This Alexander Bolton piece in The Hill is pretty damn good. It’s so good, in fact, that I recommend that you read it to get a sense of how fucked up things are in Congress and what you should expect to see there for the remainder of the year.
If you read between the lines a little bit, one thing becomes pretty clear. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fully intends to screw over conservative budget hawks, blow off military hawks, tell the culture warriors to pound sand, and to almost completely capitulate to the administration.
The way he’s probably going to try to do this is by just punting on all the work the Senate will do this year on appropriations and asking for a last second continuing resolution that will keep spending the same. All he gets out of the deal is the ability to preserve the cuts he won during the fight over the Budget Control Act of 2011, but that means that defense spending will remain below what even the Obama administration wants.
He’ll need the Democrats to go along with his plan, in both the Senate and the House. And he’ll have to let his own caucus vote on a bunch of riders to do things like ban spending on Planned Parenthood, kill Obamacare (again), declare Iran the second coming of the Third Reich, and obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency. But, since the only way the Republicans could conceivably prevail on any of those issues is to shut down the government and pray for a miracle, McConnell doesn’t really give a shit about them. He’s not interested in another government shutdown that yields nothing but aggravated voters and higher disapproval numbers for his party.
However, he’s going to have to contend with 17 presidential contenders braying at him to fight, fight, fight, as well as constant bellowing about what a sellout he is and how Washington Republicans never keep their promises. The only thing he has going for him, besides reality, is that he’s not Speaker Boehner. He can hide behind Democratic filibusters, for example, and he doesn’t have 150 members who make Michele Bachmann look statesmanlike. Boehner will deliver a conservative heat-fever wish list of a budget and then have to turn around and sell McConnell’s nothing burger to his caucus.
And, of course, the House Republicans won’t go for it. At all. So, Boehner will have to go hat in hand (again) to Nancy Pelosi and beg her to deliver her caucus.
Pelosi, of course, wants nothing more than another government shutdown, provided that she can avoid taking much blame for it. So, her inclination to give Boehner some kind of fig leaf to disguise his humiliation will be limited. And, yet, with all these presidential candidates claiming that if we just elect them things will magically get done the way that conservatives want them done, Boehner will have a tough sell to explain why a Republican-led House and a Republican-led Senate cannot accomplish even one item on their insane wish list.
What McConnell’s trying to do is preemptively accept a harsh reality, but he’s going to have very few supporters and they’ll be quieter than church mice.
Just gaming this out a little, it seems like a recipe to make the conservatives go absolutely berserk and lose every last shred of their shit.
And I just don’t see how this will work in Jeb Bush’s favor.
PermaGov 101.
WTFU.
AG
I’m detecting a theme.
It’s more like an ideé fixe…
Or a broken record.
Or the (generally unrecognized) truth of the matter.
Y’all are fans of Booman, I suppose. Have you read his recent post Michael Steele Lets Us In On the Ruse?
This is a perfect snapshot of Permanent Government
inaction…errr, ahhh, I meant in action…against the right wing in this country. It does the same thing in terms of the left wing. Two wings of the same tame PermaGov bird.I don’t call it “Frankenstein’s monster,” I call it the Permanent Government, and if you can’t see this then your head is stuck so far up your ass that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Have a nice day.
AG
Yeah, I read it. You know, quoting someone else’s words is not the best way to convince me that your capable of having original thoughts.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything, S.S. Really. I lay down what I lay down, and there it is. People either pick up on it or they don’t. All I can do is tell you what I see.
Which I do.
After that, it’s all up to you.
As a great teacher with whom I studied for many years used to say to his students, “You either do it or you don’t.”
Like dat.
Bet on it.
AG.
See my reply to S. S,
AG
See my reply to S. S.
AG
That was such fun to read. Thanks.
Hope the Dems squeeze them a little. Government shutdown is rough, but this far out it won’t impact votes.
None of this will hurt Bush. He is the presumptive nominee and all this gridlock is Obama’s fault. That’s what he’ll say.
The dysfunctional congress will go away when we give GOP total control of government. I’m guessing that will be a compelling argument to enough people to make it happen. The GOP has been throwing temper tantrums for so long that the American people will give them what they want just to shut them up.
You might be nearly right.
totally disagree. Bush is incredibly stupid as a candidate. it’s kind of unbelievable, I’ve never seen such a tone deaf candidate.
look at the latest he’s walking back on women’s health care
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-misspoke-womens-health
he won’t know how to deal with trump at all and has no sense for media otoh if it he nevertheless is their candidate, so much the better.
Yes, and Jeb! “misspoke” on the Bush’s War, iirc. A wonderful word, “misspoke”…
Against a competent candidate, “misspoke” would become the meme on Jeb!
yes, iirc the word was coined to cover Reagan errors
And that just brings The Day closer.
Those contradictions don’t heighten themselves, my friend!
love the Karl Romney paraphrase.
OT, question, how do I get my sig line into italics?
You should be able to just use [i]My sig[/i] in the Signature field on your User page (replacing square brackets with triangle brackets).
You’ll see My sig if you do it right.
(You can do other fancy HTML stuff as indicated in the “Allowed HTML” stuff below the Post Comment box.)
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Be patient.
After we shatter the present late-capitalist mode of production, and throw off the shackles of HTML, your sig will italicize itself.
magnificent!!
thank you,
and
You’re going to have to show me what the Democrats are getting out of this deal before you can convince me that McConnell is “capitulating” on anything.
What is the harsh reality that he is accepting? That the government doesn’t get shut down? That Republican poll numbers don’t crater at the start of a major election cycle in which he is at risk of losing his majority? As for Jeb Bush, his odds of winning the presidency are a lot higher under this scenario. The same is true of every other Republican candidate.
