Megan McArdle has two posts lamenting the process by which the health care bill advanced through the Senate. It should be noted that McArdle is an actual opponent of the bill and has spent a lot of time explaining why she’s opposed to it on the merits, so we can be sure that she isn’t just concern trolling. And since McArdle generally takes a dim view of any the government might actually do (it’s not like she was overjoyed with the Bush-GOP legislative agenda), we can take her to be a  pretty honest process person.

Specifically, she’s concerned with how the bill was constructed with a certain CBO target in mind and how all the budgetary shenanigans that the bill authors engaged in to meet that target have essentially made the CBO a useless institution:

My procedural complaints are somewhat more obscure.  The biggest one is that I am beginning to believe that in order to get this bill passed, the Democrats basically gutted the CBOl.  Not because they were working with the CBO to get estimates–that’s the CBO’s job, to provide Congress with a cost.  But rather, because this bill was something novel in the history of legislation.  Previous Congresses wrote bills, and then trimmed them to get a better CBO score:  witness the Bush tax cut sunsets.  But the Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill.  They’ve been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off.  I’m not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way.

Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores.  They’re now meaningless.  You don’t pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece.

I pretty much happen to agree with Megan here. Clearly, the Democrats wanted to hit a certain 10-year budget point and then did all sorts of budgetary shenanigans to get there. I would only introduce one more complication that makes me a bit more sympathetic to Democrats here: people are obsessed with things being short-term deficit neutral, whether or not that has anything to do with the actual policy being a good one. For example, we could have had both more subsidies, which would have made the bill not ten-year deficit neutral and all stronger “bending the curve” features to the bill which would actually bend the health care cost curve but wouldn’t actually effect the CBO score of the legislation. That sort of bill would have scored as more expensive, been a better bill and would have saved more money over the long term.

But let’s get back to Megan’s substantive point. She thinks that the Democrats’ finishing “the process of gaming the CBO scores” is a bad thing. I’m really not so sure. After all, it’s not like the CBO pre-health care bill was all that effective at actually getting policymakers to care about deficits. Bush and the Republican Congress passed an entitlement they didn’t pay for and substantially slashed taxes on rich people. The CBO said this stuff would explode the deficit, Bush et  al engaged in a little budget chicanery by sunsetting the tax cuts and went on their merry way with a much larger deficit.

But Democrats and the Obama administration actually profess to be concerned about the deficit and appear to be serious about, eventually, doing something about it. Remember, the Obama administration was originally quite gung-ho about reducing health care costs over the long term and Max Baucus has, up until the end, fought the good fight to keep as many cost-control measures in the health care bill.

Now, imagine there is no CBO. Is the bill substantially different? Probably not. Baucus was insisting on some sort of defecit neutral bill over some time frame no matter what. He wouldn’t have been OK with vastly higher subsidies or much tamer Medicare cuts even if he didn’t have to get his bill scored by the CBO.

For the history of the CBO, it just hasn’t been an effective at taming deficits or making politicians care more about their spending. Our deficit problems are due to the fact that we have come to agree that seniors’ health insurance should be covered by the public and that we shouldn’t reduce any of those expenditures. We also have a major political party that will never countenance a tax cut and, when they can, will cut taxes as much as they can without any real spending cuts. Having a CBO that isn’t being played by policymakers won’t really change that dynamic.

Jamelle Bouie rightfully takes Jane Hamsher to task for aligning with tea-partyers over their shared opposition to “the bank bailouts, the AIG bonuses, the lack of transparency about the Federal Reserve, “bailout” Ben Bernanke.” Here’s Jamelle, biting the bullet and defending the bailouts:

Hamsher (and her fellow travelers) seems to think that the country — and progressive goals — would have been better served if the Obama administration had not bailed out the financial industry. Which makes a lot of intuitive sense; it’s incredibly galling to know that you’ve invested a substantial portion of the nation’s resources into rescuing an industry that shows almost zero understanding of “collective responsibility.” That said, Hamsher must know that the only real alternative to bailing out a bunch of assholes was a second Great Depression, and last I checked, condemning the vast majority of Americans to economic desperation isn’t a particularly “progressive” thing to do.

Obviously, I agree with Jamelle on the policy question here. At the time, when the House voted down TARP (they would pass it a week later), I invoked the Roman concept of dictator as a perhaps useful model for how to steer ourselves through a financial crisis.  But there’s something more interesting to be said with how the bank bailouts, TARP and the unconventional Fed actions in the midst of financial calamity have to do with “progressive” goals.

