Tag Archives: democrat

GOP to Give Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency the Darrell Issa Treatment

by Shayna9349 Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ever since Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) helped get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground in 2010, Republicans have been trying to shut it down. GOPers drafted legislation to weaken the fledgling agency, which was designed to prevent mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and other financial institutions from screwing average Americans. The measures died. Republicans turned to the courts to gut the bureau. That effort failed. Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, they have another weapon at their disposal: new subpoena powers they can deploy to blitz the CFPB with document requests.

The goal is obvious: dig out material the GOPers can use to embarrass the agency. And if nothing untoward is discovered, Republican legislators can at least pin down the bureau with onerous paperwork demands. Democrats fear Republicans’ new information-gathering abilities will make it easier for the agency’s foes to launch witch-hunt style investigations of the CFPB similar to those former House oversight committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) launched regarding Benghazi and the IRS.

All committees in both the House and the Senate have the right to subpoena federal agencies for information. But until recently, either the most senior committee member from the minority party had to sign off on a subpoena or the entire committee had to vote on the request. In the last Congress, six House committees okayed a rule change giving the committee chair unilateral subpoena power. On Tuesday, the House financial services committee—which has jurisdiction over the CFPB—voted along party lines to grant the same privilege to its Republican chairman, Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

Republicans already have a track record of looking for information that could tarnish the CFPB’s reputation, and Democrats fully expect Hensarling to continue down the same path. And now Hensarling, a fierce CFPB critic, will be able to more easily mount politically motivated investigations of the agency.

Without the rule change, GOPers could still push through the subpoenas. As the majority, Republicans on the committee could vote to approve an information request. But with its new subpoena superpowers, the committee can demand records without a vote—and, thus, can keep the process from the public eye, a spokesman for the committee Democrats says. No longer will there be a public hearing where lawmakers can debate the subpoenas and Democrats can make a case if they think Hensarling and the Republicans are abusing the privilege. Last year, for example, ranking Democratic member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) used the public forum to convince Hensarling to back down on a Treasury Department subpoena.

Now, if Democrats want to keep GOPers from going on a fishing expedition aimed at tarnishing the CFPB, they won’t have as much of an opportunity to create a ruckus. At a committee hearing Tuesday, Waters, the senior Democrat on the panel, called the rules change “anti-democratic” and “insulting.” (Under the new rule, Waters will be given 48 hours notice before Hensarling issues a subpoena, so that she can alert the press if she wants.)

“We think it’s ridiculous that the Republican leadership is exporting the Issa model to the rest of the House,” a Democratic staffer told Politico. Several other House committees are expected to approve similar powers for their chairs this month.

Last year the GOP-dominated financial services committee voted to subpoena three CFPB officials to require them to testify in an ongoing investigation of alleged discrimination against minorities and women at the bureau. Democrats claimed the move was politically motivated.

Hensarling has not yet indicated how he might use the new subpoena powers. Some Republicans are unhappy with the CFPB’s plan to crack down on shady payday lenders, so Hensarling could potentially subpoena the data the agency is collecting in an attempt to prove the effort is overly invasive. Hensarling denies the new rule is undemocratic.

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

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GOP to Give Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency the Darrell Issa Treatment

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Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ — But That Doesn’t Really Mean Much

by Heike2245hgux Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Gerson thinks that Democrats have regressed to the bad old days of 70s liberal excess, when the American public rebelled against lefty craziness and finally installed Ronald Reagan as president to get the country back on track. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats eventually got their party back in power by moving toward the center, but over the past six years that’s all been thrown overboard. “President Obama has now effectively undone everything that Clinton and the New Democrats did in the 1980s and ’90s,” he warns.

Ed Kilgore, who was there, throws up his hands in irritation:

Since Gerson appears to assume that Clinton was strictly about appropriating conservative themes, I guess he cannot come to grips with the fact that the Affordable Care Act was based on the “managed competition” model that a lot of New Democrats preferred to Clinton’s own health care proposal, or that Obama’s “cap-and-trade” proposal was relentlessly and redundantly promoted by the New Democratic think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. Just about everything Obama has proposed on tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and even national security policy has been right out of the Clintonian playbook. Has Gerson noticed that Obama’s not real popular with people on the left wing of the Democratic Party?

There’s a weirdly schizoid nature to Obama’s presidency. If you were to call him the most liberal president since LBJ, you’d be right. There’s really not much question about it.

But that’s not because he’s some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It’s because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It’s easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter’s strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter’s liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.

Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal. So is it fair to say that Obama is the most liberal president of the past half century? Sure, in the same way that it’s fair to say that a Honda Civic is faster than a Toyota Corolla or a Chevy Cruze. But that hardly makes the Civic a speed demon.

