Politix Update: Why GOP Is Screwed No Matter How The Supremes Rule

PREZ AND VICE PREZ MAKE NICE WITH THE JUSTICES

It isn't exactly news that the Republican Party lost sight years ago of what governing is all about.  Not coincidentally, this was about the time the GOP got its teeth handed to it with the 2008 election of Barack Obama on the wave of an energized coalition of minorities, women and college students and found itself bereft of ideas to counter the young president's ambitious agenda.  With a nascent Tea Party, grumbling fundamentalists and John Birch Society-style right wingers fighting for the soul of a party growing more conservative, whiter and older by the election cycle, Republicans found themselves without big thinkers and new ideas and defaulted to attacking the president and his agenda with a relentlessness that has brought it short-term gains but left it ill prepared to take back the White House.

This self-inflicted malaise is about to play itself out in extraordinary ways with enormous consequences no matter how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on two historic cases fraught with politics: A challenge to the federal subsidies provision at the heart of the Affordable Care Act, and the question of whether marriage is a fundamental right afforded to everyone, gay or straight, under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.  Rulings in both cases are expected before the court adjourns early in July.

The knots that Republicans have tied themselves in over the Affordable Care Act have been getting tighter and tighter.  After years of condemning the greatest leap forward in health-care reform since Medicare laws were enacted in 1966, including scare mongering about "death panels" and other lies on an epic scale, as well as dozens of unsuccessful House repeal votes, the GOP noise machine has fallen silent.  This is because a growing majority of Americans have grown kind of fond of what is familiarly called Obamacare, many because of the existence of federal insurance exchanges in their states, which are the conduits for the subsidies, and the GOP is faced with some very unpleasant realities if the Supreme Court grants the party its wish and guts the law by striking down the federal subsidies provision.

The first reality is that Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, don't know what to do if the high court nixes the subsidies although that would leave millions of very angry people (including some of their own, dadgummit) without health insurance, while extending the subsidies by congressional fiat would incur the wrath of the party's reliably cantankerous conservative base and pretty much all of the 12 or so (but then whose counting?) wannabes crowded into the GOP presidential primary clown car. 

The second reality is that of the 34 states that have federal exchanges, 26 have now very worried Republican governors who have had a grassroots view of Obamacare in action, and while some may be ideologically opposed to it, they know that it more or less works. Of the Senate seats up for election next year, 24 are held by Republicans and 22 of those are in exchange states.  Several Senate battleground states -- including Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin -- that the GOP must win next year if it has any chance of taking back the White House would be hard hit by a negative court ruling because they all have federal exchanges, and Republican officeholders from these states caught in these crosshairs are demanding that their congressional leadership be prepared to act.   But McConnell and Boehner and Company are pretty much totally unprepared for what may be about to hit them despite vague and unspecified promises of some kind of interim solution.

"If a Supreme Court ruling against Obama turns into a hollow victory for conservatives, congressional Republicans could be in for a bloodletting," opined the conservative National Review. "Why? If the court rules that only those on state-created exchanges are eligible for subsidies, and Republicans . . . don't find a fix, nearly 6.4 million Americans would be impacted, and their health care costs could spike by almost 300 percent."

In other words -- and this is absolutely delicious -- having repeatedly tried to knock down Obamacare, Republicans would be flirting with electoral disaster if the court in effect rules for the GOP but the GOP doesn't hasten to prop up Obamacare. 

The consequences of the court in effect ruling for the GOP in the same-sex marriage case are perhaps not as drastic, but nevertheless large in terms of the 2016 election.

Six in 10 Americans support same-sex marriage, a number that jumps to seven in 10 when the respondents know someone who is gay or lesbian, while 36 states allow same-sex marriage, and those numbers continue to grow.  Next year's election will be the first in which gay rights could be a major issue and one that regardless of how the high court rules, will put Republicans on the wrong side of history as well as public opinion.  That is not a winning formula.

Beyond Republicans having worked so hard to bite themselves in the electoral ass and, in the process, continue their marginalization as a national political force, there is a deep irony here: The party that has blathered on and on . . . and on and on and on . . . about Family Values finds itself diametrically opposed to Americans who value access to affordable health care for their families and value people no matter what their sexual orientation happens to be.

HILLARY THE BOLD

The schizophrenia of the mainstream media when it comes to covering Hillary Clinton is enough to give a reader a bad case of whiplash.  A few days ago, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was sinking in the polls, unsure of her identity, being dissed by young feminists, and dragging around burdensome baggage from a family foundation with a knack for attracting dodgy contributors.  And, of course, we'll always have Benghazi.  But today Hillary is flying high.  Howcum?

She gave a speech -- one single speech -- that the media loved.

In an address on photo op-perfect Roosevelt Island in New York City, Clinton sounded a clarion call on a litany of liberal issues without appearing to pander to her base: Shared prosperity, economic fairness, investing in people, aid for distressed communities, equality for gays and lesbians, the unfairness of overpaid corporate bigs, checking Wall Street excesses, including trying to buy elections, renewable power, greater investing in infrastructure, universal pre-kindergarten, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women, increased aid for the mentally ill, tax penalties for companies that offshore their profits, and universal voter registration.  (Did I miss anything?)

This laundry list would appear to be left-leaning at first glance, but it's stuff many people like -- or at least focus groups do.  Me, too.  And most importantly at this stage in the campaign, stuff that the candidates in that overstuffed Republican field don't like.  But mark my word: It will be only a matter of time before the media will have Clinton sinking in the polls, unsure of her identity, being dissed by . . .

