“The Midterm Manifesto”: Senate Republicans Want The GOP To Make All Sorts Of Promises It Can’t Keep
Senate Republicans may be about to make the same mistake they often do when attempting to outline a platform: proposing policies that are impossible to implement.
Politico reports that a bloc of Senate Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham, “is agitating for party leaders to unveil a policy manifesto” that would explain to voters what the GOP would do if it took the majority in the midterm elections. This is yet another sign that the Republican Party realizes it needs a new political strategy, now that Obamacare has rebounded. A new “Contract With America”—the party’s midterm platform in 1994, on which this 2014 manifesto would be modeled—could prove successful at the polls.
But as a governing strategy, this manifesto will only make legislating more difficult if the GOP takes the Senate. That’s because Republicans have a bad habit of overpromising.
In 2012, Mitt Romney promised a mathematically impossible tax-reform plan to lower all rates by 20 percent and cut the corporate rate, making up the revenue by closing unspecified tax preferences. When House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp released his tax reform plan in February, he attempted to cut rates and consolidate the tax code, but struggled to make up the lost revenue, eventually creating a top rate of 35 percent, implementing a bank tax, and taxing a percentage of capital gains as ordinary income. Republicans predictably ran away from Camp’s reasonable plan.
Marco Rubio has proposed reforming the federal government’s antipoverty system. But his plan is mathematically impossible: He proposes increasing benefits for childless workers, keeping them unchanged for everyone else, and not increasing the deficit. He has yet to release legislative language for the plan, but those three goals are irreconcilable.
It’s hard to imagine what Senate Republicans could unite behind that would appeal to most of the party. If tax reform ends up in a Senate Republican policy manifesto, it will only reinforce the impossible Republican standard of drastically lowering rates and eliminating tax preferences to avoid increasing the deficit. This is exactly what Representative Paul Ryan did in his budget this year, where he reiterated his support for two tax brackets with rates at 10 and 25 percent. Camp tried to do that, but came up short. The dual-rate structure simply doesn’t raise enough revenue. As the likely replacement for Camp as chair of Ways and Means, Ryan now has made tax reform very hard to accomplish.
Undoubtedly, the midterm manifesto would propose replacing Obamacare—but replace it with what? Senators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch unveiled the Patient CARE Act in January, which actually had a lot in common with Obamacare. It didn’t earn much support among the GOP for that reason. What plan could Senate Republicans unite behind that does more than just repeal Obamacare?
Will the platform contain a balanced budget amendment, as Newt Gingrich and House Republicans included in their “Contract with America”? Republicans would face stiff Democratic opposition to such an amendment, but the GOP may also have to answer how they would close budget deficits if the amendment somehow became law. They certainly wouldn’t increase revenue. Instead, it would require even steeper spending cuts—$1.2 trillion more than even Paul Ryan envisioned in his budget. The Ryan budget already takes such a huge cut from programs for low-income Americans that it is hard to see how another $1.2 trillion in cuts wouldn’t need to come from defense spending or Social Security. Those are two areas Republicans don’t want to touch.
All this speculation may be moot. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has yet to offer an opinion on the proposed manifesto, according to Politico, while John Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, argued against it. “Even if we have a good election, President Obama is still going to be president,” Cornyn said. “I don’t think we should be in the business of overpromising.”
If only the party took that advice more often.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, May 27, 2014
“GOP’s Post-Obama Problem”: Why They’re Lost Without Him — And With The Electorate He Helped Create
With the 2014 congressional primary season almost behind us, the conventional wisdom has hardened: The Republican establishment has vanquished its Tea Party tormentors. The progressive response to that narrative — that the establishment only “won” by capitulating to the Tea Party — is hardening, too. I want to challenge that a little.
