Gingrich

Foley, Gingrich, Idaho Politics, U.S. Senate

The Unbearable Lightness of Mediocrity…

Posted on by mjohnson

Thomas S. Foley, the former Democratic congressman and one-time speaker of the House from Spokane, often said that if he didn’t take at least one vote every year or so that was unpopular with his generally conservative constituents he figured he probably wasn’t doing his job.

“The most important thing,” Foley said, about votes taken and the positions espoused in politics, “is when you consider them at election time you’re able to say with some satisfaction that you can still vote for yourself.”

Making a tough vote, Foley said, merely meant you needed to try and explain yourself to voters who might disagree. Level with them. Tell them the truth.

Spokane’s Tom Foley, likely the first and last speaker of the House from eastern Washington

When Foley lost re-election in 1994 in the Republican wave that made Newt Gingrich speaker of the House, as much as any event in the last 25 years a catalyst for the pollution of American politics, he was philosophical. “It’s not a disgrace to lose,” Foley said, “it’s part of the process.”  

Eastern Washington voters finally decided Foley’s work on behalf of farmers and free trade and his position atop the House was less important that his opponent’s characterization that the erudite, Jesuit-educated lawyer was “a liberal” who had grown too big for his Spokane britches. 

I’ve been thinking about Foley’s rule – a vote every once in a while that cuts against the grain of what most voters think they believe – because such votes have never been scarcer than they are right now. Fifty Republican members of the United States Senate, including the two passionately obtuse backbenchers from Idaho, will confront such a vote in the next few days. Most of them, and certainly Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, are going to take the gentle path of least resistance. 

They’ll vote to acquit Donald Trump on charges that he incited the insurrectionist mob attack on Congress on January 6, even though both senators were targets of and witnesses to the attack. They’ll twist themselves once again into a position of pro-Trump denial, a helix of political contortion more dexterous than you’d normally think possible for two guys aged 69 and 77. 

Both senators voted this week to not even proceed with a Senate trial of Trump on grounds, not supported by most legal experts by the way, that it is somehow unconstitutional to consider punishing a former president for conduct that was clearly designed to disrupt the work of Congress and ended with the Capitol damaged, scores injured and five dead. 

House impeachment managers cross the Capitol, the scene of a Trump-inspired riot three weeks ago, to deliver to the Senate the charges against the former president

Other Republicans – the slippery Marco Rubio for one – have said a Trump trial is “stupid” since it would further divide the country, a division that Trump, of course, set out to accomplish. The illogic is numbing since Rubio’s rationale, as the conservative columnist Charlie Sykes noted, “insists that holding Trump accountable is more polarizing than Trump’s actual behavior.”

This GOP line of resistance will almost certainly prevail, and Trump will survive impeachment for a second time even as by the hour evidence grows that Trump summoned the mob, used his campaign funds to organize it and then set them off to sack the Capitol. Even the chants of “hang Mike Pence” aren’t enough to convince a Crapo or a Risch that the person they fear most should be held to account for the most serious assault on our government ever incited by an American president. 

Crapo, who must be the least known and most minimally accomplished senior member of the Senate of his generation, worries that should he suddenly discover a backbone the same kind of mob Trump incited earlier this month will come for him during his re-election next year. Crapo voted to both impeach and then remove Bill Clinton for lying about a consensual sex act, but now the oath he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” doesn’t extend to sanctioning presidentially inspired insurrection. 

Even Kentucky’s senior political weathervane, Mitch McConnell, who a week ago was saying “the mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people,” voted at first opportunity to let Trump skate. 

In the more than three weeks since the mob came after Congress, neither of Idaho’s senators has uttered a syllable of concern about Trump’s election lies or his incendiary rhetoric on the day the Capitol was stormed. Not one word. No statement. No interview. No tweet. Nothing. 

Each did praise Capitol police officers who risked lives to protect them so they could live to exonerate the guilty. They gladly celebrated the hundreds of Idaho National Guard troops dispatched to Washington to ensure “the peaceful transfer of power,” but neither Crapo or Risch bothered to connect the presence of the troops or the attacks on the cops to the president who cause it to happen. 

