We don’t hear so much about the Tea Party these days, but it’s had a good run in Missouri, dominating the political narrative for a few years and managing to elect a slew of John Birch Society retreads who have joined forces with the rest of the GOP to work their backwards magic in Jefferson City. Although I would argue that many if not most of the Tea Party adherents were a bit confused about just what they stood for apart from the resentment occasioned by the first black president, some did talk the talk when it came to big banks and big money corruption in government. As recently as the last election, Virginia’s Tea Partying David Brat was able to defeat incipient GOP congressional star Eric Cantor in part by harping on big banks and the bailout.

Missouri’s Tea Party also vented about banks and bailouts. Nevertheless, when it came to selecting their representatives, Tea Partiers sent Wall Street’s dream team to Washington, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) and Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3). Both are charter members of what the Center for Public Integrity has dubbed the “Banking Caucus.” According to Alison Fitzgerald writing in Slate:

The group has been central to efforts […] to undo many of the financial reforms enacted in the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. At least 30 bills have been proposed to the House during the 113th Congress, aimed at chipping away at aspects of Dodd-Frank. Members of the banking caucus sponsored or co-sponsored 20 of those laws, […]

Wagner has done an especially enthusiastic job for Wall Street – most recently she got so worked up over a proposed Department of Labor rule that would require financial advisers to put their client’s welfare before their own bottom line that she proclaimed at a meeting of brokers and financial advisers that “we are at war.” And she quickly jumped into battle, introducing a bill, the Retail Investor Protection Act, to take the rule-writing ability away from the Labor Department and give it to the more easily swayed (by Wall Street) SEC.

In return, Wagner has been well paid by banking giants like Goldman Sachs, Oppenheimer Funds and big insurance trade groups. Between 2011 when Wagner was first elected to office and 2014, she took in $776,511 from the financial industry. I’m willing to bet that when you add in this year’s take, well over a million dollars of the reported $1.88 million] she now has in the bank come from similar sources, making her the “most prolific money-raiser” among the members of Missouri’s congressional delegation.

Luetkemeyer, for his part, hasn’t been a slouch. Not only does he carry water for Wall Street, he’s a go-to guy for the sleazy payday lending industry. His Clear Relief Act, has been characterized as a “sweeping deregulation bill for community banks.”He has also proposed several bills intended to chip away at the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren’s brain-child, which was created under Dodd-Frank to protect consumers from the worst depredations of the financial industry. For these Herculean efforts he reaped $788,181 from the financial industry between 2010 and 2014.

While Wagner and Luetkemeyer are working hard for Wall Street, they clearly aren’t working for everyday Missourians or any of the millions of Americans hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008 – unequivocally the result of the type of wholesale deregulation our dynamic duo are now peddling. Nor do their priorities seem to line up with the rhetoric of the Tea Partiers who helped elect them.

Jeff Spross suggests that the solution to this seeming contradiction may lie in the relatively privileged status of many Tea Partiers:

Much of the American right’s understanding of economics and its relationship to government is characterized by a lack of desperation. The idea that questions of security or starvation, dignity or destitution, could trump the abstract principles of “how capitalism works,” is just absent. The Tea Party arguably views Wall Street not as manipulative overlords, but as competitors in the sport of capitalism. Richer and more powerful competitors, obviously. But competitors still. And while they don’t want their competitors getting unfairly bailed out by the referees, they don’t want the game to be changed, either.

It is for less fortunate and less privileged Americans that the game itself is the problem.

Essentially, crony capitalism doesn’t mean the same thing to Tea Partiers that it means to you and me. As David Weigel has observed, “the Tea Party, after all, is not wholly set against the GOP’s business class. It’s just the latest populist movement funded and fueled by the Big Business.”  He implies that the Tea Party has functioned as an unwitting front:

[…] What’s the business-friendly label that’s going to be more potent than the Tea Party? Every successful movement of economic conservatives has been led in public by the non-rich, from the anti-tax farms of the 1920s to the property-tax-hating suburbanites in the 1970s to the “family farmers” who are, we’re told, the real victims of the estate tax. How do you make Rove-ism or Goldman Sachs-ism as popular as the Tea Party is, even now?

My introduction to the Tea Party involved a Town Hall meeting where several Tea Party seniors were waving signs inscribed “Save our Medicare.” They had been told – and believed – that the goal of Obamacare was to take their Medicare away from them to pay for healthcare for undeserving poor, probably black, folks. That was when I understood that this was not a movement that merited respect.

