“The Dumbest Affectation In Congress”: Members Making A Statement Of Their ‘Contempt For Washington’
There are a lot of stupid things members of Congress do to show the folks back home that though they moved hell and high water to get their jobs in Washington, D.C., they find everything about the place repugnant and despicable, and can’t wait to get away. But there are few pieces of posturing more inane than the decision to sleep in your Capitol Hill office as a demonstration that you haven’t gone native like all those sellouts with their apartments and closets and bathrooms.
I can see how a newly elected member might decide to sleep in her office while she gets settled and looks for a place. And being in Congress can be financially and logistically taxing, particularly for those who come from the West coast—you have to maintain two homes, and are expected to fly back nearly every weekend to shake hands at the county fair and pose for pictures at the senior center. But in the last few years it’s become de rigueur, particularly among Tea Partiers, to make a statement of their contempt for Washington by making their office their home, sleeping on a couch and showering at the House gym—and making sure that everybody hears about it. And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, female Republican members are getting into the act, and I do mean act:
Reps. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Lynn Jenkins of Kansas and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington are believed to be the first congresswomen to bunk in their offices, joining the ranks of lawmakers eschewing rent and a commute for an air mattress and showers at one of the congressional gyms. Like their male counterparts, the women are forgoing beds, bathtubs and home-cooked meals primarily to save money and maximize efficiency—and for some, to also make a political point—on the four days a week they generally spend in Washington. All three previously lived in apartments, not always close to the Capitol…
Male lawmakers have been bunking desk-side for decades, a practice that surged after Republicans took control of the House in 1995 and again in 2011, after the tea-party wave. Their ranks now are thought to top about two dozen. Some lawmakers like Reps. Noem and Jenkins also say crashing in the office sends a message to constituents: They don’t plan to appear too settled in Washington.
“It was never my goal to come to DC and be comfortable,” said Mrs. Noem, a deputy for the new majority whip.
Oh, spare me. If you’re doing it because you don’t want to get too settled in Washington, then I assume you won’t be running for re-election, right? I thought so.
I’ll grant that as far as affectations go, this one certainly takes commitment. But how exactly is sleeping in your office supposed to keep you connected with the real America? What’s going to make you more “out of touch,” getting an apartment so you can have a good night’s sleep when you’re doing the people’s business, or literally never leaving Capitol Hill? Is signing a one-year lease on a studio going to suddenly make you change your views on deficit spending or tax cuts or the next trade deal? If it is, your constituents probably shouldn’t have elected you in the first place.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 6, 2014
“Can The Voters Change The GOP?”: The Electorate Must Realize That The Radical Right Is The Real Culprit
The central issue in this fall’s elections could turn out to be a sleeper: What kind of Republican Party does the country want?
It is, to be sure, a strange question to put to an electorate in which independents and Democrats constitute a majority. Yet there is no getting around this: The single biggest change in Washington over the last five years has been a GOP shift to a more radical form of conservatism. This, in turn, has led to a kind of rejectionism that views cooperation with President Obama as inherently unprincipled.
Solving the country’s problems requires, above all, turning the Republican Party back into a political enterprise willing to share the burdens of governing, even when a Democrat is in the White House.
For those looking for a different, more constructive Republicanism, this is not a great year to stage the battle. Because of gerrymandering, knocking the current band of Republicans out of control of the House is a Herculean task. And most of the competitive seats in the fight for the Senate are held by Democrats in Republican states. The GOP needs to win six currently Democratic seats to take over, and it appears already to have nailed down two or three of these. Republicans are now favored in the open seats of South Dakota and West Virginia, and probably also in Montana.
Nonetheless, there is as yet no sense of the sort of tide that in 2010 gave a Republicanism inflected with tea party sensibilities dominance in the House. The core narrative of the campaign has yet to be established. Democrats seeking reelection are holding their own in Senate races in which they are seen as vulnerable.
And then there was last week’s House fiasco over resolving the refugee crisis at our border. It served as a reminder that Republican leaders are handcuffing themselves by choosing to appease their most right-wing members rather than pursuing middle-ground legislation by collaborating with Democrats.
The bill that House Speaker John Boehner was trying to pass last Thursday already tilted well rightward. It provided Obama with only a fraction of what he said was needed to deal with the crisis — $659 million, compared with the president’s request for $3.7 billion. It also included provisions to put deportations on such a fast track that Obama threatened to veto it. A White House statement said that its “arbitrary timelines” were both impractical and inhumane.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi happened to be meeting with a group of journalists when the bill collapsed. “In order for them to pass a bill, they had to make it worse and worse and worse,” she said, referring to Boehner’s efforts to placate members who have entered into an unusual cross-chamber alliance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to foil even conservative legislation if they regard it as insufficiently pure. When the bill was pulled back, Pelosi observed: “They couldn’t make it bad enough.”