Still, even with all that said, Obama is, in fact, more liberal than previous Democratic presidents of the past half century. He’s rhetorically more liberal than Clinton, for example, and he’s rarely felt the need to do any Sister Souljah-ing. What’s more, while he may have made occasional noises about entitlements and budget deficits, he’s got nothing like either welfare reform or bank deregulation on his record. Everything he’s done has been pretty much in the mainstream liberal tradition.

Plus there’s one more thing: Obama has been far more effective than either Carter or Clinton. That obviously makes him seem more effectively liberal than his predecessors. But this isn’t really due to either a fervent commitment to radical populism or to shrewd management of the lefty agenda. It’s because Obama enjoyed a huge Democratic majority in Congress for his first two years. When that went away in 2010, so did much of his success.

So two things are true: Obama is the most liberal president since LBJ and he’s also a fairly standard-issue mainstream Democrat. Obamacare, in particular, doesn’t make him a radical. It just makes him lucky to have had a Congress willing to pass it.

After 30 years of ascendant Reaganism, it’s probably normal for conservatives to feel that any kind of liberal agenda is extremist almost by definition. But that’s little more than an unwillingness to accept the normal pendulum swings of American politics. As Kilgore points out, Obama’s tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and national security policy have been to the left of George Bush, but not really much different from anything Bill Clinton would have done if he’d been able to. In the end, Obama is a Honda Civic to Clinton’s Toyota Corolla. A little faster, but still not exactly a thunderbolt.

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Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ — But That Doesn’t Really Mean Much

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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

by Ellie77Vgachfw Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that there might not really be much we can do to retaliate against North Korea for the Sony hack. So I was curious to read “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” a Wall Street Journal editorial telling us what options we had. I figured that if anyone could make the best case for action, it was the Journal.

Unfortunately, they mostly just persuaded me that there really is very little we can do. After clearing their throats with a couple of suggestions that even they admit are mostly just symbolic, they get to the meat of things:

Earlier this year Rep. Ed Royce introduced the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which gives Treasury the power it needs to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances. It passed the House easily in July but has since been locked up in Harry Reid’s Senate at the behest of the Obama Administration. Mr. Royce tells us he plans to reintroduce the bill as a first order of business in the new Congress. New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has introduced similar legislation in the Senate; a bill could be on Mr. Obama’s desk by the second week in January.

So….that’s it. And even this is weaker tea than the Journal suggests. For starters, the bill has a serious structural problem because it puts severe limits on the president’s power, which is why Obama hasn’t supported it in the past. It’s a bad idea in foreign relations for Congress to mandate sanctions that can then be lifted only by Congress. This makes it almost impossible for presidents to negotiate future agreements because they have no carrots to offer in return for good behavior.

But that could be fixed. What can’t be fixed is the fact that North Korea learned a lesson from our previous attempt at tightening economic sanctions in 2007, when we cut off the US links of Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank suspected of doing business with North Korea. This in turn panicked other Macau banks into cutting off their relationships with North Korea, which severely restricted the regime’s access to dollars. As the Journal notes, this genuinely hurt North Korea, and the Bush administration agreed to resolve the BDA issue during the Six-Party nuclear talks later that year.

Unfortunately for us, sanctions like this would hurt North Korea a lot less now than they did back in 2007. Stephan Haggard explains:

Post-BDA, and since the ascent of Kim Jong-un in particular, North Korea has also sought to diversify its trade, investment and financial links. The KPA and its associates have developed relationships with financial entities that are not concerned with access to the U.S. market, both in China and outside it; Russia will be particularly interesting to watch in this regard but there is also the open field of the Middle East….While this legislation might raise the costs of proliferation activities if implemented, it is unlikely to staunch them completely and could simply forge new networks beyond the law’s reach.

Another question is whether the sanctions will have the broader strategic effect of moving the North Koreans toward serious negotiation of its nuclear program….The paradoxical feature of sanctions is that they rarely have the direct effect of forcing the target country to capitulate. The HR 1771 sanctions will have effect only when coupled with strong statements of a willingness to engage if North Korea showed signs of interest in doing so. The legislation provides plenty of sticks; the administration will have to continue to articulate the prospective carrots in a way that is credible. Strong sanctions legislation makes that difficult to do if the legislation places a series of binding constraints on the president’s discretion. Why negotiate with the U.S. if there is no return from doing so?

