Watching the latest GOP madness from the House, I wondered why Republicans weren’t smart enough to stay narrowly focused on economic issues where they currently hold a big advantage with actual conditions likely to worsen it. I thought about it and posted this explanation at New York:

Even as the horrendous dysfunction afflicting House Republicans dominates the headlines, polls continue to show the GOP in a good position to maintain and extend its power in 2024. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Republicans lead in the generic congressional ballot (basically a measure of which party voters want to control the U.S. House) by a point (44.4 percent to 43.4 percent). And their wildly erratic and indictment-prone presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, similarly leads Joe Biden in 2024 general-election trial heats by an average of 45.5 percent to 44.4 percent.

There are multiple reasons offered for this anomaly of the crazy-person party holding a lead, ranging from the president’s age to some sort of national malaise. But the most obvious reason from the data we have is that solid majorities of Americans are unhappy about the economy and blame Biden for it. A new Marquette Law School national poll shows Trump being preferred to Biden on handling the economy by an astonishing 52 percent to 28 percent margin. It’s hardly an unusual finding. Here’s what ABC’s Gary Langer said after the latest ABC/Washington Post survey came out:

“Forty-four percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’ve gotten worse off financially under Biden’s presidency, the most for any president in ABC/Post polls since 1986. Just 37% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove. Still fewer approve of Biden’s performance on the economy, 30%.”

And that’s with most major economic metrics looking relatively sunny. If the economy takes the negative turn next year many forecasters expect, what then? How much Trump craziness might swing voters tolerate to get back that sensational Trump economy they remember (or imagine)?

Looking at the situation from a different angle, how much are Republicans unnecessarily hurting themselves by both tolerating Trump’s high jinks and displaying their own in the U.S. House? Why don’t they exhibit some self-discipline by getting onto the obvious winning message and chirping like cicadas: Economy! Economy! Economy! I’m quite certain there are Republicans in boardrooms and country clubs all over America wondering just that.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, it’s important to acknowledge a couple of factors that lead Republicans to be less than entirely mono-vocal, aside from their varying ideological and geographical backgrounds. There are some issues, notably the situation along the southern border, and — in some parts of the country — violent-crime rates, that benefit them so much that ignoring them would represent political malpractice. The Marquette Law School poll cited above showed Trump leading Biden on “border security” by exactly the same margin as his advantage on the economy. Plus, of course, it’s a signature issue for Trump and the MAGA movement he created. There are other issues, notably abortion, that are more important to key Republican activists than all the economic indicators past, present, or future. Trump is probably straining their patience by urging the GOP to downplay its unpopular views on abortion policy.

But the key thing to understand in processing wild Republican rhetoric on issues like congressional appropriations is that they and their supporters deeply believe the country’s economic problems are almost exclusively caused by excessive public spending and government overreach. Risking a debt default to rein in deficit spending strikes most Democrats and nonpartisan observers as playing an insanely dangerous game with the economy. Plenty of Republicans can’t imagine anything more dangerous and irresponsible than trillion-dollar budget deficits and unlimited public borrowing. For people who think that way, forcing a government shutdown is an absolute no-brainer. It has to be done again and again until the spending and borrowing stops.

To be sure, the wild extremism of so much Republican rhetoric on government spending is fed by non-economic concerns about objects of all that spending. According to some conservatives, Democrats are bankrupting the country and tanking the economy in order to finance radical assaults on freedom like COVID shutdowns, vicious assaults on Christians and their institutions, a vendetta against fossil fuels and those who use them or depend on them for jobs, and the partisan weaponization of law enforcement to prosecute conservatives and liberate looters and killers. Many of them also seem to think Biden is determined to spend the U.S. to death in order to save Ukraine as payback for bribes. Donald Trump seems to regard government spending as strictly designed to keep him from returning to the White House. But it’s also telling that complicity in deficit spending is one of the rare issues on which otherwise craven Republicans like Nikki Haley are willing to criticize the 45th president.

