I'm sticking with the new plan from last week: leaving it up to you. But in a very newsy week, I'll kick it off by saying that the ACA decision obviously did matter (if not, as I've argued, to the election)...and I'll say that the Holder contempt stuff goes in the "did not matter" pile.
So, turning it over to you: what do you think mattered this week?
Saturday, June 30, 2012
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I vote for the Holder thing mattering. It's pretty obvious that it's not just pettiness for pettiness' sake. Holder announced a few weeks ago that he was going to pursue the voter fraud nonsense aggressively -- and not a month passes and Holder is cited for contempt of Congress. They're trying to cut him off at the knees and render impotent his ability to point fingers at GOP bullshittery -- and voter issues are pretty important. I wish we had an AG who could go after this stuff, and now it's not clear that we do.
ReplyDeleteI'm ambivalent on the Holder issue. On one hand, the attack on him appears to be political. On the other hand, it is wrong to minimize the Fast and Furious fiasco because people did die and guns did fall into the wrong hands. Partisanship pushes Democrats to turn a blind eye to the fiasco, which in turn compromises Democrats' integrity.
DeleteLatest Europlan.
ReplyDeleteWhat would the American equivalent of those Germans be who now claim Merkel committed treason for her ESM compromise because "now everyone can steal German money"? (The way the ESM is organized, everyone in the Eurozone pays in, so if anyone consciously gets himself in trouble since the ESM will bail them out, they'll make themselves a lot of enemies)
Delete... and signs that the domestic housing market is recovering.
ReplyDeleteMy neighbor got nearly their asking price - just a hair off of peak. The tight market is pushing prices back up, which is good for the balance books, if not for buyers.
DeleteThe first-ever contempt citation of a sitting AG doesn’t matter? Wishful thinking?
ReplyDeleteMaybe a good way to test if it matters is to agree to parameters for determining if the contempt vote had any effect and a timeframe in which to measure those parameters. For example, maybe we look at 1) Obama's approval rating in the four weeks from the contempt vote and 2) whether or not Holder's department makes any reforms or re-organizations and 3) whether Romney makes any pledges to reform the Justice Department if elected. Is there any other way this could matter, aside from giving Fox News something to talk about? Let's set up a system and look at the data!
DeleteI will second anon and say Euorplan 2.0 (or is it more like 112.5)? I would also say Holder matters, but only as a good example of how deeply entrenched The Crazy is becoming. At least they are just comparing Holder to cold blooded rich kid murderers, but I do think the Menendez brothers are a bit too California specific, us here in the Midwest had to look them up on Wikipedia, guess they are saving the Charles Manson analogies for later. But come on guys, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got divorced, that's more important that giving Americans access to healthcare.
ReplyDeleteEgypt and Syria both had developments that mattered.
ReplyDeleteI think the Holder thing only matters if it leads to something significant, and I don't see what it leads to. And no, it doesn't matter just because it's the first contempt citation of an AG. This Congress is setting a lot of silly firsts. They will probably set a few more before they are done.
ReplyDeleteOk, so I’m having a lot of fun cataloguing the liberal reaction to Fast and Furious. In no particular order:
ReplyDelete1) Another partisan witch-hunt… Harrumph!
2) The drug gangs already have truckloads of weapons, what’s a couple thousand more?
3) Yawwwn…. Ok, it’s a scandal. Who cares?
4) This is Health Care Win Day. I will NOT let those Rethuglican bastards harsh my mellow!
5) Sometimes bureaucracies just do this kind of crazy sh*t. What are you going to do?
6) This isn’t oversight -- it’s an attack on the White House!
7) Ok, so there are A LOT of withheld documents, but the ones that have been released make Holder look really good!
8) What’s wrong with gun walking?
9) Gun walking? There’s no gun walking.
10) Sure it’s the first citation of a sitting AG… but this Congress is just soo full of silly firsts, it’s hard to take them seriously anymore!
11) It’s all a Republican conspiracy to divert the AG from voter fraud investigations.
12) It’s all just NRA-Limbaugh-Birther propaganda.
13) _Republicans_ are crazy
Any more?
I think #13 covers it
DeleteAgree #13 covers it, but you left out
Delete14) "idea originated in Bush administration; if crazy Rs really cared, they'd be subpoenaing Bush officials"
also
15) "if crazy Republicans had anything, they wouldn't be resorting to bizarre NRA-generated conspiracy theories to explain motivations of Democrat evildoers"
also
16) "Read the Fortune investigation and then get back to us." http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
Thanks CK!
Delete17) All this shows is that we need more gun control!
18) Crazy Republicans think this is a conspiracy to advance gun control!
