Get Ready For a Republi-CON Rumble

UPDATE V:  "John Boehner was brought down by the same conservative forces he once courted."

Read Slate, The Revolution Devours Its Own.  

UPDATE IV:  "Meet the new leader, same as the old leader. Rep. Eric Cantor’s defeat last week was a message from grass-roots conservatives to Washington’s Republican leaders: No more business as usual. But on the eve of the election to replace Cantor as majority leader—the second most powerful person in the House of Representatives—it doesn’t look like there’s been much of a change in how the House will function. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was in the No. 3 position, is now going to be elevated to Cantor’s old post. McCarthy is not an agent of change. On the issue of immigration, for example, which helped inflame opposition to Cantor, McCarthy is even more moderate. (He has in the past expressed support for giving undocumented immigrants a path to legal status.) House Speaker John Boehner, whom grass-roots activists criticize as a capitulator and dealmaker, is more powerful than ever, because without Cantor waiting in the wings, there is less threat that another member of the House could harness his grass-roots critics."

Read Slate, Under Old Management.  

UPDATE III: "How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more. . .

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.
 
Read The New York Times, The Fix Isn’t In. 

UPDATE II:  "Republicans simply don’t trust bipartisan deals.

It’s an ideological trait that goes beyond mere hatred for Obama, which is considerable. . .

Opposing Cantor because he’s too lovey-dovey with Obama is insane. But that, more than any ideology, is the reason Cantor lost, and the reason Republicans have been reportedly forced into legislative strategies — default threats, shutdowns, killing immigration reform — they see as contrary to their own best interest. Even Cantor’s totalistic obstruction is not enough. Conservative Republicans want them to fight, and fight, and fight."

Read New York Magazine, Conservatives Don’t Hate the Immigration Deal. They Hate All Deals.

UPDATE:  "The Republican primary for a Senate seat in North Carolina Tuesday offers the most desperate political prognosticators a chance to read the tobacco leaves heading into 2016."

Read the Wall Street Journal, N.C. GOP Primary Offers Preview of Sorts for 2016.

"Any Republican donor who thought that the shutdown would 'break the fever' of the Tea Party, or that it would prove the pesky base wrong about its strategy, clearly didn’t know enough conservatives. . . The immediate political legacy of the #StandWithCruz moment is a surge of primary challenges, mostly in states or districts that Democrats won’t even try to win. The goal: replace the graybeard Republicans who 'caved' with Cruz/Lee doppelgangers who won’t."

Read Slate, The Next Ted Cruz. 

This might even continue through the 2016 election cycle.

The Civil War Continues: Republi-CON Establishment v. Republi-CON Rage

UPDATE IX:  "In the three years they've been in power, Tea Partiers have gone through the stages of grief—from denial to acceptance of how Washington works."

Read The Atlantic, Why Republicans Are Surrendering on the Debt Ceiling. 

Read also, The New Republic, Why the Tea Party Is Folding on the Debt Limit, which noted that "[p]ior to the shutdown, it wasn’t clear whether Bachmann et al were irrational (that is, so zealously attached to their ideological goals that they ignored conventional political incentives, like widespread public disapproval), or delusional (meaning they were perfectly capable of responding to political incentives in theory; they just assumed the masses supported them).

The shutdown demonstrated that the Tea Partiers are, for the most part, delusional rather than irrational: They can be forced to reconsider a particular tactic if you persuade them it’s politically catastrophic. It just requires an epic level of public anger to break through their epistemically-stunted consciousness. The Tea Partiers had basically believed that the country backed their monomaniacal fixation on repealing Obamacare, and their jihadi plan for getting it done. The shutdown, or at least the endless shutdown-inspired hand-wringing on Fox News, managed to disabuse even them of this belief."

UPDATE VIII:  Does the Republi-con Party now regret its many Tea Party Frankensteins?

"Stockman, the would-be senator, must have thought he had gamed the system just right when he entered the primary battle against Cornyn on the last possible day. He seems to have calculated that his extreme views would automatically make him a contender, but it hasn’t turned out that way."

Read the Washington Post, Stockman steps forward as Republicans step back.

