“Too Inept To Lead: Steve King Fills A Vacuum Left By John Boehner
The Democratic Party’s general approach to immigration policy is pretty straightforward: create a legal process through which millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States can become legal citizens, while taking concrete steps to improve border security. The Republican Party’s position on immigration is … less clear.
GOP officials are divided, confused, and overwhelmed by uncertainty. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was asked over the weekend for his personal opinion on a pathway to citizenship, and the Republican leader was so overwhelmed by weakness and fear that he refused to give an answer.
This in turn creates a vacuum within the Republican Party, which is filled by folks like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s what the GOP lawmaker told a right-wing website about Dream Act kids:
“There are kids that were brought into this country by their parents unknowing they were breaking the law. And they will say to me and others who defend the rule of law, ‘We have to do something about the 11 million. Some of them are valedictorians.’ Well, my answer to that is … it’s true in some cases, but they aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents. For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”
In case facts still matter, King’s assessment isn’t even close to being accurate.
But even if we put that aside, King’s offensiveness reinforce a larger dynamic in Republican politics that party leaders are eventually going to have to address.
To be sure, House GOP leaders eventually got around to criticizing King’s comments last night, just as they did in March when another House Republican lawmaker used the “wetbacks” slur.
But soon after, King doubled down on his remarks, appearing on an Iowa radio show to say, “It’s not something that I’m making up. This is real.”
And while King keeps talking, and party leaders keep wringing their hands, it’s worth appreciating the political circumstances that have brought us to this point. Note, for example, that the right-wing Iowan may come across as a racist buffoon that the American mainstream finds repulsive, but at this point, he’s winning — King has been fighting to kill comprehensive immigration reform, and by all appearances, House Republican leaders intend to hand him and his allies the outcome they prefer.
In other words, as ridiculous as Steve King appears, he and his kooky friends are shaping the House Republican caucus’ position on immigration policy, largely because Boehner and his friends are too inept to lead.
What’s more, the dynamic is getting worse, not better. As Jon Chait explained back in April, “A drawn-out immigration debate commanding center stage will simply create more opportunities for conservative Republicans to say offensive things about Latinos. And make no doubt: however diligently their consultants coach them not to, they will say offensive things about Latinos.”
That was nearly four months ago, and Chait’s prediction is holding up quite well.
If Boehner wants to make this nightmare go away, the Speaker is going to have to try to pass immigration reform. Unfortunately for his party, the weight falls on Boehner’s shoulders, and he may not be up to the task.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 24, 2013
“Breaking Point”: With No Light At The End Of The Tunnel, John Boehner Is Losing Control
Trust between John Boehner and his Republican Caucus members has worn so thin that he’s been forced to swat down rumors (again) this week that he’s retiring, while conservatives worry the speaker is plotting to pull a fast one on them in the immigration reform debate.
Of the 234 Republicans in the House, just 20 percent reliably support the speaker, according to a recent Washington Post analysis. And a new poll shows that among Republican voters overall, just 37 percent think GOP leaders are taking the party in the right direction, while 52 percent say leadership is going the wrong way. Compare that to 72 percent of Democrats who favor their party leadership’s approach. And all this comes on the heels of the Farm Bill debacle, the latest in a string of legislative misjudgments for Boehner and his leadership team.
But nowhere is the divide between leadership and base more apparent than on immigration reform, where conservative House members and outside activists are now worried that Boehner will actively deceive them through procedural trickery to pass his alleged ”amnesty” agenda. Never mind that it’s not even clear Boehner really wants a comprehensive bill passed. He said Sunday that immigration isn’t his top priority (though he also said, “If I come out and say I’m for this and I’m for that, all I’m doing is making my job harder”). And never mind that Boehner has repeatedly pledged to stick to the “Hastert Rule,” the informal rule that nothing be given a vote unless it already has support from a majority of Republicans.
But some House conservatives are convinced that Boehner is planning a secret “gambit to save [the] amnesty agenda,” as the conservative news site TownHall explained yesterday. When the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill, lawmakers meet in a bicameral Conference Committee, where they hash out the differences and produce a single final bill. The Senate has already passed a bill with a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The House has not passed anything, in part because conservatives fear that Boehner will use it as a backdoor way to introduce “amnesty” into the final bill.
