Sorry, Catkiller, no help there. New SEC Chairman Christopher Cox recuses himself from the probe into Bill Frist’s suspicious stock dump, leaving four commissioners — two Dems and two GOP — to head the inquiry. Update: A blind trust? Not hardly. “Documents on file with the Senate show the trustees for Frist and his immediate family wrote the senator nearly two dozen times between 2001 and July 2005. The documents list assets going into the account and assets sold. Some assets have a dollar range of the investment’s value and some list the number of shares.”
Category: GOP
Making Hay while the Cities Drown.
Looka points the way to a truly horrifying breakdown of Operation Offset, the House Republicans’ disgusting, abhorrent proposal to pay for Katrina reconstruction (without, of course, touching a red cent of Dubya’s millionaire tax breaks) So, guess who foots the bill?
“The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president’s hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because ‘studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free’; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides ‘free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill’ to poor teenagers.
Along the way, they’d find a way to punish — or simply eliminate — some of their enemies, real and imagined. They’d cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities…
[T]he Republican plan also calls for ‘rational reforms to Defense and Homeland Security.’ Does this mean cutting weapons systems at the expense of big defense corporations? Well, no. But it does mean closing schools for the children of soldiers, cutting grants for local responders and offering National Guard members the ‘option’ to purchase a less comprehensive healthcare plan.”
So, just to clarify: Rather than roll back the Dubya tax breaks for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, which almost alone would raise the necessary funds, Boss DeLay and the House GOP want to cut a Grover Norquist-style swath of destruction through our government and foist the clean-up bill on everyone but their fatcat cronies. I must say, I am consistently surprised by the current GOP leadership’s ability to plumb new depths of repugnance.
Up the Bagman Food Chain.
Curiouser and curiouser…Already inexorably tied to Boss DeLay and Grover Norquist, “Casino Jack” Abramoff also boasted of a direct connection to Karl Rove two years ago, while helping Tyco and other corporate conglomerates try to avoid tax penalties for moving their operations overseas. Boy, pull at one brick in this rotten edifice of right-wing cronyism and the whole darned structure threatens to topple.
Hail to the Chief.
“When my party retakes the White House, there may very well be a Democratic John Roberts nominated to the Court, a man or woman with outstanding qualifications, highly respected by virtually everyone in the legal community, and perhaps with a paper trail of political experience or service on the progressive side of the ideological spectrum. When that day comes, and it will, that will be the test for this Committee and the Senate. And, in the end, it is one of the central reasons I will vote to confirm Judge John Roberts to be perhaps the last Chief Justice of the United States in my lifetime.”
By a vote of 13-5, John Roberts is approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee — with Dems Patrick Leahy, Herb Kohl, and Russ Feingold joining the Republican majority — and will no doubt become the Court’s next Chief Justice. The Dems — and particularly Sen. Feingold — are already getting flak for their Yes votes from People for the American Way and other liberal groups. (For their part, Hillary and Joe Biden have decided to keep the 2008 primary voters happy.) Well, just as I think Feingold was right to vote yes on Ashcroft in 2001, I think he made the correct decision here, both in terms of principle and politics.
In terms of principle, I think Feingold’s statement above is exactly correct. We could go through 1000 nominees, and Dubya would never pick anyone who comes remotely close to being a progressive — Sadly, the conservative tinge of the Supreme Court was decided last November, with Dubya’s re-election. The question before the Senate was whether Roberts was (a) competent enough to fill the position of Chief and (b) whether he adhered to the broad mainstream (albeit conservative mainstream) of American legal thought. I watched almost all of the Roberts hearings and, although he dodged and weaved past way too many important questions, he was clearly (a) hyper-competent and (b) more respectful of existing legal precedent than many other conservative freakshows Dubya could have appointed (and might still.) Roberts said a number of times that he believed in a constitutional right to privacy, that Griswold was good and settled law, and that (although most agree on this anyway, Janice Rogers Brown notwithstanding) the Lochner Court was not an appropriate or worthwhile historical role model for today’s judiciary. Perhaps he’s lying, but it’s no small business to lie before the Senate. I think Feingold was right to take his word at face value and vote yes, with reservations.
