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Bernie Sanders Passed on Hitting One of Hillary Clinton’s Biggest Weaknesses

by DonteNjrmn Posted on November 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has signaled for months that it doesn’t want to go negative against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. At the second Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, Sanders took the gloves off—hitting the former secretary of state for her support among Wall Street donors. But early on, he took a pass on underscoring a major point of distinction between them.

The first half hour of the second Democratic presidential debate was focused on how the United States should deal with ISIS and international terrorism. It could have been an opening for Sanders to highlight Hillary Clinton’s early support for the Iraq war. And out of the gate, Sanders did emphasize his opposition to the 2003 invasion. “I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the instability we are seeing now,” he said. “I think that was one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in the history of the United States.”

But when the CBS moderator, John Dickerson, pressed him specifically about Clinton’s support for the war, he didn’t take the gloves off:

I think we have a disagreement, and the disagreement is that not only did I vote against the war in Iraq if you look at history, John, you will find that regime change, whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Allende in Chile, whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when, these invasions, these toppling of governments…regime changes have unintended consequences. I will say, on these issues I am a little bit more conservative than the secretary in that I am not in favor of regime change.

That was it. It was a history lesson—and a true one—but it was hardly a powerful indictment of her record.

By contrast, in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama hammered Clinton over and over again for her vote to authorize the war; on Saturday, Sanders spoke right past her.

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Bernie Sanders Passed on Hitting One of Hillary Clinton’s Biggest Weaknesses

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The Biggest Difference Between Clintons’ and Sanders’ Policies Isn’t Their Substance

by FernandoBon885 Posted on November 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The contrasts between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are largely differences of degree. He’s a self-proclaimed socialist; she fashions herself a “progressive that likes to get things done.” He hopes to bust up the biggest banks and offer free tuition at public colleges and universities; she wants to tamp down on risky Wall Street behavior and require students to work part-time in order to attend college without building up debt.

But these discrepancies would likely disappear if either Democratic candidate wins the presidency and attempts to push these bills through a Republican Congress that considers all of the proposals too far left for its liking.

The real difference between Sanders and Clinton might come down less to the what of their policies than to the how of implementing them. When Sanders unveils a new policy as part of his presidential campaign, he tends to pair it with legislation he introduces in the Senate. Judging from his campaign, a President Sanders would spend much of his time trying to convince Congress to pass massive legislative overhauls.

Clinton, on the other hand, often pair ideas for legislation with promises of executive action in her policy fact sheets. When she rolls out a new policy proposal, the most details are usually in descriptions of the unilateral actions she would take through the power of the executive branch.

Take the two campaigns’ recent approaches to reforming marijuana laws. Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate that would end the federal prohibition on the drug (which, like other far-reaching bills he’s introduced alongside campaign pledges, has not yet received even a committee vote). Clinton’s approach isn’t more modest just in substance, but also in approach. She’d change the classification of marijuana on the federal drug schedule, which would allow it to be used for medical purposes. That’s within the purview of the executive branch without congressional intervention. (Neither campaign responded to requests for comment on how each candidate views the role of legislation and executive action.)

The past two presidents have both slowly ramped up the frequency of presidential action without consulting Congress. Following 9/11, George W. Bush expanded the scope of surveillance and the executive’s international actions. “We’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency,” Dick Cheney once bragged. President Obama, despite promising to “reverse” that expansion in his 2008 campaign, has only furthered the trend. Upon first gaining office, with friendly Democratic majorities in Congress, Obama pushed expansive laws like the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act. But once Republicans took the House in 2010, Obama’s ability to pass major changes through Congress was stymied, and he’s turned to executive action, such as using the Clean Air Act to lower carbon emissions from coal plants after Congress failed to pass a cap-and-trade bill.

With Democrats unlikely to retake the House anytime soon, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016, most progressive gains will probably have to come in areas where the president doesn’t have to seek congressional approval—through the courts and executive actions.

