“Not So Easy Rider”: Marco Rubio, From GOP “Savior” To Tea Party Troll In 12 Months
You can understand why Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is bitter.
While Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) became Tea Party rock stars this year with high-profile but legislatively inconsequential filibusters, Rubio went from right-wing hero to RINO by risking his career to back a comprehensive immigration reform bill that actually passed the Senate.
Initially, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was supportive of “the Republican Savior” as he tried to accomplish the only policy recommendation Republicans gave themselves in their 2012 election “autopsy.” But the GOP base as represented by the Tea Partiers in the House refused to let Speaker John Boehner even consider letting the Senate bill come up for a vote.
As the far right organized against what they called his “shamnesty” bill, Rubio saw his dream of locking up the 2016 GOP nomination early suddenly replaced with billboards condemning the “Rubio-Obama immigration plan.”
To try to win back the base, Rubio joined with Cruz and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) in the failed plot to defund Obamacare. When that wasn’t enough, he actually turned against his own bill.
So you can imagine how steamed Senator Rubio was when he heard Paul Ryan being praised as a “dealmaker” for putting together a budget deal that basically re-enforces the status quo.
Well, you don’t have to imagine. Rubio almost immediately went on the attack against the proposed legislation after it was announced, saying not only was he against it, he was pretty sure it would be responsible for destroying the American Dream.
Ryan heard that criticism Thursday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and fired back with a deft response.
“Read the deal and get back to me,” he said. “People are going to do what they need to do. Look, in the minority you don’t have the burden of governing.”
Republicans have stopped trying to hide the fact that there is a civil war going on between the Tea Party and the establishment.
Both of the leaders in the Senate — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — are among the half-dozen Senate Republicans facing Tea Party primary challengers.
McConnell has been calling out the right-wing outside groups who are funding many of the challengers against him for weeks.
“I think, honestly, many of [the Tea Party] have been misled,” he told the Wall St. Journal’s Peggy Noonan in November. “They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit… They raise money… take their cut and spend it.”
Boehner joined the fight this week by blasting the outside groups that he now says led to the shutdown.
“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals,” Boehner said in a press conference on Thursday. “This is ridiculous. If you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement.”
And Paul Ryan is making a case that being a conservative means accepting reality and actually governing.
Senator Rubio has given up on governance and moved as far to the right as he can go without falling off the game board. And he’s still being overshadowed by even more outlandish Tea Partiers.
That won’t stop him from trying to score points wherever he can. But even if he ends up opposing the immigration bills that will likely come out of the House now that the leadership has cut the Tea Party loose, chances are the only thing Marco Rubio will ever be president of is the Ted Cruz fan club.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 12, 2013
“All In The Dysfunctional Family”: Boehner’s Blasts, One More Volley In The Long GOP Battle
With a few words that reflected a mountain of frustration, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has escalated the ongoing struggle over the future of the Republican Party. Whether it proves to be a truly crystallizing moment for a party still trying to find its way after its defeat in 2012 is the critical question.
For much of the year, the Republican Party has been in a deep hole, its credibility diminished, its image at historical lows and its direction heavily influenced by conservative tea party insurgents and their allied outside groups. This fall’s government shutdown only made the hole deeper. Boehner seems to have decided it’s time to stop digging.
The speaker’s blast at outside groups that were calling for the defeat of the bipartisan budget agreement, even before it was unveiled, has reverberated widely. Among other things, Boehner declared that these organizations, which also advocated the strategy that led to the shutdown, have “lost all credibility” because of their extreme positions and incendiary tactics.
Boehner’s comments did not trigger a Republican civil war, as some have suggested. The reality is that the internal conflict has been underway for years. Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama in the 2012 election intensified the debate, and those tensions will be front and center as the GOP heads toward a divisive round of primary elections next year and then a potential battle royal when it picks a presidential nominee in 2016.
Both factions in the GOP’s ongoing struggle — those in the tea party wing and those in the establishment wing — have real grievances. Tea party insurgents have long viewed their congressional leaders as capitulating repeatedly over the years on tougher spending cuts. They see Obama’s Affordable Care Act as such an egregious expansion of big government that it prompted them to embrace a budget strategy this fall that had no chance of success.
This past week, with the bipartisan budget deal negotiated by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the tea party activists see one more example of the party’s refusal to do more to rein in government. The fact that the agreement could spare all members of Congress — and the public — repeated reruns of budgetary standoffs and shutdown threats (likely political losers for the GOP) is not an adequate offset to them.
In terms of the presidency, many conservatives believe that the GOP has not nominated a true and authentic conservative for the job since Ronald Reagan. (Whether Reagan could win his party’s nomination today, given his gubernatorial record of raising taxes and expanding access to abortion, is another matter.) Neither Romney in 2012 nor John McCain in 2008 met their standards.
