Category: Uncategorized

Erick the Red

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s been a lot of buzz, mostly in the progressive blogosphere, over the news that the proprietor of the notable right-wing RedState blogging site, Erick Erickson, of Macon, Georgia, has been given a perch on a new CNN show hosted by John King.

Most of the talk has featured some of Erick’s more colorful utterances, particularly his description of Supreme Court Justice David Souter as, well, a child molester who also enjoys carnal knowledge of certain barnyard animals, and his reference to First Lady Michelle Obama as a “Marxist harpy.” As a fairly regular reader of RedState, if only to get the juices going on slow days, I can say I’m most impressed with the casual cranky extremism of Erick’s stuff on a day-in, day-out basis, and particularly his bully-boy determination to play a role in Republican primaries around the country. His obsession, for example, with the defeat of Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, a pretty conventional conservative by most standards, has long since passed Carthago delenda est levels and must be viewed as a matter of sheer ego, if not a clinical disorder. The sheer-ego interpretation finds support in another recent Erickson encyclical, wherein he judiciously gave Mitt Romney a partial indulgence for his endorsement of Bennett upon the news that the Mittster had also endorsed RedState favorite Nikki Haley, a candidate for governor of South Carolina (in the real world, Romney predictably endorsed both for the obvious reason that they both endorsed him in 2008).

Last month I spoke at a municipal association meeting in Georgia, and was asked by a lot of people there how seriously Erick, a city councilman in Macon, was taken by national political types (much as Georgians used to ask me the same question about Newt Gingrich when he first exploded on the national scene). Seems he was already letting it be known that he was entertaining various national media offers, and was about to go big-time. I have a hard time begrudging any blogger a shot at mainstream media exposure. But it’s a sign of the times that CNN filled a mandatory conservative slot with a guy like Erick, who seems to alternate between moods of blind rage and smug triumphalism, and who (like me) also has a face made for radio.

We’ll see how ol’ Erick handles the transition to a national audience composed of people who don’t already agree with him. But he couldn’t have been happy with CNN’s press release, which lauded him as a spokesman for small-town values “who still lives in small-town America.” This will not go over well in Macon, a proud old city whose metropolitan area has a population of close to a quarter million people.

Hey, President Obama: What Are You Doing for Nowruz 1389?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nowruz is Iran’s new year, celebrated every spring. You may recall that last year, President Obama scored a ton of points from just about all quarters by sending this personalized Nowruz video message directed straight at Iran’s people. It was a great move that bypassed any formal communication with the mullahs in Tehran and successfully engaged Iranians on a personal level. From last year’s video:

You, too, have a choice.  The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.  You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.  And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

This year’s Nowruz (#1389 if you’re scoring by the Persian calendar) takes place on March 20th. And suffice it to say that some things have changed since then: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole an election last June from Mir Hossein Mousavi, which triggered millions-strong, largely peaceful (on the civilian side, anyway) demonstrations in Tehran over several weeks. The mullahs actually remain fairly divided lot, but since the Revolutionary Guards hold the balance of power in Iran, the status quo will reign for the time being. However, the protests continue to flare up, but with diminishing strength, on every subsequent public holiday or event. Their potency has been contained in large part because the Ayatollah learned the importance of crushing momentum from the country’s experience in 1979.

This raises the question: After a tumultuous year in American-Iranian “relations” that has seen the Obama administration change tack from guarded optimism of dialogue to renewed talk of targeted sanctions, what (if anything) will the administration do this Nowruz? With Tehran’s crackdown on social media and internet freedom, it might be more difficult to get a similarly successful message through. But it’s worth a try, given the negligible price of recording a three-minute message from the Oval Office.

If he does record something, part of the president’s Nowruz goodwill message to Iranians should focus on expanding Internet access in Iran, which began in earnest earlier this month when the White House lifted restrictions for the first time on U.S. companies exporting online software like chat and data-sharing programs. That’s an incredibly important step, and has been generally described as a win-win-win for Iranians, companies and American diplomatic efforts. But lifting restrictions is just one side of the equation — actively promoting this kind of software in Iran should follow next.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arasmus/ / CC BY 2.0

Underdogs Have Their Day in Colorado

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Another day, another angry right-wing challenge to “establishment” Republicans once thought to be very conservative. In Colorado, the two parties held precinct caucuses accompanied, as always, by a straw poll among candidates for statewide office. On the Republican side, prohibitive front-runner for the Senate and former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton ran almost exactly even with self-styled Insurgent from the Right Ken Buck, a district attorney who’s an ally of famed immigrant-baiter Tom Tancredo.

Other than her backing of a controversial ballot measure to relax Colorado’s draconian tax limitation law, Norton’s main sin seems to be her friendship with John McCain, also under attack from the Right.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff actually beat appointed Sen. Michael Bennet in the caucus straw poll. This, however, was no surprise; Bennet is a political newcomer while Romanoff has deep roots among the party activists who attend these events.