JEB THE PANICKY

At least the mainstream media shows some consistency in its schizophrenia.  Take Jeb Bush.  The media had all but handed the former Florida governor the Republican nomination a few short months ago on the strength of his prodigious fund raising, close ties to the so-called Republican Party elite, the presumption that an establishment-oriented candidate like himself had the best chance of winning it all, and his chameleon-like ability to appear moderate to moderates and conservative to conservatives.  But a funny think happened on the way to the media coronation: His candidacy is in big trouble.

There are a number of reasons for this: Bush is not a particularly good chameleon, he has many more challengers for the nomination than it was presumed there would be, while fellow Floridian Marco Rubio is running even if Mitt Romney is not, and while he may be establishment oriented his party is increasingly less so.  He also seems to have managed to hit pretty much every pothole in his path during the so-called invisible primary.  But the biggie is that the media, while acknowledging that Jeb's last name might be a problem, has failed to understand the deep -- and I mean really deep -- antipathy with which many Republicans view his big brother.  Not so much because of that Iraq war thing, let alone that recession thing, but because of how George W. Bush sullied the party brand in general.

So while the big task for Hillary Clinton is energizing her Democratic base, something she showed she is capable of doing with her Roosevelt Island do-over, the big task for Jeb Bush, who formally announced his candidacy with a by-comparison lackluster do-over that provoked yawns from much of the punditocracy, is trying to run from his own last name without dissing his brother, let alone alienating his own advisers, a good many of whom were architects of the Dubya train wreck. 

There may be too many miles between the here and now to the Republican nominating convention for Bush to accomplish that trick, let alone regain the momentum those pundits declare he has lost.  This is because he never really had much momentum in the first place.

SAY WHAT?

The Washington Examiner is reliably conservative and fawningly Republican, so it was startling to see this headline atop an article by Philip Klein:

If Republicans Can't Beat Hillary

They Should Disband the Party

Klein, in a lashing condemnation of Clinton's Roosevelt Island speech ("Back in 1996, her husband ran for re-election against a septuagenarian promising to build a bridge to the 21st century. Here she was, 20 years later, running for office building a bridge back to Roosevelt.") declares that the GOP "should be in a prime position to win the next election" because of "the mounting scandals, polls showing a lack of trust for her, the historical difficulty of political parties winning three presidential elections in a row, and the deep bench of fresh-faced Republican options . . . " 

But then reality catches up to Klein and nips at his heels as he acknowledges that "the next election will test whether demographic headwinds are too much for Republicans to overcome."

Klein shakes off the nipping and plunges ahead:

"When Republicans lost two elections to Obama, it was easy to explain away as a special phenomenon. In 2008, Obama was a rock star running against a boring old senator who represented an incumbent party that had presided over an unpopular war and financial crash. In 2012, he ran for re-election against a weak candidate who had trouble winning over his own party."

But the nippers are back as he concludes:

"[I]n 2016, Republicans have the ability to nominate a formidable candidate to put up against a Democrat with lots of baggage. If they blow it, then it may be time to throw in the towel."

KEEPING UP WITH THE REPUBLICANS

I would be remiss to not at least give passing mention to Donald "I'm Rich and I'm Famous" Trump, who managed to insult just about everyone, but Mexicans in particular, in an announcement filled with fantasy and devoid of factual content that he too -- indeed, one of the great buffoons of our time -- was hopping into the Republican clown car.  

Hanging onto the rear bumper is more like it, but The Donald is bound to give the other clowns fits on the power of name recognition alone.  Because of this, he is polling high enough to make the cut and be one of the 10 candidates on stage at the Fox News version of Hollywood Squares, aka the first presidential debate on August 6, and has a shot at the CNN-hosted second debate on September 16.

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETE SOUSA/THE WHITE HOUSE

Cartoon du Jour

ADAM ZYGLIS/BUFFALO NEWS VIA FROM PINE VIEW FARM

'Oh All I Ever Wanted Was Just To Come In From The Cold'

COME IN FROM THE COLD

By Joni Mitchell

Back in 1957
We had to dance a foot apart
And they hawk-eyed us from the sidelines
Holding their rulers without a heart
And so with just a touch of our fingers
I could make our circuitry explode
All we ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(we were so young)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold
 
We really thought we had a purpose
We were so anxious to achieve
We had hope
The world held promise
For a slave to liberty
Freely I slaved away for something better
And I was bought and sold
And all I ever wanted
Was to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(we were so sure)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold

I feel your leg under the table
Leaning into mine
I feel renewed
I feel disabled
By these bonfires in my spine
I don't know who the arsonist was
Which incendiary soul
But all I ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(you were so warm)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold
 
I am not some stone commission
Like a statue in a park
I am flesh and blood and vision
I am howling in the dark
Long blue shadows of the jackals
Are falling on a pay phone by the road
Oh, all they ever wanted
Was to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(I was so low)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold
 
Is this just vulgar electricity
Is this the edifying fire
(it was so pure)
Does your smile's covert complicity
Debase as it admires
(just a flu with a temperature)
Are you just checking out your mojo
Or am I just fighting off growing old
(just a high fever)
All I ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(it was so pure)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold
 
