The Mark Kirk Dilemma

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 46 Comments

Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk is a sound, rational, all-around decent guy who represents the best that the GOP has to offer. In 2010 I made phone calls, walked the precincts, and generally laid out to get him elected. It isn’t clear yet who will challenge him in 2016, but it doesn’t matter. I won’t support him.

Sending Mark Kirk to the Senate has accomplished absolutely nothing other than to empower Ted Cruz and Jim Inhofe. Remember when Kirk stood up to Cruz over his ridiculous filibuster of a budget deal? No, I don’t either. He did it as quietly as possible, with a vote for cloture but no attempt to organize any opposition that might have rallied sane Republicans into a relevant power bloc.

Remember the time Kirk called out Rand Paul over his conspiracy-driven filibuster of a nominee to head the CIA? Nope. That’s because Kirk supported him, even making a show of bringing Paul a thermos and an apple, in reference to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Cute.

Contrary to popular belief, the Republican Party has a rich base of solid citizens with the country’s best interests at heart. Many of those Republicans occupy some of the country’s highest positions of authority. Senators like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman and Lamar Alexander are just a few examples.

The problem with these folks is that they are spineless in the face of opposition from the “whacko bird” caucus. Sensible Republicans have been trying for years to get a voice in national politics, but the people we elect have fled from every fight. That’s the Mark Kirk Dilemma and that’s why I won’t support him or any other Republican for a Federal office anytime soon.

Back here in Illinois, Kirk has been proud to support immigration reform. In Washington, silence. In Illinois Kirk has claimed to embrace scientists’ positions on climate change. In Washington when he could have taken a stand that mattered, he has hedged.

Kirk will claim that he’s been “courageous” in taking a stand with Democratic Senator Menendez to impose sanctions on Iran. What courage does that take exactly? Show me the powerful, well-funded pro-Iran lobby in Washington. In Washington, “taking on Iran” is just as courageous as taunting an asthmatic fat kid on the playground.

Kirk has reserved all his “courage” for political targets that can’t fight back.

Sane, sensible Republicans who occupy influential positions in Washington will tell you they are doing all they can. They will claim that they are carefully picking their battles. Climate change, immigration reform, and restructuring the tax code are issues they would like to push forward, but the party at the national level isn’t ready for sound solutions. I’m beginning to think they are right.

In that case, those folks shouldn’t be in Washington. They should be back here in the precincts with us fighting to change the party on the ground. They may claim that they can accomplish more from a position in the House or Senate, but so far there is no evidence to support that position. If Mark Kirk can’t use his platform in the Senate to fight climate change, push back against racist immigration rhetoric, promote sensible fiscal policy, or in any other way counter the power of Neo-Confederates inside the Republican Party, then he needs to come home.

Until someone in the Republican Party is willing to take a visible, courageous stand for sanity in the style of John McCain circa 2000, there is no reason to keep voting for them. I helped send Mark Kirk to the Senate in the hope that he might counter the influence of some very frightening people inside the Republican Party. That was a mistake I am not going to repeat.

Tagged with: climate change, mark kirk, republican party
Posted in Climate Change, Election 2016, Environment, Illinois, Immigration, Neo-Confederate

Perhaps if we understood the minimum wage…

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 98 Comments

Jeb Bush, who is trying to brand himself as the sane alternative to the Republican Presidential field, just backed the repeal of the Federal minimum wage. So, that’s that.

Meanwhile, there is still time for Republicans to prepare a credible challenge in the 2020 Election. As we search for ways to restore some basic rationality to GOP politics, perhaps the minimum wage is a good starting point. The insights required to gain even a distant understanding of minimum wage economics would break apart dozens of damaging misconceptions about poverty, race, and social mobility in America.

First things first – Why do we need a minimum wage? Won’t a free market set wages at the correct rate?

A minimum wage is necessary to create a free market for labor. There is no free market if one side can coerce the other, or if one side has such disproportionate power that they can collude to manipulate prices. In a labor negotiation, particularly for low-end labor, one side has access to capital, political influence, and relative wealth. The other has a hungry family and a ticking clock. Remove the minimum wage and other protections and potential employers earn the ability to coerce potential employees, robbing them of value. That’s not a free market.

