Further thoughts on the nuclear option

The New Neo Posted on by

The cloture and filibuster rules of the Senate have been instrumental in keeping our government from careening wildly back and forth between two extremes. In other words, they have given us stability and forced a certain amount of bipartisanship on us. I never was for the nuclear option no matter who was proposing it, left or right. Sometimes what Madison referred to as the “overbearing majority” will consist of one side, sometimes the other (unless Democrats manage to create the permanent majority they think they see ahead). But the result of activating the nuclear option will always be extreme, and always tend toward the more tyrannical.

The framers were smart and tried their best to prevent this from happening—for example, by originally having senators be appointed by the states. But the country has been edging more and more in the opposite direction, step by step, for the last 200 years.

The only thing that kept the line from being crossed was the reasonableness of our elected officials. Each side realized it was in its own best interests to step back from the brink, and each side did step back from the brink—until now. But Reid and Obama (who definitely was behind it, as well) jumped over the brink, and nearly all the rest of the Democrats followed them, lemming-like.

It makes me think of this:

So here we are; I don’t think it’s possible to ever go back once the precedent is set. Each side, when in power, would have to be supremely noble to relinquish the simple majority vote, and would have to trust the other side not to cross the line all over again when they were in power.

One of three exceptions to the Democrat leap was Carl Levin, who’s about 80 and retiring, although he would have won his Michigan seat handily had he not announced he was stepping down. He spoke out strongly against the action taken by his own party:

Yet for all the one-sidedness of Levin’s speech, it was still fundamentally sound, grounded in principles once shared by leaders who understood the danger of unchecked majoritarianism. In 2005, then-Sen. Obama declared that “majoritarian absolute power on either side” was “not what the founders intended.” Those sentiments, like most Obama pronouncements, were false. Carl Levin, by contrast, is true to his word.

Why did Levin do it? Was it because he could risk offending Reid because he’s leaving the Senate? Or was it that rarest of political motivations, integrity and sincerity? If so, he may be one of the few left: a dinosaur about to become extinct.

And although the WaPo took the same obligatory swipes at the awful Republicans as Levin did, its editorial board surprised me by really scolding the Democrats, too. A little bit of integrity at the WaPo?:

Democrats who are celebrating will soon enough regret their decision. The radical action, a product of poisonous partisanship, will also be an accelerant of poisonous partisanship.

The Chicago Tribune is even harder on the Democrats than the WaPo. But funny thing, what the MSM doesn’t realize (assuming it’s sincere in these editorials) is that those who perpetrated this power play laugh in their faces. They know the press can’t hurt them; the press has put them where they are today, and will continue (even in these editorials) to support them as opposed to the Republicans.

So, how many divisions does the MSM have, again? Forget that “pen is mightier than the sword” business. The press was an enabler in all this when it abdicated its pens, or rather, when it used them in the service of the administration. They have no one to thank but themselves.

The only power of the press was to tell the truth, and they muffed it. They thought they were kingmakers, but they were the ones who were being used.

[NOTE: Would the Republicans have done the same in 2014 if they won: activated the nuclear option? I don’t know, but my guess is that they would not have, although they might have threatened it, as in the past.]

Article roundup on the Iran deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Good piece by Jonathan S. Tobin: what are Obama’s Jewish supporters to do?

In other articles on the Iran deal and its effects (particularly on Israel), see this by William Jacobson.

In contrast to many previous foreign policy initiatives (or Hamlet-like lacks thereof) under the Obama administration, Obama micromanaged the Iran deal. And I wonder what the input of Valerie Jarrett may have been, as well.

Charels Krauthammer:

“This is a sham from beginning to end. It’s the worst deal since Munich,” Krauthammer said on Fox News “Special Report” on Monday. “It’s really hard to watch the president and the secretary of state and not think how they cannot be embarrassed by this deal.”

Krauthammer’s uncharacteristically confusing wording there “not think how they cannot be embarrassed” suggests to me how flummoxed he is by the boldness with which Obama sold Israel down the river. But this has clearly been a dream of Obama’s for a long time, telegraphed by his treatment of Netanyahu from the start. Nor does he care the least bit that the American people are not behind him, because he considers himself immune from their judgment.

Embarrassed? Hardly. In fact, the more the American people begin to desert him, the more boldly he will assert his own—opposed—agenda—without shame or hesitation. And this is true on both the foreign and the domestic front.