I know we never will be perfect
Never entirely clear
(when the moon shines)
We get hurt and we just panic
And we strike out
Out of fear
(you were only being kind)
I fear the sentence of this solitude
200 years on hold
(for my loving crime)
Oh and all we ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(when the moon shines)
Oh come in
Come in from the cold
 
When I thought life had some meaning
Then I thought I had some choice
(I was running blind)
And I made some value judgments
In a self-important voice
(I was outa line)
But then absurdity came over me
And I longed to lose control
(into no mind)
Oh all I ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold
 
Come in
Come in from the cold
(you were so kind)
Please come in
(so kind)
Come in from the cold
Come in come in
Come in from the cold

PAINTING AND LYRICS © JONI MITCHELL

Politix Update: GOP Wannabes Against Big Gubberment 'Til They're For It

Republican presidential wannabes like to whine that government needs to be made smaller, and in the meantime Washington should get off our fricking backs.  After all, we get taxed -- and regulated -- through the nose and get practically nothing in return, right?  This complaint is especially loud and persistent when it comes to Texas pols with their eye on the big prize.  Were talking Senator Ted Cruz and former Governor Rick Perry here.  And so I have a plan to finally get serious about this nagging problem: Let's first pull the federal air traffic controllers from the towers at Texas airports and replace them with militiamen, municipal swimming pool monitors or Eagle Scouts, or something, and then go from there in downsizing the federal presence in the Lone Star State.  I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

This scenario isn't as crazy as it seems.  It's the politicians who complain about Washington until their constituents really need Washington who are crazy. Take Ted Cruz.  Please! 

The Tea Party darling is only the most recent inductee into the army of small-minded, two-faced politicians who harrumph about going it alone without the feds breathing down their necks until their tassel loafers get wet.  Cruz, you may recall, voted against aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, but there he was the other day calling for relief from Big Bad Washington in the wake of devastating floods and storms that have ravaged his home state.

IS RICK PERRY BEING MISUNDERESTIMATED?

Speaking of Texas, big gubberment and that other Lone Star wannabe, a most extraordinary story appeared in the liberal media the other day: A piece in Slate that argues Rick Perry is not an idiot.

You've got a big problem when you're running for prezdent and people think you're dumb, and that happens to be the albatross hanging around Perry's neck in his second bid for the nomination.  This is because his inaugural run in 2012 became fodder for stand-up comedians when he embarrassed himself spectacularly during a debate by being unable to name the third of the three federal agencies he would try to abolish as president.

Writes Reihan Salam:

"Having served as governor of Texas for an impressive three and a half terms, during which the Lone Star State thrived economically, you'd think that Perry would immediately be considered a top-tier candidate. So why isn’t he being taken as seriously as Jeb Bush, a man who hasn't run for office since 2002, or Scott Walker, a governor who has accomplished far less, or Marco Rubio, a first-term senator who’s never really run anything? There is a simple explanation. Basically, people think he’s not very bright. But that’s simply not true. Perry is extremely socially perceptive, a quality that has helped him connect with people from many different backgrounds. He’s demonstrated superb political judgment, and he’s proved to be a pragmatic and creative policy thinker. Though no one would mistake Perry for an intellectual, he has the kind of smarts voters should be looking for in a chief executive."

Although I don't think many people would consider Bush, Walker or Rubio to be rocket scientists, I initially was willing to give Salam a pass, but a nagging feeling sent me on a Web search that coughed up articles from 2008 in which Salam declared Sarah Palin to be really smart and, uh . . . . misunderestimated, to borrow a malapropism from another Texan.

"Months before Palin was selected as McCain's running mate, I told anyone who’d listen that she'd be the shrewdest pick," Salam wrote breathlessly in one piece. "When she addressed the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, I was utterly electrified."

CHRIS CHRISTIE IS BEYOND TOAST

Despite boasting that this is my 12th presidential campaign, I still, uh . . . misunderestimate the ability of some politicians to let their massive egos get in the way of doing the right thing.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is toast as a contender for the Republican nomination.  In fact, he's burned to a crisp, but less because he's a moderate gussied up in conservative drag and would flunk the party's right-wing litmus test with flying colors than his own serial missteps as governor, as well as his inability to control a proclivity for bullying.

"If you’re ready to start offending people in order to achieve a greater goal, you’ve found the right guy," he said last week in the clearest sign yet that his ego is winning out. "I’m here to help offend people with you."

In a term and a half as governor of by some measures the wealthiest state -- and despite an economic rebound nationally -- New Jersey's bond rating has been downgraded a record seven times, the state faces a $7.3 billion structural deficit going into the new fiscal year, and he has used money under the control of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as a personal piggy bank to bail out the state's debt-ridden highway and bridge fund.  That's just for starters.  Then there's Bridgegate, the scheme to plunge the George Washington Bridge approach at Fort Lee, New Jersey into four days of gridlock as payback to a Democratic mayor who wouldn't endorse Christie for re-election, agreeing to a legal settlement with mega-polluter ExxonMobil that will pay mere pennies on the dollar, and news last week that the heavy-handed governor repeatedly and casually broke federal law in revealing grand jury proceedings he had overseen when he was a U.S. attorney.

TOLD YA SO

I noted in the last installment of Politix Update that Iowa had lost its luster as the first stop on the presidential primary campaign trail because a small bunch of white Republicans wearing itchy flannel shirts had an outsized influence on an already flawed process.

