"Among its other infamies, the filibuster is blatantly unconstitutional" (Hendrik Hertzberg)

"The filibuster historically has been used selectively for a handful of issues to extend debate, but we don't have a sixty-vote rule. And yet, that's become common practice. And this is just the latest example."

-- President Obama, last week, on the GOP filibuster that
prevented a vote on the Hagel SecDef nomination

"Among its other infamies, the filibuster is blatantly unconstitutional. There's really no room for doubt on this."

-- Hendrik Hertzberg, in the newyorker.com blogpost
"The Filibuster: Obama Lets It All Hangout"

by Ken

Last night, in writing about Texas Sen. "Crazy Ted" Cruz's proud self-declaration as a dimwit, scumbag, and liar, I referred more casually than I would have wished to his joining in "the congressional Republican labor of overthrowing the government, at least in its constitutional form." And I realized that I hadn't gotten around to writing about a point that The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg made in a blogpost last week, an amplification of his Comment piece in the February 25 issue, "State of the (G.O.P.) Union."

He had concluded that piece:

What still holds the [Republican] Party together is its implacable opposition to Obama and all he stands for -- and the apparent willingness of its congressional cohort to thwart him by any means, fair or (more often) foul. At the emotional climax of his address, the President repeatedly called on Congress to bring his gun-control proposals to a vote. He wasn't even asking that they be passed. ("If you want to vote no, that's your choice.") He was simply asking -- demanding? begging? -- that they at least be considered in what was once, with very rare exceptions, the customary manner. He was also preparing the public for the likelihood that the gun-control proposals -- and, by extension, the rest of his legislative recommendations -- will be gutted or simply buried. In the Senate, the Republican minority wields the filibuster with unprecedented frequency and ferocity. At the other end of the Capitol, the Republican Speaker almost always keeps from the floor any measure disfavored by a majority of his caucus, even if a majority of the House itself supports it. Last Thursday, Republicans prevented a vote on the confirmation of Obama's nominee to oversee the Pentagon, the war hero and former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, and the President finally made his frustration explicit. "We've never had a Secretary of Defense filibustered before. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that somebody should get sixty votes," he said. "The Republican minority in the Senate seems to think that the rule now is that you have to have sixty votes for everything. Well, that's not the rule." But it's the power, as naked as Bush in the bathtub and a lot more indecent.

In the subsequent blogpost, "The Filibuster: Obama Lets It All Hangout," he noted that in the "Comment" piece he had quoted "a line or two" from President Obama's comment on the Senate Republican minority's outrageous filibuster of the move to proceed with the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense, and ventured that "his entire answer is worth a look, and offered a transcription by a New Yorker staffer. You can read the whole thing onsite, I'm just going to quote the portion that most directly engaged Hendrik:

The notion that we would see an unprecedented filibuster, just about unprecedented -- we've never had a Secretary of Defense filibustered before. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that somebody should get sixty votes. There are only a handful of instances in which there's been any kind of filibuster of anybody for a cabinet position in our history. And what seems to be happening -- and this has been growing over time -- is that the Republican minority in the Senate seems to think that the rule now is that you have to have sixty votes for everything. Well, that's not the rule. The rule is that you're supposed to have a majority of the hundred senators vote on most bills. The filibuster historically has been used selectively for a handful of issues to extend debate, but we don't have a sixty-vote rule. And yet, that's become common practice. And this is just the latest example. We've seen it on judges. We've seen it on Deputy Treasury Secretaries. And part of what's happening is it's become more and more difficult for people to join our government.

The boldfacing, by the way, is Hendrik's. He writes: "I'm especially glad to hear our constitutional-law professor of a President make the first point I've bolded above." Aha, clearly the president touched a nerve here!

Among its other infamies, the filibuster is blatantly unconstitutional. There's really no room for doubt on this. The framers quite consciously rejected the idea of requiring congressional supermajorities for any purposes beyond the five they specifically enumerated: in the House, for impeaching the President; in the Senate, for ratifying treaties; in both, for expelling members, overriding a Presidential veto, and amending the Constitution.

