Author: David Weigel

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announces the hiring of Megan Whittemore as deputy press security for the minority whip’s office. Her background, from the announcement:

Whittemore previously served as the Research Producer for “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” She also covered Capitol Hill for Fox News Channel and FoxNews.com. During the 2008 presidential election cycle, Whittemore played a key role with the Fox News Political Unit producing primary, convention, and election coverage.

Nothing too unusual about this — Amanda Carpenter recently left The Washington Times to work for Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), and Politico’s Jonathan Allen briefly left that magazine to work for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

An ugly video of Tea Party protesters, gathered outside the office of Rep. Mary Joe Kilroy (D-Ohio), mocking a pro-health care reform protester — who sits silently behind a sign informing passersby that he has Parkinson’s Disease — goes up on Kilroy’s campaign site. The endangered freshman Democrat is now “calling on the organizations that promoted the rally — including the Columbus Tea Party, and Americans for Prosperity – and those who attended to condemn what happened.”

Here’s the video.

In an interview with Matt Lewis, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) moves Ken Cuccinelli’s ball down the field, saying “it won’t even be close on how unconstitutionalized” it is to use a “deem and pass” solution for health care reform.

“Something like taking over one-sixth of the American economy without voting on it?” Bachmann asked. “You can’t do that. The Constitution is clear — Article, Section 7, Clause II? A bill being first presented to the president for his signature… you simply cannot do that. Any sixth grader could understand that in his history class at school. This is something the Supreme Court will absolutely overturn.”

Media Matters has done yeoman’s work debunking the myth of a “New England Journal of Medicine study” that allegedly found 46 percent of physicians ready to “leave medicine or try to leave medicine” if health care reform passes. The prestigious journal conducted no such study; the numbers were assembled from a non-random study by The Medicus Firm. But perhaps because Investor’s Business Daily produced another slanted poll with a similar number of “doctors ready to quit,” this meme has really taken off. One of those duped: Florida U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio.

Rubio actually writes his own tweets, by the way.

I noticed in Massachusetts that the idea of “backroom deals” and horse-trading to bring on extra votes in the Senate — to get the bill to 60 — was far more unpopular than any aspect of the bill itself. An internal RNC poll, released to the press this afternoon, backs that up. By far, senators who make “backroom deals” are less popular than senators who merely support health care reform.

Rand Paul takes a little less relish in arguing with neoconservative foreign policy hawks than his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), does. (The elder Paul’s debate confrontation with Rudy Giuliani was a pivotal moment in his insurgent presidential campaign.) But supporters of both Pauls generally despise the GOP foreign policy establishment. They’re going to love this part of Jonathan Martin’s great story on Republican jitters about Rand’s Senate bid.

Recognizing the threat, a well-connected former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney convened a conference call last week between Grayson and a group of leading national security conservatives to sound the alarm about Paul.

“On foreign policy, [global war on terror], Gitmo, Afghanistan, Rand Paul is NOT one of us,” Cesar Conda wrote in an e-mail to figures such as Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dan Senor and Marc Thiessen.

With an attached memo on Paul’s noninterventionist positions, Conda concluded: “It is our hope that you can help us get the word out about Rand Paul’s troubling and dangerous views on foreign policy.”

In an interview, Conda noted that Paul once advocated for closing down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and sending some suspected terrorists to the front lines in Afghanistan.

“This guy could become our Republican senator from Kentucky?” he exclaimed. “It’s very alarming.”

This poll by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest Advance in partnership with Pajamas Media doesn’t ask much that hasn’t appeared on other health-care-will-doom-Democrats-style surveys. But there’s one semi-surprise:

Six in ten Americans (60%) agree that a current Democrat proposal to send the Senate health care bill to the president without voting up or down on it is “unfair.”

That would be the “deem and pass” solution Democrats have floated, which Republicans are portraying as an unconstitutional game-ender. And with this wording, it’s unpopular, but less so than the actual elements of the bill.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) decision to vote “aye” on the Senate version of health care reform, while not a huge surprise, is hard for Republicans to pin on some kind of backroom deal. Kucinich simply didn’t ask for anything more than some attention and some face time with the president. That’s put the National Republican Congressional Committee in the position of alerting reporters to a March 16 story about a healthy eating event attended by Kucinich’s wife.

Kucinich Switches Vote on Health Care (The New York Times, 3/17/10)

Coincidence?

Michelle Obama Gets Backup From Scarlett Johansson On Healthful Eating

Now that Michelle Obama has made curbing childhood obesity the rage, another effort with a similar wow factor is pressing the case for schools to provide healthful foods to replace the sugary and fatty products the first lady wants to send to the principal’s office.

To publicize a bill being dropped Thursday to push school cafeteria veggies, promoters are rolling out dishy actress Scarlett Johansson and redheaded activist Elizabeth Kucinich to talk up the bennies of “plant-based meals.” (Washington Whispers, Paul Bedard, March 16, 2010)

Here’s the email itself.

