Goobergunch Political Report

9 May 2011

Today in the Senate

Goobergunch @ 12:00 CT
Posted in: Justice Will Be Met, Indeed
Tags:

The House isn’t in session today, so I’ll save the usual “This Week in the House” rundown for a bit later. In the meantime, let’s see what that cesspool of obstruction commonly referred to as the United States Senate has in store:

At 4:30pm, the Senate will proceed to Executive Session to consider the nomination of James Cole, to be Deputy Attorney General.

At approximately 5:30pm, the Senate will proceed to a roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Cole nomination.

That’s right. This is a filibuster of an executive branch nominee. The type that serves at the pleasure of the President. Because, uh…

Republicans have focused in part on a 2002 column Cole wrote for Legal Times that criticized the Bush administration’s battle against terrorism. “The attorney general is not a member of the military fighting a war — he is a prosecutor fighting crime,” Cole wrote. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has said that embodied a failed law enforcement approach to battling terrorists.

That’s from the Washington Post back in December. I’m really tempted to just say “res ipsa loquitor” here, but I really don’t think that the merits of Cole’s nomination are the biggest problem right now. A President is going to pick nominees for Executive Branch nominees that the opposition party wouldn’t have appointed and isn’t really happy with. Otherwise, there really wouldn’t be much of a point to having a Presidential election in the first place. The Senate has a Constitutional responsibility to “advise and consent” to nominees, and if a nominee is really objectionable to any Senator, than they have the prerogative to vote against. But stalling a nominee for a year, preventing a confirmation vote, is just abuse of process. The way to deal with nominees that have a different outlook on the world than you should be, unless you can muster the votes to just defeat the nominee outright, to wait for the next Presidential election and get a better candidate elected.

Of course, this is the real United States Senate, not some idealized version that I’d like to see. So the schedule will consist of filibusters as far as the eye can see.

A New Challenger Approaches: Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Senator

Goobergunch @ 03:00 CT
Posted in: Election 2012
Tags: ,

This actually slipped under my radar when it first happened back on 14 April:

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is setting up a fundraising committee that allows him to take the first steps toward a 2012 presidential campaign.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear this back in 2004 or so. Back then, Santorum was a rising young conservative star, the number 3 Republican in the Senate leadership who had easily won his 2000 re-election bid in Pennsylvania, an important Presidential swing state. But then the 2006 election happened:


PA–SEN
Bob Casey (DEM) 58.6%
2,392,984
Senator
Rick Santorum (GOP)		 41.3%
1,684,778
DEM Gain

Yeah, that wasn’t even close. It’s really hard to take seriously the candidacy of somebody whose last election saw him, as the incumbent, blown out by a full seventeen percentage points. But Santorum definitely has the conservative credibility needed to appeal to a certain segment of the Republican primary electorate. I have to question, though, whether he has other factors needed to actually win.

8 May 2011

A New Challenger Approaches: Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman

Goobergunch @ 21:00 CT
Posted in: Election 2012
Tags: ,

I’ve gotten a bit behind on these posts, but that doesn’t mean that a couple more Republicans haven’t thrown their hats into the Presidential ring. Ron Paul, who’s represented part of the Texas coast in the House since 1996 (and earlier, from 1977 to 1983), announced the formation of his exploratory committee for President back on 26 April.

Paul’s an interesting figure to those of us that have a C-SPAN addiction. Whenever there’s a House vote that features only one person voting against, it’s fairly likely that Paul will be that vote, opposing the legislation because he believes in a much more limited role for government than it currently holds. But in the middle part of the 2000s, he wasn’t well-known outside of House watchers and observant libertarians. That all changed with his 2008 run for President, which generated a lot of publicity and fundraising.

But Ron Paul’s appeal did not extend to the Republican primary electorate. By 4 March 2008, when John McCain had clinched the nomination, Paul had only received 17 delegates out of 2370. Despite the sound and fury of the “Tea Party” movement, I find it hard to believe that Paul will do substantially better this time, as too many forces in the national Republican Party oppose his candidacy. It must be acknowledged, though, that Paul’s brand of Republicanism has grown to be a far, far louder voice than I could have imagined back in, say, 2006.

2 May 2011

Bin Laden Dies, You Gain 10,000 XP

Goobergunch @ 00:37 CT
Posted in: Justice Will Be Met, Indeed, War and National Defense
Tags:

Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate. I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden.

So as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Osama bin Laden died in a gunfight during an American military operation earlier today. While I would have preferred to see him convicted on three thousand counts of murder, a world without bin Laden is a better place.

That being said, I’m not sure how much this actually changes the global situation. Certainly, bin Laden’s death has a huge symbolic value. But beyond that, my impression has always been that bin Laden was mostly a figurehead at this point, and the real leadership of the various groups calling themselves “al-Qaida” was separate. (I was actually somewhat surprised that bin Laden hadn’t died in a cave somewhere years ago.) We’ll have to wait and see what develops.

Personally, I hope we can use bin Laden’s death as an excuse to start winding down the war machines. I don’t expect to see repeal, or at least reform, of the extremely broad Authorization for Use of Military Force, as well as various other provisions of law that have been used to restrict American civil liberties, from this Congress or Administration. But that won’t stop me from supporting efforts to do so.

1 May 2011

First Week in May

Goobergunch @ 00:00 CT
Posted in: By-Elections, Navigation and Navigable Waters, Providing for the General Welfare, Public Lands
Tags:

Here are the bills scheduled for House consideration this week. All bill and committee report links are PDF files because Thomas is down for hardware maintenance over the weekend. That’s also why this listing is terser than normal.

  • H.R. 1213 (report), which would repeal PPACA Sec. 1311(a) (American Health Benefit Exchange funds). [Tuesday]
  • H.R. 1214 (report), which would repeal PPACA Sec. 4104(a) (school-based health center construction funds). [Tuesday]
  • H.R. 3 (report), the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”. This is the big item for this week, and would basically make it substantially more difficult for a woman to obtain an abortion. If I have time, I’ll try to get more on this later. [Wednesday]
  • H.R. 1230, which would require several Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sales to occur. [Thursday]

H.R. 1229, the “Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act”, may also come up on Thursday if time permits. It’s another bill about drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Over in the Senate, another two district judge nominations are up on Monday. We’ll see what the rest of the week holds soon enough, but notably, Rep. Dean Heller (R-Nevada) will be taking over disgraced Sen. John Ensign’s seat on Tuesday. The special election for Heller’s House seat will be held on 13 September.

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