Well, by now it’s obvious that the title of my last post on Democratic unity in the Alito debate should have ended with a question mark, now that several Senators have vowed to begin a filibuster, without the votes to defeat a cloture motion.But you have to play the hand that’s dealt you. I can only hope Senate Dems make a serious effort to stay focused on the Big Case against Alito during the debate, and not provide the GOP with any negative ad material. It’s especially important that they deal with the GOP “obstructionist” talking point by relentlessly reminding people that Bush deliberately picked this fight by giving conservative activists their very own Supreme Court nominee. And it wouldn’t hurt to spend some time exposing the hypocrisy of “pro-choice” Republican Senators who are deliberately giving the anti-abortion movement the fourth vote they need–just one short of a majority–to erode and then overturn Roe v. Wade.If we are to have a filibuster, let it be one that is short on senatorial bloviation, and long on clear and concise persuasion. And if nothing else, maybe the debate will complicate Bush’s State of the Union Address.

I know I’m late in officially registering opposition to the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, but I’ve said enough negative stuff about him to make my position clear. I agree with the arguments for opposing Alito mentioned in yesterday’s New Dem Dispatch. But I would add to them my particular concern that he is almost certain to do his best, or worst, to undermine or reverse Roe v. Wade, not only eliminating every woman’s constitutional right to choose, but also turning the politics and legislative process of many states into an obsessive, nightmare struggle on abortion restrictions for many years to come. The Senate debate on Alito’s confirmation is fully underway now; it appears Democrats have chosen an “extended debate” as a compromise between the short discussion and quick vote Republicans preferred, and the filibuster at least some Democrats wanted. I hope Democrats now make a more coherent and judicial-philosophy centered argument than was made during the Judiciary Committee hearings. Forget about Princeton. Don’t get too obsessed with the arcana of “unitary executive” theory. The big point is that given a chance to nominate anybody he wanted to the Supreme Court, George W. Bush chose a lifelong movement conservative whose judicial philosphy will tilt the Court to the Right for many years, and will directly threaten the erosion or reversal of constitutional protections that really matter to the American people, beginning with the reproductive rights of women. And Bush did so as a blatant pander to the conservative activists who brought down Harriet Miers, and whom he now needs to defend his wretched record. As of now, only one Senate Democrat has announced support for Alito, and at a minimum, the vote against him will be much higher than against Chief Justice Roberts. Democrats are united on an important point of principle and politics, and while that will not keep Samuel Alito off the Court, it will matter down the road.

Some of the media takes on Samuel Alito suggest there’s serious doubt he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if given the chance.That doubt certainly does not extend to the anti-abortion movement. Check out Dana Milbank’s Washington Post dispatch from yesterday’s anti-Roe rally in Washington, wherein he discovered that the usual somber mood of this annual event had dramatically changed thanks to the confirmation of John Roberts and the likely confirmation of Alito:

It was a day of clarity after weeks of fuzz generated by Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The nominee — expected to be endorsed by the committee today — maintained that he did not have strong legal views about abortion. And senators acted as if abortion were not the reason they would vote for or against him.But at yesterday’s March for Life, neither speaker nor marcher was confused by the Kabuki. “We must support the confirmation of Judge Alito and other jurists who will support a strict-constructionist view of the law and make it possible once and for all to end Roe v. Wade ,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a leading House conservative, thundered.In the crowd, Sheila Wharam of Baltimore was festive, almost jubilant. “We’re getting close,” she said, holding a banner urging “Mr. Justices, Please Reverse Roe v. Wade.”

Day of clarity, indeed.

