issue: Politics

Do Americans Hate Free Speech?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Looking for a “wedge issue” that will separate Republican politicians and interest groups from their rank-and-file, and from independents?

Check out this newly released finding from the most recent ABC/WaPo poll:

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court’s Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent “strongly” opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits.

The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent). …

Nearly three-quarters of self-identified conservative Republicans say they oppose the Supreme Court ruling, with most of them strongly opposed. Some two-thirds of conservative Republicans favor congressional efforts to limit corporate and union spending, though with less enthusiasm than liberal Democrats.

What makes this finding so interesting, of course, is that Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals have fallen over themselves praising the Citizens United decision not just as a Good Thing, but as a heaven-sent vindication of First Amendment free speech rights. This is particularly true of the solon who is supposedly well on his way to becoming Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said of the decision:

Any proponent of free speech should applaud this decision. Citizens United is and will be a First Amendment triumph of enduring significance.

So I guess Mitch is saying that 80% of Americans don’t care much for free speech. And that may even be true if you think money talks.

The good news in this poll is that it shows a very strong base of bipartisan popular support for the legislative efforts of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to fence off some of the more deplorable implications of Citizens United. But unfortunately, “fencing off” is about all Congress can do in the way of “reinstating limits” on political spending, which is what Americans manifestly want to happen. Unless Citizens United is actually overturned by a future Court (possible if Democrats hang onto the White House for a while) or a constitutional amendment (rarely a real option), the only practical counterweight to massive corporate political spending would be a system of public financing for congressional campaigns. It would have been nice if the ABC/WaPo pollsters had asked about that option. But I strongly suspect this isn’t exactly the best political environment for politicians to ask taxpayers to pay their campaign costs.

Still, the yawning gap between public opinion and the GOP on Citizens United should draw immediate and sustained attention from Democrats. And particularly at a time when the advantages of power in Washington have been so visibly minimized by structural obstacles, Democrats should open up a broader front in supporting political reforms. The status quo isn’t working for anyone other than those who don’t want government to work at all.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Culture Wars Live On In Texas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).

Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.

As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.

Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.

Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.

Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Evan Bayh Packs It In

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.

If anyone could have been expected to make a seamless transition to the national political stage, it was Bayh, the handsome, dutiful son of former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. But from his arrival here in 1998, Bayh seemed frustrated with the ideological and partisan hothouse that is contemporary Washington.

Maybe that’s because Bayh was a popular, two-term governor of Indiana who built a solid record of progressive reform in a fairly conservative state. He isn’t the first ex-governor to bring an executive temperament to Congress, only to feel stymied in an institution where partisan power struggles and the evasion of hard choices often trump public problem-solving.

Bayh nonetheless has distinguished himself as a leader of his party’s pragmatic wing, as a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and key organizer of an influential group of centrist Senate Democrats. In the Senate, he has championed the economic prospects of working Americans, like the many who have lost jobs in Indiana’s troubled manufacturing sector. He has been a stalwart for fiscal discipline, echoing the Jeffersonian view (best articulated by John Randolph of Virginia) that elected officials should spend every public dollar as if it were their own. And Bayh has filled a critical vacuum in the Democratic Party for credible, tough-minded voices on national security and foreign policy.

Bayh’s earnest centrism and refusal to put partisanship over considerations of national interest have not endeared him to the Democratic left. Some self-appointed commissars of ideological correctness are even saying “good riddance” to the Indiana Democrat. This is monumentally dumb.

If Democrats want to become the nation’s majority party again, it can only be as a broad coalition of pragmatic centrists and liberals, including a large dollop of the independent voters who have been drifting away from the party since the 2008 election. However overrepresented they may be in the chattering class, liberal purists constitute less than a quarter of the national electorate.

In fact, Democrats should worry plenty about Bayh’s decision. With the midterm election looming, the last thing they want to do is give the impression of a party hostile to pragmatic centrists and independents who have similar views. And the departure of a serious, public-spirited leader of Bayh’s caliber can only deepen the public’s jaundiced view of Congress.

