Caught in a Steele trap

Affirmative action, Republican-style, doomed party Chairman Michael Steele to failure before he ever took the job.

By Joe Conason

Topics:Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh

Pity Michael Steele. Even before he began to bury himself beneath daily gaffes, the imperiled Republican chairman was doomed to fail. He aspired to stand for a new, cool and refreshing conservatism, only to find that his party’s base and its top tastemaker, Rush Limbaugh, still prefer the old, bitter and nasty flavor.

Steele’s ordeal should scarcely be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the evolution of the right over the past four decades. Conservatives and Republicans have long faced the same dilemma concerning issues of race, gender and sexual preference. Their habits of pandering to prejudice, which once seemed so advantageous, have eroded the brand badly and created a sclerotic image that is repellent to the nation’s young.

Pasting on a black face as political disguise is an old tactic that doesn’t work so well anymore. It was a marvelous gag back when someone like the late Jesse Helms would hire an African-American in order to “prove” he wasn’t racist. It intimidated Democrats when the first President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, an African-American whose sole qualification was his fidelity to rightist ideology. And it has certainly enhanced the career of many a black conservative elevated to prominence in the media or on Capitol Hill. Now the GOP reaps the consequences of cynicism as its latest black frontman pratfalls toward the exit.

But affirmative action, Republican-style, has also always imposed certain constraints on beneficiaries like Steele. For example, they were not permitted to speak out on behalf of their race, unless they were attacking Democrats or liberals. And they were certainly not encouraged to speak honestly about the likes of Limbaugh.

What did Steele mean, after all, when he described the Limbaugh show as “ugly” and “incendiary”? Why wouldn’t the Republican chairman, or any other self-respecting African-American figure, feel that way about a radio host whose aired remarks are so replete with rancid racial comments?

While Limbaugh may or may not be a racist himself, he has never hesitated to indulge bigotry among his listeners — sometimes in the whining tone of the victimized white male, but often in an aggressive skinhead style. Not long ago, he mixed up a cocktail of slurs to express his contempt for the man he calls “the magic Negro,” complaining that we all have to “bend over” for Barack Obama merely because “his father was black.”

Then again, Rush is the kind of compassionate conservative who cannot imagine why anyone would support aid to the genocide victims of Darfur except for “the color of their skin,” which happens to match that of a certain Democratic “voting bloc” here at home.

Limbaugh’s catalog of slurs, both ugly and incendiary, dates back to the earliest days of his radio career, when he brusquely ordered an African-American listener to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” and sneeringly asked, “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” He once suggested that the NAACP, an American institution devoted to nonviolence and the rule of law, “should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”

His obnoxious remarks drone on and on in a depressingly long monologue that also targets other minorities, women, gays and so on. It used to be excused as “politically incorrect humor” but it was always just unfunny and hateful bilge.

Even Rush now seems to understand that he has a serious problem with women, who cannot stand him, yet he plainly has no idea what to do about it. He isn’t quite Michael Savage, but he too voices the frustration of a diminishing segment of white males who cannot reconcile themselves to the social change of the last four decades.

For someone like Steele, who was hired to become the moderate and minority-friendly face of the GOP, the power of Limbaugh represents an insurmountable problem. He couldn’t ignore forever the extremism and festering rage of the party base — and they couldn’t ignore forever his connections with centrist Republicans, his suspiciously moderate pronouncements on gays and abortion, and his past support for affirmative action and other policies that make them angry.

Steele’s offhand remarks about ole Rushbo merely accelerated the inevitable, despite his groveling apologies. His chronic case of foot-in-mouth and his overall ineptitude have only justified the sense among his detractors that this was another case of affirmative action gone sour. But then why would a truly talented black politician — such as a Barack Obama or a Cory Booker — devote his life to a party that really doesn’t want him?

