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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 14, 2015)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2015 Republicans, guns and abortion Founded in 1873 STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager We exemplify goals of Cultural Trust N ewcomers to Astoria commonly express amazement at the level of voluntarism and giving that rolls out every year. In this season, which includes United Way giving as well as end-of-year charitable giving, Clatsop County’s goodwill is especially apparent. Our county is a poster child for Oregon’s commitment to arts and culture, which is re- warded by the Oregon Cultural Trust. Last Thursday night at the Liberty Theater, the Clatsop County Cultural Coalition gave checks for almost $11,000 to a group of disparate causes. Some recipients were familiar to lo- cal audiences — Little Ballet Theater, North Coast Chorale and Partners for the PAC, for instance. Others are less well known — Clatsop Care Memory Community and the Maritime Archaeological Society. Taken as a group, these ben- e¿ciaries exemplify the cultural richness of life in this corner of Oregon. Our local Cultural Coalition gets its money from the Oregon Cultural Trust, which gains its revenues from a tax credit, as well as sales of custom license plates. Created by the Oregon Legislature in 2001, the Cultural Trust is unique. No other state provides a single funding mech- anism that allows taxpayers to bene¿t while giving to an ar- ray of arts, culture and historic preservation organizations in all parts of Oregon. In its 14th year, the Oregon Cultural Trust raised a record $4.4 million in ¿scal year 201 and will give $2. million in ¿s- cal year 2016. The Trust’s prin- cipal is more than $26 million. Now is the time to think about making gift to the Oregon Cultural Trust. If you have giv- en to a nonpro¿t organization in the arts and culture catego- ry, you may give an identical amount to the Trust. And you get a tax credit equal to your amount of giving. For most of us, it is one of the best deals in Oregon tax law. Support the Trust. It’s a gift you will be proud of. By GAIL COLLINS New York Times News Service T he presidential race has de- generated to the point where I am going to attempt to cheer you up by talking about abortion and guns. And state legislatures. We do not, as a nation, de- vote a whole lot of attention to what happens in state capi- tols, although I personally en- joy those ¿ghts about selecting an of¿cial rock Gail or state muf¿n. Collins In recent years, one of the most popular activities in many legislatures has been ¿nding new ways to expand the right to bear arms in places like schools (Utah) or bars (Tennessee) or airports (Georgia). The other is tromp- ing on reproductive rights. I am telling you all this as a lead-in to a fascinating bill that was recently proposed in the Missouri House of Representatives. It would treat Missourians seeking to buy ¿rearms the same way it treats Missou- rians seeking to end a pregnancy. “For instance, there would be a 72- hour waiting period,” said the sponsor, Rep. Stacey Newman. Missouri has piled so many unnec- essary requirements on abortion pro- viders that it’s down to one clinic in St. Louis. Newman didn’t attempt to limit the state to one gun store — her bill just requires that residents buy their guns at a licensed dealer located at least 120 miles from their homes. After cool- ing their heels in a local motel for three days, the prospective buyers would have to listen to a lecture about the medical risks associated with ¿rearms and view pictures of people with fatal gun wounds. Most Missouri lawmakers regard themselves as pro-life. Therefore, New- man feels, they ought to want to do something about the fact that St. Louis and Kansas City both rank in the Top 10 American cities for ¿rearm deaths. By DAVID BROOKS New York Times News Service I here are two types of Machiavellians in politics, Sel¿sh Machiavellians and Kind Machiavellians. maritime commerce and ¿sh- eries, provides some of its own housing. Even so, the tightness of the rental market is bound to be a consideration for the service as it contemplates expansion plans. Answers to this problem are largely up to the interplay of our capitalist system, in the form of private investments in new multi-family housing construc- tion, as well as working to im- prove business conditions so em- ployers can afford to pay higher wages. From a public-policy stand- point, leaders of municipalities and counties must keep housing as a top action item. We need to be looking at tax incentives, Àex- ibility in terms of land-use rules and the full inventory of other tools to encourage and facilitate affordable housing. Area nonprof- its such as Craft3 also can play a valuable role in helping ¿nd solu- tions and by matchmaking be- tween investors and developers. The population west of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington will be swelling for many years into the future. The equivalent of entire cities-worth of new residents will be squeez- ing into this fortunate and fragile area. Managing this growth will require ¿nding places for every- one to live, without