Read also about how Boehner has "reached his limit. In a meeting with his House colleagues to discuss Wednesday’s budget agreement, the House speaker finally let loose on the conservative groups that have been roiling Republican politics.  Read Slate, Boehner Lowers the Boom. 

 

UPDATE VII:  And the Republi-con civil war continues

"Texas Senator John Cornyn's challenge from Steve Stockman, a militia-loving birther congressman, could be the ultimate expression of Tea Party nihilism."

Read The Atlantic, The Republican Primary to End All Republican Primaries or Salon, Texas’ insane Tea Party caper: Nutjob challenges extreme conservative!

Go Ted and the Tea Party, Go!

UPDATE VI:  "With a budget conference forming and a new debt-ceiling hike coming early in 2014, there's more strife to come. Here is who to watch."

Read The Atlantic, Sanity Caucus vs. Kamikaze Caucus: A Cheat Sheet for the GOP Civil War.

UPDATE V:  "Shutdown polling looks apocalyptic for the Republican Party, but at the Values Voters Summit, activists weren't ready to back down."

The Atlantic, Inside the Conservative Bubble, It Looks Like Ted Cruz Is Winning Big. 

UPDATE IV:  "Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration — and the martyrdom — they sought.

Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP.

At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers would find the courage to stand up to tea party toughs, and so that business leaders would decide to stop funding a small band of right-wing activists whose interests are antithetical to their own.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans, by 53 percent to 31 percent, blame the Republican Party for the shutdown more than they do President Obama — worse even than Republicans fared during the 1995-96 shutdown that also proved ruinous to their party.

The poll, confirming earlier results, found the Republican Party and the tea party had both reached all-time lows. Americans now favor a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress by eight percentage points. And the percentage of Americans who think Obamacare is a good idea is up seven points from last month. Seventy percent say Republicans are putting politics ahead of the good of the country.

The small-but-vocal tea party had been seeking just such a confrontation since the 2010 election, and they opposed compromises by Republican leaders that postponed the showdown until now. Conservative groups that advocated for a standoff spoke openly about their motives. At a breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Michael Needham, chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action, freely admitted that he was 'pretty optimistic' that we will soon see a crackup of the old Republican order.

Read the Washington Post, Cruzifiction of the GOP. 

UPDATE III:  "In trying to understand the Republican Party’s internal battles, it helps to think of Michael and Sonny.

Corleone, that is.

On one side we have Sonny, the hotheaded, impulsive, shoot-now-take-names-later son of Don Corleone. On Capitol Hill, he personifies the tea party followers who would rather die on principle than live to win a later day.

On the other side, we have Michael, the cooler-headed son and intellectual strategist. On the Hill, Michael represents the so-called establishment legislators who understand the way forward but thus far have been reluctant to pull the trigger."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP divide: A battle of Corleones.

UPDATE II:  "We’re used to brinkmanship in Washington resulting from conflict between Democrats and Republicans. But this shutdown is different. It’s a fight between Republicans and Republicans -- or, more specifically, Republicans and the Tea Party. . .

Back in 2011, the Republican establishment was sufficiently in sync with the tea party to harness their recklessness against the Obama administration. Boehner argued that his new members were just wild enough to crash through the debt ceiling and harm the economy, which gave him crucial leverage in his negotiations with the White House.

But then Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, and the Republican establishment began to alter its approach. The tea party, however, didn’t. Now Boehner and other mainstream Republicans dealing with tea party legislators face the same problem Democrats faced in 2011: It’s hard to negotiate with people who don’t care about, or even really believe in, the consequences of burning the place down. . .

The problem for Boehner and the rest of the Republican establishment is that the tea party ethos is now being turned against them. After all, mainstream conservatives will compromise with 'evil' (or, if you prefer, 'Democrats'). For tea partiers, that makes them suspect, too. In fact, one way tea party Republicans can prove they haven’t sold out to Washington’s ways is by opposing any compromise Boehner proposes."

Read the Washington Post, The shutdown is a Republican civil war.

BTW, the previous update was 07/29/2011, during earlier budget negotiations.  And as I said before, this civil war has been brewing since November 2008.

UPDATE: The title says it all.

Read the Washington Post, Debt ceiling debate shows GOP at war with itself.

The Republi-con civil war continues. "The Republican Party is undergoing a big change in how it chooses its leaders."

