America has a revenue problem. Blame George W. Bush and Donald Trump.​

Even though the national debt is rising, spending can’t be blamed.


President Donald Trump holds up a document during an event to sign the Tax Cut and Reform Bill in the Oval Office on Dec. 22, 2017.Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images file

Oct. 27, 2023, 12:24 PM CDT
By Bobby Kogan

When jobs are plentiful and business profits soar, that means good news for federal tax revenues. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

For 15 years after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 went into effect, that’s exactly what happened: Changes in the U.S. unemployment rate were a strong predictor of changes in our federal tax revenues as a percent of the GDP; a drop in the unemployment rate caused revenues as a percent of GDP to increase. But since the beginning of the 21st century, a series of tax cuts under presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump have shattered the link between tax revenues and employment. Revenues as a percent of GDP dropped significantly, and now they no longer grow much when the economy strengthens.

After news that the federal deficit grew despite a strong economy, amid rising interest rates, there are renewed fears about the nation’s fiscal outlook. With these fears typically come calls to reduce spending. But the U.S. doesn’t have a spending problem; it has a revenue problem caused by tax cuts.

Between 1995 and 2000, the unemployment rate fell from 5.6% to 4.0%, and revenues rose from 17.9% to 20.0% of GDP — the equivalent of taking in an additional $600 billion per year after adjusting for the size of the economy. When the unemployment rate fell a similar amount between 2015 and 2019, going from 5.4% to 3.7%, revenues dropped from 17.9% of GDP to 16.3% — the equivalent of taking in $450 billion less per year after adjusting for the size of the economy.

Why did this happen? Because during that same time, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and later the Trump tax cuts slashed taxes, significantly lowering overall revenue. Importantly, a disproportionate share of the benefits from these cuts accrued to very rich Americans, profitable corporations and wealthy heirs.




This newfound pattern of low revenues even in times of high employment has persisted up to the present day. In fiscal year 2023 — which just ended Sept. 30 — the unemployment rate averaged 3.6%, the lowest since 1969. However, because of these large tax cuts, revenues were a paltry 16.5% of GDP.

These lower revenues have a profound impact on the finances of the nation. Prior to the tax cuts being enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected long-term stability of the debt-to-GDP ratio. Yes, the CBO projected rising spending driven by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But the agency also projected that revenues would be able to keep up indefinitely without any additional tax increases, due to real wage gains leading to higher revenues. Now, however, the CBO projects that debt is on track to rise as a percent of GDP indefinitely, with revenues now significantly lower and no longer projected to match primary (noninterest) program costs.


Ceasures how much primary deficit reduction is required to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio. The 30-year fiscal gap is smaller than the size of the Bush tax cuts, their extensions and the Trump tax cuts under current law over the next 30 years. Therefore, mathematically and unequivocally, without those tax cuts, the debt ratio would be declining, not rising.

Second, even though the debt ratio is rising, spending can’t be blamed. The CBO’s 2012 long-term budget outlook was the last time debt was projected to decline indefinitely — because that projection was made before the Bush tax cuts were largely permanently extended. And relative to the CBO’s 2012 projection, current projections of program costs are down, not up. In short, if you were trying to explain how we got from the CBO’s 2012 projection of a declining debt ratio to its current projections of a rising debt ratio, changes in spending have lowered the future debt path, but revenues have declined significantly more than spending. Changes in revenues are therefore entirely responsible for going from a declining debt ratio to an ever-growing debt ratio.

The first step in effecting change is proper diagnosis. Those who look to blame spending to close the primary deficit are looking in the wrong place. If not for the regressive tax cuts initiated under presidents Bush and Trump, we would have been looking at a stable debt-to-GDP ratio. Any discussion of how to change our fiscal path should focus first on generating additional revenue lost to these tax cuts.