In tacit recognition that what happens in the state generates far more interest from the national media than it does voters, let alone candidates, the Iowa Straw Poll was put out of its misery the other day.  Few candidates in the record-large GOP field were even bothering to campaign for the August event, which has preceded the January party caucuses since 1979.

While the straw poll was long on carnival atmosphere, it was short on relevance.  To wit: The 2011 winner was Michele Bachmann.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS WITH CARLY

Any politician is going to bend reality a little to fit better with their message, but Carly Fiorina is in world-record territory in staking out feminism as a conservative cause.

"It’s been 95 years since women got the right to vote. Fifty years since The Feminine Mystique.  Sixteen years since I was named the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” the Republican candidate for president declared.  Washington D.C. liberals' "version of feminism isn’t working. It’s time for a new definition."

If that definition comports with contemporary conservatism, which is to say the Republican brand, then it means limiting or denying reproductive rights, cutting rape victims no slack, unequal pay for equal work, and no paid maternity leave.  And that's just for starters.

To be fair, Fiorina does support making birth control available without a prescription and allow women to go back to work after childbirth without losing benefits.  But for unequal pay, of course.

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES

One Nation United Under, Er . . . Corporations

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Politix Update: The Nightmarish Scenario Of A Case Of Clinton Fatigue

There were 15 or so of us gathered around a large conference room table.  It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon in the fall of 1996 and the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board was conducting yet another interview in the laborious election-year process of endorsing candidates.  I happened to be sitting in because I was directing the paper's presidential campaign coverage and this particular day the candidate was William Jefferson Clinton, whose wife Hillary was at its side.  Although Election Day was a month or so off, it was assumed Clinton would roll to an easy re-election victory, which he did, and that the Daily News, a liberal bastion with a blue-collar readership, would endorse him over the hapless Bob Dole, which it did.

I have three powerful memories from that encounter: That the Secret Service had overlooked a large ceremonial African tribal dagger in a leather sheath in the middle of the table when it had scanned the room, which elicited titters from the editorial board and concerned looks from two Secret Service agents when the president pulled the dagger from the sheath and turned it in the sunlight while answering a question about education, I believe.  That Mrs. Clinton, who sat immediately to my right and said nothing but dutifully nodded and smiled when her husband spoke, was wearing a perfume reminiscent of a scent an old girlfriend used, and that together and separately Bill and Hillary Clinton exuded a power for which words like charisma and magnetism are inadequate.

Thousands of news stories, analyses and commentaries have been written about the Clintons in the nearly two decades since my close encounter, many of then negative, many of them positive, and many of them attempts to try to figure out what the heck makes them tick. 

Why, in my view, Bill Clinton is the best politician of my lifetime despite reliably being his own worst enemy yet remains hugely popular with large swaths of the electorate.  Why Hillary Clinton is the most popular woman in America in poll after poll yet remains deeply unpopular with many voters and an enigma because of the long shadow cast by her husband in the 40 years since she agreed to move to Arkansas in the service of his nascent political career.  And why the Clintons, who at ages 68 and 67 are not quietly minding their business as proud grandparents back home in Chappaqua, especially given her recent medical history and unmistakable signs of fatigue. 

But the Clintons seem to be running harder than ever -- Bill to feed his high-octane ego as a global post-presidential celebrity who still relishes the roar of the crowd, and Hillary to become not just the first woman president, but to prove her detractors wrong and finally escape that long shadow.

I wrote the other day that there are only two ways Hillary Clinton will not be elected: By Republicans suppressing the Democratic vote in enough states to eek out victory, or for the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to throw the election to the GOP as it did in 2000.  I should have added a third way, or rather the potentially toxic combination of two things: Running too timid a campaign, which she did in 2008 by conducting a traditional man's campaign and not running as herself, whoever that may be.  And not being able to keep at arm's length her husband, who meddled to excess in 2008, as well as the troubling baggage of a family foundation that in recent years has raised a cool $2 billion or so for good works from foreign donors, too many with dodgy reputations, who expect that a President Hillary Clinton would side with them when the international going got tough. 

The long and the short of the situation is this: Republicans have been fiendishly clever in keeping voters (and that supposedly liberal media) focused on her.  If she cannot put the focus on us -- as in the dividends voters should expect to reap from her presidency, a sure-thing win could slip from her grasp.

A fatal case of Clinton fatigue next November would not merely hand the White House to a Republican who, judging from the overcrowded GOP field to a man (sorry, Carly), would not merely undo the significant accomplishments of Barack Obama, but even more importantly pack a Supreme Court that would do untold damage for many years to come.

RUBIO IN A HURRY TO GET TO THE TOP

Republicans have wrapped themselves in the flag of fiscal conservatism for years.  Never mind that George W. Bush and the great Conservative God himself, Ronald Reagan, were profligate spenders as president.  It is a persuasive sales pitch to many voters and one that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is using on the stump as he tries to make the case that he should be the Republican presidential nominee.

But as The New York Times, among other media outlets, inconveniently reveal, Rubio has been downright reckless when it comes to his own finances: Blowing $80,000 on a luxury speedboat at a time when his personal finances were a mess; liquidating a $68,000 retirement account prematurely and, as a consequence, having to pay steep tax and financial penalties; recently selling a second home for $18,000 less than he and a friend paid for it a decade ago because it faced foreclosure after he and the friend failed to make mortgage payments for five months; paying for family trips with a Republican Party credit card, and funding his campaigns with personal credit cards.

