Today, The Washington Post is bidding adieu to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), two giants of the Senate who have together served more than 60 years. The paper’s editorial page says bipartisanship in the upper chamber of Congress will suffer as a result of their retirement. Read the full editorial.
Both senators were known for valuing principle over party loyalty. In 1998, Mr. Lieberman delivered a searing indictment on the Senate floor of President Bill Clinton for his misconduct with Monica Lewinsky, while opposing his removal from office. He was devoted to increasing educational opportunity for poor children, especially in the District. Mr. Lugar supported treaties reducing nuclear and chemical weapons despite their unpopularity among many Republicans.
In their farewell speeches, Lieberman – a Democrat turned Independent – and Lugar – a Republican beaten by a Tea Party conservative in a tough primary fight – bemoaned the deeply polarizing politics that have come to dominate Washington today.
The U.S. Senate will surely miss Joe Lieberman and Dick Lugar.
Steven Spielberg delayed the release of his movie on Abraham Lincoln to avoid the charge of hagiography, not of the sixteenth president, but of Barack Obama. It was Spielberg’s intuition that there were enough aspects of the film that were susceptible to being twisted to partisan ends—from its similarity to the Democrats’ narrative of a progressive president fighting off a revanchist congressional opposition, to the Obama Administration’s early infatuation with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which is credited as the primary source for the picture, to the linkage between the first American president to align himself with racial equality and the first president whose bloodlines crystallize that equality—to keep its premiere out of the election season.
So, “Lincoln” avoided becoming a bumper sticker in the final days of the last election. It has not managed to side-step a whole slew of efforts by commentators to make it an instructive template for political leadership: David Thomson’s assessment in the New Republic that the guiding principle of the film is the need for leaders “who can stoop to getting the job done” is mimicked by David Brooks’ assertion that the film elevates politics by showing the noble purposes to which ordinary political maneuvering can be deployed. Ross Douthat captures the argument that ”Lincoln” is a tribute to the revolutionary ends that can be achieved when moderates and ideologues align and temper each other.
I will venture a theory that while not one of these observations is wrong on the merits, that they all suffer from reading “Lincoln” through a certain wishful lens: in this light, Spielberg’s version (and Tony Kushner’s screenplay) of Abraham Lincoln is a model of what Barack Obama might develop into if he added more grit to the polish and the cool; or more broadly, this fictional president is an imagining of what any successful chief executive in the future might look like—savvy enough to coopt the hard-liners, tactical enough to accomplish heroic ends through hard-nosed means. In other words, these pundits see a high-minded primer on how a capable president might win friends and influence people: a home-spun, American Machiavelli.
But reading “Lincoln” as an instruction manual ignores the degree to which this film is almost subversively hostile to two of the favorite values of contemporary politics: authenticity and transparency. The blunt truth of this portrait of Lincoln’s presidency is a democratic reality that if it materialized tomorrow, we would find depressing and hardly idealistic. It is a closed universe of insiders who operated free of consistent public scrutiny, or ethics regulations, or even a softer code that words and deeds should be tightly connected to be credible. There is a void of disclosure and standards that is not remotely capable of being replicated today, and that we wouldn’t want to conjure up if we could. The point is not to treat Lincoln is anything other than great, but that his greatness operated in a zone not remotely like our own.
It is not just that Lincoln is “wily and devious”, in Thomson’s description in TNR, or that he takes “morally hazardous action”, in Brooks’ rendition, it is that the times he lived in extracted no particular price for such shiftiness. So, Lincoln saves the 13th Amendment at a critical stage by deploying a word game to fend off the news that a set of Confederate negotiators are offering a peace deal that might end the war without emancipation. The negotiators are not in Washington, Lincoln allows, despite rumors to the contrary and aren’t set to be there: the more complete truth is that they are holed up on the Virginia coastline, waiting for a presidential visit. The deceit is not a small one, and the movie to its credit captures both its importance and dishonesty: by bending the actual time line just a bit to make Lincoln’s dodging the decisive blow to enshrine freedom in the Constitution, Spielberg and Kushner are taking aim at our squeamishness over candor.
