Disloyal Democratic Party

By Frank Moraes 

I am very glad that Eliot Spitzer has decided to re-enter politics by running for New York City comptroller. And right on cue, Matt Yglesias has said what had to be said, "Eliot Spitzer Never Should Have Resigned in the First Place." Mostly, his article was an excuse to point out that Spitzer most likely wants this "lowly" job because it would give him control of the public employee pension funds. And that means he would have some power to go after Wall Street. Surprisingly, Yglesias does not go to the next step, which is that Wall Street is going to put big money behind Spitzer's primary opponent Scott Stringer. And it may not be that hard for Stringer to get the advantage given he isn't a bad guy himself. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the election goes.

What I'm more interested in is the Spitzer resignation itself. As with Anthony Weiner, I think his resignation had more to do with the complete lack of support by his own party than anything else. In both of these men's cases, the scandal was relatively small. But Democrats are not a group prone to circling the wagons. They are more in the habit of waving a white flag and yelling, "We've got him here! He's all tied up! We'll bring him right out!"

This has long been a problem for me with the Democratic Party. As much as I hate just about everything the Republicans stand for, at least they are loyal when it comes to all of this non-ideological bullshit. Of course, they are like the medieval Catholic Church when it comes to ideology. The Democrats are just the opposite. A Democratic candidates can be anti-individual welfare and pro-corporate welfare and we will herald him as the greatest Democratic President since FDR. But let a sex scandal show up and suddenly the Democratic Party is as pure as Mother Teresa. In fact, I wonder if the Democratic Party would have stayed as loyal to Bill Clinton had it not been for the constant ridiculous trumpeting of fake scandals all through his presidency. (Regardless, it was only his will to fight that saved him.)

It is interesting, this comparison of the two parties. They kind of show the main ways that parties can go wrong. The Republicans have become too pure in terms of ideology and the Democrats have become too impure. Both of these failings have advantages. But what it means as a practical matter is that the very best politicians in both parties are drummed out: Republicans because they are too reasonable and Democrats because no one is ever that perfect. At least, no one who has anything going on intellectually!

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Chris Christie hates DOMA ruling, reveals abject ignorance of American constitutionalism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you may have heard, sometime Republican superstar Chris Christie, the bullying blowhard (and media-friendly) governor of New Jersey, isn't terribly impressed with the Supreme Court for striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The ruling is an "example of judicial supremacy," he said yesterday. "I don't think the ruling was appropriate," he opined. "I think it was wrong."

He criticized the justices, or at least five of them, for replacing "the judgment of a Republican Congress and a Democratic president" with "their own judgment," adding: "I thought that Justice Kennedy's opinion was, in many respects, incredibly insulting to those people, 340-some members of Congress who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and Bill Clinton."

Okay, we already knew Christie was a bigot -- yes, if you're against same-sex marriage, that's what you are, period. But what he showed with these comments is that he's an ignorant fool as well, with little regard for the checks, balances, and the rule of law.

Does he really have so little understanding of the Constitution, the history of the Supreme Court, and the concept of judicial review, particularly as established early on with Marbury v. Madison, one of the country's defining cases? 

This is what, in essence, the U.S. Supreme Court does. It rules on the constitutionality of federal laws, providing a check on the other two branches of government. And what it said on Wednesday is that DOMA is unconstitutional. It had every right to do so. It's in the fucking Constitution.

Furthermore, it hardly matters that DOMA was enacted by a Republican Congress and Democratic president, or by any partisan combination. That was 17 years ago. Clinton himself is now against it. And laws are not enacted for eternity.

But Christie is really just grasping at straws. He opposes same-sex marriage and so opposes the ruling simply because he doesn't like it. In so doing, though, he misunderstands or misrepresents checks and balances as "judicial supremacy." And in fact the 5-4 ruling was rather conservative. The justices may have struck down DOMA, but they did not issue a sweeping endorsement of same-sex marriage, one that would have required it immediately at the state level. Yes, the case against DOMA is essentially the case against state bans on same-sex marriage as well, but the Court effectively left it to states to address.

Christie is safe. He'll win re-election easily later this year, and of course he's done a lot of good in his state in response to Hurricane Sandy, not least by embracing Obama as his BFF last year. But behind the media-friendly pragmatism lies the core of an ideological conservative who in many ways isn't all that different than your standard Republican from anywhere else.

And his ridiculous take on the historic DOMA ruling just shows him to be a moron as well.

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DOMA never had a chance

By Mustang Bobby 

It's easy to say that the Defense of Marriage Act was doomed from the outset and that its demise yesterday was inevitable. Passed in the heat of the election campaign of 1996 and foisted as a knee-jerk reaction to the possibility that Hawaii was about to legalize same-sex marriage (this was before the Aloha State was considered an "exotic" place to be from), it had a relatively short life span; a little under 17 years.

For a while it looked like it was carved in stone. The full weight of the federal government, in all its intricacies of laws, orders, rules, and codes, was behind the denial of spousal benefits of marriages between two people who shared similar genitalia. And once a federal law is in place, it is very hard to extract the tentacles.