Some great reporting by Justin Elliot on a California political action committee, run by the low-profile but influential birther attorney Gary Kreep, that’s spending an average of 2 percent of its takings on supporting Republican candidates.

…At least that’s what I see happening in the Massachusetts gubernatorial election. Yesterday, state Treasurer Tim Cahill, who’s running an independent campaign for governor, showily stated that health care reform legislation would “threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years.” The GOP’s likely candidate, Charlie Baker defended Massachusetts’ health care mandate.

Now, I think, is a good time to talk about reforming it, and rethinking some of the program components. But I would not say so far it’s bankrupted the Commonwealth.

Reid Wilson’s take on this race — that it pits McCain staff (Cahill) against Romney staff (Baker) — looks more and more prescient.

The defeated presidential candidate tweets:

If this reflects anything more than McCain’s pique, it’s the new pessimism about health care reform — that is, fear that Democrats will have the votes to pass it — on the right.

Resurgent Republic releases a poll on Hispanic political attitudes, searching for some good wedge issues to cleave them from the Obama administration. The general rule for such issues, formulated by Newt Gingrich, is that really unifying issues need 70 percent support or more. Resurgent Republic doesn’t find that much for GOP proposals. Actually, on every issue, Hispanics are more satisfied with the Obama administration’s priorities than independents are.

The key findings: 53 percent of Hispanics would back a congressional candidate who pledged to use unspent stimulus funds to pay down the debt, 62 percent support keeping Gitmo open, and 54 percent oppose a KSM trial in New York. The rub? Sixty-nine percent of Hispanics hold a favorable impression of President Obama, and 55 percent look favorably upon congressional Democrats. The Republican hope is that the Democrats just don’t bring up immigration reform, which Hispanics want to see, and which Republicans have yet to find a winning approach on.

Demonstrators at Tuesday's rally on Capitol Hill (Photo by David Weigel)

“Might as well not even be here,” grumbled Georgia Holliday. “I can’t believe that Dick Armey screwed up like this!”

Holliday was not alone. Having traveled into the city from the suburbs for the 10 a.m. “Code Red” rally on the Capitol grounds, she got more and more annoyed that she couldn’t hear any of the speakers. (She was also annoyed at the wrong Tea Party activist — the Code Red rally was sponsored by a coalition of Tea Party groups, while a different, 9 a.m. rally had been organized by Armey’s FreedomWorks.) As Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) waved a copy the massive Senate version health care bill — “I brought an abortion to show you!” — Holliday winced and chanted her disapproval.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“Kill the bill!” she said. “Kill the bill! And get us a PA system!”

The Code Red rally was small, drawing around 300 people into a noisy circle. So was the FreedomWorks “People’s Surge,” which sent Tea Party activists onto Capitol Hall to seek out one-on-one meetings with members of Congress whose votes could decide the fate of health care reform. Both events were mocked for their size, by Democrats and liberal groups that had grown used to explosive media coverage of the conservative movement. “I’ve been to birthday parties that drew more people,” sneered DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan in an email to Politico’s Ben Smith.

If the relative fizzle fazed Tea Party organizers — FreedomWorks had hoped for closer to 2,500 activists — they didn’t show it. Rob Jordan of FreedomWorks told smug Democrats to wait for election day: “You can count on people showing up.” Libertarian and conservative blogs reported on larger Tea Party protests happening in Michigan and San Diego.

But the smallish numbers of the March 16 Tea Party push amplified the new attitude coming from politicians and activists: pessimism. Slightly over a year since the start of the movement, Tea Party activists were, for the first time, contemplating a major legislative victory for President Barack Obama and the Democrats — the final passage of health care reform. While many held out hope that plans to pass the Senate’s version of reform in the House would stall out, others pondered their next steps. Some, like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), took a dark view of what might come.

“Right now, they’re civil, because they think they have a chance of stopping this bill,” said King to reporters, waving his arm at a pack of “People’s Surge” activists forming a line to enter the Cannon House Office Building. “The reason we don’t have violence in this country like they do in dictatorships is because we have votes, and our leaders listen to their constituents. Now we’re in a situation where the leaders are defying the people!” Later, King would expand on those remarks and speculate on a possible anti-Washington revolt in which Tea Parties would “fill the streets” of the capital.

Few Tea Party activists were as pessimistic as King. All agreed that the determination of Democrats to pass a bill — post-Sept. 12, post-Massachusetts special election — was getting harder to overcome.

“Nothing they do surprises me!” said an exasperated Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express. “Nancy Pelosi has said, ‘If we can’t get through the fence, we’ll go over it; if we can’t go over the fence, we’ll catapult over it; if we can’t catapult over it, we’ll parachute over it.’ So, basically, they’ll do whatever it takes. Just a total disregard for what the American people want.”

