Behind the Ad: Special House election in the Alabama 1st congressional district

By Richard K. Barry

Who: Former state Sen. Bradley Byrne

Where: Alabama 1st congressional district

What's going on: The Hill reports that Byrne will be going up with his first television ad, highlighting his "work as a public servant to clean up the state’s community college system." They say that the $47,000 positive spot will "air on broadcast for the week beginning Sept. 3, and on cable beginning Friday through Sept. 9."

You may or may not recall that Rep. Jo Bonner resigned this House seat on Aug. 2 to become vice-chancellor of the University of Alabama. Primary elections are on September 24. If no runoffs are required, the general election will be on November 5. If runoffs are needed, they will be on November 5, with the general election taking place on December 17.

While Byrne is leading in this very Republican district, The Southern Political Report offers this analysis:

The betting is that Byrne will not get a majority in the September 24 primary. Whoever comes in second is likely to run to Byrne’s right, setting up a contest between an establishment conservative and a more ideological, hard-right conservative. Notes Birmingham Southern political science Professor Natalie Davis, if his runoff foe “is a Tea Party type, it would make Bradley Byrne vulnerable. Absent that, he will probably win.” Former state GOP Chairman Marty Connors points out that “Bradley won a plurality in that district, but only a plurality.”

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People will notice if the Republicans get any crazier

By Frank Moraes 

The other day, Jonathan Chait wrote a provocative post, "Are House Republicans Voter-Proof?" In it, he argued that the Republicans likely have nothing to worry about in going full-tilt Michele Bachmann. After all, most people don't even know which party is in control of the House of Representatives. Why would they blame the Republicans?

Under normal circumstances, I agree with Chait. If the Republicans keep doing what they have been doing killing the economy inch by inch, the electorate will not notice. As I wrote last week, I fully expect the Republicans to pick up some seats in the House and also likely take control of the Senate. But I do wish people would stop talking about the Sixth-Year Curse. This is the belief of political observers that the president's party loses big the sixth year of his presidency. Sean Trende has debunked this idea. What actually happens is that the president's party loses big in one of the midterm elections. That already happened to Obama in 2010. Although it is likely that 2014 won't be a good year for the Democrats, they are already doing about as badly as they can. There aren't many seats (in the House at least) that they can gain.

Chait mentions five factors that work in the Republicans' favor. The first is the silly Sixth-Year Curse. The second is that Democrats tend to do badly in midterm elections. That's true, but that's already figured into the calculation. The third is that there aren't many swing voters anymore. I'm not sure how this gives the Republicans an advantage when most of those swing voters are just Democrats now. The fourth is the observation that Democratic voters are concentrated and thus their votes don't count as much. That's true in the Senate races, but not in the House. So I don't get his point given that the big issue is the House. And the fifth is that the 2010 redistricting favors the Republicans. That's true, but again, already figured into the calculation.

All he is saying is that the Republicans can continue to misbehave and get nothing done without a voter backlash. And that's true! But no one is suggesting that the Republicans are idiots. They respond to incentives and they see that in 2014 they are not going to harmed if they vote yet again to defund Obamacare. What people like me have been talking about is the longer term. Over the next six to eight years, if the Republicans don't start to change, they will be overwhelmed by the demographic change. And no amount of redistricting and voter suppression is going to save them.

But this isn't even about the long term. If the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling or if they simply shutdown the government, people will notice. The TV news will be all about this. Even Fox News will have a hard time blaming it on the Democrats. And people won't have to know who their legislators are or who controls the House of Representatives. They will just freak out about the crazy party that hates the government.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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There's no Tea Party rift

By Frank Moraes 

Ed Kilgore reflected yesterday on the fact that the only real ideological divide in the Republican Party is over national security. That is true, although even Rand Paul has shown himself to be nothing is not malleable when it comes to ideology. But it is true that a large bipartisan minority voted for an amendment to the half-trillion-dollar defense authorization to restrict the NSA's ability to collect telephone metadata on U.S. calls. The final vote was 205-217, so it only barely lost.

Kilgore speculated that there would have been more Democratic votes for the amendment if a Republican had been in the White House. Of course that's true. Even still, I'm pretty happy with the party; they voted in favor of the amendment 111-83 -- that's 57% of the caucus on a bill where the leadership and the White House were very vocal about how it would mean the end of free society and would effectively mean the terrorists won.

On the Republican side, Kilgore is less certain about how the White House control affected the vote. As it was, while Republicans voted for the amendment in large numbers, they did not have a majority. The vote was 94-134 -- that's just 41%. I suspect that had a Republican been in the White House, that number would have gone down to perhaps 30%.

The main question is why some Republicans care about privacy issues while others do not. Kilgore noted, "I certainly haven't figured out any consistent principle... that makes it possible to predict which fire-eating Tea Party conservative these days is frothing for an immediate war with Iran and perhaps domestic profiling of Muslims, and which is worried about excessive overseas commitments or domestic surveillance." For example, Michele Bachmann and Steve King both voted against the amendment.

