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.

Why I No Longer Support Entitlement Reform

(Washington Post)

I've long favored an approach to long-term deficit reduction similar to what President Obama has proposed: a mixture of entitlement reforms, revenue increases (ideally through reforming the tax code), and phased-in spending cuts. Of course the devil is in the details and I'd leave it to the wonkiest of wonks to determine what reforms, cuts, and revenue increases will give us the biggest bang for the buck - keeping the effective subsidies and tax breaks and eliminating the pointless giveaways to corporations. But as long as the eventual agreement was in that framework, I'd probably support it.

I'm not exactly sold on the President's negotiation skills, but nevertheless his proposal is basically a flavor of the Simpson-Bowles proposal that all of the Very Serious People in Washington claim to support. This is the sort of compromise that a sane, functional center-left party and a sane, functional center-right party would eventually agree to.

OK, you can stop laughing now since what we have is a sane, functional center-left party negotiating with an insane, dysfunctional far-right party. The Republican party will not agree to any deal that increases tax revenues. And I'm not sure they even want to really cut entitlements given the graying of their base.

It's a problem when 70% of the budget is being spent on health care for old and poor people, retirement benefits for old people, and the military. It doesn't leave a lot of room to do anything else we desperately need to do. But it's pointless for the Democrats to try to reach a balanced agreement at this point because in the long-run they will just be digging their own graves.

Let's consider the likely effects of a "balanced deal":

1. The President would get some good short-term coverage by the VSPs over the "grand bargain."

2. The President and the Dems would then propose to use some of the new savings and revenues to make investments in the economy. Republicans would likely not agree to pass any of these proposals. They will want to use all of that to reduce the deficit so they can do #4 eventually. If amazingly the GOP did agree to this new spending, it would be ultimately be cut as part of a deal in #4. Then Dems will have gotten nothing in the long-term for the entitlement cuts other than a short-term pat on the back from the VSPs who are always wrong.

3. Republicans would then shamelessly rile up their base over "Obama's entitlement cuts", even though they were voted into law by many of their members, to win more seats in the 2014 midterms.

4. When Republicans eventually take back the White House they will enact a huge budget-busting tax cut again. That's what they always do. That's why the party exists at this point.

5. Then in a half-decade or decade later when Democrats are forced to clean up the budget mess yet again, Republicans will insist we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem, even though the only major thing that will have changed in the preceding years was a huge tax cut. The VSPs will not acknowledge that history and will still demand a balanced deal. So the Democrats will seek a balanced deal to reform entitlements again and cut more spending again, with some minor tax increases that will eventually be rolled back and then some.

..... Go back to Step 1, rinse, and repeat. This is like a negotiation with a savvy child over a toy or a dessert. Are Republicans still going to clean their room first when they know they will eventually get the toy or dessert anyway if they just hold their breath long enough?

And this cycle will seemingly continue forever thanks to gerrymandering, Democratic voters not turning out in big enough numbers for midterms, and ticket-splitters sending mixed signals. So other than for the good press over a "grand bargain", what exactly is in it for the Democrats to agree to a balanced deal right now?  Much like Obama's proposal to avoid the sequestration cuts, there seems to be way more for the Republicans to like in these deals than the Democrats, yet the Republicans are the ones most vociferously refusing to negotiate, with the sticking point being tax revenues.

If we need to cut entitlements now to avoid the big budget problems in 15-20 years which will need to be solved by.... (wait for it)... entitlement cuts, why not just wait 15-20 years and see how the budget looks at that time? Give ObamaCare a few decades to see if it can contain the rate at which health care spending is eating up the federal budget. If in 20 years, we really do have a serious debt problem, just enact the same entitlement cuts then. In the meantime, those proposing entitlement cuts seem like they have a solution that is a seeking a problem.

