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The Government Takes on Arizona

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Tuesday, the federal government fired its first legal shot at Arizona’s controversial immigration law. The law as it stands now is slightly less stringent than it was in its original form.  The original law allowed law enforcement officers to inquire into the immigration of anyone that they contacted. The amended law does not allow officers to stop and look into the immigration of a person if the stop is based solely on the person’s race. However, the law does require authorities to determine the immigration status of every person that breaks a state or local law, no matter how minor. It also attempts to address other immigration-related issues such as alien registration, smuggling, and employment, among others. The state became the target of national and international scorn when its Governor Jan Brewer signed the law on April 30th.

The law is set to take effect on July 29th, but the federal government is seeking an injunction that will stop that. The U.S. is actually seeking two types of injunctions: 1) a permanent injunction that will stop the law from ever being enforced, and 2) a preliminary injunction that will stop enforcement of the law while the case winds its way through the courts. The government is concerned that if the Arizona law is allowed to stand, it will lead other states to pass similar sweeping legislation that will further encroach on the federal government’s regulation of immigration, and drain federal resources that would have to be used for enforcement.

Cutting away all the legalese in the U.S.’s 58-page brief, the government’s argument boils down to this: the Arizona law impermissibly conflicts with federal immigration laws, and it will have adverse effects on federal resources used to regulate immigration and U.S. foreign policy. Part of the argument is that Arizona’s blanket treatment of all unlawful aliens affects the discretion given to the federal government under federal law. That discretion allows the federal government to more effectively target aliens that are a national security risk. Other areas of discretion allow the federal government to allow unlawful aliens to remain in the U.S. for humanitarian reasons. Also, requiring Arizona law enforcement officials to check the status of every person that breaks a law in the state will place too heavy a burden on federal resources that keep track of individuals’ immigration status.

Furthermore, U.S. foreign policy is affected by the Arizona bill because the current immigration framework arose in part from negotiations with other countries on how foreigners in the U.S. could expect to be treated. The Arizona law criminalizes actions by certain aliens that are treated with civil laws under the federal system. The federal government argues that this broad criminalization does not account for potential foreign policy concerns with respect to some aliens, and does not allow the U.S. to “speak with one voice” in the area of immigration.

This is the first step in what is sure to be a contentious legal battle. The federal government makes a convincing constitutional argument that Arizona’s law impermissibly strays into an arena meant to be controlled by federal law. Arizona’s response will most likely be that it was forced to enact the law in an effort to protect the well-being of the state in the face of the federal government’s inability to stem the tide of undocumented immigrants that stream across Arizona’s border every day. I would not be surprised to see the federal court in Arizona grant an injunction that stops the state from enforcing the law during the litigation process in order to allow it time to get to the Supreme Court, which will certainly make the final determination.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue’s Photostream

Cross-Fire on Race to the Top

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and — in some cases — charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.

We’re seeing this phenomenon re-emerge with the implementation of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a competition to reward states for educational innovations including higher academic standards, more openness to public school choice, and stronger performance indicators for teachers. Unsurprisingly, many on the left dislike charter schools, pay-for-performance, and “teaching to the test.” Many of the right are hostile to the very idea of federal involvement in education, and particularly to national standards of any sort; others are lukewarm to charter schools because they are public, and instead favor private-school vouchers and/or oppose “government schools” altogether.

Liberal hostility to Race to the Top was reflected in this recent effort by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to shift emergency funds out of Race to the Top and into teacher layoff prevention. More broadly, there’s notable tension between teachers unions (particularly the NEA) and the administration on education policy.

One of the most interesting examples of conservative infighting on education policy is in Georgia, where lame duck Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has made his state’s RTT application the centerpiece of his administration’s education program, and also a major part of its strategy to balance the state budget. But when Republican State School Superintendent Kathy Cox abruptly resigned to take a Washington think tank post, after the filing deadline for the post, the GOP was left with two candidates who opposed RTT because they oppose federal involvement in education altogether. So Perdue is backing an independent bid for the post by the career educator he appointed to replace Cox, which has made conservatives quite unhappy.

This is one major policy area where the differences within and between the two major parties are playing out at every level of government. It could be a very rocky ride just ahead for anyone longing for consistency in how our public schools are run.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Kevindooley’s Photostream

Culture War and Peace

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal asked 109 Republican “insiders” to rank possible nominees in terms of likelihood, Daniels finished fifth, tied with Sarah Palin and well ahead of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And at the same time, 111 Democratic “insiders” ranked Daniels fourth when asked about the most formidable prospective GOP candidate. And that was all before a slow but steady drumbeat of interest in the Hoosier, culminating in one of those long, hagiographical magazine profiles that often serve as the informal launching pad of presidential runs, this one by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard.

You can see the logic behind the Daniels-for-president enthusiasm. Virtually unknown among voters outside Indiana, Daniels has none of the baggage accompanying retreads like Gingrich, Huckabee and Mitt Romney, or even fellow-insider-favorite Haley Barbour, much less the lightning-rod Palin. He’s a state official who has never had to cast a controversial vote in Congress, but also has DC street cred from his work in the Reagan White House and his stint as George W. Bush’s first OMB director (where he exited before the inevitable gusher of red ink really exploded). He’s very popular in a state carried by Barack Obama in 2008, and his state’s positive fiscal record stands out sharply against a national landscape of state fiscal disaster. Moreover, as Ferguson’s profile illustrates, Daniels has a moderately quirky but folksy personality that seems a lot more appealing than those of other, dark horses like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or John Thune of South Dakota.

Given the newly rediscovered monomania for deficit hawkery among Republicans, buttressed by Tea Party demands for smaller government now, Daniels looks like someone who can credibly wear a green eyeshade at a time when that’s the sexiest look around.

But in the self-same Ferguson profile that exemplified the emergence of Daniels ’12 buzz, the putative candidate himself (who has mastered a stance of disinterested availability for a White House run) tossed a little hand grenade into his own camp:

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.

