Duck and cover

Down goes Cantor

That's a link to a "quick take" listicle at TPM.  Most of which is fine.  Except when it comes to this part.

The resurgence of the GOP establishment just took a devastating blow. So far 2014 has been marked by entrenched Republicans wresting back control of GOP from the rambunctious tea party. Cantor's stunning loss disrupts that narrative and puts every incumbent Republican on notice that they may be next. Any comfort from the string of victories for establishment-favored candidates so far in the primaries will evaporate on Tuesday night. RedState.com blogger Erick Erickson wrote, "[Cantor] kept his attention off his district, constituents, and conservatives while he and his staff plotted to get the Speaker’s chair."

That line about "entrenched Republicans wresting back control" was mostly bullshit to begin with; the product of wishful thinking on the part of an establishment press who love "entrenched Republicans" like they do their own mothers.  We just watched 3,000 term Mississippi Patrician Senator Thad Cochran dragged into a primary runoff  last week.  There's no way anyone should assume this is a good year for "entrenched Republicans."

The bright side, if there is one, is that these results are an indication that democracy still actually kinda works... at least within the framework we've allowed it to work.  The House is badly gerrymandered in order to maintain a Republican majority. The same gerrymander also guarantees that the Republican party will always have to answer to its most radical elements.

All of that is by design. But it is a design predicated on the idea that the voters in the gerrymandered districts get to decide what matters.  Some of the things they think matter are pretty interesting.  These would include shooting down drones with rifles, hog castration, and... yeah..  reality TV.

Now, Jindal is embracing the reality TV craze and boosting his profile.

“Duck Dynasty” is back at 9 p.m. Wednesday for its sixth season. Jindal — who was born Piyush but started calling himself Bobby, after TV’s Bobby Brady, as a preschooler — joins the West Monroe clan in front of the cameras.

It should be noted that Jindal became a Duck Dynasty fan only after his hand-picked candidate for Louisiana's Fifth Congressional District was defeated by insurgent Vance McAllister. McAllister's campaign was boosted by an endorsement from Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson.

In subsequent months, Jindal has taken pains to associate himself with Duck Dynasty also. Jindal stepped in to defend duckperson Phil Robertson when he was under fire for homophobic remarks. On tonight's episode Jindal will present the duckpeople with something called the "Governor's Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence."  This is the first time anyone has received this honor.

Jindal's office has not provided details about the specific criteria for the award or what other businesses have been considered for the honor. The governor said the award would be given out periodically to "homegrown Louisiana businesses" that are expanding.

Here is a preview of the award ceremony.



The point is the people like that Duck thing.  The Duck thing liked wildcard conservative Vance McAllister. Therefore, the people spoke and McAllister knocked off Jindal's guy. And so now Jindal has moved toward the Duck... um... wing of the party.

This is textbook political responsiveness. But it's still pretty calculated.  Jindal would prefer to give out a bullshit award to a TV show rather than cave to any of McAllister's other demands like accepting Louisiana's share of the Medicaid expansion that was supposed to come with the Affordable Care Act.

Will that satisfy the super-empowered GOP fringe base?  Eric Cantor (even Eric Cantor!) couldn't supply them with enough blood.  And so they ate him.  That's the deal the Republicans have made in order to keep governing even though they are a national minority party according to popular vote. Every now and then someone gets thrown to the beast they've created.

Policywise, it works out great for them.  Party discipline is maintained because everyone is afraid of the fringe. The party's rigid intransigence guarantees it wins practically every meaningful showdown with the hapless Democrats.  The whole national program lurches ever rightward. 

Theoretically it should always work like this.

David Brat: Channel your rage at Wall St into vote for me, and I'll punish Wall St by liberating it to shower you with prosperity.
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 11, 2014

And usually it does. Keep the malcontents just riled up enough they'll support you even as you continue to screw them.  That's pretty much been the Republican formula for most of our lifetimes already. 

But still, there's an element of chaos involved that could always make for interesting mischief when a jerk like Eric Cantor has to crash and burn for the cause or when their wildcard candidates get a bit off-script.  Like, for example, McAllister on Medicaid. Or even this David Brat character here.

