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The Energy Gap: Why Democrats Keep Losing to GOP Plutocrats
Energy counts, matters, and wins the political battles. There isn't even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
Nov 29, 2024
Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article “Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?” He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all.
In 2001, long after the 1980 Reagan landslide of Jimmy Carter, Labor Secretary under Clinton, Robert Reich, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post which declared, “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.”
In the following years, while the Democrats were accelerating their abandonment of half the country as “red states,” and became more out of touch with blue-collar workers and unions, whom they took for granted, the Republicans were becoming more energized by the year. Their mouthpieces dominating talk radio – e.g., Rush Limbaugh – were directly sowing unrebutted discord, day after day, among blue-collar workers against the Democrats. Why? It’s because the Democrats essentially gave up on Talk Radio and didn’t bother listening to how these corporatist radio bloviators were turning hard working listeners into Reagan Democrats.
While the GOP was eroding the core base of the Democratic Party and taking total control of red state legislatures, governorships, and courts, the Democrats, starting in 1979, were plunging into enticing and taking corporate PAC money, as urged by then Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA). This reliance on corporate campaign money weakened the Party’s positions and actions on behalf of workers, consumers, the environment, and the need for an expanded social safety net for the populace. Western nations have provided their citizens superior health care, family support and education programs for decades.
The comparative energy levels were exhibited in the 2010 state gerrymandering drive. While the Democrats were snoozing, a laser beam effort in several states, like Pennsylvania, took the Dems to the cleaners. The result: majority GOP Congressional delegations for a decade even though the Democrats won the popular vote there. (See: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley.)
"The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers."
Recall, in 2009 Obama had a large majority Democratic advantage in the House and Senate as a result of his win over John McCain in November 2008. Instead of going forward full throttle with this mandate, Obama chose extreme caution. He focused on Obamacare, after giving up right at the beginning the crucial “public option” allowing people to opt out of the corporate health insurance grip. He gave it up unilaterally before negotiations began with the obstructive GOP.
For the rest of his term, Obama appeared to be resting. He promised a $9.50 federal minimum wage in his 2008 campaign but didn’t lift a finger for it during his first term. It is still at a poverty wage of $7.25 per hour to this day. He didn’t really put up a grassroots fight for his stimulus bill following the Wall Street collapse and the great recession starting under George W. Bush, (the war criminal against the Iraqi people.) Obama even declined to prosecute the Wall Street crooks.
In the meantime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, managed to lose the House to a reactionary GOP in the 2010 elections, the 2012 elections, the 2014 elections and the 2016 elections, straightjacketing any possible Obama agenda in the Congress. The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers while the GOP had a corporatist anti-worker, consumer, and women’s agenda and with ferocious energy blocked improvements supported by a majority of people in the US.
Even more inexplicable was the Democratic Party’s refusal to strongly support the galvanizing political civic movement to cancel the Electoral College (see NationalPopularVote.com). This organizing effort has led so far to the passage of state laws (California, New York, Illinois, etc.) handing the Electoral College vote to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton) but lost the Electoral College vote to G.W. Bush and the surprised Donald Trump. Still, the Democrats stay on the sidelines though this movement already has enabled state laws totaling 215 Electoral College votes, needing only to get to 270 to neutralize this anti-democratic vestige from the historic era of slavery.
Almost everywhere you look you see this huge disparity in energy levels. Compare the smaller Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives with the Pelosi-toady Progressive Caucus. The difference is that between thunder and slumber over the years.
Compare the Tea Party’s slamming impact on the established GOP in Congress with the tepid attitude of most labor unions and the AFL-CIO deferring to the Democratic Party.
Compare the over-the-top corporate judges to the so-called liberal judges, as relating to federal cases against Trump.
Compare the comprehensive ghastly Heritage Foundation’s 900-page 2025 blueprint directed toward the GOP expansion of the corporate state and the stripping away of services to the people and their rights with the agenda advanced by the progressive citizen groups. No comparison. The media notices this difference in energy levels which is one reason it gives more coverage to the right-wing messianic bulldozers who show in every way that they are hungrier for taking power as they take no prisoners.
Partisan energy disparities even extend to the right-wing vs. left-wing media. The former has the brazen Fox News network. The left has nothing like that. Bill Moyers told me he urged mega-rich George Soros and allies to start a competing progressive network after Fox became quickly formidable. No way.
