John Dingell is no longer the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It’s the end of an era. He was elected in a special election in 1955 (coincidentally, the year both of my parents were born). He became chairman in 1980 (coincidentally, the year I was born). For the next 14 years, Dingell made Energy and Commerce the most legislatively productive committee in Congress, producing 30% of the legislation at the time. The quip went that his committee had jurisdiction over “everything that moves, burns, or is sold.”
Although he introduced in each Congress a bill to socialize health care, he was hardly a down the line liberal. He was a long time member of the NRA board, and a skeptic of environmentalists. He managed to pass bills and beat the leadership of both parties on occasion. If I recall correctly, President Bush said upon meeting him that he was supposed to be the biggest pain in the a** on Capitol Hill, and Dingell replied, “Thank you, Mr. President. I worked long and hard to get that reputation, and I’d hate to lose it.” He’s lost it.
Now this powerful committee will be headed by Henry Waxman, who’ll be a puppet of Speaker Pelosi. The independent Dingell was long a thorn in Pelosi’s side, to the point where she backed a primary opponent against him in 2002; he returned the favor later by backing Steny Hoyer for majority leader over Pelosi’s choice, John Murtha. It looks very much like Pelosi is consolidating her grip on the House. Once, there were many committee chairment who’d go there own way: Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Thomas on Ways and Means, Les Aspin on Armed Services, Howard Smith on Rules. Dingell was pretty much the last Democratic committee chairman who’d oppose the party leadership. The days of powerful committee chairmen going against the Speaker seem to be ending. She’s well to the left of most of the nation, but it looks like the House is firmly under Pelosi’s control.
Hubbard posted this at 5:14 PM EST on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 as Politics, Denizens of DC
Considering the history of its constituents, a reasonable person might think the gay rights community would understand the benefits of a live-and-let-live mentality. As the whole Proposition 8 business in California — from the suit that led to the court ruling to the continued protests this week after losing at the polls — and now this detestable business show, a reasonable person would be wrong.
A settlement Wednesday between eHarmony Inc. and the New Jersey attorney general requires the online heterosexual dating service to also cater to homosexuals, raising questions about whether other services that target a niche clientele could be forced to expand their business models.
The settlement stemmed from a complaint, filed with the New Jersey attorney general’s office by a gay match seeker in 2005, that eHarmony had violated his rights under the state’s discrimination law by not offering a same-sex dating service. In 2007, the attorney general found probable cause that eHarmony had violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination.
So much for private rights of association. eHarmony is a private organization that provides a service people want. For whatever reasons — be they economic, religious, or homophobic — it doesn’t want to cater to gay people. It has an effing right to do that. If there’s a niche market for a civil union/marriage-focused gay dating website, there’s nothing in the world stopping anyone from doing it. Of course, that’s far more work and not nearly as emotionally satisfying as legally forcing someone to do your bidding and making them to pay thousands and create a new product line against their will.
Tom posted this at 10:02 AM EST on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 as Politics
Barack Obama has picked Rahm Emanuel for White House Chief of Staff (H/T). The good: Emanuel is a free trader, a friend of Joe Lieberman, and fights regularly with Howard Dean. The bad: he’s a steely partisan of the Untouchables school (”He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”).
An old saw of politics is that personnel is policy. For example, Bush went from the smart and tough AG Ashcroft to the foolish and weak Alberto Gonzales. The White House Chief of Staff is effectively co-president, and Obama has picked a pitbull who’ll fight Congress, so Obama won’t be a rubberstamp for Pelosi or Dean. It seems like a smart choice. The danger is that Emanuel tends to leave bruises whenever he gets involved in an issue. If I recall correctly, he was the staffer who told someone that if Senator Moynihan (then chair of the Senate Finance Committee) got in their way, they’d roll over him. This turned a shrewd and powerful politician from an ally to a critic.
The right needs to get over Tuesday quickly. Obama’s choice tells us that he’s going to play hardball.
Fascinating. This reflects abysmally on John McCain as a leader.
There’s a reason we don’t elect senators to be president, and it has to do with the fact that the average senator couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper sack. I suspect we’re about to relearn that.
Apollo posted this at 11:26 AM EST on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 as Conservatism, Politics
The absolute contempt that gay marriage advocates have for the democratic process is jawdropping.
“The core purpose of a constitution is to protect minority rights,” said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It’s the law of California that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry.”