Over the long term, everyone including the employers ends up poorer, but no one can stop that downward pressure on overall wealth. This is just one of many examples of how an absence of regulation eventually destroys capitalism. A minimum wage allows us to bring some real market forces to the labor market with very little bureaucratic overhead. The minimum wage is one of the lynchpins of capitalism.

But doesn’t a minimum wage destroy jobs?

A minimum wage destroys jobs in exactly the same way that capitalism destroys jobs. In a series of escalating cycles, a minimum wage eliminates low-value activities replacing them with more sophisticated, higher-value activities, just like capitalism does. Overall, this creates declining demand for human labor which benefits everyone. Whatever jobs are rendered unnecessary as a result of a free market for labor probably didn’t need to exist in the first place.

To see this in action, take a look at child-labor laws. Opponents of child labor laws were concerned that Federal legislation would eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs. They were right and it was good for everyone.

Elimination of child labor sped the adoption of new manufacturing and mining technologies. This created new, better paying jobs higher up the value stack making it possible for fewer employees working shorter hours to earn vastly more money, thereby supporting more people. More children could attend school and develop new skills rather than descending into the mines as soon as they could walk. Better living standards for more people enriched the entire economy and culture.

If you claim to love capitalism and markets then you shouldn’t be concerned about the jobs destroyed when workers gain more power to negotiate. That’s capitalism at its best.

Won’t markets force innovation even without a wage floor?

No, not always. Innovation requires capital to be invested and investment involves risk. Most of those new ventures fail. To the extent possible, capital owners will seek to extract rents from their capital rather than risking it by investing in technology. As long as they can continue extracting new revenue by pressing down wages instead of taking on risk, innovation will stall. Setting rules that limit the ability to squeeze rents from capital can press capital into new investment and create massive new economic growth.

Doesn’t a minimum wage limit opportunity for the poor and minorities?

Yes, a minimum wage limits the opportunity of poor and minority workers – to be coerced into work that will get them nowhere while dragging down the wider economy. This is a particularly ugly, condescending argument that deserves to die. Everyone who deploys it is making an ass of themselves.

Again, let’s refer back to child labor laws because exactly the same argument was deployed there with exactly the same realities sitting behind it. Child labor laws completely destroyed the ability of ten year old kids to earn money for their families by dropping out of school and working twelve hours days in dangerous conditions. That’s what it was designed to do and that’s what a minimum wage does.

The argument against the minimum wage assumes that this is a bad thing. It is not a bug, it’s a feature. Leaving the fourth grade to work in a sweatshop was an “opportunity.” Quitting school to feed your family with a WalMart job is a very similar kind of “opportunity.” Like child labor laws, a minimum wage is supposed to eliminate jobs that accomplish nothing for workers or the economy while encouraging the development of new, more valuable economic activities. What would this mean for the poor? Good things.

As usual, research backs up what experience demonstrates on the ground. Those who take low-wage jobs at any point experience depressed incomes for the rest of their lives. Jobs eliminated by a minimum wage are not an opportunity, but a trap.

Higher wages stimulate growth

This concept should be easy for a Republican to understand. The mechanics are very much like the effect of a tax cut in a supply-side scenario, except that raising wages actually works. When working people earn more money they spend more money. The money they spend feeds economic growth. Unlike tax cuts, this economic growth is accomplished without ruining public finances. As a consequence, while higher wages might cause some jobs to disappear, it tends to foster the creation of new, higher earning jobs.

Instead of two parents and their two children all having to work to make ends meet, three jobs might be eliminated. One, much higher-paying job might replace those three and be enough to support the whole family. Children can further their education. A parent might have time to care for the kids. And value is created all up and down the economy and the culture. See how easy that was?

Okay smart-ass, why shouldn’t the minimum wage be $35, or $100 an hour?

Maybe it will be some day, but like almost any innovation it pays to embrace evolution over revolution. It would take time to replace or automate every activity that currently pays between $10-20/hour. The capital investment cycle is not instantaneous. In theory, a large disruptive move could create long lags between the destruction of low value jobs and their replacement with higher-value activities. Given that assumption it makes sense to have a minimum wage set on an index which allows it to slowly climb over time.

We have implemented the opposite arrangement. US minimum wages have been in steady decline for the past forty years, dropping over 10%. That doesn’t make any sense, though it explains a lot.