The right-wing magazines cover the actions of their right-wing allies, plus those gatherings and books. While the progressive media mostly ignores reviewing progressive books and what citizen groups are driving for against corporate power in Washington, DC, and at the state level. The Progressive media prefers publishing their opinions and exposé pieces. That’s one reason why there are more non-fiction right-wing corporatist books which become best sellers, while progressive tomes gather dust.
Further weakening the energy gap in favor of the GOP are the Democrats who look for scapegoats like the Greens to account for their disgraceful losses. They rarely look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats like Norman Solomon (See, Roots Action) issue “autopsy reports” following Party defeats. The 2017 report documented the Democratic Party’s arrogant, entrenched leadership which ignores the progressive base.
After the November 5th debacle, have you heard about mass resignations by Democrats responsible for this victory by the convicted felon, chronic liar, bigot, corrupt, phony promisor Trump? Well, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison is resigning but that is pro forma. Other Democratic leaders are still on board at the state and federal level, in addition to, astonishingly enough, the failed corporate political/media consultants who enriched themselves while wasting away the biggest flood of campaign money in American history on the Kamala Harris campaign.
Younger Democrats who raise the need to displace the failed Democratic apparatchiks, and who want popular vigorous progressive agendas, as espoused by the naturally popular Senator Bernie Sanders, get ignored or worse pushed out of contention, visibility and, importantly, respect.
The Party’s losing elders have assured the absence of farm teams, of successors. Speaker Pelosi and her deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer are experts at this geriatric supremacy despite their track record of losing to the aggressive Republican plutocrats. Energy counts, matters and wins the political battles. There isn’t even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
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Trump’s GOP Wants to Burn the Country Down and Rule the Ashes
They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV, and keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.
Oct 25, 2023
Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum.
Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.
Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.
Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function.
You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his—and it is increasingly his alone—GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.
You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system. Perhaps it’s partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.
Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker. Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden administration of planning to replace white voters with immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Fearsome Power
Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money. My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape. These days, Miller is himself a president of something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”
Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons. “The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal, so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions.”
Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025. These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of personnel John McEntee. As The New York Times reported in July,
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists, and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle—the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president. In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—provide checks and balances on each other. Under the unitary executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump will agree and act accordingly.
By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two 17th- and 18th-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive, would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a nation’s laws and—just as the name suggests—the executive exists to “execute” them.
Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two. If that were the case, wouldn’t the executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact, Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as Locke argued) the legislative.
Heritage, however, points to Article II, which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on January 6, 2021.
While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power was met with widespread derision.
However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so. As the Times reported in July, their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly that direction.
A (Schedule) F in Government
Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government. Patronage jobs—positions granted, often to the friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors—were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified candidates for specific positions replaced the old system.
Today, the Office of Personnel Management oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.
The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives. It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on various branches of government through such appointments.
It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.
Those 4,000 positions exempted from competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules” (lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5—I told you we were going to get into the weeds!—lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from civil service exams.
Or at least those were all the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”
Such a broad, ill-defined category could, in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.
On taking office, however, President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least, Schedule F no longer exists.
In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected. That’s where the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).
Jokers to the Right of Me…
The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers. They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence. They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.
Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were. Did they want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social service programs? Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop funding Ukraine’s war effort?
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:
My goal is to get the most conservative Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and total control—this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our fellow Americans first.
All Together Now
Much of this would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told The Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal
an end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.
I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.
I can’t say it any better than she has. They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes. That would put us on a true Schedule F—for Failed State—a condition this country now seems hellbent on achieving.
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House Speaker Jim Jordan Would Be Victory for MAGA Coup Plotters
If the far-right GOP firebrand wins the gavel, Congress will be at the mercy of a “legislative terrorist” who actively colluded with the Trump to overturn the 2020 election and a cadre of extremists willing to blow up the government to achieve their goals.
Oct 17, 2023
Our first branch of government in the United States has been paralyzed and thrown into chaos—again—by a small cadre of far-right MAGA members of the House Freedom Caucus. It’s not by fluke or flaw, but rather the disciplined execution of a plan. And both the Democrats and Republicans had better wake up to the new reality if they want to preserve a government capable of responding to international crises and the needs of the American people.
The writing was on the wall less than a week after the November 2022 elections gave Republicans a razor-thin majority in the House. On Nov. 14, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) convened a forum on House Rules with leaders of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) that laid out the Freedom Caucus plan for wielding unprecedented power over Congress.
