GOP Cave on DHS: One Week Funding Approved

President Obama is head of the executive branch of the Federal government. He has, like it or not, pretty expansive powers to direct or change the enforcement priorities of the executive branch. Arguably he has exceeded those powers in his latest executive immigration policy. The courts will end up making that decision. However the legislative branch, has, like it or not, the authority to determine what the budget is and on what it may be spent. In its own way this power is just as awesome as that of the President. Reckless or not, Congress has the ability to defund executive actions that it does not like. Ultimately this is what happened with the Vietnam War. However for either the President or Congress to effectively wield those powers which they possess they must be willing to say "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" and ignore objections to valid use of those powers. For all the criticism which President Obama has received, some valid, some not, for being a weak vacillating mouse of a man who is too eager to find common ground where there isn't any, on this executive action on illegal immigration, it turns out that at least to this point he's the one with the intestinal fortitude. Faced with the reality of what a DHS shutdown would mean to the country, DHS employees, and to their poll numbers Senate and House Republicans blinked, approving a one week DHS funding bill. President Obama signed the legislation last night.

UPDATE: HOUSE GOP SURRENDERS!!

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted today to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the budget year — without any restrictions on immigration. The vote is a victory for President Obama as Republicans had wanted to strip funding for the president's executive actions on immigration from the bill.

The measure now heads to President Obama, who is expected to sign it.

Two hours before a midnight deadline, Congress has narrowly averted a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security for one week, setting up another funding showdown for next Friday.

Hours before a midnight deadline, the House easily approved a one-week extension of the funding. The vote was 357-60. It required two-thirds of members' support to pass.

President Barack Obama later signed the bill.
The move means that DHS will not experience a shutdown at midnight, but it also fails to resolve the impasse created when the House initially lashed together the agency's budget and so-called "riders" that would gut the president's immigration proposals. Some House conservatives said that Obama's actions are unconstitutional and must be stopped - even at the cost of a DHS funding lapse.
LINK

This raises the question of what is going to change in one week? So are the Republicans going to throw another temper tantrum and then cave again? Wash, Rinse and Repeat? Another one week extension? What happened to the so-called tough guys who were going to stop the "Kenyan usurper" in his tracks? I'm joking but there are some conservative activists who are asking that very question. Erick Erickson had a bizarre and amusing full gay panic meltdown over at Redstate over the approaching Republican cave-in. The fact that when it came down to it the President was not bluffing while many Republicans were is useful information for future negotiations. There is no reason to take Republican threats seriously because they've shown again and again that they lack follow through. This is basic game theory stuff. If you don't or won't do what you threatened you were going to do your power is much diminished. And by power here I mean masculinity as so much of this fight was understood by all concerned as a brutal test of willpower and manhood. It is of course possible that in one week the Republicans will find a spinal column but if I were the President I would be betting otherwise. Time will tell. Perhaps the Republicans will be so ashamed of their approval of the one week clean bill that they will feel cornered and not back down next time. But again all we know right now is that the Republicans are just like a dull knife that just ain't cutting. They're just talking loud and saying nothing as Soul Brother Number One might have pointed out.

What are your thoughts?

Is President Obama a lame duck?

Good morning. Unfortunately this is another day when it looks like the overseer at my salt mine employment wants to know in exact detail how much salt I've mined over the past month, where are the records and why didn't I mine more salt. So as a result this will be a short post but it is something that has been on my mind lately. Is President Obama a lame duck? Usually, lame duck status only accrues to a President in the final two years or less remaining of his term, after the November midterms, when his party has usually lost seats in the House or Senate or even if they haven't done so are looking forward, often for reasons of self-preservation, to the next political cycle, which by definition won't include the current President. Much like the lag period between a corporate boss announcing that they're retiring and the time at which they actually do so, people who used to toady to the boss or at least grudgingly offer respect to the position, may suddenly discover heretofore unknown independence of thought and action. The boss' requests may be ignored or slow-walked. If the boss was never much liked in the first place, open insubordination is not out of the realm of possibility. This is particularly true when the boss was not well plugged into the power structures of the company. Other power brokers can even subtly or not so subtly encourage such behavior, especially if your workplace is a real dog-eat-dog kind of environment. I've heard that Washington D.C. is such a place where the weak are killed and eaten, politically speaking.

Now as far as some more right-wing citizens were concerned of course the President lacked legitimacy in the first place so they saw him as a lame duck from the start despite being elected twice by comfortable margins. But some recent events and data should give the President and his supporters, if not fits, cause for serious concern.

