Voting against the economic stimulus package? That’s so last week. For some Republicans, there’s a hot new way to show just how fervently they opposed the $787 billion bill President Obama signed into law Tuesday: pretend they’re not going to take the money.
Or, at least, make a lot of noise about maybe not wanting it. A handful of GOP governors are making headlines for saying they’d rather not or maybe shouldn’t take the billions of dollars the stimulus package would rain down on their states. It’s the logical extension of the Republican strategy on the bill, after all; only three Republicans in the Senate, and none in the House, voted for the legislation, after the party decided en masse that the plan would put the nation on the road to socialism. If the spending won’t fix the national economy, the theory goes, it won’t fix the local economy, either.
But despite the protests, the governors will almost certainly wind up taking the money anyway, just as states do with federal aid all the time. Some of the states whose governors have been the loudest voices against the stimulus cash already benefit heavily from federal spending or from lucrative private use of federal land for oil. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided Thursday to accept the $17 billion his state has coming to it, after days of hemming and hawing about the handout. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page in November titled “Don’t Bail Out My State,” did the same. They’re in good company; Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty criticized the plan loudly while Congress debated it, then said he owed it to his constituents to take it. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley stepped up his criticism of the bill after announcing he would take the $2 billion his state gets from it. Republicans in the House even boasted about the bacon the bill would bring home, after engineering a unanimous vote against it. When just about every state is in a financial crunch, thanks to the collapsing economy, it’s hard to hold the line and actually turn down the cash. “It’s fucking stupid,” said one Republican consultant in Washington. “If the money’s there, they’d be nuts to not take it … If it’s a question of, ‘Hey, the money’s going to be spent, so we might as well spend it in our state,’ that’s just nuts to turn it down.”
Of course, in the bizarro world that is Republican politics in the age of Obama, turning down billions of dollars in federal aid might make political sense. “You could be a hero as the one guy who said no,” said anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who thinks opposing the money could help establish fiscal conservative bona fides with the GOP base. “The longer you look at this [bill], the more it smells.” Republicans who don’t like the stimulus plan are likely to notice the high-profile complaints this week. “Some Republican governors aren’t big on federal largesse even when it helps their own constituents,” said GOP strategist Mark McKinnon, who says the holdouts against the money deserve credit for standing on principle. “Pretty bold, I’d say.”
But in the end, refusing the money actually comes at very little cost; a provision in the stimulus law allows state legislatures to vote to accept the cash even if the governors don’t formally request it. What’s playing out this week, then, among the Republican refuseniks may be more about politics than policy. Here are six of the more vocal Republicans who pretended to just say no, and the amount of stimulus money they pretended to decline.
Gov. Sarah Palin, Alaska
Show me the money: $783,786,000
You can keep your money: “Congressman Young and Senator Murkowski did their best to achieve the right balance in the bill, but in the end the majority allowed the spending to balloon and encompass support for programs that don’t respond to the problem at hand.” — Feb. 16
Why am I saying this? If you don’t think Palin is thinking of running for president in 2012, you may be interested in buying a bridge from Gravina, Alaska, to the Ketchikan airport. She’s popular with conservatives; given how unpopular she is with just about everyone else, Palin can’t afford to let people get to her right on too many issues. She’s already campaigned on her ability to say “thanks, but no thanks” to federal money — even if she didn’t actually do it — so turning down the stimulus may be an easy political call.
Thanks for the money: “It’s not fair to Alaskans to create expectations about programs that wouldn’t be sustainable, so we’ll need to look at the federal funding on a case-by-case basis.” — Feb. 16
Does my state need the money? Unemployment is 7.5 percent and lower oil prices have meant fewer revenues for the state. Palin has proposed cutting the state budget $445 million.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? Yes. Alaska gets $1.84 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 3
Gov. Butch Otter, Idaho
Show me the money: $1,014,783,000
You can keep your money: “If I were in Congress and I looked at it, someone would have to be more convincing than they have been and I probably would say no.” — Jan. 12
Why am I saying this? A fiscal conservative with a libertarian streak when he was in Congress, Otter seems — unlike some others — to have few ulterior political motives for bashing the stimulus. He’s almost certainly not running for president, and he doesn’t appear to have any serious primary threats if he seeks reelection next year. Idahoans do like their politicians to have an independent streak, though it’s unclear if they like it enough to turn down almost $1 billion.