On Friday, the GOP leadership pushed the measure still further right and added $35 million for border states to get it passed at an unusual evening session — but not before Republicans themselves had complained loudly about dysfunction in their own ranks.
In the meantime, the Senate was paralyzed on the issue by filibusters and other procedural hurdles that have rendered majority rule an antique notion in what once proudly proclaimed itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
As the House was preparing to pass its bill, Obama told a news conference on Friday that GOP leaders were well aware that he’d veto it if it came to him and bemoaned the fact that “even basic, commonsense, plain vanilla legislation” can’t get through because Republicans fear “giving Obama a victory.”
Last week’s legislative commotion could change the political winds by putting the costs of the GOP’s flight from moderation into stark relief. House Republicans found themselves in the peculiar position of simultaneously suing Obama for executive overreach and then insisting that he could act unilaterally to solve the border crisis.
Pelosi, for her part, went out of her way to praise “the Grand Old Party that did so much and has done so much for our country.” Commending the opposing party is not an election year habit, but her point was to underscore that Republicans had been “hijacked” by a “radical right wing” that is not simply “anti-government” but also “anti-governance.”
On balance, Washington gridlock has hurt Democrats more than Republicans by dispiriting moderate and progressive constituencies that had hoped Obama could usher in an era of reform. The key to the election will be whether Democrats can persuade these voters that the radical right is the real culprit in their disappointment — and get them to act accordingly on Election Day.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 3, 2014
“Ted Cruz, Legislative Innovator”: What’s Bad For The GOP Can Be Good For Little Teddy
Congress, it is said, is divided into “work horses” and “show horses.” The former try to make laws, while the latter worry more about whether they can get on TV. Plenty of members try to be both, but there are a surprising number that don’t even bother legislating. And these days, being a show horse offers a much clearer path to one day running for president. It’s still technically possible to spend a few decades crafting a legislative record and working your way up the leadership ladder, then eventually get your party’s nomination, like Bob Dole did. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to inject yourself into a few controversies, make some notable speeches, and take a trip or two to Iowa. Do that, and like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz (or Barack Obama), you can run for president in your first term.
Cruz, however, is doing something completely new. He may not bother to introduce any bills, but he is creating a new kind of legislative innovation. Perhaps for the first time in American history—I can’t think of any precedent, and knowledgeable people I’ve asked can’t either—we have a senator who has taken it upon himself to lead revolts in the House in order to undermine his own party’s leadership there.
Last year, Cruz held private meetings with Tea Party members in the House, urging them to keep the government shut down in the vain hope that they could destroy Obamacare as the price of ending the crisis. And this week, he was at it again:
The beginning of the collapse of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s border bill came Wednesday evening, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gathered more than a dozen House Republicans at his office in the Dirksen building on Capitol Hill.
It was there, as Boehner (R-Ohio) held his own meetings on the other side of Constitution Avenue, that Cruz heard that the speaker didn’t have enough votes—and realized that if his House allies held firm, he could rupture the fragile coalition supporting the measure…
He agreed that Boehner was distracted and said they should stick to their principles. The freshman senator also reminded them to be skeptical of promises from House leaders, particularly of “show votes”—legislative action designed to placate conservatives that carry little, if any, weight.
That quiet assurance was enough to persuade the conservatives to effectively topple Boehner’s plan, at least on Thursday, by balking when he said he would hold a largely symbolic standalone vote on Obama’s program.
We shouldn’t overstate the impact of Cruz’s involvement; it’s likely that Boehner’s immigration plan would have failed even if this meeting hadn’t taken place. But once again, Cruz has used his influence with House conservatives to help undermine Boehner and engineer a debacle for Republicans.
You might wonder at the strategic wisdom of that, but what’s bad for the GOP can be good for Ted Cruz. If we assume that his primary goal is mounting a presidential campaign, Republican unity isn’t something to be desired. You know what Republican unity gets you? Candidates like Bob Dole and Mitt Romney: establishment figures who get the nomination because it’s their turn and they seem like the best chance the GOP has of winning. Cruz is going to be the candidate of the far right, and the only way he could possibly prevail in a nomination fight is if it turns out to be a complete mess, with multiple factions engaged in bitter recriminations that fail to resolve themselves. If there’s a compromise candidate, it isn’t going to be Ted Cruz; if there’s a bloodbath, he stands at least a chance of being the last one standing.
