Tuesday Open Thread [9.22.2015]

Scott Walker is out, and he has encouraged others to join him so that the Establishment can settle on one candidate to defeat the outside trio of Trump, Fiorina and Carson. But who will that one candidate be? Brian Beutler at the New Republic says the Republican Hunger Games have only just begun.

In addition to the fact that they have no obvious candidate to consolidate behind, the fractured field is leaving each favored contender vulnerable to other dark horses who are happy to maul and obstruct them.

As I wrote in advance of the debate, the biggest immediate threat to the GOP is a collective-action problem that enticed at least four establishment-favored candidates into the race, without a mechanism or incentive to drive any of them back out. As a result, all of them are languishing with the support of less than 10 percent of the Republican electorate. This leaves nobody with any real party backing to stand as an equal, or near equal to Donald Trump, and allows candidates who should be insurgents and also-rans, like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, to compete as peers with just as much popular backing. […]
The only candidate who managed to mix it up with others, including Trump, and not end up debased by the confrontation, was Carly Fiorina—another outsider who, like Trump, and Ben Carson, has never held elected office.

For candidates like her, and Cruz, and others outside the immediate good graces of the establishment, the hidden value of Trump’s persistence is that he’s making Republican elites desperate for anyone else to supersede him. The hope was that, eventually, it would be Bush. Or Rubio. Or Walker. Or Kasich.

After [last week’s] debate it’s no clearer that any of them will ever get a chance.

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—NBC News/Survey Monkey: Trump 29, Carson 14, Fiorina 11, Bush 8, Cruz 7, Rubio 7, Christie 3, Paul 3, Walker 3, Huckabee 2, Kasich 2, Pataki 1, Santorum 0, Gilmore 0, Jindal 0, Graham 0.

Janelle Ross says Donald Trump has reaped what he has sown:

“When a businessman-turned-entertainer finances an extended effort to prove that the president of the United States is not an American-born, U.S. citizen and is therefore constitutionally ineligible for his job — and when those claims are regurgitated uncritically and to the contradiction of all documentary evidence by television networks, blogs and professional bloviators — that question asked at Trump’s New Hampshire rally is precisely what you can expect to get.”

“The misinformation campaign around Obama, his place of birth, his citizenship, his loyalties, his faith and the crimes and threats to national security that Obama is supposedly unwilling to tamp out — it all began years ago. Donald Trump has been one of its leading voices, and no part of that question at his New Hampshire event — heard or unheard — should have come as a true surprise. And despite it all, we engage in another meaningless exercise in mass outrage — that will likely lead to another bump in the polls for Trump.”

Politico says the odds of a government shutdown spike. I say it is near certain.

“A short-term CR will be very difficult for any number of reasons, but the controversy over Planned Parenthood is perhaps the biggest one. The dispute over continued funding for the organization has added a hyperemotional element to what already is a hyperpartisan and dysfunctional budget process. Some Republicans have vowed never to vote for any legislation — including a CR — that maintains this funding, while the White House has promised to veto any bill that ends it. With Congress not likely to have the votes to override a veto, this issue alone could easily bring government operations to a halt on Oct. 1.”

“As if that wasn’t enough, the inability of congressional Republicans in recent days to stop the Obama-negotiated Iran deal from going into effect has increased their already high frustration with the White House. Some GOP representatives and senators are now considering using the CR to stop the agreement by including language preventing the State Department from spending money to implement the deal. That, too, likely would result in a presidential veto that would not be overridden.”

The Hill on the Pope becoming a political football. Becoming? He, no matter who, was always one.

“Republicans want to use Pope Francis’s visit to Congress this week — the first-ever by a pontiff — to highlight their opposition to abortion rights. Democrats, meanwhile, hope the pope will lend new momentum to their efforts to address climate change, reform immigration law and win public approval for a nuclear deal with Iran.”

“Papal experts say Francis’s address to a joint session of Congress Thursday is unlikely to fit wholesale into either party’s agenda, though they expect it to be more of a headache for Republicans.”

Matt Bai is hearing that Jeb Bush ignored his money master’s debate instructions, and thus they are about to bail on him:

If you were in Washington watching the Republican debate last night, you might have felt a small tilt in the floor, or heard the plates rattling gently in their cupboards. That was the sound of the Republican establishment shifting its collective weight away from Jeb Bush — and inching a little bit closer to their best available alternative. […]

Going into last night’s debate, longtime Republicans with whom I talked seemed to want two things from Bush. They wanted him to pivot away from his record in Florida — which no one much cares about, judging from the early success of candidates who have no record at all — and toward his vision for how he would actually govern.

And they wanted him to seize control of the debate by engaging Trump on policy. Enough about how Trump secretly loved Hillary Clinton or how he once gave money to Democrats; it was time to expose him as an entertainer who couldn’t hold his own when it came to foreign or domestic policy.

