Matt Yglesias

GOP Leadership Rivals Throw Mike Pence Under the Bus

I’ve seen a lot of people link to this Glenn Thrush Politico item, but I have a slightly different take on it:

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) raised objections to an abbreviated alternative budget “blueprint” released today — but were told by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) they needed to back the plan, according to several Republican sources. [...] “In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan,” said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy. [...] “It’s categorically untrue,” said Pence spokesman Matt Lloyd. “Cantor as well as Ryan and the rest of the leadership have been part of this process for weeks. They not only signed off on it, but their staffs helped edit it.”

To me the salient point here is that Pence’s spokesman is almost certainly telling the truth here, and the Cantor and Ryan staffers saying otherwise are almost certainly lying. As a simple matter of logic, Thrush’s item doesn’t really make sense. Look at the problems the majority party has keeping its caucus on message and united on matters of tactics and substance. There’s no way John Boehner could possibly force Reps Ryan and Cantor to endorse his joke of a budget if they didn’t want to.

Rather, Reps Ryan and Cantor saw that the press was reacting poorly to the Boehner/Pence flim-flam “budget” and decided to throw their colleagues under the bus. And, frankly, I’m not surprised that Ryan and Cantor were surprised. I was surprised, too. I’ve never really seen political reporters get outraged before about the fact that a policy document makes no sense in the past. It was a curious outbreak of substance among the press corps that I don’t think was particularly foreseeable.

Mike Pence Calls for Massive Anti-Stimulus

I’ve made this point before, but Congressman Mike Pence is not a smart man. And really, strikingly so. And you can see this kind of dumbness coming through in this floor speech calling for a “spending freeze”:

One level of dumbness here is the indiscriminate nature. A member of congress who cared about public policy would presumably have some ideas about certain federal endeavors being more worthy than others. But Pence just wants to implement an arbitrary cut (in inflation-adjusted terms that’s what a “freeze” is) in all programs.

A second level of dumbness it his fake-incredulity about how the Democrats passed one spending bill and now they want to pass a second bill. Oh my dears! But the first bill was a stimulus measure, designed at offering a fiscal policy jolt to counteract the recession. The second bill is to fund the normal operations of the federal government. It’s not like there was some sleight-of-hand here and Obama was pretending that the stimulus bill was adequate to fund all the activities of the government. And they’re not coming one after another because the congress is crazy; the timing of the appropriations bill is dictated by the schedule.

But the third, and most pernicious, level of dumbness is its pro-cyclical neo-Hooverite nature. Pat Garofalo explains:

But under the current economic circumstances, this is a far more damaging policy then it was six months ago when McCain was touting it. The economic stimulus package’s main purpose is to close the GDP gap and jumpstart the economy by spurring spending by households, government and the private sector. A spending freeze would act as an “anti-stimulus,” cutting spending precisely when it’s too low and the economy is moving too slowly.

Yessir. Lay off an EPA lawyer amidst full employment, and he’ll find a job in the private sector. Stop pouring concrete on a road amidst robust growth, and the concrete will go to some other project. One can debate whether or not that’s a good tradeoff according to the specific situation. But that’s not the circumstances we face. Companies aren’t hiring. Lay off a government worker, and he’ll just be unemployed. And as an unemployed government worker, he’ll spend less at local stores leading to more layoffs in retail and more excess inventory in manufacturing. This kind of thing is how recessions become depressions.

Mike Pence’s Ode to Rush Limbaugh

Here’s some video of Mike Pence being an idiot and talking about the joys of Rush Limbaugh:

The most egregious thing here, and I guess this will be the new conservative approach, is that in response to a substantive criticism of Rush, Pence turns around and denies that Rush is a racist. That, however, isn’t the issue. The issue is that Rush has taken the view that his loyal followers in congress ought to be hoping that the Obama administration’s policies fail.

The larger issue, however, is that Mike Pence is a moron, and any movement that would hold the guy up as a hero is bankrupt. You can see my colleague Amanda Terkel for more of the specifics on this, but I would refer you to this post from September about the earth-shattering ignorance and stupidity of Mike Pence. He has no grasp, whatsoever, of public policy issues. And yet I can only gather from the fact that his colleagues have elevated him to a leadership post, that a large faction of them are actually so much stupider than Pence that they don’t realize how dumb he is. But it’s really staggering. In my admittedly brief experience talking to him, his inability to grasp the basic contours of policy question was obvious and overwhelming.