Month: July 2015

Filibuster split

by digby

The filibuster is fundamentally illiberal. But it’s also useful. And the Republicans just don’t know what to do about it:

An internal divide is sharpening among Republican presidential candidates over whether to eliminate the Senate’s 60-vote threshold in order to fight Obamacare if they win the White House.

On Tuesday, Carly Fiorina and former Texas Governor Rick Perry told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt they would support using the “Reid Rule”—otherwise known as the “nuclear option”—to scrap the filibuster in order to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“I would,” Fiorina said. “And in this case, while I would be very reluctant to do so, the truth is that’s how this thing was passed in the first place.” She added, “Obamacare is a tangled web that is becoming worse, clearly, day by day.”

“I don’t have a problem at all with breaking the filibuster.”

Perry also answered in the affirmative.

“I’m for using the Reid Rule on—to break the filibuster,” he said, explaining that he wants to get rid of it both to repeal Obamacare and to confirm Supreme Court justices with a simple majority vote. “I support using the Reid Rule to appoint these Constitutional conservatives as well. So I don’t have a problem at all with breaking the filibuster.”

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has said he’d “certainly consider” the idea; Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said he would “absolutely” support it.

On the other side of the divide, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has rejected the proposition even if it paves the way for repealing Obamacare, arguing that “ending the legislative filibuster would ultimately undermine conservative principles.” On his side are Tea Party groups Club For Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action, who want to preserve the legislative tool for blocking legislation in the future.

Basically this comes down to whether or not you think it’s more important to block the other side from doing things you hate or removing all obstacles to doing what you love. It makes some sense that presidential candidates would be in favor of getting rid of it because if they win, they will want to pass legislation. After all, if a Democrat is in the White House that won’t happen anyway.

I think this split shows that the conservative groups are aware that they are unlikely to win the presidency and see their role in the future to be obstruction. Nothing they want will get through if a Democrat is in the White House — and they know that’s the likely outcome. They want to preserve their ability to filibuster just in case there are some coattails and Democrats take back the Senate. And hey, they might just want to filibuster a Republican majority too — they aren’t exactly what you’d call team players these days.

It’s likely they are going to hold the House regardless so they can probably stop anything anyway. But with the Tea Party being such unreliable allies on issues like trade, groups like Club for Growth probably would like to have another check. And the Tea Party/Heritage action folks are all about obstruction (also known as hostage taking/political terrorism) as their preferred weapon, Cruz being their primary practitioner. They just want to be able to do it, period.

Democrats have the same split, it’s just not as acute. Many Senators don’t want to get rid of the filibuster because they’re afraid of a GOP president and a GOP congressional majority — and for good reason. But it’s purely instrumental for them, they haven’t ever used obstruction as a tactic for its own sake. At this point the country looks as though it’s going to be splitting the power between the two parties for a while. But if it’s close enough to steal it, you know the Republicans will do it. They’ve proved that already …

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The Great Whitebread Hope slips in Iowa

by digby

I have always maintained that Walker is overvalued:

In an election season where there will likely be at least 16 Republican candidates, the survey reveals numerous contenders bunched behind Walker, whose support in the poll has dropped to 18 percent from 21 percent in May and 25 percent in February.

Jockeying for second place are billionaire Donald Trump and retired surgeon Ben Carson, tied at 10 percent; Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, tied at 9 percent; former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, at 8 percent; and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, at 7 percent.

He may still pull it off. Wisconsin and Iowa are neighbors and share the same media market. But I have never thought it was quite the slam dunk everyone else did.

But jeez, look at the rest of the  field. Carson and Trump followed by Paul and Cruz. Walker’s not exactly a moderate and he’s been going more and more wingnut as the pressure increases and the rest are certifiable loons. Yet, together they are the favorites of a large majority of Iowa Republicans. This is what they want.

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The Roberts Court is not “just right”

by digby

I have a piece in Salon this morning about the curious polling results that show half of Democrats think this Supreme Court is “just right”.  And those findings were the same before the decisions last week. Conservatives, certainly don’t agree:

Republicans are most apt in the new poll to say the Court’s ideology is too far to the left: 69% see the Court as too liberal. That’s up from 2012, when 59% of Republicans called it too liberal.