Activists spent the day — they plan on spending most of this month — trying to convey just what it is they say Americans want. Those who arrived at the Hill on Tuesday morning were handed thick packets of advice on how to lobby members, and who needed their attention. Those who couldn’t make it there could pick up other guidelines at a small “war room” set up at a hotel a few blocks south of the Capitol. In all cases, activists were given advice on how to complement the phone calls and faxes that were coming to targeted representatives from, largely, Americans who didn’t live in their districts. A white sketchpad in the war room ran down a few possible responses to members who blanched at talking to the activists.

“If you are not a constituent and they don’t want to talk to you,” advised war room organizers, “ask — ‘If you won’t talk to someone from outside of your district are you ready or willing to pledge not to take money from donors outside of your district?’ Or — ‘If I gave you a donation, would you talk to me?’”

The lobbying had mixed results. A group of activists from Georgia told TWI that they were trying to lobby Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.), who has said he’d vote “no” on the Senate bill, after a difficult time lobbying Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), who has said he’d vote yes.

“We spent an hour with him,” grimaced Kathryn Jackson, a retired hospital worker from Fortson, Ga. She pointed to a lamppost. “It was about as useful as talking to that, right there.”

Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.

“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”

Of the activists who spoke to TWI, none were ready to give up on opposing health care reform if the bill passed. Some, however, were looking to other potential fights. Jane, a Montgomery County, Md. activist who declined to give her last name (”my kids don’t want to see it show up in the paper!”) suggested that a health care win would free up President Obama to give amnesty to undocumented immigrants, possibly by an executive order. Susan Clark, whose sign compared the health care bill to the notorious Tuskegee Experiment, suggested that passage would bring Democrats a step closer to enforcing a new “slavery” over Americans. But most activists who pondered the aftermath of health care reform’s passage said they would fight on, looking for ways to roll it back. Susan Birch, a Chester County, Penn. activist, sported a button for insurgent Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Sam Rohrer because he was pledging to make the governor’s office “the front line” against government expansion.

“Whatever Congress does,” said Birch, “you’re going to see the 10th Amendment invoked to stop it.”

The thought of a post-vote backlash — electoral and legal — was the cheeriest thought of the day.

“I’ve got a standing bet with [Rep.] Jason Altmire [D-Pa.],” said Henry Hill, a retired police officer and member of the Pittsburgh Tea Party. “A case of Yuengling says that the mandate will not go through the Supreme Court.”

At the “Code Red” rally today, I did the reporting for this post. When I returned to the office, I fired off a 3:41 email to Jane Hamsher.

Hamsher did not respond; I posted at 3:57. At what’s timestamped as 2:33 — Pacific Time, I assume — she responded:

Dave Weigel isn’t a journalist, he’s a smear-monger that makes things up and projects his own fantasies onto his stories… I know Katherine, we were on MSNBC together and we’ve spoken about working on the pot legalization measure in California in the future. She tells me that when Weigel approached her and asked her who her “source” was, she didn’t say. He said “It’s Jane Hamsher, isn’t it…I’ve been around.” According to Katherine, she didn’t respond. Weigel decided to print his own suspicions as fact, and didn’t bother to contact me for confirmation.

More insults follow, including a subtle swing at possible TWI donors. I’m more interested in Serkes’ response to my post in an email — she now says that she did not mean to attribute “union thuggery” to Hamsher, and because Hamsher denies saying that, I’ll update my original post. But I am disappointed that Hamsher would use such personal insults and fabricate quotes to make me look like a liar.

Here is the relevant part of my conversation with Serkes. I was recording the rally, so I have audio to back up this transcript.

SERKES: They’re saying that there’s some serious arm-twisting, and their words were union thuggery.

ME: Who’s the they?

SERKES: The progressive side. A progressive source told me that there was serious union thuggery going on this weekend.

ME: Is this the Firedoglake folks?

SERKES: It’s Jane. You’re figured it out.

ME: I’m not new at this.

SERKES: She said they were after Altmire this weekend. Yeah, because Jane and I last talked Saturday.

As I said, Serkes no longer stands by her attribution of “union thuggery” to Hamsher, so I will correct that. I apologize to Jane Hamsher for not giving her more time to respond to my email. When Serkes spoke to me, it seemed clear that she was characterizing her conversation with Hamsher and recalled “union thuggery” enough to use it twice and, twice, attribute it that way. But that is not what she meant to say.

As for Hamsher’s insults of me and my publication — which she supports with fabricated quotes — I’d welcome an apology and a retraction.

By the way, by “I’m not new at this,” I meant I’ve been covering this stuff closely and know that Hamsher has made some high-profile team-ups with conservative activists such as Grover Norquist. And I’d argue that figuring this stuff out, and getting people to name sources, is absolutely the work of a journalist.

