Month: March 2013

“Evolving” at lightning speed

by digby

There was a mild debate among liberals a few months ago when the president said that whilehe personally believed that gay people should have the right to marry, he also thought it was a “local” issue which people had a right to arbitrate based on their own notions of right and wrong.

What you’re seeing is, I think, states working through this issue– in fits and starts, all across the country. Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times. And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what’s recognized as a marriage.
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Well, I– you know, my Justice Department has already– said that it is not gonna defend– the Defense Against Marriage Act. That we consider that a violation of equal protection clause. And I agree with them on that. You know? I helped to prompt that– that move on the part of the Justice Department.

Part of the reason that I thought it was important– to speak to this issue was the fact that– you know, I’ve got an opponent on– on the other side in the upcoming presidential election, who wants to– re-federalize the issue and– institute a constitutional amendment– that would prohibit gay marriage. And, you know, I think it is a mistake to– try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue.

He explicitly endorsed a states’ rights position while saying that he thought eventually everyone would agree that gay marriage is a fundamental right. Although I didn’t quarrel with the legal strategy of rolling out gay marriage on a state by state basis, I disagreed with the idea that any liberal leader should use the rhetoric of states’ rights in the realm of advancing universal human rights.

The good news is that he’s changed his mind:

If President Barack Obama were on the Supreme Court, he said Friday, he’d probably support a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage — though that’s not what his administration asked the current justices to do.

The brief filed Thursday by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli urges the court to strike down California’s voter-approved same-sex marriage ban, known as Proposition 8.

But the Justice Department’s submission does not contain the sweeping argument for a national same sex marriage right that Prop. 8’s opponents made in their legal filings with the court, and that the president now seems to say he supports.

“What we’ve said is that same-sex couples are a group, a class that deserves heightened scrutiny, that the Supreme Court needs to ask the state why it’s doing it, and if the state doesn’t have a good reason, it should be struck down. That’s the core principle, as applied to this case,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question during an appearance in the White House briefing room. “The Court may decide that if it doesn’t apply in this case, it probably can’t apply in any case. there’s no good reason for it….If I were on the Court, that’d probably be the view that I’d put forward. But I’m not a judge, I’m the president.”

Obama said Friday that while he viewed the state-level debate on the same-sex marriage issue as “profoundly positive,” the Supreme Court fight over Prop. 8 essentially required his administration to confront the issue directly, notwithstanding his comments last May that “this is an issue that is going to be worked out at the local level.”

“Last year, upon a long period of reflection, I concluded that we cannot discriminate against same-sex couples when it comes to marriage, that the basic principle that America is founded on, the idea that we’re all created equal, applies to everybody regardless of sexual orientation, as well as race or gender or religion or ethnicity,” Obama said Friday.

Obama said his view paralleled a broad change in public opinion on the subject.

“I think that the same evolution that I’ve gone through is an evolution that the country as a whole has gone through,” Obama added, “When the Supreme Court essentially called the question by taking this case about California’s law, I didn’t feel like that was something that this administration could avoid. I felt it was important for us to articulate what I believe and what this administration stands for.”
“When the Supreme Court asks do you think that the California law, which doesn’t provide any rationale for discriminating against same-sex couples other than just the notion that, well, they’re same-sex couples — if the Supreme Court asks me or my attorney general or solicitor general, ‘Do we think that meets constitutional muster?’ I felt it was important for us to answer that question honestly,” Obama said. “And the answer is no.”

That’s a big step in the right direction. The change in public opinion on this issue is dramatic and irrespective of the legal strategy, I think that it’s past time for national leaders to start articulating this as a constitutional right rather than a privilege to be “given” depending on the feelings of other people where they happen to reside. The president has now taken the position that the US constitution offers no rationale for discrimination against same-sex couples — and that is most definitely not a states’ rights position.

I think there should be an explicit federal right to gay marriage and I’m fairly certain we’ll get there someday. But I’m also fairly sure it’s going to take national leaders who are at least willing to say that human rights should not be subject to the whims of local prejudice and “state sovereignty.” As we’ve seen in just the last few years, it’s quite possible for states to roll back long established rights when they’re in the grips of conservative political power. We certainly know they’re willing to give it the old college try. The president took an important step today by saying clearly that he doesn’t actually believe that states have a right to discriminate. Good for him.

Update: BMAZ at Emptywheel has a more thorough legal analysis.