And it is not just the white lie over a southern peace offering. Another central point in the picture is the urgency of separating constitutional emancipation from a broader campaign to extend larger citizenship rights on blacks. In Spielberg’s mostly accurate telling, Lincoln’s rival for control of the House Republican caucus, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), equivocates at a key moment in the debate on the full implications of the amendment, and the film is complimentary of Stevens’ waffling, which is the exact rhetorical approach Lincoln himself brandished as a senate and presidential candidate and as the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. That it proved to be the shrewdest course in Lincoln’s day is hard to argue; what is impossible to argue is how aggressively such an evasion would be exploited in our climate (and how zealously we would argue for the dissembling to be unmasked if we were on the losing side).
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Lincoln’s Lost World
I am a conservative who believes that any philosophy is strengthened by reexamination. I do regard theory as a valuable measure of whether a policy has integrity, and the lawyer in me accepts that hard facts make bad law, and worse, can unfurl dangerously unintended consequences: but an ideology that can’t grasp the real-world consequences of its aims is deeply flawed. I am, it so happens, a defender of the Second Amendment who thinks that the right to own guns is privileged by some of the most explicit words contained in the Constitution. I also remember Lincoln’s admonition that a constitution is not a suicide pact that is oblivious to the ways history has reshaped us.
So, in that spirit, I acknowledge that in the last two years the gun debate has turned a corner. The slaughter of children, on top of the massacre of Sikhs in a temple, and moviegoers in a theater, and constituents at a congressional fair, demands that level of humility on the political right; arguably, it’s a corner that should have been turned earlier when bodies of inner city teenagers started piling up in morgues and assault weapons started outnumbering drug paraphernalia in crack houses.
The operative legal and moral question is how to frame a gun policy that reconciles our Constitution and the freedom of law abiding gun owners with the appalling ease of marginal, pathological drifters building a personal arsenal.
Liberals will need to concede that banning firearms altogether is undesirable as well as unconstitutional, and that prohibitionist rhetoric only aids and abets the NRA’s own absolutist stance. They will need to demonstrate a much sharper sensitivity to the fact that handguns do serve the ends of self-defense in both middle class suburbs and urban neighborhoods, and that hunting is part of the national cultural fabric: much too much of the leftwing punditry on this subject overflows with a barely disguised regional and class based contempt. In addition, advocates of stricter gun laws should drop the misleading implication that there are no meaningful barriers to gun ownership: to the contrary, they should be stressing that the Brady Bill’s waiting period and the longstanding prohibitions on gun ownership by felons or the institutionalized demonstrate pathways to strengthening public safety without shredding the liberties of law abiding gun owners.
At the same time, conservatives would do well to recognize that the fact that gun ownership is a right does not immunize it from regulation—no more than speech is shielded from defamation suits, or restrictions against inciting violence or using words to conspire to achieve a crime; no more than the free exercise of religion precludes scrutiny of whether churches are complying with the obligations of their tax exempt status, or of whether government grants to faith based institutions are being validly spent. Similarly, the roots that gun possession hold in our culture surely don’t carry more sociological sway than driving or marriage, both of which require some method of formal registration. Lastly, just as liberals ought to abandon their fictions around existing gun laws, conservatives should also admit that the existing regulations around guns have hardly marginalized gun ownership or created some unreasonable barrier to gun possession.
My own preferred approach would be to avoid outlawing classes of weapons, even the most lethal, semi-automatic versions: whether or not a hunting weapon can be distinguished from a killing machine is debatable, but even skeptics of that proposition must allow that the task of separating firearms based on their mechanical characteristics is too slippery to rely on, and too imprecise to offer gun manufacturers any predictable notice of whether they are crossing the line. But a strategy that focuses on discerning more about the humans who would own the guns (especially high impact firearms) makes sense. To be sure, constructing a licensing regime is a challenging enterprise: a firearms knowledge test would probably have had no impact on the self-taught nutjobs at work in Aurora and Newtown, much less the ex soldier in the Sikh shooting; a background check couldn’t be allowed to devolve into a profile that punishes the unemployed or the dropouts or the socially disconnected.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Emerging Moral Reality on Guns
By Jason Atkinson, on Mon Dec 17, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
My party, the Republican Party, is stunned and wandering in the desert right now. Many just don’t understand how polls could have been wrong and how primary victories were turned into general election losses. Now that the dust has settled, most Republicans I hear from are blaming it on America’s slide toward socialism.
