Saturday, March 23, 2024
GOP Chaos And Mike Johnson's Religiosity Are Turning Off Donors
To say the Republican majority in the House of Representatives since January, 2023, has been a shit show is likely being too kind. To gain the speakership, Kevin McCarty made a deal with the devil, namely the far right extremist elements of the House GOP and set the mechanism in place for his own removal. The chaos has continued under Speaker Mike Johnson and the hard right bomb throwers of the so-called Freedom Caucus continue to fail to grasp that outside of some elements of the MAGA base and the Christofascist of the GOP base, most Americans do not want what the far right GOP is offering, especially on culture war issues. Even Sen. Josh Hawley, hardly one of my favorites, has condemned the House Republicans, calling them "stupid", for proposing increasing the retirement age for Social Security, thereby setting the stage for more taxpayers to either die before receiving benefits or receiving reduced benefits over the balance of their lives. A piece in the New York Times looks at the missteps of the GOP far right while one at Bloomberg looks at Johnson's struggles with business leaders who are turned off by his religiosity and the chaos in the GOP controlled House. First, these highlights from the Times:
As 2023 opened with Republicans newly in control of the House, the far-right members of the party considered themselves empowered when it came to federal spending, with increased muscle to achieve the budget cuts of their dreams.
But it turned out that many of their Republican colleagues did not share their vision of stark fiscal restraint. Or at least not fervently enough to go up against a Democratic Senate and White House to try to bring it into fruition.
Instead, Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday pushed through a $1.2 trillion bipartisan package to fund the government for the rest of the year, with none of the deep cuts or policy changes that ultraconservatives had demanded. Those on the right fringe have been left boiling mad and threatening to make him the second Republican speaker to be deposed this term.
“The speaker failed us today,” declared Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, after one of his ultraright colleagues, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, filed a measure to potentially force a vote to remove Mr. Johnson, over a spending plan she called “atrocious” and “a betrayal.”
The vote and its bitter aftermath brought to a head the simmering tensions among congressional Republicans about difficult spending issues, including whether to force a government shutdown to try to achieve their budget aims — a divide that once again has sent House Republicans spiraling into chaos.
The looming challenge to Mr. Johnson from within sparked quick recriminations from other Republicans, who accused their colleagues of sowing discord that harms their own party and its chances of success in a pivotal election for control of Congress in November.
In the end, the bills funding the government represented fairly traditional compromise measures. They gave each party some wins, some losses and some election-year talking points while providing federal agencies with substantial financial resources through Sept. 30.
Not only did members of the far right not get the steep cuts and severe border restrictions they had envisioned, they were also unable to secure the conservative policy riders they had sought to stop the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, with most of the truly contentious proposals stripped out because Democrats would not accept them.
But in making hard-line demands in a narrowly divided Congress, the right wing essentially dealt itself out of the process, in large part because it was clear from the start that its members were highly unlikely to vote for any spending bill, even if they got what they demanded. The situation left Mr. Johnson, who sees himself as a right-wing Republican, unable to produce sufficient Republican votes to pass legislation, and therefore with little choice but to work with Democrats to do so.
Democrats have repeatedly suggested that they would come to Mr. Johnson’s aid should Republicans move to oust him. They bemoaned the damage being done to the House by the constant turmoil and infighting.
“It is going to undermine very substantially the institution,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and a former majority leader. “And I think it is very regrettable that we have people on the floor of the House of Representatives who believe their opinion is so superior to the opinion of others.
In addition to constant chaos within the Republican caucus that upsets donors, Mike Johnson's religiosity and allegiance to far right evangelicals and Christofascists is off putting to some GOP donors. Here are highlights from Bloomberg:
House Republicans are falling further behind on campaign cash with little-known House Speaker Mike Johnson at the helm.
Unlike his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, Johnson is struggling to build a donor network. His difficulties come just months before the November election with Republicans’ narrow majority at risk.
Johnson, who lacks McCarthy’s fundraising prowess and deep business ties, has dramatically ramped up meetings with donors, traveling to 50 cities in nearly 20 states. But the party’s deficit with Democrats is growing, according to federal filings.
