There’s been a bunch of dubious coverage of the “civil war” between the congressional Republican leadership and insurgent conservatives, featuring even more dubious coverage of John Boehner’s decision to “sacrifice” his gavel, which in practical terms means a year of fun and sun in Florida followed by an extremely lucrative lobbying career. Beyond that, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of how this will all play out in Congress, as I discussed at TPMCafe:

[T]he blessings Boehner has vouchsafed Washington could turn out to be ephemeral. As the budget wizard Stan Collender has observed, the avoidance of a shutdown this week has massively increased the odds of a shutdown in December. And Ted Cruz could personally wreck the dreams of those who imagine a brief Era of Good Feelings where Boehner and House Democrats liberate all sorts of gridlocked legislation.
So does that mean congressional Republicans are doomed to perpetually refight the internal battles that led to Boehner’s resignation? No, not at all. No matter what happens in December, there will likely follow an intra-party election year truce in Congress (though probably not on the presidential nomination primary trail). And then, if Republicans win the White House and hang onto control of Congress, most of the fighting will go away as the party comes together joyfully to implement most of the conservative movement’s agenda.
This last conclusion may come as a shock to those used to hearing about various struggles for the soul of the Republican Party, or the many cries of treason aimed at congressional leaders from the Right and from the grassroots. But what must be understood is that virtually all of these conflicts revolve around arguments over strategy and tactics, not principles, goals or policies.
Every single congressional Republican is for repealing Obamacare. They all, even the most egregious RINOs, oppose the Iran Nuclear Deal. All but a very small handful favor defunding Planned Parenthood, criminalizing abortions to the maximum extent the Supreme Court allows, slashing upper-end and corporate taxes, dumping Medicaid on the states, and cutting safety net funding while boosting defense spending. The fighting has been over how to advance these goals when Republicans do not entirely control the federal government. If they do entirely control the federal government, the fighting will mostly go away, or will migrate to new ideological demands that are too extreme to contemplate just now.
The “moderation” in the GOP that conservatives attack and the MSM applauds will look very different if Republicans are no longer faced with immovable Democratic opposition at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. This should have been made plain back in the summer of 2012, when plans for a post-election conservative policy blitz utilizing the budget reconciliation process–which disposes of filibusters–were circulating on the breeze of GOP hopes that Mitt Romney would win and inherit a Republican-controlled Senate as well.
Since then the targets of such a single-party offensive have only grown: presidential executive orders on carbon emissions and immigration; Obama diplomatic efforts; the Obama “tilt” in judicial appointments; along with such hardy perennials as Obamacare, the New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, and progressive taxation. And without question, the “treachery” of John Roberts has ensured that conservative litmus tests for the Supreme Court will be stricter and more focused on purely predictable conservative policy outcomes than ever before.
If, of course, Republicans lose a third consecutive presidential election, the current battles over strategy and tactics might reemerge with a vengeance, as conservatives grow frantic over the frightful damage being done to the America of their imagination by the free-spending, tyrannical, Muslim-loving, race-card-playing and baby-killing Democrats who somehow keep getting elected. And at that point pragmatic Republicans may become truly, not just strategically, moderate in counseling their compatriots that it’s time to stop pursuing the fever dreams of the Goldwater campaign.

It’s just another indicator that this is going to be a very, very high-stakes election in 2016.

In his New York Times op-ed, “What if All Politics Is National?,” Thomas B. Edsall addresses gnarly issues for Democrats, including the increasing polarization of national politics, the “inefficient distribution of Democratic voters,” the role of growing inequality, and most troubling of all, the triumph of the GOP in state politics. As always, Edsall’s entire column merits a thoughtful read. We’ll just quote from his observations about Republican domination at the state level, a problem which cries out for a more effective Democratic response:

In the states, just over half the population lives under one-party Republican rule. While Congress and the White House cannot agree on taxes, spending, immigration or any major issue, leaders in the 24 Republican-controlled states are winning enactment of a comprehensive conservative agenda.
Put another way, in a nation where the two major political parties are roughly equal, Republicans have full control of 24 states with 47.8 percent of the population, 152.4 million, Democrats have full control of only 7 states with 15.8 percent, 49.1 million. The remaining 17 states are under split control.
…Republican success at the state level – in contrast with control of the United States House and Senate – has empowered the party to actually make policy without the crippling effects of partisan gridlock.
More law and regulatory policy – much of it conservative and controversial – has been enacted at the state level than at any other level of government in the past five years. In terms of policy initiatives, the 24 states where Republicans are in full control are the most productive of all: the 11 Confederate states, except Virginia, along with Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska (with a nominally non-partisan legislature), Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah.
It is in these states that the retrenchment from social and economic liberalism is moving into high gear, as much of the rest of the country and the federal government remains mired in conflict…Democrats may have the edge in presidential elections, but Republicans now have the advantage where it counts: in the states, where they can set the policies that govern a majority of citizens’ daily lives.

That’s a lot for Democrats to worry about. It took a long time, too long, for Democrats to put together a challenge to the Koch brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been credited with spearheading the GOP’s domination of state politics. Progressive organizations like the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), the Association of State Democratic Chairs and Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) are struggling to develop effective strategies and resources for restoring political balance in the nation’s state legislatures.
The Center for Media and Democracy has had some impressive success in holding ALEC’s corporate supporters accountable. CMD reports that “As of August 2015, at least 106 corporations and 19 non-profits — for a total of 120 private sector members — have publicly announced that they cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council…(four of those corporations have subsequently returned to ALEC, and many of the non-profits listed by ALEC as “lapsed” in August 2013 share an ideological agenda with and noted their desire to return to ALEC).”
Looking forward, ending ALEC’s reign of reaction in the state legislatures will require that a lot more progressives pay attention to politics at the state level and support Democratic candidates for state legislatures. Even with a Democratic landslide in 2016, winning back political balance in state governments will be a long, difficult haul. A more energized progressive coalition to meet this challenge is overdue.

Rarely these days do we see Republicans writing thoughtful analyses of their party’s present and future. There’s a notable exception in today’s New York Times, “Anarchy in the House,” an op-ed by Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” An excerpt:

Years ago, I wrote a history of the Republican civil war between the moderates and radicals of the Goldwater era. I’m sufficiently alarmed, watching history repeat itself, that I now work as a research consultant for the Main Street Partnership, an organization of over 70 members of Congress who represent the moderate-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Their rivals are members of the Freedom Caucus, who would rather close the government than compromise.
Once again, the battle is between Republicans who want to govern and those who don’t. The radicals have no realistic alternative solutions of their own. Even to contemplate the negotiations and compromises such policies entail would sully their ideological purity.
Senator Goldwater, despite his brave talk of repeal, was an isolated, powerless legislator. The extremists who opposed John A. Boehner as speaker are likewise a small faction without the ability to accomplish any positive program. InsideGov, a government watchdog site, recently came up with a list of the least effective members of Congress, as determined by the percentage of bills they sponsored that went on to pass committee. Ideological extremism correlates closely with legislative impotence.
That’s unsurprising, since many members of the Freedom Caucus put a higher priority on scoring purity points than on carrying out the nation’s business. Its chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, is, by this accounting, the second-least effective member of Congress. The only one who’s even less effective is another longtime critic of Mr. Boehner, Representative Steve King of Iowa, not one of whose 94 sponsored bills has passed the committee stage. Most of Mr. Boehner’s harshest critics lurk at the bottom of the Lugar Center’s Bipartisanship Index. Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who triumphantly tweeted “Today the establishment lost” after Mr. Boehner’s resignation, is ranked last.
The Republican Party’s unhappy ideological adventure in the early ’60s ended in disaster. Goldwater not only lost the election in a landslide, but he dragged down the entire Republican ticket. The main result of conservative overreach was to hand President Lyndon B. Johnson the liberal supermajority he needed to pass Medicare and Medicaid.
The present resurgence of anti-governing conservatism is also likely to end badly for Republicans. The extremists have the ability to disrupt the Congress, but not to lead it. Their belief that shutdowns will secure real concessions is magical thinking, not legislative realism. And the more power they gain, the less likely it becomes that a Republican-controlled Congress can pass conservative legislation, or indeed any legislation at all.

