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- It's probably a fool's hope that the public will ever care about the details of public policy, but perhaps all that's needed is to demonstrate that in our current political moment only one of the two major political parties cares at all about crafting sensible public policy. It seems to me that Barack Obama demonstrated that today in Baltimore when he engaged Republicans during their annual retreat. What you saw was an able, intelligent, and confident Democratic president calmly showing the opposition party to be a pack of ignorant cynics. But it's not enough to simply embarrass Republicans on live television. It has to be made crystal clear that they are contributing exactly nothing to the governance of the United States and are in fact engaged in a deliberate effort to ensure that Democratic governance fails in order to boost their own electoral appeal come Election Day.
- The flip side to pointing out Republican obstructionism is that Democrats, if they truly understand that they are destined to have zero legislative accomplishments for 2010, must take steps to remove the institutional barriers that provide Republicans the ability to obstruct. First and foremost is the filibuster -- Democrats, including and especially the president, must take seriously the prospect of its repeal. Ironically, the threat of the dread budget reconciliation process, rather than leading to "war" (one would hope) with the opposition party, would lead to more bipartisan solutions. Even Ben Nelson gets this. Do his colleagues?
- If congressional Democrats truly are helpless without leadership from the White House, then the legislative outlook for 2010 looks pretty bleak if we're to take Rahm Emanuel at his word. The White House chief of staff has said that Congress should focus first on a jobs bill, financial regulation, and deficit reduction before returning to health-care reform. Is this a joke? I know the jobs bill should have been enacted yesterday, but health care is, for all intents and purposes, done. One majority-rule vote in the House and Obama can sign it. The subsequent reconciliation amendments obviously require a bit more time, but why not take care of the easy part and just get it out of the way? It might even prove to be a morale-booster!
- Britain should consider itself extremely lucky that it is not a smoldering wreckage/terrorist training ground given that it very unwisely requested that former PM Tony Blair actually talk about the run-up to the Iraq War. I mean, he's talking about war decision-making during a time of war. Doesn't Parliament know that merely talking about fighting terrorism makes the homeland less secure? Don't they realize that democratic accountability emboldens terrorists? Yes, our Special Relationship could certainly be enhanced with an injection of Cheneyism into the British body politic.
- In what might be the second-best post title at a political science blog (the first being this), Henry Farrell cites political theorist Nancy Rosenblum's examination of the role "independents" play in American politics: "From the perspective of defenders of party politics, the Independent’s unconcern for parties as institutions and dispositional incapacity for partisanship is a form of free-riding. They do not assume responsibility for the institutions that organize elections and government or responsibility to other like-minded citizens. They are not recruiting others to a position. Neither persuading nor joining is a mark of this status."
- Remainders: The White House had no Plan B for Massachusetts; more Americans were either uninsured or on a government-provided health care plan in 2009 than 2008; former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson claims unemployment could have reached 25 percent in the absence of the unpopular bank bailout; former Bush administration officials are constitutionally predisposed to telling lies; Jeff Flake (R-AZ) says something insightful about how his party's chances in 2010 are not like 1994; Harold Ford Jr., takes another crack at winning the Michael Steele Commemorative Prize for best human punchline; and can anybody tell me how the libertarian view of "government must never invest in anything" makes it different from a very selective form of anarchism?
--Mori Dinauer