In his campaign against Cantor, Brat turned every issue into a morality tale about big business cheating ordinary Americans. He attacked Cantor for supporting the farm bill (“Do those billions of dollars go to the small American farmer? No, they go to huge agribusiness, right? Big business again.”), the flood-insurance bill (“Who does that go to? A lot of the money goes to gazillionaires on both coasts who have homes in nice real-estate locations.”), and the STOCK Act, an effort to stop insider trading by congressmen, which Cantor gutted by including an exception for spouses. In his Randall-inspired stump speech, Brat was more worked up about the STOCK Act than anything else. He promised, “If you tell your friends or neighbors about this issue, I will be your next congressman!”

Granted, at the core of Brat’s ideology is an unvarnished belief, one that does not maintain majority support in any recent national poll that I have encountered, that the government should return to its pre-New Deal roots. This is not surprising. He’s a libertarian. But his message, which today is being embraced by Tea Party candidates around the country, is also sharply different from the Romney-Ryan view of limited government celebrated by Republicans in 2012.

For the time being, though, Tea Party populism is boxed in in such a way that it only further serves the establishment cause. But, unlike the perpetually moribund and bought off left, the populists on the right are the only players with even  a slight chance of shaking things up. In many ways that's a frightening prospect but it might also be the closest thing to a hopeful prospect one can imagine right now. 

McAllister really should consider running for re-election.

Not so stupid Republican tricks

Congratulations, John Boehner. You broke it, you bought it, I guess.

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was successfully re-elected as Speaker of the House for another two-year term on Thursday, receiving 220 votes to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) 192 votes. Pelosi will continue on as House Minority Leader. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) received 3 votes.

Also go fuck yourself.

The list of Representatives also receiving votes is an amusing read as well.  I'm assuming Paul Labrador (R-ID), Justin Amash (R-MI), Jim Jordan (R-OH), John Dingell (D-MI) and others all voted for themselves. Unless other members were just being nice to them. 

There was also a vote for Speaker "Present" who is never as popular as one would think. And then there are the head-scratcher votes for people who aren't even eligible. For example, former Florida Representative (and famously crazy person) Allen West received 2 votes.  Had he won, we could have called him Speaker "Absent."

But despite these protest votes, and some meaningless headfakery, the Republican caucus still voted for John Boehner to be Speaker in overwhelming numbers. The fact is, despite their made-for-TV protestations, the Republicans are just fine with Boehner as their figurehead.  After all, having Boehner at the helm worked pretty well for them strategically during the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations. Why mess that up now?

Despite its presentation as a political win for the President, the cliff settlement actually represents a major victory for conservatives on tax policy. Timothy Noah runs through a concise explanation here in this New Republic post. 

As numerous commentators are pointing out, a lot of folks who’ve been told their taxes aren’t going up will be awfully surprised when they receive their first paychecks for 2013 and see that their taxes, ahem, actually did go up. For nearly half the country—the “47 percent” (actually, 46) Romney famously spoke of during the campaign—the payroll tax is the income tax. OASDI taxes the first dollar of income up to $113,700, and it’s regressive in two ways. Everybody earning between $1 per year and $113,700 is taxed at the same rate; and everybody earning more than $113,700 is taxed at a gradually-declining rate, because no income in excess of the $113,700 ceiling is subject to the tax. 

What's particularly disappointing about the payroll tax bump is that it wasn't even part of the negotiation.   This regressive tax hike on the precise portion of the population who can least afford to bear it was considered fait-accompli. The only "tax increase" that was under such heated discussion all December was whether to allow the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts to proceed as scheduled for people earning between $250,000 and $400,000. Obama ended up conceding on this point, a concession which, amazingly, was spun largely as a Republican cave-in. More on that in a minute.

But first I cannot stress enough just what a horrendous contractionary tax policy this inaction on the payroll tax is.  Despite the  headlines about Republican concessions on income taxes in the $400,000 and above stratosphere, we have come out of the cliff negotiation with a less progressive and more backwards overall system of taxation than we had going in.  Worse, in addition to being grossly unfair the backwards policy takes money out of the pockets of the people most likely to spend it while granting a break to an upper income level where the tendency goes more toward saving. In other words, it is an anti-stimulus enacted during a stagnant economy.  It is, in every respect, a major conservative policy victory.

