Executive Orders - What, Me Worry?

On the editorial pages of a newspaper that can scarcely pass up an opportunity to beat the drums for war, Ruth Marcus has taken up the horror of the executive order. She's not employing in the over-the-top rhetoric of Ross Douthat, but she is concerned about the ever-present slippery slope,

Every Democrat should be nervous about President Obama’s plan for unilateral action on immigration reform.

Not because of the impact on an already gridlocked Congress, or because it risks inflaming an increasingly hostile public. Democrats should be nervous about the implications for presidential power, and the ability of a future Republican president to act on his or her own.

Perhaps Democrats have short memories, because it seems to me that we saw ample evidence of what a Republican president can accomplish through executive orders when G.W. Bush signed a huge stack of them while on his way out of the White House. Leaving that aside for the moment, we're speaking specifically of executive orders that are being proposed because Congress cannot or will not do its job. I'm not particularly concerned about setting a precedent, as there's nothing particularly unique or special about what President Obama is proposing. For that matter, were the President to refrain from acting, I have no reason to believe that a future Republican president would exercise similar restraint.

The very first concern Marcus raises is interesting, but not in the way she imagines,

First, is there a limiting principle that would constrain the president’s authority to effectively legalize everyone in the country?

Obviously, when we're speaking of this type of executive action, we're speaking of a context in which the White House wants to address an issue on which Congress refuses to speak. Executive orders must be consistent with existing law, and if Congress is willing to pass legislation it can either avoid the need for an executive order or preempt the president's plan.

Marcus's slippery slope rests on the idea that, in the face of Congressional dysfunction, a President may stake out the most extreme position he can arguably take under existing law. That's possible -- but I'm not sure that it would be a bad thing -- not because I want Presidents to sidestep Congress, but because that type of action may be the only thing that is sufficient to light a fire under Congress's posterior such that it actually does its job. If Congress won't act when faced with the most extreme interpretations of existing law, it's a fair inference that the demagoguery of its members doesn't amount to much and that they find that interpretation to be acceptable. Would it be a bigger threat to democracy for the President to stake out extreme positions, presenting the loudest possible "put up or shut up" to Congress, or for the President to tiptoe up to the edges of what might inspire Congressional action while taking advantage of that institution's unwillingness to do its job?

Marcus also argues,

Second, is there a limiting principle that would constrain future presidents inclined against enforcing other laws with which they don’t agree — and on which they’ve been unable to convince Congress to act accordingly?

As previously noted, we're speaking of executive action taken in the face of congressional inaction. Although it is conceivable that a future president might refuse to enforce the laws favored by his own party, it's far more likely that such a president would be in a position to simply ask his party to amend the law.

If a President refuses to uphold the laws of the United States in a manner that Congress finds unacceptable, Congress has a well-known constitutional remedy: impeachment. If Congress chooses not to pursue a legislative remedy, and chooses not to initiate impeachment proceedings, it again becomes difficult to regard any table-thumping condemnations of a president as anything but noise.

The situation in which Marcus's concern might have some weight would be one in which the White House and one chamber of Congress is controlled by one party, and the other chamber of Congress is controlled by another. In such a scenario, the chamber aligned with the White House would have to be sufficiently supportive of the President's actions that it would refuse to support impeachment and conviction, but be unwilling or unable to pass legislation addressing the issue due to the divided government. But legislators have easy access to the media, to make their case against a president. The House of Representatives can slow down or shut down the government, or vote to impeach even if it expects that the Senate will acquit the president. The Senate can similarly slow down the government, not only by impeding the progress of legislation but also by putting the brakes on executive appointments, and can also shut down the government. The tools may not be as precise as would be ideal for the theoretical task at hand, but Congress is anything but powerless.

The fact that I'm not particularly impressed with Marcus's arguments should not be interpreted as my supporting the idea of the executive forming policy through executive orders on matters that are best addressed through legislation. My concern is less about the slippery slope -- a form of argument that can be applied to any action, no matter how trivial -- and is much more about what happens when Congress won't or can't perform its duties. Unlike Marcus or the various members of her employer's editorial board, I find the issue of greater concern to be the fact that we are involved in a new war in the Middle East predicated upon an authorization that cannot reasonably be said to apply to the present circumstances, yet Congress is content to let the war wage on while refusing to pass a new authorization bill that could define its goals or limit its scope. There's not even a hint of concern from the editorial board that we should have congressional authorization for war before we get into yet another armed conflict in the Middle East.

The Washington Post editorial board wants the President to commit ground forces, in the form of special forces, to the front lines of the war with ISIS. It is chomping at the bit for the President to declare direct war on what remains of the Assad regime, without any apparent concern for what would follow the collapse of that regime. But one thing about which the editorial board is conspicuously unconcerned? The absence of Congressional authorization for the present war, let alone the escalated, potentially disastrous war that they propose.

To put it mildly, I'm not thrilled that the President is proposing unilateral action in the face of congressional gridlock. It would be better if Congress would do its job. But at least in the context of executive orders we're speaking not of Marcus's slippery slope, but of the President's following precedents set by prior administrations, and proposing lawful orders that are consistent with existing law. When it comes to war, the Constitution attempts to create a clear framework for the separation of powers, with wars to be initiated by Congress. If you're going to pretend concern about a possible constitutional crisis, can't you give that one more than a shrug and a yawn?

Congress Needs to Do Its Job

Daniel Larison is writing about one of his pet peeves:

Virginia Sen. Tim] Kaine’s point [on Congressional abdication and presidential overreach] is well-taken, and this is one more reason why the war against ISIS needs to be debated and voted on in spite of the president’s pretense that he doesn’t need Congressional approval. It is profoundly wrong to commit the U.S. to military action without having first considered the merits of the operation publicly and deliberately, but there is something even worse. It is even worse to commit the U.S. to a war that isn’t necessary for American security whether Congress has gone through the motions of a debate or not.... [Kaine is correct that Congress mustn’t be permitted to keep dodging its responsibilities on matters of war, and presidents mustn’t be allowed to wage wars without Congressional approval, but it’s even more important that members of Congress break the habit of signing off on the latest elective war. It is Congress’ habitual deference to bad presidential judgment on matters of war that is even more appalling than its refusal to debate and vote on the wars presidents choose to start. That can’t be fixed without first reviving Congress’ role in the process, but simply getting Congress to debate and vote on these wars is also woefully insufficient.

When I read Larison's complaint about a Congress that refuses to debate war, or that is excessively deferential to requests for the authorization to start or continue a war, I couldn't help but think of Ross Douthat's complaint that the constitution will be ruined if a Democratic president follows the lead of past Republican presidents and achieves by executive order what Congress has failed to accomplish through legislation. The sort of, "Wars, drones, security state, black hole prisons, torture, whatever.... immigration is serious argument that, to me, represents the worst form of missing the forest for the trees. Congress can pass legislation in response to an executive order, often long before the order takes effect. Congress can't unstart a war.

There is no hypocrisy in Larison's criticism of President Obama. Larison has consistently argued against the type of overreach he describes in Obama's actions. He is an established opponent of military adventurism and wars of choice. He's correct, in my opinion, that the nation would be well-served by Congress doing its job, by not turning a blind eye to unilateral military action by the President or granting its blessing after-the-fact. Larison is unimpressed with past Congressional debates over war authorization, and understandably so, but I'm not sure what the remedy would be short of electing different representatives.

My first reacton to Douthat's over-the-top rhetoric on how immigration reform could destroy our way of life (I exaggerate slightly) was that it was another example of Douthat writing about something that he doesn't understand. The blog posts that follow his editorials sometimes suggest to me that he encounters the basic facts and competing interpretations for the first time only after he publishes an editorial, with his making a strong, subsequent effort to reconcile the facts with his already-established opinion. In relation to unilateral war action, I found this complaint about the President's decision to go to Congress before waging war on Syria:

It would be a good thing for the country if the older constitutional norms regained some force – if we declared war in cases where we now issue so-called authorizations for the use of military force, and issued authorizations in situations where presidents of both parties claim the power to act with no congressional blessing whatsoever. But when a constitutional power atrophies, it’s extremely unlikely to be restored through the kind of last-minute, poorly-thought-out, and self-undermining approach that the White House has taken in this case.

You see, in Douthat's mind the President should have spent months reminding Congress that it has a role in debating the wisdom of involving a nation in a war, and should not have surprised them at the last minute by suggesting that they fulfill their constitutionally defined role. Douthat carries on at some length about legality and morality, bou don't have to spend much time reading between the lines to see what Douthat is actually thinking: He supported intervention in Syria, Congress voted against it, and it was thus wrong for the President to have gone to Congress.

Going to Congress is entirely optional, and it’s what presidents do when they’re pitching wars that they themselves don’t fully believe in, and need to rebuild credibility squandered by their own fumbling and failed alliance management. What future White House would look at that example and see a path worth following?

You see, where the Congress specifically addresses and issue and dictates how wars are to be declared, it is nothing short of weakness for a President to give anything more than lip service to those requirements. That's certainly not what Douthat would want a future president to do. You only destroy the constitution by acting in a legal manner, consistent with its terms, in the face of Congressional inaction, and in a context in which Congress is free to legislate on the issue, not by ignoring its explicit terms and launching wars that cannot be undone.

Douthat also complains,

Ah, you might say, but if Congress actually votes the Syria authorization down, then future presidents will feel constrained by the threat of a similar congressional veto whether they want to emulate Obama or not. Except that it’s actually more likely that future presidents will look at a congressional rejection in the case of Syria and see a case for going to Congress even less frequently than recent chief executives have done.

