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- Yesterday evening, Harry Reid failed to muster 60 votes to pass the $410 billion omnibus bill that funds the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year, comprised mostly of holdovers from the twilight of the Bush administration. Elana Schor reports on the wrangling to get Ben Nelson and Robert Menendez on board despite their opposition to Cuba provisions contained in the bill, and CQ Politics looks at the possibility of Senate Democrats looking to pass Obama's budget (as opposed to the omnibus bill) under reconciliation rules that avoid the threat of a filibuster.
- In addition to the science advisers being held up because of Menendez's hold (which apparently isn't his anymore), critical appointments at Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers are being help up by anonymous Senate Republicans who appear to be engaged in a game of petty revenge for the Democratic stalling of some Bush nominees. No big deal, though. The economy is doing just great.
- Compounding the problem of merely confirming nominees is the difficulty of attracting talent to these positions in the first place because of the draconian vetting process employed by the Obama administration to avoid political embarrassments and the blanket ban on lobbyists, as Ryan Grim reports.
- Unquestionably, the right wing has settled on some combination of sloganeering about the threat of socialism and the faux populism of the "war on the rich" to frame their opposition to the Obama administration. Of course, this was quite predictable and we've been down this road before. But as I noted yesterday, if it is true that Obama is trying to redefine the center of the American political landscape -- and I think he is -- then it's crucial that his administration finds support from self-defined centrists and "cautious moderates" like David Brooks, who as Tim wrote earlier, "needed four senior White House aides to walk him through the public record before he could climb down from his roof and stop freaking out about the return of state socialism." This proves Brooks is somewhat malleable has at least one foot in the reality-based community. But what motivates one moderately conservative op-ed columnist isn't what motivates other moderate op-ed columnists, and the game changes entirely when looking at the motivations of preening centrists in Senate who can bring the nation's business to a halt on a whim. With this in mind, Obama's remark to Evan Bayh that he intends to "spend all my political capital in four years" is encouraging, but the true test is when the rubber hits the road in Congress.
- Speaking of retreads, Karl Rove's comedy act is starting to get a little stale. Speaking with Fox News, the Lee Atwater protege sounded his concern that the Obama White House was employing the "same old style politics that we grew to really dislike in the 1990s, when the White House thought everything through from a political perspective" and keeping a "very keen eye towards the politics of the matter, not what was in the best interests of the country." I'm sure he'll repeat that punchline to chuckles when he defends his involvement in the U.S. Attorney firing scandal before the House Judiciary Committee.
- I don't think we should be surprised that President Obama is "clinging" to "extraordinary executive power." It doesn't matter how personally ethical Obama is or how his views of executive authority differ from his predecessor. He inherited an array of powerful tools and precedents devised by Addington, Yoo and Cheney that were not challenged by Congress, regardless if it was because they couldn't or wouldn't challenge them. We always knew Bush's successor was going to have access to those tools regardless of party or ideology, and Obama's disposition toward them wasn't meant to be a guarantee against their abuse.
- Remainders: The EFCA battle is going to get real ugly; MoveOn.org refines itself as something other than an opposition organization; Andrew Gelman has some nice maps and graphs breaking down socioeconomic voting patterns in the 2008 election; the GOP experiences epic fail on Hispanic outreach; Obama finally sits down with The New York Times; and the ICC (maybe) sets a precedent on prosecuting war criminals.
--Mori Dinauer