With changes, Royce’s sanctions bill might be an appropriate response to the Sony hack. However, it’s unlikely to have a severe effect on North Korea. Even worse, past history shows that a single-minded “get tough” attitude toward the DPRK can backfire badly, as it did on George Bush when his refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang in 2002 led in short order to the ejection of UN inspectors and the construction of plutonium bombs from a stockpile that had previously been kept under lock and key.

As the cliche goes, there are no good options here, just bad and less bad. I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a modified version of the sanctions bill, but it’s unlikely to have a major impact. It might even make things worse. If this is the best we can do, it’s pretty much an admission that there’s not really much we can do.

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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

by BethBolendjcmjr Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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A year ago, Mother Jones reported that a House bill that would allow banks like Citigroup to do more high-risk trading with taxpayer-backed money was written almost entirely by Citigroup lobbyists. The bill passed the House in October 2013, but the Senate never voted on it. For months, it was all but dead. Yet on Tuesday night, the Citi-written bill resurfaced. Lawmakers snuck the measure into a massive 11th-hour government funding bill that congressional leaders negotiated in the hopes of averting a government shutdown. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation.

“This is outrageous,” says Marcus Stanley, the financial policy director at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “This is to benefit big banks, bottom line.”

As I reported last year, the bill eviscerates a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the “push-out rule”:

Banks hate the push-out rule…because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

The Citi-drafted legislation will benefit five of the largest banks in the country—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. These financial institutions control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. If this measure becomes law, these banks will be able to use FDIC-insured money to bet on nearly anything they want. And if there’s another economic downturn, they can count on a taxpayer bailout of their derivatives trading business.

In May 2013, the New York Times reported that Citigroup’s proposed language was reflected in more than 70 lines of the House financial services committee’s 85-line bill. Mother Jones was the first to publish the document showing that Citigroup lobbyists had drafted most of the legislation. Here is a side-by-side of a key section of the House bill:

The bill—sponsored by two Dems and two Republicans—passed easily out of the House financial services committee on a 53-6 vote. The six no votes came from Democrats. In October 2013, the measure passed the Republican-controlled House 292-122. Seventy Dems voted in favor, but that was far fewer than expected, partly due to press coverage of Citi’s involvement in the bill’s drafting.

Back then, the bill’s chances of becoming law seemed dim. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew voiced his opposition to the measure, saying it would be “disruptive and harmful.” Obama signaled to lawmakers that he opposed it. It never came up for a vote in the Senate.

And the legislation was left on the table for corporate-friendly lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to now sneak into the pending spending bill. But Democratic leadership is raising concerns about the Wall Street-friendly provision. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted out a statement Wednesday morning slamming the provision for allowing “big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC.” And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling on the House to strike the Citi-written language from the spending bill.

“I am disgusted,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House financial services committee, said in a statement. “Congress is risking our homes, jobs and retirement savings once again.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) issued an even more dire warning, calling the bill “a good example of capitalism’s death wish.”

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

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Here Are Some of the Worst Conservative Reactions to the CIA Torture Report

by DannielFrantz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released the 525-page executive summary of its 6,700-page report on CIA torture. The report laid bare the torture CIA interrogators used in (often futile) attempts to elicit information from detainees. Although tactics that included “rectal rehydration” and sensory deprivation offended some people, others chose to celebrate the CIA today:

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh:

Conservative blogger RB Pundit:

Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016:

And of course the fine folks over at Fox News (via Raw Story):

Fox News host Eric Bolling (via Media Matters):

Fox News’ Sean Hannity (also via Media Matters):

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Here Are Some of the Worst Conservative Reactions to the CIA Torture Report

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alec MacGillis writes that there was a very specific reason for the surprising Republican win on Tuesday in the Maryland governor’s race:

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

As a native Californian, this naturally brings back memories of the infamous “car tax,” which Arnold Schwarzenegger cynically rode to victory in a special election in 2003. And this wasn’t even a new tax. A few years earlier the vehicle license fee had been lowered under Governor Gray Davis, but with a proviso that it would go back up if state finances deteriorated. Sure enough, when the dotcom boom turned into the dotcom bust, the state budget tanked and eventually Davis signed an order restoring the old VLF rates. But the VLF never actually increased; it merely returned to the same level it was at before it had been cut.

It didn’t matter. Schwarzenegger ran endless TV commercials starring ordinary citizens who simply couldn’t believe that anyone expected them to survive if they had to pay the outrageous Democrat car tax. It was just more than a body could bear. (Yes, that really was the tone of the ads. I’m not making it up.) All this caterwauling was over an average of about $70 in taxes that everyone had been paying with no noticeable distress just four years earlier.