When government intervenes in very small ways to create a credible market for employment, everybody wins. A minimum wage is a very simple way to build a richer, more dynamic economy with only a very light government intervention. Repealing the Federal minimum wage is one of the stupidest and most politically crippling ideas to emerge from the Neo-Confederate renaissance. Can we please stop talking about this and move on?

Tagged with: capitalism, jeb bush, minimum wage
Posted in Economics, Election 2016, Neo-Confederate

Rahm Emanuel versus the machine

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 170 Comments

Important things are happening in Chicago. With the fastest-growing urban core in the nation, Chicago is at the crux a major cultural transformation. Wealth and influence that shifted to the suburbs in the years after World War II has pivoted back downtown. Out of that transition, nascent political alliances are emerging. If those new alignments can survive a conservative backlash inside both parties, they might eventually offer relief from our national partisan gridlock and signal an urban renaissance.

A nominally Republican Illinois Governor and a nominally Democratic Chicago Mayor are joined in an awkward alliance to replace what remains of the old political machine. Resistance to this change is so strong that Mayor Emanuel faces the first runoff election in the city’s history after failing to win 50% of the vote in the first round.

Frustrated by the muddle of Chicago politics, pundits are mischaracterizing this election as an effort by the Democratic left to reassert itself. It is easy to get confused. A mayor with major financial backing is fighting against unions. Unions always represent the interests of struggling poor people. Hence, the distorted narrative.

Nothing remotely like this is happening on the ground. Let’s be clear, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is facing a challenge from the Democratic right. More to the point, Emanuel is facing a reactionary challenge from the Democratic Party of the 1950’s.

Emanuel is in trouble because he has openly challenged the last well-organized bastion of the machine that has run the city for nearly a century. His decision to close public schools that the city no longer needed and could not afford violated the code. His decision to push back against corrupt pension deals that are bankrupting the city and the state was a cardinal sin.

Political influence in Chicago has always been based on the ability of the mayor and the Democratic Party to dole out public jobs to loyal operatives. Since the Shakman decrees in the late ‘70’s it has been harder to operate this machine in the open.

It is now illegal to expressly tie public employment to party loyalty. Public employee unions have grown more powerful in Chicago as a sort of proxy between the machine and its politically tied employees.

Emanuel, in typical Emanuel style, identified Chicago’s thorniest problem from the outset and immediately determined to untangle it. Chicago’s future growth and prosperity is stunted by a school system that does not meet its students’ needs and a collection of pension obligations it will never meet.

Chicago’s public schools do not suffer from a funding problem. CPS spends just as much per student as some of the most elite suburban districts. Chicago suffers under a school system which has, over the course of half a century, developed into an extension of the machine. Its mission of educating young people is subject to its primary mission – to reward loyalists with good paying jobs.

Enrollment has, not surprisingly, been in steady decline for decades. Enrollment in Chicago schools has dropped by a third since 1970. Meanwhile the number of schools continued to grow, rising almost 20% over the same period. This increase emerges from the disconnect between the schools’ public service mission and their political mission. If the machine cannot produce new public jobs then it cannot feed itself.

Meanwhile the long-term costs inflicted by decades of machine politics are showing up in the city’s pension obligations. Next year’s nearly $7bn budget includes just under $700m in pension costs. Under present obligations that rises to at least $2.4bn in 2017. In other words, more than a third of the city’s revenues will be siphoned away with no compensating services or revenues.

Emanuel, with help from the incoming Republican Governor is trying to engineer pension reforms that would share the burden while keeping Chicago solvent. A combination of tax hikes and benefits cuts could create a workable balance, but public employee unions are fighting for a fantasy alternative based entirely on new taxes. The revenue simply does not exist. If they get their way they will kill the city’s growth and drive Chicago into bankruptcy.

Contrary to the popular narrative, Chicago’s public employee unions are not “unions” in the traditional sense. These are not coal miners fighting for safe conditions and reasonable wages. Public employee unions, for the most part, aggregate the political power of educated white collar workers. They are fed by largely minority and poor communities who are trapped depending on them for services. In other words, these are bizarro-unions in which a white, largely well-educated and already politically connected workforce can suppress the power of the communities that they serve.