“There is too much partisanship and…too much narrow ideology in Washington,“ Bayh said in explaining his decision not to seek reelection. “Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

That’s right, and it’s a big problem for the governing party.

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

Bayh and the Median Voter

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.

The peerless Nate Silver has come up with an analysis of what this means for Democrats:

Of the 59 Senate Democrats in the current Congress, he was the 2nd most conservative after Ben Nelson, according to the DW-NOMINATE database. Nevertheless, because he comes from a fairly red state, Bayh was reasonably valuable to his party, ranking about in the middle of the pack among all Democratic Senators based on his roll call votes.

Throughout his career, Bayh has come under fire from the left for his resolutely centrist positions. But such criticisms almost always leave out the political context in which moderates like him operate. As Silver points out, Bayh was representing a generally conservative state (it’s R+5 according to the Partisan Voting Index) in which the chances of a Democrat being elected are about 40 percent. And yet, according to Silver’s analysis, Bayh’s voting record was actually more liberal than the Indiana norm.

Complain all you want about his unreliability as a Democratic vote, but the fact is that Bayh was to the left of the median voter in his state. Considering the constituency that he had to represent, Bayh was actually a relatively valuable member of the Democratic caucus. Of course, it’s not impossible for Democrats to run a more liberal, populist candidate in Bayh’s place who could win. But the likelier possibility, especially in this environment, is that a Republican far more conservative than the incumbent will take the seat, and an iffy vote for Democrats now becomes a reliable “party of no” vote.

“[T]he fact is that over time, the median voter theorem tends to prevail, and that electing someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction,” Silver concludes. That seems obvious, but it’s a lesson that progressives tend to forget. Indeed, Bayh’s departure has been met by cheers of “Good riddance!” from some progressives. If the objective is to make the progressive tent a little smaller and the conservative one a little bigger, then yes, good riddance indeed.

A Better Glimpse at the Tea Party Movement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.

The poll shows 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43 percent saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55 percent of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62 percent of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only nine percent have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. Eighty percent have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.

Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).

There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.

But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hadesigns/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A Proposed Compromise on the Filibuster

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ezra Klein links to a Slate article by Ben Eidelson that, I think, is quietly devastating to the idea that the Senate filibuster has somehow destroyed the democratic process. Eidelson shows that from 1991 to 2008, in the typical successful filibuster, the senators behind the filibuster (i.e., opposing the cloture motion) represented states comprising 46 percent of the U.S. population. If filibustering Senators represented 51 percent of the population, then we would conclude that the typical successful filibuster was supported by senators representing a majority of Americans. In that case, at least by small-r republican principles, the filibuster would protect the will of the majority.

Forty-six percent is not 51 percent, of course. But here’s another way of thinking about the effect of the filibuster. It could be argued that, to account for the fact that most Americans’ views on most issues are only weakly held, we should have a higher threshold for legislation passing than support by a simple majority of senators, or even support by enough senators to represent a simple majority of Americans. Instead, for legislation to pass, we might decide that enough senators representing 55 percent of Americans should support the legislation. If that were the procedural guideline, then on average, the way the filibuster has worked has been consistent with that guideline.

For the practice of the filibuster when Republicans have been in the minority to be consistent with a procedural guideline, the rule would have to be that enough senators to represent 60 percent of Americans should support the legislation (see Eidelson’s table). Interestingly, however, despite the greater use of the filibuster among Republicans, in Eidelson’s data Republican minorities had an average of 20 successful filibusters per Congress, compared with 16.6 successful filibusters per Congress by Democratic minorities. That’s a fairly small difference, although the current Congress is not included in these figures.

