THE BIGGER PICTURE. With all due respect, Kevin Drum is too far quick to reject the significance of the Ken Silverstein piece. Drum seizes upon one sentence concerning a fabled offer by the Sudanese government to turn over Osama bin Laden in 1996 and rejects the story en masse.

(For what it's worth, Peter Bergen wrote the best debunking of the "offer" in his review of Richard Miniter's screed Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror.)

But Silverstein's toss-away line is an insignificant misstep. This is a hugely important story about the Bush administration's degradation of human rights and democracy promotion by forging relationships of political expedience with some of the world's most heinous criminals.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE HIMMLER IN OUR MIDST. In his explosive piece on the CIA’s secret alliance with the genocidal regime in Khartoum, the LA Times' Ken Silverstein helps to explain the motivations underlying the Bush administration’s assault on the Darfur Accountability Act, which I reported on earlier today. Writes Silverstein:

The Bush administration has forged a close intelligence partnership with the Islamic regime that once welcomed Osama bin Laden here, even though Sudan continues to come under harsh U.S. and international criticism for human rights violations.

The Sudanese government, an unlikely ally in the U.S. fight against terror, remains on the most recent U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the same time, however, it has been providing access to terrorism suspects and sharing intelligence data with the United States.

Last week, the CIA sent an executive jet here to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed.

It’s worth pausing right here. The intelligence official Silverstein speaks of was none other than Salah Abdallah Gosh -- the man considered to be the organizational force behind the genocide in Darfur.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

SAFE, SECURE, GUARANTEED TO LOSE. During yesterday's press conference, the president once again tried to allay people's fears about the risks involved in the stock market: "some Americans have reservations about investing in the stock market, so I propose that one investment option consist entirely of Treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government." Josh Marshall notes the dissonance between this and the White House's claim that, in other contexts, Treasury bonds are "just IOUs." But it's worse than that. As I've said before, under the proposal Bush has put forward an investment in Treasury bonds is guaranteed to lose money, albeit in a safe and predictable way rather than a risky way. Brad DeLong's gone and run the numbers on this one:

Follow George W. Bush's advice, divert $1,000 into your private account, invest it in TIPS, and at the 1.85% per year interest rate you will indeed by able to collect an extra amount worth $10.11 a month in today's dollars when you retire at 65...

But the clawback would reduce your normal Social Security benefit by $14.16 a month. You're $4.05 a month behind.

Right. That's dumb. And it's important to keep in mind that this dumbness doesn't go away just by diversifying your portfolio away from the all-Treasury plan. Each and every federal bond you buy with your private account is going to be a guaranteed money loser thanks to the clawback. So why would these bonds be on the menu at all? Near as I can tell, they're on the menu because they're on the menu for the Federal Thrift Savings Plan, which is open to all federal employees, including members of Congress. As long as the White House can say its plan is modeled on the Thrift Savings Plan, Bush can say things like "Congress felt so strongly that people ought to be able to own and manage their own accounts, they set one up for themselves. You've heard me say, I like to say this, if it's good enough for the Congress, it is -- it ought to be good enough for the workers, to give them that option."

Now, in fact, what Bush is proposing isn't the same at all. Members of Congress also get Social Security benefits. Under the Bush plan, you need to give up benefits to start your account. That means that some things that work as safe investments in the context of the Thrift Savings Plan turn into safe, moronic investments in the context of privatized Social Security. There's no reason to let people invest their money in ways that are guaranteed to lose money, but they need to keep these options on the table in order to confuse the public as to what's going on. There's nothing ideological about the objection here; even without this problem I wouldn't favor privatization. But if we're going to privatize -- or even discuss privatizing -- we ought to at least do so in a way that avoids obvious mistakes.

--Matthew Yglesias

BANKRUPT CONSERVATIVES. Get the gory details here about the budget conference report that the House and Senate passed yesterday. The upshot, for those who’ve been following this, is that through negotiation over the past two days Gordon Smith of Oregon, who had led the fight to reverse cuts in Medicaid in the original Senate version of the budget, managed to compel the White House and Senate and House budget chairmen to agree to about $5 billion less in entitlement spending cuts than they had originally set as their bottom-line minimum figure. Specifically, the total Medicaid cut now amounts to just under $10 billion over five years, and the total reconciled cuts for mandatory spending programs comes out to $35 billion.

This marks a very small improvement to a still egregiously awful budget package, so Senator Smith should be commended. On the other hand, as we and others have discussed numerous times before, there’s something mighty pathetic about Republicans like Smith, who blanch at even the measliest of spending cuts at the same time they happily vote for every tax cut that comes down the pike and refuse to revive serious pay-as-you-go budget rules that would make explicit the revenue costs of those cuts. And, lest one is tempted to admire the more hardcore House Republicans for principled consistency and honesty in calling for bigger entitlement cuts, note that even their opening figure -- $68 billion over five years -- was peanuts compared to the fiscal effects of the tax cuts they’ve enacted, and that the Social Security privatization plan that House conservatives are backing is a completely intellectually bankrupt free-lunch scheme promising Americans that Big Mommy Government will guarantee them never-ending and never-shrinking benefits on top of free investment accounts. What kind of conservatives are these?

The House’s original proposed cuts in Medicaid (which is, remember, by far the most politically vulnerable entitlement program) were damaging, particularly considering that the trajectory of costs for the program is rising fast. But they didn’t amount to any kind of death warrant to the entitlement. Yet even the conference report’s ultimate $10 billion figure nearly wrecked the budget’s chances of passing. These were some mighty tight votes that the leadership in both chambers squeezed through yesterday: 214-211 in the House, 52-47 in the Senate. House leaders kept the clock running an extra fifteen minutes to round up enough votes to secure passage -- a once explosive abuse of power that is, of course, now routine, but still a reflection of the difficulty leaders had in cajoling their own members to sign off on spending cuts.

Kevin Drum said recently that "liberalism has won most of the big debates in this country"; surely, with the notable exception of AFDC, that assertion rings abundantly true for state social policy. On MSNBC last night, Joe Scarborough, of all people, was quite candid in matter-of-factly dismissing the president’s prospects of victory in the Social Security fight on the grounds that entitlements really are untouchable, and always will be:

SCARBOROUGH: Think about this. I came out with Sam Brownback in 1995. We were going to change the way Washington worked. And we did a lot of things right.

But you know what killed us? What stopped the Gingrich revolution in `95 was Medicare reform. You remember that.

MATTHEWS: Sure.

SCARBOROUGH: And so, Sam Brownback remembers that. There are some older guys and women around there that remember 1982, the Reagan revolution, killed by Social Security reform. You know, it`s a cliche now in Washington to say Social Security, Medicare are the third rails of American politics, you touch them and you die. But you say that for a reason.

These Republicans remember 1982 and they remember the government shutdown in 1995. Democrats hammered them unmercifully. And, on these issues, these are extraordinarily emotional issues with Americans that vote. Logic sometimes just doesn`t play into it. They can sit there and say, well, gee, this is the fair thing to do or the Democrats aren`t coming up with a viable alternative. That doesn`t matter. That`s the big screaming headline tonight. The president steps out on means testing and his own party won`t follow him out there.

MATTHEWS: And it won`t protect you in red states, will it?

SCARBOROUGH: Not at all.

You know what? You know, a lot of people are saying, gee, why do we have to talk about red state America and blue state America? You know what? There`s that divide when it comes to judges. There ain`t that divide on Social Security or Medicare. We`re all one America when it comes to people getting their middle-class entitlements.

This is, of course, precisely why American conservatives have blocked universal health care proposals tooth and nail -- they understand that once it’s here it’s not going anywhere. But has this actually penetrated conservatives’ thinking? Do, say, the Cornerites have a thing to say about this budget? I know there will always be other issues to fight over -- war, abortion, Terri Schiavo, Ward Churchill -- but I do continue to be perplexed when I detect conservative intellectuals’ own apparent resignation to the notion that rolling back any of the great liberal entitlement programs of the 20th century or reducing the scope of government social spending even slightly is essentially an errant dream. Do they consider this any kind of problem?

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ZOELLICK'S APPEASEMENT TOUR. Is the Bush administration going soft on Khartoum? First it backed away from calling the killings "genocide" -- and now, Mark Leon Goldberg has learned, it's trying to kill the Darfur Accountability Act.

--Jeffrey Dubner

EVEN IN LOS ANGELES. L.A. mayor James Hahn is in trouble, with a poll giving Antonio Villaraigosa an 18-point lead just a month before the May 17 runoff. The LA Times explains Hahn's woes:

An ominous trend for Hahn is his steep decline in support among voting blocs that drove his 7-point victory over Villaraigosa in their runoff contest four years ago.

Whites, for instance, backed Hahn over Villaraigosa 59% to 41% in the 2001 runoff, according to a Times exit poll. But in a striking reversal, they favor Villaraigosa over Hahn in the rematch next month, 52% to 35%.

African Americans favored Hahn over his rival four years ago, 80% to 20%. This time, Villaraigosa has vaulted 20 points ahead of Hahn among likely black voters. By 52% to 32%, they support the councilman.

"I voted for Hahn, and the first thing he did was kick me in the face — and I don't forget it," said James White, 60, a retired black apartment owner, referring to Hahn's support for the ouster of Parks, an African American, as police chief. White, who lives in the Crenshaw district, supports Villaraigosa.

Nearly all of the city's black political and church leaders united behind Hahn four years ago but have switched to Villaraigosa this time, repudiating a decades-old alliance with Hahn and his father, the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. The poll suggests that black voters at large are making the same turn, despite Hahn's aggressive push to rebuild his support base among them.

Facing difficulty among black voters and conservative white suburban voters? What's a candidate to do but play the faith card?

On April 18, Mr. Hahn endorsed a countywide petition drive that would let residents vote in 2006 on reinstating the cross [removed from the county seal last year]. He signed a similar petition after the county board refused to put the question before voters, but that drive fizzled for lack of funds. It has more steam now. "Many conservatives weren't even going to vote [in the mayoral race]," Republican activist Davis Hernandez says, "but now they are."

This particular squabble has a more interesting history than most increase-the-conservative-vote petition drives; Hahn's father designed the seal, and Villaraigosa previously led the ACLU chapter that sought removal of the cross (though after Villaraigosa's departure). But it's pretty clear that Hahn's just scrambling for a branch to cling to out there. It'll be interesting to see if this blatant a pander swings any votes at all.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MATH, WHITE HOUSE STYLE. The administration is telling people that it's now supporting a package of benefit cuts proposed by Robert Pozen. They're telling people that it will close 70 percent of the 75-year actuarial gap in Social Security. They're also telling people that they will protect disability benefits from cuts. They're also at least trying to get people to think that they favor some kind of boost in benefits for the super-poor so as to guarantee that nobody drops below the poverty line. As Jason Furman and Robert Greenstein were pointing out to reporters just now, the problem here is that the Pozen plan does cut disability benefits and doesn't provide any boost to the very poor. Even if you do those things, you're only closing around 50 percent of the gap. If you're trying to close 70 percent of the gap, as Sam Rosenfeld argued this morning, then there's nothing left to help out the poor.

And, of course, disability benefits will also have to be cut. The president has consistently maintained that he doesn't want to do this, but there's a reason why every formal plan you see (i.e., the commission report that was the basis for the first White House pseudo-plan, the Pozen plan that's the basis of the new one, etc.) cuts disability benefits: It's not clear that it's possible to avoid these cuts. The current program structure links the benefit formulae so you can't change one without changing the other in any sort of straightforward way. Obviously, there's nothing stopping a clever person from disentangling the formulae and working this out, but somebody would need to actually do the work. And irrespective of what you did, the disability benefits would wind up being somewhat different, though perhaps pretty similar. If the White House is serious about protecting disability benefits, they'll have to start speaking honestly about the budgetary impact of this, and start doing the hard work of figuring out how to do it. Until then, I think it's safe to say that the plan is to cut disability benefits and just lie about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

INSOLVENCY ALL AROUND. Over on the Hill, it's revolution-devours-its-children time as Mike Pence and Clay Shaw fight about whether to phase out Social Security by means of "add on" accounts, or phase it out with a phony guarantee that nobody's benefits will ever be cut no matter what happens to their private accounts. Pence wrote a letter to Bush complaining about Shaw the other day; Shaw "responded by sending his own letter to Bush, stating, 'The assertion in Representatives Pence's and Shadegg's letter that 'add-on accounts do not solve the problems of solvency' is grossly inaccurate." But Pence and his colleague John Shadegg are right -- add-on accounts don't solve the problems of solvency. But neither does Pence's preferred plan!

And now here's a little secret the media doesn't seem to have caught wind of -- neither does the current version of the Bush plan. He used to be advocating an across-the-board benefit freeze. Now very poor people will be exempted from the freeze via "progressive price-indexing." This switch has gotten a lot of play, though none dare call it flip-flop. Nor does anyone seem to dare ask the obvious question: Why wasn't this the plan in the first place? Did Peter Wehner just have an irrational desire to screw over the poor? Nope, that would be the Republican congressional budget planners. The reason poor people weren't exempted from benefit cuts in Phase-Out Mark One is that if you exempt them you don't cut enough to eliminate the funding deficit.

Now I don't think there's any particular reason to try and pass legislation in 2005 aimed at closing a deficit that isn't projected to emerge until sometime in the 2040s, but the president is the one who's running around the country saying it's really super-duper important that we do this. And now he's backing a plan that doesn't accomplish the goal he's set out, and the goal that he demands any alternative meet. Seems worth noting.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO NEW GOODIES. His anger is well-placed, but Josh Marshall actually fails to go far enough in his denunciation of a swoony press for being hoodwinked by the president’s progressive indexation proposal yesterday:

Second, let's state specifically what this to-some-sexy-sounding proposal offers: steep benefit cuts for all but the lowest income Americans and meager increases in benefits for them.

This whole scheme is a dead duck anyway so maybe it’s not worth belaboring the point, but under Robert Pozen’s progressive indexation plan the poor would get no benefit increase at all -- not meager, not modest, not anything. Instead, the poor would simply be shielded from the gigundo benefit cuts that other Americans would experience on a sliding scale up the income ladder. That is to say, what the president generously proposed last night was to index low-income workers’ benefits according to the same formula used for all workers under the current system, and to slash everyone else’s benefits massively. That bleeding heart of his!

The egregious AP headline that Marshall flagged last night captured something of the flavor of the immediate post-conference cable news coverage. Everywhere you turned you heard talk of the “increased benefits” the poor would enjoy under George W. Bush’s plan, and how that would surely put Democrats in a bind. After all, what Democrat wants to stand in the way of help extended to the country’s downtrodden? I seem to recall that Wolf Blitzer was the worst offender in mischaracterizing progressive indexation in this way, but the CNN transcript hasn’t yet come up on Nexis. Chris Matthews will suffice:

He made, I think, three main points. One was on Social Security, laying out the idea of having kind of a sliding scale for Social Security cost of living adjustments, whereby the wealthier people would be paid on a price-based system and the less wealthy people who retire would be able to get what he called extra benefits.

Nobody is getting any extra benefits under the president’s plan. Nobody at all. Let's keep that straight.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SUBSTANTIVE QUESTIONS. In case anyone ever does feel like prying some specific answers about Social Security out of the White House, here are a few suggestions. These are not gotcha questions or demands to "negotiate with yourself" but genuine issues that need to be resolved one way or another to implement something within the Bush framework:

• What happens if the size of an individual's clawback exceeds the size of his pre-clawback Social Security benefits?
• If I inherit a private account from a family member who dies before retirement age, do I inherit his or her clawback, too? Does this work differently if he or she dies soon after retirement?
• Do foreign workers living in the United States temporarily who currently pay FICA taxes but don't collect Social Security benefits get to start private accounts? If so, what gets clawed back? If not, what happens if they wind up staying permanently?
• How will Medicare premiums be collected from people whose clawed-back Social Security benefits are smaller than the premiums they owe?

None of these are insurmountable obstacles to privatization but they all need to be answered if we privatize, and the answers to these questions have non-trivial budgetary consequences. Since solvency is the ostensible goal here, it seems that the American people are owed answers to how the president proposes to answer them.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEIZING THE BULL BY THE TAIL. Well, the press conference turned out not to offer any new specifics on Social Security. Instead, the president merely confirmed that, as has been rumored, he now supports some ill-defined form of Robert Pozen's brand of phase-out rather than the one pioneered by his hand-picked commission. Needless to say, he didn't come right out and say what this entails: big benefit cuts for the middle class and for some people the total elimination of Social Security benefits. There was a time when I'd get all worked up and outraged about the doublespeak involved in avoiding all these questions, but it's clear by now that this penchant for dodging the hard issues is more a reflection of the president's political weakness than a source of strength.

What we've learned over these past several months is that Social Security is a big, important program, far too big and important to phase out purely through a campaign of mumbo-jumbo. I've heard intelligent, principled people offer intelligent, principled defenses of phase-out à la Pozen, but making such a defense requires that you actually say what implementing such a plan would mean. The White House seems to have decided (rightly, I think) that a forthright statement of what it's trying to do would doom its plan to oblivion. But if that's the case, then the plan is already doomed. Democrats aren't going to roll over on this one and let the president muddy the waters. Vulnerable Republicans are nervous. The hardcore lunatics in the House GOP caucus are too busy entertaining bizarre free lunch fantasies to go out and make the case for the sort of thing Bush is proposing. The only way to make this fly would be for Bush to actually say what it is he's trying to make fly -- big benefit cuts for almost everyone. Until the White House can win that argument, or at least engage with the reality that this is what we're arguing about, they don't have a prayer.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS. Another point on the prospect of an "ethics war." Republicans contemplating this strategy need to remember their Clausewitz and not let a penchant for winning tactical battles lead them to take their eyes of the strategic ball. The Hill has this from Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA):

Kingston said it is inevitable that Republicans will file complaints against other Democrats. He cited reports that Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) took trips that were paid for by lobbyists, a violation of ethics rules, and that 10 aides in the Democratic leader’s office failed to report trips paid for by outside groups.

But what's the point of doing this? Assume for the sake of argument that they have the goods on Abercrombie and Jones. To hound them out of office, the GOP will have to concede that doing this is a big deal and that congresspeople who've done it should be sent into retirement. That doesn't help defend Tom DeLay -- it does the reverse. And DeLay is the Republican leader, whereas nobody's ever heard of Abercrombie or Jones (who, I hasten to add, may well be innocent). That kind of lashing out may help Republican backbenchers feel better, but it's not a very serious threat. The House caucus needs to make up its mind on the fundamental question of whether they'd be better off with DeLay or without him. If the answer is without him, then they need to get rid of him, not take swipes at random Democrats. If the answer is with him, then they need to actually defend him, not take swipes at random Democrats. No doubt a swiping strategy will smush a few Democratic flies, but it puts the Republicans in a position of simultaneously standing by their leader while undercutting any possible argument that could be used to defend him.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ULTRAS. The Hill runs a story under the headline "Ethics war is declared" that doesn't quite deliver the goods. The vagueness of House Republicans' threats in the piece seems to indicate that the conference likely still remains fearful that launching all-out war will simply make matters worse for the party.

Still, a complementary Hill story on 30 House Republicans who have been planning a far more aggressive, down-and-dirty pushback effort on behalf of their beleaguered majority leader, Tom DeLay, helpfully spotlights some of the characters we should expect to be making the most noise in the ensuing months as ethics issues continue to surface. Tom Feeney and John Sweeney have been organizing the effort, with help from Pete Sessions and feisty North Carolina freshman Patrick McHenry. Moreover, it would be safe to assume that a good number of the 20 Republican members who voted "Nay" on yesterday's ethics rule change reversal have been involved in this effort as well. That would include not only McHenry, but also Republican Study Group chair (and, it should be said, occasional leadership foe) Mike Pence, DeLay's Texas crony Joe Barton, and party pitbulls like Dan Burton and Steve King. If a serious brawl breaks out, these folks will comprise the GOP's brass knuckles contingent.

--Sam Rosenfeld

APRIL SURPRISE. The idea of holding a prime-time presidential press conference to discuss Social Security in a more detailed manner seems so self-evidently bad that I've been having trouble over the past 12 hours actually believing that this is the plan. The president's press conferences have been uniformly embarrassing with the single exception of the conference before the Iraq War where, as Elizabeth Bumiller has told us, the press corps felt it was their patriotic duty to stick to softballs. Even actual White House policy hands have trouble answering Social Security questions in ways that don't make them look stupid (read the Chuck Blahous background briefing from the State of the Union).

Kathryn Jean Lopez, however, leaps forward with a reasonable explanation -- Social Security is only a red herring. In fact, Bush will be announcing that Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed. If so, I'll take a dead OBL even if a higher presidential approval rating is the price I need to pay. On the other hand, I actually would like to hear the president address some specific Social Security question. The plan he's rumored to support at the moment has a lot of odd features. For example, the benefit cuts get bigger if productivity grows faster than expected, even though faster productivity growth means a smaller financing gap.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN THE TRUTH WON'T WORK. What is it about the Medicare prescription drug law that makes propoganda and misinformation campaigns virtual requirements for all related promotional efforts? Wait -- don't answer that.

First there was the "Same Medicare, Better Benefits" ad campaign/Bush re-election pitch, then those phony local news segments that got the administration in hot water with the GAO. Now Democrats are crying foul over a draft version of the annual federal guidebook for Medicare beneficiaries, which is a bit hazy on several of the more unpleasant details of the new law.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN ART IMITATES LIFE. In an old episode of his weekly sketch comedy show on Comedy Central, Dave Chappelle imagined what it would be like if the Internet were a real place by strolling through a shopping mall as if it were a real-life manifestation of the Internet. As a comedian is wont to do, Chappelle focused on some of the more unsavory aspects of the Internet -- pornography is omnipresent in the mall and a gang of college students and teenagers are looting a music store for free tunes.

But perhaps the funniest bit comes when a louche-looking salesman in a trench coat refuses to leave Chappelle alone. At every turn the man pesters Chappelle with offers of herbal enhancement formulas, free Viagra, and the like. Unable to withstand the constant harassment, Chappelle has something of a nervous breakdown and the sketch ends.

That salesman, of course, represents that evil of all Internet evils: spyware. In New York City today, Elliot Spitzer once again showed himself to be the people’s prosecutor by suing an Internet marketing firm that peddles adware and spyware. Unlike Chappelle, however, Spitzer’s concern for spyware goes well beyond its pernicious application as a supremely maddening feature of modern-day marketing tools.

"Spyware and adware are more than an annoyance," Spitzer said. "These fraudulent programs foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers' efforts to remove them from their computers. These issues can serve to be a hindrance to the growth of e-commerce."

God bless you, Mr. Spitzer.

--Mark Leon Goldberg.

NUCLEAR FENCE-SITTERS. Perhaps an update to the list of continued Senate GOP fence-sitters on the nuclear option is in order. I have thought for a while now that, aside from the Fantastic Foursome (made up of definite anti-nukers John McCain, Lincoln Chafee, and Olympia Snowe, plus the highly likely dissenter Susan Collins), the next most likely senator to buck the leadership was John Warner of Virginia, the institutionalist who’s long voiced his displeasure at the party’s dabblings in Schiavo-style wingnuttery. But an article in Congressional Quarterly yesterday cited a Senate Democratic leadership aide characterizing Warner as having “likely become solidly aligned with Frist and the leadership.” And today’s Washington Post rundown quotes conservative consultant Bruce Fein saying that Warner "is not super-solid, but he'll probably go along."

If that’s true, the two publicly uncommitted senators (besides Collins) who pose the biggest threat to Frist’s efforts are probably Arlen Specter and Chuck Hagel. Three others go unmentioned by the Post but are listed as still “in play” by Congressional Quarterly: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Mike DeWine of Ohio. That freshman Murkowski remains uncommitted is certainly a surprise, given the debt she owes the White House and Senate leadership for her election in November; her quotes in the Post piece make one pessimistic, however, that she’ll buck Frist in the end. Despite the fancy two-step Smith’s spokespeople are apparently still expected to engage in when constituents ask for his stance on the nuclear option, I still don’t think he’s a serious swing vote. He was leaning pro-nuke back in March and just this week an Oregonian editorial asserts that the senator “has given the Senate GOP leadership his qualified support for the anti-filibuster move, if it comes to a vote.” DeWine, however, remains a true unknown, even though he wasn't typically listed among likely dissenters in the past.

So that leaves us with three definite no’s -- Chafee, McCain, and Snowe -- and one near-definite, Collins. The remaining nuke fence-sitters are:

• Chuck Hagel
• Arlen Specter
• Lisa Murkowski
• Mike DeWine
• John Warner

Warner and DeWine, at this point, are particular long-shots. Since Dems need two of these swing votes to block the move, this may come down to Hagel and Specter in the end. Of course, even if the voting math looks moderately promising for the nukers at the moment, there’s still every likelihood that our Blackberry-loving majority leader, as usual, just can't be certain about the count. Don’t worry, though: Trent Lott’s confident the votes are there:

"You've got your clear voters, you've got your nervous nellies, and you've got those who will never tell you until the vote is taken. . . . In the end I think they'll be there because [Frist] has been very restrained" in handling the issue, he said.

So restrained!

--Sam Rosenfeld

FEDERALISM WON'T SUFFICE. Another note on the bill the House passed yesterday cracking down on people who evade "parental notification" restrictions on abortions by crossing state lines from a notification state to a non-notification state. I won't dwell for a moment on the horrors of parental notification laws, and I won't bother to call conservatives hypocrites for supporting an anti-federalism bill because hypocrisy-talk is boring. The point, though, is that anybody who thinks the repeal of Roe v. Wade will lead to some happy federalist settlement where we have a patchwork of radically different laws that takes this issue off the national agenda is fooling themselves.

Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They're not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they're happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws. It's not the sort of issue where a "mind your own business" posture is going to be viable -- the dispute hinges on a question of universal morality, not local community decency standards. Indeed, in Ireland, where they have very restrictive abortion laws but it's quite easy to travel to the United Kingdom, there have been persistent on-and-off disputes about the legality of traveling to the U.K. for that purpose (complete with efforts to secure legal injunctions preventing women from doing so) and about providing information designed to facilitate such travel. Most Americans don't have the kind of easy access to Canada that Irish people have to the U.K., but many Americans do and the very same controversies would arise. Nobody thinks it's okay to abort a 10-week-old pregnancy in Illinois but not in Indiana, nor that it's okay in Manitoba but not in North Dakota.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TAXI DRIVER SURVEILLANCE ACT. The House Judiciary Committee's distorted report, first noticed by Raw Story, really is as indefensible and childish as everybody says. In case you haven't heard about it, when James Sensenbrenner's House Judiciary Committee reported the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act out of committee, the report rewrote the descriptions of several Democratic amendments to portray them as defenses of sexual predators. (Raw Story has the before-and-after, and you can see the real thing in all its glory halfway down in the report under the header, "vote of the committee.")

One amendment in particular caught my eye: Robert Scott's amendment "to immunize taxicab drivers, bus drivers, others in the business of professional transport, doctors, nurses, and/or other medical providers or their staff from the transportation provision of the bill." (Or, if you will, "an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they are taxicab drivers, bus drivers, or others in the business of professional transport.") The amendment was, of course, defeated, meaning that any cab or bus driver who takes a visibly pregnant girl across state lines could face a year in jail or a civil suit under this law.

I don't think that's nearly as farfetched an outcome as it sounds. You can be sure that in cities near a border, "location intervention" anti-abortion centers ("crisis pregnancy centers" purposely built across the street from abortion providers) will have volunteers keeping an eye out for taxicabs and checking license plates. Companies like Greyhound might even feel forced to recommend that its drivers refuse to transport minors they believe are pregnant across state lines, just to guard against liability. It'll be a while before this all passes in the Senate and survives constitutional challenges, but this sort of draconian curb on the freedom of movement of pregnant minors really could be just around the corner.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MAKE YOUR CASE. Sam's not in the office, so I'll take Roll Call's report that Nancy Pelosi tried to build bridges with House moderates by holding a meeting and that the moderates in question aren't mollified to basically repeat what he said the other day: Can the centrists here please explain what they're doing? I'm leery of efforts to drive people out of the party, and principled disagreement about the issues and tactical opportunism on the part of vulnerable members is a necessary feature of political life. But I've yet to hear a good explanation -- or even an attempt at an explanation -- from anyone in the "centrist" faction as to what the New Dem Caucus was doing on the bankruptcy bill. Make your case on the merits and perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree. Or try to give some kind of explanation as to why it is that you can't preserve electability in Blue Dog districts without helping credit cards companies squeeze unfortunate consumers to the bone.

Now I don't really expect actual members of Congress to give an honest accounting of their tactical thinking, but usually when a party divides up into factions you can get a sense from a faction's allies as to what it is they're trying to do. On bankruptcy the forces of centrist progressivism have been conspicuously silent. The closest anyone from the DLC has come to addressing the topic has been Ed Kilgore's general clarification that the DLC and the New Dem Caucus are different things and the former doesn't control the latter. Well, fair enough. But if the intellectual arms of centrism won't defend the bankruptcy defectors either on the merits, or as a matter of tactics, then of course liberals aren't going to treat this particular disagreement respectfully.

The flipside, to be fair, is that just because, say, Rep. Adam Smith is wrong on bankruptcy doesn't mean he's a fundamentally evil man who's opinion on everything under the sun should be dismissed out of hand. Honest disagreements about policy create a productive tension within the progressive movement and, clearly, candidates in different districts are going to need to take some different stances in order to win. Not every single controversy about every single bill needs to become a dramatic battle for the soul of the party. But when you defect and can't be bothered to offer any sort of reasonable explanation for your defection, you can't turn around and act all shocked and horrified when you wind up getting criticized from the left.

UPDATE: A reader informs me that Rep. Smith actually changed his mind on this bill after consulting with constituents and that I should read this account on Daily Kos which, unfortunately, I can't read because the site is down. The broader point still stands, apologies for the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

PLAN B. Yesterday the House passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), the most restrictive federal parental notification act yet introduced -- this one, according to The New York Times, puts strict restrictions on doctors, fining them for non-compliance.

The bill, intended to prevent minor girls from going to different states to circumvent more restrictive laws in their home states, applies to adults who accompany girls 17 and under. It also, for the first time, requires doctors who perform abortions on under-age girls to comply with state notification laws, and in some cases to notify the girl's parents in person. Violators could face a $100,000 fine and a year in jail .... The bill incorporates an earlier measure that has passed the House three times since 1998. The earlier bill, the Child Custody Protection Act, did not impose criminal sanctions against doctors, only against the adults who accompanied minor girls across state lines from a state that had strict parental consent laws to one that did not.

All this makes even more relevant my old colleague Jonathan Cohn's TRB in The New Republic this week. It's an excellent run-down on the crisis that this not-yet-FDA-approved 'morning-after pill' is facing in the present political climate. At issue are conservatives claiming that Plan B will endanger women, increase abortion rates, and ultimately promote rampant pre-marital sex. But Cohn skillfully lays out the problem with complaining about abortion rates -- especially after pushing "partial-birth" abortion bans -- and then placing Plan B, which prevents implantation of fertilized eggs, in that same context. Rejecting Plan B because it's an abortifacient, as Cohn says, is a "severe standard." At least 26 countries have successfully used Plan B, safely, and some 40-60 percent of eggs don't implant on their own anyway. He also explains why support for Plan B is something progressives should be flocking to. The article is subscription only, but here's an excerpt:

Plan B is a very high dosage of progesterone, the hormone that promotes pregnancy when produced naturally by a woman's body but prevents pregnancy when taken in a standard birth-control regimen. The problem with birth-control pills is that they only work when taken before intercourse, which is where Plan B comes in. It turns out that an elevated dose of progesterone taken soon after intercourse also prevents pregnancy, though its effectiveness diminishes quickly with time. Women can get this large quantity of progesterone simply by taking several birth-control pills together rather than over several days, as they would normally. Women's Capital Corporation, since bought by Barr, eventually got the idea of producing and marketing a single dose of progesterone designed specifically for use after intercourse, to be made available by prescription. In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the application.

The move got little attention amid the controversy over RU-486, the chemical compound that induces abortions even weeks into pregnancy (something Plan B can't do). But use of Plan B remains infrequent, partly because it can be difficult to obtain the drug quickly enough. As a result, women's health advocates have embraced a Barr proposal to make Plan B available "behind the counter"--meaning pharmacists could dispense it without a prescription--to women over 16 years of age.

This time, conservatives are making noise. A year ago, 49 Republican representatives wrote President Bush, urging him to block approval of Barr's FDA application. And, while the FDA's own scientific advisory panel endorsed the application by a vote of 23 to four, the Agency has withheld approval. Early this month, Senators Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray announced they would place an indefinite "hold" on the nomination of the FDA's acting director, Lester Crawford, to become its permanent director until the Agency issued a ruling. (Unrelated issues have since stalled Crawford's nomination.) Meanwhile, stories of pharmacists refusing to fill Plan B prescriptions are cropping up. Early this month, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich issued an emergency rule requiring pharmacies, as publicly licensed health care providers, to dispense the medications, even if employees object. Conservatives there are trying to overturn the order. ...

The other serious argument against Plan B is that it will increase risky sexual activity by young people. But peer-reviewed studies published in mainstream medical publications (like one just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) have repeatedly found no such link. ...James Trussell, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, has estimated that, if emergency contraceptives were widely available in this country, they could reduce the approximately 1.3 million abortions that take place yearly in this country by half. If a culture of life is so sacrosanct, shouldn't that trump the issue of premarital sex?

... One group to whom emergency contraception would make the greatest difference is rape victims. According to Trussell, who studied statistics from 1998, about 22,000 of the 25,000 women who became pregnant from rape could have prevented pregnancy with emergency contraception. Unfortunately, the new federal hospital guidelines for rape treatment released in January mysteriously omitted Plan B, even though a previous draft had included it. In Colorado, conservatives have fought efforts to impose a guideline that includes emergency contraceptives. Apparently, elements of the right are so committed to their stark definition of life and so concerned about hypothetical cultural signals that they would prefer rape victims become pregnant than inform them about emergency contraception. Who are the extremists now?

For more on this subject see the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

--Sarah Wildman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WATCH AMERICA. Investigations of Abu Ghraib, Colin Powell assured us last spring, would show the world how transparent and responsible America is. Powell was right about only part of that, writes Reed Brody: The world is watching, but we have nothing to be proud of.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DO-OVER. Earlier today The Stakeholder aptly cautioned against jumping to any conclusions, short of explicit details, about the planned House Republican reversal of the ethics committee rule changes they had rammed through in January; there seemed to be every likelihood that the Republicans were intending for something less than a full reversal. But now it does indeed appear that the GOP conference is ready to vote this afternoon for a complete retreat from all three rule changes. As ousted panel chair Joel Hefley told Congressional Quarterly this morning, “The Speaker suggested we completely roll back to the 108th Congress [rules].”

Let’s not forget, however, committee chair Doc Hastings’ replacement of the panel’s longstanding chief of staff with the chief of staff from his own D.C. office -- a huge break with historical practice. Ranking member Alan Mollohan won’t be shutting up about that anytime soon:

But even if a rules rollback happens, Mollohan will not be entirely placated. There will remain “some very serious professional staff issues to consider,” he said.

Mollohan takes issue with a decision by ethics chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., to install his top aide as the staff director of the committee. Mollohan considers that to be a serious departure from the tradition of jointly hired bipartisan ethics lawyers to staff the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

This doesn’t appear to be a sticking point that will keep the committee from finally officially organizing, but it is something the Democrats will continue to harp on. That shouldn't be a surprise, though, since -- didn’t you know? -- Republicans are the ones who actually care about a sound ethics process, while all Democrats want to do is carp and bluster:

The House Republican Conference distributed talking points blaming the minority party for forcing the majority to take a step with which it disagrees. Talking point No. 11: “Unlike the obstructionist Democrats who would rather bluster about supposed abuses of power by the Majority than actually come to an agreement on ethics, House Republicans are committed to moving forward and protecting the integrity of the House.”

Gotta love that classic Republican "‘Alice in Wonderland’ logic.”

--Sam Rosenfeld

"HOW DARE THEY." Between last Friday, when the idea for the speech was conceived, and today, when Al Gore delivered it to a wildly enthusiastic crowd of MoveOn PAC members at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill during the lunch hour, Gore and his advisors managed to put together one of the smartest political speeches I have had the pleasure of hearing in a very, very long time. This speech, entitled "An American Heresy" is a direct assault on the religious right from within the framework of American history; it is must-see TV for this evening, when it will be broadcast on C-SPAN. It wove together the words of the founders, the current drive for one-party rule, and the fight over the filibuster into a coherent narrative about our times that rang all too true -- and which I have not heard as ably articulated elsewhere. It was, quite simply, magisterial.

And it was hard not to think while watching Gore speak that this is a man whom people would vote for, should they ever again have that chance.

I can't find the text of the speech online yet, but here's the dramatic climax of the hour-long presentation, which kept the audience rapt in their chairs, except for when they were standing in ovation.

From the prepared version:

It is no accident that this assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God's will in American politics. They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against "people of faith."

How dare they?

Long before our founders met in Philadelphia, their forbears first came to these shores to escape oppression at the hands of despots in the old world who mixed religion with politics and claimed dominion over both their pocketbooks and their souls.

This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throw-back to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place.

James Madison warned us in Federalist #10 that sometimes, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction."

