In a big step forward to protect Americans’ health and well-being, EPA announced today a two-year plan to set clean air standards for power plants and oil refineries, the two largest industrial sources of the dangerous pollution that drives global warming.
NRDC’s David Doniger has the story in this re-post:
Public approval of Congress has never been worse: this week, Gallup tracked the highest disapproval rating it has ever recorded for the legislative branch, with 83 percent disapproving and only 13 percent approving of the job being done by lawmakers. Conservatives like Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have blasted this Congress as “a disaster,” while some liberal groups complained through much of this term that “[h]opes for change are turning to disappointment as Congress fails to meet goals for a progressive agenda.”
There is no debate, however, that the 111th Congress passed a historic volume of substantial legislation, whatever one might think about the merits of these achievements. Historian Alan Brinkley told Bloomberg yesterday that “[t]his is probably the most productive session of Congress since at least the ’60s,” for an article outlining the historic achievements of this session:
For the first time since President Theodore Roosevelt began the quest for a national health-care system more than 100 years ago, the Democrat-led House and Senate took the biggest step toward achieving that goal by giving 32 million Americans access to insurance. Congress rewrote the rules for Wall Street in the most comprehensive way since the Great Depression. It spent more than $1.67 trillion to revive an economy on the verge of a depression, including tax cuts for most Americans, jobs for more than 3 million, construction of roads and bridges and investment in alternative energy; ended an almost two-decade ban against openly gay men and women serving in the military, and today ratified a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.
In addition to these headline achievements, the 111th Congress also:
– Passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for women and other minorities to file equal-pay discrimination lawsuits.
– Overhauled the federal student loan system, eliminating billions of dollars of waste being paid to for-profit loan companies while expanding access to loans, especially for low-income students.
– Confirmed two Supreme Court nominees.
– Passed legislation to help Sept. 11 first responders deal with ongoing health problems.
– Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program to include an additional 4 million children and pregnant women, after the Bush administration denied funding increases for years.
– Passed child nutrition legislation, which expands the federal school lunch program and improves the quality of the meals.
– Enacted food safety legislation, which intends to improve safety measures and prevent food-borne illnesses.
– Approved a settlement for black and Native American farmers that were subject to discrimination by the USDA.
– Passed legislation strengthening the prosecution of hate crimes.
– Passed pro-consumer legislation further regulating abusive practices of credit card companies.
Brinkley also noted these achievements are “all the more impressive given how polarized the Congress has been.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has famously said that “the single most important thing” his party wanted to achieve was a one-term Obama presidency, and congressional Republicans used an unprecedented number of filibusters and filibuster threats; they employed various procedural holds and other tricks to delay or block legislation, and blocked historically high numbers of judicial appointments and appointments to the executive branch. That these legislative achievements occurred in the face of epic Republican obstruction makes them all the more noteworthy.
The US House of Representatives is a pretty small legislature. The German Bundestag and the UK House of Commons have more members even though the United States is a much bigger country. People often say that a bigger House with more members would make people feel closer to their representatives but I agree with Jonathan Bernstein that this is a bit of a mirage:
Now, that doesn’t mean that individual representatives should have millions of constituents, but I think it also suggests that such a situation isn’t as much of a problem as we might intuitively believe. After all, what (rightly!) bothers people about the Senate is the malapportionment, not the idea that there are only 100 Senators. And note that most of us feel a lot closer to our Senators than to our Member of the House — because our Senators get so much more publicity than do Members of the House. Increasing the size of the House would, alas, only make that problem worse.
We live in an era where politics is essentially postmodern and defined by the media. Barack & Michelle Obama are stars of the national show The West Wing, and various Senators also have important recurring roles. So do a few House members, of course, ranging from leaders like Pelosi, Hoyer, Boehner, and Cantor to backbenchers like Bachman and Wasserman-Schultz. But most House members are extras or bit characters, and nobody “knows” them at all.
Fundamentally, I think the problem with the small House is simply that it leads to representation problems. Montana has way more people than Wyoming and there’s no reason for them to have the same level of congressional representation. But in terms of closeness or whatever, I think the best thing you can do is actually continue the trend toward concentrating power in the hands of the House leadership.
This past November, Nathan Deal (R-GA), a conservative former congressman, won Georgia’s governorship. Throughout his campaign, Deal vowed to crack down immigration. When Arizona implemented its draconian immigration law he promised to “work to pass and sign similar legislation.” He came out in favor of changing the 14th amendment to deny the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship long before it was even popular.
Along those lines, Deal’s predecessor — outgoing Gov. Sonny Perdue (R-GA) — shad some words of wisdom to share with the GOP. The Associated Press reports:
Perdue said his party needs to avoid “a gang-type mentality” that could be harmful to those “who want the American dream.”
“The Republican Party needs to be very, very careful that it maintains the golden rule in its rhetoric regarding immigration policy,” Perdue told The AP.
Perdue said the GOP needs to ensure that “people of color and people who are not U.S.-born” feel welcome. “And I think that’s the challenge of the Republican Party.”
“(Immigration) is a very emotive, emotion-filled topic that I think sometimes gets us out there where our hearts really aren’t,” Perdue said.
Perdue is likely concerned about the fact that the foreign-born share of Georgia’s population rose from 2.7 percent in 1990 to 9.4 percent in 2008. Almost 35 percent of those immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens who can vote. The new census data shows that, in Georgia, the share of the Latino population has grown by nearly 50 percent since 2000. It may have not been enough to stop someone like Deal from taking office; however, in a close election their voting power could tip the scale.
Finally, Perdue is not exactly a saint on immigration himself. In fact, he once stated, “It is simply unacceptable for people to sneak into this country illegally on Thursday, obtain a government-issued ID on Friday, head for the welfare office on Monday and cast a vote on Tuesday.”