Unlike most progressive bloggers, I remain ambivalent about the filibuster. Eidelson’s data shows that Republican filibusters are much more likely to be anti-majoritarian than Democratic filibusters (even if they are not dramatically anti-majoritarian). He proposes as a compromise, replacing the 60-vote rule for cloture votes with a 55-vote rule, which historically would have eliminated most successful Republican filibusters while retaining most successful Democratic ones. Another compromise that’s consistent with small-r republicanism and small-d democracy that might be more palatable to Republicans would be to implement instead something like a 55-percent-of-the-population rule for cloture votes (while still requiring a majority of senators too). This would set a higher threshold for support than simple majority-senator-rule, would ensure that small-state senators could not thwart the preferences of senators representing a solid majority of Americans, and would not have such dramatically partisan consequences compared with a 55-vote rule (meaning it would have a better chance of being implemented).

High Noon in Tehran

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Iranians are bracing for violent clashes in the streets of Tehran today, the Islamic Republic’s 31st anniversary. Both the government and the opposition Green Movement are calling for demonstrations to mark the occasion.

Reza Aslan, a PPI friend and contributor, says the regime’s increasingly brutal crackdown on domestic dissent has brought Iran to the verge of civil war. Other observers fear a Tiananmen Square-style massacre that could cripple the democratic opposition, which flared up after last summer’s rigged elections.

Meanwhile, Iran’s rulers are promising rude surprises for their external critics, too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warns of a “telling blow” Thursday, while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, threatens a “punch” for the United States and other countries that have worked to end Iran’s nuclear program.

Such cryptic belligerence no doubt reflects the regime’s desire to distract the world’s attention from its increasingly shaky position at home. The mullahs’ old tactic of whipping up paranoia and striking defiant poses against supposed U.S. or Western plots is wearing thin. A broad cross-section of Iranian society seems focused instead on the Islamic Republic’s metamorphosis into an Islamic police state.

“The Islamic Republic is nothing but an economic-religious-military complex that applies its coercive power not through political institutions but through a military and security apparatus under the direct supervision of Ayatollah Khamenei,” said Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy at a congressional hearing last week. No “engagement” with opponents for this regime; instead, it has unleashed its vast security apparatus on Iranian society. Scores of anti-government protestors have been killed and hundreds more imprisoned. Prominent regime opponents have been subjected to totalitarian-style show trials, and the government has announced plans to execute nine protesters. The government is relentless in policing the internet, jamming foreign broadcasts and blocking contacts with the outside world.

Ahmadinejad underscored his contempt for global opinion last weekend in announcing that Iran will begin enriching uranium to higher levels, bringing it much closer to fuel that can easily be “weaponized.” He also threatened, implausibly, to build 10 more nuclear plants over the next year. In any case, Ahmadinejad’s latest antics should have been an embarrassment to China, which has been blocking tougher sanctions because, it claims, the regime is ready to deal on enrichment.

How should the United States react to these and coming provocations? Not by intensifying efforts to “engage” the regime in talks focused narrowly on the nuclear dispute. Washington needs to broaden its angle of vision to encompass the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom and democracy. Twice before, in 1953 and 1979, America failed to side with such popular aspirations, sacrificing our own ideals to the logic of superpower rivalry. It was a bad bargain then, and we can’t afford to make the same mistake again.

Leaders of the Green Movement have made it clear they neither expect nor need America’s help in their struggle. But without offering direct support to democratic reformers, the United States should be more vocal in defending human rights in Iran. And, together with our European partners, we should justify stricter sanctions on human rights grounds as well as nonproliferation.

And as Khalaji noted, “The threat to regional peace and Iranian democracy are the same: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).” The Corps is in charge of Iran’s nuclear program, and is Khamenei’s chief instrument for political suppression. It also funnels Iranian aid and arms to extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as Shia militants in Iraq and other Sunni-majority countries.

Of course, Washington should keep probing for signs of Iranian tractability on the nuclear issue. But the United States should be wary of doing anything now -– either by overreacting to its bluster, or rushing to engage in high level talks –- that would boost the sagging prestige of the Iranian leadership and the IRGC. Over the long haul, political change inside Iran is our surest guarantee of safety.

