“Corporate Sponsors Should Pay His Salary”: Why Should You And I Have To Keep Paying Mitch McConnell’s Salary?
Antonin Scalia is gone. The nastiest and noisiest of right-wingers on the Supreme Court is dead.
But he can’t be any more brain dead than Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate. In a blatantly partisan ploy to prevent President Obama from nominating a successor to Scalia, McConnell has cited a historical precedent dictating that presidents who are in the last year of their term do not name new justices to the high court. “Therefore,” he babbled, “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
What a silly old squirrel McConnell is! Article II of the U.S. Constitution plainly states that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the Supreme Court.” Note that the Constitution says the president “shall” do this — as a duty to the nation. Nothing in the founding document suggests that this power and duty is voided in an election year. In fact, 13 Supreme Court nominations have been made in presidential election years, and the Senate took action on 11 of them. McConnell’s assertion is bogus (and silly), for history and the Constitution clearly back Obama.
Ironically, one who would have nailed McConnell for such a slapstick political perversion of plain constitutional language is Scalia himself. He practiced what he called “originalism” in his official judgments, insisting that the Constitution must be interpreted only by the words in it and only by the original meaning those words had for the founders when they wrote them into the document.
McConnell’s squirrelly stall tactic is as ridiculous as it is shameful. It’s also totally hypocritical, since Mitch himself voted in February 1988 to confirm a Supreme Court nominee put forth by Ronald Reagan — in the last year of his presidency.
This leads me to ask, why should you and I have to keep paying McConnell’s salary? Not only is he a Senate majority leader who doesn’t lead; the lazy right-wing lawmaker really doesn’t do anything, refusing to pick up the legislative tools he’s been given and go to work on the many things that We The People — and America itself — need Congress to do. Imagine if you tried doing nothing on your job — just drawing your paycheck after ignoring your workload!
Repeatedly, this senatorial slug says no to every task at hand. Repair and replace the water pipes that leach lead and are poisoning families all across America? No, he yawns. Raise the minimum wage to help bridge the dangerous wealth gap separating the superrich from the rest of us? Don’t bother me with such stuff, Mitch snaps. Shut off that gusher of corrupt corporate money pouring into our elections and drowning the people’s democratic rights? Not my problem, shrugs the lumpish ne’er-do-well.
And now a straightforward constitutional duty has been handed to McConnell: Gear up the Senate’s “Advise and Consent” mechanism to approve or reject President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia. We’ll do it tomorrow, muttered the somnolent senator, content to put off his responsibility to our nation’s system of justice until next year, long after Obama is gone.
We’re paying this guy a salary of $174,000 a year, plus another $19,400 for his “service” as majority leader. It’s insulting that he won’t even go through the motions of doing his job. Of course, saying no to all the chores he ought to be doing for the people is exactly what the corporate sponsors of his Republican Party expect from him. They want an inert and unresponsive government, a poverty-wage economy, a plutocratic election system and a court of their own choosing.
So “Do Nothing” Mitch is their boy. But at the very least, shouldn’t they pay his salary, rather than sticking us with the cost?
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, February 24, 2016
“Cruz: I’m Not Shady, But The People I Hire Are”: Thou Shalt Not Criticize Another Republican, Unless You Can
It’s hard to run a campaign on the slogan, ‘TrusTED’—as Sen. Ted Cruz is doing—when everyone thinks you’re a dirty trickster.
As allegations of shady behavior continues to erode his image, just one day before the Nevada caucuses, Cruz dismissed a senior staffer who circulated a false news story that questioned fellow GOP candidate Marco Rubio’s faith.
“I had made clear in this campaign that we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards of integrity,” Cruz said, in making the announcement to a group of reporters in a small meeting room at a YMCA in northern Las Vegas. “That has been how we’ve conducted it from day one.”
This is the latest indication that the Texas senator is concerned about the narrative that has gained strength with each passing state, that far from being trusTED, he is a con artist; a cheater, a liar.
