As the video also reminds these Republicans, however, there’s one giant problem with their talking point — the Senate GOP’s unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. Indeed, the number of votes attempting to break Sen. McConnell’s use of this tactic more than doubled the minute he took over as minority leader:

Speaking in 2009 to CPAC, McConnell made the same argument, commenting, “Who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich when you can be with Rush Limbaugh?”

My plans for a rockin’ time out don’t generally include hanging out with my friends in conference rooms getting all self-congratulatory about our stances on policy, but to each his own. If McConnell wants to rebrand conservatism as America’s most entertaining ideological movement, he’s probably going to have to come up with a better reason people should believe him.

But missed in this debate is the fact Boehner and McConnell’s own health insurance plans covers contraception, something they now want to deny to others.

Since 1998, every insurer participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) — including members of Congress — has had access to comprehensive contraceptive coverage, including emergency contraception, such as the morning after pill. Republican lawmakers now want to prevent access to the coverage they enjoy to employees of religious organizations who may not be of that religion or who disagree with anti-contraception doctrine (89 percent of Catholics say contraception decision should be theirs, not the church’s).

For the past year, Republicans have doggedly insisted that the nation’s deficit is a crisis that eclipses high unemployment. But they’ve only been willing to reduce the deficit through drastic spending cuts — and have denounced Buffett for saying tax increases on the rich need to be part of the solution.

Last fall, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that if Buffett was feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check to the Treasury. Now, Buffet says he’s willing to do just that to pay down the national debt — if Republicans will do their part too:

The billionaire investor, in the new issue of Time magazine, says he will donate $1 to paying down the national debt for every dollar donated by a Republican in Congress. The only exception is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell – for whom Buffett said he would go $3-to-$1.

The idea stems from a New York Times opinion piece Buffett wrote last August in which he said the rich ought to pay more taxes. It sparked an instant controversy, with some Washington conservatives calling on the 81-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” to voluntarily pay extra.

“It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” the Berkshire Hathaway CEO told Time…

McConnell certainly has the resources to meet Buffett’s challenge — he’s worth at least $10 million. Buffett went on to say that the U.S. needs a system that “takes very good care” of citizens who work hard but don’t happen to make millions in the financial sector.

Although recess appointments that occur while the Senate is at least pretending to conduct business every three days are rare, they are rare for a very simple reason. Few people in American history have done more to obstruct American governance than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his fellow Senate Republicans. As such, it has rarely been necessary for a president to use his constitutionally granted authority to appoint officials during a very short recess.

There are no modern precedents for McConnell-style mass obstructionism, and there is no Supreme Court decision considering how long senators must be out of Washington before recess appointments are allowed. There was, however, a showdown during the Bush Administration over President Bush’s decision to recess appoint Judge William Pryor to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. In Evans v. Stephens, that court considered whether Pryor’s appointment was invalid because it occurred during a very short legislative break. This court is the highest legal authority ever to weigh in on the question of whether a break in the Senate’s calendar must last a certain number of days before a recess occurs, and it answered that question with an unambiguous “no”:

The Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause. And we do not set the limit today.

There are a number of well-established precedents demonstrating the president’s authority to make recess appointments during very brief recesses. In 1903, when the first session of the 58th Congress ended, President Theodore Roosevelt made over 160 recess appointments during a recess that lasted only a fraction of a day. Similarly, President Truman twice made recess appointments during recesses that lasted just a handful of days.

A few commentators have suggested that this precedent only applies to what are known as “intersession” recesses — that is, the recess that occurs around the beginning of each new year when one session of Congress ends and another begins. Under this theory, President Obama blew his chance to make recess appointments when he allowed the second session of the 112th Congress to begin at noon today without making any appointments. This argument, however, has no basis in the Constitution itself. As Evans explains, “the text of the Constitution does not differentiate expressly between inter- and intrasession recesses for the Recess Appointments Clause,” and “the main purpose of the Recess Appointments Clause—to enable the President to fill vacancies to assure the proper functioning of our government —supports reading both intrasession recesses and intersession recesses as within the correct scope of the Clause.”