The problem with that conceit should be obvious: Congress does not have to wait for an invitation before it takes up the issue. Congress can look at a crisis in a nation like Syria and, on its own initiative, take up the question of whether military intervention is appropriate. It can pass resolutions urging the President to act. It can pass authorizations giving the President the power to Act. Or it can do the opposite, using its power of the purse to withhold funding for military action that it deems unwise. The question of whether or not Congress acts is not one that is controlled by the President -- it's controlled by Congress itself.

Douthat closes with the same sort of trademark silliness that he used in his immigration editorial,

It is just possible, I suppose, that if Congress votes “no” on this resolution and then the president unwisely goes ahead with strikes anyway and then the House impeaches the president for violating his oath of office... and then the whole thing spirals out into a wild constitutional crisis that leaves this administration permanently crippled, the end result of that crisis could conceivably reshape the White House/Congress balance of power on foreign policy, and leave future administrations more constrained.

Turning briefly to the Constitution, Article I, Section 8,

The Congress shall have Power... To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Congress does not need to wait for a president to invite it to participate in a decision to start a war, or to sit on its hands until a president ignores its refusal to authorize war. It can initiate impeachment proceedings any time a president launches a war without its authorization. Congress has done its best to avoid having to take up its constitutional duties, from passing the War Powers Resolution, an ostensible check on presidential power that is effectively treated as a delegation of constitutional responsibility, to allowing the President to declare that pretty much any military action taken by the United States -- even an action explicitly targets a single country for invasion with the purpose of removing and replacing its leadership -- as a "police action".

Whatever temptation might exist to suggest that what we're looking at is a political debate, with Larison supporting a framework that limits international adventurism and Douthat embracing a President's right to unilaterally engage in that sort of adventurism in the role of "world policeman", the text of the Constitution plainly favors Larison. At the same time, it's difficult to avoid seeing Douthat's positions as being driven by anything other than politics. When it comes to war, he doesn't seem to care what the Constitution says, and if anything he is concerned that a president's respect for the Constitution would be too constraining. When it comes to the issuance of executive orders that are consistent with both the law and Constitution, at least when he opposes the outcome, taking action by executive order usurps the authority of Congress and threatens our system of government (never mind that, at all times, Congress remains free to act).

At the end of the debate, though, it boils down to the same fundamental issue: If Congress cannot or will not do its job, the President is likely to look for ways to act unilaterally. In my opinion it's worse in a context like war powers, where Congress has a clear, constitutionally defined role and, instead of fulfilling that role, effectively encourages the President to act unilaterally. Congressional deference to the President on matters that arguably should have required a formal declaration of war did not begin in the 20th Century -- it's a long-standing problem that became particularly glaring when Congress allowed presidents to launch the Korean and Vietnam wars as "police actions". Larison can complain that the President is operating under a pretense that he does not need Congressional approval for military action in Syria, but it's only a pretense if Congress is willing to act. If Congress won't call for a vote, and won't impose any consequence on unilateral action by a President, then (constitutionally or not) Congress has effectively delegated its war-making power to the President. Douthat can whinge that the President should not engage in perfectly lawful action to bypass Congressional gridlock, but again it's only an issue if Congress refuses to act.

Either way, nothing is going to change until Congress decides to start doing its job.

Democracy Will be Ruined if Obama Acts Like... Ronald Reagan

Poor Ross Douthat is in a tizzy over the possibility that President Obama may act through executive order, to address some of the immigration issues that the Republicans refuse to address through legislation. No, of course, Douthat makes no mention of the fact that the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that died in the Republican-controlled House. He instead sees the inevitable death of democracy in the President's following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Douthat's first resort is to the slippery slope, the idea that if the President is willing to shield some groups from deportation in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority and existing law, he could exempt pretty much every person unlawfully in the U.S. from being subject to deportation. He fantasizes,

So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.

Even if we assume that to be the case, as Douthat's fantasy has no chance of actually becoming reality, it makes for a weak argument against the exercise of executive prerogative. If anything, though, Douthat's hyperbolic scare tactics reveal the weakness of the Republican position. Perhaps it is only in the face of such a fantasy scenario that House Republicans could be inspired to do their job and actually pass legislation.

Douthat makes an extraordinarily weak attempt to distinguish the President's proposal from past executive actions, revealing his essential ignorance of the facts.

In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home.

Obviously, the amnesty that Bush and Reagan granted to the wives and children of prior beneficiaries of legislative amnesty do not even slightly resemble what Douthat describes. Douthat also suggests that the number of potential beneficiaries somehow makes the Obama proposal different from what has come before. However, what the numbers truly reflect is the extent to which Congress has neglected this issue -- immigration reform was supposed to be a priority for George W. Bush, but he was never able to get a bill past his own party. As the previously linked article indicates,

"Bush Sr. went big at the time. He protected about 40 percent of the unauthorized population. Back then that was up to 1.5 million. Today that would be about 5 million."

The same article quotes a former Republican aide to then-Senator Alan Simpson that a difference at that time was that Congress indicated that it was going to pass legislation addressing the issue. That's really a distinction without a difference. Nothing is stopping Congress from passing immigration reform legislation, or a narrowly tailored bill directly addressing the issues on which Obama has proposed executive orders. Instead they talk about trying to tie anti-immigration provisions onto "must pass" legislation, potentially triggering a government shut-down. A mature Congress would debate and legislate. We don't have a mature Congress.

From there, it's back to the slippery slope. A President, Douthat argues, could "rewrite" vast areas of public policy through executive order. Again, Douthat ignores the fact that executive orders must be consistent with the law, and thus that Congress has an easy and obvious remedy to overreach -- namely, doing its job. Douthat adds one of his near-inevitable whinges about how Democrats are supposedly hypocritical,

No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates.

Perhaps Douthat spent years complaining about executive overreach by Bush and Cheney; I can't say that I've followed him closely enough to know, and can say that I don't care enough about his past writings to try to find out. I could point out the obvious, that executive orders are not the same thing as signing statements. A signing statement declares, in effect, "I don't think that this law (or some provision of this law) is constitutional, so I won't be bound by it". Congress can't do much about a signing statement -- it has already legislated on the issue, so passing another bill saying "We really mean it" isn't going to have an impact.

As Douthat should know, an executive order must be consistent with federal law. With an executive order, Congress is free to express its will, and nothing is stopping Congress from passing an immigration law addressing these issues. A better analogy would be to the objections raised to the stack of executive orders that George W. Bush signed on his way out of the White House, but perhaps Douthat doesn't know that history -- or perhaps he doesn't want to allude to facts that betray how pathetic his argument truly is.

It's also interesting that Douthat floats from accusing "liberals" of being hypocrites to relying on a poll that documents that most Democrats oppose unilateral action.

According to the latest IBD/TIPP poll, 73% of the public say Obama should work with Congress on reforms. Just 22% say he should "sidestep Congress and act on his own using executive orders" — something the president has repeatedly pledged to do.

Among independents, 78% say Obama should work with Congress, with only 19% saying he should go it alone. Even among Democrats, only 39% say Obama should act unilaterally, while 54% say he should work with Congress.

Were Douthat more interested in facts and less interested in attacking "liberals" and the President, he might concede that the President's willingness to act by executive action flows from his own party's refusal to legislate on a wide range of important issues, including immigration. He could even call on his party to preempt the President or to make immigration reform a priority in January. Odds are it will take a year from the time any executive order is finalized to when agencies have new regulations and procedures in place to carry out the new policy -- Douthat should note that if the Republicans who will be in control of both chambers of Congress choose not to pass an immigration law during that year, they have nobody to blame but themselves. If they pass a clean bill and it is vetoed by the President, they will be in a strong position to complain -- but they have no apparent intention of being that responsible.

Douthat next resorts to the notion that the midterm election stands as some sort of informal referendum on the President's agenda, I guess signifying that he's supposed to abandon his agenda in favor of whatever the Republicans want. By now, Douthat should be aware that his depiction of a midterm election as a plebiscite is not, in fact, its role, nor is it how legislators treat the outcome of an election. What the election does do, however, is give the Republican Party control in both chambers of Congress, and tremendous latitude to pass an immigration reform bill of their own design come January 1 -- or, if the House Republicans choose to do so, even during the lame duck session.

Douthat follows up by describing his column as "shrill-but-accurae", which shows, I guess, that he can be half-right. After reiterating his position that the number of people who might benefit from the executive orders is larger that with similar prior actions, percentages apparently being beside the point, Douthat expresses the belief that President Obama hopes that his executive orders create "facts on the ground" that a future President won't easily be able to reverse. Wow, now that's the sort of brilliant insight that makes clear why he got his NYTimes gig. Next column, "I just looked in a mirror and realized that there's a nose on my face."

Douthat believes that the executive orders might not be reversed because a "moral obligation" could arise; it's not clear why Douthat believes that such a "moral obligation" would sway a Republican president or legislators. He argues that the "moral obligation" would result in "a form of political pressure", with its supposedly being harder for government "to retract a benefit than to grant it in the first place". Again, no explanation as to why he believes the Republicans -- their party being dedicated to rolling back Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other aspects of the social safety net -- would not give it a college try. Oh, but then he gets to the real issue -- that we're talking about "a Republican establishment that’s fearful of doing anything to alienate Latinos in a presidential year".

A reasonable interpretation of that last point is that the rest is window dressing. Douthat knows that the problem is not so much an issue of executive overreach as it is an example of Republican Party dysfunction. The faction that wants to pass immigration reform can't get a bill past the party's anti-immigration factions, but if you have some form of immigration reform in place the party as a whole won't want to touch the issue for fear of alienating an important voter bloc.

