“It’s Just A Disgrace”: New Report Confirms GOP Obstructionism Is Unprecedented
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has released an important new report that details Barack Obama’s record on nominating judges during his first term. It’s no surprise: Republican obstruction against his selections was unprecedented. For example:
President Obama is the only one of the five most recent Presidents for whom, during his first term, both the average and median waiting time from nomination to confirmation for circuit and district court nominees was greater than half a calendar year (i.e., more than 182 days).
A quick look at the report’s summary confirms that Obama’s nominees have been treated more roughly than those of Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and the other Bush.
That’s only half the story. George H.W. Bush had to deal with an opposition party Senate for his entire first term, and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had that during about half of their first terms. It’s at least plausibly legitimate for opposite party Senators, when they have the majority, to argue that they should have a larger role in filling judicial vacancies, and to act accordingly. At the very least, if they simply oppose some of those nominees, they will defeat them in “up or down” votes.
But Obama, like Ronald Reagan, had a same-party Senate majority during his first term. He should have had among the best results over any recent president, all things being equal.
What changed when Obama took office, however, was the extension of the filibuster to cover every single nominee. Republicans didn’t always vote against cloture (or even demand cloture votes), but they did demand 60 votes for every nominee. That’s brand new. It’s true that Democrats filibustered selected judicial nominations during the George W. Bush presidency, but only at the circuit court level, and not every single one.
That meant that despite solid Democratic majorities and solid support from those Democrats, Obama’s judicial approval statistics are basically the worse of any of the recent presidents. He doesn’t show up last on every measure — for example, George H.W. Bush had a lower percentage of district court nominees confirmed — but he’s fourth or fifth out of five of these presidents on almost every way that CRS slices the numbers, and it adds up to by far the most obstruction faced by any recent president.
And remember: the losers here aren’t just the president and liberals who want to see his judges on the bench. Ordinary people who just want to get their legal matters taken care of promptly have suffered because of all the vacancies on federal courts.
It’s really a disgrace. Especially those picks that were delayed for months, only to wind up getting confirmed by unanimous votes. Especially the foot-dragging on district court nominees. Just a disgrace.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 3, 2013
“Make A Difference For President Obama”: No Matter Where You Live, Voting Really Matters This Time
Lately I’ve traveled with Bill Clinton as he barnstorms the country to elect Democrats — especially including President Obama. On Sunday night, the former president and the man he is trying to re-elect together addressed the largest crowd ever recorded in New Hampshire’s political history when they drew 14,000 people to a rally in Concord.
On Monday, I watched Clinton speak before thousands of energized, cheering voters at rallies in Pennsylvania, where the presidential race seemed to grow tighter in the final hours before Election Day. He landed first in Pittsburgh, flew to Montgomery County, then drove down to Philadelphia and ended the day in Scranton – always with the same message:
“I want you to go out tomorrow and make Barack Obama president for four more years!”
Unlike some of the president’s more reluctant supporters — who affect a fashionable disenchantment with the bruised champion of “hope and change” – Clinton says he feels far more enthusiastic this year than in 2008. That difference might reflect the years elapsed since Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in a tough primary battle, although Clinton certainly worked hard to elect him in the general election last time.
Whatever he felt four years ago, Bill Clinton can readily articulate why Obama earned his fervent backing this year – and why he finds Mitt Romney utterly unacceptable. (See his detailed essay rebutting the Des Moines Register’s Romney endorsement.) In Pennsylvania, he repeatedly mocked Romney for refusing to say whether he would sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. “It’s a simple yes or no answer,” chortled Clinton. “But he says, ‘I had a binder full of women.’” Laughter, catcalls, and applause exploded from the audience.
Clinton scolded Romney for advertising lies about Jeep moving American jobs to China that were so blatant they evoked protests from the presidents of General Motors and Chrysler. “You don’t have to be from Ohio to want a president who tells you the truth when it comes to jobs for the future,” he roared.
