The Washington Post divided its Obama-speech coverage into three parts on Friday's front page: the speech, "the immigrants," and "the opposition," because it's always fun to pitch Republicans as opposing immigrants. The headline was "The Opposition: Republicans confront own worst enemy." That would be the conservatives.
Post reporter Robert Costa warned of an "immediate and widening rebellion among tea party lawmakers that top Republicans are struggling to contain." Inside the A section, Obama's speech was headlined. "Obama promotes a 'common-sense' approach." The article on the opposition was headlined "GOP to face internal bickering."
Costa was still wedded to the theory -- apparently unchallenged by the facts in the election returns - that "intraparty warfare...has hurt the party's brand" in the Obama years, and the Obamacare shutdown "damaged Republicans last year":
Despite expanded powers and some new titles, soon-to-be Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) remain sharply limited in their ability to persuade their most conservative members. The duo has been thrust back into the same cycle of intraparty warfare that has largely defined the GOP during the Obama years and that has hurt the party’s brand among the broader electorate...
GOP leaders badly want to show the country that the party can govern constructively, even if it is not clear whether they can keep their raucous conference united.
McConnell and Boehner, for example, want to approve a long-term spending bill at least through the early part of next year — part of an effort to limit theatrical confrontations with Obama and focus on tax reform and other Republican-friendly issues.
But conservatives inside and outside Congress want to use the budget process as a battleground to wage war against Obama and his immigration program. The proposed gambit raises the specter of another government shutdown, akin to the one that damaged Republicans last year.
Costa also suggested this on Twitter, that these conservative hardliners don't think they lost the shutdown, if you can believe that craziness:
What you always hear in righty circles: whispers that shutdown actually "worked," help Rs make '14 gains. Informs their thinking on immig.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 21, 2014
The Republicans have just won a wave election, but in the wave of Obama's risky scheme on immigration, the Post offers no story on how the defeated Democrats are going to regroup. There is no concept that they "face internal bickering" after having their heads handed to them. If we're thinking about hardliners who don't accept electoral results and have a toxic brand, perhaps we should be considering the media elite.
Predictably, Costa turned to how apparently fringy Republicans like Michelle Bachmann -- who is retiring in January -- could poison the party image in the coming weeks:
The debate is also a test of whether the party can contain the controversial and sometimes offensive comments that have often hindered attempts to bolster support for Republicans among Hispanics. After tea party firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said on Wednesday that protected immigrants would become “illiterate” voters, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) winced.
“Unfortunate, unfair, unnecessary, unwise,” said Graham, who is close to party leaders.
Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a moderate from the Philadelphia exurbs, said the leadership is asking his colleagues to “not play into the president’s hands.”
“It only takes a couple” of comments for an unflattering narrative to build about the Republican response, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “That’s the trouble with having some of these new, young punks around here. They ought to listen to us old geezers.”
That's true -- especially if the comments are taken out of context by newspapers. "Unflattering narratives" about Republicans is the daily bread of the "objective" media. Costa reported Bachmann's actual quote online on Wednesday – which expresses exactly the argument liberal journalists are avoiding right now, that this is all about importing Democrat voters – which was then butchered in the Friday account:
“The social cost will be profound on the U.S. taxpayer — millions of unskilled, illiterate, foreign nationals coming into the United States who can’t speak the English language,” Bachmann told reporters at the Capitol. “Even though the president says they won’t be able to vote, we all know that many, in all likelihood, will vote.”
Bachmann added: “The president has a very single-minded vision. He’s looking at new voters for 2016.... People do vote without being a citizen. It’s a wink and a nod, we all know it’s going to happen."
In summation, the leadership wants to "govern constructively, but "Many conservative lawmakers, however, are shrugging off pleas from leadership. Furious with the president, they are planning a series of immediate and hard-line actions that could have sweeping consequences. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said Wednesday that Obama’s executive action should be met with a refusal to vote on any more of his nominees, and on Thursday, he compared the action with the ancient Catiline conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Roman Republic."
Online, Post reporter Philip Bump was openly mocking Cruz as fringy:
Obama is in office two more years, and Cruz -- already well down the path of drawing extreme analogies -- will have to try. Can we predict a moment in which Cruz arrives on the floor of the Senate in a luxurious toga, raising a hand to the marble statuary lining the chamber as he bellows, "Et tu, Barack?"
Even money says it will happen before Spring.