You can argue about whether these were the right strategies. But you can’t make the case that Bush did much of anything last night to reassure his critics on either count. Bush and Trump went at it several times in the opening minutes of the debate, but Jeb went right back to his litany of Florida statistics, almost pleading with Trump at one point: “I have a proven record. I have a proven record.”

Inexplicably, he didn’t mention his own tax plan. Nor did he confront Trump on any policy details. Instead he complained, feebly, about Trump cutting him off. “You’ve got more energy tonight. I like that,” Trump mockingly told Bush at one point.

Where do they go? A Kasich-Rubio ticket. And I agree that is the best chance for the Establishment to win this fight. But, like Ed Kilgore, I don’t think the Establishment is going to win this fight:

Sorry, I’m not buying into the Kasich Moment just yet, despite all that “Midwestern sobriety and a comfort with himself,” whatever the hell that means. Maybe I’m just having trouble believing that the Year of the Republican Outsider with all this insane rage at GOP officeholders is going to produce as a nominee a guy who’s been in elected office since the Carter Administration, with an eight-year hiatus where he worked for Lehman Brothers. There’s also the little problem that Kasich fought successfully with his own party in Ohio to impose the slavery of an Obamacare Medicaid Expansion, and continues to justify it by saying it’s God’s Will, which strikes most conservative evangelicals as not just heretical but blasphemous.

As I have said since Day 1, your 2016 GOP Nominee will be Ted Cruz.

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s candidacy exposed a burning, and heretofore mostly concealed, resentment of immigrants among large segments of the Republican base. As the campaign has proceeded, it has exposed a second related resentment, which Republicans have only barely concealed: paranoia and hate against Muslim-Americans.”

First Read: “If you wanted another example of how Donald Trump — who helped lead the “birther” movement against President Obama during his first term in office — has negatively impacted the Republican presidential race, look no further than the last 72 hours… This is what happens when a party welcomes with open arms someone who continues to espouse ‘birther’ views — and when that someone leads the party’s presidential nominating race. Would we be discussing President Obama’s religion (again) and whether a person of Muslim faith can/should be president without Trump? Doubtful.”

“Pope Francis will arrive at a military base outside the capital on Tuesday afternoon to open his first visit to the United States, and President Obama will be there to welcome him. It is a gesture the president has extended to virtually no other foreign visitor,” the New York Times reports.

“And little wonder. For Mr. Obama, there may be no more potent ally in the world in his quest to bend the arc of history, to use a favorite phrase, than a pope who helped him restore diplomatic relations with Cuba and who has spoken out on issues like economic inequality, immigration, climate change and criminal justice reform.”

Halfway into the above video, Real Time’s Bill Maher made a mockery of Republicans and their predictions of doom and gloom during his New Rules segment this Friday. After slamming Meet the Press for having the likes of Dick Cheney on, Maher ran through a list of their “greatest” hits and claims that the world was going to come to an end if the Kenyan usurper remained in office.

Ed Kilgore thinks this will be a very perilous week for Republicans.

There’s really only one way to say it: the week of September 21, 2015 could be unpleasant for a Republican Party struggling to find its way in the runup to a big, high-stakes election. […]
Over the weekend Trump batted away criticism over his silence in the face of a supporter who loudly insisted in the candidate’s presence that the president is a Muslim born outside the United States (an assertion an alarming percentage of Republicans believe against all evidence). Trump says it’s not his job to defend the hated Obama. Carson is in the spotlight for insisting against the rather explicit language of the U.S. Constitution that there should in fact be a “religious test” for the presidency, barring Muslims. Meanwhile, Fiorina is being besieged by the facts she ignored in her debate presentation—especially with respect to the Planned Parenthood videos she discussed to the delight of Christian Right voters—and by the long-overdue MSM scrutiny of her arguably catastrophic record as CEO of HP, her primary credential for high office (see Jeffrey Sonnenberg’s refutation of her debate remarks about him and her HP tenure).

But even as the three zero-experience front-runners lose friends and alienate people, it’s not like the rest of the field is moving on up. One early favorite, Scott Walker, is by all accounts in desperate condition, and having decided to drop everything else to go try to shore up his horrendous standing in Iowa, made a poor impression on his first post-CNN-debate public appearance there.

Off the campaign trail, congressional Republicans are snarled in separate yet equally dangerous internal disputes over the extent to which they will court a government shutdown to express unhappiness with the Iran Nuclear Deal—which they strangely consider a big political winner for themselves—and to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Budget wizard Stan Collender has now raised his estimate of the odds of a government shutdown to 75%. It’s a particularly bad sign that Republicans are already resorting to the tired and notably ineffective tactic ofarguing that it’s Obama who would be shutting down the government by rejecting GOP demands.

If that’s not enough for you, keep in mind the Pope is coming to town this week, and whatever comfort conservatives take from his inevitable condemnation of legalized abortion, he is certain to bring a message on climate change and corporate greed that will make conservative Catholics go a little crazy.