Neither straw poll is necessarily predictive of what will happen in the primaries for the Senate that will be held in August. On the Democratic side, it’s noteworthy than the senator whose term is being filled this year, current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, didn’t win the caucus straw poll in 2006, and still went on to win the primary handily.

But if nothing else, the Colorado results kept underdogs alive, and on the Republican side, confirmed that this will be a difficult year for anyone with the dreaded “E for Establishment” label.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/writetomikek/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The 2010/2012 Endorsement Game

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the important sideshows in the 2010 campaign cycle is the intervention of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates in current GOP primaries.

Sarah Palin has received considerable attention for endorsing Tea Party favorite and libertarian scion Rand Paul for the Senate in Kentucky over Mitch McConnell’s buddy Trey Grayson, and also for endorsing her old running mate, John McCain, in his fight with right-wing talk show host and former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

Mike Huckabee has been more aggressive in his endorsements, mainly by supporting candidates who endorsed him in 2008. Huck struck gold by getting out early in support of Tea Party/conservative icon Marco Rubio’s challenge to Charlie Crist in Florida — long before Rubio began crushing Crist in the polls. Beyond that, Huck has endorsed controversial gubernatorial candidates in two early 2012 caucus/primary states: Lt. Gov. Andre (“Stray Animals”) Bauer, and Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats. The latter is an especially interesting endorsement; if Vander Plaats upsets former Gov. Terry Branstad (who is closely affiliated with Mitt Romney supporters in that state) in the Iowa gubernatorial primary in June, Huck will be in good shape to repeat his 2008 victory in the Iowa Caucuses.

Like Huckabee, Mitt Romney has kept his endorsements so far limited to 2008 allies (with the exception of John McCain). Those include front-running California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and longshot Alabama gubernatorial candidate Kay Ivy. But two recent Romney endorsements (again, of people who endorsed Mitt in 2008) have drawn national attention: embattled incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah (a Romney hotbed, for obvious reasons), for whom conservatives have long knives out, and then state Rep. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a big favorite of the right-wing blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, after doing the Right thing by endorsing conservative Doug Hoffmann in a red-hot New York special election last year, announced he would eschew further interventions in competitive Republican primaries. But he made an exception for John McCain, presumably after ensuring he would receive cover for this step from Palin and Romney.

If Hayworth manages to beat McCain, he won’t owe any 2012 candidates a thing. But there are plenty of other competitive primaries later this year where the presidentials haven’t weighed in, and the chess game of endorsements will be very interesting.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Furor Over “Deem and Pass”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ridiculous attention that the media — cued by the GOP — lavished on process in general and budget reconciliation in particular:

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Replace “reconciliation” with “deem and pass” and the same post pretty much applies to today. “Deem and pass” is the procedure by which Democrats are reportedly planning on using to pass health care reform, allowing House members to “deem” the Senate bill passed while voting on the bill fixing it. The reasoning is that this would enable House Democrats to say that they didn’t technically vote for what they see as a flawed Senate bill. Let me repeat that: they’ll be voting for the Senate bill but can claim that they didn’t vote for the Senate bill. Really, what could go wrong with that strategy?

Republicans have pounced, and the media have been right there with them. Today’s Washington Post headline: “House Democrats’ tactic for health-care bill is debated.” From a New York Times on the “controversy”: “Democrats struggled Tuesday to defend procedural shortcuts they might use to win approval for their proposals in the next few days.” Clearly Dems did not think through the politics of this move.

But its head-slapping idiocy notwithstanding, is “deem and pass” really all that controversial? Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, hardly a lefty advocate, calls out Republicans for their hypocritical rending of garments over its anticipated use for health reform:

In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.” That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration. I don’t like self-executing rules by either party—I prefer the “regular order”—so I am not going to say this is a great idea by the Democrats. But even so—is there no shame anymore?

Steve Benen sums up my thoughts on the latest demonstration of GOP faux outrage and media complicity nicely:

Let me get this straight — the single biggest story in the political world yesterday was over consideration of a House procedure, used many times before by both parties? Republicans decided they don’t like “self-executing rules” anymore, so the matter dominated the discourse?

As with the moronic furor over reconciliation, the same dynamic is at work: a relentless GOP messaging machine that puts process ahead of substance — canny on their part because it’s the process, rather than the policy, that voters are fed up with; a tone-deaf Democratic caucus (They really thought that adding a layer of complication to the process was what health care reform needed? Really?) and feckless communications operation that seems to perpetually be on the defensive; and a mainstream media expertly played like a piano by the GOP.

It’s All About Democratic Unity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Politico

Forget about reconciliation and other parliamentary maneuvers. Forget, too, about Cadillac plans and the Cornhusker Kickback. On health care, we’re down to the heart of the matter: Can Democrats act like a disciplined, cohesive political party?

For decades, they’ve fought for the principle of universal and affordable health coverage. If they don’t pass health reform now, with medical costs mounting, with a president willing to go for broke and with sizable — and perishable — majorities in Congress, you have to wonder if they ever will.

