Category Archives: Random Blogging

If We REALLY Ran Government Like a Business….

I get so annoyed when people say that government should be “run like a business.” Government isn’t a business; the statement betrays a total lack of understanding of what government is and does.

Government should, however, be run in a businesslike fashion–and a Congressman from Minnesota has made a proposal borrowed from the world of business that I absolutely agree should be applied to government as well. According to the Political Animal blog, 

Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) introduced a bill Friday that would prevent members of Congress from getting paid in the event of a government shutdown.

“It’s time to put an end to government by crisis management,” Nolan said in a statement. “And it’s time for Congress to start living in the real world — where you either do your job — or you don’t get paid. If hundreds of thousands of other federal employees are to go without their salaries — twisting slowly in the wind in a government shutdown — then the Congress should not be paid either.”

Under Nolan’s bill, members of Congress would go unpaid for the duration of the shutdown. He introduced similar legislation during the 16-day government shutdown in 2013 that left 800,000 federal workers furloughed without pay. While his bill never got off the ground, Nolan donated the money he was paid over the shutdown to charities in his district.

As anyone who follows the news is aware, the Crazy Caucus–led by Senator Ted Cruz–is threatening to shut down the government once again if they don’t get their way; this time, “getting their way” means defunding Planned Parenthood and denying basic medical care to millions of poor women (and poor men, who rely on Planned Parenthood for STD testing, among other things).

When union workers strike, they don’t get paid by their employers. Why should We The People–who employ these bozos–continue to pay them while they are refusing to do their jobs?

It’s bad enough that they work a three or four day week for wages hard-working Americans can only dream of. As the blogger, David Atkins, concludes:

If Republicans want to run government like a business, this would be a good way to start. If you don’t do the work you’re supposed to do you don’t get paid.

Makes perfect sense to me.

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“Winning” By Making Shit Up

There is evidently a consensus among the pundits that the “winner” of Wednesday night’s GOP debate was Carly Fiorina.

There is also a consensus among fact-checkers that virtually nothing she said was accurate–and in the case of her attack on Planned Parenthood, was manufactured out of whole cloth.

Of course, the GOP primary voters to which she and the others were throwing their red meat were highly unlikely to notice.

I don’t know what’s more terrifying: the GOP’s embrace of “look at me, look at me” Donald Trump (who is unable to answer any substantive question with even a modicum of understanding or gravitas, and who endorsed the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism) or Ben Carson (the “scientist” who doesn’t believe in evolution or climate change and hasn’t a clue what government does) or Fiorina’s obvious calculation that she can improve her prospects by being the female face of the war on women, even if that requires playing fast and loose with those pesky things called “facts.”

Probably the best summary of the debate(s) was offered by Gail Collins, who–in one particularly memorable phrase–compared Jindal and Santorum to “rabid otters.”

The one indelible “take-away” from the debate–at least for Hoosiers–is that today’s GOP sure isn’t the party of Dick Lugar and Bill Hudnut.

How does that car commercial put it? This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile…

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How We Got Here

I’m sharing an unusually long quotation, also shared by Political Animal, from one Dave Roberts (a writer with whom I am unfamiliar), because it has so much explanatory power.

Roberts traces the history behind America’s current political polarization, and he’s pretty convincing:

In postwar, mid-20th-century America, there was a period of substantial bipartisanship, and it powerfully shaped the way political and economic elites think about US politics. The popular picture of how politics works — reaching across the aisle, twisting arms, building coalitions behind common-sense policy — has clung to America’s self-conception long after the underlying structural features that enabled bipartisanship fundamentally shifted.

What enabled bipartisanship was, to simplify matters, the existence of socially liberal Republicans in the Northeast and Democrats in the South who were fiscally conservative and virulently racist. Ideologically heterogeneous parties meant that transactional, cross-party coalitions were relatively easy to come by.

Over the past several decades, the parties have polarized, i.e., sorted themselves ideologically (that’s what the GOP’s “Southern strategy” was about). Racist conservative Democrats became Republicans and social liberals became Democrats. The process has now all but completed: The rightmost national Democrat is now to the left of the leftmost national Republican.

Crucially, however, the process of polarization has been asymmetrical. While almost all liberals have become Democrats and almost all conservatives have become Republicans, far more Republicans self-identify as conservative than Democrats do as liberal, and consequently the GOP has moved much further right than the Democratic Party has left.

Part of the explanation is that there has been a demographic sorting as well. The demographics that tend Democrat — minorities, single women, young people, LGBTQ folks, academics, and artists — cluster in the “urban archipelago” of America’s cities. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has increasingly become the voice of white people who live around other white people in rural and suburban areas, where they have been radicalized by burgeoning right-wing media and a network of ideologically conservative think tanks and lobbying groups.

It is not surprising that small-government ideology appeals to people who view government as a mechanism whereby special interest groups make claims on their resources, values, and privileges. Conservative whites, freaked out by hippies in the ’60s, blacks in the ’70s, communists in the ’80s, Clintons in the ’90s, Muslims in the ’00s, and Obama more recently, are now more or less permanently freaked out, gripped by a sense of “aggrieved entitlement,” convinced that they are “losing their country.” (If only someone would come along and promise to make it great again!)