“In light of the narrow majority, activist members of the House Freedom Caucus should recognize and embrace what we have today, which is de facto European-style coalition government,” noted lead panelist and CPI President and CEO Ed Corrigan. “In a sense, we have three political parties in the House: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Freedom Caucus. More than [at] any time in history, the HFC has extraordinary power to negotiate a leadership arrangement that empowers all members, especially conservatives.”
By the end of the day, Biggs had announced on Newsmax that he would challenge Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for the speaker position, saying, “We have a new paradigm here.” A few weeks later, seven Freedom Caucus members sent a letter to their House colleagues laying out their demands for supporting any speaker candidate—the same list of rule changes and appointments that CPI leaders Corrigan, Mark Meadows, and Rachel Bovard had outlined at the Nov. 14 forum.
After a 15-ballot floor fight in January, McCarthy finally caved to the caucus and gave them pretty much everything they wanted in exchange for their support of him as speaker. In addition to gaining three coveted seats on the Rules Committee, the Freedom Caucus won a rule change allowing a single member to trigger the equivalent of a no-confidence vote that ousts the speaker and requires a majority vote to elect a new one.
The hard fact of the matter is that the House Freedom Caucus views itself as a third party.
The price of this deal has proven to be extraordinarily steep. The House Freedom Caucus’ leverage over McCarthy enabled them to bring the nation to the brink of default in May over increasing the debt ceiling and repeat their brinkmanship on the pending government shutdown on October 1. And, ultimately, it enabled Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)—who participated in the forum last November—and seven other hard-right members to bring down McCarthy for avoiding the government shutdown and grind the House to a halt two days later.
The hard fact of the matter is that the House Freedom Caucus views itself as a third party. Their loyalty lies not with the Republican Party, but with a far-right ideology and CPI, the dark-money group led by former Trump insiders and insurrectionists that scripts, staffs, and trains caucus members.
Now Jordan, who helped found the caucus and serves as its vice chair, has made his move, and is working doggedly to flip the GOP members he needs to win a floor vote for speaker on Tuesday. If he wins, it will be a MAGA coup, and Congress will be at the mercy of a “legislative terrorist” who actively colluded with the Trump White House to overturn the 2020 election results and a cadre of extremists willing to blow up the government to achieve their goals.
The far more sensible path would be for the two major parties that actually care about responsible governance to strike a deal for the sake of the nation.
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Do MAGA Republicans Care How a Shutdown Would Impact Seniors?
Older Americans shouldn’t have to worry about their earned benefits because MAGA House members once again are willing the hold the government hostage to their extremist aims.
Sep 04, 2023
The MAGA faction of the House Republican Conference is once again threatening to disrupt the basic functioning of government to push an unpopular agenda. Last spring, they brought the nation to the brink of default. Now, the House Freedom Caucus is refusing to keep the government from shutting down in September unless a set of extreme demands are met. In both cases, they have displayed a callous disregard for the effect of these machinations on everyday Americans who depend on the smooth operation of government—including, and especially, our nation’s seniors.
While the possibility of a government shutdown does not pose as serious a threat to Social Security and Medicare as the averted federal default would have, it is of serious concern to seniors and their advocates. Most Social Security payments likely would continue to go out because the process is largely automated. But, depending on how long a shutdown might last, customer service for Social Security claimants and beneficiaries could be significantly disrupted.
Customer service at the beleaguered Social Security Administration (SSA) is already suffering from chronic underfunding by Congress. In the event of a shutdown, SSA employees would be forced to continue working (without being paid until the shutdown ended) and they’d be limited to performing only their most basic work functions. Non-automated and non-exempted SSA operations would come to a screeching halt. Current work backlogs would begin to grow again. If that happens, seniors hoping to submit new Social Security claims, replace Social Security cards, or report a change in status may experience delays until the shutdown ends.
At the end of the day, government spending is a moral issue—revealing society’s priorities.
We’re worried that—after more than a decade of Tea Party-initiated budget cuts—the negative impacts on SSA and its customers will not end once the government has resumed operations. The current appropriations levels being considered for the new fiscal year will leave SSA unable to even “tread water” in terms of customer service. In recent years, claimants have experienced field office closures, interminable wait times on hold on the SSA’s 800-phone line, and delays of more than a year for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) appeals hearings. In 2017, Over 10,000 people died awaiting adjudication of their SSDI claims. The trend of Congress’ underfunding this agency looks to continue—and service will continue to deteriorate.
