Tag: GOP

It’s just hilarious how things always even out. If you were all worried about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, about unlimited and anonymous money allowed into political election campaigns, you most likely are a liberal or libertarian. Richer people skew conservative these days, so the left side of the aisle thought they’d have more to fear from the Citizens United decision. And they did, it’s true that most of the anonymous money so far has gone to help conservatives.

The height of irony in this caper approaches humor, because unfettering the purses of the wealthy is crippling the Republican party and leaving the Democrats unaffected. Think about the right-leaning wealthy. Who are they? They are mainly business leaders who have big offices in tall buildings. More importantly, how did they get there? Because they’re go-getters, dealmakers and tough competitors, sometimes called Type-A personalities. This sort of person does great at their own business, but tends toward difficulty when working with equals. It’s the nature of the breed.

Already rich and in a leadership role at work, thus accustomed to having people obey them, the newest “donor class” is today the most able to influence politics. Yet at the same time they are uniquely unsuited to coordinate their efforts. Hilarious. So far, the biggest effect of the Citizens United decision has been to fracture the political right wing. Made it larger, yes, but at the price of potency.

A large influx of money has gone to party primaries on the Republican side, something we don’t see happening in Democratic primaries. Add to this another side fact: 2010 was a census year and coincided with a conservative resurgence in state elections. Thus, many states where the census results forced re-drawing the lines for electoral districts did so in a way which ensures conservatives will win until at least 2022. But making those seats in Congress more reliably red has had unintended consequences. As long as it’s going to go Republican as drawn, and if there’s an open fire hydrant of money, now the electoral district’s primary becomes much more important than the general election, and Democrats can’t vote in most Republican primaries. We have a closed loop, often called a ‘feedback loop’.

The outcome is to elevate several people to Congress from state legislatures, in states with a 1-party government, where there is no opportunity to ever learn how to compromise with a political opposition. They’re called the Freedom Caucus in the House, about 50 strong, and they have paralysed the whole of Congress. And they are the direct result of the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court.

The threat of a well-funded primary challenge has cowed a hundred otherwise reasonable Republicans into positions farther rightward than they’d like, simply because their district has been redrawn to always come up red when the coin is flipped every two years.

The other 80 Republican Housemembers support the more centrist national party leadership, because they’re from “blue” states where more extremely conservative positions could flip their seat. And they’re from states where the 2010 redistricting was done via 2-party compromise, so there’s less chance of a strong ideologue getting elected, either from the left or right.

The lesson is an old one: be careful what you wish for. The US Constitution is a very finely crafted thing, and if you try to nail one edge down to your favor, another one will pop up in your face. But that doesn’t stop people from trying.

It’s only natural. More money gets put into safe-seat primaries from donors on one political wing, then the more disjointed that wing becomes. Hilarious.

Holy pignuts, Batman! I wrote this in July of 2015, and gawldarned if it doesn’t look like prophecy, now in February of 2016. No really, holy crap, this looks like it’s all coming true as we watch. I re-read this over again twice, and it’s just freaky, how right i was 8 months ago…

“Christie’s in, and Rick Snyder’s just about to put his right leg in and do the 2016 Republican party nomination hokey pokey. With Trump running interference, the last possible candidates took their chance to jump in. There really are no others left. There’s Palin, but it’s a zero percent chance she’ll get in. She knows that she’s not smart enough. Give her credit for that.

It’s finally gut-check time for moderate Republicans. They only have one chance left to win the White House before the political right fractures. If they push Jeb to the top of the heap but lose again, they lose control of the GOP. Even though it’s got nothing to do with conservatism, but only that the country can accept a second Clinton before a third Bush. It might only be that simple if Jeb loses. But the farther-right wing gains control of the party and the moderates will never get it back. Cue the exodus, with the right splitting into a nationalist GOP and the other half being a social-middle/fiscal-right, bloc, now homeless.

It’s a gut-check for the moderates, the “establishment Republicans,” because this country is going to elect its first female president. We’ve never had a female politician with a list of qualifications like this one has. No Republican can win. Seems like a paradox, but the only way for the moderate wing of the GOP, the business wing, to hang onto the party is to step aside this cycle. Act happy with whoever wins the nomination, as long as it’s a far-right guy with plenty of inflammatory stump-speech baggage.

If the Republican nominee for 2016 is a moderate who Clinton edges out, then the political right fractures. If the nominee is a social conservative who goes down in spectacular defeat, then the right survives as an entity. Weak and confused, but a single entity. The central idea here is that, no matter what happens, there will be a major putsch in the GOP in December of 2016. If Hillary does not become incapacitated between now and the election, she wins. The only question now, is whether the GOP putsch in December 2016 will oust the moderates or the christian right.

We know what the mantra will be if Jeb loses: “He wasn’t conservative enough.” We’ve heard that for 8 years, and it doubled Fox News’s viewership. Thus, putsch. And we know what the “conventional wisdom” will be if Santorum loses: “He was too far right of the country.” Also thus, a putsch, but it will look less like a putsch from the outside. The view will spread, that arguing social issues will lead to national irrelevancy for the entire political right. They’d be left with only that big “L” across the USA: the middle stripe from North Dakota to Texas then eastwards across the Old South.

What happens when one faction is ousted? That depends on the faction. A newly-defeated moderate wing would almost certainly form its own party after expulsion, socially-centrist and fiscally-sensible, and would quickly become the second party in a 3-party system. But it would be a long struggle in certain states, ensuring a generation of Democrat dominance in national politics. The new GOP would be very difficult to dislodge in places where Republican Statehouses enacted redistricting following the 2010 census, but the surviving opposition congresspeople would be split in half.