Recess appointments during very brief recesses are not common, but they are only uncommon because few if any senators have ever engaged in the kind of systematic and determined effort to prevent America from governing itself that began once Mitch McConnell took over as Senate Minority Leader. McConnell’s rampant obstructionism can be summed up in just one chart:

That chart represents the number of times a cloture motion — a motion seeking to break a Senate filibuster — was filed in every recent Congress. The massive spike at the end, where the number of cloture motions more than doubles, coincides with when McConnell took over as Minority Leader.

Moreover, this twofold increase in cloture votes — from 68 when Harry Reid was Minority Leader to a massive 139 once McConnell took over as head of the Senate’s opposition –massively undershoots the extent to which obstructionism increased under McConnell. Under the Senate’s broken rules, breaking filibusters imposes a crippling delay on the Senate’s business. For this reason, the lion’s share of McConnell’s obstructionism never leads to a cloture vote because doing so would tie the Senate up for days on trifling matters such as a motion to end debate on whether or not to debate a bill. Indeed, it is literally impossible to confirm more than a handful of the president’s nominees if just a small group of senators engage in maximal obstructionism.

The agreement resolved the last stalemate in a year of bitter congressional fighting that earned lawmakers their lowest approval ratings in recent memory.

In exchange for supporting the 60-day patch, Republicans secured minor face-saving concessions from Senate leaders, who had already passed a two-month deal on an overwhelming vote of 89 to 10. Senate leaders had balked at the House’s demand to restart talks over the holidays on a full-year extension of the tax cut.

The Senate agreed to make a technical change to the payroll tax reporting requirements, designed to lessen the burden on small businesses of implementing the two-month deal.

And Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) promised he would appoint a conference committee to take up negotiations after New Year’s Day on ways to pay for a full-year tax cut.

Both chambers will pass the plan by unanimous consent so long as no member shows up to voice opposition in person, which lets the deal pass even though most members have gone home. There was no opposition to the deal in the Senate Friday morning. The two-month extension gives House and Senate leaders time to negotiate for a yearlong extension after the holiday recess. “I am grateful that the voices of reason have prevailed,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a statement.

But so far, a few House freshmen have threatened to stop the deal. Freshman Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said he was “not yet sure” if he would protest the deal, and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) told CNN’s John King Thursday night, “I’m not so sure I’m not going to do that,” when asked if he’d drive to Washington, D.C. to stop the deal.

Boehner acknowledged the pressure he has felt, telling reporters Thursday that “I talked to enough members over the last 24 hours who say we don’t like the two-month extension and if you can get this fixed, why not do the right thing for the American people even if it’s not exactly what we want.”

Boehner received pressure from his own party — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called on the House to pass the two month extension yesterday — as well as the public. After the White House asked people to say what $40 — the average amount an American worker would lose per paycheck without the extension — would mean to them, thousands of people responded on Twitter using the #40dollars hashtag.

McConnell’s statement further isolates Boehner, who has found little support from fellow Republicans in his position, and gives President Obama new ammunition with which to attack Boehner in an upcoming speech today.

Boehner initially appeared to support the Senate’s bill, but quickly backtracked in an “apparent breakdown between Boehner and McConnell.” McConnell had remained silent on the payroll tax dispute since the Senate passed its version with overwhelming bipartisan support last week, likely could have avoided delivering a rare intra-party rebuke longer.

But Boehner’s intransigence, which risks raising taxes on 160 million Americans next year, is increasingly hurting the GOP, according to many leaders in the party, and perhaps McConnell felt he had to speak up before more damage was done. As The Hill reports today:

Senate Republicans are worried the standoff over extending the payroll tax holiday could hurt their chances of winning the upper chamber next year.

Senior Republican aides have made clear in private conversations that their bosses are not happy with how House Republicans have handled a bipartisan Senate compromise to extend tax relief for two months.

“It’s not helping,” a veteran Senate Republican strategist said of the House GOP fight against the Senate package. “Senate Republicans are tired of paying the price for the lack of legislative thoughtfulness in the House.”

Indeed, House Republicans have drawn the public ire of Karl Rove, the Wall Street Journal, conservative pundits, and five Senate Republicans, while they’ve found little support among the GOP 2012 presidential candidates. It’s still unclear what the endgame for the payroll tax issue will be, but it’s looking increasingly like it won’t be one in which Boehner comes out winning.