The Duke lacrosse case: the third act

The New Neo Posted on by

The first act in the Duke lacrosse case were the allegations and the resultant hue and cry and calls for conviction.

The second act was the unraveling of the case and the disbarment of prosecutor and DA Mike Nifong, as well as a civil lawsuit against him that is still going forward in the state of North Carolina, slowly but unsurely.

The third act is this:

A few days ago, Ms. Mangum [the accuser in the Duke rape case] was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her boyfriend who died from wounds she inflicted with a kitchen knife. That hasn’t made too many headlines, but its is a sad, if ironically apt, coda to the whole sorry story…

The story of this tawdry melodrama at Duke deserved an entire book, and it got a very good one in Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, and the journalist Stuart Taylor. They show in horrifying detail how “many professors and, to a lesser extent, administrators at one of the nation’s finest universities chose to grind their radical political axes at the expense of both their own students’ well-being and the academy’s traditional fidelity to due process.”

Many of people suffered because of the Duke farce. But what of Professor Bakers and his preening, activist colleagues? What of the Group of 88? Only one member apologized. The rest issued a statement that categorically rejected all “public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it.”

And who is this Professor Baker, still engaged in molding young minds in academia (he seems to have made a lateral move to Vanderbilt in the ensuing years)?:

During the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, Baker (among other members of the so-called “Group of 88”) published an open letter calling for Duke to dismiss the team and its players. Baker wrote that “white, male, athletic privilege” was responsible for the alleged rape. Baker suggested that the Duke administration was “sweeping things under the rug.” More generally, Baker’s letter criticized colleges and universities for the “blind-eyeing of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”

Duke Provost Peter Lange responded to Baker’s letter a few days later, criticizing Baker for prejudging the team based on their race and gender, citing this as a classic tactic of racism. Lange maintained that a rush to judgment would do little to remedy the deeper problems and that open letters such as Baker’s do little to further the cause of justice.

In 2007, charges against the players were dropped and the state’s Attorney General took the extraordinary step of declaring the students innocent. Following the exoneration of the players, one of the parents of a Duke lacrosse player emailed Baker and reported that he responded by writing that she was “quite sadly, mother of a ‘farm animal.'”

[NOTE: Many more details on Baker here.]

The nuclear option: the people wanted it

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed that quite a few of the senators who voted for the nuclear option justify it by saying some verstion of “the people wanted it.”

But actually, “the people” wanted cooperation between the parties, not increased polarization. “The people” wanted the end of Obamacare, and they didn’t even want Obamacare in the first place. “The people” are pulling away from liberalism (for the moment, anyway), just as the left seeks to solidify its power and entrench it in the federal judiciary.

The “people” who wanted the nuclear option were the people on the left.

Here’s Senator Baucus of Montana, who long ago used to be known as a moderate Democrat:

After talking to Montanans, it was clear to me this was the right thing to do,” said Sen. Max Baucus. “The people we work for are sick of gridlock keeping Congress from doing its job and it was time to stand up and do something about it.”

The people of Montana, who voted for Romney in 2012 by a 14% margin, cannot possibly feel this way about giving Obama and the Democrats in the Senate far more power, nor could Baucus actually think they do.

Chuck Schumer is another, although at least he has the excuse that his own state probably did want this to happen:

“The public is asking ”” is begging ”” us to act,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday [the day the Senate went nuclear].

But as the editors at the Chicago Tribune add:

Not at all. If the public is begging for anything, it’s for Congress to stand down from partisan enmity. Instead, Capitol Hill has gone to war.

There is no question that the nuclear option will increase partisanship, although it will streamline the ability of a bare majority to do what it wants. It was just as bad when the right proposed it. Now both sides will use it if they get the chance, and US policy will careen ever more wildly from one extreme to the other as each party comes to power—unless, of course, one party or other comes to dominate the political scene entirely.

It strikes me more and more that right now the House is our only line of defense against the left getting everything it ever wanted.

The Obama Doctrine bids us welcome our new ally Iran…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and our new enemy, Israel.

I get tired sometimes of writing “this is no surprise” about what the Obama administration does. But: this is no surprise.

The word “historic,” which has been used in many articles about the deal with the Iranians, has no particular valence—no relation to good or bad or indifferent. It merely means something of significance to history. And when the Iranians are happy about something and hail it as a “new era,” and the Israelis are furious, condemning it as a “historic mistake,” you better believe it’s not of significance in a good way.