There will be no shortage of excuses if they fail: a populist backlash against bailouts and joblessness; GOP obstructionism and rising public antipathy for Washington and Big Government in general.

But let’s face it: If health care reform crashes and burns, it will be because Democrats couldn’t summon the courage and internal coherence to deliver on a key progressive commitment.

Labor unions, Blue Dogs, single-payer stalwarts, favor-extorting moderates, Latinos, anti-abortion Roman Catholics — it’s no use singling out one culprit, because all the party’s tribes will have contributed to the debacle.

By holding firm for comprehensive reform, President Barack Obama has put his party, especially House Democrats, on the spot. He’s asking doubters to put their party’s collective interest above their personal interests and views.

That’s a tough ask, especially for those from marginal districts who could lose their seats by voting for the Senate bill. It’s easy for self-righteous lefties to brand them as trimmers or cowards, but swing-district Democrats can argue plausibly that a “no” vote would more accurately reflect majority sentiment among their constituents. Liberals from overwhelmingly Democratic districts have no such excuse.

Still, Congress is a national legislature, and its members have a responsibility to act in the national interest. For most Democrats, that surely means ending the injustice of leaving millions of Americans vulnerable to financial ruin or death due to illness or injury. It also means beginning to get a handle on the runaway growth of health care costs that bedevils U.S. workers and businesses.

While party unity isn’t the highest political value, being a member of a party does carry some obligation to its fundamental principles. Tactically, it makes sense for party leaders to give Democrats in tough districts a pass on tough votes — as long as there are votes to spare.

That’s not the case on health care reform. Speaker Nancy Pelosi needs every vote she can get.

Not one Republican will vote for the Senate bill. About a dozen or so anti-abortion Democrats say they won’t either. Pelosi can afford to lose only 37 of the party’s 253 members to get to the magic number of 216. That probably means persuading some of the 39 Democrats who voted against the House plan to support the more centrist Senate blueprint.

Moderate Democrats, including those in the 49 districts that Sen. John McCain won in 2008, face political risks. Voting to support a major health reform bill on a party-line vote could, conceivably, cost them their seats. But if Democrats again stumble on health care, it could also trigger a “wave” election, like 1994, which would engulf marginal seats.

Some party pollsters claim that Democrats already have lost the debate and can only make things worse by passing reform anyway. But a careful reading of polls shows that many skeptical voters don’t think the bills go far enough, and most favor key provisions such as banning insurers from cherry-picking healthy patients and setting up insurance exchanges.

Reasons for this ambivalence are complicated, but it’s probably not because voters have pored over the details of the Senate health bill or the “fixes” Democrats aim to pass on reconciliation. In any case, who thinks Democrats will gain public respect by giving up on their top priority?

Obama was elected on a promise to tackle the nation’s biggest challenges — with health reform as Exhibit A. Independent voters have drifted away from his winning 2008 coalition during the past year, in part because they are losing confidence in the Democrats’ ability to govern.

The party may thus have more to fear from wasting a year to produce nothing than from passing a controversial bill. Failure won’t just make Democrats look bad; it will also vindicate the Republicans’ hyperpartisan campaign to torpedo comprehensive reform.

Sometimes, parties gain even when they lose — especially when they stand on principle. The odds facing Obama and Pelosi and company are daunting.

But the task is doable — as long as enough Democrats recognize that their careers won’t amount to much if their party can’t deliver on its core commitments.

Read the column at Politico.

The Progressive Policy Institute And Americans For Campaign Reform Unite To Make Case For Campaign Reform Legislation

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 16, 2010

CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka – schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the White House takes up its next legislative priority, the Progressive Policy Institute and Americans for Campaign Reform on Wednesday, March 17, will host Senator Dick Durbin and a bipartisan panel to address the public’s appetite for campaign reform and how the Fair Elections Now Act offers a solution to fix the broken political system.

WHO:                Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

Dan Weeks – President, Americans for Campaign Reform

Mark McKinnon – Former advisor to President George W. Bush and Vice Chairman of Public Strategies                  

John Samples – Director, Cato’s Center for Representative Government

Andrew Baumann – Senior Associate, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner

Will Marshall – President, Progressive Policy Institute

WHAT:             AFTER CITIZENS UNITED: A NEW PARADIGM FOR CAMPAIGN REFORM

Senator Dick Durbin will offer remarks on the Fair Elections Now Act and the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case lifting the ban on corporate spending in elections.  Following Senator Durbin’s remarks, a panel discussion moderated by Will Marshall will examine voter opinions on campaign reform, Democratic and Republican support for the Fair Elections Now bill and its prospects for passage.

WHEN:           Wednesday, March 17 — 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.

WHERE:         Dirksen Senate Office Building – SD-106, U.S. Capitol Complex, Washington, D.C.

MEDIA COVERAGE:  The event is open to the media and panelists will be available following the discussion for individual interviews.

