Dark Money Politics

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

In the world of nonprofit “dark money” groups, nothing is as it seems: political committees, through the magic of the internal revenue code, become tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations; a partisan campaign ad becomes principled “issue advocacy”; and federal election law that requires public disclosure of donors is rendered toothless by regulatory loopholes.

The flow of cash through organizations asserting tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code has been rising exponentially, from just $5.2 million in 2006 to $310.8 million in 2012.

There is one reason for this growth: 501(c)(4) groups do not have to reveal their donors.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images James Martin, chairman of the 60 Plus Association, and Selena Owens before a Tea Party Express press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Aug. 4.

Two pie charts — Figure 1 and Figure 2 — drawn up by the Center for Responsive Politics demonstrate the crucial role of conservative non-profits in driving this increase in spending.

Center for Responsive Politics Fig. 1Center for Responsive Politics Fig. 2

The Center, which has dug deeply into this submerged area of American politics, has gathered a lot of the relevant data about the influence of money on American politics at OpenSecrets.org. It makes for instructive reading.

The controversy over the revelation that organizations whose names include the words “Tea Party” were targeted by the I.R.S. for review has provided new cover for politically active conservative organizations, allowing them to charge that investigations of the legitimacy of their tax-exempt status are politically motivated. Many of these groups have, in fact, been explicitly involved in federal election campaigns, as reported upon by The New York Times and Politico.

Sheila Krumholz, the Center’s executive director, told me that despite the denials coming from conservative non-profits her organization has found increasing evidence of practices designed to evade I.R.S. rules governing tax-exempt status and donor disclosure.

The actual I.R.S. rule is worth examining closely:

The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax under section 527(f).

The phrase “not its primary activity” has been interpreted by campaign finance lawyers to mean that a 501(c)(4) organization can spend no more that 49.9% of its money on political activity, according to Krumholz.

In a process she refers to as “money churning,” a hypothetical tax-exempt organization, let’s call it the Good Government Coalition, has $10 million in revenues. The G.G.C. fulfills its obligation to spend just over half its money on non-political activity by giving $5 million plus $1 to another tax-exempt social welfare organization with an ambiguous name, the Liberty Bell Alliance. G.G.C. can now spend what it has left, $4,999,999 on political activity. The Liberty Bell Alliance, which now has $5 million plus $1, can spend just under half, $2,499,999, on political activity. The net result is that of the original $10 million, instead of only $4,999,999 going to political activity, $7,499,998, or 75 percent of the original $10 million, can be spent on politics.

Your eyes glaze over trying to follow money trail between organizations with names like TC4 Trust, the Center for the Protection of Patients’ Rights, Americans for Job Security, American Future Fund and American Commitment – not to mention the difficulty for a layperson, or even for a political professional, of keeping track of the differences between 501(c)(4)s, 501(c)(3)s, super PACs, Political Action Committees, independent expenditure groups, and political party committees — or God forbid 501(c)(6)s.

Let’s look at just one “social welfare” 501(c)(4) organization, the 60 Plus Association. The purpose of 60 Plus is to serve as a conservative counter to the A.A.R.P., which many Republicans believe to be a subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

60 Plus claims to be “a non-partisan seniors advocacy group.” Nonpartisanship is crucial for an organization seeking to get and maintain 501(c)(4) tax exempt status as a social welfare organization, which confers the magic right to conceal the identity of donors.

Generously interpreting the 49.9 percent guideline covering political activity, 60 Plus has pushed the non-partisanship rule beyond the limit. Its web site features items like these: “Shameful Democrats Rush to Defense of Their I.R.S. Political Partners”; “House Votes to Repeal Obamacare as Democrats Stand by Corrupt I.R.S.”; “Seniors Overwhelming Support for Romney Could Spell Trouble for Democrats Nationally”; “Democrat Deceptions on Full Display with Paul Ryan Joining GOP Ticket.”