The Federalist Papers are absolutely clear on the question of requiring more than a simple majority for any other congressional business. It's a lousy idea, Hamilton thought. Why? Because, he writes in Federalist No. 22,

its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

An insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto: not a bad description of the Senate Republican caucus in the era of Inhofe and Cruz -- except, unfortunately, for the "insignificant" part.

In No. 58, Madison was on the same page:

In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.

It doesn't matter if you're an "original intent" guy, a "living Constitution" gal, or a "plain language" purist: routine supermajorities are a big fat no-no.

WHAT ABOUT THE SECOND BOLDFACED SENTENCE?

Says Hendrik, "[T]he President may (or may not) have gotten it a little wrong in the other sentence I bolded. It depends on what he meant by 'you're supposed to have a majority of the hundred senators vote on most bills.'

If he meant that the Senate (and the House) can't vote on a bill unless at least half the members are in the room (Article I, Section 5: "a Majority of each [house] shall constitute a Quorum to do Business"), then he got it right. But if he meant that, under the Constitution, the Senate can't pass a bill unless a majority of the entire membership, fifty-one Senators, vote for it, then he, well, misspoke.

Our Hendrik isn't finished with the quorum clause, though. It is, he says,

the nail in the filibuster's Constitutional coffin. In today's Senate, a quorum "to do Business" is fifty-one Senators. If voting on a bill is Business, as it obviously is, then voting to end debate on that bill and proceed to a vote on the bill itself is Business, too. If fifty-one Senators are present to vote on a measure, then all it takes to pass it is for twenty-six of the fifty-one to vote for it.

Senate Rule XXII, which purports to require a minimum of sixty Senators to vote not just on ending a filibuster but for ending one, is worse than unconstitutional. It is a grotesque logical absurdity, an offense to human reason.

Strong stuff. "Worse than unconstitutional." "A grotesque logical absurdity." "An offense to human reason." And there you have it, ladies and gents: your Republican Party, A.D. 2013.

And it sure seems like they couldn't be prouder.

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Is it possible that Newt might NOT crash and burn? If so, Hendrik Hertzberg of "The New Yorker" thinks he knows why

"Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted 'big ideas' than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt."

-- Hendrik Hertzberg, in a "Comment" piece, "Alt-Newt,"
in the December 19 & 26 New Yorker

by Ken

I didn't intend to be writing about Newt again so soon, really and truly. For all I knew, or at least hoped, he might soon slither back into whatever primordial slime he oozed out of and never be seen or heard from again. But I've got a loose end from my post last night troubling me, and it happens to segue naturally into Hendrik Hertzberg's current New Yorker "Comment" piece on the subject.

Before clicking "publish" on my post last night I lingered over the title, "When Newt crashes and burns, will the GOP be sending out for a new batch of "front-runners"?" I did wonder whether that shouldn't be "if Newt crashes and burns." After all, while I did "offer the observation that ol' Newt's front-runner status may be no more long-lasting than that of any of the front-runners who've preceded him in this campaign cycle," I preceded this observation with the qualification: "Far be it from me to predict what's going to come out of a process with such heavy input from the Republican 'base.' "

At the time of writing I hadn't yet read Hendrik Hertzberg's "Comment" piece on Newt in this week's New Yorker, "Alt-Newt." But when I got home yesterday, there in the mailbox, now that I've gotten used to Tuesday (or even Wednesday or, like last week, Thursday) delivery, there in the mailbox, on a Monday, just like in oldent times, was the new issue!

As I pointed out recently, Paul Krugman in his December 4 NYT column, "Send in the Clueless," offered one theory of why Newt "may not implode like his predecessors" as GOP front-runner. After delivering one of my very favorite lines about the pustule, "He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be," and qualifying that with the observation that "he's a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he's talking about," he added: "[M]y sense is that he's also very good at doublethink -- that even when he knows what he's saying isn't true, he manages to believe it while he's saying it." This certainly rings true to me.

