Cruz, comity, and comedy

11/25/13 10:04 AM

By Steve Benen

 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sat down with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt the other day, who asked the Republican senator about the “nuclear option.” Alas, the message didn’t match the messenger (via Caitlin MacNeal).

HUNT: Will it complicate passing budgets or debt ceilings or anything?

 

CRUZ: Of course it will. I mean, it will poison the atmosphere of the Senate.

I should note that I’ve only seen the transcript, and therefore have no idea whether the right-wing Texan was able to say this with a straight face.

 

Either way, let’s not forget that this is the same Ted Cruz who helped oversee his party’s government-shutdown strategy. Cruz has repeatedly drawn the ire of his own Republican colleagues who’ve been the targets of his extremist tactics. Cruz won’t endorse his own Senate allies. A “remarkable number” of lawmakers in both parties have come forward “to say that they think Cruz is kind of a jerk.”

 

He’s the guy who wants to talk about poisoning the atmosphere of the Senate? Maybe someone else can take the lead on defending institutional comity?

 

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U.S. Senate goes 'nuclear' on filibuster rules

Senate Democrats pushed through a controversial rules change known as the "nuclear option."

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.,
answers questions from reporters following
the weekly policy lunch of the Democratic
caucus on Nov. 19.
(Photo: Win McNamee, Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pushed through a controversial change to Senate rules Thursday that will make it easier to approve President Obama's executive and judicial branch nominees.
Fifty-two Senate Democrats voted with Reid to reduce the threshold from 60 votes to 51 votes to approve executive and judicial nominees against unanimous GOP opposition. Three Democrats, Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Carl Levin of Michigan, opposed the change.
The rules change does not apply to Supreme Court nominees, who are still subject to a 60-vote filibuster threshold, or to legislation.
"The American people believe Congress is broken. The American people believe the Senate is broken. And I believe they are right," Reid said Thursday on the Senate floor. "The need for change is so very, very obvious."
The turning point in this latest showdown was Republicans' decision to block all three of Obama's latest nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the nation's second most powerful court with vast jurisdiction over federal agencies and regulations.
STORY: First Take: Could partisanship get worse? It just did
The court currently has four judges appointed by Republican presidents and four by Democrats, with three vacancies. But six "senior" judges, five of them Republican nominees, tilt the court to the right. Republicans claim no more judges are needed, so they have based their opposition on workload, not the qualifications of Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins.
Democrats control the Senate 55-45, but the majority is at stake in the 2014 elections. Republicans warned that it would not only tear apart cross-party relationships in the Senate, but it will come back to haunt Democrats if they return to the minority. "You will no doubt come to regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned Democrats.
Only 22 Democrats have ever served in the minority. Vice President Joe Biden, who opposed a similar rules change as a senator, said Thursday that he supports Reid's decision.
The move is informally referred to as the "nuclear option" because it blows up long-standing Senate procedure and protection of minority rights. It would be the most far-reaching change to filibuster rules since 1975, when senators eased the two-thirds requirement for ending filibusters to today's three-fifths requirement of 60 votes.
Progressive groups cheered Reid's move. "This was not a decision made easily or taken lightly. There was no choice. The Republican minority had turned the existing rules into weapons of mass obstruction," said Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron.
Conservative groups said it would undermine minority rights in Congress. "For Harry Reid and President Obama, this is not about a couple circuit court judges; this is an attempt to remake America to reflect their unworkable and unpopular progressive vision," said Michael Needham of Heritage Action, which urged senators to oppose the rules change if it comes to a vote. "If Reid and his colleagues continue down this path, they will set a precedent that fundamentally alters the role of the minority in American politics."
Contributing: Associated Press

 

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Parker: Can the Republicans handle prosperity?

Parker: Can the Republicans handle prosperity?

By Kathleen Parker

| The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — In spite of everything — the GOP’s internal scrimmages, the government shutdown, the party’s transparent attempts to derail Obamacare — Republicans keep getting second chances.

The question is, can they handle prosperity? Do they even know what to do with it?

With the myriad problems besieging Obamacare, from the non-rollout to the minuscule number of enrollees in the health insurance exchanges, this is no time for gloating. Rather, it is time for Republicans to get very, very busy with their own ideas for across-the-board reforms.

The party of "no" must become the party of "we can, too!" This doesn’t mean sacrificing core principles, though some could use a little shelf time. It does mean picking battles Republicans can win and avoiding skirmishes that further alienate centrists and minorities.

Forget building a larger tent, which increasingly looks like a pup for two white guys and a flashlight. Ditch the tent and build a coliseum. Install Doric columns, if you like, and grab an obelisk on your way to redemption. At no extra cost, here’s an inscription for the keystone: Waste not, want less. Waste not this moment; want less than perfection and aim for the possible.

