“Unlimited Spending”: This Is How The Koch Brothers Plan To Win The U.S Senate
The Koch brothers* are hiring.
You’ll find job listings for campaign staff positions in Koch-funded groups in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Some of the ads call for experts in social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, YouTube, Google, and OutBrain to effect a strategy that’s both agile and overwhelming.
And you’re already seeing $20 million worth of TV ads from the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) targeting incumbent senators in Alaska, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Louisiana for supporting Obamacare. Similar ads are now up Michigan and Iowa, where veteran Democrats Carl Levin (D-MI) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) are vacating their Senate seats.
Now Democrats are sounding the alarm to their donors in a moment that’s reminiscent of the note the Obama campaign hit with an email in which the president said, “I will be outspent.”
“Democrats need money at this early stage in order to fight back against the limitless spending from the Kochs,” Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told The New York Times. “The limitless spending from the Kochs means we need Democratic donors to step up in a bigger way immediately.”
Republicans need six seats to take over the U.S. Senate and the Kochs are trying to expand the map to put even the states that twice voted for President Obama in play. And they’re building on a model that they perfected in 2010 when right-leaning groups hammered the president and Democrats in Congress for a year over the “failed” stimulus before it even had a chance to work.
With Democrats holding virtually every swing seat in the nation after the landslide of 2008, they defended on all fronts and avoided trying to nationalize the race, even though the choice was made for them. As the midterm election hit, in the midst of the worst job market in 60 years, Republicans won more elected offices than they had at any time since before the Great Depression.
The right tried to reprise this strategy in 2012 with dismal results. But in an off-year election, without President Obama on the ballot and with Obamacare disapproval soaring in red states, there’s a clear opportunity to use health care reform to define Democrats early.
And that’s what the Kochs are doing wherever they see an opportunity.
With former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land polling better than expected against her likely Democratic opponent Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), especially in polls that under-sample African-Americans, Michigan presents such an opportunity. Land supported Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) in his plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare in previous budgets, but she’s unlikely to produce the sort of gaffes that cost Republicans Senate seats in Missouri, Indiana, Nevada and Rhode Island.
Land recently touted outside groups supporting her run right as AFP’s ad targeting her opponent began a $1 million three-week run — even though collaboration between candidates and these groups is illegal. Wink, wink.
Democrats also hope to expand the Senate map to Georgia — where Obama only lost by 8 percent without spending a dime in the state. Michelle Nunn, the daughter of the state’s former beloved senator Sam Nunn, will likely be the Democratic nominee and could easily end up facing Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) who was voted “Most Likely to be the Next Akin.” His primary opponent, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) — who recently said that children would benefit from working — was a close second to Broun.
While Karl Rove is actively trying to influence Republican primaries to ensure the most electable candidates win, Americans for Prosperity retains its Tea Party credibility by aiming its fire only at Democrats and sticking to the issue that will preoccupy the right for the third national election in a row — Obamacare.
So if you’re in one of those 13 targeted states, expect to hear about #fullrepeal of a law that’s been on the books for almost four years now on TV, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, email and anywhere the Kochs can find you.
*The Kochs go out of their way to obscure how they spend the millions they invest in Republican politics. Americans for Prosperity is a 501(c)(4) social welfare group that doesn’t have to release the names of its donors — though we know David Koch helped to found the group. These non-profits, which are limited in the amount of resources they can apply to political efforts, were the subject of the controversy where the IRS used political keywords to identify conservative and progressive groups for extra scrutiny. Big groups like AFP and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS avoided such scrutiny, until recently, at least.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 15, 2014
“Political Arsonist Condemns Partisan Fires”: When Mitch McConnell Looks At The Dysfunctional Senate, He Sees His Own Handiwork
Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delivered a lengthy, beautifully written soliloquy on the once-great institution in which he serves. “What have we become?” McConnell asked. “I’m absolutely certain of one thing: the Senate can be better than it is,” he added. “We’ve gotten too comfortable with doing everything we do here through the prism of the next election, instead of the prism of duty. And everyone suffers as a result.”
The long-time Republican is apparently quite invested in his concerns over the demise of the Senate, publishing a piece in Politico on the subject.
When you look at the vote tallies for some of the more far-reaching legislation over the past century, for example, the Senate was broadly in agreement.
Medicare and Medicaid were both approved with the support of about half the members of the minority. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with the votes of 30 out of 32 members of the Republican minority. Only six senators voted against the Social Security Act. Only eight voted against the Americans With Disabilities Act.
This is, oddly enough, practically identical to the kind of lament one might hear from a progressive Senate Democrat. Before the radicalization of Republican politics, bipartisan cooperation on major policies was common, and when centrist GOP lawmakers still existed, popular and even progressive legislation was approved with large majorities.
So why is McConnell echoing Democratic concerns? Because he’s convinced of his own misguided righteousness.
When Democrats couldn’t convince Republicans that [the Affordable Care Act] was worth supporting as written, they plowed ahead on their own and passed it on a party-line vote.
That’s why the chaos this law has visited on our country is not just tragic, it was entirely predictable. Chaos will always be the result if you approach legislation without regard for the views of the other side.
