It sure doesn't look like Richard Lugar is long for the political world.
The news that the major super PAC supporting his candidacy is bailing on him a week before the Republican primary reinforces a growing consensus
that the six-term Indiana senator will likely be defeated next Tuesday
by his conservative challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock.
And there's a good chance Mourdock could win in November. The Democrats would have a better shot against him than against Lugar, to be sure, but, as Kornacki notes, Indiana is "a traditionally Republican state that's expected to land in the Romney column this fall," even though it went for Obama in '08.
The real significance of a Lugar loss, though, would extend far beyond
November. The fact that he's now fighting for his political life in a
GOP primary is a reflection of the endurance of the Tea Party
phenomenon. The term itself may feel tired and even dated, a relic from
2009 or 2010, but it's really just a colorful synonym for "Republican Party base." And as Lugar's perilous standing shows, that base is waging the same kind of purity crusade in 2012 that it did in 2010.
(Read the whole thing. It's a good piece that delves into the dominance of party's right-wing base, "Tea Party" or otherwise.)
It's important not to ignore this, to overlook what's happened to the Republican Party over the past few years. It's easy to dismiss the Tea Party, but the mutual co-optation of the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party has resulted in the latter becoming even more extremist.
Long one of its most sensible members, appealing to the center and even to Democrats, particularly with respect to foreign affairs, Lugar is about to become the latest victim of the Republican Party's ongoing, and deepening, campaign of self-purification.
By Capt. Fogg I suspected there must be something afoot when talk at the Tea table began about killing FEMA. I'm more than suspicious now. It seems our former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who according to The Maritime Executive, is announcing a 'strategic partnership' with O’Brien’s Response Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of SEACOR Holdings Inc. Bush's company, Old Rhodes Holdings now looks forward to
"helping a broader array of organizations and communities become more resilient through preparation, response, communication and recovery”
says Bush, whom Floridians will remember was the governor through the disastrous hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. How they will remember him is hard to tell and probably depends on whose house and car and boat and livelihood was demolished and how long it was before he got any significant help. As I recall, my neighbors and I felt pretty much on our own, despite Bush's alleged leadership, although FEMA certainly was here with food, water and some generators.
I played a small part in delivering food to those who had no means of getting to a FEMA distribution center -- and there are many such people here -- and also used my amateur radio license to good effect, facilitating communications between Red Cross shelters and government agencies until commercial communications and electric power were restored. The interface between need and help was public and public spirited. It was not corporate, it was neighbor to neighbor working through non profit organizations. It was restaurants sending food to police and firefighters, carpenters and roofers and others helping those who needed it.
The only time we heard from Governor Jeb and his brother, the Commander Guy was when they showed up at Red Cross headquarters for a photo op, disrupting operations for half a day, and when they posed for the cameras handing out a bag of ice for a few minutes before escaping into an air conditioned limo and the Presidential helicopter to fly off to a party in Miami Beach while we sweltered in the dark for weeks and weeks.
"Governor Bush has unparalleled experience in crisis management, as he helped guide Florida through some of the most significant natural disasters in its history"
said Charles Fabrikant, executive chairman of SEACOR Holdings. Unparalleled, of course isn't quite the same as unequaled.
Jeb is a Bush, however and the "strategic partnership" may be about a further strategy than to provide "emergency planning, disaster response, preparedness consulting, crisis communications and regulatory compliance services to corporations and governments" which is what O’Brien’s Response Management, the SEACOR subsidiary in question does. O'Brien's has been picking up people like former Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was the Incident Commander during hurricane Katrina and the recent BP oil spill. It's funny how oil and the Bush family float to the top. O'Brien Oil Pollution Service being part of the O'Brien family.
So do we have the same people who were so heavily criticized for mishandling that Gulf oil spill soon to be handling more disasters for profit while FEMA goes the way of Social Security and Medicare and the FAA and all those agencies being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of tea?
I don't mean to say that FEMA has always been what it should be or done as well as it should have done, but FEMA sits at the end of a chain of responsibility that leads to the American public while SEACOR is ultimately responsible to its owners -- and like the former Blackwater owners, they're quite able to ignore questions as to what they did and how much they made by doing it by saying "sorry, we're a private corporation."
I do mean to be suspicious however and I'm aware that evidence of collusion and corruption and various acts of grift, graft and flim-flam are too easily dismissed as "conspiracy theories." Our history is basically a series of conspiracies conveniently mislabeled and when I hear the words, oil, Bush, and disaster used in close conjunction, and when I hear about efforts to privatize yet another not-for-profit health and safety organization, I'm more than suspicious.
People like me, who belong to well organized volunteer groups like ARES, American Red Cross, SATERN and many, many others are used to working with government agencies, not that there isn't some friction on occasion, but the prospect of mercenaries who take orders from corporate CEO's who profit from disaster aid and are motivated to control and monopolize the process, rationing help to maximize private gain, isn't a welcome one. In fact it's infuriating to think about being told what to say and do, where we can go and where we can't go by black uniformed privateers protecting turf and profit and it would tempt me to ignore them and work around them if possible the next time a storm rages ashore and Florida goes dark.
(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)
To an extent, the Republican Party and the Tea Party are the same thing.
The latter isn't politically independent, even if a small minority of its members are, it's solidly Republican. And the Tea Party has become such a major part of the Republican Party that it's hard to tell the two apart.
To be sure, there are a number of Republicans, mostly in what has been the party "establishment," who aren't Teabaggers, but that number, and their power, appears to be in decline.
To put it another way, the Republican Party and the Tea Party (which, again, is mostly Republican anyway) have embraced each other. Now, another word for "embrace," in this context, is "co-opt," as each sees the other as its vehicle for electoral success. The Tea Party needs the Republican Party, and vice versa.