At the end of a rare Saturday session, the Senate’s last day of official business for the year, McConnell blocked an effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to confirm more than 50 executive and judicial branch nominations awaiting Senate action.

And he laid out a condition to releasing his objection: “confirmation from the administration that it will respect practice and precedent on recess appointments.”

McConnell added that he needed from the White House “assurances that have been routinely given at this point with regard to recess appointments.”

It’s unclear just what “practice or precedent” McConnell is referring to, but there is no one who has less standing to complain about unprecedented action than McConnell himself — the lead architect of the Senate GOP’s nihilistic campaign to make it impossible for President Obama to govern. Without an agency head in place, the CFPB cannot perform many of its core functions. Yet, Senate Republicans are filibustering CFPB director-in-waiting Richard Cordray in order to sabotage this newly created consumer protection agency. If McConnell really cares one bit about respecting “practice and precedent,” he can show it by ending this blockade and recognizing that the Senate minority does not have the legitimate authority to effectively repeal an entire agency.

McConnell could also show that he respects practice and precedent by returning the Senate to the way it operated before he became minority leader. Simply put, no one in recent American history has done more to abuse the filibuster than Mitch McConnell — as demonstrated by the massive spike in votes attempting to break filibusters once McConnell took over the minority caucus:

President Obama is not powerless, however, against McConnell’s effort to sabotage the CFPB. If McConnell will not end his blockade, Obama can invoke the Roosevelt Precedent, which allows him to appoint Cordray the second the Senate adjourns for the year.

GOP Threaten to Kill Tax Relief and Unemployment Extension Over Keystone XL, Forcing a Quick Decision that Likely Dooms Pipeline — as GOP Intends!

JR:  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said today he will not support a payroll tax cut extension if he is not allowed to shoot this dog (or at least the climate the dog lives in) TPM reported today.  Apologies to “National Lampoon” and canine aficionados.

UPDATE:  Obama and the Dems caved to the GOP, agreeing to a decision in 60 days on Keystone in return for a 2-month (!) extension of tax relief and unemployment.  Reuters reports:

An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration hadn’t changed its earlier stance that it would reject the application for Keystone if forced to act within a 60-day window.

That, I believe, is what the GOP wants.  I was on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night and explained why:

By Kate Gordon and Daniel J. Weiss in a CAP repost

As Congress attempts to finish its 2011 work, the House leadership continues to push hard to speed up the permitting process for the Keystone XL pipeline. Today Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) threatened to add a Keystone provision to a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, scheduled to expire on December 31. Boehner told reporters:

These rumors that are floating around here about a two-month extension, I’ll just say this: If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate.

Ironically the State Department said Monday that such legislation would prevent it from approving the Keystone permit:

Should Congress impose an arbitrary deadline for the permit decision, its actions would not only compromise the process, it would prohibit the Department from acting consistently with National Environmental Policy Act requirements by not allowing sufficient time for the development of this information. In the absence of properly completing the process, the Department would be unable to make a determination to issue a permit for this project.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday House leadership—and some Democrats—passed a tax extender package that included a sped-up permitting process for the Keystone XL pipeline. In explaining why on earth this controversial 1,700-mile oil pipeline should be appended to a tax package focused on unemployment insurance and payroll taxes, Rep. Boehner argued that the pipeline private-sector infrastructure project “would create tens of thousands of American jobs.”

But as The Washington Post pointed out Wednesday, the Keystone project would do no such thing.

Yes, the TransCanada Corporation initially said the pipeline might create as many as 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. But the company soon walked that figure back, explaining that its calculation was based on a “one job-one year” measure, meaning that one person working for two consecutive years would be counted twice. Using a more accurate calculation, TransCanada estimated the project would employ about 6,500 jobs. And an independent study by the Cornell Labor Institute found an even smaller number, noting that the pipeline will actually create “no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary direct construction jobs for two years.”

So Keystone is not, in fact, the key to getting tens of thousands of Americans back to work and off of unemployment insurance. But Keystone is much more insidious than that. Committing to this project would put the United States on the path toward an energy future characterized by extraction and export of dirty fossil fuels, where the vast majority of the benefits go straight to Big Oil companies.

