“Trouble In 2014”: All Signs Point To A Difficult Fight For Mitch McConnell In The Coming Election Year
According to a new Public Policy Polling poll released Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will face a very difficult re-election battle in 2014.
The poll finds that McConnell and Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes, would be tied at 45 percent in a hypothetical 2014 Senate race. Grimes has not yet said whether or not she plans to enter the race.
The PPP poll, which was conducted on behalf of Senate Majority PAC, suggests that McConnell’s greatest opponent may be himself. Kentucky’s senior senator holds a mere 44 percent approval rating in his home state, with 47 percent disapproval. While Grimes’ favorability is just 34 percent, 42 percent of Kentuckians are still unsure of their opinion of her.
McConnell’s standing has been deteriorating over time; two previous PPP polls had McConnell leading Grimes by margins of 7 points in December and 4 points in April.
McConnell supporters immediately lashed out against the survey. National Republican Senatorial Committee strategist Brad Dayspring, for example, argued via Twitter that questions such as “Mitch McConnell has voted to cut taxes for millionaires like himself, while supporting cuts to Social Security and Medicare for hard-working Kentucky seniors. Does this make you more or less likely to vote for him, or does it not make a difference?” are indicative of a push poll. Notably, PPP does have an extremely accurate record.
McConnell’s campaign has long prepared itself to run against Grimes. In April, a secretly recorded tape obtained by Mother Jones exposed McConnell and his aides discussing ways to discredit Grimes, along with actress and activist Ashley Judd, who was considered a likely challenger at the time. On the tape, Team McConnell considered hitting Grimes for ”blatantly endorsing the 2008 Democratic national platform” and suggesting that she “definitely has a very sort of self-centered, sort of egotistical aspect,” due to her tendency to refer to herself in the third person.
The SuperPAC Kentuckians for Strong Leadership has also attacked Grimes, in a series of online ads. The ads equate her to Democratic leaders such as President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), saying “When Grimes promises ‘new leadership,’ it means she doesn’t agree that Kentuckians like McConnell should stand strong against: Obamacare, Higher Taxes, Wasteful Stimulus, Cap and Trade, EPA’s War on Coal, and Gun Control.”
Even if Republicans like Dayspring dismiss the poll’s results, all signs point to a difficult fight for McConnell in the coming election year. The combination of McConnell’s deadlock with Grimes — despite her low name recognition — and his even lower approval rating make it clear that Democrats will have a strong opportunity to take down their number-one political target in 2014.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, May 28, 2013
“A Fight Worth Having”: A Strategy On Judicial Nominees Takes Shape
For nearly five years, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — aka, the D.C. Circuit — has had seven sitting judges hearing cases, four from judges appointed by Republican presidents and three from Democratic presidents. Last week, President Obama finally saw one of his nominees confirmed to this bench, bringing some parity to the appeals court.
There are, however, three remaining vacancies, which Senate Republicans would love to keep vacant indefinitely. What does the White House plan to do about it? A plan has apparently come together.
President Obama will soon accelerate his efforts to put a lasting imprint on the country’s judiciary by simultaneously nominating three judges to an important federal court, a move that is certain to unleash fierce Republican opposition and could rekindle a broader partisan struggle over Senate rules. […]
White House officials declined to say who Mr. Obama’s choices will be ahead of an announcement that could come this week, but leading contenders for the spots appear to include Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center; David C. Frederick, who often represents consumers and investors at the Supreme Court; and Patricia Ann Millett, a veteran appeals lawyer in Washington. All three are experienced lawyers who would be unlikely to generate controversy individually.
For those hoping for a more progressive federal judiciary, there’s a lot to like in this plan. Indeed, it’s arguably overdue.
It’s a pretty straightforward exercise — Obama has to nominate jurists to fill these vacancies, and he’s apparently focused on three excellent, mainstream choices, who would ordinarily garner broad support. From the White House’s perspective, if Senate Republicans act responsibly, great — the nominees will be confirmed, the D.C. Circuit will be at full strength, and the bench will be less conservative.
