Actually, it really is unremarkable | read this item
Writing earlier today, Howard Kurtz argues that President Obama’s interview tomorrow on Fox is a sign that the White House accepts Fox’s argument that it is is a traditional news operation, at least by day.
This [the Fox interview] would be unremarkable — the president is constantly on TV — except for last year’s White House campaign attacking Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party. Fox executives insisted there is an important distinction between its news operation and opinionated hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. In sitting down with Baier, Obama — who cordially greeted Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes at a White House Christmas party — seems to be accepting that distinction.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable, but let’s get some context. Here’s White House Communications Director Anita Dunn last October answering a question about whether President Obama would do interviews with Fox:
The answer is yes, obviously he’ll go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. And he has done that before. He will do it again. I can’t give you a date because, frankly, I can’t give you dates for anybody else right now.
But what I will say is that when he goes on FOX, he understands that he is not going on — it really is not a news network at this point. He’s going to debate the opposition. And that’s fine. He never minds doing that.
So either Obama thinks Fox has changed since October (unlikely) or he is simply sitting down with what he considers to be an unfriendly media outlet (far more likely). But he’s definitely not implicitly accepting Fox’s argument that they were right all along. And given that Dunn said Obama would go back on Fox (this will be the second time since October), this is certainly not remarkable.
Oh, and by the way, do you know whose question Dunn was answering?
Obama Issues Veto Threats Over Intelligence Oversight During Sunshine Week | read this item
The White House issued this statement from the President today:
As Sunshine Week begins, I want to applaud everyone who has worked to increase transparency in government and recommit my administration to be the most open and transparent ever, an effort that will strengthen our democracy and ensure the public’s trust in their government.
We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government. We’ve put our White House visitor records on the Internet for the first time in history; opened up more government information than ever before on Data.gov, Recovery.gov and USAspending.gov; and issued an Executive Order fighting unnecessary secrecy, to name a few.
We are proud of these accomplishments, but our work is not done. We will continue to work toward an unmatched level of transparency, participation and accountability across the entire Administration.
The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities. . . .
In a letter sent to the senior members of the intelligence panels, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag said Gang of Eight notifications are made in only “the most limited of circumstances” affecting “vital interests” of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would “undermine the president’s authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information.”
This after a year-long process in which the intelligence committee has significantly watered down their original intent. Glenn:
To their credit, Congressional Democrats — over the objections of right-wing Republicans — have been attempting since the middle of last year to fix this serious problem, by writing legislation to severely narrow the President’s power to conceal intelligence activities from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and abolish the “Gang of Eight” process. After all, those Committees were created in the wake of the intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, and their purpose is “to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” But if they’re not even told about what the Executive Branch is doing in the intelligence realm, then they obviously can’t exert oversight and ensure compliance with the law — which is the purpose of keeping them in the dark, as the last decade demonstrated.
Yet these efforts to ensure transparency and oversight have continuously run into one major roadblock: Barack Obama’s threat to veto the legislation. Almost immediately after leading Democrats on the Intelligence Committee unveiled their legislation last year, the Obama White House issued a veto threat with extremely dubious (and Bush-replicating) rationales: such oversight would jeopardize secrecy and intrude into “executive privilege.” In response to Obama’s veto threat, Democrats spent the last nine months accommodating the White House’s objections by significantly diluting their legislation — their new bill would actually retain the “Gang of Eight” briefings but impose notification and other oversight requirements — and two weeks ago the House passed that diluted bill. …
It’s critical to note that this is far from an abstract concern, because the Obama administration has almost certainly been hiding intelligence activities from the Intelligence Committees, thus ensuring it operates without oversight. Read this October, 2009 article from The Hill — headlined: “Feingold sees similarities between Bush and Obama on intelligence sharing” — in which Senate Intelligence Committee Member Russ Feingold explains ”his suspicion that the Obama administration is continuing some of the stonewalling practices of the George W. Bush administration when it comes to providing full intelligence briefings to the relevant committees in Congress.” And indeed, all year long, there’s been a series of disclosures about highly controversial intelligence programs that appear to be “off-the-books” and away from the oversight of the Intelligence Committee. In late January, it was revealed that the President was maintaining a “hit list” of American citizens he had authorized to be assassinated far from any “battlefield,” followed by yesterday’s story describing the use of shadowy private contractors to collect intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A true departure from the practices of the Bush administration would not just be paying lip service to transparency, but to actually provide it. Note that in the case of intelligence briefings, we’re not even talking about public transparency–we’re talking about a restoration to the checks and balances, restoring Congress’s constitutional role of oversight.
