California's Past, California's Future

Gordon Skene posted a fascinating echo of the past, from a Jerry Brown address to the state the day after the passage of Prop. 13 in 1978.



The Jerry Brown you hear is in full backpedal mode, telling voters that the message was received, that government spending is a scourge, that "we must look forward to lean and frugal budgets." Voters sent a message that they want their taxes cut, and the state will oblige. Brown offered a hiring freeze for state workers, proposed a round of budget cuts, and endorsed some kind of automatic limit on spending for the future. He offered a defense of state workers late in the clip, and he asked corporations to pretty-please take the huge windfall they would get by having their property taxes lowered to "invest in the state," but otherwise, it's a full-on co-opting of the Jarvis message.

Now, coming the day after passage of Prop. 13, you can argue that Brown was doing what he had to do. The people really did speak, although they didn't quite know the consequences of the words they were using, and Brown would have a re-election battle within 5 months, and he had to project a message that he "felt the pain" of those out there who voted to save their homes.

The problem is that this statement is directly analogous to the statement of Darrell Steinberg on May 20, 2009, the day after the special election went down in flames. Some would obviously ague that he was in the same position as Brown, and did what he had to do as well. As I said on May 20:

Where is the argument for DEMOCRACY in these statements? Since 1978 that democracy has crumbled and needs to be completely rebuilt. Everyone knows this but refuses to say it out loud. This is why the legislature and the Governor have historically low approval ratings. People are starved for actual leadership and see none. Only democracy will save us. This failed experiment with conservative Two Santa Claus Theories has now become deeply destructive. Because the democrats have provided no leadership and ceded the rhetorical ground, California public opinion holds the contradictory beliefs that the state should not raise taxes and also not cut spending. And if it persists without leadership and advocacy to the contrary, nothing will change.

Not once in those 31 intervening years has an argument been offered that leads proudly instead of placates meekly, that tells people about the future instead of the past, that makes stands on principle instead of trying to do the best with the system we have. That address in 1978 should have been replayed in a loop at every Democratic committee meeting and club event for 31 years, with the inevitable question asked afterward: "Is this a rallying cry? Is this the voice of a party that presumes to be on the side of the people? Is this giving people a vision, a dream, even a goal?"

People understand this in their lizard brains. They can naturally discern the strong and the weak, and gravitate toward the former even if their strength is repulsive. Since 1978, we have had exactly one other Democratic Governor in California, the kind of guy who signs on to amicus briefs with the Cal Chamber of Commerce defending illegal gubernatorial actions, and he was run out of Sacramento by a radical right movement that considered him too much of a hippie.

I have always thought that a strong defense of democracy, of the principles of majority rule, of government as a protector and a defender, would be rewarded in the public square. Instead we muddle through, and people suffer. I have not taken too much note of this "failure of the California dream" concept - for my money, as long as there were millions in poverty, gated communities and invisible barriers stratifying society, a separate California for the poor, the sick, the aged, then that dream was a good tool for marketers but a destructive proposition to tout. And while this has never been more true in our unequal society, it was ever thus. For the dream to be resurrected, it would have to be something fundamentally different. Not a "dream" of suburban sprawl and excess, but a dream of a society that takes care of one another, that seeks to maximize potential, that provides opportunity and allows individual dreams to take root. That can only happen in a flowering democracy reflective of the popular will.

I think leaders are emerging. While I won't be a part of day-to-day writing of the back and forth of California politics, as a citizen of the state I intend not to abandon it but to do whatever I can to involve myself in a movement toward fulfilling that new dream. It's deeply frustrating to analyze the politics of a state surrounded by brick walls to responsible governance at every turn, but paradoxically I think it remains an exciting time to be a progressive in California. The long march continues.

John Garamendi Becomes First Prominent Dem To Endorse Lakoff Initiative Concept

John Garamendi appeared on Angie Coiro's Live From The Left Coast with Professor George Lakoff and our own David Atkins to talk about the California Democracy Act, Lakoff's one-line initiative which would change all legislative actions on budget and revenue to a majority vote. Listen at around 13:00 for Garamendi's remarks endorsing Lakoff's approach.

Garamendi: Well, if you put a proposition or a Constitutional amendment on the ballot, and it says, gives the legislature a majority vote to raise taxes and a budget, or one or the other, it's likely to be turned down. You know, that's, the polling indicates that, there are issues that have come up before, there was one I think two years ago that was on the ballot, it was turned down (it was 2004 -ed.). That was 55% for budgeting. The fundamental problem is, we're not framing the issue, we're not putting the proper issue to the people, and I think that was the common error from just a moment ago. If you make it about the budget, if you make it about taxes, I think you're sure to lose. If you make it about the very nature of democracy, all the way back to the Greek, the Greek civilization and the start of democracy, it was a majority. It was a majority situation, and here we are in this day and age in America where we really have thrown majority out, and we, in California at least, we are faced with minority rule, and some would say the tyranny of the minority. Which is exactly what's happened in the last two or three decades now, when it's come time for tight budgets and tight situations, urgency bills, as well as budget or tax bills. So I think we need to have a new discussion about what is the nature of our democracy.

While not an explicit endorsement, this mirrors Lakoff's theory on how to properly put together this kind of initiative. The majority rule theory is fairly rooted in the American imagination, and that's really the only way to explain this to people. There isn't enough of a sense that we have minority rule right now, and that this tyranny of the minority is largely the cause of the state's dysfunction over the last several decades. This is more than anything an education project, and Garamendi appears to understand it.

We're a democracy, we elected these people, let them do their jobs, and if we don't like what they do, we'll throw them out the next election.

Majority rule is an accountability measure. People currently have everyone and no one to blame for the problems of the state. Democrats can blame the rules, Republicans can blame the Democrats. Majority rule would make things much clearer for the public.

This is an important turning point, to have someone like Garamendi openly siding with the concept of the Lakoff initiative in what is fast becoming a grassroots/establishment split. The folks at CA Majority Rule are still raising money for a poll to prove their concept as one that can work with voters. I suggest you give it strong consideration.

The Wanker Caucus

Ben Nelson thinks that the health care crisis is worth taking our time, and we should cut focus on cutting everyone's coverage for now and wait until later to expand coverage. Because those 47 million uninsured can wait. He also offered a stirring defense of minority rule:

Nelson appeared to settle on 65 Senate votes as a figure that would provide him a comfort level in terms of establishing a level of bipartisan support for a bill.

"I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy," he said.

A minimum of five Republican votes would be required to reach a total of 65 senators.

Sixty votes would be sufficient to clear a Republican filibuster and win passage of the legislation.

"It would be a tremendous mistake to jam it through with 50 votes" under the Senate's arcane budget reconciliation process, Nelson said.

Yes, it would be a mistake to assert the proposition that majorities can pass legislation. That would be an assault on democracy.

As David Kurtz, notes, Ben Nelson has never received 65% of the vote in his elections, so I'm sure he'll resign.

But Nelson is practically a single-payer advocate compared to Artur Davis.

Davis, D-Birmingham, said Democratic House leaders should listen to their members and President Barack Obama, who has said there is room for compromise on the public option.

"The idea that it's the holy grail of this debate is wrong," Davis said.

"Public option can't pass the Senate," Davis said. "I'm interested in something that can pass and Barack Obama can sign." [...]

