Month: November 2014

A Democrat Finally Steps Up, Ctd

Joe Klein welcomes Jim Webb’s presidential run:

He will be a refreshing presence on the campaign trail. He doesn’t talk like a politician. He can be blunt and combative. He has taken strong populist economic stands and was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. In fact, Webb goes in strong whenever he takes a stand. He’ll certainly be fun to watch during debates (he was a boxer at Annapolis).

You’d have to call him a longshot, of course. But I suspect he’ll be one of those long shots who have the power to shape a campaign with new ideas and sharp arguments. He will certainly cause Clinton some populist agita, should she run.

David Freedlander downplays Webb’s chances:

It has all the trappings of a campaign as vanity project, the type of presidential exploration designed not to excite convention delegates but to boost a candidate’s name ID before cable-TV bookers.

Webb, after all, would come into a Democratic primary with considerable baggage—never mind that he would likely be squaring off against Hillary Clinton, the most overwhelming favorite in an open Democratic primary in history. There is the fact that Webb used to be a Republican, a point he proudly points to in the video when he mentions his service in the Reagan administration. Or the fact that Webb, who decided not to run again after only one term in elective office, doesn’t seem to have the stomach for the degradations of politics. And the fact that Webb’s base of support lies among working-class whites, who are a diminishing constituency in a party made up more and more of liberals, minorities, and the professional classes.

Jonathan Bernstein opines that Webb “isn’t so much a serious candidate for a presidential nomination as he is an interesting person who has chosen to enter the contest”:

In that, he reminds me of Bill Bradley in 2000 or perhaps Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Interesting people can be excellent (or so-so) senators, but they never get close to presidential nominations. For that, the requirement is almost insane ambition.

Nevertheless, on the surface Webb looks like a viable candidate (he fits my criteria of having convention qualifications and fitting in the mainstream of his party on policy). He also appears to be well-regarded by many in the national press corps. So even if he polls badly six months from now and has little in the way of  the organization that real candidates need, it will probably be easier for Clinton to accept at least a couple of debates with him than to freeze him out.

Jennifer Rubin talks up Webb’s run:

If nothing else, Webb can show how empty Clinton’s message may be. He can turn her insistence on inevitability into a portrait of entitlement, which in fact it is. And if he starts getting attention, it might stir other Democrats to get in and steal some of the limelight.

Noah Millman hopes Webb will force Clinton to debate foreign policy. But he fears Webb will get tripped up by the culture war:

Webb’s campaign is going to be severely under-funded, and Webb himself is going to start out of the gate a terrible campaigner, so it may be that Clinton will simply ignore him and we won’t get any debate at all. But if she wants to make him instantly irrelevant, the last thing she’d do is engage him. Rather, all she – or, rather, her surrogates – need to do is to position him as a culture war conservative, someone who is at best iffy and at worst outright hostile on women’s equality, gay rights, affirmative action, immigration, and so on down the line. Once that becomes the story, that will likely be the only story – the only one that matters, anyway. And then, either he sinks without a trace or, if he gets a little bit of traction, it’ll be another story about how culturally conservative working class whites who rejected Obama are rejecting Clinton as well. Which, in turn, will further facilitate their consolidation as a GOP voting bloc – precisely the opposite of what Webb intends to achieve. …

Webb is never going to be the great progressive hope – and that’s fine. Indeed, it’s better than fine. It’s better for Clinton to be challenged on foreign and economic policy by a Jim Webb than a Bernie Sanders. People who aren’t the usual suspects might just listen. But he needs to avoid being defined by the cultural signals he gives off.

Can Republicans Avoid The Trap Obama Set?

GOP Immigration

Noam Scheiber highly doubts it:

[T]he conservative message machine has gone on at length about the “constitutional crisis” the president is instigating. The right has compared Obama to a monarch (see here and here), a Latin American caudillo, even a conspirator against the Roman Republic. (Ever melodrama much?) The rhetoric gets a little thick. But if you boil it down, the critique is mostly about Obama’s usurpation of power and contempt for democratic norms, not the substance of his policy change. Some Republicans no doubt believe it.

And yet, try as they might to stick to the script, there’s something about dark-skinned foreigners that sends the conservative id into overdrive.

Most famously, there’s Iowa Congressman Steve King’s observation last year that for every child brought into the country illegally “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” While King tends to be especially vivid in his lunacy, he’s no outlier.