In terms of raw political advantage, all of this gives Dems realistic optimism about 2016, perhaps even the possibility of a landslide. But the tragedy in the GOP’s descent into scorched-earth partisanship is the lost opportunity – progress for all Americans, had the Republicans negotiated for compromises to benefit millions. Instead, a landslide drubbing now looks like the best hope for restoring reason to the GOP.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from huffPo:
High tech hyper-libertarians, and increasingly right wing politicians who love both their money and their vision of marketplaces with no regulations, love to sell the virtues of the “sharing economy”, as they call it. Others slightly less enamored might call it the gig economy or the on-demand economy (which might be the most descriptive term, as I will write more of below), but whatever you call it, there are real concerns with having marketplaces with no rules to govern them.
Check out this great rant by Bill Maher to get the funniest take on these problems:

What the hyper-libertarian dreamweavers of Uber and AirBnB are spinning is a world where anyone can earn a little extra money on the side driving people around or sharing their extra room, and all of the rest can have more convenience besides. No need for rules: just some sharing among the new friends you meet through the app, right? The problem with no rules between new app-friends is that the old norms of safety and reliability and fairness go out the window- not to mention the stable jobs all those industries companies like Uber and AirBnB are competing with provide. Worried about safety on your trips? Stories like this. Worried about what AirBnB is doing to housing prices as it becomes a bigger and bigger business? Studies like this sure drive me to wonder. Do you have a disability and want to rent from AirBnB or ride with Uber? I’m hearing a lot of bad stories from my friends in the disability community. Want to stay in a building where the fire codes are done right? No guarantees at all with your new friend you just found on AirBnB.
And now AirBnB is starting to partner with the apartment industry, which will lead further away from individuals renting out their spare room, and more toward what would essentially be illegal hotels with no health and safety rules.
The issues go on and on, but at the center of it all is what kind of society are we trying to build. As the video my organization American Family Voices put out yesterday, I want an economy that is built around a prosperous and expanding middle class, where there is some stability in jobs, wages steadily rise, and most of the nation’s income is going to the bottom 90% of people rather than the top 1%. How does an on-demand economy get us to those goals? The whole idea of “on-demand” in corporate America was to have goods delivered exactly when they were needed. The problem with doing that in services is that you turn your workers into expendable cogs in your giant corporate wheel. That doesn’t lead to stability or higher wages or better benefits or economic security for anyone but the extremely wealthy executives at a few tech companies with clever apps.
There’s also an issue with these companies quickly joining the small number of firms- the big banks on Wall Street, Wal-Mart, a few big energy and food companies, etc- that have such incredible power in the economy and in politics that they can bully or bribe politicians into doing anything they want them to do.
So you know what? Let’s keep some basic ground rules in our economy. I want to stay at a place on my trips that has some health safety regulations they have to abide by; I want there to be an even playing field so that Uber and AirBnB have to live by the same rules that taxi companies and hotels do; if Uber drivers are full time, if AirBnB hosts are renting out apartments most of the time, they ought to be treated like employees and have their payroll taxes paid.
Today, there is a hearing in the House about the on-demand economy. The Republicans love the idea of the app-driven wild, wild west economy. Their answer to leveling the playfield for everyone else is to just de-regulate everything so there will be no rules that anyone has to live by in the modern economy. Not sure that works for anyone but the very wealthiest, but that is fine by them. In the meantime, the rest of us ought to keep a wary eye out for the on-demand libertarians: their vision could impoverish, and make unsafe and unfair, the entire society in the years to come.

