“On And On It Goes”: How The GOP Became A Party Of Ideological Extremism
As America’s two major political parties have evolved in the direction of philosophical purity over the past half century — with the Democrats emerging as the home of ideological progressivism and the Republicans as the font of ideological conservatism — it has become common for each to accuse the other of extremism.
Republicans call the Democrats strident socialists eager to bring about the End of Freedom in America, while Democrats accuse the Republicans of waging a War on Women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and just about anyone else who isn’t a Wealthy White Man. The vacuous centrism of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom then reinforces the pox-on-both-your-houses narrative, treating both sides as equally to blame for every failure to reach consensus and Get Things Done.
The reality is far less fair and balanced.
Over the past six years, Barack Obama has shown himself quite willing to compromise with Republicans, while Republicans have demonstrated over and over again that they have no interest in cutting deals with the president. (Number of Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote for President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill? Zero. Number of House Republicans to vote for the Affordable Care Act? Zero. And so on.)
Whether this is because of the GOP’s principled opposition to Obama’s policies, or its Machiavellian conviction that the president is hurt more than the opposition party by inaction in Washington, or (more likely) some combination of the two, the end result is the same: The Democrats prove themselves to be a pragmatic, centrist party, while the Republicans consistently demonstrate no-holds-barred ideological stridency.
We saw further examples this past weekend, at the Iowa Freedom Summit, where a long list of GOP presidential hopefuls spoke to adoring crowds in Des Moines.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz advocated an ideological litmus test: “Every candidate’s going to come in front of you and say, ‘I’m the most conservative guy to ever live.’” But “talk is cheap,” he insisted. “Show me where you stood up and fought.”
Now imagine a liberal presidential candidate taunting fellow Democrats, daring them to demonstrate their progressivism and willingness to stand up and fight for it.
Unlikely.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, meanwhile, plans to build a national campaign “on his record of defying teachers’ unions.”
Now imagine a Democrat building a national campaign on a record of defying police unions.
It wouldn’t happen.
Then there was rabble-rousing neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who promised that he would dismantle ObamaCare “even if it worked.”
Now imagine a Democrat showing an equal disdain for pragmatism by promising to prop up a government program “even if it doesn’t work.”
I don’t think so.
On and on it goes, with the GOP’s would-be presidential candidates competing to stake out the ideologically purest, most unambiguously right-wing position. An analogous scramble to the left just doesn’t happen among the Democrats — or at least it hasn’t happened since the time of the Reagan administration.
The question is why.
The answer has nothing to do with the machinations of party leaders or anything else that originates in Washington. On the contrary, the stance of each party reflects above all else the ideological makeup of its most loyal voters. And the fact is that in the United States, right-wing Republicans outnumber left-wing Democrats by a significant margin.
As the Pew Research Center showed last summer in an important report on political polarization, 22 percent of the general public identify as conservative (either socially or economically), while just 15 percent think of themselves as liberal.
Those are the relative sizes of each party’s ideological base.
The gap increases to 27 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal when highlighting registered voters. And it increases even further — to 36 percent conservative and 21 percent liberal — among the most “politically engaged” Americans.
Electorally speaking, Republicans are being pulled to the right by public opinion much more powerfully than Democrats are being pulled to the left.
This is one significant reason why the RealClearPolitics cumulative average of polls currently shows just 16 percent of Democrats supporting left-wing candidates (Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders), while nearly double that percentage of Republicans (30 percent) favor right-wing options (Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, or Rick Perry).
It’s also one important reason why Hillary Clinton — a candidate only a right-wing Republican could consider a radical lefty — currently enjoys 61 percent support among Democrats, while the more moderate Republicans (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio) receive a comparatively lukewarm combined total of 43 percent. (I’ve left Rand Paul, with 6.8 percent, out of both camps because his positions defy tidy ideological categorization.)
The GOP is a party increasingly being steered by its most stridently ideological voters. Which is one reason (among many others) why I won’t be voting for a Republican anytime soon.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 27, 2015
“The Ugly Assumptions Driving The Policy”: GOP Governors Recommit To Welfare Drug-Testing Schemes
The Wall Street Journal recently noted that when it comes to welfare recipients, “few” applicants have been caught up in the “drug-screening net.” How few? The piece noted that in Arizona, for example, between 2011 and 2014, over 108,000 people seeking benefits were subjected to drug screen. A grand total of 2 applicants were disqualified due to testing positive.
Note, I don’t mean 2 percent; I mean literally 2 individual people out of 108,408.
In recent years, the idea of imposing drug tests on welfare beneficiaries – which is to say, poor people receiving aid; those who receive corporate welfare benefits are exempt – has become exceedingly popular among many Republicans. The problem for proponents is that the programs keep failing – in practice, in the courts, or both.
