Tag Archives: republican

President Obama Acted Unilaterally on Immigration and the Right Is Predictably Outraged

by KathlenFromm Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama, who has issued fewer executive orders than any president since Grover Cleveland, issued a set of directives this week to protect 5 million undocumented residents from deportation. The new executive actions will allow undocumented parents of US citizens to stay in the country, and allow children who were brought to the United States by their parents to apply for employment visas. It also, according to various Republican critics, cements Obama’s status as a dictator, a king, an emperor, and maybe even a maniac bent on ethnic cleansing:

Obama is a king. “The president acts like he’s a king,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said. “He ignores the Constitution. He arrogantly says, ‘If Congress will not act, then I must.’ These are not the words of a great leader. These are the words that sound more like the exclamations of an autocrat.”

This will lead to anarchy. “The country’s going to go nuts, because they’re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it’s going to be a very serious situation,” retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told USA Today. “You’re going to see—hopefully not—but you could see instances of anarchy. … You could see violence.”

He could go to jail. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told Slate that the president might be committing a felony: “At some point, you have to evaluate whether the president’s conduct aids or abets, encourages, or entices foreigners to unlawfully cross into the United States of America. That has a five-year in-jail penalty associated with it.”

Is ethnic cleansing next? When asked by a talk-radio called on Thursday if the new executive actions would lead to “ethnic cleansing,” Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach said it just might:

What protects us in America from any kind of ethnic cleansing is the rule of law, of course. And the rule of law used to be unassailable, used to be taken for granted in America. And now, of course, we have a President who disregards the law when it suits his interests. And, so, you know, while I normally would answer that by saying, ‘Steve, of course we have the rule of law, that could never happen in America,’ I wonder what could happen. I still don’t think it’s going to happen in America, but I have to admit, that things are, things are strange and they’re happening.

Kobach is hardly a fringe figure. He was the architect of the self-deportation strategy at the core some of the nation’s harshest immigration laws.

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President Obama Acted Unilaterally on Immigration and the Right Is Predictably Outraged

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

by RenaGroves Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve been paying only moderate attention to the whole issue of President Obama’s executive order on immigration, and it’s only over the past few days that I’ve started trying to learn more about the legal issues involved. And I confess that I’ve been a little surprised by what I’ve discovered. As near as I can tell, both liberal and conservative legal scholars—as opposed to TV talking heads and other professional rabble-rousers—agree that Obama has the authority to reshape immigration enforcement in nearly any way he wants to. Here are answers to five key questions about the legality of the immigration plan Obama announced tonight:

  1. The linchpin of Obama’s executive action is the president’s inherent authority to engage in prosecutorial discretion, and just about everyone agrees that this authority is nearly unconditional. Speaking to a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society, Christopher Schroeder said: “I think the roots of prosecutorial discretion are extremely deep. The practice is long and robust. The case law is robust.” Erwin Chemerinsky and Samuel Kleiner agree: “It has always been within the president’s discretion to decide whether to have the Department of Justice enforce a particular law. As the Supreme Court declared in United States v. Nixon, ‘the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.'”
  2. OK, but exempting entire categories of people from prosecution? It turns out that current immigration law explicitly recognizes this. Margaret Stock, a Republican immigration lawyer and a Federalist Society member, says: “The Immigration and Nationality Act and other laws are chock-full of huge grants of statutory authority to the president. Congress gave the president all these powers, and now they are upset because he wants to use them. Other presidents have used the same authority in the past without an outcry.”
  3. But are those grants really broad enough? Apparently so. In fact, immigration law provides the president an unusually broad scope for executive action. Eric Posner writes: “The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law….In 2012, the Supreme Court recognized the vast discretion of the president over immigration policy. In the case Arizona v. United States, the court struck down several Arizona laws that ordered state officials to enforce federal immigration laws, on pain of state penalty….As Adam Cox puts it, in a recent academic article, the court’s reasoning “gives executive branch officials near complete control over the content of immigration law.'”
  4. Still, even if this is true in theory, is it really true in practice? As it turns out, yes, there’s plenty of prior precedent for exactly this kind of thing. As the LA Times reports, “Obama would not be the first president to push through immigration reform by working outside of Congress.” In fact, presidents from FDR through Bill Clinton have issued executive orders that deferred deportation for various categories of undocumented immigrants. And while it’s true that Obama’s action will likely affect more people than any of the previous ones, that’s a political issue, not a legal one. From a strictly legal viewpoint, Obama is doing something that has plenty of past precedent.
  5. Finally, what about work permits? Even if Obama can legally defer prosecution—a right conferred by both constitutional authority and statutory language—does that also give him the right to issue work permits to immigrants affected by his order? Surprisingly, perhaps, that has a long pedigree too—one that goes back not just to DACA (Obama’s 2012 mini-DREAM executive order), but well before that. David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explains: “The federal regulations governing employment under immigration law existed well before DACA. Under those regulations, any undocumented immigrant granted deferred action — under programs that preceded DACA or coincide with it — had already been able to apply for employment authorization….The president’s authority to grant work status long precedes DACA, and while it does apply to DACA and would apply to its expansion, it is not a direct outgrowth or creation of either.”

