Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 4: Wiiliam Walker and the proslavery filibuster movement

I wish I could think of some Panama Papers link to Confederate "Heritage" Month. Because I'm fascinated by the money-laundering and tax-evasion and shady real-estate deals being described in the far-flung coverage of it.

Maybe for next year I can at least dig into some of the Latin American connections to slavery and the Confederacy.

And there were connections. Like the white Southerners who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War, when slavery was still legal in Brazil.

Then there are the cowboy stories of the filibusterers. Not the Congressional kind, the raisig private armies to take over another country kind. The ever-trusty Encyclopædia Britannica's online article on Filibustering as of today says:

Spurred by land hunger and by the desire of proslavery Southerners to add future slave states to the Union, filibusterers were active during the decade prior to the American Civil War. Starting in 1849, Narcisco López led three unsuccessful expeditions against Cuba. He convinced many prominent Southerners that the island was ripe for revolt against Spain. In his last attempt (1851), López landed in Havana with a contingent of Southern volunteers. The expected popular uprising against Spain failed to materialize, and López, along with about 50 Southerners, was executed by Spanish military authorities.

The high point of American filibustering was reached under William Walker, a Californian who first tried to take Mexican Baja (Lower) California and then turned his attention to Nicaragua. In 1855 Walker took advantage of a civil war in Nicaragua to take control of the country and set himself up as dictator. In May 1856 President Franklin Pierce recognized the Walker regime.

Pierce was crassly proslavery.

William Walker is not an admirable character in that he was willing to do things like that. But he was a fascinating character as an adventurer, though an adventurer on behalf of slavery.

William Walker (1824–1860)

And since I'm fond of looking into older history books, I dug out this description of the episode from A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steel Commager and William Leuchtenburg, pp. 253-5, which shows that Walker was as fond of the Money Power as he was the Slave Power:

In the meantime, a curious episode occurred in Nicaragua. Cornelius Vanderbilt, 'commodore' of the Hudson river steamboat fleet, organized a company to compete with the Panama railway . It ran steamers up the San Juan river and across Lake Nicaragua, whence freight was forwarded to the Pacific by muleback. Wanting political stability in that region, this company financed William Walker, a professional filibuster, to overthrow the existing government of Nicaragua. Walker, 'the gray-eyed man of destiny,' in 1856 succeeded in making himself President of Nicaragua. He planned (with the approval of Pierce's Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis) to introduce Negro slavery and to conquer the rest of Central America. But he had the bad judgment to quarrel with Vanderbilt and seize his ships. The 'commodore' then supported a Central American coalition that invaded Nicaragua, and Walker surrendered. Twice more this prince of filibusters tried; on his last attempt, in 1860, he was seized and executed by a Honduran firing squad. [my emphasis]

The reckless of these activities carried a risk of war with Great Britain, when Pierce sent an American ship in 1954 to bombard the Nicaraguan city of Greytown.

It was neither the first nor the last time that the Slave Power and their supporters did reckless things.

William Freehling gives a flavor of Walker's proslavery agitation and goals in The Road to Disuntion. Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007). He talks about Walker and other filibusters like Narcisco López and their problems with the US Neutrality Laws, which made filibustering illegal (p. 161):

William Walker, briefly president of Nicaragua in the mid-1850s, can be more easily seen as a planters' partisan and the Neutrality Laws' victim. This native Nashvillian and (sometimes) resident of New Orleans articulated (on occasion) a brilliant slaveholder case for Caribbean expansion. Sounding just like a western Missouri slaveholder, worried that free soil Kansas would imprison the state on a third side, Walker told Georgia planters that the Nicaraguan question involves "whether you will permit yourselves to be hemmed in on the south, as you are already on the north and west." The South must not remain "quiet and idle, while impassable barriers" closed up "the only side left open."

But Freehling also notes that Walker didn't seem personally that dedicated to the proslavery cause that he nevertheless served:

William Walker preferred free soil California, his most common American residence in the 1850s, to enslaved New Orleans, where he restively spent the late 1840s. The "Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny" never held slaves, never farmed, never married, never owned land, never settled in any profession, never stayed in any community. ...

The shy dreamer, always wrapped (even on the battlefield) in an enormous preacher's frock coat, never preached a proslavery syllable in his conquered land or legalized Nicaraguan slavery until his hold on the country had slipped, a year after he seized power. His speeches down south on proslavery Caribbean adventuring came only after his support in New York and San Francisco capitalistic circles had dried up. He first based his filibustering operations in San Francisco, not New Orleans. His first soldiers were failed gold dusters, not enterprising slaveholders. His Nicaraguan army ultimately enrolled as many foreign-born as southern-born troops and more northern-born soldiers. His men were scarcely ever slaveholders, rarely farmers, usually the poor young sports in the cities where capitalistic merchants financed his flings in Nicaragua. When this strange general swore at his enemies, he could sound as fanatical as John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame. But as fanatical on slavery as was John Brown and equally the victim of U.S. capture?! No way, answered most Southerners, who generally considered this curiosity some species from another civilization.

The KQED series History Detectives Special Investigations sketches "The Filibuster Movement" in this undated article.

Modifying the filibuster rule: Senate Democrats actually act like Democrats!

Lat week was a good week for Democrats!

The Senate abolished the filibuster rule for judicial and Executive Branch nominations except for the Supreme Court at Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's demand. Francine Kiefer in Senate takes 'nuclear option' on filibusters: What does that mean? Christian Science Monitor 11/21/2013), "Reid’s proposed change to the rules bulldozes the filibuster and replaces it with simple majority approval for all executive and most judicial branch appointees, from agency heads and their assistants to federal judges."

This was long overdue. The Republicans were ready to do the same in 2005, and the Democrats would have been well-advised to let them do it. Instead, the "Gang of 14" constructed a classical "bipartisan" solution in the Beltway Village's meaning of the term, i.e., the Democrats agreed to do pretty much what the Republicans wanted and declined to call their bluff on the the "nuclear option" of amending the filibuster rule.

