Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
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Freebooting: How bad are the 12 filibustered judicial nominees? According to People For the American Way, several of them are pretty bad:
In addition, there are three seats on the 6th circuit whose appointments are being upheld because the only reason they are vacant is that Senator Hatch stalled Clinton's nominations for the judgeships. A little payback only seems fair.
That leaves three sane appeals court judges who have a legitimate case that Democrats are obstructing their appointment for no good reason. All of them either hostile to plaintiffs' actions in cases of discrimination or workplace and environmental regulation, or have a habit of turning opinions into policy editorials, or both. (I personally don't have a problem with policy editorials; sometimes they can be helpful to the legislature). Three judges, out of a total 229 appointments under the Bush administration. I'm going to take a page out of Donald Rumsfeld's book and call them "collateral damage".
My other bone of contention is that the GOP, starting in the Reagan Era, has been packing the court with younger and younger judges, which increases the odds of the nomination of a stealth arch-conservative (see Thomas, Clarence) and decreases turnover on the courts. I'd cede the right to filibuster for a few months or even a year or two in exchange for a promise not to nominate anyone under the age of 60. At some point everyone on both sides has to get over the fact that judges are going to have long records and occasionally say some things that are a bit off the wall, so we can go back to having more experienced judges with higher turnover. In the future, if there is a Democratic Senate and a Republican President, Senate Leadership should extract a promise not to nominate young judges just to pack the courts, perhaps in exchange for an agreement to "go soft" on the record of a few nominees.
For comparison's sake, somewhere between 30 and 60 Clinton nominees were denied hearings, committee votes, cloture votes, or floor votes, mostly in the last three years of the Clinton Presidency.
So no more carping about obstructionism.
Today has seen a new attempt be the center-left blogosphere to answer the eternal question "how do you fit liberalism on a bumper sticker?" Yglesias, Klein, Kos, Digby, and Drum have all chimed in at one point or another. The consensus seems to be that it's important to have both (a) sufficiently specific statements that the opposition can't simply say "well, I'm for that too!" and (b) specifics that conservatives must inherently reject. I usually don't have much to offer to bumper-sticker discussion, but somehow today I find myself with slightly better command of the English language than usual.
During The American Prospect's 30 word competition, I submitted this entry:
Liberalism represents a new set of freedoms: freedom from poverty for all who work; from bankruptcy cause by sickness; from intolerance and hatred; and from the fear of nuclear proliferation.
It's a weak attempt to riff on Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" concept. Roosevelt's freedoms were speech, worship, want, and fear, but that doesn't make for a very good campaign slogan, so I ended up picking a different set of four freedoms. I found the exercise helpful, but the results were slightly dissatisfying -- a slightly higher word limit wouldn't even have been enough to get the sentiment right. What's more, this phrasing still doesn't have the same punch as the conservative bumper sticker of "smaller government and lower taxes, family traditional values, and a strong national defense". It's not even in the same ballpark.
But today, over at Ezra Klein's, I was inspired by Digby's suggestion:
fair taxes, a secure safety net, personal privacy, civil rights, and responsible global leadership.
Which I modified to look like this:
A stronger safety net, responsible budgeting, a fairer playing field for businesses, and global leadership.
But I would now like to revise again to look like this
A stronger safety net, responsible budgets, family privacy, better citizenship from business, and responsible global leadership.
Contra Digby, claims that liberals are for fair taxes and conservatives are not simply won't work. After all, the addle-brained House members who support flat taxation (whose numbers include both the Republican1 Speaker and the Majority Leader) have a bill they call the "Fair Tax Act". Has the press called them on this game yet? Who in the world is going to say they're for unfair taxation? That's like saying you're running for President on a platform opposing job growth. The same goes for civil rights -- remember that discrimination has was always been couched in the language of "preserving liberty of private citizens", which, in theory, is a civil right in and of itself.
Conservative government clearly involves a weak safety net: witness the bankruptcy bill, the wretchedly executed Medicare bill, attempts to dismantle social security, a punitive notion of welfare reform rather than honest assessments of what's needed to get welfare recipients back to work, the Freedom to Farm Act, and so on. Empirically, the conservative notion of "budgeting" is fundamentally irresponsible; of the 20 years of Republican rule, we will likely have structural deficits for 18 years (the exception being the last 2 years under George HW Bush). My hunch is that "family privacy" probably focus-groups better than "personal privacy" and covers family planning, gay rights, end-of-life issues, and religious freedom. In all these cases, the Republican party would rather have the government intervene just for grins. As for global leadership, well, you're not a leader if no one follows. Business citizenship encompasses environmental protections, workplace safety regulations, the minimum wage, and hits universal health care again. Finally, between our abandoned treaties and the rapidly disintegrating Coalition of the Willing, there aren't too many folks out there who are following.
It's not perfect. For one, it's still a hair too long: it's sixteen words, and they're all a bit heftier than words in the twelve-word Republican bumper sticker. It uses the word "responsible" twice, which I'm not thrilled by. And it still feels a bit like a laundry list. Perhaps the "stronger safety net" could go. Still, I think this is a reasonable starting point for the elusive Liberal Bumper Sticker. It avoids policy specifics like "universal health care", traps like "fair taxation", and potentially divisive statements about abortion or gays.
Revisions are more than welcome.
Update: More suggestions from Article 19, Political Interest, CapitalistImperialistPig [sic], and Daniel Starr. I think Starr's bumper sticker is pretty good, too.
1Remember to remind everyone who controls Congress whenever they have bad ideas.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 06:11 28 April 2005