Hertzberg offers a simpler -- and uglier -- thought, namely the one I quoted at the top of this post: "Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted 'big ideas' than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt."

HH takes us through the necessarily squalid journey of Newt Gingrich through the particular cesspool of American politics that he's made his own, using as a reference point the phony history professor's own fondness for, and actual practice -- however grotestquely inept -- of the genre of "alt-history," which is to say alternative versions of history imagined with "counterfactual" switches in circumstances in that history. (Strangely, HH doesn't mention that his magazine just published an extensive Critic at Large piece on the subject by an actual practitioner, Thomas Mallon, "Never Happened," of which only an abstract is available free online.) And then as he takes us through the high/low points of the Newtly CV, he repeatedly asks us to "imagine" such surely imaginary historical circumstances, all of which are of course not counterfactual but shockingly factual.

Eventually HH comes to this (boldface emphasis added):

Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted "big ideas" than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt. In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: "betray," "bizarre," "decay," "anti-flag," "anti-family," "pathetic," "lie," "cheat," "radical," "sick," "traitors," and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama's actions cannot be understood except as an expression of "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." Liberals constitute a "secular-socialist machine" that is "as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union." There is "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us" and "is prepared to use violence." In this campaign, Gingrich's performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls -- audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News -- is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated "liberal" media.

In March, at the Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Gingrich declared, "I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America," his grandchildren will live "in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." Last spring, this was a kind of right-wing performance art. Now it is the language of the man leading in the Republican polls, a man who -- in the real world, not the alt-world -- could, not inconceivably, become President of the United States. Imagine that.

I can understand two perfectly logical responses to the reappearance of the Newtster in public, as a candidate for attention, let alone public office: violent nausea, or engulfing rage. Any other response confounds me totally. Perhaps there's at least a partial explanation in the lovely line I quoted last night from a blogpost of Paul Krugman's yesterday:

"Truly, it is amazing how our political landscape continues to be dominated by people who have been wrong about everything for years."

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"Eric Cantor . . . reminds some people of why they were glad to leave high school behind" (Hendrik Hertzberg)

Eric Cantor: Not a GOP heretic after all,
it turns out, "just a run-of-the-mill martyr"

by Ken

New Yorker senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, following hard upon a blogpost called "Answer Me These Heresies Three," in which he had some fun with GOP presidential contenders Rick Santorum (caught paying tribute to superior European social mobility), Herman Cain (burbling incoherently about something or other), and Mitt Romney (defending Massachusetts's Willardcare against a ritual attack from the aforementioned Rick Santorum), posted a follow-up that seemed poised to stretch his original choice of three (count 'em, three) heresies (the number inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count . . . ").

Thanks to a late save, though, HH manages to disqualify his new contender from the "Republican heretic" ranks, and the mystical harmony of threeness is preserved.

From HH's newyorker.com blog:

October 24, 2011
HERESIES, CONT’D: FOUR SHALT THOU NOT COUNT
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg

A week ago, Eric Cantor, who reminds some people of why they were glad to leave high school behind, went on Fox News Sunday and said the Fox News/Republican Party unsayable:

We agree that there’s too much income disparity in this country.

Expanding on this remarkable admission, the House Majority Leader added that “we”, i.e., Republicans and Democrats alike,

know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scale, if they make too much, and too many don’t make enough. Well, we need to both go encourage those at the top of the income scale to actually put their money to work to create more jobs so that we can see a closing of the gap. You know, we are about income mobility and that’s what we should be focussed on to take care of the income disparity in this country.

Adepts at code-breaking will understand that “encouraging those at the top of the income scale to actually put their money to work” is Cantorspeak for cutting rich people’s income taxes, gutting environmental and financial regulations, and, probably, abolishing corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and inheritance taxes altogether. Still, good for Cantor for recognizing that the “complaint” is valid. (And good for Occupy Wall Street for doing the complaining.)