"We need a new bill. The Senate is moving in that direction," Davis said. "Unfortunately, the House is not moving in that direction. What I see in the House is some hardening of the battle lines. That's discouraging."

"I'm not for penalizing any of our small businesses or any businesses ... especially during a time when you have an ongoing recession," Bright said, a point Davis echoed.

"Frankly, the House leadership seems wedded to keeping that in," Davis said. "And the more you look at it, the more indefensible that is."

Artur Davis is running for Governor of Alabama. He'll probably introduce a bill to hang immigrants before too long.

The Real Story On The Lakoff Initiative

You may have seen me live-tweeting the events last night at SEIU Local 721 in LA, where Professor George Lakoff and the folks behind CA Majority Rule met with around 200 activists, union members, elected officials, legislative candidates, representatives from Speaker Bass' office, and more, to talk about the just-released proposed November 2010 initiative on majority rule. If you read through both the live tweets and Dante Atkins' notes on the meeting, I think you get a picture of a potential split inside the California Democratic Party, one that could have major implications for all elections next year.

It should be noted that CDP Vice-Chair Eric Bauman was there to offer support. He gave a typical stump speech and said very plainly that "the reason you're here tonight is the solution" to the problems that grip the state, problems he laid out very carefully and completely. He was honest in saying that any Democrat who opposes this kind of measure will be told that "vertebra are available for installation... I think the chiropractor's lobby can help us with that." He made clear that we don't have a spending problem, "we have a common sense problem," and he pushed everyone in the room to work toward a real solution.

But Professor Lakoff's speech seemed to capture the dynamic between the grassroots and the establishment much better. Lakoff opened by talking about the origins of the initiative that he filed yesterday:

I got into this last spring when Lonnie Hancock invited me to speak to a group of State Senators. And I said, what's the problem, you're the majority! And they said they don't have any power. And they explained the whole 2/3rds rule, and how the leadership has to work with them because we want to lose as little as possible.

And I asked, why aren't you in every assembly district explaining this problem? It's about schools, healthcare, everything, and there's no answer. I went back and said that there's something really wrong. Its name is democracy [...] Which is more Democratic? Majority rule, or minority rule? You knew the answer from the 3rd grade on. Even Republicans know the answer but they don't like to. We know there will be a blowback if we try to change things, but the hardest blowback is coming from our side. The reason that Loni Hancock invited me was that there was a poll done by a progressive organization, and it asked the wrong question.

This is my business. Studying language and the framing behind language. If someone presented you with the poll question: would you rather have more taxes and higher services, or fewer taxes and less services. Obviously, it went with the latter. And the legislature concluded that they shouldn't put anything about taxes on the 2010 ballot. Why do they think that? Because they think that polls are objective, and that language just floats out there. They're wrong. Language is not neutral. There's a truth here that that language hides. It's the truth that we don't have Democracy in this state. We have minority rule.

In response, because nobody else would do so, Lakoff's initiative reads: "All Legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote." It's tweetable and it's fairly simple to understand. It's framed as a democratic action to return the state to democratic rule. And it appeals very much to those interested in preserving democracy.

Which is the consensus opinion inside the Democratic Party. We know this because, back in July, the state party passed a resolution calling for majority rule for budget and revenue. And it didn't pass with contentious debate - it passed unanimously. One of the very few people to speak out against it was the Party Chair, John Burton. But the rank and file supported it utterly.

It was something of a reversal for Burton, who when he was trying to get the votes of those rank and file supported a majority vote position. Now he's seen some polls and decided to take half a bite out of the apple. Lakoff described his exceedingly short meeting with Burton last night.

Burton wouldn't talk to me for more than a minute. He just said that he saw the polls, and it said 55% on budget and nothing on taxes. How many of you were at the state convention? You voted on a resolution about this. How did that resolution come before you? The resolutions committee. And that was the point. We got the resolutions committee to do it and got a standing ovation. The rank and file Democrats know it's the right thing to do and they have to tell their leaders. So how do you change this? You have to have a poll, but you have to have pressure. The major donors have to call Burton and say, if you want any money from me, you get behind this. And he has to hear that from donor after donor and organization after organization. We have to win in our own party first. I think John Burton is a good person, same with Bass and Steinberg. It's the good people that we have to win over first.

Later, a woman from AFSCME asserted that Willie Pelote was willing to give $1 million dollars to a majority vote campaign until Burton called him and told him to forget it.

You can argue about what the most effective approach is to deal with California's budget dysfunction. We've been doing that all week. You could say that leaders must prepare the ground by tying things Californians want to revenue, and tell the story of Republicans thwarting the popular will. You can say that we need to throw out the Constitution and move straight to a convention. But what becomes incredibly clear is that there is a groundswell of support inside the party for a simple move to restore democracy to the state, and if the establishment in Sacramento rejects that, in particular John Burton, the subsequent outrage will have a major impact on grassroots support for all Democratic candidates next year. There's just no question about this. The grassroots already feels disrespected and abused by the leadership. They got Hillary Crosby into a statewide officer position based on just this kind of frustration. They feel that one of the richest economies in the world is run like a third-world country, and they know that they will never change that when procedural rules force Democrats into a defensive crouch, where they see their role as losing as little as possible. This split will grow and branch out into statewide officer races, legislative races, etc. The grassroots workhorses won't be very inclined to work so hard for a Party that disrespects them and fails to act in their stated interests. Not to mention the fact that everyone knows that, while we wait another Friedman Unit until the electorate figures out the problem on their own, people will suffer from budget cuts, people will go bankrupt, and people will die.

The CA Majority Rule team has a multi-pronged strategy. One, they are raising money for this poll, to try and prove that a properly framed set of questions will elicit the desired results. Two, they will put Speaker's Bureaus together in every district in California with people who can talk about majority rule and restoring democracy, complete with real-world examples of the fruit of the state's dysfunction. Three, they will seek to pass endorsements of the one-line majority rule initiative in every Democratic club and county committee in California. There's an executive board meeting coming up in November where this will probably come to a crescendo, too.

The real story of the Lakoff initiative is a story about rank and file Democrats wanting their leaders to follow their will. You can argue about tactics or strategy or approach, but that's what it boils down to. And the party leadership had better take heed.

Breaking The Dam

I'm going to have to pretty much agree with Thers' take:

Like I said over at the Cerulean Cherub's place, getting a health care bill passed through reconciliation would be great fun even if it were a crap bill [...]

From a democratic (small d) perspective, the Senate has been asking for it for a long time now. The filibuster is not a constitutional tradition, and as we've seen, amply, is a safeguard of made-up Senatorial principles, not democratic principles, and the public good be damned.

Yes, we need sane healthcare, but we need lots of sane things that we're not getting because of the absurdities that the Senate enables -- Max Baucus directly represents fewer than a million people, and has extensive power over the healthcare of over 300 million Americans. Why? Because he's a fucking healthcare maven genius! Or not! It's all amazingly silly.

A case could be made that whatever the content of any specific bill, a punch to the solar plexus of the pudgy, complacent Senate would be good for the nation. The nation's health literally rests at the whim of a very small number of individuals who are only directly accountable to a very, very small percentage of the nation's voters. Whatever this is, it's not democracy.

The Senate has basically gotten completely out of control. It was conceived as a saucer to "cool the cup" of the passions of the House, but there's a fine line between that and freezing the cup and throwing it into a meat locker. If the Senate were instituted after passage of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court would likely have found it unconstitutionally in violation of the equal protection clause. California has 69 times as many citizens as Wyoming, and yet their citizens get the same amount of Senate representation. The Senate was a bad compromise put in by the Blue Dogs of the 18th century.

