The Progressive Mind

Dark Money Makes Our Politics Nastier

LIBertea — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 15:06:51 GMT

We’re less than two weeks away from a midterm election that could decide which party controls the Senate, and ultimately shape the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

It’s the first complete midterm cycle since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United — it came down just nine months before the 2010 election — and the first since another key campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC. Mountains of money are flooding key races in the most expensive non-presidential campaign in history.

To keep you up to date with the latest, we’ve rounded up some key campaign finance stories from the past week.

$4 Billion

According to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets blog, “almost $4 billion will be spent for this year’s midterm election,” making it “by far the most expensive midterm ever.”

(Credit: OpenSecrets.org)

When all the dollars are tallied, The Center for Responsive Politics expects Republicans and conservative-leaning outside groups to outspend Democrats and their “independent” backers by $160 million. Here’s the breakdown of how much will be spent by parties versus super PACs and other outside groups:

The candidates and parties alone will combine to spend about $2.7 billion, while outside groups will likely spend close to $900 million on their own — a figure that veers close to the $1.3 billion spent by outside groups in 2012, when the hyper-expensive presidential race was fueling the fire.

Outside Spending Makes Politics Meaner

Jessica Meyers reports for The Boston Globe that “in one of the most negative midterm elections, an unprecedented amount of funding comes from secret donors.”

While vitriolic ads are hardly new, voters this year have witnessed an inundation. Nearly three quarters of Senate ads in a two-week period between August and September showed a candidate in a negative light. This outpaced the last two cycles at that time, according to Wesleyan Media Project, a nonpartisan group that researches advertising in elections…
“The increased presence of outside spending is one of the reasons why the elections in the last two cycles have been so negative,” said Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan project. “Outside groups don’t do positive advertising.”

This chart shows an increasing share of negative advertising over the past few cycles:

Donors’ Interests Can Trump Parties’ Priorities

National Journal correspondent Scott Bland reports that a major Democratic super PAC, the House Majority PAC, mystified observers this week by pulling nearly a quarter-million dollars of ad spending out of a close race in New Jersey’s 3rd District and moving it into the 1st District, which is a very safe, deep-blue seat. Bland writes:

Why move the money? A look at House Majority PAC’s fundraising from last month appears to hold the answer. The numbers suggest the group is now running ads in the 1st District because allies of well-connected Democratic candidate Donald Norcross gave them money specifically to do that.
House Majority PAC operates as the unofficial super PAC version of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, looking after Democratic candidates in tough races. This move doesn’t fit into their typical strategy, but it does match up with some of their newest donors’ local aims.
In September, House Majority PAC took in six donations, totaling $270,000, from labor unions and businesses tied in various ways to Donald Norcross, a New Jersey state senator.

State Senator Donald Norcross’s 5th State Senate District overlaps with the 1st Congressional District; the money appears to be for promoting Norcross rather than fighting for a competitive seat in the US House of Representatives.

A Novel Argument Against Our Wild West Campaign Finance System

The Supreme Court has based a long series of decisions undermining campaign finance limits on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. In a landmark 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the court established that giving money to candidates was a form of political speech, but allowed it to be limited. More recently, the court has struck down most of those limits.

But at The Brennan Center for Justice’s blog, constitutional attorney John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, argues that “there is another part of the US Constitution which ought to be applied in any scrutiny of the campaign finance question: the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Through that lens, we can see that an exclusionary system which is open only to the wealthy few and which plays an integral role in our elections violates the equal protection rights of those locked of the process. Two lines of Supreme Court rulings, taken together, make this case.
First, the Supreme Court has made clear that wealth discrimination in the political process is prohibited under the Equal Protection Clause…

The second line of rulings held that parties’ exclusionary, whites-only primary processes violated the Equal Protection Clause even though they were conducted by private organizations rather than the government. Bonifaz offers much more detail in his essay.

Judicial Races Raise Conflict-of-Interest Questions

James Oliphant writes in National Journal that “39 states elect some portion of their Appellate Court or high-level trial judges,” and warns: “as judicial candidates increasingly resemble their office-seeking cousins, critics are gravely concerned that the judiciary is being cheapened, that public trust is eroding the same way it has with other branches of government.”

The FEC Is Overwhelmed With Disclosure Reports

The Federal Election Commission compiles candidates’ disclosure data and makes it available to the public on its website, FEC.gov. But this year’s battle for the Senate has generated so many reports that the system has been overwhelmed. Here’s the message posted on the site’s “Candidate and Committee Viewer” Friday afternoon:

Bipartisan Opposition to Dark Money in Arizona

Anastasia Reynolds reports for the Tucson Sun-Sentinel that both candidates for secretary of state in Arizona want to crack down on dark money.

With shadowy nonprofit groups expected to spend millions this year to influence Arizona voters without disclosing the sources of their money, both candidates for the state office overseeing elections are offering plans to address the practice.
Democrat Terry Goddard and Republican Michele Reagan say they want laws taking a harder line with so-called dark money groups and requiring them to register with the Secretary of State’s Office.

Dark Money Floods Colorado Senate Race

Michael de Yoanna reports for Colorado Public Radio that “tens of millions of dollars” are flowing into the state’s hotly contested race between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Corey Gardner. De Yoanna also looks at Colorado’s complex campaign finance disclosure laws, and speaks to incoming FEC Chair Ann Ravel about how partisan gridlock is preventing the agency from enacting much-needed new disclosure rules.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at]moyersmedia [dot]com.

