Monthly Archives: February 2015

Putting the Con in Conservative

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I don’t often link to right-wing sites to approve of something, but recently John Hawkins of Right Wing News published the results of a study showing how right-wing PACs spent contributors’ money. And — what a not surprise — there are many PACs soliciting money for “conservative” politicians that are spending little to no money on behalf of those politicians. Even PACs that are allegedly linked to a particular candidate aren’t spending money on behalf of that candidate. For example, the National Draft Ben Carson for President PAC spent only 4 percent of nearly $13 million received on efforts to draft Ben Carson for President. It may actually surprise you not in the least that SarahPAC spent maybe 7 percent of more than $3 million to help political candidates, which is the ostensible purpose of SarahPAC.

The PACs are not necessarily guilty of criminal activity. There are all sorts of legal ways to move money around to confound oversight. A PAC might set up a couple of vendors, possibly owned by people associated with the PAC, and send the vendors $100,000 each. The vendors then print $1,000 worth of fliers and pocket the rest. But on the PACs paperwork, it shows $200,000 spent on political action.

The Good Roger Ailes is derisive of Hawkins’ work, mostly because — duh, you didn’t know this already? Plus Hawkins’s analysis has lots of blind spots, some willful. But the larger point stands.

There is much speculation on rightie blogs that left-wing PACs are just as bad and probably worse. And I welcome similar analysis of leftie PACs. One of my gripes about progressivism going back many years is that, until the last decade or so, about the only activism going on was coming from single-issue advocacy groups that incessantly raised money but never seemed to accomplish anything. I may have told the story about how I stopped giving money to NARAL back in the 1980s, because as far as I could tell my donations were all being spent on salaries and office furniture.

But progressives across the board have been much more opposed to no-holds-barred contributions and want significant campaign finance reform that would stop a lot of this, whereas conservatives oppose reform and like the system just as it is, thank you, except they’d like to be able to bar unions from political activity if they could. But just unions; not the Koch Brothers.

And the even larger point is that the Right is mostly a grift, anyway. Characters like Richard Viguerie, Ann Coulter, etc., have been cashing in for years by doing nothing but raising alarm about the Coming Darkness of Liberalism When You Will Be Forced to Convert to Islam and Eat Babies. I wrote awhile back:

If bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is, grifters infest the Right because that’s where the gullibility is. People who can be made to believe in death panels can also be sold on dubious investment schemes, survivalist kits and quack arthritis cures. It’s too easy. See especially Rick Perlstein, “The Long Con.”

At least, I’m not aware of anyone using leftie political networks to sell cancer cures, dubious investments schemes or the leftie equivalent of survivalist kits, whatever that might be.

There are also subcategories of specialized grifters such as the NRA/firearm industry and climate change denialists/petroleum industry. But it’s all of a piece, really.

I wrote recently that the only substantive difference between the “extremists” and the “moderates/establishment” in the Republican Party is that “the ‘moderates’ realize elections have to be won, and the ‘extremists’ don’t know that, or don’t care.” When you look at someone like Ted Cruz, who unlike many others may not be crazy or stupid, one suspects his long game isn’t winning the White House. The long game is making a ton of money. In this country, once you become a reliable supplier of red meat for the Right, you are set for life. Whether you ever actually accomplish anything that’s good for anyone is irrelevant.

Now Paul Waldman writes about how rich conservatives are bilking the rank and file:

This particular con is just one variant of a wider system, one that has been in operation for decades. While there may be some cases of similar scams on the left, they’re absolutely rampant on the right, because they’ve been so central to the conservative movement for so long. In the 1960s, conservatives realized that the nationwide grassroots network that activists built to support Barry Goldwater could be an ongoing source of funds, not only for conservative causes but for people wanting to sell snake oil. Lists of names and addresses became a valued commodity, built, bought and sold again and again for the benefit of those who controlled them and those who used them (Rick Perlstein lays out that history here).