[Recognition of Republican reluctance to alienate Latino voters] is, of course, part of the political calculation here … that claiming more presidential authority won’t just accomplish a basic liberal policy goal, but could also effectively widen the G.O.P.’s internal fissures on immigration, exploiting the divergence of interests between the congressional party and its would-be presidential nominees.)

It's not the President's fault that Douthat's party is dysfunctional on this issue. It's the fault of its elected representatives.

Douthat makes a rather incredible statement,

Then finally, even setting all of the foregoing aside, even allowing that this move could be theoretically reversed, pointing to the potential actions of the next president is still a very strange way to rebut complaints about executive overreach.

It's as if Douthat has never before heard of an executive order. Could he be so ignorant of the U.S. system that he's unaware of the thousands upon thousands of executive orders that have been signed by past administrations, or that there's absolutely nothing unique or special about how Congress or a future President would respond to Obama's proposed administrations as compared to any other executive order?

And this....

But that reality doesn’t really tell us much of anything about whether a particular moves claims too much power for the executive branch itself. Even in the fairly unlikely event that Chris Christie or Marco Rubio cancels an Obama amnesty, that is, the power itself will still have been claimed and exercised, the line rubbed out and crossed; the move will still exist as a precedent, a model, a case study in how a president can push the envelope when Congress doesn’t act as he deems fit.

Given his prior concessions, Douthat knows that's a specious argument. When you're talking about actions that literally track the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, you're not talking about a new line being set. Perhaps Douthat means to indict Reagan and Bush for moving the line that Obama is treating as a fair limit? No, of course not. We're dealing with a standard Republican argument that boils down to, "Whatever may have happened under a past Republican president, it's different when a Democrat does it."

Douthat could have offered a reasoned explanation for why immigration reform is a bad idea, or why his political party is correct to oppose it. He could have offered a balanced argument -- yes, it follows precedent; yes, it follows Republican precedent; yes, it flows from Republican obstruction in Congress; but it's still a bad way to implement policy. He could have implored his party to finally pass an immigration reform bill and render the issue moot. But any of that would be far too surprising. Instead, predictably, Douthat makes what is at its heart an appeal to fear, built on the weak foundation of the slippery slope.

Me? As this whole issue could be preempted if Congress simply does its job, I call on Congress to do its job. If Congress can't do that much, even as Douthat bleats about executive overreach, presidents will be effectively forced to rely on executive orders to circumvent Congressional gridlock. That's bad for the country, but in most cases it will likely be worse for nothing to get done.

George Will's Odd Argument for Congressional Term Limits

Although I understand the sentiment behind term limits, dissatisfaction with career legislators, a "throw the bums out" attitude, and the like, I have not been particularly impressed with the reality that they create. Specifically, rather than having perhaps a few too many career legislators we seem to end up with far too many neophytes, many of whom fully intend to have long political careers by transitioning from one office to another as they're term limited out. It also seems that the point at which many legislators are term limited out of office roughly corresponds to the point at which they finally have enough experience and seniority to actually do their jobs effectively.

George Will wrote an editorial in favor of congressional term limits, based principally upon his personal dislike of Democratic Presidents Congress's failure to assume its role in a decision to take the nation to war. Will tells us,

The president should present to Congress the case for war. The House, structurally the government’s most democratic institution (short terms, small constituencies), should express itself. The Senate, whose powers (to approve treaties and confirm ambassadors) give it special pertinence to foreign policy, and whose structure (six-year terms) is supposed to encourage sober deliberation, should speak. Then the president, through relevant civilian and military officials, executes the approved policy.

Okay, fair enough. But despite being in near-constant military conflicts since WWII, we have not had a declared war since that time. So, what gives?

What has actually transpired since Barack Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation has been, Corbin and Parks argue, “a parody” of propriety. In his address about the Islamic State (which did not mention Khorasan, the asserted imminent threat that supposedly justified acting without Congress), Obama spoke to the public, not to the public’s institutional embodiment, Congress, whose support he said would be “welcome,” implying that it is unnecessary. Next, the administration argued with itself about what it was that Obama was going to do without congressional approval. (This was before his press secretary identified it as war.) Then the House tacked onto a spending bill its approval of arming certain Syrians (the “vetted” moderates?) and dispersed. The Senate, having added its approval without discernible deliberation, also skedaddled.

So, pretty much what we have seen in every armed conflict since WWII, except the President happens to be a Democrat?

I've commented before on this particular failure of Congress -- and make no mistake, it is a failure of Congress. The fact is, Congress does not want to have any responsibility for the entry into our outcome of armed conflicts, and thus does its best to wash its hands of the issue. The net effect is that they delegate war-making power to the executive. Will is correct in his inference that only one branch of government can correct the imbalance that this delegation creates -- Congress, the very branch that doesn't want that responsibility.

I can't help but think of Jack Kingston's admission, some months back, in relation to Syria and ISIS:

”A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. ”It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”

For the House of Representatives, every other year is an election year -- but truly, they never go out of election mode. Kingston correctly identifies the strategy of the opposition party -- do everything it can to avoid having any responsibility for military action, and criticize the President no matter what happens. A president's own party, though, doesn't want responsibility either, so the biggest difference is that by avoiding authorizing military action they can avoid taking responsibility for the outcome, but with less finger-pointing at the President.

Will cites a professor from a small Catholic college, who argues that Members of Congress are seeking office "for something other than the power, for power is something with which they are not merely willing but often eager to part." I think that's incorrect. I think that Members of Congress want power without responsibility, and that there remains plenty of power within the halls of Congress but that when they are looking at a context in which they may have to face voters over a bad outcome they are happy to let somebody else make the decision and take the heat. Congress as middle management. While Will seems to endorse the professor's theory, "[Congress] has an ever-higher portion of people who are eager to make increasingly strenuous exertions to hold offices that are decreasingly consequential", I have little sense that the power of Congress has in fact lessened.

The professor believes that long-term politicians who should be "more competent [and] confident" aren't standing up to the President, apparently because "something has gone wrong with Federalist 51’s assumption that members of Congress seek office for power and not perquisites", and that the solution would be term limits:

[']Members of Congress who serve for brief periods will have . . . every political reason for taking up the power available to them while they can. . . . Members so situated will be likelier to defend their branch as a branch.”

Except perhaps those new, less confident, less competent legislators will in fact be more likely to defer to the executive. And perhaps those neophyte legislators, looking at a short term of office, will be more interested in perquisites, more interested in moving onto their next jobs, than they are with legislating or standing up to the White House. What is the incentive for a Member of Congress, being term limited out of office, to take a strong stand? Congress is to soar on the wings of lame duck legislators?

erm limits are Madisonian measures, altering the incentives — the “interests” or “personal motives” — for entering and using public office. Term limits can define a conservative agenda of taming executive power by enhancing the power of Congress.

To me it seems more likely that term limits would weaken Congress in favor of the executive, and potentially make Congress even less functional. But even if I presuppose that Will is correct, I can't help but think of how recently the "conservative agenda" involved expanding executive power through the theory of the unitary executive. As Will himself once put it,

Because contemporary conservatism was born partly in reaction to two liberal presidents -- against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- conservatives, who used to fear concentrations of unchecked power, valued Congress as a bridle on strong chief executives. But, disoriented by their reverence for Reagan and sedated by Republican victories in seven of the past 10 presidential elections, many conservatives have not just become comfortable with the idea of a strong president, they have embraced the theory of the "unitary executive."

This theory, refined during the Reagan administration, is that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president, as chief executive, is rightfully immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy. Judicial abridgements are another matter. When in 1952 Truman, to forestall a strike, cited his "inherent" presidential powers during wartime to seize the steel mills, the Supreme Court rebuked him. In a letter here that he evidently never sent to Justice William Douglas, Truman said, "I don't see how a Court made up of so-called 'liberals' could do what that Court did to me." Attention, conservatives: Truman correctly identified a grandiose presidency with the theory and practice of liberalism.

You'll notice an inherent inconsistency to Will's thinking -- he argues that Truman, who was not a particularly liberal President, was rebuked by the Supreme court when attempting to seize control of steel mills, rendering the expansive view of executive power relatively inert until it was revived by Reagan and kicked into overdrive by George W. Bush -- and thus it's a liberal theory. Will can call it what he chooses, but to the extent that he believes that modern conservatives eschew the unitary executive in favor of a weak President, it would be because he sees in them a reflection of his own thinking -- that it's absolutely horrible that the President continues to have power when he's a Democrat -- and he can expect their concerns about executive power, like his own, to face the moment a Republican takes office.

Dennis Ross: A "No" Vote on Syria Makes a Military Strike on Iran Both Less Likely and Almost Inevitable

Dennis Ross, the man who helped engineer the catastrophic failure of President Clinton's last ditch efforts to secure an Israel-Palestine peace deal, was given space in the Washington Post to bring the same special brand of help to the crisis in Syria. His central thesis is that if Congress blocks the President from bombing Syria, it becomes more likely that military action will be taken against Iran. He thus urges Congress to abandon its concerns over whether the bombing would accomplish anything constructive, whether it would suck the U.S. into a protracted conflict, or consider the extent to which U.S. interests are implicated by events in Syria, and authorize military action.

After telling Congress to ignore the slippery slope argument, in which military action in Syria "suck[s] us into a conflict that we cannot win", Ross offers a slippery slope of his own:

President Obama and Secretary Kerry have pointed out that there will be a great cost to international norms that prohibit the use of terror weapons such as chemical weapons. And surely they are right that if Bashar al-Assad can gas his own people and elicit only harsh words but no punitive action, he will use the weapons again. The price in Syria and the potential for spillover in the region are certain to be high. Additionally, other rogue actors may also draw the conclusion that chemical weapons are not only usable but that there are no circumstances, no outrages, no genocidal actions that would trigger a meaningful reaction from the so-called civilized world.