Voting for or against a 50-year-old Chief Justice is not a decision to be taken lightly, and I’m sure Dems on both sides of the vote chose their stance on principle. But, to be base for a moment and consider the politics of the situation, the Yes voters allowed themselves wiggle-room on the next nominee that most Dems have basically wasted on a sure thing. Roberts is replacing Rehnquist, a conservative for a conservative. The real battle lies ahead, when Dubya appoints a justice to take O’Connor’s swing-vote position. Where are the Dems who voted no on Roberts going to go? Chances are the next candidate for justice will be less competent and more conservative, in the scary-fundy sense, than Roberts, but the no-voting Dems have lost all pull by not keeping their powder dry. Had the Dems acceded to Roberts’ nomination, they would have easier recourse to a possible filibuster in Round 2, particularly with the fair-play-minded Gang of 14. Now, not so much.
At any rate, I’ll admit to being already something of a Feingold groupie — More than any other Dem, except perhaps the late Paul Wellstone, I view him as my Senator in Congress, the closest thing to a true progressive out there. (For what it’s worth, I also thought he did a better job than any other Dem in his questioning of Roberts, with the possible exception of Dick Durbin.) Still, I think he made the right decision in this vote, and I hope very much that groups on the left who disagreed with his choice here keep an eye on the big picture and don’t start calling for his head.
And Roberts? Well, I’m never going to agree with the guy on a lot of issues, that’s for sure. But, in the hearings, I thought he came across as conservative in the old and best sense of the term — cautious, restrained, not inclined to break tradition — and not as a frothing, fundamentalist reactionary like any number of judges Dubya has appointed to the bench. Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that this turns out to be the case.
Catkiller goes Gekko.
By way of Looka, did Catkiller Frist pull a Martha? “Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family’s hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent…To keep the trust blind, Frist was not allowed to know how much HCA stock he owned…but he was allowed to ask for all of it to be sold.” Update: The Post has more: “The notion that you have a blind trust but you can tell your trustee when to sell stock in it just doesn’t make any sense. It means you have a seeing eye trust and not a blind trust. It’s ridiculous.” Update 2: The SEC steps in, and subpoenas start flying.
Light of Recognition.
FYI, Medley has birddogged a great Dubya lightbulb joke…
Dubya (and Grover’s) Crooked suit.
So apparently it was Follow-the-Money-Monday in Washington yesterday, which nine times out of ten will mean trouble for the GOP. On the same day that the FEC filed suit against the pro-Republican political group Club for Growth (in what may well be the first of many actions taken against soft money groups in both parties), David Safavian, the top federal procurement official at the White House, is arrested for lying about his involvement with — and obstructing the investigation into — “Casino Jack” Abramoff. Safavian, who as of last week was not only “setting purchasing policy for the entire government” but active in Katrina relief efforts, has a history of crooked behavior — he was earlier a bagman for Utah Rep. Chris Cannon. So, naturally, Dubya put the guy in charge of the nation’s pursestrings in 2004.
And here’s an interesting triangle for you. Safavian is also “a former lobbying partner of anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, he of the “drowning goverment” and “bipartisanship is date rape” quips, at a firm they co-founded called Janus Merritt (It was acquired in 2002.) As it turns out, Norquist was also — and I can’t believe I hadn’t heard this before — none other than Casino Jack‘s college roommate. Hmmm…you think maybe the shredder was working overtime this weekend at Americans for Tax Reform? Update: Upon further review, the article calling Norquist and Abramoff college roommates was probably wrong. However, their close college connection as leading Reagan Youth in Massachusetts (along with Christian Coalition guru Ralph Reed) is without question — more in the comments.
Wal-Mart 1, Wildlife 0.
Clearly missing the good ole days of business-as-usual, the GOP Congress will sidestep Katrina-related matters next week to fast-track instead a plan to gut the Endangered Species Act. The proposed GOP bill “would make it more difficult for the federal government to set aside land it deems crucial to the health of endangered species…[and] also increase the obligation of government agencies to tell landowners quickly if the law limits their development options, and to compensate them.” Update: The bill makes it out of committee.
Rock the Vote.
The Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and longtime Bush consigliere James Baker, delivers a set of proposals for fixing our tottering election system. Among the recommendations included are the adoption of a standard photo ID [which former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) has likened to a “modern-day poll tax,”] full electronic voting paper trails, free TV time for political candidates, the implementation of a regional primary system, and the non-partisan administration of future elections. Well, I’d like to see more strictly campaign-finance-related initiatives here, but, if nothing else, these sound like a good starting point for debate. After all, it should be clear to all by now that the current system has major issues, to say the least. (Just ask Ohio.)
Better Late than Never.
“It’s a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing…Had he signed this rather innocuous joint statement back then (it wouldn’t have harmed our national interest to forgo an option — invading North Korea — that we were never going to exercise in the first place), the next steps toward an arms-control treaty would have been much easier than they will be now.” Slate‘s Fred Kaplan realistically assesses the good news — and work ahead — in North Korea.