“A Crash Course In Congressional Mischief”: Voters Have An Entirely New Reason To Scorn Congress
After years of excoriating Congress for not legislating, Americans got a crash course Tuesday night about the mischief that can transpire when Congress actually fulfills its duties.
With both parties (for a change) committed to passing a spending bill by Thursday to avoid a government shutdown, the comprehensive legislation became a lobbyist’s delight. These omnibus last-minute bills traditionally pass Congress with virtually no debate. And since Barack Obama would never veto legislation to fund the government over minor provisions, anything small snuck into the bill is as good as inscribed into law.
Which brings us to the gem that Matea Gold of the Washington Post discovered on Page 1,599 of the 1,603-page bill. The provision — inserted in the legislation by persons unknown — would suddenly allow a married couple to give as much as $1.56 million to their political party and its committees in a two-year election cycle.
No, that isn’t a typo. Without resorting to Super PACs or taking advantage of a new loophole from the Supreme Court, couples or individuals could give roughly eight times more to their party in 2015 than they could in 2014. As election law expert Kenneth Gross told the Washington Post, “The cost of an ambassadorship just went up.”
Technically, this new giving can only go to three designated areas — convention costs, recount expenses and building funds. But while nothing is certain until regulations are written, it is a safe bet that these categories are likely to be porous. Hypothetically, funds for a new addition to the Democratic National Committee that houses the computers that contain the party’s voter files might also be used to update these registration lists. If nothing else, the parties would no longer have to take money from their general operating funds to pay for these activities.
A case can be made for strengthening the political parties in a Super PAC era. If the parties were too financially powerful in the 1990s when they were the only conduits for unregulated “soft money” contributions, now they are suffering from, in effect, being mere millionaires in a billionaire age. This is especially true as Super PACs are beginning to take on many of the traditional functions of parties like candidate recruitment, voter contact and polling.
It is worth recalling that parties are a force for responsibility and moderation in politics — since their ultimate goal is winning elections rather than enforcing an ideological agenda. Also, as ongoing organizations, the Republican and Democratic National Committees will still be around when the enthusiasms of the current generation of Super PAC donors wane or turn to art collecting and buying sports teams.
As a result, there could have been a robust public debate over the best way to fund political parties in this new electoral environment. Both Republican and Democratic party leaders — as well as the candidates themselves — should come to realize that they are the big losers when the mega-rich dominate campaigns through Super PACs.
It would have been possible to imagine bipartisan legislation in the next few years that would have traded increased legal contribution limits for enhanced disclosure of Super PAC and “dark money” spending. Or even swapped more generous giving for a functioning Federal Election Commission.
Instead Congress in its infinite wisdom decided that “dark money” legislating was a wiser solution. And blaming this one exclusively on the Republicans is probably not true, especially since the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is currently $20 million in debt.
The result is that the McCain-Feingold legislation, signed with such high hopes 12 years ago, is now as outmoded as Morse Code. And voters (or, at least, that small remnant who still care) have an entirely new reason to scorn Congress. Quite an accomplishment for a group of stealth middle-of-the-night legislators.
By: Walter Shapiro, Brennan Center For Justice, December 10, 2014
“When Elephants Attack”: Red On Red Violence, Like Ignorance, Is A Signifying Trait Of Wingnuttery
And now, let us have a brief moment of silence to honor the victims of red-on-red violence.
They’re fresh off their biggest electoral victory in years. But when Massachusetts Republicans got together this week for their regular state committee meeting, they dwelt on the losses of last month’s election, voting to scold former governor William F. Weld for endorsing a Democrat.
The members of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee voted 35 to 18 to condemn endorsements of Democrats by Republicans and name-checked their former standard-bearer for his violation. Weld endorsed Democrat Michael Day in the contest for a vacant House seat representing Stoneham and Winchester, narrowly edging out Republican Caroline Colarusso.
The Republicans also called out former party chairman Brian Cresta for his across-the-aisle endorsement of state Representative Theodore Speliotis, a Democrat who edged out Republican Tom Lyons.
You would figure that Republicans in the Bay State would get down on their knees every morning and thank the God they allegedly believe in for Weld, who kicked off a 16-year streak of GOP control of the State House when he defeated the late John Silber in 1990. Of course, ingratitude, like ignorance, is a signifying trait of wingnuttery.
The move comes at a time when Weld is resuming a leading role in Massachusetts. Charlie Baker, the Republican who just won the race for governor, was Weld’s political protege. He has named several fellow former Weld-era officials to his own cabinet…But to disgruntled conservatives, the former governor has betrayed them. The resolution expresses ‘deep disappointment in the poor judgment exercised by any Republican official who supported any candidate other than the Republican candidates during the past election cycle.'”
Keep in mind that the real reason the wingnuts are still angry at Weld is not because of anything he did in this election cycle; it’s because of what he did in the 2008 election cycle, when he endorsed Barack Obama instead of John McCain.
Weld’s endorsement of Mitt Romney in 2012 wasn’t enough for these cranks to set aside their hatred. At least one of the cranks admitted it:
“This guy is a traitor,” said one disgruntled Republican, John DiMascio, who faulted the party establishment for showcasing Weld, despite his support for Democrats. “You don’t turn around and take someone who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and further make him a celebrity in the state.”
