posted September 28, 2015 12:10 PM            

Mine was that the Republican leaders in Washington would see the decline of Donald Trump as proof that they need do nothing to change. Like the Bourbons of France, they’d forget nothing and learn nothing.

On Sunday, Douthat wrote, “In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.”

Yes, exactly. The Republican Party is dying because the GOP in DC has gone corporate and K Street. They attack any Republicans who dare hold them to their promises. They’ve gone to war against Heritage Action for America, Club For Growth, the Madison Project, etc. They’ve blackballed any political consultant who does work for outsiders.

The GOP has become so incestuous it continues to hemorrhage and will die. It cannot adapt because the key consultants it has shaping its future are wedded to the capital that comes from not changing.

The Project ORCA guys are doing quite well. The guys who collapsed Voter Vault are doing well. The idiots who run outreach for the GOP go out and form consultancy groups, then get embedded within the NRCC, NRSC, or RNC itself and hand contracts back to themselves.

In short, the GOP has become so incestuous it continues to hemorrhage and will die. It cannot adapt because the key consultants it has shaping its future are wedded to the capital that comes from not changing.

It should be eye opening to the Republican leaders in Washinton that Ross Douthat and I have come to the same conclusion — they will not recognize the need to change and will therefore die.

posted September 28, 2015 12:17 PM            

Outgoing House Speaker John A. Boehner, in his first one-on-one interview since announcing his resignation last week, compared conservative hard-liners in his party to biblical "false prophets" who promise more than they can deliver.

Boehner announced Friday that he would step down Oct. 30 after nearly five years as speaker amid constant pressure from his party's right flank. Asked Sunday by host John Dickerson on a live broadcast of CBS's "Face the Nation" whether those hard-liners are "unrealistic about what can be done in government," Boehner exploded.

"Absolutely, they're unrealistic!" he said. "But, you know, the Bible says beware of false prophets, and there are people out there spreading noise about how much can get done."

Boehner referred, as he has in the past, to the ill-fated 2013 shutdown over funding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare: "This plan never had a chance," he said, but he blamed outside forces for leading Republicans down an ill-advised path: "We got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town, who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know — they know! — are never going to happen."

Dickerson followed up by asking whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the leading proponent of the 2013 shutdown, was a "false prophet."

"Listen, you can pick a lot of names out; I'll let you choose 'em," Boehner said as he sipped from a coffee mug. He added: "I refer you to my remark at a fundraiser I made in August in Steamboat Springs, Colo." — a reference to a report, published in the Daily Caller, that he had called Cruz a "jackass" behind closed doors.

Earlier Sunday, the leader of one of those outside groups who have pushed for greater confrontation cheered Boehner's departure. Michael Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action for America, said on Fox News Sunday that Boehner and his allies treated conservatives as "crazies" to be marginalized, not as central players in developing the party agenda.

"[Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi does not talk about her base that way; Barack Obama doesn't think about his base that way," Needham said. "We need a Republican leadership that is showing conservative values. ... That's not what we've had. We've had to fight our own speaker."

Boehner addressed the remaining five weeks of his speakership, in which he pledged to "get as much finished as possible." Pressing matters include striking a deal with President Obama to keep the government open through the coming fiscal year, raising the federal borrowing limit, passing a long-term transportation bill and extending popular tax breaks.

"I don't want to leave my successor a dirty barn," Boehner said. "So I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets here."

On Friday, he offered words of support for Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as a successor. He did not mention McCarthy on Sunday but offered advice to whoever follows him in the speaker's chair: "Have the courage to do what you can do. ... Just go do it."

"In our system of government, it's not about Hail Mary passes; it's the Woody Hayes school of football," he said, referring to the legendary Ohio State University coach. "Three yards and a cloud of dust. It's a slow, methodical process."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/27/republican-hard-liners-are-false-prophets-boehner-says/

posted September 28, 2015 02:04 PM            

But only against Democrats.

12:16 PM By Nate Silver

John Boehner’s tenure as Speaker of the House, which will end with his resignation next month, is striking because of a seeming contradiction. By statistical measures, it featured an extraordinary degree of party unity among Republicans in the House. At almost no point in history have such a large majority of Republicans voted together so often, especially when they stood in opposition to Democrats.

