“Kindergartner’s Behaving Badly”: The GOP Is Too Juvenile To Govern
With budgetary tantrums in the Senate and investigative play-acting in the House, the Republican Party is proving once again that it simply cannot be taken seriously.
This is a shame. I don’t share the GOP’s philosophy, but I do believe that competition makes both of our major parties smarter. I also believe that a big, complicated country facing economic and geopolitical challenges needs a government able to govern.
What we don’t need is the steady diet of obstruction, diversion and gamesmanship that Republicans are trying to ram down the nation’s throat. It’s not as if President Obama and the Democrats are doing everything right. It’s just that the GOP shrinks from doing anything meaningful at all.
The most glaring example, at the moment, is in the Senate. For four years, Republican senators lambasted their Democratic colleagues — with justification — for not approving a budget, one of the basic tasks of governance. Sen. John Cornyn(R-Tex.), and others regularly took to the Senate floor to announce the number of days since the body last produced a spending plan and to blast Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for this shocking failure.
Two months ago, Reid and the Democrats finally passed a budget. Since the House has already passed its version — the controversial plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — the next step should be for both chambers to appoint members of a conference committee that would iron out the differences. But Republicans won’t let this happen.
Specifically, far-right conservatives including Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky are refusing to allow the Senate to appoint its representatives to the conference. Yes, having demanded this budget for four years, Republicans are now refusing to let it go forward.
Some Republicans, that is. Establishment types such as John McCain of Arizona are apoplectic at the antics of their tea party-inspired colleagues, which McCain called “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.”
Cruz and the others are worried that a conference committee might not only work out a budget but also make it possible to raise the federal debt ceiling without the now-customary showdown threatening default and catastrophe. They believe that brinkmanship is the only way to stop runaway government spending, which produces massive trillion-dollar deficits, which add to the ballooning national debt, which . . .
Hold on, senator. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the deficit is shrinking rapidly and will fall to $642 billion this fiscal year. That’s still substantial, but it’s less than half the deficit our government ran in 2011. More important, if annual deficits continue to decline as the CBO predicts, the long-term debt problem begins to look more manageable. That’s good news, right?
What Republicans ought to do is declare a victory for fiscal conservatism and move on to the battle to have their priorities reflected in the budget — a promising fight, since the conferees appointed by the GOP-controlled House are hardly going to be flaming liberals. Instead, the party seeks not consensus but crisis.
This is no way for a 2-year-old to act, much less the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
And speaking of juvenile behavior, I would be remiss not to mention how Rep. Darrell Issa of California and his GOP colleagues in the House are embarrassing themselves by straining to turn Obama administration missteps into Watergate-style scandals.
The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, resulted from a security lapse of the kind that every recent administration, unfortunately, has suffered. Since future administrations will have lapses as well, congressional oversight could be useful in at least making sure the specific mistakes of Benghazi are not repeated. But instead, House Republicans summon the television cameras and ask round after round of tendentious questions — without paying the slightest attention to the answers.
Similarly, on the question of how and why the IRS gave added scrutiny to conservative “social welfare” groups seeking nonprofit status, House inquisitors seem barely interested in what actually happened. “What did the president know and when did he know it?” was an appropriate question. But the follow-up — “Harrumph, well then, why didn’t he know sooner?” — isn’t much in the way of scandal material.
And concerning the Justice Department’s overzealous crusade to thwart classified leaks — and investigative reporting — it is amusing to watch House Republicans twist themselves into champions of the hated Lamestream Media. Who knew?
None of this is boosting the GOP’s poll numbers. I’ve got an idea: Why don’t they try doing the people’s business for a change?
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 30, 2013
“Chuck Grassley’s Pretext”: Why The GOP Is So Obsessed With Three Little Judges
It’s beginning to feel a bit like 1937 in Washington this week as the White House and Senate Republicans hurl allegations of “court-packing” up and down Pennsylvania Avenue at one another. The what — Republican obstruction of Obama’s nominees to fill three vacant seats on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — has been widely and well covered elsewhere. What bears further explanation is the why. It goes without saying that the GOP has an interest in blocking Obama’s nominees in general; the fewer judges the president appoints, the less liberal the courts overall. But why do they care so much about these three particular nominees — who haven’t even been named yet — that they’re willing to risk triggering a “nuclear war” on filibuster reform while also trying to change the basic makeup of the court.
