“Kings Of Comity”: Dear John McCain, Ted Cruz Isn’t What’s Wrong With The Senate, You Are
The Senate runs, as the wise old men who make up the majority of that institution would tell you, on comity. Recently, Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been in the Senate for about 10 minutes, has been accused of disrespecting the Senate’s tradition of comity. He has been accused of “engaging in innuendo” by repeatedly insinuating that Chuck Hagel is somehow in the pocket of evil foreign powers, and he is also said to have engaged in the even worse crime of talking too much even though he’s just a freshman.
Here’s Politico with the shocking details:
Behind closed doors, some Republican senators report that Cruz, in his stone-cold serious prosecutorial style, speaks at length when it’s far more common for freshmen to wait before asserting themselves — particularly ones who were just sworn in.
Absolutely appalling, how he insists on acting as self-impressed as his more senior colleagues. Politico also reports that Cruz was rude to Chuck Schumer on a Sunday show, which just isn’t done. After Cruz’s hostile questioning of Hagel, McCain publicly rebuked the Texas senator, something McCain only does to practically everyone who annoys him in any fashion. “All I can say is that the appropriate way to treat Senator Hagel is to be as tough as you want to be, but don’t be disrespectful or malign his character,” Mr. McCain told the New York Times.
Yes, Ted Cruz has obviously not yet learned that the Senate runs on comity. Except the problem is the Senate isn’t running at all, and hasn’t been for some time now. It was not running before Cruz got there. His arrival changed nothing.
Ted Cruz has indeed been acting horribly, lobbing McCarthyite smears and generally playing it up for the rubes back home. Last week, stories and columns ran, effectively simultaneously, in Politico, the Times and the Washington Post, all with the same basic message: Ted Cruz is being a dick. It was almost as if someone was trying to send him a message!
But Ted Cruz being a dick isn’t what has prevented the Senate from accomplishing anything. Ted Cruz’s rudeness isn’t what’s led the Senate to stop performing even its most basic tasks, like confirming uncontroversial agency heads and judges. Ted Cruz’s loudmouthed Senator Asshole routine is not what’s wrong with the Senate. What’s wrong with the Senate is grandstanding buffoons like John McCain who think comity is actually more important than accomplishing anything.
Lindsey Graham told Politico what he says to all new senators: “You’re going to be respected if you can throw a punch but you also have to prove you can do a deal.” Here’s what Lindsey Graham doesn’t ever do: a deal. Graham is a peerless negotiator, but he also always backs out of every deal at the last second because he cares more about the act of negotiation than he does about accomplishing goals through legislation. Ted Cruz didn’t blow up immigration reform on multiple occasions. Ted Cruz isn’t why senators like McCain and Graham decide to stop supporting things they used to support, like cap-and-trade, because of political cowardice or petty grievances over vote scheduling or something.
Because senators refuse to see themselves as unimpressive party hacks, they relish the power that comes with being seen as someone who makes “deals.” And the best way to exercise that power is to negotiate until legislation is objectively worse at accomplishing its supposed objective and then declaring with anguish that you cannot bring yourself to support the result of your negotiation. That is considered very impressive senator-ing. What Lindsey Graham wants is for Cruz to vote exactly the way he’s voting now (when the Senate bothers to vote), but for him to also spend a lot more time pretending he might vote a different way.
The Senate doesn’t work because Mitch McConnell uses every rule at his disposal to block the Senate from working, and he’s allowed to do this because Democrats respect the tradition of Senate collegiality so much that they refuse to end the rules that empower the minority to politely block all Senate business for no reason.
Not long ago, the Wilson Center’s Donald Wolfensberger praised the “gentlemen’s agreement” Harry Reid got instead of filibuster reform as a sign of a new comity golden age.
This year’s failed reform efforts produced headlines such as, “Filibuster Reform Goes Bust” and “Filibuster Lives.” The reality, however, is that the reformers’ bold ploy did force the hand of the bipartisan leadership to work out agreements that will enable the Senate to operate in a more functional and conciliatory manner. That bodes well for getting some important things done this year, even on the eve of what will be a contentious election season.