It’s at this point when knowledgeable readers, too well informed to fall for such a clumsy con, realized that McConnell is playing the public for fools. What we have is a political arsonist condemning partisan fires after he lit the match.
As Ed Kilgore, Greg Sargent, and others noted in response to McConnell’s breathtaking, almost nauseating, complaints about the Senate, the Minority Leader’s whining is not only hypocritical, it’s making a mockery of the very idea of self-awareness.
Medicare and Medicaid were approved with bipartisan support, but as GOP extremism becomes the new norm, McConnell and his party are eagerly trying to undermine both. The Voting Rights Act has enjoyed near-unanimous support, but it was Republican justices on the Supreme Court that gutted the law, and it’s Republican lawmakers who are now reluctant to repair it.
Social Security is a venerated American institution, which Republicans actively hope to replace with a privatization scheme. The Republican right to celebrate the Americans With Disabilities Act officially ended in December 2012.
Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to think all of these landmark legislative accomplishments – Medicare, Medicaid, VRA, Social Security, and the ADA – would not only face a Republican filibuster if brought to the floor for the first time today, they’d all fail in the GOP-led House.
“When you look at the vote tallies for some of the more far-reaching legislation over the past century, for example, the Senate was broadly in agreement”? That’s true. Then the Republican Party became radicalized and it stopped being true.
As for the Affordable Care Act, Democrats desperately tried to find Republican support for a policy built around Republican-friendly policies. No matter how much Dems pleaded with GOP officials to work in good faith towards a compromise, the more Republicans refused.
And it was McConnell who was candid enough to explain in 2010 how and why this happened.
“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought – correctly, I think – that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
Right. McConnell figured that if Republicans worked in good faith on a bipartisan health care bill, the public would assume it was a worthwhile idea. So McConnell insisted that his party oppose every effort at compromise, and slap away every outstretched hand, so that the GOP could condemn “Obamacare,” regardless of the merits.
In other words, even if Dems approached McConnell with a health care plan McConnell liked, he’d still reject it. To do otherwise would be to help Democrats, while denying the Minority Leader a chance to complain later.
Indeed, it’s this attitude that has served as a template for Republican obstructionism for five years. When McConnell looks at the dysfunctional Senate, what he sees is the result of his own handiwork – the ashes of the fire he started, then complained constantly as emergency crews struggled to put it out.
For the Minority Leader to ask, “What have we become?” is a good question. Perhaps McConnell can answer it after a long look in the mirror.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, January 14, 2014
“Endless Crusades”: Tea Party Delays Spending, Beats Dead Horse
It will only cover three days, but once again next week Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open. The current resolution expires on Wednesday, and even though a budget agreement was reached last month, appropriators in both chambers still haven’t nailed down a plan to tell various agencies what they can spend.
There are many reasons for that delay — the appropriations committees only had a few weeks after the budget deal to cobble together a massive $1 trillion bill, known as an omnibus. But one of the biggest is that House Republicans from the Tea Party wing have demanded that the bill reflect their ideological goals.
They have insisted, for example, that no money be spent to implement the health care reform law, or that various aspects of the law be cut back so sharply that it would not be workable. They don’t want money spent to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They want sharp reductions in the National Labor Relations Board.
More than 130 of these so-called riders have been filed by lawmakers, many of whom wouldn’t vote for the omnibus even if their provisions were adopted. Some are particularly ridiculous, including:
* Forbidding the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing its rule on the safe removal of lead paint.
* Prohibiting the Fish and Wildlife Service from including the sage grouse on the endangered species list.
* Prohibiting subsidies for any health care plan that includes abortion. (Many states already forbid this, but this rider would make the ban nationwide.)
* Banning the government from requiring federal contractors to disclose their political contributions — one of the Obama administration’s better transparency proposals, which it eventually dropped in the face of business opposition.
Many of these riders have been dropped by the negotiators, but some, including those involving the health care law, have yet to be resolved. (Appropriators think the omnibus bill will be ready by next week.) Republican leaders can’t afford another government shutdown, but apparently they haven’t yet convinced their most radical members to stop their endless crusades.
By: David Firestone, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, January 10, 2014
“Still Playing Games”: House Votes To Undermine ACA, Again
The House of Representatives held its first meaningful floor vote of 2014 this morning, sending a clear signal about the Republican majority’s priorities. Did they vote on unemployment benefits? The farm bill? One of the many other unfinished bills from 2013?
No, the GOP majority is still playing games with health care.
A significant number of Democrats broke party lines to vote on the House’s first anti-Obamacare vote of 2014 on Friday, a blow to party unity and leadership’s advice that rank-and-file members stand strong against GOP “gotcha” bills.
The legislation, which would require victims of security breaches through HealthCare.gov insurance exchanges to be notified within two days, passed 291-122. Sixty-seven Democrats sided with all voting Republicans to hoist the bill over the finish line.
The fact that so many Democratic lawmakers broke ranks wasn’t a huge surprise – it’s now an election year and they seem reluctant to create attack-ad fodder by opposing pointless “messaging” bills.
