Ruth Marcus is concern-trolling again: Or, maybe she’s trying to reassure the Villagers that Obama isn’t a secret socialist. I can’t even tell the difference anymore. In any case, Ms. Marcus doesn’t think Obama is going to do anything radical in a second term, but she sure wishes he would talk about doing some radically centrist things during the campaign.
Congressional math will constrain Obama for the remainder of his presidency even if he wins a second term and the Dems do better than the historical average in the next midterms. There is no way Obama will ever again have a Congress as compliant as the one he enjoyed in 2009-2010, if you can call that Baucus-Nelson-Lincoln-Landrieu-Lieberman-led Congress “compliant.”
The good old days are over, and our next shot at bold progressive change will come in 2016, when we’ll have a chance to win the presidency again and get back to a 60 vote advantage in the Senate.
There is literally nothing the president or the party or you or I can do to change that reality. It is what it is.
In a second term, however, Obama will be free to make decisions that are politically unpopular. He can be bolder on using the executive branch to address climate change, civil rights, election reform, prison reform, drug enforcement reform, etc. He can stand up to his own party, too, and will likely pursue tax and entitlement reform that liberals will not like.
He will continue to tilt the federal courts to the left, and might make a truly meaningful Supreme Court appointment (or two). He’ll protect the health care, Wall Street, and consumer protection reforms that he’s made. Millions of people will begin receiving subsidies to pay for health insurance or Medicaid, creating a culture of dependency a huge bloc of Democratic voters for the foreseeable future and ending this nonsense about repealing ObamaCare.
Our foreign policies will be protected from the neo-conservatives for four years, and we’ll likely see a period of peace reminiscent of the mid-1990’s.
All-in-all, not what I would wish for, but so much better than what we’ve had and what Romney is offering that it’s not even a close call. Four more years!!
Right on.
if you can call that Baucus-Nelson-Lincoln-Landrieu-Lieberman-led Congress “compliant.”
I call it “complaint”, more like.
crappy supermajorities are preferable to the alternative.
I’d like to see Obama himself on the Supreme Court someday, if only to piss off the Gang of Five (or what’s left of them).
Yeah, he’d be perfect for the SC. I think he has a mind better suited to that than politics, even though he’s very good at it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see him using the bully pulpit pretty aggressively to move the debate forward on some issues like rethinking the War on Drugs.
What signs do you see that he’d be interested in relaxing the drugwar? Holder has been as despicable on this front as anyone under Bush.
really? You “see him using the bully pulpit pretty aggressively to move the debate forward on some issues like rethinking the War on Drugs”.
That is not going to happen. It simply will not.
That is one of the most obvious of Obama’s broken promises.
We’ll see. Obama’s a smart guy. The War on Drugs is a disaster. Largely freed from political constraints, I’m not going to be shocked if he has more than one “revelation”.
I don’t know. It seems to me like exactly the kind of thing he’d have a “change of heart” about once he didn’t need to give a crap about Fox News having a cow about it.
But, honestly, the answer isn’t to allow federal law to go unenforced. To truly take this on requires bolder action. Whether he would do it or not would depend on what else is on his plate, the prospects for success, and his personal beliefs.
I don’t think he believes our marijuana laws make sense. The question is really only whether he’d invest the capital to try to do anything about it.
Change the classification. How much capital will that take?
Well, that’s a process. And he can’t be seen as dictating the outcome. He’d need scientists at HHS to say the drug has a legitimate medical purpose and that it doesn’t have a high potential for abuse. If he tried to bypass that somehow or to announce that he has making those determinations, he would run into trouble. However, HHS could go ahead and do that and it could reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That would pretty much put it on the same plane as Special K.
Exactly.
I’m not really seeing broken promises when it comes to the drug war.
Here are the only 4 promises that even remotely relate to drugs:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/299/eliminate-disparity-in-sentenc
ing-for-crack-and-co/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/300/reform-mandatory-minimum-sente
nces/
Those 2 were about mandatory minimums.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/301/enhance-drug-courts/
Stalled
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/414/send-first-time-nonviolent-dru
g-offenders-to-rehab/
In the works
Plus I don’t remember him mentioning during the campaign really anything related to ending the drug war or in favor of legalizing anything. Maybe I’m wrong but I was paying close attention.
he promised to have the feds back off the medical marijuana raids. The opposite is what has happened.
he’s also had a couple of events where people have brought up ending marijuana prohibition and medical marijuana and he laughed at them.
So no, i don’t expect anything on THAT front.
I wouldn’t expect anything, but he’d have the freedom to pivot if he wanted to. And he might.
Did you read the second link you provided about the warehouse in Oakland?
From that U.S. Attorney’s explanation, it sounds like the DOJ sent a signal that they’d be totally hands-off, and people decided to really ramp up their operations far beyond what they had been.
I think this is more complicated than a broken promise.
I agree, it looks like the DoJ said it was going to be hands off and then a couple places ramped up to being close to $1 million operations.
Of course these are large-scale operations. How else do you go about providing legal marijuana year-round to a large population of sick people?
a dispensary isn’t going to be supplied by a couple of stringy plants in a closet. it takes a large scale operation to produce enough weed to meet the demand.
so i think this line that they got too big is a little disingenuous.
C’mon brendan. There two or three whole counties in Northern California that do almost nothing other than grow weed. They supply a huge percentage of the recreational marijuana people consume in this country. The kind bud. So, what need is there to suddenly start opening warehouse-sized grow houses in Oakland?
It looks pretty clear to me that the U.S. Attorneys felt like their authority was being mocked. It’s a classic “we give you an inch, and you take a mile” scenario.
They need to fix the law. In the meantime, the growers need to show some respect and let the Attorneys have some face.
Of the people growing weed in Northern California, how many are permitted to do so? Is there oversight?
Of the grow houses in Oakland, how many were permitted to do so? Is there oversight?
The answer to your question seems pretty obvious to me: the need for growhouses is to know where and who your supply is coming from.
Maybe I need to smoke more weed or something.
Anybody to the left of Atilla the Hun would want to see Obama get 4 more years. I feel fairly positive about the House, and I do think we will maintain the Senate, though nowhere near a super majority which Obama never had.
I agree he will do more, to the extent he can, but I also think he will speak more about what could happen if only the Republicans would cooperate. I don’t think you will see a lot of reaching out to them unless they show that, knowing they can no longer deny him a second term, they show some sense.
He has said all along that a lot of what he would like to see happen can’t even be done in 8 years, so I think he will work hard to lay a groundwork for whoever runs in 2016, partially by expressing what he would like to see and partially by making the Republicans look so bad even people to the right of Atilla wouldn’t vote for them.
I don’t think he’s as predictable as you suggest. I’d expect him to move left, but he’ll continue to disappoint on civil liberties/”defense” issues, and maybe buy into the phony deficit “crisis” — phony because it’s easily solved by tax reform, not spending cuts. Seems to me he has a strong need to leave a legacy, and he has to know he’s not going to get much of one by continuing to hide his conservative inclinations behind “bipartisanship”.
Your conclusion is right on — he’ll almost certainly be better than what we’ve had for the last half century or so. Which is a remarkably low bar, but a measure of what this citizenry seems capable of doing at the moment. My only real complaint with the analysis is your standard claim that “There is literally nothing the president or the party or you or I can do to change” the reality of not having 60 votes. Of course there is: they can nuke the filibuster if they keep a majority at all. I don’t understand why you keep framing this as some kind of impossible dream. The leadership deserves no support or respect on this issue at all. Rule by minority is a choice, not an act of gods.
AMEN