But, hugging notwithstanding, the relationship is not always amicable, not least with the Tea Party trying not just to co-opt the Republican Party but to take it over and control it. The Tea Party doesn't just want to be one of the Republican Party's main components but its dominant force. It doesn't want the Republican Party to be an umbrella party (like the Democratic Party) with multiple perspectives and policy positions within it, but a rigid ideological party of Tea Party dogma.
It wants the Republican Party, that is, to be the party of Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, and the rest of the Teabaggers who ran last year to varying success. And, to that end, and drunk on delusion, it's gearing up for 2012:
Leaders of more than 70 Tea Party
groups in Indiana gathered last weekend to sign a proclamation saying
they would all support one candidate — as yet undetermined — in a
primary challenge to Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Republican who has represented the state since 1977.
They are organizing early, they say, to prevent what happened last year,
when several Tea Party candidates split the vote in Republican Senate
primaries, allowing the most establishment of the candidates to win with
less than 40 percent.
The meeting in Sharpsville was hardly the exception. Just three months
after the midterm elections, Tea Party organizers are preparing to
challenge some of the longest-serving Republican incumbents in 2012.
In Maine, there is already one candidate running on a Tea Party platform against Senator Olympia J. Snowe.
Supporters there are seeking others to run, declaring that they, too,
will back the person they view as the strongest candidate to avoid
splitting their vote. In Utah, the same people who ousted Senator Robert F. Bennett at the state’s Republican convention last spring are now looking at a challenge to Senator Orrin G. Hatch.
The early moves suggest that the pattern of the last elections, in which
primaries were more fiercely contested than the general election in
several states, may be repeated.
They also show how much the Tea Party has changed the definition of who qualifies as a conservative. While Ms. Snowe is widely considered a moderate Republican, Mr. Hatch is
not. Mr. Lugar, similarly, defines himself as a conservative.
Ah, but that's not good enough anymore.
You can't just be a "conservative," you have to be a Tea Party conservative, a right-wing extremist like Rand, Angle, and O'Donnell, predominantly on economic issues (where the insane views of Ayn Rand are standard fare) but also on social ones (the Tea Party may be known best for its views on "limited" government, but it's extremely conservative, if not generally theocratic, on social issues as well, even allowing for hyper-libertarian exceptions like Rand).
And if even an Orrin Hatch isn't good enough, well, you know just how far to the right the Tea Party is -- and would like the Republican Party to be.
So are we headed for an ugly, internally divisive Republican primary season, with Teabaggers challenging any and all Republicans who don't meet their far-right standards, including established conservatives like Hatch?
Hopefully. Let's see what these Teabaggers are made off -- and let's watch the Republican Party reap what it has sown.
(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)
Well, that didn't take long, did it? Reince Priebus has only been RNC chair for a few days and already the Tea Party is trying to knock him down:
While Priebus boasted, during his campaign for RNC chairman, of his good
relations with Wisconsin tea party groups, the leaders of those groups
give his tenure mixed reviews, with some accusing him of giving only lip
service to the movement while stacking the deck against its candidates,
shutting them out of the process or working to absorb them into the
GOP.
"Priebus will do whatever it takes to co-opt the tea party movement,"
said Mike Murphy, chairman of a tea party-allied 527 group called The
Republican Liberty Caucus of Wisconsin, founded in late 2009.
In the midterm elections, Murphy's group supported tea party candidates,
including some who were undercut by the state GOP, which largely
ignored long-shot tea party candidates and endorsed the primary rivals
of others at its May convention — months before the primary election.
"He didn't allow for conservative voices that didn't jibe with the
establishment view and if he charges down that course (at the RNC), the
tea party people will wake up and it may very well split up the
Republican Party" coalition that powered the GOP's 2010 landslide, said
Murphy.
Interviews with eight other Wisconsin tea party leaders since Priebus's election Friday as RNC chairman revealed
similar misgivings about Priebus's handling of the party endorsement
process, which they saw as emblematic of the clubby establishment
politics that the tea party has railed against since the movement burst
onto the scene in April 2009.
Priebus is hardly some wishy-washy moderate. He may be an insider, but his politics are on the far right (and hence well within the mainstream of the GOP).
And yet the Tea Party still doesn't like him? Why?
Well, because he didn't turn the Wisconsin GOP over to the Wisconsin Tea Party, obviously, even if he was more than willing to embrace Tea Party politics.
And that's the key here, you see. The co-opting goes both ways.
The Tea Party accuses the GOP of trying to co-opt it, and, sure, the GOP has very much been trying to do just that, that is to say, to capitalize electorally off Tea Party support, but the Tea Party is also trying to co-opt the GOP, to take control of it and use it to win elected office.
The Tea Party presents itself as against the establishment, but what it really wants is to became establishment itself, specifically within the Republican Party. To put it another way, it wants the counter-establishment to be the establishment. It denies this, of course, but its pursuit of control of the Republican Party, and its pursuit of power generally, would seem to refute its credibility.
Of course, most, if not all, revolutionaries -- and I use the term broadly when referring to Teabaggers, most of whom are either right-wing Republicans or otherwise right-wing anti-government types who are Republican in spirit -- desire power, not merely the overthrow those in power. Simply put, they want what others have, and often want it badly enough to resort to violence. (Read Hannah Arendt.)
I get it.
But let's stop pretending that the Tea Party is really all that distinct at this point from the GOP. They may not be one and the same, but they need each other and feed off each other, and they're moving closer and closer all the time.
In this case, Priebus is surely more than happy to open the doors of the GOP as wide as possible to the Tea Party. But even that won't be enough. The Tea Party won't be happy until it takes over, until Priebus and the "establishment," however right-wing, bow to its every command.
It's an uneasy relationship, but it's the essence of the Republican Party.