The five largest oil companies have made $100 billion in profits so far in 2011 and are on track to make $130 billion. Rather than investing in clean alternative fuels, these companies are using their profits to buy back their own stock. And the five largest companies have nearly $60 billion in cash reserves. Meanwhile, four of the largest companies shed a total of 11,000 U.S. employees over the past five years.

But here’s what’s really at stake. This is a 1,700-mile pipeline, which would run all the way from upper Alberta, Canada, down to Houston, Texas. On the way it would pass through one province and six states. As originally routed, the pipeline would move 435,000 barrels per day of heavy crude oil through miles and miles of pipe that some fear is being manufactured under less-than-stringent controls in China and India. The line will run through critical areas such as Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, where a leak or an oil spill could easily contaminate the water source for nearly 20 percent of the country’s agriculture.

All that oil—which, not incidentally, is extracted in the dirtiest way possible from the tar sands in Alberta—would then run down to Houston, where it would be refined and made, in large part, into petroleum products for export to foreign markets.

So far this story isn’t that great: not too many jobs, lots of environmental concerns, and not exactly promoting energy independence.

But it’s even bigger than that. If we build this 1,700-mile pipeline, we are making a decision about what kind of America we want to live in. We are choosing to allow Big Oil to tell us what kind of energy and fuel we should use, rather than choosing energy alternatives that work for each region of the country and build off our natural advantages of sun, wind, geothermal, and biomass.

We are also choosing to put our land, dollars, and hard work into the service of an industry that, in the long run, won’t really create all that much economic wealth for ordinary Americans.

Over the long term, most jobs in the oil sector aren’t good middle-class construction and manufacturing jobs; they’re minimum-wage jobs behind gas station counters. Contrast this with initiatives aimed at growing the clean energy economy, where there are job opportunities across a huge variety of industries and occupations, including a significant chunk in the manufacturing sector—long the anchor for America’s middle class.

In short, by choosing the pipeline, the House leadership is forcing America onto an economic path based on extraction and export, not one based on innovation and choice.

When the alternative looks like it can create jobs today, making a choice that’s in our long-term economic and environmental interest can be hard. It is especially hard for those workers (and the unions who represent them) who are most likely to get the 6,500 temporary construction jobs promised by pipeline developer TransCanada. But that’s why we have a national government—to take the long view and make the decisions that are truly best for the country, not for any particular state, region, industry, or interest group.

It is Congress’s job to get this country onto the path toward sustainable and strong economic growth, not to sell our country to the oil-and-gas industry. Clearly the House did not get that message. But that doesn’t mean the American people need to agree.

– Kate Gordon is Vice President for Energy Policy and Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress.

Related Post:

• James Hansen slams Keystone XL Canada-U.S. Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts”

So does that mean Republicans have dropped their demand that an extension be tied to the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Of course not:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that his chamber will not sign off on an extension of the payroll tax cut sought by President Obama without including a provision to speed construction of an oil pipeline, which Obama has opposed…“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate,” Boehner said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined in, saying, “Frankly, I will not be able to support a package that doesn’t include the pipeline.” Republicans claim that the oil pipeline will be a job creator, but the only independent analysis into the pipeline found that just 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, “with a negative long-term economic impact.”

In order to attain its beloved pipeline, the GOP is willing to raise taxes on 113 million households next year, costing the average family $1000. At the same time, the GOP adamantly refused to consider a surtax on the very wealthiest Americans. This has become the standard operating procedure for the GOP this year: exploit expiring provisions (or the imminent expiration of U.S. credit) to force through a conservative agenda. In this instance, it’s middle-class taxpayers or the environment that suffers if Republicans get their way.

The Leader will not support any bill without the Keystone XL language as part of the agreement.

“What should the Congressional Republicans do? They should attach it to the middle class tax cut, send it to the president, force him to veto it, send it a second time,” Newt said last night. “I’d say to the president, ‘You want to look like you are totally out of touch of the American people? Be my guest, but I’m not backing down when we’re right and you are totally wrong.’”

