Pair in GOP committee won't attack on Medicaid

(PNI) Pushing back on Medicaid pushback …It's all the rage now for Republican precinct committeemen to vote to censure Gov. Jan Brewer and the 14 Republicans who voted in favor of Medicaid expansion.

When the issue came up at a District 26 meeting, district resident and gubernatorial candidate Hugh Hallman cast an unpopular "no" vote.

"In the interest of the Republican Party, I don't think it makes sense for Republicans to be attacking members of their own party," Hallman said.

Besides, censure is a legal concept and not within the purview of the committees, he said, showing his lawerly side.

Hallman called Medicaid expansion "a 'Sophie's Choice' of the worst magnitude," but said he comes down in reluctant favor of it because the piper must be paid and it's unfair to foist uncompensated emergency-room care onto hospitals and doctors.

Those costs will ultimately get passed on to the paying customers.

"It's not a Republican principle that we tax people who are paying the medical bills through insurance or private dollars to pay for those who aren't covered," Hallman said.

The other "no" vote at that meeting?

Former state Sen. Jerry Lewis, R-Mesa.

Signs around town… Dozens of campaign signs have sprung up on street corners in central Phoenix and Ahwatukee Foothills in the last week touting unusual messages: "Lobbyists Support Sal DiCiccio" and "Developers Support Sal DiCiccio."

As one might assume, the Phoenix City Council member isn't the one behind the signs.

An independent-expenditure group, Phoenix Truth and Safety, paid for the signs.

The group is funded by public-safety unions.

They hope to oust DiCiccio in the upcoming Aug.27 primary election.

It's the latest jab in a bitter feud between DiCiccio and the police and fire unions.

The two have been at war over DiCiccio's criticism of employee pensions and overall compensation.

"The signs are accurate," said David Leibowitz, a public-relations consultant working with the group. "Campaign-finance reports make that abundantly clear … and yet he holds himself as some paragon of virtue."

DiCiccio said that while he has accepted donations from lobbyists, businesses and developers, his opponent, Karlene Keogh Parks, is accepting contributions from unions.

He said the unions are trying to block his efforts to make reforms.

"I think people see through this," DiCiccio said. "It's all part of the union control of City Hall."

Your policy doesn't cover "Cat Scratch Fever" … Conservative rocker Ted Nugent will reportedly take up the anti-Medicaid-expansion banner at his concert scheduled for tonight at Celebrity Theater in Phoenix.

Frank Antenori, a former state senator from Tucson and an organizer of the petition drive to put the Medicaid-expansion law on the 2014 ballot, said he had dinner with the gun-loving, Obama-hating, 64-year-old "Motor City Madman" a couple of years ago and the two connected over their love of archery hunting.

When Antenori learned Nugent's tour was coming to Phoenix, he put in a call to see if the "tea party" darling would give an on-stage shout-out to the referendum effort and ask fans to sign petitions after the concert.

After last summer's U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the federal health-care overhaul, Nugent called Chief Justice John Roberts a "traitor" and said he was "beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War."

The United Republican Alliance of Principled Conservatives, which is leading the referendum drive, hopes to collect 120,000 signatures by the Sept.11 deadline.

Compiled by Republic reporters Mary Jo Pitzl, Dianna M. Náñez, Dustin Gardiner and Mary K. Reinhart. Get the latest at politics.azcentral.com.

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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In Kansas Primaries, Conservatives Attack Fellow Republicans

But after publicly criticizing elements of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax plan this year, Mr. Kelsey found himself among a cluster of conservative Republican state senators that a more conservative coalition here is working to defeat in Tuesday’s primary elections.

Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades. And now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party. Conservatives are feverishly working to win the Senate and drive out the last remnants of what they see as moderate Republicanism in a state with a deep-rooted history of centrist Republicans in the mold of Bob Dole, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum.

The divisive primary campaign reflects the ambivalence gripping Republicans across the country, yet the situation here is more complicated than the typical conservative-versus-establishment disputes.

What sets the battle in Kansas apart is the distance between the factions. Conservative and moderate Republicans essentially operate as separate parties, and so far, no one — including Mr. Brownback — has stepped forward to try to bridge that gap in the popular tradition of moderation. Instead, each side claims to represent the soul of the party.

“We don’t even know what it means to be a Republican in the state of Kansas,” said Casey W. Moore, a conservative Senate candidate from the Topeka area.

Nationally, conservatives have been defining the party in their image. Last week, they scored a big victory in Texas when a Tea Party favorite defeated Gov. Rick Perry’s favored candidate in the primary for an open United States Senate seat. That outcome followed conservative victories this year over established Republicans in Senate primary races in Indiana and Nebraska.

Kansas conservatives are optimistic that they can do the same on the state level and upend long-held assumptions that the people of their state prefer moderate lawmakers.

Two years ago, conservative Republicans here captured a majority in the Kansas House of Representatives — around 70 of 125 seats — for the first time in about four decades, and, for the first time in at least half a century, Kansans elected a conservative governor, Mr. Brownback. Conservatives need to pick up three or four seats to win control of the 40-member Senate, where 14 moderate Republicans and 8 Democrats often vote together to maintain a coalition that gives them a majority.

The move toward a more conservative Kansas began about 25 years ago, when a small group of fiscally conservative legislators, feeling marginalized by the Republican leadership, began promoting an agenda that emphasized free markets, tax cuts and reducing government spending. They teamed with grass-roots social conservatives and, in 1994, gained a significant number of seats in the Kansas House and ousted its moderate speaker.