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The Biden-McConnell shuffle

by digby

Until yesterday, I was a confused by this as Matt Yglesias is about this:

As the sequestration fight continues, I’m reminded that I continue to be confused as to why the White House struck the fiscal cliff deal back in January. As you may recall, at that time the country was facing three simultaneous occurences. One was sequestration. One was the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. One was the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. Democrats and Republicans agreed on a deal that extended more of the Bush tax cuts than Obama had proposed but less than all of them, allowed the payroll tax holiday to fully expire, and kicked the can on the sequestration issue until March 1. Now they’re arguing over whether sequestration should be replaced fully with spending cuts, or with a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.

Now imagine an alternate universe in which everyone woke up on January 3 to discover sequestration in effect and the Bush tax cuts fully expired. Republicans would have wanted a giant tax cut, and a big increase in defense spending. Obama would have wanted a smaller-but-still-large tax cut, a smaller increase in defense spending, and a substantial increase in non-military spending. It seems like cutting a deal to cut taxes and increase both military and non-military spending could have been struck relatively easily. Yes, the country would have suffered from a week or two or maybe even five of excessive fiscal drag. But with everyone agreeing that taxes are too high and military spending too low, working something out where we raise non-military spending a bit more than Republicans want and in exchange cut taxes a bit more than Democrats want doesn’t seem too hard.

Now, I knew before yesterday that the president has often said he wanted to “fix” the “entitlements.” And he has offered up cuts to Social Security and Medicare numerous times over the past couple of years in various negotiations. But I would have thought that he’d nonetheless be open to not cutting them when he had the chance to put an end to this constant budget brinksmanship, if only for the good of the country. That’s why I too was confused when they sent in Biden to work with McConnell and they came up with this particular deal. I always thought that kicking the can down the road was better than cutting vital programs, but I thought they would put it on the back burner when the best opportunity to break the GOP’s obstructionism was in their hands.

Now I think it’s quite clear that the whole point of all this is to force cuts to “entitlements” — and wrapping up the sequestration with a deal to cut taxes and increase both military and non-military spending would have defeated that purpose. Apparently, they truly want their legacy to be the administration that raised taxes and cut the safety net. Perhaps they believe that being the mirror image of Ronald Reagan’s manufactured reputation means that they’ll be loved just as much. I don’t think that’s true.

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Colbert explains the sequester

by digby

…and explains it better than anyone:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

He leaves out the part about how “entitlement” cuts and tax hikes were the DNA of the deal, but you have to be watching pretty closely to know about that.

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Dispatch from Bizarroworld: “The vast inane”

by digby

I thought Bob Borosage’s piece today said it all so I’m just re-posting it here:

Welcome to the vast inane. Today the “sequester” – mindless, across the board cuts of military and domestic spending designed to be abhorrent – will go into effect. Republicans claimed a “big victory” as House Speaker John Boehner shut down any negotiations and sent the House home. The cuts will cost jobs and add to the headwinds facing the economy. The sequester will be followed by operatic melodrama over keeping the government open after the end of March and keeping the government from defaulting on its debt beginning in the middle of May.

The deficit is falling faster than any time since the demobilization after World War II, Americans are afflicted with mass unemployment and falling wages, but Washington will be traveling into the vast inane for the foreseeable future.

The media is focused on the possible effects of the cuts. But what is actually being sequestered is any sensible debate about the fundamental changes needed to revive the middle class and make this economy work for working families once more. The old economy – and the failed economic ideas that drove it – benefited the few, while undermining the broad middle class, even before the collapse.

Sadly, that old economy is back. Consider the unsustainable imbalances that contributed directly to the Great Recession:

Global trade imbalances: The U.S. trade deficit is still over $1 billion a day. The trade deficits with China remain the largest bilateral imbalances in history. This costs the U.S. good jobs and undermines wage growth. The Chinese suppress consumption in their own country to sustain their export-led growth. This imbalance is destabilizing and unsustainable, but is not up for discussion. Instead, the administration and the Republican leadership push traditional corporate trade accords that will only add to the problem.

Gilded-Age Inequality: In the two years coming out of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent captured an obscene 121 percent of the income growth, while the remaining 99 percent lost ground. The rich pocketed all the new income growth and then some. Corporate profits are setting new records as a percentage of the economy; wages are setting new lows. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued, extreme inequality not only crushes the middle class, it saps the demand needed for a prosperous economy.