Let’s slow down here. We can agree America is changing, but we should look at us first. Our primaries are about who can out-conservative the other, then who can swing to the middle for the general election. It’s as if we’re telling voters we don’t even believe ourselves.
Many, many Republicans I know feel the party has left them. They believe the party is out of step, focused on fear and being the party of “no.” Whether other Republicans believe that or not isn’t the issue. Americans believe it, and they’re not voting Republican.
Parties and federal government aside, people today are just trying to hold it all together. We’ve all got bills, health care issues, aging parents and kids with cavities. Research shows that most Americans are center right, believe in limited government and personal responsibility, and don’t think government is a good steward of tax money, but they are choosing to be unaffiliated, independent voters.
It appears to many that Republicans have forgotten that politics is about serving people. Who cares if we’re ideologically perfect to each other but not elected to office?
If my party is going to win in the future, it must do 10 things immediately:
Read the rest of… Jason Atkinson: Advice for the GOP — Don’t be about perfection, be about service
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Dec 12, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
The Daily Iowan published an op-ed from The RP about No Labels. Here’s an excerpt:
You may have more in common with your member of Congress than you think, especially around this time of year. Students and lawmakers alike want to finish up the year and head home for the holidays. But there’s a final exam standing between Congress and the holidays — and America’s citizens are ready to give the body an “F” if it doesn’t pass.
That exam is coming in the form of the “fiscal cliff” — the combination of arbitrary, automatic, across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases coming at the end of the year that could cripple the economy. It all started last year when Congress picked 12 of its members to try to find a deal to secure America’s long-term financial future. Consumer confidence had dropped dramatically, and a credit ratings agency dropped our country’s rating.
It seemed the only thing that could make members of both parties work across the aisle was an alternative so terrible it would be untenable to both parties.
The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that if we do not avoid the fiscal cliff, the $7 trillion combination of spending cuts and tax increases could send the economy hurtling back into recession for years to come. Unemployment, especially among young people, will rise even further. Education will suffer among the harshest spending cuts, losing about $4.8 billion in funding.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Dec 12, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
As we fast approach the fiscal cliff, The RP has dedicated his latest column in The Huffington Post to rallying Americans behind No Labels’ demands for leadership by our elected officials.
Here’s an excerpt:
The last couple of weeks have been littered with false starts and steps backward in fiscal cliff negotiations. America needs its leaders to find a solution now more than ever, but real leaders have not yet emerged from the Capitol or the White House.
The American people are tired of short-term solutions that fail to solve any actual problems. We need real leadership in this country that can find a way to get things done.
Right now our leaders are unable to bridge the partisan divide that keeps government from solving problems. That’s why No Labels, a movement of more than 600,000 Democrats, Republicans, and independents who want to end congressional gridlock, calls for five principles of leadership to be present in the fiscal cliff negotiations. These principles are:
1. Tell the people the full truth. In order for Americans to make informed decisions, we need to know the details — all of them. If our lawmakers don’t tell us the enormity of the problems we face, how can we begin to solve them? When telling us the truth, lawmakers have to agree on the facts. There can’t be two different sets of numbers in the search for solutions. It was Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said that while every man is entitled to his own opinions, he is not entitled to his own facts.
2. Govern for the future. If we can’t find solutions to our economic issues, we put our potential for growth and opportunity at stake. America’s tradition of upward mobility and ingenuity is threatened by our lingering economic uncertainty. If we want to convince the rest of the world that we are still a leader, we must prove that we can overcome the petty partisan issues and take control of our fate.
