Tag Archives: Pat Toomey

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Election: An Extreme Makeover


During the current campaign season, many Republican candidates have pushed to revive failed and unpopular policies from the GOP past, such as eliminating the Department of Education or privatizing Social Security. “We need to get back to transferring many of the powers of the federal government to the states,” said Alaska’s Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller, calling for the abolition of Social Security as we know it. “I’d start by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education at a cost of $50 billion and then move on to Housing and Urban Development,” said Utah Republican Senate nominee Mike Lee. Lee’s call was echoed by Nevada’s Republi can Senate nominee Sharron Angle, who said, “I would like to go through to the elimination. I think we start by defunding it, and the reason that we should eliminate it is because its not the federal government’s job to provide education for our children.” And these newcomers to the national political stage may find many sympathetic ears in the incumbent Congress, as the GOP’s shift to the right and embrace of the Tea Party has caused it to espouse an extreme anti-government zeal. These ideas — and others becoming part of the mainstream right wing, like ending the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship — highlight the extreme policy positions that have come to define the modern-day conservative movement and the candidates that it has adopted.

PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY : In 2005, President George W. Bush attempted to privatize Social Security, but the effort fell flat in the face of wide public opposition. Bush now says his greatest failure was not privatizing Social Security, and many Republicans are attempting to succeed where Bush did not. According to a Center for American Progress Action Fund review, 104 Republicans in Congress have, at one point or another, supported privatizing Social Security. In all, 47 percent of House Republicans and 49 percent of Senate Republicans are on record in support of the idea. Many Republican candidates for the Senate — including Pat Toomey (PA), Ken Buck (CO), John Boozman (AR), and Rob Portman (OH) — have also proposed some form of privatization. This push comes despite the 2008 turmoil in the stock market, which would have cost an October 2008 retiree almost $30,000 in lost savings. In the end, creating private Social Security accounts would impose new risks on seniors , create new administrative costs and benefit reductions, and wouldn’t even set the Social Security system on a path to solvency. In fact, such a move would force the federal government into trillions of dollars of new borrowing, as money that should have gone into the general Social Security system gets diverted into the creation of personal accounts. This is an unnecessary risk, as more than 13 million seniors (and 20 million people in all ) are kept out of poverty only because of Social Security.

ABOLISHING THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION : As recently as 1996, the Republican Party platform declared, “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” However, multiple bills attempting to do so were stymied in Congress. As ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes pointed out, “The last time the Republicans made a concerted effort to eliminate the Department of Education in 1995, they ran into a strong public backlash. Polling conducted by Hart Research Associates found that 80 percent of respondents in June 1995 wanted the Department of Education to be maintained, while just 17% wanted it eliminated.” And evidently not much has changed, as a new New York Times/CBS poll found that education funding is the last area in which respondents would like to see spending cuts. But that hasn’t stopped plenty of GOP candidates — 36 in all — from advocating for the Department’s abolition. And those candidates would find plenty of like-minded colleagues in Congress, as 75 incumbents have also supported the idea in the past. The Department of Education is currently responsible for the federal student loan program, Pell Grants, and education reform programs like the Teacher Incentive Fund and Race to the Top.

ENDING BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP : In April, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), after previously working with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on crafting an immigration reform package, proposed that the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship should be overturned. “I’m looking at the laws that exist and see if it makes sense today,” Graham said. “Birthright citizenship doesn’t make so much sense when you understand the world as it is.” While Graham’s declaration was challenged by conservatives outside of Congress — Mark McKinnon, a former Republican adviser to President Bush, said, &quot ;The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican party. It is a shame and an embarrassment that the GOP now wants to amend it for starkly political reasons” — Graham’s idea received a very different reception on Capitol Hill, with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) all saying Congress should at least hold hearings on the issue. In all, 130 Republicans in Congress want to consider ending the 14th amendment’s citizenship guarantee, which amounts to nearly 60 percent of the Republicans in Congress. As Keyes put it, “Ending birthright citizenship is no idle belief in the GOP caucus. Rather, Republicans have been pushing this idea for n early two decades, introducing 28 separate bills to eliminate birthright citizenship since 1995.”

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Final Countdown … a word from Jon Vogel


Just wanted to update you, President Obama is crisscrossing the country in these final days and our Get Out the Vote operation is in full swing. I have been on the phone with people in the field and our targeting director is crunching the numbers.

Undecided voters in key districts are heavily breaking in our favor — that means we have to double, no, triple our turnout efforts. There are several races where funds are too tight and they don’t have enough for their final day push on Monday.

That’s why I am turning to you folks — any last minute cash given online today will be settled in our accounts for Monday — I wouldn’t ask again but this is the difference between victory and defeat for races within the margin of error. Can you help me with a generous gift today? Contribute now.

Victory is on the line,

Jon Vogel
DCCC Executive Director

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The facts about Republicans …


Organizing for America

Republican Senate candidates Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Rand Paul in Kentucky, John Raese in West Virginia, and Dino Rossi in Washington have all pledged to roll back or eliminate the minimum wage.

Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania have all talked about privatizing Social Security — or eliminating it altogether.

Twenty of this year’s Republican candidates for the Senate have been asked about climate change, and 19 of them have said that the science is wrong.

But taking stances this extreme has consequences. Pat Toomey is slipping in Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson is losing ground. Raese, Paul, and Buck are running out of steam.