That tradition continues, but in new and more complicated ways that I like to call the circle of scam. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks pay radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity big money to offer on-air endorsements that are the radio equivalent of ‘native advertising.’ Future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee sells his email list on ‘miracle cancer cures’ hidden in the Bible. Conservative media figures like Dick Morris solicit contributions that somehow are never turned to the political ends they claim. Nobody wants to upend the system, because too many people are getting a taste.

The common thread can be found in the marks: the little old lady in Tupelo who sends in $50 thinking that she’s striking a blow against Barack Obama, the couple in Topeka who hopes Mike Huckabee’s biblical cancer cure can save their daughter’s life, the man in Toledo who thinks that the group with ‘Tea Party’ in its name is going to have an impact on his state’s races. What none of them know is that their money is just going to make somebody who’s already rich a little bit richer.

It’s been a hugely successful scam. However, there are signs more and more people are getting elected who don’t know it’s a scam. Could The Stupid eventually become so blatant even wingnuts notice? Hmm, I’m not holding my breath until that happens. But maybe Peak Wingnut will finally come to pass.

Netanyahu Is Not Our Friend

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I haven’t said anything about the Netanyahu addressing Congress flap, even after John Boehner admitted he deliberately kept the White House out of the loop when he extended the invitation. I can’t say I entirely understand the Republican Party’s fawning obsequiousness to Bibi. I assume they think making nice with Bibi hurts the President somehow.

But this sheds a different light on things —

U.S. officials suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized leaking details of U.S. nuclear negotiations with Iran to Israeli journalists, according to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

Concerns that Israeli officials had leaked key details about those negotiations, including that the U.S. offered to let Iran enrich uranium with “6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal,” has prompted the U.S. to limit the amount of sensitive information it exchanges with Israel about the Iran nuclear negotiations, Ignatius reported.

The White House is not confirming this, and it’s possible Ignatius is wrong. But there’s a leak somewhere. Ignatius writes,

This latest breach in the U.S.-Israeli relationship began around Jan. 12 with a phone call from Netanyahu. Obama asked the Israeli leader to hold fire diplomatically for several more months while U.S. negotiators explored whether Iran might agree to a deal that, through its technical limits on centrifuges and stockpiles, extended the breakout period that Iran would need to build a bomb to more than a year. But Netanyahu is said to have responded that a year wasn’t enough and to have reverted to Israel’s hard-line insistence that Iran shouldn’t be allowed any centrifuges or enrichment.

Obama was concerned because the United States had shared with Israel its goal of a one-year breakout period since the beginning of the talks. The White House saw Netanyahu’s comment as a change, one that could potentially scuttle the negotiations. The Israeli response is that Netanyahu has always argued for “zero enrichment.”

Relations began to unravel quickly after the phone call. On Jan. 21, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) invited Netanyahu to address Congress and share his concerns about the talks. The invitation hadn’t been pre-negotiated with the White House, as is usually the case when foreign leaders are invited to address Congress.

Then came the alleged leaks about the nuclear talks. On Jan. 31, the Times of Israel reported that an unnamed senior Israeli official had told Channel 10 TV news that the United States was ready to allow more than 7,000 centrifuges and had “agreed to 80 percent of Iran’s demands.” Channel 2 reported that the U.S. offer was 6,500 centrifuges. U.S. officials believed that Netanyahu’s office was the source of these reports and concluded that they couldn’t be as transparent as before with the Israel leader about the secret talks.

There may have been another time in U.S. history when someone strongly suspected of undermining U.S. foreign policy was invited to address Congress without even notifying the White House, but I wouldn’t know when that might have been.

The Real Road to Serfdom

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In the last post I argued that Republicans have reversed John Locke’s “life, liberty and property,” putting property (or the wealth of the wealthy) first, liberty second, and life a distant and expendable third. Now Paul Krugman agrees —

If you look for an overarching theme for overall conservative policy these past four decades, it definitely isn’t liberty — by and large the GOP has been enthusiastic about expanding the security and surveillance state. Nor is it in a consistent fashion smaller government, unless you define military and homeland security as not government. Instead, it has been about making the tax-and-transfer system harsher on the poor and easier on the rich. In short, class warfare.