Realtors found liable for $1.8 billion in damages in conspiracy to keep commissions high​

By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN
3 minute read
Updated 10:26 PM EDT, Tue October 31, 2023

Washington, DC (CNN) — A Missouri jury on Tuesday found the National Association of Realtors, a real estate industry trade group, and some residential brokerages liable for nearly $1.8 billion in damages after determining they conspired to keep commissions for home sales artificially high.

The lawsuit covered home sales that took place between April 2015 to June 2022.

“We view it as a tremendous day of accountability for these companies,” Michael Ketchmark, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told CNN.

Despite the verdict, the matter is still far from being resolved.

“This matter is not close to being final. We will appeal the liability finding because we stand by the fact that NAR rules serve the best interests of consumers, support market-driven pricing and advance business competition,” NAR president Tracy Kasper said in a statement after the verdict was announced.

However, she said NAR “can’t speak to the specifics” to its basis of appeal until it is filed. “In the interim, we will ask the court to reduce the damages awarded by the jury,” Kasper added.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway-owned HomeServices of America and two subsidiaries, as well as Keller Williams Realty, were among the other real estate groups the jury found guilty of conspiring.

A spokesperson from HomeServices told CNN the company is “disappointed with the court’s ruling and intends to appeal.”

“Today’s decision means that buyers will face even more obstacles in an already challenging real estate market and sellers will have a harder time realizing the value of their homes,” the spokesperson said.

Keller Williams did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for a comment.

Ketchmark said groups like HomeServices are claiming this “because they’re desperate to hang on to the system that they have rigged against everyone.”

“They made that same argument in court for the last couple of weeks and it took a jury all of two and a half hours to disregard it,” he said.

Appeals process could be protracted​

The appeals process could take up to three years, said Jaret Seiberg, a housing policy analyst at TD Cowen. The losing party he said will likely attempt to have the case tried by the Supreme Court.

But Tuesday’s verdict does not mean “buyer commissions are a thing of the past,” he said.

The judge presiding over the case will have to decide the scope of the injunction, which could end up amounting to “minor tweaks” to the current commission-sharing system. “If that is the case, then the impact may be limited as we expect most brokers will continue to offer commission sharing to boost interest in the property,” Seiberg. added.

Minutes after Tuesday’s victory, Ketchmark filed a new class-action lawsuit against real estate companies including Douglas Elliman, Compass and Redfin. The new suit also alleges the companies violated antitrust laws by conspiring to keep commissions high.

Douglas Elliman and Compass declined to comment on the new case. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman labeled it “a copycat lawsuit.”

Our viewing portion of practice just ended. We have notes on Jacobe Covington. We are not sure what the interview list is because they are expecting "scheduling conflicts" tomorrow. We are expecting both offensive and defensive players today including Lincoln Riley and Alex Grinch, but they are working on the list as I write this.

What went into the two-point conversion decisions the past couple of week -- is that a chart or gut feel dictating those?

"Little bit of both. We have a chart that gives us, that's obviously analytics-based that gives us a thought process on where you want to do it. Some of it is, and I've always said I don't want to be the coach that, well I just made this decision based solely on analytics. I think that's at times a cop out. There's feel and flow of the game and confidence to execute it or confidence to stop it. There's how many possessions are left in the game. Charts the other day were pretty strong to go for it. I was lukewarm on one of them -- the first one just because it was so early in the half and the nature of the game, it was such a heavy possession game, there was so many possessions I knew there was a lot left to unfold. So it was one of those, the chart was not 50-50, but in my mind it was 50-50 and decided to go for it. We had exactly what we wanted and didn't catch the ball. But yeah, we haven't done too many, but every now and then you get into those situations where they come up and we've actually had more here in the last few weeks than maybe we've had my entire time here at 'SC."

...is even more "Berkeley" than you think. It's a case of one whacko stalking another whacko (and a bunch of other whackos threatening to go on the whacko diet).

What did we say @Kylerkeener ?? We told you to cut it out, but you didn't listen! At least the 2 points you missed by were for our team, not theirs. I'm starting to think you have some sort of mildly warped version of Biff's sports results book from Back to the Future 2.