This was always House Speaker John Boehner’s battle plan, but he finally concluded that leading his conference where it wanted to go was preferable to inciting a civil war. In a recent interview, Boehner told me he thinks at least some of the better-death-than-compromise caucus had come around to understanding that attaching Obamacare to the continuing resolution, resulting in the government shutdown, was the wrong tactic.

Even so, "at least some" may not be enough. And who knows what Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has up his sleeve as new deadlines loom for budget and debt-ceiling negotiations early next year?

In the meantime, House and Senate Republicans have a small window, while Obamacare is hugging the shoals, to show why their ideas are best. Americans frustrated with Congress and disappointed by the president are primed for someone to pick up the bullhorn and say, "We hear you."

It’s too bad "compassionate conservatism" has become tarnished because compassion is what is needed in today’s GOP playbook: Compassion for the hungry whose food stamps House Republicans excised from the farm bill; compassion for 11 million immigrants who are prisoners in illegal limbo; compassion for gays, lesbians and others seeking protection against workplace discrimination.

These are not such difficult choices in the scheme of things. How to guarantee that Iran can’t weaponize its nuclear capability? That’s tough. Not so tough: Helping the poor feed their families, finding a path for citizenship along with other immigration reforms, extending equal protections to individuals whose sexual orientation should not be a firing offense.

The Senate also has passed a comprehensive immigration bill with the help of 14 Republicans that contains a relatively strenuous path to citizenship that includes paying back taxes and fines, and getting in line behind others seeking citizenship. Hardly a giveaway. Even so, some Republicans aren’t on board with the path to citizenship. Although Boehner told me he hopes to get an immigration bill to the House floor next year, others say 2014’s midterm elections make this unlikely.

Phooey.

What’s really not likely to happen is a Republican White House — ever — without Latino voters. There’s only so much Republicans can accomplish when they control only half of one-third of government. Consider that the biggest states with the largest concentrations of Hispanics — Florida, California, Texas and New York — also convey 151 of the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president.

Appealing to Latinos doesn’t mean Republicans have to pander or bow to President Obama’s wishes. It means doing the right thing. Even though a slim majority of Americans (53 percent) think most immigrants here illegally should be deported, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online survey last February, a more recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 65 percent favor a path to citizenship if it requires essentially what the Senate bill proposes.

The draconian option of deportation would be an unlovely sight. Not only would families be torn asunder, but America’s crops would wither on the vine, as they did in Alabama after that state’s crackdown prompted a sudden, mass exodus. Yet again, unyielding principle prevailed over common sense and survival.

Time is of the essence if Republicans hope to refresh their image in the public square. Picking battles wisely, acting compassionately, creating rather than negating is the only way forward. Jar the hardwoods, campers, there’s daylight in the swamp.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

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Tea Party shocker: Even right-wingers become liberals when they turn off Fox News

America's center is to the left, and even Tea Partyers are liberals when they turn off Rush and learn real facts

Paul Rosenberg

(Credit: trekandshoot via Shutterstock)

As the government shutdown neared its end, an NBC/Esquire poll appeared trying to promote the idea of “New American Center.” Salon’s own Alex Pareene skewered it rather mercilessly, for various good reasons, not least of which was how the whole enterprise came off: “It seems like marketing for NBC and Esquire — we represent the sensible (and probably affluent) center! Don’t be scared of our political content, advertisers!” Pareene wrote. But there was more: “[I]t is clearly very psychically important to the elite political media that a reasonable center exist. A common-sense, centrist middle is an essential, foundational myth of the nonpartisan press.
And yet, as James Fallows pointed out in “Breaking the News,” in 1996, today’s elite media also thrives on superficial coverage of controvery, which makes it complicit in generating the very extremism it simultaneous deplores, condemns and needs to hold at bay in order to legitimate itself.
With such a profoundly self-contradictory practice, it should not surprise us that the poll was even more misleading than Pareene described. Polarization in some sense is real — and yet also partial, misleading and embedded in consensus as well. Tea Partyers ranting “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!” may seem comical — but they also show just how broad a true consensus can be.  In fact, they reflect two central (but routinely ignored) facts of American public opinion that have remained remarkably stable since the 1960s, despite all that’s changed since then:

1.  It’s not just the center vs. the extremes; there is broad consensus across the boards on the basic contours of government spending priorities — the historically most important dimension of political opinion.
2.  It’s just that the center is not where it’s supposed to be: It’s not somewhere in between the two parties, it’s well to the left of the Democrats in D.C.

These two facts are both in full force with respect to the ongoing post-shutdown budget battle. In fact, a sophisticated poll covering 31 budget items as well as revenue sources conducted around the 2010 elections found that, even then, Republican, Democratic and independent voters all agreed on much higher taxes and much deeper defense cuts as the most striking elements of how the budget should be crafted. But before we examine that poll, we need to put these two key facts into long-term context.