James Martin, the chairman of 60 Plus, demonstrated his “nonpartisanship” just before the 2012 election thus:

Senior citizens better than any other group understand how devastating President Obama’s policies have been to every generation. They won’t sit idly by as he continues to squander our nation’s greatness, and liquidate our future under trillions more in debt.

Martin continued in the same vein:

Never forget, America’s seniors fought in wars and bled to defend freedom and make this country everything it is today. For four long years we’ve watched as this President has trampled on everything that defines us as a nation, and now tramples on his opponent, his predecessor and the truth itself in a desperate plea for four more years. Seniors know a great leader when they see one, regardless of party, and this President falls far short of deserving our consideration or our vote.

In the past two elections, 60 Plus has invested heavily in overtly partisan independent expenditures. In 2012, the tax-exempt organization doled out $4.62 million, $3.19 million of which was spent in support of Republicans, with the remaining $1.43 million spent to defeat Democratic candidates for federal office, including $321,933 to defeat Obama.

In the 2010 elections, 60 Plus spent even more money, $6.72 million, almost all of which, $6.67 million, was allocated to defeat Democratic candidates.

60 Plus is one of the major beneficiaries of the recent surge in the investment of conservative money in 501(c)(4) organizations.

In the two years from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009, the organization’s annual budgets were a modest $1.89 million and $1.81 million, according to 990 forms filed with the I.R.S. and available through the Guidestar web site. In 2009-10, 60 Plus receipts abruptly rose to $16.01 million, and then to $18.58 million in 2010-11. In 2011-12, the total fell to $11.8 million, which was still 650 percent larger than in 2008-09.

This burst of cash was in part the result of multi-million dollar grants to 60 Plus from two of the other “social welfare” groups I mentioned above, TC4 Trust and the Center for the Protection of Patient Rights. The Center for the Protection of Patient Rights has been the subject of investigations by the Center for Responsive Politics, by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the web-based Republic Report and the Los Angeles Times.

The L.A. Times reported that Charles and David Koch, the conservative billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, “have several ties” to the Center for the Protection of Patient Rights:

It is run by Sean Noble, a Phoenix-based GOP consultant who is a key operative in the Kochs’ political activities, as noted by the investigative blog Republic Report. One of the center’s original directors, Heather Higgins, is chairwoman of the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received funding from a Koch-controlled foundation. And Cheryl Hillen, a Connecticut-based consultant who raised $2.6 million for the center, was director of fundraising for the Koch-backed Citizens for a Sound Economy.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that the Center to Protect Patient Rights gave 60 Plus a total of $11.39 million, TC4 Trust gave $4.06 million, and other groups gave smaller amounts, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS ($50,000) and the American Petroleum Institute ($25,000).

This year, 60 Plus reported in lobbying disclosure forms that in addition to issues affecting seniors, it is supporting off-shore drilling legislation and a measure to permit online gambling. Past issues it has supported have included opposition to the federal telephone excise tax and to legislation allowing drug imports, as well as support for Arctic drilling and the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

60 Plus has been the subject of a number of attempts to restrain its activities, but it remains undaunted. In July 2012, for example, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that 60 Plus, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity “are ‘political committees’ who have failed to register and disclose with the F.E.C.” The D.S.C.C. dismissed the organizations’ claims of 501(c)(4) status as “spurious” and “risible on their face.” The complaint is still pending before the F.E.C.

In July, 2012, well before the current I.R.S. controversy, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, called on the I.R.S. to investigate the political activities of a dozen 501(c)(4)s, including 60 Plus. Levin’s list included both Republican and Democratic-leaning 501(c)(4)s: Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Priorities U.S.A., Americans Elect, American Action Network, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, Americans for Tax Reform, Patriot Majority USA, Club for Growth, Citizens for a Working America Inc. and the Susan B. Anthony List.