The Cruz campaign has found itself in the middle of a number of controversies, starting from the very first presidential contest in Iowa. The Texas senator’s campaign circulated information that suggested Carson might be leaving the presidential race, drawing the lasting ire of the neurosurgeon.
Even some Cruz’s supporters, who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, worry about how nasty that campaign has become. Andrew Russell said he thought that circulating information about Ben Carson’s potential dropout on the night of the Iowa caucuses was “a dirty trick.”
“I don’t know if I would point it to Cruz directly, as opposed to his campaign. I saw on Fox News that he fired his communications director today. So I think maybe people on his team have probably gone too far… they’re definitely dirty tricks. I definitely don’t like it, but I’m willing to overlook it,” Russell told The Daily Beast. “This election process in general has become way too negative, way too harsh.”
And other die-hard supporters blamed Cruz’s opponents for dragging the entire presidential campaign into the mud.
“His campaign is positive, because he’s not attacking anybody… Rubio, Carson and Trump all [are] basically lying about him, so I think they’re the ones running a negative campaign,” said Sheila Rhinehart, a Cruz supporter, who called the Iowa caucus incident “unfortunate.”
It’s true that Trump’s opponents have been hammering him for lies and tricks.
Cruz tried to make nice with Ben Carson, who has argued that Cruz’s campaign spread false information about him on the night of the Iowa caucuses. Despite a face-to-face meeting in a large closet in South Carolina, Carson and Cruz did not make amends.
Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters, “It’s every single day, something comes out of the Cruz campaign that’s deceptive and untrue, and in this case goes after my faith…but this is a pattern now and I think we’re now at a point where we start asking about accountability.”
And Donald Trump can’t seem to utter the name “Cruz” without saying the word “liar” immediately afterward.
Still, the Texas Republican has insisted, from the beginning of the campaign, that he would refrain from criticizing other Republicans, frequently citing Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: ‘Thou shalt not criticize another Republican.’ But the campaign has turned nasty, and he is losing control of his image.
“When other campaigns attack us personally, impugn my integrity or my character, I don’t respond in kind,” insisted Cruz Monday.
So, at a critical point in the presidential contest, Cruz had to dismiss one of the most senior members of his staff.
The most recent incident involved communications director Rick Tyler, who was forced to apologize after posting a story that alleged Rubio telling Cruz’s father that the bible did “[n]ot have many answers” in it. The story included a video with incorrect subtitles—Rubio was in reality praising the bible.
Cruz announced his decision to ask for Tyler’s resignation in a small, nondescript meeting room at a northern Las Vegas YMCA, before taking the stage and delivering his standard stump speech. To his supporters, he made no mention of his dramatic announcement. It was a shock, perhaps even to Tyler himself, who reportedly stormed off the MSNBC set when the news broke, even though he was scheduled to appear on television.
“Rick Tyler’s a good man,” Cruz told the press. “This was a grave error of judgment. It turned out the news story he sent around was false, but I’ll tell you, even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.”
Cruz faces a seminal moment in his campaign Tuesday: a neck-and-neck race with Rubio for second place in the Nevada caucuses, and then a race to a slew of states that will be contested on March 1st, also known as Super Tuesday. If he can’t build trust, Cruz could be obliteraTED.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, February 22, 2016
“A Phony GOP Parody”: Why The Democratic Candidates Need To Get Obama’s Record Straight
There is an imbalance in the argument at the heart of the 2016 presidential campaign that threatens to undercut the Democrats’ chances of holding the White House.
You might think otherwise. The divisions among Republicans are as sharp as they have been since 1964. Donald Trump may be building on the politics of resentment the GOP has pursued throughout President Obama’s term. But Trump’s mix of nationalism, xenophobia, a dash of economic populism and a searing critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy offers a philosophical smorgasbord that leaves the party’s traditional ideology behind.
