November 21, 2008
11/21: King Henry
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) on 11/20 officially dethroned Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) in a secret vote of 137-122, thereby ending Dingell's 27-year reign as chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Cmte. Liberal bloggers, who had been rooting for environmentalist Waxman to replace the Detroit-friendly Dingell, predictably rejoiced. While cmte leadership battles are usually inside-baseball affairs, Waxman's accension had far-reaching ramifications, as bloggers of various stripes explained:
- Politico's Jonathan Martin: "At a substantive level, this news will have just as much impact than the assorted Cabinet appointments leaking out."
- Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "[Dingell's defeat] is a very encouraging development. The Energy and Commerce Committee will be at the heart of the policy making on global warming, environmental, and energy policy, and Waxman will take a far more progressive and ambitious approach than Dingell would have. ... I honestly expected Dingell to prevail. He's been in the House for 27 terms, made a lot of friends, and had organized a large whip team to help him keep his gavel."
- American Prospect's Ezra Klein: "If you care about action on global warming, that's a very big deal indeed. ... [I]t's evidence that Democrats are serious enough about climate change to want the relevant committee to be something more than an arm of Detroit. And though this is a direct victory for Waxman, it's a quiet triumph for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi. Without her tacit support, Waxman's campaign would have quietly died. ... [Dingell] not only loses jurisdiction over global warming, but over health care and most everything else. And on some level, he's been publicly humiliated. Recalcitrant chairmen are going to be far more afraid of crossing Pelosi this afternoon than they were this morning."
- TPM's Greg Sargent: "Here's another wrinkle to consider.... Congressional insiders point out that Barack Obama, in a little-noticed move a few days ago, appointed as the top White House liason to Congress one Philip Schiliro, who has spent many of his past 25 years on the Hill working for (you guessed it) Waxman. In the wake of Waxman's victory, this is significant. It means Waxman will be closer to the center of the action and will have a direct line into the White House. ...Waxman is perhaps the House's leading legislator on three key issues prioritized by Obama: Universal health care, global warming, and the need for strengthened consumer protections. ... [I]t's another sign that Obama is extremely well positioned to make big things happen rather quickly once he takes power."
- Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher: "This is a huge defeat for the Blue Dogs, who were hoping to use Dingell as a roadblock to keep any meaningful change from happening with regard to issues under the Committee's jurisdiction -- telecommunications and health care, energy and environmental protection, interstate commerce and consumer protection."
- BooMan: "Roll Call reported that the freshman class planned on voting roughly 18-3 in favor of Waxman, which tells us a little about their sensibilities on environmental issues and Blue Doggery in general. When you consider that the two Michigan freshmen came out openly for Dingell, it becomes obvious that the freshman class was nearly unanimous in supporting the liberal over the moderate. That's doubly surprising when you consider that we elected two congressmen from Alabama, one from Idaho, and another from North Carolina."
- NewsBusters' Tom Blumer: "Well, isn't this a hoot? As Barack Obama appears to be appointing less than totally pro-surrender officials to his inner circle, far leftists are feeling constrained in their criticism by Obama Mania. A Los Angeles Times article by Paul Richter with an amusing title ("Antiwar groups fear Barack Obama may create hawkish Cabinet") notes that Obama has appointed or is considering many people who originally supported the war in Iraq (this apparently automatically makes them "hawks"). Richter's hawkish characterization of the likes of Richard Holbrooke, Hillary Clinton, Vice-president Elect Joe Biden, and John Kerry is inadvertently amusing to any reader who has followed the machinations in Washington since the 110th Congress began in January 2006."
- This Ain't Hell's Jonn Lilyea: "While Code Pink declares that they ended the war in Iraq by electing Obama, while IVAW chirps about meetings with Obama's staff, they still don't realized they're just being strung along. They threw Hillary Clinton under the bus for her vote in 2002, so now they get her for Secretary of State. And they're also getting the Senate Majority Leader who wrangled the vote for the war in Iraq and the airline bailout for his wife's industry in 2001 - Tom Daschle - in the Obama cabinet. ... So, all that Hope and Change stuff is out the window."
- Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "[W]elcome to Washington, where it's almost always a case of 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' Obama needed to impress the Left to get the nomination, and now he needs to shed himself of the albatross in order to govern."
- Say Anything Blog's Rob: "This is the problem with personality cults. Once that personality has power it's hard to move outside of the cult to criticize him."
- The Atlantic's Douthat: "Here's a fearless prediction: On an awful lot of issues, the Obama foreign policy will end cutting to the right of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which was already more center-left than left. Even with the GOP brand in the toilet, Republicans are still trusted as much or more than Dems on foreign policy, mostly for somewhat nebulous 'toughness' reasons. So why give the Right a chance to play what's just about its only winning card, when you can satisfy your base with a phased withdrawal from Iraq that's scheduled to happen anyway while waxing hawkish on Pakistan, Afghanistan ... and who knows, maybe Iran as well? ... And with his right flank safely guarded ... he'll have that much more political for the big-ticket goals that will guarantee his place in the liberal pantheon -- universal health care, a New Deal for energy policy, a succession of young liberal judges who will tilt the Supreme Court leftward for a generation, etc. Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama's centrist instincts.... Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled."
- Think Progress' Yglesias: "I object! All the work here is being done between the parenthesis. A phased withdrawal from Iraq plus a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan wouldn't be a lurch to the right, that's what Obama's been calling for throughout the campaign. ... But add 'authorize airstrikes against Iran' to the mix, and then you're talking about something entirely different. Obama made repeated, explicit promises during the campaign for a new approach to Iran, and the new approach wasn't 'bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.' ... Maybe he'll break the pattern. But until he actually does, I think the safe thing to assume on foreign policy is that we'll keep seeing more of the same -- a President who meant what he said when he was a presidential candidate."
- Douthat: "First, I should have been clearer: I don't think Obama is going to 'lurch to the right,' exactly, on foreign policy. Rather, I think there was an assumption among many on the right (and in some precincts of the left) that he would swing to the left once in office. That assumption always seemed to me more rooted in paranoia and/or wishful thinking than in Obama's actual rhetoric and proposals, and I think that the hints we've gotten about his personnel choices to date bear my assumption out. If Barack Obama's comfortable with the idea of Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, he's just not going to be the ridiculously-dovish President a lot of right-wingers kept insisting he might be."
- "The Iran issue is a separate and much more speculative matter, I admit, but here I think Matt and I just disagree about how to think about the incoming President's foreign policy vision. He sees Obama's various breaks with establishment thinking during the campaign as marking a real departure from the sort of liberal hawkery that made so many establishment liberals sympathetic to the invasion of Iraq. And I see them as representing a much more superficial departure, in which the lessons of Iraq are 1) don't invade Iraq and 2) take diplomacy more seriously that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did. These are, of course, perfectly plausible lessons to take, but they don't amount to a strategic rethink of America's approach to the Middle East, or the world. And they don't tell us that much about how Obama will handle the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran"
"On a sad note, John Dingell, who is serving his 27th term in Congress, has introduced a universal health care bill in every Congress since 1956. Now, at the very moment when his lifelong dream is going to be fulfilled, he gets kicked out of the chair that will mark-up the legislation. I feel badly about that." Also, as Grist's Kate Sheppard points out, Dingell is "just three months shy of becoming the longest-serving chairman in House history."
For progressives, Dingell's defeat offsets the disappointing Dem decision earlier this week to leave Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) in his coveted Homeland Security Cmte chair. Hamsher: "This week the Senate voted to remain a bunch of self-protecting hacks by letting Lieberman keep his gavel, but the House voted for progress." The New Republic's Noam Scheiber: "Chris [Orr] proclaims the Waxman victory over John Dingell a big win for Barack Obama. I agree, for somewhat cynical reasons. In a nutshell: Letting Lieberman keep his chairmanship was clearly the right political move, but it also sent a somewhat dangerous message to Democrats, which is that you can cross Obama without paying for it. Dingell largely fixes that problem."