Read The New York Times, For G.O.P., End of the Preordained Candidate.

Go Ted and the Tea Party, Go!

UPDATE:  Tuesday is a pivotal day for the Tea Party in their civil war with the Republi-con establishment.  They have already lost the battle in NJ, where "highly popular incumbent Chris Christie, who conspicuously spurned the tea party wing, is cruising to reelection. In Virginia, a seat that should be safely Republican has been put in jeopardy. . .

[The Democratic nominee, Terry McAuliffe] shouldn’t have a chance in this race. He’s a liberal from New York, a McLean millionaire, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who served as chief moneyman to Bill and Hillary Clinton. A company he led as chairman until last year, GreenTech, is under federal investigations, and he failed to disclose his investment in a Rhode Island insurance scam that used the identities of dying people."

Read the Washington Post,When the tea party jumped the shark.

Another battle is a special Republican primary runoff for Congress in South Alabama, piting “Bradley Byrne, a lawyer and former Republican officeholder” who is supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against "Dean Young, the Tea Party-backed businessman."

Read The New York Times, In Alabama Race, a Test of Business Efforts to Derail Tea Party.
 FYI -- jumping the shark, coined to describe an episode of the 1970s TV show Happy Days, is an idiom "used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery, which is usually a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use [a cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry] in a desperate attempt to keep viewers' interest."

"Polling released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News found the GOP’s unfavorability ratings among Americans at an all-time high of 63 percent.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals that this has been accompanied by a massive collapse in 2013 of the GOP brand among core constituencies important in midterm elections: Independents, women, and seniors. The crack Post polling team has produced a new chart demonstrating that in the last year — since just before the 2012 election – there’s been a truly astonishing spike in the GOP’s unfavorable ratings among these core groups:

 The interactive chart (run the cursor on the bars for numbers) shows the GOP’s unfavorable ratings have jumped 19 points among seniors, to 65 percent; 17 points among independents, to 67 percent; and 10 points among women, to 63 percent. Those are all key constituencies in midterm elections."

Read the Washington Post, The implosion of the GOP brand, in one chart.

And invite Sarah to join in too!

How Radical Can They Be?

UPDATE VII:  Republi-con "elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. . .

Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner."

Read The New York Times, The Boehner Bunglers. 

UPDATE VI:   How did the Republi-cons become so radical?

"It was Mr. Gingrich who pioneered the political dysfunction we still live with. His inflammatory rhetoric provided a model for the grandstanding guerrilla warfare of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. And his actions — particularly his move to shut down the government in 1995 and 1996 — undermined popular trust and ushered in the present political era of confrontation and obstruction.

But here’s the catch: Mr. Gingrich, of Georgia, rose to party leadership because he was the preferred candidate of the moderates themselves. They even sided with him against Robert H. Michel of Illinois, the House minority leader from 1981 until 1995, who, in his civility and willingness to cooperate with Democrats, embodied the moderate’s political sensibility.

Mr. Michel once reminded his fellow House Republicans that “we also have an obligation to the American people” to be “responsible participants in the process.” Talk of obligation and responsibility to the greater public good would quickly become obsolete in the Gingrich era of hyperbolic partisanship.

The problem for Republicans was that playing a “responsible” role appeared to consign them to permanent minority status. For a 40-year span beginning in 1955, Republicans were in a minority in the House and were in the majority for only six years in the Senate. By the early 1990s, even moderate House Republicans felt that the ruling Democrats had grown arrogant and corrupt.

As moderates came to believe that nothing was to be gained from cooperating with Democrats, they became more receptive to Mr. Gingrich’s argument that the way to dislodge the entrenched majority was to polarize the electorate while attacking Congress as an irredeemable and illegitimate institution. . .

The Republican Party won’t change course until the Gingrich strategy for winning House elections stops working."

Read The New York Times, The Moderates Who Lighted the Fuse. 

UPDATE V:  Republi-cons are "barking-mad pack of ideologues," with an approach that "places great value on zeal and combativeness and isn’t very concerned with success" and an idée fixe "that some sort of cataclysmic confrontation is inevitable."

"This is the reality that finally brought Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of DC’s most arbiters of political standards and practices, fastidiously sober, even-handed and high-minded, to finally just throw up their hands mid-last-year and say 'Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.'"