And Arnold won. Cutting the VLF made California’s finances even worse, of course, as did Arnold’s cynical-beyond-all-imagining bond measure a couple of years later to make up for the revenue shortfall. As usual, Californians were somehow suckered into thinking that this was free money of some kind, not something that would cost more in the long run than just paying the VLF in the first place.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that lots of liberals have spent the past few years predicting the end of the tax revolt. I plead guilty to this once or twice myself. It generally seems to happen whenever some state or another successfully passes a tax for something, but as California showed a decade ago and as Maryland showed yesterday, it ain’t so. I think it’s fair to say that raising taxes is no longer an automatic kiss of death, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. For the most part, we still live in Grover Norquist’s world.

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

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If Millennials Had Voted, Last Night Would Have Looked Very Different

by UlyssesRockwell Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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The GOP’s big Election Day victory may have a lot to do with who didn’t show up at the polls—and one of the groups that stayed home at a record rate were young people. According to an NBC News exit poll, the percentage of voters aged 60 or older accounted for almost 40 percent of the vote, while voters under 30 accounted for a measly 12 percent. Young people’s share of the vote is typically smaller in midterm elections, but the valley between age groups in 2014 is the largest the US has seen in at least a decade.

NBC News

And that valley made a huge difference for Democrats, because younger voters have been trending blue. Some 55 percent of young people who did turn up voted for Dems compared to 45 percent of those over 60.

An interactive predictor on the Fusion, the news site targeted at millennials, indicated how Democrats could have gained if young people had shown in greater numbers. Using 2010 vote totals and 2014 polling data, the tool lets users calculate the effect of greater turnout among voters under 30 in several key states.

On Tuesday, according to preliminary exit polls, young voters in Iowa favored Democrats by a slight margin—51 percent—but they made up only 12 percent of the total vote, leaving conservative Republican Joni Ernst the winner. In Georgia, 58 percent of young voters went for Democrat Michelle Nunn, but they made up 10 percent of the total who showed up to cast their ballots. In Colorado, where a sophisticated political machine delivered Democratic wins in 2010, the calculator shows that a full 71 percent of young people voted for Dems in 2010; exit polls indicate that young voters made up 14 percent of the final tally, leaving Mark Udall out in the cold.

If historical voting patterns hold, it’s possible that these Democratic leaning millennials will turn out in greater numbers in the future. If so, that will bode well for Dems—as long as these voters don’t also become more conservative as they age.

Felix Salmon, Fusion

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If Millennials Had Voted, Last Night Would Have Looked Very Different

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

by LucaDavison Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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States and localities nationwide voted yesterday on a host of hot-button food and agriculture issues, from GMO labeling to soda taxes to food stamps. The outcomes of these contests have major implications for policy—and your dinner plate. Here’s a roundup of how they shook out:

Colorado Proposition 105: This statewide ballot initiative pushed for the labeling of genetically modified foods, requiring most GM foods to bear a label reading, “produced with genetic engineering.” Burrito chain Chipotle and Whole Foods came out in support of the measure, while agribusiness giants Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kraft came out against it. (Unsurprisingly, 105’s opponents raised more than $12 million—many times what supporters brought in.) Outcome: Colorado voters resoundingly rejected Prop 105, with nearly 70% of voters voting no.

Oregon Measure 92: This ballot measure was nearly identical to Colorado’s, requiring foods with GMO ingredients to be labeled. Like in Colorado, Big Ag mobilized big-time against Measure 92, raising more than $16 million. But 92’s supporters—including Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—raised an impressive $8 million. Outcome: Undecided

San Francisco Measure E and Berkeley Measure D: These two Bay Area cities both considered levying taxes on sugary beverages. San Francisco’s Measure E proposed a two-cent per ounce tax, while Berkeley’s Measure D proposed one-cent per ounce. Both races were considered something of a last stand for the soda tax—if it couldn’t pass in these two bastions of liberalism and healthy living, it was essentially doomed everywhere else. No surprise, then, that Big Soda spent more than $7 million in San Francisco and over $1.7 million in Berkeley (population: 117,000) to defeat the measures. Outcome: Failing to gain the necessary two-thirds supermajority, the San Francisco soda tax failed. Berkeley’s is undecided.