The first clear picture of this situation came from two pioneers of public opinion research, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, in their 1967 book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” based on surveys conducted in 1964. Their most striking finding was profoundly paradoxical: While half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, based on questions about government interference and individual initiative, two-thirds of the population were operationally liberal, supporting an activist federal government when asked about specific programs or responsibilities — stable or increased federal government spending on education, housing and urban renewal, adoption of Johnson’s Medicare proposal, and government responsibility to fight poverty.
In short, the American people were in some sense schizoid — opposed to big government in principle, but even more supportive  of it in practice. Most strikingly, almost one-quarter of the population — 23 percent — were both ideological conservatives and operational liberals, and this figure skyrocketed to 46 percent in the Deep South states that Goldwater carried in the 1964 election.
In the final section of the final chapter of the book, titled “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology,” Free and Cantril wrote:

The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms …
There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

Of course, such a restatement never happened. To the contrary, the white backlash to advancing civil rights provided a framework for sharply increased attacks on “big government,” which liberals were increasingly reluctant to defend unreservedly. And yet, despite the far more strident conservative tone of political discourse since then, support for government spending has varied somewhat cyclically since then, but only within a relatively narrow range, as recorded by the gold standard of public opinion research, the General Social Survey [data archives here].
The GSS asks about more than two dozen specific problems or program areas, asking if the amount we’re spending is “too little,” “too much” or “about right.” Not only do most Americans think we’re spending too little in almost every area — most conservatives also think the same. Indeed — hold onto your hats — even most conservative Republicans feel that way as well.
Take Social Security and Medicare, for example: two top “entitlements” that Republicans insist must be cut significantly, and that Obama has repeatedly indicated he would cut … if Republicans would agree to raise revenues as well.  Progressives long have argued that these programs need more revenues, not less spending, so it’s not surprising that liberals surveyed by the GSS think we’re spending too little on such programs. Combining GSS data from 2000 to 2012, and asking about Social Security and spending on “improving and protecting the nation’s health” (GSS’s closest match with Medicare), liberal Democrats thought we were spending “too little” rather than “too much” on one or both  by a margin of 87.1 percent to 2.4 percent — a ratio of over 36-to-1.  But all other groups of Americans held the same view, even conservative Republicans — just not by the same overwhelming amount.  They “only” thought we were spending “too little” rather than “too much” by a margin of 59.2 percent to 13.1 percent— a ratio of 4.5-to-1.  With figures like that — all well to the left of Democrats in D.C. — it’s no wonder that conservatives in Congress always talk about “saving” Social Security and Medicare, and forever try to get Democrats to take the lead in proposing actual cuts.
One more thing: If you look at how much liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans agree with one another — regardless of the positions they take — you come up with figures for a cross-ideological consensus. It’s the lower of the two percentages for each position taken. The conventional narrative has liberals and conservatives always, consistently taking opposite positions, but this example clearly shows that’s not the case. If the conventional narrative were true, the lower percentage for each position would be zero. Instead, it comes to a margin of  59.2 percent to 2.4 percent, for a ratio of 24.7-to-1.
Of course objections can be raised to these results.  For one thing, people are reminded that spending costs money, but they are not being asked to directly weigh spending more money to paying more in taxes. When people are asked if they want more government and higher taxes, or the opposite, results tend to be more conservative. But there’s also evidence that people are generally more willing to pay for government programs the more specifically they are identified — even when they’re asked to consider the costs. Even welfare, which is very unpopular in general, gains substantial support when people are asked specific questions about specific people in specific situations. (In a one-time GSS supplement in 1986, 98 percent of all respondents indicated that welfare recipients should get more money than they actually receive — author’s analysis of data in “The Deserving Poor,” by Jeffry A. Will.) In short — it’s complicated.
Which is why it’s best to take more than one approach. This brings us to the budget-crafting poll I mentioned above—courtesy of researchers at the Program for Public Consultation, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes, and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. In early 2011, PPC released the results of two waves of “deliberative” polling bracketing the 2010 midterms, which swept a wave of Tea Party Republicans into Congress, who in turn pushed for sharp cuts in domestic spending with no tax increases as a matter of principle. They presented their results in two reports, “How the American Public Would Deal With the Budget Deficit” in February 2011, and “Competing Budget Priorities: The Public, the House, the White House” the next month.
As PPC noted in the second report, there is a decided lack of clarity from standard polling about what the public wants: “When the public is asked about the budget most people express their displeasure with the idea of cutting spending in most areas, their displeasure with the idea of raising taxes, as well their belief that it would be desirable to balance the budget. This creates the impression that the public is simply a mass of contradictory feelings.”  To counter this, PPC created a simplified budget process, meant to mimic the deliberative budget process, particularly with its consideration of tradeoffs.
The results of the process were extremely detailed, particularly compared to what pollsters normally produce.  But the big picture was strikingly clear. Massive cuts to defense on the spending side, massive tax hikes on the revenue side — both positions well to the left of the Obama administration, as well as Democratic leaders in Congress.  More specifically, on the spending side, the public favored an average net reduction of $135.3 billion for general defense spending ($109.4 billion), intelligence ($13.1 billion) and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ($12.8 billion), compared to increases proposed by both President Obama and the GOP-dominated House.  This represented just over 92 percent of net spending cuts.  When you add in cuts to military aid and strategic economic aid to U.S. allies, the total cuts involving what the pollsters described as “spending on American international power” came to 96 percent of the total — $139.4 billion. Yet, the public also supported modest increases in several liberal priority areas: job training, education, energy conservation and renewable energy, and pollution control.  Their average net reduction of all spending — $146 billion — was far more than either the president or the GOP House proposed.
On the revenue side, the public increased taxes by an average of $292 billion—roughly triple the amount proposed by President Obama. Majorities increased taxes on incomes over $100,000 by 5 percent or more, and by 10 percent or more for incomes over $500,000. Majorities also increased corporate taxes and other excise taxes. Overwhelming majorities also favored raising estate taxes: 77 percent favored reverting at least to the 2009 levels, with estates over $3.5 million taxed at a 45 percent rate. These positions are generally so far left, they don’t even appear on the spectrum of discussion in Washington.
The researchers also found broad agreement across party lines. Their first report noted, “Among a total of 31 areas, on average Republicans, Democrats and independents agreed on 22 areas — that is, all three groups agreed on whether to cut, increase or maintain funding. In 9 other areas there was dissensus.”  That’s not to say there weren’t differences. Republicans cut much less from defense — $55.6 billion for core defense (versus $109.4 billion) — and much less overall — $100.7 billion (versus $146 billion) — than Americans as a whole. But even so, the position of Republican respondents overall was still dramatically to the left of the political conservation in Washington.
In fact, PPC noted:

It is striking that no group — Republican, Democrat, or independents — on average acted in ways that fit their respective media stereotypes. It might be assumed that Republicans would cut the most; Democrats would cut the least or even increase spending; and that independents would be in between. But on the contrary:

• Republicans cut spending the least, though still considerably ($100.7 billion, or 7.4%)
• Democrats cut spending more than Republicans ($157.3 billion, or 11.6%)
• Independents cut spending substantially more than either Republicans or Democrats ($195.5 billion or 14.4%).

Thus, everything the media and Washington’s conventional wisdom tells you about the will of the voters is wrong. But don’t forget the Tea Party! They, too, did not respond as expected.  Sure, they were more conservative than Republicans overall, but they still come across as wild-eyed socialists compared to their D.C. representatives:

Those who described themselves as “very sympathetic” to the Tea Party (14% of the full sample), as would be expected, raised taxes and revenues less than Republicans in general, and less than Democrats and independents. Even so, on average, Tea Party sympathizers found a quite substantial $188.2 billion in additional revenues to reduce the deficit ($105.2 billion in individual income taxes).

Tea Partyers raising taxes? By more than President Obama? Welcome to the strangest world of all: Welcome to reality.  Think I’m kidding?  Then consider the next way that PPC chose to look at its data — a comparison of blue and red districts.  Remember, these districts have become dramatically safer for partisans than in years past — a fact that’s help push House Republicans ever further to the right, because fear of a primary challenge from the right is greater than fear of losing in the general election. And yet, PPC found surprising little difference between red and blue districts as a whole:

Overall, red districts and blue districts were very similar in the ways that they increased revenues…. What is surprising is that red districts on average increased revenues slightly more than did blue districts on average.
On average, red districts increased revenues by $295.5 billion, of which $155.9 billion came from increases to individual income taxes. Blue districts increased revenues by $286.4 billion, of which $153.6 billion came from individual income taxes. In red districts, more respondents increased effective tax rates on incomes over $500,000, as well as some other taxes.

The reason for this counterintuitive result, PPC notes, is the greater presence of independents in red districts (25 percent vs. 19 percent in blue districts). Because they favored higher taxes and deeper spending cuts, they tipped the balance to make red districts remarkably similar to blue districts. The differences were almost as modest on the spending side: 

On average, red districts made spending cuts totaling $140.6 billion, while blue districts made cuts totaling $153.4 billion—a difference of $12.8 billion.

