“Orrin Hatch Gives Away The Game”: Perfect Illustration Of GOP Obstruction The President Has Faced
This is priceless:
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) hasn’t yet met with Supreme Court nominee Merrick B. Garland for what has been a long anticipated encounter between the former Judiciary Committee chairman and the federal appeals court judge he has long praised.
But when the meeting does happen, don’t expect Garland to succeed in convincing Hatch to support his nomination, because Hatch has already declared that it won’t.
“Like many of my Senate colleagues, I recently met with Chief Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. … Our meeting, however, does not change my conviction that the Senate should consider a Supreme Court nominee after this presidential election cycle,” Hatch wrote in an op-ed published on the website of the Deseret News early Thursday morning and later removed. It remains available in a Google database.
This is the same Orrin Hatch who recommended that President Obama nominate Merrick Garland to replace John Paul Stevens when he retired back in 2010.
This is the same Orrin Hatch who said this less than one week before President Obama actually did nominate Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court:
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) told Newsmax on Friday that President Obama wouldn’t nominate a “moderate” like Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the Utah senator was proven wrong.
“The President told me several times he’s going to name a moderate, but I don’t believe him,” Hatch told the conservative news site on Friday.
“[Obama] could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man,” he continued. “He probably won’t do that because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the [liberal Democratic base] wants.”
Now he’s decided he won’t support a hearing for Garland and has actually written an opinion piece to rationalize his decision, and he’s done it before meeting with the judge.
This is a perfect illustration of the kind of obstruction the president has faced from the Republicans. I’m not sure I could ever find a more apt demonstration.
By: Martin Longman, Web Editor, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 26, 2017
“No, Really – I Mean It”: The Same-Old Same-Old Paul Ryan
One of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 is that the Republican agenda had been shattered. After eight years of Bush/Cheney, our economy crashed due to deregulation, while the federal deficit soared because of unfunded wars and tax cuts for the wealthy. Similarly, our foreign policy was a mess because, after invading Afghanistan, we pretty much ignored those who were actually responsible for 9/11 and went on to invade Iraq based on lies that were meant to gin up a “global war on terror.” We abandoned basic universal values with an embrace of things like torture and the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Americans were ready to abandon all of what the Republican Party stood for in the modern era.
That’s what led the GOP to become “post-policy.” Instead of fighting for what they wanted to do to address the challenges America faced, they decided to fight President Obama and obstruct anything he attempted to accomplish. The result is that their current presidential nominee is the one who best captured post-policy nihilism.
Obviously that approach doesn’t sit well with House Speaker Paul Ryan. As the guy who impressed a lot of the Washington press corp with his wonkishness, he is determined to take Republicans back to the the agenda that failed in the past. This week Ryan announced that starting next week, Congressional Republicans will release six policy papers that he calls their “Confident America” agenda.
As Steve Benen noted, you can hear Ryan saying, “No, really – I mean it,” in this quote:
“What you will see with these [releases] are detailed policy papers,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “We’re not talking about principles here. This is substance. It’s going to be a clear explanation of the policy changes that are needed in these areas.”
The six areas to be covered include: poverty, taxes, healthcare, national security, regulations and constitutional authority. In case anyone is tempted to think that they will be any different from the failed Republican policies of the past, there’s this:
Ryan declined to detail the contents of the policy papers, other than offer a few hints: anti-poverty proposals will transition existing programs from “a work replacement system to a work encouragement system”; deficit reduction proposals will not affect seniors in or near retirement; and a healthcare overhaul will involve repealing the Affordable Care Act despite recent member proposals that wouldn’t involve full repeal.
In other words, we’ll see social programs block-granted to states (with significant reductions in revenue), voodoo economics with tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of entitlement programs and the elimination health care coverage for millions of people. Sound familiar? Of course, Ryan will dress all of that up with language that pretends it will actually help working Americans. But it will all be the same-old same-old that failed so miserably in the past.
Yesterday I described the dance that is currently going on between Ryan and Trump – mostly from the perspective of what Trump is looking for (submission to his enormous ego). This is what Ryan wants. It is the classic post-truth/post-policy battle that has been going on among Republicans over the last few years. To the extent that Ryan makes any headway in that dance, it would provide a contrast for the 2016 election. Do Americans want to return to the failed policies of the Bush/Cheney years? Or do they want to continue the policies that have worked during the Obama administration?
