Today Senate Republicans filibustered the confirmation of Goodwin Liu to the 9th Circuit U.S. Appeals Court. The official rationale from Senate Republicans was, basically: so’s your old man! During the Bush administration, Democrats preserved the right to filibuster Republican nominees for federal judicial spots, so we will filibuster your people!
I’m a bit heretical on this subject, believing that if we are going to have filibuster rights at all, they are more appropriate for lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary than for legislation that future Congresses can repeal.
But the Liu controversy reveals the very different levels of emphasis that conservatives and progressives place on judicial appointments. It’s holy war for conservatives, as suggested by their ready flip-flop from support for a “nuclear option” to kill judicial filibusters when it happened to suit their purposes, to an entirely contrary position now. It just doesn’t seem to be that big a deal for Democrats. And that’s a problem.

As a close observer of the Christian Right and its preoccupations, I try to make a habit of checking The Brody File–the blog of CBN political correspondent David Brody–now and then. Today I ran across a video of his show from last week, a feature on the “Teavangelicals” (people equally at home in the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right) shot in Atlanta. It included interviews with Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, and the teavangelical godfather himself, Ralph Reed–all of whom live in Atlanta.
The whole thing is actually worth watching. But the most interesting moment for me was when Brody began rating a few Republican presidential candidates, on a scale of 1 to 5, in terms of their “Teavangelical” street cred. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, unsurprisingly, got a 5. Mitt Romney got a 1, and apparently only rated above a zero because he occasionally wears Tea Party ties (“He’s not, after all, an evangelical” noted Brody). But guess who else got a 5? Tim Pawlenty, which might come as a surprise to those who persist in thinking of him as some sort of “moderate.”
Brody interspersed a clip of a walk-and-talk interview he did with the former Minnesota governor recently, wherein he quizzed him about his appeal to Tea Party folk and evangelicals. Not missing a beat, T-Paw rattled off a list of all the GOP’s factions (including libertarians, economic conservatives and national-security conservatives in addition to evangelicals and Tea Folk) and said he appealed equally to them all. (Note that “moderates” didn’t make the grade.) This is clearly his calling card as a candidate, and he sure can stay on message, even if it means passing up a chance to do some more specific pandering.

It may seem a bit cruel to dwell on the smoking ruins of Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions at this particular moment. But the rejoinder sent to Huffington Post by his press secretary Rick Tyler yesterday really must be mentioned as one of the great masterpieces of unintentional humor in American political history. Gaze in awe:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

I’d normally feel sympathy for Tyler, who has just suffered through a truly nightmarish week. The poor guy is probably updating his resume as we speak. But the bizarre mix of paranoia, idolatry, and idiocy in the passage just quoted indicates that Tyler needs a good long vacation somewhere far away from any keyboard or microphone–just like his boss.
UPDATE: Via Salon‘s Alex Pareene, check out this hysterical cartoon illustration of Tyler’s statement.