Among Democrats, 34% now say they see the Court as too conservative and 15% too liberal, 49% say the Court is about right. In 2012, just 6% of Democrats described the Court as too liberal, but the share calling it too conservative was about the same at 35%.

Read on to see some of the reasons why this disconnect has happened. I found that it’s not as simple a question as it may seem — and it’s actually fairly complicated. And daunting. Liberals will continue to win a few even with this court simply because the conservatives are swinging for the fences and striking out some of the time. But overall, this court is moving us right and very quickly, particularly on issues that favor business and big money,  and it won’t be easy to swing it back.

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How should we then rule?
by Tom Sullivan

For a sub-sect of Christians, it is an attack on “religious liberty” when they can no longer tell equally free Americans how they can and cannot live. As Yul Brynner said, playing Moses, their god “IS God.” The Big G, the top dog, the Big Kahuna. Freedom of religion in America is fine, and all, so long as other, lesser faiths understand whose god IS God.

Fear of losing that top-dog status is behind the insistence by conservative Christians that America was founded as a Christian nation. White fear of having to share power with former slaves was behind decades of Jim Crow and KKK terror. Thus, it is “erasing white history and white culture” to take down a flag flown as a constant reminder of just whose race is boss.

“Religious liberty” has become the catchphrase for people who find their ability to lord it over their neighbors eroded by America extending freedoms they enjoy to “lesser thans” whom they fear. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges to extend the blessings of legal recognition of marriage to same-sex couples has them freaking out. The American Spectator calls the ruling “the Dred Scotting of religious liberty.”

It’s as peculiar a conception of liberty as it is a peculiar definition of persecution. Especially for a group so flush with cash and influence. Talking Points Memo reports on the Hobby Lobby Bible museum planned for just off the Mall in Washington. Among other things, it will be there as a staging area for lobbying efforts and marches by the Christian right:

The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism—yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics, and nestled among its iconic public monuments. If you ask its creators, it’s meant to protect American Christianity from persecution. But it may be the most strident example yet of how that expression of religion, which in many ways is running counter to trends in American public opinion, continues to flex its political—and financial—muscle.

The founders of the Museum of the Bible are the Green family, the owners of the arts and crafts store chain Hobby Lobby, whose litigation against the federal government over contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act turned their franchise into a new ambassador for the overt expressions of Christianity in public spaces—including workplaces, museums, and even the nation’s courtrooms.

How it is any of an employer’s business how employees spend the compensation they’ve earned and, in a contractual arrangement, the employer agreed to pay? Well, when you feel employees are lessers, not equals, and your god IS God, it all makes sense. George W. Bush wanted to give people a tax cut from the Clinton surplus because it was “your money.” For outfits like Hobby Lobby, your compensation (cash and benefits) is not really your money if it’s paid from their accounts. It’s still their money, and an infringement on their “religious liberty” not to be able to control how equally free employees choose to spend it.

We’re still waiting for the religious liberty people to get incensed over the string of recent suspicious fires at African-American churches in the South. The count is up to seven.

Yes there is a red and blue America

by digby

Barack was wrong about that:

A more complete analysis shows that being male, low-income, less well educated, Southern, white and Republican are related to reporting a lower level of offense at the Confederate flag. In contrast, being younger, non-Southern, Democrat and white are associated with reporting a lower level of offense at the gay pride flag.

And that explains:

… the initial hesitation of Republican presidential candidates to support removing the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds in South Carolina. Only once nine people were murdered during Bible study in a prominent Charleston AME church did the candidates respond to national public opinion, which is strongly weighted against the flag, and call for its removal.

Hey you can’t really blame them too much. It wasn’t all that long ago that many liberals’ favorite candidate was campaigning by saying that he wanted the guys with confederate flags on their trucks to vote for him too. Indeed, it took until an African American ran for president that the Democrats stopped furiously strategizing how to get back those confederate men. For a long time they seemed to be the Holy Grail to every national politician.

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