Month: March 2013

The Jacobins And The Judiciary

The current GOP is an inherently revolutionary institution. It has just unveiled a budget proposal so divorced from the center of public opinion, so draconian in its gutting of the safety net and so dedicated to a military more suited to a global empire than a major power it has little chance of gaining traction. But it can obstruct – and it should obstruct up to a point. But that point has long since passed and is now reaching a level of refusing to accept the winner of a general election. To wit: the president has been effectively prevented from getting almost any nominees confirmed for the federal judiciary for the past three years. To take one example, noted by Jeffrey Toobin:

Judicial appointments represent one of the great missed opportunities of the Obama Presidency. In his first term, especially in the first two years, Obama himself bore much of the blame for this. When Democrats controlled sixty Senate seats, Obama was slow to nominate lower-court judges, and his moment of greatest leverage passed. But, since the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have been at fault, almost entirely.

In the fifth year of his Presidency, Obama has failed to place even a single judge on the D.C. Circuit, considered the second most important court in the nation, as it deals with cases of national importance. (Its judges—like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—also often wind up on the Supreme Court.) The D.C. Circuit now has four vacancies out of eleven seats… When Democrats controlled sixty Senate seats, Obama was slow to nominate lower-court judges, and his moment of greatest leverage passed.

But, since the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have been at fault, almost entirely. Most nominees are not formally stopped, as Halligan was, but rather are delayed and delayed. Bush’s nominees got votes within weeks; Obama’s take months, even for uncontroversial selections. William Kayatta, Jr., nominated to the First Circuit, waited three hundred days for a vote and then received eighty-eight votes for confirmation. Republicans delay because they can. “The Republican Senators are not punished for it, and they are rewarded by their base,” a senior administration official said.

Not to go all Fallows on you, but there is a false equivalency here. No president should be required to rush all his judicial appointments in that recently rare window of controlling 60 votes in the Senate. He is not equally at fault here. This should be a steady, reasonable process – especially for utterly uncontroversial nominees. The American system requires some give-and-take, some acknowledgment that when you lose an election, you cooperate with the winner and take some responsibility for important institutions, like the federal courts. And yet this core conservative instinct to preserve the constitutional order and process has disappeared in the fanaticism of the current GOP. They are behaving like moody teenagers with grudges.

Chart Of The Day

Ryan's Cuts

Derek Thompson looks at what the Ryan budget does and doesn’t cut:

[T]his budget is as notable for what it cuts as for what it doesn’t cut. Social Security, defense, and Medicare — together making up about half of the federal budget — would scarcely be cut at all. After all, it’s hard to win a Republican election if you abandon old voters and the defense industry. As for health care and cash support for the poor? That’s where the hammer hits.

Jon Cohn adds:

The report’s distinct treatment of defense and non-defense spending is actually a great window into Ryan’s fundamental philosophy. The section on defense spending has long passages about the importance of national security and the dangers of intemperate cuts. Rooting out waste is important, the document says, but it must be done carefully. The section on the social safety net has virtually no similar language. A reader unfamiliar with the reality of American life would have no idea that millions of Americans live in poverty—that they struggle, every day, to pay for bare necessities like gas, rent, and food. Of course, if “The Path to Prosperity” mentioned those things, readers might want to know what Ryan proposed to do about them. But Ryan doesn’t propose meaningful substitutes for the support he’d take away. Instead, he puts his faith in the strength of individuals and communities to help those who struggle.

The absence of defense cuts reveals that this is not about fiscal conservatism; it’s about a society that celebrates soaring inequality while attempting to remain the sole global hegemon. It’s almost a parody of a document of how a democracy perishes – because its social contract ends with two utterly separate nations of “hyper-rich” and “always-struggling”, it delegitimizes capitalism by rewarding and even celebrating its abusers, and because its premature austerity could well increase the long-term debt, rather than lower it.

It’s a high school term paper of utopianism. And it’s all Paul Ryan knows.

Paul Ryan’s Shtick Begins To Wear Thin: Reax

Cassidy identifies the Ryan budget’s purpose:

About the only argument you can make for Ryan’s budgets (or roadmaps, or pathways) is that they aren’t budgets at all: they are political manifestos. A few years ago, well before he was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I asked Grover Norquist, who knows a thing or two about Republican politics, what function Ryan performed in the G.O.P. and why, even then, he was taken seriously by pundits and party elders. “Ryan’s role is to point to the Promised Land,” Norquist replied.

Douthat sighs:

[The budget] sacrificed seriousness for “seriousness,” by promising to reach budgetary balance not over the long term (as budgets 1.0 and 2.0 did) but in a ten-year window. This is not going to happen, and more importantly there’s no reason why it needs to happen: Modest deficits are perfectly compatible with fiscal responsibility, and restructuring the biggest drivers of our long-term debt is a much more important conservative goal than holding revenues and outlays equal in the year 2023. What’s more, the quest for perfect balance leaves the House G.O.P. officially committed to a weird, all-pain version of Obamanomics — in which, for instance, we keep the president’s tax increases and Medicare cuts while eliminating his health care law’s assistance to the uninsured.

