President Constitution Supreme Court Senate Gobbledygook

President/Constitution/Supreme Court/Senate Gobbledygook, part I.

Nothing in the U. S. Constitution says ‘a president’s fourth year doesn’t count.’ What the Constitution does say about the president’s term:

“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:” (Article 2, Section 1)

Nothing in the U. S. Constitution says ‘a president cannot nominate a Supreme Court justice in the fourth year of his term.’ What the Constitution does say about a president’s nominating a justice for the high court:

“He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” (Article 2, Section 2)

Nothing in the U. S. Constitution says ‘a Senator can refuse to advise and consent if he doesn’t feel like it.’ What the Constitution does say about Senators’ powers:

“Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.” (Article 1, Section 5) (Also see Article 2, Section 2 again)

Cut through the gobbledygook. Key word: EXPULSION.

I think the same thing this time that I thought last time (2016).

  1. The president’s term is four years.
  2. Mitch McConnell should be expelled from the Senate.

Before I clarify points a) and b), later, a short comment on the headlines. Forget about the day’s mantra from the national political press or prominent Democrats – that the GOP leadership, i.e. Mitch McConnell and henchmen, are being “hypocritical” or “inconsistent.” To do it justice, the GOP in the Senate is not being inconsistent. It is being consistent. It pursued a scurvy strategy last time; it is pursuing a scurvy strategy this time. The strategy is to improperly control nominations to the U. S. Supreme Court, an executive power, by legislators. The tactics are somewhat different (not entirely, but I’ll get to that later), but the strategy is consistent. It is also openly and blatantly unconstitutional. Separation of powers in three branches of government is a cornerstone of U. S. government.

As to “hypocrisy,” hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld used to say. To call McConnell’s action “hypocrisy” or “hypocritical” is just an insult to hypocrites. McConnell and his allies in Senate and party are barely pretending to do the right thing. They’re not even pretending aggressively to seem as though they think they are doing the right thing. They’re legislators (of a sort) trying to control an executive branch power, appointments to the high court. They’re making no bones about it.

Mitch McConnell - Wikipedia

(The flip side of the same coin is that they don’t tend to be eager to legislate, when legislation would benefit the public. For example, Congress could heal Social Security simply by removing the arbitrary cap on income that supports it.)

If the Democrats and a few Republicans in the Senate are paying attention, they will at least ensure that any nominee for the highest court in the land is sufficiently vetted. And the time remaining is not enough time for vetting. This is one occasion upon which a genuine filibuster might work.

After the election. Part 1

GOP game plan: Now, the midterm elections are over. Let the harm to the nation begin.

What a difference a few days make. Very quick run-down here, on some key issues, before and after November 4.

Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton before the Senate

On gay marriage:

Opposing a national trend and many better-qualified judges on the bench, two rightwing judges ban gay marriage in four states. In case you had not noticed, the cases were filed in 2012; argued in 2013; proceeded in 2014. The opinion was announced after our midterm elections. More on the decision here. It was written by George W. Bush appointee Jeffrey Sutton, joined by Bush appointee Deborah Cook. A quick glance at their ideological track record tells the story.

One other thing these two Circuit Court judges have in common is that neither received Senate confirmation, after being nominated to the court by GWBush, until a post-9/11 Republican Senate, presided over by Vice President Dick Cheney, was in position.

So, to all the depressed-turnout voters who just sat out the midterm election in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee who have now lost another round: bear in mind that whom you elect to Congress matters, in off-years as well as in presidential election years.

Senator Mitch McConnell, appearing in public

On the Affordable Care Act:

Speaking of coming out, House Speaker John Boehner and probable Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have now exposed themselves in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, Virginia, McConnell is going to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Contrary to what McConnell said on Fox News television a week before the election, he’s going after Obamacare.

I suppose the only real question is why Roll Call covered for McConnell, giving further play (and credibility) to his falsehoods on television:

Updated 9:35 p.m. | Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare [sic] anytime [sic] soon.

Tempering the expectations of conservatives a week before the elections that could install him as the first Republican majority leader in eight years, the Kentucky Republican said in a Fox News interview Tuesday a repeal of the health care law simply wasn’t in the cards for now.

He wasn’t telling Fox News anything that close observers of the Senate and the budget process didn’t already know, but it serves as a reminder of the limitations Republicans should expect even if they net six or seven seats, given the obvious reality that President Barack Obama is still in the White House.”