Very broadly, progressives would say that their goals are widely shared prosperity, lessening the influence of the rich and corporations on the political process, more personal freedom for individuals, a more restrained and peaceful foreign policy, social insurance for everyone and the like. It’s obvious that buying up mortgage securities, lowering the discount window, loaning money to banks at very favorable rates and TARP exist in a weird relation to these goals.

I think it’s fair to say that our actions in late 2008 should be thought of in a similar way as actions in a war. Engaging in acts of national self defense are not really progressive, or for that matter, conservative, liberal or anything else. They are just what the government does because that’s their responsibility as a government. Now, obviously, people of different political ideologies will disagree about how and when to do this, but I think basically everyone agrees that, at a minimum, we should defend the country and, when we can, advance its interests.

So, when Spencer Ackerman was asked “whether the Afghanistan war — or escalating it — is justifiably seen as a progressive goal” he responded that “the case for continuing the war and progressivism as two ships passing in the night, a category error.”

I don’t want to argue that escalation in Afghanistan and the Fed and Treasury’s actions in 2008 bear the same relation to our broadly construed national interests, but Ackerman’s distinction is an important and useful one. Preventing a financial panic which could have lead to an economic collapse and a years long depression is not a “progressive” thing to do, it’s just what people with political responsibility do.

I guess, in the broadest sense, preventing economic collapse is a “progressive” goal because an economic collapse makes people poor and it makes the poor extra miserable, but once we’re at that level of abstraction, the distinctions between ideologies and approaches to politics don’t matter much.

]]> http://whippersnapper.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/whats-so-progressive-about-preventing-economic-collapse/feed/ 0 Matt Zeitlin http://whippersnapper.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/alex-pareene-is-so-full-of-win/ http://whippersnapper.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/alex-pareene-is-so-full-of-win/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:40:21 +0000 Matt Zeitlin http://whippersnapper.wordpress.com/?p=3399 ]]>

Yesterday, I wrote some thousands of words trying to make one basic point. Pareene has written a few hundred that make the same point much more effectively (and quite funnily).

In John Derbyshire’s new book We Are Doomed he discusses the modern-day view of the President as an “omnipotent pharaonic priest-king.” Less colorfully, Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency charts both the massive expansion of the President’s formal powers as well as the expectation among much of the public and the media that the President is just more than the head of the executive branch; he  (and, hopefully soon, she) is seen as a magic problem solver for all maladies facing the nation.

Best I can tell, when Naomi Klein isn’t fawning over Omar al-Bashir’s man at the U.N. for his brave stance against “certain death for Africa” (except, apparently, those Africans in Darfur and South Sudan), she is a big proponent of the Omnipotent Pharonic Priest-King vision of the presidency. She thinks that Obama would have been able to get a good deal had he “had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment.” Now, I agree that it would be nice if the American political system could allow for a real commitment to weaning our economy off of fossil fuels, but it seems a little fanciful to think that Obama can just declare such a commitment to reorganizing our entire economy and see it be done. There’s also the fact that such top-down “leadership” might not be the best or most effective way of cutting carbon emissions, but that’s clearly a different debate.

But Naomi Klein is a pragmatist and has some concrete suggestions for how Obama could have made commitments so that China and India – who, in the case of China, agreed to a deal that requires them to do very little and, in the case of India, agreed to deal that requires them to do very little and gets the developed world to give them lots of money — would have agreed to some real emissions cuts. Her suggestions basically require that Obama had been president before January, 2009 and have a Congress made up entirely of Nancy Pelosis.

Take, for instance, her suggestion that Obama “could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn’t tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it’s harder than ever to get a loan.” Put aside the fact that requiring banks to make certain types of loans to favored industries that, right now, probably are not credit worthy in a recessed economy might be a bad idea, how exactly could have Obama “mandated” that this happen? Would he have mandated that banks give these loans in perpetuity until, magically, a green economy has sprung up? Would the Congress that passed a stimulus bill that Klein found halfhearted gone along with this? There is, needless to say, little discussion of this pesky issues.

Elsewhere, Klein has suggested that the money that went to bail out the banks should have gone towards green industries, but the vast majority of bank bailout money was either appropriated by the Bush administration or by the Fed.

She also suggests that the stimulus money should have been more green and that the auto bailouts been explicitly oriented around greening the American economy. Because Obama “free hand and a blank check” to design the stimulus package, he could have designed it to accord with Naomi Klein’s desires. Anyone who paid attention to the stimulus debate noticed that those with the power to design the stimulus package were Congressional Democrats and, at the end, centrist Republicans and Democrats. Obama mostly had the power of setting certain parameters for size and signing the bill at the end.

