The Exodus Of The Governors

With Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano now ensconced in Barack Obama's cabinet, and with perhaps Kathleen Sebelius perhaps joining them as Secretary of Agriculture (I don't know if that will please the foodies who want a "sustainable choice"), the number of Democratic governors leaving in the middle of their second terms rises to three. That's 3 out of 28 Democratic governors, which seems to me to be a high number. From a party-building standpoint, this doesn't seem to be a great idea, particularly in Arizona, where a Republican Secretary of State will now replace Napolitano as Governor, and Kansas, where there's a conservative Republican legislature and Sebelius vetoed a lot of bad bills. However, as FMguru noted in the comments the other day, this is a bad time to be a governor. Revenues from state taxes and property taxes are way down, and budget gaps are growing. In fact, Arizona has the biggest budget deficit in the nation, at a whopping 24% of total spending. And balanced budget amendments demand that either taxes rise or services get cut. There's no way out of the mess (save for a more generous stimulus package to state and local governments than I expect) and the pain will be deeply felt. These governors are leaving at the right time for their credibility.

The question is whether the Republican governors, who are stuck at their posts, will make good choices or drown the government in the bathtub, which would have catastrophic consequences.

In the wake of a dreary election for Republicans, the quest to find their new leaders is on, and the party's governors think they can fill the void. The problem is their states are heading for budget difficulties that may compel the governors to swallow hard and either propose or accept tax increases.

And there is no better way to alienate the base of the Republican Party than to push for, or acquiesce to, tax increases.

"This is a tremendous opportunity to separate the sheep from the goats," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "The guys who turn around and say 'I can't rein in spending, I must raise taxes'...are going to have a hard time."

It must be so easy to be a mewling child like Grover Norquist, playing to the selfish fears of his base, acting like a three year-old at the mall. This crisis will hopefully domesticate him, so that he might pee on the furniture a bit, but he won't be much of a problem anymore.

By the way, his Governors aren't listening to him anymore.

Among the states led by Republicans, Florida may have the biggest headache. Gov. Crist faces a $1.7 billion mid-fiscal-year shortfall, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Meanwhile, tax revenue in the state, which doesn't have an income tax, plunged 8.2% in the quarter ended in September from a year earlier as sales took a hit, according to the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. Seeking to balance the budget, Gov. Crist has said he would consider a cigarette-tax increase of 50 cents a pack.

A similar situation is playing out in Mississippi, where Gov. Haley Barbour, widely viewed as a star among Republicans, proposed a 24-cent-a-pack cigarette-tax increase and a host of other tobacco-related fees. The combined fees, if implemented, are projected to create $80 million in revenue for a state with a roughly $24 million midyear shortfall.

It's called reality, and it's hitting governors in the face. The real problem is all the balanced budget amendments, which paralyze states and force cuts at the worst possible time. But poor Grover probably was a cheerleader for them as well, so he's going to have to take the tax hikes like a good little boy.

Wherefore Republicans?

The most entertaining parlor game in the media is figuring out where Republicans go from here, because a new Administration facing major challenges at home and abroad just isn't sexy enough, I guess. And so you have some jockeying for power among the leading lights of conservatism. I was a little worried that some of them were catching on after reading this:

Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, poised to ascend to House Republicans' No. 2 leader this week, said the Republican Party in Washington is no longer "relevant" to voters and must stop simply espousing principles. Instead, it must craft real solutions to health care and the economy.

"Where we have really fallen down is, we have lacked the ability to be relevant to people's lives. Let's set aside the last eight years, and our falling down in living up to expectations of what we said we were going to do," Mr. Cantor told The Washington Times in his district office outside of Richmond. "It's the relevancy question."

That's pretty much right, and one could see a new Republican Party with legitimate, free-market solutions on things like health care and the environment. This is how the Tories under David Cameron, waving a green banner, are rising to prominence in England.

Fortunately, far more conservatives are focused on taking the party back into the distant past.

Lee Edwards, a historian of the conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation, said that in meetings with conservative leaders since the election there was an emerging consensus that the Republicans had been hurt by drifting away from conservative principles and that religious conservatives, economic conservatives and strong-military conservatives had seemed to realize the need to unite to regain power.

“It isn’t a question of stressing economic issues or stressing social issues,” Mr. Edwards said. “What we have to do is to go back to what Ronald Reagan did and put together a coalition.” [...]

