Americans do love their scandals, as the Republicans well understand in their amping up their bogus outrage over Benghazi and the alleged I.R.S. investigation targeting right-wing organizations. But sometimes we get distracted by the bright and shiny thing and overlook the real scandal, the one that does much more damage and justifies more legitimate outrage. As Jonathan Bernstein writes at The Plum Line:

Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.
…Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.
…Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy…Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters.
That’s just two examples. There are numerous others; again, with virtually all nominees required to have 60 votes…Republicans are filibustering every nomination. But perhaps the worst are the “nullification” filibusters, in which Republicans simply refuse to approve any nominee at all for some positions — the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because they don’t want those agencies to carry out their statutory obligations.
In doing so, Republicans are not breaking the rules of the Senate. They are, however, breaking the Senate itself, and harming the government…Republicans, by refusing to accept those norms, make it impossible for the normal machinery of government to function.
…This is entirely unprecedented. Until very recently, simple majority confirmation was the norm on executive branch nominations with only a handful of exceptions. Not only that, but both Democrats and Republicans agreed that in almost all cases presidents were entitled to their choices when it came to these posts.
…The only recourse for the majority — and recall that Democrats enjoy a 55-seat duly elected majority in the Senate — is to threaten to change the rules if Republicans continue, and then carry out that threat with majority-imposed reform to end filibusters on executive branch nominations altogether…If filibusters become routine instead of used only for those things the minority objects to the strongest, then the majority will have little choice.
Yes, I know that in the way Washington works, this kind of routine disruption of normal government procedures doesn’t qualify as a Scandal! But it should. And while it’s quite proper for those concerned about good government to be outraged by the IRS story, this one is a much bigger deal, and the facts of it are plain for all to see — in fact, the people responsible are openly bragging about what they’re doing…Now that’s a scandal.

Bernstein is right. The only question is how long the MSM will continue to be suckered by GOP theatrics and when, if ever, they will find the courage to address the real scandal with the coverage it deserves.

Although “Republicans hope public anger over the Benghazi attacks and their aftermath will besmirch congressional Democrats in next year’s midterm elections,” reports AP’s Charles Babbington, “a major independent inquiry largely absolved [former Secretary of State]Clinton of wrongdoing.” Further, ”The unsubstantiated Republican allegations about Benghazi disintegrated one by one,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the House committee’s top Democrat. ”There’s no evidence of a conspiracy to withhold military assets for political reasons, no evidence of a cover-up.”
Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas argue in “The good reasons for the IRS’s dumb mistake” at Wonkblog that it the IRS should target political groups like the tea party to insure that they are not abusing their 501(c)4 status with political activity. “The IRS is supposed to reject groups that are primarily political from registering as 501(c)4s. If they’re going to do that, then they need some kind of test that helps them flag problematic applicants. And that test will have to be a bit impressionistic.” What would be wrong, say Klein and Soltas, is if progressive groups were not also scrutinized.
The Newark Star-Ledger editorial, “Christie’s early voting veto will hurt turnout” pretty much shreds NJ Governor Chris Christie’s bogus image as a leader committed to bipartisanship.
At The Fix Chris Cillizza asks “Can Democrats rebuild Obama’s winning coalition?” and answers, “Black voters, the census study makes clear, were the story of the 2012 election. For the first time since the bureau started measuring voter participation in 1996, the African American turnout rate (66 percent of eligible voters) surpassed that of whites (64 percent)… The bigger problem for the party in attempting to rebuild the Obama coalition is the youth vote. The census study of the 2012 electorate found that just 41 percent of eligible voters ages 18 to 24 actually voted, well below the overall turnout rate of 62 percent of eligible voters. The youth voting rate was a significant dip from the 49 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 who turned out in 2008….Voters ages 18 to 29 made up just 15 percent of the 2012 electorate — lower than exit poll data have shown for the past few elections. That decline should be of significant concern to Democratic strategists, particularly without Obama on the ballot in future elections.”
That the Obama Administration is leveraging private and nonprofit sector support for publicizing and implementing the Affordable care Act is commendable; That it should have to as a result of GOP obstruction of funding is a sad commentary on the Republican party’s willingness to endanger the health of millions of Americans for political advantage.
At Daily Kos, Joan McCarter reports that “Maine became the 13th state in the nation to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission..Maine joins West Virginia, Colorado, Montana, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Rhode Island, Maryland, Vermont, New Mexico and Hawaii in calling for that Constitutional amendment…Outside of the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court, Republicans hate corporate spending in campaigns [pdf] almost as much as Democrats (71 percent versus 73 percent, respectively) and want to see reform. A Constitutional amendment is not an easy thing to achieve, but the time is right for this one.”
Michael Wear’s post at The Atlantic “How the GOP Can Win Back the Values Debate–and How Dems Could Lose It” should probably be put in the “not likely, but worth a quick read” category. His point that Dems should tone down the “strident moralizing” and embrace a little more civility in dialogue is not a bad one, although the Republicans are worse offenders by far.
In the Washington Post editorial “The GOP’s Politics of Dysfunction,” the editorial board calls out the Republicans for their “absurdly flimsy pretexts” in blocking cabinet appointments needed to enable proper functioning of government: “Americans elected Barack Obama president, and reelected him. He’s entitled to his Cabinet. It’s possible that Republicans will muster the 41 votes needed in the Senate to block both nominations — despite their strong qualifications and high ethical standards. If they do, Americans will be under no illusions that the GOP has led Washington to new lows of dysfunction.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz’s “Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream” at the New York Times Opinionator spotlights an issue of increasing concern to middle class voters, and one which Dems would be wise to address with more assertive leadership.
‘Bout time.

