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March 12, 2008
"Even Fair Tax Co-Founder Didn't Support Huck"
So reports Matt Lewis: "Robert McNair, co-founder and Finance Chairman of the Fair Tax was actually a major donor to Romney, Thompson, and Giuliani -- but I can't find where he donated a dime to Huckabee."
Posted by Kyle at 1:48 PM | Permalink
February 15, 2008
Economic and Religious Right Team up Against GOP Moderate
This week, the Club for Growth declared victory as incumbent Rep. Wayne Gilchrest lost the Republican primary to the Club’s handpicked candidate. The Club’s PAC, which has carved out a niche for itself with right-wing primary challenges, spent more than $600,000 on the race, mostly with TV ads calling Gilchrest a “liberal.”
But the Club for Growth, known for its hard-line supply-side economics, wasn’t the only outside group giving a boost to challenger Andy Harris. “It is imperative that Dr. Harris win this contest!” declared Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who trumpeted right-wing complaints about Gilchrist.
“He voted against the constitutional amendment (on) marriage; he voted to allow homosexuals to adopt children; he had been pro-abortion," Maryland state Sen. Alex Mooney told Family News in Focus.
This isn’t the first time the Club for Growth and Dobson have joined forces: the duo also backed a right-wing primary challenge in 2006 that ousted incumbent Rep. Joe Schwarz—who, like Gilchrest, had the backing of President Bush. Dobson crowed that the upset would “send a mighty signal that the days of anti-family, liberal Republicans are finally over.” Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, another Club for Growth target, accused the economic group of having a hidden social agenda in its choice of candidates and targets.
If so, it would only mirror the Religious Right, whose definition of “values voter” expands as needed to fit the GOP’s platform. In a recent appearance on MSNBC together, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and Club for Growth President Pat Toomey were in full agreement on the importance of the “three-legged stool.” “For [the] Republican Party to win they must have a conservative candidate who brings together the conservative coalition: fiscal conservatives, defense conservatives, and social conservatives,” said Perkins.
Indeed, while Dobson recently endorsed Mike Huckabee—the Club for Growth’s enemy number one—Perkins has maintained his ambivalence, always making note of the stool.
Posted by Ezra at 5:47 PM | Permalink
February 7, 2008
The Earmarks Candidate
In his last State of the Union speech, when President Bush promised to make his top budget priority the trimming of earmarked special projects, it may have seemed like a gimmick; after all, there was no veto threat when his own party had control of Congress and special projects ballooned. But at CPAC this afternoon, the earmarks obsession took center stage, and provided an aimless crowd of activists with a clear path to the only candidate they seem to have left.
It began with Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the right-wing Republican Study Committee in the House, and continued through a panel on the GOP being “lost”: Rep. Jeff Flake, Rep. Thad McCotter, Sen. Tom Coburn, and Sen. Jim DeMint all endeavored to explain that, although earmarks only make up about one percent of the budget, they are a threat “even greater” than that of terrorism, in the words of Coburn. And so they launched, parallel with the war on terror, a “war on pork—the gateway drug,” Coburn said, “to the spending addiction” that in turn will be “bankrupting” the country. The battle against earmarks, as former House Speaker Dick Armey put it, is a method of “leading the Republican Party back to its way.”
But in the short term, it was method of leading the CPAC crowd to the GOP candidate. DeMint, as he lectured on earmarks, complained that Republican voters “missed an opportunity of a lifetime” by not rallying around Romney, but he looked through his “tears [!] and disappointment” to a need to oppose Democrats in the general election. Armey groused about McCain’s one-time position on high-end tax cuts, but complimented him on the issue of earmarks, urging activists to “shape” their inevitable nominee—to extract promises. Surprise speaker George Allen—two years ago, speaking as CPAC’s hope for 2008—lauded McCain’s “character” and promised leadership in the war, in appointing judges, and in vetoing earmarks. And Coburn offered his grudging support, saying McCain would have the “courage” to face down Congress (except on immigration, he added quickly). McCain, he said, would appoint “strict constructionist judges” like Bork, Roberts, Alito, and Janice Rogers Brown, and yes, would take on those earmarks.