Going Easy on Eric Holder’s Wall Street Inaction

LIBertea — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 16:06:03 GMT

This post first appeared at Columbia Journalism Review.

There’s one word missing in too many major press accounts of Eric Holder’s tenure as Obama’s only attorney general: bankers.

It’s a baffling lapse for outlets like the Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and ABC News, none of which, in their main stories on the resignation, mentions Holder’s dismal record prosecuting Wall Street fraud in the wake of the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. The New York Times drops one line toward the bottom of its front-page story on the news, inaccurately calling it a “liberal” notion that the AG “should have used his power to prosecute those responsible for the financial crisis in 2008.”

Holder leaves office having been far outclassed by the Bush administration even in prosecuting corporate criminals, despite overseeing the aftermath of one of the biggest orgies of financial corruption in history.

In March 2009, a month after Holder was sworn in as attorney general, The New York Times reported that “federal and state investigators are preparing for a surge of prosecutions of financial fraud” and that the DOJ considered it a “a top priority.”

Holder came from the white-shoe DC law firm Covington & Burling, which represented half of the top 10 mortgage servicers, along with MERS, the mortgage records system that played a big role in the foreclosure fraud scandal (the firm and the Justice Department declined to tell Reuters in 2012 whether Holder worked on any of those cases). He brought along his Covington colleague Lanny Breuer as enforcement chief, and Breuer would play a key role in the lack of indictments of major executives.

By the end of 2010, it was clear the financial prosecution surge hadn’t happened, and the media began making noise about it. Holder announced the results of a financial fraud task force, claiming more than 300 scalps.

The press quickly exposed Holder’s campaign as a public relations stunt, reporting that many cases were started years earlier by the Bush administration, other were double-counted, and that almost all of the rest were small fry. Even The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who’s no anti-bank populist, mocked Holder’s financial fraud task force as an exercise in missing the point.

Two years later, Holder did it again, announcing a mortgage fraud sweep had resulted in 530 prosecutions and a billion dollars in fines. Bloomberg immediately noticed that the DOJ had again included Bush-era cases in its tally. Several months later, the administration quietly admitted it had inflated the real numbers, which were 107 prosecutions and $95 million in fines — almost all from small-time criminals.

Then there’s the Holder Doctrine, set forth in a 1999 memo when he was Clinton’s deputy attorney general. It says that prosecutors should take “collateral consequences” into account when “conducting an investigation, determining whether to bring charges and negotiating plea agreements.”

By 2012, Breuer all but admitted that the administration didn’t criminally charge banks because it worried about the collateral consequences. “In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected and even that global markets will feel the effects,” he said.

“Those are the kinds of considerations in white-collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement.”

We know now — too late to do anything about it — that Holder never even really tried to investigate the banks. By early last year, 60 Minutes was confronting Breuer with reporting that sources inside the DOJ’s criminal division who said, “There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps” of Wall Street for the financial crisis. Eventually, after the political pressure grew intolerable, Holder squeezed billions of dollars in civil penalties from Wall Street without forcing a single individual to face trial. Contrast that with the Holder DOJ’s aggressive criminal prosecution of insider trading, which is basically a Wall Street-on-Wall Street crime.

Holder and Breuer were part of a pattern within the Obama administration of weak Wall Street enforcement — one that leads right back to the president himself. The tally of top officials who were close to Wall Street and have since left for finance or finance-related jobs includes former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former SEC chairwoman Mary Schapiro, Breuer, former SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, and, soon, you can bet, Eric Holder.

Here’s Holder’s legacy on the financial fraud front, which was one of the biggest issues he faced when taking office:

Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum

Pressure mounts on Senate to overhaul the National Security Agency

LIBertea — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 13:54:18 GMT

Outside voices are increasing their calls for the Senate to overhaul the National Security Agency, putting pressure on leaders of the upper chamber to bring legislation to a vote.

On Monday, a coalition of technology industry groups wrote a letter to Senate leaders in favor of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) USA Freedom Act, which would effectively end the NSA program that collects Americans’ phone records in bulk while adding new ways for companies to disclose what information the government requests about their users.

The industry letter comes on the heels of a similar call from dozens of civil liberties organizations and the endorsement of the bill by Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“The surveillance reforms embodied in the USA Freedom Act are necessary to help restore public trust in both the U.S. government and the U.S. technology sector, as well as to continue the innovative and competitive success of the American tech sector in global markets,” wrote the five technology trade groups, which represent most of the industry’s biggest names, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Last year’s disclosures from Edward Snowden had a disastrous effect on global public trust in tech companies and has been estimated to cost them tens of billions of dollars in lost profits.

The bill Leahy unveiled earlier this summer, industry groups said, “will send a clear signal to the international community and to the American people that government surveillance programs are narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight.”

The five groups signing Monday’s letter were BSA | The Software Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Software and Information Industry Association and the Reform Government Surveillance coalition.

The pressure could add new fire to Leahy’s push to get the bill considered this year, though the short Senate calendar and midterm elections could make action in September difficult.

Leahy unveiled his new version of the bill in July, before the upper chamber left Washington for a five-week recess.

A wide swath of senators have signed on in support of the bill — including lawmakers rarely seen on the same side of an issue, such as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) — but Leahy will need the support of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to get the bill to the floor this year.

Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee have voiced the loudest skepticism, and it remains to be seem whether they will mount an effort to prevent it from reaching the floor.

Dark Money Hits $50 Million, Most Still to Come

LIBertea — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:54:41 GMT

Congressman Tom Cotton (R-AR) is a dangerous man and a hypocrite. Cotton — who is running to unseat Senator Mark Pryor – wants to “end Medicare as we know it” while also treating himself and his friends in Congress to “taxpayer-funded health care for life.” At least, that’s what a liberal group called Patriot Majority USA wants you to believe, especially if you plan on voting in the Arkansas Senate race in November.

Neither of the claims is true, and weren’t in 2012 when Patriot Majority first trotted them out. Yet, while the group is generous with questionable facts, mum’s the word when it comes to who, or what, is the source of the $7 million it has spent on political ads so far this cycle. As a 501©(4) social welfare organization that isn’t supposed to have politics as its primary purpose, it isn’t required to disclose its donors.

Political spending by these groups is reaching new heights: This week, it crested $50 million, a record for this point in an election cycle, and more than seven times beyond the outlays by such groups at this time in the last midterms. And that’s just the amount that has been reported to the Federal Election Commission, which doesn’t include tens of millions more spent on “issue ads” that aired earlier in the cycle and didn’t have to be reported to the agency. It’s another reminder that the current cycle is shaping up to be the darkest election in a long time.

Spending by organizations that don’t disclose their donors is ahead of all other cycles, even the last presidential cycle.

Lying in the name of “educating voters” isn’t new, and Patriot Majority isn’t the only dark money group doing it, not even in Arkansas. Another 501©(4), Americans for Prosperity — which is backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch’s conservative donor network — also seeks to “educate US citizens.” Ads by the group, which had raised more than $115 million at the time of its last report, contain glaring mistakes, according to independent fact checkers.

Unlike Patriot Majority, though, Americans for Prosperity has reported almost none of its spending on ads in Senate races around the country to the FEC. That’s because they highlighted issues like health care and the economy — albeit in connection with embattled Senate Democrats — rather than calling directly for the election or defeat of a candidate, and they didn’t air within specific pre-primary and pre-general election time periods.

The rules that allow 501© organizations to make ads like this are meant to allow issue-oriented nonprofits to put pressure on elected officials to adopt a certain policy position or to educate the public about the need for a particular course of action. Increasingly, though, the groups running ads like this are using the rules as cover for a clearly political agenda. The way it works: Well-funded nonprofits run ads outside the reporting window – often making false or misleading claims about a candidate. Then, months later, they run ads advocating openly for the candidate’s defeat, often recycling the same false or misleading claims.

In August 2012, for example, a 501©(4) called American Future Fund falsely claimed that Rep Martin Heinrich (D-NM) “spent a trillion of our tax dollars on a stimulus for failed companies here and jobs overseas” and asked for viewers to “tell Martin Heinrich to stop the wasteful spending that’s hurting our economy.” Then, days before the election, AFF ran an ad with the same false claim, this time calling for Heinrich to be voted out. The first ad didn’t have to be reported. The second one did.

For months, we’ve mostly been seeing the first side of that equation play out in the midterms. But come September, the spending will have to be reported to the FEC, and like clockwork, many of these groups will start openly advocating for and against candidates.

In other words, despite already being at record highs, the vast majority of the dark money spending that will be reported to the FEC in 2014 is yet to come. To put it in perspective, at this point in the last midterms, only $6.6 million had been reported by groups that don’t disclose their donors; by Election Day, that total was more than $130 million. At this point in 2012, the reporting window for presidential elections had already been open for about a month, and total dark money had just topped $50 million (though still a hair less than this cycle: $51.1 million versus $51.3 million). By Election Day, that total was more than $300 million.

The groups that would go on to report the most spending in 2012 had yet to report much at this point in the cycle.

At the current rate, the Center for Responsive Politics projects that dark money spending in the 2014 midterms will easily match or surpass the spending records set in the last presidential elections. If the rate of spending from previous cycles continues, the totals could reach upwards of $730 million or — if the rate seen in the last midterm holds — edge close to $1 billion.

Based on spending in previous cycles, 2014 dark money is projected to set a new record.

There are no signs of slowing either. Patriot Majority, for one, has already reported as much spending in 2014 — $7 million — as it spent in the whole 2012 presidential cycle, and liberal dark money groups as a whole have spent much more so far this cycle, $14.2 million, than they spent in the entire 2009-2010 midterm elections, $10.3 million.

And despite the boom in liberal spending, these groups still don’t compare to their conservative counterparts. Groups on the right have reported spending more than $33 million dollars, and that doesn’t include the months of unreported spending by groups making issue ads in states with tight races.

Organizations in the Koch network in particular have been spending far more than they did in previous cycles. The $35 million that Americans for Prosperity had already reportedly spent by April of this year dwarfs the estimated $18.2 million it had spent by early August of 2012. AFP says it plans to spend $125 million in 2014 — a more than $10 million increase over its overall expenditures in 2012 and nearly $100 million over its 2010 outlays.

Other groups within the Koch network like Freedom Partners and Libre Initiative – both of which claim educating or informing the public as a part of their mission — have begun running ads for the first time, making similarly dubious claims.

Voters around the country should brace themselves for a flood of spending in the coming months, but don’t expect the donors behind it to lay claim to the often deceptive political speech they enabled.

