Campaign slogan for 2016: The Public Sucks!

Ah, politics!  I can describe it the way women have been joked about by men: you can't live with them, and you can't live without them!

Ouch, ouch, those rotten eggs that landed on my face stink like crazy ;)

Where was I?  Women?  No, no, I was talking about politics.

Today, yet again I am thinking that Obama is one damn good Republican president and I have no idea why the GOP is always upset with him.  Maybe it is because he is black?

Consider this.  Obama even came here to Oregon, to talk up the fast-tracking of the trade deal across the Pacific.  He even chose an appropriate Republican venue for it--the campus of the University of Oregon Nike, which liberals love to hate.  Guess what happened at the US Senate?  

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked consideration of giving President Obama power to accelerate a broad trade accord with Asia, a rebuke that the president helped bring on himself.

That's right.  The Democrats, with one exception, blocked it, and the Obama-hating Republicans voted to support him.

Isn't politics the best theatre that money can get!

It gets even more entertaining: Obama is pissed off at the Democrats.  Hehehe, fun times!

Mr. Obama has said Democrats have been spreading disinformation about the Pacific trade accord and the authority he is seeking, singling out Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for her role in opposing the accord.

The GOP's mood?

Republican leaders were pleased with the turn of events.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate Republican conference chairman, said Democrats were “throwing their own president under the bus.”

Ok, enough about that.  Let us move on to one more exhibit of how Obama is the best Republican president that the GOP can have, shall we?

Remember that old GOP slogan "drill baby, drill!"?  Republicans are almost always pissed off at the Democrats because of the opposition to drilling offshore or in the Arctic.

Obama being the best Republican president has, of course, approved drilling in the Arctic:

Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan

Thus writes Bill McKibben, who "teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org."

You know what?  I take back that comment about comparing politics and women.  Because, politics is infinitely more entertaining than women are.

Ouch, ouch, ouch--stop pelting me with those lumps of coal, you crazy women! ;)

Election: The insanity of the status quo!

Let us see how the President and the Congress prove that Albert Einstein was wrong.

Einstein is often quoted for his observation that "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results."  One doesn't need to be anywhere as smart as Einstein was to notice that there has been practically no change between the distribution of power before the election versus post-election: Obama was the president, and will be in office for four more years.  The House was in firm Republican control, and will be so for at least two more years.  The Senate continues with a Democratic majority, but without a filibuster-proof super-majority.

If the last couple of years provided nothing but a dysfunctional system with such an arrangement, and if we have voted for a continuation of the same, can we expect results to be any different?  If we expect different results, well, are we insane?  Will any of the principal agents in this setup have undergone any Damascene conversion so as to produce results that will be different from what the experiments yielded the last time around?

Perhaps this election shows, yet again, that by and large Americans are conservative.  Conservative as in not being in favor of huge changes to the situation we are familiar with. The status quo is then preferred over the possibilities that a change might promise.

The election results do not mean that any of the real issues have evaporated away.  They are looming out there, with deadlines fast approaching.  The fiscal cliff is merely one.  If the President, the House, and the Senate couldn't come up with a solution to the fiscal problems over the two years, they will work it out within a couple of months?  Then there is unemployment, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, China, student debt, ....

Good luck to us.

Andy Borowitz satirizes thus:

One day after the costliest Presidential election in U.S. history, Americans awoke to the ugly realization that the nation had spent $2.5 billion with absolutely nothing to show for it.
“Four years ago, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and that is still the case,” says Professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota. “The only difference is that we as a nation are out $2.5 billion.”

Mr. Logsdon claims that America’s system of egregious political spending “has made us the laughingstock of the world,” arguing, “Even Greece would know better than to blow through money like that.”

  Borowitz is wrong; estimates are closer to $6 billion, than the 2.5 billion he writes about :)

We are a military police state. We will detain citizens. Will wage war forever.

For those of you complaining about how the Senate is all screwed up and they can't get anything done, you might be tempted to applaud the overwhelming bipartisanship in the 93-7 vote in favor of the $662 billion defense authorization bill.

Hold your applause.

It is about the military. It is about the War on Terror. It is about government's powers to haul citizens too, and without having to worry about due constitutional processes. Right in your backyard!

First, from Glenn Greenwald:

the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Now, perhaps you are also thinking, "hey, we killed Osama, and isn't it time we started winding up things?"  Ha ha, the joke's on you us.