First, there’s the numbers. Right now, Republican appointees have an effective 9-5 majority on the D.C. Court. There are only 11 “active” seats, but another six judges serve as a sort of auxiliary corps in a semi-retirement status where they participate in cases as needed. With three vacancies on the active bench, these “senior” judges are needed often. Of all the judges, three were appointed by George W. Bush, two by George H.W. Bush, and four by Ronald Reagan, compared to just three by Bill Clinton, and one by Jimmy Carter. Until last week, when the Senate finally confirmed Sri Srinivasan, Obama had made zero successful appointments in over four years, despite the vacancies, thanks to GOP obstruction.
“That’s what this is about. It’s that the court is already packed in favor of Republican judges,” Judith Schaeffer, the vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told Salon.
Second, the stakes couldn’t be higher. With near-exclusive purview over federal government action, the D.C. Circuit will be a critical battleground in legal challenges against everything from the Affordable Care Act to new EPA regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention labor policy, gun safety regulations, Wall Street reform, national security issues, campaign finance, voting rights, and much more. With Congress deadlocked, executive action has become an increasingly important tool for the Obama White House, and the D.C. Circuit is where people trying to stop those reforms will mount their fights. Already, the Republican majority on the court has rolled back a major EPA air pollution rule, curbed Obama’s recess appointment powers and hamstrung the National Labor Relations Board.
Outside of the House of Representatives, the court is one of the most important roadblocks to Obama’s agenda. Obviously, Republicans would like to keep it that way.
But now, the White House is reportedly planning to push through three nominations simultaneously in an effort to overcome GOP filibusters. Republicans have filibustered plenty of nominees, but they pounced on this plan with unusual vigor and a unified message. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, called this scheme “court packing.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the White House is trying “to pack the D.C. Circuit with appointees.” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a constitutional lawyer hailed by conservatives for his legal smarts, also invoked the term.
It’s a little disturbing to think that three of the Senate’s top Republicans on judicial matters have no idea what court packing is, but that’s what we’re lead to believe if we assume they’re being honest in their charges. FDR tried to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 by dramatically expanding its size, so he could appoint more justices who agreed with him. Court packing involves trying to change the rules of the game in your favor. Obama is following the rules set forth by the Constitution and Congress by aiming to fill three already vacant seats. To accuse Obama of court packing is plainly ridiculous.
Now, wouldn’t it be ironic if Grassley and his colleagues were in fact the ones who wanted to change the rules of the game? As it turns out, they do. Grassley wants to eliminate the three vacant seats from the court entirely, thus cementing the current Republican majority indefinitely. This is the plan that has led the White House to turn the “court packing” allegation back on Republicans, as White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did in a blog post today. “[O]n the merits, Senator Grassley’s ‘court unpacking proposal’ fails to make any sense,” the Obama aide wrote.
Grassley’s argument — or pretext, depending on where you sit on the political spectrum — is that the D.C. Circuit is underworked, because it sees fewer cases per judge than other appellate courts. Eliminating each judgeship would save $1 million per judge per year. Million with an “m” — a pretty puny amount of money when it comes to government.
Critics, meanwhile, see Grassley’s plan as little more “pure partisan hypocrisy,” as Schaeffer said, predicated on an erroneous assumption about the court’s workload. Currently, the D.C. Circuit has 120 pending cases per authorized judgeship, which Grassley says is too few. But under George W. Bush, Grassley voted to confirm two judges when the court had just 109 cases per judge.
And everyone agrees the cases the D.C. Circuit deals with are far more complicated than those seen on other circuits, so you can’t really compare the numbers. “There is cause for extreme concern that Congress is systematically denying the court the human resources it needs to carry out its weighty mandates,” wrote Pat Wald, who was the chief judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, in the Washington Post.
You don’t have to be a federal courts scholar to see the stakes here, or the politics at play, but they’re probably hoping only scholars will pay attention.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, May 30, 2013
“Ted Cruz Against The World”: The Supercilious, Arrogant, Crackpot, Con Man Of The GOP
One bonus for Republicans in the trifecta of pseudo-scandals ensnaring the Obama White House this month is that it distracted the party from its looming civil war. It’s even possible that the Senate immigration reform got as far as it did partly because wingnut radio talkers and Tea Party xenophobes were consumed by their hatred of Obama, and paying less attention to GOP immigration sellouts.
But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.
Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.