Watch Newt’s mandate to Congressional Republicans:

Last Sunday, McConnell indicated flexibility on the poison pill, saying that the extension of payroll tax cuts for 160 million Americans was “obviously” going to pass no matter what. However, in the last week, Republicans have shown increasing willingness to embrace the style of brinkmanship that Newt Gingrich displayed as Speaker of the House of Representatives, who shut down the federal government repeatedly on behalf of a radical right-wing agenda.

If passed, these love-letters to the oil and coal industries would be devastating to public health and the environment, risking infant brain damage and poisoned aquifers.

On Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) admitted the Keystone XL and Boiler MACT poison pills threaten the passage of the payroll bill. He told Wallace that the payroll tax cut extension “obviously” will pass, but claimed Republicans have added these pollution poison pills on a “bipartisan basis“:

But we also need to have something in there that prevents the loss of jobs and something that will create the jobs. And that’s why we inserted Boiler MACT, supported on a bipartisan basis and the Keystone pipeline supported on a bipartisan basis. One would save jobs, one would create jobs right now.

McConnell is technically not lying about the bipartisan support, as there are a handful of Democrats who have cast their lot in with polluter interests instead of people’s health like the Republicans on both issues. However, neither the Keystone nor Boiler MACT poison pills would save or create jobs — studies have found that the economic and societal impact of their increased pollution would far outweigh any short-term benefits of allowing polluters to keep dumping waste into the atmosphere and water without consequence.

President Obama has said unequivocally that he will “reject” any attempt to include the Keystone language in the payroll bill, but has not issued a similar veto threat on Boiler MACT.

For instance, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) last week said that the CFPB director would be akin to an “almighty god” with no oversight. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continued this narrative yesterday during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: What’s your problem with an agency that would protect consumers from mortgage lenders, from debt collectors and student lenders?

MCCONNELL: Yes, here’s the problem: this new agency answers to no one, absolutely no one — another unelected czar. We’ve got a bunch of those in the White House. We don’t need any more of them. And the only way we can incentivize the administration to change this agency which isn’t subject to oversight by Congress, doesn’t get its money from Congress, answers to literally to no one — it’s one individual who could bring down the banking system in this country if he chose to, has unlimited power. No one has that kind of power.

Watch it:

The GOP may have decided this is a clever line of attack, but that doesn’t make it any more true. For starters, the CFPB was created by an act of Congress, which mandated that the agency have a director. By McConnell’s logic, the head of every cabinet or regulatory agency is “another unelected czar.”

Moreover, it’s simply a lie to say that the CFPB director has unlimited power and is subject to no oversight. As we explained last week, the CFPB, unlike any of the other federal financial system regulators, can have it’s rules struck down by a vote of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a panel composed of the heads of the bank regulatory agencies, the Treasury Secretary, and the Federal Reserve Chairman. No other financial regulator is subject to this sort of check. Theoretically, the FSOC could veto each and every rule that the CFPB makes.

Finally, McConnell has a dim view of the banks in this country if he believes that consumer protection rules would bring the whole banking system down. Implicit in that argument is the belief that banks must rip people off in order to make a profit. McConnell’s rhetoric leads to the conclusion that the GOP not only believes banks must hose consumers to survive, but that Republicans are only too happy to help the banks achieve that end.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) what he made of characterizations of the GOP as the party that defends millionaires, given that more than half of McConnell’s caucus has repeatedly voted against a tax cut for the middle class. McConnell laughed at the assertion before saying the GOP is “not here to defend high-income people.” As proof, McConnell told Wallace that the Republican plan took such drastic steps as to prevent millionaires from receiving unemployment benefits or food stamps:

WALLACE: Why are so many Republicans, including more than half of your Senate Republicans, why are they voting against the payroll tax cut?

MCCONNELL: Well the president’s comments, it’s hard not to laugh, because four out of five of the people they’re targeting, of “the rich people” they’re targeting, are actually business owners who create jobs. Look, we’re not here to defend high-income people. In this bipartisan package that we’re just discussing, we make sure millionaires don’t get unemployment, don’t get food stamps. [...] It doesn’t do anything for millionaires, in fact, it goes after them on the benefits side.