The party is "committed to a reckless, pointless budget brinkmanship, which creates a perpetual cycle of outrage and disillusionment among conservatives and leaves Washington lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next."

"[D]ivided government now looks like dysfunctional government.  And despite the political security created by the rigged system of redistricting, Republicans may suddenly find the congressional midterms a referendum on their ability to get things done.  The scorecard is ugly on that front, providing yet another reason for Democrats to accept a government shutdown, however painful.

There is the sense that maybe the stark stupidity of this conflict will break the hyper-partisan fever consuming our nation’s capital.  Republicans are realizing that the angry conservative populist forces they empowered to achieve power have turned on them and are now actively restricting their ability to be taken seriously as a governing force."

Read The American Conservative, Republicans, Over the Cliff.

The article quotes other conservatives, and concludes that the "Republicans cannot govern. These people aren’t conservatives. They are radicals."

UPDATE IV:  "What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule."

Read The New York Times, Our Democracy Is at Stake,.

The article notes that the "contempt for the democratic process" by a "superempower[ed] small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule" is the result, of among other things, "the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — [which] has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so." 

UPDATE III:  What are the Republi-cons risking by shutting-down the government to attack Obamacare?

"Right now, then, a kind of sour spot seems like a pretty plausible outcome for Republicans: A shutdown that lasts just long enough to convince swing voters that the G.O.P. can’t be trusted with the reins of government, but also ends with the party’s grassroots convinced that they’ve been sold out by their leaders once again."

Read The New York Times, Is Republican Intransigence Reasonable?   

UPDATE II:  "It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be. . .

The blown opportunities and self-inflected wounds are adding up."

Read Politico, Eve of Destruction, which notes that the problem is that "pressure from conservative media only encourages their public voices to say things that offend."

UPDATE:  Republi-cons may soon "suffer a third straight crushing defeat at the Presidential level. Based on history and common sense, that will probably be enough to give the reformers the upper hand. With today’s G.O.P., though, you never can be sure. . .

A party that loses once can put it down to bad luck or the political cycle. A party that loses twice can blame a bad candidate. (That’s you, Mitt!) A party that loses three times can hardly avoid some navel inspection. . .

For now, the G.O.P. and many of its tribunes on Capitol Hill appear content to ignore this elemental fact of political life. Maybe things will change during the next few months, but I wouldn’t wager on it. More and more, it’s looking like it will take Hillary Clinton, or another Democrat, succeeding Barack Obama in the White House to bring about real changes in the G.O.P.

To put it another way, the great G.O.P. freak show still has a ways to run. From the point of view of the cynical heckler in the cheap seats, that’s just dandy: extremism and nuttiness makes good copy, and it keeps the Republicans out of the White House. The problem is that, diverting as it is, the show is paralyzing the government and doing great damage to the country."

Read The New Yorker, Why the G.O.P. Needs to Lose For a Third Time.

"When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was picked as Mitt Romney’s running mate last August, conservatives rejoiced.

Ryan, after all, is known as a conservative’s conservative, having authored the GOP budget that contained trillions in spending cuts and major entitlement reform. By picking Ryan, the logic went, Romney was making a bold choice in the name of shoring up the GOP base.

But in today’s Republican Party, Ryan’s recent voting record is hardly one of the most conservative. And in fact, his votes over the past two years paint the picture of a middle-of-the-road conservative Republican rather than a rabble-rousing tea party crusader.

Whether that says more about the Republican Party or Paul Ryan is up for debate."

Read the Washington Post, In today’s GOP, Paul Ryan is middle-of-the-road. 

This is interesting because Ryan was (and I do mean was) a expected contender in 2016. Read the Washington Post, Rubio vs. Rand vs. Ryan, The race for conservative mantle in 2016. 

Even more interesting, "CPAC will have a hole in the line-up: Chris Christie, the outspoken governor of New Jersey, has not been invited to speak at CPAC, despite his massive popularity."  Read the Washington Post, Chris Christie’s CPAC snub.

Republi-cons just don't understand or accept that political extremism is a problem in the general election, even Romney, who was a relative liberal before the campaign, lost in 2012 to Obama and a bad economy.