With those words, Jon Stewart gave another eloquent speech at the beginning of Monday night's Daily Show, dispensing with humor to address Saturday's horrific events in Tucson.
With each passing hour and day since alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, critically injuring her, killing six and wounding 14 others, it becomes clearer that this 22-year-old man was not a political partisan but someone who was severely mentally ill. With Arizona government offices finally open Monday, The Washington Post finally was able to answer one simple question that's not open to debate: his voter registration. The answer turns out to be that he was a registered independent but was considered inactive because he hadn't bothered to vote in such a long time, including in November. Hardly indicative of a Tea Party participant.
I am guilty of jumping to conclusions. With the precursors without body counts such as smashed windows, threats, cut gas lines, it was an easy assumption to make. However, in my horror of the moment I forgot the old line about what happens when you assume: it makes an ass out of u and me. Subconsciously, there probably was part of me as there consciously was in many others who wanted this tragedy to turn out to be that way for political advantage. I may disagree with the Tea Party, believe them to be terribly misinformed and inflamed by the likes of Glenn Beck, but they aren't all homicidal lunatics.
When so many on the left criticized Jon Stewart's rally, claiming he was trying to make both sides equivalent, in the wake of Saturday's events, now he seems more right than ever. Keith Olbermann's Saturday special comment didn't say so explicitly, but if you read between the lines, it was a bit of a mea culpa for his own role. As Sarah Palin rushed to delete her graphic with the gunsight over Giffords' district, Daily Kos also had to delete a post where one of Giffords' constituents said that Giffords was "dead to me" because she voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader.
Already, both sides are starting to revert to old habits. Because we on the left rushed to link the act of a madman to the politics of those we oppose, now those on the right revert to defensive mode and attack us. Hopefully, someone can stop this quickly. This is an opportunity for everyone to step back, take a breath and restore civility to the political process. I'm not saying compromise your principles, but it's long past time where both sides stop treating political opponents as the enemy. As it's been said many times, you can disagree without being disagreeable. The political climate probably didn't set Loughner off, but both parties need to look at themselves critically and seriously.
I hope that people take Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Gupnik to heart and start rejecting the Becks and Limbaughs, but the only way that happens is when they get hit where it really hurts: the wallet. Beck has shown those signs with the loss of lots of sponsors, being taken off a big New York radio station and even dropping numbers on Fox News. I wish their listeners realized they were in it for the money, but oh well.
What really needs to be addressed seriously is the fact that this country has a gun problem and it's had a gun problem for a long time. A man rejected by the military, kicked out of college and who worried others around him was still allowed to legally purchase his Glock and, more importantly, his high-volume ammunition clips. He had three clips which had 33 rounds each. These sorts of clips were illegal under the assault weapons ban which was allowed to expire during the Bush Administration. If that law were still in place, he could only have purchased clips that held 10 rounds, meaning he would have to reload more frequently and the bloodshed would have been less. I hope the NRA and their friends in Congress are proud. Right now, Arizona is considering allowing faculty and college students to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
We also have to improve our ability to treat the mentally ill. In a rare moment of a television newsperson saying something profound, Lester Holt did the other day when he said that in the end, the motive doesn't matter. Six people are still dead, including a 9-year-old student council president born on 9/11.
In the wake of yesterday's deadly shooting in Arizona, the assassination attempt on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, with fingers being pointed (justifiably, I think) at the likes of Sarah Palin (and the Tea Party, as well as much of the Republican Party), much of the talk today is about political speech:
Do Palin and others deserve any of the blame for what happened yesterday? More broadly, what is appropriate and what isn't?
At Slate, Jack Shafer defends "inflammatory rhetoric and violent imagery," criticizing those, like Keith Olbermann, who are calling for American political rhetoric to change. Shafer writes:
Only the tiniest handful of people -- most of whom are already behind bars,
in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds -- can be driven to kill by
political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues
lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes
politicians no safer.
At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz, another media-focused pundit/apologist, takes a somewhat more balanced approach, noting that such violent rhetoric, while "highly unfortunate," is hardly new. He writes:
Let's be honest: Journalists often use military terminology in
describing campaigns. We talk about the air war, the bombshells,
targeting politicians, knocking them off, candidates returning fire or
being out of ammunition. So we shouldn't act shocked when politicians do
the same thing. Obviously, Palin should have used dots or asterisks on
her map. But does anyone seriously believe she was trying to incite
violence?
To a certain extent, Kurtz is right. And it isn't just in politics. How often do we hear military terminology used in sports? Take the NFL, where winning the war in the trenches is part of every game. But to a certain extent, he is also deeply naive. Palin may not explicitly have been trying to incite violence, but the reality is that words have consequences. This is hardly a new observation, but it bears repeating.
(Update: I realize I'm being way too nice to Kurtz here. His piece, like Shafer's, is appallingly smug. For a sound critique, see Sullivan.)
When you whip up a frenzy and try to mobilize the mobs who follow you unthinkingly, as Palin did during the '08 campaign and again last year, you plant seeds in the minds of those who may not quite get what you're doing, who may not appreciate all the various nuances of political speech. Even if we give Palin and others on the right the benefit of the doubt and allow that all they were doing was trying to rally their "troops" to vote, the possibility, if not the likelihood, remained that one or more of those "troops" would misinterpret the message.
Palin may not have been talking about killing Giffords when she put her in the crosshairs, but it's hardly a stretch to think that others might take her literally. And when you add to that the obsession with guns that animates so much of the right, including both the Tea Party and the Republican Party -- think back to the guns that showed up at health-care town halls a couple of years ago -- what you end up with is a cauldron of potential violence just waiting to explode.
In a perfect world, or at least in a world of universal rationality, Shafer may well be right. We should all be mature enough to understand the context of political speech, including that which is inflammatory and violent. But we don't live in such a world, and the fact remains that all is takes is one person with a gun, or whatever other weapon, to turn whispers or shouts into a bloodbath.
