Republican Party

That was why I had to stifle a laugh this morning when Joe Scarborough asked me on his radio show (and later on "Morning Joe," too) why the alleged abuse of parliamentary maneuvers didn't cause me to worry about the future. "Won't this give the Republicans the excuse to use the same tactics when they win the majority and John Boehner becomes speaker?" he demanded. But then Joe had to laugh when I asked whether he doubted that the Republicans would use whatever tactics suited their agenda -- no matter what the Democrats do now -- just as they did when he was in Congress. He knows they will.

(Scarborough also asked, perhaps sincerely, why the insurance companies haven't run their own "Harry and Louise" campaign to kill this bill if they actually hate it and don't secretly see it as a subsidy to them. The answer is that Frank Luntz warned last year against raising the industry's profile in a debate where they are the entities most despised by the public -- and that they have instead run their campaign against reform through other corporate outfits, notably the mammoth U.S. Chamber of Commerce.)

The will to stand and fight is the fundamental difference between the parties, which the current struggle over healthcare may yet begin to bring into closer balance. At the moment, too many elected Democrats pay too much heed to David Brooks and the editorial page editors of the Washington Post, whose chief purpose in life is to oppose their interests and objectives. Democrats constantly worry that they won't seem sufficiently "bipartisan" and "responsible" if they employ the legislative and procedural tactics required to achieve their aims and enforce majority rule. Democrats are afraid to look bad.

Republicans think David Brooks is a wuss, to put it politely, but at least he is their wuss. Republicans openly proclaim that bipartisanship is merely another cynical ploy, only to be used and then discarded in their quest to "defeat the left" -- a quest that to them has always meant dismantling the progressive achievements of the past century via permanent one-party rule. Republicans rarely worry whether they look bad to anyone beyond their narrow ideological base.

It's a style that can lead to excess and often does. But the Democrats may at last get something done this week by emulating it. And they may be surprised by the respect they earn from the public -- and from their adversaries -- by standing up with strength for what they claim to believe most deeply.

So what House leaders want to do is have one (or maybe two) votes, wrapping up all their unfinished business in one fell swoop. The rule guiding debate on the reconciliation measure would declare that if the House passes the reconciliation bill, the Senate healthcare bill is also passed. The rule might even declare that if the rule is adopted, the reconciliation bill and the Senate bill are both passed, but that hasn't been decided yet.

What makes that plan attractive is it lets House Democrats pretend they're voting for the Senate bill with their preferred fixes included, even though in actuality, as soon as they deem the Senate bill passed, it would go to President Obama to sign into law; the reconciliation measure would still need to pass the Senate separately for its fixes to take effect. "What we want to do is pass the Senate bill as amended by reconciliation," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters Tuesday.

Not surprisingly, Republicans are having a field day with the idea, running around telling anyone with a cable TV satellite feed that the "deem and pass" technique is just another sneaky way to pass a government takeover of healthcare by ignoring the will of the public (just like passing the fixes in the Senate using reconciliation, with a majority vote). It doesn't help Democrats that it was suggested by House Rules Committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., whose name just lends itself to GOP attacks. "The 'Slaughter Solution' is the ultimate in Washington power grabs, a legislative ploy that lets Democrats defy the will of the American people while attempting to eliminate any trace of actually doing so," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday, keeping up what's become a new Republican tradition of giving dopey nicknames to parts of the healthcare bill they don't like (the "Slaughter Solution," the "Cornhusker Kickback," the "Louisiana Purchase," etc.). Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., even suggested that the healthcare bill would be "illegitimate" if the technique was used. "This is dictatorial, what they are doing," she told a rally back home in Minnesota. "We are not compelled to follow a non-law just because Obama and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi tells us we have to... If they pass the bill legitimately, then yes, we have to follow the law -- until we repeal it. But if they pass it illegitimately, then the bill is illegitimate, and we don't have to lay down for this."

But the GOP has used self-executing rules more often than Democrats over the years. The Rules Committee has a background document up about the rules on its Web site already. Democrats pointed out a 2006 Roll Call story saying the GOP had self-executing rules on between 22 percent and 37 percent of the legislation passed when Republicans controlled the House. Democrats use the technique far less frequently. Once again, all the outrage is being ginned up completely selectively.

Officially, Democrats haven't even said they'd use the tactic. "This is the process -- strike that," Hoyer said. "We haven't decided on a process at this point in time." But it's pretty clear they're leaning that way -- and if they do, they don't think voters are going to care. "Other than the people in this room, do you think any American's going to make that distinction?" he asked reporters. "I don't think any American -- real American out there -- is going to make a distinction" between passing the rule and passing the legislation.