Scott Brown for President? No Way.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A lot of dumb things get said in American political commentary, and I’ve undoubtedly said a few myself over the years. But one dumb thing that ought to be quickly exploded is the persistent talk that newly minted Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts might run a viable campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

Yes, Brown is a godlike figure to Republicans right now. Yes, various domain names connected with a Brown presidential run got snatched up the moment he won his Senate race. And yes, he’s the symbol of the “fresh faces” Republicans long for every time they look at the rather unexciting (or in the case of Sarah Palin, too exciting) field they will likely choose from in 2012.

But it ain’t happening. And that’s not because of his rather signal lack of experience since, as his fans love to point out, Barack Obama only had a year more of elected experience beyond the state senate when he was elected in 2008.

To mention the most important reason it ain’t happening: Brown is pro-choice. He explicitly opposes overturning Roe v. Wade, and in fact, his rhetoric on abortion is remarkably similar to that of the president. And this, boys and girls, has become an absolute disqualifier for Republican presidential prospects these days; just ask Rudy Guiliani. Or better yet, ask John McCain or Joe Lieberman, since McCain’s decision to put Lieberman on his ticket in 2008 was only abandoned when his advisors told him he’d face a potentially successful convention revolt if a pro-choice running-mate were chosen.

Sure, pro-lifers supported Brown’s Senate run, but there’s all the difference in the world between being a candidate in a blue state who can help disrupt Democratic control of the upper chamber, and being a candidate for national leader of the GOP and the person who makes Supreme Court appointments. Past Republican presidential candidates have gotten into trouble for failing to support a constitutional amendment recognizing fetuses from the moment of conception as “persons” endowed with full constitutional rights. Supporting Roe is an abomination to today’s GOPers; in a recent poll, self-identified Republican voters said they considered abortion “murder” by a margin of 76 percent to eight percent (nearly a third of them, in fact, want to outlaw contraceptives). This is not a negotiable issue.

If that’s not enough to convince you that Brown 2012 is a mirage, consider another problem: Brown was and remains an avid supporter of Massachusetts’ universal health plan, which is extremely similar to the national plan passed without a single Republican vote by the U.S. Senate. That wasn’t a problem for Brown in the Senate race; indeed, his main argument for his pledge that he would vote against any such bill in the Senate was that Massachusetts didn’t need help from the feds because they had already enacted the same reforms. But he’s still on record favoring a “socialist” scheme for health care, and specific items like an individual mandate for health insurance coverage, which most Republicans nationally consider unconstitutional, or perhaps even a form of slavery.

To be sure, this is a problem that Brown shares with Mitt Romney, who signed his state’s version of ObamaCare into law. But Romney has been inching away from the health plan since his 2008 presidential campaign, and will probably repudiate it entirely before long, while Brown’s hugs for the plan are very fresh.

Speaking of Romney: his own presidential ambitions are still another bar to a Brown candidacy. The Brown campaign kept the Mittster under wraps until Election Night, which was smart since Romney is not very popular in Massachusetts. But Brown’s political advisors are all Romney people, who presumably have some residual loyalty to their old boss. Will Romney, who probably first saw a future President of the United States in the mirror before entering kindergarten, step aside for this whippersnapper? Unlikely, and there’s definitely no room in a Republican presidential field for two socialized-medicine supporters from Massachusetts.

So you can forget about Brown for President in 2012, which will become apparent once he starts casting heretical votes in the Senate in order to position himself for a re-election run that same year. He clearly seems smart enough to understand that in 2012, he’ll be dealing with far less favorable turnout patterns, and can’t expect his opponent to run as feckless a campaign as Martha Coakley’s. Odds are, Democrats will run a candidate against Brown who has heard of Curt Schilling and doesn’t wait until the final week to run ads.