The rational for the House of Representatives is that it is “closer to the people,” and this is what Tea Party political representatives have repeatedly claimed as well, as they’ve fought to push the political spectrum sharply to the right. Meanwhile, back in the real world, nothing could be further from the truth. The main reasons are obvious: First, the independents who shift the balance so decisively do not vote in GOP primaries, so their voices simply don’t count. This is the point of the PPC’s red district/blue district analysis. Second, and even more fundamentally, nobody ever asks the public what they want in ways that allow them to articulate a coherent vision. This is the point of PPC’s entire project, and their budget project in particular.
It should be pointed out that cutting the budget deficit much more than Democrats or Republicans does not make the public more left-wing in one very crucial respect: Cutting the deficit amounts to austerity economics, the opposite of the Keynesian approach, which keeps deficits high when the economy is struggling, letting public-spending demand take up the slack of missing private sector demand, in order to hasten recovery. Classic Keynesian policy calls for cutting back deficits only after economic recovery is well established — a point we are still far from reaching roughly three years after PPC’s surveys were conducted.
Yet, this doesn’t necessarily mean the public actually believes in austerity economics in the way that these figures might suggest, for at least three main reasons. First, as Free and Cantril’s research showed, Americans have always believed in austerity economics at a symbolic, ideological level.  This is what their findings about American’s ideological conservativism were all about.  But this finding — based on surverys in 1964 — did not prevent LBJ from winning a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, and thus cannot be taken seriously as a policy prescription. That’s what their findings of operational liberalism are all about.
Second, there’s the “the Beltway deficit feedback loop” described by Washington Post Plum Line blogger Greg Sargent back in April 2011 — the cumulative impact on public opinion of the Beltway deficit-cutting obsession eventually stifling the public’s primary concern over jobs.  Thus, the public that PPC was polling around the 2010 midterms was a public repeatedly primed to cut deficits by Beltward Democrats as well as Republicans.
Third, this priming was reinforced by the entire structure of the budget exercise as designed by PPC. There was nothing in PPC’s approach designed to ask if people preferred to prioritize putting people back to work before reducing the budget deficit, or to provide accurate information about the macroeconomics involved.  This is not to say that PPC is ignorant of this concern.  Another PPC survey conducted in roughly the same time frame, just after the 2010 midterms found widespread minformation throughout the elctorate, with some of the most prominent examples having clear impact on people’s view of the economy and economic policy. This includes underming their understanding of how effective economic stimulus has been.  But that’s a topic for a whole other article.
We’ve just been through a lot of facts and figures, but the bottom line boils down to this, an echo of what Free and Cantil discoved back in 1967: The real polarization in Americcan politics is a split between symbolic conservative intuitions on the one hand, and pragmatic liberal facts on the other.  The more that confusion and unconfirmed, even unconscious biases abound, the more that conservative “common sense” carries the day. The more informed that people become, the closer they are to the problems that need solving, the more liberal they become — no matter what they call themselves, liberal, conservative, Tea Party or whatever.
Finally, it matters just as little whether pollsters label them cozy centrists or wild extremists. Sober facts bring us together. Unchecked fantasies drive us apart.  This should be our focus as we move toward trying to fashion a way forward in the budget talks ahead. We need facts now, more than ever, to get our country — and our government — working again.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.

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'One Senator From Texas': Obama Calls Out Cruz, But Not By Name

AP Photo / Evan Vucci 

 

Tom Kludt – November 7, 2013, 6:18 AM EST5519

 

President Barack Obama took some pointed shots at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday without ever addressing the Texas Republican by name.
Speaking at a Dallas fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Obama was on Cruz's turf. As he heaped criticism on GOP intransigence, Obama said that some Texas lawmakers are among the worst offenders.

"But we could name for you a whole bunch of Republicans who are good and decent people who are as frustrated as we are in some ways about what's happened to their party," Obama said, according to a White House transcript. "But right now at least, there's a group that -- and a few of them are from Texas, I've got to admit -- who just aren't willing to do the hard work and the compromise necessary to move the country forward."
For that reason, Obama said "it is absolutely critical that we transform Congress."
When he turned his attention to the government shutdown, Obama made another thinly veiled reference to Cruz.
"Now, I’ll give you the second example of what precipitated  -- according to at least one senator from Texas -- the necessity for the shutdown, and that is the Affordable Care Act," Obama said, while expressing anger "with some IT people in Washington" over HealthCare.gov's woes.

 

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Why do 'red states' have more poverty?