That's probably true; process arguments don't appear to be affecting how voters look at the healthcare issue one way or the other. But the longer Democrats spend talking about how they're going to pass the bill, the less time they spend doing what every single pollster is advising them to do: talk about what's actually in the bill. Which means the net result of all the "self-executing" talk is probably good for the GOP. Even if it won't stop the bill's progress in the end.

Of course, it should go without saying that when Republicans start chirping up with unsolicited suggestions for how Democrats can improve their political fortunes, Democrats would be wise to consider the source. The GOP isn't interested in helping Democrats avoid defeat this fall. This is so obvious that even typing it is hard to do without laughing, but just in case, here goes: Republicans want Democrats to lose in November's elections, early and often, if possible.

And yet, House Democrats still can't figure out whether they've got the votes to pass the Senate's version of the healthcare bill and a separate measure, using the budget reconciliation process, to fix what pretty much everyone agrees are problems in the Senate's legislation. Leadership aides say talks are still ongoing about exactly how to move forward, and when; a final vote may not come until Saturday, and even that tentative schedule is basically a guess.

Part of the agonizing comes down to legitimate policy disputes -- take Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and his dozen or so antiabortion Democrats, who say they can't vote for the Senate bill because it doesn't include enough restrictions on the ability of women who get federal subsidies for their insurance to have abortions. You may disagree with what Stupak is doing, but at least his opposition has something to do with what's actually in the bill. Same goes for Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who says the legislation is basically a giveaway to corporate interests.

But then there's a not insubstantial chunk of Democratic anxiety that appears to come down to the same question Republicans are trying to guide them on -- "will voting for this thing mean I lose my seat?" Few of the lawmakers who are still waffling on what they'll do will explicitly say that, since the only thing likely to turn voters off more than a politician who does something they don't like is a politician who does something they don't like and says they're doing it to help their reelection campaign. Still, look at the 37 Democrats who voted against the bill in November, when the House passed its version; 31 of them represent districts that John McCain won in the 2008 presidential election, in some cases by far wider margins than the lawmakers won their own elections. It would be hard for many of them to deny that how the vote will shake out on the campaign trail is playing some part in whether these members will switch from opposing the bill to supporting it.

Not surprisingly, all that drives aides to the Democratic leaders in charge of passing the bill crazy. "Democrats listening to Sen. McConnell on healthcare is like a chicken taking advice from Col. Sanders," said Rodell Mollineau, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. (whose own political fate looks murky, but who's still aggressively pushing for the legislation). House Democrats don't think much more highly of the GOP advice. "[Republicans] are about the last people any Democrat should be listening to, especially since the GOP did absolutely nothing on healthcare for 12 years while the number of uninsured grew and premiums skyrocketed," said Doug Thornell, a spokesman for Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who chairs the House Democrats' campaign committee. "If you think healthcare is such a political loser for us, why are you encouraging Democrats to vote no?"

Which raises an interesting notion. If it does begin to look like leadership will fall short on the Democratic votes needed to pass the healthcare bill, might a few Republicans want to vote "yes" to help push them over the abyss? Surely, if healthcare is such an albatross, the GOP would do just about anything to keep it tied to their opponents. Otherwise, it might just turn out that once Congress stops fretting about the bill and finally passes it, voters actually like some of what's in it.

Buckley's "movement conservatism" sought to unite the anti-communist, socially conservative and free-market wings of the right on the basis of an ideology of "fusionism" cooked up by National Review editor Frank Meyer. This did not work, and by the 1980s there were three distinct political-intellectual movements on the right: the neoconservatives (originally pro-Cold War social democrats and liberals), the religious right and the libertarians. The coalition survived the end of the Cold War, but not the presidency of George W. Bush.

What we are seeing now, in the second decade of the 21st century, is the rise of the libertarian right, at the expense of the neocons and social conservatives.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, many former neoconservatives, like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and yours truly, concluded that we could resume the project, interrupted by the Cold War, of building a Rooseveltian liberal internationalist order, based on a great-power concert and international law. A remnant of the Cold War neocons, based at the American Enterprise Institute and Rupert Murdoch's the Weekly Standard, rejected this in favor of a project to convert America's temporary Cold War primacy into a militarized, permanent Pax Americana.

The neocons were marginalized under Clinton, but 9/11 gave them an excuse to carry out projects such as the invasion of Iraq and the encirclement of Iran, neither of which had anything to do with jihadism, under the Orwellian label of "World War IV." When Bush embraced their agenda and invaded Iraq, conservative voters initially rallied behind the flag, but by the second Bush term the public had turned against the Iraq war, the neocons were purged and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a realist, was brought into the Bush administration as trustee in bankruptcy. The neocons have been sidelined again, possibly forever.