While it’s impossible to sort out all the different evils with which Republicans associate “big government” and “runaway spending,” there’s no question that when they rage about these things they believe they are addressing the same economic concerns that their voters, as well as swing voters, want them to deal with urgently. Keep that in mind as you watch House Republicans choose a new Speaker against a backdrop of fresh promises to radically pare back federal spending.

 

 

The federal government is going to shut down this weekend, barring some miracle. And Democrats really need to make sure Americans know exactly who insisted on this avoidable crisis. It’s the House GOP, as I explained at New York.

If you are bewildered by the inability of Congress to head off a government shutdown beginning this weekend, don’t feel poorly informed: Some of the Capitol’s top wizards are throwing up their hands as well, as the Washington Post reports:

“’We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing,’ said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain has started referring to the current GOP House-led impasse as “the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown,” a reference to the popular sitcom widely known as ‘a show about nothing.’ ‘The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.’”

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Many House Republicans, led by a band of right-wing hard-liners, want to impose their fiscal and policy views on the nation despite the GOP’s narrow majority in the House. Their chief asset, beyond fanaticism, is that the federal government can’t remain open past the end of the fiscal year without the concurrence of the House, and they don’t really mind an extended government shutdown, if only to preen and posture. They are being encouraged in this wildly irresponsible position by their leader and likely 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump.

But the hard-liners’ real motive, it seems, is to use the dysfunction they’ve caused in the House to get rid of Speaker Kevin McCarthy for being dysfunctional. The not-so-hidden plan hatched by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is to thwart every effort by McCarthy to move forward with spending plans for the next fiscal year and then defenestrate him via a motion to vacate the chair, which just five Republicans can pass any time they wish (with the complicity of Democrats). Indeed, the Post reports the rebels are casting about for a replacement Speaker right now:

“A contingent of far-right House Republicans is plotting an attempt to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker as early as next week, a move that would throw the chamber into further disarray in the middle of a potential government shutdown, according to four people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.”

McCarthy’s tormenters would like to have a successor lined up who will presumably be even less inclined to compromise with Democrats than the current Speaker. And that’s saying a lot, since McCarthy has already bowed to the Gaetz demand that House Republicans reject even the idea of a continuing resolution — the stopgap spending measures used to forestall or end government shutdowns in the past — and instead plod through individual appropriations bills loaded with provisions no Democrat would ever accept (e.g., deep domestic spending cuts, draconian border policies, anti-Ukraine measures, and abortion restrictions). It’s a recipe for a long shutdown, but it’s clear if McCarthy moves a muscle toward negotiating with Democrats (who have already passed a CR in the Senate), then kaboom! Here comes the motion to vacate.

Some observers think getting rid of McCarthy is an end in itself for the hard-liners — particularly Gaetz, who has a long-standing grudge against the Californian and opposed his original selection as Speaker to the bitter end — no matter what he does or doesn’t do. In theory, House Democrats could save McCarthy by lending a few “no” votes to him if the motion to vacate hits the floor, but they’ve made it clear the price for saving him would be high, including abandonment of the GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry.

So strictly speaking, the impending shutdown isn’t “about nothing”; it’s about internal far-right factional politics that very few of the people about to be affected by the shutdown care about at all. Understandably, most Democrats from President Biden on down are focusing their efforts on making sure the public knows this isn’t about “big government” or “politicians” or “partisan polarization,” but about one party’s extremism and cannibalistic infighting. For now, there’s little anyone outside the GOP fever swamps can do about it other than watch the carnage.

If like me you are cursed with the determination to follow the ins and outs of congressional procedures and party tactics, you might be interested in my item at New York looking ahead to the price Democrats will demand if Kevin McCarthy comes to them for help after engineering an avoidable government shutdown.

For weeks, it’s been clear that the extremist grip on the House Republican conference is making it nearly impossible for Congress to avoid a government shutdown before the money runs out on October 1. And now the situation is getting steadily worse. Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s nemesis, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, has now convinced a critical mass of his House GOP colleagues to reject any stopgap spending measure (known as continuing resolutions, or CRs, in congressional jargon), even one crafted to right-wing specifications. McCarthy, who cannot get the votes to pass a CR (particularly after Donald Trump urged Republicans to defund the government), is going along with the Gaetz strategy. The idea is to let the government shut down and remain shut down until Congress has enacted all 12 single-subject appropriations bills. Last time that happened was in 1996. As Politico Playbook reports, we’re potentially looking at a very long stalemate.

