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Archive for 2014
January 13, 2014
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Only a special prosecutor can get truth about IRS abuse.
TRAINWRECK UPDATE: CNN: Help! I can’t use my Obamacare benefits.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Administrator Who Ran Phone Sex Line Won’t Be Fired.
THAT’S RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: ABC News: Health Care Website Frustrates Spanish Speakers. “Gabriel Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, said the problems hurt the credibility of federal officials and reinforce the belief held by some that authorities are indifferent to the plight of Latinos.”
UPDATE: “When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish.”
OF COURSE SHE DOES: Hillary Has An Enemies List.
TODAY: High Drama At The The Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning. It is a very important case, which is why the court is allowing 90 minutes of oral argument instead of the usual sixty. You can find the legal background here on the indispensable www.scotusblog.com, which will be live-blogging the argument tomorrow morning.
On December 13, 2011, President Obama nominated two people to the National Labor Relations Board, just days before Congress adjourned for the holidays. On January 4, 2012, even before Congress had really opened for business for its second session, which began January 3, he gave them recess appointments to the board. The power to do this is in Article II, Section 2: “The president shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”
The original purpose of this provision was to provide a means, at a time when travel was extremely slow and the Senate was likely to be out of session for months at a time, of appointing federal officials temporarily to carry on the business of the government when the Senate was unavailable to confirm the appointment. But presidents had increasingly been using it when the Senate refused to have an up-or-down vote on a nominee, installing the nominee when the Senate had recessed sometimes for only a few days. No one seriously challenged a president’s constitutional right to do so. Indeed, in 2007, the Senate, under Majority Leader Harry Reid, had begun holding pro-forma sessions every couple of days precisely to deny President George W. Bush the power of making recess appointments.
But Obama struck when the Republicans tried to do the same after they took the House in 2010. By having the House not adjourn, the Senate was prevented from doing so as well under Article I, Section 5. Obama simply declared the Senate not to be in real session and made the recess appointments, even though the Senate, far from lollygagging on the confirmation process, had not even had time to have the nominees—nominated less than three weeks earlier and with the holidays intervening—vetted by the FBI or to schedule a committee hearing on them. (Why did the president wait until January 4, and not just appoint them the instant the Senate began holding pro-forma sessions in mid-December? Simple: By waiting until January 4, when the next session of the Senate had officially begun, he secured their positions until the end of 2013 instead of just until the end of 2012.)
When a company named Noel Canning subsequently lost a decision at the NLRB, it sued, claiming the board was illegally constituted. The D.C. Circuit Court agreed a year ago.
Read the whole thing. I’m conflicted, because I’d love to be a recess appointment to the Supreme Court. Like being appointed to fill an unexpired term in the Senate, it’s the only way I’d ever make it, and I think I’d last just about as long as I could enjoy it. . . .
RANDOM ACTS of academic kindness.
SEEMS KINDA 20TH CENTURY: ‘TELEPHONIC SIGNATURE’? As of Jan. 1, Obamacare Forces States to Accept Applications ‘Signed’ by Voice.
K-12 IMPLOSION, NEW YORK CITY EDITION: No books, no clue at city’s worst school.
CLARICE FELDMAN: Bridging the Obamacare, IRS, and Benghazi Scandal Gap.
I MENTIONED THIS IN PASSING YESTERDAY, BUT REPUBLICANS really should get behind abolishing the national drinking age.
Republicans are supposed to stand for limited government, freedom and federalism, but it was under a Republican administration—and a Republican transportation secretary, Elizabeth Dole—that states were forced to raise their age limits or face financial penalties. That was before the tea party, though. Perhaps today, when Republican leaders across the board are singing the praises of limited government, it is time for them to put their money where their mouths are and support an end to the federal drinking-age mandate.
And if arguments based on fairness and principle aren’t enough, perhaps one based on politics will do the trick: This will get votes.
Democrats traditionally do well with the youth vote, and one reason is that they have been successful in portraying Republicans as fuddy-duddies who want to hold young people down. This may be unfair—college speech codes and the like don’t tend to come from Republicans—but the evidence suggests that it works. What’s more, the first few elections people vote in tend to set a long-term pattern. A move to repeal the federal drinking-age mandate might help Republicans turn this around.