At The Upshot Nate Cohn assesses the political leverage of red and blue state Republicans in the wake of Boehner’s resignation on the road to 2016. Cohn notes some interesting statistics, including: “In 2012, there were more Mitt Romney voters in California than in Texas, and in Chicago’s Cook County than in West Virginia. Over all, the states that voted for President Obama in 2012 hold 50 percent of the delegates to the Republican National Convention, even though they contain just 19 percent of Republican senators…In the last two cycles, relatively moderate Republican candidates won the party’s nomination by sweeping the blue states.”
Trump calls one of his best possible running mates a “clown and a “baby.”
Has Trump peaked? But even if he falls short of the delegates needed for the GOP nomination, there are two ways he could be the kingmaker: He could urge his delegates to support another GOP candidate or he could break his pledge and run as an Independent.
I’m tempted to say that Steven Rattner has nuked Carly Fiorina’s presidential aspirations by detailing the string of embarrassing failures that define her career as a “business leader.” But then I remembered no voters seemed to care that Bush II screwed up every business he touched.
Marcela Valdes has a NYT Magazine profile of Univision’s Jorge Ramos, arguably “the most influential news anchor in the Americas,” who has the unrivaled attention of Latino voters in the U.S. and throughout the hemisphere.
Jeb “free stuff” Bush may have driven a big spike in his own political coffin. Not that he was going to get many African American votes, even before this latest blunder. But the incident does indicate a proclivity for gaffes which even a modestly-astute candidate should be able to avoid. NYT columnist Charles M. Blow explains: “There it is! If you let people talk long enough, the true self will always be revealed. Not only is there a supreme irony in this racial condescension that casts black people, whose free labor helped establish the prosperity of this country and who were systematically excluded from the full benefits of that prosperity for generations, as leeches only desirous of “free stuff,” this line of reasoning also infantilizes black thought and consciousness and presents an I-know-best-what-ails-you paternalism about black progress.”
At Newsweek “Should Voting Be Compulsory?” by William A. Galston and E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the case for universal voting based on the Australian model, which mandates that all eligible citizens show up to vote or pay a modest fine, which increases with repeated failures to vote. The authors argue “Universal voting would help fill the vacuum in participation by evening out disparities stemming from income, education and age. It would enhance our system’s ability to represent all our citizens and give states and localities incentives to lower, not raise, procedural barriers to the full and equal participation of each citizen in the electoral process…Candidates would know that they had to do more than appeal to their respective bases with harshly divisive rhetoric and an emphasis on hot-button issues…The balance of electoral activities would shift from the mobilization of highly committed voters toward the persuasion of the less committed. Candidates unwilling or unable to engage in persuasion would be more likely to lose. If political rhetoric cooled a bit, the intensity of polarization would diminish, improving the prospects for post-election compromise.”
At Media Matters Hannah Groch-Begley’s “50 Headlines That Reveal Wash. Post Reporter Chris Cillizza’s Obsession With The Clinton Email Story” provides a disturbing indication that Cillizza may be functioning more like a GOP echo chamber parrot than a nonpartisan reporter.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman puts the Boehner melt-down in clear perspective: “John Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy and undermined America’s credibility around the world…Still, things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost surely will be worse. Bad as Mr. Boehner was, he was just a symptom of the underlying malady, the madness that has consumed his party.”

We’re all going to be treated to an orgy of inside baseball over the weekend about the genesis of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation, and lots of weepy stuff about his sacrifice in the national interest. Indeed, some hands are wringing over the terrible weakness of the contemporary Speakership, as though that is some hallowed Washington Institution.
Asked by Politico to comment on that dire possibility today, here’s what I said:

I’m afraid I have to challenge the premise of a Politico question again. The Boehner resignation didn’t show the demise of the Speakership, but its abiding strength. Think about it: Congress avoided (more than likely) a federal government shutdown; angry conservatives got a scalp; and Boehner himself got the clock ticking early on the one-year lobbying ban that’s the only thing standing between him and vast wealth. Everybody wins!

More fundamentally, the problems with the House since 2010 have less to do with the power or powerlessness of the Speaker than with the inability of certain Members–and the radicalized conservative movement they represent–to recognize the limitations of the House as an institution in an era of divided government. Many conservatives became furious at Boehner and the GOP Establishment for failing to keep promises they had no business making. If everybody stops pretending a House majority can tell a president of another party what to do, the House and the speakership will be healthier institutions.

To put it another way, the problem that led to Boehner’s resignation isn’t going away other than temporarily, even with a different personality holding the gavel. What’s required is an end to the ideological delusion that leads conservatives to believe they are destined to have their way.

