“Clowns, Stunts, And Acrobatics”: The ‘Traveling Circus’ The RNC Can’t Stop
Nearly two years ago, with his party still licking its wounds after a rough 2012 cycle, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus looked ahead to the 2016 presidential race and focused on a specific goal: far fewer debates.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday he was trying to stop the party’s primary process from transforming into a “traveling circus.”
“Quite frankly, I’m someone – I don’t think having our candidates running around in a traveling circus and doing 23 debates, slicing and dicing each other is in the best interests of our party,” Priebus said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
There’s little doubt that Priebus’ concerns were rooted in fact. The 2012 debates for the Republican presidential candidates were often entertaining, but they didn’t do any favors for the aspirants themselves. When the Republican National Committee sharply curtailed the total number of debates for the 2016 race – and prioritized events on Fox – it didn’t come as a surprise.
But as the Republicans’ presidential field takes shape, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the “traveling circus” is not wholly dependent on debates – a circus needs clowns, stunts, and acrobatics, and the likely 2016 candidates are already providing plenty of antics for our viewing pleasure.
* The entire party is facing a curious new litmus test about whether President Obama is a patriot and a Christian. It’s a test Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is failing badly.
* This comes on the heels of a vaccinations litmus test that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed – one of many key issues the senator doesn’t seem to understand.
* Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is desperate to prove he’s his “own man” by hiring his brother’s and his father’s team of advisers, and advancing his ambitions with his brother’s and his father’s team of donors.
* New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) operation appears to be moving backwards – his vaccinations flub didn’t help – as his popularity falls quickly in his home state.
* Right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson (R) has positioned himself as a rare candidate who supports war crimes.
* The closer Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) gets to launching his campaign, the more some party officials plead with him not to run.
* Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) wants states to pursue nullification if the Supreme Court endorses marriage equality.
* Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) seems eager to say and/or do anything to get attention.
* A variety of GOP candidates have set up private meetings with Donald Trump.
The Greatest Show on Earth? Probably not, though it’s clear the “traveling circus” is well underway, and there’s very little Reince Priebus can do about it.
The problem isn’t the debates, per se. Rather, it’s the candidates themselves who run the risk of embarrassing themselves and their party. As the last few weeks have reminded us, they don’t need a debate platform to cause trouble.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 23, 2015
“The Dangers Of Another Bush In The White House”: Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It
The more we learn about Jeb Bush, the more less he appears ready for primetime:
“Some states, like yours here in New York, are choosing not to grow. They won’t approve fracking,” Bush said, his veiled shot at Cuomo drawing roars of approval from Republicans gathered at a Sheraton in Manhattan. “Meanwhile, in parts of New York where huge opportunities exist for the restoration of economic activity, people languish.”
Bush left unmentioned that fracking in the Marcellus Shale beneath the New York-Pennsylvania border also presented a big opportunity for himself.
One of his private equity enterprises at that time was raising $40 million to back a Denver-based company acquiring fracking wells in hopes New York would lift its ban. The company, Inflection Energy, has active leases in Pennsylvania, and one of Bush’s equity partners sits on the board. He also has fracking ties through a separate business with both of his sons.
The intersection between Bush’s private and public life — calls for fracking have been a part of his speeches and came as recently as last month in San Francisco — triggers questions of disclosure.
It’s not just that fracking is a horrid, unpopular practice. It’s that the self-dealing in this case is so obvious it will confirm voters’ suspicions about the dangers of putting another Bush in the White House. One of the less highlighted but most damaging subtexts of the Bush Administration was the number of members of the Bush White House who were invested in moneymaking schemes directly profiting off the invasion of Iraq, not least of them being Dick Cheney and Halliburton.
With Jeb Bush hiring the same foreign policy advisors, ramping up rhetoric for war with Iran and evidently engaged in self-dealing over oil in his speeches, the same suspicions will arise with him. As well they should.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, February 23, 2015
“… And Justice For All”: The Rule Of Law Defines Civilization And Underpins America’s Precious Democratic Experiment
I’m a little emotional about same-sex couples accepting Alabama Probate Judges’ time-honored offer to newlyweds “You may kiss”. These marriages are all the sweeter because when we were married by an Alabama Probate Judge three decades ago, it was a very different world. Sorta.
