House Republican leaders put out the word on Wednesday night that they’ll be prepared to swing into action if the Supreme Court invalidates President Obama’s healthcare law next month.
The political necessity of this was obvious: “Obamacare” itself doesn’t tend to poll that well, but some of its individual components do, and when voters are asked which party they trust more on healthcare, Democrats enjoy a clear advantage. So if the court does away with the law, it will be hard for Republicans to hit the campaign trail this fall without having some sort of plan that they can point to for dealing with the issue.
Of course, calling what GOP leaders leaked a “plan” is really stretching the term. As stories in the New York Times and Politico made clear, the intent seemed more to shield the party from Democratic attacks that it helped kill off provisions of the law that are actually popular:
If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.
The problem, as critics were quick to note, is that the popular components of Obamacare are only made feasible by the unpopular parts. Forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions only makes sense with the individual mandate that Republicans abhor, since it compels young and healthy people who would otherwise forgo coverage to enroll too. Beyond that, the Times reported, the House GOP was prepared to consider a variety of modest measures that might bring down insurance premium rates slightly:
Republicans are dusting off proposals that date back more than a decade: allowing individuals to buy health insurance across state lines, helping small businesses band together to buy insurance, offering generous tax deductions for the purchase of individual policies, expanding tax-favored health savings accounts and reining in medical malpractice suits.
But even this may be too much for the right. By late Thursday morning, just hours after the GOP leadership’s plans were leaked, Rep. Paul Ryan threw cold water on the idea that Republicans would offer any specific legislation before the November election, telling the Washington Examiner: “Now, we’ve got nine weeks of session left. Do we want to cram through our own 2,700 page vision? No, that’s what the country hated. But do we believe in patient-centered health care and market-based medicine? A lot of us have put time and effort into this, yeah.”
And by the end of the day, Politico reported that a revolt had broken out on an influential conservative Google email group that GOP House leaders monitor, where the sentiment seemed to be that publicly supporting any components of Obamacare – even the popular ones – would amount to a sellout of conservative principles. The uprising, according to Politico, began almost as soon as the stories leaked Wednesday night, leading to this:
Cognizant of the conservative anger, Dave Schnittger, Boehner’s longtime deputy chief of staff, sent a separate email to a small group of fellow leadership aides Wednesday night, saying that, during his weekly media availability, the speaker would “knock … down” the plan that had leaked.
Boehner did not address health care once in his 12-minute news conference. Aides say he was prepared to talk about it — if the issue came up.
One of the first moves Republicans made when they reclaimed the House in 2011 was to pass legislation repealing the healthcare law. It was a symbolic move, since it had no chance of clearing the Senate, but it was also billed as the first step. Soon, Republicans insisted, they’d unveil a new, better plan to replace Obamacare. More than a year later, that plan still hasn’t seen the light of day, and if the events of the last 24 hours are any indication, there’s not going to be one before the election – or maybe ever.
There’s a persistent belief on the right that President Obama snuck into office in 2008 because an awestruck media refused to look into his background and personal associations, preventing voters from learning about all sorts of radical, anti-American connections that would have turned them against the Democratic nominee. In this narrative, John McCain also comes in for criticism because of his refusal to fully exploit Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the general election.
This is the mind-set that, according to a New York Times story from Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg, has a billionaire super PAC overseer mulling a $10 million anti-Obama ad blitz that’s designed to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”
According to the Times, Joe Ricketts, the Ameritrade founder whose super PAC just played a crucial role in the upset victory of a Sarah Palin-backed candidate in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary, has been presented with a 54-page blueprint drawn up by GOP media consultant Fred Davis, who produced the anti-Obama “Celebrity” ad that the McCain campaign ran four years ago:
“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”
The story includes all kinds of interesting tidbits about the proposal, including its suggestion that the super PAC hire an “extremely literate conservative African-American” as a flack in order to deflect charges of race-baiting.
The reality, though, is that even if Ricketts signs off on the plan – and the story makes it clear that it’s just one of several options he’s mulling – it won’t have the devastating impact its authors envision. It probably won’t have much, or any, impact at all.
For one thing, the notion that Obama wasn’t fully vetted by the press in 2008 and that voters are in the dark about all sorts of troubling biographic details and character traits just doesn’t compute. The Rev. Wright issue, for instance, was covered exhaustively by the press, enough to compel Obama to deliver a lengthy speech on race that, if anything, probably made him more appealing to the average swing voter. And while McCain may not have authorized ads about Wright, many of his allies on the right (not to mention his own vice presidential nominee) filled the air with warnings about Obama’s secret radicalism. None of this seemed to move voters back then.