For two months, Clinton has jetted across the swing states from Florida, Virginia, and Ohio to Nevada and Colorado, talking himself hoarse. During the campaign’s closing hours, however, he recorded dozens of robocall messages to voters in the non-swing states, specifically in New York and New Jersey — promoting Democratic Senate and Congressional candidates, and simply encouraging voters in the storm-wracked Northeast to find a way to cast their ballots.
In what pollsters predict will be such a close contest, Clinton’s message is not just another civics lecture, but terribly urgent. Whether you live in a blue state, a red state, or a purple state, it is vital for you to vote in this election. The reason is simple. Although President Obama appears likely to win enough electoral votes for a Constitutional victory, he could quite conceivably receive fewer popular votes than Romney. That prospect is more likely now because Superstorm Sandy has badly damaged voting sites and processes in New York and New Jersey, where the president may be deprived of hundreds of thousands of votes as a consequence.
If President Obama wins the electoral vote but loses the popular vote, nobody should expect the Republicans to behave as magnanimously as Al Gore and the Democrats did in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but was awarded the electoral vote — and the presidency — by a partisan, truth-twisting Supreme Court majority of one.
There is a danger, in fact, that a popular vote margin for Romney, no matter how small, might embolden a Republican governor in a state where Obama had won — perhaps Ohio or Florida — to instruct his Republican-dominated legislature to choose electors committed to Romney rather than the president. The right has rarely hesitated to violate Constitutional and democratic principles for the sake of power. Indeed, the Ohio secretary of state — like Republican officials across the country – has already sought to deprive citizens of that state of their voting rights.
So wherever you live, do not fail to vote. Make sure that your family and friends and neighbors vote. The focus on swing states is understandable, but it is only half the story of this election. Every ballot cast, in every state, is certain to make a difference this time.
By: Joe Conason, The National Review, November 6, 2012
“Big ‘Perilous’ Change”: Now More Than Ever, George W. Bush Is On The Ballot
It’s probably safe to say no publication has more consistently promoted the idea that “George W. Bush is on the ballot” in 2012 than the Washington Monthly. And that goes beyond the usual issue of the Bush administration’s responsibility for the Great Recession. We’ve argued that the 2012 campaign closely resembles the 2000 precedent in the specific policies and agendas of the GOP nominees, and the likely trajectory of the country if Romney wins. That’s why we’ve published and promoted the e-book, Elephant in the Room: Washington in the Bush Years. We’ve been here before.
But as election day approaches, there’s a final parallel that’s worth underlining: Romney is emulating Bush’s mendacious claim to be a “uniter not a divider,” and far more moderate than his party. As Paul Glastris reminds readers in the Editor’s Note in the upcoming November/December issue of the magazine (a sneak preview is available here), W. relied a lot on misleading voters about his relationship with his party:
One early summer day in 2000 I was summoned to the Oval Office along with several other White House staffers to get instructions from President Bill Clinton on what he wanted to say in his upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, a speech I was assigned to cowrite. But the president was in political strategist mode that day, and in the midst of downloading his thoughts on the speech he launched into a long soliloquy about the dynamics of the presidential contest and the nature of the man Al Gore was up against, Texas Governor George W. Bush. “Let me tell you something,” he said at one point. “Bush is a lot more conservative than people realize.”
The Big Dog certainly got that right, and the scary but unmistakable thing is that the Republican Party which Mitt Romney is trying to distance himself from at the last minute (rhetorically, though not substantively in any major way) is if anything considerably more conservative than it was in 2000. And if there’s any actual split between Romney and his party, it will only produce incompetent and dystfunctional government, as it often did when W. tried to exhibit “compassion” in order to appeal to swing constituencies:
The ideological contradictions unleashed within the GOP during those years have only grown. We see it in the increasingly stormy and dysfunctional relationship between the corporate and Tea Party wings of the party, in the freak show that was the 2012 GOP primary, and in the bottomless, robotic mendacity of the Mitt Romney campaign.
Yep, we’ve heard it all before. And as someone who was on to Bush’s game in 2000, and thinks he won (or to put it more accurately, succeeded in being inaugurated) because Democrats let him become the candidate of “safe change,” the possibility that Romney will succeed in the exact same scam is maddening.