Unless, of course, you’re on Iran’s side. Which, sadly enough, it’s been clear for some time that the Obama administration is. That or the alternative, which is that Obama and company are naive dupes. It’s the old “knave or fool” dilemma, and I suppose there’s room (as there often is with this administration) for the answer to be “both.”

John Bolton doesn’t mince words:

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement. Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.” This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club. Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer.

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more. Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges. Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

Bolton goes on to suggest that this agreement makes Israel’s position even more difficult than before, but its position was already extremely difficult to begin with. His entire piece is well worth reading.

I happened to catch a minute or so of Obama, and then Kerry, hailing and describing their agreement: what it does, what it doesn’t do. I noted that, although both have long been difficult to listen to (Kerry for well-nigh forty years), now both seem to have lost whatever shred of credibility that had still clung to them until now. In particular, Obama passed some turning point with his repeated “If you like your health plan…” pronouncements that showed unequivocally and forever more how cool and how sincere he can sound when he’s lying through his teeth. Once the American public has seen that, how can they ever believe him again?

I wonder how many people in this country are with him on this one. Oh, the far left is, and Valerie Jarrett. But even Congress seems unhappy, since they may vote for increased sanctions on Iran in some sort of probably unenforceable move:

But the announcement, after months of secret face-to-face talks between the United States and Iran, left many U.S. lawmakers deeply doubtful of the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran in more than three decades of estrangement. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, said Sunday he would work with colleagues to have sanctions against Iran ready “should the talks falter or Iran fail to implement or breach the interim agreement.”

Such distrust that Iran was negotiating in good faith ran across political parties that are otherwise deeply divided. And ready-to-go sanctions seemed to have rare bipartisan support across both of Congress’ chambers.

Why the difference between the president and Congress? Well, members of Congress still have to answer to the American people, whereas a second-term president does not. Would it not be ironic if one of the very few bipartisan bills passed in Congress were to be one where the parties united against Obama? It would be interesting to see whether Obama would veto it, or would just go around it in some administrative manner, if it were to be passed. And if he vetoed it, it would be interesting to see whether Congress would have the votes to override his veto. I doubt there are that many profiles in courage around.

[NOTE: Gabriel Malor at Ace’s points out that the new agreement was praised by Syria, Iran, Russia, China, and the EU, which certainly should tell you something. I’ve been looking for some words of praise from Democratic politicians in this country who are on Obama’s side, and all I’ve found so far from Obama’s strongest allies are tepid declarations of hopeful first steps combined with concerns.]

On the Democrats and the nuclear option: why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to understand what happened Thursday when the Democrats jettisoned 200 years of precedent and exercised the nuclear option, a good start would be this WSJ piece by James Taranto, who points out (among other things) that the Senate’s move not only diminishes the power of the minority party in that legislative body, it diminishes the power of the Senate itself vis a vis the president and the House:

The end of the filibuster entails a serious diminution of the Senate’s power vis-é -vis the president and the House. As we observed this July, the Senate’s power consists largely in its ability to withhold consent from both House-passed legislation and presidential actions (nominations and treaties). Thus majority rule enhances the power of the majority party at the expense of every individual senator, regardless of party.

As the Senate has become more partisan, and members elected during an earlier age have retired or died, concern for the Senate’s institutional power has diminished. Yesterday’s third Democratic dissenter, Carl Levin of Michigan, is one of only three remaining Democratic senators first elected before 1984.

Taranto doesn’t mention it, but another long-timer—Montana’s Max Baucus, who was originally elected in 1978 as a moderate Democrat—voted with the majority Democrats to pass the move the killed the filibuster. Why did Baucus do it? Well, this is what he said:

After talking to Montanans, it was clear to me this was the right thing to do,” said Sen. Max Baucus. “The people we work for are sick of gridlock keeping Congress from doing its job and it was time to stand up and do something about it.”

However, I can’t imagine anyone (much less Baucus) believing that the people of Montana, who went for Romney in 2012 by a 14% margin, actually feel this way about giving Obama and the Democrats in the Senate far more power. I would postulate that Baucus actually did it because he could: he already was no longer seeking re-election, because the people of Montana had decided that they’d had enough Baucus for a lifetime and withdrew enough support that polls last spring showed he would probably lose his next race. So what better way to stick it to them than to vote for the nuclear option?