Jeb Bush, the candidate who represents the greatest degree of continuity with the Republican past, is floundering. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both Cuban Americans, are competing fiercely over who is toughest on immigration. So much for the party opening its doors to new Americans. As for the less incendiary John Kasich, he probably won’t be relevant to the race again until the primaries hit the Midwest.
Add to this the GOP’s demographic weakness — young Americans are profoundly alienated from the party, and nonwhites will only be further turned off by the spectacle created by Trump, Cruz & Co. — and the likelihood of a third consecutive Democratic presidential victory is in view.
But then comes the imbalance: If there is a common element in the rhetoric of all the Republican candidates, it is that Obama’s presidency is an utter disaster, and he is trying to turn us, as Rubio keeps saying, into “a different kind of country.” You’d imagine from hearing the Republicans speak (Kasich is a partial exception) that we were in the midst of a new Great Depression, had just been defeated in a war, had lost our moral compass entirely, had no religious liberty and were on the verge of a dictatorship established by a slew of illegal executive orders.
Oh, yes, and the president who brought about all these horrors has lost the authority to name a Supreme Court justice, no matter what the Constitution — which should otherwise be strictly interpreted — says.
You can laugh or cry over this, but it is a consistent message, carried every day by the media whenever they cover the Republican contest.
The Democrats offer, well, a more nuanced approach. True, Hillary Clinton has embraced Obama more and more, seeing him as a life raft against Bernie Sanders’s formidable challenge. In particular, she knows that African American voters deeply resent the way Obama has been treated by Republicans. (No other president, after all, has ever been told that any nomination he makes to the Supreme Court will be ignored.) Tying herself to Obama is a wise way of shoring up her up-to-now strong support among voters of color.
Nonetheless, because so many Americans have been hurt by rising inequality and the economic changes of the past several decades, neither Democratic presidential candidate can quite say what hopefuls representing the incumbent party usually shout from the rooftops: Our stewardship has been a smashing success and we should get another term.
Sanders, in fact, represents a wholesale rebellion against the status quo. He tries to say positive things about Obama and how the president dealt with the economic catastrophe that struck at the end of George W. Bush’s term. But the democratic socialist from Vermont is not shy about insisting that much more should have been done to break up the banks, rein in the power of the wealthy, and provide far more sweeping health insurance and education benefits.
A good case can be made — and has been made by progressives throughout Obama’s term — that if Democrats said that everything was peachy, voters who were still hurting would write off the party entirely.
But ambivalence does not win elections. Running to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, George H.W. Bush triumphed by proposing adjustments in Reagan’s environmental and education policies but otherwise touting what enough voters decided were Reagan’s successes.
Democrats need to insist that while much work remains to be done, the United States is in far better shape economically than most other countries in the world. The nation is better off for the reforms in health care, financial regulation and environmental protection enacted during Obama’s term and should be proud of its energetic, entrepreneurial and diverse citizenry.
If Clinton, Sanders and their party don’t provide a forceful response to the wildly inaccurate and ridiculously bleak characterization of Obama’s presidency that the Republicans are offering, nobody will. And if this parody is allowed to stand as reality, the Democrats will lose.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 19, 2016
“Making Up Traditions That Don’t Actually Exist”: GOP Tries To Make Up Supreme Court ‘Tradition’ That Doesn’t Exist
Marco Rubio, like most Senate Republicans, intends to maintain a blockade against any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama, regardless of the person’s qualifications. He even has a talking point he’s eager to share.
Yesterday, CNN’s Jake Tapper noted, for example, that Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in President Reagan’s final year in office, but Rubio replied that doesn’t count because the nomination was made a couple of months prior. The senator added:
“This is a tradition that both parties have lived by for over 80 years where in the last year, if there was a vacancy in the last year of a lame duck president, you don’t move forward.”
