Saturday 20 February 2016
Why Is Mitch McConnell Picking This Fight?
This is also the best way to understand Mr. McConnell’s staunch opposition to the president: It is less about blocking liberal policy goals than about boosting Republican chances. Mr. McConnell intuited, shrewdly, that if he could bottle things up in Washington with the filibuster and other tactics, the blame for the gridlock would fall mostly to the Democrats — the party in the White House. Not to mention that Mr. Obama had campaigned on the promise of transcending Washington’s divides, which made partisan dysfunction look like a personal failure.
There was an obvious cost to this approach. Withholding any support for President Obama’s agenda meant giving up the chance for more policy concessions on big issues like health care and financial reform. But for Mr. McConnell, shaping policy wasn’t the goal. Winning was. When he said, notoriously, just before the 2010 election that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” it was less an expression of personal animosity than it was a simple reflection of the permanent campaign ethos.
Another cost to this approach became apparent only later. Withholding any votes from Obama’s big proposals meant, by definition, that the Democrats ended up forcing them through on party line votes, which further inflamed the grass-roots conservative backlash to the president. This backlash helped Republicans win in 2010 and 2014, but it also left Mr. McConnell with an empowered right wing, led by the likes of Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, that was deeply wary of this onetime moderate with weak ideological moorings. Sometimes, Mr. McConnell could use this right wing to his benefit — warning the White House, for instance, that it had better accede to Republican demands on the debt ceiling in 2011 lest the renegades take the country to default.
More often, though, these self-described revolutionaries confounded him, which led to explosions of frustration like the one that a longtime associate witnessed in 2011: “He said, ‘Those idiots, those people come up here and have never been in office and know nothing about being in office.’ ”
Such outbursts were kept under wraps, of course. Mr. McConnell needed to appease enough of the chaos makers in order to stay atop the Republican caucus, and to overcome a Tea Party Republican challenger leading up to his 2014 re-election.
He managed to do so, and finally attained his goal of becoming majority leader. He made initial overtures to Mr. Obama about finding common ground in areas like trade policy. But soon enough, the focus turned back toward the next election, 2016. Republicans now have seven Senate seats to defend in states that the president carried in 2012.
Justice Scalia’s death has greatly complicated Mr. McConnell’s election-year plans. Remarkably, he has, for once, chosen a path that would seem to reduce his party’s odds in November.
Unlike 2009 and 2010, when his opposition took the form of procedural delays, Mr. McConnell is taking a high-profile stand. Had he instead allowed the nomination process to proceed and bog down in more gridlock, the outrage quotient among Democrats would have remained lower and his prospects for retaining the majority higher.
The likeliest explanation is that the insurgency that Mr. McConnell helped engender has gotten so strong, embodied in the rise of Donald J. Trump and Ted Cruz, that it has caused him to lose his bearings. He felt compelled to get out in front of the base’s ire over the Scalia replacement to avoid a later challenge to his leadership perch.
It is also possible, though, that in the Supreme Court’s balance, in particular in relation to campaign finance law, Mr. McConnell has at long last discovered one matter that is so consequential that it is worth risking an election over.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
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