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

Turning Coats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Some of you may remember that the very day after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Republicans began fantasizing about actually taking over the Senate this November, in no small part because former senator Dan Coats had announced he was coming out of retirement to take on the previously unassailable Democrat Evan Bayh in Indiana. Yeah, it was noted at the time that Coats had been living and voting in Virginia for the last decade, while working as a DC lobbyist, but GOPers figured Coats’ long political record in the Hoosier State would enable him to brush that off as a less-than-youthful indiscretion.

But since then, Indiana Democrats, accessing public records, have found out and loudly let it be known that Coats wasn’t just a lobbyist for banks and equity firms, but for foreign governments. He personally lobbied for India, but much more interestingly, his firm lobbied for Yemen. You know, Yemen, that al Qaeda stomping ground where “Christmas Day Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab got his training.

Suffice it to say that Democrats have not kept this information to themselves. According to a piece in Politico today about the “nuking” of Coats:

“We just hit him with a freight train,” one Democratic official familiar with the anti-Coats effort said Monday. “It’s Politics 101: Frame the guy early.”

The effectiveness of the Democratic attack on Coats is probably best reflected by the fact that none of the Republicans previously in the race to challenge Bayh (including former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, a fiery conservative) have pulled out. Coats’ proto-campaign has largely confined itself to whining about “mud” being thrown at their hero.

So maybe Republicans shouldn’t be quite so quick to mark Indiana down in the column of likely Senate wins this year.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The GOP’s Health Farce

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.

It’s bad enough that Democrats, despite holding the White House and commanding majorities in Congress, can’t pass their top domestic priority. They look as feckless as Moliere’s cuckolded husbands.

But now Republicans are trying to dictate health care policy, despite having been soundly whipped in the last two national elections. As piously as one of Moliere’s hypocrites, they profess their devotion to covering the uninsured and restraining health care costs in a market-friendly way, though somehow they never got around to pushing a serious proposal when they held power.

Republican leaders have warily agreed to attend the summit, for fear that a no-show would cement their image as the party of “no.” But they are telling reporters it will be a waste of time unless Obama agrees to jettison reform bills that have passed both Houses of Congress and start over from scratch.

“Why would they want to keep pushing something that the public is overwhelmingly against?” GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell asked rhetorically after meeting with Obama this week. “Really, right now, it’s up to the President and Speaker Pelosi to start listening to the American people,” chimed in Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “If they don’t, there’s not much to talk about.”

They may be the minority party, but Republicans are effectively claiming a new mandate on health reform – from opinion polls.

True, public opinion has turned against the health reform blueprints that emerged after many months of haggling and horse-trading on Capitol Hill. Obama says Americans were turned off by the “process,” but then, he was the one who decided to offer only the most general reform guidelines and let lawmakers fill in the blanks.

But public opinion is mutable, even fickle. Most Americans were strongly for health reform before they were against it. And it’s highly unlikely they oppose it because they’re intimately familiar with the complex provisions of the House and Senate bills. The way they were put together – basically, by paying off powerful interests and hold-out lawmakers – no doubt was a factor, but polls indicate that worries about the economy and jobs were a bigger one.

Public opinion may yet be turned around by a decisive show of political leadership. That’s why Obama is right to keep pressing for reform, even if in the end he has to settle for less than he wants or the country needs. And the coming summit is shrewdly conceived to give Republicans a chance either to win some substantive points – Obama is already talking about adding tort reform to the mix – or to show their overriding motive is to defeat a Democratic president, not fix health care.

In any case, shifting polls, tea parties and a single U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts don’t give Republicans the right to speak for the country, much less shape the nation’s health care agenda. That would turn a farce into a tragedy.

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

Not Working: Republicans’ Assault on Obama’s National Security Policies

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what we already knew: Republicans may be hammering away at Obama for being soft on terrorism, but the public isn’t listening.