Unfortunately the virulent faction now committed to changing the basic nature of democracy now wields enough political power within the Republican party to have a major influence over who secures the Republican nomination for president in the 2008 election. It appears painfully obvious that some of those who have their eyes on that nomination are falling all over themselves to curry favor with this faction.

They are the ones demanding the destructive constitutional confrontation now pending in the Senate. They are the ones willfully forcing the Senate leadership to drive democracy to the precipice that now lies before us.

I remember a time not too long ago when Senate leaders in both parties saw it as part of their responsibility to protect the Senate against the destructive designs of demagogues who would subordinate the workings of our democracy to their narrow factional agendas.

Our founders understood that the way you protect and defend people of faith is by preventing any one sect from dominating. Most people of faith I know in both parties have been getting a belly-full of this extremist push to cloak their political agenda in religiosity and mix up their version of religion with their version of right-wing politics and force it on everyone else.

They should learn that religious faith is a precious freedom and not a tool to divide and conquer.

I think it is truly important to expose the fundamental flaw in the arguments of these zealots. The unifying theme now being pushed by this coalition is actually an American heresy-a highly developed political philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of the United States of America.

We began as a nation with a clear formulation of the basic relationship between God, our rights as individuals, the government we created to secure those rights, and the prerequisites for any power exercised by our government.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," our founders declared. "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."

But while our rights come from God, as our founders added, "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed."

So, unlike our inalienable rights, our laws are human creations that derive their moral authority from our consent to their enactment-informed consent given freely within our deliberative processes of self-government.

Any who seek to wield the powers of government without the consent of the people, act unjustly.

The whole thing is worth reading, once it's online somewhere.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ACTING OUT OF STRENGTH. As Bill Frist backs away from contemplating a non-nuclear solution, one of the other good signs I noted yesterday becomes more concrete: Ben Nelson is apparently done looking for a "compromise" that eliminates the filibuster. From subscription-only Roll Call:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who has been at the center of many talks aimed at avoiding the showdown, also said that Democrats would not agree to any deal that forced them to give up the future right to force cloture votes requiring 60 votes to move to final passage.

“Nobody wants to give it up altogether,” he said.

That's a significant departure from his earlier suggestion that the passage from committee to the floor be routinized in a way that would eliminate any opportunity for a minority party to block a nominee. As others have noted, Harry Reid has very effectively claimed the mantle of rationality and openness to compromise, and it's a measure of his tactical strength (and the rightfulness of the Democrats' position) that even the most conservative members of his caucus are insisting on his goalposts.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CLARENCE THOMAS LOVES INTERNATIONAL LAW! I don't know anything about the actual merits of Small v. United States, but it's pretty clear that Clarence Thomas wants to give foreign courts the ability to limit our 2nd Amendment rights. OK, perhaps it's not as simple as that, but he did choose the pro-international law side of both rulings yesterday. And his dissent in Small seems to require something that I can't imagine the 1968 Congress intended -- that a conviction in any court, anywhere in the world, carrying a potential punishment of more than a year in prison should ban citizens from possessing a firearm in the United States. A Singaporean conviction for "joining or continuing in an unlawful assembly, knowing that it has been commanded to disperse" should strip somebody of their right to carry a firearm? Might be that there's "a good ground of impeachment" for Thomas and Antonin Scalia, too.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE MISSING MIDDLE. I think Fred Kaplan goes a little soft on the president for his lover's stroll with Crown Prince Abdullah:

Which leads us back to the stroll through those bluebonnets. Regardless of what Bush really thinks about the Saudi royal family and its undemocratic ways, he—like any other modern American president—has a strong interest in assuring access to oil, preferably at lower prices. Similarly, a president might like China's rulers to treat dissidents more humanely, but he really wants China to keep buying dollars and floating the U.S. deficit.

This seems to me to buy into an overly neocon-ish black-and-white view of things, even if Kaplan winds up coming down on the opposite side of the ledger. Obviously, we can't -- or at least shouldn't -- just treat every distasteful regime the way we treated Saddam Hussein or do treat Kim Jong-Il. But one can still maintain distinctions. The case of China seems rather apropos. We have normal diplomatic relations with China -- trade agreements, high-level meetings at international fora, occassional bilateral get-togethers, etc. But it's all done on the level of formal, proper diplomacy. Two major sovereign states that need to talk and reach agreements and otherwise share the globe together. But Bush doesn't go around testifying as to the quality of Hu Jintao's soul, and quite rightly so. Now does he pretend to believe Hu is taking steps toward democracy the way he regularly singles Saudi Arabia out for praise as a liberalizing regime when it clearly isn't.

It would be perfectly viable -- and, I think a good idea -- for Bush and his successors to implement an informal policy of declining to host dictators at his personal home or at the Camp David vacation facility. There's also no need for the United States to be the major supplier of weapons to the Saudi security services or to be collaborating with the Saudi government in a campaign to shut down the only major Arabic-language media outlets that aren't owned by the Saudi royal family. Oil is a commodity sold openly on a global market. Every country on earth, in other words, is effected by Saudi oil production decisions. Neverthless, no other country feels the need to establish this kind of special relationship with the Saudi government (nor do any other major Western leaders treat the local Saudi ambassador as a member of the family).

This stuff makes a difference. In practice, the United States doesn't do much of anything to promote political change in China, largely because we can't do very much. But nobody in Asia is confused as to whether or not America approves of the Communist Party's dictatorship. By contrast, lots of Arabs don't buy our democracy-talk when applied to the Middle East precisely because we seem to be on the House of Saud's side rather than simply accepting of the reality that they're in charge in need to be dealt with. And they think this because in a variety of substantive and symbolic ways, the Bush administration really has put itself on the royal family's side. But there simply isn't a stark choice between total isolation and hand-holding strolls through the flower garden. Ordinary diplomacy works just fine.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEE NO TERROR. Via Laura Rozen I see that in response to data indicating a steep rise in the number of terrorist attacks around the world, the State Department is following through with the plan reported by Jonathan Landay a little while back to just stop releasing the data in public reports. After all, reporting news whether or not it makes you look good is just so reality-based.

--Matthew Yglesias

SAVE TOM? Jonathan Alter and Kevin Drum both get on board with the argument Sam and I have been making for a while that Democrats would be much better off if Tom DeLay stays than if he goes. I'm beginning to actually have some doubts on this score. Everything Kevin and Alter say is true, but another consideration has entered the picture: The Republican Party's much-vaunted discipline seems to be falling apart to some extent. Under the circumstances, the fall of the House's main disciplinarian might further accelerate the trend, even if DeLay's successor isn't really substantively different. I'm not sure whether or not that outweighs the considerations on the other side, but it does mean that whatever happens Democrats stand to make some gains either way.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE LEGEND OF THE POWELL MEMO. All of conservatism's successes over the past 35 years can be traced back to one memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell ... or so the tale has it. Mark Schmitt sweeps away the myth and finds that there may be rather less to the legend than you think.

--Jeffrey Dubner

OW! While pondering the systemic corruption of Republican governance, have some fun hitting Tom DeLay's head with a mallet. This site was put together for Democracy Radio, of Ed Schultz fame; give it a look.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FOREST, NOT THE TREES. It appears that House Democrats’ strategy in the fight over the ethics rules -- including their prompt and unequivocal refusal to consider last week’s GOP offer to investigate Tom DeLay in exchange for Democratic caving on the new rule changes -- is paying off:

House Republican aides said yesterday for the first time that they believe they will have to reverse or modify the ethics rules that were passed on a party-line vote in January and have caused Democrats to refuse to allow the ethics committee to organize. Republican leaders had been trying to avoid a new floor vote over the rules, but aides said they now are convinced that they need to get the committee going so that Democrats cannot accuse them of squelching an investigation of DeLay.

That's very encouraging news. Meanwhile, the rest of the Washington Post article isn’t about the ethics committee fight; it’s about the mad scramble of House members, Republicans and Democrat alike, to refile travel and billing forms and make sure all their old billing arrangements are on the up-and-up now that Tom DeLay’s woes have shined a spotlight on the issue of lobbyists funding trips.

Lobbyists shouldn’t be funding trips for legislators, so it’s a perfectly good thing that members are feeling a bit of heat right now and thinking about being more careful in the future. But it’s important that the significance of DeLay’s myriad scandals not be reduced by the feverish pitch of current media coverage to petty questions of nepotism and lavish travel. Just as the serious case against John Bolton isn’t actually that he’s a mean boss, the real problem with DeLay has little to do with how much money his wife makes. To quote my boss, when it comes to the way Republicans run Congress, “the worst corruption has been the legal kind.” The scourge, of course, is less DeLay than DeLayism -- the wholesale incorporation of K Street into the Republicans’ legislative and policymaking apparatus and the transformation of Congress into a close-looped patronage machine for party functionaries and industry interests. On that score, in some ways a run-of-the-mill Hill article like this gets closer to the central story of the House of Scandal more than the latest scoop on DeLay’s travel receipts. It’s just a report that yet one more DeLay aide -- as it happens, one who was involved in the Hammer’s delirious efforts to track down the escaped Texas Dem legislators during 2003’s re-redistricting fight -- is joining up with yet one more high-powered lobbying outfit. Just one more story to lodge in the K Street Project files:

Akin Gump has hired three senior GOP staffers and Tommy Thompson, former health and human services secretary, in recent weeks, adding to the Republican heft in its lobbying shop.

“It’s a 50-50 ratio today,” Paxon said, adding, “When I started, only 20 percent of the section was Republican.”

In addition to Thompson, the firm has recently hired Thompson’s counselor, Ladd Wiley, and Jeff McMillen, a former aide to Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.).

Paxon said Sullivan would not have specific issue portfolio but would help the firm’s clients, including AT&T, the National Cable Television Association, Ford Motor Company, Boeing, and PhRMA develop legislative strategy.

This is no scandal, and it’s certainly not illegal. But a decade into the GOP's efforts along these lines, it's not hard to see that the effect on our political institutions has been pretty pernicious.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROMISES HE COULDN'T DELIVER. To reinforce what Sam wrote earlier about Bill Frist's ever-receding deadline for the nuclear option, let's remember what the majority leader said on the very first day of the 109th Congress (pdf):

Next month we will have the opportunity to restore Senate tradition. I will bring one of the President's very capable, qualified, and experienced judicial nominees to the floor. We can debate that nomination. We can vote to support it or to oppose it. And we must offer the President advice and consent by giving this and future judicial nominees who are brought to the floor up-or-down votes. ...

So let me say this: If my Democratic colleagues exercise self-restraint and do not filibuster judicial nominees, Senate traditions will be restored. It will then be unnecessary to change Senate procedures. Self-restraint on the use of the filibuster for nominations--the very same self-restraint that Senate minorities exercised for more than two centuries--will alleviate the need for any action. But if my Democratic colleagues continue to filibuster judicial nominees, the Senate will face this choice: Fail to do its constitutional duty or reform itself and restore its traditions, and do what the Framers intended.

On January 4, he said in no uncertain terms that the following month he would bring a nominee to the floor and deploy the nuclear option if that nominee did not receive an up-or-down vote. But it was three months before Frist brought the first nominee to the floor -- utterly non-controversial district court judge Paul Crotty, confirmed on April 11. Frist set a deadline for himself that, even if the entire GOP caucus were behind him, would still have been hard to meet -- too much choreography to fit into seven weeks -- and did it knowing full well that it was a lower priority than class-action reform, bankruptcy, and Social Security for the White House and/or most senators. He didn't come close to meeting his deadline, and he may never get the nominees he had in mind to the floor. Trent Lott or Orrin Hatch may have nudged Frist toward this tar pit, but there's no question that he's responsible for jumping in headfirst.

--Jeffrey Dubner

“RUDDERLESS CLOWN.” I agree pretty much 100 percent with the analysis of the nuclear option fight offered by this fellow at that old favorite of ours, RedState.org. My agreement extends even to his claim that Bill Frist “was pushed into a few [traps] by a bitter Trent Lott who dreamt up this fiasco in the first place.” Indeed, last week I heard the same speculation -- that a mischievous and vengeful Lott pushed the nuclear option fight onto Frist’s agenda knowing it would end disastrously -- from an official at one of the leading anti-nuke advocacy outfits. Who knows if it’s actually true, but I sure wish it were.

The Washington Times’ hit piece on the stumblebum majority leader provided just a hint of things to come -- a whole slew of conservative bloggers are beginning to get their licks in as well. Poor Bill has got quite a needle to thread here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MAJORITY BLEEDER. It may be premature to record the nuclear option's time of death, but it's not too early to predict the cause. Sam Rosenfeld blames Bill Frist himself, the man who's made a promise he can't deliver.

--Jeffrey Dubner

POOR JANICE. The Carpetbagger Report details a recent speech by filibustered judicial nominee Janice Rogers Brown before a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Connecticut where she expressed the view that she is a combatant in a "war" being waged against religious people. This goes well beyond the usual despicability of such claims because of all the objectionable judicial nominees we've seen, the problems with Judge Brown have the least to do with religious faith. Indeed, they have nothing to do with religion. Check out the Alliance for Justice's page on her and you'll see that cultural issues don't even come up.

The objection to Brown is that she opposes the New Deal and everything that came afterward in overheated, takes the view that judges should show no deference to legislatures, and takes the view that judges should show no deference to precendent. In other words, liberals worry that from the bench she'll strike down huge swathes of American economic and regulatory policy. Her views can be defended on the merits -- many conservative and libertarian law professors seem to agree with her -- but they have nothing to do with religion, it's obvious why the Democratic Party wouldn't want to see such a person on the bench, and it's clear that if such views were put squarely before the American people they would be overwhelmingly rejected. So, instead, she lies. And, as usual, cultural conservatives are falling for the scam.

--Matthew Yglesias

FRIST FEELS SOME HEAT. I see that the AP story I quoted in my previous post has been updated. Check out the difference between the original and current versions of Jesse Holland's report this morning:

(Original): Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is quietly talking to the Senate's chief Republican about confirming at least two of President Bush's blocked judicial nominees but only as part of a compromise that would require the GOP to end its threat to eliminate judicial filibusters, officials say.

Reid also wants a concession from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, officials said speaking on condition of anonymity: the replacement of a third Michigan nominee with one approved by that state's two Democratic senators.

At the same time, these officials say Reid remains opposed to four conservative candidates for other appellate circuits, Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, William G. Myers III and William H. Pryor Jr.

(Revised):Reacting to a Democratic offer in the fight over filibusters, Republican leader Bill Frist said Tuesday he isn't interested in any deal that fails to ensure Senate confirmation for all of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid had been quietly talking with Frist about confirming at least two of Bush's blocked nominees from Michigan in exchange for withdrawing a third nominee. This would have been part of a compromise that would have the GOP back away from a showdown over changing Senate rules to prevent Democrats from using the filibuster to block Bush's nominees.

But Frist, in a rare news conference conducted on the Senate floor, said he would not accept any deal that keeps his Republican majority from confirming judicial nominees that have been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The way I read it, Holland's first version was accurate: Bill Frist has been discussing deals that could involve the abandonment of some nominees and the allowing of the filibuster; the new information is that he says he won't accept such a deal, not that he hasn't been considering it. The most likely explanation is that Frist ('08) is just afraid of the electoral consequences of admitting that he's entertaining a deal that would, as I said before, represent a profound failure -- particularly in the eyes of the religious right. Look at the heat he took for simply saying that the judiciary should be respected. If he loses membership in the conservative movement for that, think what'll happen when he fails to get Bill Pryor confirmed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

GOOD SIGNS. For a couple of reasons, I'm optimistic about the Senate compromises that have been floated this week. There's been a bit too much variation to know what the most likely proposal is at this time, but some of them would seem to represent decisive victories for Harry Reid. The base of most proposals, as reported so far, has been this:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is quietly talking to the Senate's chief Republican about confirming at least two of President Bush's blocked judicial nominees but only as part of a compromise that would require the GOP to end its threat to eliminate judicial filibusters, officials say.

Reid also wants a concession from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, officials said speaking on condition of anonymity: the replacement of a third Michigan nominee with one approved by that state's two Democratic senators.

At the same time, these officials say Reid remains opposed to four conservative candidates for other appellate circuits, Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, William G. Myers III and William H. Pryor Jr.

If this is what the final compromise looks like (and it's worth noting that both The New York Times and The Washington Post hint at ominous "other guarantees" that could involve confirmation of some of those fanatical four), then it'll be pretty clear that Democrats have flat-out won.

The first thing to understand is that the impasse in Michigan is a bit different from the fight over the fanatical four. While the nominees range from conservative to radically conservative, they're not of the same stripe as, say, Janice Rogers Brown (who, as recently as Sunday, seemed to describe her intention if confirmed as to rein in individual "autonomy"). But the Sixth Circuit, particularly its Michigan seats, has seen perhaps the most egregious manipulation of any court over the past seven-and-a-half years, the quintessential abuse of absolute power that Democrats complain of. Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings on any of three Clinton nominees after 1997; one of them, Helene White waited from her nomination on January 7, 1997, until George W. Bush withdrew her nomination on March 20, 2001, without a single hearing. That's over 1,500 days without a hearing. Needless to say, there were four vacancies on the court, two of them "judicial emergencies," when Bush took office. After pulling Clinton's nominees, Bush put four new judges on the bench and nominated three more for the open Michigan seats. Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow offered to support those three nominees if Bush filled a fourth slot with one of the stonewalled Clinton nominees; instead, Bush nominated Richard Griffin. (It's only the "consent" part of "advise and consent" that interests the White House, as we all know.) Levin and Stabenow declined to return their home-state blue slips, just as Spencer Abraham did to two Michigan nominees in the '90s, and Hatch tore up the blue-slip policy. So Democrats filibustered.

If the result of Bill Frist's threats is that Democrats get to choose one of the Sixth Circuit nominees, and get to deny one of Bush's appointees, it'll be a great reassertion of the limits of the absolute power Bush and Frist feel they deserve on judicial nominations. Double that if Democrats' right to selectively stop a tiny handful of extremely objectionable nominees is preserved as well.

There are two more tea leaves that bear notice, too, that make me hopeful that Republicans know they've lost. The first is that reports of these Reid-backed negotiations involve Frist. I've heard rumors of a Michigan compromise before, but it usually involved moderate Republicans who were trying to forestall the nuclear option. If Frist has been beaten down to this level, it may mean the moderates forced his hand and he's given up on winning nuclear war. Second, the current incarnation of the ignominious Trent Lott-Ben Nelson "compromise" no longer consists of the Broder-esque surrender that earlier versions did. According to subscription-only Roll Call their plan now calls for "votes on four nominees in exchange for Republicans’ withdrawing their threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations.... Republicans would also agree not to pursue votes on the three remaining nominees being filibustered by Democrats." If that's the negotiating position Republicans are bringing to the table, there's no question Frist has lost.

--Jeffrey Dubner

HYPOCRITES ALL! Rich Lowry's latest column on how Democrats were against the the filibuster before they were for it is a pretty banal effort in the pin-the-hypocrisy on the donkey sweepstakes. I think his conclusion is just right, though:

Whichever party is in the minority will love the filibuster most. But something deeper is at work too. When you have little positive to offer and the tide of history seems to be moving against you, obstruction — whether through opportunistic federalism or the filibuster — becomes not just a tactic, but a kind of sacred cause. Just ask Senator Eastland.

Okay, well not just right. Lowry thinks it's liberals who have no ideas and "little positive to offer." I think Tim Noah got this question just right:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price. If the Senate eliminated the filibuster, Republicans would have to choose between putting their money where their mouth was or just shutting up. Either choice would put Democrats in a better political position than they're in right now.

Indeed. This is why the remarkable thing about the filibuster debate is how little hypocrisy you're seeing from liberals on this front. Today's LA Times editorial page joins Noah, myself, Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic, Bruce Ackerman, Rick Hertzberg at The New Yorker, and many, many, many other liberals outside government in expressing dismay only that the GOP won't eliminate the filibuster on all issues. But however opportunistic the judges-only anti-filibuster stance is, the reality is that the nuclear option will pave the way for Democrats to eliminate legislative filibusters as well whenever they find themselves in the majority. When that happens, the GOP will find that while their only big legislative idea -- tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts -- is already immune to the filibuster, they can no longer block Democratic ideas.

It's become a clichéd trope of the right to say that liberals have nothing positive to offer, but it's simply not true. We've got at least two big ideas -- labor-law reform and universal health care -- that, historically, have only been beaten thanks to the filibuster and that, if passed, will generate self-sustaining political coalitions that the right will find it essentially impossible to ever defeat. There's a reason that right-wing parties in Canada and Europe never propose eliminating those countries' national health care systems, just as America's GOP doesn't try to abolish Medicare. And, of course, anti-union policies will become immeasurably harder to implement if it's made easier to unionize new groups of workers. Anti-filibuster conservatives aren't so much being hypocritical as they are shooting themselves in the foot, if not the head.

--Matthew Yglesias

REALLY AND TRULY NO EXIT. If you're looking for reasons to believe that the Bush political machine is losing its deft touch then look no further than Bloomberg News' report that the President will be extending his Social Security privatization world tour beyond the initial 60-day timeframe. This is an absolutely baffling thing to do. By all objective standards, the tour has been a catastrophic failure. He's induced zero new legislators to back his agenda. Privatization's numbers have sunk further in the polls. Indeed, the best polling evidence available suggests that the more people focus on the issue, the less they like the president's ideas. Even worse, we're now seeing clear signs that pushing privatization is driving down the GOP's overall level of support with key constituency groups like senior citizens and rural people, both groups that backed Bush in '04 on cultural grounds and are now being driven back into the Democrats' arms.

Frankly, Bush has won enough battles over the years that I have trouble believing his team would do anything as dumb as a tour extension clearly seems to be. Maybe they've got some trick up their sleeve so brilliant that I can't grasp it. Certainly if there's a trick here I'm not seeing what it's supposed to be. Then again, I refused to believe the polling that showed the Republicans misstepped on Terri Schiavo until I saw it confirmed three or four times because I was just incredulous that the GOP could err after having been so successful for so long at manipulating these cultural issues. Maybe Karl Rove's deft touch really has suddenly gone bad.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FALSE GOSPEL. Why shouldn't judges put their faith above the law? Matthew Yglesias envisions a world where the religious right gets its way and Quakers lead our armies, Hindus run our slaughterhouses, and everybody has to eat matzah in April. Yeah, that'll work.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NOT IN THE TANK ENOUGH. The Washington Times has a fascinating account of how Bill Frist's efforts to ingratiate himself with the Christian Right through the identity politics of the right seem to be failing. During his "Justice Sunday" address, the majority leader stated that:

When we think judicial decisions are outside mainstream American values, we will say so. But we must also be clear that the balance of power among all three branches requires respect -- not retaliation. I won't go along with that.

This observation set off a torrent of conservative grumbling from fringe religious leaders and House Republican backbenchers. The Times reports that it was understood as a veiled swipe at Tom DeLay who "said last month that judges who denied appeals by Terri Schiavo's relatives who were trying to keep the brain-damaged Florida woman alive must 'answer for their behavior.'" It could just as easily be read as a swipe at the much broader and increasingly demented conservative anti-judge campaign in its entirety. My colleague Sam Rosenfeld has brought to my attention the Declaration of Constitutional Restoration put out by the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It not only calls on the Senate Republicans to go nuclear, it also demands that Congress strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over questions of marriage and establishment clause cases, calls for the impeachment of judges who make rulings they don't like, and most wackily states that "where appropriate, Congress should reduce or eliminate the funding of federal courts, the salaries of judges excepted, that overstep their constitutional authority."

They want, in other words, retaliation. Social conservatives seem to have been content to get mild rhetorical support of their agenda and essentially no policy substance from George W. Bush during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. But it looks like the 2008 GOP contenders are going to need to bid pretty high to get this crowd in their corner.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEEF GAP ONCE AGAIN. Via Nick Gillespie, a PPI report argues that cracking down on pop culture is the key to Democratic Party efforts to regain the support of married parents. Reading through the report, I'm once again wondering where the beef's gone off to. On the one hand, there doesn't seem to any actual evidence here that doing what the report's author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, advocates really is the key to gaining the support of married parents. Instead, we get an anecdote from Madonna, who votes Democratic anyway, and probably isn't the best bellwether of median voter sentiment besides. We certainly don't get an analysis of whether or not any gains this approach might reap would be offset by losses among younger people, single people, or the childless.

On top of that, there isn't much policy substance here. The only actual recommendation is an endorsement of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's drive to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. That's fine by me, I suppose, but it's consistent with the approach she criticizes -- expecting parents, rather than the state, to take the lead role in deciding what their children do. Indeed, it's hard to see what the practical effect of such a ban would be, since kids whose parents are okay with them playing Grand Theft Auto can get the games for them, and parents who aren't okay with their kids playing the game can already stop them. Beyond that, Whitehead espouses posturing, citing Bill Clinton's support for school uniforms as a worthy example. I think school uniforms are great -- wore 'em myself when I was in elementary school -- but as she says, "Clinton obviously had no power to impose school uniforms on the millions of school kids in the thousands of local public school districts across the country."

Except that he did have the power. Or, at least, he had the same power deployed in every instance of federal involvement in education: attaching strings to federal education dollars. So the signature example here is presidential advocacy of something he kinda sorta didn't have the power to implement and, irrespective, didn't actually implement anyway. I'm open to the possibility that this sort of cynical, manipulative stunt really is crucial to political success but insofar as this is what folks are pushing for I wish they'd be a little less high and mighty vis-à-vis those of us who regard the politics of culture-bashing as a bit, well, cynical. Meanwhile, the tragedy here is that I think there really are measures that the government could take that would radically improve the ability of all Americans (parents included, of course) to exercise more influence over what gets beamed into their homes and to encourage the production of alternative cultural products. Sadly, those measures mostly involve the boring old game of implementing regulations that run contrary to the financial interests of large corporations rather than the more fun and appealing practice of denouncing low-brow entertainers.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE BLASTS FROM THE PAST. And then there's this Oct. 24, 1985, gem from the nexis.com archives. Again, check out that byline:

Hiding a Lobby Behind a Name; Why Not Truth in Labeling For Interest Groups?

By Howard Kurtz; Howard Kurtz is a Washington Post investigative reporter.

THE PRESS RELEASES arrive in the mail nearly every day. The Committee for National Security. The Committee for enan Effective Congress. The American Council on Science and Health. The Committee for Energy Awareness. The U.S.A. Foundation.

The names are patriotic-sounding, forward-looking, uplifting. And they all have something in common: They don't tell you a heck of a lot about what the group stands for.

I may be a bit cynical, but it seems to me that we are entering an era of obfuscation -- that the real powers in our society now prefer to stay in the background while these surrogate groups toil on their behalf. It gives their efforts a kind of objective sheen that pronouncements by chemical companies or drug manufacturers could never achieve. After all, who can quarrel with folks who call themselves the U.SA. Foundation?

In the old days, things were simpler. The Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO had their political action committees, the Democrats and Republicans their campaign arms, and it was clear who was fighting for what. But that was before all these committees, commissions, councils, societies, associations, foundations, federations and plain old lobbies multiplied like so many bunnies and burrowed into their downtown office cubicles.

These days, it seems that half the people in Washington no longer work for a living, but spend their time representing those who do. And even an avid fan can't tell the players without a scorecard....

...subterfuge has spread to the realm of politics, where Voters for Joe Doa has been replaced by such fund-raising groups as Citizens for the Republic (Ronald Reagan's PAC) and Committee for the Future of America (Walter Mondale's). This was underscored during last October's first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada, when nationwide ceremonies and campus rallies were sponsored by the U.S.A. Foundation.

A few phone calls revealed that U.S.A. Foundation chairman Jack Abramoff also happens to head the College Republican National Committee, and that other College Republicans were helping to stage the Grenada extravaganza. They insisted it was not designed to aid President Reagan's reelection. This is not surprising, since the U.S.A. Foundation is what's known in IRS jargon as a "501/C3" organization, meaning that its tax-exempt status can be yanked if it engages in partisan politics.

A spokesman for Abramoff explained the arrangement: "When he has his College Republican hat on, he's partisan. When he has his U.S.A. hat on, he's nonpartisan." (emphasis added)

Abramoff was such a Bartholomew Cubbins for so many years, it really is a wonder it took more than 20 years for him to run afoul of the law. Still, two reasons present themselves: 1) the laws governing some of the areas he was working in evolved over the past 20 years to become more stringent; and 2) the arrogance of having gotten away with so much for so long led Abramoff to operate at such a scale that his actions couldn't but provoke inquiry. (That would be the "Shakespearean hubris" explanation.) Still, when Abramoff argues he hasn't done much that wasn't common practice in lobbying circles, it's hard not to suspect he may be telling the truth as he knows it, given his blemished but by and large uninterrupted 20-year history of mixing things up. The young Howard Kurtz sounded a lot like Josh Marshall when writing about Abramoff 20 years ago; I'd be curious to hear Kurtz's reflections now, two decades later, on that new "era of obfuscation" ushered in by Abramoff and his Reagan-era allies. Clearly, this present scandal has been a long time coming.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FRIST PLAYS IT COOL. The Family Research Council was at it again last night. Rob Garver reports on their kinder, gentler salvos in the war against the judiciary.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ON SECOND THOUGHT... Hard to know why Tom DeLay and friends have so quickly abandoned the threatened hearings to "look at an arrogant and out of control judiciary that thumbs its nose at Congress and the president." Was it the backlash against Schiavo intervention and the unmuzzled lunatic fringe? Or is there just a lack of enthusiasm among House members for attaching themselves to DeLay-soaked endeavors?

--Jeffrey Dubner

A BLAST FROM THE PAST. A savvy Democratic communications pro recently quipped to me, describing her philosophy of life in Washington: "It's a small town and a long life, so don't piss people off." Good words to live by if you're in politics -- witness the John Bolton hearings, where all manner of past deeds are coming back to haunt the man -- but a heck of lot harder to follow as a maxim if you're a journalist, where aggravating people is pretty much part of the job description.

Still, if you want a classic example of just how true the long life-small town part of that formulation is, check out this blast from the past about scandal-plagued lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- a July 30, 1985 Washington Post story -- and pay attention to that byline.

Staff Shakeup Hits Conservative Group; 7 Fired at Lehrman's Citizens for America

By Sidney Blumenthal, Washington Post Staff Writer

The national leadership staff of Citizens for America, a conservative group headed by drugstore magnate Lewis Lehrman, was fired or prompted to resign last week amid charges of mismanaged funds.

Lehrman sped from political obscurity to national prominence, particularly among conservatives, with his surprisingly effective 1982 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Mario M. Cuomo in New York, which Lehrman lost by a margin of 2 percentage points. Since then Lehrman has used Citizens for America (CFA) largely as a personal vehicle to keep his name and trademark red suspenders in the political spotlight.

According to Lehrman's friends, he still has political ambitions and is considering challenging Cuomo next year if the governor seeks reelection and a national campaign in 1988. One of those fired last week from CFA said the organization was "gutted." But Lehrman said in a telephone interview that he remains "very optimistic" about the organization's future.

Last week seven members of the CFA national staff were fired or quit. Apparently, Lehrman concluded that the organization's $3 million budget was being mishandled, although he declined to comment on the reasons for the shakeup. (In the previous six months, more than half the staff of 40 had left the organization, CFA sources said.)

Lehrman has not been closely involved in the group's day-to-day activities. Instead, he has raised money and traveled.

In early June, Lehrman went to Angola, where CFA staged a conference featuring four anticommunist guerrilla movements. There he gave framed copies of the Declaration of Independence to Afghan, Laotian, Nicaraguan and Angolan rebels.

When he returned, he discovered that he was "boxed out of the bookkeeping" of CFA, according to one of his personal aides. He sent in his private lawyer. "It was one big party," Lehrman's aide said. Jack Abramoff, executive director of CFA, and other members of the staff Abramoff had hired "had gone hog wild," Lehrman's aide -- who declined to be identified -- said. The financial "mismanagement" and "lavish spending," the Lehrman aide said, is still being untangled.

On July 15, Abramoff resigned. All those staff members associated with him no longer are associated with CFA. Abramoff could not be reached for comment. Grover Norquist, the former CFA national field director, is in South Africa, according to a CFA spokesman. [Gary] Willett, the former CFA comptroller, said, "Everything from my end is off the record."

Abramoff's long life in this small town is going to be keeping a lot of reporters busy for some time to come, I believe, and fortunately they don't care who that annoys (as long as it's not their editors). Abramoff's career of high-rolling fiscal recklessness and mixing political, business, and non-profit activities dates back 20 years. Along the way, he has entangled his dealings with those of some of this town's most important Republican activists and politicians. Tom DeLay is really just the tip of the iceberg.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SO BOLD, SO ENGAGED. One hopes the LA Times's Janet Hook will get some good access in the future in exchange for today's mash note about how personally engaged the president is with the Social Security fight. Bush "has become a master of actuarial arcana, such as the concept of a 'bend point' — a feature of the complex formula for calculating benefits." Fantastic! The president of the United States bothers to familiarize himself with how Social Security works before proposing to radically revise it. Perhaps the reporters covering the story should do the same so that they could actually inform their readers what this stuff is. They might even learn that bend points aren't really an actuarial concept at all -- they're the Social Security equivalent of tax brackets.

My real complain, however, is this. The clear takeaway message from the article is supposed to be that the president, while deeply concerned about Social Security's solvency, is very much open to any and all ideas about how to fix it. In reality, the president has ruled out any increases in taxation as a way of closing the gap, and has ruled out any plan that does not involve the diversion of payroll taxes into private accounts. While that still does leave a lot of different possibilities, it rules out a great deal. If you require permanent solvency, and require private accounts, and rule out tax increases, then your plan must involve large benefit cuts and/or big increases in public debt.

Being open minded within that framework would be as if the Democrats said they were open to any ideas about health care reform as long as they resulted in universal coverage that was paid for without cutting government spending on any other area. In other words, the White House is being vague about what, exactly, they want to do -- but not flexible, pragmatic, or open minded about any of it.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: UNNATURAL LAW. A Utah judge has found that a 10-year-old federal law prevents the FDA from doing anything about dangerous herbal supplements like ephedra. She was right to do so, writes Chris Mooney, but the law needs to be changed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CAN WE CLARIFY THE ARGUMENT, PLEASE? At the same time that The Washington Post marvels at the shocking unity demonstrated by the Democratic Senate caucus this year, subscription-only Roll Call reports that moderate-liberal fissures are beginning to expand among House Dems. At last week’s caucus meeting, apparently, simmering tensions finally surfaced when liberal members castigated those who voted for the bankruptcy bill as sell-outs and Nancy Pelosi criticized the New Democrat Coalition for having sent a letter to Dennis Hastert urging him to bring the bill to a vote in the first place:

A major rift has developed within the House Democratic Caucus, as moderates and liberals wage a war over influence and questions mount over the leadership’s direction for the minority party.

While allegations of ethical abuse on the other side of the aisle have helped mask Democrats’ divisions, the split burst into public view last week at a whip meeting. Tensions flared at the gathering over recent defections by moderate Democrats on key votes, most particularly the recent bankruptcy bill, in which 73 Members including House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) sided with the GOP. The meeting left Hoyer defending the moderates’ votes and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) siding with progressives and criticizing centrists.

“People are frustrated we had a divided leadership on this bill and they were very outspoken on the opposite sides. Maybe that’s what helped this meeting turn into what it turned into,” said a senior Democratic staffer. “It’s possible this was the final straw for many.”

Numerous House Democratic sources said the meeting simply underscored broader tensions between a growing and emboldened centrist faction and the traditionally dominant liberal wing of the Caucus. It also raised new questions from some about the direction of House Democrats and the party as a whole, and once again underscored the ideological division that exists between Hoyer, a moderate, and Pelosi, a liberal.

…

Said another well-placed aide: “I think there is some jockeying within the Caucus between the progressives and the centrists. A lot of it is a result of the last election, where progressives believe that we should have dug in as more liberal and more progressive to show a stronger distinction.

“Moderates believe [2004 presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry was a left-wing liberal from Massachusetts who didn’t reach out to conservative districts.”

Even before Tuesday’s dust-up, a veteran Democratic House Member summed up the 109th Congress this way: “There is heavy division in the Democratic Party over virtually every policy issue.”

But that Member, a moderate, said the struggle is a welcome one among many, given that the Democratic Caucus has long been led by liberals who know — and often care — little to nothing about the difficulty endangered lawmakers face winning in Republican-leaning districts. The predominantly liberal leadership has done nothing to improve the minority’s status at the ballot box, the Member said.

“There is emerging a centrist group within the Democratic Party that will be playing a part on major policy votes,” the Member vowed. “It’s about common sense. We cannot win from the left.”

Another Democratic lawmaker said the growing push to move to the center in the Caucus stems from “a realization that the American people and the political spectrum are at the center,” and given that the party already dominates liberal districts, those likely to be elected to the Democratic Caucus now and in the future will be moderates.

It’s hard to say how pervasive or growing this rift is, since a large majority of the article concerns disagreement over the bankruptcy bill alone. On that particular score, however, it’s very hard to countenance the moderates’ argument. Can anybody make a convincing case that getting behind this bill was a requirement for red-district Democrats? That when Democrats are hobbled by a public perception of being too left-wing and out of the mainstream, the party’s opposition to legislation like this is what people are thinking about? The “personal responsibility” line the bill’s supporters tossed around worked on welfare reform because Americans hated free-loading welfare queens, and had for decades. Was there any indication that such an argument resonated on this issue?