How Chait expects this to play out:

Substantively, Obama’s executive order gives him less than he hoped to gain with a bipartisan law. But politically, he has ceded no advantage. Indeed, he has gained one. Not only does immigration remain a live issue, it is livelier than ever. The GOP primary will remorselessly drive its candidates rightward and force them to promise to overturn Obama’s reform, and thus to immediately threaten with deportation some 5 million people — none of whom can vote, but nearly all of whom have friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who can. …

The emotional momentum in the Republican Party now falls to its most furious, deranged voices. Michele Bachmann has denounced what she calls “millions of unskilled, illiterate, foreign nationals coming into the United States who can’t speak the English language.” Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama has even presented the most sympathetic slice of the immigrant community — the ones serving in the military — as a source of insidious competition and even treason. (“I don’t want American citizens having to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs in our military … These individuals have to be absolutely 100 percent loyal and trustworthy.” Steve King, a regular font of nativist outbursts, is setting himself up as a power broker in Iowa, which will command center stage in the GOP primary for months and months on end.

(Graphic from Josh Marshall.)

Obama’s Legal Footing Is Firm

That’s Walter Dellinger’s determination:

The idea that the immigration plan just announced by President Obama is a lawless power grab is absurd. As the Justice Department legal analysis that was just released amply demonstrates, much of the advance criticism of the president’s action has been uninformed and unwarranted. The opinion is well-reasoned and at times even conservative. The president is not acting unilaterally, but pursuant to his statutory authority. Wide discretion over deportation priorities has long been conferred on the executive branch by Congress, and it is being exercised in this case consistent with policies such as family unification that have been endorsed by Congress.

The piece is by far the best I’ve read on the subject, and calms my fears a lot. This is the best response to Ross’s point that if the president can do this for 4 million, why not every undocumented immigrant:

The lawyers here were cautious. They gave approval for deferred actions for parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents, finding that Congress had demonstrated support for permitting people who are lawfully in America to be united with their parents, spouses, and children. They did not, however, believe that they could approve a similar program for parents of those who are in the United States under the deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, program. Because the Dreamers remain in the country based on discretion, not on the basis of a legal entitlement, OLC reasoned that without a family member with lawful status in the United States, there was not the same grounding in congressional policy to justify classwide relief.

But, again, the ability of the Obama administration to make its best case seems to be in doubt. They put out a long legal paper – but back it up with no aggressive messaging in the broader public square. That way, they win the argument but somehow lose the debate. Which is the story on the ACA as well. Here’s Dellinger’s strongest point, it seems to me, and one critical to understanding the debate about executive discretion:

There are 11.3 million people in the United States who, for one reason or another, are deportable. The largest number that can be deported in any year under the resources provided by Congress is somewhere around 400,000. Congress has recognized this and in 6 U.S.C. 202 (5) it has directed the secretary of homeland security to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” In the action announced tonight, the secretary has done just that, and the president has approved.

Drum, for his part, is somewhat surprised to find that “both liberal and conservative legal scholars—as opposed to TV talking heads and other professional rabble-rousers—agree that Obama has the authority to reshape immigration enforcement in nearly any way he wants to”:

It’s an open question whether Obama’s actions are politically wise. It might force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner as they compete loudly to denounce Obama’s actions, further damaging their chances of appealing to Hispanics in future elections. Alternatively, it might poison any possibility of working constructively with congressional Republicans over the next couple of years, which might further degrade Democratic approval ratings. There’s also, I think, a legitimate question about whether liberals should be cheering an expansion of presidential power, whether it’s legal or not.

That said, Obama’s actions really do appear to be not just legal, but fairly uncontroversially so among people who know both the law and past precedent.

Marty Lederman dispels “some of the more commonly heard myths about the DHS enforcement priorities and ‘deferred action’ policies that the President just announced.” One myth he busts:

It does not “cut out Congress”—indeed, it relies upon statutory authority.  Nor does it contradict what Congress has prescribed.  Neither the President nor the Secretary nor OLC has said anything to suggest that Congress could not, by statute, require a different enforcement scheme—to the contrary, OLC specifically acknowledges (pp. 4, 6) that Congress could legislate limits on enforcement discretion that the agency would be obliged to follow.  Moreover, and of great significance, OLC specifically concludes that, because enforcement priority decisions must be “consonant with, rather than contrary to,” Congress’s policy decisions as reflected in the governing statutes (pp. 5, 20), it would not be permissible for DHS to afford deferred action status to one category of aliens that the agency had proposed to cover (parents of children who have received deferred action status under the so-called “DACA” program):  Offering deferred action status to such aliens, OLC opined, would be unlawful because it would “deviate in important respects from the immigration system Congress has enacted and the policies that system embodies” (p. 32).

