Month: November 2013

Molly Ball explains why the Senate blew up part of the filibuster today:

Why did Reid pull the trigger? He was tired of making deals with McConnell, only to see their spirit violated by yet more obstruction, allies say. The two reached an informal agreement in January that was supposed to lead to fewer filibuster threats, and another deal in July that paved the way for several executive-branch nominations, including Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Thomas Perez to head the Department of Labor. But none of these bargains affected the overall trend of blockage, and Reid finally had enough.

Patrick Caldwell provides more details:

The real reason Democrats were so eager to confirm Obama’s DC Circuit nominees, and Republicans were so desperate to block them, is that the court’s current conservative majority has repeatedly blocked the president’s agenda. Since most of the federal bureaucracy resides in DC, the DC Circuit is tasked with assessing the constitutionality of federal rules and regulations. Conservatives on the court have neutered much of Dodd-Frank, the post-recession financial reform bill that was meant to keep banks in check. The court also overturned Obama’s ability to appoint staff while Congress is out of town and struck down state environmental rules that would have regulated emissions from other states.

Chait adds that “main reason for this odd, partial clawback of the filibuster is that President Obama has no real legislative agenda that can pass Congress”:

Bernstein puts the change in context:

This is a major, major, event. It changes how the nation is governed in a significant way. That said, it’s not as if the Senate has been static since the last time filibuster rules were changed (at least in a major way) almost 40 years ago; most reform is incremental, and one could argue that the rules change today returns nominations closer to how things were done in the 1970s than they have been for the last decade, and especially during the Obama era.

Bouie doesn’t take Republican criticisms seriously:

Republicans will spin this as an unprecedented power grab. Already, Mitch McConnell has warned this will backfire on Democrats when they are in the minority, John McCain has predicted it will put a “chill” on the “entire” chamber, and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter has said that this is “a shame for the Senate” and “scary and dictatorial” for the country. But there’s nothing undemocratic about changing the rules to allow a majority to prevail, or—in this case—robbing a minority of a tool to obstruct without consequence. Indeed, if there’s anything undemocratic, it’s the GOP’s war on President Obama’s ability to make nominations, and to nullify one consequence of the 2012 elections.

Waldman also pushes back against GOP spin:

Iowa senator Chuck Grassley recently threatened, “So if the Democrats are bent on changing the rules, then I say go ahead. There are a lot more Scalias and Thomases that we’d love to put on the bench.” In other words, without the restraint of the filibuster, the next time Republicans have the White House and the Senate, which will happen eventually, they’ll go hog-wild, appointing the most radical conservatives they can find. But there’s one big reason that argument fails:They would have done it anyway. …

You can make an argument that Democrats should have taken the high road and not changed the filibuster rule today. But if you think Republicans wouldn’t have changed the rule to benefit themselves at the first chance they got—no matter what Democrats did—then you haven’t been paying attention.

Weigel considers why this happened now:

Beutler hopes for judicial nominees to get more liberal:

Over the course of several decades, the right has nurtured what essentially amounts to a shadow judiciary, composed of conservative legal scholars who disagree, juridically and ideologically, with the post-New Deal consensus. Republican presidents draw upon this class of activists to fill judicial vacancies, creating a modern antipode to liberal judicial activists of previous decades.

As that movement has matured, and in part because that movement has matured, politics has shrunk the ideological sphere from which Democratic presidents have been able cull liberal jurists. Outspoken progressives, on the periphery of the sphere, have been marginalized. The liberal legal establishment is so scrutinized and subject to so many litmus tests that it has self-selected for timid or self-censoring thinkers, at least in part because it was assumed “liberal activists” would be blocked.

That limiting force is gone now. And the hope is its absence draws a new generation of legal minds out of the shadows and on to the bench sooner than later.

David French throws some cold water:

I look forward to the speedy confirmation of President Cruz’s or President Paul’s nominees, beginning in January 2017.

Kilgore examines the vote count:

The only Democrats who didn’t go along were long-time “nuclear” opponent Carl Levin and two red-state senators of wandering loyalty, Joe Manchin and Mark Pryor. It took a lot of GOP obstruction to create this level of Democratic loyalty.

And Drum thinks “Republicans missed a bet here”:

[B]y refusing to compromise in any way, they’ve lost everything. Just as they lost everything on health care by refusing to engage with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act. Just as they lost everything on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. Just as they lost the 2012 election.

Hard-nosed obstinacy plays well with the base, but it’s not a winning strategy in the end. Republicans never seem to learn that lesson.

Deborah Sontag reports (NYT) that a relatively new maintenance drug for opiate addicts has made its way to the streets:

Buprenorphine has become both medication and dope: a treatment with considerable successes and also failures, as well as a street and prison drug bedeviling local authorities. It has attracted unscrupulous doctors and caused more health complications and deaths than its advocates acknowledge. It has also become a lucrative commodity, creating moneymaking opportunities – for manufacturers, doctors, drug dealers and even patients – that have undermined a public health innovation meant for social good. And the drug’s problems have emboldened some insurers to limit coverage of the medication, which cost state Medicaid agencies at least $857 million over a three-year period through 2012, a New York Times survey found.

Alec MacGillis defends the treatment and slams its media coverage:

Buprenorphine – bupe for short – has proven so successful at allowing opiate addicts to feel normal and go about their lives that advocates hail it as something of a wonder drug.

And the benefits multiply – less painkiller and heroin abuse means less HIV transmission, less hepatitis C, and, yes, fewer fatal overdoses. Check out the recent trends in buprenorphine use and heroin overdoses in Baltimore, which has embraced bupe as a weapon against its deeply entrenched heroin problem. No, correlation does not equal causation—for one thing, Baltimore was over the same period also expanding the use of naloxone, medication used by drug users and EMTs to reverse overdoses as they’re occurring. Still, it’s hard not to draw certain conclusions from these lines displayed in a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health, which echo the plunge in overdoses in France, an early adopter of buprenorphine.

So what’s not to like? Why are we not shipping as much buprenorphine as possible into small towns in Maine and eastern Oregon and eastern Kentucky and all the other places reporting surges in abuse of painkillers and now, increasingly, heroin? Well, partly because bupe has gotten stuck with its own stigma—not as strong as methadone’s, but damaging nonetheless. … The Times cites data showing 402 fatal overdoses linked to buprenorphine in the United States reported to the F.D.A. from spring 2003 through September. As the article notes, this pales in comparison with the 2,826 attributed to methadone over roughly the same period and the more than 19,000 fatal overdoses from opioids overall in 2010 alone.

The fact is, there is no silver bullet for the country’s growing opiate addiction problem. And any approach is going to seem tainted, to bourgeois eyes, by the inherently chaotic and desperate nature of the milieu in which opiate addiction is rooted (though not confined to – painkiller abuse has been on the rise in tony suburbs, too). It would be deeply unfortunate if fraught portrayals in the media with decidedly oversimplified, alarmist headlines had the side effect of dulling one of the best tools we have in this fight.