It’s an open question whether Obama’s actions are politically wise. It might force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner as they compete loudly to denounce Obama’s actions, further damaging their chances of appealing to Hispanics in future elections. Alternatively, it might poison any possibility of working constructively with congressional Republicans over the next couple of years, which might further degrade Democratic approval ratings. There’s also, I think, a legitimate question about whether liberals should be cheering an expansion of presidential power, whether it’s legal or not.

That said, Obama’s actions really do appear to be not just legal, but fairly uncontroversially so among people who know both the law and past precedent. Republicans may not like what Obama is doing, and they certainly have every right to fight it. But they should stop spouting nonsense about lawlessness and tyranny. That’s just playground silliness.

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

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Why Scott Walker Might Be Our Next President

by QuinnHeavener Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

In 2012, I basically considered Mitt Romney a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. I figured that he’d hoover up most of the moderate votes—and despite all the breathless press accounts, moderates still account for at least half of GOP voters—plus a share of the tea partiers, and that was that. The rest of the field would destroy each other as they fought over their own sliver of the tea party vote, eventually leaving Romney battered and unloved, but triumphant.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. But I don’t see a strong moderate in the field right now. I suppose Jeb Bush and Chris Christie come the closest, but even if they run, they strike me as having some pretty serious problems. Romney was willing to adopt tea party positions across the board, even as he projected a moderate, adult persona, but neither Christie nor Bush will kowtow in quite that way. That’s going to cause them problems, and Christie’s fondness for showy confrontations is going to be an additional millstone around his neck. Either one might win, but neither seems like an especially likely nominee to me.

All this is a long way of explaining why I think Scott Walker is the frontrunner. He has a record of governance. His persona is relatively adult. He doesn’t say crazy stuff. Relatively speaking, he’s attractive to moderates. But at the same time, the tea partiers love him too. The big strike against him, of course, is that he’s lousy on TV. He’s a terrible public speaker. And he’s just boring as hell. However, Ed Kilgore perfectly explains why this doesn’t make him another Tim Pawlenty or John Kasich:

This is why Walker is so very commonly compared to Tim Pawlenty in 2012; the Minnesotan was perfectly positioned to become the most-conservative-electable-candidate nominee in a large but shaky field. And he wound up being the first candidate to drop out, before a single vote (other than in the completely non-official Ames Straw Poll) was cast. His sin was congenital blandness, and the defining moment of his campaign was when he all but repudiated his one great zinger: referring to the Affordable Care Act as “Obamneycare.”

But TPaw’s demise does point up one big difference between these two avatars of the Republican revival in the Upper Midwest: nobody suspects Scott Walker may be too nice for his party. He may be bland, and a bad orator, but his bad intent towards conservatism’s enemies is unmistakable. He’s sorta Death by Vanilla, or a great white shark; boring until he rips you apart. I think Republican elites get that, and it excites them. But how about voters?

Mitt Romney managed to base nearly his entire campaign on hating Barack Obama more than anyone else. It worked. Whenever someone started to score some points against his sometimes liberalish record in Massachusetts, he’d just launch into an over-the-top denunciation of Obama and the crowd would go wild. Walker can do the same thing, but without the artifice. Unlike Romney, he really has been fighting liberals tooth and nail for the past four years, and he has the scars to prove it. This will go a long, long way to make up for a bit of blandness.

