Republican Governor Learns Downside of Being Part of Republican Party

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New Jersey governor Chris Christie delivered one of his trademark rants today, this time aimed at House Republicans who declined to hold a vote on an aid bill that would give his state lots of money to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The obvious point to make about this is that maybe it serves Christie right. He certainly has no reluctance to mock other people who want money, after all, so all that’s happening here is a Republican governor getting a faceful of his own Republican medicine.

But Dave Weigel points out another interesting tidbit. The House Republican leadership apparently tried to pass the bill by engaging in a bit of vote-counting strategery, splitting the aid bill into two parts that they hoped could pass with two different majorities:

But instead of explaining this, Republicans allowed a familiar narrative — oh, the bill’s full of pork and waste! — to creep out. Christie mocks the narrative in the single boldest part of this rant. The “pork,” he points out, was $600 million in a total $60 billion package — one percent of the total. The Republicans who got angry about that, he says, are dupes. “Those guys should spend a little more time reading the information we send and a little less time reading the talking points sent by their staff.”

That’s quite an ask. Making fun of waste in an omnibus bill is one of the GOP’s most effective tactics. It was key to the strategy against the 2009 stimulus bill, making the “porkiest” parts of the bill famous, then forcing Democrats to denounce them, creating an impression of disarray and shame. And here Christie admits that it’s a sort of cheap argument, not worth sinking legislation over.

Republicans rail endlessly about trivial expenditures, mostly as a way of avoiding putting their money where their mouths are. Over the past two weeks, reporters have routinely asked John Boehner for details about what cuts he wanted as part of a fiscal cliff deal, and he just as routinely refused to answer. Mitt Romney did the same thing over an entire campaign. The problem is that real cuts are politically unpopular, and they know it. So instead they ban earmarks, complain about foreign aid, give out silly awards for allegedly silly research projects, and kvetch about “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That last item has been abused so often that it’s little more than an inside-the-Beltway joke these days.

In any case, Christie is now being hoist by the same tea-party petard that’s responsible for making him famous in the first place. Ditto for the House Republican leadership, which tried to figure out a clever way to pass the bill, but ended up a victim to the same kind of anti-pork nonsense that they usually save for Democrats. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of all this, I decided to look up “hoist by his own petard” for the first time today. I had always vaguely assumed that a petard was something like a belt or a pair of suspenders. But no: it’s an explosive device. If you are hoist by your own petard, it means your bomb went off in your face and blew you skyward. You learn something new every day.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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