And it’s not just on the national security and intelligence realms. From the torture photos to the private deal brokered with PhRMA in the health reform negotiations, the Obama administration has done a piss poor job on the transparency front in its first year.
At least for today, it appears that the global epicenter of stupid is in Washington, DC, where they are buzzingmanically about Speaker Pelosi’s diabolical plan to pass health care reform without actually having a vote on the Senate health care bill.
The implication — that the House will approve health reform without voting on it — is utterly baseless as David Waldman detailed earlier today. There will be a vote on health care reform, and nobody is suggesting otherwise.
But, as David has explained before, the final vote in the House won’t be a simple vote on the Senate health care bill. Instead, it will be a vote on a resolution which effectively passes and amends the Senate health care bill at the same time.
So why don’t Democrats do it the FNC/RNC way and have the final vote be on the Senate bill?
Simple: because the Senate bill is not the final health care reform measure. And the House is working to structure its final vote to ensure that the Senate bill does not become law without being amended.
In so doing, the House is trying to do the responsible thing, eliminating any chance of the Senate bill passing without reconciliation fixes, thereby making sure that we end up with the best possible policy.
Sure, the House could trust the Senate to do the right thing. But if they can structure things to make sure the Senate does the right thing, why shouldn’t they?
Obviously, it creates an opportunity for Republicans to attack, but anything Democrats do creates an opportunity for attack. More importantly, this isn’t about politics. Everybody knows there will be a vote. No matter what, people will know who was for reform and who was against reform. The question is whether we’ll end up with the best possible reform package, and the approach being worked on in the House is merely an effort to ensure that we do.
According to GOP aides, the resolution would require the House to hold an up-or-down vote on the Senate healthcare bill.
What? Republicans demanding an up-or-down vote on healthcare? Huzzah!
But what could possibly be going on here? We need more context.
House GOP leaders will try to force the House to vote on the Senate’s healthcare bill.
Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Ala.), who defected from the Democratic Party last December out of frustration on healthcare, will offer a resolution barring Democratic leaders from using the so-called “Slaughter solution.”
Ah, I get it now! Republicans think they deserve to have an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill, but the Senate doesn’t!
Why are we going through this self-executing rule exercise in the first place? Because Senate Republicans won’t allow an up-or-down vote on making the changes contained in the fix bill. If they’d agree to an up-or-down vote on that, then the House could drop the self-executing rule (scary!) plan and the use of reconciliation (nuclear!) completely, and we could just have a good ol’ fashioned who’s-got-the-most kind of vote.
Which Republicans would then lose.
Which is why they instead find themselves shamelessly screaming for up-or-down votes on healthcare, after all this time dedicating themselves to preventing exactly that.
Get your bids in now because the Netroots Nation spring auction closes today.
There really isn’t anything that the Party of No will support:
A group of Republicans this afternoon will meet with reporters to protest the Democrats’ plans to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies to private companies that lend to students. The Democrats’ bill would have students borrow directly from the U.S. Treasury, which makes sense to supporters because it’s the Treasury that currently assumes all the risk for those loans anyway — a boon to private companies that assume no risk. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the private middleman will save $67 billion over the next decade, most of which will go toward expanding college scholarships to low-income students.
Birther queen Orly Taitz is still on the hook for the $20,000 fine levied against her last year for filing frivolous lawsuits.
Do you want to get under Karl Rove’s skin? Talk about his family.
Of the independents polled in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Nevada by Benenson Strategy on behalf of the Service Employees International Union for a survey released Monday afternoon, 32 percent said they’ll vote for a Democrat, 33 percent said they’ll vote for a Republican, and 34 percent were unsure.
And they didn’t like either party’s performance in Congress, but a clear advantage went to Democrats: independents: Dems collected a 33 percent approval/64 percent disapproval rating; Republicans, 26 percent approval/71 percent disapproval. [...]
And they want Congress to do something on health care: 69 percent of Independents said that health care is “an urgent problem that requires immediate action” or “serious problem that should be dealt with as soon as possible”–though 63 percent said Democrats had cut “too many deals with special interest groups such as pharmaceutical companies” as a prime complaint with health reform.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) calls the health care reform bill “an abortion,” while pandering to a crowd of teabaggers.