Tampa : FL : USA | Feb 24, 2013 at 10:56 AM PST

By itobin53

Why do Red States have more poor people? Image: Upworthy.com

Americans do not have to guess what the country would be like if the small-government, conservative economic agenda were implemented on a national scale.
Many Republican-controlled, predominantly Southern “red states” already have. The result is not an abundance of prosperity from under taxed “job creators,” as often touted in sound bites and on the conservative candidate campaign trail. Instead, according to the numbers, it’s quite the opposite.
Smaller government austerity policies in red states have created macroeconomic societies with high poverty and low education rates. Low-paying jobs and lack of health care also dominate states that have implemented the smaller government theories of conservative ideology.
In Texas, for example, decades of Republican control, from the governor’s office down to state and local legislatures, has kept the Tea Party ideological model in place. And it has the highest poverty rate of “any large industrial state,” according to Texas Politics data.
The data showed similar high poverty rate numbers for other red states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Lack of health care is also a bigger problem in states following the conservative Republican ideological view of less funding for government assistance programs.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott recently acknowledged the serious economic problems associated with having more than 21 percent of the population without health insurance. The costs for hospitals treating the uninsured is so high, Scott surrendered to pressure from Florida health care providers and accepted the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare.
Hunger is also a bigger problem among states where Republicans have had their way with local budgets. And while southern red states do not have a lock on growing US poverty rates, they still lead with the worse numbers. More than 24 percent of the people in Mississippi suffer from food deficiencies, with Alabama coming in second at nearly 23 percent.
Red States also top the charts for populations with lower education levels. The top 10 include Oklahoma, Tennessee, Indiana, Nevada, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia, according to Fox Business.
There is a disturbing correlation between Republicans and high poverty rates. CNN reports that the 10 poorest states in America tend to elect Republicans. Is this because they haven’t made the connection between conservative government policy and the need for the social safety net? Or have they simply been convinced by right-wing political rhetoric to vote against their own best interests?
In addition to the disconnect between conservative policies and economic security, it has been demonstrated in states completely controlled by Republicans that consolidated power can lead to loss of personal freedom and the most fundamental elements of democracy.
In the 2012 elections, the people of Michigan voted by a 53 to 47 percent margin to repeal the state’s power to replace their local elected representatives with appointed emergency managers, in areas with struggling budget issues. “The law was intended to help municipalities avoid bankruptcy or default, but it has been criticized for infringing on the rights of local governments,” according to the New York Times.
Rather than listening to the voice of voters who repealed the law at the ballot box, Michigan legislators have ignored court orders to remove “emergency managers” and reinstated the legislation, this time adding a clause that blocks any further attempts by the public to make it a ballot initiative in the future.
Republican-controlled legislatures have also used their power to strip unions workers of their rights to collective bargaining, as Gov. Scott Walker did in Wisconsin.
So not only are Republican’s changing the fundamental economic structure of America, they are using scare tactics and misleading campaign ads to try to gain monopoly-control of as many branches of government as they can.
Salon.com put it this way:
This is the formula for a reactionary politics that does not serve the collective good….
Elites who have long been disconnected from the masses manipulate this anxiety into a politics that serves to gut the social safety net and chase down the chosen bugaboos of the Right--the "evil" unions, "liberals," "intellectuals," teachers, Muslims, immigrants, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, "overpaid" public employees, and/or anyone who is not a "real American."
In the end game, the authoritarianism infused White reactionary Tea Party AstroTurf politics of the New Right are the road to inverted totalitarianism--an order that rises out of a failure of democratic politics, a collapsed and exhausted economy, a triumphant corporatism, and the false promises of popular Conservatism.
In the 2012 elections, voters did indeed reject the policies of right-wing Republicans by giving Democratic House candidates over a million more votes. However, Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census prevented those votes from counting toward democratic control of Congress.
Today, the only thing preventing the United States from becoming the poverty-ridden, low education, no health care, totalitarian-style government that has taken over red states is the Democratic majority in the Senate and Barack Obama in the White House.
Will voters in 2014 make the connection between their own economic interests and adversarial conservative policies and reject GOP monopoly rule? Or will they continue to vote for candidates who have demonstrated that their best abilities lie only in creating less opportunity, and more hardship and poverty than their blue state counterparts?
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Recommended:
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Wayne LaPierre: Guns are for Armageddon and 'fun'
Is Apple’s edge gone without Steve Jobs?
Sources and more info in addition to the links above:
Child poverty in the South getting worse
'The Hunger Games' Are Here. And They Are Very, Very Real.

itobin53 is based in Tampa, Florida, United States of America, and is an Anchor for Allvoices.

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Tom Graves's Government Shutdown Stance Cheered By Georgia Constituents