And yet, several GOP policymakers just can’t seem to help themselves.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is pushing forward with a plan to make food stamp recipients pass drug tests – a requirement that the Obama administration says violates federal law. […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as FoodShare in Wisconsin), says it’s against the rules for states to require drug testing as a condition of receiving benefits. The federal government could yank administrative funding from states that are out of compliance – a threat the USDA leveled at Georgia over a similar drug testing scheme last year. Georgia backed down.
Walker has been aware of the rule from the start. “We believe that there will potentially be a fight with the federal government and in court,” he told the Journal Sentinel in September.
Indeed, for the ambitious Republican governor, it’s a two-fer – he gets to look “tough” on poor people in advance of his presidential campaign, and at the same time, Walker gets to boast about a big fight with the Obama administration, which will make a nice addition to his presidential stump speech.
Of course, it’s not just Walker. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) recently approved a policy of drug testing welfare recipients, and Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) is an enthusiastic supporter of the idea.
The case against the policy is pretty straightforward. It’s legally dubious for states to require poor people to give up bodily fluids in exchange for benefits they’re entitled to; it’s exceedingly expensive to administer the tests; and wherever these policies have been implemented, they’ve failed to produce much of anything in the way of results.
But as we’ve discussed before, perhaps the most striking problem is the ugly assumptions driving the policy itself. For many, especially on the right, it makes sense to assume those who are struggling are to blame for their plight.
If you’re relying on TANF aid to help your family keep its head above water, maybe there’s something wrong with your lifestyle. If you’ve fallen on hard times and need the public safety net, the state should probably assume you have a drug problem.
Real-world evidence, however, points in a different direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 23, 2015
“Let’s Go Inside His Head”: The True Confessions Of Mitt Romney
Say you’re Mitt Romney, and you still can’t believe you lost the 2012 election. You’ve been aiming barbs at President Obama and sending heartwarming Christmas cards featuring your large family. In 2014, you star in a flattering documentary and post charming photos of your hike through the Mountain West with five of your 22 grandchildren. When asked whether you will make a third try for the White House, you and your wife say absolutely not, many times in many ways.
And then suddenly you’re giving off definitive “let’s do this thing” vibes: telling donors you will almost certainly run, calling former allies and aides, adding yourself to the program at the Republican National Committee meeting in San Diego and inviting conservative radio host Laura Ingraham to an “off the record” lunch at a ski resort in Utah, after which she tells The Washington Post you were “fully engaged and up to speed,” and seemed no longer content to be “just a passive player in American politics.”
So what catapulted you off the sidelines? Jeb Bush’s forceful entry into the emerging field was the spark. But you’ve been reconsidering for a while, looking at the other establishment favorites and wondering why the heck not. It’s not like you’re too old. The baby boom generation is still clogging up the runway. At 67, you’re about the same age as Hillary Clinton and not all that much older than Jeb, who will be 62 next month. As for old news, you’re practically a fresh face compared with Clinton, who has been in the news nonstop for more than two decades. And seriously, how damaging is a third grab for the ring when your competition is the third guy in his family to run?
What else is Romney thinking? Let’s go inside his head.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s tendency to erupt at people was fun for a while and raised lots of money, he muses. But I can raise money, too. And while I’m kind of awkward sometimes, I’m pretty sure voters won’t want a president who gets into public screaming matches. Not that I hold a grudge against Christie, even though his 2012 convention keynote was much more about him than me. But what makes him think people are going to disregard eight downgrades in his state’s credit rating, a poor job-creation performance or investigations into Bridgegate, the five-day traffic nightmare that punished a Democratic mayor? I certainly won’t.
It’s impressive, yes, that Gov. Scott Walker took on unions and has won three Wisconsin elections in six years. But would voters really pick this untested young candidate over the man who saved the 2002 Olympics and countless floundering businesses? (That would be me). And does Walker have the presence and skills to dominate a national race? I’ve already proven I can crush a sitting president in a debate.
And don’t get me started on Jeb and his family: his father’s reversal on his no-new-taxes pledge; his brother’s wars, deficits and intrusive federal education law; and his own support for comprehensive immigration reforms and Common Core education standards. All I did was sign “Romneycare” when I was governor of Massachusetts. I’ve already denied that it was the model for Obamacare. I’ve already said no other state should be required to do what I did. I’ve already said the federal law should be repealed. Problem solved.
I want to pause here to thank my good friend, the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, for his advice on how to deal with that time I dismissed 47 percent of the country as moochers who are dependent on government, believe they are victims, and will never take responsibility for their lives. Hewitt is right, everyone makes mistakes. Look at Hillary’s “we were broke when we left the White House” gaffe; Rick Perry’s “oops” moment when he forgot the third federal agency he wanted to eliminate; and Jeb’s description of illegal immigration as an “act of love” by people trying to give their families better lives. I never pretend to be poor, and I don’t start lists I can’t finish. Maybe I went a bit too far with the “self-deportation” business on immigration. You won’t hear me use that phrase again.
