Elephant Dung #33: Snowe and Collins to vote NO on Ryan budget plan

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

As the recent Gingrich vs. Ryan brouhaha revealed, the Republican wunderkind's budget plan, including its Medicare-slashing component, has become, despite its widespread unpopularity, Republican orthodoxy from which deviation/dissent is not tolerated. (If you do happen to dissent even just a smidge, the party's Bolsheviks will do their utmost to purge you from their ranks.)

And yet it's obvious that many Republicans are having their doubts. The result in NY-26 yesterday, in a way a referendum on Ryan's plan that was a resounding NO, shows that Republicans are vulnerable, and many are distancing themselves from the plan, if not outright opposing it already. Fear of voter revolt, it seems, may just overcome the party whip.

And that appears to be especially true in Maine:

Maine's Republican senators will vote against the House Republican 2012 budget authored by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, with Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe in opposition to the House GOP-proposed Medicare changes.

Snowe confirmed her opposition [yesterday] afternoon during a Capitol Hill interview, while Collins reiterated a position she first made known last month.

Senate Democratic leaders are expected to call up the House GOP budget for a Senate floor vote later this week, probably Thursday. Collins and Snowe join a small but growing group of Republican senators – including Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and possibly Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who have announced they will vote against the proposal to partially privatize Medicare, the federal health care program for seniors, and hand over authority to run Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor, completely to the states in the form of a block grant program. 

To be fair, both Collins and Snowe are on the more moderate, more sane side of the party and aren't exactly the sort of right-wing hardliners who have been falling head-over-heals for Ryan. And Snowe, who is facing a Tea Party challenge in 2012, would seem to have every reason to reach out to the right, but isn't. So maybe, just maybe, this is a matter of principle for them, not political opportunism.

Still, what we're seeing here, and not just in Maine, is what I'll call The Great Republican Exodus of 2012. It isn't really exodus from the party but rather exodus from the new party orthodoxy, from the new right-wing Republican mainstream. As more and more Republicans come to see how unpopular the Ryan plan is, and how vulnerable it makes them, more and more of them will do what Collins and Snowe and Murkowski and Brown are doing (and what it looked like Gingrich was doing), which is rejecting it as way too extreme.

Yes, this too is opportunism. The fear of a voter revolt, of losing moderates and independents and possibly even losing safe Republican seats, apparently outweighs, for them, the fear of a Tea Party challenge and of being attacked by their fellow Republicans and in the conservative media for being un-Republican and anti-American.

Still, it's the sort of opportunism that makes them look respectable, and obviously more appealing to voters in states like Maine and Massachusetts (if not necessarily Alaska). This will be one of the dominant stories over the next year and a half, this divide in the Republican Party between those on Ryan's side and those who, for whatever reason, have had enough, with a large gray area in between for those who want to hedge their bets and have it both ways.

Enjoy.

The plight of Olympia Snowe, revisited

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Hill has a piece up today noting that Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, long thought to be one of those most endangered of species, a moderate Republican, has actually "taken surprisingly conservative positions in the Senate this year."

Surprising? Not so much. While Snowe claims consistency, the truth is that she's not just endangered but in danger, facing the possibility of a serious Tea Party primary challenge from the right. And as she moves more and more to the right, she's even voting against her own ideas:

Snowe stunned longtime Democratic colleagues Wednesday by blocking action on a small-business bill she co-wrote because Democratic leaders refused to allow a vote on an amendment they saw as a political hit job.

"Sen. Snowe actually wrote this bill," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chairwoman of the Senate Small Business Committee. "She killed her own bill under the guise that she feels so strongly about reg reform."

She claims that she voted against the bill because the amendment was necessary (and because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denied her the opportunity to vote on it), but the amendment, co-sponsored with right-wing Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was decidedly anti-regulatory and contrary to the spirit of the legislation. Far from being consistent, Snowe clearly sought to embrace a right-wing effort to undermine the bill in order to display her newfound conservative bona fides, all part of her disingenuous move to the right in order to ward off, or at least to try to be in better position to defeat, a Tea Party challenge.