Ilya Somin agrees that Obama is in the clear:

I am no fan of the Obama administration’s approach to constitutional interpretation. In too many instances, the president really has acted illegally and undermined the rule of law – most notably by starting wars without congressional authorization. But today’s decision isn’t one of them.

What Happens To The Iran Talks Now?

Monday is the deadline for reaching a comprehensive agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program. Despite some hopeful signs in recent weeks, it is not likely to be met: not only have the negotiators failed to resolve some of the major sticking points in the talks, Senate Republicans once again made clear in a letter to Obama this week that they will kill any deal they don’t like – possibly meaning any deal at all -especially if the president attempts to circumvent Congress in enacting it. Acknowledging this reality, Fred Kaplan favors extending the talks for another interim period, given the grim alternative:

As Winston Churchill famously said, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” and the situation is no different here, as long as it’s clear we’re not being taken for a ride. As long as the interim accord isn’t altered, Iran will not easily be able to move closer to a nuclear bomb. And on a broader level, the United States and Iran have some common interests, not least in countering Islamist extremists in the Middle East (or at least Sunni extremists, such as al-Qaida and ISIS).

The P5+1 talks are the two countries’ only diplomatic forum; as long as it’s not a forum for deception, it’s a good idea, on many grounds, to keep them going.

The same was true of the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks during the Cold War. For their first 15 years or so, the talks accomplished little in reducing strategic arms; but, had the forum not existed, it would have been much harder to make genuine progress, in cutting arms and ending the Cold War, when the time grew ripe. Who knows: the same may be true, a decade or so from now, with Iran.

But Gary Sick fears that failure to reach a deal will empower opponents of detente in Tehran and weaken the US’s leverage:

The primary leverage that the U.S.-led side has brought to the table is the international sanctions regime that has limited Iran’s energy exports and choked off its access to international financial networks. But those are not U.N. sanctions; they rely primarily on Washington’s ability to persuade or pressure companies in countries whose governments do not endorse those sanctions to refrain from trade with or investment in Iran, under threat that noncompliance could result in their being shut out of the international banking system. But if Iran is internationally perceived to have made a good-faith offer of compromise to no avail, the dynamic could change. Washington might no longer have that leverage.

Nazila Fathi notes how the long-running dispute has already empowered the Iranian hardliners, making the case for an amicable resolution all the stronger:

When the sanctions made it difficult for the government to sell oil legally, the Revolutionary Guards took charge of Iran’s underground, illegal oil market. The Guards were also able to seize control of oil projects left incomplete by foreign investors forced to abandon them because of the sanctions. All this has helped the Guards to expand their political and economic influence. If the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program ends, the Guards will lose much of this power. As Tehran economist Saeed Laylaz explains: “The hard-liners are opposed to a deal because they will lose their control over huge revenues that they have controlled and wasted over the past few years.”

Bearing this in mind, Rouhani’s conservative opponents warned him ahead of his trip to the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September to avoid reconciliation with the United States, which is widely seen as the key to ending the sanctions.

And Charles Recknagel reviews the benefits of a deal to both Iran and Western countries:

For both Iran and the West, the potential benefits of ending the nuclear crisis and lifting international sanctions on Tehran could be enormous. Iran, which has seen sanctions dramatically reduce world demand for its oil, not only wants to increase its exports again, it also needs Western investment and technology to revitalize its oil and natural-gas industry, kick-start its economy, and lift its standard of living. At the same time, many Western energy companies want to return to work in Iran, which holds the world’s fourth-largest proven crude-oil reserves and the world’s second-largest gas reserves. Many other Western, nonoil, businesses regard Iran — with 80 million people — as a rich potential consumer market.

But nobody expects a nuclear deal to lead to instantaneous changes.

What’s actually happening behind closed doors in Tehran and Vienna this week remains opaque. But the underlying reasons for continuing this dialogue remain powerful: Iran’s nuclear program is currently suspended, and the consequences of a breakdown for the entire region are dire. We need persistence. And, somehow, hope.

Republicans Take Obama To Court

House Republicans just filed their lawsuit against Obama “over unilateral actions on the health care law that they say are abuses of the president’s executive authority.” Michael Lynch and Rachel Surminsky list reasons the lawsuit is likely to fail. Among them:

The courts have made it evident through precedent that they do not want to settle inter-branch disputes that can be remedied through legislative action. Congress has to establish that it cannot stop or remedy executive actions through legislation. Additionally, Congress must show it has made a previous attempt to address the executive action (see Goldwater v. Carter and Kucinich v. Obama). Evidence must be presented that any failures are not simply a result of an inability to overcome political opposition to potentially effective remedies.

