“The GOP Needs To Change”: Paul Ryan Just Revealed That The GOP Has Learned Nothing From Its Trump Debacle
Paul Ryan is, at least arguably, the leader of the Republican Party. He was the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012. He’s now speaker of the House of Representatives. And he remains the party’s unofficial wonk-in-chief.
So what lessons has the savvy, brainy Ryan drawn from the stunning ascent of Donald Trump, as the billionaire (probably) businessman closes in on the Republican presidential nomination?
Maybe none. Certainly none that suggest Ryan thinks the party needs a big change of direction.
In a CNBC interview on Thursday, reporter John Harwood repeatedly probed Ryan on what the rise of Trump means for the future of the GOP. Not only is Trump against many of the GOP’s traditional policy pillars — including free trade, immigration, and entitlement reform — but he is also attracting working-class voters who are equally skeptical of center-right economics as practiced in Washington.
To his great credit, Ryan insisted that he will continue to push for Social Security and Medicare fixes to prevent a future debt crisis. And he still supports the Pacific trade deal, noting that “America should be at the table, writing the rules of the global economy instead of China.”
All good stuff, as far as it goes. But at no point did Ryan acknowledge that the rise of Trumpism possibly signals a Republican agenda inadequate in meeting the anxieties and real struggles of middle- and working-class America. This exchange between Harwood and Ryan about the tax burden is illustrative:
Harwood: “On taxes, when your predecessor as Ways and Means chair, Dave Camp, came out with a comprehensive tax reform a few years ago, he adopted as a principle that it was going to be distributionally neutral. It wasn’t going to give an advantage to any group over the current system. Is that still a principle that you think is appropriate for the Republican tax agenda?”
Ryan: “So I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you’re talking about is what we call static distribution. It’s a ridiculous notion. What it presumes is life in the economy is some fixed pie, and it’s not going to change. And it’s really up to government to redistribute the slices more equitably. That is not how the world works. That’s not how life works. You can shrink or expand the economy, and what we want to maximize is economic growth and upward mobility so that everybody can get a bigger slice of the pie.”
Harwood: “And you’re not worried that those blue-collar Republican voters, who are voting in the primaries right now, are going to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You’re really taking care of people at the top more than you’re taking care of me.'”
Ryan: “I think most people don’t think, ‘John’s success comes at my expense.’ Or, ‘My success comes at your expense.’ People don’t think like that. People want to know the deck is fair. Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”
In other words, Republicans should keep deeply cutting taxes for the richest Americans — as part of across-the-board tax cuts — and not give any special preference to targeted or direct middle-class tax relief.
Not only does Ryan’s position clash with the Trumpist truths of 2016 — his position makes little sense from a policy standpoint. Analyses of the tax plans of the various GOP presidential candidates show their deep individual income tax cuts — such as slashing the top rate from 40 percent to 28 percent — would cost the most revenue while producing the least amount of economic growth. That 2014 big-bang tax reform plan by Camp would have likely increased the size of the economy by less than one percent over the next decade. And if you ask Silicon Valley about pro-growth policy, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are far more likely to mention burdensome regulation than income tax cuts.
Ryan’s professed politics are also dodgy. Most middle-class Americans seem to think they’re already paying their fair share in taxes. And a YouGov finding poll last year found 45 percent of Americans disagreed with the idea that lower taxes on the wealthy creates shared prosperity vs. 29 percent who agreed. Also, fair or not, voters see the GOP as the party of the rich. A recent Pew survey found 62 percent say the GOP favors the wealthy, compared to 26 percent who say it favors the middle class. And recall that in 2012, 81 percent of voters who wanted a president who empathized with them voted for Barack Obama.
The same middle class that does not trust the GOP on trade and immigration is also unlikely to trust them to reform Medicare and Social Security or the tax code. So maybe the GOP ought to listen to the recommendation of National Review editor Reihan Salam and take a break from tax cuts for households making over $250,000 a year. Even better: Use your political capital to formulate a middle-class agenda that acknowledges the challenges as well as the opportunities from globalization and technological change. This might mean expanded tax credits or payroll tax cuts for working-class families. Maybe even broad wage insurance for people who lose their jobs, whether to offshoring or the robots. Social Security reform that improved benefits for those at the bottom. And wouldn’t the GOP be better off if voters thought it was the party obsessed with making higher education a better value for students as opposed to cutting taxes at the top?