Besides, it’s worth remembering that people can improve on the basics of campaigning. Maybe Walker will turn out to be hopeless. You never know until the campaign really gets going. But if he’s serious, he’ll get some media training and start working on developing a better stump speech. A few months of this can do wonders.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future. But if he runs, I rate Walker a favorite right now. If his only real drawback is midwestern blandness—well, Mitt Romney wasn’t Mr. Excitement either. Walker can get better if he’s puts in the work. And if he does, he’ll have most of Romney’s upside with very little of the downside. He could be formidable.

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Why Scott Walker Might Be Our Next President

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Big Oil Can’t Wait For the New Republican Majority in Congress

by StefanFrank Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Pop the champagne corks in Washington! It’s party time for Big Energy. In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican energy hawks are ascendant, having taken the Senate and House by storm. They are preparing to put pressure on a president already presiding over a largely drill-baby-drill administration to take the last constraints off the development of North American fossil fuel reserves.

The new Republican majority is certain to push their agenda on a variety of key issues, including tax reform and immigration. None of their initiatives, however, will have as catastrophic an impact as their coming drive to ensure that fossil fuels will dominate the nation’s energy landscape into the distant future, long after climate change has wrecked the planet and ruined the lives of millions of Americans.

It’s already clear that the new Republican leadership in the Senate will make construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, intended to carry heavy oil (or “tar sands”) from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the US Gulf Coast, one of their top legislative priorities. If the lame-duck Congress fails to secure Keystone’s approval now with the help of pro-carbon Senate Democrats, it certainly will push the measure through when a Republican-dominated Senate arrives in January. (Editors’ Note: The Senate voted Tuesday night to reject the Keystone pipeline.) Approval of that pipeline, said soon-to-be Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, will be among the first measures “we’re very likely to be voting on.” But while the Keystone issue is going to command the Senate’s attention, it’s only one of many measures being promoted by the Republicans to speed the exploitation of the country’s oil, coal, and natural gas reserves. So devoted are their leaders to fossil fuel extraction that we should start thinking of them not as the Grand Old Party, but the Grand Oil Party.

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Big Oil Can’t Wait For the New Republican Majority in Congress

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

by CarleyFreehill Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks is unhappy that President Obama continues to be a liberal even though Democrats lost in this year’s midterm election:

The White House has not privately engaged with Congress on the legislative areas where there could be agreement. Instead, the president has been superaggressive on the one topic sure to blow everything up: the executive order to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws.

….I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it’s being done is ruinous. Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.

I continue to not get this train of thought. In 2006, Republicans lost. President Bush’s first action was to order a surge in Iraq, which infuriated Democrats. In 2008, Republicans lost. They responded by adopting a policy of obstructing every possible action by Democrats—including even a modest stimulus package during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2012, Republicans lost. They responded with brinkmanship over the fiscal cliff, a flat refusal to fill open judicial positions on the DC circuit court, and an endless bellowing rage over Benghazi and other manufactured outrages.

By comparison, all Obama is doing is something he’s been saying he’ll do for nearly a year. It’s not even all the big a deal if you step back for a moment and think about it. Several million undocumented immigrants are going to be told they’re officially free of the threat of deportation for a temporary period, as opposed to the status quo, in which they’re effectively free of the threat of deportation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a big deal for the immigrants affected. But in terms of actual impact on immigration policy writ large? It doesn’t really do much.

And yet, this single action is apparently enough to—rightly!—put Republicans into warfare mode. If that’s true, I can only conclude that literally anything Republicans don’t like is enough to justify going into warfare mode. That’s certainly been how it’s worked in the past, anyway.

Look: Republicans can decide for themselves if they want to go to war. If they want to pass yet another bill repealing Obamacare, that’s fine. If they want to sue the president over the EPA or immigration, that’s fine. If they want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, that’s fine. I assume Obama will win some of these battles and lose others, but in any case will treat them as the ordinary cut and thrust of politics instead of declaring them calculated insults that have infuriated him so much he can’t possibly ever engage with the GOP again. In other words, he’ll act like an adult, not a five-year-old.

