Cheri Bustos Has Some Kindred Souls-- At The NRSC

Same kind of authoritarian, anti-democratic mindset and instincts. Bustos, chair of the DCCC, is trying to prevent primaries of Blue Dogs and New Dems in Congress, while she recruits New Dem and Blue Dog-types to run against progressives. Yesterday evening, Politico ran a report by Alex Isenstadt showing how the McTurtle and Todd Young, who are running the NRSC, are coming from the exact same place. Does this sound familiar? "Senate Republicans and their establishment allies are vowing to blackball any political consulting firm that works to defeat GOP incumbents, a dramatic step likely to further inflame intraparty tensions over 2020 primaries."

McTurtle and Young are all riled up because the far right is attempting to primary Thom Tillis (R-NC), who's more like the near-right. McTurtle was heard screeching that there will be a "zero tolerance policy." That kind of thing is more likely to work in a fascist-oriented party than among Democrats, where Bustos is rapidly destroying her own credibility and her career.

“It is the policy of the NRSC that we will defend any member of our caucus from any challenge-- be it in a primary or general election-- by any means necessary,” Kevin McLaughlin, the National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director, said in a statement. “It is a zero tolerance policy and we will not work with any vendors who work for campaigns or outside groups challenging incumbent Republican senators.”

The announcement is the most public brushback to those working for primary challengers since 2014, when the NRSC-- looking to beat back a wave of conservative insurgents-- cut off a consulting firm that had targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other incumbents up for reelection that year.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a well-funded super PAC closely aligned with McConnell, joined the committee in its decision.

“We have a long-standing policy of not using consultants who are assisting primary challenges against our Senate incumbents,” said Steven Law, the group's president.

The Club for Growth has not opposed an incumbent Republican senator since 2014, when it tried to unseat then-Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran. But this week, the organization indicated it was trying to nudge North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker, a staunch Trump ally, into the primary. The Club for Growth also released a poll suggesting that Tillis would be vulnerable in a primary and general election.

The flare-up threatens to divide Republicans in a state at the center of the party’s 2020 strategy. Senate GOP campaign officials have warned aides to President Donald Trump that a disruptive and chaotic North Carolina Senate primary could hurt Trump in the battleground state.

North Carolina had already become an early focus of GOP concerns. The state Republican Party, whose chairman was recently indicted in a corruption case, has been wracked by turmoil. And there is considerable angst within the party about a field of lackluster gubernatorial candidates.

Senate Republicans are vigorously working to protect Tillis. In recent weeks, NRSC officials raised concerns with Trump campaign aides over the work that John McLaughlin, one of the president’s pollsters, was doing for Tillis primary challenger Garland Tucker. On Tuesday, McLaughlin’s firm withdrew from the North Carolina race.

The NRSC has indicated that it’s prepared to aggressively go after Walker, a third-term evangelical pastor. The committee, for example, has pointed out that the congressman has become entangled in the same federal corruption probe that led to the indictment of state party chairman Robin Hayes.

Major donors and outside groups are also coming to the senator’s defense. A spokesman for GOP megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson said the couple “stands by Thom Tillis.”

Ending Spending Action Fund, a super PAC that in the past has received funding from the billionaire Ricketts and Adelson families, said it “will proudly support his reelection and vigorously oppose candidates or groups that seek to challenge the senator.”

Club for Growth officials say Tillis’ past differences with the White House have made him vulnerable in a state where Trump is popular among Republicans. Last year, the senator was criticized by fellow Republicans for co-sponsoring legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller. Earlier this year, Tillis wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he announced his opposition to Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a border wall, though he ultimately voted in favor of it.

The Club for Growth tried to defeat the president in the 2016 GOP primary but has since refashioned itself into a pro-Trump outfit. On Friday, the group said it is still assessing whether to oppose Tillis.

“The Club for Growth has not made a determination if we will support a primary challenge to Sen. Tillis’ seat in North Carolina,” said Joe Kildea, a spokesman for the organization. “If we do endorse Walker, it will only be if we believe he is a stronger candidate in the general election.”