despoiling farms, forests, wildlife habitat and open spaces. Deliberate, well-planned housing solutions will take years to bring to fruition. We to get our act together and lay plans now for keeping roofs over Paci¿c Northwest heads for generations to come. What this campaign needs is a 72-hour waiting period for everything. “It was one way to get people’s at- tention,” she said. Nobody thinks her bill is going to pass — or even get a hearing in the Republican-dominated Legislature. Newman says the odds are far more favorable for proposed legislation that would allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses and re- quire that women who want abortions get permission from the man who im- pregnated them. We live in hard times, people. But when you think of Missouri, give a fond mental shout-out to Stacey Newman. And remember her lesson — when it comes to civil liberties, there’s currently far more concern in this country over the right to buy weapons than there is over a woman’s right to control her own body. All the major Republican candidates for president are pretty much on the same page when it comes to ¿rearms. So much so that you probably can’t guess which one of them said: “I used to think they needed to be registered, The Ted Cruz establishment Get it together to T create housing payoff n the latest bad news for rent- ers — and quite good news for landlords — the U.S. Census Bureau last week said that Oregon’s 2014 rental vacancy rate was 3.6 percent in 2014, the lowest in the whole nation. Nor can apartment hunters hope for much more luck by looking across the Columbia River — the vacancy rate in Washington state was 4.2 per- cent — the ¿fth lowest in the U.S., including Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. This issue is one abundant- ly familiar to renters in towns around the Columbia estu- ary and the adjacent seashore. Though perhaps not so scarce or anywhere near as pricey as in Portland and Seattle, lack of apartments and affordable rent- al houses is becoming a limiting factor for our economy. When it comes to recruiting and retaining employees, their ability to locate affordable hous- ing is a prime factor. Particularly for important local industries in- cluding hospitality and seafood, prevailing wages run headlong into a rental market that can easi- ly consume half of monthly take- home pay, The rule of thumb is that landlords require annual in- come of 40 times monthly rent. A bargain-basement, one-bedroom apartment in our area might therefore require an income of $30,000. The one rental house in a recent local classi¿ed advertis- ing section would necessitate at least $0,000 in annual income. The U.S. Coast Guard, one of our biggest economic contrib- utors and one that plays a huge role in ensuring the viability of Missouri state Rep. Stacey Newman but if you register them they just come and ¿nd you and take your guns.” OK, it was Ben Carson. All the major candidates are also opposed to giving women any rights whatsoever when it comes to termi- nating a pregnancy. But lately, there’s been disagreement on the far edge of the issue: whether bans should in- clude an exception for rape and incest victims. It came up at a recent gather- ing of a group of donors and activists called the Republican Jewish Coalition. (This was the same event where Donald Trump told his Jewish audience: “I’m a negotiator, like you folks ... Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t nego- tiate deals?”) Sen. Ted Cruz, the up-and-coming darling of social conservatives, was asked about his abortion positions, and he rambled on about the evils of contra- ceptives without ever acknowledging that he does oppose giving any leeway in the cases of rape or incest. Cruz is also, of course, an avid protector of all things gun-related, and recently theo- rized that the man arrested in the mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic was a “transgender leftist activist.” Ah Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz. “If the nominee of the Republican Party will not allow an exception for rape and incest, they will not win,” predicted Sen. Lindsey Graham, who followed Cruz to the podium. The presumption is that voters will de- mand some show of mercy, but there are plenty of women who are not vic- tims of rape whose stories are equally heart-rending. Girls who become preg- nant before they’re old enough to know what they’re doing. Poor women with several children and two jobs whose birth control method fails. Women who desperately want a baby but dis- cover the fetus they’re carrying is too deformed to survive after birth. Most Americans don’t want to prioritize — they’d leave the whole matter to the women and their doctors. But the current debate on the Re- publican side has slid so far to the right that the moderates are people who do not want to force rape victims to carry the fetus to full term. Or allow con- cealed weapons in kindergarten. Maybe what this campaign needs is a 72-hour waiting period for every- thing. The Sel¿sh ones are the ones we usually think of — the nakedly ambi- tious people who are always strategiz- ing, sometimes ruthlessly, for their own personal advantage. The Kind Machiavellians realize that