Marco Rubio – Same Old GOP Swill, Shiny New Bottle!

So by now, everyone’s already discussed Marco Rubio’s gulp-heard-round-the-world to death. Many more words than necessary or advisable have been written about what wags almost instantaneously dubbed “watergate.” And in truth, even though our media and much of the electorate remains shallowly image-focused instead of issue-focused, Rubio’s odd tics and apparently severe dehydration were not the most important part of his response to the President’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Rubio’s speech itself was.

It was tired, it was off-base (which wasn’t really Rubio’s fault, since he or his speechwriters had the unenviable task of trying to rebut the President’s speech without seeing what was in it first, which necessarily entailed some guesswork – much of which turned out to be quite wrong). Most of all, though, it felt familiar. Commentators from Rachel Maddow to Jon Stewart almost immediately noticed that, other than the person who was actually mouthing the words, the speech itself sounded like it could have been given by Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, circa last October. In fact, large chunks of Rubio’s speech sounded like they would have been at home in the Reagan era.

The GOP has spent a lot of hand-wringing time over the past few months since Romney’s trouncing in November speaking of “rebranding.” Americans, however, are still waiting to see any tangible results of all this collective rumination on the conservative side of the political aisle. Tuesday night, what started to dawn on not just the pundits but the people, is that when the GOP says “rebranding,” all they mean in practice is putting old wine – excuse me, water – in a new bottle. Marco Rubio’s PAC, Reclaim America, immediately began to attempt to capitalize on their leader’s awful, sweaty, fidgety performance by issuing a “Marco Rubio water bottle” (no, really!) to those who were “thirsty for conservative leadership.” Just take a look at the image from their donations page:

Dripping With Irony

Given how at home Rubio’s listless, twitchy speech would have sounded coming out of Mitt Romney’s mouth, or Ronald Reagan’s, or nearly any Republican in between those two, it seemed fitting (not to mention more accurate) to re-do Reclaim America PAC’s fundraising effort with the water bottle:

What Reclaim America SHOULD’VE Said

IMF (Politely) Confirms: Austerity Doesn’t Work

Wow, it just doesn’t get much more stark than this. Via Paul Krugman:

‘Contractionary Fiscal Policy Is Contractionary’

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund came out with a new report which states, albeit in dry, fact-based bureaucratese, that the world’s governments (particularly though not exclusively those in the Eurozone) ought not continue down the path of fiscal consolidation (debt-reduction), lest they risk slowing the world’s economy even further. The importance of this study can hardly be overstated, since it comes from a supra-national NGO like the IMF and not some politically-interested party within a specific country.

What you are looking at in the above graph is a plotting of the change in GDP of various Eurozone countries against those same countries’ fiscal consolidation. In other words: for each country, how did their attempts (if any) at debt reduction fare in terms of their GDP? The results aren’t pretty (if you’re an Austrian/Austerian debt-scold: virtually every country on the list attempted some form of debt reduction recently. Some had it forced upon them by necessity and/or other countries within the Eurozone (see: Greece, Spain) while others undertook debt reduction on their own initiative based upon political leaders’ belief they were doing the economically prudent thing (read: Britain). But in every case, the larger the fiscal consolidation, the greater the loss of GDP.

This suggests that not only are Keynesian contractionary effects real, but their multipliers and effects may be even greater than previously supposed. And it also suggests the converse, as professor Krugman points out:

So one thing I haven’t seen pointed out is that this directly contradicts current GOP doctrine. To the extent that the GOP has a theory of recession-fighting…it was embodied in the Joint Economic Committee manifesto “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy,” which declared that

In the short term, fiscal consolidation programs that rely predominately or entirely on spending reductions have expansionary “non-Keynesian” effects that may offset the contractionary Keynesian reduction in aggregate demand.

In some cases, “non-Keynesian” effects may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term.