It’s just silly to justify supporting the bankruptcy bill on public opinion or party image grounds. One can either defend it on the merits -- a tough challenge in itself -- or make a brass tacks argument that the Democrats can’t alienate the credit and banking industries completely if they want their campaigns funded. But judging from the quotes in this piece, that’s not what moderates are arguing.

It’s dispiriting to see internal party debates carried out in this way, since there are issues where moderates’ arguments for adhering to a degree of political realism are valuable. But the kind of corporate whore legislation that Republicans don’t even make a big public spectacle out of supporting surely does not fall under that category.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TEEN ENDANGERMENT ACT IN HOUSE THIS WEEK. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted Teen Endangerment Act: Facing Abortion Alone, which outlines the complexities and problems with the House and Senate versions of the Teen Endangerment Act. The piece includes links to more resources and ways to get involved.

The Teen Endangerment Act requires teens to jump through hurdles when seeking an abortion in another state, which is often the only option in many locales. Teens must comply with their home state's parental involvement laws as well as those of the state they are in.

The House bill also requires doctors to provide 24-hour parental notice for all abortions for out-of-state teens. Even when a teen is accompanied by a parent or has a medical emergency, she must wait 24 hours. And when neither state has a parental involvement law, no judicial bypass procedure is available.

With 87 percent of counties in the United States lacking an abortion provider, this bill goes a long way in limiting abortions in this country. Learn more and take action today on this unconstitutional and dangerous bill.

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

YOU CALL THAT A COMPROMISE? David Broder's horrendous column advocating total and immediate Democratic surrender has already received a bit of the criticism it deserves. If he were proposing that Republicans reinstate some of the procedural tools that they used to prevent an up-or-down vote on Bill Clinton's nominees (and then scuttled upon taking power in the 2002 midterms), or that some of the 65 nominees stonewalled in the 1990s be confirmed in exchange, then he might be onto what we call a compromise. Instead, he thinks Democrats should give Republicans everything they want in return for a promise that Republicans will do a couple of the things they're constitutionally and historically expected to do. A promise from George W. Bush that he'll refrain from recess appointments he no longer would need and may well be unconstitutional anyway, and a promise from Arlen Specter to un-break the 1985 agreement preventing the chairman from lumping multiple controversial nominees in one expedited hearing? Please. And doesn't the fact that Republicans may have seen the light on John Bolton, but only after intense Democratic opposition, indicate that Democrats should press harder on the otherwise reflexively aye-saying majority?

Why this particular subject ties Broder in such knots I don't know. Last week, he stated that the idea that this is all prep work for a Supreme Court clash was too cynical for him, before coming to the far more cynical conclusion that it was all done "merely to satisfy the imperatives of rival interest groups." And this week, he advocates that Dems take that cynical route and abandon the appeals courts in hopes of having more leverage with an upcoming Supreme Court nomination. How rolling over here would strengthen the Democrats' hand there -- rather than just postpone the deployment of the nuclear option -- is left unsaid.

Believe it or not, though, this doesn't quite win the prize for most laughable "advice to Democrats" op-ed of the weekend. That has to be Bob Novak's suggestion that Hillary Clinton skip the Iowa primaries in 2008. But it's always sad to see Broder drop to Novak's level.

--Jeffrey Dubner

INSIDE THE BUBBLE. As a new conventional wisdom begins to dawn about the Democrats' growing success as an opposition party, and an increasing number of people are raising questions about the political skills of the post-election Bush administration, it's worth pondering some possible explanations for the (potentially temporary) shift in the political winds.

Is it possible that Bush has become so isolated inside his bubble of thoroughly pre-screened, heavily sympathetic town-halls -- the only environment in which he has interacted with real Americans for more than a year now -- that he has genuinely lost touch with American opinion?

This passage from yesterday's Jonathan Weisman piece on Social Security provides a tantalizing clue:

After a White House meeting with lawmakers Wednesday, the president took Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) aside to tell him how well his "60 stops in 60 days" tour is going, Rangel recalled. Then Bush warned that voters would punish members of Congress in 2006 if they failed to act on Social Security's long-term problems.

That is not how progress has been portrayed, Rangel said he responded. "I told him if he is right, the press has not been very kind to him."

The idea that Charlie Rangel -- Rangel! -- might be punished by voters in '06 for opposing Bush on Social Security is, of course, beyond ludicrous. More importantly, if Bush really thinks his "60 stops in 60 days" tour is going well, it is a worrying sign of a president so isolated by his zealous advance staffers and hyper-partisan aides from the country he's governing that he is actually being led astray. Of course, it's always possible Bush could have had some politically strategic reason for feeding Rangel this particular positive line, as opposed to making some other boosterish remark. But I'm hard pressed to think of one.

Indeed, Bush's actions on Social Security recently -- including his lack of an "exit strategy" -- have seemed increasingly inexplicable to those accustomed to viewing the White House as a ruthless and uncannily successful political machine. But once you hypothesize that he's a leader isolated from reality inside a wholly positive and supportive bubble -- a situation all politicians must guard against, but presidents more than others -- and that, in this case, it's a bubble that also distrusts and discounts objective press reports, his actions begin to make a lot more sense.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SYRIA FINALE. By tomorrow, the last of the Syrian army will have departed Lebanon. Robert Tuttle looks at what may follow this historic withdrawal.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NO EXIT. Fred Barnes has an article in The Weekly Standard arguing that the push for Social Security privatization is likely to fail in Congress and is hurting the GOP politically. I agree. What's needed, Barnes says, is an exit strategy. That also seems plausible. But the piece gets mighty thin when it comes to describing the strategy:

But Bush can deny them that issue with the right exit strategy. He could say he tried his best to alert Americans to the coming crisis in Social Security, and that Democrats not only opposed him in the most partisan and irresponsible fashion possible but failed to present a plan of their own for modernizing the system. Sadly, he could add, the matter must now be left to future presidents and Congresses.

One grows hoarse repeating this, but Bush has not, in fact, presented a plan of his own for modernizing the system either. Beyond that, it's hard to see much of a strategy here. It's what's usually known as "surrender." It also seems to me that abandoning in this manner the various congressional Republicans who have put their necks on the line in support of some kind of privatization and who need to face re-election in 2006 is going to wind up hurting his credibility in getting the Republican caucus behind the rest of his legislative agenda. Nobody likes to be shoved out onto the battlefield and then promptly abandoned by his general as soon as the going gets tough. On top of that, phrasing this as an issue that "must now be left to future presidents and Congresses" utterly fails to take Social Security off the table as an issue in '06 and '08. Rather, it will serve to bolster Democratic arguments that even though privatization may be dead for now, a continuation of Republican political power will lead it to revive, zombie-like, at the next possible opportunity.

--Matthew Yglesias

SMART TELEVISION. As a coda to the discussion of liberalism and media regulation, let me offer a link to Stephen Johnson's argument in The New York Times Magazine that television is making people smarter because shows have grown more complicated and intellectually demanding over time. I'd certainly like to believe him, but while the book from which the article is excerpted may make this case convincingly, the magazine-length version really doesn't. He convincingly demonstrates that TV shows have become more demanding, but there's no particular reason to think this is having a causal impact on audience intelligence.

There's a well-known phenomenon in intelligence studies known as the Flynn Effect that indicates that the population grows smarter with each successive generation. Nobody knows exactly why that is, but given that it clearly seems to be true, it would make perfect sense for popular culture products to become more complicated as a means of keeping pace with the general population's growing intelligence. It could be that increasing cultural complexity (not just on TV shows, but in things like video games as well where today's XBox offerings are clearly more challenging than the 8-bit offerings I grew up on) is one of the causes of the Flynn Effect, but it could just as simply be a consequence of a general trend.

--Matthew Yglesias

LOSING BY WINNING? A rather obvious fact was pointed out to me over the weekend about undersecretary of state for arms control and international security John Bolton. Obvious, and yet also underconsidered. If he fails to be approved by the Senate to be the ambassador to the United Nations, as now appears possible, he will still hold a critical position at the State Department from which to continue doing American foreign policy real damage. Indeed, getting him out of the State Department, so that someone less temperamental and more in tune with new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could fill the post, seems to have been one major goal of appointing him to the UN slot in the first place. Should that fail, the question is: will State be stuck with him? Or will he be so humiliated he'll have to step down?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WEEKEND UPDATE. Too enthralled by "Justice Sunday" to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists:

• Frank Rich. Plug the Prospect and you'll be spared.
• John Tierney. Even though I stayed a right-winger despite all this evidence that it was unhealthy to be overweight, new evidence casting doubt on that conclusion proves that liberals should switch sides.
• David Brooks. Tierney stole my column idea -- bring back Bill Safire!
• Nicholas Kristof. What good will real-world progress do us if it isn't reflected in the movies?
• David Broder. Democrats should compromise by agreeing to surrender.
• George Will. Young people don't watch network news because the network news is too liberal (please don't notice that young people are more liberal than their elders).
• Jim Hoagland. Blame Dick Armitage.

The Editorial You Actually Need To Read:

• The Journal-News on what's really in the defense supplemental.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PLAME GAME REDUX. The latest from Murray Waas' exploration of the stalled Plame investigation: a senior administration official has confessed that he leaked Plame's name. But prosecutors will need much more than that to bring any charges. Over on his blog, Whatever Already, Waas also reveals the contents of Alberto Gonzales' rejection of Democratic attempts to find out what's going on.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CHUCK BLAHOUS: MASTER OF ADDITION. The Wall Street Journal provides the second article I've read attesting to the massive, unprecedented genius of chemist-turned-privateer Chuck Blahous. Once again, I'm baffled as to what the prevailing intellectual standards are inside the White House if this guy can count as a policy whiz. Karl Rove calls him "our ongoing rabbi." The Journal praises his "mastery of arcane details." But what does it all amount to?

By the time Mr. Bush returned to Social Security last year, Mr. Blahous's side had won a crucial internal battle. Years ago, past advisers say, Mr. Bush leaned toward the "free lunch" view -- that personal accounts were the answer to Social Security's looming woes, with hard choices on benefits and taxes unnecessary. Mr. Blahous helped persuade the president that there is no free lunch, because even with private accounts, future benefit cuts and perhaps tax increases are needed. . . .

Mr. Blahous also has been influential on potential changes to benefits and payroll taxes. Two Democrats on Mr. Bush's Social Security commission -- the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Pozen, then-vice chairman of mutual-fund company Fidelity Investments -- had backed increasing the cap on wages subject to payroll taxes. Mr. Blahous had to tell them the president wouldn't agree. . . .

Several months ago, other administration officials were espousing an across-the-board change to the formula for workers' initial retirement benefits, which would greatly reduce future retirees' income. Mr. Pozen by 2004 had crafted a variant of the idea, called "progressive indexing," that would keep the current formula for the bottom third of workers, apply the less generous change for those at the top, and blend the two for retirees in the middle. "This is really an interesting approach," Mr. Blahous told Mr. Pozen in a phone call late last year.

Last month, Mr. Pozen visited the White House to brief Mr. Blahous's boss, National Economic Council chief Allan Hubbard. At one point, Mr. Blahous took over. With pen and paper, he drew one set of lines to show how, under current law, Social Security outlays eventually would climb above revenue. He drew another to show that, under Mr. Pozen's plan, the spending line would slip below the revenue line in 2079.

That's it. The master of arcane details has such accomplishments under his belt as convincing the rest of the White House that you can't resolve a program's fiscal imbalance without either increasing its revenue or decreasing its expenditures. Awesome. His God-like command of Social Security minutia allowed him to point out to Democrats that Republicans don't like tax increases. And his keen analytic mind allowed him to grasp that if benefits are cut over time and taxes aren't, that will, over time, lead revenues to exceed expenses. And even better, he can illustrate this fact by drawing lines with a pen! I really, really don't want to know how the other, less policy-savvy members of this administration operate.

--Matthew Yglesias

OUT OF THE WOODWORK. That Colin Powell isn't a big John Bolton fan was pretty widely known, but his decision to actively express doubts about the appointment to Republican senators has to count as significant. Perhaps more importantly, Ambassador Thomas Hubbard says Bolton "might have misled the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a provocative and controversial 2003 speech on North Korea." This isn't the only instance of the veracity of Bolton's sworn testimony coming under question. Lying to Congress under oath has traditionally been considered a not-okay thing to do, though Donald Rumsfeld's gotten away with it (see, e.g., "We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and is pursuing nuclear weapons ... knowing what we know about Iraq's history, no conclusion is possible except that they have and are accelerating their WMD programs"), so who knows if the Senate Republicans will find it in their hearts to get agitated about it this time.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NOTHING'S DOING. Could the Democrats be breaking the cardinal rule of politics and winning by doing nothing? It's so crazy that it just might work, writes Terence Samuel.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? I never expected to say (or type) these words, but here goes: I agree 100 percent with Ted Olson. His op-ed in The Wall Street Journal is spot-on regarding Tom DeLay, court-stripping, judicial impeachment, and even the nuclear option. Especially compared to, say, Charles Krauthammer's obnoxious endorsement of DeLay's and John Cornyn's loose talk, it's refreshingly level-headed.

It makes me wonder, though -- why do we never hear Olson's name floated as a possible Supreme Court nominee? He can match any prospective nominee on three of the most important attributes to this administration: He's one of the most conservative and partisan lawyers in the country; he's got a touching personal story (his wife, Barbara Olson, died on Flight 77 on September 11); and he was a top official in George W. Bush's first term, a trait Bush seems to value highly. The obvious strikes against him are his age (64, older than any of the frontrunners); his long, ugly paper trail; and the difficulty he had getting confirmed as solicitor general in the first place. For all I know there's a backstory to his departure from the administration that hasn't been reported, too. Still, another one of these feints toward reasonableness and it'll be hard not to speculate.

--Jeffrey Dubner

O CANADA. Charles Krauthammer channels David Brooks this morning, writing half of a reasonable column and then shifting into partisan ideologue mode for part two:

Have that independence and supremacy been abused? Grossly. What other advanced democracy would radically legalize abortion by judicial decree rather than by democratic will expressed through legislatures or referendums? What sane democracy allows four unelected robed eminences in Massachusetts to revolutionize the very definition of marriage, the most ancient institution in society?

Obviously, no nation other than the United States would allow robed eminences in Massachusetts to make decisions about the legality of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in marriage, but provincial Supreme Courts in such far-off lands as Canada have likewise been ruling on such matters. And if you want to know what other advanced democracy would have judicial decrees legalizing abortion you, again, don't need to look further than Canada. All of which would merely demonstrate ignorance on Krauthammer's part were he not, well, Canadian.

--Matthew Yglesias

PERPETUAL POSTPONEMENT. As of earlier this week, most people involved in the nuclear option fight -- activists on both sides, Hill staffers -- seemed fairly sure that Bill Frist would finally, at long last, pull the trigger next week, just before the May recess. There was some feeling that if the Republicans were going to go through with the nuclear option at all, they would do it then.

Here’s today’s Washington Post:

Some senators thought the rule-change showdown might occur next week, but the Senate will take up the highway bill instead. The following week, the Senate is in recess.

And here’s The New York Times:

There were signs, though, that Dr. Frist was planning to postpone the confrontation for at least another two weeks, when the Senate returns from a spring recess.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said Dr. Frist had told him he would like to take up a transportation measure next week, an indication that he did not expect a filibuster fight before the Congressional recess.

Meanwhile, under the headline, “GOP Leaders Still Looking for Votes in Preparation for Showdown on Judges,” subscription-only Congressional Quarterly reports:

As the Senate moves toward a high-stakes showdown, Republican leaders still are not claiming to have the votes for a parliamentary move that would prevent Democrats from filibustering President Bush’s most conservative judicial nominees.

Senate GOP leaders have begun a public relations campaign to make their case for outlawing filibusters of judicial nominees. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, vice chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said Thursday that GOP leaders are discussing the so-called nuclear option with undecided senators in an attempt to ease some concerns and close party ranks.

Needless to say, such an outreach effort would probably be unnecessary if they already had the votes to go through with the change.

Boy, it’s almost as if most Republicans’ hearts just aren’t in this fight, and Frist is too weak a leader -- and too transparently guided by his own personal political agenda -- to get enough of his colleagues on board.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HACK WATCH. Poor misunderstood Alan Greenspan now wants the world to know "that his support for tax cuts in early 2001 unintentionally led to policies that helped swing the federal budget from surplus to deficits." In other words, his support for tax cuts unintentionally led to ... tax cuts. He's now trying to cover himself by reminding the world that he notionally advocating putting a "trigger mechanism" into the tax bill so that the cuts would be halted in case deficits arose. But of course when the bill emerged without such a mechanism, he didn't speak up against it. Nor does any of this explain his support for the 2003 tax cuts when the budget was already in deficit. Nor did he himself act as a virtual trigger and suggest that the cutting should be halted once the deficits emerged. Harry Reid had this one very, very right.

--Matthew Yglesias

PLAYING THEIR CARDS. If I'm wrong and the Senate Republicans do proceed with the nuclear option next week, we'll get to watch as this fight turns into an amazing one-stop shop for shameless displays of modern conservatism's New Left-style identity politics. We'll watch Bill Frist and leading lights of the Christian right push the anti-Christian bigotry line to the hilt on Sunday, and then enjoy a classic demonstration of the conservo-race card next week, if Republicans decide to pull the nuclear trigger over appellate court nominee -- and African American woman -- Janice Rogers Brown. These judicial fights have served as the stage for some of the most shameless acts of conservo-race carding and religious identity politics in the past -- recall the asinine comments made by Republican senators about the Miguel Estrada nomination or the loose accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry lobbed at opponents of Bill Pryor -- and it looks like the nuclear option fight could raise the artform to new heights of virtuosity.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MARLA'S LAW. In the wake of Marla Ruzicka's death in Baghdad last week, one thing can make sure her legacy lives on. Michael Shellenberger explains how we can make Marla's dream job a reality.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PAUVRE FRANCE. I generally have an incredible distaste for French bashing. But French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier’s comments on the utility of NATO in Darfur are nothing short of disgusting. According to Reuters, at a meeting in Lithuania today, Barnier rebuffed Condoleezza Rice's suggestion that NATO ready itself for the possibility that the African Union will ask NATO for logistical support for their paltry monitoring mission. The rejection itself is bad, but he did so in the worst way possible by offering up that tired old refrain, “We can’t be the world’s gendarmes.”

Note to Barnier: providing minimal logistical support to aid the African Union does not a global policeman make.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

SLICK RICK. It's old news that Rick Santorum raised $250,000 on the same Florida trip as his much ballyhooed personal visit to the dying Terri Schiavo’s hospice in late March, even though he canceled a planned Social Security event in the state “out of respect” for Schiavo’s family. But today the Philadelphia Daily News helpfully reminds us why it is that Outback Steakhouse reps sponsored one March 30 fundraising luncheon for Santorum in Tampa in the first place.

As the piece reports, Outback’s PAC gave a check to Santorum’s reelection campaign back in January. Then in March, Santorum submitted his infamous minimum-wage hike amendment to the bankruptcy bill in the Senate. As you’ll recall, one provision of the amendment would have overturned any state or local minimum-wage ordinances that don’t apply a 100-percent tips-as-wage standard -- a major agenda item of the restaurant industry. A few weeks later, Outback returned Santorum’s favor by throwing him the luncheon down in Tampa.

The Schiavo story really is the gift that keeps on giving.

--Sam Rosenfeld

AFTER JEFFORDS. David Sirota is covering the nascent Bernie Sanders Senate candidacy in Vermont pretty comprehensively (keep scrolling), and it seems fairly clear that Democrats will be coalescing around the lovable, rumpled socialist and will refrain from fielding a challenger. Sounds great. Sanders’ statewide popularity is quite impressive, and he’s apparently no flake when it comes to nitty-gritty constituency-tending, according to Middlebury political scientist Eric Davis:

“Bernie has a very good constituent-service operation in the state,” Davis said. “Tracking down the lost Social Security checks, [working] hard on veterans issues. He’s got a lot of grants for the state, particularly these little urban-development projects. … When a town in Vermont can get $10,000 from [the Housing and Urban Development Department] to make the town hall accessible to disabled people — that’s the sort of thing he’s good at.”

Looks like it’ll end up being a match-up between Sanders and popular Vermont governor Jim Douglas. Sanders has a great shot.

(Incidentally, on the subject of James Jeffords’s legacy, Brad Plumer makes a good point here about the importance of the senator having switched parties after rather than prior to the vote on Bush’s first big tax cut. It should be said, however, that had Senate control switched beforehand and Max Baucus taken over as Finance committee chairman, at least some kind of egregious tax bill might still have ended up passing. Recall that Baucus voted for Bush’s tax cut, along with 11 other Dems who permanently stained their legacies that day.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. Richard Stevenson writes in The New York Times that the recent downturn in the stock market is creating political problems for Social Security privatization. And no doubt it is. It's no coincidence that support for privatization tended to climb during the stock market boom of the late 1990s and that the White House didn't feel comfortable pushing this long-held goal until the beginning of their second term when memories of the crash had largely faded.

What's more interesting, I think, is that the sort of mentality on this subject that you see in the polls indicates a policy problem for Social Security. Whether the stock market is up or down on any given day has nothing to do with the merits of privatization. But when the market is up, people think to themselves "I wish I owned some stocks" and are inclined to support it. But market peaks are, in reality, the worst possible time to buy stocks. After a crash is when you want to buy. But as the privatization polling shows, large segments of the population don't see it that way.

What this psychological reality means is that even with investment options restricted to just a handful of relatively safe funds, many people are still likely to do a very bad job managing their money by "churning" from one fund to another: Selling low and buying high, in other words, in an endless effort to own whatever's up in any given month even though this is the reverse of a sound investment strategy. Democrats -- quite wisely -- don't spend much time on these "investor incapacity" arguments, even though there's a lot of evidence to suggest that they're right. This stuff because especially problematic when you start examining the sort of free-lunch plans that are gaining steam in the House, since the structure of those plans actually encourages people to make foolish investments.

--Matthew Yglesias

DAVID BROOKS GETS IT. I won’t attempt to engage the main argument of David Brooks’s much-maligned column today, but I can’t fail to point out that he makes a pithy and perfect liberal case for abolishing the filibuster towards the end:

In response, Republicans now threaten to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster on judicial nominees. That they have a right to do this is certain. That doing this would destroy the culture of the Senate and damage the cause of limited government is also certain.

The Senate operates by precedent, trust and unanimous consent. Changing the rules by raw majority power would rip the fabric of Senate life. Once the filibuster was barred from judicial nomination fights, it would be barred entirely. Every time the majority felt passionately about an issue, it would rewrite the rules to make its legislation easier to pass. Before long, the Senate would be just like the House. The culture of deliberation would be voided. Minority rights would be unprotected.

Those who believe in smaller government would suffer most. Minority rights have been used frequently to stop expansions of federal power, but if those minority rights were weakened, the federal role would grow and grow -- especially when Democrats regained the majority.

Just right!

--Sam Rosenfeld

WANKERY. The British Labour party is trying to raise a ruckus over a Liberal Democrat fundraiser to be held in Washington, D.C., this evening. British election laws allow non-European Union nationals to donate up to £200 to political parties, and the invitation for tonight’s fundraiser states that non-Britons can donate up to $400, which as of this morning equates to £208.36.

The scandal!

For their part, the Lib Dem organizers contend that this 8 pound 36 pence discrepancy will cover the cost of the dinner and drinks. Speaking to the Guardian, a spokesman for Labour party sees something more sinister at hand:

"It is disgraceful that the Liberal Democrats are actively seeking money from foreigners to fund their election campaign…This dinner is yet another sign of their hypocrisy. It should be cancelled and all the money raised in this way paid back.”

Please. It’s no secret that Labour will win this election. What’s disgraceful here is that Labour has lost so much credibility over the Iraq War that their victory will be a miserable event for most of the UK, and especially so for those who only reluctantly bring themselves to vote Labour.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

MANAGERS GONE WILD. Mark Kleiman indulges in a little schadenfreude at GM's expense, noting that the company probably wouldn't be sinking like a stone beneath staggering health care costs if it'd taken up Bill Clinton's offer of a national health care reform plan would have relieved them of the burden. Quite so. But I'm not so sure about this:

But GM and the other big-business beneficiaries turned the deal down flat. Partly this reflected the threats of payback from the Republicans on the Hill against any firm that did business with the Clintons. Partly it reflected the self-interest of the corporate Human Resources bureaucrats, whose importance within their firms would have shrunk if health care was no longer a corporate problem. But in large part it reflected an almost Marxian expression of class solidarity over individual interests. GM's managers decided that denying a triumph to a Democratic President was more important than keeping their own firm from going broke.

It seems to me that the really shocking thing about this affair is that GM's managers probably didn't side against their own interests when they decided to sink the Clinton health care plan and, with it, their own company. As we've increasingly seen over the past several years, top executives are remarkably insulated against poor corporate performance. If their company's stock shoots up, they make huge sums of money in stock options and other incentive-based forms of compensation. But if their company does badly, they don't lose money the way shareholders do; they just make somewhat less money than they otherwise would have. GM going bankrupt will likely be no real skin off their backs.

Meanwhile, the executives have been paying much less in taxes than they would have had the Democratic Party been seeing more political success over the past 10 years. They used GM's resources in a way that was almost surely contrary to the interests of General Motors, but probably made the right call from an individual perspective. And as long as corporate America is governed in such a way as to create incentives for this sort of irresponsible political behavior on the part of corporate managers, it will be very hard to cope with serious national problems.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOVERNMENT GOOD: THE POSITIVE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted our companion piece to The American Prospect's May special report on the positive role of government. Moving Ideas provides readers with links to numerous related resources in addition to links to the articles themselves.

Tax & Spend: The Unapologetic Case for Big Government discusses the positive societal goals that government programs uniquely address. The report also dispels some of the stereotypes associated with big government programs, such as the mistaken belief that government programs are less efficient and create waste.

"The claim that social programs are 'inefficient' is often just a politically correct way of saying that they don't follow the usual market logic of giving the most to those with the greatest means," Jacob Hacker asserts.

In his piece, Geoffrey Nunberg explains that the government has a role to play in the struggle between the people and the powerful, that government protects the people from unfettered economic forces. About the Social Security debate he says, "What it comes down to is whether voters trust the government or Wall Street fund managers with their money."

Learn more about how government can be the best choice for the job.

--Diane Greenhalgh

STILL MORE BLINKING. Amid mounting speculation that next week is detonation time for the nuclear option, The Hill's Alex Bolton reports that Rick Santorum and some GOP aides are now cautioning the leadership to put on the brakes for the time being. They're citing internal polling that doesn't bode well for the Republican position:

Details of the polling numbers remain under wraps, but Santorum and other Senate sources concede that, while a majority of Americans oppose the filibuster, the figures show that most also accept the Democratic message that Republicans are trying to destroy the tradition of debate in the Senate.

The Republicans are keeping the “nuclear” poll numbers secret, whereas they have often in the past been keen to release internal survey results that favor the party. David Winston, head of the Winston Group, which conducts Senate GOP polls, did return phone calls seeking comment.

Confirming public disquiet over the “nuclear” or “constitutional” option, Santorum said, “Our polling shows that.” ...

...

Many Republicans and conservative activists had thought the Senate GOP leadership would trigger the tactic next week to end the judicial filibuster. The nominees considered most appropriate for such a historic procedural maneuver, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, are expected to be discharged from the Judiciary Committee later this week.

Conservative activists said they received word last week to ramp up their communication efforts on the constitutional option with the goal of having their activity peak next week, before the May recess. Also last week, a New York Times report citing senior Senate lawmakers bolstered the expectation that the showdown would happen next week.

Santorum said he has left the timing to Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

“I’ve been suggesting one way or the other we need to make a decision. I haven’t said [a] longer or shorter” timeframe should be followed, he said.

But GOP aides said Santorum has made known to the leadership reasons for why Republicans should not move forward on the nuclear or constitutional option.

“He was concerned that too many things are competing in the same area and you couldn’t get a clean shot at it,” a GOP aide said. The aide cited the “fallout” from congressional Republicans’ intervening in a Florida court’s decision to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube and the subsequent controversy caused by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s (R-Texas) statement that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.”

Count me as one who's skeptical that poll numbers are what's fundamentally causing the GOP to backpedal. There certainly have been public polls showing significant majorities opposed to the nuclear option, but Republican whining about how Democrats and liberal activists have been dominating the p.r. fight and controlling the debate over this issue has always rang a bit hollow. Is Phil A. Buster really triggering a swelling of grassroots public concern over this issue?

I suspect something else is going on here: A large number of Republican senators -- far larger than the number who've publicly expressed ambivalence -- simply don't want to pick this fight. They (reasonably, from their perspective) don't think ramming through a tiny handful of judicial nominees is worth the sacrifice of being able to pass more GOP-friendly legislation in the coming months. The real enthusiasm for judicial battles is concentrated in a number of hardcore Senate fire-breathers and a huge array of conservative interest groups, and the continued push for the nuclear option has been fueled more by Bill Frist's presidential ambitions (that is, his need to earn the credibility of a religious conservative movement that has long cast a very skeptical eye on him) than it has by any real desire on the part of most of his caucus. I continue to believe, even at this late date, that going nuclear began as a bluff -- a negotiating tactic in fights with Democrats that also served as a sop to the religious right. But Frist is such an inept, stumblebum strategist, and the spiral of wingnuttery that the Schiavo affair catalyzed took on such a life of its own, that the majority leader ended up bluffing himself into a corner. And now he's in a real pickle.

Of course, I may be completely wrong on this. But do consider: just how many times in the past several months have we heard that action on the nuclear option was imminent? If Frist doesn't deliver next week -- as Tony Perkins and co. ramp up their Capitol Hill offensive following their "Justice Sunday" whinefest -- the fate of the nuclear option will be pretty clear. And presidential candidate Frist will be in a bind at least partly of his own making.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WATCH THIS. So parents want to protect their kids from television? That's fine, writes Greg Anrig -- but it starts with the parents themselves. Any politician who wants to score points on culture ought to recognize that.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHAT CONSERVATIVES WANT LIBERALS TO WANT. There's an amusing article by Power Line's John Hinderaker about the American Constitution Society's "Constitution in 2020" conference, which I wrote about last week. It's mostly a set of notes by someone who apparently couldn't be bothered to attend more than three panels, but that's alright. What's truly revisionist is this graf:

The left makes no secret of its intentions where the Constitution is concerned. It wants to change it, in ways that have nothing to do with what the document actually says. It wants the Constitution to enshrine its own policy preferences--thus freeing it from the tiresome necessity of winning elections. And how will the Constitution be changed? Through a constitutional convention, or a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures? Of course not. The whole problem, from the liberal perspective, is that they can't get democratically elected bodies to enact their agenda. As one of the Yale conference participants said: "We don't have much choice other than to believe deeply in the courts--where else do we turn?" The new, improved Constitution will come about through judicial re-interpretation. It only awaits, perhaps, the election of the next Democratic president.

This is typical Power Line dishonesty. The reason that quote was even uttered was that the majority of panelists and attendees opined that liberals can't rely on the courts -- and that, even if they could, they probably shouldn't. Cass Sunstein, whose dialogue with Bruce Ackerman occupies most of the Weekly Standard article, forcefully disavowed decisions like Roe and Goodridge (although it should be noted that he was further out on this than most attendees) and said that hoping for "100 Browns ... is not feasible, and it would not be preferable if it were feasible." The clearest consensus coming out of the conference was that courts are an essential part of the American legal and political structure but not a fora for change unless public opinion is with them. Willy Forbath, also speaking at a panel Hinderaker's correspondent attended, ordered the best path to progress as "movement, legislative, and then judicial," and everybody I asked agreed. See this article by Bert Neuborne for one of the best explications of this view.

On the other hand, I have on my desk the latest issue of the libertarian journal Critical Review, which features an article titled "Getting Over the Constitution" by National Review trustee Austin Bramwell. Bramwell seems to think that "trumpeting the virtues of the original Constitution will accomplish very little" and that "if a cadre of judges properly educated about what they can do and why they should do it rose to power, much beneficient constitutional reform could result" -- but that's couldn't possibly be as activist as trying to figure out what the Ninth Amendment requires, could it?

--Jeffrey Dubner

PLAN FOR THE WORST. Liberal Washington is once again abuzz with talk that the Bush political machine may be rolling off the rails. I'm a bit skeptical about this, and though he's a believer, Mark Schmitt expresses my concerns well:

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

That third sentence is, I think, key. It really does kind of look like the president's political coalition and ability to control events is falling apart. But it's looked that way in the past several times before and he's been able to pull things back together. So I think it's dangerous for liberals to put too much stock in the idea that it's going to happen this time. It's not so much that I'm sure the Republicans will get their act back together as I'm sure they might. Hope, as they say, is not a plan, and I think it's only wise for liberals to assume that we'll have to beat our political adversaries when they're at the top of their game.

--Matthew Yglesias

NUCLEAR CONSTITUTIONAL FAIRNESS OPTION. The Weekly Standard hands down a new party line on what you're supposed to call violating the rules of the Senate in order to eliminate the possibility of filibustering judicial nominees: "let's call this 'nuclear option' by its proper name: the fairness option." Everyone plays these sorts of little message games, but as with Social Security privatization personalization modernatization, the trouble here is that conservatives want to forbid the use of words that they themselves devised to describe their agenda. It's a little sad.

--Matthew Yglesias

NUCLEAR FENCE-SITTERS. Jeff’s count from last week of the remaining swing Republicans on the nuclear option should be amended slightly in light of this New York Times piece and this analysis from The Carpetbagger. The sure no votes are: Lincoln Chafee, John McCain, and (this is perhaps not utterly 100 percent sure but it’s damned close) Olympia Snowe. The one fence-sitter who’s now pretty much off the fence in favor of pulling the trigger is Dick Lugar. That leaves five unknowns:

• Susan Collins
• Chuck Hagel
• Lisa Murkowski
• Arlen Specter
• John Warner

The Carpetbagger points out that both Collins and Warner appear to be leaning against the option. If they voted no, Democrats would need one more vote to prevent it from happening: As Jeff says, for Murkowski to buck the leadership and White House so soon after having used their help in November would be quite odd. Similarly, one would assume this is a decision that Specter feels obligated to accede to after the gauntlet he ran during his ascension to the Judiciary chairmanship several months back. Does that leave Hagel as the possible key vote? One wild card to consider is Mike DeWine, who hasn’t been on anyone’s swing vote shortlist but has refused to disclose his decision publicly.

Bill Frist’s presidential whims, combined with his reliably clumsy negotiating approach, are putting an awful lot of Republicans in an awfully unwelcome position.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT CONSERVATIVE POPULISM? If you ask me, the real news here isn't that Tom DeLay failed to reimburse Jack Abramoff for his use of an MCI Center skybox at a fundraiser (apparently, this was legal at the time), the real news is that DeLay wasn't going to a Wizards game, wasn't going to a Caps game, and wasn't even going to a Mystics game. No. DeLay, "the first legislative power broker to be an authentic Red State conservative," was going to a Three Tenors concert! What will the NASCAR dads say?

Incidentally, Rich Lowry quite rightly pointed out yesterday that the liberal proclivity for mocking DeLay for being a former exterminator reflects an unseemly snobbery. Exterminators are doing the Lord's work. Who wants to be overrun by bugs and rodents? Keep the focus on the opera fandom.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE BLINKING. Doc Hastings, chairman of the still-deadlocked House ethics committee, had promised that an "important announcement" was coming this afternoon, and here it is: With the committee stalled over opposition to the rules changes Republicans rammed through in January, the Republican panelists have announced their plan to go ahead and launch an investigation into Tom DeLay's conduct. According to Hastings, four out of the five Republican committee members (sans DeLay lackey Lamar Smith) agree on this, and are "prepared to vote at the earliest opportunity to empanel an investigations subcommittee to review various allegations concerning travel and other actions." "Earliest opportunity" presumably means when Democrats back down from their opposition to the rules change and allow the committee to organize officially. Who wants to bet the Republican members haven't even consulted their Democratic counterparts about this decision?

On top of the continuing negotiations over the rules, the other operative question here, of course, is what allegations, exactly, are going to be investigated. It won't be a shock to see the Republicans attempt to cherry-pick accusations they can rebut or soft-pedal while ignoring others.

UPDATE: See Jesse Lee for Steny Hoyer's rather, um, straightforward reply to Hastings.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CORRUPTION AND ITS LIMITS. Christopher Hayes, writing in what he assures me is, despite appearances, an article in The Nation, discusses the Democratic takeover of Illinois politics and adds it to the Republican triumph in 1994 as examples of how good government and reform can be winning political issues. A second data point is certainly welcome, given how much effort liberals are putting into the Tom DeLay ethics issues. The piece is also, however, a reminder of the limits of the sort of strategies liberals are implementing nowadays. Since state government deals mostly with small-bore issues and voters (and reporters) don't pay much attention to state government, you can accomplish almost everything that can realistically be accomplished at the state level simply by winning elections.

The federal government, which deals with huge issues and where debates on these issues attract massive scrutiny, doesn't really look like this. Conservatives won Congress in '94 and the White House in 2000, but that hasn't let them curb Medicare spending, doesn't seem to be letting them privatize Social Security, and certainly hasn't let them cut government spending. Similarly, Democrats have had varying degrees of political power since the debacle of 1968 but have been totally frustrated in their quest to overhaul the health care system or curb rising inequality even during high-water marks like 1977-80 and 1993-94. Getting this sort of big-picture stuff done requires you to really take your ideas to the people and win them over. Sneaking into office because voters are disgusted at the opposition's behavior (1976, 1994) or thanks to poor macroeconomic performance (1992) or third-party candidates (2000, and -- sort of -- 1992) doesn't get the job done.

