Your future under a Romney presidency. The Tea Party reads the tea leaves.
The stunning Texas victory of Ted Cruz, a young Tea Party-backed Republican over an establishment candidate vying for a Senate seat, has already so emboldened the insurgent conservative movement that activists are warning Mitt Romney he had better get on board.
“If we can elect a really conservative House and Senate that will force Romney to go along with our bold conservative agenda,” Shell said. “He’s going to have to really, really go to the right. He’ll be working with guys in the House and Senate. He won’t be able to get away with too many middle of the road policies, especially on things like the deficit.”
“It’s not going to be a Romney driven presidency,” Norman Orenstein, a researcher at the conservative think tank AEI recently told ABC News. “It’s going to be a Congressional, conservative, Republican driven presidency from Congress.”
I see no evidence that they’re wrong. And wasn’t it Grover who assured us earlier that Romney would do as he’s told?
BGinCHI
I doubt Romney will even move into the White House. I mean, they can’t live in a place recently lived in by black people, for pete’s sake!
I’m thinking yacht in the Potomac or buy a street in Georgetown.
WereBear
Because that Tea Party congress is working sooooooooooooooooo well for us now!
LanceThruster
“Taking dinosaurs off this island and installing them in Congress is the worst idea in the sad, long history of bad ideas”
[apologies to Jurassic Park]
Herbal Infusion Bagger
They won’t do shit on the deficit. They’ll cut taxes on the rich, stick Alito-clones on the SCOTUS and appeal courts, repeal Obamacare. They’ll expand the deficit by tax cutting, just like Reagan and Bush Invictus, plus I’m sure there’ll be a war or two, if we’re lucky they’ll pick an enemy du jour more like Grenada or Panama than Iraq, but we probably wouldn’t get lucky.
Oh yeah, they’ll cut back on spending on poor people, and I’m sure they’ll cut back on non-defense R&D, in case any of the money goes to science on evolution or climate change. But actually tackling the deficit? No way.
c u n d gulag
Still think keeping “The Ol’ Union” intact is such a good idea, folks?
We may not have a choice after November if they win the Presidency and the House and Senate.
Goodbye, USA. HELLO, CSA!!!
Patricia Kayden
We need campaign ads warning people about the dire consequences of a T’Bag congress with a sock puppet Robot in the White House.
What a nightmare!
Chris
LOOOOL…
That “really conservative” majority will last as long ad it takes them to realize that “real conservatism” isn’t the Utopia they thought it would be. Then they’ll promptly declare that their “real conservative” majority wasn’t “really conservative” after all, but rather a bunch of liberal, elitist, establishment, RINO counterrevolutionary saboteurs, and charge off to the right as the search for a REAL real conservative alternative goes on.
“Real conservatism” is as undefinable and unattainable as “real communism.”
Libby Spencer
I don’t see how he can go much further right. I mean, what Tea Party trope has he not embraced already?
MattF
I agree with this. If Mitt is elected, he’ll be a figurehead.
raven
@c u n d gulag: Nah, it would fuck up football. I think you overestimate their influence.
Chris
@Libby Spencer:
It’s not that he doesn’t embrace them, it’s that he doesn’t sincerely believe them any more than he sincerely believed his liberal stances ad Governor. Makes them all freaked out to realize that. But Obama hate will still drive them to vote for him, IMHO.
dmsilev
Yeah, somehow I find it hard to imagine Mittens resisting anything which emerged from the howling lunatics of the GOP House delegation. For that matter, I’m pretty sure he’d agree with their economic agenda. On social issues, he’s been a weathervane for his entire career, so I’m sure he’d go along with the Slut-Shaming Act of 2013 or whatever.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Does anyone seriously think a man running for president and refuses to release his tax returns because it’s none of the peon’s business is going roll over for Congress?
Cacti
@dmsilev:
He would certainly be on board with the neocon, perpetual mid east war agenda. He believes that the US and Israel have a religious destiny to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. He tipped his hand on that with his “divine providence” statements.
Also too, considering he was a common coward during Vietnam, he’s anxious to prove what a big, macho, war president he would be.
Amir Khalid
A POTUS who doesn’t dare scratch his nose without permission from a pack of nihilistic right-wing extremists will be so good for America’s prestige abroad. What foreign power will want to waste time doing business with a President Romney, if the tea party is liable to veto anything Romney agrees to?
Libby Spencer
@Chris: Thinking Obama hate has been driving their entire agenda since about 2007. At least for the 27%ers. Can only hope that’s not enough, even with all the cheating they’re doing with vote rigging.