Thanks for the money: “It will take a lot of work to get our arms around all the implications of this law. We need to make sure safeguards are in place and that every i is dotted and t is crossed. This is taxpayer money, and all of us are committed to seeing it used in the most effective and efficient way possible.” — Feb. 17
Does my state need the money? Prior to the stimulus, Idaho was looking at slashing $110 million from public-school funds and an across-the-board pay cut for state employees. The state legislature will now extend its session into April to figure out how to use the federal money to avoid cuts.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? Yes. Idaho gets $1.21 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 20
Gov. Bobby Jindal, Louisiana
Show me the money: $3,874,013,000
You can keep your money: “I do worry about the debt being created. I worry about the fact that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay back this debt. And I worry that many of the programs that are being called temporary aren’t really temporary at all.” — Feb. 10
Why am I saying this? He may say he’s not running for president in 2012, but Jindal is a popular, young, non-white rising star in a party that’s desperately seeking to change its image. Taking a combative public stand on an issue the conservative base cares about deeply wouldn’t exactly hurt his chances. Just weeks before he declared himself out of the running, Jindal had gone on a heavily publicized tour of Iowa — not a move that screams out, “I don’t want the job.”
Thanks for the money: “Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday that if he were still in Congress, he would have voted ‘no’ on the federal stimulus bill. But he said he will review the final version of the bill for federal money for Louisiana projects.” — Feb. 16
Does my state need the money? The state budget deficit for next year is now projected to reach $2.1 billion. State universities are expecting to cut their budgets up to 30 percent.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? Yes. Louisiana gets $1.78 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 4
Gov. Haley Barbour, Mississippi
Show me the money: $2,327,806,000
You can keep your money: “It’s not a possibility of strings being attached, it’s a certainty … there may be some things that we’d be better off not to take.” — Feb. 2
“A lot of this is just crazy … I’ll tell you what I told [Obama] in front of 45 governors. Don’t give me $400 million of one-time money and make me spend it on recurring expenses. I’m better off not to get it.” — Jan. 10
Why am I saying this? It does seem odd to think the Republican Party would nominate an old Southern white guy — who used to be a lobbyist — to do battle against Obama three years from now, but stranger things have happened in politics. Barbour has a fairly active federal leadership PAC that gave more than $90,000 to Republicans all around the country during the last election cycle, and he’s forbidden by state law from ever serving as governor again after — conveniently enough — January 2012.
Thanks for the money: “I’ve never said we were going to reject it. I have said, however, that we are going to make prudent decisions based on what’s best for Mississippi.” — Feb. 18
Does my state need the money? Gov. Barbour has already ordered $38 million cut from state university budgets this year and the schools expect another 10 percent cut next year. The state unemployment rate is 8 percent; White House projections say the stimulus bill would mean 30,000 jobs in Mississippi.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? Yes. Mississippi gets $2.02 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 2
Gov. Mark Sanford, South Carolina
Show me the money: $2,879,104,000
You can keep your money: ”I think that this is the biggest gut check we’ve ever had as a country on, indeed, where we go next, on a politically-based economy or a market-based economy.” — Dec. 17
“A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt.” — Feb. 8
“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy.” — Feb. 8
Why am I saying this? Some conservatives were disappointed Sanford didn’t run for president last year; chances are pretty good he’s at least considering a run next time around. (GOP gossip held that South Carolina Republican boss Katon Dawson’s bid to head the national party was motivated at least in part to help Sanford win the nomination.) Sanford has even taken to the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page — a good place to get attention from conservative activists — to attack the stimulus twice, first with a November piece titled “Don’t Bail Out My State,” and then again in December with an anti-bailout article co-authored by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Thanks for the money: “Being against it doesn’t preclude taking the money.” — Feb. 19
Does my state need the money? The state’s budget has already been cut by more than $1 billion since July, and unemployment — at 9.5 percent — is the third-highest in the nation. The White House says the stimulus money would create 50,000 jobs there.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? Yes. South Carolina gets $1.35 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 16
Gov. Rick Perry, Texas
Show me the money: $16,231,325,000
You can keep your money: ” We’re asking other governors from both sides of the political aisle to join with us in opposing further federal bailout intervention for three reasons.” — Rick Perry and Mark Sanford, Dec. 2
“We need the freedom to say, ‘No thanks.’” — Feb. 17
Why am I saying this? Perry is probably more worried about next year than he is about 2012; he faces a likely primary challenge from Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. He wound up taking the money, but making clear how opposed he is to federal spending will probably come in handy if he does have to fend off KBH — who, as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, could be vulnerable on questions of fiscal discipline.
