Category Archives: Politics: US

I’m happy to be here, and I’ll try to hold down the fort while Michael’s out of town. This is the first blog I read every day; I can’t really live up to Michael’s standards, but I’ll give it my best shot.

As Michael explained in his too-complimentary introduction, I’m a law teacher. The O’Connor resignation, though, has been reminding me of the year I spent, way back when, working for the Justice Department. Late in the year, Harry Blackmun announced his resignation, and I found myself part of an ad hoc team putting together a memo for a White House working group on the decisions of Richard Arnold, an Eighth Circuit judge then being considered for the top job. I got the gig helping to summarize Arnold’s jurisprudence not because of any merit of my own, and not because I’d done anything like this before (I hadn’t), and not even because I worked for a unit of the Justice Department that was concerned with such things (I didn’t), but pretty much by happenstance. I thought we wrote a pretty good memo, considering that none of us had ever vetted a potential Supreme Court Justice before, and we were making up our procedures as we went along.

What I began to realize then, and came to realize much more fully later on, is that government decision-making routinely is undertaken, with the best of intentions, by people who have never been in this situation before and are making it up as they go along. I was working for the government again a few years later — this time for the Federal Communications Commission — and found myself part of an interagency group trying to figure out what to do about the domain name system. That was the process that brought you ICANN. And the most salient facts about it were that (1) we had the best of intentions; (2) we didn’t have a lot of humility; and (3) we didn’t know what we were doing. And it showed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like government. Some of my best friends have been in government. And these were the good guys — while I got a pretty good sense of the clueless and humility-free tendencies of government back then, nobody during the Clinton Administration was so hubristic and detached from reality as to pop off and invade another country at the cost of more than 1700 American lives, more than 20,000 Iraqi lives, and incalculable damage to U.S. foreign policy interests — so far, with only quagmire in our future. (That’s a matter for another post, I guess.) I did come away with the firm lesson, though, that one should never overestimate the extent to which government players (or anyone else) know what they’re doing, or have done it before.

I missed the news that Anthony Principi, the only member of the Bush cabinet I respected, had resigned as VA Secretary. It seems he went on to chair the base closure commission.

Meanwhile, it's back to the bad old days at the VA. Last week they revealed they are facing a $1 billion health funding shorfall, which you would think is something of crisis — two months after the new Secretary, Jim Nicholson, told Congress “I can assure you that VA does not need [additional funds] to continue to provide timely, quality service….” Now, the Washington Post reports that the VA Deputy Undersecretary told VA hospitals and clinics that their “highest priority” should be…wait for it…to make sure that Principi's picture is replaced with Nicholson's. (spotted via The Carpetbagger Report)

The Post's Al Kamen serves up the irony:

… we hear some officials disagreed that the photos should be their “highest priority.”

“And here we're trying to figure out where our next patient meal is coming from and what furniture to sell to buy drugs next year,” one VA official said.

Media Matters for America cites this great snippet from a recent book review:

This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.

Can you guess who said it, about which recent much-hyped book?

Bard DeLong explains why he is a Democrat:

I'm a Democrat, and I believe that I will always be a Democrat: Richard Nixon's decision that the appropriate reaction to Lyndon Johnson's commitment to Civil Rights was to turn the Republican Party into The Party for People Who Don't Like Black People was a sufficiently evil action to make it next to impossible for me to think of situations in which I would vote Republican (and it may well have destroyed the soul of the Republican Party). But I would be happy to build bipartisan coalitions from the center outward, based on what policies are likely to work and achieve agreed-on long-run prosperity and security. I would, that is, if there were grownup Republicans to be found…

Then he offers a thumbnail analysis of the Democrats' fortunes:

In my view, the Democratic Party is doing OK in an age of high income and wealth inequality. The rich are spending lots of money to brainwash the rest, and the Democrats have to hold on against that tide. The Democratic Party is doing OK given its extraordinary success over the past two generations in pushing social equality and liberty—for African-Americans, women, homosexuals, Hispanics… pretty much anyone who isn't white and male—faster and further than large components of the electorate are comfortable with. Twenty-seven percent of Americans still disapprove of interracial marriage. They aren't going to vote Democratic. That's a powerful Republican base.

