“Bobbing And Weaving”: GOP Caught Flat-Footed On Immigration
Republicans are bobbing, ducking and weaving around President Barack Obama’s move to allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to stay in the country, fearing a lose-lose proposition no matter how they weigh in on the policy shift.
While most Republicans criticized Obama for circumventing Congress, they are far more circumspect about the plan’s merits or their preferred method of dealing with the 800,000 young illegals who will be affected by the order.
The GOP fear boils down to this: If it backs the plan, it would infuriate the right flank of the party, which considers the policy nothing short of “amnesty” for lawbreakers. But if Republicans attack it, it could turn off scores of Latino voters who are poised to play a huge role in crucial battleground states this November.
So the Republican response? Say very little.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the GOP would follow the direction of Mitt Romney, who in turn has called on Congress to deal with the matter without laying out specifics himself. Arizona Sen. John McCain said Republicans are ready to embrace a proposal under development by Sen. Marco Rubio, but the Florida freshman now plans to shelve the proposal until after the election.
And there’s been virtual silence on the Senate floor from Republicans who have shied away from talking about the matter publicly.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn — the ranking member on a key immigration subcommittee and head of the powerful National Republican Senatorial Committee — was asked if the GOP needed its own policy proposal on the matter this election year.
“We were working on that, and the president basically undercut it by trying to do this unilaterally, something he said a year ago he couldn’t do,” Cornyn told POLITICO. “This isn’t going to get implemented in the next 140 days before the election.
“The most important thing we can do is to get America back to work.”
Republicans are in virtual agreement on that. The election, they believe, will turn on Obama’s stewardship of the economy, something they think will resonate with Latinos also frustrated with the president’s failure to deliver on comprehensive immigration reform.
But there’s far less unanimity among Republicans on how to deal with the emotional issue of children of illegals brought to the U.S. through no fault of their own.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday after a party lunch, McConnell refused several times to weigh in on the substance of the change, instead deferring to the party’s presumptive presidential nominee to address it at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials convention Thursday in Orlando, Fla.
“I think most of my members are interested in learning what Gov. Romney has to say about this issue, and we’re going to withhold judgment — most of us — until that time,” McConnell said.
Romney — who along with Obama will speak at the three-day convention — repeatedly declined to answer on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday whether he as president would make the same policy change as Obama did. Instead, Romney criticized the process by which Obama enacted the move.
McConnell declined to answer what should happen to young children and adults who are in the country illegally and would qualify under the new policy. He also deflected questions about whether the new policy constitutes “amnesty,” as immigration hard-liners charge.
“If it leads to citizenship as a reward for some kind of illegal entry, that could be argued,” McConnell said on amnesty. “But I think we’re going to wait and see what Gov. Romney has to say and then our members are going to be discussing his views on this and I think many of them will have similar views, others may not.”
But like other top GOP officials, the Kentucky Republican criticized Obama over his process.
“What I can say for sure is, the president said a year ago he didn’t believe he had the authority to do what he announces he was going to do last week. And I don’t think that’s an irrelevant thing to discuss,” McConnell said. “I mean, did he have the authority to do what he did?”
Twenty Republican senators, including McConnell, released a letter sent to Obama Tuesday demanding a detailed response from the White House on its authority to issue such a broad move. But the missive stopped short of picking apart the policy itself.
In the House, Speaker John Boehner said the immigration move puts “everyone in a difficult position” and accused the president of trying to shift the debate away from his stewardship of the economy.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune , No. 3 in the Senate GOP leadership, called Obama’s move “politically motivated” but acknowledged that “he’ll probably stand to benefit politically from doing that.”
Asked about the GOP approach, Thune said he preferred a broader solution, something he believed Romney was in the “process of formulating.” Like other Republicans, Thune said the president undermined the Rubio effort.
Rubio announced Monday he would likely punt the matter until after the election, since the president’s move sapped the legislative momentum out of his push — a decision that appears to have caught many Republicans flat-footed.
McCain, the 2008 presidential nominee, said Republicans should talk about the matter “as an issue of compassion and concern.”
Asked if the GOP needed a legislative proposal to show voters, McCain said: “Well, Marco Rubio had one that obviously was nearing completion.”
Informed that Rubio appeared likely to drop the effort now, McCain said: “Well, I don’t know what his decision is — but I know he’s close to completing one.”
There were many similarities between Obama’s and Rubio’s plans.
