Among themselves. It isn't just fake bargaining with Democrats any more.
Mourning takes as long as it takes. Four years after Barack Obama became America's second Black President—OK, our first actual Black actual African/actual American President—Republicans have reached real bargaining, accompanied by serious depression. Republicans are falling all over each other to offer advice on how to reverse their decline. Maybe they have to get with the program on immigration in order to win Latinos back. Maybe they have to back off on women's issues. Maybe they have to give in on raising taxes for the rich. Maybe this, maybe that.
But whatever the suggestions being made about changing the Republican Party's stance on issues, or even just on messaging, they face two problems.
- Will the base let them do that?
- Is it enough to win voters from our side?
The answer in both cases appears to be No. Any substantive shift on issues loses the base, but merely cosmetic changes to the messaging do not win any of us. Rock, meet hard place. Scylla/Charybdis. Devil/deep blue sea. Heads, we win/Tails, they lose. Schadenfreude/Schadenfreude.
I'm not holding my breath for acceptance. I'll settle for the disappearance of the Republican Party, in the manner of the Federalists in 1815 and the Whigs in 1856.
Four years ago, Republicans went into mourning over a historic election, which marked the tipping point on their slide into irrelevance. We saw vociferous denial (Birtherism, for example), then outrage, outrage I tell you (Socialism! The Antichrist!), then a little bit of false bargaining and a hint of depression, but not one whit of acceptance, except among some who have left the Party.
I joined Daily Kos in August, 2009, and wrote about this phenomenon of Republican mourning four times in 2009 and 2010.
Death of GOP; Republicans in mourning (denial and anger)
Republicans in Mourning 3: Bargaining (fake bargaining with Democrats)
Republicans in Mourning: Bargains and Lies (more fake bargaining with Democrats)
Republicans in Mourning: Folding on Health Care
I have no advice for Republicans, in part because I consider their situation hopeless (and good riddance, especially to the Southern Strategy and the Religious Right), and in part because I detest concern trolling. Well, actually I do have one bit of advice, which I share with many Democrats. Go right on as you are, Republicans. Double down even. Because that way we will see the back of you as early as possible. Or you could see the light and become Democrats.
But, that aside, my purpose today is to list a few of the most prominent voices in the Republican party now actually bargaining with the future, or more likely pretending to bargain with the future, and a few that are failing utterly to do so, and to analyze how they are doing. Short version: They are making a mess of it, except to the extent that they are coming around to sanity on a few of the issues, notably LGBT rights and medical marijuana, where the public has tipped decisively against them in recent years, and these are now winning Democratic issues.
The fundamental problem for Republicans is that, regardless of the Congressional gerrymandering after the 2010 Census (still rather successful), or voter suppression (pretty much a failure this time after successes in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004), they are in a distinct minority for future Presidential elections, and they have no paths to Electoral College success through the current swing states. (Romney won in only one of them, North Carolina.) Demographics have turned against them, both because they have seriously outraged the most important majority group in this country, women (If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!), and because we are about to become a so-called majority-minority country, and about time, too. There simply are not enough angry White men left to win an election, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, noted in August. There is also a huge Generation Gap, a much more consequential gap than the famous one in the 60s, though a less in-your-face contentious one. (I am White according to current US government classification, but I am actually part Jewish, Polish, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh, with almost no so-called Anglo-Saxon (which is also at least as much Pictish, Roman, and Norman French). I am also very proud of my 100% Black African ancestry, when you look far enough back. Yours, too.)
Furthermore, they have no decent candidates who can get through their primaries. This year's crop was a complete disaster, and the prospects for next time look no better.
No, Never
Republicans were strongly in denial, with plenty of anger, during this last campaign, claiming, and in many cases apparently believing, that the polls (even Fox!) were skewed toward Democrats. From the article linked just above:
Romney's senior advisers told CBS News:
"We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory. I don't think there was one person who saw this coming."
Many on the right also claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was cooking the books in favor of Obama. Some still are.
Fox is claiming that Hurricane Sandy could not possibly have caused the loss of about 78,000 jobs last month, and that BLS made it up. (Those were not 78,000 people fired because of the hurricane. Any such suggestion would be stupid. Those were jobs at establishments that, in the extreme case, no longer exist. Even where the buildings are still standing, they may require extensive repair. There were towns where the population was not able to return home right away, and many areas remained without electricity for weeks.)
Mitt Romney still believes that Barack Obama won by promising gifts to women (free birth control!), young people (free college!) and minorities (free citizenship for Latinos! Welfare without work for Blacks!), and even the population as a whole (free health care!).
None of those were in fact offered. Student loans are not free, and neither is insurance under ObamaCare. Non-citizens who were brought here by their parents without visas do not get citizenship under the President's plan, just a temporary work permit. Getting rid of the work requirement for welfare was a Republican lie from start to finish.
Romney spouts this nonsense with no sense of irony, given the lavish gifts he and Ryan promised to the 0.001% in tax cuts. Why wouldn't the rest of us vote for that? It makes no sense. He can see its appeal, so what is wrong with the rest of us? Don't we want to protect our investments? (Particularly our investments in politicians. ^_^)
Bill O'Reilly is just as vehement about Democrats cheating by promising people "stuff". He does admit the demographic challenge.