What's more, it's gotten worse, as runaway egos and peculiar Senate rules have completely paralyzed the legislative process. The filibuster has only recently been transformed from an occasionally used temper tantrum to a de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement. This recent development is a significant intrusion to the ability of the country to govern itself.

The filibuster, however, has undergone little-noticed changes. Even as successive generations have weakened it by creating the option of cloture, the filibuster itself has become more present in everyday legislative maneuvering. The political scientist David Mayhew argues that we've misremembered our own past on this matter. He's written that Senate has never faced “any anti-majoritarian barrier as concrete, as decisive, or as consequential as today’s rule of 60."

That seems strange, of course. After all, the filibuster was stronger back in the day. But it wasn't used to create a de facto 60-vote majority. It used to be more akin to a temper tantrum. Mayhew looked at FDR's court-packing scheme as one of his examples. The filibuster hardly figured into the discussion. “General opinion is that the [bill] will pass,” wrote the conservative Portland Herald Press, “and sooner than expected, since votes to pass it seem apparent, and the opposition cannot filibuster forever.”

Its elevation to the decisive rule in the U.S. Senate is a recent development, and one that has taken a countermajoritarian institution (both in its structure and representation) and saddled it with a supermajority requirement. The product is an almost impossibly obstructed legislative body. We tend to assume this will work out fine, as we've had the filibuster forever, and we're still around. But the evidence is that the filibuster did not really exist in this form before, and so it's very hard to say whether it will work out fine. And those who think that the political system will always respond to emergency, and that countermajoritarian rules don't matter, should really take a look at what's going on right now in California.

Reconciliation may or may not be able to produce a bill worth a darn; YMMV. But if the fallout from using it produces a demystification of "Senate process" as some kind of holy writ, the effects would be profound. Process changes have often preceded substantive policy changes. Unless you want health care reform and financial regulatory reform and climate change and energy and all the rest in the tender hands of President Ben Nelson in perpetuity, it may be worth breaking the dam that's holding back the country.

The Battle Of Urumqi

While the Chinese government is claiming that the Uighur riots in Urumqi, Western China are under control, the importance of this uprising for the future of China should not be overlooked. It took thousands of troops to quell Uighurs brandishing makeshift weapons. The Chinese have engaged in brutal repression in Tibet and in Xinxiang Province, but it doesn't look entirely sustainable to me. Rebiya Kadeer writes in the WSJ:

On Sunday, students organized a protest in the Döng Körük (Erdaoqiao) area of Urumqi. They wished to express discontent with the Chinese authorities' inaction on the mob killing and beating of Uighurs at a toy factory in Shaoguan in China's southern Guangdong province and to express sympathy with the families of those killed and injured. What started as a peaceful assembly of Uighurs turned violent as some elements of the crowd reacted to heavy-handed policing. I unequivocally condemn the use of violence by Uighurs during the demonstration as much as I do China's use of excessive force against protestors.

While the incident in Shaoguan upset Uighurs, it was the Chinese government's inaction over the racially motivated killings that compelled Uighurs to show their dissatisfaction on the streets of Urumqi. Wang Lequan, the Party Secretary of the "Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region" has blamed me for the unrest; however, years of Chinese repression of Uighurs topped by a confirmation that Chinese officials have no interest in observing the rule of law when Uighurs are concerned is the cause of the current Uighur discontent [...]

The unrest is spreading. The cities of Kashgar, Yarkand, Aksu, Khotan and Karamay may have also seen unrest, though it's hard to tell, given China's state-run propanganda. Kashgar has been the worst effected of these cities and unconfirmed reports state that over 100 Uighurs have been killed there. Troops have entered Kashgar, and sources in the city say that two Chinese soldiers have been posted to each Uighur house.

The nature of recent Uighur repression has taken on a racial tone. The Chinese government is well-known for encouraging a nationalistic streak among Han Chinese as it seeks to replace the bankrupt communist ideology it used to promote. This nationalism was clearly in evidence as the Han Chinese mob attacked Uighur workers in Shaoguan, and it seems that the Chinese government is now content to let some of its citizens carry out its repression of Uighurs on its behalf.

It's possible that this works in the short-term, but not in perpetuity. Closed societies like China's struggle to remain close. Eventually, Xinxiang will be free just as Tibet will be free.

Consent of the Governed

Iranian state-run media is trying to suggest that Mir Hossein Mousavi and his followers are criminals and terrorists. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's daughter and four other relatives have been arrested. Media, like the BBC's main correspondent, have been expelled. The crackdown has escalated, and yet the protests continue. And the arrest of the relatives of Rafsanjani shows the split among the clerisy. Even Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has asserted that a majority of the public questions the election results. And you're hearing open talk about an alternative leadership structure.

Fareed Zakaria makes an important point:

Fareed Zakaria: One of the first things that strikes me is we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.

CNN: Do you mean you think the regime will fall?

Zakaria: No, I don't mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may -- I certainly hope it will -- but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

CNN: How so?

Zakaria: When the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "divine assessment," he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran's supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today --- legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

We weren't sure that the "consent of the governed" meant anything in an Islamic theocracy, but what we're seeing in the streets show that it in fact does.

Everyone's A Winner In Iran

Both Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have declared victory in the Iranian elections before the polls have even closed. That raises the possibility of an Orange Revolution scenario, especially if the hardliners hand victory to Ahmadinejad, where a popular revolt in the streets forced the ruling party to succumb. Not to be alarmist, but I can see it happening.

Meanwhile, what few seem to be saying is that, with four contestants in the race, it's unlikely that anyone will get the 50%+1 required for victory, and Ahmadinejad and Mousavi will probably go to a runoff.

If he does lose, Ahmadinejad will make wingnut history as the first fascist dictator to lose an election and leave office.

A Peek Into The Machine

I just came across an astonishing interview on The Ed Show with Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell about the potential Specter-Sestak primary. It's a combination of a threat, Newspeak, muddled and often contradictory logic, and a depiction of how the spoils system works in government, particularly a machine state like Pennsylvania. It's really something, and it looks almost staged, like an infomercial designed to bash Sestak's chances in public. Here's a transcript.

Schultz: Do you think Joe's got a shot?

Rendell: I'm an admirer of Joe Sestak. I'm going to work hard to get him re-elected when he runs for Congress next year, not for the Senate. Joe should not run for the Senate in the Democratic primary, he'd get killed. And let me tell you why he'd get killed. Number one, Arlen Specter's been going around PA for three decades, as the Senator. He goes into every one of the 67 counties each and every year, and he holds town meetings, and he does constituent service, and he's never asked whether people are Republican or Democrat. Last three weeks or so, we've been having regional conferences with elected Democratic Party chairs, and elected Democratic officials, in every region of the state. It's unbelievable how many of them know Arlen personally, and admired him and supported him, even though he was a Republican in the past. You can't buy that, and you can't overcome that in one campaign. It's been thirty years. Number two, Arlen Specter will raise two, three, four times as much money as Joe Sestak. Number three, Arlen Specter has the support of the President and the Vice President, a President who's got a 90% approval rating among registered Democrats in Pennsylvania. Joe Sestak does not want to be one of the candidates who ran against Bob Casey in the Democratic primary, when the whole governmental establishment was for Bob Casey. He doesn't want to be marginalized, he doesn't want to get 15, 18%. Joe should run for Congress again, establish some seniority, his time will come. He's a terrific guy, his time will come, but it's not this year.

