Today's top headlines
Over at
The New York Times,
Andrew Rosenthal examines the GOP's "purity control" problem:
After losing the 2012 election the G.O.P. engaged in a bit of soul-searching, and talked publicly about changing their image, if not their policies. That phase is definitively over. The Republicans are back to denouncing every utterance that strays from an absolutely rigid right-wing orthodoxy, and even ones that really don’t. [...]
In another sign of the intense pressure on Republicans to prove their bona fides, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas on Sunday released evidence indicating that he is really and truly American. I mean he gave the Dallas Morning News his birth certificate proving that he is a “natural born American” — and therefore eligible to run for president. Mr. Cruz was born in Canada (not quite Kenya, but definitely not the U.S. of A.). But his mother was an American citizen, meaning he never had to go through a naturalization exercise.
How bizarre that Mr. Cruz felt he had to do this. Of course, the way the Republicans are going, by 2016 merely having lived in the socialist haven north of this country will probably be enough to knock him out of contention.
Jake Sherman at
Politico highlights the divide between Republicans in Washington and California Republicans over immigration reform:
Republicans in Washington are taking a piecemeal approach to immigration reform — a strategy that could give the party’s most polarizing figures a months-long platform to pop off about illegal immigrants.
California Republicans have a much different line: Shut up and get it done.
The divide boils down to simple math for California Republicans, who know they can’t win elections here for long without the support of Hispanic voters.
In Maine,
Christopher Cousins at Bangor Daily News runs down the mass resignation of a dozen Republicans "upset with party politics at the national and state level":
At the national level, they targeted their ire at House Speaker John Boehner for removing “the most fiscally conservative GOP members from leadership positions, citing their ‘unwillingness to be team players,’” according to the group’s resignation letter. They also took issue with Republicans in Congress who were unable to implement limits on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities, their support for U.S. military aid in other nations and the fact that they allowed the passage of gun control legislation.
At the state level, they cited Republicans who did not sustain LePage’s veto of a bipartisan biennial budget bill that temporarily raised sales, meals and lodging taxes.
“We have been told that many donors have refused to donate one more cent to the MEGOP due to this budget debacle, but nevertheless we are expected to ignore these facts and get out there and raise funds for the party,” reads the letter. “This we cannot do in good faith; the Republican Party has lost its way and the donors know it.”
Zeke Miller at TIME:
Iowa has become a proving ground for the Republican Party’s various ideological wings. As Chris Christie and Rand Paul duke it out on foreign policy, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz battle over immigration reform. It’s the struggle in the state that will in many ways shape the future of the GOP. Indeed, the fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party in Iowa is in many ways a proxy for the national party’s struggle for its identity.
In particular, the state has become a test case for how the Republican Party incorporates a growing libertarian contingent. [...] The GOP in Iowa is roughly equally divided among the GOP’s warring factions — the Establishment, the social conservatives and the libertarians. Combine two of the three and you have an ironclad grip on the party. That’s exactly what happened in 2012, when evangelicals threw their support behind the so-called Liberty movement of Paul supporters, with chairman A.J. Spiker repeatedly clashing with longtime Establishment governor Terry Branstad. The challenge for Republicans is that with Democratic gains among youth voters and Hispanics, they need all three factions to get along.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Louis Jacobson at Governing lays out the numbers on why the GOP's future with Hispanics looks so bleak:
To gauge how big a hole the party is in with Hispanics, we looked at states and legislative districts that are home to a significant number of Hispanics, scrutinizing whether GOP candidates have had any success winning over Hispanic voters.
According to interviews with national and state political observers, it remains rare for Hispanic Republicans to win either statewide or state legislative offices in predominantly Republican states or districts. This isn't to say that Hispanic Republicans aren't winning office -- they are. But when they win, it's most often due to the support of non-Hispanic voters who share their conservative ideology. It remains quite rare for Hispanic Republicans to actually win a large share of votes from Hispanic voters. (The main exceptions are Cuban-American lawmakers in Florida, including Rubio.)
Switching topics to Egypt,
Steven Simon writing in
The New York Times explains why it's so difficult for America to influence events on the ground there:
WASHINGTON — EGYPT has entered a dark tunnel, and it is difficult to say when, and in what condition, it will emerge.
Many Americans, in the meantime, are outraged that the Obama administration has not exerted its supposed leverage, in the form of military aid, to pressure the Egyptian army to restore a democratic form of government.
But it is time for some realism about that leverage. A yearly sum of $1.3 billion may seem persuasive, but this money has always been intended to secure foreign policy outcomes, not domestic political arrangements that the United States favors.
The New York Times editors, meanwhile, examine other possible courses of action:
The choice the generals are promoting is that the world must decide between them or instability. “At this point, it’s army or anarchy,” one Israeli official told The Times. Israel has been vigorously lobbying the United States and Europe to back the generals. Over the weekend, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia strongly endorsed the crackdown; he and other gulf monarchs, who hate the Brotherhood, have pumped billions into Egypt’s treasury.
There is a better path, and that is to choose not to help the military, which is making things worse, and could fuel a generation of Islamists to choose militancy over the ballot box. (The possible release of ousted President Hosni Mubarak from prison would be the ultimate repudiation of the 2011 revolution.) Is that really in the best long-term interests of the United States? Obviously not. [...] President Obama’s muted chastising of the generals and his indecisive reaction to the slaughter does not inspire confidence. Instead of wringing their hands, administration officials should suspend the $1.3 billion in annual American military aid to Egypt — including the delivery of Apache helicopters — until the military puts the country on a peaceful path.
Finally,
The Los Angeles Times editorial board examines "what could be [the] most significant church-state case in decades":
[T]he Supreme Court will decide whether official prayers at government meetings that overwhelmingly favor one religion violate the 1st Amendment. Although the case involves a town in New York, not the federal government, the Obama administration has filed a "friend of the court" brief that is distinctly unfriendly to the separation of church and state.
According to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the town council of Greece, N.Y., did not engage in an unconstitutional establishment of religion "merely because most prayer-givers are Christian and many or most of their prayers contain sectarian references." Verrilli argued further that "courts should not be in the business of parsing the theological content of or meaning of particular prayers."
The court should reject that position, which would give governments a blank check to pray in a whole community's name with language drawn from a particular faith. If the 1st Amendment's ban on the "establishment of religion" by government means anything, it means that a Jewish, Muslim or atheist shouldn't have to endure routine official prayers "in the name of Jesus" as the price of participating in local government.