The following article excerpt by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Well the debate is over and, if the Trump spectacle were not so dangerous, watching the Republicans devour each other in the shark tank would be fun. But America is more than a reality show, and the stakes are too high for pure enjoyment.
…In the “children’s table” warm up debate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal joined the anti-immigrant fray with the memorable statement that “immigration without assimilation is an invasion.”
In fact, of course, the immigrant rights community has been organizing to make legal immigrants citizens for a long time.
…Citizenship Day in the U.S…was commemorated by a White House announcement that it was launching a national, multilingual public awareness campaign to promote the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship among eligible lawful permanent residents, and to build a volunteer corps that will support them throughout the naturalization process. It’s called the “Stand Stronger” Citizenship Awareness Campaign.
You’d think the “immigration without assimilation is an invasion” crowd would just love the push for legal permanent residents to become full fledged American citizens, but don’t bet on it.
That’s because citizens can vote.
And there is a growing movement brewing out there that is worth watching, enjoying, and actively supporting. That is the work being done in the immigrant communities through naturalization and voter registration that may teach the Republicans a lesson.
I have been working in the progressive movement a long time and I have many close friends in the immigrant rights movement. They are smart, tough, and they are street fighters. Usually their communities work hard and try to quietly raise their families. But if there is anything that gets them mad and moves them into action, it is seeing their hard working communities being bullied.
They are quite bi-partisan about it — and have gone after Democrats on occasion.
But usually the bullies are on the Republican side of the fence. In 1994 California Governor Pete Wilson pushed for the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. The Mexican immigrant community first responded with marches, and then they proceeded to naturalize in massive numbers and turn out to vote. California, that had been Ronald Reagan Red for eight straight elections has been true-blue Democratic ever since.
When Rep. James Sensenbrenner passed the harshly anti-immigrant H.R. 187 late in 2005, he triggered the mega-marches in the spring of 2006, and a massive surge in naturalization and voter registration. Latino immigrants, who had voted 49 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, voted 75 percent for Barack Obama.
The Latino, Asian, and immigrant vote carried many swing states, such as Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, and Colorado for Obama, and helped to sweep in Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate as well. We enjoy ObamaCare as a result.
When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lurched to the Right on immigration issues in the primaries leading up to the 2012 elections he was lured into talking about the need for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”. That sound bite played in almost a continuous loop on Spanish language television, and Mitt Romney “self-deported” from the White House. Over 70 percent of the 15 million Asian and Latino voters sent a strong message by voting for President Obama.
For a while it looked like Republicans had learned their lesson, and were going to engage in constructive bi-partisan solutions. But the lure of rancid, right-wing populism was too great, and now the Republicans are tripping over themselves talking about invasions, fences on the border to both Mexico and Canada, and changing our U.S. Constitution to prevent babies born in the U.S. from ever being voters. Not to mention the racist bloviating by Donald Trump, calling Mexicans “rapists” and drug dealers.
These provocations have resulted in large immigrant demonstrations calling out Trump. Latinos protesting Trump were outside his speech in Dallas…next to the USS Iowa battleship…in San Pedro, CA, and…outside the Simi Valley, CA Ronald Reagan Library.
Just as interesting and perhaps more important, there were over 40 naturalization workshops being organized around the nation…by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA). NPNA is an umbrella organization of well-known immigrant rights coalitions operating in 34 States.
Over the last three years they have assisted over 66,000 immigrants to naturalize or get the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protection from deportation. And they have plans to greatly increase the pace of naturalization during the coming months and to begin promoting a “New American Dreams” platform for sensible immigrant integration.
The Latino and Asian vote was some 15 million in the 2012 elections, and under normal circumstances that number grows with each election. These are not normal circumstances. There are right now 9 million legal permanent residents (green card holders) who are eligible to apply to naturalize today. There are over 13 million unregistered Latinos and Asians who are eligible to vote.
If even 20 percent of the Green Card holders or unregistered voters are motivated by the Trump hate to get up, become citizens, and vote, then that changes the political demographics of this next election by adding an additional 4.4 million voters to the voting pool. In addition, we should not forget that close to 900,000 U.S. citizens immigrant families turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote. Nothing like insulting their parents to get them motivated.
The anger generated by the nativist rants coming from Donald Trump and the Republican party look like they are fueling a growing political revolution in immigrant communities. This is one reality show that will be fun to watch, and I am going to do my very best to help my friends to make it happen.