“The Stench Of Sulfur”: It’s Time To Call A Satan A Satan
I do not lead a partisan organization, but I do lead a faith-rooted organization that has a long history of speaking out on matters of public concern.
Here is why speaking out rather bluntly at this time seems necessary to me: Unless I have misread or misheard the news lately, the GOP majority in the House of Representatives holds roughly these positions on key issues:
Immigration Reform: No bill, or else a bill with no path to citizenship.
Farm Bill: Subsidies for fat-cat Agribusiness operators but no renewal of food assistance for the urban poor—which has long been the traditional rural-urban tradeoff in enacting compromise farm bills.
Student Debt: Let the financial markets decide, and we are not concerned with the actual devastating burden laid upon the future workforce. (In fairness, here the Wall Street Democrats are also a big problem.)
Universal Health Care: Hell no! Just repeal the damned thing!! If it is implemented it might actually allow poor “takers” to live a little bit longer than is convenient for us “makers,” who no longer require a large low-wage labor force—in the United States, that is.
Women’s Health: Whatever can you mean? You must mean infanticide??
Religious Liberty/First Amendment: We believe that any employer’s “religious convictions” should trump all civil rights and equal right protections under established law. Do we need to remind you that the Constitution was written by Christians and for Christians in particular?
Energy/Climate: I’m not that hot—are you? We in the One Percent will manage to stay cool by any means necessary as the rest of you suffer.
Regulation More Broadly: You can catch up with our death-and-debt-dealing corporate friends AFTER the damage is done, OK? That’s the American Way.
That’s the House Republicans. And on the Senate side:
Presidential Appointments: It is our firm intention to thwart and destroy this president; effectively nullifying his power to make appointments forms a central part of that effort. (Please go ahead and do that Google search on earlier nullification fun times in US history.)
If I am misrepresenting these positions, by all means call me on it. But if I describe them accurately, don’t we have a responsibility to say that these positions have the sulfurous stench of Satan about them?
Not in precisely those words, perhaps. But we have many valid ways—and many long-accepted homiletical, liturgical, and hermeneutical means—to get the primary point across. And to repeat, these are ways and means that do not cross red lines for 501(c)3 charitable or religious organizations.
The IRS language for what “charitable” means is worth reviewing:
The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged…eliminating prejudice and discrimination; [and] defending human and civil rights secured by law.
The radical Republicans in Washington and in many statehouses want to further punish and distress the poor; they want to enshrine prejudice and discrimination; they want to shred human and civil rights that are currently secured by law.
We not only have the freedom to say that; we have a responsibility to say it.
By: Peter Laarman, Religion Dispatches, July 12, 2013
“The Self Delusional Party Of No”: Carrying On As If Whistling Past The Graveyard Were A Plan
Self-delusion is a sad spectacle. Watching Republicans convince themselves that killing immigration reform actually helps the GOP is excruciating, and I wish somebody would make it stop.
House Speaker John Boehner’s unruly caucus has been busy persuading itself not to accept or even modify the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate. Rather, it wants to annihilate it. It’s not that these Republicans want a different kind of comprehensive reform; it’s that they don’t want comprehensive reform at all.
The Obama administration “cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill,” Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership said in a statement. Instead, the idea is supposedly to deal with the tightly woven knot of immigration issues one at a time.
That’s like sitting down with a piece of cake and saying, “First I’m going to eat the flour, then the sugar, then the eggs.”
House Republicans think they can begin with “border security,” which would be laughable if the need for real immigration reform were not so serious. It is ridiculous to think the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico can be made impregnable.
The border, after all, was judged 84 percent secure last year by the Government Accountability Office — meaning that only 16 percent of attempts to enter the country illegally from Mexico were successful. Any improvement, at this point, would necessarily be fairly modest. Perhaps Republicans know of a border somewhere in the world that is 100 percent secure. I don’t.
And never mind that the flow of undocumented migrants is way down from its peak, while apprehensions of would-be migrants are way up. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Senate bill, if enacted, could slash illegal immigration in half. No realistic increase in border security would do as much.
So the House Republicans’ intransigence isn’t really about the border. It’s about avoiding the central question, which is what to do about the 11 million undocumented migrants who are here already.
In the view that has become far-right dogma, giving these people a path to citizenship “rewards bad behavior” and puts them ahead of presumably well-behaved foreigners who are waiting “in line” for admittance. For the most adamant House Republicans, giving the undocumented any legal status and permission to stay would amount to “amnesty.”
No legal status, of course, means no solution. Opponents of comprehensive reform should just come out and say what they mean: Rather than accept measures that studies say would not only reduce illegal immigration but also boost economic growth, House Republicans would prefer to do nothing.
This makes no sense as policy or as politics. Amazingly, however, some conservatives who should know better — magazine editors Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Rich Lowry of National Review — contend that the GOP would actually help itself politically by killing the Senate immigration bill.