Again, the level of harm to seniors from a government shutdown really depends on how long it lasts. The deeper problem is the willingness of MAGA Republicans to hold the federal government hostage to their unreasonable demands—for the second time in a year. They risked a federal default last spring in order to extort deep cuts in domestic spending that the majority of Americans do not support.
In June, the White House and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were able to reach a last-minute deal to lift thedebt limit and avert a default. But the deal effectively keeps non-defense spending flat, with funding for FY 2024 failing to keep up with inflation. Unfortunately, many House Republicans are ignoring even that miserly deal. The GOP-controlled House appropriations committees are marking up spending bills at FY 2022 levels, which is considerably lower than in the debt limit agreement.
MAGA Republicans in the House do not seem to care what impact a shutdown would have on everyday Americans. In fact, many MAGA House members seem to relish the prospect of throwing sand in the gears of the federal government. The Freedom Caucus refuses to vote to keep the government open unless their egregious demands are met, demands which are publicly unpopular. These include new laws to address the supposed “weaponization” of government and the revocation of so-called “woke” policies at the Pentagon.
These issues are not only bogus; they have little to do with serious spending policy. One former GOP Senate aide told The Hill that the Freedom Caucus demands are “fundamentally ridiculous.” And yet their agenda to shut down the government can have real consequences for real people, including society’s most vulnerable.
What’s more, many of these same MAGA Republicans have proposed to cut and privatize Social Security—if not for today’s seniors than for their kids and grandchildren. The 2023 House Republican Study Committee budget blueprint called for raising the retirement age to 69 (despite the fact that many older Americans simply cannot work that long); adopting a miserly COLA formula; and means testing benefits, which would cut deep into the heart of the middle class.
So-called “fiscal hawks,” who have no problem making the Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations permanent, continue to conflate Social Security with the debt. The program is self-funded by workers’ payroll contributions and does not contribute to the debt. Even Ronald Reagan said, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.”
As seniors’ advocates, we do not believe that older Americans should be shortchanged in the federal budget process. At the end of the day, government spending is a moral issue—revealing society’s priorities. After a lifetime of contributing to this county in innumerable ways—and with the cost of growing old escalating every year—our seniors deserve to be a priority. And they shouldn’t have to worry about their earned benefits because MAGA House members once again are willing the hold the government hostage to their extremist aims.
On Thursday, The White House urged Congress to adopt a short-term measure to fund the federal government, allowing more time to craft a spending deal and avert a shutdown. Congress should heed the president’s request.
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House Freedom Caucus Economic Hostage-Takers Issue Latest Ransom Demands
"These power-hungry lawmakers are so determined to keep the Biden administration from rebuilding the middle class that they're willing to tank the economy to do it," one advocate warned.
Mar 10, 2023
A cadre of far-right Republicans announced Friday that they may only vote to raise the debt ceiling if Congress agrees to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending, limit federal agencies' future budgets, and abandon progressive elements of President Joe Biden's economic agenda.
Since Washington's arbitrary and arguably unconstitutional borrowing limit was breached in January, the Treasury Department has implemented "extraordinary measures" enabling the U.S. government to meet its obligations for a few additional months. Unless the Biden administration takes unilateral action to disarm the debt ceiling, Congress has until sometime between July and September to increase or suspend the nation's borrowing cap. If Republicans refuse to do so, the U.S. is poised to suffer a catastrophic default.
Led by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the House Freedom Caucus said Friday in a
statement that its 45 members would "consider voting" to raise the debt limit if their colleagues in the House and Senate agree to:
- Eliminate Biden's $400 billion student debt cancellation plan;
- Rescind unspent Covid-19 relief funds;
- Nix nearly $400 billion worth of clean energy investments approved in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA);
- Repeal the IRA's roughly $80 billion funding boost for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS);
- Restore Clinton-era work requirements on welfare recipients;
- Require congressional approval before any major federal regulations can take effect;
- Cap future federal spending at 2022 levels for the next 10 years; and
- Find "every dollar spent by Democrats that can be reclaimed for the American taxpayer."
Although Capitol Hill's deficit hawks are eager to attack the poor and slash popular programs, they
don't support reducing the ever-expanding U.S. military budget or hiking taxes on corporations and the rich to increase revenue. Rescinding the IRS funding boost, meanwhile, would help wealthy households evade taxes and add an estimated $114 billion to the federal deficit.
"The MAGA extremists running the House fully intend to manufacture a disastrous default crisis by making demands they know to be nonstarters—like letting wealthy tax cheats and big polluters off the hook," Liz Zelnick, director of Economic Security and Corporate Power at Accountable.US, said in a statement.