I think what explains this is the same thing I've been arguing for years: the Tea Party is no kind of small-government libertarian movement. It has always been just a branding campaign for the Republican base. But because all of their supposed worship of the founding fathers, "Tea Party" is a moniker that appeals to libertarian minded politicians. But these people don't get elected because of their isolationist leanings; they get elected because they are against abortion rights and are no-tax ideologues.

So that is what defines the Tea Party. Beyond that, we can generally say that they are supporters of big military and big surveillance. Some of them (a distinct minority) do have libertarian leanings. But that's not what the Tea Party movement is all about because that's not what the Republican Party is all about. And so it shouldn't come as a surprise that there might be small disagreements inside, because they are distinctly not what the movement is about. 

Afterword 

Note that libertarian-minded people would be crazy to vote for libertarian-"sounding" members of the Republican Party. If you care about actual libertarian policy, all you will get from such people is lip service to ideals and votes that push the country further toward a big military feudalism. Sad as it may be, the Democratic Party is far more inclined toward libertarian policy than the Republicans.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Republican scare tactics

By Mustang Bobby 

The House Republicans are planning to scare the crap out of Americans about Obamacare:

The August House Republican Conference planning kit, titled "Fighting Washington for All Americans," offers a rare glimpse into the constituent outreach efforts of the GOP. Those efforts, it turns out, are highly calculated, hashtag-heavy and rife with references to the video app Vine.

The best way to stay in Washington appears to be to deride Washington, and Republican leadership isn't going to deviate from that familiar formula.

That would be a really cool plan were it not for the inconvenient fact that the Republicans are the majority party in the House and they're the ones who are doing things like trying to repeal Obamacare every time John Boehner farts. 

Steve Benen: but wait, there's more:

Among the other tidbits:

* The House Republican Conference is apparently preoccupied with Vine, a social-media tool that allows users to create and easily share six-second videos. Good luck, House GOP, on solving your problems six seconds at a time.

* Members are being encouraged to publish op-eds in local media on the IRS "scandal." That there is no IRS "scandal," and all of the allegations Republicans raised have been discredited, has apparently been deemed irrelevant.

* According to the Roll Call piece, the Conference "suggests planting questions" at local events "to get the conversation rolling in the right direction."

* And House Republicans are encouraged to go on an "Energy Production Facility Tour" during the recess. Members, of course, have been told to "wear a hard hat" and — you guessed it — put this and other events on Vine.

What could possibly go wrong?

It sounds like the GOP realizes that Obamacare is really going to work and that scares the crap out of them.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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The farm bill and Big Government Conservatism

By Frank Moraes 

A lot of people wonder what a liberal like Dean Baker means when he writes a book like The End of Loser Liberalism. He means a lot, of course, and you should read it because that link provides the book in various electronic formats that are free. But mostly what he means is that the whole paradigm that we have of liberals being for big government and conservatives being for small government is just dead wrong. I write about this a lot myself, but I'm not sure that I didn't originally get the idea from him. The fact is that conservatives are just for a different kind of big government. Most of the time, it is even bigger than the government liberals want. What's more, it is infinitely more pernicious. My favorite example is that liberals want to spend money on libraries. No one ever lost their liberty because of public libraries. Yes, I know: conservatives think that taxation is theft, but that doesn't stop them from taxing for whatever it is they want. And the things they want to tax for really are associated with the loss of liberty: armies, spying, vaginal probes.

Yesterday, we had as clear an example of this divide as we will ever have. The farm bill is normally a very popular thing. Rural representatives like it because it gives money and price supports to farmers; urban representatives like it because it gives food (mostly in the form of food stamps or SNAP) to poor people. But when the House tried to pass a farm bill last month, it failed. Democrats didn't like it because it made savage cuts to SNAP. The most conservative Republicans didn't like it because it didn't cut SNAP enough. So in order to get a farm bill passed, the House Republicans split the farm bill in half: part for farms and part for SNAP. And they passed the "farm only" bill and said they would get to the "SNAP only" bill later.

Note what's going on. The Republicans have no trouble with spending taxpayer money. They just don't want it to go to the poor. It is just fine if it goes to farmers. This is interesting, because as economist Vincent H. Smith has shown farmers are richer than Americans on average, and getting more so. And in the past, this is what people hated about the farm bill. It wasn't that poor families were getting nutritional support or that kids were getting hot lunches at school. Now the Republican Party is saying very clearly that all that really matters is that tax dollars go to people they see as authentic rather than those who might actually need it.

There is another part of it. The farm bill sets price floors on goods. That is a big way that it helps farmers. This means that everyone has to pay more for food than they would in a free market. Those hit worst by these price floors are the poor. Thus, SNAP is a logical way to offset that unfair burden (although it does far more than that). As you can see from this, it has nothing to do with conservatives being in favor of free markets. Not only are conservatives giving direct payments middle class and much more wealthy farmers, they are providing a huge distortion to the market with price supports.