Robert Maguire joined the Center in August 2011 as the outside spending and PACs researcher. In 2012, he started CRP’s Politically Active Nonprofits project, which tracks the financial networks of “dark money” groups, mainly 501©(4) and 501©(6) organizations. You can follow him on Twitter @RobertMaguire_.

A Bill to Get the Labor Movement Back on Offense

LIBertea — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 14:42:47 GMT

For years, the American labor movement has been on the defensive as it has become harder and harder for workers to join or maintain a union. But some House Democrats are planning a dramatic counter-offensive: a bill that would make union organizing a civil right.

Representatives Keith Ellison and John Lewis plan to introduce a bill Wednesday that would make labor organizing a basic freedom no different than freedom from racial discrimination.

Representatives Keith Ellison and John Lewis plan to introduce a bill Wednesday that would make labor organizing a basic freedom no different than freedom from racial discrimination. That sounds like a nice talking point — but this isn’t just another messaging bill.

The Ellison-Lewis legislation would amend the National Labor Relations Act to include protections found under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include labor organizing as a fundamental right. That would give workers a broader range of legal options if they feel discriminated against for trying to form a union.

Currently, their only redress is through a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board — an important process, but one that workers and labor analysts frequently criticize as both too slow and often too lenient on offending employers.

If the NLRA were amended, however, after 180 days a worker could take his or her labor complaint from the NLRB to a federal court. This is how the law works now for civil rights complaints, which gives workers the option, after 180 days, to step outside the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process.

Then, workers would have sole discretion on whether to push a complaint, as opposed to relying on a decision by the NLRB on whether to forge ahead. Workers could also move the process along much faster than the NLRB handles complaints, which can often take years.

Is Labor a Lost Cause?

Ellison told The Nation that the legislation would also help workers recover more money — the NLRB will award back pay to a grieved worker minus whatever they earned while awaiting a decision, which can often amount to basically nothing. “[The NLRB] remedy, though useful and very important, and nothing in our legislation changes that, that remedy is considered slow and somewhat inadequate. For some of these union-busting law firms, [they]will say ‘so do it and we’ll just pay.’”

Ellison said he believes the labor movement needs to get back on the offensive. “With the Supreme Court in here, and what they just did in Harris v. Quinn and all the things they wrote about Abood, it’s insane to hope for the best,” he said, referring to the recent decision involving non-union public workers and their fee arrangements with unions. “I mean this Supreme Court is openly hostile to racial justice and worker justice simultaneously. So we better be moving out on both fronts.”

Ellison told MSNBC, which first reported the bill, that he got the idea from a book by Century Foundation fellows Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Marvit, titled Why Union Organizing Should Be a Civil Right. They argue that the First Amendment’s right to free association should clearly include one of the most crucial forms of association — banding together to push back against unfair treatment from employers.

Marvit told The Nation he thinks treating labor organizing as a civil right is not only constitutionally appropriate but also much more appealing to the general public. “Civil rights is something that Americans really understand, and has a legitimacy that is sort of beyond reproach,” he said. “So when you put it in civil rights terms, it’s something that really speaks to people.” (In the interest of full disclosure, Marvit has written for The Nation in the past.)

Both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition will back the bill, along with The United Food and Commercial Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

“Frankly, I think Republicans have been saying it on the other side. That’s been the message of the National Right to Work Committee for sixty years, that workers have a civil right not to join a union,” Marvit continued. “And I think that’s been a successful argument for them. It taps into this notion of your freedom to choose.”

The Nation has learned that when Ellison and Lewis introduce the bill on Wednesday morning, they will boast eleven other original co-sponsors: Representatives Jerrold Nadler, John Conyers, Marcia Fudge, Barbara Lee, Mark Takano, Rush Holt, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Karen Bass, Danny Davis, Albio Sires and Janice Hahn. All of the co-sponsors are Democrats.

Major unions will also be on board. Both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition will back the bill, along with The United Food and Commercial Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Joseph Geevarghese, deputy director of Change to Win, told The Nation that his union was joining the push “because union organizing has been maligned. Unions have been maligned in our society. There is a value in re-defining what all of these tens of thousands of brave workers are doing as, “We have a fundamental right to stand up and speak out about injustice in this country.’”

Why Today’s Right-Wingers Surpass Wingers of the Past

LIBertea — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 15:30:10 GMT

A terrific essay published this week in the National Journal looks at historical “tugs of war” within both the Republican and Democratic parties, then explains why the current conservative movement’s efforts to yank Republicans right are unprecedented. The author, Norm Ornstein — a journalist, resident political science scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former guest on Moyers & Company — writes that today’s tea party is meeting with more success than other radical movements of the last hundred years, with frightening consequences for America.

