So it’s official: Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The vote was 68-31 (with the ailing Ted Kennedy not voting). All 59 Democrats present voted “aye,” while Republicans split 31-9 “no.”
There are various ways to look at the nine GOPers voting for Sotomayor. Of eight Republican senators representing states carried by Barack Obama, six (Collins, Gregg, Lugar, Martinez, Snowe and Voinovich) voted aye, and two (Burr and Ensign) voted no. Four retiring Republicans (Bond, Gregg, Martinez and Voinovich) voted aye, two (Bunning and Brownback) voted no.
TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg put it another way in an online discussion at The New York Times site:

With but two exceptions — Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee — every Republican senator supporting Judge Sotomayor is moderate, retiring or Hispanic. The power of the National Rifle Association in Republican primaries and the continuing ascendancy of race issues for the Republican base are the real drivers on the Republican side of the chamber. This is pretty mundane politics but a slap in the face for Hispanic voters and a powerful statement for voters in general about tolerance and the consuming issues of today’s Republican Party.

Since Republican right-wingers are upset about the defections they did experience, this pretty much looks like a lose-lose scenario for the GOP.

There’s been plenty of debate here and elsewhere about the White House strategy on health care reform, and particularly the issue of exactly how prescriptive the President should have been in the past or might be in the future in specifying the legislative provisions that are or aren’t essential for him.
That’s all fine, but there’s a growing tendency among Obama critics to forget that the President can’t just come up with a specific bill and get it to the House or Senate floor. Matt Yglesias offers a pertinent reminder about the separation of powers:

[L]et’s recall that Obama didn’t decide to leave the details of the health overhaul to Congress. That’s just how American political institutions work. I heartily agree that this isn’t the best way for political institutions to work; there’s a lot to be said for a system in which the executive (which is less hostage to parochial interests and possesses more policy expertise) to write proposals that the legislature can either accept or reject. But our institutions don’t work that way, have never worked that way, and couldn’t be made to work that way without scrapping the whole constitution.

Each House of Congress has its distinct procedures, its zealously-guarded turf, its baronial committee and subcommittee chairs (and ranking minority members), its own schedules, and (particularly with the respect of the Senate) its arcane and clubby “traditions.” These factors, while frustrating and often irrational, cannot be wished away or abolished by fiat. The closest thing to a pure presidential coup on major legislation that I can recall was the famous Reagan Budget battle of 1981, when administration officials exploited a then-obscure procedure called “reconciliation” and then created a floor vote in the House over a substitute budget bill almost entirely written by the Office and Management and Budget and a few congressional allies, effectively preempting legislative powers over a vast array of provisions. It was a very rare event, and Congress has worked hard ever since to make sure it never happens again.
There are ways, theoretically, to increase the executive branch’s legislative role. In my home state of Georgia, the governor has his or her own floor leaders (in addition to the partisan chiefs) who formally submit not only budget legislation but a full-scale administration agenda pre-drafted into legislative language. Special committees could be set up to streamline complex legislature and make it easier for executives to obtain a decisive result (it actually took some doing to keep the number of congressional committees dealing with health care reform down to three in the House and two in the Senate).
But in the end, the President, for all his power, can place his imprimatur on legislation only via intermediaries whose loyalty to his agenda rarely extends to details. You can fault Barack Obama for not weighing in earlier or more often as the sausage was made on health care reform, but in the end, the meat-grinder belongs to others.

