Former House Majority leader Tom DeLay needs something to keep him busy now that he's left the cast of "Dancing With the Stars" due to injury. So he's attaching himself to the Birthers -- again.
Unofficial Birther headquarters WorldNetDaily is trumpeting the news: In an interview with the man once known as "The Hammer," Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh pointed out, "You got into some trouble for saying on TV that you weren't sure President Obama was born in the United States." DeLay responded, "What I said was, to answer a question from Chris Matthews, I said: 'Why wouldn't the president of the United States show the American people his birth certificate?' You have to show a birth certificate to play Little League baseball. It's a question that should be answered. It's in the Constitution that you have to be a natural-born citizen of the United States to be president."
Seetodeh followed up by asking, "Do you think he isn't a citizen?"
"I have no idea," DeLay answered.
Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay knows an opportunity when he sees one -- and not just an opportunity to do a little ballroom dancing. And he believes he's spotted one for the Republican Party in the current political environment. But there's a problem.
"The Republican Party doesn't have the organization or leadership to take advantage of this dire political situation that Obama is in now. We have these grassroots sprouting up, but not the party organization to use them," the man known as "The Hammer" told Politics Daily. "Republicans are leaderless ... It's all the same old guys who were in leadership with me, and those old guys aren't the leaders the party needs."
Delay also offered some thoughts on healthcare reform, saying he believes the current Democratic plans are unconstitutional:
The federal government doesn't have the authority to mandate small businesses .... The only way any of this health care could be constitutional would be if the government allowed interstate choice so people could choose health care policies from any of the 50 states.
Not long ago, Tom DeLay was one of the most powerful men in Congress, if not the whole United States. As House majority leader, he ruled with an iron fist, and established the kind of party discipline today's congressional leadership can only dream of -- at least, until he was indicted.
Now, DeLay's going to be back in the spotlight, albeit one of an entirely different sort. He'll be on the next season of the "celebrity" reality show "Dancing With the Stars," along with fellow luminaries like Donny Osmond, Kelly Osbourne, Melissa Joan Hart and Michael Irvin.
The show's executive producer, Conrad Green, told Entertainment Weekly, "We usually throw a few Hail Marys every season to people we don’t think are gonna say yes, but we think, oh, why not ask him. Occasionally, they come off. As it turns out, Tom DeLay likes to do a bit of the Two Step, he likes dancing with his wife. His daughter is a country dancing champion, I believe .... Now I don’t know whether that translates into him being the next Mario Lopez on the dance floor, but I think he’s gonna come into it with a big smile on his face and probably surprise a lot of people cause he’s gonna embrace it so much.”
Even if DeLay turns out to be the world's best dancer, going from House majority leader to being compared -- not in a wholly favorable way -- to someone best known for starring in "Saved By the Bell" is not exactly the dream career trajectory for most politicians.
(Hat-tip to Michael Scherer.)
A funny thing happened on the way to the Tea Party. The more furiously the party out of power denounces President Obama, the more confident Americans appear to be that voters made a wise decision last November. That would be the Republican Party. Remember them?
Every time you turn on the television, some Republican is ranting like the kind of barstool know-it-all who gives booze a bad name. Recently it was Tom DeLay, explaining to MSNBC's Chris Matthews that Texas might leave the United States to avoid (imaginary) tax increases. And here I thought the Dallas Cowboys were "America's Team."
After first giving us George W. Bush, then impugning the patriotism of anybody who thought invading Iraq was a bad idea, the Texas Knothead faction loses an election, and then talks secession. DeLay was making it up as he went along, claiming the Obama administration seeks "50 percent to 60 percent tax rates on American citizens." In reality, it seeks a 39.6 percent rate on yearly income over $250,000, tax cuts for everybody else.
It's also nonsense that Texas can divide itself five ways, forcing the United States to accept eight new Republican senators or kiss all five mini-states goodbye. (Would that make Austin the new West Berlin? Which tiny Texas would claim Willie Nelson?) According to the 1846 treaty annexing Texas, partition requires congressional approval. So as tempting as it would be to bid the Five Star State farewell, it's not going to happen.
Then there's Washington Examiner columnist Byron York, who actually wrote that Obama's "sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are." Got that? Apart from those pesky minorities, real (i.e., white) Americans dislike Obama. York's not a Texan; he's from Alabama.
Meanwhile, Fox News can't decide whether the new president's policies make him a "socialist," a "communist" or a Nazi -- words that once meant very different things, but have now come to signify "I'm a big crybaby who pitches a hissy fit whenever I don't get my way." MSNBC's Joe Scarborough uses similar language. Mediamatters.org keeps a handy "Red Scare Index" for people keeping score at home.
Ironically, the upshot of this crazy talk may be the opposite of that intended. Not only did a remarkable 81 percent of Americans express a favorable personal opinion of the president in a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, but almost two-thirds support his policies across the board. Asked to describe Obama in a single word, most said "intelligent."