60 Plus was not cowed. It is pulling out the stops to capitalize on the controversy regarding the I.R.S. focus on Tea Party groups. In one of his many denunciations of Democrats and the I.R.S., James Martin declared:

The shades of Watergate continue to hover over this scandal. We recall Nixon’s defenders dismissed that as a “3rd rate burglary.” With new revelations coming out by the day and more I.R.S. employees tucking tail, this disgraceful escapade is making Watergate look like a bad hair day by comparison.

Martin appears to be acting on the premise that the best defense is a good offense. (He did not respond to email or phone requests for comment.) In fact, what the past and present activities of 60 Plus, and of a host of other independent expenditure groups, point to is the need for a thorough rewriting of section 501(c)(4) of the tax code to limit the benefits of tax-exempt status – and of the right to conceal the identity of donors — to legitimate “social welfare” organizations.

The current political activities of large numbers of 501(c) organizations in no way constitute the kind of charitable work for which the public would grant favorable tax status as a reward. One of the reasons the people involved with political nonprofits — operatives and donors alike — love secrecy is that they fear public repercussions if their activities have to be conducted in the open. It is by now abundantly clear that abuse of the 501(c)(4) loophole corrupts and corrodes a campaign-finance system that was hardly a model of rectitude to begin with.

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McGovern-G.O.P. Alliance a Sign of Shift on Afghanistan

An unusual groundswell of support from House Republicans for a Massachusetts liberal’s measure is a stark example of changing sentiments on Afghanistan.

Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, offered an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill specifying that combat operations involving United States forces in Afghanistan be completed by the end of 2013, and “the accelerated transition of military and security operations by the end of 2014.” More than half of the House Republican caucus, 120 in all, supported Mr. McGovern’s effort, and the amendment passed by 91 votes.

Compare that with a 2009 House vote on a McGovern amendment requiring that the Pentagon report to Congress on an exit strategy for American military forces in Afghanistan by the end of that year. Just seven House Republicans voted for it. They included skeptics on the Afghan war like Walter B. Jones Jr. of North Carolina and Ron Paul of Texas, who had made a military pullback part of his 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. McGovern’s amendment failed by 71 votes.

Four years later, a wide range of Republicans from across the nation, including six from Texas, 11 from Florida and four of five Kentuckians, joined all but nine Democrats in voting for Mr. McGovern’s amendment. It was the most Republican support any amendment by him has ever received on the House floor.

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Complex Fight in Senate Over Curbing Military Sex Assaults

But the truth reflects a more complex battle driven by legislative competition, policy differences and the limits of identity politics in a chamber where women’s numbers and power are increasing.

The vote to replace the measure offered by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, in favor of a more modest provision pushed by Mr. Levin, the Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, did not break down along gender lines: of the seven women on the committee, three, including a fellow Democrat, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, sided with Mr. Levin. “I think all of us need to acknowledge that this isn’t a gender issue,” said Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, at a recent hearing.

Nor was it particularly partisan. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, two of the most conservative Republicans on the committee, sided with Ms. Gillibrand, while seven Democrats and an independent peeled away.

Ms. Gillibrand’s measure, which she is likely to revive on the Senate floor this fall, would give military prosecutors rather than commanders the power to decide which sexual assaults to try, with the goal of increasing the number of people who report crimes without fear of retaliation.

Mr. Levin’s bill requires a senior military officer to review decisions by commanders who decline to prosecute sexual assault cases. Although his measure would change the current system, it would keep prosecution of such cases within the chain of command, as the military wants.

Mr. Cruz did not buy it. “The data indicates that there is persistent reluctance to report sexual assault,” he said. “Senator Gillibrand made an effective case.”

Unlike so many Congressional policy battles that end with an empty pot, the search for sexual assault legislation is likely to result in significant policy changes to military laws. All told, more than a dozen sexual assault provisions were approved by the committee this week and are headed for the Senate floor.

On Friday, the House passed a defense bill that contained some of the broadest changes to military law intended to curb and more strongly punish sexual assault. The bill would strip commanders of their authority to dismiss a finding by a court-martial, establish minimum sentences for sexual assault convictions, permit victims of sexual assault to apply for a permanent change of station or unit transfer, and ensure that convicted offenders leave the military.