What's more, this isn't just about speech but about ideology as well. It's not just that Palin put Giffords and others in the crosshairs, targeting them, or that military terminology is prevalent specifically on the right, but that conservatism today, as reflected in both the Tea Party and the Republican Party, is exceedingly violent. It isn't just about limited government, it's about conspiracy theories rooted in anti-government, and specifically anti-federal government paranoia. It isn't just about the right to bear arms, it's about owing guns en masse, carrying them in public (whether concealed or right out in the open), and flaunting them (and also using them) as political protest.
All of this, too, is in that cauldron, and it's threatening to bubble over for years. From time to time it has, and what happened yesterday was just the most dramatic incident so far. It could very well get even worse.
As I do not in theory disagree with Shafer and Kurtz, I do not necessarily disagree with Olbermann (see his comment below) and others who are calling for political speech to be more responsible. I certainly do not want this to be yet another Janet Jackson moment, with a single incident (however tragic, in this case, unlike the mere exposure of a nipple) leading to gross over-reaction. Remember when 9/11 was supposed to have been the end of irony? Of course it wasn't. People moved on. And there will continue to be violent political rhetoric even after this.
No, what I worry about is not so much political speech itself but that speech, when violent, combined with a similarly violent political ideology, as we find on the right today. That's when it gets dangerous, and when, as we have seen in the past, long before yesterday, it can get literally violent.
No, let's not over-react, but let's not just dismiss what happened yesterday as merely the violent outburst of an insane individual acting alone, haunted by demons disconnected from political reality. The context and the discussion need to be broader, absorbing not just political speech on its own, which can usually be justified, but the context of that speech, the ideology behind it and the climate in which it is expressed.
It may still be far too early to pin the blame on anyone or anything in particular, but it's pretty clear, I think, if we do consider speech alongside ideology, that our fingers ought to be pointing at Palin and all those like her on the right, which is to say, at much of American conservatism today, including the Tea Party and the GOP.
We must not allow them to get away with what they're doing. And they should not be allowed to get away with claiming that they had nothing to do with it.
Delusions of adequacy. There's no other way to explain it.
With the newly-sworn Congress barely in session, we are well into the horse race leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Chronologically, we're entering the third year or "autumn" of the cycle, and appropriately the nuts are starting to fall from the trees.
Thus far the Obama administration has governed differently than candidate Obama campaigned, frustrating progressives and liberals and compromising away hoped-for policy gains. Given both disappointment among the base and the slow pace of economic recovery, especially unemployment, you'd think the president would be particularly vulnerable to a primary opponent. Certainly, some on the left would welcome the prospect of a Democratic primary, but at this point it doesn't seem likely.
The water is a bit muddied by the successful lame-duck session, which demonstrated that once in a rare while Democrats can accomplish something, yet generated a sense of frustration and wondering where that can-do competence had been the previous two years.
Frustrations notwithstanding, a credible primary challenge on the left seems increasingly unlikely. That leaves the GOP side of the aisle where the excitement is to be found.
Starting with a blast from the insufficiently distant past, CNN reports that former Senator Frothy, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, is making preparations for a 2012 White House run:
A source close to the former senator from Pennsylvania confirms to CNN that later Wednesday Santorum will announced [sic] that he's bringing on board one of the top GOP political strategists in New Hampshire, a state that plays a crucial role in the race for the White House. Santorum will also next week make another visit to the state, which traditionally holds in nation's first primary in the presidential calendar.
Haven't we suffered enough? It's hard to imagine a world in which a Santorum candidacy would be taken seriously, but then I look at the current House of Representatives and wonder if he isn't an ideal stealth candidate. He's got the social conservative bona fides Multiple Choice Mitt lacks. He was a wingnut before teabagging asshattery was cool and the public at large doesn't have the longest of memories.
But things could be even more entertaining. Gazing northward from my comfortable home in Minnesota's Fourth Congressional District, we find the Sixth District, a rather "special" place represented by the always entertaining (usually not deliberately so) Michele Bachmann.
Michele Bachmann is always unpredictable – her logic isn't like other people's logic. There was speculation she would consider taking on Minnesota's senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, who will stands for re-election in 2012. It turns out Bachmann's ambitions may be a bit more grand in scale:
MinnPost has learned that Bachmann loyalists have already begun holding conversations with activists and officials in key early caucus and primary states and will begin travelling to those states in the coming weeks and months. Internal conversations have already begun about who might leave her Washington and district offices to staff a potential bid. And Bachmann told reporters she will likely visit additional early voting states in the upcoming months.
I have to admit this is a bit mind-numbing. Bachmann's ability to raise vast sums of money, mostly from out-of-state, was demonstrated in the 2010 election, but that's not the same thing as a national draw for votes. Bachmann's idiocy is a known quantity in the Sixth and they vote for her anyway. It's probably a mistake to think Americans nationwide, even a majority of GOP voters, are equally forgiving.
There is yet some amusement value to be had here. The GOP leadership created the monster. As Hot Air observes, "[a] 'Palin vs. Bachmann' storyline in the primaries would be the political event of a lifetime." Yeah, it would. The GOP leadership has fed the teabagging beast for electoral advantage, praying all the while they could keep it under control. But the beast doesn't want to be controlled.
When Bachmann stopped having her way with the GOP leadership in the Minnesota Senate, she launched her quixotic bid for Congress in the Sixth. Bachmann aspires to leadership, having recently formed the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives and campaigned actively for far-right candidates in the 2010 season. Not only were her attempts to secure a leadership position within the House GOP solidly rebuffed, she was denied a desired seat on the Ways and Means Committee, to be placed on the Intelligence Committee. Now in principle the Intelligence Committee is prestigious, but it's also a committee that by nature of its work is often out of the limelight – something troublesome for Bachmann, who follows TV cameras like a moth to flame.