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, scoffed at calls for the Republicans to move left, which he said had followed Republican defeats in 1964, 1976 and 1992. And he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.

“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.

Whew!

Then there are others who don't think they have much of a problem.

Older party hands pointed to John McCain’s lackluster campaign and the difficult terrain on which Republicans found themselves battling this year, and they eschewed any sky-is-falling rhetoric. The up-and-comers, meanwhile, sounded the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes.

“I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party, and this ain’t it,” assured Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who was RNC chairman in the 1990s. “I’ve seen it a lot worse."

Thank you Haley Barbour!

There's a certain justice to this. Republicans have spent the last decade tossing out apostates and using loyalty oaths and purity tests to make their party monochromatic and completely ideological. Now when they hit hard times, OF COURSE they can't figure out the way back, because they all have the same failed ideas and principles.

I think I'm going to tune out of this "debate" for the next several months and just go back to Matt Stoller's dead-on precis.

The GOP is going to do is futz around for awhile with the fake moderate versus conservative argument and then eventually find a way to tap into the newly emergent overt racism. It may happen in 2010, and it's impossible to predict whether the issues will be framed around 'law and order' as the millions of unemployed young people inevitably do what young people do when they are bored and disempowered in a recession, or some sort of stabbed in the back narrative around Iraq or Afghanistan, or some new set of issues focused on the fallout from this very scary financial crisis. Whatever happens the party will reorganize on the internet and that's going to seem really cool and innovative and counter-intuitive except that it will be perfectly normal for a political party to reorganize using a culture's mainstream medium for organizing, which is the internet. The right already did it once, with Drudge and the Free Republic in the 1990s.

The animus for the new Republicans, though, will not be fake conservative principles like low taxes, a strong military, and family values, because Republicans like taxes on non-rich people, they like hollowing out the military, and the GOP leadership is full of sexually tortured souls. It's going to be racism, as it always has been. There, soul-searching over. And this blog post only took you five minutes to read, which is probably a bit shorter than it will take for the Republicans to find and manufacture millions of new right-wing dog whistles.

Stamping Out Suppression In Mississippi

I really thought that Haley Barbour and his gang was going to get away with it, but the state Supreme Court grew a spine:

The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the special election to replace Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) – who resigned last December – will appear near the top of the November ballot.

The court ruled 8 to 1 that the ballot layout approved by Republican Governor Haley Barbour violated state election law by listing the race at the very bottom of the ballot. Barbour was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997 [...]

Many saw Barbour’s choice as a hardball political tactic to discourage voter participation in a close Senate race. Democrat Ronnie Musgrove is within striking distance of unseating former Republican congressman Roger Wicker, whom Barbour appointed last winter to replace Lott.

They're trying to hide this race because Musgrove is a former Governor and proven winner with a compelling story.



But the voter suppression tactics are going to sprout up like daisies as we get closer to Election Day. And that's aside from the potential voter registration database glitches (which could just randomly eliminate people's voter registration) and high turnout on Election Day which could end up with long lines and voters left out in the cold.

Some friends of ours have set up a Voter Suppression Wiki to call attention to a lot of these efforts. I'm certainly going to be checking in throughout the next month or so. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

MS-Sen: Barbour Fought The Law, And The Law Won

Good news from Mississippi: a county judge has ruled that Haley Barbour is breaking the law and must schedule a special election for Trent Lott's Senate seat within 90 days.

A Hinds County Circuit judge ruled today that Gov. Haley Barbour exceeded his constitutional authority by setting the special election to replace former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott for November [...]

DeLaughter voided Barbour's proclamation that scheduled the election for Nov. 4, 2008.

In his order, DeLaughter said the election should be held "within 90 days of the governor's Dec. 20, 2007 proclamation of writ of election...on or before March 19, 2008.

Hood cited Mississippi Code 23-15-855, which applies to U.S. senator vacancies. He and Barbour have differing interpretations of that statute.

Good for Attorney General Jim Hood for pursuing this in the interest of justice and the rule of law. DeLaughter's interpretation that the election must be held within 90 days of Lott's resignation means that there's only a little more than 60 days left. I expect appeals, but this could be a slingshot of an election, and Ronnie Musgrove, the Democratic former governor, is the only candidate with the statewide recognition in a quick-strike race. (Musgrove is a very conservative Democrat and is likely to be infuriating in the Senate, but it'd be good to reduce that vice-lock on the South that the Republics have).

