[Special] Mick Mulvaney, Trump's Selection to Head Office of Management and Budget

Here is what you need to know about John Michael "Mick" Mulvaney, a man with a nickname that has nothing to do with either of his three actual names:

• Washington Post: Trump Names Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a Fiscal Hawk, to Head Budget Office by Abby Phillip (December 17, 2016)

Mulvaney, 49, was elected to Congress in 2010 in the wave that brought a cohort of younger, staunchly conservative members into the House. Mulvaney quickly staked out ground as one of Congress’s most outspoken fiscal hawks — playing a key role in the 2011 showdown between President Obama and House Republicans that ended in the passage of strict budget caps.

• New York Times: In Mick Mulvaney, Trump Finds Anti-Establishment Leader for Budget Office by Jennifer Steinhauer and Michael D. Shear (December 17, 2016) 

Mr. Mulvaney, who did not respond to emails seeking comment, has cut an influential swath among House conservatives since he was elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, when he defeated a longtime representative, John Spratt, a Democrat. He won by characterizing his opponent as a big-spending liberal, unconcerned about fiscal prudence, even though as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Mr. Spratt was among his party’s leading deficit hawks.

Since then, Mr. Mulvaney has perpetually rejected short-term spending agreements and questioned the government’s need to increase its statutory borrowing limits to avoid default. He has repeatedly opposed some of his own party’s budget proposals, and quickly established himself as one of the most outspoken members of that 2010 class of Republicans. By 2013, at the start of his second term, he declined to support Mr. Boehner’s re-election as speaker, abstaining from the vote in protest.

• Mother Jones: Trump's Budget Director Pick Spoke at a John Birch Society Event by Peva Levy (December 19, 2016)

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), the ultra-conservative congressman tapped by Donald Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, recently accepted a speaking invitation from the notorious John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing group known for peddling outlandish conspiracy theories for more than half a century.

In July, Mulvaney spoke at a dinner held by a local chapter of the group, which has long been exiled from mainstream conservatism. Founded in the 1950s, the outfit promoted a paranoid obsession with communist infiltration. It declared President Dwight Eisenhower "a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy." It opposed the civil rights movement as a communist plot. Ever since William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, felt compelled to disavow the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, most mainstream conservatives have dismissed the organization as an embarrassment for the right. But the group still exists and continues to emphasize the communist threat. In recent years, it has pushed more modern conspiracy theories: Obamacare finances euthanasia, the United Nations has a sinister scheme for world domination, Moscow is the hidden force behind Islamic terrorism.