When North Carolina State Sen. Thom Tillis won the GOP Senate nomination in early May, it seemed ridiculous to claim the Tea Party had been defeated, though he technically had a Tea Party rival: Tillis was as extreme as his opponent, supporting personhood legislation and tax cuts for the wealthy, opposing immigration reform and boasting that he’d personally stopped the state’s Medicaid expansion. I argued at the time that the story was not the Tea Party’s defeat, but its victory: the extent to which it had taken over the Republican establishment.
That didn’t seem true in the wake of Tuesday night’s election results, particularly in Kentucky. Credit where it’s due: Mitch McConnell crushed Matt Bevin. Sure, he did it by courting his Tea Party junior Sen. Rand Paul and by sliming and outspending Bevin. And sure, he won by a smaller margin than any incumbent GOP senator who’d faced a primary in the last 80 years.
But he won, even after making a deal with Harry Reid to reopen the government that was supposed to be his undoing. So did Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Boehner ally with a Tea Party rival, while in Georgia, the three candidates tied to the Tea Party lost, to two more polished and mainstream conservatives, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, who face a July run-off. And looking ahead, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Kansas’s Pat Roberts and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander look likely to beat back Tea Party challengers. In 2010, when even conservative incumbents like Utah’s Bob Bennett and South Carolina’s Bob Inglis lost their seats in Congress, all of those races likely would have turned out differently.
Something’s changed, and liberals can’t ignore it. Democrats won’t be running against neophytes or crackpots likely to self-destruct before November. Yet the GOP establishment’s short-term wins mask a long-term nightmare: The party has no real plan for American politics once Barack Obama goes off to enjoy a long retirement, or for the electorate he’s helped create.
“Mission Accomplished”: Tea Party Has Succeeded In Moving GOP Further Right
Last week, primary elections in several states killed off a few ultraconservative candidates whose views flirted with nuttiness. In Georgia, for example, U.S. Rep. Paul Broun — a physician who has called evolution and the big-bang theory “lies straight from the pit of hell” — drew only 9.8 percent of the vote in a crowded race to become the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.
In the same Georgia primary contest, U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, an obstetrician-gynecologist, pulled down just 10 percent of the vote. Last year, the gaffe-prone Gingrey drew national ridicule for defending former Missouri congressman Todd Akin, who had said that natural processes protect a woman from pregnancy after rape.
Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell easily dispatched a Republican challenger, Matt Bevin, who had suggested that legalizing gay marriage could lead to parents marrying their children.
Those results, among others, cheered the Republican establishment, which has grown tired of fielding weird candidates who cannot win general elections, and led to a round of obituaries for the Tea Party movement, which had backed several of the losers. According to the chattering classes, the election results prove that the Tea Party is on life support, a dying force in conservative politics. That goes double for the doyenne of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin, whose chosen candidate in the Georgia Senate primary, Karen Handel, also lost.
But that view is just wrong. Tea Partiers have already accomplished what they set out to do: move the Republican Party much further to the right. While the foot-in-mouth, reality-challenged candidates may have been swept from the stage, the Tea Party has grafted its DNA onto the GOP. The Republican Party is now a small tent of hard-right absolutists who deny science, worship the rich and detest compromise.
Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize his party — and wouldn’t be welcome there either, as former Florida governor Jeb Bush noted two years ago. “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground,” he said.
Georgia’s Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat (as Senator Saxby Chambliss retires) was instructive. It was a frenzy of Obama-bashing, an unedifying contest among candidates who repeated far-right orthodoxy like a mantra. They pledged to fight Obamacare, to resist tax increases, to cut spending on social programs, to defend every citizen’s right to own a shoulder-fired rocket launcher. Each of them pledged to fight abortion, though they all want to cut the programs that help keep poor babies healthy.
When the leading candidate, millionaire businessman David Perdue, said something rational, it was denounced as a gaffe and used as fodder by his opponents. Asked by a Macon Telegraph editorial writer whether he would chose spending cuts or increased revenue to improve the economy, Perdue said “both.” His opponents jumped on the remark quickly, claiming he had given notice that he would raise taxes.
