Elsewhere

I know there hasn't been much here lately, but I've been busy as usual over at PP, plus a bit at Greg's place.

I'm really skeptical about the "Obamacare rollout hurt Obama's approval ratings" story. It just doesn't match the numbers, as far as I can tell. Part of which is that it's a bit difficult to know what to make of the shutdown. Since I'm inclined to think the shutdown hurt Obama's approval, I see less movement from the ACA fiasco than those who believe the shutdown helped him.

Here's some others from the last week or so:

Return of the Huck.

A big lesson from the HealthCare.gov fiasco

Polling? Interviews? Just get it right.

No, don’t shut up the minority on judges

More Senate drama

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jerome Williams, 32. I was a big fan, and I'm really glad he got to have a career. Belongs on some sort of team with Solomon Torres, Ryan Vogelsong, and I suppose Jason Grilli.

Good stuff:

1. More on ACA, Obama, and the presidency from Scott Lemieux. By the way: I'm open to arguments that Obama (and Waxman, and Pelosi, and Dodd, and Harkin) could have done marginally better overall, if "better" is defined as getting more of what they were fighting for. My overall assessment, however, is that there was a lot more downside than there was upside; the whole thing could definitely collapsed, but better presidenting would have made very small differences. As for the question of how much agency Obama had...yes, he certainly could have pulled the plug at a few key points. But I strongly suspect that the incentives were overwhelmingly in the direction he wound up in, and that pretty much any plausible Democratic president would have gone down (and stayed on) the same path.

2. Kevin Drum is probably right about White House responsibility for the October Healthcare.gov fiasco. I do think successful GOP obstruction is an underrated factor, though.

3. "Pervasive sexual harassment and violence against female reporters, editors, and writers is rarely aired publicly, but it is an open secret in the field." Amanda Hess discusses.

4. And Josh Huder on the Embarrassing 113th.

Catch of the Day

To Scott Lemieux for (once again) shooting down liberal fantasies that the only thing preventing Congress from passing single-payer health care insurance in 2009-2010 was a failure of will from the president.

It's an excellent job, and sadly necessary, over and over again.

One key point that Lemieux doesn't mention this time: in one sense, this really isn't about 2009 at all. It's about 2007 and 2008, when the three leading Democratic presidential candidates converged on essentially the same plan (with Obama famously omitting the individual mandate). That says a lot. It says that none of those three candidates believed that adopting single-payer would have given them a serious edge in a closely contested nomination fight -- and that no other candidate was able to leap to the top tier by embracing single-payer. In other words, it tells us that in the world of 2007-2008, at least, the ACA was mainstream within the actual Democratic Party as it was, and single-payer was a fringe position in the actual Democratic Party as it was. Maybe lots and lots of Democrats preferred single-payer in some sense, but virtually none of them, either elites or electorates, did anything about it. And that's what counts.

What this also means is that ACA vs. single-payer had virtually nothing to do with Barack Obama himself. And so Obama-centric explanations for it are clearly, 100%, wrong.

I'd further argue, although here it's not quite as clear, that there was very little about the way that Obama fought for the ACA that had much to do with Obama himself. Yes, a Hillary Clinton WH would have looked a little different from the Obama WH...but not all that very different. Yes, presidents themselves do make key decisions, and not their staff or their party. But not only are they often severely constrained by their party (and by Congress, and by lots of other things), but they're also highly influenced by the incentives of the job, and those are the same whether we're talking Obama, Clinton, or George W. Bush.

In short, there's an excellent chance that both the good and bad outcomes on health care reform would have wound up more or less the same whether the winner of the 2008 Democratic nomination was Obama, or Hillary, or a hypothetically unscandaled John Edwards, or for that matter John Kerry or Al Gore.

Meanwhile: nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Max Grodenchik, 61.

And some good stuff:

1. Information and the structure of the Obama White House, from Andrew Rudalevige.

2. While Ezra Klain interviews Peter Baker about Bush and Cheney.

3. Henry Farrell on the new research on "cyber Pearl Harbor." Sounds right to me.

4. Rick Hasen on what might happen in VA-AG: the legislature could step in.

5. And goodbye, Thomas. Hannah Hess lets us know that it's gone next week.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tatum O'Neal, 50.

No shortage of good stuff for Election Day:

1. I had noticed the same point that Dan Drezner noticed about the White House and Middle East policy planning, but he makes some very good points about it -- and about Obama's problems with allies.