Near as I can tell, all the major political-strategy fads on the left in recent years, from base-mobilization to reform insurgency to framing to hopes of Republican overreach or a "conservative crack-up," are self-limiting in this way. You don't get universal health care, a real policy on day care and family leave, a renewed commitment to fighting poverty, or whatever else is on the wish list this way. Now don't get me wrong -- some relatively small-bore stuff like the Employee Free Choice Act, a higher minimum wage, and a return to actual enforcement of environmental rules could be achieved if some combination of these tactics pays off, and that stuff matters. But liberals would also be well-advised to keep the limitations of these gambits in proper perspective.

--Matthew Yglesias

“WE CANNOT PAY LIP SERVICE TO THE VALUE OF DISSENT WITHIN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY…” Senator Russ Feingold was one of a handful of Democratic senators to vote to confirm John Bolton as undersecretary of state in 2000. Yesterday, he formalized his opposition to the current nomination and his statement is well worth a read.

First, far beyond simple anecdotes revealing a hot temper or a tendency to abuse those less powerful than himself, this Committee has been presented with credible information indicating that Mr. Bolton sought to retaliate against intelligence analysts when their work did not suit his policy inclinations. We cannot pay lip service to the value of dissent within the intelligence community and then fail to hold officials accountable when they seek to silence dissent through intimidation, or to so tightly control dissent such that it is never heard or shared. This is not an abstract point, it is an issue vital to our national security, as both the 9/11 Commission and the Silberman-Robb Commission have so recently noted. It is also vital to restoring the credibility of the United States in the world. When we point to a threat to global peace and security, the world should be able to believe us. But after the embarrassing failures of U.S. intelligence in Iraq, and after the wildly overheated rhetoric that our policymakers employed to characterize shaky intelligence on the global stage, our credibility has taken a beating. It is the responsibility of everyone in the U.S. government to restore it. We can start by insisting on holding those who would suppress inconvenient analysis accountable for their actions.

Right on.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND. I and others have been wondering what, exactly, the president's been saying as he continues to barnstorm the country in support of Social Security privatization. Well, it's mostly the same old stuff, but a couple of days ago in South Carolina he described the work of a high-school lesson gone horribly awry:

I don't know if you've ever heard of Dutch Fork High School in Irmo. I met a very innovative teacher who assigned her students this assignment: Why don't you write letters to the editor about their impressions of Social Security? Here's what one of her students wrote: "By the time my generation gets to the age to draw Social Security, there will be no money left for us to draw on." This is a young high school student writing that. This isn't a professor in economics. This is a high school student. He said, "I don't know about other people, but I don't like the sound of that." People are beginning to get the message that there is a problem in Social Security.

This has got to be one of the most clever ways to get around the truth that I've ever heard. The President doesn't quite say that at some point in the future there will be no money left to draw on, but he sure as hell makes it sound like there won't be. Needless to say, as loyal readers know, it's not possible for Social Security to go "broke," "bust," "bankrupt," or otherwise "run out of money." It's structured as a pay-as-you-go system, and until the payroll tax is repealed money will keep coming in every year until the end of time. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of the substantive merits of "fixing" Social Security through further pre-funding -- the political perfidy of Alan Greenspan aside, trying to pre-fund a system that doesn't have a pre-funded structure (as the privateers say, it's "just IOUs" and not a pot of gold) invites this sort of misunderstanding, and support for privatization among the young is, in my experience, largely driven by the false belief that my generation won't get any benefits because of this purportedly looming bankruptcy.

All that aside, can't Teacher's Union High Command tell its members to stay on message? What kind of political machine is this?

--Matthew Yglesias

REPUBLICANS BLINK. Roll Call (subscription only) reports on the continued trepidations felt by House leaders about escalating the fight over Tom DeLay into an all-out ethics war. The worry (which I think is clearly correct) is that there’s virtually no way for such a war to end up benefiting the party in power, no matter what kind of damage is exacted on the opposition.

While that strategy may help the party blunt attacks on DeLay in the short term, some GOP strategists on and off Capitol Hill worry that they are playing into Democrats’ hands. According to this theory, if Congress grinds to a halt amid partisan bickering, the party in power will bear the brunt of the blame.

Republicans have done well to avoid such ethics fights over the last several years, argued one strategist close to the GOP leadership, and “I don’t think that’s changed” even in the current environment.

The strategist said that at best, Republicans have nothing to gain from such a battle, and at worst, they could take a hit next November.

Last year, Democrats mounted a sustained effort to pressure the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct into investigating allegations that GOP leaders had threatened then-Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) during the 2003 Medicare prescription drug vote.

At the time, while some Republicans warned darkly of possible retaliation against Democratic leaders, most senior GOP officials agreed that a full-fledged ethics war would likely have disastrous consequences for the party.

And when then-Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) eventually filed a voluminous complaint against DeLay, no Republican stepped up to file against Bell or any other Democrat.

Even if the two sides fought to a stalemate on a substantive level, many Republicans feared that their side would suffer at the polls because voters would likely blame the party in power if a partisan food fight broke out.

They’re right to be wary, but the kind of dithering and halfhearted pushback we’ve seen from the Republicans so far is hardly an appealing alternative.

Meanwhile, our beleaguered, put-upon House majority leader spent 30 minutes talking to Tony Snow yesterday. This caught my eye:

In the interview, Mr. DeLay said many Democratic members of Congress had quietly approached him to tell him that they believed he was being treated unfairly. "Very many of them," he said.

Uh huh. This is rather less than plausible, but if there’s even a glimmer of a possibility that any Democrats have offered words of sympathy to the very leader who has repeatedly called their party “irrelevant” and striven to make that characterization an effective reality in the House, it seems like ample grounds for someone to launch a Josh Marshall-style blog/whip operation to unmask these sad creatures.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHY ARE WE SUCH PUSHOVERS? Al Kamen has this on Bob Zoellick’s recent trip to Khartoum:

Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick went to Khartoum last week to prod the Sudanese government to stop the genocide in Darfur. But a top Sudanese government official apparently had his own diplomatic message about westerners getting mixed up in Sudan's affairs.

So when Zoellick, a history buff, went to the presidential palace in Khartoum, the first vice president, Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha (the real power in the country), couldn't resist showing him the stairwell where "Gordon of Khartoum" was killed in 1885.

General Charles George Gordon (played by Charlton Heston in the 1966 epic "Khartoum") was a British hero who was sent there with almost no troops (being, after all, such a military hero) to quell a revolt and to rescue isolated garrisons but became cut off in Khartoum. After a 10-month siege, the town fell, and he was killed -- and his head was paraded on a spike through the streets.

Apparently this unsubtle attempt by some pissant warlord thug to intimidate the representative of the United States of America proved quite effective. Zoellick was the first senior U.S. official to travel to Khartoum since Colin Powell determined last September that the government in Khartoum and its Janjaweed allies were committing genocide in Darfur. But instead of using his personal audience with Taha to ratchet up pressure on Khartoum, Zoellick gave him a degree of criminal lebensraum by signaling the Bush administration’s new reluctance to view the atrocities as genocide.

This (subscription req.) Financial Times piece reveals an unfortunate turn in Bush administration policy in the Sudan (via Eric Reeves):

[A]t a press conference after meeting Ali Osman Taha, vice-president, Mr Zoellick was clearly unwilling to repeat that assertion. "I don't want to get into a debate over terminology," he said, when asked if the US believed genocide was still being committed in Darfur against mostly African villagers by Arab militia and their government backers.

He said it was Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who had "made the point" in his testimony to Congress.

Of course, it should be noted that Powell "made the point" based on evidence gleaned from an extensive State Department inquiry involving thousands of local interviews and analysis by a variety of experts in international humanitarian law. But Zoellick decided to belittle that finding by describing it as merely the opinion of one man, now out of power.

In the eyes of the butchers in Khartoum, we’re backing off the seriousness of our intent to halt the crimes they are committing in Darfur by reneging on the genocide claim. They’ll surely take the opportunity to show us who’s the boss. Just two weeks ago they demolished the town of Khor Abeche and about 25,000 of its inhabitants were either killed or displaced in the attack. They keep pushing and we keep moving.

How I long for the days when Richard Holbrooke would stare down the far more powerful Balkan bullies and make them blink first.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BENEDICT'S EDICTS. Will the Catholic Church respect dissentersunder Benedict XVI? Not if the past is any indicator, predicts Adele Stan. And there are a whole lot of nuns, priests, and theologians who'll be surprised if it does, considering their own encounters with Cardinal Ratzinger in the past.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PRO-INDUSTRY, ANTI-ENVIRONMENT ENERGY POLICY BILL IN HOUSE. The House will work on the Energy Policy Act (H.R. 6) beginning today and could vote on the bill as early as tomorrow. The bill provides $8.1 billion in tax incentives for the energy industry, doesn't do a thing for rising gas prices, and is bad for the environment.

Check out Moving Ideas' updated analysis of the bill and contact your representative today!

Moving Ideas is a project of The American Prospect.

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

CONSTITUTION IN EXILE. It's already Wednesday, but I'd be remiss not to direct you to Jeffrey Rosen's excellent article on the "Constitution in Exile" movement from this weekend's New York Times Magazine. The piece has come in for some sharp criticism from some libertarian or libertarian-ish legal folks who fairly convincingly make the point that in an important sense there really is no such movement. There isn't, in other words, a group of people who self-identify in this way and are marching in lockstep to impose a uniform view of the Constitution on the country. That's fair enough, but I don't think it really undermines what's important or valuable in the Rosen piece. As Mark Schmitt puts it:

So what if no one considers themselves part of a "Constitution in Exile" movement? There is clearly a group of scholars and judges who hold the view that judges should give far greater deference to what they view as core economic liberties in reviewing legislative decisions. While there are variations within this view, it broadly unifies a group whose viewpoint differs on the one hand from Scalia's federalism and originalism, and on the other hand from the tradition that largely defers to Congress on matters of economic regulation.

Right. This is important both tactically and substantively. The Republican Party has done an excellent job of positioning itself as having a populist view of the judiciary -- railing against "activist judges" and "our robed masters" -- while simultaneously getting behind a movement to put lots of people on the bench who will countermand popular, democratic, legislative mandates for various forms of regulation. Given the near-total collapse of the small government program as a legislative agenda, the judicial sphere becomes the last place in which an actual shrinkage of the state might be achieved. And -- appallingly -- it's something that risks happening essentially in the dark as the public debate about judges continues to be all about gay rights, abortion, and God.

Those are important topics, but the economic topics at stake are crucially important, too. What's more, my strong guess is that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly aware that the GOP is the more culturally conservative party and have basically made up their minds regarding what they think about that. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of people seem to have no idea that the GOP may put judges on the bench who would strike down statutes that no Republican presidential candidate would ever dare advocate repealing in public. This is, in other words, a huge potential growth area for liberals in terms of broadening the public understanding of what's at stake in these nomination fights.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE FILIBUSTER. At last, yesterday Slate’s Tim Noah revived his 2001 argument for abolishing the filibuster and made a worthy contribution to the debate kicked off a few weeks ago by Nathan Newman -- though Noah seems to have missed that debate entirely. (Meanwhile, The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn has taken a very odd, finger-wagging approach to convincing liberals to oppose the filibuster -- somewhat along the lines of “your views are unpopular, so quit hiding, jerks” -- that is unpersuasive on several levels.)

Noah echoes, in passing, the basic institutionalist argument that I find most persuasive: state activism depends on legislative processes that aren’t too gummed up by decentralized structures and minority privileges, so a tool like the filibuster benefits conservatives more than liberals over the long run. (Put another way, there are reasons unrelated to Americans’ innate “individualism” that the United States has historically been a laggard welfare state, and a lot of those have to do with the structures of our political institutions.) Then he addresses the basic liberal concern about the damage that Republicans could cause in the short term if given the ability to ram through their agenda without fear of a filibuster:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price. If the Senate eliminated the filibuster, Republicans would have to choose between putting their money where their mouth was or just shutting up. Either choice would put Democrats in a better political position than they're in right now.

I think Noah is being too flippant on this point, but only somewhat. The closer one watches the Republicans in action as this country’s governing party, the less impressive they seem and the more illusory this notion of ruthless GOP efficiency and effectiveness is revealed to be. On cultural issues, perpetually losing is the end-all and be-all of Republican action. They want to lose these battles, and they need to lose them. The major entitlements, meanwhile, remain basically untouchable. Even the Rovian “permanent majority” rationale that gets attached to so many Republican schemes -- be it the Medicare expansion that will supposedly lead to the marketization of the entire system, or the Social Security reform that will create a permanent, loyally GOP “investor class” -- usually amounts to a lot of hot air on closer inspection. Liberals should be careful not to get hoodwinked into taking seriously the rationalizations Republicans offer themselves for ludicrous and indefensible policies. The real nexus of GOP action is tax policy, which isn’t filibusterable anyway. There are several other areas where Republicans can and do inflict real damage -- regulation, environmental policy and development, labor law, etc. But only on the issue of development can the argument really be made that the actions Republicans might take would be irreversible.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A BROADER CASE. Like Ed Kilgore I'm in the rather awkward position of having my skepticism about the merits of the tactics the Foreign Relations Committee Democrats have taken against John Bolton apparently disproven by yesterday's dramatic events. But more than a disagreement about tactics, I think the disagreement here is really a disagreement about priorities. I don't want to see Bolton be UN ambassador, but I was always more interested in using this appointment as an opportunity -- not to give the White House a bloody nose, but to take advantage of Bolton's extreme views (or at least his willingness to articulate them clearly) to outline a clear Democratic alternative and start rebuilding the liberal internationalist consensus that served the party quite well until Iraq tore it asunder.

There was always a tension between that goal and the narrower one of just beating Bolton. But as Suzanne Nossel writes there's a way to square this circle by taking advantage of the new three-week delay to not only build up the file of allegations against Bolton, but start speaking publicly about what sort of thing Democrats would like to see in a UN ambassador. Not personal qualities and not an unqualified embrace of the Turtle Bay bureacracy, but policy priorities that seek to use international institutions in a pragmatic and creative way to advance common goals.

--Matthew Yglesias

VOINOVICH! For weeks, those hoping to scuttle John Bolton’s nomination had set their sites on Lincoln Chafee as the key swing vote. Over the weekend, Citizens for Global Solutions, (the group that operates the Stop Bolton website) went so far as to commission a Zogby Poll of Rhode Islanders to show Chafee his constituents' overwhelming disdain for the ideology that Bolton represents.

But it was George Voinovich who, out of the blue, put a kink in the administration’s plan to ram the nominee down Democratic votes. Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all he’s got something of a history as an independent on the committee and a moderate streak as well. In 2000 he was one of the few Republicans to vote against Bolton mentor Jesse Helms' piece of anti-International Criminal Court legislation, the American Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA). If you’ll recall, ASPA contained a needlessly antagonistic provision granting the U.S. military the theoretical authority to invade The Netherlands to free an American held at the ICC, thereby earning ASPA the moniker of the "Hague Invasion Act" among our European allies.

Voinovich didn’t want any part of that pointlessly hostile legislation, and so it seems that he wants to delay the confirmation of a pointlessly hostile nominee.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

LIBERALS LIKE ... LIBERALS! Cliff May at the Corner connects the dots linking Joseph Ratzinger, John Bolton, Tom DeLay, and the federal judiciary to reach the striking conclusion that liberals like it better when positions of power and influence are held by liberals. He's found us out!

Pope aside, I find this style of argumentation baffling. Yes, of course Democrats aren't untouched by thoughts of partisanship and ideology as they embark upon these various endeavors. But neither are Democrats holding up every Bush appointment or inquiring into Dennis Hastert's financial dealings. This is the way an adversarial political system works. Everything is, in part, partisan in motivation. But when partisan feelings lead to the revelation of actual wrongdoing, that's the system functioning properly, not grounds for ignoring the wrongdoing.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN. Brad Plumer highlights some of the terrific work Nathan Newman has been doing in response to the latest reports of the Department of Labor’s brazen harassment campaign against unions. Congressman George Miller’s office issued a release yesterday highlighting the DOL’s steady transformation into a fully functioning and focused anti-union arm of the White House political apparatus. Today the same office announces Miller’s reintroduction of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would codify card-check elections as a sanctioned method of organizing. (Ted Kennedy sponsors the Senate counterpart.) Chances of this bill even getting considered during this Congress are, of course, exactly zilch.

The bill offers a good reminder of what was lost last November. Card checks provide one of the only effective modern ways for workers to form a union in the face of employer hostility and labyrinthine and protracted NLRB procedures. (Many of the SEIU’s organizing successes in the last decade under Andy Stern came through card-check elections.) Giving card checks official sanction would represent a hugely important victory in labor-law reform, and last year Miller managed to amass 209 cosponsors for his bill. Had John Kerry been elected, perhaps combined with even slight Democratic gains in Congress, passage of this bill would be a real possibility. Instead, the bill faces a hopeless near-term future; the NLRB, chaired by the Bush-appointed management lawyer Robert Battista, is moving to outlaw card-check recognition outright; and the DOL can proceed apace with its harassment offensive against unions across the country. This wasn’t a subject that surfaced much during the election, but the reverberations of the president’s victory will be felt by labor for years to come.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FIREWORKS IN THE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE. The pro-Bolton forces suffered a crushing blow: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee postponed the vote on John Bolton. The hearing featured impassioned pleas from Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Paul Sarbanes, and Chris Dodd, each requesting a full hearing on new allegations concerning Bolton's behavior and emphasizing how misleading Bolton was in last week's hearing. The Democrats were countered by stonewalling and procedural wrangling from Dick Lugar, some so audacious it drew vocal gasps from Democrats being shut down.

But the Dems forcefulness paid off. Around 4:33, Republican George Voinovich declared that he was uncomfortable supporting Bolton without further investigation of the claims raised by the Democrats. Chuck Hagel quickly followed, noting that if the vote were held today, he didn't think Bolton would get out of committee.

The conversation abruptly turned to when a new hearing could be held, if Bolton could be brought back before the committee, and how committee investigators could ensure agency's compliance with the investigation. Looks like the vote on Bolton has been delayed about three weeks, until after the April recess.

--Dave Meyer

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NO LAUGHING MATTER. It's an all-out assault on the third branch of government: DeLay and co. are attacking judges' decisions, their livelihoods, and their authority to perform their historic role as constitutional experts. Michael Tomasky paints the whole frightening picture.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE PERFECT REPUBLICAN BILL. Tomorrow the House will likely take up the vomitous energy bill that has been mercifully stalled in Congress for over three years. The New York Times offers a few righteous objections in an editorial today. The bill closely resembles the conference report that Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans filibustered in 2003. (The total pricetag of the corporate tax subsidies included is less than its predecessor's, though there's still another chance for conference committee logrolling to pump up the cost once more.) For an unmatched chronicle of the formation of that bill, do not miss the second installment of The Boston Globe’s three-part series on Republican governance and the era of DeLayism in the House that came out last fall. It’s really worth a look.

On that note, now that it’s clear that congressional Democrats are coalescing around a reformist theme that emphasizes Republican corruption and abuse of power as an all-purpose critique, they’ve developed a rubric that is perfectly suited for an out-of-control lobbyist bonanza like this bill. This is exactly the kind of legislation that can be used to highlight the cronyism at the heart of the modern Republican Congress and the disinterest in sound policy that such an arrangement engenders. Americans’ real energy concerns are not being served by this kind of corporate whore legislation. The systemic corruption that Tom DeLay helped to ensconce in the House is precisely what underlies such legislation’s continued viability. There’s your critique.

How likely are the bill’s prospects in the Senate, given the Republicans’ larger margins this year? It’s hard to say, though it should be remembered that ethanol champion Tom Daschle had been a steady supporter of the bill, so the GOP didn’t pick up another vote by defeating him. The main bone of contention will likely again be the provision protecting MTBE makers from lawsuits. DeLay single-handedly -- and in contravention of White House requests -- held up passage of the bill in 2003 by refusing to strip that provision from the conference report. That was an incredible show of strength by the majority leader. Whether he has the strength to do it again, and whether he’ll even have to face such a decision, are both open questions at this point.

--Sam Rosenfeld

RATZINGER. Not too much to add on the new pope, but readers who haven’t already should read E.J. Dionne’s miraculously timed column in today’s Washington Post, Andrew Sullivan’s alarmed and aggrieved initial thoughts, and the manic papal speed-blogging over at the Corner. This decision doesn’t make one optimistic about the reconciliation between the Church and American Catholics that John T. McGreevey calls for in the latest New Republic:

…As the American Church has tried to reach out to American Catholics, it has simultaneously alienated them by disdaining so much of the non-Catholic culture in which they are irrevocably immersed. Indeed, if the first strategy of evangelizing is to be successful, then the American Church will have to reconcile itself to certain aspects of American culture.

Managing two problems that prevent this sort of reconciliation is crucial. The first is the intertwined knot of gender and ministry. Few women within the institutional Church structure hold decision-making power, and women working in parishes--increasingly important figures in a Church with a rapidly declining number of priests--struggle to obtain the opportunity to perform even basic ministerial tasks. This situation runs against one of the most powerful currents in modern history: the expansion of vocational opportunities for women. The real question is not the high-profile issue of women's ordination, but whether the next Pope will have the courage, unlike John Paul II, to sever some of the links between an ordained male clergy and ecclesiastical power. If not, what most educated Catholic women in the United States perceive as raw discrimination will have an inevitable multiplier effect, as they detach themselves from active participation in Church life, discourage their sons from entering the priesthood, and make the Church seem far more male in its authority structure than in the early '50s, when powerful, well-educated nuns ran many hospitals and schools.

The second problem is one of theological literacy. It is one thing for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul's most important theological adviser, to meditate on the virtues of an all-male priesthood, since Ratzinger has forgotten more theology than most of his liberal critics ever knew. It's quite another to have young priests and bishops, educated in intellectually narrow seminaries and without serious immersion in either the Catholic tradition or the languages that constitute it, express grave doubts about female altar servers or Catholic Democrats who take Communion. Meanwhile, the self-declared Catholic "spokesmen" who took to the airwaves in recent weeks to pontificate on the Terri Schiavo case proved unable to give a compelling account of Catholic teaching on end-of-life issues--a teaching more complicated, contested, and rich than the blunt demand not to remove a single feeding tube. The contrast between the situation at the Second Vatican Council in the mid-'60s (when the elegant Latin and theological acumen of Americans like the Jesuit John Courtney Murray startled jaundiced Europeans) and the current moment (when some of the most visible "orthodox" American Catholics shuttle between pro-life protests and Mother Angelica's loopy Catholic cable network) could not be more stark.

The slow almagamation of Catholic and evangelical commentators on cable news, etc., into a united front of shrill right-wing punditry is a development of note and one that shows no signs of abating.

One question I’ve had ever since John Paul II’s passing and over the course of the past weeks’ debates about his legacy and reformist/conservative splits within the Church: Where’s Garry Wills? Surely he’s got a lot to say these days, and today especially.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A CHERRY-PICKING ACCIDENT. Senator James Inhofe can't make his climate-change quackery sound legitimate without having it both ways, as Chris Mooney demonstrates. Can one report be both "junk science" and "sound science"? Apparently, it can...

--Jeffrey Dubner

BOLTON IMBROGLIO. For the last two hours or so, the status of John Bolton's Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote has been up in the air. Democrats have been trying to delay the vote, originally scheduled for 2:15 today, until the Department of State and the National Security Agency answer some questions about Bolton's behavior -- who Bolton was spying on via NSA intercepts, and what information Bolton kept from then–Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Reuters has a piece out that hints at what's going on, reporting that "Democrats seeking to slow the process formally objected to the meeting, meaning the Senate will have to recess and stop work on a must-pass spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan operations while the committee convenes."

What appears to have happened is that Senator Bill Frist asked for unanimous consent to allow committees to meet while Congress was in session. Senator Harry Reid objected, denying consent for the convening of the Foreign Relations Committee. Frist responded by trying to recess the Senate, so that the FRC could meet regardless of the objection. At the same time, someone in Dick Lugar's office tentatively rescheduled the committee vote for 4:30 today. Reid withdrew the objection when it looked like Republicans would win the vote on the recess.

The vote is now back on for 2:15.

--Dave Meyer

ALMOST SENSIBLE. Representative Mike Pence turns out to have an interesting perspective on Social Security. As he sees it, the big domestic policy story of the Bush years is conservatives getting snowed. They started working on No Child Left Behind to get school vouchers; they wound up with more federal spending and less local control. They started working on Medicare to introduce more private-sector forces; they wound up with much, much, much higher spending. Pence is all for privatizing Social Security. But unlike most conservatives, he's not especially worried about whether or not the drive will succeed.

Instead, his big worry is that in their determination to launch private accounts, the GOP will end up backing tax increases (a la Lindsey Graham) or, worse, Gene Sperling-esque progressive add-on accounts. He's more interested in blocking that kind of sell-out than he is in scoring a legislative win by passing "something." I want to like the guy, but he has nice things to say about the idiotic Ryan/Sununu Social Security Plan, so that's off the table.

--Matthew Yglesias

ONE UNHAPPY CAMPER. Congressman Mike Pence, elected in 2000 and now the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee (an ultra-conservative House group) is talking to us over lunch. He doesn't seem to have much to say about Social Security, but boy is he disgruntled. He started off by praising the Heritage Foundation for its opposition -- in the face of what was apparently considerable pressure -- to the Bush Medicare "reform" bill. He says he feels "like a Minuteman who showed up to the revolution ten years too late." He first ran for Congress in 1988 and says he told his supporters "someday we'll get a Republican majority and maybe one day we'll get rid of that federal department of education Jimmy Carter put in." Then he finally showed up on the Hill in 2001 and was asked to vote for "largest expansion in the federal Department of Education since Jimmy Carter was president."

After re-election he "arrived on Capitol Hill and they showed up with H.R. one in 2003 -- the Medicare expansion bill," at which point the room full of conservatives snicker derisively. "When you take a stand against the administration and the leadership's number one priority," Pence explained, "you get to see some parts of the White House that aren't on the public tour." Interestingly, though, even Pence, one of the very few elected officials willing to stick by his small-government guns, says he would have been willing to support a raising of Medicaid eligibility limits as a way of delivering a prescription drug benefit to more poor seniors. In other words, even the most rock-ribbed conservatives in Congress have, in practice, given up on actually shrinking federal spending.

--Matthew Yglesias

LOST IN ENTROPY. At this point it’s impossible what will transpire between now and 2:15 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to meet on the John Bolton nomination. Ranking member Joe Biden has asked Chairman Dick Lugar to further delay the vote, but Lugar is thus far hesitant to do so.

As of 11:30 I see four possible outcomes.

First, the vote is held as scheduled and, in the grand tradition of the Republican Senate moderates, Lincoln Chafee joins Chuck Hagel in questioning the wisdom of the administration’s nomination and then falling in line and voting to confirm. In scenario two, Chafee breaks ranks (thanks to considerable grassroots pressure applied by the Stop Bolton network) and the nomination is essentially scuttled. Third, the Democrats, through parliamentary maneuvering, halt the nomination until they receive information from the administration regarding NSA intercepts Bolton may have improperly requested in order to spy on his bureaucratic rivals, possibly necessitating a damaging second committee appearance by Bolton. Fourth, (and this is doubtful) Lugar calls this afternoon’s hearings off in the face of Democratic pressure.

This all has something of a entropic quality to it this morning, but check back later in the day for updates.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

REXON RYU. When allegations about John Bolton's intimidation of Rexon Ryu first surfaced, the story was bizarrely muddled. Dafna Linzer reported:

The officials, who would discuss the incident only on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it, said Rexon Ryu, an expert on nonproliferation issues in the Middle East, was transferred to another bureau after he failed to produce a document requested by Bolton's chief of staff.

Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security for the past four years, reportedly accused Ryu of concealing the information and of insubordination. One of the officials recalled Bolton saying that he had a file on Ryu and did not want him to work on issues he was involved in.

John Wolf, Ryu's former boss, said that Ryu was a brilliant and dedicated civil servant, and that the allegations were found to be baseless.

It was unclear both what was in the document requested by Bolton and why Ryu refused to turn it over. Linzer, though, clarified the circumstances in an article yesterday that was primarily focused on another example of Bolton's insubordination.

It turns out that the document Bolton wanted to see was "a copy of a cable [Ryu] had written about the work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq." At the time, of course, Bolton was trying to undermine Hans Blix's accurate reporting on Iraq's WMD capability in the run-up to the Iraq war. Linzer also reports a likely ulterior motive for Bolton's attack on Ryu:

Just weeks before the incident, Ryu had been among a small number of State Department officials who accompanied Powell to CIA headquarters to review the presentation Powell would give to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's alleged weapons programs. Officials said Ryu had been instrumental in getting the most controversial allegations out of Powell's speech.

Considering how error-filled Colin Powell's speech eventually turned out to be, we should be grateful for Ryu's presence. And again, Bolton tried to punish someone for opposing inaccurate intelligence. Add Ryu to the list of Bolton's victims, beside Fulton Armstrong, Greg Thielmann, and Christian Westermann, but note the distinction that Ryu is directly related to Iraq -- and to Chuck Hagel.

--Dave Meyer

WHAT'S LEFT AFTER PREMIUMS? Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities made an interesting point in conversation after his presentation. Right now, Medicare is financed in part through premiums that go to pay for Part B services -- doctors' bills, in other words. Those premiums are automatically deducted from your Social Security checks. Starting soon, an additional premium for the prescription drug benefit will also be deducted. Under the White House Social Security plan, in addition to those deductions, there will be the clawback of whatever was put into your private accounts, plus inflation, plus 3 percent per year also deducted from your Social Security check. Last but not least, there will be an across-the-board benefit cut in the form of some sort of price-indexing.

The upshot of all of this is that for some people benefits after clawback and after price-indexing will be smaller than the two Medicare premiums. The administration hasn't said what happens then. One possibility is that if you don't have the money necessary to pay the full premiums, you don't have to. You pay what you can pay, and then you get your benefit. If so, then we're essentially closing the Social Security deficit by increasing the (larger) Medicare benefit. The other alternative is that you'll have to pay the premiums out of pocket. If that's right, then the average projected value of private accounts ought to be adjusted downward accordingly. Even worse, if your account does poorly, it might be entirely wiped out -- or more -- by these premiums, leaving you destitute in retirement.

On top of that there are questions about enforcement. One reason -- probably the main reason -- that premiums are automatically deducted from Social Security checks is that this allows easy enforcement through centralization. If people need to pay more in premiums than they're getting from the Social Security Administration there's going to need to be some kind of apparatus for making sure that people actually pay what they owe. So far nobody seems to have said anything at all about how this might work.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLL RESULTS ON RHODE ISLAND AND BOLTON. The committee vote on John Bolton is scheduled for today. Meanwhile, Senator Lincoln Chafee continues his pusillanimous fence-sitting while Chuck Hagel moved from determinedly in the Bolton camp to on the fence with revelations that Bolton actually attacked a State Department analyst, Rexon Ryu, currently detailed to Hagel's staff.

Yesterday, Citizens for Global Solutions released a Zogby poll (pdf) of Rhode Islanders' opinions on Bolton. The results do not support a Chafee "aye" vote, as his state's opposition to Bolton is strong and surprisingly bipartisan: 34 percent of Republicans say they would be less likely to vote for Chafee in 2006 if he supports Bolton.

The poll found that men are more likely (66 percent of all male respondents) to hold Chafee accountable for supporting Bolton than women (46 percent). Similarly, young people (85 percent of all respondents under 30) are more likely to hold Chafee accountable than seniors. This suggests both that the fight against Bolton is burnishing Democratic credentials on national security and that Chafee's lineage carries more weight with older voters than younger.

The results are quite bad for Senator Chafee. His rationale, to date, for supporting Bolton -- namely, deference to George W. Bush's whims -- was also tested and faired quite poorly:

By nearly seven to one (72% vs. 11%), voters believe that Senator Chafee should not vote for a nominee who is unpopular in Rhode Island, even if the Bush administration asks him to do so.

A significant majority in nearly all sub-groups believe that Senator Chafee should not vote for a nominee who is unpopular in Rhode Island, including 72% of Republicans and 83% of Independents. Women (85%) are much more likely than men (59%) to say that the senator should not vote for someone unpopular with Rhode Islanders simply because the White House asks him to. Voters in the 2nd Congressional District (80%) are more adamant about not voting for someone unpopular in Rhode Island than are those in the 1st Congressional District (65%).

Will Senator Chafee put the interests of his constituents above his loyalty to the party?

-- Dave Meyer

SO MANY NUMBERS.... Bill Beach, director of Heritage's Center for Data Analysis, is up now talking on the subject of, "what is the problem?" His discussion seems to involve virtually everything but the problem. He started by noting that there are "so many numbers" involved in this debate that people tend to get confused. Instead, he hopes to offer a "big picture" approach. His picture is so big that it's hard to find Social Security lurking there in the weeds. We're hearing a lot about global demographic trends. He makes the point -- known to me, but unknown to many -- that the Chinese population is aging faster than the American population. Fascinating. But what does this have to do with anything?

I will say, though, that these facts about global demographic trends do have one point of relevance. One major counterargument to the liberal view (see this PDF from Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and Brad DeLong) that if economic growth is as bad as the SSA says it will be stocks (and therefore private accounts) will do poorly as well is that Americans could still earn large rates of return thanks to robust growth elsewhere. But if the demographic problems in the rest of the world are worse than those in the United States (which Beach has persuasively argued), then international earnings can't help us at all.

--Matthew Yglesias

HERITAGE, SOCIAL SECURITY, AND AFRICAN AMERICANS. Heritage's vice president for domestic policy is speaking right now and he's singling out Social Security's purported "unfairness" to African Americans as a topic of special concern to the Heritage Foundation. And, indeed, this is something they've done a lot of work on. Shockingly, they seem much less concerned about the fate of long-lived Hispanics. Nor does Heritage seem to have much to say about increasing African American life expectancy. Nor are there any actual African Americans in the room. Naturally. But any discussion of Heritage's work on the subject really needs to begin with Kilolo Kijakazi's classic paper for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

A major part of this paper is drawn from an assessment of the Heritage paper on African Americans that the Social Security Administration's highly respected Office of the Chief Actuary conducted. The Office of the Chief Actuary identified major errors in Heritage's work, including the fact that Heritage exaggerated the taxes that African Americans pay into Social Security while substantially understating the Social Security benefits that African Americans receive. The actuaries concluded that Heritage "grossly underestimates the expected rates of return from Social Security benefits" for the overall population and especially for African Americans. The actuaries also examined Heritage's subsequent work on Hispanic Americans and found it seriously flawed as well. The analyses of Heritage's work by the Office of the Chief Actuary are attached as appendices.

It's almost as if the real concern is with eliminating Social Security rather than with America's minorities.

--Matthew Yglesias

PRIVATIZATION: NOT DEAD YET. I'm at the Heritage Foundation live-blogging their event, "Social Security Reform: Separating Fact from Fiction, A Seminar for Journalists and Bloggers." So far nothing's happened except the serving of coffee. This seems like a good time to note, however, that rumors of the death of the Bush privatization plan seem to be proving premature. We heard the other day that House Republicans were considering passing a "free lunch" plan whether or not the Senate acts. Yesterday's Washington Post carried a story about the White House trying to pressure the Senate Finance Committee to take action. Today we read that Bush is now talking up the possibility of raising the retirement age. And of course Heritage is holding this event. Republicans still have majorities in both houses of Congress and all signs are that they're still determined to push this issue.

--Matthew Yglesias

PSA. Tapped will be offline today in celebration of Patriots Day.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE "SERIAL ABUSER". Adding to the increasingly lengthy catalog of U.N. Ambassador nominee-John Bolton's disturbing behavior toward his colleagues is this letter, sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now posted on DailyKos by a friend of the writer's.

Dear Sir:

I'm writing to urge you to consider blocking in committee the nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN.

In the late summer of 1994, I worked as the subcontracted leader of a US AID project in Kyrgyzstan officially awarded to a HUB primary contractor. My own employer was Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, and I reported directly to Republican leader Charlie Black.

After months of incompetence, poor contract performance, inadequate in-country funding, and a general lack of interest or support in our work from the prime contractor, I was forced to make US AID officials aware of the prime contractor's poor performance.

I flew from Kyrgyzstan to Moscow to meet with other Black Manafort employees who were leading or subcontracted to other US AID projects. While there, I met with US AID officials and expressed my concerns about the project -- chief among them, the prime contractor's inability to keep enough cash in country to allow us to pay bills, which directly resulted in armed threats by Kyrgyz contractors to me and my staff.

Within hours of sending a letter to US AID officials outlining my concerns, I met John Bolton, whom the prime contractor hired as legal counsel to represent them to US AID. And, so, within hours of dispatching that letter, my hell began.

Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel -- throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman. For nearly two weeks, while I awaited fresh direction from my company and from US AID, John Bolton hounded me in such an appalling way that I eventually retreated to my hotel room and stayed there. Mr. Bolton, of course, then routinely visited me there to pound on the door and shout threats.

When US AID asked me to return to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in advance of assuming leadership of a project in Kazakstan, I returned to my project to find that John Bolton had proceeded me by two days. Why? To meet with every other AID team leader as well as US foreign-service officials in Bishkek, claiming that I was under investigation for misuse of funds and likely was facing jail time. As US AID can confirm, nothing was further from the truth.