But Cruz was having none of it, because he insisted sneaky Democrats might use the committee to raise the debt ceiling. He got support from Tea Party allies Mike Lee and Rand Paul, as well as Marco Rubio (trying to claw back the Tea Party credibility he lost by working on immigration reform). McCain reminded Cruz and his friends that their party controls the House. “So we don’t trust the majority party on the other side of the [Capitol] to come to conference and not hold to the fiscal discipline that we want to see happen? Isn’t that a little bit bizarre?”
Here’s where Cruz set himself apart, one man against a corrupt world. He responded to McCain on the Senate floor the next day: “The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans … Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this mess.”
That made the senior senator from Arizona apoplectic. He accused Cruz and friends of trying to “paralyze the process.” He singled out Utah’s Mike Lee, who is not as bright a light as Cruz, for his ignorance of the way Congress works. Lee made the conference committee sound like a political brothel facilitating “backroom deals.” McCain shot back: “How do we reconcile legislation that’s been passed by one body and the other body? That’s what we’ve been doing for a couple hundred years. Perhaps the senator from Utah doesn’t know about that.”
Poor John McCain. He gave the world Sarah Palin, and Palin helped give us Cruz, Lee, Paul and Rubio. Still, Ted Cruz’s self-righteous grandeur puts him in a class by himself. He oozed condescension, openly mocking McCain, declaring that Senate Republicans would side with him on the budget impasse. “I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected,” a reference to McCain calling Cruz, Paul and Justin Amash “wacko birds” earlier this year.
What’s clear is that we’ve reached a new state of warfare in the normally collegial Senate, where increasingly, a minority faction of the minority party has the power to grind everything to a halt. McCain blasted that point of view Thursday: “It’s not the regular order for a number of senators — a small number, a minority within a minority here — to say they will not agree to go to conference. We’re here to vote, not here to block things,” he said.
That’s clearly Cruz’s plan. Watching the supercilious Cruz mock the sputtering McCain, I was struck by how much he enjoyed preening for the cameras. All senators do, but Cruz stands out, with his proud contempt for Republicans along with Democrats. As he dreams of the White House, with barely five months in the Senate under his belt, look for him to play a leading role in the next debt ceiling battle.
In other news: Michelle Malkin and friends are calling me a racist for referring to Cruz as a “skeezy huckster” on Twitter yesterday as I watched him insult McCain. I admit it wasn’t my most elegant turn of phrase, but I wasn’t aware that “skeezy” or “huckster” were slurs associated with Hispanics/Latinos. Maybe that’s because I don’t travel in the same circles as Malkin. Can you say “projection”?
Still, they weren’t the most artful choice of words. If I had it to do over again, I would call Cruz a “supercilious con man.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 24, 2013
“Not Much To Chew On”: Conservatives Show A Lack Of Appetite For Sen Mike Lee
Whoever thinks there’s no such thing as a free lunch has not been to the Heritage Foundation.
After Sen. Mike Lee’s speech to the conservative think tank Monday, his listeners didn’t rush to the front of the room, where the Utah Republican was greeting well-wishers, but to the back to get in line for sandwiches, cookies and soft drinks provided gratis to the hungry young conservatives who sat through the hour.
Such an inducement may have been necessary to fill the room for Lee, who is not exactly an electrifying speaker. His colleague Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a fellow first-term senator with tea party backing, packed a much larger auditorium at Heritage in February. But Lee is no bomb-thrower; he is amiable and cerebral and uses phrases such as “We can start ensuring policy sustainability” and “The true and proper end of political subsidiarity is social solidarity.” Even Lee’s former Senate colleague Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who took over as Heritage’s president this month, apparently had more pressing business elsewhere.
This lack of appetite for Lee helps explain why the vision he outlined for conservatives, though worthy, is unlikely to receive serious GOP consideration. He essentially wants a return to “compassionate conservatism,” but there are a few big problems: George W. Bush tarnished the notion (by giving it lip service but little else), Paul’s libertarian wing is ascendant in the party, and Lee has little to propose other than vague notions of federalism.
Lee, a young man with a round face and thinning hair, diagnosed the conservatives’ condition fairly well. “The left has created this false narrative that liberals are for things and conservatives are against things,” he said. “A liberal proposes an idea, we explain why it won’t work and we think we’ve won the debate.”
