“Apocryphal Scene”: Braveheart Republicans? Or False-Hearted?
House Republicans, on the eve of Tuesday’s vote denying tax relief to 160 million Americans, huddled in a conference room in the Capitol basement for more than two hours.
Were they puzzling over how to explain to constituents why they were effectively ordering a tax increase on the middle class after fighting for much larger tax breaks for the wealthy? Were they justifying the killing of a bipartisan compromise that had the support of all but eight Senate Republicans and the tacit approval of House Speaker John Boehner?
Nope. Turns out they were talking Monday night about their favorite scenes from “Braveheart.” About 10 House Republicans went to the microphones to share their memories of the Mel Gibson film, Republican sources told my Post colleagues Paul Kane and Rosalind Helderman.
One member spoke about the apocryphal scene in which the 13th-century Scottish rebel William Wallace ordered his troops to moon the English. Another member recounted the scene in which Wallace commanded the rebels to hold their positions before raising their spears against the charging English cavalry.
This inspired the assembled lawmakers to chant: “Hold! Hold! Hold! Hold!”
Finally, toward the end of the meeting, Rep. Rob Bishop (Utah) bravely rose to tell his colleagues that he hated the film. He introduced a motion that all references to “Braveheart” be banned. His colleagues laughed and heckled. The motion was not adopted.
But Bishop was right: “Braveheart” is a conspicuously poor choice for the House GOP.
For one thing, the Republicans are, if anything, in a reverse-“Braveheart” position: In this fight, they are the nobles putting down the overtaxed peasants. For another, the Scots they are emulating were defeated and slaughtered, and Wallace was captured (possibly betrayed by his own side), then drawn and quartered.
That the House Republicans would embrace a doomed cause and its martyred leader gets at their main problem in the majority: They’d rather make a point than govern the country. And in this case, it’s not entirely clear what point they’re trying to make.
Is it making sure the tax cut is paid for? For the last decade, Republicans approved billions of dollars in tax cuts, mostly for the rich, without paying for them.
Is it because they want the tax-cut extension to be for a year rather than just two months, as the Senate approved? Then why did so many Republicans originally criticize any tax-cut extension?
In killing the Senate compromise, which passed 89 to 10, with 39 Republican votes, the House GOP resorted to a variant of the “deem and pass” resolution they derided when Democrats proposed it during the health-care fight. Reneging on their pledge to hold a vote on the Senate compromise, Braveheart Republican leaders ordered up a resolution that rejected the Senate measure without a direct vote.
Caucus chairman Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), demanding a conference between the House and Senate to resolve differences, instructed his colleagues to “go and watch ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ ” to see how “things are settled between the House and Senate.” But this ignored the fact that Senate Democrats had already compromised with Senate Republicans; Hensarling was asking them to compromise on their compromise.
House Democrats didn’t exactly distinguish themselves, either. Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.) said Republicans had imposed “martial law.” Rep. Jim McDermott (Wash.) brought a Christmas stocking and lump of coal to the floor. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) recalled a Woody Allen joke (“the food at this place is really terrible . . . and such small portions”) that she attributed to Yogi Berra.
But that didn’t hold a torch to the Republicans’ “Braveheart” performance. It wasn’t the first congressional invocation of the film (Dick Gephardt once showed up to a meeting in William Wallace attire when he was House Democratic leader), but until now it hasn’t been embraced quite so earnestly.
“Look, this is a ‘Braveheart’ moment,” Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said on Fox News on Monday, describing the House Republicans’ instructions to Boehner. “You, Mr. Speaker, are our William Wallace. Let’s rush to the fight.”
Apparently plenty of others felt the same way. Staffers emerged from the GOP caucus meeting at 6:45 p.m. Monday to say the meeting would break up in five minutes. But the Republicans’ impromptu movie night didn’t end until 8:17 p.m., when Boehner, face as orange as Mel Gibson’s was blue, marched forth with his Bravehearts in a cloud of cigarette smoke toward their inevitable tragedy.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 21, 2011
The GOP’s Payroll Tax Fiasco: Even The WSJ Is Ticked Off With Their Own Minions
Cry Me A River….
GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.
The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.
Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.
House Republicans yesterday voted down the Senate’s two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday to 4.2% from 6.2%. They say the short extension makes no economic sense, but then neither does a one-year extension. No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year’s tax holiday has demonstrated. The entire exercise is political, but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.
Their first mistake was adopting the President’s language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.