It also corrodes our democracy and corrupts our politics. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for raising the minimum wage, but deficit jockeying is consuming the limited congressional calendar, curtailing any discussion of even this modest reform. Also needed are measures to empower workers to organize and bargain collectively for a fair share of the profits and productivity they help to produce. Corporate tax reform should offer lower rates to those companies that create jobs at home rather than abroad and that limit the divergence between the median wages of workers and the compensation of the top executives. Instead, Republicans are waging war against unions and basic worker rights, and CEOs continue to receive million-dollar short-term incentives to plunder their own companies.

Starved Public Investment: All the posturing about cutting government – with the president bragging about bringing discretionary spending down to levels of the economy not seen since Eisenhower and Republicans vowing to cut it to pre-industrial levels – ignores the painful reality that America is starving public investments vital to its future.

Our dangerous and decrepit infrastructure costs lives while making our economy far less competitive. If we are to be a high-wage country, we need to rebuild, modernizing and hardening our infrastructure to better withstand the extreme weather that is surely our fate.

We aren’t even doing the basics in education – from universal preschool to affordable college and advanced training. Instead we’ve decided to use testing and piecemeal privatization to substitute for investment. It hasn’t and won’t work.

We should be doing more, not less, public investment in research and development, particularly in clean energy and the green industrial revolution that is already sweeping the world. Some of this could be achieved from changing priorities – ending obscene subsidies to Big Oil and Big Pharma, reducing our bloated Pentagon budgets – but any progress gets sabotaged by the fixation on cutting, not investing wisely.

Bloated Finance: Wall Street’s financial wilding inflated the housing bubble and then blew up the economy, doubling our national debt in the process. Deemed too big to fail, the big banks were bailed out at the cost of trillions. Financial reform tried to strengthen accountability, but the big banks have emerged from the crisis bigger and more concentrated than ever. The financial subsidy they pocket from the reality that they won’t be allowed to fail makes it difficult for small banks to compete. The guarantee also encourages gambling with other people’s money, for they pocket the winnings confident that we will cover their losses. Progressive Democrats in the Senate – Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders and others – as well as conservative Republican bankers and pundits have called for breaking up the big banks. But this barely registers in the public debate.

President Obama had it right when he said in his State of the Union address, “We just can’t cut our way to prosperity.” We need to move beyond the “vast inane” in Washington if we are to begin even to consider what must be done to revive the American middle class.

Two years ago, Occupy Wall Street showed what it took to “change the conversation,” as the pundits described it. It will take a much more powerful and disruptive movement to actually begin to drive the reforms we need.

I don’t know where it’s going to come from, but he’s absolutely right. This bizarroworld solution to a bizarroword crisis (while ignoring real solutions to a real crisis) is going to be a great challenges to historians as they try to piece together the reasons for the decisions taken in the last few years. Like Iraq, the question is going to be why they insisted on taking actions that were obviously counter productive. And also like Iraq, I think they will find many reasons, not just one.

To be sure, there are people who are making a lot of money right now so their motivations are clear. Many others are in thrall to them and see these profits as validation of the rightness of their decisions. Others simply want to see government shrink by any means necessary — they believe it is an essentially immoral enterprise that allows half the people (not including them, of course) to be lazy and shiftless. This combination of profit worship and self-serving moralism, along with elite social distance, seem to me to be the main underlying motivation. I don’t know what to do about any of that.

Update: Obama is holding a press conference as I write this. He’s pretty clear that he wants to cut entitlements in this one and says there are people on both sides who are willing to do this, they just need to speak up.

He also says that the real long term problem is health care costs and he’s willing to tackle them. “There are members of my party who violently disagree with doing anything (to cut) Medicare. I disagree with them.” He then goes on to say that he’s willing to cut “entitlements.” Interesting little sleight of hand.

Look, he’s never been straight with the American people about this, I don’t care what anyone says. He never admits that he’s put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he’s been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he’s willing to make “tough choices” and will do things “his own party won’t like.” He never comes right out and says what her means about “entitlement” cuts. And there’s a reason for that. They are terrible, terrible ideas that nobody of either party wants. (Meanwhile, he’s said several times that he rejected Simpson-Bowles because the defense cuts were too high.)

I sure hope the Democrats who are going to be strong-armed into voting for this, if it happens, understand that they will get it from both sides in the next election because they will. This will be a very, very ugly campaign for all of them. They have constituents too and those voters will learn from both the right and the left that these folks cut Social Security and Medicare. And it will be true.

They need to just repeal this hideous sequester and get on with it. There’s no reason for these Democrats to pay the price for an ill-advised, face-saving deal that was cooked up with the intention of of forcing entitlement cuts without making that explicit to anyone.