Sanders is hardly opposed to an expansive view of what a president can accomplish through executive order. Earlier this spring, before launching his presidential campaign, Sanders wrote a letter urging the Obama administration to close several corporate tax loopholes through executive fiat and and boost revenues by $100 billion. He’s cheered Obama’s use of executive orders to force federal contractors into more liberal employment practices.

But on the campaign trail, Sanders shows his instincts as a senator. While Clinton’s plan for financial reform pledged to appoint more aggressive regulators to crack down on Wall Street’s bad actors and focused on what she’d veto, Sanders’ issues page on Wall Street is a litany of changes that would have to clear Congress: a bill breaking up the biggest banks, a return to the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking, and a financial transaction tax.

When Clinton released her plan to tackle gun violence, she offered up a slew of ideas for the kind of legislation she’d like to see passed and said she’d push Congress to expand background checks. But in the likely event that a Republican Congress didn’t help her in passing that legislation, Clinton said, she’d focus on how she could use executive orders to close the gun show loophole. She made clear that she’d prefer to pursue the traditional legislative route, but was resigned to the realities of dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Clinton’s proposals for executive action might be easier to enact, but they carry plenty of risk. Laws last until they’re overturned, which often involves relitigating the entire fight. Executive orders and instructions to federal agencies can be wiped out as soon as a successor enters the White House. And ambitious executive actions often stand on shaky ground while awaiting judicial approval. Take Obama’s executive order known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, which offered millions of undocumented immigrants a reprieve from deportation. He signed the order last year, but it’s remained in judicial limbo ever since. Earlier this week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the order unconstitutional, leaving the fate of the policy in the hands of the Supreme Court.

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The Biggest Difference Between Clintons’ and Sanders’ Policies Isn’t Their Substance

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Republicans Are Very Mad About Obama’s Keystone XL Decision

by GusDransfield3 Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Friday morning, after years of heated battles between environmentalists and Republicans, President Barack Obama announced that he is rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.

In a speech, the president criticized both supporters and detractors of the pipeline from placing too much emphasis on a project that, according to the State Department’s analysis, would neither create many jobs nor ruin the climate if approved. Still, reactions to his decision from Republicans in Congress and the 2016 presidential primary were swift and terrible.

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic candidates were quick to praise the decision:

Notably absent, so far, is a reaction from Hillary Clinton. She only recently took a public position against the pipeline, after years of dodging the question.

UPDATE 3:30pm ET: A couple latecomers:

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Republicans Are Very Mad About Obama’s Keystone XL Decision

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Give Seniors a Raise

by KatlynHamel Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Warren wants to give seniors the same pay raise enjoyed by CEOs—and to raise taxes on some executive pay in the process. The liberal senator from Massachusetts is introducing a bill on Thursday to boost Social Security payments for 2016 with a one-time bump in benefits.

Social Security payments—for both retirees and people receiving disability insurance—are pegged to inflation, with the government calculating a cost-of-living adjustment, the percentage by which payments increase each year. But in recent years, with the economy still puttering only slowly upward following the recession, inflation has stalled, which has left Social Security recipients with no or minimal annual increases. 2016 is set to be only the third year since 1975 when Social Security won’t get any cost-of-living increase, joining 2010 and 2011.

Warren’s bill, dubbed the SAVE Act (short for Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act), would offer a one-time 3.9 percent increase. Why such a specific percentage? Warren points to a study showing that pay for CEOs at the 350 largest companies increased by 3.9 percent in 2015. Warren’s bill would pay for this one-time benefit hike by eliminating a corporate tax exemption for performance pay packages—which would also extend the solvency of the entire Social Security program.

As Mother Jones‘s Pema Levy documented earlier this year, Warren has focused on Social Security since coming to the Senate—not just defending the current program against cuts, but fighting to expand benefits. Her proposal comes at a time when much of the political debate over entitlements has pulled in the opposite direction. New House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose earlier proposals would have privatized parts of Social Security, is promising to explore changes to entitlements, and the Republican presidential candidates have debated lowering Social Security benefits. But Warren may be rallying Democrats to her side. Earlier this year, during votes on amendments to a budget, Warren introduced legislation to expand benefits that failed to pass but won the backing of all but two Democratic senators.