And then of course Republicans responded by filibustering the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of Defense, a move that was both unprecedented (while a Cabinet nominee has failed an up-and-down vote, none have been actually filibustered) and pointless (because he’ll eventually still be confirmed, in a few more days). They did it because they could, more or less, and while Ted Cruz was one of the loudest voices for the filibuster, it only actually happened because of kings of comity John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They were outraged over Cruz’s out-of-bounds questioning of a Cabinet appointee they then filibustered.
Meanwhile Republicans are still all trying to nullify the Consumer Financial Protection Board, but for the most part they are doing so politely so it is not considered a shocking breach of etiquette or whatever.
Ted Cruz is what’s wrong with the modern Republican Party — he’s an extremist who says outrageous things specifically to be seen as disrespecting “Washington elites” — but what’s wrong with the Senate is just about every other senator, most of whom think their first duty is to be incredibly respectful of one another while never evincing any concern whatsoever for the real-life consequences of their inaction on nearly every single one of America’s most urgent problems, from unemployment to catastrophic climate change. And their tradition of deference to one another, and their high esteem for the broken institution they are members of, is what stops them from doing anything to change the way they don’t do business.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 18, 2013
“The Grand Old Jurassic Party”: From The Advocacy Of Freedom To Retribution Against The Weak
The Republican Party is a presidential election away from extinction. If it can’t win the 2016 contest, and unless it has bolstered its congressional presence beyond the benefits of gerrymandered redistricting—which is to say not only retaking the Senate but polling more votes than the opposition nationally—the party will die. It will die not for reasons of “branding” or marketing or electoral cosmetics but because the party is at odds with the inevitable American trajectory in the direction of liberty, and with its own nature; paradoxically the party of Abraham Lincoln, which once saved the Union and which gives such passionate lip service to constitutionality, has come to embody the values of the Confederacy in its hostility to constitutional federalism and the civil bonds that the founding document codifies. The Republican Party will vanish not because of what its says but because of what it believes, not because of how it presents itself but because of who it is when it thinks no one is looking.
The contention by some that the GOP has an identity crisis is nonsense. It’s hard to remember any political organization in the last half century that had a clearer idea of itself. The party’s problem isn’t what it doesn’t know but what everyone else does know, which is that—as displayed in Congress on Tuesday night at the president’s State of the Union address, when Republicans could barely muster perfunctory support for the most benign positions favoring fair pay and opposing domestic violence—the party apparently despises women, gays, Latinos, African Americans, the poor, and the old. The more indelible this impression becomes, the more impossible it will be for even an estimable candidate, be it Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, or the now famously desiccated Marco Rubio, to transcend the party that nominates him. This isn’t to say that the argument for limited government will die with the party. It has been part of the American conversation since James Madison and Alexander Hamilton squared off over the Constitution in 1789, with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams each in their corners holding the coats of their respective protégés. The intent of the argument, however, has changed from an essential advocacy of freedom to retribution against the weak.
The Republican Party was born of the most righteous of purposes, which was the containment and eventual elimination of slavery. Trumping the party’s love of the free market was the insistence that a human being should not be one of that market’s commodities: FREE LABOR, FREE LAND, FREE MEN was the party’s manifesto in the 1850s. Four decades after Lincoln, the party under Theodore Roosevelt believed that the captains, colonels, and generals of industry who most profited from the market had become the market’s biggest threat and needed to be constrained for the market’s sake. In the 1960s the candidacy of Barry Goldwater represented not the birth of modern corporate conservatism as later embodied by President Ronald Reagan and then Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Eric Cantor, but a libertarianism more practical and less unhinged than the present-day version. Sometime in the last 30 years, however, the party became a flack to corporate culture at the expense of either freedom or individualism, and as the country grows more economically oligarchic, the Republican Party that best reflects that oligarchy loses political credibility with the public.