After wending his way through notable political schisms of the 20th century, Ornstein finds many of the roots of today’s conservative movement took hold in the 1990s:

Clinton’s election in 1992 moved the Democrats firmly to the center on previously divisive issues like welfare and crime. But it also provided the impetus for the forces that have led to the current Republican problem. These forces were built in part around insurgent Newt Gingrich’s plans to overturn the Democratic 38-year hegemony in Congress, and in part around a ruthlessly pragmatic decision by GOP leaders and political strategists to hamper the popular Clinton by delegitimizing him and using the post-Watergate flowering of independent counsels to push for multiple crippling investigations of wrongdoing (to be sure, he gave them a little help along the way). No one was more adroit at using ethics investigations to demonize opponents than Newt. In 1994, Gingrich recruited a passel of more radical candidates for Congress, who ran on a path to overturn most of the welfare state and who themselves demonized Congress and Washington. At a time of rising populist anger—and some disillusionment on the left with Clinton—the approach worked like a charm, giving the GOP its first majority in the House in 40 years, and changing the face of Congress for decades to come.
Newt’s strategy and tactics were abetted and amplified by the new force of political talk radio, which had been activated by the disastrous federal pay raise in 1989-90, and of tribal cable television news. As Sean Theriault details in his book The Gingrich Senators, many of Newt’s progeny moved on to the Senate and began to change it from an old club into a new forum for tribal warfare. Move on through right-wing frustration with George W. Bush’s combination of compassionate conservatism and unfunded social policy (and wars) and then the election of Barack Obama, and the ingredients for a rise of radicalism and a more explosive intra-party struggle were set. They were expanded again with the eager efforts in 2010 of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Young Guns (Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan) to exploit the deep populist right-wing anger at the financial collapse and the bailouts of 2008 and 2009 by inciting the tea-party movement. But their expectation that they could then co-opt these insurgents backfired badly.
A lot of history to get to the point. What began as a ruthlessly pragmatic, take-no-prisoners parliamentary style opposition to Obama was linked to constant efforts to delegitimize his presidency, first by saying he was not born in the U.S., then by calling him a tyrant trying to turn the country into a Socialist or Communist paradise. These efforts were not condemned vigorously by party leaders in and out of office, but were instead deflected or encouraged, helping to create a monster: a large, vigorous radical movement that now has large numbers of adherents and true believers in office and in state party leadership. This movement has contempt for establishment Republican leaders and the money to go along with its beliefs. Local and national talk radio, blogs, and other social media take their messages and reinforce them for more and more Americans who get their information from these sources. One result is that even today, a Rasmussen survey shows that 23 percent of Americans still believe Obama is not an American, while an additional 17 percent are not sure. Forty percent of Americans! This is no longer a fringe view.
As for the radicals in elected office or in control of party organs, consider a small sampling of comments:
“Sex that doesn’t produce people is deviate.” —Montana state Rep. Dave Hagstrom.
“It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education.” —Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Reynolds.
“I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!” —Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert, at a tea-party rally.
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GOP’s magical impeachment epiphany: “Wasting everyone’s time” is bad!

LIBertea — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:13:58 GMT

GOP’s magical impeachment epiphany: “Wasting everyone’s time” is bad!

Republican leaders say impeachment isn't worth it since it would die in the Senate. Here's their new civics lesson

Thanks to the heroic stance taken earlier this week by Sarah Palin, impeachment chatter is in the air, and every Republican’s got to answer for it. Surely Palin’s fellow conservatives in the House of Representatives are grateful to her for giving them the opportunity to dodge reporters’ questions on this most summery of questions.

So is it gonna happen, or is it gonna happen? It’s not gonna happen, is the thing. John Boehner has ruled it out (so far). And that’s a true shame. Can the Republic endure even another hour of rule from the Imperial President who uses the Constitution as toilet paper? If the Obama administration can’t take a breath of oxygen without violating some crucial clause, it doesn’t make much sense for the Republican House of Representatives to sit on their fannies and allow this tyranny to endure.

It’s not just orange Ohio RINOs like Boehner that are tut-tutting calls for impeachment. The Hill reports that even “staunch House conservatives are quashing calls for President Obama’s impeachment,” arguing that “an impeachment trial would be a doomed effort in a Democratic Senate that could hurt Republicans in the midterm elections.”

“Harry Reid’s going to block anything we do in that regard,” said Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who in February said he would vote to impeach Obama.

“We’d like to do more, the problem is the avenues are just not available,” said Rep. John Fleming (R-La.). “Even if impeachment was to pass in the House, it wouldn’t remove the president from office.

“It’s one of those things that if you can’t see an end solution, why even get into that debate?” Fleming said. [...]

“If somebody were to file impeachment proceedings — well, the fact is we know that’s going nowhere in the Senate,” [Rep. Charles Boustany] said. “And it’s going to be a major, major distraction from actually getting results, which means rolling back some of his power relative to Congress.”

All of this is correct. Impeachment in the House wouldn’t lead to a conviction in the Senate. It would be a “major, major distraction” that would backfire on Republicans when they least need another self-imposed catastrophe.

It’s fascinating, though, to see the House Republican majority that came into power in 2011 use “it wouldn’t go anywhere in the Senate” or “Harry Reid would just block it” or, more broadly, “there’s no point, it’s a waste of time,” as a justification for not taking an insane course of action.

In the summer of 2011, there was no chance that a debt ceiling agreement that included a “cut, cap and balance” amendment to the Constitution and all sorts of other partisan goodies would go through the Senate or be signed by the president. And yet, until the very last minute, with an arbitrary global market collapse looming over their heads, House members refused to eliminate these items from their debt ceiling demands. “This wouldn’t go anywhere in the Senate” was a sellout’s excuse for not trying, even if “trying” meant putting the country through months of unnecessary stress, fear, and embarrassment.

Similarly, last fall, there was little chance that the Senate would pass a government spending measure defunding the Affordable Care Act, or that President Obama would sign a government spending measure defunding the Affordable Care Act. The House tried anyway, oh did it try! This led to a government shutdown in October, and nearly another debt default scenario.

