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“Under Seige By Conservatives”: Progressives Must Take Back The Courts

Confronted by record judicial vacancies and unprecedented Senate obstruction in filling our courtrooms, the White House Monday is convening a summit meeting of 150 advocates and community leaders from across the country — to demonstrate that the courts are crucial for our nation.

Regardless of where you live, or what issues you care about, all Americans deserve a judiciary that works.

Why Monday? A short-lived Senate deal to speed the pace of some judicial nominees expires that day. Yet right now, roughly 250 million Americans live in a community without enough judges on the bench. Much more needs to be done.

The White House summit reaffirms that progressives at all levels, and from all corners, are deeply committed to filling our nation’s courtrooms with qualified judges quickly — today and in coming months.

A record number of courtrooms are not functioning because there are not enough judges seated to do the work of the American people. This includes 19 empty federal bench seats in 16 states that could be filled today.

Our nation’s courts — where Americans vindicate their most cherished constitutional rights — are under siege by conservatives. As we have seen over the past few months, Senate Republicans have significantly stalled votes on qualified nominees — including ones with broad bipartisan support — just for the sake of obstruction. Many have later been approved by significant margins.

Conservatives have long made the courts a priority. When in power, they have actively worked to fill the bench with judges who share a conservative ideology — one increasingly out of the mainstream. So it should be no surprise that Senate Republicans are so adamant about blocking any progress on filling our nation’s courts today.

The third branch of government has for too long been neglected in politics — particularly by liberals. Yet it plays a defining role in the American story. And progressives have a huge stake in making sure our courtrooms have a full complement of judges familiar with our issues to make the tough calls.

Every issue progressives care about today ends up in court. From education and immigration to the right to work; from clean air, water and food, to the right of the laws of the land to apply equally to all Americans; from protecting the right of our elected representatives to writing laws that protect consumers and providing for our health.

Fortunately, progressives are rising to the challenge. We need judges confirmed now, to be sure. But what we really need — and what we are doing — is building a long-term foundation among the nation’s progressives, on all issues, to care about the courts. Because they matter for all that we stand for.

It’s a foundation motivated by basic values and interests, not just short-term political tactics. We are engaging new groups of progressives to integrate issues involving the courts into their daily work — in their local communities and online — for the long term.

If you care about your issue, you should care about the courts. Or else our hard-fought gains will be undone by an increasingly conservative judiciary.

We know this strategy works. Consider, in just a few days, a groundswell of support forced the Susan G. Komen Foundation to reverse a politically motivated decision to end its funding relationship with Planned Parenthood. Tens of thousands of progressives organized and made their voices heard — online, with small donations and in communities nationwide — and achieved results.

The same thing happened last fall when Bank of America backed down from imposing a monthly $5 debit card fee after an online change.org petition collected 300,000 signatures. This same energy essentially fuels the Occupy movement.

This is a strategy that works especially well for defending the foundational principles of our democracy that progressives care about — like fully functioning courts.

Voters organizing to make their voices heard is the only thing that can counter the power of money-driven advertising in politics. It’s the very essence of a system that works for all Americans — not just the wealthy few.

 

By: Andrew Blotky, Opinion Contributor, Politico, May 6, 2012

 

May 7, 2012 Posted by | Courts | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Moon Dreams”: Newt Gingrich Redecorates The Oval Office

Not only has the former speaker of the House banked on winning a second term; he has his first day in office planned.

Newt Gingrich has been roundly mocked by both the media and his opponents for his preposterous proposal to build a moon base by 2020. As outlandish as that claim may be, it’s nothing compared to the promises Gingrich offered yesterday during a campaign stop at The Villages, a planned retirement community in central Florida.

A huge crowd of seniors—numbering possibly in the thousands—packed into a parking lot outside a Barnes & Noble on a warm and sunny afternoon. A hot-dog stand held a steady line throughout the event, and its neighbor stand offered a full bar of beer and liquors. Golf carts—the apparent vehicle of choice in the area—whizzed by, fighting with SUVs for parking spots.

It was a bizarre scene, but nowhere near as ridiculous as the tail end of Gingrich’s speech. Overall, it was mostly his standard stump, with a few extra zingers directed at Mitt Romney. Then, near the end, he offered a laundry list of promised accomplishments. This wasn’t the typical first 100 days agenda; the proposals were all things Gingrich promised to achieve by his very first day in the White House:

  • “I will ask the new Congress to stay in session on January 3, and I will ask them first to repeal Obamacare. I can ask them to repeal Obamacare, because I haven’t passed something that resembles it.”
  • “I will also ask them in the same session to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, which is killing banks.”
  • “I will ask them to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley bill.”
  • “On the inauguration day, about two hours after the inaugural address, I will sign a series of executive orders. All of them will have been published by October 1, everyone in America will know what is coming.”
  • “The very first executive order will eliminate all of the White House czars.”
  • “My goal would be, by the end of that first day—about the time that President Obama arrives back in Chicago—that we will have dismantled about 40 percent of his government on the opening day.”