Taranto points out another point about the vote by Democrats, which is that in some ways it would appear self-destructive:

What’s peculiar about the timing of the Democrats’ decision is that it comes just when the partisan risk of abolishing the filibuster has been heightened…The abject failure of ObamaCare has made the prospect of a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017 much likelier. Thus even from a purely partisan standpoint, rational Democrats would have been more cautious about invoking the nuclear option when they did than at just about any other time in the past five years.

Taranto goes on to explain the action in terms of what’s called “prospect theory,” which postulates that:

…people will take bigger risks in the hope of minimizing a loss than in the hope of maximizing a gain. The psychological impact of the loss itself clouds one’s thinking about the risks of magnifying the loss. That explains why the Democrats went nuclear just as the perils of doing so multiplied.

That may be true, but I disagree that the perils of an action such as this have multiplied for the Democrats, if you look at it from their point of view.

Here’s why: Democrats may know they’re on their way out, but they’re playing the long game and in any event they may think the loss inevitable and therefore unstoppable. By doing this now, Obama gets to play out his very liberal agenda to much greater effect, and will be able to institutionalize changes in the judiciary that will benefit the Democrats in the long run.

But even more important than that may be something I haven’t seen talked about too much, which is the fact that the Democrats may have believed (whether it’s true or not) that if they lost the Senate in 2014 it would be the Republicans who would then go for the nuclear option at that point. So why not do it now themselves, when Democrats would be the beneficiaries for over a year?

But why didn’t they go even further and abolish it for other types of votes, too, not just judicial appointments of the non-SCOTUS type? I firmly believe that the Democrats would have done just that if they thought it would have benefited them right now, but I think they calculated that at the moment it wouldn’t have because they don’t control the House. Therefore it would be hard to pass much legislation even with the nuclear option in the Senate for regular bills. They will extend it to apply to SCOTUS appointments, however, if within the next year something happens to any SCOTUS Justice and there’s an appointment of a new member to the Court; no way the Democratic majority in the Senate would allow the Republican minority there to block such an all-important approval.

They would also extend the nuclear option to apply to regular legislation if there is a chance of some of their pet legislative projects getting through the House. But until then they will act as “moderate” as possible by limiting the scope of the majority rule, leaving it up to the Republicans to go further (and incur lots of criticism for doing so) if they ever get into power.

The Democrats also realize that most people don’t really understand how cloture or the filibuster works, and may not understand the significance of the move the Democrats have made and just how hypocritical they are being. The Democrats sometimes underestimate the American public, but sometimes they get it just right, and I don’t know which it is this time.

In sum, I just don’t think the Democrats thought this move was all that risky considering their position prior to it, and considering what they thought Republicans were poised to do if and when they got to power. I wonder whether the GOP actually would have had the cojones (and the disrespect for precedent) to do that; I have my doubts, although they may have.

But rest assured that if they do come into power and extend the nuclear option to SCOTUS appointments and/or to ordinary bills, the Democrats will then excoriate them for their extreme and evil partisanship. You can bet on it.

The British educational thought police…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have the power to label children “racist” on their permanent records if they don’t attend a workshop on Islam.

Let’s put aside the fact that Islam is not a race (I suppose it’s an honorary race in Britain) and note that in Britain they’re not going to need re-education camps. Apparently the schools are already performing that function—by law:

According to the letter sent last Wednesday, the visit is part of the National Curriculum for religious education and also reflects “the multi-cultural community in which we live.”

It went on: “It is a statutory requirement for primary school children to experience and learn about different cultures…”˜Refusal to allow your child to attend will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child’s education record, which will remain on this file throughout their school career.”

The note caused such a hue and cry that it was followed the next day by another saying, Emily Litella-like (actually, Obama-like), “”˜On reflection, disregard a section from the earlier letter” and apologizing for “inaccuracies.”

I would imagine one could write an entire blog populated by this sort of “PC run amok in school” story. And in a few years such an effort by a school may not even be considered the least bit remarkable or out-of-the-ordinary, if the entire PC campaign succeeds still further.

How very tolerant we have become.

Obama changes the rules—again—to benefit Democrats in next year’s election

The New Neo Posted on by

The imperial president whose party is nevertheless subject to those pesky little formalities known as “elections” changes the ACA rules again in order to delay 2015 insurance enrollments until after the election.