This doesn’t count the hundreds of other bills (40+ just to repeal the ACA) that the House has spent time passing knowing that they would have no chance in the Senate. If anything has defined the House of Representatives in the Tea Party era, it has been passing bills that have no chance of passing or being called up in the Senate. “Harry Reid’s going to block anything we do in that regard” has rarely come into the House GOP’s calculus for choosing to spend time on one thing or another.

So why are they all of a sudden deferring to this excuse when the topic’s impeachment? Because they know they’ve got nothing. If there really was a president who’d committed glaringly impeachable offenses, getting a Senate trial and conviction wouldn’t be a problem. It was this sort of clear impeachment threat that finally forced Richard Nixon’s hand into resignation. The rhetoric about the Obama administration’s illegal actions — at least in terms of what they’re complaining about, instead of, say, NSA spying programs — doesn’t match up with the reality. So, no, prosecution of a bluff would not go anywhere in the Senate.

A truly Progressive Movement may be closer than you think

LIBertea — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:57:21 GMT

A left-wing Tea Party may be closer than you think

A few liberal pols get all the press, but the real work of movement-building is happening in the states

After supposed RINO Thad Cochran relied in part on African-American voters to defeat Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel and win the Mississippi GOP’s nomination to the Senate, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe was very upset. Kibbe was so angry, in fact, that he was moved to petulantly declare, “If the only way the K Street wing of the GOP establishment can win is by courting Democrats to vote in GOP primaries then we’ve already won.” This Black Knight-like declaration of victory following conspicuous defeat was widely mocked as yet another example of the Tea Party’s preference to curate reality.

Not every Tea Party opponent was so dismissive, though. Calling “the daily vicissitudes” of the battle between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment “beside the point,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote that McDaniel’s defeat obscured a more significant truth: “n many key issues, the business community is getting nothing for its investment in the GOP establishment’s picks.” He went on to cite immigration reform, the Export-Import Bank, and federal spending on infrastructure as just three obvious examples. The obvious conclusion to be drawn? Maybe what Kibbe said wasn’t quite so silly after all.

At the very least, those on the American left hoping to push the Democratic Party away from the centrist, neoliberal policies it’s embraced since at least Bill Clinton (and arguably earlier, beginning with Jimmy Carter) and more toward a more populist, redistributionist approach should be lucky to be so silly. Indeed, members of what little there is of an American far left have long admired the Tea Party’s effectiveness, if not its goals. When, during last October’s Tea Party-inspired government shutdown, Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara wrote that “Tea Party-like success … would be a tremendous advance for those looking not just to protect, but to expand, the welfare state,” he wasn’t playing contrarian but rather echoing a sentiment I’ve heard many times from leftist friends over the past four years. (For those unaware, here’s a good rundown as to why Occupy Wall Street, for all its virtues, doesn’t count.)

Some pundits have argued that the rising popularity of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is proof that, even without a left-wing Tea Party, demographic changes are pushing the Democratic Party inexorably leftward. There’s no doubt at least a kernel of truth to this. But it’s important to keep in mind that there’s nothing new about unapologetically liberal politicians coming out of the Big Apple and the Bay State. And the narrative gets even screwier if we keep in mind Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fiscally conservative record, as well as his pending, almost certain, landslide reelection. Above all else, focusing on high-profile pols misses what makes the Tea Party so powerful: its ability to rally American conservatism’s activist troops.

As Ned Resnikoff recently wrote in the Baffler, if there’s to be a true left-wing Tea Party, it’ll have to be a bottom-up affair, one that is driven as much or more by longtime activists, issue-advocacy groups, organized labor and disaffected youth. It will have to be a movement, not a P.R. campaign. And as is the case with the Tea Party, it’ll have to derive much of its power and influence from hard work on the state and local levels, saving the more glamorous — but often less fruitful — work on Congress and the White House for last. As is the case for the real Tea Party, there would no doubt be politicians who seek to align themselves with the movement; but its real power players (at least at first) will have names you’ve never previously heard.

I frame a left-wing Tea Party as a hypothetical because, quite frankly, it right now manifests itself chiefly in tremors and glimmers of something bigger that may one day come. For this piece, I spoke to a handful of state-level candidates who fit that description — politicians whom Howard Dean might describe as coming from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” But while fondness for the party as it currently exists varied among them, a belief that Democrats need to do a better job pushing for economic justice — and against corporate prerogatives — was universal.

When I asked Rhode Island House of Representatives Democratic candidate Aaron Regunberg how he felt about the Democratic Party in Rhode Island (which is at once prohibitively powerful and often decidedly unprogressive), he answered at first with a pause and then a long sigh. “I think there’s a lot of frustration nationally with Democratic officials who folks feel have sort of sold out the values — justice, equity, fairness — that we want in our Democratic Party,” he said, “and I think here in Rhode Island that problem is taken to an extremity.” Despite his misgivings, though, the 24-year-old candidate — like many Tea Party-aligned politicians on the right — said that he ultimately wanted to bring the party back to its fundamental principles. “As often as the Democratic Party has let us down, I am a Democrat and I’m running as a Democrat and I want to be working to make our party live up to the values that it should,” he said. Asked what those values are, Regunberg descried them as “valuing the collective, valuing the community good and using the state effectively to advance that.”