And yet, Boehner was brought down by division within the Republican ranks: His decision to resign was motivated by a group of dissident, highly conservative Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, who had threatened a no-confidence vote in his speakership. Meanwhile, Republicans have had trouble reaching consensus in many other respects during Boehner’s years as speaker: most notably, in choosing a candidate in the current presidential race.

So are Republicans a party united or divided? To a historic degree they are both. They are united against Democrats and deeply divided as a group.

The rest of this article will rely on data from Voteview.com, a website published by political scientists Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal and Christopher Hare. Voteview tracks roll call voting in Congress and publishes statistics such as DW-Nominate, an algorithm that rates members of Congress on a liberal-conservative scale. One Voteview statistic is called the Party Unity Score, which measures the unanimity of voting within one party when it stands in opposition to the other party.1 In the 113th Congress, which served under Boehner from January 2013 to January 2015,2 Republicans had a Party Unity Score of 94.6 percent, the highest ever for the GOP.3

Revealingly, however, Republicans were more united when voting against Democrats than when voting with them. On issues where Republicans voted in the opposite direction from Democrats, the GOP had a Party Unity Score of 94.6 percent, as I mentioned. But when the parties took the same side on a vote, fewer Republicans — 90.4 percent — joined the GOP majority. Put another way, Boehner had an easier time getting Republicans to agree with one another when they disagreed with Democrats. This might seem obvious, given the hyperpartisan politics of Congress today, but by this statistical measure it’s fairly unusual historically.

It also helps to explain the dynamics of the last couple of congresses. The 112th and 113th Congresses were among the least productive ever as measured by the number of bills passed into law. But that doesn’t mean Boehner left the House to twiddle its thumbs. Instead, he scheduled a lot of votes: The 112th Congress took about 1,600 roll call votes and the 113th took about 1,200, according to Voteview’s data, high figures by historical standards.

Many of those votes were like the dozens that Boehner scheduled to defund Obamacare or Planned Parenthood. The legislation under consideration had no chance to become law so long as Democrats controlled the presidency (and, until this year, the Senate). It’s not that these votes served no purpose, however. Instead, they may have been more like bonding rituals — a way for Boehner and congressional Republicans to reassert their partisan loyalty, both to one another and to the donor base at home.

Republicans may have needed a few of those feel-good moments because, as we’ve seen in the presidential race, there are quite a few ideological divisions within the party. We at FiveThirtyEight usually prefer to think of these divisions as existing along multiple dimensions — for instance, there can be some Republicans who are moderate on social policy but conservative on fiscal policy, or vice versa. But they also show up in DW-Nominate, an algorithm that tries to explain as much congressional voting behavior as it can along a single, left-right axis.4

GOP lawmakers have steadily become more conservative, according to the system. DW-Nominate scores run on a scale from roughly -1 (extremely liberal) to +1 (extremely conservative), where 0 represents a centrist, and the median House Republican in the 92nd Congress, which served from 1971 to 1973 under President Richard Nixon, had a DW-Nominate score of +0.193, only very slightly to the right of center. By the 113th Congress, the median score had increased to +0.732, which is extremely conservative. The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now, says DW-Nominate.

But, while there are few truly moderate Republicans left in Congress,5 there are meaningful differences between highly conservative, anti-establishment groups like the Freedom Caucus and pro-establishment, mainline conservative groups like the Main Street Partnership. In fact, according to DW-Nominate, these differences have expanded over time. In the 113th Congress, the gap in DW-Nominate scores between the most conservative flank of the GOP and the most moderate flank6 was the highest ever for the modern Republican Party:

posted September 28, 2015 02:08 PM            

I am deeply dissapointed in the politicians and people who buy all the crap spewed out by them.
Rant over

posted September 28, 2015 04:44 PM            

Bernie Sanders is kind of a surprise development, but he's got the "maverick" street cred people want to see in a politician. He's gone against the grain in several areas for many, many years, which means he's of his own mind. His values are attractive, too, particularly getting money out of elections. It's early, so this is my pick for now.