If you haven't guessed from the title, @Kylerkeener wins Week 9 with a 2! Yes, he predicted a 48-49 SC loss. He runs away with it in a week where no one else was remotely close. This is he second win of the year. If you came within 30 this week, you did very well (only 13 guessers did). @cj and @Alex3000 were the only other 2 within 20 points, posting a 12 and a 15 respectively. The average miss was by 33 points. Only @maduchi with a guess of 76-75 had a higher Cal score than what they actually put up.

That got me curious as to how bad the D has actually be in relation to where the GTSers think they will be. The stats are astounding. Here are the results of picks higher than what the other team actually scored so far this year:
Game 1 - San Jose St - 0/66
Game 2 - Nevada - 33/65
Game 3 - Stanford - 61/62
Game 4 - ASU - 0/60
Game 5 - Colorado - 1/56
Game 6 - Arizona - 1/56
Game 7 - Notre Dame - 0/56
Game 8 - Utah - 3/52
Game 9 - Cal - 1/50

Overall - 100/523 - 19% (and a total of 6 guesses since the Stanford game or 1.8% of guesses)

Apparently we don't learn very well.

No change at the top of the season standings as we had a lot of drops this weeks but @Kylerkeener does now crack the top 5.

Congrats to our winner this week, and let's all ask him to please make a guess in SC's favor this week, as he can clearly control outcomes.

Formerly committed to Boston College.

Login to view embedded media
Login to view embedded media Login to view embedded media

Formerly committed to Boston College.

Login to view embedded media
Login to view embedded media

Most say yes, but CLR teams beg to differ. Before scrolling down to the answer, take a guess where we currently rank among the 130 FBS teams.





















The 2023 Trojans rank 127th out of 130 FBS teams in penalties per/gm.
Last year we ranked 77th
The '21 season, while at OK they ranked 87th
The '20 season, while at OK they ranked 98th
The '19 season, while at OK they ranked 101st
The '18 season, while at OK they ranked 72nd

Here's the full transcript of Lincoln Riley's comments from last night on Trojans Live:

On celebrating the win Saturday ...

"Yeah, it was awesome, it was. I think more than anything, just after three quarters and you're there together -- I said it after, there's nowhere to hide, you have to win this game, you're down at that point in the fourth quarter right there in the beginning two scores and you've got to go find a way to do it, and that was our best ball of the game. Just to see that kind of manifest itself in the way it did, to transpire the way it did with all that's gone on here the last few weeks, was really cool to see the guys respond. It was a fun locker room after, it was. To come back and win like that on the road down like we were was a tremendous effort, and it showed. It wasn't the cleanest certainly that we can play by any stretch, but this team has a lot of guts, this team has a lot of toughness, has a lot of character. They fight, man. They fight, fight, fight and they continued to fight all throughout that thing. That's the No. 1 reason we won the game."

How is the mentality created?

"It's been important for this year and it'll be important going forward in the future years as you continue to establish the winning culture, the attitude that we want here at USC. We've had four games in a row where at some point in those games we've been down double digits, and we've come back and won two. We were just a quarter of Eric Gentry's index finger from getting three, and again, I still feel like very, very close, probably one possession away there in the third quarter of the Notre Dame deal of that one potentially turning out different as well. So the common denominator, any time we've been down we've put ourselves right back in the mix -- we have. That shows a lot. I mean, listen, we want to play as good as we can. We want to play cleaner more than anyone wants us to play cleaner, but you've still got to find a way to put yourself in position to win at the end of the day and we're doing that. So, the obvious battle for us right now, the consistency, some of the breakdowns, some of the mental mistakes, we've got a handful of plays every single game -- or these last several games -- on each side of the ball, all three sides that we're not making. Self-inflicted errors that we are gifting our opponents, and that's the reason that these games have been close. That's the No. 1 reason by a mile that we have had to come back in some of these games and the reality is, we don't need to fix 60 plays, we need to fix 5-10 on each side of the ball. You flip those, and all of a sudden we don't make those breakdowns, we don't give those teams those opportunities, we make those plays, these games feel a lot different. So that's our journey, that's our path, but to find a way to win -- especially this one here with all that's transpired over the last few weeks -- is big because it sets up an incredible opportunity."