Meanwhile the bad old habits die hard in the Grand Old Party. While a coup against Steele is reportedly brewing within the Republican National Committee, the first member to demand his resignation was a black state committeewoman from North Carolina named Ada Fisher. Is it a coincidence that Fisher supported Katon Dawson for the RNC chairmanship? Dawson is the South Carolina state party chair who belonged to a whites-only country club before he entered the RNC race last year. The runner-up to Steele in the RNC contest, he has now called for a special election to oust the man who beat him. Using a black woman as front to oust a black chairman may just be the latest evidence that the Republicans have yet to acknowledge the legacy of Lincoln — or the realities of America in the 21st century.

: Joe Conason blogs in Salon several times a week and writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His latest book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." More Joe Conason

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The danger of an endless GOP primary

No, it won't make people realize how crazy the GOP is. It will just shift the debate even farther right

By David Sirota

(Credit: AP/Tony Dejak/Gerald Herbert)

Topics:2012 Elections, Republican Party

Among progressive friends and colleagues of mine, there seems to be a consensus that the longer the Republican presidential primary continues the better for progressives. The idea is that Republican infighting weakens the ultimate nominee and exposes just how radical all of the GOP candidates are. As the domino theory goes, that will help more Americans see the ugly truth about what the Republican Party really is, which will subsequently convince more Americans to vote against the GOP, which will eventually force the GOP to moderate its politics.

Straightforward as this hypothesis is, I don’t buy it — I believe the longer the Republican primary battle continues, the more the GOP’s most extreme proposals are given a mainstream platform, the more their ideas are granted public credibility and the more conservative propaganda is invisibly woven into our most basic political assumptions. In other words, I believe in the Goldwater Principle, which suggests that while the eventual nominee may fail to win the cycle’s general election, the elongated nomination contest — with its news cycle dominance and hardcore ideological edge — will help permanently shift the supposed mainstream “center” of our public debate to the fringe right.

Consider the heated attacks Mitt Romney’s campaign is now lobbing at Rick Santorum in the run-up to Super Tuesday. By calling the former Pennsylvania senator “Big Labor’s favorite senator,” the effort aims to paint the viciously anti-union Santorum as nothing short of the flesh-and-blood reincarnation of Paul Wellstone. Romney is clearly hoping that such a portrayal will spur a GOP voter backlash, and sensational headlines across the country spur his framing on. The result is a troubling ripple effect that could transcend a single election.

Laugh all you want at the absurdity of calling Santorum union workers’ best friend, and tell yourself that it all will teach average Americans how ridiculous the GOP is, but in reality, it’s not funny and will most likely have the opposite effect: It will probably help the larger effort to undermine the once-undebatable idea of what “pro-labor” fundamentally means.

As the framing of the Republican primary debate argues, it no longer means consistently backing minimum wage increases; consistently opposing corporate-written “free” trade deals; supporting budgets that let the Labor Department enforce labor laws; opposing so-called right-to-work laws; or even casting a majority of one’s legislative votes in favor of unions’ agenda. It means the opposite: a senator who has repeatedly voted against minimum wage increases, for job-killing trade agreements, against budgets that adequately fund labor-law enforcement, and against unions’ stated priorities a whopping 88 percent of the time. It also means a presidential candidate who is actively campaigning in support of a national “right to work” law.

While this particular — and particularly ridiculous — definition of “pro-labor” might not fully stick in the American psyche, it does have a longer-term psychological effect, especially since so much media attention is focused on it. It’s part of a larger process that, over the years, gradually shifts our assumptions and definitions to the right — a process that makes Santorum into “Big Labor’s favorite senator” and by comparison, genuinely pro-labor lawmakers into wild-eyed leftists. Indeed, with Santorum depicted as Paul Wellstone, today’s conservative Democrats who sometime votes with unions are suddenly at risk of being seen as European socialists, and progressive Democrats who are actually pro-labor are almost certain to be reimagined as Marxist revolutionaries — even though nothing could be further from the truth. Meanwhile, the momentary argument over whether Santorum is pro- or anti-union bleeds out into the larger campaign to reset the political center and define both the terms “liberal” and “conservative” as something farther to the right than they were even a few years ago.