Republicans also failed to put together a unified House and Senate strategy. The House passed a one-year extension last week that included spending cuts to offset the $120 billion or so in lost revenue, such as a one-year freeze on raises for federal employees. Then Mr. McConnell agreed with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the two-month extension financed by higher fees on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (meaning on mortgage borrowers), among other things. It passed with 89 votes and all but seven Republicans.
Senate Republicans say Mr. Boehner had signed off on the two-month extension, but House Members revolted over the weekend and so the Speaker flipped within 24 hours. Mr. Boehner is now demanding that Mr. Reid name conferees for a House-Senate conference on the payroll tax bills. But Mr. Reid and the White House are having too much fun blaming Republicans for “raising taxes on the middle class” as of January 1. Don’t be surprised if they stretch this out to the State of the Union, when Mr. Obama will have a national audience to capture the tax issue.
If Republicans didn’t want to extend the payroll tax cut on the merits, then they should have put together a strategy and the arguments for defeating it and explained why. But if they knew they would eventually pass it, as most of them surely believed, then they had one of two choices. Either pass it quickly and at least take some political credit for it. Or agree on a strategy to get something in return for passing it, which would mean focusing on a couple of popular policies that would put Mr. Obama and Democrats on the political spot. They finally did that last week by attaching a provision that requires Mr. Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days, and the President grumbled but has agreed to sign it.
But now Republicans are drowning out that victory in the sounds of their circular firing squad. Already four GOP Senators have rejected the House position, and the political rout will only get worse.
One reason for the revolt of House backbenchers is the accumulated frustration over a year of political disappointment. Their high point was the Paul Ryan budget in the spring that set the terms of debate and forced Mr. Obama to adopt at least the rhetoric of budget reform and spending cuts.
But then Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were gulled into going behind closed doors with the President, who dragged out negotiations and later emerged to sandbag them with his blame-the-GOP and soak-the-rich re-election strategy. Any difference between the parties on taxes and spending has been blurred in the interim.
After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago, and the chances of Mr. McConnell becoming Majority Leader in 2013 are declining.
By: Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2011
John Boehner Is Letting The Inmates Run The Asylum
Things are going from bad to worse for Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans.
It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the speaker over the last two years since all his Tea Party freshmen hit town. The good news for him was that he was elected speaker; the bad news was who elected him!
And it is not helpful that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor seems to want his job and is coddling the conservatives in the caucus.
For Speaker Boehner this is like herding feral cats that are getting increasingly wild.
The House rejection Tuesday of the bill overwhelming agreed upon in the Senate (89-10) to enact a compromise on the extension of the middle class tax cuts and unemployment payments was a shock—maybe even to Boehner when his caucus revolted over the weekend.
Anyone who is watching the inmates take over the asylum that is becoming the Republican caucus has got to fear for the country—and the Republican party.
If the House Republicans are responsible for raising taxes this year on the middle class, taking $1,500 out of their pockets as a little Christmas present, they will send the very clear message that they do the bidding of the millionaires and billionaires but put coal in the stocking of working families.
And as America’s businessmen and woman understand, the best prescription for growth, hiring, and greater profits, is a middle class that is well-off enough to buy their products. Starving middle class families does not exactly help their bottom line.
In addition, Republicans cannot make the argument that they are so concerned about the deficit that they want to shackle the middle class but let the wealthiest of Americans continue to get hundred of thousands of dollars in tax breaks that “are not paid for!”
The speaker understands that effectively raising taxes now on middle class families, while continuing huge tax cuts for the richest Americans, simply will not wash.
Such a decision is kryptonite in a political year such as this one.
Hiding behind a conference committee or talking about a year extension is simply hogwash—the Tea Party House members want to kill it, pure and simple.
Speaker Boehner is in real trouble on this one and he knows it; he is better off to cut the crazies loose in his own party, make a deal with Democrats and reasonable Republicans, and move on. It is the right thing to do for the country to prevent a double dip recession and the right thing to do politically. If Cantor tries to dethrone him, so be it, he did the right thing. But, right now, he is getting run over by a right wing caucus out of control.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, December 20, 2011
Newt Gingrich’s Congressional Ethics Scandal Explained
As Newt Gingrich looks to complete his improbable political comeback, his opponents won’t let him (or the electorate) forget about the scandal that ended the first act of his political career—a string of 84 ethics complaints in the House that culminated in a $300,000 sanction. The pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future hammered home the message in a recent Iowa television ad, citing the fine as evidence that “Newt has a ton of baggage.”
The former Speaker of the House has a handy response for those taking aim at his past. “All of the substantive issues, we were ultimately told we were right,” Gingrich told the DesMoinesRegister editorial board on Thursday. “It’s truly one of the most frustrating things of my career.” He blamed his congressional downfall on bad lawyering and on the zealotry of the House ethics committee (although half of the members were Republican).
