“Secret Audio Nails Mitch!”: Endangered McConnell Busted Humiliating Himself On Tape
This year Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell chose to spend Father’s Day with two GOP political sugar daddies, Charles and David Koch, at their annual retreat, this time at the lovely St. Regis Monarch Bay resort in Orange County, California. As befit the day, McConnell brought the love: “I want to start by thanking you, Charles and David, for the important work you’re doing. I don’t know where we’d be without you.”
It’s a good thing McConnell sucked up to the wealthy right-wing industrialists. He could be looking for a job soon, once Kentuckians (and opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes) hear the audiotape of the session obtained by the Nation. (A transcript can be found here.)
The same weekend ISIL began approaching Baghdad, and Eric Cantor had just lost his primary for, among other reasons, being too cozy with big donors, McConnell took time to schmooze the Kochs and their network of funders and organizers. He wasn’t the only Senate candidate there: the next day, GOP Senate nominees Joni Ernst of Iowa, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Cory Gardner of Colorado joined the retreat, the Nation’s Lauren Windsor has reported, and all pledged allegiance to the Kochs.
“The exposure to this group and to this network, and the opportunity to meet so many of you, really started my trajectory,” kvelled Ernst, who attended the summit last year. (You can hear audio of her remarks at the Huffington Post).
But only McConnell was devoted enough to spend Father’s Day addressing the Kochs – and only McConnell said anything substantive enough to ensure him home-state trouble.
Kentuckians may find themselves chagrined to learn that McConnell promised the Kochs and their friends that he would intensify gridlock if Republicans win control of the Senate. While legislation requires 60 votes, he noted, budget bills only require a simple majority, and he promised to attach “riders” defunding Obamacare, financial regulation laws and the entire Environmental Protection Agency to any spending bill — riders that President Obama would likely veto, which could trigger another government shutdown.
He also attacked Democrats for wasting time on their “gosh darn proposals” – like raising the minimum wage, which Kentuckians support by almost 2-1, and extending unemployment insurance, likewise backed by his state’s voters.
Here’s what McConnell said on those points, verbatim.
We can pass the spending bill, and I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill: No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board.
And we’re not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage — cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment — that’s a great message for retirees; the student loan package the other day; that’s going to make things worse. These people believe in all the wrong things.
Kentuckians can decide who believes in all the wrong things come November.
In June the Nation first reported on the annual Koch retreat, loftily titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” and heavily focused on helping the GOP take back the Senate. 2016 contender Sen. Marco Rubio attended along with McConnell, but it was the man the Kochs hope will be the Senate majority leader come January who headlined the crucial session “Free Speech: Defending First Amendment Rights.”
If dollars themselves could vote in Kentucky politics, McConnell would defeat Grimes in a landslide. At the Koch retreat, the Senate veteran depicted himself as a tireless soldier for the freedom of money in politics. He described the right to make unlimited political contributions as “the one freedom, that without which we can’t do anything.” His fealty to the cause of money in politics got embarrassing at times.
According to the Nation, McConnell talked about his many filibusters of campaign finance reform the way other men his age describe war battles. “The worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law,” McConnell told the Kochs and their friends. Others might say 9/11, or the day President Reagan was shot (or further back, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.) But not Mitch.
The only people he praises more than the Koch brothers are the five-member Supreme Court majority that voted to abolish McCain-Feingold in the Citizens United decision, calling the John Roberts-led bench:
The best Supreme Court in anybody’s memory on the issue of First Amendment political speech…[Now] you can give to the candidate of your choice, You can give to Americans for Prosperity, or something else, a variety of different ways to push back against the party of government…I’m really proud of this Supreme Court…It’s only five to four, and I pray for the health of the five.
But not the other four, obviously. Tough luck, RBG.
When David Koch himself, during the question and answer session, complained about a New York Times editorial lamenting the influence of big Koch money, and asked about Democrats’ attempts to start the process of amending the Constitution to state that Congress may in fact regulate campaign contributions, McConnell was at his feistiest.
“This is an act of true radicalism,” McConnell declared. “It shows how far they’re willing to go to quiet the voices of their critics … The IRS, the SEC and the FEC. They’re on a full-tilt assault to use the power of the government to go after their critics.”