The Moar You Know
There’s nothing in Mitt Romney’s history that suggests he’s ever taken orders from anyone about anything in his life.
I appreciate the bluster coming from the failed Tea Party movement; it’s understandable, most adherents to failing philosophies tend to get pretty belligerent – but let’s not shit ourselves here, Romney’s going to be too busy giving away America to his rich friends to have time for the teatard bullshit.
Shawn in ShowMe
The House is going to get wingnuttier but I don’t see any Tea Party favorites making hay in the Senate. For example, in my state, the two Republican candidates leading the charge against Claire McCaskill are considered RINOs.
Given a choice to endorse the Tea party darling, Todd Akin, and the other two candidates, Sarah Palin has chosen to endorse Steelman. The Moose Hunter doesn’t even think the Tea Party guy can win. And this is in friggin’ Missouri, where every town outside of St. Louis and Kansas City is bloodshot red.
Frankensteinbeck
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yes, I believe it instantly. His tax returns are something he cares about, something that involves personal risks for him. As he’s demonstrated, he doesn’t give two figs about policy. He’ll rubber stamp whatever they want, so long as he gets to pack Mormons into the courts and executive branch.
Or he would, except he’s going to lose in a humiliating landslide.
Villago Delenda Est
@Libby Spencer:
He hasn’t called for the creation of concentration camps for liberals, blacks, Jews, Muslims, queers, browns, atheists, mainstream Christians, and other undesirable non-Mammon worshipers yet.
He’s slacking.
David Hunt
Repeal of the 13th Amendment.
Citizen_X
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: Deficit? If the Republicans won, you would never even hear the word after January. The deficit issue would simply disappear, poof!
I’m all for making this an anti-tea party campaign. People hate the Teabaggers. They’re as unpopular, and as clueless about that fact, as Palin.
Libby Spencer
@Villago Delenda Est: But he has a secret plan to make them self-deport…
Cassidy
Hell, I think we need to start the meme that he’s the Anti-Christ. I’d love to see that shit go mainstream.
Mark S.
Yes Mitt, you need to move waaaaay to the right. Screw those stupid swing states. You need to get those teabaggers on board.
4tehlulz
Now that Mitt’s exhibited open racism, why wouldn’t the Teabaggers think he’d going along with their agenda?
4tehlulz
@Villago Delenda Est: Mitt’s decided that The Wall is a political tract, not entertainment.
mikej
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He can stand firm on not releasing his taxes because that’s something that affects him. He doesn’t really care about being president beyond winning it. If someone else wants to do all the hard work I don’t see why he wouldn’t let them.
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X:
“The Deficit” is the window dressing to conceal the true issue.
The Sheriff is near. Just as bad, he’s a Democrat.
That is the true issue. They can’t come out and say it, so they blather about the deficit. Which was doubled by their hero, the deserting coward, who was given a budget surplus and a national debt pay down plan when he took office.
Which is the proof that it’s not truly the issue, or they would have been screaming about this in 2002. But they were not.
Chris
@Mark S.:
The hard right voter base’s ability to make all the Serious People believe they’re the only constituency that matters has been remarkable. Idiotically, Republican politicians ACTUALLY BELIEVE this… You’d think the number of times they’ve been bit on the ass for their ideological Puritanism would’ve taught them something.
mechwarrior online
@Libby Spencer:
Liberal hate has been driving their agenda, and it’s important to realize this and call it for what it is. We seem to forget the 90’s. Where Clinton, a good old southern boy, was quickly accused of murdering Vince Foster, running an international cocaine smuggling ring, having a kill list, trying to create the Amero, and being in league to put UN troops in America and take our guns away. Hillary Clinton wasn’t popular then and was treated with vastly more venom than Michelle ever was as soon as she tried to tackle healthcare and then accused of being a lesbian. We also had another government shut down, witch hunts, and an attempt at impeachment.
Blaming all of this on conservative hate of Obama is not only inaccurate it’s naive as hell and dangerous. Blaming it on Obama hints that there is someone the Democrats could elect who wouldn’t be subject to this sort of insanity, and history has proven that to be laughably false.
The right simply does not accept Democrats as legitimate American’s and views them as enemies. There is no Democrat we could put in the White House who would not trigger a backlash.
There is a bright side to all of this, which is that they always over reach. Democrats tend to recover their values when out of office, Republicans double down on retard.
Shawn in ShowMe
@The Moar You Know:
The Tea Party agenda IS giving away America to rich job creators. If Mitt wasn’t a Mormon robot, he’d be their ideal candidate.
Villago Delenda Est
We learned in WWII how you deal with fascists.
