Month: July 2009

How do you feel about Max Baucus?

Contrary to common wisdom in Left Blogistan, I do not think the House should attempt to pass health care reform before they recess. I am aware of all the reasons for doing so (mainly, to pass something before opponents can rally a defense), but Ezra Klein explains perfectly my reasoning.

Some sources are speculating that the Blue Dogs are getting cold feet as they watch Max Baucus dither. Many of them felt burned by the hard and damaging vote on the cap-and-trade bill, as it looks like nothing will come of it in the Senate. Committing themselves to a health-care bill before the Senate shows its hand carries similar risks, and they’re no longer in a risk-taking mood. The worst outcome for conservative Democrats in the House is that they’re on record voting for a health-care reform bill that dies in the Senate and is judged a catastrophic example of liberal overreach.

The problem, of course, is that the more dissension there is among Democrats in the House, the less pressure there’ll be on the Senate Democrats to make a hard vote on health-care reform. This makes health-care reform something of a prisoner’s dilemma for conservative Democrats. If Blue Dogs in the House and centrists in the Senate both put it on the line to pass the bill, they’re both better off. But if one puts it on the line and the other whiffs, then the other pays the price.

If the House passes a bill in this atmosphere, it will probably receive the bare minimum of votes (218-220), and that will only serve to highlight the intraparty squabbling on the Democratic side along with the monolithic opposition of the Republicans. That does not create a good dynamic for Max Baucus to work with in trying to get something through the Finance Committee.

Remember that the only vote that that the electorate will really remember is the vote on final passage of the conference report. That means that House Dems can get an almost free vote against the House bill now and make up for it later by voting for final passage. It would be far preferable to have the Senate pass their bill first so that centrist Dems don’t feel like they are taking a difficult vote that might not be translated into law. But, even if the House goes first, they should have a better idea than they have now of what is going to be in the Baucus bill.

We want the largest vote in favor of the bill that it is possible to get in the House…not the narrowest. But we can’t get anything but the narrowest of victories if we force the bill through before the recess.

Congressional leaders should spend August hammering out deals so that they are prepared to come in after Labor Day and pass both bills without worrying about a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Jay Cost has been doing some pretty decent electoral analysis from a right-wing perspective over at HorseRaceBlog. He recently wrote an interesting rebuttal to a Bill Greener Salon piece on the enduring Democratic majority. The column is worth reading for its own sake, but my take-away is related to the Blue Dogs’ resistance to health care reform. For starters, Cost makes an interesting point about the Democrats’ structural deficit in the House of Representatives:

Assume a 50-50 split among the parties, something akin to 2004. That year, George W. Bush won 255 congressional districts to Kerry’s 180. Why the disparity? The Republican vote was distributed more evenly, while the Democratic vote was concentrated in urban and minority-majority districts. This is a distinct advantage that Republicans enjoy. To win the House, Democrats have had to win districts that Republican presidential candidates carry in 50-50 years. This is not inconsequential for public policy.

Ironically, it is the Democrats who currently control 255 seats in the House. In holding 59% of the seats in the House and 60% of the seats in the Senate, the Congressional Democrats overperformed Barack Obama’s 53% of the popular vote. This is, of course, only one way of looking at things. For example, Barack Obama won 68% of the Electoral College vote. Perhaps the best comparison is to note that Obama beat John McCain in 242 of the 435 congressional districts (or 56% percent of them).

Looked at this way, the Democrats only have 13 more seats in the House (255) than one might expect them to have (242) based on Obama’s electoral performance. But the Blue Dog coalition, at 52 members, is four times larger than that. Keep this in mind, as we look further into Jay Cost’s argument. This next bit focuses on the prospects of immigration reform, but the dynamic is similar on the issue of health care. Cost wants to rebut the following points from Greener.

Thanks to redistricting, and the legal imperative to give emphasis to “community of interests,” these minority voters tend to be jammed into congressional districts where they are the overwhelming majority. That means the other districts tend to be more white in nature, and thus more friendly territory for Republicans…

…What this means is that when it comes to an issue like immigration reform, the pressure on Republicans who actually have been elected to office is more often to favor a position that is unattractive to minority voters. If they were to take a different position, they might find themselves facing a primary challenger supported by the party’s activist base. So, at the expense of any long-term perspective, the Republican Party is likely to be responsive to the sentiment of the people responsible for them serving at this very moment.