Klein says that the only thing holding back Obama from doing these things is that he is not a “A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos.” But in nearly every case of progressive disappointment, we have seen Obama’s proposals be diluted either by Congress or, in the case of climate change, by nations who simply do not want to do anything and will always find excuses to do so. But instead of focusing their ire on the structural impediments to good policymaking, they seem to channeling that frustration by lamenting that Obama is something that he is not and never can be.

I understand why Kenneth Feinberg is chopping the pay at companies that received TARP money. There are two reasons, on face, why this is a good idea. One is a simple moral one — if you’re on the dole, you shouldn’t be getting multi-million dollar paydays. The second is more long-term: a bonus structure which encourages people to make big profits at the end of every year will encourage risky activities which will then lead to the companies’ and the economy’s collapse. Also, there’s the problem of poor corporate governance, where high-up officers in companies stock boards with their friends who have no interest in thinking rationally about pay.

The problem, of course, is that there are a bunch of financial institutions, namely the investment banks bank holding companies who have paid back their TARP money, who are still receiving government support in terms of cheap Fed financing and rock-bottom interest rates who are not under Feinberg’s jurisdiction and are going back to giving out bonuses like it’s 2007 and “Irreplaceable” is burning up the charts all over again. More generally, there will eventually be a time when no banks will be in the position of having not paid back their TARP money and the legal claims Feinberg or his successor will be much murkier. There’s also the problem of highly paid traders and executives simply going to other firms who aren’t having their pay schedules set by the government.

But it would obviously beneficial to society if we had a financial sector that was smaller and where the executives and traders were much less wealthy. And it seems like the only way to do that well is to think more structurally. So that means a combination of regulations on size and riskiness on the front-end and higher taxes for the rich on the back-end. Obviously, it’s much harder to do something that will actually work than to take advantage of populist anger against the least-liked people in America, but this is really important stuff.

At a certain point of the health care debate, when it looked like the Democrats were struggling to win broad public support, many liberal pundits tried to rehabilitate the “moral” argument for health care reform. The idea was that, while the Obama health care push was laudatory and that the bill was a great improvement over the status quo, the strategy Obama using was wrong. His wasn’t getting enough broad support because his focus on “bending the curve” — using health care reform to slow the growth in health care spending which, unchecked, would bankrupt the country — couldn’t get any traction. So, they argued, we should emphasize what a disaster our current system is for the uninsured and why it was an urgent moral failing.

Now, Max Baucus is always talking about bending the curve. He has emphasized over and over how important it is that any bill be, ultimately, deficit reducing. And now the CBO has scored the most recent Baucus bill and found that, it’s well, deficit negative. Maybe not entirely cost-curving, but surely good enough for Obama and Baucus. It also basically covers everyone. But, wait, Ezra Klein says, as he’s been saying for a while, that it’s also incredibly incremental. As he puts it, the bill “leaves 245 million non-elderly Americans who will pretty much be in the exact place they would’ve been otherwise.” Yet, Klein, like many others, is disappointed that a more ambitious and comprehensive bill isn’t in the offing and probably isn’t even possible.

But I think the fact that such a bill — which spends a lot of money to cover the uninsured but otherwise leaves most of the health care status quo intact — is probably going to be the bill, and will ultimately win support from the center-left and left is due tot he fact that leftie health care advocates, who tend to also be single payer supporters, have really been making an explicitly moral argument. It’s almost a weird coincidence that during the years where any universal health insurance was impossible (1995-2009), those who were most loudly insisting on universal health care were also wedded to one of the most radical methods of achieving such reform. In short, a world where what people really care about is universal coverage, something like the Baucus bill will end up being the means that universal coverage is achieved. It is, since it must go through the 60 vote senate, the Finance committee and get signed off by the interests which control health care policy, the way of achieving the most basic health care reform goal (covering the uninsured) that has the least resistance.

There are two Irving Kristols. One is the wide-ranging, detached and influential New York Intellectual of the 40s, 50s and most of the 60s. This was the man who was at the center of an intellectual culture whose scope and influence is only rivaled by Bloomsbury and 1930s Vienna. Although his colleagues produced more substantial work of lasting import (Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer), Kristol was hardly some intellectual dilettante.

