Elephant Dung #33: Snowe and Collins to vote NO on Ryan budget plan

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

As the recent Gingrich vs. Ryan brouhaha revealed, the Republican wunderkind's budget plan, including its Medicare-slashing component, has become, despite its widespread unpopularity, Republican orthodoxy from which deviation/dissent is not tolerated. (If you do happen to dissent even just a smidge, the party's Bolsheviks will do their utmost to purge you from their ranks.)

And yet it's obvious that many Republicans are having their doubts. The result in NY-26 yesterday, in a way a referendum on Ryan's plan that was a resounding NO, shows that Republicans are vulnerable, and many are distancing themselves from the plan, if not outright opposing it already. Fear of voter revolt, it seems, may just overcome the party whip.

And that appears to be especially true in Maine:

Maine's Republican senators will vote against the House Republican 2012 budget authored by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, with Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe in opposition to the House GOP-proposed Medicare changes.

Snowe confirmed her opposition [yesterday] afternoon during a Capitol Hill interview, while Collins reiterated a position she first made known last month.

Senate Democratic leaders are expected to call up the House GOP budget for a Senate floor vote later this week, probably Thursday. Collins and Snowe join a small but growing group of Republican senators – including Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and possibly Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who have announced they will vote against the proposal to partially privatize Medicare, the federal health care program for seniors, and hand over authority to run Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor, completely to the states in the form of a block grant program. 

To be fair, both Collins and Snowe are on the more moderate, more sane side of the party and aren't exactly the sort of right-wing hardliners who have been falling head-over-heals for Ryan. And Snowe, who is facing a Tea Party challenge in 2012, would seem to have every reason to reach out to the right, but isn't. So maybe, just maybe, this is a matter of principle for them, not political opportunism.

Still, what we're seeing here, and not just in Maine, is what I'll call The Great Republican Exodus of 2012. It isn't really exodus from the party but rather exodus from the new party orthodoxy, from the new right-wing Republican mainstream. As more and more Republicans come to see how unpopular the Ryan plan is, and how vulnerable it makes them, more and more of them will do what Collins and Snowe and Murkowski and Brown are doing (and what it looked like Gingrich was doing), which is rejecting it as way too extreme.

Yes, this too is opportunism. The fear of a voter revolt, of losing moderates and independents and possibly even losing safe Republican seats, apparently outweighs, for them, the fear of a Tea Party challenge and of being attacked by their fellow Republicans and in the conservative media for being un-Republican and anti-American.

Still, it's the sort of opportunism that makes them look respectable, and obviously more appealing to voters in states like Maine and Massachusetts (if not necessarily Alaska). This will be one of the dominant stories over the next year and a half, this divide in the Republican Party between those on Ryan's side and those who, for whatever reason, have had enough, with a large gray area in between for those who want to hedge their bets and have it both ways.

Enjoy.

The plight of Olympia Snowe, revisited

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Hill has a piece up today noting that Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, long thought to be one of those most endangered of species, a moderate Republican, has actually "taken surprisingly conservative positions in the Senate this year."

Surprising? Not so much. While Snowe claims consistency, the truth is that she's not just endangered but in danger, facing the possibility of a serious Tea Party primary challenge from the right. And as she moves more and more to the right, she's even voting against her own ideas:

Snowe stunned longtime Democratic colleagues Wednesday by blocking action on a small-business bill she co-wrote because Democratic leaders refused to allow a vote on an amendment they saw as a political hit job.

"Sen. Snowe actually wrote this bill," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chairwoman of the Senate Small Business Committee. "She killed her own bill under the guise that she feels so strongly about reg reform."

She claims that she voted against the bill because the amendment was necessary (and because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denied her the opportunity to vote on it), but the amendment, co-sponsored with right-wing Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was decidedly anti-regulatory and contrary to the spirit of the legislation. Far from being consistent, Snowe clearly sought to embrace a right-wing effort to undermine the bill in order to display her newfound conservative bona fides, all part of her disingenuous move to the right in order to ward off, or at least to try to be in better position to defeat, a Tea Party challenge.

Snowe has been a "moderate" for so long that I highly doubt that her efforts will work. Maine voters, and especially Maine Republican primary voters, are not about to take her as a Coburn-like conservative. It's just not what she's ever been, and her efforts now, like Mitt Romney's seem desperate and pathetic.

Nonetheless, I suspect that Snowe is fairly safe if only because of her long-standing incumbency in a state that is hardly as conservative as, say, Oklahoma. Still, there's an opening for the Tea Party to bring her down, and she's obviously concerned enough to forsake her past and embrace her party's mainstream extremism.

And she's hardly alone. Any Republican who in any way departs from Tea Party orthodoxy is a target. This is one of the key developments to watch as we look ahead to November 2012.

For more on this, see Richard Barry's post from Tuesday.

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Is Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe completely safe in 2012?

By Richard K. Barry 

There is no doubt that Olympia Snowe, Republican senator from Maine, has typically rankled the hard right by being generally less ideologically rigid than they require. First she supported George W. Bush's TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bill and then President Obama's stimulus package not to mention voting in favor of Obama's health care reform bill at the committee level.

As of late April she has attracted two GOP challengers to her right -- Maine Tea Party Patriots head Andrew Ian Dodge and businessman Scott D'Ambroise -- but according to local press neither seems particularly strong.

This doesn't mean that the right challenger coming along at the right time with significant resources couldn't give her trouble. As Mark Brewer, University of Maine political scientist, said recently, "I do think there is a possibility that if there were someone -- a good candidate from the right of her -- in the Republican primary, they could possibly give her some problems, but at this point I just can't seem to come up with much in the way of names."

It's not that she hasn't made some powerful enemies. Recently, Club for Growth President Chris Chocola lumped her in with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah saying that he didn't rule out getting involved in primary contests against Hatch and Snowe and that they are "on his radar."

The Club for Growth has made a mission of taking on establishment Republicans who they don't feel support the Club's "pro-growth" ideals such as "limited government, low taxes and economic freedom."

And the national group the Tea Party Express has sent out a press release saying that Snowe will be one of their top targets in 2012. These folks have money and they have had some success.

But it may be one of those cases where Tea Party and radical fiscal conservative anger is more potent outside the state than in. It's interesting to note that the new governor of Maine, Tea Party favorite Paul LePage, has said he is backing Snowe.

Still, it has been noted that Snowe, generally a more pragmatic Republican, has been getting her right-wing bona fides in order more recently.

In Maine, the Morning Sentinel has pointed out that in meetings with Tea Party activists she has been expressing strong opposition to the Affordable Care Act and has pledged her support to make sure that Sharia law doesn't infiltrate American Courts (which I doubt is a huge problem in Maine). As well, she has been voting more conservatively as of late to the point of changing her positions on the DREAM Act and the Bush-era tax cuts.

As another sign that she is preparing for battle, she recently released fundraising numbers to show that she has over $2 million in cash on hand.

In 2006 Olympia Snowe beat her Democratic challenger by a margin of 74% to 21%. Despite this, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Chair Patty Murray has identified Maine as a possible Democratic pickup in 2012. Seems unlikely and more likely that Snowe's headaches will come from her right flank if at all. It also seems clear that national right-wing forces would like to make trouble for her. It's less clear that they will be able to do so. But Snowe is not taking any chances, and that, all by itself, should tell us something.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)