On that latter point, notice the response from the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO (emphasis added):

Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, remembered trying to schedule meetings with Santorum, but always being passed over to his staff. After appealing to the Republican Senator’s aides on the labor issue of the day, Bloomingdale said his office would receive a letter stating the senator “was opposing you on whatever that issue was.”

“His thing was, ‘I won without you.’ He’s an arrogant guy, he thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong,” Bloomingdale said. “Calling him a labor supporter would be similar to calling Mitt Romney a conservative. They’re both ridiculous.”

So now, not only is the media forwarding the idea that Santorum is pro-labor, but labor leaders themselves are suggesting archconservative Mitt Romney is not actually conservative! For the national conservative movement, that means the whole affair — regardless of whom it helps in a given election — is a victory in the larger war to move America to the right.

This is precisely why the longer the GOP primary and these vernacular-changing skirmishes take center stage, the better it is for conservatives, and the worse it is for the progressive movement. Sure, an elongated primary battle may (and I stress may) minimally help President Obama’s reelection campaign. But over the long haul, it threatens to change the very parameters of our political discourse — and that will have consequences for many elections to come.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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Republicans rebel against an oily transportation bill

Instead of fixing roads, the House leadership proposes a bonanza for the oil industry. Many Republicans are balking

By Brian Merchant

Legislative train wreck ahead (Credit: val lawless via Shutterstock)

Topics:Congress, Republican Party

There are over 4 million miles of road in the United States, 600,000 bridges, and more than 100,000 miles of rail. To prevent the lot of it from crumbling beneath us, Congress passes transportation authorization bills to fund the repair of the nation’s withering infrastructure. Given their unmistakable utility — everyone tends to agree that sagging bridges need fixing — they’re typically highly bipartisan affairs that come and go without anyone really noticing. Not this time.

When the GOP announced its transportation bill last month, Capitol HIll jaws dropped. The $260 billion five-year plan would, for the first time, tie transit funding to a bevy of new oil and gas projects. One would open up the long-preserved Arctic National Wildlife Refugee. Another would offer up millions of acres of public lands to shale drilling. Still another would open nearly all the nation’s coastline, including the recently oil-soaked Gulf of Mexico, and mandate a host of new offshore drilling operations.

You’ve almost got to admire the sheer audacity of House Republicans: This was supposed to be a transportation bill, not a bonanza for the oil industry.

The actual transit elements are equally aggressive. Pedestrian and bike programs would be shut down; Safe Routes to School, which does exactly what it sounds like, would be eliminated. And to free up money for highway expansion and bridge repair (which the bulk of the $260 billion is allotted for), the bill would sever the funding mechanism for public transit. For 30 years, one-fifth of the cash flow from the federal gas tax has gone to transit, and this bill would boot it out of the Highway Trust Fund altogether, forcing it to compete for financing with all other programs.

This is a nightmare, I thought, perusing the proposals for the first time. Transit policy experts concurred. They balked at the radical move to link crucial funding to highly speculative oil revenues. They puzzled over measures that rolled back environmental protections, and lambasted the drive to gut funding for anything that wasn’t a highway. U.S. Secretary ofTransportation Ray LaHood, a Republican, told Politico that it’s “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.”

And there’s essentially one big fat reason the bill is so bad.

“The Republican House leadership hijacked the transportation bill for political purposes,” says Deron Lovaas, director of transportation policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When the speaker announced it, I hate to say it, my first thought was: OK, we’re now in election season, and the House leadership is not interested in policy — they want to play politics.”

Despite the fuzzy logic guiding the bill, and the even fuzzier math it’s built upon — the Congressional Budget Office found that relying on drilling revenues would leave a $78 billion gap in the budget — it may indeed have made for a shrewd political gambit.

Gasoline prices are rising, and whenever that happens, support for domestic drilling grows. And so Speaker John Boehner’s blog booms: “Republicans have a plan to address high gas prices – and create more than a million new private-sector jobs in the process: the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act.”