Although Congress has made no attempt to legislatively reverse Obama’s deadline changes, Boehner will likely argue that any such attempts would be unable to effectively constrain executive implementation of the ACA. It is unlikely that courts will be swayed by such an argument.

Republicans are talking about suing Obama over his immigration executive order. That suit would also be an extreme long shot:

[I]t would be “very difficult” for the House—or another challenger—to successfully press a case against Obama’s immigration actions on deportation enforcement, said John Malcolm, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. The main problem is the legal question of standing, or who has been injured by Obama’ s policy change and can bring a lawsuit. That issue has already stopped a legal challenge brought by border agents to Obama’s similar 2012 immigration action, and it looms over any other suit lodged by a member of Congress.

 

What Is The GOP’s Immigration Policy?

Here’s what Obama did last night:

Ezra requests that Republicans formulate a real response:

Republicans need to decide what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country now. They need to take away Obama’s single strongest argument — that this is a crisis, and that congressional Republicans don’t have an answer and won’t let anyone else come up with one. …

That, really, is Obama’s advantage right now. Even if you think he’s going too far, he at least wants to solve the problem. Republicans don’t seem to want to do anything except stop Obama from solving the problem. That’s not a winning position. More to the point, it’s not a responsible one.

Bloomberg View’s editors echo:

It’s time for Republicans to put up or shut up. By now it’s clear what they’re against — the dreaded “a” word (amnesty). But what are they for? They can’t avoid that question any longer. Now that they are the majority party in both houses, they don’t have the luxury of sitting back and criticizing everything that Democrats propose. Now they’re in charge. They need to start acting like it.

Thomas Mann is in the same ballpark:

Let’s get serious. Republicans used their majority foothold in the House to guarantee that Congress would be the graveyard of serious policymaking, a far cry from the deliberative first branch of government designed by the framers. They have reduced the legislative process to nothing more than a tool in a partisan war to control the levers of public power. The cost of such unrelenting opposition and gridlock is that policymaking initiative and power inevitably will flow elsewhere  — to the executive and the courts.

America Is A Good Place To Be Undocumented

Relatively speaking:

Illegal immigrants do not cause exploitative employers to put Americans out of a job. Rather, the toleration of exploitative employers is what creates the demand for illegal immigrants.

To illustrate this, look to Europe. In August, your correspondent was standing on the seafront in Calais, France, asking young penniless Africans why they were so desperate to hitch a ride over the channel, when France is just as wealthy as Britain. The answer is actually simple. In France, finding work without an identity card is extremely difficult. That is why in Paris, unlike in London, tourists often find themselves accosted by African men selling beads or running scams. Africans living in London without paperwork don’t need to sell trinkets to get by: they can find better-paid work cleaning offices.

Eric Posner’s read on the situation:

Republicans are right about one thing. Obama’s action will not fix the problem of illegal immigration; nor would congressional action that created a legal pathway to citizenship. The great irony is that as undocumented aliens gain rights, they will no longer need to, or even be able to, supply menial work at a low wage. Illegal immigration will rise again, just as it did after the last path-to-citizenship-law in 1986. America’s hunger for cheap labor can’t be legislated away.

Making Yourself Legal Isn’t So Easy

For Jose Antonio Vargas, the executive action Obama took last night was personal:

Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two—asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person—that chill me to the bone: “Why don’t you just make yourself legal?”

And: “Why don’t you get in the back of the line?”

The questions underscore the depth of misunderstanding about how the immigration process works, and doesn’t work. They imply that, short of self-deportation, there is a process for undocumented people like me to follow, a way to rectify the situation and adjust our status. Just show up at an office, fill out a form, and get in the back of a line. Somewhere. Anywhere.

I’ve gotten asked these questions so many times that I decided to walk viewers through the process—or lack thereof—in a scene in my film “Documented,” where I chronicle a broken and inhumane immigration system that, among other things, has kept my mother and I apart for 21 years. Barring any executive action, I can’t leave the U.S.; there’s no guarantee that I’d be allowed back.

Flavelle also dismantles the Republicans’ moral argument:

[S]ay you’re a Mexican citizen with no special skills, no money for an investor’s visa and no relatives living legally in the U.S. You can’t apply for the green-card lottery, and you have no grounds for asylum. Your only hope to move to the U.S. is to be one of the few thousand unskilled workers who squeak in each year — or to enter illegally. …

Yes, people living here without authorization are breaking the law. Pretending that they had a viable legal alternative just makes it easier to demonize them, by viewing those immigrants as wrongly taking something that might have been theirs had they only followed the rules. The annual green-card figures show that for most of the people affected by Obama’s order, that probably wasn’t the case.