As the GOP has grown more demographically and ideologically homogeneous, it has become, in the memorable words of congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, “a resurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

When I was a new lawyer, a more seasoned colleague told me “There’s actually only one legal question: what do we do?”

That question is equally applicable to politics. But for those of us who miss the previously sane and respectable Grand Old Party–and the balance it provided to the political system–the answer is far more elusive.

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When We Don’t Know It When We See It

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that he couldn’t define pornography, but that “I know it when I see it,” the line has become something of a joke–trotted out to underscore the less-than-coherent nature of an observation or complaint.

What isn’t a joke, however, is the increasing divide between people who recognize the complexities and realities of the world we live in and those who are increasingly at sea. The latter group– grasping for bright lines and responding to slogans in lieu of analysis–are easy pickings for  politicians willing to pander to their fears and incomprehension.

A recent commentary posted at Talking Points Memo provides a graphic example of the phenomenon. The writer attended the Trump/Palin/Cruz rally against the Iran agreement, and noted the reaction to Trump’s bombastic, non-specific attack, which boiled down to “I could have done it better” and “America needs to win again, and I’ll make America a winner.”

“We’re going to build up our military. We’re going to have such a strong military, that nobody—nobody!—is going to mess with us. We’re not going to have to use it,” said Trump.

This is American Exceptionalism re-imagined by Charles Atlas. Trump wants to prove that he can make America so huge and so strong—the strongest!—that no terrorist would dare kick sand in our faces again. Thinking this way is more than a little silly, but it is exactly how the people who went to the Stop Iran Deal Rally felt.

The pity of this all is that the Iran deal shows how America can lead (and win!) in an increasingly disorganized world. We negotiated with Iran from a position of strength. We had support from our European allies. We had Iran’s billions in our banks. Behind door number one was Iran giving up their nuclear weapons program. Behind door number two was Iran becoming the next destination for Drone Airlines. The United States gave up nothing in this deal. In exchange for their own money, Iran gave us what we wanted: an Iran without The Bomb.

This is what winning looks like. This is our enemy surrendering their weapons without a fight not because they love us but because they know they would not survive the fight. After our embassies getting bombed, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia invading Georgia, the red line in Syria, Benghazi, Russia invading Ukraine, Boko Haram, and ISIS, stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons was change we need to believe in.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the dispute over the Iranian agreement was the absolute lack of alternatives (other than war) offered by its opponents. Watching proponents and opponents debate the issue was like watching an adult argue with a two-year-old having a meltdown.

If people who don’t know it when they see it, people looking instead for simple, non-specific messages, bombast and empty rhetoric, end up outnumbering thoughtful Americans at the polls next year, we’re all in trouble.

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Corrupting the Courts

Can we talk about checks and balances? The rule of law?

On July 16th, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned that state’s limits on money in politics, and handed Scott Walker a significant political victory as he began his (thus far pathetic) campaign for the White House.

If the case had been argued and decided on legal principles, it would be unremarkable, no matter how unfortunate “good government” advocates might consider the consequences. But it wasn’t. Walker’s victory was political, not legal. As Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Policy, explained in the wake of the decision,

“The dark money groups that bankrolled the Walker team’s recall victories got the decision they wanted from the justices they swept into office with their spending.”

Defenders of judicial elections point out that it is impossible to remove politics from other methods of judicial selection, and that is certainly true. But those processes–like the one we follow in Indiana, where a panel of lawyers “vets” candidates and sends three names to the Governor–do not involve the obscene amounts of money and the blatantly political motivations that characterized the Wisconsin high court election.

The Wisconsin Club For Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturer’s and Commerce, the organizations that brought the lawsuit, spent $3,685,000 supporting Justice David Prosser in his 2011 race (five times as much as the Prosser campaign itself). The election was decided by just 7,000 votes. Anyone who doubts that expenditures at that level were meant to “buy” judicial outcomes is living in a fantasy world.

In Wisconsin, what that money bought was an elimination of checks and balances, ensuring that the judicial branch would roll over and play dead when faced with corrupt activity by the executive.

“It comes as no surprise that a court elected with $10 million in support from the same dark money groups under investigation would overturn years of precedent and open the door to unlimited secret funds in Wisconsin elections, fully coordinated with candidates,” said Brendan Fischer, General Counsel of the Center for Media and Democracy.

The groups challenging the probe, Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG) and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), allegedly coordinated with Walker and were parties to the case, and also among the top spenders on Wisconsin Supreme Court elections.Justices Michael Gableman and David Prosser were both elected to the court by narrow margins and with huge expenditures by WMC and WiCFG, yet declined a motion from Special Prosecutor Schmitz to recuse themselves from the case. In court filings, Walker’s lawyer also argued against the recusal motion.

In Wisconsin, partisans used judicial elections to buy the result they wanted. In Kansas, where the courts recently invalidated an administrative change desired by the state legislature, the legislature has threatened to defund the judicial branch. 

And of course, we have candidates for the highest office in the land supporting the right of a county clerk to ignore the highest court in the land.

Rule of law, anyone?

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