OFA supporters are out there every day, making record numbers of phone calls and contacts at the doors. And these conversations are changing elections. You are making the choice to voters absolutely clear: whether to continue to move America forward, or to go back to the failed policies of the past.

This election is an uphill battle — it’s a tough environment and special interests are spending tens of millions of dollars attacking Democrats.

But the more people find out about this crop of Republicans, the better our candidates do. The call scripts and ads are all ready to go to continue spreading the word. We just need your help to amplify the message. And we have nine days to do it.

Will you chip in $25 or more to help tell as many voters as possible about the choice in the final days?

https://donate.barackobama.com/Extreme

Thanks,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

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ENVIRONMENT: Climate Zombies


One of the defining characteristics of the current Republican Party is the near-unanimous denial of the science behind the threat of global warming pollution. “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones,” writes the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein. Many of the candidates — whom Daily Kos blogger RL Miller has dubbed the “climate zombies” — are signatories of the Koch Industries‘ Americans For Prosperity No Climate Tax pledge and the FreedomWorks‘ Contract From America. The second plank of the Contract From America is to “Reject Cap & Trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.” The Koch oil billionaires have pumped $1,125,400 into the campaign accounts of congressional candidates and $332,722 to state-level candidates, 87 percent to Republicans, and have contributed $1 million to the Proposition 23 campaign to kill California’s AB32 climate legislation. But Koch’s main influence is through its Astroturf arm, Americans for Prosperity, which has spent $649,188 in attack ads while organizing a massive get-out-the-vote effort for its Tea Party members across the nation. The polluting power of Koch Industries and other fossil fuel giants over the GOP in the Tea Party age is overwhelming. “[S]kepticism about climate science has become one of the many litmus tests for candidates backed by the surging right,” Nature magazine’s Jeff Tollefson observes. The denialism is an excuse to oppose green economic policies that would bring jobs back to America and clean the air, and would also limit the influence of the fossil fuel industry‘s dirty money on our nation’s politics.

ZOMBIES FOR SENATE: Remarkably, of the dozens of Republicans vying for the 37 Senate seats in the 2010 election, not one supports climate action, after climate advocate Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) lost his primary to Christine O’Donnell. Even former climate advocates Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) now toe the science-doubting party line. California GOP candidate Carly Fiorina is “not sure” that global warming is real, and is supporting Koch’s Prop 23 effort. Tea Party darlings are leading the charge: Florida’s Marco Rubio questions the “scientific evidence,” Kentucky’s Rand Paul charges scientists are “making up their facts,” and Nevada’s Sharron Angle has attacked the “climate change mantra of the left.” Some Democrats have made their opponents’ denial of science an issue.  When Koch-funded Pennsylvania candidate Pat Toomey said the science is “very much disputed,” the Joe Sestak campaign called him a “closed-minded ideologue bent on insisting that the ‘world is flat.'” After Wisconsin candidate Ron Johnson said that global warming is caused by “sunspot activity,” Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) responded, “I’m not going to take a course in Ron Johnson science any time soon.” However, in coal company-dominated West Virginia, both U.S. Senate candidates — John Raese (R) and Gov. Joe Manchin (D) — question the scientific reality that burning coal is destroying our climate.

ZOMBIES FOR THE HOUSE: If Republicans take back the House, Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) would take over committees and have pledged to launch investigations against climate scientists. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who apologized to BP and demonizes climate scientists, wants to become the chair of the House energy committee. And they may be joined by dozens of new radical global warming deniers who are campaigning to replace Democratic incumbents who were the swing votes in favor of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2009. “I just don’t buy into it,” says GOP House candidate Bob Gibbs (OH-18). It’s “crap,” says Steve Pearce (NM-2). Global warming is “a hoax perpetrated by leftist ideologues with an agenda,” believes Todd Young (IN-9). “I don’t believe we have a significant impact on climate change,” argues Randy Hultgren (IL-14). The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has identified fourteen top House races in which a strong supporter for action to reduce global warming pollution is being challenged by a denier of the threat of global warming, but there are dozens more climate zombies in every state of the nation (especially Texas).

ZOMBIES FOR GOVERNOR: In Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming, four Democratic governors who have supported clean energy may be replaced by Republicans who have expressed fealty to big oil in the November 2010 elections. Florida is under imminent threat from the rising sea levels, fiercer heat waves, and stronger storms resulting from global warming, but GOP candidate Rick Scott has “not been convinced.” In Illinois, Tea Party candidate Bill Brady says the “premise” of global warming is “wrong.” Minnesota’s Tom Emmer thinks global warming science is just “Al Gore’s climate porn.” Ohio candidate John Kasich believes “global warming is cyclical.” Even in the Northeast, where the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative cap-and-trade system has been successfully in place for years, Maine’s Paul LePage thinks “scientists are divided on it,” Maryland’s Bob Ehrlich is newly “skeptical,” and Massachusetts candidate Charlie Baker is “not smart enough to believe that I know the answer to that question.” The Western Climate Initiative — the regional compact scheduled to begin in 2012 — is threatened by California’s Meg Whitman, Oregon’s Chris Dudley, and New Mexico candidate Susana Martinez, who thinks the science of climate change is an “ideological debate.” Even more troubling is the growing opposition by Republicans to renewable electricity standards, which have long enjoyed bipartisan support. LePage, Ehrlich, Kasich, and Brady have all challenged their state’s renewable standards, with Scott calling Florida’s proposed standards “leftist energy proposals.”