Republicans are not alone in trying to cut off oxygen to primary challengers. At a time when progressive insurgents are looking to unseat establishment incumbents, the House Democratic campaign arm has said it will no longer do business with vendors who are working to defeat sitting lawmakers.

The Club for Growth’s threat to Tillis puts some of the Republican Party's incumbents, who typically treat their fellow colleagues with deference, in an awkward position. Arizona Sen. Martha McSally has previously used two consulting firms, Axiom Strategies and WPA Intelligence, who have done work for the Club for Growth and Walker.

WPA Intelligence oversaw the Club for Growth’s new North Carolina survey, though a person familiar with the arrangement said it was done through a firewalled division of the polling firm. Jeff Roe, founder of Axiom Strategies and a top McSally adviser, said his firm would not be involved in any effort to defeat Tillis.

McSally is one of the most endangered senators up for reelection in 2020. A spokeswoman for the senator suggested that she took the same no-tolerance approach as the party committee.

"Sen. McSally strongly supports the reelection of Thom Tillis,” said McSally spokeswoman Katie Waldman, “and has made it clear that she will not use any vendors who are involved in a primary against the senator or any other Republican senator in the 2020 cycle.”

Arbeit Macht Frei, Save American Workers Act of 2014-- GOP And Blue Dogs Go For 52nd Vote To Kill The Affordable Care Act

Ever hear the German phrase Arbeit macht frei? The literal translation is fairly neutral: "work makes you free." But the reason the phrase resonates for people around the world is because when Jews, gypsies, union leaders, gays and other victims of the right-wing apocalypse of the 1940s arrived at the Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Dachau death camps this phrase, in metal letters, was the first thing they saw above the gates. Work did not make them free. Today far right Indiana Congressman Todd Young had bis bill, H.R. 2575, the Save American Workers Act of 2014, voted on. I'm not categorically stating that Young is a modern day Nazi-- his work speaks for itself-- but I am saying that the purpose of his bill was to save the American work and much as his right wing political progenitors' metal letters were going to set the victims of Nazi oppression frei. Every single Republican voted for it-- as did 18 of the most right-wing Democrats. It passed 248-179. The right-wing Democrats who crossed the aisle to help the Republicans betray American workers today were:

• Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ)
• John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)
• Brad Schneider (New Dem-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)

What these 18 Democrats voted for-- at the urging of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and along with their GOP brethren-- was another scheme to kill the Affordable Care Act and deny health insurance to a least a million American workers. The bill changes the definition of a full-time employee from someone who works 30 hours a week to someone who works 40 hours a week. The aim is to allow companies with 50 or more employees to deny health insurance participation to anyone who works 39 hours/week or less. The CBO estimates that the new bill-- should it ever become law-- would kick at least a million people off their health insurance coverage. It was the House's 52 cynical vote to kill or maim ObamaCare. This is what you expect from Republicans. But you probably don't expect it from these 18 Democrats. You should. They're just as bad as Republicans-- every one of them.

7.1 million Americans have already signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Ryan's latest Austerity budget, released on April Fool's Day, seeks very deep cuts to Medicare that will prevent millions of Americans from getting health care. Dick Durbin said he saw Ryan's budget as a wake-up call for Americans-- a warning about what the GOP would do if they could ever get control of both houses of Congress. "You’re not going to turn away seven or 10 million people from insurance coverage-- doesn’t work anymore. And then comes Ryan. Thank you, thank you Congressman Paul Ryan, for reminding us what Republicans would do if they had control."

[T]he Ryan budget, which was approved by the House Budget Committee on Wednesday night along party lines, will present the Democrats a chance to expand the political conversation beyond health care, to more Democrat-friendly subjects like Medicare, Social Security, education funding and health research. The tax-and-spending plan once again proposes to convert Medicare into a “premium support” system in which older people would be given subsidies to purchase private insurance-- a proposal that Democrats ran on successfully in 2012.

It cuts Medicaid by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, food stamps by $125 billion, education programs by $145 billion-- including Pell grants-- and makes university students begin paying interest on student loans while still in college. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, forecast that 57 percent of the people who vote will be over 50 this November, compared with 43 percent in 2012.

