offending 2014 immigration executive order has been suspended pending judicial review; and (d) this gives Democrats a huge, huge political gift while contradicting the dominant media narrative of 2014 that the GOP was all grown up and had muzzled its Tea Party faction.
Point this out to your average conservative activist and you’ll generally hear mumbling about the Constitution, various forms of denial that anyone will care, and/or the classic ex post facto argument that being stupid on a government shutdown didn’t keep Republicans from doing very well in 2014. I guess the prospective argument would be that Republicans can and should keep doing egregiously stupid things until they lose an election, which could happen in a little over nineteen months. What you won’t hear are many predictions this strategem will actually work to change public policy. So it’s all about posturing, and that’s never a good sign for a serious political party.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 23, 2015
“When A ‘Gotcha’ Question Is More Than A Gotcha”: When It Reveals Something Worth Knowing About Scott Walker
I’m no fan of John McCain’s (to say the least), but there was at least one moment in his 2008 presidential campaign in which he did the right thing by standing up to the crazies in his party, even if it might have meant some political risk. At an event just before the election, a voter stood up and said “I can’t trust Obama…he’s an Arab,” to which McCain replied, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
Seven years later, Republican voters are still convinced that Barack Obama is The Other, an alien presence occupying an office he doesn’t deserve. He might say that he was born in the United States, he might say that he’s a Christian, he might say that he loves the country he leads, but they know better. And if you want their favor, so many Republican politicians think, you’d better indulge their fears and resentments and bigotries.
In order to do so, it isn’t necessary to actually agree with them on these matters. You can just admit to uncertainty, say you aren’t quite sure who Obama is and what he believes. That’s the path Scott Walker took over the weekend when he was asked by the Washington Post about Obama’s religion:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a prospective Republican presidential contender, said Saturday he does not know whether President Obama is a Christian.
“I don’t know,” Walker said in an interview at the JW Marriott hotel in Washington, where he was attending the winter meeting of the National Governors Association.
Told that Obama has frequently spoken publicly about his Christian faith, Walker maintained that he was not aware of the president’s religion.
“I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that,” Walker said, his voice calm and firm. “I’ve never asked him that,” he added. “You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that. How [could] I say if I know either of you are a Christian?”
Barack Obama has been president of the United States for six years. He talks about his Christian faith quite regularly. He sometimes goes to church. As you might recall, there was quite a controversy back in 2008 about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Are we supposed to believe that Scott Walker is genuinely unsure of Obama’s religious affiliation? I guess it’s technically possible for a politically aware and active person in 2015 to not know the answer to that question, in the same sense that it’s technically possible for a lifelong and ardent basketball fan to be unsure what position Shaquille O’Neal played. It could be true, but the person would have to be suffering from some unfortunate brain disorder, perhaps involving having had a metal spike penetrate their skull.
So let’s not bother pretending that Scott Walker doesn’t actually know that Obama’s a Christian. Walker could have said, “He’s a Christian, of course. We all know that. Now let me tell you what I think he’s done wrong.” But Walker also surely knows that had he said that, he’d be showing a willingness to puncture at least one prejudice held by an alarming number of GOP primary voters. That might win him some plaudits in Washington, but it probably wouldn’t get him too many votes in Iowa.
After his interview, a spokesperson contacted the Post reporters to clarify, saying: “Of course the governor thinks the president is a Christian.” Not that I want to read too much into one word, but the fact that she said her boss “thinks” Obama is a Christian would put Walker in line with what has become a tradition among Republican politicians when it comes to these questions. Whether it’s Obama’s religious affiliation or his American citizenship, Republican after Republican has treated the question not a matter of fact but of belief. As John Boehner said in 2011, “I believe that the president is a citizen. I believe the president is a Christian, I’ll take him at his word.” In other words, he might be an American and a Christian, he might not be, there’s no way to know for sure, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. By sheer coincidence, Mitch McConnell said not long before, “The president says he’s a Christian. I take him at his word.”
To understand how weird this formulation, imagine you heard Boehner or McConnell say, “I’ll take Chuck Schumer at his word that he’s Jewish,” or “Jeb Bush says he was born in Texas, so that’s what I’ll believe.” But you’d never hear them say that.
I’m sure that Walker and his supporters think this was an unfair “gotcha” question to ask. About that, they’re half right. On one hand, there are many more important topics to query Scott Walker about than this one, and we can hope that we’ll get to as many as possible over the course of the long campaign. On the other hand, this isn’t the kind of inane question so many candidates are subjected to, like whether they prefer Elvis to Johnny Cash or deep dish to thin crust—actual questions CNN’s John King asked Republican candidates at a debate in 2011. This question does actually reveal something worth knowing about Walker, because it’s rooted in today’s Republican Party.
It tells us that Walker is (as yet anyway) unwilling to stand up to the Republican primary electorate’s ample population of lunatics, the people who think Barack Obama is a Mooslem Marxist foreigner enacting his secret Alinskyite plan to destroy America. Depending on which poll you read, those people may constitute a majority of Republican voters. Walker is either afraid to alienate them, or perhaps he genuinely shares many of their beliefs. This isn’t about whether you’re a “real” conservative; you can be emphatically right-wing on every policy issue but still be tethered enough to reality not to get seduced by conspiracy theories and fantasies of Obama’s otherness.
Many knowledgeable people thought Scott Walker had great potential as a presidential candidate even before he began his recent rise in the polls. Perhaps more than any of the GOP contenders, he looked like a person who could bridge the party’s key divide, between the pragmatic establishment that supplies the money and the decidedly less reasonable grassroots that supplies the troops. Walker is both an enemy of labor unions and an evangelical Christian himself (if he becomes president, Walker will be the first evangelical in the office since Jimmy Carter; contrary to popular belief, George W. Bush is not an evangelical). While he’s still unfamiliar to most of the country, Walker is the the kind of candidate that the Koch brothers and the tea party protester with a sign accusing Obama of being a communist can both get excited about.
So it’s important to know just how much he represents each of those groups, both in policy and in spirit. He just offered us one important clue. It won’t be the last.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 23, 2015
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