“I think this is doable,” Gingrich said. The former speaker expects each of the bills to have already passed and be ready for him to sign on the first day of his hypothetical presidency. “On January 20, I will sign all three as a sign of our seriousness about changing Washington,” he said.

By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, January 30, 2012

January 31, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

GOP Nightmare: Obama Fixes The Economy

President Obama’s bold decision to ignore GOP obstructionism and make recess appointments at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board started off 2012 with a bang, inspiring long-deferred jubilation among liberals and paroxysms of outrage from conservatives. There’s an enormous irony here: After three ridiculous years in which conservatives unfairly and absurdly attacked Obama for impersonating a socialist tyrant, the president is suddenly acting like an actual leader — and now the right is really freaking out.

Here’s the nightmare scenario: What if Obama runs totally wild and uses his executive powers to fix the economy? He might, gasp, win reelection!

Sounds crazy, I know. But that’s exactly the sense of panic that emerges from American Enterprise Institute blogger James Pethokoukis’ excited-to-the-point-of-stark-terror post “January Surprise: Is Obama preparing a trillion-dollar, mass refinancing of mortgages?”

Citing speculation from Jaret Seiberg, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, Pethokoukis paints a picture in which Obama recess appoints a replacement for the current acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Bush appointee Edward DeMarco. DeMarco’s job is to oversee the giant mortgage finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. DeMarco has long made it clear that he believes his primary job is to improve the financial bottom line of Freddie and Fannie, rather than employ the huge power the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) exert over the residential mortgage market to make it easier for homeowners to refinance their mortgages and escape the threat of foreclosure. With DeMarco out of the way, so the theory goes, the Obama administration would have a free hand to push through a much more aggressive plan to help struggling homeowners.

Seiberg:

That could lead to a mass refinancing program for agency-backed mortgages that would go well beyond the existing HARP program. That could hurt agency [mortgage-backed security] pricing and result in higher financing costs going forward. Yet it also could be a big boost for the economy and housing going into the election.

Pethokoukis:

…[S]ome $3.7 trillion of mortgages would be refinanced. That’s right, this would be the Mother of All Mortgage Refinancing Plans. It would help roughly 30 million borrowers save $75 billion to $80 billion a year. As Mayer puts it: “This plan would function like a long-lasting tax cut for these 25 or 30 million American families.” … Talk about a political and economic game changer in this presidential election year. Obama could offer a trillion-dollar stimulus — as measured over a decade — that would directly and immediately impact tens of millions of Americans suffering from the housing depression. Cash in their pockets. Imagine the electoral impact on key states, such as Florida, suffering from both high unemployment and devastated housing markets.

If only. As a Federal Reserve white paper analyzing problems in the housing sector and reviewing potential solutions noted on Wednesday, 12 million U.S. homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgages. The steady flood of newly foreclosed properties hitting the market — expected to be a million per year in both 2012 and 2013 — exerts a relentless downward pressure on home prices. There are few things the Obama administration could do that would have a bigger positive effect on the overall economy than a really large-scale program of homeowner relief.

So how realistic is the January surprise scenario? As with all good conspiracy theories, there are some grains of truth. DeMarco has definitely been obstructing the Obama administration’s efforts at housing reform. Even the usually mild-mannered Federal Reserve hints at this reality in its white paper. Sure, there would be a cost to a large-scale refinancing program, but the benefits might well outweigh the downside:

“Nonetheless, some actions that cause greater losses to be sustained by the GSEs in the near term might be in the interest of taxpayers to pursue if those actions result in a quicker and more vigorous economic recovery.

Protecting Fannie and Freddie’s balance sheet at the expense of the nation’s is penny-wise and pound-foolish, in other words. Why go to all the trouble and expense of bailing out the GSEs if not to use them to good effect?

However, that still doesn’t quite connect the dots between the appointment of Richard Cordray to run the CFPB and a possible recess appointment that would replace Edward DeMarco. First of all, the Obama administration’s efforts to reboot housing have been, at best, halfhearted, and their failure more properly should be blamed on the White House than a single agency administrator. (And late Thursday afternoon, Bloomberg News reported that the White House was denying it had any new refinancing plan in the works.) Secondly, the legal basis for shoving out DeMarco and replacing him with a recess appointment seems especially iffy. Cordray is considered an independent regulator — so, theoretically, he can’t simply be fired at will by the White House, (although his “acting” status does inject some fuzziness into the equation). According to reporting by Ezra Klein and Brad Plumer, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explored the possibility of firing DeMarco, but ultimately found it unfeasible. Republicans are already threatening to sue the administration for the current batch of recess appointments; axing the existing director for the FHFA in pursuit of an election-year housing reform agenda could easily precipitate a constitutional crisis.