Those were the days of “I now pronounced you man and wife.” Unmistakably, a man was a man whatever his marital status. Once married, a woman was reduced to her role. We’d already warned the Judge off the the “obey” thing, but he informed us that another trip to the courthouse and a formal petition — fifty bucks, please — was required for me to reclaim my own surname. It had legally vanished with “I do”. It is a privilege to see justice finally promised to another oppressed group. And what additional satisfaction it is to have a front row seat, watching seemingly immovable traditions — reserving marriage for some, refusing it to others, arbitrarily elevating some over others — dissolving before the irresistible force of a Federal Judge’s orders overturning Alabama’s law banning same-sex marriage — celebration time.
A victory of this proportion is for everyone, a lesson on a grand scale. People died for these rights. Credit especially the martyred San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk and his profound insight: “‘Coming out’ is the most political thing you can do.” When individuals risked everything to be true to themselves, debilitating stereotypes dissolved into the faces of our family members, neighbors, friends and coworkers. Millions shared the honor when Mr. Milk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009. Our world is improving because people were brave.
Would that the heroic reporter Dudley Clendinen had lived to see this turn of events. His Out for Good, which we explored with him in 1999, remains an important report on harsh realities still endured by too many homosexuals in the world and in America. The particulars of people’s private lives continue to elicit sensational and hate-filled reactions. Still.
Not surprising is the recalcitrance of the “Ten Commandments” Alabama Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore. Nor is this appalling defiance of the Federal Judge’s direct order out of character. In 2003, his own colleagues removed him from office for defying the law. What does it say for the voting majority in Alabama, that In 2012 they returned him to the same position?
I am amazed that half the judges in the State defied their Chief Justice. Perhaps they realized his argument is “so 1832”, dating back as it does to South Carolinian John C. Calhoun’s (and later the Confederacy’s) notion of “nullification“. Maybe those law-abiding Probate Judges didn’t want to be counted among the more recent neo-nullification gang: Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and now, notably, the list includes the former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee (who’s also voiced suspicions about dancing).
Whatever their motivation, it’s a breath of fresh air that so many Alabama Probate Judges obeyed the Federal court order and married whomever chose that august and demanding path. This is all the more noteworthy given their Chief Justice’s recalcitrance, which carries the distinctive stench of oppression still lingering across America from white supremacists imposing equally noxious restrictions based on race as well as gender.
The rule of law defines civilization and underpins America’s precious (and precarious) democratic experiment. A less privileged individual would go to jail for the kind of defiance we are witnessing. A senior judge flagrantly breaking the law with apparent impunity is a sad spectacle, even in long-benighted Alabama.
Ultimately, justice will win out in a just polity. Still, it should not be necessary to overcome the willful injustice of atavistic elements of our judicial system.
By: Paula Gordon, The Blog, The HUffington Post, February 22, 2015
“Self-Styled Super-Patriots”: Loving An Imaginary America, Hating The Real One
Leave it to Matt Taibbi in a return to the pages of Rolling Stone to come up with a unique perspective on Rudy Giuliani’s rants about Obama not loving America: it reminds Taibbi of communist bitter-enders in post-Soviet Russia:
Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks…..
Not to go too far down memory lane, but in 1990, I went to Leningrad to study. The Soviet empire was in its death throes and most people there, particularly the younger ones, knew it.
But some hadn’t gotten the memo yet, and those folks, usually nice enough, often older — university administrators, check-room attendants, security guards, parents of some of my classmates, others — were constantly challenging me and other exchange students to East-versus-West debates, usually with the aim of proving that “their” way of life was better.
By the time I left Russia a dozen years and a couple of career changes later, a lot of those people still hadn’t gotten the memo. They were deep in denial about the passing of the USSR and spent a lot of time volubly claiming ownership of words like we and our and us in a way that quickly became a running joke in modernizing Russia.
