We Deceive, You Believe: A New Reality Show For Sarah Palin And Fox
I have a great idea for a new show on Fox. It would be a reality comedy show with Sarah Palin as the host. It’s what Hollywood calls “high concept.” The idea would be that all the Republican presidential candidates would travel across America in Sarah’s RV. Hilarity follows.
Late night comic Jimmy Fallon put it best: “Obama was in Ireland. He thought about buying a four-leaf clover for good luck, and then he looked at the field of Republican candidates and decided it wasn’t necessary.”
Dramatis personae include:
Gary Johnson—Ex-governor of New Mexico who favors the legalization of pot. He didn’t get an invite to the next GOP debate, but his hopes are high and he has grassroots support.
Herman Cain—Multi-millionaire and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. He’s rolling in dough.
Newt Gingrich—Former speaker of the House. If he really is a fiscal conservative, he would use his $500,000 revolving charge account at Tiffany’s to make a payment on the federal debt. He is clearly the jewel in the GOP crown. The former speaker is currently on a cruise with his wife in the Mediterranean. He will return to the campaign trail after he decides whether he supports or opposes the Ryan plan to gut Medicare. It might be a long trip.
Palin—Can the former half-term and half-baked governor of Alaska see Russia from her magic bus? This trip is her magical mystery tour because we have no idea where it will lead. She rained on Mitt Romney’s parade by showing up in New Hampshire on the day of Romney’s formal announcement and popping him for his support of a state run healthcare program in Massachusetts with a personal mandate. National surveys indicate that twice as many voters dislike her as like her. So, I don’t think she will get a mandate from Americans.
Michele Bachmann—Tea Party favorite and conservative congresswoman from Minnesota. When baseball players have a short stay in the majors, it’s a cup of coffee. She will have a cup of tea in the presidential race. Last week, Representative Bachmann said she and former half-governor Palin were friends. That didn’t last long. This week, Bachmann’s campaign manager said Palin wasn’t a “serious” candidate. At least the Minnesotan and I agree on something.
Chris Christie—Governor of New Jersey. Teddy Roosevelt described the presidency as a bully pulpit. Christie is just a bully. Don’t be surprised if he helicopters into the race.
Rudy Giuliani—The former mayor of New York City. Why not? He did so well last time. If he runs, he should borrow Donald Trump’s toupee and MapQuest Iowa so he can find it this time.
Jon Huntsman—Ex-governor of Utah who served two years as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to China. He will charge Obama with incompetence. Just look at the clown the president made ambassador to China.
Bobby Jindal—The governor of Louisiana who is not ready for prime time TV. But that hardly disqualifies him in this field.
Mitt Romney—Former governor of Massachusetts and the father of Obamacare. This would be the grudge match of all time. Healthcare reform 1.0 vs. 2.0. A Romney position is like the New England weather. Don’t like it, just wait, because it changes every 15 minutes.
Ron Paul—Paul is the anti-Romney because the Texas congressman sticks to his positions for more than 15 minutes. Actually, he still holds Herbert Hoover’s positions. But will socially conservative voters buy his opposition to drug laws and will the neocons accept his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? I don’t think so.
Tim Pawlenty—The former two-term governor of Minnesota is as bland as his fellow charismatically challenged Minnesotan, Walter Mondale. Jay Leno described T-Paw to a t when he joked, “You know, I don’t want to say Tim Pawlenty is boring, but his Secret Service codename is Al Gore.” Bland is good, though, because the other GOP candidates have enough baggage to fill a Boeing 727 headed for LAX.
Rick Perry—In 2009, the governor of Texas threatened to secede from the union. The question is whether he wants to lead or to secede. Too bad Jeff Davis isn’t still around to be his running mate.
Rick Santorum—Why does he torture himself with the hope he could win? Is the GOP this desperate for a candidate? He lost his Senate seat in a presidential battleground state, Pennsylvania, by 16 percent.
This may be why four out of 10 Republicans in a new Pew Research Center poll say they are not impressed with the GOP presidential candidates. But I think the reality TV show would get good ratings hammocked between Family Guy and The Simpsons on Sunday nights.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 9, 2011
GOP Has 2012 Trouble: Attacking Medicare And Social Security Could Be Death Of Republicans’ 2012 Hopes
Recent weeks have finally defined the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The field has finally achieved a greater level of clarity as many candidates have opted out, running the absurd-to-formidable gamut from Donald Trump to Mitch Daniels. A smaller number have opted in, running the has-been to may-never-be gamut from Newt Gingrich to Tim Pawlenty, not to mention former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who officially entered the race yesterday.