Jim Risch has praised National Guard members from his state deployed to Washington but hasn’t said a word about why they had to deploy

The see no evil twins of Idaho’s Senate delegation watched quietly while the arsonist Donald Trump laid the fire, said nothing while he spread the gasoline and went silent when the blaze ignited. Then, as if by magic, they watched the criminal responsible slink off to Palm Beach while celebrating the fire fighters standing around in the cold outside the Capitol.  

The belief that a true conservative party, one not dominated by Proud Boys, white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists and guys perpetually decked out in animal skins and Hawaiian shirts, would ever reckon with the disaster that is Trump is as dead as Ronald Reagan. What’s left is a bunch of cowering non-entities like Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, complicit in supporting a level of criminal conduct that will forever be at the center of their mediocre careers. 

At the end of the day, you have to wonder what these guys are afraid of? Are these comfortable, secure Republicans afraid that Trump will sic the racist mob on them? Are they betting that the country is ready to move on from a president they lock step condoned even as he tried to steal an election and when that failed tried to prevent Congress from certifying the real winner? Are they simply betting on national amnesia about the first attack on the Capitol since 1814? 

Crapo and Risch will never make the kind of tough vote a Tom Foley envisioned as being more important than sacrificing your integrity in order to win an election. But then again, it’s not possible to sacrifice something you’ve never had. 

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Additional Reading:

Some other reading for your consideration…

The Education of Josh Hawley

A terrific, enlightening and ultimately frightening Politico profile of the controversial senator from Missouri: “The subversive senator’s college peers and professors don’t recognize the affable intellectual they once knew. But they do recognize his ambition.” 

Josh Hawley of Missouri, a leader of the GOP sedition caucus

The profile features comments from people who knew Hawley well from his days at Stanford, including the Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Kennedy. 

“I absolutely could not have predicted that the bright, idealistic, clear-thinking young student that I knew would follow this path,” says Kennedy. “What Hawley and company were doing was kind of the gentlemanly version of the pointless disruption that happened when the mob invaded the Capitol.”

Read the whole thing to better understand a guy emerging as a key figure in the Republican Party.

The Constitution According To Birch Bayh

A central character in my new book on how the election of 1980 helps explain our current politics is a remarkable United States senator from Indiana.

Birch Bayh is responsible for more of the Constitution than anyone not of the founding generation. 

Senators Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh

Author of two amendments, including one much in the news at the end of the Trump presidency, Bayh came near passing a third as Susan Salaz recounted recently in Indianapolis Monthly magazine. 

“Even more relevant than the 25th Amendment’s ‘nuclear option’ for presidential removal was the next goal to which Bayh turned his attention — abolishing the Electoral College. By 1969, the senator gained strong support in the Senate, and even from President Nixon. In 1970, ratification of the amendment that would establish a national popular vote seemed within reach.”

Worth your time:

The Guy Who Made the Bernie Mitten Photo 

You’ve seen the photo that inspired a million memes so you should know the photographer’s name – Brendan Smialowski.

An mage of our times

“It’s hard to say why something becomes a meme — there’s no logic to it,” Smialowski said. “When you look at them in hindsight they sort of make sense.”

Here’s the link:

Thanks for reading. Be safe out there.

2012 Election, 2016 Election, Al Gore, American Presidents, Campaign Finance, Gingrich, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Poetry, Politics, Romney, Supreme Court, Theodore Roosevelt

A New Gilded Age

Posted on by christian

A System Awash in Money

If Mitt Romney wins the Florida primary Tuesday, as now seems likely, the media scrum following his every move will no doubt credit his win to his new-found aggressiveness in taking on Newt Gingrich, including his clearly superior debate performances during the week leading up to the vote. But that explanation will only be part of the story.

