Goobergunch Political Report

31 August 2010

Upgrade Complete

Filed under: Meta — Goobergunch @ 17:25 EDT

I’m pleased to report that we’re now running WordPress 3.0.1. It’s good to be running software that isn’t ancient. :)

UPDATE [21:29 CDT by Goobergunch]: And in news from Alaska, Murkowski conceded to Miller tonight. So yeah.

25 August 2010

A Congressional Tea Party

Much ink has been spilled on the implications of the Tea Party movement—and growing public anger at their government generally—for both the nation as a whole and the particular effects on the upcoming midterm election. However, I haven’t seen much discussion as to how Tea Party candidates would act if actually elected. While there’s some credence to the argument that the extremism demonstrated by many of these candidates will be detrimental to their chances of actually winning, I feel that at this point, with no sign of abatement for the Democrats’ electoral prospects (let alone poor economic conditions), it’s a scenario that bears considering. We’ve already seen Tea Party candidates be surprisingly successful in Republican primary races, with the most surprising result (at least to me) being last night’s Senate primary in Alaska:

AK–SEN (GOP Primary)
Joe Miller 51.1%
45,909
Senator
Lisa Murkowski
48.9%
43,949
97.9% reporting

While it’s too soon to declare a winner in this race yet due to the number of absentee ballots that haven’t been counted yet, this race shouldn’t have been close to begin with. Indeed, it wasn’t really on my mind that it would be competitive.

The problem with figuring out what the Tea Party candidates would accomplish if elected is that their stated policy goals don’t seem particularly realistic. For instance, Miller’s issues page emphasizes his opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, global warming legislation, and all abortions. Somehow I don’t think bills expressing these policy views are likely to go anywhere—if nothing else, because President Obama will veto them. I see these Tea Party Republicans as more of an opposition force doing their best to obstruct anything that Obama and Congressional Democrats support. Since Republicans essentially vote “no” as a bloc in both the House and Senate already, I’m not sure that this will make any real difference from a legislative perspective in the 112th Congress. (Unless some form of filibuster reform is enacted in the Senate, it just won’t be these people the Democrats will be seducing to get 60 votes.

That’s assuming the Democrats keep some control of Congress. If the Republicans retake at least the House (I still view the Senate as unlikely, due in part to the extreme nature of these candidates, but not completely out of the question), then all bets are off. And I still don’t have a real concept of what, say, a Speaker Boehner would get through the House that would actually get enacted. My greatest concern is that the Obama Administration would adopt some “moderate” form of the Republican calls for spending cuts, despite the evidence that stimulus spending is pretty much the only thing keeping the economy from contraction. The combination of a continued recession, a government seen as impotent to solve problems, and rising popular anger about all of it can lead to places I don’t really want to think about.

3 February 2010

Hiatus

Filed under: Meta — Goobergunch @ 17:16 EST

I’m interning on Capitol Hill, and will be for the next few months. To avoid embarrassing my boss, this place is going quiet until I’m done.

Look for the next update sometime in June. The old-school GPR Dynamic Race Ratings will probably appear then. :)

26 December 2009

Downtime, and a look at the Second Session

Filed under: Congress,Meta — Tags: , , , , , — Goobergunch @ 16:56 EST

Well, that planned amendment postings got somewhat ruined with the downtime we had recently. While I guess I could put it together now, it’s really kind of pointless given that the full text of the bill, as passed by the Senate, has been printed. Hopefully the new Congressional session will be a bit more productive.

With both the House and Senate adjourned sine die (a nice Latin way to say that the first session is officially concluded), the next item of business is for both Houses to reconvene on Tuesday, 5 January, for what look to be mostly pro forma sessions. After that, the House remains out of session until Tuesday, 12 January; the Senate won’t be back until Monday, 18 January. Obviously, a high priority will be melding the House and Senate bills—while a formal conference may be obstructed by Republican procedural objections (forcing a conference would eat about six days), informal negotiations may be able to bypass the official process while providing roughly the same result (in the form of amendments to the other body’s amendments and such). But what else is on the Congressional agenda?

In the Senate, we’ve got the first hint of an official schedule, at least for Wednesday, 20 January:

After a period of morning business, the Senate will proceed to consideration of Ex. Cal. 421, the nomination of Beverly Martin for the 11th Circuit Court, with 60 minutes of debate evenly divided and controlled by Sens. Leahy and Sessions immediately followed by a vote on the nomination.

