Politics
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Quote of the Day: Seth Ackerman
However disastrous or ridiculous the outcome of this crisis ultimately proves to be, the sub-democratic structure of American politics will guarantee that the consequences will be non-existent for those who initiated it: the regime of repressed competition will ensure no consequences for the individual legislators, while its separation of powers will probably ensure no consequences
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Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened? II
In the Senate, there were already signs that an emergent group of 14 centrist senators from both parties was looking to make an impact on the fiscal battles ahead. The group, led by Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has already planned to meet in the coming weeks.
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Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened?
From Grover Norquist: “They hurt the conservative movement, they hurt people’s health care, they hurt the country’s economic situation and they hurt the Republican party,” he says. “And a lot of congressmen and senators are not going to win because we spent three months chasing our own tail — or at least, parts of the
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Is This an Historic Moment?
As this week’s deadline neared, the investor Warren Buffett, among others, likened threatening default to a kind of economic nuclear warfare. The White House approached the confrontation with the gravity of those October days a half-century ago when President John F. Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles in Cuba. If
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Provincial Poobahs on the National Stage
I've been a fan of Texan and former neoconservative writer Michael Lind since reading his 2002 book Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. His article today in Salon brings the thesis in that book to bear on the Teaparty phenomenon, especially in its current attempt to paralyze Washington. The
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Should We Be Worried?
I haven't been paying much attention to Ted Cruz's antics nor to the threats in the House to shut down the government over Obamacare. This is a soap opera I lost interest in months ago. It's a conflict between the crazy redemptive reactionaries in the Tea Party and the country's political elite. I don't have
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Sirota v. Brooks on Egypt’s Mental Capacity
“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response. After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end. “Didn’t we do what they
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Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy
According to the civics text books, a democracy is a government in which the people are sovereign. In its republican forms it elects people who represent them in legislatures, and they work to create the laws that the sovereign people are obligated to obey, whether they like them or not because they were enacted by
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SCOTUS Rulings Lost in the News
From today's NYT piece on the Robert's court 'steady move to the right': In lower-profile cases, the court’s rulings continued to be good for business interests and bad for the Obama administration. “We shouldn’t lose sight of the court cementing its legacy as the most pro-business court in the modern era,” said Lee Epstein, who teaches
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Quote of the Day: David Brooks
Since the New Deal, we have become accustomed to seeing American politics as an ever-concentrated national enterprise. But the sclerosis of the federal system will inevitably produce a reversal, as regions fill the void. The happiest people these days are those who leave Washington and get elected mayor or governor. The most frustrated people are