Republican Party

Let the King Reign

Yesterday’s Times profile on the history of that quintessentially American tradition — the peaceful, loyal succession — ought to raise a question for today’s Democrats. Has the tradition been followed in this administration, in fact as well as in form? And if not, what can we say about it?

Consider Senator McCain’s dignified concession speech that night three years ago, offered in the best tradition of small-r republican magnanimity, in which McCain embraced his opponent and acknowledged the President-Elect’s mandate for change… to a chorus of boos. Since then, it’s fair to say that congressional Republicans, and presidential candidates, have treated Barack Obama’s presence in the White House as an imposition, an aberration to be corrected, rather than anything to which he might be entitled by virtue of 69 million votes (and 9-and-a-half-million-vote margin over his opponent). We’ve been reminded that America is a center-right nation, with the implication that Obama’s win is something to be explained away; heard trumped-up charges of voter fraud aimed at delegitimizing the process that gave him his position; and dealt with a Congress that’s gleefully broken its own rules and ended longtime truces to block the President at every turn.

If President Obama ever had a honeymoon phase to his presidency, we might say — as seems to be the usable thesis of Ron Suskind’s otherwise factually-challenged, narrator-driven tome on Obama’s first few years in office — that he squandered it on an unnecessarily divisive issue, healthcare reform, when he could’ve taken bold, consensus-generating steps to right the economy. But even this evaluation should be tempered by a reminder of how quickly the Republican opposition rushed to Total War on the President.

This is a story we should play up — that for the past three years, America has functionally lacked a loyal opposition, one that works against the President but within expected norms, and votes against his interests, but offers their own affirmative plans for action in response. Rather than accepting the consequences of eight years of mismanagement under Bush, and acceding to the result of a lawful election, the Republican Party offered us that first part of Tennyson’s famous line, glorifying the fight, without the peace that comes thereafter:

Blow trumpet! he will lift us from the dust.
Blow trumpet! live the strength and die the lust!
Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

This is a case we can make in 2012, provided it’s mixed in equal parts with a reminder of those positive plans the minority derailed for their own benefit, and at great cost to the country. And we can start with the unemployment extension.

Horrifying

Don’t miss Rolling Stone‘s long-form piece chronicling the sad saga of the Republican Party’s deliberate descent into economic malpractice. We need a reckoning.

The Republican Party as a Shakespearean Anti-Hero

Longtime readers will remember how much I enjoy the theater of politics, and its tendency to produce characters whose fortunes rise and fall in an almost Shakespearean fashion: like Macbeth or Othello, these are likable figures who somehow lose themselves, and everything they’ve built, based on one outsized character flaw. In years past, we’ve had Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who made the mistake of trusting George W. Bush; and John McCain, undone by his own impetuousness, and for failing to realize that the Republican Party was no longer a place for statesmen. To that, let’s add another one — though it doesn’t have to happen, a chain of events could be about to unfold that places the Republican Party, writ large, at the center of its own Shakespearean tragedy, where the party will see itself undone by no less of a classical failure than hubris.

Naturally, for my story to come true, Mitt Romney has to lose the primary, and Newt Gingrich has to win. That’s looking like an increasingly plausible outcome — remember, “inevitable” nominees aren’t always so inevitable — but it’s also one that leads directly to the Republican Party’s loss next fall. While that could prompt the kind of soul-searching Doug Mataconis desperately hopes for, I’m not so optimistic. The time for introspection was 2008: is this Republican Party actually capable of arresting and revising its descent into radicalism? I think no. Which leaves us with this plot structure:

• ACT ONE: curtain opens on a series of Republican leaders, assembled after John McCain’s devastating loss. As Mitch McConnell states that his #1 goal is to destroy the President, by any means necessary, the leaders settle around a rationale that manages to explain their loss while completely exculpating everyone in the room: McCain just wasn’t conservative enough! Obviously.
• ACT TWO: the group’s plan to swing the party rightward is off to a roaring start: 2010 midterms, Tea Party ascendant, screaming town halls, “socialism,” you get it.
• ACT THREE: shows the debt ceiling debate, but dramatized, as our cast of heroes from Act One score victory after victory against the President, teeing us up for the primary season.
• ACT FOUR: a newly emboldened Republican Party, cheered but unsurprised by President’s Obama’s low poll numbers — they engineered them, after all — enters the primary season, and tosses around talking points that evidence a severe disconnect from reality to anyone who’s paying attention and has half a mind. Moderate, likable statesmen Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman warn against reading Obama’s perceived weakness as an invitation to excise electability from the nominating calculus, but the base and other candidates are all convinced of their own invincibility. Intoxicated, Republican voters toss aside elitist “liberal” Mitt Romney as the latter day Goldwater, Newt Gingrich himself, cruises to an easy primary win in Iowa, and nets the nomination early. Newt pledges to best Obama in an ever-increasing number of debates, each of his own suggestion. What could go wrong?
• ACT FIVE: the dream starts to collapse as the Supreme Court issues its decision on “ObamaCare” — upholding the individual mandate by a vote of 6 to 3 (opinion by: Kennedy, J.), with a withering concurrence from Justice Scalia, upbraiding the public for politicizing the Court. A now-irrelevant Tea Party disbands. In their first debate, Newt Gingrich, unwilling to shed his haughty exterior, comes off as pompous-but-ignorant next to the cool, collected Obama — just what we saw in that second debate against McCain, four years earlier. Gingrich’s campaign unwinds in a series of embarrassing gaffes, which I leave to your imagination. The closing speech belongs to Rush Limbaugh, who uses Gingrich’s “pro-amnesty” immigration policy to explain that the only reason the Republicans lost was that their nominee just wasn’t conservative enough. Again. Meanwhile, in the background, a Latino man casts his first ballot at a Florida pollsite.

Exeunt, Republican dominance.

Has Occupy Wall Street Won?

While the right will happily delegitimize the 99% movement based on the excesses and failures of these particular messengers, the message, it seems, has landed precisely as it was intended.

For one, this week’s New Yorker highlights a discovery Politico made earlier this month: “the use of the phrase ‘income inequality’ in the media has more than quintupled since the beginning of the occupation.” For another, congressional Democrats are poised to finally push Republicans to choose, conspicuously, between preserving job-stimulating cuts to the payroll tax, and preserving the historically low upper-income tax bracket. Republicans, of course, will elect the latter.

It’s a sign of the times that this potential “victory” for us takes the form of, functionally, requiring Republicans to choose the less offensive platform of their hand-crafted arguments. The argument that tax cuts stimulate job growth, after all, derives more than a little from Republican theory, even if the connection between tax relief and hiring is a little less attenuated than Reagan’s discredited “trickle-down” model. Here’s hoping Democrats manage to stick to their guns and, somehow, overcome their basic inability to message to make Republicans pay for the choice. We need to not be afraid of taking a tough rhetorical stand against bad policies. It’s probably time, for one, to embrace some elements of the right’s rhetorical toolbox. The featured picture, for one, demonstrates a damn-fine catchphrase, keyed to make our point while delegitimizing theirs. Let’s see it on some buttons.

This could be the final value of Occupy Wall Street: that they’ve given Democrats some cover to be less extreme than them, and take a stand on issues that should properly be understood to belong to the middle of the political spectrum. At the end of the day, at least we’re talking about it.

Chemistry, Timing, and the Transformative Presidency

Certainly without knowing it, President Obama, in this pre-inaugural picture plucked from the New York Times, manages to pull off a fair impression of the famous classical statue, the Augustus of the Primaporta, matching almost perfectly the second Caesar’s raised arm, held either to indicate a more prosperous future and recovery from Rome’s century of civil wars, or to address his gathered legions moments before a great victory. It depends on who you ask. But in either case, it’s a promise the administration has, by and large, failed to live up to. We can play the blame game another time — I for one continue to blame a Republican party more interested in killing the Democratic resurgence, embodied in Obama, than in running the country — but we’ve had a hand in it too. We haven’t fought when we should have, we’ve fought when we should’ve kept quiet, and overall blanched from the Total War the administration so obviously faced as early as January 21, 2009. Where did we go wrong? To start, let’s rewind to 2008. Maybe it should’ve been Hillary.

Let’s assume — correctly, I think — that there was little policy difference between Hillary and Obama, except possibly as to Iraq. Instead, the choice between Hillary and Obama reduced to a choice of visions for the country. With Hillary, we had a proven fighter, someone who could stand toe-to-toe with the ideological violence of the Bush-era Republican Party. Choosing her would commit us to another eight years of fighting the culture wars, but probably a victory. With Obama, instead, we had the promise of the beginning of a national healing period. Time after time, Obama shrugged off the divisive rhetoric his opponents hurled at him, and always seemed capable to draw us back to our common denominators. Choosing him, it seemed, gave us a fair shot at national unity, consensus politics, and an end to the hyperpartisanship, brinksmanship, and overall reduction of American values that characterized the Bush years.