After all that, it was an anticlimax to hear McCain pledge that he “will not sign a bill with any earmarks in it.” But the rest of the candidate’s speech consisted of his effort to make clear to the assembled activists that he himself would emerge from CPAC larded with right-wing policy earmarks. Of course there was his about-face on comprehensive immigration reform and his revelation that he now supports making the “Bush tax cuts” permanent. But more broadly, he promised to fight for “our principles”: from protecting the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” of “the unborn” to appointing judges like Roberts and Alito.
Ignoring Laura Igraham’s dig earlier in the afternoon, McCain told CPAC he had “come to public office as a foot soldier” in their movement, and assured them he remains one today.
Posted by Ezra at 6:46 PM | Permalink
January 8, 2008
Huckabee's Populist Image Belies Bizarre Economic Plan
Mike Huckabee’s first-place finish in the Iowa Republican caucus was a victory for the Religious Right, after the combined efforts of a number of lesser-known right-wing figures eager to nominate one of their own. But while James Dobson and Richard Land issued cautious statements endorsing the victory if not the candidate, other national religious-right activists remained aloof, maintaining that Huckabee jeopardizes the vaunted right-wing coalition by alienating some of its partners, especially allies on the economic Right.
“I'm still skeptical that Mike Huckabee is the right man to speak for them because of his views on economics and foreign policy,” said Gary Bauer. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said Huckabee supporters “overlooked the fact he was not attractive to other members of the conservative coalition, and they said they don't care about us, and we don't care about them."
Indeed, these prominent religious-right activists are echoing people like Patrick Toomey of the Club for Growth, who called Huckabee the “John Edwards of the Republican Party,” FreedomWorks' Dick Armey ("Huckabee undermines the GOP's longstanding unity between its traditional and economic wings"), or American Enterprise Institute Vice President Harry Olsen. Toomey’s Club has done the most to convince Republicans of Huckabee’s alleged tax-hiking heresy, running anti-Huckabee ads heavily in Iowa since the summer.
Huckabee himself has played up this reputation as a populist, deriding the “Club for Greed” and talking about “the growing angst in the middle class.”
While many pundits seem to have accepted this presentation, it’s important to separate style from substance: When it comes to economic policy, Huckabee has arguably been running to the right of any of his major opponents.
Key to jumpstarting Huckabee’s surge in Iowa, along with conservative homeschoolers, was his early embrace of a little-known right-wing group called FairTax.org, which proposes replacing all income taxes with a 23 percent national sales tax. FairTax sent at least 20 buses full of people to the Ames straw poll in August, where Huckabee finished a surprising second-place, and the group almost went broke in the fall working the campaign.
Huckabee sells the plan with a populist flair, promising to abolish the IRS and put in place a “progressive” system that would be less for everybody while rewarding “hard work and thrift.” However, the substance doesn't quite match the rhetoric.
Economists and observers on the right and left have mocked the FairTax plan as “politically unrealistic and mathematically impossible.” The 23 percent number, for example, seems to be an obvious ruse to disguise what is in fact a 30 percent tax. (Here’s how that works: adding a $30 tax to a $100 purchase is what anyone would call a 30 percent tax – but the “FairTax” folks say that $30 is only 23 percent of the new total cost of $130.)
Even that number is not sufficient to meet current government spending, which would also be taxed under the plan: Supporters include the tax government agencies would themselves pay when computing revenue but not when calculating spending. Other estimates put the required sales tax rate to meet current spending at above 50 percent.
But beyond the legerdemain and “fantasy” numbers put out by FairTax, the plan for a national sales tax—which would ignore corporate income and capital gains as well as wages—is most vulnerable to criticism that it hits the poor and middle class hardest. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who worked in the Reagan administration, wrote that under the FairTax plan, “there would be an enormous shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to those with lower and middle incomes.” As Money magazine explained:
Let's say a hedge fund manager has a good year and earns $1 billion. If he can somehow manage to scrape by spending, say, $100 million, the other $900 million is tax free. He'll have paid about 2% of his income in taxes that year.