Even more surprising, a recent Rasmussen survey found Americans favoring "capitalism" over "socialism" by only 53 percent. Among the under-30 set, capitalism edges out socialism 37 to 33 percent. Have younger voters decided that since most Americans already enjoy "socialist" water, sewers, trash collection, fire and police protection, highways, public schools, universities, hospitals, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we may as well nationalize private enterprise altogether?
Of course not. The average American could no more concisely define "socialism" than explain the infield fly rule in Sanskrit. But if Rush Limbaugh calls Obama a socialist, maybe a socialist's not such a terrible thing to be.
Regardless of how they label themselves, Americans are mainly pragmatists. Most are leery of abstract dogma. It's their very insistence on ideological purity that makes Republican Knotheads look so foolish. When Obama calmly explains, as he did last week, that he didn't come into office yearning to take over Wall Street and Detroit, people hear him.
"You know, I don't want to run auto companies," Obama said. "I don't want to run banks. I've got two wars I've got to run already. I've got more than enough to do. So the sooner we can get out of that business, the better off we're going to be. We are in unique circumstances. You had the potential collapse of the financial system, which would have decimated our economy, and so we had to step in ...
"With respect to the auto companies, I believe that America should have a functioning, competitive auto industry. I don't think that taxpayers should simply attach an umbilical cord between the U.S. Treasury and the auto companies, so that they are constantly getting subsidies."
Then he put it in terms every garage tinkerer from Ben Franklin to Thomas Edison through Bill Gates would appreciate: "I'm not an auto engineer. I don't know how to create an affordable, well-designed, plug-in hybrid, but I know that if the Japanese can ... then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same."
Many in Detroit would say that General Motors and Ford already have. But it's that "doggone it" -- straight out of the Kansas plains -- along with the president's almost preternatural calm and self-deprecating sense of humor, that people respond to.
Most understand that America needs not a theoretician, but a leader.
© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
When they write their retrospectives about the era that ended with the 2008 election, economic historians will undoubtedly credit George W. Bush with almost single-handedly moving the country to embrace extremist conservatism. It’s a simple storyline: Cowboy president drives bewildered American herd over laissez-faire cliff. What such reductionism will ignore, though, is what we must remember now: namely, that Congress also played a decisive role in the stampede.
As former House Republican leader Tom DeLay said, he and his colleagues deliberately started “every policy initiative from as far to the political right” as possible, so as to shift “the center further to the right.” The formula emulated Franklin Roosevelt’s fabled admonishment to allies: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
With Bush, congressional Republicans knew they had an ideological comrade in the White House. But they also knew he was confined by the (minimally) moderating desire for reelection and the (even more minimally) moderating limits of his national office. So, to reach their goals, conservatives had to compel their presidential friend to do what they wanted -- and compel him they did. When Bush’s tax cuts and deregulatory schemes hit the Capitol, Republicans inevitably expanded them to fully achieve the right’s objectives.
Of course, that triumph was the country’s loss, as Republican policies thrust the political center off a conservative precipice and America into an economic freefall. And as we plummet, we are desperately groping for a lifeline.
If we are lucky and we end up snagging one that saves us -- a huge if -- it will be one that is strong enough to snap the center back from the conservative brink. This super-durable bungee cord must have the force of law, meaning it will be woven by Democratic legislators now exerting as much pressure on President Obama's left as congressional Republicans focused on President Bush’s right.
When, for instance, Obama hedged on his promise to revoke $226 billion worth of Bush’s upper-income tax cuts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pushed him to fulfill the pledge and put the money into programs that better guarantee job creation.
When Obama initially offered up a stimulus bill filled with discredited business tax breaks, Democratic senators forced him to back off. Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., and Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., then argued that the president’s proposed infrastructure investments were too small to boost the economy. That led House Democrats to increase Obama’s spending targets.
As stimulus negotiations continued, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., tried to add provisions letting courts renegotiate banks’ primary-residence mortgages so as to prevent more foreclosures. It’s a common-sense proposal: Judges already have the power to renegotiate vacation-home mortgages, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank says existing bankruptcy laws are exacerbating the foreclosure crisis. While Obama opposed the initiative out of fear that banking industry opposition might slow the underlying stimulus bill, Conyers’ effort ultimately made the president commit to supporting the reforms in future legislation.
Then there was the progressive reaction to Obama’s demand for more financial bailout money. Turning a routine committee hearing into a modern-day incarnation of the Great Depression’s Pecora Commission, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., upbraided a Federal Reserve official for refusing to disclose which banks are receiving taxpayer dollars. The spectacle was one of many that whipped the House into passing a bill attaching strings to the funds. Obama responded by committing to enact some of the restrictions by fiat.
At once complementary and adversarial, this intragovernmental squabbling probably makes the conflict-averse Obama uncomfortable. But the “make him do it” dynamic could finally bring the center of Washington’s political debate closer to the progressive center of American public opinion. Even more important, it is precisely what will help the new president avert an economic disaster.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
As Time magazine notes, when George W. Bush went back to Texas last week, he found a divided state Republican Party. Well-coifed incumbent governor Rick Perry faces an intraparty challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison, who plans to leave the U.S. Senate before the end of her current term to battle Perry for the 2010 GOP gubernatorial nomination.