Lost in the campaign trail barbs about Gingrich’s ethical lapses, however, is any sense of what Gingrich actually did, either allegedly or as a matter of record. In short, he used a network of consulting firms, educational institutions, and even a charity for inner-city teens to promote a set of clearly partisan political goals designed to sweep Republicans into power in Washington. Gingrich’s web of interconnected organizations formed the early prototype for the multi-million-dollar public and private network he established after leaving public office, known now as “Newt Inc.”
Here’s how it worked:
Step 1: The Vehicle
Gingrich’s political machine took advantage of a number of institutions that actually predated his congressional tenure, the most significant of which which was GOPAC, a political action committee founded by former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. du Pont. GOPAC had not distinguished itself particularly in its early years, but things began to change in 1986 when Gingrich, an ambitious back-bench congressman from Georgia, took control of the group. He instilled in it a sense of purpose—namely, his vision of a Republican majority in Washington by 1996. GOPAC, in turn, became a fundraising machine, raking in $15 million on Gingrich’s watch. As Connie Bruck later reported in the New Yorker, it also skirted Federal Election Commission disclosure requirements by distributing fundraising dollars without ever actually handling the money itself. In some cases, it effectively served as a matchmaker, pairing candidates with like-minded donors.
The committee’s plan was to change the very language of politics and recast the terms of the debate entirely; Gingrich would, like the professor he once was, educate rising conservative politicians to “speak like Newt.” One way to do that was to issue buzzword-packed cassette tapes to aspiring Republican lawmakers.
The other method Gingrich conceived of was to hold nationally televised seminars. In 1990, he developed a program, the American Opportunities Workshop, in which he offered his—and by extension, GOPAC’s—vision for the future and outlined steps to organize activists on cable television. Gingrich specifically avoided linking the program to the Republican Party by name, lest he scare off political novices. But winning elections was, by all accounts, the intent. As the House ethics committee noted in 1997, “While the program was educational, the citizens’ movement was also considered a tool to recruit non-voters and people who were apolitical to the Republican Party.”
Step 2: The Shell Charity
Running a national political movement without the formal backing of the party was resource intensive. So to save money, Gingrich and his allies tried something new. They replaced the American Opportunities Workshop with an almost identical program with a different name, American Citizens’ Television. And they turned over the operations to the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, a tiny Denver-based charity founded and controlled by GOPAC ally Bo Callaway, a former Colorado Congressman and Army Secretary.
According to papers filed with the IRS in 1984, ALOF was designed to instill a sense of civic virtue inner city kids by sponsoring “Land of Opportunity Speaking Competition Contests” in Colorado public schools. The charity’s leadership was nearly identical to the leadership of the Colorado Republican Party (in fact, it was the state GOP that had come up with the idea for the contest in the first place).
If the contest helped nudge teenagers toward the Republican party and further the GOP’s minority outreach efforts, well, that was all well and good; the first winner, a Vietnamese immigrant, earned a $2,500 scholarship and delivered the opening Pledge of Allegiance at the 1984 Republican National Convention.
By 1987, Colorado Republicans had lost interest in speech competitions, the contests had stopped, and ALOF had gone dormant. It had just $486.08 in its bank account—but it did have one thing of much greater value: 501(c)3 status from the IRS, meaning all donations to the group were tax-exempt. Control of the charity remained in the hands of Callaway.
Step 3: Doubling Your Money
Gingrich brought the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation back to life in 1990—albeit in a dramatically different role. Instead of fostering a love of capitalism and civic virtues in inner-city kids, it was paying for Gingrich to teach conservative activists how to elect Republicans. Internal memos placed a premium on airing the program in specific congressional districts.
The strategy was clear—by giving money to a tax-exempt organization, donors could effectively double their buying power because they could write it all off as a tax deduction (meaning it was that much less they had to pay to Uncle Sam). Not that there was much of a difference between ALOF and GOPAC. It was a matter of paperwork and little else; the two organizations shared a DC office, and many of the same employees. They even shared money—while the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation was nominally operating Gingrich’s television program, GOPAC loaned the group $45,000; the Los Angeles Times reported that in 1990, GOPAC donors gave the former inner-city charity at least $150,000.
In 1997 Gingrich was ultimately slapped with a $300,000 fine by the House ethics committee for his “reckless” or “intentional” use of nonprofits for partisan political ends.
