“Feeling A Little Left Out”: The Religious Right Won’t Tolerate Being Ignored
The defining debate within the Republican Party over the last several months has pitted Tea Partiers against the GOP’s Corporate wing. The two contingents have already begun gearing up for some notable primary fights in advance of this year’s midterm elections.
But there’s another wing of the party that’s apparently feeling a little left out.
On a recent snowy day in the Washington suburb of Tyson’s Corner, Va., some of the religious right’s wealthiest backers and top operatives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton to plot their entry into the conservative civil war.
Their plan: take a page out of the playbooks of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers by raising millions of dollars, coordinating their political spending and assiduously courting megadonors…. It’s all geared toward elevating the place of social issues like abortion and gay marriage in conservative politics.
To be sure, all of this makes sense. The religious right, as a political movement, wants to remain relevant with its allies, so it stands to reason that leading social conservatives would begin plotting to defend and expand its influence. It may make intra-party tensions a little more complicated in the coming months, but the religious right probably doesn’t much care.
The trouble, though, is in the assumption that social conservatives have been irrelevant of late.
Indeed, the Politico article stated as fact that social issues have “been largely relegated to the sidelines” in Republican politics, and the GOP’s competing wings have both “steered away from social issues they deem too divisive.”
I can appreciate why this might seem true – after all, it’s not as if John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor run around prioritizing the culture war above other GOP goals. But the closer one looks, the more these assumptions start to crumble.
For example ,the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit reproductive health research organization, found that “abortion was at the forefront of the state legislative debate during the past three years – so much so that states added more restrictions to the books from 2011-2013 than during the entire preceding decade.”
This isn’t the result of a party steering away from divisive social issues; this is the opposite.
What’s more, as we discussed a few months ago, let’s not forget that Republican leaders lined up to kiss the religious right movement’s ring at the 2013 Values Voter Summit, and GOP officials incorporated their opposition to contraception into the government-shutdown strategy. While Republican governors spent much of the year trying to limit women’s reproductive choices, it’s not limited to state government – just about the only bills House GOP lawmakers find it easy to pass deal with abortion.
The Republican Party’s commitment to the culture war remains alive and well. The religious right is worried about lost relevance, but the movement already has considerable influence over the GOP’s direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“Listening To The Founding Fathers”: Constitutionalism With An Anti-Government Ideology Is Historically And Philosophically Mistaken
A political backlash has commenced within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and unelectable primary candidates.
But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates describe as “constitutionalism.” Our national recovery, in this view, depends on returning to the severely constrained governing vision of the Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution. Many Republicans now seem to be saying: Yes, this is the conservative ideal, but it is just not practical to implement at the moment.
This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,” Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is historically and philosophically mistaken.
It is not enough to praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong central government, which is what the Constitution actually created. Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of government, they believed that good government was essential to promote what they called the “public good.”
And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34, “are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages. . . . Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”
In the tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,” Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action” of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and afflicted.”
Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an 18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.
This is not to argue that the Founders would be happy with the current size and role of government. But, after protecting a variety of essential civil liberties, they placed such matters mainly in the realm of democratic self-government. They made it procedurally difficult for majorities to prevail. But they placed few limits on the public policies that durable majorities might adopt in the future — leaving “a capacity to provide for future contingencies.”
In our time, durable majorities have endorsed the existence of Social Security and Medicare. These roles of government were not envisioned by the Founders. But they do not violate a principle of our system nor run counter to the prescient mind-set of the Founders. People are free to argue for and against such programs. But this debate can’t be trumped or short-circuited by simplistic and legalistic appeals to the Constitution as a purely limiting document.
The broad purposes of the modern state — promoting equal opportunity, providing for the poor and elderly — are valid within our constitutional order. But these roles are often carried out in antiquated, failing systems. The conservative challenge is to accept a commitment to the public good while providing a distinctly conservative vision of effective, modest, modern government.
But a shift in mind-set is first required among conservatives: thinking of government as a precious national institution in need of care and reform. This would honor the Founders. The real Founders.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“There’s Something There”: GOP ‘Confronting A New Reality’ On Healthcare
The Obama administration won’t have an official announcement on December’s health care enrollment numbers for a few more weeks, but chances are good that we’ll see a spike in the number of newly enrollment Americans. At the end of November, the Affordable Care Act had helped bring coverage to about 1.2 million people; by the end of this month, that total will include millions more.