Perhaps the House leadership hoped that by pegging drilling measures to an otherwise mundane transit bill, they could force the Democrats’ backs against the wall. (And maybe generous contributions from oil and gas interests helped motivate their strategy: According to OpenSecrets.org, Boehner received $210,000 in contributions from the industry between 2011-2012. Other influential architects of the plan, like Rep. David Camp, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, also raked in over $100,000. House Republicans have altogether received a total of $10 million. And indeed, pairing drilling and transit might’ve been canny; it’d be unpopular to oppose. But then the GOP did something it’s proven quite adept at: It went over the top.

Not satisfied with the oily glut already on hand, the GOP tacked on a provision that would approve the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the permit for which was denied by the Obama administration. Obviously, the 1,700-mile pipeline, which environmentalists have vehemently opposed, has nothing to do with transportation. Tossing Keystone into the fray made it clearer than ever that any intent to approach this legislation in a bipartisan manner was out the window. Hundreds more amendments followed, and the House leadership was overwhelmed. The bill so heavily favored highways and oil production that it couldn’t be taken seriously as a transit plan.

Bill McKibben, the author and environmentalist leading the fight against the Keystone XL, wrote me the following in an email:

Transportation is clearly one of the key issues of the new century, but instead of thinking about, say, trains, subways, buses, high-mileage vehicles, and the stuff that other cutting edge nations are doing they’re headed straight back about three decades … Clearly they understand one thing and one thing only, which is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. So we get … ANWR? Keystone? This is supposed to be serious?

A burgeoning number of Republicans think not. Especially after the grim CBO forecast, fiscal conservatives are backing away. Influential right-wing groups like the Club for Growth, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Taxpayers for Common Sense all oppose the plan. The Club for Growth went so far as to put out a Key Vote Alert imploring conservatives to vote against the bill, calling it “a remarkably bloated and inefficient piece of legislation.”

The Ohio Republican Steven LaTourette vocally condemned it, noting that it’s “pissing off all the people that ride bicycles and like to walk.” LaTourette, frustrated by the partisan posturing, said, “This has to be a bill that everybody signs off on that actually puts people back to work. It can’t be an ideological punching bag, or else it’s dead.” He lamented that ”Infrastructure used to be something that was widely popular among both parties, and for some reason over the last few Congresses, they’ve become highly polarized.”

Meanwhile, conservation-minded Republicans like Charlie Bass, R-N.H., are against the reckless drilling blitz.

“Opening ANWR to drilling as a means to pay for the transportation bill is neither reasonable nor realistic,” he told the Associated Press. He sent a letter to the GOP leadership, signed by five other Republican House members, asking them to reconsider the Arctic drilling provision. And Rep. Robert Dold, R-Ill., penned a passionate Op-Ed warning that pushing to drill in ANWR is ”a mistake on many fronts.”

The fact that the bill jeopardizes funding for public transportation is scaring off urban Republicans in New York and Chicago. Newly elected Bob Turner, R-N.Y., whose district stretches between Brooklyn and Queens, told Streetsblog, “I have concerns about how the funds will eventually be allocated. We cannot underestimate the importance of providing efficient, safe, mass transit, roads, bridges and tunnels to the people who live and commute in New York City.” He added that “I will not support any bill that does not allow New York City to sufficiently meet those needs.”

In other words, it’s too brazen in its gift-giving to the oil industry, too hard on mass transit, and too fiscally irresponsible. Even for Republicans.

“I think this is an example of overreach. I also think this is an example of politics trumping substance,” Lovaas says. “The whole ‘might the revenue be inadequate’ issue, it’s possible it never occurred to them. Because they were thinking about this through the political lens and not thinking at all about the policy.”

The Senate, meanwhile, passed a sensible version with overwhelming bipartisan support—and, amazingly, two old-school Republicans even floated the idea of pegging the gas tax to inflation to help account for the persistent shortfalls. See, though today’s politicians would rather burn the Constitution than suggest raising gas taxes, it’s traditionally how we’ve paid for highway upkeep. Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the GOP, actually instituted the highest-ever bump in gas taxes in the nation’s history: five cents per gallon in 1986. But it was last raised in 1993, and the current tax simply isn’t adequate to cover for inflation and higher material and labor costs.