Andrew McCarthy & Mark R. Levin, writing for the segregationist National Review at the beginning of 2008 (McCain and the Gang of 14 01/18/2008) were very much upset with the Republican members of the Gang of 14 that brokered the deal that kept the filibuster rule intact:

Besides preserving their privilege (which allows a single senator, for absolutely no reason, to prevent a president from fulfilling his constitutional obligation to appoint officers of the United States, without whom the government cannot function), McCain and his confederates were most determined to avoid accountability. That was the essence of the Gang of 14 deal. The senators pretended, in a bluster of high-minded twaddle, to resolve the controversy without disturbing the chamber’s procedures. It was nonsense.

At the time, the president had made ten nominations that Democrats (and some Republicans) blocked. Three of them had been so abused by the senatorial intransigence that they finally withdrew their names from consideration. Of the remaining seven, the Gang of 14 agreed there would be a vote on only three. It then went on to preserve the filibuster, purporting that it could only be invoked in "extraordinary circumstances."

The editors of that same segregationist journal wrote in Nuclear Fallout 11/21/2013 after last week's victory for democracy, howled about the dreadful consequences they expected from this move:

The filibuster is not sacred writ, and we are on record supporting procedural changes to overcome partisan obstruction. The more serious concern here is that the Democrats are attempting to pack the courts, especially the D.C. Circuit court, with a rogue’s gallery of far-left nominees. That is worrisome in and of itself, but there is a deeper agenda: Much of what President Obama has done in office is of questionable legality and constitutionality. The president no doubt has in mind the sage advice of Roy Cohn: "Don't tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is." He is attempting to insulate his agenda from legal challenge by installing friendly activists throughout the federal judiciary. That is precisely what he means when he boasts, “We are remaking the courts.” Republicans are in fact obstructing those appointments; unlike the nomination of John Roberts et al., these appointments deserve to be obstructed.

The filibuster is a minor issue; the major issue is that President Obama is engaged in a court-packing scheme to protect his dubious agenda, and Harry Reid’s Senate is conspiring with him to do so.

Roy Cohn was the bizarre mob lawyer who kick-started his career for his sleazy staff work for Joe McCarthy, a man National Review founder William Buckley admired and defended.

Michael Gerhardt and Richard Painter described the Gang of 14 agreement and its results in "Extraordinary Circumstances:" The Legacy of the Gang of 14 and a Proposal for Judicial Nominations Reform (Revised; American Constitution Society; Nov 2011).

On May 23, 2005, seven Republican and seven Democratic senators banded together to block a movement that would have changed the Senate forever. Because the Senate at that moment was otherwise almost evenly divided over a radical plan to revise the rules of the Senate to bar judicial filibusters without following the Senate’s rules for making such a revision, the Gang of 14, as the senators became known, controlled the future of judicial filibusters. They each agreed not to support a filibuster of a judicial nomination unless there were “extraordinary circumstances.” For the remainder of George W. Bush’s presidency, the agreement held, and there were no filibusters of judicial nominations. But, in the past two and a half years, several developments have threatened the continued viability of the agreement of the Gang of 14: Five members of the Gang are no longer in the Senate; Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate in 2006 and managed to hold onto a majority of seats in the Senate, albeit by a thinner margin, in 2010; and delays and obstruction of judicial nominations re-intensified after President Obama came into office. Perhaps most importantly, the remaining Republican members of the Gang of 14 have each found “extraordinary circumstances” justifying their support of some judicial filibusters.

In other words, the Republicans agreed to drop some of the most conservative nominations the Democrats were filibustering at the time, and the Democrats agreed to basically not filibuster any new ones, and the Democrats stuck to their agreement. (In other words, please let us keep the filibuster and we promise not to use it!) As soon as the Democrats got a Senate majority and a Democratic President was nominating judges, the Republican didn't bother themselves with the 2005 agreement and used the filibuster to an unprecedented extent against judicial nominations. Why not? It worked well for them during the Clinton Administration. Gerhardt and Painter describe the results as of the time of the paper:

However, in President Obama’s first two and a half years in office, his judicial nominations have been subjected to various delays and obstruction, including a successful filibuster upheld by each of the remaining Republican members of the Gang of 14. Almost 50 of the President's judicial nominations are still pending before the Senate, including 12 to the federal courts of appeal, while 84 judicial vacancies remain, 31 of which are considered emergencies based upon, among other things, extremely high caseloads. We cannot square this state of affairs with what the Gang of 14 had originally wanted or with any credible, neutral standard of "extraordinary circumstances." The Gang of 14 had hoped that their bipartisan compromise would facilitate judicial appointments and remove ideological differences as a ground of objection to a nomination as long as the nominee’s views were within the mainstream
of American jurisprudence and he or she had sound character and no serious ethical lapses. Instead, judicial filibusters, among other means of obstruction within the Senate, have been persistently directed at judicial nominees on the basis of speculation and distortion. These tactics have prevented the federal judiciary from operating at full strength, and have made the process of judicial selection unpredictable for everyone concerned, including the White House, the Senate, and the nominees. [my emphasis]

A recent Rick Perlstein piece reminded me that the very useful term High Broderism, which bloggers had used to designated the Beltway Villagers' idolatry of a phony centrism that was understood as Democrats conceding to Republicans, has fallen into disuse since its namesake, David Broder, passed away.

But High Broderism lives on. And its adherents were predictably disturbed at suchy a shameless display of partisanship (by the Democrats!) as the amendment of the filibuster rule this past week. Here are Sleep Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks, declaring their allegiance to the faith on their Political Wrap (PBS Newshour 11/22/2013), Shields and Brooks look at long-term impact of Senate's 'nuclear' rule change :

Shields starts off by declaring it obviously a bad idea. But then proceeds to explain all the good reasons that the Senate Democrats have for doing what they did. Bobo was even more incoherent, and of course has a big sad because of the baleful effects it may have of sacred Bipartisanship:

Yes, they made a big mistake.