Rubio’s plan would have legalized undocumented children brought to the United States at an early age provided they have no criminal record and have completed high school. It would grant them “non-immigrant” visas and allow them to stay in the country and access the existing immigration system, through which they could eventually become green card holders or naturalized citizens.
Similarly, Obama’s executive action said that those who entered the United States before the age of 16, are younger than 30 and pose no security threat, served in the military and completed minimum levels of education can get a two-year deferral from deportation and apply for work permits.
The Democrats’ DREAM Act — which Obama supports and Romney promised to veto during the primary campaign — would provide a direct pathway to citizenship by providing green cards to children seeking higher education or military service of at least two years.
At least one Republican praised Obama’s decision: Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), whose support for the DREAM Act became a political liability in his losing primary bid.
“The executive action is controversial,” Lugar said, “but nevertheless, on balance, it seems to me that it was a constructive move.”
By: Seung Min Kim and Manu Raju, Politico, June 19, 2012
“Invested In Economic Misery”: The GOP’s Job-Killing Election Strategy
The Republicans’ 2012 election strategy is perversely brilliant: Sabotage President Obama’s job-creation efforts, then blame him for the wreckage.
This strategy was in action the other day, when Mitt Romney assailed Obama on the stump. Romney said that “with America in crisis, with 23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work, he hasn’t put forth a plan to get us working again.”
Romney conveniently omitted the fact that Obama put forth such a plan last autumn. The American Jobs Act would have put as many as two million construction workers, cops, teachers, and firefighters back to work — so said economic forecasters — if only congressional Republicans hadn’t dynamited it.
Yes, sabotage was indeed required. Republicans knew their prospects for beating Obama would be damaged if they signed on to a plan that got more Americans working again. They’re far too invested in economic misery to let that happen. Working with Obama on job creation is not their top priority; as Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell candidly remarked in 2010, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Fortunately for the GOP, voters typically pay scant attention to the parliamentary play-by-play in Washington. Fortunately for the GOP, we are a nation of amnesiacs. What happened last autumn, when Senate Republicans successfully blocked debate on the jobs plan, is ancient history. That episode, yet another example of obstruction by filibuster, has vanished down the Orwellian memory hole — which allows Romney to pretend the bill never existed.
The 2012 election may be a cliff-hanger, much like 2000 and 2004, and the sabotage strategy just may be clever enough to work.
The GOP saboteurs deserve a share of the blame for our stalled economy, but politics is a shorthand business — and the shorthand is that presidents take the hit when times are tough. When the latest jobs report tallied only 69,000 new jobs during May and put the jobless rate at 8.2 percent, Obama got the brunt of the blame. People tend to believe the maxim that sat on Harry S. Truman’s desk — “The buck stops here” — even though power is widely dispersed in a system that cannot function without at least a modicum of bipartisan comity.
By: Dick Polman, The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 2012
“Rooting For America To Fail”: Republicans Are Deliberately Sabotaging The Economy
Raise your hands if you think Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the US economy to prevent the re-election of Barack Obama. Me too. Okay, knowing what you do about the Republican Party, raise your hands if you can think of any reason why Republicans wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of our economic engine to accomplish Mitch McConnell’s stated goal of making Barack Obama a one-term president. Me neither.
I wouldn’t have said this earlier, but I have no doubt now that Republicans are deliberately making the economy worse for political gain. I’m trying to picture a Republican consultant advising his clients against such a move on grounds of, say patriotism and propriety, and I just can’t. Probably because they would be out of a job. It’s amazing what people can convince themselves it is okay to do once they’ve convinced themselves they are in the right.
The filibustering of every conventional and sensible proposal the Obama Administration has put forward to help stimulate the economy — up to and including tax cuts that were Republican ideas to begin with — was only our first clue that Republicans were rooting for America to fail.
But neither does it take a genius to imagine the phone calls being made by Mitt Romney’s henchmen or the candidate himself (properly filtered, of course, to provide maximum deniability) to all of those bankers and business types sitting on their $2 trillion in uninvested cash that, if they want access to a future Romney Administration, they’d better keep sitting on that cash until after the November election. Think of this strategy as just an extension of the Republican Party’s K Street Project, the one where America’s trade associations and lobbyists were informed by partisan mob enforcers like disgraced Majority Leader Tom DeLay that doing business with the new Republican House was on a strictly pay to play basis.
But what I am also sure about is that Greg Sargent of the Washington Post is certainly correct when he says the establishment media will never let Democrats get away with accusing Republicans of deliberately doing harm the country because the establishment media has far too much to lose from allowing such a suggestion to take root.