The religious right, too, is in decline. Protestant evangelicals were never as numerous or as electorally powerful as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claimed. The Protestant religious right benefited from a backlash against the cultural liberalism of the 1960s on the part of working-class and middle-class white Americans. That backlash, however, appears to have been a generational phenomenon. Younger Americans are less racist, more educated, more secular and more liberal on social issues. Archie and Edith Bunker have passed away, and Gloria and the Meathead voted for Obama.

It is hardly surprising, then, that libertarianism is the beneficiary by default of the relative decline of its rivals on the right, neoconservatism and the religious right.

It is merciful, perhaps, that Buckley did not live to see the detested Ayn Rand become the central intellectual figure on the right. Until recently the only prominent conservative known to have been influenced at one point by the Evita of the nerds was Alan Greenspan, and he was given a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Now two of the stars of the emergent right, Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, are professed disciples of the Mary Baker Eddy of egotism. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan told a convention of Randians in 2005.

Glenn Beck, another rising star on the right, sounds Randian in his denunciation of the idea of Christian social justice as misleading progressive propaganda. It was Rand's hatred of religion and her praise of selfishness that irked Buckley and the movement conservatives, who were more concerned about preserving what they saw as Western civilization from communism and relativism than with creating a free-market utopia.

All of this is great news for American progressivism. In the last third of the 20th century, many liberals who supported New Deal economic policies defected to the right on the basis of the Cold War or the culture war. Now that the Cold War and the culture war are over, what remains is the class war. And in the class war, the libertarians are on the side of the classes.

Consider Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future." As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, it would raise taxes on middle-class Americans while dramatically lowering them on the über-rich. Ryan would use a national value-added tax (a good idea) to replace income, capital gains and estate taxes (a terrible idea). He would privatize Social Security and replace Medicare with vouchers, and then allow inflation to eat away at the value of the vouchers. Oh, and despite his claims, his Rand-inspired redistribution of income upward to the virtuously selfish rich would not eliminate the deficit.

The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for decades.

Before Buckley and the movement conservatives took the right in another direction in the 1950s, this country had a libertarian, isolationist right, the right of Robert A. Taft and Alf Landon. Thanks to their opposition to the New Deal, U.S. entry in World War II and the Cold War, the libertarian isolationists turned the Republicans into the minority party between 1932 and 1968. The only Republican to be elected in that era, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for the presidency in 1952 to save the GOP from Taftian isolationism and dismissively rejected suggestions that the Republicans try to repeal New Deal programs like Social Security.

Richard Nixon, like Ike, was a modern Republican whose formula for a Republican majority was big government on behalf of the middle class plus a hawkish foreign policy and moderate social traditionalism. The neoconservative writer David Frum has argued that this is the only possible combination that can produce an enduring Republican majority. I agree, and it is therefore with delight that I observe the rise of radical libertarianism in the GOP.

True, thanks to the popular backlash against the bailouts and the unpopular healthcare bill, the Democrats will suffer losses in the midterm elections. The Randian right will claim that Republican gains in Congress are proof that the American people share their goal of abolishing Social Security and Medicare. They should be encouraged in that belief.

After all, the public has repeatedly rejected any attempts to privatize Social Security or slash Medicare benefits. Reagan denounced both entitlements, but as president he raised taxes to support Social Security and refused to touch Medicare. Under George W. Bush, a Republican Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its concessions to the pharma lobby, was the biggest expansion of socialized medicine in the U.S. since Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law.

When Bush supported the partial privatization of Social Security, the proposal was so unpopular with the public that the Republican majority in Congress never allowed it to come to a vote. Bush touched the third rail of American politics -- and was promptly electrocuted. Last but not least, one of the arguments that Republicans opportunistically used to mobilize popular opposition to the Democratic healthcare bill was the claim that it would lead to cuts in Medicare for the elderly.

AARP vs. the objectivists. That's not a fight, it's a massacre.

There is not the slightest chance that either Social Security or Medicare will be privatized in an America where the proportion of the elderly in the electorate will continue to expand. Any attempt to means-test Social Security for the middle class, rather than the rich alone, will be quickly punished by the voters. The most that the right can do would be to use indexing tricks to allow inflation to reduce the value of Social Security, but surely progressives and centrists will be around to point this out.