UPDATE: Here’s the audio.

Click To Play

Here’s the top part of the packet FreedomWorks handed out this morning to participants in “The People’s Surge,” the effort directing a few hundred Tea Party activists to meetings with the key members of the House who will vote on health care reform. Note the detailed list of ayes and nos, and whether FW thinks they’re gettable. Only 26 Democrats are marked as firm, leaning or likely “no” votes.

[UPDATE: This post was originally titled “Tea Partiers Working With Firedoglake on HCR Whip Count.” After I posted it, Kathryn Serkes e-mailed me to say that she didn’t mean to imply that Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher used the phrase “union thuggery. Serkes also disputed my description of her as a “Tea Partier,” but I really used that because this was a Tea Party rally, and she was an organizer of it. She also argued that there was a difference between working with Hamsher and working “with Firedoglake.” I agree, and none of the links below are meant to imply that other FDL bloggers have any connection to Tea Parties.]

I spoke to Kathryn A. Serkes of the Doctor Patient Medical Association at this morning’s rally against the health care bill, after Serkes had addressed the smallish crowd.

“I’m in contact with folks on the progressive side,” said Serkes. “They’re saying right now that Pelosi’s almost there with the votes. What they’re saying is that there’s some serious arm-twisting — their words were union thuggery. One progressive source told me that there was serious union thuggery this weekend, targeting Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.).”

The source, she said, was Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, a liberal blog that’s also paid for polls in some Democratic districts asking voters whether “aye” votes on health care reform would help or hurt their re-election chances. “She said that they’re very close — [liberal blogs] are better at keeping a tab on it. And I think Pelosi’s very close. I think we’re right at the edge.”

Hamsher did not respond to an email from TWI, but denied much of this in a post at FDL.

Republicans have grabbed hold of reports that Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has readied a rule that would allow the House to deem the Senate health care bill passed and start making corrections — something the GOP quickly dubbed the “Slaughter Option” or the “Slaughter Solution.”

“[W]e are hearing reports that the Majority will try and ram this through without a direct vote on the Senate bill,” said GOP Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a floor speech. “Madam Speaker, we should take an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. I yield back.”

That language — “take an up-or-down vote” — belonged to Democrats just a few days ago, when they were spinning the use of reconciliation.

After the jump, a slideshow of the Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill today:

During and after a pair of anti-health care bill rallies on Capitol Hill, I asked a few Republican members of the House — two of whom went on stage — whether they thought the Tea Parties would win out and stop the bill.

“[Rep.] Bart Stupak [D-Mich]” says he has twelve ‘no’ votes,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who spoke at a 10 a.m. rally organized by multiple Tea Party groups. “I can count one — Bart Stupak. I can’t name number two. There’s eleven anonymous people and you can’t count anonymous votes. If you can’t count them, they’re not no votes. I think that’s something that should have been pressed much, much harder.”

At the rally, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) informed Tea Partiers they had “won every inning” of the health care fight and were in the “bottom of the ninth.” After her speech, she made it clear to reporters: “I think it’s a flip of a coin right now whether it will pass or not.”

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) acknowledged — based on the history of such tough votes — that more Democrats might vote “aye” than were being counted in public “whip counts.” He was hopeful that pro-life Democratic holdouts would be convinced by the argument that “this will be the biggest expansion of abortion since Roe. v. Wade.” But he was also looking past the vote to his home state, where Republicans are looking at legislation to opt out of a health care mandate.

The most confidence I heard came from Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who said that he’d “heard of” Democrats being fed false information about what could be fixed in reconciliation.

“I know they don’t have the votes right now,” said Broun. “As soon as Nancy Pelosi has 216 votes, we’ll have the vote, even if it’s in the middle of the night.”

King, however, expressed more nervousness.

“I’d rather serve in the minority,” said King, “however long they send me back here to do that, that I would live under this socialism that they’re trying to impose upon us. I can’t sleep at night.”

See a slideshow of the rally here.

I’m a little surprised to read exposes of how Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has launched a Tea Party group, Liberty Central. After all, I reported on Liberty Central back on Feb. 24. When The Washington Post reports that “it was not until this past weekend, after a story in the Los Angeles Times, that awareness of the new organization prompted a debate about the involvement of a justice’s spouse in a political movement,” well, that hurts my feelings.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see any controversy in Ginni Thomas’s new venture. She was a political activist in the 1990s; she was an activist in the Bush years; she’s an activist now. I see this as the latest data point in the Tea Party’s alliance with the old-line conservative establishment. Tea Partiers are picking and choosing which conservatives they want to validate, and I’ve never heard them criticize the likes of Justice Thomas. Ginni Thomas, too, is close to activists taken very seriously by Tea Partiers, like Mark Levin. But stuff like this should really settle the question of “Tea Partiers — conservative movement or rising force of angry independents?”