As an elite establishment itself, whose place and privileges in American politics comes from its having mastered the rituals of our two-party system, the mainstream media is threatened by anyone who challenges the comfortable status quo of two evenly-balanced, sane and sensible, political parties. The media sees its own interests as neutral observer and referee threatened when people begin opening up that Pandora’s Box which exposes one of those major parties to be exactly what congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said about the GOP, that it: “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
It’s been more than a month since Mann and Ornstein dropped that bombshell in the pages of the Washington Post and there is still no discussion of its ominous implications on the Sunday political talk shows, says Sargent. Indeed, for their troubles as pundits too hot to handle, Mann and Ornstein have been effectively blackballed from Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and State of the Union.
Most of the time the media loves to talk about itself, says Sargent, so you’d think Mann and Ornstein’s allegation that “the press’s addiction to fake even-handedness has led them not to acknowledge, or at least grapple with, a fact that is absolutely central to understanding what’s happening with our politics right now,” would have Sunday show producers burning up the phone lines trying to book the duo on their shows.
“But what continues to strike me is the radio silence on these shows about both these themes,” Ornstein told Sargent. “The Republicans bear a lot of the onus for rank obstructionism. But there’s a false equivalence here, and the press corps has been AWOL in its duty to report the truth.”
Ornstein said that judging by the communication he’s had with elite reporters, his description of the GOP as a radical party “has generated lots of discussion in the newsrooms. But the shows are making a conscious decision to ignore it.”
So, despite all you hear about the so-called “liberal bias” against Republicans, you can see why the mainstream media is predisposed to shoot down the idea that Republicans might be secretly planting Comp-4 explosive around our economy’s foundation in order to detonate it while Barack Obama and the Democrats are the ones likely to suffer the collateral damage.
Which is why it’s good to see Democrats making the charge anyway.
As Sargent reports, Harry Reid called out Republicans on the Senate floor the other day for their opposition to the Paycheck Fairness Act, saying that from the GOP perspective the act to help ensure women get equal pay for equal work already has two strikes against it because “it would be good for women and good for the economy.”
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said on Face the Nation this weekend in regard to the disappointing May jobs reports and Republican efforts to obstruct Obama’s job creation policies that: “Instead of high-fiving each other on days when there is bad news, they should stop sitting on their hands and work on some of these answers.”
And on Friday after the bad jobs numbers were released, Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard went on MSNBC to accuse Republicans of “cheerleading for failure,” notes Sargent
“There was a time when charges like these were approached with a bit more caution by Democratic leaders,” says Sargent. “Now top Obama and Dem officials are going out into every conceivable forum and repeating the claim that Republicans are actively rooting for widespread economic misery and are doing all they can to block solutions designed to alleviate it.”
Paul Krugman says Obama has no choice but to make Republicans the issue and to note we’d all be better off were it not for deliberate GOP sabotage. Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly is not so sure. He thinks swing voters will always hold the President and his party accountable for the state of the economy no matter how much the other guys are gumming up the works.
And even those of us who think Democrats need to call out Republicans for their obstruction have to admit that, despite everything Republicans have done to make the jobs situation worse, the Republican counterattack against charges they are sabotaging the economy practically writes itself: “Stop whining, Mr. President, and lead.”
Nevertheless, while there are many things I thought the GOP capable of doing, deliberately standing in the way of America’s economic recovery with all of the hardship and misery it would entail for millions of their fellow citizens, wasn’t one of them. That was actually one of the few outrages I was not willing to impute to these radical Republicans in their heedless pursuit of power.
But even that low ceiling above my scorn and contempt for the modern GOP was shattered by last summer’s debt-ceiling debacle when Republicans showed just how far they were willing to go to achieve their narrow ideological ends.
The subsequent credit rating downgrade that, for good measure, Republicans even blamed on Democrats for not parleying in good faith, was an abject lesson in how quickly and easily even responsible Republican opinion can be herded into line by today’s conservative movement. Within a matter of a few short weeks, the initial indignation among sensible conservatives at the suggestion by House Republicans that the full faith and credit of the United States should be put on the table as a bargaining chip to bully Democrats into caving on spending, was converted into accepted conventional wisdom on the right.
Compared to the game of debt-ceiling chicken that threatened what the White House called “economic Armageddon,” what’s not to believe about Republicans intentionally keeping the economy in the doldrums for another six months if the reward at the end is absolute political power?