It seems that several Republican governors, whose “conservative” economic policies strangled their states’ economies, are proposing tax increases to make up for loss of revenue. However, Krugman writes, “in every case the tax hike would fall most heavily on those with lower incomes, and many are proposing simultaneous tax cuts for business and/or the wealthy.”

In short, doing more of what hasn’t worked before. Erik Loomis writes,

Watching how Republican presidential possibilities have been talking in the last couple of weeks, it’s pretty clear that they are going to focus on income inequality, but define income inequality as a problem that exists because the rich pay too much in taxes and the poor don’t pay enough. I know this sounds like a terrible strategy for the Republicans, and maybe it is, but I do believe in their ability to obfuscate an issue and twist meanings that the message of income inequality I hope the Democrats run on in 2016 will have a lot of difficulty motivating the public.

Unfortunately, I think he’s right. A substantial portion of the American public will be persuaded that “income inequality” means the rich are being soaked so that the poor can lounge around living high on the hog and food stamps.

Life, Liberty, Property, but Not in That Order

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Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was presumably inspired by John Locke’s “life, liberty and property.”  Locke’s thinking influenced the U.S. Founding Guys more than any other single philosopher, and Locke said government is obligated to protect the life, liberty and property rights of the people. You would think teabaggers/Republicans would know this and respect it.

However, if you pay attention you notice that they’ve reworked the order — property first, then liberty, but life gets bumped off the list unless you are a fetus. Mark Joseph Stern provides several examples of Republicans putting liberty and property ahead of life. These include putting a right to refuse vaccination ahead of public health and their frantic crusade to stop the government from paying for health care.

Republicans are currently cheering on an anti-Obamacare lawsuit that could strip millions of health insurance. They’re willing to put Americans at risk of death just to score points against a law they hate. … Many conservatives are cheerfully unconcerned by this lawsuit’s potentially fatal consequences. In one op-ed titled “End Obamacare, and People Could Die. That’s Okay,” Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute insisted that the Supreme Court should have no compunction about rendering a decision that will kill Americans. A higher mortality rate, Strain wrote, is “an acceptable price to pay for certain goals,” including “less government coercion and more individual liberty.”

Liberty trumps life, in other words. Better dead than taxed, or something. If anyone knows on what planet that makes sense, do raise your hand. The Michael Strain op-ed is a chilling thing to read, but you know this “acceptable price” stuff is conventional wisdom among the privileged crew he rubs elbows with. They’re never going to have to pay that price, of course. But they’re kicking some of us to the curb for the Greater Good, and we’re supposed to be grateful. Yay, freedom!

I’ve been particularly infuriated by reports that the Koch Brother-led Americans for Prosperity has been going around strangling any movement toward expanding Medicaid in the non-Medicaid-expanding states, most recently Tennessee. Apparently the Koch Boys love freedom so much they’re determined to kill any poor, sick hillbillies that get in the way.

So, obviously, liberty is ranked ahead of life. But I would argue that for all their rhetoric about liberty, in truth the U.S. Right puts property ahead of liberty. The late 19th century Supreme Court was notorious for putting property rights above civil liberty, so this is not without precedent. But the base has been well trained to unquestioningly support everything from Citizen’s United to more tax cuts for the rich at the expense of everyone else to climate change denialism, because it’s in the best interests of the 1 percent to do so, and those policies are not promoting anyone’s liberty. Indeed, if you pay close attention you may notice that a lot of their arguments for “liberty” are mostly in favor of unrestricted acquisition of wealth.

It’s property first, then liberty when it doesn’t get in the way of property, and life for the post-born can be bumped off the table as necessary.

Update: How could I have forgotten that gun rights also trump life?  Little children killing themselves with guns is the price we pay for the freedom to keep loaded guns anywhere we want, right?