Cory McCray, who is running for the House of Delegates in Maryland under the Working Families Party banner, had a similar view of the Democratic Party, describing it as needing to be “pushed” by outsiders to better live by what is ostensibly its foundational code. Behind “all great [political accomplishments],” McCray said, “people were pushing.” After citing Frederick Douglass — who famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand” — McCray argued that the great progressive politicians of American history were only able to achieve what they did because of public pressure. “So many people pushed these great [politicans]from good to great,” McCray said. These politicians “didn’t just sit there and do it because they had to,” he added, “they were being pushed.”

Running under a different party name as he is, McCray can afford to be strongly critical of Democrats. Wisconsin Assembly Democratic candidate Marina Dimitrijevic, on the other hand, advocated for policies just as left-wing as McCray, but did so without describing the Democratic Party itself as an enemy. “I am a Democrat and I’m a progressive Democrat and I’m very proud to be a Democrat,” she told me after I asked her if Democrats need a Tea Party of their own. Calling her party “a big tent,” Dimitrijevic noted how the party’s “more progressive, left-wing [bloc]continues to push us and I think that’s wonderful, and I actually tend to go more to the left myself.” Still, she said, even this push-and-pull happens within “a united front.”

More than anything else, it’s the tension evident in McCray and Dimitrijevic’s differing estimations of the Democratic Party that poses the biggest threat to a nascent Tea Party left. To be fair, this is certainly a reflection of Maryland and Wisconsin’s different circumstances and different political histories; but the underlying question of whether it’s better to work within “the system” or push it from without has been confronted by all of these candidates, and will no doubt plague future ones as well. If there’s to be a left-wing Tea Party, it would have to be held together by a somewhat paradoxical consensus — that the Democratic Party as it currently existed was fraudulent and corrupt, and that it was at the same time the only realistic vehicle for those looking to move American politics decidedly to the left. (Yes, Tea Partyers make occasional threats to break from the GOP and create a part of their own, but these warnings are not only infrequent but thoroughly hollow.)

Before she decided to run for the state Senate in Washington as a Democrat, Pramila Jayapal told me, the outside-inside conundrum was “the question that I thought about a lot.” Jayapal ultimately decided to fight from within and run as a Democrat because, she said, “different strategies are right for different times” and “here in Washington where we are [now]is working from within.” She acknowledged that “there’s a point at which [the inside game] just doesn’t work anymore and you really have to go to an outside strategy,” but ultimately decided that was a crisis-point her state had not yet reached. Still, when I asked her how she felt about calls for a left-wing Tea Party, Jayapal responded that “The basic concept that we want to make sure the Democratic Party is still reflecting the values and the vision of the left in this country is really what’s behind [those calls],” a concept, she said, that “certainly resonates with me.”

Whether Jayapal, Dimitrijevic, McCray and Regunberg will win their races and usher in a new era for the Democratic Party only time will tell. Similarly, it’ll take a while before we know whether Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio’s success in recent years was a historical hiccup or an omen of American politics undergoing a more consequential shift. At this point, however — after more than five years of Tea Party disruption and rapid success — we should know at least this much: If the left is going to have a Tea Party of its own, it’ll have to do it by making its peace with the Democratic Party and supporting grass-roots candidates willing to change it from within. So, by all means, get excited for Sanders 2016; but just remember, a dissident underdog’s run for the White House cannot be seen as the end-result of so much left-wing agitation. It can only be the start.

John McCain Contradicts Himself On Iraq Victory

LIBertea — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 19:14:51 GMT

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has spent much of the past week attacking President Obama's response to the militant insurgency sweeping through Iraq, pointing to the lack of a U.S. presence in the region as a factor in creating an environment more vulnerable to insurgent advances. On Thursday, McCain called for the resignation of Obama's national security team and rebuked Obama for calling the withdrawal of troops from Iraq a "victory."

McCain's current attacks on Obama's Iraq response don't completely line up with the Republican senator's past positions. Either McCain has selective memory, or his objection to labeling the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq a "victory" appears to be dependent on who is declaring the victory.

A tweet from McCain's account in 2010 stated, "Last American combat troops leave Iraq. I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory."

Last American combat troops leave Iraq. I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 19, 2010

HuffPost's Ryan Grim preserved McCain's "victory" tweet, in case it were to disappear from McCain's account.

While it could be the case that McCain forgot about his 2010 "victory" proclamation, it is worth noting he managed to recall a statement from 2011 where he warned Obama of the risks of removing U.S. forces from Iraq.

As the situation in Iraq has worsened, McCain has been joined by other Republicans in chastising Obama's hesitancy to involve the U.S. in the conflict, as Politico reports. In addition to hitting Obama over the removal of troops from Iraq, GOP hawks have been pressing for increased assistance to the Iraqi government with their defense. Obama has said that the U.S. will need to provide some means of support as Iraq defends against the Islamic militants, but has ruled out sending troops.

As Paul Waldman of The Washington Post notes, there is reason to take McCain and other Republicans' criticism of Obama with a grain of salt: they were often wrong about Iraq when the case was being made for the invasion of 2003. MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" put together a video compilation of John McCain being wrong on Iraq.

All Conservatives Are Sell-Out: Cantor's just the latest

LIBertea — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 04:05:53 GMT

Off with their heads! Eric Cantor, the Tea Party guillotine, and the certainty of conservative sell-out

Cantor's just the latest: From Reagan to Rove, the GOP's driven ever-rightward by clash of idealism and betrayal

“We got what we had coming,” wrote Rep. Eric Cantor in his book “Young Guns” in 2010. He was referring to the drubbing his party took in the 2006 Congressional elections.