Meanwhile, in their rush to get to the top, Rubio and wife Jeanette have piled up a significant number of traffic citations -- he four and she 13 -- and together they have had to attend four remedial driving school courses after a violation. 

All of this, of course, begs a couple three teensy questions: How can a guy who vows to balance the federal budget not even balance his own checkbook?  How can a guy who has benefited from the government safety net in the form of student debt forgiveness oppose the safety net for others?  And how can a guy who finds red lights and stop signs annoyances to be ignored be a responsible commander in chief?

THE HAWKEYE STATE'S LAMENT

The dirty secret of the Iowa caucuses, the first-in-the-nation hurdle for presidential aspirants, is that it has long been much ado about little. 

As I wrote way back in October 2007, "I'll eat my straw boater if it turns out that the Iowa caucuses next January play a decisive role in determining who the Republican presidential sacrificial lamb will be, let alone who the Democrats nominate to be the next president.  This is because some candidates -- averse to shoveling snow off of potential voters' driveways in Sioux City or Des Moines -- may avoid the caucuses altogether. . . . No, that's not the real reason at all. It's because not even 10 percent of eligible Iowa voters will show up at their local caucus, fewer than the number of media pundits who already are filling their drool cups in anticipation of this overhyped but underwhelming quadrennial event."

Nothing has changed since then and Iowa's "political and chattering classes," as one pundit describes them, are clearly worried.  While Hillary Clinton is going through the motions of putting on itchy flannel shirts and meeting with small groups of Iowans, she doesn't need to win the Democratic caucus although she probably will.  Eventual Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney ignored Iowa in 2008 and 2012, while Jeb Bush may well give it a pass this time around.

Truth be known, Iowa has never been a presidential kingmaker and in 2016 may well again play the role of knave.

IN THE COURT OF KING GROVER

Speaking of fiscal conservatism and royalty, I nearly died laughing when I read that a group of Republican legislators from Louisiana had gone hat in hand to anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, the king of the GOP "no tax pledge," to beg him to give them special dispensation to relieve a whopping $1.6 billion budget deficit that has anti-tax Governor Bobby Jindal caught between a rock and a hard place -- or perhaps an oil slick and an alligator -- and threatens to scuttle his own possible presidential bid.

Couldn't Norquist, pretty please, look the other way and give them some wiggle room on raising taxes and scuttle Jindal-backed legislation that they say would set a "dangerous precedent" in how government could mask revenue hikes?

No way, snapped King Grover, who harrumphed that he found the groveling legislators' inability to find budget cuts elsewhere "disconcerting."

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM MSNBC

Ornette Coleman (1930-2015)

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The Author Of The Greatest Newspaper Headline Evah Writes '-30-'

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Doing What The Good Book Says, Never Mind Which Good Book

HAT TIP TO JOB'S ANGER VIA  FROM PINE VIEW FARM

Politix Update: Hillary Asks, 'What Part Of Democracy Are They Afraid Of?'

The increasingly all-white Republican Party, faced with a demographic tsunami that will all but guarantee its continuing marginalization as a national political party, has been striking back with one of the most insidious weapons in its dirty-tricks arsenal: Trying to limit the ability of minorities to vote.

This strategy to undermine one of the most fundamental of American rights has gained traction in 21 Republican-controlled states since the 2010 election, including several swing states.  Voter suppression laws will be in effect for the first time in 14 states next year for a presidential election in which the increasingly right-wing GOP has to find a candidate palatable to mainstream voters while confronted with the reality that virtually no blacks and few Hispanics and Asian-Americans will vote their way because they simply are not welcome under the formerly big GOP tent. 

Not surprisingly, of the 11 Republican-controlled states with the highest African-American turnout in 2008, seven have new voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, while of the 12 Republican-controlled states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, nine have passed laws making it harder to vote.

Voter suppression is a nightmare in the making for the Democratic Party because, by my reckoning, there are only two ways for the Republicans to retake the White House next year: By suppressing the Democratic vote in enough states to eek out victory, or for the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to throw the election to the party as it did in 2000.  Republicans got a big boost in their efforts to disenfranchise voters in 2013 when the ever helpful high court put a stake through the heart of the Voting Rights Act.

By any measure, voter fraud is a miniscule problem, and attempts to characterize it as rampant simply do not stand up to scrutiny.  From 2002 to 2008, the Bush Justice Department was unable to prosecute a single case of voter fraud, while a comprehensive 2014 Washington Post investigation found 37 cases of fraud out of one billion ballots cast. 

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a former high-ranking Bush Justice Department adviser, has been an especially zealous propagator of fears that immigrants in particular are engaging in voter fraud in his four years in office.  Problem is, Kansas has prosecuted only a single voter fraud case on his watch. Kobach also has railed against dead people voting and cited a Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as a typical culprit. There was only one problem: Brewer was alive and well, and the Wichita Eagle found him raking leaves in his front yard.

"I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."

So why is it so damned difficult to vote in the first place?  Why do not Americans automatically become eligible to vote at age 18 as is typically the case in many other countries?  And why not make early voting -- a proven way of reducing long lines on Election Day -- the law of the land?  Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton posed those very questions last week in pushing back against Republican voter suppression efforts. 