I think that's utter nonsense. First, in relation to Syria, Assad has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons, and the few nations that back him are hanging their hats on that denial. If Assad were to now announce, "Hah! Now that Congress has voted, I admit it - it was me!", it would be extremely difficult for him to avoid a Security Council resolution authorizing use of force. Putin may be a stubborn man, but after making repeated denials about Assad's involvement in the attack, it is difficult to believe he would have much interest in protecting Assad by vetoing the resolution. Second, were Assad to engage in additional attacks, any plausible deniability that remains from the prior incident would evaporate. It is difficult to believe that Congress would vote against military action, and even more difficult to believe that the President would sit and wait for approval from Congress if he believed it would not be immediately forthcoming. I don't think Ross believes what he suggests.

Second, in relation to the rest of the world, Ross is pushing the nonsensical idea that despots are eager to use chemical weapons against their own populations, but are held back by fear of military reprisal by the world's powers. With a whopping two significant uses of chemical weapons since World War II, the first (and more significant) use being the repeated use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and the second being this attack by Assad, it's difficult to see why Ross would imagine that despots are in fear of reprisal. If Syria is not attacked, that would be in keeping with the precedent seen in Iraq. Also, if despots are so eager to use chemical weapons, why weren't they emboldened by Hussein's use of those weapons? Perhaps Ross seriously believes that despots around the world would respond to a military strike by thinking, "Dang, just as I was about to add chemical weapons to my use of torture, imprisonment without trial, summary execution, military strikes, collective punishments, internment camps, starvation, and occasional genocide, the world has made clear that I can't use them. Now I have no choice but to stick with my tried and true methods of perpetuating my regime," but again I doubt that he believes a word of what he said.

After mocking those who emphasize that military strikes should be used only against "threats that are immediate and directly affect us" as regarding other concerns as "abstractions", Ross introduces his argument about Iran:

Leaving aside the argument that when the threats become immediate, we will be far more likely to have to use our military in a bigger way and under worse conditions, there is another argument to consider: should opponents block authorization and should the president then feel he cannot employ military strikes against Syria, this will almost certainly guarantee that there will be no diplomatic outcome to our conflict with Iran over its nuclear weapons.

Note his use of language: "...over its nuclear weapons." Iran has no nuclear weapons.

I say this for two reasons. First, Iran’s President Rouhani, who continues to send signals that he wants to make a deal on the nuclear program, will inevitably be weakened once it becomes clear that the U.S. cannot use force against Syria. At that point, paradoxically, the hard-liners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and around the Supreme Leader will be able to claim that there is only an economic cost to pursuing nuclear weapons but no military danger. Their argument will be: Once Iran has nuclear weapons, it will build its leverage in the region; its deterrent will be enhanced; and, most importantly, the rest of the world will see that sanctions have failed, and that it is time to come to terms with Iran.

First, President Rouhani has been in office for what? A month ago? Yet we are to believe that it is his voice of reason that keeps Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Does Ross want us to believe, then, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged similar restraint and that it was his calming influence that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons during his eight years in office? That Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is going to suddenly declare, "I know I've been arguing for years that nuclear weapons are a sin, are forbidden in Islam, and should be eliminated from the planet, but I've changed my mind!"

Ross then argues, without explanation, that "Under those circumstances, the sanctions will wither". Why would he believe that? I don't think he does believe that and, once again, he feels no need to substantiate the claim. He instead insists that if the U.S. is blocked from using force in Syria, a different country involving different facts and different weapons, Iran will decide it will never be attacked and acquire nuclear weapons. He then contradicts himself,

Israel, however, is not prepared to accept such an eventuality, and that is the second reason that not authorizing strikes against Syria will likely result in the use of force against Iran. Indeed, Israel will feel that it has no reason to wait, no reason to give diplomacy a chance and no reason to believe that the United States will take care of the problem.

As should be needless to say, if a military strike becomes more likely if the U.S. votes "no" on striking Syria, the government of Iran is not going to conclude that it is not going to be attacked and forge ahead, full speed, with its nuclear weapons program.

Does Ross believe that Iran has never heard of Israel? That Iran is unaware of Israel's military power? That Iran is unaware of Israel's position on other nations developing nuclear weapons? That it somehow passed beneath Iran's notice that Israel has launched military strikes against nuclear facilities in both Iraq and Syria when it decided those nations were too close to developing nuclear weapons? Apparently so, given his expressed certitude on how Iran would react to a "no" vote in Congress on the use of force in Syria.

Ross makes a cryptic statement,

Ironically, if these opponent [sic] succeed, they may prevent a conflict that President Obama has been determined to keep limited and has the means to do so.

Is Ross speaking about Congressional opponents of a military strike - those are the only people otherwise described in Ross's editorial as "opponents"? If so, and their "no" vote prevents a conflict that the President is trying to limit, wouldn't that be a good thing? Or is it that Ross thinks the President is wrong to want to keep that conflict limited? Based upon his next statement,

After all, even after Israel acted militarily to enforce its red line and prevent Syria’s transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad, Iran and Hezbollah have been careful to avoid responding. They have little interest in provoking Israeli attacks that would weaken Syrian forces and make them vulnerable to the opposition.

Perhaps Ross means to suggest that if no strike is made against Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah will continue to show restraint rather than trying to widen the conflict? Does Ross believe that those factions would respond to a U.S. strike by engaging in acts that would invite a massive U.S. or Israeli military response? If Ross seriously believes that Hamas and Hezbollah will launch attacks in Lebanon, Israel and perhaps around the world in response to a strike on Assad, isn't that a solid argument for restraint? Ross undermines any such suggestion, admitting, "the Syrian and Iranian interest in an escalation with the United States is also limited". He continues,

Can the same be said if Israel feels that it has no choice but to attack the Iranian nuclear infrastructure? Maybe the Iranians will seek to keep that conflict limited; maybe they won’t. Maybe an Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program will not inevitably involve the United States, but maybe it will — and maybe it should.

Maybe Ross will attempt to do more than toss out mutually inconsistent alternative scenarios about what the future might hold; maybe he won't. Maybe Ross will provide a coherent, logical argument; maybe he won't - but maybe he should.

To summarize... If the U.S. doesn't strike Syria, Iran will conclude that the U.S. won't strike it's nuclear facilities, demolishing the credibility of the new Iranian president who has spent a full month advocating a diplomatic resolution of the controversy over its nuclear program, and inspiring Iran's Supreme Leader to abandon his stated views on Islamic law and seek to immediately acquire nuclear weapons. This will happen even though Israel, a nation with a decades-long history of using espionage and military strikes (and is rumored to have used assassinations) to stop other nations in the region from developing nuclear weapons, will almost certainly strike Iran's nuclear facilities if it senses that Iran has not abandoned its nuclear weapons program. This will result in a regional conflict that may or may not involve the United States, but that Ross apparently believes should involve the United States.

And this argument is supposed to... convince Members of Congress to support a strike?

Just Add the Word "Republican"...

Daniel Larison is not impressed with Michael Gerson's argument on why Congress needs to authorize force in Syria:

Insofar as the ability of future presidents to wage wars of choice on their own authority would be limited or even slightly constrained by a no vote from Congress, that would be a welcome and very desirable outcome. Gerson is drawing attention to one of the possible benefits of the resolution’s defeat. Even so, the president would retain enormous latitude in the conduct of foreign policy, and he would he hardly have his “hands tied behind his back.” It is laughably false to claim that the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy or his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces would be seriously impaired, and it could hardly be dangerous for the powers of the presidency to be restrained after growing virtually unchecked over the last forty years.

Gerson’s argument is an attempt to blackmail members of Congress by claiming that they will inflict massive institutional damage simply by carrying out their own constitutional responsibilities and by reaching a conclusion different from the one Gerson wants. It is a fairly desperate move, and it is the sort of argument that should make more members of Congress recoil from what they are being asked to support. Gerson is horrified that Congress might actually vote down unnecessary and deeply unpopular military action, which speaks volumes about his priorities. Americans should not be afraid to let their representatives do the work they were elected to do by speaking and voting on behalf of their constituents. In this case, that obviously means voting down the resolution, and that is what I hope most members will do when it comes up for a vote later this month.

As happens all too ofter, Gerson's editorial is risible from top to bottom,

Obama is inviting members of Congress to share responsibility for a Syrian policy that has achieved little to justify their confidence. In fact, he has undermined political support for the legislative outcome he seeks. For more than five years, Obama has argued that America is overcommitted in the Middle East and should refocus on domestic priorities. Now he asks other politicians to incur risks by endorsing an approach he has clearly resisted at every stage.

Gerson would apparently have us believe that the President has spent five years resisting Republican calls for additional military intervention in the middle east, and has reached the point where he has actually convinced the Republicans in Congress that "America is overcommitted in the Middle East and should refocus on domestic priorities". Oh, their poor heads must be spinning, having spent five years giving the President a fair, deferential hearing and now, just when they had decided that there was no situation grave enough to justify additional military action in the Middle East, being told that there actually are situations in which the President believes that military intervention is appropriate.

Obama attempts to rally the nation around a reluctant exception to his ambivalence. And this exception — a calibrated punishment for the use of chemical weapons — seems more of a gesture than a strategy.

Gerson proposes instead, what... the George Mallory philosophy of military intervention?¹

Gerson does not want the President to have completely unlimited discretion to attack any nation in the world without the consent of Congress:

This does not, of course, amount to blanket permission for self-destructive military actions such as attacking China or surrendering to Monaco.

