Are Ad Hoc, Issue Driven Congressional Coalitions An Option?

On any given day there is an odd-- and I mean odd-- assortment of Republicans willing to buck their much loathed party leadership and cross the aisle to make common cause with Democrats. That can be as many as 60 members as we saw when the GOP leadership offered an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act on February 28. It was carried by Conference Chair Kathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), #4 in the GOP hierarchy and the intent was to strip out protections for gays and lesbians in the domestic violence bill about to pass the House. 60 Republicans helped defeat the amendment at 11:39 AM and then at 11:56 AM 87 Republicans joined every Democrat to reauthorize the VAWA against Republican opposition.

Believe me when I tell you there aren't 87 or 60 or even 20 "good" Republicans who are moderate and mainstream and will work with Democrats for a more just and equal America. Far from it. So far in the current session, the Republican who has defied Boehner and Cantor most consistently on crucial votes is drooling neo-fascist extremist freak Paul Broun, the back-country Georgia John Birch Society maniac. His ProgressivePunch score (38.89) is not just identical with a mainstream, sometimes moderate-- and very pissed off-- conservative Republican, Peter King (R-NY), but with 8 right-leaning Democratic freshmen, New Dems Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Scott Peters (CA), and Dan Maffei (NY) plus Raul Ruiz (CA), Ann Kuster (NH) and Cheri Bustos (IL). That's a score that DCCC Chair Steve Israel and New Dem chair Ron Kind have steered these 8 exceptionally clueless and confused freshmen into, a comfortable place for the fringe lunatic from the Pit of Hell.

There are another 5 Democrats even more likely to stick with Boehner and Cantor on a regular basis, Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dems-NC), Ron Barber (New Dem-AZ), Bill Owens (New Dem-NY), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ) and Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT). And voting less frequently with Boehner on key roll calls than Matheson... 28 Republicans (+ Broun).

In her later years, but before she lost her mind, someone asked Margaret Thatcher what her greatest contribution was. She quipped, only half joking, "Tony Blair." New Labour, like the New Dems, represented a basic betrayal of progressive, working-family-oriented politics. If she "came to represent all that was wrong with our get-rich-quick and look-after-number-one society" in Britain and Blair was able to put lipstick on that pig, both Clinton, Obama and the New Dems have done and are doing the same thing for brutal Reagan conservatism here. We'll come back to bad Democrats in a second.

The defeat of the McMorris Rogers anti-gay amendment with those 60 Republicans was exceptional-- a lot more Republicans than usual going against their party leadership and only two renegade homophobic extremists on the Democratic side-- Dan Lipinksi (IL) and Mike McIntyre (NC)-- pitching in to try to shore up Boehner's losses from inside his own party. The 20 or so Republicans who have been willing to defy Boehner and Cantor regularly range from the neo-Nazi fringe (Herr Broun, Louie Gohmert, Phil Gingrey) to libertarian-leaning Republicans like Justin Amash (MI), Thomas Massie (KY), Walter Jones (NC), Mo Brooks (AL), Tom McClintock (CA), Jimmy Duncan (TN) and Tim Huelskamp (KS) and vaguely mainstream conservatives sick of the GOP's descent into extremism, or, in many cases, afraid that their suburban moderate constituents will be sick of it. That group, all northerners wary of the drastic neo-Confederate swing their party has taken, includes Richard Hanna (NY), Tom Marino (PA), Tom Reed (NY), Leonard Lance (NJ), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Tom Cole (OK), Mike Turner (OH), Jon Runyan (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Michael Grimm (NY) and Chris Smith (NJ).

Depending on the issue, an ad hoc anti-Establishment coalition can be cobbled together. Pelosi, I'm afraid, is now past her date of expiry and should retire with whatever dignity she has left. She's not putting together any anti-Establishment anything anymore. Hoyer and Wasserman Schultz, their heirs apparent, are far worse on their best days than Pelosi was on her worst. Each would be a perfect Tweedledee to Boehner's or Cantor's Tweedledum. So... scratch any hopes for ad hoc anti-Establishment coalition? Or could, say, Xavier Becerra or Alan Grayson, work with, say, Justin Amash and Walter Jones, effectively to put a spanner in the wheel of Establishment hegemony inside Congress?

Boehner and Obama are determined to remove the third rail status from Social Security-- the weapon of choice is the Chained CPI-- to Social Security can be gradually trampled into dust in the future. Below is what Grayson sent me about it last night; are there Republicans (as well as progressives) who can buy into this?

I'm against the proposed "chained CPI" cut in Social Security because it substantially undermines the protection against inflation that Social Security recipients enjoy under current law. The existing cost of living adjustment ("COLA") already understates actual increases in the "cost of living;" the chained CPI would exacerbate the problem.

Here is how the "chained CPI" would change things: Let's say that the cost of gasoline tripled, from $3.33 per gallon to $10 per gallon. Most people would call that a 200 percent increase in the price of gas. That's how it would be calculated under the CPI today. Under the chained CPI, however, it would be calculated at less than 200 percent, because some people couldn't afford to pay $10 a gallon. They would drive less. They might have to take the bus to work. They might take a "staycation" instead of a vacation. Because a tripling in the price of gas basically makes everyone poorer, and thus less able to buy gas, the chained CPI doesn't count that as a 200 percent increase. It reduces the percentage increase in proportion to the amount of gas that people can no longer afford to buy.

In fact, the bigger the price increase (and the poorer people get), the bigger the gap between the actual price increase and the chained CPI adjustment. This effect starts off small, and barely noticeable, but then as time goes by, it swells like a blister. In fact, it swells from $1.4 billion in the first year to $22 billion in the tenth year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So the chained CPI is inflation protection that, by design, inflation itself erodes.

The political proponents of the chained CPI are hoping that you don't understand it. Because when you do understand it, you won't support it. We should be doing more to protect seniors against inflation, not less.  The chained CPI calls to mind something that W.C. Fields once said: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with... " With the chained CPI.