TownHall explained that “the worry among Capitol Hill conservatives was that Boehner would take any House-passed bill with the word ‘immigration’ in it and set up a conference that would produce a bill with the trappings of compromise,” but would really be something unacceptable to the right. Conservative firebrands like Rep. Steve Stockman and Steve King have already raised the alarm. Ann Coulter told Fox News, “If they pass a bill that does nothing but enforce e-verify, does nothing but enforce the fence, it will go into conference with the Senate and it will come out an amnesty bill.” “Ann Coulter got it exactly right,” an unnamed senior aide to a conservative lawmaker told Breitbart News. “We are scared to death of what we figure is already Boehner’s end game.”
What these conservatives seem to miss is that the House would still need to pass whatever comes out of the conference committee. And the only way a pathway to citizenship will pass after the conference, as now, is if conservative Republicans allow it, or if Boehner is willing to break the Hastert rule and let it pass with Democratic votes. But he’s already said: “For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House, It’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.”
If Boehner went back on that pledge, he’d face open revolt in his caucus, just as he would if he broke it now to bring the Senate bill up for a vote (which would likely pass with Democratic votes). Boehner has also so far done everything he can to avoid a revolt, considering his speakership would be on the line, and there’s no reason to think he’d be any more willing to risk it in a few months, after a conference committee, than he is now.
Perhaps it’s that conservatives don’t trust themselves to recognize secret “amnesty” in a conference bill. Breitbart’s Matt Boyle warned that the report would only “get a short amount of time for actual review, and votes would be whipped up and sold using talking points just like how the Senate bill passed,” as if talking points are some kind of Jedi mind tricks. But if a conferenced bill contained a pathway to citizenship and they vote for it, that’s on them, especially given their “read the bill” rhetoric.
Worse yet for Boehner, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Immigration reform will come to a head after the August recess, just as the debate ramps up on the debt ceiling, another issue which will inevitably pit Boehner against his rank-and-file. Maybe retirement will start to sound like a pretty good idea.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 23, 2013
“A Minimum Threshold For Competence”: The Republican House Of Representatives Is Still Terrible At Everything
Somehow or other, the U.S. government, for the first time in years, is close-ish to being functional. Don’t read too heavily into that word “functional.” The government is not and will not probably be moving on your pet issue any time soon, sorry. But the Senate is actually moving, on bipartisan pieces of legislation that are in the public spotlight: a farm bill, a comprehensive immigration bill. GOP senators who typically pretend to negotiate compromises and then run for the hills once they near a motion to proceed, like Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker, are suddenly seeing out those compromises. One of the two houses of Congress, in our lifetime, may well be nearing the minimum threshold for competence.
Now then, what’s the problem? Oh right, it’s the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let’s give some credit: They’re adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words “Under God” to every baby’s forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they’ve got nothing. You know this. You’ve seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real “working out” before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.
It always works out the same way, at the 11th hour. A Senate-originated compromise, after much pouting, is taken up by the House after several defeats of their own insane legislation. Maybe a tweak or two is offered. The House passes it. Conservatives serve up uncreative epithets for John Boehner for exercising the only decent option available to him. The next big piece of legislation comes up. And, at least as of yesterday’s farm bill flop, they begin this same fatal cycle of time wasting again.
The House leadership seemed to think, this time around, at least, that a combination of cheap tricks and a backup plan called “blaming Democrats” would change this deeply entrenched dynamic of incompetence that surrounds everything it tries to do.
The House didn’t even get to a vote on the farm bill last year, knowing it didn’t have enough votes. What could the leadership do differently this time to make sure that a bill hated by most Democrats and still too many Republicans, facing a certain Senate death and then if necessary a White House veto, could pass for no productive reason?
It could … put Iowa Rep. Steve King in charge of whipping? Yes. Yes! This would change the dynamic altogether. If a nutbird like Steve King was the one pushing for this bill then surely all conservatives would fall in line.
There’s little we enjoy more than watching a useless no-voting screecher in Congress suddenly realize he needs his goddamn corn money and then desperately try to persuade his comrades for their votes. And then when it fails, he is just so disappointed in their ability to see the bigger picture. Come on, guys, it’s about the long game here:
GOP leaders blamed Democrats and insisted their whip counts were accurate, even as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who helped whip support for the bill, said he was surprised at the 62 GOP defections.
“I was surprised by about half of them,” he said. “I thought they would have taken more of a 10,000-foot view.”
Yes, show a little maturity for once, Steve King said, to other people.