There's -- Mark's right. There's no question there's been a deterioration of norms, but that's no reason to basically begin the erosion of the institution of the Senate, what makes the Senate special. When you go to the Senate dining room and you look at the senators, they actually do talk to each other across party lines. They have working relationships. It's not great. It's not the way it used to be.

But they basically have working relationships. And they were able to pass legislation, even immigration reform, a couple weeks or months ago, because they have to do that, because to get a lot of stuff passed, including nominations, you have got to get 60 votes. And it's very rare that one party has 60 votes. So, they're used to working across party lines, in a way they just aren't in the House.

And so, if you take away that 60-vote thing, starting now with some of the nominations, but probably going within a couple of years to the Supreme Court nominations and maybe the legislation, you basically are turning the Senate into the House. You're basically beginning the erosion of what makes the Senate special, beginning the erosion of minority rights.

You're creating a much more polarized body over the long term. So, if you think partisanship and polarization are in short supply, well, then this was a good move, because we're going to have more of it, I think, in the medium and long term.

Here in the real world, of course, the Republicans have transformed themselves into a crassly segregationist party and are too busy howling at the moon to worry about all this responsible government nonsense. But Bobo and Sleepy Mark both cherish one of the Scriptural tales of High Broderism, the one about how Tip 'n Ronnie (Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Republican President and Saint Ronald Reagan) used to argue over politics during the day and then get together and have a bear together that evening. One enduring legacy of the Tip 'n Ronnie beer drinking is that the Social Security retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Which is fine by Mark and Bobo, since they both support the Grand Bargain for "entitlement reform" to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid again.

When Mark is off, they usually fill his spot with Ruth Marcus, Bobo's Washington Post colleague, who by Beltway standards is somehow considered a liberal. She usually begins her responses by some form of, "I agree with David ..." It's a real Bobo and Bobita show when she's on. In her column, Bobita was, of course, agreeing with David (In filibuster fight, the Democrats go too far Washington Post 11/21/2013):

Still, the Democrats’ move is a mistake.

Not when it comes to executive-branch nominees — eliminating the filibuster in such cases makes complete sense. A president, Republican or Democrat, deserves deference in deciding how to staff the government. If a president picks the wrong person, that’s his or her problem. The harm won’t last long. ...

Judges are different, and this is where the Democrats erred. Their move — unlike previous proposals — eliminated the filibuster except for Supreme Court nominees. The simple reason for subjecting judicial nominees to a higher hurdle for approval: lifetime tenure. ...

... eliminating the possibility of filibustering lower-court nominees will fundamentally change the calculus of judicial appointments. Presidents will understand that in picking judges they have to count only to 50, which will embolden them to press the envelope, ideologically and otherwise.

Republicans will be empowered to pick more conservative judges, Democrats more liberal ones. Perhaps this will make for a more vibrant judiciary. I fear it will create one that is more polarized and possibly less well-qualified.

Because judges might start doing things like handing the Presidency to the loser in national elections, overturning long-standing and important precedents on issues like segregation and campaign finance on narrow majority votes, and so on.

If the Democrats approve Republican Presidents' judges loyally and the Republicans routinely block Democratic appointments to the bench, that would certainly avoid that awful partisan division. The whole federal bench would be Republican. And I'm sure the Republicans will only approve judges of the same high quality as Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

Bobo himself used a similar gambit on the Newshour:

I would say the most defensible thing that the -- part of this law is the White House personnel. I agree with Mark on that. The president really should have wide leeway to choose who he want. I can see sort of getting rid of the 60-vote thing for the administration personnel.

I find it much harder to defend the idea of getting rid of it for the judges. And, believe me, the Supreme Court judges, that will be -- that 60-vote thing will be gone in short order because of this.

This way Bobo and Bobita can give a nod to the Democrats - gee, maybe had more of a point on Executive Branch appointments - but actually supporting the Republicans on judicial nomination part, which is the more critical one. Shields does his version of the same thing. High Broderism at work! Both sides are blame (but the Dems a little more). And the priesthood of the order get to mourn for the decline of sacred Bipartisanship.

James Fallows provides a perspective on the filibuster from someone who's more in touch with the real world, California Gov. Jerry Brown (California's New 'Problem': Jerry Brown on the Sudden Surplus, and the Filibuster The Atlantic 05/26/2013):

We can't have a country based on the 60-vote standard. This is serious.

We've never had to have 60 votes for appointments or day-to day-decisions. Really, you can't govern that way. That's a radical change.

How can you govern? Does England have 60? [JF note: Obviously a rhetorical question. His point is that the U.S. has the drawbacks of parliamentary democracy, including political polarization -- without the benefits, namely the ability to get things done.] I think that 60 votes could end America's ability to govern itself. We have to get rid of it.

That 60 votes is bad.

The US Senate includes two Senators for each state. They are popularly elected. But the Senators' representation is based on state, not population. Utah has just as many Senators as California or New York. So the Senate has a built-in over-representation of smaller, more rural states as it is. And those states tend to be more "red" in the exceptional American political color-scheme: more conservative and more Republican. The filibuster rule gives an even smaller portion of the general population the ability to block any legislation and Supreme Court appointees, which are still subject to the rule.

It needs to be abolished for those things, too. But I don't want to detract from the Harry Reid's and the Senate Democrats' real accomplishment this past week. It's very good to see.

Gerard Magliocca in The Not-So Nuclear Option Balkinization 11/21/

The Senate today voted to change its rules and end the power of the minority to block a judge or an executive nominee through a non-traditional floor filibuster. I applaud this change, as readers of the blog know that I am a critic of modern filibuster practice. It is worth noting, though, that all this change does is bring us back to where we were about ten years ago. Filibusters of lower federal court and executive nominees were basically unknown prior to the Bush 43 Administration.

Stan Collander's Nuclear Option Increases Chances Of Another Shutdown, Sequestration (Capital Gains and Games 11/22/2013) raises the question of how this will affect the Republicans' approach to the upcoming rounds of sequestration and debt-ceiling decisions:

I have talked for several years about how the tea party sees working with Democrats (and some non tea party Republicans) as collaborating with the enemy. It thinks of compromise in religious terms ... as "a sin."