Medicare will not be replaced by Ryan's scheme of inflation-diminished vouchers. But there is a genuine danger that the Democrats, along with the Republicans, will continue to put medical price controls off the table and instead will try to reduce benefits to pay for the inflated rewards of American physicians (other than primary care doctors), insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

Other countries that do not have single-payer systems have avoided cancerous cost inflation by means of "all-payer regulation," in which the government sets the prices ("fee schedules") of all medical services and goods, private as well as public. Obama and the Democrats are too intimidated by the health industry lobby even to talk about the primary method of health cost containment used everywhere else, as well as in the state of Maryland, which has its own successful rate-setting system.

But interest in all-payer regulation is growing, and in the next decade or two, if it comes down to a choice between government regulation of medical prices and the immiseration of middle-class voters, my bet would be on regulation.

The biggest danger is that Democrats will misinterpret the coming electoral setbacks to mean that they need to move in a libertarian direction. That would repeat the mistake made by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the other New Democrats during the Reagan era. It was their failure to understand that foreign policy and the culture war, not conservative economic policies, were the basis for Republican victories -- that, and the fact that they did Wall Street's bidding for Wall Street's campaign contributions -- that inspired these neoliberals to move to the right on economics: "The era of big government is over."

Obama's instinct is to appease those who attack him, so there is a danger that he might move (further) to the market fundamentalist right. But Obama is not the Democratic Party, and the party's progressive base is increasingly hostile to Carter-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism.

So bring it on, geeky disciples of Ayn Rand. Gird thy loins and put on thy Spock ears. Demand the abolition of Social Security and Medicare! Call for reducing the U.S. military to the Coast Guard! Insist on tolling every highway and street in America and selling America's infrastructure assets to foreign corporations and foreign sovereign wealth funds! Go Galt!

Bring it on! Even confined to a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt can defeat Ayn Rand.

Specifically, Bickhart oversaw a "charitable" foundation set up by Santorum, known as Operation Good Neighbor, which shared both staff and space with Santorum's own Senate political action committee, confusingly called America's Foundation.

In early 2006, dubious spending by both entities came under sharp scrutiny by the American Prospect (where I was then the investigative editor) and the Philadelphia Daily News, which jointly published a two-part examination of Santorum's tangled finances by reporter/blogger Will Bunch.

What Bunch found wasn't very edifying, especially for a politician who had just been named to rewrite ethics rules for the Senate Republicans in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The Operation Good Neighbor Foundation, billed by Santorum as a "compassionate conservative" project to uplift the poor, was raking in money but spending most of the proceeds on overhead, salaries and fundraising, with relatively little devoted to actual charitable endeavors:

A review of federal tax returns filed by the foundation for 2001, 2002, and 2003 shows that the charity spent just 35.9 percent of the nearly $1 million raised on its charitable grants, while spending 56.5 percent on expenses like salaries, fund-raising commissions, travel, conference costs, and rent. Charity experts say that charitable groups should spend at least 75 percent of their money on program grants, and that donors should beware of organizations that spend as little as Santorum's has.

"The majority of organizations are able to meet that 75 percent figure," says Saundra Miniutti of Charity Navigator, a watchdog group. Without addressing Santorum's charity specifically, she noted that nonprofits spending in the range of just one-third on programs are "extremely inefficient."

Moreover, the foundation is not registered with the Pennsylvania Department of State. A spokeswoman for the state agency said that any charity that solicits and raises more than $25,000 in Pennsylvania is required by law to register. Records included on the foundation's 2002 tax filing list $94,000 in donations from sources in the state. State law says that violators of the registration law run the risk of civil penalties and possible legal action by the state.

The list of 2002 donors -- displayed on a Web page marked "not open to public inspection" -- includes several major donors to Santorum's political campaign. Most notable is Philadelphia Trust Company, the same private bank that refinanced Santorum's Virginia home in 2002, which gave $10,000. The CEO of Philadelphia Trust, Michael Crofton, is chairman of the charity's board of advisers. The foundation also raised $25,000 from the PMA Foundation, the charitable arm of a risk-management firm in suburban Philadelphia; $25,000 from the suburban Philadelphia development firm Preferred Real Estate; and $10,000 from J. Brian O'Neill, the brother of that firm's founder and himself a developer.

The charity also received $10,000 from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, owned by Louis DeNaples, a controversial Scranton businessman who is fending off published allegations that he associates with organized-crime figures. [DeNaples is in fact a casino owner whose alleged ties to the Bufalino mob family in Pennsylvania have landed him in very hot water over the past few years.]

The donor list isn't the only overlap between Santorum's charity and his political operation. The charity's treasurer is Barbara Bonfiglio -- who works out of the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm of Williams and Jensen and serves as treasurer of the senator's leadership PAC, America's Foundation.