If the social-right wing is ousted, it looks very different. The surviving GOP structure would keep trying to placate the evangy wing in words, while acting to remove social policy from the platform altogether. In this case, the only pressing question is how long the social conservatives will tolerate being pushed aside before the program becomes evident. There would be a schism in this situation too, but if managed slowly and deftly by the moderate Republicans, the defection might only be a trickle.

Difficult choice, become the party of far-wing nuts or shake off the wingnuts and lose half of the base. A real gut check.”

That’s what i said in July of 2015, and, like, wow.

Wow, it’s all coming true. The major donors in the Republican base are sitting out the primaries. Jeb’s donors are not flocking to Rubio. Rather, they’re taking a pause, detesting Trump but not risking the ire of an ascendant Trump. There is only one way to stop Trump, and that is to convince both Kasich and Cruz to take a powder by Friday, February 26th. Kasich is reasonable, but good luck with Trusty Ted, hahaha.

In other words, Rubio and Cruz will eviscerate each other even though they’ve declared an unspoken truce as of February 23rd. Even if they’re both attacking Trump, they’ll split the non-Trump vote on March 1st, and hand him 1/4 of the nomination in one day. Mark these words: if Cruz doesn’t quit by Friday February 26th 2016, then Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for President.

We don’t even have to consult the crystals to see what happens next. That future is very, very clear. Hillary Clinton wins big on March 1st, carrying a consensus from South Carolina. In debates with Trump for the general election, Hillary gorges on Donald’s vagueness, ripping spare chunks of flesh off his already-skeletal policy proposals. Between the two, it becomes painfully obvious by September which one is prepared to be President, and which one is just jacking around.

By October, the presumptive President-elect will have enough poll-driven political capital to force the Senate to finally approve Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, and on the day she takes office in January of 2017, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will retire. Goodbye to the center-right Court which the Reagan Legacy built.

The interesting part is what happens to the Republicans throughout November and December of 2016. Obviously, the “business wing” and the Tea Party wing can no longer live together. That leaves the Christian wing, created by Reagan, to decide which cousin they’re more kin to. Odds layed now, by me, say that the evangelicals will invest in the Tea Party wing, united by mutual aversion to compromise.

Now the odd man out, the business wing of the Republican Party has two choices. It can strike out alone as a third party, or it can become the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Hilarious as it is, the Dems keep moving farther left, so the orphaned moderate Republicans are steadily pushed into being more likely, to form a third party, fiscally conservative and socially pragmatic.

Reagan’s bargain to align government with evangelical protestantism in return for voter loyalty was a masterpiece of political architecture, but as the current Republican Party is discovering, it was a deal with a devil, one that they just can’t shake. To the 33% Left and the 33% Middle, the things Republicans have to say in order to compete in primaries are absurd and often disturbing.

15 years ago, that kind of rhetoric was the proud tradition of protestant pilgrims carrying our national resilience into terrortimes. Now, it sounds like those Christians who are the deepest into the mystical symbolism of prophecy have the loudest political voice in the GOP’s evangelical wing. Need proof? Accusing a Republican Senate candidate of being a witch ruined her campaign. More proof? The 2010 midterms featured a very fired-up GOP base (the Tea Party), and was again proved a potent voting bloc in the 2014 midterms. So what happened in between? What happened in 2012? Romney happened, who happens to be a Mormon. As far as a swath of social-right Christians are concerned, he might as well have been Muslim.

Romney would have lost narrowly, had he been a Christian. But being a Mormon kept a couple million Republicans from voting for him. This week, i read something on Politico which almost made me snort beer out my nose from sudden and unexpected laughter. Politico has been becoming more a voice for Rubio slowly over months (reaching a fevered pitch just after the February 25th GOP debate in Texas), and they gave voice to some Republican operative who postulated that Marco Rubio, as a former Mormon, might do well in Utah-proximate Nevada. That’s making me laugh out loud all over again right now. What this political professional quoted on Politico is ignorant of, is that (to Mormons) an ex-Mormon is the functional equivalent of a demon in human guise. Mormons are so resentful towards their apostates, that some people call Mormonism “Hillbilly Scientology”.

That’s just another example of myopia by the GOP establishment, thinking that an ex-Mormon might be acceptable to practicing Mormons. Hilarious ignorance. Unexplained so far, is how the Republican establishment could have hooked their wagon to devout Christians for so long, and yet be so shockingly unaware of how to manage a religious community. You’d think that by now, they’d have someone in charge of steering the social-conservative movement into softer positions and rhetoric, dangling the carrot of patient incrementalism before the preachers.

This is why the “business wing” of moderate Republicans will be ousted in December of 2016, leaving the GOP as an alliance of Tea Party activists and evangelicals. The GOP establishment just never saw it coming. The old guard is just humming along in lala mode, confident that they could moderate and digest any new clusters of constituency which crop up on the right. They never foresaw the Christian fundamentalists outvoicing the majority of Christian moderates after 9-11. They never thought the Tea Party would elbow their way up to 50 in the House and 5 in the Senate. And they sure as shit didn’t think Trump would take half their deck and start dealing.

So moderate Republicans are out in December of 2016, and the split should become formal in early 2017. The new party will have a whole lot of support among the wealthy and the GOP’s skilled political pros would defect en masse. It would quickly become America’s second party, after a brief 12-year struggle with a socially-conservative residual Republican Party in an electoral death-spiral, remember that big Red L across America. And hopefully everyone in American politics for the next 50 years will think twice about hooking their wagon to this or that brand of religion. Has Queen Cersei taught us nothing?

That will be fun to watch for 15 years, including watching Fox News dither for several years on which faction of the right to favor. Once the political right re-coalesces in 2030, we can see what it looks like. Middle class blacks, self-made hispanics, upper class whites, leaders in the financial and manufacturing fields, and two of the three remaining media congloms in the world. Fun times, i tell ya.