And nothing that has happened in the intervening four years has given Americans any reason to believe that there was anything to the radicalism charges of ’08. Obama’s approval rating isn’t that great right now, but it’s because the economy is in rough shape and voters are questioning his policies. It’s not because he’s said or done anything that validates the charge of radicalism; the policies he’s pursued are entirely within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. So the idea that a bunch of ads that dredge up a four-year-old controversy will make voters suddenly conclude that the warnings were right seems entirely off-base.
More to the point, the airwaves will be awash in political ads this summer and fall, with the Obama and Romney campaigns and all sorts of party committees, independent groups and super PACs launching their own multimillion-dollar campaigns. The Wright ads probably wouldn’t stand out nearly as much as the Davis blueprint suggests. And, as Jonathan Bernstein has pointed out, “voters will pay less attention to information they hear through paid advertising when there is plenty of other information available, as is the case with high-profile presidential elections.”
What the news about Ricketts and his super PAC could do, however, is put Mitt Romney in a bit of an awkward spot. The law prohibits him from coordinating with super PACs, but that doesn’t mean the media won’t demand that he make a statement over whether he thinks the Wright stuff is fair game.
It’s clearly not a road that the Romney campaign and most Republican leaders want to go down. They (mostly) recognize that Obama is more personally popular with Americans than their party’s base realizes, and that there’s a real political risk in pushing too far on race/culture-based attacks on him. This is why, for instance, Haley Barbour has been arguing that the GOP’s general election effort should focus on Obama’s record, not on anything personal.
At the very least, the Republican Party base’s revolt against its own establishment cost the GOP a 50-50 Senate tie in 2010, with primary voters forcing unelectable nominees on the party in three races that it had otherwise been on course to win. A decent case can be made that the uprising actually cost Republicans outright Senate control.
And now the same thing may be happening all over again, with Nebraska joining a growing list of unexpected 2012 Senate battlegrounds – at least for the moment.
The impetus is the surprise victory of Deb Fischer, a little-known state legislator, over two seasoned opponents in Tuesday’s Nebraska Republican Senate primary. Fischer’s candidacy seemed dead in the water until about a week ago, when she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. A last-second ad blitz from a super PAC controlled by the founder of Ameritrade added to her momentum, and Fischer ended up beating out state Attorney General Jon Bruning, who had been the favorite, by 5 points.
The outcome was greeted with immediate joy by Democrats, with the DSCC putting out a statement calling Fischer an “untested” and “accidental” nominee for the seat being vacated by Democrat Ben Nelson. The hope for Democrats is that the 61-year-old Fischer, who has represented a rural western Nebraska district in the state Senate since 2005, will melt under the spotlight of a high-stakes general election contest – much the way Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck and Joe Miller did in 2010.
This may prove to be wishful thinking. Fischer could end up being a perfectly competent candidate, one who isn’t prone to erratic behavior and pointlessly inflammatory rhetoric and who doesn’t have any serious skeletons in her closet. Certainly, she showed strong communication skills in her acceptance speech Tuesday night. And because of Nebraska’s deep red shading and its particular antipathy toward Democrats in the Obama era, Fischer’s margin for error is probably substantial. The same mistakes that derailed Angle in Nevada may only be the difference between, say, a 20- and 10-point win in Nebraska.
That said, Fischer absolutely is an untested candidate. Bruning and the race’s other major candidate, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, spent months firing shots at each other and gobbling up all of the attention. The intensity of their battle probably helped create the opening that Fischer seized, but the late timing of her surge also spared her from facing much in the way of media scrutiny or attacks from her rivals. She raised and spent very little money, and not much is known about her.
For Democrats, that’s reason to cheer. Had Bruning (or even Stenberg, a veteran of eight previous statewide campaigns) won the primary, the general election race would have been a snore. Polls showed both men comfortably ahead of the Democratic candidate, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who won elections in the state in 1982 (for governor), 1988 and 1994, back when he was something of a local hero. But Kerrey spent the last decade running the New School in New York and hasn’t been on a Nebraska ballot in 18 years. Partisan divisions have hardened since then, and Kerrey now faces cries of carpetbagging.
There are no meaningful Fischer/Kerrey poll numbers out yet. Presumably, the GOP nominee will begin with a solid lead, just because this is Nebraska (and because right now she embodies a neat underdog story). The question is how she’ll hold up, and on that score there’s some real doubt, which means that Nebraska is in play, at least provisionally.