Well, there you go. How dare Weld think for himself! Doesn’t he know he’s a Republican, and therefore he’s not supposed to think at all?
The RINO-hunting will only get worse as we move into the 2016 election cycle, and with your help, we’ll be able to keep an eye on the savagery and stupidity of these scoundrels. Please make a tax-deductible donation today, so that we can continue to record the radicalism and monitor the madness.
By: D.R. Tucker, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 14, 2014
“An Outlier For All The Wrong Reasons”: What America’s Gun-Toting Cops Look Like To The Rest Of The World
From protests in Washington, the police shooting of an unarmed teen in suburban St. Louis looks tragic. From rallies in Los Angeles, the death of a man caught selling cigarettes in New York City looks baffling. From inside churches in Chicago, the police shooting of a black child with a toy gun in Cleveland looks heartbreaking.
Still, there’s often a weariness to these responses, a sense that excessive police force is both shocking and predictable at the same time. Which is why it’s helpful, every now and then, to remember what all of this looks like from abroad.
The Economist this week has penned a blunt editorial that captures how much of the rest of the developed world views the American criminal justice system and our particular brand of policing: “In many cases,” the U.K.-based magazine writes, “Americans simply do not realise how capricious and violent their law-enforcement system is compared with those of other rich countries.”
We forget that other countries (the U.K. included) often police without firearms at all. We don’t realize that other parts of the world maintain public safety without the high costs of over-incarceration. We don’t know — in a country where we’re bad at keeping such stats ourselves — that police killings of any kind are exceeding rare elsewhere.
From that foreign perspective, this is what our system looks like:
Bits of America’s criminal-justice system are exemplary—New York’s cops pioneered data-driven policing, for instance—but overall the country is an outlier for all the wrong reasons. It jails nearly 1% of its adult population, more than five times the rich-country average. A black American man has, by one estimate, a one in three chance of spending time behind bars. Sentences are harsh. Some American states impose life without parole for persistent but non-violent offenders; no other rich nation does. America’s police are motivated to be rapacious: laws allow them to seize assets they merely suspect are linked to a crime and then spend the proceeds on equipment. And, while other nations have focused on community policing, some American police have become paramilitary, equipping themselves with grenade launchers and armoured cars. The number of raids by heavily armed SWAT teams has risen from 3,000 a year in 1980 to 50,000 today, by one estimate.
Above all, American law enforcement is unusually lethal: even the partial numbers show that the police shot and killed at least 458 people last year. By comparison, those in England and Wales shot and killed no one.
The U.S. is an international model in a lot of ways, the magazine points out. But this is decidedly not one of them.
By: Emily Badger, Wonkblog, The Washington Post, December 12, 2014
“Normalizing Illegal Behavior”: Why Are Torturers Being Given “Balance” In The Press?
After the publication of the torture report, the torturers and their enablers have been all over the airwaves defending themselves and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These “techniques” included horrific acts of rape, threatening family members with rape and death, suspension from ceilings and walls for days on end, forcing prisoners to soil themselves in diapers, and various forms of psychological torture including sleep and sensory deprivation. In many cases the people being tortured had done nothing wrong and had no information of value.
There is simply no defense for any of this. None. “It gave us actionable intelligence” isn’t a defense. It happens to be untrue. We know that torture doesn’t produce valuable information, and it didn’t produce valuable information in any of these cases, either. But it doesn’t matter if it worked or not. Cutting the hands off of thieves works wonders to reduce theft, but we don’t do that. A moral people does not do these things. “We’re not as bad they are” isn’t a defense, either. That’s not the standard by which a moral people judges itself–and besides, most of the rest of the industrialized world does hold itself to a higher standard, despite also being victimized by Islamist terror attacks.
This stuff is obvious. And yet the TV shows and newspaper stories are full of balance given to the pro-torture side. Why? Despite objections to the contrary, journalists do not always give balance to both sides of an argument if the other side is deemed irrelevant or depraved. Whenever the deficit bugbear rolls to the forefront, almost no balance is given to the Keynesian point of view despite their predictions being consistently correct: the idea that one needn’t actually cut the deficit during a recession is treated as so outre as to require no journalistic attention.
More pointedly, when journalists write about torture and depredations of current or former regimes, journalists don’t feel the need to get the torturers’ side of the story. No one is rushing to ask Assad’s torturers in Syria if their tactics are necessary to keep “terrorists” in check. No one is asking North Korean guards if their treatment of their people is OK because some other country is worse. No one rushes to counterbalance the accounts of Holocaust victims with the justifications of Nazi guards. It simply isn’t done, any more than we “balance” stories of child sexual abuse with a hot-take counterpoint from a member of NAMBLA. The reason we don’t provide “balance” in these cases is that to do so would be to normalize those behaviors as part of legitimate discourse.
So why in the world are the torturers who subjected innocent people to anal feedings and dungeon ceiling hangings given the courtesy of “balance” in the press? Where is the line that separates issues that require balance from those that do not?
In a decent moral universe, torturers don’t get the benefit of explaining themselves to the press any more than serial killers do, except potentially out of morbid curiosity.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 14, 2014
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