"These power-hungry lawmakers are so determined to keep the Biden administration from rebuilding the middle class that they're willing to tank the economy to do it," Zelnick continued.
With Republicans possessing a five-seat House majority and the ability of any party member to introduce a motion to remove the House speaker—a new rule the Freedom Caucus secured in exchange for electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to the role—a few dozen of the GOP's most right-wing members have significant leverage over the fate of the U.S. and world economy.
"They demand sacrifice only from everyday Americans while they insist on preserving or even expanding wasteful tax breaks for billionaires and greedy corporations," said Zelnick. "They're playing a dangerous game of chicken with the economy and the lives of millions of working families."
"The MAGA extremists running the House... demand sacrifice only from everyday Americans while they insist on preserving or even expanding wasteful tax breaks for billionaires and greedy corporations."
A 2011 debt ceiling standoff—when Biden was vice president—enabled congressional Republicans to impose austerity and also resulted in a historic downgrading of the U.S. government's credit rating, but the country has never defaulted on its debt. Economists warned during the last standoff in 2021 that a default would trigger enough chaos in global financial markets to destroy almost six million jobs and roughly $15 trillion in household wealth in the U.S. alone.
Fully aware of the stakes, GOP lawmakers have threatened on multiple occasions over the past few months to unleash economic pain on a mass scale unless they succeed in gutting the relatively underdeveloped U.S. welfare state.
"Speaker McCarthy is not going to cut a deal with Democrats," Perry said Friday at a press conference. "We're not assuming that leadership is opposed to these thing[s]... this is all reasonable stuff."
The latest ultimatum from the Freedom Caucus "appeared to complicate efforts to clinch a deal and avert a looming fiscal calamity," The Washington Post reported.
Biden has repeatedly denounced Republicans for taking the economy hostage in a bid to force through harmful changes, declining to entertain what he calls their "gut punch to the middle class." The president on Friday reiterated his refusal to consider the GOP's proposed cuts, saying, "I don't know [if] there's much to negotiate on."
On Thursday, the White House released its budget request for fiscal year 2024. Notwithstanding Biden's attempt to further increase Pentagon spending, the framework has been hailed by progressives for proposing tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy to expand a range of public goods, including substantial funding for climate action, childcare, education, healthcare, housing, and more.
Although Biden's proposal would reduce the federal deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade—the same amount mentioned in the Freedom Caucus' austerity blueprint—Perry said Friday that the White House's progressive tax and investment plan is "not happening."
In an ominous sign, "Republicans readied a bill earlier this week that would prepare the government in the event of a default," the Post reported. "The measure, which the tax-focused Ways and Means Committee sent to the full House, essentially would prioritize some federal payments over others in the event the United States no longer had the authority to borrow."
Notably, this entire episode of fiscal brinkmanship could have been avoided had Democrats listened to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other progressives who urged the party to raise the debt ceiling—or abolish it altogether—when it still controlled both chambers of Congress last year.
Conservative Democrats refused to act during the lame-duck session despite Warren's warning that GOP lawmakers desperate to win the White House in 2024 will "blow up the economy" and run ads blaming Biden for it.
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Insurrection 2.0: The GOP Is Now a Party Focused on Sabotage and Destruction
What we saw this week is a preview of much worse to come, with or without McCarthy as figurehead speaker.
Jan 08, 2023
I’d wondered how Republicans would mark the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Then untarnishable Florida Man Matt Gaetz and his freedom contras reenacted it by other means this week. This insurrection is from within. It’s just starting.
Kevin McCarthy, the wobbliest amoeba to be elected Speaker and stand third in line for the presidency, got his prize by sacrificing it. There is no Speakership anymore except in name.
Any single member of the House can now call for the speaker’s ouster whenever they choose. Previously, only party leaders could. Insurrectionists got their pick of crucial committee assignments. They’ll dictate what bills get to the floor, rig any bill with whatever suicidal amendment they choose, kill any spending bill they don’t like. These 20 insurrectionists with neither congressional seniority nor accomplishments to their names will sabotage committees, Congress and country from weaponized backbenches, with their party’s blessing. Is anybody surprised?
McCarthy surrendered gavel for grovel.
Lost in the din is the very unusual bipartisan success of the two years of the 117th Congress that just ended. Democrats and Republicans combined to give us laws that protect gay marriage. They gave us the largest infrastructure bill and largest government investment in research and development in decades. They gave us tighter background checks on younger people buying guns. And they gave us a law that changed the way electoral votes are counted so people like Donald Trump couldn’t attempt the kind of coup he did two years ago by fabricating constitutional clauses the way he does his tax returns.