Thanks for the money: ” I might as well quit grousing about it, because it’s reality now.” — Feb. 17
“On behalf of the people of Texas, please allow this letter to certify that we will accept the funds.” — Feb. 19
Does my state need the money? Texas doesn’t face a budget shortfall for fiscal year 2009, though it may for fiscal year 2010, and its unemployment rate of 6 percent is lower than the national average. But the White House estimates the stimulus will create 269,000 jobs there.
Does my state already get more money from the federal government than it sends to the federal government? No. Texas gets $.94 for every dollar it pays in. Rank: 35
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Sources: Numbers for stimulus funds to each state come from a spreadsheet prepared by the National Conference on State Legislatures. The ratio of money sent by each state to the federal government versus the amount paid in, and the ranking, is from a chart compiled by the Tax Foundation. Number of jobs created by the stimulus is based on a White House projection. Unemployment rates for states are as December 2008, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Apparently it is a great big lie — an “utter fabrication with malice and forethought” — to say that the Democrats lost their longtime hold over the old Confederacy because their support for civil rights legislation drove white Southerners away. That’s according to the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who wrote a big National Review piece about how mad this lie makes him, when the secret truth is that Republicans have always been, and will always be, the single most pro-civil rights party ever.
The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which attempted to expand “Nazi stands for National Socialist” to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the “lie” he’s arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.
So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Williamson’s argument seems to be that Republicans couldn’t have taken advantage of a Democratic split over civil rights by appealing to racist white Southern voters because Republicans were too uniformly pro-civil rights, themselves. (This great big lie he’s debunking is one that Nixon and Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan happily signed on to — they were thrilled when the Democrats fractured the New Deal coalition by eventually embracing civil rights!)
Williamson would, I guess, call it revisionist history, but he has revised all of the history out of it.
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.
Oh, did they? It’s dubious to argue that the party that nominated Barry Goldwater for president was “far more enlightened” than the one that nominated Kennedy, but Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist, so sure, fine, pretend Nelson Rockefeller cancels out Barry. But the segregationists didn’t all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasn’t until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished.
After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial.
Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.
Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.
What is the funniest part of this: How it basically makes one brief stop in between 1875 and the mid-20th century in its exhaustive history of Democratic racism? Or how Williamson is clearly annoyed at having to even slightly, obliquely credit Harry Truman (Democrat!) for desegregating the armed forces, a thing (Democrat) Harry Truman did? Like, maybe what happened in 1964 was the eventual result of an intraparty battle that was happening in 1948 when Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (and Strom Thurmond, future Republican, threw a big fit about it)?
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon Johnson’s role in ensuring its passage, was one major victory in a years-long effort by the party’s liberals to make the Democratic Party the civil rights party, and it worked so well that the racists were effectively no longer welcome. They responded by changing their positions or changing sides. It wasn’t an overnight change, because politics is slow, but it happened: Robert Byrd and even George Wallace changed their positions on black civil rights and apologized. Those who couldn’t adapt, or those for whom bigotry was more genuine belief than political opportunism, left the party. Strom Thurmond became a Republican. Lester Maddox launched a third-party presidential bid against Jimmy Carter and eventually endorsed Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992. Maddox was also a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white supremacist paleoconservative group that once counted Trent Lott, Thurmond and Jesse Helms as members. These guys are the heirs to the conservative white Southern Democrat tradition. I’m not really sure they themselves would consider it a pernicious lie to say as much.
What would have been much, much more entertaining would have been if, instead of writing this piece about “Democrats” and “Republicans,” Williamson had written it about liberals and conservatives. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both used conservative rhetoric to justify their segregationist beliefs — and so did William F. Buckley. Both parties at the time had liberal and conservative wings, and in each of those parties it was the liberal wing that was right on civil rights.