Canada’s national election yesterday went pretty much as forecasted: the Conservatives won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, and will get to form a minority government under Stephen Harper. But it’s reasonably clear Canadians were casting votes to expel the current scandal-plagued Liberal government of Paul Martin rather than to give the Tories any real mandate to move the country to the Right. Minority governments in Canada don’t tend to last very long, and moreover, even those Tory governments who have won strong majorities in recent decades have typically gone belly-up after short holds on power. Aside from public ambivalence about the Tories, Harper will have to deal with a House of Commons where the balance of power is held by the left-labor New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois, which is well to the left of center on most domestic and foreign policy issues. Despite making gains and punishing its ancient Liberal enemies, the BQ actually had a disappointing election, falling far short of the 50 percent vote in Quebec it had publicly set as its goal. And the NDP, which slightly boosted its share of the total vote from 15.7 percent to 17 percent, still wound up with only 29 seats in the House, as compared with 124 for the Tories, 103 for the Liberals, and 51 for the Bloc. So while it’s easy to identify the loser in yesterday’s elections, the ultimate winner is anybody’s guess. Martin quickly resigned as Liberal leader, and aside from Harper’s behavior as a P.M. without a majority or a mandate, the Grits‘ ability to regroup under new and uncertain leadership is the key political variable Up North. The most jarring difference between contemporary Canadian andU.S. politics is the restrained tone of the former, even in a campaign considered “bitter” by Canadian standards. Martin’s much-derided campaign for survival depended heavily on negative ads warning Canadians of the Tory boogeyman and its Republican friends in Washington (motivated in part by a largely unsuccessful drive to get NDP supporters to engage in “strategic voting” for the Grits in closely competed contests). It did not go over well.I got a personal taste of the low-key nature of Canadian politics yesterday afternoon, when I picked up a Toronto AM radio station while driving up I-95 from Richmond. NDP Leader Jack Layton was being interviewed; he sounded sort of like a decaffeinated Dick Gephardt–bland, wonky and very civil, particularly for a guy whose election-day objective was to shore up the “base” of the country’s most firmly ideological party.The aspect of yesterday’s vote that might well have parallel implications here in the U.S. is obvious enough: the connection voters made between Liberal ethics scandals and that party’s entrenched status and smug sense of entitlement to power. And that’s why Republicans probably shouldn’t get much satisfaction from a temporary and minority government led by their “friends” in Ottawa. North and south of the border, voters can and will provide corrupt and bumbling incumbenets with an “accountability moment,” even if they harbor misgivings about the opposition. Word up, Karl.

During a busy weekend down in the country, I neglected to do my usual trolling of Georgia media to see if anything significant had happened to damage the campaign of Casino Jack Abramoff’s buddy Ralph Reed to become Lieutenant Governor of the Empire State (and then Governor, and then President of the United States).Fortunately, the Carpetbagger Report was more vigiliant than I was, and supplied links to two Atlanta Journal-Constitution articles about Ralph’s frantic effort to avoid embarassment at the annual meeting of his homeboys and homegirls, the Christian Coalition of Georgia. On Saturday, Jim Galloway reported that Reed’s campaign was offering via email to pay registration fees and even pick up hotel room costs for supporters willing to show up for the Christian Right gabfest. But on Sunday, the AJC’s James Salzer filed a story from the event itself, reporting that the crowd appeared equally divided in support between Reed and his primary opponent, state senator Casey Cagle. This is really bad news for Ralph: he shells out cash to make it easy for his friends to attend what should have been a revival meeting for his campaign, and instead he gets a tepid reception and mixed reviews. True, Ralph has been spending a lot more time lately in the service of Mammon than of God, and Mammon’s legions may still back him in the July GOP primary. But still, he tried to use Mammon’s resources to put on a good show for the faithful this weekend, and it appears to have gone over about as well as his claims that he didn’t know Jack Abramoff was shoveling gambling money in his direction. As those intrepid politico-theological pundits Led Zeppelin observed, it’s a perilous business to buy the stairway to heaven.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a post predicting that the GOP’s “damage control” strategy on the Abramoff scandal and related Republican abuses of power would include an effort to basically say: “Everybody does it.”But I didn’t think they’d have the chutzpah to claim that the Abramoff scandal itself was bipartisan.I mean, here’s a guy who has been at the absolute epicenter of Republican and conservative-movement politics since the 1980s. His College Republican deputies, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, who have risen to incredible power in the GOP machine, were the chosen bag-man in all his shakedown schemes. The lies he told his client-victims were exclusively about his inordinate power in the GOP’s New Ruling Class in Washington, nicely underlined by his appointment by the incoming Bush administration in 2001 to the transition team for the Interior Department, his big moneymaking target. And there’s not a shred of evidence that anybody sent sacks of cash to Democrats on his say-so.Jack Abramoff was so complete and absolute a career-long partisan that he stayed partisan whether he was acting within or in violation of the law. Indeed, that may be the only straight thing about this crooked man. Josh Marshall hit the nail on the head: “tying” Jack Abramoff to Republicans is like tying James Carville to Democrats. Every moment of Casino Jack’s career, there’s been a big elephant in the living room, every time he looked in the mirror.