More from Greenwald, who, as I noted earlier, can easily make one depressed:

One of the nation’s most stalwart war cheerleaders and one of the bill’s most vocal proponents, Sen. Lindsey Graham, made clear what the provision’s intent is: “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer . . . I believe our military should be deeply involved in fighting these guys at home or abroad.” As Graham made chillingly clear, one key effect of the provision is that the U.S. military — rather than domestic law enforcement agencies — will be used to apprehend and imprison accused Terrorists on American soil, including U.S. citizens.
In doing so, Graham and the bill he supports — exactly like all those who supported Obama’s due-process-free assassination of Anwar Awlaki – have apparently decided simply to dispense with Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution, which provides that nobody can be punished for treason without heightened due process requirements being met. In that regard, compare (a) Graham’s pronouncement (widely shared by those supporting Awlaki’s assassination) that “if you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer” to (b) the Constitutional requirement in Art. III, Sec. 3 that “No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” To deny a citizen the right to a lawyer and go to court on the ground that they’ve “betrayed their country” and thus deserve to be imprisoned without a trial (or, worse, to be assassinated without one) is as violent a betrayal of the U.S. Constitution as one can imagine, literally.

So, what's with this fixation on violating the Constitution?  Take it away, Dahlia Lithwick:

So forget the presumption of innocence. Forget the protections of the Constitution. If you are suspected of terrorism, you may be held indefinitely, maybe even shipped off to Guantanamo. And in this war that will last forever and play out on every square inch of the planet, the chances that these new powers will ever be rolled back are negligible. Even long after the war on terror has waned.

Ok, I am now scared shitless that I can be made to suddenly disappear!  But, why such a bill from the Senate?

The underlying rationale for allowing the military such unprecedented power is the tiresome assertion that all of our current strategies against terrorism have failed. It’s almost as if the bill’s sponsors think that there have been multiple successful terrorist attacks since 9/11; that dozens of terrorists have been freed as a result of the sloppy civilian justice system; and that domestic law enforcement has failed in its efforts to combat terror. None of that is true. Congress appears determined to do away with every tactic that has identified and halted terror attacks in the past 10 years, and to enshrine into the law everything that has failed.

WTF!

Lithwick adds:

The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed. It sees the proposed language as limiting its flexibility.

WTF!

I remembered this from my own blog entry from two years ago:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The unbearable (intellectual) lightness of ... our senators :(

Jon Stewart explains:

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I wish I could vote for "none of the above"

Couple of years ago I watched the fantastic thespians at Ashland enacting Shakespeare's Coriolanus.  I had no idea of the story and, therefore, found the play that much more engaging.  Coriolanus is an arrogant Patrician, and does not heed to the advice that he has to pretend that he can relate to the plebes--which is how the other patricians behave.  As I was watching the play, all I could think of was our own arrogant politicians (editor: aren't politicians by definition arrogant?) who pretend that they are one of the "middle class" common folk.  And we are supposed to play along as well.  I would rather that politicians revealed their inner Coriolanus and went around boasting why they are the elite while the rest of us are suckers.

Last August, George Packer's depressing essay was yet another layer of revelation regarding how our elected officials work to promote themselves and ensure their re-elections--and not to advance the country's agenda.  If that didn't depress us enough, the same magazine, the New Yorker, now has a fine essay on how any meaningful action on an energy policy died in the Senate.

No diagnosis of the failure of Obama to tackle climate change would be complete without taking into account public opinion. In January, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the importance of twenty-one issues. Climate change came in last. After winning the fight over health care, another issue for which polling showed lukewarm support, Obama moved on to the safer issue of financial regulatory reform.
In September, I asked Al Gore why he thought climate legislation had failed. He cited several reasons, including Republican partisanship, which had prevented moderates from becoming part of the coalition in favor of the bill. The Great Recession made the effort even more difficult, he added. “The forces wedded to the old patterns still have enough influence that they were able to use the fear of the economic downturn as a way of slowing the progress toward this big transition that we have to make.”
A third explanation pinpointed how Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman approached the issue. “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level,” Gore said. “And it’s to the point where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman were not alone in their belief that transforming the economy required coöperation, rather than confrontation, with industry. American Presidents who have attempted large-scale economic transformation have always had their efforts tempered—and sometimes neutered—by powerful economic interests. Obama knew that, too, and his Administration had led the effort to find workable compromises in the case of the bank bailouts, health-care legislation, and Wall Street reform. But on climate change Obama grew timid and gave up, leaving the dysfunctional Senate to figure out the issue on its own.

I know what the solution is: stop reading the likes of the New Yorker!  if I didn't read them, I would not know how awful every one of these politicians are, right?  I truly wish for that blissful ignorance.

Oh well ...

The good news?  Coriolanus is soon coming to a movie theater near you.  Has some heavy-hitting actors: Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler (ok, not a great actor!!!) ...