Ultimately, the IRS caught wind of the arrangement and stepped in, ruling that as an educational nonprofit, ALOF couldn’t finance a purely political enterprise. In 1990, the final episode of the program was produced instead by a third conservative group, Citizens Against Government Waste—which, while not technically affiliated with Gingrich, was a major donor to his enterprises.
With the IRS’ ruling, ALOF’s new role was more or less dead. But it continued to beat on, at least for a few years, as a conduit between donors and GOPAC. Because ALOF owed GOPAC money, Callaway offered donors the option of giving to ALOF instead, thereby shoring up the group’s finances and taking advantage of its tax status. Citizens Against Government Waste gave $37,000 to ALOF in 1991, and ALOF cut a check for $37,000 to GOPAC later that day. The Ethics committee report noted that in addition to Callaway, “Two other GOPAC Charter Members made contributions to ALOF which were immediately turned over to GOPAC.”
Step 4: The College Course
With ALOF relegated to the background, Gingrich once again devised an elaborate funding and control mechanism to organize conservatives. This time, GOPAC would craft and develop a message of civilizational drift that would propel his party to victory; the corrupt welfare state was steering the United States away from the values that had made it great. But to cut costs (and skirt tax laws), he’d recruit outside groups to handle the fundraising and operations.
Gingrich unveiled a new television program, “Renewing American Civilization,” and found a willing host in Georgia’s Kennesaw State College, which offered to make it a four-credit course. Publicly, the goals were strictly educational; privately, it was a partisan mobilization drive. As Gingrich wrote in a letter, “Our hope is to have at least 50,000 individuals taking the class this fall and to have trained 200,000 knowledgeable citizen activists by 1996 who will support the principles and goals we have set.”
You didn’t need to work at GOPAC to see the real aims of the course. Gingrich was rebuked by many of the same scholars he claimed had helped devise the course. Boston College professor James Q. Wilson, whom Gingrich touted as an adviser to the course, actually repudiated the program after initially coming on board. According to one letter obtained by the ethics panel, the famed academic scolded the Speaker for the clearly partisan tone of his lesson plan: “If this is not to be a course but instead a sermon, then you should get a preacher to comment on it.”
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist whom Gingrich had also touted as a contributor to the course, soured on the experiment as well. In a 1996 book, he called the course “a partisan organizing tool.”
It was an odd public-private partnership. Kennesaw State provided classroom space to Gingrich and gave out course credits to students who participated in the class, but it relied on a third-party called the Washington Policy Group to manage and raise funds. All of that would be pretty innocuous, except GOPAC was the Washington Policy Group’s only client, and its staff consisted of three GOPAC vets. Gingrich promoted the entire operation in floor speeches.
Step 5: Public to Private
When a new Georgia state law explicitly prohibited public universities from sponsoring elected officials as teachers, Gingrich found a new home for Renewing American Civilization, but he kept the operation intact. GOPAC continued to supply the message, and Gingrich continued to deliver it. He simply moved the course from Kennesaw State to tiny Reinhardt College. And in place of the Washington Policy Group, Reinhardt outsourced fundraising for the course to a small group called the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
Like WPG, its staff overlapped GOPAC’S, and its ties to Gingrich ran deep. As the Washington Post reported, much of the $900,000 the group raised came from Gingrich donors.
Step 6: Sanctions
In 1997, Gingrich was ultimately slapped with a $300,000 fine by the House ethics committee for his “reckless” or “intentional” use of nonprofits for partisan political ends, and for misleading the House by offering conflicting account about GOPAC’s role in all of it (for which he blamed his lawyer). Although the sanction was tied to the specific violation of providing misleading information, he wasn’t exactly absolved of other wrongdoing. In some cases, the committee decided not to pursue a matter any further simply because he had stopped the unethical activity that had gotten him in trouble in the first place; for other charges (such as the use of official resources for his own non-profits, Gingrich received letters of admonition). That same year, Abraham Lincoln Opportunity was stripped of its nonprofit status by the IRS, only to have it restored again six years later in a decision that raised eyebrows among campaign finance watchdogs.
Whether or not Gingrich technically broke House rules, his makeshift fundraising network was undeniably shady. He gladly appropriated a tax-exempt organization aimed at helping inner-city kids and used it to finance his goal of winning control of the House of Representatives. He likewise took two nonprofit educational institutions and used them to host a college course whose partisan aims he happily gushed about in private correspondence, and whose high-profile advisers actually repudiated it.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire in November, Gingrich promised that if elected, he would teach an online class to the American people. The course, he said, would be free to the public. If the past is any indication, the real questions is: What’s the real motive—and who’s footing the bill?
By: Tim Murphy, Mother Jones, December 20, 2011
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