The Senate's action yesterday didn't just reconfirm that to the tea partiers, it almost certainly exacerbated it. If they didn't before, the tea party certainly now thinks of the Democrats either as a tool of the devil or the devil incarnate.

I'm guessing that Reid took this prospect into account in the filibuster vote. I think he and the Democratic Caucus in the Senate have reached a point - if not a tipping point, at least a moment - where they just got tired of pretending the Republican Party is acting as anything but a wrecker Party in Congress.

Collander seems more bothered by that prospect than I am. That's because I expected the Republicans to be hardline obstructionists on those negotiations anyway. Reid's removal of the filibuster for non-Supreme Court appointments are a clear sign to any Republicans still thinking soberly enough to see it that he could further undercut the Republican institutional power in the Senate by getting the Democratic majority in the Senate to abolish the filibuster for legislation, as well.

It's also important to remember that abolishing the filibuster for nominations is a real victory for the Democrats. A huge part of the Republicans' strength the last few years has been to exploit President Obama's obsession for bipartisan solutions to slap him and the Congressional Democrats around on one thing after the other. It is very good to see the Democrats strike back in a visible and effective way on this. And the whining from Republican blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Rand Paul emphasizes that it was an effective strike. It's something that Democratic progressives have been wanting to see for a while.

Joan McCarter addresses the likely Republican counterstrike over the budget and debt-ceiling negotiations that Collander references (The potential silver lining to the post-nuclear Republican obstruction Daily Kos 11/22/2013). She agrees that Republican obstruction could get worse, but will a skeptical qualifier about how much worse could we expect them to be than they already are:

If there's one thing that's a given that the Senate will experience post-going nuclear, it's ongoing and probably even escalated Republican obstruction in other areas — if it could get worse, that is. That's a given, and a given that Senate Democrats have been very much aware the whole time, and won't be surprised to see. They will still use up every bit of debate time they can wring out of the still-existing rules and procedures to delay every nomination for as long as they can. They will still filibuster every piece of legislation for whatever reason they feel like.

She points out that Republican efforts to block judicial nominees will likely shift to the Judiciary Committee now, which is likely to be a good thing because the Reps will have to air their frivolous reasons for opposing the President's qualified nominees:

But now Republicans are going to have come up with real, valid, substantive reasons to oppose a nominee. They won't be able to do it just to block President Obama, or as in the case of Robert Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to nullify some law they don't like. If they really want to stop a nominee now, they're going to have to bring something real, and that's nothing but good for our government.

Tags: filibuster, harry reid

The Villagers protest that anyone would expect democracy to work

The Beltway Village seems to have finally decided to bring Maureen Dowd to heel on something. Something that she actually got right.

That would be her column, No Bully in the Pulpit New York Times 04/20/2013, in which she said that Obama lost the Senate vote on gun regulations because, "No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him."

Obama apologists often make the argument that (when a Democrat is President), the Presidency is a fairly weak office that can't get much done. But neither the liberal-leaning ones nor the conservative ones seemed to have thought that when Bush the Magnificent, Scourge of the Heathens and Liberator of Peoples, was at the helm. At least prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when wound up making even the Village recognize that he wasn't all that.

In Obama and the Myth of Arm-Twisting NRB Blog 04/26/2013, Elizabeth Drew explains why poor Obama can't get a background check supported by 90% of the public passed, because he's only the President, after all. He doesn't have that much power. She doesn't mention Dowd specifically. But the concept that MoDo wrote about that Drew wants to shoot down.

This line is a beauty: "Arm-twisting is particularly futile on an issue involving ideology." Yes, because Members of Congress are such highly principled characters.

Drew somewhat carelessly explains that Republican Presidents and their Congressional allies can get their programs passed against stiff opposition, apparently forgetting momentarily that what the Beltway accepts as self-evident - Republicans President have enormous power, Democrats very little - isn't at all self evident to the plebes out here:

Persuasion on such procedural maneuvers can come from congressional leaders as well as from the White House (though they are often on its behalf). Probably the most flagrant example in modern politics was the colossally expensive (and unpaid-for) addition of drug benefits to Medicare in 2003—at once a play for reelection support for George W. Bush, whose second term didn't seem at all a sure thing at that point, as well as a boondoggle for the drug industry, which also got itself exempted from competitive bidding by the government. In their efforts to get the bill through the House, Republican leaders held the final vote open for an unprecedented three hours—fifteen minutes is usually the max, so they froze the clock as if this wasn’t happening—while House majority leader Tom DeLay, who did not come by his sobriquet "The Hammer" for no reason, “persuaded” enough of them to vote for the bill. Members literally ran and hid from DeLay, who later was reprimanded for his heavy-handedness; unperturbed, two years later DeLay handed out checks from the tobacco industry while the House was considering the elimination of a tobacco subsidy.

Remarkably, she blandly adds, "No president since [Obama being the only one so far] could come close to matching such methods of persuasion, nor would he or she be advised to."

Now I don't want the Democrats to stoop to DeLay levels of corruption. But if, for instance, 50 Senate Democrats and the Vice President were willing to vote to do away with the filibuster, that 54-vote majority the background check bill did get would have meant that the Senate passed it. Drew mentions the filibuster rule, but only to describe as though it were an immutable law of nature. Though she does observe, "The march away from majority rule picked up its pace." Which doesn't merit her outrage, because carping about such a breakdown of democratic processes would be "totally irrelevant to the current state of our politics." What she means here is totally irrelevant to the Villagers who don't give a flying fig if representative democracy is completely corrupted by lobbyist money.