He indicated to key employees of or contractors to State that, based on his discussions with investigatory officials, I was headed for federal prison and, if they refused to cooperate with either him or the prime contractor's replacement team leader, they, too, would find themselves the subjects of federal investigation. As a further aside, he made unconscionable comments about my weight, my wardrobe and, with a couple of team leaders, my sexuality, hinting that I was a lesbian (for the record, I'm not).

When I resurfaced in Kyrgyzstan, I learned that he had done such a convincing job of smearing me that it took me weeks -- with the direct intervention of US AID officials -- to limit the damage. In fact, it was only US AID's appoinment of me as a project leader in Almaty, Kazakstan that largely put paid to the rumors Mr. Bolton maliciously circulated.

As a maligned whistleblower, I've learned firsthand the lengths Mr. Bolton will go to accomplish any goal he sets for himself. Truth flew out the window. Decency flew out the window. In his bid to smear me and promote the interests of his client, he went straight for the low road and stayed there.

John Bolton put me through hell -- and he did everything he could to intimidate, malign and threaten not just me, but anybody unwilling to go along with his version of events. His behavior back in 1994 wasn't just unforgivable, it was pathological.

I cannot believe that this is a man being seriously considered for any diplomatic position, let alone such a critical posting to the UN. Others you may call before your committee will be able to speak better to his stated dislike for and objection to stated UN goals. I write you to speak about the very character of the man.

It took me years to get over Mr. Bolton's actions in that Moscow hotel in 1994, his intensely personal attacks and his shocking attempts to malign my character.

I urge you from the bottom of my heart to use your ability to block Mr. Bolton's nomination in committee.

Respectfully yours,

Melody Townsel

Seems like someone in the Senate should follow up on this.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EARTH DAY RESOLUTIONS: MAKE YOURS TODAY! Next Friday, April 22, we celebrate the 35th Earth Day. I like to think about Earth Day like I do New Year's Day: an opportunity to take stock and make appropriate resolutions. But instead of promising myself to exercise more and eat better, on Earth Day I resolve to be a better steward of the Earth.

Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, is making it easy for folks to resolve to take at least one action that will benefit the planet with resources to help you have local, national and international impact. Check it out and then pass it on to your friends.

--Diana Onken, Moving Ideas

FUZZY MATH. It seems that the usually astute Christian Science Monitor has fallen prey to one of the great political magic tricks of the Bush administration: the prevailing belief that most Americans have benefited from tax relief in the past four years.

In an article on state solvency schemes that rely on increasing a variety of fees rather than raising income tax, Alexandra Marks writes:

Yet the increase in revenues doesn't necessarily mean taxpayers were taking an extra hit. While they may actually be shelling out more dollars to keep the state police on patrol and high school gymnasiums from leaking, most people aren't paying any more as a percentage of their income.

To be fair, you should read the whole article. But I feel as if the piece misses the point that the kinds of fees that we are talking about -- which range from parking tickets to fishing licenses to car registration to state college tuitions -- tend to be flat rates and are inherently regressive. The total sum of federal income and state taxes that most Americans pay has decreased nominally, but the commensurate rise in other kinds of taxes and fees, raised to compensate local governments for the loss of federal funding, hurts the lowest rungs the worst.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

HOUSE OF SCANDAL. For everyone who’s questioned the nascent liberal strategy in taking on Tom DeLay, worrying that activists were personalizing the fight too much and not broadening the critique into a politically effective attack on Republican governance itself, the DCCC’s snazzy new "Tom DeLay’s House of Scandal" website should come as a big relief. This is good stuff. Notice that they take a nice hard line against Connecticut weasel Chris Shays and have the good sense to harp on other moderates’ history of fealty to the majority leader. And don’t miss the fun video they put together, set to Pink Floyd’s “Money”.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO'S ON THE FENCE? The calculus on the nuclear option is fairly simple: Bill Frist needs to keep 50 Republican senators on board if he wants to break the rules and keep his nearly stillborn presidential campaign alive. By my count, Frist seems to have 43 definite votes. Over the past couple weeks, we've seen some senators who had been "deliberating" over the nuclear option come off the fence in what was probably an attempt to make the nuclear option seem moderate (see also Frist's attempts to compromise and the phrase "constitutional option" (pdf)). Of the remaining 11, there are three more who are currently "ambivalent" who I can't see bucking the line: Thad Cochran, Mike DeWine, and Pat Roberts. Three Republicans have stated that they'll vote against the nuclear option: Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, and John McCain. That leaves six swing votes, of whom three need to oppose Frist for the nuclear option to fail:

• Susan Collins
• Chuck Hagel
• Dick Lugar
• Lisa Murkowski
• Arlen Specter
• John Warner

I highly doubt that Murkowski will go against the leadership on this, but fairly recently she let out as anti-nuclear a comment as you can while still staying on the fence:

"The fact of the matter is that there has been an ability to filibuster judges from the day the Senate was formed," Murkowski said earlier this year. "And out of protocol, or courtesy, or just a recognition of the Senate's constitutional obligation to give advice and consent on the president's judicial nominees, filibusters weren't even considered up until the 108th Congress."

So for now she's in the pool. We're not really of the "call your senator and demand answers" nature at Tapped, but we sure would be interested to hear about the local outlook if you share a state with any of these senators.

--Jeffrey Dubner

AGAINST THE NUCLEAR OPTION. Guest blogging at The Washington Monthly, Julie Saltman takes a poke at those "who argue that we should partially, if not fully, learn to stop worrying and love the nuclear option." To be clear on where I stand, I argue no such thing. For one thing, as Jonathan Chait observes and as Bruce Ackerman argued more fully a while back, the case for a supermajority requirement is stronger when it comes to confirming judges than with regard to passing laws. The Republicans are doing the reverse, in keeping with their new principle that the GOP policy agenda need no longer be argued for with reference to any vaguely coherent set of principles.

But what's really, really hasn't gotten enough attention in the nuclear option debate is what the nuclear option is. It is, in short, a proposal to have the presiding officer of the Senate, backed by a GOP majority, simply ignore what the rules of the Senate have long been understood to be. This is how it got known as "the nuclear option" rather than "a dull change in procedural detail." What's nuclear -- i.e., extreme and explosive -- about it is that it involves breaking the rules, not changing them. Belief that rules should be changed properly rather than broken is, apparently, becoming quaint. Every revelation that the Bush administration has violated the Geneva Conventions has been met with someone or other on the right arguing that this or that provision of the Conventions is bad policy. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's also the law of the land, and it needs to be either followed or changed, not just overlooked.

Most recently in the Terri Schiavo case we had all manner of pundits, from David Brooks on the right, to Joe Klein on the annoying pseudo-left, to the usually sharp Noam Scheiber expressing the view that there was something unduly "legalistic" about the liberal position that a lawsuit should be resolved in accordance with the existing legal procedures. This is a trend that bodes ill for America. The case for legalism is at its strongest when it comes to matters like the nuclear option that relate to the internal procedures of the American government. Following the internal rules is the difference between a real government and anarchy or mob rule. Bill Clinton wanted a BTU tax. It didn't pass. He didn't order to Army to collect it anyway. George W. Bush can't just stop sending out Social Security checks on his own say-so. One can imagine moments of national crisis so severe that they would justify breaking the rules, but it would need to be a pretty grave crisis. What's going on with judges right now is nothing of the sort. If you don't like the rules you need to change them in a manner that accords with the rules. Anything else is just a power-mad majority running amok.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TAX AND INTERDEPEND. April 15 may be the most hated day in America. But it should be possible to think of taxes as more than a burden, writes Jared Bernstein: They could be an investment.

--Jeffrey Dubner

FAITH WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES. As Matt noted, Bill Frist '08 (is it too soon to append "'08" to the end of his name? He is, after all, running the Senate on the sole basis of what might appeal to primary voters) and the religious right will frame the nuclear-option battle as a matter of religious freedom and anti-Christian persecution. It's the perfect one-two punch for blowhards: Every talk-show host gets to indulge in both the pious sanctimony of claiming soft bigotry and in hysterical fulminations about "church-hating elites" who "hate the Prince of Peace." These will be fun times at FOX News.

We've reached a bizarre place where no conservative religious belief can be challenged in polite society. Pat Buchanan spent last night's Scarborough Country interviewing Marty Minto, a pastor who believes Pope John Paul II will not make it to heaven because he wasn't born again. Minto said that he doesn't believe Jews or, say, the Chinese can get to heaven either. It's no exaggeration to say that this sort of uncompromisingly intolerant religious belief is now not only given a free pass, but sought out and promoted -- particularly on cable television. I see that foxnews.com is publishing excerpts of Eric Rudolph's incendiary testimony (and they should, certainly), but I haven't heard a word of criticism for Rudolph or the beliefs that led him to his actions. Indeed, the little we know of FOX's strategy for covering Rudolph indicates that FOX bends over backwards to avoid discomforting those who agree with Rudolph -- "feelings in North Carolina may just be more complicated than the NY Times can conceive," after all.

(Liberal faith, of course, forces no such prostration. Liberal theology is said to "make a lot of believers very angry," for example, and there seems to be nothing at all wrong with calling John Kerry, Pat Leahy, or Paul Begala bad Catholics.)

What astounds me, though, isn't that this dynamic exists. It's that nobody sees an upside in challenging this idiocy or in forcing religious extremists and their simpaticos to defend the consequences of their views. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart competes healthily with FOX News programs and easily beats CNN, according to the Los Angeles Times -- and that's without the credibility of a real news network. Keith Olbermann seems to be moving in this direction, but he's got a long way to go before he's any sort of counterweight to the new PC.

UPDATE: Sam raises the good point that belief in only one path to heaven is not at all a fringe view. That's certainly true, but it's the sort of personal belief that an open society needs to put aside if it wants to remain an open society. That the monolithic "people of faith" category ("Orthodox International," as Harold Meyerson put it) includes mutually incompatible strands of intolerance should make it even more subject to critique, I would think, when it's used as a rationale for public policy and the like.

--Jeffrey Dubner

GOTTA HAVE FAITH. It seems that Bill Frist and buddies are preparing to unveil the argument that "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith." Now I'm a filibuster skeptic but what's at issue here is obviously not the procedures, but the underlying merits. We saw a dry-run of this tactic about a year ago when the argument was made that anyone who was against putting Bill Pryor on the bench must be "anti-Catholic" no matter how many of the opposing senators were, themselves, Catholics.

The rhetoric here is warmed-over, '80s-vintage identity politics, complete with the inane "people of X" formulation standing in for the totally serviceable "religious people." The idea seems to be that if you oppose the policy views of a religious person you are being, as such, anti-religious or anti-religion. It's hardly worth responding on the merits, but suffice it to say that if this were really the issue Republicans would be clamoring to put the Reverend Al Sharpton or Rabbi Michael Lerner on the bench. What we've actually got are the Democrats trying to block a small number of crooks and incompetents lurking in a bushel of conservative ideologues.

At any rate, liberals of faith have spent a lot of time telling liberals of little faith such as myself that we need to be more open to religion, which is fair enough. Now, though, I think it's time for the liberals of faith to stand up, because in many ways they're the real targets here. Apparently being a "person of faith" is now synonomous with "holding conservative views about constitutional interpretation and the role of precedent in the legal system."

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PRICE OF BAD HEALTH CARE. Today's Paul Krugman column treats the subject of America's exorbitant expenditures on health care in comparison to what you see in other countries where the populations experience as good or better health outcomes for a fraction of what we pay. Harder to quantify is the indirect cost of a system that is both expensive and oddly distributed. The article keeps shying away from the topic, but if you read The New York Times' inquiry into problems at Ford and General Motors it's impossible to escape the large role played by the expense of providing health care to a large unionized workforce.

Increasingly, of course, the successful American companies are the ones that don't have large unionized workforces precisely because in a non-union environment you can usually get away with offering minimal health benefits. But the viability of our health care system as a whole depends on the existence of plenty of Fords and GMs. A world of Wal-Marts will be one where Medicaid, Medicare, and emergency-room costs bankrupt the government. On top of the price to insurance-providing companies and uninsured individuals, this system introduces a lot of inflexibility into the labor market. A person who's got a job at a company with a solid benefits package is going to have to be very reluctant to strike out on a new venture. That makes it hard for the fact that some sectors of the economy are doing quite well to adequately compensate for the fact that others are doing poorly. It's widely recognized that the regulation-induced inflexibility in many major European economies (especially Germany) is a serious source of economic problems, but the link between health care and employment has much the same effect here at home.

--Matthew Yglesias

REBEL WITH A CAUSE. Newly disgruntled with Tom DeLay House Republican Tom Tancredo (via Atrios) is even less worthy of admiration than erstwhile moderate Chris Shays, but I think we can say that Rep. Tancredo (unlike Shays) is a man whose views matter inside conservative politics. Lurking behind a Beltway obsession with conservative-moderate and neocon-realist fissures inside the GOP, the only split from Bushite orthodoxy that's shown any signs of real grassroots support on the right has been Tancredo's rebellion against the White House's effort to reposition the Republicans as the party of higher immigration.

Tancredo's a man with presidential aspirations in the short term, and unlike most of the other names you hear bandied about, efforts to secure the support of the party leadership for such a candidacy are so obviously doomed that he doesn't really need to try. What's more, unlike the perennially embattled moderates, Tancredo and his merry band of anti-immigration followers have shown bona fide independence from the monied business interests who stand behind DeLay. His actual remarks were pretty mild, so it's very possible that nothing will come of this. It's a salutory reminder, however, that if a real insurgency against the GOP establishment does emerge, it's likely to come from people who can credibly position themselves as more conservative than the folks running the show right now.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHRIS SHAYS, BRAVE INDEPENDENT. So House Republicans voted once again to table a Democratic resolution to open up the ethics process and examine reforms through a commission. Two Republicans voted with the Dems: spurned ethics committee chair Joel Hefley and Jim Leach of Iowa. That brave knight Chris Shays, he of the "outspoken" independence and strong "backbone," voted with his party. On yesterday’s vote for permanent repeal of the estate tax, who was the lone Republican dissenter? Was it that lonely voice of decency in the dark Republican wilderness, Chris Shays? No, it was Leach.

--Sam Rosenfeld

AFRICA. Picking up on what Matt has to say about the British elections on his personal blog, war in Iraq aside, Tony Blair will try to win over those who may dabble with the Liberal Democrats by reminding voters that his Labour Party’s foreign policy contains more than its decision to aid the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The UK took over the G-8 presidency on January 1 and is poised to assume the presidency of the European Union on July 1. By my calculations, this double presidency is the first for any country, and it looks as if the Blair government will use these platforms to advance a highly ambitious agenda for Africa.

Blair foretold of Britain’s intention to use the double presidency to push an African development agenda back in October when he called the continent the “moral scar of the world.” Now, his Labour government is poised to unveil new plan for international action on AIDS and the small-arms trade, as along with a timetable for phasing out export subsidies to Western farmers, as the cornerstones of its new Africa-centric foreign policy.

Of course, the cynics in us would see Blair’s new-found love for the global south as a way to win back liberal-minded voters disaffected with Blair’s unpopular decision to support the Iraq War. That said, the practical results of a commitment towards Africa that yields to most of the demands and policy recommendations of the aid community may be astounding.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

DESTROYING THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT. Subscription-only CQ reports on some new Tom DeLay pushback talking points penned by GOP operative Barbara Comstock (who’s currently getting paid as a consultant through the Hammer’s legal defense fund) and distributed yesterday to attendees of Grover Norquist’s weekly meeting. The theme here: everybody does it!

The next time Democrats or reporters (or both) question Majority Leader Tom DeLay over ethics-related issues, his allies will be ready to defend him.

They have talking points and a simple message: Democrats do it, too, whether “it” is relatives on the political payroll or questionably financed foreign travel.

“I just wanted to say, here’s the big picture and lay out the volume of travel and show that it is common and bipartisan,” said Barbara Comstock, author of two lengthy memos that have been distributed to House Republicans and their conservative allies. “It’s kind of like Paul Harvey . . . and here’s the rest of the story.”

…

One of the Comstock memos lays out names, dates and amounts of money that family members of Democrats earned from the payrolls of campaign committees, including the the daughter of Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; the sister of Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia; the wife of Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan; the wife of Rep. Pete Stark of California; and both the wife and wife’s graphics company of Gene Taylor of Mississippi.

Those Democrats all said having family on political payrolls was done by the books.

Comstock’s travel memo points out that every year hundreds of members on both sides of the aisle take trips paid for by private entities. Democrats, the memo says, have taken 600 more trips than Republicans in the past few years and the five most frequent fliers are Democrats.

This is something Matt has touched on before: if “everybody’s rotten” becomes the GOP’s go-to defense, Democrats will have reason to be pleased, not only because they stand to win out in any serious investigation into these kinds of ethics questions, but also because a pervasive public mood of generalized hostility to Congress -- leading to a “throw the bums out” atmosphere in the midterm elections -- will inevitably redound to the benefit of the party out of power. Newt Gingrich knew there would be a good number of Republican casualties from the check-kiting scandal he drummed up virtually out of nothing in 1992; he knew it was worth it. So should Democrats.

On a completely different note, the CQ piece ends with this priceless quote from Norquist responding to a question about his buddy Jack Abramoff’s legal troubles:

Norquist described himself as a friend of Abramoff and said he had not read about the dealings with the tribes. “I don’t know enough about this case to comment on it,” he said.

Sorry -- Abramoff, you said? And Indian casinos? Nope, haven’t heard about any of that. Has it been in the papers or something?

--Sam Rosenfeld

SOMEBODY STOP STENY HOYER. I've just seen a press release from House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer that makes me want to scream. The ostensible idea is to use tomorrow, tax deadline day, as a good opportunity to talk about tax reform. Good plan. But rather than tout any of the various progressive tax-reform proposals out there, he says:

The President's appointment of the bipartisan Federal Tax Advisory Panel was an important step in the effort to reform and simplify our tax laws. Democrats in Congress are committed to tax reform that makes our system fairer, simpler and more efficient.  I urge the President to personally engage on this issue, and demonstrate a willingness to expend political capital on it.  Without his leadership, tax reform and simplification will not happen.

This is madness. The FTAP was handpicked by the president and is going to deliver the verdict that "tax reform" and "simplification" mean an endless parade of new tax shelters for wealthy individuals and large corporations. Everybody knows this. The "bipartisan" element element on the commission is being provided by former Senator John Breaux, a man whose views on this subject are in no way representative of those of the Democratic Party. I'm glad that Hoyer, unlike the bulk of his colleagues, at least realizes that Bush appointed this commission. But the commission is the enemy. It needs to be destroyed and discredited. Democrats cannot -- and must not -- be in the position of giving its recommendations bipartisan legitimacy. And they can't be ceding the initiative to the president. There are lots of smart, progressive tax policy people out there. Many of them are working on reform ideas or have released such ideas recently. Talk to -- and about -- them. Forget the president and forget Senator Breaux.

--Matthew Yglesias

JOHN KERRY: STILL PLUGGING AWAY. He may not have become president, but yesterday John Kerry nonetheless got to see a couple of campaign promises turned into legislation that is going to pass the Republican-controlled Senate. Two provisions sponsored by Kerry were adopted as amendments to the defense supplemental bill.

One amendment dealt with the increase in military survivor benefits from $12,420 plus insurance to $500,000, through a mix of benefits and insurance. The administration had proposed limiting a $100,000 death gratuity portion -- talk about awful Orwellian phrases -- to those who died in a designated combat zone, while Kerry's amendment allows the increased death gratuity to be claimed by survivors of any member killed on active duty, regardless of location. The other amendment allows military families to remain in military housing for up to a year after the loss of a servicemember, so that children can finish school years in one community, instead of the present 180 days.

Worth recalling is that the White House embrace of the massively expanded death benefit -- based on a formula developed in late 2004 by Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and David S. C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and later introduced as a seperate bill co-sponsored by Joe Lieberman -- comes nearly a year after Kerry proposed such an increase, and two years after "the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary -- including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty," according to a bitter 2003 Army Times article, "Nothing but lip service." Several other senators also proposed death benefit increases as the 109th Congress got underway.

In March 2004, Kerry first proposed his Military Family Bill of Rights, from which the two provisions added to the defense supplemental bill are derived, in a speech at George Washington University, saying:

[A]s President, I will sign legislation to provide for those families who suffer a loss in war and to protect the livelihood of reservists who are called up and have to leave their jobs. This legislation will include $250,000 on top of their present life insurance policies for all service members who die in the line of duty....

[T]he Military Family Bill of Rights will allow the spouses and children of those killed in action to remain in military housing for up to a year after the loss of a loved one. It will offer help to move on to a new life. It will provide one year of pay to military dependents of soldiers killed in action. It will make permanent increases in family separation allowances, and permanent guarantees of reservist access to military healthcare. For reservists who are called up, it will also permit penalty free withdrawals from their IRAS to cover the unexpected expenses of lengthy activations and deployments.

Some of the provisions Kerry backed were adopted by Congress last year, and in January 2005 Kerry announced, to little notice, efforts to get the rest of them enacted. They are:

Allow Americans to donate to military relief charities on their income tax forms, similar to the current earmark that can be made to public financing of elections;

Allow surviving widows and children to remain in military housing for up to 365 days, rather than the current 180 days;

Increase the death benefit to the families of troops who die in action to $250,000. Doing so, when combined with the $250,000 insurance policy already carried by service members brings total compensation to $500,000;

Allow penalty-free withdrawals from Individual Retirement Accounts for expenses associated with deployments;

Extend TRICARE eligibility to all members of the National Guard and Reserves, whether mobilized or not;

Provide COBRA eligibility to Reservists who prefer to keep their families covered with private health insurance;

Expand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder programs in the Department of Veterans Affairs;

Establish economic injury disaster grants for small businesses that employ Reservists;

Empower the Small Business Administration to help Reservist-owned small businesses prepare for potential mobilizations; and

Create Veteran Entrepreneurship Loans to help veterans start new businesses.

On Feb. 15, 2005, Kerry introduced S. 460, the "Strengthening America's Armed Forces and Military Family Bill of Rights Act," which was referred to the Finance Committee, to cover all these provisions and increase the size of the military. Several similar proposals are also circulating in Congress, according to the Associated Press.

The amendments adopted yesterday will mean a great deal to those they touch and obviate the need for additional later legislation expanding the locales eligible for the increased death benefits. They also sit well within the broader context of Democratic regrouping on national-security issues. Yesterday, the Security & Peace Institute and the Marttila Communications Group released results of a 1,600-person poll on "American Attitudes toward National Security, Foreign Policy, and the War on Terror" that found 66 percent of respondents -- including 92 percent of Republicans -- trusted the Republican Party more than the Democratic one when it comes to maintaining a strong military. Similarly, 58 percent thought the Republicans better suited to modernizing the military for the 21st century. This is a stunning gap in trust that will take a great deal to overcome. One way for Democrats to show Americans that they support a strong military is for them to do what Kerry is doing, which is to keep enacting actual changes that affect the lives of real people, even when the spotlight is off.

More importantly, this is the right thing to be doing and seems like the one issue area where Democratic pressure and leadership can and does have a powerful positive impact, resulting in changes everyone can agree on in a bi-partisan fashion, even within the Republican-controlled Congress. There's little question that the conflict over who best supported the troops during campaign 2004 and the pressure Kerry and others put on Bush brought the adminstration back from the brink and pushed it to reverse course on several issues of importance to troops. Thanks in part to campaign-season controversy, increasing the military death benefit similarly became a high priority for Republicans this year. There are a lot of areas, such as Social Security reform, where Democrats feel they can't make proposals in the present environment of extreme partisan distrust, because the resulting legislation will be so distorted as to be unrecognizable. Conveniently for the Democrats, doing right by America's veterans and military families looks like the one area where that worry doesn't pertain.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MUDDIED WATERS. Paying his wife and daughter out of PAC funds is, frankly, the least of Tom DeLay's problems, but this LA Times effort to muddy the waters by noting that lots of representatives in both parties put family members on the payroll isn't very helpful:

"I need a campaign manager I can trust," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), whose wife, Rhonda, is now paid $40,000 a year to run his campaign. Over the last four years, she has received $114,894, records show.

DeLay, a Texas Republican, has defended the payments to his wife, Christine, and his daughter, Danielle DeLay Ferro, saying his family members provided valuable service to his campaign. They received $473,801 over the last two election cycles, records show.

His daughter has managed some of his recent congressional campaigns and has worked as a fundraiser for his political action committee, and his wife provides "strategic guidance" for the political action committee.

There's a pretty clear distinction here between Rhonda Rohrabacher getting paid a non-extraordinary sum of money to perform the genuine job of campaign manager and what Christine DeLay seems to be into, which is getting a very large sum of money to perform an ill-defined task. On the one hand, you've got some harmless nepotism -- hiring family members to do jobs for you. On the other hand, you've got a pretty transparent effort to take bribes. If I'm a member of Congress and ACME Corp. wants to put some money in my pocket, that's illegal. But they can donate the money to my PAC, and my PAC can give it to my wife for her work providing "strategic guidance," and my wife can deposit it in our joint checking account.

I don't think the problem there is genuinely unclear to anybody. It's probably not possible to create a legal rule to prevent option two that wouldn't also seriously restrict the more harmless option one, and which way to go on that is a bit of a hard call. But it's not at all difficult to draw an ethical distinction between a person who's hiring his spouse and a person who's using his spouse as a tool for laundering bribes.

--Matthew Yglesias

BROOKS THE HACK. From David Brooks today we get a shining example of the kind of disjointed arguments that flow forth when an erstwhile reasonable person rises to defend the extremism of John Bolton.

First, Brooks dabbles with conspiracy theory as he theorizes the genesis of the International Criminal Court. The way he would have it, the ICC is the manifestation of a wacky world federalist ideology, and is part of an insidious plot to ever expand global governance. That sort of conspiracy-mongering might sit well with those of Bolton’s embattled nationalistic proclivities, but the fact is that the ICC’s genesis was the result of the practical need for a permanent body to replace the expensive, experimental UN– and U.S.–supported ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

As it happened, these bodies breathed new life into the narrow subset of international law that deals with the laws of war and war crimes prosecutions, and this is now enshrined in the ICC’s charter.

But today, Brooks the Hack is channeling Bolton. Thus he feels compelled to push back against a European-style transnationalism that threatens to undermine the very fabric of American democracy.

We will never accept global governance … because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.

Of course, there is absolutely zero chance that the Rome Statute that serves as the ICC’s charter will ever replace the U.S. Constitution. This is the sort of alarmist canard that hackish journalists feed as slop to the Black Helicopter crowd.

Further, I’m fairly certain that Brooks has read the Constitution, but if I’m not so sure he’s read the Rome Statute (PDF). If he had, he’d realize that the authortity granted to the ICC is quite narrow and serves only the single, practical purpose of trying war criminals. Conversly, the U.S. Constitution sets forth broad strictures on the function and structure of the American government and legal system. But the Constitution did not, for example, play a huge role in forming the opinions of Department of Defense legal advisors as they worked with Iraqis to set up the Iraqi Special Tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein and his cronies. The ICC, however, apparently did. If you place the charter of the ICC side-by-side with the charter of the Iraqi Special Tribunal you'll find that the portions of the two documents that deal with the kinds of crimes that both are competent to judge are nearly identical.

Of course, don't expect David Brooks to point any of this out. For today he's got a job to do -- and it rhymes with daiquiri.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

REPUBLICANS REGROUPING. After yet another little period in which Social Security privatization was looking good and dead, the privateers seem to be preparing for a new assault. Josh Marshall notes new thinking that the House Republicans should press ahead with privatization, abandoning the old "Senate first" strategy and the fear of getting BTUed. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum assures National Review readers that "The GOP won’t drop individual accounts for Social Security."

What's interesting here is that as privatization keeps running into brick walls, the momentum has shifted away from the swing conservatives and toward the extremists. Santorum is now promising that privatization will allow workers to avoid "massive tax increases, painful benefit cuts, or both." That means goodbye to the White House pseudo-proposal and hello to the Ryan-Sununu "plan" to "fix" Social Security by borrowing on an unprecedented scale. Tom DeLay, interestingly enough, used to be the voice of reason and caution on the Social Security front within the GOP elite. But now that he's taking fire, he's become a prisoner of the Ultras on whose blind loyalty he's relying to stay in power. The Washington Times reports that he's now on board for the free lunch strategy.

I'm dubious that the votes exist to pass this through the House, and quite certain there's no majority for it in the Senate. The interesting question, at this point, is when the center-right "pain caucus" that dominates conventional wisdom inside the Beltway will wake up to what's going on here. This crowd has long supported privatization on ill-defined fiscal probity grounds. The drive is now being led by people who care nothing for such probity and will, in fact, make the budgetary situation far, far, far worse. Where's The Washington Post on this? Tim Russert?

--Matthew Yglesias

DELAYISM. For a good sense of what DeLayism means in the context of one lawmaker’s rise to power and what kind of legislation it reaps, read The Washington Post’s profile of Texas congressman Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and all-around lobbyist-friendly sleazeball. For an even better, and infinitely more dispiriting, sense of DeLayism in action, read The Hill’s account of Democrat Joe Crowley’s marshalling of lobbyists to help whip Democrats in support of the bankruptcy bill:

Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) summoned Democratic lobbyists to the Capitol for a meeting last week and then dispatched them to solidify pro-business Democratic support for the bankruptcy reform bill, adopting a practice regularly used by the Republican majority and its business allies on K Street.

Lobbyists at last week’s meeting said they were pleased that a House Democrat was taking the initiative to deputize them as off-campus whips and expressed hope that their joint effort on the bankruptcy bill would become a blueprint for future coordination between Democratic leaders and lobbyists.

As part of his regular outreach to interest groups, but not in his official capacity as a chief deputy whip, Crowley asked the lobbyists to help drive up the final Democratic tally to signal to the financial-services community — in New York and on K Street — that House Democrats are not averse to promoting a responsible business agenda.

…

While Democratic whipping efforts often coordinate with outside interests, several lobbyists said that the bankruptcy push was more coordinated than ever before and that it resembled Republican efforts.

I know fundraising matters and that Democrats take business support where they can find it, but this sure seems like a fool’s game to me. The fact that the Republican Party’s ideological agenda lines up with industry interests nine times out of ten anyway is integral to DeLay and co.’s K Street strategy, so as far-reaching a marriage as possible between the Republican majority and K Street will both feed on and perpetuate GOP dominance. There’s perfect logic to that thinking, and "moderate" Democrats are kidding themselves to think that they can compete in the same game. Or, at least I hope they’re wrong. It would be worse if they weren’t.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, HARRY? Reports have it that Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin announced at the still-ongoing Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that they would allow a vote on Thomas Griffith, he of the suspended bar license. This could mean one of many things:

• Democrats think that Republicans have or nearly have the votes for the nuclear option, and that easing up on some nominees will pull wavering Republicans back from the line.
• Republicans can't get the votes for the nuclear option, and see confirming nominees as more productive than continuing a logjam. See Paul Crotty, confirmed on Monday, for more evidence.
• Democrats can't stay united on Griffith, who has a reputation for integrity from his time as Senate legal counsel during Bill Clinton's impeachment.
• Democrats arranged a deal: Griffith for ... what?

Options one and four seem the most likely, with a healthy does of option three in either case. I've always thought that the six magic words practiced law illegally for six years made him the perfect nominee to highlight in the context of the "rule of law"/"absolute power" message the Dems prefer, but that can also be interpreted as an honest mistake. I worry that allowing a nominee whose problems center mostly on ethical lapses, while holding the line on prominently anti-abortion nominees like Bill Pryor, will make it easier for the Dems to be painted as anti-Christian, but that might be a secondary concern at this point.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MORE ON THE GANNON HOAX. They searched and they searched, but the EPluribus Media team at Daily Kos found no record that Jeff Gannon/James Guckert ever served in the military. After a Freedom of Information Act request failed to turn up any service record, a hand search was conducted at the Personnel Management Support Branch located at Marine Corps Base Quantico (MCBQ).

The hand search was conducted by Quantico staff member Delores Smith, who accessed computerized records from 1995-2005 and an additional 15 years' worth of archived microfiche files dating back to 1980, the year Guckert graduated from college. (He graduated from high school in 1975.)

The searches at Quantico were conducted by Social Security number, as well as by birth date and last name, with no hits on any combination of the criteria in either the computerized or microfiche records.

At the completion of the search, Smith stated that Guckert had never served in the United States Marine Corps.

The man is quite literally unbelievable. Now can people stop inviting him to panel discussions?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BUM RAP. The House sources talking to Jason Spitalnick of the TPM Bankruptcy blog fed him misinformation, and Spitalnick is giving the House Republican leadership a bum rap. Today’s floor debate on the bankruptcy bill will not be only 30 minutes long, as he claimed last night. As the Democratic whip office informs me via its daily email:

The Rules Committee has recommended a Closed Rule that allows one hour of general debate and blocks all Democratic amendments submitted to the Rules Committee.

See? A generous whole hour for debate, and no amendments allowed. Who says the House Republicans are autocratic? (Another closed rule data point to add to the graph.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

TARGET RICH. This New York Observer piece reports on New York Dems’ intentions to use the Tom DeLay scandals as a stick with which to bludgeon the moderate Republican congressmen in the state, whose ranks have been dwindling for years anyway. I was completely unaware that Tom Reynolds, chair of the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) and a guy with a lot of clout in Congress, won his race with only 55 percent of the vote in his Buffalo district in 2004. That doesn’t put his reelection prospects in any kind of extreme danger zone, but it's a close enough race to warrant some Democratic attention in 2006 -- particularly because, as head of the NRCC, Reynolds is not going to be in any position to voice Chris Shays-style “courageous” criticisms of the majority leader. It’ll be a bit hard for him to distance himself from DeLay when he’s also charged with the task of getting DeLay reelected (assuming the Hammer survives until then).

The Dems may want to think hard about candidate recruitment this time around, though. Reynolds’ opponent last fall was a self-financed local businessman who, judging strictly by this article, leaves perhaps a bit to be desired. Maybe I was just turned off by his use of the term “butt boy.”

--Sam Rosenfeld

NEVER SAY NEVER. As usual, there are various things one could take issue with in the latest David Brooks column, but I'll just pick the assertion that Americans "will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents." Now since treaties have the force of law, in a sense all international agreements overrule our own laws, regulations, and precedents. Less tendentiously, trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO have set up transnational arbitration mechanisms that are empowered, on certain issues, to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. In other words, this thing that we'll allegedly "never allow" is something we have, in fact, already allowed. NATO's Article V guarantee that we will regard on attack on, say, Denmark as an attack on the United States also de facto overrides Congress' power to declare war, though the document uses some ambiguous wording to get around the constitutional problems here.

--Matthew Yglesias

PLEASE DON'T EMERGE. Somebody convinced Ben "Nellie/Benny/Benator/Hunter" Nelson that he has an "emerging role" on resolving the judicial nominees confrontation. Somebody else better unconvince him, fast. Like the Carpetbagger Report said, this is the worst sort of "bipartisanship": Democrats give up the store, the stock, and the contents of the cash register, and receive not a thing in return. This isn't even the "statesmanship" Matt has railed against on Social Security, whereby "principled" Democrats put forth a reasonable proposal that gives cover to an unrelated, disastrous Republican initiative; this would just give Republicans every nominee who can attract 51 votes, the same as would nuking the filibuster. It was no surprise when Zell Miller held this branch out last year, but what's Nelson's excuse? This sort of diplomacy makes John Breaux look like a master tactician in contrast.

Meanwhile, keep your eye on tomorrow's Judiciary Committee hearing. Multiple people closer to the nominations battle than I have told me that if you see a whole bunch of nominees stack up for committee votes, you'll know trouble's brewing. I would say that six nominees qualifies as trouble. Then again, they scheduled and canceled the same hearing last week, so who knows what's going on. But combined with the announcement of a major p.r. effort and Bill Frist's sudden attempt to seem like a moderate, deliberative majority leader, this has the makings of a do-or-die few weeks.

And I can't say enough: Look at the people they're putting up as potential judges. Thomas Griffith has been practicing law illegally for six years. Terrence Boyle can't get the law straight. Janice Rogers Brown thinks FDR was a socialist. They want absolute discretion to give these people lifetime appointments to make life-or-death decisions? Russ Feingold is absolutely right to demand answers on whether or not William Myers perjured himself in his hearing testimony. These clearly disqualifying factors simply cannot go unmentioned.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE RUTHLESS AND THE PATHETIC. Subscription-only Congressional Quarterly has a little article that nicely captures the combination of autocratic control and abject intellectual bankruptcy and cowardice that characterizes the modern Republican Congress. The ostensible deadline for passing a fiscal year 2006 budget resolution is Friday, and Senate and House conferees haven’t even been named. What’s keeping the House?

Not only will Congress breach the April 15 deadline for completing the fiscal 2006 budget, but House Republican leaders are not naming their negotiating team for fear that a prolonged stalemate might allow Democrats to force a series of politically difficult votes.

After chiding their Senate counterparts for losing a floor vote on cuts to Medicaid last month, House Republican leaders would be in serious danger of losing a symbolic vote on Medicaid after conferees are appointed.

Democrats could offer motions to instruct conferees — non-binding efforts to express the will of the House to its negotiators — on varied topics, including Medicaid.