Predictably, Mike Huckabee pounced on the “truce” idea (or gaffe, or whatever it was):

“Apparently, a 2012 Republican presidential prospect in an interview with a reporter has made the suggestion that the next president should call for a ‘truce’ on social issues like abortion and traditional marriage to focus on fiscal problems,” Huckabee said. “In other words, stop fighting to end abortion and don’t make protecting traditional marriage a priority.”

“For those of us who have labored long and hard in the fight to educate the Democrats, voters, the media and even some Republicans on the importance of strong families, traditional marriage and life to our society, this is absolutely heartbreaking. And that one of our Republican ‘leaders’ would suggest this truce, even more so,” said Huckabee, a social conservative who is weighing another presidential run.

Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins chipped in with his own more harshly worded condemnation of Daniels for talk of a culture-war truce:

We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the Establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.

Other, more sympathetic social conservatives, like National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru, wondered if Daniels had simply misspoken or overstated his focus on fiscal issues, but also warned him not to get carried away with fiscal-first rhetoric:

A lot of people will cheer [Daniels’] statement: Truces are usually popular, and most people see the economic issues as more important than the social ones at this moment. But I’m not sure how a truce would work. If Justice Kennedy retired on President Daniels’s watch, for example, he would have to pick someone as a replacement. End of truce.

I also can’t help but think of Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. Like Daniels, Gramm was an enthusiastic budget-cutter. Concern about big government was running strong in the years just prior to that election. Gramm had a solid social-conservative record, but consciously chose not to campaign on it; he famously flew out to Colorado Springs to tell James Dobson, “I’m not a preacher.” That approach helped to doom Gramm’s campaign.

Finally, the Washington Post’s resident religious conservative Mike Gerson gave Daniels a chance to backtrack, and the Hoosier allowed as how cultural issues with a fiscal dimension, like the Mexico City rules (and presumably abortion funding generally), would not fall under any “truce.”

Crisis averted? Perhaps; certainly many Republicans will be privately counseling Daniels not to make the same mistake twice, and he’d be smart to take advantage of the Kagan confirmation issue by blowing the dog whistle of determination to appoint “strict constructionist” judges. Meanwhile, he’ll get some credit from the shrinking band of social moderates in the GOP, not to mention libertarians, along with secular MSM types whose skepticism of the Tea Party movement has always been tempered by their obvious relief at the sight of conservatives thumping not Bibles but the Constitution.

But it’s worth noting that Huckabee’s not the only 2012 possibility who is taking a different tack than Daniels on the culture wars. And indeed, the other candidate with a bullet next to his name of late, and in public polls rather than insider buzz (viz. a recent PPP survey of Texas Republicans, which placed him at the top of the 2012 list with or without home-state Gov. Rick Perry), is none other than Newt Gingrich, who seems determined to escalate the culture wars into a full-scale Clash of Civilizations.

The former House Speaker raised some eyebrows in May when his new, just-in-time-for-the-campaign book, To Save America, came out, with the unsubtle subtitle of: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Most of the negative commentary involved his comparison of the Obama administration to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and even on that assertion, he’s only partially backtracked, according to a Fox News report:

Gingrich said that he stands by his argument that the “secular-socialist machine” represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, not in the sense of the immorality of those deadly regimes, but as a “threat to our way of life.”

In the book itself, Gingrich calls this “threat” an “existential threat,” a term most often heard in connection with Israeli fears of a genocidal nuclear attack by Iran. And he is very clear that he’s not just fretting over debt or deficit forecasts, but instead is fighting an anti-religious threat to the essence of American culture:

[E]ven more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists is a second threat that is right here at home. It is an ideology so fundamentally at odds with historic American values that it threatens to undo the cultural ethics that have made our country great. I call it “secular-socialism.”

The Left has thoroughly infiltrated nearly every cultural commanding height of our civilization.

Not much of a hint of any “truce” in that kind of talk, is there?

So which of these two conservative Republicans best has his finger on the conservative Republican zeitgeist, the green-eyeshaded Daniels or the crusading Gingrich? Will there be peace with the socialist infidels until the books are balanced, or total war until the secularist roots of the socialist “machine” are destroyed once and for all?
It’s probably worth remembering where both of these men–and particularly the nationally-obscure Daniels–would have to begin any path to the White House: in Iowa.

This is not only a caucus states where social conservatives have always had a disproportionate influence (viz. Huckabee’s astonishing 2008 victory over Mitt Romney, who outspent him a gazillion-to-one). It’s also a place where conservative activists are more than a little obsessed with the goal of overturning the State Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage, a process that cannot, due to the vagaries of Iowa constitutional law, culminate before 2014.

Here’s guessing that a awful lot of Iowa Republican Caucus-goers won’t be ready to smoke any peace-pipes with their secular-socialist–and in their eyes, “sodomite”–enemies real soon, and that Daniels will have a tough sell convincing them otherwise.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Indiana Public Media

A Nation of Pilot Projects?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

More news this weekend that the Obama administration continues to pursue its unheralded campaign to reverse retrograde Bush-era policies and put the nation on a more sustainable footing. The president announced that the Department of Energy will award $2 billion in conditional commitments from the Recovery Act to two solar companies for plants in Arizona, Colorado, and Indiana, which together will create over 5,000 jobs.

The president’s heart is clearly in this cause. In his address, he said, “Already, I’ve seen the payoff from these investments. I’ve seen once-shuttered factories humming with new workers who are building solar panels and wind turbines; rolling up their sleeves to help America win the race for the clean energy economy.”

However, as good as it is, the announcement leaves a lingering question: On cutting-edge infrastructure issues such as solar, will we continue to be a nation of pilot projects? Or will we take any quantum leaps and achieve actual national policy?

There’s nothing to quarrel with in the announcements themselves. Abengoa Solar will build the plant in Arizona, which, when complete, will provide enough clean energy to power 70,000 homes. Over 70 percent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured here in the U.S.

Abound Solar Manufacturing is building the Colorado and Indiana plants, which will produce millions of state-of-the-art solar panels each year—in Indiana’s case, using an empty Chrysler factory.

In announcing the plants on July 4th weekend, the president said, “But what this weekend reminds us, more than any other, is that we are a nation that has always risen to the challenges before it. We are a nation that, 234 years ago, declared our independence from one of the greatest empires the world had ever known. We are a nation that mustered a sense of common purpose to overcome Depression and fear itself. . . I know America will write our own destiny once more.”

But the question is whether the scale, scope, and ambition of our solar policy rises to the level of the president’s language. The Recovery Act monies, and the policies underlying them, have been attacked left and right for failing to deliver on a set of clear national priorities. The stimulus dollars have been spread so wide and thin that they’ve been vulnerable to attacks both on pork and policy grounds.

That two solar plants are heralded as helping America “win the race for a clean economy” is the same pattern we’ve seen elsewhere in the collision between the clean economy campaign and today’s toxic budgetary and political environment. We saw the pattern in high-speed rail. As PPI’s Mark Reutter has noted, the administration announced $8 billion in stimulus funds that would go to a handful of projects. But without additional administration pressure, those funds are only being followed by $1 billion of congressional authorization. As 100 members of Congress wrote the president recently, “[G]iven budget constraints, we cannot continue to rely on general authorizations and appropriations to finance high-speed rail. We need to identify a dedicated revenue source for high-speed rail, and we need your help to do that.”

We have also seen the pattern in nuclear energy, where the administration took the bold step of announcing loan guarantees for two new nuclear plants in Georgia, the first built in a generation. However, the president’s language again made the actual commitment pale in comparison to the challenge. In announcing the guarantees, he cited the fact that there are, today, 56 nuclear reactors under construction around the world: 21 in China; six in South Korea, and five in India. He said, “Whether it’s nuclear energy or solar or wind energy, if we fail to invest in the technologies of tomorrow, then we’re going to be importing those technologies instead of exporting them.  We will fall behind. Jobs will be produced overseas instead of here in the United States of America. And that’s not a future that I accept.”

The ambitions are noble and the rhetoric stirring, but the question is whether we really are shaping a future here—or just a set of ambitious but singular pilot projects.

Yes, there is too little money in annual authorizations for serious infrastructure. But as infrastructure expert Norm Anderson has recently written for PPI, “The financing issue — not a surprise for anyone in the infrastructure business — is the number one problem facing the industry.”

This is all the more reason the administration should follow the stirring rhetoric about competitiveness and “writing our destiny” by creating a new institution, such as an infrastructure bank of the type proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and supported by the president in the past, that would create a long-term funding source and the energy for true national policy.

Photo credit: Bilfinger Berger Group

The State of the States: A Look at the Governors’ Races

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Having looked at the overall landscape of House and Senate elections recently, it’s probably time for another overview of gubernatorial contests, which will have a bearing not only on state policies but on the upcoming decennial round of redistricting.

There are 37 governorships up for grabs in November, including 19 held by Democrats and 18 by Republicans, which closely reflects the narrow 26-24 Democratic advantage in gubernatorial offices overall. How many of these races are competitive? Well, according to the (subscription-only) Cook Political Report’s Jennifer Duffy, 18 of them, or nearly half, are toss-ups, including eight now held by Democrats and ten by Republicans. Add in eight more that are rated as leaning in one direction or another, and that makes an amazing 26 competitive gubernatorial races, and a range of possible outcomes that’s all over the lot, and won’t necessarily reflect the congressional results. For one thing, even if you concede a Republican “tide” this year, the competitive races are largely in states carried by Barack Obama in 2008: that includes 12 of the 14 currently held by Democrats, and 8 of the 12 currently held by Republicans.

There are races all over the country where late primaries and/or competitive dynamics could change. Fully 21 states with gubernatorial races haven’t yet held primaries (counting Alabama, with a Republican runoff next week), including 18 now rated as competitive. And most states are experiencing deep fiscal problems that cut in all sorts of different directions; it’s not automatically clear in many places whether frightening budget shortfalls will benefit Republicans who are talking about cutting back government or Democrats who are resisting new tax cuts and fighting unpopular teacher layoffs and service reductions. And thanks to term limits, retirements, and primary outcomes, the impact of incumbency is also more limited than you might think: only two of the 12 vulnerable Republican seats (Arizona and Texas), and five of the 14 vulnerable Democratic seats (Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maryland and Ohio) will have an incumbent on the ballot in November. Making things even more confusing, a significant number of former governors are running as non-incumbents this year, including Democrats Jerry Brown of California, Roy Barnes of Georgia and John Kitzhaber of Oregon, and Republicans Terry Branstad of Iowa and Bobby Ehrlich of Maryland.

I’ll be doing a separate memo focusing on redistricting later on, but it’s worth noting that gubernatorial contests could have a huge impact on that process. For example, there are five states certain to gain congressional seats where Republicans currently control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Utah. The first four of those states have competitive governor’s races where a Democratic victory could mess up Republican “trifecta” control just in time for redistricting. New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all of which will lose congressional seats, also have very close partisan balances in the state legislature, and Ohio and Pennsylvania have competitive governor’s races. It’s kind of like three-dimensional chess, and well worth watching as we approach November.