Maui County, Hawaii, GMO Moratorium Bill: Hawaii’s Maui County—which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai and Molokai—considered one of the strongest anti-GMO bills ever: a complete moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe. Agriculture is big business on Maui: the island is a major producer of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple, among other things. Monsanto is among the companies operating farms in Maui County, and this bill would’ve effectively shut it down. (Under the law, farmers knowingly cultivating GMOs would get hit with a $50,000 per day fine.) Opponents raised nearly $8 million against the measure, making it the most expensive campaign in state history. Outcome: Undecided

Florida Second Congressional District: Rep. Steve Southerland, a tea party darling, faced Democrat Gwen Graham in his attempt to get re-elected in this Florida Panhandle district. Last year, Southerland attempted to pass legislation that would’ve cut $39 billion in food stamp funding, forcing millions out of the program. (He called the cuts “the defining moral issue of our time.”) Widely considered the most sweeping cuts in decades, they were not passed, and made Southerland an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Outcome: In a rare House flip for Democrats, Rep. Southerland was defeated by Democrat Gwen Graham.

Kansas Senate: Pat Roberts, the three-term Republican Senator from Kansas, faced independent challenger Greg Orman in a surprisingly tight race for this deep-red state. The race was considered a key indicator of the GOP’s Senate hopes, and important for agriculture too: Roberts had said that in the event of a Republican majority, he would be Senate Agriculture Committee Chair—given that he won his own contest, of course. Roberts, once considered a “savior” of food stamp programs, attempted to cut $36 billion from the program last year, and would certainly advocate for similar policy as chairman. Outcome: Roberts won re-election, and the GOP won the Senate majority. Look for Chairman Roberts in 2015.

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

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Iowa Swings Right, Elects Joni Ernst to Senate

by FVBGertrud Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Iowa’s next senator will be Joni Ernst, a one-term state senator who has endorsed personhood for fetuses, supported the government shutdown, said she wants to impeach President Obama, discounts climate change, insisted there were WMDs in Iraq, and once said she believes there’s a nefarious UN plan—Agenda 21—to rob Iowans of their farmland.

It’s hard to overstate just how much of a change she is from the senator she is replacing, Democrat Tom Harkin, a progressive hero during his 30 years in the chamber, who spearheaded the Americans with Disabilities Act and was a longtime champion of health care reform.

Ernst defeated her opponent, Rep. Bruce Braley, by playing up the grievances of Iowa’s rural population, which feels under siege from a growing urban population. She also used her military service in Iraq to revive Bush-era terrorism politics.

Ernst is the first woman Iowa has elected to Congress (leaving Mississippi as the only state that’s hasn’t yet put a women either in Congress or the governor’s office). But in getting there, she relied heavily on male voters. Even in polls that put her ahead by wide margins leading up to the election, she was losing female voters by double digits. “What we like to remind folks is that being a women candidate doesn’t make you a pro-women candidate in all circumstances,” Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, told me during a pre-election event in Des Moines late last month.

Iowa Republicans gathered Tuesday night at a Marriott in West Des Moines to celebrate their successes. (Incumbent Gov. Terry Branstad easily won reelection.) The crowd, packed into a too-small ballroom, erupted in cheers anytime Ernst appeared on the TV screens. Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” piped through the speakers as they waited for Ernst to take the stage.

The last time I’d set foot in this particular hotel was in early 2012, when I watched Rep. Michele Bachmann end her presidential campaign the day after the Iowa caucuses. Bachmann’s drubbing in that contest appeared to represent a repudiation by state Republicans of the Party’s Fox News fringe. Two years later, voters have elected a candidate who represents that very fringe, for while Ernst may be the chosen candidate of the state’s supposed moderates, she readily attaches herself to just about any idea that bubbles up as a Fox News meme. As Tom Harkin put it to me earlier Tuesday afternoon, she’s not quite Ted Cruz, but she’s only an inch or so off.

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Iowa Swings Right, Elects Joni Ernst to Senate

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Why Are Environmentalists Supporting This Republican Senator?

by EarnestTrumbo Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Since the 2008 election and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party has moved far right on energy and environment issues. Politicians who once accepted climate science have decided that they actually don’t. Congressional Republicans have voted to cut funding for the EPA and its programs, to prevent federal agencies from studying climate change, and to revoke EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Environmental groups that want to demonstrate their bipartisanship haven’t been left with many Republicans to support. In this election cycle, Maine Sen. Susan Collins stands out. She unequivocally accepts climate science. In 2009, she cosponsored a “cap-and-dividend” bill to limit emissions with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). She is the only Senate Republican to vote against preventing EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. (UPDATE: But she did vote to block EPA climate action in 2010, arguing that “Congress, not the EPA, should decide how to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”) The Environmental Defense Fund ran an ad earlier this year praising her for “confronting climate change.” The League of Conservation Voters endorsed her. Her lifetime environmental voting score from LCV is 67 percent. That’s low for someone the group has endorsed, but unusually high for a Republican.

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Why Are Environmentalists Supporting This Republican Senator?

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