“The Grand Old Party Of Nihilists And Cranks”: The Politics Of Destruction With The Values Of Zealots
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, Republican Saxby Chambliss, Georgia’s senior senator, was considered a steadfast conservative. The American Conservative Union has given him a lifetime score of 92, while the Club for Growth has scored him at 83. He earns an A from the National Rifle Association.
But a couple of years ago, Chambliss embarked upon an exercise that would merely have cemented his stature as a power broker as recently as the administration of George W. Bush: He joined Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, to form a bipartisan group of senators working to come up with a deal to whittle down the deficit. In other words, he considered compromise with Democrats.
In our current warped political universe, that was enough to earn Chambliss a potential challenger from the right, and he decided not to seek re-election. Chastened by Chambliss’ experience, none of the Georgia Republicans running for his vacant seat wants to occupy the same ZIP code with the words “compromise” and “bipartisan.”
This is what the Grand Old Party has come to: It’s now led by nihilists whose only politics are those of destruction and whose only values are those of zealots. There may be reasonable Republicans remaining in office, but they’ve been bullied into compliance and cowed into silence.
If you don’t believe that, listen to the growing drumbeat for the impeachment of President Obama — despite the glaring lack of evidence that he has committed impeachable offenses. (Having the temerity to win a second term is not an impeachable crime.) While such talk was once restricted to the nutters — men like U.S. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI), who has said the president’s impeachment would “be a dream come true” — it has leaked into the GOP’s water supply.
Witness the recent off-the-cuff remarks of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who, though a standard-bearer for the hard right, has been considered a thoughtful and rational man. At a recent meeting with constituents, Coburn declared that the president was coming “perilously close” to the standards for impeachment.
Last month, at a tribute in his honor, the retiring Chambliss obliquely urged his party to come to its senses. He didn’t explicitly mention the GOP’s spiral into right-wing madness, but he did speak of the importance of his work with the Gang of Six, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I don’t mind crossing party lines. If Republicans had a patent on all the good ideas, we’d be in power forever. We don’t have a patent on all those good ideas,” he said.
But his intended audience has taken another lesson from Chambliss’ bipartisanship: If you even consider it, you will be labeled a RINO — Republican In Name Only — by the tea party activists who now wield enormous power in the Republican Party. Having chased Chambliss off, they have taken to hectoring Georgia’s junior Republican senator, Johnny Isakson, for his failure to jump with enthusiasm to the idea of shutting down the government over Obamacare.
Tea Party types have also targeted longtime senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee. In a letter urging Alexander to retire, they claimed that “our great nation can no longer afford compromise and bipartisanship, two traits for which you have become famous.”
In response, Alexander penned a remarkable op-ed in The Tennessean defending his record as a politician who has occasionally reached across the aisle. “I know that if you only have 45 votes and you need 60 senators to get something important done like balancing the budget and fixing the debt, then you have to work with other people — that is, IF you really care about solving the problem, IF you really want to get a result, instead of just making a speech,” he wrote.
However, such time-honored traditions of governance have little effect on the white-hot rage of radicals who want to toss out any conservative who remembers the lessons of his middle-school civics classes. They have no respect for the basic give-and-take on which representative democracies thrive, no real interest in improving the nation’s fortunes. So, no, Senator Alexander, they don’t care about solving problems.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 31, 2013
“Got To Have One”: Impeachment Is The Right’s New Lost Cause
Sometimes politics is like high-stakes poker. If you look around the table after a few hands and you can’t tell who’s the pigeon, citizen, chances are it’s you: the guy who plunked down $26.95 for a book called Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office.
Yeah, you with the “Impeach Obama” bumpersticker on your car. The guy standing on a freeway overpass waving a “Honk for Impeachment” sign. You may as well go around in a little bird’s nest hat, like Donald Duck’s eccentric friend Gyro Gearloose.
Because it not only ain’t going to happen, but the people peddling this nonsense don’t even want it to happen. Not really. They’re just making a buck off people who can’t count and running a classic misdirection play.
It’s actually a good sign if you think about it.
Basically because the more Republicans you hear talking about impeachment, the closer the party has come to surrender on the big issues they claim to care about.
Like it or not, the possibility of repealing “Obamacare” ended when the Supreme Court found it Constitutional and the president won re-election. You’d think after 40 — count ’em, 40 — fruitless votes to abort the law, that message might start to sink in. We still have majority rule in this country.