More Elusive Than Bigfoot

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The King v. Burwell case, to be argued in front of the SCOTUS in March, was deliberately crafted to take down the Affordable Care Act. So why is it the crafters couldn’t find better plaintiffs? Jeffrey Toobin writes,

The case is based on the claim that the Obama Administration policy of allowing those who received tax subsidies to buy insurance on the federal exchanges—which cover the thirty-four states that don’t have state-run exchanges—violates the terms of the Affordable Care Act itself. If the plaintiffs succeed in making their case, eight million people are estimated to lose their health insurance, and the A.C.A. itself could subsequently unravel.

But the King case, like any case, can only proceed if the plaintiffs have standing—that is, if they can claim an “injury in fact” from the Obamacare law. Thanks to two recent, excellent pieces of journalism, in Mother Jones and the Wall Street Journal, we now know a great deal about the four plaintiffs. Two are veterans of the Armed Forces and can receive health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs; accordingly, they have no reason to seek the tax subsidies under the law. The other two plaintiffs may make too little money to qualify for the tax subsidies, and, furthermore, one who claimed to be a Virginia resident listed a motel that prohibits long-term stays as her address. In short, the provisions of the Affordable Care Act in question in King v. Burwell may be irrelevant to all four plaintiffs—which would mean that they lack standing to challenge it.

Toobin says that conservative justices for many years have dismissed various challenges from liberals on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not demonstrate the law posed an “injury in fact” on them, and thus they lacked standing.

During the George H. W. Bush Administration, a coalition of environmental and conservation groups sued to stop new federal regulations that limited the application of a section of the Endangered Species Act. Chief Justice Roberts, then the Deputy Solicitor General, persuaded the Supreme Court to throw out the case because the plaintiffs would not suffer direct harm from the new regulations and lacked standing to bring the case. In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the court held that a “generally available grievance about government—claiming only harm to his and every citizen’s interest in proper application of the Constitution and laws, and seeking relief that no more directly and tangibly benefits him than it does the public at large—does not state an Article III case or controversy.”

I understand they don’t hear cases brought by spotted owls, either. A pity.

The Administration’s lawyers didn’t bring up the issue of standing in their brief, which means they either were asleep at the switch or they’d rather not have the case dismissed in a way that would allow the Right to try again.

This also begs the question of why the Right can’t find better plaintiffs. I occasionally read posts or comments from someone who has a legitimate-sounding story of being worse off because of Obamacare, but somehow the examples the Right chooses to feature never stand up to scrutiny.

On the Road

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I’m traveling today. My brother is being buried at Arlington tomorrow,  so I’m in the DC area. My motel room has a great view of the Pentagon, which is a very boring building to look at. So talk about whatever.

I see that David Axelrod wrote in his new book that President Obama was in support of same-sex marriage all along, and just said he wasn’t back in 2008 so he wouldn’t scare off voters. Righties are incensed.  The President lied! Booman says, “The President Lied, People Got Married.”

Joy in Rightieville Over a Faux Climate Change Scandal

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Did you know there is a global warming scandal? A novelist with no known scientific background named James Delingpole writes for Breitbart that he knows for a fact that organizations like NASA and NOAA are falsifying the data people are going by to make claims of global climate change. This claim has been picked up by The Telegraph, no less, which I’ve noticed publishing science denialism propaganda in the past. And the whole right blogosphere is eating this up and crowing about the “scandal,” utterly oblivious to the flagrant hinkyness of their source.

Reading on, we learn that the scandal was “broken” by a retired accountant named Paul Homewood who has made something of a name for himself by writing inane science-denialist articles for pseudo-science websites.

In brief, wingnuts, wake us up when you’ve got scientific, peer-reviewed data. Otherwise, just keep playing in traffic. Thanks much.

Stock Buybacks Are Strangling America

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Stuff worth pondering in an article by Nick Hanauer, “Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy.”