A former Minnesota governor, Pawlenty officially joined the wannabe ranks last week with a speech aimed at defining himself as a fearless teller of hard truths (previously he had perhaps best been known for lacking any definition at all). This is smart on several levels. He quickly moved to fill the void left by Daniels, the governor of Indiana, whom many in the party had yearned for as a tough-minded fiscal hawk. And in part it is a strong bid for the mantel of not-Romney, the alternative to the former Massachusetts governor and current GOP front-runner. Romney is a laughably transparent flip-flopper, so Pawlenty’s new truth-teller frame could make him an ideal foil.
Politicians love to position themselves as tellers of hard truths, brave enough to boldly level with the voters. And the current tempestuous political climate, with its roiling discontent with politics as usual, especially lends itself to such a pose. Pawlenty is merely the latest candidate to seize this meme.
But his candidacy runs squarely afoul of Robert’s 13th rule of politics: People like the idea of hard truths and hard-truth tellers much more than they like the reality of them. You can ask straight shooters like Walter Mondale (“Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”), Paul “I’m not Santa Claus” Tsongas, and John “Straight Talk” McCain. Winning the presidency requires an aspirational element at odds with the doom-and-gloom that comes with those self-consciously trying to speak hard truths.
So kudos to Pawlenty for standing up to big ethanol in little Iowa. But while some may take off their hats to him for traveling to Florida in order to call for overhauls (read: cuts) of Social Security and Medicare, it might be merely to scratch one’s head. As Hot Air blogger Allahpundit quipped after Pawlenty’s Florida performance, “Alternate headline: ‘Pawlenty now unelectable in not one but two early primary states.’ ”
Maybe this is actually deep strategy. Many conservatives and Tea Partyers in particular seem intent these days on—as Ronald Reagan used to complain of some of his more gung-ho supporters—going “off the cliff with all flags flying.” Perhaps this is a clever way for Pawlenty to appeal to that “I’d rather lose being right” instinct.
An additional problem for would-be hard-truth tellers is that in the telling, these so-called truths often become vehicles for an even harder ideology. The attempt to conflate serious problems with ideologically inflexible and partisan solutions can create political tensions and open deadly political rifts. See the political abyss House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has marched his colleagues into over his plan to repeal and replace Medicare.
With the future insolubility of Medicare as a starting point, Ryan and the GOP have embarked on an emphatically ideological course. They hailed themselves as seriously facing a tough issue, and they spin the plan as an attempt to save the program, but all it would save would be the name “Medicare.” A guarantee of healthcare would be replaced with a voucher of diminishing value. If it fails to cover seniors’ costs . . . tough luck. The view was perhaps best summed up by Georgia GOP Rep. Rob Woodall, who chastised a constituent at a town hall meeting last month when she asked how, after Ryan’s reforms eliminated the guarantee of Medicare, she could expect to get medical coverage since she worked for a company that doesn’t offer it in their retirement package. “Hear yourself, ma’am,” he said. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’ ”
Woodall, like many conservatives, fails to grasp why programs like Medicare were created. They were a response to a market failure—specifically an inability of senior citizens to get or pay for healthcare. But in Woodall’s world there are apparently no market failures; if seniors can’t get healthcare it’s because they simply won’t take responsibility for themselves. Of course in 1964, 44 percent of senior citizens had no health coverage, and the cost of medical bills had driven more than one third of them below the poverty line. If only they had had the moral fiber to take care of themselves!
Safe in a heavily conservative district, Woodall can spout such nonsense. But roughly 60 House Republicans represent districts Barack Obama won in 2008 and virtually all voted for the Ryancare overhaul. In this case, the gap between hard truths and hard ideology may be big enough to swallow a House majority.
Just ask the pollsters employed by the House GOP, who warned that the bill was a ticking time bomb, Politico reported last week. Or ask Jane Corwin, that bomb’s first casualty. She is the Republican who lost May’s special election in a GOP-leaning New York district in which the Ryan plan was the defining issue. Or ask Sens. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Scott Brown, four of the five Senate Republicans who fled the plan last week (the fifth, Rand Paul, opposed it as not being conservative enough).