For conservatives, however, Waxman's victory could spell disaster for the ailing U.S. economy. PoliGazette's Jason: "Coming after a summer of record high gas prices and in the midst of a global financial crisis, the shift to the left could not come at a worse time. Waxman has a long record of harsh and unyielding partisanship and extreme demogogury. He is prone to demonize opponents rather than build bridges of compromise, as he did in his long anti-tobacco campaigns through the 1990s. He also has little interest in issues of practicality, preferring to stick with a hard ideological agenda even in the face of contravening facts. Given the scope of his committee's jurisdiction over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, Waxman's record for extremism and intolerance poses yet another threat to the already fragile U.S. economy. ... For years, moderates and centrists complained about the over-the-top extremism that too often seemed to dominate the House Republican caucus. Now, it seems we are going to get the same political strychnine just in a different partisan flavor."
CLINTON: Leaks In The Kitchen Cabinet
While highly credible, Politico's Mike Allen's reporting last p.m. that Obama plans to name Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) the next Sec/State is just the latest in a string of "will she or won't she?" reports over the past week. As a result, the "No Drama" Obama camp has been "increasingly frustrated by a steady stream of leaks" from anonymous Clinton sources.
"But there's another issue to consider, one that has been overshadowed by the drama: if she runs the State Department in a fashion similar to how she managed her campaign, then the country will be in trouble. Her spinners went beyond the boundaries of fair and reasonable spinning. Her team was a snake pit of competitive aides. She did not master the art of refereeing internal disputes. She signed off on strategic blunders. Hers was not a steady hand. Perhaps that's the better argument against her. Being secretary of state isn't just about giving speeches and touring the world as a celebrity, it's about managing (and now reviving) the creaky and beleaguered foreign policy apparatus of the United States. And Clinton's résumé is not strong on that front."
Other liberal bloggers are pushing back against such aspersions. Talk Left's Big Tent Democrat: "When I discuss Clinton Derangement Syndrome, this [NYT report] is what I mean: ... 'Some in the Obama camp are bristling at what they see as strategic leaks by the Clintons aimed at boxing in the president-elect and forcing him to offer the post.' Excuse me? As I have seen the story, the Clintons were minding their business when, last Thursday (yes, it has only been a week) President-Elect Obama asked Senator Clinton to come see him in Chicago. President Clinton has offered to remove any impediments he may cause. And 'some in the Obama camp bristle?' What in the hell?"
OBAMA: Hawk In Dove's Clothing?
With Clinton likely to take the Sec/State slot, Sec/Defense Robert Gates probably keeping his post, and other Clinton-era moderates filling Obama's Cabinet, anti-war activists are increasingly wary of Obama lurching to the right on foreign policy. Many conservative bloggers are rubbing those fears in the faces of liberal bloggers:
Meanwhile, conservative Ross Douthat and liberal Matthew Yglesias have a spirited exchange over whether Obama will in fact take a more hawkish approach to the Middle East:
BUSH: With Judges Like These...
The Bush administration on 11/20 suffered a severe blow to its credibility as federal court ruled that five detainees imprisoned over the past seven years should be released immediately due to lack of evidence. NION's smintheus blogs the details: "Today the Bush administration suffered its fourth major defeat since June in litigation over detentions at Guantanamo. This ruling by US District Judge Richard Leon ... is the most devastating yet. He'd been expected to favor the government, not least because in 2005 Leon had ruled that the detainees have no habeas rights. And these are not low-profile prisoners. In his 2002 State of the Union address, George Bush had accused them of planning to bomb the US embassy building in Sarajevo. ... Leon found the government's case to be extremely flimsy, based as it was upon one undocumented allegation by a single unnamed source. ... Yet Leon rejected the administration's argument that five Algerian nationals formerly resident in Bosnia are enemy combatants and ordered their release 'forthwith'."