The overriding answer is that the Republican Party as it now is constituted in Congress is not going to enact anything to make it easier to vote.  As it is, only Oregon comes close in automatically registering eligible citizens with a driver’s license.   More than one-third of all votes in the 2012 were cast early, but 14 states have no such provision and several Republican-controlled swing states actually have cut back on early voting.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, among other Republican champions of voter suppression, accused Clinton of "demagoguery" and lamented that she was "running around the country dividing Americans."  (I suppose they might say the same thing about billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is gifting the Democratic Party a cool $5 million for lawsuits against the restrictive state laws.)

Clinton noted that the Republican efforts don't just include marginalizing minorities.  Restricting student voters is part of the GOP scheme because they tend to be diverse, tolerant and inclusive, three things today's GOP most definitely is not.

"What part of democracy are they afraid of?" Clinton asked of her critics.  Good question.

SCORCHED EARTH SCOTT MARCHES ON

Having neutered state employee unions, Wisconsin Governor and GOP president candidate Scott Walker is now taking aim at the academically excellent University of Wisconsin system by trying to undermine the faculty's role in campus governance through weakening tenure.

Walker, who escaped a recall vote in 2012, is branding himself as a plain-speaking, Miller-drinking, cheap-clothes-wearing, Harley-riding guy who understands the struggles of the middle class, and what better way to appeal to the conservatives whose support he needs if he is to win the nomination than by going after those liberal professors who pollute young minds.

It matters not to Walker that his proposal to gut the tenure system might irreparably damage the University of Wisconsin, where Dick Cheney among many other notables got degrees.  This is because while tenured positions typically make up only 20 percent of the faculty of four-year colleges with the rest of the positions mostly filled by part-timers, the tenured profs are the magnets for grants, students who excel, and for those part-timers.

The tenure system was created to protect academics from political reprisals, and current Wisconsin state law respects this tradition, allowing tenured faculty to be fired only for just cause or in financial emergencies.  Walker already has pushed through devastating spending cuts, while his long-term goal is to pick off faculty undesirables by removing tenure from state law and leaving the matter of who teaches to the university system's 18-member Board of Regents, 16 of whom are appointed by the governor.  They will, of course, have substantially vaguer standards at their disposal for firing faculty.

WILL THE BIRTHER RUN AGAIN?

The only person the already crowded Republican presidential primary clown car lacks to be a full monty is Donald Trump.

The bad-hair real-estate mogol is playing coy about whether he will run. "In my own mind, I’ve decided, but I haven’t made it official – that’s for the 16th," Trump said in referring to a scheduled announcement on June 16 in a phone call to MSNBC from Iowa. "Can’t tell you yet, though I’d like to!"

Trump told the news network that he is "excited" to see "strong" poll numbers, but that would depend on the poll.

The birther leads 2016 hopefuls like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in Iowa polling, but isn't doing so hot in a national poll in which  21 percent of Republicans said they would "definitely would not support" him and just 5 percent said they would vote for him if the election were held today.

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Previous Politix Updates are here, here and here.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM USELECTIONATLAS.ORG

Politix Update: We've Come A Long Way Since 9/11, Or Have We?

I'm am unapologetic bleeding heart who believes that my right to be free from the threat of terrorism must be counterbalanced by my right to be free from  government overreach.  But as forthright and constitutionally sound as that view may be, too few politicians have shared it in the years since the 9/11 attacks rocked the national boat.  That seems to have changed last week with bipartisan approval of a seemingly watered down U.S.A. Patriot Act with new restrictions on National Security Agency snooping, but on closer inspection that's not really the case.

In a warp-speed action that Big Brother loved and had George Orwell spinning in his grave, Congress passed the Patriot Act six weeks after 9/11 and handed the Bush administration a big fat blank check.  A number of civil liberties-focused amendments counterbalancing the law's more draconian provisions were rejected.  Some 66 congressfolk voted against the law, while Russell Feingold of Wisconsin cast the lone dissenting vote in the Senate.  

President Bush and his neocon puppet masters took the blank check and ran with it. 

The NSA began an extraordinary phone metadata collection program, the full extent of which was not made public until Edward Snowden spilled the beans on it and other super-secret government mischief in June 2013.  The Bush White House viewed the Patriot Act as giving it carte blache to conduct what was being called the War on Terror as it saw fit and with no regard as to constitutional niceties, the upshot being that the administration deftly -- if perversely -- undercut many of the very American values the fight against Al Qaeda and other emerging terrorist threats were supposed to protect.  These included the extensive use of torture as an "enhanced" interrogation technique and emergence of an imperial presidency greased by secret pretzel-logical Justice Department legal opinions, my favorite being what I call Mukasey's Law: "Lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers."

Barack Obama had been against the Patriot Act before he was for it, and in May 2011 signed a four-year extension of its key provisions, but by the time it again came up for renewal last month, there seems to have been a change of heart in Congress that the media attributed to a change in the public mood.  In the wake of 9/11, 75 percent of the very frightened American people in effect endorsed a police state, while one recent poll showed that 74 percent of the American people are now averse to giving up personal liberties, an attitude shift for which -- like it or not -- Snowden must be given a lot of credit.

Earlier this week, 67 senators -- including 23 Republicans -- voted to renew the act, now dubbed the USA Freedom Act, but with a key change in Section 215, which was amended to stop the NSA from continuing its mass phone data collection program.  Instead, phone companies would retain the data, which the NSA could now obtain with permission from a federal court on a case-by-case basis. 