But then in the 1970s and onward, he turned into one of the most dangerous creatures that can exist in the public sphere: the ironic, cynical ideologue. Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan both point out that Kristol openly and blatantly disregarded expertise in economics when selecting supply-side pieces to be published in the Public Interest and maintained a thoroughgoing agnosticism despite publicly insisting that religion was necessary for the maintenance of the values that hold society together. Kristol himself, the philosopher king of the Republican Party, could maintain a basically faithless, cosmopolitan life among intellectual elites of all political stripes, but the masses could not. It’s not so much that he made arguments for the superiority of white-middle class values and religion in bad faith, it’s that his entire intellectual style — whatever is good for the Republican Party is true — doesn’t admit any difference between good and bad faith.  When you see his son, William, be so cynical and cavalier about the truth or any objective standards for candidates besides the ability to provide a short-term boost to a flagging Republican presidential campaign (Palin, Sarah) you are seeing the inevitable result of his father’s style.

Of course, Kristol’s heirs could use some cynicism — the conservative movement’s obscene faith in the magical ability of supple side tax cuts is nothing if not sincere — but it should be recognized that much of the synthesis that defines the conservative movement was conceived in a way that regarded intellectual honesty and skepticism as a crutch.

PS – Even if you don’t think that “ideas” or intellectuals are the driving forces of political coalition building or success, it’s still worth pointing out that the conservative movement reveres Kristol.

It’s hardly news that centrist D.C. types aren’t huge fans of any effort to prosecute C.I.A. agents for torture or the figures in the Bush administration who paved the way for torture. But David Broder’s latest column, where he criticizes Eric Holder for looking into the possibility of prosecuting C.I.A. agents who exceeded O.L.C. guidelines in interrogations, draws an interesting analogy that really shows how wrongheaded the push to absolve the Bush administration is:

In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

When President Ford pardoned Nixon in 1974, I wrote one of the few columns endorsing his decision, which was made on the basis that it was more important for America to focus on the task of changing the way it would be governed and addressing the current problems. It took a full generation for the decision to be recognized by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and others as the act of courage that it had been.

It’s worth remembering what happened in the wake of Watergate, and more importanlty, the extensive revelations of all sorts of nasty and illegal executive branch behavior. The people directly involved with the Watergate robbery and subsequent cover-up — with the obvious exception of Nixon himself — went to jail. Furthermore, the Church Commission led to a bunch of new rules regulating the behavior of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But almost as soon as those rules were passed, conservatives started grousing about how they restricted the president’s freedom of action. And even if the Reagan administration didn’t immediately violate the rule of FISA, their behavior in Iran-Contra clearly showed that they didn’t really care for any formal restraints on executive activity.

Fast forward to 2001. 9/11 happens, and the Bush administration promptly throws out FISA, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and domestic criminal and military law prohibiting torture. Why did they do this and think they could get away with it? Because no political or jurisprudential actor has had the stomach to actually make presidents and high executive branch officials pay for their overreaches of executive power. Or, to put a fine point on it, Ford pardoned Nixon, just as Obama wants to “look forward, not backward.” Now, what’s tricky is that, in a very basic sense, Broder is right about the consequences of any investigation into Bush-era torture. It will derail Obama’s agenda, it will look petty and political and will embitter everyone.

But here’s the thing: the same thing would have been true about not pardoning/actually prosecuting Nixon. Eventually, if we think that these laws we have are important and should be upheld, we’re going to have to bite the bullet and enforce them. And yes, it will hard to do so, and, in the short term, it will seem somewhat hopeless. But if we can make it so executive branch officials will actually be deterred from lawbreaking, it will be worth it. Otherwise, we might as well not have these laws at all.

When I first saw that Ted Kennedy had died, I had my own blog-obit already planned out. I was going to talk about despite having the least impressive natural endowments of the three political Kennedy brothers, how he actually achieved the most good of any of them (not the most original point, I know). But then Dylan, despite it being very early in the morning/late at night on the East Coast, explained his policy achievements much better than I could. Then Tim Noah’s obit went up, and yeah, that’s really what I was getting after. But here are some scattered thoughts.

I guess what’s so interesting about Kennedy is the sharp contrast between his staggering substantive accomplishments and the procedural travesty that was his political existence. To put it simply, he never really worked for anything, and none of his accomplishments — with the exception of all the legislation for which he’s responsible — were very much a reflection of anything besides the luck of his birth.

He got into Harvard because he was Kennedy, and then got kicked out for cheating. He enlisted in the Army because he was draft eligible, but through his father’s connections got a plumb job at NATO headquarters and left the service as a private. He went back to Harvard, graduated, and went on to law school. Only because he wasn’t yet old enough to become senator, he waited out a few years as a Boston assistant district attorney, and then won his first senate election at the age of 30 in what Joe Klein describes as “the closest thing to a regency appointment the Senate had ever seen.”