What the current party shares in its collective psychosis with the party of the ’60s is its yearning for martyrdom. If it’s true that what hold on power the GOP still has lies in congressional districts more and more resembling outliers—a power that will die off as figuratively as the constituents of those districts die off literally—it’s also true that many in the party are gripped by the death wish that thrills all martyrs and leaves them moist for self-annihilation. These Republicans have a different notion from other modern political parties of what a party is supposed to be. They don’t see a party as a coalition of disparate interests having just enough in common that together everyone gets what they need, if not what they want. Republicans believe that, definitionally, a party signifies principles so unyielding that any compromise of anything at all renders the party meaningless. Nothing better indicates the theocratic personality of the party than that the very notion of coalition is corrupt, even debased, like a congregation that allows infidels in its ranks. In the last couple of weeks a national poll reported that by three to two, Democrats are willing to compromise on certain things in order to achieve other, larger things. Among Republicans, the numbers are exactly the reverse. It’s not unreasonable that true believers conclude Karl Rove—as responsible as any single person for what the party has become—is now a hack, given that he is one and always has been, and given what for true believers is the rather belated revelation that Rove loves power for its own sake which, whatever else may be so, can’t be said of the party’s zealots.
Self cannibalization is the instinct of such movements. The more desperate the Republican Party becomes, the more voraciously it devours its Robespierres, Dantons, Héberts, if such comparisons don’t unduly flatter the romantic delusions of self-styled Republican Jacobins. Thus Senator Rubio’s superstardom is already on the descent, so blemished by his flirtations with reality not to mention with compassion on the matter of immigration reform that not only did he back away from the issue in his response to the president on Tuesday but it was necessary for Kentucky Senator Rand Paul to offer another, purer response to Rubio’s tainted one. Thus the face of Hispanic Republicanism, however far beyond the oxymoronic such a concept lurches, isn’t Rubio on Tuesday night but Tuesday afternoon’s new hotshot Ted Cruz, senator from Texas for 43 days and attacking the character of Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel so ruthlessly and without any facts that even fellow Hagel opponent John McCain objected. Thus the scowling response of congressional Republicans Tuesday night to the president’s clarion call on behalf of voting rights, which was last regarded as controversial 50 years ago by Southern segregationists and might have been considered in 2013 something of a gimme as far as applause lines go. Thus on further review the videotape reveals Speaker John Boehner—who initially stood with the rest of the country to applaud the victims of gun violence during the State of the Union’s concluding litany—looking out nervously at his seething and largely unmoved caucus (which leads him far more than he leads them) and, realizing the error of his heart, taking his seat again halfway through the honor roll of the dead, by the time the president got to Tucson.
By: Steve Erickson, The American Prospect, February 14, 2013
“Active Inertia” Of A Dying Party: Intellectually Bankrupt, Republican’s Are Pyromanic’s In A field Of Strawmen
Take pity on poor Marco Rubio. You’d be reaching for a bottle of Poland Springs, too, if you had to spit out the dry-as-dust bromides and the well past their sell-by date Reagan-era platitudes that Rubio was forced to expectorate as the Republican Party’s designated responder to President Obama’s State of the Union address last Tuesday.
“More government isn’t going to help you get ahead,” said Rubio, doing his best Ronald Reagan “government-isn’t-the-solution-it’s-the-problem” impersonation. “It’s going to hold you back. More government isn’t going to create more opportunities. It’s going to limit them. And more government isn’t going to inspire new ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs. It’s going to create uncertainty.”
Later on, Rubio wasn’t content to merely propose we reduce debts and deficits. He had to go all the way to balance the budget in ways that did not involve the choice between “either higher taxes or dramatic benefit cuts for those in need.” Instead, Rubio offered the oldie but goodie that we should “grow our economy so that we create new taxpayers, not new taxes, and so our government can afford to help those who truly cannot help themselves.”
Good grief! Could this speech have been given 30 years ago? Of course it could, says Andrew Sullivan, because it was not a political speech at all but rather a “recitation of doctrine dedicated to Saint Ronald.”