Additional credit for Romney’s rebound from what looked like near disaster in South Carolina must go to the faceless, if not altogether nameless, pro-Romney Super PAC – Restore Our Future. The Super PAC has lavished millions on the Sunshine State to help restore the future of Mitt’s campaign. Of course, Romney is not alone in enjoying the largess of a well-heeled Super PAC. Gingrich has come to depend for television exposure in the dispersed and expensive Florida market on the Super PAC that supports him – Winning Our Future. Other less well financed Supers are supporting Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and a Super PAC supporting Barack Obama is waiting patiently in the wings.

There are so many sleazy angles to the Super PAC story it is difficult to create a priority list of all the real and potential outrages. We are now into the second year of this new 21st Century reality of unlimited, corporate, and often secret money perverting what were our already money drunk campaigns.

Still in fact what seems like a new reality is really an old American tradition; a tradition of unlimited corporate money in campaigns that dates back more than 100 years to what came to be called the Gilded Age. So, remembering the old admonition that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, we have effectively arrived at a new Gilded Age in the year 2012. It’s not necessary to be a good government, goody two shoes to worry that the very nature of our democracy is changing in ways that are profound and deeply troubling in this new age.

As the American Enterprise Institutes’ Norm Ornstein wrote recently in The Hill, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case – that’s the now infamous ruling were the Court’s majority overturned a century of settled campaign finance law, allowed unlimited corporate and labor union money to flow to Super PAC’s and equated money with free speech – has put our politics more and more into the hands of the 21st Century captains of the new Gilded Age.

“By giving corporations free rein to meddle in politics without any accountability required, just like in the robber baron days, and by defining money as speech, the court dealt a body blow to American democracy,” Ornstein wrote. “Candidates no longer can focus simply on raising money for their campaigns against other candidates. Because corporations have almost unlimited sums they can put in with no notice, candidates have to raise protection money in advance just in case such a campaign is waged against them.”

The website OpenSecrets.org reports that the Romney aligned Super PAC has spent more than $17 million so far, most of it to attack Gingrich. Here’s where the perversion begins. Big money donors give unlimited amounts to the Super PAC’s, often attempting to conceal the real source of the cash, but nonetheless maintaining the ability to curry favor with the candidate supported by the big PAC. One has to be awfully naive to believe that a $1 million donation doesn’t buy more than a thank you note.

One example: Utah news organizations have reported that two Provo, Utah companies listed as $1 million contributors to Restore Our Future don’t really seem to be companies at all.

“Companies called Eli Publishing and F8 LLC contributed $1 million each to Restore Our Future,” Utah television station KSTU reported last August. “The companies share an address in downtown Provo and the super-PAC received the money from both on the same day.” The address listed for the companies, according to the TV report, was an accounting firm where employees said they had no knowledge of the businesses.

Other Romney Super PAC donors aren’t so obscure. John Paulson a New York hedge fund manager is in for $1 million. Forbes magazine lists Paulson as the 17th wealthiest guy in the world, worth $15.5 billion, which begs the question: why only a million bucks?

J.W. and Richard Marriott, the hotel guys, are into the Romney PAC for a half million each. Until a year ago, Romney served on the Marriott board. The CEO of New Balance athletic shoes is a half million dollar contributor, as is the managing partner at Romney’s old Bain Capital firm. That fellow’s wife shelled out her own $500,000.

Clearly the Romney-aligned Super PAC hasn’t had to look under many rocks to turn up millions. These dollars aren’t falling far from the tree, which is one reason all this Super PAC business has the real potential to be so sinister. The candidates all regularly proclaim that they have no connection to the Super PAC’s who are raising and spending so freely on their behalf. Federal law prohibits coordination between the campaigns and the PAC’s they say, but the line that separates the campaigns from the big corporate money certainly isn’t a very bright line.

USA Today reported over the weekend about the remarkable “coincidence” of the message in Romney’s speeches on the stump matching up with the anti-Gingrich television ads Restore Our Future is putting on the air. Of course, the two organizations don’t need to really coordinate since the PAC’s are run, in every case, by former close aides and associates of the candidates. But the no coordination mandate helps maintain the fiction that all this is happening at arm’s length and that there is no quid pro quo involved for the millionaire and billionaire contributors.

Gingrich’s Super PAC is, of course, mostly funded by an extraordinarily wealthy Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife Marion. Adelson says his support for Gingrich is easy to explain. He is a long-time friend of Newts and values the former Speaker’s vocal support for Israel, a cause near and dear to the Adelsons. But, of course, nothing is that simple in politics. Adelson’s international casino empire has vast interests in public policy and since early last year Adelson’s company has been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is reportedly looking into violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

So, you might ask: what does the fact that all these very rich, very well connected, very politically interested corporate leaders have to do with a new Gilded Age? Isn’t this just the way politics has always worked? Maybe the only thing different is the amount of money involved.

Maybe the only thing different is the amount of money involved and the fact that thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United these vast amounts of corporate dollars can flow unregulated into the political process. We have gone back to the future, back to the first Gilded Age at the end of the 19th Century.

University of Texas historian H. W. Brands wrote his book Reckless Decade: America in the 1890’s in 1995. In an interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, Brands nailed the essence of why corporate money in politics has such a potentially corrosive effect.

“Any capitalist economy,” Brands said in the C-SPAN interview, ” is based on the notion of economic self-interest. And, you know, if you put it another way, you can — if you’re not being too complimentary, you can call it greed. And our economy runs as much on those lines as it did back then [the 1890’s] – maybe not quite as much. There’s a government safety net now to deal with those people who were falling out the bottom of the economy during the 1890s. But, certainly, I mean, the idea of profits, and I’m certainly not going to criticize profit. But, nonetheless, the idea of economic self-interest is definitely as much a motive.”

The question to ask of our democracy in this new Gilded Age is how any candidate, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how honest, can escape the human impact of a well-heeled friend donating a few million to help get him elected?

And granting that the casino owners, the hotel operators, the unions and the guy running the non-business businesses in Utah may truly value the particular approach and policies of a particular candidate, we also can’t deny that each has a self-interest. We all have a self-interest, but not all of us can buy so much free speech or so much access.

Justice Anthony Kennedy rather unbelievably wrote in his opinion in the Citizens case,  “[The Court majority] now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

You wonder if Mr. Justice Kennedy has been following the campaign so far.

At a time when growing concerns about income distribution in America collide with a mounting distrust of most of our national institutions, including corporations, the Congress and the Presidency, the Supreme Court has, by opening the flood gates to unlimited corporate money in our elections, given us even more cause to doubt the fairness and sustainability of our democratic system.

As H.W. Brands noted in his history of the first reckless decade in the 1890’s, the greed and corruption that seemed to seep into every facet of America life in the first Gilded Age became so serious that only two political alternatives seemed possible – revolution or reform. Thankfully, the country took the path of reform and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson ushered in a Progressive Era in response to the Gilded Age.

One of T.R.’s Progressive Era reforms was to ban corporate money from political campaigns. That ban lasted for 100 years. That ban ended, and a new Gilded Age began, with a breathtakingly impactful Supreme Court decision two years ago.

As one of the beneficiaries of the excesses of the Gilded Age, Tammany political boss George Washington Plunkett, famously said, there is dishonest graft and honest graft. Plunkett went in for the honest variety. As he said, “I might sum up the whole thing by sayin: I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

 

2012 Election, Baseball, Gingrich, Minnick, Pete Seeger, Politics, Romney

Mitt’s Errors

Posted on by christian

Good Campaigns – and Candidates – Avoid This Stuff

In tennis they call what Mitt Romney has been doing for the last couple of weeks “unforced errors.” In football, Romney has been committing turnovers in the red zone. His primary game has been the political equivalent of fumbling on the six yard line. In my long ago basketball playing days we called what Mittens has been doing – Mittens is what the ever nasty, but always with a smile Maureen Dowd has taken to calling Romney – “blowing the bunny.” That was pickup game short hand for missing the easy, uncontested layup – the bunny.