For further questions, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), 202.556.1752 (cell).

# # #

Why an EPA Rule for Traditional Pollutants Matters for Greenhouse Gases

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the sexy pollutant. “Traditional” pollutants like sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrous oxides or NOx (which are themselves GHGs, though their climatic effects are not the basis for their regulation) get less attention, with media, legal, research, and to a lesser extent regulatory attention devoted to GHGs. These pollutants have much greater health impacts than GHGs, however. Moreover, how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates them under the Clean Air Act (CAA) might shed some light on how they will regulate GHGs under the same statute.

Unfortunately, the EPA’s master plan for new  SO2 and NOx regulations, the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), is in legal limbo. In North Carolina v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit found such substantial flaws in the rule that it vacated CAIR completely in 2008, before backing down somewhat and directing the EPA to fix a number of problems. In the meantime, the rule has remained in effect — CAIR is zombie regulation.

Nobody likes zombie regulation. It’s hard to determine environmental benefits and for industry to determine costs, and markets in tradable allowances don’t work very well when the future structure of those markets (and even whether they will exist) is unclear. Whatever the EPA does to address the court’s concerns with CAIR is therefore likely to be an improvement on the current situation.

The EPA is expected to release the required revisions to CAIR soon. Some of the issues the court identified with CAIR in its original form are that compliance deadlines for it and other regulations do not match, and that the EPA exceeded its authority by making changes to the congressionally created Title IV trading program for SO2.

The largest problems for the court, however, were with the trading programs created or modified by CAIR. How the EPA addresses these concerns will be the most interesting part of the new CAIR and will shed the most light on how far the EPA can go in using emissions trading methods under existing CAA authority — something that may be important for future GHG regulation.

Will Emissions Trading Survive?

 

The original CAIR created new interstate trading programs for SO2 and NOx or expanded existing ones. The court, however, cast real doubt on whether these trading programs are viable. Specifically, the court held that the CAA authority (NAAQS) used by the EPA requires actual reductions in emissions from each state that contributes to pollution in downwind areas (it is largely this interstate pollution “transport” problem that CAIR is designed to address). The trading programs in the original CAIR would have reduced pollution from upwind states, but free trading among states meant that the EPA could not guarantee that every upwind state would reduce its emissions.

It’s hard to see how the EPA can comply with the court’s interpretation of the CAA here and keep interstate trading as part of the revised CAIR. If you have interstate trading, you reduce costs of compliance but at the expense of certainty over where emissions will be reduced. It is just this certainty that the court claims the CAA requires. Trading may survive in the form of purely intra-state markets, or the EPA may devise some hybrid regulation that includes some command-and-control elements that would force reductions in emissions in all upwind states.

The structure the EPA chooses — and whether the court deems it permissible — is important. There is some chance that the EPA will choose (or be forced) to regulate GHGs under the NAAQS program. If the EPA does go down this route, CAIR and the courts’ treatment of it will provide the precedent for a GHG trading system. Can such a system be implemented nationwide under the CAA if only intrastate trading is permitted for other pollutants? If GHG regulations are not driven by contributions to other states’ pollution problems, the EPA might be able to distinguish them from the CAIR regulations. But SO2 and NOx are the best examples by far of emissions trading programs under the CAA. If the new CAIR kills or guts these programs, the precedent for any GHG trading scheme – at least under the NAAQS – will be weakened.

The proposed new CAIR should be released by the EPA in the near future. The character of the emissions trading programs it creates will tell us a lot about the future of the Clean Air Act for greenhouse gases and beyond.

This item is cross-posted at Weathervane.

Reason #178 Not to Negotiate with the Taliban: Women’s Issues

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’ve written before about why we shouldn’t negotiate with any Taliban member who ranks higher than “low- and mid-level fighters.” I think it’s a fool’s errand to believe that the Taliban’s leadership would negotiate in good faith, especially when the likes of Taliban chief Mullah Omar starts sounding like he’d rather spend his time in Haight-Ashbury in 1968.

However, the idea has gained more-than-superficial traction with some highly respected individuals — Vice President Biden, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, to name a few. Of course, details like with whom we would negotiate and under what circumstances remain relatively opaque, but the fact that the Pakistanis are now vacuuming up the Taliban’s higher-ups suggests that the idea is a serious one and Islamabad wants to control the bargaining chips.

But today, the Washington Post reports yet another reason not bark too far up the Taliban’s tree — women’s issues:

The Taliban’s repressive treatment of women helped galvanize international opposition in the 1990s, and by some measures democracy has revolutionized Afghan women’s lives. Their worry now is … that male leaders, behind closed doors and desperate for peace, might not force Taliban leaders to accept, however grudgingly, that women’s roles have changed.

[…]

“We don’t want them to stop us from getting an education or working in an office,” said Jan, 18, wearing a rhinestone-studded head scarf at her rebuilt school. Women, she said, should be “the first priority.”

