“Hijacked By Ideologues”: The Republicans Have Now Agreed To Raise Taxes For The Entire Country
The inside line from Washington is that there will be no Fiscal Cliff deal before the end of the year.
That’s not surprising. Unfortunately, it always seemed unlikely that our politicians would agree to any vote that could be framed as them having voted to “raise taxes” — which any deal before December 31 could have been framed as.
The more likely scenario seemed to be that politicians would wait until taxes increased automatically on January 1 and then heroically vote to cut them — at least some of them.
And that’s still my bet about what will happen in January.
But just because it seemed likely that politicians would be ruled by “politics” instead of pragmatism doesn’t mean this is something to be proud of.
And let’s be clear about what has happened in the past two months.
What has happened is that the political party that has based its entire existence on never agreeing to a tax hike of any kind has essentially agreed to tax hike for the entire country.
By not accepting the Democrats’ offer to extend the Bush tax cuts for ~98% of Americans, the Republicans have agreed to let taxes rise on ALL Americans.
The Republicans have done this, it appears, only (or at least mainly) in a stubborn attempt to preserve lower tax rates on the highest-earning Americans.
And now those tax rates, too, will go up.
And the economy will slow down.
The Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the tax hikes on the Democrats, but most Americans have seen through this. And rightly so. The Republicans agreed to the coming tax hikes when they voted for the legislation in the summer of 2011. And now, by refusing to extend the tax cuts for all Americans but the richest 2%, the Republicans have tacitly once again agreed to raise taxes on all Americans.
This is what happens when a party that used to be known for pragmatism and responsibility allows itself to be hijacked by ideologues.
A deal to mute the impact of the Fiscal Cliff and raise the debt ceiling should be within easy reach of reasonable people on both sides of the aisle.
Unfortunately, our government isn’t run by reasonable people anymore. Especially on the Republican side.
NOTE: This is my personal view, not “Business Insider’s” So if you want to lecture someone about how the Republicans are absolutely right to agree to raise taxes on the entire country just to avoid voting to increase taxes on the highest-earning Americans, please direct those notes to me.
By: Henry Blodgett, Business Insider, December 27, 2012
“The Prettification Of The Gun Culture”: The Pro-Gun World Is Aggressively Exploiting Female Fears To Grow Their Base
Here is something that becomes clear when you look at polling data on support for gun control laws, both after Sandy Hook and over the past several years: The same demographics that rejected Republicans in the presidential election are likeliest to support gun control, notably Latinos of both genders and women across the board.
White male Republicans in redder regions are still the base for untrammeled gun rights, even if they’re not the only ones. But when it comes to women, that number had been slowly moving in the NRA’s favor — and it’s all part of a plan.
Four years ago, 30 percent of women told Pew that gun rights were more important to them than controlling gun ownership. This April, that number was 39 percent — still less than the 60 percent of men who favored gun rights, but a dramatic rise nonetheless. And these women were likelier to be white; in the same poll, 57 percent of whites picked gun rights over gun control. African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly told pollsters they preferred gun control.
This is why we have “Packing Pretty.” This is why we have the NRA Women’s Network. And it’s why we have “Flash Bang bra holsters.”
Nancy Lanza wasn’t the only woman who liked to shoot. For years, gun manufacturers and their political enablers have clearly recognized that they need to broaden their base. There is a saccharine-pink infrastructure built around trying to get women to pack heat, and it’s working by nearly every measure. The marketing often holds out the specter of rape as an incentive, despite the fact that the majority of rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances, and domestic violence-related deaths run along similar lines. That’s working, too: In one survey, a majority of the new female gun buyers proclaimed that they owned guns for self-defense.
That was the rationale of Regis Giles, who runs the site Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, and who gave a memorable speech at CPAC last year saying she was “sick and tired of seeing defenseless girls being abducted in broad daylight by some fruity freak who gets aroused by raping and abducting them.” (Nearly two years after I first encountered these words, I’m still confused by “fruity.”)
Giles is from a combative and visible conservative family; her sister posed as a prostitute alongside “pimp” James O’Keefe to ensnare ACORN, and her father has a shouty Christian radio show. Her commentary on last week’s tragedy — on a site framed with images of bloodstains — included “Quite frankly it is retarded that schools haven’t enforced their security measures after Columbine,” and suggestions for all school staff to be required to carry guns to work. Watch out, Wayne LaPierre: These ladies are coming for your job.