Rep. Keith Ellison had this to say about Michele Bachmann's possible candidacy:
I think it would be great for her to run for president. I think she has strongly-held views which she should test on the whole of the United States – see how her views are received across the country, not just in the comfort of the 6th District.
It certainly could be educational:
I think her views would not match up with the mainstream of American society, but I do encourage her to try it, I think it would be a very good thing for her to get out there – and maybe she should resign from office now so she can devote all her time to her presidential run.
Educational indeed. This has potential for some great political theater. Please Michele... please GOP.
Publius has lived in and spent most of his life thinking about
Washington, D.C. He is an attorney, an avid sports fan, and the editor
of The Fourth Branch.
(Ed. note: This is Publius's second guest post for us. You can find his first, on George Will and "engaged justices," here.
-- MJWS)
**********
Many
have noted the irony of conservative politicians running on a platform
of undying love for and understanding of the Constitution while
simultaneously advocating the repeal of many of its significant
provisions. Vocal elements of the conservative base, primarily centered
on the Tea Party and pundits on Fox News, have advocated for repealing
part of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (citizenship) and all of the
16th Amendment (income tax) and 17th Amendment (direct election of
Senators). Those would be significant changes to the nation's governing
text, but they pale in comparison to the most recent calls for change
involving nullification.
The so-called "Tenther" movement holds that the Congress continues to
pass "unconstitutional" laws that are beyond Congress' power to enact,
and that the states have the right, under the Tenth Amendment, to
reject all such laws. The legal theory behind the Tenther movement
isn't novel, but it is one that has been soundly rejected -- politically,
legally, and militarily. The doctrine was used by the South to justify
its continued use of slavery prior to the Civil War. It led to the
South invoking nullification's close relative, secession, as the
ultimate exercise of state sovereignty. Military elimination of the
doctrine and the racist policies supported by the doctrine cost the
lives of over 600,000 Americans. The Constitution itself was born
following a failed history with a legal document codifying the concept
of nullification -- the Articles of Confederation.
Given the racist past of nullification and secession, and the severe
strain both policies placed on the nation and the Constitution as a
whole, one would think the conservative movement would stray far from
such policies. Instead, nullification has found new life and even a place on the ballot in many states.
In Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, and Colorado, voters have been asked to "nullify" the recent health-care law, and nullification passed in each
of those states but Colorado. Virginia recently passed a law through
the legislature "repealing" health care with respect to that state. None
of these efforts have any legal significance (which ought to be a sign
that they aren't constitutional, but I digress).
Of course, health-care reform isn't the only law targeted by Tenthers for nullification. According to the Tenth Amendment Center
(which is pushing many of the nullification efforts), other laws
targeted for nullification include medical marijuana laws, firearm
control laws, cap and trade (which hasn't even been enacted yet), EPA
regulations, and more. In addition to repealing laws, the Tenthers
advocate passing laws or constitutional amendments which restrict the
definition of "interstate commerce" (which would restrict Congress'
ability to pass laws, because many laws are passed under the Commerce
Clause), require state approval of federal tax laws, and require a
return to the gold/silver standard.
It ought to be obvious that such efforts, if enacted, would
effectively eliminate the federal government. If the federal
government, for example, could not pass a budget without state approval,
or could not raise taxes from residents of a state until that state
consented, the federal government would be crippled. How do we know
this? Because it was already tried once before and it failed miserably
with the Articles of Confederation.
Under the Articles of
Confederation, the Confederation Congress could pass laws, but the power
of enforcement lay with the states. Furthermore, Congress itself had
no power of taxation -- all revenue had to be requested by the states.
Substantively, such provisions in the Articles of Confederation are
identical to granting states under the Constitution the power of
nullification. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal
government neared insolvency, inflation of the "continental dollar"
skyrocketed so much that the saying "not worth a continental" was born,
and the military, desperate for funding which rarely came from Congress,
was authorized to confiscate whatever property it needed to carry on
the Revolutionary War.
Notwithstanding these clear lessons from our past and the bloodiest
war fought in U.S. history, many in the conservative base continue arguing
that embedded in the Tenth Amendment is the state right to nullify
unconstitutional laws. Taking the next step in the logical
nullification process, even conservative elected officials have articulated a state right to secession, including Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC, arguably the head of the Tea Party), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), and more.
Arguments for nullification and even secession are, more subtly, a
rejection of Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the
judiciary and gives it the sole right to interpret the Constitution, and
Article VI of the Constitution, which establishes constitutional and
federal supremacy. Any state that considers a law to be beyond the
powers of Congress can challenge that law in the courts (as many have
done with the health-care law, for example). The courts then make a
determination as to the constitutionality of that law and, provided it
is constitutional, the law is then binding upon all states pursuant to
Article VI of the Constitution. Nullification shifts that
decision-making process away from the judiciary and into the hands of
the state political classes. In effect, the role of the judiciary as a
constitutional arbiter is eliminated.
Nullification proponents are quite familiar with the role of the
judiciary and its ability to nullify unconstitutional laws. Simply put,
such proponents have zero confidence in the judiciary and seek to
re-write Article III.
The Tea Party's admiration for the Constitution appears to end where
Article III, Article VI, and Amendments 14, 16, and 17 begin. It is an
admiration that ignores the historical fact that the Constitution was
enacted to establish a stronger central government as a replacement for
the weaker state-centered government that was failing miserably. It is
a devotion that calls for violent "second amendment remedies" when Congress and/or the courts take an action with which one may
disagree. It is a love that calls for a return to policies that
supported the racial oppression of millions to the shame of a nation.
It is a love of the Constitution that would cause its demise.