In his May 12th Daily Beast column, Mike Tomasky says that “the idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway”
Here’s his analysis:

When the histories of this administration are written, I hope fervently that last Friday, May 10, does not figure prominently in them. But I fear that it might: the double-barrel revelations that the White House hasn’t quite been telling the whole story on Benghazi and that some mid-level IRS people targeted some Tea Party groups for scrutiny are guaranteed to ramp up the crazy. But to what extent? I fear it could be considerable, and the people in the White House damn well better fear the same, or we’re going to be contemplating an extremely ugly situation come 2015, especially if the Republicans have held the House and captured the Senate in the by-elections.
…I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. Most Republican members of the House live in districts where it is a given (among the white constituents, anyway) that Obama is a socialist; that’s he bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution (nudge nudge) the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with. …
… there is no end to Republican figures–and to a distressing extent, the mainstream media–feeding the crazy. [Republicasns] do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.
I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. It might crescendo right up to his very last day in office. ….If my worst fears are never realized–well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do

Tomasky’s right and before any Democrat dares to disagree with him and say “Oh, they’ll never really go That far” they should just stop and think about how many times they’ve said the same thing before in the last five years and been utterly and totally wrong.

For a richly-deserved takedown of the phony Republican outrage about Benghazi, don’t miss Bob Cesca’s Huffpo post on the topic, which lists 13 incidents during President Bush’s watch, in which American diplomats were attacked and/or killed by terrorists with little or no criticism by Fox News or Republican politicians. The incidents include:

January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the U.S. Consulate. Five people are killed.
June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al Qaeda attacks the U.S. Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.
October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. U.S. diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of “Bali Bombings.” No fatalities.
February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the U.S. Embassy. Two people are killed.
May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al Qaeda terrorists storm the diplomatic compound, killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.
July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the U.S. Embassy, killing two people.
December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda terrorists storm the U.S. Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.
March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan again. Suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Consulate killing four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name “David Foy.” This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what’s considered American soil.)
September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” storm the U.S. Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.
January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy. No fatalities.
March 18, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the U.S. Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits nearby school killing two.
July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate. Six people are killed.
September 17, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the U.S. Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband (they had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred). This is the second attack on this embassy in seven months.

As Cesca notes, “Nearly every accusation being issued about Benghazi could’ve been raised about the Bush-era attacks, and yet these self-proclaimed truth-seekers refused to, in their words, undermine the commander-in-chief while troops were in harm’s way (a line they repeated over and over again during those years).”

No, not Michelle Obama. Michelle Nunn, head of the Points of Light Foundation and daughter former Senator Sam Nunn. She should run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss.
Many Georgians believe Nunn would be a strong Democratic candidate. As Greg Bluestein and Daniel Malloy report in the Atlanta Constitution, commenting on the recent decision of Rep. John Barrow not to run for the Democratic senatorial nomination:

Barrow’s decision opens the door for Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former senator Sam Nunn and head of the volunteer service organization Points of Light. She didn’t return a call seeking comment, but supporters had urged her to run regardless of Barrow’s decision. Her refusal to step aside – setting up a potentially contentious primary — was a factor in Barrow deciding not to run.

