“Taking A Shit On The Constitution”: Senate Republicans Make Donald Trump Look Good
When a presidency is winding down we start to think there probably isn’t that much to fight over. Yet here are the Republicans acting like it’s 2009 all over again, and more. These moves on the Supreme Court situation and Guantanamo Bay aren’t just obstructionist. They are certifiably insane.
No hearing for the nominee? Not even a courtesy call? They’ve really gone ’round the bend. Look, there’s hypocrisy to go around on Court stuff. Reverse the situation, and a lot of people saying A now would be saying Not A. I get that. Although I don’t get what in the world that 1992 clip of Joe Biden that everybody’s showing and re-showing has to do with anything. He was speaking hypothetically. There was no nominee. The one time in Biden’s tenure as Judiciary Committee chairman that there was a flesh-and-blood nominee, Anthony Kennedy, the committee and the full Senate passed him through unanimously, and in an election year.
But since you brought up the old days, let’s talk Robert Bork. Bork was a crazy radical extremist. He saw no constitutional justification for the civil rights bill. He also thought states should be free to criminalize the purchase of contraception by married couples. Off the charts, that guy. But he was the president’s choice. The Democrats gave him a hearing.
Say what you want, conservatives, but I feel pretty confident that if the situation were precisely reversed, the Democrats would be going through the process. At the end of the day, a majority of them would presumably vote against a conservative, balance-tilting nominee in a presidential election year. So, you might say, it amounts to the same thing.
No. It doesn’t amount to the same thing. One approach is called respecting the Constitution. The other approach is called taking a shit on the Constitution.
I suppose I could be wrong about what my hypothetical Democrats would do. But I don’t think so. Why? Because the liberal-left base, while certainly ideological and often choleric, just isn’t the same thing as the right-wing base. The right-wing base, led by Limbaugh and all those blowhards, is the reason McConnell said what he said while Scalia’s body was still warm. The liberal groups would not have demanded of Democratic leaders that they just shut the process down.
And if I am wrong about the Democrats, I can 100 percent guarantee you this: I would have written a column calling their behavior shameful. Vote against the person in the end, I’d have written, but for Chrissakes, respect the constitutional process, you bunch of morons. And I think every other prominent liberal columnist I can think of would have done the same. I don’t recall these last few days seeing any of our conservative counterparts calling out the Republicans.
Obama and the Democrats better find a way to make them pay. Nominate an unimpeachably qualified Latino or African American, and let Latinos and/or black voters watch as the GOP stonewalls this person for months, and run 3,000,000 attack ads on ethnic radio stations. (This is the paragraph where conservatives on Twitter will say “There goes that hack Tomasky making everything racial again.” Right. Whereas the guy who wants a brown-shirt police force to go in and break up Latino families, no, he’s not making anything racial. And the party that’s passing law after law to see to it that voting is made as hard as it can be for black people, no, they’re not making anything racial either. Just me. I get it.)
It’s such scandalous behavior. But because it’s them, and it’s all anyone expects out of them, it’s not even scandalous anymore. Which brings us to the Gitmo situation. If anything this is even worse.
Let me ask you this, reader. Do you have the slightest idea where the nearest supermax prison is to your house? Of course you don’t. Oh, a few of you do—you live in a town where it’s a big employer, your cousin works there, like that. But I’d wager that 98 percent of Americans have no idea where the nearest supermax prison is. There appear to be around 50 (some are wholly supermax, some partly). I bet thousands of people drive past one every day without even knowing it.
And of the 2 percent who do know, do they have any idea who’s in there? How many murderers, rapists, drug kingpins, Bernie Madoffs? Of course they don’t. And the reason they don’t is that the prisoners inside these prisons have zero impact on their lives. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Mahmud Abuhalima, terrorists all, live in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Do the good people of Florence ever see them? They don’t even see each other. They spend 23 hours a day alone in a cell the size of a typical upstairs-hallway bathroom. And almost nobody ever escapes from these places. You know how your chances of being killed by a terrorist as an American are one in 3.5 million? Well, the odds of you being killed by a terrorist who escaped from a supermax prison have to be considerably longer than even that. Anyone in Florence, Colorado and environs who sits around worrying that one of these guys is going to come pounding on their screen door is a paranoid lunatic or an idiot.
And that’s what the Republicans want us to be, a nation of paranoid lunatics and idiots, because paranoid lunacy and idiocy tend to benefit the Republican Party at the polls. So this is what we get stuck with. We keep open this facility (Gitmo) that’s notorious around the world—the Arab world and the entire world—that gives America a horrible reputation and whose very existence provides rhetorical fodder for our foes, so we don’t run the “risk” of putting terrorists inside facilities they’ll never get out of and where their movement the rest of their lives will be limited to maybe four rooms.
