This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Many Beltway insiders seem to have convinced themselves that abortion doesn’t matter anymore. Just look at the press clippings from CPAC, where Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wowed his D.C. cheerleaders with a speech doubling down on his earlier call for a “truce” over culture-war issues like abortion. Chris Christie came into town a few days later, and excited a lot of the same people with a speech focused almost exclusively on the idea that entitlement-spending cuts are the nation’s top priority. Big-time conservative strategists like Michael Barone have opined that a truce over abortion policy–as reflected in a structure of legalized abortion with “reasonable” state restrictions–is already in place. And we are told incessantly that the driving force in Republican politics, the Tea Party movement, is basically libertarian in its orientation and wildly uninterested in cultural issues.
How out of touch could they be? It’s rare to see the Washington zeitgeist so disconnected from the reality of what conservative activists and their representatives are doing and saying on the ground in Iowa, in state capitals across the country, and next door in the House of Representatives. Far from being a sideshow, the Right-to-Life movement’s priorities have been front-and-center for conservatives across the country.
Take the incoming “Tea Party Congress”: This January, House Republicans made restricting abortions an immediate goal, pushing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3) as a top priority right after their vote on Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law (H.R. 2). The abortion legislation, which has 209 co-sponsors (199 of them Republicans), is advertised as simply codifying the Hyde Amendment that’s been attached to appropriations bills since 1977; but it would actually go much further, denying employers a tax exemption for private health policies that include coverage of abortion services. Originally, H.R. 3 also sought to redefine “rape”–for purposes of the longstanding “rape and incest” exception to the Hyde Amendment–to include only “forcible” acts, presumably to remove pregnancies resulting from acts of statutory rape from the exception. The House also appears poised to pass appropriations measures that would eliminate funds for the Title X program, which provides contraceptive services for low-income women, and ban any federal funding for Planned Parenthood. And it is working to keep participants in the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance exchanges from purchasing policies that cover abortions, even with their own money. If there’s a “truce” in place, it’s being violated daily.
At the state level, newly empowered Republicans are also promoting anti-abortion measures. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has designated a bill to require pre-abortion sonograms an “emergency” measure, giving it legislative priority. In South Carolina, a bill is moving toward passage that would create an unusually broad “conscience clause” to protect health care workers and pharmacists from disciplinary actions prompted by a refusal to administer birth control or emergency contraception, to take part in medical research that destroys an in vitro human embryo, or to halt care of a dying person in a hospital. In Ohio, Republican legislators are pushing a blizzard of anti-abortion bills, including one that would fine doctors for performing abortions when a fetal heartbeat is discerned. A South Dakota legislator just made national headlines by introducing a bill that would classify as “justifiable homicide” a death caused with the aim of protecting the unborn. He withdrew it after critics called it a license to kill abortion providers, but a separate bill in the same state, headed for a floor vote, would require women to attend a lecture at a crisis pregnancy center (code for an anti-abortion advocacy office) before getting an abortion. Even Mr. Focus-on-the-Fiscal-Crisis, Chris Christie, opted to eliminate state contraceptive services in the interest of “fiscal restraint,” and made the cuts stick with a gubernatorial veto. One could go on and on; there’s clearly no “truce” in the state legislatures.
And there will be no truce on the presidential campaign trail. Daniels’s statements about dialing down the culture wars have already been vocally rejected by potential presidential rivals Mike Huckabee, John Thune, and Rick Santorum. Rush Limbaugh has said that Daniels’s position reflects the interests of a Republican “ruling class” that wants to rein in social conservatives and the Tea Party movement. In his CPAC speech, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour framed his anti-abortion record as a core element of his conservative credentials, and repudiated his own past remarks urging support for pro-choice Republicans. Mitt Romney, whose previous support for abortion rights is a major problem for him politically, isn’t about to soft-pedal the issue. It’s likely that either Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, two the Right-to-Life movement’s very favorite pols, will be running for president later this year. In fact, in the vast field of Republicans considering a presidential campaign, there’s not a single figure who is publicly identified as pro-choice; even Donald Trump has gone out of his way to reassure the anti-abortion crowd he’s now on their side.
Why are Republicans are still fixated on abortion, at a time when they seem to be slowly drifting toward tolerance, or at least relative indifference, on other culture-war issues such as LGBT rights? For one thing, public opinion on abortion seems frozen in amber: Notably, in sharp contrast with issues like gay marriage, there’s no evidence of generational change. But the main reason for the GOP’s focus on restricting and ultimately outlawing abortion is simply that the Right-to-Life movement has worked very hard for many years to make itself perhaps the most impossible-to-ignore, dangerous-to-diss faction in Republican politics, particularly at the presidential level. Its strength was most recently illustrated when it stopped John McCain from choosing Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as his 2008 running mate, and had its poster pol, Sarah Palin, placed on the ticket instead. That’s power.
By failing to note these dynamics, Washington types have been ignoring what is right in front of their eyes. Whether it’s the economic crisis–which has raised the relative volume of debate over fiscal issues–or the alluring media focus on seemingly “libertarian” legislators like Rand and Ron Paul (both of whom, by the way, are anti-choice), or the ever-present longing for a mature, bipartisan consensus, the punditocracy has convinced itself that Tea Party Republicans aren’t interested in going to war over abortion. As I’ve written before, in fact they’d love to. Why are we acting so surprised?
UPDATE: The House approved Mike Pence’s amendment to ban federal funding for Planned Parenthood by a 240-185 vote, with eleven Democrats voting for the amendment and seven Republicans voting against it. This was pretty predictable; the most significant thing that happened during the floor debate was a remarkably brave speech by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) about an abortion she had undertaken during a troubled pregnancy, in response to the usual GOP slurs against women as casual baby-killers. (I’ll be writing a separate post about the important strategic implications of Speier’s speech for pro-choice progressives).
The whole GOP sponsored continuing resolution, which included both the Planned Parenthood ban and the destruction of Title X family planning appropriations, passed the House over the weekend. I’m pleased to report not one House Democrat supported it. It will be interesting to see how the abortion-contraception issues play out in the ultimate House-Senate-White House negotiations over the CR, which may include a government shutdown.

