“Rebranding Failure”: John Boehner Tries To Defend Congress’ Ineptitude, Because Getting Nothing Done Is Exhausting
This Congress is generally perceived as failing miserably when it comes to governing, and a few weeks ago, we learned this perception is quantifiably true: the 113th Congress is on track to pass fewer bills than any since the clerk’s office started keeping track in the mid-1940s.
When a reporter asked House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) late last week about the institution’s “historically unproductive” nature, the Republican balked. “That’s just total nonsense,” he snapped, before the question was even finished.
Over the weekend, however, Boehner reversed course, deciding that his unproductive tenure isn’t something to be denied; it’s something to be celebrated.
House Speaker John Boehner says Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
The Ohio Republican makes the comments on an interview aired Sunday on CBS “Face the Nation.” He was responding to a question about how little Congress is doing these days.
Boehner says Congress “should not be judged by how many new laws we create.”
Let’s appreciate exactly what Boehner is trying to do here. When he and his Republican colleagues sought power, they told the electorate that they would work to find solutions to national problems. After having been unsuccessful, the Speaker of the House has decided to rebrand failure — he wants credit for his record of futility and expects praise for the fact that he and his caucus have made no legislative progress since he took power three years ago.
Instead of finding solutions to ongoing challenges, Boehner believes Congress should be focusing on undoing solutions to previous challenges. By the Speaker’s reasoning, we should probably change the language we use when it comes to Capitol Hill — Boehner and his colleagues aren’t lawmakers, they’re lawenders.
The House Speaker is on his way to establishing an accomplishment-free legacy, and at this point, he’d like you to think that’s great.
Indeed, the closer one looks at Boehner’s argument, the more bizarre it appears.
On the surface, his rhetoric is the epitome of the kind of post-policy nihilism that dominates Republican thought in 2013 — Boehner doesn’t want to build up, he’d rather tear down. Given an opportunity to look forward and make national progress, the Speaker sees value in looking backward and undoing what’s already been done.
And just below the surface, the argument reinforces what has long been suspected: House Republicans not only don’t have a positive policy agenda, they don’t even see the point in pretending to want one.
But then there’s the most problematic angle of all. Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal”? I’m afraid I have bad news for the Speaker: Congress isn’t repealing laws, either. Indeed, in order for lawmakers to repeal laws, Congress has to — wait for it — pass legislation addressing those laws.
In other words, by Boehner’s own standards for evaluating Congress on the merits, he’s failing.
Don’t expect a sudden burst of productivity, either — after taking four weeks off for the August recess, Boehner announced late last week that the Republican-led House only intends to work nine days in the month of September.
Keep in mind, in an election year, we might expect congressional leaders to schedule fewer work days in September because members want to be on the campaign trail, but odd-numbered years are generally supposed to be focused on governing.
It seems getting nothing done is exhausting.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 22, 2013
“The Privilege Of Whiteness”: Since White Is The Default Setting, There’s No Such Thing As White Crime
As a biracial child who spent part of his youth abroad, Barack Obama learned the feeling of otherness and became attuned to how he was perceived by those around him. As a politician, he knew well that many white people saw him as a vehicle for their hopes for a post-racial society. Even if those hopes were somewhat naïve, they came from a sincere and admirable desire, and he was happy to let those sentiments carry him along. Part of the bargain, though, was that he had to be extremely careful about how he talked about race, and then only on the rarest of occasions. His race had to be a source of hope and pride—for everybody—but not of displeasure, discontent, or worst of all, a grievance that would demand redress. No one knew better than him that everything was fine only as long as we all could feel good about Barack Obama being black.
So when he made his unexpected remarks about Trayvon Martin on Friday, Obama was stepping into some dangerous territory. By talking about his own experience as a black man, he was trying to foster both understanding and empathy, to explain to white Americans why the Martin case has caused so much consternation and pain among black Americans. The petty (and not so petty) daily suspicion and indignities and mistreatment black people are talking about? Even I, the most powerful human being on the planet, know it well.