Since the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the percentage of Americans who approve of the White House’s handling of terrorism has actually increased by 3 percentage points, from 53 to 56 percent between November and now (39 percent disapprove). Respondents also gave the president a five-percent edge over Republicans on the question of who is more capable of handling terrorism issues. Public attitudes have shifted, however, on the issue federal courts vs. military tribunals — the number supporting federal courts has slipped a full eight points since the end of last year.

It’s slightly curious that Republicans view terrorism as such a winner, especially because the only effect they’re having is on the electorally dubious issue of which mechanism should be used to try suspects. Even there, the administration has made arguments in favor of federal trials (like the one that sentenced shoe bomber Richard Reid to life) that are only now taking hold.

So why are Republicans continuing to hammer away? I imagine its a bunch of factors. The anti-Obama sentiment has them pushing back on absolutely everything (even if they supported the same policies under Bush), they really believe Obama is a weakling, and they fundamentally misunderstand national security in the 21st century. It’s also an issue that really fires up the conservative base almost as much as taxes, and that will be important to motivate volunteers and donors in an election year.

Take Sarah Palin’s remarks at the Tea Party Convention. She said, “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.” The truth is that in the fight against terrorism — if we really stand a chance at long-term American security — we need the president to be both. And a clear majority of the public believes he is.

Same-Sex Marriage in Iowa: Safe Until 2014

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have failed to force a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Under Iowa’s constitution, amendments have to be enacted by two consecutive legislatures (which meet for two years), and then face ratification by voters. So barring some unforeseen development late in the current session, the earliest an amendment could be sent to voters would be in 2014.

Aside from the fact that this gives same-sex marriage a new lease on life, this non-barking dog also preserves the issue as a source of political controversy in Iowa for two more election cycles. But it also means that it won’t be directly on the ballot during the 2012 presidential contest.

Same-sex marriage has become a heavily partisan issue in Iowa, with virtually all Democratic officeholders supporting the Supreme Court decision and virtually all Republicans opposing it. But it’s also a bit of an intraparty issue for Republicans, since elected officials and candidates deemed insufficiently obsessed with efforts to overturn the court decision (e.g., former Gov. Terry Branstad, the favorite in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary) have faced angry criticism from the Cultural Right. And the issue could spill over into the 2012 Republican presidential caucuses, where Iowa, as always, will have the first say, and where the Cultural Right (viz. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 victory) has always been very strong.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Going Along with the GOP Charade

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 37-second snippet of House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking after yesterday’s jobs bill meeting left me fuming.

Asked to comment on the upcoming bipartisan health care summit that President Obama proposed, here’s what Boehner said:

It’s going to be very difficult to have a bipartisan conversation with regard to a 2,700-page health care bill that a Democrat majority in the House and a Democrat majority in the Senate can’t pass. So why are we going to talk about a bill that can’t pass?

First of all, health care legislation did pass. In both chambers. The House passed its bill. The Senate passed its bill. They were in the process of reconciling their bills when the Senate lost its 60th seat to Scott Brown. Now, because the Republican strategy calls for total obstruction of any major legislation that is not 100 percent Republican, a Democratic majority in the Senate can’t pass whatever emerges from a House-Senate conference even though Dems hold 59 out of a 100 seats. (And Rep. Boehner, it’s “the Democratic majority,” not “Democrat.” But you knew that already.)

But there’s another part to the clip that set me off. It comes in the last few seconds when a reporter outside the frame asks Boehner, “Do you think [Obama’s] sincerely listening to your concerns?” “We’ll see,” Boehner solemnly intones.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about our discourse today is the pretense among the media and the commentariat that these Republicans are open to discussion — that there actually is a meeting point in the middle, or even right of the middle, where the Republicans finally say, “OK, it’s a deal.” There isn’t. The Republican objective isn’t to shape policy with their own ideas — it’s to make sure policy doesn’t get made at all.

