Jim Johnson's List: Government & Politics

• In a world of dogs, diplomatically speaking, Mr. Obama is a cat. Just as he has suffered from being standoffish with Congress, donors and his base, our feline president can be oblivious to the neediness of other less Zen leaders. As Helene Cooper and Robert Worth wrote in The New York Times Tuesday, some Arab officials are critical of Mr. Obama's impersonal, distant style. "You can't fix these problems by remote control," one Arab diplomat told them.

  At least the president has a foreign policy. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan haven't spent much time thinking or speaking about foreign policy. They have taken the path of least resistance and parroted the views of neocon advisers. They talk tough and label the president a weak apologist and build up bogymen and rant about how America must dictate events in the Middle East. That's not a doctrine; it's a treacherous neocon echo.

  It's amazing that many of the neocons who were involved in the Iraq debacle are back riding high. (Foreign Policy magazine reports that 17 of Mr. Romney's 24 special advisers on foreign policy were in W.'s administration.)

• In his speech Wednesday night, the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies.

  As the writer Dermot McEvoy notes, Mr. Ryan has "the so-sincere, so-phony air of a gloomy Irish undertaker standing outside the funeral parlor where you've come to plant your mother, shaking his head consolingly and giving you that firm two-handed Irish handshake."

  Except with Mr. Ryan, it's the safety net in the coffin.

• Mr. Ryan's harsh stances toward women, the old and the poor are on record, so he set a new standard for gall when he intoned, "The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves."

  The convention rebranding as compassionate conservatives is encouraging in that it shows that Republicans feel they are at a disadvantage with their Ayn Rand disdain for altruism, their Kempian trickle-down economics stripped of the humanity of Jack Kemp, their worship of the wealthy as the engine of economic prosperity.

  Expected to draw Catholic votes, Mr. Ryan has been forced to renounce the atheist, Russian-born Rand, but he channeled her when he talked about wanting to define his own happiness, adding, "That's freedom, and I'll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners."

• If Paul Ryan were a liberal, conservatives would describe him as a creature of Washington who has spent virtually all of his professional life as a congressional aide, a staffer at an ideological think tank, and finally, as a member of Congress. In the right's shorthand: he never met a payroll.

  If they were in a sunny mood, these conservatives would readily concede that Mr. Ryan is a nice guy who's fun to talk to. But they'd also insist that he is an impractical ideologue. He holds an almost entirely theoretical view of the world defined by big ideas that never touch the ground and devotes little energy to considering how his proposed budgets might affect the lives of people he's never met.
• the issue in this election will be how Americans want to be governed. Republicans mock President Barack Obama for still thinking like the professor he once was, yet in this race, Mr. Obama -- far more than today's conservative theorists and to the occasional consternation of his more liberal supporters -- is the pragmatist. He's talking about messy trade-offs: between taxes and spending, government and the private sector, dreams and the facts on the ground. In embracing Mr. Ryan, Mr. Romney has tied himself to the world of high conservative ideology. As liberals learned long ago, ideology usually loses.

• To be sure, the new voter ID law is different from the law upheld in Patterson. So it is possible to acknowledge Patterson's illegitimacy and find other reasons to approve voter ID.

  But Patterson is relevant in another way. It shows that a majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was once led to rationalize burdensome election procedures based on generalized and biased fears about fraudulent voting. That historic mistake should make the court hesitate to uphold another election law ostensibly aimed at preventing fraud when the state has offered no evidence that any such fraud has actually occurred.

  Wrenched out of context, the legal language that the Commonwealth Court judge chose to quote from Patterson sounds like a fair basis for upholding the new voter ID law. But, in fact, the old Patterson case represents the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's shameful failure to protect elections from a law designed to make voting harder for some people than for others.

  The court should not compound its earlier mistake by treating Patterson as legal support for new voting procedures. Given the biased nature of that old decision, using it to uphold new voter ID requirements can only undermine public confidence in the state's electoral -- and judicial -- process.

• Medicaid, the nation's health insurance for low-income Americans, actually covers more people. It covers children, the disabled and the elderly.

• Medicaid covers 62 million Americans.