Then, inexplicably, when one considers anything else besides his breeding, he was considered as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate, but demurred. And then Chappaquiddick. It was through a combination of the press’s love for the Kennedy mystique and the now-baffling level of deference that the media and the public gave politicians for grave personal failings that Kennedy was able to survive politically an incident that, at best, refelcted a horrible combination of entitlement, cowardice and callousness.

The point of recounting all of this is to show that Kennedy’s rise and sustained influence reflect the type of privilige on account of birth and social standing that ought to sicken every liberal. If liberalism means anything, it’s diminishing the influence of birth on one’s chances in life. And, almost too ironically, Ted Kennedy is probably the political figure who has done the most to make that vision, that dream, to anything close to a reality in the United States.

It was because of his name that he never had to be worried about reelection. Once again, on a procedural level, Kennedy’s lifetime Senate seat was distressing, but substantively it allowed Kennedy to be bolder in his vision for American than nearly any other senator. As Matt Yglesias points out, Kennedy was  able to achieve so much through another illiberal, anachronistic feature of our political system — the cult of seniority in the Senate. Just like the deep social injustice of inherited wealth and power that allowed Kennedy to become so powerful, the seniority system in the Senate is systematically illiberal. There are far many Max Baucuses than Teddy Kennedys.

But unlike so many others who achieve so much purely on the basis of their birth and accrue so much power simply by staying around for so long, Kennedy recognized that his great power and privilege could be used for good, to help those who didn’t have the advantages Kennedy was born with. No matter how sickening the cult of Kennedys is, no matter how offensive it is to basic American values to have “political royalty,” at least Kennedy had the oblige befitting his noblesse.

Hopefully, one day, there won’t be anymore Ted Kennedys. And, if that day comes, it will be because Kennedy’s vision was finally realized.

Mark Schmitt has a very good piece on the history of the much talked about “public plan.” What’s interesting about the plan is show it was originally conceived as a piece of honest wonkery by Jacob Hacker, as a way to give Americans the benefits of government sponsored health care and to increase competition with private insurers, especially in places where one or two insurance companies dominated the market. And, as a piece of wonky health policy, the public plan wasn’t perfect, but made a lot of sense, and was more politically palatable than going for single payer.

But this was, weirdly enough, the root of the problem. The only real health care constituency on the left was the single payer constituency. And the public plan people decided to sell their plan — which, even if it passed in its original form as seen in the House, would not be anywhere near big or powerful enough to turn into single payer — as a back-door path to single payer:

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

Basically, the very same interest groups and constituencies that made single payer a political impossibility weren’t going to be fooled by the public plan, especially when it’s promoters were openly telling liberals that the public plan would eventually lead to something like single payer. The insurance companies, medical device companies, pharma, hospitals everyone else aren’t complete and total idiots. Even though polls have shown that a large portion of the public supports a public plan, the political center of gravity on health care, which is largely determined the the bizarre nature of a 60 vote senate, seems to be around fairly extensive insurance regulations, some sort of mandate, subsidies for the poor, increases in Medicaid and a newly empowered Medicare panel. If, after all this huffing and puffing, a plan containing those policies is signed, liberals should be pretty happy.  Also, it was about all anyone could expect.

The ideological makeup of the Court remains roughly the same, while the demographic balance has shifted so that the Court is more representative of the country it governs. This is a good day for America.

Sally Quinn’s Post article where she elicits quotes from a bipartisan clique of Washington’s elites expressing their utter shame and dismay in response to Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Monica investigation has been criticized over and over. I won’t go line-by-line or explain why it’s so horrible — just read it – but this one quote is just so absurd in light of the events that occurred between Jan 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2009:

Washington’s insider press corps has shown little pity for any of them. The feeling toward the president is similar.

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

The crazy thing about the collective freakout to Monica-gate and Bill Clinton more generally is how little sense it made on its own terms. It’s obvious that the press and the greater Washington elite doesn’t mind being lied to — there was no equivalent freakout about Iran Contra or the pre-war intelligence fiasco — but the fact that they were willing to cut Bush so much slack despite the fact that he, in a deep way, despised Washington as a city and as a social group is really just mind boggling.

I haven’t written much about health care because I’m not particularly interested in/somewhat overwhelmed by the day-to-day parliamentary wrangling and because other bloggers, like Klein and Cohn, are doing such a good job covering it. But here are my very sketchy health care thoughts.

1. Before Thanksgiving, at the latest, Obama will sign something called health care reform.

2.” Health care reform” will include some sort of mandate, subsidies for those who can’t purchase health insurance, community rating and a wide range of new regulations for health insurance companies. It will also include a beefed up Independent Medicare Advisory Council. It probably won’t include a public plan or health insurance exchange. If it does, it will be too weak to do anything. On paper, and pretty much in reality, it will achieve universal coverage.