2. Andrew Rudalevige on Lee White.

3. Sarah Kliff has five things we know about ACA signup customers.

4. And here's yet another reason some may not get subsidies they're entitled to, from Kate Pickert.

5. Brian Beutler thinks the Democrats have the leverage to get HHS funded for the rest of FY 2014. Could be.

6. Yes, Dan Hopkins is correct: studying voters pretty much means using quantitative methods.

7. And I'm pretty sure Bill James got there first, but nevertheless this Joe Posnanski item on what MLB would be like if they played 16 games is terrific.

Catch of the Day

Here's one for Jaime Fuller, who tells us about "The Inside the Beltway Center for Presidents Who Can't Lead Good." It's a great item, chock full of links to all the totally excellent advice that pundits have been giving Barack Obama, everything from "stop golfing" to "grow a beard."

That last one was probably not fair; I'm pretty sure Alex Seitz-Wald didn't really think it would solve Obama's problems, much less the nation's. But the rest? Fair game!

Okay, I don't really have more to say about this; I just really enjoyed the list and the title (I should also probably note that Fuller is my editor these days over at TAP, but that doesn't have anything to do with this CotD! All of you finalists who lost out? Yours just wasn't Catchy enough). Hey, it's something of a holiday today, so why not enjoy a fun one.

And of course: nice catch!

The Saturday Night Massacre and the Presidency

"The recall of MacArthur, the steel seizure, and the dispatch of troops to Little Rock share still another notable characteristic: In each case, the decisive order was a painful last resort, a forced response to the exhaustion of all other remedies, suggestive less of mastery than failure -- the failure of attempts to gain an end by softer means" (Neustadt, Presidential Power, 24).


The Saturday Night Massacre, forty years ago yesterday, was critical in the public story of Watergate; it marked the point at which impeachment of the President of the United States became part of the normal political conversation. Indeed, one might say that it marks the point where the standard for a major presidential scandal became impeachment; ever since, from Iran-Contra to Lewinsky to, I don't know, whatever they're talking up on Fox News these days, everyone has been a lot quicker to bring up impeachment than they ever were before Richard Nixon needed three Attorneys General to fire a special prosecutor.

The Massacre was also one of the best illustrations of Richard Neustadt's key point about presidential power: that presidents do not, and can not, govern by command as a normal way of going about their business.

The problem for Nixon was that he was saddled with a special prosecutor who was, in his view, overreaching his mandate (and, at any rate, threatened the presidency by attempting to obtain White House tapes which would prove Nixon guilty of offenses he would surely be impeached and convicted for if they became public). Now, Archibald Cox was supposed to be independent, but he was still part of the Department of Justice. Could Nixon either get him to back off, or, even better, get rid of him?

In the event, the answer was: only by command. Persuasion utterly failed. Which ultimately meant that Nixon couldn't get what he wanted -- relief from a truly independent prosecutor.

Remember, "persuasion" for Neustadt doesn't really mean convincing someone that the president's preferences are good in some abstract way; it merely means convincing someone that to do what the president wants is in his or her own self-interest at that moment. That could involve an appeal to the good of the nation, but it's more likely to be done by some combination of bargaining and the sort of influence that the president's scope gives him. That is, the head of an agency might do what the president wants in order to receive budget support in the future, or the promise of a promotion to a bigger job, or perhaps threats to a political ally. Whatever is available; and while presidents have very limited powers of command, they have nearly limitless tools to use for this kind of persuasion. If, that is, they know how to use their office.

What Neustadt tells us is that the structure of the presidency and the executive branch is set up that way. Part of that is because command only works in particular circumstances; without fairly unusual conditions (Neustadt identifies five), it doesn't work at all. Part of it is that executive branch officials must obey multiple masters -- even when the president can technically fire them (as was the case for the Attorney General), they can often nevertheless ignore what he wants. Indeed, that's part of what happened here. Elliot Richardson simply refused to do what Nixon wanted, meaning that eventually Nixon needed to turn his lower-case order into a proper Presidential Order that Richardson could no longer ignore. And yet even here, Richardson resisted and resigned.

Why? Because Richardson had made a promise to the Senate -- that he would appoint a special prosecutor and let him do his work. Why? Because the Senate insisted; they would not confirm him otherwise. Why did Richardson keep his word to the Senate over his loyalty to the president? Because he was the sort of man who would do that. And why did Nixon appoint such a man to such a post, anyway? Because the politics of the situation required it during a time that spring when the outgoing Attorney General and the previous one were both implicated in wrongdoing, and during a time when the independence of Justice Department investigations of White House wrongdoing was under fire.