Not only that, but Cantor was all set to give a lecture Friday afternoon on that very formerly taboo subject, income inequality (or “disparity,” as he prefers to call it), at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Around lunchtime, he suddenly bailed out, so to speak, after learning that the speaker series of which his lecture was to be a part is open to the general public, riled-up Occupy fans and business-school students alike.

Cantor, therefore, is not really a fully qualified heretic [You can disregard this link; it's just to the earlier "Heresies Three" post -- Ed.], just a run-of-the-mill martyr.

Update: Tim Noah reads the prepared text of the speech Cantor was going to give, and suggests that its cancellation was an act of euthanasia.

Thanks to Mr. H anyway for his charming image of Majority Leader Cantor as the ghost of high school past, and also for calling attention to the incident -- which I'd been meaning to take note of -- of Majority Leader Cantor's panicky pullout from the Wharton School speech upon discovering that he wouldn't be addressing a private audience of friendlies.

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Hold on, Tom Tomorrow isn't suggesting that all those "isolated events" aren't entirely isolated, is he?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

What a wondrous piece of machinery is the right-wing mind!

On a related note, I have to give The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg credit for rising, in his "Comment" last week, "Words and Deeds" (January 24), at least partly above the current "isolated event" and "they all do it" conventional wisdoms. Yes, he devotes the now-obligatory long, long paragraphs to insisting that, unlike the case of Jerusalem in 1995 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an extreme right-wing Jewish settler egged on by the right-wing religious establishment, "In 2011 in Tucson, there was no such close, let alone causal, connection."

But. having satisfied that obligation, Hertzberg continued, fairly unexpectedly in the present climate:

[I]t is also the truth that, when the news broke of the Tucson shootings, no one's first thought was that some unhinged leftist was responsible. From the outset, commentators of all persuasions assumed something like the opposite -- assumed it openly if their instant impulse was accusatory, implicitly if it was defensive. And no wonder. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (who, miraculously, survived) is a Democrat. Last March, after she voted for the health-care law, someone shattered the plate-glass door of her Tucson office. Her Republican opponent in the November election, whose campaign poster showed him cradling an assault rifle, held a gun-themed fund-raiser. ("Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.") Giffords herself expressed concern about the political use of violent imagery. "For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list," she told an interviewer. "But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there's consequences to that action."

These things took place amid a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives -- not just from professional radio and television propagandists but also from too many Republican officeholders and candidates for office. The portrayal of the national government as a sinister tyranny and President Obama and his party as equivalent to Communists and Nazis -- as alien usurpers bent on destroying the country and the Constitution -- spawned a rhetoric of what a Nevada candidate for the Senate approvingly referred to as "Second Amendment remedies." During the same period, there has been a sharp, sustained rise in death threats against the President and against (mostly Democratic) legislators. And there have been real victims: according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, at least fifteen people had already been killed by practitioners of "insurrectionist" violence since the middle of 2008.

These realities, and not the malevolence of liberal opportunists, were why, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, the "national conversation" focussed on the nation's poisonous political and rhetorical climate. That conversation, which was worth having before, is not less worth having now because the connection between the crime and the climate is so murky -- and it may well turn out to be more productive.

He went on to swathe President Obama's Tucson speech in encomia, but that you've heard from any number of sources, and if you choose to believe it will make a dime's worth of difference, well, more power to you.

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Since righties lie about everything else, there's not much chance they'll stop lying about the planned Muslim cultural center

Tireless priestess of the right-wing holy trinity of ignorance,

hatred, and fear: Yes, i

t's Princess Sarah the Refudiator.

by Ken

So here we are, back at the Islamic cultural center planned near Ground Zero. There are people for whom the campaign of lies on the subject serves a larger purpose of lies.