It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.
O'Reilly conveniently forgets that the Irish were once non-White, if they were considered
human at all, and that Catholics were once acolytes of the Papal Antichrist. Some Antichrist, anyway. It gets confusing when there are so many of them.
Barack Obama,
Dick Cheney,
Ayn Rand, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan…
The Book of Common Prayer—1549
From all sedicion and privye conspiracie, from the tyrannye of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, from al false doctrine and herisy, from hardnes of heart, and contempte of thy word and commaundemente:
Good lorde deliver us.
Karl Rove claims that
Obama suppressed the Republican vote by, you know, campaigning.
Instead of expanding voters, Rove argued, Obama "suppressed the vote" by demonizing former Gov. Mitt Romney and encouraging people not to vote.
Rush Limbaugh still
despises everybody except Rush Limbaugh.
Just as I predicted, ladies and gentlemen—wait 'til you hear the sound bites—this election was lost because of your host, Rush Limbaugh. I am the primary reason.
There are others, but I'm the primary reason the Republican Party lost. And I am, by the way, the primary reason the Republican Party will keep losing, until I am denounced by the Republican Party.
Sorry, Rush, the Republican Party is too busy denouncing the Republican Party, and especially Mitt Romney and Karl Rove.
Yes, Sort Of
Joe Scarborough
I’m just tired of the Republican Party being the Stupid Party! Stupid people saying stupid things and scaring off independent voters and swing voters!
Yes, Joe, we know you are smarter than the average Republican. Just not smart enough.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-LA
We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything, We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.
It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.
Good luck with that, Gov. Creation Science, Gov. Laughs at Volcano Monitoring. Let us know when you think up those solutions you keep saying Republicans need to offer.
Bill Kristol, editor of the Daily Standard, and author of the plan to kill health care reform. The Clinton health care reform.
You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer to freeze taxes for everyone below $250,000. Make it $500 [thousand], make it a million.
See,
that's bargaining.
David Frum, author of Why Romney Lost (and what Republicans can do about it)
Mitt Romney was very wrong to see 2012 as a referendum on "stuff." It was a referendum on the question, which candidate would do a better job promoting prosperity and creating jobs. That was the referendum that Romney and the Republican party lost. We lost both because voters did not believe in the job-creating magic of upper-income tax cuts—and because voters were unpersuaded that the GOP even cared that much about job creation, as opposed to wealth preservation.
Also,
Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.
He also said, on
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday, talking about the Republican Party,
And what you hear everywhere is the sound of ice cracking.
Frum is a very frustrating person, because he can see facts (unlike most Republicans) but is unable to draw the appropriate conclusions from them. What part of the Republican Party program does he believe in, then? If you take out the tax cut Voodoo and the Fox/Tea Parties/Christian Right fear-mongering on Blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTs, Kenyan Muslim Maumau terrorists, and the social safety net, what's left?
Sean Hannity of the aforementioned Conservative entertainment complex, on the need for immigration reform to get back the Latino vote:
It’s simple to me to fix it. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here—you don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on.
Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home; but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.
Because Latinos just love them some martial law on the border, and would be just delighted to wait for citizenship until you have that organized. Not.
Bargaining on Issues
The actual bargaining has begun with the Fiscal Cliff, which MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell insists is more like stepping off a curb, because the effects don't kick in right away (except for cutting off the unemployment extension).
Leaders confident deal can be reached on fiscal cliff
Speaker of the House John Boehner has said that we can discuss revenue enhancement by closing tax loopholes, but no tax increases. What will that mean after Jan. 1, when the Bush tax cuts have expired whole and entire? Will he be willing to discuss cutting taxes on the middle class, or will it have to be all or nothing? The only way to find out is to wait for it.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Republicans generally view spending as a bigger problem than revenue. "We fully understand that you can't save the country until you have entitlement programs that fit the changing demographics of America in the coming years," he said. Also, "We’re prepared to put revenue on the table, provided we fix the real problems," specifically entitlement costs, which are not even problems, except for those who consider it their highest priority to destroy the social safety net and any other program that helps real people.
What are We Bargaining Over?
On the Democratic side, the leading issues are
- Filibuster reform, whose outlines remain hazy. Majority Leader Harry Reid is definite about getting rid of the Motion to Proceed, so that we can have one filibuster per bill, rather than three or more (whether to start debate, whether to end debate, whether to deal with amendments, whether to conference with the House over different versions of bills, and whether to vote). A number of other Senators have proposed making the filibuster real again, so that those who wish to block progress must actually debate the bills, or at least stand up in the Senate and read the telephone book. (The only argument I have heard against this is that it cuts into the Senate's limited time to do more important things. This fails the rolling helplessly, pounding on the floor laughing test.) There is also support for ending unlimited secret holds on both bills and nominations. The nuclear option, getting rid of the filibuster completely, is off the table.