Poll Watch

It’s been a quiet week on the polling front. New Rasmussen surveys of the gubernatorial races in Ohio and Pennsylvania show competitive races with GOPers out in front. In Ohio, which has been a very close contest, the poll gives Republican John Kasich a 47-40 lead over incumbent Ted Strickland, his biggest lead in any published poll since a Rasmussen survey in March. In Pennsylvania, however, Rasmussen shows Republican Tom Corbett’s lead over Democrat Dan Onorato dropping from 16 points (49-33) to ten points (49-39) since early June; the 10-point margin is also what PPP reported in its latest Pennsylvania poll.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, whose primary is on July 20, Insider Advantage has a new poll of the Republican gubernatorial race showing long-time front-runner John Oxendine falling into a tie with Karen Handel at 18 percent, with Nathan Deal at 12 percent. This is a bit counter-intuitive since Oxendine and a fourth candidate, Eric Johnson, have recently been dominating the airwaves with ads, though at Iowa’s Southern Political Report site, John Tures attributes a purported Handel “surge” to her recent endorsement by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, “the next Sarah Palin.” (I have a separate post at FiveThirtyEight examining Brewer’s new national influence.) It’s probably worth noting that shortly before South Carolina’s June 8 primary, Iowa showed Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer headed for a runoff with Nikki Haley; he instead finished a dismal fourth. We’ll see if the firm has got a better “Handel” on Republican sentiment in Georgia.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs every Tuesday and Friday.

Terrorism, Material Support and the First Amendment

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There is no freedom more sacrosanct in the U.S. legal system than the First Amendment right to free speech. The First Amendment protects speech that a lot of people may find offensive: pornography, violent movies, even hate speech. The Supreme Court is fiercely protective of the right, and does not hesitate to strike down any law that encroaches on it. However, on June 21, the Supreme Court departed from that stance when it handed down its decision in a case challenging maybe the most important anti-terrorism law in the U.S. arsenal.

The case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, concerned a federal law commonly referred to as the “material support” statute. The law criminalizes a range of activities aimed at helping terrorist groups. The plaintiffs in the case are a collection of groups and individuals who sued the federal government to declare the “material support” statute unconstitutional as it applies to their activities with respect to two known terrorist organizations. In this specific instance, the plaintiffs wanted to provide money, legal aid, and political advocacy for two groups that the secretary of state declared to be terrorist organizations. One of their central arguments was that criminalizing its ability to advocate for those organizations was an unconstitutional restriction of their First Amendment rights.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the government saying that the statute did not unconstitutionally impinge on the plaintiffs’ right to free speech. The crux of the Court’s 36-page opinion is this: The nature of the acts of terrorist organizations is so nefarious that support in any form, even when the support goes towards legal activities, is an illegal act that Congress can constitutionally regulate. The Court did identify advocacy that is “entirely independent” of a terrorist organization as permissible under the statute, but that any assistance directed at or by a specific terrorist organization or organizations is illegal.

In support of its stance that the statute does not encroach on the right to free speech, the Court paints a convincing picture of how the statute promotes a compelling governmental interest to fight terrorism and how the plaintiffs’ proposed action may help a terrorist organization further its illegal objectives. The opinion points out that supporting legal activities can free up an organization’s resources, allowing it to direct those resources towards planning and carrying out acts of terrorism. Providing legal advice or political advocacy can also help legitimize an organization, making it easier to recruit members and raise funds.

The Court lays out a logical and convincing argument as to why activities like those proposed by the plaintiffs in this case should be restricted; but what are all the different types of activities that could be considered to materially support terrorism? For example, what if Hamas wanted to sue someone or was being sued and they wanted to hire an American law firm? Besides the obvious fact that providing legal assistance to a terrorist organization would be a public relations nightmare for an American law firm, such an act, like the legal assistance that plaintiffs in this case proposed to provide, also appears to be illegal.

The Court’s bottom line here is that terrorist organizations do not segregate their legitimate activities from their criminal ones. Any money that they raise through legitimate channels is likely to go towards supporting violence. The same goes for political or legal aid. While the Court’s rationale is solid, it seems that there will likely be future arguments over what kinds of actions the “material support” statute actually proscribes and what degree of connection someone must have with a terrorist organization for their advocacy actions to be considered illegal.

Photo credit: Jeff Kubina’s Photostream

A Great Friend

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican U.S. senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.

In a long and interesting profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, it was vouchsafed that the senior senator had described the Tea Party Movement as a marginal, passing fad that “will die out.”

Asked about this comment on Fox News yesterday, the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who has been intervening in state after state to support Tea Party-approved candidates against alleged RINOs, had this to say:

“Lindsey’s a great friend, but he’s wrong on this.”

“The tea party is just the tip of the iceberg of an American awakening of people that want to take back their government,” said DeMint, a vocal leader of the tea party movement. “Americans are going to show in November that they aren’t going anywhere.”

Insofar as DeMint appears to think the Tea Party Movement is coextensive with “Americans,” it might be inferred that doesn’t think his “great friend” Lindsey Graham is actually an American, much less right on this subject.

As for Graham’s intentions, the Times profile can be read in two very different ways. Perhaps he’s already decided to pack it in when his current term ends, and thus doesn’t care what he says. On the other hand, given his obvious pride in mastery of public opinion polls, perhaps he thinks he can flip-flop just enough to stay ahead of the conservative mobs back home who are itching for his destruction, and get re-elected anyway. He’s certainly off to a good start with his abandonment of bipartisan negotiations on several key topics, but he might be advised to be a little more circumspect about the political calculations that guide his conduct.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A Look at the Senate Races

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s now just four months until Election Day, and for those who really like to think ahead, not much more than a year-and-a-half away from the next Iowa caucuses. (Speaking of the 2012 presidential nominating process, I’ve got an item posted at FiveThirtyEight about the maneuvering over the rules and calendar for that contest.)

