“Shuffling The Deck Chairs On The Titanic”: Are Right Wing Republicans Plotting A Coup Against John Boehner?
Right-wing Republicans are reportedly organizing a coup against House Speaker John Boehner — and if they get their way, Paul Ryan could end up holding the speaker’s gavel.
Speaker Boehner — who is currently the least popular leader in Congress — has long struggled to control the right-wing flank of his party, but his disastrous failure to pass his “Plan B” budget deal crystallized the problem in a highly public way.
In response, some on the right are mobilizing to replace Boehner with a House speaker who drops Boehner’s pretense of being willing to negotiate with the White House, and who sticks more purely to extreme conservative dogma.
According to Matthew Boyle of the far-right website Breitbart News, conservative House Republicans have already laid the groundwork to do just that. Boyle reports that several members and staffers are quietly circulating a multi-step plan to oust Boehner as speaker on January 3rd. The first step of the plan would be to change House rules to elect the speaker by secret ballot instead of by a public roll-call vote; this would protect the congressmen who vote against Boehner from retribution.
The plotters are confident that such a measure would succeed, because Boehner himself has passionately argued in favor of secret ballots in the past. While opposing the Employee Free Choice Act — ironically, a favorite target of the right wing that now has Boehner in its sights — the speaker wrote a 2009 op-ed stressing that secret ballots protect against “coercion” and “intimidation.” In a document laying out the plan to oust Boehner (which can be viewed on Breitbart.com), the anonymous staffers behind the planned coup note that Boehner would be in the “impossible position of opposing secret ballot or being confronted on the Floor with his own, indicting op-ed.”
If the move to vote via secret balloting is successful, then House Republicans would be able to anonymously vote until a Republican gains the 218 votes necessary for election as speaker. According to Boyle, House Republicans are confident that Boehner would not survive a secret ballot — but that another, still-anonymous congressman, “will unite the party and take the speakership.”
Could that congressman be Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan? Right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham said on Wednesday that “a well-placed conservative voice on the Hill” told her that there were “rumblings” that Ryan could replace Boehner. Although the former vice-presidential nominee is a member of Boehner’s “fiscal cliff” negotiating team (and supported Boehner’s ill-fated “Plan B”), he has the support of prominent right-wing voices such as Red State’s Erick Erickson, and his Tea Party bona fides have been well established over the past four years. If any congressional Republican could unite Boehner’s supporters and the Tea Party-backed base of the party, it would probably be Ryan.
That said, were Ryan to be elected as sSpeaker, there’s no reason to believe that he’d prove any more successful in the role than Boehner has. House Republicans — most of whom come from extremely safe districts where their only electoral concern would be a conservative primary challenge — seem wholly unconcerned with the political realities facing their party, and the fiscal realities facing the country. It doesn’t matter if Boehner, or Ryan, or even an outsider like Jon Huntsman becomes speaker (as American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein recently suggested in a Hall of Fame example of how inside-the-Beltway consensus loses touch with reality).
Until the Republican Party listens to the American people and compromises on its extremely right-wing (and extremely unpopular) positions, changing its leadership will amount to little more than shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 27, 2012
“Homemade Trail Mix”: Obama-Fearing Gun Nuts Are, Well, Nuts
There seems to be a little confusion on the part of gun enthusiasts about what a second Obama term means for them, and how they can battle any efforts to control their firearms ownership.
First, there are the nervous sorts who raced out and bought guns rights away after President Obama was re-elected. The subtext is that somehow this president will take away their guns—and yet there is no evidence to indicate that. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama has not only not done anything to advance gun control, but he actually expanded gun rights early in his term, signing a law that allows people to bring guns onto federal land.
Nor does the ongoing Democratic majority in the Senate pose a plausible threat. The Democrats, while perhaps at heart in favor of sensible limits on guns, figured out a long time ago that they will only be the majority party if they keep pretty quiet about that—and allow some of their recruits to be staunchly pro-gun.
But while that seems a tad hysterical, as a reaction to Obama’s win, it’s positively rational compared to the behavior of the owner of an Arizona gun shop. Says a full-page newspaper ad in the White Mountain Independent:
If you voted for Barack Obama your business is NOT WELCOME at Southwest Shooting Authority. You have proven you are not responsible enough to own a firearm.