But House Republicans already voted for the Medicaid cuts. Why then, you ask, is there fear that a large number of Republicans would vote against the cuts in a non-binding motion? Well, Republican (and Democratic) dissent on the matter hadn’t exactly been allowed to surface in the two days during which the House “debated” the budget resolution a few weeks ago:

Any motion the Democrats offered would be designed to attract support from Republicans who agree with them on the issue but did not have the opportunity, because of leadership-written rules, to offer floor amendments to the budget on favored issues.

For example, Rep. Heather A. Wilson, R-N.M., has nearly three dozen Republican signatures on a letter to Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, urging him to abandon planned Medicaid cuts and instead instruct the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which Wilson is a member, to establish a Medicaid commission.

To prevent politically treacherous votes on motions to instruct conferees, Republican leaders do not plan to name conferees until budget writers near a deal. [emphasis added]

The House leadership’s strongarming antics are an easy target and a perennial one, but no one should be rushing to praise Heather Wilson and her merry band of beleaguered Republican Medicaid saviors. These people are centrally implicated in the budget crisis that is the ostensible rationale for the Medicaid cuts they apparently don’t have the nerve to sign off on. As we speak, Wilson is voting for the permanent repeal of the estate tax. Where, if not even in relatively small cuts to the most politically vulnerable mandatory spending program, does Wilson expect to find a way to make up for the hundreds of billions of dollars that tax cut will quickly rip out of the budget after 2010? We discussed Wilson’s Senate counterparts in weaseltude a few weeks back; people who lack even the courage of their own party’s sinister starve-the-beast convictions do not warrant praise.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROGRESSIVE TAX REFORM, TAKE TWO. Via Max Sawicky, a PPI/DLC proposal for progressive tax reform. It's much less ambitious than the Center for American Progress' approach to the same subject, focused on consolidating and improving the tax credit system, but modest ambitions have their merits. Under the realities of the current political situation, any proposals for reform are little more than pipe dreams anyway, so disputes about the tactical benefits of going big or going small can probably be delayed. The key thing is that unless some Democrats pick up these batons and run with them, it will do little good. Branding the Democrats as the party of tax reform before John Breaux stabs them in the back is going to be vital for winning the debates of 2006 and beyond.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JUSTICE SUNDAY. If you thought the radical-right judge-bashers were done after Friday, think again. Rob Garver looks at the next phase of their crusade. When the other side likens itself to the Swift Boat Vets, you know there's trouble brewing...

--Jeffrey Dubner

BIZARRO POLITICS. What to say about permanent estate-tax repeal, currently being debated on the House floor? We’re in Twilight Zone territory when it comes to this policy debate. (Witness the Democrats' sterling alternative proposal, which would eventually limit the cap on exemptions to estates worth up to $3.5 million. Such a piece of extremist, class-warfare, soak-the-rich populist demagoguery, of course, stands no chance of passing.) I haven’t yet read the much-talked-about new book chronicling the decade-spanning fight to repeal the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts, but this 2004 Prospect article by Larry Bartels captures nicely the nearly inexplicable public-opinion dynamics relating to the policy. Meanwhile, take a look at this short new CBPP report showing, among other things, that a permanent repeal would cost the treasury a cool trillion bucks between fiscal year 2012 and 2021.

Small solace might be taken in the fact that there may not be the votes for this to pass in the Senate anytime soon. Jon Kyl is the Senate’s leading advocate of the repeal, while Kent Conrad is by most accounts the Democrat who will likely take the lead in forging some kind of compromise if such an endeavor seems potentially fruitful. Here’s hoping for stalemate.

--Sam Rosenfeld

"BUT I VOTED AGAINST THE FARM BILL!" Building on Sam's point, "where do you stand on Tom DeLay?" is the wrong question to be asking Chris Shays' cohorts in the ranks of blue-district representatives. Instead, the question Shays and anyone else trying to distance themselves from their party's fearless leader needs to answer is "what are you doing about it?" Shays and Shays-style moderates aren't a majority in the Republican caucus and never will be. Are they issuing ultimata to their more conservative, safe-district colleagues? Are they considering bolting the party? Could a united Democratic caucus and a rump element of Republican moderates form a majority to reorganize the House? Speaker Shays and Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel?

Well, obviously, they're not doing any of that, and I doubt they ever will (though I'll be happy to be proven wrong). If I'm right, the only thing to be done about it is to vote them out of office. For better or for worse it's Shays and co. who can be beaten in November 2006; liberals shouldn't be getting in the business of offering them cover. And good riddance. Here's Daniel Gross's memorable take on the gentleman from Connecticut:

The day before the election, I saw my congressman, Republican Chris Shays of Connecticut, greeting potential voters on Platform 19 at Grand Central Station, the launching point for the 5:01 to New Haven, the Bushenfreude express. When I thanked him for cutting my taxes, Shays smiled broadly. But when I suggested that he had raised taxes on my children, he looked at me quizzically. "You have to know all these tax cuts aren't really tax cuts. They're just tax shifts," I said. "All this debt has to be paid back."

Shays acknowledged that there had been a massive increase in debt. "But 40 percent of that is due to spending." That was the moment I realized my sober, moderate representative may have slipped the surly bonds of reality. Like virtually every other Republican in Congress, Shays had voted for each of Bush's revenue-reducing tax cuts and every spending-increasing budget. And yet he seemed blissfully, willfully unaware of the role he—and his party—played in controlling, originating, and approving all that spending. "And did you vote for the Medicare bill?" I asked. "I did," he smiled. As I scurried off to get a seat before the doors closed, I heard a plaintive cry from one of the last remaining Republican moderates in Congress: "But I voted against the farm bill!"

That's pathetic, and stacked up next to it a few junkets or even perpetrating a massive scam on wannabe casino-hosting Indian tribes is small beans. Insofar as House Republicans may not have lined their pockets personally when they tossed conservative principles aside to vote for the lobbyist-written Medicare bill, that just shows they're unimaginative, not honest.

But he voted against the farm bill? Please. No mercy.

--Matthew Yglesias

LEARNING FROM THE MAN. The House majority leader may have some valuable civics lessons to impart onto younger visitors to his Web site, but he also might have a thing or two to teach the shadowy left Syndicate that's currently trying to take him down.

Common Cause's blog offers three highly amusing quotes of Tom DeLay ruminating on ethics reform in the House during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Read them and savor the delicious irony, but then pay some close attention to the argument DeLay makes in one of his remarks, from April 1992:

Now, the House needs new management, and that is Republican management. In my opinion, it will not do any good to get rid of the present Speaker or the present leadership, because what will happen is more will come in and it is the arrogance of power that we are talking about here. What is going on here is arrogance of power. We need a change in management...

The Democrats could offer us another candidate, but it just will not change the system. Only when the public and Republican pressure becomes so great does the Democrat leadership act. We need new leadership which will act because it is right, not because they have been caught in coverups and scandals.

The real problem is not any individual House leader but rather the present system itself, put in place by the party in charge -- hmm, does that sound like an argument that certain activist organizations and liberal critics mobilizing anti-DeLay sentiment still need to take to heart? Good-government outfits may need to take an approach that's less holistically anti-Republican, but what, with all due respect, is Josh Marshall's excuse? He seems to be gearing up a Social Security-style whip operation on the question of where House Republicans "stand" on DeLay, but what point is there to such an endeavor? This isn't a serious policy battle. A congressman's decision to go off the reservation on DeLay doesn't signal a victory for liberals or for the good fight; it just signals rank opportunism and cowardice on the part of that congressman. What is supposed to be the upshot of liberals helping to prompt moderate Republicans (who are every bit as implicated in the era of DeLayism as anyone else) to break ranks with the majority leader at this late date?

--Sam Rosenfeld

SWEET, SWEET DATA. Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy's posted a chart plotting the "publicness" of a nation's health care system (i.e., what proportion of health care dollars are spent by the state) versus its overall per capita cost. It shows pretty clearly that more public systems are cheaper systems overall. This seems like a good occassion to revisit an old Tapped post of mine which looked at the OECD data and revealed that even America's largely private system costs the government more per capita than do the Swedish, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. systems. America's health care system is so inefficient that only the outlier cases of Iceland and Norway wind up paying more in taxes for their health care than we do.

And that, of course, is just the direct cost in taxes. As Kieran's post showed, the difference in overall cost is just enormous. And on top of that you've got to consider the permanent drain on the economy created by an employer-based health care system that reduces labor flexibility and a tax code that distorts spending and compensation priorities in favor of ever-greater health care spending.

--Matthew Yglesias

FRIENDS AGAIN. In an offline email exchange Amy Sullivan and I seem to have reached the conclusion that despite our debate on Democrats and the media (see here, here, here, and here) we're not really so far apart on substance. Ed Kilgore, who's written on this before and who I sort of dragged into the mix, offers a fuller elaboration of his views and, again, when you get down to brass tacks there's not an enormous realm of disagreement:

[W]e think entertainment corporations, and anyone who directly markets products to children, should admit some social responsibility, and work with public officials to (a) develop, to the maximum extent possible, parental information and control mechanisms, like a unified rating system for television shows, video games, and movies, and like technologies that are more effective and user-friendly than the V-Chip; (b) create a "zone of protection" for really young kids by eschewing direct and indirect (i.e., television and internet) marketing techniques aimed at children too young to distinguish truth from hype and crap; and (c) provide some transparency about the most egregious of those marketing techniques, such as the practice of hiring "alpha kids" to wear brand name products to influence their peers.

That all strikes me as reasonable, though I do have some skepticism that this stuff, especially proposal (a), is a genuinely (as opposed to politically) important issue. The Kaiser Family Foundation's recent study on media consumption generally failed to find any alarming trends in media consumption or any evidence that high levels of media consumption are problematic, even though Kaiser's press people chose to hype the findings in an alarmist way. More to the point, it found that simply laying down rules about media consumption -- even without a V-chip, even without parental enforcement of the rules at all -- effectuates a pretty large drop in consumption. But if parents want more help in this regard, who am I to deny them? Parents have plenty of problems.

All of which seems like an excellent opportunity to once again plug my pet cause: à la carte cable pricing. This is cruder than the V-chip in that you're only blocking whole channels at a time rather than individual shows. But by the same token it's simpler to implement, and in an era of massive choice and narrowcasting, picking and choosing channel-by-channel can be pretty effective. Plus, letting parents not only block, say, MTV if they don't want their kids watching it, but also not pay for a channel they don't like has an obvious appeal. Best of all, this is a measure that would help smut-friendly and smut-averse consumers, thus making everyone happy. The difficulty, though, is that a really good policy measure like this requires not the pseudo-bravery involved in hurting a few movie stars' feelings, but the real-life bravery to take measures that will hurt the financial interests of the well-heeled media conglomerates that increasingly control the regulatory agenda at the FCC and beyond.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN THE SERVICE OF NOTHING. For those of you keeping score, on day two of the John Bolton nomination hearings we heard from the boss of a State Department intelligence analyst who described the unhinged former undersecretary as a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.” Bolton, you see, tried to get an intelligence analyst fired for refusing to exaggerate the capabilities of Cuba’s biological weapons program.

To be sure, yesterday Bolton claimed that he only wanted the analyst moved to a different portfolio -- not fired. (Of course, that analyst was a long time biological weapons–capabilities expert, so reasonable people can assume what switching his portfolio actually meant.)

As Laura Rozen points out, this all points to a character flaw of Bolton’s that some of his apologists would consider a trait: namely that’s he’s a bully.

One could perhaps respect a bully if that bully was a bully in the cause of making the UN an institution that saved human life more effectively. Some might say Richard Holbrooke fits this model. But you can't respect a bully just because he's a bully. From Bolton's testimony yesterday about not having any particular interest in the UN intervening to stop genocide in Rwanda, even with the benefit of all that we know now that close to a million innocent people were slaughtered, it's clear Bolton's bullying is in no service to the good of making the UN save lives. His grandstanding has done nothing to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power. It's just asshole for the sake of being an asshole. It's in the service of nothing.

Well said.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

STILL WAITING FOR THE BEEF. Amy Sullivan responds to my post on Democrats and the politics of popular culture. I'm still waiting for the beef. Amy says I'm out of touch, which I unequestionably am. Amy says if Democrats talk the way I talk they'll need "to settle in for a looooong winter's night in the minority." I agree wholeheartedly. I'm like a walking stereotype of everything people hate about liberals. This fact, though, and just about everything else in Amy's post, seems to be all about politics. If you want to win elections, people need to think you're in touch with what they're worrying about. That means acknowledging their worries rhetorically and taking them seriously. Belittingly people or their worries is a great way to lose votes. Again, I agree.

But I return to the question, "where's the beef?" The anti-Hollywood faction is constantly raising this issue as if there were nothing to be said on my side of this debate other than "I'm hopeless in hock to movie stars' fundraising abilities." But it's the folks on Amy's side who seem to me to be playing a cynical political game here. I'm trying to raise some questions about policy and reality. I understand that parents always worry about their kids -- it would be quite literally unnatural for them not to. Nevertheless, what I wrote yesterday is still true. "Almost every major indicator of child well-being is getting better, not worse. The big exception is obesity, where the lobby to be taken on isn't Big Smut but Big Unhealthy Food." When Amy does get around to policy, I agree with her 100 percent:

We're also talking about the fact that parents are working more than ever before, and that's a major reason why they aren't around to monitor their kids. The fact that with our country's woefully inadequate child care system, the mere juggling of work and kid schedules is enough to drive the most resourceful parent insane.

That's great. I think better child care is desperately needed. I think the Democratic Party's neglect of work/family issues is insane and unconscionable and that if liberalism has any future it's in tackling these issues. But -- and this is crucially important -- going all Joe Lieberman and ranting and raving about how video game companies are destroying the soul of America's youth does not constitute addressing the problem. If you need to pretend you think Grand Theft Auto is a major social problem in order to get people to support actual solutions to actual major social problems arising from the intersection of feminism and capitalism, so much the better. But I worry that obsessing about Friends does the reverse: It's a convenient ploy to distract attention from the actual structural economic forces at work. So if our disagreement is really just about political tactics, let's have the disagreement on those terms without castigating the less-cynical side as composed of insidious "cultural elites." If Amy really thinks there is something government ought to do on the merits to curb popular culture, then I'd like to hear what, exactly, it is.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND INTEREST-GROUP LIBERALISM. Michael Singer at Democracy Arsenal says:

The DNC and our party elders (Bill Clinton?) need to negotiate with the powerful Democratic interest groups to ignore their navels for a moment and get on board with a democratization vision, in broad-brush outline, because the stakes are just too high to do otherwise.  It won't be easy--but then politics never is.

Needless to say, I agree, and the problem goes beyond security as such. Recapturing political power for liberalism means developing a capacity to address broad concerns that may not do a great deal to advance the agenda of any particular already-extant constituency group. To be fair to the groups in question, I think people understand this pretty well. Nobody's agenda is going to move forward under the current political climate, and altering that climate will require a politics that goes beyond the agenda of any particular group.

Nevertheless, addressing these cooperation problems presents a strategic problem because you need to worry that other groups will free-ride while you're busy trying to cooperate. That's where leadership comes in. An effective leadership cadre can create the sort of environment where people feel confident in their ability to work together without fear of getting stabbed in the back. I'm a bit skeptical that the DNC is really the best forum for the exercise of such leadership, which I think is more likely to come from the congressional leadership offices and campaign committees, but it certainly needs to come from somewhere. In a negative sense, I think we've seen a great deal of progress on efforts to address Social Security privatization and the nuclear option in this sort of broad way, but I haven't seen it yet in terms of positive proposals.

--Matthew Yglesias

NEW NEWS FROM NEGROPONTE'S PAST Today's Washington Post has a piece that won't shock those who have followed John Negroponte's rise in the Bush administration. There's still not much information about Negroponte's time as ambassador to Iraq or the UN, but Michael Dobbs has more on that niggling little period in the middle of his long foreign-service career: his time as ambassador to Honduras between 1981 and 1984, and as the acting liasion to the Reagan administration's war on Communism. Just in time for Negroponte's confirmation hearing as national intelligence director, Dobbs has unearthed (via a Freedom of Information Act request) some key cables and telegrams, long secret, that implicate Negroponte:

The documents offer revealing glimpses into the personality, leadership style and political attitudes of the man President Bush selected to shake up U.S. intelligence in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Negroponte's determination to reverse the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua occasionally put him at odds with fellow envoys and with more cautious State Department bureaucrats.

"I have my doubts about a dinner at the residence for a man who is in the business of overthrowing a neighboring government," cabled U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton, after Negroponte played host to the political leader of the contra rebels, Adolfo Calero. Quainton made it clear that he was not a fan of Negroponte's "gastronomic diplomacy."

Overall, Negroponte comes across as an exceptionally energetic, action-oriented ambassador whose anti-communist convictions led him to play down human rights abuses in Honduras, the most reliable U.S. ally in the region. There is little in the documents the State Department has released so far to support his assertion that he used "quiet diplomacy" to persuade the Honduran authorities to investigate the most egregious violations, including the mysterious disappearance of dozens of government opponents.

The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Jack R. Binns, who was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1981 to make way for Negroponte, is striking. Before departing, Binns sent several cables to Washington warning of possible "death squad" activity linked to Honduran strongman Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Negroponte dismissed the talk of death squads and, in an October 1983 cable to Washington, emphasized Alvarez's "dedication to democracy."

Back in 2001, I spoke to Jack Binns, a Carter appointee. "I reported these abuses repeatedly," he told me then, "and urged that we take action to try and turn it around."

In one cable to Washington after Reagan took office, Binns warned that General Gustavo Alvarez, chief of the Honduran armed forces, was considering modeling Honduras's response to suspected subversives on the infamous "dirty war" waged by the Argentine military in the late '70s. "Alvarez stressed [the] theme that democracies and [the] West are soft, perhaps too soft to resist Communist subversion," wrote Binns. "The Argentines, he said, had met the threat effectively, identifying--and taking care of--the subversives.... When it comes to subversion, [Alvarez] would opt for tough, vigorous and Extra-Legal Action."

A few months and several urgent cables later, Binns was summoned to Washington to meet with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders, who told him to keep human rights violations out of his official reports and to restrict such information to undocumented back channels. "The rationale given to me by Enders," says Binns, "was that he was afraid this information would leak if it were reported in official channels and make it much more difficult to get funding from Congress."

Negroponte appeared untroubled by the human rights abuses that so bothered Binns. As the Post explains, "Negroponte's support for Alvarez remained unwavering until March 30, 1984, when fellow officers ousted Alvarez from office, accusing him of corruption and authoritarian tendencies." Negroponte, Dobbs explains, worked "hard to maintain the fiction that Honduras was not serving as the logistical base for as many as 15,000 anti-Sandinista rebels known as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, or FDN."

But eventually the press began to catch on. "As reports of U.S. covert support for the contra war swept Washington in 1982, Negroponte became a controversial symbol of Reagan administration policies. The ambassador kept a separate file documenting his efforts to combat the negative press coverage, and he fired off letters to editors and newspaper owners to complain about their correspondents' reporting."

--Sarah Wildman

DON'T LET THE GET AWAY. I continue to have concerns about the Democratic strategy surrounding the Tom DeLay matter. What, for example, is the DCCC doing trumpeting efforts by vulnerable Republicans to distance themselves from DeLay? They should be emphasizing everyone's ties with DeLay. Rick Santorum is just the Senate version of DeLay. And I'm totally unimpressed with Chris Shays's conversion to the anti-DeLay cause. Abandoning your friends when they get in hot water shows you're a coward, not a principled and independent thinker.

Near as I can tell, Shays had nothing but good things to say about DeLay when the bad deeds were going down. Switching sides once they came to light in public is a silly stunt, not something liberals should be highlighting. Do we really think GOP members of Congress had absolutely no idea what was going on? Didn't Shays vote for all the big pieces of pay-to-play legislation? At a minimum, folks who want to distance themselves from DeLay with cheap ex post facto talk should find it really, really, really hard to get that message out. Liberals have no business helping them. This isn't Social Security, where winning the policy battle is overwhelmingly important. It would be nice to get DeLay out of the House, but Majority Leader Roy Blunt is clearly a worse outcome than DeLay sitting in the Minority Leader's chair.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FAILURE BUSTER. Should liberals be attacking the filibuster more broadly than conservatives are? So says Matthew Yglesias, who argues that in the long run a filibuster-free world would advance progressive causes further than the present system.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHERE'S THE BEEF? Amy Sullivan and Dan Gerstein team up to offer a litany of complaints about Democrats and Hollywood that I've been hearing more and more lately. Roughly speaking, it boils down to this:

• We need to recognize that these concerns about the culture are legitimate.
• We need to stop accusing people of advocating censorship.
• Democrats take on non-media corporations, so why can't they take on major content-providers too?
• The Hollywood campaign contributions aren't worth it.

Okay, fine. From where I sit, though, I kind of resent the implication (well, okay, it's not just an implication, they come right out and say it) that the only reason one might have for disapproving of the New Prudishness is a cynical hunger for campaign contributions. Indeed, it seems to me that it's the liberals on the other side who are playing the pure cynicism game here. What, after all, is the policy problem that Amy, Gerstein, Ed Kilgore, Hillary Clinton et. al. are purporting to solve here? Almost every major indicator of child well-being is getting better, not worse. The big exception is obesity, where the lobby to be taken on isn't Big Smut but Big Unhealthy Food. It's simply not the case that Grand Theft Auto has sparked a youth crime wave, or Friends an uptick in teen motherhood, or whatever else it is people are worried about.

The analogy between Hollywood and Democratic willingness to "bash big business" on other topics is directly contrary to the "nobody's talking about censorship" line. Liberals don't "bash" businesses, we regulate them. Regulating the content of publishing and broadcasting is censorship. A while back Kilgore observed that "We rightly say HMOs and tobacco companies should be accountable for the pain they inflict on consumers. What about the giant, profit-seeking corporations of the entertainment industry?" Well, what about them? Do we think parents should be able to sue television for damages when they don't like their kids watching their programming? That sounds a lot like censorship. In another post Ed ridiculed the notion that "the utterances of Paris Hilton ... merit judicial protection." But they do! Say what you want about her, but she's entitled to her freedom of speech. Judicially protected freedom of speech.

But taking this crowd at their word and assuming they actually don't want to see censorship, what do they want? Feckless posturing a la Joe Lieberman, I suppose, where politicians will publicly denounce various shows, movies, or video games they find distasteful and then not do anything about it. That's better than censorship, and if it's really what the Democrats need to do to win elections I guess I'll live with it, but it's pretty silly. Does anybody really want to see America's elected officials operating as freelance cultural critics? Wouldn't that be a little silly? Aren't they bound to do a bad job of it? More to the point, such an effort would only be meaningful if the (implicit, at least) threat of censorship lurked in the background, just as the politicians of several generations ago convinced the comic book industry to start censoring itself by making it clear that if they didn't do it, Congress would. This isn't an improvement over actual censorship by any metric I can think of. Which would all be worth contemplating if there were a substantive problem this was supposed to be addressing, but it seems to be nothing more than a crass stunt.

--Matthew Yglesias

IT'S THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS, STUPID. Conservative defenders of embattled House Majority leader Tom DeLay say they plan to turn the tables on the Democrats and point out that they, too, have taken foreign trips. This strategy seems to be contingent on missing the central point about what's been driving the story about Tom DeLay. It's not "liberal bias" or concerns about junketeering; it's the criminal probes.

The major difference between the trips DeLay took and any taken by Democrats -- and there are surely plenty of Democratic trips -- is that DeLay's trips are intimately connected to the business dealings of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is the subject of Department of Justice and Department of the Interior investigations, as well as a federal grand jury probe into possible criminal activity. The ongoing investigations into Abramoff, a very close associate of DeLay's -- along with that of "a state grand jury in Texas that has indicted two of [DeLay's] chief political operatives, including the director of his political action committee, on charges of illegal fund-raising," according to The New York Times -- means that the DeLay ethics story will get pushed forward regardless of what journalists chose to investigate on their own, because the full investigative apparatus of the state is being brought to bear to expose dealings on the Republican side, even in the absence of a functioning House ethics committee. More than 30 F.B.I. agents have investigated Abramoff's activities as part of the work of the Justice Department's task force, along with agents from the Internal Revenue Service.

There is simply no equivalent on the Democratic side, no matter how many overseas junkets various Democrats might have gone on. Again: The issue here is not overseas junkets; it's overseas junkets arranged and financed through a lobbyist who is the subject of a criminal investigation and other probes, taken by a congressman whose operatives are themselves the subjects of criminal investigation.

Further, the lobbyist in question has worked assiduously to court a vast array of conservatives and enmesh their lives and livelihoods with his business interests. Indeed, I wonder if one reason so many conservatives are now rallying around DeLay and Abramoff is because so many of them also have ties to Abramoff's lobbying clients. Frank Foer documented just how widely Abramoff distributed his lobbying largesse in a 2001 story pegged to Abramoff associate Patrick Pizzella's nomination to be assistant secretary of labor for administration and management in the Bush adminstration.

Wrote Foer:

[T]he Senate's vote to impose U.S. immigration laws on the islands...finally made the [Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands] get serious about influencing Washington. In an effort to prevent the immigration bill from becoming law, the islands' government hired the law firm Preston Gates to lobby legislators in the House. More specifically, it hired the firm's top lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, a longtime right-winger who viewed the Marianas assignment as an ideological crusade. In an interview with The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin last year, he compared federal regulation of the CNMI to the Nazis' Nuremberg laws: "The[y] are immoral laws to destroy the economic lives of a people." In assembling his team for the Marianas account, Abramoff plucked conservative lobbyists from key congressional offices--two came directly from Tom DeLay's staff. He also picked Patrick Pizzella....

Much of Pizzella's coalition-building on behalf of the Marianas was typical Beltway networking. "He'd come to Grover Norquist's Wednesday meetings to hawk his goods," says one conservative. When CNMI officials came to Washington, Pizzella hosted dinners at downtown eateries like Sam & Harry's steakhouse, where they met with conservative activists. But Pizzella also deployed a device considerably more persuasive than filet mignon: the fully paid tropical junket.

Between 1996 and 1998, Pizzella brought Republicans on regular jaunts to the islands--I spoke to eleven he'd personally invited. By The Wall Street Journal's estimate, more than 100 representatives, congressional aides, and activists accepted Preston Gates's invitations. Nor was it just Hill dwellers. Pizzella specialized in courting conservative intellectuals and journalists. In 1997 he organized a trip that included Clint Bolick (of the Institute for Justice), John Fund (of The Wall Street Journal), Kellyanne Conway (a pollster), Ron Bailey (of Reason), and Marc Lampkin (then general counsel to the House Republican Conference), among others. As one think-tank denizen told me: "If you were a conservative intellectual and you didn't get invited, you just knew you weren't cool."

Pizzella's guests flew first-class, dined at fine restaurants, and stayed at the beachfront Hyatt Regency, where they spent evenings lounging at the hotel's bar. When DeLay visited the CNMI over New Year's Eve in 1998, he played two rounds of golf at the Lao Lao Bay course.

But Pizzella also made sure the junkets played to his vacationers' ideological predispositions. On the face of it, the Marianas development strategy wasn't necessarily one conservatives would cheer. Anti-Communists might have been upset to learn that some of the islands' garment manufacturers are indirectly owned by the Chinese government, which presumably uses the profits to fund its military. Social conservatives would have been troubled by anecdotes of coerced abortions. But Pizzella's tours were carefully calibrated. For libertarians, they emphasized the islands' lack of regulations. ("It is a perfect petri dish of capitalism," DeLay has proclaimed.) For social conservatives, they highlighted the islands' growing church population. Pizzella even arranged for Bolick, a staunch proponent of school choice, to meet government officials to discuss the CNMI's interest in school vouchers. As David Cahn, a former consultant to the Marianas, puts it, "Pat's very effective. Visitors to the island seemed to get all the right information."

There are several ways to measure the work Preston Gates did on the Marianas' behalf. For starters, consider the propaganda generated from just that one 1997 trip led by Pizzella. Bolick returned to defend the Marianas in editorials for Human Events and The Wall Street Journal. Bailey penned his fond observations of the island in The American Enterprise. And the Heritage Foundation's Mitchell, another junketeer, wrote in The Washington Times that "Washington politicians should cease their assault on Saipan." Another way would be to look at the firm's billing--more than $8 million for the CNMI account over five years--or its own explanation of what that money bought. In a memo to the Hong Kong textile mogul Willie Tan, intercepted by The Washington Post in 1998, Abramoff wrote that, "thanks to past trips," the CNMI had "many friends on the Appropriations Committees in the Congress." But perhaps the best way to measure Abramoff's and Pizzella's work on behalf of the Marianas is this: Despite all the reports of abuses, Congress hasn't passed a single piece of legislation to reform business practices there. (emphasis added)

Given that all the cool conservative intellectuals were invited to Saipan, and that Robert Novak is certainly a leading conservative voice, I'd be curious to know if Novak, who has today taken up the mantle of defending DeLay against the lefties at The New York Times, ever went on a Preston Gates junket overseas. Indeed, a complete list of movement conservatives who went on Preston Gates junkets would seem to be in order at this moment when so many conservatives are speaking out on DeLay's behalf.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BOLTON COVERAGE ROUNDUP. Today's hearing has overwhelmingly dealt with John Bolton's pressure on intelligence analysts, particularly Christian Westermann, discussed here last week. The Washington Post and The New York Times both emphasized this issue, and the lineup of witnesses scheduled for tomorrow promises more of the same.

But the hearings barely scratched the surface on Bolton's politicization of intelligence. Most glaringly, as Steve Clemons notes, no one asked Bolton about his role in the Niger-uranium fiasco. Aside from a single allusion by Joe Biden at around 4:40 p.m., Bolton's role in disseminating the uranium-from-Niger story wasn't mentioned. Also glossed over was Bolton's pressure on Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei -- he got away with a misleading statement, buried in mounds of evasion. (And that's before you get to his current IAEA tangling.)

Still, the hearing raised many issues that are distinct from the minutiae of Westermann, most importantly Lincoln Chafee's interesting line of questioning into Bolton's role in losing North Korea, particularly related to Jack Pritchard. I suspect we will hear much more about this in the near future.

The Associated Press chose to emphasize a different aspect of the hearing, specifically Bolton's "vow" in his opening statement to strengthen the UN. The conversion predictably left some people a bit skeptical, especially since he rationalized away his recent vitriol, rather than repudiated it.

Cutting straight to the core of the issue, Hesiod of American Street raises a question about Mr. Bolton's double life. Atrios and Nickisthebest discuss another important symbolic issue. Only slightly less serious, Bolton's champions have their rigorous arguments rebutted by Media Matters and Thinkprogress.org. For yet more, check out Armscontrolwonk.com's speculation on the identity of Mr. X, the undercover intelligence official that may testify tomorrow; Suzanne Nossel's defense of the administration against charges of foreign policy-schizophrenia ("If it were, that would suggest moderates had real influence"); and Salon's report that John Kerry has purchased advertisements in Rhode Island to pressure Sen. Chafee on Bolton.

--Dave Meyer

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MISLEADING.GOV. It doesn't say that HIV can be transmitted through tears, but it might as well. The new government-run sex-ed Web site is exactly the sort of misinformation you might expect from an administration that owes its survival to the religious right, as Chris Mooney details.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MORE FRUSTRATIONS. If you're interesting in the burgeoning social conservative discontent with the state of things, don't miss this First Things article alleging that the Bush administration has dropped the ball on moving the country toward an abortion ban. Fascinatingly, Bush stands condemned not only for his failure to achieve much on this front policy-wise, but also for his failure to engage in more pointless political stunts on the issue.

I've also just been reading Greenberg/Quinlan/Rosner's moronically titled new report, "OMG! How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era" (largely through a continuation of longstanding trends -- omg!), which says 63 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds favor a legal right to abortion, cutting against some claims I've heard that America's youth will turn the tide of public opinion against the pro-choice cause.

--Matthew Yglesias

MAN THE TORPEDOES. I’ve asked this before and it bears asking again: What, exactly, is the White House’s game plan on Social Security, given that public opinion and the political dynamics seem to be unbreakably opposed to privatization? If this Roll Call piece is even close to resembling some version of the truth, basic, commonly-held conceptions about how this president and his team approach legislative battles should probably be reexamined. Apparently the White House is looking to push a bill quickly through the Senate, then the House -- soon, and come hell or high water:

Republicans in Congress and the White House say they have nearly finished the first stage of their push to overhaul the Social Security system and will soon begin crafting a bill that could pass both chambers by the end of July.

Indeed, Bush administration officials and senior Republican Congressional staffers said they also are gearing up for the president to begin outlining more details on how he would like to structure his plan to provide private investment accounts under Social Security.

“It’s all going to be moving very fast,” said one Senate Republican leadership aide of the push for Social Security in the next few months.

…

“It’s very doable that we get a bill done this year,” said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who serves as Chief Deputy Majority Whip and sits on the Ways and Means Committee.

Indeed, the Senate Republican leadership aide noted that the White House has been frank with Congressional Republican leaders in saying that Bush has planned “no exit strategy” even if public opinion polls continue to show the president’s proposal sinking rapidly.

“No exit strategy,” says the White House -- points for consistency! Really, though, the implications of having no backpedaling contingency plan in this fight are actually quite mind-boggling. The current dynamics in Congress and in the polls -- dynamics that do not look to be changing anytime in the near future -- essentially guarantee that no Social Security bill will pass. It’s out of the question. Yet off they go, preparing to ram through a bill like it’s the 2001 tax package or the Medicare drug bill all over again. I especially love the Republican Senate aide explaining outright to Roll Call (on background) exactly how the party might bamboozle Senate Democrats into negotiations by making a false promise of ruling out private accounts. (It’s enough to give one flashbacks of how the White House approached “engagement” with the UN in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.):

As to whether Senate Republican leaders have expressed a willingness to abandon the president’s push for personal accounts, Republican aides acknowledged Friday that Senate leadership talks last week included the notion of trying to get Democrats to negotiate aspects of Social Security outside of private investment accounts. However, even if they convinced Democrats to begin negotiations, the topic of private accounts would never be off the table, aides said.

“If Republicans were to come up with a way to bring Democrats to the table on a bill that doesn’t necessarily have personal retirement accounts, we wouldn’t reject that because at least Democrats would be talking,” said the Senate Republican leadership aide.

However, the aide noted that any such bill would eventually have to incorporate private accounts before being brought to the Senate floor.

“Any permanent solution that passes should include personal retirement accounts,” the aide said.

Republicans seem to have come far enough along in their long-run transformation of Congress into a negotiation-free parliamentary system that they’ve lost a basic ability to engage the other side effectively, even in bad faith.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BRING IT ON. I always find it fascinating that liberals and conservatives alike both tend to feel that one of the major problems with their preferred political party is that it, unlike the other team, doesn't play dirty. In that spirit Jonah Goldberg posts and appears to endorse an email from a correspondent arguing that the GOP is fighting the Tom DeLay wars with one hand tied behind their backs and needs to get ready to sling some mud:

Every attack on Delay was predictable -- heck, it was even announced by Rahm Emmanuel months ago -- and we certainly should have (or at least could easily have) a mountain of data proving that Democrats (think: Harry Reid) have not only done everything Delay has done, but have bent and shredded every ethics requirement ever conceived by Congress!

Why then, are we not calling press conferences, complete with charts and graphs and photos, of Democrats doing everything Delay has done, and much more?? Why are we not attacking the very publicly debauched and corrupt behavior of Sen. Edward Kennedy? How about Nancy Pelosi?

I want to see your wonderful online publication put all of your formidable muscle behind a counter-assault and behind Rep. Delay, who just happens to be a very nice man and one heck of an effective champion of everything conservative.

Count me as skeptical that the GOP hasn't done this because they're just a bunch of softies. Rather, the problem is that flinging countercharges won't save DeLay. Indeed, it would only weaken his position if Republicans start leaning on thinner material to go after Democrats, because you'd have to concede the point that DeLay is dirty in order to use it. Instead, they're trying at the moment to use the threat of countercharges to get the Democrats to back down, hoping that the party will shift into incumbent-protection mode rather than go for the gold. So far, Democrats don't seem to be afraid, and rightly so. I'm reasonably certain that if we have an all-out ethics war, both sides will take some casualties, but I've got no particular brief for corrupt Democrats, and upheaval in the House can only advantage liberals as a general matter.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOUSE TO PASS TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted Reform Not Repeal the Estate Tax, which discusses the efforts on the part of Republican leaders to permanently repeal the estate tax, a boon for this nation's millionaires. The House is expected to vote on the bill (S. 420/H.R. 8) this week. Tax fairness groups are working to reform the tax so that average Americans are exempted but the much-needed revenue from the top few payers still flows into the federal budget and cash-strapped states.

The estate tax currently only applies to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans and with reforms would only apply to the top 0.25 percent. Now is not the time to provide tax relief for the country's millionaires and billionaires, especially when congressional leaders are calling for slashing health care and other essential programs for our nation's poor. Learn more and take action today!

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

NEXT YEAR'S MESSAGE. Talking to my parents this weekend, I learned that they got slammed by the alternative minimum tax this year for the first time. What surprised me wasn't that it was catching up with the middle class this soon, but that they had no idea it was coming. My parents follow politics as closely as anybody whose jobs don't directly involve the government, and yet all the Paul Krugman columns, Citizens for Tax Justice or Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyses, and Prospect articles in the world didn't prepare them for it.

