Who's Behind the Secretive Group Bashing Elizabeth Warren's Favorite Agency?
Anonymous donors "hired" a PR firm to launch the US Consumer Coalition, its founder admits.
By Patrick Caldwell
Based off its name alone, the US Consumer Coalition—which bills itself as a "grassroots organization" that exists to "build bridges, ensure public awareness and mobilize the powerful voices of consumers and business owners to protect our freedom of choice"—sounds like the sort of outfit you'd expect to find sticking up for the little guy.
Yet last month, Brian Wise, one of the group's founders, penned an op-ed in the Hill attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer protection agency that came into existence in 2011 thanks to Elizabeth Warren. The CFPB crafts financial rules to protect ordinary consumers—making mortgage applications simple, preventing banks from hiding fees and charges, and cracking down on payday lenders. But since the US Consumer Coalition launched early last year, it has been on a mission to bring down the bureau—which it has called "America's most dangerous federal agency"—and other financial regulators.
Conservative media outlets regularly turn to Wise, who has accused the CFPB of being a spying agency akin to the NSA, for quotes attacking Warren's agency and financial reform from the consumer's perspective, touting him as someone who represents consumer interests. But the US Consumer Coalition—which other consumer groups told me they had never heard of—is run and staffed entirely by a Virginia public relations firm stuffed with ex-GOP operatives. In fact, Wise tells Mother Jones a group of donors—he won't say who—came to him last year and "hired" his firm, Wise Public Affairs, to set up the Consumer Coalition, which shares staff with his firm.
"This is sort of the new pro-choice movement, if you will," Wise says. But he has an unusual résumé for someone who supposedly represents the interests of consumers. Before he became a consumer advocate, the press often described Wise as a Republican political consultant. His LinkedIn page describes expertise in "developing and executing public policy campaigns and corporate image campaigns through the use of non-profit organizations, grassroots mobilization, and strategic communication strategies."
Wise's colleagues at his PR firm now do double duty at the Consumer Coalition. The press contact for the Consumer Coalition, Rob Damschen, lists Wise Public Affairs as his primary employer on LinkedIn. In May, Sarah Mankin, a vice president at Wise Public Affairs, registered with Congress as a lobbyist on behalf of the US Consumer Coalition. She came to the Wise Public Affairs after working as director of conservative coalitions and state outreach for the Republican Study Committee. And Laura Kreehner Rigas, Wise Public Affairs' vice president of strategic communications, joined the group after working as communications director for the American Conservative Union and various communications roles in the Bush White House. She's been listed as a media contact for the Consumer Coalition in the past.
In some sense, Wise's employees' deep involvement in the Consumer Coalition's work is no surprise: Setting up groups like the Consumer Coalition seems to be a big part of what Wise Public Affairs offers its customers. "Whether you partner with existing organizations or create new nonprofits to show support for your issue, we can develop, manage and execute a campaign that will produce results," a July 2013 post to the firm's Facebook page promised. "Let's start the conversation about how we can support your policy campaign." On its website, Wise Public Affairs touts an "Advocate Boot Camp" that trains corporate "employees, supporters, or stakeholders to become effective grassroots advocates," and highlights how companies can "save money on expensive lobbying efforts by giving your people the tools to lobby directly at the grassroots level where they have more credibility and can more effectively advocate for your cause." Another Facebook post from Wise Public Affairs specifically pitches financial-services companies, warning that "this election season poses special problems for many interest groups."
The Consumer Coalition's top issues, Wise says, are reforming the CFPB to weaken its power; "saving" Uber, the popular ride-dispatching app; and attacking Operation Chokepoint, a Department of Justice program intended to force banks to close accounts of businesses they suspect of committing fraud. In June, the Consumer Coalition announced plans to run a $3 million to $5 million campaign to tear apart Operation Chokepoint, including $1 million in paid ads. Last summer, the group hired Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, as a paid adviser; he now gives closed-door speeches at DC steakhouses attacking Operation Chokepoint.
But the Consumer Coalition's interests don't make it any easier to decipher who's funding it. Wise—who admitted that corporate donors and "people who have interest in the industries" backed the group—denied that "any financial institution" was involved in paying its bills. Uber isn't funding it either, he says. The porn industry and the NRA, which have both been critical of Operation Chokepoint, haven't chipped in, either, according to Wise.
The group's true funders may never be known. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the Consumer Coalition is permanently exempt from revealing its donors.
February 26, 2015
Stop Cops From Enforcing Gun Laws
Inside The Conservative Campaign To Stop Cops From Enforcing Federal Gun Laws
By Dana Liebelson
Conservative lawmakers in at least 11 states are pushing legislation that would prevent state law enforcement from enforcing some or all federal gun restrictions. Proponents of these bills are emboldened by the success of marijuana legalization at the state level and claim that federal law enforcement is stretched too thin to stop them.
Right now, there are a number of federal laws restricting various kinds of gun use. For example, felons, fugitives, people convicted of domestic abuse misdemeanors and people subject to certain domestic restraining orders are restricted from buying guns under federal law. And no civilians are allowed to buy newly manufactured machine guns.
In Montana, the state House passed legislation earlier this month that would prohibit the enforcement of any potential federal ban or restriction on firearms and magazines. If a Montana cop did enforce such a federal law, it would be considered theft of public money. The Montana bill says that state employees are still allowed to enforce some federal laws -- for example, the ban on machine guns. But most states that have introduced this type of legislation have used broader language.
An Arizona bill that passed two state Senate committees this month says that state employees can't enforce "all federal [laws]... that are in violation of the Second Amendment" if they "violate the Second Amendment's true meaning." That bill does not address federal restrictions on domestic abusers or felons. And Arizona state law is weaker than the federal law in some respects. The state does prohibit people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from owning firearms -- but only while they are serving their probation.
The so-called "nullification" movement isn't entirely new, but it has taken off since President Barack Obama was elected, and it appears to have been further spurred on by the anti-gun sentiments many people expressed after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
"I am concerned with Obama, his admin[istration] has been hostile to gun rights," state Rep. Art Wittich (R), the sponsor of the Montana legislation, told The Huffington Post in an email.
Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, was involved in writing the first draft of that bill. He said he discussed the concept in 2009 while waiting to appear on Glenn Beck's Fox News show with Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, in New York City. As Marbut remembers it, Napolitano told him: "All you need to do is don't help [the federal government] enforce these federal laws, because they don't have the manpower to do it."
Napolitano did not respond to a request for comment, although The Huffington Post verified that he did appear on Beck's show with Marbut in 2009 to discuss gun legislation.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that bills like the one in Montana could have effects beyond a simple symbolic statement. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Printz v. United States that the federal government cannot force local chief law enforcement officers to fulfill federal tasks. And the resources of the federal government are stretched thin. In that sense, backers of these bills say they are relying on the same reasoning that allows states to flout the federal ban on marijuana possession.
"I've seen how quickly the federal government had to back off in response to marijuana legalization measures in Colorado and Washington state, and found this to be a good strategy in support of our right to keep and bear arms as well," said state Sen. Kelli Ward (R), who introduced the legislation in Arizona.
Ward said she consulted with representatives from the Arizona Citizens Defense League, the Tenth Amendment Center and the National Rifle Association. Michael Boldin, founder and executive director of the Tenth Amendment Center, also pointed to the Obama administration's failure to enforce marijuana laws as evidence that these bills could succeed.
The way this could play out, said David Kopel, an adjunct constitutional law professor at the University of Denver, is that if the federal government were to ban assault weapons, and then a local cop pulled someone over for a traffic violation and saw an assault weapon in the car, the cop could simply give the guy a ticket for the traffic violation and send him on his way.
A handful of states have passed nullification laws in the last few years. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is challenging a Kansas law that goes so far as to declare that Kansas firearms and accessories are "not subject to any federal law, treaty, federal regulation, or federal executive action." (A similar Montana law was struck down in 2013 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.)
The Brady Campaign argues that the Kansas law is reminiscent of certain states' efforts in the 1950s to fight federal law requiring the integration of African-American students into all-white schools. Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Campaign, told HuffPost that these kinds of gun laws are "blatantly unconstitutional" and "extraordinarily dangerous" if permitted by the courts.
The Obama administration has agreed that the Kansas law is unconstitutional. "I am writing to inform you that federal law enforcement agencies... will continue to execute their duties to enforce all federal firearm laws," Attorney General Eric Holder told Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) in an April 2013 letter.
By Dana Liebelson
Conservative lawmakers in at least 11 states are pushing legislation that would prevent state law enforcement from enforcing some or all federal gun restrictions. Proponents of these bills are emboldened by the success of marijuana legalization at the state level and claim that federal law enforcement is stretched too thin to stop them.
Right now, there are a number of federal laws restricting various kinds of gun use. For example, felons, fugitives, people convicted of domestic abuse misdemeanors and people subject to certain domestic restraining orders are restricted from buying guns under federal law. And no civilians are allowed to buy newly manufactured machine guns.
In Montana, the state House passed legislation earlier this month that would prohibit the enforcement of any potential federal ban or restriction on firearms and magazines. If a Montana cop did enforce such a federal law, it would be considered theft of public money. The Montana bill says that state employees are still allowed to enforce some federal laws -- for example, the ban on machine guns. But most states that have introduced this type of legislation have used broader language.
An Arizona bill that passed two state Senate committees this month says that state employees can't enforce "all federal [laws]... that are in violation of the Second Amendment" if they "violate the Second Amendment's true meaning." That bill does not address federal restrictions on domestic abusers or felons. And Arizona state law is weaker than the federal law in some respects. The state does prohibit people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from owning firearms -- but only while they are serving their probation.
The so-called "nullification" movement isn't entirely new, but it has taken off since President Barack Obama was elected, and it appears to have been further spurred on by the anti-gun sentiments many people expressed after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
"I am concerned with Obama, his admin[istration] has been hostile to gun rights," state Rep. Art Wittich (R), the sponsor of the Montana legislation, told The Huffington Post in an email.
Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, was involved in writing the first draft of that bill. He said he discussed the concept in 2009 while waiting to appear on Glenn Beck's Fox News show with Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, in New York City. As Marbut remembers it, Napolitano told him: "All you need to do is don't help [the federal government] enforce these federal laws, because they don't have the manpower to do it."
Napolitano did not respond to a request for comment, although The Huffington Post verified that he did appear on Beck's show with Marbut in 2009 to discuss gun legislation.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that bills like the one in Montana could have effects beyond a simple symbolic statement. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Printz v. United States that the federal government cannot force local chief law enforcement officers to fulfill federal tasks. And the resources of the federal government are stretched thin. In that sense, backers of these bills say they are relying on the same reasoning that allows states to flout the federal ban on marijuana possession.
"I've seen how quickly the federal government had to back off in response to marijuana legalization measures in Colorado and Washington state, and found this to be a good strategy in support of our right to keep and bear arms as well," said state Sen. Kelli Ward (R), who introduced the legislation in Arizona.
Ward said she consulted with representatives from the Arizona Citizens Defense League, the Tenth Amendment Center and the National Rifle Association. Michael Boldin, founder and executive director of the Tenth Amendment Center, also pointed to the Obama administration's failure to enforce marijuana laws as evidence that these bills could succeed.
The way this could play out, said David Kopel, an adjunct constitutional law professor at the University of Denver, is that if the federal government were to ban assault weapons, and then a local cop pulled someone over for a traffic violation and saw an assault weapon in the car, the cop could simply give the guy a ticket for the traffic violation and send him on his way.
A handful of states have passed nullification laws in the last few years. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is challenging a Kansas law that goes so far as to declare that Kansas firearms and accessories are "not subject to any federal law, treaty, federal regulation, or federal executive action." (A similar Montana law was struck down in 2013 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.)
The Brady Campaign argues that the Kansas law is reminiscent of certain states' efforts in the 1950s to fight federal law requiring the integration of African-American students into all-white schools. Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Campaign, told HuffPost that these kinds of gun laws are "blatantly unconstitutional" and "extraordinarily dangerous" if permitted by the courts.
The Obama administration has agreed that the Kansas law is unconstitutional. "I am writing to inform you that federal law enforcement agencies... will continue to execute their duties to enforce all federal firearm laws," Attorney General Eric Holder told Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) in an April 2013 letter.
Ambush in the Senate
Democrats Fear an Ambush on the Senate Floor
To prevent a DHS shutdown, Democrats have to trust that Ted Cruz and other Republicans won't betray them or hold up the whole process.
By Sarah Mimms
To prevent a DHS shutdown, Democrats have to trust that Ted Cruz and other Republicans won't betray them or hold up the whole process.
By Sarah Mimms
Mayoral Runoff
In Mayoral Runoff, Rahm Emanuel’s Corrupt Governance Has Finally Caught Up With Him
It’s become increasingly clear to Chicagoans that Rahm Emanuel is out for himself and his rich friends, not for us.
BY Rick Perlstein
On Tuesday, Chicagoans voted themselves a reprieve. With 45.4 percent of the vote, Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended the first round of his first reelection bid almost five points below what he needed to avoid a runoff election in April—and three points below his performance in the last major pre-election poll. “Mayor 1%” will face second-place finisher Jesus “Chuy” García, the soft-spoken, compassionate Cook County board member who proclaimed himself with a Chicagoan lilt the “neighborhood guy”—who over-performed the poll.
Perhaps what turned some voters against Rahm at the last minute—or motivated them to go to the polls in the first place on a cold Chicago day that started out in the single digits—was an Election Day exposé that appeared in the British paper the Guardian by investigate reporter Spencer Ackerman. “The Disappeared” revealed the existence of Homan Square, a forlorn “black site” that the Chicago Police operate on the West Side.
There, Chicagoans learned—many for the first time—arrestees are locked up for days at a time without access to lawyers. One victim was 15 years old; he was released without being charged with anything. Another, a 44-year-old named John Hubbard, never left—he died in custody. One of the “NATO 3” defendants, later acquitted on most charges of alleged terror plans during a 2012 Chicago protest, was shackled to a bench there for 17 hours.
It “struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it,” the Guardian reported. And for a candidate, Rahm Emanuel, who ran on a message he was turning the page on the old, malodorous “Chicago way,” the piece contributed to a narrative that proved devastating.
Indeed, the mayor faced a drumbeat of outstanding journalistic exposés all throughout the campaign. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Deborah Quazzo, an Emanuel school board appointee who runs an investment fund for companies that privatize school functions. They discovered that five companies in which she had an ownership stake have more than tripled their business with the Chicago Public Schools since she joined the board, many of them for contracts drawn up in the suspicious amount of $24,999—one dollar below the amount that required central office approval. (Chicago is the only municipality in Illinois whose school board is appointed by a mayor. But activists succeeded—in an arduous accomplishment against the obstruction attempts of Emanuel backers on the city council—to get an advisory referendum on the ballot in a majority of the city's wards calling for an elected representative school board. Approximately 90 percent of the voters who could vote for the measure did.)
The Chicago Tribune reported that of Emanuel’s top 106 contributors, 60 of them received favors from the city. Another in-depth investigation discovered that City Hall had lied repeatedly about a signature initiative of the Emanuel years, automated cameras that issue tickets for the running of red lights. The administration insisted the cameras led to a 47 percent decline in “T-bone” crashes, when the true number was 15 percent—and they also caused a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end collisions. That reinforced suspicions that the cameras weren’t installed for the safety of “the children,” as Emanuel sanctimoniously insists, but are a revenue grab, a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on the poor.
The International Business Tribune discovered that Emanuel was evading his own, much-trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shoveling $38 million in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments,” a sketchy loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts—without, in fact, any way of documenting what the money is used for.
And a joint investigation between public radio station WBEZ and the magazine Catalyst Chicago demonstrated that the Chicago Public Schools CEO Emanuel hired, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, was able to juke the statistics on high school graduation rates—which supposedly went from 70 to 85 percent over the last decade—by contracting with for-profit online education companies that demanded very little work from students, while still allowing them to receive diplomas from the last school they attended.
All the while, Emanuel’s ubiquitous commercials—he spent $7 million of his $15 million war chest on television—and mailers painted Emanuel as a heroic reformer, an Eleanor Roosevelt responsible for showering poorer Chicagoans with favors, and cast his two most prominent opponents, each of them courageous reformers, as old-school Windy City grifters.
In the mailers, Alderman Bob Fioretti, who became such a thorn in the administration’s side he was gerrymandered out of his own ward, was scored for voting for the infamous deal to privatize Chicago’s parking meters—even though the previous Mayor Richard M. Daley sold it to aldermen under screamingly false pretenses and the current mayor has passed up an opportunity to sue to get the unconstitutional contract abrogated. García was attacked for once owing the county back property taxes—an error, García countered, that resulted from getting a tax break he did not request on a home inherited from his dead mother. He promptly fixed the error.
The way the Emanuel ad shamelessly put it? García claimed an “illegal” favor for “two houses at the same time to avoid paying over $8,000 in taxes.” The tag: “Chuy García: Out for himself. Not us.”
In their way, these Emanuel messages, as misleading as they were, are heartening. This was Karl Rove’s trademark election strategy: attack, with brazen audacity, your opponents’ biggest, most taken-for-granted strength. In this case it was García and Fioretti’s unimpeachable probity, and the fact that they are out to help ordinary Chicagoans, not themselves.
This is not just a backhanded tribute to García’s integrity. It suggests a strategy for García to slay Goliath when he and Rahm go head-to-head in the April runoff.
Look at it this way: having purchased the services of the best research dirty money can buy, what Emanuel’s focus group wizards discovered was that Chicago voters care about corruption. They’re desperate to get rid of the old sordid “Chicago way.” Which is why the Emanuel campaign spent so much time and energy tagging his opponents as representatives of that brand of politics.
It suggests García has his work cut out for him in the six weeks he has left: to belabor what is increasingly becoming obvious to Chicagoans—that Rahm Emanuel is a flagrantly corrupt mayor, out for himself, and never for us.
It’s become increasingly clear to Chicagoans that Rahm Emanuel is out for himself and his rich friends, not for us.
BY Rick Perlstein
On Tuesday, Chicagoans voted themselves a reprieve. With 45.4 percent of the vote, Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended the first round of his first reelection bid almost five points below what he needed to avoid a runoff election in April—and three points below his performance in the last major pre-election poll. “Mayor 1%” will face second-place finisher Jesus “Chuy” García, the soft-spoken, compassionate Cook County board member who proclaimed himself with a Chicagoan lilt the “neighborhood guy”—who over-performed the poll.
Perhaps what turned some voters against Rahm at the last minute—or motivated them to go to the polls in the first place on a cold Chicago day that started out in the single digits—was an Election Day exposé that appeared in the British paper the Guardian by investigate reporter Spencer Ackerman. “The Disappeared” revealed the existence of Homan Square, a forlorn “black site” that the Chicago Police operate on the West Side.
There, Chicagoans learned—many for the first time—arrestees are locked up for days at a time without access to lawyers. One victim was 15 years old; he was released without being charged with anything. Another, a 44-year-old named John Hubbard, never left—he died in custody. One of the “NATO 3” defendants, later acquitted on most charges of alleged terror plans during a 2012 Chicago protest, was shackled to a bench there for 17 hours.
It “struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it,” the Guardian reported. And for a candidate, Rahm Emanuel, who ran on a message he was turning the page on the old, malodorous “Chicago way,” the piece contributed to a narrative that proved devastating.