Romney made millions, as we now read in the papers every day, by the careful, calculating, some would say ruthless, takeover and remodeling of corporations. Corporations may not be people, but they are apparently more accommodating to Romney’s management style than the grueling primary quicksand that now threatens to sink him in Florida.

At the moment when the once secure frontrunner should have been stretching for a victory lap, Romney’s unforced errors – three of them seem particularly egregious – have given the twice dead Newt Gingrich a new lease on life. The Gingrich who stole South Carolina in Jon Stewart’s way of thinking must be close to exhausting his nine lives, but that is another story for another day.

Mitt’s three missed layups – his tax returns, Bain Capital and Romneycare – deserve the bunny label because any campaign operative worth his or her salt should have ground down these issues months – years? – ago and found a way to talk about them, or at least front end them, in a way that would not threaten to cripple his campaign. The unforced campaign errors that plague the Romney camp again prove that business experience rarely translates to political agility.

It is now widely reported that Romney is likely the wealthiest guy who has ever aspired to the Oval Office. It was a no brainer months ago that his tax returns and his personal and family wealth would be an issue in the campaign, particularly in light of the Occupy movement, the continuing fallout over big Wall Street pay days and the partisan debate over taxes on the most wealthy Americans. The campaign should have seen this coming like a Form 1040 in the mail.

The Romney campaign could have – and should have – quietly released his tax returns during the dog days of last August; packaged not as it played out as a purely defensive move on the candidate’s part, but as an “I’ve got nothing to hide” moment of transparency. The release could have been handed to an individual reporter who could have been given open access to the candidate’s financial and legal advisers. Such a move would have been the best chance to ensure a complete, fair story that might have been less about politics and more about economics and how the tax code really works.

Sure I’ve done well, Mitt could have said, and I want all Americans to have a chance to do well, too. And as for this capital gains tax rate that Obama keeps harping about – guess what? It works! I worked hard, made money and now I’m investing in other companies just like they tell you it works at the Harvard Business School.

Romney would have gotten plenty of questions about his taxes, but those questions would not have made news on the eve of the Florida primary and wouldn’t have given Newt Gingrich, he with his own bundle of secrets, an issue to bash him over the head with. And, while we’re assessing unforced errors, what smart campaign operator decided that once the Romney returns were going to be dumped that it should happen right in the middle of the run –up to Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech? Half a brain might have correctly concluded that the president’s speech would be all about the struggling middle class in contrast to the Thurston Howell III class? Obama speaks now for the middle class, Mitt for those with Swiss bank accounts.

Fumble number two involves Romney’s unbelievably clumsy handling of his Bain Capital story. His work as a private equity whiz is the absolute centerpiece of his personal narrative, which holds that his kind of business experience is just what the country needs right now. Yet, the campaign never fleshed out the narrative beyond the fact that Romney worked at Bain and created “thousands of jobs.” What did he learn about the country working there? Why do the lessons apply to politics and governing? What management style would he bring to the Executive Branch? Zilch on all that from Mittens.

Smartly answering those questions with appropriate verification, endorsement from people he worked with and from companies he turned around could have been a powerful narrative. His handling of his Bain story has become, rather than a strong positive, a combination of Gordon Gekko of Wall Street meets Mr. Potter of Bedford Falls. Suddenly Romney’s business career is a real liability.

One now completely obvious thing the Romney campaign could have done months ago and had ready in the can: its own 30 minute film version of Romney’s story at Bain. Instead the campaign now finds itself reduced to defending capitalism – or in Rick Perry’s one good line of the campaign “vulture capitalism” – in the abstract rather than extolling the details of a credible story of job creation and economic growth. Romney’s handling of his Bain history reminds me of how badly the 2004 Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, did in managing his Vietnam War record. The strongest piece of Kerry’s story was laid waste by the Swift Boat attacks and he never recovered.

Finally, Romney, as we are about to see in Florida, has kicked his health reform story out of bounds on fourth down and short.