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 27, 2016
“President In Name Only”: There Are Presidential Duties Trump ‘Doesn’t Want To Do’
Paul Manafort, a controversial Republican lobbyist, joined Donald Trump’s team in late March, and at least initially, his task was to help oversee delegate recruiting. It wasn’t long, however, before Manafort worked his way up to effectively running the entire operation: less than two months after joining the campaign, he’s now Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist.
Yesterday, Manafort sat down with the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman for a fairly long interview, and while the two covered quite a bit of ground, there was one exchange in particular that stood out for me.
The vice presidential pick will also be part of the process of proving he’s ready for the White House, Manafort said.
“He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.”
This is no small acknowledgement. For months, it’s been clear that Trump has no meaningful understanding of public policy or even how government works at a basic level. By any fair measure, his ignorance and incompetence about affairs of state is unlike anything Americans have ever seen in a major-party presidential candidate. The question has long been when we can expect Trump to get up to speed.
And the answer is, he has no intention of doing any such thing. Day-to-governing and overseeing the executive branch apparently represent “the part of the job he doesn’t want to do.”
President Trump, in other words, would prefer to be more of a big-picture kind of guy who isn’t overly concerned about details and roll-up-your-sleeves kind of work.
As for who, exactly, might be the best person to “do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do,” Manafort added that there’s a “long list” filled with contenders who have “major problems.”
We should not, however, expect to see diversity on the Republican ticket. Choosing a woman or a member of a minority group to run as vice president, Manafort said, “would be viewed as pandering, I think.”
As for what else we learned from the interview:
* Manafort thinks Trump will be elected president easily. “This is not a hard race,” he said.
* The campaign chairman believes Trump may “moderate” his proposed Muslim ban a little.
* We shouldn’t expect to ever see Trump’s tax returns.
* Manafort believes Trump won’t budge on building a border wall: “He is going to build a wall. That is a core thing with him.”
As for the GOP candidate’s ability to demonstrate his preparedness for the Oval Office, Manafort added, “Does he know enough? Yes, because he knows he has more to learn.”
I’m honestly not sure what that means – it sounds like he’s saying Trump knows enough because he knows he doesn’t know enough – but in Trump Land, making sense is generally an annoyance that’s better left to others.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 26, 2016
“Dems With A Different Name”: Bernie’s Independent Voters Are Very Likely To Cast Ballots For HRC In The End
Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight has helped unravel one of the great mysteries of Campaign ’16: Who are the self-identified independent voters Bernie Sanders is carrying so heavily in primaries and caucuses? Are they swing voters who might well swing to Donald Trump in a general-election contest with Hillary Clinton, or stay home in large numbers?
According to the Gallup data Enten is looking at, no, they’re not.
Sanders’s real advantage over Clinton is among the 41 percent of independents who lean Democratic, with whom he has a 71 percent approval rating as opposed to HRC’s 51 percent. Among the 23 percent who do not lean in either party’s direction — the stone swing voters — Sanders’s approval rating is 35 percent, virtually the same as Clinton’s 34 percent (both are much better than Trump’s 16 percent).
But aren’t a lot of the leaners swing voters, too, particularly if their favored candidate does not win the nomination? Probably not:
In the last three presidential elections, the Democratic candidate received the support of no less than 88 percent of self-identified independents who leaned Democratic, according to the American National Elections Studies survey. These are, in effect, Democratic voters with a different name.
Yes, Clinton may need to work on this category of voters, but the idea that they are unreachable or likely to defect to Trump doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. These aren’t left-bent voters who have lurked in hiding for years, waiting for a Democrat free of Wall Street ties or militaristic tendencies, and they’re not truly unaffiliated voters who will enter the general election as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat. They’ve been around for a while, and in fact they are being affected by partisan polarization more than the self-identified partisans who have almost always put on the party yoke. So while a majority of these Democratic-leaning independents clearly prefer Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, they represent a reservoir of votes that are ultimately Hillary Clinton’s to lose.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 25, 2016
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