Year: 2013
Budget Showdowns Have Not Changed the Size of Government
$3.455 trillion
Amount the federal government will spend in 2013, following 2.5 years of budget battles. According to the Washington Post: “That figure is down from 2010 — the year that worries about government spending helped bring on a tea party uprising, a Republican takeover in the House and then a series of ulcer-causing showdowns in Congress. But it is not down by that much. Back then, the government spent a whopping $3.457 trillion.”
GOP Sees Obama Impeachment as Increasingly Unlikely
We’re stuck with him.
— Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), quoted by the Salt Lake Tribune, telling constituents it was not going to be possible to impeach President Obama.
Jindal Soft-Peddles Impeachment
Let’s not talk about impeachment. Let’s actually talk about the policies we disagree with.
— Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Dean Hopes Cruz Remains Just a ‘Senator for Texas’
He’s a slick spokesman and god help us if he gets to be anything more than the senator from Texas.
— Howard Dean, quoted by CNN, on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Younger Republicans Want More Party Diversity
68%
Of Republicans and leaners under 40 say nominating more racial and ethnic minorities would help, and 64% say the same about more female nominees. Of Republicans 40 and older, 49% say nominating more racial and ethnic minorities would help and 46% say the same of nominating more women, a new Pew Research survey of Republicans finds.
Ted Cruz, Racist Comedian
I am secretly a citizen of Ethiopia.
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), quoted by the Houston Chronicle, poking fun at the flap over his citizenship issues.
A Blue Tide Terrified North Carolina Republicans into Launching Their War on Voting
Rachel Maddow covered the North Carolina Republican Party’s war on voting live from Elizabeth City, N.C., last night. She led off by explaining what it was that so terrified the state GOP that became desperate to kill the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of their own constituents. The source of their terror can be summed up in the two charts above. The chart on the left shows the demographics of the most motivated voters in 2008: students and African Americans. The chart on the right shows how efforts by the formerly Democratic-controlled North Carolina government to make voting easier helped improve the state’s turnout record from one of the worst in the nation, in 1991, to one of the best in 2012.
North Carolina Republicans realized that their days were numbered if these trends were allowed to continue. But instead of coming up with policies that might be more popular or candidates with better appeal, they chose instead to change the rules for voting in ways that specifically targeted students and African-Americans, among others.
Watch the entire segment from last night’s Rachel Maddow show below:
As California Republicans Go, So Goes the National GOP?
To any objective observer, the national Republican Party appears to be bent on suicide — a colony of angry white male lemmings headed straight for the cliff. Every decision the party’s leadership makes, every strategy they pursue, seems to be motivated by a singular, urgent need to stoke their voters’ basest fears and inner rage.
In the minds of much of the population of this minority-majority state, the GOP is the party of white people who don’t like non-white people, a branding that — fair or not — repulses most minority voters and no small number of white voters as well.
But while the GOP base may take glee with the party’s wars on women, African-Americans, Latinos, students, the poor, immigrants, seniors and science, normal Americans, including the independent swingsters who decide elections, are increasingly unnerved by it. Driven by their base, the national GOP is ignoring the swingsters’ concerns and doubling down on efforts to appeal exclusively to teavangelical Fox watchers and Dittoheads.
As Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community noted this week, this is a familiar scenario for Californian Democrats and independents, who have watched with muted astonishment over the post 20 years as the nation’s largest state Republican Party obstinately pursued a similar doubling-down on its angry white base — a strategy that has left the state party fiscally and ideologically bankrupt and shriveled to its lowest voter registration in over a century:
Sen. Tom Coburn Says Pres. Obama Is ‘Perilously Close’ To Being Impeached
They can’t say yet what high crimes and misdemeanors the president has committed, but they are sure that if Chairman Issa will just keep looking, he’ll find something. The other obstacle is that they need to both keep the House and take the Senate next year, a prospect that appears likely.
Impeachment has come up in a few Republican congressional town halls during the summer recess. Texas Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz is on board, of course, as are a couple of hard-core nobodies in the House. The new wrinkle is that now Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn — who the DC punditocracy insists is a reasonable fellow — jumped on the bandwagon. He told a room full of constituents that Pres. Obama is “getting perilously close” to having committed an impeachable offense:
