“Shifting Winds, Changing Landscape”: Eric Holder Steps Up, GOP Stands Down On Sentencing Reforms
If you missed Rachel’s segment last night on Attorney General Eric Holder’s dramatic announcement on sentencing in drug crimes, it’s well worth your time. Indeed, by any fair measure, yesterday may be one of the most important days of the Obama administration’s second term, at least insofar as criminal justice is concerned.
Holder declared what many have long argued: too many Americans convicted of non-violent drug crimes are stuck in too many prisons for far too long. It’s a policy that costs too much, ravages families and communities, and has no practical law-enforcement rationale. That the Attorney General is using his prosecutorial discretion to circumvent mandatory minimums is an incredibly important step in the right direction — it’s the kind of move that will put fewer Americans behind bars for low-level, non-violent drug crimes.
What I was also eager to see were the next-day reactions, most notably from the right. Would Holder face a backlash from Republicans? So far, no. The conservative Washington Times ran this report today:
Grover Norquist, a conservative libertarian Republican and founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform … [claimed] that the Holder directive simply cribs from legislation by Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, along with Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, that would give federal judges greater discretion in sentencing certain drug offenders.
In the House, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, and Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, Virginia Democrat and ranking member on the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism, homeland security, and investigations, also have introduced legislation to reduce recidivism and federal prison costs through post-sentencing risk assessments and other evidence-based programs developed by states.
Mike Huckabee responded to the AG’s announcement by saying he “finally found something I can agree with Eric Holder on.”
As best as I can tell, not one member of the congressional Republican leadership in either chamber criticized Holder’s decision in any way.
And that matters enormously.
As we discussed earlier in the summer, in the not-too-distant past, the conservative line on these issues lacked all reason and nuance. The right wanted more prisons, more prisoners, harsher sentences, an aggressive “war on drugs,” and no questions. To disagree was to invite the “soft on crime” condemnation. As the nation’s prison population soared to unprecedented levels, the right simply responded, “Good.”
The landscape has, however, changed rather quickly. Twenty years ago, if an Attorney General from a Democratic administration had made this announcement, conservatives would have condemned “letting drug addicts onto our streets.” Yesterday, such reactionary, knee-jerk reactions were muted, and among prominent Republicans, non-existent.
On the surface, this gives the Obama administration some breathing room — Holder and other officials will realize they can adopt common-sense measures without facing political fury and instigating a national uproar. But below the surface, the response suggests more systemic reforms may yet be possible — the A.G.’s move represents progress, but Congress will have to act to make more sweeping changes.
And for the first time in recent memory, that now seems realistic. As Greg Sargent explained yesterday, as the political winds shift on this issue, the “soft on crime” attacks “no longer have anywhere near the cultural potency or political relevance they once did. As a result, “this may now be an area where compromise is possible.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
“Stop Me Before I Kill Government Again”: Republicans Tying Themselves Into Knots Yet Again
Happy as I am that a bipartisan convergence on sentencing reform just possibly could be in the works, it can’t obscure the more immediate spectacle of Republicans simultaneously trying to identify with and tamp down the “base’s” desire for a government shutdown (or debt default) over “defunding Obamacare.” Greg Sargent nicely diagnoses the malady after watching Reince Priebus tie himself into knots on a Sunday show:
After CNN’s Candy Crowley pointed out some Republicans are challenging the conservative demand for a government shutdown confrontation to force the defunding of Obamacare, Priebus actually responded:
“I think all Republicans are unified on one thing and that is defunding, delaying, getting rid of, eliminating Obamacare. So we have total unanimity on that issue and the question is what are the tactics? And you know, even if you take the position of a Ted Cruz or Mike Lee, basically what they’re saying is we actually are funding 100 percent of the government except for that small percentage of nondiscretionary — excuse me, discretionary funding the Obamacare.
“So Mr. President, if you want to shut the government down because you want to continue to fund this monstrosity that you’ve already admit is half broken, then go ahead. I mean the fact that it’s on the Republican Party I just think is spin from the Democratic Party that you ought not be adopting. I don’t know why you’re adopting that spin….”
[I]t’s not surprising that Republican officials have effortlessly internalized the framing of the coming Obamacare/government shutdown Priebus adopts above. Thanks partly to the GOP leadership’s willingness to lavish years of care and feeding on the base’s preoccupation with Obamacare repeal, large swaths of the party’s base appear to remain convinced that the law is entirely illegitimate and that they need not accept that the law is here to stay. It’s easy to get from here to the conclusion that Obama will be to blame for any catastrophic consequences that flow from the continued showdown over Obamacare; after all, this whole situation was created by Obama’s initial exercise of tyranny (Dems rammed the law through!!!) and is now being perpetuated by his continued tyrannical resistance to undoing it in the face of the popular will.
I’m guessing the next act for “adult Republicans” like Priebus will be to oppose a government shutdown confrontation on grounds that they are saving the country from Obama’s reckless behavior. The truth is that they would be acting to save their own party from the same kind of political disaster the GOP incurred with the same behavior in 1995.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 12, 2013
“Gingrich’s Revisionist History Of Himself”: Bizarre Anyone Would Take Newt’s Advice About How To Engineer A Government Shutdown
Newt Gingrich has often relied on short memories of his political career (as I can attest from the shocked reaction I got in 2011 when writing about his well-known history as a Rockefeller Republican), but he’s clearly going too far in pretending the government shutdown he engineered in 1995 was some sort of triumph. Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru slaps him down pretty emphatically today:
Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him….
Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.
Almost nobody back then believed it. Democrats thought that they had won the battle over the shutdowns, and that the agreement to end them was a Republican surrender. Clinton made a point, in his next State of the Union address, to criticize Republicans for their strategy. It was an applause line. Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.
Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.
It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit….
Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now.
I’d say Ramesh is really pulling his punches here. The rationalization that the GOP “lost only a few seats” reflects some serious amnesia. This was the only time in U.S. history that the party holding the White House for two consecutive terms gained House seats in the second midterm election. It was perceived as a disaster at the time–after all, Gingrich stepped down as Speaker almost immediately–and was largely blamed on Gingrich’s handling of the budget negotiations that led to the shutdown. Ponnuru mentions Clinton’s rising approval ratings after the confrontation with Newt, but here’s what Gallup’s Frank Newport had to say about the saga’s effect on Gingrich’s popularity:
The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995. (Publicity at the time, including a famous front page caricature in the New York Daily News, included the allegation that Gingrich had closed down the government because he was given a bad seat at the back of Air Force One when returning from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.) By January of 1996, 57% of Americans said that their image of Gingrich was unfavorable, compared with 37% who had a favorable image of him. This nearly two-to-one negative-to-positive image ratio persisted throughout most of 1996 and 1997.
It’s just bizarre that anyone would take Newt Gingrich’s advice about how to engineer a fiscal confrontation involving a government shutdown threat, and an example of the man’s invincible chutzpah that he’s offering it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 12, 2013
“Lord Help Us!”: The Return Of One Of The GOP’s Dumbest Ideas
Lord help us, is the balanced budget amendment—one of the dumbest policy ideas the right ever cooked up (and that’s saying something)—actually back? Only time will tell, but today on the New York Times op-ed page, two prominent conservative economists, Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, try to revive it with an argument so unconvincing that I worry it’s going to be embraced by every Republican in sight. If you think the sequester was a terrific idea and worked out great for everyone, have they got a deal for you.
Hubbard and Kane start by insisting that deficit panic must not be allowed to wane. “We are stuck in a bad and worsening place: sure, deficits strike fear in the hearts of economists and intellectuals, but they don’t matter at the ballot box.” Haven’t we actually cut the deficit by more than half from its 2009 peak? And isn’t creating jobs and increasing wages more important? And aren’t most “economists and intellectuals” not actually driven to terror by the deficit at the moment? Of course not, silly. We must put aside parochial concerns like jobs and focus our fear on deficits, lest they one day…well, one day they’ll do something really bad, but don’t worry about what it is.
You never hear conservatives articulate exactly why running a deficit, any deficit, is so problematic. They rely on the fact that it seems self-evident, and in fairness, some Democrats, Barack Obama in particular, contribute to widespread misunderstanding of the subject by repeatedly comparing the government’s finances to a family’s finances. But the government’s budget isn’t at all like a family’s budget. For instance, when it’s faced with a crisis like the Great Recession, borrowing more and spending more is exactly what it has to do. In the last 50 years, we’ve had a balanced budget eight times, four of which were at the end of the Clinton years. There’s no reason why the deficit has to come down to zero. If that’s what you’re forced to do, then you end up making problems worse at the worst moments. That’s what happened to states over the last few years; because nearly every state has a requirement to balance their budget every year, when tax revenues plummeted, they were forced to slash government services and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. This made the recession more painful for everybody (and the federal government sent billions of dollars to the states in an attempt to mitigate the damage).
If you had a balanced budget amendment in place, when a recession hits and tax revenues fall, the federal government would have to immediately cut back its spending, precisely the opposite of what it ought to be doing. Yet for years, a balanced budget amendment was Republican dogma, nearly on par with tax cuts for the wealthy and big defense budgets. Which brings us to Hubbard and Kane’s new balanced budget amendment proposal. Here’s part 1:
First, because reconciling expenditures and revenues would be impossible in real time, the constraint should be on expenditures only. A good rule would be this: Congress shall spend no more in the current year than it collected, on average, over the previous seven years. No more overspending in fat years and no draconian cuts to expenditures during future recessions.
This rolling average idea makes things a bit more sane, but do you see what they did there? I’ve highlighted it in bold. “The constraint should be on expenditures only,” meaning that their balanced budget amendment would require spending cuts, but not tax increases. Why? Because these are Republicans, that’s why. Here’s part 2:
Second, any amendment should be simple, focused only on fiscal balance. The best mix of tax and expenditure changes is for each generation of voters to decide.
Is that supposed to mean that the amendment itself shouldn’t actually write into the Constitution budgetary limits for every single federal agency for every year in the future? Well since that would be insane, I’m not sure why it has to be an explicit part of their three-part proposal. Perhaps they should also specify that a balanced budget amendment shouldn’t deal with abortion and drug legalization, or that the amendment need not specify the headline font on the Department of Energy’s press releases. And on to part 3:
Third, there should be an exception to the spending constraint for national emergencies.
And what would be a national emergency? Would the Great Recession count? How about the Iraq War, which the Bush administration (where Glenn Hubbard served) financed through deficit spending? This is basically a way of saying, don’t worry, we’ll require balanced budgets, unless requiring balanced budgets looks like a terrible idea, at which point we won’t. And then we get to the end, where Hubbard and Kane finally reveal the threat posed by deficits, a threat so profound it must be met with the constitutional equivalent of permanent sequestration:
America’s high and rising national debt threatens our economic health through higher future taxes, crowding out important government services, or both. The best antidote is a focus on economic growth and a balanced approach to deficit control
Ah, there we are. We must force draconian budget cuts now, because if we don’t, at some point in the future we might have to…force budget cuts. And of course raise taxes, which we can’t ever, ever do. So by imposing those cuts, we can “focus on economic growth,” not by actually promoting economic growth, but by…um…confidence!
This isn’t some dopey politician offering his opinion on a topic he plainly doesn’t understand, this is two highly-placed and supposedly informed conservative economists. Hubbard is dean of the business school at Columbia and was George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. Kane is chief economist at the Hudson Institute. These are the Republican party’s big economic thinkers. And this is what they have to offer.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 12, 2013
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