But, you know, short of that.... As long as it's some other nation that is being destroyed, Gerson's "compassionate Christian" perspective seems to be, "Go for it!"

Nations such as China, Russia and Iran would see this as the triumph of a political coalition between the peace party of the left and the rising isolationists of the right. And they would be correct.

They would be correct because... they're stupid?

Larison suggests, "There is no way to know what long-term effect the defeat of the Syria resolution might have on the actions of future presidents, and it is even less certain how other governments would interpret a Congressional rejection of the resolution", and that's true to a point, but history suggests an answer: The next President will not feel bound to follow the policies or priorities of the current administration, and foreign nations understand the difference between a nation led by Ronald Reagan vs. George H.W. Bush vs. George W. Bush vs. Barack Obama.

One might anticipate that foreign leaders will look at the past five years of Congressional obstructionism, and then look at the fact that it was the Republicans who were blocking military action, and conclude, "More than a half-century after the start of the Vietnam war, hacks like Gerson still believe they can sell the Democrats as a 'party of peace'? And given that same history, that 'isolationists of the right' will have any influence the day after the next Republican President takes office? Seriously?"

And those who claim that this credibility has already reached bottom are lacking in imagination.

I suspect that most of those who read Gerson know that the President and Congress have a long way to go before reaching bottom.

Try reading Gerson this way:

[Repubican] Legislators are not arguing between preferred policy options, as they would on issues such as health care or welfare. They are deciding if they will send the [next Republican] chief executive into the world with his hands tied behind his back.

As in, the next President might feel compelled to consult Congress before acting, the Democrats might feel free to vote against military adventurism, and war opponents would be able to point to any number of comments made by Republicans in the present debate that suggest naked, partisan hypocrisy. Gerson's mistake,² of course, is assuming that the next President is going to care.

Really, the best argument Gerson can make for a military assault on Syria is that if Congress evaluates the situation and finds an attack to be inappropriate, future Presidents might hesitate before launching wars of choice, and the world will scoff, "The United States isn't going to attack us unless they have a UN mandate, a NATO mandate, a Congressional mandate... or the President feels like it"? The horror!
---------------
1. "Why do you want to attack another country in the Middle East, Mr. President?" "Because it's there."

2. Or should I say, one of them.

When the Business Community Wants Something Done....

Congress jumps.

Gridlock, partisanship... it all melts away.

12/17/2012 - Introduced in House
12/18/2012 - Passed/agreed to in House: On motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill Agreed to by voice vote.
12/20/2012 - Passed/agreed to in Senate: Passed Senate without amendment by Unanimous Consent.

(Be careful with your privacy settings on Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and the like, lest your video viewing habits be shared with the world.)

David Brooks Rejects Moderation - Anything to Get a Tax Cut

David Brooks pens a predictably partisan "analysis" of how Mitt Romney would supposedly govern as a "center-right moderate". Not in the sense of Brooks' recent definition of "moderate", but in the sense of the guy who stakes out a position between two extremes and calls himself a "moderate".

Now let’s try to imagine the world if Mitt Romney were to win. Republicans would begin with the premise that the status quo is unsustainable. The mounting debt is ruinous. The byzantine tax and regulatory regimes are stifling innovation and growth.

Brooks told us that a moderate is informed not by politics or philosophy, but by history. What does history tell us about Republicans and deficits? It tells us that they campaign against deficits and then, once elected, run up deficit spending to unprecedented heights. Brooks may want to believe that "this time will be different", but that can only be because his eyes are clouded by his own wishful thinking and political partisanship.

Brooks is also not being honest with his readers. He pretends, "", but he knows that's a lie. He knows that a lot of government regulation that stifles innovation was created and is maintained at the behest of businesses that don't want competition. He knows that the tax code is complex, byzantine, not because it's necessary to include that level of complexity, but because a simple tax code makes it difficult for large corporations and phenomenally wealthy individuals (such as Mitt Romney) to avoid taxes. Brooks knows that Romney made his fortune by exploiting tax loopholes, by larding up businesses with debt and deducting the interest

Dos Brooks truly believe that Romney is going to take away the loopholes that allowed him to get $100 million into his IRA? That he's going to do away with carried interest, the loophole that allowed him to have his massive income taxes as capital gains? That he's going to shut down the loopholes that make private equity funds so profitable? Not in this lifetime. You need only look at who is funding Romney's run for the White House to know that there's a zero percent chance he's going to do any of that.

Does Brooks believe that Romney is terrified of disclosing his tax returns because they'll disclose his scrupulous, honest nature, his self-sacrifice, his interest in closing tax loopholes? Only if he's on crack. Most likely, Romney is concealing the fact that he took advantage of the tax amnesty on dubious offshore bank accounts - an important tool in tax avoidance and one that Romney has made no mention of eliminating.

Which tax loopholes is Romney going to close? He refuses to specify - and of the ones he's mentioned in the abstract they all inure to the benefit of the middle class. Which government spending is Romney going to cut? He mentioned PBS - but history tells us that he won't cut PBS (even if such a cut mattered in the greater scheme of things). He has talked about cutting or privatizing FEMA. I suspect that, as I type, Brooks can look out of his window and get a sense of how likely that is to happen. Seriously.

What history indicates is that Romney will follow the path of George W. Bush. He ran on a promise to cut taxes, those who paid for his campaign are going to want him to deliver on those tax cuts, and he will do so without regard for the deficit or national debt. To the extent that people remind him of his pledge to cut spending to offset the tax cuts, history says he'll talk about growth and cuts to occur in the future - it's a ten year plan, remember? And history tells us that ten years later when, just as with G.W.'s tax cuts, the Romney plan turns out to be bunkum and to have put the nation into an even deeper fiscal hole, you can expect David Brooks to be telling us to vote for the next Republican because "he's going to govern from the center-right and this time he really will balance the budget."

Republicans would like to take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform.

You'll excuse me for asking, but how many Republican governors are there in the state of Indiana? Last I checked, Indiana followed the crazy model of only having one governor at a time. And what is the gist of Indiana's tax reform? To limit property taxes and overcome the loss of revenue by increasing the state sales tax? How in the world does Brooks propose to translate that type of reform to the federal government? Does Brooks even understand how taxes work? And other than jumping on the money-losing "drug testing for welfare recipients" bandwagon, what "structural entitlement reform" are we talking about?

I recognize that as a Republican partisan Brooks is happy to pretend that conclusory statements and platitudes constitute policy proposals, and is happy to suggest that "We'll balance the budget by doing things we're not going to tell you about" is an actual plan to balance the budget, but get real.

These reforms wouldn’t make government unrecognizable (we’d probably end up spending 21 percent of G.D.P. in Washington instead of about 24 percent), but they do represent a substantial shift to the right.

Recall how, when pressed for specifics about his tax reforms, he announced that his solution was to just "pick a number" - an entirely random number?

And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets -- I'll pick a number -- $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

That's not even close to serious. On top of that, Romney is promising massive increases in military spending. History tells us that when Republicans promise to cut taxes, they cut taxes. When they promise to increase spending, they increase spending. And when they promise to balance the budget... it never happens. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Romney will reduce government spending. He may shift it around, he may make life even easier and more lucrative for those at the top, but cut it? Sorry, David, those were numbers, not beams of sunshine, that Romney pulled out of his posterior.

At the same time, Romney would probably be faced with a Democratic Senate. He would also observe the core lesson of this campaign: conservatism loses; moderation wins.

But if Romney wins, that won't be the lesson of the campaign. The lesson will be that you can lie your way into the White House, all the while being enabled by columnists like David Brooks, because you promise an agenda that they like - one that keeps them and their peers, and the even richer elite they so admire, in their positions of wealth and privilege. You'll note that Brooks isn't pointing to anything Romney has said or done to paint his portrait of what's likely to happen, and he's intentionally ignoring history. Why? Because honesty loses elections, and Brooks wants Romney to win.

Only a few days ago Brooks was lecturing us that "Moderates start with a political vision" derived from history and "is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there". Yet now we're suddenly to regard as "moderate" a "center-right" Mitt Romney who gets legislation through the Senate by staking out a position between the Republicans in the House and the Democrats in the Senate and asking, "Is this a good enough way to split the baby?"

This is funny, as well - and false:

Romney’s prospects began to look decent only when he shifted to the center.

This election has been close from the outset. While Romney did dip in the polls after the Republican National Convention, his subsequent "bounce" has been much more a return to the baseline than anything else. And yes, his latest reinvention of what he believes and what he stands for seems to have helped him move back to the status quo ante, I think it's much more fair to say that his demagoguery, his race-baiting surrogates like John Sununu, and his exploitation of the financial crisis and mendacity about the recovery have helped him build what is in no small part an anti-Obama vote. He can't win as Mitt Romney, so he's running as "But I'm not Barack Obama". To the extent that people believe Romney stands for something, it's wishful thinking - "For no good reason, I'm sure Romney agrees with me on issue X, and that the dozens of other positions he's taken on the subject were all self-serving lies." A Romney victory would be a sad indictment of our political system, and frankly also of how it is covered by people like David Brooks.

A President Romney would look at the way Tea Party extremism had cost the G.O.P. Senate seats in Delaware and Nevada — and possibly Missouri and Indiana.

