FactCheck.org revisits last week’s face-off between Obama and the House GOP, taking up the President’s challenge for an “independent fact-checker” to critique his response to Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling’s accusations that Obama holds the majority of the blame for the nation’s debt crisis.
FactCheck’s results? “We have to score this one for Obama. Hensarling told a Texas-size whopper.”
“Why will this matter? Isn’t there a lot of money sloshing around in politics already? Consider Exxon-Mobil. In 2008, its political action committee (PAC) raised about $1 million from its employees and offices. Its profits that year -– which it was legally barred from pouring into politics -– were $45 billion. It was illegal for Exxon to spend that money on elections; now with this decision, it will be legal. Exxon or any other firm could spend Bloomberg-level sums in any congressional district in the country.” - Michael Waldman, executive director, Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law
NY Times: “How Corporate Money Will Reshape Politics.” Legal scholars predict fallout from the decision.
“The court has, in effect, legalized foreign governments and foreign corporations to participate in our electoral politics. It’ll happen instantaneously. It’ll happen in the 2010 elections….The Japanese corporations, the European corporations will do it instantly through American subsidiaries.” - Pat Choate, Author and former Reform Party candidate for Vice President
Politico.com: Decision May Mean More Foreign Cash in Elections
“[We] believe that Congress pays far too much attention to Wall Street and not enough attention to Main Street.” - Judson Phillips, Organizer, Tea Party Nation
Liberal columnist Joe Conason wonders, will “Main Street over Wall Street” Tea Partiers support the ruling?
“Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is ’to confuse metaphor with reality.’ Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court.” - Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick ponders the bizarre implications the ruling holds for the “personhood” of Corporate entities.
Finally, Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg speculates that the ruling may be the effective end of political parties. The catch? They’re going to be replaced by massive special interest groups.
“The bills before Congress are politically partisan and substantively bipartisan.
What does that mean? The first part is obvious. All 60 Senate Democrats and independents voted for the bill, and all 40 Republicans voted against it. The second part is the counterintuitive one. Yet it’s true.
The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.” - David Leonhardt
Centrist Approach on Health Reform Fails to Build Consensus - NYTimes.com
Politics is about messaging, not content. It doesn’t matter how bipartisan the content of the bill truly is if it’s not seen that way by the electorate. Perception matters more than reality.
I’ll be totally honest - I’m left of center. I want this to pass. Supermajorities never last; I expect the Dems to lose big in November regardless of whether or not healthcare survives. If losing is inevitable, I’d rather it be with this bill in the can.
But looking at this as objectively as I can, what should the Democrats do now in terms of strategy heading into the November midterm elections? As I see it, they’ve got three real options: Scrap the bill and admit defeat, send the bill back to comittee and try to hash out something with the GOP minority, or use whatever options necessary (including budget reconciliation, the so-called “nuclear option”) to try to ram the bill though as quickly as possible.
Scrapping the bill is not a solution. Their base would never forgive them, and I could only imagine that the psychological blow of tossing out legislation you spent the bulk of a year on, a landmark goal of the left for over 60 years that you couldn’t get passed even with a historic degree of party influence, would be too much for Democratic morale to recover from. Taking it back to committee is also a terrible idea - there’s no guarantee the GOP is interested in compromising anyway, and why should they be? The longer this fight drags on, the worse the Democrats’ numbers get. It would slaughter them in November.
In my eyes, pushing the healthcare reform bill through as quickly as possible is the best option they have left. Wrap it up and move on to more popular legislation. Historically, healthcare reform has always polled well in a general sense - what’s driven down Democrats’ numbers is the sense of conflict and political gridlock the debate has generated. Get it over with and start looking like you’re doing something about the economy. Give Republicans something less volatile to fight over. Six months of that - virtually an eternity in American politics - and it might start to turn their numbers up.
That’s what they’ll do if they’re smart. Admittedly, that’s always a big “if” with Democratic leadership.
“The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist.”
This article underscores the primary issue many civil rights advocates have with anti-terrorism legislation — the potential for abuse. Oversight must be written into the original laws, otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for situations like this.
It’s fascinating to see how both the left and the right pick out obscure tidbits from the others’ policy actions and turn them into evidence for some vast conspiracy to take our freedoms away. Bush couldn’t sneeze without liberals citing it as some evidence for his slavish devotion to the military-industrial complex, while the right sees Obama’s every move as betraying his status as a pawn of the New World Order globalist conspiracy. I’m sure these kind of hysterical political fantasies are probably inevitable, but they’re exhausting to watch.
Links to stuff I like.