Many lawmakers say commanders wield too much power on both the front and back end of prosecutions. A Navy judge ruled this week in a pretrial hearing that two defendants in military sexual assault cases could not be punitively discharged because President Obama, in public remarks, exercised “unlawful command influence” when he said offenders should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.” The decision was first reported by Stars and Stripes.

“Statements by high officials have always been problematic,” said Eugene R. Fidell, who teachers military justice at Yale Law School. “On the one hand, people do look to them to take a stand on things; on the other hand, we are administrating justice here.” Should Congress pass a measure that would require sexual assault offenders to be dishonorably discharged, it would not necessarily render this type of contention moot, Mr. Fidell said, because “those comments would have a distorting effect on the question of conviction.”

The measures in the Senate include a mandatory review of decisions by commanders not to prosecute sexual assault; making retaliation a crime; and subjecting sex offenders to automatic dishonorable discharges. Commanders would also no longer be able to overturn jury convictions unilaterally.

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The Worst of Both Worlds

According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, the reason most Americans disapprove of Congress isn’t because of a specific policy or bad ethical behavior but because of inaction and partisan gridlock. Americans believe that Congress is broken.

And there is no need for any banal stretch for a false equivalency to explain why that would be. The reason Congress doesn’t work is because Republican lawmakers have ceased to believe that it should. For too many of them, compromise has become synonymous with collusion. They would rather resist than work. So the wheels of government are screeching to a halt. Obstruction and bluster have replaced solutions and courage.

As the former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich wrote last week:

“Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.”

On that last point at least, Congress has a chance at redemption. It may be the best chance this year — and possibly the last during the Obama administration.

But the Republican caucus is deeply torn about how to deal with — and discuss — comprehensive immigration reform. Acerbic dissension among conservatives is doing damage to the Republican brand even as the legislation holds the promise of lifting the Congressional brand.

This could mean that whatever comes of the bill — pass or fail — Republicans could in fact get the worst of both worlds. If it passes, Republicans are not likely to be credited with the victory, and if it fails they will most likely be seen as responsible for the failure.

They have only themselves to blame.

Last week, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to defund the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programs, essentially voting to deport more Dreamers. (Only six Republicans voted against defunding the program; only three Democrats voted for it.) After the vote, the Hispanic Caucus tweeted: “House Republicans just voted to treat Dreamers and undocumented spouses of servicemembers in the same way as violent criminals.”

When the Senate tried Tuesday to bring the “gang of eight” ’s immigration bill to the floor, all 15 senators who voted to filibuster the law were Republicans.

The optics on this bill don’t look good. And things get worse online, where many Republican commentators have dubbed the bill “Shamnesty.” Opponents of the measure accuse Republicans who are for it of being apostates to the conservative cause, concerned more about presidential politics than principle and defending the Constitution.

There may be some measure of truth in these charges. Most political positions have a degree of ambiguity, a mix of genuine concern and raw cynicism.

For instance, while Hispanics make up about 16 percent of the population as a whole, three of the four Republican members of the Senate’s “gang of eight” — John McCain, Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio — are from states where the Hispanic population is more than 22 percent.

The one exception is Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose Hispanic population is only about 5 percent, but he has his own particular problems.

First, as the Augusta Chronicle pointed out in 2011:

“South Carolina’s population grew by 15.3 percent during the past 10 years, but its Hispanic population grew 148 percent.” Those are the kinds of numbers that can make a politician sit up and take notice.

And Graham’s current electoral math seems tougher than his last time out.

According to an April Winthrop University poll: “United States Senator Lindsey Graham, who is up for re-election in 2014, received a 44 percent approval rating among South Carolina registered voters, but his approval rating has dropped from 71.6 percent to 57.5 percent among Republicans and those independents who lean toward the G.O.P. compared to the February poll.  This drop corresponds to the entry of two vocal challengers, and discussion of a third, into the primary race against him.”

