“Farewell, Grand Old Party”: GOP Dug Its Own Grave And Dropped One Foot In When McCain Selected Sarah Palin
It wasn’t precisely an act of moral courage, but House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (Wis.) comment that he’s not ready to support presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump was at least . . . something.
Whether it’s a start or a finish remains to be revealed, but it would seem that we’re witnessing the beginning of the end. To wit: A Republican friend, who has abandoned her behind-the-scenes work of getting conservatives elected, called me recently to express her condolences. “I feel sorry for you,” she said, “because you (given your job) can’t ignore the collapse of Western civilization.”
Now a renegade from the nominating process, she is like so many others disillusioned by the Trump movement who’ve slipped the noose of politics in search of meaning beyond the Beltway. But Trump’s triumph, though most insiders thought it impossible, should have surprised no one. He was inevitable not because he was The One but because he’s a shrewd dealmaker with deep pockets and unencumbered by a moral compass. Both his platform and style were crafted to fit the findings of extensive polling he commissioned before announcing his run.
In other words, Trump didn’t write a book you loved; he wrote the book you said you’d love. If people were outraged about immigration, why then he’d build a wall. If they were upset about manufacturing jobs lost overseas, well fine, he’d kill the trade agreements.
Trump was never about principle but about winning, the latter of which he kept no secret. What this means, of course, is that his supporters have no idea whom they nominated. He simply paid to read their minds and then invented a drug that would light up the circuit boards corresponding to pleasure and reward.
“Believe me,” he crooned to the roaring crowed.
“I’m not there right now,” said the speaker, blessing himself in the sign of the cross.
Poor Ryan — a man of conscience in an unconscionable time. He wants to support the Republican nominee, but, at the end of the day, he has to answer to a higher authority. Trump, the party’s standard bearer, isn’t bearing the standard, Ryan said.
But what Ryan expressed as the basis for a desired meeting of the minds isn’t about those standards, except the hope that Trump will behave better in the future. You know, act presidential and all that. Otherwise, Ryan is standing by the phone to hear that Trump will unify the party. How, pray tell? What would satisfy the Ryans of the party? For Trump to say, Hey, I was just kidding?
The problem, as with all relationships, is that certain words, once expressed, can’t be taken back. No amount of backtracking can erase memories of what Trump really thought and said in a particular moment. It isn’t only that his wildly conceived and frequently revised positions are at odds with those of leveler heads, but also Trump has embarrassed those who can still be embarrassed.
Among those with either the gumption or nothing to lose by expressing no-support for Trump are both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. Neither will endorse the Republican nominee. Laura Bush, a consistent voice of sanity, recently hinted at a “Women in the World” conference that she’d rather see Hillary Clinton as president than Trump.
This is utterly treasonous to most Republicans. Not only is Clinton a Clinton, notwithstanding her Rodham-ness, but also the next president likely will select up to four Supreme Court justices. Republicans magically think that at least Trump would pick good justices.
But upon what shred of fact or fiction do they base this assumption?
Still other Republicans are expressing disapproval by vowing not to attend the party convention in July. These include the last two GOP presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, though McCain is on record saying he’ll support Trump, which can be viewed as loyal or merely sad.
The “sads” have it.
McCain seemingly has forgiven Trump’s remark that he was a war hero only because he was captured. “I like people that weren’t captured,” said the anti-hero who managed to avoid service and once compared his navigation of the sexually risky 1960s to “sort of like the Vietnam era.”
This is the man who would become commander in chief.
Meanwhile, we’re told, the party that adopted Trump without really knowing him is suffering an identity crisis and facing a moment of truth.
Phooey. The GOP began digging its own grave years ago and dropped one foot in when McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. With Trump’s almost-certain nomination, the other foot has followed.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 6, 2016
“Constraining Trump’s Erratic Impulses”: The Coming Struggle Over Policy Between Donald Trump And The GOP
Now that Donald Trump has nearly secured the GOP presidential nomination, Republicans everywhere have to start thinking seriously about how they’re going to deal with him and how having him as their party’s leader affects their own plans for the future. And here’s the basic challenge that will create for Republicans: How can they keep Trump from veering wildly from the straight and narrow path of conservatism?