In doing so—and by saying “it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching”—he may have implicitly encouraged white people to think about their own privilege, the privilege of whiteness. Privilege is a dangerous word, one that raises lots of hackles, and one Obama himself would never, ever use. But it’s inescapable.
Despite the way people react when the word is introduced, acknowledging your own privilege doesn’t cost anything. I grew up in a home with lots of books, in a town with good schools, in a country with extraordinary opportunities. I benefited hugely from them all, though I created none of them. I may have earned my current job as a writer, but compared to the labors of those who wait tables or clean houses or do factory work, it’s so absurdly pleasant you can barely call it work at all. But more to the point, in all my years I’ve never been stopped by a cop who just wanted to know who I was and what I was up to. I’ve never been accused of “furtive movements,” the rationale New York City police use for the hundreds of thousands of times every year they question black and Hispanic men. I’ve never been frisked on the street, and nobody has ever responded with fear when I got in an elevator. That’s not because of my inherent personal virtue. It’s because I’m white.
I will never have to sit my children down and give them a lengthy talk about what to do and not to do when they encounter the police. That’s the talk so many black parents make sure to give their children, one filled with detailed instructions about how to not appear threatening, how to diffuse tension, what to do with your hands when you get pulled over, and how to end the encounter without being arrested or beaten. I can tell my children, “Don’t do anything stupid,” and that will probably be enough. I worry about them as much as any parent, but there are some things I don’t have to worry about.
Because of my privilege, I also don’t have to concern myself with how strangers are thinking of me when I leave the house, because their thoughts will bear on me not a whit. Amir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer for The Roots and bandleader for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, wrote last week about how he is constantly made aware of the fact that, as a large black man, he makes other people uncomfortable. “My friends know that I hate parking lots and elevators, not because they are places that danger could occur, but it’s a prime place in which someone of my physical size can be seen as a dangerous element. I wait and wait in cars until I feel it’s safe for me to make people feel safe.” Privilege means not spending any mental energy worrying about how you make other people feel by your very presence. Privilege means never having the thought even occur to you.
My privilege as a white man is to be unnoticed if I choose, because when I step into an elevator or walk through a store or pass a cop on the street, I’m an individual. No one looks at me and says, “Hmm—white guy there,” because I’m the default setting. I’m not suspicious, I’m not a potential criminal, I ring no alarm bells in anyone’s head. And that is a gift. Even as an adult, Barack Obama, the “articulate and bright and clean” Harvard-educated lawyer, had something in common with Trayvon Martin and every other 17-year-old black kid: the presumption of suspicion with which they found themselves treated. They couldn’t just be themselves. To so many people, they were a type, and a bad one at that, or at least assumed to be of a lesser station. So a fellow guest at a posh party in 2003 could walk up to state Senator Obama and ask him to fetch the man a drink. Has that happened to you?
Privilege is also not worrying that the deeds of other people who are like you in some way will reflect poorly on you. As Jamelle Bouie wrote last week, at times like this, some conservatives will always bring up the idea of “black on black” crime as a justification for the presumption that young black men are criminals, but we never speak about “white on white” crime. The reason? When a white person robs a liquor store or beats someone up or commits insider trading, we see it as just a crime, not a crime that has anything to do with the whiteness of the perpetrator. Since white is the default setting, there’s no such thing as white crime. Each white criminal is just himself.
And retaining your individuality means you’re granted an exemption from some kinds of costs. Last week The Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen wrote a remarkable column arguing that it’s perfectly reasonable to treat all black men like criminal suspects, since there are some black men who commit crimes. As Ta-Nehisi Coates noted, Cohen was “arguing for a kind of racist public safety tax” that black men should be forced to pay. Sure, most black men are perfectly law-abiding, but since some aren’t, you sir are just going to have to put up with getting stopped and frisked, getting followed by store security, and getting pulled over even when you haven’t been speeding. If you’re white, that’s a tax you will never have to pay, because you will be treated as an individual.