How Ezra sees the plan:

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.

Kilgore agrees:

The reality is that he’d be promoting the same policies even if the federal budget were in balance. His plan would just have more tax cuts. Let’s don’t let the wrangling over deficit numbers obscure that simple fact.

Kornacki thinks Paul Ryan has lost some of his appeal:

[Y]ou’d never know that just a few months ago he was the nominee of a major political party for the second-most powerful office in America. Watching his latest budget rollout, there’s no evidence Ryan enjoys any additional clout or stature thanks to his vice presidential campaign. He’s playing the same role he played before Mitt Romney drafted him onto the GOP ticket last summer. In fact, if his VP bid is affecting him now, it’s probably a net-negative, with some in the press taking a more critical view of his plans than in the past.

Pareene nods:

CNN spent the day talking about the pope. Joe Scarborough and his chums seemed more interested in the soda ban. Politico was still fixated on Obama’s “charm offensive.” The Senate Democratic budget actually got more play. Hell, the National Review Onlinedevoted more digital ink to the pope election today than to Paul Ryan and his 10-year plan. I think the apex of mainstream Beltway press attention was when Luke Russert live-tweeted his own reading of the budget for like a half-hour. I think — and let’s all hope I’m actually right and not just being incredibly hopeful — this finally confirms that Ryan is “over” as a figure the Beltway press treats with incredible reverence.

Galupo argues long the same lines:

Aside from its base-stroking unrealism about a balanced budget in 10 years, there is a subtle sort of realism about this new Ryan budget. In its very lack of creative “new ideas,” there is an admission that “The Path to Prosperity” no longer has the magic-rabbit power it had after the 2010 midterm election. It’s a budget document scarcely worth more than the PDF pixels in which it’s displayed. I think Ryan knows this, and expended very little effort to hide the fact.

Wilkinson wonders if the familiarity of the plan is the point:

I hazard that Mr Ryan seeks to make his vision of government seem decreasingly radical and increasingly reasonable simply by repeating it. You can think of Mr Ryan’s fantasy budget as a gambit in a diffuse cultural negotiation over the bounds of reasonable opinion in the ongoing negotiation over fiscal policy—a sort of ideological meta-negotiation. You may think that proclaiming the same “radical”, “deeply unpopular” ideas again and again and yet again can’t possibly make them more palatable and mainstream, but there’s a queer phenomenon psychologists call the “mere exposure effect” that suggests otherwise.

Suzy Khimm points out the lack of details:

This year, Ryan is even more vague about how he’d simplify the code and lower taxes without disproportionately impacting revenues or lower-income Americans. The budget he proposed Tuesday only commits to “making the tax code simpler and fairer,” without any mention of the kind of base-broadening that’s become synonymous with junking certain tax preferences. So it’s even less clear how Ryan’s proposed tax cuts would be achieved without blowing a big hole in the budget.

Pethokoukis lists problems with the plan:

1. If the GOP’s Medicare reform plan is such a good idea (and budget deficits are such a problem), it should be implemented before 2024. Ryan knows this, surely. 2. There’s no Social Security reform plan. 3. The plan repeals Obamacare, which is highly unlikely. Better to have shown how the ACA can be fixed.

Suderman wants a plan that isn’t simply against what Obama is for:

[G]iven the nation’s dismal fiscal outlook and its sluggish economic performance, opposition is not necessarily a bad place for the GOP to start, especially as a minority party with limited ability to set the legislative agenda. But it’s only a start. For Republicans to begin winning the fiscal argument with Obama, they’ll eventually have to figure out more than what they’re against—and make a sustained case that they’re for something too.

And Gleckman notes that Ryan’s revenue target “falls far short of what Democrats are willing to accept”:

Thus, we remain at square one. Until there is a middle-ground on a revenue target, there will be no tax reform and no grand bargain. The Ryan plan provides little hope that such a consensus is near.

A Lull In The Drug War

Jeremy Relph checks in on Juarez, Mexico, which is “no longer the world’s murder capital, a distinction passed on to San Pedro Sula, Honduras; now it’s number 19”:

[T]here is a peace in Juárez: People are out eating in restaurants, drinking in bars. A girl can punch another girl in the head for going out with her ex and it can be just that, not a prelude to a bloodbath. What no one can know is if the peace is real, lasting. “Just like [the] first World War was preparation for the second World War, the peace has come because they’ve exterminated each other,” says [human rights investigator Gustavo] de la Rosa. “And the 5,000 in jail, these people could be the reserves for the second gang war. I hope it’s not like that.”

The Youtubes Of Trans Teens

Margaret Talbot has new piece [paywalled] on the young and transgendered. She also rounded up some videos:

Some of the most interesting videos deal frankly with the dilemmas of life post-transition: pursuing romantic relationships, or whether or not to try and “go stealth” by “passing” in the new gender without openly acknowledging one’s trans status. The young F.T.M. in sideburns and a baseball cap in one video, for instance, talks about the problem of dating in an era when things get physical so fast that he’s forced into explanations before he really knows a girl. I particularly liked the frank, girlfriend-y tone of Natalie Sweetwine, who has posted ninety-two videos, which run the gamut from the kind-of-political (“Jealousy in the MTF Transgender Community”) to the highly personal (“Effects of Estrogen/HRT on Penis and Sex Drive”). A video posted by Stephen Beatty, the trans son of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, conveys a vivid sense of the niches-within-niches branding of the self you see in a lot in the YouTube offerings. “I identify as a transman, a faggy queen, a homosexual, a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist, and a guy who needs a haircut,” he says in the video.