Add in Indiana, where the Tea Party-aligned Richard Mourdock knocked off Dick Lugar last week, and two GOP primaries in one week have resulted in a surprise general election opportunities for Democrats. And primary season isn’t over yet. As Josh Kraushaar notes, the GOP’s grass roots seem poised to rise up against former Gov. Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin; that race is already considered a tossup, but a weak GOP nominee could tip the scales.
Other developments over the last year have also bolstered Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate, including the emergence of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (her recent troubles notwithstanding), Olympia Snowe’s unexpected retirement in Maine, and encouraging news from Arizona and maybe even North Dakota. What looked like an awful Senate map for Democrats at the start of this cycle has come to seem more manageable – even more so after Tuesday night’s shocker in Nebraska.
Let’s be clear: No matter what, Republicans in the state of Nebraska will be nominating a very conservative candidate for the U.S. Senate today. But the sudden prospect of a surprise victory by an underfunded state legislator best known for the endorsement she received from Sarah Palin lends potential national significance to tonight’s outcome.
To set the stage, the front-runner in the race is (and has been the entire way) Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s third-term attorney general. The 43-year-old Bruning has made some gestures to his party’s restive base, suing the Obama administration over its healthcare reform law and contraception mandate and likening welfare recipients to raccoons. But his polished demeanor and political resume – elected to the state Senate at age 27, a seamless rise to the AG’s office six years later, and now a Senate bid – make him seem more like an establishment man on the rise.
Which can be a problem in the Tea Party era. Conservative leaders and voters today aren’t as easily satisfied as they once were by candidates who are with them on paper. They want proof of absolute commitment to the cause – reason to believe that a would-be senator won’t ever compromise away a single conservative principle, no matter how much pressure is coming from party leaders, polling and the press. And Bruning, who has had to contend with revelations about his personal investments in state-regulated businesses and his purchase of a summer home with two executives from a company that the AG’s office had previously sought to help, doesn’t really have the image of a true believer.
Until very recently, Bruning’s main challenger for the GOP nomination was supposed to be Don Stenberg, the current state treasurer and a former attorney general. Backed by some serious money from the Club for Growth, Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, Stenberg has been portraying himself as the candidate of purity and pounding away at Bruning. But Stenberg, a veteran of three failed Senate bids and two other statewide offices, is something of a perennial candidate, and he lacks the freshness and outsider credentials that Tea Party conservatives tend to respond to. Thus did Bruning still seem poised to win the primary … until last week.
That’s when Palin came through with a surprise endorsement of the third candidate in the race, Deb Fischer, whose personal story is the most naturally appealing to the Tea Party crowd. The 61-year-old didn’t enter politics until 2004, when she won a seat in the state Senate, and on the campaign trail plays up her work as a rancher. She doesn’t ooze the same ambition as her opponents, and of the three candidates she’s the most likely to be immune to Potomac Fever.
The Palin announcement offered a huge jolt of momentum to Fischer’s effort, and was followed a day later by an endorsement from 1st District Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. Then, over the weekend, came one more surprise: a last-minute $200,000 ad buy from a super PAC that has decided to promote Fischer, and savage Bruning. (The super PAC is run by Ameritrade founder Pete Rickets, whose son, Pete, defeated Stenberg in the 2006 GOP Senate primary.)
Where, exactly, the race stands in hard to say. Fischer’s campaign has been promoting internal polls that show her leapfrogging Stenberg and threatening Bruning for the lead. There hasn’t been a reputable public poll since earlier in the race, when Bruning was still the runaway favorite.
The national implications are twofold. If Fischer does manage to win, Nebraska could actually emerge as a Senate battleground this fall. With Democrat Ben Nelson declining to seek reelection, the seat has long been assumed to be an automatic Republican pickup, even after Bob Kerrey, a one-time governor and senator, decided to return to the state and launch a comeback bid. Polls have shown Kerrey getting trounced by Bruning – and with Barack Obama on course to lose the state by at least 20 points, it’s not as if Kerrey is going to get any help from the top of the ticket.
Fischer, though, would be a wild card. She’s largely untested, and there’s a lot that isn’t known about her background and her skills as a candidate. If she wins the nomination, she might do fine in the general election, but there’s also the chance she’d prove to be another Sharron Angle. And, of course, it could be that she does turn out to be the next Angle, and that it still doesn’t matter, given Nebraska’s partisan bent. (It’s doubtful that a Stenberg win would do much to help Kerrey, since he’s a more established figure and has been able to win before.)
