“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
“Crossing The Line”: Senate GOP Ponders Hagel Strategy
Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to become the Secretary of Defense, struggled during his confirmation hearing last week, but that’s hardly derailed his chances. Thus far, Hagel has not yet lost the support of any Senate Democrats, and over the weekend, he picked up the backing of a second Senate Republican, Nebraska’s Mike Johanns.
With this in mind, when Hagel’s nomination is brought to the floor for an up-or-down vote, there’s no real doubt that a majority of the Senate will vote to confirmation him. The question for Republicans, then, is whether to allow the up-or-down vote to happen.
Since Hagel appears to enjoy the support of most, if not all, Democrats, Republicans would have to filibuster his nomination — something that has never been done to a Cabinet nominee since the advent of the 60-vote threshold nearly four decades ago, according to Senate records.
Several Cabinet nominees have failed to win the backing of a majority of senators — and others have withdrawn their names before reaching the Senate floor — but a filibuster would mark a serious breach in the unwritten protocol that governs the Senate.
I’ve been digging around for two weeks, trying to find an example of a cabinet secretary facing a filibuster, and my research is in line with Roll Call‘s findings — it just hasn’t happened. Not only has no nominee ever been defeated by a filibuster, no nominee (since the cloture threshold was moved to 60 votes) has ever even faced a filibuster.
The closest example I could find was Ronald Reagan’s nomination of C. William Verity to serve as the Secretary of Commerce in 1987. At the time, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) threatened to filibuster Reagan’s choice because Verity supported increased trade with the USSR. (Helms argued Verity supported “selling the Soviets the rope with which to hang the free world.”) But Helms eventually pulled back, dropped his threats, and the nominee was approved on an 84-11 vote.
In 2006, there was also a cloture vote on Dirk Kempthorne’s Interior nomination, but only eight Senate Democrats registered their opposition, there was no filibuster or attempt to block an up-or-down vote, and Kempthorne was confirmed with a voice vote.
So, in 2013, Republicans have to decide whether they’re prepared to break new ground.
From the Roll Call report:
No Republicans have said yet that they will demand Hagel clear that 60-vote hurdle, but the possibility has been bubbling below the surface in the Senate in recent days.
An aide to Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, who has been among the most vocal opponents of Hagel’s nomination, said Feb. 1 that “all options are on the table.” […]
Top aides insist there is no discord among leaders, but statements made in the wake of Hagel’s highly scrutinized appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee indicate there could be a difference in opinion. The consensus among leadership aides, however, is that if a filibuster is to happen, it likely would be staged by a junior member.
There is no formal head count on whether a filibuster would block Hagel or whether it would fail, but it would cross a line in the sand when it comes to Senate norms. And if you’re thinking it might reinvigorate the debate over reforming the institution’s filibuster rules, you’re not the only one.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 4, 2013
“Appallingly Short Sighted”: “Anything Goes” Is The New Normal In Republican Politics
The GOP’s attempt to gerrymander the Electoral College by having a few swing states distribute their electoral votes according to congressional district rather than through the winner of the popular vote seems to be collapsing. The scheme has been voted down (Virginia) or talked down (Ohio, Florida, Michigan), in four of the states in question. Only Wisconsin (where the governor is walking back his initial enthusiasm for the idea) and Pennsylvania still seem to be seriously considering the notion.
The Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen yesterday had a good take on the implosion of the electoral gerrymander movement:
… while the relief of the scheme’s failure is understandable, it’s the result of diminished expectations.
… The “bar has shifted” so far that many of us are delighted, if not amazed, when Republican policymakers voluntarily agree not to crash the global economy on purpose. Our standards for success have fallen so low, we don’t actually expect progress—we instead cheer the absence of political malevolence.
But something’s going on here that’s larger than merely diminished expectations. The electoral vote-rigging scheme was the latest example of the end of norms in our politics. It used to be that certain tactics and certain tools simply were not used or were used only in extremis. But we are currently in an era of no holds barred politics: The end—accruing political power and/or victories—apparently justifies all means. Consider:
The filibuster was once a rarely used tool but has become the order of the day. Now the Senate passing something with less than 60 votes is the extraordinary exception where it was once the rule.
The idea of using the debt ceiling—or more specifically the threat of causing the United States to default on its obligations by not raising it—would once have been inconceivable but is rapidly becoming just another sign of gridlock.
Ditto the idea of intentionally shutting down the government.
Republicans in the Virginia state Senate last week used the absence of one Democratic member (he was attending President Obama’s inaugural) to ram through a mid-decade, partisan redistricting plan. If the new map, which the House of Delegates is slow-walking, is enacted, they are following the trail blazed in Texas by Tom DeLay (preconviction) and his state acolytes a decade ago. Redistricting is meant to take place on a decennial basis after the new census, not where political opportunity presents itself.
So is it any surprise that some conservatives thought the idea of gerrymandering the Electoral College was acceptable?