The Republicans won’t pay any political price for this, because the mere word terrorism turns most Americans into quivering little poltroons. But we as a country pay a price when an argument that is so galactically far removed from objective reality carries the day. And we pay a price when a constitutional norm is flouted and no one even cares because everyone has long since stopped expecting anything more. It’s not easy making Trump look good, but this week, Washington Republicans have pulled it off.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2016
“Obama Rejects The Rejectionists”: Scalia’s Passing Starts A Court Fight For The Ages
In most presidential elections, Supreme Court nominations are a major issue for elites and a substantial concern for significant parts of the conservative movement. Other voters usually see the future makeup of the court as a side matter, or not essential to their decisions at all.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Saturday will change this.
The issue of conservative judicial activism had already begun to take hold among liberals because of a series of fiercely ideological and precedent-shattering 5-to-4 decisions.
You read that right: After decades during which conservatives complained about “liberal judicial activism,” it is now conservatives who are unabashed in undermining progressive legislation enacted by the nation’s elected branches. Scalia will be remembered fondly on the right as the brilliant exponent of the theory of “originalism” that provided a rationale — or, in many cases, a rationalization — for decisions that usually fit conservative ideological preferences.
In 2010, Citizens United v. FEC rewrote decades of precedent on Congress’ power to regulate how campaigns are financed, facilitating a flood of money into elections from a small number of very wealthy Americans. Three years later, Shelby County v. Holder ripped the heart out of the federal government’s enforcement power in the Voting Rights Act. Last week, conservatives on the court halted the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his central initiative on climate change.
This is merely a partial list. The court’s conservatives have also regularly undercut the power of unions and the ability of citizens to wage legal battles against corporations.
Such decisions already had the potential of broadening the range of progressive constituencies invested in making the court a major election issue, including political reformers, African Americans, environmentalists and organized labor.
But Scalia’s death means that Obama or his successor — if that successor is a Democrat — could overturn the current conservative majority on the court, which could lead it to revisit many of the most troubling decisions of recent years.
And Republicans did themselves no favors in the coming argument by moving in a hard political direction even before most of the tributes to Scalia had been published — and even before the president had actually picked someone: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proclaimed that no Obama nominee would be considered, period.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” McConnell said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Republicans claimed precedent for ignoring court appointees from presidents on their way out the door. During Saturday night’s debate in South Carolina, Marco Rubio said that “it has been over 80 years since a lame-duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice.” Ted Cruz made a similar point.
Well. A Senate controlled by Democrats confirmed President Reagan’s nomination of Anthony Kennedy on a 97-0 vote in February 1988, which happened to be an election year. By what definition was Reagan not a lame duck when he put Kennedy forward on Nov. 11, 1987?
Obama rejected the rejectionists. He said Saturday he would name a new justice and that there would be “plenty of time . . . for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”
My hunch is that Obama will try to put the Republicans’ obstructionism in sharp relief by offering a nominee who has won support and praise from GOP senators in the past. Three potential candidates who fit these criteria and won immediate and widespread mention were Merrick Garland and Sri Srinivasan, both judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and Jane Kelly, a judge on the 8th Circuit. (I should note that Garland is a dear friend of long standing.)
Whatever choice Obama makes, he will try to make it as hard as possible for Republican senators — especially those struggling for reelection this year in blue or purple states — to claim that he had picked an ideologue. Obama could also argue he had deferred to the Republicans’ Senate majority by offering a candidate whom many of them had supported in the past.
An extended court fight would allow progressives, once and for all, to make clear it is their conservative foes now using judicial power most aggressively. The partisan outcome of this year’s election just became far more important. This fall, Americans will not just be picking a new chief executive. They will be setting the course of the court of last resort for a generation.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2016
“Agent Of (Message) Change”: Hillary Clinton Went After Bernie Sanders’ Strengths In New Hampshire
Would it be impolitic (this being a Democratic debate and all) to say that Hillary Clinton came out with guns blazing? She may be on course to a Granite State thrashing, but she showed up at the University of New Hampshire loaded for Bern.
She tempered a broad hug of Sanders’ liberalism (“We have a vigorous agreement here,” she said at one point when discussing financial reform) with the assertion that she is better positioned to advance that agenda.
Beyond that, go through the issues that have animated the Democratic race recently or are central to the Sanders case: Is he running a more inspiring campaign? Only because it’s a more fantastical one: “Let’s go down a path where we can actually tell people what we will do,” she said. “A progressive is someone who makes progress.” (That’s better phraseology, by the way, than the “progressive with results” formulation she had been using, which sounded like a rip-off of George W. Bush’s “reformer with results” message from 2000.)