Actually, that is not a real question. It is a rhetorical question; Roll Call is pro-GOP, not nonpartisan.

Anyway, to all of the voters in Kentucky who sat out the election figuring that at least McConnell would be smart enough not to try to destroy every attempt at health insurance reform: you just lost another one.

I told you so.

This is what you get when you rely for ‘analysis’ on paid shills or media-outlet groupthink, whether at Roll Call or in the big-city daily newspapers or on NBC.

The problem goes back a few years. With the amnesia typical of political coverage, few media outlets recall (or reveal) the political temper dominant in the news media only ten years ago. So simple, so forgotten: A candidate who mentioned that people ought to be paid a day’s wage for a day’s work was laughed out of town, or ignored. (Who could win with an argument like that?) It was largely Barack Obama who up-ended that political worldview, somewhat as J. K. Rowling up-ended the conventional wisdom that ‘young people don’t read’, and (much earlier) Dr. Seuss up-ended the notion that children’s books had to be eye-glazingly dull.

There are some small enclaves in the national political press who will never forgive him. Sorry, but some people are more threatened by merit than supportive of it. When times are tight, those individuals tend to get worse, not better.

Note to human beings: the ‘smart money’ is usually wrong, at least when the smart money comprises a small number of under-qualified and over-promoted individuals in a declining profession–whose decline was brought about largely by their own misdirection of resources.

I say this with love.

Once again, dear friends: when, between c. 1980 and 2006, did you ever see insurance industry problems/abuses/outright fraud discussed with clarity and focus in national political coverage?

 

More later.

 

 

Those pesky regulations and the empty threat of filibuster

Regulation, public policy and the hollow threat of filibuster

Family responsibilities and work have taken me in recent months to Louisville, Ky., Shreveport, La., and Houston, Texas. The changes of place did not change the big picture. In every place, local news stories and larger news stories–this is something one can count on–reconfirmed the need for what the GOP calls ‘job-killing regulations’. This phrase is quite the talking point, by the way, notwithstanding its lack of validity. The nonprofit web site Think Progress reported in April that use of “job-killing regulation” increased 17750 percent in U.S. newspapers between 2007 and 2011.

Orwell lives, and this is one of the big Orwellianisms. Repeat it often enough, and it starts to seem plausible? –Let’s hope not. There is no evidence that regulation kills jobs.

On the contrary, there is every indication that unregulated outsourcing, off-shoring, merger and consolidation do kill jobs, or at least U.S. jobs. This is one of the big reasons why the rightwing noise machine is so against what it characterizes as regulation: protection of jobs, like protection of public health and public safety, works to the advantage of the many, rather than just of the few.

There is also every indication that lack of regulation–genuine regulation, backed up by oversight and enforcement–kills people. Does any responsible person really want an Alzheimer’s facility, or any long-term care facility, to be unregulated and unmonitored? Unlikely, and the same goes for day care centers, private schools, and children’s camps. For that matter, the same goes for the athletic program at Penn State (State Penn).

Travel is a continuing reminder of the need to protect public safety and public health. From the interior space on an airplane–if any–to getting from airport to final destination, from questions like whether your luggage arrives to more essential questions like whether you do, our predominant business model tends to create a continuing tug-of-war between efforts to cut corners at the top (corporate management) and efforts to survive at the bottom (customers). The same goes for every other industry. There are some honorable exceptions, such as CREDO, and they deserve kudos. But exceptions do not disprove the general rule.

Among the local news stories in Kentucky:

  • Neighbors in one community gathered at an elementary school to hear about ground contamination from lead, arsenic and DDT from a 29-acre industrial site near their property.
  • Three day care centers in Louisville recently closed, after the driver of a van crashed, killing a woman passenger and sending 14 children to the hospital, three in intensive care. The company operating the centers had previously been cited by state agencies for dozens of safety violations; this is a perfect example of the kind of ‘small business’ where ‘job-killing regulations’ are bemoaned by Mitt Romney and his spokespersons including Ed Gillespie.
  • In other local news, an abandoned theme park has been getting only minimal maintenance, meaning that its structures will at some point just fall down. The company that owns it, Six Flags, was in bankruptcy reorganization, and the Kentucky State Fair Board faces its own budget constraints–like virtually all state and local agencies.

When we lose ‘government jobs’–another favorite Orwellianism–we lose independent oversight for dangerous occupations and sites.