We’re in the “just win, baby” era of politics. But that attitude is appallingly short sighted because once the new normal takes hold it’s hard to walk back. If Democrats lose the Senate does anyone think they’ll throttle back on the filibuster because it’s the honorable thing to do? Or will they disavow unilateral disarmament while grinding the chamber to a halt?
The problem we all face is that the ends-justify-any-means attitude infecting our politics threatens the system itself. The Founding Fathers were brilliant and created a wonderfully durable system, but not an indestructible one.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2013
“An Imagined Privilege”: Mitch McConnell’s Distorted View Of Free Speech
A newspaper will make you sign your name to a letter-to-the-editor so that you take ownership of the content and consequences of your 250-word rant against the injustices of the age. But when billionaire oil and gas tycoons sign their names to $250 million campaign donations, you and I have no right to know what favors their favoritism might have bought, or even who they are.
Or so says Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. In a recent Washington Post op-ed warning of “the dangers disclosure can pose to free speech,” McConnell turns democracy on its head when he writes of the “alarming harassment and intimidation” being waged by the Obama administration in its attempt “to single out its critics” by using the FCC, IRS, SEC and even the Department of Health and Human Services as partisan enforcers to “silence” those who support causes and positions different from its own.
Gracious. You’d think from the frenzied tone of McConnell’s urgent admonition that Democrats had proposed using the NSA to spy on Republicans without FISA Court warrants, or to rendition them off to some secret prison where Moveon.org operatives would water-board Republicans in violation of the Geneva Convention into telling all they knew about Karl Rove’s evil designs over at Crossroads GPS. You’d never suspect from what McConnell has to say that what Democratic proponents of a federal Disclose Act really have in mind is the seditious idea that million-dollar campaign donors should be publicly accountable just like everyone else.
It’s true, concedes McConnell, just as Post columnist Ruth Marcus says, that he introduced a constitutional amendment in 1987 to put spending limits on self-funded millionaires. But that was then and this is now and, besides, everyone is entitled to make a mistake.
The punitive boycotts of their businesses that reactionary billionaires might face if the public caught wind they were bankrolling unpopular politicians or causes is no different, argues McConnell (ludicrously) from the chilling effect on political activity that groups like the NAACP endured during the Jim Crow 1950s, when the State of Alabama demanded the civil rights group make public its membership list, presumably so that local Ku Klux Klansmen could more easily target NAACP members for nailing to some tree.
McConnell’s backward ideas about free speech are no less radical than the peculiar ideas he has about governing, learned no doubt as a young lad sitting at the knees of those white-suited Kentucky Colonels while they sipped their bourbons and mint juleps and sneered at the unwashed masses as they rocked on their plantation’s front porches.
For we already know that McConnell’s response to the Republican Party’s loss of the White House and its shrinkage in the US Senate to just 40 members was to use the GOP’s dwindling minority to vacate the verdict of two national elections by doing everything in their power to prevent the Democrat’s duly-elected national majority from governing.
As the New York Times reported in 2010, even before President Obama took office, McConnell had a strategy for his party: “Use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.”
On nearly every major issue, McConnell used the Senate filibuster to essentially institutionalize minority rule by holding Republican defections “to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent,” says the Times. This allowed McConnell “to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it.”
When Democrats refused to capitulate to Republican obstructionism, McConnell accused them of “being inflexible,” says the Times. And when Democrats cleverly found ways around McConnell’s procedural obstacles he accused them of “arrogantly circumventing the American people.”
That is what McConnell did when President Obama broke a GOP blockade and appointed a director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board Republicans were determined to keep vacant after being unable to (democratically) prevent the agency from being created in the first place.
According to McConnell’s imperious presumptions, the Republican minority has the right to unilaterally overrule the decision of the duly-elected President of the United States and both houses of Congress by preventing a consumer protection bureau created to protect the American people against Wall Street abuses from doing its work. Therefore, according to McConnell, when the President staffs the agency so it can do the job Congress has authorized it to do, it’s somehow the President who has “arrogantly circumvented” the Constitution and the American people.
“Seriously?” asks an incredulous James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly. “This kind of thing needs to be called out for what it is: nonsense.”
We can’t yet know the full consequence of McConnell’s obstructionism. But one result we do know is that Republicans may lose a once safe seat in the Senate after Maine Senator Olympia Snowe shook the political establishment last February by announcing she would be retiring after this term. The cover story was that Snowe was fed up with “partisanship” in general. But Snowe isn’t quitting because “partisanship” in Congress had become too much for her. She’s quitting because the Republican Party has.
As her cousin, Georgia Chomas, said: social conservatives and Tea Party activists had been hounding Snowe at her home in Maine while party leaders in Washington had been ignoring the issues she cared most about. “There was a constant, constant struggle to accommodate everyone, and a lot of pressure on her from the extreme right,” said Chomas, “And she just can’t go there.”
