schmitz-a-t

Peter Baker’s thoughtful “lessons learned” piece on the Obama first term in yesterday’s NY Times suggests that the President might have done well to add some political science classics to his pre-inaugural reading list in 2008-09. (It is, of course, never too late!) Generally, “Mr. Obama in private sometimes expresses surprise at the constraints of […]

Ben Heineman, presidential troubleshooter and Lyndon Johnson confidant, has died at the age of 98. His NYT obit is here. Heineman was offered various jobs by LBJ, including the chance to become a department head or director of the Bureau of the Budget, but turned them down. However, he made an important study of the Budget Bureau in 1967 […]

Recent weeks have seen a series of attacks on the Obama administration’s use of waivers to exempt states from the provisions of federal law. Most prominent until now had been Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s issuance of waivers to the No Child Left Behind Law. Yesterday, though, Mitt Romney accused the Obama administration of seeking to remove […]

This week’s back-and-forth between the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Justice Department over the Operation Fast and Furious gun-tracking (sic) initiative serves as a useful hook for a new report from the good folks at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The Center has pulled together scholars in the field […]

Not many people say nice things about the Environmental Protection Agency, so it seemed only charitable to pass along the unanimous ruling by the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirming EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The text of the opinion, in Coalition for Responsible Regulation et al v […]

Just a quick addendum to my post trying to disconnect the president’s recent administrative directive regarding immigration from broader and more dubious assertions of executive unlateralism. The Court’s decision on the Arizona immigration law SB 1070 upheld the notion that federal authorities may and even must make discretionary decisions about who, within the broad class […]

While everyone else is busy rebutting Jacqueline Stevens, I wanted to mention a different piece in the NYT’s Sunday Review: Ross Douhat’s take on “All the President’s Privileges.”  Douhat’s basic take is that political partisans switch their views on executive power depending on the party of the executive in question. Thus, Democrats who thought George […]

As I start this post, news is breaking that President Obama has formally invoked executive privilege in his administration’s running battle with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee over the latter’s investigation of – and demands for documents from – the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” southwest border gun-tracking (or rather not) operation. Combined […]

The Census Bureau has released a new website giving interactive access to voting data from the 1996-2010 elections, broken down by state and by demographic characteristics such as age, sex, race, and education. It does not provide measures of partisanship or candidate preference. The data are from the Current Population Survey, which surveys 50,000 households […]

The House vote to de-fund the American Community Survey, the 3 million-person strong supplementary sample to the US census, has been noted on this site before but perhaps deserves to be highlighted. A useful NY Times primer from the weekend is here (with a h/t to Rob Mickey). The data are used for many purposes, […]