As Krugman concludes after plotting the above graph: “tell that to the Greeks.” Yet another dose of deficit-cutting fiscal austerity is nevertheless exactly what Republicans in America like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would have us do here, despite the fact that, as Krugman and the IMF show conclusively, it’s the fiscal equivalent of prescribing leeches for illness.

Texas GOP Formally Opposes Critical Thinking In Schools

(h/t: ThinkProgress)

Texas GOP Educational Policy

As Dave Barry used to say, I swear I am not making this up. You could certainly be forgiven if you assumed I was making it up, because such a statement sounds so obviously ridiculous that no one – not even the Texas GOP – could possibly say it and mean it. Alas, you’d be wrong. Page 13 (or, in Texas GOP-numeration, “page 12″ – go figure) states the following (pdf):

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs…

Why? Why would even such a revanchist entity as the Texas GOP oppose what they call “HOTS” (but you may be familiar with as TAG or the gifted program), as well as critical thinking, period? Because it has…

…the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

No, really. Go read it for yourself. Then go and wonder no more why America’s academic achievement continues to slip relative to other countries.

Payroll Tax Holiday Aftermath

I just received, as I’m sure many of you did, an email from the White House crowing about the recent total victory over John “Dr. No” Boehner and the GOTea party house.

I don’t blame the President and his team at all for sending out these glad tidings. It WAS a shockingly complete rout of Boehner and his pro-1% flying monkeys. Congratulations all ’round. For real. Only…the email focused upon the involvement of individual citizens who took to their computers and their webcams to record stories of what an extra $40 per paycheck means to them. While I’m sure that helped reassure the Democrats (and warn the Republicans) that the 99% really did stand with the President and the Democrats on this issue.

That made me write the following response:

Although I’d like to believe the heartwarming fiction that it was only the response of tens of thousands of people who took to the web to tell their stories of privation via a tax increase which made the difference between the payroll tax holiday passing and it NOT passing, I’ve watched Washington work for too long to be fooled by that story. And so have all of you.

After all, it wasn’t as if John Boehner and the rest of the obstructionists in the house GOP really didn’t understand the concept of a tax cut and what it could mean for people. That’s Republicans’ wheelhouse issue. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps that may be changing…that would be the true miracle of Christmas as it applies to gridlocked Washington this year.

No, what made the difference (as we both know) was the both the President and the Democrats in the House AND Senate simply stood firm. You knew you had the people at your backs and the facts on your side, and this time, you simply. didn’t. cave.

And look what it got you.

Everyone from Paul Krugman to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal took to their respective podiums and called this one an unmitigated disaster for Boehner and his Tea Party minions. And rightly so. It WAS an unmitigated disaster for them. But let’s be clear about the reasons, here: YOU did it, not us. The public has a responsibility every couple of years to change the makeup of Washington, if enough of us don’t like what’s been going on.

The problem is – or has been, up until now – that no matter how we seem to shuffle the deck each biennial election, Washington doesn’t seem to change into what we need, want or – in most cases – into what the people running for the seats we elect them to promised they’d push for.

This time was different. You stayed the course, to quote a certain ex-President. We’ve never doubted that you knew what was right, or what would work…we’ve just been disappointed because time and again, you seemed to lack either the political will or the negotiating skill to make it actually happen. There’s a limit to what the public can do, once the election is over. Every election, we’re painfully aware that we’re not electing policies, we’re electing individuals, and that means a crap-shoot. It means we’re getting a pig in a poke. We TRY to get what we want by electing people who SAY they’re for this or that…but, too often, it just doesn’t happen, even when it seems like it was quite possible.

This time, YOU held the line, not us. We don’t vote on the floor of congress. We don’t have veto power (or the power of a threatened veto). You do. And look what happens when you stick together and USE IT. You win.

Remember that. It’s an important lesson, one I’m sure I sound patronizing to even remind you about. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but the truth is that, from out here, far too often it seems as if you’ve forgotten that simple fact. Once the election’s over, YOU have the power. And when you step up and use it, you’ll instantly have that astonishingly hopeful coalition of the public behind you that you had in 2008.

