“On Leadership”: Does President Obama’s Actions Only Count As Leadership If He’s Taking Steps Republicans Like?
By all appearances, President Obama would welcome the chance to work with lawmakers on a solution to combat the climate crisis. But in 2010, a cap-and-trade bill couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, and the legislative prospects effectively collapsed after the GOP claimed a House majority in 2011.
There are, however, some steps the president can take on his own, and it appears Obama is increasingly prepared to do just that.
On the heels of the Senate’s passage of a long-awaited farm bill, the Obama administration is to announce on Wednesday the creation of seven regional “climate hubs” aimed at helping farmers and rural communities respond to the risks of climate change, including drought, invasive pests, fires and floods.
White House officials describe the move as one of several executive actions that President Obama will take on climate change without action from Congress.
In substance, the creation of the climate hubs is a limited step, but it is part of a broader campaign by the administration to advance climate policy wherever possible with executive authority. The action is also part of a push to build political support for the administration’s more divisive moves on climate change – in particular, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on coal-fired power plants.
This move follows a more expansive climate policy Obama unveiled last June, relying almost exclusively on executive authority already acknowledged by the Supreme Court.
To be sure, these “climate hubs” are a fairly modest policy, intended to help a limited number of farmers adapt to changing conditions. But in the bigger picture, it’s also evidence of a sixth-year president eager to do something fairly specific with his power: lead.
And the more I think about it, the more common this seems to be.
There are a notable group of pundits who have spent much of Obama’s presidency demanding that he “lead more.” It’s never been entirely clear what, specifically, these pundits expect the president to do, especially in the face of unyielding and reflexive opposition from Congress, but the complaints seemed rooted in misplaced expectations and confusion over institutional limits.
As the argument goes, if only the president were willing to lead – louder, harder, and bigger – he could somehow advance his agenda through sheer force of will, institutional constraints be damned. And if Congress resists, it’s necessarily evidence that Obama is leading poorly – after all, if only he were a more leading leader, Congress would, you know, follow his lead. The line of criticism became so tiresome and so common that Greg Sargent began mocking it with a convenient label: the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.
What’s I’m curious about now, however, is whether those same pundits are willing to concede that in the West Wing, there’s been all kinds of leading going on lately.
When Republicans threatened to hold the debt ceiling hostage last fall, promising to crash the economy on purpose unless Democrats met their demands, Obama drew a line in the sand – there would be no negotiations over the full faith and credit of the United States – and the GOP backed down. In the process, a new precedent was set, thanks to the president’s willingness to lead.
When a bill to impose new Iranian sanctions threatened to sabotage international nuclear diplomacy, Obama stepped up, applied pressure, worked the phones, arranged meetings, and convinced senators to hold off and give the ongoing talks a chance. The president’s leadership turned a bill that appeared ready to pass and stopped it in its tracks.
When congressional Republicans balked at a minimum-wage increase, Obama used the powers available to him to give thousands of government contractors a raise. The GOP remains outraged, but the president showed leadership and ignored the complaints. Obama now appears ready to take similar executive action on addressing climate change.
So here’s the question for the “lead more” pundits: doesn’t this count as presidential leadership, too? Or do Obama’s actions only count as leadership if he’s taking steps Republicans like?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 5, 2014
“Stick A Fork In Chris Christie”: A Textbook Lesson In How Many Politicians’ Public Personas Often Conflict With Reality
If Chris Christie knew, his presidential ambitions are kaput.
There’s a reason why nearly everyone who came to Christie’s defense left a wide-open caveat—if he’s telling the truth. Friday’s allegation that Christie knew about the George Washington Bridge lane closures, coming from the lawyer for his Port Authority official, David Wildstein, suggests he was lying during his epic two-hour press conference by claiming no knowledge of the situation.
“Christie would have to be the world’s biggest fool to say what he said in the way he said it if he did have any responsibility,” former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer told me after the governor’s press conference. “If there’s anything that contradicts what he said at the press conference, it would make it almost impossible for him to survive.”
One Democratic operative who was always skeptical of Christie’s outright denials pointed to other famous politicians caught in scandal who lied in order to forestall immediate consequences. Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky, John Edwards lied about his affair and child with staffer Rielle Hunter, and Anthony Weiner misled reporters about his online sexting. All hoped to buy time, desperately wishing that the media would turn its scrutiny elsewhere.
If Wildstein’s allegations are accurate—he’s seeking immunity from prosecutors for his own role in the scandal—Christie’s cover-up will be even more brazen. A former U.S. attorney, Christie is fully aware of the legal jeopardy he put himself into with unequivocal denials of involvement, all for only a short-term public-relations gain. He fired two of his closest loyalists, even though they may have been acting on his orders—or at least with his consent—all along.