Given the trumped up freakout about the highly distorted PP videos and the way the Teabaggers are screaming about it, I wouldn’t assume that McConnell will be able to prevent a shutdown even though he claims there will be none. He only has nominal control over his caucus.
The Teabaggers want more confrontation with Obama according to a May Pew poll. Most of the country is upset with Congress, for lots of reasons, and if you believe what the Teabaggers say, it’s because the Congress doesn’t do anything substantive about their issues.
Boehner’s in worse shape, as we know, but McConnell shouldn’t assume he can run out the clock without consequences.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s another 2 week shutdown. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there was a battle over the debt ceiling, and even a “technical default” (it has happened in the past), though that is less likely. The Teabaggers want to confront Obama. They won’t do this stuff in 2016 as it is too close to the election.
The Hill’s reporting often seems too glib to me. This stuff isn’t a game. These antics cost real money and have real impacts on people’s lives. Reporting that gets too inside-baseball without discussing the real costs helps feed the cynicism that makes the bombthrowers stronger.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
this is what I’ve been saying…he’s not appealing to a sliver of the GOP. He’s straight in the MAINSTREAM GOP.
……………………….
It’s Wrong to Call Donald Trump a ‘Fringe’ Candidate
A new Bloomberg Politics poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters demolishes the claim that he appeals to mouth-breathing xenophobes and nobody else.
Donald Trump’s rise to a position of total dominance in the Republican presidential field has been accompanied by a dismissive snort from Beltway mandarins that Trump is merely a “fringe” candidate. The idea, in essence, is that Trump has a strong but narrow appeal to a group of mouth-breathing xenophobes and practically nobody else.
But a new Bloomberg Politics poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters demolishes this claim. Trump not only laps the competition–he has twice the support of the second-place candidate, Jeb Bush (21 percent to 10 percent)–but he also leads among every demographic subgroup, but one (self-identified “moderates”).
Let’s break it down. Trump leads with male voters (Trump 24 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 10 percent) and female voters (Trump 18 percent, Bush 10 percent, Huckabee 10 percent). He leads with voters younger than 45 (Trump 15 percent, Bush 10 percent, Rubio and Paul at 9 percent) and voters older than 45 (Trump 25 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent) and seniors (Trump 23 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 9 percent).
Trump wins voters with no more than a high school degree (Trump 27 percent, Huckabee 13 percent, Bush 11 percent) and voters with a college degree (Trump 19 percent, Walker 12 percent, Bush 11 percent). He leads among affluent voters who earn $100,000 or more annually (Trump 18 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 13 percent) and those who make less than $50,000 a year (Trump 19 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent).
The thrice-married Trump, who recently told a Christian forum that he “never” asks God for forgiveness, wins “born-again” voters (Trump 16 percent, Huckabee 14 percent), as well as Catholics (Trump 27 percent, Rubio 9 percent) and Protestants (Trump 18 percent, Bush 12 percent). And he also wins “Tea Party” conservatives (Trump 24 percent, Walker 11 percent).
The only demographic category Trump does not win is self-professed moderate voters. But even here, Trump who is often said to horrify moderate Republicans, is a narrow second choice: Bush leads with 20 percent, followed by Trump with 19 percent. Nobody else is even close.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-08-04/it-s-wrong-to-call-trump-a-fringe-candidate
Another case of reading numbers and possibly reaching a false conclusion. There are xenophobic mouthbreathers in all those demographics.
The real question is, what is Trump’s ceiling? It is possible he is already there, which means as folks start dropping out, their supporters will go elsewhere. When it gets down to a 2-3-4 person race, and Trump is still at 25%, he loses.
I’ve been trying to figure out what his ceiling is too, and I’m sure it’s higher than 25%. For instance, there’s a useful question in the latest Fox News poll. Instead of ranking candidates, respondents were asked if they would definitely vote for, might vote for, or would never vote for each candidate in the Republican primary. 56% said they definitely would or might vote for Trump, which is the highest of any candidate.
Don’t know what happened there. Anyway, the comment I wanted to make was that that figure causes me concern.
We can see from all the other polls that Trump is cutting into the support for most of the other candidates. From that I concluded that his support isn’t as narrowly defined as the Beltway would have us believe.
That said, he’s far from closing the deal. 25% of one-third of the total electorate is less than ten percent. Wallace and Perot did better than that.
What Republicans always want more than anything is a winner. If that is the devil himself, sobeit. At this point the GOP natives are restless because they feel they were forced to suck it up in the last two elections and accept “Mr. Electability” who ended up being losers. They want their Reagan back and so far, can’t see him in the pack. And while not as smooth and affable as Reagan, Trump does have TV chops.
I guess the question is then, as the number of candidates narrows who’s votes go to him as opposed to one of the other front runners?
Better to leave everyone guessing until 1) there’s some actual dropouts and/or 2) some detectable movement from the Thursday debate.
OTOH, a candidate with the bucks may have hired a pollster to include “who is your second choice.” Could be valuable data on how to play the debate.
i think I saw a poll that had only 10% saying Trump was they’re 2nd choice but it was a few weeks ago not really sure where I saw it either
I guess that’s not really helpful information after all
Probably too old and doesn’t identify which candidate’s supporters had Trump as their second choice.
Latest poll has over half of Republicans GOP saying that they would vote for Trump. But suspect the number for the other candidates isn’t far off from Trump’s.
We are moving irreversibly toward the abolition of the filibuster. The days of Mitch’s Olde Tyme senate are numbered.