Zandar Versus The Stupid

Last Call For Douchebag Darrel

2013-06-19T21:40:00.000-04:00

GOP Rep. Darrel Issa's "IRS Scandal" charge has just run headlong into the brick wall of reality named Rep. Elijah Cummings. Evan Puschak blogging at The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell's site:

Rep. Elijah Cummings–ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee–made good on his promise to release more transcripts from the committee’s interviews with workers at the Cincinnati IRS. Despite protests from chairman Darrell Issa, Cummings made available Tuesday the full interview of the IRS Screening Group Manager, who handled groups applying for tax-exempt status.

“This interview transcript…debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Issa. “Answering questions from Committee staff for more than five hours, this official—who identified himself as a ‘conservative Republican’—denied that he or anyone on his team was directed by the White House to take these actions or that they were politically motivated.”

The “conspiracy theories” Cummings mentions were disseminated by Issa himself. On May 14th, Issa said unequivocally, “This was the targeting of the president’s political enemies effectively and lies about it during the election year, so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards.” But he had no evidence to support this claim.

And not only does Issa lack evidence to support his nutjob claims, the evidence that the committee does have 100% contradicts those claims. If anything, the "conservative Republican" whistleblower came forward out of a desire to vet Tea Party organizations to make sure they didn't screw up fundraising rules for the big Republican groups. He was helping the GOP, not targeting them.

In other words, if anyone's guilty of politics in the IRS, it's conservatives who want to make sure that the Citizens United gravy train of campaign billions rolls on unimpeded. Imagine that.

Nice of Darrel to actually find the real scandal in this mess. Will he do anything about it?

What do you think?

More Immigration Disintegration

2013-06-19T15:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I pointed out that as I've been saying for months now, the House will not let the Senate immigration bill pass in any form. Indeed, Orange Julius promised that any bill that can't get a majority of Republicans to vote for it won't even come up for a vote, and House Republicans are warning that if Boehner breaks that rule and allows the Senate bill to even get an up or down vote, he's political toast.

But Greg Sargent disagrees and believes Boehner is bluffing.

There are two apparent endgames here. Either the House ends up not passing anything. In that case Boehner will have to decide whether to allow the House to vote on the Senate bill — including a path to citizenship. He claims he won’t allow it if a majority of Republicans opposes it. But the pressure on him to allow a vote will be very intense, from powerful GOP stakeholders such as the business community and wide swaths of the consulting/strategist establishment.

Or, alternatively, the House passes something and we go to conference. What happens if whatever emerges from conference contains a path to citizenship, and a majority of House Republicans don’t support it? Asked today by reporters what would happen then, Boehner’s response contained a key tell:

Asked he would require majority Republican support on a bill that came out of a formal negotiation with the senate, Boehner said “we’ll see when we get there.”
In other words, Boehner would not rule out a vote that violates the supposed “Hastert Rule.”

I admit, Boehner's in a tough bind. But Sargent forgets that the nutjob wing of the party always exacts a price. Right now that price is the end of any citizenship path for undocumented immigrants, and when you have major conservative outfits promising to primary any House Republican who votes for the Senate bill, you're going to see that brick wall come up real fast, just like 7 years ago.

Immigration reform will not pass the House. This is all but a guarantee.

Nuclear Turtle Alert

2013-06-19T10:25:00.000-04:00

Shorter Mitch McConnell: Harry Reid doesn't have the balls to touch the filibuster, because I will end you freakin' libtards if he does.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, threatening to end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if he becomes the majority leader.

“There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything,” McConnell said on the floor.

About as subtle as nuclear waste, the GOP.

"Make no mistake, a vote to end the filibuster is a vote to complete Yucca mountain," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., warned Reid in a Tuesday morning floor speech. "If the Democrats can turn the Senate into a place where a majority of 51 can do anything they want, soon a majority of 51 Republicans are going to figure out the same thing to do," he said earlier in that same speech.

Here's a thought. Has anyone considered that the next Republican Senate majority (definitely a possibility in 2014) will completely trash the filibuster anyway?

Reid should just get on with it.

StupidiNews!

2013-06-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

President Obama will call on Russia to join the US in a joint effort to reduce nuclear weapons by one-third in a speech in Berlin today.
Journalist Michael Hastings, the man whose Roling Stone expose' of Gen. Stanley McChrystal ended the general's career, is dead from a car crash at age 33.
NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander testified before Congress that leaked intelligence gathering programs have stopped 50 plus terrorist attacks, including an attempt on the NYSE.
Chinese smartphone maker Huawei is taking on Apple and Samsung in Asia and Europe with its world's-slimmest Ascend P6 model.
New FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's first act may be to overturn the Library of Congress's ban on unlocking cell phones under the DMCA.