Schultz: Governor, you're very strong with that answer tonight. It almost sounds as if Joe Sestak would be making a fool of himself if he were to try this. Would you go that far?

Rendell: Well, I wouldn't say making a fool of himself, of course, Joe's a terrific guy, and he's got great credentials. But he's being talked into it by people on the extreme of the party, and they're good people, and they care about the right issues, but they don't represent the broad slice... this is a conservative state. I know people shake their heads when I say that, but the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania is more Bob Casey's party than it is Ed Rendell's party. I won because I was a great regional candidate, Ed, and I won re-election because I think I did a good job. But this, our Democrats are middle-of-the-road Democrats, with the exception of the Southeast. And Arlen Specter appeals very much to them. And it's not so much who I support, or who Bob Casey supports, it's all these party chairmen and all these elected officials that Arlen's been taking care of for years. And most people think that Arlen's supported our constituencies, and he has, over the years.

Schultz: So the infrastructure of the party in PA, would, no matter what side it is, is going to be with Arlen Specter. So the question begs, is anybody willing to step up and tell Joe Sestak, don't do this? That we've got a good enough guy, that he's gonna be good on the issues? Because Mr. Sestak was on this program, and the point that he made, he didn't like the idea that there was someone in the party, including yourself, including the President and the Vice President, that were willing to anoint Arlen Specter because he'd been around for a long time.

Rendell: Well, we anointed Bob Casey because he was a good candidate and he had been around for a long time, even though he was a young age, he started very young. Ed, it's not a question of anointing. In the end, people decide, not me, not even the President. People decide. But when they hear from the President that we need Arlen Specter. When people understand that Arlen Specter single-handedly saved the stimulus program for this country and put his political rear end on the line, when they understand that ten billion dollars more for NIH, to help us do research on every incredible disease that we're facing as a human race. People understand, and they like Arlen Specter and they understand that he's who the President wants. Look, I'm the last person to tell Joe not to run, because people told me not to run when I decided to run for Governor, because no one from Philadelphia had been elected since 1914 as Governor. So I'm not about to say to someone don't run. But I think Joe should think about what Arlen has done, the things that, the alliances that he's made over the years, the constituent services operation that has that's second to none, and the fact that he does have the support of Democrats, particularly the President.

Schultz: Well, labor has told me that they're not going to sit this thing out. Now, would this competition make Arlen Specter a better Democrat when it comes to voting on Employee Free Choice Act, free trade issues, and also health care reform? What about those three?

Rendell: Well, it's interesting. Both Joe Sestak and Arlen Specter are trying to broker a compromise on the Employee Free Choice Act, because they know they're aren't enough votes right now. There are at least, and you know this better than I do, Ed, how many Democratic Senators will not vote for the Employee Free Choice Act as is?

Schultz: Well, they're a little nervous about it, there's no question about that. But I think-

Rendell: Arlen and Joe are both trying to make some changes in the Act so that everyone can support it so they can have a broad base of support. So I think Arlen Specter has been for our constituents for the longest time. You know he's been called a RINO, a Republican in name only, and in fact there's a lot of truth to that. He's always been there for poor people, for working people. And he's been there for labor! He ran against a good Democratic Congressman, Joe Hoeffel in the 2004 election, and organized labor was for Specter. Arlen is going to do the right thing on the Employee Free Choice Act, just like he did on the stimulus. He's going to try and broker a compromise. Ironically, Joe's doing the same thing in the House. So, look, these guys are very much the same. Joe Sestak's not a liberal Democrat either.

Schultz: No, he's not. But he is better to labor, and he is, wants a public option on health care, and he is not the free trader that Arlen Specter has been. I think your analysis and your take is great, you know, I don't want to go against you on anything. I always want you on my team. You've got Pennsylvania down, there's no question. But from my instincts, I think Americans are tired of the good old boy network. And I love competition, and I think competition makes people better, that was my Op-Ed last night...

Rendell: And you're right about that, except, we will lose a terrific Congressman. Joe Sestak runs against Arlen Specter, he's out of the Congress, after just two short terms. We will lose a terrific Congressman, and when he loses to Arlen, he fades into political obscurity. He's a guy who should be there for us. We don't have a deep bench among Democrats in Pennsylvania, we need Joe to stay in the Congress and do the work he's been doing.

So, Sestak would get killed because Arlen backslaps all the party chairs and everybody loves him, and he'll raise a lot more money (a veiled threat alluding to what Rendell will tell local donors) and the President wants him in. Then he says that the dirty hippies are pushing Sestak, but Pennsylvania Democrats are conservatives and Arlen Specter, a 30-year Republican, suits them fine, and Rendell (the noted hardcore lib) only snuck in on a technicality, but Arlen's a good guy because he invented the stimulus package himself and he's supported everything Democrats have supported forever, because he's the Dennis Kucinich of the Keystone State. And then Schultz asks why are you choosing for the voters, and Rendell disavows doing that at all - no telling somebody not to run from him - and proceeds to say that Specter's "who the President wants," even though it doesn't matter who the President wants because people decide.

Then Schultz asks whether the pressure is good or bad, and Rendell says that Sestak and Specter are exactly the same on Employee Free Choice, "same" being defined as the fact that one supported it and one said he wouldn't support it in the curent form. But it's all fine because a lot of Democrats don't want to pass the bill - including Specter - and Arlen will "do the right thing" on that because he loves poor people. Anyway, Joe Sestak and Specter are exactly the same - never mind the hippie morons - and when Schultz talks precisely about the areas where they differ and says that competition is healthy, Rendell makes the most open threat of the interview, warning that we'd lose Sestak's Congressional seat (a district Obama won 56-43), and Sestak will fade into oblivion (with a not-so-gentle push from Rendell, of course).

This pretty much is how things are run in Pennsylvania, as I understand it. Rendell recounts with pride how he cleared the field for Bob Casey in 2006. If Rick Santorum, sensing a loss, switched parties then, Eddie probably would have cleared the field for him, too.

Me, I support democracy. And if Ed Rendell wants Arlen Specter to beat Joe Sestak and stay in the Senate, he has a means to do that. He has a vote. We'll see how it turns out next year.

...C&L has the vid:

Bass And Steinberg Statement Considered Harmful

George Lakoff writes today that this could be a moment of freedom for California Democrats. Their compromised ballot measured having gone down in flames, they can now focus on the only solution to what ails the state: democracy. They can include in every public utterance until the moment the 2/3 rule is repealed the theme that California's democracy is broken, and that we must restore it with a majority vote for budget and revenue matters. The time for half-steps and non-fixes must be over.

Up to now, Democrats have been acting like sheep being herded by the Republican minority. They need to show courage and stand up for what they believe. That’s what the voters are waiting for [...]

Get rid of the 55% proposals. People understand that majority rule means democracy. 55% means nothing.

Even if you don’t address taxes and just address the budget process, the Republicans will still say you’re going to raise taxes. You may as well go for real democracy.

And finally, get a unified message that can be supported by the grassroots. Do grassroots organizing for 2010, starting now. Organize spokespeople to get that message out. Organize bookers to book your spokespeople in the media. You Democrats are a majority. Act like it. The public will respect you for it.