But it's also a major conservative strategic political victory. This is because it almost certainly sets the stage for a second round of argument over the very cuts to Social Security and Medicare Obama's "cliff victory" was supposed to have averted. And the Republicans are likely to win in that confrontation, mainly because they've been so successful at pretending to have "lost" the last round.

According to The Hill, Speaker Boehner has told members of his caucus that he’s done negotiating with President Obama. From the perspective of Boehner and House Republicans this process has amounted to nothing more than Boehner and the members he represents being taken again and again to the cleaners.

This is actually pretty brilliant. But not at all surprising once you understand  the GOP governing imperative.

Because House districts are so badly gerrymandered, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is basically an illegitimate governing caucus.

David Wasserman, undisputed popular votemeister, has just updated his national House popular vote number with the certification of final results from New York State. And the Democrats now has a non-trivial lead of 1.362 million votes. 49.15% to 48.03%.

Understand this and you begin to understand why they do not govern as consensus-seeking dealmakers in the sense one would expect from a democratically representative body. Instead, as the minority delegation of a narrow interest, their behavior pursues that interest with reckless indifference to all other concerns. Unconcerned with the consequences of policy for anyone other than the narrow wealthy interest they represent, the minority governing party is encumbered only by the massive unpopularity of its goals. So, even for an illegitimate minority governing party, enacting an unpopular agenda requires some finesse.

The House Republicans do this in two ways.  First, they govern by perpetual crisis.  Fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, government shutdowns, none of these crisis points the House GOP intentionally steers us toward every few months is anything other than a manufactured crisis of choice. They come about simply because Republicans want them to happen.  Like a spoiled child holding his breath, the Republicans force a negotiation based on their own absurd and dangerous behavior.  Of course the appropriate adult response to such foolishness is not to reward and encourage it. But, as we're all well aware, there are no adults in Washington.

The second tactic Republicans use to enact their unpopular policy agenda is affected victimhood. Which is why they are so eager to tell this story about how they were "taken to the cleaners." Most working people just saw a 2% bump in the payroll tax. Republicans know this is going to be unpopular. What better way to explain an unpopular tax increase than as the result of Obama's arm twisting? Nevermind that the payroll tax wasn't even part of the Fiscal Cliff negotiation. Neither side made it a priority.  The Republican story now is taxes are up and this is because Obama "won" the last negotiation. And since so many of us will see less money in our paychecks this month, this story is bound to resonate with the public.

All of this sets up the next round where Republicans, suddenly finding their backbone, are going to insist that Obama gives them something in return for their trouble. And what he's going to give them will just happen to be various forms of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  For the average American that means paying more in taxes for a reduced benefit.  That's bound to be an incredibly unpopular program. But it's precisely what the narrow interests represented by the illegitimate governing minority party have wanted all along.  So they are winning.  But here's what's so brilliant about how they are winning.

Not only are Republicans closing the door on more tax revenues than they already provided Obama. And not only are they demanding unpopular spending cuts as their price for raising the debt limit. If you read between the lines, they’re actually insisting that Democrats put together the spending cuts themselves.

Remarkable.  The Republicans have forced major concessions on tax policy, pretended those concessions were actually Obama victories, and will parlay that into even more concessions on social spending policy all while painting those cuts as a Democratic initiative. And this week we were supposed to believe that a party on such a strong winning streak was really getting set to depose John Boehner? Why would they do such a thing?

Observers who focus on Boehner's weak leadership style or his supposed inability to control the Tea Party caucus are missing the point.  There's value for conservatives in victimhood.  A supposed challenger like Eric Cantor, for example, doesn't actually want to be Speaker because he doesn't want to be the guy everyone holds accountable for failures (even if they are not, in fact, failures). But he does enjoy being a guy who everyone "knows" is really on the side of those good Conservative principles which.. according to script... are always being abused.  

At the same time, there's value for Boehner in appearing too weak to control conservative recklessness.  He doesn't have to be fully accountable for the hard line agenda he seemingly has no choice but to push. And since none of the hardliners actually wants to be the sacrificial stooge, his position is never under any real threat. 

Boehner may be an idiot, I don't know. But even if he is he's a useful idiot.  He's the perfect useful idiot to pull of the remarkable trick the Republicans are currently executing anyway. And that trick isn't nearly as stupid as all the acting and posturing may make it appear.