Back in 1994, he reminded readers, his fellow Republicans had taken control of Congress on a platform of high idealism. Once in power, however, “too often they left these principles behind.” The Republicans in that Congress, Cantor continued, “became what they had campaigned against: arrogant and out of touch. There were important exceptions, but the GOP legislative agenda became primarily about Republican members themselves, not the greater cause.”

These Republican backsliders abandoned their free-market ideology for an orgy of earmark spending, Cantor charged, and as a result they were rightfully punished at the polls. “The fact is,” the high-minded young gun declared, “we had our chance, and we blew it.”

Given what happened to Cantor himself last week — shot down in a Republican primary by an even younger gun promising an even more zealous dedication to free-market ideals — these passages seem highly ironic and more than a little bit prophetic.

In truth, however, both Cantor’s attitude circa 2010 and his sudden downfall last week were part of a long-running and basically unchanging Republican melodrama. The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

And so the movement advances along its rightward course not directly but by a looping cycle of sincerity and sellout in which the radicals of yesterday always turn out to be the turncoats of today; off to the guillotine they are sent as some new and always more righteous generation rises up in their place.

It is the logic of the French Revolution, only nowadays these cycles of idealism followed by betrayal (and then by idealism again) drag us always in a reactionary direction. The New Right in the 1970s dismissed Nixon-era Republicans as squishes and called for a startling form of conservative purity. The principled president they made possible, Ronald Reagan, had only been in office a few years before conservatives were asking “Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” to quote the subtitle of a popular 1986 book.

Reagan’s designated successor, George H. W. Bush, bravely challenged the world to read his lips and disappointed the faithful even faster. A few years later the idealistic Freshmen of 1994 arrived on the Washington stage, shaking their fists at the mighty; after a few noble years of shutdowns and defundings and even a bit of impeaching, they too were dismissed as compromisers, this time after one of the greatest outbreaks of corruption the city has ever seen and for which the grinning mug shot of their one-time hero Tom DeLay will stand forever as a symbol. And let us not overlook George W. Bush, the prayerful leader of a triumphant conservative movement a mere 10 years ago; today he is regarded on the right as an impostor if not some kind of closet liberal. Ditto Karl Rove. Ditto Newt Gingrich. Ditto even Grover Norquist, in some circles.

Then came the Tea Party, dedicated to building a republic of economic virtue and determined to liquidate a host of Republican deviationists; its one-time hero Eric Cantor swiftly became its victim, carted off in a tumbril to meet the fate of Danton. He got what he had coming, as he himself said of the previous generation of faded radicals.

What is it about this pattern that makes it so perfect for modern conservatism? Part of the explanation, as I argued in my book “The Wrecking Crew,” is simple expediency: Ronald Reagan was a sellout when his poll numbers were bad and an ideological hero when they recovered. George W. Bush may or may not have abandoned his principles (whatever they were), but there is no doubt that he was a lousy president, launching a catastrophic war and staring stupidly in the wrong direction while hurricanes chewed up Louisiana and a real-estate bubble wrecked the global economy. Such a loser could not possibly have been a real conservative.

But there is also something greater in this eternal progression of authenticity and fakeness than sheer opportunism: Sometimes the acts of betrayal that obsess the right really do seem to happen. Consider the case of Eric Cantor. The specific object of his idealistic passion, back in his bang-bang Young Gun days, was small business, which he hailed in glowing terms as the soul of the free-market order and the very opposite of the hated Wall Street bailouts. This was, of course, typical populist posturing of the period. Also typical was the direction Cantor took in reality, becoming such a staunch defender of big business and Wall Street that the stock market actually swooned on news of his defeat.

The man who beat Cantor, a college economics professor named David Brat, simply called him on this blatant reversal. Brat’s shoestring campaign was a market-populist crusade, an uprising against “crony capitalism” and its flesh-and-blood representative, Eric Cantor, friend of the Chamber of Commerce. “All the investment banks up in New York and D.C., those guys should’ve gone to jail,” this guy Brat said at one particularly inspired moment. “Instead of going to jail, where’d they go? They went onto Eric’s Rolodex.” Even his stance on immigration was meant as a shot at the tech companies who will benefit in a lopsided way from immigration reform.

Why is it that Republicans are uniquely prone to this cycle of idealism and betrayal? I think the answer is simple: Because free-market idealism is a philosophy that automatically leads to betrayal—and also to misgovernment, and cronyism, and even corruption, as we saw in the DeLay era. The movement’s greatest idealists often turn out to be its greatest scoundrels—think of Jack Abramoff, or of Oliver North, or (as Rick Perlstein has pointed out) the gang of hard-right purists who signed up to do dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. In truth, there seems to be no real contradiction between conservative morality and following the money; to be a capitalist true-believer is to sell yourself.

Free-market idealism, after all, is about applying market forces to the state. This is what everything from Citizens United to toll-road privatization is all about. To be true to such a principle means respecting incentives, answering the call of money. And it ain’t small business who has the money in Washington these days.

A number of years ago I wrote about the market-minded men of the Bush era who did the bidding of lobbyists and who filled the federal agencies with hacks and fools, and I think my verdict on them still applies: “They did not do these awful things because they were bad conservatives; they did them because they were good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds followed naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.”

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say, they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.