The gap echoes a trend at the presidential level in which President Joe Biden is vastly out-raising presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Johnson’s reputation as a devout evangelical Christian who frequently makes biblical references is at odds with the beliefs of some business executives invited to meetings and dinners, one person familiar with GOP fundraising said.
Another donor said Johnson, who represents a district in northwestern Louisiana, comes off as much more thoughtful than McCarthy. Yet his very thin majority and a rule that makes it fairly easy to remove a speaker put him in a difficult position. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida deployed that mechanism to overthrow McCarthy.
There were also aggressive efforts to court donors on the sidelines of an American Enterprise Institute event at the Sea Island resort in Georgia, which one person said was seen as a faux pas and a sign of desperation on Johnson’s part because that event is generally devoid of fundraising.
The National Republican Congressional Committee raised $8.2 million in February and began March with $45.2 million cash on hand. Its Democratic counterpart raised nearly double that — $14.5 million over the same period — and has $59.2 million in the bank.
“Business likes certainty, so they can look at planning and determine what the return on investment is,” he said. “It seems every day we wake up and we’re not quite sure where the day is going to go.”
Democrats’ fundraising advantage has already helped them this year. Thomas Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman from Long Island, flipped the Republican seat held by George Santos, who was expelled from the chamber. Suozzi’s campaign spent millions more than that of his GOP rival, Mazi Pilip.
With the challenges facing the House GOP, some donors see the Senate as a better investment. Republicans in that chamber have avoided much of the chaos and in-fighting that have plagued their House counterparts in recent months. That makes them a more attractive option for donors who want candidates who can help advance their policy goals on taxes, energy production and deregulation.
The solution to the never ending GOP circus? Give Democrats control of both the House and Senate in November, 2024.
Friday, March 22, 2024
What’s the Matter With Ohio (And Red State Voters)?
For many years, Ohio has been thought of as a bellwether state: With rare exceptions, whoever won Ohio in a presidential election won the nation as a whole. But in 2020, Donald Trump won Ohio by about eight points even as Joe Biden led the national popular vote by more than four points and, of course, won the Electoral College vote.
Then Ohio’s 2022 Senate election was won by J.D. Vance, who has staked out a hard-line ideological position that may be more thoroughly MAGA than that of Trump himself. And in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary, Trump’s endorsement was enough to propel Bernie Moreno, a former car dealer who has never held elected office, to victory over the preferred candidates of the state’s relatively moderate Republican establishment.
So I’ve been trying to understand what happened to Ohio, and what it can teach us about America’s future. My short answer is that the United States of America has become the Disconnected States of America, on several levels.
Once upon a time, Ohio’s bellwether status could be explained by the fact that in some sense it looked like America. These days, no state really looks like America because the economic fortunes of different regions have diverged so drastically. And Ohio has found itself on the losing side of that divergence.
You might expect Ohio voters to support politicians whose policies would help reverse this relative decline. But there’s a striking disconnect between who voters, especially working-class white voters, perceive as being on their side and politicians’ actual policies. For that matter, as I wrote earlier this week, there’s a striking disconnect between voters’ views of what is happening with the economy and their personal experiences. It’s vibes all the way down.
One quick way to see the divergence in regional fortunes is to compare per capita income of a given state with income in a relatively rich state like Massachusetts. During the generation-long boom that followed World War II, Ohio and Massachusetts were basically tied. Since around 1980, however, Ohio has been on a long relative slide; its income is now about a third less than that of Massachusetts.
A lot of this has to do with the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs. There are considerably fewer manufacturing jobs in Ohio than there used to be, partly because of foreign competition . . . . although deindustrialization has been happening almost everywhere, even in Germany, which runs huge trade surpluses.
And wages for production workers in Ohio have lagged behind inflation for 20 years. That probably has a lot to do with the collapse of unions, which used to represent a quarter of Ohio’s private-sector workers, but are vanishing from the scene.
More broadly, the 21st-century economy has favored metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces; Ohio, with its relatively low share of college-educated adults, has been left behind.