What Time does not explain, however, is that Bush has returned to a state far different from the one he left eight years ago. A rapid rise in the Latino electorate promises to turn the state purple in the foreseeable future, and the Republicans have lost seats in the state legislature in each of the last three election cycles. But more importantly, having placed all its chips on the wrong party, in 2009 the state has ceded nearly all of its national influence.
For the past 80 years, no state has held more power in the federal government than Texas. Starting in the 1920s, there have been only 10 years when the Lone Star state could not claim the allegiance of either the president, the vice president, the Speaker of the House or the leadership of at least one of the two major parties in at least one of the chambers of Congress. There have been relatively fallow periods, like the years following the departure of the last two Texan presidents, LBJ and the elder Bush, from the White House. It has been nearly a century, however, since Texas has experienced the power vacuum it is feeling now that the latest Texan president has headed home. And that is almost exclusively due to the fact that Texas has become so Republican.
The state had a good run, especially in that distant era when it was monolithically Democratic. In 1929, John Nance Garner became Democratic minority leader, and then two years later, after the Republicans were hammered in the first national election during the Depression, Garner became Speaker of the House. For the next 40 years, except for two years when the most powerful Texan, Sam Rayburn, was merely minority leader of the House, Texas Democrats were either Speaker, Veep, or President; often party leaders in Congress were Texans as well. For example, Sam Rayburn was Speaker from 1940 to 1961, with two brief interruptions, while LBJ was leader of the Senate Democrats from 1953 to 1961, and whip for two years before that.
When Richard Nixon replaced LBJ as president in 1969, Texas endured a diminished status for a time. But still, George Mahon was chairman of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, and soon Olin Teague was chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and John Connally was secretary of the treasury. By 1973, George Bush was chairman of the RNC and Bob Strauss was head of the DNC, but the state really regained its accustomed power when Democrat Jim Wright became majority leader of the House in 1977. In 1981, George Bush became veep; six years later, Wright became Speaker, and in 1989 George Bush became president (defeating a Democratic ticket that included a Texan vice presidential candidate). Order was restored to the world, at least as viewed from Austin.
When the elder Bush lost his reelection bid -- in a general election in which Texans came in second and third, and the winner was from next-door Arkansas -- the Lone Star state again suffered a brief period of relative powerlessness. Between 1993 and 1995, Texas had to make due with Clinton adviser Paul Begala and cabinet secretaries Lloyd Bentsen and Henry Cisneros.
But Texas quickly recovered, this time by going all in with the GOP. Once a bulwark of the Democratic party, Texas began to turn deep red in the mid-'90s. In 1995, Dick Armey became House majority leader, and Tom Delay became majority whip. In 2001, George W. Bush became president. Delay, long seen as the true power behind Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, took over Armey's majority leader job in 2003. When Republicans took control of the Texas state legislature, Delay helped redraw congressional lines so that the state would send even more Republicans to Congress. A delegation of 22 House members in 1959, all but one of them Democrats, had grown to 32 in 2005, 21 of them Republican. Texas again had reached a peak of power.
Since 2006, however, it's been a deepening valley. First Tom Delay lost his job. Then the Republicans lost control of Congress. Now George W. Bush is back in Texas. The most powerful Texas Republicans in Washington today are Senators Hutchison and Jon Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions. Hutchison was, until recently, the Senate GOP's policy chair, while Cornyn and Sessions helm the respective efforts of Republicans in the Senate and the House to reverse their fortunes, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.
And the other problem, at least for Texas Republicans, is that the state is changing. Texas became majority minority in 2005, when whites dipped under 50 percent of the population. The surge in the Latino electorate, 20 percent of the vote in 2008 and climbing fast, is the prime factor turning the state purple again, but younger white voters and Anglo transplants are also less Republican than older whites. Experts who spoke to Salon predicted that Texas would be a presidential swing state by 2016. While a Republican just won back Tom Delay's old Congressional seat in a Democratic year, on the local level the Democratic party is already resurgent. Democrats are now within two seats of a majority in the state house; they just used their increased power to force out Speaker Tom Craddick, the arch-conservative who helped Tom Delay gerrymander the state. Democrats peeled off enough dissident GOP votes to replace Craddick with a GOP moderate. A growing population means Texas is set to add three more seats in Congress after the 2010 census, but now it's no longer clear that that's a guarantee of three more Texas Republicans in Washington.
If Texas Republicans want to hang on to power in Austin, they should probably decide the civil war within their party in favor of Kay Bailey Hutchison, and the more moderate wing of their party generally. Nominating Hutchison for governor in 2010 would probably be smarter than reupping with Rick Perry, since Hutchison appeals to suburban swing voters and Perry's base is rural and socially conservative. But if Texans of all political tribes want to reclaim the power they once held in Washington, they might need to fast forward to 2016 (or rewind to 1928), and start electing Democrats to Congress again.
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