It’s going to require constant work. For Republicans, the next six months will be a struggle to constrain Trump’s erratic impulses, and even if they’re mostly successful, it still might not diminish the damage Trump could to do the conservative project.
Some Republicans are already trying to downplay this challenge. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who is currently engaged in an effort to shape his party’s policy agenda for the next decade or two, said this morning that he and other Republicans who care about conservative ideology have nothing to worry about:
House Speaker Paul Ryan downplayed any conflict between his detailed policy proposals and those pushed by Donald Trump on Wednesday, hours after the front-runner sewed up five more states and marched ever closer to locking up his party’s nomination.
“The key for populism, Joe, as you well know because you practiced this, how do you take this populism and connect it to principle so that it’s populism tethered to good principles which give us good solutions, not unprincipled populism and that to me is our value added to this equation,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a segment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday, referring to co-host Joe Scarborough’s time as a lawmaker representing Florida.
Though he did not mention Trump by name and has been magnanimous even in his policy criticisms of Trump in the past, Ryan signaled that no matter Republicans’ standard bearer in November, the party will be “comfortable” and unify around the platform that he is advocating in Congress.
He also described any differences with Trump and other candidates over Obamacare and tax reform as small obstacles, remarking that they share broader agreement on the issues.
It’s possible that Ryan could prove right about this. But the amount of vigilance that will be required from Republicans could itself prove a strain.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Trump’s relationship to the conservative policy agenda, and to any agenda at all, is that he just doesn’t care about policy in the least. He has some sincere opinions on some issues, but for the most part, not only has he never thought much about any policy issue one might present him with, there’s almost nothing he thinks about an issue that isn’t subject to revision.
That’s why we’ve seen a particular pattern repeat itself so often. Trump will get asked a question about an issue he obviously hasn’t considered before. He’ll give an answer that doesn’t line up with conservative orthodoxy, because he isn’t aware of precisely what conservative orthodoxy is. Then Republicans will get enraged, the controversy will blow up, and a day or two later — after he’s had a chance to learn what he’s supposed to say — he’ll come back and offer a revised version of his position.
This happened on abortion (where he said women should be punished for having abortions, then said they shouldn’t), on transgender people being forced by the government to use the wrong bathrooms (where he said they should use whatever bathrooms they want, then said the issue should be decided at the state and local level), and on Israel and the Palestinians (where he first said he wanted to be a neutral arbiter, then went to AIPAC and said “There is no moral equivalency” between Israel and the Palestinians).
That’s not to mention the positions on issues like abortion and guns that he changed before the race began. So if you’re a Republican, that’s about as much as you can hope for. He may not be with you already, but he’s responsive to pressure. Once you tell him that he has strayed, he comes back to the fold.
To be sure, whenever Trump comes out with a formal policy proposal, it’s right in line with conservative orthodoxy. So for instance, he has repeatedly said we should raise taxes on rich people, much to Republicans’ horror, but when he actually released a tax plan, it featured, guess what, a huge tax cut for the wealthy. The same thing happened on health care: he said some things suggesting there were parts of the Affordable Care Act he liked, but when he released his plan, it could have been lifted from the boilerplate on the issue you’ll find on any Republican candidate’s web site.
Today Trump is going to deliver an address on foreign policy, and while we don’t know what’s going to be in it, because this is a prepared speech — which means it was written for him by other people — I’m almost sure that there will be little if anything in there that Republicans will object to. It’ll talk about how Barack Obama is weak, our enemies don’t fear us, we need to increase military spending, we should tear up the Iran nuclear deal — all things ordinary Republicans say all the time.
This is all possible because, to repeat, Trump just doesn’t care about policy. That should make Republicans at least somewhat sanguine about what his presidency would be like. Paul Ryan can deliver him one bill after another written and passed by the GOP Congress, and Trump is likely to say, “Sure, whatever” and sign them.
And yet, there are some trouble spots for conservatives ahead, signaled by the areas where Trump has in fact gone against conservative orthodoxy. Trade is a big one — Trump seems to believe that if we increase tariffs on Chinese goods, then everyone in America will have a great job. There have been a few others, like his lack of enthusiasm for cutting Social Security. Then there’s his ban on Muslims entering the U.S., which (while Republican voters support it) GOP elites find vulgar and damaging to the party.