Speaking of oversight and dangerous sites, word of fraud in the investment world also continually seeps out. A few familiar examples suffice:

  • Bernard Madoff’s brother Peter has pleaded guilty to fabricating compliance reports and deceiving the SEC. This case–the record-breaking Madoff Ponzi scheme–is another reminder of the need for good, honest record-keeping, and for someone to watch the custodians.
  • Houston can do you an Allen Stanford, investment scheme $8 billion.
  • An investment advisor in Glasgow, Ky., is indicted for allegedly defrauding investors in Kentucky and Indiana of $2.4 million. Having promised to invest customers’ money, the so-called advisor allegedly spent it on a shooting range he set up in an old rock quarry, and on himself.
  • Closer to home (D.C. region), the former CEO of Virginia’s Bank of the Commonwealth has been indicted for alleged fraud conspiracy in covering up the bank’s financial condition since 2008.
  • On a grander scale, we have august Barclays bank allegedly depressing its interest rate on lending–and thereby short-changing institutional investors including Baltimore City on returns they could have gotten. The city of Baltimore is suing. Time will tell whether Virginia Attorney General Ken (“Kooky”) Cuccinelli elects to do the same.

All of these problems are a function of privatizing gain, socializing risk; reserving gains for the few and shifting the burdens of compliance, taxation and monitoring to the general public, to the individual, and to state and local government. The pattern fits into a larger one: Over-all family wealth in the U.S. declined 39 percent from 2007 to 2010, while the wealthiest gained 2 percent.

No one talks about it this way, but the NRA and nut-right mantra that what everybody needs are bigger guns and more guns also fits into the same pattern. Why, when you think about it, should a private citizen be expected to go out and purchase ludicrously expensive semi-automatic weapons for protection? Why should the onus of acquiring combat gear and combat training be on private citizens in the first place? Socializing risk, privatizing gain–the big-time weapons commerce fills the bill, and our docile GOP lawmakers relentlessly forward this agenda by talking about it as a “right.” Funnily enough, they do not talk about purchasing health insurance the same way.

For self-defence, there is actually no evidence that bigger magazines and more clips mean more protection. Even at worst–firing a gun at someone–you need one good shot, not a spray of careless rounds. That’s if you really care about self-defense rather than aggression.

But our NRA, and the politicians hired by the NRA, have been intent for decades now on blurring the line between self-defense and aggression.

Again when you think about it, the sole use for automatic and semi-automatic multiple-shot firearms, as for big magazines that hold hundreds of rounds of ammo, would be to kill off a whole crowd or army of attackers. It happens in movies. In real life, armed attacks are generally perpetrated by–what’s that word again?–oh, yes!–loners. In reality, unlike in film, attacks with big-time weapons are more liable to come from one gunman or two, shooting into a crowd or a classroom, than from a crowd shooting at the one lone individual (you, in this paranoid view).

This fact could represent something of a hurdle for the guns-and-ammo industry, the NRA, and the GOP officeholders who support them, if they were to permit its transmission. So they prevent its getting out, as much as possible–no small feat, given that it surfaces again every time some disturbed young guy, heavily armed, commits a mass shooting. So what’s a guns-and-ammo industry to do? –Why, market to the paranoid and unstable, of course. What are the cartel-supporting NRA and the NRA-supporting GOP to do? –Why, vent as much hyperbolic us-and-them rhetoric into the air as possible (Michelle Bachmann’s nonsense about Huma Abedin is only the most recent example).

Anything to obfuscate the fact that mass shootings are committed by the lone off-base guy, against the masses, not the other way around.

James Holmes

This point should not be oversimplified, but it also should not be lost sight of. Back to ‘regulation’ again–that being the GOP word for providing for public safety and public health: Public safety and public health require decent regulation of indecent commerce. Multiple clips and magazines, body armor, automatic or so-called semi-automatic rifles, assault weapons, military-grade- and SWAT-team gear–there is no reason why unauthorized civilians should be allowed to buy them. We need regulation of the online commerce that gets around state and local attempts to protect public safety. We need for private gun sales, second-hand gun sales, straw purchases, auctions, and gun shows to operate under the same law as storefront owners who sell guns do.

The laws, furthermore,  need to be good.

Contrary to the thrust of some media representations, the situation is not hopeless. There is no such thing as perfect safety or perfected public safety, as there is no other perfection on earth. But the fact that we cannot do everything is not an argument for doing nothing. In public policy, some specific remedies are clear.