If Senate Republicans act irresponsibly and block these nominees out of partisan spite, Democrats will have even more incentive to pursue the “nuclear option” and end this style of obstructionism altogether.
And just to reiterate a relevant detail, filling judicial vacancies is important everywhere, but the D.C. Circuit is of particular significance — not only is it often a proving ground for future Supreme Court justices, but the D.C. Circuit regularly hears regulatory challenges to the Obama administration’s agenda. Indeed, as the NYT report noted, this bench “has overturned major parts of the president’s agenda in the last four years, on regulations covering Wall Street, the environment, tobacco, labor unions and workers’ rights.”
With this in mind, it’s a fight worth watching.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2013
“Full Speed Ahead”: Republican Overreach Is Coming Soon
A number of people have asked whether the Republicans will overreach in their reaction to the current collection of scandal-ish controversies (by the way, someone really needs to come up with a name that encompasses them all). The answer to that question is, of course they will. Try to remember who we’re talking about here. Overreaching is their thing. Congress will be going home this weekend, and I’ll bet the Republicans are going to come back from their recess reassured that their constituents really, really want them to pursue Barack Obama to the ends of the earth. I’ll explain why in a moment, but in the meantime the National Journal has details on their strategy:
Congressional Republicans head into next week’s Memorial Day recess armed with a strategy designed to keep the controversies that have consumed Washington in the news back home.
Both House and Senate Republicans will focus on the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as well as the still-open questions about Benghazi. And more and more, they’ll try to tie them together into a made-for-2014 narrative of an unaccountable and out-of-control government.
In interviews on local television and radio programs and with newspapers, Senate Republicans plan to talk about the Obama administration’s “credibility gap.” They’ll throw into the mix Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s request that health industry officials help fund “Obamacare,” a move Republicans call a “shakedown” of the companies she regulates, according to a Senate GOP leadership aide.
Lawmakers will argue that a “lack of details, stonewalling,” and what they call an “ever-changing White House narrative” on both Benghazi and the IRS have led to a trust deficit with the public, a sentiment reflected in recent polls, the aide said.
Part of the aim is to get voters to question how they can trust the administration, and the IRS more specifically, to enforce key provisions of Obama’s health care law after improperly targeting Americans.
This fits into Republicans’ emerging scandal-riding midterm election strategy—one that the GOP’s congressional campaign committees think can blend easily into their anti-Obamacare message to help the party take the Senate in 2014.
When they return from this recess, Republicans are going to be more sure than ever that they’re doing the right thing. Think about what a member of Congress does when he’s home. He’ll be doing those media interviews with friendly talk-radio hosts, for whom outrage is the bread and butter of their programming. He might do a couple of town meetings, and who comes to those? People who like him already (i.e. the Republican base, who will tell him to keep up the scandal-mongering) and people who are pissed off about something. But right now, the people who think the scandal thing is going too far aren’t really pissed off, they’re just kind of disappointed. So they won’t be so inclined to show up. And then the representative will just go around town talking to folks, and once again the ones he’s most likely to hear from are his supporters who want to tell him to stick it to that no-good socialist in the White House.
After a few days of that, he’ll come back to Washington thinking, “Wow, my constituents are really fired up about this stuff. Full speed ahead!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 14, 2013
“What Packing The Court Means”: Chuck Grassley Has No Idea What He’s Talking About
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second highest federal bench, has 11 seats. For the last five years, four of those seats have been vacant, which has not only put a strain on the court, but left Republican appointees as the clear majority, pushing the bench to the right.
And so, yesterday offered something of a breakthrough when the Senate unanimously approved Sri Srinivasan, President Obama’s first confirmed judge to the D.C. Circuit. That leaves three vacancies on the bench, and the White House intends to send nominees for those slots to the Senate soon.
For Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), that’s a problem. Indeed, Dylan Matthews noted yesterday that Grassley believes rascally Democrats and the Obama administration are trying to “pack the court” through a “court-packing” scheme. Grassley was reading carefully from a prepared text, suggesting the Iowa Republican was quite serious about the argument — he repeated it five times.
It fell to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Grassley’s colleague on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to gently explain that Grassley has no idea what he’s talking about. “Court packing” was an FDR-era idea in which the executive branch would expand the number of seats on a bench in order to tilt the judiciary in the president’s favor. The idea was floated in the 1930s, but not seriously pursued.
What we’re talking about in 2013 is very different. There’s a vacancy on the federal bench; the president chooses a nominee to fill that vacancy; the Senate Judiciary Committee scrutinizes that nominee and sends him or her to the floor; and then the Senate’s full membership has an opportunity to vote “yea” or “nay” on confirmation.
Chuck Grassley sees this as some kind of underhanded Democratic scheme. The rest of us should consider it basic American governance.
Postscript: I should note that if Senate Republicans reclaim the majority after the 2014 midterms, Grassley would become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite his apparent confusion on these issues.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 24, 2013
“Marco Rubio’s Tangled Web”: Don’t Let President Obama Stop Immigration Reform!
Marco Rubio has a big op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today explaining to conservatives why they should support immigration reform, and WaPo’s Greg Sargent has a persuasive take on it:
So how can Republicans who want immigration reform get conservatives to accept it, given that Obama also wants it?
Republicans pushing for reform have come up with a strategic answer to that question, one that isn’t really acknowledged openly. They are subtly making the case to their base that a defeat for immigration reform is actually a hidden victory for Obama, and that passing the Senate compromise is actually worse for the President than the alternative, i.e. doing nothing.
In this sense, the immigration reform debate is perhaps the ultimate test of what Obama referred to as the need to create a “permission structure” — that is, a way for conservatives to accept something Obama wants, too. The message — which is carefully couched – is that, yes, Obama wants immigration reform, but conservatives should accept the Gang of Eight compromise because the alternative is actually better for the President.
The basic idea here is that the status quo with its alleged weak border enforcement is as bad as or worse than legalizing the undocumented workers already here. There’s even a hint in Rubio’s op-ed that absent reform legislation, the radicals in the administration will find other, more devious ways, to legalize undocumented folk, even as they are inviting more to come in.
Perhaps understanding that this argument isn’t exactly open-and-shut, Rubio also invites conservatives to “toughen” the border enforcement language in the Gang of Eight bill–as he’s been doing in interviews for several days. I guess ideally he’d like Obama to play his part by yelling and screaming about any modifications before eventually caving in, because he’s so weak, you know.
Greg notices something else interesting about Rubio’s pitch: it doesn’t contain the usual political arguments that are actually the motive for virtually all the Republican interest in immigration reform:
There’s a key nuance here. As I understand the thinking, GOP base voters are turned off by the political argument that we must reform immigration because if we don’t, Obama will be able to screw Republicans over politically with Latinos. The reason the political argument doesn’t work is partly because many GOP base voters are persuaded that immigration reform will create a whole lot of Democratic voters — in purely political terms, rank-and-file members of the GOP base believe immigration reform is a net win for Democrats no matter how you slice it.
I’d add to that observation the equally important fact that a lot of Tea types are turned off by electoral arguments generally: they don’t want to hear about how the Republican Party might wrangle a few more Latino voters via a betrayal of principle–they want to pursue their ideological tenets to the ends of the earth. There’s just not a lot of openness to strategic or tactical thinking here; it’s fight-fight-fight, based to some degree on the iron conviction that all the strategery of the Republican Establishment of the past hasn’t worked while howling at the moon worked just fine in 2010.
In any event, it’s a tangled web ol’ Marco seems to be weaving, and if Greg and I can see through it, I’m reasonably sure a lot of his intended audience can see through it, too.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 3, 2013
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