And so, in the general election, we may see examples of Republicans like Ryan struggling to pull Trump back into line: when his impulse takes him to a place that’s popular with the electorate, but it’s a place other Republicans don’t want to go. Then they’ll have a much harder time making the case to him that he needs to get back with the conservative program.
On the other hand, if Trump remains as dreadfully unpopular with the general electorate as he is now, and he goes down to a sweeping defeat, maybe Republicans would be better off if he proves to be an imperfect representative of GOP ideology. Though that may not be much comfort.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 27, 2016
“It May Be Too Late For The GOP To Stop Trump”: The GOP Is Much More Trump’s Party Than Theirs
For decades, the Republican Party gave voters the impression that they get to pick the presidential nominee. The much-weakened GOP establishment theoretically has the power to choose someone else — but not, I believe, the strength of purpose to do it.
The author of this dilemma is, of course, Donald Trump. After a two-week pause in the primary schedule, Trump — a Manhattan icon — is expected to romp in New York on Tuesday and capture the lion’s share of the state’s 95 convention delegates. Polls show he is also likely to post big wins the following week, on April 26, in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
The bigger his victory margins, the closer Trump can come to securing 1,237 delegates, a majority, and thus making all the “contested convention” machinations moot. But it seems likely that when all the primaries and caucuses are done, he will fall short. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he comes to the convention with around 1,100 delegates — far more than rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich. What happens then?
The Cruz campaign has worked tirelessly, and quite successfully, to ensure that as many delegates as possible are Cruz supporters, even if they are pledged to vote for Trump on the convention’s first ballot, which presumably would be inconclusive. In subsequent rounds of voting, those delegates would be free to switch to the Cruz side — and ultimately give him the nomination.
To pull this off, however, Cruz would need the support, or at least the acquiescence, of party insiders — who dislike Cruz almost as much as Trump. Many leading Republicans believe, in fact, that Cruz, with his hard-right views, would be an even surer loser in November than the unpredictable Trump, who is unburdened by philosophy.
I have heard veterans of GOP smoke-filled rooms make the argument this way: If the party is going to incur the wrath of primary voters and caucus-goers by nominating someone other than Trump, why pick a candidate who will most likely lose to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee? Why not pick someone who has a fighting chance with independents, such as John Kasich? Or even a “white knight” such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (who made clear last week that he does not want the nomination)?
I have also heard prominent Republicans argue that the convention delegates will have what amounts to a fiduciary duty to choose a candidate who is fit to serve as president. Trump’s volatile temperament and ignorance of policy, according to this view, make him ineligible.
And then there’s the political calculation. Some GOP graybeards believe the party is unlikely to capture the White House with any nominee. But Trump’s massive unpopularity with the wider electorate — about two-thirds of Americans view him unfavorably, and a recent Associated Press poll of registered voters found that 63 percent said they would never vote for him — could threaten the party’s Senate and House majorities. Cruz, Kasich or a white knight might lose without dragging the rest of the ticket down with them.
All of this is fascinating to ponder, at least for those who love politics. But I wouldn’t bet on any of these scenarios. I believe that if Trump comes anywhere close to a delegate majority, the party leadership caves and he gets the nomination.
Trump would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what’s coming. In recent speeches, he has staked out the position that the candidate who comes to the convention with the biggest number of delegates should be the nominee, period. Polls show that a majority of Republicans agree with the helmet-haired billionaire. It turns out that once you tell people they get to choose their standard-bearer, they don’t take kindly to being patted on the head and told to go sit in the corner.
Trump’s newly hired convention manager, GOP veteran Paul Manafort, accused the Cruz campaign of using “Gestapo tactics” to steal delegates. Trump said Sunday that, gee, he sure hopes there’s no violence in Cleveland if the party establishment tries to take the nomination away from him. Not that he would ever suggest such a thing, of course.
As I said, all of this is moot if Trump wins a delegate majority outright. But if he narrowly misses the magic number, I don’t believe the debilitated establishment can muster the solidarity it would need to deny him. At this point, I’m afraid, the GOP is much more Trump’s party than theirs.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 18, 2016
“Seven Years And Counting”: House Republican On Health Care Plan: ‘Give Us A Little Time’
One of the best running jokes in American politics is the one about Republicans releasing their own alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Any day now, GOP leaders have been saying for many years, they’re going to have a plan that rivals “Obamacare,” and it’s going to be awesome.