They love saying how the prior AG didn't know anything about it, and that 'it was wrapped up'.
DeleteAs if that meant the ATF guys and federal prosecutors were laid off, or something. Or that because this AG did attempt oversight, he's doomed for it but no oversight was fine.
Ugh.
So Couves, did you read Jonathan's post this week on scandalmongering?
DeleteI've been having a lot of fun cataloguing average American voter reactions to Fast and Furious:
Delete1) I love that movie!
2) It was so cheesy
3) I hated it but I love car chase scenes
4) I didnt really understand the plot
5) why would Congress vote that they had contempt for a stupid movie?Does that mean we're not allowed to like it now?
"So Couves, did you read Jonathan's post this week on scandalmongering?"
DeleteYup, he contributed #6.
"why would Congress vote that they had contempt for a stupid movie?"
DeleteWell the contempt vote was for Holder, but I'm going to give that one to you... well played.
Crissa, if you try to make sense of it all, you're going to pull something really bad. The only rational response to liberal talking points here is to just laugh.
DeleteI think the "average American voter" reaction would simply be to assume that Eric Holder was the director of the movie Fast and Furious ("didn't he also direct Aliens vs. Predators? I think that's the same guy") and would assume that Congress was voting to express contempt for his movie making abilities. Ironically, liberal leaning voters would support the vote ("I hate movies about cars!") and conservative leaning voters would hate it ("This is Big Govt! Why doesnt Congress do something useful like fixing all the potholes around here?")
DeleteI don't think the Fast and Furious scandal looks a helluva lot worse than other government scandals.
DeleteMost people have some awareness of lax standards for gun buyers, and accept that as a consequence of our gun culture. I think that is the main reason this scandal is a yawn. People know that guns are getting across the border, whether the ATF or DOJ makes a stupid decision or not. There isn't much shock value in this scandal.
The level of outrage in the GOP and conservative media is out of proportion to the way most people feel about it. Also, they seem to be targeting the wrong level of the bureaucracy, reaching straight to Holder rather than investigating lower-level officials who implicate Holder.
To the non-aligned, the investigation looks fishy when they bother to look at all.
MP - My main problem with Holder and Obama is that they’re using the power of their offices to keep information from the public. That, by itself, is inexcusable.
DeleteIt wasn't inexcusable to a lot of the electorate when Bush/Cheney were reelected. But I don't throw around the word 'inexcusable' because I tend to understand the desire for secrecy and discretion. So what is inexcusable to some is given a pass by those who are sympathetic.
DeleteFrankly, partisanship makes it hard to determine what is inexcusable because the outrage is dialed up so high against the opponents. Are you sure you're equal opportunity when it comes to using the 'inexcusable' label?
The Court's ACA decision is very personal to me. Not only do I have no health insurance myself, but my brother is a walking example of the types of problems that Obamacare was designed to fix. A few years ago, at age 35, he suffered a severe epileptic seizure that caused him to hit his head on the bathroom floor, left him unconscious for several days, and led to a small stroke, making him have to use a cane. If his wife hadn't been there to call the ambulance, there's a strong chance he would have died. It was his first seizure since he was 12, and apparently he had needed an increase in his medication, but he didn't know that at the time, since the insurance companies had refused to cover him as they classify epilepsy (which Justice Roberts has, a fact my brother believes may have influenced his ruling) to be a preexisting condition. He now is on Medicare (an outcome which, I feel, adds a certain irony to those claims I've heard by conservatives that Obamacare increases "dependency").
ReplyDelete(As a side point, I should note that my brother opposes the individual mandate but supports single-payer.)
This is another one of those weeks where it's important to clarify what we mean when we say that something "matters." Since this is a political blog in an election year, we tend to focus on the whether or not something will affect the outcome of the election. For the record, I'm skeptical of claims by JB and others that the Court decision will have no effect at all on the election, though I lean toward thinking the effect, if there is one, will be relatively minimal. I just don't know.
But on a personal level, the Court decision matters to me perhaps more than any other political event in recent times. It's part of why I was so irked by those opinion pieces speculating that a Court defeat for Obamacare would end up helping Obama. It wasn't just that this was so obviously wishful thinking on the part of some liberals. It was that most of those writers seemed to care more about the political consequences than the policy ones.
Honestly, I'd rather see the Republicans win big this year with the law intact than see them lose with the Court having destroyed it. Seriously.
For starters, I believe this truly was the GOP's last serious chance of eliminating the law. (That factor was one of the main reasons I feared, long before most pundits and legal experts acknowledged the possibility, that the Court would strike down the law. To the question, "Why would the Court do that?" the answer to me was the age-old "Because they can." Considering how narrow the decision was and the current rumors that Roberts switched sides at the last minute, I don't think my fears were so misplaced.) Even if the GOP wins the trifecta next year, Dems will still have the filibuster (unless the GOP somehow picks up 14 Senate seats, which is theoretically possible but highly unlikely), and it's far from clear the GOP will truly have the appetite to get rid of the law's many popular provisions. They may have the power to weaken some aspects of the law, but I don't believe they'll be able to nullify the bulk of it.
Thus, it's clear now that Obama has cemented his legacy, even if he turns out to be a one-term president. We can argue all day on whether the law will have a positive or negative effect on the health care system, but he has unquestionably made a significant change to that system that will last a long, long time--and I believe that matters more than almost anything else we discuss on this blog.
Epilepsy is heritable. While Roberts has lifetime healthcare, his children do not.
DeletePerhaps that was a factor that influenced his ruling, as my brother believes. I personally doubt it. I lean toward the more conventional explanation that he worried about public perceptions of the Court's credibility if it struck down the law, even though he would prefer the law to go away. I suspect his tax rationale was intended as a kind of poison pill--to give Republicans a new talking point they could use against the mandate, even if it was deemed constitutional.
DeleteThanks for sharing something so personal, Kylopod. My husband has been dealing with entirely unpredictable and extremely serious health issues, expensive enough that continued treatment would likely have brought us to the lifetime coverage cap in our early thirties. That lifetime coverage caps are a thing of the past is a huge deal.
DeleteI agree about Europe, Syria/Turkey, Egypt. Certainly hope the housing news matters (to the economy, that is); we'll have to wait and see on that. It is the first week with net positive economic news in some time.
ReplyDeleteNo one has mentioned the Arizona SCOTUS decision; there's also the "Stolen Valor" decision. Substantively, I have to think the Arizona one mattered. There's also the Circuit court EPA ruling.
And the Transportation/student loan bill.
And: anyone else think that the Chinese space program story is one that matters?
The Transportation bill sucks rocks.
DeleteBack door stimulus for red states, it is.
I think the Arizona decision matters less than the two year DREAM-related amnesty announced by Obama a few weeks ago. My sense is that the SCOTUS decision was muddy enough that everyone can claim victory (and based on my conservations with people on both sides of the issue, they have). The two-year visa rule is viewed on the pro-immigrant side (read: Latino) as a bold measure of support. It helps Romney too in that it fires up the immigration foes, who have emerged as a key GOP constituency. Much like birth control and gay rights, though, it's an issue that Romney would rather take a backseat to unemployment. I wrote this before, but if Romney loses, the 2016 GOP primary is going to be quite something. They will be an older, whiter party and I'm not sure they'll want to win badly enough to nominate a moderate, but we'll see.
DeleteIt's not news yet, but the hot drought plaguing the Southeast and Southern plains states is devastating small farmers. Many are dumping animal stocks because there is no grass to feed them.
ReplyDeleteI think Mitt Romney's decision to receive the ACA decision by declaring that a full repeal is a major priority had short term benefits but has some serious problems that people don't see yet. On the plus side, it may have rallied the right to his side (which had been a problem) and he's apparently raised a lot of money. That's going to help him put ads on the air and will help him claim momentum when those $$ numbers come out. The Beltway media's favorite story is Romney momentum so expect that meme to get a ton of play.
ReplyDeleteOn the downside, he's committed himself to talking about Obamacare during the general election, which I think is a problem both for him and the Republicans. The ACA's purported unpopularity was not the result of its contents (as we know from poll after poll), but was more because of concerns that some people had that the ACA would negatively impact them and also because of the messy, partisan nature of the debate that led to passage. Also, let's rememeber that some of the people who disapprove of the ACA do so because they don't think it goes far enough (they want single payer or something like it).
The concern about the unknowns of the ACA will persist on the right, but will subside among others as people don't see their lives negatively impacted. Concerns about the one-sidedness of the bill are going to dissipate as it now has the one thing it never had from Congress- bipartisan approval coming from Justice who conservatives have not accused of going soft.
Does this mean that health care is a big winner for Obama? Not really, but it at least starts to look like real progress, which makes Romney look petty by attacking it and makes his possible presidency look regressive by advocating repeal. Romney needs to look, empathetic, forward-looking, and inspiring. Railing against ACA, in my opinion, won't help. Obama's reelction campaign is themed on moving "forward" not backward. By dredging up an issue that looks resolved, Romney could help Obama look like the steadier hand.
Looking empathetic, forward-looking, and inspiring is really hard when you're a venture capitalist.
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