So it makes sense for Ohio voters to feel disgruntled. But again, you might have expected disgruntled voters to support politicians actually trying to address the state’s problems. The Biden administration certainly hoped that its industrial policies, which have led to a surge in manufacturing investment, would win over more blue-collar voters. You might also have expected Democrats to get some dividend from the fact that unemployment in Ohio is now significantly lower than it was under Trump, even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.
What about Trump? In most ways he governed as a conventional right-wing Republican, among other things trying to reverse the success of Obamacare, which had greatly reduced the percentage of Ohioans without health insurance. Trump did, however, break with G.O.P. orthodoxy by launching a trade war, with substantial tariffs on some manufactured imports.
In economic terms, the trade war failed. . . . Trump tariffs didn’t raise manufacturing employment. . . . . Yet, they found, the trade war appears to have been a political success. Regions whose industries were protected by tariffs became more likely to vote for Trump and Republicans in general, even though the tariffs didn’t result in a boost to employment. This, as the authors rather discreetly note, is “consistent with expressive views of politics.” That is, in 2020, many working-class voters in Ohio and elsewhere saw Trump as being on their side even though his policies didn’t help them. And if you look at some of today’s polling, it appears that they refuse to give President Biden credit for policies that actually do help workers.
Perceptions of the economy have improved, even if they’re still somewhat depressed. So the economy may be good enough for other issues, like reproductive rights, to carry Biden over the top. . . . But it’s still disturbing to see just how disconnected views about politicians have become from what those politicians really do.
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Trump's New "Lost Cause" Myth
At an Ohio rally this month, Donald Trump saluted the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “unbelievable patriots” and referring to those who’ve been locked up for their involvement on that terrible day as “hostages.”
This was a continuation of Trump’s “Lost Cause” mythmaking that began during his successful presidential campaign in 2016 and was ramped up in service of his efforts to remain in power despite his 2020 loss and the deadly riot that those efforts stoked.
More than 1,200 people have been charged related to Jan. 6. And though it shouldn’t have to be said, let’s be clear: Those who’ve been tried, convicted and imprisoned for storming the Capitol aren’t hostages, they’re criminals.
But Lost Cause narratives aren’t about truth. They’re about negating the truth.
Which is what happened when the Lost Cause mythology was constructed after the Civil War. The cause of the war was framed as “Northern aggression” rather than slavery. A lore about happy slaves and benevolent enslavers proliferated. The narrative valorized those who seceded from and fought against the United States.
And it has survived to some degree for over 150 years, tucked into the cracks of our body politic. It still surfaces in ways that may seem remote from the Confederate Lost Cause myth, but that definitely promote it.
It manifested itself last year when Florida changed its African American history standards to say that the enslaved “in some instances” benefited from their enslavement, and in Nikki Haley’s hesitance on the campaign trail to state the obvious, that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
It manifested itself in the infamous torchlight march in Charlottesville and in the bitter resistance to removing Confederate monuments.
Trump has his own version of the Lost Cause, one that’s not completely untethered from the old one, but one that’s miniaturized, personal and petty.
The Confederate Lost Cause narrative came after enormous loss: Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died, the South was decimated and its economy was hobbled. Trump’s Lost Cause, on the other hand, is about the grievances he promotes, his inability to accept losing to Joe Biden and his utter disregard for democratic norms.
Trump’s version grows out of a more recent vintage of the Lost Cause narrative, one that has been around at least since George Wallace’s first presidential campaign in the 1960s. One in which a sense of displacement and dispossession is driven by a lost cultural advantage.
David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and the author of “Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History,” told me that many of Trump’s supporters feel that they’ve lost something similar to what white Southerners felt they had lost after the Civil War: “They were no longer relevant. They were no longer listened to. And on top of that, there were lots of other voices that were in play in public that were not there before.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight . . . . told me that Trump’s iteration has all the necessary elements: a story of loss, culprits, ready-made villains and “an enormous narrative of grievance.”