Unfortunately, Darrell Steinberg and Karen Bass failed the first test, stuck in a mindset that will bring the state to ruin. First, Steinberg.

"The voters have spoken and they are telling us that government should do the best it can with the money it has. We will immediately and responsibly get to work to balance the budget and head off a cash crisis in July. Delay is not an option. The necessary decisions we must make will only get harder with time."

That is not what voters are telling you. As I said yesterday, you cannot reconcile the supposed anti-tax fervor with the passage of a transient occupancy tax in conservative Palmdale with 64% of the vote. California is a big state and no one message from a statewide election can predominate, but the mass boycott of the polls certainly suggests that we don't want to do your job anymore. I know it's been so long since Democrats exercised their Democratic muscles and principles in Sacramento, but this election called out the political leadership for failed governance. And everyone who has studied this for half a second understands that the failure will continue until the structural barriers are removed. And so making this absurd and vindictive statement about voter intentions both misses an opportunity to refocus the discussion and angers the grassroots further.

Here's Bass:

"There are many difficult choices and a lot of hard work ahead of us. We now have to responsibly fill the budget hole that has been caused by the national recession and deepened by the failure of today's ballot propositions. I hope the bipartisan cooperation between the Legislature and the Governor that went into this effort will continue as we move forward - the people of California clearly expect us to work together to get the job done. And we will.

The people of California could give a rat's ass who works together with who. They don't want to see this level of dysfunction anymore. Bipartisan cooperation was clearly rejected last night, because inevitably that gives leverage to the minority and provides unworkable non-solutions.

Where is the argument for DEMOCRACY in these statements? Since 1978 that democracy has crumbled and needs to be completely rebuilt. Everyone knows this but refuses to say it out loud. This is why the legislature and the Governor have historically low approval ratings. People are starved for actual leadership and see none. Only democracy will save us. This failed experiment with conservative Two Santa Claus Theories has now become deeply destructive. Because the democrats have provided no leadership and ceded the rhetorical ground, California public opinion holds the contradictory beliefs that the state should not raise taxes and also not cut spending. And if it persists without leadership and advocacy to the contrary, nothing will change.

The California Nightmare

Many of you know that I do double-duty over at Calitics, the California progressive political website. We had quite a couple of weeks here leading up to another election (our 13th in 7 years), which the voters defeated resoundingly. The Yes side outspent the No side 7:1 and still got crushed. Let me back up a bit and describe the problem.

There is no functional government in California. We might as well be Somalia. Because of the 2/3 requirement needed to pass a budget or raise taxes, because of the cap on property taxes at 1978 rates which make income tax revenue 53% of the overall general fund, because of the various past ballot measures and Constitutional amendments which mandate a healthy part of the budget into certain spending operations, because local governments are funded in the most absurd way possible, because of the utter lack of a political media to explain this jumble to people, we don't have a government that works. Democrats hold a 63% majority in both houses of the legislature, and yet they cannot invoke the popular will because of hard-right Republican holdouts (we don't grow any other kind out here).

Now, this would be true if John Birch or Noam Chomsky were Governor, because it's a failure of process and not policy. But let's offer a particular bit of scorn for the current Governor, who, despite what you hear in the national media, has been the biggest failure of any California executive in decades. He entered government because he labeled his predecessor Gray Davis a failure and said he had to be recalled. Six years later we have a bigger budget deficit and largely the same dysfunctional structure. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would "blow up the boxes" in Sacramento, and the boxes remain untouched. He said he would be the "Collectinator" in DC, and yet California gives much more in income taxes to the Feds than they receive in services. Schwarzenegger has virtually no substantive accomplishments; he showed up in DC yesterday for that fuel economy announcement, which is based on California's tailpipe emissions law, passed in 2002, when he was still making movies.

The man has absolutely no ability to persuade members of his own party, who actually give him lower approval ratings than Democrats. And his latest reinvention will be as a hard-right spending cutter. He's in Washington today trying to get waivers to cut Medi-Cal and in-home supportive services and still qualify for stimulus money. In other words, he's reacting to a terrible recession in the state by cutting more government spending and throwing 5,000 state employees out of work. This is more neo-Hooverist than any Mark Sanford or Rick Perry plan.

And yet the local media and the Village treat this guy like the movie star he is, with glossy magazine covers and puff-piece profiles. Imagine George Bush circa 2007 STILL being treated like the guy on the aircraft carrier in his codpiece suit and you get what I mean.

The Democratic leadership doesn't exactly help matters by capitulating at the first opportunity, and refusing for 30 years to detail the root of the problem - a structural revenue deficit and an ungovernable system. They backed this special election nonsense, and like national Democrats, they view polls as immutable realities cast in stone, rather than a starting point for advocacy and persuasion.

It's beyond clear what has to be done now. We need to repeal the 2/3 requirement and restore democracy in the state of California. As George Lakoff says, this is the lesson of the election, the voters demanding a functional government that doesn't have to return to them every couple months to sort out their budget problems. It's time for a majority vote.

And the new Democratic Party leader, John Burton (who was in Congress I think back in 1874), says he agrees. But I've always had the sneaking suspicion that the Democrats like it this way - they may not be able to fix the budget from year to year, but at least they have something else to blame instead of themselves. The 2/3 rule works for BOTH parties - Republicans can hijack the process, Democrats can point at Republicans.

Enough. A growing movement at the grassroots wants to live in a democracy again, not a failed state. Expect initiatives on the 2010 ballot as wide-ranging as a simple repeal of the 2/3 rule, to a Constitutional convention (no state needs one more) to completely rewrite this absurd collection of contradictions. And you can see this as a test case for whether a progressive movement can really deliver the change they seek. If not, I don't see how the country recovers with this massive sick patient on its West Coast.

Zardari Blinks

I didn't think it would turn out this cleanly, and it probably hasn't. But the Pakistan crisis has at least been delayed, as the government decided to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This led Nawaz Sharif to call off the "Long March," as this was its goal. Some reports are calling this the first triumph of diplomacy for one Hillary Clinton.

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appears to have succeeded in persuading warring political leaders in Pakistan to soften their attitudes towards each other, the US media reported on Saturday.

Various US television and radio networks noted that soon after Secretary Clinton called President Asif Ali Zardari, a presidential spokesman announced in Islamabad that the government will restore the deposed judges in the light of Charter of Democracy and will file a review petition in the Supreme Court to undo the disqualification of Sharif brothers.

A spokesman for opposition leader Nawaz Sharif later described these decisions as ‘a corrective measure,’ the US media noted.

If true, that would be great, and another sign of a positive foreign policy from the Obama Administration. However, the fact that local police in Punjab apparently refused to honor the house arrest for Sharif forced Zardari to recalculate and give in to demands to save his political skin. Plus, as Juan Cole notes, Pakistan's political strife is not over.

The Punjabi population resents Zardari's imposition of 'governor's rule" or a Federal take-over of the province, which has an elected provincial legislature in which the PMLN is the leading party. And, the Sharifs are not going to put up with being excluded from politics, and Zardari and his courts tried to do.

Those issues have to be resolved before the political situation can calm down. Moreover, Iftikhar Chaudhry is himself an iconoclast, and what if he indicts Musharraf or even Zardari? Or maybe Dick Cheney. If Chaudhry is worried about Pakistanis who were made to disappear without habeas corpus or formal legal proceedings, as part of a 'war on terror,' I have suggestions for perpetrators he should look into, who now live in Texas.