The GOP needs to change. If conservative reformers in Washington won’t do it, then populist outsiders like Donald Trump just might.
By: James Pethokoukis, The Week, March 18, 2016
“How Conservatives Lost 2015”: Talked A Big Game But Ended Up Losing Almost Every Big Legislative Battle
Establishment Republicans had a miserable year on the campaign trail. But on Capitol Hill—far from Make America Great Again hats—they cleaned up.
Conservatives on the Hill, emboldened by Republican gains in the midterm elections, followed the battle cry of the Heritage Foundation’s powerful lobbying arm against their Establishment overlords. But over the past year, they’ve faced defeat after biting defeat.
Most of these wins were on wonky, unsexy issues—like funding for infrastructure construction and rules about how the president can negotiate trade agreements. Not exactly the most scintillating stuff.
But while these individual debates may not have galvanized national attention, they were hugely important to Tea Party-friendly conservative groups. And the cumulative losses these groups face suggest that their clout may have flatlined or they overplayed their hands.
Heritage Action, the lobbying wing of the powerful Heritage Foundation think tank, got a major shellacking in March during the fight over “Doc Fix” legislation, which overhauled how doctors who treat Medicare patients get reimbursed. Heritage Action key-voted against the bill, citing concerns that it would grow the national debt by half a trillion dollars over twenty years. Despite the group’s protestations, though, the Doc Fix passed the House with just 37 no votes (only 4 of whom were Democrats). In the Senate, just 8 members voted against it.
It was a tough loss for Heritage Action. And many more followed. Trade legislation drew significant opposition from the group in June, as members fought over whether Congress would give the president extra authority to negotiate trade deals, allocate funds to support Americans who lose jobs due to said deals. While issues like Trade Adjustment Assistance and Trade Promotion Authority may not roll off the tongue of your average Tea Partier (or, well, your average human being), Heritage Action’s key-voting against trade provisions helped energize grassroots conservative opposition. That, combined with Breitbart News and the Drudge Report’s liberal (and frantic) use of the “Obamatrade” moniker stoked opposition on the right.
And all those guys lost.
Congress gave the president additional authority to negotiate trade deals and allocated more funds to help Americans who lose jobs to overseas competition, and the president announced he plans to have the U.S. sign on to the new Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
“Is Anyone Still Scared of Heritage Action?” wondered National Journal. It was a good question.
And it was a question that arose again in July, when legislation came up to change funding for the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. The bill was called the 21st Century Cures Act, and, well, was complicated. Heritage Action opposed it adamantly, for comparably complicated reasons. If NIH funding mechanisms get your juices flowing, check out Heritage Action’s release explaining its stance. If not, just rest assured that it was a big deal for the group, and the group lost. Seventy-seven House members voted against the bill, seventy of whom were Republicans.
And, of course, there’s perhaps the unsexiest issue of all: the highway bill! Next time you’re trying to get out of an unpleasant conversation, just bring up infrastructure funding and see what happens. The highway bill allowed more than $300 billion for transportation spending, and it reauthorized the Export-Import Bank—a program that gives loans to U.S. businesses that have overseas commerce, and that conservatives have long criticized as corporate welfare. Heritage Action’s denunciation of the bill said the highway projects were funded with “almost exclusively with embarrassing budget gimmicks.”
The Ex-Im bank’s funding expired this summer, and Congress couldn’t get it reauthorized—due in large part to conservative opposition—until the Highway Bill came up.
“Ending this bank was a major blow to the culture of crony capitalism festering in Washington,” said Heritage Action’s statement, “and reviving it now damages the conservative movement and the credibility of efforts to rid the federal government of favoritism for special interests.”
The president signed the bill early in December.
But there was one last loss to be felt: the year-end omnibus spending bill—a legislative package full of the kind of spending projects that make conservatives want to scratch their eyeballs out, including funding for Planned Parenthood. Heritage Action, naturally, key-voted against it. And the House, as was natural in 2015, passed it anyway.
It wasn’t always this way. During the 2013 government shutdown, Heritage Action exerted enormous influence to pressure members of Congress against supporting any funding for the Affordable Care Act. And members shivered at the prospect of facing primary challengers who would attack them over low marks on the group’s vote scorecard. But now, much of that fear seems to have abated.
“When Heritage key-votes against a bill now, it is almost guaranteed to get less conservative, and guaranteed to pass both chambers and become law,” said one former Republican House leadership staffer. “They have reverse Midas touch.”