The day after California’s special election “jungle primary” to choose two candidates to compete for the vacant congressional seat of former Rep. Jane Harman, the precise outcome remains uncertain. Democratic Los Angeles city councilwoman Janice Hahn has definitely won a place in a July 12 runoff. But second place, and the other runoff spot, remains up in the air. In a big upset, little-known self-funding Republican Craig Huey ran 200 votes ahead of Democratic Secretary of State Deborah Bowen with all precincts reporting. There are enough absentee and provisional ballots out to theoretically erase Huey’s lead, and there’s also the possibility of a recount (though Bowen’s role as California elections chief makes that scenario tricky).
The district’s heavily-Democratic complexion means that Huey is very unlikely to prevail even if he does make the runoff. And regardless of who wins the remainder of Harman’s term, the district lines may soon be scrambled by California’s unique “citizens’ commission” redistricting system.
But the results have been watched carefully by political pros for signs of how California’s new “top two” electoral system will work. Imposed by a 2010 ballot initiative, and in place already in Washington State, the “top-two,” or “jungle” primary allows all candidates from any or no party to compete in a single primary contest, with the top two finishers proceeding to the general election ballot. So for the first time, general election contests in California could feature two Democrats or two Republicans, which might well happen in quite a few of today’s highly gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts in the Golden State.
Since this was a special election, the “top two” finishers proceed to a special runoff, not to the next general election. Additionally, had someone won a majority yesterday, he or she would have been declared elected; that won’t be the case in regular elections in the future (this is the one of two key differences between the California system and Louisiana’s, where a majority wins; the other difference is that Louisiana’s jungle primary only applies to elections for state offices).
Yesterday’s “special election” features make it difficult to draw any major conclusions about the impact of “top two” in the future. But one claim about the system–that it would make intraparty conflict a more visible feature of primaries–may already be coming true. According to one California political wizard quoted at Politico, Hahn helped lift Huey towards a primary spot by going after Bowen in a way that diverted Democratic votes to fourth-place finisher Marcy Winograd (an anti-war activist who twice challenged Harman). And let’s say Bowen does make it to the runoff: you can imagine that what is essentially an extended primary contest could get pretty abrasive if it were to run all the way to November, which will be the case in the future.
There are quite a few other questions about “top two” that remain to be answered; one in particular is whether primary contests on general election day in heavily D or R districts will boost general election turnout. Another is whether “true independents” will play a more visible role. But we’ll have to wait until 2012 for most of the answers.

One of the staples of federal, state and local Democratic campaigns is the call for a major investment in upgrading the infrastructure. Dems have been great at making the call, less impressive in delivering the upgrades. Yet the need remains so compelling that it would be hard to identify an American city of significant size that doesn’t need major improvements in roads, bridges, transportation systems, harbors, airports, utilities or waste disposal facilities.
In his post, “Obama Should Call Chamber’s Infrastructure Bluff,” Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America’s Future works a slightly different angle to illuminate the problem and a strategy for addressing it more effectively:

The Chamber of Commerce claims it supports spending on infrastructure. President Obama should call them on it because a majority of the public supports rebuilding our infrastructure and millions of us need work. The President should tell the Chamber to take its rhetoric seriously and support spending what is needed. Imagine the jobs it would create and the boost it would give to our economy now and in the future. The President should make it the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

Johnson does an excellent job of documenting the extent to which many other nations are taking infrastructure upgrades far more seriously to enhance their competitive advantage, while the U.S. muddles on, quibbling about budget cuts and deficit reduction. Republicans have dodged the infrastructure issue artfully, often parroting libertarian cliches about privatization as a solution to the problem.
Johnson notes the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $2.2 trillion investment is needed to get America up to current standards. According to the ASCE, “Years of delayed maintenance and lack of modernization have left Americans with an outdated and failing infrastructure that cannot meet our needs.”
Johnson notes that 80 percent of the public supports major infrastructure upgrades, according to a survey by Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies for the Rockefeller Foundation. Even the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce recognizes the need, as this excerpt from its web page indicates:

The U.S. Chamber is leading the charge to modernize and expand our nation’s transportation, telecommunications, energy, and water networks. Without proper investment and attention to our infrastructure systems, the nation’s economic stability, potential for job growth, and global competitiveness are at risk.

With all of the conservative whining about the need for budget cuts, it’s hard to imagine a multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrade program, much less a two trillion dollar one get much traction. But, with 80 percent public support, maybe a little bully pulpit could help elevate infrastructure upgrades as a national priority. As Johnson suggests,

This is a tremendous opportunity for the President to lead with a plan for massive investment in infrastructure, employing millions and positioning the country to compete in the world’s economy again. The publiic is overwhelmingly behind this. The Chamber says they support updating our infrastructure, and the President should challenge them to really support it. This popular plan is good for the country and is the right thing to do, and that makes it the right thing to do politically as well.