I think it’s highly unlikely that Cruz could get the GOP nomination. But if you think about his actions in terms of stoking the GOP division and dismay that give him a shot, they make a lot more sense.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 1, 2014
“A Republican Chronic Affliction”: From Clinton To Obama; Why GOP Impeachment Fever Is Now So Predictable
Making predictions is a perilous practice for any political journalist. Too often, the would-be seers turn out to be dead wrong – as can be attested to by George Will, Michael Barone, Larry Kudlow, and the humiliated boy genius on Fox News, all of whom projected a big victory for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Yet there is at least one future event that could be safely forecast years ago, almost as soon as Barack Obama entered the White House: a movement among House Republicans to impeach the president.
In the conventional wisdom that chronically afflicts Washington, all the current muttering about impeachment is merely a theatrical display for the GOP’s wingnut base – as Democrats use the same threat to stir emotions (and donations) among Obama loyalists. Such complacent analysis misreads not only the mood and character of the Republican Party’s dominant Tea Party wing, but the recent history of impeachment as a political instrument of the far right.
The same forces that have sought to ruin Obama from the beginning were hatching schemes to remove Bill Clinton from office long before the unveiling of his reckless indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky. Back then, the talk of impeachment among zealots who schemed against Clinton, ranging from Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and disgraced former attorney general Ed Meese to an assortment of back-bench congressmembers and religious hucksters, could be easily brushed aside. Today, many of the survivors among that old cast of characters are peddling Impeach Obama bumperstickers– notably including Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, which features an “impeachment store” online.
Claims that Clinton had committed a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment under the Constitution dated as far back as 1994, the year after his inauguration, when the teamwork of determined right-wing activists and incompetent mainstream reporters ginned up a series of phony scandals. At secret meetings, the leadership of ultra-right organizations such as the Council for National Policy persuaded themselves that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted (for something), and that Bill Clinton could soon be impeached (for anything).
The itch to impeach Clinton gathered momentum in 1997, not long after his re-election, a democratic victory that did not impress his right-wing enemies. As with Obama, they wanted to undo his presidency not because he had committed a supposed constitutional offense, but simply because his “liberal, globalist, socialist” politics offended their sense of morality. Of course, they feel the same way about Obama today. Indeed, from the perspective of the insurrectionary Tea Party Republicans and other self-styled “patriots,” elections hardly matter at all, unless their candidate wins. To them, a Democratic president lacks legitimacy by definition.
For a pungent whiff of irony, remember that electing Obama in 2008 was supposed to preserve us from another decade of political trench warfare, instigated by those polarizing Clintons. Electing Hillary Clinton would lead America back into the partisan psychodrama of the Nineties, or so the Washington pundits warned us; better to choose that nice, inspirational, bipartisan-sounding senator from Illinois, they advised.
And how did that work out for us? Scarcely through any fault of Obama, the result has been no different from the scary projections of a divisive Clinton presidency: legislative gridlock, economic brinksmanship, kooky conspiracy theories, and now congressional lawsuits accompanied by loud talk of impeachment. Clinton and Obama are just names for the object of hate, against whom any slanderous, mendacious, and vacuous attack can be mounted.
That was why gullible rubes once bought hundreds of thousands of videotapes accusing the Clintons of murder – and why the same kind of suckers bought into the race-baiting “birther” insinuations about Obama. It is why a top House Republican will lie blatantly on television about the Supreme Court’s dozen rebukes of this president’s alleged constitutional overreach – when most of those cases involved George W. Bush.
In temperament and ideology, the Tea Party Republicans who run the House aren’t much different from the Gingrich gang that went after Clinton. They don’t care whether Obama won the election in a near-landslide — or that seeking to remove him would be very dangerous for our country and the world. If their party wins control of the Senate in November, then the reactionary impulse to impeach may well become irresistible.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, August 1, 2014
“Hilarious High-Dudgeon Denial”: GOP; How Dare You Say What I Said About Impeachment
The Republican leadership is furious that the media keep talking about their plans to impeach Barack Obama, and the GOP knows who’s injecting this false idea into the talking heads: Barack Obama.
Even as he led the House in the unprecedented step Wednesday of voting to sue a POTUS, House speaker John Boehner insists that all this talk about impeachment is “coming from the president’s own staff, and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill.” Why? Because they’re trying to rally their people to give money and to show up in this year’s election. We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Boehner emphasized. “Listen, it’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House.”
