“Time For The GOP To Pitch In”: Passing Bills That Have No Chance Of Ever Becoming Law Is Not Best Advertisement For Effectiveness
With Republican majorities in both houses, the new Congress should begin by focusing on traditional GOP priorities: improving the nation’s sagging infrastructure, reforming an unwieldy tax code and finding ways to boost middle-class opportunity.
When pigs fly, you say? Skepticism is definitely in order. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner have a fundamental choice to make. They can acknowledge the obvious areas of common ground they share with President Obama — thus showing that the Republican Party can participate responsibly in government — or they can throw temper tantrums.
McConnell told The Post that one of his goals, as he takes leadership of the Senate, is to avoid doing anything that would make it harder for the party to elect a president next year. “I don’t want the American people to think that, if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he said.
The scariness of the GOP field probably will also depend on Ted Cruz’s apocalyptic rhetoric and Chris Christie’s progress in anger management. But McConnell is right that the whole “Party of No” routine, which he helped orchestrate, is unlikely to yield further political benefit — and may, at this point, inflict more damage on Republicans than on Democrats.
It is perhaps inevitable that the GOP will use its control of Congress to highlight the party’s pet issues — advocacy for the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, and opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Every once in a while, Republicans may even muster the needed 60 votes in the Senate — and force Obama to use his veto. But then what? Passing a bunch of bills that have no chance of ever becoming law is not the best advertisement for effectiveness.
McConnell told The Post he wants voters to see his party as a “responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.” Well, two obvious things such a majority should be doing right now are celebrating the economic recovery and looking for ways to ensure that more of its benefits reach the middle class.
Growth is accelerating, inflation is virtually nonexistent, stocks had a great year, unemployment is down and the U.S. economy is the envy of the developed world. That all of this has happened under the leadership of a Democratic president may be inconvenient for GOP leaders, but it’s the reality. Sourpuss grousing about how Obama is somehow “killing jobs” sounds ridiculous and out of touch. It seems to me that a “responsible” majority ought to be able to bring itself to say, “Nice job, Mr. President.” Even if it hurts.
Such a majority then should recognize that present economic conditions offer the opportunity to address big structural problems — and that addressing these problems can, in turn, broaden and deepen the recovery.
Infrastructure is perhaps the most obvious place to begin. Our airports are getting old. Many of our seaports cannot handle the newest generation of container ships. Thousands of our bridges need to be repaired or replaced. Century-old municipal water systems are breaking down. The electrical grid needs to be more robust and secure. And while we invented the Internet, citizens of other countries enjoy networks with faster speeds and lower costs.
Republicans used to agree with Democrats that good economic times offer the opportunity to invest in infrastructure — which creates jobs, both now and in the future. Deficits are falling rapidly and interest rates are at historic lows. What are we waiting for? Shouldn’t a “responsible” Congress have a bill on Obama’s desk by the end of the month?
Another subject on which Obama and the Republicans in Congress agree, at least in principle, is the need for corporate tax reform. Obama has acknowledged, and Republicans have long contended, that the current top corporate rate of nearly 40 percent is too high — and that the strategies corporations use to avoid paying those taxes, such as moving their headquarters overseas, are detrimental to the national interest. There is a larger debate to be had about overall tax policy, but couldn’t we just start by lowering the corporate rate and closing the loopholes?
Finally, a “responsible” party that’s prepared to govern would have some ideas about how to boost economic mobility, which is what we really mean when we talk about “opportunity.” If Republicans think the American Dream means the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, then no, they’re not remotely ready for prime time.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 5, 2015
“He Must Not Merely Lose, He Must Be Humiliated”: If Mitt Romney Insists On Running For President, Then He Needs To Be Trounced
The main reason democracy works is not the ballot box. It is accountability.
Humans are weak and prone to corruption, and one problem with authoritarian regimes is that there is no mechanism for holding people accountable when corruption inevitably occurs. In a democracy, there is. It’s far from perfect, but in the long run accountability leads to democratic countries being more prosperous, peaceful, and powerful. Just look at the rampant corruption and pollution in China, or Russia’s slide into fascism.
The ballot box is just a mechanism for accountability. I suspect that the U.S. would more or less achieve the same results if it had a computer that replaced one clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates with another clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates every time GDP growth and unemployment hit a certain number — this is essentially what the ballot box does.