Snowe has been a "moderate" for so long that I highly doubt that her efforts will work. Maine voters, and especially Maine Republican primary voters, are not about to take her as a Coburn-like conservative. It's just not what she's ever been, and her efforts now, like Mitt Romney's seem desperate and pathetic.

Nonetheless, I suspect that Snowe is fairly safe if only because of her long-standing incumbency in a state that is hardly as conservative as, say, Oklahoma. Still, there's an opening for the Tea Party to bring her down, and she's obviously concerned enough to forsake her past and embrace her party's mainstream extremism.

And she's hardly alone. Any Republican who in any way departs from Tea Party orthodoxy is a target. This is one of the key developments to watch as we look ahead to November 2012.

For more on this, see Richard Barry's post from Tuesday.

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Elephant Dung #25: Maine Republicans slam Republican Gov. Paul LePage

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

I wrote last year about "Mainesanity," the takeover of Maine's state GOP by Tea Party wackos. And by that I don't mean your run-of-the-mill small-government Teabaggers, the sort who are extreme but not utterly insane, or not necessarily so, but rather... well, wackos. As Maine Politics explained at the time:

The official platform for the Republican Party of Maine is now a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of "collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth," suggests the adoption of "Austrian Economics," declares that "'Freedom of Religion' does not mean 'freedom from religion'" (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that "healthcare is not a right," calls for the abrogation of the "UN Treaty on Rights of the Child" and the "Law Of The Sea Treaty" and declares that we must resist "efforts to create a one world government." 

This was extreme even by Republican standards.

November 2010 witnessed yet more "Mainesanity" with the election of Tea Party Republican Paul LePage as governor. (It was a narrow win. LePage squeaked by an independent candidate and won with just 38 percent of the vote.) He proved to be a pretty nasty character during the campaign and has done nothing since then to indicate that he's anything but a right-wing extremist who rode the Tea Party wave, got lucky with a split vote, and somehow got himself elected in a state where leading state-wide Republicans typically resemble Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, not, well, Paul LePage.

And like certain other Republican governors -- Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio come to mind -- he's made labor unions (and working people generally) one of his primary targets. But that isn't going over all that well in Maine, including among Maine Republicans, some of whom (presumably not the ones who wrote that platform) are pushing back:

Eight Republican state senators have issued a rare public rebuke of Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), writing an op-ed expressing "discomfort and dismay" with some of his recent comments directed at labor backers.

The controversy centers around LePage's recent decision to order a mural depicting the state's workers' history removed from the Department of Labor, arguing that it was biased against businesses and employers. When asked how he would react if protesters carried out their plan to form a human chain around the mural, LePage replied, "I'd laugh at them, the idiots. That's what I would do. Come on! Get over yourselves!"

"But for him to announce that he would 'laugh at the idiots' should they choose to engage in our honored tradition of civil disobedience is another personal attack that only serves to further lower the bar of our public discourse," write the senators in the op-ed, which ran in The Portland Press Herald and the Kennebec Journal. "We may disagree with civil disobedience in this particular instance, but it is a fundamental right each and every one of us might engage in if we found the issue important enough. 

Now...

These are "proud Republicans" who "want Gov. LePage and his administration to succeed." They want to see his right-wing policy agenda (lower taxes, less government, etc.) enacted. And their criticism of LePage isn't directed at his opposition to organized labor but at "the tone and spirit of some of the remarks he has made." What they seek to uphold is civil disobedience, the right to dissent, a political culture of dignity and respect, a spirit of civility. While they claim that they "are not the enemy of labor and labor is certainly not an enemy to [them]," it is clear that the rights of workers, and particularly organized workers who bargain collectively, not only isn't their priority but may actually be antithetical to their pro-business ideology.

So is this really dung at all? These Republicans like LePage. They just want him to tone it down and respect their common opponents.

Fair enough, but this is a case of a prominent Tea Party Republican going too far and members of his own party publicly chastising him. And even if these Republicans aren't necessarily pro-labor, and even if they support much of the Tea Party agenda, their call for greater dignity and respect, including towards labor, is very much a rebuke to the politics of extremism and absolutism that characterizes so much of the right these days. 

