In the early morning, Dubya chooses White House Counsel Harriet Miers as the next Supreme Court nominee. (Searching far and wide again, I see.) Well, let the vetting begin. On the plus side, the fundies seem perturbed, and she has some Dem donations in her past. On the other hand, she’s a rabid Bush loyalist, calling him “the most brilliant man she had ever met.” (Get out much?) Update: The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol is disappointed, depressed, and demoralized by the Miers pick, while Legal Times was already unenthused about her. Update 2: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon are similarly nonplussed: “Can anyone really imagine that she’d be the nominee if she weren’t a woman and the president’s friend and loyal adviser? Cronyism and affirmative action: It’s a nasty mix.“
Category: Politics (2005-2006)
Leakin’ Libby & Ramblin’ Rove.
“As the CIA leak investigation heads toward its expected conclusion this month, it has become increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated.” Bringing the somewhat bizarre recent revelation of Judith Miller’s source to bear on the story, the Washington Post surveys the roles of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in Plamegate. “[Lawyers with inside info] surmise that [Special Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials..”
Empire Falls.
(Ring-)Breaking news: As with two of his Texas cronies, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, Boss DeLay has been indicted on criminal conspiracy charges this morning, in connection with the grand jury probe into money laundering at TRMPAC. (TRMPAC itself was indicted a few weeks ago.) As a result, DeLay will be forced to step down as Majority Leader, to be replaced by (corrected, after a possible last-minute switcheroo) Roy Blunt of Missouri. (Of course, even if he beats this indictment, Boss DeLay is also being investigated by federal authorities for his role in the Casino Jack story.)
In 1994, the Republican Contract with America stated that the GOP would “restore accountability to Congress [and] end its cycle of scandal and disgrace.” Today, with the Republicans controlling both sides of Congress and the Oval Office, their leader in the House has been indicted as a criminal, their leader in the Senate is under dual investigations for insider trading, and the top moneyman in the White House was arrested only last week for lying and obstruction. (And that’s not even counting the inquiries into footsoldiers like Casino Jack Abramoff and Randy “Duke” Cunningham, or the continued investigation into Karl Rove’s role in Plamegate.) Simply put, the GOP leadership have broken their promise and embarrassed the nation with their rampant cronyism and illegality. It is time for them to go.
Update: While a vituperative Boss DeLay calls the charges “one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history,” (now that‘s a bold statement), the GOP look to Roy Blunt of Missouri (who will share power with Dreier) as their new leader.
The Trouble with Dems.
“The core difficulty for Democrats is that they must solve two problems simultaneously — and solving one problem can get in the way of solving the other. Over time Democrats need to reduce the conservative advantage over liberals in the electorate, which means the party needs to take clear stands that could detach voters from their allegiance to conservatism…But even indeterminate talk of a ‘national’ message makes many Democrats holding those 41 pro-Bush House seats (and Democratic senators from red states) nervous.” E.J. Dionne attempts to explain the structural basis for our party leadership’s frequent disarray, which was in full evidence again on the Roberts vote.
New Deal, Raw Deal.
“It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called ‘affirmative action for whites.’ During Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.” With Katrina as a newspeg, Columbia’s own Ira Katznelson previews his new book on New Deal racial exclusion in the Washington Post.
Dubya’s 2nd Round Draft Pick.
“I will pick a person who can do the job. But I am mindful that diversity is one of the strengths of the country.” As the Roberts nod goes to the full Senate (my thoughts on Roberts below), Dubya hints at a woman and/or minority justice for O’Connor’s seat. With these parameters in mind, Salon‘s Tim Grieve surveys the most likely choices. Among them are faces familiar — Edith Clement, Priscilla Owen, and Janice Rogers Brown, for example — and unfamiliar, such as Maureen Mahoney, the “female John Roberts.” (And, of course, there’s always Gonzales, although his star seems to have dimmed.)
Cox (and) Communications.
Sorry, Catkiller, no help there. New SEC Chairman Christopher Cox recuses himself from the probe into Bill Frist’s suspicious stock dump, leaving four commissioners — two Dems and two GOP — to head the inquiry. Update: A blind trust? Not hardly. “Documents on file with the Senate show the trustees for Frist and his immediate family wrote the senator nearly two dozen times between 2001 and July 2005. The documents list assets going into the account and assets sold. Some assets have a dollar range of the investment’s value and some list the number of shares.”
Making Hay while the Cities Drown.
Looka points the way to a truly horrifying breakdown of Operation Offset, the House Republicans’ disgusting, abhorrent proposal to pay for Katrina reconstruction (without, of course, touching a red cent of Dubya’s millionaire tax breaks) So, guess who foots the bill?
“The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president’s hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because ‘studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free’; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides ‘free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill’ to poor teenagers.