Ruben Navarrette Jr., on the other hand, worries about how the executive action will play out:

Looking ahead, it’s unclear how many of the estimated 4 to 5 million illegal immigrants who might be eligible for relief under the guidelines spelled out by Obama will actually apply for the dispensation. Another unknown is how many from that pool will eventually qualify. In the case of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that served as a model for what the president intends to do with, for instance, the undocumented parents of U.S.-born children, only about a third of those who were eligible were willing to risk going through the process to be awarded deferred action. This includes walking into a Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, turning yourself in, getting fingerprinted, handling over your home address and all your personal information, all in return for the promise not to deport you—at least for now. Expect many of those who are eligible for relief under the new program to say, “Thanks but no thanks” and go on their way.

Meanwhile, the Obama deportation machine will continue to run 24/7 and enforcement might be even more aggressive than it has been up to now in order to overcompensate for what many Americans perceive as a giveaway for illegal immigrants.

Along those lines, Hayley Munguia looks closely at the undocumented immigrants still under threat of deportation:

Obama said Thursday that his plan prioritizes “deporting felons, not families.” And the percentage of deportations that involved undocumented immigrants convicted of a crime has increased significantly from 35 percent in 2007 to 59 percent last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security. But those numbers include minor infractions like traffic violations. Since 2003, there have been 433,000 removals of undocumented immigrants convicted exclusively of nonviolent crimes, the MPI has reported.

Obamacare’s Numbers Were Inflated

The administration “erroneously” over-counted Obamacare enrollments by “incorrectly adding 380,000 dental subscribers to raise the total above 7 million.” Jonathan Cohn calls the error “inexcusable.” McArdle face palms:

Adding in a bunch of unrelated plans, with all the attendant risk of being exposed and embarrassed, seems flatly insane. In fact, this is the most compelling reason to believe that it was a mistake. If it was a mistake, however, I’m not sure how much better that is supposed to make us feel. For the administration to have this poor a handle on its own data while attempting to make over almost one-fifth of the U.S. economy is a lot more frightening than some rather pedestrian lies.

Jordan Weissmann puts the news in context:

380,000 sounds like a large number, and it did conveniently push Obamacare’s enrollment figures over the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of 7 million sign-ups. However, 380,000 also only amounts to 5.6 percent of the real tally, and the 7 million figure was never particularly meaningful to begin with (nothing particularly magical happened if Obamacare reached that milestone, and nothing tragic will happen because the program missed it). And, as Charles Gaba of ACASignups.net told Bloomberg, even with the lower total, Obamacare’s attrition rate was still in line with what experts like him predicted. This new news shouldn’t especially change anybody’s opinion about whether the exchanges have succeeded or not.

But Suderman recalls that, at “the end of the first open enrollment period, the administration repeatedly touted its success at getting 8 million sign-ups during the first year”:

What the new figures reveal, then, is the fragility and instability of that initial figure. Not only did the number of enrollments continue to drop during and after the summer, the figure wasn’t as high as reported in post-open-enrollment updates. This is probably at least one reason why enrollment targets for the second enrollment period were recently slashed by about 50 percent.

And Erik Wemple points out how “the pursuit of Obamacare data is a dicey matter for health-care reporters”:

Following the October 2013 launch of the dysfunctional HealthCare.gov, determining enrollment numbers called on investigative journalism skills. As the numbers improved, so did the willingness of HHS to dish them out. And even as states furnish all kinds of health-care metrics, HHS just cannot provide a compelling explanation as to why it cannot provide running enrollment figures.

 

The Generation Gap On Global Warming

Young Republicans

It’s significant:

The key question, though, is whether even within the GOP, there is a split between younger and older voters on climate change. Sure enough, our poll suggests that this is the case … What this shows is that age matters above and beyond partisanship in how people think about the climate issue.

Roughly six in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents under age 50 think the government should limit greenhouse gases even if it causes a $20 increase in their monthly bill; fewer than half of Republicans ages 50-64 or over 65 support this policy. Support is only slightly higher among Democrats under age 50 than those over age 65, which is statistically insignificant. Support does rise to 78 percent among Democrats under age 40.

Despite both issues having major generational divides, Loomis is skeptical that climate change will follow the path of marriage equality:

Gay marriage has a simple solution: making gay marriage legal. But climate change is far more complicated with no clear situation. Polling showing young people would pay $20 extra a month in home heating have some value but let’s be clear, that ain’t solving climate change. So what happens then? And the mechanism for change is much murkier. Ballot measures mean people can vote to legalize gay marriage. Lawsuits can force states to do the same. There isn’t really a similar mechanism for climate change.