To answer the question of the title, it’s hard to know what’s going on that we don’t see, but what we do see is, um, well, let’s say there are reasons some people think the Republican definition of “outreach” must be uniquely theirs.

For example, in what I assume must have been an audition for the new reality show, “State Legislators are the Craziest People!”, state legislators in North Carolina decided to try a new direction in tentherism by establishing a state religion. Feeling reached-out to, non-Christians? No, they didn’t specify Christianity as the state religion explicitly, but they’re trying to preempt a lawsuit by the ACLU against a county whose board begins public meetings with Christian prayers. I mention that just in case anyone mistakenly thought these Republican legislators meant to institute Zoroastrianism. They’re working under the tenther theory that the 10th Amendment gives states the sovereignty to ignore the rest of the Bill of Rights, especially the establishment clause (“Congress will make no law respecting the establishment of religion…). How can they take away the right to sue? The right to petition for the redress of grievances is in the First Amendment right next to … oh yeah.

Let’s stay in North Carolina another moment, because the GOP majority hasn’t forgotten you, college students. They’re well aware of your problem. No, not the need to take on excessive debt to get an education. They mean your tendency to vote Democratic, and they hope to help you by making voting costly. Well, making it more costly for parents, who will have to pay a tax penalty if their children vote where they attend school instead of voting at home, even though federal law says they can do that. The Republicans also want to reduce early voting  to just one location per county (gee, I wonder which party the larger counties tend to support) and abolish election day registration. College students might think it’s ridiculous to claim that such restrictions on voting are aimed just at them, and you’d be right. There are reasons beyond stopping you from voting. They also want to stop voting by other people too! People who use election day registration and early voting. Who tends to make the most of those things? Well, people who move more use election day registration more, and low income people tend to move more than middle and upper income people, and who on average has a lower income than white Republican legislators? Black people, of which North Carolina has a sizable minority. Who uses early voting more often? Low income people, who can’t afford to take off all day to wait in long lines on election day (and contrary to Republican mythology, they mostly work), so they try to vote when they can. Well, creating long lines during early voting should fix that problem. Hey 47%, why aren’t you feeling the love?

At least North Carolina didn’t just impose a new photo ID requirement for voting, at least that I’m aware of. The one I’m aware of was just passed in Virginia. How is that going over with the people the GOP supposedly wants to reach out to? From first indications, not well. Blacks think Republicans want to stop them from voting, and they won’t vote Republican. I have a feeling these two things go together. As usual, the IDs are supposed to be free, but somehow there are people who can’t afford the documents to get the “free” ID, people who have problems getting the documents aside from affording them, and people with transportation problems getting to the DMV. We in Minnesota managed to beat photo ID because it was a constitutional amendment on our ballot, so we could show a majority that voters would be suppressed and the elections turned into a mess. Unfortunately, in Virginia they had the task of convincing the Republican governor and legislative majorities who think voter suppression is a feature and not a bug. Now Republicans get to try to convince disabled people, elderly people, and low income people to vote for them. Not sure which is the tougher task.

The latest conservative darling, Ben Carson, once known as one of our most prominent neurosurgeons before he decided there was more appeal to playing crazy guy at conservative events, rather scuttled whatever outreach to the LGBT community by comparing them to pedophiles and people who engage in bestiality. You might think someone with a scientific background like his would know better. Instead, you would get a lesson how human beings can compartmentalize. You should trust him with your brain in the operating room, but maybe not with the steak knives in the cafeteria. You shouldn’t be wondering why so few gay people vote GOP.

And just for some bonus crazy, Carson might make outreach to scientists a bit more difficult despite his credentials since he’s a creationist. Is his objection to evolution that the science doesn’t support it. No. He insists evolution is false because it’s immoral. “Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires.” Maybe that great scientific thinker Rush Limbaugh is right that scientists are Democrats, but Limbaugh and Carson might be confused about which came first. Good thing they don’t think gravitational theory is immoral, or they would insist we fly off into space right now as the ethical thing to do.

Maybe the GOP is making progress closing the gender gap. How is the outreach to women going? In Ohio, the GOP state attorney general wants to give employers the right to stop women from getting contraceptives. The boss man’s religion trumps the female worker’s health. Funny, I had the notion it was the employee’s insurance, not the employer’s. Telling the employees how to use their insurance is like telling them how they can spend their paycheck. It’s part of their compensation. They do their job, get paid, and use their pay as the y see fit — unless they have a religious employer who thinks he gets to control employees outside of work.

Well, let’s be fair, maybe Republicans meant “outreach” only in terms of non-whites, particularly Latinos. How is that working out? If you’ve been following the news recently, you probably saw Republicans cringing when they heard Rep. Don Young, R-AK, refer to migrant workers as “wetbacks”.  How about if we replace the ethnic slur with the phrase “cheap labor”.  Would that be better? Actually no, because once you get past the slur, the message to Latinos is “we think of you as cheap labor”. But hey, they’re all really conservatives you don’t know it yet, right?

Sure, that headline is an overgeneralization. I’m sure new state chair Keith Downey cares about finding a way back into politics or he wouldn’t have run for chair. I mean he doesn’t care about the effects of the policies he wants to put in place. That’s how you can recognize an ideologue: they care that their policies are ideologically correct, and the actual effects are irrelevant.

I dug up the post I wrote about Downey last September, to see if there was any material in there still relevant. Obviously his bills died and he’s not in the legislature to propose them anymore, but in terms of how the new chair thinks, pretty much the whole post still applies.

