“Government Is The Solution”: Healing The Economy For The Common Good
Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.
You probably read that and thought: But don’t Democrats and liberals say this all the time? Actually, the answer is no. It’s Republicans and conservatives who usually say that Democrats and liberals believe in government. Progressive politicians often respond by apologizing for their view of government, or qualifying it, or shifting as fast as the speed of light from mumbled support for government to robust affirmations of their faith in the private sector.
This is beginning to change, but not fast enough. And the events of recent weeks suggest that if progressives do not speak out plainly on behalf of government, they will be disadvantaged throughout the election-year debate. Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election owed to many factors, including his overwhelming financial edge. But he was also helped by the continuing power of the conservative anti-government idea in our discourse. An energetic argument on one side will be defeated only by an energetic argument on the other.
The case for government’s role in our country’s growth and financial success goes back to the very beginning. One of the reasons I wrote my book “Our Divided Political Heart” was to show that, from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay forward, farsighted American leaders understood that action by the federal government was essential to ensuring the country’s prosperity, developing our economy, promoting the arts and sciences and building large projects: the roads and canals, and later, under Abraham Lincoln, the institutions of higher learning, that bound a growing nation together.
Both Clay and Lincoln battled those who used states’ rights slogans to crimp federal authority and who tried to use the Constitution to handcuff anyone who would use the federal government creatively. Both read the Constitution’s commerce clause as Franklin Roosevelt and progressives who followed him did, as permitting federal action to serve the common good. A belief in government’s constructive capacities is not some recent ultra-liberal invention.
Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth.
Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.
So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: “Yes it has, and yes, it does!”
Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help. Obama’s jobs program would be a step in the right direction, and he’s right to tout it now. But he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus from the beginning. The anti-government disposition has so much power that Democrats and moderate Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated into keeping it too small.
Let’s turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem. It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so.
By: E’ J’ Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 10, 2012
“A Cautionary Tale”: Remember When Breaking The Law Used To Mean Something?
The big piece today is in the Washington Post, where Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward share a byline for the first time in 36 years. It’s about President Nixon and Watergate 40 years after the fact, and how the whole situation was much worse than was thought back then:
Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.
The article is full of great quotes from the Nixon tapes as he became increasingly paranoid and irrational, going on profanity-laced tirades against journalists, the antiwar movement, and “the Jews,” among others. But what is perhaps most notable about the article is the implicit frame it presents. The sense I get from it is that Woodward and Bernstein are presenting a cautionary tale, a kind of story to tell young politicians before you tuck them into bed. “Be careful, kids, or this is where you’ll end up.”
The trouble with this is that recent cases of elite lawbreaking, up to and including top officials, are still almost too common to count. Just for the most obvious example, consider the fact that George Bush has admitted to ordering the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. There’s a ginned up controversy about whether or not that was against the law, but don’t take my word for it, listen to the chief law enforcement officer of the United States:
In his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder declared that the interrogation practice known as waterboarding amounts to torture, departing from the interpretation of his Bush administration predecessors.
And finally, from the UN Convention Against Torture, Article II, signed by President Reagan:
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
Nixon was not the last of the presidential lawbreakers. Far from it.
By: Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 6, 2012
“The Fragility Of The 3rd Branch Of Government”: Why The Public’s Growing Disdain For The Supreme Court May Help Obamacare
The public’s growing disdain of the Supreme Court increases the odds that a majority will uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare.
The latest New York Times CBS Poll shows just 44 percent of Americans approve the job the Supreme Court is doing. Fully three-quarters say justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal political views.
The trend is clearly downward. Approval of the Court reached 66 percent in the late 1980s, and by 2000 had slipped to around 50 percent.
As the Times points out, the decline may stem in part from Americans’ growing distrust in recent years of major institutions in general and the government in particular.
But it’s just as likely to reflect a sense that the Court is more political, especially after it divided in such partisan ways in the 5-4 decisions Bush v. Gore (which decided the 2000 presidential race) and Citizen’s United (which in 2010 opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign spending).
Americans’ diminishing respect for the Court can be heard on the right and left of our increasingly polarized political spectrum.
A few months ago, while a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich stated that the political branches were “not bound” by the Supreme Court. Gingrich is known for making bizarre claims. The remarkable thing about this one was the silence with which it was greeted, not only by other Republican hopefuls but also by Democrats.
