Sunday Question for Everyone

What's a realistic policy outcome you are particularly hoping for in 2014?

What Mattered This Week?

Okay, I know, I'm a day late, and I'm not sure if any of you are around anyway, and even worse I've really been on full vacation this week and can't even suggest anything...but let's do What Mattered anyway.

So anyway: what have you noticed? What do you think mattered this week?

Sunday Question for Everyone

What's a gift you would like to give to a politician you like? This is for sincere, not sarcastic, gifts, but creative ones if you can think of them.

What Mattered This Week?

Sure, why not do this one?

Let's see...I'll go with the nominations that made it through the Senate. Yes, there was some foot-dragging that successfully delayed others, but nothing that's really a big deal, and the ones that got through are now done. Plus there were new judicial nominations this week. Both the number of judicial vacancies and vacancies without nominees -- most of them blue slip issues -- remain stubbornly high, but things are better than they were.

Obviously this week's silliness -- Pajama Boy, White Santa Claus, Duck Dynasty, whatever else -- didn't matter, and once again you don't need me to tell you that.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Housekeeping

Well, this is a big one.

I've accepted a position as political blogger for Bloomberg View. I'm consolidating all my stuff over there. Yup, after four plus years, I'll be your Plain Blogger no more.

Or at least, not over here. The plan is basically to do what I've been doing since I started: same topics, same regular items, same everything. I won't, at least at first, be doing columns there (or elsewhere). Just the blogging, all back under the same roof, as it was when I started here. It all kicks off a little after New Year's. I'm very excited about it; it's exactly what I've wanted, having all my stuff together again (and, yes, to get paid for it, too). I'm very impressed with the folks over at Bloomberg View; all I can tell you is that every time I asked any of them about whether they wanted more of this or less of that, they basically had the same answer: we like what you've done, so keep doing it. So that's what you can expect when I get over there.

What do I want to do now? I want to thank a whole lot of people. John Sides and Seth Masket, for linking to me and making me surface-respectable right away. Andrew Sullivan was very generous with his support from very early on. Ezra Klein has been terribly important in boosting the meeting of political scientists and journalists, both publicly with links and other support and behind the scenes. Both Andrew and Ezra trusted me with guest-blogging gigs well before I was anyone's obvious choice for that sort of thing. Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Jonathan Cohn have been very generous, again from early on, with both links and with occasional advice when I asked. And certainly Greg Sargent has done more for me than I can ever hope to repay.

More: the people at The New Republic, Salon, and the Prospect who picked up my stuff. Paul Glastris, too, at Washington Monthly, and Fred Hiatt at the Post. Also the editors who I've worked with and taught me how to write columns...quite a few good ones, but especially Seyward Darby, Gabriel Arana, and Jaime Fuller.

I'm missing a lot, and I apologize to those I'm leaving out. If anyone is still reading: what I need to impress on people is that really without exception bloggers have been extremely open and generous towards me the whole time I've been doing this.They may bring the snark, but what's important is that they act as colleagues, not competitors.

And thanks so much to all of you for reading Plain Blog, and especially to the commenters who made this a really nice place to hang out. I hope you all follow me over to Bloomberg.

As far as this place...

I'm off on vacation beginning Sunday and going through New Year's. After that, I'll have a couple of days, and then start the new gig. I'm really not sure what, if any, posting I'll be doing in the interim. Not much, for sure, but I may do the occasional item...haven't even decided whether to put What Mattered and Sunday Questions up this weekend (we're driving to Phoenix on Sunday, so I'm not exactly going to be plugged in very much).

After that, I really don't know about the old blog. I'll certainly be leaving the site up for the old posts...as of now, I'm not aware of anything that I do here that they don't think fits over there. But we'll see. All I really know is that most of my stuff will be over at Bloomberg View. I'll see you there!

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

Once More on Judicial Strategic Retirements

I one of those who have been writing for quite a while that if Breyer and Ginsburg care primarily about advancing the positions they've fought for on the Court, the best thing for them to do is to retire. Now. Or at least, pending confirmations of their replacements. But before the 2014 midterms, and certainly before the 2016 elections.

Ginsburg has been firing back. But the best case I've seen for resisting strategic retirements comes from Linda Greenhouse, who channels Ginsburg to Emily Bazelon:

I think from her perspective she is taking a long view of history, not a case by case one, or a term by term one. She has to believe that justice will win out in the end—or that, if it doesn't, her departure at one point or another couldn't be the major factor. I agree with her and I think people ought to give this issue a rest and concentrate on electing Democrats to the White House and the Senate. ... I think the issue is serving as kind of a displacement for the liberals’ general sense of powerlessness—they seem to feel that getting Ruth to resign would be something concrete they could accomplish when all else is failing. 

It's a nice sounding argument, but it won't wash. "Justice will win out in the end?" Politics doesn't have an "end." It just has a series of "nows." Nor is there any certainty about any of it. Political events are incredible contingent, and path dependent; it's very, very, easy to tell counterfactual stories involving slightly different election results and the implications that spin out from there.

Of course, not all events begin new paths of their own. And sometimes, the path is overwhelmed by other factors, whether they are technological, or demographic, or whatever. But Supreme Court Justices, right now, in this extremely partisan era, and in a closely divided court? I don't know anything about "in the end," but it's very easy to see how a flip or two in who serves on the Court could make very large changes which would matter very much for a whole lot of people for decades.

Now, for most political actors, it's certainly true that there's more they can do about House and Senate elections than there is about changing the mind of two individuals. So, sure, if you're a liberal, don't get mad as Ginsburg or Breyer; help a Democrat win a Senate seat.

But I'm not talking about what Democratic activists want -- after all, many of them don't care very much (whether they should or not) about what SCOTUS does. At best, most activists and most voters care about one or two Court outcomes. After all, they have plenty of competing issues, and no particular reason to believe that the Court should be at the top of their list. The people who do care about what the Court does, passionately -- at least, we suspect they care passionately -- are the Justices themselves. So this is on them, not on anyone else.

None of which is to say what Ginsburg or Breyer should do in any absolute sense. It's a great job, and both are clearly -- now -- able to do it at the highest level. As I've said before, giving that up in order to better fight for their principles is a lot to ask. If either of them believes that it's not worth it...it's not up to any of us to pick their priorities. All I'm saying, and I think it's just clearly true, is that if their top priority is fighting for the legal principles and the outcomes they prefer, then resignation is the best way to ensure that priority.