Malloy and Bluestein quote former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin on the possibility of Nunn’s candidacy, noting that she has “an excellent reputation among women — and not just among liberals.” Nunn is also well-liked by African Americans, partly as a result of her stewardship of Hands on Atlanta, which served thousands of disadvantaged citizens in the Atlanta area.
Having recently heard Michelle Nunn address the Coretta Scott King birthday commemoration, I can report that she is an excellent speaker. Whip-smart (Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard M.A), Nunn is also savvy about mobilizing youth, which she did exceptionally well at Hands on Atlanta.
She would likely do well with political centrists and perhaps even some conservatives by having the Nunn name, especially if her highly popular father accompanies/introduces her to key forums.
With the current Republican field seeking the GOP nomination to replace Chambliss, Nunn could face a divided opposition. The Republican field is not very impressive, to put it generously. Indeed there is a possibility they could nominate Rep. Paul Broun, arguably one of the most irrational right-wingers in congress.
There are a few other Democrats considering a run for the Senate seat being vacated by Chambliss. Yet, none can match Michelle Nunn’s potential to energize women, youth, African Americans and progressives, while also getting a healthy percentage of political moderates. If she runs, the Republicans could lose this seat and the U.S. Senate could gain a member who actually knows how to inspire citizens to serve their country.

In his WaPo column, “Labor wrestles with its future,’ Harold Meyerson provides an update on what the trade union movement is planning, not only to increase union membership from the current low figure of 6.6 percent of private sector workers, but also to provide new forms of worker participation in politics, as well as economic uplift. Meyerson explains:

…Unions have begun to experiment with answers, even if, as the unions readily admit, they’re a poor substitute for collective bargaining. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has detailed dozens of organizers to fast-food joints in a number of cities: There have been one-day strikes of fast-food workers in New York and Chicago, and such actions are likely to spread. The goal isn’t a national contract with companies such as McDonald’s but the eventual mobilization of enough such workers in sympathetic cities and states that city councils and legislatures will feel compelled to raise the local minimum wage or set a living wage in particular sectors. This means, however, that the SEIU is helping to build an organization that won’t produce anywhere near the level of dues-derived income that unions normally accrue from collective-bargaining agreements. This new approach may not pencil out, but neither does the slow decline in membership that labor will continue experiencing unless it changes course.
The AFL-CIO has embarked on a similar — and perhaps even more radical — roll of the dice. “We’re not going to let the employer decide who our members are any longer,” federation president Richard Trumka told me in a recent interview. “We’ll decide.”
Instead of claiming as its members only the diminishing number of workers in unions whose employers have agreed to bargain, the AFL-CIO plans to open its membership rolls to Americans not covered by any such agreements. The first part of this plan is to expand its Working America program, a door-to-door canvass that has mobilized nonunion members in swing-state working-class neighborhoods to back labor-endorsed candidates in elections in the past decade. In New Mexico in recent months, Working America enrolled 112,000 residents on their doorsteps in a campaign that raised the minimum wage in Albuquerque and then in an adjacent county. But the goal of such campaigns, says Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director, isn’t just to win a raise; it’s also “to get as many workers as we can involved in winning the raise and hope this carries over to specific workplace activism.” They aim to build a workers’ movement — even though, as with the SEIU campaign of fast-food workers, securing workplace contracts (and the kind of membership dues that sustain unions) isn’t on the horizon.
The AFL-CIO’s plans don’t end there. “We’re asking academics, we’re asking our friends in other movements, ‘What do we need to become?’ ” says Trumka. “We’ll try a whole bunch of new forms of representation. Some will work; some won’t, but we’ll be opening up the labor movement.” Forming a larger organization of unions and other progressive groups isn’t out of the question, though it would take time to pull off.

Organized labor is rightly concerned with increasing its membership. But the new emphasis on searching for other forms of worker participation is a healthy development. A stronger union movement would be a tremendous asset for the Democratic Party (and vice-versa), and broadening the pathways of participation for workers in social and political change would be a very good thing for America.