At a time to be determined by the Leaders, the Senate will proceed to H.J. Res. 45, the Debt Limit (Increase) resolution. After Reid offers a substitute, which will only change the amount by which the debt limit is increased, the following amendments are in order:

  • Thune (TARP)
  • Murkowski (endangerment EPA regs)
  • Coburn (rescissions package)
  • Sessions (spending caps)
  • McConnell (relevant to any on the list)
  • Reid (relevant to any on the list)
  • Reid (pay-go)
  • Baucus x3 (relevant to any on the list)
  • Conrad/Gregg (fiscal task force)

All of these are subject to a 60–vote threshold for adoption, as will be the final passage vote, which will happen right after all of the amendments get dealt with.

As for the House, there’s nothing concrete about their early schedule yet. There are, of course, plenty of rumors about upcoming immigration and jobs bills floating around, but they haven’t actually materialized yet. Given that the Senate still has a huge backlog of House bills that they could be working on—climate change comes to mind—we’ll just have to wait and see.

9 December 2009

Omnibus!

Filed under: Congress — Tags: , — Goobergunch @ 02:57 EST

It’s been widely suggested that there was going to have to be some kind of consolidated appropriations bill this year, given that the Senate is bogged down on the health care bill (which I will update tomorrow) leaving it little time to deal with anything else. The main question was what the vehicle would be for the omnibus.

Well, the conference report on H.R. 3288 (formerly Transportation/HUD Appropriations) has been filed, and it’s got six of the seven outstanding appropriations bills. The one bill that doesn’t appear to have been rolled into H.R. 3288 is Defense Appropriations, which I assume will be dealt with separately.

Look for a House vote on consolidated appropriations later in the week.

3 December 2009

Healthcare in the Senate, Day 5

Filed under: Congress — Tags: , , — Goobergunch @ 22:23 EST

So today the Senate adopted the Mikulski Amendment #2791 and rejected both the Murkowski Amendment #2836 and the McCain Motion to Commit on mostly party lines. The Bennet (CO) Amendment #2826, meanwhile, passed unanimously.

The fun continues tomorrow with consideration of:

  • Whitehouse Amendment #2870 (Sense of the Senate—Fiscal Responsibility)
  • Hatch Motion to Commit (Medicare Advantage)

Votes aren’t scheduled on these yet, but they could occur at any time after 11:30 EST.

The text of the Whitehouse Amendment is under the fold. As you can see, it’s not overly substantive. While I don’t have the text of the Hatch motion yet, I expect it would kill the bill if passed similar to the McCain motion mentioned yesterday. I’ve also updated the main bill text page to reflect the amendments that were made today. I think it’s useful to have a continuously–updated page reflecting the current text of the bill, not just the original text that’s on most sites.

(more…)

2 December 2009

Healthcare in the Senate, Day 4

Filed under: Congress — Tags: , , — Goobergunch @ 19:10 EST

As the health care bill works its slow way through the Senate, it’s somewhat sobering to note that the very first substantive votes there will finally occur tomorrow. We’re getting votes on:

  • Mikulski Amdt. #2791 (Women’s Medical Care) as amended,
  • Murkowski Amdt. #2836 (Women’s Medical Care),
  • Bennet (CO) Amdt. #2826 (Medicare), and
  • McCain Motion to Commit (Medicare).

All of these require 60 votes to be adopted. The first two will be voted on at 11:45 EST, and the last two will be voted on at 14:45 EST.

Of course, the next question is what these amendments actually do. Sen. Blanche Lincoln has posted the text of various amendments on her website. If it weren’t for this, we wouldn’t know the full text of the Murkowski and Bennet amendments until the Congressional Record comes out early tomorrow morning.

(As for the McCain motion, it sends the bill back to committee with various instructions to make changes to it. It can be read here (PDF), but its language is really unimportant—sending the bill back to committee would probably just kill it for good.)

(more…)

27 June 2009

June 2009: The Joys of House Partisanship

Filed under: Congress — Tags: , , , — Goobergunch @ 00:16 EDT

It’s been an exciting couple weeks to be watching the House floor. First, there was the incident a couple weeks ago, where H.R. 2847, the Commerce/Justice/Science appropriations bill, was given a rule that required Congressional Record pre-printing for all amendments. In English, this means that while Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) could offer any amendments to the bill that they wanted, they had to appear in the Congressional Record at least one day before the House actually considered the bill. Republicans claimed that this unfairly limited their flexibility, and 127 amendments were eventually filed for printing. While Republicans insisted that they didn’t plan on actually offering all 127 amendments, the Democratic leadership reported out a rule limiting these amendments themselves; ultimately, only 32 amendments would be offered. But Republicans were angry enough to force a vote on every single procedural question that they could come up with. Ultimately, 53 recorded votes were held on 18 June, a new daily record.