But then again, Republicans would only have themselves to blame for the chaos that would ensue if Obama did take the unlikely step of all-out war. In 2010, the Obama administration proposed North Carolina banking commissioner Joseph Smith as its nominee for FHFA director. But as with so many of Obama’s economic-policy-related nominations, Smith’s appointment by the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, Richard Shelby, was scuttled on the grounds that Smith was unlikely to resist Obama’s housing reform agenda.

So there is after all a direct connection between the Cordray recess appointment and the FHFA. Senate Republicans have routinely blocked Obama’s executive branch appointments, not because they have any particular problem with the quality of the people being proposed for the jobs, but because they want to block Obama’s reform agenda. It’s a travesty of government — and a made-to-order campaign platform. Want to know why the economy sucks? Because Republicans won’t let Obama appoint the people necessary to take direct action — whether that be at the Federal Reserve, or the FHFA, or anywhere else.

By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, January 5, 2012

January 7, 2012 Posted by | Economic Recovery, Economy, Election 2012 | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Standard And Poor’s Goes Tea Party

Big headlines for a Friday night: “U.S. Loses Top Credit Rating!” Yes, as most now know, Standard & Poor’s went ahead with its warnings of the past weeks and downgraded the sovereign debt of the United States government from its pristine triple-A to a still stellar but one notch less so AA+. And after a miserable week in global equity markets that was almost as ugly as it gets, a week that began with the conclusion of a universally reviled debt-ceiling deal, the late-night downgrade was the fitting end.

The symbolism is undeniable. This is the first downgrade in history, as commentators rushed to remind us. But of course, that history goes back only to the late 1930s, when the ratings agencies began to hold sway. And S&P is the only one of the major three—Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P—to downgrade. So this was big bad news, a bad coda to a bad week, but only as news and not as a trenchant analysis of the creditworthiness of the United States or its ability to meet its debt obligations going forward.

Let’s be clear: Congress and the White House did not cover themselves with glory during the debt debate throughout July. The United States has a stalled economy and a large amount of debt. But on so many levels, this downgrade is absurd.

First there is the question of math. When S&P informed the White House of its intention to downgrade on Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department took issue with S&P’s math and claimed that their assessment of the trends of the U.S. debt burden and its ratio to GDP was off by trillions of dollars. No matter. After a brief review, the wizards at S&P went ahead and removed an A.

A news ticker reads “Standard & Poor’s downgrades US credit rating from AAA to AA+” in Times Square on August 5, 2011 in New York City., Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Second, what’s with the fetish for a so-called proper ratio of debt-to-GDP. Academic economists have done no favors here. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become the go-to economists for their work showing how countries that reach a 90% ratio slide into recession and see slowing growth well before. The U.S. current level according to S&P is 74% and will rise to 85% by 2021. The explanation of the downgrade closely tracks this academic logic.

I have no criticism of an academic theory about how nations function economically. But when debatable theories become the underpinnings of decisions by unelected individuals who run organizations with significant sway (sway ceded to them by governments throughout the 20th century), then we have a problem. We have a problem when that argument gives short shrift to the debt-servicing burden. The current interest rate that the U.S. government pays to service its massive debts is hovering around 2.5%, which makes interest payments as a percentage of GDP as low as they have been since the mid-1970s.

Servicing the debt does not enter into the analysis, yet that and current interest rates make all the difference. Dismissing that counterargument, warning that rates will of course rise (yet even if they double, that will still leave the U.S. more than able to meet its obligations), and drawing on theories about the “right” level of debt puts S&P in a strange bedfellow alliance with the Tea Party.

The people who run the ratings agencies are welcome to their analysis, as is the Tea Party. But if Rogoff and Reinhart or the Tea Party announced that they were downgrading U.S. sovereign debt, they would be laughed for their audacity. Yet when it is one of the anointed ratings agencies, there is this sudden need to genuflect.

This is largely because covenant after covenant in both SEC rulings and institutional money management (pensions especially) dictate that many types of capital can only be invested in credit-worthy instruments as determined by Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. The downgrade doesn’t remotely begin to threaten the “investment grade” status of U.S. debt, and there is little reason to suspect that borrowing costs will go up as a result. Still, the reason we are in this situation of having to genuflect to S&P is because an entire structure of credit and investments, and the issuance and purchase of bonds above all, has been built on the shaky and questionable foundation of the ratings agencies.