Nor is this the only time when executive branch refusal to go along with presidential plans mattered in the Watergate saga. Indeed: the whole thing started when Nixon's ("Huston") plan for domestic surveillance was shot down by the FBI, leading Nixon to bring an alternate version of that plan inside the White House. And while presidents generally can get their orders followed within the White House, it's the regular executive branch departments and agencies which have the expertise to carry out policy successfully.

Neustadt calls command -- director orders, rather than persuasion -- a "last resort" for a president:

Not only are these "last" resorts less than conclusive, but they are also costly...[D]rastic action rarely comes at bargain rates. It can be costly to the aims in whose defense it is employed. It can be costly, also, to objectives far afield (27).  

So he wrote, over a decade before Nixon's attempt at command was successful at ridding him of Archibald Cox, but at a terrible price indeed.

Elsewhere: The CR, Ted Cruz, more

Let's see...haven't done this for a while, so there are a few.

Today at Plum Line I got into the question of whether Democrats have already surrendered on the budget by accepting a sequestration level CR (the answer? No, probably not, but I'm not impressed with their strategy).

And I got on Ted Cruz's case for his "new paradigm" of grassroots activism.

What else?

Cruz's rhetoric is self-defeating.

The Republicans could use a Pope -- or maybe Gowron.

Five reasons we might get a budget calamity.

Summers and the proper use of trial balloons.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jim Cullum, Jr., 72.

On to the good stuff:

1. I missed this one a while back, but it's very good: Jack Shafer on real media bias and how it explains coverage of Syria and Iraq.

2. Robert Costa continues to do great reporting on Republicans, this time on Ted Cruz and his Republican critics.

3. Important from Andrew Sprung: why are Democrats getting distracted by the ACA/GOP infighting circus and failing to fight on spending levels in the CR?

4. Sarah Kliff has another batch of exchange TV ads.

5. And Brendan Nyhan reminds everyone about second terms. I'm not totally convinced, but it's a fair point to bring it up.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Orlando Cepeda, 76

We do need some good stuff, don't we:

1. Dan Drezner on credibility. I don't keep up on what's happening in IR at all (well, not beyond the bloggers, I suppose), but I'll add that most Americanists think less of the importance of "personal credibility...inside the corridors of power" than Neustadt did. On the other hand, if politicians think it's a big deal, then it is, even if it doesn't actually buy them anything in negotiations. And as long as the value in negotiations is positive, even if it's small? Well, rather have it than not, no?

2. I really do have to watch the Discovery Channel thing on presidential Chiefs of Staff. But I'm not sure I buy Ken Duberstein's claim that they have become celebrities. He wasn't, but Hamilton Jordan was surely more of a celebrity than all but one of Obama's CoS, no? Lucia Graves has the story.

3. Good Josh Barro point on how Obamacare will change things.

4. Interesting reporting from Amelia Thomson-Deveaux on the battle over abortion in New Mexico.

5. And I don't agree with everything Stan Collender says about the budget negotiations, but I always recommend reading him.

Q Day 7: Evaluating Presidents?

Dan asks:

When evaluating presidents, what weight do you give to the actual policies they pass or support? Can someone be a "good" president while supporting policies that are morally awful?

It's a hard question to answer. I try to evaluate them based on policy "success" in which success means that it worked...but what works and what doesn't is, admittedly, not always an objective call. I mean, sometimes is it: losing a war is generally objectively less successful than winning a war -- or avoiding a war. And it's at least somewhat possible to objectively characterize winning and losing a war, isn't it? But even there it's dicey (did the US win the Gulf War? Seemed so at the time, but if it set up an unstable situation which made the Iraq War -- and perhaps the September 11 attacks -- more likely, then is that policy success?). And when it gets to domestic policy, it's even more difficult.

Nevertheless, that I guess I'd say is that I look at process, and at policy success; if a policy is enacted, accepted, and generally considered successful, then it counts as policy success. I try, in this, not to impose my policy preferences, but the obvious critique that any observer is going to impose his or her own policy preferences on what counts as success is a perfectly fair one. The only question is: is there anything better?

Meanwhile, longwalkdownlyndale asks:

Who do you think are the most overrated and underrated presidents, other than Wilson and Carter who you've written about a bunch in the past. 

