In case you missed it, last night, NBC News published a Justice Department white paper detailing the criteria the administration uses to decide if it will kill Americans who belong to al-Qaeda as senior leaders. National security is not my area of expertise, but several reporters have already given excellent takes on the memo and its implications.
Last month, Republicans in several swing states—Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—floated a change that would give the GOP a decisive advantage in presidential elections. As it stands, most states, sans Nebraska and Maine, distribute their electoral votes in a winner-take-all system—if you win the state, you win the electoral votes. What Republicans have proposed is a system where electoral votes are distributed by congressional district—if you win the district, then you win the votes.
From its inception as part of Dodd-Frank financial, Republicans have been opposed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency meant to protect consumers from predatory financial practices. In a sane political world, Republicans would register through the usual channels, including elections. If you want to change Washington—or even just an agency—the first order of business is winning elections.
When Republicans began 2012, the Senate was within in their grasp—Democrats were defending a huge number of seats, and several incumbents, like Claire McCaskill of Missouri, were deeply unpopular. They finished it, however, with a smaller minority than anyone could have predicted. Obviously, this was a huge defeat for the GOP, and blame for it has fallen on two particular candidates—Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri—who represent the failures and excesses of Tea Party conservatism.
Every community has its problems. It’s only among African Americans, however, that those problems are pathologized and turned into a symptom of “culture.” Crime against neighbors becomes “black-on-black” crime, the predictable patterns of poor communities becomes a “culture of dependency,” and the usual teasing of grade school—where nerdy kids become targets of ridicule—is used as evidence of an anti-education pathology among African Americans.
When it was clear that Barack Obama would choose John Kerry to lead the State Department, I wrote that it was tantamount to giving Scott Brown—and the Republican Party—another Senate seat. Brown may have lost his bid for reelection, but he remained popular among Massachusetts voters, and would have been well-positioned for a comeback.
As it turns out, however, Brown won’t be back in the Senate anytime soon. NBC News reports that the former senator has decided against running in the special election to replace Kerry:
Last year, as part of implementation for the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration rolled out a rule on contraception that inspired a huge backlash from religious conservatives and began the “war on women” fight that extended through the presidential campaign. In short, Health and Human Services required all employers to include contraception in health insurance plans, without extra charge. Religious institutions could receive an exemption as long as they met particular requirements: Said organizations had to be nonprofits who mainly employed co-religionists, and had “the inculcation of religious values” as their primary purpose.
According to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy created 157,000 jobs in January, a solid number, though behind what we need to see a robust recovery. More important, as always, are the revisions. November’s job growth was revised to 247,000 (up from 161,000) and December’s was revised to 196,000 (up from 155,000).
These are big revisions, and when analyzed as part of a trend, it’s clear that the government was been underestimating job growth for most of 2012, to the tune of 28,000 jobs a month.
Writing at the Weekly Standard, William Kristol offers a little advice to the Republican Party as it looks for a path forward. He outlines four steps for the GOP to take, but it’s the second one that stands out:
The second step is to recall Bill Buckley’s famous words, at the founding of National Review. The magazine—and by implication the conservative movement—would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” A little willingness on the part of Republicans to sometimes stand athwart History would also go a long way.
For as much as immigration reform is talked about as an unqualified good for Democrats (who need to protect their standing with Latinos) and Republicans (who need to improve it), it’s not nearly that simple. The GOP relies on high support from working-class whites to win elections. These are the same people who view increased immigration with trepidation—after all, a large influx of low-wage workers means new competitors for jobs, housing, and education. Given the wage stagnation of the last 20 years, there is real fear of increased immigration and its implication for their livelihoods.
Over the weekend, conservative activists and politicians got together under the banner of the National Review to discuss the future. How can Republicans recover from 2012 and move the United States away from the liberalism of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party? While some political observers have called for ideological reform—a reorientation of the GOP’s priorities—Republicans themselves are less interested in taking this path. According to GOP insiders, notes Politico in a story on the summit, 2012 had little to do with substance and everything to do with message.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has kind words for Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s immigration proposal, which would create a path toward legal residence—but not citizenship—for undocumented immigrants.
Since the Virginia GOP moved forward with its bill to allocate the state’s electoral votes by congressional district, there have been several great analyses of what effect this arrangement would have on a national level. At the Crystal Ball, for instance, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that if every state distributed electoral votes by congressional district, Mitt Romney would have won the presidency with 276 electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote by 4 points.
To follow up on yesterday’s post on the Virginia GOP and it’s attempt to gerrymander presidential elections, ThinkProgress reports that one Republican—State Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel—abstained from the initial vote, sending it to the Privileges and Elections Committee without full recommendation.
Her abstention was more procedural than anything else—she chairs the redistricting subcommittee—but she has announced her opposition to the proposal. If the bill reaches the floor, and Vogel joins the Democratic opposition—it will fail to win passage, on account of the Virginia Senate’s even split between Republicans and Democrats.
This morning, I wrote on an emerging Republican plan—in swing states won by President Obama—to rig presidential elections by awarding electoral votes to the winner of the most congressional districts. Because Democratic voters tend to cluster in highly-populated urban areas, and Republican voters tend to reside in more sparsely populated regions, this makes land the key variable in elections—to win the majority of a state’s electoral votes, your voters will have to occupy the most geographic space.