This is what we expect from presidents. Why don’t we expect the same from congressional Republicans? Why are they allowed to stamp and scream whenever something doesn’t go their way, and everyone just shrugs? Once and for all, why don’t we demand that they act like adults too?

POSTSCRIPT: I didn’t bother with Brooks’ claim that Republicans are “privately” discussing real, honest-to-goodness immigration reform, but color me skeptical. If they want to engage on this subject, they need to discuss it with Obama, not between themselves. They’ve had plenty of time for that, and have never been willing to buck the tea party to get something done. Why would it be any different now? For more, I think Ed Kilgore has about the right take on this.

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

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The Supreme Court Might Gut Obamacare. Your State Could Save It.

by AlyceL77dvcyrf Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear King v. Burwell, a case that could gut Obamacare and leave millions of Americans without health insurance. The case hinges on what is essentially a typo in the Affordable Care Act, a mistake that conservatives claim invalidates most of the subsidies the bill provides to help people buy insurance. If the justices buy the conservatives’ argument—and there’s reason to think they might—residents of the 34 states that provide health insurance via the federal government’s HealthCare.gov, rather than through a state-run exchange, could lose their subsidies. Many people would be unable to afford to buy insurance (as the ACA requires), and the whole system could collapse.

Here’s the good news: There may be a workaround. But there’s also bad news: The solution requires the cooperation of Republican governors and legislators.

The King plaintiffs base their argument on the fact that in parts of the Affordable Care Act, the text says subsidies will be available for people “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” Conservatives argue that the phrase “established by the state” means the government never intended to, and therefore cannot, offer subsidies in the 34 states that use the federal exchange, a.k.a. HealthCare.gov. There’s plenty of evidence that Obamacare opponents are wrong about this. The rest of the law, its legislative history, and the recollections of lawmakers and journalists who were present at its creation all suggest that conservatives are misinterpreting a vague mistake in the legislation. Even the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon—the intellectual force behind the lawsuit—once referred to this language as a “glitch.”

Salon‘s Simon Maloy calls the conservative case the “Moops” argument:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to best characterize and/or mock the legal reasoning… and I think it can be boiled down to one word: Moops.

I’m referring, of course, to George Costanza’s famous game of Trivial Pursuit against the Bubble Boy, in which Costanza tries to cheat his way out of losing by taking advantage of a misprint on the answer card: “Moops” instead of “Moors.”

“That’s not ‘Moops,’ you jerk. It’s Moors. It’s a misprint,” the Bubble Boy explains, accurately presenting the game manufacturer’s intent in spite of the minor technical error.

“I’m sorry, the card says ‘Moops,'” Costanza replies, adopting an absurdly narrow and nonsensical interpretation of the rules that furthers his own interests.

There are all sorts of other reasons why the anti-ACA argument here is ridiculous. (Brian Beutler gets into a few here.)

But let’s say the Supreme Court agrees that the card says “Moops.” What then? There’s a way out—for states that want it.

Remember: Even if the King plaintiffs succeed in invalidating health care subsidies for people using the federal exchange, state-run exchanges would remain eligible for subsidies. So if a state wants to save its residents’ health insurance, all it would need to do is set up its own exchange.

There’s even federal money available for states to do this, but the deadline to apply for those funds is this coming Friday, November 14. (The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not say whether it would extend the deadline in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear King.) Health care exchanges are complex, and a few days is not much time for a state to get its act together.

States could still set up their own exchanges after Friday—as long as they do it with their own money, not federal funds. That could get expensive. But Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan law school, explains that there’s a relatively cheap workaround:

A state could…establish an exchange and appoint a state-incorporated entity to oversee and manage it. That state-incorporated entity could then contract with Healthcare.gov to operate the exchange. On the ground, nothing would change. But tax credits would be available where they weren’t before.