By; Ted Frier, Open Salon, June 5, 2012
“A Lesson Never Learned”: A Hostage Takeover By Any Other Name Is Still A Hostage Takeover
It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War. Last summer, congressional Republicans held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage, threatening to impose a catastrophe on all of us, on purpose, to achieve a specific (and unnecessary) policy goal.
It was a move without parallel. The entirety of a party threatened to deliberately hurt the country unless their rivals paid a hefty ransom — in this case, debt reduction. It didn’t matter that Republicans were largely responsible for the debt in the first place, and it didn’t matter that Republicans routinely raised the debt ceiling dozens of times over the last several decades.
This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. This one radical scheme helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it severely undermined American credibility on the global stage. Indeed, in many parts of the world, observers didn’t just lose respect for us, they were actually laughing at us.
It’s the kind of thing that should have scarred the Republican Party for a generation. Not only did that never happen, the Republican hostage takers are already vowing to create this identical crisis all over again, on purpose.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will threaten Tuesday that Congress will not raise the debt limit next year without spending cuts greater than the size of the debt ceiling increase.
According to excerpts of the remarks Boehner will deliver to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation fiscal summit on Tuesday afternoon, the Ohio lawmaker will “insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase.” […]
He will also tell the audience: “We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.”
It’s not hyperbolic to characterize this as madness. Boehner is, in no uncertain terms, announcing that he and his party will deliberately hurt the country — and he’s calling his hostage-taking strategy an “action-forcing event.”
At a certain level, it’s true that holding a gun to someone’s head forces “action,” but it’s also true that such aggression tears at the fabric of the body politic.
I should emphasize that Boehner’s comments don’t come as a surprise. After the crisis was resolved last summer, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Robert Greenstein explained, “Those who have engaged in hostage-taking — threatening the economy and the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury to get their way — will conclude that their strategy worked. They will feel emboldened to pursue it again every time that we have to raise the debt limit in the future.”
And that’s exactly what has happened. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Fox News that the GOP-created crisis “set the template for the future.” He vowed, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013.
In case anyone’s forgotten, over the last 72 years — before 2011 — Congress raised the debt ceiling 89 times. Lawmakers from both parties, working with presidents from both parties, treated this as routine housekeeping. Preconditions have never been applied to this process, and neither party has ever used the law to hold the nation’s full faith and credit hostage. Clean debt-ceiling votes weren’t always popular, but they’ve been a standard American norm for generations.
Last year, radicalized Republicans changed the game, and they apparently have no intention of going back. This wasn’t a one-time hostage strategy, threatening the nation’s wellbeing in a fit of partisan rage; this was the creation of a new norm, to be repeated forever more. Why? Because the dangerous scheme worked — when radicalism is rewarded, the result is more radicalism.
Update: Incidentally, it’s also worth realizing that Boehner is demanding another debt-ceiling deal less than a year after breaking the terms of the agreement he reached last summer. President Obama is well positioned to ask a simple question: “If you won’t keep your word and honor your own agreements, why should I negotiate with you?”
By: Steve Beneb, The Maddow Blog, May 15, 2012
“Idelogical Extremism”: Former Republican Senator Hagel Says Reagan Would Not Identify With Modern GOP
Last week, former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO) told ThinkProgress that his party was becoming “increasingly inconsequential” and “intolerant” following the defeat of veteran Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN). Now, former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has also taken aim at his party for its ideological extremism.
Hagel — who served two terms in the Senate, between 1997 and 2009 — told Foreign Policy magazine on Friday that the Republican Party “is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before.” He observed:
Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending. Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party. …
Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before. You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first 8 years of the century, it was under Republican direction. …
The Republican Party is dealing with this schizophrenia. It was the Republican leadership that got us into this mess. If Nixon or Eisenhower were alive today, they would be run out of the party.
Hagel hopes the pendulum will eventually swing back to moderation for the GOP, but warned that it is unlikely to happen in this election, noting that “what latitude [Mitt] Romney has to shape the party as we go into the election is somewhat limited because of the primary he’s had to run.”
It again bears mentioning that like Lugar and Danforth, Hagel was himself a solid conservative in the Senate earning a lifetime 85 percent rating with the American Conservative Union. The fact that even solid conservatives like these men — or Reagan — are not conservative enough to fit in the modern Republican Party is an indication of just how far right the GOP has drifted.
By: Josh israel, Think Progress, May 14, 2012
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