The real catastrophe in today's America is what has happened to the Republican Party. Fixing that is job #1.

I'm more in agreement with the last paragraph than the one above it. The GOP used to have some virtues: being for a balanced budget, for example (one carried to excess, perhaps, as it failed to be at all attuned to the business cycle). Now it spends like the proverbial drunken sailor in order to give tax breaks and contracts to kleptocrats and multi-millionaires.

But that doesn't mean that the Democrats are doing OK. They have failed to understand that the GOP plays by harsher rules than it did even in Nixon's day. And that the the Fairness Doctrine — which was not without problems, I'd be the first to admit — has been replaced by an Unfairness Doctrine which is poisoning public life. And to the extent that Democrats get this, they react by running scared.

The Durbin escapade — apologizing for remarks that were accurate — is a sign of the Democrats' problem. Howard Dean — on good days — is one path out of the mire (Howard Dean on bad days is proof he couldn't have been elected President….).

Via TaxProf Blog some good advice for Democrats from Prof. Deborah Geier:

Democrats should focus on the following statement: The distribution of the tax burden worsens inequality because there is less income inequality before annual tax bills are paid than after they are paid. That's the key point that should be stressed, over and over again, like a broken record (in the days of yore before CDs): The government imposes taxes in such a way that the distribution of income is more unequal than if the government imposed no taxes at all. Congressional Budget Office data discussed below shows that the gap (which is increasing) in pretax income between the very wealthy and the rest is smaller than the gap in after-tax income. Thus, the distribution of the tax burden itself is increasing inequality. I need to stress here that I am not talking about using the tax system to reduce income inequality, which is a use of the tax system that is utterly anathema to conservatives and libertarians alike. What I am saying here is that the tax system should be structured so that the distribution of the aggregate tax burden itself does not actually worsen income inequality. In other words, the government should not be intervening through the tax system to make the gap between the very rich and everyone else actually greater than it otherwise is (in the absence of tax). I think most Americans, whether Democrat or Republican (or Rockefeller Republican), would agree with that statement.

Amen to that.

YATA, Afghanistan edition: In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths.

They didn't even think the guy was guilty, and they tortured him to death.

How many 'bad apples' in how many places does it take to make a pattern and practice? How many deaths by torture in how many different places does it take to get top military and civilian commanders to admit responsibility for negligence if not commission? Surely there is some number of deaths (not to mention other barbarisms) at which point we hold, say, Rumsfeld responsible? One? Ten? A hundred? Can we agree a number now, so that when we get there, we can impeach the guy? And then, I think, prosecute him.

This is not a good moment for the Republic. Ordinarily, the public is to blame if it doesn't get outraged over atrocities committed in its name. Can we justly blame the public if it is getting its news from Fox? A steady diet of lies makes it hard to see the truth.

Meanwhile, on the floor of the Senate, Senator Santorum compares Democrats to Nazis … because they filibuster judges. Don't expect to see the people who bayed at the moon about Howard Dean screaming get the least bit anxious about this one. You certainly won't see it repeated on the news several hundred times in one week, even though it is much more serious.

In this context of what people can be expected to know, it's quite significant that the GOP now wishes to fully neuter the already partly neutered staff at PBS and NPR, thus making the only non-conglomerate major broadcast media sound like the ones bought and paid for.

And, oh yes, the people who want to pack the courts with anti-consumer and (by and large) anti-civil-liberties judges…also want to unleash the FBI from judicial oversight. The draft update of the 'Patriot' Act would let the FBI subpoena records without permission from a judge or grand jury.

Yes, that's the same FBI that, it appears, has been investigating protesters on the grounds that protest is a suspicious activity.

Meanwhile, while the Senate fights about procedure, the economy is approaching a precipice.

All it would take to be fully Roman is well organized corruption (more), and orgies.

Oh. Wait.