U Nas Lusche — roughly, Ours is Better or It’s Better Here — was the unofficial slogan of the pining-for-the-old-days crowd in post-communist Russia….
[T]he Soviets also had a strong sense of exceptionalism. It was something that was carefully nurtured and encouraged by The Party and had been spread successfully from the Kremlin to the remotest drunk-tank in Kamchatka.
But the problem with exceptionalism is that it can turn unintentionally comic with the drop of a hat. You’re made to believe you’re at the center of an envious universe, but then the world changes just enough and suddenly you’re a punchline clinging to a lot of incoherent emotions. I watched this happen with my own eyes to a lot of people in the former Soviet Union.
And I feel like it’s happening here now, with Rudy and the rest of the exceptionalist die-hards. They’re hanging on to a conception of us that doesn’t really exist anymore, not realizing that “America” is now a deeply varied, rapidly-changing place, one incidentally that they spend a lot of their public lives declaring they can’t stand.
And that’s the real irony and outrage: self-styled super-patriots who make it more apparent every day that they don’t much like, much less love, their country.
The Giuliani crack-up started up a long-overdue discussion about what exactly it means when patrician pols like Rudy accuse others of not “loving America” enough.
After all, which America do they mean? The one that will be majority nonwhite by 2042? The one that twice elected Barack Obama president? The one that now produces more porn than steel? The one that has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates and one of the highest immigration rates? That America?
Are they big fans of South Park maybe? The Wu-Tang Clan? Looking? Because it’s ironic: The heavy industry and manufacturing might that was a key source of American power in the days of Giuliani’s youth is now in serious decline, but Hollywood (and American pop culture generally) is a bigger, more hegemonic world power than ever.
Yet the current batch of exceptionalists mostly despises Hollywood, one of our few still-exceptionally-performing industries. They liked it better in the days when John Wayne was the leading man, Rock Hudson was in the closet and nobody made movies about copulating cowboys or Che’s motorcycle trips.
And here’s the classic Taibbi-esque coup de grace:
Conservative politicians like Rudy are a bizarre combination of constant, withering, redundant whining about Actual Current America, mixed with endless demands that we all stand up and profess our love for some other America, one that apparently doesn’t include a lot of the rest of us or the things about this country we like.
I feel sorry for Rudy that he can’t love this country the way it is. I love America even with assholes like him living in it.
Kinda the way I feel about Erick Erickson insisting that Barack Obama and I can’t possibly be Christians.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 23, 2015
“An Alternate History”: The 3 Stages Of ObamaCare Trutherism
As we approach the March 4 oral arguments for King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court case that may decide the fate of ObamaCare, it’s worth delving further into a legal argument that approaches 9/11 truther levels of insanity.
As I observed in a recent piece for The Week, there are two ways that the argument can proceed in its attempt to establish that the Affordable Care Act does not authorize health insurance subsidies on federally established state exchanges. The first is to say that no matter what lawmakers intended to accomplish, they mangled the letter of the law to say that the subsidies will not flow to such exchanges. Whoops.
The other argument, fully embraced by the law’s opponents at the Supreme Court, is that legislators intended to deny subsidies to the states — even though that would go against everything they set out to accomplish.
These are both terrible arguments; one would deny millions of people health insurance over the equivalent of a typo, while the other flies in the face of common sense and the historical record. But they permit opponents of the ACA to switch from one to the other as a means of evading devastating objections to any individual argument.
A classic example of a pundit engaging in this dance is Ramesh Ponnuru, who tries to split the difference between the two variants. His column in Bloomberg is a useful distillation of the three stages of Affordable Care Act trutherism.
Ponnuru starts out by suggesting that the letter of the law is clear — “nowhere does the law authorize subsidies for plans purchased on those federally run exchanges.” But you can arrive at this conclusion only by using terrible, unworkable methods of statutory construction. You don’t have to take my word for it — the brief submitted by major legal scholars, including Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general and one of the country’s foremost experts in statutory construction, explains this in clear detail.