Indeed, the mayor faced a drumbeat of outstanding journalistic exposés all throughout the campaign. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Deborah Quazzo, an Emanuel school board appointee who runs an investment fund for companies that privatize school functions. They discovered that five companies in which she had an ownership stake have more than tripled their business with the Chicago Public Schools since she joined the board, many of them for contracts drawn up in the suspicious amount of $24,999—one dollar below the amount that required central office approval. (Chicago is the only municipality in Illinois whose school board is appointed by a mayor. But activists succeeded—in an arduous accomplishment against the obstruction attempts of Emanuel backers on the city council—to get an advisory referendum on the ballot in a majority of the city's wards calling for an elected representative school board. Approximately 90 percent of the voters who could vote for the measure did.)
The Chicago Tribune reported that of Emanuel’s top 106 contributors, 60 of them received favors from the city. Another in-depth investigation discovered that City Hall had lied repeatedly about a signature initiative of the Emanuel years, automated cameras that issue tickets for the running of red lights. The administration insisted the cameras led to a 47 percent decline in “T-bone” crashes, when the true number was 15 percent—and they also caused a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end collisions. That reinforced suspicions that the cameras weren’t installed for the safety of “the children,” as Emanuel sanctimoniously insists, but are a revenue grab, a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on the poor.
The International Business Tribune discovered that Emanuel was evading his own, much-trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shoveling $38 million in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments,” a sketchy loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts—without, in fact, any way of documenting what the money is used for.
And a joint investigation between public radio station WBEZ and the magazine Catalyst Chicago demonstrated that the Chicago Public Schools CEO Emanuel hired, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, was able to juke the statistics on high school graduation rates—which supposedly went from 70 to 85 percent over the last decade—by contracting with for-profit online education companies that demanded very little work from students, while still allowing them to receive diplomas from the last school they attended.
All the while, Emanuel’s ubiquitous commercials—he spent $7 million of his $15 million war chest on television—and mailers painted Emanuel as a heroic reformer, an Eleanor Roosevelt responsible for showering poorer Chicagoans with favors, and cast his two most prominent opponents, each of them courageous reformers, as old-school Windy City grifters.
In the mailers, Alderman Bob Fioretti, who became such a thorn in the administration’s side he was gerrymandered out of his own ward, was scored for voting for the infamous deal to privatize Chicago’s parking meters—even though the previous Mayor Richard M. Daley sold it to aldermen under screamingly false pretenses and the current mayor has passed up an opportunity to sue to get the unconstitutional contract abrogated. García was attacked for once owing the county back property taxes—an error, García countered, that resulted from getting a tax break he did not request on a home inherited from his dead mother. He promptly fixed the error.
The way the Emanuel ad shamelessly put it? García claimed an “illegal” favor for “two houses at the same time to avoid paying over $8,000 in taxes.” The tag: “Chuy García: Out for himself. Not us.”
In their way, these Emanuel messages, as misleading as they were, are heartening. This was Karl Rove’s trademark election strategy: attack, with brazen audacity, your opponents’ biggest, most taken-for-granted strength. In this case it was García and Fioretti’s unimpeachable probity, and the fact that they are out to help ordinary Chicagoans, not themselves.
This is not just a backhanded tribute to García’s integrity. It suggests a strategy for García to slay Goliath when he and Rahm go head-to-head in the April runoff.
Look at it this way: having purchased the services of the best research dirty money can buy, what Emanuel’s focus group wizards discovered was that Chicago voters care about corruption. They’re desperate to get rid of the old sordid “Chicago way.” Which is why the Emanuel campaign spent so much time and energy tagging his opponents as representatives of that brand of politics.
It suggests García has his work cut out for him in the six weeks he has left: to belabor what is increasingly becoming obvious to Chicagoans—that Rahm Emanuel is a flagrantly corrupt mayor, out for himself, and never for us.
Right to Work
Scott Walker Says He’ll Sign Anti-Labor ‘Right to Work’ Legislation
by John Nichols
A funny thing happened on the way to the 2016 presidential race.
Scott Walker suddenly remembered how enthusiastic he is about “right to work” laws.
When Walker was running for re-election as governor of Wisconsin in 2014, he was frequently asked if he would sign so-called “right to work” legislation, which is designed to weaken unions and undermine the voices of workers on the job and in public life. Despite his reputation as an anti-labor zealot, Walker dodged the question again and again and again.
A month before the 2014 election, at a point when the polls were close and Walker was running for his political life, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Walker “won’t say if he would veto right-to-work legislation barring private-sector workers from having to join a union as part of their job.”
The Associated Press reported three weeks before the election that “Walker says he won’t push to make Wisconsin a right to work state or expand the Act 10 collective bargaining law if elected to a second term.”
As Election Day approached, Walker went further. He claimed he had told Republican legislators not to send him that legislation. Recalling the historic protests that arose four years ago when he attacked the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions, Walker warned that raising the “right to work” issue would “bring the whole firestorm back.”
“Those aren’t the sorts of debates that are helpful for us to take the next step forward,” said the governor, as he made his case for re-election. “It’s about the tenor and the tone of the Legislature and what it means to the state as a whole.”
Every indication from Walker suggested that he wanted the issue to go away. “Right-to-work,” the governor declared, was “not something that’s part of my agenda.”
“My point is I’m not pushing for it,” he said. “I’m not supporting it in this session.”
Plenty of Walker critics in the labor movement and the legislature expressed skepticism about the governor’s temperate statements. After all, when one of his wealthiest supporters, Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, had asked in 2011 about making Wisconsin a “right to work” state, Walker was caught on tape replying: “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.” That did not sound like a man who had any qualms about signing anti-labor legislation.
Yet, throughout the high-stakes 2014 campaign, the governor stuck to his newly moderate line, presenting himself as a smart manager who wanted to get things right rather than the rigid ideologue of the 2011 conflict.
That was then. This is now.
Walker’s not worrying about Wisconsin these days. He’s in a new race — scrambling to win the support of 2016 Republican presidential caucus-goers and primary voters who like their candidates to take a hard line on social and economic issues.
So Walker’s line just got a whole lot harder.
On Friday, two of the governor’s closest legislative allies, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and state Assembly speaker Robin Vos, announced that they will call a rare “extraordinary session” to rush through a “right to work” bill with limited public input and debate. With solid Republican majorities in both chambers, they say they aim to pass the measure — which mirrors “model legislation” language peddled by the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council — in a matter of days.
This development took most Wisconsinites by surprise. Republicans and Democrats had thought that the issue was on the legislative back-burner — not just because of Walker’s pre-election and post-election talk about wanting to avoid distractions, but also because some legislative Republicans had griped about the wisdom of advancing “right to work” legislation.
“It is absurd that Republicans would fast-track legislation to interfere with private business contracts and lower wages for all Wisconsin workers at a time when our state is facing a massive $2.2 billion budget crisis,” Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader Jennifer Shilling said after the announcement that the “right-to-work” fight was on.
“Objective polling clearly shows that the vast majority of Wisconsin residents view this issue as a distraction,” added Shilling, using the precise language that Walker had employed in dismissing discussions about advancing “right to work” initiatives. “Rather than creating economic uncertainty for Wisconsin families and small businesses, Republicans should focus their attention on boosting family wages, closing the skills gap and fixing the $2.2 billion budget crisis they created.”
But what does Walker say? Now that the issue has come to a head, is he wrestling with it, as he seemed to be during the campaign? Is he still asserting that “right to work” is a distraction? Does he worry that the proposed legislation would make it a Class A misdemeanor to maintain a traditional union shop in Wisconsin? Is he explaining that this move isn’t “helpful for us to take the next step forward”?
Not anymore.
Walker, who is busily preparing a 2016 Republican presidential run that highlights his anti-labor stance, is now all in for “right to work.”
His office announced Friday that: “Governor Walker continues to focus on budget priorities to grow our economy and to streamline state government. With that said, Governor Walker co-sponsored right-to-work legislation as a lawmaker and supports the policy. If this bill makes it to his desk, Governor Walker will sign it into law.”
Why didn’t Governor Walker say that during last year’s gubernatorial campaign?
It’s not like he is suggesting that he has come to some new conclusion with regard to anti-labor legislation of this sort, which the Economic Policy Institute warns “is associated with lower wages and benefits for both union and nonunion workers.” In fact, Wisconsinites have heard plenty of warnings in recent months that “right to work” legislation could do real harm to the state’s workers and communities. In a recent opinion piece written for the Journal Sentinel, Marquette University Economics Professor Abdur Chowdhury explained that “right-to-work legislation would provide no discernible overall economic advantage to Wisconsin, but it does impose significant social costs.”
What the statement from Walker’s office reveals is what the governor would not say when he was running for re-election in 2014 but what he will say as a 2016 Republican presidential prospect. He was just fooling some of the people some of the time when he feigned uncertainty on last year’s gubernatorial campaign trail. Walker is what he has always been: a longtime supporter of this agenda “who co-sponsored right-to-work legislation as a lawmaker and supports the policy.”
by John Nichols
A funny thing happened on the way to the 2016 presidential race.
Scott Walker suddenly remembered how enthusiastic he is about “right to work” laws.
When Walker was running for re-election as governor of Wisconsin in 2014, he was frequently asked if he would sign so-called “right to work” legislation, which is designed to weaken unions and undermine the voices of workers on the job and in public life. Despite his reputation as an anti-labor zealot, Walker dodged the question again and again and again.
A month before the 2014 election, at a point when the polls were close and Walker was running for his political life, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Walker “won’t say if he would veto right-to-work legislation barring private-sector workers from having to join a union as part of their job.”
The Associated Press reported three weeks before the election that “Walker says he won’t push to make Wisconsin a right to work state or expand the Act 10 collective bargaining law if elected to a second term.”