State Rep. Keith Downey, the GOP Senate candidate in district 49, is probably best known for his 15×15 plan, mandating a 15% reduction in the state’s payroll by 2015. What’s so magical about 15%? It’s the same as the last two digits in 2015. 15 … and 15. See? Isn’t that clever? All the same thought that went into Herman Cain’s “9-9-9″ plan, which I believe was borrowed directly from a pizza pricing campaign. I’m not sure if Downey got his plan from a pizza sale, or a price war among sandwich shops.

 

Unfortunately, looking at Downey’s bills, this isn’t the only time Downey went off the deep right end with no concern for the consequences. It’s probably not even the most egregious example. This might be though: Downey authored a bill to reduce the maximum weeks of unemployment compensation to 18 when the state unemployment rate is below 6%, and as few as four weeks should unemployment ever dip below 3%. Current law says maximum unemployment benefits are the lower of one-third what the unemployed person made over a one-year period, or 26 times the weekly benefit. It’s not much to survive on, but Downey wants to reduce it further.

 

(c) The maximum amount of unemployment benefits available on any benefit account is the lower of:
(1) 33-1/3 percent of the applicant’s total wage credits; or
(2) 26 [The strike through is in the bill. That's the current 26 weeks being replaced.] (i) four times the applicant’s weekly unemployment benefit amount if the
statewide unemployment rate is at least three percent;
(ii) ten times the applicant’s weekly unemployment benefit amount if the statewide unemployment rate is at least four percent;
(iii) 18 times the applicant’s weekly unemployment benefit amount if the statewide
unemployment rate is at least five percent; or
(iv) 26 times the applicant’s weekly unemployment benefit amount if the statewide
unemployment rate is at least six percent.

 

We probably will never see unemployment below 3%, so why would he even bother lowering the maximum weeks to four? We’re already below 6%, so this measure would reduce benefits immediately when the job market still is difficult. Would he do anything about prohibiting employers from discriminating against unemployed applicants as is so rampant now? If so, he didn’t include it in the bill. Instead, he seems to want to punish unemployed people for not having a job by cutting holes in the safety net.

 

One mark of a fundamentalist is not caring about the effects of policies, as long as the ideology is pure. Downey didn’t care about the effects of dumping an arbitrary 15% of state employees or reducing unemployment benefits, nor did he care about the effects of the government shutdown the Republicans brought us in 2011:

 

“Nobody wants a shutdown, but it’s an interesting opportunity to see what impact not having these nonessential employees has,” he said. “It will allow us a chance to assess, one-by-one, what can actually be done without all of those people.”

 

He knew, or should have known, because it came up before the shutdown, how hard his shutdown would be on people with disabilities. Sure, lots of people thought the only effect of the shutdown would be the state parks would close, but a legislator should have known better. Somehow Downey could take an action that would have a profound effect on vulnerable people with the attitude, “it’s an interesting opportunity to see what impact not having these nonessential employees has”. Maybe he thought only state employees would be hurt, and it’s not like he values them at all anyway.

 

Downey made it apparent how little he respects state employees by a change he tried to make in the rules controlling when state agencies can hire outside contractors. He wants so badly to replace public employees even at the extra cost of hiring contractors, the he tried to take out the requirement that no employee be available before hiring a contractor. He struck this line in the list of requirements for hiring a contractor: “no current state employee is able and available to perform the services called for by the contract;” In case it’s assumed laid off employees would be called back because their old jobs need to be done again, this line was also struck: “the agency will not contract out its previously eliminated jobs for four years without first considering the same former employees who are on the seniority unit layoff list who meet the minimum qualifications determined by the agency.”

 

Efficiency be damned I guess. Let’s spend extra on contractors despite having people on the payroll who can do the same job, or being able to recall laid off employees who already know something about the work they would be doing.

 

That’s looking at bills he authored. In his voting record, he voted twice for Minnesota’s version of the “stand your ground” law, also called the “shoot first” law, or maybe we should call it the “let’s make Minnesota as nuts as Florida” law. I wonder if he’s been admitting to this since the Trayvon Martin murder? I wonder if he checked into the effect of this law in Florida before voting for it? Most of us heard about how many killings Florida had only after the Martin murder, but if you’re going to pass such a law here, wouldn’t you check? Only if you cared about the effects of your ideologically correct vote and as we keep seeing, Downey doesn’t care.

 

Finally, some brief bits of Downey’s brilliance:

• He authored a bill for a constitutional amendment limiting expenditures to revenues in the prior biennium. Shouldn’t the legislature look at expected revenues and expected costs, and make those two match? Better he apparently thinks to write a gimmick into the constitution.

 

• Here’s Downey in 2007 saying we need to work with our governor, not against our governor(2:10). At 4:33, he said “obviously” we need to work on our transportation systems, including, really, a gas tax increase. At 5:10, he said the bulk of health care reform has to come from the federal government. Any bets on whether he still feels that way? I wonder if he knows this video is still on Youtube?

 

• Here’s Downey defending right-to-freeload laws on the grounds they’re good for unions. Yes, the best thing for unions would laws designed to make them difficult to impossible. This might be the exception where he does care about the effect of his policies, because he cared enough to lie about what he proposes.Downey’s DFL opponent is Melisa Franzen. Hey district 49, how about electing a senator who won’t force a government shutdown if she doesn’t get everything she wants?