“The ability to drive our advantage on Medicare will be invaluable,” she said.

Wednesday E.J. Dionne opined in the Washington Post that the Republicans need to be held accountable for their willful sabotage of attempts to help ordinary Americans get medical care.

The ACA is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do. It is getting health insurance to millions who didn’t have it before. (The Los Angeles Times pegged the number at 9.5 million at the beginning of the week.) And it’s working especially well in places such as Kentucky, where state officials threw themselves fully and competently behind the cause of signing up the uninsured. Those who want to repeal the law will have to admit that they are willing to deprive these people, or some large percentage of them, of insurance.

Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don’t want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered. Admitting this can sound cruel, so they insist that their objections are to the ACA’s alleged unworkability, or to “a Washington takeover of the health system” (which makes you wonder what they think of Medicare, a far more centralized program). Or they peddle isolated horror stories that the fact-checkers usually discover are untrue or misleading.

Thus the moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes.

From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law’s enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn’t, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the “replacement” plans?

Perhaps more importantly, will we finally be honest about the real argument here: Do we or do we not want to put in the effort and money it takes to guarantee all Americans health insurance? If we do-- and we should-- let’s get on with doing it the best way we can.

Which 2 House Dems Were Eager To Go On Record As Anti-Gay-- And Which Republicans Wanted To Be On Record As Less Bigoted Towards The LGBT Community?

Congress' ugliest Member, Dan Lipinski (D-IL) will never be able to use gay panic as a defense for his vicious homophobia

Everyone was cheering this week when 4 conservative Democratic senators, Claire McCaskill (MO), Mark Warner (VA), John Tester (MT) and Mark Begich (AK), [UPDATE: and Kay Hagan (NC)] finally came up, tepidly, with the courage to come out in favor of marriage equality. That's nice. I wish they weren't so late to the party. Even Rob Portman (R-OH) came first. Needless to say, none of the GOP congressional closet cases-- Lindsey Graham (SC), Tim Scott (SC) and Miss McConnell (KY) in the Senate and only-god-knows how many in the House-- are supporting marriage equality. Many of them, take Patrick McHenry (NC), Aaron Schock (IL) and Trent Franks (AZ) for example, are virulently opposed, hoping that they can hide behind a policy of steadfast homophobia without anyone back home remarking on the grotesque hypocrisy. There are only 9 House Republicans who don't have a zero lifetime ProgressivePunch score on crucial LGBT roll calls: libertarians Justin Amash (MI) and Jimmy Duncan (TN), mainstream conservatives Richard Hanna (NY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Jim Sensenbrenner (WI) and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), and libertarian-leaning teabaggers Jason Chaffetz (UT), Tom McClintock (CA), and John Campbell (CA). None of them have remotely pro-gay records. But none have zeroes like the rest of the House Republicans.

Now I'm wondering how many libertarian-oriented Republicans in Congress are ready to just tell their Establishment colleagues-- if not the religionist nuts in the caucus-- to just leave it alone and stop inserting Big Government into people's private lives. Indiana Republican Todd Young doesn't ever step out of line. He's the ultimate dull backbencher who does whatever he's told by the leadership in the hope that no one ever notices him and tries to take away his cushy new job. This year his ProgressivePunch crucial vote score is a nice round ZERO. A former Heritage Foundation staffer, rocking boats is not what Todd Young does. So it was with some surprise that he actually spoke up on gay marriage this week-- and not in the usual homophobic way most Indiana Republican elected officials do. Explaining that it may not be appropriate for government to sanction marriage-- gay or straight-- in the first place, he insists that his priority remains addressing the nation's budget issues-- he's an Austerity freak-- as opposed to social issues like same-sex marriage. "It's my hope that we would leave these things to the states rather than one side prevailing over another. We'll see if that is exactly what the law says. It's the Supreme Court's job to decide what in fact our fundamental law, the Constitution, requires. Of course all of us will abide by that decision." He almost sounds like Robert Reich.