“The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.”

With House Republicans miles apart from Democrats (and even some Senate Republicans) on spending levels in a wide array of areas, negotiating and then enacting all these individual appropriations bills would take ages. Absent a CR, the federal government could remain shuttered for an unprecedented period of time.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Senate is moving toward enactment of a CR, which in the normal course of events the House would consider in frenzied late-night sessions just prior to the deadline for avoiding a shutdown. The Gaetz plan means rejecting this overture; if McCarthy even thinks about negotiating to get Democrat votes to pass a CR (just as he did, to the fury of conservative hard-liners, in enacting a debt-limit measure in May), Gaetz will spring a motion to vacate the chair and McCarthy would almost surely lose his gavel, assuming Democrats join Gaetz and other hard-liners in defenestrating the Californian.

But might House Democrats save McCarthy’s bacon and at the same time prevent or end a government shutdown by voting against a motion to vacate the chair? It’s a tantalizing possibility that must have occurred to the tormented McCarthy, for whom kowtowing to Gaetz must be agonizing. But in an interview with Politico, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark made it clear Democrats would demand a high price for any McCarthy rescue effort. The concessions they want would begin with the Speaker returning to the spending-level deal he cut with Joe Biden before the debt-limit vote, which under right-wing pressure he has abandoned in favor of much deeper domestic spending cuts:

“We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.”

But that’s not all Democrats want.

“We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.”

Kaboom.

If McCarthy can only keep his gavel with Democrats’ help, and abandoning the Biden impeachment inquiry he was forced to undertake is part of the deal, he will alienate the MAGA wing of his conference and his party until the end of time.

McCarthy has regularly shown he is above all a survivor devoted to his own ambitions. But in the current crisis over federal spending, he is really caught in a vise between totally craven surrender to the most irresponsible of his troops or earning their eternal enmity.

Perhaps public reaction to a completely pointless government shutdown that may damage a fragile economy will get McCarthy out of his jam and enable the bipartisan deal that looks so unlikely now. But it probably won’t happen for quite some time. “Nonessential” federal workers and those who rely on the services they provide should hunker down for a long wait.

Reading through the ambiguous to vaguely positive remarks made by Republican pols about the historic auto workers strike, one of them jumped off the page, and I wrote about it at New York:

One of the great anomalies of recent political history has been the disconnect between the Republican Party’s ancient legacy as the champion of corporate America and its current electoral base, which relies heavily on support from white working-class voters. The growing contradiction was first made a major topic of debate in the 2008 manifesto Grand New Party, in which youngish conservative intellectuals Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued that their party offered little in the way of material inducements (or even supportive rhetoric) to its emerging electoral base. Though Douthat and Salam were by no means fans of Donald Trump, the mogul’s stunningly successful 2016 campaign did follow their basic prescription of pursuing the economic and cultural instincts of white working-class voters at the expense of doctrinaire free-market and limited-government orthodoxy.

So it’s not surprising that Trump and an assortment of other Republicans have expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the unionized autoworkers who just launched a historic industry-wide strike for better wages and working conditions. But there was a conspicuous, even anachronistic exception among nationally prominent GOP politicians: South Carolina senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott. As NBC News reported:

“It’s the latest of several critical comments Scott has made about the autoworkers, even as other GOP presidential candidates steer clear of criticizing them amid a strike at three plants so far …

“’I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.’”

Scott’s frank embrace of old-school union bashing wouldn’t have drawn much notice 40 or 50 years ago. And to be clear, other Republicans aren’t fans of the labor movement: For the most part, MAGA Republicans appeal to the working class via a mix of cultural conservatism, economic and foreign-policy nationalism, nativism, and producerism (i.e., pitting private-sector employers and employees against the financial sector, educational elites, and those dependent on public employment or assistance). One particularly rich lode of ostensibly pro-worker rhetoric has been to treat environmental activism as inimical to the economic growth and specific job opportunities wage earners need.