The new Congress hasn't been seated yet but signs of a rift are already beginning to emerge between Republican leaders and Tea Party groups who were a driving force propelling many unknown candidates to victory last month.
There are many ways to characterize this. I prefer to think of it as the chickens come home to roost.
The Republicans have had a forty year "Southern Strategy" which has yielded some pretty impressive political victories and some pretty shameful defeats. On the one hand, this strategy was most directly responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, as well as the takeover of Congress in 1994, and the House in 2010.
On the other hand, it was directly responsible for the corrupt Congresses that ensued, the rape of the American budget, the tax hikes needed to compensate for the spending by Republicans on credit, as well as war without end and a terror attack that will go down in history as one of America's weakest moments, bought and paid for by the GOP.
This strategy divided the nation into three groups: economic royalists, socially conservative Christians, and the rest of us. Power within the GOP rested firmly in the economic royalty camp, with the occasional intruder like Pat Robertson allowed a seat at the table primarily because he could speak both lingoes fluently. The Christian Coalition was allowed to rant and rave and was allowed loose in the neighborhood every two years (especially during presidential elections) to foam at the mouth about "teh gehys" or dead pre-babies or "war on Christmas" or what have you.
The Tea Party is a curious admixture of both camps. There's a strain of "I got mine Jack, now you get yours" that economic royalists have attuned to like a 50,000 watt radio station next door, but there's also a deep strain of social conservatism that infests the movement, too.
It's basically the rank-and-file saying "Help us, finally, dammit!" to the powers that be that dictate policy that helps the wealthy without assisting the middle class and poor from losing ground.
Sadly, they still see the "free" market as the solution to the problem, when as I've pointed out consistently, the government is better poised to help them.
Worse for the GOP, there's really no way to placate all forms of the movement:
In a sense, identifying with the Tea Party movement was like catching Beatlemania in the 1960s. People were drawn in for different reasons — the beat, the haircuts, the lyrics — and great gulfs of taste divided the John fans from the Paul fans, the George fans from the Ringo fans.
Smashing success broke the Beatles apart. As 2010 closes, there is no bigger question in U.S. politics than whether the Tea Party will go the same way. The pressures on this already divided movement will be enormous. As long as the far-flung elements of the Tea Party were shoulder to shoulder against Obama, it was easy to keep them together. But now, the party that argued so effectively for smaller government is headed to Washington, where so many other waves have broken and receded. Having remade Congress and with a GOP presidential nomination up for grabs, the Tea Party is about to learn that rallying against its enemies is easier than choosing among its allies.
Effectively, the Tea Party is a movement without a leader and many people vying for that leadership. But it may be too late: success happened so quickly for the chaotic movement that even early adopters like Dick Armey have had trouble herding the kittens.
"The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."
-US Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas-
Anyone in the US with more political awareness than a telephone pole knows that there's a whole lot of loosely related and sometimes contradictory stuff hidden under the camouflage blanket of "we're for smaller, less intrusive government," including the somewhat contrary and certainly not Libertarian opinion that that government may, at its own discretion, hide its actions, its statements and defend its deceptions and coverups, making the exercise of protected rights a crime. That so many who feel concern about paternalistic government can none the less defend it passionately and thus sanctify subterfuge is puzzling. That members of that government can ask that we treat the media and its sources as traitors and terrorists with all the extra-legal powers it possesses, is hardly puzzling at all. That the need to cover its ass supersedes any respect for the Constitution it pretends to worship: that government can be in terror of being exposed, hardly makes the case, in my opinion, for Terrorism. Perhaps the test of being a true and loyal Republican is not to think of Richard Nixon at this point.
So how do we feel about Wikileaks release of leaked State Department documents yesterday? Well at least one Republican congressman recommends that we move that organization under another one of those capacious and convenient camo blankets: the one we call terrorism, or 'terrism' in the dialect spoken by a great number of self-styled conservatives. So, by the gerrymandering of ill-defined symbols, we manage to expose -- or at least the horrifically hyperbolic Rep. Peter King (R-NY) hopes to expose Wikileaks and perhaps anyone revealing that which slithers through the wires to and from Washington, to the dire and drastic treatment we afford "foreign terrorist organizations." To expose embarrassing diplomatic cables showing many world leaders at their scurrilous antics, is "worse than a military attack" he said last night.
King, saysCBS News, New York, has written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder asking that Julian Assange of Wikileaks be prosecuted as a spy for publishing 'sensitive' information given him by a whistleblowing soldier, even though that's what the mainstream media does, is supposed to do and the Court has affirmed their constitutional right to do.
It will be interesting to see the Tea Party reaction to this -- if there is one. They'll be torn between maintaining support for the First Amendment and the role of a free press and the treasured myth of its untrustworthy liberal bias. I'd like to think that it might increase pressure to actually define what they mean by a smaller, less intrusive and more limited government, but as they say - a watched teapot never boils.
(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)
It's just the second day of this series and we're already on to #4. And even then I'm having to be selective. It hasn't taken long for the post-election smugness to disintegrate.
Lisa Murkowski is already on the fringe of the GOP, having lost the Alaska Senate primary to Teabagger Joe Miller and then (it would appear) winning as a write-in candidate and triumphing over Sarah Palin's Tea Party GOP.
After
ripping Sarah Palin, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski isn't mincing words
about another one of her high-profile GOP critics: South Carolina Sen.
Jim DeMint.
"I think some of the Republicans in the Congress feel pretty strongly
that he and his actions potentially cost us the majority by encouraging
candidates that ended up not being electable," Murkowski told POLITICO
outside her Senate office. "And I think Delaware is a pretty good
example of that, and I think there're some folks that feel that DeMint's
actions didn't necessarily help the Republican majority."