As we discussed last week, the proposal comes by way of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has a lengthy record of preferring partisan games to actual governing. It also dovetails with a coordinated messaging campaign championed by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
Indeed, today’s vote was unusually vapid. As has been reported many times, there have been no security breaches; literally zero Americans’ personal information has been compromised; administrative security testing for healthcare.gov is constant; and when rare vulnerabilities have popped up, the problems have been identified and resolved quickly and safely.
What’s more, while the bill approved by the House today would require HHS to notify consumers if their personal information is accessed improperly, it’s worth noting (a) HHS is already required to make these notifications, making the legislation unnecessary; and (b) since consumers’ personal information is not actually stored on healthcare.gov, the underlying concern really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So what’s the point of pushing a pointless bill and making it the first proposal voted on in 2014? I found remarks from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, quite compelling.
“Despite all these positive results, Republicans are still obsessed with killing this law. Since they cannot do so legislatively, they have shifted to a different tactic: scaring people away from the website.
“So my second point is this: there have been no successful security breaches of Healthcare.gov. Nobody’s personal information has been maliciously hacked. […]
“These are important facts for the American people to know. But the Republicans disregard them and omit them because they undermine their claims. Many of us would support efforts to strengthen requirements for the entire federal government and private sector to notify consumers of breaches. But today’s bill does not do that. Today’s bill is the latest attempt to attack the Affordable Care Act and deprive millions of Americans of the healthcare they deserve.”
As for actual security threats, Jennifer Bendery makes a point that can’t be emphasized enough: “[T]he most credible threat to the website’s security may be the loudest critic of the website’s security: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 10, 2014
“Becoming Increasingly Clear”: Despite What The Critics Say, Obamacare Is Working
Despite the treasured right-wing talking points, it’s increasingly clear that Obamacare is a success. Moreover, in places where Obamacare is not succeeding, it’s also clear that the right wing is to blame. Well, it’s clear to any who look at the state-by-state numbers of the newly insured. A whole lot of Americans will have to look, however, for the program’s success to redound to Democrats’ advantage.
Charles Gaba, an enterprising Web site designer, has taken it upon himself to track the number of Americans who have gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Tallying those who have signed up on the state and federal exchanges (2.1 million), those who have obtained Medicaid coverage (4.4 million) and those who gained coverage through the law’s requirement that private plans allow parents to cover their children up to age 26 (3.1 million), he cites more than 9 million newly insured through Obamacare.
The meaning of that number is, to be sure, a little fuzzy. To begin, it’s a gross, not a net, increase. Some of the 2.1 million who purchased insurance on exchanges did so after their previous plans were altered or canceled. In some states, the increase in those insured through Medicaid does not distinguish between those not eligible previously and those who are simply renewing coverage.
All that said, whether the total is 9 million or 7 million, it’s a big number and it’s rising rapidly: December sign-ups far exceeded those in November, and the number is expected to continue growing through 2014.
Whether you can access the benefits of the ACA, however, depends on where you live. In states that set up their own exchanges and accepted federal funding for Medicaid expansion, the increase in the number of insured vastly exceeds that in states that declined to do either.
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of government and sociology, has compared state totals of those who gained insurance through the exchanges and Medicaid with Congressional Budget Office projections of the number of enrollees in each state for the first year the ACA is in effect, as well as with the Kaiser Medicaid Commission’s projections of new Medicaid recipients in that first year.
In the three months since the exchanges opened, she wrote this week, the 14 states that established their own exchanges and accepted Medicaid funding reported increases amounting to 37.2 percent of the projected yearly exchange purchases and 42.9 percent of the projected Medicaid enrollments. In the 23 states that refused to establish insurance exchanges, refused to cooperate in making the federal Web site easily accessible and declined to expand Medicaid, exchange purchases were just 5.6 percent of the projected increase and Medicaid enrollments just 1.5 percent. (The 13 states that partially embraced the programs generally had increases lower than the 14 full implementers but higher than the 23 refusniks.)
Which is to say, the ACA is working as planned, perhaps a little better, in the states where governors and legislatures chose to implement it, such as California and New York. It is barely working in those states where governors and legislators have refused to implement it, such as Texas. Although the number of states declining any participation probably will diminish over time, as the tea party’s grip on the Republican Party wanes or as older white conservative voters die off, the resulting red-blue division between the states probably will be a feature of the nation’s political economy for some time.
Consider the implications: A larger share of Californians will be able to afford regular medical check-ups than Texans. A smaller share of Californians is likely to be bankrupted by the expense of major medical treatment than Texans. When the law’s tax penalties take effect, a smaller share of Californians will be subject to the penalties that come with the individual mandates than will Texans. In the coming years, a smaller share of California hospitals will face financial risk for indigent care than hospitals in Texas, where fewer of the sick and poor will be covered by Medicaid.
The conservative argument that the ACA is a disaster is true only when it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Most of the negative consequences that right-wingers have warned against have occurred only in those places where right-wingers have subverted implementation of the law. What supporters of the ACA must keep in mind, however, is that Americans who live in states where implementation has been stymied may continue to see the act as a failure and continue to blame President Obama and his party.
Only by publicizing the act’s manifest success in states where it has been implemented can supporters begin to change the public’s verdict.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 8, 2014
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