What Rubio gave us on Tuesday, says Sullivan, “was an intellectually exhausted speech that represents the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Republicanism” — a series of “Reaganite truisms that had a role to play in reinvigorating America after liberal over-reach in the 1960s and 1970s,” perhaps, but offering little that was new or applicable today.
If reciting these platitudes in Spanish counts as what the GOP thinks it will take to restore the party to political or intellectual relevance, says Sullivan, then “they are more deluded than even I imagined.”
After listening to Rubio, I am in agreement with Josh Barro when he says the Republican Party’s problem isn’t the messenger but its whole economic message. And to fix that, Republicans need to show they are serious about policy — and for “smart government” on a case-by-case basis – and not just demagogues when it comes to government.
Michael Grunwald had the same thought when he said if Republicans really believe they lost the last election “because Romney was a boring rich white guy who alienated Hispanics” then in Rubio they got their chance “to see a charismatic Cuban-American with humble roots but otherwise indistinguishable positions on every issue except for immigration.”
And the result should have had Republicans reaching for drinks stronger than water.
I am not sure what to say when Rubio tried to pass himself off as a regular guy who went through college on federal student loans and has a mother who gets Medicare — but who then speaks for a party committed to cutting, if not eliminating, both.
At the same time, I am left speechless by Rubio’s assertion that Obama has no cause for blaming President Bush for the nation’s debt – at the same time Rubio insists the “real cause of our debt” is the $1 trillion deficit Bush left Obama when he took office — times four. And shame on Obama, says Rubio, that Obama did not immediately undo everything George W. did and reduce the deficit to zero in the middle of the second worst recession in 70 years.
But “that’s why we need a balanced budget amendment,” concludes Rubio, idiotically.
Rubio offered no compromise on gun control, nothing but border security on immigration, drill, baby, drill as an energy policy, not a word on gay equality, and nothing at all about the 60,000 Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan. And as for climate change, he quipped: “No matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather.” Ha, ha, ha.
Rubio was also like a pyromaniac in a field of straw men insisting President Obama is hostile to the free enterprise economy, believes the economy collapsed because government didn’t tax enough and that the “solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.”
At the same time, Rubio blames the 2008 financial collapse on a “housing crisis created by reckless government policies.”
I used to write speeches for Republicans, and so I suppose I should be indebted to Senator Rubio for providing such a perfect distillation of all the reasons I gave up on the thankless, potentially health damaging task of articulating ideas for Republicans who don’t have any.
By my counting, Rubio is now the third leading Republican (after Governor Bobby Jindal and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor) who’ve gone “over the top” like doomed WWI doughboys as they charge across their barren ideological No Man’s Land in a futile effort to reposition a Republican Party that wants no part of change.
One measure of the heavy lift facing Rubio and Company as they try to pour new wine into old bottles was the reaction of other Republicans to the President’s State of the Union address. Their collective message seemed to be: What a tragedy a perfect opportunity was squandered for the President to declare he’d become a Republican after winning reelection in a landslide.
“He seems to always be in campaign mode, where he treats people in the other party as enemies rather than partners,” said House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who seemed puzzled Obama had not immediately embraced Ryan’s ideas.
“In the last election, voters chose divided government which offers a mandate only to work together to find common ground,” said Speaker John Boehner who seemed puzzled the President actually thinks like a Democrat. “The President, instead, appears to have chosen a go-it-alone approach to pursue his liberal agenda.”
But the response I loved best came from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who sounded like some slave-owning Southern Oligarch warning the President against offering “another litany of left-wing proposals” or throwing “red meat” to his base because, you know, “the campaign is over” and so the “Republican-controlled House” is back to calling the shots.
You’ve had your fun Mr. President, McConnell seemed to be saying. You won the election fair and square. But now it’s time to face facts. That’s a nice little democracy you’ve got there, Mr. President. But don’t forget, we’re still in charge.