Last Call For The Jindal Solution

2013-06-18T22:13:00.000-04:00

So remember after the 2012 elections when Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal decided he was going to make himself a frontrunner for 2016 by pretending to be the "moderate voice of reason" that would lead the GOP out of the wilderness? Among his seven suggestions last November for fixing the GOP:

Stop being the stupid party. It's time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It's time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. Enough of that.

That lasted, let's see, eight months. Apparently Bobby's crash landed back in the badlands again with these offensive and bizarre comments.

Let’s stop defeating ourselves, get on offense, and go kick the other guys around. If you’ve followed the news over the past month, they are certainly asking for it. We are the conservative party in America — deal with it. We have a lot of dissenting voices. So what? Deal with it. The American public waxes and wanes. Fine. It will wax again soon enough. Deal with it, and start fighting for our principles instead of against them, so we can be in position to create the next wave.

At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.

Sure, because that worked so well for you in 2012, threatening to kick the other guys around. And then we kicked your ass up and down the block, Roberto.

Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

What we actually believe is that government can be a force for good, and it must be prevented from being a force for evil, but your small-minded worldview is exactly why most of us don't have very high opinions of the anti-science, anti-secular, Christian Taliban party. See how this works?

Oh, and Josh Barro lays it out for you.

This is a big reason the Republican party can't change. So many of its members have a warped vision of what liberalism is. They think it's something so mind-bendingly awful that they cannot fathom how voters could willingly choose it. It must be some mistake. And sooner or later, mistakes get fixed.

And if those mistakes don't get fixed through voting means, well, maybe it's time to resort to other, more permanent, more violent measures. It's always 1861 in someone's mind....

The Vote's The Thing

2013-06-18T15:30:00.000-04:00

The always awesome Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog recaps Monday's Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, where in a 7-2 decision, the Supremes declared that federal election law does indeed trump state law when it comes to the mechanics of voting. But Lyle points out the larger issue in the decision: when it comes to who is allowed to vote using those federal rules, states get to determine eligibility.

There is a customary rule that courts are to operate on the basic premise that, when Congress and the states act in the same field, state laws won’t be displaced unless Congress explicitly says they must yield. That “presumption against preemption,” in technical terms, does not even apply to the joint enterprise of Congress and the states in regulating elections, according to the new decision.   Thus, in this one field, states do not get the benefit of the doubt when they pass election laws that appear to be, or are, different from what Congress has mandated.

If a reader of the Scalia opinion stopped at the top of page 13, the impression would be very clear that Congress had won hands down in the field of regulating federal elections.   But from that point on, there is abundant encouragement for what is essentially a states’ rights argument: that is, that the states have very wide authority to define who gets to vote, in both state and federal elections.

On the particular point at issue in this case — Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship before one may register to vote or actually vote — the Scalia opinion said that a state was free to ask the federal government for permission to add that requirement.   And, Scalia said, if that doesn’t work — either because the federal agency that would deal with such a request is either not functioning or says no — then a state would be free to go to court and make an argument that it has a constitutional right to insist on proof of citizenship as an absolute qualification for voting, in all elections.

The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing, because that part of the Scalia opinion laid a very heavy stress on the power of states under the Constitution to decide who gets to vote.   Indeed, that part of the opinion said that the Constitution simply does not give Congress the power to decide who can qualify, but only how federal elections are run procedurally.

In other words, Wario Scalia has just opened the door to serious court challenges to federal election laws. It's a decision that means the only reason Arizona can't force proof of citizenship in order to vote is because that has to be a national requirement, and that Arizona really, really should sue the federal government in order to make it so.

It also means that states are free to disqualify people from voting for various reasons, mostly through voter ID requirements.

If all of this gives you a headache, it's supposed to. It's an argument that when it comes to federal elections, the how and when is done by the feds, but the question of who is up to the states and the states alone, and that Congress has no power to interfere in who a state allows to vote.

That bodes very, very badly for the days and weeks ahead in the other big voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, that will determine the power Congress has in the Voting Rights Act. I'm more convinced than ever that Section 5 of the VRA will be toast, and that GOP-controlled states will do everything they can to disenfranchise millions in future elections.