   

  We cover 40 percent of the births in this country. We cover the majority of long -- publicly funded long-term care services.
• We cover the majority of HIV/AIDS treatment, the majority of mental health treatment.
• Medicaid is run by the state through rules set by Washington. And although it varies from state to state, the federal government, on average, pays nearly 60 percent of the cost. The states pay the rest.
• Those costs, along with its prominent role in the federal health care reform law, has inserted Medicaid firmly into the middle of the presidential campaign.
• Roughly two-thirds of Medicaid spending goes to the elderly or disabled, many in long-term care.

• The issue for a lot of folks who wind up on Medicaid is that they end up doing what we call spending down.

   

  They end up in a nursing home or they end up with other types of very high medical bills that essentially exhaust all of their savings, all of their resources relatively quickly.

   

  And then, at that point, Medicaid steps in and picks up the rest of their care essentially for the rest of their lives.
• Any one of us at an advanced age really is just one fall away from a broken hip and then a spiraling out of conditions that could end you up in a nursing home or some other kind of, you know, life-altering decision.

• For most states, Medicaid is one of the single biggest costs in their budgets.

   

  Costs and coverage are two of the principal reasons that President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney have laid out very different visions for Medicaid.

• The elderly and disabled are one-quarter of Medicaid beneficiaries, but two-thirds of the cost.

   

  That will rise as the population ages. And there is no way you can extract savings of this magnitude without dramatic reductions in health care for low-income people who are seniors or who have disabilities.

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• The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...” Although the Internal Revenue Code prohibition against political campaign intervention may burden the exercise of religion to the extent that a religious organization must choose between the receipt of the benefits of tax exemption and intervention in a political campaign, not every burden on religious exercise is constitutionally prohibited.
• Religious organizations, as well as all other organizations exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, are prohibited from participating or intervening, directly or indirectly, in a political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for elective public office.⁷ This prohibition encompasses a wide array of activities. It precludes direct political campaign intervention, including the making of statements, whether oral, written or in an electronic medium, supporting or opposing any candidate, political party or political action committee (“PAC”); creating a PAC;⁸ rating candidates;⁹ and providing or soliciting financial support (including loans¹⁰ or loan guarantees) or in-kind support for any candidate, political party or PAC. It also precludes indirect political campaign intervention of a sort that reflects bias for or against any candidate, political party or PAC, such as distributing biased voter education materials or conducting a biased candidate forum or voter registration drive.

• 6. Must religious organizations restrict their discussion of issues during election campaign periods? 

  No. The political campaign intervention prohibition does not restrict discussions of issues that are not linked to support for or opposition to candidates. The fact that candidates may align themselves on one side or another of an issue does not restrict the ability of religious organizations to engage in discussions of that issue.¹¹ That said, a religious organization may nonetheless violate the political campaign intervention prohibition if it communicates preferences for or against particular candidates as part of its issue discussions.

• 7. When would an issue discussion violate the political campaign intervention prohibition? 

  The IRS has advised that for an issue discussion to violate the political campaign intervention prohibition, it must contain some reasonably overt indication of support for or opposition to a particular candidate.¹² A communication is particularly at risk of violating the political campaign intervention prohibition if it makes reference to candidates or voting in a specific upcoming election. The IRS has identified the following factors as relevant when determining whether an advocacy communication constitutes political campaign intervention: (a) whether the communication identifies one or more candidates for a public office; (b) whether the communication expresses approval or disapproval of one or more candidates’ positions and/or actions; (c) whether the communication is delivered close in time to an election; (d) whether the statement makes reference to voting or an election; (e) whether the issue addressed in the communication has been raised as an issue distinguishing candidates for a given office; (f) whether the communication is part of an ongoing series of communications on the same issue that are independent of the timing of any election; and (g) whether the timing of the communication and identification of the candidate are related to a nonelectoral event, such as a scheduled vote on specific legislation by an officeholder who also happens to be a candidate for public office.¹³ 

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• Every year, federal agencies issue thousands of rules and regulations.
• These regulations, like almost all others, can be challenged in a court, which is typically a federal court of appeals consisting of a three-judge panel. As it turns out, a lot depends on whether the panel consists of Republican or Democratic appointees.

• Here are three facts: 

   

   

  1. When the affected industry challenges a rule, Republican appointees are significantly more likely than Democratic appointees to vote to strike down that rule. 

      
   

  2. When a public interest group challenges a rule, Democratic appointees are significantly more likely than Republican appointees to vote to strike down that rule. 