Even before his latest reinvention of himself, candidate Romney was aware of the dangers of being too closely identified with the Tea Party movement. But again, Brooks is forgetting his history. The Tea Party movement isn't a new thing - on the whole it's little more than a new name for a faction of the Republican Party that has been around for decades. Republican presidents have a long history of making broad promises to that faction, while being pretty modest about advancing that type of ideology when in office. Why? Because, as Brooks knows, the presidency is a national office. While Romney may represent a new extreme in how far a party nominee may go in pandering to an extremist element when seeking the nomination, then adopting a contradictory agenda when running for office, the rest is par for the course.

Brooks fails to mention that the danger the Tea Party poses to the Republican Party comes not at the level of the White House, but at the level of the primary. In states that have a significant Tea Party movement, candidates like Rick Santorum seem viable. Even long-term senators like John McCain start trembling in their shoes at the thought of a Tea Party-driven primary challenge. An honest Brooks would acknowledge that the newly center-right Romney may well be able to peel off some Democrats to support his agenda, but if he strays too far from the Tea Party line he's apt to lose as many Republicans, perhaps more. That could be paralyzing for any "moderate" or "centrist" agenda.

You know what else? Whether they win or lose in certain state races, the Tea Party has never been closer to having its agenda implemented by the Republican Party. There's no reason to believe they're going to back off.

To get re-elected in a country with a rising minority population and a shrinking Republican coalition, Romney’s shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate.

"Romney’s shape-shifting nature".... What a description. It's the description of a man with no core, a man with no backbone, and yet Brooks seems excited at the prospect of his becoming President. Let's take another look at history, shall we? Twelve years ago we had a Republican President who was going to usher in immigration law reform - he saw the handwriting on the wall, and was going to build ties with the Latino community.

We had a prominent Senator who also favored immigration reform and championed the DREAM Act - one John McCain. Let's recall, shall we, how much the President accomplished toward immigration reform.... He made immigration more difficult. And what of that Senator? Eight years later he was running against the immigration policies he once championed, and as time has progressed he has moved further and further away from his former positions. He also used to champion campaign finance reform... fat chance that he or President Romney are going to get behind that idea.

Seriously, it's safe to say that a man like Romney - a man who appears to care for absolutely nothing but advancing his own interests - will govern in a manner he believes is likely to result in his being reelected. But history is instructive, and there's far less reason to believe that Romney wants immigration reform as compared to Bush, and there's no reason to believe that Romney will succeed where Bush failed. Beyond that, what does Brooks imagine Romney will do to appeal to "a country with a rising minority population"? Apologize for all of the race-baiting he and his surrogates have engaged in during his campaign?

To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises.

Brooks is, in essence, repeating himself. And we're back to this notion that the Republican Party is going to break with history and suddenly prioritize balancing the budget over cutting taxes for the rich. I mentioned the head count in my last post, 236 out of 242 Republican Members of Congress, and 40 out of 47 Republican Senators, have signed Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. The numbers may change slightly after the next election, but not significantly. Also, there is no reason to believe that Romney is going to decide that the best way to win reelection is to tell his largest donors, "You know what? Obama was right about taxes as well." Some degree of compromise may be required for him to get his tax cuts through a Democratic controlled Senate, but he will make it a priority to keep of that promise to his donors (and, frankly, to himself).

As for "the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget", Romney has already abandoned them. When it comes to how he'll balance the budget, he won't get more specific than cutting PBS. Romney and Ryan are both cowards - they have both failed to explain who would feel the bite from their proposed cuts. And while Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program, and Romney proposes to push forward with that idea, the cowards have pushed the implementation of that reform so far into the future that they'll be long out of office before anything changes. They are not serious about balancing the budget and as much as Brooks attempts to fool himself - or is it only others that he's trying to fool - they will not hesitate to run up the deficit and the national debt. And when they do so, they'll claim "It's all Obama's fault."

You gotta love this:

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform.

All of four days ago, Brooks was telling us about the difference between being "moderate" and being "bipartisan", in that column and at the start of this one Brooks told us that Romney's latest reinvention of himself involved advancing a "moderate and sensible agenda", and yet here he is, admitting that his favorite spineless pretzel of a politician is not advancing "moderation", but is embracing the shallowest form of "bipartisanship", "finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting [him]self there".

Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama.

Yes, Brooks sees that as a good thing - a basis for endorsement. "You can't trust a word out of his mouth and you'll never know what he stands for (other than himself), so vote Romney."

He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans.

You'll excuse me for asking, but what evidence can Brooks offer that Romney will have any influence over House Republicans?

He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

If by "big stuff" you mean "tax cuts for the rich", yep. If you mean addressing any of the nation's most serious problems, Romney is expressly campaigning on a platform of leaving the hard stuff for the next guy - even if he serves a full eight years. He'll start the country on the path to have the budget balanced... in ten years. He'll start the process of privatizing and voucherizing Medicare and the first people who get vouchers instead of insurance will receive them... in ten years.

Romney is a coward, and he'll govern as a coward. If that makes Brooks comfortable, I am hard pressed on that evidence to believe that Brooks cares about anything other than getting a tax cut.

A Lethal President?

Same as it ever was.

It's not that I don't appreciate the concerns raised by those who question the targeting of a secret list of enemies of the state, whether by drone or by commando raid. Those concerns are for the most part well-founded, and the issues will only become more pressing.

Drone technology will continue to advance. It's easy to imagine a future in which drones the size of birds or insects can be used to strike somebody who has been declared an enemy of the United States, with minimal chance of damage to anything or anyone beyond the target. But such an advancement would not resolve the question of who should be placed on a "kill list" or why, what due process should be available to a targeted individual, or how accurately the government determines who should be on the list. Similarly, the U.S. military is likely to increasingly rely upon special forces, and small, targeted raids, rather than full-scale land invasions.

As these trends continue, some questions wil become more pressing. Will improved drone technologies inspire a rapid escalation of the use of drones and the circumstances under which they're deemed appropriate? As drones continue to take the place of boots on the ground, will the temptation be to rely upon drones to kill people who could or should have been taken prisoner? Will the margins blur in relation to who is an appropriate target - terrorists and their sympathizers vs. the political leaders of rogue or enemy states? And as drone use is legitimized and expanded, what happens when other nations inevitably gain similar technology and start applying it to contexts that they deem equivalent to ours?

History implicates all of those questions, and then some, in relation to pretty much any protracted conventional or asymmetrical conflict, anywhere in the world. When under threat, developed nations with well-educated populations tend to tolerate, accept, even applaud the use of tactics that they once deplored - and perhaps continue to deplore when exercised by other nations. Indefinite detention without trial? Torture? Dismissing the Geneva Conventions as outdated relics? The Bush Administration's decisions on those issues were in many ways regrettable, but the U.S. was far from the first nation to rationalize that actions we used to describe as crimes and human rights violations were necessary to achieve the greater good.

Cato Institute Policy Scholar Jason Kuznicki's reaction to "kill lists" and drone strikes is about as strident as you'll find. He points out that the President's "kill list" can include U.S. citizens, even minors, "including within the United States. Including children sleeping peacefully in their homes."

If Obama wanted to, he could put all of Mitt Romney’s delightful, gingham-clad grandkids on the kill list, then send commandos to kill them (or drones, it hardly matters). He wouldn’t need to show any cause, and no one could stop him or tell him otherwise.

Do not say that he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. The problem is that someone else might. And that’s enough.

Kuznicki declares,

Yet the very act of claiming the power also calls into question anyone’s good judgment. How exactly does someone conclude that he, personally, deserves the unchecked power of life and death? I couldn’t. I would be ashamed to show my face in front of you or to call you my equals. I might be a god or a beast, but not a man in a society.

I'm not going to argue that it's a job I would want. It isn't. But although the mechanism has changed, what Kuznicki is describing has been part of the President's job from day one. Every armed conflict, domestic or abroad, involved strategic decisions that may prioritize destroying a block of buildings or even a town or urban area in order to harm the enemy's ability to produce weapons, mobilize, feed its troops, or may even be justified by the belief that a "high-value" individual is in the targeted area. You want to talk about the deaths of children sleeping in their beds? There's a reason that allied commanders were concerned that fire bombing raids in Germany and Japan might be deemed war crimes.

We are presented with a modern myth of surgical warfare, collateral damage is minimized, civilians aren't harmed, our soldiers are less likely to be killed. There's a disturbing sequence in the movie, Waltz With Bashir, in which a series of efforts to target militants result in the deaths of civilians, presented in the manner of a comedy montage. The film also highlights how a thin veneer of rationalization can help somebody who might otherwise be wracked with guilt decide that his role in an atrocity was marginal or excusable. I'm not trying to argue that an individual citizen or soldier will change the course of history by speaking up, but it's much easier to disregard our role if we think of ourselves as noble heroes, at least trying to do good and minimize harm, offloading responsibility for collateral damage or atrocity onto local forces or our enemies.

Kuznicki knows our nation's history, so he knows we have a long history of legal presidents and generals, deciding from a distant war room what military measures to take, estimating losses to their forces, our forces and civilians, drawing up lists of individuals who should be captured or killed, dispatching special forces and snipers to capture or kill specific individuals. He knows that the Constitution was drafted with that lethality in mind - the Constitution's suspicion of standing armies, preservation and reliance upon state militias, placing a civilian President in charge of the military, and attempting to create a system of checks and balances to rein in excess. Yet Kuznicki writes of the President,

We know that no one gets to review his decision. Ever. The ones who might do it have all abdicated the responsibility.

Kuznicki, in essence, declares that he is never again going to vote for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the presidency because Congress and the courts aren't doing their jobs. Frankly, I would view skeptically even the most sincere promise of a third party candidate to change the practice if elected, not only because presidents tend to accept any expanded powers achieved by their predecessors, but also because he'll have to directly face and address the consequences of a policy change.

