“Abandoning The Pretense Of Seriousness”: GOP Motivations Have Nothing To Do With Governing
The new House Republican leadership team, facing its first real test yesterday, failed miserably. They backed a bill that ostensibly addresses the humanitarian crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, but the bill died before it even reached the floor. Rank-and-file Republican lawmakers had rejected their own party’s bill.
But instead of leaving town for Congress’ five-week break, GOP lawmakers met this morning to work something out, and by all appearances, Speaker John Boehner and his team effectively told right-wing members, “Tell us what you want and we’ll say yes.” The result is a new bill, set to pass this afternoon.
House Republicans are taking a second shot at passing a border funding package Friday after party leaders failed to whip enough support among conservatives and were forced to pull legislation Thursday. The new version of the bill will add $35 million to offer states that dispatch National Guard service members to the border, adding up to $694 million in emergency funding relief to cope with the flood of unaccompanied minors streaming into the United States.
Unwilling to leave Washington without first passing a border package, lawmakers aim to vote on the revised legislation Friday along with a separate vote on legislation to undercut laws protecting young undocumented immigrants.
To appreciate what the House GOP has come up with, note that Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), two of the fiercest opponents of the bill that died yesterday, think this new proposal is awesome.
[Update: King told Roll Call, “The changes brought into this are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years. It’s like I ordered it off the menu.”]
The agreement conservative Republicans reached with very conservative Republicans can charitably be described as a bad joke. This legislation wouldn’t address the humanitarian crisis in any meaningful way, and really doesn’t even try.
The Washington Post’s report conceded the legislation “would do little to immediately solve the crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border but would allow [Republican lawmakers] to go home and tell voters that they did what they could.”
In other words, the post-policy House majority is putting on a little show this afternoon. Even marginally informed observers will recognize this as pointless theater, but GOP members won’t care because the point of the exercise will be to create a talking point – one that no fair-minded person will believe anyway.
Some of the details are still elusive, but reports suggest that the right was satisfied when Republican leaders agreed to advance provisions that not only support deportations of Dream Act kids, but also blocks current Dreamers who are already benefiting from the Obama administration’s DACA policy from renewing their participation in the program.
As a practical matter, this makes the bill more of a far-right fantasy than an actual plan. The motivations behind it have nothing to do with governing. Indeed, the very idea is laughable under the circumstances – it’s not as if the Speaker’s office has been in communication with Senate Democrats and the White House, looking for some common ground on a proposal that could become law.
Rather, Boehner, bruised and embarrassed, gave up. The goal this morning was to craft a new plan that makes far-right extremists happy. And that’s precisely what they’ve done.
Of course, the charade would be easier to pull off it weren’t quite so transparent. Republicans will spend the next five weeks saying, “See? We did our jobs!” it will be painfully obvious that their claims are as misleading as they are demonstrably ridiculous. For GOP lawmakers to have done their jobs, they would have had to agree to a serious proposal that related in some meaningful way to the task at hand.
That is clearly not what’s happened.
As for the road ahead, Sahil Kapur reports, “The plan is to have two votes: the first one is on the supplemental and tougher border language to swiftly send home children coming from Central American countries. If that passes, there’ll be a second vote on the bill to end the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and stop the president from granting legal status to anyone in the U.S. illegally.”
If Republicans get on planes this evening feeling good about themselves and their accomplishments, they’re not paying close enough attention. They’ve become the Cruz/Bachmann/King Party – which is exactly the opposite of what party leaders had in mind at the start of this Congress.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2014
“Just Doing Nothing Is Difficult”: Even By ‘Do-Nothing’ Standards, This Congress Is Useless
On Friday, the House of Representatives will join the Senate on recess, leaving the 113th Congress on pace to be one of the most ineffective in history.
Its reputation for inaction is well earned. As the Pew Research Center’s Drew DeSilver points out, as of Wednesday this Congress has passed just 142 laws — fewer than any of its recent predecessors did in their first 19 months.
And Congress isn’t just failing to act on major iniatives, like gun, immigration, or tax reform. It’s also passed fewer ceremonial bills — think post office renamings, or commemorative coin authorizations — than any of its predecessors in the past 16 years.