When it became clear that there weren’t going to be enough GOP votes to pass the whole package, the House leadership split the bill up into three pieces, falling back on a rarely used procedural motion that would tie them all together once (and if) they all passed. Lovaas likens the bill to the Titanic, which also split into three parts … before sinking.

The first of those chunks, the one stuffed with drilling projects, and that approves the Keystone XL, passed the House along a party-line vote last week. The White House promptly threatened to veto the whole transit bill if those drilling provisions remain, and it has an abnormally strong case for doing so. But it might not need to. Boehner delayed the vote on the transportation chunk, largely because a) he still has no idea how to pay for it, and b) it has become so unpopular he might lack the votes to pass it. As such, the GOP may have sacrificed the nation’s shot at a coherent transportation plan, getting only political embarrassment in return.

Like the FAA debacle and the debt ceiling showdown before it, the entire transit bill blowout showcases the opportunism of the Tea Party House, its preference for playing politics over governing, its opposition to even the most pragmatic tax increases of the sort Ronald Reagan approved, and, ultimately, its willingness to put partisan posturing ahead of acting in the public interest. The transportation bill is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with modern American governance.

: Brian Merchant is a freelance writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in Slate, GOOD, and Paste, and he's a contributing editor for Treehugger.com. He's currently working on a book based on his column, Getting Samy Out of Burma. More Brian Merchant

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Brokering a GOP disaster

Republicans hoping for a deadlocked convention overlook the perils to the party

By Jonathan Bernstein

Republicans, be careful what you wish for (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)

Topics:2012 Elections, Republican Party

Some Republicans, dissatisfied with their candidates for president, have taken to openly pining for a deadlocked convention to solve their problem. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wants a “deliberative”conclave in Tampa, Fla., this summer. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says if it happens, she wants to “help.”

They should be careful what they wish for.

In the modern era since the nomination process was reformed before 1972, we’ve never had a real contested convention, and the institution that we have today isn’t built for deliberation and decision making; it’s built to formally ratify a decision made months before, and then serve as props and extras for the nominee’s multiday TV extravaganza. If the delegates were suddenly forced to make a decision, it’s not hard to imagine some of the nightmare scenarios that might develop.

Imagine, then, that Newt Gingrich really does stay in and win delegates, especially in the South; that Ron Paul’s delegate strategy is wildly successful; and that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum split the rest; and that the delegate count after the last primary stands at Romney 700, Santorum 650, Paul 450, Gingrich 400, with a hundred or so automatic delegates and formally unbound caucus state delegates remaining uncommitted. No one is close to the 1,144 needed for nomination as the delegates arrive in Tampa.

What happens then? Remember, the conventions are essentially the governing body of the political party. They have rules, but if they choose to change those rules there’s really no one (not the Republican National Committee, not the courts) who is going to prevent them from doing so. The majority of the convention, ultimately, is responsible only to itself. And unlike the old days, when many delegations were simply creatures of a state party chair and the individual delegates would do whatever the chair said, the delegates now would be over 2,000 free agents. They might follow the orders of the candidate they were pledged to, or not; some of them might choose to follow some other party leader. Most of them, however, would be free to choose, with little or no professional or personal risk involved.

What could go wrong?

Back when we had real conventions, one of the ways that nominations were fought out was over credentials. Rival groups would claim that they were the “real” delegation from one state or another. Ultimately, the convention itself decides. Anyone who recalls the extended dust-up over the Florida and Michigan delegations to the Democratic National Convention, a bitter fight that went on even after there was nothing at stake, can imagine how vicious something like that can be when the nomination is at stake. Given the various penalties that have been assigned as well as the dicey counting so far in the caucus states, there’s plenty of material available for some awesome, and awesomely ugly, credentials challenges.