I don't want to overstate the role of the courts, as Congress hasn't provided either the courts or prospective litigants with much of a framework for these issues, but their overall history is to defer to the executive on issues of national security and to quietly regret any mistakes only in future decades. The branch of government that has been least willing to do its job in this context is Congress. You'll find Republicans like Darrell Issa angrily demagoguing about issues of embassy security, but when there's hard work to be done - when they are asked to take ownership of their own failings - you'll find excuses ("Our refusal to fund increased embassy security has nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't increased") or silence. You can get objections out of Republicans like Issa over drone and cruise missile strikes - if they produce favorable media coverage; "The President did that to distract you from domestic politics, wag the dog, wag the dog!" But that type of reaction is not a substantive objection - its a politically calculated claim that relates only to timing.

We don’t need an elected beast-god with a kill list. We need to end the system that proposes, every four years, to place one of our human equals into that role. A role any decent human would refuse. And this election just isn’t going to do it.

This election won't do it, the next one won't either, nor the next.... To prevent Presidents from having this power, we would need a constitutional amendment. And as long as Congress pretends that this is not an issue, and the general public reaction is to accept the notion of surgical strikes with no collateral damage (the key rationalization, if you're innocent you won't be near the target, right?), and the media at large treats the issue with a collective yawn, nothing will change.

In Esquire, addressing the fine line that can exist between targeted killings and murder, Tom Junod argues that, unlike his predecessors, President Obama "had to answer an additional question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and the piteous suffering of whole populations." But again, that's more a question of degree, and of technology, than it is of fact. Sure, Ronald Reagan had to launch a significant air raid on Libya to try to kill Gadhafi. George H.W. Bush had to indvade Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. Clinton, though, sent cruise missiles to try to kill Osama bin Laden.

One could argue based upon that history that the new way is better - that as technology has advanced, in many contexts we can avoid the type of massive collateral damage that results from a full-scale invasion, even if we won't have to subsequently occupy the nation whose leader we've toppled. It's possible to point to the history of "boots on the ground" in nations like Somalia, and argue that the President can get at least as much cooperation from local warlords by making them aware of the possibility of a targeted drone strike, without putting large numbers of soldiers into the nation at great expense and considerable risk to their lives.

One could reply that history doesn't yet demonstrate that those possibilities are now reality, but the come-back would presumably be that a failed intervention by drone will cost far less in terms of money and lives than the cost of a failed intervention by land. If the choice is to "try drones and special forces" or "do nothing", what does an advocate of "humanitarian intervention" do? If the choice is between attempting to achieve a surgical victory, even if the surgery will be a lot less precise than the government or media are likely to admit, and a massive on-the-ground assault, can we really presuppose that the latter will be less lethal to civilians, more precise, or more likely to bring about and sustain the outcome we want?

A rather compelling objection to targeted killings, particularly in the context of asymmetrical warfare or a distributed target organization, is that the strategy can degenerate into trying to fight a hydra - cut off one head and two grow back. There was a period under Bush during which it seemed like a month wouldn't go by without a successful strike taking out the #2 or #3 man in al Qaeda. Either the strikes were a lot less accurate than the Bush Administration let on (and in some cases we know that to be the case - with the targeted individual turning up alive at a different location) or the U.S. was encountering the same level of "success" as nations have traditionally achieved by capturing and killing "terrorist" leaders - they're pretty easily replaced, and sometimes "martyring" the leader helps with recruiting efforts. Also, while collateral damage may seem modest and acceptable to somebody sitting in the U.S., you can rest assured that the populations hit by those attacks don't share our detachment when it's their loved ones who are being killed.

If Kuznicki wants change, he has a decent platform from which to advance his opinions in the public sphere. Far better than most. But if he wants to influence a political actor, rather than refusing to vote for the President and implicitly urging others to follow, he should be attempting to turn up the heat on Congress.

Working With The Other Party is Only "Bipartisanship" When You Have a Choice

Jamelle Bouie takes a look at one of the themes of the Romney campaign, that he has "proved" himself capable of working in a bipartisan manner because he was a Republican governor working with a Democratically controlled legislature. While Bouie explores the fundamental dishonesty of using this theme to attack President Obama, there's something else that we should note:

It's not "bipartisan" to work with the other party when you have no choice. When a Democratic legislative majority passes a bill, the Republican governor who signs it cannot claim that in doing so he is "reaching across the aisle". The compromise of the governor's agenda is inevitable. The same is true when party control is flipped - Jennifer Granholm doesn't have a proud history of bipartisan accomplishment, but instead struggled for eight years to push back against a Republican-controlled legislature. It's what the people voted for, but I would not argue that the result was good for the state, nor would I accept a Romney-type argument that Granholm proved her ability to reach across the aisle merely by showing up for work and signing bills that were invariably passed by Republican majorities, no matter how many state Democrats also signed on.

It's difficult to address these issues without inviting a glib response, "You're right, I had to work with the other party, and I did, successfully, time and time again." But when you cannot pass a single piece of legislation without the support of a large number of legislatures from the other party, that is simply not evidence of how you would work in a polarized environment, where your party shares or holds control of the legislature.

Promising the Moon then Passing the Hard Work to Congress Isn't Leadership

A central theme of the Romney/Ryan campaign is that they don't have to be specific about the more difficult aspects of their otherwise pie-in-the-sky plans because they're simply going to delegate the task to Congress.

"Here's our specific proposal for a $4 - $5 trillion tax cut, inuring largely to the benefit of the wealthy. Now it's your job, Congress, to find the loopholes to close and deductions to eliminate to make our plan revenue-neutral.

I have forgotten. Which branch of government controls the purse strings again? Which branch of government is infamous for its pork and earmarks, for not wanting to cut anything that might alienate a constituent or wealthy donor? Which branch of government has two-faced "budget experts" who publicly decry stimulus spending while privately pleading for stimulus dollars to be sent to their districts? Which branch of government delegates its difficult budgetary tasks to committees and forces "up or down" votes on committee reports, because that allows its members to avoid taking personal responsibility for any resulting pain? (Give me a "C", give me an "O", give me a "N"....)

This would be the same Congress that created those deductions and loopholes? This would be the same Congress that passed, with "budget expert" Paul Ryan's support, authorization for two unfunded wars and the massive unfunded entitlement expansion, Medicare Part D? This would be the same Congress that has passed each and every budget that has added to our national debt? When he's not campaigning, and professing deep regret for his career of deficit-expanding votes, Paul Ryan is very much part of the problem.

If Romney and Ryan believe what they're saying, they're fools. But you know what? They're not fools. They're hoping that the rest of us are fools, and that a pliant media continues to go along with their game.

To be leaders in this context, Romney and Ryan don't have to take a "my way or the highway" approach. They simply need to put together a credible proposal and say, "If Congress can improve on this, that would be great, but as you can see this really can work." You know what else? If they're deferring to Congress, with Paul Ryan being the GOP's "budget expert" in Congress, Ryan should be able to speak for the House majority right now. If this proposal were to come before the Republican majority in the house, what would Ryan endorse right now? It's a fair question, and one a leader would not be afraid to answer.

Were they honest, they would admit that they're not willing to risk their political futures by telling the truth - that even if we assume there are enough loopholes and deductions to close, there is simply no way that Congress is going to take responsibility for inflicting that kind of pain. If they were courageous they would stand behind their convictions and state exactly what their plan entails, accepting the political consequences. Were they leaders they would produce an actual plan and present it to Congress and the nation. But alas, they're none of the above, so they pretend that its enough to pass the buck to Congress, knowing full well that Congress will demur.

The Latest News from Planet Douthat

When it comes to politics and political commentary the "fools or frauds" question often arises. When somebody makes an assertion that reflects badly on their intelligence, you have to wonder are they truly that foolish or are they knowingly advancing a fraudulent argument. Some columnists appear to believe that "fool or fraud" is a false dichotomy, far too constraining - you don't have to be one or the other when you can be both? And then, alas, you at times see somebody who is attempting a fraud so clumsily that he reveals himself to be a fool.

For some reason my thoughts now shift to Ross Douthat. Douthat opens by assuming that last week's debate was between "the flaws in contemporary conservatism" and "the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism", and suggests that flawed contemporary conservatism carried the day. I am wondering at this point if Douthat watched the same debate I saw, but alas, he offers no analysis to support his conclusion. We then move into fantasy land:

Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance – a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was only supposed to be the beginning.

The glory days of Lyndon Johnson.... wasn't that the Obama team's tag line going into the election? Seriously, other than a handful of first time voters already exhausted by eight years of Bush ineptitude, few of whom would get the "Johnson/Vietnam" reference, who does Douthat imagine he is describing?

The most common reaction I was hearing from Democrats was, "I hope the Democrats in Congress don't **** this up." A close second place went to, "I wonder how the Democrats in Congress are going to **** this up?" Perhaps Douthat is confused and believes that Democrats live in opposite land, and if he and his circle of confederates were crying about how Obama was going to ruin the world it could only mean that Democrats believed the opposite. It appears that he needs a bit more grounding in what the Bush Administration deemed "the reality based community."

He goes from there to worse:

With the Democrats enjoying huge congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: Immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector – and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

Immigration reform. You know, that ridiculous "liberal" concept that George W. Bush wanted to make part of his first term agenda, and that "liberals" like John "DREAM Act" McCain used to champion.

A program to combat climate change. You know, like the cap and trade approach that John McCain guy used to advance, in the past also endorsed by that other ridiculous, naive liberal, Newt Gingrich.