Republicans are supposed to be against mandates aimed at the states, so this would demonstrate consistency. Second, it’s a pro-freedom move that younger voters—not yet confronted with the impact of, say, the capital-gains tax—can appreciate on a personal level. Third, it puts the Democrats in the position of having either to support the end of a federal mandate — something they tend to reflexively oppose — or to look like a bunch of old fuddy-duddies themselves.
It’s still true. Anyone interested? Rand Paul? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? Mike Lee? Anyone? Hey, Obama’s losing his grip on younger voters. Strike now!
The Democrats, meanwhile, have their own strategy for this.
OF COURSE THEY DO: Anti-Israel academic boycotters demand Freedom From Criticism.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: Blogger’s Incarceration Raises First Amendment Questions.
For over six years, Roger Shuler has hounded figures of the state legal and political establishment on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, a hothouse of furious but often fuzzily sourced allegations of deep corruption and wide-ranging conspiracy. Some of these allegations he has tested in court, having sued his neighbor, his neighbor’s lawyer, his former employer, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the Alabama State Bar and two county circuit judges, among others. Mostly, he has lost.
But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.
A former sports reporter and a former employee in a university’s publications department, Mr. Shuler, 57, was arrested in late October on a contempt charge in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by the son of a former governor. The circumstances surrounding that arrest, including a judge’s order that many legal experts described as unconstitutional and behavior by Mr. Shuler that some of the same experts described as self-defeating posturing, have made for an exceptionally messy test of constitutional law.
Judges really need to be held more personally accountable for unconstitutional orders. Judicial immunity, after all, is a judge-made doctrine, with no foundation in the Constitution, and rather self-serving.
SALENA ZITO: Cyclical Politics Can Lift GOP.
America is famous for its political duality, despite the vitriol of the left and right wings of its two major parties.
It has a slim, moderately progressive majority when it comes to social values and a slim, moderately conservative majority when it comes to economics. . . .
Political schizophrenia is in our national DNA, which is why “wave” election cycles occur fairly frequently and parties rarely hold the White House for longer than two consecutive terms.
Despite sometimes nasty election cycles, when we shift from one party to another, the creative tension that this fosters has always been a source of our national greatness.
“It would probably be bad for the country if one side or the other ever truly won and forced everyone to conform to the tenets of conservative or progressive politics,” Nichols said.
Fortunately for Republicans, American politics is cyclical — which means that if one side is up today, it is assured of being down in the near future, as the political tide slowly ebbs and flows.
Well, a rising tide will lift your boat — unless you’re busy knocking holes in the bottom.
ANALYSIS: Why Bridgegate made headlines but Obama’s IRS scandal didn’t.
Government officials and political operatives working for Christie, for weird and petty reasons, chose to make traffic worse. That’s the takeaway. When they are reminded of the fact that people working on Christie’s behalf thought it was a good political game to mire tens of thousands of their fellow Americans in the nightmarish gridlock that is a daily dreaded prospect for tens of millions, they will be discomfited by that and by the politician in whose name it was done.
And yet, you know what is also something everybody would find “relatable”? Politicians who sic the tax man on others for political gain. Everybody has to deal with the IRS and fears it. Last year, we learned from the Internal Revenue Service itself that it had targeted ideological opponents of the president for special scrutiny and investigation — because they were ideological opponents.
That’s juicy, just as Bridgegate is juicy. It’s something we can all understand, it speaks to our greatest fears, and it’s the sort of thing TV newspeople could gab about for days on end without needing a fresh piece of news to keep it going.
And yet, according to Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center, “In less than 24 hours, the three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they’ve allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service controversy.”
Why? Oh, come on, you know why. Christie belongs to one political party. Obama belongs to the other. You know which ones they belong to. And you know which ones the people at the three networks belong to, too: In surveys going back decades, anywhere from 80% to 90% of Washington’s journalists say they vote Democratic.
Scandals are not just about themselves; they are about the media atmosphere that surrounds them. They are perpetuated and deepened by the attention of journalists, whose relentless pursuit of every angle keeps the story going. That is exactly what has been missing from the IRS scandal from its outset; Republicans in Congress have been the dogged pursuers, not the press.
They’re not the Fourth Estate. They’re the Praetorian Guard.