President Obama hit a new low in support, according to an NBC/WSJ poll. President Obama’s job approval rating sank to a new low of 41 percent in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Tuesday, forecasting political headwinds for the Democratic Party in the months leading up to November’s midterm elections.

Forty-eight percent of respondents in the survey said that they are less likely to vote for a candidate who is a solid supporter of of Obama, versus 26 percent who said they are more likely to support a candidate that supports the president. More than a third of respondents remained neutral, with 41 percent saying that their vote will have nothing to do with the president.

LINK

Now from a purely selfish standpoint this may not matter too much to the President. We don't have a parliamentary system with votes of confidence or party leaders being removed by their party. Short of impeachment and conviction President Obama will serve out his term. But this matters a great deal to Senate and House Democrats, who are starting to see less of a downside to opposing the President. This was made clear in the successful (and shameful) disposal of the nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the similar ominous storm clouds gathering around the nomination of Vivek Murthy to be the Surgeon General. Now regardless of whether you think that either man would have been good at his job the point remains that it is Senate Democrats who either wavered or led the charge against both men. Those aren't the actions of people who think that President Obama is popular or that they need to worry about opposing the President. There is no price to pay for opposing President Obama. He talks tough but seems to be at a loss how to deal with determined opposition. Again, it is a little early to be having these sorts of problems with your own party. Part of this may be coming from a long held belief among some Democrats that President Obama has short coattails and so they have to look out for themselves, politically speaking. 

WASHINGTON — Democrats are becoming increasingly alarmed about their midterm election fortunes amid President Obama’s sinking approval ratings, a loss in a special House election in Florida last week, and millions of dollars spent by Republican-aligned groups attacking the new health law. The combination has led to uncharacteristic criticism of Mr. Obama and bitter complaints that his vaunted political organization has done little to help the party’s vulnerable congressional candidates. Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, state party officials and strategists revealed a new urgency about the need to address the party’s prospects. One Democratic lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Obama was becoming “poisonous” to the party’s candidates. 

At the same time, Democrats are pressing senior aides to Mr. Obama for help from the political network. When two senior White House officials — Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director, and Phil Schiliro, the health care adviser — went to the Capitol late last month to address Senate Democrats about the Affordable Care Act, they were met with angry questions about why Mr. Obama’s well-funded advocacy group, Organizing for Action, was not airing commercials offering them cover on the health law....

Surprise, surprise the PPACA has been driving some of the Democratic problems. Well I can't see the future but you may remember that I predicted that it would not work as designed, which is apparently why the President has been making so many changes to it. Time will tell if I'm wrong or not but if it was such a great plan there wouldn't have to be so many unilateral changes to it. Similar past changes to the REAL ID act and some deep discussions with our very own The Janitor have grudgingly convinced me that the President is probably still within his legal rights though he may be pushing up against the extreme limits. Different topic, different day. But anyway I don't think that pro-PPACA voters will be a serious factor in the midterm elections. Democrats know this which is why they are about two minutes away from hitting the abandon ship button. Still, as we've seen in the past, oftentimes the evil overlord plans don't work out. President Obama wasn't supposed to win in 2008 or 2012. But he did. Every time his rivals cackle that they've got him now he seems to thrive and win. So Democratic panic may be real but it also may be overstated. I can't call it. Well I could but I'd rather know what you think.

Is President Obama a premature lame duck?

Are some Democrats correct to distance themselves from the President?

Do you think Republicans can retake the Senate?

How can the President keep Senate Democrats moving in his direction?

Louis Seidman: Is the Constitution Outmoded??

After the electoral stomping that President Obama gave to a hapless Mitt Romney as well as the slow transformation of once solidly red states into purple or even blue states, many people on the political left are chafing at limits on Presidential and/or majoritarian power. Whether it's Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow getting their talking points from the White House and dutifully coming out against whatever the "evil Republicans" are doing or immigration rights activists urging the President to meet their goals through executive orders or law school deans jawboning the Supreme Court to not invalidate a law because the President really wanted it, some folks aren't fond of limited government or separation of powers, at least as long as their guy is in charge.

There's an unseemly amount of outrage, among the Right and the Left that the other side is able to thwart their goals by using procedural mechanisms built into our system of governance. This is currently most obvious among the Left but that's just because the Left is politically ascendant while the Right is still slightly better at unified opposition-or at least it was until the fiscal cliff deal.