Like so many, I opted for the latter vision. This was a mistake, but a well-intentioned one. I never expected, nor thought the post-Bush Republican Party capable of, an actual net increase in partisanship. It’s the rare faction that gets handed a crippling loss, and decides the solution is to radicalize. But that’s the opposition we received — as was evident pretty early on — and Obama was not the right President to fight that war. Nor has he truly endeavored to become that type of President. He’s stuck by Bush’s quickly-abandoned goal of being a “uniter, not a divider,” with some exceptions, and if that’s what we need eventually, it’s not what we need now. Though we may never know, a President Hillary Clinton might have understood that.

Like relationships, presidencies are part chemistry, and part timing. Chemistry — here used in the individual sense — our current President has no shortage of. He’s an important, even singular individual, a presidential character if there ever was one. But the Republicans’ dangerous game has functioned to strand him an era not of his own making, nor suited to his strengths, and Obama and the Democrats alike have consistently failed to adapt. America desperately needs a transformative President; but more urgently, we need a soldier to fight the war to get us to a place where we’re ready for a transformation. I suspect the great majority of Americans are already there, but their leaders, at least on one side of the aisle, are not. And until those leaders are absolutely and completely crushed, we’ll never have peace. Octavian had to kill Antony before he could become Augustus.

A Look at the “Forgotten 15″: Does the GOP’s Radical Deregulation Agenda Actually Create Jobs?

It’s not hard to see why Republicans do so well on Twitter: in a forum that limits debate to 140 characters, there’s no room for principled disagreement, shades of grey, or arguments backed up by facts. It’s the perfect environment for unsubstantiated talking points like, “drill baby drill!”, “Where’s the birth certificate?”, and the Republican House majority’s job creation “strategy,” which apparently fits in a hash tag: #forgotten15, a reference to 15 “job creating” bills passed by the Republican House, but stalled out by the Democratic Senate.

Terrifying, isn’t it?! Why wouldn’t the Democrats pass job-creating legislation!? Well, let’s find out. Here, a review of the bills Eric Cantor gladly tags as job-creators, through an increasingly creative bill-naming process:

1. Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act (HR 872): substantially deregulates the use of insecticides in farming, by expanding those situations where a permit for the insecticide’s use is not required.
2. Energy Tax Prevention Act (HR 910): bars the EPA from taking into account “climate change” when restricting the emissions of acknowledged greenhouse gases like sulfur hexaflouride, hydroflourocarbons (like freon), and carcinogenic/poisonous perflourocarbons.
3. Disapproval of FCC’s Net Neutrality Regulations (HJ Res 37): just like it says, this nonbinding resolution would express Congress’ “disapproval” of proposed FCC rules banning corporations from charging disproportionately for certain types of internet access. Conservatives like to conflate net neutrality with the discredited Fairness Doctrine — because they kinda sound alike — but “net neutrality” means neither the government nor corporations could charge for internet use based on type or amount of access. Why conservative voters want a world where they’ll pay more for internet access, I’ll never know; but for conservative lawmakers, it’s a clear play for donations from the telecomm companies that stand to benefit from being able to charge higher rates.
4. Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act (HR 2018): lets states submit compliance plans to the EPA, but without any real guidance. So, under this bill, a state could functionally deregulate water pollution, and the EPA would be forced to sign off — which is precisely what would, and does happen. Energy companies are  tragically and phenomenally successful at fracturing public opinion about whether and how to sell off their land for a quick buck.
5. Consumer Financial Protection & Soundness Improvement Act (HR 1315): defangs the Consumer Protection Bureau; changes the systemic oversight council’s mission from protecting “the safety and soundness of the United States banking system” and “the stability of the financial system of the United States” to “the safe and sound operations of United States financial institutions”… seriously. I could not make this up. And in keeping with radical pro-business, anti-family thinking, in a move supported by the Heritage Foundation, this “Consumer Financial Protection” act ends the Federal Housing Administration’s underwater mortgage buyout program, meaning, quite simply, that more Americans will lose their homes.
6. Protecting Jobs From Government Interference Act (HR 2587): terminates the NLRB’s authority to order that an employer “restore or reinstate any work, product, production line, or equipment” or “rescind any relocation, transfer, subcontracting, outsourcing” initiative. The bill targets one of the far-right’s new pet causes — an NLRB action that seeks to block Boeing from moving an airline construction plant from a union state, to union-free South Carolina, as possible retribution for previous union bargaining initiatives. Query whether the bill would save jobs, or simply move them to more business-friendly states.
7. Transparency In Regulatory Analysis Of Impacts On The Nation (HR 2401): orders the President (?) to establish a committee reviewing the “feasibility” of clean air standards. Note the constitutional issue, that the Act doesn’t actually do anything, and in contravention of Republican Rule #1, it spends $3,000,000 just to constitute the Committee.
8. Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act (HR 2681): stays EPA rules applicable only to a specific group of cement producers, and directs the EPA to issue more favorable rules, and cuts back the definition of the term “solid waste.”
9. EPA Regulatory Relief Act (HR 2250): stays existing EPA regulations, and orders the agency to re-promulgate rules that “can be met under actual operating conditions.” In other words, without any change to industry practice.
10. Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act (HR 2273): devolves the regulation of “coal combustion residuals,” responsible for a devastating industrial accident in Kingston Valley, Tennessee, to the states.
11. Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act (HR 1230) [not yet reported to the Senate]: directs the EPA to approve four specified offshore drilling leases, by name, and deems them environmentally sound for EPA purposes.
12. Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act (HR 1229): extends some offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico, while severely limiting private rights of action challenging agency decisions to grant leases. Under HR 1229, challenges could be filed only within 60 days of agency action, heard only within the Fifth Circuit (despite or, presumably, because of their conflict-of-interest problem), and resolved in the agency’s favor based only on the agency’s record, without the benefit of extrinsic evidence. Presumably, these limitations look forward to a future Republican presidential administration, and a Republican EPA willing to grant any license requested.
13. Reversing President Obama’s Offshore Moratorium Act (HR 1231): directs the EPA to lease 50% of all available drilling locations in the Gulf of Mexico, and set an aggressive production schedule.
14. Jobs and Energy Permitting Act of 2011 (HR 2021): neuters all EPA rules related to the Clean Air Act would apply to offshore drilling operations, and provides that environmental impact will be measured at shore. So, to Hell with the Gulf of Mexico, I guess.
15. North American-Made Energy Security Act (HR 1938): expedites approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — a Koch brothers project that’s likely unnecessary, expands our dependence on dirty and foreign energy sources, would create tens of thousands of dirty-energy jobs but only at the expense of millions of clean-energy jobs, and risks catastrophic spills over vital interstate aquifers, a real risk considering repeated spills in the Trans-Alaskan system.