As Blight explained, Trump “feeds on this imagined tale of what could have been, should have been, might have been and once again can be retrieved; the glory can be retrieved.”
And Trump invokes his Lost Cause in combination with another false telling, one of unprecedented happiness and unity — in which all the glory belongs to him. As he told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday, “African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, women, men, people with diplomas from the best schools in the world and people that didn’t graduate from high school, every single group was doing better than ever before.” He continued, “Our country was coming together.”
What he ignores is that his presidency began with the Women’s March, the day after his inauguration, and ended not long after the 2020 summer of protests, driven by outrage over the murder of George Floyd. Trump didn’t bring the country together; he tore it further apart.
Unlike previous Lost Cause appeals, Trump’s has the advantage of a modern communications environment: 24-hour cable news, an internet replete with partisan news sites and social media — an octopean virtual world that reaches deep into the darkest places of our politics.
In this election, disciples of the MAGA movement not only have an opportunity to enshrine Trump’s fallacies. MAGA also might rise again.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Americans' Disconnect From Economic Reality
Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Honestly, I didn’t think Republicans were going to try replaying Ronald Reagan’s famous line, since so much of the G.O.P.’s 2024 strategy depends on a sort of collective amnesia about the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Is it really a good idea to remind voters what the spring of 2020 was like?
For it was a terrible time: It was a time of fear, with Covid deaths skyrocketing. It was a time of isolation, with normal social interactions disrupted. It was a time of surging violent crime, perhaps brought on by that social disruption. It was a time of huge job losses, with the unemployment rate hitting 14.8 percent that April. And do you remember the great toilet paper shortage?
Also, when Reagan delivered that line in 1980, things were pretty bad, with 7.5 percent unemployment and 12.6 percent inflation, and the 1979 gas lines were still fresh in memory. Today, unemployment is below 4 percent and inflation is around 3 percent (and probably, despite some noisy recent statistics, still heading down).
Some observers, however, tell us to ignore fancy statistics indicating that America is doing pretty well. Americans’ lived experience, they say, is that it’s still a lousy economy. And isn’t the customer — or in this case the consumer — always right?
It’s true that most Americans have a negative view of the economy. But people don’t directly experience the economy. What they directly experience are their own financial circumstances — and most Americans are feeling relatively positive about their own finances.
Before I get into the numbers, let’s talk about what we’re capturing when we measure consumer sentiment, either in opinion polls or in regular surveys . . . . these surveys don’t ask about consumers’ personal experiences; they ask for their views about the economy overall — that is, what they think is happening to other people.
So what happens if you do ask about personal experience?
I’ve been struck by the results of swing-state polls being conducted by Quinnipiac University, which ask respondents about both the national economy and their personal financial situations. In the latest poll, of Michigan voters, only 35 percent of people said that the national economy was excellent or good, while 65 percent said it was not so good or bad. But when asked about their personal finances the proportions were basically reversed, with 61 percent saying that they were in excellent or good shape and 38 percent saying they were in not so good or bad shape.
A January poll of Pennsylvania voters produced almost the same results.
It’s not just Quinnipiac. Other evidence points to a similar disconnect between perceptions of the economy and what people see in their own lives. For example, a September Harris Poll conducted for The Guardian found a narrow majority of Americans saying that unemployment was near a 50-year high when, in fact, it’s near a 50-year low . . . . and the University of Michigan asks consumers to compare their personal financial situation now with that of five years ago: In January, 52 percent said it was better and 38 percent said it was worse.
To the extent we can measure Americans’ personal experiences, as opposed to what they say about the economy, it seems to be quite positive and more or less in line with the macroeconomic indicators.
There may be multiple reasons for this disconnect between personal experience and narratives. Partisanship is clearly a major factor: Supporters of both parties tend to be down on the economy when the opposing party holds the White House, but the effect is much stronger for Republicans.
And for what it’s worth, news reporting on the economy, as measured by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, was extraordinarily negative last summer, comparable to the depths of the Great Recession, although it has been more positive recently.
Whatever has been going on, it’s important to understand that the political challenge facing Democrats is not that they have to overcome a bad economy. What they need to overcome instead is the false narrative that the economy is doing badly.