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Austerity continues its disastrous course in Europe

by David Atkins

Joe Weisenthal witnesses what austerity has wrought in Europe:

But everyone predicted that this austerity would be devastating for growth, and now we see that playing out in 2013 in a wicked way.

While the German economy is strong, the rest of Europe just stinks, as today’s PMI numbers show quite nicely….

While Germany is benefiting from strong exports, the French economy is mired in a horrible slump…

A very severe leg down is taking hold, and there’s nothing anybody is doing about it.

The ECB might at some point cut rates again, which should benefit marginally. But the lack of domestic demand remains brutal.

And now politics is getting worse, as the electoral crisis in Italy shows.

The question is: Will anyone address it?

Right now most of the rhetoric is about the importance of sticking with various austerity commitments. If nobody has the guts to change direction, there will be more Italies in the future.

Despite the obviousness of austerity’s failure in Europe and the comparative health of the U.S. economy vis-a-vis the trouble Eurozone, anti-government forces have succeeded once again in dragging us down the same path via sequestration and other terrible, regressive ideas.

It’s not like there aren’t good alternatives.

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When can we end the empire?

by digby

Oliver Stone’s Untold History continues to provoke the academic and political establishment into fits of mean girl nastiness. I imagine Stone is used to this, but it’s still astonishing to see scholars dismiss documentary work out of hand. The latest is a review of the series and book by Bill Clinton BFF Sean Wilentz in the NY Review of Books which, in a nutshell, defends the US National Security State as if it had been ordained by God and complains that Stone and Peter Kuznick (his collaborator) are doing the devil’s work by suggesting that engagement with the Soviets might have yielded benefits that the cold war could not. (I’m being somewhat facetious, obviously, but if you read the piece you’ll see what I mean.)

Jonathan Schwarz has written a long piece on Wilentz’s review that’s well worth reading in its entirety but I’d like to focus on the important observation about the series’ documented National Security through-line from the post war period to the Iraq debacle. He points out something that should be obvious to all of us and yet none of us (or very few) have actually noticed:

We can never know what might have come to pass had the U.S. adopted a different posture toward the Soviet Union, either after World War II or during the decades that followed. From the viewpoint of liberals like Wilentz, the answer clearly is: nothing good. The Soviets were determined to export their totalitarianism to the world, and any naive failure on our part to resist would end in disaster. Yes, the U.S. might have gone overboard here and there, but the overall story of the cold war was that the Soviet Union acted and we reacted.

But this is what we can know: if Wilentz’s understanding of history is correct, U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans.

I think we know the answer to that, don’t we?

The question reminded me of the many, many times during the past decade that I noted the odd fact that the national security establishment, the neocons in particular, saw everything in the world in terms of the old fight against totalitarianism. Back in 2004, I was complaining about this:

Many people have been writing recently, and some of us quite some time ago, about the fact that the Bush administration, instead of seeing the assymetrical threat of terrorism for what it was, simply applied their cold war tenets of nation state rollback to the new threat. It is an intellectual failure of huge magnitude and it will haunt us for many years to come.

If you look back at the PNAC manifestos of the late 90’s that served as the guiding documents of Bush’s policy you will see that terrorism per se was not perceived as a threat. Indeed, it was hardly mentioned. Richard Clarke and others have verified that the Bush administration did not take it seriously. But, what is most distressing is that they refused to let go of their erroneous notions of state sponsored terrorism even after 9/11 which led to the mistaken belief that the key to defeating al Qaeda was to overthrow the Taliban, (thus freeing them to go after what they perceived to be a real threat, the totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein.)

There has been a lot of discussion about the “faith based” nature of this presidency, drawing parallels to unquestioning fundamentalist religion and cults of personality. There are obviously elements of all of this in explaining why the Bush administration has made so many huge strategic errors that were entirely predictable before any action was taken. However, it’s more than that. You cannot explain intellectuals like Wolfowitz away with fundamentalist religion and there is no reason to believe that men like Rumsfeld and Cheney are subject to any Bush cult of personality. But, they all have one thing in common that is demonstrable throughout their public careers — their relentless adherence to their beliefs, no matter what the facts may seem to show. Going all the way back to TEAM B and the Committee for the Present Danger, these people have been proven wrong — proven, mind you — again and again and yet they maintain their bedrock belief that the threat of totalitarian nations is the singular overwhelming threat to our country and they must be defeated militarily wherever they occur. These people are stuck in a fringe cold war mindset that nothing can shake. 9/11, it seems, did not change anything.