Operation Good Neighbor also paid $50,000 in total salary in 2002 and 2003 to Rob Bickhart, Santorum's finance director, who is also the charity's executive director. It has paid $118,710 in fundraising fees to Maria Diesel of Chester County, Pa., who also raises money for Santorum's political efforts.

Under Bickhart's direction, in other words, Santorum's tax-exempt nonprofit "charity" filled the wallets of his political operatives while shortchanging the poor. The story provoked immediate revulsion. The Washington Post ran a strong editorial complaining that outfits like Operation Good Neighbor were marred by "an inevitable element of extortion" and noting its shoddy self-dealing. Santorum stepped aside as the Senate leadership's ethics spokesman and lost his bid for reelection.

Four years later, everybody associated with that dingy episode is back in business, thanks to short memories and enduring gall.

Bickhart is collecting huge fees on top of a big salary at the RNC, where Chairman Steele has now asked him to investigate his own misconduct. Santorum raised well over a million dollars for his still-active PAC last year, which he is using to promote himself as a potential presidential nominee. Just the other day, he addressed a major religious right group in Iowa, where he was introduced by none other than Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader and Abramoff crony -- who is also trying to refurbish his career.

If Republicans worry about the party's lousy public image, they should ask themselves why figures like Bickhart, Reed and Santorum always prosper in their midst -- and why such political grifters are never punished or ostracized.

Similar tactics have, of course, been used by shameless broadcast evangelists to pry open the piggy banks of elderly shut-ins since the invention of mass media. The antichrist will get you if you don't watch out!

Just imagine the uproar that would have attended the Democratic National Committee's caricaturing President Bush as, say, a Nazi prison guard from "Hogan's Heroes," or as Wile E. Coyote, the incompetent cartoon predator. But when it comes to Obama, anything goes.

Wealthy donors, as the world knows, need their posteriors kissed and their egos stroked. Hence GOP fundraisers ply them with access to party bigshots and tchotchkes ranging from "luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas." And who could resist rubbing elbows with Newt Gingrich or Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol at a Napa Valley wine tasting? Kind of an Ayn Rand meets "Sideways" thing.

"Tchotchkes" is New York Yiddish for promotional freebies handed out at trade shows like the Oscars or the Republican National Convention. The idea is to flatter wealthy donors and make them feel important. It's the way of the world.

But what's so unusual about the document accidentally left behind in the hotel hosting the RNC's $2,500-per-person event, explains reporter Ben Smith, is the "air of disdain for the party's donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives." Indeed, the thing makes high-ranking RNC operatives -- Terpeluk was Bush's ambassador to Luxembourg, the cushiest of sinecures -- sound like carnies setting up sideshow exhibits at a backwoods county fair. What will open the yokels' wallets, the two-headed rattlesnake or the hoochie-coochie show?

No sooner did the document become public than Republicans took flight in all directions. Party Chairman Michael Steele's spokesman said he hadn't attended the conference, "disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable. It will not be used by the Republican National Committee -- in any capacity -- in the future."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, "I can't imagine why anybody would have thought that was helpful. Typically, the way parties raise money is because people believe in the causes they advocate. I think the way we raise money from donors across America is to stand for things that are important for the country."

Ah, but there's the rub. What's telling about the RNC sales pitch isn't so much its borderline offensiveness and condescending tone. It's a classic bait and switch, revealing its authors' bad faith. The people who put the thing together not only don't believe in the causes they advocate; they have no intention of delivering on their implied promises should they return to power.

Socialism? When it comes to economics, today's GOP has nothing to advocate except the very policies that got us into this mess to begin with. They're simply trying to trick tea party activists into believing that this time, Republicans will deliver the fiscal conservatism they always advocate but haven't delivered since Herbert Hoover.

The simple truth is, they can't. The reasons, moreover, aren't far to seek. For all the anxiety President Obama's election has generated among those who perceive that people like them are losing power, everyone knows the America of the "Andy Griffith Show" and "Leave It to Beaver" isn't coming back. (Actually, it never existed, but that's a different column.)

Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the budget deficits tea party activists rail about were created on President Bush's watch. When it comes to spending, surveys show that fewer than 25 percent of self-identified conservatives support cuts in government programs supporting science, protecting the environment, building highways, helping the poor, etc. When it comes to big-budget drivers such as defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, forget about it.

GOP politicians say government can't create jobs, but that's theology, not economics. They all want federal projects in their districts.

Hence the RNC's bait-and-switch campaign. It's all they've got.

Except for this: Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona recently argued that unemployment-insurance benefits prevent people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Former GOP House Speaker Tom DeLay echoed him on CNN over the weekend. Just keep talking, boys. You're coming through loud and clear.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

© 2010, Gene Lyons. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.