The peculiar aversion to compromise runs counter to the example set by Reagan, the patron saint of the modern conservative movement. He famously bartered with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill to arrive at a 1983 agreement to cut spending and raise taxes, which firmed up Social Security for a generation.
Yet, the Tea Party takeover of the GOP is holding strong, producing an adherence to far-right dogma. That’s what voters are likely to see in the runoff for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat, in which frontrunner Perdue will face U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston on July 22. Both candidates will feel pressure to prove themselves to the Tea Party supporters who voted for Gingrey, Broun and Handel, so they’ll engage in even more ultraconservative rhetoric and indulge even more right-wing impulses.
The Republican establishment thought that it was going to use the energy of far-right activists to win elections while remaining firmly in control. If any members of the GOP establishment — including old-line institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce — still believe that’s what happened, they are only fooling themselves.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia; The National Memo, May 24, 2014
“GOP’s New Plutocratic Populism”: A Bizarre Vision Of The Working Class
Fresh off his victory over Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell headed to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday to make himself over as a GOP populist. The party, as you’ve heard, has decided it needs “middle-class outreach” – since it’s given up on outreach to women, Latinos, African-Americans and the LGBT community – and thus some intellectuals and politicians have tried to craft “a middle class agenda.”
While the party should continue to stand for the free market and business interests, McConnell said, it had to face facts: “For most Americans whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long commutes, shrinking budgets and obscenely high tuition bills, these hymns to entrepreneurialism are as a practical matter largely irrelevant. And the audience for them is probably a lot smaller than we think.”
That, you’ll recall, was the takeaway from Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, where the plutocrat’s self-satisfied slogan “You built that!” was meant to mock Obama’s declaring that nobody builds a business entirely alone, but seemed to mock anyone who drew a paycheck, which is most of us.
But what is the tangible help McConnell and his friends are now offering to middle-class families? Very little, it turns out. McConnell had the audacity to present his union-busting National Right to Work Act as a pro-middle class reform, ignoring the way the labor movement actually built the middle class from the 1940s through the 1970s. Oh well.
The AEI event also included Sens. Mike Lee and Tim Scott, along with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and writers like Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam, who contributed to a collection of essays on the new middle-class agenda called “Room to Grow.” They talked about helping single mothers, tackling student debt and ending corporate cronyism. But they offered very few ideas that would make a difference, and their good ideas are strangled by GOP orthodoxy. Lee wants to develop a package of tax cuts and credits for the middle class, for instance, but it adds $2.4 billion to the deficit so he hasn’t worked out his numbers.
The Utah Tea Party favorite also proposes to help the middle class while cracking down on the poor: Since he believes poverty programs create a “disincentive to work,” he wants to cut them and step up work requirements for those who do get help. “We don’t want people to have to make that kind of awful choice” between welfare and work, Lee told a reporter, so we’ll cut back welfare and make it harder to access. Bless his heart.
Ending corporate cronyism seems like a place the two parties might find common ground, but every time Democrats and a few Republicans put together a proposal for cutting the tax loopholes that make the tax code so unfair, conservatives squash it.
Still, let’s give the folks behind “Room to Grow” credit for trying, again, to buck the prevailing pro-plutocrat direction of their party. In the conservative Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti praised the agenda, but offered a caveat. “I do not doubt for a moment that if the Republican Party adopted Room to Grow as its platform tomorrow, then both the GOP and the country would enjoy a better future,” he wrote. But he remembered a similar reception for Douthat and Salam’s widely praised “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream,” and concluded the GOP “is no closer to embracing the ideas of Salam [and] Douthat…than it was when we celebrated the publication of ‘Grand New Party’ at the Watergate in 2008.”
Continetti deserves credit for explaining exactly why that is:
The outreach Republicans make to single women and to minorities inevitably repels the groups that give the party 48 percent of the popular vote—Christians and seniors and men. As has been made abundantly clear, 48 percent of the popular vote does not a presidential victory make. But 48 percent is not quite something to sniff at either. That number can always go down.