I hope that won’t be lost on you as you head into 2012. Good job on this one, truly. See what YOU can accomplish when you don’t let the GOP steamroll you?

House Republicans to Force Senate to Hold ‘Pro Forma’ Sessions to Prevent Recess Appointments

In a move which will surprise approximately no one who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention since 2006, when the Democrats re-took control of congress, the House GOP signaled yesterday that it would use a parliamentary procedure which prevents either house of congress from going into a recess longer than three days without the consent of the other house.

How can House Republicans force the Senate not to adjourn? Republicans, always on the lookout for ways to deny President Obama and the Democrats their due authority and legislative goals, have discovered and are utilizing a never-before-used-in-this-way provision of the constitution, Article I, section 5, clause 4, which reads:

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

This means even though Democrats are still in the majority in the Senate, Harry Reid cannot simply adjourn the Senate for the holiday break (during which time President Obama could recess-appoint some of the blocked nominees the GOP has been filibustering). Instead, the Senate will hold a pro-forma session every three days which will last no more than a couple of minutes, but which is long enough to prevent the Senate from considering itself in recess for the entire month-plus between yesterday and January 23. In short, what this means in practice is: President Obama will not be able to recess-appoint Richard Cordray to the CFPB.

Unless.

Unless Mr. Obama is willing to take steps of his own, also granted to him explicitly by the constitution. Specifically, Article II, section 3, clause 3, which reads:

[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

The constitution is an astonishing document. Although the framers could not foresee everything which might come to pass in the future, they did in an amazing number of instances have an uncanny insight into human nature as applied in the political process, setting up our justly-vaunted system of checks and balances. Most people, when they hear of checks and balances, think of the separation of powers into three branches of government, with good reason. But the framers’ clear desire not to have the government shanghied by any faction using the law as a procedural weapon for subverting the will of the people or the balanced operation of government, can be seen in many smaller and less famous portions of the constitution, as well. This is definitely one of them.

Everyone knows the framers were considerably worried about the re-imposition of a monarchy. That’s why they gave the President considerable power but made him or her subordinate to congress in many key areas. Conversely, however, the framers had already (in the late 1700s!) seen enough of legislative grandstanding, gridlock, treachery and abuse in Europe that they also were able to foresee the kind of shenanigans that might ensue in a body so large and diffuse in responsibility as congress. So they put little mini-checks and balances directly into our constitution so the President, while he could not and cannot simply ride roughshod over congress, can use power specifically granted to him to break up such ideological and legislative logjams.

I’ve written extensively already about the self-professed need of the Obama administration to have a competent, pro-consumer director of the CFPB. The administration themselves has highlighted this need, and I agree 100% with their reasoning. Now, as every alert onlooker has observed already, the time has come for the White House to put up or shut up about this desire. The Republicans have opened the door by using an obscure provision of the constitution to jam up the Senate majority into accepting the will of the OTHER chamber. Now, President Obama can and should allow the houses of congress to function as the framers intended them to. He has the explicit authority to force the Senate (and House) into adjournment, during which time recess appointments can be made. Even the GOP Senators don’t assert that Cordray is unfit to helm the CFPB; they simply don’t want the CFPB itself to exist. Too late. They already lost that battle, and their unprecedented obstructionism must be met with equally unprecedented obstruction-removal.

Break the logjam. Adjourn congress for the holidays. Recess appoint Richard Cordray so he can begin protecting consumers from fiscal predation. Obstructionism delenda est!

PolitiFact Points Out Unprecedented GOP Obstruction of Cordray Nomination

There’s been a fair amount of forensics done lately on some of the “ratings” made by PolitiFact and other fact-checking agencies. Some of the criticism has been very accurate and illuminating, some of it is partisan nonsense designed to reduce the public value of facts to the level of opinions (after all, if opinions are as valid as facts, then the GOP is on much firmer debate ground).