As the Senate vote on Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination draws nigh, most Republicans, privately if not publicly, are probably relieved that this hasn’t become a strict party-line (and thus party-defining) vote, much less a filibuster fight, and are ready to move onto other issues.
But cultural conservatives, who are absolutely obsessed with the shape of the Supreme Court, and are bitter about the failure of past Republican presidents to deliver such prizes as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not happy about GOP defections on Sotomayor, or the corresponding decision against going to the mats to stop her. And what better messenger could they have for their unhappiness than their disgraced former chieftain, Ralph Reed?
Yes, Ralph’s back, having (so far) avoided any indictments over his relationship with Jack Abramoff, and apparently recovered from his embarrassing defeat in a Republican primary in 2006 to become Lieutenant Governor of Georgia (en route, he reportedly assumed, to much higher political glory). He’s founded a new group called the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which religion-and-politics writer Dan Gilgoff calls “the Christian Coalition 2.0.” And in a memo to “Republican leaders and conservatives” about Sotomayor that was published in the can’t-miss beltway outlet Politico, Reed has served notice that he intends to re-occupy his old position as ideological enforcer on behalf of the Christian Right nationally. No more screwing around with state politics, it seems.
The memo itself is unremarkable. It cherry-picks polls to make the dubious claim that Latinos don’t care about Sotomayor’s fate. It restates the familiar if tired ideological case against Sotomayor as a Justice. But its real message is simple enough: Republican votes for Sotomayor will “discourage the GOP base” (as defined by an assortment of activist groups opposing the nomination) and give Obama a big win. And in case anyone misses Ralph’s implicit threat on behalf of the “base,” he calls the vote a “political Rorschach test” for Republicans–a fancier way of saying “litmus test.”
While Ralph’s memo is unlikely to change any votes, it will be most interesting to see if his fellow Republican insiders–or for that matter, his old allies in the Christian Right–take it seriously. By all rights, he should be hooted off the stage and shunted back to his Atlanta-based political consulting firm, though he doesn’t seem to have any Georgia clients in the upcoming 2010 elections. But he gets high chutzpah points for reemerging on the scene as though the last four years or so never existed.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
One of the abiding frustrations attending the campaign for health care reform is that the complexity of the subject enables opponents to, as Sarah Palin might put it, “make things up.” Pro-reform folk have to work overtime to swat down claims that range from the deeply exaggerated to the completely fabricated, only to see their arguments treated as equivalent to conservative howlers in “he said, she said” media coverage. (Harold Pollack tears apart a few particularly egregious provocateurs over at The Treatment today.)
My own personal favorite howler, based on an usually high ratio of drama to fact, is the “kill granny” meme, whereby health reform is alleged to be aimed at saving money by hurrying seniors to the graveyard. And as it happens, Pat Buchanan’s latest syndicated column offers a classicly twisted presentation of this claim, showing that the old demagogue has not lost a step in his ability to defy logic in pursuit of his political aims.
After announcing that “Obamacare” depends on reduction of end-of-life care costs, Buchanan suddenly takes us to the United Kingdom, where a government agency has issued guidelines opposing the routine prescription of steroids for chronic pain. Then we’re back in the USA:

Now, twin this story with the weekend Washington Post story about Obamacare’s “proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical treatment they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills,” and there is little doubt as to what is coming.

Having conflated British and American policies, and identified counseling designed to let seniors control their own care with a government restriction on a particular pain medication, Buchanan suddenly starts talking about an assisted suicide in Switzerland, notes that some people in America support that, too, and then gets to his real argument:

Beneath this controversy lie conflicting concepts about life.
To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life, be it of the unborn or terminally ill, may not be taken. Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment, Thou shalt not kill.
To secularists and atheists who believe life begins and ends here, however, the woman alone decides whether her unborn child lives, and the terminally ill and elderly, and those closest to them, have the final say as to when their lives shall end.

Note that the only “concepts about life” that Buchanan mentions are those of “traditional Christians” and “secularists and atheists.” Thus excluded from the debate are 40 million or so mainline American Protestants, 20 to 30 million “non-traditional” American Catholics (i.e., those who support abortion rights), and of course, Jews, Muslims and all sorts of other people who aren’t remotely “secularists and atheists.” Unbelievers are in turn stereotyped without evidence as holding a casual attitude towards human life, instead of, perhaps, a serious commitment to the rights of human beings who happen to be women or people near death.
But this doesn’t end Buchanan’s vast smear. Next he flies us back in space and time to early-twentieth-century Germany, where a treatise on assisted suicide by two professors in the Weimar era (you know, that decadent “liberal” period) is assumed to have led directly to Nazi Germany’s euthanasia policies. (Pat doesn’t mention that the Nazis were big opponents of abortion, at least for Aryans.)
So in one short column, Buchanan manages to associate “Obamacare” with the intentional infliction of pain on seniors to encourage them to commit suicide, as part of an anti-Christian and proto-Nazi drive to destroy “the sanctity of life.”
I’m not saying that opponents of health care reform generally embrace Buchanan’s ravings, but let’s face it: The man has enormous exposure via his column and his MSNBC appearances. And he merely adds a particular shrill voice to the chorus urging Americans that this complicated idea of health care reform is too risky to undertake. Why open the door to even a small chance of a Fourth Reich in America, via government-sponsored assisted suicide? It’s better to trust the devil we know.