By comparison with the seasoned McConnell, Senate candidates Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton and Cory Gardner were restrained, as Lauren Windsor reports in the Huffington Post. A grateful Gardner, happy about all the Koch-related third-party money flowing into his race, told the crowd that among the people most excited about his run was “the station manager at Channel 9 in Denver because he knew the activity that would be taking place on the airwaves.”
Tom Cotton likewise thanked the group for its role in his success. “[The Koch-funded] Americans for Prosperity in Arkansas has played a critical role in turning our state from a one-party Democratic state … building the kind of constant engagement to get people in the state invested in their communities,” Cotton explained.
But only McConnell went on record endorsing the Koch brothers’ entire big money agenda, while mocking popular “gosh darn” Democratic policies like a minimum wage hike, restoring extended unemployment insurance and easing the student loan burden. McConnell’s role in blocking her student-loan compromise earned him a visit to Kentucky by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on behalf of Grimes. ”Mitch McConnell says it’s more important to protect the billionaires,” she told the crowd. “And that’s what this race is all about.”
It would be ironic if the Koch brothers won their GOP Senate majority, but McConnell wasn’t around to lead it.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 27, 2014
“Taking Cover Behind What’s Left Unsaid”: The GOP’s Midterm Strategy Is As Hollow As Their Ideas Are
The most interesting thing about Senator Mark Pryor’s decision to tout his support for the Affordable Care Act in a well-financed, statewide television ad isn’t that he stands apart from other embattled Democrats this election cycle. It’s that Republicans scrambled to spin the story, insisting to reporters that Pryor couldn’t possibly be running on Obamacare if he won’t refer to the law by name.
This was poorly disguised Calvinball, a standard that Republicans invented for the special case of the ACA. Literally no other members of Congress are expected to refer to the laws they’ve helped pass by name or nickname. Republicans in the aughts weren’t expected to refer to the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act,” or “EGTRRA,” or “the Bush tax cuts,” or “the Bush tax cuts for the rich,” no matter how unpopular the moniker became. They ran on having cut taxes, and wanting to renew those tax cuts. And sure enough when President Obama set about trying to let “the Bush tax cuts” expire, he conveniently omitted the popular ones. Which is to say, the vast majority of them. He made those permanent.
Nevertheless, several reporters fell into line. And good for the ref workers. Score one for them.
But if Obamacare is a huge liability for Democrats, why are conservatives and GOP operatives desperate to control the narrative surrounding Pryor’s decision to run on the law? If your opponent’s stepping on rakes, why not just stand back and let him?
The answer is that with respect to both Obamacare and other issues Republicans must rely on diversions from policy and outcomes when expressing their substantive and strategic views. We’ve reached a point in the fight over Obamacare where the best thing Republicans have on their side is the law’s unpopular brand. Particularly in states like Arkansas, where President Obama is widely loathed but his signature law has cut the uninsurance rate nearly in half. It’s deeply silly to argue that Pryor isn’t running on Obamacare unless he refers to it using one of two unpopular slogans. But that’s the argument.
Instead, Pryor says, “I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or deny [sic] coverage based on pre-existing conditions.” Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything about “a law” at all, but that’s a niggling, semantic critique. That Republicans working to defeat Pryor are asking reporters to squeeze the word “Obamacare” into this sentence is an admission that they’ve lost the policy fight. They criticize Pryor for eschewing the label, because the label’s just about the only thing they’re comfortable assailing. In this way, they resemble Democrats six and eight years ago, running against the Bush tax cuts (for the rich), knowing that they had no intention of letting anything but the most regressive of those tax cuts expire.
In that sense, the GOP’s obsession with the moniker, and only the moniker, is excellent news for Obamacare’s political durability. But only if the people who cover politics are clear about the implications of the GOP’s rhetoric. Unlike Democrats, who were generally clear about the fact that they planned to make most of the Bush tax cuts permanent, Pryor’s opponent, Representative Tom Cotton, acknowledges that the pre-Obamacare status quo, in which insurers denied coverage to people with pre-existing health conditions, was “broken,” but nevertheless maintains that his goal is to repeal the law that makes that practice illegal.
Cotton repeated that mantra just this week, on the trail with Mitt Romney, who, in an amusing twist, tried to save Cotton from himself. “Tom Cotton is going to make sure that we change Obamacare, making sure that people can keep insurance and those that have pre-existing conditions can have coverage,” Romney said, “but he doesn’t want to see the federal government telling people in Arkansas what kind of insurance they have to have or making it more expensive.” Those are remarkably accommodating priorities. They’re just not ones Cotton is prepared to espouse just yet.