Neither did the Democratic Party. This is the sort of real life issue that Democrats can and should use to their advantage: Not only is it politically convenient to pin such a severe economic hit on the Republicans, it's politically accurate as well. But it can't be done post hoc without seeming vulturous; just like John Kerry's reliance on the news of the day in October 2004 failed, blaming Republicans now won't have any of the effect that priming voters in advance to identify that shock of losing several thousand dollars with George W. Bush's class-war tax policy would. It's too late this year -- but it could be a very potent strategy with middle-class and upper-middle-class voters in 2006, when even more families will be gouged for the first time.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TANKER IN CHIEF. Say it with us: George W. Bush is not popular. It's true, as Michael Tomasky shows -- so why doesn't the media seem to recognize it?

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE VISION THING. In The Weekly Standard, Stephen Moore argues that the president can still reap a political victory from his looming policy defeat on Social Security with "the message that the Democratic party is reactionary and devoid of ideas." I fear he may be right -- there's plenty of evidence that this perception is hurting Democrats. At the same time, it's crucially important to keep in mind Noam Scheiber's point that "if ever there were a piece of evidence casting doubt on the link between 'having ideas' and offering specific plans, John Kerry is it."

As Noam says, the boatloads of wonky white papers produced by the Kerry campaign did approximately nothing to instill in the public the idea that he was a man of vision and ideas. Offering a nuts-and-bolts Social Security plan will accomplish nothing, and, indeed, only serve to muddy the clash of visions that's taking place. Roughly speaking, the Republicans want to respond to economic changes that have brought increased dynamism and increased risk by making American life even riskier. The thing to say in response is that liberals have a vision where the government provides the policy equivalent of safety equipment, not to eliminate the element of risk from the market economy, but to mitigate it enough so that average people have the chance to participate in it fully.

--Matthew Yglesias

HEARINGS UNDERWAY. John Bolton has not undertaken a run-of-the-mill confirmation conversion -- he's gone for the moon shot. He embraced in his opening statement the ideas of "reforming" and "strengthening" the United Nations. He declared his absolute desire to abide by the wishes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush.

He laid out four principles for the United Nations:

• Promoting and strengthening global democracy;
• Strengthening arms-control sgreements;
• Enhancing cooperation against terrorism;
• Resolving humanitarian crisis.

Democrats and some Republicans will certainly question Bolton on his sincerity, since everything he's said today contradicts decades of on-the-record commentary.

Barry Schweid, diplomatic reporter for the AP, already has a story out.

--Dave Meyer

FUTILITY. Dana Milbank’s piece on last week’s “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith” conference generated plenty of alarmed attention, and rightly so. (Ruth Marcus has a good column today that is similarly alarmed but a bit more aptly qualified and tempered in its analysis.) But I do want to dissent slightly from the general “theocrats at the gates” tenor of the coverage this conference and the recent spate of high-profile judge-bashing have inspired -- typified by Atrios’ comment on Friday that “the Theocrats are coming for their payment.”

The folks I saw and talked to at the two-day shindig were certainly theocrats and they were certainly demanding action, but nothing about the conference should convince anyone that the evangelical right will finally be getting their “payment” anytime soon. As I noted last week, the atmosphere was suffused with a sense of anger and despair at the way the vast majority of Republicans they helped to put in power -- with the notable exception of a certain House majority leader locked in an existential bid to keep his career alive -- inevitably betray or ignore the religious conservative cause. This is, of course, the unavoidable problem faced by a movement whose central policy goal at the moment (judging by this conference) appears to be the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, but it needs to be stressed that the scorn and outrage the evangelical base feels towards the likes of Bill Frist are not misplaced.

The Senate Republicans proved completely willing last week to backpedal on judicial issues important to the Christian right the minute that poll numbers revealed their Terri Schiavo shenanigans to have been a miscalculation. (Sam Brownback and Tom Coburn had both been scheduled to speak at the conference, and their absence was both notable and, as of this writing, still not satisfactorily explained to me by their spokesmen or the conference organizers.) Meanwhile, the lengthy policy agenda the conferees laid out on Friday -- impeachment of judges, stripping of judicial jurisdiction over various issues, granting Congress the right to nullify federal and Supreme Court rulings, etc. -- poses zero chance of actually happening. Even the nuclear option looks like it may not happen; the bad polling on the Schiavo matter obviously didn’t help its chances. And when the social conservative activists end up inevitably disappointed on all these fronts, there’s of course little doubt that they’ll go right back to electing Republicans who will inevitably disappoint them once again.

All this is to say that the conference did nothing to challenge evangelical conservatives’ well-earned reputation for being the biggest suckers in American politics. The latest, fittingly timed cover story in The American Conservative, written by Jim Antle, tackles just this subject. (Take a close look at the very apt cover art for this issue.) Even given all the inflammatory rhetoric at the conference, I think the key line uttered at the event is one that Milbank, luckily, included in his piece: It was activist and “scholar” Mike Farris’ bitter lament on Friday, “I’m sick and tired of having to lobby people I helped get elected." Of course, the lobbying is usually in vain anyway. And Farris, sick and tired though he may be, will most likely go right on doing it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A BIT RICH. Congressman Chris Shays made a clean break with Tom DeLay in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday, but he really let it rip at a town meeting in his district the day before. There he called the Hammer “an absolute embarrassment to me and to the Republican Party," and told one questioner: “With all due respect, I can be accused of a lot of things, but supporting Tom DeLay is not one of them."

With all due respect, Shays is laying it on just a bit thick here. Not only has he recently demonstrated less than full commitment to efforts to revive the ethics committee in the wake of his party’s DeLay-inspired gutting (which is of a piece with a historical pattern of all-hat, no-cattle demonstrations of “independence” by the Connecticut rep), as late as last fall Shays didn’t shy away from explicitly supporting the majority leader. Following the ethics committee’s third straight admonishment of DeLay, Shays told Congressional Quarterly on October 7 of last year that complaints against the leader from redistricted Texas Democrat Chris Bell were just sour grapes and that the ultimate unlikelihood of DeLay becoming speaker didn’t cool Shays’ regard for him as a party leader:

Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said he believed Bell's complaint was politically motivated, but added, "I don't anticipate Tom DeLay will be Speaker. But I think he's been a great majority leader."

Poor DeLay. Apparently three ethics rebukes in short succession make you “great,” but a few weeks of tough press and the first stirrings of an incipient campaign by Democrats and good government outfits turn you into an “absolute embarrassment.”

--Sam Rosenfeld

WEEKEND UPDATE. Confused by the lull in depp-Pope coverage? Here's what you missed: The Columnists

• David Brooks. Now that Saul Bellow's dead, nobody cares about Europe.
• Nicholas Kristof. Fortunately, I haven't actually put any money on this bet.
• Jim Hoagland. I am morally superior to Saddam Hussein -- take that, liberals!
• David Broder. Republicans love cities after all, or at least HUD programs that incidentally help Republican districts.
• George Will. In its hour of peril, the nation cries out for covert union-busting schemes.
• Michael Kinsley. Time to go after some soft targets.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Robert David Jaffe on psychosis.

--Matthew Yglesias

DELAY EXPLAINER. One reason I think the DeLay scandal story will still take some time to reach critical mass -- and that Democrats worried about chasing him from office too soon need not fret -- is that the ethical questions raised about his activities are so numerous and so complicated -- and so lacking in accompanying high-impact T.V. visuals -- that even many sophisticated and politically attuned people are having trouble figuring out what exactly is at issue in each instance, and what the specific charges against DeLay are.

Over time, the consequence of all the charges against DeLay are likely to add up to a strong, though not necessarily well-informed, public impression of him being a shady character. Still, the story remains in its news-breaking phase, with new revelations continuing to come out, and so there haven't been that many good round-up pieces explaining the whole mess of charges in the kind of media shorthand you get when a story reaches its apex. Indeed, the shorthand thus far is about "ethics charges," rather than the far more important substance of those charges -- that DeLay is accused of taking money from foreign agents and lobbyists, in violation of House rules.

Fortunately, Slate today has an excellent explainer on the DeLay-Abramoff connections and why they are a scandal and where the story is thus far. A handy cheat-sheet for newcomers.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PRICELESS. I'll have more to say about the judge-bashing conference on Monday, but I couldn't fail to mention this line from panelist Bill Greene, who runs RightMarch.com. Greene was speaking about grassroots mobilizing, and described the conservative movement's funding difficulties in comparison to the opposition -- which is, of course, swimming in dough:

We don't have that kind of money. I wish we had a George Soros of the right that just handed us some really big checks. I wish that a lot. But we don't.

Poor guys.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEMOCRACY FOR MEXICO. In case you haven't seen it on every other liberal blog already, take a look at efforts by Mexico's two largest parties to block the populist mayor of Mexico City from running for President on the most dubious of pretexts. This is a turn of events that deserves to be analyzed on its own terms, but I'm afraid I don't know too much about the Mexican political scene other than that this situation stinks. Naturally, then, one turns to the question of whether the Bush administration will prioritize its ostensible commitment to democracy-promotion or its commitment to establishing pro-business regimes throughout the western hemisphere. My money's on the latter -- so far, they've said and done basically nothing, though the United States has a huge ability to exert pressure in a case like this.

So, as usual, where there's Bush and democracy, there's hypocrisy. But beyond hypocrisy, there's simply bad policy. The consolidation of Mexican democracy is important to America -- more important than whether or not the Mexican government takes an America-friendly line at any given time. It's an adjacent country, and one of our largest trading partners, so what goes on there matters. For all the reasons Bush has stated ad nauseum with regard to the Middle East, long-run stability and prosperity depends on democracy, and that depends on letting the opposition run its candidate.

--Matthew Yglesias

SOLVENCY AND THE TRUST FUND. To elaborate a bit on a point Atrios alludes to, the press needs to understand the fact that if you accept the view that the Social Security Trust Fund is somehow unreal, then it's simply impossible for Social Security to be "insolvent." The thing that's projected by the Social Security administration to be insolvent is the Trust Fund. If there's no Trust Fund then Social Security is just one portion of the consolidated federal budget. There's a budget deficit, of course, right now but the sky isn't falling, and no particular element of the government is "insolvent."

You can look at the Trust Fund through whatever perspective you'd like, but if you want to have a conversation about solvency, you need to be treating the fund as real. If it's not real, there's no solvency conversation to be had. It would be like worrying if we're going to have a unicorn shortage. Something can only run out of money if it exists.

--Matthew Yglesias

DELAY WATCH CONTINUES Adding on to the DeLay watch: At yesterday's Traditional Values conference, "Confronting The Judicial War On Faith"- that Sam is so ably reporting on - Tom DeLay's videotaped remarks included this, as reported by the New York Times: "I believe the judiciary branch of our government has overstepped its authority on countless occasions, overturning and in some cases just ignoring the legitimate will of the people," he said. "Legislatures for too long have in effect washed our hands on controversial issues from abortion to religious expression to racial prejudice, leaving them to judges who we then excoriate for legislating from the bench. This era of constitutional cowardice must end." I've emphasized the racial prejudice line, because extending this conversation beyond the traditional effigies - abortion, gays, religion - to race, is worth noting. He's referring to affirmative action, but I'd love to see some elaboration on what exactly about recent judicial rulings on racial prejudice DeLay would like to see overturned. For fun, you can go back and read this piece by Bush paid consultant Armstrong Williams about DeLay's efforts to express the "dignity of all human beings."

Beyond that, and I'll return to that later, that Senators (like Sam Brownback) and congressmen feel comfortable addressing a radical group like the Traditional Values Coalition - the crawl on their web page reads like an evangelical National Enquirer like TVC Credited With Firing Of Bisexual From YWCA Leadership Post" and "Ladies Restrooms: Who is That Male-Bodied Woman In the Next Stall?" is appalling. The people at Americans United For Separation of Church and State have been doing an excellent job of tracking and monitoring the types of speeches and promises elected officials are giving the radical right.

--Sarah Wildman

DAY ONE OF THE JUDGE-BASHING FEST. The Judeo-Christian Council For Constitutional Restoration’s two-day conference, “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith”, continues today, but here is just a brief note on yesterday’s festivities:

The anger, mixed with confusion and sadness, that the attendees feel toward Senate Republicans, and Bill Frist in particular, for their lily-livered backpedaling and fudging on judiciary-related issues is absolutely palpable. There were several tense moments throughout the day at various panels when an audience member would demand an explanation for why Frist was capitulating on this or that front (e.g., his recent, backpedaling statements regarding the Schiavo case, the fact that he could have more easily pushed for an actual rule change to end judicial filibusters right at the beginning of the year, but chose not to, etc.), and various speakers, be they movement types or political people like congressman Lamar Smith and Orrin Hatch’s longstanding point man on judicial issues, Tom Jipping, would awkwardly dodge the question. Frist has always been notably clumsy in his attempts to square the circle of pandering to the Christian right while trying to run the Senate in a halfway effective manner, and that clumsiness has certainly taken its toll on grassroots support for the good doctor. If he fails to pull the nuclear trigger on judicial filibusters (and I still think that's likely), he’ll only be earning more ire and contempt from that base.

Before I head back out for day 2, here’s a fun passage I transcribed from panelist Kay Daly’s speech on the judicial nominee fight. TAP-Online readers will recall Greg Sargent’s terrific November profile of the faux-grassroots GOP operative who heads up the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary. She knows how to work a crowd:

My job is stand in the breach between the left and the president’s judicial nominations . . . You know who they are. You’ve seen them. The pro-abortion fanatics and the radical feminists, the atheists who file lawsuits attacking the pledge of allegiance and the ten commandments, the environmentalist tree-hugging animal-rights extremists, the one-world globalists who worship at the altar of the United Nations and international law, the militant homosexuals and the anti-military hippie pieceniks, the racial agitators who believe we are all created equal but some are a little more equal than others, the union bosses and the socialists posing as journalists and college professors, the government bureaucrats and the tax-and-spend junkies, the Hollywood elitists, the air-headed actors and singers who think that we actually care what they think, the pornographers who fund the leftists and who won’t be happy until every Bible in every child’s hands is replaced with the latest copy of Hustler magazine, and of course the gun-grabbing trial lawyers and their willing accomplices in the United States Senate who won’t be happy until they disarm every last citizen down to the last bee bee and paintball gun.

You get the drift of what this conference is like.

--Sam Rosenfeld

AND YET MORE TIES! O.K., so now I've come across a report, via the Wayback Machine, showing links dating back to 1996 between Naftasib's current lobbyist Ellen Levinson and the Naftasib-financed, Jack Abramoff-directed National Security Caucus Foundation's Gregg Hilton. The two went on an NSCF delegation of observers to the elections in the Republic of Montenegro in November 1996.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NAFTASIB WEB-WIPED? I can't find a live site for Naftasib on the web and the Wayback Machine records of it at naftasib.ru appear to have been completely wiped clean. Anyone out there know how to find or reconstruct English-language online records for this company? If so, please send a letter to me at tapped-at-prospect-dot-org. Thanks so much.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CODDLING A.Q. KHAN. John Bolton's champions like to tout his "strength," claiming that he's "tough as his critics fear and as realistic as he seems." They are equally fond of claiming that you can "judge a man by his enemies."

They rely on such inane, characterological defenses of the appointment because Bolton's done nothing to actually make America more secure. It's no mean feat to impress conservative isolationists with brash rhetoric and poor diplomacy -- but it's much harder to actually strengthen America's position in the world. The Arms Control Association's Wade Boese, explained earlier today how Bolton has exacerbated America's security problems with Iran and North Korea.

Another example of Bolton's weakness should be mentioned: Bolton has led the flaccid administration reaction to dealing with the A.Q. Khan proliferation network, which allegedly sold "step-by-step directions for making crucial parts of a [nuclear] bomb." The administration let Pakistan handle the intelligence produced by the Khan capture, in "some sort of deal with the devil." After more than a year of inaction, the United States is apparently finally demanding access to Khan, but one must ask why we waited so long after Khan's capture.

The answer appears to lie in John Bolton, who has mounted an impressive campaign of obstruction on behalf of the Pakistani government. He claimed Pervez Musharraf didn't know about Khan's network, despite serious unanswered questions. Bolton went so far as to tell Congress:

We have not asked for access to Mr. Khan, nor do we think we should ... we are satisfied for now that the government of Pakistan is complying with the commitments they've made to us about the pursuit of the investigation into Khan's activities and the activities of the Khan network. We're not sovereign in Pakistan.

Bolton's champions will undoubtedly claim that Bolton's Proliferation Security Initiative is an achievement on which the nominee can hang his hat. Unfortunately, as Boese pointed out last month in Arms Control Today, Bolton's blindness to A.Q. Khan is an enormous gap in the Proliferation Security Initiative.

I want toughness in a UN ambassador, but I want toughness that produces results.

--Dave Meyer

THE PERFECT STORM. Republicans hate Social Security benefits, and hate illegal immigrants, but want to give more Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants as long as they're from Cuba:

Miami congressional representatives are prodding the Social Security Administration to change a policy that denies benefits to scores of elderly Cubans who settled in the United States after overstaying their visas.

U.S. Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Republicans, fired off letters to SSA Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart demanding answers.

The background here is that thanks to the exile community's viselike grip on American politics, anyone -- visa holder or otherwise -- who manages to come to America's shores from the worker's paradise of Cuba is entitled to Social Security benefits under circumstances where someone coming from another country would be deported. Cubans who overstay their visas, for similar viselike-grip reasons, don't count as illegal immigrants for deportation purposes, but apparently do for Social Security purposes. Personally, I've got nothing against Social Security benefits or illegal immigrants, so I'd be happy to see the folks in question get some checks. But would it kill our Cuban-American representatives to act under some kind of broader principles than naked communal self-interest?

--Matthew Yglesias

DELAY'S SKETCHY JUNKETS ALREADY CONTROVERSIAL IN 1997. Aides to Tom DeLay have said he took the financing for his 1997 Moscow junket at face value as coming from the non-profit National Center for Public Policy Research and did not suspect the non-profit was being used to lobby. That is simply not a credible defense, and for the following reason: By his 1997 Moscow trip, DeLay had already been the subject of a highly critical story for taking a controversial junket with his wife to Myanmar financed in part by U.S. oil giant Unocal's donations to the non-profit Asia Pacific Exchange Foundation. He must have known, in 1997, exactly how the game was played, and the way non-profits were being used by lobbyists.

Here's a blurb on the topic from an April 1997 issue of In These Times:

Corporate America has come up with a new, behind-the-scenes way to lobby members of Congress: A company gives lots of dollars to a tax-exempt foundation, which in turn takes members of Congress on foreign educational junkets that promote the company's business. Jim Drinkard of The Associated Press reports that last fall, four Republican House members--Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, Dennis Hasert of Illinois, Bill Paxon of New York and Deborah Pryce of Ohio--went to Burma courtesy of the Asia Pacific Exchange Foundation in Washington, D.C. Once in Burma, the four representatives went on a fact-finding mission to the oil pipeline being built by Unocal and Burma's military dictators.

Wrote Drinkard in March 1997:

When four senior House Republicans landed in Burma three months ago as guests of the country's military dictators, their official mission was to inspect drug interdiction efforts. But that was not the only agenda.

During part of the trip, Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and an aide flew by helicopter over the remote area where a U.S. oil company, Unocal, and its French partner, Total, are building a natural gas pipeline.

That $1.2 billion project, Burma's largest foreign investment deal, could be in jeopardy because of possible U.S. sanctions against the southeast Asian country.

The trip by Hastert, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, New York Rep. Bill Paxon and Ohio Rep. Deborah Pryce was paid for by the Asia Pacific Exchange Foundation, a tax-exempt organization in Washington.

The group's president, Richard G. Quick, declines to say where its money comes from. But Unocal acknowledged it is among the foundation's sponsors.

By donating to Quick's foundation, Unocal could claim a tax deduction for underwriting a congressional fact-finding trip to its pipeline, in effect using a taxpayer subsidy to lobby against U.S. government policy....

The State Department and human rights groups say Burma's military rulers are guilty of widespread repression and human rights violations, including use of forced labor to build the pipeline. The oil companies deny the charge.

At the sites he was shown, Hastert said, he saw no evidence of human rights abuses. Instead, there were well-paid villagers operating heavy equipment.

"It was a good insight for me,'' he said....

The State Department was given no advance notice of the trip, which came at a tense time of student unrest. The department had issued a travel warning on Dec. 9 because of the potential for street violence.

The group made no effort to meet with opposition leaders, Quick said, because the lawmakers expressed no interest. Another lawmaker, Rep. John Porter, R-Ill., was denied a visa when he sought a visit at about the same time to explore human rights issues. (emphasis added)

Amazing how every trip DeLay seems to have taken also put him on the wrong side of some human rights, freedom, and democracy issue. ABC News reported this morning that DeLay also travelled to Saipan with his family in late 1997 as "part of an effort by former aide Jack Abramoff to stop legislation aimed at cracking down on sweatshops and sex shops in the American territory, which is known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE COMING CONFIRMATION CONVERSION. This morning's important New York Times article on the John Bolton hearings claims that the Democratic strategy on Bolton is to "dig up evidence of intelligence abuses and try to confront Mr. Bolton with his past criticism of the United Nations and to win over Mr. Chafee, a strong United Nations supporter, if Mr. Bolton does not repudiate his earlier positions." Would that it were so easy. Bolton will obviously "repudiate" his past positions, just as he already repudiated them in 2001. Bolton's attachment to honesty is looser than his attachment to reality.

John Kerry used the term "confirmation conversion" to describe Bolton's performance in his 2001 hearing:

MR. BOLTON: "...would you mind if I made a kind of general comment about writings, because I think this does go to an important point about one's role in the government...One of the things that you do when you engage in debate is you learn and, in fact -- I guess I should say this right at the beginning of the hearing, I've actually changed my mind from time to time.

...So I think that what I wrote in circumstances at the time I wrote, I believed that when I said it, and I don't in any way back away from it.

But what my responsibility is, or what my responsibility would be should I be confirmed, would be to provide advice on certain circumstances as they exist at that point...

...I understand what intellectual integrity is, I understand what the chain of command is, I understand what loyalty are, and I don't think those three things are at all necessarily inconsistent."

SEN. KERRY: Well, I appreciate your answer, but I guess, effectively, it sort of fits a pattern, if I may say politely, of what we call, "confirmation conversions" that take place up here. (Scattered laughter.) I mean, are we supposed to believe that you come here now, a man who is extraordinarily well-educated, tabula rasa, that you're a clean sheet and nothing that you've written before has meaning?

MR. BOLTON: No, I - perhaps I didn't speak clearly, Senator. I apologize. What I said was that I believed what I said at the time, and all I'm suggesting is that the events and circumstances have moved beyond, in every case, what I have written at the time. It is a matter, I think, that any appointee who has ever written or spoken on anything faces; that there is never a cookie cutter that you can fit into where you find yourself in agreement with every single thing the administration does.

Mark already made the case that Bolton's 2001 conversion was nothing but hot air. Bolton pledged to abide by the administration line, but promptly went cowboy on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In the above quote, Kerry was directly asking whether Bolton would support the Agreed Framework, and encourage rapprochement between North and South Korea. Over the past four years, hope for peace on the Korea peninsula has evaporated, in large part due to Bolton. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has recently tried to revive talks with the North, but Bolton can again be counted on to undermine them from within.

Bolton's record since his first confirmation demonstrates that any conversion he undergoes will be illusory. But we should have known that the first time -- his record of dishonesty and obstruction is too long. From sham think tanks, to obstructing Congress' investigation into Iran-Contra, to surreptitiously advancing the agenda of a foreign country before Congress, Bolton has failed to demonstrate the slightest fidelity to integrity.

Republicans and some Democrats believed the sincerity of his first conversion. Will they be duped again?

--Dave Meyer

MORE GREAT GOOGLE ON THE RUSSIANS. Following up on Matt's Google-find of the "Kommersant article [that] seems to suggest that Naftasib and DeLay are actually mixed up in the much hyped corruption surrounding the oil-for-food program," it's interesting to note that the lobbyist Naftasib has directly hired in the states is Ellen Levinson, described by The Washington Post as "a longtime food-aid lobbyist."

Also the long-time executive director of the Coalition for Food Aid -- which The Post descibes as being "concerned with international trade negotiations and protecting food assistance from limitations on government subsidies and with U.S. legislation providing funds for food aid" -- Levinson took on client Naftasib when she left Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft last year to found her own firm, Levinson & Associates.

Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, you will recall, is the firm that, along with Jack Abramoff's company Preston Gates, recieved cash that flowed from Naftasib through mysterious Bahama-based group Chelsea Commercial Enterprise in 1997. Cadwalader's Julius Kaplan joined DeLay and Abramoff on the Russian trip.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BILL TO PROVIDE IMMUNITY FOR NEGLIGENT GUN SELLERS. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted The Gun Industry Immunity Bill: Immunity for Negligent Gun Sellers, which discusses upcoming legislation that would provide the gun industry with immunity against paying damages for negligent conduct.

Despite the fact that guns are the second leading cause of product-related deaths in America, they remain practically the only consumer product not subject to any federal health and safety regulations. Teddy bear manufacturers must comply with numerous safety standards, so why not gun manufacturers?

Learn more and take action to allow gun victims to seek the justice they deserve!

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

LANGUAGE AND SECURITY. Fred Kaplan details with appropriate lamentations the Defense Department's pathetic efforts to get more speakers of key languages (primarily Arabic, but also including, I would imagine, various Persian and Turkic tongues) working for the military. Besides mocking the ineptitude on display, I think there are two important policy issues here. One speaks to the wisdom of the hypermilitarization of U.S. security policy. The military, obviously, is always going to have a huge role to play in America's relations with the rest of the world, and for various reasons is bound to have the bulk of the money and the personnel associated with it.

One approach to that level of necessary defense gigantism would be to say that when you're looking at gray areas you should err on the side of not putting something under the Defense Department's control. Over the decades leading up to Bush's inauguration, we'd basically done the reverse. Not only were the uniformed services and their core support institutions enormous, but huge quantities of other stuff -- from strategic policy-formulation to diplomacy (through regional commanders-in-chief) to intelligence, etc. -- was put under the SecDef's authority. Then under Bush the situation got even more unbalanced in favor of the Pentagon. Don Rumsfeld has brought even more intelligence and covert operations under DoD control, clearly sees the formulation of U.S. foreign policy as such as part of his job description, has run freelance diplomatic operations around the world, and for the first time got the Pentagon named as the lead agency on a postconflict stabilization operation in Iraq. One of several reasons to think this is a bad idea is the point raised by Kaplan's article: The Defense Department is not a language school. An organization is bound to focus on its core competency and the Defense Department is and always will be primarily about war-fighting and preparation for war-fighting.

Stabilization missions, intelligence, and a certain amount of covert operations all do require lots of language skills. This stuff should, insofar as it's possible, be assigned to agencies (like the State Department and the CIA) for which language competence is more necessary for their main mission. The Pentagon's core job is plenty difficult and plenty important; it's not really a surprise that it doesn't do all that well at undertaking new, loosely related tasks.

The second point, however, is that there simply aren't very many Americans who speak Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages:

In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government funded dozens—if not hundreds—of Russian-language and Russian-studies departments not just within the military but in high schools and colleges all across America.

My strong sense is that the real scandal is here. It would be enormously in our interest to have a very large increase in the number of Arabic (and Persian, etc.) speakers in the United States. We would have a better military, better diplomacy, better intelligence, better journalism, better think tanks, better congressional staff work, better everything if we had it. More people would be able to directly understand what was being said in the Islamic world, and more stuff would get translated for the rest of us. My best guess as to why we haven't done this is simply that doing so would entail giving a lot of money to institutions conservatives don't like -- universities, professors, and departments of Middle East studies in particular -- and the feeling is that it's better to keep the country, and the government, steeped in ignorance than to fund people who largely disagree with the prevailing trends in American policy.

--Matthew Yglesias

MOUNTING TROUBLE. Tuesday night I watched an incredibly disturbing Frontline documentary on Jewish extremists in Israel. The film focused specifically on Kahanists, the followers of the late extremist Meir Kahane. Kahanism was actually outlawed in Israel, but it still commands a following -- some say a growing following -- among a handful of militant settlers. These are precisely the people who will fight the Gaza disengagement. These are also the Jews from whence Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire in a mosque in March 1994, came and among the extremists that Gershom Gorenberg has written incredibly eloquently about. (In fact, in 1999, Gorenberg and I went to meet the Temple Mount Faithful, who want to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem on the site where the Dome of the Rock now stands, for a story I was working on for the Jerusalem Report. They were very respectful, but it all had a strange intrigue and chilling calmness given their dire endgame: They want to take the Temple Mount from its current occupants. They've gotten more media savvy since; there's even a tour of Israel you can take with them. I wouldn't be surprised if their biggest backers were evangelicals; these far-right Jews hold a similar end-times belief to that of thousands upon thousands of evangelical Christians and Christian Zionists. The New Yorker published a story in 1998 on this alliance and the search for the red heifer.)

Logging on to Ha'aretz late yesterday I saw this headline: "High alert amid warnings of Temple Mount attack." The Israeli security force, Shin Bet, is apparently concerned about an attack that is connected to the Gaza disengagement plan. This is incredibly worrisome on several levels, not least because, obviously, a Temple Mount bomb would spark unheard of levels of violence. (I shudder at the thought.) But the threat (whether real or imagined) also seems timed to coincide in some way with Ariel Sharon's visit (planned for next week) and comes at a difficult time in Abbas' struggle to consolidate power and broker peace talks with Israel.

--Sarah Wildman

THE MIRACLE OF GOOGLE. It's amazing what you can learn with a little Google. I was trying to learn a bit more about Tom DeLay's friends at Naftasib and I found an August 2004 article in the Russian business paper Kommersant about Naftasib's involvement in the sale of oil company YUKOS. The following was in the fifth graf of the story:

[Naftasib President Aleksandr] Kulakovsky and [Vice President Marina] Nevskaya are not particularly well known in Russia, but are more familiar to Americans. In August 1997, NaftaSib paid for the Moscow leg of US House of Representatives leader Tom DeLay's trip to Moscow. Nevskaya accompanied him in Moscow. It was claimed in the American press that she taught at the Military Diplomatic Academy, where personnel for the Main Intelligence Division of the Russian Joint Staff are trained.

Needless to say, Aleksandr Kulakovsky and Marina Nevskaya are not, in fact, familiar to Americans. Indeed, they're so unfamiliar that this information thrown offhanded into a basically unrelated business report became the lede of yesterday's major Washington Post scoop attributed to "four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements." The same Kommersant article seems to suggest that Naftasib and DeLay are actually mixed up in the much hyped corruption surrounding the oil-for-food program:

In January 1998, before a visit by Viktor Chernomyrdin to the United States, the management of NaftaSib held several meetings with lobbyists, including the American Security Council Foundation (ASCF), as “people close to the circle of Viktor Chernomyrdin” (quoted from an AFSC press release). After that visit, part of the “Gore-Chernomyrdin program,” Russian companies began to work much more actively in Iraq. . . .

That company's [i.e., NaftaSib's] most noteworthy connection is with the Ministry of Emergencies, however. Official statistics identify NaftaSib as 49% owner of the service companies for that ministry that call themselves Emerkom: Emerkom-Spetsmontazh, Emerkom-Kompleks, Emerkom-Demayning and Emerkom-Avia. . . .

Emerkom is one of the 170 Russian companies on the list received by Kommersant from the US Congress of companies having preferential rights to trade with Iraq within the Oil-for-Food program. According to the Washington Post, that company and Zarubezhneft were accused in 2002 of secretly financing ex-president of Iraq Saddam Hussein. Emerkom does not hide its ties with NaftaSib. Emerkom provided a Kommersant correspondent with a list of telephone numbers for NaftaSib representatives.

Interesting, that. This Moscow News report, also primarily focused on the YUKOS issue, says that Naftasib "has been around for a while, and was originally linked to ex-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin." Chernomyrdin was out as prime minister by the time of the Kosovo War, but was still plugged into Boris Yeltsin's government to the extent that Yeltsin tried to reappoint him as prime minister in August 1998 during a major economic crisis. He was rebuffed by the Duma, but later in 1999 Chernomyrdin resurfaced as Russia's special envoy to ... Yugoslavia ... in the middle of the Kosovo crisis.

--Matthew Yglesias

HAWKS, DOVES, AND DEANIES. Marshall Wittman points to a new Pew comparison of Howard Dean activists versus Democrats at large to make the point that Deaniac claims to speak for the true feelings of all Democrats everywhere are a bit off-base. He also highlights the interesting finding that, contrary to popular belief, young people weren't actually overrepresented in the Dean campaign. Instead, seniors were underrepresented and middle-aged people were overrepresented. The confusion stems, I think, from the media's usual habit of forgetting that the predominant demographic feature of the under-30 generation vis-à-vis our elders is that it includes many fewer white people.

But what I actually think is most interesting here are the findings about Dean supporters' views on national security. Not surprisingly, Dean folks are essentially unanimous in their view that invading Iraq was a bad idea. More surprisingly, Dean activists are much more likely than Democrats as a whole to think we should keep troops in Iraq now that we're there. 45 percent of Deaniacs want to stay the course, as opposed to 33 percent of Democrats as a whole (which implies an even smaller number of non-Dean Democrats). There's also a strong generation gap here: Dean supporters under 30 are way more likely to stay the course than are older Dean fans. Twenty-one percent of Dean backers and 20 percent of Democrats generally say pre-emptive use of force is never justified, but only 15 percent of younger Deaniacs agree. Meanwhile, young Dean fans are way more supportive of gay marriage than are older ones.

So what does it all mean? Well, first and foremost I think it means it's time to call off the Beinart-MoveOn feud. The core constituency for socially progressive, internationalist liberalism is, in fact, among the young, highly educated Dean backers who come to mind when one thinks of the MoveOn crowd. These folks vehemently believe the Iraq War was a bad idea, but are generally more supportive than most Democrats of both pre-emptive war and nation-building. It also means this is a pretty tiny constituency.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE WAGES OF EXTREMISM. The latest Wall Street Journal poll (via Josh Marshall) has some pretty astonishing numbers that go a long way toward explaining the morning-after headaches Senate Republicans are feeling from their antics in the Schiavo circus; they also underscore why the nuclear option on judicial filibusters is less likely to happen than a lot of people seem to realize.

Forty-one percent of Republicans report having lost respect for Congress due to its intervention in the Schiavo case; and in case you’re suspecting that a good chunk of that number represents people who were disappointed that Congress didn’t do more, note that 39 percent of Republicans in this poll say that removing Schiavo’s feeding tube was “the right thing to do.” That’s all old news, though. The real surprise: 41 percent of Republicans oppose pulling the trigger on the nuclear option. Remind me again, what reason do we have to think that the Republican conference actually is united behind an action that will guarantee the shutdown of the Senate and that contravenes the wishes of nearly half of their own party’s ranks? Rick Santorum may be working overtime to quell the Christian right’s suspicions that his colleagues are buckling on the issue, but if you read that Hill piece you’ll be left with the unmistakable impression that, indeed, his colleagues are buckling on the issue. And chances are that their hesitancy is due less to kitschy Schoolhouse Rock homages than to the worries and regrets they’re feeling about having let their Schiavo antics tar them as judge-threatening nutcases in the eyes of many.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DELAY'S RUSSIAN POSITION ON THE BALKANS. Kevin Drum asks the right questions:

Back in the mid-90s, wasn't DeLay awfully vocal about opposing action to stop Serbian genocide in Kosovo? And wasn't the Russian security establishment one of the biggest defenders of Serb interests?

I wonder if this subject happened to get mentioned between tee shots on that junket?

This, of course, brings up such critical questions as: What Russian government positions did Naftasib want to lobby the U.S. Congress to support? Why were they specifically going after conservatives? And why did they choose to go through the folks who had previously lobbied for the Milosevic regime in Montenegro? Mark Kleiman thinks he has an answer:

Kevin recalls correctly that DeLay was on Milosevich's side against Bill Clinton. He doesn't mention the extraordinary maneuver by which DeLay managed to send an encouraging message to the enemy while our men and women in uniform were in harm's way, by promising Clinton a resolution of support for the air war and then arranging for it to come to the floor and fail. (Of course, DeLay wasn't alone among Republicans, back then, in hating the President more than he hated the mass murderer the President was trying to rein in.)

And now we know, as Kevin points out, that DeLay was doing all of this as the beneficiary of largesse from the Russian security services. Taking an expensive vacation at the expense of the military of a foreign power to support America's enemies probably doesn't amount to treason under the Constitutional definition, but it comes close.

I just want to add that saying DeLay was taking money from "Russian security services" is probably overstating the situation a bit, based on what we know so far, though he did clearly meet with a Russian military intelligence instructor, who was also a key executive at Naftasib, which is an oil company that went on to supply Russian spy ships in the Balkan theatre. The United States had already deployed carrier groups against Yugoslavia in the Adriatic when these Russian spy ships were sent in, according to the Russia Reform Monitor. Also of note is the fact that the National Security Caucus Foundation, the weird junket-sponsoring organization with Jack Abramoff on its board that also was funded, in part, by Naftasib, published a rather opaque "study" on the Russian Navy, which suggests to me that Naftasib had some kind of business interest in Russian naval vessels that it wanted to influence the American government on. Many of the trips the NSCF sponsored were to the Balkans, as well, though that's not particularly surprising as the Balkans were then a major global hot spot of interest to members of Congress.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CONTROL FREAK. The problem with John Bolton isn't his strong-willed attitude -- it's what that attitude does for our security. The Arms Control Association's research director, Wade Boese, details how the untamable Bolton operated as the administration's number-one man on arms control and the nonproliferation opportunities he missed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

KEYWORD SEARCH: RUSSIA & TOM DELAY. Rereading The Washington Post's masterful reconstruction of the cash flow behind House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's 1997 Moscow junket -- "underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government" -- what jumped out at me was the final section about the ultimate source of the cash that paid for the trip. In case you just scanned it, reread it and consider the highlighted portions below. They suggest that more is at play here than simply another lobbying scandal:

The question is: Who stood behind Chelsea [Commercial Enterprises], and thus ultimately financed the trip? A regular office for the firm could not be located by The Post, in Moscow or at its two listed addresses; its Bahamian registration ended in 2000, officials there said. Efforts by The Post to find the three men -- one Belgian, one British, one Russian -- named in lobbying registrations as Chelsea investors or owners in lobbying disclosures were unsuccessful.