This impression has been borne out over the last few years as the GOP, which was the sole beneficiary of misinformed Tea Party ardor, has, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, gone after Medicare while basking in the support of the predominantly middle- and senior-aged Tea Partiers. Although Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, for example, has never exactly been a Tea Party favorite, he gets their votes. This is the same Roy Blunt who has voted again and again for Republican budgets that would voucherize Medicare while shifting much of the cost onto the shoulders of the recipients. Almost all GOP members of the Missouri House delegation, overtly Tea Party or not, have also consistently voted to support Paul Ryan’s proposed budget plans, all of which seek to voucherize or otherwise decimate Medicare under the rubric of “reform.”

Now one of the leading GOP presidential candidates, Jeb Bush, has put the issue on the table front and foremost, proposing to “phase out” Medicare. How does he plan to sell this “phase out”? By persuading the gullible that the Medicare sky is falling. Medicare, he claims, is too expensive and will eventually run out of money. Bear in mind that Bush, as Governor of Florida, went all out to cut taxes for the wealthy. It’s no wonder that he can’t imagine that Medicare solvency could be addressed from the revenue side – that’s not the Republican way; instead GOPers all want to reform it out of existence.

Nor, as a Republican, can Bush acknowledge the fact that savings realized through Obamacare have added years to Medicare’s stability, ensuring that the program is financially secure through 2030 – and proving that there are better ways to address the future of the program than to destory it through privatization. Ironic isn’t it? Medicare-baiting was a major mechanism used to rile up Tea Party seniors against Obamacare; now it looks like Obamacare is adding years to Medicare’s solvency. The voice of the Tea Party, the Republican Party, won’t “Save our Medicare,” but Obamacare might help us reach that goal.

 

Roy Blunt often goes along to get along when it comes to lots of the crazy shenanigans that have characterized the Grand Old Party in recent years. Nevertheless, when he can do so without exciting the pitchfork brigade, he occasionally exhibits a functioning intellect. Blunt never forgets whose ax he’s in the Senate to grind and it has nothing to do with Tea Party bromides and libertarian fantasies. No, our boy is in Washington to do the best that he can for Montsanto, AT&T, Big Oil, King Coal, etc. Nevertheless, he’s not above making use of his colleagues’ ideological excesses when the occasion presents itself, as now seems to be the case with the silly conservative controversy over reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank.

The Export-Import Bank. I know, very dry stuff. Nevertheless, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post describes the current conservative furor over the extension of its charter as “the heart of the battle to define conservatism, probably the defining ideological struggle of our time.” He summarizes the issues:

Almost out of nowhere, conservatives are suddenly campaigning against the Ex-Im Bank, which has to be reauthorized or its charter will expire in the fall and it will go out of business. If you want to get up to speed, here’s an explainer on the bank, but the quickie version is that the bank arranges loans to support U.S. exports, often by helping foreign companies buy U.S. goods. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything (the bank operates at a profit), but its critics say that it favors companies with political power.

Whether the Ex-Im Bank is good for the economy is a complicated question. But the bank’s effect on the economy isn’t what people are arguing about. Tea partyish conservatives have an ideological objection to the bank, not a practical one. They say it’s “crony capitalism,” so they want to kill it. While liberals have made similar arguments, today the White House wants it reauthorized, as do many congressional Democrats. The Republican leadership is caught in the middle, between its loyalty to business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, which want to see the bank reauthorized, and tea partyers who have discovered in this issue a way to prove their independence from big business and their devotion to pure free markets. …

So the Export-Import Bank helps businesses and is basically harmless otherwise, costing taxpayers nothing. Why are folks who routinely defend oil company, agricultural and defense industry subsidies so worked up? As Waldman posits, the Tea Partiers:

… like to think of themselves as rebels fighting against the go-along-get-along culture of Washington, so an issue like this is a perfect way for them to show their independence and ideological purity. By opposing crony capitalism, they can say their commitment to free markets is so fervent that they don’t mind bucking big business, which tends to prefer markets whose rules are written to benefit them rather than markets that are truly free. And that most of them probably never heard of the Ex-Im Bank until a month ago makes it easier to oppose.  