This line of argument — I can’t call it reasoning — holds that the Senate bill must be killed because it does not end illegal immigration for all time, it does not fix the legal immigration system for all time and it is really long. The GOP should not waste time and effort chasing after Latino and Asian American votes, according to this view, and instead should concentrate on winning working-class whites with an economic message for the striving middle class.
As for the Senate bill, Kristol and Lowry wrote in a joint editorial that “House Republicans can do the country a service by putting a stake through its heart.”
Some House Republicans worry openly that giving undocumented residents a path to citizenship would eventually add millions of Democratic voters to the rolls. But they should be more concerned about the millions of Latino citizens who are unregistered or do not bother to vote. Democrats are making a concerted play for these people. Republicans are telling them they’d like to deport their relatives and friends.
Most House Republicans have nothing to worry about for the time being; their districts are safe. But the GOP’s fortunes in national contests — and eventually in statewide races — will be increasingly dim. Maybe they’ll wake up when Texas begins to change from red to blue.
In the meantime, it’s sad to see a once great political party carry on as if whistling past the graveyard were a plan.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 11, 2013
“Someone Has To Do It”: Congressional Gridlock Leaves Lawmaking To The Supreme Court
One is the loneliest number and only one in 10 Americans trusts the United States Congress. And who can blame people?
The most visible congressional failure was the Senate vote that killed background checks on people who want to buy guns. It was a perfectly reasonable proposal. No one’s guns would have been taken away and national polls showed that nine in 10 Americans supported the proposal.
But that didn’t matter because the Senate was more responsive to pressure from the National Rifle Association than it was to public opinion. Gridley, damm public opinion, full speed backward!
The same tragedy is about to unfold with immigration reform. The Senate passed a compromise immigration proposal under which undocumented immigrants would have to get over a series of hurdles higher than the border fence to become citizens. To get the measure passed, Democrats agreed to GOP demands to hire 20,000 more border control agents. That’s enough of a force to conquer Mexico and more than enough to guard the border we share with our neighbor to the south.
Despite these concessions, House Republicans are doing everything they can to stop reform, and they will probably succeed even though national polls show strong support for citizenship for undocumented people if they meet a long list of requirements.
I could go on and on and on. What happens to a democracy when democratic institutions aren’t democratic anymore? Nothing good.
What if they gave an election and no one came. Well, we almost found out in two recent elections. Turnout was abysmal in the race for mayor in Los Angles and in the special Senate election in Massachusetts to select a replacement for John Kerry. Voters don’t see the point in going out to vote to elect people who can’t or won’t do anything to tackle the challenges facing the nation.
Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the Supreme Court.
When democratic institutions fail, undemocratic institutions step in. When the legislature stops legislating, the unelected Supreme Court rushes in to fill the vacuum. Someone has to make laws, and if Congress doesn’t legislate the federal court system will step in to fix problems. Like it or not, unelected or not, the Supreme Court has filled the vacuum that Congress created.
Historically, the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to void laws passed by the peoples’ elected representatives. But the court did just that on successive days last month. On day one, the high court nullified part of the Voting Rights Act. The next day, the court consigned the Defense of Marriage Act to the dustbin of history where it belonged.
The high court’s message to Congress was do something, just don’t stand there. Standard operating procedure in Congress these days is don’t do anything, just stand there. The world does not come to a grinding halt to accommodate Congress when it can’t get its act together.
When he ran for president in 1996, Ross Perot proposed the idea of having national referendums to make decisions on issues. Americans like the idea. A recent Gallup survey showed that two in three Americans supported it. Somebody has to make decisions. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 11, 2013
“A Party That Can’t Decide To Chose”: The GOP Establishment Fractures On Immigration
Over the course of this year’s immigration debate, we’ve come to view the Republican party division as follows. On one side, advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, you have a group that is sometimes called “the establishment” or “the elite,” made up of people whose primary interest is in the party’s long-term national prospects. These are the big money people, the top consultants, some senators, and so on. On the other side, opposing comprehensive reform, you have “the base,” which is not only voters but also members of the House with a narrow interest in getting re-elected, usually by appealing to extremely conservative constituencies. On that side you also have some conservative media figures and others with strong ideological motivations against immigration reform. And then caught in the middle you’ve got the Republican congressional leadership, which can’t afford to antagonize the base but also worries about the effect killing immigration reform will have on the party.
But we may be reaching the point where these categories are no longer adequate to describe what’s going on within the GOP. This morning, William Kristol and Rich Lowry, the editors of the two most important conservative magazines (the Weekly Standard and National Review) joined together to write an unusual joint editorial titled “Kill the Bill,” coming down in opposition to the “Gang of 8” immigration bill that passed the Senate. The substance of their argument is familiar to anyone following this debate—the Obama administration can’t be trusted, it won’t stop all future illegal immigration, the bill is too long—but the substance isn’t really important. What’s important is that these two figures, about as establishment as establishment gets, are siding firmly with the anti-reform side.
