Moderate GOPers Are the Problem

Charlie Dent (R-PA) (Lehigh Valley Live) - part of the problem

Peter King (R-NY) (Huffington Post) - part of the problem

For all the Tea Partiers who have been complaining about RINOs the last several years, I have to admit I agree with them that the alleged "moderate" GOPers are part of the problem, but obviously not for the same reasons. And I don't just mean the alleged moderates in Congress. I'm also talking the moderate GOP voters.

Jonathan Chait wrote about a potential plan for moderates to depose John Boehner as Speaker of the House and create a real governing coalition between Democrats and moderate Republicans. Chait nails the problem with moderates in this passage:

Say you live in Pennsylvania and your representative is Charlie Dent. Representative Dent is fighting hard against the leadership to prevent a shutdown. If you’re following him in the news, you can read the hometown newspaper’s report explaining Charlie Dent’s opposition to his party’s tactics. But Charlie Dent is the one who is giving power to the very right-wing fanatics he is decrying, by supplying the decisive votes to the Republican majority. If you want to stop Ted Cruz from paralyzing the government, you need to vote against Charlie Dent. That is confusing.

The problem is this assumes "moderates" like Dent and Peter King aren't just posturing for the media to seem moderate to continue being re-elected in their more moderate districts, while continuing to vote with the most radical members of their party 95% of the time. So as Chait wrote if you are a moderate Republican who isn't happy with how Ted Cruz is operating, unfortunately for you the answer in 2014 is to vote Democratic, not to send a moderate Republican back to Congress. I think some Republican voters think and vote this way splitting their tickets in Presidential elections (possibly being horrified by the positions their eventual Presidential nominee is forced to take in order to win the primaries), but not in Congressional elections. And that needs to change.

You see daily polls showing that 50+ % of registered Republicans agree with the Democratic Party's position on several key issues. Whether it be immigration reform, a balanced deficit-reduction plan, background checks on guns, etc. So what does it say about a party that it is so unresponsive to the majority of their base? Issues that get 50+% Republican voter support sometimes result in zero Republican votes in Congress. Issues that get 75-80% Republican voter support may end up forcing the hand of a handful of Republicans, as you saw with the Manchin-Toomey background checks bill, but not enough to pass even with 90+% support nationwide.

As long as the moderates keep giving the GOP candidate their votes, they are enabling the radical nutty wing of the party. I understand you may be a Northeastern moderate Republican who is pro-choice and in favor of same-sex marriage (or at least indifferent enough on those issues that they aren't decisive when it comes to casting your vote). And you vote Republican usually because you want your taxes lower, you don't like the welfare state all that much, and you'd prefer less regulations and "smaller government" (whatever that means at any given moment). But the thing is that even though you are voting for your moderate GOP Congressman, in doing so you are empowering the Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Louie Gohmert, Michelle Bachman wing of the party. They are the ones who hold the power in Congress and/or have the national talk-show celebrity status to drive the daily conversation. 

If you think those politicians are bad for your party in the long run and that wing of the party embarrasses you as a card-carrying Republican, then you need to think long and hard about what your vote means when you vote locally. I'm not saying you should vote for a Democrat whom you disagree with on most issues. But chances are if you are in a Republican-leaning district, the Democrat opposing your Republican incumbent is going to be a moderate to center-right Democrat, if he/she has any hope of winning. The Democratic candidate will vote much more moderately than whatever Republican you elect. 

But yet the majority of the base continues to vote for people who then don't represent their views. And the alleged moderate politicians continue to go along with the most radical elements of their party, out of fear that the radical voters will outnumber the moderates in primaries. So if moderate Republican voters really want to exert some political power, their best option is to vote for Democrats, at least right now. And then eventually (maybe) Republican politicians will moderate and begin adopting some of those positions to truly represent the will of the electorate.


The Republican party used to always be considered the "daddy party", while the Democrats were the "mommy party."  But as we've seen the last several years the Republican party has been governing like an abusive dead-beat daddy party. And perhaps moderate GOP voters should consider putting mommy back in charge of the household until daddy goes through counseling and rehab.

Mission of Boehner

The ballad of Johnny Boehner (swampland.time.com)

People will blame Congressional Republicans much more than President Obama and Congressional Democrats by wide margins, according to recent polls, if the sequestration cuts take place and the economy lags.

In spite of a last minute attempt to re-brand these unpopular spending cuts as Obama's cuts (pictured above*), the public is not falling for it. The Republican party has spent four years preaching austerity. You can't suddenly reverse yourself and have any credibility on the issue. That was their brand and Speaker Boehner and the Tea Party was boasting about these budget cuts not too long ago. And at the time Boehner said he got 98% of what he wanted.

This is yet another reminder that the ideology the Republicans have espoused in recent years is incredibly unpopular outside the bubble. So Boehner and the GOP's goal now is to try to shift the blame to President Obama.

Good luck with that.

* Is this the first time a political re-branding campaign had the slogan represented by a Twitter hashtag?