Karzai, the Afghan president, has endorsed the idea of talking with all levels of the Taliban, and his aides insist that women need not worry about the equal rights the Afghan constitution guarantees them. But they also say they are performing a difficult balancing act, and suggest that making bold statements about the sanctity of such topics as women’s rights might kill talks before they start.

Is there any question about women’s fate in an Afghanistan that includes Taliban governing officials? There shouldn’t be — even if the Taliban holds a minority of, say, ministries or seats in parliament, it’s obvious that women’s development in all walks of Afghan life would be serverly hampered.

Misanalyzing Democratic Divisions on Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

We’ll soon know the fate of health care reform legislation in Congress. But win or lose, the retrospective analysis of the health reform fight, and particularly the Obama administration’s overall strategy, will go on for years. That’s why I think it’s important to refute some questionable interpretations right now, before they are incorporated into the unofficial history of the debate.

Today Peter Beinart posted an article for The Daily Beast that treats the last-minute skirmishing among Democrats over health reform as the final stage in a two-decade-long battle between Clintonians and progressives, which Barack Obama brought to a conclusion by choosing to move ahead despite Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. This decision, Beinart says, changed Democrats “forever.”

Beinart’s piece is something of a pinata: it can be whacked from any number of directions. Most obviously, he mischaracterizes the current, and actually very limited, conflict among Democrats about what Obama should have done after the Brown victory. Yes, you can find a few self-described Democratic pundits (and he names virtually all of them) who have argued that Obama should have folded his tent or (somehow) pursued a bipartisan, incremental health reform proposal in the wake of Massachusetts. But the idea that the polling pair of Doug Schoen and Mark Penn, or longtime eccentric Pat Caddell, speak for the entire “Clintonian” tendency in the party is completely absurd. More typical and certainly more relevant are TDS Co-Editor William Galston (whom Beinart treats as a major foundational thinker for what he calls the “DLC types” in the party) and Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC’s think tank during all the battles Beinart describes) president Will Marshall, who have avidly backed Obama’s decision on both philosophical and practical grounds (here and here).

If you look at the actual conflict among Democrats in Congress, “no” or possible “no” votes in the House nearly all fall into two categories: nervous Democrats from very tough districts, who do not neatly fit on one side of some intraparty ideologicial spectrum, and more importantly, the “Stupak Democrats” who are focus on abortion policy. By and large, “Stupak Democrats” aren’t “Clintonian” in any meaningful sense of the term; many are very liberal voters on economic issues, and some, in fact, profess to be upset by the absence of a public option in the Senate bill and/or the presence of an insurance premium tax which many unions don’t like. To the extent that they reflect any intra-party conflict of an enduring nature, the “Stupak Democrats” represent the losing side of a debate over abortion that pre-dated the DLC/progressive battles and has little or nothing to do with them.

At least a few actual or potential Democratic defectors on health reform do so strictly from a progressive point-of-view, on grounds that the Senate bill, even if it’s “fixed” via reconciliation, merely ratifies the tainted health care status quo.

And so long as the Clinton brand is going to be thrown around in this discussion, it’s worth noting that the single most crucial modification of Obama’s campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate, which Hillary Clinton championed. The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obama’s Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.

Equally implausible is Beinart’s claim that Obama’s decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic “left” as opposed to the “center.” Yes, most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic “centrists”) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. That’s because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view, and surrender as politically calamitous as well. But as anyone who has been paying attention should know, many, perhaps most, on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did, and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.

And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinart’s analysis: his assumption that “partisanship” and “bipartisanship”–or as it puts it elsewhere, a Rovian “base mobilization” strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style “crossover” strategy–are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party, leading to the conclusion that Obama has now, once and forever, chosen the former over the latter. For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years, the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude, in fact, as his characterization of the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay “The Politics of Evasion” as urging Democrats to “move to the right”).

It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t “choose” partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obama’s many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete, but by a conviction that he could best achieve “crossover appeal” in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP. It’s not clear this strategy will work in 2010, but it might well work in 2012 and beyond, thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course. In any event, he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and “base mobilization,” and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated can’t be shoehorned into Beinart’s scheme.

Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous. But it wasn’t really a hard choice given the circumstances, and it certainly didn’t resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make “forever.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Civil Disobedience for Republicans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I know, I know, paying attention to anything Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says is a bit lazy, since she offers up irrational outrages on a near daily basis. But her remarks suggesting that Americans don’t have to comply with health care legislation if it’s enacted via procedures she doesn’t like really do blaze some new trails for the American Right — or at least trails not pursued since the early 1960s, when segregationists urged noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws.

Here’s Bachmann flirting with jail-time in defense of the great American principle of unregulated private health insurance, or whatever it is she’s standing for:

If they pass the bill legitimately, then yes, we have to follow the law — until we repeal it. But if they pass it illegitimately, then the bill is illegitimate, and we don’t have to lay down for this. It’s not difficult to figure out. So if for some reason they’re able to get their votes this week and pass this 2,700-page Senate bill — if they get it, trillions of dollars is what it’s gonna cost, when we didn’t vote on it, we need to tell them a message: That if they get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything — with anything. And you can’t say you voted on a bill when you didn’t, because it’s fraud. But we are not helpless here. We are not helpless, there are things that we can do.