And in the politics that lead to policy changes, some highly specific small steps are also clear, and timely. There is no reason, for example, why strong public support for reasonable public safety measures should be contravened by a minority in the senate–by the mere threat of filibuster.

Calls to abolish the filibuster by amending the constitution are about as good an idea as most proposed constitutional amendments, which means not very. There is a simpler, cleaner and more legitimate means to address this ridiculous problem that never should have been allowed to arise in the first place: When our GOP minority in the U.S. Senate threatens to filibuster, make them actually filibuster. Let Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe and Dan Coats and the rest get up there and do like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, albeit with less idealism. Let them read aloud from the Bible they profess to love so much, read Shakespeare, read Little Women or Anne of Green Gables for that matter.

Mitch McConnell

Having the mere threat of filibuster substitute for putting in the time on the floor, preventing needed legislation, is unconstitutional.

 

 

Sad, pathetic jobs

Just got a call from someone who has not been taught manners. When telephoning someone, especially someone you don’t know, the general guideline is that the caller identifies himself first, then asks for the person being called.

This was an unsolicited call from some company. What company? Still don’t know. [Name offered, possibly not his real name] said he was calling from the “Auto Processing Department.” When asked “of what?” he didn’t seem to understand the question. Pressed for the name of the company, he repeated “Auto Processing Department,” then adjusted slightly to “Auto Processing Center.”

Never did get a company name; have no idea what product or service was being offered. Caller–a young guy located in California–probably didn’t go to college for this, assuming he went. But this–telephone soliciting–was in all probability the only job he could land. Usually I try to be decent to cold callers, when I make the mistake of answering the phone, but this time the caller gave up, courteously, signing off wishing me a good day. Irritating though the whole thing was, I hope at least the job is just for the summer. It’s still a waste of everyone’s time. But our anti-regulation types on the whole won’t hear of protecting consumers against waste of time, waste of money, product malfunction, service misfeasance, or outright fraud.

We need our Do Not Call list capabilities again.

More fundamentally, we need to invest in our country, so our young people will have something to do besides telephone soliciting, waiting tables and bartending.

Rep. Boehner and Sen. McConnell seem unlikely to come through any time soon, since their place in Congress depends on preventing the Obama administration from accomplishing anything further positive. But at least the larger media outlets could report and explain the difference between debt and deficit, and the tax differential between income tax and capital gains, and the place of hedge funds and holding companies in the larger picture of wealth and income disparity in the U.S.

On related matters

Speaking of California–one of the unspoken truths in our century is that real estate in California costs too much. California is not Hawaii, certainly is not Hong Kong or Tokyo. California does not have to import almost all of its manufactured goods and most of its food. For a house to cost five times as much, or more than five times as much, in California as on the East Coast is not economically rational. There is no objective necessity for the gross difference. People should not have to finance a move to California as though they were about to rent on Saturn.  The gap between California and the rest of the nation is a drag on the entire housing industry.

[Update]

Re-reading the above, on second thought I do not lump in waiting tables and bartending with telephone soliciting. Waiting tables is honest work. Telephone soliciting is often not. This is not to blame a young guy for taking whatever job he could get. The fault lies with his employers, among others: He has the thankless task in the first place of calling strangers who do not want to hear from him. To perform this task, he is given no job training except on reading from a script. Probably they bestowed on him a fake name to identify himself with.

The script is a bunch of malarkey, and to have to read from it is demeaning, comparing unfavorably with reading from scripts (TV/radio commercials) pitching embarrassing body products.  At least commercial voice-over pays well, something not said for telephone soliciting.

The kicker is that all the time spent by this employee on the job is subsidized through our federal tax policy; his wages or salary are a business write-off for the employer. Any time misspent or message misdirected, owing to lack of training or lack of demand or lack of good business judgment, falls under the same heading of business expenses. My time wasted, au contraire, or that of any other unwilling customer, is of course not a write-off.

Meanwhile, we’ve got GOP legislators and candidates screaming about ‘government jobs’–meaning teachers among others (firefighters, police, emergency response). These guys are perfectly willing to support half-trained telephone soliciting on behalf of possibly fraudulent products–most of these calls turn out to be about refinancing mortgages or some other form of lending, which is seldom offered via cold calling by any reputable company. They’re considerably less willing to support education at any level, in the public interest, by genuine teachers at genuine schools.

It’s the scandalous set-up for-profit diploma-mill online ‘universities’ all over again, on a smaller scale.