Furthermore, McCain ran for president in 2008 and lost, in part because he lost the Hispanic vote 2-to-1 to Barack Obama. And Marco Rubio is almost certainly making a run for the White House in 2016.

Whatever these senators’ motives, it’s clear that the Hispanic population is growing in many of their Southern, stronghold states, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to imagine a presidential victory without substantial Hispanic support.

But it’s becoming just as apparent that far-right conservatives see immigration legislation that allows a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as a suicidal mission.

The problem is that their overwrought opposition — which may well be futile — may prove as damaging to their party as to the legislation itself.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 13, 2013

A previous version of this column stated that the Augusta Chronicle was a South Carolina newspaper. It's a Georgia newspaper.

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The Wisdom of Bob Dole

Bob Dole no longer recognizes the Republican Party that he helped lead for years. Speaking over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday,” he said his party should hang a “closed for repairs” sign on its doors until it comes up with a few positive ideas, because neither he nor Ronald Reagan would now feel comfortable in its membership.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

“It seems to be almost unreal that we can’t get together on a budget or legislation,” said Mr. Dole, the former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate. “I mean, we weren’t perfect by a long shot, but at least we got our work done.”

The current Congress can’t even do that, thanks to a furiously oppositional Republican Party, and that’s what has left mainstream conservatives like Mr. Dole and Senator John McCain shaking their heads in disgust.

The difference between the current crop of Tea Party lawmakers and Mr. Dole’s generation is not simply one of ideology. While the Tea Partiers are undoubtedly more extreme, Mr. Dole spent years pushing big tax cuts, railing at regulations and blocking international treaties. His party actively courted the religious right in the 1980s and relied on racial innuendo to win elections. But when the time came to actually govern, Republicans used to set aside their grandstanding, recognize that a two-party system requires compromise and make deals to keep the government working on the people’s behalf.

The current generation refuses to do that. Its members want to dismantle government, using whatever crowbar happens to be handy, and they don’t particularly care what traditions of mutual respect get smashed at the same time. “I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told The Times last week.

This corrosive mentality has been standard procedure in the House since 2011, but now it has seeped over to the Senate. Mr. Rubio is one of several senators who have blocked a basic function of government: a conference committee to work out budget differences between the House and Senate so that Congress can start passing appropriations bills. They say they are afraid the committee will agree to raise the debt ceiling without extorting the spending cuts they seek. One of them, Ted Cruz of Texas, admitted that he didn’t even trust House Republicans to practice blackmail properly. They have been backed by Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who wants extremist credentials for his re-election.

At long last, this is finally drawing the rancor of Mr. Dole’s heirs in the responsible wing of the party. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said that negotiating on a budget was an “issue of integrity.” Roy Blunt, Lamar Alexander and many others have encouraged talks, and Mr. McCain (who was not above veering to the far right when he was running for president in 2008) now says the Tea Partiers are “absolutely out of line” and setting a bad precedent.

“We’re here to vote, not here to block things,” he said last week. “We’re here to articulate our positions on the issues and do what we can for the good of the country and the let the process move forward.”

Already, the mulish behavior of Congressional Republicans has led to the creation of the sequester, blocked action on economic growth and climate change, prevented reasonable checks on gun purchases and threatens to blow up a hard-fought compromise on immigration. Mr. Dole’s words should remind his party that it is not only abandoning its past, but damaging the country’s future.

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Wind Down the War on Terrorism? Republicans Say No

Republican lawmakers on Sunday criticized President Obama’s vision for winding down the war on terrorism, using talk show appearances to accuse him of misunderstanding the threat in a way that will embolden unfriendly nations.

“We show this lack of resolve, talking about the war being over,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “What do you think the Iranians are thinking? At the end of the day, this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine.”

In his first major foreign policy address of his second term, Mr. Obama said last week that it was time for the United States to narrow the scope of its long battle against terrorists and begin a transition away from a war footing.

