As my colleague The Moose reported earlier today, Ralph Reed gave Georgia Democrats something to get excited about by officially announcing his candidacy for Lieutenant Governor in 2006. This race, folks, will be more fun than a barrel of monkeys at a creationism conference.Why, you might ask, is the Lordly Ralph, the legendary architect of Christian Right politics and more recently the extremely successful Georgia GOP chairman and Bush-Cheney strategist, so interested in presiding over the Georgia State Senate? In an earlier post, I suggested that he may be the victim of the Raquel Welch Syndrome, the natural if often hopeless desire to become respected as a serious practitioner of one’s chosen art, whether it’s acting or governing. But I’ve since learned that Reed has harbored a burning ambition since childhood to serve as Chief Executive of the Empire State of the South, and views the LG job as a stepping stone to that Seat of Power, a necessity since one of his political makeover projects, Governor Sonny Perdue, is running for re-election in ’06.But first Ralph must overcome a primary challenge from another guy who’s been seeing a future Governor in the bathroom mirror since he became old enough to reach the sink, Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, the scion of a well-known political family who’s been elected statewide three times. The first published polls show Oxendine with a healthy lead over Reed. And he will not readily concede Christian Right support to Ralph: in his first race for Insurance Commissioner back in 1994, Oxendine’s big proposal was to exempt churches from paying some state tax on insurance policies, arguing that he didn’t want to “tax God” (you just can’t make this stuff up).But I suspect that Oxendine’s campaign against Reed will be, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, “like sending out a three-toed sloth to take turf from a wolverine.” With all due respect to the Insurance Commissioner, he’s not exactly a Big Strategic Thinker. In fact, he’d probably draw even odds in a game of State Capitals with Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, the guy who’s besmirching my surname in his campaign for governor this year.Should Reed dispatch Oxendine, the real fun will begin. Former state legislator Greg Hecht, who ran a respectable but losing campaign for Congress in 2002, has already announced for the Democratic nomination. But the buzz is that Hecht will likely face one of my favorite politicians, Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond. Thurmond is a smart, charming, funny, and accomplished African-American with a proven track record of biracial appeal (he used to joke that he did particularly well in heavily-white counties bordering South Carolina where they thought he was Strom Thurmond’s grandson).If Reed is the GOPer in the race, the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, will have no trouble raising money in-state and nationally, and will need no more than fifteen minutes to compile an oppo-research file so toxic that they’ll have to handle it with tongs. Indeed, Oxendine aside, the biggest obstacle to a Reed candidacy may be the possibility that Ralph will have to take crucial time off the campaign trail to cool his heels in various courtrooms and congressional hearing-rooms preparing to explain his alleged role in the ever-widening Abramoff Indian Tribe Casino Shakedown scandal, a truly bizarre tale of corruption and hypocrisy that is likely to tranfix the whole hep political world at some point this year. I’m not the only one who’s looking forward to the moment when Reed has to testify before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee chaired by Sen. John McCain, the object of the famous 2000 South Carolina primary smear-and-whispering campaign by Bush operatives, reportedly under the direction of one Ralph Reed.If that’s not enough intrigue to keep you bookmarking that Atlanta Journal-Constitution web page (or checking out Reed’s exceptionally cheesy campaign site), there’s additional irony in Ralph’s aspiration to become Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. In between his better-known gigs with the Christian Coalition, the 2002 Georgia coordinated campaign, and the two Bush campaigns, Ralph tried his hand at being a down-home paid political consultant. In 1998, he was the key strategist for a Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor named Mitch Scandalakis, who ran a series of ads that (a) made an overt racial appeal, and (b) accused his opponent, Mark Taylor, of a completely fabricated cocaine addiction. Not only did Ralph’s candidate get righteously stomped like a Klansman at a Hip-Hop club; the backlash against his tactics took down most of the whole state Republican ticket.If that’s not enough irony for you, there’s this: when Ralph’s Republican buddies took over the state Senate in 2003, they stripped the Lieutenant Governor’s Office–occupied by the self-same smear target Mark Taylor–of most of its considerable powers. If Ralph somehow wins, he will have to go back to those same senators (assuming his party hangs onto control) and explain why he needs to lord it over them with powers denied to his predecessor.All in all, it’s going to be a wild ride.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 23: Trump’s BBB Far From Final, But Democratic Message Is Pretty Clear
Having followed the ups and downs and twists and turns of House passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I offered some thoughts at New York of where things stand for Republicans and for Democrats:
Republicans are in a state of euphoric self-congratulation over House passage of what’s known as the Big Beautiful Bill.
Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s daily bread, referred to the GOP Speaker of the House as “Magic Johnson” for his last-minute deal-making and cat-herding in securing its passage by a single vote, which happened before a Memorial Day deadline that many had thought unrealistic. He’s sharing credit, of course, with The Boss, Donald Trump, who wheedled and threatened and thundered in the presence of BBB holdouts at several key moments. In the end, for all the interminable talk of “rebellious” GOP factions unwilling to support the gigantic bill as either too vicious or not vicious enough, the price of collective failure was just too high for nearly all of them.
But now, of course, we are about to be reminded that Congress is a bicameral institution, and despite Republican control of both chambers, there are enough issues in the Senate with the carefully balanced Jenga tower the House built to endanger the edifice anew. And when the Senate does produce its version of BBB (the informal but very real deadline is July 4), the two bills will have to be reconciled, and the final product passed by both Houses and sent to Trump for his signature. This needs to happen before the arrival of the so-called X Date — likely in August — when the Treasury finally breaches the statutory debt limit, which is increased in the BBB.
As a former Senate employee, I can assure you that members and staff of that body have enormous institutional self-regard, regardless of party, and will not accept take-it-or-leave-it demands from the petty little pissants of the House. Beyond that, it’s important to understand that what makes “reconciliation” bills like BBB possible is the ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, and there are arcane but very real rules, policed by the non-partisan Senate parliamentarian, about what can and cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill. So some changes may become absolutely necessary.
More importantly, the very divisions that came close to derailing the bill in the House exist in the Senate as well, with some special twists.
One of the most powerful House factions was the SALT caucus, a sizable group of Republicans from high-tax blue states determined to lift or abolish the cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions imposed by the 2017 tax cut bill. They were able to secure an increase in the cap from $10,000 to $40,000 (with an inflation adjustment over the next ten years), a juicy treat for upper-middle-income tax itemizers with big property-tax bills, costing an estimated $320 billion. There are no Republican senators from the big SALT states, but there are a lot who deeply resent what they regard as a subsidy for free-spending Democrats in the states most affected. Maybe they’ll care enough about GOP control of the House to throw a lifeline to vulnerable members like Mike Lawler of New York or Young Kim of California, who have made SALT a big personal campaign-trail issue. But there are limits to empathy in Washington.
Another red-hot issue in the House was the size and nature of Medicaid cuts, with the BBB winding up with big cuts mostly accomplished via new “work requirements” that will cost millions of low-income people their health insurance. Senators are divided on Medicaid as well, notes Politico:
“GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have all warned they have red lines they will not cross on Medicaid and that they believe the House bill goes beyond ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ The alignment between Hawley, a staunch conservative, with moderates like Murkowski and Collins, underscores how skittishness over changes to the health safety-net program is resonating across the ideological spectrum.”
There are similar problems with the SNAP (food stamp) cuts that shift many billions of dollars of costs to the states. And the way BBB structure the SNAP cuts the cost-shift will be particularly egregious for states with high “error rates” for SNAP paperwork and benefit determinations. Three states with two Republican senators each, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee, could really get hammered. They won’t be happy about it.
But at the same time, the HFC hard-liners, who were the very last faction to cave in to Trump’s pressure on the BBB, have counterparts in the Senate with their own complaints about the roughly $3 trillion the BBB adds to the national debt, notes Politico:
“Sen. Ron Johnson … is pushing for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels — a roughly $6 trillion cut. The Wisconsin Republican said in an interview he knows he won’t get that level of savings in the megabill but wants to tackle a chunk under the budget reconciliation process and then set up a bicameral commission to go ‘line by line’ to find the rest.
“Johnson also believes he has the votes to block a bill that doesn’t take deficit reduction seriously, pointing to Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky as senators sharing his concerns.”
If Mike Johnson is “magic,” Ron Johnson is “poison.”
On top of everything else, the budget resolution the Senate passed to set up its version of BBB includes an accounting trick that basically means the two chambers are operating from very different baseline numbers. The Senate’s insistence on “current policy scoring” means $3.8 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts that will be resurrected are deemed as “revenue neutral,” a fancy term for “free.” Perhaps the Senate parliamentarian will blow up that scam, but if not, it will cause problems in the House.
These are just the most obvious BBB problems; others will emerge as senators use their leverage to shape the bill to reflect their own political needs and the grubbier desires of the wealthy interests Republicans tend to represent. And for all the talk of the House being the body in which Republicans have no margin for error or division (two voted no and one voted “present”), the same number of GOP senators, four, could blow up the BBB. It’s going to be a long, wild ride, and the only people in Washington who know exactly what to say about the BBB are Democrats. No matter what tweaks Republicans make, the final product is still going to “cut safety net programs to give the wealthy tax cuts” while borrowing money to do so. That’s just baked into the cake.