But its doom was ordained by its own existence. Born in a fit of pique and panic, it begged for states to pass marriage equality, or at the very least civil unions, and once they did, DOMA -- an assault on the Equal Protection clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments anyway -- became moot.  Equal rights to married couples granted by states such as Massachusetts or New York were being denied by the federal government, and that put DOMA on the path to invalidation.

What is especially ironic is that all of the arguments against DOMA are deeply conservative and traditional right wing talking points, ranging from big government intrusion into the lives of citizens to the hatred of the Internal Revenue Service and its big-footing of the tax code. The plaintiff in the case that brought DOMA to the Supreme Court wasn’t looking for the federal government to bless her wedding; she wanted to be treated fairly by the tax collector. How hard is that for a Republican to understand and sympathize with?

From the day DOMA was signed into law by President Clinton (who must acknowledge his own chutzpah for championing the ruling yesterday), I believed it would be thrown out. That does not lessen the joy and satisfaction that I left yesterday morning when the ruling came down. If anything, it affirms my belief in the law and the inevitability of marriage equality, even if I am still single. (Hope springs eternal.)

And we are one step closer to putting an end to an adjective-enhanced society, such as "gay marriage" or "lesbian couple." We're just people.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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Michele Bachmann's influence: Credit where credit is due

By Mustang Bobby 

Rachel Maddow thinks that Michele Bachmann was far more influential in shaping the agenda of the modern Republican party than people give her credit for:

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

She may have a valid point. Without Ms. Bachmann, would we now have people in the Senate like Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah? (We will always have folks like Louie Gohmert, Virginia Foxx, and Steve King battering against the walls of Congress.) 

As Ms. Maddow noted in her piece, Matt Taibbi warned us in 2011 against making fun of Michele Bachmann: 

You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger. 

Fortunately, his prediction did not come true; Michele Bachmann's ride to national prominence was accompanied with the same laugh-track that followed Charlie Sheen's career path, and the Mel Brooks method — laughter as the best weapon — did not enable her. 

It was inevitable that we would have gotten the growth of the fringe-right even without the able assistance of Ms. Bachmann. That destiny was set long before she came on the scene in Congress. One can make the case that it started with the Republicans' reaction to the election of Bill Clinton, or even as far back as the presidency of Ronald Reagan where the damp and fetid undergrowth of religious bigotry and patriarchy grew and spread as a response to Roe v. Wade and the progress of LGBT rights. The emergence of Barack Obama — a man who encapsulates every boogedy-boogedy stereotype of the Other and Liberalism that the GOP has been mustering since the defeat of Herbert Hoover — broke open the floodgates, and Ms. Bachmann, ever the opportunist, took full advantage of it. 

As Edward R. Murrow once said about another prominent Republican, she did not create this situation, she merely exploited it — and rather successfully. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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What can Republicans talk about besides scandals?

By Frank Moraes 

After reading John Dean's take on the recent scandals, I noticed that another of my favorite conservatives, Ramesh Ponnuru had waded into these waters with "'Obama Scandals' Could Actually Hurt Republicans." I love those scare quotes in the title. The truth is that these aren't really Obama's scandals, but it would be fair to call them Obama's troubles.

The argument that Ponnuru made is a common one these days on the left: the Republicans might be overreaching on these issues. Coming from liberals, I'm unimpressed. Just like with the talk that the current scandals might turn out to involve Obama, the Republicans might overplay the scandals. The truth is that the Republicans don't exactly need these scandals to overplay their hand. Regardless, this wasn't Ponnuru's main point.

The big comparison for everyone seems to be 1998. That was Bill Clinton's sixth year. Clinton had been involved in a scandal regarding lying about an affair. The standard narrative is that the Republicans overplayed the scandal and ended up doing damage to themselves. It is widely believed that the president's party loses lots of seats in Congress during the president's sixth year in office (this is a myth). So when the Democrats picked up a couple of seats, everyone said it was because the Republicans angered the voters with all their focus on Cigar-Gate.

But Ponnuru showed that this wasn't the case. Only 5% of the voters in 1998 were motivated by the sex scandal and most of them voted against Clinton. The real story was that the voters cared about the economy and education (As usual!) and they were very unhappy with where the Republicans were on these issues. Ponnuru argued that the current crop of Republicans is being equally out of touch. And the scandals are just making it worse on them because it is allowing them to focus on scandals that will likely come to nothing rather than pushing for real policy changes. As he put it, "They’re trying to win news cycles when they need votes."

The only place I disagree with Ponnuru (and this is a running disagreement) is his belief that the conservative movement actually has policy ideas. I really don't see this. They do have some ideas relative to current policy. For example, changes in Medicare will put limits on the few people currently using Medicare Advantage. But if the Republicans suddenly found themselves in charge of the federal government, what policies would they push? They would repeal Obamacare, but not replace it with anything. They would enact regressive tax cuts. And they would try to outlaw abortions. Basically, they would try to destroy the legacy of the New Deal onward. But none of these policies even claim to tackle the problems that our country faces.

So I continue to wonder why someone as smart as Ponnuru can continue to think that his movement has ideas for the future. I'm sure that there are conservative ideas out there. But the movement itself isn't interested in them. The Republicans could rename their party the Anti-Democratic Party. That would be more honest. But Ponnuru is correct that they aren't going to succeed as long as they think all they need to do is to destroy Obama. After all, Obama will never again run for office.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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