How do you approach the fine line of fixing those handful of plays without overcoaching?

"We're attacking the team with it. Listen, we're not going to reach the things we want to reach if we don't aggressively go after it. We're doing that as coaches, we're doing that with our players. We want to play great here down the stretch -- I think that's really important and I do feel like last Saturday's got an opportunity to be that spark that this team's looking for a little bit. I really do. How we played in that fourth quarter and how we had to bow up, the stretch to me that still just sticks out in my mind is cause the turnover, offense turns it right back over and they've got the ball there on the plus-40 in great position for Cal, and we go four-and-out right there. That was like, OK. That was a defining moment of that game, and I honestly think we'll look back, it wouldn't surprise me at all if we look back years down the road, look back on that say that wasn't a defining moment for this team in its entirety. That was everything, and that was what we're capable of and I think the guys felt it, the sideline felt it and we took it down and scored and had some good special teams plays. It was cool to see that run in that moment because you felt like you had momentum and you're coming back and you give it right back to them and you have to stop them again. It was like bam, bam, bam, bam, four plays in a row all executed at a high level. That's what we can be and that's like that vision that we're holding onto and that mountaintop that we're chasing right now."

The Republicans' first impeachment inquiry hearing targeting President Joe Biden was a debacle. Chairman James Comer doesn't want to bother with a second.


Oct. 30, 2023, 10:23 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

It was about a month ago when House Republicans tried to get the ball rolling on their impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden. Expectations weren’t exactly high. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who led the proceedings, failed to clear that low bar.

As we discussed soon after, there was a bipartisan consensus that the event was an embarrassing fiasco. One senior Republican staffer described the proceedings as “an unmitigated disaster.” Another conceded that the Kentucky congressman and his staff “botched this bad.” Steve Bannon, meanwhile, slammed GOP members for being unprepared, while one of his guests said House Republicans “don’t know what they’re doing at all.”

Of course, it’s unrealistic to think anti-Biden crusaders would simply give up and walk away. The first hearing was a debacle, but perhaps the second would be less embarrassing? Evidently, Comer isn’t eager to have another hearing. A Washington Post analysis noted late last week that by the Oversight Committee chairman’s own admission, he doesn’t even want a follow-up.

“I don’t know that I want to hold any more hearings, to be honest with you,” Comer said while speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill last week. He complained that it was hard to keep members present for hours on end, given that so many had other commitments. Instead, he said, he preferred depositions, which “you can do more with.”

Click to expand...

The Post’s analysis added that depositions have political advantages that Comer and his colleagues could exploit: “You can do more with cherry-picked transcripts when your goal is to coat Joe Biden with insinuations and unproved allegations.”

A summary in the Meidas Touch put it this way: “So that appears to be Comer’s new plan: work in the shadows, give depositions, and cherry pick information to make his case, rather than allowing the public to see his case fall apart.”

Of course, it says a great deal about the GOP members’ confidence in their case that Comer is reluctant to hold another public hearing. Ordinarily, when a president from the opposite party is at the center of a genuine controversy, his congressional critics can’t wait to show Americans what they’ve uncovered.

Comer, after already having failed once, has apparently learned that there’s little upside to repeating the same mistake in front of a national audience.

But for Republican voters concerned about the fate of the evidence-free anti-Biden efforts, the Oversight Committee chairman’s reluctance to hold a second hearing does not mean the crusade is puttering out. Politico reported last week that the GOP’s impeachment advocates see an ally in new House Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I think Mike Johnson is more than happy to move forward, and will move forward, and the only question is the timeline,” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, a House Freedom Caucus member, said in an interview. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has authored resolutions to oust Biden as well as repeatedly pushed for more action, added: “I definitely think he’ll be supportive.”