As House Republicans demonstrated this week, even doing nothing has become exceedingly difficult for this group. Republican leaders were forced to pull their immigration bill from the floor without a vote on Thursday, after failing to collect enough votes for it from within their own caucus. This, despite the fact that the bill has no chance of ever becoming law, and is — by House Republicans’ own admission — substantively useless.
After allowing the most right-wing Republicans to order from a menu of changes, it appears that the House will be able to pass its message bill on Friday. But as long as the Republican majority is filled with “a lot of members who just don’t want to vote for anything,” as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) put it, Congress will continue to struggle to pass many actual laws.
By: Henry Decker, the National Memo, August 1, 2014
“Hilarious High-Dudgeon Denial”: GOP; How Dare You Say What I Said About Impeachment
The Republican leadership is furious that the media keep talking about their plans to impeach Barack Obama, and the GOP knows who’s injecting this false idea into the talking heads: Barack Obama.
Even as he led the House in the unprecedented step Wednesday of voting to sue a POTUS, House speaker John Boehner insists that all this talk about impeachment is “coming from the president’s own staff, and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill.” Why? Because they’re trying to rally their people to give money and to show up in this year’s election. We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Boehner emphasized. “Listen, it’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House.”
And although any alert reporter knows it’s Boehner’s protest that’s the scam (a dozen or so Republican congressmen have openly called for Obama’s impeachment; White House spokesman Josh Earnest named some of them, including Representative Steve King of Iowa and Steve Stockman of Texas, earlier this week), some in the corporate media nevertheless sniff a chance to deploy false equivalencies once more.
Chuck Todd, for example, said on Morning Joe, “I think the White House ought to be embarrassed at how they’re trying to play it. Boehner, the idea that he’s saying, Oh, we’re not talking impeachment. The lawsuit, please. That’s about placating the impeachment caucus in his own party. This is sort of an embarrassing moment for Washington. The leaders of both parties here, they’re driving away people from the polls. They’re driving people away from politics. This is cynical, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting.”
This pox-on-both-your-houses rant ignores the two houses’ very different dimensions. Calling for impeachment when no grounds for it exist and responding to those calls by raising funds to beat the impeachment-wingers at the polls are not equally cynical. It’s true that Democrats are exploiting GOP calls for impeachment to raise ire and money—several million dollars so far. And good for them. Why, in the age of Citizens United, shouldn’t they? “It would be malpractice if they didn’t do it,” Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart said on Hardball.
The Republicans’ inability to throw their base red meat without sane people noticing drives them into high-dudgeon denial. Hilariously so. On Tuesday, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said, “Republicans, conservatives, not talking about it. Only Democrats. It’s to gin up the base before November.” He said this even though, just days earlier, as Media Matters points out, Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano appeared on F&F “and counseled the GOP to impeach the president, which Napolitano claimed would ‘focus his attention immediately.’”
Fox is also trying to gloss over the impeachment soap opera coming from some of its other contributors, like Allen West and, most famously, Sarah Palin. Yeah, but those are just has-been fringers, not to be taken seriously, centrists point out. Chuck Todd even mocked Josh Earnest for listing pro-impeachment officials currently in office. The White House spokesman, Todd said, was “sitting at the podium trying, ticking off names of—oooh-oooh—look at Republicans that want impeachment.”
But look who’s wagging the dog here. According to a CNN/ORC International poll, 57 percent of Republicans say they support impeaching Obama. And Representative Steve Scalise, the new House majority whip, wouldn’t put impeachment off the table when Chris Wallace asked him about it three times. (It was a fascinating example of getting hoisted on your own talking point: each time Scalise refused to rule out impeachment, he blamed Obama for keeping the issue alive.)
For the record, John Boehner won’t take impeachment off that increasingly crowded table either.
Worse, Boehner is ignoring the top GOPer who “started” it: himself. The notoriously weak speaker set this latest round of impeachment talk in motion by bringing the lawsuit against Obama to the floor in the first place. The idea of this “impeachment lite” was to let his Tea Party masters vent their Obama hatred in a way that it would squelch talk of actual impeachment. The Republican leadership knows the issue could backfire on them during the 2014 elections, just as it did when the GOP impeached Clinton in 1998 and lost five House seats that year they previously had in the bag.
But rather than cool impeachment fever, the lawsuit has in fact heated it up by giving extremists in the House another way to question “responsible” Republicans’ true commitment to the cause. At least four of the five conservatives who voted against the lawsuit did so because they think it’s a weenie version of impeachment.