In this way, the politics of Obamacare in Arkansas mirror the politics of legislative brinksmanship in Kentucky. Just two days ago, Mitch McConnell, the embattled Senate minority leader who hopes to become majority leader next year, vowed to lard up appropriations bills with partisan policy riders and allow the president to choose between a veto, precipitating a government shutdown, and a bitter pill. A classic take it or leave it proposition.
McConnell said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.
Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process,” McConnell said. “He would have to make a decision on a given bill, whether there’s more in it that he likes than dislikes.”
It wouldn’t be much of a challenge to Obama if McConnell plans to cave the moment the president whips out his veto pen. So the threat is pretty clear. Nevertheless, McConnell’s campaign wasn’t pleased by the ensuing deluge of stories about how a GOP majority would embrace high-stakes confrontations and potentially shut down the government again. And in a very narrow sense they have a point—McConnell never said he’d shut down the government. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, no McConnell partisan, was among those who defended McConnell on this score.
But much like Cotton can’t credibly claim to support protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions when his plan is to repeal Obamacare, McConnell can’t sidestep the implications of his publicly declared strategy. He can’t say “when we’re in power, we’re going to put two and two together,” and then get angry when the headlines say, “McConnell promises four.”
That won’t stop him from trying to, though. And to an unappreciated extent, the broader Republican strategy heading into November is to speak in abstractions, and take cover behind what’s left unsaid.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, August 22, 2014
“Running Out Of Fresh Attacks”: Republicans Revive Mitt Romney’s Favorite Medicare Attack
With HealthCare.gov substantially improved and new insurance signups surging, Republicans have been forced to pivot to a new line of attack against the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a series of news releases accusing Democratic candidates of cutting Medicare through their support of the health care reform law.
“As the ObamaCare disaster continues to unfold, Mark Pryor and National Democrats have resorted to deceiving seniors using their old and discredited MediScare playbook,” reads the release targeting Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR).
“What’s new this year is the blatant hypocrisy that Mark Pryor and his liberal allies in Washington are exhibiting,” it continues. “Pryor’s deciding vote for ObamaCare cut $717 billion from Medicare—including nearly $5.4 billion directly from Arkansas ($10,296 per Medicare recipient in Arkansas).”
CNN reports that the NRSC campaign will target Senators Pryor, Mark Begich (D-AK), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Al Franken (D-MN), along with Senate candidates Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) and Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI).
If this line of attack sounds familiar, it’s because it was a centerpiece of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s case against the Affordable Care Act in the 2012 elections. The Republican ticket repeatedly accused President Obama of having “robbed” and “raided” $716 billion from Medicare to “pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven, federal takeover of health care.”
Of course, that attack ignored the fact that the overwhelming majority of the $716 billion actually represented reductions in how much Medicare pays hospitals and insurers, as WonkBlog’s Sarah Kliff explained last August. Medicare benefits themselves are not affected.
It also ignored the fact that Ryan’s own budget included the exact same $716 billion in cuts (with the implied promise of deeper cuts in the future to pay for trillions of dollars in new defense spending and tax cuts). He has also kept the savings in subsequent budget proposals. Nearly every Republican in Congress — including Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Pryor’s chief rival in his 2014 re-election bid — has supported Ryan’s budget plans, significantly blunting the accusation’s impact.
Nonetheless, House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) spokesman Brendan Buck told MSNBC that the attack is “a tried and true campaign hit” — ignoring that it totally failed to blunt the Democratic Party’s sweeping victory in 2012.
There’s no denying that Republicans had a good political month targeting the Affordable Care Act’s rocky rollout. But the fact that they are already returning to this easily debunked attack, which was proven to be unpersuasive in the last election, raises the question of whether they are running out of fresh attacks against the law. And with repeal seemingly off the table, one wonders where Republicans will turn if good news about the law continues to trickle out.
By: Henry Decker, Featured Post, The National Memo, December 4, 2013
“Adolescent Nihilism”: The GOP’s True Believers Risk Nothing By Threatening Economic Catastrophe
So what’s it going to be for GOP hotheads in Congress this fall?