Heritage Action didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, January 2, 2016
“The GOP Is One Heck Of A Dysfunctional Family”: Republican’s Having A Lot Of Trouble Getting That Governing Thing Down
If you wonder why Congress is so feeble these days that it can’t even find a simple way to pass a transportation bill, look no further than Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who proffered a little resolution on Tuesday night to oust John Boehner from the speakership.
The move was quickly dismissed by Boehner loyalists as showboating by a second-term member, and Meadows himself said he might not even seek a vote on his own measure. His hope is to provoke a “family conversation” among Republicans. It’s a heck of a dysfunctional family. The GOP these days may have its advantages on the Lannisters of “Game of Thrones” fame, but it’s a very long way from the Brady Bunch.
Perhaps by crushing Meadows’s insurrection, which many of even the most rebellious right-wing Republicans thought was ill-timed, Boehner will strengthen his hand. The more likely outcome is that this resolution to “vacate the chair” will once again remind Boehner of the nature of the party caucus over which he presides. I use “preside” rather than “lead” precisely because his difficulty in leading these folks is the heart of his problem.
The House GOP (and this applies more than it once did to Senate Republicans as well) includes a large and vocal minority always ready to go over a cliff and always ready to burn — fortunately, figuratively — heretical leaders and colleagues. More important, a significant group sympathizes with Boehner privately but is absolutely petrified that having his back when things get tough will conjure a challenge inside the party by conservative ultras whose supporters dominate its primary electorate in so many places.
This means that Republicans have to treat doing business with President Obama and the Democrats as something bordering on philosophical treason. Yes, on trade, where Obama’s position is relatively close to their own, they will help the president out. But it’s very hard to find many other issues of that sort. Politicians of nearly every kind used to agree that building roads, bridges, mass-transit projects and airports was good for everybody. Now, even pouring concrete and laying track can be disrupted by weird ideological struggles.
The text of Meadows’s anti-Boehner resolution is revealing. He complains that the speaker has “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches, diminishing the voice of the American people.” Actually, Congress has done a bang-up job of blocking Obama’s agenda since Republicans won control of the House in 2010. How, short of impeachment, is it supposed to do more to foil the man in the White House?
Meadows also hits Boehner for “intentionally” seeking voice votes (as opposed to roll calls) on “consequential and controversial legislation to be taken without notice and with few Members present.” He has a point. But since so many Republicans are often too timid to go on the record for the votes required to keep government moving — they don’t want to be punished by Meadows’s ideological friends — Boehner does what he has to do.
On the other hand, Meadows’s charge that Boehner is “bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent” is absolutely true.
But the logic of this legitimate protest is that Boehner should allow many more votes on the floor in which a minority of Republicans could join with a majority of Democrats to pass legislation, thereby reflecting the actual will of the entire House. If Boehner had done this with immigration reform, it would now be a reality. Boehner didn’t do it precisely because he worried about what Republicans of Meadows’s stripe would do to him.
Meadows’s move bodes ill for the compromising that will be required this fall to avoid new crises on the debt ceiling and the budget. Republicans already faced difficulties on this front before the “vacate the chair” warning shot, as Post blogger Greg Sargent noted Wednesday.
And Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), another Boehner critic, reacted to the resolution by invoking the Lord Voldemort all Republicans fear. Jones expressed the hope that “the talk-show hosts who are so frustrated would pick up on this thing and beat the drum.” It’s enough to ruin a speaker’s summer.
Republicans are talking a good deal about the threat to their brand posed by Donald Trump’s unplugged, unrestrained appeal to the party’s untamed side. The bigger danger comes from a Republican Congress that is having a lot of trouble getting that governing thing down.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 29, 2015
“Not Exactly The Same As Others”: Procedural Dissolution Resolution Included For The First Time In TPA
Yesterday the Senate failed to pass a procedural vote on granting the president Trade Promotion Authority (TPA or so-called “fast-track“). As Ed Kilgore noted, this is probably not the end of the line for TPA. It will likely be brought up again very soon.
As I read commentary about the debate on this legislation, I often see an assumption that this TPA bill is exactly the same as others that have been approved in the past. Statements like this one from Senator Elizabeth Warren are regularly repeated.
The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done.
Here’s Steve Benen saying basically the same thing.
At issue is something called “trade-promotion authority” – also known as “fast-track” – which is intended to streamline the process. As we discussed a month ago, the proposal would empower President Obama to move forward on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating its specific provisions. If successful, the White House would then present a finished TPP to Congress for an up-or-down vote – with no amendments.