And indeed, there are times when the fact-checking services (not just PolitiFact) get it wrong. Despite the occasional gaffes, mistakes and (inevitable, human) bias that sometimes creeps into their work, however, the fact-checking services DO provide an invaluable service: they do the research and verification that the average news consumer has neither the time nor, often, the skills to perform on a daily basis for themselves in order to make sure that the news they’re getting is factually correct. So, while it’s important to “watch the watchers” and make sure the fact-checkers got it right, when they make a pronouncement, it’s worth paying attention to.

Such is the case with the recent fact-checking by PolitiFact of Senator Sherrod Brown’s claim that the GOP obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Richard Cordray to helm the CFPB specifically because they objected to the agency itself that Cordray is nominated to direct, was literally without precedent in Senate history.

PolitiFact checked into Brown’s claim and (surprise, surprise!) after their investigation, rated it true:

…based on the record, including its nuance, we take the Senate historian’s word: Brown was correct when he said this was the first time that a political party has blocked a nomination unless changes were made to an agency. To repeat Ritchie’s words: “We searched through past cases and could not find anything that fit the current circumstance.”

We rate Brown’s claim true.

That’s “true.” Not “mostly true” or “partly true,” but TRUE, full stop.

PolitiFact also, as is their wont, goes out of their way to say that their determination “isn’t a question of which side is morally or politically correct,” and I agree: it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) PolitiFact’s job to determine which side of a question of fact is morally or politically correct. But the determination itself of which side was speaking truthfully and which side was not can and should lead voters, readers, media figures and the public at large to draw conclusions about the political or moral worth of each side’s claims and/or action.

I point this out because in this case, there is already both hand-wringing on the Democratic side and saber-rattling on the GOP side that if President Obama should recess-appoint Mr. Cordray to the post Republicans are denying him even a confirmation vote for, it will be seen by voters as a power play or even an abuse of power by the President. Making matters worse, it may even be difficult for Mr. Obama to make a standard-issue recess appointment like the ones George W. Bush used to install John Bolton as head of the United States UN delegation, because even though it is the Senate which provides advise and consent on Presidential nominations, there is an obscure rule in Congress which provides that each house must obtain the permission of the other house if it wishes to adjourn for more than three days.

In the past, recess appointments weren’t made by Presidents during such short Congressional breaks, so it would indeed be unprecedented for President Obama to do so now. Ordinarily the upcoming winter/Christmas break would be much longer than three days, but because the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is working with the GOP-minority Senate to try to stymie as many Obama appointments as they can, they are utilizing this obscure congressional rule to deny the Senate the ability to go into recess for longer than a few days. This sets up the specter of President Obama having to either forcing Congress to adjourn (a power the President has, but which has never been used by a President), or make a recess appointment in a much shorter break than has ever occurred before. Either action by President Obama would indeed be without precedent in American history.

However, this is a conscious strategy by the GOP. They are already utilizing every tool at their disposal to prevent the CFPB from functioning effectively as a consumer bulwark against rapacious lenders, and they are counting on the fact that the President will lose his nerve if his only choices are to take one of a number of unprecedented steps in order to accomplish what should be a relatively routine task. Indeed, Republican Senators and right-wing media figures are already bloviating against “unprecedented abuses of power” and the like by the President.

In truth, I am not usually a fan of creative rule-interpretation in government, even when it benefits “my side,” precisely because of the precedent it can set. There’s always the proverbial possibility of opening up Pandora’s box, and with it, a host of unforeseen consequences which might be potentially very damaging. But in this case, the President himself has already pushed Cordray’s nomination to the forefront of the White House agenda, with the President publicly and repeatedly highlighting the importance of installing a staunch consumer ally into the position as the head of the CFPB. President Obama is quite right to do place such emphasis: the Dodd-Frank law provides for this position to be filled, and if it remains unfilled, the CFPB cannot fulfill all of its mandate to protect consumers from predatory lending.