Romneycare, the Massachusetts version of health insurance reform that Mitt championed as governor and now avoids like swine flu, may have been the most obvious issue his campaign needed to manage. He still hasn’t found a credible way to talk about the issue and a Gingrich supporting Super PAC is now on the air in Florida with the completely predictable attack that Romney has not yet found a way a deflect.

In every serious campaign a candidate will be dished a few unwelcoming surprises. Given the long slog we put these people through it’s a given there will be the quip that sounded funny in the head, but turns out to not be so funny played over and over on television. The “you’re likable enough, Hillary” moment “or the clinging to guns and God” line that offers a rare glimpse inside what a politician really thinks. These moments are bad enough and force campaigns into damage control.

It’s the unforced errors, the mistakes made due to lack of planning, lack of attention to detail or inability to really self reflect that often hurt the most. After all, they can often be avoided if a candidate and a campaign are really on the top of their game. Romney clearly isn’t. He best get better really fast.

 

American Presidents, Gingrich, Obama, U.S. Attorneys

Better Late…

Posted on by christian

dojU.S. Attorneys Nominated for Idaho, Eastern Washington

If you need any proof that the confirmation process for high officials of the United States government works about as well as Toyota’s braking system, consider the long delayed, but finally announced appointments of U.S. Attorneys in Idaho and eastern Washington.

Barack Obama took office more than 13 months ago and as of last week, according to the website Main Justice, he has nominated just over half of the 93 U.S. Attorneys in the country. The Senate has approved just 34 of the nominees. What is strange about this pace is that no one seems to think its strange.

The good news is that both the nominees recently announced, Wendy Olson in Idaho and Mike Ormsby in eastern Washington, are highly respected attorneys and quality people who should be quickly confirmed by the world’s greatest – and slowest – deliberative body, the United States Senate. The Main Justice site has good profiles of both Olson and Ormsby, including the interesting tidbits that Olson once interned in the Los Angeles Times sports department and that Ormsby is part owner of the Yakima Bears baseball team in the Northwest League.

Olson is the consensus choice of the entire Idaho delegation, which put out a joint statement expressing approval. The fact that a consensus choice of a long-time and highly respected career prosecutor, whose appointment has been the best kept secret in Idaho’s legal circles for months, could take so long speaks volumes about the time consuming, onerous vetting process that now slows down even the most obvious presidential appointment.

In Ormsby’s case, his nomination, also speculated upon for months, was slowed by questions about his role in a controversial downtown Spokane development and by what the Seattle PI correctly called “partisan gridlock” in the capitol. Now that the Justice Department and the FBI have combed over the story, he should receive – and deserves – quick bipartisan approval in the Senate.

[Full disclosure: I’ve known Mike Ormsby for a long time and know him to be both a quality individual and a fine attorney. That a fellow of his experience and ability is willing to undergo the months-long vetting process, with all the uncertainty and turmoil it must create for his existing practice, is a testament to his commitment to both professionalism and public service. He’ll do a superb job.]

Federal prosecutors play extremely important roles in our justice system. They should be people of great experience, sound judgment and outstanding character. The advice and consent of the Senate is properly the place to double check on those qualifications.

By the same token, when an election takes place, a new president – regardless of party – must be able to make timely and considered judgments about the people he wants in important positions. We will soon have new, high quality U.S. Attorneys in place in our neck of the woods, but it certainly hasn’t been a hasty process.

A better approach for these important jobs might be to do what Bill Clinton did following his election and request the resignation of every U.S. Attorney. Then during the long vetting and confirmation process a career prosecutor would be in charge of every office. The opportunity for political mischief is actually reduced under this scenario. The Obama method has left in place for months and months a gaggle of the previous administration’s political appointees, with many likely going through the motions of being a United States Attorney.

Maybe the best that can be said is that the deeply flawed confirmation process in Washington, involving everything from assistant secretaries of this and that to Supreme Court judges, is so onerous and so time consuming that few people with real flaws can possibly survive running the gauntlet. Maybe that’s the point. But, does it have to take so long?

Too bad we can’t apply the same level of scrutiny to the Eric Massa’s of the Congress. That kind of vetting would be worth the wait.