Tag: Republican Ideas

The Real Reason Republicans Don’t Want Immigration Reform

Buck Banks

60%

Of House GOP members (143 of 232) represent congressional districts where Latinos make up less than 10% of the population, and that’s the reason they are balking at reform — not because they don’t trust President Obama on immigration reform, NBC News says. “In addition, Republicans don’t really face serious Democratic opposition in 80% of the districts (71 of 89) with more than 10% of Latinos, meaning their biggest threat to re-election comes from an intra-party primary. As a result, more than nine in 10 of House Republicans will be nearly unfazed by any possible pro-immigration-reform backlash heading into the November election.”

Congressional Republicans Have Devolved Into Anarchists

Buck Banks

The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses–partisanship, obstruction, gridlock–don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

Radical Republicans Thwart Revitalization of the Party

Buck Banks

In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today. … The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.

— Pollster Andrew Kohut, writing in the Washington Post.

Intellectually, Republicans Are Stuck in the 1980s

Buck Banks

Today’s Republicans are very good at tending the fire of Ronald Reagan’s memory but not nearly as good at learning from his successes. They slavishly adhere to the economic program that Reagan developed to meet the challenges of the late 1970s and early 1980s, ignoring the fact that he largely overcame those challenges, and now we have new ones. It’s because Republicans have not moved on from that time that Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, in their responses to the State of the Union address last week, offered so few new ideas.

— Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in the New York Times.