http://youtu.be/AxXwiRAqz3g
Once again, Rolling Stone has proved to me why they’re worth subscribing to. They have three excellent pieces on the Republican party this issue. In this piece, national correspondent Tim Dickinson points out the real power in the Republican caucus is… the radical Republican Study Committee, which of course includes many members of the teabagger caucus.
Members from these über-safe districts don’t fear the challenge posed by a mainstream Democrat in the general election. They dread a well-funded primary opponent running to their right. “You’ve got very small numbers of people who vote in GOP primaries,” says Bartlett, who served in the Reagan administration. “It doesn’t take very many of these Tea Party people to show up to find out you’re on your ass.”
To keep this threat fresh in members’ minds, the Club for Growth recently launched a campaign called “Primary My Congressman!” that seeks to oust centrist Republicans from safe seats – and replace them with the hardest of the hardcore. “The Club for Growth is a cancer on the Republican Party,” said Steve LaTourette, a recently retired moderate House Republican from Ohio. “The only thing that grows when the Club for Growth gets involved is the number of Democrats in office.”
Republicans were also ecstatic when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision undermined the system of regulated campaign finance. But this boon to the wealthy donor class has become the bane of those trying to forge party unity. Now donors can microtarget the faction of Republicanism that suits them best. “There’s a difference between rich Republicans used to working through K Street and the guy who just sold his plumbing business and happens to be a total libertarian winger,” says the think-tank fellow. The rise of outside money has made a mockery of what used to be the leadership’s biggest stick: “If leadership says, ‘We’re not going to fund you if you don’t vote with us,’ the members laugh,” the strategist says. “‘Keep your $10,000. I’m going to take $200,000 from an outside group.’ Or better yet, ‘I’m going to start my own Super PAC and send out e-mails about how John Boehner is standing in the way of our shared values.'”
In the last election, for instance, John Ramsey, a 21-year-old Ron Paul fan from Texas, used money he inherited from his grandparents to create the Liberty for All Super PAC. He funded the winning campaign of libertarian Kentucky freshman Massie with more than $629,000 in independent expenditures. As a result, Massie – a gregarious, MIT-educated 42-year-old – is a party of one, free to buck GOP leadership. Indeed, in his very first week in office, Massie joined in the coup effort that nearly stripped Boehner of his speakership.
The chaos now roiling the House is, in many ways, a battle between the two most powerful GOP party bosses – Karl Rove and Jim DeMint. For Rove, the activists of the Republican base have always been useful rubes. Republicans in the Rove school campaign on wedge issues that rally grassroots Republicans to the polls. But once these politicians get to Washington, they shift to fight for the interests of the party’s financial backers. In the emerging party of DeMint, however, the base that Rove scorns is everything. Only the daily pressure of grassroots activists, DeMint believes, can force Republicans to deliver in Washington on the smallgovernment promises they make to their constituents back home.
These two schools of governing can’t, ultimately, be reconciled. The DeMint school believes in combat, and in turning every possible government choke point into a high-stakes confrontation: You win by standing on principle, refusing to yield and letting the chips fall where they may. As Cruz put it to activists in Dallas, “If you have an impasse, one side or the other has to blink. How do we win? Don’t blink.”
“The elites have different agendas than the rank and file,” says Bartlett, the former Reagan official. “Your average Tea Party people may be content to have gridlock forever, but the money people – the corporations, the lobbyists – they need stuff.” And people in that camp have a lot riding on John Boehner and Eric Cantor.
Boehner and Cantor have learned to speak the language of the Tea Party – the majority leader more fluently than the speaker – but their real job is to keep the old Republican-patronage machine humming. In their political bloodlines and in their donor networks, both Boehner and Cantor are deeply connected to the politics of Rove. Boehner’s signature accomplishment was steering George W. Bush’s education initiative No Child Left Behind to passage – a law that Needham decries as “a gargantuan federalization of education” and “an anathema to conservatives.” For his part, Cantor was a key member of the 2003 Tom DeLay whip team that twisted arms in an infamous all-night session required to pass the deficit-financed Medicare prescription-drug plan, a Rove-driven gift to Big Pharma and the most sweeping expansion of the program since the days of Lyndon Johnson.
Boehner is renowned as a “Chamber of Commerce Republican” – and the campaign-finance data are unambiguous: In the 2012 election cycle, Boehner was the House’s top recipient of campaign cash from 34 different industries, from hedge funds and investment firms to coal mining, studentloan companies, hospitals, nursing homes and Big Tobacco. He was also the top recipient of campaign cash from lobbyists themselves, raking in $393,000 according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. In D.C., the speaker’s clubby network of staffers and lobbyists is known as “Boehnerland,” and its members include heavy hitters for Citigroup, UPS, Altria, AmEx, Akin Gump and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “The Boehner folks barbecue on Sunday together, they go on vacations together, they name their kids after each other,” says the former leadership aide.
Although he’s positioned himself as a kindred spirit of House insurgents, and has even joined the RSC, Cantor is perhaps more deeply knitted into the Republican establishment than Boehner is. It was Cantor’s prodigious fundraising talents that elevated him to the fast track in 2003, when he became chief-deputy whip after just one term in Congress. Married to a former Goldman Sachs VP, he speaks the language of the investment class and is said to sell financiers on the “return on investment” of their political donations to the party. He’s been a fierce defender of the hedge-fund loophole that taxes the income of top investors at less than the rate of their secretaries – once arguing that taxing “carried interest” at normal rates would hurt “the average blue-jean-wearing American.” Over his career, he’s raised more than $2.4 million from the investment community.
The drama in the GOP House used to center around the palace intrigue between Cantor and Boehner. The rift was real – but exacerbated by hyperloyal staffers, in particular, Boehner’s former chief of staff, Barry Jackson, who has since decamped for K Street. By all accounts, the speaker and the majority leader now enjoy a smoother working relationship. “The guys agree on most policy,” says the former leadership aide. “I mean, there’s very little dividing line on that.” The two men even share the same benefactor: The Cantor-affiliated Super PAC YG Action Fund received $5 million from casinos magnate Sheldon Adelson last cycle – the same amount that the Boehner-affiliated Congressional Leadership Fund got.
The budget fight produced a worst-case hybrid of Republican governance. The forces of DeMint succeeded in grinding the gears of Washington to a halt – provoking the first government shutdown in 17 years. But not before the forces of Rove had whittled a big, existential battle over the size of government down to a squabble over poll-tested tweaks to the president’s health care law.
In the end, Republicans did not shut down the government for a full repeal of Obamacare. Rather, they furloughed nearly 1 million federal employees, shuttered national parks and brought other core functions of government to a halt, because they couldn’t persuade Democrats to agree to a one-year delay in the mandate that Americans buy insurance – or face a $95 fine. Said New York Rep. Peter King, one of the few centrists left in the House GOP, “[This] whole thing has become madness.”
The madness has also ratcheted up the danger of a catastrophic federal default, looming on October 17th. Left to their own devices, House radicals won’t pull themselves back from this brink: “If we miss the deadline, it’s no big crisis,” RSC member John Fleming of Louisiana told Rolling Stone. “It can be used politically.” But if Boehner sidelines the Tea Party contingent and defuses the debt-ceiling crisis with the help of Nancy Pelosi and Democratic votes, it’s likely to be his last act as speaker.
Even the men who put this chaos in motion have admitted they don’t have a strategy for the endgame. They just wanted to put the ball in play. Speaking on September 19th, after the House had all but guaranteed a federal shutdown, Jordan invoked the coach of the NFL’s New England Patriots. “Even Belichick,” he said, “doesn’t script out the whole game.”
Thanks to Jason Kalafat Defense Attorney.