Striking a more ominous tone, Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "Judge Leon is a Bush-43 appointed Judge known as a right-wing ideologue and known for ruling in favor of the Government and for expansive executive power. ... That Judge Leon -- of all judges -- ruled that there was no credible evidence to suggest that these detainees are 'enemy combatants' is as compelling a sign as one can imagine that there is no such evidence. Simply juxtapose that finding with the fact that these men have been imprisoned for seven straight years with no meaningful due process, and one can vividly see the grotesque injustices we have wrought with Guantanamo and our denial of basic due process to detainees. That is a stain -- one of many -- that will never be fully expunged."
NRO's Andy McCarthy was more circumspect: 'We don't know what the evidence was because virtually the entire proceeding was classified and thus sealed. The Times report says Judge Leon found "the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.' Why not? What was the standard of proof by which the court found evidence that was good enough to detain was now not good enough to detain? We don't know. In its Boumediene decision, the Supreme Court did not provide guidance as to how these habeas hearings it has ordered should be conducted. Congress, moreover, has failed to enact any rules, even though that is Congress's job... [AG Michael] Mukasey implored federal lawmakers to prescribe sensible procedures back in July — and the Democrat-controlled Congress gave him the back of the hand."
Nevertheless, McCarthy takes aim at Bush: "It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here. Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information. We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions."
Responding to McCarthy, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan: "When even the Cheney-Addington fan writes the following, you have some idea of just how dumb and counter-productive Bush's detainee policy has been. ... Does anyone now believe what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have stated as fact: that their administration captured the right people, treated them humanely and brought them to justice? They failed on all three counts. They committed, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a crime and a mistake. We are all less safe as a result."
Reason's Radley Balko piles on: "A Republican-appointed judge ... ordered their release forthwith, and urged the government not to appeal his ruling. That's a pretty resounding repudiation. And McCarthy's reaction is, 'Gee, I hope this doesn't undermine the public's faith in executive power!' It damned-well ought to. ... Me, I look at all of this and I worry that we've given the executive way too much power, that they're abusing that power, and that our government is arresting, detaining, and possibly torturing people who are either innocent, or clearly not a threat to the United States. McCarthy looks at all of this and worries that it might undermine the cause of continuing to give the executive unchecked power to keep people in prison indefinitely, no questions asked."
THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Generation Sap
Matt Maroon: "Interesting read on Wall Street Journal's website here about my generation's sense of entitlement. Allow me to rebut, on behalf of the millions of people born in the two decades after myself. What you mistake for entitlement is, in actuality, a differing world-view. We grew up seeing our parents and grandparents work their lives away in a state of near-indentured servitude. ... If we seem to have high self-esteem, it's because we're better. Not intrinsically, but because we're riding the rapidly accelerating wave of technological progress. ... [W]e're the Nintendo generation, and as such, we're all about working smarter rather than longer. ... Our desire to skip the long hours is not laziness; we're simply concerned with efficiency in everything we do. The 24 hour news cycle has made us more aware of our mortality than any generation before us, so we abhor waste, especially of time, which is the only thing in life you can't buy more of. ... We don't feel entitled. That notion comes from your feelings of inadequacy in the face of a rapidly changing technological and economic landscape. You know that most of what you learned in college can now be done by a $3 an hour data-entry clerk in India with a copy of QuickBooks and a cheap Dell, and the fact that we know it too makes you view us as entitled or egotistical."
LEST WE FORGET: Close Call
The Onion: "In a landmark decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly ruled to uphold the Bill of Rights, the very tenets upon which American society is based. 'After carefully considering the relevance of the 10 inviolable rights that comprise the ideological foundation on which our nation is built, the court finds that these basic freedoms remain important for the time being, and should not be overturned,' read the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the tie-breaking vote. 'Until such time as it can be definitively proven that citizens no longer require the protections provided by the Bill of Rights, it shall remain the principal legal guidance for the United States of America.' The Supreme Court's latest decision comes on the heels of last month's 6-3 ruling to abolish the pursuit of happiness from the three inalienable rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence."
Posted by Chris Bodenner at November 21, 2008 01:04 PM
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