By BILL BARROW 11/04/13 03:01 AM ET EST





ROME, Ga. -- ROME, Ga. (AP) — Undeterred, U.S. Rep. Tom Graves is stepping up his criticism of President Barack Obama's health care law and defending his role in last month's partial government shutdown, even though tea party demands weren't met to dismantle it.
"This isn't over," Graves, the sponsor of the GOP's unsuccessful resolution to defund the president's signature law, says despite the fact that the shutdown ended Oct. 16 without any changes to the health care law. "In no way was this in vain."
The Republican has hit the national talk show circuit, and his social media sites regularly highlight the law's clumsy implementation. "POTUS refused to negotiate, forced govt shutdown & now Ds are running to our last pre-shutdown offer to delay #Obamacare indiv mandate," he posted on Twitter recently.
Back in his northwest Georgia district, constituents like John Massey, a 67-year-old jeweler and military veteran, applaud his steadfastness.
"Sometimes it takes somebody to stir it up, and if the tea party is what it takes, so be it," he said.
The mood helps explain why many House Republicans like Graves have little incentive to relax their governing approach, from opposing every aspect of Obama's health care law to refusing to raise the nation's borrowing limit.
Massey's sentiment is widespread in Georgia's 14th Congressional District, which encompasses the Appalachian foothills near Chattanooga, Tenn., to the outer edges of metro Atlanta.
A former state lawmaker, Graves won a special election in 2010 to succeed Nathan Deal, who left Congress for the governor's mansion. Deal had gone to Congress as a Democrat two decades ago, but switched parties in 1995, months after Georgia's Newt Gingrich led Republicans to the House majority. The region has trended solidly Republican since, and redistricting after the 2010 census pushed Graves' district even further to the right.
In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney got 73 percent of the district's presidential vote, 20 percentage points better than his statewide total. So it's no surprise that the 43-year-old congressman was at the forefront of House Republicans who pushed Speaker John Boehner to deny money for the health-care law and block a debt-ceiling vote.

The strategy ultimately led to a partial government shutdown and threatened a default on national debt payments. Boehner relented to the White House on the eve of the Treasury Department's default deadline, but Graves was among the 144 Republicans who voted against the deal.
"It didn't fix any of the problems with the (health care) law or the larger problems with the budget," Graves said, without offering specific recommendations for health care policy or ways to curb the debt.
Floyd County Republican Chairwoman Layla Shipman said Republicans should "offer more detailed alternatives," but said emphatically, "I'm proud of Tom." The congressman, she said, "pretty much mirrors most of the views here. ... I was proud of seeing the Republican Party dig in. I think we need more Tom Graves."
Massey, the Rome jeweler, put the standoff in the larger context of his views on government and the economy.
He said the anchor provisions of the health care law — the insurance exchanges with taxpayer-subsidized premiums and expansion of the government's Medicaid insurance program — are "more giveaways" that cost too much. Any major budget deal, he said, should curtail "this entitlement mentality."
Even some residents with less strident views are skeptical about the health care law and realistic about the district's politics.
Nedra Manners, a Democrat who works in Massey's antique shop in Rome, said she's shopped around on the federal insurance exchange — Georgia's Republican leaders declined to run their own — but hasn't been able to get a price quote. The 62-year-old noted new coverage standards and methods for figuring premiums and said her existing individual policy premium, not sold on the exchange, is set to double. "A shutdown isn't the answer," she said, but, "I'm not sure the law is set up the best way."
Self-described libertarian Colin Williams, a 27-year-old who works in a new home supply distribution center in the district, also blasted widespread premium increases, and he blamed the new law. Asked whether he followed his congressman's efforts to derail it, Williams said he hadn't but added that he wasn't surprised at Graves or the shutdown.
"He's just another cog in the political machine," Williams said, "and I'm sure he'll get re-elected."
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Voters’ Anger Over Shutdown Is Inspiring Democrats to Run

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

Pete Festersen, an Omaha Democrat seeking a House seat occupied by a Republican, with his fund-raiser, Jessica Lathrop.

By MICHAEL WINES

OMAHA — Nebraska has not elected a Democrat to the House of Representatives since 1994, and until this month, prospects for changing that were dim at best. Of the state’s three House seats, a Democrat has a fighting chance only in the district encompassing Omaha and its suburbs. And the party’s sole hope there, Omaha’s popular City Council president, had declared that he was not going to run.

But suddenly, the Council president, Pete Festersen, has jumped into the 2014 race against an eight-term incumbent Republican. And a Lincoln lawyer, Dennis Crawford, declared his candidacy in a second Nebraska district where the Republican incumbent also had been unopposed. Both say their moves are fueled by popular anger over the 16-day Republican-led shutdown of the federal government.

“If I ever see Ted Cruz, all I’m going to say is ‘Thank you, thank you,’ ” Vince Powers, Nebraska’s Democratic Party chairman, said in an interview. “I would’ve been in witness protection, because I didn’t have anybody to run.”

Here and nationally, the Democratic Party is enjoying something of a boomlet in newly declared candidacies for the House. Since Oct. 1, five candidates have lined up to contest Republican-held seats, with at least four more in the wings, Democratic officials say. Almost all say they are driven to run — ostensibly, at least — by disgust over the shutdown, first espoused by Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and embraced by Tea Party Republicans in the House and, eventually, most others as well.

Nonetheless, most of the Republicans viewed as most vulnerable are moderates, not those who pushed for the shutdown.

Mr. Festersen, 42, a business consultant, said he was driven to run by “the dysfunction, the widespread dissatisfaction with Congress’s inability to get anything done.”