It's good to see that at least some Republicans have had enough.

As Maine goes...

By Distributorcap

Until 1960, Maine held all its elections (except for president) in September. With those early elections, Maine was often a bellwether state for the November national vote. From 1832 until 1932 (with few exceptions), the party that won the governorship in Maine went on to win the White House.

Hence the once popular (and now passé) political phrase, "as Maine goes, so goes the nation."

In 2010, there was a 5-way race for the statehouse in Augusta. Paul LePage was elected governor of Maine with about 38% of the vote, barely 2 points (or 10,000 votes) ahead of independent candidate Eliot Cutler. The Democratic candidate (who by all accounts was a weak candidate) was in third with 19%. Paul LePage may have an R after his name, but have no hesitation with this, Paul LePage is a Teabagger -- and a really nasty one at that.

During the campaign, LePage denied courting the Teabaggers, even though there are videos of him courting the Teabaggers. Also on video (doesn't ANYONE remember why George Allen's macaca moment was more than a moment?) is LePage telling Obama to "go to hell." He also said he was "about to punch a reporter" and has received 10 speeding tickets and was involved in 7 collisions. The best part of LePage's campaign was that he was livid that Maine charges sales tax on bull semen (which they don't).

And true to Teabagging form, LePage is a racist. He said that "private schools have brought their math scores way up because they bring in kids from Asia."

As one of his first moves as governor, LePage, who promised to avoid political cronyism, "hired" his 22-year old daughter (who was just out of college) as assistant to the governor's chief of staff, a job that pays $41,000 plus $15,000 in an expense account. His daughter will also live in the governor's mansion, thus eliminating any money she would have to spend on rent and food. There are no rules in Maine that bar a governor from hiring his family.

Note that LePage's daughter graduated from Florida State, where she paid in-state tuition for two years because Mrs. LePage claimed residency in Florida and Maine. Mrs. LePage had to pay back taxes after avoiding paying any Florida property taxes.

In keeping his Teabag credentials front and center, Governor LePage turned down an invitation from the NAACP to participate in some Martin Luther King Day events. LePage "claims" the NAACP is a "special interest" group and that he "would not be held hostage to special interests." (I am sure if they are Teabag or gun-related, LePage will happily be held hostage). When criticized, LePage, in language representing the new tone of civility from right-wing politicians, told the NAACP they could "kiss my butt." And it didn't end there. LePage went on to say that the NAACP should "look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they'd like about it."

The new Teabag meme (give the 'baggers some credit, they come up with new memes as fast as they protest community centers being built -- Sarah "Blood Libel" Palin is a victim, Jared Loughner is a liberal, repealing health care will save jobs, etc.) is not "some of my best friends are [Black, Hispanic, Gay, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or fill in whatever group is the Teabag target du jour] but rather, this new-fangled Paul LePage meme, "my son is ____."

They would be laughable if they didn't have so much political power.

I will guarantee that civility will be defunct by Super Bowl Sunday. Based on the language this week related to Tucson and other issues in the forefront (see statements by Virginia Foxx, Louis Gohmert, Trent Franks, Rand Paul, and of course from the Queen of Teabagging, Sarah "Blood Libel" Palin), the Teabaggers' arrogance is hitting new dizzying levels. I suppose LePage thinks he can easily get away with his snub/disparagement of the NAACP, the nation's leading advocacy group for African-Americans, since only around 1% of Maine's 1.4 million citizens are Black (and around 1% are Hispanic), making Maine the second "whitest" state in the Union (only Vermont has a smaller percent of minorities). It is easy to say such idiotic and harmful stuff when you don't have to worry about the impact of such a small political constituency.

Maine is a wonderful state, with some of the most beautiful coastline and forestlands in the country. While not as liberal as New England-neighboring Massachusetts (Maine split off from Massachusetts in 1820 and is the only state that borders only one other state, New Hampshire), Maine is decidedly not a red state. How the Teabaggers were able to organize and elect such a tyrant is beyond comprehension.

Either buyer's remorse will ooze to surface quickly in Maine, or we really do need to hope that as Maine goes, so goes the nation is as passé as political civility.