But it doesn’t stop there. Former president George W. Bush disappointed many in the party’s base who argue that he perpetuated Washington’s big spending ways. Former Senate majority leader Robert Dole, the party’s nominee in 1996, was derided by supply-side conservatives (among them former House speaker Newt Gingrich) as the “tax collector for the welfare state.”
Former president George H.W. Bush proved an apostate to tax-cutting conservatives for breaking his “no new taxes” pledge, an action that split his party in 1990. Conservatives such as Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, later recalled being elated when Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, seeing his defeat as an opening to create a more-conservative party.
Now it’s Paul Ryan who is the disappointment. Ryan has been the intellectual leader of conservatives in the House and, more broadly, in his party. Now he is seen as something of a traitor to the cause for negotiating the bipartisan budget deal.
But the GOP establishment has its own list of grievances and is threatening to fight back. Establishment Republicans view the purity police on the right with disdain. They believe in big-tent Republicanism and pragmatism when it comes to governing.
They see the tea party movement writ large as a decidedly mixed blessing, a faction whose grass-roots energy is valued, but which also has engaged in a series of divisive primary battles. It’s arguable that the tea party cost the Republicans four or five Senate seats over the past two elections. Had most of those races gone the other way, Republicans would be at near-parity with Democrats in the upper chamber.
Establishment Republicans have special scorn for outside groups that are fueling the primary challenges and trying to dictate to members of Congress the strategies they should pursue. These groups include Heritage Action, the Senate Conservative Fund and the Club for Growth — the ones that drove the disastrous shutdown strategy and oppose the latest budget agreement.
A few months ago, Boehner made himself an agent of this strategy, and both he and his party paid a big price. This past week, when these groups called for defeat of the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, Boehner blew his stack.
Whether this was a well-thought-out plan to launch an attack or a spontaneous statement by a fed-up leader isn’t clear. Whatever it was, he was able to marshal a big majority of Republicans to support the agreement in the House, along with a sizable majority of Democrats. The partisan breakdown of the vote in the Senate is likely to look considerably different.
Establishment Republicans hope the tea party’s influence will diminish as a result of the shutdown debacle. That will depend in part on the tea party’s success in challenging a number of incumbent GOP senators next year, but there’s nothing right now to suggest its adherents are in retreat.
The announced opposition to the budget deal by three Republican senators who are prospective 2016 presidential candidates — Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas — suggests that they at least believe the tea party wing will continue to be a powerful force in charting the GOP’s direction.
GOP strategist John Feehery said the fact that so many Republicans voted for the budget agreement in the House was “hugely significant” and gives members an opportunity to begin to do some repair work. “It allows Congress to do its job,” he said. “They can get the appropriations process going, go home and talk about accomplishments and get their ratings above 10 percent.”
That could help in next year’s midterm elections, which will be influenced as much by Obama’s approval ratings, the state of the economy and judgments about the new health-care law as by the relative popularity of the Republican Party. But whether Boehner’s pushback marks a real turning point inside the party is another matter.
The business community has vowed to become more active in the intraparty battles, but their history of success is spotty. Conservative groups, fueled by some big donors and grass-roots energy, show no sign of pulling back, but will the fire burn as strongly as it has in the past?
In the absence of a consensus, and with both sides committed to the fight, the intraparty conflict will probably shift from the House and Senate floors to future elections. As one GOP strategist put it: “We’re in for a long, bloody conflict. Inside the family, we’re going to duke it out, and the place you duke it out is where you’re supposed to, which is at the ballot box.”
By: Dan Balz, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 14, 2013
“Boehner Might Be A Pragmatist, But He’s No Moderate”: The Budget Deal Has Passed, But Don’t Hold Your Breath For Bipartisanship
For the first time in months, Washington seems…optimistic. Not only did House Republicans pass the budget deal brokered by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and his counterpart in the Senate, Senator Patty Murray, but Speaker John Boehner made news with a small Howard Beale moment:
“Frankly I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they want to be. And frankly I just think they’ve lost all credibility,” he told reporters at his weekly press conference Thursday. “There comes a point when people step over the line. When you criticize something and you have no idea what you’re criticizing, it undermines your credibility.” […]
“You know, they pushed us into this fight to defund Obamacare and shut down the government,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly the strategy I had in mind. But if you recall, the day before the government re-opened, one of the people at one of these groups stood up and said, ‘well we never really thought it would work.’ Are you kidding me?”
Asked if he thinks the groups should “stand down,” Boehner said, “I don’t care what they do.”