Then the Republican leadership blames Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for only bringing 24 Democratic “aye” votes to the table. Jesus. We’re not sure that Nancy Pelosi got 24 votes from the Republican Party on all major bills combined in the years 2009 and 2010. Also, there’s a reason that most Democrats didn’t vote for this farm bill, and that’s because they hate it, because it assaults the social safety net. But yeah, anyway, sure, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault, boo, she’s evil and wears a lot of makeup, boo.
There’s only one way to a bill becoming a law in this government setup, which we’re stuck with for a while: The House has to work within the framework of a Senate-drafted compromise, and lean on Democratic votes. This is the only way things work right now, and no special guest whip or hollering at the mean San Francisco lady will change that.
And of course yesterday’s farm bill failure has implications on comprehensive immigration reform, which will most likely soon pass through the Senate. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than Brian Beutler’s:
But more broadly, it’s tough to look at the farm bill fiasco and imagine the House passing an immigration reform bill that Dems don’t carry.
If that’s the case, then the key to the whole immigration reform effort really is John Boehner accepting the internal consequences of just putting something similar to the gang of eight bill on the floor and getting out of the way.
You can watch the farm bill fail and reason that Boehner might think immigration reform isn’t worth it. Or you can watch the farm bill fail and reason that he might decide to dispense with all the member management theatrics and throw in with Democrats and GOP donors. But you can’t watch the farm bill fail and see the House GOP passing a Hastert-rule compliant immigration reform bill and going into conference with the Senate.
We’d say Boehner will go with option 2, bringing immigration to the floor and leaning on Democrats. There’s no mysterious character quirk specific to Boehner that always leads him to this conclusion, as conservatives seem to believe. His decisions follow a fairly simple weighing of the pros and cons, and anyone in his position would make the same ones. That’s why he still has his job: because there’s no other way to do it, and those who would hope to become speaker can see that.
By: Jim Newell, Salon, June 21, 2013
“Looking At A Time Capsule”: The Tea Party’s Sad, Nostalgic Reunion Tour
Remember way back to 2010? When the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” was tearing up the charts and a hot new upstart political movement called the Tea Party was striking fear into socialists everywhere? What began on Tax Day in 2009 hit a high-water mark just 18 months later with a massive rally on the National Mall organized by Glenn Beck (which later proved to be the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s purpose for existing: massive anti-government rallies of colorful, flag-waving patriots). There’s no question the conservative revival in the GOP has remade the party inside Washington, but the Gadsden flags were rolled up and the tricorn hats put away as the outsider movement honed its insider game.
Until today. For one day only, the Capitol has been consumed by what feels a bit like a single-night stand reunion tour for a band that had one good album that mostly gets played for nostalgic reasons today. The event was billed as “the largest demonstration of Tea Party support since 2010,” and while it may have succeeded on that count, it also underscores how much the movement has slipped since that year of its glory.
Taking in the scene on the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday feels like looking at a time capsule of early 2010. There are hundreds or possibly thousands of (mostly white, mostly older) people decked in “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirts, sitting in folding camping chairs and waving yellow flags. Classic Tea Party signs like “hands off my healthcare” are joined by newcomers like “Waterboard the IRS” and “We Want Truth Benghazi.”
In two separate rallies on either side of the Capitol, one focusing on immigration reform and the other on the IRS, the whole gang got back together. There was Michele Bachmann and Steve King and Louie Gohmert and all the lesser Tea Party lawmakers, radio hosts, activists and hangers-on who became fixtures of the big rallies in the Tea Party’s glory days.
“The two rallies are bigger than the sum of their parts, however. They mark the return of Tea Party activists to the national political stage,” Breitbart’s Mike Flynn promised. “When the Tea Party started in 2009, the idea of government growing out of control was a theory. Today, it is a fact.”
But the main event was Glenn Beck, who helped organize the anti-IRS rally. As skilled an orator as ever, the former Fox News host delivered a sprawling and classically Beckian 35-minute barn-burner that incorporated, among other things, Frederick Douglass, geotagging, the Arab Spring, an allegory about slavery and elephants, Woodstock, Hollywood, “the hippie culture,” MLK, Gandhi, the Bible, Las Vegas, the liberal media, Foxconn, “homosexuals who are being stoned to death in Egypt,” Jews, Jesus, sex trafficking, border security, government spying, and the proclamation: “We are not racist.”