If you ever took a civics or political science class, you know that we have three co-equal branches of government. The President doesn't get to make law, only enforce it. The courts can interpret but have no enforcement capacity. Congress can withhold money and write law but can't tell the executive branch what to do. So theoretically, each branch can prevent the other two from carrying out unlawful or unconstitutional actions. And human nature being what it is each branch tends to be jealous of its powers and prerogatives. Purely from spite one branch may oppose another branch and limit its options. This rivalry and jealously should work to the citizens' advantage as there is no all powerful centralized government which can create, enforce and interpret law all at once.

That's the theory of our Constitution.


But reality is quite different. There has been, almost from the beginning, a tendency for the President to stretch his authority and break rules. Sometimes there are strong people in Congress and the Courts to, figuratively speaking, throw something high and inside to make the President stop hogging the plate, so to speak. Sometimes, however, there aren't. Often, majorities don't see why they shouldn't win on everything.

There have been increasingly loud mutterings on the Left about getting rid of the Senate filibuster, having the President raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, dropping the electoral college, eliminating the Senate, ignoring the rule that spending bills must start in the House, and urging Presidential executive orders on every hot button issue that twists their knickers. 
Recently Louis Seidman, a Georgetown law professor, wrote that the time had come to junk the Constitution. Unfortunately he didn't say what to replace it with or, in my view, make a cogent argument about why the Constitution was bad. Seidman made the by now obligatory ad hominems that the Founders were long dead white men, had no idea what challenges we faced today, and were often racist slave owners. That's all true and all in the context he was using, completely irrelevant. Those same dead white men also placed freedom of speech and the right to jury trial in the Constitution. It seems a bit, well, difficult to blast something that you don't like as coming from evil white slaveowners and then keep quiet about things you do like but which came from those same evil white slaveowners. 

In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.

Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian.  If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

The professor assumes that everyone agrees that the Constitution is preventing progress and must be changed. I don't agree. It's frightening that he thinks the laws and constitutional restrictions against government taking of life, liberty or property should be followed just because we respect them, not because they're the law. We're supposed to have a legal system based in law, not fleeting respect. Respect is an arbitrary thing. As the country becomes ever more diverse it is critical to have baseline rules everyone understands. Seidman gives short shrift to the fact that there is a process both to amend the Constitution and to even start from scratch. The problem from Seidman's pov though, is to do that requires agreement from a wide variety of people with different viewpoints. The results might not be what he was expecting. I think Seidman is high on his own supply. But he may have a point that we need to change some things.

So give it a shot. You are Willy F***** Wonka and this is your chocolate factory! You are King or Queen for a day. The below questions are only examples. Don't let them limit you.

Questions

You and you alone can rewrite the Constitution. What stays or goes?

Free Speech? Commerce Clause? Police Searches? Presidential Authority on War?

Get rid of state authority completely? No private ownership of guns?

Place abortion rights and equal pay for women in the Bill of Rights?

Ignore the rules about being able to confront witnesses at trial?

Allow 15 yr olds to vote? Prevent people on welfare from voting? Have intelligence tests for voting?

Ban all forms of affirmative action? Make hate speech unprotected by First Amendment?

Eliminate standing armies? Get rid of the Federal Reserve?

Allen West and Black Conservatives

You may have heard about the tiff between Representative Allen West (R-Florida) and Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.(D-Florida) If not you can read about it here.  In short , DWS criticized West's support for Medicare cuts, given the high number of seniors living in his district and West went ballistic, firing off this email.

From: Z112 West, Allen
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 04:48 PM
To: Wasserman Schultz, Debbie
Cc: McCarthy, Kevin; Blyth, Jonathan; Pelosi, Nancy; Cantor, Eric
Subject: Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman-Schultz

Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige. You are the most vile, unprofessional ,and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up. Focus on your own congressional district!
I am bringing your actions today to our Majority Leader and Majority Whip and from this time forward, understand that I shall defend myself forthright against your heinous characterless behavior......which dates back to the disgusting protest you ordered at my campaign hqs, October 2010 in Deerfield Beach.
You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!
Steadfast and Loyal
Congressman Allen B West (R-FL)

Now this is pretty pathetic because it shows among other things that West is incapable of taking criticism without reacting personally. It was pretty over the top behavior for someone who is supposed to be a cool calm leader. But ok. Congress has seen worse. But West wasn't done of course. He went on the Mark Levin radio show where he saw fit to drop these words of wisdom.