A spokeswoman for Cadwalader, Paula Zirinsky, said the firm had no contact information for anyone from Chelsea, because "persons that worked on that matter have not been with the firm since 1997." Jonathan Blank, managing partner of the Washington office for Preston Gates, similarly said his firm had no current contact information for Chelsea.

In interviews, however, five individuals with direct knowledge of the lobbying effort separately described executives of a diversified Russian energy firm known as Naftasib as being intimately involved in the lobbying.

Naftasib, which oversees interests in mining, oil and gas, construction and other enterprises from a four-story unmarked building in downtown Moscow, says it is a separate company from Chelsea but acknowledges seeking to cultivate friends in Washington in 1997.

In a written statement issued Friday in response to questions from The Post, Marina Nevskaya, Naftasib's deputy general manager, explained that her firm "wanted to foster better understanding between our country and the United States, and felt that if these trips were successful they would foster a better overall climate that could ultimately benefit Naftasib as well as other Russian enterprises."

...those involved in organizing DeLay's trip said he met with Nevskaya and was escorted around Moscow by the general manager of Naftasib, Alexander Koulakovsky. DeLay has also met with Nevskaya and Koulakovsky in Washington since then, according to several sources with direct knowledge of the contact....

The efforts by Naftasib's executives to curry favor among Republicans -- including DeLay -- sowed controversy at the time among conservatives. A journal published by a Washington think tank, the American Foreign Policy Council, claimed within a few days after DeLay's trip ended that it was actually "sponsored" by Naftasib. The journal -- the Russian Reform Monitor -- also highlighted what it characterized as Naftasib's tight connections to the Russian security establishment.

The journal quoted promotional literature for Naftasib that described the firm as a major shareholder in Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas giant. The literature also said Natfasib's largest clients were the ministries of defense and internal affairs. The literature also states that Nevskaya was an instructor at a school for Russian military intelligence officers. She declined to address those claims in response to questions from The Post. (emphasis added)

The United States of America cannot have one of its top congressional leaders taking money from people advocating for Russian military-intelligence and defense interests as part of a lobbying deal. It simply cannot. It is unacceptable for a critical leader in the U.S. government to be taken on a junket by groups working for foreign military interests or lobbying on their behalf, even if indirectly and without his knowledge. He should have known: 1997 was a banner year for stories on congressional junkets, and many members of Congress were stepping back their overseas travel at that time or had begun to more closely scrutinize foreign trip offers out of concern for adverse publicity.

This is what the Russia Reform Monitor had to say about Naftasib in 1999:

The Russian oil company that has supplied fuel to the [Russian spy ship] Liman, the [Russian naval reconnasaince vessel] Kildin, and the rest of the Black Sea Fleet [in the Adriatic], has been bankrolling a political influence operation in Washington. Working through a cutout in the Bahamas, NaftaSib is paying a prominent D.C. law and public relations firm, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, to influence congressional staff, lawmakers, editorial writers and journalists. A NaftaSib executive involved in the influence effort is tied to GRU military intelligence. Most of the targets are conservative Republicans. In 1995, the same lobbyists were paid to represent the then Milosevic-controlled government of Montenegro, Yugoslavia. (emphasis added)

Naftasib was also "a major donor" to the National Security Caucus Foundation, according to a February 1997 report in the Tennessee Knoxville News-Sentinel (Nexis.com only). According to the paper, that foundation had a fictional board of directors, unbeknownst to members of Congress who traveled on trips it organized:

U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., who has refused to take foreign trips at taxpayers' cost, accepted an invitation last month to go to Bosnia and Serbia at the expense of a private foundation boasting of backing from the nation's top leaders, including all four living former presidents -- Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Duncan said he did not check out the foundation because he and other House members were impressed by the number of prominent Americans listed as board members on the group's letterhead....But after Duncan, a Knoxville Republican, returned from the seven-day trip, he learned that his sponsor, the National Security Caucus Foundation, had never contacted any of the 35 political and business superstars on its letterhead to see if they wanted to associate with the organization. According to the foundation, 11 other members of Congress have traveled overseas with the organization.

In addition to deceiving members of Congress, the foundation, which began operations last September, is being run on a meager budget out of its director's home. With a three-employee staff, it has an operating deficit of $ 45,000 covered by the director's savings.

"It's wrong on my part," said Gregg Hilton, the foundation's executive director, when he was asked why his group used the false letterhead when inviting congressmen on trips. "There's no fraudulent intention or anything like that."...

....Hilton conceded he had not contacted any of the 35 dignitaries. The 35 had been associated with a previous organization, the American Security Council Foundation, with which Hilton worked for about 15 years. When that group became inactive, Hilton started the new foundation and printed the same dignitaries' names on the new group's letterhead. He said he had planned eventually to seek permission for use of the names. (emphasis added)

The National Security Caucus Foundation also funded a trip to Bosnia for troubled Ohio Rep. Bob Ney in 1996, according to a 1997 story in The Hill (Nexis.com only). Ney has also come under scrutiny by ethics watchdogs for his connections to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The National Security Caucus Foundation appears to no longer exist, or, if it does, it lacks a Web site. The Wayback Machine has the goods on their old Web site, including the press page, which consists of a link to a single article: "Bring Back the Junkets!" from a 1997 issue of U.S. News & World Report.

And guess who was on the NSCF's real board of directors, according to its Web site? None other than Jack Abramoff, of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds!

Gregg Hilton, the head of the NSCF, now works with other defense lobbying and educational groups, including a revived American Security Council Foundation. Who is Hilton? According to his own Web site:

Defense Daily called him "the eyes and ears of the defense lobby." ...Hilton serves as Executive Director of three non-profit and bipartisan organizations. In this capacity, he has had an active legislative role on practically every major foreign policy issue on Capitol Hill. The groups include the American Security Council (which was established in 1955), the Institute for American Strategy, and the American Security Council Foundation (which were both established in 1958). ASC is an advocacy organization, while the ASC Foundation and its Institute for American Strategy are tax exempt 501 (c)(3) educational organizations....

Hilton also served as Editor of the National Republican Congressional Committee's monthly magazine Congress Today, and ASC's newsletter, National Security Report....For five years Hilton had a full page column in the weekly conservative newspaper Human Events....

Hilton has appeared or his work has been discussed in such publications as Thunder on the Right by Alan Crawford; The Conservative Decade by James C. Roberts; The New Right: We're Ready to Lead by Richard Viguerie; The New Right Network by the Americans for Democratic Action; and The Fear Brokers by former U.S. Senator Thomas J. McIntyre (D-N.H.).

In short, Hilton is a movement conservative who takes members of Congress on overseas trips -- and used to do so through a foundation that used a fake list of supporters, deceived Congress, and had Jack Abramoff on its board.

There is doubtless a lot more here to be uncovered as this story about the nexus between movement conservatives, lush overseas junkets, and foreign interests moves forward. But this is clearly no longer just a story about DeLay's relationship with a couple of American lobbyists; it's about the relationship of a cadre of movement conservative lobbyists with foreign business and government interests.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY! Ah, hackish politicians backpedaling furiously from obvious political overreach -- this makes a lot more sense than the collective plunge into wingnuttery that congressional Republicans seemed to me to be intent on taking yesterday. Subscription-only Roll Call has two pieces today chronicling the morning-after regrets of Republican senators who cast their lot with Tom DeLay and the judge-threatening wing of the Christian right by intervening in the Schiavo case. One piece documents senators distancing themselves (to the consternation of the true believers) from the Hammer’s outlandish post-Schiavo bromides against the judiciary and promises for legislative action:

Rebuking DeLay’s claim that judges would have to “answer” for their Schiavo decisions, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) instead said Congressional intervention in the matter was a singular event and the case would not result in any further legislation related to judges.

“I believe we have a fair and independent judiciary today, and I respect that,” Frist said.

Frist also said that the Schiavo case, which pumped up the passions of conservative activists across the country, would make it neither more nor less likely that the Senate would adopt a GOP plan to end filibusters on judicial nominations. “They’re two entirely different issues,” he said.

…

Senate Republicans did not specifically mention DeLay by name, but did little to back up his claims that action was needed. Asked if DeLay had overreached on the Schiavo issue, Frist demurred.

“I’ll have to let Members of this body and others speak for themselves,” he told a group of reporters at a “dug out” press conference on the Senate floor Tuesday morning. Asked later to specify whether he thought DeLay went too far, Frist said, “I am going to speak for myself and not speak for the House at all.”

Even Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), whose remarks on the Senate floor Monday wondering whether anger at judicial decisions had indirectly led to a recent spate of violence against judges also drew criticism, said he would not support any legislative action against judges. “I don’t think Congressman DeLay and I see eye to eye on that,” said Cornyn, a former state judge.

While he said questionable decisions by judges should be criticized, Cornyn backed away from DeLay’s remarks about judges having to “answer” for their decisions. “I really don’t know what he means,” Cornyn added.

Meanwhile, another piece chronicles the heat Bill Frist took from grumbling colleagues at the Republican Senate caucus’ weekly meeting yesterday:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told his Republican colleagues in a private meeting Tuesday that he stood by his decision to have Congress intervene in the Terri Schiavo debate — but added that he would support a full review of Congress’ action.

“I am open to any sort of review or critical review [of whether] we could have done anything differently,” Frist said in an interview Tuesday. “But the fact is it was unanimous, and the fact is we worked with the Democratic leadership, and I felt it was appropriate to act.”

…

Frist said a Congressional review could include holding Senate hearings on whether Congress acted within its jurisdiction.

…

GOP sources said there is an acknowledgement among many Republicans that the American public believes the GOP-led Congress “overstepped” its authority by inserting itself into the Schiavo case, which had to do with whether to continue feeding a brain-damaged Florida woman.

“There is a broad consternation that we overreached on Schiavo,” said a senior GOP aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It has been politically negative that Republicans have been perceived as meddling in this situation.”

To top it all off, even three of the most outspoken congressional allies of the Christian right are going to be no-shows at a righteous judiciary bash-a-thon conference they'd been scheduled to speak at as recently as Monday. DeLay is off to the Pope’s funeral, but what are Tom Coburn and Sam Brownback’s excuses?

--Sam Rosenfeld

TRUDY RUBIN ON BOLTON. Author and Phildelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin asks an excellent question in today's column: What exactly does George W. Bush want John Bolton to do if he becomes UN ambassador? This entire debate is as much about the president himself as it is about John Bolton.

The forces opposed to Bolton have been arguing that if you take the president at his word, John Bolton is incapable of implementing the agenda the president favors. Taken on its face, that simply means the president received bad advice, that he's chosen a person that will be incapable and unwilling to do what he wants; in that case, Lincoln Chafee or any Republican who wants to treat this seriously should tell Bush what he needs to hear, rather than what he wants to hear.

But that's assuming Bush is sincere in his stated desire to win back international respect and to reform the UN, rather than undermine it. The latter was my first reaction upon hearing of Bolton's nomination -- there goes the UN. I will gladly concede, though, that Bush's information processing practices are almost completely foreign to me, and that it's possible that he truly believes Bolton is the right man to reform the UN. Bolton's supporters, though, think they know Bush's real intentions. The signatories of the Gaffney letter believe that there are no differences between Bolton's views and Bush's views. Move America Forward is running its pro-Bolton campaign alongside its "Get the UN out of the USA" campaign.

It could be that they are correct. I can't see into the president's heart. But I can read his words, and they could scarcely be more at odds with Bolton's.

--Dave Meyer

CHAFEE'S WAVERING. The delay in the Bolton confirmation hearings is a gift to the administration, as it gives them more time to pressure Lincoln Chafee. Chafee is wavering, apparently due to significant constituent pressure, though over the course of the day his courage seems to be waning. This morning, the Boston Globe's Farah Stockman quoted Chafee spokesperson Stephen Hourahan:

''We are overwhelmingly hearing from the people of Rhode Island that they are opposed to the Bolton nomination," said Hourahan, who said that Chafee is still undecided about Bolton. But he said that, in the past, Chafee ''has voted mostly with the people of Rhode Island's interests in mind."

Within the last hour, though, the Financial Times has Hourahan backing off from the obvious implication:

Mr Chafee's office said it was receiving telephone calls and mail from constituents that was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the nomination, most of it generated by organised campaigns.

Mr Chafee “is inclined to vote for the nomination”, said his spokesman, Stephen Hourahan. “Barring any unforeseen situation, he will do that.”

It is unclear what sort of pressure the administration is bringing to bear on Senator Chafee. If he votes for Bolton, will it be for a carrot, or to avoid a stick? Does the administration have a bigger stick than the people of Rhode Island?

--Dave Meyer

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TO THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE. If any recent American novelist will be read 50 years from now, D. T. Max writes, it will be Saul Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IS BOLTON IN RACINE'S HANDS? Senator Russ Feingold will host one of his listening sessions in Racine County this Friday, at 3:00 p.m. Each year, Feingold holds a session in each of Wisconsin's 72 counties, giving his constituents a chance to be heard. The sessions also, of course, give the senator the chance to make news, keeping people informed about his decisions and thought processes.

Feingold heard some straight talk on John Bolton at one such session last week, and he came as close as he has come to announcing opposition to the nomination. Racine's Journal Times noted this morning that Bolton would figure heavily on Friday, though the article was written before the delay in the hearing was announced.

This will be one of the last chances for Senator Feingold to go on the record before the Monday hearing.

--Dave Meyer

JACK ABRAMOFF? DOESN’T RING A BELL. Don’t miss Jesse Lee’s takedown of David Frum’s lame defense of Tom DeLay. Besides throwing around some bogus George Soros talk, Frum stakes his argument on the notion that the only thing these lobbying and trip-funding shenanigans reveal is that Jack Abramoff was a sleazy wheeler-dealer desperate to get access to a GOP leader who would have had no reason to suspect that Abramoff was bankrolling trips for him. In other words, the “duped by Abramoff” defense. This would make more sense if there weren’t ample indication that DeLay regarded Abramoff as an intimate associate and comrade (in the words of a GOP operative quoted in a National Journal article that Lee excerpts, “director of travel for DeLay Inc”) rather than some antic nuisance. Apparently Abramoff was quite the creepy stalker of the unsuspecting majority leader, even crashing his daughter’s baby shower three years ago.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: EXPOSED. George W. Bush is right about one thing: Not all companies deserve to be hit with asbestos litigation. But the ones that do? They're getting away with millions, report Stuart Levit and Jeff Milchen.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THOSE GLORIOUS IDEA FACTORIES. There are hack think tanks, and there are hack think tanks. The rise since the 1970s of highly ideological and advocacy-oriented policy groups boasting dubious intellectual value but high partisan utility is old news. But one phenomenon that recent news stories -- the latest Tom DeLay travel scandal, the sprawling Indian casino lobbying story, and the resurfaced account of John Bolton’s role in bilking a Taiwanese businessman backing a conservative education group Bolton headed in the mid-1990s -- have all helpfully shed light on is that special and privileged category of think tanks that serve as literally nothing more than money laundering fronts for business lobbies and the Republican Party.

The RNC set up a nonprofit “education group” called the National Policy Forum in 1993 that channeled money from foreign donors to the Republican Party; the activities were so closely aligned to the party’s that the group eventually lost its tax status. Mike Scanlon set up the American International Center in a Rehoboth beach house and “staffed” it with a neighboring lifeguard and yoga instructor. The National Center for Public Policy Research, meanwhile, has existed as a clearinghouse and Republican advocacy group for decades (though not an organization that produces much original research), so it’s not nearly as out-and-out phony an outfit as the other two. But it clearly has allowed itself to be used as a conduit for lobbyists to fund trips for lawmakers; Jack Abramoff did it for The Hammer on at least two occasions. This is sort of the reductio ad absurdum of business/conservative politicization of the think-tank world: policy outfits devoid of policy content of any kind, and concerned solely with the brass tacks function of funneling money.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROGRESSIVE SAVINGS PRINCIPLES. Center for American Progress economist Gene Sperling has put out a memo to help liberals who'd like to see an affirmative agenda on savings and asset-building distinguish our ideas from pernicious efforts to sneak Social Security privatization in through the back door. The key principles are that an acceptable plan must be progressive in its impact -- i.e., offer refundable tax credits and/or subsidies for low-income savers and not be centered around tax deductions that only help the rich, must not be financed with new debt, and must be separate from the Social Security program. The memo, on my reading at least, isn't very clear as to what the last point means. But on a conference call just now I got Sperling to clarify it. Basically it comes down to the following:

• Don't pay for the accounts with payroll-tax money.
• Don't pay for the accounts by cutting Social Security benefits.
• Don't pay for the accounts by borrowing.

That sounds right to me. Sperling being a wonky sort associated with "third-way" tendencies, the members of the dread MSM on the call seemed determined to bait him into alternativism, via the standard arguments that Democrats have a moral obligation to offer an alternative Social Security plan or that they will "pay a political price" for failing to do so. Sperling wasn't as shrill on this as I would have been, but made the essential point that unless and until the president wants to propose something real and detailed, there's no reason for Democrats to do so. Instead, Bush has offered principles: solvency through benefit cuts, and partial privatization paid for through a mix of further benefit cuts and new debt. All Democrats need at this point are principles of our own, and Sperling's put some smart ones on the table.

--Matthew Yglesias

CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS? In the wake of further revelations about Tom DeLay's dirty dealings, I'm developing some real concern that the liberal advocacy groups going after the majority leader are becoming too effective. It seems to me that the last thing one wants is a replay of the Trent Lott situation where the critics manage to bag their man but don't succeed in gaining anything larger. My advice would be for liberals to back off inquries into DeLay's finances and certainly to stop pressuring other figures on the right to distance themselves from DeLay. Instead, let the establishment press keep following that thread while liberals spend our energy focusing on broader points.

DeLay's potentially illegal dealings with lobbyists are just coextensive with much more widespread brands of behavior that, while often perfectly legal, are no more morally praiseworthy. The issue here is the rise of a Republican Party that in its House, Senate, and White House incarnations is wholly a prisoner of corporate interests and has abandoned any pretense of ideological principle in an effort to put policy up for sale to the highest bidder. The big game here is hundreds of billions in corporate subsidies masquerading as Medicare reform; massive tax cuts; and the failure to properly enforce labor, environmental, tax, and consumer-protection laws. The real payoffs aren't junkets but the hundreds of millions of dollars that finance the entire conservative institutional apparatus.

Don't "tell corporate America to drop the Hammer," drop the hammer on corporate America and its shills.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOLTON HEARING DELAYED. The Associated Press is reporting that John Bolton's confirmation hearing has been delayed until next week. The administration is concerned that Senator Lincoln Chafee will vote no, and wants the extra time to pressure him.

The postponement — probably until Monday — comes amid increased focus on the pivotal vote that will be cast by Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. Chafee is a moderate who has said he likely would support the nomination, but he has given Bolton only a lukewarm endorsement.

"The senator has not made up his mind. He's waiting to hear on the record what is said and then he'll decide. But we're inclined to support the nomination. That's where we are," Stephen Hourahan, a Chafee spokesman, said Wednesday.

Farah Stockman detailed the sort of pressure Chafee's under in this morning's Boston Globe.

--Dave Meyer

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PLAME GAME OVER? Is the Plame investigation finished? Murray Waas reports that it may have effectively wrapped up six months ago -- quite possibly without indictments.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DOMINO EFFECT. Yesterday Kansas became the 18th state to decide an anti-gay marriage law was insufficient, changing its constitution to ban gay marriage. Kansas' amendment, unfortunately, is as bad as Ohio's in the broad sweep of its language: “No relationship," the constitutional amendment reads, "other than a marriage, shall be recognized by the state as entitling the parties to the rights or incidents of marriage.” This means, potentially, health benefits (it may strip rights currently enjoyed by unmarried couples, straight and gay, who have, say, domestic-partnership health benefits) legal rights for gay families, adoption issues, hospital visitation, the full gamut.

Of course, the state's on-the-ground homophobia has top-down supporters: Kansas is responsible for Senator Sam Brownback, one of the most prominent supporters in the Senate for the Federal Marriage Amendment. When California judges declared that one-man/one-woman marriage was discriminatory, Brownback issued a press release declaring: "This is another instance of judicial tyranny where one judge has thrown out the will of the people over an issue of deep concern to society in general. We’ll have several hearings on this issue in the Senate Constitution Subcommittee in the upcoming legislative session."

Despite this set back, all news is not grim. Last month, Topeka kept its anti-bias ordinance (a kind of city-wide protection for gays in hiring) and didn't elect Fred Phelps' granddaughter to city council. (You might know Phelps as the sponsor of the website www.godhatesfags.org).

--Sarah Wildman

WHAT WAS THE DEAL? It's certainly heartening to learn that the Iraqi Assembly has picked a three-member Presidency Council, breaking the deadlock in which the political process has been stuck. Still, what's not being made clear in the coverage is what deal actually got made here. The contending factions had actually reached agreement on this personnel decision long ago, but formal implementation was being held hostage to disagreements about various policy points pertaining to Kirkuk, Kurdish autonomy, the role of Islam in the legal system, etc. That's the important stuff. If the Kurdish parties and the United Iraqi Alliance really have reached agreement there, that's very good news. If they're still mired in dissension and just decided to go ahead with the official naming of the Presidency Council to generate a symbolic token of momentum, that's not such good news.

--Matthew Yglesias

TWO ON BOLTON. There are two smart pieces out this morning about the politics of the John Bolton nomination. Writing in TNR, Kenneth Baer urges Democrats to move past the idea that Bolton is too mean to the UN and focus on the concrete ways his actions have impeded the fight against terrorism and WMD proliferation. (To add a suggestion to Baer's list, I would note what my colleague Mark pointed out on Monday -- Bolton's apparent role in messing up the Iraq WMD intelligence.)

Even more, though, I agree with Heather Hurlburt that this is an important opportunity for Democrats to articulate some broader vision and principles about the United States and the world. Bolton is an outlier inside the administration, but in many ways his over-the-top rhetoric and out-of-control behavior makes him a useful exemplar of ideas and attitudes that are much more widespread. He can be a useful foil for people willing and able to articulate a liberal internationalist vision, based not on "permission slips" but on the idea that a cooperative, rule-governed international framework serves American interests and values better than an impossible effort to perpetually rule the world alone.

--Matthew Yglesias

AGAINST THE FILIBUSTER. For Senate Democrats locked in an existential battle against a GOP effort to change procedural rules in the middle of the game, this may not be a very opportune time to do so, but I think more liberals not involved in the actual Capitol Hill fight over the nuclear option really ought to consider and engage the argument against filibusters that Nathan Newman puts forth here. I’ve quibbled before with the flimsy “principled” defense of the filibuster offered by The New York Times editorial writers, and they did themselves no favors last week by reminding me, in another dubious defense of the institution, that the Times editorial page had come out in favor of abolishing the filibuster in 1995, after having watched Republicans obstruct liberal initiatives for two years. (That editorial, a gem of the fiery Howell Raines era called “Time to Retire the Filibuster,” characterized the institution as “the tool of the sore loser” and “an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.”) But Newman takes a longer view and casts the filibuster as a tool that, over the course of ever-shifting partisan fortunes, inherently helps conservatives more than it ever does liberals, since the latter actually seek to enact major, positive government programs and an activist state is inevitably thwarted by such a stringent procedural protection of minority rights and obstruction in the legislature.

Mark Schmitt offered a principled defense of the filibuster back in December that made much of the deliberative structures built into the Senate. It strikes me that those features fostering debate, persuasion, etc. (particularly open amendment rules) that are lost once cloture is invoked wouldn’t necessarily have to disappear -- couldn’t some package of reforms include various protections for open debate while phasing out the 60-vote requirement for cloture? (I don’t have a mastery of the procedural questions involved here, so I could be wrong about that.) On the narrower question of filibusters on judicial nominees, Schmitt made the basic point that these are lifetime appointments and they really, really matter. This is incontrovertible. And yet, as Dems never cease to point out, the actual proportion of nominees they’ve deemed sufficiently objectionable to filibuster is quite small, and (as Matt pointed out in conversation) as horrible as these individuals are there doesn’t really seem to be a categorical, qualitative difference separating them from the generally ideological judges that Democrats have confirmed. Conservative stacking of the judiciary is in and of itself a profoundly important and consequential political reality, but what is the effective long-run significance of the filibuster in hindering that campaign? I don’t pretend to have the answer to that.

I had assumed that by the time the nuclear-option debate was upon us we’d be hearing an argument from the usual neolib contrarian suspects, a la Tim Noah four years ago, that Democrats should act against their short-term interests and take a principled lead in abolishing the filibuster. But we live in polarized times; the Republican threat to ram through awful legislation and awful judges is obviously very dire, and no one seems inclined to make the contrarian case. So I’m glad the stalwart labor progressive Newman finally did. The basic truth is that while the elaborate checks and balances, decentralization, and protections of minority rights that are built into the organizational fabric of our political and legislative system (and that Republicans are doing their mightiest to smash now that they’re in charge) have much to recommend them, they’re a pretty major factor in the United States’ historically laggard status relative to the welfare states of other Western countries. (Read this book, and then ponder American liberals’ enduring inability to enact universal health care.) Having the ability to ram through large legislative slates and enact big social programs that end up creating their own self-sustaining constituencies is, for reasons that should be clear, more important for an activist liberal party when it takes power than it is for a conservative business party when it’s running things. There is every reason to think that sometime at least in the mid-term future Democrats will come back to power in the Senate. There’s considerably less reason to think that they’ll have sixty seats sometime in the mid-term future. Do the short-term costs to the country of an unfilibusterable GOP majority outweigh these considerations? They might. But it certainly seems worth a discussion.

To be sure, the nuclear option itself is a move that every right-thinking lawmaker can oppose on principle, since it is a transparently opportunistic power play that violates the integrity of all rules governing the Senate as an institution. But one can imagine, in some alternate universe, the Democrats offering a more global compromise package that reformed Senate procedures so as to phase out the filibuster while maintaining various hard-and-fast protections for open debate and amendment rules and, on the judicial nominee question, requiring Republican concessions on particular nominees or a reinstatement (and enforcement) of blue-slip-type rules in the judiciary committee. Indeed, the Times editorial in 1995 calling for the retirement of the filibuster was written to promote a resolution then offered by Tom Harkin and Joe Lieberman (yes, I know) that would have provided for a successively lowered threshold to invoke cloture, down to a simple majority on the fourth try. They offered this, recall, just after the Democrats had lost their majority in the Senate. Many liberal Senators endorsed it. You can chalk that up to the foolish naïvete of an era when Democrats either underestimated the extremism of their opponents or assumed they’d be back in power soon anyway. (They also, of course, knew there was a veto-wielding Democratic president in place.) But the mere fact that such a proposal was made so recently should provoke liberals to think about this a little more.

UPDATE: Only now do I see that Brad Plumer covered much of this ground a few days ago.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TARGET-RICH ENVIRONMENT. The GOP seems to be somewhat apoplectic that MoveOn.org plans to launch a new series of ads attacking relative moderate Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and John Warner of Virginia (as well as conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska), and has issued a prebuttal to the ads, which call on constituents to demand that the moderates support preserving the Senate filibuster.

This got me thinking. The RNC has been much more aggressive of late in attacking and negatively defining Democratic activist and interest groups than the DNC has been in going after the institutions that make up the Republican-conservative lobbying and advocacy infrastructure, even though there are more institutional targets on the GOP side.

In just the last month, the RNC has twice gone after the Campaign for America's Future, whose surprisingly effective Social Security campaign has insured that tough questioners showed up at Republican congressional townhalls across the country, generated negative local media for Republicans, and made anti-privatization protests in the districts the president visits a commonplace; gone after "labor unions," such as those who have been working in concert with CAF, once; and attacked MoveOn twice.

Meanwhile, in the same time period, the DNC has not sent out a single release attacking a GOP–affiliated group by name, or even an interest group sub-category. Not Generations Together, the new front group formed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security. Not the Progress for America Voter Fund, creators of the devastingly effective Ashley's Story ad during campaign 2004, now running pro-privatization ads on television with such frequency and targeting skill that even an irregular TV-watcher like me has viewed them organically. Not even USA Next. Instead, in mid-February, the DNC sent out a release attacking nebulous Republican "Special Interest Groups," and has focused its attentions on George W. Bush, Sen. Chuck Grassley, and Republican members of Congress.

If you've ever wondered why the left always seem to be more controversial than the right no matter how outlandish the right becomes, this is why: Because left-of-center organizations are more frequently attacked and made controversial by people with an interest in discrediting them.

And if you ever wonder why it is that Republican and conservative groups seem to get away scot-free no matter what appalling thing they say, well, perhaps it's just because people on the left, such as those at the DNC, let them.

Josh Marshall already dinged an array of rapid-responders, if I read him correctly, for failing to take advantage of the president's visit to the Bureau of Public Debt, saying: "Half the point of President Bush's privatization jihad is to make off with all that money which is owed to future recipients. And here he goes to case the joint, but I'm not hearing a lot about it." Worth noting too is that there's been no formal DNC response (at least that I can find on their site) to Sen. John Cornyn's remarks suggesting that the violent murder of judges might have something to do with their politics, instead of their role in trying to send vicious criminals to jail and protect society from predators.

On a related note, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga at DailyKos observes that there seems to be a kind of strangle-them-in-the -crib strategy on the part of the right-wing and the GOP toward the nascent vast left-wing conspiracy. Yet the DNC seems to have little if any strategy for addressing and defining the already strong right-wing groups on an ongoing basis. Little wonder, then, that the net effect of such discrepancies -- and the above is but one of many -- should be high levels of Democratic dissatisfaction with their leaders, congressional and otherwise.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CHAFEE NOT GOING TO POPE'S FUNERAL. I just talked to Lincoln Chafee's office again. It looks like he is not going to the Pope's funeral this weekend, which means the Bolton hearing is likely to occur Thursday, as scheduled.

--Dave Meyer

BOLTON'S HABITS OF RETALIATION AND INTIMIDATION. I want to second the recommendation that people read Mark Goldberg's excellent analysis of John Bolton's inability to faithfully implement administration policy. Bolton has a personal agenda that he unhesitatingly places over the demands of his formal position.

Mark refers to an interesting event in the study of Boltonology: the expulsion of State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann from Bolton's morning staff meetings. Secretary of State Colin Powell had assigned Thielmann to acts as an intelligence liaison for Bolton, and wanted Theilmann to attend the meetings. Bolton contravened Powell's wishes and "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly," according to Thielmann.

This event illustrates not only Bolton's inability to accept interference in his fiefdoms, but also his inability to tolerate dissent. "Dissent" within the intelligence community is big news of late, with the Silberman-Robb report singling out the stifling of dissent as a prime cause of the various intelligence failures that have plagued the administration. Bolton is one of the worst stiflers -- considering some of those who brought Bolton news he didn't want to hear, Thielmann got off lucky.

He could have been Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, on whom Bolton sicced the CIA. Mohamed El-Baradei, Director General of the IAEA, had his phones tapped and Bolton has been working to replace him, at one point favoring Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. Baradei and Blix shared the sin of producing good intelligence on Iraq.

State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann dared contradict Bolton's assertion that Cuba had a biological weapons program, and was promptly called into the principal's office for a tongue lashing. Six months later, Bolton tried to get Westermann fired. Westermann was the first intelligence analyst to go public with allegations of pressure and intimidation.

There are other cases. Bolton has a problem dealing with people who disagree with him. If you slight him -- or his agenda -- he will try to destroy you. And his agenda is not necessairly the same as the administration's agenda. Oh, and his positions always turn out to be wrong.

--Dave Meyer

OUR POWERLESS PRESIDENT. Josh Marshall wonders about the pro-Social Security forces' response to the president’s nauseating appearance today at the Bureau of Public Debt in West Virginia, where he got to show everyone the actual Social Security Trust Fund bonds he’s getting ready to default on. Well, in addition to the activist counter-event in the area, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid decided to write the prez a letter:

We are writing today to urge you to publicly express your commitment to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund for all Social Security payroll taxes diverted for other purposes. This would ensure Social Security's solvency until 2052, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

As you know, as a result of bipartisan legislation signed by President Reagan in 1983, Social Security has been accumulating huge annual surpluses in preparation for the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. American workers were promised that if they paid payroll taxes beyond those required to pay for current benefits, the surpluses would be invested in securities backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. These securities would be redeemed to pay guaranteed benefits as the baby boomers retired.

…

…It is simply wrong to suggest that the Social Security Trust Fund does not exist, or that the securities held by the Trust Fund are merely pieces of paper. For a President to even suggest that the federal government might, for the first time, default on a security backed by the full faith and credit of the United States unnecessarily misleads American workers about the health of the Social Security program.

Just as significantly, these statements could raise needless doubts among American and foreign investors about the United States' willingness to meet its fiscal obligations. This has potentially broad ranging and damaging implications for our economy.

It is especially unwise to raise doubts about the full faith and credit of the United States at a time when the federal government is running historically large and unsustainable deficits. These deficits are forcing the U.S. government to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign governments and investors. If these investors lose confidence in U.S. securities, Americans will be forced to pay higher interest rates to service our growing debt.

Good stuff. (And it’s nice to see the CBO’s numbers cited instead of the Social Security Administration’s!) The decades-spanning Greenspanian Robin-Hood-in-reverse scam to finance high-end income-tax cuts through regressive payroll-tax hikes in the name of “saving Social Security” is by far the most heinous and unconscionable chapter in the history of privatizers’ efforts to undermine the program. Substantive ideological belief in the idea of privatization is one thing; this whole scheme is simply criminal and would outrage vast swaths of the American people if the issues at hand weren’t so damned boring and complicated. When it comes to the fate of the Social Security Trust Fund, the president isn't some helpless bystander; he’s the president, and if he refuses to commit himself to honoring the U.S. treasury bonds held by the fund he ought to be forced to explain to everyone why that is.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AMBASSADOR OR EMBITTERER. If the UN is ever to be reformed, the U.S. ambassador to the UN will have to lead the charge. Nancy Soderberg, a former U.S. representative to the UN, considers whether John Bolton can fill that role.

--Jeffrey Dubner

POSSIBLE DELAY ON BOLTON. I just got off the phone with Senator Lincoln Chafee's office. There've been rumors and speculation for the last several days that John Bolton's confirmation hearings, scheduled for this Thursday, may be delayed if Chafee travels with a delegation to the Pope's Friday funeral. As of 3:45 p.m., Chafee is still undecided as to whether he will go, and "he is waiting to hear from leadership."

Steve Clemons has heard that George W. Bush wants Chafee to travel with him, so that he can exert a little one-on-one pressure. According to Chafee's office, we should know details by the end of work today. I've also heard, from Democratic staffers, that if the hearing is rescheduled, it will take place next Tuesday.

--Dave Meyer

CABLE INDECENCY BAIT-AND-SWITCH. Via Ogged I see that Representative James Sensenbrenner wants criminal penalties, and not mere regulatory fines, for cable broadcasters who run afoul of the decency police. Quite the crackdown, huh? Maybe, but maybe not:

While he expressed a wish to criminalize the indecency violations, he also applauded the cable industry for its actions. Cable companies allow customers to block channels they find offensive but still require the customers to pay for it.

What's going on here is that liberal-leaning consumer groups have been advocating something called à la carte cable for a while now. The basic idea is that cable providers will be forced to allow customers to pick exactly which channels they want to subscribe to and only pay for those stations, rather than bundling whole big groups of channels together. That's bad for cable broadcasters, who like charging people for channels they never watch, and the leverage it gives them. If you want ESPN you also need to buy Disney's family channel. And ESPN2. And ESPN News. At any rate, a pro-consumer regulation that would ill-serve a powerful corporate interest ought to be dead on arrival in the current climate, but for one thing: social conservative concern about indecent programming.

The consumer groups have managed to form an alliance with cultural conservative groups who think, quite rightly, that they shouldn't need to pay for "indecent" channels they don't want to watch. This would be an elegant solution to the purported problem and would also have benefits for those of us who like our cable indecency just fine, thank you, but maybe aren't so excited by the Hallmark Channel. Sensenbrenner's stance -- "no" to à la carte, "yes" to unrealistic hopes of draconian criminal penalties -- strikes me as a neat trick to keep the Christian/business GOP coalition together at one of its stress points.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHO'S AFRAID OF INTERNATIONAL LAW? What pushed John Cornyn over the edge yesterday? If you read his whole speech, you'll see it's his fear that judges are trying to hand our Constitution to foreign leaders. Deborah Pearlstein looks at Cornyn and the decisions that have the isolationist law crew so steamed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CRIME, BUT NO PUNISHMENT. As I warned last week, the government of Sudan is deliberately targeting humanitarian workers for harassment, according to a new Human Rights Watch report. Some 20 foreign and local aid workers operating in Darfur have been arbitrarily detained or arrested b