Republicans like to think themselves connected to the disciplines of the free market, with its emphasis on competition, innovation and the relentless “creative destruction” of revolutionary change. Yet, it’s astonishing to me how Republicans at the same time exhibit the sclerosis of what author Chrystia Freeland calls the “active inertia” of dying organizations that fail to adjust to the imperatives of change because “they do what they always did — only more energetically than before.”
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 15, 2013
“Shallow, Ignorant, And Totally Unserious”: Why Republicans Can No Longer Be Trusted on National Security
It’s been clear, at least since the 2012 election, that the Republican Party has abrogated its role—really, abandoned any interest—in shaping or seriously discussing American foreign policy. But only recently has this indifference shifted into toxic territory, and on Tuesday the fumes formed a poisonous cloud, the likes of which hadn’t been witnessed in decades.
The occasion was the Senate Armed Services Committee’s vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense. In the end, Hagel pulled through, but only on a party-line vote (all Democrats in favor, all Republicans opposed) and after a debate that raised doubts less about Hagel than about the modern GOP’s inclination—and the Senate’s ability—to oversee anything as consequential as national security.
Hagel’s Jan. 31 confirmation hearings had been appalling enough—not just for his own lackluster performance, but more for his inquisitors’ bizarrely narrow focus. They asked almost nothing about the issues that will face the next defense secretary: the budget, the roles and missions of the Army, the balance of drones vs. manned aircraft, the size of the Navy, the future of Afghanistan, or the “pivot” from Europe to Asia. Instead, they hectored the nominee about the adequacy of his fealty toward Israel, his animosity toward Iran, and whether he was right or wrong about the 2007 troop-surge in Iraq.
There was all that in the follow-up session on Feb. 12, plus a whiff of paranoia and sedition that’s rarely been cracked open since the days of Joseph McCarthy.
The stench started wafting through the air with the comments of Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, who trumpeted the warnings that in 2008 Hagel gave a speech to the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. Vitter called for halting the hearings until a video of the speech could be found, to see whether the nominee had voiced extremist or anti-Israeli comments.
Then came Sen. Ted Cruz, freshman Republican from Texas, who seemed to be explicitly angling for McCarthy’s inheritance. Cruz shuddered that Hagel had made $200,000 over a two-year period from Corsair Capital, which has contracts abroad, yet he could not tell the committee whether any of that money came from a foreign government. It would be “relevant to know,” Cruz intoned, “if that $200,000 … came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea. I have no evidence to suggest that it is or isn’t,” but there should be an investigation.
At that point, Sen. Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, lambasted Cruz for having “impugned the patriotism” of Hagel, for accusing him of getting “cozy” with terrorists.
Now Cruz is but a freshman; his idiocies can’t be ascribed to his party as a whole. But Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is the Armed Services Committee’s top-ranking Republican, and he not only sided with Cruz but snapped back at Nelson’s admonitions. Hagel’s nomination had been “endorsed” by the Iranian government, Inhofe said. “You can’t get any cozier than that.”
That was too much for Sen. Carl Levin, the usually amiable and tolerant committee chairman. “I have been endorsed by people I disagree with totally,” he said. “I don’t want people who hate me to ruin my career by endorsing me.”
Sen. Claire McCaskell went further, warning Inhofe and Cruz, in a “have you no shame, senator” moment, to “be careful” with their tactics of character-smear and guilt-by-association.
Even Sen. John McCain, the erstwhile Republican leader, seemed abashed by the storm he’d helped unleashed against the nominee a month before. “I just want to make it clear,” McCain said, “Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He has served his country. And no one on this committee at any time should impugn his character or his integrity.” It was reminiscent of the time, on the 2008 campaign trail, when a woman, fired up by the gunplay rhetoric of his running mate Sarah Palin, started going on about the socialist Muslim Barack Obama—and McCain felt compelled to dial down the passion, defending his opponent as a good American. One wonders, does McCain lie awake at night, gnashing his teeth at the hash that he’s made of his own reputation and the noisome role he’s played in turning his country’s politics into a cesspool?