Any platform fights that have made it to the convention floor in recent decades have been carefully staged and choreographed by the campaign that controlled the convention. No nominee, no one in control – and the choreography collapses. All those crazy amendments offered in the House of Representatives last year, or the ones you’ve seen offered by state legislators? If the convention decides to open up the platform for amendments from the convention floor, they could get a string of those — in prime time. Remember, most intense conservatives (and most intense liberals) tend to believe that their fringe, unpopular ideas are really supported by a silent majority out there.

What are the odds that it works out well for the Republican Party image? In a normal convention, if a few delegates misbehave in any way, the campaign can simply disavow them, and the story goes away quickly. In a deadlocked convention, there’s no one who can do that; the delegates are the party at that point. So if some of them turn out to have nasty stuff in their backgrounds, or decide to enjoy the convention atmosphere a little too much, or just get carried away with partisan or ideological behavior – remember how the Republican debates were marred by embarrassing behavior by the audiences – well, that’s going to get press attention. And no one is really in a position to look after the party image. To the contrary, rival campaigns might even feed the press stories about delegates for the other candidates.

The ultimate nightmare: It’s really not hard to imagine Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich becoming fed up with a credentials or platform decision and just stomping off. Perhaps taking their delegates with them. Remember, a deadlocked convention, if it ever happens, would be the end of months of hardening of positions and intensifying rivalries. Partisans who may have thought back in 2011 that it was a tough choice deciding between candidates will, by the convention, have spent months and in some cases years trying to convince everyone how great their candidate is and how dangerous the others would be, and the one set of people they’re most likely to have convinced is themselves.

How ugly could it get? What if Paul and Gingrich go off by themselves, and declare that their rump group is the real, authorized Republican National Convention and those RINOs down the street are the imposters – and the Paul/Gingrich nominee is the one who is entitled to Republican ballot slots in the fall. Hmmm … I can think of one former governor of Alaska who might be willing to head that ticket.

The truth is that Republicans are living in a fantasy if they assume that someone could just snap their fingers and 2,000-plus Republican delegates would automatically switch their loyalties to Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels and that everything would run smoothly from that point. A sensible party would do anything possible to avoid the possibility of a true deadlocked convention.

: Jonathan Bernstein writes at a Plain Blog About Politics. Follow him at @jbplainblog More Jonathan Bernstein

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The men who own the GOP

Shadowy billionaires like Freiss and Adelson are spending record amounts of money on the election

By Robert Reich

Foster Freiss and Sheldon Adelson (Credit: Wikipedia/Gage Skidmore/Bectrigger)

Topics:2012 Elections, Republican Party

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president.

I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are running. They are – but only because the people listed in the first paragraph have given them huge sums of money to do so. In a sense, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul and Romney are the fronts. Dore et al. are the real investors.

According to January’s Federal Election Commission report, William Dore and Foster Friess supplied more than three-fourths of the $2.1 million raked in by Rick Santorum’s super PAC in January. Dore, president of the Dore Energy Corp. in Lake Charles, La., gave $1 million; Freiss, a fund manager based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., gave $669,000 (he had given the Santorum super PAC $331,000 last year, bringing Freiss’ total to $1 million).

Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, provided $10 million of the $11 million that went into Gingrich’s super PAC in January. Adelson is chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Texas billionaire Harold Simmons donated $500,000.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, provided $1.7 million of the $2.4 million raised by Ron Paul’s super PAC in January.

Mitt Romney’s super PAC raised $6.6 million last month – almost all from just 40 donors. Bruce Kovner, co-founder of the New York-based hedge fund Caxton Associates, gave $500,000, as did two others. David Tepper of Appaloosa Management gave $375,000. J.W. Marriott and Richard Marriott gave a total of $500,000. Julian Robertson, co-founder of hedge fund Tiger Management, gave $250,000. Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman gave $100,000.

Bottom line: Whoever emerges as the GOP standard-bearer will be deeply indebted to a handful of people, each of whom will expect a good return on their investment.