There was really only one American political party with a solid record on civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the American Communist Party. But “in praise of the liberal Northeastern Republicans who stood with the communists on civil rights and who were eventually driven from the party by conservatives like the ones who founded this magazine” would not go over well in the National Review, I imagine.
Williamson goes on to argue that the white South didn’t go Republican because of civil rights, it went Republican because of … the New Deal. So while the change happened too slowly and gradually to be ascribed to racism, it can happily be pinned on a series of popular economic programs that had been enacted 30 years prior to 1964. (Programs so popular that Southern racists and blacks joined together in a political coalition that lasted until liberals began … winning civil rights victories.)
But let’s not also forget to blame hippies and welfare:
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party.
In other words, it was literally everything that was going on in the 1960s besides civil rights issues that made white Southerners eventually fully embrace the Republican Party. (And blacks continue to support the Democrats because Democrats lied about what happened in the 1960s and because Johnson promised them free government money forever, apparently.)
I mean it’s obviously true that the shift didn’t happen purely because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it’s just as obviously true that it’s a hilarious and deeply stupid misreading of history to pretend that the Republican Party has always and will always be the champion of civil rights.
[Thanks to, and please also read: Adam Serwer, Jonathan Chait, Mark Schmitt, Clay Risen, and Jonathan Bernstein.]
One thing when writing about the Republican Party and the crazy – you can always be certain that it’ll generate new examples. So just when the news that a member of the House accused dozens of Democrats in Congress of being Communists seemed to be going stale, along comes Donald Trump – who is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser with Mitt Romney next week – to spout birther nonsense.
For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.
So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.
Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.
A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.
So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.
We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.
Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.
Watching the antics of the House GOP, you get the very strong sense that if the class of Republicans elected in 2010 were offered a chance to repeal the Enlightenment, they would leap at the opportunity. The great flowering of science and philosophy that reached critical mass in the 17th century employed human reason to batter away at the dogmas of blind faith. But as far as the Tea Party seems to be concerned, that was just one big wrong turn.
The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that’s part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on “demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics.” In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 — the current version is the fourth major iteration.
Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. Both private and public sector policymakers use ACS data to make important decisions. The federal government allocates $450 billion annually according, in part, to information derived from the ACS. Businesses also consider the ACS vital, which explains why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely a fan of government spending, is opposed to the House action.
Even conservative economists are leery: The clearest evidence that the House GOP has gone completely beyond the pale can be seen in a Businessweek article reporting that representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute all declared their support for government data gathering. If you don’t understand what’s going on in the U.S. economy on a granular level, you’re flying blind. This should not be a controversial statement.
Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled — although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.
With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.
Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal’s editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers.
There’s been no end of media chatter focusing on the importance of the data gathered by the ACS. We’ve also heard how the Constitution specifically enjoins Congress to gather demographic information “in such a manner as they shall by law direct.” And, in fact, the current form of the ACS follows the mandate set forth by a Republican Congress in 2005.
The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too “intrusive” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what’s wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.
Which brings us back to the 17th century. It’s no stretch to argue that both representative democracy and the Industrial Revolution flourished in large part through the application of Enlightenment principles. The founders of the United States were very much a product of Enlightenment ideals. Looking for an Enlightenment avatar? Think Ben Franklin. Progress is built on the accumulation of knowledge, and ideological rigidity shouldn’t be able to compete against the truth that derives from a better understanding of our universe. And yet that’s where we are today — watching as one of the two major political parties in our country becomes not just more and more distrustful of science, but also opposed to the very notion of information-gathering — and governs accordingly.
One of the most overused metaphors in a writer’s arsenal is the one about “walking and chewing gum at the same time.” As a hiker and Big League Chew enthusiast, I particularly hate this cliché. Nonetheless, I feel it is fitting right now because it so perfectly summarizes the argument being made by Republicans. They now insist that America cannot simultaneously walk the walk on equal rights and also chew economic gum.
In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about [like] the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?”
At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”
Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.
But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.
Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.
In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.
That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.
The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.
(Credit: Library of Congress) 
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/David Moir) 
House of Representatives Republican leadership (Credit: AP) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: AP/Carlos Osorio) 