My political memo on Tuesday focused mainly on an overview of House races, so today let’s take a closer look at the U.S. Senate. As noted on Tuesday, Nate Silver has slightly upgraded Democratic Senate prospects after the recent batch of primaries, and now thinks the probabilities come in at about 55 for what Democrats might have in the way of a Senate majority after November. Over at the (subscription-only) “Cook Political Report,” Jennifer Duffy, relying somewhat less than Silver on polling data, reaches similar conclusions about the overall landscape but with different takes on specific races. Duffy, for example, still has Arkansas in the toss-up category, while Silver says: “Our model now shows Blanche Lincoln’s chances to be close to zero (technically, about 0.3 percent, which rounds down to zero).” Conversely, the Cook Report shows the Connecticut race as “lean Dem” (having briefly rated it as a toss-up after the military record controversy hit Democrat Richard Blumenthal), while FiveThirtyEight rates it as “safe Dem.” It will be interesting to see if these and other forecasts begin to converge as we get closer to November.

It’s also worth remembering that the nominees haven’t been sorted out yet in several competitive or potentially competitive Senate races, notably Colorado, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.  And most interesting of all will be to see if some sort of intensified national wave begins to help Republican Senate candidates towards the home stretch, which could solidify the GOP’s shaky hold on seats in Ohio and Missouri (and perhaps Florida, where Marco Rubio consistently trails now-indie Charlie Crist), while making Democratic incumbents in Washington, California and Wisconsin a lot more vulnerable. To use historical analogies, we’ll find out if this Senate cycle is more like 1980 and 2008, when one party (Rs in 1980, Ds in 2008) got every break and won every close race, or like 1982, a recession-ridden year when the incumbent Republicans dodged a lot of bullets.

The polling world this week was roiled by a conflict between Daily Kos and the Research 2000 public opinion research firm, which has done regular polling for DKos for the last two years.  DKos proprietor Markos Moulitsas dismissed the firm recently, apparently unhappy with its accuracy as rated by FiveThirtyEight. But then an investigation of anomalies in R2K numbers convinced Markos that there might be fraud or at least book-cooking involved, and now the charges and counter-charges are flying and lawsuits are being filed. As the facts get sorted out, all sorts of political observers (including yours truly) are looking back at what they might have said or concluded based on R2K data. It is clear that if R2K gets out or is forced out of the state polling biz, the dominance of Rasmussen data, with its apparent pro-GOP “house effect,” could grow, though PPP seems to be expanding its state polling significantly.

Poll Watch

In polls this week that aren’t part of any overriding dispute, PPP takes a look at GOP statewide primaries in Wisconsin, and finds self-funder Ron Johnson with a big lead over hard-core ideologue David Westlake in the Senate race, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker with an equally comfortable lead over former Rep. Mark Neumann in the gubernatorial race.  Meanwhile the increasingly visible Republican polling firm Magellan has Democratic former Gov. John Kitzhaber and Republican candidate Chris Dudley even in the Oregon gubernatorial race, and shows Republican former Gov. Bobby Ehrlich inching ahead of incumbent Democrat Martin O’Malley in Maryland.

Recommendations on Curbing the National Deficit

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is the is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s June 30 testimony before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform during the commission’s first public listening session:

Chairman Bowles, Chairman Simpson, and Members of the Commission, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss ways to put America on a fiscally sustainable course.

Once unemployment rates start to fall, U.S. policy makers must be prepared to pivot sharply from fiscal stimulus to fiscal restraint. Otherwise, a large and growing federal debt will deplete our capital stock and thereby limit future economic growth. It will divert resources from productive investment to interest payments on the debt, half of which is already held by foreign lenders. And it will shake investor confidence, here and abroad, in the fundamental soundness of the U.S. economy, eventually driving interest rates up and the dollar down.

Despite these dire and entirely foreseeable consequences, too many federal policy makers remain in denial about the need for fiscal discipline. You have taken on what many consider a Mission Impossible: forging a bipartisan consensus on how to defuse the nation’s debt crisis. That’s put you in the crosshairs of extreme partisans of the left and right, who imagine this problem can be solved strictly at the other side’s expense. By refusing either to cut spending or raise taxes, the two have joined in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt the country.

Common to both is the assumption that you can have fiscal responsibility, or you can have progressive government, but you can’t have both. We at the Progressive Policy Institute have always rejected this false choice. We believe that a progressive government can and must live within its means, and that if it instead chases the illusion of borrowed prosperity, it’s not really progressive.

To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, Americans know instinctively that borrowing routinely to consume more than you produce is both bad economics and bad morals. I don’t think it’s an accident that, as public worries about deficits have been mounting, public trust in government has been plummeting.

So there’s a lot riding on your ability to forge consensus behind a bold and balanced plan to restore fiscal responsibility. Let me offer some thoughts on what that plan should include from the perspective of a “progressive fiscal hawk.”

Read the entire testimony.

Obligatory World Cup Interlude

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m not that much of a soccer fan. I don’t follow a club team, though by proxy, I suppose my obsessed Liverpool-loving Swedish best-bud Eric Sundstrom would claim me for his side.

But I love the World Cup.

To put this in perspective, my World Cup love pales in comparison to my Notre Dame football obsession, an illness that transforms the otherwise mild-mannered, level-headed gentleman I consider myself into a stark-raving lunatic on 12 Saturdays in the fall. (It’s bad. I drop F-bombs in front of eight-year-olds; I now know myself well-enough to warn their parents.) My Notre Dame addiction allows me to speak the same language as my soccer-loving brethren. Read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (a great memoir about his love of English club Arsenal that was translated into “American” in a horrible film with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon about the Red Sox), and you see where I’m coming from.

The soccer affair started in France, like all wonderfully cliched romances. I did an internship outside of Paris in 1998, the summer between my junior and senior year of college. When I arrived that May, I was only vaguely aware that the planet’s greatest competition/festival was about to kick off underneath my nose. A naively conceived, cellphone-less attempt to meet with Kate Sullivan, the only other American I knew in Paris that summer, on the Champs Elysees in the wake France’s 3-0 victory over South Africa turned out to be as fun as it was initially frustrating. The spontaneous gathering of 400,000 French football nutters made our rendezvous, er, challenging.