This idea—a state exchange in name only—is clever, and it would take less time and money than a state setting up its own exchange. (It’s also eminently achievable: Oregon and Nevada already operate state exchanges that use federal technology.) But Bagley’s plan still requires a state to want to save its residents’ Obamacare subsidies. Republicans hate Obamacare—in fact, the reason so many states don’t have their own exchanges already is because state-level Republicans refused to set them up. And that’s the real problem: Most of the states that are on the federal exchange—and risk losing subsidies—are controlled at least partially by Republicans, who may block any attempt to salvage Obamacare. (The exceptions are Delaware, Illinois, and West Virginia, and the latter two states will fall under partial Republican control in January.)

“The politics of this will be volatile,” Bagley says. “Governors and legislators are going to come under intense pressure to think about creating exchanges, but it’s probably much too optimistic to assume that Republican governors and legislators will move to establish exchanges in short order. Even if at some point in the future all the states were to establish their own exchanges, that point could be a very long time from now.”

Some experts think it may never happen. Many states “will never establish exchanges, because it means going along with Obamacare,” says Timothy Jost, a health reform expert at Washington & Lee University Law School.

And that, it seems, is exactly the point of King: Setting up a system in which only a handful of blue states have Obamacare, while people in red states—the states that benefit the most from the law—go without. “My personal feeling is that a decision for the King plaintiffs would create an unavoidable catastrophe,” Jost says. “There is no easy way out of it.”

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The Supreme Court Might Gut Obamacare. Your State Could Save It.

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2014: The Year of Koch

by BradforLanders Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The 2014 election season acquired its fair share of nicknames: the Nothing Election, the Seinfeld Election, and the Meh Midterms. Here’s another: The Year of Koch.

Big money from outside spenders like the Koch brothers’ political network and the pro-Democratic Senate Majority PAC dominated this year’s elections. In the battleground states, a voter couldn’t watch five minutes of television, listen to the radio, or cue up a YouTube clip without being bombarded by political ads, most of them of the minor-chord, attack-ad variety. Broadcasters in Alaska, North Carolina, Colorado, and other critical states collected money by the fistful. Major candidates galore had a deep-pocketed super-PAC or a political nonprofit in his or her corner.

Here are seven big-money takeaways from the second election since the Supreme Court’s landscape-changing Citizens United decision.

The price tag for 2014 will probably be the highest in American history.
Candidates, parties, PACs, super-PACs, and political nonprofits—those anonymously funded outfits including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the pro-Democratic Patriot Majority—were on pace to spend $3.67 billion on the 2014 races, according to projections by the Center for Responsive Politics. That would be a new record, surpassing the $3.63 billion spent in 2010.

When all the numbers are tallied, Republicans will likely outspend the Democrats—but not by much. CRP predicts that Republican candidates and their allies will unload $1.75 billion this election, while Democrats and their supporters will spend $1.64 billion. (The remaining dollars, according to CRP, went toward nonpartisan and third-party spending as well as overhead costs.)

Super-PACs and dark money are a bigger deal than ever.
All those attack ads clogging up the commercial breaks during your favorite show? Chances are they were funded not by a candidate but an outside group—a super-PAC, a labor union, or a political nonprofit.

The 2014 elections will be remembered as the cycle when outside groups handled much of the mudslinging, which traditionally was the responsibility of candidates and their campaigns. In Kentucky, for instance, a secretly funded group called Kentucky Opportunity Coalition ran 12,000 TV ads—many of which attacked Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, depicting her as an Obama clone. The group’s commercials accounted for one out of every seven ads run during that race, according to the Center for Public Integrity. On paper, Kentucky Opportunity Coalition was independent of the candidate it supported, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But the group was run by a former McConnell aide and functioned effectively as an offshoot of McConnell’s campaign.

This pattern unfolded across the country, as outside spending ramped up. In all, outside groups pumped $554 million—$301 million from Republican-aligned shops, $225 million from Democratic allies—into 2014 races. And you guessed it: That, too, is a new record for a midterm election.

Koch and Rove: From zeroes to heroes.
Two years ago, the biggest donors and operatives in the Republican money universe—Karl Rove, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers and their donor network—spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat President Obama and retake the Senate. They got nothing; it was an embarrassment.

This year, they won big.