FDR showed what a President could do with an iron clad, refuse-to-take-no-for-an-answer commitment to infrastructure improvement. To a lesser extent, President Eisenhower was ‘the infrastructure President’ of the post-war period, modernizing the nation’s interstate highways into the finest system ever created.
America will have to upgrade our infrastructure sooner than later. I’d hate to think that it’s going to take another Republican to meet this challenge (“Only a Nixon can go to China” sort of paradox) The need has never been more urgent, and President Obama should make the commitment to be ‘The Infrastructure President’ who takes America into the 21st century.

For those of you interested in the battle over abortion policy, I’ve written a review for The Washington Monthly of a book on the notorious 2009 political murder of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas late-term abortion provider. The book, The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion, by “true crime” specialist Stephen Singular, is a solid recounting of the facts of the case. But as I tried to convey in my review, its treatment of late-term abortion as the central theater in the war over reproductive rights is misleading, and its treatment of anti-choice activists as “fringe” players little different from (and in fact, often the same as) militia members underestimates their power.
A lot has happened to confirm my concerns since I wrote the review. Republicans in Congress and in the states have waged war on any sort of direct or indirect public funding for Planned Parenthood, which is not a late-term abortion provider, and in fact, is most significant as a dispenser of contraceptives. A House-passed appropriations bill also sought to all-but-terminate federal family planning services. And most ominously, states (so far, Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana, with a bill pending in Missouri) are beginning to act on “fetal pain” bills designed to roll back abortion rights taken for granted for years, typically via bans on abortions that occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy. No one seems confident the Supreme Court will invalidate these new laws.
With respect to the late-term abortion issue, the most interesting development is currently unfolding in Iowa, where the planned relocation of a late-term abortion clinic run by Dr. Leroy Carhart (one of Tiller’s colleagues featured in the Singular book), whose Nebraska practice was shut down by the first of the “20 weeks” laws, is hanging fire. Iowa Republicans managed to get their own “20 weeks” law through the state House, which they control, citing Carhart’s plans as a chief motive. Senate Democrats (whose leader, Mike Gronstal, represents the Council Bluffs district where Carhart’s planned clinic would be located) have countered with a bill that through various technical means would thwart Carhart’s plans, but would not actually ban any late-term abortions, much less the second-trimester abortions that would be affected by the “20-weeks” bill.
The anger of anti-choicers (some of whom actually opposed the “20-weeks” bill as insufficiently radical) at this maneuver makes it pretty plain that their alarms over late-term abortion providers like Carhart simply provided a pretext for steps to shut down abortion providers more generally.
The drive to overturn reproductive rights is enjoying much more success than is implied by books like Singular’s, and is far more extensive than the controversies over Tiller and Carhart, reaching increasingly into the use of contraceptives by the vast majority of Americans. The election of a Republican president, who would be under an iron pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices sure to overturn Roe v. Wade more explicitly, could have enormous implications in this area.
UPDATE: Stephen Singular offered a thoughtful comment to this post, and I responded in a way that I hope will allay any impression that I don’t fully appreciate his work. We’re equally alarmed about what’s going on in the “abortion battle” right now. Please check out the comments thread.