In addition to renewing his call to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he said he would seek to limit his own war powers. He also issued new policy guidelines that would shift the responsibility for drone strikes to the military from the Central Intelligence Agency, and said there would be stricter standards for such attacks.

Mr. Graham, a strong supporter of the drone program, said he objected to changing the standards. Separately, he called for a special counsel to investigate both the Justice Department, which has come under scrutiny for seizing journalists’ phone records, and the Internal Revenue Service, which has acknowledged that it unfairly targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Democrats, including Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, praised Mr. Obama for what they said was a necessary rebalancing of civil liberties and national security interests. “We have to balance our values,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”

But at least two lawmakers — the current and former chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas and Peter T. King of New York — complained specifically about the president’s remarks about Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. McCaul warned against closing the detention center, especially if it meant moving prisoners to the United States. “Name me one American city that would like to host these guys,” he said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

More than half the remaining 166 detainees at Guantánamo Bay are Yemeni; of these, 56 have been cleared to go home. Mr. Obama has proposed repatriating detainees when he can, but will still face the thorny question of what to do several dozen men who cannot be prosecuted and who have been deemed to be too dangerous to release.

Mr. King, appearing with Ms. Wasserman Schultz on “This Week,” said the detention facility had been a success. “Many experts believe it did work,” he said, adding that he was “very concerned about sending detainees back to Yemen.” Noting that Mr. Obama had campaigned on a promise to close the prison, he said the president “could have done a lot more than he has done if he was serious about it rather than just moralizing.”

In calling for a special counsel, Mr. Graham said the Justice Department had begun to “criminalize journalism” and had engaged in “an overreach” in investigating leaks of classified national security information. He also complained of an “organized effort” within the I.R.S. to target political opponents of the president. “I think it comes from the top,” he said, although current and former I.R.S. officials have said Mr. Obama did not know of the targeting.

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The World As Wonkblog Sees It

Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic profile of Josh Barro, the Bloomberg View blogger and columnist who’s gradually transitioned from reform-minded center-right pundit to entertaining scourge of the contemporary G.O.P., has launched a lot of discussion about conservative reform projects in general, and (for my sins) I’ll probably write a post or two on that theme later this week. To start with, though, I think it’s worth saying something in response to this post from Ezra Klein, which uses Barro’s recent arc as a case study in the Republican Party’s intellectual self-marginalization:

Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative. The result is that the range of policies you can hold and still be a Republican is much narrower than it was in, say, 2005. That’s left a lot of once-Republican wonks without an obvious political home.

Klein goes on to talk about health care (where Republicans used to be open to an individual mandate, but no longer) and climate change (where there used to be G.O.P. support for cap-and-trade, but no longer), and then makes a broader point:

As the Republican Party’s range of acceptable policies has narrowed, the Democratic Party’s range has expanded. Stimulus based entirely on tax cuts? It’s not their preference, but they’ll take it. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation? Sure, why not. Capping the employer-based exclusion for health care? Of course. Hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement cuts to help reduce the deficit? Uh-huh.

If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.

A lot could be written on why the Republican Party has been so quick to abandon these positions. I’ll leave that for another time. The point here is that it’s happened, and it’s left a lot of policy wonks who could’ve easily fit into the Republican Party a decade ago in a tough position.

That there are important issues where the G.O.P. has retreated into a kind of policy bunker, with uncomfortable consequences for writers with center-right views on those issues, is not a point that I’m likely to dispute! But I think that Klein’s “basic shape of American politics” paragraph misleads on two counts.

First, you can’t just bracket the “why” of the G.O.P.’s shift without downplaying the ways in which the basic ground of our policy debates has shifted since 2006 as well. For instance, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade bill might have looked like a sensible-centrist “5? back when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich were sharing a couch. But back then we were pre-crash and thought we were considerably richer than we actually were; back then the prospects for a meaningful global climate treaty looked much better than they do post-Copenhagen; back then global temperatures were expected to rise faster in the short term than they actually have; and back then we hadn’t yet knocked our own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1994 levels without a cap and trade bill.