I've written on this in the past...The overrated president recently has been JFK, who does well in scholar surveys and very well in popular polling. I think TR is a bit overrated. Wilson, obviously. I think on balance Nixon is overrated...there's a school of thought that he was good on policy even while being a crook, but that tends to overlook both Congress's responsibility for much of what gets credited to him...and Vietnam. Reagan is overrated these days; he has a fair chance to catch JFK for most overrated, I suppose.

Underrated? I'm with those who pick Grant. I'm not really a Harding booster, but I'm willing to buy the notion that he's underrated, since he's often considered a bottom-five president and I don't see how he rates that low. I think Ford is a bit underrated.

All that said, there are two huge disclaimers necessary. First: the "ranking the presidents" game is fun, and I'd argue that it helps us to think about the presidency...but it's a game, not a science or even a serious study. And, just as important, the question of overrated/underrated turns mostly on how presidents are, in fact, rated. JFK is overrated in my view as the 10th greatest president, and insanely overrated as a top-5 president...but he's just fine as a middle-ranked president. So knowing whether he's over or underrated depends a lot on an accurate assessment of the rankings.

Q Day 4: CoS?

Another anonymous commenter:

Are there any chiefs-of-staff who stand out as exemplary at the job? What about awful? How much does quality of White House personnel affect legislative outcomes?

Exemplary? I don't know...I think Jim Baker for Reagan did well; the Clinton chiefs-of-staff after McLarty were generally a good lot; and, yeah, I think Rahm Emanuel did a good job -- in part, by wisely leaving before he went all Sununu. Howard Baker probably goes on this list, too. Maybe Sherman Adams?

Awful? Well, I think Bob Haldeman sort of goes in a category all his own as a major disaster: if you and half your staff go to jail and the president resigns to avoid impeachment and conviction, that's not real good.

Beyond that, Hamilton Jordan was a disaster, as were Donald Regan and McLarty. Andy Card, maybe? The presidency was certainly a disaster while he was there, but he was widely seen as having far less influence than the usual Chief of Staff.

How does it affect legislative outcomes? Well, it has to be a subset of how the presidency in general affects legislative outcomes, with the latter being often overrated. Still, while all such evaluations have to be put into the context of both the president (as Brad DeLong always likes to say, the cossacks work for the czar) and how the votes line up on the Hill, it seems reasonable to say that Jordan contributed some to Carter's failures in Congress, while Baker contributed to Reagan's successes. Or, to put it another way: Bill Clinton's first two years would probably have been more productive if Leon Panetta had started out as Chief of Staff -- but then again Clinton hadn't yet learned that, so it wasn't just some sort of random fluke that Clinton had McLarty and then replaced him with Panetta. How to attribute responsibility in such situations is difficult!

Elsewhere: Torture and Syria, more

Housekeeping: I'm going to try to get a Friday Baseball Post up before sunset...we'll see. I still should have one over at Greg's place this afternoon, and my Salon column will run over the weekend (again assuming I can get it done before sundown).  What Matters? won't run until Sunday morning, I guess. For those observing the holiday, G'mar Chatima Tovah, and Shana Tovah.

My column at TAP this week was an argument that Barack Obama's failure to deal with the fallout from ush-era torture was part of why the GOP was so dysfunctional during the Syria episode. It is admittedly speculative, but I think I'm right about it.

While I'm at it, I don't think I ever linked to last week's column, which was about the advantages for the president in getting Congress involved in policy -- and the advantages of politician-centered democracy over the rule of experts. Worth it despite the awful title they gave it!

And yesterday at PP, I noted the strange Democratic budget priorities.

More:

A quick primer on deadlines.

A judicial nominations update.

And one on why presidential speeches are worthwhile, even if they won't change public opinion.

Professional Reputation: Obama and Syria

Okay, with the main point about Syria and the presidency out of the way, time to turn to stuff like this:

If he loses the vote on Syria, the Republicans will be emboldened to challenge him on fiscal issues, immigration and on his nominee to be chairman of the Federal Reserve...If Obama wins, his position on those issues, along with immigration, will be strengthened just as he also is starting enrollment for his health-care law.

That's Michael Tacket reporting at Bloomberg, but you can find lots of similar examples.

It's totally the wrong way of thinking about presidential reputation.

As regular readers know, I'm a great believer in Richard Neustadt's portrait of presidential influence. And so I do tend to believe that a president's professional reputation matters -- in fact, I probably ascribe more to that concept than most current presidential scholars do.