In other words, the NSA will now need a court's rubber stamp, an inconvenience to be sure, but not the sea change depicted in the media.  Meanwhile, the warrantless wiretap provision, among other holdovers in the act, live on.  The massive government security apparatus has survived with barely a ding, while only yesterday it was revealed in The New York Times that the NSA, with the Obama administration's approval, has branched out into warrantless surveillance of Americans' Internet traffic without public notice or debate, ostensibly to track down foreign hackers, but it also has the ability to monitor emails and determine wrongdoing with substantially lower legal standards than criminal inquiries.  Snowden was the source of the new information.

Beyond hair-on-fire Senator Rand Paul, there is indeed a new libertarian mood in Congress, and even some Tea Partiers noted that the blanket NSA phone snooping was a breach of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable government seizure.  Said hyper-conservative Republican Congressman Justin Amash: "No serious representative or senator thinks it's OK to reauthorize unconstitutional spying on all Americans."  (Note that a federal appeals court said the same thing in April in ruling that the NSA data dragnet was "an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.")

Even the Justice Department acknowledges that the data being mined is so vast that the government cannot sift through it quickly or effectively enough to stop events such as the Boston Marathon bombings, the Ft. Hood massacre, and the attempted massacre last month outside of Dallas.  In fact, this orgy of spying has not succeeded in stopping any terrorist plots or aided any federal terrorism prosecutions.  So why do it? Because the government wants to create the impression that it is doing something.

The big back story to this week's rare bi-partisan moment was that Mitch McConnell was left looking like an even bigger smacked ass than he already was.

The Senate GOP leader assumed that if Obama was for the revised Patriot Act then he and the GOP should be against it.  Natch.  McConnell's "ideological mindlessness," as one commentator called his monumental fumble, blinded him to the reality that most of his House colleagues and a fair number of Senate colleagues, as well, supported the bill.  Poor, poor Mitch.

SANTORUM TO POPE: FUGGEDABOUT THE PLANET 

I have yet to read a plausible scenario by which Rick Santorum can take the wheel of the Republican primary election clown car, let alone win the GOP nomination, although he is considered by some wizened souls to have been runner-up to Mitt Romney in 2012, which is pretty scary in and of itself. 

Santorum wouldn't even be able to win Pennsylvania, where as an incumbent U.S. Senator he got throttled by 16 percentage points in 2006, the largest losing margin for a Senate incumbent in history.  What he can do with some of his nuttier positions -- like opposing contraception, believing that a child conceived through a rape is a "gift from God," oh, and that liberal brahmins made all those Catholic priests in Boston become drooling pedophiles -- is force the other clowns to tack harder to the right, although it is unlikely any of them will do what this devout Catholic has done: Take on Pope Francis for framing climate change as a moral issue. 

Like Santorum, few Republicans of any stature believe global warming is for real despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, but here was Santorum telling a Philadelphia show host earlier this week that the pope should leave science to scientists and his cred would be damaged if he issued a promised encyclical on climate change.

"The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focus on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality," Santorum said.  "And I think when we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible."

The church should tend to souls, he said.  Fuggedabout the planet.

IMAGE FROM LIBERTY BLITZKRIEG BLOG

Please Join Us To Honor The Memory Of The Reverend Bob Andrews

A memorial service will be held for the Reverend Robert W. Andrews at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16 at the New Ark United Church of Christ at 300 East Main Street, Newark, Delaware.

Bob Andrews was a tireless civil rights crusader, internationalist and mentor for six decades in Newark.  He had long lived on Grays Avenue and had a home in Ticadel, Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica, where he died in his sleep on May 8 at age 85.

He was born on July 14, 1929 in Chicago and educated at Wheaton (Ill.) College, Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania.

Andrews traveled widely, taught in Indonesia and marched with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Ala., in 1965.  He twice was invited by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to consult with him in Beirut regarding U.S. public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was a volunteer in the World Council of Churches refugee program for the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and worked with the Carter administration for the release of political prisoners in Indonesia.

He was Protestant co-secretary of the National Conference on Religion and Race; chair of the Delaware delegation to the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963; president of the Delaware Commission for Fair Practices, and head of American Christians for Justice in Palestine.

But for Newark residents and generations of University of Delaware students, Andrews was the longtime (and always smiling) face of the United Campus Ministry on Orchard Road, which was better known as the Phoenix House.

The Phoenix House was many things — a place to explore one’s religious and political beliefs, a shelter for the troubled and downtrodden, but most of all an escape from rigid town-and-gown formality of Newark and the university campus.

The Phoenix’s coffee house was welcoming to folkies and other musicians who had nowhere else to play, as well as an opportunity to be served hot cider by a professor who had taught you in class earlier in the day.  It also was a safe haven for aspiring young journalists, including the staff of The Heterodoxical Voice, which chronicled ghetto life in Wilmington while championing radicalism, counter-cultural music and literature, and free speech.  I was just one of many young people who was first introduced to vegetarian cooking at the Phoenix House’s one-dollar Friday night dinners.

A frequent jumping off point for protest marches and sit-ins, the Phoenix House also was a target of the Ku Klux Klan, which burned a cross on its lawn one night.  Andrews frequently locked horns with the university administration, which won in the end.   Today the site of perhaps Bob's greatest work, a place of so many positive memories for so many people, where many of us arguably came of age, is a parking lot.

After his career on campus, Andrews founded The Phoenix Community in Delaware Inc., an ecumenical ministry with a global perspective.  He continued to work tirelessly until his death for the many causes he championed during a long and extraordinarily giving life.