As a white person, I’ll continue to enjoy this privilege almost no matter who I am or what I do. In my heart I could be the most kind-hearted humanitarian or the most vile sociopath. I could be assiduously law-abiding or a serial killer. I can dress in a suit or in torn jeans and a hoodie, and no one will react to me with fear or suspicion, because if they don’t know me they will assume they know nothing. I am myself, nothing more or less. That’s privilege.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 22, 2013
“Public Ninth Amendment Fund?”: Ohio PAC, “We’re Buying George Zimmerman A New Gun And We Need Your Help”
The Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio-based political action committee, has issued a startling statement in the wake of the George Zimmerman trial: “We’re buying ZIMMERMAN a NEW GUN – We need your help.”
The PAC is in fact not just buying Zimmerman a new gun, but asking the public for donations — “$100 … $50 … $25 … even just $10” – to fund the replacement of his “firearm, holster, and other gear.”
The statement even reminds readers that Zimmerman – who stood trial for the fatal shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida – has “no current source of income.”
And last week, conservative author Brad Thor used Twitter to say that he would buy Zimmerman a new gun and “as much ammunition as he wants.”
The offers come after both Thor and the pro-gun group expressed their disagreement with the Department of Justice’s decision to put a hold on all evidence in the case, including the gun that he used to kill Martin, until it can determine whether or not to charge Zimmerman with violating Martin’s civil rights.
The Buckeye Firearms Foundation has now established what it calls the “Zimmerman Second Amendment Fund,” arguing that the fund is “about more than mere principle. …Gun owners must stand together and refuse to allow an injustice like this to go unanswered.”
The article also adds: “Zimmerman and his family now face daily threats on their lives. More than ever, he has a right to defend himself against those who would seek to do him harm.”
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a “Public Ninth Amendment Fund” to protect those of us who have to share the streets with a gun-toting murderer while still being told we have the right to life.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, July 22, 2013
“The Painful Paradoxes Of Race”: A History That Just Doesn’t Go Away
“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” the young African-American man wrote. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall they follow me. … Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.”
“I have lost control of my emotions,” he declared. “Rage, Frustration, Anguish, Despondency, Fatigue, Bitterness, Animosity, Exasperation, Sadness. Emotions once suppressed, emotions once channeled, now are let loose. Why?”
The words came not in response to the George Zimmerman verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing but to the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The author of the May 6, 1992, column in the Stanford University student newspaper: Cory Booker, now the nationally celebrated mayor of Newark and the frontrunner to be the next United States senator from New Jersey.
Booker pointed me toward his angry essay more than halfway through a late breakfast on a visit here last week. He spoke the day before President Obama went to the White House briefing room to issue his powerful reminder to Americans that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
In words that resonated with what Booker had said, the president noted that “the African-American community is looking at this issue though a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”
For his part, Booker didn’t start with the Zimmerman trial but instead spoke enthusiastically about a program he had established in cooperation with the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute to help men released from prison become better fathers. “The right intervention,” he said, “can create radically different outcomes.”
Booker knows about crime. He described his experience of holding a young man who had just been shot, trying and failing to keep him from dying in his arms. He returned home disconsolate and washed off the young man’s blood.
His account, and Obama’s later words, put the lie to outrageous claims by right-wing talk jocks that those upset over the outcome in the Zimmerman trial have no concern for what the conservative provocateurs, in one of their newly favored soundbites, are calling “black-on-black” crime. African-American leaders, particularly mayors such as Booker, were struggling to stem violence in their own communities long before it became a convenient topic for those trying to sweep aside the profound problems raised by the Martin case.
Booker fully accepts that there is a right to self-defense. “One of the things I learned from the good cops is that there were some times when they were completely justified in pulling their weapons and killing somebody,” he said. But those good cops, he insisted, also understood that their first obligation was “to defuse a situation,” to try to prevent violence. Discussing Zimmerman, Booker added: “This so-called community watch guy, having been told by the police to back away, had so many opportunities to defuse the situation.”
Why, Booker wonders, do we only have our famous conversations about race and fear “when things go terribly wrong”? Why, he wants to know, was it impossible for Zimmerman to look upon Martin “as someone he could have a conversation with”?
This shrewd politician is under no illusions that his questions have simple answers. Yet as we neared the end of the interview, he offered a thought you might hear in a church or synagogue. “Fear is a toxic state of being,” Booker said. “You’ve got to lead with love.”