Their confidence is rooted in fact: Johnson not only endorsed the baseless impeachment inquiry, the Louisiana Republican also falsely told the public last month that there’s “mounting evidence” of the president having “engaged in bribery schemes, pay-to-play schemes.”

Watch this space.

House Republicans have effectively declared, “We’ll only assist Israel if we can undermine the IRS and help tax cheats while making the deficit bigger.”


Oct. 31, 2023, 7:00 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

Now that the House finally has a speaker, the Republican majority has an opportunity to at least try to get back to work, tackling priorities the chamber neglected during the 22 days of GOP-imposed chaos. Near the top of the list is a congressional response to international crises involving U.S. allies abroad.

For the White House and the bipartisan leadership in the Senate, there’s a straightforward vision in place: Congress can and should, the argument goes, approve an aid package that includes support for both Israel and Ukraine.

For the Republican majority in the House, it’s quite a bit more complicated. For one thing, GOP leaders in the chamber are determined to separate Israeli and Ukrainian assistance, which necessarily imperils the latter country’s future.

For another, there’s a serious problem with how, exactly, House Republicans are prepared to respond to the Israel-Hamas war. NBC News reported:

In his first major move, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is using the bipartisan goal of providing aid to Israel to pick a fight with President Joe Biden over his signature achievement. A new bill House Republicans released Monday includes $14.3 billion in emergency funding for Israel while rescinding the same amount of IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate, health care and tax law Biden signed last year.

Click to expand...

Under normal circumstances, Congress would simply recognize the seriousness of the crisis in the Middle East and approve emergency funding without concerns for budget offsets. The post-McCarthy, Johnson-led House Republican conference has instead decided it wants aid to Israel to be budget neutral — by transferring money away from the IRS.

Except that’s ridiculous. For one thing, the funding doesn’t need to be offset. For another, the whole point of budget offsets is to prevent making the deficit worse, and taking money from the IRS necessarily has the opposite of the intended effect.

Indeed, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein highlighted the fact that the specific provisions of the House GOPs’ bill target, among other things, tax enforcement and IRS operations support.

In other words, House Republicans have effectively declared, “We’ll assist Israel, but only if we can undermine federal law enforcement and help tax cheats in a way that makes the budget deficit bigger.”

It’s likely that GOP leaders are simply playing a tiresome game. They’ll bring this bill to the floor, Democrats will reject its absurdities, and Republican strategists will start preparing attack ads that claim Democrats “voted against assisting Israel during a deadly war.”

But the goal right now shouldn’t be creating fundamentally dishonest fodder for the next election. Rather, Johnson & Co. have a responsibility to work on writing a bill that can pass — and this cynical stunt masquerading as legislation cannot.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin described the IRS provisions as a “poison pill” that would derail the effort. The Maryland Democrat added that House GOP leaders must realize that “they can’t work on a bill just with Republicans.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, meanwhile, issued a written statement that read in part, “Politicizing our national security interests is a nonstarter.”

The next steps should come into focus fairly quickly. The House will return to work on Wednesday, at which point the Rules Committee will take up the GOP’s bill. A floor vote is expected before the end of the week.

But stepping back, this is the first real governing test for the new House speaker and the overhauled Republican leadership team. It’s a test Johnson is failing.

This is not the sort of step a governing party would take if it were serious about providing assistance to a foreign ally in the midst of a security crisis. Rather, this is what we’d expect from an unserious party that’s prioritizing partisan games over policymaking.

This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews, and a Jewish community center under construction in the city of Nalchik was the target of an apparent attack.

Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on Oct. 18. Some Jews found Stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution. German politicians have been forceful in their denunciations, but apparently not forceful enough in their policing.

Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. They’re probably right to worry the state can’t protect them. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for “jihad” and chanted “from the river to the sea,” a demand for the erasure of Israel and by extension its citizens. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted “gas the Jews” after the Hamas attack.