Researchers, political satirists and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet.
The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.
Ezra Klein has a few words about David Brooks’ latest realty-challenged op-ed:
Brooks isn’t wrong in the sense that “I disagree with him.” He’s wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.
Republicans Continue Fight on Process | read this item
In the House, Republicans are going to do their damnedest to derail the health insurance reform bill by trying to force a vote on whether Pelosi can use a self-executing rule.
“If passed by the House, the resolution would prohibit Speaker Pelosi from implementing the ‘Slaughter Solution,’ the scheme by which Democratic leaders are seeking to ‘deem’ the Senate bill as passed without an actual vote in the House,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.
That’s the “scheme” that Republicans used dozens of times when they had control of the House, of course. Over on the other side of the Hill, Senate Republicans are still whining about reconciliation, and even have enlisted Bobo to the cause. I’ll let Ezra do the debunking since he did it so well.
But none of Brooks’s evidence is true. Literally none of it. The budget reconciliation process was used six times between 1980 and 1989. It was used four times between 1990 and 1999. It was used five times between 2000 and 2009. And it has been used zero times since 2010. Peak reconciliation use, in other words, was in the ’80s, not the Aughts. The data aren’t hard to find. They were published on Brooks’s own op-ed page.
Nor has reconciliation been limited to bills with “significant bipartisan support.” To use Brooks’s example of the tax cuts, the 2003 tax cuts passed the Senate 50-50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats joined with the Republicans in that effort. Georgia’s Zell Miller, who would endorse George W. Bush in 2004 and effectively leave the Democratic Party, and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson. So I’d say that’s one Democrat. One Democrat alongside 49 Republicans. That’s not significant bipartisan support….
To recap, Brooks argued that reconciliation is being used more frequently, and that past reconciliation bills, like Bush’s tax cuts and prescription drug benefit, were significantly bipartisan. Reconciliation is, in fact, being used less frequently, past reconciliation bills like the tax cuts were not significantly bipartisan by any stretch of the imagination, and the prescription drug benefit did not go through reconciliation. Brooks isn’t wrong in the sense that “I disagree with him.” He’s wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.
David Brooks? Correction? Yeah, that’ll happen. Since the GOP’s case against the use of reconciliation is so weak that they have to rely on Bobo to lie about it for them, they need an ace in the hole to derail this, and to that end they only hope to bury it in amendments [sub req.]:
Senior Republican leadership aides were reluctant to divulge the number of amendments Senators are prepared to file. But given that reconciliation rules prevent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) from limiting amendments to such a bill, the GOP is looking to upend the Democrats’ health care agenda by proposing an unspecified number of changes.
“There is a healthy batch of amendments that were excluded from the health care debate that will serve as a down payment,” a senior Republican Senate aide said Monday. “But it is safe to say our Conference has plenty of other ideas that are being put to paper.”
Ideas that they hope will make Dems have to take a whole lot of politically difficult votes. Which is precisely why the House doesn’t trust the Senate, and has to go to the lengths of things like self-executing rules. If nothing else, this prolonged debate has shown just how deeply broken our system is, that it can be hijacked by a bunch of nihilists who want nothing to do with governing.
Of course, if Obama and every other Democrat with a microphone pointed out that this is what the modern Republican party has become–a bunch of bomb-throwers who think government is the problem–instead of persisting in the delusion that they the loyal opposition who need to be reached out to and who have ideas worthy of consideration, it might be easier to govern around them.
Dems move closer to passing Senate bill without actual vote
These two headlines are going to be difficult to explain when the House holds its vote. How do they plan on reconciling the fact that they’re reporting on an actual vote, expected to take place later this week, when they’ve already reported that there won’t be one?
The answer, of course, is that there will be a vote, and the headlines are misleading and inflammatory.
Meanwhile, confusion (willful and otherwise) fans the flames of panic on both the left and the right, the right insisting that self-executing rules (not counting the 200+ Republicans used) are, “the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. It would be 100 times worse than Watergate,” and the left worrying that the procedure creates constitutional problems.
But both sides make a single fundamental error, which I’ll illustrate with Jack Balkin’s example, that leads to all the rest:
Whether or not it provides plausible deniability, is it consistent with the Constitution? Stanford Law Professor (and former judge) Michael McConnell doesn’t think so. The argument is simple: To satisfy Article I, section 7’s requirement of bicameralism and presentment, both houses must pass the same bill for the President to sign. If they pass different bills, no law is created, even if the President signs both.