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Give Seniors a Raise

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The Time Jeb Bush Hired a Spanking Proponent to Run His Troubled Child Welfare Agency

by EnriqueKeisler Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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It was 2002, Gov. Jeb Bush was up for reelection, and the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) was in chaos. News had recently broken that a five-year-old Miami girl in state care had disappeared—and no one had noticed her absence for more than a year. Police had recently found a child welfare worker passed out drunk in her car with a kid in the back seat. A two-year-old boy was beaten to death on the same day a caseworker claimed to have visited him. The department head had quit amid a series of controversies. Bush needed a replacement, one that signaled that he had a plan to restore order to the scandal-plagued agency. But his choice to fill the job, Jerry Regier, a Christian conservative culture warrior who had served in Bush’s father’s presidential administration, soon landed in a controversy of his own involving spanking.

Regier held a range of hardline religious views and supported the use of corporal punishment against children. He was the founding president of Family Research Council, the social conservative group that has denounced homosexuality and defended the rights of parents to physically discipline their children. (FRC was co-founded by James Dobson, an influential psychologist who, starting in the 1970s, wrote numerous parenting books touting the value of using a switch or belt on defiant children.)

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The Time Jeb Bush Hired a Spanking Proponent to Run His Troubled Child Welfare Agency

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Senate Republicans Are Blocking Obama’s Judges at a Nearly Unprecedented Rate

by DorisCreason006 Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Gridlock has famously prevented Congress from enacting meaningful legislation in recent years, but it’s in another area that congressional inaction is truly setting new records. The Senate has confirmed just nine judges nominated by President Obama so far this year. It’s the slowest pace of confirmations in more than half a century, on track to match the 11 confirmations in 1960.

“It’s still like pulling teeth to move nominations,” says a senior Democratic Senate aide. “They’re being held by a number of different Republican senators for every reason under the sun. None of which have anything to do with the actual qualifications of the nominees.”

With Republicans in charge of both branches of Congress, odds are slim that Obama will sign major domestic legislation during the last two years of his presidency. Even keeping the government’s lights on and selecting a new House speaker have required protracted fights in this dysfunctional Congress. But judges are still one area where a hamstrung president can leave a mark, as district and circuit court judges who win confirmation receive a lifetime appointment.

It’s not unusual for a president to get fewer nominations through the Senate as the end of a White House term nears and the opposition party begins to dream of winning the next presidential election and tapping the judges it prefers. But the current rate is far off from the historical norm. According to the liberal Alliance for Justice, by this point in 2007, when Democrats controlled the Senate, 34 of President George W. Bush’s judges had been confirmed.

The lack of confirmations has provoked anger among Senate Democrats over what they see as politicking at the expense of a functional judicial system. Last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, put a statement in the congressional record blasting Republicans for dragging their feet on scheduling votes for uncontroversial judicial nominees. “The glacial pace in which Republicans are currently confirming uncontroversial judicial nominees is a failure to carry out the Senate’s constitutional duty of providing advice and consent,” Leahy said. “We should be responding to the needs of our Federal judiciary so that when hardworking Americans seek justice, they do not encounter the lengthy delays that they currently face today.”

This summer, Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat on the committee, got in a public tussle on the Senate floor with its Republican chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. After Schumer’s request for unanimous consent to approve a slate of judicial nominations for New York courts was denied, Schumer called the Republican slowdown a “disgrace” that was hurting the judicial system. “Democrats will not stand by and watch our judicial system brought to its knees by death by a thousand cuts,” he said. Grassley, though, would have none of it. He argued that Republicans didn’t need to rush confirmations after Democrats approved 11 nominees in the 2014 lame-duck session, when Democrats were about to lose the Senate majority following the November midterm elections. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it, the senator from New York,” Grassley said.