3. President Obama will give a speech at the 2012 Democratic convention saying that he’s done something that every Democratic president since FDR has tried to do — cover every American.

4. This will be the greatest domestic policy accomplishment since the Johnson administration.

5. Besides IMAC, there won’t be any good price control or delivery reforms and so further reforms will happen, but much later.

This may turn out to nothing, but Evan Perez of the Wall Street Journal has a big story claiming that “Obama administration officials are holding discussions that could result in White House counsel Gregory Craig leaving his post.”

This would be a pretty big deal. Not only is White House counsel an incredibly important position that is usually staffed by the someone the President wholeheartedly trusts, but Craig has been a huge Obama supporter going way back. He was one of the first Clintonites to go over to the Obama team, canvassed for him in New Hamphsire in January, advised him on the campaign, and most notably,  publicly disputed Clinton’s claims of extensive foreign policy and national security. It’s often said of Obama that he doesn’t really value loyalty and personal ties all that much, and if fires Craig, that would be great proof.

Not only that, but the reasons for the administration’s concern strike me as incredibly lame. Perez writes that the White House is unhappy with the political fall out that came as a result of Craig dealing with “the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the release of Bush administration-era national-security documents, and efforts to find legal ways to indefinitely hold some detainees who can’t be put on trial.”

While it’s certainly true that the fallout from all three of these has been pretty nasty, capping Craig seems like a bad way to deal with it. Closing Guantanamo was a campaign pledge that was finalized during the transition. The fact that foreign countries and Congress are being as difficult as possible isn’t surprising considering the way Congress works and the fact that other countries are perfectly in their rights to be wary of accepting these detainees. There was no obvious way to manage this very, very sticky and difficult situation any better than it has. We have a bunch of detainees who are probably dangerous and some of whom can not and will not be tried, and yet any administration would be uncomfortable releasing them. Getting rid of Greg Craig won’t change those fundamental facts.

As for the torture memos, not only was there a strong a priori case to be made that the Obama administration was obligated to release them, but the fact of torture was already public knowledge. Sure, the CIA was upset and the Republicans jumped all over them, but the fact that we had torture had been seeping out for years, and everyone knew these memos were out there, and seeing as they were no longer in effect, it made sense for the White House to release them on their own volition.

Also, releasing the memos, if it really was a bad idea, is something Obama really ought to take responsibility for. Perez writes that “Mr. Craig and Attorney General Eric Holder won the fight to release the memorandums, with minimal redactions, but the White House had to move quickly to limit political damage.” So, yes, Craig and Holder convinced Obama to do something, and there was some controversy. This does not strike me as a good reason to fire Craig.

Now, obviously, the people who are currently deciding Craig’s fate know a lot more than I do and are much, much smarter than me, but I still think it would be a big mistake to fire one of the most skilled, knowledgeable and experienced attorneys currently in the game, just because cleaning up after eight years of Bush recklessness hasn’t been easy.

UPDATE Marcy Wheeler has more.

Robert George is a very smart and accomplished man. He makes his arguments honestly and rigorously. So, when he goes to the Wall Street Journal to make an argument against gay marriage, it’s probably a good idea for gay rights defenders to perk up their collective ears. But what’s interesting about his pretty simple natural law argument for why gay marriage is a bad idea is how, well, silly it is. This isn’t really his fault. Natural law is a silly concept, and it’s often times just a cudgel used by conservatives to deny the rights claims of minorities. But anyway, here’s George:

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

What makes George’s natural law argument better than most is that he points out how our current legal understanding of marriage is premised on some sort of possibly procreative sexual union between the two opposite-sex people. But this only gets you so far. All he’s established is that the institution of marriage, at least formally, embeds some assumptions about the gender and behavior of the couples. What George can’t prove is whether this set up currently meaningful or if it’s in accordance with our ideas of justice

Historians and social scientists who actually study the empirical reality of what marriage is today don’t agree with George. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, for example, characterize modern marriage as “hedonic marriage” where people meet and institutionalize their relationship because they want to share “consumption complementarities — activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse.” Now, the language and formal  institution of marriage may not have caught up with the changes we’ve seen since, say, the 1960s, but those changes are real, and if George wants to make an argument for excluding gays for marriage based on what marriage is, he should actually cite how marriage has changed over the years and where it is today. The work of Stephanie Coontz is useful here as well. So, when George frets about what happens “If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined,” he’s really fighting a lost cause. Marriage has been redefined, and it’s been redefined in a way that makes excluding gays illogical.

