DCCC Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee : ICYMI: The Price of Republican Orthodoxy

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

ICYMI: The Price of Republican Orthodoxy

The New York Times

By Thomas B. Edsall

January 20, 2016

In the week after the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead, both the House and Senate voted on legislation to ban the sale of guns and explosives to people on the F.B.I.'s consolidated terrorist watch list.

In case you're wondering if such sales are a bogus issue, the Government Accountability Office reported last March that individuals named on the F.B.I. list had sought to buy guns or explosives 2,233 times during nearly 11 years between 2004 and 2014. Federal officials approved 2,043 of these sales, or 91 percent. The accompanying table illustrates the G.A.O. data.

In the report, David C. Maurer, the director of homeland security and justice issues at the G.A.O., wrote:

Under federal law, there is no basis to automatically prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives because they appear on the terrorist watch list. Rather, there must be a disqualifying factor (i.e., prohibiting information) pursuant to federal or state law, such as a felony conviction or illegal immigration status.

Who could be against a bill to keep pistols, rifles, assault weapons and such commercially available explosives as Tannerite, ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, and potassium chlorate out of the hands of those on the terrorist list?

The answer is 53 of 54 Senate Republicans and every one of the 241 House Republicans, who voted on Dec. 2 and Dec. 10, respectively, against taking up legislation to ban those on the F.B.I. list from buying explosives or guns.

On one level, Republican votes against restrictions on weapons sales to terrorism suspects reflect the power of the National Rifle Association and the more extreme Gun Owners of America. These two groups have a tight grip on the Republican Party.

On another level, these votes illuminate a conservative orthodoxy that dominates Republican politics. In some way, this orthodoxy is analogous to the liberal orthodoxy known as political correctness.

In the current presidential campaign, Republicans have escalated their attacks on liberal dogma - including college speech codes, bans on hate speech, exclusionary language, trigger warnings and sensitivity training.

Annual criminal background checks, for sales of firearms or explosives, that turned out to be for people on the federal Terrorism Watch List. In this period, more than 91 percent of those people obtained the weapons.

Not only are gun rights sacrosanct, there are conservative prohibitions against the acknowledgment of climate change; opposition to abortion is mandatory; immigration reform is rejected; and top priority goes to tax cuts.

In a successful effort to secure compliance, the right has institutionalized enforcement through such groups as Americans for Tax Reform, Freedom Works, the Club for Growth and the network of national and local Tea Party organizations. These watchdog groups ensure that Republicans toe the line, ready to foster - and finance - primary challenges against those who deviate from the party line.

There are adverse consequences for the nation in adherence to doctrinal conservatism.

A majority of economists surveyed in 2012 by the University of Chicago found that, despite Republican demands for austerity, the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus legislation significantly reduced unemployment. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill on Feb. 13, 2009, as did 38 of 41 Republican senators on the same day.

Republican opposition to raising taxes, in turn, resulted in a decade-long delay before the enactment last year of long-term Highway Trust Fund legislation. During the delay, the nation's infrastructure continued to decay, with one out of nine bridges considered structurally deficient; the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that airport overcrowding and delays cost the nation $22 billion annually; and 42 percent of major urban highways were congested.

Similarly, Republican cuts to the I.R.S. budget have resulted in a loss of tax revenue. In an April 2015 speech, John Koskinen, the commissioner of the I.R.S., noted that over the previous five years, as the number of taxpayers has grown, the I.R.S. budget was pared by $1.2 billion (to $10.9 billion from $12.1 billion), its lowest level since 1998, adjusted for inflation. In addition to a sharp reduction in the quality of services to taxpayers - the I.R.S. in 2015 answered only 37 percent of taxpayer phone inquiries - Koskinen said that 'the drop in audit and collection case closures this year will translate into a loss for the government of at least $2 billion in revenue that otherwise would have been collected.'

Republican rejection of climate change and global warming is having a substantial impact at both the national and state levels.

In two votes on Nov. 17, 2015, for example, Senate Republicans voted by identical 49 to 3 margins to disapprove a proposed E.P.A. regulation of carbon pollution emissions and an E.P.A. regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Two weeks later, House Republicans voted 231 to 10 to disapprove the greenhouse gas regulations and 231 to 2 to disapprove the carbon pollution emission guidelines.

It is more interesting to see how climate change opposition plays out in Republican-controlled states facing the brunt of rising seawaters.

In Florida, present and former state employees contend that the words 'climate change' have been banned from state documents, although Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, denies any such edict.

In North Carolina, where communities along the Atlantic are threatened, the Legislature voted in 2012 to bar the state Coastal Resources Commission from defining 'rates of sea-level change for regulatory purposes' before July 1, 2016. The real estate industry was a major backer of the legislation.

In Mississippi this year, Republican leaders of the state House changed the electronic display board where the votes of members show up in lights. The new board puts all Republicans together, separate from all Democratic members, in what was interpreted locally as a mechanism for Philip Gunn, the speaker, to make sure all Republican members voted in unison on key bills.

Both liberal and conservative orthodoxy have roots in the polarization of the electorate, a division in which each side holds the opposition in contempt.

If there is a godfather of current Republican intransigence, it is William Kristol, the conservative strategist and editor of The Weekly Standard. In 1993, Kristol wrote a memo to Republican congressional leaders titled 'Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal.'

In the memo, he flatly rejected all compromise strategies in negotiations with the Clinton administration:

Any Republican urge to negotiate a 'least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president 'do something' about health care, should also be resisted.

Instead, the first step in a bid to revive 'a newly bold and principled Republican politics,' Kristol wrote,

must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.

During the Obama years, the Kristol strategy has become fully operational for Republicans dealing with administration proposals.

The 2010 Republican vote against Obamacare was even stronger than the Republican opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: unanimous in both the House and the Senate.

The Republican strategy was summed up by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who famously told National Journal in an Oct. 23, 2010, interview: 'The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.'

In many ways, the Republican strategy of huge resistance has backfired on the party itself.

As recently as 2001 to 2003, Gallup found that Republicans in Congress had favorability ratings in the high 40s to mid-50s, consistently better than their unfavorable ratings.

By 2015, the Polling Report, which tracks all public surveys, found that in five polls taken between August and the end of the year, the favorability rating of congressional Republicans had fallen to 14 percent, and the unfavorable ratings had risen to 79.4. Ratings of congressional Democrats at the end of 2015 were also negative, but significantly less so than those of Republicans: 27 percent favorable, 66.6 percent unfavorable.

The fact is that as political orthodoxy matures, it calcifies, imposing more costs than benefits. Politicians who submit to such doctrinal pressures threaten their own authenticity.

The Trump campaign - with its angry, 'truth telling,' transgressive style - might open the door to a less hidebound, more honest politics in the future. The American political system could use a candidate who possesses a good faith desire to address aggrieved voters who believe they have been shortchanged. But for this to be legitimate, such a candidate would have to have greater integrity, range and moral capacity than Donald Trump.