With today’s announcement by the president (carried live in Iran, BTW) of a “framework” for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, to be completed by the end of June, we’ll hear an acceleration of cries from Republicans to kill the deal in its cradle, and actual promises from GOP presidential wannabes that they will not honor it if elected.
It’s time for Democrats to go on the offensive, as I argued at the Washington Monthly today:

For those who, like Scott Walker, are already promising to blow up such an agreement on his first day in office, it’s time, as Greg [Sargent] suggests, to ask him what he plans to do about the blowback from our European allies, who, after all, are full participants in the negotiations and will not look kindly on a key signatory cutting and running.
Beyond that, what do the critics think we should do? Seek a different, tougher agreement with different goals (e.g., an Iran with no nuclear capacity at all)? This would almost certainly require that the U.S. go it alone diplomatically. Or are the Scott Walkers of the world ready to follow John Bolton into outfront advocacy of war with Iran? And if that’s the case, where does that leave the fight against IS, which a lot of the same people are anxious to expand as well? Who’s going to replace Iran and its client Iraqi Shia militia in that battle? US troops? Guess we just need to nuke Iran while we are at it, since there are just not enough available boots to put on the ground in both places. Or I guess we could bring back conscription. It’s hard to say, until the critics stop second-guessing Obama and the others negotiating with Iran, and start proving they’ve thought this through beyond tomorrow afternoon.

The sense of outrage Democrats had when Republican senators wrote an open letter to Tehran warning there was no point in negotiating needs to be revived. We’ll need it in the weeks just ahead.

One of the memes we are now hearing is that progressives are being churlish and perhaps even self-destructive in resisting “religious liberty” statutes like those enacted last week in Indiana because, after all, they represent a face-saving device, or even “terms of surrender,” for the Christian Right. I addressed that seductive but misleading argument at some length today at the Washington Monthly:

If you want a good example of what cultural conservatives are telling themselves about the backlash over Indiana’s… “religious liberty” law, there’s none better than the pity party Timothy Carney held at the Washington Examiner yesterday afternoon:

[O]ur culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

I don’t know if actual tears were falling on the keyboard as Carney typed this column, but he certainly wants to give the impression that he speaks for a poor, persecuted minority that has no interest in controlling anybody’s behavior but its own.
Which is, of course, complete hooey.
Yes, conservatives have little choice but to accept legal and political setbacks over marriage equality, but they’re making it as clear as ever that given the opportunity they’d reverse those trends, ban gay marriage all over again and probably bring back the sodomy laws to boot. Look at the huge field of Republican proto-candidates for president. Do any of them actually support marriage equality? Sure, they’ll not talk about it or mumble about it being a state matter or engage in various other evasions, but they’re a long way from “surrendering.” And that’s even more obvious on the abortion issue where (a) the only meaningful difference among 99% of Republican politicians is about whether 99% or 100% of abortions should be banned; (b) Republican controlled state governments are beavering away at new restrictions that strike mainly at the availability of any abortion services; and (c) the right to choose hangs by a thread in a Supreme Court that any Republican President would be lynched for failing to tilt with his or her next appointment into a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
All this weepy talk of being attacked while trying to surrender also misses the even more obvious point that conservatives are hardly impotent politically; they do sorta control Congress and a majority of states.
So no, there’s no real “surrender” going on here, and Lord knows conservatives aren’t withdrawing from political combat; otherwise Carney would have punctuated his long whine by quitting his job. What they are doing is better understood as a strategic retreat: unable to outlaw or (increasingly) even to stigmatize gay behavior as a matter of law, they’re working to protect private discrimination. It’s what a big part of their constituency expects of them, and it’s the obvious next front–not some sort of Appomattox–in the culture wars.

As it happens, it may not even be necessary for Democrats to stiffen their own spines on this subject, since Republicans are drawing friendly fire from their corporate allies on “religious liberty” laws that just aren’t good for business. But don’t cease fire until you see the whites of their flags for real.

It occurred to me yesterday that we were hearing less about “tax reform” on the GOP presidential campaign trail than we were about that old chestnut, the “flat tax.” So I figured I’d do a quick explainer at the Washington Monthly for those confused by the various forms of this bad idea:

Technically speaking, all a “flat” tax means is that whatever is being taxed will be taxed at uniform rates. So the very concept pretty much rules out progressive taxation. “Flat” tax advocates who also emphasize “simplicity”–you know, a tax form you could print out on a post card–are generally alluding to a wholesale elimination of exemptions, deductions and credits, which gets rid of a lot of special-interest provisions along with a host of provisions aimed at reducing or eliminating income taxation on the working poor. If rates are “flattened” too, the net effect would be huge tax breaks for upper- and upper-middle class folk and big tax increases for the poor. Some of these proposals, of course, also casually exempt corporate or investment income from taxation, so the regressive effect is even greater than first appears.
Then you’ve got “flat tax” advocates who simultaneously want to move from income to consumption taxes, which is generally the case with people who talk about “abolishing the IRS,” insofar as merchants would be collecting the taxes rather than a federal agency. This approach is even more regressive than a “flat” income tax, since everybody’s got to “consume,” but poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income covering essential living needs (yes, it’s true some progressive countries, mainly in Europe, depend heavily on consumption taxes, but they deliberately offset them with redistributive spending programs, which is not what our Republicans have in mind).
A lot of these ideas get jumbled together in politicians’ rhetoric, as Paul Waldman noted the other day at the Prospect:

[A]lmost every potential GOP presidential contender has at the very least expressed support for tax flattening, and most of them have come out and endorsed a flat tax.