Such a scheme is far more regressive than the current income tax, and no other candidate has proposed anything so radical. Nevertheless, Huckabee continues to employ the FairTax plan as part of his “populist” image, which pundits and his right-wing opponents alike—not to mention religious-right leaders—have bought into.
Posted by Ezra at 1:55 PM | Permalink
November 27, 2007
Wash. Times Knocks Thompson Tax Plan
"Indeed, unless the laws of arithmetic are repealed, the Thompson tax plan almost certainly will lead to massive budget deficits." But CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow, a Thompson water-carrier, is in his corner.
Posted by Ezra at 11:19 AM | Permalink
August 9, 2007
Americans for Tax Reform Rates Candidates
Brownback, Huckabee, Hunter, Paul, Romney, Tancredo have signed "pledge."
Posted by Ezra at 11:35 AM | Permalink
August 8, 2007
Right-Wing Coalition United against SCHIP (Mostly)
While the conservative movement coalition of the economic right and social right has shown some small cracks in the last year, one bill in Congress has them singing the same tune: a proposal to expand the coverage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The Religious Right is complaining that the bill defines “children” beginning with birth, rather than conception. According to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, making “unborn children” ineligible to sign up for insurance “is a calculated move to open the door to federal taxpayer-funded abortions.” (FRC’s David Christiansen clarified: “The federal dollars wouldn't necessarily be used to do the abortion, but it's freeing up states to perform these other services, including abortion, with their own state money.”)
Meanwhile, National Right to Life Committee asserted that the bill would lead to Medicare “rationing” and thus “involuntary euthanasia.” “They have attacked the sanctity of life both at the beginning and the latter stages of life,” cried Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, speaking of “the Democratic leadership” in Congress.
In addition, the Religious Right warns that the bill renews funding for abstinence education, but doesn’t restrict it to abstinence-only programs. “They’re simply giving states more money to fund Planned Parenthood and the programs that teach our children to have sex,” complained Linda Klepacki of Focus on the Family. “Comprehensive sex education will once again have a monopoly on your school systems.”
Meanwhile, economic-right activists are warning that expanding SCHIP is “a step towards socialism.” In this, they find welcome support from Perkins, who – despite his warnings about abortion – wrote that the “[m]ost important” aspect of the bill is that “its expansion represents a direct attack on private insurance, pushing Americans closer to what many Democratic leaders have long advocated--government-run, taxpayer-funded, universal health care, managed with the same efficiency and customer care as your local DMV.”
Both the Heritage Foundation and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform have trashed the bill. But as Robert Novak reports, they are having some trouble on the details, arguing with each other over right-wing amendments offered by Republicans.
The 42 senators and 196 House members who have signed a no-tax-increase pledge received a stern warning Wednesday from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform: If you vote for Amendment 2548 to the Democratic-sponsored expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), you will violate your solemn promise. However, Amendment 2548 is not the product of tax-and-spend liberals but of conservative lawmakers and policy experts.
Sen. Richard Burr, a first-term conservative Republican from North Carolina and principal sponsor of 2548, pulled it off the floor Thursday night as SCHIP expansion passed the Senate, 68 to 31. The conservative movement is split over Norquist's warning, with two right-wing think tanks at each other's throats. Sponsors of the Burr amendment are furious that they are being depicted as tax-increasers when they claim they are fighting a movement toward "socialized medicine" in America.
This disarray on the right is part of a broader conservative breakdown. SCHIP passage, with notable Republican support, means that the Democrats -- 12 years after the failure of "Hillary care" -- have figured out how to market a government-financed plan. The quarrel over the Burr amendment reflects not only a failed Republican reaction to big government but also a weakening of GOP resolve to hold down taxes.