Betsy Palmer (1926-2015)

YES, SHE HAD A CAREER BEFORE SHE PLAYED MRS. VOORHEES

ABC Photograph

Politix Update: Objects In Your Mirror Are Not As Close As They Appear

Although the Iowa caucuses are eight months distant, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's air of inevitability has been burst like so many balloons.  Or so we are led to believe.  Fuggedabout her 50 point leads in the polls, a big war chest, formidable campaign organization, and a level of popularity and name recognition to kill for.  An obscure senator with no dough or standing in the polls and a campaign organization that could fit into a minivan who is a ringer for Doc Brown from Back to the Future is lurking Godzilla-like just over the horizon.

But while every day is a bad hair day for Bernie Sanders, this doesn't mean that Hillary is going to have one on his account.  Sanders is an immensely likable septuagenarian who is technically an Independent and self-styled "democratic socialist," but reliably votes with the Democratic caucus.  As the Senate's most left-leaning member, he is a leading voice on climate change, income inequality and taxing the pants off the super rich, as well as a civil libertarian who adamantly opposes mass surveillance on American citizens.  And he has about as much chance of getting the Democratic nomination as one of my goldfish, while Clinton already has the nomination all but locked up and is kicking the ass of every potential Republican challenger in head-to-head polls. 

This, of course, has not deterred a press corps tired of writing about Clinton's emails or her family foundation's unquenchable thirst for looking dodgy while raking in tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and other interests while she was secretary of state.  And, of course, we'll always have Benghazi.

The lamestream media is breathlessly reporting that Sanders is coming after Clinton: "Challenging Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Gains Momentum in Iowa," chirped The New York Times in a headline.  "It's Not Just Hillary," wrote The Washington Post, while the Des Moines Register declared "Some Iowa Democrats Prefer Sanders Over Clinton."

Well, you don't have to be into Newtonian mechanics to know that in terms of momentum, Sanders has gone from a state of inertia to the speed of a tricycle on the upstroke of a very steep hill.  But like I said, he's immensely likable, and maybe . . . just maybe, he'll smoke out some of Clinton's less progressive tendencies.  Beyond that, don't hold your breath.

I'LL HAVE SOME FOX NEWS KOOL-AID WITH MY HEMLOCK

Unlike Bernie Sanders, I never have a bad hair day.  This is because I don't have any hair, or more precisely not enough to warrant a regular haircut.  But every once in a while, the mood strikes me and I succumb to a few minutes in the chair, which has become akin to getting a root canal because Fox News is my barber's television channel of choice.

Bill O'Reilly caterwauling about President Obama's "impotent" foreign policy and the twisted pronouncements of Karl Rove are bad enough, but having to put up with the Perpetual War Twins -- Dick and Liz Cheney -- is like oral surgery without novocaine. 

Yet I got up from the barber chair the other day with a smile on my face and a quiet hosanna to Bruce Bartlett for helping me to see the forest for the trees: Fox News is a gift that keeps on giving . . . to the Democratic Party.

Economist Bartlett, a former adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, believes -- as do I and should anyone grappling with the Republican Party's march to national electoral irrelevance -- that Fox News has created a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves into believing that the U.S. is more conservative than it actually is.  The consequence is that the GOP has dutifully responded by running radical conservatives representative of the influential network's viewers, not the true state of the electorate.

"Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people," Bartlett said in promoting his new paper on the subject. "When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily."

"And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing."

'SWEEPING THE MATTER UNDER THE RUG JUST WON'T WORK'

How does a history teacher from Nowheresville, Illinois become so wealthy that he can pay a blackmailer a cool $3.5 million to make a sexual molestation allegation go away?  If you're Dennis Hastert, you become a congressman and a Republican Speaker of the House, to boot, and then retire to spend more time with your family . . . er, become an "influential" Washington lobbyist who gets rich by playing all sides of issues and, in his case, amassing a small fortune with land deals, one greased by an earmark he secured for a highway interchange.

I do not make light of the allegation by a former student of Hastert's.  After all, it probably is true if Hastert chose to pay hush money rather than face down his accuser.  Or more admirably, go public and acknowledge that he had lust in more than his heart before checking himself into a fancy clinic.  Yes, Democrats do inappropriate sexual stuff, too, but Republicans like Hastert are especially despicable because they self-righteously clothe themselves in Family Values mufti and owe much of their own success to mouthing the right-wing Christianist mantra and telling other people how to mind their own business.

Let us not forget that Hastert, an evangelical, was propelled to the speakership in 1998 on the very day on which the House impeached President Bill Clinton over the Blue Gap Dress Affair. This is because the presumptive speaker, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, announced that he would step down over revelations of his own marital infidelities, some four in all, and not succeed serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. And that Hastert has not been indicted for sexual misconduct, but for giving FBI agents "false, fictitious and fraudulent" information about large bank withdrawals to pay his accuser.   

That's kinda weak, but it's also kinda rich, because in voting to impeach, Hastert harrumphed that the House Judiciary Committee must "uncover the truth" and "uphold the rule of law. . . . Sweeping the matter under the rug just won't work."

And had told his pals in the Christian Coalition in 2004, "More kids need to be taught to just say no. That doesn't just apply to drugs, that also applies to sex before marriage." As well as, "It is equally important to stop those predators before they strike, to put repeat child molesters into jail for the rest of their lives."