Greener explains how the Republicans find themselves in a death-spiral where their need to satisfy their overwhelmingly white constituents on the local level leads them to take actions that alienate Latinos on the state and national level. But Cost wants us to consider a flip-side argument:

I’ll grant that the racial distribution across congressional districts *might* “skew” legislative preferences on immigration (but see the footnote below for pushback on this point!) – although given the geographical concentration of Hispanics in just a handful of states, and then in discrete areas within many of those states, redistricting is not so much the problem as geographical-based single-member districts are…

…Hence Blue Dog resistance to health care reform. This also suggests that the Democrats might have the same problem in advancing immigration reform, given the large number of members who come from mostly white, conservative-tilting districts. You can stick either a Democrat or a Republican in districts like PA-12, MS-1 or CO-4. Those reps will be hard-pressed to vote yea. Perhaps this is why the issue has been tabled this year?

In essence, the Democrats’ solid majorities in Congress are masking a conservative-tilt in how the districts are drawn, which means that a lot of Democrats are representing marginal districts that have a very low percentage of minority constituents. Massive displeasure with the Republican governance of the Bush years has given Democrats an opportunity to control these seats, but that doesn’t mean they are culturally aligned (or especially politically aligned) with the national party or with President Obama’s agenda.

I think Cost makes some interesting points. For example, even though Obama won 242 congressional districts, he won many of them by the skin of his teeth, such that he can’t really be considered to have a massive mandate in those districts. Or, consider the case of Oklahoma Democrat, Dan Boren:

“Barack Obama is very unpopular,” said Boren, who represents Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District. “He got 34 percent of the vote statewide, and less in our district. If he were to run for re-election today, I bet it would be even worse.”

Boren points out that he does support some of Obama’s initiatives, like the economic stimulus package. He has voted for Obama-supported bills 81 percent of the time, according to a recent Congressional Quarterly study. But despite this, he said the president is too liberal.

“It would be a lot nicer if we had someone who was in the middle,” he said. “Bill Clinton won our district. A lot of people don’t remember that, but he, in 1996, carried this district. I think if you have someone who governs from the middle, who’s pragmatic, who works with both parties. President Obama talks a lot about bipartisanship. If you look at some of the legislation, he may have one or two Republicans.”

Obama lost every county in Oklahoma. It is small wonder that Rep. Boren feels the need to keep some distance from the president.

But one has to wonder if Rep. Boren’s constituents would really be displeased with health care reform. No doubt they don’t trust the president, let alone liberal congressional leaders.

The chairmen of key House committees and other leaders – Frank, Rangel, Waxman, Conyers, Pelosi, etc – often come from districts that have little in common with swing districts. In fact, Bush’s median share of the vote in 2004 in the districts of committee chairmen and leadership in the 111th Congress was just 36%. Can these Democrats be expected to have the individual incentives to craft policy designed to help the Democrats maintain a national majority?

Maybe it is asking a lot to request that the Blue Dogs take a leap of faith on health care. I believe their constituents can only be brought over decisively to the Democrats through reforms in health care that will tangibly improve their lives. That is the bridge that can overcome cultural differences. But you won’t see evidence of that bridge in the polling numbers beforehand. Supporting the president’s health care reforms may involve a bit of leaping before you look.

In any case, despite there cultural and political differences, deriving in large part in how the districts are drawn, the American people gave the Democrats these margins so that they could solve problems. There may be some issues where there are unbridgeable differences within the Democratic caucus, but access to health care shouldn’t be one of them. The real problem with the Blue Dogs isn’t so much cultural as financial. Because they represent marginal districts, they have to worry about building large war chests. Because their districts are some of the most impoverished in the country, they have to raise lots of money from outside their districts and states. Liberal groups are loathe to supply funding for candidates who are culturally conservative, so they wind-up getting their money from corporate PAC’s and lobbyists. And this takes the populism right out of the Southern and Prairie Democratic Party.

If we really want to improve this situation, we need to draw more balanced districts. There is no reason that Philadelphia’s Chaka Fattah needs 88% of the vote, while his neighbor Patrick Murphy struggles to get 50%. We need better districts and, ideally, we need publicly-financed elections. Those reforms would change the behavior of the Blue Dogs more than any amount of cajoling.

Imagine for a moment Bush had followed through on everything his puppet master Cheney advisers had recommended he do to fight the evildoers in the “War on Terror.” We might have seen widespread use of US troops patrolling US cities, for just one example:

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property. […]

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose. […]

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

If you don’t remember the horrific dangers posed by the Lackawanna 6 you’re not alone. Here’s brief primer on who they were and how advanced their nefarious scheme had gone and the grave threat they posed:

For [Sahim Alwan, a 29-year-old from upstate New York] traveling to Afghanistan with a handful of his friends from the steel town of Lackawanna, was more of a thrill ride than a spiritual journey. Speaking to FBI investigators later, he likened his brush with jihadism to a teenager’s decision to steal a car: He knew he shouldn’t, but a youthful rush made him do it anyway.