So, good news, but not an end by any means.

The Highest Broderism

David Broder's paean to bipartisanship yesterday was pretty funny. Funny in an "what version of Earth in the DC multiverse is this guy living on" fashion.

Some consider Obama's wooing of Republicans a rookie mistake, a measure of his naivete. Others focus on the Republicans and fault them for obduracy in denying Obama all but three of their votes on the stimulus bill. The critics agree that the effort at bipartisanship should end.

I hope Obama isn't listening. It's the worst advice he has received.

It starts from a false premise: that the stimulus bill proves the failure of outreach to Republicans. In fact, had Obama not negotiated successfully with Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter and met most of their terms, his bill would have died. This was a success for bipartisanship, not a failure.

Morone's history also is false. To prove that bipartisanship has never existed, he has to skip over Harry Truman's success with a Republican Congress on the Marshall Plan, Lyndon Johnson's forging the great civil rights acts with Sen. Everett Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch, and Ronald Reagan's steering his first budget and tax bill through a Democratic House.

But the real reason Obama should ignore this advice is that he will need Republican votes to pass the remaining parts of his program. When it comes to energy, regional and commodity interests will inevitably divide the Democrats. They always do. Oil, coal, natural gas and consumer groups will exert their will. If Obama writes off the Republicans in advance, he will end up with a watered-down bill -- or nothing.

It's useless to argue with Broderella, but nevertheless...

Never mind the fact that he has to go far back in history, when Dixiecrats still existed and the parties were ideologically jumbled, to prove his fantasy. He really manages to define bipartisanship in this one, doesn't he? Meeting most of the terms enforced by conservatives is the new working definition. And he demands that the President give in to the terms of Republicans in the same way to pass his agenda.

Is Broder aware of the modern conservative rump faction that includes about 90-95% of elected Republicans in Washington? Their spiritual leader Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that trying to understand a Democrat is like trying to understand a murderer or a rapist. Their favorite son Jim DeMint's plan for economic recovery is to do nothing, stand still and hope everything magically bounces back. Their top legislative agenda consists of cherry-picking pieces of stimulus spending to prove that the entire bill is wasteful, a project they have ANNOUNCED TO THE MEDIA IN ADVANCE.

The parties disagree. These days they violently disagree. And the public has pretty much made their decision on who to support.

According to a new AP poll, voters are assigning blame to gridlock -- and they're blaming Republicans. Asked whether Obama was doing enough to cooperate with the Republicans, 62 percent said he was. Asked if the Republicans were doing enough to cooperate with Obama, 64 percent said they weren't.

Republicans now run the risk of being blamed for their own irrelevance. The stimulus bill passed without their votes and that's being seen as evidence of their intransigence, not Obama's. Bipartisanship is being measured by through the evident intention's of the players, not the final tally on the bill. If this normalizes -- if Americans begin to expect that the GOP won't cooperate and so Obama can't be expected to win their votes -- you'll have a situation where Obama can reach out to them on entirely on his terms because it doesn't matter if the outreach actually succeeds. If the President asked Mithc McConnell to help him pass Medicare-for-All, it's hardly the President's fault if McConnell refuses. And that will lead the GOP totally, and unsympathetically, marginalized.

In fact, Republicans are starting to actually be blamed for their own policy ideas, and are desperately trying to run away from them. Jim Tedisco, the candidate in the New York Congressional special election to replace Sen. Gillibrand, refuses to answer the question of whether or not he supports the stimulus even though the answer is obvious. Rep. Joseph Cao, who beat Dollar Bill Jefferson in Louisiana, is now facing a potential recall as a cause of his vote against the stimulus. This is not a function of whether one side or the other is bipartisan enough, it's that the public has generally discovered that they really don't like Republicans.

Parties disagree. They have a particular platform and they are expected to uphold it. The electorate looks at each side and makes a decision. If they don't like the results they can choose the alternative later. It's called democracy. I don't think David Broder believes in it.

Not Personality But Process.

So Zed Hollingsworth is trying to reopen budget talks and take taxes off the table, and if there's not a breakthrough in a couple days, he'll probably succeed. Darrell Steinberg is vowing to hold out, but the dynamic can change quickly and he doesn't have much left to offer the likes of Cox and Maldonado.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with Robert's take on how the Yacht Party putsch last night does nothing but highlight the need for fundamental reform and a return to democracy in California. He did an admirable job going over the history and the menu of options, but I want to make the more emotional argument for a return to majority rule. Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money did the best and most concise job of explaining why, despite the essential truth of the Republican Zombie Death Cult, it's the process-based enabling that it the original sin.

Although Krugman is of course right to blame a "fanatical, irrational minority" for the current crisis in California, it can't be emphasized enough that what really matters is the incredibly stupid institutional rules that empower this minority: namely, the idiotic super-majority for tax increases and an initiative system that both created that supermajority requirement and provides incentives to vote for every tax cut while mandating certain kinds of spending because the issues are isolated. Fortunately, the federal level (while it has too many veto points) is not quite at this level yet, and at least the stupid filibuster rule doesn't apply to budgets.

It's very easy to get people excited and motivated about a PERSON. Not so much about a process. And yet, as we all know, without the process, the villains in this melodrama would be sidelined. And I believe that is a fact which serves both parties.

People on the left often obsess over whether the electorate can figure out who to blame in these crises. The 2/3 requirement is a powerful enabler for that confusion. Because the elected representatives of the majority party are not allowed to impose their will on how the state is to be run, they cannot be held to account. Because the elected representatives of the minority party are in the minority party, they cannot be held to account. Therefore we have a political cycle that mirrors the economic cycle that results from these bad policies. The powerful stay powerful, the voiceless stay voiceless, people lose faith in the process, leading to more entrenched power and more voiceless, and so on.

Greg Lucas at California's Capitol makes the moral case for a majority-vote budget along these lines, that it is the only way for true accountability in the system.

If the huckstering of the President’s Day Weekend demonstrated anything at all, it’s that the majority party should be able to pass the budget it considers best for California.

If its awful the governor, should he or she be of a different political party, can slice-and-dice it through the miracle of the veto process.

Should the governor be of the same political party and warmly endorse the spending plan well he or she can be thrown out by voters.

And, if the non-partisan commission created by Proposition 11 last November to draw new legislative boundaries does its job it will be possible to throw out members of the party that passed the budget as well.

I don't agree about the panacea of redistricting - the available data shows virtually no link between gerrymandering and political polarization - but on balance Lucas is right. It's not a marketplace of ideas unless citizens can buy one idea or the other and make their decision based on the evidence. Democracies work when ideas are allowed to stand strong or wither on the strength of results. We do not have that here in California.

As to my point that this serves both parties? Greg Lucas:

Just to sweeten the majority-vote budget pot a little, there’s a fairly hefty number of folks who work both in and around the Capitol who assert that whichever team wins the power to run roughshod over the minority party will be so scared of exclusive blame for any badness in the budget being exclusively their fault that they won’t do anything real drastic.

This is what they are scared of CURRENTLY. There are lots of checks and balances in political systems. There is no need for an artificial veto. Democrats will still be timid to stick their necks out (they're politicians), but at least they would have no excuses.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is irrelevant and a failure. Democrats are spineless jellyfish. The Yacht Party is a collection of flat-earthers bent on destruction. All well and good. Yet all of these discrete groups are enabled by a political system that does violent disservice to the people of the state and the concept of democracy. We must have a return to majority rule. For the sake of accountability.

