“Beyond Polarization To Warfare”: It’s The Broader Acceptance Of Political Warfare In The Conservative Movement That’s Most Alarming
At WaPo’s Monkey Cage subsite today, there’s an important piece by University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault that gets to a distinction in political attitudes that some of us have been trying to articulate ever since the radicalization of one of our two major parties occurred:
I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….
Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.
That’s probably why Cornyn has attracted a right-wing primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman.
The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo last year. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.
All I’d add at this point is that it’s not terribly surprising that people who think of much of the policy legacy of the twentieth century as a betrayal of the very purpose of America–and even as defiance of the Divine Will–would view liberals in the dehumanizing way that participants in an actual shooting war so often exhibit. But it’s the broader acceptance of political warfare in the conservative movement and the GOP–typified by the perpetual rage against the Obama administration–that’s most alarming.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 10, 2014
“Supporting The Politicians”: Wal-Mart Exploits Employee Charity To Help Ted Cruz And John Boehner
Wal-Mart and other top U.S. corporations “reap worker political donations through charities,” according to a Bloomberg report published Monday.
Reporter Renee Dudley wrote that major companies, “forbidden to give money directly to political action committees, are taking advantage of controversial federal rules allowing them to ask employees to do it for them in exchange for matching charitable donations.” Dudley notes that the Federal Election Commission ruled in the 1980s that tying employees’ charitable donations to matching political contributions was legal, and that precedent has remained in place despite repeated disagreement within the agency, including a split vote in 2009. She reports the practice “has become commonplace,” and that those who contribute are mostly in management.
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, draws particular attention in the Bloomberg story, which says the retailer’s program is distinguished by offering a two-to-one rather than one-to-one match, and by requiring that the charitable donations go to the company’s Associates in Critical Need Trust. Wal-Mart’s employee-to-employee charitable activities drew unkind scrutiny in November, when the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on a worker-to-worker food drive at a local store.
Bloomberg cites a 2004 memo from Wal-Mart’s then-general counsel pledging, “We’re going to be relentless in encouraging participation until 100% of our management associates are on board.” Center for Responsive Politics data for Wal-Mart’s “PAC for Responsible Government,” cited by Dudley, show a roughly even split in donations between Republicans and Democrats, with recipients including House Speaker John Boehner, Tea Party favorite Senator Ted Cruz and hometown conservative Democratic Senator Mark Pryor. (A June report from the union-backed Making Change at Walmart campaign, factoring in donations from the Walton family which owns half the company, found that 69 percent of combined total Wal-Mart and Walton donations from 2000 to 2012 went to Republican candidates or committees.)
Wal-Mart did not immediately respond to Salon’s inquiry regarding Bloomberg story. Wal-Mart Vice President David Tovar told Bloomberg’s Dudley that the program was “a great way for people who contribute to the PAC to also do good for fellow associates,” and offered “an opportunity to support the company and the things we’re advocating for on behalf of the shareholders, our associates, our customers” at the state and federal levels.
As I’ve reported, Wal-Mart also maintains the Walmart Foundation, whose grantees have included non-profits in key cities where the company seeks to expand. The legally-distinct Walton Family Foundation is a major funder of anti-union education reform efforts.
Bloomberg’s story comes weeks after a day of civil disobedience actions mounted by the non-union workers’ group OUR Walmart, which is closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union. In an e-mailed statement, OUR Walmart activist Barbara Gertz called the Bloomberg story “further proof that Walmart is determined to spend millions to support politicians who vote to cut food stamps and who oppose increasing the minimum wage, instead of focusing on creating good jobs in our communities.” While OUR Walmart and allies have recently emphasized Wal-Mart employees’ widespread use of public assistance programs (including Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky calling those at the top of the company “welfare kings”), in October Wal-Mart’s U.S. CEO declared the company “cautious but modestly optimistic” that food stamp cuts would be good for business — a statement Congressman John Conyers told Salon “borders on the ludicrous.”
Gertz, a Denver Wal-Mart employee, said it was “upsetting to hear that Walmart not only exploited the associates in critical need fund to push a political agenda that hurts ordinary Americans, but it also may have done so in violation of federal laws.”