As economic power has shifted from workers to owners over the past 40 years, corporate profit’s take of the U.S. economy has doubled—from an average of 6 percent of GDP during America’s post-war economic heyday to more than 12 percent today. Yet despite this extra $1 trillion a year in corporate profits, job growth remains anemic, wages are flat, and our nation can no longer seem to afford even its most basic needs. A $3.6 trillion budget shortfall has left many roads, bridges, dams, and other public infrastructure in disrepair. Federal spending on economically crucial research and development has plummeted 40%, from 1.25 percent of GDP in 1977 to only 0.75 percent today. Adjusted for inflation, public university tuition—once mostly covered by the states—has more than doubled over the past 30 years, burying recent graduates under $1.2 trillion in student debt. Many public schools and our police and fire departments are dangerously underfunded.

Where did all this money go?

The answer is as simple as it is surprising: Much of it went to stock buybacks—more than $6.9 trillion of them since 2004, according to data compiled by Mustafa Erdem Sakinç of The Academic-Industry Research Network. Over the past decade, the companies that make up the S&P 500 have spent an astounding 54 percent of profits on stock buybacks. Last year alone, U.S. corporations spent about $700 billion, or roughly 4 percent of GDP, to prop up their share prices by repurchasing their own stock.

The more I learn about stuff going on, the more I think we should give up trying to live in the 1 percent’s world and just go build ourselves cottages on the prairie somewhere. We takers, we undeserving poor, should be the ones who “go Galt.”

In the past, this money flowed through the broader economy in the form of higher wages or increased investments in plants and equipment. But today, these buybacks drain trillions of dollars of windfall profits out of the real economy and into a paper-asset bubble, inflating share prices while producing nothing of tangible value.

As with many other things, the rules that used to discourage this practice were changed during the Reagan Administration, and the finance guys get more and more brazen about it all the time.

But … but … but … Free Markets (Blessed Be They)! Most of the commenters seem to think Hanauer is some airhead socialist who doesn’t understand how real he-men run an economy.

Right-Wing Politics and Vicarious Pride

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Some People can’t handle the truth. President Obama referenced the Crusades at yesterday’s prayer breakfast, and from the reaction you’d think he’d just pissed on Jesus.

What he said:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Mr. Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

These are what we call bare-assed facts. Yes, terrible things were done in the name of Christ during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Yes, lots of antebellum ministers delivered sermons supporting slavery, quoting the Bible as they did so. These are well-documented facts that ought to be taught in high school level history, and certainly anyone who has a bachelor’s degree in just about anything should have had enough History 101 to have been exposed to these facts.

But I guess not.

“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia. “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States.”

Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his show to what he said were the president’s insults to the “whole gamut of Christians” and Twitter’s right wing piled on. Guests on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show spent 15 minutes airing objections to the president’s comments.

Another article quotes Gov. Gilmore this way —

“He has offended every believing Christian in the United States,” said Mr. Gilmore, a Republican. “This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we share.”

Of this, Ed Kilgore writes,

While some of Obama’s critics may claim the Inquisition and the Crusades just weren’t all that bad (though an auto-da-fe in a capital case for, say, the refusal to eat pork, was probably about as “barbaric” as a beheading), I think Gilmore articulates the main objection: we’re in a “religious war” and the president needs to show solidarity with “our” religion. Others, of course, reject the idea of separation of church and state that Obama spoke of yesterday, typically by drawing on David Barton’s spurious histories of the Founders’ intentions.

In other words, it’s possible that knowledge of Christianity’s less glorious episodes does reside in a little-used nook in Gilmore’s head, but it’s disloyal to the Team to talk about that stuff! (See also “Mass Rage Event.”)

Ed Kilgore goes on to make some excellent points about the President’s understanding of Christianity being more traditional and, well, religious than those of his critics, but for now I want to skip to another point, which is the rightie obsession with labels. I’ve written about this in the past (see, for example, “Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?” ). Many righties, such as South Carolina Senator Miss Lindsey Graham, are demanding that the President say the words “we are in a religious war against radical Islamists.”