And, of course, any attempt for Democrats to insist on their representatives supporting what they voting base needs and overwhelmingly support, why, my dear people, that would be so, so un-centrist:

Much wrath has fallen on the head of Heidi Heitkamp, a freshman senator from North Dakota, for having voted against the bill, since she has more than five years to go before reelection; but memories in Washington are long. Some liberal groups have said that they will go after Mark Pryor, of Arkansas, who faces a difficult reelection—though the result might be the election of a Republican who will oppose them on many more issues than gun control. Outraged liberals intent on punishing Democrats who didn’t support the background checks—all of them from states where the feeling for gun ownership is strong—could end up getting Republicans elected instead.

In other words, Drew is saying that not only is a mere President unable to insist that Democrats in Congress support him on something overwhelming popular with the Democratic base and virtually everyone else in the country. But any attempt for Democratic voters in their own states to hold them accountable, why, it's just not done! Only Republicans might do such a thing. It's worth noting in her example that Clair McCaskill of Missouri, a not especially popular Democrat who was generally expected to lose, won re-election in 2012 by a strong margin because her opponent Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin imploded. Harry Truman's observation (perhaps slightly overstated) that, given the choice between a real Republican and a Democrat trying to act like one, the public will prefer the real thing every time, just wouldn't register for today's Villagers. The concept couldn't even settle in most of their heads long enough to consider it.

I hope Elizabeth Drew writes a piece soon on Obama's proposal to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare. Those positions are as unpopular as gun backgrounds checks were popular. But the Villagers take it as a matter of faith that benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be cut. And think it amusing that the silly proles should think otherwise. We'll see if she's as convinced that the political system is utterly incapable of passing those measures.

Drew is outraged that any of those airhead 90 Percenters would expect Obama to get a background check passed. It doesn't seem to bother her at all that the democratic system is so obviously stymied that such a popular and necessary bill get even get through one house of Congress. But she's obviously disgusted that anyone should be outraged. Because she's clearly not.

For more Village conventional wisdom on this, see: Glenn Thrush and Reid Epstine, Gun control: President Obama’s biggest loss Politico 4/17/13 ("The president ... broke his own informal 'Obama Rule' — of never leaning into an issue without a clear path to victory."); Jonathan Chait, How America’s Crappy Political System Killed Background Checks New York 04/17/2013 ("that’s how American politics works ... Presidential leadership doesn't matter.").

Tags: filibuster, gun control, gun regulation

Republicans and the Senate filibuster

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks makes some excellent points about the filibuster in Disastrously Timed Filibuster Comments By Harry Reid YouTube date 05/20/2012:



Cenk is ranting a bit here, but the basic point he's making, that the Democrats are way too willing to let the Republicans kick them and kick them and kick them again, is right on the mark. And the corruption of the system by big money is the single biggest factor in producing that situation.

Tags: filibuster

Making excuses for Obama

Ezra Klein is viewed as being close to the White House, i.e., he often provides friendly coverage for White House arguments. I'd like to think for the Democratic Party's sake that the arguments he makes in Obama's Flunking Economy: The Real Cause New York Review of Books are not ones being encouraged by the White House (11/24/2011 issue; accessed 11/05/2011)

Ezra's argument is one that is by definition answerable only with a hypothetical. The Obama record, he says, is the best record possible, the best he or anyone could have done. Arguing that he could have accomplished more of his own nominal goals is by definition a hypothetical.

But people make judgments like that all the time about political leaders. And the comparisons are not entirely hypothetical. How many times did we hear Bush supporters during the period 2001-6 complaining that they couldn't do what they wanted to do because they didn't have 60 votes in the Senate? When they got tired of Senate Democrats filibustering their most egregious judicial nominees, the Republicans were simply going to abolish the filibuster rule in the middle of the Senate session for judicial nominees and jam them through on a Party-line Republican vote. That didn't happen only because the Democrats, in an all-too-typical deal, folded and gave the Republicans most of what they wanted.

Here's how Ezra deals with that issue:

But in general, the fundamental constraints on the administration’s leaders have not been economic or conceptual, but political. They know they need to act. But they can’t act, or at least they can’t act at the scale necessary to really change the economic situation. Republicans won’t let them. Between 2009 and 2011, Senate Republicans launched more filibusters than we had seen in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s combined. Democrats had sixty votes for a short period of time, but with Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman included in that total, they never had easy control of the Senate, whose minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in October 2010, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." [my emphasis]

Ezra has heard about something John Kennedy's Administration did about antidemocratic House rules. But he doesn't mention the more relevant and far more recent 2005 confrontation over the filibuster, resolved through the "Gang of 14" Democratic surrender to the Republicans:

Another option would have been to mount a frontal assault on the filibuster, much as John F. Kennedy’s administration began by launching a frontal assault on the House Rules Committee, which was bottling up civil rights legislation.

I don’t consider this plausible. For one thing, the White House understandably wanted to use its political capital on policies that would be understandable and tangible to Americans rather than on a divisive set of procedural reforms. For another, it would have been very difficult for a candidate who had come to power promising a new era of postpartisanship to begin his presidency by ripping minority protections out of the United States Senate. And finally, there is no evidence that Democratic senators, many of whom quite like the power that the filibuster gives them, would have gone along with the plan.

What could they do? Why, Obama is only the President of the United States, it's not like he has a lot of power or anything. Sure, he can join a war in Libya on his own, assassinate American citizens on his own word, make unprecedented claims for Executive secrecy. But raise a stink over Republican Senators blocking vital programs? Oh, golly, that would be way to much to expect!

Whether it's coming from the White House or it's mainly Ezra's excuse-making, it sounds pitiful. This kind of thing looks weak because it is. It's a big part of what has disappointed and discouraged Democrats these last three years or so. It has dismayed independent voters, especially on the debt ceiling fiasco this year. And it has emboldened the Republicans to continue their obstructionist course, because it's clearly working to their advantage.

This kind of excuse just reaffirms in voters' minds that the Democrats are weaker than the Republicans and Obama is a weak President. This in turn plays into the Republicans' routine charge against Democratic President that they are weak and ineffective.