But George seems to be aware of some of these problems and so writes “But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation.” [emphasis added]. If there is a great benefit to those who enter into marriage from doing so, if “a comprehensive sharing of life” is indeed a good thing, than the burden would fall on George to show why someone’s sexuality is a reason why the state should not recognize and confer equal benefits to gays and lesbians.

But aside from any flaws in George’s description of how marriage actually works in today’s society, there is the sheer lack of recognition of how gays are disadvantaged because of their sexuality by not allowing them to marry. As Jon Chait pointed out, conservative arguments about social policy tend to absolutely ignore the welfare of gay citizens, and instead make tendentious or speculative arguments about why affording them equal rights willhurt everyone or will irrevocably damage our institutions.

This seems like the insurmountable challenge for opponents of gay marriage. The institution has already changed into one that is no longer based around procreation. Also, we are approaching a societal consensus that discriminating against gay people just because of they’re sexuality is bigoted and wrong. Lots of gay people want to get married and abide by the standards, rules, regulations and expectations of married people. So, it’s going to take a lot more than a legalistic, nostalgic definition of marriage combined with a slippery slope argument about polyamory to deny a strong claim from fairness and equality about why a group of people should enjoy some rather basic rights .

The great thing about working at the Center for American Progress is that I’m just a small cog in a great plan to dominate the world.

For intance, Glenn Beck has dutifully uncovered that John Podesta and a “self-proclaimed communist” have joined up with environmental groups, organized labor and community organizers to do all sorts of bad things.

But any good plan to take over the world needs more than just the organizational acumen of Mr. Podesta. What’s also needed  are scary brown people to spread the message, and a Jewish money-changer to fund them

There’s a good magazine piece out there to be written by how both the liberal and conservative movement alternates between a spooky conspiratorial discourse and an admiring one when discussing the other’s activist, policy and intellectual infrastructure.

Jamie Kirchick has a good piece in the Post criticizing those liberals who just assume that because President Obama is so intelligent and cosmopolitan, he must support gay marriage. This persistent belief isn’t a total fantasty: for one, educational attainment and “cosmopolitan-ness” are associated with greater support for gay rights, and two, Obama, in 1996, did write on a questionnaire that “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

But since 1996, and more importantly, since January 20th, 2009, Obama hasn’t exaclty backed up those words. Most importantly, he and his spokespeople always say that he supports same-sex unions. On this point, I see no reason not to take him at his word.

But this entire business about trying to figure out what anyone “actually believes” on gay marriage is really quite silly. I could care less about politicians “actually” believe about anything. Does once hard-core pro-lifer Dick Durbin actually support reproductive rights? I don’t know, but he votes the right way on them. And the fact that Bill Clinton now supports gay marriage, despite being partially responsible for the biggest institutional roadblack to gay marriage in America (DOMA) doesn’t exactly make me feel much better about him.

Maybe if Obama spearheaded a repeal of DOMA, I could buy the crypto-support of gay marriage argument, and yes, he has said he supports a repeal (though, like DADT, he’s gotten murky on this since actually becoming president).

But until we see Obama actually risk anything to support gay rights legislation or executive action, we should just take him at this word and not project our hopes onto him.

Peter King, the New York Congressman, should probably start leading seminars for his fellow Republicans on how to must effectively stir up resentment against liberals and their cultural and educational elite supporters in as few words as possible. This is from Politico:

“I wouldn’t have gotten involved if the president hadn’t used the word ‘stupidly.’ I know the pressure cops are under. Whatever Sgt. [James] Crowley did here, it was well-intentioned, and he conducted himself as a gentleman throughout,” said King. “If race was injected, it was injected by the Harvard professor. I don’t see it as a racial issue. The underlying issue here is the arrogance of the Harvard professor toward a working cop. It’s the academic elites who look down on firefighters, cops and the military. It’s a class issue, not a race issue.”

The guy manages to say “Harvard professor” and “academic elites” three times in four sentences. Also, throwing in “arrogance” is a nice touch.  But one would think that Republicans who say things like “It’s a class issue, not a race issue” wouldn’t be so quick to denounce marginally more progressive economic policies as “class warfare.”

A little more than two months ago, David Broder wrote a column complimenting a few Senators and Congressman who proposed a “bipartisan commission to examine the big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

As Broder well knows, the idea behind these independent comissions is to fashion a plan to reduce entitlement spending, which means reducing benefits from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but do so in a way that gives Congressmen and Senators political coverage to cast a vote that will piss off the old people who are the biggest voters. The way it usually works is that the comission draws up a bill, and then Congress votes yes or no. The sad thing for Broder was that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi had no interest in such a commission and so Broder lamented that “the nation” had “missed an opportunity.”