What Bachmann is thundering about here specifically are reports that the House may vote on a reconciliation bill to “fix” the Senate bill, and then by a Rules Committee provision “deem” the Senate bill itself as having passed the House via efforts to amend it. Turns out the “deem and pass” strategy was used by Republicans during the Bush administration to enact a debt limit increase — never a popular vote — so there is, ahem, some bipartisan precedent for the procedure. And for all the talk about its sneakiness, it should be remembered that it is being considered not because of some substantive concerns about a “fixed” Senate bill, but because House members fear the Senate will just celebrate House passage of their bill and not bother to get around to the “fix.” In other words, it’s all procedural mumbo jumbo that’s unrelated to real health care reform. Any House member voting for the “fix” is, in fact, going to be held responsible by Republicans for supporting “ObamaCare,” so conservatives are being more than a little disingenous in claiming that “deem and pass” is some sort of devilish trick to avoid accountability.

In any event, the courts are where such matters should be thrashed out, not the streets. And by suggesting that her own view of “deem and pass” as representing “tyranny” should trump the law of the land, Bachmann is taking a fateful step towards the revolutionary posture that her Tea Party allies have been hinting at all along.

I’m reminded of an incident back in Georgia some time ago when Congress had enacted a tax bill that imposed a state-by-state volume limitation on the use of tax-exempt financing for private development projects. I was part of a state government team that designed Georgia’s system for implementing this law, and after a public briefing on the new rules in one locale, a local development official replied: “We appreciate y’all coming down here to explain all this, but we think we’ll just use the old system.” We decided not to humiliate the guy by pointing out that the IRS wouldn’t exactly let him “use the old system,” but instead informed him of that privately.

I hope someone informs Michele Bachmann and her listeners that she doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are “valid.” And if she’s willing to go to the hoosegow to resist ObamaCare, there are quite a few other Americans who think the supremacy of law is a rather important principle who will be happy to accomodate her.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Knowing What You Paid For

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

‘Tis the season to fill out your tax forms — and, for many Americans, to complain about all the tax dollars that disappear into the maw of what they see as an indifferent government. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Democracy‘s Ethan Porter has a great idea to increase Americans’ sense of investment in their government:

[L]et’s offer individual taxpayers a clear breakdown of what they’re getting in return for their taxes. The IRS should provide individual taxpayers with a receipt. To be as accurate a reflection of spending as possible, such a receipt would be mailed at the beginning of the year following the April 15 deadline. So, for example, I would receive a receipt for my 2009 tax return, filed in 2010, in the beginning of 2011 estimating where my money has gone thus far, and will go until I file my next return. Soon after, the president would unveil a new budget resolution, and, as April loomed, the process would begin again.

By necessity, such a receipt would be an estimate, broken down according to what each taxpayer had paid the previous April. (Only the portion of the budget consisting of money generated by individual taxpayers would be deconstructed for each person.) The receipt would necessarily represent a bit of an oversimplification–the federal budget is a monstrously complicated thing. For our purposes, comprehensibility, as opposed to comprehensiveness, should be prized. The text should be simple, and the accompanying graph should be clear. We have the capacity to do this already: Today, numerous outside groups, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities probably the best among them, produce material along these lines. But they don’t do so in accordance with the federal government, and their work isn’t distributed to every taxpayer.

If done right, a receipt could have powerful and lasting consequences. It would make clear the enormous amount of goods and services provided by the government.

Even as conservatives have launched a largely successful crusade against taxes over the last couple of decades, public demand for services that the government provides hasn’t waned. The result is a disconnect: anger at the level of taxation — which has already been generally decreasing since the 1970s — and yet a steady expectation of goods and services from a government that relies on taxpayer money to sustain itself.

Considering the misconceptions the public has about where their taxpayer money goes, Porter’s idea could be a great corrective to the conservative narrative of a government squandering its tax dollars or prioritizing areas of less importance to them. As Porter points out, Americans tend to overestimate how much of the money goes toward things like welfare and foreign aid. When confronted with the fact that those numbers are actually small compared to other expenses like national defense and Social Security, taxpayers may see the check that they’re dropping in the mailbox every spring in a whole new light.

It’s no secret that the U.S. is going to have to find new ways to cut spending or raise revenues to steer us off our current path of fiscal disaster. An informed taxpayer might be more realistic about the hard choices necessary on both sides of the budgetary ledger. A receipt for our tax dollars will make for a less inflamed electorate — and, by extension, plant the seeds for a more reasonable fiscal politics.

Biden, Israel, and the Aftermath

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here’s a lesson in how political optics and poor timing can conspire to exacerbate diplomatic squabbles into really big deals.