In suburban Naperville or New Trier, the power of public employee unions is countered by relatively small political units with relatively affluent, well-connected constituents. Their harm is limited.

Meanwhile in Chicago, the massive weight of an enormous school system is set against minority and immigrant communities with relatively little organization, influence or money. The outcome is schools that consistently fail to meet students’ needs while siphoning resources away from those communities and toward the unions. Cloaking this political dynamic in traditional “union” rhetoric helps further confuse the matter, complicating efforts by those communities to gain access to the services they need and deserve.

Emanuel’s efforts to make the schools function for the benefit of students have directly challenged the power of the unions. By closing down schools that had largely emptied, he disrupted a jobs and patronage engine that had turned CPS into a piggybank for local political interests.

Efforts to introduce accountability both in financial and educational terms have earned him powerful opposition. This election is likely to determine whether city public services can be made to serve citizens or whether Chicago’s public schools will continue their long decline in enrollment. Along the way it may tell us whether a new politics of pragmatism, forged on alliances across party lines, can bring new dynamism to our cities.

Tagged with: chicago, chicago election, chicago public schools, democratic party, pensions, rahm emanuel, unions, urban issues
Posted in Chicago, Cities, Civil Rights, Education, Illinois

This is how you know you’ve lost

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 247 Comments

Inviting a foreign head of state to Congress to undermine American foreign policy was childish and dumb. This idiotic letter from 47 Senators to the Iranian government is even worse. As reckless as this move appears on its face, there is an even more worrying message lurking between the lines.

Worded as a condescending children’s primer on treaty law, the real message of the letter is more subtle. Looking past the embarrassing Constitutional error they made in the document itself and the grave Constitutional violation in their decision to write the letter in the first place, the real shocker in this incident is what it says about Republican ambitions.

Clearly, at least 47 Republican Senators are convinced that the party will never again hold the White House.

Let’s be clear. This has never happened before. We’ve had Congressmen visit countries against the wishes of the executive branch. We’ve even had a few instances where individual outreach from a specific Congressman complicated US diplomatic efforts. We’ve had Jane Fonda crawling around on North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns. None of those incidents compare.

There has never been an instance in which an organized partisan bloc in the Legislative branch disregarded the separation of powers in order to publicly and intentionally undermine US foreign policy. Disagreements over foreign policy have often been bitter, but they have been tempered by an understanding that they can be resolved by elections. I may not like a President, but undermining the office itself will haunt me when my party finally wins.

It seems clear that many Republicans have lost their belief that the party can compete for the Presidency. No other logic explains their willingness to burn down the office itself. The demographic realities are brutal and the Blue Wall looms large. This kind of behavior will only get worse, and more dangerous, in 2017.

Seven Republican Senators declined to sign this letter. They deserve some recognition.

Lamar Alexander (TN)
Susan Collins (ME)
Bob Corker (TN)
Dan Coats (IN)
Jeff Flake (AZ)
Lisa Murkowski (AK)
Thad Cochran (MS)

As a quick postscript, here’s the text of the Logan Act:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.

Quick thought exercise. Imagine that a clutch of Democratic Senators had sent a letter like that to Saddam Hussein in 2002. How many of them would still be in Guantanamo today?

Tagged with: iran, negotiations, obama, treaty
Posted in Foreign Policy

Senate considers reclassifying marijuana

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 36 Comments

In a potentially groundbreaking development, the Senate is going to consider for the first time a plan that would change the way marijuana is listed as required by the Controlled Substances Act. Currently marijuana is listed as a Schedule I drug, the most restrictive category. That’s more restrictive than cocaine or meth.

The proposed bill would place marijuana in Schedule II. Here’s the description of Schedule II drugs:

Schedule II drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a high potential for abuse, less abuse potential than Schedule I drugs, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Some examples of Schedule II drugs are:

cocaine, methamphetamine, methadone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid), meperidine (Demerol), oxycodone (OxyContin), fentanyl, Dexedrine, Adderall, and Ritalin

The bill would also expressly legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Rescheduling marijuana would not change the status of marijuana as an illegal drug in general terms, but it would accomplish some very important goals. It would force senior politicians to declare themselves on this issue in an way that could influence future elections. Along the way it would provide new legitimacy, making future schedule downgrades a lot easier.