That is such crap. Complete, absolute, total crap, and I could almost guarantee that 9 out of 10 constitutional law professors would agree with it. That’s why lawyers believe it.
The core purpose of a constitution is to define how a free people is to govern themselves: how bills become laws, who can hold offices, what powers each office has. Protecting rights is incidental to that.
A document that laid out the rules for how the government worked but didn’t specifically protect any rights would still be a constitution, but a document that just “protected” rights without laying out how the government worked would not be. When you start viewing a constitution as nothing more than a method of vindicating supposed rights, all you get are lawsuits and rule by lawyers.
It is the law of California that its people have the fundamental right to govern themselves, subject only to the restraints of their good sense and the Constitution of the United States. Things get wild and woolly when you give a people the ability to amend the constitution with a majority vote, but democracy is, everywhere and always, wild and woolly.
But that doesn’t change the fact that living in a democratic republic compels a respect for the majority and a respect for all citizens to select rules of government that reflect their values and traditions.
The damned thing passed on Tuesday, and on Wednesday there are already lawsuits - attempts to substitute the rule of lawyers for the rule of law. When you so fundamentally disrespect the majority’s right to self-government, you have no legitimate claim that the majority is disrespecting your right to use a specific word to describe your personal relationships.
Since the founding of the Republican Party in 1854, there have been 39 presidential elections. 27 times Americans have elected someone different than they did in the previous election, though because of Grover Cleveland, only 26 men have been elected president during that time frame. Of those 26:
16 have been Republicans, winning a total of 23 elections
10 have been Democrats, winning a total of 16 elections
13 have been Republicans who won a majority of the popular vote in at least one election. Republicans have won a popular majority 17 times. The last Republican president not to win a popular majority at least once was B. Harrison, who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college in 1888. Also not winning majorities: Hayes and Garfield.
4 have been Democrats who won a popular majority. Democrats have been elected with a popular majority 7 times. Additionally, Samuel Tilden won 51% in 1876 but lost the electoral college.
6 have been Democrats who won without getting a majority. Impressively, three of them did it twice: Clinton, Wilson, and Cleveland. The other three: Kennedy, Truman, and Buchanan.
In those 39 elections:
2 Democrats, F. Roosevelt and L. Johnson, have exceeded Obama’s 52.3% of the popular vote, though F. Roosevelt did it 4 times, so Obama has the 6th highest percentage registered for a Democrat
10 Republican have exceeded Obama’s 52.3%. Grant and Eisenhower did it twice, making 12 times Republicans have done so.
Obama’s popular vote percentage is the 18th highest.
12 Republicans have exceeded Obama’s popular vote margin of 6%, doing so 15 times: Reagan, Eisenhower, and Lincoln did it twice.
5 Democrats have exceeded Obama’s popular vote margin of 6%, doing so 8 times: F. Roosevelt did it four.
Obama’s popular vote margin is the 24th largest.
7 times a Republican has won a popular vote margin at least twice as large as Obama’s: 1984, 1972, 1956, 1928, 1924, 1920, and 1908.
5 times a Democrat has won a popular vote margin at least twice as large as Obama’s: 1964, 1944, 1940, 1936, 1932, and 1856(!).
Last night at about 9:30pm I switched off my TV, fired up the computer, and got back to my incredibly more interesting game of Spore (fyi - best game ever). The inevitable Obama victory had been declared and I had no real interest in seeing pundits preen for the cameras.
Still, after an hour or so of fierce interspecies warfare (damn those neighboring predators!) I was sucked back in to the world of politics via my obsession with blogs. Just when I thought I was out, I go looking for more punishment. In reading the various reactions the following thoughts swam through my head:
1) Shit.
2) There are two types of Obamacons. One that I think has a place in the conservative movement going forward and the other I think has so abandoned conservative principles as to make their return to the conservative fold almost impossible.
Like many conservative writers, my good opinion of Barack Obama diminished somewhat over the course of the campaign. Part of this was the inevitable hardening of the partisan arteries that takes place during a Presidential year, but part of it was that Obama’s particular gifts - his combination of charisma and thoughtfulness, and his ability to project sympathy for positions he does not himself hold - created unreasonable initial expectations for the kind of actual compromises he might make with conservatives. You start with the fact that he seems to understand your side of the argument, and the next thing you know you’re imagining scenarios in which he moves the Democratic Party to the center on abortion, or comes out against race-based affirmative action, or offers some other grand, conciliatory gesture that you’d like to see American liberalism make.