Every one of these laws drew a dozen or more Republican senators and quite a few Republican House members, too. It was one of the most productive congresses in not-so recent years. Now the barbarians are back in charge. It only takes a few, if the rest of them allow it. That’s the thing: we keep hearing that the 20 insurrectionists are a tiny minority. But they’re the core of Republican ideology, such as it is. They couldn’t get away with their stunts if they didn’t represent a constituency reflecting the anarchy. It’s Trumpism on steroids. It can only end one way. The Republicans had yet to swear-in their new House majority before they turned the whole thing into Jonestown. You remember Jonestown, don’t you, the town the paranoid California preacher and power-mad Jim Jones established in the jungles of Guyana with about 900 of his more gullible church flock, first taking their savings then taking their lives in a mass murder-suicide in 1979. That’s where the expression drinking the kool aid comes from, because he had everyone drink cyanide mixed in with kool aid as he drilled their souls with conspiracies all around. Jones was a QAnon stem cell.
It’s Trumpism on steroids. It can only end one way.
You know Republicans have gone Jonestown when the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green and action-figure Trump end up sounding like their most reasonable voices. Here those two were this week, begging the monsters they created to calm down at least long enough to elect that other Californian while Gaetz’s horde played what Green herself called “Russian Roulette” with their newly gained power. Republicans know suicide.
Lost in the din, too, is the scum pond that “Freedom Caucus” crawled out of a few years ago. One of its founding members was none other than Ron DeSantis, the Guantanamo graduate who’d have been standing right along Gaetz and other insurrectionists this week had he not become Florida’s doubleplus caudillo-in-chief. Every time DeSantis speaks the word “freedom”–as he did 12 times in his inaugural address Tuesday–another liberty loses its wings.
Like the speakership, the word freedom has lost its meaning, though in fairness to DeSantis he’s only applying the Grand Old Party’s stately definition of the word, coined by Ronald Reagan, that unassailable freedom-loving deity, when he called the rapists, terrorists and mass murderers of Central America “freedom fighters.”
“Freedom lives here,” DeSantis told us Tuesday, the way it does in the Republican House: The 20 nut cases holding it hostage are the party’s purest, and purist, expression.
If their fight was about ideas, policies, even principles, even I’d cheer it on. But it’s none of those things. Right wing Republicans have no ideas. No idea, period. Not that moderates have been doing much better. The GOP hasn’t had a single new idea in 30 years, other than lowering taxes and defeating every social and ecological initiative possible while rolling back the hard-won civil rights and liberties of the Warren Court. It’s reactionary ideology: opposition for its own sake, a black and white, all or nothing approach that sees treachery in compromise and an enemy behind every moderate, when compromise and moderation are the essence of American democracy at its best. It was Mitch McConnell, remember, who explicitly put that in words when, as Senate majority leader, he said his only aim in 2010 was to make Obama a one-term president. Accomplishments be damned. The extremists’ nihilism today is not materially different. They’re not about achieving the country. They’re about destruction, their mentality comparable, again, only to the psyche of the suicide bomber, this one wearing a bright red maga hat.
What we saw this week is a preview of much worse to come, with or without McCarthy as figurehead speaker. There’s nothing to cheer here, not for anyone who cares about this country. Not as long as Maga’s white-collar insurrectionists are calling the shots.
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The Very Dangerous Reasoning Behind the Freedom Caucus' Hatred for Kevin McCarthy
The far-right Opposed-to-Big-Government cultists are dead set on destroying the working class.
Jan 06, 2023
While Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be about personality and struggles within the House Republican caucus, it’s really about something much larger: the fate and future of American “big government” and the middle class it created.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the phrase “big government” has been on the lips of Republican politicians. They utter it like a curse at every opportunity.
It seems paradoxical: Republicans complain about “big government,” but then go on to support more and more government money for expanding prisons and a bloated Pentagon budget. Once you understand their worldview, however, it all makes perfect sense.
First, some background.
From the founding of our republic through the early 1930s the American middle class was relatively small. It was almost entirely made up of the professional and mercantile class: doctors, lawyers, shop-owners and the like. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were what we would today call middle class.
Factory workers, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and pretty much all manner of “unskilled laborers” were the working poor rather than the middle class. Most neighborhoods across America had a quality of life even lower than what today we would call “ghettos.”