Today, the House considered H.R. 2454, the Energy and Climate Change bill. Policy differences aside, Republicans were angered this time by a 309-page manager’s amendment not published until 3:47 AM last night. While this amendment was considered adopted at the start of floor consideration, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH 8) resorted to a different protest tactic at the end of debate on the legislation. Traditionally, the Speaker and the Majority and Minority Leaders are given as much time as they wish to close debate on major bills, even though they will officially have only one or two minutes to speak. While this privilege frequently extends to speeches that are several minutes in length, Boehner used his time to begin reading from the manager’s amendment. He would eventually extend the 2½ minutes he was granted to over an hour.

It is unclear what action Democrats could have taken to stop Boehner. The only relevant precedent I could find in a brief scan of Deschler’s Precedents seemed to give all timekeeping authority to the Speaker pro tempore. In theory, the presiding officer (at the time, Ellen Tauscher (D-CA 10)) could have declared Boehner’s time to have expired, but I rather suspect the outcry from Republicans about House procedure would have dwarfed even what we’ve seen so far. Ultimately, Boehner’s mini-filibuster was to no avail anyway; H.R. 2454 passed 219-212 in the closest final passage vote we’ve seen this session.

Congress now stands in recess for the July 4th holiday. Will the partisan rancor decline after the break? I doubt it, but the House should at least remain entertaining to watch.

26 May 2009

Strauss v. Horton

Filed under: California,Judiciary — Tags: , , — Goobergunch @ 23:22 EDT

By now, it’s not exactly news that the California Supreme Court has, in a 6-1 opinion, upheld the legality of November’s Proposition 8, which removed the right of same-sex couples to marry in the state. The most deeply troubling part of this opinion, at least in my mind, was the part holding that amendments restricting fundamental rights are permissible under the existing California Constitution (notwithstanding any federal intervention). Unfortunately, this is merely a symptom of a larger problem impacting California. The state has become ungovernable, due in significant part to the ability of anybody with a spare couple million dollars to put a legislative question directly to a public that generally doesn’t have the time to sit through a few dozen pages of legal text. With the ethical standards of modern ballot campaigns, this can result in people voting differently from how they would with a proper understanding of the given ballot measure.

Proposition 8 isn’t a bad example of these campaign practices. While the No on 8 campaign was disorganized and somewhat incoherent in its message, the Yes on 8 campaign had its act together. Notably, they informed voters that legal gay marriage would impact public schools, leading to teachers telling their students about same-sex marriage being equivalent to opposite-sex marriage. While I wouldn’t have a problem with this, there’s also nothing in In re marriage cases requiring this. I don’t know how much of an effect the well-organized Yes on 8 campaign ultimately had, but with the final margin on passage being only about six hundred thousand votes, it wouldn’t have taken much to have been the decisive factor.

The good news is that most substantive same-sex marriage rights have been retained post-8. On page 37, the Strauss ruling holds that

Proposition 8 reasonably must be interpreted in a limited fashion as eliminating only the right of same-sex couples to equal access to the designation of marriage, and as not otherwise affecting the constitutional right of those couples to establish an officially recognized family relationship.

Indeed, California remains one of four states to grant strict scrutiny to discriminatory statutes against homosexuals. I’d argue that existing prejudice against homosexuals, combined with current political influence levels, should qualify under my reading of Carolene Footnote Four. But of course, that’s not for me to decide, and Justice Kennedy rather dodged the issue in Lawrence v. Texas.

Since this is California, the next step in overturning Proposition 8 is obvious — put together a new ballot measure that strikes out the added language from the state Constitution. I fully expect a ballot measure to this effect to appear on the 2010 ballot. Due to favorable demographic changes, a majority of state voters should favor marriage equality in the very near future, especially if the campaign supporting it is competent. In the long term, however, California needs structural change in its government. On page 13 of its ruling today, the California Supreme Court noted (citations omitted):

If the process for amending the Constitution is to be restricted—perhaps in the manner it was explicitly limited in an earlier version of our state Constitution, or as limited in the present-day constitutions of some of our sister states—this is an effort that the people themselves may undertake through the process of amending their Constitution in order to impose further limitations upon their own power of initiative.

We should do this, preferably as part of a larger process to reform the problems that are removing California’s ability to govern itself.

Back on the air!

Filed under: Meta — Goobergunch @ 22:05 EDT

Welcome back to the Goobergunch Political Report, now back after a lengthy hiatus. I haven’t come up with any new and particularly creative things to do with this space, so I’m just going to be blogging on news and events I happen to care about. Hopefully other people find it interesting.

I’ll be skinning this site and making it a bit less ugly than a default WordPress site over the next few days. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple topical updates to post.

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