The first flawed premise in Balkin’s opening is that he believes the Senate health care reform bill will be incorporated by reference in the House reconciliation bill. It will not. Instead, the rule governing consideration of the reconciliation bill will incorporate a motion to agree to the Senate bill (actually a Senate-amended House bill). Agreeing to such a motion is perfectly routine and perfectly legitimate. The House will be presented with the opportunity to vote up or down on a measure incorporating that motion, and by adopting it will in turn adopt a procedure for agreeing to exactly the same text as the Senate passed, which will be triggered by the House’s recording of a vote in favor of passage of the reconciliation bill. At no point does the House amend or otherwise alter the text of H.R. 3590 as amended by the Senate. The requirements of the Constitution are satisfied.
They’re going to present a rule issued by [Rep. Louise Slaughter's] committee, with her as chairman, that says that the House already adopted the Senate bill, when we know it didn’t?
He’d be right to be incredulous if his premise were correct. It isn’t. The rule will not say that the House already adopted the Senate bill. It will say that the House, by adoption of the rule, agrees that it will manifest its assent to the Senate bill with its vote on reconciliation bill.
Can it do that? Yes it can. The House, under its constitutional prerogative stemming from Art. I, Sec. 5, determines its own rules of proceeding. All the Constitution requires of it is that approval of bills be signaled by a recording of the yeas and nays in its Journal, and that the same text be agreed to by both houses of Congress. By agreement under the rule, the House will indeed signal its agreement by the yeas and nays to the language of the Senate bill, but it will do so with its vote on the reconciliation bill.
But isn’t that odd? A bit. Could the House signal its agreement to the Senate bill with its vote on a bill establishing National Unicorn Day? Yes it could, so long as the procedure is agreed to by a majority of the House beforehand, the yeas and nays are recorded on the Journal, and the text of the Senate bill itself remains unchanged in the action.
And that’s exactly what happens here.
It’s no different in that sense than when the Senate agrees by unanimous consent to a House-passed bill. Or when the House takes up a motion to agree to the Senate version of a bill, as opposed to bringing the bill itself to the floor and voting on that. The House determines for itself, through its own rules, whether it will accept a Senate bill by calling it to the floor and voting on it directly, or instead by agreeing to a motion to agree to the Senate version. In one case, the vote is on a pending bill. In the other, the vote is on a procedural motion. But either will do, thanks to Art. I, Sec. 5, and the idea that that would suddenly be constitutionally suspect endangers probably 50% or more of the entire body of federal law.
To Balkin’s credit, he proposes later in the piece a method by which “deeming” the Senate bill passed would be acceptable:
Despite Judge McConnell’s concerns, which are textually well founded, there is a way that “deem and pass” could be done constitutionally. There have to be two separate bills signed by the President: the first one is the original Senate bill, and the second one is the reconciliation bill. The House must pass the Senate bill and it must also pass the reconciliation bill. The House may do this on a single vote if the special rule that accompanies the reconciliation bill says that by passing the reconciliation bill the House agrees to pass the same text of the same bill that the Senate has passed. That is to say, the language of the special rule that accompanies the reconciliation bill must make the House take political responsibility for passing the same language as the Senate bill. The House must say that the House has consented to accept the text of the Senate bill as its own political act. At that point the President can sign the two bills, and it does not matter that the House has passed both through a special rule.
Option 3: Place self-executing language in the rule for the reconciliation bill that deems the Senate amendments agreed to upon passage of the actual reconciliation bill in the House.
[...]
The Speaker took care to say that nothing’s been finalized in terms of this decision, but her preference is clearly for #3.
Freak out over. You may resume your normal level of confusion. But there will be a vote, and the dopes who have run headlines saying there won’t be would have some explaining to do when the vote is held and they report it. Except that no one will demand that of them, because … uh…
A New Jersey appeals court is allowing a conservative tea party group to proceed with an effort to throw a Democratic U.S. senator out of office.
The three-judge panel Tuesday ordered the secretary of state to accept the group’s petition seeking to recall Sen. Robert Menendez. That allows the tea party activists to begin collecting the 1.3 million voter signatures they need to get a recall on the ballot.
The court said they’ll cross any Constitutional bridges if the petition drive is successful.