This looks like the establishment backlash we expected during the shutdown fight, or—as Molly Ball put it for The Atlantic—“House leaders stopped trying to get along with the enforcers of an impossible conservative standard and started fighting back.”
Now, the speculation is that, perhaps, Boehner is prepared to buck Tea Party Republicans on other issues. Immigration activists, for example, are hopeful that this development could change the calculus for reform, and give Boehner the room he needs to pass a bill with votes from pragmatic Republicans—who have an agenda they want to accomplish—and Democrats. Indeed, there’s the potential for a whole rush of activity around issues where Democrats and Republicans can come to narrow agreement, from an extension of unemployment insurance to the Employee Non-Discrimination Act.
The problem is that, aside from this budget deal, it doesn’t look like Boehner has broken from conservatives on much at all. In that same press conference, for instance, he repeated conservative boilerplate on repealing the Affordable Care Act. And afterwards he went to the House floor and blocked a vote on extending emergency unemployment benefits. Likewise, there’s no real indication that he’s changed his mind on the EDNA or unemployment insurance. The House Speaker might be a pragmatist, but he isn’t a moderate.
Earlier this year, Boehner bucked conservatives by violating the “Hastert rule”—the faux requirement that all legislation passed by the House have support by a majority of the majority—to pass a deal on the fiscal cliff, authorize aid for Hurricane Sandy, and renew the Violence Against Women Act. The prediction was that this could be the new normal, and that Boehner could restore a modicum of sanity to the House by refusing to rely on Republican votes for legislation.
What followed, instead, was a year of inaction, culminating in a government shutdown and a stand-off over the fiscal cliff.
All of this is to say that we shouldn’t hold our breath about Boehner and his “new” approach. The Ryan-Murray deal was a necessity: Not only does it preclude Tea Party conservatives from forcing another shutdown, but it preserves most of the sequester and hands Republicans a solid victory.
As for the other agenda items? Most Republicans don’t want them and there’s no reason for Boehner to go against the tide.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, December 13, 2013
“Pure Cultural Hatred”: Why Obama’s Haters Are Worse Than Bush’s
Permit me to share with you my favorite set of headlines from Thursday.
USA Today: Official who OK’d Obama birth papers dies in crash.
NPR: Hawaiian Official Who Released Obama’s Birth Certificate Dies in Plane Crash.
NBC News: Health care director who approved Obama birth certificate dies in plane crash.
And finally, National Review, and note the difference, which rests in just one word, but what a word it is: Official Who Released Obama’s Birth Certificate Dies in Mysterious Plane Crash.
Ah, of course. “Mysterious.” Well, I mean, it had to be, didn’t it? Poor Loretta Fuddy, 65 and a longtime public servant, was evidently a beloved figure in Aloha State political circles, at least based on the tributes I’ve read over the last couple of days from Hawaii officials, who seem to be absolutely grief-stricken at her passing. But to certain of their fellow Americans, Fuddy’s tragic death provides the occasion for only one thing—sly suggestions that her death might not quite have been an accident. You see, she was the only person of nine on board the small Cessna who perished. Hence, “mysterious.”
In fairness, the National Review writer was having a bit of a laugh. But even so, that word did appear in the headline, and that headline happened to appear toward the end of the most flagrantly batshit-crazy week of Obama obsession we’ve seen in a long, long time. I needn’t rehearse all the ridiculous and false and not-a-little-racist things that have been said. But let’s look into this dementia a little more broadly.
Of course, some on the left said nutty things about Bush too, and for the arbiters of conventional wisdom, that mere fact makes for “equivalence.” Both sides do it. Well… OK. But that depends on how you define “it.”
In fact, both sides do different things. My assertion is this: Baseless left-wing attacks on Republicans differ in character from baseless right-wing attacks on Democrats in two ways. First, most liberal-left attacks on Republicans are more political than cultural, while virtually all right-wing attacks on Democrats are about culture. And second, those liberal-left attacks that are about culture tend to be mocking in tone, expressing derision, while the right’s attacks are fearful, expressing deep paranoia.
Let’s take them one by one. Bush and his top men were often called fascists on the left. That’s an attack that certainly has its cultural elements, but it is first and foremost political. The worst thing people on the left could think to do, in other words—call Bush a fascist—is a political smear, not a cultural one. This reflects the way most people on the left see the world—through a political lens primarily, and through a cultural one only secondarily. There are exceptions to this, but in the main, for the broad liberal-left, politics is primarily about politics, not culture.
On the right, politics is much more about culture, because the right feels itself to be an aggrieved minority whose culture (industriousness, self-reliance, Godliness, etc.) is under constant attack from the libertines and relativists, who of course far outnumber and surround the righteous few. Culture is where people on the right live, and so the worst thing they can think to do is to make attacks that are about culture, about the Democrats hating God, destroying America, and so on.