And with each new enrollment, it slowly dawns on congressional Republicans that the larger calculus has changed in fundamental ways. Jonathan Weisman reported overnight that GOP policymakers are “confronting a new reality.”
The enrollment figures may be well short of what the Obama administration had hoped for. But the fact that a significant number of Americans are now benefiting from the program is resulting in a subtle shift among Republicans.
“It’s no longer just a piece of paper that you can repeal and it goes away,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and a Tea Party favorite. “There’s something there. We have to recognize that reality. We have to deal with the people that are currently covered under Obamacare.”
And that underscores a central fact of American politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act during the Depression: Once a benefit has been bestowed, it is nearly impossible to take it away.
Quite right. The Republican repeal crusade, whether the party wants to admit it or not, is over. Sure, Boehner & Co. can schedule a few dozen more repeal votes to help Tea Partiers feel warm and fuzzy, but even that’s less likely in light of the millions of consumers who’ve signed up for coverage – in an election year, candidates don’t generally thrive running on a platform that says, “Vote for me so I can take health care benefits away from your family.”
Indeed, GOP officials are desperate to talk about the “cancellation notices” a small sliver of the population received, but it gets a little tricky for these same Republicans to draw up plans to cancel millions more health care plans on purpose.
As we discussed a few weeks ago, the fight over health care is no longer an abstraction over hypothetical benefits. There’s a profound difference between “Republicans are voting to deny you a benefit you don’t yet enjoy” and “Republicans are voting to take away your health insurance and replace it with nothing.” The former struck GOP officials as plausible; the latter is politically suicidal.
So, as of this minute, what’s the Republican position on health care? No one, including GOP policymakers themselves, has any idea. For years, it was a straightforward push to repeal the entirety of the law, regardless of the consequences or human suffering. Now, some still want to pretend repeal is possible, others want to tinker around the edges with “reforms.” Some believe it’s time for Republicans to craft a policy alternative of their own to present to voters, others believe incessant complaining should be enough to give the GOP a boost on Election Day.
“The hardest problem for us is what to do next,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Weisman.
Ya don’t say.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 27, 2013
“The GOP’s Growing Divide”: The Provocateurs Can Be Counted On To Keep Far-Right Anger And Resentment At A Rolling Boil
The Republican Party, which should have the wind at its back, enters 2014 in disarray bordering on open warfare.
President Obama and the Democrats have had, let’s face it, a bumpy few months. The debut of the Affordable Care Act was not quite the hair-pulling, garment-rending, world-historical disaster that some critics claim, but it was — and remains — messy enough to buff the shine on the GOP’s badly tarnished brand.
A CNN poll released Thursday found that 49 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer to be represented by a Republican in Congress, while 44 percent favored a Democrat. That’s not much of a margin, but it’s a big change from two months ago when 50 percent preferred a Democrat and just 42 percent preferred a Republican.
Such generic polls are of limited use in predicting what will happen in November. But the numbers do suggest that the GOP is back in the game. Voters appear willing to listen to what the party has to say.
If only the GOP had a message.
There is one proposition on which the party’s warring factions agree: “We don’t like Obama’s Affordable Care Act.” But there is a lack of consensus, to put it mildly, on how this visceral dislike of a president and his signature policy initiative should translate into concrete political action.
For Republicans — to invert a classic George W. Bush bon mot — Obamacare has somehow become a divider, not a uniter. In a year when the GOP may have a legitimate chance of capturing the Senate, several primary contests appear likely to devolve into bloody battles over Obama’s health-care reforms — not whether to oppose them, but how.
In Georgia, for example, one of the leading candidates to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss is Rep. Jack Kingston. He has voted repeatedly — and fruitlessly — with his House Republican colleagues to defund the Affordable Care Act. But when he suggested recently that to “just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own” was not “the responsible thing to do,” opponents quickly attacked Kingston as some kind of quisling who was waving a flag of surrender.
In fact, Kingston was simply acknowledging reality. Obamacare is the law. Memories of the program’s incompetent launch will fade. Republicans are going to have to decide whether to collaborate in making the Affordable Care Act work better — or risk being seen as working against the nation’s best interests.
On a range of issues, this is the party’s essential dilemma. Ideologues want to continue the practice of massive, uncompromising resistance to anything Obama tries to accomplish. Pragmatists want the GOP to demonstrate that it can be reasonable and trustworthy, on the theory that voters want their government to function well and won’t put a bunch of anti-government extremists in charge of running it.