But no, it hasn’t sunk in at all. Like a baseball team demanding to play the eighth game of the World Series, GOP hardliners have come up with yet another plan to force the president’s hand. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has called for something he infelicitously called a “grassroots tsunami” to make Obama relent. More rationally consequent party leaders, however, are fearful of the terrible consequences of shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt in a vain attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.
Neither tactic would accomplish the ostensible goal and would doom Republican chances to regain Congress or the White House for the forseeable future. More than 70 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, oppose a government shutdown. A debt default could have catastrophic economic consequences. However, many GOP politicians are equally fearful of the wrath of Tea Party zealots to whom they’ve made undeliverable promises.
Hence the melodramatic appeal of impeachment, a totally unserious threat its sponsors hope hotheads will see as more decisive. So what if it makes the United States look like a Banana Republic? That’s the form of government that fools prefer to democracy, with its tedious committee meetings, quorum calls and compromises. Just think how happy an impeachment battle would make the impresarios and talking heads of cable news.
So far only a couple of largely unknown House Republicans — Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan and Blake Farenthold of Texas — have publicly endorsed the idea of impeaching Obama. But the clamor has also reached more powerful figures.
At a recent town hall meeting in Muskogee, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, ostensibly a personal friend of the president’s, answered a constituent’s question about impeachment by allowing as how “those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. And I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close.”
Campaigning in Texas, Senator Cruz responded to a constituent who asked, “Why don’t we impeach him?” by saying, “It’s a good question.”
Cruz went on to give what he called “the simplest answer: To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate.”
Asked by the National Review if he’d consider changing his mind if Republicans take the House and Senate in 2014, Cruz answered, “that’s not a fight we have a prospect of winning.”
He didn’t say that there’s no remotely plausible evidence against the president, or that Americans settle political disputes through elections rather than show trials. Merely that a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate to remove President Obama from office isn’t feasible right now.
Cruz left the distinct impression that after his dry land political tidal wave fails to sweep the country this fall, he’d be willing to revisit the question. If he’s half as smart as he appears to think he is, the Texas Republican has to know that he’s going to be needing a powerful new issue come 2014.
To the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, “Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success.”
The point, see, wouldn’t be to defeat Obama, but other Republicans. And the key would be establishing himself as the champion of what E.J. Dionne calls the Republican Party’s “Armageddon Caucus.” Impeachment could then become the next lost cause.
They’ve always got to have one.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 28, 2013
“Memo To The Crackpots”: No, You’re Not Impeaching Anyone
The last time Sen. Tom Coburn spoke warmly but candidly to his Oklahoma constituents about his “friend” Barack Obama, it was to reassure them that the president doesn’t want to “destroy America.” Instead, Coburn said two years ago, “his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him.” He went on: “As an African-American male,” Obama received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.” That’s what friends do, in Coburn’s world: They indulge in delusional racial stereotyping to defend their “friend” from detractors.
Also? Apparently they claim their “friend” is “perilously close” to “high crimes and misdemeanors” – the standard for impeaching a president – and promise they won’t let their friendship stand in the way of impeaching the “lawless” president.
Coburn is just the latest Republican to humor his crackpot constituents in August town halls by suggesting the president can and/or should be impeached. By the standards of the modern GOP, he may be the most surprising, since every once in a while he has an outbreak of sanity and refuses to go along with his party’s nihilism caucus. Most recently he said Sen. Mike Lee’s drive to shut down the government to repeal Obamacare amounts to “destroying the Republican Party.”
To make up for that breach with the base, Coburn told constituents in Muskogee that the administration is “lawless” and “getting perilously close” to the constitutional standard for impeachment. He one-upped Lee by joining crackpot Mark Levin’s call for a new constitutional convention. “The constitutional republic that we have is at risk,” he told the crowd. When asked directly about impeachment, he said, “I think those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. And I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close.”
To be fair, Coburn also defended his “friend” Obama by allowing that the first black president just might not be very good at his job. “I think there’s some intended violation of law in this administration, but I also think there’s a ton of incompetence,” he said. Glad to have that out there.
Though Coburn’s impeachment remarks have triggered a lot of coverage, he’s gotten less attention for another wild assertion to the Muskogee crowd: that a better strategy for repealing Obamacare than shutting down the government is to use the debt ceiling deadline.