McConnell’s assertions seem belied by the facts. Though he insists the payroll tax cut extension will pass, it was the GOP that opposed paying for it through a small surtax on the wealthiest Americans. It was the GOP that opposed any move to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in efforts to reduce the deficit — leading to the first credit downgrade in American history and ultimately dooming the super committee. It was his party that nearly shutdown the government in April over the same issue — even though the wealthiest Americans are paying historically low tax rates.

And while McConnell claims the GOP plan “goes after” millionaires “on the benefits side,” it “goes after” low- and middle-income Americans “on the benefits side” even harder. While the GOP opposes any tax increase on millionaires, the House plan to extend the payroll tax cut guts unemployment insurance — one of the most effective means of economic stimulus the government has — reducing the number of weeks one can remain on the program from 99 to 79, and then from 79 to 59.

McConnell’s claims that “four out of five people” Democrats are “targeting” are actually “business owners who create jobs” is equally laughable. NPR last week tested that claim, asking Republican Congressional offices to help them find business owners who opposed the millionaire surtax. Unsurprisingly, since only 2 percent of those with business income would be affected by the surtax, the Republican offices and business lobbying groups couldn’t find anyone for NPR to talk to.

McConnell and six Republican secretaries of state discussed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), a proposed plan for using a popular vote in presidential elections. The NPV would guarantee whichever candidate wins the popular vote would also win the electoral college – preventing a repeat of the 2000 election when Al Gore won the most votes but still lost the presidency. It would do so by getting states to agree to collectively award their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, but the compact would only kick in once states with a majority of the electoral college sign on. Currently, eight states and the District of Columbia have joined the NPV, comprising 132 of the needed 270 electoral votes for the compact to take effect.

Rather than embracing the NPV as a way to solidify the Constitution’s guarantee of “one man, one vote,” McConnell lambasted the plan, calling it a “genuine threat to our country.” Though McConnell admitted that the notion of a popular presidential vote where the candidate who receives the most votes wins is “appealing,” he called the idea “absurd and dangerous.”

MCCONNELL: Hosting this seminar on the most important issue [the National Popular Vote proposal] in America nobody’s talking about. Everybody’s following the debt crisis in Europe, the presidential election in America, unemployment statistics, but nobody is paying much attention to the genuine threat to our country. That’s what I want to address this morning.

Watch it:

This is not the first time McConnell has expressed unease with elections and popular votes. In July, the Republican Leader took to the Senate floor to declare that we must rewrite the Constitution and add in an amendment permanently entrenching a Tea Party policy agenda because “elections” haven’t “worked.”

Awarding the presidency to the candidate who receives the most votes is an eminently reasonable and democratic position. McConnell’s suggestion — that ensuring the person who gets the most votes becomes president is a “threat to our country” — is not.

Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Discuss Their Understanding Of The Constitution

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

• Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
• Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
• Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
• John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
• Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
• Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
• Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
• Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
• Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
• Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
• John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

Federal law requires recusal from a case if a judicial officer of the United States “has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case or controversy.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(3). In addition, a federal judge must disqualify herself from participating in a matter if her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Id. at § 455(a). It appears that former Solicitor General Kagan’s participation in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA may satisfy both requirements for recusal.

Then-Solicitor General Kagan acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that, in fact, she played a “role” in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA, including attending “at least one meeting” that discussed the litigation. But she minimized her degree of involvement in the litigation, characterizing it as not “substantial.” Federal law, however, requires recusal if a government official participated in a matter that is the subject of litigation; it does not require the government official’s past participation in that same matter to be “substantial” (as determined by the self-same government official).

Unsurprisingly, the letter from McConnell and his colleagues misrepresents Kagan’s actions. Although Kagan did testify at her confirmation hearing that she was once present in a meeting where the existence of the Affordable Care Act litigation was brought up, she also testified under oath that she did no work whatsoever as an attorney on this litigation. Being in a meeting where a particular lawsuit is mentioned does not constitute participation “as counsel, adviser or material witness” on a case any more than attending a football game makes you a coach.

Moreover, even though a far-right group filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence that Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation, this request proved so fruitless that even the National Review’s Carrie Severino — a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas — was forced to conclude that the documents uncovered by this request contain no evidence requiring Justice Kagan’s recusal.

