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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

How the Republicans Broke Congress

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In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings. Worse, Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.

Congress no longer works the way it’s supposed to. But we’ve said that before.

Eleven years ago, we published a book called “The Broken Branch,” which we subtitled “How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.” Embedded in that subtitle were two assumptions: first, that Congress as an institution — which is to say, both parties, equally — is at fault; and second, that the solution is readily at hand. In 2017, the Republicans’ scandalous tax bill is only the latest proof that both assumptions are wrong.

Which is not to say that we were totally off base in 2006. We stand by our assessment of the political scene at the time. What is astounding, and still largely unappreciated, is the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause. If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Even today, many people like to imagine that the damage has all been President Trump’s doing — that he took the Republican Party hostage. But the problem goes much deeper.

We do not come at this issue as political partisans; though we are registered Democrats, we have supported Republicans, consider ourselves moderates and have worked with key figures in both parties to improve political processes. Still, we can’t help seeing the Republican Party as the root cause of today’s political instability. Three major developments in the party required us to change our view.

First, beginning in the 1990s, the Republicans strategically demonized Congress and government more broadly and flouted the norms of lawmaking, fueling a significant decline of trust in government that began well before the financial collapse in 2008, though it has sped up since. House Republicans showed their colors when they first blocked passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, despite the urgent pleas of their own president, George W. Bush, and the speaker of the House, John Boehner. The seeds of a (largely phony) populist reaction were planted.

Second, there was the “Obama effect.” When Mr. Bush became president, Democrats worked with him to enact sweeping education reform early on and provided the key votes to pass his top priority, tax cuts. With President Barack Obama, it was different. While many argued that the problem was that Mr. Obama failed to schmooze enough with Republicans in Congress, we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic. The Senate under the majority leader Mitch McConnell weaponized the filibuster to obstruct legislation, block judges and upend the policy process. The Obama effect had an ominous twist, an undercurrent of racism that was itself embodied in the “birther” movement led by Donald Trump.

House leaders continued to inflame the populist anger of their base to win enormous midterm victories in 2010 and 2014. They repeatedly promised the impossible under divided party government: that if they won, Mr. Obama would be forced to his knees, his policies obliterated and government as we knew it demolished. Their subsequent failures to do so spurred even more rage, this time directed at establishment Republican leaders. But most pundits still clung to the belief that pragmatism would win out and Republicans would nominate an establishment insider in 2016.

Third, we have seen the impact of significant changes in the news media, which had a far greater importance on the right than on the left. The development of the modern conservative media echo chamber began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in the late 1980s and ramped up with the birth of Fox News. Matt Drudge, his protégé Andrew Breitbart and Breitbart’s successor Steve Bannon leveraged the power of the internet to espouse their far-right views. And with the advent of social media, we saw the emergence of a radical “alt-right” media ecosystem able to create its own “facts” and build an audience around hostility to the establishment, anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment. Nothing even close to comparable exists on the left.

Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.

This is a far cry from the aspirations of Republican presidential giants like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as legions of former Republican senators and representatives who identified critical roles for government and worked tirelessly to make them succeed. It’s an agenda bereft of any serious efforts to remedy the problems that trouble vast segments of the American public, including the disaffected voters who flocked to Mr. Trump.

The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy. A few Republican senators have spoken up, but occasional words have not been matched by any meaningful deeds. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.

We have never suggested that Democrats are angels and Republicans devils. Parties exist to win elections and organize government, and they are shaped by the interests, ideas and donors that constitute their coalitions. Neither party is immune from a pull to the extreme.

But the imbalance today is striking, and frightening. Our democracy requires vigorous competition between two serious and ideologically distinct parties, both of which operate in the realm of truth, see governing as an essential and ennobling responsibility, and believe that the acceptance of republican institutions and democratic values define what it is to be an American. The Republican Party must reclaim its purpose.
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NRSC staffers resign after digital break-in

Two fundraising staffers for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who broke into the computer servers of the House GOP campaign arm resigned late last week, Republican sources said.

The staffers, Laura Kleffner and Krista Madaio, had previously worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee. POLITICO first reported last week that the NRSC aides used their old NRCC passwords to collect information on more than 200,000 donors, according to three Republican sources.