Rubio isn’t the only one using the word “tradition” this way. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on social media yesterday that President Obama should “follow a tradition embraced by both parties and allow his successor to select the next Supreme Court justice.”
I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that traditions matter in the political process. In fact, I made just such a case earlier this week, exploring the consequences of congressional Republicans abandoning traditional norms that have helped make governing possible for generations.
But now seems like a good time to add some clarity to the matter. Honoring traditions is one thing; making up traditions that don’t actually exist is something else.
Look at that Rubio quote again: “This is a tradition that both parties have lived by for over 80 years where in the last year, if there was a vacancy in the last year of a lame duck president, you don’t move forward.”
Now, I have no idea if Rubio is confused, uninformed, or trying to deceive the public. I do know, however, that his talking point doesn’t make any sense.
There is no such “tradition.” In order for something to become “traditional,” it has to happen routinely over the course of many years, and in this case, the number of instances in which both parties have agreed to leave a seat on the Supreme Court vacant for a year, waiting for an upcoming presidential election to come and go, is zero.
Or put another way, if Rubio and Murkowski want to compile a list of all the examples that help establish this tradition – instances in which Supreme Court vacancies went unfilled because it was a presidential election year – I’d find that incredibly useful.
But I have a hunch such a list won’t appear anytime soon. That’s because plenty of presidents have nominated justices in election years – and those nominees have generally been confirmed.
One might even say the American tradition holds that presidents do their jobs when there’s a vacancy (choosing a nominee), which leads senators do their jobs (consider that nominee for the bench).
It’s one thing to make up “rules” that don’t exist. But to characterize an event that hasn’t occurred as a bipartisan “tradition” is to take partisan propaganda to unhealthy levels.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 18, 2016
“Not At All What Republicans Wanted To Hear”: O’Connor Undermines GOP Talking Points On Court Vacancy
In the fight over filling the Supreme Court vacancy, Republicans clearly have the more difficult task, at least when it comes to rhetoric and public relations. The Constitution has already made clear how the process is supposed to unfold, it’s now up to GOP senators to make the case that they should ignore – indeed, they have an obligation to ignore – the constitutional model.
Republicans can’t come right out and say the truth, since “we hate the president” isn’t a compelling talking point, so they tend to frame their concerns as high-minded. As Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) put it yesterday, the partisan blockade against any court nominee is intended to protect the institution from “politicization” and “denigration.”
It’s difficult to take such an argument seriously, and it certainly doesn’t help when an actual retired Supreme Court justice seems to have no use for the right’s talking points. The Huffington Post reported yesterday:
Sandra Day O’Connor, the retired Supreme Court justice appointed by a Republican president, said on Wednesday that President Barack Obama should get to name the replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
O’Connor, in an interview with a Fox affiliate in Phoenix, disagreed with Republican arguments that the next president, and not Obama, should get to fill the high court vacancy.
O’Connor specifically said during the interview, “I think we need somebody there to do the job now and let’s get on with it.” She added, in reference to President Obama, “It’s an important position and one that we care about as a nation and as a people. And I wish the president well as he makes choices and goes down that line. It’s hard.”
That’s not at all what Republicans wanted to hear.
On the contrary, O’Connor, a Reagan appointee who retired in 2006, effectively said the opposite of what GOP senators have argued since Saturday night.
Republicans have said the seat should remain vacant for 11 months; O’Connor wants the confirmation process to begin and for a new justice to take the seat “now.” Republicans have argued that the president shouldn’t nominate anyone; O’Connor made clear the nominating choice is up to the president.
Obviously, O’Connor is now a private citizen and her opinions are her own, but she’s also a respected figure, especially on matters related to the high court. If she’d said the opposite in the interview, encouraging Obama and sitting senators to leave the seat vacant until 2017 for the good of the institution, it’s a safe bet Republicans would be citing her judgment every day for the next several months.
But she didn’t. O’Connor seems to have no use for the GOP arguments whatsoever.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 18, 2016
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