This also offers an interesting opportunity to scramble the otherwise rock-hard partisan political alignment that have gridlocked almost every legislative effort. Marijuana decriminalization has broad support that is largely bi-partisan. This bill has sponsorship from Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand.

Tagged with: legalization, marijuana, medical marijuana
Posted in Drug War

Republicans for Same Sex Marriage

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 204 Comments

This is what the GOP might look like when the culture wars finally end.

Republicans in Massachusetts have openly backed same sex marriage, joining an amicus brief filed by former RNC Chair and Bush Administration official Ken Mehlman.

Almost all of the party’s major figures in Massachusetts have signed the brief including new Governor Charlie Baker. Also signing the brief are Maine Senator Susan Collins and Republican donor David Koch.

The brief makes the conservative case for same sex marriage rights, citing a laundry list of favorite conservative cases and authors. This quote from Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative is particularly biting:

“The Conservative is the first to understand that the practice of freedom requires the establishment of order: it is impossible for one man to be free if another is able to deny him the exercise of his freedom. … He knows that the utmost vigilance and care are required to keep political power within its proper bounds.”

A few other excepts:

The governmental bans at is-issue here rest on similarly ungrounded, archaic, and obsolete beliefs—however sincerely, strongly, or long held—and thus the Fourteenth Amendment requires recognition of the bans’ invalidity.

…

This Court has repeatedly made clear that although legislators and voters may generally exercise power over certain subjects—including many contentious social issues—the government’s power is limited when it comes to injurious incursions upon the freedom of minorities.

No one at any point in this decades-long debate has been able to describe any credible harm that might rise from same sex marriage. Cut through all the bullshit, and the argument against same sex marriage is absolutely singular – “my religious convictions dictate that homosexuality is wrong.” That’s it.

People are asking the government to discriminate against homosexual couples on the basis of sectarian religious beliefs. There is absolutely no defense for that practice under our Constitution.

When same sex marriage is finally settled law in this country, religious people will remain free to hold their beliefs about the sinfulness of gay couples. They will lose their ability to use those beliefs to constrain the basic Civil Rights of other people. We all have a right to our religious beliefs. No one has a right to legislate their religious beliefs.

This isn’t a dispute about religious freedom. This is a dispute about cultural supremacy. That’s why the last, most bitter holdouts against gay marriage are the same institutions, people and states who were the last bitter holdouts against the Civil Rights movement.

Gay marriage is likely to destroy something, but it’s not marriage. The fight over gay marriage is going to severely damage the lingering cultural supremacy once enjoyed by white Protestants.

We are on the cusp of experiencing real pluralism for the first time in the country. That’s why same sex marriage matters and that’s why the battle lines are drawn across the same boundaries as in the Civil Rights movement.

Massachusetts Republicans are recognizing, a little late, what most of the rest of the country has already come to terms with. If the party at large has the good sense to drop this issue then a lot of future harm can be avoided.

The full text of the conservative amicus brief in favor of same sex marriage can be found here.

Tagged with: civil rights, massachusetts, republicans, same sex marriage
Posted in Civil Rights, Neo-Confederate, Religious Right

Northern states are not turning purple

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 333 Comments

Dave Weigel posted an excellent piece this morning explaining one of the red herrings from the ’14 election results – victories by Republican Gubernatorial candidates in solidly blue states. He focuses in on Larry Hogan’s win in Maryland, but the same analysis works for Illinois and Massachusetts.

Hogan’s win does nothing to open up new opportunities at the Federal level. Weigel explains:

Hogan was able to run as a candidate who cared nothing about social issues, a reformer who’d undo some of outgoing Governor Martin O’Malley’s most hated taxes. Any Republican running for Senate in Maryland will be asking—probably—for a chance to Change Washington. Functionally, he’d be asking a Democratic-leaning electorate to help him join Mitch McConnell’s Senate.

The case gets even more persuasive with a look at the numbers. The apathy of an off-year electorate was critical to Hogan’s success.

884,400: The number of votes won by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan in his upset 2014 win over former Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown.

51 percent to 47 percent: Hogan’s margin of victory over Brown.

971,869: The number of votes won by Mitt Romney in Maryland in the 2012 presidential race.