So if the GOP can craft an agenda that it can sell to Christian senior men, this middle-class thing is a go. Otherwise, it’s going to have to wait for people with the courage to sacrifice part of that 48 percent to get to 51 percent.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 23, 2014
“The GOP Is Still Swallowing The Tea”: The Tea Party’s Extremism And Obstructionism Live On
What’s happening in the Republican primaries is less a defeat for the tea party than a surrender by the GOP establishment, which is winning key races by accepting the tea party’s radical anti-government philosophy.
Anyone who hopes the party has finally come to its senses will be disappointed. Republicans have pragmatically decided not to concede Senate elections by nominating eccentrics and crackpots. But in persuading the party’s activist base to come along, establishment leaders have pledged fealty to eccentric, crackpot ideas.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, who easily won his primary this month against a weak tea party challenger, said Tuesday that there isn’t “that big a difference between what you all call the tea party and your average conservative Republican. We’re against Obamacare, we think taxes are too high, we think the government’s too big.”
That doesn’t sound so crazy. But is it reasonable for Republicans to keep voting to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act — more than 50 times, so far — knowing full well that they have zero chance of success? Does it make sense, if taxes are excessive, to refuse President Obama’s invitation to begin serious talks about tax reform?
If Boehner wanted to be honest, he’d have said that his party is in favor of posturing and is opposed to reality.
As for the “government’s too big” part, this traditional GOP mantra has become — thanks to the tea party — a weapon of spite, not a statement of policy. No to extended benefits for the unemployed. No to struggling families who need food stamps. No to underprivileged kids who need Head Start. No to a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. No to undocumented immigrants who want to contribute more fully to our society. No to sorely needed infrastructure projects that would make the U.S. economy more productive and competitive.
The victories by establishment-backed Republicans in Senate primaries hold no promise that the party is ready to stop throwing tantrums and begin governing. They do ensure, however, that Democrats will have few, if any, “gimme” races this fall. None of the GOP contenders nominated thus far is likely to self-immolate in the manner of, say, Christine O’Donnell, a tea party favorite in Delaware who memorably had to run a campaign ad in 2010 clarifying that “I’m not a witch.”
Well, maybe one candidate has the potential for a pratfall: Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon who had establishment support in winning Oregon’s Senate primary this week, was accused of physically attacking her ex-husband in 2007 during a messy divorce. She faces incumbent Democrat Jeff Merkley in November.
Elsewhere, the potential for GOP looniness has been minimized. In Georgia, the tea party’s favored candidates, Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, were both dispatched Tuesday. The establishment’s favorites, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, will square off in a July 22 runoff. Either will present a tough challenge for Democrat Michelle Nunn, who still has a fighting chance, polls indicate, to steal a seat from the Republican column.
Polls also show Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a surprisingly close race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell handily defeated Matt Bevin, a challenger with tea party support, in Tuesday’s primary. But in what devolved into a contest of more-conservative-than-thou boasting, McConnell — by nature a dealmaker — promised, essentially, no deals with Obama.
The tea party is claiming a victory in college president Ben Sasse’s victory over Shane Osborn in the Senate primary in Nebraska. But there was no discernible difference between the candidates’ positions on the issues — they fought mostly over who was more determined to waste time and energy trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And Sasse, despite his protestations to the contrary, is actually a polished Washington insider.
Nothing I’ve seen in the primary results so far suggests that the Republican Party is tempering its views or weakening its implacable opposition to anything the Obama administration proposes. To the contrary, the GOP slate promises to display a remarkable degree of far-right ideological purity. Republican candidates simply cannot risk being called “moderate.”
Democrats can, though. The Republican Party’s move to the right opens political space for Democratic incumbents and challengers trying to win in red states. Candidates such as Grimes and Nunn can emphasize local issues while maintaining some distance from Washington — and, in the process, make Republicans play defense.
Democrats must not let voters be fooled. Yes, tea party candidates are going down. But the tea party’s extremism and obstructionism live on.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 22, 2014
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