By: Josh Eidelson, Salon, December 23, 2013
“The Battle For The Republican Party”: Just Another GOP Pity Party, Looking For Sympathy In All The Wrong Places
Imagine what would happen if:
• The budget deal passes the Senate with a handful of Republicans;
• Immigration reform passes the House and something is agreed upon by the Senate;
• In 2014 the House lead expands;
• All Senate incumbents defeat their right-wing challengers and the GOP takes the Senate;
• If not a grand bargain, then a modest bargain with some entitlement reform is passed; and
• One or more tea party favorites run in 2016 and lose decisively to a mainstream GOP nominee who wins the presidency.
Well, that would be a triumph of the center-right and the demise of the tea party, at least from an electoral and governance standpoint. It would reaffirm the GOP as a national, if not dominate, party. And it would move the national agenda significantly to the right since the GOP would hold both houses of Congress and the White House.
One can see, then, that what is of tremendous benefit to mainstream Republicans (and to the agenda of conservative reform) puts the tea party professionals — those inside the Beltway right wingers who gain glory and make money by attacking Republicans and blocking legislative compromise — largely out of business. Sure, they remain active participants in electoral politics, even more active critics and occasional contributors to national policy debates, but they no longer have the influence to either elect or primary candidates. They become merely gadflies and kibitzers.
That is one possible scenario that plays out over the next few years. One can see how the interests of mainstream and tea party conservatives collide and why, for example, the recent budget deal was a threat to the latter. The enemy (not of conservatism) but of the right wingers who depend on controversy, resentment and defeat is center-right governance. Functional government of the center-right saps the interest in throwing the “traitors” out. It discourages primaries from the right. It dulls the interest of donors.
It is important to distinguish here between conservatives who largely embrace the modern Reagan and post-Reagan agenda (best exemplified these days by GOP governors) and right wingers, those whose volume is always turned to high, see politics as all-or-nothing, want to take the country back to the pre-New Deal or even pre-Progressive era, and aim to freeze the United States demographically by keeping immigrants out and socially by refusing to accept changed beliefs on topics like gay marriage. The entities and politicians (the Heritage Action, angry talk radio, Sen. Ted Cruz crowd) that populate the second group flourish when the GOP is in the minority, so defeat is their ally.
The contrast between the two groups is evident in the trajectory of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), pre- and post-shutdown. His ideology didn’t change, but his tone, outlook and purpose sure did after he saw the destruction wrought by the shutdown. He moved from the group that relishes defeat and delights in spreading resentment to the group that wants to govern. I’d suggest in the wake of the shutdown, and now the budget deal, we will see more conservatives follow Lee’s lead.
Now, there is another scenario, maybe less likely but certainly possible over the next few years:
• The budget deal passes the Senate with no Republicans;
• Immigration reform never passes the House and nothing is agreed upon with the Senate;
• In 2014 the House GOP lead stays the same or shrinks;
• Some Senate incumbents defeat their right-wing challengers, but others do not and the GOP doesn’t take the Senate;
• No bargains are struck for the remainder of the Obama term; and
• One or more tea party favorites runs in 2016, one wins the nomination and loses decisively to Hillary Clinton while the GOP House majority is lost as well.
In that case we return to an era of Democratic rule and the GOP becomes a marginal player on the national scene. It is impossible, I would suggest, for the country to be governed mostly, let alone entirely, by the GOP if the tea party contingent triumphs within the GOP. The people who brought us the shutdown do not reflect the desires, outlook and views of a majority of the country. When presented with that alternative, the lion share of the country will choose the Democrats time and time again.
Which one will it be? It’s up to GOP office holders, candidates and voters.
By: Jennifer Rubin, Opinion Blogger, Right Turn; The Washington Post, December 16, 2013
“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
“Shining A Light On ALEC’s Power To Shape Policy”: A Slow-Motion Corporate Takeover Of Our Democracy
It’s amazing how a little sunlight will change the behavior of some of the biggest names in corporate America — sunlight here meaning greater transparency and accountability.