Yet, while McConnell’s letter is clearly just the latest chapter in a witchhunt seeking to discredit Kagan, it is nonetheless significant simply because McConnell’s name is on it. Previously, only a few senators such as Sessions and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — both of whom represent the Senate’s far right fringe — had jumped onboard the anti-Kagan witchhunt. The fact that McConnell, Kyl, and Grassley are now lighting up torches and demanding that Kagan be burnt at the stake indicates that this witchhunt is the official position of the Senate GOP caucus.

Iran's Central Bank building

The Obama administration flirted with the idea of sanctioning the Iranian Central Bank, with Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen saying that they were “looking very actively” at imposing such measures. But officials have since warned against the broad sanctions.

Director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Adam Szubin said this week at a House of Representatives hearing that the Central Bank sanctions could actually benefit Iran and hurt the U.S. and global economies by causing oil prices to spike:

There are very real scenarios in which an oil spike might hit. [...]

If there is a hike in the price of oil, Iran gains. If there is a spike in the price of oil…there could be profound harm to the global economic recovery and a windfall to Iran.

The amendment also constricts the administration’s ability to conduct its foreign policy. In most matters, the president is afforded a foreign policy waiver to free his hand to make policy and maintain relations with other countries. But the Kirk amendment “require(s) the President to impose sanctions on foreign financial institutions that conduct transactions with the Central Bank of Iran.” The waiver, in this case, lasts only 60 days and must be renewed and certified to Congress, and only in the case that allowing the financial transactions is “necessary to the national security interest of the United States.”

The sanctions, however, could be difficult to implement. “[F]oreign financial institutions that conduct transactions with the Central Bank of Iran” might include entities such as European central banks that are conducting what, according to their own and international laws, are completely legal business in and with Iran that is routed through the central bank.

This summer, more than 90 senators signed onto a letter to Obama, led by Kirk and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supporting the notion of sanctioning Iran’s central bank.

I am awarding the Washington Post fact checker Four Pinocchios, a Pants on Fire, and a Jim Carrey (below) for his inane piece “President Clinton’s overenthusiasm for growth in green jobs.”

The fact checker decided to “fact-check” these two recent “comments about stimulus funding during NBC’s Meet the Press, Sept. 18, 2011″:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell : “If you look at the stimulus bill, what did we get out of that? Turtle tunnels and Solyndra. More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges out of the entire stimulus package last year, and now he’s asking us to do it again.”

Former President Bill Clinton: “I heard what Senator McConnell said about that one project, but the hard truth is that in America, in spite of his hostility to it, green technology jobs have grown twice as fast as the overall job-generating capacity of the economy in the last eight years, where all job growth has been anemic. You’re going to have a lot of that.”

Now you might think the WashPost would be all over McConnell’s falsehoods.  After all, it is an outright lie that all we got out of the stimulus was “Turtle tunnels and Solyndra.”  The Washington Post itself reported that according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus may have generated up to 3.3 millions jobs by mid-2010 alone.

And, of course, this sentence is false: “More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges out of the entire stimulus package last year, and now he’s asking us to do it again.”  Obama isn’t “asking us to do it again,” in any reasonable reading of the word “it.”  And the WashPost points out “Overall, Kentucky received nearly $3.7 billion overall in stimulus funding between 2009 and 2011, according to the government-run stimulus-tracking Web site Recovery.gov.”

But it appears that one small piece of McConnell’s cavalcade of  misinformation is correct “More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges.”  So, of course, the WashPost fact-checker gives McConnell a clean bell of health, saying nothing more about his falsehoods than, “We find no fault with McConnell’s claim about Solyndra funding versus Kentucky’s stimulus money.”

UPDATE:  CAP’s Bracken Hendricks has sent me a good explanation of why even this one supposedly fault-free part of McConnell’s statement is incredibly misleading, which I reprint below.

President Clinton, however, uttered the truth and even provided the WashPost with a reference to back him up, but the Post gave him two Pinocchios, claiming “He relied on selective data that would support his case while ignoring other relevant numbers.”  Seriously.  Who is being selective here — Clinton or the Washington Post?