Or ask Gingrich, the former House speaker who drew party-wide opprobrium when he dismissed the Ryan plan as being so much “right-wing social engineering.” Pity poor Newt: He was just trying to tell a hard truth.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 3, 2011
GOP Supported Individual Mandate To Prevent ‘Government Takeover’ Of Health Care
The Los Angeles Times’ Noam Levey looks at the history of the individual health insurance mandate and discovers that not only was the provision designed by Republicans as an alternative to President Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan in the 1990s, but it was specifically seen as a way to prevent a “government takeover” of health care:
“We were thinking, if you wanted to achieve universal coverage, what was the way to do it if you didn’t do single payer?” said Paul Feldstein, a health economist at UC Irvine, who co-wrote the 1991 plan with Pauly.
Feldstein and Pauly compared mandatory health insurance to requirements to pay for Social Security, auto insurance, or workers’ compensation.
So too did the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler, who in 1989 wrote a health plan that also included an insurance requirement.
“If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car,” Butler told a Tennessee health conference that year.
“But healthcare is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance.… A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract,” said Butler, who was the foundation’s director of domestic policy studies.
Levey notes that fully a third of Republicans supported a bill that included a national individual requirement, introduced by then-Senator and current Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Sens. Bob Dole (R-KS), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) all backed that measure. The National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative small-business group, even “praised the bill ‘for its emphasis on individual responsibility.’”
And this wasn’t some fluke of the ’90s either. As recently as 2007, “[t]en Republican senators — including Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, now a GOP leader — signed on to a bill that year by Bennett and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to achieve universal health coverage.” The legislation penalized individuals who did not purchase insurance coverage.
Listing all of the GOP presidential candidates who have previously supported the mandate (Romney, Gingrich, Huntsman, Pawlenty) would only belabor the point, which is that the GOP’s new-found religion on the mandate and its constitutionality is driven by the political need to unravel the Democrats’ crowning social achievement, not any great concerns about policy, constitutionality, or freedom.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, May 31, 2011
The Fake James Madison: Conservatives Selective Reading Of The Founding Fathers Threatens Social Security And Medicare
The House Republican plan to phase out Medicare is crashing and burning. Rep.-elect Kathy Hochul (D-NY) just won an impossible election victory by campaigning to keep Medicare alive. The Senate just soundly rejected the House GOP’s plan. Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who once shut down the government in a failed attempt to force President Bill Clinton to support draconian Medicare cuts, blasted this Medicare-killing plan as “radical right-wing social engineering.”
Yet even as this concerted assault on Medicare hemorrhages support from elected officials, conservatives have a backdoor plan to get the courts to kill Medicare for them. Numerous lawmakers embrace a discredited theory of the Constitution that would not only end Medicare outright but also cause countless other cherished programs to be declared unconstitutional. Under this theory, Pell Grants, federal student loans, food stamps, federal disaster relief, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Social Security must all be eliminated as offensive to the Constitution.
In essence, supporters of this constitutional theory would so completely rewrite America’s social contract that they make Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP plan, look like Martin Luther King Jr. This issue brief explores the legal and historical gymnastics required to accept the conservative position that programs like Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution.
The general welfare
Although Congress’s authority is limited to an itemized list of powers contained in the text of the Constitution itself, these powers are quite sweeping. They include the authority to regulate the national economy, build a national postal system, create comprehensive immigration and intellectual property regulation, maintain a military, and raise and spend money.
This last power, the authority to raise and spend money, is among Congress’s broadest powers. Under the Constitution, national leaders are free to spend money in any way they choose so long as they do so to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” For this reason, laws such as Medicare and Social Security are obviously constitutional because they both raise and spend money to the benefit of all Americans upon their retirement.
Many members of Congress, however, do not believe the Constitution’s words mean what they say they mean. Consider the words of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who recently explained the origin of the increasingly common belief that Congress’s constitutional spending power is so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub:
If you read [James] Madison, Madison will tell you what he thought of the Welfare Clause. He said, “Yeah, there is a General Welfare Clause, but if we meant that you can do anything, why would we have listed the enumerated powers?” Really, the Welfare Clause is bound by the enumerated powers that we gave the federal government.
In essence, Paul and many of his fellow conservatives believe Congress’s power to collect taxes and “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” really only enables Congress to build post offices or fund wars or take other actions expressly authorized by some other part of the Constitution. According to this view, the spending power is not—as it is almost universally understood —itself an independent enumerated power authorizing Congress to spend money.