The biggest whopper in the piece is this:

But if the White House couldn’t go through Congress, perhaps it could have done a better job going around it. A major omission in [
Ron] Suskind’s book—which is also a major omission in political punditry more generally—is that it makes little mention of the Federal Reserve. But the Fed is arguably more powerful than Congress when it comes to setting economic policy, and it is certainly more powerful than the president. [my emphasis]

He goes on to explain that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who Obama (in this telling) had every reason to regard as superman of economic recovery, was disappointing after Obama re-appointed him:

Of course, the most straightforward path to energizing the Fed isn’t adding two new members to its Board of Governors, but replacing its chairman. And the White House had an opportunity to do so in 2010, when Ben Bernanke’s term expired. Instead, Obama chose to renominate Bernanke. The thinking was that Bernanke had pursued an extraordinary set of activist policies during the worst of the crisis — he probably deserves more credit than any single person for preventing a second Great Depression — and he was respected in the institution and by the markets. Reappointing him would thus help with confidence and ensure that the White House had an able partner if the economy turned south again.

But Bernanke has been much more cautious in accelerating the recovery than he was in combating the initial crisis. When the financial markets were collapsing, he went far beyond the traditional limits of the Fed to support the financial markets, purchase depressed assets, and inject liquidity directly into the banking system. But he has not been nearly as aggressive in his efforts to support the recovery. The second round of quantitative easing could have been much bigger. The Fed’s commitment to employment—even at the cost of modest inflation—could have been communicated directly to the markets. Unorthodox policies, such as targeting a specific level of nominal GDP growth, have been left untried.

At this point, even quite mainstream voices have come to worry over Bernanke’s apparent timidity. [my emphasis]

Even after the bumbling indifference of former Fed money god Alan Greenspan, Ezra seems to buy into the mystical image of the Federal Reserve Chairman as the Highest of High Priests of Finance, gifted with mysterious powers that we mere mortals can only admire from afar.

This is just plain ridiculous. As Paul Krugman has been explaining for years now, the Federal Reserve has very limited ability to stimulate the economy in depression condition like we have now, because interest rates are up against the zero bound, i.e., that can't really go any lower. And in fact, the Fed's "quantitative easing" attempts expanded the money supply as expected, but with negligible effects on the real economy.

Some traditional Keynesians like John Kenneth Galbraith doubted whether the Fed had even the powers generally attributed to it in managing recessions during even normal times. I'm inclined to that Galbraithian view myself; but that's another story.

Ezra's article also doesn't discuss the basically conservative elements in Obama's outlook that has also led to disappointments for Democrats: his deal with the health-insurance lobby to make sure the public option he nominally supported in health care reform didn't pass; his commitment to light regulation of the financial industry; his appalling desire for a Grand Bargain that would severely cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in exchange for an easily-reversed increase in taxes on the wealthy.

This is pitiful excuse-making for what progressive Democrats see as the failures of the Obama Administration.

Tags: filibuster, obama administration

Can Obama be a new "Comeback Kid"?

Joe Conason in Obama should push back -- like Bill Clinton Salon 11/05/2010 makes an important point. Though he doesn't put it quite like I'm going to.

Comparisons of Obama's situation now to Bill Clinton's situation after the 1994 "Gingrich Revolution" are inevitable. Despite Bill Clinton's devotion to the gospel of neoliberal economics and his famous/infamous "triangulation", i.e., giving Republicans some of what they wanted, he was also willing to fight Republicans. As Conason points out:

... the most important political events in the first year following the ’94 midterm were not compromises over policy, but confrontations that swiftly became disruptive, angry, polarizing -- and that Clinton won. When the Gingrich Republicans twice shut down the government at the end of 1995 in order to win their way on the budget, the president faced them down and portrayed them as right-wing extremists whose ideology portended chaos. He kept that message alive not only as he confronted the Republicans in Washington, but in a series of stealthy political commercials heralding his reelection bid that started airing in the summer of 1995, nearly a year and a half before the 1996 election. [my emphasis]

Conason has some suggestions about how Obama could do that. I'm not nearly so confident as he is that so-called fiscal responsibility would be good for the Democrats politically. To put it mildly. I think it's terrible politics for Dems. More importantly, cutting back government spending now may seal the economy's fate to be a "lost decade" like Japan experience in the 1990s and still hasn't fully recovered from.

But some of his suggestions are good and the basic idea is sound. The problem is that after fighting Republicans successfully in the 2008 campaign, Obama has been stunningly unwilling to fight them as President. He was far more willing to fight progressive Democrats to eliminate the public option from health care reform.

But it's what he needs to do politically for himself and for the Democratic Party. As Conason also points out, "Obama's position today is stronger than Clinton's after 1994. Today, unlike then, the Democrats can look forward to retaining control of the Senate."

Obama in 2009-10 let the best opportunity for legitimating a genuinely progressive Democratic message since the Great Depression go by. He's unlikely in the extreme to get that kind of opportunity again. But he can make far better use of the opportunities he does have.

Obama has spoken publicly about how the filibuster rule in the Senate is outdated and undemocratic. Harry Reid at last summer's Netroots Nation convention made the best brief case against the filibuster I've ever heard. Fighting to abolish the filibuster rule like they fought to keep the public option of health care reform would be a real step toward progress in the right direction.

barack obama, filibuster, joe conason

"I can’t stand you, now go vote for me"

I'm getting the sinking feeling that we may be on the verge of a major political realignment, one not at all like the one many Obama supporters hoped for in 2008. It's looking more and more like the Democratic leadership assumes that they can build a new electoral base founded on a largely mythical middle. And that they will do so by provoking what they can pass off as fights between "the left" and the "mainstream" Democratic Party.

I doubt the realignment, if such an event occurs, will look like what the Democratic leadership envisions. The more likely short-term effect is to empower the Republicans and to force the Democrats to fight the Republicans for years to come on political ground largely defined by the Republicans. If you have both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party running against the Democrats - which is what the current "punch the hippies" strategy looks like - these doesn't really seem the most favorable position for the Democratic Party.