One suspects that many in the media know this. But for some reason, they have to engage in the kabuki theater of pretending that Republicans actually do want to participate in governing, when obstructionism in the pursuit of regaining power is clearly their game plan. Just once I’d like a journalist to ask of Republicans, “You have asked Democrats to drop some of their priorities to achieve compromise. Which of your priorities are you willing to drop?” Or, “If the president accepts your pet provisions for health reform, which of his provisions would you accept?” But in the current media narrative, all the onus to achieve bipartisanship is on Obama and the Democrats. Bipartisanship will be measured by how much they give in to a Republican Party that doesn’t have to budge at all.

Playing Chicken

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.

On one very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.

Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.

Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.

This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.

But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.

It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less the president’s terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.

The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.

Cheney’s Terrorists

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is a guest column from Major General Donald Edwards, Vermont Army National Guard (Ret.), who served in the military for 37 years.

Just last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared with certainty that there will be another terrorist attack aimed at the United States within the next six months. With the Obama administration pursuing record numbers of drone attacks and taking out top al-Qaeda leaders, it’s hard to understand how this could be the case. But the paradox becomes clearer if we take a quick trip back through time to examine the track record of one particular individual: Vice President Dick Cheney.

As a former military officer, it is immensely difficult to speak out against our former vice president. While he was in office, I believed that it was inappropriate to criticize Dick Cheney. But now that he is no longer in government, I am compelled to speak my mind about his disastrous national security policies.

In the days and years following September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney stood out as the chief architect of a calamitous approach to U.S. foreign policy that resulted in a weakened United States and the recruitment of a new generation of terrorists dedicated to anti-American jihad. The Bush-Cheney contribution to terrorist recruitment is clear from the numbers: In 2000, there were 423 international terrorist attacks. The Iraq War heralded a sharp spike in terrorist attacks, which continued with a 607 percent average yearly increase. Eight years later, there were 11,770 international terrorist attacks, as the terrorists birthed by the Bush-Cheney policies grew up.

Unlike Dick Cheney, who glorifies conflict but has never put his own body on the line, I am a retired military officer. I know firsthand the long list of security threats that our country faces. And I know that Cheney’s reckless strategy, out of touch with today’s threats, made that list longer. The first rule of grand strategy – from Sun Tzu to General Petraeus – is to choose your own battlefield. On September 12, 2001, the United States was in a position to frame the security threats of the new century as the world united against violent, radical extremists. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was eager to frame his battle as the West versus Islam. The Bush administration walked onto al-Qaeda’s battlefield and began fighting Osama bin Laden’s war.

As even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld realized, winning the fight against al-Qaeda requires killing more terrorists than we create. Instead, Cheney served as a prime recruiter for our enemies. Al-Qaeda featured Guantanamo Bay in its recruiting videos, citing its evasion of the Geneva Conventions as “evidence” of American’s lack of moral standing and antipathy toward Islam.

Defeating al-Qaeda turns on human intelligence, which requires careful infiltration, relationship-building, cultural research, and triangulation of information. But conservatives based their intelligence-gathering tactics on Hollywood movies: bust a knee cap hard enough, and the truth will pour out like blood. In reality, interrogators rarely know whether they have the right knee cap — and even if they do, actual intelligence agents know that busting it is likely to yield a string of lies, misinformation, and false leads. Instead of generating information and creating leads, Cheney’s strategy led to an Arab generation growing up on images of Abu Ghraib.

Finally, quashing al-Qaeda requires focusing on the countries where the movement had built relationships and infrastructure. For over a decade, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had lived in and erected training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, Bin Laden’s roots lie in Yemen, and he repeatedly recruited the radically loyal tribes originating in that country for his riskiest missions. Yet the past administration ignored Yemen and starved Afghanistan for troops in order to launch a war in Iraq, where there were no terrorists. Terrorist attacks spiked following the invasion of Iraq, and have continued to grow since.