UPDATE: Here's Gov. Musgrove talking about his effort to be elected to the Senate.

Trent Lott Inc., Open For Business

I'm watching the New Hampshire state dinner, and I saw Howard Dean note that the Democratic ethics reform law chased Denny Hastert and Trent Lott out of the Congress so they could cash in with lobbying shops before the hammer came down. Turns out that Lott and his good buddy John Breaux have teamed up to service corporate America.

Putting weeks of speculation to rest, former Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and John Breaux (D-La.) confirmed Friday they plan to file paperwork next week to form a powerful lobbying partnership called The Breaux Lott Leadership Group....

“This is not a well kept secret to say the least,” Lott said. “We’ve worked together for many years in the House and Senate and in the leadership together in the Senate. We thought it was a good opportunity and a fun opportunity to work together.

It's so sad. Lott clearly left to cash in because he just couldn't wait to get rich from all those corporate dollars. He tried to lie about it for a while, but it was obvious. I'm sure Dean Broder will get visions of sugar plums from this bipartisan circle jerk (and really, John Breaux is no Democrat), but these two ought to be banished from lobbying their colleagues until every one of them is out of the Congress. That'd be a legitimate ethics law. Our government shouldn't be for sale. And it's a good thing for Howard Dean to bring up. This is a fundamental fault line between the two parties.

Meanwhile, while Lott's replacement Roger Wicker has been installed, Mississippi's Attorney General is suing Haley Barbour to force him to follow the law.

Republican Congressman Roger Wicker (R-MS) was named as the appointee to Trent Lott's Senate seat only two days ago, but the legal wrangling has already begun. State Attorney General Jim Hood (D) has made good on his promise to sue Gov. Haley Barbour (R) over when the special election for the rest of the term ought to be held.

Hood says that the election must take place within the next 90 days under state law, while Barbour maintains that Wicker can serve until the November election. A spring election might give a relatively conservative Democrat a decent shot, while a November race would be much more in favor of the Republican incumbent, running alongside the presidential election.

Good. Keep the pressure on. Barbour is writing his own rules here.

The Wicker Man

There's a new Republican Senator from Mississippi, Rep. Roger Wicker. Being appointed in 2007 should mean that there's a special election within 100 days, but Haley Barbour is playing by his own set of rules. Barbour also didn't replace Trent Lott within 10 days as required by law but it's Mississippi so that's... OK?

Wicker will pretty much stay in the background, never covet the spotlight, and vote the authoritarian agenda with vim and vigor. I hope Ronnie Musgrove gives him a run for his money next year.

One Less For The Baby Party

This may be the ultimate Baby Party move:

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) will resign his seat by the end of the year, he announced in his home town of Pascagoula on Monday.

The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job [...]

A Lott friend said part of the reason, and a factor in the timing, is a new lobbying regulation, signed by President Bush in September, extending the existing lobbying ban for former members of Congress from one to two years. The lobbying ban takes effect at the end of this year.

Lott was just elected in 2006. He waited to see if Republican Governor Haley Barbour, who will select a replacement to serve until November 2008, was re-elected at the beginning of the month. Then, seeing that his cash cow would slip away and he'd have to wait a whole TWO YEARS to make a bazillion dollars on K Street, he decided to put his wallet first and resign. Plus the Senate wasn't any more fun anyway, what with all this "minority" stuff.

You'd think a guy like Lott, with his history, would be relishing the Minority Whip position, but it didn't have the allure of making millions for the pharmaceutical industry or something.

Thing is, there's a good Democratic candidate named Mike Moore, a former Attorney General in the state, waiting in the wings. And Mississippi apparently has a funny thing called the law that won't let Lott resign without automatically triggering a Senate election within 100 days:

Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said in a statement Monday that he would schedule the special election for the same day as the November 2008 general election. State law, however, appears to require an earlier date if Lott retires this year, as he said he would.

While Lott sneaks in under the wire for the extended ban on lobbying Congress by retiring this year, the secretary of state’s office said Monday that state law appears to require a special election within 90 days if he does so.

Conversely, if Lott were to wait and retire in 2008, the law allows for the special election to be held the same day as the general. Of course, he would then be subject to the new two-year ban on lobbying his former colleagues, instead of the current one-year ban.

Whoopsie!

Not only is this the ultimate selfish act, it actually harms Republican chances in the Senate. Lott will have to choose between waiting a year for his payday or allowing a rushed general election in the middle of April. Three guesses what he'll pick.