Accountability is a different phenomenon. If you have the ballot box without a culture of accountability, you get Iraq’s chaos or Hugo Chavez’s bread lines. Only culture generates and sustains accountability — the rules of the game are the product of a culture that is willing to enforce them. Such a culture creates secular saints like John Profumo, who, after resigning from the British government over a sex scandal, didn’t join a private equity firm, but instead spent years mopping toilets at a charity.
All of which brings us to Willard Mitt Romney.
In the political realm, you want a culture that says you can only be a major party’s presidential nominee once (unless you win the presidency, of course). Why? Because. Because it allows new blood to emerge. Because otherwise you risk becoming a place like France, where the same politicians have been playing musical chairs for decades. Both Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand ran for president twice on a major party ticket before being elected to the top job, and the country would have been better off if their parties had held them accountable instead. Party machines run like feudal systems, doing everything to protect the Boss, including tolerating a culture of corruption. Healthy political parties realize that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men and rotate their troops.
This means that if Mitt Romney is to run for president, which it increasingly looks like he will do, he must not merely lose — he must be humiliated. This is not only because he would be a terrible standard bearer for the GOP (although that’s certainly true), but also because an example must be made of him. He must suffer a defeat so stinging that it will deter anyone else who might try that trick in the future.
Romney’s candidacy is clearly an exercise in self-delusion. For the GOP to nominate a painfully wooden private-equity baron — at a time when its biggest problem is its image as the party of rich white men — was excusable the first time; a second time, it would be a joke. No American would take the party seriously. And if Romney thinks talking about poverty — an issue on which no mainstream journalist would give him the benefit of the doubt — will change his public perception, he clearly has departed from reality. Even without the accountability aspect, a Romney candidacy would be a disaster.
I personally find it impossible not to have sympathy for Mitt Romney, the man. But there seems to be two Romneys. There’s “Mitt,” the fair-dealing businessman, the talented technocratic governor, the Christian man deeply involved in his church, the devoted husband and father. And then there is “Candidate Romney,” a man who seems to be so consumed by his self-regard, his unshakeable faith in his own world-historical significance, that he is willing to say anything, and do anything, to reach the highest office in the land. The question was always which one would end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if elected. But now it is moot.
What was most endearing about Mitt Romney was what seemed like a genuine, basic human decency. But this selfsame decency should have told him that, no matter how great a president he thinks he would be, he could not run again, for the good of his party and country. Since he seemingly does not understand this, the country must make him understand.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, January 15, 2015
“A Triumph Of American Culture Welcoming Immigrants”: Why Republican Fear-Mongering About France Is Detached From Reality
One frequent criticism conservatives make of Barack Obama when it comes to terrorism is that he doesn’t “understand” the threats we face. This supposed lack of understanding, they say, is what leads the President to be so weak when what is needed is more strength, more military action, more belligerence. Those who “understand” terrorism know that this is the only path to combating it effectively.
With the attacks in Paris last week, conservatives and Republicans are again asserting that Obama’s lethal combination of ignorance and weakness is leaving us vulnerable, because terrorist incidents like the ones in France are soon to occur here in America. For instance, here’s an excerpt from a glowing story about John McCain in today’s New York Times:
He said in an interview last Thursday that Mr. Obama’s decision not to send more American troops to Iraq to thwart the Islamic State had put America at risk.
“That attack you saw in Paris? You’ll see an attack in the United States,” Mr. McCain said. He repeated his frequent assessment that the president’s foreign policy is “a disaster” and “delusional.” He said “of course” he would have made a better commander in chief.
Let’s follow the logic here. McCain is arguing that because we don’t have enough troops in Iraq, someone could get some guns and shoot a bunch of Americans — presumably at ISIS’s behest — whereas if we had more troops there, ISIS would still want to launch (or order, or encourage, or inspire) that kind of an attack, but they wouldn’t be able to.
So what exactly does McCain think was required for those two men to attack the Charlie Hebdo offices? Was it an international conspiracy involving a huge mobilization of resources and the coordination of large numbers of people spread across the world? No. Despite the fact that al Qaeda in Yemen is trying to claim responsibility for it, all that the attack required was two guys and a couple of guns.