62 percent to 36 percent: President Barack Obama’s victory margin over Romney.

The Blue Wall is solid. The only thing that will dent it is a major shift in Republican politics away from religious fundamentalism and toward urban concerns. Neither of those trends is apparent anywhere at this point.

Tagged with: blue wall
Posted in Election 2016

Remembering the GOP before the Neo-Confederates

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 39 Comments

We have largely come to accept that our political parties are ideologically driven and geographically aligned. Yet, only a short time ago these stark divisions did not exist.

The 1994 wave election marked the beginning of a Neo-Confederate renaissance that has redrawn our political maps. Look back only twenty years and the shape of American politics is nearly unrecognizable today.

Twenty years ago Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and New York had Republican Governors. The party’s most prominent figure was Jack Kemp. Half of the nation’s ten largest cities had Republican mayors, including New York City and Los Angeles.

There were only three or four states that either party could always count on winning in a Presidential election. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Neither party was entirely aligned on almost any issue.

Now Republicans hold the mayor’s office in only four of the country’s thirty largest cities. The South is Republican from top to bottom, but the country’s major economic and population centers are solidly Democratic. Our politics is now defined almost entirely by geography and demographics – a dangerous division not seen since the 19^th century.

Barring some remarkable occurrence in the next few months, we are about to have our first Presidential election in which the outcome is determined by demographics before the candidates are even selected. We have had plenty of blow-out elections, but that isn’t what we’re facing in 2016.

Candidates in the coming election will probably be separated by less than six or seven percentage points, yet the outcome is not in doubt. In only twenty years the GOP has entirely lost the ability to influence national policy.

Republicans’ Neo-Confederate makeover has given us serious clout in the South and in rural areas, but that appeal is too narrow to allow us to compete for the Electoral College. The Blue Wall of reliably Democratic states means that no credible Republican candidate has a chance at the White House. If things shape up as expected, we may in 2016 see a disturbingly large delta between the popular vote and the Electoral College.

It isn’t clear how this situation can be reversed. If Republican politicians can earn a living winning state and local elections in the South and the rural Midwest they may cease to care what happens in Washington. The losers in the culture war seem content to retreat to Alabama. Until they are dislodged by changing demographics, we may remain geographically divided in a manner less red or blue than blue and gray.

Tagged with: cities, jack kemp, liberal Republicans, mayors, neo-confederate, republicans
Posted in Election 2016, Neo-Confederate

If you can’t say anything nice…

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Chris Ladd — 97 Comments

Late last night Congress passed legislation that keeps the Department of Homeland Security funded – for one week. What does a week accomplish? For Republicans, absolutely nothing. Democrats on the other hand would be content to keep granting one week funding extensions all the way up to the 2016 election. This ridiculous spectacle is a gift to Hillary Clinton.

A very busy cycle in the day job and a very depressing news cycle have conspired to make writing tough. Even I’m getting bored with these ‘WTF are they thinking’ posts, but that’s the material they’re giving me.

Congressional Republicans built this trap from the ground up. They picked the hostage. It’s not the EPA, or the IRS. They picked the agency charged with protecting US internal security. Congressional Republicans picked the issue on which to grandstand. It’s not tax reform or infrastructure or jobs. It’s white fear of Latinos, who the GOP must recruit if they are ever going to win another national election.

So, Republicans are threatening our own base’s second favorite government function (after the military) as part of a campaign to stir up public hostility toward the ethnic group we most desperately need to win. Even worse, there are no actual public policy issues at stake. None.

Congress has no authority to do anything material about the President’s executive orders on immigration. This self-defeating spectacle has zero public policy implications. The entire effort has been engineered as theater for the paranoid old white people who form the rock-hard spine of the party’s base.

In a better world, Republicans in Congress could use their newly minted majority toward a novel purpose. They could pass laws.

Rather than throw a fit over the President’s immigration action, they could build coalitions to pass some form of an alternative. After building legislation on a base of broad public support, they could dare the President to veto it. If he did, then the party’s nominee in ’16 could use that veto for new leverage.

Or they could threaten to shut down our largest security agency out of blind, idiotic rage. Either way works I guess when you have no point of contact with reality.

What is there to write about this? I’ve run out of theories to explain this kind of behavior.

Posted in Uncategorized