None of these trends prove the case against carbon taxation, but I would submit that they should at least nudge the position that a sweeping regulatory response to climate change occupies on the spectrum of American policy debates — toward a slightly left-of-center “4,” perhaps? In which case the G.O.P.’s opposition isn’t just a matter of a sudden rightward lurch (though that’s clearly part of the story). It’s also a matter of changing circumstances making a particular program both more politically unpopular (Mitt Romney did not lose in 2012 because of climate change, to put it mildly) and more doubtful as policy, with inevitable consequences for the opposition party’s attitude on the issue.

Second, Klein’s definition of the “policy spectrum” is confined to the set of debates that tends to confirm his hypothesis, while leaving a number of high-profile, highly-contested arenas out. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a much livelier debate about immigration policy within the Republican Party right now than there is within the Democratic Party (where the Byron Dorgan/Barbara Jordan tendency has mostly disappeared or been suppressed), and the G.O.P.’s uncertainty and internal tensions arguably puts it closer to the center of public opinion than does the pro-amnesty lockstep on the Democratic side of the aisle. On foreign policy and national security, meanwhile, President Obama does clearly occupy a kind of center, but his Republican critics are attacking him (and each other) on a variety of fronts — hawkish, civil libertarian, etc. — that reflect the G.O.P.’s increasingly interesting internal debate, rather than just huddling together at a “9? on the Cheney scale. The debate over entitlement reform doesn’t quite fit with Klein’s paradigm either: On Medicare, for instance, the Obama-era Republicans have alternated between cynical “Mediscare” arguments (whose ideological valence is both right-wing and left-wing at once) and arguments for premium support, which is arguably a centrist proposal, a “6? in the spectrum of 1998 or so, that Democrats have had to move leftward in order to effectively demonize.

And then there are social issues, where it’s the Democratic Party that’s become notably more ideologically conformist in the Obama era — more likely to pick fights over religious liberty, more absolutist on abortion, and lately more inclined to make support for gay marriage a party-wide litmus test. This social-issues consolidation is partially a rational response to underlying ideological shifts, of course (the electorate has grown more “spiritual but not religious” in the last decade, and support for gay marriage was a “2? or “3? in 2006 and probably a “6? today), and partially a defensive response to a G.O.P. that’s been pushing harder on pro-life legislation at both the state and national level. But that, again, makes the case against using ’06 as a permanent baseline for assessing what counts as centrism, and what’s ideologically extreme.

Stepping back a bit, my fellow heterodox conservative James Poulos responded to Klein’s post with an extended brief against the wonkification of punditry, and the ideology-smuggling assumption that “our biggest problems would be better addressed by letting our smartest experts direct our activity toward a solution.” As someone slightly more sympathetic to the wonkish turn in political writing, I would make a narrower point. Left-of-center wonks, like all of us, have a particular set of issues that inspires and defines their engagement with politics, and like all of us they tend to assume that their issues are the most important issues that there are. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the more you narrow the scope of American politics to the issues that Klein built his reputation covering and that Wonkblog treats in great depth, the more centrist and reasonable liberalism looks, and the more difficult the position of the conservative pundit can seem. Nor should it be surprising that how alienated a given right-of-center writer feels from the contemporary G.O.P. depends on how many premises and interests he shares in common with liberal wonks — a lot for a Rockefeller Republican (or maybe neoliberal) like Barro; some for a social conservative, would-be-1970s neoconservative like me; fewer for others somewhat further rightward, and so on.

This doesn’t mean that liberals can’t profitably analyze this alienation: The Plight of the Conservative Wonk, As Seen From The Vantage Point of Liberal Wonkery, is certainly an entertaining-enough genre, and sometimes an illuminating one. But it would profit from keeping its own distinctive vantage point in mind.

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