Every voter should think about ol’ W. when they go to vote this year, and ask themselves: “Do we want to go back down that road again?”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 2, 2012
“A Tale Of Presidential Surrogates”: Bill Clinton Stumps For Obama, While George W. Bush Heads To Cayman Islands
On Thursday, Bill Clinton will be campaigning for President Barack Obama while George W. Bush will be spreading a message that Mitt Romney would rather voters forget, in a stark example of the differing roles that the two former presidents have played in the 2012 campaign.
Clinton will spend Thursday on the campaign trail in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Throughout the 2012 campaign — but especially since giving a universally praised nominating speech on Obama’s behalf at the 2012 Democratic convention — Clinton has been Obama’s most effective surrogate, forcefully endorsing the president’s agenda and gleefully attacking Romney and the Republican Party. Forced off the campaign trail by Hurricane Sandy with just six days until the election, Obama has become more reliant on Clinton than ever. In the past several days, the Obama campaign has dispatched Clinton to Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota — where the former president blasted Romney for the faulty tax plan at the heart of his economic agenda.
Bush, on the other hand, will spend Thursday in the Cayman Islands, delivering the keynote address at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. As Romney struggles to convince voters that he understands their economic struggles, having the previous Republican president reminding them of the questions surrounding Romney’s financial dealings in the Caymans is beyond unhelpful.
Of course, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise; after all, Bush has not helped Romney at all throughout the campaign. From Bush’s tepid endorsement of the Republican nominee — telling reporters “I’m for Mitt Romney” as a set of elevator doors closed on him — to his almost complete absence from the Republican convention and campaign trail, Bush and Romney seem to have come to a mutual understanding: the less mention of the years 2000-2008, the better.
There’s a simple reason that Clinton is seemingly omnipresent in this campaign, while Bush can’t even be found in this country: Clinton is one of the most popular political figures in America, while Bush is one of the most reviled. Romney has steadfastly avoided Bush — and will continue to do so in the campaign’s final days — because if the campaign is framed as a choice between eight more years of Clinton or eight more years of Bush, it would be a landslide.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, October 31, 2012
“Another Miscalculation”: Romney’s Odd Insistence On Using Bill Clinton As A De Facto Spokesperson
I’ve written before about the Romney campaign’s odd insistence on using Bill Clinton as a de facto spokesperson. Every so often, Team Romney highlights a comment by Clinton as a critique of President Obama, as if Clinton wasn’t an avowed and enthusiastic supporter of the president. The rationale, I suppose, is to be able to claim bipartisan discontent with Obama. The problem is that this does nothing more but boost Clinton’s credibility by turning him into a nonpartisan figure of repute. And as we saw during the Democratic National Convention, he can use this “referee” status to effectively hammer Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.
Indeed, it was after Clinton’s devastating speech that I expected Republicans to leave the former president out of the election. Turns out, they couldn’t resist: Today, Team Romney is distributing a clip of Clinton in Ohio, where he said that the economy has not been “fixed” under President Obama.
In their eagerness to use Clinton against Obama, it’s obvious that the Romney campaign failed to listen to what came after that statement.
Here’s the transcript:
“This guy ran Bain Capital and is a business guy, and he’s hiding his budget? That ought to tell you something. Well, he’s hiding his taxes, too, but he’s hiding his taxes in the years when he earned ordinary income. He’s given us two years when he was just running for president. And, he’s hiding whether he would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter act. He’s hiding everything. He doesn’t want you to think about him. He wants you to think, ‘Oh this economy is terrible. I’m a jobs guy.’ And as President Obama said in the debate, if I brought you a deal to Bain Capital and I said, fund my new business, I’ll give you the budget sometime in the future, just trust me on that, you wouldn’t give me one red cent, and we should not give him one vote on that.”
This is a potent message—it’s a variation on the “sketchy deal” language adopted by Obama—and by giving credibility to Clinton, Romney is making it stronger.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, October 19, 2012
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