The bigger consequence of a Fischer win, though, would be to reinforce the message that was sent to Republican senators by last week’s Indiana Senate primary, when Dick Lugar was trounced by his Tea Party-aligned challenger. As I wrote yesterday, the Tea Party movement really isn’t about making the GOP a more conservative party; it’s about making what is already a conservative party more obstinate, unyielding and hostile to Democrats. A surprise victory by Sarah Palin’s candidate today would help that cause.
The possibility that Mitch McConnell might be ousted when Senate Republicans pick their leader after the November elections was raised by a Sunday New York Times story, which found several Tea Party-aligned GOP candidates refusing to commit to backing him. McConnell, though, still has plenty of allies and remains the prohibitive favorite to retain his post.
But there’s a more interesting question at work here than whether he can hang on: Why would he even want to?
The impetus for the Times piece was the landslide victory of Richard Mourdock over Richard Lugar in an Indiana Republican primary last week, which refocused attention on the rising influence of Tea Party-style conservatism in the upper chamber. Mourdock, if he’s elected, will join a bloc of Republican senators whose governing approach mirrors that of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the Tea Party’s de facto leader on Capitol Hill.
To promote unity within his ranks and to secure his grip on power, it’s important for McConnell to respond to his party’s evolution toward the DeMint/Tea Party style, something he’s been doing lately. The problem, though, is that this style severely constrains his ability to exercise the traditional prerogatives of a Senate leader and threatens to render him the upper chamber’s equivalent of John Boehner, who lives with the knowledge that any deal-making with the other side could spur an intraparty coup.
This reflects an important point about Tea Party Republicanism: It isn’t really about ideology; it’s about governing tactics.
After all, the battle for the Republican Party’s ideological soul was fought and settled decades ago. In the late 1970s, a movement somewhat similar to the Tea Party gave rise to a number of primary challenges to sitting GOP senators. The targeted incumbents, though, were genuine liberals – New Jersey’s Clifford Case, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, and New York’s Jacob Javits. The Republican Party of that era was in the midst of a sweeping geographic and demographic evolution, one that established it as the home for white Southerners and newly mobilized evangelical Christians and left the old Rockefeller wing extinct. When Ronald Reagan triumphed in 1980, it certified the GOP as the conservative party it remains today.
The primary challenges of the current Tea Party era are not defined by similarly vast ideological gulfs. Lugar, for instance, was generally a party man in his Senate votes, racking up a fairly conservative record and voting against President Obama’s major domestic initiatives. But he did leave some room for independence and compromise, particularly in his specialty area of foreign policy. His opponent, Mourdock, was to Lugar’s right on some issues, but what really distinguished him is his belief that the Senate is a venue for partisan warfare.
“Bipartisanship,” Mourdock declared last week, “ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This is as concise a distillation of the Tea Party’s governing vision as you’ll find. It’s not really about moving the GOP to the right; the party is already there, and has been for a while. It’s about reflexively opposing the other party on every issue, resisting compromise at all costs, and exploiting every available legislative tool to stymie the other side. This mind-set is already pervasive in the House, and as the Times story shows, it’s now making its way into the Senate.
The lesson that Lugar’s defeat sends to individual Republican senators is that they risk the same fate if they don’t get with the Tea Party program. Traditionally, there’s been room for them to carve out a specialty area – like Lugar with foreign policy – and to reach across the aisle to advance legislation that affects it. But that model is fast giving way to the Tea Party’s expectation of relentless, 24/7/365 partisan warfare.
A case study in how this works can be found in Orrin Hatch, who was spooked when his Utah colleague Bob Bennett was denied renomination in 2010. Hatch’s voting record is reliably conservative, but he has (or had) a reputation as a deal-maker. When Bennett went down, though, Hatch swore off compromise and recast himself as a Tea Party-friendly partisan warrior. It will probably be enough to save his job, which only reinforces the message of Lugar’s defeat.
All of this affects what McConnell is, and isn’t, able to do as the GOP’s leader. In the past two years, he’s played a crucial role in resolving standoffs with the White House that House Republicans instigated – over the debt ceiling last summer and expiring payroll taxes before Christmas. But his ability to keep doing this depends on having space to negotiate and cut deals with Democrats, and with every Tea Party primary triumph, that space erodes a little more.