Even assuming we can define “radical Islamist” narrowly enough so that it doesn’t include anyone who’s ever visited a mosque or worn a headscarf, what do you mean by “religious war”? America is not supposed to do “religious wars,” I don’t think. A “religious war” by definition is “a war primarily caused or justified by differences in religion,” according to Wikipedia, and I honestly don’t think “differences in religion” are the real problem. The problem is “whackjob radicals murdering people and destabilizing the Middle East,” as I understand it. The radicals may have co-opted some twisted version of Islam to justify what they’re doing, but it’s what they’re doing, not our “differences in religion,” that is the problem.

John Amato quotes Uber-Catholic Bill Donohue as saying “We have a problem with Islam. Not just with Islamists, but a problem with Islam.” But who is “we”? I don’t have a problem with Islam. As John Amato says,

For some reason the right has focused on Obama for not constantly bashing the Muslim religion, as Bill Donohue does in this interview, but then they demand that Muslim countries join us in fighting groups like ISIS. Do they not understand the fallacy of their reasoning?

Peter Beinart (yeah, I know, it’s Peter Beinart) writes,

If there’s one thing top Republicans know, it’s that America can’t defeat terrorism unless we call it by its real name. “We are in a religious war with radical Islamists,” Lindsey Graham recently told Fox News. “When I hear the President of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.” Rudy Giuliani agrees: “If we can’t use the words radical Islamic terrorism, we can’t get rid of them. So does Ted Cruz. At the Iowa Freedom Summit in January he declared that, You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you’re unwilling to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.'”

There are several problems here. Even if one believed that calling the enemy radical Islam were a good idea, it would hardly explain how to defeat it. …In reality, denouncing radical Islam offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas.

Back to Ed Kilgore:

As Beinart suggests, the real purpose of these demands seems to be a sort of defiance of “political correctness” — a test of the president’s willingness to offer unnecessary and counter-productive offense for the sheer hell of it. Some conservatives, of course, wish to wage war on Islam in its entirety, which would require a degree of unilateralism and bottomless resources that might daunt even Dick Cheney. Others are simply intoxicated with the alleged power of “moral clarity” involved in insulting people. Any way you look at it, though, it’s an irresponsible obsession.

So they don’t really have a plan, but just think America will be naturally empowered if its head of state says the right magic words. Of course, some of this is the usual faux outrage intended to damage the President politically, even if it means messing up U.S. foreign policy. But the faux outrage wouldn’t score points if it didn’t tap into something deep and nasty and real.

Every now and then one runs into something that gets to the heart of things, and I ran into such a thing this morning. This is from an article on karma (emphasis added) —

We read the early Buddhist attacks on the caste system, and aside from their anti-racist implications, they often strike us as quaint. What we fail to realize is that they strike right at the heart of our myths about our own past: our obsession with defining who we are in terms of where we come from — our race, ethnic heritage, gender, socio-economic background, sexual preference — our modern tribes. We put inordinate amounts of energy into creating and maintaining the mythology of our tribe so that we can take vicarious pride in our tribe’s good name.

That’s at least 80 percent of most right-wing politics these days — the mythology of their tribe. It’s all about taking vicarious pride in being Christian, or American, or white, or whatever. And the other 20 percent is protecting the assets of the 1 percent.

Failure Accomplished

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Paul Waldman asks if it’s too soon to declare the current Congress a failure.

In fairness, with a Democratic president there really isn’t much that a Republican Congress can achieve unless it’s willing to compromise, which this Congress isn’t. But after six years of waiting for the moment they’d take complete control, you’d think they’d have some kind of plan. If they do, it’s hard to discern how it’s supposed to work. Every conflict they have with the president only seems to make them look worse, and they seem to be lurching from day to day with no idea how to do anything but fall on their faces.