So unsurprisingly, Republican politicians who want to show some sympathy for the autoworkers have mostly focused on the alleged threat of climate-change regulations generally and electric vehicles specifically to the well-being of UAW members, as Politico reported:

“’This green agenda that is using taxpayer dollars to drive our automotive economy into electric vehicles is understandably causing great anxiety among UAW members,’ [Mike Pence] said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Other Republicans followed suit, with a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson calling out Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin — Democrats’ favored candidate for the state’s open Senate seat — for her Thursday vote allowing state-level limits or bans on gas-powered cars as choosing her ‘party over Michigan.'”

More strikingly, Trump, the 2024 presidential front-runner, is planning to hold an event with Michigan workers at the very moment his GOP rivals are holding their second debate next week, notes the Washington Post:

“While other Republican candidates participate in the Sept. 27 event in California, Trump instead plans to speak to more than 500 autoworkers, plumbers, electricians and pipe-fitters, the adviser said. The group is likely to include workers from the United Auto Workers union that is striking against the Big Three automakers in the country’s Rust Belt. The Trump adviser added that it is unclear whether the former president will visit the strike line.

“Trump’s campaign also created a radio ad, to run on sports- and rock-themed stations in Detroit and Toledo, meant to present him as being on the side of striking autoworkers, the adviser said.”

There’s no evidence Trump has any understanding of, much less sympathy with, the strikers’ actual demands. But in contrast to Scott’s remarks endorsing the dismissal of striking workers, it shows that at least some Republicans are willing (rhetorically, at least) to bite the hand that feeds in the pursuit of votes.

Meanwhile, the mainstream-media types who often treat Scott as some sort of sunny, optimistic, even bipartisan breath of fresh air should pay some attention to his attitude toward workers exercising long-established labor rights he apparently would love to discard. Yes, as a self-styled champion of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private- and homeschooling at the expense of “government schools,” Scott is constantly attacking teachers unions, just like many Republicans who draw a sharp distinction between public-sector unions (BAD!) and private-sector unions (grudgingly acceptable). But autoworkers are firmly in the private sector. Maybe it’s a South Carolina thing: Scott’s presidential rival and past political ally Nikki Haley (another media favorite with an unmerited reputation as a moderate) famously told corporate investors to stay out of her state if they intended to tolerate unions in their workplaces. For that matter, the South Carolina Republican Party was for years pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of violently anti-union textile barons. Some old habits die hard.

One of the useful by-products of the current wave of labor activism in this country is that Republicans may be forced to extend their alleged sympathy for workers into support for policies that actually help them and don’t simply reflect cheap reactionary demagoguery aimed at foreigners, immigrants, and people of color. But Scott has flunked the most basic test threshold compatibility with the rights and interests of the working class.

 

Now and then some of my Democratic and independent friends get enchanted with a Republican pol who seems to be standing up to the MAGA folk. There are a few, but there are also those who invariably try to have it both ways, and I wrote about one at New York:

Campaigning at the Iowa State Fair recently, 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley sported a T-shirt with the legend “Underestimate Me … That’ll Be Fun.”

As a longtime critic of her record and the relentless self-promotion that has obscured it, I wouldn’t for a moment underestimate Haley. She has world-class political skills and an instinct for the main chance that has served her well — it dates back at least to the 2010 gubernatorial campaign in which this Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin protégée exploited nasty smears accusing her of sexual infidelity to transform herself into the victim and vanquisher of the ex-Democratic “good old boys” who had dominated the state GOP for years. Similarly, in 2015 she got massive favorable press around the world for taking down a Confederate flag at the statehouse after a white-supremacist massacre at a Charleston church made such a step no longer controversial (a previous Republican governor had proposed taking down the flag 20 years earlier). She has managed to make that “courageous” stand the only thing that national political observers remember about her governorship, instead of more characteristic moments such as her rejection of any corporate investment in her state that might involve “union jobs.”

More recently, her virtuoso efforts to pose as both a loyal friend of Donald Trump and the symbol of a post-Trump Republican Party infuriated New York Times columnist Frank Bruni into calling her out: “Past Haley, present Haley, future Haley: They’re all constructs, all creations, malleable, negotiable, tethered not to dependable principle but to reliable opportunism.”