Above all, I won’t forget that a lot of those 47-percenters are veterans, seniors, low-income workers, the disabled and people searching desperately for jobs. And I won’t forget that a lot of them vote Republican — even for me! I won the seniors and the veterans, and I nearly won the union vote. I’m not only going to remember these folks, I’m going to focus my next campaign on opportunity and upward mobility. Wait, what do you mean, Jeb already named his political action committee Right to Rise, and stole the phrase — with permission — from my own 2012 running mate?
Back to the drawing board for the third round. I know the right message is out there somewhere.
By: Jill Lawrence, Creative Writers Syndicate; The National Memo, January 15, 2015
“So Much For The Deep Bench”: Republicans Look To The Past For 2016
On Friday, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney walked back months of promises and told a group of his past donors that he is “seriously considering” another White House bid. According to the Washington Post, he then spent the weekend “calling former aides, donors and other supporters” to rebuild his political operation, and even told one senior Republican that he “almost certainly will” launch another presidential campaign.
There’s still plenty of reason to believe that Romney will not run — and that he’d struggle to win if he did. But if Romney does join the race, he won’t be the only retread candidate seeking the GOP nomination in 2016.
Romney’s runner-up in 2012, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, has made no secret of his intention to pursue the Republican nomination again. When Santorum was informed that Romney may run again in 2016, he reportedly responded, “bring it on,” and declared that he sees himself as “the winner” in what looks as though it will be a crowded field. Former Texas governor Rick Perry has also begun laying the groundwork for a campaign, huddling with donors and policy experts in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of his 2012 disaster.
If Santorum does run, he’ll likely be joined by fellow Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor recently ended his Fox News show to explore a White House bid. Huckabee won 278 delegates in the 2008 presidential race, barely edging Romney’s 271 but losing easily to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has dismissed 2016 speculation by quoting the late Morris Udall: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”
As Romney, Huckabee, Perry, and Santorum weigh their options, former Florida governor Jeb Bush has moved decisively towards a run and established himself as the early frontrunner. Of course, Bush isn’t exactly a fresh face, either; he has not held elected office in six years, and he would almost certainly not be mentioned as a top-tier candidate were he not the brother of the 43rd president and the son of the 41st.
There’s plenty of precedent for Republicans considering well-known national figures and former candidates for their nomination; it’s been the party’s modus operandi for decades. But this year was supposed to be different. As various pundits repeated ad nauseam during the 2012 campaign, the Republican Party was supposed be the party with a “deep bench” of “rising stars” to lead America into the future. But upon further review, anointing Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, or Marco Rubio as the party’s standard-bearer doesn’t seem like such a great idea.
Some candidates who won media favor in 2012 (such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Kentucky senator Rand Paul) still seem capable of mounting serious campaigns. But they have generated so little support as to leave candidates like Romney and Huckabee confident that they could run again and win. And so the GOP once again seems poised to turn to its failed candidates of the past.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that many Republicans seem determined to take down Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton with a campaign straight out of 1994.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“The Courts’ Baffling New Math”: By What Logic Do Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Simply Stop Counting?
The Supreme Court of the John Roberts era gets one thing very right: It’s one of the most free-speech-protective courts in modern history. There is no purveyor of semi-pornographic crush videos, no maker of rape-aspiring violent video games, no homophobic funeral protester, no anti-abortion clinic counselor, and no filthy-rich campaign contribution–seeker whose rights and privileges will not be treated by the court with the utmost reverence and solicitude.
This is important and vital, and one doesn’t want to slag the court for the boundless attention and care it lavishes upon the most obnoxious speakers in America. After all, the First Amendment is kind of the constitutional gateway drug, the portal to the rest of the Bill of Rights. And without securing meaningful protection for the rights to speak, assemble, worship, and publish, so many of our other rights might be illusory. Great. Stipulated.
That makes it extra weird whenever the assorted (lets call them largely “conservative”) justices of the Roberts court, and judges on lower courts across the land, turn their attention to the protection of other rights—equally crucial but perhaps less sexy—like, say, the right to vote or to obtain an abortion. That’s when the nameless, faceless rights seekers all blur into oblivion, a great unwashed mass of undifferentiated shadow people. And that is when some judges find it all too simple to bat these rights away with a stroke of the pen.
In the past few weeks, it’s been astonishing to contrast the regard afforded to individual speech rights with the cavalier dismissal of other, equally precious hallmarks of democracy.