This destructive fantasy of a woman shooting down her rapist may sound more like feminist empowerment than Charlotte Allen blaming weak women for the children’s deaths, but it’s a distortion that puts more women and men at risk. All the pink holsters in the world can’t change that.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, December 26, 2012
“The Bolsheviks Of The Right”: The GOP Brings Politics To A Crisis Point
Really, what is to be done about this Republican Party? What force can change it—can stop Republicans from being ideological saboteurs and convert at least a workable minority of them into people interested in governing rather than sabotage? With the failed Plan B vote, we have reached the undeniable crisis point. Actually we’ve been at a crisis point for years, but this is really the all-upper-case Undeniable Crisis Point. They are a direct threat to the economy, which could slip back into recession next year if the government doesn’t, well, govern. They are an ongoing, at this point almost mundane, threat to democracy, subverting and preventing progress the American people clearly desire across a number of fronts. They have to be stopped, and the only people who can really stop them are corporate titans and Wall Streeters, who surely now are finally beginning to see that America’s problem is not Barack Obama and his alleged “socialism,” but a political party that has become psychologically incapable of operating within the American political system.
We all know that the GOP has become much more extreme in the last few years, and, taking the longer historical view, the last 20 or 25 years. But when that gets said, it usually elides an important point—the important point. It’s usually meant to refer to the party’s policy positions. And the move to the hard right is obviously true along those lines.
But politics, and certainly political parties, aren’t only about policy positions. There’s also the question of what I’ll call process, which means simply how a party practices politics on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis. This isn’t a question of the positions per se, but how the party attempts to advance and defend them.
And it’s on process far, far more than on policy that the Republican Party has gone nutso. You know this story, too, so I needn’t rehearse the details, except to describe the current end point, which is that to the GOP today, the Democrats must be denied any victory by any means necessary. The Republicans unwilling to vote for Plan B weren’t in the main loathe to give Boehner a win. The problem was that that particular Boehner win might have led to an Obama win. That was the issue that drove them.
In that sense, all these people saying they learned no lesson from the election are completely wrong. They learned a lesson, all right, but the lesson they took away is just the opposite of the kind of lesson normal small-d democrats would learn. Normal small-d democrats would learn that you’ve lost twice now, and while you should still stick to your principles of course, it was also time to play a little ball. But these Republicans learned that they have to be even more obstructionist. Their ideas are unpopular, their America is dying. But by God, they’re standing until the last man! They’re Paulus’s soldiers at Stalingrad, surrounded by an enemy that embodies evil—and is fated to outlast them. This is how they’ve been trained to think.
So they’ll give no ground. People are now saying that the only way to avoid going off the cliff is for Boehner to let the Senate bill come to the floor and let it be passed mostly by Democrats. But what reason is there to believe that even 20 or 25 Republicans would vote for a bill? And please, don’t tell me “because a large majority of Americans would support it.” That doesn’t matter to them.
And next year, in January or February, when Joe Biden’s task force completes its work and we have new gun legislation? We have now rafts of new polling showing that clear majorities will support the kinds of proposals that are likely to be in any such legislation. But that won’t matter. They have the votes to block, and they will. And then perhaps Obama will attempt immigration reform, again with a solid majority of Americans behind him. They showed a few post-election signs of yielding here, so we’ll see. But as the issue heats up, the usual sources will start warning even the softer-hearted GOP legislators that a vote for immigration is a vote for Obama, you quisling, and if you waver on this you can certainly expect a primary challenge.
They didn’t come to Washington to govern. They came to sabotage. So our working assumption must be whatever the issue, sabotage is what they’re going to do.
And they can do it all they want. Our founders didn’t assume that a cadre of people of such immense bad faith and cynicism would ever come to control key levers of government; they built a system that would work, albeit slowly, in the hands of people of reasonably good will. It’s a system that people of bad will can subvert and stop from functioning.
Someone has to tell them enough. The only people I can think of with the power to do so are the high-profile figures of Wall Street and the corporate world. They’re the only people these Republicans might conceivably listen to. They should have done it—and some did—last year during the debt-limit hostage-taking. But then, most of corporate American was still wagering that the Republicans could beat Obama in 2012. Now that that hasn’t happened, now that we’re four years away from another election and Obama will be retiring anyway, and now that the Republicans have demonstrated that they are interested in no compromise at all in any way shape or form, maybe the business elite will finally show some responsibility.
Once upon a time, the statists—Roosevelt and his brains trusters—helped save capitalism from the Bolsheviks of the left. Today, the capitalists have to help save the state. This time the enemy is the Bolsheviks of the right, our current GOP. They’re taking us over the fiscal cliff, and they’ll do far worse without an intervention.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 23, 2012
“It’s Our System On The Cliff”: Republicans Can Spend Two Years Doing Absolutely Nothing Or Try To Help Solve The Country’s Problems
The United States faces a crisis in our political system because the Republican Party, particularly in the House of Representatives, is no longer a normal, governing party.
The only way we will avoid a constitutional crackup is for a new, bipartisan majority to take effective control of the House and isolate those who would rather see the country fall into chaos than vote for anything that might offend their ideological sensibilities.