Scott Horsley’s npr.org post “Democrats Hope For A Bright Future In The Lone Star State” sheds light on Latino voter turnout: “According to the census figures, turnout among Latinos who were eligible to vote last year was just 48 percent, 14 points lower than the turnout for non-Hispanic whites. Latino turnout was considerably higher in swing states, though. These numbers aren’t as precise, because of smaller sample sizes, but the trend is clear: 52 percent of Latinos turned out to vote in Colorado, 62 percent in Florida and 67 percent in Virginia — all states where the Obama campaign invested heavily in Latino mobilization and won by narrow margins.” Horsley quotes TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira: “I think it tells you you get what you pay for…We know there’s this sleeping giant of the Hispanic electorate. So if you don’t do anything, or you just do the average amount, you’ll get your average turnout…But there’s a potential there to put more effort, more mobilization, more money, more time, into getting the Hispanic voters to the polls, and it should produce an increment in their vote.”
Of course, demographic trends would never deter Republicans from exercising their singular genius for seizing every opportunity to alienate Latino voters, as demonstrated by this latest example.
A statistic from a new Pew Research Center poll that should give Dems real hope for a 2014 upset: “…Just 22 percent approve of the job performance of GOP leaders in Congress.”
Dan Balz and Todd Mellnick report at the Washington Post that “In terms of participation rates, the Census survey said that 66 percent of eligible black voters turned out last November, compared to 64 percent of eligible white voters. In the course of three presidential elections, from 2004 to 2012, black participation has gone from seven points lower than white participation to two points higher.” However Balz and Mellnick also add that “The Census report notes that 2012 was marked by “large decreases in youth voting rates for all race groups and Hispanics.” Voting rates dropped by about 7 percentage points among both whites and blacks ages 18 to 24, and by almost 5 points among young Hispanics.”
NBC Senior Political Editor Mark Murray reports at NBC First Read that, according to a “new NBC News/Marist poll, 55 percent of Virginia residents say they want stricter laws governing the sale of firearms, versus 36 percent who want them left the same.”
Underdog Democrat Terry McAuliffe gains on VA A.G. Ken Cuccinelli in race for Governor, which is now a stat tie in new NBC/Marist poll.
Sarah Kliff has an interesting Wonkblog post, “Democrats say there’s a reason they’re not selling Obamacare yet,” noting, “I’ve put this question to top administration officials and advocates, and the answer tends to be this: If we start selling Obamacare now, we’re going to be raving about a product that doesn’t yet exist. That would, in turn, undermine the sales pitch they want to make in October, when enrollment in the new health plans opens…Both Enroll America and the Obama administration have discussed early summer, around June or so, as the point at which they’ll start ramping up their outreach campaigns. That’s when they believe they can start talking about health benefits that will become accessible a few months down the road…So, as Republican take more shots at the health care law, the Obama administration’s relative silence is part of a larger plan.”
Yet more evidence that progressives have a powerful weapon in consumer boycotts against wingnut media advertisers.
There may be more detail than you want to know about in Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Opinionator post,”In Data We Trust” about Karl Rove’s ploy to be the GOP’s information technology czar. But this is required reading for Dem oppo researchers and data managers.
The Nation’s John Nichols explains why Mark Sanford’s win in SC-1 was pretty much a lock once he got the GOP nomination: “In 2012, the Democratic nominee took just 29 percent of the vote. Colbert Busch took 46 percent. So, in what was probably a best-of-all-worlds scenario for the Democrats, their candidate raised the party’s percentage of the vote by almost sixteen points. But she needed a swing of more than twenty-one points…What happened in South Carolina will keep happening there and in the vast majority of American congressional districts for so long as those districts are drawn to advantage one party or the others.”

The following article by TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore, is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:
TPM’s Brian Beutler takes a casual comment from Paul Ryan (“Do I want my budget to become the law? Yeah. If Mitt and I won, we were planning on putting it together.”) to remind us how close the United States came to heading on a very different trajectory last November.
Had Mitt Romney won with Republicans retaking control of the Senate (the two would have likely gone hand in hand), the president-elect and the congressional leadership would have turned the Ryan Budget (along with language effectively repealing Obamacare) into a front-loaded budget reconciliation bill that would have very quickly passed both Houses by a majority vote (you cannot filibuster reconciliation bills), and would have been in law by now. You know the argument House Republicans are having about whether to offer the uninsured access to crappy high-risk pools or nothing at all? That would be the argument over national policy towards the uninsured in this alternative universe. Remember the Oregon Medicaid study that got so much attention last week in connection with state decisions on expanding Medicaid? Had Republicans won the White House and the Senate last November, the same study would have likely been used to argue that states about to enjoy “flexibility” over their shiny new Medicaid Block Grants might want to consider liberating poor people from any help altogether.
It’s easy to get discouraged about gridlock and Republican obstruction and the unprogressive impulses of Democratic politicians. But we are in a vastly different and better place than we might have been at this point. Add in the likely impact on our Constitution of a President Romney sending judicial appointments to a Republican Senate, and it’s possible to manage an occasional smile.