Republicans have been gumming up the works at each step of the process. Judicial nominations are generally put forward by the president only once they’ve been approved by both of the home-state senators. Republicans have been slow to give their consent to any nominee, with 55 judicial vacancies currently lacking a nomination. “If you look where these empty seats are, they’re almost all in states with at least one Republican senator,” says the Alliance for Justice’s Kyle Barry. Even when Republican senators appears to support a nominee, they’ve dragged out the process. Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, recommended Mary Flores to the White House for a spot on a Florida district court, but has been withholding his so-called “blue slip” approval form, preventing her from moving forward to a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. (He says he is still reviewing her qualifications.)

Even after a judicial nominee has cleared the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been slow about scheduling votes on the Senate floor, where 11 nominees are awaiting confirmation. The delays generally haven’t been due to controversy about the nominees. The last two judges confirmed, for district court seats in New York, were approved by votes of 95-2 and 88-0, respectively.

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Senate Republicans Are Blocking Obama’s Judges at a Nearly Unprecedented Rate

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Hillary Clinton’s Newest Ad Zeroes in on Calls for Increased Gun Control

by Luz67Wegjv Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign debuted a new television ad that zeroed in on the need for increased gun control laws—an issue the Democratic front-runner is using to position herself as a markedly different candidate to her rival, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. The spot is being shown in the early battleground states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the New York Times, and stands out as novel compared to recent presidential campaigns in which Democrats have mostly been on the defensive about gun control.

“We need to close the loopholes and support universal background checks,” Clinton is seen telling a crowd in the clip titled “Together.” “How many people have to die before we actually act?”

The ad comes just one day after Clinton held a private meeting with several family members of victims of gun violence, including the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice:

Shortly after the deadly rampage in Oregon last month, Clinton announced a series of proposals to help combat rising gun violence, including using executive authority to close the so-called “gun show loophole” if she became president.

In recent months, Clinton has accused Sanders of being too lax on gun control, taking swipes at the Vermont senator for supporting a controversial law in 2005 that protected gun manufacturers from being sued by victims of violence.

Her momentum on the issue has been steadily growing, particularly after she charged Sanders with not doing enough to tackle gun violence at the first Democratic debate in October. You can watch that tense exchange below:

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Hillary Clinton’s Newest Ad Zeroes in on Calls for Increased Gun Control

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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

by xf0ks040u Posted on November 3, 2015

TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

By on 3 Nov 2015 6:40 amcommentsShare

President Obama has reportedly been gearing up to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project, so pipeline company TransCanada is trying a last-ditch effort to get the decision punted to Obama’s successor.

The latest twists and turns in the long-running Keystone saga kicked off on Monday afternoon, when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest responded to a question from a reporter by saying that President Obama will make a decision on the pipeline before he leaves office. It’s been rumored for months that his decision will be “no.” As The Washington Post reports, “The administration is preparing to reject a cross-border permit for the project aimed at transporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands region to Gulf Coast refineries, according to several individuals who have been briefed but spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House’s decision has not been announced.”

A few hours after Earnest’s comments, TransCanada sent a formal letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to “pause” its review of the Keystone proposal. His department has been tasked with determining whether the project would be in the “national interest” and then reporting its determination to the White House. TransCanada is arguing that because the pipeline’s planned route through Nebraska is in contention, the federal review should be put on hold until the route is finalized.

That’s pretty cheeky: After years of complaining that the administration has been delaying its Keystone decision, TransCanada is now asking the administration to further delay it.

Climate campaigners and anti-Keystone activists see TransCanada’s move as a desperate ploy that has exactly nothing to do with the pipeline route. “The route in Nebraska has been uncertain for years,” activist Jane Kleeb of the group Bold Nebraska told the Omaha World-Herald. “The only difference is they know they are losing now.”

Activists are loudly calling on Obama to reject TransCanada’s request for a delay and then reject the pipeline altogether. Said 350.org founder (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben, “No matter what route TransCanada comes back with, the ultimate problem all along with Keystone XL has been that it’s a climate disaster.”