The American political hysteria over outsourcing. Pathetic!

Not that American political discussions have been spectacularly impressive the last few years ... the latest one is a wonderful addition to the list of idiotic things our politicians cook up:

senators will consider would impose tax increases on corporations that shift operations overseas, costing U.S. jobs.

So, why this now?

Democrats view the outsourcing issue as a big winner with voters because it speaks to the heavy manufacturing job losses that have devastated communities in Midwest and East Coast industrial states.
"There is no issue more important to the American people than the outsourcing of jobs, and that's why we're focusing on it," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership.

Ok, let us look at this logic, and the jobs in manufacturing. We want to manufacture for the domestic and external markets, right?  We are happy when we export, say, Caterpillar trucks or Boeing planes, correct?  You with me?

Suppose India imports Boeing planes. And it does.  Does it not mean that India has then "outsourced" to America all those jobs related to the manufacture of planes?  Hasn't pretty much the entire world "outsourced" to America (Microsoft) many of the jobs that then give us the various products from that company?

Global economy means that there is enormous give and take--we give others what we are good at, and take from them what they are good at. If certain manufacturing jobs have been lost, it is simply because there are a number of other countries who have gotten to be much better than us on that widget.  The problem is not that "they" have taken "our" jobs, but is a different one of figuring out what we can do and export to get access to their wallets.

This demagoguery six weeks prior to the election will further chip away the relationship that took years to build, with India in particular:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington and, thanking President George W. Bush for pushing a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries, told him that the “people of India deeply love you.”
Recent months have witnessed something of a cooling in that ardor. A series of events have contributed to the impression that the relationship is going through tough times.
In August, the civilian nuclear deal, a symbol of the two countries’ new closeness, came under strain when the Indian Parliament passed a bill that would increase the potential liability of nuclear plant operators. The United States expressed its concern and asked India to change aspects of the bill.
Also in August, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that hiked fees for the H1-B and L visa categories used by skilled Indian technology workers. Indians were incensed by Senator Charles Schumer’s characterization, during debate over the bill, of Indian businesses as “chop shops.” (He later clarified that he meant to say “body shops.”)
Then, earlier this month, Ohio’s state government announced a ban on the outsourcing of state technology projects to offshore centers.

 In fact, even before this Senate bill, there have been irate responses in the Indian media to Ohio's decision. The diplomat-speak is, of course, polite and tactful, but the emotion underneath is all too visible:

Describing the State of Ohio's ban on offshore outsourcing by government departments as ‘ill-advised', India has ‘firmly' conveyed to the U.S. its displeasure over the move and other protectionist measures such as the hike in visa fees for professionals.
“We have put it firmly in our discussions. I feel that the U.S. has seriously registered India's viewpoint as well as concerns of the Indian IT industry. We do hope there will be timely and appropriate responses,” Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma told reporters here on Tuesday ....
Citing the example of the recent Airtel-IBM deal, Mr. Sharma turned the table on the U.S., stating, “Airtel, an Indian company, has placed orders of $3.5 billion on IBM. Isn't that outsourcing? Where would those jobs be created? Where (would) those jobs would be supported?”
The largest orders for Boeing aircraft had also been placed by India. “How many jobs would have been sustained and how many jobs would be created?,” he asked.

If Republicans can be stupid on some issues, then Democrats ensure that they can be equally moronic, and up the ante!  I wish we could outsource the politicians' jobs!!!

A wonderfully ironic backdrop to these Senatorial pontifications?  Yesterday, NBC premiered its sitcom, Outsourced :)



Update: A history professor, writing in the Oregonian, finds fault, not with the Republicans, nor the Democrats, nor the Wall Street speculators, but "globalization":

Unless we have the courage and foresight to examine the significant problems of our national economy, a decade from now we may still be trying to stimulate a sluggish economy. In the 1980s Latin America suffered the "lost decade." It had zero economic growth and widespread social upheaval. If we don't seriously examine our economy and revise the WTO, we may face a similar decade.

Why does he compare the US with Latin American countries?  At least a comparison with Japan's experience the last few years makes sense--comparing two advanced economies, with a reliance on international trade. But, with Latin America?  Come on, we have not become a banana republic, and are far from that.