The thing that really most aggravates me is that there's this double standard in that the people on the hard left can continue to attack conservatives -- and especially minority conservatives and female conservatives. But yet when all of a sudden you stand up and say you will not tolerate this any more, then they claim to be a victim, which I find to be absolutely laughable...People who are black conservatives — I grew up in the inner city, strong values, came from a strong military family and background — (and) what we do is we totally invalidate the liberal social welfare policies and programs...“I’m a threat because I’m the guy that got off of their 21st Century plantation. And they cannot afford to have a strong voice such as mine out there reverberating and resonating across this country. And even more so, they’re not used to anyone that says ‘I’m going to fight back against you.’ That is absolutely reprehensible to them.

Whoa....wait a minute there Nat Turner.
Aren't the defining characteristics of Black conservatives supposed to be personal responsibility and a belief that racism either no longer exists or is so small as to be not worth bothering about? I mean that isn't what we hear all day every day from such conservative icons as Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Ken Hamblin, Ward Connerly, Clarence Thomas, Star Parker, Thomas Sowell and others?
Hmm. Ok I guess I get it now. I really do.

• If you have to wait six years for a promotion that whites get in three...
• If you have discovered that you earn less than some whites with worse education....
• If you constantly have your work checked and double checked for mistakes you never made..
• If you have a sneaking suspicion that you're never in the room when the really important decisions are made at work...
• If you can't get a business loan despite having a great plan, great credit and great assets but see that whites get one despite having less of these requirements
• If you are stopped and harassed by the police because the car you drive is too nice...
• If it takes you a year or more to find work after being laid off because interviewers have a different response to seeing you in person than hearing you on the phone...
• If homes for sale or rent are suddenly "taken" when you show up to look at them
• If you are turned away from a club or restaurant because there are already enough people that look like you inside
• If you are a little irritated and concerned about pictures of the President as a pimp, a witchdoctor or an ape being seen as humorous by certain elements in society
• If you move into a neighborhood and like mushrooms "For sale" signs start popping up
• If you are driving with a white friend and are stopped by the police because they are concerned for the white friend's safety...

then obviously you just need to work harder my friend and stop whining. Being Black has NOTHING to do with your issues. Man up!!! Stop being a crybaby!!!!

But if you are a Black Conservative and someone disagrees with you, well OBVIOUSLY they're only doing it because you're Black. Those racist so-and-so's!!!! The nerve of them slavemasters!!!! And you should definitely go ahead and use offensive and charged references to lynchings and plantations.  Let the chips fall where they may because simply disagreeing with your ideas is JUST LIKE whipping escaped slaves. Oh the humanity!!!!

Whether it's Herman Cain claiming Jon Stewart mocked him because he's Black or Clarence Thomas referring to "high tech lynchings" or the ubiquitous black conservative references to "democratic plantations" or comparing some social program or discussion as being just like slavery, black conservatives too often use racially charged language both as a sword to attack their rivals and as a shield to prevent legitimate debate. Most disgustingly the ONLY time Black conservatives ever even appear to consider the possibility that racism still exists is when someone criticizes them or opposes them politically. Victimology powers! Activate!!!!!

And I hate to break it to West or Cain or any of the other clowns that traffic in this stuff but guess what? Your family wasn't the only black family to deal with slavery, segregation, discrimination, etc. Millions of other black families throughout the diaspora did as well. So let's stop pretending like you did everything by yourself. Black people in 2011 America are in a better position than we were in 1951 America precisely because many Black (and other) people struggled and died.

And that brings me to the final point. Look I myself have some conservative ideas on some issues. There are indeed honorable conservatives of all backgrounds. I think they're wrong on most things but people can agree to disagree. 

The problem with Professional Black Conservatives is that they are usually used (or in some cases disgustingly eager) to give cover to the most rancid reactionary right wing views, often (IMO) because they have personal issues to work through. Many Professional Black Conservatives have little interest in attracting black people to the conservative side of the aisle. Rather their primary concern appears to be buck dancing for white conservatives and assuring these white conservatives that racism is long gone. Making comparisons to slavery on EVERY FREAKING ISSUE that comes up or running for martyr status anytime someone offers criticism won't attract black people to your cause. It would work just as well as a Jewish conservative constantly telling Jews that supporting (insert social program or idea here) is like taking the fast train to Auschwitz or that Jewish liberals are like kapos at Treblinka while Jewish conservatives have escaped the Democratic death camp. It insults my intelligence and makes me very angry....

QUESTIONS:

What's your take?

Was West out of line?

Is it possible for everyone (black/white/left/right) to tone down and/or remove slavery metaphors and comparisons from modern political debate?