As Election Day approached, Walker went further. He claimed he had told Republican legislators not to send him that legislation. Recalling the historic protests that arose four years ago when he attacked the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions, Walker warned that raising the “right to work” issue would “bring the whole firestorm back.”
“Those aren’t the sorts of debates that are helpful for us to take the next step forward,” said the governor, as he made his case for re-election. “It’s about the tenor and the tone of the Legislature and what it means to the state as a whole.”
Every indication from Walker suggested that he wanted the issue to go away. “Right-to-work,” the governor declared, was “not something that’s part of my agenda.”
“My point is I’m not pushing for it,” he said. “I’m not supporting it in this session.”
Plenty of Walker critics in the labor movement and the legislature expressed skepticism about the governor’s temperate statements. After all, when one of his wealthiest supporters, Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, had asked in 2011 about making Wisconsin a “right to work” state, Walker was caught on tape replying: “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.” That did not sound like a man who had any qualms about signing anti-labor legislation.
Yet, throughout the high-stakes 2014 campaign, the governor stuck to his newly moderate line, presenting himself as a smart manager who wanted to get things right rather than the rigid ideologue of the 2011 conflict.
That was then. This is now.
Walker’s not worrying about Wisconsin these days. He’s in a new race — scrambling to win the support of 2016 Republican presidential caucus-goers and primary voters who like their candidates to take a hard line on social and economic issues.
So Walker’s line just got a whole lot harder.
On Friday, two of the governor’s closest legislative allies, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and state Assembly speaker Robin Vos, announced that they will call a rare “extraordinary session” to rush through a “right to work” bill with limited public input and debate. With solid Republican majorities in both chambers, they say they aim to pass the measure — which mirrors “model legislation” language peddled by the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council — in a matter of days.
This development took most Wisconsinites by surprise. Republicans and Democrats had thought that the issue was on the legislative back-burner — not just because of Walker’s pre-election and post-election talk about wanting to avoid distractions, but also because some legislative Republicans had griped about the wisdom of advancing “right to work” legislation.
“It is absurd that Republicans would fast-track legislation to interfere with private business contracts and lower wages for all Wisconsin workers at a time when our state is facing a massive $2.2 billion budget crisis,” Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader Jennifer Shilling said after the announcement that the “right-to-work” fight was on.
“Objective polling clearly shows that the vast majority of Wisconsin residents view this issue as a distraction,” added Shilling, using the precise language that Walker had employed in dismissing discussions about advancing “right to work” initiatives. “Rather than creating economic uncertainty for Wisconsin families and small businesses, Republicans should focus their attention on boosting family wages, closing the skills gap and fixing the $2.2 billion budget crisis they created.”
But what does Walker say? Now that the issue has come to a head, is he wrestling with it, as he seemed to be during the campaign? Is he still asserting that “right to work” is a distraction? Does he worry that the proposed legislation would make it a Class A misdemeanor to maintain a traditional union shop in Wisconsin? Is he explaining that this move isn’t “helpful for us to take the next step forward”?
Not anymore.
Walker, who is busily preparing a 2016 Republican presidential run that highlights his anti-labor stance, is now all in for “right to work.”
His office announced Friday that: “Governor Walker continues to focus on budget priorities to grow our economy and to streamline state government. With that said, Governor Walker co-sponsored right-to-work legislation as a lawmaker and supports the policy. If this bill makes it to his desk, Governor Walker will sign it into law.”
Why didn’t Governor Walker say that during last year’s gubernatorial campaign?
It’s not like he is suggesting that he has come to some new conclusion with regard to anti-labor legislation of this sort, which the Economic Policy Institute warns “is associated with lower wages and benefits for both union and nonunion workers.” In fact, Wisconsinites have heard plenty of warnings in recent months that “right to work” legislation could do real harm to the state’s workers and communities. In a recent opinion piece written for the Journal Sentinel, Marquette University Economics Professor Abdur Chowdhury explained that “right-to-work legislation would provide no discernible overall economic advantage to Wisconsin, but it does impose significant social costs.”
What the statement from Walker’s office reveals is what the governor would not say when he was running for re-election in 2014 but what he will say as a 2016 Republican presidential prospect. He was just fooling some of the people some of the time when he feigned uncertainty on last year’s gubernatorial campaign trail. Walker is what he has always been: a longtime supporter of this agenda “who co-sponsored right-to-work legislation as a lawmaker and supports the policy.”
Barbara Boxer on GOP Hypocrisy
Barbara Boxer Knocks It Out Of The Fucking Park With GOP Hypocrisy, Irresponsibility & Obama Hatred
by Leslie SalzilloFollow
"This is a self-inflicted crisis, made up by the Republicans. It is dangerous, it is the height of irresponsibility, and it's unnecessary."-Barbara Boxer, February 24, 2015 (regarding the GOP threat of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown.)
I love this speech, I love this lawmaker. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) minced no words on Tuesday when addressing Republicans. I tried to choose only a few excerpts, but there were too many jewels (and still more in the video). Tell me, if you don't agree.
In the beginning of her speech, Senator Boxer states:
We all know Republicans won in huge numbers in the 2014 election, and they took over the United States Senate and they run it. They run it. Or at least they're trying to run it. And let's be clear, less than eight weeks after they took over the Senate, we are facing a shutdown; a shutdown of the very agency that protects the health, the safety, the lives, of the American people - the Department of Homeland Security.
They're shutting down the program that funds our police officers back home, our firefighters, our first responders. Any way you look at it - this is a national disgrace. And think about what our friends abroad, and those who are not our friends, are thinking about this.
Republicans say, 'Oh, we're in danger, we have to go to go to war, put combat troops on the ground!' But they're wiling to shut down the department that protects Americans here in the homeland, from a terrorist attack.
How does it make sense, at a time when we're facing serious threats to our national security, to furlough 30,000, thirty thousand, department of homeland security workers, and to force more than 100,000 frontline homeland security personnel to work without pay?
Why don't theses senators go without their pay?
Give up your pay! Give up your healthcare, give up your benefits, if this is so important to you. Oh, no, they'll collect their pay!
Senator Boxer reminds Congress that this shutdown threat is in retaliation to President Obama's recent plan for immigration. Boxer talks about those at risk of being deported. She talks about children who were born to American immigrants (as she was) who would be torn away from each other if the GOP had their way.
"I thought they were the party of 'family values.' Show me where that's true, ripping families apart. I thought they were the party of 'economic prosperity.' Show me how that's true, when we know from study after study show that one of the greatest things we can do for our economy and job creation is get people out of the shadows so they can go buy a home and hold a good job. They (Republicans) can't or won't pass an immigration bill. They will not do their job. So when the president steps in and does his job, they say, 'Oh, this is terrible! Let's shutdown a totally unrelated department. The Department of Homeland Security.
To make her points about Republican hypocrisy, Boxer brings up the GOP's claimed concern for 'fiscal responsibility' and executive orders.
The Center for American Progress, states it would cost more than $50 Billion to deport the entire population that the president is protecting.
And here's the deal - I've never heard of a Republican (and I will stand corrected if any Republican corrects me) I've never heard of a Republican complaining when President Eisenhower used his executive order power to help immigrants, when President Nixon did the same thing to protect immigrants, when President Ronald Reagan, their hero, protected immigrants, when George Bush Sr. protected immigrants, when George W. protected immigrants, they all used their authority.
Show me one Republican that stood up and said, 'Oh, this is outrageous! Let's impeach the president!' But it's president Obama. And they're annoyed because he won twice. Sorry. Sorry. Wake up and smell the roses. He IS the President. And he is doing the right thing for America, because he loves America.
The senator from California goes on to tell several stories, one about a young woman name Anna, born to hardworking undocumented immigrant parents. Anna has come out of the shadows and is now studying to be a bilingual first grade teacher.
So tell me, Republicans, how does it make sense to deport people like Anna, split her up from her parents, when all they want to do is contribute to the country that they love. How does it make sense?
How does it make sense? Because you're too incompetent to hold a vote on your immigration plan? You want to kick people out of the country? Put it to a vote! Let's go. You want to deport 11 million people? Put it to a vote. Don't hide behind the Homeland Security Bill, holding the President's work hostage. You never did it to the other presidents.
Our national security is at stake, our family values are at stake. And our economy is at stake here. So get over the fact that you don't like the president. We get it. You couldn't beat him. Too bad for you. But you're in charge here, in the Senate. Do your job!
Don't hold it hostage to your hatred of this president, and I use that word because that's what I think. That's what I think….
So I say to my Republican friends. There's a presidential race coming. Forget this last one. Get over it. Okay? Let's work together. Listen, I served with five presidents. I'm a strong Democrat. Everyone will tell you that. But I respect the office of the presidency. If I didn't agree with Ronald Reagan, I came down here and said it. But we had the respect back and forth. If we lost, we lost. And we moved on. And that worked both ways. I know what it is not to like the policies of a president. I get it. But don't overdo it and make it so personal. Get on with it. Grow up. Do your job, you know? Do your job! Have respect for the office of the presidency.
Don't suddenly say executive orders are bad when the president you don't like does it, but you don't say one word when a Republican president does the same thing!
The speech is glorious and worth watching. Boxer is speaking not only for Democrats, she is speaking out for Americans. Her words are rousing and affirming, much like those in the speeches of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Republican extremists are getting away with the closest thing to treason many of us have witnessed in our lifetimes. And it's not only betrayal against the President, it's betrayal against the U.S. Constitution and the tax-payers/citizens.
Here's hoping Barbara Boxer's words will resonate across social media. And let's see if mainstream media picks up on a politician like this, instead of all the ego-driven Tea Party clowns like Ted Cruz. I mean for crying out loud.