There is only one way to deal with them.
You drive them back under the rocks they crawled from under.
If some die in the process, well, one has to break some eggs to make an omelette.
4tehlulz
@Villago Delenda Est: Let them run Spain?
NonyNony
@The Moar You Know:
But he won’t have a choice. At least on the domestic side.
A lot of folks severely underestimate the power of the Presidency when it comes to domestic issues. The president can do almost precisely “jack” and “shit” in the domestic sphere without Congress. He has some wiggle room when it comes to enacting laws that they’ve already passed, but if he needs new money to do something or needs to get authority to spend money on something that they haven’t authorized, he needs them.
What Orenstein is alluding to here is that a president who is seen as a leader gets to set the domestic agenda for his party to a large extent. If the president says “I think the most important thing this year will be health care”, well, if he’s a leader then his party follows the agenda he’s set (with minor adjustments because, hey, Congressmen are Very Important People and they need to Provide Their Input and Make A Contribution).
He’s saying that Romney won’t be setting agendas. He can try, but he will fail. He can maybe look like he’s setting agendas if he finds out what Jim DeMint wants done first and then gets out in front of it, but it won’t be Romney’s ideas.
Which, I think, is probably fine with Mitt Romney. He doesn’t seem to actually want to do the heavy lifting of being president, he just wants the job and the prestige and to be the guy who gives his buddies the best tax cut they’ve ever received (which he’ll get from the tea party types without really having to ask). And possibly to resolve a few daddy issues. So outsourcing his domestic responsibilities to the tea party is probably a net positive to him.
And he can outsource his foreign policy to his buddy Netanyahu too. That just leaves the state dinners and other ceremonial duties. Maybe run a few cabinet meetings to really feel presidential.
Catsy
A prospect that should horrify any informed person anywhere in the world with a functioning brain and conscience.
I would be very worried if I thought the RomneyBot Automated Gaffe Dispenser had any realistic chance of winning in November. The real question is how much damage we can get him to do with his tuxedo’s coattails.
Libby Spencer
@David Hunt: I believe that’s covered under repeal of the ACA. Being chained to a job for health insurance effectively accomplishes the same goal.
The Moar You Know
@Citizen_X: from one of my favorite – and until today, completely non-political – sites:
“As always, encounters with ultra-conservative America are terrifying to normal people.”
Greg
I think this is actually just attempted bluster to shore up the right-wing “true conservatives” who hate Mitt Romney. It’s to push the idea that it doesn’t matter whether he sucks and you hate him, vote for him anyway, because we’ll make him do the right thing.
Yet more evidence that he hasn’t consolidated “his base”.
Cassidy
There is a part of me that wants these tools to get their conservative paradise. Maybe we need a few generations of pain and sufferring to finally kill of this horrid belief system and it’s death cult appendage.
redshirt
Sounds great – Teabaggers can make the domestic policy, and Bibi can set US foreign policy for Rmoney’s Administration.
What could go wrong?
Libby Spencer
@mechwarrior online: Was talking about this election, not the entire history of the GOP.
HelpThe99ers
@Libby Spencer: There’s one thing Rove couldn’t do that a GOP Congress plus a figurehead Executive can and will do:
Permanent. Republican. Majority.
1. Solidify the conservative majority on the Supreme Court;
2. Federal Voter ID, or ALEC-driven templates across as many states as they can;
3. “Cut, Cap and Balance” or the Ryan Budget Plan with permanent exceptions for military spending.
4. Repeal the ACA.
5. Block grants for whatever social programs are left after their budgets are gutted using CC&B.
6. A 20-week ban on all abortions as a way to eventually…
7. Overturn Roe v. Wade and Griswold.
That’s the first month of a Romney Administration.
Frankensteinbeck
@mechwarrior online:
No, I’m sorry. I DO remember the Clinton years. I remember vividly the militias, the Republicans wearing black on Nov 5th because the US wouldn’t be here in 4 years, the bizarre conspiracy allegations, the ridiculous impeachment.
None of that compares to what has been directed at Obama. The difference in scale is huge. Yes, the nastier elements of the GOP said Clinton was a murderer involved in drug trafficking, but now the MAINSTREAM GOP accuses Obama of being a Muslim not born in the US. The nastier elements think he’s part of a Martian conspiracy. Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress acted like whiny babies and harassed Clinton with a pathetically partisan impeachment everybody knew was just an insult. Obama has faced an organized across-the-board campaign from the entire GOP congress from day one to prevent him from accomplishing anything whatsoever, to the point where they’ve gone quite insane and are voting for positions they’ve avoided for fifty years because they’re electoral poison. They will support anything they believe Obama is against, and oppose anything they believe he’s for.