The worst part of the downgrade is this: S&P spent considerable time in the body of their explanation about debt and GDP and growth. But they didn’t lead with that. That wasn’t the kicker. No, this was: “the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges.” The company assailed the Washington culture of “brinkmanship” so in display during the debt ceiling fiasco, and used that as the primary reason to take us down a notch.

Excuse me, but since when is a pristine political process a key ingredient to good credit? Are we supposed to have civil politics in order to maintain the rating? Are we supposed to have some mythic Scandinavian concord? Washington has usually been a mess, and arguably more now than ever. Nonetheless, the great distortion of the debt-ceiling imbroglio was that failure to do a deal would have led to a default. It would have led to a partial and then increasing complete shut down of the government, which would have soon enough forced a resolution. At no point would there have been insufficient tax revenue to meet the $20 billion of so in monthly interest payments on the debt, unless the crisis had gone on for months and months, which barring collective national psychosis simply could not have happened.

So S&P doesn’t feel comfortable that the American political process is conducive to dealing with long-term debt issues and so issued a downgrade. Yet S&P is a ratings agency, not a political arbiter. Olympic judges rule on athletic aptitude, not the politics of the athletes (usually). There is not a scintilla of evidence that the political process has yet impeded the ability of the United States to meet its debt obligations, even with the debt ceiling brinkmanship. The political process may indeed be contributing to the morass of the American economy, but the larger causes are the challenges of emerging economic centers and changing patterns of global commerce. Those are long-term issues that have little bearing on current ability to manage debts.

Finally, as a symbol that the United States is sliding off the rails, the downgrade is potent. It’s hard to argue with the reality that America is in a challenging moment that looks and feels a lot like decline. Whether that proves false and a new dawn awaits, we’ll find out soon enough. But the actions of S&P are part of problem and not just an independent verification that one exists.

These agencies have been elevated to heights that should not ascend; they have been chronically wrong and late in the past; and their rationale for a downgrade sounds more like a prim distaste for a dysfunctional political process that a reasoned assessment of the ability of the United States to discharge its obligations. No defense can be offered of our current political system or near-term economic prospects. But S&P—already on overreach as “neutral” judge of American creditworthiness—has no special standing to rule on the political system, and using that as a cudgel to prove their own power is a destructive act.

 

By: Zachary Karabell, The Daily Beast, August 6, 2011

August 7, 2011 Posted by | Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democracy, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

With Deal Announced, The White House Makes It’s Case

So the final deal has been announced, pending approval by the House, and one of the key new pieces of the compromise is that the Congressional committee tasked with coming up with a second round of spending cuts in exchange for the later debt ceiling hike would be forced to act by the new “trigger.” In the event that the committee deadlocks, that trigger would force an even division of non-defense and defense cuts, and since the latter is anathema to Republicans, they would not have any incentive to deliberately sabotage the committee in order to force the deep entitlements cuts they want.

The White House’s argument is that even if the deal is far short of what liberals hoped for, Republicans have effectively surrendered the amount of leverage they were expected to have over entitlements cuts. Now that the committee — which is half Republicans and Democrats — will all but certainly advance a package of cuts in exchange for the later debt ceiling hike, the argument is that Democrats can live to fight it out another day on entitlements.

The White House is also arguing that the deal sets the stage for a re-litigation of the tax cut fight, and it’s now distributing talking points to outside allies that are heavily devoted to making that case on entitlement and taxes, an argument that seems designed to quiet angst and criticism among liberals:

* Expedited Process for Balanced Deficit Reduction: Puts in place a longer term process for additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction through a committee structure that will put everything on the table, including tax and entitlement reform. To prevent either side from using procedural tricks to prevent Congress from acting, the committee’s recommendations will receive fast track authority, which means they can’t be amended or filibustered.

* Sets the Stage for a Balanced Package Including Revenues: The American people and a growing number of Republicans agree that any deficit reduction package must be balanced and included revenue.

* Even Speaker Boehner was open to a deal with $800 billion in revenues, and nearly 20 GOP senators were supportive of the Gang of 6 framework, which had more than $2 trillion in revenue.

* If the Committee does not succeed in meaningful balanced deficit reduction with revenue-raising tax reform on the most well-off by the end of 2012, the President can use his veto pen to raise nearly $1 trillion from the most well-off by vetoing any extension of the Bush high income tax cuts.

By;: Greg Sargent, Washington Post-The Plum Line, July 31, 2011

August 1, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, GOP, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, President Obama, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, Senate, Taxes, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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