Christie’s approval ratings were already taking a nosedive even before Friday afternoon’s revelations hit. His personal favorability in both national and New Jersey polls dropped underwater, and increasing numbers of voters have expressed skepticism that Christie knew nothing about what was happening under him. His main selling point for any presidential campaign was electability—that he was popular with independents and some Democrats—and that is no longer operative, even if he can recover from this scandal.
Depending on where the evidence leads, there are a lot of other political implications for the New Jersey governor. Can Christie stay on as chairman of the Republican Governors Association under the cloud of scandal? Republicans, already facing a bruised brand, won’t want to have a scandal-plagued governor as the face of their party. It’s hard to see even the most enthusiastic prospective donors, like Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone, sticking on the bandwagon. And it’s hard to see how Christie will be able to accomplish much in his second term with investigations poised to continue indefinitely.
Christie’s downfall is a textbook lesson in how many politicians’ public personas often conflict with reality. Christie has assiduously developed an image as someone who was above politics to get things done, but in reality, he was a product of a New Jersey political system where trading favors for political support is ubiquitous.
As I wrote this month, Christie’s downfall stems from his hubris—the belief that he could win over many Democratic officials to a landslide reelection victory, and his confidence that he could use his impressive rhetorical skills to talk his way out of this mess. On both counts, he got what he wanted initially, only to see the house of cards collapse.
By: Josh Krausher, The National Journal, January 31, 2014
“So Much For Republican Rebranding”: The Mike Huckabee Boomlet Betrays The GOP’s Lack Of Seriousness
Since Mike Huckabee delivered his anti-contraception “Uncle Sugar” speech to the RNC two weeks ago, he has catapulted to the top of two GOP presidential primary polls.
Yes, that is what it takes to become the Republican frontrunner these days. Not innovative policy solutions. Not an impressive legislative record. No, what you need is to let loose a politically incorrect swipe at a liberal caricature, stir up a bunch of media outrage, and Republican primary voters will want to give you the nuclear codes.
The Republican Party is suffering record low favorability and struggling to be seen as capable of governing. And the Huckabee boomlet provides the latest evidence that the party’s rank-and-file are still allergic to seriousness.
With the first 2016 primary contests two years away, Republicans have already begun replicating the dynamic of the 2012 primaries. Last time around, primary voters fleetingly embraced anyone, regardless of their plausibility, so long as they tossed out fresh “cable catnip” to make liberal heads explode. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum… The revolving door of unpresidential wingnuts reduced the Republican primary to a traveling circus, hamstringing eventual nominee Mitt Romney as he struggled to keep up in the pander parade.
Another circus is not what party poo-bahs have in mind. Indeed, they’re already moving to condense the primary schedule and wrest some control of the debates away from the media in hopes of dialing down the nuttiness.
Wipe the dust off of the RNC’s year-old “autopsy” of its 2012 debacle, and you’ll find a forgotten plan to “Promote Our Governors” because they “have campaigned and governed in a manner that is inclusive and appealing. They point the way forward … working successfully with their legislatures to enact meaningful changes in people’s lives.” In other words, the governors were supposed to be the ones with the ideas to make the party look serious again.
But over the course of 2013, the only governor that got widely promoted — or, more accurately, promoted himself — was New Jersey’s Chris Christie, and we know how that turned out. Other governors touted in the autopsy have had their own struggles, be it Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who was recently indicted for corruption, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal ,who flopped trying scrap his state’s income tax, or Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who is polling below 50 percent in his re-election campaign this year.
There are other low-key Republican governors who are doing just fine. In particular, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval is hugely popular, and is a swing state Latino to boot. Unlike the controversial Walker, Sandoval doesn’t even have a serious opponent to his re-election this year. But he’s popular because he is governing pragmatically, implementing ObamaCare in good faith and forging budget compromises that raise some tax revenue. And so he is completely ignored by Republican primary voters.
The upshot is this: No Republican governor begins the race as a top-tier presidential candidate. No Republican governor’s ideas are reshaping and rebranding the party. And a joke candidate like Huckabee can waltz into the lead, however briefly, with a low-rent crack.
Why are Republicans insistent on setting themselves up for more mockery? Because conservative obsession with fighting political correctness clouds their political thinking, compelling them to repeatedly alienate the moderate voters they need to get back in the game.
Many conservative Republicans seem to believe that political correctness is such a societal scourge, silencing ideas and warping debate, that it must be fought at all costs — even at the cost of forgoing new ideas.