Talking to Booker was a reminder of the bundle of contradictions that is the story of race in America, precisely what Obama was underscoring when he spoke of our progress as well as our difficulties.
The young man who protested against the need to prove his innocence had earned a Rhodes scholarship and went on to become one of the country’s most prominent politicians. He has won friends across the political spectrum (which makes some liberals nervous). Most of what he had to say to me was about practical things government can do to reverse rising inequality and battle child poverty. One of the central problems of our time, he said, is “the decoupling between wage growth and economic growth,” a development that feeds so many other social challenges.
We cannot give up on trying to solve these problems any more than we can blind ourselves both to the persistence of racism and our triumphs in pushing it back. That, I think, is the message of his old column. We have come a long way, and have a long way to go.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 22, 2013
“Count On It”: Will The Ghost Of Trayvon Martin Haunt Rick Scott?
Floridians aggrieved by George Zimmerman’s acquittal might get some succor from a federal civil rights charge, or maybe at some point a civil suit. But the one thing for sure they will have at their disposal in a 2014 election in which the case and the concealed-carry and “Stand Your Ground” laws that affected it will be an inevitable issue. At National Journal, Beth Reinhard takes a look at the post-trial politics of the case, and suggests it could be a real problem for Rick Scott, who has been slowly recovering from the intense unpopularity he earned in his first couple of years in office.
Rick Scott couldn’t do much worse among black voters than in 2010, when only 6 percent backed him for governor.
Or could he? African-American leaders outraged by the not-guilty verdict in the death of teenager Trayvon Martin are assailing Scott for supporting the “Stand Your Ground” law that arguably helped Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, go free. Students protesters are camping out in the governor’s office, musician Stevie Wonder has announced a boycot,t and Attorney General Eric Holder denounced the law at the NAACP convention in Orlando earlier this week.
If black voters turn out in force against Scott in 2014, they could swing a race as close as his last, which he won by only 61,550 votes. Black voters comprised between 11 percent and 14 percent of the vote in recent gubernatorial elections, and their share of the electorate is on the rise. Racial and ethnic conflicts, such as the bitter debate in 2000 over custody of Cuban rafter Elian Gonzalez, have a history of shaping elections in the nation’s largest swing state.
To be exact, the African-American percentage of the Florida electorate dropped from 13 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2010 and then went back up to 13 percent in 2012. This represents a relatively normal dropoff in minority voting from a presidential to a midterm election; anything that provides an unusually powerful incentive to high midterm voting by minorities is a big deal in a state like Florida.
Scott’s likely Democratic opponents on Thursday joined the criticism of his leadership after the racially polarizing trial. “I’m troubled that we don’t have a governor that can bring people together after such an emotional and personal public debate,” said Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor who switched parties and is expected to challenge Scott. “No law is perfect, and it seems to me that Trayvon’s tragic death provides an opportunity for a real dialogue on how we can improve our laws to ensure that we are protecting self-defense while not creating a defense for criminals.”
Democratic Sen. Nan Rich, who’s struggling to gain traction in the polls after running against Scott for more than one year, mocked him for being out of town during the sit-in in his office, though he returned to Tallahassee late Thursday and met with protesters. “I think he’s afraid to come back,” Rich quipped. “Leadership is lacking, and we need leadership from the governor to change this law.”
Crist, Reinhard notes, did about three times as well as Scott did among African-American voters when he was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2006, and improved his reputation in that community significantly by supporting a restoration of voting rights for ex-felons and expanded early voting opportunities in urban areas in 2008. And even before the Zimmerman verdict, Crist was leading Scott in a June poll by 10%.
A wild card for Scott in 2014 will be fallout from his failure to convince Republican legislators to support the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, after his own flip-flop from opposition to support. If he were to submit to pressure to call a special legislative session to act on the expansion, he could attract a primary challenge. If he does nothing, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in Florida, leaving many thousands of low-income Floridians ineligible either for Medicaid or for Obamacare tax credits to buy insurance on the new exchanges, could become a pretty big deal in 2014.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 19, 2013
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