This isn’t a job-creation strategy; it’s a love letter to hazardous industry, and the same radical deregulation strategy, calling for a return to the turn-of-the-century working conditions, that’s been rejected by the voters time and time again. Only now, the House majority’s repackaged each individual sell-out as “job creating,” relying on the shaky major premise that deregulation of finance and heavy industry goes hand-in-hand with job creation. Perhaps that idea holds together for bills #11-14 — in some cases, we will have to decide between long-term environmental health and short-term job creation — but it’s tough to see how letting corporations charge differential, higher rates for internet access (#3), or move jobs away from union states and into non-union states (#6), results in any net addition to the workforce.

I understand we may not believe in Keynes anymore — even though we hardly gave him a chance this time around. But it’s telling, isn’t it, that Republicans offer nothing in the way of an alternative model. Instead, we’re expected to fall for the stimulus bill’s evil twin: rather than invest in our future with aggressive, government-funded public works, we’ll sell our health and our heritage to private corporations, trusting that they’ll deal with us fairly, and that an increase in their bottom line will translate to more than a handful of transient, unskilled, low-paying, dangerous jobs in heavy industry. Has this ever worked before?

The Problem of the Palin Ponzi Scheme

Sarah Palin’s decision not to run could push her to the top of the vice presidential slate, where (with the right nominee) she could reprise her role as the extremist spoiler that tanked a mainstream candidate. Here’s hoping.

But in the interim, all that’s certain is that she’s managed to successfully cash in on the uncertainty surrounding her potential presidential bid without going through the hard work of actually running for something, holding public office, or making a difference. Jon Stewart details the absurdity of it all — especially in light of misleading fundraising letters her personal PAC has put out over the past few months. From one:

Someone has to save our nation from this road to European Socialism. Do you think it should be [ex-]Governor Palin?

If so, can you send your best, one-time gift to SarahPAC today to help her elect more common-sense conservatives — and show her that we support her if she decides to run?

Now there’s certainly nothing illegal in any of this fundraising — when I use the word “Ponzi Scheme,” I use it as loosely as Governor Perry — but this sort of inducement to give someone money, to perform a discretionary act that they have no intention of ever performing, feels a lot like the kind of securities fraud that gets companies investigated, and directors thrown in jail. At the very least, it’s slimy. Voters spend money to “convince” Sarah to run, and in exchange, get nothing more than another visit from the Grifter Express, and the peace of knowing that someone cares enough about their loose cultural beliefs to take their money and use it to write Facebook posts. I suppose that’s something, but it’s not much.