Still, McCain’s move to reticence had no effect on Inhofe, who clanged the alarm bells still louder. Hagel, he said, had voted against a bill labeling the Iranian Republican Guard Corps as a terrorist organization (because, by definition, it wasn’t). He’d voted against unilateral sanctions against Iran (because unilateral sanctions have no effect). He’d appeared on Al Jazeera TV and agreed with the show’s hosts that Israel had committed war crimes (the first part is true, the second part is not).
On the few occasions during the session when Republican senators explored substantive issues, it was soon clear they had no idea what they were talking about. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire who has often stood alongside McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham to bash President Obama on Benghazi, tried to make much of Hagel’s co-authorship of a 2012 report by an ad hoc group called the U.S. Global Zero Nuclear Policy Commission. Ayotte expressed shock that, in the wake of North Korea’s third nuclear test, Hagel had not removed his name from this report, which called for eliminating one leg of our nuclear triad. “We have three legs to our nuclear triad,” she said (yes, senator, that’s why it’s called a “triad”), as if it were some nuclear holy trinity.
Ayotte too is new; she seems not to know what a nuclear triad is. She certainly isn’t aware that, even among conservative thinkers in the nuclear-weapons realm, the idea of scrapping one leg of the triad—namely, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles—is at least a respectable notion. The argument is that ICBMs are vulnerable to nuclear attack and, at the same time, tipped with multiple, highly accurate warheads that make an opponent’s ICBMs vulnerable to attack. In other words, by their very existence, ICBMs create an incentive for both sides to launch a pre-emptive attack in the event of a crisis.
But Ayotte’s remarks were seconded by Sen. Jeff Sessions, who does know something about nukes yet seems trapped in 1982. Hagel, he charged, “comes out of the anti-nuclear left,” as if, first of all, there is such a thing these days. It’s worth noting who wrote that Global Zero report along with Hagel: Thomas Pickering, a veteran U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Moscow; Richard Burt, a State Department negotiator in the Reagan administration; retired Gen. John Sheehan, former commander-in-chief of U.S. Atlantic Command; and—not least—retired Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, before that, head of U.S. Strategic Command, which manages the nuclear arsenal. Hardly a pack of lefties.
Not to sound like a Golden Age nostalgic, but there once was a time when the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee prided themselves on having an understanding of military matters. They disagreed in their conclusions and sometimes their premises. But most of them worked to educate themselves, at least to the point where they could debate the issues, or ask questions of a general without coming off like complete idiots. The sad thing about this new crop of senators—especially on the Republican side—is they don’t even try to learn anything; they don’t care if they look like complete idiots, in part because their core constituents don’t care if they do either.
After Tuesday’s vote, Sen. Levin adjourned the session, saying, “We thank you all, and we look forward to another wonderful year together.” The other senators laughed, but it really wasn’t funny.
By: Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 13, 2013
“A Pattern Of Timidity”: Press Yawns While Partisan Republicans Shred Cabinet Confirmation Process
Reporting on the contentious, drawn-out political battle surrounding President Obama’s decision to pick Republican Chuck Hagel to be his next secretary of defense, Politico recently noted the extraordinary partisan acrimony the confirmation process has produced.
With Republicans adopting an unprecedented obstructionist strategy to block a premier cabinet post by lodging all kinds of threats to “hold” the confirmation or even to try to deny Hagel a Senate vote, Politico concluded the controversy meant problems for party leaders, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI).
“Levin faces a conundrum,” Politico reported. “He can force a party-line vote on Hagel, but that could damage the committee’s longtime bipartisan spirit.”
This makes no sense.
By launching a drawn out campaign against Hagel, Republicans have torn up decades worth of tradition on the Senate Armed Services Committee in terms of working across party lines to confirm secretaries of defense. But according to Politico it’s the Democratic chairman who faces a “conundrum” over the lack of “bipartisan spirit” in the Senate. It’s the Democrat who has to deal with the “damage” done by Republican maneuvers.