For a generation of young Arabs now in the prime terrorist age range of 18-25, September 11 was their first political memory. The Bush-Cheney strategy handed Al Qaeda the colors they needed to paint a false picture of “America versus Islam.” It produced hundreds of terrorists who learned that they could be heroes by fighting the West — the West that tortured and indefinitely detained Arab brethren and killed women and children.

And to think we had an opportunity, in the wake of 9/11, to bring about a smarter, more hopeful strategy. America was unified and ready to sacrifice on September 12. If our leaders had called on the best and brightest to learn Arabic or join the CIA, we would now have a flood of fresh intelligence experts. If they had asked us to declare our independence from oil – demanding that auto companies innovate and asking environmentalists to accept a resurgence of nuclear power – we would have stopped funding the bullets that are now going into terrorist guns.

We have not heard the last from Cheney’s terrorists. We cannot waste another day. We must act immediately to build the covert networks we need to fight terrorists. We must prioritize shutting down Guantanamo — a gift that keeps on giving for Al Qaeda — and not make it a political football. And we must understand that, as we did during the fight against the Soviet Union, claiming the higher ground in the debate is strategically important. Cheney sold America’s greatest weapon – our moral authority and our freedoms — on the cheap. Let’s win it back, before more of Cheney’s terrorists strike again.

Update: The original version of this piece did not include the author’s full rank and title. We regret the error.

Remembering John Murtha

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’d be remiss if I let Jack Murtha’s (D-PA) passing go unnoticed.

It’s easy to sneer that Murtha represented the worst of Washington business. While it’s true that Murtha had some extraordinarily close ties to the defense industry, focusing on his dealings at the time of his death misses much of his otherwise extraordinary life story. Not only was he the first Vietnam veteran to serve in Congress, but he had the gumption to join the military twice. It’s true — after serving as an enlisted man in Korea, he went to the University of Pittsburgh on the G.I. Bill, and then became an officer before being shipped off to Vietnam.

But to me, the most impressive part of his military career might have been his stint as a drill sergeant in Parris Island, S.C. Parris Island, you see, is the United States Marine Corps’ boot camp, and I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the place from my father, a former Marine who lived in fear and dread of flunking out of Officer Candidate School and ending up in the South Carolina swamp. Rep. Murtha may have looked like a teddy bear, but I assure you that he’s caused his fair share of 18-year-olds’ bed wetting.

As a congressman, Murtha endorsed the use of force in Iraq in 2002, but then turned on the Bush administration, saying the campaign was “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” He also did the right thing by speaking out against his own USMC’s excessive use of force in the 2005 Haditha killings. It’s probably for these reasons, as much as anything else, that Secretary of Defense Gates called Murtha “a true patriot” upon his death.

Ah yes, and then there were those ties to the defense industry. I couldn’t sum them up better than my friend Brian Wingfield at Forbes.com:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who died Monday at age 77, was an old-school, dealmaking politician and a master of the earmark. Some watchdog groups, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called him “corrupt.” Murtha just said he was good at his job, and obtaining government money for the folks back home came with the territory.Obtain he did. According to the annual “Pig Book,” a listing of pork projects, published annually by Citizens Against Government Waste, Murtha had a hand in 50 earmarks totaling $132 million–last year alone. The year before, he was responsible for 73 earmarks worth $159 million. Years prior are similar. …

Murtha will undoubtedly be remembered most for his skill at acquiring earmarks, for good and for bad. During the past several years, his reputation was tarred by his association with the PMA Group, a lobbying firm that was the fifth most generous donor to Murtha’s campaigns since 1989. According to press reports, Murtha helped direct $137 million on federal contracts to PMA’s clients, who helped fill the Pennsylvania congressman’s campaign coffers. The Office of Congressional Ethics last year dropped its investigation of Murtha.

Murtha once said, “I know better than those damn people in the White House what needs to be done in my district.” It’s a valid point, but one that is symptomatic of the problem in today’s politics.