Alwan was one of the group of suspected terrorists now known as the Lackawanna Six, a handful of Arab American 20-somethings who went to an al-Qaeda camp outside the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the spring of 2001 and returned to the United States just months before 9/11. Their arrests in September 2002 gave shape to American fears of post-9/11 homegrown terrorism. Headlines called them the enemy within, and U.S. authorities called them an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.

But after I spent three years researching the case — interviewing family members and law enforcement officials and seeing public and internal legal documents — what emerged was something much more nuanced and complicated: a story about how young Muslims reared in the United States can be swept up in the undertow of international jihad, and about just how clumsy preemptive justice has become in the age of sacred terror. […]

But for the Lackawanna Six, the flirtation with Osama bin Laden’s vision of life was fleeting. We often forget that, unlike their European counterparts, they never took the last step and traveled the short distance from al-Qaeda trainee to bona fide religious warrior.

At the time of their arrest in September 2002, none of the Lackawanna Six appeared to be actively plotting to attack anything. None of them had signed the true jihadist’s pledge of loyalty to bin Laden. And none of them seemed eager to put what they had learned at the training camp to use. For some reason, they traveled to the brink of radicalization but didn’t go over it. [..]

[Their Al Qaeda recruiter] Derwish assumed that after spending time at al-Farooq camp, rubbing shoulders with dedicated jihadists determined to change history, the Lackawanna Six would find it easy to leave their aimless lives in upstate New York. But in the end, the young men could hardly wait to get back home. They faked injuries and left the camps early. Nearly all the men returned to the United States hoping that they could put their brush with Islamic extremism behind them.

In other words, people who had no plans to commit any acts of terrorism were the excuse Cheney attmepted to use to convince his Commander in Chief that we ought to employ the military in the streets, and damn that quaint document known as the US Constitution. (That last story is from The Washington Post, by the way, Freddy Hiatt’s romper room for people like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and at one time, Robert Novak, plus and any neoconservative guest columnist you can shake a stick at such as Dick’s baby girl Liz Cheney, so it’s hardly an unfriendly media source). So, because of the media drumbeat about the dangers of these minor and frankly insignificant members of an upstate New York Yemeni community, Cheney and others tried to bamboozle Bush and the rest of the country into authorizing something that no President had done since the Civil War — use US soldiers to capture “enemy combatants” on US soil. Lincoln might be forgiven that excess, considering the South was in open rebellion and fielded armies in the field capable of invading the Northern states (which they did on several occasions). Cheney on the other hand saw these inept young men as an excuse to eliminate the Fourth Amendment whenever the President deemed it necessary. Spying on US citizens using the resources of the NSA to sweep up information on our financial, medical and online transactions and communications wasn’t enough for this Dick. Truly, this was an attempt at an executive branch power grab of monumental proportions.

Good thing Cheney never sent his CIA “death squads” after Bush. Imagine what a President Cheney would have done had he not been hindered by such a lazy faux cowboy like Dubya?

A recent Supreme Court ruling illustrates yet again the dangers of ever-expanding the power of the president.  Perhaps even more troubling, partisans on both sides continue to be largely silent about it.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

All presidents are unpopular with a good part of the electorate, but there seems to be little skepticism towards the office itself.  There is plenty of distrust and even outright revulsion towards particular presidents based on, for instance, whether one is more outraged by extramarital sex – by a political opponent, not by an ally – or war crimes.  (Ironically, Republicans’ approach with Mark Sanford has been to censure and move on; their refusal to use precisely that remedy with president Clinton was key in launching the first highly visible netroots site.)  I am not even referring to the lunacy now coming into full bloom in some quarters.  All those examples are about who a particular president is or what he has done.  I am referring more to what a president ought to be able to do, which has trended almost exclusively towards greater deference and larger grants of authority in the last few years.

It is possible to argue, as Dana Nelson details in her book Bad For Democracy, that the presidency has been slowly but steadily aggrandizing since 1832 when Andrew Jackson “detoured from his predecessors who viewed the president as a mere executive by expanding his power when a clear mandate was expressed to him from ‘the people.'”  The president has increasingly come to be central to American political life and even viewed as the personification of the country.  For as troubling as that is, though, we recently seem to also have added the idea that the president can act with impunity as long as it can be rationalized (however fabulously) as in the national interest.  Presumably blowjobs are still verboten.