Murkowski
suggested the South Carolina conservative and favorite of the tea party
seemed more interested in bolstering his own political standing rather
than that of the Republican Party.
"So the real question is, what's his desire?" she said. "Does he want to
help the Republican majority, or is he on his own agenda, his own
initiative?"
Asked what she believed the answer was, Murkowksi said: "I think he's out for his own initiative."
Well, yes, probably so. DeMint has already scored a significant win over Mitch McConnell's establishment on earmarks, securing a two-year ban that McConnell initially opposed, and he's emerged as an influential leader on the right of the party. Can there be any doubt that he wants to take over?
And Murkowski is right that DeMint and Palin and the other Tea Party Republicans, going way back to the primaries, backed candidates that were either completely unelectable (Christine O'Donnell in Delaware) or that otherwise seriously weakened Republican prospects for victory (Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, John Raese in West Virginia). There's no reason Republicans couldn't have won in Nevada, Colorado, and West Virginia with less extreme and generally more appealing nominees, and even Delaware was winnable.
The thing is, it's not as simple as that. Republicans did well this year in part because of the "enthusiasm gap," that is, because their base was engaged and committed. And the base this year included the Tea Party, which injected a great deal of vigour into the Republican Party at a time, not long after Obama took office, when its prospects looked bleak. So, sure, maybe Republicans could have won in those states, but without Palin and DeMint and the Tea Party revving up the enthusiasm across the country would they have won, say, in Illinois or Pennsylvania? Perhaps not.
So while Murkowski may be right about DeMint's failures, she does not seem to take into account the fact that the Republican Party did so well this year to a great extent because it had embraced the Tea Party and linked itself to just the sort of extremism DeMint and Palin represent.
Anyway, far be it from me to want to put a stop to this. Let the blame game continue!
The CSM reports on a significant divide opening up in the Republican Party:
Representatives of the loosely organized tea party movement urged GOP
leaders in a letter released Monday to abandon their fronts in the
culture wars – issues such as gay marriage, school prayer, and abortion –
and instead focus their new electoral power on individual liberties and
"economic freedoms."
The letter,
signed by 16 tea party groups and a conservative gay organization,
points to an emerging rift between the tea party movement and the GOP,
which still counts social conservatives seeking "moral government" as a
key constituency.
The signatories, ranging from conservative commentator Tammy Bruce to
local tea party group leaders, say the key lesson the GOP should draw
from the election is that Americans are concerned chiefly about taxes
and the size of government, not their neighbors' lifestyle choices or
personal decisions.
Actually, I think that's largely right. The midterms were mostly about the economy (that is, about the lousy state of the economy and about widespread anti-incumbent sentiment resulting from the lousy economy, boletered by effective Republican propaganda and the lack of a defining narrative from Democrats) and not at all about "culture war" issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. And I applaud these Teabaggers for trying to move the Republican Party beyond the divisive wedge issues that it has long exploited for electoral gain.
But that's the thing. Republicans have relied on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, flag burning, and the pledge of allegiance to arouse and incite their base -- and to get these manipulated voters to the polls to vote out of fear and anger. Over the past several decades, Republicans have succeeded largely because they've been able to manufacture this fear and anger, to convince enough voters that "liberals" and "progressives" are destroying America with their newfangled ideas about things like civil rights.
Sure, Republicans have focused consistently on tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, and some have been, or at least claimed to be, "fiscally responsible," but economic issues alone don't win elections. Think back to '88. Bush famously said "read my lip, no new taxes," but his campaign relied on race-based fearmongering, as in the notorious Willie Horton ad, to beat Dukakis. Lee Atwater knew then what was needed and knew how to win. So does Karl Rove today, and anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric is only part of the equation.
In other words, whatever the protestations of Teabaggers, or of extremist libertarians in Congress like Rand Paul, Republicans are not about to abandon social/cultural issues, to cede that ground to Democrats, to give Democrats high-profile victories. And why? Because Republicans -- or at least those few like Rove who are realistic about the party's electoral prospects -- know what's good for them, what works for them, and what scares their base into outraged submission. (It's not about giving the social conservatives and theocrats what they want, it's about duping them into voting Republican by continuing to promise change that likely won't be implemented.)
And while the Teabaggers may think they have the country behind them on economic issues, they don't. Just try making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Social Security, slashing entitlement programs, and cutting police and other essential local services -- all in the name of "economic freedom."
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I've had so many things on my mind relating to cluster known as the 2010 midterms, but today two independent things, small and insignificant, really brought home to me what happened to the Democrats this year.
First off, coming home from work I had an envelope in the mail addressed to me. It lists "President Barack Obama" and "Democratic Headquarters" as the sender and has in big letters, "Deadline: October 29." Note, today is November 4, two days after the election.
Naturally it's asking me for money to help with the final days of the election.
"A day late and a dollar short" goes a long way toward how the Obama administration has governed, and particularly in how it is managing its relations with the base.
Next anecdote: I was sitting in the jacuzzi at the gym after working out the other evening and there were several elderly gentlemen speaking about the election and a couple of them were just droolingly upset about Obamacare, knowing their pensions and health care are being taken away from them, etc. I tried to engage them for a few minutes, but it really was futile. They have been fed a lot of nonsense by opportunists trying to scare them and sell them stuff. It didn't matter what the facts were, they were scared and livid and, by damn, they voted.
It's easy to talk about how the Democrats have squandered Howard Dean's work with the Fifty State Strategy. It's easy to talk about how independent thinkers and donors and doers have been discouraged in an attempt to centralize and micromanage. It's easy to talk about how the White House strategy is too timid, too aloof, and too willing to compromise. It's been done before, and how it's not speculation, we know the result.
A day late, a millions of dollars short, and the agenda up for grabs for the next two years. Why were the Republicans allowed to control terms of debate? A dispirited base has consequences. Letting the teabaggers lie through their teeth and outright make things up without challenge has consequences.