Paul’s understanding of the Spending Clause is not simply the idiosyncratic view of an outlier senator. Indeed, there is strong reason to believe his view is shared by the majority of his caucus. In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans released a “Pledge to America,” which broadly outlined their plans for governing if they were to prevail that November. In it, the lawmakers claimed that “lack of respect for the clear constitutional limits and authorities has allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year.”
This language suggests that many conservatives agree with Sen. Paul that Congress is somehow exceeding its constitutional authority to spend money. But there is no support for this view in constitutional text or in Supreme Court precedent.
In its very first decision to consider the issue—its 1936 decision in United States v. Butler—the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that “the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution,” as Sen. Paul would claim. Similarly, while the text of the Constitution establishes that “the exercise of the spending power must be in pursuit of ‘the general welfare,’” neither Sen. Paul nor the Pledge cites examples of laws that fail to meet this criterion.
Selectively reading Madison
While conservatives’ narrow understanding of the spending power finds no support in the text of the Constitution or in the Supreme Court’s decisions, Sen. Paul is correct that it does have one very famous supporter. In an 1831 missive, former President James Madison claimed that the best way to read the Spending Clause is to ignore its literal meaning and impose an extra-textual limit on Congressional power:
With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
Sen. Paul suggests that Madison’s extra-textual limit is both authoritative and binding—even if it means that programs ranging from Social Security to Medicare to Pell Grants must all cease to exist. But it is a mistake to assume that Madison’s preferred construction of the Spending Clause must restrict modern-day congressional action.
First of all, even the most prominent supporters of “originalism”—the belief that the Constitution must be read exactly as it was understood at the time it was written—reject the view that an individual framer’s intentions can change constitutional meaning. As the nation’s leading originalist, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explains, “I don’t care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words.”
Indeed, Madison himself would have been dismayed by the claim that an established understanding of the Constitution must bend to his own singular views. Like Scalia, Madison rejected the notion that the framers’ personal desires can defeat the words they actually committed to text. As he explained to future President Martin Van Buren, “I am aware that the document must speak for itself, and that that intention cannot be substituted for [the intention derived through] the established rules of interpretation.”
Secondly, Madison embraced a way of interpreting the Constitution reminiscent of the evolving theories of constitutional interpretation that are so widely decried by modern conservatives. Although Rep. Madison opposed on constitutional grounds the creation of the First Bank of the United States in 1791, President Madison signed into law an act creating the Second Bank in 1816. He “recognized that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and (most important, by failing to use their amending power) the American people had for two decades accepted” the First Bank, and he viewed this acceptance as “a construction put on the Constitution by the nation, which, having made it, had the supreme right to declare its meaning.”
The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt
Even if we must, as Sen. Paul suggests, be bound by the Founding Fathers’ subjective intentions, Madison’s understanding of the Constitution hardly reflects the consensus view among those who created it. The truth is that Madison’s voice was merely one of many competing voices among the founding generation—and his vision of the Constitution was eventually rejected by no less a figure than George Washington himself.
Madison’s chief antagonist in early debates about constitutional meaning was Alexander Hamilton. As the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton offered an interpretation of the Spending Clause that closely resembles the modern understanding:
These three qualifications excepted, the power to raise money is plenary, and indefinite; and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts and the providing for the common defence and “general Welfare.” The terms “general Welfare” were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those which Preceded; otherwise numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a Nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou’d have been restricted within narrower limits than the “General Welfare” and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.
Hamilton’s understanding of the spending power was one part of a broader, more expansive vision of congressional power that also included a robust interpretation of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause. This broader understanding of Congress’s role prevailed over Madison’s very limited one during the earliest days of the Republic. Hamilton was the chief advocate who convinced President George Washington to sign the First Bank bill over Madison’s objections.
The point here is not that constitutional interpretations should be played like the card game “War,” where conservatives play the Madison card and everyone else plays the Washington card, and whoever plays the higher card wins. Rather, the point is simply that conservatives are wrong to treat the Founding Fathers’ statements as if they were a menu that lawmakers can search through and order the kind of Constitution they want. The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt.
Moreover, it is hardly necessary to dismiss Madison’s tremendous contributions to the Constitution itself in order to recognize why America should not relitigate a 230-year-old argument about America’s power to spend money on programs like Medicare. Hamilton was undoubtedly correct that his own reading of the Spending Clause is more consistent with the Constitution’s text than the reading offered by Madison—Madison himself concedes as much—but Madison was also correct to warn that the nation rejects a longstanding and widely accepted constitutional interpretation at its peril.