As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America.
There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, public schools, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.
There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent). As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:
“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.
“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years.
“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. ... Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …
“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”
The Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, though, was a huge wake-up call for American voters, answered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His New Deal programs brought us, for the first time, “big government” and the people loved it. They elected him President of the United States four times!
FDR created Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed the right to unionize, outlawed child labor, regulated big business by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies, and funded infrastructure across the country from roads to bridges to dams and power stations.
He raised taxes on the morbidly rich all the way up to 90% and used that money to build schools and hospitals across the nation. He brought electricity to rural parts of the country, and put literally millions to work in various “big government” programs.
“Big government,” in other words, created the modern American middle-class.
By the 1950s a strong middle class representing almost half of Americans had emerged for the first time in American history.
By the late 1970s it was around 65 percent of us.
And that’s when the billionaires (then merely multimillionaires) decided enough was enough and got to work.
In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.
His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:
— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”
Today’s challenges to Kevin McCarthy are mostly coming from members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, pretty much a reinvention of the Tea Party Caucus, funded in substantial part by rightwing billionaires and CEOs who share the late David Koch’s worldview.
The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” they’ll tell you. The billionaire “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support the “moochers” who demand everything from union rights to a living wage to free college.
Why, these Freedom Caucus members ask, should their billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support the ungrateful masses through “big government” programs? Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Darwin right?
These Republicans believe our government should really only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires.
That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or food stamps.
And that’s why they hate Kevin McCarthy.
In the past, McCarthy has shown a willingness to compromise and negotiate with Democrats. Most recently, as Congressman Chip Roy pointed out on the House floor yesterday when nominating Byron Donalds to replace McCarthy, he failed to block the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill through Congress that was loaded with what rightwing billionaires consider “freebies” for “taker” and “moocher” Americans.
It appears all or nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members, dancing to the tune first played by David Koch, don’t believe in our current form of American government. They want us to go back to the pre-1930s America, before FDR’s New Deal.
Those were the halcyon days when workers cowered before their employers, women and minorities knew their places, and government didn’t interfere with the business of dynasty-building even when it meant poisoning entire communities and crushing small businesses.
They appear to agree with the majority of the Supreme Court Republicans who recently began dismantling the “big government” administrative state by ending the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses.
They’ve already succeeded, over the past 40 years of the Reagan Revolution, at whittling the middle class down from 65 percent of us to around 45 percent of us: NPR commemorated it in 2015 with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”
Now they want even more poverty for workers and more riches for their morbidly rich funders, and don’t believe that “moderate” Republicans will get them there. As Ginni Thomas and a pantheon of “conservative” luminaries wrote yesterday in an open letter opposing McCarthy’s speakership:
“[H]e has failed to answer for, or commit to halting, his coordinated efforts in the 2022 elections to promote moderate Republican candidates over conservatives.”
The “conservative” Republicans have already announced that once they get their act together in Congress with a new speaker, their first order of business is going to be to cut more taxes on billionaires.
While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology and policy. It’s about the future of “big government” and whether or not we will continue to have an American middle class.
And as long as Libertarian-leaning billionaires continue pouring cash into the campaigns and lifestyles of Republican members of Congress, this battle that’s been going on for over 40 years to tear apart the American middle-class is not going to end or go away any day soon.
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GOP Lawmakers Battered With Boos and Jeers in Face-Offs With Constituents
Town hall events an avenue for voters to decry attack on healthcare coverage
Apr 14, 2017
While some lawmakers are avoiding town halls altogether or holding "sham" events, the Republicans who are facing their constituents during April's congressional recess are taking a beating on a range of issues, notably their support for the failed GOP healthcare bill.
Take Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who held an event in his hometown at the Mesa Convention Center Thursday (and posted ground rules for the forum). "While several topics were discussed at the town hall, no issue was more prominent than that of healthcare," the Mesa Independent writes.
The Arizona Republic describes it as "a brutal face-to-face confrontation" where the crowd began shouting "healthcare for all" before Flake even hit the podium.
Flake, for his part, declared his support for "our free-market system of healthcare." The Associated Press adds: "On several occasions, Flake's answers were drowned out by boos." In contrast, a woman who said, "In Germany we have had a universal healthcare system... since 1871" elicited cheers.
A day earlier in Mesa, it was GOP Rep. (and Freedom Caucus member) Andy Biggs who faced angry constituents. His comments expressing doubt on established climate science drew boos. Yet he compared himself to Albert Eisenstein, saying the Nobel laureate was also "shouted down." At the end of the event, chants of "coward" were directed at Biggs.