Here’s the bottom line: Boehner responded to impeachment talk from his right wing by filing a lawsuit. Yet when Democrats responded to that same impeachment talk from the same right wing, Boehner claims that it doesn’t exist—and if it does, the Dems are behind it.
We’ve seen this political blame-the-victim game before. Republicans from Glenn Beck to Karl Rove blamed Obama for keeping the birther issue alive by not releasing his long-form birth certificate as soon as they demanded it. (When he did, the Trump-led crazies received a very public pie in the face.) Last October, Republicans with presidential ambitions, like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, blamed Obama for the government shutdown, even though they both voted for it and maneuvered around their leadership to make it happen. It’s worth recalling that before the shutdown went down, Boehner insisted that it was going nowhere—just as he now swears that impeachment ain’t gonna happen.
Making the GOP bear some responsibility for the crazy in their ranks is the real purpose behind the spotlight Democrats are shining on the right-wing fever swamps. The media’s “both sides do it” reflex obscures the real meaning of this particular charade. Chris Matthews, I think, has it right: he’s been saying the right wants to delegitimize this president (more than they did even Clinton), to put an “asterisk” by his name in the history books so they can pretend that a black man was never really the president of the United States.
If Republicans win the Senate in November, then we’ll be hearing more a lot more about impeachment, no matter how much John Boehner says otherwise.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, August 1, 2014
“Why GOP Reformers Are Bound To Fail”: The Conservative Base Is Staying Right Where It Is
Have you heard about the “reformicons“?
They’re a group of center-right writers and policy wonks who hope to coax the Republican Party away from its recent addiction to ideological extremism, tactical brinksmanship, and a do-nothing/know-nothing approach to governing. They have interesting, smart proposals for reforming tax policy, health policy, education policy, welfare policy, energy policy, family policy, and labor policy (though, strangely, nothing at all to say about foreign policy). And over the past few months, some of the men contemplating a run for the White House in 2016 (Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and, as of last week, Paul Ryan) have begun to embrace their ideas — or rather to propose ideas of their own that seem to be broadly harmonious with the “conservative governing vision” held out by the reformers.
It would be very good for the reformicons to have a substantive influence on the GOP. I admire their efforts. I wish them the best of luck.
But they are bound to fail. At least in the near term.
Why? Because the base of the Republican Party — the voters who will turn out at the polls for the midterm elections this November and then decide on the party’s nominee for president in 2016 — isn’t clamoring for the reform of job-licensing requirements. They (or two-thirds of them) don’t support impeaching President Obama because they’re dying for health-care reform based on targeted tax credits. They (or three-quarters of them) don’t support House Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit against the president because they’re furious at the White House for failing to offer enough anti-poverty block grants to the states.
The base of the Republican Party doesn’t particularly care about policy — unless the policy is tax cuts. Or policing the border, kicking out undocumented immigrants, and sending them dirty underwear.
From the moment Barack Obama took the oath of office, the base of the Republican Party has been gripped by a form of political psychosis, doing furious battle with ideological phantoms of its own creation, motivated by racial resentments and status anxieties that were once limited to marginal right-wing groups, but that thanks to tireless efforts of talk radio and Fox News now infect the minds of many millions of voters.
Among the most pernicious and self-destructive of these fantasies is the belief that the GOP lost to Obama in 2008 and 2012 because it nominated “Republicans In Name Only” (RINOs). If only the party had gone with a “true conservative” instead of the professional centrist John McCain and ObamaCare-architect Mitt Romney, the party would have won in a landslide.
There’s no empirical basis for rejecting the median voter theorem and supposing, instead, that the number of far-right voters surpasses the number of those in the ideological center. But no matter: a lot of grassroots Republicans believe it, and so a number of Republican politicians (foremost among them Frank Underwood — oh sorry, I mean Ted Cruz) accordingly treat it as cross between divine revelation and a self-evident truth.
As long as the Republican base and its would-be electoral champions use the RINO charge to police GOP ranks, there will be a strong incentive for presidential candidates to avoid embracing too much of the reformicon agenda — which in its details can sound an awful lot like ideas for, you know, reforming government rather than just cutting, slashing, and gutting it. Nothing could be more RINO, after all, than failing to see that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
But that doesn’t mean reformicon hopes are entirely misplaced. It’s just that reform is likely to take quite a bit longer than they seem to expect.