Let’s run this one down since it involves accuracy by the former president and hypocritical inaccuracy by the Washington Post of a kind I expect that we will see repeated by bad fact checkers.  The key point President Clinton made that the WashPost contests is:

… green technology jobs have grown twice as fast as the overall job-generating capacity of the economy in the last eight years, where all job growth has been anemic.

Please note that the President said green technology jobs.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the Brookings report  has a slight confusion between what they call “clean economy” jobs, which  includes everything including conservation, nuclear energy, waste management, and what they call “clean tech,” which is what most of us would consider to be the emerging clean energy economy.

Here is how Time magazine reported on the Brookings analysis:

And the clean energy sector in particular is growing very quickly: it grew by 8.3% between 2003 and 2010, nearly twice as fast as the overall economy during those years. “The pace of growth really is torrid in that sector,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metropolitan Program and a co-author of the report. “This confirms the intuition that these exciting industries really are growing as fast as we think they are.”

Time magazine says almost the exact same thing that Clinton said.  And the report co-author used the word “torrid”  to describe the pace of growth in the clean tech sector.
Brookings itself in its release on the report says:

The clean economy grew more slowly in aggregate than the national economy between 2003 and 2010, but newer “cleantech” segments produced explosive job gains and the clean economy outperformed the nation during the recession.

So Brookings draws a distinction between the “clean economy” and the newer “cleantech” segment — which Clinton was obviously talking about when he said “green technology jobs have grown twice as fast as the overall job-generating capacity of the economy in the last eight years.”

As an aside, I checked with Muro when the report came out, and he is perfectly fine labeling the fastest growing clean energy parts of the clean economy “cleantech.”

The worst you can say about Clinton is that he didn’t repeat the phrase “cleantech” exactly, but said “green technology.”  But that pales in comparison to the outright lies and misleading statistics from McConnell.

But the WashPost gives Clinton two Pinocchios for making a completely legitimate distinction while signing off on McConnell’s multiple falsehoods.

I suppose this shouldn’t come as a big shock to Climate Progress readers, who are more than aware that when it comes to fact checking, the Washington Post leaves much to be desired:

• The Washington Post op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming
• Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?

UPDATE:   Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks sends me a note explaining why even McConnell’s comparison of money lost on Soyndra with roads and bridges funding in Kentucky is misleading:

One last point goes to Senator McConnell, more so than Reporter Hicks, and the original question posed to Clinton on Meet the Press.  McConnell asserted that more money was lost to Solyndra than was received in his state to fix roads and bridges.  This is highly misleading, and willfully misses the point of both how loan guarantee programs work, and the nature of risk management.

The Solyndra loan was one deal that went bad.  That is unfortunate, but it was in a pool of loans that overall are very high performing.  Because it is impossible to know in advance which loans will succeed and which will fail, all loan guarantee programs invest in pools of risk.  They score that risk appropriately, and then budget for it.  The loan guarantee program anticipated that some loans would not be paid back, and this is why there was a final score of $2.5 billion set aside in ARRA [the stimulus bill] to pay for the cost of the program.

It should be obvious that those loans that are actually paid back don’t cost the government anything, but you can’t get the benefit of those gains without taking some risk and potentially making a few investments that don’t pan out.  That is the entire reason that there was a cost associated with the program in the federal budget.

The relative success of the Loan Guarantee Program [LGP] should be considered as a whole portfolio, it is meaningless to assess whether it was a good investment looking at one line item in the ledger of costs and gains.  Looked at correctly, the LGP is creating very substantial net new jobs, new revenue through taxes, and new profits for US businesses.  It is estimated that the LGP will create about 29,000 jobs overall.  The loss of 1,000 jobs at Solyndra is unfortunate, but it is the price of getting the other jobs and investments.  Without policy leadership through ARRA, we could not have gotten that bump of nearly 30 thousand jobs.

For McConnell to pull out one loss in isolation of the gains that were leveraged through the LGP, is a distortion of the record that President Clinton was correct to challenge.  This is fundamental to business risk and it is fundamental to capitalism.  Either McConnell is unclear on how markets work, or he is willfully being misleading for partisan political gain.  That is bad for the country, and John Hicks fell right into his trap with his junk follow-on story.

Related Post:

• Getting the Facts Straight on Green Jobs