“If you wanna do it,” he told an angry constituent, “do it on the debt limit, don’t do it on shutting down the government, because the economy’s so precarious right now, and shutting down the government won’t stop Obamacare one iota.” If the economy is too “precarious” for a government shutdown, imagine what a debt-ceiling meltdown would do. Nobody in the crowd asked Coburn to explain.
Coburn’s impeachment rambling comes on the heels of similar musings by other congressional Republicans at their August town halls. Just Monday, when asked why not impeach the president, Sen. Ted Cruz genially replied: “It’s a good question. And I’ll tell you the simplest answer: To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate.” Actually, the supposedly brilliant Cruz ought to know that to impeach a president, you need the votes in the House – the Senate then votes on whether to “convict” him.
But you know, maybe Cruz is getting ahead of himself because he believes his fellow Texan Rep. Blake Farenhold, who recently told his constituents that Republicans have the votes in the House to impeach Obama. “If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it,” he said. “But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted.”
Of course, reindeer farmer Kerry Bentivoglio thinks impeaching Obama would be “a dream come true,” but he sounded more skeptical than Coburn about the chances of doing it – though he admitted consulting lawyers about possible grounds. “Until we have the evidence, you’re going to become a laughingstock if you’ve submitted a bill to impeach the president, because number one, you’ve got to convince the press,” he said.
So let’s recap: Coburn, one of the Republicans the Beltway media regularly use as an example of someone willing to work with Obama, sounds more convinced the president might be impeachable than a former reindeer farmer who resides on the party’s wingnut fringe. Reporters have to stop covering the supposed attempt of the GOP to heal itself, because it’s not happening. Real change in the party will require Republican leaders leveling with their base. That means standing up to nuts like Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh and the delusional extremists organizing “Overpasses for Obama’s impeachment” (yes, that’s a thing) and showing up to rant at town halls.
Tom Coburn doesn’t have the guts to do that, so he can’t be counted among the last few reasonable Republicans. Let’s hope Time magazine leaves him off its annual list of 100 “influential” luminaries next year. Or at least let’s hope Obama declines to write the tribute to his GOP “friend” next time around.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 23, 2013
“Dowd Transference Syndrome”: When Republicans Don’t Receive Blame They Deserve, They Have No Incentive To Be More Responsible
When the Senate minority killed expanded background checks last week — and in the process, stopped the entire legislative effort to reduce gun violence — I thought it would put to rest the assertion that Congress would function more effectively if only President Obama would “lead” more. Alas, I thought wrong.
By the rules of the Beltway punditocracy, Obama did everything right: he took his message to the public, to the media, and to lawmakers directly. The president leveraged public opinion, accepted compromises, activated his electoral operation, and remained focused on achievable, popular, mainstream goals. The Republican filibuster prevailed anyway.
In a column that’s remarkably difficult to understand, Maureen Dowd is blaming Obama for the GOP’s intransigence.
Unfortunately, [Obama] still has not learned how to govern.
How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.
It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate.
There’s something rather amazing about the argument itself: after 20 years of complete inactivity on gun reform, President Obama was quickly able to persuade a majority of the country and a majority of the Senate to endorse sensible reforms. What a feckless leader!
I realize Dowd’s column has generated quite a bit of scrutiny, but the more I read it, the more I’m puzzled by it.
Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.
Well, yes, Senate Democrats ostensibly “controls” the Senate, but Obama’s party could not “muster 60 votes” because that would require the existence of several Republican moderates who do not exist. There are 53 Democrats and two independents who caucus with Democrats. A 60-vote supermajority it is not. What is there to “marvel” over?
President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things.
Really? Because it seems to me reform proponents, including the president, have relied on reason and substance — the way adults respond to things. Does Dowd think Republicans — who engaged in post-policy nihilism throughout the debate — would have been more receptive if the president was more cerebral with them?
To thunderous applause at the State of the Union, the president said, “The families of Newtown deserve a vote.” Then, as usual, he took his foot off the gas, lost momentum and confided his pessimism to journalists.
Took his foot off the gas? He gave a bunch of speeches, turned his weekly address over to Newtown parents, worked the phones, and did all the things a president does when he or she wants to see a bill passed.
The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in “The American President.”