Republicans ideologically want to cut entitlements, but functionally have a difficult time doing so now without a lot of cover, since they are so dependent on older voters to win elections. Democrats are willing to give them that cover and they still won't take it. Also, putting off cutting entitlements until there is actually a real debt crisis would put everything on the table and would likely mean it will be easier to increase taxes as part of a deal at that time. For instance, helping to save Social Security by extending the payroll tax so it hits more of the income of richer people would probably poll at about 99% support if we reached a real crisis. Whereas now it's not even part of the discussion, which is a huge victory for Republicans.

So, for all these reasons I can no longer support entitlement reform, at least not right now. If someone can convince me that we will have both a sane center-left party and a sane center-right party negotiating in good faith to solve a genuine debt crisis that is in need of fixing immediately, I'll think about it. Good luck.

ObamaCare's Plan to Insure 30 Million More People Leads to 30 Million More People Being Insured

Here are a few of the headlines that caught my eye on the Yahoo! newsfeed this week:

The first article points out a glitch in the law that could affect two to four million people and whether or not they receive the proper tax credits to help pay for their insurance coverage. It's a legit hole that could easily be plugged if there was support in Congress to make government work better, rather than dismantle it.

The second article, however, seems to miss the overall point of the law. Let's face it, ObamaCare was a large bill, thousands of pages long, as Republicans were always eager to point out. Surely, you can pick out any one piece of the bill and say, this will hurt this business or that sector of the health care market. But when you take the bill in its entirety it's expected to be a net-good for almost everybody.

The bulk of the increase in claims costs will largely be passed on to the states who are implementing the expanded Medicaid coverage. And the Feds will be picking up 100% of those costs now and 90% in the future. The rest of the costs will effect those who get their insurance through the individual marketplace - self-employed people or very small businesses. Those who get insurance through their employer will not be affected by these changes.

With ObamaCare in general and on this issue specifically, my initial reaction usually is "compared to what?" If the baseline is millions of people have no health coverage and receive emergency room care for everything, then that currently is already driving up the costs of: health insurance, hospital reimbursements, tests and procedures, and the subsidies the government is providing for all of that. In the long term, after the initial increase in claims costs is absorbed, costs stabilize.

Focusing on something like increasing claims cost, which are due to more claims being filed because more people will have health coverage, while the costs of which are more than offset by reductions in costs elsewhere, misses the point. Covering more people is a feature of the law, not a bug. And if it was easy and inexpensive to extend coverage to the uninsured, it would have already been done years ago. The rise in claims costs was not unexpected and was already factored into the bill.

The key point here is that ObamaCare wasn't passed to ensure that the number of medical care claims were held steady. The main goals of ObamaCare were: 1)to help give thirty million-plus more people access to health coverage, 2)to end insurance company abuses by more tightly regulating the health insurance market, and 3)by doing those previous two things and by implementing hundreds more cost control mechanisms, to attempt to eventually bring down the growth in health care costs to a more manageable number going forward, so we can deal with our long-term debt problem. You can't accomplish those goals without some minor and somewhat major changes and reforms.

Update 03/28/13: Yahoo! News continues to troll ObamaCare.....

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?

Final Thoughts on the Election

Here are some longer thoughts on this election:

1. The Electoral College map figures to remain very tough for Republicans for at least the next few Presidential cycles. Currently, the six states with the most electoral votes are all getting more Democratic every year. California (55), Texas (38), Florida (29), New York (29), Illinois (20), and Pennsylvania (20) are all much more Democratic that they were 20 or even 10 years ago. California, New York, and Illinois remain safe deep blue states. Pennsylvania is a swing state in name-only, and is leaning Democratic now. As long as the Republican party keeps their extreme positions on social issues, they've lost the Philadelphia suburbs for good, and thus any chance of winning the state. Florida remains a true toss-up. So Texas is the only large state that is currently solidly Republican. And with the projected demographic trends, in 10 years Texas will likely become a swing state.

Even other fairly large states are becoming more Democratic. Virginia  (13) and North Carolina (15) were solid Republican states just 10 years ago and now are toss-up states, while Georgia (16) is approaching swing state status with the last two Presidential elections decided by just 5 and 8 points, respectively. And the Democrats still remain strong in New England and the upper Midwest.