When you focus on the statute as a whole, rather than on the isolated phrase that appears to confine subsidies to the exchanges established by state governments, it is clear that exchanges established by the federal government on the state’s behalf are “[e]xchange[s] established by the State,” as the statute defines them. Indeed, the ACA is an excellent illustration of why phrases in statutes should be read in context. Doing so produces a coherent reading of the statute’s purpose, whereas the reading of the ACA’s opponents, represented by Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon, produces numerous anomalies and puts the statute at war with itself.
There’s a reason why Adler and Cannon haven’t been content to rest on the typo argument. It sounds superficially plausible in a seminar room, but in the broader world, people are going to wonder why literally none of the relevant federal or state officials read the statute in accordance with its allegedly clear and unambiguous meaning. (If the statute is not clear and ambiguous, under well-settled precedent the courts are supposed to defer to the judgment of the IRS, which will be responsible for administering the subsidies.)
As a sort of way station between the two arguments, then, Ponnuru proceeds to an argument we can label, “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.” In other words, various members of Congress had different intentions, many weren’t really paying careful attention — who can say what Congress was really trying to do? As Ponnuru writes, lawmakers are “generally not detail-oriented people.”
There is a grain of truth to this argument — Congress is a “they,” not an “it,” as social scientists say, and we should be careful in making broad generalizations. Nonetheless, everybody makes reasonable judgments about what Congress is trying to accomplish, not least because it would otherwise be impossible to practice law or interpret history. We can understand why the Wilmot Proviso, for example, broke down on sectional rather than partisan lines without claiming to know the precise subjective intentions of each and every member of Congress.
And in this case, the idea that we can’t reasonably infer what Congress was trying to do is absurd. The amicus brief written by Nicholas Bagley, Thomas Merrill, Gillian Metzger, and Abbe Gluck is particularly strong on this point. Federal backstops are not some mysterious new innovation of the ACA — they’re a bog standard part of cooperative federalism. They’re inserted in statutes when Congress wants to ensure that benefits of programs administered primarily by states will flow to citizens even if the states decline to participate.
Congress did not intend for the federal backstop to fail, and it was universally understood that the insurance exchanges could not work without tax credits and the individual mandate. There’s only a mystery here if you hate the ACA so much that you’ve become willfully blind to what it’s trying to accomplish and how it relates to previous statutes in the New Deal/Great Society tradition.
As such, it makes sense that the ACA’s opponents would develop an alternate history that can actually reconcile their reading of the statute with an explanation of Congress’ intentions. The Supreme Court is much less likely to strip insurance from millions of people based on what the architects of the suit initially identified as a “glitch,” than if it convinces itself that it’s upholding the will of Congress.
Ponnuru doesn’t go quite so far as to say that he’s “100 percent certain” about what the ACA’s drafters were setting out to accomplish, but he does argue that the Adler/Cannon interpretation makes sense. Denying subsidies on federally established exchanges, Ponnuru asserts, is “not at all absurd in principle.” After all, states that don’t comply with the requirements of Medicaid don’t get the money — why shouldn’t we think that the same principle of coercion is at work in the exchanges?
But the contrast with the ACA’s Medicaid expansion destroys Ponnuru’s argument rather than fortifying it. The Medicaid expansion shows how Congress proceeds when it’s actually trying to coerce states. To state the obvious, if you’re making a threat, you don’t keep the consequences of failing to comply a secret. On the flip side, legislators were well aware that some states would not or could not establish their own exchanges, and this is why they wanted to establish a backstop.
The weakness of all these arguments explains why apologists for the latest legal war on the ACA like to alternate between them. If a critic points out that you should take the context of the entire statute into account, just say that Congress was consciously trying to coerce the states, not create a federal backstop. When people point out that this is nonsense, return to asserting that Congress messed up the language. Repeat as necessary.
Hopefully, at least five justices will see through this game of legal three-card monte.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, February 20, 2015
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