Rove’s groups—American Crossroads, a super-PAC; and Crossroads GPS, its dark-money-funded sibling—spent heavily in 10 Senate races. The Republican won in at least six of those elections. If Republican Dan Sullivan defeats Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska (Sullivan was leading the vote count the day after the election) and GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy ousts Sen. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana’s run-off next month, Rove will end up eight for 10. The Sunlight Foundation calculates Crossroads GPS’ return on investment—that is, the success rate of GPS’ spending to elect or defeat candidates—at an impressive 96 percent.

The Koch brothers’ flagship organization, Americans for Prosperity, had an equally stellar Election Day. At least five of the nine AFP-backed Senate candidates won. The Kochs’ Freedom Partners Action Fund recorded an 85 percent ROI, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

By contrast, Senate Majority PAC, the super-PAC aligned with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that funded more ads than any other outside group, took a beating. It spent $47 million—the most of any super-PAC—but saw only two of the nine Republican candidates it targeted go down to defeat. Senate Majority PAC’s ROI: 9 percent.

The Democrats’ new George Soros had a bad night.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor turned environmental activist, put nearly $73 million of his money into electing candidates who believe in human-caused global warming and who want to do something about it. No single person gave more in 2014 than Steyer, according to CRP. He has become the big-money bogeyman of the right, but he fell short in multiple key races.

The bulk of Steyer’s money funded NextGen Climate, the organization he started to elect more climate-savvy politicians. NextGen’s super-PAC spent at least $20 million and defeated two of the four Republicans running for Senate it targeted. NextGen fared worse in governor’s races: Of the three GOP governors it sought to defeat—Florida’s Rick Scott, Maine’s Paul LePage, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett—only Corbett went down to defeat. And he might have well done so without Steyer’s money in the race.

North Carolina: Our Senate race cost more than yours (and yours, and yours).
The campaign pitting incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) against Republican Thom Tillis officially cost more than $100 million. It was the most expensive Senate race in American history.

To better understand that figure, consider this statistic: In the final stretch of the race, the Center for Public Integrity reports, a Senate-themed ad ran on TV somewhere in North Carolina every 50 seconds.

Larry Lessig’s spend-big-money-to-fight-big-money plan flopped.
Larry Lessig, the Harvard law professor revered by the Reddit crowd, launched MayDay PAC to great fanfare in May with a plan to raise and spend millions of dollars to elect candidates who would, once in office, fight to get big money out of politics. “Embrace the irony,” Lessig likes to say.

But in the end, MayDay was more hype than action. It spent $7.5 million and of the eight “anti-corruption candidates” listed on its website, only two MayDay-backed candidates won. There’s little evidence to suggest that either of those candidates—Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallegos and North Carolina Republican Walter Jones—won due to MayDay’s intervention on their behalf.

Every Voice, another anti-super-PAC super-PAC, didn’t fare much better. Only four candidates supported by Every Voice won in the dozen races the group tried to influence.

Judicial elections keep attracting big bucks.
Nearly $14 million was spent on advertising in judicial races this year, an increase from 2010’s $12.2 million, according to Justice at Stake and the Brennan Center for Justice. But the money flowing into those races from business interests and anonymous outside groups seeking to toss out incumbent justices largely failed in Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, through its new Judicial Fairness Initiative, spent $3.4 million on TV advertising in judicial races in five states. The RSLC has sought to elect more pro-business judges across the country. This year, though, it failed to defeat seven judges it had targeted. Its only success was the reelection of Justice Lloyd Karmeier, who sits on the Illinois supreme court.

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2014: The Year of Koch

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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

by Myron83Nao Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oops. Last year, fresh from a presidential reelection campaign in which it was hailed for its 21st-century tactics and organizing prowess, a group of Obama for America veterans descended on Texas with the goal of turning the state purple. They launched a new group, Battleground Texas, raised millions from wealthy donors, and teamed up with a rising Democratic star running for statewide office. What happened next will…probably not shock you.

In the first test-drive for Battleground Texas, Democrats got trounced, losing every statewide race for the 16th consecutive election. In the much-hyped governor’s race, state Sen. Wendy Davis lost to Attorney General Greg Abbott by 21 points. She fared only two points better than the sacrificial lamb running for agriculture commissioner, who didn’t campaign at all. But Republicans didn’t just fend off Davis, or rile up their base against a Democrat whom activists mocked as “abortion Barbie”—they ran up the score, and did so in all the places where Democrats were supposed to take baby steps.