If TransCanada’s request for a delay is granted, the final Keystone decision would likely fall to the next president. TransCanada is obviously hoping that president will be a Republican, as all of the Republican candidates support Keystone, while the top three Democratic candidates oppose it. Hillary Clinton had refused to take a position on the pipeline for years, but in September she finally came out against it. “This is nothing more than another desperate and cynical attempt by TransCanada to build their dirty pipeline someday if they get a climate denier in the White House in 2017,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters.

If Obama sticks to his plan and denies TransCanada the permit it needs, the move could help build his legacy as a leader in the climate fight. Says McKibben, “If President Obama rejects this pipeline once and for all, he’ll go to Paris with boosted credibility — the world leader who was willing to shut down a big project on climate grounds.” A major round of U.N. climate negotiations will start in Paris on Nov. 30, and Obama has been working to get other big countries to make significant pledges of climate action ahead of that meeting.

A pipeline rejection from Obama might mean that TransCanada is screwed even if a Republican moves into the White House in 2017. “The company would either have to restart the difficult and costly application entirely from scratch — or, more likely, abandon the pipeline altogether,” writes Brad Plumer of Vox.

So where does all this leave us now? Exactly where we were two days ago: waiting to see what Obama will do.

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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

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Wisconsin Poised to Gut Its Campaign Finance and Anti-Corruption Laws

by LinwoodSain Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scott Walker’s presidential bid may have failed, but the Wisconsin governor and his Republican allies are making a massive push to transform the way the state conducts elections and investigates illegal campaign activity. If they’re successful—and by all indications, they will be—by the end of this week, they will have uprooted Wisconsin’s anti-public corruption laws and lifted restrictions on the money pouring into state elections.

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Wisconsin Poised to Gut Its Campaign Finance and Anti-Corruption Laws

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

by Lenore55Fuug Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hudson Christie

Has any piece of legislation in American history held on by its fingertips more dramatically than the Affordable Care Act? Let’s review the tape.

In 2009, it passed in the Senate by a margin of zero votes. In 2010, thanks to some fancy parliamentary maneuvering, it survived the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-­proof majority after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death. In 2012, it squeaked through a Supreme Court challenge after Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly changed his vote at the last minute. It hung on again later that year when President Barack Obama won reelection. In 2013 came the disastrous rollout of its website, and in 2015, yet another unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge. And along the way it outlasted more than 50 attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of it.

For six years, Obamacare has been the ultimate Republican punching bag. It helped win the party a landslide victory in the 2010 midterms. Repealing it has consistently been an applause line for conservative politicians. And even now that it’s up and running pretty successfully, poll after poll shows at least 40 percent of the public still disapproves of it.

All this means that Obamacare should be a killer issue for Republicans in 2016. It’s fragile, it’s unpopular, it’s hated by the base, and this is their last realistic chance to repeal it. If they don’t take the presidency and both houses of Congress next year, they’ll have to wait until 2020 for another opportunity. By that time, the law will have been in place for a decade, and it will be covering upward of 20-25 million people. While that might not be enough to make it as beloved as Social Security or Medicare, it’s certainly enough to make it politically unassailable. Conservatives have been warning for years that if Obamacare doesn’t get repealed this instant, it will soon be too late. This time they’re finally right.

And yet, so far the issue has been oddly MIA in the Republican primary. Chants of “repeal and replace” are still around, but they have a distinctly pro forma ring to them. Obamacare was barely mentioned in the first two Republican debates, eclipsed by Donald Trump, border walls, and ISIS. And even if a Republican wins the White House next fall, conservative health care wonks have nearly given up on enacting anything more than a partial rollback of the law.

So what happened? What killed off the frenzied demands to destroy Obama’s signature achievement?

The most obvious answer is that conservatives have been whipping up outrage about the law for so long that even its most ardent haters are exhausted. What’s more, it’s much harder to take away a benefit that lots of people are actually relying on than to repeal a theoretical one.