But the details are hazy and often contradictory. Ted Cruz, for example, has endorsed both a consumption tax and a “flat” income tax (Mike Huckabee is the one consistent consumption tax proponent). Rand Paul, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal have all indicated support for a flat income tax. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have spoken of a flat income tax as a “goal.”
The political motive for such talk, or at least so I think, is to do two things: first, it offers an alternative, less unseemly way of talking about upper-income tax rate reductions, and second, it sneakily scratches the itch of conservative “base” anger at the “lucky duckies” who are too poor to pay income taxes under the current system.

The other thing about “flax tax” ideas is that they aren’t going to happen, less because Democrats oppose them than because the numbers don’t add up and/or half the population would get openly and egregiously screwed. But that doesn’t stop the gabbing about them.

I’m second to no one in warning against wishful-thinking claims that the Christian Right (or for that matter, its Siamese Twin, the Tea Party) is dying or losing influence. But it does appear these folks are in a strategic muddle that could limit their impact on the 2016 Republican nominating contest, as I speculated at Washington Monthly:

One emerging irony of the 2016 GOP presidential nominating cycle is that the Christian Right may have too many options for its own good.
There are no likely candidates who dissent–as did, say, Rudy Giuliani in 2008–from the Christian Right’s core positions. So far, there’s no one who will even criticize the Christian Right–as did John McCain back in 2000 when he gave a speech comparing Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Meanwhile, there are two probable candidates that did extremely well with this constituency in past presidential contests (Huckabee in 2008, Santorum in 2012), another who had sizable elite Christian Right support during the brief period he was viable (Rick Perry), two who are egregiously pandering and panting for such support right now (Cruz and Jindal), and one who for all his shortcomings in their eyes, is still closely associated with one of the emotional high points of recent Christian Right history, the Terri Schiavo affair. There’s not much Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have done to offend these people, though they may be disliked for other reasons.
But while nobody can ignore or diss Christian Right voters or their actual or self-designated leaders, their very prosperity within the GOP makes it less likely they can have the impact on the contest some want. Indeed, as Trip Gabriel shows at the New York Times today, Christian Right leaders are deeply divided over whether it makes sense to unite around a particular candidate, and almost certainly even more divided over the identity of their champion if they had one. War horses like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer and Richard Viguerie are scheming to force some sort of collective decision. But others aren’t buying it:

Some on the Christian right remain skeptical of the effort to settle on a single socially conservative candidate. Similar attempts in 2008 and 2012 collapsed because no consensus was reached, they say. And it is unclear what impact an endorsement by national social conservatives would have on a primary competition that will probably be driven by gobs of outside money, debate performances and long months of retail campaigning.
“I think it’s a useless process,” said David Lane, who arranges expenses-paid meetings of conservative pastors to hear from potential candidates, most recently at a gathering in Des Moines where Mr. Cruz and Mr. Jindal spoke. “My goal is to give the constituency access to candidates, then let them decide.”

You could call this a portfolio strategy, I suppose. But Lane is also at the center of another dispute among Christian Right folk, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, following Sarah Posner’s analysis: one between old-school culture warriors like Lane and a new breed of quieter leaders focused on less abrasive advocacy for the defensive-sounding “religious liberty” cause.

Now while these complicated dynamics may well splinter the Christian Right during the Republican primaries and limit their leverage if not their influence, there’s nothing about what I’ve written that suggests they will not overwhelming support the GOP presidential nominee, with varying degrees of pandering required to get them to take on the party yoke again depending on that nominee’s identity. This remains an important Republican faction, even if it cannot get it together to dictate a presidential nominee.

A lot of Democrats seem to think making seniors think about Medicare every time they are asked to think about any social programs is a silver bullet. This is why some Democrats did and still do think “Medicare for All” is the right model and message for universal health care, and why others think Republican efforts to play off Obamacare against Medicare are obviously absurd.
But there’s a problem with this approach, as I wrote about here at TDS in 2011, and discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

At TNR Danny Vinik takes a long look at a provocative new Brookings Institution report that indicates support among African-Americans and seniors for “government redistribution” programs has been declining gradually for decades. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Vinik’s article, and probably even more in the report. But I want to zero in on one point that some of us have been trying to make for years to Democratic strategists who think Medicare is the perfect model for every social program:

Democrats can learn a lot from the elderly’s declining support for redistribution. As [the report’s authors] note, it’s a bit strange that the elderly have become less supportive of government health insurance. “One might ask how,” they write, “by the end of our sample period, seniors can be less supportive of the idea that government cover medical bills given that they, uniquely, are categorically entitled this coverage.” There’s a simple explanation: Seniors don’t think the government helps them pay for health insurance. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 93 percent of Americans over the age of 65 said they don’t receive a government subsidy to pay for health insurance. (Nearly all seniors receive a subsidy via Medicare.)

Ding! Ding! Ding! Jackpot! Democrats are forever trying to suggest that senior think about their Medicare benefits when forming opinions about “the social safety net” or “redistribution” or the moral qualities of Big Government. But to a remarkable extent, seniors view Medicare (like Social Security) as an earned benefit–a literal entitlement. In part that’s because, as Vinik notes, they erroneously think their own payroll deductions and premium payments finance their benefits (actually nearly one-half of Medicare benefits come from general revenues). But they also distinguish themselves from those people on welfare by virtue of considering themselves entitled to a comfortable retirement via a lifetime of work. This is why so many of them can simultaneously bridle at Republican efforts to reduce or means-test Medicare benefits while opposing similar benefits for others.

This is why making a moral and economic case for social programs targeted to poor and sick people–including Obamacare and the Medicaid program it builds upon–is essential. Just saying to seniors “everybody should get the same benefits you’ve been given” will make many of them furious.