Keep in mind that despite the findings of that CNN poll, other surveys show the GOP still has a ton of work to do. A recent Wall Street Journal poll reported that 48 percent of respondents had “negative feelings” toward the Republican Party, as opposed to 39 percent who felt negatively toward the Democratic Party.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), took a giant step for pragmatism by negotiating a budget deal with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) — and the ideological wing of the party freaked out. House Speaker John Boehner, as rock-ribbed a Main Street conservative as you’ll ever meet, is routinely attacked on far-right Web sites as some kind of squishy moderate.
The question of how the GOP should proceed really should be a no-brainer. But after cynically taking advantage of the huge jolt of energy provided by tea party activists, the Republican establishment is finding that these true believers don’t necessarily listen when they’re told to go sit in a corner and shut up.
The no-compromises GOP base is fertile fundraising territory for potential presidential candidates, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and for pressure groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth. So these provocateurs can be counted on to keep far-right anger and resentment at a rolling boil — and resist the establishment’s attempt to lower the temperature.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is expected to spend up to $50 million to ensure that the Republican Party chooses no extremist “loser candidates” for Senate races. As Scott Reed, the chamber’s chief political strategist, told the Wall Street Journal: “That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.”
Wanna bet?
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 26, 2013
“Rove’s Republican Rivals Step Up”: With The Bloom Off The Rose, Struggle Over Money And Influence Is Roiling The Republican Party
About a year ago at this time, Karl Rove found himself in a fairly awkward position. While maintaining a prominent media role as a campaign analyst, the Republican strategist was also raising truckloads full of cash for his Crossroads operation, which was trying to buy victories for the candidates Rove was covering.
The result was a rather striking fiasco. Rove burned through several hundred million dollars, but lost nearly every race he targeted, culminating in an unfortunate on-air tantrum. Conservative activist Richard Viguerie said at the time that “in any logical universe,” Rove “would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again.”
Indeed, a Republican operative told the Huffington Post, “The billionaire donors I hear are livid…. There is some holy hell to pay.”
A year later, on a superficial level, much of the landscape appears similar – Rove still enjoys his media perches, still leads the Crossroads attack operation, and still hopes wealthy far-right donors will finance his election plans. But Nick Confessore reports that there’s one important difference: Rove has more intra-party rivals, hoping to take advantage of his record of failure.
A quiet but intense struggle over money and influence is roiling the Republican Party just as the 2014 election season is getting underway.
At least a dozen “super PACs” are setting up to back individual Republican candidates for the United States Senate, challenging the strategic and financial dominance that Karl Rove and the group he co-founded, American Crossroads, have enjoyed ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 cleared the way for unlimited independent spending.
In wooing donors, the new groups – in states like Texas, Iowa, West Virginia and Louisiana – are exploiting Crossroads’ poor showing in 2012, when $300 million spent by the super PAC and a sister nonprofit group yielded few victories. Some are suggesting that Crossroads’ deep ties to the Republican establishment and recent clashes with conservative activists are a potential liability for Republican incumbents facing Tea Party challengers.
It wasn’t too long ago that Rove’s name carried almost mythical weight in Republican circles, which no doubt made a difference when Crossroads approached donors for checks. But after 2012, the bloom is off the rose. Rove’s reputation took a hit and it hasn’t recovered.
In some respects, this is overdue. In 2000, it was Rove’s idea to keep George W. Bush in California in the campaign’s waning days, instead of stumping in key battleground states. Bush lost California by a wide margin, and Rove’s strategy practically cost his candidate the election.
In 2006, after nearly getting indicted, Rove’s sole responsibility was overseeing the Republican Party’s 2006 election strategy. At the time, he told NPR in late October that he’d found a secret math that gave him insights that mere mortals can’t comprehend, and soon after, Democrats won back both the House and Senate in a historic victory.
And then in 2012, Rove managed to strike out in ignominious fashion with other people’s money, raising questions anew about whether his reputation was ever fully deserved.
The result is skeptical GOP donors who not only see Rove as someone who can’t deliver victories, but also part of a tired Republican Beltway establishment that’s lost perspective. With the proliferation of groups similar to Crossroads, Rove has to worry about competition within his own party in ways he’s not accustomed to.
By: Steve Benen, the Maddow Blog, December 26, 2013
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