Those of us who have been around for a while can’t help but be reminded of a memo Kristol wrote to Republicans 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was trying to enact health-care reform. It argued that from a substantive and political point of view, Republicans should not try to negotiate with the Clinton administration or work with them to pass a reform that was as conservative as possible; instead, they should wage all-out war to kill it. “The plan should not be amended,” Kristol wrote, “it should be erased.”
Politically speaking, it was good advice; Republicans followed it, and they won. Sixteen years later they used the same strategy during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, and they lost.( It turned out, however, that conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman did the Republicans’ substantive work for them, extracting a number of concessions from the administration that moved the bill in a more conservative direction). There’s a difference in this debate, however. Those two efforts at health care reform were always understood as a conflict between a Democratic administration seeking a longtime Democratic goal, and Republicans in Congress trying to stop them. It was reported like a sporting event: Clinton loses, Republicans win; Obama wins, Republicans lose. Immigration, on the other hand, has been reported largely as a battle within the Republican party. President Obama, knowing full well that anything he advocates immediately becomes toxic for most Republicans, has been using a lighter touch when it comes to public advocacy for comprehensive reform. (I’m not saying he hasn’t been pushing for it, but he hasn’t done the all-out, campaign-style barnstorming tour that would help turn it into a purely Democrats-versus-Republicans issue). The story has always been, “What will the Republicans do?” and if reform goes down, the headlines won’t read, “Obama Defeated on Immigration Reform,” they’ll read, “Republicans Kill Immigration Reform,” with subheadings like “Danger ahead for GOP as Latino voters react.”
I once knew a professor who would say to his students, “Institutions don’t speak. People speak.” His point was that we often ascribe a unified intelligence or will to things like the government or a corporation or a political party, glossing over the fact that it’s individuals making those decisions and statements. There may be a single most beneficial path for the Republican party to take, but the Republican party can’t just decide to choose it. A party is made up of lots of individuals, each with their own opinions, self-interest, and levers of influence, who will push it in one direction or another. With Kristol and Lowry coming out in opposition to reform (and perhaps other people like them to follow), it may no longer even be possible to say that the party establishment has a single position on the issue.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 9, 2013
“Senator Cheney?”: Just When You Thought The Senate Couldn’t Get Any Worse, Up Pops The Devil’s Daughter
If we were to make a list of competitive Senate races to watch in 2014, Wyoming wouldn’t make the cut. Sen. Mike Enzi is a popular Republican incumbent in a deep-red state — he won re-election in 2008 with more than 75% of the vote — and at age 69, the senator is not yet in a position where he needs to think about retirement. Enzi’s fourth term looks like one of the cycle’s safest bets.
At least, it did. In an era in which even conservative Republican incumbents have to worry about fierce primary challenges, Enzi will apparently have a high-profile foe next year.
A young Dick Cheney began his first campaign for the House in this tiny village [Lusk, Wyoming] — population 1,600 — after the state’s sole Congressional seat finally opened up. But nowadays, his daughter Liz does not seem inclined to wait patiently for such an opening.
Ms. Cheney, 46, is showing up everywhere in the state, from chicken dinners to cattle growers’ meetings, sometimes with her parents in tow. She has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father.
It’s not just idle speculation. Liz Cheney, despite having no meaningful background in the state whatsoever, moved with her family to Wyoming just last year and quickly became a ubiquitous political player. Indeed, the right-wing media personality even called Enzi directly, letting him know she’s likely to run against him in a GOP primary.
The result would probably be an ugly fight within the state Republican Party, pitting a popular three-term incumbent against a powerful family with deep roots in the state.
It’s not altogether clear why Cheney would bother. Her brief tenure in public office — she worked in the Bush/Cheney State Department — didn’t go well, but she remains a fixture in political media, routinely publishing “stark raving mad” pieces and making Sunday show appearances. Cheney’s megaphone is formidable, even if she uses it towards ridiculous ends.
But whatever her motivations, this will probably be one of the cycle’s more noteworthy primary fights. Enzi, assuming he doesn’t retire, would almost certainly have the edge, though he has not yet faced a rival as fierce and unburdened by propriety as Cheney.
On Twitter, @pourmecoffee added, “If ‘Liz Cheney’ is the answer, the question must be ‘How could the U.S. Senate possibly get any worse?'”
Postscript: The NYT piece noted that the former vice president, eager to help his daughter, has also begun traveling more regularly to the state he used to represent. That said, Liz Cheney “has told associates that if she runs, she wants to do so in her own right.”
It was the only sentence in the article that literally made me laugh. Cheney wants to run against a popular incumbent from her own party in a state she’s lived in for a year, and she thinks her candidacy should be unrelated to her last name? C’mon.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 8, 2013
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