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January 3 - January 13, 2021
The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to
muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.
Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump’s lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to ...
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the precedent for the Republican Party’s attacking law enforcement has been established for decades by the National Rifle Association.
language used by any homegrown terrorist group, from neo-Nazis to the 1960s radical-left bombers of the Students for a Democratic Society.
President George H. W. Bush resign his lifetime NRA membership in a blistering letter.
To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” wanting to “attack law abiding citizens” is a vicious slander on good people.
your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country.
Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in fifty years. This was the “Contract with America” election that made Newt Gingrich into the Death Star of the Republican Party.
Both Trump and Gingrich have a transparent need to compensate for their deep insecurities with childlike boasting.
It says a lot about the Republican Party that both of these disturbed and broken men have become dominant figures.
The Princeton political science professor Nolan McCarty has written extensively on polarization
The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems.
Yes, both parties are to blame, but here is the actual relevant question to ask: Is one party more to blame than the other?
Professor McCarty is clear on Republicans’ greater role in the negativity of polarization:
Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11
The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted,
summed up the change embodied in the insanity of the government shutdown in 2011 over the passage of a simple bill to extend the national debt ceiling and stop the government from default:
like any political party on Earth, the GOP has always had its share of crackpots,
But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital core today: Eric Cantor, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, and Allen West. The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.14
Lofgren explained perfectly the conditions that made a Donald Trump
an inevitable next step on the path chosen by Republicans:
There were signposts on the road ahead—the Gingrich revolution of 1995, the Clinton impeachment circus—but things got much worse after September 11, with the massive infringements of civil liberties that followed and the bluster and bravado that preceded the invasion of Iraq. By the 2010 midterm election the party had collectively lost its mind.
The evidence
the debt ceiling debacle, the kamikaze politics over the payroll tax cut extension, the freak show of the R...
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I’ve become a radical on campaign finance and support a system of federal funding for all elections.
one of the key post-Watergate reforms was a system of federal funding for presidential elections. Under the system, each candidate received around $80 million—it
in exchange for agreeing to not raise or sp...
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Every presidential candidate stuck to that system until 2008, when Barack Obama, after routinely pledging to accept federal funding, realized how much money he could raise and decided to reject federal funding.
As is always the case with campaign finance reforms, once the system was broken, it proved impossible to put the genie back in the bottle,
Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed contributions from corporations to be treated the same as individual donations—an
the ruling was two years after the 2008 campaign.
The ending of the federal funding system is, in my view, one of the most negative long-term legacies...
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But it isn’t really the power of money that gave right-wing special interests so much power over Republican politicians; it’s the ability of those groups to mobilize voters.
An infinite amount of money is available to candidates who are willing to do the demeaning work of fund-raising
But there are a finite number of voters in ...
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The core groups that influence the Democratic nominating process the most are African Americans, labor, and liberals. These are wildly disparate voters with different, sometimes competing interests.
the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, who are white, Christian, and middle class or more affluent.
It is near functionally impossible for a Republican to win a presidential nomination in the Republican Party and actively oppose the NRA.
gatekeepers to the power center of the Republican Party.
The only like group in the Democratic Party would be the coalition of groups who supp...
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On economic issues, one man, Grover Norquist, has spent the last thirty years pressuring Republican candidates to commit to a pledge not to raise taxes.
Americans for Tax Reform,
ubiqu...
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Norquist has acquired disproportionate power because, if there is one single unifying conviction among Republicans, it is the assumption that all good in government flows from cutting taxes.
There is no like unanimity among the coalition of the Democratic Party.
The truth is that most Republican politicians I’ve known—and I’ve known a lot—greatly resent the power of Grover Norquist and resent the childlike indignity of signing a pledge,
committing to not raising taxes for the entirety of their careers greatly limits their and their party’s basic ability to govern and deal with a chaotic and unpredictable world.
few if any Republican politicians will even broach the possibility of a tax increase.
The result of this weakness will be generations forced to pay off the debt and interest resulting from the simpleminded conspiracy of silence that i...
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