Those Republicans who are already predicting a landslide win in 2010 might want to put down the champagne glasses for a minute and take a look at Gallup’s latest survey on party identification by state. True, the numbers are from interviews over the entire brief course of the Obama presidency, but they’re still interesting.
With leaners duly leaned, Gallup finds Democratic identifiers with a plurality in 44 of the 50 states (plus DC). The six GOP redoubts, in ascending order of Republican strength, are Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. Democrats have a majority of the electorate in half the states; Republicans in two (Wyoming and Utah).
The numbers are an ever-present reminder that any weaknesses shown by President Obama or congressional Democrats do not automatically translate into Republican gains, short-term or long-term. We’re a long way from November 2010, and Republicans haven’t won back much trust.

I don’t know what it is about getting a New York Times column, barring deals with the devil to obtain them in the first place. But it seems to be having a corrosive effect on Ross Douthat’s analytical skills, as it earlier did for his colleague David Brooks.
Douthat’s column today touting Texas as an economic “model citizen” for the nation is just plain wrong. Ezra Klein peforms an efficient smackdown on the idea that Texas is booming while “blue states” are wallowing in economic despair, and just as importantly, reminds us that the Lone Star State is famed for its poor treatment of poor people, which helps it keep the state budget balanced.
But I have a more fundamental beef with Douthat’s breezy assumption that state policies have made conservative Texas do well while afflicting “liberal” California. The truth is that state policies have little or no effect on short-term economic trends affecting their populations. Texas and California exist in national and global economies. Unemployment rates in Fresno or El Paso are largely controlled by forces affecting manufacturing exports and imports; prices for housing, oil and gas; and credit availability that have almost nothing to do with the policies of Arnold Schwarzenneger or Rick Perry. Republican-governed Florida is getting hammered, and Democratic-governed Iowa is doing well.
Governors and state legislators do have a big effect on how their constituents are affected by such external forces–on the distribution of wealth, if not its existence–and on that front, regressive Texas has nothing to brag about.
But Ross Douthat’s identification of “low-road” economic development strategies as vindicated by the current recession is deeply flawed and dangerous. If the no-regulation regressive-tax approach really represented the keys to the kingdom, then Mississippi and Alabama would have long since become the economic dynamos and social showcases of America. That hasn’t happened, and isn’t happening, regardless of short-term growth and unemployment rates. With far more resources than its country cousins to the east, Texas has managed to create similar social conditions. Touting the Lone Star State as a lodestar state is a terrible mistake. Ad as a southerner, I’d have to say that it takes a conservative Yankee to celebrate so unreflectively the South’s high ratio of private affluence to public squalor.

There’s not much doubt right now that conservatives are feeling their oats, now that the President’s approval ratings have dropped, health care reform and climate change legislation are in doubt, and in general, Republicans have no responsibility for governance in Washington.
But they’ve got a problem. Their activist “base” remains too small and too wacky to represent an effective grassroots force. We saw that in the earlier Tea Party protests, and we may soon be seeing it again in August Recess events where small groups of angry people demonize Democratic members of Congress. Certainly the shrieking protest held in Austin over the weekend against Rep. Lloyd Doggett, isn’t likely to influence him, insofar as he denounced it as a “mob” put together by the local Republican and Libertarian Parties. Like the angry crowds that materialized at McCain-Palin rallies in the latter stages of the 2008 campaign, such hate-fests tend to draw more attention to their own participants’ behavior than to the targeted Democrats.
On another front, efforts to create a “rightroots” to rival the progressive blogosphere as a force in American politics are moving rather slowly. This last weekend RedState.com, the site often touted as the conservative counterpart to DailyKos, held its first “Gathering” in Atlanta. 200 people showed up, and mainly spent time listening to conservative primary candidates fighting uphill battles against other Republicans, along with familiar right-wing firebrands like Jim DeMint. In a couple of weeks, 1500-2000 attendees are expected at the Kos-inspired Netroots Nation event in Pittsburgh. It’s not clear who the headline speakers will be (as is appropriate for an event focused on workshops and small panels, not speeches), but in 2007 the event attracted a major presidential debate.
It all comes back to a point that conservatives really need to internalize: “base” energy and “noise” can be a significant political asset, but only if it’s focused, strategically deployed, representative of actual rank-and-file sentiment, and attractive to “outsiders.” If it’s none of these things, it’s worse than useless, because it simply serves as a reminder of why so many voters don’t like the Republican Party in the first place.