Lawmakers would effectively have a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity.
And finally, here’s Caitlin MacNeal:
“Fast track” authority would limit Congress to a simple up or down vote on the TPP without amending the deal.
That’s pretty much how TPA is being described across the board. Those statements would be accurate if we were talking about trade promotion authority that has been approved in the past. But for the first time, the current TPA bill (you can download it from that link) contains the ability for Congress to pass a “procedural disapproval resolution” after a particular trade agreement is presented to them. Such a resolution can be presented for several reasons, but the most likely would be that it fails to adhere to the “trade negotiation objectives” outlined in the bill (IOW, a pretty open door). If such a resolution were to pass, it negates trade promotion authority and consideration of the agreement would then be open to amendments and a filibuster.
All of this is available to Congress AFTER a negotiated trade deal has been finalized and made available to the public. In other words, lawmakers would have three options:
1. Approve the trade deal
2. Reject the trade deal
3. Pass a procedural disapproval resolution and open up debate on amendments
Such a resolution would require 60 votes in the Senate to pass. But given that the opponents of TPA required 60 votes to approve it, the fact that dissolving it also requires 60 votes makes sense.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 13, 2015
“Something Liberals Should Remember”: Obama Is Right: Elizabeth Warren Is “A Politician Like Everybody Else”
On Friday, President Barack Obama sat down with Yahoo’s Matt Bai to promote the Trans Pacific Partnership and delivered his sharpest rebuke yet to Senator Elizabeth Warren and other liberals who oppose the trade deal.
“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” he said in the interview, which was published Saturday. “And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that. And on most issues, she and I deeply agree. On this one, though, her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
Bai correctly interpreted these comments as some of the harshest words the president has used against his liberal allies. But, at the same time, they are rather innocuous: Warren is a politician and is susceptible to outside pressure like anyone else. Liberals should remember that.
When Warren speaks about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she often references a battle over a financial regulatory bill in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A law professor at the time, Warren strongly opposed the bill. But the economic team in President Bill Clinton’s White House was divided on it. Warren met with Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, and convinced her to oppose the bill as well. Hillary then convinced her husband not to sign the legislation at the end of his presidency.
Yet just a few months later, Clinton, as a senator from New York, the financial capital of the world, reversed her position. The bill passed and President George W. Bush signed it. “There were a lot of people who voted for that bill who thought that there was going to be no political price to pay,” Warren told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza recently. Warren wants to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
The fact that Hillary, the first lady, and Hillary, the New York senator, had opposite opinions of the bill shouldn’t have surprised Warren that much. As first lady, Hillary had no constituents to worry about. But as a senator, Hillary suddenly had millions of constituents with jobs either directly or indirectly connected to the financial industry. It would be great if she—and all politicians for that matter—always voted on principle and were immune from lobbying pressure. But that isn’t the case.
That’s true for Warren as well. The medical device industry is one of the most important industries in Massachusetts, and Warren has gone to bat for the industry multiple times. For instance, she is one of the few Democrats that supports the repeal of the medical device tax, which is part of Obamacare. In February, she introduced a bill to require pharmaceutical companies that pay a penalty and break the law to reinvest a percentage of that penalty into the National Institute of Health. But it has a loophole: Medical device manufacturers are exempt from the requirement unless they make drugs as well.
If liberals want to see a politician who always votes with his conscience, they need to look no further than Hillary’s one current challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. When Sanders announced his presidential run, Matt Taibbi, writing at Rolling Stone, explained:
Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he’s motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can’t protect themselves, I’ve never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.
When Sanders sat down with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, the host noted that he “can hear the Republican attack ad right now: He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.” To which Sanders responded, “That’s right. That’s right. What’s wrong with that?” That is a politician who doesn’t care about his image.
It’s just about impossible to imagine Warren answering a question that way. She and her staff closely guard her image. For instance, she is notorious for not speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol, unlike most of her colleagues. It’s very rare that she strays off message.
That doesn’t mean that her votes and policy positions aren’t principled most of the time. I have no reason to believe that she is opposing the trade deal for political reasons. I think she and the president simply disagree on the issue. But as liberals criticize the TPP as a sop to big business and the U.S. Trade Representative for its corporate ties—both of which may be true—it’s worth remembering that Warren herself is not immune to pressure.
By: Danny Vinik, Staff Writer, The New Republic, May 11, 2015
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