Puppet masters or better known as "suicide caucus handlers".

The Ten Hardline Conservatives Pulling the Strings of the GOP Shutdown

 

by BillMoyers.com Staff

Much of the coverage of the government showdown has focused on a relatively small group of hardline conservatives within the Republican caucus who have backed their party’s leaders into a fight they didn’t want.

As Ryan Lizza noted in The New Yorker, these lawmakers mostly represent very safe, heavily Republican and disproportionately white districts that don’t look much like the rest of the country. Many of those on the front lines are recent arrivals to Capitol Hill, and they’re pushing a leadership they see as having been too willing to compromise with Democrats in the past.

It’s an important angle. Yet it also obscures what should be an obvious question: Since when do freshmen senators or one- or two-term reps push their congressional leadership around? Historically, it’s been the reverse. And since when does a newcomer to the Senate such as Ted Cruz (R-TX) have the right to tell House Republicans what to do? If there’s only a relatively small group of lawmakers who think defunding the law is a dandy idea, why has every budget resolution with such a provision won more than 200 Republican votes in the House of Representatives during the showdown? Why is this supposedly silent majority of Republicans so docile? Why don’t they push back?

The answer lies in the clout wielded by an extensive web of non-governmental conservative groups supported by mountains of dark money. Those groups see the Affordable Care Act as an existential threat to their worldview and their party and have waged a multipronged campaign to kill it in its cradle. Theirs is the ultimate inside/ outside strategy: They fund primary challenges from the right by upstart candidates against incumbents they view as insufficiently pure. When those true believers get into office, these groups promote them relentlessly to the party’s activist base – filling their re-election coffers with donations by portraying them as courageous mavericks fighting against ossified “RINOS” (Republicans in Name Only). They mount “public education” campaigns and buy ad blitzes, and they coordinate messaging among friendly voices within the conservative media.

According to a report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire in The New York Times, a coalition of these groups has been plotting a budget crisis to shut down Obamacare for months.

Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.

With a broad, well-funded campaign, these groups have effectively shifted the balance of power in conservative Washington away from Republican leaders on the Hill and onto a cadre of true believers who will go to any length to destroy a modest set of health care reforms that, just 20 years ago, the very same conservative movement was itself advancing.

So just looking at the rank-and-file members of the “suicide caucus” isn’t enough – it’s like focusing on the marionette rather than the puppet-master.

 
The masters...

Jim DeMint may be the most powerful person in the conservative movement today. He was one of the most conservative senators when he was elected to represent South Carolina in 2005, bucking his party to vote against such initiatives as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In 2009, DeMint formed the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), a political action committee backing not only successful candidates, including Pat Toomey (R-PA), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), but also extremists who blew winnable races for the GOP, among them, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Todd Akin in Missouri.

The SCF is currently headed by Matt Hoskins, a former DeMint staffer. SCF has led the fight against Republicans who oppose the effort to defund Obamacare, winning a ton of donations in the process. But it also faces a backlash. According to Politico, “That fundraising windfall has left the impression among the group’s legion of critics in the Republican establishment that the anti-GOP campaign has been more about boosting the group’s notoriety among the conservative base – rather than the common cause of electing more Republicans to the Senate.”

In 2010, DeMint was re-elected to his Senate seat, but in January 2013 resigned to head the Heritage Foundation.

 

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The Koch Brothers claim they are “neutral” about shutting down the government in an effort to defund Obamacare. This week, Koch Industries' chief lobbyist Philip Ellender sent a letter to the Senate distancing the company from the shutdown, and insisting that the Kochs wanted to focus on slashing spending rather than Obamacare.

But, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire noted in arecent New York Times article, the two “have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”

“A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.”

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Before James O’Keefe – the right-wing videographer who brought down ACORN with selectively edited videos – there was David Bossie. His most famous film is Hillary: The Movie, which the Federal Election Commission barred Bossie from advertising and airing on pay-per-view TV. That action led to the game-changing decision in Citizens United v. FEC barring the restriction of political spending by corporations, associations or labor unions.

A veteran GOP operative, Bossie was a foot soldier in the “Clinton Wars” during the 1990s, when he served as an investigator for former Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), who chaired the House Oversight Committee.

According to The Washington Post, he was fired for releasing deceptively edited recordings that appeared to implicate the Clintons in wrongdoing related to the Whitewater affair. In 2006, Max Blumenthal wrote in The Nation that Bossie considered himself an “accidental filmmaker.”

The group is one of a handful of conservative organizations that signed a letter in February demanding that Republicans use budget battles to defund Obamacare “before it’s too late.”