No American family embodies mainstream Republicanism more than the Bushes, noted a New York Times article this year.
For three generations, Bush men have occupied towering positions in the party pantheon, and the party’s demographic and ideological shifts can be traced through the branches of the Bush family tree: from Prescott, the blue-blooded Eisenhower Republican, and George H.W. Bush, the transitional figure who tried and failed to emulate the approach of the New Right, to George W. Bush, who embodied the new breed of tax-cutting, evangelical conservatism. Indeed, the Bushes’ metamorphosis from genial centrism to deep-fried conservatism has both anticipated and reflected the party’s trajectory.
But now, Jeb Bush, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, seems to be bucking the trend. He is seeking to return the party to its ideological moorings — toward the centrism of his grandfather. Even before the GOP’s ignominious defeat in November, Jeb was offering tough love to his party, suggesting that Republicans stand up to Grover Norquist and craft a bipartisan compromise to reduce the deficit significantly. But will Republicans listen? There are many reasons to believe they won’t.
Prescott was a Manhattan investment banker who called himself a “moderate progressive.” In the 1952 primary between conservative presidential candidate Sen. Robert Taft and moderate Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Prescott chose Eisenhower — and became the president’s favorite golf partner. Prescott rode Eisenhower’s coattails into the Senate, where he focused on urban renewal, spearheading the 1954 Housing Act. An early proponent of the line-item veto, he received national recognition as an advocate of fiscal responsibility.
Prescott’s son George H.W. left for West Texas in 1948 when Texas was still a one-party state. But change was afoot in the South, and by the time H.W. ran for U.S. Senate in 1964, he encountered a flourishing Texas Republican Party that had recently elected its first U.S. senator by attracting hordes of conservative Democrats. But the new rank-and-file Republicans were nothing like the Connecticut Republicans he knew — or even like those in the Houston suburbs. Biographer Richard Ben Cramer imagined H.W.’s vexation at this new breed of Texas Republican:
“These … these nuts! They were coming out of the woodwork! They talked about blowing up the U.N., about armed revolt against the income tax. …The nuts hated him. They could smell Yale on him.”
Recognizing that his 1964 primary campaign would need to be more Goldwater than Rockefeller, he ignored the social problems Prescott had addressed. “Only unbridled free enterprise can cure unemployment,” H.W. asserted, contending that government bore no responsibility for alleviating poverty. Though he lost, he began the transition to Sunbelt conservatism that would make him (barely) acceptable to Ronald Reagan as a running mate. But he never fully evolved: He famously reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge. His son George W. would complete the transition.
George W.’s first major legislative accomplishment as president was the enactment of a massive $1.6 trillion tax cut. He rode roughshod over the green-eyeshade types to pass a massive tax cut. When it produced runaway deficits, he accepted Dick Cheney’s argument: “Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter.”
In adopting Sun Belt conservatism — sometimes clumsily — George H.W. and George W. anticipated the Republican Party’s ideological shift. Hence, in evaluating Jeb’s prescriptions for fiscal responsibility, today’s Republicans should recall the Bushes’ past political palm reading.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: Can Jeb Bush sway the GOP on taxes, debt?
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Dec 11, 2012 at 5:00 PM ET
The RP just sent out this email to the No Labels troops. We encourage you to join them:
It’s urgent: On Sunday, President Obama and Speaker Boehner met face-to-face for the first time in 23 days. With our leaders not even sitting down with each other regularly, how can they find a solution to the fiscal cliff?
Last week, we told Washington to park the planes, stop the trains — get the job done. The fiscal cliff is too big of a problem to let political point scoring get in the way of problem solving.
Add your name to the thousands calling for our leaders to park the planes, stop the trains and get the job done — Click here to SIGN ON NOW.
Together, we’ll make sure our leaders stop the political games and get to work in Washington.
Yesterday the President warned Congressional Republicans not to mess with him and the country when it comes to raising the debt ceiling.