A soul-satisfying episode of adolescent nihilism culminating in a government shutdown and yet another debt/default scare? Or an abject capitulation to political (and fiscal) reality and an acceptance of the Republican Party’s role as the loyal opposition?
As I write, there’s just no telling. It’s partly a contest between the GOP’s electronic infotainment/Tea Party wing and the party establishment. Talk-radio shouters and cable TV entrepreneurs thrive on melodrama, and a substantial proportion of the Tea Party base follows excitedly along. Defund Obamacare! Shut it down! To those of us of a certain age, this has a ring of nostalgia, like Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 vow to levitate the Pentagon. I don’t know what they’re smoking down at RNC headquarters, but on CNN’s State of the Union, party chairman Reince Priebus made a lame attempt to blame President Obama.
“I think all Republicans are unified on one thing and that is defunding, delaying, getting rid of, eliminating Obamacare,” Priebus said. “So we have total unanimity on that issue and the question is what are the tactics?…So Mr. President, if you want to shut the government down because you want to continue to fund this monstrosity…then go ahead.”
Nice try. No cigar.
Having wasted countless hours on 40 — count ’em, 40 — votes to defund Obamacare, you’d think House Republicans might be getting the message. Their scheme’s DOA in the Senate, and even if it weren’t, the White House holds veto power. The GOP’s last constitutional chance to prevent 30 million Americans from buying affordable health insurance coverage expired with Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy. End of story.
True, rising Republican celebrities like Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and rising star Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) are breathing smoke and fire. However, it’s also true that none of these worthies hold leadership positions. Until very recently nobody knew who they were. They risk nothing by enrolling in a purely symbolic resistance.
Quite the opposite: True Believers in utopian right-wing crusades evaluate politicians according to their fervor, not their coherence. Did Ronald Reagan ever pay a political price for describing Medicare as the death knell of freedom? He did not.
Indeed, the best possible outcome for Senatorial rabble-rousers would be what now appears likely: A minority of GOP House moderates voting with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution, avoiding a party-line government shutdown that could doom the Republican Party’s national electoral chances. Speaker Boehner won’t have much choice but to allow it.
See, there’s nothing the Southern wing of the GOP loves more than a heroic defense of a lost cause. Save your Confederate dollars, boys, because…
Well, you know the rest.
Lately the party’s adult leadership has also taken to signaling the need for restraint regarding the National Debt. According to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, congressional Democrats scrutinize Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore for signs of Republican establishment thinking.
Recently, Moore informed readers that “[t]he biggest underreported story out of Washington this year is that the federal budget is shrinking and much more than anyone in either party expected.”
Overall federal spending that peaked at $3.598 trillion in FY2011 due largely to recession-related costs will drop to $3.45 trillion by the end of FY2013. “The $150 billion budget decline of 4 percent,” Moore writes “is the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.”
Also dropping is the annual federal budget deficit. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office show a $642 billion shortfall this year—less than half of the $1.3 trillion shortfall the Obama White House inherited from George W. Bush. It’s forecast to drop to $560 billion next year, and $378 billion in 2015.
Moore: “Already the deficit has fallen from its Mount Everest peak of 10.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, to about 4 percent this year. That’s a bullish six percentage points less of the GDP of new federal debt each year.”
In short, informed conservatives understand that there is no need whatsoever for a melodramatic standoff over raising the federal debt limit. No need to risk “the full faith and credit of the United States” by threatening default. Hostages need not be taken.
As in the Obamacare charade, Republican posturing on the debt would only risk catastrophe for the sake of certain defeat.
Alas, but herein lies the rub: The great majority of GOP voters out in the wilderness beyond the Hudson and the Potomac not only don’t know these facts, they’re constitutionally incapable of accepting them.
To followers of politicians like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, fears of fiscal collapse, runaway inflation and social chaos aren’t political ideas, but fixed beliefs scarcely amenable to arithmetic or reason.
And their Antichrist is Barack Obama.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 14, 2013
“Beset By Condescending Outsiders”: Michael Bloomberg’s Gift To Arkansas’ Pro-Gun Sen Mark Pryor
In the unlikely event that Mark Pryor wins re-election as Arkansas’ senior U.S. Senator in 2014, he should send New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg a thank-you gift. Something like a sugary 44-ounce Big Gulp or a case of Dr Pepper. Offering His Honor a 30.06 deer rifle would be churlish.