Video of the day

The young woman in this video grew up to become ... the Republican senatorial candidate from Delaware :) (ht)

Republicans shun 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Unable to find a single Republican senator willing to break ranks and support the measure, Senate Democrats failed Thursday to stop the filibuster of S. 6253, a one-page resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. "We almost had Scott Brown (R-MA) on board, but he balked when members of his party insisted the book only be commended if its court-room scenes were shortened a bit and the setting changed to Nebraska," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), explaining the procedural difficulties in passing legislation to honor the classic tale of a small-town lawyer's tireless efforts to defend an innocent man. "If we'd agreed to all their compromises, we'd have wound up with a watered-down version of the novel containing only seven of its original 31 chapters." At press time, Republicans said they would be willing to resume negotiations if the beloved work of American literature is revised so that Tom Robinson is a small-businessman wrongly accused of failing to provide employees with health benefits and Scout is a boy.

Thus reports the only finest news source that America has for such absolutely earth-shattering developments.
And, BTW, don't overlook Packer's description of how the Senate works (or does not!)

The screwed-up US Senate

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

George Packer's essay in the New Yorker is quite a depressing read on how the Senate works.  Just awful.  Here is Packer describing a typical senator's modus operandi:

Daschle sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

Whether it is in India or here in America, it is amazing how much life goes on in spite of politics and politicians. Do we have to wonder anymore why the energy bill is stalled, or nothing ever gets accomplished? 

The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

Just awful!

The late Sen. Byrd and the Iraq War

He was one of the few who stood up against the war chants; his speech in two parts ...

this administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the Twin Towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war .

Part 1


Part 2

I am thankful that I am not unemployed

First the graph here shows (ht):

The blue line is the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The red line is the same data as a percent of the civilian workforce.

According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce.

More than six million people unemployed for more than half-a-year and still not discouraged enough and are looking for jobs!  What a recession this has been ....

Krugman messes up my mind some more:

We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work.

So, can we help out the unemployed?:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a shot across the Capitol at Sen. Jim Bunning, slamming the Kentucky Republican for his one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits, which are due to expire Sunday.

"It is really hard to understand why one senator in the United States Senate is holding up the extension of unemployment insurance at this time," said Pelosi. "But he is, and I'm pleased that the Senate Democrats are trying to make a move to dislodge that."

Adds Megan McArdle:

His cunning plan to put a hold on the reauthorization of unemployment benefits until the Democrats agree to fund them out of existing stimulus dollars will not do much good, and it could do great harm.

An age limit for the Senate? Why not, eh!

Jon and Jon dissect the DADT discussions .... Try your best not to laugh :)

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The senate race in MA gets tight, and nasty!

Here is the absolutely dejected and frustrated academic, blogger, and MA resident Dan Drezner expressing his longing for some peace and quiet, and for a better set of politicians:

[The] candidates are God awful.  Seriously, they stink.  Just to review our choices:  Democrat Martha Coakley has a prosecutor's complex that would make Javert seeem like a bleeding-heart liberal.  She is a God-awful politician so out of touch with  reality that she accused Red Sox hero extraordinaire Curt Schilling of being a Yankee fan (Schilling's blog response is here).  Based on the ads I've seen, her campaign has also been, by far, the nastier of the two.
This leaves Republican Scott Brown, who based on this vacuous Boston Globe op-ed, is an empty shirt with no actual policy content whatsoever.  He was in favor of health care reform before he was against it.  He can't stand the run-up in government debt, and wants to cut taxes across the board to take care of the problem -- cause that makes perfect economic sense.   The one thing he is unequivocally for is waterboarding suspected terrorists. 
Seriously, these are my mainstream choices?  These people are the recipients of all the political firepower both parties can muster?  I'm inundated with 24/7 political blather so I can choose between Nurse Ratched and Bob Roberts?  And I'm a professor of political science -- if I'm fed up with the state of this campaign, just imagine how other Massachusetts voters feel. 
Let me assure the rest of the country -- whoever wins tomorrow night, it's not going to be about sending a message to anyone.  The only message that I can detect is, "will every professional politico please get the hell out of this state."

Healthcare reform: subterfuge, and the triumph of hope over experience

The House narrowly passes a healthcare reform bill.  Next stop the Senate.
But .....
First, from this NY Times piece that reports on Maine's healthcacre efforts:

Maine is the Charlie Brown of health care. The state’s legislators have tried for decades to fix its system, but their efforts have always fallen short: health insurance premiums are still among the least affordable in the nation, health care spending per person is among the highest and hospital emergency rooms are among the most crowded. Indeed, many overhauls to the system have done little more than squeeze a balloon — solving one problem while worsening another.

But like the Peanuts character, the state keeps trying. Indeed, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Maine’s senior United States senator and so far one of only two Republicans in Congress to vote for an overhaul, spent two years in the late 1970s as chairwoman of the State Legislature’s joint Health and Human Services Committee pushing small reform efforts. “That’s where I garnered an enormous deference to the issue of health care and its complexities,” Ms. Snowe said in an interview.