In a democratic system with separated powers, two houses of Congress, split between the parties, a normal party accepts that compromise is the only way to legislate. A normal party takes into account election results. A normal party recognizes when the other side has made real concessions. A normal party takes responsibility.
By all of these measures, the Republican majority that Speaker John Boehner purports to lead is abnormal. That is the meaning of his catastrophic failure to gather the votes for his “Plan B” proposal on the “fiscal cliff.” Many of his most radical members believe they have a right to use any means at their disposal to impose their views on the country, even if they are only a minority in Congress.
There may, however, be good news in the disarray: The right wing of the Republican House has chosen to marginalize itself from any serious negotiations. The one available majority for action, especially on budgets, is a coalition uniting most Democrats with those Republicans who still hold the old-fashioned view that they were elected to help run the country.
To avert a fiscal nightmare in the short run, this potential majority needs to be allowed to work its will. The result may well be a modestly more progressive solution than President Obama offered Boehner, a deal with somewhat fewer cuts and more revenue. That’s the price the right wing will have to pay for refusing to govern.
This is almost exactly what happened in 1990, when the most conservative Republicans rejected a deficit-reduction agreement negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and Democrats in Congress. After a conservative rebellion brought the initial bill down, a more progressive measure was enacted with more Democratic votes.
In the longer run, the non-tea party wing of the GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be subject to the whims of colleagues to their right or look to the center for alliances with the Democrats. The choice is plain: We can spend two years doing absolutely nothing, or we can try to solve the country’s problems. This includes the problem of gun violence, and the question is whether the GOP will reject the tone-deaf extremism of NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre response to the killings in Newtown, Conn.
Our political structure has been disfigured in another way: In November’s election, Democrats failed to win the House even though they received about a million more votes in House contests than the Republicans did. Republicans were protected by gerrymandered districts and by political geography: Democrats tend to win urban and certain suburban districts by overwhelming margins.
In Pennsylvania, to pick a stark case, Democrats edged out the Republicans in the popular vote for House races. But given how the districts were drawn, this resulted in the Republicans winning 13 seats to only five for the Democrats.
Both parties gerrymander, of course, but Republicans had far more influence over the process this time because the 2010 election gave them dominance of so many legislatures. Thus did one election shape our politics for a decade, even though the country changed its mind one election later.
This unfortunate moment is a vindication of those like my colleagues Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have been arguing that today’s Republicans are fundamentally different from their forebears. In their appropriately named book, “It’s Even Worse than It Looks,” Mann and Ornstein called the current GOP “an insurgent outlier in American politics,” and described the party this way: “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise . . . and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Their words are a rather precise description of why Boehner was unable to deliver a majority of his party to his budget bill.
It’s true that Boehner miscalculated, foolishly asking Republicans to vote for a symbolic tax increase that had no chance of becoming law. And the speaker fed the fires of rebellion with repeated false claims that Obama had made no meaningful concession when the president had, in fact, annoyed his base by making rather big ones.
But now, at least, we know something important: The current Republican majority in the House cannot govern. Only a coalition across party lines can get the public’s business done.
By: E. J. Dionne, J., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 23, 2012
“Bedford Falls Or Pottersville?”: The Mr. Potter’s Are Still Alive And Well In America
It’s easy to feel discouraged about the bullying by right-wing Republicans and their patrons over everything from gun control to taxes and social safety nets to trade unions and jobs.
Every year about now I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” again to remind myself what Frank Capra understood about America — its essential decency and common sense.
In many ways the nation is better than it was in 1946 when the movie first appeared. Women have gained economic power and reproductive rights; we enacted Civil Rights and Voting Rights and, through Medicare and Medicaid, dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly; we began to tackle environmental devastation; we stopped treating gays as criminals and have even started to recognize equal marriage rights. We elected and then re-elected the first black president of the United States. We have enacted the bare beginnings of universal healthcare.
But we are still in danger of the “Pottersville” Capra saw as the consequence of what happens when Americans fail to join together and forget the meaning of the public good.
If Lionel Barrymore’s “Mr. Potter” were alive today he’d call himself a “job creator” and condemn George Bailey as a socialist. He’d be financing a fleet of lobbyists to get lower taxes on multi-millionaires like himself, overturn environmental laws, trample on workers’ rights, and shred social safety nets. He’d fight any form of gun control. He’d want the citizens of Pottersville to be economically insecure – living paycheck to paycheck and worried about losing their jobs – so they’d be dependent on his good graces.
The Mr. Potters are still alive and well in America, threatening our democracy with their money and our common morality with their greed.
Call me naive or sentimental but I still believe the George Baileys will continue to win this contest. They know we’re all in it together, and that if we succumb to the bullying selfishness of the Potters we lose America and relinquish the future.
Happy holidays.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, December 22, 2012
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