      
   

  3. Judges’ likely votes are greatly affected by the positions of their colleagues. Sitting with two fellow Republican appointees, a Republican appointee becomes even more likely to side with industry. Sitting with two Democratic appointees, a Democratic appointee becomes even more likely to agree with a public interest group. 

      
   

   

  Of course the law imposes constraints; judges cannot strike rules down simply because they dislike them. But there is no question that the ultimate fate of rules protecting health, safety, and the environment may ultimately depend on whether the judges on the panel were appointed by a Republican or a Democrat.
• What this evidence suggests is that
• many of the biggest battles of the day—over health care reform, financial reform, environmental protection, workplace safety, civil rights—will ultimately be settled in court by lower-court judges in rulings that will get little public attention. The Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act, but some of the rules that are necessary to implement it may turn out to be vulnerable. Unlike presidents, judges often stay in their jobs for decades, and any president is in a position to shift the judiciary in major ways. Of course it is true that the 2012 presidential election will help to establish the meaning of the Constitution. Perhaps equally important, it will help to establish the fate of numerous rules designed to protect public safety, health, and the environment.

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• Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Thursday that the United States was facing the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation's power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.
• He said he was reacting to increasing aggressiveness and technological advances by the nation's adversaries, which officials identified as China, Russia, Iran and militant groups.
• "An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches," Mr. Panetta said. "They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."
• Pentagon officials acknowledged that Mr. Panetta was also pushing for legislation on Capitol Hill. It would require new standards at critical private-sector infrastructure facilities -- like power plants, water treatment facilities and gas pipelines -- where a computer breach could cause significant casualties or economic damage.

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• Paul Solman talks to the authors of "The Betrayal of the American Dream," Donald Barlett and James Steele, who say the drive for free trade has exported so many jobs to China, Brazil and India that American workers may become irrelevant to their own economy, just as other countries gain a middle class.
• They say the age of mass affluence is over. And now you're going to have to learn to cater to the super rich and the affluent in other countries, because the middle class in China, Brazil, India, that's the source of the coming wealth, not the U.S. middle class.
• Barlett and Steele believe that the real culprit is the theory of free trade
• The problem is, when the theory was developed back in the early 1800s, it was envisioned as countries operating comparably.
• Free trade was always presented on the basis that everybody will benefit. You may lose your job, but you will get some other job. And for the most part, people said, let the dirty jobs go. Let those manual labor jobs go.
• If you're going to get the smart jobs in this country, the brain power, and it is not working out as everybody said it would, because now many of those jobs are starting to go offshore faster than the old manufacturing jobs did.
• We're losing jobs in manufacturing basically for the same reason as we lost jobs in agriculture. We became a lot more productive at growing food. And as a result, we needed fewer farmers.

• The real bottom-line question is, what kind of a society do we want? Do we want a society built on the principle that the only thing that matters is the lowest possible price or a society built on the principle that everyone should have a living wage?

   

  And those are going to be two very different societies. And this goes back again so what we're talking about. The people up here, they don't want everyone to have a living wage.
• if you have lots of Americans who are out of the game entirely who can't buy their products and so forth...
• they're replaced by a Chinese middle class, Brazilian middle class, Indian middle class.
• We need to get tough in opening foreign markets and signing trade agreements that increase our exports. But if we start to discriminate against foreigners with tariffs, they will do the same to us, and what we will end up in is a giant trade war, in which we will all be losers.
• You can't just have your designers turning the stuff over to robots and things of that sort. You have still got to have human beings involved in this process.
• And the closer you have that process together, the better your end product is. This is the great contrast with a country like Germany or Switzerland, which has these very sophisticated apprenticeship programs where people are trained for years and years. We need to put more of an emphasis on that in this country.
• But you're suggesting apprenticeships, government programs. And many, many people in this country say, hey, the last thing we need is more government.
• Maybe things will have to get a lot worse before people realize that there are some things, some positive things that government can do.

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• Reagan’s legacy is so powerful because he identified the state as the central issue in American politics. That is still true today. Both in Tampa, Florida, where the Republican promise was to shrink the state, and in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Democrats’ promise is to transform the state into a more effective servant of the middle class, the big question is what government should do, and how big it should be.

• In 2008, Mr. Obama identified the force of Reagan’s leadership because he aspired to have the same impact. But the problem for him — and for American liberals in this century more broadly — is that the task they have set for themselves is both harder to do and, crucially, harder to explain.

