I am going back to Ryan Lizza’s big profile of Eric Cantor in The New Yorker again, and probably not for the last time. The following excerpt made a strong impression on me, as well as several other people. What struck me wasn’t so much that Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia) has had his head stuck in the sand or that there are strong regional differences even within the Republican Party. What struck was one particular thing that Mr. Price said.
Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.”
He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
He’s talking about raising taxes on millionaires. He’s not talking about abortion. He’s not talking about religiosity or state’s rights. I read that and I thought to myself, “Is this really true? Are hordes of non-millionaire southerners ‘livid’ about raising taxes on the top two percent of earners?”
Can this explain why Southern Democrats have tended to be deficit scolds?
My working assumption has been that Blue Dogs went hat in hand to corporate America because their natural constituents in the South are quite poor and unable to make sufficient contributions for the party to compete in the South. This reasoning is based in large part in the genesis of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980’s, and their reasoning at that time. Maybe it is wrong.
I was reminded of this exchange with Rep. Price while reading a different article in Roll Call about Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray’s plans to unfurl the Democrats’ budget in the coming weeks. Roll Call obtained an internal document (quoted below) that Senator Murray sent out to the Democratic caucus.
“We don’t yet know the details of House Republicans’ updated budget plan, but assuming they keep their promises, we have a good idea about what to expect. Because they have boxed off so much of the federal budget, House Republicans will have to resort to gimmicks or make deep, extreme cuts to programs that impact families, seniors and our long-term economic strength,” the memo said. “We won’t be able to impact the budget House Republicans are preparing. But as we work on our own, and hope to find a path to a bipartisan budget agreement, the House Republicans’ extreme approach makes the need for a responsible alternative that puts middle class families first is all the more clear.”
But while Murray and Democratic leaders are pushing a unified front in preparing to introduce their budget and tackling the Ryan plan head on, not everyone in the caucus is on board. In particular, vulnerable senators up for re-election in 2014 aren’t necessarily looking forward to having to vote on a Democratic plan that carries tax increases — one reason that doing a budget has been politically difficult for Democrats over the past three years.
The vulnerable senators are not named, but they surely include Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and probably Kay Hagan of North Carolina, as well. There are a couple of non-Southern Democratic senators, like Mark Begich of Alaska and Max Baucus of Montana that could conceivably be in the same group, but it just seems strange that closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich could be a toxic position to take in the South.