What we have with McConnell’s obscene definition of “free speech” is not a mechanism by which a free people governs itself but rather an imagined privilege for right wing billionaires to manipulate the political process behind the scenes, in secret, and outside the bounds of customary disclosure and accountability. It is another example of reactionary elements using the rights guaranteed to them by our liberal democracy to undermine the liberal democratic regime itself.
A better understanding of free speech and why it is valued “as a method of attaining moral and political truth” is provided by Walter Lippmann. In his Essays in the Public Philosophy, Lippmann lists free speech among those “traditions of civility” which support self-government itself. But it is not just any speech that Lippmann defends, or which the Founding Fathers enshrined in our First Amendment, but speech “conceived as the means to a confrontation of opinion.”
The classic defense of freedom of speech comes from John Milton who, in 1644’s Areopagitica, asks; “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”
But it is a free and open encounter, says Lippmann in his typically high-minded way, that must never be treated “as a trial of strength” but rather as “a means of elucidation.”
In his wonderful new book, Our Divided Political Heart, E.J. Dionne, Jr., devotes an entire chapter to the idea that America is “One Nation, Conceived in Argument.”
But for speech to be truly “free” it must also be open to rebuttal and refutation, says Lippmann, for when genuine debate is lacking freedom of speech does not work since “unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion.”
It is sophistry, says Lippmann, “to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men. There is no more right to deceive than there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets.”
But that is exactly what many conservatives do claim today when they insist on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which is why its elimination has been so destructive of the kind of debate Lippmann says is central to the proper working of democracies.
The discarding of the long-standing requirement that access to the public’s airwaves meant giving equal time to opposing points of view, gives to demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and (fill in the name of your favorite “leftist” broadcaster here) three or four hours of uninterrupted air time each day to inject their unchallenged poison directly into our politics, where as Lippmann says the “chaff of silliness, baseness and deception” can become so “voluminous” that it “submerges the kernels of truth” and produces such “frivolity” and “mischief” that free speech can no longer be preserved against those who “demand for a restoration of order or of decency.”
If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, says Lippmann, “it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance and incite the passions of the people. Then freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.”
Fabrications and falsehoods are not expressions of freedom but applications of brute force. And where truth is unable to confront error in a live debate – as it cannot do on conservative talk radio unlimited by the Fairness Doctrine or in the negative advertising purchased by the billionaires McConnell means to keep nameless and faceless — then “some regulation is necessary” in order to reestablish that element of “confrontation” upon which the “right” to free speech is predicated, says Lippmann.
Conservatives once swore by the magical properties of “competition.” Yet, how characteristic of Mitch McConnell that his distorted view of political speech is so perfectly aligned with the diseased view he has of the American Republic he hopes to create, one in which a cabal of wealthy oligarchs are given a blank check in the name of “freedom” to deploy their over-sized financial resources in order to suffocate whatever democratic impulses still beat in America today.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, July 11, 2012
“The Minority Defeats The Majority”, Again: The Media Needs To Tell Readers The Truth About GOP Filibustering
The death-by-filibuster of the Buffett Rule in the Senate yesterday revealed, among other things, that the news media still has a ways to go in learning how to report on the era of the 60-vote Senate.
Most Americans, not surprisingly, do not realize that majorities can no longer get their way in the Senate. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most key votes in the Senate were based on simple majority voting. Only since 1993 has constant filibustering been common, and only in 2009 did Republicans create a situation in which virtually everything requires a supermajority. Reporting in these circumstances is a bit tricky, but if you are going to tell the full story of a bill killed by filibuster, you need to report not just the outcome — a bill lost — but that majority sentiment was thwarted by a minority.
So, how did the major papers do yesterday? Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had the word “filibuster” in their on-line front page headlines or teasers. The Post story does get the “F” word into her second paragraph, which is good. The Times story merely refers to the 60 votes the Democrats “needed” to pass the bill, without mentioning that the 60 votes were “needed” to break a GOP filibuster until way down in the eighth paragraph. Politico called it a “filibuster” in the second graf. But none of the three stories said explicitly that a minority of Senators defeated a majority.
CNN’s web story was particularly awful, reporting simply that “the Democrats fell nine votes short.” There was no mention of a filibuster, or that the “nine votes short” added up a 51 vote majority — so no one reading the story could deduce that a majority of the Senate favored the policy. The Los Angeles Times, in a broader story, also claimed that the Buffett Rule was blocked by “Republican-led opposition,” whatever that means. Again, no mention at all of a filibuster, or which way the majority voted.
None of this is good enough. Whether one supports the filibuster, opposes it, or (as I do) hopes for a middle course, it’s simply not informative enough to just say that something was “blocked” without explaining that it was blocked by a minority of Senators who deployed a filibuster.
The decision of the Republican minority to create the 60 vote Senate — and the willingness of the Democratic majority to go along with it — remains perhaps the most important single structural fact of Congressional procedure. It has been at least as important as any other factor in shaping Obama’s legislative agenda. And news organizations still aren’t telling readers and viewers the full truth about what’s happening.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, April 17, 2012
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