Democrats appear likely, though they haven't fully decided, to pass health care reform via something called a "self-executing rule." Instead of passing the senate health care bill and then passing the changes to it in a separate reconciliation bill, they'd pass a reconciliation bill with a "rule" that deemed the Senate bill to have been passed. So, one vote instead of two. The tactic is called "deem-and-pass."
If the Republicans are going to continue spreading the fiction that Congressional Democrats are playing fast and loose with procedural rules, then D.C. journalists at least have the obligation to fully explain those procedures to their readers and put them in the proper context.
Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party.
I just this morning got the chance to watch Jon Stewart's interview with former Bush speechwriter, and current Washington Post columnist, Marc Thiessen. These interviews are often described as knockouts when the reality is a little more murky. The Thiessen interview, though, was a true knockout. Thiessen repeated his Cheney-ite talking points about how Obama was making us less safe, and Stewart just dissected one after another. Thiessen's only recourse was to try to talk over Stewart's rebuttals, making several points in a row so that Stewart couldn't rebut each one.
In a recent TNR article about the Citizens United decision, “Roberts versus Roberts,” I argued that the chief justice has so far failed to achieve his goal of promoting narrow, unanimous decisions rather than ideologically polarizing ones. After the piece came out, Ed Whelan claimed that Roberts had never promised to try to lead the Court in such a fashion.
There are a lot of thorny issues in American politics that require a great deal of concentrated attention to grasp. The controversy over budget reconciliation and health care is not one of them. It's pretty simple, and can be explained in thirty seconds or so. And yet large chunks of the political class seem unable to grasp it.
One of the oddities of the health care reform saga is that, amid a debate that raises profound questions about a citizen’s right to medical attention and the appropriate structuring of an entire industry, public discussion has come to focus on an issue that is both picayune and utterly phony: the legitimacy of Democrats using budget reconciliation to pass a final bill.
House Republicans mock the Dems via email:
"I realize there are lots of problems that cannot be solved just by throwing money at them," writes Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, "but snow removal is not one of them. We have the know-how, we have the technology and we have the money and economic self-interest to do it right."
So how would Republicans respond to President Obama's invitation to a bipartisan meeting on health care? Consider the first paragraph of this new letter from House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor:
From a Washington Post feature on Rand Paul, GOP senate candidate in Kentucky and son of Ron Paul:
According to his mother, Carol, he was, like his father before him, a talented athlete (a defensive back in football) and more ambitious than his two brothers, whose names both begin with the letter R. During swim meets in high school, "he wanted his name on the board," she said. "He didn't want just R. Paul, because they are all R. Paul.
Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency,” wrote Adam Nagourney in The New York Times on January 17. A similar theme appeared that day in a Washington Post piece by Dan Balz, that paper’s lead political analyst.
From today's New York Times piece about David Plouffe's re-emergence in Obamaland:
As January comes to a close, it’s safe to say that it’s been a rough first year for the Obama administration. On the right, he is hammered for being a big government liberal, and on the left for being too cozy with big business and Wall Street (and don’t forget the two wars). Yet, there is at least one realm where the administration has received rather broad support, and deservedly so: education policy.
With the first round of competitive grant applications due earlier this week, the “Race to the Top” program will give states grants for implementing positive reforms like allowing charter schools to be created at all, or more easily, or be funded at parity with non-charter schools. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has endorsed the plan, as have leading policy experts.
Unsurprisingly, it has drawn the ire of an interest group that the Obama team is wont to placate in other circumstances--teachers unions. They resent that charter school teachers and administrators are not subject to the same restrictions and pay as contracted unionized teachers. Unfortunately, any system which pays based on seniority rather than talent discourages the latter. This isn’t just an abstract hypothesis; rather it is the conclusion one reaches when reading the work of one of the most talented economists and education experts in the country: Caroline Hoxby.
Hoxby is famous for demonstrating that competition increases educational performance. In a more recent paper, she finds strong evidence that teachers’ unions have led to a perpetual loss of talent in the teaching profession by compressing wages and driving away many skilled people, who find their ambitions stifled in public schools. This builds off her earlier work, summarized nicely by Robert Barro here, in which she finds that unionization increases the high school dropout rate above what it would otherwise be if unionization was random, and it does so despite increasing school funding.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee emails this:
From: Ryan Rudominer
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 1:17 PM
Subject: Winners and Losers from the Mass. Senate special - Washington Post's Chris Cillizza
From: Chris Cillizza
To: Chris Cillizza
“Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency,” writes Adam Nagourney in the Sunday New York Times.
Anderson Cooper was one of the first reporters to arrive in Haiti after last week’s massive earthquake. According to a Los Angeles Times account, the CNN personality raced to the airport upon hearing the news and caught the last flight out of New York. Unfortunately, the flight he caught deposited him in the Dominican Republic, not Haiti.
Charles Krauthammer! The winning entry is Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post, which spends roughly 700 words gloating over the decline in Obama's poll ratings as a function of his wild liberalism, without a single reference to unemployment:
If you don't follow the NBA, the name Stephen Jackson might not immediately ring a bell. Allow me to reacquaint you. Jackson was the kindly Samaritan who followed his then-Indiana Pacers teammate Ron Artest into the stands to slap some fans around during a 2004 brawl with the Detroit Pistons. For this Jackson received a 30-game suspension. It turned out to be such a life-altering experience that Jackson would never again use his hands as a weapon in public. Not even close.
A couple of days after June’s stolen election in Iran, Flynt Leverett and I were both guests on “The Charlie Rose Show.” Mr. Leverett was waxing eloquent about how Ahmadinejad could have actually won the election. His supposed evidence was a May poll, conducted by phone from Turkey, before the presidential campaign had even begun. Apparently he did not read the entire report of the poll, merely a summary, published in a Washington Post editorial. Much of the full report contradicted his conclusions. Moreover, anyone who believes that Iranians today will reveal their real electoral preferences to a pollster calling from Turkey probably responds to emails from Nigerian princes.
The conservative defenses of Brit Hume have started to roll in. Hume, of course, upbraided Tiger Woods for his Buddhist faith and urged him to convert to Christianity. (On the air.) Former George W. Bush Minister of Propaganda Peter Wehner writes:
The provost of University College, London, where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied for three years, said that he was "completely shocked" by the news of what the Christmas terrorist had tried to do. Really?
I've just received an e-mail from an old Harvard colleague, whose accomplishments include seeing social and intellectual trends in the world--the Muslim world, especially--that many of his fellow academics blithely deny.
Here is his New Year’s morning correspondence:
I’m a big fan of Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. Unlike her colleague Michael Wilbon, she was willing to expose the utter incompetence of Michael Jordan as a sports executive during the time he ran the Washington Wizards. So I was willing to be convinced when I saw her column this morning defending Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach who was fired for punishing a player for sitting out practice after incurring a concussion.
There are any number of ways to read (and, yes, spin) this latest Washington Post/ABC poll on Obama and global warming. Take the headline figure: Americans now only barely approve of the president's handling of climate change, 45 percent to 39 percent, which is down dramatically from his 61-29 approvals back in April. Is that because people genuinely don't want him to deal with the issue?