Yet McCain thinks that whether such an attack occurs in America will be determined by how strong and aggressive we’re being against ISIS.
McCain’s good friend Lindsey Graham had a similar interpretation of the events in Paris: it’s going to happen here, and it’s because President Obama is weak. “I fear we can expect and must prepare for more attacks like this in the future,” he said, adding that, because of Barack Obama’s poor policy choices, “I fear our intelligence capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly eroding.”
But even if you believed that Obama is eroding our intelligence capabilities (and I have no idea what he’s talking about on that score), does that make us more vulnerable to a couple of guys with guns shooting up a public place? If such an attack were in the works, it wouldn’t require getting resources from overseas, and it wouldn’t require coordination and communication of the kind American intelligence might intercept. All that would be necessary is for someone who is angry enough to go to a gun show, pick up some heavy weaponry, and he’d be on his way. And he probably wouldn’t have to go far — according to this calendar, there are 61 gun shows happening this week in America — not this year or this month, but just this week.
Given how easy it would be to carry out an attack like the one on Charlie Hebdo, the real question is why it doesn’t happen all the time. While there have been a number of cases in recent years in which right-wing terrorists have tried to shoot a bunch of people, there have been only a couple of occurrences of politically motivated jihadist attacks like the ones in Paris — not an attempt to plant a bomb or do something similarly elaborate, but just somebody taking a gun and shooting a bunch of people — most notably that of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people at Ft. Hood in 2009 (there was also a Seattle man who killed four people last year and claimed it was revenge for American military actions).
So why doesn’t it happen more here? The answer is that unlike their European counterparts, American Muslims are as a group extremely assimilated and patriotic. So there’s virtually no one here who wants to carry out such an attack. Our relative safety on this score isn’t a triumph of intelligence, it’s a triumph of the American culture of welcoming immigrants.
Of course intelligence is important in preventing terrorism. But Republican critics, who are so proud of their supposedly deep understanding of national security issues, seem to believe that every kind of terrorist attack is exactly alike, and is made more or less likely for exactly the same reasons. That’s the kind of sophisticated thinking on terrorism we’ve supposedly been missing for the last six years.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 14, 2015
“Whose Security?”: The GOP Is Playing Games With The Department Of Homeland Security’s Funding In Order To Placate Its Extremists
The Republicans are railing against President Barack Obama for not having a high level U.S. official marching in solidarity with the French this past weekend. OK, that was a mistake on Obama’s part, but this from the Republican crowd that was so anti-France it wanted to change the name of “French fries” in the House of Representatives cafeteria to “Freedom fries”? This from the crowd who will vote tomorrow to approve a Homeland Security Bill totaling $39.7 billion only if it guts our immigration system and refuses to fund the Dream Act, deporting hundreds of thousands of children as well as parents? This from the Republicans who refused to act for a year and a half on a bipartisan Senate bill on immigration that passed with over two-thirds of the vote?
Does Speaker John Boehner really want to put in jeopardy the funding for Homeland Security, especially after the attacks in France and the raised threat level? I doubt it. But the speaker needs to throw his sizable right-wing caucus a bone and let them vote to defund Obama’s immigration plans. He then prays that the Senate saves him, doesn’t pass this absurd piece of legislation, so then they can end up passing a clean bill funding Homeland Security before the end of February when funding runs out. Or if the president is forced to veto the bill, he figures that somehow some fig leaf can be created to allow him to basically bring up a clean funding bill.
This strategy, negotiated with the extremist members of the House of Representatives, was lunacy in December; it is akin to a Kamikaze mission for Republicans now.
In fact, it is a double whammy. It convinces voters that Republicans are the anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant party, and that they are more than willing to sacrifice our nation’s security to prove how intolerant they are as a party.
My guess is that the reason Boehner wants a vote on Wednesday is to get it out of the way, to give the extremists their say and then avoid a last minute crisis over Homeland Security funding. One day of a “shutdown” of those critical agencies is one day too many.
It will be interesting to see how many of these strategic blunders the Republicans make over the course of the next two years. The House, of course, can pass whatever it wants, but if the GOP puts forth bills as unrealistic and unhelpful as this effort, it will certainly pay the price at the ballot box. It will be their own job security that will be put in peril.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, January 13, 2015
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