Lee sounded much like Bush when he campaigned in 1999 against the “Leave us alone” conservatives. “Freedom doesn’t mean you’re on your own,” the senator said. “It means we’re all in this together.” He even echoed Bush’s “No child left behind” phrase as he argued for a “voluntary civil society that strengthens our communities, protects the vulnerable and minds the gaps to make sure no one gets left behind.”
Lee criticized Bush for misapplying the philosophy, referring to “one politician’s occasional conflation of ‘compassion’ and ‘bigger government.’ ” He also criticized past conservatives for overusing federal power and for being intolerant (“The price of allowing conservative states to be conservative is allowing liberal states to be liberal”). His criticism of Paul’s libertarian wing was particularly colorful: “This vision of America conservatives seek is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie.”
But as a practical matter, Lee wasn’t offering anything much different from the Rand acolytes. He spoke of an end to “corporate welfare” — an admirable goal, but his targets were the same old villains such as Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting. He employed the usual straw-man characterization of liberals: “They attack free enterprise. . . . Elite progressives in Washington . . . believe in community organizers, self-anointed strangers, preferably ones with Ivy League degrees.” (This from a man who is the son of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, grew up in McLean and went on to clerk for Samuel Alito.)
Lee’s grand solution is one that conservatives have wanted for decades: the devolution of power to state and local governments. “We must make this fundamental principle of pluralistic diversity a pillar of our agenda,” he said, in a typically airy phrase.
But how? A questioner asked the senator how to “translate what you’re saying to benefit the 40 percent at the bottom” rather than “protecting the 1 percent.”
Lee’s answer provided nothing specific. “When you take government out of the equation,” he replied, “it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game between this top percentage and that bottom percentage.”
Another questioner asked whether the government should support the “social entrepreneurs” who Lee said are crucial to strengthening society. Again, he had no specifics. He said the government should “establish a neutral set of rules” for all. To do more, he said, would be “destructive.”
A third questioner asked bluntly: “Which policies . . . help promote these vibrant communities which we as conservatives want to foster?”
Lee replied: “The single most important policy would be federalism,” which means making “as many decisions at the most local level as possible.”
That’s a philosophy, not a policy. If Lee wants conservatives to rediscover compassion, he’ll have to provide something more substantial for them to chew on.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 22, 2013
“Court Packing Scheme”: GOP Plots To Hollow Out The Federal Courts
The high-water mark of FDR’s power came when he tried to give himself the power to appoint six new Supreme Court justices, which opponents decried as an underhanded scheme to rig the court with justices who favored his agenda.
Now, 75 years later, Republicans are trying to do the same thing, but in reverse. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and thus the most important member of his party on such issues, introduced legislation yesterday that seems innocuous enough at first. Here’s how he explained it in a hearing yesterday:
This legislation is straightforward. It would add a seat to the Second and the Eleventh Circuits. At the same time, it would reduce the number of authorized judgeships for the D.C. Circuit from 11 to 8. If adopted, this legislation would be a significant step towards rectifying the extreme disparities between the D.C. Circuit and the Second and Eleventh circuits.
Even the name of Grassley’s bill, “The Court Efficiency Act,” sounds anodyne, but the bill’s sponsors — including Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, two of the most extreme Republicans on legal issues — should give one pause.
See, for months, Republicans have been filibustering Obama’s nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, among others. Grassley’s bill would simply eliminate three of those vacancies, reducing the court from 11 to eight judges, and thus cement the existing conservative majority on the country’s second most powerful court, after only the Supreme Court.
Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive legal advocacy group, said the move is just a clever reinterpretation of FDR’s “court-packing scheme.” “The conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit has used its power to issue decisions undermining protections for workers, consumers, and the environment that affect all Americans. This activism is possible only because there are four vacancies on the court,” Aron said.
The stated reason for Grassley’s bill is to equalize the caseload between the D.C. Circuit and other courts, but Ian Millhiser, a legal expert at the Center for American Progress, calls Grassley’s pretext “highly misleading.” “Unlike other federal courts of appeal, the D.C. Circuit hears an unusually large number of major regulatory and national security cases, many of which require very specialized legal research, involve intensely long records, and take more time for a judge to process than four or five normal cases of the kinds heard in other circuit,” he wrote at ThinkProgress.
While Democrats deployed the filibuster against judicial nominees under Bush, Republicans have used it far more often by any measure. The slow pace of confirmations has hollowed out the federal judiciary to such a degree that Chief Justice John Roberts warned the courts were facing a crisis and called on Republicans to advance more judges.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, April 11, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 