When Battleground Texas first launched, 2014 was considered too much, too soon. But when Davis entered the race, fresh off of an 11-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill, the calculus changed. The group merged its offices with Davis’ gubernatorial campaign, set about building an army of 34,000 canvassers, lawyers, and voter-registration volunteers, and looked to pick off low-hanging fruit wherever it could.

The idea was that an Obama-style organizing operation could make a real impact in down-ballot races, which are traditionally less sophisticated. It didn’t.

Battleground invested in a dozen state-legislature races, targeting House and Senate districts that will have to turn purple for anyone at the top of the ticket to have a chance—East Dallas, the Houston suburbs, and a South Texas seat held by a party-switching state represenative. Democrats didn’t win a single one, and most of the races weren’t even close. In Harris County (Houston), where Democrats talked of tapping into the roughly 800,000 nonregistered potential voters, Davis lost by four points. (The Dem’s 2010 nominee, Bill White, won it by two.) In the final indignity, Democrats even lost Davis’ state Senate seat to a pro-life tea party Republican.

“Tonight’s decisive victory proves they picked the wrong battleground,” boasted GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick, who won the race for lieutenant governor by 19 points, despite an almost concerted effort to alienate Hispanic voters. (He warned, at one point, that child migrants might bring Ebola with them across the border.)

Soon-to-be-Senator Abbott had a low bar to clear, and he did so easily. Davis hammered him for comparing law enforcement corruption in heavily Hispanic South Texas to that of a “Third-world country,” and for refusing to say whether, as attorney general, he would hypothetically defend a hypothetical Texas law banning interracial marriage. (Abbott’s wife, Cecilia, is Mexican-American.) His simple response was to show up in South Texas and campaign seriously. It paid off: Abott won 44 percent of Latino voters, according to exit polling—including a plurality of Latino men.

And, in a sprawling, heavily Hispanic district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, Republicans unseated Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego. His replacement: Will Hurd, a former CIA agent who will be Texas’ first black Republican congressman since Reconstruction.

One silver lining for Battleground Texas is that no one was even running in some of these races two years ago. On Wednesday, the organization released a detailed memo from Senior Adviser Jeremy Bird and Executive Director Jenn Brown outlining their accomplishments and vowing to fight on: “We said from the beginning that turning Texas into a battleground will take time and commitment—and we’re just getting started.” Among their wins: a more potent fundraising operation, a growing voter database, and a nugget from the exit polls: higher percentages of young voters, women voters, and minority voters than in 2010.

But the voters just weren’t going for Davis. Even though Battleground boasted of having trained 8,700 new voter-registration volunteers, the overall voter turnout dropped by 300,000 from 2010. Absent any sort of marquee victory to call its own, the fate of Battleground is now outside its control. Texas Democrats won’t have another big election for four years—plenty of time to lose interest—and, well, something else might come up in the interim.

When I dropped by the group’s Fort Worth headquarters in September, I asked director Brown if she’d consider leaving her post to work for Hillary Clinton’s almost certain presidential campaign. She laughed and looked down at the mostly blank paper in front of her.

“The most important thing about Battleground Texas is that it is a Texas-run organization,” she said. “It’s not about me—I just am lucky to be a part of it, so I actually think no matter who runs it, whether it’s me or something else, ultimately, we don’t actually run the organization.”

So, Battleground took a shellacking in its first test run. Now comes the hard part.

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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

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The Climate Lost Big-Time in Tuesday’s Election