Throughout this dragged-out mess, as the PolitiFact investigation reminds us, it is Republicans who have been the ones taking unprecedented steps, not Democrats. The GOP leadership want to re-legislate the creation of the bureau itself, and its structure and powers. Too bad. That time has passed. If they truly believe the CFPB to be a threat to the country (instead of just to the bankers who pull the GOP strings), then they should wait until the next time they’re in the majority in the Senate and control the White House, and see how well they do at repealing or gutting the CFPB. See what the public thinks about going back to the days of fifteen-page credit card agreements and predatory payday lending at thirty, forty, fifty percent interest. Indeed, that’s why the GOP is fighting so hard – and so dirty – now: because they know for certain that once this bureau is fully up and functioning, the public is going to LOVE it and wonder how they ever did without it. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner know full well that they’ve got one chance to strangle this pro-consumer agency in its infancy, before the public gets a chance to see how well it will protect them. So they’re pulling out ALL the stops.

From a tactical standpoint, I suppose, you can’t fault them: they are playing (as they always do) as hard as they can, playing to win. President Obama, however, should take a page from the GOP’s playbook and play equally hard; play to win for voters and consumers. The President and Democrats are agreed that the country needs the CFPB to have a pro-consumer director, sooner rather than later. They have both the public and the law on their side. More importantly, they are right in their assessment. Richard Cordray is the director the CFPB and the public deserve, and President Obama should not allow himself to be cowed by threats of taking “unprecedented action” by opposition leaders who utilize parliamentary parlor tricks and equally unprecedented maneuvering to block what the law provides for. As PolitiFact reminds us, it is the Republicans who are taking unprecedented steps to block reform; President Obama should not fail to use the tools which the constitution clearly puts at his disposal to break such a logjam of obstructionism. Although taking such steps would indeed be unprecedented, doing so would also be a nothing more than an appropriate proportional response to the unprecedented obstruction of the GOP. To put it more bluntly – and in keeping with PolitiFact’s meter with which I began this post – here’s a graphical representation of how much weight President Obama should assign to GOP warnings against him taking “unprecedented steps” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the CFPB:

Recess appoint Richard Cordray by whatever means necessary.

US Businesses NOT Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says

That’s the title of an article over at that noted socialist rag, Forbes Magazine (yes, FORBES!).

I capitalized the “not” in the title, because if one only listens to GOP Presidential candidates or the conservative media and talk radio, the cognitive dissonance from reading that article’s title might very well lead the reader to simply elide the “not.”

One of the few (but distinct) downsides to the Republicans having spent the last forty years crafting such a coherent narrative about what’s wrong in America and who’s to blame for it is that now, that narrative is so entrenched that most Republicans tend to recite it literally as if someone had just pressed the “play” button, i.e.: without even thinking if it’s in fact true. That sort of message coherence and party discipline has won them countless elections they did not deserve to win and would not otherwise have won…but it also means that they’re increasingly unable to think about the actual facts of the world in any other way than the received “wisdom” of their narrative.

That’s an opportunity for Democrats, or indeed for anyone (Occupy Wall Street?) who wishes to show just how wide the gap is between reality and GOP/conservative cant. According to Forbes, the World Bank found:

…according to the World Bank’s 212 page “Doing Business 2012″ report, released on Wednesday, there is less red tape for setting up shop in the U.S. than there is in all of Europe, Latin America, Africa and most of Asia…

What it looks like from the research desks at one of the most powerful and elite multilateral institutions on the planet is a U.S. that does not have the government in its way, but a U.S. whose government is more out of the way than it is in every other major economy on earth, including mainland China.