Millions of Americans depend upon programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and federal student loans, and America has grown into the wealthiest and most prosperous nation ever to exist in the years since these programs were enacted. Throughout this golden age, not one Supreme Court justice has questioned what Justice Scalia recently told a gathering of members of Congress: “It’s up to Congress how you want to appropriate, basically.”
Conclusion
Few things are certain in American politics, but after this week one thing is crystal clear—the American people cherish Medicare and they want no truck with an agenda that would destroy it. Sadly, far too many conservative lawmakers refuse to listen to their constituents on this basic and obvious point—to the extent of inventing a theory of constitutional interpretation that would achieve their goal of ending Medicare far sooner than the House Republicans’ ill-considered budget.
Conservatives will tell you that killing Medicare is the only way to read the Constitution consistently with the framers’ intent. Don’t believe them. The truth is that the only way to reach this conclusion is to hunt through the framers’ statements, cherry pick statements that conservatives like, and ignore the very text of the Constitution itself in the process.
By: Ian Millhiser, Center for American Progress, May 27, 2011
Republicans Ignored Warnings On Paul Ryan Plan
It might be a political time bomb — that’s what GOP pollsters warned as House Republicans prepared for the April 15 vote on Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, with its plan to dramatically remake Medicare.
No matter how favorably pollsters with the Tarrance Group or other firms spun the bill in their pitch — casting it as the only path to saving the beloved health entitlement for seniors — the Ryan budget’s approval rating barely budged above the high 30s or its disapproval below 50 percent, according to a Republican operative familiar with the presentation.
The poll numbers on the plan were so toxic — nearly as bad as those of President Barack Obama’s health reform bill at the nadir of its unpopularity — that staffers with the National Republican Congressional Committee warned leadership, “You might not want to go there” in a series of tense pre-vote meetings.
But go there Republicans did, en masse and with rhetorical gusto — transforming the political landscape for 2012, giving Democrats a new shot at life and forcing the GOP to suddenly shift from offense to defense.
It’s been more than a month since Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his lieutenant, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va) boldly positioned their party as a beacon of fiscal responsibility — a move many have praised as principled, if risky. In the process, however, they raced through political red lights to pass Ryan’s controversial measure in a deceptively unified 235-193 vote, with only four GOP dissenters.
The story of how it passed so quickly — with a minimum of public hand-wringing and a frenzy of backroom machinations — is a tale of colliding principles and power politics set against the backdrop of a fickle and anxious electorate.
The outward unity projected by House Republicans masked weeks of fierce debate, even infighting, and doubt over a measure that stands virtually no chance of becoming law. In a series of heated closed-door exchanges, dissenters, led by Ryan’s main internal rival — House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) — argued for a less radical, more bipartisan approach, GOP staffers say.
At a fundraiser shortly after the vote, a frustrated Camp groused, “We shouldn’t have done it” and that he was “overridden,” according to a person in attendance.
A few days earlier, as most Republicans remained mute during a GOP conference meeting on the Ryan plan, Camp rose and drily asserted, “People in my district like Medicare,” one lawmaker, who is now having his own doubts about voting yes, told POLITICO.
At the same time, GOP pollsters, political consultants and House and NRCC staffers vividly reminded leadership that their members were being forced to walk the plank for a piece of quixotic legislation. They described for leadership the horrors that might be visited on the party during the next campaign, comparing it time and again with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ram through a cap-and-trade bill despite the risks it posed to Democratic incumbents.
“The tea party itch has definitely not been scratched, so the voices who were saying, ‘Let’s do this in a way that’s politically survivable,’ got drowned out by a kind of panic,” a top GOP consultant involved in the debate said, on condition of anonymity.
“The feeling among leadership was, we have to be true to the people who put us here. We don’t know what to do, but it has to be bold.”
Another GOP insider involved to the process was more morbid: “Jumping off a bridge is bold, too.”
Time will tell whether the Medicare vote, the most politically significant legislative act of the 112th Congress thus far, will be viewed by 2012 voters as a courageous act of fiscal responsibility — or as an unforced error that puts dozens of marginal GOP seats and the party’s presidential candidates at serious risk. That question might be answered, in part, this week during a special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District, in which Republican Jane Corwin appears to be losing ground to Democrat Kathy Hochul.
The GOP message team is already scrambling to redefine the issue as a Republican attempt to “save” Medicare, not kill it.