- Voting rights and procedures. The President called out over-long voting lines early in his victory speech. The Constitution gives Congress full power to regulate Federal elections. We need to counter voter suppression. If we cannot get rid of voter ID, we need to require governments to provide it automatically to newly naturalized adult citizens and citizens reaching voting age, in the same way that we used to send out draft cards automatically. We need better laws on public records, so that those who cannot get birth, name change, marriage, or divorce certificates to prove their identities are not left hanging. College and university IDs must be accepted. Military ID must be accepted. (In several states, the laws required an expiration date on these IDs. Schools and the military have made considerable progress on this, but it should not matter.) We need uniform voter registration procedures, and reliable methods for verifying registration at the polls. We need much better methods for counting ballots. Arizona missed its legal deadline for counting on Friday. We need non-partisan voting officials, and we need to put corrupt voting officials in prison. Rachel Maddow played a segment of an interview with Nancy Pelosi on this on Friday.
- Jobs, jobs, jobs, in the form of another stimulus, as opposed to the faith-based Republican agenda of Voodoo Economics for which they use the same name. Theirs consists in reality of cuts, cuts, cuts (to taxes, regulations, union rights, sanity, any program that helps anybody other than the rich, and especially government jobs such as teachers, firefighters, and police), or worse, of abortion restrictions, abortion restrictions, abortion restrictions. They even oppose giving out contracts to good Republican road-and-bridge-building contractors. Who could imagine?
- Implementing ObamaCare, including state insurance exchanges and expanding Medicaid. Governors who vowed to have nothing to do with it when there was a prospect of beating Obama and taking the Senate are now starting to talk about getting down to work on it, Florida's Rick Scott among them. Thirteen state governors, including several of the supposedly staunchest States'-Rights anti-big-(Federal)-government Republicans, have just announced their decisions to let the Federal government set up insurance exchanges in their states. The deadline for all of the other states to make their announcements is in December. The list includes Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Bob McDonnell in Virginia, Sam Brownback in Kansas, Bobby Jindal in Lousiana, John Kasich in Ohio, Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Rick Perry in Texas, and more. Nebraska, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, South Dakota, Alaska. This could mean that those Federal systems could be combined down the road into a universal health care system. (Reported on the Ed Show on Friday. Ed Shultz also noted that Republicans are bargaining on many issues now.)
- Ending the war in Afghanistan. There is some sentiment for getting out before the end of 2014 among both Democrats and Ron Paul Libertarians. Dan Rather said last week on The Chris Matthews Show (not Hardball, but his Sunday show) that he has heard from a prominent Republican, whom he did not name, about an interest in getting out of Afghanistan sooner.
- Gay, more precisely LGBT rights. The President could put the government and government contractors under non-discrimination rules by executive order. Nobody in the Administration has a satisfactory excuse for why he has not done this, but he is being asked to do it, and will be asked to do it again and again. Still, DOMA is going down eventually, so that the Federal government will have to provide Federal marriage benefits to gay and lesbian couples in states that allow them to marry, and we will be able to ask states to recognize gay marriages legal in other states, in accordance with the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution. Many Libertarians and all Log Cabin Republicans are on board with this. David Blankenhorn, one of the the "expert" witnesses in the California Prop. 8 case who testified against gay marriage has now reversed position and supports it. (C-SPAN aired a good session on these matters on Thursday, organized by the Williams Institute.)
- Union rights. It is hard to see how to get this through Congress, but it will be fought in many state legislatures. EEOC and NLRB could step up support for workers. Safety enforcement could be tightened considerably. Unions felt their power in Wisconsin and Ohio in the last few years, and especially in this last election, where they built their own GOTV ground game and ran their own outside ads, rather than contributing to the Democratic Party campaigns.
- Energy and the environment. At some point the Dakotas will realize that there are more jobs and tax revenues in wind power than in oil shale. Gov. Chris Christie, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have started to come to grips with Global Warming in a very practical way that trumps ideology. Renewable power will become less expensive than carbon fuels, especially if we can do anything about carbon subsidies and about cap and trade. At that point ideology will be irrelevant, and market forces will rule.
- Gun control. The once-invincible but increasingly strident and nonsensical National Rifle Association failed to take down any of the legislators they targeted in this cycle. They did spend some money in support of Sen. Orrin Hatch R-UT, but he was an incumbent with no serious opposition. Most Democrats have not yet realized that the NRA has turned itself into a paper tiger, and are not yet willing to break cover and talk about the issue.
The NRA Got Its Clock Cleaned On Election Day And Planned Parenthood Cleaned House
- The Drug War. Not only did we win major victories in the election, but Republicans are shifting to support for medical marijuana, decriminalization, and even legalization, now that public opinion has tipped.
Republicans In Washington State, Colorado Endorse Legalization Of Marijuana
Decriminalizing Pot in Indiana?!
If we could do that and no more, it would be a historic agenda, and there are more issues that we could take on if we had a way to get anywhere with them. Well, we know that we will not be able to do all of that this time. But there is reason to think that the monolithic Republican party of the last four years is breaking apart under the strain. But the demographics and the generation gap are just getting worse and worse for the Republicans. And Barack Obama just might be able to replace one of the Conservatives on the Supreme Court in the next four years. Then we could discuss taking Republican gerrymandering to the Court on an Equal Protection complaint.