Yesterday, The Hill reported on the latest installment in this ongoing fiasco.
A group of senior House Republicans is promising to deliver proof that the party is making headway in its six-year struggle to replace ObamaCare.
“Give us a little time, another month or so,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) told reporters this week. “I think we’ll be pretty close to a Republican alternative.”
Upton is not just some random figure in the broader effort: The Michigan Republican is a key committee chairman and a member of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s “task force,” responsible for coming up with the GOP’s reform alternative.
Upton said the Republican group is currently in “listening mode” – which it’s apparently been in since its creation 14 months ago.
And yet, we’re apparently supposed to believe that in “another month or so,” House Republican lawmakers will be “pretty close” to having their own reform plan.
Who knows, maybe the GOP is making enormous strides towards its goal. Maybe “listening mode” is going so well that the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act is nearly complete. Maybe, with “a little time,” they’re ready to deliver.
It’s certainly possible, but the odds are heavily against it.
As we discussed when the Republican “task force” was created early last year, the political world may not fully appreciate just how overdue this GOP health care plan really is. It was on June 17, 2009 that then-Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) made a bold promise. The Missouri Republican, a member of the House Republican leadership at the time, had taken the lead in crafting a GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act, and he was proud to publicly declare, ”I guarantee you we will provide you with a bill.”
The same week, then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters that the official Republican version of “Obamacare” was just “weeks away.” We’d all see the striking proof that far-right lawmakers could deliver real solutions better than those rascally Democrats.
This was nearly seven years ago. The Huffington Post’s Jeffrey Young has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of a joke, documenting all of the many, many times in recent years GOP officials have said they’re finally ready to unveil their big health care solution, only to quietly fail every time.
In early April 2014, then-House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said his party’s health plan was nearly done, but it was being delayed “at least a month.” That was 24 months ago. In 2015, assurances that the Republican plan was on the way were also wrong.
In 2016, however, a GOP leader has been reduced to arguing, “Give us a little time,” seemingly unaware of how hilarious this is.
As we talked about last week, the problem probably isn’t dishonesty. In all likelihood, Republicans would love to have a health care plan of their own – no one likes to appear ridiculous while breaking promises – but haven’t because they don’t know how to craft one.
As New York’s Jon Chait explained, “The reason the dog keeps eating the Republicans’ health-care homework is very simple: It is impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to the broader public. People who can’t afford health insurance are either unusually sick (meaning their health-care costs are high), unusually poor (their incomes are low), or both. Covering them means finding the money to pay for the cost of their medical treatment. You can cover poor people by giving them money. And you can cover sick people by requiring insurers to sell plans to people regardless of age or preexisting conditions. Obamacare uses both of these methods. But Republicans oppose spending more money on the poor, and they oppose regulation, which means they don’t want to do either of them.”
Or as a Republican Hill staffer famously put it in 2014, “As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act…. To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA.”
Which, of course, Republicans can’t bring themselves to do.
But hope springs eternal, and I can’t wait to hear more about the GOP’s progress in “another month or so.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 19, 2016
“Republicans To Wealthy; We Just Can’t Quit You”: Giving Equal Benefits To Everyone Would Be Ridiculous
Any marginally aware citizen is familiar with what I like to call the Four Pillars of Conservatism: low taxes, small government, strong defense, and traditional values. The simplicity and clarity of these ideas allows any Republican anywhere to move into politics with a ready-made ideological program, and as long as they stay abstract, it’s reasonably popular. It’s only when you start to get into specifics that the agenda becomes problematic.
The trick is that if you’re proposing something unpopular, to speak about it in the most abstract terms possible. “Low taxes” sounds great, because who wouldn’t like to pay less in taxes? The trouble is that what Republicans actually want is to cut taxes for the wealthy. They’re perfectly happy to cut taxes for other people if the opportunity presents itself, but the value of tax cuts for the wealthy is an absolutely foundational belief.