And this is just the beginning. We haven’t even come to the general election.

Nonprofit political fronts like Crossroads GPS, founded by Republican political guru Karl Rove, are already gathering hundreds of millions of dollars from big corporations and a few wealthy individuals like billionaire oil and petrochemical moguls David and Charles Koch. The public will never know who or what corporation gave what because, under IRS regulations, such nonprofit “social welfare organizations” aren’t required to disclose the names of those who contributed to them.

Before 2010, federal campaign law and Federal Election Commission regulations limited to $5,000 per year the amount an individual could give to a PAC making independent expenditures in federal elections. This individual contribution limit was declared unconstitutional by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in a case based on the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision at the start of 2010, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission.

Now, the limits are gone. And this comes precisely at a time when an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s income and wealth is accumulating at the top.

Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many.

: Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." More Robert Reich

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What are Republicans thinking?

The continuing obsession with limiting contraceptive access shows how out of touch GOP politicians are

By Irin Carmon

Foster Friess (Credit: talkingpointsmemo.com)

Topics:Birth Control, contraception, Republican Party

You may have heard that Foster Friess, Rick Santorum surrogate and bankroller, offered women a solution for saving money on contraception in lieu of President Obama’s plan to cover it fully. “You know, back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly,” he told Andrea Mitchell today. If you weren’t familiar with the old-timer expression, he didn’t mean applying the aspirin vaginally — he meant that the sluts should just keep their legs shut.

But it’s worth looking at what he said right before that: “I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex that I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are.”

This is deeply ironic, and not just because Friess has chosen to back a candidate whose singular obsession with state regulation of sexual behavior has helped bring the more extreme stances of the anti-choice movement to the forefront. It bears repeating that Santorum said as recently as October, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s OK, contraception is OK. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

It’s also because Friess said all this on a day when Rep. Darrell Issa convened a House Oversight Committee to ponder the following question (rendered verbatim), “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?” The topic, of course, was the Affordable Care Act’s mandated coverage of contraceptives as preventive care, and how unsatisfied Republicans remain with the compromise that has satisfied everyone who actually provides healthcare. And it’s not just the Republican House, which has long been interested in convening show hearings about regulating uteruses without any realistic path to getting something done: Marco Rubio and Roy Blunt are trying to tack on a “right of conscience” amendment to the highway bill that would allow all employers to opt out of any coverage they claim violates their religious beliefs.

Those hearings got a lot more attention than your average subcommittee does, when two female congresswomen, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Carolyn Maloney, walked out in protest of the all-male lineup in the first panel. “What I want to know is, where are the women?” asked Maloney. “I look at this panel, and I don’t see one single individual representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventive healthcare services, including family planning.” Two women were on the second panel, but Republicans barred the female Georgetown law student who had been put forward to testify about how lack of access to contraception had led her friend to lose an ovary. Issa, according to Politico, said “she was ‘not found to be appropriate or qualified’ to testify about religious liberty. He said liberty, not contraception, was the topic of the hearing.”

Contraceptive coverage and women’s health are “real issues,” contrary to Friess’ formulation, but they’re public health issues that should be addressed by expanding access to options that women are already choosing for themselves, when they can. Still, the administration moved on from this almost a week ago, defusing it for anyone persuadable when they announced their compromise. The only people keeping this issue in the news right now are Republicans vainly posturing on behalf of legislation that has no chance in the current climate. The only real question is, why? Can’t they read polls? Aren’t they aware of how much they’re playing into Obama’s hands by associating themselves with a position that Americans manifestly find extreme — with video, no less? We already know they’re completely unaware of how prohibitively expensive birth control access can be for the average American.

Most of all, Republicans seem intent on proving that pro-choicers are correct when they accuse them of being more obsessed with policing women’s sex lives than any actual policymaking. By the way, here’s how Mitchell responded to Friess: “Excuse me, I’m just trying to catch my breath from that.” It is, in fact, breathtaking how incredibly divorced from reality this conversation has been.