When you get right down to it, the right-wing "holy trinity" of ignorance, hatred, and fear, which once seemed merely a set of tactics toward its soul-deadened ideological goals, has become the ideology and the goal itself. And since the exaltation of ignorance, hatred, and fear has long since eclipsed, indeed obliterated, any consideration of decency or truth, it's futile to expect them to stop lying anytime soon.

But that's no excuse for backing down from calling them on their lies. Or calling their witting and unwitting coconspirators on their complicity.

In the new (Aug. 16) New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg has a nice "Comment" piece on the subject, called "Zero Grounds." Early on, he takes notes of Princess Sarah the Refudiator's twittered denunciation of "the Ground Zero mosque plan," and observes:

Ah, the “Ground Zero mosque.” Well, for a start, it won’t be at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic “prayer room,” which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001, and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y -- a Y.M.I.A., you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. and H. persuasions.

Not that there's any reason why the simple concept of a mosque should strike such terror even in Americans' terror-craving hearts. But it does; the very word is sort of a multiple warhead of ignorance, hatred, and fear. Which probably explains why, notwithstanding that planned "prayer room," the planners of the cultural center have been careful to make it not a mosque.

Of course to the crusaders for ignorance, hatred, and fear, it doesn't seem to matter. And it's not just Princess Sarah throwing around the intentionally inflammatory terminology. The crusade has found allies, or at the very least gullible and willing coconspirators, throughout the Infotainment Newsmedia.

Inevitably, the proponents of ignorance, hatred, and terror preaching against the Muslim cultural center fall back on shadowy terrorist conspiracies. Are there any more pestilential breeding grounds for terrorism than their own churches and synagogues?

I think Rick Hertzberg puts a nice period to the matter in the conclusion of his piece:

Last Tuesday, after the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, in a unanimous vote, gave Park51 a green light, Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated the occasion with a speech that, in its gruff eloquence, will be remembered as a high point in his distinguished tenure. “We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors,” he said.

That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.

That should have been the end of it, but it isn’t. The midterm elections loom. Locally, partisanship—Republican partisanship, to be specific—trumps propinquity. The two leading Republican candidates for governor of New York have made the “Ground Zero mosque” an issue, urged on by Rudy Giuliani, the ex-mayor, and by George Pataki, the ex-governor. Nationally, opposition to Park51 is rapidly becoming a matter of Republican discipline and conservative orthodoxy. By the end of last week, John McCain had joined his former running mate’s chorus. (“Obviously my opinion is that I’m opposed to it.”)

In a famous letter—the one that holds that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens”—George Washington offered a benediction:

May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Lower Manhattan is a little short on vines and fig trees nowadays, though there are some excellent wine bars. Washington’s point remains. His letter was addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. But, as he knew, Muslims are Abraham’s children, too. By the McCain standard, George Washington was a three-time loser: as President, he lived in New York City; the nation’s capital bears his name; and, even by the standards of his time, he was an élitist. Nevertheless: he was right.

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Quote of the day: Chimpy the Prez turns out to be the worldwide cham-peen at regime change-- toppling regimes that get too close to him

"President Bush has probably dithered too long to have
any hope of solving the world's most complicated and
persistent rebus ["the Israeli-Palestinian morass"].
His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war."

"Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. . . .
"And regime change, it turns out, is infectious--a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration's Mesopotamian misadventure."
--Hendrik Hertzberg, in a "Comment" piece, "Follow the Leaders," in the Dec. 10 New Yorker

It started with Spain, Hertzberg recalls, then proceeded to Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia, and onward to Britain's Tony Blair, and most recently it has sent Australia's John Howard packing.

It's a favorite theme of Howie's when he's traveling: What do people around the world think of the U.S.? And in the Age of Bush, can this be separated from what they think about our government? Hertzberg has some thoughts:

They don't much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia's Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners "found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable." An avalanche of new international polls--from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others--show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. "Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us," Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about "world opinion," wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Count that--along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment--as another cost of the war."

"Those costs keep mounting," Hertzberg concludes, "and they're not likely to abate until there's regime change a little closer to home."

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