Bruni was enraged by Haley’s characteristically crafty performance in the first Republican debate last week, which showed, in his mind, what the candidate could represent if she flatly repudiated Trump and the MAGA creed. Indeed, she attacked Trump’s presidential record from the right (criticizing him for signing the then–wildly popular CARES Act), called him unelectable, and savagely took down Trump mini-me Vivek Ramaswamy’s Trump-adjacent foreign-policy views. But in a moment of truth, she raised her hand when the candidates were asked if they would support Trump as the presidential nominee even if he becomes a convicted felon.

The debate also gave Haley the chance to rehearse her latest rap on abortion policy, which has been getting rave reviews from those across the ideological spectrum (including Bruni) who don’t seem to understand that her “reasonable” approach simply means recognizing that Republicans don’t have the Senate votes to impose the national ban she would eagerly sign. As abortion-rights advocate Jessica Valenti explains, Haley is again confecting a “moderate” image out of thin air:

“Haley … tried to position herself as moderate on abortion by repeating something she’s said multiple times on the campaign trail: ‘Can’t we all agree that contraception should be available? And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?’

“It’s a scary state of affairs when ‘I’ll allow you birth control and won’t kill you’ is something a candidate says to show they’re the reasonable one of the bunch …

“Just by virtue of not being yet another man saying a stupid thing about women’s bodies, she’s ahead of the game. But despite all the sweet ‘pro-woman’ messaging, Haley’s policies are no different than any of those men’s. She just hides it better.”

The question now, though, is whether this supreme opportunist has created a real opportunity for herself as a viable presidential candidate who will perhaps replace the ever-struggling Ron DeSantis as the defender of and rival to Trump with the best chance to emerge if the 45th president’s campaign somehow collapses.

Haley has gotten reams of publicity (most of it favorable) for her debate performance; she especially outperformed her fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott, who had previously been the back-of-the-pack candidate to watch. And now, a leading pollster for Trump has let it be known in a deafening stage whisper heard by Axios that Haley is “surging” in the early states:

“Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio is telling Republican donors that Nikki Haley ‘has surged’ in Iowa since last week’s GOP presidential debate — and that she and Vivek Ramaswamy are essentially tied with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire, according to a polling memo obtained by Axios.”

Lo and behold, another pollster, working for the DeSantis campaign, has also leaked private polling results showing Haley gaining ground in Iowa but not at the expense of DeSantis, who is surging even more.

Both of these polls should be taken with a shaker of salt since Team Trump and Team DeSantis are strictly focused on damaging each other, even if that means temporarily showing progress by a third candidate (in this case, not one who was doing very well prior to the debate). In public polling, Haley is at 4.9 percent (and fourth place) in the national RealClearPolitics averages; she’s at 4.6 percent (and fifth) in Iowa and 3.8 percent (and seventh) in New Hampshire. And it’s important to note that a lot of those who loved Haley’s debate performance won’t be in a position to vote for her in the primaries. As the Washington Post reported, its postdebate polling showed that, among Republicans, the “winner” was DeSantis at 29 percent, closely followed by Haley’s punching bag, Ramaswamy, at 26 percent, and with only 15 percent thinking she was the star.

So unless Haley is enjoying a boom that has yet to fully appear, she needs more breaks to become a viable candidate, and that’s assuming anyone is truly viable against Trump. If she does become a threat to the top two candidates, they’ll probably stop ignoring her, and, particularly if Trump begins eyeing her with malice, her careful dance at the periphery of MAGA-land may become much more difficult. Displacing Chris Christie as the most prominent anti-Trump candidate is not a recipe for success. But if she leans back into her periodic loyalty to the former president, she could fall prey to the irrepressible suspicion that she’s really running for the vice-presidency, a suggestion she has contemptuously dismissed without ruling it out. You do have to wonder if Haley’s frequent predictions that Kamala Harris would soon become president if Joe Biden wins in 2024 involve an element of projection. Becoming president without having to win a presidential nomination is every political opportunist’s dream.