And is she indeed a real progressive? She had a whole soliloquy prepared in answer: “I have heard Senator Sanders’ comments, and it’s really caused me to wonder who is left in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” Clinton said. “Under his definition, President Obama is not progressive because he took donations from Wall Street.” Ditto Joe Biden (Keystone XL) and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota (Defense of Marriage Act). Then a pivot to Sanders’ progressive weak underbelly: “I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady [gun control] bill five times.”
Bonus points to moderator Chuck Todd for pressing Sanders on whether President Barack Obama is a progressive; the Vermonter’s answer seemed to be that Obama is progressive despite failing some litmus tests because he’s actually made progress. (Which is rather like the argument that Clinton is making.)
Is she in the establishment? Hell no – she’s a woman running for president which by definition means she’s not establishment. This answer was glib if, as Ezra Klein noted, nonsensical:
If Clinton is not part of the establishment than there is no such thing as the establishment. And there is such a thing as the establishment
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 5, 2016
Is she part of the corporate-money-corruption problem that is central to Sanders’ political message? That’s a “very artful smear,” an “insinuation unworthy” of the Vermont progressive, she fumed.
Did she vote for the Iraq War while he voted against it? “We did differ,” she said. “A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat [the Islamic State group].”
Indeed foreign policy was easily Sanders’ weakest portion of the evening. A question about Afghanistan sent him on a verbal tour through Syria, Iraq, Jordan and the battle with the Islamic State group, prompting Todd to follow up: “Can you address a question on Afghanistan?”
Saying we need allies is not foreign policy. Example: We can’t get Sunni allies w/o taking on Iran. What does Sanders suggest?
— Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) February 5, 2016
I hated the Iraq War as much as anyone, but “I made the right call on a vote 13 years ago” is really not a foreign policy vision for now.
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) February 5, 2016
If there’s one takeaway from this debate it is that Sanders is woefully unprepared, on foreign policy, to be president
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) February 5, 2016
For his part Sanders was standard-operating-Bernie. It’s a compelling message but it’s limited and he did little to address the arguments against it. Take the entirety of his agenda: How will he get something passed? “No, you just can’t negotiate with [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell,” Sanders said. “Mitch is gonna have to look out the window and see a whole lot of people saying, ‘Mitch, stop representing the billionaire class. Start listening to working families.'” The revolution will come and Mitch McConnell will cave.
Sanders believes a sufficiently large crowd outside McConnell’s window would make him support campaign finance reform. I do not.
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 5, 2016
Chait’s right; Sanders is basing his would-be presidency on the kind of tea party thinking that informed Ted Cruz and the shutdown crew. And it won’t work any better for the left than it did the right.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2016
“The Insanity Started A Long Time Ago”: Overheated Talk Against The Government Has Come Back To Bite The GOP
Julian Zeilzer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, isn’t buying the handwringing we’re seeing from David Brooks and the National Review about the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. In a case that others have made, but perhaps not so thoroughly, he says: GOP Establishment Deserves Trump, Cruz.
Going back to Reagan’s embrace of the Moral Majority, the racism Lee Atwater infused into George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign and the fact that it was McCain who chose Palin to be his running mate in 2008, Zeilzer demonstrates how GOP presidential candidates laid the groundwork for what is happening today.
He also captures how Boehner and McConnell initially embraced the election of tea party candidates like Ted Cruz back in 2010.
In the House of Representatives, Republican leaders were more than welcoming to the tea party revolution that took hold in 2010 — until it no longer suited their purposes. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell welcomed the energy and enthusiasm that tea party activists brought to the fight against President Barack Obama.
While the activists might have pushed the boundaries of acceptable partisan compact with threats like allowing the government to go into default, the discipline as a voting block and willingness to stand up to an ambitious President helped, in the leadership’s minds, to revitalize the standing of the party. Or at least that’s what Boehner thought before he felt he had to leave.
Zeilzer points out that conservative media has also played a role – echoing the warnings of conservative David Frum.
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
Finally, Zeilzer notes that overheated talk against the government has come back to bite the GOP establishment.
At the heart of the Cruz and Trump campaign is an essential message that has been a central theme of conservatism in the post-World War II period: that Washington is never good and career politicians are without virtue.
Their anti-politics rhetoric comes directly out of the “conservative establishment” politics that formed in the 1970s and 1980s. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said.
Once again today, David Brooks is pleading with Republicans to “stay sane.” His supplications completely ignore the path the GOP took that led them to where they are today. As Zeilzer notes, “the alliance, the ideas, the rhetoric and the style have all come from the heart of Republican politics.” In other words, there’s no “staying” sane. That’s because the insanity started a very long time ago.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 26, 2016
“The Classier Of Two Evils”: Cruz Is The Leader Of A Faction; Trump Is A One-Man Band
With less than two weeks till the Iowa Caucus, the shape of the Republican race could hardly be more frightening for the Republican establishment. Both of the two leading candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, carry baggage that would make winning the general election a tough slog. But while some establishment types still hold out hope that one of their preferred candidates—Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or even Chris Christie—can pull off a surprise resurgence, there is a growing acceptance of the reality of having to chose between Cruz and Trump. And the surprise is that all signs are pointing to Trump being the establishment’s favored candidate—or, more accurately, the lesser of two evils.