Since it’s a relatively insignificant agency, Waldman notes, they can act like free-market heroes without stepping on any really big corporate toes.

So where does Roy Blunt get into the picture? Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin opened a door that is very near and dear to our Roy, one that leads to the wish-lists of Missouri coal giant, Peabody Energy:

The Hill reported on Saturday that a proposal from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., would reauthorize the bank while reversing bank policies that prevent it from financing power plants that don’t adopt greener technologies.

The federally-run bank, which finances and guarantees some exports of U.S. goods, adopted the policies last year as part of President Barack Obama’s larger efforts to address climate change, The Hill reported.

The irony of it all. Some fools run around making noises abut “crony-capitalism,” which noises are then exploited by coal-compromised politicians like Manchin and corporatist bagmen like Blunt to do the capitalist cronies a great big solid.

And what about the fact that undoing the Export-Import Bank provisions will contribute to more carbon emissions from overseas sources? The ironies only compound. Blunt is on the record with the view that we have to be careful about enacting energy policies that could “drive jobs overseas to countries where they don’t care as much about what comes out of their smokestacks as we do.”  In fact, it’s the growing foreign, specifically Chinese and Indian carbon emission problem that folks like Blunt usually agonize about when asked why they can’t support carbon restrictions here – it just isn’t fair for the U.S. to take the big economic hit all by its lonesome they say, anyway our unilateral efforts “do little to address the global problem of carbon pollution” – even though we’re one of the biggest polluters.  Of course when a big time local campaign contributor wants to take their dirty fuel overseas unhindered, the same folks are Roy Blunt seems eager to help.

The reactionary/tea party wlng of the Republican Party is not stupid.  They understand that if Obamacare is implemented their philosophy of government will be shown to be a sham and they will be looking at decades in the wilderness and  being the disloyal opposition.

Freedom Works, a tea party astro-turf organization, is demanding that Republicans refuse to sign-on to a Continuing Resolution unless it defunds Obamacare. Freedom Works says:

The Continuing Resolution (CR) that allows funding for the federal government expires on September 30th and must be renewed in order for the doors to stay open in Washington. The CR is the best chance we will get to withdraw funds from ObamaCare. This can be done by attaching bills by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) or Congressman Tom Graves (R-GA) to the CR, which will totally defund ObamaCare.

I’m sure you want to know who in the Missouri delegation supports shutting down the government unless Obamacare is “totally defunded.”

They provide a score card:

Blunt is a co-sponsor.

In the House,

Graves is a signer.

Hartzler is a co-sponsor.

Luetkemeyer is a co-sponsor.

Smith is a co-sponsor.

Let’s remember what this means.  Those four Republicans are publically committed to shutting down the federal government if Obamacare is not completely defunded. Let’s go back to the “freedom” of health insurance companies denying insurance to pre-existing conditions.  Let’s go back to being a female as a pre-existing condition.  Let’s go back to having insurance companies spending less than 80% of their revenue on covering health care.

This is more embarrassing than some clown at the State Fair.

 

You know how every year you hear somebody say that such-and-such a color is the new black? Well it seems that Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann is such an icon of rightwing goofiness that now that she has announced her intention to retire at the end of her current term, commentators are searching for the new Michele Bachmann. And guess who the first contender to be named is? Missouri’s own Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4), author of Running God’s Way, a guide for rightwing Christians in politics, famous locally as the Tea Party darling and mostly closeted birther who is also the recipient of massive governmental farm subsidies.

Makes sense. the Tea Party queen stands down while one of the possible number one ladies in waiting takes the crown. Charles Pierce, who is leading the hunt for Bachmann’s successor, notes that among the  points in Hartzler’s favor is her intellectual acuity:

Among other things, Ms. Hartzler apparently believes that the heathen Chinee are spying on us through our toasters.

and her courageous stand for religious freedom for the right kind of Christians:

She’d also rather the government not tolerate those “fringe religions” because the First Amendment says that Congress Shall Make No Law Unless Vicky Hartzler Thinks Your God Is Freaky.

I’d say Vicky has a good chance of becoming the new Michele Bachmann, but I want to know if her election would mean that Missouri will become known as the Bermuda Triangle of Crazy? Do you feel proud that we’re first-off in the running for the crazy crown, or what?

ADDENDA: This is one account of the record of achievement that Hartzler has to equal or surpass in order to become the new Bachmann.