It feels good. It feels plenty good to see more Democrats grab the mic and tell Republicans, and this country, what time it is. Thank you, Senator Boxer.
by Leslie SalzilloFollow
"This is a self-inflicted crisis, made up by the Republicans. It is dangerous, it is the height of irresponsibility, and it's unnecessary."-Barbara Boxer, February 24, 2015 (regarding the GOP threat of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown.)
I love this speech, I love this lawmaker. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) minced no words on Tuesday when addressing Republicans. I tried to choose only a few excerpts, but there were too many jewels (and still more in the video). Tell me, if you don't agree.
In the beginning of her speech, Senator Boxer states:
We all know Republicans won in huge numbers in the 2014 election, and they took over the United States Senate and they run it. They run it. Or at least they're trying to run it. And let's be clear, less than eight weeks after they took over the Senate, we are facing a shutdown; a shutdown of the very agency that protects the health, the safety, the lives, of the American people - the Department of Homeland Security.
They're shutting down the program that funds our police officers back home, our firefighters, our first responders. Any way you look at it - this is a national disgrace. And think about what our friends abroad, and those who are not our friends, are thinking about this.
Republicans say, 'Oh, we're in danger, we have to go to go to war, put combat troops on the ground!' But they're wiling to shut down the department that protects Americans here in the homeland, from a terrorist attack.
How does it make sense, at a time when we're facing serious threats to our national security, to furlough 30,000, thirty thousand, department of homeland security workers, and to force more than 100,000 frontline homeland security personnel to work without pay?
Why don't theses senators go without their pay?
Give up your pay! Give up your healthcare, give up your benefits, if this is so important to you. Oh, no, they'll collect their pay!
Senator Boxer reminds Congress that this shutdown threat is in retaliation to President Obama's recent plan for immigration. Boxer talks about those at risk of being deported. She talks about children who were born to American immigrants (as she was) who would be torn away from each other if the GOP had their way.
"I thought they were the party of 'family values.' Show me where that's true, ripping families apart. I thought they were the party of 'economic prosperity.' Show me how that's true, when we know from study after study show that one of the greatest things we can do for our economy and job creation is get people out of the shadows so they can go buy a home and hold a good job. They (Republicans) can't or won't pass an immigration bill. They will not do their job. So when the president steps in and does his job, they say, 'Oh, this is terrible! Let's shutdown a totally unrelated department. The Department of Homeland Security.
To make her points about Republican hypocrisy, Boxer brings up the GOP's claimed concern for 'fiscal responsibility' and executive orders.
The Center for American Progress, states it would cost more than $50 Billion to deport the entire population that the president is protecting.
And here's the deal - I've never heard of a Republican (and I will stand corrected if any Republican corrects me) I've never heard of a Republican complaining when President Eisenhower used his executive order power to help immigrants, when President Nixon did the same thing to protect immigrants, when President Ronald Reagan, their hero, protected immigrants, when George Bush Sr. protected immigrants, when George W. protected immigrants, they all used their authority.
Show me one Republican that stood up and said, 'Oh, this is outrageous! Let's impeach the president!' But it's president Obama. And they're annoyed because he won twice. Sorry. Sorry. Wake up and smell the roses. He IS the President. And he is doing the right thing for America, because he loves America.
The senator from California goes on to tell several stories, one about a young woman name Anna, born to hardworking undocumented immigrant parents. Anna has come out of the shadows and is now studying to be a bilingual first grade teacher.
So tell me, Republicans, how does it make sense to deport people like Anna, split her up from her parents, when all they want to do is contribute to the country that they love. How does it make sense?
How does it make sense? Because you're too incompetent to hold a vote on your immigration plan? You want to kick people out of the country? Put it to a vote! Let's go. You want to deport 11 million people? Put it to a vote. Don't hide behind the Homeland Security Bill, holding the President's work hostage. You never did it to the other presidents.
Our national security is at stake, our family values are at stake. And our economy is at stake here. So get over the fact that you don't like the president. We get it. You couldn't beat him. Too bad for you. But you're in charge here, in the Senate. Do your job!
Don't hold it hostage to your hatred of this president, and I use that word because that's what I think. That's what I think….
So I say to my Republican friends. There's a presidential race coming. Forget this last one. Get over it. Okay? Let's work together. Listen, I served with five presidents. I'm a strong Democrat. Everyone will tell you that. But I respect the office of the presidency. If I didn't agree with Ronald Reagan, I came down here and said it. But we had the respect back and forth. If we lost, we lost. And we moved on. And that worked both ways. I know what it is not to like the policies of a president. I get it. But don't overdo it and make it so personal. Get on with it. Grow up. Do your job, you know? Do your job! Have respect for the office of the presidency.
Don't suddenly say executive orders are bad when the president you don't like does it, but you don't say one word when a Republican president does the same thing!
The speech is glorious and worth watching. Boxer is speaking not only for Democrats, she is speaking out for Americans. Her words are rousing and affirming, much like those in the speeches of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Republican extremists are getting away with the closest thing to treason many of us have witnessed in our lifetimes. And it's not only betrayal against the President, it's betrayal against the U.S. Constitution and the tax-payers/citizens.
Here's hoping Barbara Boxer's words will resonate across social media. And let's see if mainstream media picks up on a politician like this, instead of all the ego-driven Tea Party clowns like Ted Cruz. I mean for crying out loud.
It feels good. It feels plenty good to see more Democrats grab the mic and tell Republicans, and this country, what time it is. Thank you, Senator Boxer.
Cost of incarceration
How to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors
Make them answer for the cost of incarceration.
By Leon Neyfakh
When a local prosecutor sends a convicted felon to prison, the cost of keeping him locked up—an average of $31,286 per year—is paid for entirely by the state, not the county where the prosecutor holds office. The problem with this setup, some argue, is that prosecutors end up enjoying a “correctional free lunch,” meaning they can be extremely aggressive in their charging decisions without having to worry about how much it will cost the local taxpayers who elected them. If prosecutors were forced to take the cost of incarceration into account, the theory goes, there might not be 1.36 million people in America’s state prisons.
The “correctional free lunch” problem has been with us for decades; it was first named in a 1991 book called The Scale of Imprisonment by Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Now, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law has come forward with a new idea for how to fix it.
W. David Ball’s proposal begins with defunding state prisons, and making the counties pay for every inmate they incarcerate. In a recent paper, Ball argues that states should take the money they’re currently spending on their prison systems, distribute it among counties based on their violent crime rate, and allow local decision-makers to spend it as they see fit. If county officials want to use the money to fund crime prevention programs, they can; if they want to use it to put lots of convicted felons in prison, they can do that too.
“The hope would be that they would start using prisons at the societally optimal level,” Ball told me. “They’d say, ‘Here’s $50,000 we can spend on sending someone to prison, but that’s $50,000 we’re not going to spend on other things, like the police budget or drug treatment programs.’”
Making those trade-offs transparent could potentially introduce political pressure on prosecutors that they currently don’t have to deal with, Ball said. “It would at least introduce some competing voices that would say, ‘There are other things we can spend law enforcement resources on.’ Because the problem right now is that there’s no one who is going to stand up during a DA’s election and say, ‘We shouldn’t prosecute criminals to the maximum extent possible because it’s really expensive.’ I can imagine that under my system, you would have people saying there are costs to this, and that [local efforts to drive down crime] are being deprived of resources by these prosecutorial decisions.”
Underlying this argument is the idea that prison is just one way to deal with crime—and it’s far from clear it’s the most effective one. “There’s lots of evidence that prison is a superexpensive and really ineffective way to treat people’s criminogenic risks and needs,” Ball said. “The state should not pay for prison unless prison is better, and prison isn’t better.”
Ball writes in his paper that, under the existing system, “counties that choose to use state prison to address crime are, in essence, subsidized by counties that choose local programs such as probation and treatment instead,” since the state typically pays for the former, while the county pays for the latter. This is not just theory: Ball analyzed the use of prisons by counties all over California and found wide variation, even among counties that had similar rates of violent crime. His findings are best illustrated by a comparison of Alameda and San Bernardino Counties over the 10-year period of 2000-2009, during which they had similarly sized populations and nearly identical overall crime rates. And yet, Ball found, “San Bernardino's prison population was more than twice as high, on average, as Alameda's, and it sent an average of more than three times as many ‘new felons’ to prison each year.”
The difference can’t be chalked up to prosecutorial zeal alone—there are surely other factors at play. As a spokesman for the San Bernardino DA’s office said in an email when asked about Ball’s numbers, “No conclusions can be drawn from the statistics other than for the time period studied there must have been more cases in San Bernardino County that met the statewide standards for a state prison sentence.” But this underplays the vast amount of discretion that a prosecutor has in deciding whom to charge and what to charge them with, and that discretion is unquestionably central in determining a county’s felony admission rate.
Putting a price tag on the disparity between a county that sends a lot of people to prison and a county that doesn’t underscores the point that the decisions of prosecutors should matter to taxpayers: On average, according to Ball’s analysis, San Bernardino’s prison population cost the state of California $236,761,677 more per year during the time period in question than Alameda’s did. But voters in those counties don’t necessarily recognize that the prosecutors they elect are partially responsible for that difference—and they have little reason to care, since the cost is borne by the state, not the county. This is one of many reasons why county prosecutor races tend to be extremely uncompetitive: According to one study, which looked at election results between 1996 and 2006 in 10 states, the success rate for an incumbent DA running for re-election was an incredible 95 percent.
If criminal justice spending was allocated locally, as Ball suggests, the impact of the decisions made by local prosecutors would be more obvious to voters, which could exert pressure on the way prosecutors operate. As Ball writes, “The average person could more easily spot the linkage between increasing numbers of local prison commitments and, say, a decrease in the frequency of road repairs or a shorter public school year, allowing political checks on criminal justice to operate more effectively.”
Make them answer for the cost of incarceration.