Twelve Angry Cross-Examiners

After reading the scores of questions put to accused murderer Jodi Arias by the members of her Arizona jury, Gideon wonders whether the “juror questioning” model should be expanded to other states as well:

I’ve written about proposals permitting questions, among others, and of a proposal to permit Q&A during closing arguments (which I still think is a fabulous idea), but the idea that jurors will get to ask questions of my defendant sends a shiver or two down my spine. The initial knee-jerk negative reaction stems from the fear of losing control, as evidenced by what’s happening with Arias. Losing control of the defense and perhaps undoing some of the work done to that point and also losing control of the trial itself when jurors ask absurd questions designed solely to disclose their displeasure or incredulity.

On the other hand, the allure of knowing just what the jury is thinking and being given a limited opportunity to address or reinforce their doubts is far too tempting. I’d always want to know, rather than not. I’m the lawyer who hangs out in the courtroom after a verdict so I can talk to jurors, because I want to know why they voted one way or another, so I can learn and put it to good use next time. But that’s merely educational. Wouldn’t it be great to know what they’re thinking while the trial is going on?

Peter DeFilippis sees a clear benefit to the questioning:

I think this process insures that the jury is better informed and makes its decisions based more likely on facts gleaned from testimony under an oath than on conjecture. The individual juror is presumably happier and more satisfied if inquiries are answered via live testimony as opposed to not at all or by speculation in the deliberation room (which is frowned upon by the court). Keeping jurors interested and engaged through this active participation in the legal process is of paramount benefit to the litigants and jurists. Perhaps it might increase attentiveness and help to mitigate the tedium and boredom often complained of in connection with serving as a juror on a trial (especially a lengthy one).

The Black Sheep Of Impressionism

Pivoting off a new exhibit at the Royal Academy, Manet: Portraying Life, Rebecca Willis wades into a longstanding debate over whether or not the painter should be considered an Impressionist, arguing that he shouldn’t. The reason why? His frequent use of the color black:

Black was anathema to Impressionists with a capital “I”, who believed that light was broken up into colours and achieved greys and dark tones by mixing complementary colours. Manet used black—which is actually the absence of colour—as a colour in its own right. A striking number of Manet’s works have large, flat areas of black, which take on an almost abstract quality, like the graphic darkness of women’s elaborate hairstyles in the Japanese paintings he admired: Leon’s coat, for example, in “Luncheon in the Studio”; the riding habits worn by some of his sitters; the men’s frock coats in “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” and (with top hats) in “Music in the Tuileries”. The black notes chime through these and a huge number of the other paintings in this show.

Are Drug Tests Worth It?

Judy Stone questions the logic of drug screening and its widespread use:

Among full-time workers in the US, 42.9% reported that tests for illicit drug or alcohol use occurred as part of “pre-hire” testing—so more than 47 million adults were subjected to testing as part of the hiring process. (2004) Further, 29.6%, or 32 million full-time workers reported random drug testing at work.⁠ A 2010 study reported about 130 million drug screens⁠.

In the second part of her essay, she argues that drug testing destroys workplace trust:

Drug screens are but one example of the increase in surveillance throughout our society. Such intrusive testing inherently sets up an adversarial relationship as well. Many people likely work better in an environment of respect and trust. I’ve seen a dramatic change in the working atmosphere of some hospitals over the years, as the institutions adopt fingerprint scans to clock in and out, GPS phones that track employees’ movements, measure the response time to answer a call light, etc. These processes are dehumanizing and counterproductive.

Dr. Seuss’s Cinematic Flop

Levi Asher recently watched the 1953 film written by Dr. Seuss, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, which he describes as being so bad it left him “traumatized for days”:

This was the only movie Dr. Seuss ever tried to make, and it went over so badly with audiences in 1953 that he never tried again, and the movie nearly disappeared from view. It was almost crazy and psychedelic enough to gain a second life as a midnight cult flick, but it’s too excruciatingly boring for the midnight circuit. It’s hard to watch without wincing…often.

5000 Fingers doesn’t start out too badly: a sweet kid is suffering through a piano lesson in an antique parlor (this setting must recall Theodor Seuss Geisel’s own childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts). The boy falls asleep and has a bad dream in which he’s persecuted by his nasty piano teacher, Dr. Terwilliker, who is also scheming to marry the kid’s widowed mother. In this dream, the kid wears a glove on the top of his beanie, is chased by weird chubby thugs in brightly colored suits who resemble proto-Oompa-Loompas, dodges a pair of roller-skating old men who share a common beard, and is forced to participate in a 500-kid piano performance on a swirling 5000 key piano.

I assure you that I just made the movie sound better than it is.