How can they do this? . . . . . reminding them just how bad 2020 was and arguing that President Biden, who inherited an economy and a society badly damaged by the pandemic and has led us through the aftermath to a much better place, just might work.
Monday, March 18, 2024
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Christofascists Attack Youngkin for Same Sex Marriage Approval
If Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) had his eyes on higher office, his decision Friday almost certainly put those dreams out of reach.
To the shock of voters across the Commonwealth, Youngkin, who campaigned as a born-again Christian and spent many a Sunday in sanctuaries like Cornerstone Chapel’s, committed the ultimate betrayal — signing a same-sex marriage bill that was not only completely unnecessary but a stinging rebuke of conservative values.
The move, announced in a Friday afternoon news dump to avoid attention, was called “symbolic” by even LGBT activists since the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling and Congress’s Respect for Marriage Act already grant the “rights” supposedly reaffirmed here. Youngkin’s decision was even more astounding considering that he’d already panned the need for such legislation two years ago.
People had no reason to suspect that the governor’s opinions had changed, since as recently as last Wednesday, Youngkin hadn’t taken a public position on the proposal. And yet, in what local reporters are calling a “surprising twist,” the homegrown governor inked his name to the law, which essentially says that marriage licenses must be given to any two people “seeking a ‘lawful marriage’ regardless of gender, race or sex and that Virginia will recognize such marriages as valid.”
His office pathetically tried to explain away the move as a defense of religious freedom. “The bill adds First Amendment protections to the code of Virginia,” Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez claimed — apparently forgetting that the First Amendment already applies to the state.
While the governor’s staff cheered the bill’s conscience rights for pastors, it offers no such shield for bakers, photographers, teachers, web designers, adoption agencies, Christian schools, and so many others. A few throwaway sentences clarifying that ministers won’t be forced to perform actual wedding ceremonies do nothing to resolve the hammer this legislation takes to everyday people. . . . . Thanks to Governor Younkin, anyone who believes in marriage as human history defines it is a sitting duck — a prime target for persecution, marginalization, and even civil action.
The most outrageous part of it all is that Youngkin had no reason to consider this proposal in the first place. He threw away his conservative credentials for what is ultimately a Democratic messaging bill.
At the end of the day, whatever Youngkin thinks he’s gained from this treason is nothing compared to what he’s lost with his base: trust.
“I voted for Glenn Youngkin,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand, “but I didn’t vote for this.”
Setting aside the religious arguments for a moment, she explained, “on a practical and political level, the signing of this bill is a total fail. The Democratic Party is seeking to define the rules of engagement for GOP governors by creating this situation for Governor Youngkin. When he signs a bill like this, it sets a precedent for other Republican elected officials that it is okay to capitulate — maybe even necessary — to bow to LGBTQ+ lobbying groups.”
Conservatives, unfortunately, have a lot of recent experience being stabbed in the back by Republicans. From Mike Pence throwing Hoosiers under the bus over religious freedom in 2015 to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) killing bills to protect kids from gender mutilation, GOP careers have been made and broken on the backs of marriage and sexuality. More than a year after the vote, Republican members of Congress are still being censured by state parties for siding with the far-Left’s same-sex marriage law — the repercussions of which continue to this day as double-crossing incumbents lose critical campaign cash and endorsements. The heat back home has been so intense that two congressmen publicly recanted their vote.
And yet, in this messy aftermath, Youngkin has made the fatal decision to embrace what his party’s platform has rejected. The man who stood in Pastor Gary Hamrick’s church and declared, “At the cornerstone of everything that we do is our faith in Him” has proven to be just another insincere, weak-kneed politician.
People want Republicans to believe in marriage that “this ship has sailed,” Cobb shook her head. They tell elected officials, “‘Don’t be on the [wrong] side of this. Just come along and sign these bills.’ But I think it’s going to matter in primaries,” she warned. “I really do. . . . It’s the time to tell leaders like Glenn Youngkin that when it comes to representing Republicans, cowards need not apply.
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