For instance, their beliefs about Iraq sponsored terrorism were not solely fometed by Laurie Mylroie. She neatly piggybacked her theory that Saddam the Stalinist was the root of all mid-east terrorism onto an earlier theory promoted by Claire Sterling which posited that all terrorism was sponsored by the Soviet Union. Her book, The Terror Network from back in 1980 made the case that terrorism could not exist without the support of a state sponsor and that idea has guided the Republican foreign policy establishment even until this day. Just as it is said that Wolfowitz and Feith encouraged everyone in the DOD to read Mylroie’s book, William Casey responded to his analysts assertion that there was no Soviet terrorist conspiracy by saying,”Read Claire Sterling’s book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.” This is, then, an old story.

In those days I saw this as a peculiarly neo-conservative worldview. But the truth is that this was the rationale behind the bipartisan National Security Policy of the entire post-war period, which Untold History documents (and which I should have remembered — hey,hey LBJ how many kids….) The neo-cons were just more aggressive about it and both sides created the illusion that there was a serious argument about these things for their own purposes.

It was awkward for a while after the cold war, trying to fit that old totalitarian square peg into the asymmetrical terrorist threat. The selling of Iraq was so terribly clumsy, consciously drawing upon Stalinist imagery with lugubrious rhetoric about rape rooms and “gassing his own people,” because they were still caught up in their own fantasy, as if it was the only way they knew how to get off. It would appear that the Obama administration has gone a long way toward solving that problem with its antiseptic drone warfare that keeps the threat level high and the risk level low. We have adjusted now and no longer need totalitarianism to sell us on the need for our empire. Today it’s all about us needing a “light footprint” on the ground and eyes in the sky all over the planet to keep us safe from the boogeyman.

I didn’t see Stone’s series saying that the containment theory was wrong in all respects but merely that there were missed opportunities, particularly at the end of the war and the decade following to try to seek a different path. The temptation to be a military superpower was too great and the industrial and political forces that wanted it were too powerful. (And anyway, you can’t be a great hero without a great villain, right?) But even if it’s absolutely true that the Soviet threat required two generation’s worth of global military build up, it’s also certainly true that one would have expected the period since 1989 to be one of withdrawal from empire. And that has not happened. Like Jonathan, I can’t help but see that as just more evidence that much of the rationale for the National Security State was bullshit from the very beginning.

As he points out:

[E]stablishment historians like Wilentz play the same role today as they did during the cold war: not just refusing to ask critical questions about U.S. history and its effect on the present day, but shouting down those who attempt to do so. That’s what Wilentz is doing with his review of Untold History. And it’s what he did in October, 2001 when he explained why the U.S. had just been attacked: “To the terrorists, America’s crime – its real crime – is to be America.”

Or as George W. Bush put it:

I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.

I’m sure the Soviets believed exactly the same thing.

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Scalia’s originamalism

by digby

Ian Millhiser takes a deeper look at Justice Scalia’s rather alarming comments in yesterday’s oral arguments:

When Scalia uses the term “racial entitlement” he appears to be referring to the kind of law that entrenches itself because lawmakers are too afraid to vote against it for fear of being accused of racially improper motives. As Scalia puts it, “[w]henever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.” In other words, Scalia believes that the Voting Rights Act somehow “restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation,” and thus it is his job as a judge to strike it down.

This is a disturbing idea for many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that its logic could extend well beyond the Voting Rights Act. There is a common belief among conservatives that welfare programs by their very nature lead to the kind of so-called breakdown of democracy that Scalia finds objectionable in the Voting Rights Act case. Indeed, the most famous articulation of this view was Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark: “those that are dependent on government and those that think government’s job is to redistribute — I’m not going to get them.” In essence, Romney warned that as the government creates welfare programs, this transforms welfare recipients into a constituency for those programs. And eventually that constituency becomes so large that it is impossible for a lawmaker to repeal those programs, or for people who oppose those programs to get elected.

To be sure, Scalia has never explicitly endorsed Romney’s view of welfare — although I’d be willing to make a $10,000 bet that he agrees with Romney. But it’s not hard to predict how a judge who agrees with both Romney’s view of welfare and Scalia’s view of when judges must destroy democracy in order to save it would react to the modern welfare state. With his racial entitlement comment, Scalia offered a constitutional theory that would allow movement conservatives to strike down the entire American safety net.

Just don’t call it judicial activism because that would be very wrong. And unconstitutional.

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