*Slightly edited.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), known as “Congress’s think tank”, has recently sent two reports concerning the Article V Convention to their chief audience-members of Congress and their staff.

Entitled, “The Article V Convention for Proposing Constitutional Amendments: Historical Perspectives for Congress (July 10, 2012) and Contemporary Issues for Congress (July 9, 2012),” the confidential reports were made available on the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Governmental Secrecy webpage.

The Article V Convention (AVC) is a method to amend the constitution by bypassing Congress-an action more and more Americans are prone to support as confidence in the Federal government has plummeted to all-time lows.

Congress has repeatedly been lambasted by abysmal approval ratings, but a record-low 10% was recorded by Gallop in early 2012-with a whopping “86% of Americans disapproving of our Federal legislature’s performance.”

People are waking up to the fact that the well-traveled road of electoral and party politics is where good ideas go to die, and consequently, more voters are choosing to self-identify as independents.

A recent Rasmussen poll from late June 2012 found that 53% of likely U.S. voters say that, “neither party in Congress is the party of the American people”-an all time-high.

Occupied Tea Partying

The compound effects of this overwhelming dissatisfaction with Congress has contributed to the birth of contrarian and anti-establishment movements such as the Tea Party in 2009, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Although the Occupy Wall Street movement has largely steered clear from traditional electoral politics-in many respects, both the Tea Party and Occupy movements have either been marginalized or made subservient to the interests of the status quo.

To date, neither the Tea Party nor the Occupy movements have succeeded in coercing substantive changes in the way the Federal government conducts the business of the people.

Sadly, Washington is still home to the “best democracy money can buy.”

Enter the AVC

Time after time, traditional efforts toward political action have been co-opted, stymied or blocked, and organizations like the Friends of the Article V Convention (FOAVC) advocate for a new front to be opened, where new possibilities and real hope for change can flourish.

The frustrations born from a lack of representation in Congress have led activists from across the political spectrum to pursue untried measures, namely, the Article V Convention which bypasses corrupt Federal political processes.

“FOAVC states on its website, “Are you aware that we are being denied our constitutional right to an Article V Convention to propose amendments, despite a whopping 400+ (or more) Article V applications from the state legislatures of 49 of all 50 states? Only 34 are required. So why has Congress ignored the Constitution?”

FOAVC’s position is that not only has the requirement been met to trigger the Article V Convention as early as 1911, but that Congress has cynically disregarded their constitutional duty to call the convention in favor of protecting a de facto monopoly power over the amendatory function. This puts members of Congress in a legal quandary as they’ve all sworn an oath to “support and defend” the U.S. Constitution, and yet-if FOAVC’s position is correct-have brazenly ignored the direct and simple command of Article V, thereby violating their oaths of office, a felony criminal offense.

Joel Hirschhorn of FOAVC stated, “…Congress never wanted to share the constitutional power to propose constitutional amendments. The public should know that the reason this part of the Constitution has never been used is not because of lack of interest by the states or of citizens, but because of Congress.”

The growing support and awareness of Article V has prompted the Congressional Research Service to generate two white papers on the implications of this untapped resource being utilized.

“The author of the reports, Thomas H. Neale states, “…the evidence of the founder’s actions at the 1787 Constitutional Convention suggests that they intended the Article V Convention as a “way around” a Congress unwilling to consider an amendment or amendments that enjoyed broad support.”

To wit, the Founders and Framers placed the convention method in the heart of the U.S. Constitution to provide the people with a means to exercise their right to “alter or abolish” when the Washington establishment has shown itself to be largely ineffective, tone deaf and unresponsive to needs of the people and nation.

Neale credits the rise of social media and information technology with creating a political environment where the speedy emergence of a movement toward an Article V Convention could become a very real possibility.

Popular ideas such as–

•Balanced budget amendment

•Repealing the legal doctrine of corporate personhood

•Securing the vote by providing open-source and independent verification of ballot results

•Campaign finance laws with teeth / public financing of campaigns

— have all been given lip service by the powers that be, but no real movement has occurred to pass these common-sense ideas into law. Amendment ideas with broad support could be visited at a convention, bringing the nation into an empowering dialog and debate-but these amendment proposals would never become law unless they’ve succeeded at garnering significant bi-partisan support from the various state legislatures (see Article V Primer below). This requirement within Article V for amendments to have broad political support absolutely debunks the oft-repeated canard of a “runaway convention.”