Unlike liberal groups who scared up a primary opponent for former Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010, predictably helping her lose to a cookie-cutter GOP conservative, Bloomberg’s group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has given the beleaguered Democrat, well, a target to shoot at.
Angered with Pryor’s Senate vote against broadening background checks for gun sales—one of four Democrats to do so—Mayors Against Illegal Guns has been running TV ads in Arkansas citing the murder of state Democratic Party chair Bill Gwatney by a deranged gunman in 2008.
Narrated by former Democratic Party official Angela Bradford-Barnes, the commercial expresses the disgust of just about every Arkansas Democrat I know with what they saw as Pryor’s cowardly vote. “The Caspar Milquetoast of Arkansas politics,” one acerbic columnist dubbed him.
“When my dear, innocent friend was shot to death, I didn’t blame guns,” Bradford-Barnes says, “I blamed a system that makes it so terribly easy for criminals or the dangerous mentally ill to buy guns.”
Pryor has said that he found the politicizing of his friend’s murder “disgusting.” Maybe he did.
Tactically speaking, the problem with the Bloomberg ad is that just about every Democrat I know lives either in Hillcrest, basically the Upper West Side of Little Rock, or in the college town of Fayetteville—completely atypical of Arkansas voters generally. They can be as disgusted as they like. But they have exactly nowhere to go.
Blanche Lincoln carried Hillcrest handily against Rep. John Boozman in 2010. She lost statewide 58 to 37 percent.
President Obama also carried Pulaski County (Little Rock) in 2010; Mitt Romney won Arkansas by 24 points.
So you can see Pryor’s dilemma. Meanwhile, the billionaire-coddling Club for Growth (or “Club for Greed” as former Gov. Mike Huckabee once called it) has also been hammering the Arkansas Democrat with TV ads blaming him for President Obama’s supposedly runaway spending.
But more about that to come.
Do I think Pryor’s vote against background checks was cowardly? I did then. However, Democrats like The Daily Beast’s Mike Tomasky, who cite polls showing strong majorities of Arkansans favoring universal background checks, may be overlooking the difference between a mild preference expressed to a telephone pollster and a conviction strong enough to hold against a barrage of paranoid NRA propaganda.
Can a majority of Arkansans be convinced that bogeyman Obama is coming to confiscate their guns? I wouldn’t bet against it in Arkansas or any state it borders upon—Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee or even Missouri.
Simply put, fear and loathing of President Obama has reached cult-like proportions across the region, and there’s little Mark Pryor can do about it before November, 2014. Almost everywhere you go—dentists’ offices, auto dealers, fitness centers, airports—the waiting room TV is tuned to Fox News, and people are swallowing it whole.
So more than a year early, Sen. Pryor has come out swinging against his dream opponent: Michael Bloomberg. Even though no Republican rival has yet declared, he’s begun airing a 30-second TV spot complaining that, “The mayor of New York City is running ads against me because I opposed President Obama’s gun control legislation.”
The commercial ends with the Senator striking a belligerent pose: “No one from New York or Washington tells me what to do,” he growls. “I listen to Arkansas.”
Take that, limousine liberals! As much as the vote, it was the impression of weakness that may have been Pryor’s greatest liability. Months of unanswered Club for Growth ads also didn’t help.
Now the question is whether he can carry the fight to his presumptive, albeit undeclared GOP opponent Rep. Tom Cotton, the favored candidate of the aforementioned Club for Greed. Also of GOP kingmaker Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, whose greatest hits as a political prognosticator include the Iraq War and Sarah Palin.
The hand-picked selection, that is, of another passel of New York/Washington elitists. A superficially appealing candidate with impressive credentials, Cotton also appears to be a stone right-wing zealot who not only voted against federal disaster aid for storm victims, but recently proposed a law punishing relatives of lawbreakers—parents, siblings, aunts and uncles—for their transgressions. In a word, a crackpot.
Basically, Pryor’s got to portray himself as an advocate of the Arkansas Way—a moderate Democrat like his father, former Sen. David Pryor, like Dale Bumpers, and Bill Clinton—a just-folks pragmatist beset by condescending outsiders, and one who’ll fight for you as hard as he fights for himself.
A longshot? Definitely. But it’s been done before.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 5, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 