No Taxation Without Representation

Residents of DC may finally get a vote in the House under a compromise plan that was reintroduced in the Congress today.

The D.C. House Voting Rights Act will be reintroduced by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat and the District's non-voting House member, and Sens. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican.

The legislation would give one House vote to the District and a fourth one to Utah, which narrowly missed getting an additional seat after the last U.S. Census. Utah, which traditionally leans to the right politically, now has one Democrat and two Republicans in the House and is the next to receive a new seat based on the last census.

"Men and women of the District have fought bravely in our wars, many giving their lives in defense of our country, yet they have no vote on the serious questions of war and peace," Mr. Lieberman said.

If the bill makes it through Congress, it will increase the number of House members for the first time in 96 years.

Obama was a co-sponsor of this bill in the last Congress. He would support it, and with expanded numbers in the Senate, where it got 57 votes the last time around, I would guess that it has a very good chance of passage.

It's absurd that it's taken this long and requires this compromise with Utah. DC got electoral college representation in 1961, and a voting rights Constitutional amendment passed the Congress in 1978 (it failed to get 3/4 of the states to ratify within the seven-year window). It's absurd that we have 581,000 Americans with no voting representation in Congress. If 580,000 white people in Oklahoma were being denied voting rights, you can bet this would have been cleared up by now.

If anything, the proposal isn't bold enough. To rebut the Constitutionality claims, you could give DC statehood and create a small federal district around the White House and government buildings that wouldn't disenfranchise a single American. DC has more residents than Wyoming, so it's not an exceptional scenario. If that was too politically thorny you could retrocede that portion into Virginia or Maryland, and create the same federal district. Furthermore, since the House hasn't expanded their ranks in 96 years and yet the population has doubled many times over, it would make a lot of sense to expand the Congress to 500 members or more, to put the representatives closer to the people they represent.

But this bill at the very least would be an improvement and a victory for democracy. What is being done right now is unconscionable.

Constitution Day and Cheneyism

Today is Constitution Day, a commemoration of a document that reportedly once governed the United States of America. At one time, the rules contained therein actually bound politicians and citizens to an agreed set of laws which everybody would follow or suffer consequences.

That was a quaint time.

Today, we know from experience that indomitable will and a talent at evading opponents is sufficient to nullify that Constitution. This week, the Washington Post printed two excerpts from Angler, a new book by Barton Gellman about the Cheney Vice Presidency. Longtime readers probably already know that Fourthbranch has hijacked the government and used it to his own ends, but reading these excerpts (and I'm sure, the book) reveals one head-scratching moment after another. Here's an example:

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

The excerpts cover the time period in March 2004 when a significant portion of the upper leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse over the illegal spying program, which of course the Democrats were bullied into giving blanket amnesty for earlier this year (a law which the ACLU is continuing to fight, because they're the ACLU). But this violation of the Fourth Amendment is certainly not the end of Cheney's assault on the Constitution. Scott Horton asked 6 questions of Gellman today about his book, and the revelations are amazing. Cheney may have burned VP hopeful Frank Keating by releasing damaging information HE GOT DURING THE SELECTION PROCESS to Newsweek. That's just the kind of guy this is. You can see the parallels to other events. Then there's this very important point:

A lot of critics call Cheney and Addington contemptuous of the Constitution. I think that’s completely wrong–a cartoon that misses something important, because it fails to take them seriously. The vice president has an unyielding conviction, to which he has devoted substantial thought, about what the Constitution means. He occupies an extreme position in the usual separation-of-powers debate, sometimes beginning with widely accepted tenets but carrying them beyond the bounds of accepted scholarship. In his own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions.

Go back and look at what he says about “opinion polls.” Invariably his message is that a politician who pays them heed is failing to do his job. As Cheney sees it, public opinion is fickle, ill-informed, self-contradictory, emotional–nothing like his own conversation with himself and trusted aides. He speaks disdainfully of critics as “elites,” but his own view of democracy is at the far elite extreme. Voters are entitled to choose a president every four years, he said at the National Press Club, but then they need to let him do his job. The transaction is like hiring a surgeon; pick a good one, and don’t try to tell him where to place the knife. This “trustee” model of democracy is associated with Edmund Burke, the Old Whig philosopher in 18th century England. It is not the model that took root here when the Founders designed a plan of government that derived its authority from the people. If you take Cheney’s view, aggressive efforts at secrecy, for our own good, to prevent us from making the wrong choices or interfering with government’s important work, are a rational response.

That is crucial. If you simply don't care about what anyone thinks of you, there is no barrier. You can state without compunction that "To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of the prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law," because you feel you know better and you must organize your belief of the Constitution around that belief in yourself. You can lie to Congressional leaders boldly, asserting that Iraq has suitcase nukes, because you believe that Saddam is a threat and you organize the intelligence around that belief.

Gellman may think that Fourthbranch has given the Constitution a lot of thought, but I don't. I think he's given his own ego a lot of thought, and he's warped the Constitution to fit around it. And he's secure that this interpretation won't be challenged because he has enough will to steamroll right through anyone who would raise an objection. We're seeing this again right now from the woman who would be Vice President with respect to the "Troopergate" investigation in Alaska. The McCain campaign has sent a lawyer (one of a whole passel) to shut down the investigation and pressure the state Republicans who allowed it in the first place. Subpoenas have been issued for aides and Todd Palin, but the Governor's hand-picked Attorney General has told investigators that they won't testify. And Sarah Palin herself has refused to testify.

This is not about this particular politician. What is significant here is that Cheneyism is LEARNED behavior. Want to avoid a subpoena? Don't show up. Want to break the law? Just plow ahead and do it, and fight like hell to ignore the consequences, saying things like "I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't."

The question becomes how you end Cheneyism before this cancer grows. Russ Feingold has some ideas.

Our next president will face a difficult challenge. He must repair the wreckage the current administration has left, which means renouncing some of the powers the current President tried to amass as he turned a blind eye to the rule of law and separation of powers. No president will want to limit his own power. But if we are to be the nation our founders envisioned when they gathered in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago, we must work together — across party lines and at all levels of government — to protect and defend our Constitution and restore the rule of law.

So does Marty Lederman:

1. A Well-Founded View of Presidential Power. To advance the first commitment, the next President should initiate a process to ensure that the new Administration withdraws and repudiates the reasoning of memoranda and opinions that overstate the President’s constitutional powers and that minimize those of Congress and the courts. We have not conducted a comprehensive review of OLC opinions, nor could we as many are classified or otherwise inaccessible. Thus, we cannot offer an exhaustive list of the opinions that should be withdrawn. We do believe, however, that the list should include the Torture Memos, the DOJ Whitepaper on the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the September 25, 2001 opinion on war powers.

The next President should also affirmatively adopt a view of presidential power that recognizes the roles and authorities of all three co-equal branches and that takes account of settled judicial precedent. We believe that a model the next President should seriously consider adopting is “The Constitutional Separation of Powers between the President and Congress.”[18] Setting forth the principles that will govern the determination of questions of presidential power will provide a constraint against the sort of result-oriented advice-giving that proved so problematic in instances such as the Torture Memo.