However.

First of all, to the extent that reputation matters, it matters within the context of everything else going on. Most obviously, partisanship. As Brian Beutler puts it: "Syria won’t derail Obama’s second term — Republicans will" (see also Matt Yglesias).

Second...professional reputation isn't a question of "political capital" (whatever that is); it's, in Neustadt's words:

The men he would persuade must be convinced in their own minds that he has skill and will enough to use his advantages. Their judgement of him is a factor in his influence with them...A President's effect on them is heightened or diminished by their thoughts about his probable reaction to their doing.

What does it mean to lose an important vote in Congress? It depends! It depends on the context; it depends on the president's actions; it depends on how it happens; it depends on how everyone perceives it.

What will Washingtonians (to use Neustadt's old-fashioned but very useful term for the people who must deal with the president, directly and indirectly) take away from the Syria vote?

Surely the most likely answer is: not very much.

After all, to begin with we're dealing with a fifth-year president, so the question is what adjustments will be made in their view of him. And why would their views change? Obama has, for better or worse, never been a president who was noted for punishing those who opposed him. He's surely never been a president who could be counted on to deliver Republican votes. He's not really a president who could be counted on to deliver Democratic unity, across the board...yes, Democrats did supply needed tough votes on some policies, but not on others. No one in Washington could possibly believe that Obama has the ability to massively change public opinion with a single speech or an extended campaign (that no president can do that is perhaps better understood now than it used to be, but at any rate no one has thought that of Obama since, at best, January 2010).

That's not to say that Obama's professional reputation was terrible going into this fight; it's just to say that the particular limitations that would be on display if he loses are exactly the limitations everyone already believes he has. Whether one believes those limitations are personal to him or part of the general conditions of the current presidency.

Moreover, if we take professional reputation as more nuanced than just "winner" or "loser," then it's hard to see how the particular qualities on display here matter very much to upcoming fights. For example, on the budget and debt limit, the basic reputation question that Republicans will need to ask is whether Obama is likely to cave quickly when faced with a shutdown (or potential default). It's hard to say that anything in this fight -- especially the part of it having to do with working for Congressional votes -- is really parallel to anything in that one.

So to put it all together: what matters are changes to presidential reputation from a particular episode, and then what matters are the particular, specific, changes to reputation, and how they are relevant to future battles, in Congress or elsewhere. I'm open to arguments that it can matter some...I do believe, as I said at the top, that a president's professional reputation can make a difference. But we certainly should not pretend that presidential reputation is the only or even the leading thing that matters, or that one episode can completely rewrite years of examples.

Point One on Obama's Presidency and Syria

There are a bunch of things out there that I suspect I'm going to write about with respect to Barack Obama, presidential power, presidential reputation, and Syria...I'll start with what might seem the most obvious, but a point that isn't being made much and should be.

The preface: There are multiple balls in the air. There's the effects of winning vs. losing a Congressional vote. There's the effects of forcing a Congressional vote, which Obama did, as opposed to not forcing it, which is what everyone expect. But then there's also the effects of actually carrying out the policy (that is, a military intervention) or not. And that last one has all sorts of possibilities, right? The scale and scope of the intervention could be various different sizes and durations, and could go well or badly; some of that is within the control of the White House, and some isn't.

Of all of those, there's one permutation that absolutely, no question about it, would destroy the rest of Barack Obama's presidency is: a disastrous war. Ask Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush. Or Harry Truman. Unending, seemingly pointless wars are the one sure way to ruin a presidency.

Now, I'm not saying that's in the cards; in fact, I don't think it is. I'm just saying: that's the kind of thing that really does matter a lot to presidencies. And if you do believe that the administration is going down a path that winds up there, or a path that has a high risk of winding up there, then you should be very worried about the health of this presidency.

If not? None of the other permutations here are anywhere close to that kind of threat to the Obama presidency. Presidents lose key votes which are then mostly forgotten all the time. They pursue policies which poll badly, but are then mostly forgotten, all the time. There are important things to say about all of that, because "mostly" isn't completely. But the first thing to get right when considering the effects of Syria policy on the rest of the Obama presidency is that the scale of a Vietnam or an Iraq (or a Korea, for that matter) overwhelms everything else we might talk about.

DeLong on the Presidency: Good Diagnosis, Bad Prescription

Brad DeLong is absolutely correct about this:

[T]he failure in 2009 to nominate Fed governors who would give Bernanke a left wing on the FMOC to balance out the bank presidents and thus give him freedom of maneuver was a huge unforced error.