This is why RNC Chair Reince Priebus was engaging in folly last week when he dropped everything to demand MSNBC apologize for a tweet suggesting the “right wing” is racist (after the network had already apologized). He was scratching the Republicans’ politically incorrect itch, instead of finding the ointment.
Priebus can cram the primary schedule down to two weeks and turn every debate into an infomercial. But until he can clamp down on the victimhood and crank up the idea machine, 2016 will be another cacophonous GOP circus.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, February 4, 2014
“The ‘Lawless’ Presidencies Of Barack Obama And Ronald Reagan”: Consistency Must Count For Something, Otherwise It’s Hypocrisy
The headline emerging from last week’s SOTU address continues to be the President’s stated intent to go around Congress, where necessary, to effectuate elements of his agenda through the use of the executive order.
So grave is the situation—according to conservative leaders and pundits—Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) took to the airwaves this weekend to warn one and all that we now have “an increasingly lawless presidency.”
Tea Party firebrand, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, could not agree more.
Indeed, so concerned is King with Obama’s decision to order up a raise for those employed by federal contractors, he referred to the executive action granting the wage increase as a “constitutional violation”, adding “we’ve never had a president with that level of audacity and that level of contempt for his own oath of office.”
Still, a highly placed White House aide noted that there are a number of things “the President can unilaterally do,” stating that “With a hostile Congress that doesn’t show much sign of coming toward us on some of these issues, it behooves us to take the initiative when we can take it.”
There is, however, one thing I should point out regarding the sequencing of events set forth above.
While Paul Ryan and Steve King are certainly functioning in today’s highly charged political environment, the White House aide who made the statements regarding the President’s ability to do many a thing unilaterally—particularly when a hostile Congress is not cooperating with the president’s agenda—was none other than Gary L. Bauer, chief domestic policy advisor to President Ronald W. Reagan. What’s more, the statements were made in August of 1987 and were the direct result of the years of frustration Reagan had experienced at the hands of a Congress that simply would not get with his program.
Sound familiar?
Of course, nothing President Reagan did through the use of his executive order power could possibly match the severity of Obama’s attempt to get around an obstructionist Congress in order to accomplish his own agenda, right?
Not so much.
Do the words ‘National Security Agency’ ring a bell?
The NSA, of course, is the government body that has been collecting our phone and Internet data while spying on Americans and foreigners (including foreign leaders) in ways that have infuriated the very Republicans—along with just about everyone else—who hold Ronald Wilson Reagan up to be the icon of modern day conservatism.
As a result, you might be surprised to learn the following bit of history:
It was President Reagan’s infamous Executive Order 12333 (referred to as “twelve-triple-three”) that established and handed to the NSA virtually all of the powers under which the agency operates to this day—allowing the agency to collect the data that so many now find to be so offensive.
McClatchy describes Executive Order 12333 as follows:
“It is a sweeping mandate that outlines the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes.”
If you view Reagan’s actions as an appropriate use of the executive order, Tea Party/GOP Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) would beg to differ.
Speaking at a gathering hosted by the Cato Institute, Amash described Congressional hearings into the actions of the NSA as follows:
“Amash describes those briefings as a farce. Many times, he says, they focused on information that was available from reading newspapers or public statutes. And his account of trying to get details out of those giving the briefings sounds like an exercise in frustration:”
“So you don’t know what questions to ask because you don’t know what the baseline is. You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on. So you have to start just spitting off random questions: Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don’t know what kind of things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a totally ridiculous game of 20 questions.”
Congressman Amash’s displeasure over Congress’ neutered role when it comes to the NSA does not stop him from frequently quoting the words of Ronald Reagan—despite Reagan’s responsibility for supplanting Congress in this regard—particularly when it comes to The Gipper’s declaration that “libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.”
The use of the Executive Order has long been controversial, dating back to President Abraham Lincoln’s use of the device to suspend habeas corpus along the Philadelphia to Washington line in response to the assault on Union troops in Baltimore.
What made Lincoln’s move so dramatic is that the suspension of habeas corpus is placed by the Founding Fathers in Article I of the Constitution—the section that lays out the powers reserved for Congress.
However, as Jennifer Weber of the New York Times notes in her excellent piece on Lincoln’s use and abuse of power, the Founders “muddied the water” on just who could order a suspension of habeas corpus by writing, “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Whether you view Lincoln’s actions as a proper exercise of power by the Commander-In-Chief during a time of emergency, or blatant defiance of the Constitution by the President of the United States, I don’t recall too many modern Americans—Democrat, Republican or otherwise—referring to Abraham Lincoln as a “lawless” president.
Nor do I recall many of the Republicans who worship at alter of Ronald Wilson Reagan referring to him as a “lawless” president.