it’s smart to get along with peo- ple, so they pick their friendships strategically, feigning af- fection toward those who might David be useful. Brooks In Washing- ton and maybe in life, there are many more Kind Ma- chiavellians than Sel¿sh ones. But Ted Cruz has always stood out for being na- kedly ambitious for himself. He was always drawn to establish- ment institutions: Princeton, Harvard Law. His personal drive to gain elite posts was noted, even by the standards of such places. He learned tennis to get a clerkship with Justice William Rehnquist. According to The Boston Globe, a female law student who was giving him a ride was shocked when he quickly asked her about her IQ and SAT scores. He joined the Republican establish- ment while young, working for George W. Bush, although he was marginalized when administration jobs were handed out, reportedly because his ambition was off-putting. Yet Cruz is intelligent, and knows that sometimes you have to switch tactics in order to climb. Over the past few years, Cruz has become a team player. In fact, he’s become a cen- tral member of the conservative estab- lishment. A little history lesson is in or- der. During the 1970s conservatives self-consciously built establishment institutions to counter the liberal es- tablishment. But with the election of Ronald Reagan, the conservative es- tablishment split into two. There was the regular conservative establishment, ¿lled with mainstream conservatives who wanted to use the inside levers of power that Republicans now controlled. But there was also a conservative counter-establishment. This was pop- ulated with people like Paul Weyrich, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas meets with supporters after speak- ing at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Thursday. Pablo Martinez Monsivais AP Photo Richard Viguerie, Brent Bozell and members of the Council for National others who were temperamentally in- Policy, an important Counter Establish- capable of governance. Many of these ment gathering. He’s been endorsed by Old Right people broke with Reagan the old guard, Viguerie and Bozell. The Counter Establishment is now because he wasn’t ideologically pure nearly as ¿nancially Àush and institu- on this or that policy matter. Today the conservative community tionally entrenched as the mainstream still has at least two establishments, or establishment. Cruz has been able to three if you want to throw in the young tap into it to raise gobs of money. In the Reform Conservatives. The main- third quarter, Cruz raised $12.2 million, stream establishment tends to side with about twice what rival Marco Rubio party leaders like Paul Ryan and who- raised over the same period. His super ever the presidential nominee is. The PACs raised $31 million in the few Old Right Counter Conservative Es- weeks of his campaign, largely from tablishment has grown in recent years. hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. For example, the Heritage Foundation, He’s had fundraisers hosted by Joseph which used to be more or Konzelmann, a manag- less conservative estab- ing director at Goldman Ted lishment, has gone more Sachs. Counter Establishment. He’s won over the Cruz has Counter The difference is the Establishment establishment wants to and even some of the always use the levers of power to regular establishment practically pass reforms. stood out by being tactical in his The Counter Establish- positions, shifting for being policy ment believes that Wash- his views most notori- ington is pervasively on trade promotion nakedly ously corrupt and is implacably authority and foreign hostile to the GOP lead- ambitious policy generally. He ership. savages Republicans ha- for Since he came to bitually but initially re- Washington, Ted Cruz to criticize Donald himself. fused has meticulously aligned Trump. As Eliana John- himself with the rising son of National Review and rich conservative Counter Estab- put it, the paradox of Cruz is that “The lishment. He’s called his party leader a man who boasts of his ideological puri- liar on the Senate Àoor. In another re- ty is perhaps the most obviously tactical cent Àoor speech he accused every Re- candidate.” publican but him and Mike Lee of sell- Cruz is riding the shift in the conser- ing out their principles for money. His vative activist establishment, the way efforts to shut down the government did groups like the Club for Growth now enormous harm to the Republican Party provide a power base for someone who and to the country, but they cemented wants to run against the GOP leadership. his relationship with the members of A friend once joked that the journal- the Counter Establishment. Crucially, ist has the ultimate power: The power to those battles enabled him to amass the choose who he wants to be co-opted by. email lists that are a large part of his do- Ted Cruz is surging as the ¿gurehead nor base. of the rich and interlocked Counter Es- His campaign is uniting the Counter tablishment. And he gets to do it while Establishment. According to some ex- pretending that he is anti-establishment. cellent reporting in the National Jour- That’s a nice trick. Even a Machiavel- nal, he was rapturously received by lian one.