   

  That argument is made eloquently in a newly published essay on the Obama presidency by Theda Skocpol
• “Obama and America’s Political Future,” the slim volume that includes Dr. Skocpol’s essay and three smart responses.
• Dr. Skocpol’s starting point is the comparisons between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Mr. Obama’s ambitious plans — often described as a New New Deal
• It is the difference
• between building a brand-new house and renovating an old one.
• change usually antagonizes vested interests
• it often increases complexity

• The submerged state lurks most massively in tax policy, which provides huge benefits, but ones that are largely invisible to their recipients. The result is the familiar American paradox of beneficiaries of government largess who passionately call for a shrinking of the state.

   

  “A lot of people derive a lot of benefits from public policy, but they don’t recognize that the government is assisting them, so they are less likely to support government

• When it comes to the campaign trail, the easiest platform is a start-up — Americans love the shiny new thing. Next best is demolishing something that’s old and rotten — the appeal of Representative Paul D. Ryan’s radical rhetoric is no accident.

   

  Hardest of all is to promote a painstaking, time-consuming renovation — which is exactly what U.S. government needs and what Mr. Obama, at his best, has promised to accomplish

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• It's legal to get an abortion in America, but in many places it is hard and getting harder.

  Just this year, 17 states set new limits on abortion; 24 did last year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights nonprofit whose numbers are widely respected.
• "The level and scope of activity on abortion and family planning is completely unparalleled to anything we have seen before,"
• Most states -- 41 -- ban abortion after a certain stage of pregnancy, generally around 20 weeks, unless the mother's life or health is in danger. In many of those states, the bans are based on a challenged premise that fetuses that early can feel pain.
• Pre-abortion counseling is required in 35 states; 26 require waiting periods after counseling, and in 13 states, the counseling must warn women about alleged risks from abortion

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• Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.
• In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.
• Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.
• Experts on race said they were not surprised by the findings.
• "We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked," said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. "When we've seen progress, we've also seen backlash."

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• The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has officially halted tax audits of churches until it can adopt rules that clarify which high-level employee has the authority to initiate them.

• the IRS hasn't been auditing churches since 2009, said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund).

   

    That's when a federal court found that the IRS wasn't following its own regulations.
• No one seems to know why the IRS hasn't changed its regulations to allow another position to approve the audits, or why IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman hasn't been approving church audits in the interim. Shulman will step down November 9, the end of his five-year term.

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• For Republicans, the idea of requiring every American to have health insurance is one of the most abhorrent provisions of the Democrats' health overhaul bills.

• "Congress has never crossed the line between regulating what people choose to do and ordering them to do it," said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). "The difference between regulating and requiring is liberty."

    

  But Hatch's opposition is ironic, or some would say, politically motivated. The last time Congress debated a health overhaul, when Bill Clinton was president, Hatch and several other senators who now oppose the so-called individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required it.
• Over the summer, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told Fox News, "I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates.... There isn't anything wrong with it." A few months later, he used individual mandates as an excuse to oppose reform, and voted for a resolution characterizing mandates as unconstitutional.
• Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Bob Bennett (R-Utah), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) all declared their opposition to an individual mandate in December. All five of them are on record co-sponsoring a reform measure that included an individual mandate.

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• At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the framers wanted to create a powerful new executive branch -- something that had been missing from the first national American government organized under the Articles of Confederation in the middle of the War for Independence. But the Philadelphia convention was stymied over how to choose a president.
• They were leery of too much democracy, which is why only one of the four power centers they created (the House of Representatives) was to be directly elected.
• The framers didn't foresee the development of national political parties
• Without parties to nominate candidates and organize their supporters, without a national media, without a tradition (which didn't come for more than 100 years) of candidates traveling around the country begging for votes, the framers couldn't picture how
• there would be political leaders with sufficient national reputations among ordinary voters to support a national election.
• The presidential electors were meant to solve that problem. They would be chosen (not directly by the voters but by the state legislatures) as members of the better-informed elite
• Of course, the party system came along and electors are no longer chosen for their wisdom or knowledge but for their loyalty to those parties.
• The framers also left it up to the states to decide whether to hold a popular election for president at all.
• A group called National Popular Vote has figured out a scheme to get around the problem by encouraging states to pass a law in which they pledge to award all of their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. So far, nine states -- including California, the biggest prize -- have done so. The nine account for a combined 132 electoral votes, almost half of the 270 necessary to win an election.