But the party’s stars remain stubbornly misaligned. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich candidly described the Medicare plan as “right-wing social engineering” — only to pull it back when Ryan and others griped. And Priorities USA Action, an independent group started by two West Wing veterans of the Obama administration, was out Friday with its first ad, a TV spot in South Carolina using Gingrich’s words to savage Mitt Romney for saying he was on the “same page” as Ryan.
“The impact of what the House Republicans have done is just enormous. It will be a litmus test in the GOP [presidential] primary,” said former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, one of the group’s founders.
“I couldn’t believe these idiots — I don’t know what else to call them — they’re idiots. … They actually made their members vote on it. It was completely stunning to me,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat who worked hard to win over the western part of his state, which has among the highest concentration of elderly voters in the country.
It was also the site of some of the Democrats’ worst losses in 2010 — three swing House seats Democrats hope to recapture next year, largely on the strength of the Medicare argument.
“Look at [freshman House members in the Pittsburgh-Scranton area], they make them vote on this when they’re representing one of the oldest districts in the country?” Rendell asked.
“We have a message challenge, a big one, and that’s what the polling is showing,” conceded Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a former Karl Rove protégé who enthusiastically backed the Ryan plan. “There’s no way you attack the deficit in my lifetime without dealing with the growth of Medicare. Do we get a political benefit from proposing a legitimate solution to a major policy problem? That’s an open question.”
The House Republican leadership had hinted at an emerging plan to tackle entitlement reform on Feb. 14 — the day Obama released his budget without reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Cantor caught Hill reporters by surprise when he said, nonchalantly, that the Republican budget would be a “serious document that will reflect the type of path we feel we should be taking to address the fiscal situation, including addressing entitlement reforms.”
But there were also internal motivations in the decision to go big on Medicare, rooted in Boehner’s still tenuous grasp of the leadership reins, according to a dozen party operatives and Hill staffers interviewed by POLITICO.
Republican sources said Boehner, who has struggled to control his rambunctious new majority, needed to send a message to conservative upstarts that he was serious about bold fiscal reform — especially after some of the 63 freshmen rebelled against his 2011 budget deal that averted a government shutdown.
Then there’s the ever-present friction between Boehner and Cantor, who, along with Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has positioned himself as the next generation of GOP leadership and champion of the conservative freshman class.
Boehner’s camp said the speaker has always supported the Ryan approach — which would offer vouchers to future Medicare recipients currently younger than 55 in lieu of direct federal subsidies — and proved his support by voting for a similar measure in 2009.
“Boehner has said for years, including leading up to the 2010 election, that we would honestly deal with the big challenges facing our country,” said his spokesman, Michael Steel. “With 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day, it is clear to everyone that Medicare will not be there for future generations unless it is reformed. The status quo means bankruptcy and deep benefit cuts for seniors. It’s clear who the real grown-ups in the room are. We’ve told the truth and led, while the Democrats who run Washington have cravenly scrambled and lied for partisan gain.”
But that message hasn’t always been quite that clear. On several occasions, Boehner has seemed squishy on the Ryan budget. In talking to ABC News, Boehner said he was “not wedded” to the plan and that it was “worthy of consideration.”
Still, even if Boehner had opposed the plan — and his top aide, Barry Jackson, expressed concerns about the political fallout to other staffers — he probably couldn’t have stopped the Ryan Express anyway, so great was the push from freshmen and conservatives.
That’s not to say some of the speaker’s allies from the Midwest didn’t try. Camp and Ryan hashed out their differences in a series of private meetings that, on occasion, turned testy, according to several GOP aides. Camp argued that the Ryan plan, which he backed in principle — and eventually voted for — was a nonstarter that would only make it harder to reach a bipartisan framework on real entitlement reform.
A few weeks later, Camp told a health care conference that, from a pragmatic legislative perspective, he considered the Ryan budget history. “Frankly, I’m not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in. I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” he said.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) also made the case for a more moderate approach — but his principal concern was the Medicaid portion of Ryan’s plan, an approach he believed wouldn’t do enough to reduce burdens of indigent care on states.
But even as Democrats high-five over the possibility of Medicare-fueled political gains, Republicans are trying to muster a unified defense. Cantor, for his part, stumbled by suggesting to a Washington Post reporter that the Ryan Medicare provisions might be ditched during bipartisan debt negotiations being led by Vice President Joe Biden.
Cantor later clarified his remarks and claimed he still backed the Ryan principles, but no GOP staffer interviewed for this article believed the Medicare overhaul has any realistic chance of passage.
By: Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman, Politico, May 23, 2011
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