By Leon Neyfakh
When a local prosecutor sends a convicted felon to prison, the cost of keeping him locked up—an average of $31,286 per year—is paid for entirely by the state, not the county where the prosecutor holds office. The problem with this setup, some argue, is that prosecutors end up enjoying a “correctional free lunch,” meaning they can be extremely aggressive in their charging decisions without having to worry about how much it will cost the local taxpayers who elected them. If prosecutors were forced to take the cost of incarceration into account, the theory goes, there might not be 1.36 million people in America’s state prisons.
The “correctional free lunch” problem has been with us for decades; it was first named in a 1991 book called The Scale of Imprisonment by Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Now, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law has come forward with a new idea for how to fix it.
W. David Ball’s proposal begins with defunding state prisons, and making the counties pay for every inmate they incarcerate. In a recent paper, Ball argues that states should take the money they’re currently spending on their prison systems, distribute it among counties based on their violent crime rate, and allow local decision-makers to spend it as they see fit. If county officials want to use the money to fund crime prevention programs, they can; if they want to use it to put lots of convicted felons in prison, they can do that too.
“The hope would be that they would start using prisons at the societally optimal level,” Ball told me. “They’d say, ‘Here’s $50,000 we can spend on sending someone to prison, but that’s $50,000 we’re not going to spend on other things, like the police budget or drug treatment programs.’”
Making those trade-offs transparent could potentially introduce political pressure on prosecutors that they currently don’t have to deal with, Ball said. “It would at least introduce some competing voices that would say, ‘There are other things we can spend law enforcement resources on.’ Because the problem right now is that there’s no one who is going to stand up during a DA’s election and say, ‘We shouldn’t prosecute criminals to the maximum extent possible because it’s really expensive.’ I can imagine that under my system, you would have people saying there are costs to this, and that [local efforts to drive down crime] are being deprived of resources by these prosecutorial decisions.”
Underlying this argument is the idea that prison is just one way to deal with crime—and it’s far from clear it’s the most effective one. “There’s lots of evidence that prison is a superexpensive and really ineffective way to treat people’s criminogenic risks and needs,” Ball said. “The state should not pay for prison unless prison is better, and prison isn’t better.”
Ball writes in his paper that, under the existing system, “counties that choose to use state prison to address crime are, in essence, subsidized by counties that choose local programs such as probation and treatment instead,” since the state typically pays for the former, while the county pays for the latter. This is not just theory: Ball analyzed the use of prisons by counties all over California and found wide variation, even among counties that had similar rates of violent crime. His findings are best illustrated by a comparison of Alameda and San Bernardino Counties over the 10-year period of 2000-2009, during which they had similarly sized populations and nearly identical overall crime rates. And yet, Ball found, “San Bernardino's prison population was more than twice as high, on average, as Alameda's, and it sent an average of more than three times as many ‘new felons’ to prison each year.”
The difference can’t be chalked up to prosecutorial zeal alone—there are surely other factors at play. As a spokesman for the San Bernardino DA’s office said in an email when asked about Ball’s numbers, “No conclusions can be drawn from the statistics other than for the time period studied there must have been more cases in San Bernardino County that met the statewide standards for a state prison sentence.” But this underplays the vast amount of discretion that a prosecutor has in deciding whom to charge and what to charge them with, and that discretion is unquestionably central in determining a county’s felony admission rate.
Putting a price tag on the disparity between a county that sends a lot of people to prison and a county that doesn’t underscores the point that the decisions of prosecutors should matter to taxpayers: On average, according to Ball’s analysis, San Bernardino’s prison population cost the state of California $236,761,677 more per year during the time period in question than Alameda’s did. But voters in those counties don’t necessarily recognize that the prosecutors they elect are partially responsible for that difference—and they have little reason to care, since the cost is borne by the state, not the county. This is one of many reasons why county prosecutor races tend to be extremely uncompetitive: According to one study, which looked at election results between 1996 and 2006 in 10 states, the success rate for an incumbent DA running for re-election was an incredible 95 percent.
If criminal justice spending was allocated locally, as Ball suggests, the impact of the decisions made by local prosecutors would be more obvious to voters, which could exert pressure on the way prosecutors operate. As Ball writes, “The average person could more easily spot the linkage between increasing numbers of local prison commitments and, say, a decrease in the frequency of road repairs or a shorter public school year, allowing political checks on criminal justice to operate more effectively.”
NASA’s Chandra Finds Intriguing Member of Black Hole Family
“In paleontology, the discovery of certain fossils can help scientists fill in the evolutionary gaps between different dinosaurs,” said Mar Mezcua of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the study. “We do the same thing in astronomy, but we often have to ‘dig’ up our discoveries in galaxies that are millions of light years away.”
The intriguing object, called NGC2276-3c, is located in an arm of the spiral galaxy NGC 2276, which is about 100 million light years from Earth. NGC2276-3c appears to be what astronomers call an “intermediate-mass black hole” (IMBH).
For many years, scientists have found conclusive evidence for smaller black holes that contain about five to thirty times the mass of the sun. There is also a lot of information about so-called supermassive holes that reside at the center of galaxies and weigh millions or even billions times the sun’s mass.
As their name suggests, IMBHs represent a class of black holes that fall in between these two well-established groups, with masses in the range of a few hundred to a few hundred thousand solar masses. One reason that IMBHs are important is that they could be the seeds from which supermassive black holes formed in the early universe.
“Astronomers have been looking very hard for these medium-sized black holes,” said co-author Tim Roberts of the University of Durham in the UK. “There have been hints that they exist, but the IMBHs have been acting like a long-lost relative that isn’t interested in being found.”
To learn about NGC2276-3c, the researchers observed it at almost the same time in X-rays with Chandra and in radio waves with the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Network. The X-ray and radio data, along with an observed relation between radio and X-ray luminosities for sources powered by black holes, were used to estimate the black hole’s mass. A mass of about 50,000 times that of the sun was obtained, placing it in the range of IMBHs.
“We found that NGC2276-3c has traits similar to both stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes” said co-author Andrei Lobanov of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “In other words, this object helps tie the whole black hole family together.”
In addition to its mass, another remarkable property of NGC2276-3c is that it has produced a powerful radio jet that extends up to 2,000 light years. The region along the jet that extends for about 1,000 light years from NGC2276-3c seems to be missing young stars. This provides evidence that the IMBH may have had a strong influence on its environment, as the jet could have cleared out a cavity in the gas and suppressed the formation of new stars. Further studies of the NGC2276-3c jet could provide insight into the potentially large effects that supermassive black hole seeds in the early universe have had on their surroundings.
The location of this IMBH in a spiral arm of NGC 2276 raises other questions. Was it formed within the galaxy, or did it come from the center of a dwarf galaxy that collided and merged with NGC 2276 in the past?
This IMBH is one of eight ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in NGC 2276 studied by Anna Wolter of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, Italy, and her colleagues. Hundreds of ULXs have been detected in the last 30 years; however, the nature of these sources is still a matter of debate, with some thought to contain IMBHs. Chandra observations show that one apparent ULX observed by ESA’s XMM-Newton is actually five separate ULXs, including NGC2276-3c. Wolter’s study concluded that about five to fifteen solar masses worth of stars are forming each year in NGC 2276. This high rate of star formation may have been triggered by a collision with a dwarf galaxy, supporting the merger idea for the IMBH’s origin.
The results from Mezcua and Wolter and their colleagues will appear in separate papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Mezcua paper and Wolter paper are also available online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
February 25, 2015
End Big Money
End Big Money’s Chokehold on Democracy. Amend the
Constitution.
by Robert Weissman
The American political system is facing an existential crisis. Do we aim to be a democracy – meaning a system of rule by the people – or do Americans stand down and permit a very narrow elite class to operate a functioning oligarchy?
Our Constitution begins with the powerful words “We the People” and elaborates a political system in which the people are sovereign. Yet in a series of decisions, of which Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the most notorious, the US Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment of that document so as to erode our democracy. Now it’s time to amend the great document to re-establish democratic principles.
Americans widely perceive – correctly – that the political system is rigged. But even so, few realize how small in number are those doing the rigging. Occupy Wall Street focused attention on the one percent; but just the top point-oh-one-percent (.01 percent) are responsible for more than 40 percent of all political contributions. Fewer than 200 individuals and their spouses are responsible for almost 60 percent of the more than $1 billion in super PAC spending since 2010, according to a Brennan Center analysis. We’ll never know which robber barons and giant corporations are fueling the surge in dark money, but it’s almost surely as at least as tight a group as the super PAC funders.
Not surprisingly, a politics funded by this tiny class of the super rich and corporations is responsive to their own interests and not to those of the American people. And there is a big difference.
The super rich are not like you and me. More than half of the top 1 percent “favor cuts in Medicare, education and highways to reduce budget deficits;” only about a quarter of the rest of the population agree. Eighty-seven percent of the general population agree that “government should spend what is necessary to ensure all children have good public schools;” only 35 percent of the super rich share that sentiment. And while 53 percent of regular people believe that “government should provide jobs to everyone who can’t find one in the private sector,” only 8 percent of the super rich agree.
By overwhelming margins, Americans favor raising the minimum wage, reducing wealth and income inequality, stopping any more NAFTA-style trade agreements, breaking up giant banks, investing in infrastructure, taking measures to avert catastrophic climate change, and protecting and expanding Social Security and Medicare. But these strong policy preferences clash with the interests of the corporate class, and the corporate class prevails – thanks in very substantial part to Big Money’s dominance of our politics.
As a matter of basic democratic principle, we need to make clear that We the People have the authority to set the rules for election spending as we see fit. We must overturn the Supreme Court-created doctrines that “money is speech” and “corporations are people.”
Ending Big Money’s dominance of our politics – choosing democracy over oligarchy – will require a wide range of solutions. As a first and immediate measure, we need robust disclosure to end the phenomenon of dark money. For local, state and federal elections, we need to replace the super rich-dominated campaign finance system with one that empowers regular people to make a difference with small contributions, backed up by robust public matching funds.