Oh debt ceiling. If I had to describe you in one word, it would be seducer. That’s right…seducer, you naughty debt ceiling, you. Members of Congress got together and gorged themselves at the table of deficit spending, ordering up Porterhouse sized tax cuts for their rich friends and a heaping helping of extended unemployment benefits for their out of work neighbors.
Krystal Ball
Now the bill comes due and when it’s time to whip out the national credit card, you whisper your sweet nothings into the Tea Party’s ear and the GOP threatens to dine and dash as a matter of “principle.” After all, who wants to put $16 trillion on the national credit card? Who is pro-debt? No one. GOP extremists get to pretend they are the adults in the room, railing about spending that has already happened and that they agreed to. And the best part, you naughty naughty debt ceiling, you offer them the chance to get some more goodies in the form of more tax cuts for their rich benefactors or the righteous thrill of cutting Medicaid assistance from those Obama-loving takers.
For nearly a hundred years now, you were this boring, nondescript wallflower, never drawing attention to yourself. When Congress, through spending and tax cuts, came up against your limits, you were raised without a word…they barely gave you a second glance. Sure it was a waste of time to have to deal with you but waste of time is what Congress does! You’ve been raised 74 times since the 60’s, 18 times under Reagan alone!
You saw wars, peace, a man on the moon, and no matter how you batted your fiscal eyelashes, nobody cared. Invisible. Now, all of the sudden, the Tea Partiers can’t keep their hands off you.
Like a case of fiscal syphilis you now put the entire body in peril. Yes, I know this disease is no fault of your own. Congressional Republicans have decided that consequences be damned: threatening the country with national default by refusing to lift you (after having already voted to cut taxes and spend until you absolutely must be raised) is a useful tool for getting their way. I know you love all the attention, but seriously, debt ceiling, this isn’t a harmless flirtation.
I know you think that no sane person or party would actually cause a national default for the sake of a temper tantrum and the chance for a few extra fiscal goodies, the chance to cop a fiscal feel, if you will. But alas, we have looked into their eyes, and they actually seem crazy enough to do it.
And so dear debt ceiling, it’s time to say goodbye. You can’t seduce our Congress any more with your promises of phony courage and self-righteous hostage taking…the gig’s up, dear, but I do know this great looking bunch in China that we’d love for you to meet.
But reading “Lincoln” as an instruction manual ignores the degree to which this film is almost subversively hostile to two of the favorite values of contemporary politics: authenticity and transparency. The blunt truth of this portrait of Lincoln’s presidency is a democratic reality that if it materialized tomorrow, we would find depressing and hardly idealistic. It is a closed universe of insiders who operated free of consistent public scrutiny, or ethics regulations, or even a softer code that words and deeds should be tightly connected to be credible. There is a void of disclosure and standards that is not remotely capable of being replicated today, and that we wouldn’t want to conjure up if we could. The point is not to treat Lincoln is anything other than great, but that his greatness operated in a zone not remotely like our own.
Liberals will need to concede that banning firearms altogether is undesirable as well as unconstitutional, and that prohibitionist rhetoric only aids and abets the NRA’s own absolutist stance. They will need to demonstrate a much sharper sensitivity to the fact that handguns do serve the ends of self-defense in both middle class suburbs and urban neighborhoods, and that hunting is part of the national cultural fabric: much too much of the leftwing punditry on this subject overflows with a barely disguised regional and class based contempt. In addition, advocates of stricter gun laws should drop the misleading implication that there are no meaningful barriers to gun ownership: to the contrary, they should be stressing that the Brady Bill’s waiting period and the longstanding prohibitions on gun ownership by felons or the institutionalized demonstrate pathways to strengthening public safety without shredding the liberties of law abiding gun owners.
Parties and federal government aside, people today are just trying to hold it all together. We’ve all got bills, health care issues, aging parents and kids with cavities. Research shows that most Americans are center right, believe in limited government and personal responsibility, and don’t think government is a good steward of tax money, but they are choosing to be unaffiliated, independent voters.