Suffice it to say that the combination of good sport, a month-long French national fete, and what I would discover to be World Cup’s intriguing ties to politics, demographics and diplomacy had me hooked.

Frank Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World and Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski can explain. This year’s tournament hasn’t disappointed, and the star has been North Korea. Seriously, who else would have paid 1,000 Chinese fans to travel to South Africa and cheer for Pyongyang? This was after Kim Jong-Il made the disasterous decision to air his country’s match against Portgual. We joked that the 7-0 public drubbing that must have landed the team in a concentration camp for “re-education.” I fear that may be closer to reality than we’re comfortable with.

Dictators struggle with such a broad, uncontrollably open international stage. Pyongyang was playing with fire — what if self-exiled protestors exploited the opportunity to beam their grievances back home? Iran routinely blocks soccer broadcasts out of such fears. And it was shocking to me that last year’s qualifier between Egypt and Algeria had to be moved to neutral Sudan due to violence against the Algerians in Egypt. Can’t Hosni Mubarak extend his police-state’s writ to football crowd-control? Or is he letting Egyptian hooligans blow off steam that would be otherwise targeted at him?

Then there was the “most politically charged game in the world,” that occurred during that amazing French summer of 1998: USA vs. Iran. Here’s a taste:

Iranian-born Mehrdad Masoudi was a FIFA media officer for the match but, given the diplomatic and security issues surrounding the game in Lyon, his responsibilities were far more wide-ranging.

“One of the first problems was that Iran were team B and the USA were team A,” explains Masoudi. “According to FIFA regulations team B should walk towards team A for the pre-match handshakes, but Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei gave express orders that the Iranian team must not walk towards the Americans.”

Masoudi eventually negotiated a compromise which saw the Americans walk towards the Iranians…

Iran won, 2-1, but the game wasn’t all lost from the American side: “We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years,” said U.S. defender Jeff Agoos at the time.

That’s it. I revel in the split-second excitement of a well-struck goal, and appreciate the enduring frustration of so, so many near-misses. But the World Cup’s true allure is how it means so much more, to so many billions of people, beyond just the final score. That just happens to be why Notre Dame means so much too.

Good Ol’ Days

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When House Republican leader (and would-be Speaker) John Boehner claimed the other day that Democrats were “snuffing out the America I grew up in,” it didn’t cause much reaction (or at least far less than his remarks on Social Security and on financial regulation), since it’s the kind of thing conservatives say all the time. But as Mike Tomasky quickly noted, it was a very strange statement if you actually think the problem with Democrats is their addiction to big government and their subservience to unions:

Boehner was born in November 1949. Let’s take a look at the America he grew up in.In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.

In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

That’s all very true. But as Matt Yglesias observes, the country was in fact a lot more conservative back then on the cultural front:

[In] many other respects the America of John Boehner’s youth was a much more right-wing country. Gays and lesbians were stuffed deep into the closet, and there was no suggestion that they should be allowed to serve openly in the military or in any other role. African-Americans were subjected to pervasive discrimination in housing and employment, and in the southern states they couldn’t vote or exercise any basic rights–all this backed by the state, and also by collusion between state authorities and ad hoc terrorist groups. It was a whiter country with dramatically fewer residents of Asian or Latin American descent. It was a more religiously observant country, and it was a country in which Jews were far from fully accepted into American life.I’m not nostalgic for that era at all. There are a few areas of policy in which I think we’ve moved backwards since the mid-sixties, but I wouldn’t want to return to an America with almost no immigrants or to an America with a single monopoly provider of telecom services. I’m glad airlines can set their own ticket prices and I’m glad black people can sit in the front of the bus. What is it that Boehner misses?

What indeed? Let’s all remember Boehner’s regret for the passing of the good ol’ days of high taxes, strong unions, Jim Crow and homophobia next time we are told that the GOP wants to declare a truce in the culture wars, or only cares about economic or fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A Red Card for Airbus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Referees often make costly mistakes, as we’ve seen in the World Cup. But the World Trade Organization (WTO), which umpires international commerce, got a big decision right yesterday. It handed the United States a thumping victory in a long-standing, high-stakes dispute with Europe over aircraft subsidies.

At issue were some $20 billion and below-market lending rates — known as “launch aid” – that several European governments had provided to aircraft manufacturer Airbus. The WTO deemed launch aid to be an illegal subsidy, upholding a September 2009 interim ruling.

The largess of European taxpayers was critical to Airbus’ development of several of the companies’ main commercial jets. Without such favorable financial assistance, the WTO’s ruling said, it “would not have been possible for Airbus to have launched all of these models, as originally designed and at the times it did.” In other words, without government subsidies, Airbus would have never have become the world’s number 2 player in the lucrative market for commercial airframes. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has said that the subsidies have done “great harm” to competing U.S. manufacturing firms, especially number 1 Boeing.

The ruling is welcome, not just for Boeing and American manufacturers but because it boosts the credibility of the rules-based global trading system, which lately has shown signs of fraying at the edges. If the rules aren’t enforced, trade will become a zero-sum game as countries resort to mercantilist and protectionist strategies to protect their economic interests. That in turn could bring global prosperity crashing down. The WTO’s decision is important too because it serves as a warning to other countries — China, Brazil, and Russia — who might or want to subsidize their own aircraft producers.

In an ironic twist, even the unions were on board in support of freer trade in the Airbus case. As Will Marshall and I wrote back in September (when the interim ruling was announced), “Although organized labor often has taken a skeptical if not hostile stance toward international trade, Boeing’s unions strongly backed the U.S. government’s decision to file the case in 2004. The unions realized that Boeing competitiveness was suffering and that only fair and enforceable trade rules would ensure it.”