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• Jesus didn't carry a weapon. And he famously taught, "Blessed are the peacemakers." He didn't mean peacemakers who were packing.

  Jesus tells us not to repay evil for evil, but to bless our enemies and turn the other cheek.
• At one point, as Jesus was being arrested, a disciple tried to protect him by cutting off a soldier's ear with his sword. Jesus healed the wounded soldier, then chided the disciple, saying that those who live by the sword will surely die by the sword. Does this mean that Jesus was against owning weapons?

• being one of his disciples had become a dangerous vocation. So he told them to carry a sword for self-protection while spreading the Gospel. If they didn't have a sword, they were to sell their cloak and buy one.

  One disciple responded in a very American way. If one sword is good, more is better. Excitedly he told Jesus, "Look, I have two!"

  Jesus replied, "That's enough."

  So ... Jesus refused to carry weapons, allowed his disciples to do so for protection, but opposed stockpiling them.

• there are those who appeal to the Old Testament, in which a number of biblical characters wielded weapons. For centuries nations have used these passages to justify wars, abusing the Bible in order to support their causes while ignoring the simple First Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill."

  The Bible is filled with imagery and instructions to put down arms and turn swords into plowshares. The Bible isn't against self-defense or national defense, but it clearly sees an obsession with weapons and self-defense as eventually leading to destruction.

• It certainly could be argued that Christianity is entirely consistent with possessing guns for hunting and self-defense. But being Christian also means resolving problems peacefully, to the point of willingly giving up possessions and obsessions for the welfare of others. Should Christians be willing to limit, or even forgo, their access to guns, especially if it might reduce gun deaths?

  Christians are called to be healers and peacemakers, to turn the other cheek, to bless their enemies and to respond to evil with self-sacrifice and love, rather than violence. How do guns fit with these teachings? Can we love guns more than we love people?

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• But he argued that "modest encroachments on privacy" were "worth us doing" to protect the country, and he said Congress and the courts had authorized those programs.

  A National Security Agency telephone surveillance program collects phone numbers and the duration of calls, not the content, he said. An Internet surveillance program targets foreigners living abroad, not Americans, he added.

  "There are some trade-offs involved," Mr. Obama said. "I came with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly." In the end, he concluded that "they help us prevent terrorist attacks."
• In Congress, the main vehicle for any changes, a reauthorization of the 1978 law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, passed only in December and is not due for renewal for five years. During the debate last winter, the Senate voted on a bipartisan basis to reject amendments to force transparency or curtail surveillance.

• The Guardian posted online a copy of a classified directive that Mr. Obama signed last year laying out conditions under which the president could order cyberattacks against another country, akin to the attacks on Iran's uranium enrichment plant.

  The directive ordered the government to "identify potential targets of national importance" against which offensive cyberoperations "can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power." That means, in essence, that the Pentagon's Cyber Command and the intelligence agencies would maintain lists of targets around the world that could be damaged more effectively, and more covertly, by a computer attack than by a missile or bomber attack.

  As previously reported, the document says only the president can authorize offensive cyberoperations, just as only he can authorize use of nuclear weapons. The directive also reserves the right to take "anticipatory action against imminent threats" to protect critical infrastructure in the United States, including power utilities, cell phone networks and financial markets.

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• Americans who are left-of-center are far more religiously diverse than their opponents on the conservative side. When it comes to matters of faith, liberals and Democrats have a far more complicated task of coalition management -- although religion also raises some serious difficulties for the right.

• Non-religious Americans are a very important part of the liberal constituency, yet the majority of liberals have ties to religion. The survey found that African-Americans, who are deeply loyal to most liberal causes (and to the Democratic Party), are among the most religious people in the country. For liberalism to thrive, there needs to be acceptance and, even better, some respect across the boundaries of belief and non-belief.

  Yet if liberals face obstacles when it comes to faith, conservatives have problems of their own. The most serious? The religious conservatism that is such an important component of the right and the Republican Party is deeply unattractive to the rising generation of voters. In addition, many across age groups who are quite conservative in their theological views are rather progressive when it comes to economics, especially on issues such as raising the minimum wage.

  The generation gap on religious commitment is stark.
• Conservatives need to pay attention to the power of justice and compassion. Otherwise, they will find their cause undercut, even within their religious base, by a refusal to grapple with the economic system's unfairness.

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