2. Openness and Accountability. To advance the commitment to openness and accountability, we offer several recommendations. OLC should review its procedures for releasing opinions and publicly release guidelines that will govern publication decisions. The goal of the review should be to make sure that OLC’s memoranda and opinions are made available to the public to the maximum extent possible consistent with the legitimate confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch.

Congress, the Courts, and the public are unable to check against abuses of executive power if they do not know about them. In this regard, the experience of the past eight years is instructive. It was only years later and due to leaked information that we learned of highly consequential opinions advising that the Executive Branch was not bound to comply with statutory limits on its power, including opinions relating to the treatment of detainees, the President’s domestic surveillance program, and the use of secret prisons overseas for detention and interrogation [...]

The next President should also commit to review the Executive Branch’s practice in asserting privileges, including executive privilege. The presidential communications privilege is, according to the Supreme Court, a legitimate constitutional privilege rooted in the separation of powers. Nevertheless, this privilege is not absolut e and judicial precedent as well as long Executive Branch and congressional practice recognize that the President’s constitutional interest must be balanced against Congress’s legitimate interests in conducting investigations and oversight. The next President should commit that, when disputes over privilege arise, the executive will seek to resolve them through good faith negotiation and meaningful accommodation. This negotiation and accommodation process must include recognition by the Executive Branch of the legitimate claims to information that the Congress does have in its legislative, oversight and investigatory functions. In a recent and highly relevant case, Judge Bates authored a helpful discussion of Congress’ legitimate interests in information, which in our judgment is largely correct.

3. Structural Safeguards against Abuse of Power. To advance the third commitment to enhance structural safeguards, we suggest that the President instruct the Attorney General to pay particular attention to the procedures of OLC. Together with a number of our former colleagues, we have written a set of guidelines that OLC should foll ow in order to best effectuate its role... Public confidence in the impartial administration of justice must be restored. It is not sufficient that the President and Attorney General themselves be satisfied that they have addressed the problem. Their efforts must be considered credible on bipartisan and interbranch bases.

The Constitution has not become an issue in this election, as much a cause of the failure of the media to cover it as of the candidates to express it. Barack Obama made a strong statement a week or so ago on habeas corpus, but it went into the ether. Joe Biden made noise by appearing to put criminal prosecutions of those who violated the law on the table (he later recanted), but it didn't gather much interest. There are rumblings about a Congressionally-empowered commission in an Obama Administration to study abuses of the rule of law and maybe prosecute down the road. But you're not hearing a lot about it.

I do believe that ending Chenyism in our time is the greatest challenge for the next President. Unless we restore the fundamentals of American government it won't much matter what we do on an economic or foreign policy or environmental level. I would like you to pledge to be a Constitution Voter. The pressure will be immense to bind up the nation's wounds and heal the partisan divide, and then we'll have another disciple of Cheneyism 4, 8, 12, or 16 years down the road. We cannot cede the Constitution because it doesn't hit people in the gut. Democracy is at risk, everyone. That cannot be in dispute. Cheneyism must be rejected. Fully.

This Actually Happened

The Thai Prime Minister was forced to resign because he violated the Constitution for...

...starting a war based on lies? No.

...violating international conventions against torture? Uh-uh.

...indefinite detentions, suspension of habeas corpus, illegal wiretapping, misusing intelligence, outing a covert operative, untold instances of corruption....

No, no, no, no, no, no.

He took money to appear on a cooking show.

And they forced him to resign for that.

And yet we're the shining beacon of democracy in the world, where no man is above the law.

Why We Should Be Better Than This

I want to amplify clammyc's remarks from yesterday about the tension and over-the-top rhetoric that has characterized the online version of this primary race. It hasn't characterized the offline version of this race, by the way; in the election of 1800 Thomas Jefferson was called an "atheist," "rapist," and "infidel," and I don't think any Federalist was denounced, rejected or repudiated. But I want to take a look at why this race has become so hotly contested, practically to the exclusion of all else, and not just in the traditional media where that's expected, but pretty much everywhere. I have a somewhat novel interpretation.

This is George Bush's fault.

Under 7-plus years of Bush, we've seen Congress cowed and the courts made irrelevant. We've seen a President ignore the popular will on a whole host of issues, break the law with total impunity, protect his cronies from prosecution or harm, and run roughshod over international law and our Constitution at home. Since 2001 we've come to believe that electing a President is akin to electing a 4-year dictator, because that's been the practical effect of Bush policies.

So why wouldn't it get heated, even among friends, over this decision about which dictator to install for the next four years? That's why these petty concerns and personal features have been magnified as the struggle between candidates with similar platforms becomes literally a battle of life and death.

There's of course a lot of evidence to support the dictator theory of American politics, but in actuality this is fiction. We have a broken Constitution, a shattered Constitution, but not one that is beyond repair. And if we neglect that repair, it won't matter who is President, because the fundamentals of the system will inevitably lead to more Bushes and more Cheneys and more Condis and more Rumsfelds. Until we get under control the restoration of the balance of power among the three branches of government, this energy and anger over the Presidential race is little more than a distraction, and we'll sink further and further away from the government the Framers envisioned.

Today Lawrence Lessig is presenting his "Change Congress" initiative in Washington. Here are some of his thoughts from an editorial in the Huffington Post.

Though "change" is the dominant rhetoric of this presidential campaign, everyone realizes that fundamental reform can't come from a president alone. If there are problems in the way Congress now works, for example, no president can fix those problems alone. Any fix would require the cooperation of the very institution that needs changing -- Congress.

Not surprisingly, however, not everyone in Congress is eager for change. Whatever they say, and however strongly they may deny it, there are many who have grown used to a system they understand well. And many of those are not about to support radically reforming that system, at least until pushed.

But the 111th Congress will be the freshest that Washington has seen in more than a decade. There are more than 67 "open seats" in this years' election; the last time we were anywhere close to that number was 1996 (62). This fact has led some to think about strategies for getting Congress to take seriously the idea of remaking itself.

Lessig organizes his movement to change Congress around issues like public financing for elections, transparency in Congress and earmark reform. He aims to use a wiki to track reform-minded candidates all over the country and track them from the outside.

This is exactly the kind of initiative the progressive online community should be embracing. Rather than relentlessly focusing on the top dog, and reinforcing a theory that the President is a dictator who wields full control of the government, we should use the other institutions of power to build a reform movement from the bottom up. And we should also empower that movement with a mandate to repair the broken institutions that have failed us in the Bush era and would normally rein in executive power and overreach. And that means supporting initiatives like the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. At this point 22 Congressional challengers have signed on to the plan, which seeks not only to end the war, but to ensure we never make such a historic foreign policy mistake again, and really change the conversation around national security. The candidates come from places like Idaho and Maryland, Ohio and Maine, Montana and New Jersey, Florida and Colorado and Washington and Virginia. We have far more leverage and power to impact this debate and these candidates than we ever will in the Presidential race. And it actually is far more important at this stage.

We don't elect dictators. We elect Presidents, and we have a host of structures in place to hold them accountable. Unfortunately, the last seven years have seen a total breakdown of those structures. The reaction to that ought to be to repair those structures and build this movement, not bicker back and forth about who has what delegate in what state. I'm not saying the Presidency is irrelevant - that's obviously not true - but I'm saying that we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that the President equals the government. That's only true in the rampantly illegal era of Bush - and we need to roll that back if we want to keep some semblance of a democracy.