There is a similarity in kind between how the GOP feels about Democrats in general and how they feel about Obama, but the difference in scale is huge. I have never seen anything like this across-the-board obsessive derangement. Leaders and rank-and-file, they are all consumed by an obsessive hate that makes them ignore their own self-interest. The only reasonable explanation for that difference is racism, and it would be silly to think that President would be the first high profile exclusively white job an African-American broke into without receiving widescale abuse and backlash for it.
NonyNony
@Cassidy: Apocalyptic fantasies are just that – fantasies. Human beings aren’t that smart – look at how things are now. As things get worse, people make them even worse. “Crabs in a bucket” as they say. In a downward spiral people start to blame other people for their problems – insularity, xenophobia, conservative religious beliefs – all of those things increase the worse that things get. That is not a recipe for fruitful change. Though I will admit that it is attractive in a sort of “Tales From The Crypt” be-careful-what-you-wish-for sort of way to think about the people voting for these guys getting what they’re voting for good and hard, it isn’t actually a method that has historically led to change – historically it leads to retrenchment and things getting worse in the short term, and not getting better in the long term.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes, fortunately for the country this unlikely to happen.
Romney has that CEO must be the biggest dick in room thing going. He isn’t going to accept someone who he sees lower on the org chart of FED-USA INC getting uppity with him. What I suspect a President Mittens to be like is him in a constant fight with Congress over powers while his cabinet officials do what ever they want.
dmsilev
Of course, meanwhile the Romney campaign is emitting sparks and the occasional stripped gear trying to explain away yesterday’s analysis of their tax plan. Great fun.
Also, too, http://www.barackobama.com/tax-calculator
Shawn in ShowMe
@Cassidy:
Seventy years of the military industrial complex and the collapse of labor has done nothing but strengthen belief in the horrid meme that might makes right. When you’re as heavily propagandized at this culture has been, you lose the collective will to kill horrid belief systems.
danielx
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That is a thought – the Marquis doesn’t take kindly to anyone telling him what to do under any circumstances whatsoever. On the other hand, you dance with the ones that brung ya, etc etc.
LanceThruster
@dmsilev:
Couldn’t happen to a nicer cybernetic organism.
Count Fenring
I think that the Ted Cruz thing is being deeply underestimated. Cruz is unbelievably smart, has an incredible story, has repeatedly argued cases in front of the Supreme Court, and is far more appealing than your average GOP candidate, even if he is slightly to the right of Jim DeMint and thus certifiable. If Romney is elected, Cruz will be placed on the Supreme Court at the first available opportunity, or he will be positioned to run for President in 2024. He is a far more significant development than Romney, regardless of what happens in November.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Romney doesn’t give a fuck about America. He’s rich, he can live somewhere else after his administration destroys the country.
mdblanche
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yes. The tax return thing is an outlier that affects Mitt personally. Releasing them would also probably be more suicidal than being constantly bombarded to do it. Otherwise he always buckles under. We’ve already seen him give Bryan Fischer veto power over his foreign policy team. Romney probably wouldn’t even be appointing his own cabinet.
bemused
Daddy Romney must be spinning like a top in his grave by now. At least, George had some standards.
Bubblegum Tate
For whatever reason, the phrase “bold conservative agenda” strikes me as funny. There’s nothing bold about being a hateful dipshit.
catclub
I still think it is funny that the Teaparty is demanding he move right NOW – when it will be electoral poison, rather than after he is elected. Are they really that stupid?
Apparently.
Cassidy
Yes
wrb
@Frankensteinbeck:
I have some doubts about this.
Obama still polls amazingly well on personal, being thought likable and a good person by good chunk of those who won’t vote for him.
So I’m not sure that today’s Republicans wouldn’t be at least if not more deranged with a less likable Dem.
Of course there are some on the extreme who are probably wound up even further by his likability, since it frustrates their ability to win more people to their narrative.
I agree that slavering is even more foamy and rabid than in the past, but suspect that might be due to the progression of the disease.
ChrisNYC
Small quibble. Norman Ornstein, not Orenstein — ABC got it wrong. And he’s no Tea Partier. He’s the co-author of the “Republicans are the problem” book.
wrb
Great ad material, that.
Edit after reading ChrisNYC @ 59
damn
Villago Delenda Est
@Shawn in ShowMe:
It will take what one of my NCOs termed “a significant emotional event” to change attitudes.
The Germans had one of these in the 1940’s.
It may take an event of that magnitude to change a lot of teabagger sympathizers into teabagger enemies.