Conservatives continued to gain seats in the Legislature, and the rest of the country began to take notice of their brand of politics. “What’s The Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, which was made into a film, documented that rise.

Now that conservatives are closer than ever to full control of the state’s government, fighting between the two factions of the Republican Party has become more overt, and nastier.

“The conservatives, they hate the moderate Republicans,” said Burdett A. Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “They think they really have conspired with Democrats and have prevented conservative forces from their rightful place of dominating the government.”

Mr. Brownback is openly challenging the moderate members of his party. Interest groups like the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking moderates and rallying support for conservatives.

Moderates have gotten a lift from Bill Graves, the former two-term Republican governor who has held fund-raisers for the candidates he supports. Mr. Graves, who was in office from 1995 to 2003, is familiar with intraparty scuffling: the conservative state party chairman resigned to challenge him in 1998, when he successfully ran for re-election. Moderate candidates have also benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from labor and teachers’ unions.

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Democrats Get Line of Attack in Europe’s Woes

In a new line of attack, top Democrats are arguing that Mitt Romney and the Republicans, with their focus on spending cuts, are following Europe’s austerity-first example, to dismal effect so far: Greece over the edge; Italy, Spain, Portugal on the edge; Britain in recession; and the United States suffering through a needlessly weak recovery because of government cuts.

Former President Bill Clinton offered the clearest version of the case on Monday night, when, introducing Mr. Obama at a fund-raiser in New York, he listed the steps that Mr. Obama had taken to spur the economy, and then asked: “Why aren’t things roaring along now? Because Europe is in trouble and because the Republican Congress has adopted the European economic policy.”

Mr. Clinton added, “Who would have thought, after years and years, even decades, in which the Republican right attacked ‘old Europe,’ that they would embrace the economic policies of the euro zone — austerity and unemployment now at all costs.”

Mr. Obama has so far declined to take up the line of attack himself, in part, administration officials say, because it would be unseemly for him to do so when he is trying to persuade European leaders to move away from austerity and deal more aggressively with their financial crisis.

But plenty of administration officials, Obama advisers and campaign surrogates have been quick to take up the argument, making a case that had previously been relegated to liberal writers instead of Democrats. At a time when the American economy is looking weaker than it had seemed only a few weeks ago, the European analogy gives Democrats a story to tell about why the recovery has been slower than they had hoped.

Romney campaign officials and other Republicans are not entirely unhappy about the new Democratic message, in part because it keeps the debate focused on Mr. Obama’s biggest weakness: the state of the economy.

Mr. Romney’s aides respond that Europe is in bad shape all right, but that is because European leaders have not gone far enough on austerity.

“Europe is facing some terrible choices because they postponed the effort to get their economic house in order,” said Kristen Silverberg, a United States ambassador to the European Union under President George W. Bush and now a Romney campaign official. “The United States still has the chance to correct course, but not if we sustain four more years of Obama-styled deficits.”

The prime example for Democrats is the European country that has long seemed most similar to the United States — Britain — where Prime Minister David Cameron came into office in 2010 arguing that excessive spending by his Labor predecessors had spurred the country’s economic woes. Mr. Cameron, a conservative, slashed spending and eliminated hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs in a bid to reduce the deficit. Two years later, Britain’s Office for National Statistics says the country is experiencing a double-dip recession and is doing even worse than only a few months ago.

“We have a laboratory experiment going on for what the Republicans want to do here, and that’s Europe,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “Particularly England, because they had the equivalent of a Democratic government, and Cameron comes in with austerity, and now they’re in a recession.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Schumer said, “can point to England as what could happen if the Republicans win.”

Since the depth of the economic crisis in 2009, the United States, which has put a bigger emphasis on stimulus than Europe, has performed better than Europe, after the two had suffered similarly from the start of crisis in 2007 until 2009. Over all, gross domestic product in the United States was 3 percent higher in the first three months of this year than in late 2007, according to Haver Analytics, while gross domestic product in both the 17 countries of the euro zone and in Britain was still slightly smaller than at the end of 2007.

“Europe has failed trying to do austerity,” said Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington. “They took the austerity approach, and that’s not how you get out of recession. Even Franklin Roosevelt learned that — we didn’t get out of the Great Depression until World War II.”

Obama advisers argue that the budget proposal of Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, which Mr. Romney has called “marvelous,” is actually a radical vision that would deepen the inequality in American society. They say that Mr. Ryan’s call for overhauling Medicare could drive up costs for future retirees and fundamentally change the popular health plan.

“The Republican budget approach is far more extreme than austerity measures considered in Europe, in terms of both underlying goals and specific short-run policies, and the lack of any balance in approach,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the National Economic Council. “Republican plans in Congress would be even more detrimental to longer-term growth because their refusal to consider any revenues necessitates even deeper spending cuts. In contrast, even conservative governments abroad have taken a more balanced approach to deficit reduction.”

Mr. Romney recently gave the Democrats some ammunition when he appeared to acknowledge the connection between spending cuts and recessions in an interview with Time magazine, saying that he would not make too many cuts in his first year as president.

“If you take a trillion dollars, for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink G.D.P. over 5 percent,” Mr. Romney said. “That is, by definition, throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”

Still, his campaign and Congressional Republicans remain comfortable making an economic argument that revolves largely around spending cuts. Polls show that many Americans are skeptical that the Obama stimulus made a big economic difference.

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