The Senate is not the House yet, but the Tea Party is pushing it in that direction. As Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann explain in their new book, the principles of a parliamentary system – absolute party loyalty and reflexive, unyielding opposition from the out-of-power party – are coming to define Capitol Hill. For McConnell, this will force a personal reckoning over whether he’s comfortable functioning as the kind of leader such a system demands. For the rest of the country, it will force a different kind of reckoning, as the total incompatibility of the parliamentary style with the American system becomes apparent.
For those who are anxious to see the filibuster die, this week has produced some very hopeful developments.
The biggest news came late yesterday afternoon, when what Harry Reid thought was going to be a routine exercise – approving a bill already passed by the Republican-controlled House to reauthorize the Export-Import bank – was ruined by surprise Republican objections, forcing the majority leader to file a cloture motion and delaying action on the bill at least until next Monday.
This is the 84th time in the current Congress that Reid has formally sought to bypass a Republican filibuster or filibuster threat, a continuation of a trend toward Senate obstructionism that has been building for decades – but that really took off when Republicans returned to minority status in 2007. In the Congress that began that year, Reid filed 139 cloture motions, and in the next one there were 137, numbers that dwarf anything seen since the procedure for cloture was developed in 1917.
And if anything, this understates the degree to which filibustering has become an everyday tool; how often have Reid and Democrats not even bothered to file cloture on bills, knowing they lacked the necessary 60 votes and not wanting to waste precious days of precious Senate time?
Faced with yesterday’s Republican maneuver, an exasperated Reid took to the Senate floor and said, “If there were anything that ever needed changing in this body, it’s the filibuster rules, because it’s been abused, abused, abused.”
He also invoked the names of two of his Democratic colleagues, Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley, who attempted before the current Congress convened in January 2011 to sell their party on what they called the “Constitution option” – under which Democrats would exploit a technicality to change Senate rules on the first day of the new session with a simple majority vote, not the two-thirds supermajority normally required. Merkley and Udall weren’t actually proposing to get rid of the filibuster; the new rules they envisioned would just have stopped the mere threat of a filibuster from killing a bill and forced senators to engage in “real” filibustering. But the ultimate ability of the minority party to kill legislation it doesn’t like by forcing proponents to secure 60 votes would have stood.
As benign as their plan was, it still prompted an outcry from the right and was regarded as too extreme even by some Democratic senators. In the end, Reid struck an agreement with Mitch McConnell, his Republican counterpart, that made some very modest and superficial reforms – an agreement that, as Reid’s frustration yesterday demonstrated, didn’t change much.
“If there were ever a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, it’s tonight,” Reid said in his floor speech yesterday. “These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t. They were right. The rest of us were wrong — or most of us, anyway. What a shame.”
The question is whether Reid’s outburst signals a real shift in his thinking, or if he was simply blowing off steam (or trying to gain some leverage with Republicans by flirting with rules reform). In the near-term, it doesn’t really matter. if filibuster rules are going to be changed, it will almost certainly be at the start of a Senate session, not in the middle of one, so the earliest Democrats would move on anything is next January. And with all of the vulnerable Democratic seats up this fall, there’s a real chance they won’t be running the Senate next January, anyway.
That said, there’s another big development this week that increased the Democrats’ chances of holding on to the Senate — and their incentive for changing the rules if they do: Richard Lugar’s primary loss in Indiana.
With Indiana Republicans now saddled with a far-right candidate, Richard Mourdock, Democrats have a real opportunity to pick up Lugar’s seat. If they succeed, it will radically diminish the GOP’s odds of reclaiming the chamber.
But even if Mourdock goes on to lose in the fall, his primary triumph ensures that Senate Republicans will be even more ideologically inflexible, compromise-resistant and filibuster-dependent going forward. The threat that they’ll suffer the same fate as Lugar (and the other Republican congressional incumbents and establishment favorites who went down in the 2010 primary season) will hover over every vote that every GOP senator takes.
So if Reid really has had it with the filibuster, next January may be a good time to do something about it, because the problem isn’t going to get any better. Of course, if divided government is still the rule next year – a Democratic White House and Senate and a Republican House, say – then any filibuster reforms wouldn’t have much practical effect on the enactment of laws. But the Merkley-Udall proposal could be a good starting point, a means of reestablishing the precedent for filibuster reform and laying the groundwork for a more sweeping overhaul at a later date.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's 2012 Fiscal Summit, Tuesday, May 15, 2012, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) (Credit: AP) 
In this March 25, 2010 file photo, Rev. Jeremiah Wright speaks at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File) (Credit: AP) 
Sarah Palin (Credit: AP) 
Mitch McConnell (Credit: AP) 