In short, it appears unless there are drastic changes, the Republicans will have a narrow path to winning the Electoral College in the foreseeable future. Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina will be must-win states for the Republicans in every election, while the Democrats will start off with something like 220 electoral votes safely in hand.

2. Republicans aren't going to win in the majority of big cities any time soon, but they can't continue to get killed in cities and expect to win elections. Of the 25 largest cities in the country, Mitt Romney only won the majority of the votes in three: Phoenix (55-43), Jacksonville (51-47), and Fort Worth (57-41). The cities are where the voters are and in most big cities Democrats are winning 2/3 or more of the votes. The New Republic has more on this.


3. The Republicans and Tea Party marriage was mutually beneficial at first and now has really harmed Republicans. They used each other to get something in the short term. Republicans needed to re-brand themselves and needed grass roots energy to win back power. And the Tea Party apparently was really just made up of a lot of social conservatives pretending to care about the deficit in order to have more influence on social policy. Rachel Maddow was one of the first pundits to point out that the Tea Party kept insisting they were mainly concerned about the economy and the deficit, but if you actually paid attention to the people showing up at the rallies or how they spoke about abortion and marriage equality, you could tell this was just another iteration of the very extreme social conservative base of the party.

This was very apparent in 2010 when the Republicans lost what should have been three easy Senate seat pickups in NV (Harry Reid), CO (Michael Bennet), and DE (Chris Coons), by nominating the less electable Tea Party favorites in the primaries - Sharon Angle, Ken Buck, and Christine O'Donnell. All three of these candidates were favorites of the social conservatives and two ran on the "I will make abortion illegal, no exceptions" platform and were rejected by voters even in a Republican wave year.

Then the Republicans took back the House and decided to focus on passing a lot of bills (67 by last count as of August) to restrict access to abortion and contraception, because you know....jobs, jobs, jobs. So 67 bills directly or indirectly about restricting access to abortion or contraception and not one bill to create jobs.


4. In the 2012 cycle, the Tea Party still not deterred, cost the Republicans a chance at Senate seats in Missouri (Claire McCaskill). The more extreme Tea Party candidate won in the primary, so McCaskill ended up facing off against Todd "you can't pregnant from rape" Akin, while Indiana Republican incumbent Dick Lugar was defeated by Richard "rape is a gift from god" Mourdock in the primary. These candidates were a gift from god to the Democrats who won both seats easily.

We kept wondering why Republicans couldn't get the Tea Party coalition in line so they could win. But as the old proverb goes, "he who rides the tiger must beware lest he end up inside."

And arguably the Tea Party forcing the Republicans to adopt more extreme positions on abortion is what helped the Democrats turnout more women voters and win this group by such a big margin. This no doubt tipped other close House and Senate races to the Democrats and was a key factor in President Obama's victory in swing states.


5. When women voters vote in big numbers, Democrats win. Period. This election the Democrats won single women by a 67-31 margin and won women overall 55-44. The single women/married women gap was very large - 49 points! - as married women backed Republicans 56-43. The difference is there are a lot more single women voters now than there were years ago. This demographic trend is also helping the Democrats. Women are putting off getting married until later in life and thus the "marriage gap" is more of a factor every election.


6. I was offended by the dismissive talk in conservative circles about Obama winning by huge margins among the "non-white" vote, as if those voters don't really count. The argument boiled down to, "Obama won but he didn't win the majority of votes of real Americans." Republicans are still trying to comfort themselves that they didn't lose on the actual issues, since minority voters obviously don't vote on issues or anything. As if only white people concern themselves with abortion restrictions or tax cuts for the rich or Medicare cuts.