This article should be exhibit #1 on every Democrat’s and progressive’s list of why the GOP is simply out of touch with reality. This needs to be brought home to the media, again and again, and repeated in public spaces where a wide variety of people will hear it. We in the Reality-Based Community™ have always believed that facts matter, and we’ve been gobsmacked periodically at the extent to which the GOP message machine has appeared to be successful in rendering what should be an obvious truism like that UN-true. We’ve watched white, working-and-middle-class voters vote against their own economic interest time and again, and we’ve wondered why they DO that, because we keep bringing them the facts…sort of.

Well, these days, after so much economic turmoil, and with Occupy movements in so many states and even countries throughout the world, even the thick hides (skulls?) of the low-information and “swing” voters here in the United States is in an unusual situation: they’re receptive to having their perspective changed…if we mount an organized campaign to do it. We can’t just leave this out there as a fact, we have to hammer it home, again and again and again.

Both Sides Do NOT Do It…

…at least, not nearly to the same degree.

Michael Tomasky over at The Daily Beast decided to, you know, actually check whether the oft-repeated (because it sounds both ‘sage’ and ‘balanced’, yet requires no research) claim that “both sides do it” was true with respect to partisan obstructionism and refusal to support the signature initiatives of a President from the opposite party. Here’s what he found (unsurprisingly):

I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.

The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.

[...]

Here’s how it all adds up:

Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.

Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.

Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.

Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.

Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.

Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.

Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.

(emphasis added)

Exactly. What many of us have been saying for literally nearly a decade. Perhaps someone should ping Sam Waterston and the rest of those idiots over at Third Way. This might be some new information for them.

Last Chance to Vote in the Fabulous PTL Debt-Ceiling Poll!

I know, I know, it’s Monday, August 1st, and the weekend’s wrangling would appear to indicate that it’s all over but the shouting (or, more accurately, screaming) as far as the eventual solution to the nation’s manufactured debt-ceiling crisis goes. I tend to agree, since there is indeed a deal which can be measured and read about circulating.

However, it’s not over ’til it’s over. The one thing that, so far, has NOT occurred (as of this writing – 10am Monday morning, though things are moving VERY fast on this issue for obvious reasons) is the actual VOTING. As Stan Collender at Capital Gains and Games reminds us, though momentum is definitely well underway in the direction of a particular deal, it’s not a certain thing that the battered John Boehner – who had to cave and pander to the tea party wing of his caucus in the House in order to get something passed – will be able to round up the votes he needs, especially when one factors in the news that the congressional progressive caucus is also none-too-sure they can or will support this deal. Nancy Pelosi’s reaction last night to news of the finalization of the deal was – by far – the least-warm reception of any congressional leader’s, so I’m not even sure how invested she is in whipping this particular deal.

In all likelihood, this deal – or something very like it – is what the final proposal that passes both houses and is signed into law will look like. But since it’s not set in cement quite yet, I thought I’d give folks one last chance to place their bets on what sort of final resolution might emerge from the smoke surrounding this deal. Last bets, everyone! (see sidebar to your right). I will close the poll once the deal is actually inked and signed.

Misbehaving Children Get Punished

Out Of A Job?

I see that John Boehner isn’t taking too kindly to freshman tea party Republican Jim Jordan openly whipping against/opposing His Orangeness’ debt-ceiling plan. Via Political Wire, we learn that

Republican sources “deeply involved” in configuring new Ohio congressional districts confirmed to the Columbus Dispatch “that Jordan’s disloyalty to Boehner has put him in jeopardy of being zeroed out of a district.”

Proving my long-standing and only partially tongue-in-cheek thesis that Republicans eat their young. To be fair, Jordan isn’t actually related to Boehner (as far as I know), but that only means that perhaps I ought to adjust the wording of my thesis to: “Republicans are cannibals.” **Ahem**

Without making specific predictions or going overboard with the schadenfreude, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Jordan isn’t the only newbie who may find himself out looking for a new job soon, not at the hands of his district’s voters, but at the hand of his own party’s leadership.