The real question is why even liberals continue to believe that they are for big government and conservatives are not. I think this stems largely from conservative mythology. They so believe that liberalism is a form of socialism and conservatism is a form of libertarianism, that they have themselves convinced that they really are for small government. History tells a different story with the two coming out of exactly the same traditions. And thus, it isn't surprising that they act much the same. And there is also the question of how politics works. People get political power by providing their constituencies things they want. There is no consistency that wants the government to disappear. But there are constituencies that believe the only correct function for government is to give stuff to them alone. And that's how we get today's logic: farmer gooood! Poor people baaad! 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Immigration reform still unlikely

By Frank Moraes 

(Ed. note: Well, good for the Senate, or at least for the Democratic majority along with a handful of Republicans. But now it goes to the House, where crazy-ass Republican extremism prevails, where the Republican leadership is divided, with Speaker Boehner barely clinging to power, and where it will likely die. Maybe there's enough establishment Republican support to give Boehner cover, and so maybe the bill can pass with Democratic votes and a few Republicans on board, but it's awfully hard to move anything forward when the majority party is insane, so much so that it won't even support a flawed, Republican-oriented bill that Ronald Reagan would have backed and that includes a pile of throw-ins for conservatives. -- MJWS)

I'm sure you've heard that the Senate managed to pass their little immigration reform bill with a vote of 68-32. Let's think about that for a second. That means that 32 of the 46 Republican senators voted against the bill: 70%. This is what passes for a huge bipartisan compromise. And notice: the bill itself is extremely conservative. Bernie Sanders voted for it, but with a great many misgivings. Yet despite giving in on all kinds of issues, the Democrats only managed to get 14 Republicans to vote for it. And these were senators: the more moderate of the congressional Republicans.

Now it moves to the House where many of our liberal friends in the pundit world are cautiously optimistic. Somehow, they think that winning 30% Republican support in the Senate will put pressure on the House to pass the bill. Maybe! Stranger things have happened. But Dylan Matthews wrote an article this afternoon that made me think it is highly unlikely, "Immigration Reform Has Passed the Senate. Here's How it Passes the House." In the article, he provided three ways that the immigration reform might make its way through the House.

The first way is that the House "Gang of Seven" bill might be able to get majority Republican support. But it contains a path to citizenship, so that isn't going to happen. The second way is for one or more of Bob Goodlatte's proposals -- none of which include a path to citizenship -- might be able to pass. Then that bill could go to conference with the Senate. If the resulting bill had a path to citizenship (which is hardly certain), it would only allow the Republicans to vote for a path to citizenship once. This is downright funny. Does Matthews really think that representatives are going to be able to sneak one vote past their constituencies? They would be primaried as much for one vote (especially the one that caused the bill to become law) as they are for a dozen votes. The third way is for the House to get a discharge petition and force a vote. The problem here is that they've tried to get discharge petitions before and have failed. There would be hell to pay by Republicans who signed it.

For the umpteenth time: nobody, including me, knows what is going to happen. But this just doesn't look good for the immigration bill. I'm not wedded to it either way. I think it would be good to provide a path to citizenship for all of these people. It is the right thing to do. But the bill has a lot of baggage and the path to citizenship is ridiculously long and punitive.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Special election in Alabama's 1st Congressional District

By Richard K. Barry

Earlier in May, Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala) announced that he would resign from Congress to take a job at the University of Alabama. A date has not been set for the special election to replace him, but this is a very reliable red state, so Democrats shouldn't get excited. 

Word now is that Rick Santorum will endorse conservative columnist Quin Hillyer. As a safe Republican seat, this will draw a lot of competition in the primary so I suppose Santorum could help his candidate stand out. 

Roll Call: 

Aside from Hillyer, consultants say the most likely and viable candidates in the race include:

-- State Sen. Tripp Pittman, a wealthy owner of a tractor company in Baldwin County, a rural area in the 1st District.

-- First-term state Sen. Bill Hightower. 

-- Former state Sen. Bradley Byrne, a lawyer who lost a Republican gubernatorial primary bid in 2010. 

-- Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran, who consultants say is well-respected in the community and has strong name recognition.

If you want to know how red a district it is, Romney beat Obama by a margin of 62 to 37 percent last November. 

Will this one get national attention like the South Carolina 1st? Uh, no. 

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

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Behind the Ad: Dreaming of a House without Michele Bachmann

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.) 

Who: House Majority PAC.

Where: Minnesota.

What's going on: The House Majority PAC is working to help Democrats retake a majority in the House. In a new video, they say that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is "running scared" a day after a new poll shows her slightly behind her Democratic challenger.

The Hill:

The video features news clips outlining a number of investigations into Bachmann's presidential run, including an FBI probe into alleged financial misconduct involving top aides to Bachmann's campaign.

Knocking off an incumbent is never easy but Jim Graves lost by just 4,300 votes in 2012 and he's back for another try in 2014. And he'll have a lot of help from House Majority PAC and other groups just like them.

Defeating crazy Michele would be so sweet for Democrats and they might just be able to do it this time.

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

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