Last week I was on a left-leaning radio talk show whose host suddenly went on a riff about how the Constitution doesn’t really give the Supreme Court the power to overturn laws for being unconstitutional, and it shouldn’t have that power.
All this is deeply dangerous for the Court, and for our system of government.
Almost 225 years ago, Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist (Number 78, June 14, 1788) noted the fragility of our third branch of government, whose power rests completely on public respect for its judgement:
The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. [Yet lacking sword or purse, the judiciary] is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches; and that as nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office, this quality may therefore be justly regarded as an indispensable ingredient in its constitution, and, in a great measure, as the citadel of the public justice and the public security.
The immediate question is whether the Chief Justice, John Roberts, understands the tenuous position of the Court he now runs. If he does, he’ll do whatever he can to avoid another 5-4 split on the upcoming decision over the constitutionality of the Obama healthcare law.
My guess is he’ll try to get Anthony Kennedy to join with him and with the four Democratic appointees to uphold the law’s constitutionality, relying primarily on an opinion by Judge Laurence Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia – a Republican appointee with impeccable conservative credentials, who found the law to be constitutional.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, June 8, 2012
“Illogical Reasoning”: Mitt’s Utterly Empty Massachusetts Boasts
The Obama campaign has been criticizing Mitt Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor, and the presumptive Republican nominee is now responding with an ad of his own. Romney certainly has a right (and, from a strategic standpoint, an obligation) to rebut his opponent’s attacks, but the defense he offers is a textbook demonstration of how to make something out of nothing.
The spot makes three specific boasts about Romney’s term as governor, which ran from 2003 to 2007. The first involves job creation:
“As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney had the best jobs record in a decade.”
That sounds impressive, but look a little closer. In the decade before Romney’s tenure, Massachusetts had three other governors, all Republicans. One of them, Bill Weld, clearly had a better jobs record than him. When Weld came to office in January 1991, the state’s economy really was in a freefall. A major Boston-based bank, the Bank of New England, had just failed and the jobless rate was 7.4 percent and climbing fast. Within a few months it reached 9.7 percent, then began falling as the economy – in the state and nationally – revived. Weld left office at the end of July ’97 (to pursue an ill-fated bid to become ambassador to Mexico) with the jobless rate at just 4.1 percent.
His successor, Paul Cellucci, oversaw a further decline, with the rate plummeting to just above 2 percent in 2000. But the economy began sagging, and the number started to rise again. On April 10, 2001, he resigned to become George W. Bush’s ambassador to Canada. If you use the data from March ’01, Cellucci’s last full month on the job, he left the state with a jobless rate of 3.1 percent. If you use the April ’01 data, the figure was 3.3 percent. Either way, it’s comparable to the 0.9 percent drop that Romney presided over from ’03 to ’07.
The only governor in the decade before Romney’s arrival with a clearly worse jobs record was his immediate successor, Jane Swift, who served as acting governor from April ’01 to January ’03. During that time, unemployment climbed to 5.6 percent, which is where it stood when Romney was sworn-in.
So what Romney’s “best governor in a decade” boast actually means is that he had a better jobs record than Cellucci and Swift. And the reality is that there wasn’t a dramatic difference between his jobs record and Cellucci’s. So really, Romney is just bragging that he was better than Swift, who served less than half a term.
Then there’s this:
“He balanced every budget without raising taxes.”
This is only true in a very literal sense. Romney didn’t raise the income or sales taxes, but his first budget did impose more than $500 million in new fees that directly hit middle class residents. At the time they were enacted, the National Conference of State Legislatures noted that no other state had relied so heavily on fees to balance its books. Not that this is news: Obama’s campaign has been playing up Romney’s fee spree, and his Republican opponents threw it in his face during both of his presidential runs.
The ad’s final claim is that Romney achieved balanced budgets “by bringing parties together to cut through gridlock.” Again, this means a lot less than it sounds like. A balanced budget is required in Massachusetts and the state’s legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The only way for Romney to meet his constitutional duties was to sign a balanced budget approved by Democrats.
What Romney is banking on, of course, is that swing voters aren’t aware of this context, or don’t care about it even if they are. His entire strategy depends on economic anxiety leading voters to look for reasons to throw out Obama and to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, even if those reasons aren’t logical. From that standpoint, this ad might work just fine.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, June 8, 2012
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