The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.
In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That’s a 24-point flip.
The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44%, and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39%, and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.
The fall-off in young and minority voters can't be understated. Yes, Sharon Angle is a moron, but Harry Reid will remain a U.S. senator because he got 90% of the Latino vote. Nearly comparable numbers have been reported in California and Colorado which were also relative bright spots for Democrats.
Polls showed before and after the vote that people like Republicans less than Democrats. They voted for them anyway. The election was the Democrats' to lose, and lose they did.
But there are some bright spots. Yes, we had help from the Tea Party, but the Senate held. Many of the worst of the worst Tea Party candidates lost. Sarah Palin's endorsements turned out to be less than golden.
Better still, the remaining House Democrats are, in fact, better Democrats overall. And Senate Democrats, being further from the "magical" sixty, are less dependent on individual senators to allow things to get done, perhaps making it more difficult for individual troublemakers to hold legislation hostage. Time will tell, but there is cause to be cautiously optimistic for the next couple years.
Of course, there's the down side... Election 2012 is now underway.
I thought it might be fun to watch a bit of Glenn Beck's program last night as we headed into Election Day. I clearly have an odd sense of humour, but I did think it could be of interest to watch the crazy little man ping off the walls as he anticipated Republican gains in the House and Senate.
But what I also saw was Beck focusing his anger on certain parts of the GOP leadership for not being sufficiently on side with the Tea Party tide, which Beck believes to be the voice incarnate of the American people.
Whatever may be true of Beck, we know that this election is not so much about the popularity of the Republican Party but about anti-incumbency sentiment in hard economic times. This sentiment has obviously manifested itself in great measure as the Tea Party movement. We can likely count on these folks feeling pretty empowered in their relationship with what they will consider the "inside Washington" Republican establishment should their anticipated electoral successes materialize.
In this context, Beck also took aim at those unnamed sources cited in the Politico story about certain individuals in the Republican leadership who are fearful of a Sarah Palin run for the presidency as they begin to strategize about how to oppose it. As the story goes, these Republicans know as well as anyone that a nomination for Palin, with her Tea Party affiliation, would almost certainly guarantee an Obama re-election.
Nothing new in any of this, but it does speak to the tensions that we will continue to see between the insurgents and the establishment within the GOP.
We saw it in the nominations of candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, and Marco Rubio. Some of these people are undoubtedly going to Washington. We will see how beholden they feel to the people who got them elected and, perhaps, how crazy they really are.
On the other hand, those old enough to remember will speak of the divisive 1964 elections resulting in Barry Goldwater's nomination and the ability of the Republican Party to pull things together enough to elect Richard Nixon in 1968.
This will be one of the most important political questions over the next two years. We can speculate as to how well the Republican Party will be able to assimilate its rebels. The answer will tell us a lot about Obama's chances in 2012, especially if it all leads to a Palin candidacy or to another nominee feeling the need to move that much further to the right.
But it will also be interesting to see how much public sniping there is within the Republican Party over the next two years and how many outlandish tactics Tea Party affiliated members of the House and Senate pursue. Are we going to see attempts to impeach the president or to revisit the Birther nonsense, the kinds of things that would not only damage the credibility of the Republican Party but could also expose strains within the party itself?
Anyway, it will be fun to watch. My commitment is to wake up Wednesday morning and begin the process of keeping close track of every internal battle within the GOP and amongst conservative pundits so that, by the time the next election rolls around, I will have a pretty good database of every nasty thing they have said about each other and every silly thing they have done to wreck their credibility.
I think it's quite hilarious that Republicans are now trying to distance themselves from Joe Miller, and, as ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports, "banking on a victory by write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski as the best bet for Republicans to keep the Alaska Senate seat.
What's so hilarious? Miller is the Republican candidate, having defeated the incumbent Murkowski earlier this year to much fanfare on the right. And now Republicans are bailing?
Sure, Miller, running a brutal campaign (and being, from what I can tell, a brutal thug), may very well be a lost cause, as even Sarah Palin has suggested, but, if anything, Republicans are just reaping what they have sown. Karl:
Murkowski defied party leaders by running a write-in campaign after
she lost the Republican primary last month. But with Miller's campaign
faltering, the source tells me that Republican leaders are now worried
that Democrat Scott McAdams has a shot of winning and that Murkowski may
be the only way to stop him.
It's a remarkable turnaround for Murkowski. She was punished by
party leaders last month -- unceremoniously stripped of her post in
the Senate leadership -- when she refused to bow out of the Senate race
and endorse Miller. But she has consistently said she is still a
Republican and will caucus with the Republican party if she wins.
The nightmare scenario for Republicans is that McAdams comes in
second on Election Day, trailing "write-in candidate." Those write-in
votes won't be counted unless there are more write-in votes than there
are votes for any candidate on the ballot. Once the write-in votes are
counted, however, some of them will inevitably be disqualified
(illegible writing, wrong name, etc.). And a small number will be for
candidates other than Murkowski. If enough are tossed out, second place
McAdams would be the winner.
Murkowski lost the primary largely because the Tea Party, with Palin perhaps its #1 cheerleader, took over the GOP (or vice versa -- they're now pretty much the same, particularly at the "base" level). And now the Democrats do see an opportunity to pull out a surprise victory in a race that, had Murkowski been the GOP nominee, the Republicans surely would have won. (No wonder the Breitbart Right is resorting to lies and smears in the last few days of the campaign.)
If I were Lisa Murkowski, I'd tell the Republican Party to fuck off. But, of course, I'm not Lisa Murkowski.
A blog on politics, philosophy, science, sports, and the arts -- featuring news, commentary, and analysis by Michael J.W. Stickings and the Reaction team.