I think we can all agree that a show about a group of gay sci-fi fans is a fairly niche product, even in an era where The Big Bang Theory is a significant hit. I also think, even given its niche nature, that it’s a reasonably good idea for a television show. Identity, these days, comes not just from race and church and sex and nation. We define ourselves based on our politics, our interests, our places of education, our groups of friends, our sports teams.
What’s interesting is less any individual thing we choose to define us, and how the disparate pieces of our identities come together and clash. It’s fascinating that we live in a world where it may be more socially acceptable to be gay than to be a very serious and committed fan of science fiction, that fantasy sports can be the basis for an entire social network. Exploring affinities and how they affect our lives, friendships, marriages, and families is important work for understanding the power of our popular culture, and for understanding ourselves.
The headlines of 2010 were driven by global warming disasters — involving the dangers of fossil fuel extraction or the biblical might of the climate they have polluted. Hundreds of thousands of people died in climate disasters, and hundreds of millions more affected by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires. Below is a small selection of the most striking and iconic news photography of 2010, from the BP disaster to the Pakistan floods. Meanwhile, polluters successfully blocked enactment of climate policy or oil industry regulation in the United States, as the Obama administration advanced health care reform and other legislative priorities.
The hard-right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.
Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty. Heritage Fellow James Carafano, in columns for the Daily Caller, urged the Tea Party “tackle defense issues.” This summer, it launched a 501(c)(4) entity called Heritage Action for America and chose two issues to focus on: spending and stopping START. Josh Rogin reported in July:
Heritage Action for America was established as 501c4 organization, which means it can do direct lobbying on the Hill and broad grassroots lobbying around the country. Killing START is one of the group’s two keystone efforts, along with a drive to push a repeal of the new health-care bill in the House. The organization is now circulating a petition to its 671,000 dues-paying members featuring a video of Romney criticizing the treaty… And Heritage Action is not stopping there. The group has a detailed plan to target lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and persuading wavering senators to oppose the treaty. Votes up for grabs include moderate Republicans like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, but also conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, D-NE, and Evan Bayh, D-IN.
Heritage even produced a video that warned that, if START passed, it would lead to a nuclear attack in 2018.
Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.
Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that the United States will lead the world into levels of CO2 emission over the next twenty five years that would almost certainly lead to catastrophic global warming. Brad Johnson has the story (and I add some comments at the end).
Amory Lovins has a funny piece in the Weekly Standard arguing that conservatives shouldn’t be supporting massive subsidies to the nuclear power industry because such subsidies don’t comport with the dictates of free market economics: “Yet most congressional budget hawks—supposedly sages of circumspection and defenders of free markets—urge more nuclear socialism.”
Obviously the fallacy here is thinking that conservatism has something to do with reduced spending, circumspection, or free markets. There’s no evidence that conservatives care about any of these things, and the conservative affection for nuclear subsidies is just one of hundreds of counterexamples to the “conservatives support free markets and low spending” thesis. That said, Lovins is right to think that stigmatizing nuclear subsidies in conservative circles would be a good thing to do. I think, though, that what he should do is focus less on the economics and more on France. At one point he observes:
A Maryland reactor’s developer reckoned just its requested federal loan guarantee would transfer $14.8 billion of net present value, comparable to its construction cost, from American taxpayers to the project’s 50/50 owners—Électricité de France (EDF), 84 percent owned by the French government, and a private utility 9.5 percent owned by EDF. The project’s builder, AREVA, is 93 percent owned by the French state, yet has been promised a $2 billion U.S. loan guarantee for a fuel plant competing with an American one.
If subsidies are socialism, then all energy sector players are socialists. What makes nuclear special is the dominant role played by French state-owned enterprises. I see no evidence that conservatives have any kind of problem with subsidies but there’s plenty of evidence that conservatives don’t like France. In fact, conservatives hate France so much that National Review’s John J Miller even wrote a book called Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France. I think that when you combine the France angle with the fact that (non-German) environmentalists don’t really hate nuclear power as much as they used to, that suddenly conservatives will abandon their affection for the stuff.
I’m on vacation in Mexico, so I can’t really stay on top of the latest filibuster news. But with the pro-reform position shifting to be the consensus view among Senate Democrats, I do want to look back at how this issue has evolved. For one thing, I often hear from conservatives that this drive for reform is cynical or hypocritical, so I think it’s important to note that during the 2005 standoff on the “nuclear option,” I said Democrats should seize the opportunity for filibuster reform rather than standing by the alleged benefits of arbitrary obstruction.
And back in December 2008 when most progressives were still flush with post-election optimism, I wrote that the filibuster was likely to ruin everything and needed to be reformed. Then across the course of 2009, frustrations grew but for all too many that was a personalized frustration with Barack Obama or the White House personnel. But Jeff Merkely was early on the mark noting that reforming the process was key to resolving people’s frustrations. Then by the summer of 2010, Tom Udall of New Mexico was also interested in the issue and starting pushing the “constitutional option” concept highlighting the possibility for changing the rules in January 2011. We even did a Netroots Nation panel about this.
As it became clearer and clearer that the 2010 midterms would produce big GOP wins, I feared momentum might vanish, but it hasn’t. Instead, the coalition’s just gotten bigger and bigger with progressive interest groups weighing in, and scholars organizing to produce a letter (PDF) clarifying the history and political science around the issue. It’s been a great triumph for common sense that’s brought us this close to reform, and I like to think that the Internet—including folks like myself, Ezra Klein, Dave Dayen, but also just the broader possibility of forging linkages between the political and scholarly communities and finding a space for discussion of “boring” subjects like congressional procedure—has played a big role in making it happen.
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