However:

…[T]his misses the real risk for the White House, which isn’t in the individual market in 2015.The people in that market will have been battered all year with higher premiums and ridiculous deductibles, and another round of escalation in both will only have a limited shock value. The risk is in the employer-provided group market, where costs will either skyrocket or employees will get kicked out of their coverage and forced into the individual market. Those decisions will come in the late summer or early fall, as businesses have to prepare 2015 budgets in those time frames. By the time the standard October 1 open enrollment date hits for those consumers, the enormous impact of ObamaCare will be well known ”” even if they can’t access price information in the individual exchanges. When tens of millions of Americans get handed huge price increases or get pushed out of their group coverage altogether at that point, the outrage and political meltdown will dwarf whatever pricing changes take place in the individual markets.

Still, Obama must think it’s worth a try, and that the risk is minimal or non-existent. After all, who except the right will squawk about what he’s done or even pay attention to it at all? And every little bit of delay helps; it certainly helped in 2012 because he probably could not have been re-elected if the election were to happen today.

The only thing is—it may not help nearly enough.

The nuclear option: Senator Obama has a bone to pick with President Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

And Senator Feinstein has some harsh words for Senator Feinstein, while Senator Harry Reid disagrees with Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Joe Biden begs to differ with Vice President Joe Biden, Assistant Minority Leader Dick Durbin counters Majority Whip Dick Durbin, and—oh, you get the idea:

By the way, this is one of the issues on which both parties switch sides regularly, depending on who’s in power. The difference is that, in the GOP, enough RINOs bonded with Democrats to stop it from actually happening.

So now we have this successful and strategically-timed Democratic power grab [emphasis mine]:

Whatever the merits of filibustering judicial nominees, it was obvious that the Democrats would end the practice as soon as they had both the power and the need to do so. Now they have.

Predictably, no bipartisan “Gang” stepped up to prevent this. Bipartisanship runs only one way in these matters.

Thanks to [Lindsay] Graham, Democrats were able to use the filibuster to block nominees like Jim Haynes and Peter Keisler. If Graham hadn’t played the stooge, the Fourth Circuit would be more conservative today and, with fewer vacancies to fill on the D.C. Circuit, Obama would not be about to flip it his way.

More here from Bill Otis, who points out that the rule changed yesterday had stood for about 200 years. Again, we have the interesting situation (as with Obamacare) where only one party, Democratic, voted for the bill. It was the opposition that was bipartisan.

I mentioned that the timing was strategic. Otis explains that this is all about Obama doing an end run around Congress through the regulatory process:

The Administration has an ambitious regulatory agenda it can’t get through Congress because the opposition party controls the House. It thus plans to push through what it wants via executive orders and administrative agency rules, all of which will be challenged in court. And the court that will decide those challenges will be none other than the DC Circuit…

The reason the Senate filibuster has its pedigree, and has been maintained by both parties for such a very long time, and through administrations of wildly differing outlooks, is the recognition that what seems like a good idea right now might later, with more time to examine its long term unforeseen effects and unintended consequences, seem less appetizing than it did at first…

The ability to entertain that sort of thinking depends, of course, on a certain reasonably high degree of maturity. With pugilist Harry Reid in command, that was only going to last so long, and today it went bye-bye.

…[T]his is somewhat personal to me, because two friends of mine, Peter Keisler and Miguel Estrada, were denied seats on the federal courts of appeals because of filibusters or the threat thereof, and were turned away even though they were universally known to be brilliant lawyers and honorable men. Those filibusters were eagerly, indeed belligerently, supported by Harry Reid.

…[T]his power-grabbing spasm is astoundingly short-sighted. With Obama’s approval ratings now in the 30’s and cratering, and the worst failures and deceptions of Obamacare yet to land on the American public, Democrats are looking for the tall grass. But there will be little tall grass to be found when the election rolls around in less than a year. Their margin in the Senate is thin (five seats) as it stands. Harry Reid thus stands an excellent chance of having fashioned a weapon he’ll have for a year or two or three, and his opponents will have for the indefinite future thereafter.

I am reasonably certain that Harry Reid isn’t really so very short-sighted, he just fails to see the future Otis’s way. He is counting on holding onto the Senate in 2014, and he may well do so. But even if he doesn’t succeed on that score, he is banking on the fact that, with the DC Circuit safely in friendly hands, the court will give the stamp of approval to whatever Obama wants to do (in the regulatory sense) for the next three years. That can be an awful lot, and a great deal of it will probably be geared to solidifying and institutionalizing Democratic control of the voting public.

[NOTE: That clip of the Democrats waxing eloquent about the value of preserving the filibuster and minority rights would make a nice campaign video, wouldn’t it, contrasted with their stance now that they’re the ones in power?]