And, we should never forget, this is the first election in which we're seeing the already huge effects of the reactionary Roberts Court ruling in Citizens United that effectively eliminated limits on corporate sponsorship of political advertising in elections.

One thing is important to remember about the "enthusiasm gap": neither labor or the Democratic netroots or any major Democratic constituency is promoting a boycott of the November elections. If past experience and common sense are any measures, Democrats who have been active enough to volunteer for campaign work or participate in some kind of organized political activity - Democratic activists, in other words - are highly likely to vote, and to vote down the line for Democratic candidates.

But, to borrow a marketing term, having the wholesale voting market in good shape doesn't mean that the retail market will be as good. Okay, it's a flawed analogy but we all speak neoliberal-"market-economy"-speak these days. Most voters, including many loyal Democratic voters who make up part of the base without being "activists", vote on broad themes and perceptions. (On this point, George Lakoff's analyses are useful.) It's a midterm election, where conservative affluent Republicans are chronically over-represented in voter participation compared to Presidential elections years. The economy sucks for most people. Most people can see that the economy is again doing very, very well for Wall Street bankers and hedge funds managers, thanks to huge taxpayers bailouts. That doesn't mean that the retail customers want to buy the Republican widget in November. It does mean a lot of them are likely to not feel the need to buy the Democratic widget either.

This is important to remember. Because, whether by design or by the dead weight of conventional thinking, the White House message is beginning to be not just that base voters should look on the bright side or, more precisely, look at how much darker the Republican alternative is. It's that the Democratic left is discouraging people from voting. Unless you abstract the political contest this fall to the point where it's like a sports event, Our Team against Their Team, that's not the case. On the contrary, progressive activists have been publicizing the screaming lunacy of much of the Tea Party hoopla, much better than the establishment Democrats have been able to pull themselves together to do. By contrast, look at Obama's nicey-nice description of the Tea Party in the Rolling Stone interview linked below (though he does manage to mention its corporate financing).

David Dayen - from whom I borrowed the phrase I use for the title of this post - asks a common-sense question, Has the White House Lost Their Minds? Firedoglake News Desk 09/28/2010, based on a common-sense observation that the Bash-the-Base strategy doesn't even make sense in pure sports-event terms:

Have you ever seen an athlete stay in the game for too long (no intentional resemblance to any quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings) because they cannot imagine a world without the adulation and cheering? That's about the only analogy I can make to the persistent carping inside the White House, now a definitive strategy and part of the President's stump speech, telling the liberal base to "stop whining," "get over it," "wake up" and "get in gear." ...

Before revealing the latest in this genre, I would just add that I've never seen a politician run an election with the message "Don't be stupid, quit your bitching and vote for me." This goes orders of magnitude beyond "Here are the stakes, my opponent would vote against everything you care about.["] That at least has a certain time-tested quality. That would make the election a choice and not a referendum. But "vote for me, you simpletons"? There's a reason that strategy has never been employed: because it's so insane to think that open berating would inspire a voter to action. [my emphasis]

Following are some of the other key pieces discussing the the current remarkable political line the White House is taking:

Jann Wenner, Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview Rolling Stone 09/28/2010. The opening paragraphs of this interview are remarkable, in that Obama said that the Republicans showed him very early on that they intended to pursue a destructive course, including a fundamental opposition to his economic recovery measures. And then he explains how he knew the Senate filibuster rule was a destructive thing and "that the machinery there [in the Senate] was breaking down".

What's remarkable is not those observations. They are plainly accurate and were publicly obvious to anyone who was paying attention. What's remarkable is that he claims to have understood this early on, but then continued to pursue a policy of compromise designed to gain bipartisan support that he knew wasn't going to be there. If the President of the United States is saying that the functioning of the Upper House "was breaking down", shouldn't he and his Party have done something about it? For one thing, they had a 60-vote majority for part of Obama's term in the Senate. And the filibuster rule is a Senate rule that is enacted by a majority vote of the Senate and can be changed by a majority vote of the Senate.

Digby, On Hippie Punching Hullabaloo 09/26/2010. Digby explains the history of hippie-punching. Include the origin of the "DFH" ironic self-designation by liberal bloggers: "damn fucking hippie," in its less urbane original version.

Joan Walsh, Say it ain't so, Joe Salon 09/27/2010. Though a bit defensive about the accusation of discouraging people from voting, she writes:

It's true that the healthcare and financial reform bills were the most ambitious, far-reaching social legislation since the Great Society. You add in the $787 billion stimulus package, and it seems like a trifecta of social change that should have progressives ecstatic – especially when you consider that the right considers all of that legislation proof that Obama is a socialist.

Of course the problem is that all three of those accomplishments were the product of ugly, maybe even uglier-than-usual compromise, the first two with financial and insurance titans who caused the problems the bills were supposed to solve. The third, the stimulus, was crafted to win over Republicans, which made it a much less effective package than it needed to be – and then they still overwhelmingly voted against it. We are living with the inadequacy of the stimulus every day, politically and economically, as stubborn unemployment and financial insecurity make this a tougher election cycle for Democrats. [my emphasis]

Glenn Greenwald, WH messaging about its base Salon 09/28/2010. He writes of the I-hate-you-now-vote-for-me approach (emphasis in original):

Obama supporters often claim that those who object to this White House messaging are reacting emotionally and personally because they're "offended" by these criticisms. Speaking only for myself, that has nothing to do with any of this. I'm not the slightest bit "offended" when Obama officials and their apparatchiks voice these accusations. They have the same right to condemn their critics as their critics have to condemn them, and it's hardly a surprise that Obama officials harbor these thoughts about the "left." Contempt for the left is one of the unifying beliefs of the Washington establishment, which is why most conventional establishment journalists -- Maureen Dowd, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank -- cheered Gibbs' outburst about the "Professional Left." None of that is new; none of it is a surprise; and none of it is "offensive."