Baltimore Sun columnist Thomas Schaller has a post up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “The Latino Threshold: Where the GOP Needs Latino Votes and Why” mulling over different scenarios for allocation of the Hispanic vote for President in ’12. In assessing Republican prospects with Hispanics in the upcoming presidential election, Schaller cites three key considerations:

First, as the white share of the electorate shrinks, the share of the Latino vote Republicans need to remain competitive will gradually inch higher. It is axiomatic that if one party attracts a minority share of votes from any group or subset, if that subset is growing as a share of the electorate these losses are magnified. Republicans get roughly the same share of the vote from Asian Americans as Latinos. But GOP losses among Asian Americans are less punitive overall because the Asian American vote is smaller and growing less fast as a share of the electorate than are Latino voters.
Second, whatever threshold the GOP needs to maintain–40 percent, 45 percent–will zigzag up and down a bit between midterm and presidential elections. Because midterm electorates trend older, whiter and more affluent, until and unless the Democrats can find ways to mobilize presidential-cycle voters in off years, the GOP’s Latino competitiveness threshold drops slightly in midterms before rising again in presidential years.
Finally, the Latino vote is of course not uniformly distributed across districts and states. So the calculus varies depending upon geography. In states where Latino voters are paired with significant African American populations–such as Florida, New York or Texas–the Republican cutoff is higher; where Latinos represent the bulk of non-white voters–such as Colorado or Nevada–the threshold is easier to reach.

Schaller doesn’t discuss a worrisome scenario for Dems, in which the Republicans nominate Sen. Marco Rubio for vice president, which would likely ice Florida for the GOP presidential candidate and maybe even help them get a bigger bite of the Latino vote elsewhere. Rubio only got 55 percent of the Latino vote in Florida’s Senate contest. I say only, because I would have expected a higher figure. But even assuming he would be a big asset on the GOP ticket, and assuming Dems lose NC and VA, Dems would likely have to win Ohio, or all of the remaining three swing states with large Latino populations, NM, NV and CO.
In terms of public opinion, Schaller explains:

…Is Obama’s Latino support holding steady?
On Monday, impreMedia and Latino Decisions released a new survey showing a strangely bifurcated answer to this question: Although 70 percent of Latinos approve of Obama’s performance as president, only 43 percent say they will for certain vote for him in 2012. Of the poll results, impreMedia pollster Pilar Marrero writes that “doubts about the president and the Democrats are not turning into support for the Republicans.”
To win re-election, President Obama must close the sale again with Latinos during the next two years. But if recent numbers from Public Policy Polling in key swing states are any indication, at least in potential head-to-head matchups against Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and (most especially) Sarah Palin, Obama is in as good a shape if not better in all four of Latino-pivotal swing states.