Which he expanded (on twitter) to appointments more generally. Include judicial appointments in that -- if Obama had filled DC Circuit and other appeals court spots early, more decisions go his way over the years.

But is this right?

It is, I think, a powerful reason not to nominate senators--or, indeed, anybody other than a successful governor--for the presidency.

I don't think so. As far as I know, Jimmy Carter was a successful governor, but he was an awful president. The post-WWII governors -- Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush -- are a mixed bunch, both overall and, I'd say, simply in terms of the administration/executive branch side of the job. In part, that's because Washington experience counts, too. In part, I suspect it's because "governor" means different things in different states, and in many cases the job of governor is just very different than the job of president.

Sure, I'd like to have presidents with some executive experience. Or perhaps (federal) executive branch experience. FDR had both, and he turned out OK. But legislative experience helps, too.

Here's what I really think: presidents these days have presidencies. That allows them to bring in experience that they lack.

And I have a story that may be correct which explains what the last two Democrats got right and what they got wrong. Bill Clinton deliberately tried to do better than Carter by bringing in people from Washington...unfortunately, however, because he also wanted to get away from having anyone at all, good or bad, who worked for Carter, he wound up getting lots of Hill people and no one who knew how to run a White House.

Barack Obama fixed that, hiring lots of people with White House experience, and therefore ran a more competent White House. However, he was still very low on people with significant executive branch experience. Probably compounded, by the way, by the anti-lobbyists nonsense. Thus, I suspect, the appointments problem.

So the lesson isn't to pick a president with any particular background, although, sure, more experience(s) help. The lesson is to fill the White House with people from different backgrounds.

As far as the president...mostly what I want in presidents are really good politicians. Which you would think we would get, but unfortunately we often don't.

Elsewhere: Senate Deal, more

Lots of stuff to pass along, including one on the Senate deal still holding on today's ATF vote. One quick addition to that: it's worth remembering that the Senate deal is important, and that the potential instability in the tag-team approach is important, because Republicans are still filibustering everything. So it still takes 60 to defeat all these filibusters; all that's happened is that some Republicans are willing to help the Democrats defeat those filibusters in order to avoid a nuclear confrontation. But the filibusters are still going on.

Here's the other recent ones, beginning with my weekend column from Salon, which is about why presidents should continue going public even if it doesn't do what people think it can do.

Is the bully pulpit dead?

The conservative (led) boycott of (some) health insurance

In defense of context-included policy coverage

Will Obama finally move ahead of W?

Ignore the Obamacare spin war!

The NLRB Court Case

I don't really have anything to add to this, but I was wondering about it so maybe others were, too. SCOTUSBlog's John Elwood seems pretty confident that confirmation of the new replacement will not derail the recess appointment court case, scheduled to be considered by the Supremes in their upcoming term (via Goddard).

It's worth a reminder that this is a pretty big deal of a case, too. The lower courts took somewhat different positions, but the DC Circuit in particular had an extremely radical decision which basically ended the president's recess power; it ruled that practically all recess appointments in US history were actually unconstitutional, that we'd been getting it wrong ever since presidents wore funny wigs. In particular, only vacancies that arose during the recess between sessions of Congress (typically these days in November and December, at most) would be eligible to be filled by recess appointments, which would have to be made during that same recess. Essentially, the court ruled that recess appointments had become obsolete once Congress's modern schedule emerged. I think it's a terrible decision, but regardless: both the president and the Senate do need to know the ground rules, and so it's probably a good thing for the case to go forward.

Which, if Elwood is correct, it will. And with less baggage attached, too, for better or worse.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Katherine Helmond, 85. Terrific on Soap; and solid in Brazil.

And some good stuff for this semi-holiday:

1. Elizabeth Nugent on Egypt.

2. Jay Ulfelder on Egypt.

3. And Timothy Lee on why secrecy is bad for presidents. Very good.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Yeardley Smith, 49. Also? Happy birthday to my mom! I can do both, right? One of them was awesome in the sadly neglected and forgotten Herman's Head.

Should I link to more good stuff when I'm over at Greg's? Guess it can't hurt. Also:

1. Dan Drezner: "What Edward Snowden tells us about international relations theory."

2. Brendan Nyhan surveys the good and the bad of recent Barack Obama coverage.

3. And Garance Franke-Ruta on what White House occupants have said about it.