Advocacy for "a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector"? Earth to Planet Douthat? Where did he get the idea that President Obama supported whatever he imagines "trust-busting in the banking sector" to mean? Perhaps Douthat has President Obama confused with Teddy Roosevelt? In the real world, Obama was praising Jamie Dimon while letting Larry Summers and Tim Geithner spearhead financial industry reforms.

A "return to Clinton-era tax rates"? Republicans continue to feign concern about deficit spending and the need for lower deficits and balanced budgets, so it would not be unreasonable for Obama to allow the "Bush-era tax cuts" to expire. I am sure Douthat has erased the facts from his memory, but the cuts passed through reconciliation and were scheduled to expire after ten years. But I digress. No member of the Democratic Party advocated "", and in fact taxes were cut. There is talk about "a return to Clinton-era tax rates" for the wealthiest wage earners, but that's entirely different from what Douthat is pretending to have been Democratic Party policy.

Card check legislation? Well, obviously the modern Republican Party isn't going to help labor unions, so at least he is correct in terms of associating it with the Democratic Party, but it was not the priority Douthat would have us believe. Why pull it out of mothballs? Because it remains a Republican talking point.

In other words, Douthat complains that the Democrats wanted to pass a "weak" form of "liberalism" which, for the most part, had previously been at the core of campaign rhetoric and policy proposals of the prior President and Obama's 2008 election opponent. Well, yes, adopting Republican policies can reasonably be described as a weak form of liberalism, but that's obviously not what Douthat meant.

And... whoah... we're only too paragraphs into Douthat's foolishness.

Douthat pontificates,

Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party’s upper middle class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

It should be unnecessary to say this, but McCain/Gingrich style "cap and trade" measures, and McCain/Bush-style immigration reform aren't the best examples of "Obama-era liberalism" or its failure. Immigration reform failed because of right-wing demagoguery, a strategy of xenophobia that remains remarkably effective at scaring and dividing people. John McCain could have demonstrated some backbone and picked up at least one of his old causes, rallying the tiny number of Republican votes it would have taken to see his dreams (no pun intended) become reality. But no, politics were more important, and as Mitch McConnell said, their number one job was to beat Obama in 2012.

How about that little sneer at the Democratic Party's elites who are out of touch with "the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents"? Because, you know, 95% of Democrats are rich, urb9o0anites, doing something other than working in the financial industry but, you know, otherwise that rich and out of touch. Were Douthat an honest man, he would admit that he's using a euphemism here for "working class white males who have not attended college", but... he's not. Even if we assume that there remains no lingering effect of the Republican Southern Strategy, which we should not, the Republican Party has engaged in shameless demagoguery on a wide variety of issues to keep that group of voters largely in its corner. And yes, it reached the point where John McCain had to scamper away from his own long-held beliefs in support of policies that Douthat purports to be "Obama-era liberalism".

Douthat next launches into the standard Republican double message on Obama's first year in office - having just told us how the President should have been able to resolve pretty much every major, unresolved issue facing the country, we get "but he simultaneously should also have tried to do less".

Then came the White House’s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus’s underperformance – by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead – and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010.

You see, there was no issue with Republican obstructionism and demagoguery, the whole "death panels" thing never happened, Republicans didn't (and don't) criticize the President for supposedly cutting Social Security (to give money to undeserving people who haven't "paid for" Medicare), and the like. No, all the President had to do was give speech and the nation would have magically understood the entire bill. You have to ask, why didn't he think of that. Oh yeah, because he doesn't have the good fortune of living on Planet Douthat.

This failure of salesmanship doesn’t in and of itself discredit the bill’s provisions.

That's an interesting admission, Ross. Funny how you didn't have enough space in your blog post (which does not have any limitations on its length) to better explain that one.

But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will only be accepted if they’re founded on a secure base of economic growth – growth that Obama’s policies, unlike F.D.R.’s or L.B.J.’s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

And just like that, we're beamed back up to Planet Douthat. The planet where seniors won't take a penny of Social Security or Medicare unless they're sure they paid for everything they receive (and more!) over their working lives. The planet in which Medicare Part D, a gargantuan, unfunded expansion of Medicare wasn't spearheaded by a Republican President, passed by a Republican Congress, and eagerly accepted by a panoply of senior citizens who vote Republican. With Paul "Mr. Fiscal Responsibility" Ryan himself voting for the expansion. Because... redistribution. Ew.

Not being big on internal consistency, Douthat explains the biggest fault of "Obama-era liberalism" - it's designed to advance the ends of powerful interest and industry groups, instead of the people.

More broadly, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform).

One wonders how Douthat defines "conservatism", or if he has ever heard either the expression, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" or "business as usual". He can't possibly be that clueless about how Washington works.

A small dose of reality: The legislation the President passed could have been made significantly better had a handful of responsible Republicans signed on. The President would have been able to avoid making unseemly deals with the likes of Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, the nation would have been better served, the special interests might have been pushed back at least a few inches. But no, Mitch McConnnell was focused on creating a context for Obama's defeat, and it makes for much better demagoguery to whine about "The Louisiana Purchase" than to admit that one responsible Republican could have voted in favor of the bill and obviated the need for that deal.

It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

The President was, of course, handicapped by the facts. Romney can do his usual, embracing both sides of the issue: "I love Dodd-Frank, except for the parts that I hate and will repeal, and no I'm not going to tell you what parts I'm taking about," and pretend that he would do more than the President to take on the financial industry. May have been an empty rhetorical gesture? Once again, "Earth to Planet Douthat...." The financial sector is openly seething about what they see as an attack by the President. Bailing them out so that they could pay their bonuses with taxpayer dollars and borrow for next to nothing, and get right back to business as usual? You can only imagine their horror. You can rest assured that Romney is presenting a very different message behind closed doors. Those are, after all, his people.

And hm... what word is it that anti-Obama demagogues like to use to describe Obama, and what does it have to do with "big government intertwine[d] with big business"? (Something that Douthat has apparently never noticed before. Seriously?) Perhaps he's been hanging out with Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, Obama's that brand of socialist-communist-fascist that is always ignoring the needs of the people in favor of serving powerful industries.

How can you follow up on such a wonderful analysis? How about by... lying?

But what we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn’t worked out as planned.

Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course” and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent.

You know, job bill? Blocked by Republicans? Because they want Obama to lose? Apparently no similar effort was made on Planet Douthat? You can criticize it on substance - Matt Taibbi thinks it's a handout to Wall Street, Richard Epstein thinks it would create a socialist nightmare - but you cannot pretend it does not exist. What does Mitt Romney promise to do, again? Oh, that's right... "create" the exact number of jobs that are projected to be created if we vote a turnip into the White House.

It’s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn’t, and couldn’t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint.

Actually, as Douthat knows, if Romney's party thought Romney believed half of what he said in the debate they would pull the plug on his campaign. The same interests that Douthat whines are too influential in the Obama Administration consider Romney to be bought and paid for.

But Romney isn’t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them – and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism’s glass jaw.

Wow. For mixed metaphors of that caliber I usually have to read Thomas Friedman.

Frankly, if a Republican presidential nominee can win an election by serving up a steaming dose of Rafalca leavings, but doing so in a "forward-looking, energetic and reassuring" manner, we have bigger problems than trying to figure out how to make glass jaws stop shivering. Douthat may come to realize that, should he ever move back to Planet Earth.

Should Douthat venture beyond his peer group and into the world at large, he will find that Democrats are very concerned about what might happen in a second Obama term. That they're aware of the institution impediments politicians like McConnell are happy to utilize to damage the President, even when he knows he's also harming the country, because power is more important than policy. But I suspect I"m now getting into stuff that's beyond Douthat's ability to grasp, harder and nowhere near as much fun to write as a blog post that echoe's Republican talking points, and not at all likely to fill Douthat's pockets through speaker fees and book contracts.

Update: Ethan Gach is far more charitable to Douthat than I. Responding to Douthat's claim that "liberals" have "rallied" behind the President and his lukewarm second term agenda, Gach comments, "What makes Douthat’s chiding so unbearable isn’t that it’s untrue: it’s that it completely misses the point."

When Douthat complains, "we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about it seems that he missed his own political party's inability to "soul search" following various election losses. But more than that, he's presenting a hollow man argument. In his bifurcation of society, Douthat whines about "liberals" as if there's a single, unified "liberal" mindset, and that "liberals" are all cheering for the President. He can only believe that if... he never ventures outside and limits his media exposure to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It would be more true to accuse conservatives of mindlessly cheering for Mitt Romney despite his offering what Douthat charitably describes as "at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint". Seriously - Douthat defends that on the ground that Romney is not the incumbent, but it's much easier to run on a fantasy when your campaign is not firmly grounded in facts on the ground.

Gach believes that Douthat is expressing a clever form of contrarianism, that "The very thing that liberals love to accuse Romney of being, well, it’s actually true of their guy". Except the concern about Romney is not that "his agenda going forward is insubstantive" - the concern about Romney is that he has an agenda that he refuses to disclose, but that he may nonetheless be elected.

Gach continues his charity work,

I can understand why Douthat doesn’t want to look at the entire context in which the people, philosophies, and political parties he’s discussing are operating. That would be difficult, complex, and inconclusive. It certainly would not lend itself to the kind of “actually THIS is what’s going on” blogging that professional pundits are expected and encouraged to turn out.

If you say, though, that Douthat "doesn’t want to look at the entire context" you have the choice of stating that his blindness is not willful (fool) or that he's deliberately omitting the context in order to present an argument he knows to be deeply flawed if not false (fraud). Yes, if you can see through the charade this approach "makes what he says kind of silly", but his pontifications weren't intended for somebody like Gach who can see through the charade.