Randall, I don't think Hillary can sink the Dems as effectively as virtually any of the Republicans can do so for their party. I see people saying that Rubio is going to charm people as well as Obama did. I could see him possibly not botching it for Republicans, but I don't see him as anywhere near as charismatic as Obama.

posted October 01, 2015 01:56 PM            

1. The U.S. already contains Socialistic systems

2. There are a number of nations that would be considered to be more Socialist than us that have designed some better systems than us.

posted October 01, 2015 04:43 PM            

That a solidly Republican Congress have done nothing but ditch dirt and stall for 7 years is not lost on the public. The whole horse race/ football game mentality has nothing to do with anYone but Congressmen looking to keep their jobs and the accompanying perks.

As Boehner said two years ago certain parties who pull purse strings have got pathetically big for their britches. I am surprised he hasn't resigned earlier it's been obviously coming.

Now watch those britches split at the seams.

Socialism as Sanders uses the term just means government "by the people, for the people"...creepy idea? Or no?

posted October 01, 2015 04:56 PM            

Rand Paul is right: Cruz's career in the Senate is "done for." Once he leaves, he can become a full-time grifter

Sean Illing

I’m not sure when it started, but at some point the Republican Party ceded the business of governance to the Democrats. Maybe it began with the Tea Party movement or Fox News or the larger conservative media-industrial complex – I honestly don’t know. But it’s clear now that the GOP is no longer a legitimate governing party. A party that allows rank neophytes like Herman Cain and Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina to run for the highest office in the country has lost its way.

If you look at how the Republican Party operates today, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that governing just isn’t a priority – or internal pressures within the party make it impossible. Instead, the GOP has become what I previously called a self-perpetuating hype machine for conservative political entrepreneurs. Particularly at the national level, Republican candidates and legislators (many of them, at least) show no interest in compromise or serious policymaking, which is what you’d expect from a party of and for purists.

While the new GOP has been bad for the country, it’s been great for political celebrities, people looking to promote their personal brands. Ted Cruz is the most recent and obvious example of this approach to politics. Cruz has been a remarkably ineffective Senator. He has done nothing but bloviate and showboat on the Senate floor. He’s accomplished zero legislatively. His only practical contribution has been to obstruct and draw attention to his martyrdom (read: presidential) campaign.

Ted Cruz will never be elected president. If he manages to win the Republican nomination, he’ll lose in a landslide to a Democrat, whoever that happens to be. And because he’s so eagerly made a spectacle of himself in the Senate, he’s alienated all but the tiniest segment of his own party. Which means he has no political capital in Congress – hardly a concern for someone uninterested in legislating, however.

Cruz’s latest squabble with Rand Paul helps to illustrate Cruz’s intentions. In an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, Paul basically wrote Cruz’s political obituary:

Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem. I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing, I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result.

Paul is right, of course, but he omits an essential point: Cruz has been ineffective by design. Managing relationships and respecting decorum only matter to people trying to accomplish things in the Senate – that’s not what Cruz is up to. Like the fanatical Tea Party wing of the House, Cruz is there to obstruct and self-promote. In all likelihood, Cruz will retire after a single term in the Senate. Now that he’s boosted his national profile and endeared himself to the insurgent elements of the base, he can pivot to the private sector and make more money as a professional conservative activist – as, for example, Jim DeMint did in 2012.

Cruz ought to be seen as the grifter that he is. It was never about policy for him. When he leaves the Senate, he’ll be a hero to the fringe right. He’ll make a fortune on the conservative lecture circuit, telling rapturous audiences about his willingness to challenge the “Washington cartel.” It won’t matter that he accomplished nothing, changed nothing – it’ll be enough that he pretended to while he was there.

The same is true of Carson and Trump and Fiorina and even politicians like Huckabee and Jindal: None of them will be president, but their over-the-top activism will ensure them a profitable career after politics. And that, I assume, is the whole point. The Democrats have their share of bad politicians, but you don’t see this kind of faux activism and exploitation in their party.

This is a uniquely Republican problem.

posted October 02, 2015 04:07 PM            

Sanders understands that "republic" covers a wide variety of governments. Do you know what he says, suggests for policies? Or do you just listen to the Fox Digest description?

Heard of the Union of Socialist Republics?
the Peoples Republic of China?

posted October 05, 2015 04:28 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by etherealsaturn:
Sanders is the new Rand Paul. Lots of chatter but it's not going to happen.

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I tend to agree. Same with Carson and Trump.