How long? As long as it takes for the party to nominate a genuine right-wing radical — and then watch him go down to defeat in a landslide to rival Goldwater in 1964 (38.5 percent) or McGovern in 1972 (37.5 percent). Only that kind of blowout will exorcize the demons that have taken hold of the Republican soul in recent years.
Believe me, I don’t relish this scenario playing itself out. The country would benefit immensely from the GOP waking up from its fever dreams. But getting there could be risky. In a two-person race, even a loony candidate has a chance of winning. Hillary Clinton will be a strong contender for the White House in 2016, but with Obama’s consistently soft approval ratings, world order falling to pieces on his watch, and the Senate in jeopardy of falling into Republican hands this November, she isn’t likely to be a shoo-in.
Still, the best chance for genuine Republican reform will be for the party to nominate a fire-brand who gets roundly and unambiguously repudiated by voters. That defeat, coming after two previous ones, just might provoke genuine soul-searching, and a dawning awareness that the GOP has gone down a dead end and can only find its way out by a dramatic change of direction. Think of liberals nominating New Democrat Bill Clinton after losing with Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael “Card-Carrying Member of the ACLU” Dukakis. Or Tony “Third Way” Blair leading the U.K.’s Labour Party to victory after 15 years in the wilderness under the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Sometimes a political party needs to get knocked upside the head before it can come back to its collective senses.
That’s what I’ll be waiting for — and what the reformicons have no choice but to hope for.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, July 30, 2014
“The GOP Loses Control Of Its Frankenstein Monster”: Speaker Boehner May Hold The Gavel, But He’s Not In Charge
The headline on the L.A. Times story reads, “Boehner rules out impeachment.” But when it comes to what the House Speaker actually said yesterday, the headline isn’t quite right.
“No, no, no, no,” Congressman Greg Walden, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Politico when asked whether the House would initiate impeachment proceedings. Boehner told reporters on Tuesday that there were “no plans” to remove Obama, calling the idea “a scam started by Democrats at the White House.”
We already know with certainty that the Ohio Republican is wrong when he blames this on the White House – the impeachment talk has come from GOP lawmakers and it’s been going on for years. Indeed, if this is a “scam,” John Boehner’s own leadership team is in on it – the new House Majority Whip, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) refused to take presidential impeachment off the table during an interview just three days ago.
But then there’s the part about Boehner’s “plans.”
There are a few angles to this story that are running on parallel tracks, all of which carry equal weight. The first is the GOP’s Frankenstein problem: Republican leaders created a monster, doing nothing to tamp down the right’s crusade to tear down the Obama presidency, and they suddenly find themselves scrambling now that the monster is running lose. As Arit John put it, Republicans have “lost control of the impeachment plot they hatched.”
It’s led to, among other things, an awkward dance in which pro-impeachment Republicans try to walk back their own rhetoric now that they realize how happy Democrats are to hear it.
The second is the intra-party tensions that won’t go away. In 2006, Nancy Pelosi disappointed some on the left by definitively ruling out presidential impeachment, taking it “off the table.” Today’s Republican leaders will do no such thing for a very specific reason: too many GOP lawmakers really do support the idea. Indeed, there was palpable disappointment among many on the far-right yesterday when Boehner suggested impeachment isn’t part of his future plans.
As Jonathan Capehart put it, “A ‘No, don’t be ridiculous. We’re not going to impeach the president. Period!’ from Scalise on Sunday or from Boehner today would have put an end to the chatter. But no.”
And finally, there’s the ongoing problem of Boehner’s weakness as House Speaker. By all appearances, Boehner appears genuinely reluctant to pursue an impeachment scheme. When he says he has “no plans” to push such a reckless move, he’s almost certainly telling the truth.
But Boehner also had “no plans” to shut down the government. He had “no plans” to force a debt-ceiling crisis. He had “no plans” to kill immigration reform. He had “no plans” to ignore the Hastert Rule. He had “no plans” to ignore the Boehner Rule.
The point is, it’s become painfully obvious that the Speaker may hold the gavel, but he’s not in charge in any meaningful sense. He may not intend to go after Obama with some ridiculous impeachment crusade, but given Boehner’s weakness and lack of credibility, the decision probably isn’t his to make.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, July 30, 2014
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