In Arkansas, former Mayor Patrick Henry Hays of Little Rock announced his candidacy for the seat of Representative Tim Griffin, a Republican who is retiring, by denouncing the shutdown as a travesty. Last Thursday, Bill Hughes Jr., a former federal prosecutor, opened his challenge to a New Jersey incumbent, Representative Frank A. LoBiondo, by railing against what he called the Republicans’ “irresponsible brinksmanship” in closing down the government.

And on Wednesday, Alex Sink, Florida’s chief financial officer who narrowly lost a 2010 bid for governor, entered a special election race to fill the House seat of Representative C. W. Bill Young, a Republican who died at 82 on Oct. 18. He had announced his retirement the week before.

“I, like everybody else I know, is angry and mad about the logjam, about shutting down the government, about not understanding the impact it was going to have on small businesses and people,” she said in an interview with The Tampa Bay Times announcing her decision.

All but Mr. Crawford, of Lincoln, are viewed as credible contenders in next November’s election, said David Wasserman, a top analyst of House races for The Cook Political Report in Washington.

“The climate for candidates to jump into races has improved significantly,” he said in an interview. “Who knows whether they would have run had the shutdown not occurred? But the fact is, they’re running.”

By themselves, victories by the new entrants would hardly dent the Republicans’ 17-seat House majority. But should voters’ low regard for the shutdown provoke a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment next fall, their candidates could prove important to Democrats’ hopes for regaining control, some analysts say.

Republicans say they are unimpressed. Since Oct. 1, five Republican candidates have announced challenges to Democrats, said Daniel Scarpinato, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Others call the Democrats’ giddiness premature. “We’re 13 months away from an election,” said J. L. Spray, Nebraska’s Republican Party chairman. “There are going to be a lot of people talking about other issues.”

As for anger over the shutdown, he added, “My people aren’t clamoring about anything.”

But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which recruits candidates and funnels money into races it deems winnable, claims that the shutdown will push others to enter 2014 House races within weeks. In Indiana and in other districts in Arkansas and New Jersey, other Democrats are publicly signaling their intentions to run for Republican seats next year. Almost all cite the shutdown and Republicans’ threat to provoke a default on the federal debt as a crucial factor in their calculations.

The Democratic campaign committee conducted polls in districts where potential candidates “had shut the door” on running, its chairman, Representative Steve Israel of New York, said in an interview. “I showed that same polling to those same candidates,” he said, “and they opened the door.”

Should the latest Democratic challengers win election next year, Tea Party legislators and their most ardent allies are unlikely to suffer as much as moderates. A handful of seats held by far-right Republicans are being contested — or are likely to be — by the new Democratic entrants, most notably those of Michigan’s Kerry Bentivolio, Indiana’s Jackie Walorski and Mr. Griffin of Arkansas.

For the most part, however, “the Democrats who are getting into these races aren’t running against the fire-breathers,” said Mr. Wasserman of the Cook Report. “They’re running against Republicans in semi-marginal districts.”

Nebraska’s second district, where Mr. Festersen is running, is a prime example. The 51-year-old incumbent, Lee Terry, is a generally moderate Republican who has boasted of working with Democrats on legislation like a federally mandated increase in average fuel efficiency for automobiles.

He has kept his seat since 1998, often handily defeating well-financed Democratic challengers. But his margins of victory have dwindled in recent years, and in 2012 he beat a popular Democratic challenger by barely 4,000 of the 263,000-plus votes cast. He also lost the editorial backing of the conservative and influential Omaha World-Herald, which complained that his leadership had been undistinguished.

Like many other Republicans, Mr. Terry lined up behind Mr. Cruz’s strategy to shut down the government and force a default should the Affordable Care Act not be defunded. Unlike more conservative Republicans, he voted to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling when that strategy failed.

But voters next year may remember him best for a mid-shutdown gaffe in an interview with The World-Herald. Asked whether he would continue to accept his $174,000-a-year salary while furloughed federal workers went without theirs, Mr. Terry replied, “Dang straight,” adding: “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college, and I’ll tell you we cannot handle it.”

Other legislators from both parties had said they would not surrender their pay, but hardly in such vivid language. Mr. Terry quickly recanted, saying he was ashamed of his remarks and would not collect his salary until the shutdown ended.

With the electorate already furious, Mr. Terry’s comment may only have poured gasoline on the fire. But political analysts say he and other Republicans still may have two things going for them: One, next year’s elections are midterms, when the party in the White House usually suffers losses and voter turnout is reliably low. And two: Even the experts cannot predict how angry voters will express themselves.

“This is a screwed-up situation,” said Tom King, a consultant working for the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia in next week’s election. “When this happens, ‘throw the bums out’ either becomes ‘throw everyone out,’ or ‘throw one party out.’ ”

Which is more likely? “Look at the results two weeks from now,” he said, referring to Election Day, “and you’ll get a better idea of how this is breaking.”

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