Ironically, the Republicans had a lot more power when they were in the minority than they do now. With a Democratic Congress, the administration set out an ambitious legislative agenda, which Republicans were able to obstruct and subvert as long as they stayed unified, which they did very well. But once they took control, the administration all but gave up on legislating (apart from unavoidable tasks like passing budgets to keep the government open), which leaves Republicans with no fights to wage apart from the meaningless ones they manage to concoct on their own. And they can’t even figure out how to win those. Winning Congress has put Republicans in a position where they have little choice other than to make things worse.

The box they’ve put themselves in is that they can’t actually do anything. Even if they were capable of doing something, they can’t allow themselves to do it. The few things they might be able to do, like approve the XL pipeline, will be vetoed, and anything that wouldn’t be vetoed would probably get them in hot water with the base. Waldman continues,

They could come to an agreement with President Obama on infrastructure spending, which everyone used to agree is absolutely necessary. They could make tough but realistic demands on the budget, and pass something that Obama will be willing to sign but still manages to move government’s priorities in the direction they’d like — even if tea partiers call it a betrayal, because tea partiers will call any compromise a betrayal. If the Supreme Court rules in their favor in King v. Burwell and takes insurance subsidies from millions of people, they could be ready with a plan to help them immediately, instead of just celebrating the fact that they successfully made so many Americans’ lives worse.

All that could happen. But based on their first month with control of Congress, does anyone think it will?

The health care issue more than any other reveals how hamstrung they are. They’ve been promising their own version of health care reform since the bleeping Clinton Administration. Where is it? The one halfway workable idea they came up with ended up becoming Obamacare, which they have sworn to destroy.

Recently the GOP announced it was creating a task force, headed by Paul Ryan, to come up with an alternative plan in case the SCOTUS screws with the subsidies. CNBC reported,

The GOP has been criticized for their continued opposition to President Barack Obama’s signature health law without offering a serious alternative to the program, which is credited with significantly reducing the number of uninsured Americans last year.

But the pending Supreme Court case, due to be argued in March, has spurred what could turn out to be serious action by Republicans.

But … but … but … for years they’ve been saying they do have an alternative plan. Lots of them, actually. Here on this very blog I have written about them. For example, I wrote about a plan back in 2009 that, remarkably, is a lot like their other plans. These plans largely are designed to provide talking points so they can fake having a plan. They survive scrutiny about as long as a Popsicle in July.

They’re in the same box regarding presidential politics. They may not allow themselves to address real issues or propose workable solutions, because it will piss off the base. Michael Tomasky wrote,

I finally sat myself down and watched that Scott Walker speech from last week that everyone is raving about. If this was the standout speech, I sure made the right decision in not subjecting myself to the rest of them. It was little more than a series of red-meat appetizers and entrees: Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, said no to Obamacare, passed some kind of law against “frivolous” lawsuits, and moved to crack down on voter “fraud””—all of that besides, of course, his big move, busting the public-employee unions. There wasn’t a single concrete idea about addressing any of the major problems the country faces.

There’s lots of noise that Walker is the front runner this week.

He’s gained because those items— kicking Planned Parenthood, denying your own citizens subsidized health-care coverage, pretending that voter fraud is a thing—are what pass for ideas in today’s GOP. Walker is even more vacuous on foreign policy, as Martha Raddatz revealed yesterday, twisting him around like a pretzel with a couple of mildly tough questions on Syria. The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary. Rick Santorum is, in fairness, but a) his solutions are the same ones conservatives have been advertising for years (lower taxes, less regulation, more two-parent families) and b) he’s not going anywhere in the polls so far, undoubtedly precisely because he’s trying to drop the homosexuality-is-bestiality shtick and talk about actual economic problems.

This vacuity works for them sometimes, especially when they can blame screwups on Democrats and OH LOOK MUSLIMS SHAIRA LAW MOSQUES BOOGA BOOGA. So, one can argue, they don’t need to accomplish anything; they just have to persuade enough voters that Democrats will take away their guns / give them cooties / hate Jesus. So we’ll see.