Over in Colorado, GOP Congressman Mike Coffman was "booed, jeered at, and shouted down by angry voters" on Wednesday during his first town hall. Politico wrote of the event:
Nearly every other constituent brought up health care at a town hall here on the outskirts of Denver on Wednesday night, in one of the most competitive House districts in the country.
But not a single one did it to thank Rep. Mike Coffman for backing the House GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Instead, dozens of local residents--Democrats and Republicans--pummeled the Colorado Republican for supporting legislation they said would harm their community.
One sexagenarian and lifelong Republican told Coffman he "was shocked when you declared your intention to vote for the American Health Care Act," referring to the GOP healthcare bill. "That is not the way we do things here in Colorado."
In Oregon on Wednesday, Rep. Greg Walden held two events, one the The Dalles and one in Hood River, and "was repeatedly shouted down," the Oregonian writes.
"I witnessed you on television with Paul Ryan when he announced his so-called health care bill," one constituent, Roger Wagner, said during The Dalles event, according to the Oregonian. "That bill eliminates 24 million people off of healthcare. But that wasn't enough. You also wanted to cut funding for Meals on Wheels, well-baby care, all the while giving $1 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy and your corporate buddies?"
New Jersey Republican Rep. Leonard Lance also took a beating Wednesday night at a town hall in which "he was drowned out by standing ovations for speakers urging Lance to fight climate change and GOP healthcare plans," The Hill wrote.
Though Lance fielded question on numerous issues including the U.S. missile strikes in Syria and internet privacy, "his exchanges with constituents on healthcare got the most heated," The Hill continues. One of the participants who was able to ask a question was Janet Katz, who drew cheers when she said, "I want this repeal crap to stop." (Lance voted against the GOP's Obamacare repeal bill.)
The TownHallProject.com has a list of ongoing forums taking place.
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Tea Party Tanks: Latest Poll Shows New Low for Faux Grassroots Movement
Five years after helping sweep Republicans back into office, voters appear to be shedding their support for the movement once described as a "weird and disorderly mob" created to do the bidding of the corporate elite
Oct 26, 2015
According to new polling released by Gallup on Monday, national public support for the far-right Tea Party movement has plunged to historic lows.
The survey shows that only 17 percent of Americans now actively support the Tea Party, while a majority (54 percent) neither oppose nor support the faction, which has aimed to drag the Republican Party further to the right in recent years.
As Democrats and self-identified liberals continue to represent the largest set of outright opponents, the largest drop in support for the Tea Party comes from so-called "conservative Republicans," of which only 42 percent are now supportive, compared to 63 percent who described themselves as backers in 2010.
Gallup noted that the other significant drop in support was among "Republican leaners"—independent voters who lean Republican. Among those voters, support for the Tea Party dropped a dramatic twenty-nine points, from 52 percent in 2010 to 23 percent this month.
Since first appearing on the political scene in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2007 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Tea Party was primarily interpreted as a re-branding of the Republican Party after the political and economic disasters produced by the presidency of George W. Bush. Though many of its supporters spoke of it as an authentic grassroots movement fueled by conservative and independent-minded voters, observant critics--including journalists like George Monbiot and Matt Taibbi--documented how well-known members of the Republican establishment and other elite interests orchestrated its founding and political development.
Taibbi, for his part, explained the phenomenon of the Tea Party this way:
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement -- which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
Despite such criticisms, however, the undeniable energy created by the Tea Party was widely credited with Republican Party victories in the 2010 midterm election, which returned the House of Representatives to GOP control and swept right-wing governors to power in numerous states across the U.S.
The bottom line of Monday's polling, according to Gallup, is this:
Republicans made huge strides in the 2014 midterm elections, including increasing their majority in the House and gaining control of the Senate. However, the Tea Party movement that had played such a huge part in the GOP's 2010 election successes was much less visible this time around. Still, several Republicans elected to the House and Senate with Tea Party support have become major players on the national stage, including presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The Tea Party movement has also been tied to the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican members of the House who have played a key role in the current battle to select a new speaker.
While the effects of the Tea Party movement on previous elections still resonate, the big drop in support from Republicans and Republican leaners over the past four or five years may indicate that the Tea Party movement's impact on American politics is fading.
The Gallup poll on Monday was based on telephone interviews conducted between October 7-11, using a random sample of 1,015 national adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
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