We’re still legislating and regulating private morality, while at the same time ignoring the much larger crisis of public morality in America.

...The new House Republican budget gets a big chunk of its savings from programs designed to help poor kids. The budget sequester already in effect takes aim at programs like Head Start, designed to improve the life chances of disadvantaged children.

Meanwhile, the morality brigade continues to battle same-sex marriage.

Despite the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider the constitutionality of California’s ban, no one should assume a majority of the justices will strike it down. The Court could just as easily decide the issue is up to the states, or strike down California’s law while allowing other states to continue their bans.

Conservative moralists don’t want women to have control over their bodies or same-sex couples to marry, but they don’t give a hoot about billionaires taking over our democracy for personal gain or big bankers taking over our economy.

Yet these violations of public morality are far more dangerous to our society because they undermine the public trust that’s essential to both our democracy and economy.

...Why doesn’t the morality brigade complain about the rampant greed on the Street that’s already brought the economy to its knees, wiping out the savings of millions of Americans and subjecting countless others to joblessness and insecurity-- and seems set on doing it again?

What people do in their bedrooms shouldn’t be the public’s business. Women should have rights over their own bodies. Same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

But what powerful people do in their boardrooms is the public’s business. Our democracy needs to be protected from the depredations of big money. Our economy needs to be guarded against the excesses of too-big-to-fail banks.

With most Americans supporting marriage equality-- and a plurality of Republicans under the age of 50 backing it-- GOP legislators have to figure out how to pivot on the issue before they look even more out of touch with the zeitgeist than usual. I suspect more and more Republicans are looking towards Rand Paul (R-KY) for guidance on this kind of thing-- and he's tap dancing.

In recent years, Senator Rand Paul has called for abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service. He’s urged an audit of the Federal Reserve. He’s questioned the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He’s even suggested there’s a risk Americans could soon become like Germans of the “Weimar Republic in 1923” and need wheelbarrows full of money to buy groceries because of hyperinflation triggered by excessive debt. Adolf Hitler, Paul warned, gained power as a result.

“We’re on that road, if we’re not careful,” he said during an April 2010 campaign stop.

Now that he’s considered a possible Republican candidate for president in 2016, Paul isn’t emphasizing any of that... Paul says he’d like to see marriage eliminated from tax and insurance laws. Instead, he’d promote the use of contracts between adults as the marital bond for legal and tax purposes.

“I don’t want the government promoting something I don’t believe in,” Paul, who supports the religious definition of marriage between a man and a woman, said during a March 24 Fox News interview. “But I also don’t mind if the government tries to be neutral on the issue.”

The most recent vote regarding the LGBT community in the House was a failed amendment to the Violence Against Women Act offered by Washington homophobe Cathy McMorris Rodgers on February 28. She tried to would strip the bill's protections for American Indians, immigrants, and members of the LGBT community from the anti-domestic violence bill. Sixty Republicans and all but two Democrats--vicious homophobes Dan Lipinski (IL) and Mike McIntyre NC)-- teamed up to block McMorris Rodgers' amendment. It went down to defeat 166-257. The aforementioned Todd Young voted for it, as did Boehner's leadership team-- Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA), Whip Kevin McCarthy (CA), Conference Chair McMorris Rodgers (WA), Conference Vice Chair Lynn Jenkins (KS), Conference Secretary Virginia Foxx (NC), Policy Chair Jim Lankford (OK), NRCC Chair Greg Walden (OR) and committee chairs Fred Upton (MI), Paul Ryan (WI), Buck McKeon (CA), Frank Lucas (OK), Hal Rogers (KY), John Kline (MN), Jeb Hensarling (TX), Mike Rogers (MI), Mike McCaul (TX), Ed Royce (CA), Goodlatte (VA), Pete Sessions (TX), Lamar Smith (TX), Sam Graves (MO), Bill Shuster (PA), and Jeff Miller (FL). The only members of Team Boehner voting with the Democrats were Darrell Issa (CA), closet case Dave Camp (MI) and Doc Hastings (WA). Another Republican closet case who, uncharacteristically, voted NO, was Patrick McHenry (NC).