Regarding the Latino Decisions poll, Ed Kilgore’s take is a little different:

The president’s job approval rating in this poll is at 70%, up from 57% in the last LD survey in September. The percentage of respondents saying they are “certain” they will vote to re-elect Obama is at a relatively soft 43%; but with “probables” and leaners, his “re-elect” number rises to 61%. Meanwhile, the total percentage of Latinos inclined to vote for a Republican candidate in 2012 is at 21%, with only 9% certain to vote that way. It’s worth noting that in most polls, a “generic” Republican presidential candidate has been doing a lot better than named candidates in trial heats against Obama. And the 61-21 margin he enjoys among Latinos in this survey compares favorably with the 67-31 margin he won in 2008 against John McCain.
With the Republican presidential nominating process more than likely pushing the candidates towards immigrant-baiting statements, and with Latinos having relatively positive attitudes towards the kind of federal health care and education policies the GOP will be going after with big clawhammers, it’s hard to see exactly how the GOP makes gains among Latinos between now and Election Day…

Democrats received 64 percent of the Latino vote in the mid-terms, with Republican candidates winning 34 percent. After crunching all of the numbers, Schaller concludes “Republicans don’t need to carry the Latino vote–yet–but in the near term, and particularly in presidential cycles, they need to stay reasonably competitive, whereas Kilgore concludes of GOP hopes for ’12, in light of Hispanic opinion trends, “They’d better hope their 2010 margins among white voters hold up.”
In between those two perspectives, there are lots of variables that can influence Hispanic turnout and voter choices in different directions. But it’s certain that Democrats stand to benefit, perhaps decisively, from a greater investment in Latino naturalization, voter education and turnout.

To hear Republicans tell the tale, destroying public employee collective bargaining rights–as is currently being attempted in Wisconsin and Ohio–is essential in addressing the current state budget crisis in most parts of the country.
Aside from the fact that many Republican governors and legislators are manufacturing or exacerbating budget crises by pushing for tax cuts or corporate welfare (notably in Wisconsin and in Florida), it’s not at all clear there’s any correlation between public employee collective bargaining rights and budget problems.
As it happens, (these numbers are from American Rights At Work) thirteen states have no collective bargaining rights for public employees, and others limit them to selected public employees. Are these states in fine fiscal shape? Not entirely. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20% (Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina). Another, South Carolina, comes in at a sizable 17.4%. Nevada, where state employees have no collective bargaining rights (but local employees do) has the largest percentage shortfall in the country, at 45.2%. All in all, eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio.
An agenda of busting public employee unions does not appear to be any sort of budgetary silver bullet, and instead, should just be understood as representing the ancient conservative hostility to unions and workers’ rights generally, with fiscal problems, real or manufactured, just serving as a fresh excuse to grind this particular ideological ax and wage class warfare.

There is some excellent reporting at The Nation and other progressive websites about the loathsome effort of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker to gut unions in his state. But it would be hard to find a better video primer explaining the motives behind the scam and what may be at stake than this alarming clip from Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC report, “The Survival of the Democratic Party.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Even the anti-Maddow, Sean Hannity acknowledges in his FoxNews diatribe that Walker’s measure “would eliminate collective bargaining rights for most state workers.” Hannity conveniently omits noting that the unions exempted in Walker’s initiative are precisely the three unions that supported Walker’s election campaign, as Maddow points out in her clip above.

In the post just below, TDS Co-Editor William Galston alludes to reports of “serious bipartisan talks underway in the Senate to follow up on recommendations of the president’s fiscal commission.” This has indeed been a source of major buzz over the last few days, particularly when the Wall Street Journal‘s Jonathan Weismann broke the story and erroneously reported a revenue target for the group that indicated Democrats weren’t getting any significant tax increases in exchange for cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits (always the implicit tradeoff at the heart of hopes for a bipartian deficit deal).
Seems there is always a “gang” that emerges in the Senate to explore bipartisan deals, and this one naturally involves the four senators who sat on the deficit commission and actually supported its report: Democrats Dick Durban and Kent Conrad, and Republicans Tom Coburn and Mike Crapo. They’ve apparently brought Democrat Mark Warner and Republican Saxbe Chambliss into their cabal, creating a credible-sounding “Gang of Six.” Ezra Klein provides a chart of what the commission recommended, which has a much higher revenue figure than the original “Gang” reports, and which also assumed the Bush tax cuts for high earners would be allowed to expire.
It’s anybody’s guess whether Durban, Conrad and Warner can actually get a significant number of Senate Democrats to support what looks like a complex automatic mechanism for producing domestic spending cuts (including Social Security and Medicare), and whether the GOPers in the Gang can actually get Republicans to back off on the Bush tax cuts and contemplate “tax reforms” that raise total net revenues. It’s also unclear whether the White House and House Republicans, who are engaged currently in a game of chicken over FY 2011 appropriations, are in any way bought into this process.
But as a point of historical fact, as Jonathan Bernstein has pointed out, past Big Deficit Deals were only executed when financial markets very explicitly demanded it, which isn’t happening right now:

The last two major deficit reduction packages — the bipartisan one during the George H.W. Bush administration, and the partisan one passed by the Democrats in 1993 — were both driven by that kind of “explicit outside pressure.” There’s simply no reason to believe that Republicans would agree to significant increased revenues under current circumstances, and no reason to believe that Democrats would slash spending enough to make a serious dent in medium-term deficits without a Republican buy-in on taxes.