The CRS white papers also point to the fact that Congress or the National Archives have never kept a record of state applications for an AVC, forcing the government to rely on the Friends of the Article V Convention’s independent research of the Congressional Record.

From 2008, FOAVC sponsored its own investigation of the nation’s Congressional Record tallying the hundreds of applications that have been submitted-

“…this organization’s list is evidently the only comprehensive compilation of state applications. Neither Congress, which receives state applications for an Article V Convention, nor the National Archives, which is the custodian of most congressional documents, retains the applications in an organized collection.” ~ Congressional Research Service report on Article V Convention

Hirschhorn, co-founder of FOAVC and a former congressional staffer, commented on the government’s seemingly purposeful negligence, “…that Congress never established a mechanism for assembling state applications for a convention nor passed any law directly on the Article V convention means that Congress intentionally wanted to diminish the importance of the Article V convention option and reduce the likelihood of ever using it… …the new CRS reports sidestep the most crucial issue of all, namely, whether or not a sufficient number of state applications have actually already been submitted and, if so, that Congress has disobeyed the Constitution!”

An Article V Convention Primer

Article V of the constitution provides two methods for amending the U.S. Constitution.

The first is by a vote of two-thirds of both the U.S. House and Senate to pass an amendment, which then needs three-fourths of the states to ratify the amendment into law, thereby affixing it to the supreme law of the land. This process has occurred 27 times in the history of our nation.

The second method is through an Article V Convention, which is called into session when two-thirds of the states have applied for one (a threshold that’s already been met).

The convention debates different ideas and then votes on them. Aspiring amendments that have been successfully passed by the convention then need to follow the same track as the first amendatory method-ratification by three-fourths of the states. This strict requirement prevents any extreme or radical proposals from surviving-the Founders would not have been so shortsighted as to place a self-destruct switch in the center of their masterpiece.

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the PBS Newshour rebroadcast a segment originally shown at this time last year in which school children read Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was, as you might expect, both a charming and moving exercise. As I listened, however, I was suddenly struck by the specific phraseology in one of the refrains where King had begun to develop the variations on the “I have a dream” theme, especially the words I have bolded below:

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” – one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Let’s see – where I have I heard folks talking about “nullification” before. Could it have been the Tea Party – those folks who pretend to be so outraged when anyone points out that there are often hints of petty racism in their rhetoric? Could it have “dripped” from the lips of some of our own Missouri legislators – Jane Cunningham and Jim Lembke perhaps?

Nullification is a constitutional theory, based on a questionable interpretation of the 10th amendment, that holds that individual states can abrogate federal law; in its most extreme form, it stipulates that states are voluntary participants in the federal union and can withdraw their allegiance as they desire. It formed the theoretical basis for the Confederate secession and should have been laid to rest by the civil war. According to the Constitutional Accountablility Center:

… the tactic was most aggressively advocated for in the 1820s and ’30s by pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun (who started the short-lived Nullifier Party), extended by the Confederate secessionists in the 1850s and ’60s, and then reinvigorated by segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.

There you have it – a theory utilized by slaveholders and bigots.

But, you say, aren’t Tea Partiers and their representatives like Cunningham and Lembke using nullification to protest laws like Obamacare that affect all races? Indeed. But isn’t it interesting that the Tea Party grew out of opposition to a mild, centrist health care reform law that would bring millions of uninsured into the health care fold, while helping slow increases in health care costs overall. Didn’t you find the violence of the opposition surprising? Don’t you – at least secretly – suspect that the general rage might have had something to do with the fact that the law in question is the signal achievement of America’s first black president?

And, of course, there’s the fact that many on the right are convinced that big government programs benefit brown people at the expense of whites. Just a few days ago, in fact, one of the GOP presidential contenders let the cat out of the bag once again. Rick Santorum, speaking on the topic of welfare in Iowa declared that:

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

This in spite of the fact that only 9% of food stamp recipients in Iowa are black, or that most welfare recipients in the U.S. are white.

So was Mr. Santorum revealing his own racism, or pandering to what a 2010 survey described as the “racial resentment”  of his Tea Party leaning audience? Actually, I ‘m not sure it makes much difference. What the revival of nullification talk tells us, among many other things, is that we still have a way to go before Martin Luther King’s vision of the peaceable kingdom is fully realized.