Maine’s history is a cautionary tale for national health reform. The state could never figure out how to slow the spiraling increase in medical costs, hobbling its efforts to offer more people insurance coverage.

 And, then from John Cassidy's essay in the New Yorker:

So what does it all add up to? The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.

That takes me back to where I began. Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars.

Ahem!

The boringly choreographed Senate hearings!

Of course, I know nothing about the law. But, as a citizen commentator, I did not particularly care for the celebrated John Roberts line that his job was to play plate-umpire and call balls and strikes. I did not care for it because the supreme court is a place where the definition of the strike zone itself if defined. To carry the metaphor more, well, they can also call a balk. Ok, enough with that baseball stuff. My point is that the Supremes figure out what the law can be, or cannot be, and it is not reducible to a simplistic balls/strikes analogy.

But, Roberts set up the formula for relatively easy confirmation hearings. And Alito followed that same strategy. And so did Sotomayor. This sucks! I am so glad that a legal expert like Ronald Dworkin can explain so well why it sucks:

[Sotomayor] repeated at every opportunity throughout the hearings, that her constitutional philosophy is very simple: fidelity to the law. That empty statement perpetuated the silly and democratically harmful fiction that a judge can interpret the key abstract clauses of the United States Constitution without making controversial judgments of political morality in the light of his or her own political principles. Fidelity to law, as such, cannot be a constitutional philosophy because a judge needs a constitutional philosophy to decide what the law is.

Thanks, Professor Dworkin.

And Dworkin also points out how tweedledum and tweedledee, er, Republicans and Democrats alike play this game:

Sadly, practically everyone concerned in judicial confirmation hearings—senators and nominees—has an overriding interest in embracing the myth that judges' own political principles are irrelevant. Sotomayor was, of course, well advised to embrace that myth. Her initial statement, and her constant repetition of it, made her confirmation absolutely certain; she could lose the great prize only by a candor she had no reason to display. She was faced by a group of Republican senators who had no interest in exploring genuine constitutional issues but wanted only to score political points, if possible by embarrassing her but in any case to preen before their constituents. They scoured her record of extrajudicial speeches for any sign that she actually doubts the myth so they could declare her a hypocrite who is not faithful to the law after all.

Democratic senators had no wish to challenge the myth either. They only wanted to protect her from questions that might supply ammunition to her opponents, so they offered her endless opportunities to repeat her empty promise to follow the law. Only President Obama, in a remarkably candid statement, seemed to challenge the myth. The law, he said, decides 95 percent of the cases but that leaves 5 percent to be decided in the judge's "heart." Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona asked Sotomayor if she agreed with Obama on this point. No, she roundly declared, I do not.

So the minuet was choreographed, and any illumination ruled out, before the hearings began.

Dworkin's conclusion--recommendation--is far from optimistic:

What is to be done? Nothing, I fear, until the idea that judges' personal convictions can and should play no role in their decisions loosens its grip not just on politicians but on the public at large. Perhaps a brave senator, who declares that he will not vote for any candidate who does not respond to questions like those I described earlier, may begin that process. But the only realistic solution is longer-term. In a book recently reviewed in these pages I suggested that our politics would be improved if high school classes were encouraged to explore political issues in a much more sophisticated way than has been customary.^[14] An enlightened discussion of the Constitution and of constitutional adjudication would be an essential part of such courses.

A "brave senator"? Hmmm .... add to the list of political oxymorons!

Congress and Court: The tyranny of the old

According to USA Today, the average age of a House member this term will be 57 — which is a day nursery compared to the Senate, where the average age now stands at 63. Both are records.

Thirty years after Ted Kennedy griped about Ronald Reagan's advanced age, the man serves as a 76-year-old, nine-term senator recovering from brain-tumor surgery Really, is there no one else available in the state of Massachusetts who can drop his Rs and vote dependably Maoist?

An average adult would not trust Sen. Robert Byrd (who is 91) to pet-sit their mutt for fear that the unfortunate creature might accidentally turn up in chili con carne. Yet, Byrd sits on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where he doles out massive amounts of taxpayer funds for West Virginia landmarks with "Byrd" in the title. Fortunately, this session Byrd has lost his chairmanship to make way for a young whippersnapper in Hawaii's Daniel Inouye, who is 84.

That is from a neat column by David Harsanyi :-)

Al Franken heading to ...?

The Georgia senate election is finally over. The result shouldn't surprise anyone who watched the Daily Show :-) That leaves Al Franken in Minnesota as the only remaining Democratic contender still waiting for the results. I am going to leave it up to Jon Stewart to predict the outcome ....