It’s reasonably clear by now that despite some significant differences on the details, the really striking difference between Democratic and Republican “lobbying reform” proposals in Congress is that Democrats are promising to shut down wider abuses of power like the K Street Strategy, while Republicans basically deny the K Street Strategy even exists (or, as that unlikely Republican “reformer,” Rick Santorum, occasionally claims, it’s just a good government process whereby GOP Hill Barons benevolently try to make sure lobbying shops hire the best qualified people). So it’s kind of important to understand what the K Street Strategy is really all about.Like everyone else, I recommend, and have recommended from the day it was published, Nick Confessore’s famous 2003 Washington Monthly analysis of the whole scheme (in which “good government” Ricky Santorum plays a prominent role). But long and brilliant articles like Nick’s don’t necessarily boil it all down to something newspapers can understand, so here’s my simple take: The K Street Strategy was and is an effort to concentrate the vast array of money and power commanded by lobbyists into a simple relationship with the vast array of money and power commanded by the Republican leadership of Congress (and its ally in the White House). The message so often conveyed by Ricky and others to K Street is simply this: you’re on our team, and there’s no other team to join. Thus, the K Street Strategy, aimed explicitly at consolidating lobbyists into a single and disciplined force, had to be accompanied by a parallel consolidation of total power within the federal government, creating the big and single bargaining table. That’s why the K Street Strategy was indeed the crown jewel of Republican corruption, and why it went hand in hand with so many other abuses of power in Washington. Its whole aim was to create a cartel of power with a few players who were free to do what they wished at public expense, not only to do each other’s will, but to perpetuate the arrangement as long as possible. So please, “even-handed” reporters, don’t buy into the idea that today’s Republicans are just emulating the abuses of power practiced by yesterday’s Democrats. This is new stuff: the ruthless effort to establish a small place in Washington where all the deals go down, and all the money changes hands, and all the legislation gets cleared. It’s breathtaking in its audacity, and Democrats need to explain that destroying it isn’t just a matter of “lobbying reform” or even “ethics reform,” but a necessary effort to restore Congress as a functioning representative body.

Need a break from poring over gift-rule and lobbyist-disclosure provisions? If so, Ruy Teixeira has posted an excellent summary of the simmering debate that’s been going on in academic and political circles since November 2004 about Democratic weakness in the “white working class,” and just as importantly, how to define that group.I’ll let you read this long post yourself, but do want to quote some rather startling 2004 stats that dramatize the different impact of educational levels and income on voting behavior:

Among non-college-educated whites with $30,000–$50,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by twenty-four points (62 percent to 38 percent); among college-educated whites at the same income level, Kerry actually managed a 49 percent to 49 percent tie. And among non-college-educated whites with $50,000–$75,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by a shocking forty-one points (70 percent to 29 percent), while leading by only five points (52 percent to 47 percent) among college-educated whites at the same income level.

I’m sure age is a variable affecting these numbers, but still: guessing at an average of those two groups, it’s pretty clear the bulk of the non-college-educated white middle class went for W. by roughly a two-to-one margin. That’s correct, but Lord knows it ain’t right.

Conservatives are blowing up a big brouhaha about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s remark yesterday that the U.S. House of Representatives has recently “been run like a plantation.” That got my attention, because I once drafted a New Dem Dispatch using exactly the same metaphor for exactly the same management of exactly the same institution, and a cautious colleague suggested I find a different word (don’t remember which one I wound up using, and I’ve written so many NDDs blasting the House GOP that the search function on the DLC site is of little help). But that didn’t mean I thought the metaphor inapposite, since the House is indeed run by tyrannical overseers who don’t much care about the views or welfare of the people (Members or staff) toiling in the fields of legislation. Moreover, aside from the current management of the House, staffers for decades have referred to Congress as “the last plantation” because of the working conditions there. But let’s say it’s the wrong word, since it connotes racism or actual slavery. What metaphor works for you, critics? Maybe we should have a contest. Here are a few nominations:* an 18th century sweatshop* the H.M.S. Bounty* the Third Soviet Congress of the Toilers of the East* a Saudi public hearing* an Enron stockholders’ meetingYou get the point. But Hillary’s critics don’t.

I did a blog post last year suggesting some appropriate things to meditate on in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, and won’t repeat it (though a similar take is now up on the DLC site as a New Dem Dispatch). But I do want to share some words by Alan Wolfe in a 1998 New York Times book review of Taylor Branch’s second volume on King’s life and death, that sum up his accomplishments better than I ever could:

Our century’s identity has been to insure that the ideal of civic equality announced to the world in 1776 would become a reality. Just to help make that come about, King had to overcome the determined resistence of terrorists without conscience, politicians without backbone, rivals without foresight and an FBI director so malicious that he would stop at nothing to destroy a man who believed in justice….For all the tribulations his enemies confronted him with, it is not those who foolishly and vainly stood in his way whom we remember, but Martin Luther King, Jr., our century’s epic hero.

That’s exactly right.