Last week, Vice President Biden went on a trip to Israel. He was nominally there on a goodwill visit to reinforce the strong ties between the two countries, particularly as George Mitchell, the administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, sought to reengage the Israelis and Palestinians in indirect diplomacy.

Biden’s trip started well. He did a press conference with PM Benjamin Netanyahu and proclaimed America’s “absolute, total, unvarnished” commitment to Israeli security. Then he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on March 9, writing in the guest book that Israel is the heart, life and hope of the world’s Jews and that it saves lives every day, before laying a wreath and lighting a candle on behalf of the administration. So all’s going swimmingly, right?

Then, this little bombshell fell: Israel’s Interior Ministry announced that 1,600 new housing units would be built in East Jerusalem. The Obama administration has long pushed for a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank as a prerequisite to peace talks, a position that Will Marshall and I backed in this opinion piece just before Obama was inaugurated.

The announcement turned the trip on its ear — Biden delayed attending a dinner with Netanyahu and issued this uncomfortably harsh statement: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units,” saying that it “undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.” It was a tough but necessary statement – as I’ve written before, the administration must “restore America’s credibility as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Biden’s statement is testament to that. Had Biden not been in the country when this news broke, the tone coming from D.C. would have been more muted.

Privately, Biden has reportedly been even more blunt. The fallout continues to be ugly — Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. claims that U.S.-Israeli relations are at their worst in 35 years. Things will heat up this week in the U.S. as AIPAC‘s annual conference is scheduled. Will the White House snub them?

It has been quite a storm, and one that might be traced to internal Israeli politics. The Interior Ministry — the department that approved the settlements — is controlled by a far-right religious party and could have timed the announcement to embarrass and out-flank Netanyahu during such a high-profile visit.

Assuming so, it worked like a charm — the move forced the Obama administration into an uncomfortable position, derailed any semblance of peace talks for the time-being, and put Netanyahu on the spot to reiterate his strong support for Israel building settlements wherever it wants.

Where do we go from here? Frankly, this is going to be a difficult one to recover from. The White House should channel its No Drama Obama persona and remember that that’s the most constructive long-term role it can play, even when internal Israeli politics try to derail the process.  The Obama administration should continue to view itself as an honest broker and retain a cool head in marshalling Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, making it make clear to the Palestinians that they shouldn’t use the flap as an excuse to give up on talks.

Empty Threats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the political world prepares for what appears to be Last Stop Week on health reform, conservatives seem astonished that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing ahead for final enactment of legislation passed by both Houses last year, instead of folding their hands and fleeing in terror. They are particularly incensed that Democrats aren’t being shamed or frightened by the prospect of–gasp!–a poisoned partisan atmosphere in Washington. Here’s how Julie Mason of the conservative Washington Examiner presents the threat:

The White House claims it’s above worrying about the politics of health care — they just want a bill passed this week.Good thing, because politics in Washington could become a lot more ferocious and partisan, whether their plan flies or not.

“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Even in the current, highly partisan atmosphere, it can get a lot worse.”

Sorry, Brian & Julie, you are wrong. It really can’t get much worse. And for that, conservatives have no one but themselves to blame, if they actually even care.

Just to cite the most obvious example, there were many moments over the last year when the White House and congressional Democrats might well have significantly changed health reform legislation in exchange for just a few Republican votes (in fact, they made unilateral concessions in the Senate again and again simply to keep the possibility open). And after the loss of the 60th Senate vote last month, had Republicans offered any suggestions other than complete repudiation of the bills already enacted by a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, Democrats would have snapped them up instantly. But in an atmosphere where long-held Republican ideas on health reform like the individual mandate were suddenly being denounced as socialist or even fascist by the Right, no serious offers were forthcoming, unless you think such “ideas” as sweeping away state regulation of health insurers via mandatory interestate sales is “serious.”

So let’s not hear any empty threats about Republican “partisanship.” For better or worse, the GOP made a clear and collective decision last year to take partisanship to the max on every conceivable front, and they have been quite successful with that strategy in a nilhilistic sort of way. But there are no arrows left in that particular quiver.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The New Yorker Goes Nuclear

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this week’s New Yorker (subscribers only), Hendrik Hertzberg wades into an issue that has taken up increasing bandwidth in our climate and energy debates: nuclear energy. Weighing nuclear power’s virtues against its drawbacks, Hertzberg concludes:

Republicans love [nuclear energy] anyway – perhaps because it annoys environmentalists, perhaps on its merits. But they don’t love it as much as they hate taxes, which is how they view cap-and-trade. Obama’s willingness to give nukes a chance won’t win him many of their votes. “It won’t cause Republicans to support the national energy tax,” a spokesman for Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said. But it might win a few of those among them who don’t hate taxes (and science) enough to dismiss global warming as an elaborate hoax. Carl Pope, the executive chairman of the Sierra Club, has said that Obama’s nods to nuclear “may ease the politics around comprehensive clean-energy and climate legislation, but we do not believe that they are the best policy.” But the best, as often happens in our sclerotic political system, may not be among the available choices. As we stumble our way toward an acceptable approach to energy and climate change, the merely good might be the best that we can get.