Yet ultimately, reclaiming our democracy will require a constitutional amendment. As a matter of basic democratic principle, we need to make clear that We the People have the authority to set the rules for election spending as we see fit. We must overturn the Supreme Court-created doctrines that “money is speech” (meaning that election contributions and spending are entitled to the same kinds of robust First Amendment protections as actual speech) and “corporations are people” (meaning that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional protections as living, breathing human beings).
We need the amendment (or a Supreme Court reversal of its campaign finance jurisprudence) as a practical matter, as well. With current Supreme Court jurisprudence in place, we can empower small donors and enable public financing of elections, but we can only impose limited restraints on super-rich contributions to candidates (and even those limits are in jeopardy). Most important, for as long as we live in the Citizens United era, we can’t impose limits on outside spending by the super rich and giant corporations.
That outside spending has in many ways become the defining feature of our election landscape. Outside groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and those controlled by the Kock Brothers and Karl Rove, are spending vast sums. They concentrate their money on close races, where their spending often exceeds that of the candidates themselves. Outside groups focus on negative attack ads, which work, and for which they cannot be held accountable (unlike candidates).
In many races, it is the outside groups that are defining the contours of the campaign. There is no limit on outside spending, nor any limits on what individuals or corporations can contribute to outside spending efforts, so this is the campaign spending arena that by definition most elevates the corporate class. If you have any doubt about the decisive importance of this spending, consider this: The Kock Brothers have announced plans to spend, through their network, $889 million on the 2016 elections. That’s more than any political party.
Winning a constitutional amendment is, by design, incredibly difficult. But that’s no reason to shrink from the project. It’s right on the merits, and we need it as a practical solution. The idea of a constitutional amendment is also hugely energizing and mobilizing, in a way distinct from other reform measures. People get that the system is rigged, they get that corporations have far too much power, they understand that Big Money is corrupting our democracy in fundamental ways, they passionately believe that super rich ownership of our elections is incompatible with core notions of political equality. People understand how big the problem is, and they want big solutions.
People get that the system is rigged. They passionately believe that super rich ownership of our elections is incompatible with core notions of political equality.
Since Citizens United was handed down five years ago, a powerful movement has risen across the country calling for a constitutional amendment. Sixteen states have passed resolutions or the equivalent calling for an amendment, as have nearly 600 cities and towns. More than 5 million people have signed petitions calling for an amendment. Polling shows overwhelming support for an amendment, including strong majority support among Republicans. People turn out on the street for the amendment – last April, there were more than 150 demonstrations nationwide on the day the Supreme Court issued its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, another ruling designed to enable the super-rich to spend more.
Even if the movement for an amendment does not prevail, the energy around the effort is helping carry forward advocacy around disclosure, small donor financing of elections and other reform measures. This demonstrated and sustained grassroots demand for an amendment is the best means to nudge the Supreme Court – when someday its composition has changed – to overturn Citizens United and other harmful campaign spending decisions.
But this is not a movement organized around symbolic politics. The effort to win an amendment is gaining ground faster than anyone could have anticipated. In 2010, four US senators supported an amendment. In 2012, the number grew to 26. In 2014, following the McCutcheon decision, Senate leadership brought the Democracy for All constitutional amendment – establishing that We the People, operating through Congress and the state legislatures, have the authority to regulate campaign spending – to the floor for a vote. Fifty-four senators voted in favor. Not yet enough to prevail – winning a constitutional amendment requires a two thirds vote in each house, followed by ratification in three quarters of the states — but a showing of support that even a year previous was unimaginable.
We know exactly why the amendment came to the floor and why it won so many votes: Senators were responding to the demand from the grassroots. As the movement continues to gain power and support – as we quiet the skeptics and breach the established Republican Party opposition to reform – we’ll take the next step forward. The day is not long off when we win the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.
by Robert Weissman
The American political system is facing an existential crisis. Do we aim to be a democracy – meaning a system of rule by the people – or do Americans stand down and permit a very narrow elite class to operate a functioning oligarchy?
Our Constitution begins with the powerful words “We the People” and elaborates a political system in which the people are sovereign. Yet in a series of decisions, of which Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the most notorious, the US Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment of that document so as to erode our democracy. Now it’s time to amend the great document to re-establish democratic principles.
Americans widely perceive – correctly – that the political system is rigged. But even so, few realize how small in number are those doing the rigging. Occupy Wall Street focused attention on the one percent; but just the top point-oh-one-percent (.01 percent) are responsible for more than 40 percent of all political contributions. Fewer than 200 individuals and their spouses are responsible for almost 60 percent of the more than $1 billion in super PAC spending since 2010, according to a Brennan Center analysis. We’ll never know which robber barons and giant corporations are fueling the surge in dark money, but it’s almost surely as at least as tight a group as the super PAC funders.
Not surprisingly, a politics funded by this tiny class of the super rich and corporations is responsive to their own interests and not to those of the American people. And there is a big difference.
The super rich are not like you and me. More than half of the top 1 percent “favor cuts in Medicare, education and highways to reduce budget deficits;” only about a quarter of the rest of the population agree. Eighty-seven percent of the general population agree that “government should spend what is necessary to ensure all children have good public schools;” only 35 percent of the super rich share that sentiment. And while 53 percent of regular people believe that “government should provide jobs to everyone who can’t find one in the private sector,” only 8 percent of the super rich agree.
By overwhelming margins, Americans favor raising the minimum wage, reducing wealth and income inequality, stopping any more NAFTA-style trade agreements, breaking up giant banks, investing in infrastructure, taking measures to avert catastrophic climate change, and protecting and expanding Social Security and Medicare. But these strong policy preferences clash with the interests of the corporate class, and the corporate class prevails – thanks in very substantial part to Big Money’s dominance of our politics.
As a matter of basic democratic principle, we need to make clear that We the People have the authority to set the rules for election spending as we see fit. We must overturn the Supreme Court-created doctrines that “money is speech” and “corporations are people.”
Ending Big Money’s dominance of our politics – choosing democracy over oligarchy – will require a wide range of solutions. As a first and immediate measure, we need robust disclosure to end the phenomenon of dark money. For local, state and federal elections, we need to replace the super rich-dominated campaign finance system with one that empowers regular people to make a difference with small contributions, backed up by robust public matching funds.
Yet ultimately, reclaiming our democracy will require a constitutional amendment. As a matter of basic democratic principle, we need to make clear that We the People have the authority to set the rules for election spending as we see fit. We must overturn the Supreme Court-created doctrines that “money is speech” (meaning that election contributions and spending are entitled to the same kinds of robust First Amendment protections as actual speech) and “corporations are people” (meaning that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional protections as living, breathing human beings).
We need the amendment (or a Supreme Court reversal of its campaign finance jurisprudence) as a practical matter, as well. With current Supreme Court jurisprudence in place, we can empower small donors and enable public financing of elections, but we can only impose limited restraints on super-rich contributions to candidates (and even those limits are in jeopardy). Most important, for as long as we live in the Citizens United era, we can’t impose limits on outside spending by the super rich and giant corporations.
That outside spending has in many ways become the defining feature of our election landscape. Outside groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and those controlled by the Kock Brothers and Karl Rove, are spending vast sums. They concentrate their money on close races, where their spending often exceeds that of the candidates themselves. Outside groups focus on negative attack ads, which work, and for which they cannot be held accountable (unlike candidates).
In many races, it is the outside groups that are defining the contours of the campaign. There is no limit on outside spending, nor any limits on what individuals or corporations can contribute to outside spending efforts, so this is the campaign spending arena that by definition most elevates the corporate class. If you have any doubt about the decisive importance of this spending, consider this: The Kock Brothers have announced plans to spend, through their network, $889 million on the 2016 elections. That’s more than any political party.
Winning a constitutional amendment is, by design, incredibly difficult. But that’s no reason to shrink from the project. It’s right on the merits, and we need it as a practical solution. The idea of a constitutional amendment is also hugely energizing and mobilizing, in a way distinct from other reform measures. People get that the system is rigged, they get that corporations have far too much power, they understand that Big Money is corrupting our democracy in fundamental ways, they passionately believe that super rich ownership of our elections is incompatible with core notions of political equality. People understand how big the problem is, and they want big solutions.
People get that the system is rigged. They passionately believe that super rich ownership of our elections is incompatible with core notions of political equality.
Since Citizens United was handed down five years ago, a powerful movement has risen across the country calling for a constitutional amendment. Sixteen states have passed resolutions or the equivalent calling for an amendment, as have nearly 600 cities and towns. More than 5 million people have signed petitions calling for an amendment. Polling shows overwhelming support for an amendment, including strong majority support among Republicans. People turn out on the street for the amendment – last April, there were more than 150 demonstrations nationwide on the day the Supreme Court issued its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, another ruling designed to enable the super-rich to spend more.
Even if the movement for an amendment does not prevail, the energy around the effort is helping carry forward advocacy around disclosure, small donor financing of elections and other reform measures. This demonstrated and sustained grassroots demand for an amendment is the best means to nudge the Supreme Court – when someday its composition has changed – to overturn Citizens United and other harmful campaign spending decisions.
But this is not a movement organized around symbolic politics. The effort to win an amendment is gaining ground faster than anyone could have anticipated. In 2010, four US senators supported an amendment. In 2012, the number grew to 26. In 2014, following the McCutcheon decision, Senate leadership brought the Democracy for All constitutional amendment – establishing that We the People, operating through Congress and the state legislatures, have the authority to regulate campaign spending – to the floor for a vote. Fifty-four senators voted in favor. Not yet enough to prevail – winning a constitutional amendment requires a two thirds vote in each house, followed by ratification in three quarters of the states — but a showing of support that even a year previous was unimaginable.