The digital break-in infuriated NRCC officials when they became aware of it in October.

The NRSC and NRCC both declined to comment on Monday.
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Dem share of the electorate is near its lowest as well.
 
The G.O.P. Is Rotting—Brooks

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A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot. You don’t help your cause by putting the pursuit of power above character, by worshiping at the feet of some loutish man or another, by claiming the ends justify any means. You don’t successfully rationalize your own tawdriness by claiming your opponents are satanic. You don’t save Christianity by betraying its message.

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto.

It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.

The Republican Party I grew up with admired excellence. It admired intellectual excellence (Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley), moral excellence (John Paul II, Natan Sharansky) and excellent leaders (James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick). Populism abandoned all that — and had to by its very nature. Excellence is hierarchical. Excellence requires work, time, experience and talent. Populism doesn’t believe in hierarchy. Populism doesn’t demand the effort required to understand the best that has been thought and said. Populism celebrates the quick slogan, the impulsive slash, the easy ignorant assertion. Populism is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.

Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.

Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.

Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time. They have no vision of the common good, except that Republican donors should get more money and Democratic donors should have less.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”
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Privatization mythology being recognized

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JOHN HARRISON, Winston-Salem

Privatization myth

Journal reporter Richard Craver cannot be too highly commended for his reporting on the Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions debacle.

The mismanagement and abuse of public funds is truly nauseating and was allowed to persist for far too long — if indeed, it should have been conceived as a means of caring for vulnerable citizens in the first place.

Much of the blame rests with conservative politicians and their blind belief that the private sector is always better. Clearly this is not the case here and in numerous other instances, like the privatization of prisons and schools, which has gone badly in many states.

Transferring enormous amounts of public funding appropriated for services to the vulnerable and dependent to corporations and quasi-NGOs, thus making clients a source of profit, strikes me as morally dubious. Immediately, the funding is diluted by high salaries to executives, in the Cardinal case extortionate, and the need to trim staff costs and services so that companies accrue profits and surplus funds.

It is high time that the myth surrounding the privatization of public services was dispelled and that elected politicians ceased to abnegate responsibility for those least able to care for themselves.
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Another letter to W-SJ

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BARNEY HARPER, Winston-Salem

Obstructing justice

It seems to me that when President Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, claims that Trump “cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer” under the Constitution, what he really means is that Trump can obstruct justice. He can do whatever he wants, Dowd might phrase it, and no one can stop him.

If that’s the case, then he can fire the head of the FBI every week and nobody can do anything about it because he’s the president. He can grab all the feminine private parts he wants and nobody can stand up to him and make him quit. He can pardon himself for any crime he commits and there’s no legal recourse.

And so can the next Democratic president.

Didn’t we leave Europe to escape that type of imperial behavior? Or is that only when there’s a Democrat in office?

I know some Republicans, good people, who have disavowed the Republican Party because it has leaned so far toward fascism and dictatorial rule and sheer worship of Trump as if he’s Jesus. They recognize that there are such things as fairness, integrity and honesty, and they don’t see that in the party any longer. How long will it take the rest to wake up?
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David Brooks is an idiot. Republicans like Mitt Romney, and Ben Sasse are the worst, two-faced pieces of shit in the Senate. They vote with Trump 99% of the time, and then bitch about his temperament in the media.
 
Romney’s never been in the Senate nor had any opportunity to vote with or against Trump.

And he certainly spoke against Trump in no uncertain terms during the primaries. And I suspect (as apparently does Trump) that Romney would be a [selectively, likely] counter to Trump if he does get into the Senate.

It’s true that Pubs generally will go along with Trump as long as it suits their interests, until it does not. And that’s part of what Brooks is pointing out is wrong with them. That and that their interests are anymore irrational, counterproductive, intellectually vacuous, and likely harmful.

And he’s correct, IMO.

He’s also correct that better-educated Pubs are struggling and leaving the party.
 
ConnorEl said:
Romney’s never been in the Senate nor had any opportunity to vote with or against Trump.
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He’s also correct that better-educated Pubs are struggling and leaving the party.
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Thank you for the correction. I include Romney in that group of anti-Trump Republican congressmen because he is always brought up as part of conservative Trump opposition, which are nearly all rank & file "classic" conservatives who are absolutely full of shit.
 
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