Its support notwithstanding, Hertzberg’s piece still traffics in the same fear-mongering about nuclear energy’s safety record that has hindered its expansion for decades. “The nuclear industry is one whose record for safety and transparency is very far from spotless, and reviving it will require, besides big spending, nanny-state levels of government regulation,” Hertzberg writes.

In fact, the nuclear industry’s safety culture is so strong that working in the nuclear industry is actually safer than working in manufacturing. Considering the alarmist rhetoric surrounding nuclear energy safety, it might surprise most Americans to know that not one person has died or been injured from a nuclear-related incident in the U.S. (Three Mile Island, that ominous symbol of nuclear risk, did not actually lead to any adverse health or environmental effects.) According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), plant safety performance since Three Mile Island has improved exponentially, with the average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years dropping to nearly zero. Meanwhile, the average number of times that nuclear plant safety systems have had to be activated – a good index of safety performance – is one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.

What about Vermont Yankee, the nuclear plant in the Green Mountain State that was recently shut down by its legislature after tritium was detected in nearby groundwater? While such events demonstrate for some critics the unreliability of nuclear, one could argue it actually shows the improved vigilance and monitoring at nuclear plants – and the continuing hysteria among public and politicians over even small amounts of radiation. According to NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, such leaks – which have been found at other plants – do not constitute a public health threat. “In the grand scheme of radiation, it is well down the scale,” Jaczko said last month, “but in the area of public perception, it takes on greater significance.” According to an NRC study in 2009, “These pipe leaks have been of low significance with respect to public health and safety and the environment.” Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency has called tritium one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits low levels of radiation and leaves the body quickly. (For more perspective on the health effects of the Vermont tritium leak, check out this post from Rod Adams’ indispensable Atomic Insights blog.)

Hertzberg’s piece adds one more voice to a growing chorus of acceptance among liberals that nuclear energy needs to be a part of the energy mix if we are to address climate change. There’s no getting around it: We need to stop using coal and replace it with low- and non-carbon emitting sources. Wind and solar will certainly have a role in that transformation, but they simply can’t be scaled up to meet our energy needs at the moment or for the next couple of decades. Nuclear, on the other hand, is here, it works, and it doesn’t emit carbon. Based on those facts, one would expect a stronger push from progressives eager to battle climate change. But in the current climate, grudging acceptance might be the best that we can get.

Jesus at the Tea Party

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As you may have heard, Glenn Beck has gotten himself into some serious hot water by suggesting that people (or more specificially, Christians) leave their churches or even their denominations behind if they harbor any talk about “social justice” or “economic justice,” terms he identifies as “code” for communist- and Nazi-sponsored totalitarian designs. As usually interpreted, Beck’s line sounds like a fairly common kulturkampf tactic by conservatives who are engaging in civil war against alleged “modernism” within the Roman Catholic Church, or who have been urging Protestants for years to abandon “liberal” mainline churches for various fundamentalist gatherings.

But if you listen to what Beck actually said last week, in another rant on the subject, he’s saying something about Christianity that’s a lot more radical than the usual back-to-the-1950s stuff about religion focusing on personal morality rather than caring for the poor. Calling “social justice” a “perversion of the Gospel,” Rev. Glenn explains it this way:

Nowhere does Jesus say, “Hey, if someone asks for your shirt, give the government a coat, and then have the government give him a pair of slacks.” You want to help out, you help out.

Now you often hear religious conservatives argue that state social welfare programs undermine the charitable instinct or the private organizations that help the poor. But Beck seems to be suggesting that any government efforts–indeed, any collective efforts–to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and so forth, are “perversions of the Gospel.” Beck’s Jesus is a strict libertarian.

Beck’s original remarks were treated by some as a thinly veiled attack on the Catholic Church, since, as the conservative religious journal First Things quickly pointed out, the very term “social justice” was invented by a nineteenth-century Jesuit theologian interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas. “Social justice” isn’t just a trendy contemporary slogan, and it certainly wasn’t pioneered by communists or Nazis: it was the central theme of the great Social Encyclicals of various Popes, most notably Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, is considered especially normative.

More basically, the idea that Christianity is opposed to state action in pursuit of the common welfare is highly alien to both Catholic and Protestant traditions. Most religious observers would contend that “social justice” as practiced by communists and Nazis is a “perversion” of Christianity, and hardly any would confuse government-sponsored health and welfare programs with totalitarianism. Even amongst the hard-core Christian Right, most spokesmen save their Nazi analogies for attacks on legalized abortion.

As it happens, Beck is a Mormon, which isn’t exactly a libertarian creed, either. But he’s really endangering his status on the American Right by claiming that Jesus would today be out there with the Tea Party folk fulminating about the “looting” of taxpayers to help the poor.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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