Fast forward to July 26th, where David Broder devotes his column to trashing Obama’s proposal to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council which would, instead of Congress, “recommend to the president updated fees that Medicare would pay doctors, hospitals, rehab centers, nursing homes, labs, home-care and ambulance services, equipment manufacturers, and all other providers” and “annually recommend a set of broader reforms to improve the quality or reduce the cost of medical care.” What makes IMAC so nifty is that the President would sign off on their recommendations, and Congress would have to explicitly overrule the board and the President if they disagreed with the recommendations.

For someone who’s so obsessed with entitlement spending, this should a dream come true. Broder even admits that one of the reasons Medicare spending is going out of control is that Congress sets the fee schedules and their decisions are affected by “the lobbying by potent hometown individuals and institutions.” It’s basically a problem of having a legislature determine entitlement spending. Because no congressman wants to be the person to screw their hometown industry or be the man who gave old people less money, Medicare and Social Security spending continues to grow. This is why entitlement hawks want to de-democratize the process as much as possible, with things like IPAC or an independent comission.

But Broder, when faced with a liberal president pushing for a mechanism which would be a potent weapon in reducing Medicare costs, finds a reason to oppose it. Namely, he’s “uncomfortable” with these decisions being placed in the hands of “five unelected IMAC commissioners.” Nevermind the fact that the commissioners would have to be approved by Congress and that Congress would have the opportunity to strike down their recommendations, Broder is still “uncomfortable.”

This gets really embarrassing when you actually look at what the SAFE Act, which is the piece of legislation Broder was so in love with in May, actually entailed. Here’s how AEI described it in a write-up of a talk by the SAFE Act’s two cosponsers, Jim Cooper and Frank Wolf.

The sixteen-member SAFE commission–composed of administration officials, members of Congress, and outside experts–would hold town hall meetings across the country and form recommendations to balance the federal government’s long-term fiscal obligations. These recommendations would be presented to Congress for an up-or-down vote, forcing members of Congress to go on record with their constituents and giving them cover to make difficult decisions.

Although there the commissions are composed slightly differently, these two proposals — IPAC and the SAFE act — are essentially the same. An independent commission has wink-wink, nudge-nudge mandate to make recommendations that would reduce entitlement spending, and the  recommendations would face an up-or-down vote which could give individual congressman “cover to make difficult decisions.” So far as I can tell, the only difference is that President Obama opposed and  supports the other.

I must admit, even I’m slightly taken aback by the rank intellectual dishonesty on display here.

It makes sense for one to think that their particular policy preferences are perfectly reasonable, and if it weren’t for hidebound, interest group driven ideologues, more people would agree with them. Or, more cynically, people will often put forward that their ideas are totally reasonable, just to score some rhetorical points.

I imagine something like that is happening when Jonah Goldberg says “The healthcare bill looks more and more like a stimulus bill redux. Obama seems to feel he must placate the Democratic party’s base more than win Republicans which would give him centrist cover.”

This doesn’t make any sense on two levels. One, in crafting the stimulus bill, Obama preempitvely put in $275 billion in tax cuts, as a sign of good faith to get Republican approval, and then when Senate centrists held the bill up, Obama and his congressional allies shaved off $200 or so billion to get the bill through. What made the bill so partisan and liberal was that Republicans decided it would be better for their political standing to be (nearly) universally opposed.

On health care, Obama has once again, preemptively moved towards the center, presenting a hybrid plan that achieves the liberal dream of universal coverage, while still, at least in the short-to-medium term, doing relatively little to change the health care system in the way that liberal dreamers might like. And, besides trying to expand coverage, the proposal to reform the Medicare Advisory Board so that the onus is on Congress to reject its recommendations by a two-thirds vote, is an admitted ploy to make it easier to give old people less entitlement money. Hardly seems like something a hard-core leftist in the vice-grip of liberal interest groups would do.

There’s also public opinion. In a June poll which was hardly an outlier, 72% of respondents said that they supported a public option, 57% said they would be willing to pay higher taxes, while 65% said they more concerned with expanding coverage than constraining cost. So it seems like a health care plan that makes coverage universal and is paid for partially by tax increases would be right in the middle of public opinion. But just because something matches up pretty well with what the public wants doesn’t make it easy to pass, thanks to both the perverse nature of our legislative institutions and the bizarre, unintelligible posture of the Blue Dogs.

Considering that the Republican party has basically been boiled down to its Southern, conservative core and conservative ideology has gone right there with it, it makes sense that Goldberg can’t recognize relative moderation when it is right there in front of him.