And although any alert reporter knows it’s Boehner’s protest that’s the scam (a dozen or so Republican congressmen have openly called for Obama’s impeachment; White House spokesman Josh Earnest named some of them, including Representative Steve King of Iowa and Steve Stockman of Texas, earlier this week), some in the corporate media nevertheless sniff a chance to deploy false equivalencies once more.
Chuck Todd, for example, said on Morning Joe, “I think the White House ought to be embarrassed at how they’re trying to play it. Boehner, the idea that he’s saying, Oh, we’re not talking impeachment. The lawsuit, please. That’s about placating the impeachment caucus in his own party. This is sort of an embarrassing moment for Washington. The leaders of both parties here, they’re driving away people from the polls. They’re driving people away from politics. This is cynical, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting.”
This pox-on-both-your-houses rant ignores the two houses’ very different dimensions. Calling for impeachment when no grounds for it exist and responding to those calls by raising funds to beat the impeachment-wingers at the polls are not equally cynical. It’s true that Democrats are exploiting GOP calls for impeachment to raise ire and money—several million dollars so far. And good for them. Why, in the age of Citizens United, shouldn’t they? “It would be malpractice if they didn’t do it,” Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart said on Hardball.
The Republicans’ inability to throw their base red meat without sane people noticing drives them into high-dudgeon denial. Hilariously so. On Tuesday, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said, “Republicans, conservatives, not talking about it. Only Democrats. It’s to gin up the base before November.” He said this even though, just days earlier, as Media Matters points out, Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano appeared on F&F “and counseled the GOP to impeach the president, which Napolitano claimed would ‘focus his attention immediately.’”
Fox is also trying to gloss over the impeachment soap opera coming from some of its other contributors, like Allen West and, most famously, Sarah Palin. Yeah, but those are just has-been fringers, not to be taken seriously, centrists point out. Chuck Todd even mocked Josh Earnest for listing pro-impeachment officials currently in office. The White House spokesman, Todd said, was “sitting at the podium trying, ticking off names of—oooh-oooh—look at Republicans that want impeachment.”
But look who’s wagging the dog here. According to a CNN/ORC International poll, 57 percent of Republicans say they support impeaching Obama. And Representative Steve Scalise, the new House majority whip, wouldn’t put impeachment off the table when Chris Wallace asked him about it three times. (It was a fascinating example of getting hoisted on your own talking point: each time Scalise refused to rule out impeachment, he blamed Obama for keeping the issue alive.)
For the record, John Boehner won’t take impeachment off that increasingly crowded table either.
Worse, Boehner is ignoring the top GOPer who “started” it: himself. The notoriously weak speaker set this latest round of impeachment talk in motion by bringing the lawsuit against Obama to the floor in the first place. The idea of this “impeachment lite” was to let his Tea Party masters vent their Obama hatred in a way that it would squelch talk of actual impeachment. The Republican leadership knows the issue could backfire on them during the 2014 elections, just as it did when the GOP impeached Clinton in 1998 and lost five House seats that year they previously had in the bag.
But rather than cool impeachment fever, the lawsuit has in fact heated it up by giving extremists in the House another way to question “responsible” Republicans’ true commitment to the cause. At least four of the five conservatives who voted against the lawsuit did so because they think it’s a weenie version of impeachment.
Here’s the bottom line: Boehner responded to impeachment talk from his right wing by filing a lawsuit. Yet when Democrats responded to that same impeachment talk from the same right wing, Boehner claims that it doesn’t exist—and if it does, the Dems are behind it.
We’ve seen this political blame-the-victim game before. Republicans from Glenn Beck to Karl Rove blamed Obama for keeping the birther issue alive by not releasing his long-form birth certificate as soon as they demanded it. (When he did, the Trump-led crazies received a very public pie in the face.) Last October, Republicans with presidential ambitions, like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, blamed Obama for the government shutdown, even though they both voted for it and maneuvered around their leadership to make it happen. It’s worth recalling that before the shutdown went down, Boehner insisted that it was going nowhere—just as he now swears that impeachment ain’t gonna happen.
Making the GOP bear some responsibility for the crazy in their ranks is the real purpose behind the spotlight Democrats are shining on the right-wing fever swamps. The media’s “both sides do it” reflex obscures the real meaning of this particular charade. Chris Matthews, I think, has it right: he’s been saying the right wants to delegitimize this president (more than they did even Clinton), to put an “asterisk” by his name in the history books so they can pretend that a black man was never really the president of the United States.
If Republicans win the Senate in November, then we’ll be hearing more a lot more about impeachment, no matter how much John Boehner says otherwise.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, August 1, 2014
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