None of this was ever terribly plausible, of course, given Obama’s actual record - and it was especially implausible in a year when running as a “generic Democrat” has such obvious upsides. Obama moved to the center on issues where Democrats more or less have to be move to the center - making hawkish gestures on foreign policy, promising middle-class tax cuts, etc. - but there was never any way that he was going to live up to the hopes of the various conservatives who said favorable things about him in the early going (unless they engaged in outright self-deception, as some did). Unlike previous Democratic nominees, Obama was operating in an environment where his side had the upper hand on almost every issue, and there was actually more risk than reward involved in straying too far off the liberal reservation. And the campaign he ran reflected that reality, rather than living up to its initial promise to transcend the left-right divide.
Then there are those who post videos like this (unfortunately we no longer link to his site):
The sheer joy certain “conservative” pundits took in abandoning deep rooted conservative principles to support Obama betrayed, I believe, their utter unconservative nature. I am willing to believe that after the disastrous incompetence of the last eight years of Republican government that a principled conservative could, reluctantly, come to support Obama. I cannot believe that someone who claims to want conservative government would throw their support to Obama with such emotional ferocity so as to overlook the very liberal policies that will be enacted by an Obama administration.
3) This election has highlighted the lie that is Andrew Sullivan’s “Conservatism of Doubt.” Andrew abandoned all “doubt” and any pretence of conservatism in his emotional support of Obama and his disgraceful attacks on Sarah Palin. Andrew is perhaps the worst kind of intellectual - the preening pundit ruled almost entirely by his emotions. His commentary was insightful when it was confined to longform journalism but blogging has destroyed his perspective.
4) We will hear in the coming weeks that this election represents a Reaganesque shift towards the left. A watershed moment in liberal politics that will usher in a generation of liberal policies. I disagree. I think more than anything this election shows that what the majority of Americans want in their government is competence. The governing Republicans managed to tarnish the reputation of conservatism as a competent steward of our nation. Americans want a government that will keeps things steady, and in a choice between the calm, even keeled campaign run by Obama and the frenetic, often times lost, campaign of McCain the choice was easy.
5) California voted against Prop 4: Parental Notification for Abortions and for Prop 8: Banning Gay Marriage. The end result is the exact opposite of what I would want the law to be. Still I’m glad that federalism is still alive in this country and that states can still decide certain issues for themselves. The fact that Californians were able to overturn a law imposed on them by judicial fiat gives me hope for my home state. The fact that they can’t seem to grasp that young women need more support in life changing decisions than an underpaid doctor and Planned Parenthood saddens me.
6) Thank GOD Franken looks to be losing.
7) Thank GOD Dole lost – that ad was shameful and represented everything I despise about the modern Republican Party.
8) What the hell is wrong with Alaska? Stevens? Are you kidding me?
9) Its looking like we won’t have to face a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Hopefully this will curb some of the more excessively liberal policies an Obama/Pelosi/Reed triumvirate will try to enact.
10) Politics aside, it truly is wonderful to see a black man be elected President. Although I am not naive enough to think that this one event will heal all racial divides or that race hucksters like Jesse Jackson will disapear, it is still an example of the greatness of American society that race is no longer an impediment to the most powerful position in the world.
It takes an optimist like George Will to point out what’s good these days:
Really grim news always contains good news. Remember Orwell’s rule that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it? One way to reduce the price of oil is to have an economic slowdown. The price plummeted from a July 3 peak of $145.29 to $62.65 last Friday. Is everybody happy?
Not exactly. Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ruling mullahs, whose geopolitical ambitions are lubricated by high oil prices, are dismayed, which augments America’s stock of happiness. Some Americans, who discern a lead lining in any silver cloud, fret that falling oil prices will lure less virtuous Americans out of the market for electric cars, if there ever is such a market. The plummeting profits of oil companies please people who think profits represent economic success but moral failure. Such people are not among the millions of individual investors who own 23 percent of the companies and who do not worry that their pension funds are among those that own 27 percent of the oil companies, or that their IRAs, mutual funds, etc., are among those that own 43.5 percent of the companies. Anyway, as Congress contemplates yet another “stimulus,” the plunge in oil prices has delivered the equivalent of a huge cut in income taxes.
Thank you, Mr. Will. By the way, where are we going and why am are we in a handbasket again?
Hubbard posted this at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 as Philosophy, Politics