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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsComing Undone -- Josh Marshall
By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 10, 2017 9:31 AM
For the last nine months in some way for the last 28 months weve been told there was some breaking point coming where President Trumps hold over the GOP, his supporters or some mix of the two was about to come undone. I flagged a few articles last night that suggested something like that might be coming. Im not suggesting some major rupture is afoot. But for a few different reasons, I do think this blow up with Bob Corker may be something new and different.
This is for two specific reasons: the 2018 election and tax reform.
A big tax cut (currently under the marketing term tax reform) should be the easiest thing for the GOP majority to pass. Tax cuts are goodies for the recipients and to a great degree irrelevancies for those paying: the costs are too vague and spread out to generate the political traction weve seen with cutting peoples health care coverage. Yet the process has been so jagged and disorganized that even this is looking harder than it should be. Starting a civil war with his own party makes Trumps job even harder.
Then theres the election. I had been quite skeptical of this idea that Steve Bannon was going to recruit a large number of challengers to GOP Senate incumbents. Now thats looking much more real. He even seems to be focusing on the most conservative and tractable of incumbents like Sen. Barrasso of Wyoming. Notably, Wyoming may be further from reach for Democrats even than Alabama, even with the craziest candidate. So unlike Arizona, where the Bannonites are directly endangering a GOP seat, Wyoming may be a free shot in purely electoral terms. But electoral terms are not the only issue.
Policy achievements have a reciprocal and catalytic relationship with elections. Strength leads to strength and the opposite is just as true. The fewer electoral achievements the greater the pressure on GOP congressional majorities. The darker the electoral outlook seems, the harder it is to command those majorities in legislative terms. Disciplining recalcitrant members of a Presidents congressional party goes back literally centuries in American history. But doing that from a position of weakness rather than strength is quite difficult. President Trump has his back against the wall on the legislative front. But hes not focusing on tax reform. Hes picking new legislative fights and (albeit perhaps indirectly) going to war with Senators he needs in his camp for critical legislation. Unbridled aggression, going to war with everyone at once, can work in some cases. I dont see it working here.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/coming-undone
yellerpup
(12,253 posts)Whining is the other.
procon
(15,805 posts)Republicans seems determined to elect the worst people they can find. They are uniformly unqualified, incompetent, ignorant, jingoistic, misogynistic, fundamentalist and authoritarian, and they are all determined to destroy the normal government functions that are vital to our nation and its role in world affairs.
I can't imagine what they think to accomplish in undermining our whole system government. We are not a patchwork of isolated, independent city-states, each with a different purpose and laws unto themselves. Maybe that's the only way they can force their ideas on the rest of us. Since they can't persuade enough people to join them through letgitimate means, maybe they can do it by destroying the regular order of society until nothing is left but some bizarro syfy tale of an austere, authoritarian theocratic state ruled by a tyrannical madman.