There are some obvious inherent problems with this policy. For one, how will the owner know whom a potential buyer voted for in the election? Secondly, wouldn’t a gun-owning, pro-Obama voter be more likely to pull the party even closer to an embrace of the Second Amendment (omitting the inconvenient part about a “well-regulated militia”)? And if someone opposes gun control, why initiate a de facto limit on gun ownership by denying your firearms business to the 51 percent of voters who indeed chose Obama?
Perhaps the owner believes there will be, as a Texas judge irresponsibly and irrationally predicted, some sort of civil war provoked by Obama’s re-election—and maybe he doesn’t want the other side to have guns. Or maybe it’s just about the “other”—Obama’s race, his unusual name, and the legions of African-Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians, single women and everyone else who doesn’t fit into the Ward Cleaver mode—that are giving the gunshop owner such a case of the nerves. He might want to get used to it. He’s now in the minority.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2012
“Insecure And Delusional”: Donald Trump’s Racist Hassling Of President Obama
Ridicule Donald Trump if you will. But he has, in his self-aggrandizing, delusional way, earned his own place in history.
It’s not in the way he would like. Trump appears to imagine that he is some financial and political genius, someone who alone knows how to run businesses and by extension, government. Not so much: It doesn’t take any special smarts to make a lot of cash during an historic real estate boom, and Trump in recent years has focused mainly on attaching his name to buildings and events—usually in gaudy letters. Nor has Trump displayed anything close to thoughtfulness or sophistication when it comes to politics or public policy.
Trump, whose primary goal is promoting his own name, is indeed achieving that goal. He is establishing himself as the poster adolescent for the segment of the American public that just can’t, or won’t, accept that the country is no longer run entirely by rich white men like him. In the hateful campaign to define President Barack Obama as “other” in some way—absurd insistences that he is Muslim, not American, or a socialist—Donald trumps the crowd.
Trump was clearly pleased at his pivotal role in forcing Obama to release his long-form birth certificate—an undignified and demeaning move that the president should never have had to make. But there were enough people in denial over the fact that we have a mixed-race president that Obama, unfortunately, was pushed to release the document. Trump was thrilled at his own power in the situation, but that was not enough.
In the most recent, and really, most pathetic display of Trump’s irritation with Obama’s existence as president was Trump’s ballyhooed “bombshell” announcement this week. Was it Obama divorce papers? Some other “evidence” that Obama is not really one of us? No—it was, laughably, a TV hucksterish pledge by Trump to donate $5 million to the charity of Obama’s choice if the president releases his university records, including his applications. Trumps wants the documents by 5 p.m. on October 31, suggesting this might have something to do with Trump’s Halloween costume.
It’s no surprise that Trump thinks everything and everyone can be purchased. It’s getting a little tiresome that he thinks he’s raising legitimate questions about Obama’s academic record. Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. Trump seems to think that Obama got where he was—Ivy League schools and perhaps even the presidency—through some elaborate web of lies and affirmative action. That’s not just insulting, it reveals the egomaniacal Trump’s true insecurities.
There have been a lot of misstatements and outright lies thrown around in this campaign, but Trump could set an example by revealing one truth. And that is that he just can’t stand the fact that an African-American man with an exotic name is smarter and more successful than he is. It’s part of what will hopefully be a last-gasp wave of racism and fear of “other” in American society. And in history books yet to be written, Trump will be included. And it won’t be flattering.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 25, 2012
“Romney The Detail Man”: Another Convenient Right-Wing Lie
The so-called “mainstream media” (aka The New York Times) is constantly being assailed by Republicans and the right for their supposedly liberal slant. Yet another convenient right-wing lie.
Take, for example, Saturday’s above-the-fold NY Times story, entitled (in the print edition that arrived at my home this morning): “Romney Recalled as Leader Who Savors Details.”
What?
It’s mainly a puff piece, aglow with Romney’s supposed managerial prowess. Coming just a bit more than three weeks before Election Day, it attempts to confirm Romney’s central selling point – that he can run the government better than Obama.
Nowhere does the Times bother to mention that Romney’s campaign has been devoid of any detail at all — details about his economic plan, his budget plan, his plan for what to replace Obamacare with, his plan to replace Dodd-Frank, or even details about the taxes he’s paid.
When he was governor of Massachusetts, the citizens of the Commonwealth had no idea what he was doing (I can attest because I was there, and as much in the dark as most people). He kept the details of his governing to himself and his staff. And he spent most of his last two years in office laying the groundwork for his run for the presidency.
Romney has always savored details when it helps him make money. But when it comes to running or holding office he’s been a standout for avoiding all details and keeping the public in the dark.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, October 20, 2012
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