What is notable about it is what it reveals substantively. The country is drowning in a severe and worsening unemployment crisis. People are losing their homes by the millions. Income inequality continues to explode while the last vestiges of middle class security continue to erode. The Obama civil liberties record has been nothing short of a disgrace, usually equaling and sometimes surpassing the worst of the Bush/Cheney abuses. We have to stand by and watch the Commander-in-Chief fire one gay service member after the next for their sexual orientation. The major bills touted by Obama supporters were the by-product of the very corporatist/lobbyist dominance which Obama the candidate repeatedly railed against. Rather than take responsibility for any of this, they instead dismiss criticisms and objections as petulant, childish, "irresponsible whining" -- signaling rather clearly that they think they're doing the right thing and that these criticisms are fundamentally unfair.

Glenn evens speculates that the administration may actually be pursuing this line to deflect criticism away from the White House over the all-but-inevitable Democratic losses in the Congressional elections this year. It's all the hippies' fault, you see.

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party, filibuster, obama administration, us economy

The filibuster: anti-Jacksonian then, anti-Jacksonian now

The symbolism is just too perfect:

The first time that the filibuster was used in the United States Senate was in 1837, when several Jacksonian Senators sought to expunge the Senate's formal censure of President Andrew Jackson in 1834 for withdrawing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States. The Anti-Jacksonian Senators used the filibuster as a procedural tactic to delay the motion. Ultimately, the filibuster failed and the pro-Jackson contingent succeeded in expunging the President's censure from the Senate record.

From FightingRegistrar, A Brief History of the Filibuster Daily Kos 12/14/09.

Tags: filibuster

The death of health care reform yet again?

Gregg Levine in this column (Kill Bill? Latest Flips by Lieberman, Nelson Predictable; Require Hard-Line Response Firedoglake 12/14/09) doesn't mention to obvious option of abolishing the filibuster rule, though he does explain why it's almost unthinkable at this point that any meaningful health care reform bill will win 60 votes in the Senate. The Democrats have no excuse on this one. It takes a majority vote to abolish the filibuster rule. And with the "Gang of 14" agreement in 2005, the Republicans essentially declared that they will only recognize the filibuster rule as sacrosanct when it immediately benefits them.

But Levine does give a good description of the kind of scenario that could well lead the Progressive Caucus in the House to vote down the compromise:

It is quite possible that the Senate will produce a bill that contains no public option—or, likely, a mythical and weak PO resting behind a trigger well-nigh impossible to pull—no ban on annual or lifetime caps, no repeal of the insurance anti-trust exemption, no pharmaceutical reimportation, and no real Medicare buy-in (and let me add no community rating and a meaningless loss ratio), all accompanied by an easy opt-out, and a time-lag on any benefits that could be as much as four years. It is also likely the bill will still include an individual mandate, a massive extension on patent protection for biologics, permission to sell national plans, and all the garbage that has been tossed in along the way (like money for abstinence-only education and start-up/conversion funds for state-based cooperatives). And (and I admit I am saying this without any evidence but a gut feeling), I fully expect that, when the smoke clears, we will discover loopholes in the bans on the exclusion of pre-existing conditions and rescission. With all of that, what do we have?

Well, we do have conference, and, as we have said all along, our leverage is with the House, with the Progressive Caucus, and with individual representatives; so, of course, we hold our allies to their commitments to a robust public, and hope that they demand whatever comes out of conference include one (and include one without triggers). But what if what comes out of that meeting between Pelosi and Reid (with a soupcon Emanuel and Obama thrown in) is something much closer to the Senate beast I outlined above? Then what?

The bottom line is this. Joe Lieberman and the Republicans can gut health care reform because they're willing to kill the whole thing if they don't get what they want. Unless the Progressive Caucus is willing and able to do that, too, the White House and the Congressional leadership will just assume that they will always come along in the end on votes like health care reform, even for a genuinely bad bill.

Tags: democratic party, filibuster,, health care reform

An idea whose time has come

Abolishing the filibuster in the Senate, that is.

Chris Hayes writes about the basic problem with the filibuster rule in What Ails the Senate The Nation 11/04/09 (11/03/09).

The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on "cloture," the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans were in the minority, there were a record 112. Even without the filibuster, our system already has more choke points where legislation can die than almost any other liberal democracy. It's rare for one party to control both houses of Congress and the White House, and to have as solid a majority as the Democrats currently do. But the filibuster confers such power on an obstinate minority that it distorts the relationship between elections and governance in a way that dangerously attenuates democracy itself. [my emphasis]

Also from The Nation on this topic: William Greider, Stop Senator No 12/10/08 (12/29/08 issue); Thomas Geoghegan, The Case for Busting the Filibuster 08/12/09 (08/31/09 issue)

Tags: filibuster

Abolishing the filibuster

Josh Marshall published a comment from one of his readers that said something entirely sensible that I've seen hardly anyone talking about: it's time for the Democratic Senate to abolish the filibuster.

Now, I've always had kind of a warm and fuzzy feeling about the whole concept of the filibuster because I remember those junior-high and high-school civics and history lessons where we heard cute stories about what kind of strange things Senators have read into the official record in the course of filibusters.

But it's a Senate rule, not a law or a Constitutional provision. The Senate can abolish it with a majority vote.

And today's Republican Party is an authoritarian party that won't hesitate to use the filibuster as they just did to sink the auto bailout bill. In order to create more problems for the incoming Democratic administration - and probably at least as important to them, to try to wreck the United Auto Workers union - the Republicans were willing to risk another devastating blow to the economy and to use the filibuster to accomplish that dubious achievement. To show you how bad it is, even Dick Cheney took a more reasonable position than the Senate Republicans. For more about this aspect, see Memeorandum.

The Republicans were ready to abolish the filibuster back in 2006. Remember the "nuclear option" and the "Gang of 14"? In reality, the "Gang of 14" compromise - which like most such compromises during the Bush years gave the Republicans almost everything they wanted - effectively abolished the filibuster anyway.

The Democrats can't fight the Republicans effectively if the Reps are willing to filibuster to death anything and everything of major importance. It's time to abolish the filibuster.

Tags: filibuster