Romney will not become President "Moderate Mitt"

David Frum believes Romney is lying and that's the reason to support him

David Brooks and David Frum, my favorite conservative pundit, both endorsed Mitt Romney in the last week, both seemingly supporting him in hopes that he is really lying and would really govern as "Moderate Mitt."

I understand this impulse. If you are one of the few prominent moderate Republicans remaining, you must convince yourself that the Presidential candidate would govern more to your liking or else there would be little reason to remain a Republican at this point. At the Congressional level, moderate Republicans are practically extinct. The last chance for a moderate Republican to have any impact on the party is at the Presidential level and he/she will have a really tough time making it through a primary. Romney, to his credit, did win the primary rather easily. But his path isn't likely to be repeated by future moderates. They just don't make many as shameless as Romney, and only someone lacking in any conviction could reinvent himself on virtually every issue in such a short period of time.

Here's the thing though, history shows us Presidents try to keep campaign promises. Frum, at least circles this square, but pointing out that with the Democrats likely to retain control of the Senate, Romney won't be able to follow through on a lot of the crazy misguided stuff he promised his base during the campaign. It's not a very comforting thought to a liberal like myself that the future of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, etc, may hinge on a handful of Senate Democrats not caving and voting with the Republicans.

So the argument seems to go: vote for Romney because he's really been lying to us and will govern as a moderate....oh and if he wasn't lying, well the Democrats in the Senate will save us from "Severely Conservative Mitt."

I admire the hope that Romney is secretly running to stick it to the majority of his party and will govern as a moderate. It just seems extremely unlikely. I seem to remember a lot of moderates making the same case about George W. Bush in 2000. And while Bush was more moderate when it came to immigration, since his party was more moderate on that issue at the time, he governed as advertised or even more extreme than how he campaigned on virtually every other issue. As former President Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Do Big Corporate Donors Matter More or Less?

 The Citizens United decision was ex-cellent

I just want to preface the following post by saying I've haven't really thought this through all the way yet, so there may be some major holes in my analysis, but this occurred to me today when I was daydreaming in line at the coffee shop.

The conventional wisdom after Citizens United was that our political system would now just be bought by the highest bidders in the corporate world. While I still think that is probably true. A few things have happened recently that changed my mind a little.

You could always determine how members of Congress and Senators voted on particular issues, just based on whatever industry had donated the most to their campaigns. In some cases a politician already supported that particular industry or issue and would just use that previous support to raise more money. In that case, the bribe kind of went in the other direction: "I already support you, but if you don't donate to my campaign, I may stop supporting you." But typically it seemed to go in the usual direction, as witnessed during the Health Care Reform debate when the last 4 Democratic holdouts in the Senate (Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu) all happened to be huge recipients of campaign donations from Aetna, Mutual of Omaha, etc). Therefore concessions had to be made to get all of them on board. And of course with the exception of Landrieu, the others will have been voted out of office or retired without facing voters again. So congrats, you tried to make the bill worse at the behest of your campaign donors and it didn't even help your political career anyway.

But getting back to the original issue, with the exception of the vote against getting rid of tax breaks and subsidies for Big Oil, I can't think of one other vote the last few years where it was obvious the GOP was voting blindly in the interest of one of their traditional big corporate donors.

Part of the reason I was always so confident that the GOP eventually would let ObamaCare stand once it became law and validated by the SCOTUS, is that to tinker with the structure of the law at that point, could hurt Big Insurance's profits. For example if you are able to take away the mandate, but leave the other regulations in place and Big Insurance could be in a risk-management death spiral. Big Insurance fought the law and the law won. And at that point, the theory goes, having the whole law in place is better for them, than just some parts of it.

If the Republicans truly go forward with their vow to remove the mandate and possibly other parts of the law through the Reconciliation budget process that only requires 51 votes in the Senate (they'd also need a President Romney to sign that), then I think we really are seeing a party that doesn't care as much about corporate donors any more. (Caveat: maybe I'm missing something but I can't see how Big Insurance would be better off with part of the law repealed). It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If Romney wins, will they really follow through on this or not? Is this all a ruse to fire up the Tea Party for one more election, or are they really going to try to repeal key parts of it?

It seems to me the shift we could be seeing is the GOP being able to rely more on the donations of many, many rich individuals, along with a few dozen billionaires like the Koch Brothers. The big corporations still contribute, but with other sources of unlimited campaign cash, they may not hold the same sway they used to within the party. And with Unions even weaker, that means the Democrats ultimately will be more dependent on the donations of the big corporations. In the end, the middle class will continue losing ground, until Citizens United is overturned or the campaign finance system gets repaired. And of course it's just assumed that Wall St. still has veto power over everything either party does.

For liberals like myself it's actually a much scarier world where the GOP isn't predictable when it comes tending to the whims of whoever is their highest bidder in the corporate world. That's when the political system shifts from being a conventional center-right party vs a conventional center-left party to a far right-wing party looking to implement radical change to the social democracy we've had for the last 100 years vs. a center-left party who may not have adapted to this change in the game quickly enough.