Since the House Republicans who are hankering for a government shutdown over appropriations are also extremely unlikely to support even a nickel of new revenues, the Gang is definitely fighting an uphill battle, even if it reaches internal agreement in its Capitol hideout.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s newly released budget avoids any offer to fix the long-term, structural deficits that his fiscal commission put on the table, and in doing so confronts his Republican critics with a choice: take the lead (and the heat) for proposing entitlement cuts or admit to your followers that you can’t meet your own long-term spending targets. After sending mixed signals for a few days, Republican leaders have decided to take the lead and hope for the best. In a joint statement, House Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan declared, “Our budget will lead where the president has failed, and it will include real entitlement reforms so that we can have a conversation with the American people about the challenges we face and the need to chart a new path to prosperity.”
Laying down such a clear marker makes it difficult to turn back. While Republicans have not decided on the details, it is now more likely that their FY2012 budget proposal will include substantial long-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. (Whether it embraces a Medicare voucher plan and the partial privatization of Social Security–two of many proposals that have made Ryan’s “roadmap” such a lightning rod–is another question.) The conventional wisdom is that the president has made a smart tactical choice and that Republicans will end up inflicting political pain on themselves, without even the solace of policy gain. And there’s certainly no shortage of data to support this proposition: In survey after survey in recent months, Americans say they want the government to spend less–without cutting anything of significance.
But now there are signs that attitudes may be shifting. A Pew survey out last week found that, for nearly every issue area where trend data are available, “either support for increased spending has fallen or support for spending cuts has grown (or both).” Elected officials seem to be responding. Serious bipartisan talks are underway in the Senate to follow up on the recommendations of the president’s fiscal commission. A shrewd political observer and senior Democratic leader, New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, remarked that “the feeling to do genuine deficit reduction is greater on both sides of the aisle than I’ve ever seen it.” He added that the task is “meeting in the middle and throwing away the ideological baggage.” And, in his February 15 press conference, President Obama offered his clearest indication so far that he is willing to enter into serious negotiations despite omitting entitlement reforms from his budget.
If there is indeed a shift taking place, it will be a long-overdue development. Our current approach to spending reflects many years of misrule by political leaders who have defaulted on their duty to speak directly and honestly to the people they represent. For too long, one party has pretended that we can stay on our current course without raising taxes, while the other has pretended that we can do so without touching anything people like. In the long run, we can’t have what we’re unwilling to pay for. If we want to continue on our current course, we’ll have to accept much higher levels of taxation. If not, we’ll have to cut spending for popular programs. It’s time for the pretense to end. And maybe–finally–it’s beginning to.
The issue isn’t just the budget; it’s self-government. To have confidence in democracy, we must believe that the people will, over time, respond affirmatively to official candor, even if the news is bleak. Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The peroration of his great speech is less remembered: “I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail.” He understood that a democratic people will be willing to endure sacrifice, but only if it is necessary to attain a greater good. Granted, a budget deficit–even a massive one–is not the same as a prospective Nazi invasion of the homeland. There is no moral equivalent of war. Still, Americans are worried about the future, perhaps more deeply than the Obama administration understands. A recent Gallup survey found that 52 percent of Americans–up from 39 percent just two years ago–think that China has become the world’s leading economic power. Only 32 percent think that the United States still is. More and more Americans (pluralities in recent surveys) now doubt that their children will live as well as they themselves do now.
In his 2011 State of the Union, Obama spoke of “winning the future.” If the American people are told the truth, they may come to understand that such a victory will require a radical shift of our fiscal course. As soon as Republicans put entitlement reforms on the table, Obama will have to choose whether to defend the status quo or to counter with his own proposal. The superficially safe move would be to do the former, which is what the base of the Democratic Party is demanding. The question is whether a president who prides himself on taking the long view can look beyond the superficial: After all, Americans want their president to be a strong leader, not just a likeable human being. If Obama comes to be seen as someone who follows events rather than leading them, he could end up paying a larger price than his political tacticians now expect.