It’s also amazing how the U.K.’s The Guardian is covering this changed behavior — and its potential consequences for every American — without much competition from U.S.-based media. It seems that reporters in Washington in particular can’t be bothered.
Over the past several decades, one of the country’s most influential political organizations — the 40-year-old American Legislative Exchange Council — was able to operate largely under the radar. Never heard of it? That’s by design. Founded in 1973 by conservative political operatives, ALEC has been successful in shaping public policy to benefit its corporate patrons in part because few people — including reporters — knew anything about the organization, much less how it went about getting virtually identical laws passed in a multitude of states.
That began to change two years ago when an insider leaked thousands of pages of documents — including more than 800 “model” bills and resolutions, showing just how close ALEC is with big corporate interests and revealing how it goes about getting laws passed to enhance the profits of its sponsors, usually at the expense of consumers.
The Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit corporate watchdog organization, sifted through the documents and posted them on a dedicated website, ALECexposed.org. Those bills and resolutions, drafted by or in collaboration with industry lobbyists and lawyers, “reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state,” CMD says on the website.
I reviewed all of the health care legislation in the leaked documents and wrote about what I found for The Nation magazine in July 2011. It became clear from my review that health insurers felt one of the best ways to block the profit-threatening provisions of ObamaCare would be to use ALEC to disseminate bills it had helped write to friendly state legislators. It was also clear that ALEC’s staff and membership had been at work for more than a decade on a broad range of issues important to my former industry, from turning over state Medicaid programs to private insurers to letting them market highly profitable junk insurance.
While ALEC-member legislators hail from every state, the organization has been especially successful in getting bills introduced in legislatures controlled by Republicans. As The New York Times noted in an editorial in February, more than 50 of ALEC’s model bills were introduced in Virginia alone last year.
In addition to insurance companies like State Farm and UnitedHealthcare, ALEC’s corporate membership has included big names ranging from ExxonMobil and Wells Fargo to Johnson & Johnson and Kraft. And it has worked closely with groups like the National Rifle Association as well.
It is the organization’s association with the NRA, in fact, that has led to dozens of corporations severing their ties with ALEC, as The Guardian reported.
Soon after the NRA succeeded in pushing a stand-your-ground bill through the Florida legislature — which George Zimmerman used in his defense in the Trayvon Martin case — ALEC adopted it as a model for other states. The group took that action after a 2005 NRA presentation to ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. As The Center for Media and Democracy reported, the corporate co-chair of that task force at the time was Walmart, the country’s largest seller of rifles. Since then, more than two dozen states have passed laws identical or similar to the ALEC/NRA stand-your-ground model legislation.
News coverage of ALEC’s role in getting the controversial law enacted from coast to coast — coupled with CMD-led disclosures about the organization over the past two years — has caused many of ALEC’s longtime corporate members to abandon it, according to The Guardian.
Documents obtained by the British newspaper indicate that since 2011, ALEC has lost more than 60 corporate members, a hit so severe that during the first six months of this year it has “suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income.” It has also lost nearly 400 state legislative members during the same time frame.
The organization has launched what it refers to as the “Prodigal Son Project” to woo back companies like Amazon, Coca-Cola, GE, Kraft and McDonald’s that have dropped their membership. Another “prodigal son” ALEC hopes to welcome back: that big retailer and rifle seller, Walmart. The loss of Walmart alone undoubtedly was a major contributor to the budget shortfall, considering the size of the company.
Meanwhile, just blocks from Capitol Hill where many Washington reporters spend their days, ALEC last week held its annual “policy summit,” but very few of those reporters felt the summit was worth their time, despite the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., were on the agenda. And despite the fact that even with fewer resources, ALEC is still hugely influential in shaping public policy. As Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, noted in a May column for North Carolina Policy Watch, “What ALEC and the companies that provide it with millions in operating funds seek is, in effect, a slow-motion corporate takeover of our democracy.”
That might be a story worth covering.
By: Wendell Potter, Center for Public Integrity, December 9, 2013
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