Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson correctly observe that organized labor was integral to throwing together a political coalition for financial regulatory reform:

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, unions were a primary voice urging reform. In the face of aggressive lobbying by the health-care and financial industries, labor sunk a huge share of its limited resources into advocacy groups pushing for health-care reform and greater financial regulation.

This brings to mind the phenomenon that’s sort of the obverse of union decline—the extraordinary level of solidarity manifested by the corporate executive class in the United States of America. There are plenty of individual firms that benefit from this or that public sector spending stream, but essentially all business organizations are solidly united in opposition to essentially all possible ways to enhance government revenue. On financial reform, it’s not merely that the big banks opposed the Dodd-Frank bill, but there was absolutely no counter-lobbying from firms in the non-financial economy in favor of it. And that’s not to say that Dodd-Frank was the greatest thing since sliced brad, but there were no proposals coming out of corporate America for any financial regulatory overhaul of any kind. Yet clearly something went badly awry in 2007-2008. But the business class united behind TARP, then united to oppose any regulatory reforms, and is now united against any return to pre-Bush levels of taxation on rich people.

We’re so accustomed to this kind of thing that we take it for granted, but I don’t think it’s obvious ex ante that business lobbying should be such a simultaneously solidaristic and nihilistic venture. Presumably most American firms would, in fact, benefit from the existence of a sensible and sustainable financial regulatory scheme. But there’s no lobbying activity whatsoever dedicated to creating it.

Rep Anthony Weiner (D-NY)

Congressman Anthony Weiner:

“When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing? I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your fucking bike lanes.”

Meanwhile, here’s Rep Weiner trying to debate Israeli-Palestinian issues but apparently unable to acknowledge that there’s an Israeli occupation on the West Bank or that IDF troops are present there. An incredulous Roger Cohen asks “Have you been to the West Bank lately?” and Weiner claims that he has, but if so it’s hard to see how he missed this.

Dana Milbank writes about his family’s personally experience with mortgage lender malfeasance:

The nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank legislation, could rein in these abuses – which explains why the banks, in concert with House Republicans, have been working to strip funding and responsibility from the new agency. This, combined with the repeal of Obama’s foreclosure program, would leave the mortgage servicers supervised only nominally by the anemic Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

My wife and I are reasonably savvy consumers – she has a brand-name MBA, and I began my career as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal – but we were no match for a bungling bank. After five months of trying, we still haven’t been able to resolve all of Citibank’s mistakes – nearly all of them, curiously, in the bank’s favor.

Sometimes the difference between a story and a non-story is whether it happens to people who celebrity political journalists know personally. Here’s hoping Milbank will get more attention for this perennially underplayed issue.

Charles Pascal argues that it’s time for Canada to ditch the monarchy and go republican. I find it striking, though, that he doesn’t actually have a specific proposal for how Canada ought to pick its head of state. The current system is that the Queen selects a Governor-General to be “her representative” in Canada, and does so “on the advice” of the Canadian Prime Minister. Since in practice the Queen’s assent is a pure formalism, you could easily cut her out of the process and replace the Governor-General with a President appointed by the Prime Minister.

But it’s not clear to me what problem of democratic legitimacy that solves. If anything, it creates a metaphysically somewhat weird situation in which the head of state is an appointee of the head of government that having him be formally speaking the appointee of the monarch avoids.

Ultimately, I think these kind of situations call for a Burkean caution. Lots of political arrangements only withstand a limited quantity of direct scrutiny. But there’s a real practical problem with the US Electoral College that the National Popular Vote works as a solution to. If the problem with the monarchy is the fiscal cost, which seems to be Pascal’s main concrete complaint, then this seems more easily addressed through budget cuts. The British monarchy is unusually expensive compared to the others of Europe so there’s plenty of room for economizing.

The Tea Party’s sterling defense of freedom:

Questions about who really benefits from medical marijuana are now gripping Montana. In the Legislature, a resurgent Republican majority elected last fall is leading a drive to repeal the six-year-old voter-approved statute permitting the use of marijuana for medical purposes, which opponents argue is promoting recreational use and crime.

If repeal forces succeed — the House last month voted strongly for repeal, and the Senate is now considering it — Montana would be the first to recant among the 15 states and the District of Columbia that have such laws.

Now, to be sure, there’s often something more than a little silly about “medical” marijuana as a wink/nudge kind of legalization. I think the sensible course of action for a state (especially an overwhelmingly rural one like Montana) that doesn’t want to see a commercial marijuana industry is to just straight-up legalize small-scale growing and possession. That way Montanans who want to smoke pot will be able to smoke pot without the state turning into a smuggling center or drug tourism hub.