by Myrna Posted on November 5, 2014

Climate deniers are officially in charge of Congress, and other bad news. Susan Santa Maria/Shutterstock Tuesday’s elections were a major defeat for those who want to take serious action against global warming. Environmentalists spent millions in an effort to defeat pro-fossil-fuel Republicans, but their efforts largely failed. Key Senate committees will now be controlled by climate deniers, and even in blue states, clean energy advocates suffered big setbacks. Here are some of last night’s most significant electoral blows in the battle against climate change—along with a couple small victories. The Senate’s environment committee will be run by the biggest climate denier in Congress. With a Republican majority in the Senate, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) will likely become chairman of the Environment and Public Works committee, which handles legislation on air pollution and the environment. Inhofe is an outspoken climate denier. Two years ago, he published a book titled, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. He’s also a big opponent of the Obama administration’s proposed rule to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, describing it as the “definitive step in the administration’s war on fossil fuels.” There’s new life for the Keystone pipeline. The Republican-controlled House has already voted on more than one occasion to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, but with the Senate under Democratic control, that gesture has been little more than political theater. That will likely change now that Republicans have taken over the Senate. President Barack Obama could still veto any Keystone legislation that does pass, but as Grist explains, there’s “no guarantee” that he won’t seek to strike a deal with the GOP on the issue. Tom Steyer’s climate super PAC largely fell flat. Could a one-issue super PAC make climate an election-deciding issue? Not this time. California billionaire Tom Steyer put millions of his own money into the NextGen Climate PAC—and raised millions more—in an effort to elect pro-climate action candidates across the country. Much of the cash went to senate races in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Colorado, and to gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maine. Out of those seven races, Democrats won only three. A Washington State carbon tax? Not so fast. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) wants to put a price on carbon. In April, Inslee formed a taskforce to propose some “market-based” ways to reduce greenhouse emissions. Their recommendations are due later this month, but Republicans, who control the state senate, are likely to stand in the way. Steyer’s super PAC threw down more than $1 million in an attempt to help climate friendly candidates legislative candidates in the state. Early returns suggest it may not have worked; as of last night the Washington senate was expected to remain in the GOP’s hands. Climate adaptation measures passed: The impacts of climate change are already obvious on America’s coastlines, where rising sea levels are combining with other factors to threaten human and animal habitats alike. But there was a bit of good news on Election Night. In Rhode Island, voters passed a measure to provide $3 million to communities for flood-prevention projects, like replacing pavement with vegetation that can more easily absorb storm water. Louisiana voters also passed a ballot measure that will ensure the state can’t redirect money set aside for building artificial reefs to help rebuild the Gulf’s disappearing coastline. Local fracking bans: Pro-fossil-fuel candidates triumphed across the country last night, but the election still presented an opportunity for some voters to take a stand against fracking in their communities. The town of Denton, Texas, which is already home to some 275 fracked wells, voted to ban the practice, becoming the first city in the state to do so. Bans also passed in Athens, Ohio, and in Mendocino and San Benito Counties in California. Four other ban proposed bans failed—three in Ohio and one in Santa Barbara County, Calif. See original article here:  The Climate Lost Big-Time in Tuesday’s Election ; ; ;

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The Climate Lost Big-Time in Tuesday’s Election

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The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

by ROWDarcisvg Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Danny Vinik says that with Democrats soon to be the minority party in the Senate, Harry Reid will employ the filibuster just as much as Mitch McConnell ever did:

Reid has a history of supporting the filibuster when in the minority and criticizing it when in the majority. There’s no reason to expect that to change with McConnell as majority leader.

And that’s a good thing. If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminate filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well. The advantage of filibustering is that it allows a party to block progress without taking all of the blame for it, for the simple reason that most of the public—and, surprisingly, most of the media—don’t realize that filibusters are basically thwarting majority rule. Presidential vetoes, on the other hand, are easy for the public and media to understand and easy to appropriate blame. If Democrats relinquished the tool now, they’d give up a chance to make the same sort of gains. It’d be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

Agreed. In fact, it never even occurred to me that Democrats might use the filibuster any less than Republicans have over the past six years. The GOP has taught a master class in the virtues of obstruction, and there’s no reason to think that Democrats haven’t learned the lesson well. The only question is whether Reid will be able to hold his caucus together as well as McConnell held together his.

Actually, I take that back. That’s not the only question. Here’s the one I’m really curious about: will the media treat Democratic filibusters the same way they treated Republican filibusters? To put this more bluntly, will they treat Dem filibusters as routine yawners barely worth mentioning? Or, alternatively, will they treat them not as expressions of sincere dissent against an agenda they loathe, but as nakedly cynical ploys employed by vengeful and bitter Democrats for no purpose other than exacting retribution against Mitch McConnell? Just asking.

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The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

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