Update: The court’s opinion is here. The Court stated that It was “disinclined to allow the process to go forward, and the citizens of this State to believe they are participating in a recall process, if it is certain that the court would have to decide, shortly thereafter, that the process was manifestly unconstitutional,” but that contrary to what you might have believed it wasn’t completely certain that a recall of a United States Senator would be unconstitutional. You’ll see the Court’s analysis of this on pages 20-27 of the opinion, focusing on language from the 1995 term limits case that “‘the people should choose whom they please to govern them” and that “this case deals with neither the qualifications clause nor with handicapping the electorate or its choice; even a recalled Senator could run for reelection.” The Court summarized as follows:
In sum, there are a host of genuine arguments and counterarguments that can be articulated and debated about whether or not the Federal Constitution would permit a United States Senator to be recalled by the voters under state law. There is no express textual answer to this debate in the United States Constitution. Nor is there any precedent from the United States Supreme Court squarely on point. The briefs and arguments in this appeal do not convince us that we can safely predict what the United States Supreme Court would do if it were presented with the issue. Although many commentators have suggested that such recall measures are, in fact, invalid, such analyses involve debate about the true meaning and intent of the Framers.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty about the preemptive contours of the Federal Constitution, we must also consider the fundamental significance of our State’s own constitutional charter, and the overwhelming majority of voters who approved the recall measure in 1993. We live in a State that has a rich tradition, particularly since our modern State Constitution was adopted in 1947, of recognizing individual rights that often go beyond the bare minimums conferred by the Federal Constitution. Time and time again, our courts have identified and enforced rights of the people of our State that emanate from our own constitution and that are not embodied, or guaranteed to the same degree, in the United States Constitution. … Typically, such issues have arisen in the contexts where the New Jersey Constitution confers greater protection than cognate rights in the Federal Constitution, rather than a case such as this one involving structural provisions of the respective Constitutions. Even so, we do not treat lightly defendants’ request that we declare the words of our State Constitution to be irreconcilably in conflict with federal law, and absent clear precedent that compels such a declaration, we are loathe to strike down a component of our State’s charter that fortifies the democratic role of our citizens. In short, our State Constitution, and the democratic process that produced it, deserves our utmost respect unless federal law clearly and definitively trumps it.
Given the will of the people embodied in our State organic law, and the dearth of clear precedent nullifying the people’s enactments, we accordingly decline at this juncture to find our State constitutional provision and related statute permitting recall of a United States Senator to be unconstitutional. We, as an intermediate appellate court, like the Secretary of State, are sworn to uphold the State Constitution as well the federal, and we have a duty to endeavor to reconcile the provisions of the Constitutions so long as we also recognize the Supreme Law of the Land.
Essentially, the Court decided that the question wasn’t so clear as to allow the Secretary of State to not even accept the signatures, should they be so gathered. Urging the need for judicial restraint, the Court concluded: “There is, and there will be, no necessity for our courts to resolve this difficult constitutional issue if the Committee’s petition drive fails to collect the necessary, approximately, 1,300,000 signatures. Pending that possible eventuality, we see no urgent reason to now decide the question of invalidity or validity with finality. All we need to decide, as we have done, is whether there is a sufficient basis for the Committee to proceed with its initiative and for the Secretary of State to perform her ministerial function.” – Adam B
About that homework assignment .... | read this item
Oh, this is rich. Karl Rove on the current U.S.-Israel kerfuffle:
“I think this is part of a broader problem with the Obama administration, and that is there doesn’t seem to be enough groundwork done before these international meetings that they don’t get caught by surprises like this,” Rove said on ABC’s “Top Line.”
Yes, this from the “brain” of the administration that brought you the oh-so-well-planned Iraq war.
In the same interview, he criticizes the Honduran leader for–hang on to your hat–being a “cowboy president” who violates the Constitution. And somehow this is Obama’s fault.
ROVE: We saw it in Honduras. Where rather than monitoring the situation, they [the Obama administration] let a cowboy president try to act in an extra-constitutional way to violate a fundamental principle in the Constitution, all without having done their homework in advance.
Republicans are threatening to make life difficult for Democrats if they try to push health care reform through the Senate using the budget reconciliation process.
That’s probably the funniest thing you’ll read all day. Until, that is, you read Joe Lieberman’s deep thought on the subject:
It will make it a partisan and less productive place than it’s been, I’m afraid.