Yep, that was a great movie, but it was fiction. They didn’t need a war room; they needed five more votes. The problem wasn’t the lack of Michael J. Fox in the OEOB; the problem is there’s a radicalized Republican caucus on Capitol Hill that doesn’t give a damn about anything but tax cuts.
Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”
Here’s something casual observers of American politics may not fully appreciate: Obama has very little to offer Heidi Heitkamp. She represents a red state that voted against him, and by the time she’s up for re-election, he won’t even be in office anymore.
Obama had to persuade some Republican senators in states that he won in 2012. He should have gone out to Ohio, New Hampshire and Nevada and had big rallies to get the public riled up to put pressure on Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Dean Heller, giving notice that they would pay a price if they spurned him on this.
A few paragraphs prior, Dowd wrote that speeches weren’t going to cut it. Besides, the public was riled up and Republicans didn’t care.
Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill. Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”
In what universe was Tom Coburn going to vote for new gun restrictions? What makes Dowd believe he was a gettable vote?
Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do.
Right, which is why Obama failed to pass the Recovery Act, health care reform, Wall Street reform, DADT repeal, student loan reform, New START ratification, credit card reforms, and food-safety reforms. Oh wait, Obama actually passed all of those things, suggesting the president’s “hatred” of “selling” isn’t really the problem.
There were ways to get to 60 votes.
If Dowd knows what those ways are, she should say so.
The larger point here is that accountability and responsibility should matter, which makes columns like Dowd’s so disappointing. Republicans filibustered gun reforms, they lied about gun reforms, they partnered with extremists against gun reforms, and then they killed gun reforms.
So let’s blame Obama? Because he didn’t remind a columnist of a president she once saw in a fictional movie?
When those who deserve blame don’t receive it, they have no incentive to be more responsible the next time. Imagine how hilarious Senate Republicans found Dowd’s column — “We ignored the will of 90% of Americans four months after a madman massacred children and a liberal New York Times columnist is condemning the president she agrees with! Amazing!”
Dowd’s column is a counterproductive mistake.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 22, 2013
“All Worked Up About Guns”: The Ironies Of The Senate Gun Control Debate And Emotional Attachment Of Senators To Their Jobs
As a guy who works with words for a living, I marvel at the gun lobby’s gift for turning logic inside out. The bumper-sticker classic: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The post-Newtown twist: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And this week we have the latest cynical talking point: Let’s not legislate with our emotions.
“It’s dangerous to do any type of policy in an emotional moment. Because human emotions then drive the decision. Everyone’s all worked up.” (Mark Begich, D-Alaska)
“The emotion associated with all the violent events over the last 3 or 4 years tends to cause us to lose sight of some pretty commonsense principles,” (Tom Coburn, R- Oklahoma)
“We should not react to these tragedies in an irrational manner here in the Senate.” (Richard Shelby, R- Alabama)
“It is largely a mistake to talk about issues in the wake of crisis, in the wake of tragedy.” (Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, who also accused President Obama of using the Newtown victims’ families as “props.”)
I don’t know who put out the memo. But this patronizing line is a transparent attempt to devalue the outpouring of heartbreak from parents and survivors that has – at least temporarily – fueled a drive to do something, even something inadequate, to make the next massacre a little less likely.
The grand irony behind the insult is that no movement has been so successfully propelled by passion – so “worked up” – as the gun rights movement. This is a movement that feeds on fear and resentment. This is a movement driven in part by the paranoid expectation that the government is itching to confiscate all of your guns – and, one layer down, by the even darker paranoia that citizens need guns to defend against impending tyranny. And these are the people telling us to calm down and be reasonable?
From such phobic nightmares, what clear-headed, common-sense arguments arise? Arguments like these:
- The answer to an armed lunatic in a movie theater is for the other patrons to pull out their concealed weapons and fill the air with lead.
- Our current, loophole-ridden background checks don’t catch criminals, so tougher background checks are pointless. (By this reasoning, since our border fences aren’t stopping illegal immigration, there’s no point in building better fences.)
- Every state has the right to issue concealed-carry permits, but no state has the right not to recognize permits granted in other states. (That got 57 votes in the Senate, just short of the 60 needed to pass.)
Of course, the real ruling passion Wednesday in the Senate was the emotional attachment of senators to their jobs. Not doing them. Keeping them.
By: Bill Keller, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, April 18, 2013
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