1. Sarkisian has the Longhorns ranked #7
2. Kiffin has Ole’ Miss ranked # 11.
3. In the PAC-12, Wa is #5, Or is #6, Or St is #16, Ut is #18, UCLA is at #20 all ahead of us at #24.
4. Programs such as Miz # 14, Louisville #15, Air Force #17, Tulane #21, Kansas #22, and James Madison #23 are all ranked ahead of us.

All I can is -damn. That’s sad.

Can’t wait to see his pressor…

I’m sure he will make Clay Helton proud…

I've never heard of something like this happening before, but I don't follow hockey and could be wrong. RIP Adam Johnson, and Godspeed to your family.

As his radical blockade continues, Sen. Tommy Tuberville apparently now believes that Democrats "created" the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East.


Oct. 30, 2023, 8:34 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

Between the crisis in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war, patience for Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade is wearing thin on Capitol Hill. The Alabama Republican has nevertheless said he has no intention of abandoning his blockade, regardless of the circumstances, and his spokesperson added the right-wing senator would only shift gears if the Pentagon gave in to Tuberville’s demands and ended reimbursement benefits for U.S. troops.

It was against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported last week that Democrats are moving forward with new plans to circumvent the Alabaman’s blockade. A day later, as The Hill reported, Tuberville responded to the efforts in a deeply strange way.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who has held up more than 360 military promotions and created a stalemate that has consumed the Senate for months, claimed the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were “created” by Democrats.

Click to expand...

That account might seem hard to believe, but it’s actually what the GOP senator said, out loud and on camera.

“They need to be worried about what’s going on in Ukraine, the Middle East, the wars that their side, the Democrats and Joe Biden, have created but you know, they want to circumvent the rules in the Senate.”

So, a few things.

First, Democrats didn’t “create” the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East. Tuberville, among other things, serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which means he really ought to know this simple truth.

Second, Democrats are “worried about” these international crises, which is why they want to confirm pending U.S. military nominees. This really isn’t complicated.

Third, Democrats don’t “want to circumvent the rules in the Senate,” so much as they want to allow the Senate to vote on military confirmations. It’s Tuberville’s abuse of the rules that is standing in the way.

It’s an open question as to whether the coach-turned-politician actually appreciates these details. In fact, the senator told CNN over the weekend, “This administration would rather burn the Senate down and that’s what would happen. ... If you change the rules of the Senate then it lasts forever. So they would rather burn down the Senate than negotiate.”

But the closer one looks, the less sense this makes. As the Post’s report explained, the Democratic plan “would not require a permanent rule change that would alter senators’ individual power to slow nominations in the future,” despite Tuberville’s insistence to the contrary.

What’s more, the administration has repeatedly reached out to the Republican about working toward a solution, but to date, the senator has said he expects to be rewarded in exchange for his radical tactics — and what he wants is fewer benefits for U.S. troops.

That’s not a price the White House is willing to pay.

Parties are expected to pursue course-corrections after defeats. But every time Republicans fall short, their response is to move further to the right.


Oct. 30, 2023, 11:58 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

The day after Mike Johnson was elected House speaker, the editorial board of The New York Times published a good summary of the Louisiana Republican’s radicalism on a wide range of issues. But in passing, the editors touched on an underappreciated point about the GOP’s trajectory.

It has been disturbing to watch the slide from Republican speakers like Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who denounced attempts to challenge the election results, to the hemming and hawing of Kevin McCarthy to the full-blown antidemocratic stands of Mr. Johnson. And it has certainly been a long slide from the party of Ronald Reagan — whose 11th Commandment was not speaking ill of other Republicans and who envisioned the party as a big tent — to the extremism, purity tests and chaos of the House Republican conference this year.

Click to expand...

There are no credible questions about Johnson’s ideology. The Wall Street Journal, in a news report, described the Louisiana as “the most conservative speaker of the last century,” and I’m hard pressed to imagine how anyone could credibly draw a different conclusion.

But among the reasons that’s relevant is the eagerness among House Republicans to keep finding new ways to move even further to the right.