We know exactly why the amendment came to the floor and why it won so many votes: Senators were responding to the demand from the grassroots. As the movement continues to gain power and support – as we quiet the skeptics and breach the established Republican Party opposition to reform – we’ll take the next step forward. The day is not long off when we win the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Most Liberal President
Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ—But That Doesn't Really Mean Much
Ed Kilgore, who was there, throws up his hands in irritation:
Since Gerson appears to assume that Clinton was strictly about appropriating conservative themes, I guess he cannot come to grips with the fact that the Affordable Care Act was based on the "managed competition" model that a lot of New Democrats preferred to Clinton's own health care proposal, or that Obama's "cap-and-trade" proposal was relentlessly and redundantly promoted by the New Democratic think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. Just about everything Obama has proposed on tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and even national security policy has been right out of the Clintonian playbook. Has Gerson noticed that Obama's not real popular with people on the left wing of the Democratic Party?There's a weirdly schizoid nature to Obama's presidency. If you were to call him the most liberal president since LBJ, you'd be right. There's really not much question about it.
But that's not because he's some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It's because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It's easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter's strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter's liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.
Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal. So is it fair to say that Obama is the most liberal president of the past half century? Sure, in the same way that it's fair to say that a Honda Civic is faster than a Toyota Corolla or a Chevy Cruze. But that hardly makes the Civic a speed demon.
Still, even with all that said, Obama is, in fact, more liberal than previous Democratic presidents of the past half century. He's rhetorically more liberal than Clinton, for example, and he's rarely felt the need to do any Sister Souljah-ing. What's more, while he may have made occasional noises about entitlements and budget deficits, he's got nothing like either welfare reform or bank deregulation on his record. Everything he's done has been pretty much in the mainstream liberal tradition.
Plus there's one more thing: Obama has been far more effective than either Carter or Clinton. That obviously makes him seem more effectively liberal than his predecessors. But this isn't really due to either a fervent commitment to radical populism or to shrewd management of the lefty agenda. It's because Obama enjoyed a huge Democratic majority in Congress for his first two years. When that went away in 2010, so did much of his success.
So two things are true: Obama is the most liberal president since LBJ and he's also a fairly standard-issue mainstream Democrat. Obamacare, in particular, doesn't make him a radical. It just makes him lucky to have had a Congress willing to pass it.
After 30 years of ascendant Reaganism, it's probably normal for conservatives to feel that any kind of liberal agenda is extremist almost by definition. But that's little more than an unwillingness to accept the normal pendulum swings of American politics. As Kilgore points out, Obama's tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and national security policy have been to the left of George Bush, but not really much different from anything Bill Clinton would have done if he'd been able to. In the end, Obama is a Honda Civic to Clinton's Toyota Corolla. A little faster, but still not exactly a thunderbolt.
Polling already...
Walker breaks out in national GOP race
Public Policy Polling's newest national Republican poll finds a clear leader in the race for the first time: Scott Walker is at 25% to 18% for Ben Carson, 17% for Jeb Bush, and 10% for Mike Huckabee. Rounding out the field of contenders are Chris Christie and Ted Cruz at 5%, Rand Paul at 4%, and Rick Perry and Marco Rubio at 3%.
Walker has more than doubled his support since his 11% standing on our January national poll, and Carson has moved up 3 points. Bush, Huckabee, Paul, and Perry have largely stayed in place while Cruz has dropped 4 points and Christie has dropped 2 points.
Walker is climbing fast in the polling because of his appeal to the most conservative elements of the Republican electorate. Among 'very conservative' voters he leads with 37% to 19% for Carson, 12% for Bush, and 11% for Huckabee. Bush has a similarly large lead over Walker with moderates at 34/12...the problem for Bush though is that there are two times more GOP primary voters who identify as 'very conservative' than there are ones who identify as moderates.
Bush is really struggling with conservative voters. Among 'very conservative' voters on this poll, just 37% rate Bush favorably to 43% with an unfavorable opinion. By comparison Carson is at 73/2, Walker at 68/3, and Cruz at 68/8 with those folks.
You can really see the divide between Walker and Bush's support on issues like global warming and evolution. Among primary voters who believe in global warming 37% support Bush to only 2% who favor Walker. The problem for him is that only 25% of GOP voters say they do believe in global warming- and among the 66% who don't Walker has the 35/10 advantage over Bush. It's a similar story on evolution. Among voters who believe in evolution Walker and Bush run pretty much even at 24/23. But that's just 37% of primary voters, and with the other 49% of them who don't believe in it Walker has a substantial advantage over Bush at 28/13.
The struggles Bush is having with some Republican primary voters don't seem to have anything to do with his brother's legacy. George W. Bush has a 74/21 favorability rating with them, and the closest any of this year's candidates get to that is a 56% favorability for Mike Huckabee. And the former President has plenty of credibility with conservatives- among those rating themselves as 'very conservative' his favorability is 81/14 compared to his brother's 37/43. It's Jeb's record on certain issues rather than his last name that is causing his issues.
Chris Christie just keeps on becoming more and more unpopular with Republican voters. Only 28% rate him favorably to 45% who have a negative opinion. Christie's issues with conservatives are nothing new- among 'very conservative' voters just 20% rate him favorably to 61% with a negative opinion. But increasingly we're finding that moderate voters don't like him anymore either- on this poll just 33% gave him good marks to 38% with a negative opinion.
2015 has been a struggle for Rand Paul in the polls so far. This is the second month in a row he's come in at 4% nationally, and he's only registered at 5-7% in our state polls so far this year as well. Over the last year his favorability rating with primary voters nationally has fallen from 58/21 to 42/24. It's not that he's had a big uptick in voters disliking him, but the 13% decline in ones who even have an opinion about him suggests he's not really grabbing the attention of Republican voters in the way the other candidates are.
Republican voters nationally actually have one elected official they like better than any of their potential choices for President- Benjamin Netanyahu has a 57% favorability rating. Huckabee at 56%, Carson at 54%, and Walker at 51% come closest but none of them are liked by as many voters in their party base as the Israeli Prime Minister.
Public Policy Polling's newest national Republican poll finds a clear leader in the race for the first time: Scott Walker is at 25% to 18% for Ben Carson, 17% for Jeb Bush, and 10% for Mike Huckabee. Rounding out the field of contenders are Chris Christie and Ted Cruz at 5%, Rand Paul at 4%, and Rick Perry and Marco Rubio at 3%.
Walker has more than doubled his support since his 11% standing on our January national poll, and Carson has moved up 3 points. Bush, Huckabee, Paul, and Perry have largely stayed in place while Cruz has dropped 4 points and Christie has dropped 2 points.
Walker is climbing fast in the polling because of his appeal to the most conservative elements of the Republican electorate. Among 'very conservative' voters he leads with 37% to 19% for Carson, 12% for Bush, and 11% for Huckabee. Bush has a similarly large lead over Walker with moderates at 34/12...the problem for Bush though is that there are two times more GOP primary voters who identify as 'very conservative' than there are ones who identify as moderates.
Bush is really struggling with conservative voters. Among 'very conservative' voters on this poll, just 37% rate Bush favorably to 43% with an unfavorable opinion. By comparison Carson is at 73/2, Walker at 68/3, and Cruz at 68/8 with those folks.
You can really see the divide between Walker and Bush's support on issues like global warming and evolution. Among primary voters who believe in global warming 37% support Bush to only 2% who favor Walker. The problem for him is that only 25% of GOP voters say they do believe in global warming- and among the 66% who don't Walker has the 35/10 advantage over Bush. It's a similar story on evolution. Among voters who believe in evolution Walker and Bush run pretty much even at 24/23. But that's just 37% of primary voters, and with the other 49% of them who don't believe in it Walker has a substantial advantage over Bush at 28/13.
The struggles Bush is having with some Republican primary voters don't seem to have anything to do with his brother's legacy. George W. Bush has a 74/21 favorability rating with them, and the closest any of this year's candidates get to that is a 56% favorability for Mike Huckabee. And the former President has plenty of credibility with conservatives- among those rating themselves as 'very conservative' his favorability is 81/14 compared to his brother's 37/43. It's Jeb's record on certain issues rather than his last name that is causing his issues.
One thing that continues to be interesting is that among Tea Party voters Ben Carson is really stealing Ted Cruz and Rand Paul's thunder. Carson's favorability with them is 80/3, compared to 70/3 for Cruz and 60/13 for Paul. Although Walker is winning the Tea Party vote, Carson's 16% is beating out both 10% for Cruz and 5% for Paul. This is something we're finding pretty much everywhere we poll right now.
Chris Christie just keeps on becoming more and more unpopular with Republican voters. Only 28% rate him favorably to 45% who have a negative opinion. Christie's issues with conservatives are nothing new- among 'very conservative' voters just 20% rate him favorably to 61% with a negative opinion. But increasingly we're finding that moderate voters don't like him anymore either- on this poll just 33% gave him good marks to 38% with a negative opinion.
2015 has been a struggle for Rand Paul in the polls so far. This is the second month in a row he's come in at 4% nationally, and he's only registered at 5-7% in our state polls so far this year as well. Over the last year his favorability rating with primary voters nationally has fallen from 58/21 to 42/24. It's not that he's had a big uptick in voters disliking him, but the 13% decline in ones who even have an opinion about him suggests he's not really grabbing the attention of Republican voters in the way the other candidates are.
Republican voters nationally actually have one elected official they like better than any of their potential choices for President- Benjamin Netanyahu has a 57% favorability rating. Huckabee at 56%, Carson at 54%, and Walker at 51% come closest but none of them are liked by as many voters in their party base as the Israeli Prime Minister.
Republican Presidential Debate
Hugh Hewitt Details What He Won't Ask Republicans at His Presidential Debate
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