And actually a similar thing happened with how FDR's coalition came together in 1930's, but then it was the European immigrants of that time. If there were cable news and talk radio shows back then, I'm sure the Republican WASPs and the Rush Limbaughs of their time would have been saying similar things about how FDR just won with a coalition of unwashed masses like Irish, Italian, Jewish, and German immigrants who just wanted handouts from the government, taking from the people "who built this country." The more things change, the more they stay the same. That coalition of Northern ethnics and Southern whites mostly held for the Democrats for 40 years. It'll be interesting to see how long-lasting this new Democratic coalition is.


7. It was a solid win for the Democrats and the demographic trends are definitely in their favor, but perhaps a better Republican candidate and a flip of a total of a few million votes in a handful of states and we could be having a very different discussion at the moment. So I caution Democrats not to get too cocky and assume a semi-permanent new majority coalition is here to stay. It is going to take a lot of work to hold it together. Obama is a once in a generation politician who has the ability to motivate and inspire these voters. In four years there could a less-inspiring figure at the top of the ticket and this coalition could easily be fractured if Republicans make some savvy political decisions.

Marco Rubio could be running at the top of the GOP ticket in 2016 after having helped pass immigration reform. It's not hard to imagine the Republicans winning back similar levels of Latino support that Bush won, which would probably be enough to flip enough states to win the Presidency. So sadly the GOP could very well win again in 2016 without having to do much differently on the policy front. I figure the party will first try running on the same tired Bush/Romney agenda like they always do, but try it with a Latino guy at the top of the ticket and see how that goes. Only if that ticket is rejected will they moderate on other issues. So tokenism before substance most likely.


8. And finally, let's face it, Democrats don't just win over huge majorities of Latino and black voters because they have a lot of Latino and black officeholders. It's more the other way around - the big melting pot coalition of voters they already have, help elect the Latino and black officeholders. And the reason they have so much support from such a diverse group of voters is because of the results of the policies Democrats support. Clinton, Gore, and Kerry received close to the same percentage of the black vote nationally that Obama did because of policies not tribalism.

If Republicans wonder why 95% of black voters side with the Democrats, maybe it has something to do with the opposition to Civil Rights laws in the 1960's. Maybe it has something to do with the party passing state laws every cycle to try to keep many in this group from voting in elections. It's difficult for black voters to perceive the Republicans are treating them as equals when they are constantly trying to make voting more difficult.

Shockingly to some Republican pundits, black voters may not want to support a party who has people who attend rallies and consort and agree with people who carry signs like this

Or this:

Yes, surprisingly black voters who might even agree with you on taxes and social issues may not support your party if it includes a lot of people who think like this.

And of course who can forget this guy from a Romney rally in Ohio:

 (Source: Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)

Think of the comfort level these people at rallies must have to express such blatantly racist views in public. It's obvious they aren't scorned by other politically like-minded people and don't get a lot of negative feedback about it. And that's part of the problem with living in the bubble.

Maybe it has something to do with the conservative media that drives the party's agenda using code words or signals to attempt to make every issue into a "Hey, white people look at what black people are saying or doing now!" issue. Republicans, these are your friends in the media. You never say a bad word about Limbaugh or the people on Fox. If you want to appeal to black voters, maybe don't have so many racist friends or friends who are willing to play on white people's racial fears in order to get ratings.

The same thing applies to Latino voters. If you want to win over more Latino voters, maybe you need more candidates and talk show hosts who don't flex their muscles over how fast they can deport illegal immigrants, without giving any thought to the consequences of these policies on people and communities. The Arizona "papers please" law and near unanimous national Republican support of this did not help when it came time to run for President.

It may shock some Republicans, but if a significant portion of your base views Latinos as "invaders", then you might have trouble wooing Latino voters. (source AP/Chris Pizzelle)

If you are a Latino voter, do you want to vote for the guy who hangs out with the guy who views having too many Latinos in this country as a problem in and of itself?

In short, until the Republican party leaders stand up to and call-out blatant racists and xenophobes, instead of just ignoring them publicly while keeping them in the fold with dog-whistles, black and Latino voters simply won't trust that any outreach is sincere. Republicans have a big choice to make and they can't honestly court minority voters without alienating part of their base, and vice versa.