The courts have at times been all too eager to assist in this project, and on Monday the New York Times reported (via) their willingness to do so has unleashed some unintended consequences.  The Supreme Court’s Ashcroft v. Iqbal decision in May was a civil rights damages lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft.  Javald Iqbal was swept up along with more than 1,000 other mostly Arabic people in America right after 9/11.  He claimed mistreatment and filed suit against Ashcroft on the theory that responsibility goes to the top.  The Court ruled that essentially unless Ashcroft was physically present and ordering the abuse he was not liable.  In other words, in its eagerness to shield the executive branch from being held responsible for this or any other covert lawbreaking it substantially raised the evidentiary bar for lawsuits.  Or as the Times described it, the ruling eviscerated discovery:

For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath…The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible…In the new world, after Iqbal, a lawsuit has to satisfy a skeptical judicial gatekeeper.

The article notes it has already been cited as precedent over 500 times and quotes Stephen Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School: “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”  It is a clear and substantial act of judicial activism, and yet another example of how the nice-sounding principles of conservatism (see also fiscal probity, sound management and prudent foreign policy) never seem to make it into practice.

The suppression of discovery was a key motive behind last year’s execrable FISA Amendment Act (FAA) as well.  Its retroactive immunity provision nullified lawsuits which “had provided some hope that through the process of discovery, the public would at last learn about the extent of the illegal spying program.”  Discovery means transparency; the telecom companies who pushed the FAA arguably had more to fear from the PR apocalypse that discovery might have produced than an actual jury verdict against them.  This week we learned CBS may also feel its sting as well.  Discovery promised perhaps the best avenue for getting the details of Bush-era violations of civil liberties and human rights out in the open, and both the legislative and judicial branches have bent over backwards to shield the executive from it.  It suggests an outsized understanding of the presidency that considers it superior to the other two branches.  The judicial chaos unleashed by Iqbal is just one example of the mess that can be created in defense of that concept, and the latest reason why it truly is bad for democracy.

Hello again painting fans.

This week we’ll be continuing with our 2 new paintings.

The photos that I will be using are seen directly below.  The first photo shows the Monument Rocks in Kansas.  Seen below that photo is one depicting a decrepit 1950 Hudson.

I’ll be using my usual acrylics on 8×10 canvases.

For this week’s installment, I’ve continued with the old Hudson.  I’ve gotten stuck in one mode.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I’ve continued to work on the painting.

I’ve continued to refine the surface of the old Hudson.  Recently, madame boran moved some of my paints and I discovered a tube of rather bright orange.  Using that orange over the existing surface has now made for a nearly perfect simulation of rust.  I was amazed at the difference.  I will probably add some more to the front fender and a bit more on the rear.

I’ve also painted in the chrome window moldings and the shadowed interior.  For the interior I’ve used a shade of blue that I mixed just for that purpose.  The moldings are done in what is actually a very light shade of blue edged by dark blue.

The current state of the painting is seen directly below.

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Did you know that you are only ten percent human?

[h/t to Second Nature]

In a time of rising economic uncertainty, Massachusetts is moving away from its attempts to provide health care for all.  The new state budget eliminates coverage for approximately 30,000 legal immigrants in an attempt to help close a budget deficit.

This is a mistake.

Health care is not commodity but a basic human right.  Massachusetts had taken a strong, significant step in this direction.  Their experience is particularly crucial right as the federal government works towards expanding health care to everyone across the country.  And public opinion is behind dramatically expanding health care.  Nationally, 89% of Americans believe that access to health care is a human right and 77% believe that the government has a responsibility to guarantee access for everyone.

Specifically, the Massachusetts’ cut will affect permanent, immigrant residents who have had green cards for less than five years and are currently covered under Commonwealth Care, the state program to subsidize health insurance for those who cannot afford it.

Massachusetts attempted to provide health insurance to every citizen of the state.  Its main mechanism for doing so was requiring that everyone have health insurance, much in the way every driver is required to have car insurance and providing Commonwealth Care, state subsidized coverage for those earning up to three times the federal poverty level ($66,150 for a family of four).

Health Care For All, a Boston based advocacy group, points out that the rationale behind expanding health care (besides the moral imperative) is “it’s less expensive to keep people healthy than it is to pay for illnesses.”

When health care resources are distributed evenly and fairly across a large population, everyone gets the care they need before health problems become costly and more difficult to treat.  This notion of pooling resources and spreading risk is central to all forms of social insurance and is particularly important in health care.

Hopefully, Massachusetts will return to the values originally adhered to when first working to expand health care to all.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.