There was no better reminder of this phenomenon than watching the justices simply write off the voting rights of what may well amount to 600,000 Texas voters, many black and Latino, last weekend, in the wee hours of the morning, without stated reasons or written opinion. As Richard Hasen has explained, after a nine-day trial, a district court determined that there were “hundreds of thousands of voters potentially unable to get IDs because they were hours away from the government offices issuing IDs.” The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not much bothered by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Texans would be forced to travel for hours to obtain proper ID for the midterms, and the Supreme Court agreed. Meh, what’s a few hundred thousand disenfranchised voters when you have “electoral integrity” to protect?
This is of course the same 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that, only weeks earlier, was not much bothered by the prospect that 900,000 women in Texas will soon live more than a 150 miles away from the nearest clinic offering a safe and legal abortion, or that 750,000 would live more than 250 miles away, if Texas’ draconian new abortion restrictions are allowed to stand and a majority of reproductive health clinics must shut down. For now, at least, the Supreme Court has blocked the law, in another unsigned order. But the staggering lack of concern for not just hundreds, not just thousands, but tens or hundreds of thousands of women was all over the 5th Circuit’s opinion.
The 5th Circuit evinced a kind of Marie Antoinette approach to individual justice in these cases. When it shut down access to both voting and abortion in Texas, it indicated without precisely saying so that as long as citizens have fast cars and flexible work schedules, they are not burdened by Texas’ regulations. And seemingly there are no Texans without fast cars and vacation time in their view. At oral argument in the case about the shutdown of 20 Texas clinics, Judge Edith Brown of the 5th Circuit heard that abortion clinic closures would leave the Rio Grande area without any providers, forcing women who live there to drive 300 miles round trip to Corpus Christi. The judge sniffed, “Do you know how long that takes in Texas at 75 miles an hour? … This is a peculiarly flat and not congested highway.”
Looking at the 5th Circuit’s screwy fractions earlier this month, Amy Davidson noted that it’s astonishing on its face that the judges who agreed to shut down Texas reproductive health clinics would deny one-sixth of Texas women reasonable access to a clinic. More astonishing still is the fact that the judges were perfectly aware that this burden would fall most heavily on women without cars, who couldn’t afford to take several days off work to travel to distant clinics. And that was OK. These facts of life affected their conclusions not at all.
The idea that judges would simply vaporize the interests of hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters is perhaps just as amazing. By what logic do thousands of abortion-seekers and would-be voters simply stop counting?
A panel of judges on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals was similarly unfazed by the possibility that 300,000, or 9 percent, of Wisconsin voters would be disenfranchised by that state’s new voter ID law. Whether it’s 500,000 voters or 300,000 voters or almost a million women, these numbers are just not capable of moving the judicial heartstrings.
Perhaps these hundreds of thousands of people—a seeming multitude to you and me—are dismissible because they are poor or minorities or just women, or in any event people who don’t drive really fast cars. As Judge Richard Posner painstakingly explained in his dissent in the Wisconsin voter ID case, the cost of obtaining the appropriate documentation to vote under the new Wisconsin law is somewhere in the range of $75 to $175. Adjusted for inflation, he noted, that is higher than “the $1.50 poll tax outlawed by the 24th amendment in 1964.”
There’s an equally obvious and far more troubling problem with the math on the other side of the ledger, as Michael Hiltzik points out, where people are worried about infinitesimal percentages of potential fraud. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker defended his state’s voter ID law by claiming it is worthwhile whether it stops “one, 100, or 1,000” illegal votes. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, another big fan of voter ID, similarly argued recently that a glitch that would result in the disenfranchising of 12,000 people wouldn’t be a “major problem” because they represent a “tiny percentage” of Kansas’ voters. Walker and Kobach pooh-pooh the disenfranchisement of tens or hundreds of thousands of state voters in order to fight the scourge of vote fraud, of which there were seven incidents in Kansas in the past 13 years, and two documented in Texas. It’s not just bad that real votes and real abortions are blocked to deter an imaginary problem (vote fraud and botched abortions). It’s that even if the problems were genuine, the math still wouldn’t work.
It’s utterly baffling, this new math. Math that holds that seven incidents of vote fraud should push hundreds and thousands of voters off the rolls. Or that hundreds of thousands of women can be denied access to safe abortion clinics, supposedly to prevent vanishingly small rates of complications. I don’t know how we have arrived at the point where members of the judicial branch—the branch trusted to vindicate the rights of the poorest and most powerless—don’t even see the poor and powerless, much less count them as fully realized humans.
This brings us back to the First Amendment, seemingly the only right that truly counts anymore in America. Why has the constitutional right to be heard all but overmastered the right to vote or legally terminate a pregnancy? Maybe the court is still capable of hearing even as it loses the ability to see? Or maybe the powerful voices of Fred Phelps, Shaun McCutcheon, and Anthony Elonis—the creatures who rightly are allowed to say and do horrible things in the name of free speech—count for more than the hundreds and thousands of voiceless voters and abortion-seekers who are seemingly not even important enough to name?
By: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, October 24, 2014
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