A political commentariat that’s finally getting nervous about the slow-to-develop 2012 presidential field has been operating on the assumption that the real show begins on February 6, 2012, the current date for the Iowa Caucuses. That’s where the two parties’ calendars, which only allow four states to hold nominating events prior to March, have placed the starting gun.
But states have to take action to implement the party schedules, and at present, the big fly in the ointment is once again Florida, which under state law is scheduled to hold its primary on January 29, 2012. Unfortunately for those who want an orderly process, Florida legislative leaders, and now superstar U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, are opposing a change in the date.
Much of the talk about Florida’s primary date revolves around the question of whether the national GOP will penalize the state by denying it delegates if it breaks the calendar rules (this was the dilemma that faced Democrats in 2008). But just as important is the almost certain triggering of action by Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to guarantee their primacy by moving up their own contests into January, as happened four years ago.
Josh Putnam, an expert on this whole topic, is currently projecting that Iowa will hold its caucuses either on January 16 or January 9, with New Hampshire’s primary occurring on January 17 or 24, and Nevada and South Carolina holding their events on January 28. That could all obviously change, but any Republican wanting to run for president would be smart to assume their campaign needs to be in very high gear by Thanksgiving Day of this year.

Whatever the relative degree of success or failure conservatives have had in convincing Americans that deep spending cuts are necessary to reduce debts and deficit at the federal level, I don’t think there’s much doubt they’ve done pretty well in blaming public employee benefits and pensions for budget problems at the state level. But it’s important to understand that what Gov. Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin right now goes a lot further than any effort to trim benefits and pensions. Here’s Slate‘s Dave Weigel, who is not unsympathetic to conservative spending reduction efforts:

This goes much, much further than reckoning with the size of public employee pensions. This is clearly designed, as Taft-Hartley was clearly designed, to make it impossible for labor to retain its strength. And this is happening in most states now; the table’s set for cuts to public sector union benefits, so it’s not altogether difficult for Republicans to go a little further, while they have the chance. (It’s tough to imagine Wisconsin retaining its lopsided GOP majorities after 2012.) The difference between what states can get away with now and what the Democrats could get away with in 2009-2010 — when they were always a few votes short of passing [card] check — is dramatic, but it’s not new.

It’s also pretty clear that pols like Scott Walker (and Christ Christie, and Rick Scott, and others) see themselves as enjoying the same political benefits from busting public employee unions as Calvin Coolidge, the obscure Massachusetts governor who broke a police strike and was quickly elevated to the vice presidency and then the presidency. As in so many areas of public policy and politics, today’s conservatives are taking us down a long memory lane deep into the last century and beyond.

Do you think Democrats are divided over the necessity or advisability of thinking about “entitlement reform?” Maybe, but that’s in part because Democrats have somewhat different ideas about how to maintain a robust and progressive social safety net.
Among Republicans, there’s little or no substantive disagreement about the desire to transform Social Security and Medicare into something radically different. But when it comes to politics–well, just check out two prominent GOP voices on this subject that were raised this very day.
Today New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came to Washington and made a well-received speech at the American Enterprise Institute thundering against the cowards in Congress and demanding an immediate Republican assault on Social Security and Medicare as a simple measurement of “spine.” There’s no speech text available just yet, but believe me, Christie sounds a lot like Howard Dean circa late 2003 challenging the guts of his party colleagues on Iraq.
And yet here is Rich Lowry of National Review, by any conventional measure a much more conservative figure than Christie, making a very different calculation:

The public opposes cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and most Republicans did nothing to signal on the campaign trail that they’d do anything to touch them — in fact, most of them ran against Obama’s Medicare cuts. Changing popular programs without an explicit mandate to do so is a perilous business. It may be that the public is in a Chris Christie “give it to us straight” mood, and House Republican work on the entitlement front will dovetail with the bipartisan effort developing in the Senate, forcing President Obama to make good on his oft-expressed interest in reform and making real progress possible. It also may be that the House Republicans will repeat the experience of their forebears in 1995-96, who didn’t run on Medicare cuts, made them a centerpiece of their budget-balancing anyway, and got killed, setting back the limited-government cause for more than a decade.

As Jonathan Chait notes, Lowry goes on to endorse an assault on Medicaid–not a program of enormous interest to the old-white-folk base of the GOP, except for those who can’t afford nursing home care–and perhaps some cautious probing on Medicare. But in a context where pols like Christie (and others) are loudly trying to shame Republicans into expressing the courage of their actual convictions on Social Security and Medicare, such tactics may ring hollow both within and beyond the conservative movement.