None of this is to say that Presidents Lincoln, Reagan, Obama—or the many other American presidents who have relied upon the executive order—are acting in obedience to our Constitution or that they are not. That is up to the Courts to decide.
What it is to say is that, once again, consistency must count for something.
If you disagree with what President Obama might have in mind to do through the use of the executive order, you may have constitutional authority to back you up. Indeed, I acknowledge my own concerns about presidents who go around Congress’ lawmaking authority by using the executive order, no matter how much I may disapprove of our current and recent incarnations of Congress.
However, to take the tact of accusing Mr. Obama of a “lawless presidency”, while lauding previous presidents who did the identical thing, is just so much more hypocrisy on the part of leaders like Congressman Ryan who are far more wedded to the process of scoring political points than they are to remaining true to history or governing with good intent.
Or could it be that people like Paul Ryan—a man who holds a great deal of power and responsibility in our government—are simply ignorant of our history and the subject matter upon which they deign to expound?
Either way, there is little comfort to be gained when our system is so disgustingly politicized that a president is accused of lawlessness when following in the very same footsteps of previous presidents hailed as some of the greatest heroes of the nation.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, February 3, 2014
“A Deliberate Coyness”: The Farce Of Paul Ryan, Serious Man
Like a phoenix risen from the ashes of Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is back.
The conservative budget guru is once again being hailed as the Ideas Man who will lead the GOP to electoral salvation. But this time, he’s supposedly toning down his idealism a bit and, as is his party in general, putting on a softer, gentler face.
From Politico’s Jake Sherman, we hear that Ryan “is sifting through the lessons of his political past to shape a new persona” and, after trying to radically redraw the federal budget toward his conservative vision in the past, now “betting that incrementalism — legislative half-steps toward conservative solutions is the best look for Republicans.”
“The brand Ryan is cultivating is deliberate, serious, and aims to be inclusive of other political parties and voters who haven’t considered Republicans,” he adds.
Ah, there it is, the “S” word: Serious.
Ryan is often portrayed as the lone adult in the room, the man with serious ideas when the rest of Washington is embroiled in partisan sniping. Whether or not he’s truly offering sound policy — and there have been many questions on the front — he’s incessantly framed as being above-the-fray, concerned only with making Washington work right. In a word: Serious.
The trouble is that the mystique is largely media-crafted. A quick Lexis-Nexis search of U.S. newspapers for “Paul Ryan” and “serious” returned more than 3,000 results from the past year alone.
To be sure, Ryan does offer up a lot of policy proposals, an anomaly in D.C., and especially for a party that has voted to repeal ObamaCare more than 40 times without offering, until now, any semblance of an alternative. Yet his policy ideas don’t always hold water. Sometimes, they’re deeply flawed.
His previous budget plans were widely criticized for relying on highly suspect data, and for following a formula along the lines of: Cut spending + pixie dust = economic growth.
“If Obama tried to claim that his policies would achieve anything like this,” the liberal Paul Krugman wrote of Ryan’s 2011 budget plan, “he’d be laughed out of office.”
As for Ryan’s big new anti-poverty crusade, the details there, too, are suspect. His ideas — placing work requirements on safety-net programs, tax breaks, and so on — are “supply-side policies that don’t change the overall level of poverty” says Ryan Cooper in The Washington Post, making them no more than “vague rhetoric and window dressing.”
Other thorough assessments of his anti-poverty campaign have been similarly harsh. Meaning, it’s not so much that Ryan has changed, but rather that he’s tucked his old ideas into new packaging and — voila! — become the serious man once again.
Consider it the Republican rebrand writ small.
Part of Ryan’s enduring “seriousness” is actually deliberate coyness, which allows pundits to hang the simple narrative on him. He’s deflected questions about his political ambitions with a “Who, me?” shrug, while insisting he’s just trying to do his job. It’s an effective though farcical facade. Ryan has a knack for shrewdly self-promoting his supposed quiet humility and wonkish credentials. As the economist Jared Bernstein wrote, Ryan “is the classic example of the adage that if you’ve got a reputation for being an early riser, you can sleep til noon.”
To be sure, Ryan did help craft the mini budget compromise that passed earlier this year to avoid another government shutdown. But absolutely no one — okay, maybe Ted Cruz — wanted another shutdown, especially the GOP leadership, considering how badly the last one hurt the party. In that sense, Ryan was merely ensuring the GOP didn’t self-immolate once again.
Ryan’s big rebrand doesn’t prove that he’s a “serious” lawmaker. It does, however, prove he’s serious about looking serious.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, January 30, 2014
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