The WTO has no mechanism for enforcing its rulings,  but rather provides the legal justification for the United States  to even the playing field. It would be best, of course, if Airbus and its European patrons bowed to the WTO’s judgment and end the illegal subsidies. It would be a tragic irony if Europe were to embrace an economic unilateralism even as President Obama has put the United States back on a course of multilateral cooperation. But if Europe won’t play by the rules, the United States has three options.

First, our government could levy tariffs on Airbus imports to the United States. Second, it could spread the pain by taxing other European imports. And third, Washington could subsidize aircraft production by U.S. firms.

The first is far and away the best choice — taxing Airbus limits the trade dispute to an isolated sector of the market, and avoids a broader trade war over other products. Government subsidies for U.S. firms are the least attractive option, because other companies in other sectors may lobby for money based on that precedent, further distorting trade.

I don’t expect Europe to just roll over and play dead. Though the EU hasn’t officially decided whether or not to appeal the ruling, and there is the possibility that some governments will just ignore the ruling and continue to subsidize production. That’s a big gamble of course, because it would just provoke more stringent U.S. tariffs on imports.

But for now, the good news is that the worlds’ trade ump is on the job, sending off those who break the rules.

Photo credit: Caribb’s Photostream

“Top Two” Illusions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting developments on the June 8 “Super Tuesday Primary” day was the approval of a ballot initiative (Prop 14) by California voters creating a “top two” voting system. Similar to the process already used in Washington State, it essentially abolishes party primaries and provides that the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary will proceed to the general election.

Over at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has examined the claims of Prop 14 backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger that the new system will reduce ideological and partisan polarization in California, and concludes it’s pretty much a nothing-burger. He takes on two particular illusions associated with Prop 14: the idea that party primaries and gerrymandering are responsible for political polarization in California, and the idea that abolishing party primaries will prevent ideologues from winning elections.

On the first topic, his reseach shows:

The most important source of polarization in California politics is the ideological divide between supporters of the two major parties….In both California and the nation, ideological polarization increased considerably over this time period, but it has always been greater in California. That’s because while California Republicans are as conservative as Republicans in the rest of the country, California Democrats are considerably more liberal than Democrats in the rest of the country.

And on the second topic:

In Washington, which began using the new system in 2008, the electoral consequences were minimal. In all 9 of the state’s congressional districts the open primary produced a general election runoff between the Democratic or Republican incumbent and a challenger from the opposing party and in all 9 general election contests the incumbent was victorious. And based on the winners’ voting records in the 111th Congress, the new primary system has had no effect on partisan polarization–the gap between the state’s Democratic and Republican representatives was just as large in the current Congress as it was in the previous one. Expect the same results in California.

So can we just forget about Prop 14? That’s not quite clear just yet. The new system could produce some strange and unintended consequences.

For one thing, making the primary non-partisan could be a major boon to self-funders, who may simply need high name ID to win a general election spot, particularly in California statewide races where the cost of television advertising will be prohibitive for many candidates. For another, the system could theoretically increase partisan polarization. The “top two” system does not provide any particular incentive for winning an actual majority of votes in a primary; the top finisher still must face the runner-up in the general election, where turnout is very likely to be much higher. So the safe thing to do is to nail down a general election spot by appealing to partisans (Prop 14 does not repeal party registration, which means that candidates will know exactly whom to contact with partisan messages), while beginning the general election campaign by going after the other party’s preferred candidate.

Consider this year’s governor’s race. If Meg Whitman were running with her vast fortune in a “top two” system, perhaps she would not have spent quite so much time attacking Steve Poizner for alleged ideological heresy. But on the other hand, she would have had every incentive to go after Democrat Jerry Brown (whom she largely ignored) hammer and tongs to drive up his negatives in preparation for November.

In effect, Prop 14 makes the general election cycle a lot longer. That does not seem to be a particularly smart way to reduce partisan polarization.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Nancyf’s Photostream


School Reform or Edujobs?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s a move afoot in Congress to cut one of President Obama’s most creative and cost-effective reforms – the Education Department’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. Which GOP troglodyte is behind it? Actually, it’s a prominent liberal: Rep. David Obey (D-WI).

Obey, chairman of the mighty House Appropriations Committee, introduced a bill this week to cut $500 million from the fund. He also wants to skim $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps districts set up pay-for-performance systems to reward excellent teachers, and to take $100 million from a pot of money set up to help finance charter schools.

These raids on signature Obama school improvement initiatives are intended to raise $10 billion to help fund the Keep Our Educators Working Act, otherwise known as the “edujobs” bill. It would send federal dollars to the states to prevent teacher layoffs. Pitting jobs against efforts to improve America’s lowest-performing schools is a profoundly bad idea.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has used the Race to the Top Fund brilliantly to leverage overdue changes in state laws that inhibit innovation in underperforming school districts. To compete for federal grants, states must remove arbitrary caps on charter schools, track students’ educational growth year by year, and include that information in teacher evaluation. The other funds operate on the same principle that the federal government should play a strategic role in education, using small investments to stimulate state and local innovations in teacher compensation and public school choice.

No one wants to see teachers lose their jobs in today’s dicey economy. But no one wants to see firefighters or police or, for that matter, construction workers, sales reps or bank tellers lose their jobs either. With unemployment stuck near 10 percent, Congress has a clear moral responsibility to extend unemployment and transitional health care benefits. But what’s the rationale for singling out teachers for a special measure of job protection?

What’s more, Obey and his liberal allies have not tied the extra money to changes in the way school districts conduct reductions in force. Most districts use the last-in-first-out (LIFO) method, in which teachers with the least seniority and lowest salaries are dismissed first. LIFO thus reinforces a tenure system that ties compensation to years on the job irrespective of job performance, and that deters more talented people from becoming teachers. It also means that the cost of overall spending on teacher salaries will rise faster than if reductions in force had been made across the experience spectrum.

If edujobs is bad policy, it’s worse politics. It practically begs conservatives to charge that Democrats put the interests of the adults in public education over the interests of the kids.