This also came to mind the other day when The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent highlighted Johnson’s radicalism on immigration, including the GOP congressman’s embrace of highly provocative conspiracy theories. It was, after all, at a Capitol Hill hearing last year when Johnson falsely asserted that the U.S./Mexico border is “open” because Democratic officials want to “turn all the illegals into voters.” Greg’s report added:

The pro-immigrant group America’s Voice, which tracks lawmakers’ positions on the issue, has not documented any comparable rhetoric in Johnson’s predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. “Johnson has gone farther than most of his Republican colleagues in elevating alarmist and dangerous rhetoric,” says Vanessa Cardenas, the group’s executive director.

Click to expand...

It’s not just immigration, of course. On everything from abortion rights to climate change, LGBTQ+ rights to the separation of church and state, Johnson is well to the right of McCarthy.
Who was to the right of Paul Ryan.

Who was to the right of John Boehner.

There’s a school of thought in American politics that parties pursue course-corrections in the wake of electoral setbacks. Indeed, it probably seems like common sense: When a party fails to persuade voters and struggles at the ballot box, party leaders look for ways to become more popular in the hopes of winning the next time.

For Republicans, the course-correction never comes. The party struggled mightily in 2006 and 2008, and its response was to move further to the right. The GOP struggled again in 2012, and its response was to move further to the right.

Republicans lost the House in 2018, and its response was to move further to the right. The party lost the Senate and the White House in 2020, and their response was to move further to the right. The GOP assumed it’d ride a “red wave” in 2022, but the party instead underperformed to a historic degree.

Its response — let’s all say it together — was to move further to the right.

To hear Speaker Mike Johnson tell it, he's spent his career supporting a state-by-state approach to abortion rights. His record suggests otherwise.


Oct. 30, 2023, 9:53 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

There are currently 221 House Republicans. Of the 221, a grand total of zero describe themselves as supporters of abortion rights.

With this in mind, as the public sees reports about new House Speaker Mike Johnson being a fierce opponent of reproductive freedoms, the news might not seem especially striking. He’s a Republican congressman. Of course he wants to impose restrictions on abortion rights.

But Johnson is not just a run-of-the-mill opponent. The Louisianan fought to shut down abortion clinics, referred to abortion as a “holocaust,” suggested abortion could be blamed for school shootings, and at one point argued during a congressional hearing that if women couldn’t terminate unwanted pregnancies, there’d be more “able-bodied workers” — which in turn would mean Republicans would feel less of a need to pursue cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

It was against this backdrop that the new GOP leader sat down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week and fielded a question about the demise of Roe v. Wade. When the host asked whether he supports letting states decide on reproductive rights, Johnson replied:

“We argued my entire career for 25 years that the states should have the right to do this. There’s no national consensus among the people on what to do with that issue on a federal level for certain.”

Click to expand...

A casual viewer might have seen this and come away with the impression that the new House speaker is an opponent of a national abortion ban, to be imposed on states at the federal level.

But that’s not his position at all. On the contrary, Johnson has pushed for federal abortion bans.

I’m not just referring to an obscure newspaper column the Republican wrote decades ago; it was just two years ago when the future House speaker co-sponsored legislation that would have created a national policy banning abortion after 20 weeks.

What’s more, it was exactly one year ago this week when a GOP member unveiled a bill that would’ve created a federal abortion ban after 15 — and Johnson co-sponsored that proposal, too.

To be sure, there’s no reason to assume the new House speaker will be rushing similar measures to the floor anytime soon. For one thing, Congress’ to-do list is already long. For another, Johnson very likely knows that such a bill stands no chance of success in the Democratic-led Senate. What’s more, there are plenty of House Republicans from competitive districts that would eagerly avoid such a contentious vote.

But these legislative realities don’t change the fact that when Johnson presented himself to the public last week as someone who’s spent his career supporting a state-by-state approach to abortion rights, his rhetoric didn’t exactly paint an accurate picture.

When it comes to reproductive freedoms, watch what the House speaker does, not what he says.