Posted by Ezra at 10:15 AM | Permalink
August 5, 2007
Huckabee under Fire before Ames Straw Poll
With the upcoming straw poll in Ames, Iowa a make-or-break moment for second-tier GOP presidential candidates – and for Mitt Romney, the only major candidate not to skip the event – tensions at the bottom are flaring up. The Club for Growth -- a group known for translating its strict economic conservatism into large cash expenditures in Republican primaries to weed out so-called “Republicans in Name Only” – has made its first TV ad of the 2008 campaign, spending $85,000 in the Des Moines/Ames market to accuse former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee of “a willingness to slap a tax increase on everything from groceries to nursing home beds.”
Huckabee denied the tax-and-spend charge, which is a rehash of the Club for Growth’s “white paper” against Huckabee from January.
But that’s not Huckabee’s only problem. While Mitt Romney’s campaign has had to deal with anti-Mormon sentiment among some conservative Christians, which many see as parallel to John F. Kennedy facing anti-Catholicism in 1960, one Huckabee supporter decided to turn back the clock, targeting Catholic Sen. Sam Brownback. One Rev. Tim Rude, in an e-mail sent to Iowa Evangelicals, noted that Huckabee, unlike Brownback, is “one of us”:
Huckabee is an evangelical. He has not learned how to speak to evangelicals; i.e. Bush 41 & 43. He is one of us. I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002. Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s. I don’t if this fact is widely known among evangelicals who are supporting Brownback.
Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, has made much of his pious past. He’s called on religious-right activists choosing candidates “to be Christian leaders, not Republican leaders,” and of the potential nomination of Rudy Giuliani, he said back in April,
I am Christian first; I am a Republican second. And so, my convictions are what led me to the Republican Party. And I am not saying that I would never vote for a person who is different from me, because obviously I have to vote for a lot of people who are different than me and have different views. But my value system is the one thing I have to hold on to. A hundred years from now, which party is in power is not going to make a whole lot of difference, but whether I was true to my moral compass means everything.
Huckabee disavowed Rude’s comments – which was good enough for the Catholic League. But given the stakes for the two long-shot candidates, both competing for the all-important narrow slice of the electorate – conservative Christian Republicans in Iowa – neither is looking to back down. Brownback’s campaign called his apology “tepid,” and Huckabee’s campaign fired back hard – telling Brownback to “stop whining and start showing some of the Christian character he seems to always find lacking in others.”
Posted by Ezra at 9:51 AM | Permalink
July 19, 2007
Well, How Big Is Your Bathtub?
The National Tax Limitation Committee and the National Center for Policy are hosting an awkwardly worded “The ‘Optimal (Right) Size of Government’ Conference” (PDF) tomorrow that will bring together “more than 20 of the leading free-market experts will convene in Washington to discuss whether there is and can be an objective standard to determine the proper size and role of government.”
Among the participants is Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform – and it is not hard to figure out what his view of the proper size of the government will be:
“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Posted by Kyle at 6:45 PM | Permalink
July 17, 2007
Club for Growth President: Movement 'All About Protecting Our Christian Heritage'
In 2004 and 2006, the Club for Growth emerged as a major factor in a number of Republican primary races, specializing in challenging incumbents from the Right. The group spent millions in direct contributions and independent advertising to nearly unseat Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in 2004 and Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee in 2006, and they succeeded in ousting Michigan Rep. Joe Schwarz. Chafee, who narrowly survived the brutal primary challenge only to lose in the general election, accused the Club of backing a hidden social agenda, but the group insisted it was strictly business, with a public focus on advocating for policies like tax cuts on investment income.
But Club for Growth President Pat Toomey struck a different chord speaking at a recent meeting of a Christian conservative group in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he said the Club continues to “scour” for right-wing challengers:
The featured speaker was former U.S. Congressman Pat Toomey, who provided the crowd with an update on the conservative movement.
Toomey lost in the primary Senate race against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. He is also the president of the Washington-based conservative group The Club for Growth, which promotes economic freedom and raises funds for conservative candidates.
"It's all about protecting our Christian heritage," Toomey said. "And, a culture that is under assault."
Posted by Ezra at 5:07 PM | Permalink
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