It happens, however, that that’s not true. Obey’s proposal has sparked strenuous objections both from the Education Department and from progressive school reformers in Congress. “If we are to meet the President’s goal of becoming global leaders in college graduates by 2020, we must rethink and reinvent our approach to education by moving forward with bold reforms,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “Unfortunately, the proposed cuts represent a major step backward.”

Obey is a liberal lion who is retiring after a long career in Congress at the end of this term. Polis is only a freshman, but he’s right, and progressives ought to rally behind the president’s efforts to fix America’s broken schools.

Photo credit: House Committee on Education and Labor’s Photostream

Give Innovation Economics a Chance

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Budget deficits are emerging as one of Washington’s chief economic obsessions, with both liberal and conservative economic camps opining about the deficit’s effect on the economy. Robert Samuelson’s recent column in the Washington Post describes how the major economic doctrines—particularly Keynesian and monetarists (or supply-siders)—interpret the fiscal impact of budget deficits.

Keynesians believe budget deficits (either from increased spending or reduced taxes) can stimulate the economy, leading to more demand and therefore more jobs. As Paul Krugman’s recent arguments have demonstrated, they believe that when unemployment rates are high job creation should not be sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction. In contrast, many neoclassical economists, especially conservative supply-siders, argue that big government deficits reduce national savings and increase interest rates while also contributing to financial uncertainty and reducing private sector investments.

While Samuelson rightly points out the differing perspectives of the Keynesian and supply-siders, he misses what they have in common. Neither of them considers the role of innovation in their growth models or distinguishes between spending and investment. And with this omission they fail to see what particular types of deficit spending can be harmful to the economy and conversely what kinds can be beneficial.

Innovation economists argue that the long-term benefits of investments, particularly in innovation, outweigh the costs of temporary budget deficits. For example, as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently demonstrated, expanding the R&D tax credit, while costing the government money in the short run, would actually lead to more revenue for the Treasury in the medium term. Innovation economists support direct investments, such as government research, and indirect public investments, such as an expansion of the R&D tax credit. Robust investment in innovation and technology are essential to long-term growth. This is because innovation increases productivity, and productivity gains have accounted for the lion’s share of economic prosperity over the last several decades.

Once economists recognize innovation as the most important part of economic policy, the impact of budget deficits becomes clearer. For example, neoclassical economists worry that deficit spending will increase interest rates and reduce the amount of capital available for private sector investment. Innovation economists believe that investments in technology and knowledge spur economic growth and will generate more capital. The problem is that the market doesn’t always allocate as much capital to these endeavors as it should. Indeed, the extremely low interest rates in the early 2000s did little to boost these kinds of investments. Instead, people used low interest rates to increase capitalized spending, specifically in housing, which created the housing bubble. Instead of emphasizing access to capital, innovation economics argues that if investment in technology (including new capital equipment used by business) is the goal, then policy makers would do better to focus on policies that incentivize such investments, such as allowing first-year capital expensing—even if doing so temporarily increases the budget deficit.

Samuelson frets that the differing opinions on how to handle the budget deficit indicate that “[w]e may be reaching the limits of economics.” Indeed, if in the knowledge-based economy we are limited by theories that still define the production process as only land, labor or capital, as Adam Smith did, these legacy economic doctrines will likely offer little advice on the budget. On the other hand, the new-growth theory of innovation economics that puts knowledge and innovation at the center of the contemporary production process is more able to intellectually navigate the modern, global economy and dictate appropriate policy decisions.

Photo credit: TheTruthAbout…’s Photostream

The Ever-Shifting RINO Line

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting byproducts of the Tea Party Movement and the ideological battles going on within the Republican Party is that the tolerance of “movement conservatives” for dissent is really reaching a low level. This was made most painfully evident during the recent Utah Senate primary, when Tim Bridgewater, whose issue positions would have placed him on the far right fringe of the GOP as recently as a couple of years ago, was regularly denounced by supporters of Mike Lee as a RINO, mainly for supporting in the past Republican initiatives that a majority of Republican officeholders also supported.

Now the litmus-testers seem to be training their sights on the GOP’s leadership in the House. Check out the language of this post today from right-wing opinion leader Erick Erickson of RedState:

Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives and, more troubling, do not have any intention of trying to win at the polls by forcing Democrat hands on Obamacare….Last week and on Monday I mentioned Rep. Steve King’s effort to repeal Obamacare and start over. He’s filed a discharge petition. If he gets 218 signatures, Nancy Pelosi must hold a vote.

At the time, I was hearing that Eric Cantor was desperate to undermine Steve King’s efforts and, sure enough, he’s trying. Worse, he has John Boehner helping him….

Today, Eric Cantor and John Boehner are announcing that they’ll sign King’s discharge petition, but they’re also going to go with one by Congressman Wally Herger that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with a Republican alternative….

Tea Party activists and others should pay attention here: Eric Cantor and John Boehner are implementing a strategy that makes it look like they are on your side, but are in fact stabbing you in the back.

Cantor and Boehner are spinning this as a good thing. But it is not. It muddies the water and gives Democrats an escape from being forced to take action.

Any Republican who signs on to the Herger discharge petition should be driven from office for betraying the “repeal” cause. This does nothing but provide cover to people who don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, just nibble at the edges.

And should the GOP take back Congress in November, we should remember this betrayal and the lies that go with it.

So a strategic difference of opinion in which Boehner and Cantor, who are slavishly deferential to the conservative movement, chose not to go along with the routinely demented Steve King becomes a “betrayal” rationalized by “lies” that reveal the two top House GOP leaders as secret allies of the satanic socialists.

Granted, Erickson likes to play the bully-boy and go rhetorically over the top as an intimidation tactic, but this is still pretty amazing stuff. Looks like by November the RINO line will have shifted so far that even Steve King will need to watch his back.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: asterix661