Sometimes it seems the Beltway press will do anything to avoid blaming Republicans for their wildly obstructionist ways. It’s a pattern of timidity that has marked Obama’s time in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the press for years now has insisted on providing no framework with regards to the radical ways that now define the GOP.
By refusing to hold Obama’s opponents accountable, and by actually making media stars out of the ones who actively obstruct, the press simply encourages the corrosive behavior. (By the way, this is the same Beltway press corps that has routinely blamed Obama for not successfully changing the tone in Washington.)
Both in terms of Republican obstructionist behavior and the press’ unwillingness to call it what it is, the trend has reached its pinnacle with the current confirmation mess. And it’s getting worse. Fox News this week reported Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was threatening to block a confirmation vote on Jack Lew, selected by the president to be the next secretary of treasury.
Discarding centuries worth of advise-and-consent tradition (i.e. the winning president picks his cabinet), Republicans have radically rewritten the cabinet confirmation rulebook while journalists have stood quietly by, not bothering to inform news consumers about the dramatic shift taking place. Instead, the press treats it all as being commonplace; as just more partisan bickering.
And when not downplaying the ramifications or erroneously suggesting Obama’s “picking fights” with “controversial” cabinet picks like Hagel, journalists have bungled the story altogether, giving Republicans political cover in the process.
Appearing on Fox News on Monday to discuss the Hagel impasse and the various hurdles Republicans keep putting up while plotting ways to put off his confirmation vote, Roll Call’s associate political editor David Drucker said, “Everybody argues it’s politics, but everybody does it.” He claimed the party out of power often does this for key cabinet positions.
False.
I understand that political journalists operate under the constant threat of the Liberal Media Bias mob that the GOP Noise Machine perpetually whips up. Pointing out the Republican’s radical path of obstructionism would certainly draw the wrath of the right-wing. But sometimes that’s the price reporters have to pay for practicing journalism. And this week journalism does not mean simply reporting that Republicans continue to try to delay and block high-level cabinet appointees. It means reporting that it’s never been done with this frequency before in modern American history.
The endless, never-before-seen attacks on Obama’s Cabinet choices (and would-be choices, such as Susan Rice who was preemptively attacked; an unheard of partisan strategy) have been going on for months now since Election Day. But we’ve only recently begun to see efforts by journalists to include context regarding how unusual the Republican confirmation behavior has been.
From Politico:
But the filibuster threat — reiterated Monday by Sen. Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee — would make Hagel just the third Cabinet nominee in history to require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster on the Senate floor. The other two nominees were President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 choice to head his Commerce Department, C. William Verity, and President George W. Bush’s 2006 choice of Dirk Kempthorne to be secretary of the interior.
So this kind of obstructionism is abnormal but it’s not entirely new, Politico seemed to suggest, noting recent Republican presidents have faced similarly dug-in Democratic opponents when trying to fill out their cabinets.
Not quite.
In the case of Reagan, it was a group of Republican senators who threatened to filibuster Reagan’s Commerce pick because he wasn’t sufficiently conservative. And with regards to Bush’s pick of Kempthorne to head Interior, there was Capitol Hill chatter about a Democratic hold being placed on his confirmation, but in the end it didn’t amount to anything.
Looking back at the news coverage, the Beltway press never took seriously the idea that either Kempthorne’s or Verity’s confirmation would be blocked or that a major battle was brewing. In the end, Verity won 84 votes of support and Kempthorne was easily confirmed on a Senate voice vote.
All of which means we’ve never seen anything like the coordinated, dubious efforts by outside conservative groups and Republican members in Congress to block Hagel’s confirmation. (Or to make sure Rice was never nominated.) As Sen. Levin noted yesterday, we’ve never seen a secretary of defense nominee like Hagel be asked to provide detailed financial information about non-profit organizations that have paid him in the past.
It’s all unheard of. But if you turn on cable news you’ll hear a Beltway editor claim “everybody does it.”
They didn’t. Until now.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, February 13, 2013
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