But Obamacare’s foes running out of steam is just the most obvious sign of a larger trend: A lot of traditional conservative issues are losing their momentum. Gay marriage lost its fear factor years ago and was taken off the table once and for all by the Supreme Court in June. The economy is probably in good enough shape to not be a big campaign issue. Taxes have already been lowered so much that the average family pays only about 5 percent of its earnings to the IRS. And 14 years after 9/11 and four years after Osama bin Laden’s death, accusing liberals of being spineless on terrorism no longer packs the same punch.

True, Republicans still have a short list of hot-button topics that inflame their base, but increasingly these are wedge issues that promise nearly as much downside as upside. Immigration is the most visible example. Hysteria over border walls, birthright citizenship, and anchor babies risks losing Hispanics to the Democratic Party for good—something the GOP can ill afford. And the problems go far beyond immigration. Republican voters aren’t sold on the idea of Iraq War 2.0, and as a result even the most hawkish candidates are unwilling to propose sending more than a few thousand troops to fight ISIS. Even abortion runs the risk of becoming a wedge issue for the party as activists demand that candidates take extreme positions such as opposing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother—even though these are popular among most Republican voters.

This is the point at which liberals are supposed to sneer that the GOP is now the party of no new ideas. But that’s not really fair. The difference between the two parties isn’t so much one of ideas, but of unity behind those ideas. Thirty years ago, Democrats were the ones torn apart by wedge issues: affirmative action, crime, abortion, taxes. These tensions haven’t gone away completely—just look at Black Lives Matter activists heckling Sen. Bernie Sanders over the summer—but they no longer dominate the party. Now the tables have turned. A recent survey showed that nearly half of Democrats agreed with their party’s core position on at least six of seven major issues. Only a quarter of Republicans were in such broad agreement with their party. And the discord is coming at the worst possible time, just as long-term demographics are starting to seriously eat into their base.

Millennials, the most socially liberal generation ever, are increasing their share of the electorate as more conservative cohorts die off. And every year, the racial minority share of the population rises by 0.4 percent. The net result is simple: Every four years, roughly 2 percent of the population leans further left. It’s a slow enough process that Republicans can still win presidential elections, but in a 50-50 nation even small changes in support are enough to make these wins more difficult. Gerrymandering and incumbency effects may keep Republicans in partial control of Congress for a while longer, but the presidency is slipping out of their reach.

There are no obvious solutions. If Republicans move to the center—as Democrats did in the ’80s—they risk losing the support of their base. If they move to the right, they lose moderates and independents. Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, acknowledged this conundrum recently when he told the Washington Post that “Republicans need to recognize this and change the terms of the conversation—or they’ll pay the price for decades.”

Every party faces conflict between its center and its base, but the emergence of the tea party and the Fox News echo chamber has put this dynamic on steroids. Moving even to the moderate right, let alone to the center, is all but impossible for the GOP. Its base demands not just a border fence, but the repeal of the 14th Amendment; not just opposition to gun control, but rejection of universal background checks, which even the National Rifle Association used to support; not just skepticism about climate change, but insistence that global warming is a grand hoax perpetrated by liberals to subvert the free market. This conflict between party and base entered uncharted territory earlier this month when Republicans literally couldn’t find a single plausible candidate willing to be Speaker of the House. No one wanted to deal with the bomb-throwing antics of the reactionary wing of their own party. Even candidates who consider themselves tea partiers didn’t think they could control a caucus dominated by tea partiers. Among Republicans, becoming Speaker is now considered a career death sentence.

It’s hard to see any way out of this. If Republican candidates appeal to nativism, they lose the Hispanic vote. If they appeal to social conservatives, they lose the millennial vote. If they appeal to older white voters, they energize black voters and do the Democrats’ grassroots organizing for them. And if they throw up their hands and rely on endless hysteria about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email server, the tea partiers will turn out in droves but they lose everyone else. In an era when the inmates are running the asylum, it’s not just Obamacare bashing that’s become a double-edged sword for Republicans. It’s nearly everything they’ve relied on for the past three decades.

Increasingly, this is the GOP’s true dilemma. It’s not the party of no ideas; it’s the party of no escape.

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

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