Along the way, they’d find a way to punish — or simply eliminate — some of their enemies, real and imagined. They’d cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities…
[T]he Republican plan also calls for ‘rational reforms to Defense and Homeland Security.’ Does this mean cutting weapons systems at the expense of big defense corporations? Well, no. But it does mean closing schools for the children of soldiers, cutting grants for local responders and offering National Guard members the ‘option’ to purchase a less comprehensive healthcare plan.”
So, just to clarify: Rather than roll back the Dubya tax breaks for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, which almost alone would raise the necessary funds, Boss DeLay and the House GOP want to cut a Grover Norquist-style swath of destruction through our government and foist the clean-up bill on everyone but their fatcat cronies. I must say, I am consistently surprised by the current GOP leadership’s ability to plumb new depths of repugnance.
Up the Bagman Food Chain.
Curiouser and curiouser…Already inexorably tied to Boss DeLay and Grover Norquist, “Casino Jack” Abramoff also boasted of a direct connection to Karl Rove two years ago, while helping Tyco and other corporate conglomerates try to avoid tax penalties for moving their operations overseas. Boy, pull at one brick in this rotten edifice of right-wing cronyism and the whole darned structure threatens to topple.
Hail to the Chief.
“When my party retakes the White House, there may very well be a Democratic John Roberts nominated to the Court, a man or woman with outstanding qualifications, highly respected by virtually everyone in the legal community, and perhaps with a paper trail of political experience or service on the progressive side of the ideological spectrum. When that day comes, and it will, that will be the test for this Committee and the Senate. And, in the end, it is one of the central reasons I will vote to confirm Judge John Roberts to be perhaps the last Chief Justice of the United States in my lifetime.”
By a vote of 13-5, John Roberts is approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee — with Dems Patrick Leahy, Herb Kohl, and Russ Feingold joining the Republican majority — and will no doubt become the Court’s next Chief Justice. The Dems — and particularly Sen. Feingold — are already getting flak for their Yes votes from People for the American Way and other liberal groups. (For their part, Hillary and Joe Biden have decided to keep the 2008 primary voters happy.) Well, just as I think Feingold was right to vote yes on Ashcroft in 2001, I think he made the correct decision here, both in terms of principle and politics.
In terms of principle, I think Feingold’s statement above is exactly correct. We could go through 1000 nominees, and Dubya would never pick anyone who comes remotely close to being a progressive — Sadly, the conservative tinge of the Supreme Court was decided last November, with Dubya’s re-election. The question before the Senate was whether Roberts was (a) competent enough to fill the position of Chief and (b) whether he adhered to the broad mainstream (albeit conservative mainstream) of American legal thought. I watched almost all of the Roberts hearings and, although he dodged and weaved past way too many important questions, he was clearly (a) hyper-competent and (b) more respectful of existing legal precedent than many other conservative freakshows Dubya could have appointed (and might still.) Roberts said a number of times that he believed in a constitutional right to privacy, that Griswold was good and settled law, and that (although most agree on this anyway, Janice Rogers Brown notwithstanding) the Lochner Court was not an appropriate or worthwhile historical role model for today’s judiciary. Perhaps he’s lying, but it’s no small business to lie before the Senate. I think Feingold was right to take his word at face value and vote yes, with reservations.
Voting for or against a 50-year-old Chief Justice is not a decision to be taken lightly, and I’m sure Dems on both sides of the vote chose their stance on principle. But, to be base for a moment and consider the politics of the situation, the Yes voters allowed themselves wiggle-room on the next nominee that most Dems have basically wasted on a sure thing. Roberts is replacing Rehnquist, a conservative for a conservative. The real battle lies ahead, when Dubya appoints a justice to take O’Connor’s swing-vote position. Where are the Dems who voted no on Roberts going to go? Chances are the next candidate for justice will be less competent and more conservative, in the scary-fundy sense, than Roberts, but the no-voting Dems have lost all pull by not keeping their powder dry. Had the Dems acceded to Roberts’ nomination, they would have easier recourse to a possible filibuster in Round 2, particularly with the fair-play-minded Gang of 14. Now, not so much.
At any rate, I’ll admit to being already something of a Feingold groupie — More than any other Dem, except perhaps the late Paul Wellstone, I view him as my Senator in Congress, the closest thing to a true progressive out there. (For what it’s worth, I also thought he did a better job than any other Dem in his questioning of Roberts, with the possible exception of Dick Durbin.) Still, I think he made the right decision in this vote, and I hope very much that groups on the left who disagreed with his choice here keep an eye on the big picture and don’t start calling for his head.
And Roberts? Well, I’m never going to agree with the guy on a lot of issues, that’s for sure. But, in the hearings, I thought he came across as conservative in the old and best sense of the term — cautious, restrained, not inclined to break tradition — and not as a frothing, fundamentalist reactionary like any number of judges Dubya has appointed to the bench. Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that this turns out to be the case.