You have to wonder if Newt Gingrich wishes he’d just never bothered to run for president in the first place. The day after he announced, he spoke at the state Republican convention in his home-base of Georgia, and was upstaged by talk-show host Herman Cain (who is also from Georgia, but has spent twenty-one fewer years than Gingrich representing the state in Congress). Then on the eve of his first big tour of Iowa as a candidate, he went on Meet the Press and casually dissed Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal, which has earned him vast abuse from conservative opinion-leaders and Republicans generally (even those who undoubtedly agree in private with his assessment of RyanCare as a political non-starter). The gaffe even got him some personal grief from a loud Iowan who accosted him during a campaign swing and demanded he just get out of the race.
And now Jake Sherman of Politico did some inspired digging through the financial disclosure forms that Callista Gingrich was required to file as a highly paid House employee up until 2007, and discovered that Newt owed somewhere between a quarter and a half million dollars to Tiffany and Company as recently as 2006. Considering that the same forms showed the Gingriches as having total assets valued at somewhere between one and two-and-a-half million dollars at the time, that’s some pretty serious jewelry debt for such debt-conscious times.
You can imagine what the late-night comics will do with this story. I mean, the jokes just write themselves. Did Newt exceed his Tiffany’s Debt Limit? Is he still paying on all three engagement rings? How many jobs did he produce at Tiffany’s? Would a tax cut help him grow out of debt? Does he really just like eating breakfast at Tiffany’s? Ba-da-bing, ba-da- boom.
I’ve never been that high on Newt’s chances of becoming the 45th President of the United States. But if he can overcome this campaign launch, he deserves some real respect as a survivor.

Can anyone say today with any degree of certainty where the Republican Party is on “reforming” Medicare?
Sure, nearly all House Republicans are stuck with a vote for a budget resolution whose most visible feature was Paul Ryan’s proposals to voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid into a block grant. Harry Reid may yet maneuver Senate Republicans into a similar vote.
But in the meantime, the self-same Senate Republicans, most notably the Senator from the Club for Growth, Pat Toomey, and the Senator from the Tea Party, Jim DeMint, are backing a different budget that avoids any long-term changes to Medicare, opting instead for very deep cuts in non-defense discretionary spending.
And now Newt Gingrich has come right out and said what his fellow-candidates-for-president seem to have privately concluded: Ryan’s Medicare plan is “too big a jump” from a political point of view. The hysterical reaction of many conservatives to Gingrich’s remarks has all the signs of an attack on a rogue commander who has sounded a retreat before it can be made to look “orderly” and “strategic.”
I suspect the original idea among Republicans was to embrace a “bold” form of “entitlement reform” in hopes that the White House would give them cover by accepting something a little less “bold” but aimed in the same direction. If so, it hasn’t worked. And if Republicans manage to lose next week’s House special election in New York after a campaign in which their candidate was pounded for supporting Ryan’s budget, the retreat, orderly or not, is likely to begin in earnest.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest Public Opinion Snapshot reports on yet another poll indicating strong public distaste for GOP tax policy and budget cuts. As Teixeira says, “From town meetings with constituents to surveys of public opinion, the public is speaking up loudly to oppose cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and to support taxing the rich.” Teixeira adds:

The latest evidence comes from an early May Quinnipiac University poll. In that poll, 72 percent of the public opposed cutting Social Security to reduce the budget deficit, 70 percent opposed cutting Medicare, and 57 percent opposed cutting Medicaid, even after being told that 60 percent of the federal budget comes from defense, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The poll is equally-clear about the kind of taxes they support, explains Teixeira: “On the other hand, the public does support–by an overwhelming 69-28 margin–taxing the rich to reduce the budget deficit.”
Could it be any clearer? The public strongly opposes conservative tax and budget policies — and that’s good news for Dems.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, there’s been a silly effort among the conservative chattering classes to bat down the idea that this development means a permanent boost in Barack Obama’s approval ratings, or even guarantees his re-election. It’s silly, of course, because no one really believes the straw-man proposition in the first place. But this time-wasting exercise has obscured a more interesting question: How does this event affect the Republican national security case against Obama, and what are the implications for Republican presidential candidates who have been planning–in some cases for years–to make this a major part of their campaigns?
Lest we forget, until very recently the conservative narrative about Obama–and the Democratic Party as a whole–has been that the people running the country are constitutionally allergic to the use of military force and hopelessly addicted to multilateralism. At least two major Republican proto-candidates, Mitt Romney (as expressed in his 2010 manifesto, No Apologies) and Newt Gingrich (through an array of books, speeches and projects), have taken this argument to the front-and-center of their campaigns, and a highly influential article in National Review made the idea of “American exceptionalism” the linchpin of the conservative critique of Obama in general. Obama’s reluctance to use unilateral force to defend America from its enemies, the argument went, speaks to a broader incapacity of the president to reflect and defend American values in all walks of life, including domestic policy, where he is trying to impose European welfare-state limitations on American capitalism.
But the difficulty in challenging incumbent presidents is that they have the power to confound the best-laid arguments of their challengers. The Libya intervention called into question the alleged allergy of Obama and Democrats towards the use of force, driving conservatives to instead object to Obama’s deference to multilateral allies. But the Bin Laden operation, which involved a lethal mission in Pakistan without specific notice to its government, refuted the entire conservative critique in a manner that’s hard to undo.
As a result, the first problem Republicans now face is that there is little left in their foreign policy critiques to which they can still cling. For the most part, conservative commentary on Obama’s decision to authorize the OBL operation has focused on its alleged hypocrisy: Obama supposedly relied on intelligence derived from torture, or from his predecessors’ general approach to counter-terrorism, which he claimed to oppose in 2008. This line of attack is reminiscent of the feeble efforts of conservatives during the 1990s to attack Bill Clinton for “stealing our issues” or “stealing our ideas.” In short, who cares?
For someone like Mitt Romney, who dedicated the bulk of his recent book to railing against Obama’s foreign policy as weak willed and self loathing, it’s unclear exactly what he should do. Having spent a good deal of the last four years trying to recast himself as a foreign policy heavy, should he simply discount recent events as an aberration and plunge on with the claim that the administration is indifferent to terrorism and hostile to America’s right to unilateral self-protection? Or should he cut his losses and shift to other issues? In either case, he can’t exactly pivot to health care.
The second problem for the Republican field is that the death of bin Laden could accelerate the administration’s timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. If this happens, it would not only heal long-standing Democratic rifts over Afghanistan, but expose the degree to which Republicans are newly divided over the same issue.
While it’s highly unlikely that foreign policy will be the driving factor in 2012, Republican presidential candidates are still going to have to talk about foreign policy and national security issues in a vast number of primary debates. At this point, there will likely be not one, but two libertarian candidates, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, making constant trouble with their isolationist views, which–unlike in years past–are clearly finding some traction among Tea Party folk and other grassroots conservatives. Former governors Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and (if he runs) Mike Huckabee, for their part, will be torn between trying to appeal to these groups and trying to out-hawk Obama. Moreover, Tea Party-generated conflict about whether the Pentagon should be exposed to budget cuts will be unavoidable.
And finally, if the GOP nominating process delivers up a candidate with questionable foreign policy credentials–as it likely will, unless Jon Hunstman pulls off a political miracle–then foreign policy issues could actually be an important advantage for Obama. It’s worth remembering that in the contest Republicans like to cite as a precedent for 2012, the 1980 race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, doubts about Reagan’s competence as commander-in-chief helped keep the contest competitive until doubts about the actual commander-in-chief’s competence in handling the Iran hostage standoff took over. And, if nothing else, the snuffing of OBL made it clear that Obama is no Jimmy Carter.
Perceptions of political parties are hard to change, of course. Many progressives thought Bill Clinton’s successful (if multilateral) use of force in Kosovo convincingly slayed the dragon of Republican claims that Democrats were latent hippies unwilling to kill bad guys. A couple of years later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were campaigning on the argument that Clinton and Gore were starving the military of resources and that “help is on the way.” And less than two years into the Bush administration, Republicans had revived the Democrats-won’t-defend-you claim with a vengeance.
At this particular moment, however, Republicans are hard-pressed to pass themselves off as the party of patriotic clarity and determination. They may soon have their own fractious debate over Afghanistan, our country’s overseas commitments in general, and whether to make cuts to the defense budget. And whatever transpires on the GOP side, the President of the United States is certainly a more formidable figure on national security than he was two weeks ago.