What Sarah Palin has become, and what we’ve allowed her to become through this “will she or won’t she” dance, is a political version of Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, “famous because she’s famous,” consuming public money and attention in exchange for the sheer joy of knowing she exists, and witnessing her wacky hijinks. She’s an entertainer, taking in the political energy of her supporters and converting it into spectacle. We should ignore her, until she decides to do something useful.

That we don’t, though, says something. It speaks to a vacuum on both sides of the aisle — of ideas on the Republican side, and of leadership on the Democratic side. There’s no space for such demagogues in a healthy democracy.

Still More Cheering

Early in The West Wing, a newly invigorated President Bartlett abandons the key phrase in his planned State of the Union address — “the era of big government is over,” previously intoned by President Clinton — for a more complicated sell. “Government can be a place where people come together and where no one gets left behind.”

Mark it as the precise moment where today’s timid liberalism diverged from the benevolent, triumphant liberalism of Sorkin’s fictional world. Toby’s sentiment is jarring even today — we just don’t talk about government as a force for good. Not anymore. Take last night’s Republican debate:

For the second time in two consecutive showings, the Republican audience actually cheered death – here, the death of a hypothetical uninsured man in dire need of health care, whose loss is apparently preferable to government intervention — while Ron Paul backtracked, explaining that society can care for the deathly ill, rather than government. Our patient needn’t die, so long as the community chips in.

Except, it won’t — not in every case. Not everyone is so privileged as to be able depend “on the kindness of strangers.” For those without family, friends, or community support, Paul’s answer is no answer at all. And even where it might offer a solution — for a middle-class man, say, with little personal wealth but well-connected friends able to rally the community around them — what Paul’s answer saves the public fisc, it passes on to the community in the form of transaction costs. The sick individual must hope and trust that he can pay his bills, and his community must dedicate its time to solving that problem.

Government removes that burden from society — the uncertainty and cost inherent in collective action — and places it in the hands of experts. All we have to do, in return for the knowledge that our fellow citizens are cared for, and not a one is left behind, is suffer the trivial psychic indignity of having to pay taxes. “Big government” pledges us to each other, to unite us in defense of the common welfare, and there’s pride in a society that takes care of its own. I wish to God we’d discover it.

This Actually Happened

The Republican audience, reminded of the 234 individuals executed during Rick Perry’s tenure as Texas governor, actually applauded:

This doesn’t strike me as a pro- or anti-death penalty issue. It’s one of basic human decency. Punishment — any punishment — isn’t a joyful answer to crime. It’s one to be dispensed solemnly, with cognizance that another’s life has to be ruined, whether by imprisonment or by death, for society’s benefit. I don’t expect Ned Stark (YouTube), but I do demand respect for lives taken.

That said, I don’t believe a reasonable man can support the death penalty in a world full of cases like Claude Jones’.

Our Republican Endorsement

Today, let’s take a break from negativity. In the Republican Primary, this site endorses Jon Huntsman.

Mr. Huntsman will never win the nomination. He rejects creationism and climate denialism. He has the diplomat’s ability to speak to other cultures in their own terms, instead of the cultural hegemon’s insistence that they speak to him in his. In short, he rejects everything it means to be a Republican in the modern era. And by taking on the Republicans’ fringe, and its increasing pretensions to dominance, he shows no sign of stopping.

It’s this very commitment to centrism, and reasonable solutions, that together entitle him to the very position he’ll never occupy. Lesser men start from the center, and swerve right when it gets tough: McCain, for example. Huntsman shows every indication of sticking to his guns, even though it’ll cost him the nomination, to make a point about the way politics should be. For that, we applaud him.

To be clear, I at least could not support the Ambassador in a general election. The “flat tax,” and the notion that the poor should start paying taxes before the rich should pay more, remain wrongheaded and at odds with the facts (pdf). But a look at today’s political atmosphere makes clear that extremism begets extremism: when we first determine to forsake compromise, and set out to destroy one another rather than govern, we unlock Pandora’s box. It’s what happened in Wisconsin, and we can only fix the national problem by agreeing to govern together from the center again. Huntsman appears to understand as much, in a way that no other Republican does.

For that, he’s condemned to be an afterthought in a primary that’ll be defined by the Palins, Perrys, and Bachmanns, not by the Lugars and Huntsmans. That’s the Republicans’ loss — none of the former set have even a shadow of a shot in the general — but it’s the country’s loss, too. We deserve an election about ideas, not one where the Republican (wrongly) considers his opponent a foreign-born socialist, and the Democrat (probably correctly) considers his an intellectually bereft ideologue.