In an interview with the New York Times yesterday, Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996 and the very epitome of the party establishment, said that picking Cruz as the presidential nominee would be “cataclysmic,” and the party would have better success with Trump. And it’s not just on the electability issue that Dole prefers Trump. Dole denounced Cruz as an “extremist,” but said that Trump has the type of deal-making personality that would allow him to work with Congress if elected. Cruz, he said, would not. “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole told the Times. “Nobody likes him.”
Dole is far from alone in making a move toward Trump’s camp. According to a report in the Washington Post, the GOP donor class is increasingly seeing Trump as a better bet than Cruz. “A lot of donors are trying to figure their way into Trump’s orbit,” said Spencer Zwick, who ran the finances for Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid.
On the face of it, preferring Trump to Cruz seems bizarre. After all, Cruz is a more conventional politician. He sits in the Senate, and he has longstanding ties to the conservative movement and speaks their language. Why spurn him and hook up with a wild card like Trump, who has no political experience—and a record of making reckless racist and sexist comments that will damage the Republican brand?
But it’s possible that it is precisely because Trump is such an unusual figure that he might be more attractive to establishment Republicans. Cruz is the leader of a faction; Trump is a one-man band. This means Cruz has the potential to do much more damage to the Republican Party in the long run. “If Trump loses, we wash our hands of him,” a leading GOP strategist told CNN. “Cruz will think we need to be more crazy and be a long-term nightmare.”
If Cruz wins the nomination, that extreme-right faction will dominate the Republican Party not just in the presidential run but for the foreseeable future—even if Cruz loses. Just as the followers of Barry Goldwater held key positions in the party long after 1964, Cruz’s followers will be lodged tight and will be in a stronger position to combat the RINOs.
“If Cruz wins, the Loony Bird takeover of the GOP is complete,” Ian Millhiser, Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told me by email, sketching out the establishment’s nightmare scenario: “GOP candidates view Cruz’s election as vindication of Cruz’s tactics, and they rush to emulate him. Rank-and-file voters embrace Cruz’s message that the best candidates are belligerent conservatives. And interest groups decide that they no longer need to back the proverbial most conservative candidate who can win, because the very most conservative candidate has just won the presidency. So they use their money to back Cruz clones in primaries.
“Mitch McConnell and possibly even Paul Ryan’s relevance disappears overnight, as does quite possibly their career in politics. And because all of the sitting Republican lawmakers are Cruz clones who view them as traitorous RINOs, the deposed establishment cannot even cash in as lobbyists.”
Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. Trump would be like the character The Mule, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. In the schema of Asimov’s far future science-fiction series, The Mule is a galactic conquerer who throws history off the course that it was expected to take, but the changes he introduces are ultimately minor because he has no successor.
From the point of view of the Republican elite, it’s easy to see Trump as The Mule: He’s unexpected, he disrupted their plans to coronate Jeb Bush, but he’s also someone who can’t leave a lasting legacy because the traits that made him who he is are not replicable. There are not that many billionaire reality-show stars who are interested in taking over a political party.
Further, because Trump is much more pragmatic than Cruz, it’s easier to imagine him being tamed if he won the presidency. Already, on the issue of tax cuts for the rich, Trump has reverted to GOP orthodoxy. Unlike Cruz, Trump has no army of ideological loyalists working with him. President Trump would need advisers and policymakers, which the Republican Party could happily provide him.
If this is the gamble the GOP is taking, though, it is not necessarily the right one. Trump is an unstable and unpredictable figure, governed by personal piques that take him in strange directions—like his recent, bizarre twitter feud with the actor Samuel L. Jackson over cheating at golf. As a presidential nominee, Trump would likely continue to be flighty and capricious. If Hillary Clinton is his rival for the White House, it’s a near-certainty that Trump will make sexist tirades that will damage the GOP’s reputation, as he already has with comments on Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina. Moreover, unlike Cruz or the other, more polished candidates, Trump does not know how to disguise his racism with dog-whistles. This may not hurt Trump with GOP primary voters, but it would be toxic on the national stage.
The fact that the GOP elite is sidling up to Trump is remarkable—and perhaps the ultimate reflection on Ted Cruz as a man and politician. After all, how wretched must he be that there are people who prefer to stake their money and reputations on Donald Trump?
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, January 21, 2016
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