Sometimes, of course, the left goes cultural. Calling Bush a chimp and an idiot and a cowboy, say; those trafficked in liberals’ stereotypes about Texans, Southerners in general, back-slapping oil men, and so on (well, chimp just had to do with certain facial features). That wasn’t nice, I suppose, but here’s the thing. It was done to laugh at him.
By and large, the right doesn’t laugh at Obama. Oh, sometimes. There’s the absurd teleprompter meme from early on, which held that he couldn’t put two sentences together without huge transcripts placed in front of him. And there’s a strain of criticism that he’s in over his head. But those tropes are far outweighed by the ones that assign to Obama a world-historical level of devious intelligence—indeed, he’s so maliciously brilliant that he managed to fake a birth certificate decades ago, all as just the opening salvo of a grand scheme to bring America and/or the white race to ruin.
If that’s how they see him, and it is, it stands to reason that the most out-there attacks will be pegs that will fit nicely in that hole. And, always, race will be ladled on top, like, well, chocolate syrup. Both elements were at work in this ridiculous thing about the Danish prime minister, with whom Obama was allegedly bringing dishonor upon America and behaving the way black men behave in Concerned Citizens’ Council newsletters, unable to keep his libido on a leash and so forth.
To people on the left, Bush was embarrassing, ever a threat to behave boorishly or be asked to appraise a Kandinsky on a European visit and crack that it looked like yesterday’s breakfast leftovers. To people on the right, though, Obama is a menace. They are different—and yes, the latter is worse than the former, because it does breed a more intense hatred.
Did you know, for example, that Obama has “ordered” the deaths and executions of some 30 or more people? Here’s the list, have a look. One of them is particularly impressive—apparently, a 10-year-old Obama iced an Indonesian classmate, decapitating him as part of an initiation ritual, “since Islam demands that a boy spill another’s blood before the age of 10 to prove their loyalty to Allah.” The Clintons, of course, were accused of murder, too. Whereas no one had to make crazy murder accusations against Bush. He actually did kill people (not with his own hands, obviously, but by starting a war of choice whose death tally will never be fully known).
One can only roll one’s eyes, but in fact, all this is psychotic and sickening, and it has power in the media, which can’t resist talking at length about The Handshake or The Selfie, even if it’s to defend Obama, because the mere fact of talking about those things really only fuels the fire. Yes, Obama will be out of office one day—which only raises the question what they might say (that they haven’t already) about Hillary.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 14, 2013
“The Tea Party Is Pissed And That’s A Good Sign”: Here’s The Real Story, The GOP Has Surrendered On Repealing Obamacare
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) both referred to the budget deal they announced on Tuesday evening as “historic.” They were correct — but not because of any of the cuts or fees in the modest deficit-reduction plan.
What’s historic about Ryan and Murray’s bipartisan deal, which eases the automatic sequester cuts, is that it quietly funds Obamacare for the next two years, rejecting the Tea Party argument to defund/repeal the president’s signature legislative accomplishment until at least 2017.
Yes, Republicans are giving in and accepting the Affordable Care Act, right as the law and the president are near all-time popularity lows.
Two months of severe problems with the website compounded confusion and frustration with an already complex law. Most of the problems have been fixed, but the public perception of the law will take months to heal, if it ever does. But Republicans have figured out, after their failed attempt to dive-bomb the law with a shutdown in October, that they have no hope of getting rid of it — at least until President Obama is out of office.
The Ryan-Murray agreement isn’t the only sign that many Republicans are nearing the “acceptance” phase of mourning the existence of Obamacare.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who repeatedly said that the president’s health reform was an abomination that compelled him to run for office, now says he can accept the law’s state insurance exchange system.
Five of the 25 Republican-led states that have rejected Medicaid expansion are edging toward accepting federal money to help insure millions who earn just a bit too much to qualify for Medicaid. Republican governors in the key swing states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are already working toward implementing expansion.
Another sign that most Republicans understand that they’re going to have to live with Obamacare is that the Tea Party is pissed.
Red State‘s Erick Erickson — one of the leading voices for primarying just about every incumbent Republican senator — put it this way:
Last month Republicans bailed on the Obamacare fight and declared sequestration their line in the sand. Now they are saying they’ll bail on sequestration, but they’ll hold the line on unemployment benefits.
Why should we believe them anymore? Is it any wonder that poll after poll shows Republican voters hate their Republican congressmen and senators?
Bend over America, here it comes again.
Republicans had two months of unity as they celebrated the miserable rollout of HealthCare.gov. Now the GOP is back to where it was in October, stuck with a base that’s pretty much furious at its leadership for surrendering — again.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 11, 2013
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