The trust of Beck’s speech was that the people standing before him were engaged in an epic holy war against the people inside the Capitol building behind him, who are trying to “enslave mankind.” “We have chosen sides, and we chose God’s,” Beck said to rapturous applause. “Those who wish to use unrighteous dominion over mankind are not enemies of ours, they are enemies of His. And I have a sneaking suspicion he’s not going to be silent much longer either.”
“The mainstream media will mock me,” Beck said, but we can trace this fight “all the way back to Moses,” via Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. “I am a man and I demand to be treated as such,” he added.
Beck updated his fare for the current times, weaving in references to fears about the surveillance state — “information and data gathering … is evil, it is un-American, it is wrong” — but the message still felt of a 2010 vintage, aspiring for a new conservative dawn that seemed so much within reach a few years ago, only to slip back over the horizon by the end of 2012.
And like a reunion concert, the rally showed all the fraying edges of passing time and spoiled potential, underscoring how the Tea Party has become a shadow of what it was in its more hopeful youth. Some people couldn’t be with us today. Allen West, Joe Walsh, Jim DeMint are all gone from Congress. Bachmann, the Tea Party Caucus chairwoman herself, is retiring. Beck is off of Fox News and is today more of a sideshow than the guy who once struck so much fear into the heart of the Obama White House that they wouldn’t even let a falsely accused USDA employee finish driving home before firing her, for fear of ending up on his blackboard.
Still, there are green shoots for the movement. Sarah Palin is back on Fox. The Obama “scandals” have incited the conservative base. But 2013 feels very different from 2010.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 20, 2013
“Clearly Moving Backwards”: For The GOP And Tea Partiers, It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again
There was a certain irony to the timing. Yesterday, the House Republican leadership began a new outreach effort to leaders of the Latino community, trying to repair years of damage. And during their discussions, and assurances about the GOP’s sincerity, a far-right rally was underway on the national mall featuring anti-immigrant speeches from one Republican after another.
As Kate Nocera reported, Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) “was prepared to talk about immigration for six hours all by himself if he had to,” but it didn’t come to that.
But King didn’t have to talk by himself. Crowds showed up in droves. One member of Congress after another showed up to give speeches. The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector dropped by to talk about his widely criticized study that the Senate’s immigration bill would cost $6 trillion (though there was no criticism from this crowd).
For King the outpouring of support from Tea Party groups and likeminded members of Congress was proof that his efforts to stall, and hopefully kill, the Senate’s immigration bill in the House were working. If party leaders had hoped King would sit this fight out, by day’s end on Wednesday he had made it abundantly clear he wasn’t going anywhere. […]
“This bill is at its core amnesty,” King said to cheers. “We’re here to today … to take this debate outside the halls of Congress. If it’s not going to be good enough inside, we’ll take it outside!”
To help underscore the larger problem, consider the fact that Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) appeared at the event, spoke briefly in Spanish, and was heckled.
It’s true that immigration wasn’t the only subject discussed yesterday — the legion of far-right lawmakers were also eager to talk about the IRS. Imagine that.
But the point of the gathering was to condemn the bipartisan immigration legislation pending in the Senate: “Protesters wore T-shirts emblazoned with American flags and tea party slogans, and they waved homemade signs that read, ‘John Boehner: no amnesty, get a backbone,’ ‘Boehner: go home,’ ‘exporting illegals = importing jobs for Americans, stop socialism,’ and ‘if we lose rule of law we become Mexico.'”
And for a moment, if you lost track of the calendar, you might even think it was 2010, which isn’t exactly the Republican Party’s goal right now.
Indeed, consider yesterday’s event in the larger context: what have Republicans shown the nation lately? There was a Tea Party rally this week, which followed a big fight over an anti-abortion bill that can’t pass. In the states, we see a focus on culture-war issues, including state-mandated, medically-unnecessary ultrasounds. On Capitol Hill, most Republican lawmakers are running around talking about “amnesty” and “illegals,” which is every bit as insulting as their rhetoric about women.
Yesterday, we even heard talk about “takers,” as if the “47 percent” video never happened.
And on the horizon, many in the GOP are already planning another debt-ceiling crisis.
I argued a week ago that the Republican Party’s “rebranding” effort had gone off the rails, but in retrospect, I probably understated matters. Party leaders hoped to apply some lessons from 2012 and move the party forward, but half-way through 2013, it’s clear Republicans are moving backwards.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 20, 2013
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