They know, however, that most Americans don’t agree. So when they talk about taxes, they’re supposed to be circumspect and careful, answering questions about tax cuts for the wealthy by saying that tax cuts in general are good for everybody. Which is why it’s so surprising when one of them is candid, as House Ways and Means Committee chairman Kevin Brady was in an interview with John Harwood published today.
Brady, who is in charge of tax policy, just comes out and says that Republicans won’t accept any tax reform that doesn’t include reducing the top income tax rate. All that talk of making the tax code simpler is all well and good, but there’s one thing they will absolutely not compromise on, and that’s the top rate, which is currently paid by those making over $415,000 a year:
HARWOOD: Could you envision a tax reform that you could go along with that had many elements that you liked that did not decrease the top rate?
BRADY: That’d be difficult to accept, because I think that holds back investment, both by businesses, small businesses, and by families.
HARWOOD: Because there are some conservatives who are arguing that in the environment that we’re in now, that conservative tax reformers ought to focus on things other than the top rate.
BRADY: I’d have to disagree, and here’s why. Besides businesses investing, when individuals, after they make that dollar, they have three choices. They can spend it, they can save it, which is good as well, but they can reinvest it back in the economy. And earners, not just high earners, all along the scale do that. I want to encourage families and environments to do more of that. And so on that side of the ledger, let’s look at those pro-growth packages.
There’s a rationale here, which is that when you give rich people more money, they’re more likely to invest it, which helps grow the economy over the long run. But conservatives sell this idea not as a long-term way to sustain investment, but as a short-term strategy to bring prosperity to all. This year, every Republican running for president essentially pledged to bring back George W. Bush’s economic policies. There were differences in the details of their plans, but all of them centered on large tax cuts for the wealthy, and all promised that the effects would be spectacular.
But here on Planet Earth, there is zero real-world evidence that large tax cuts for the wealthy super-charge the economy. If it were true, then Bush would have been the most economically successful president in American history. But he was actually one of the worst, and when it comes to job creation, the last two presidents who raised taxes on the wealthy — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — were among the best. The economy created 22 million jobs while Clinton was president, and Obama is on pace to see around 16 million new jobs created since the trough of the Great Recession in his first months in office (I discussed this at length here — with charts!).
Meanwhile, media coverage continues to suggest that Paul Ryan represents some kind of sober alternative to the presidential candidates. But he has long advocated slashing the top rate from its current 39.6 percent down to 25 percent, which would represent an enormous giveaway to the wealthy (he says it’ll be paid for by “cutting loopholes,” which are never specified). Just a month ago, Ryan was asked whether he might consider a plan that’s “distributionally neutral,” in other words, one that gives equal benefits to every income group. Here’s what Ryan said:
So I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you’re talking about is what we call static distribution. It’s a ridiculous notion. What it presumes is life in the economy is some fixed pie, and it’s not going to change. And it’s really up to government to redistribute the slices more equitably. That is not how the world works. That’s not how life works. You can shrink or expand the economy, and what we want to maximize is economic growth and upward mobility so that everybody can get a bigger slice of the pie.
To translate: Giving equal benefits to everyone would be ridiculous. The only way to expand the economy for all is to shower benefits on the rich. But most people don’t quite understand what Ryan is talking about; all they hear is that he wants more pie for everybody. That’s how you’re supposed to talk about taxes.
And this is the key thing to understand: no matter which Republican ends up being the presidential nominee, cutting taxes for the wealthy will be at the absolute top of the agenda. Even Donald Trump, who has been happy to buck Republican orthodoxy on a variety of issues, issued a tax plan the greatest benefits of which went to the wealthy — just like every other candidate.
In this election, just like in every other election, Democrats will charge that Republicans only want to help the rich. It’s an effective attack, mostly because it’s true. Or to be more generous, Republicans want to help everyone, it’s just that they really want to help the rich, and they see helping the rich as the best way to help everyone else. But it’s possible that the Democratic attack could be particularly potent this year in winning over independents and even a few Republicans. The Republican Party has spent the last year in a brutal argument about their own perfidious elites, who supposedly look with scorn on the masses in their party. And after all that, the centerpiece of their economic plans for the future is still cutting taxes at the top.
When a party advocates something that politically dangerous, it isn’t because they’re stupid. It’s because they believe in it, down the marrow of their bones.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 12, 2016
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