What Could Sanders Accomplish By Executive Action Alone?

Which Democratic candidate would be this bold, would do what any Republican in the country would do — simply dare to say, "Make it so" when executive power is clear and available?

by Thomas Neuburger

During the 2016 primary race it became apparent that Bernie Sanders was offering more than just a revolt against entrenched elites; he offered a revolution in the way our government functions. That revolution would be executed along three branches or lines of action, two of which he had complete and personal control of.

First, he would revolutionize the norms by which the past forty years of neoliberal government operated — years that started with Reagan and continued through each administration since — by not doing what each administration before him had done as a matter of course.

These acts of not-doing would not only save the nation enormous grief, they would save progressive activists and voters enormous time and energy. From this 2015 piece on the subject, here's my imagined Sanders speech on "What I Will Never Do":

If you elect me president, here's what I will never do —

    ▪ You can count on me never to push a plan to cut Social Security and Medicare. Not one person outside of government will have to spend one minute trying to prevent me from privatizing — or cutting in any way — these vital programs. Not one minute. And if Congress proposes these cuts and it reaches my desk, you won't have to spend one minute asking me to veto that proposal. It's vetoed the minute it arrives.

    ▪ I will never negotiate a so-called "trade" deal that sends American jobs across our borders. No one will have to spend one minute asking me to stop a deal that hurts American workers. I will support only trade deals that increase American jobs, that create new workers in this country, that increase our balance of payments, and nothing less.

    ▪ No one will have to spend one minute stopping me from granting coal, oil and gas leases on lands or in waters controlled by the Department of the Interior. Not one minute. Drilling in the Arctic? You won't even have to ask. The answer is already No. New coal leases? Not one. Dangerous and deadly-to-the-climate offshore drilling leases? Those days are over.

    Soon I will tell you what I will do to aggressively bring down carbon emissions. But if I don't start here, with what I won't do, how will you know I'm serious?

    ▪ You will never see me even contemplate extending tax breaks for the very rich, as we saw all too often in our recent past — for example, during the negotiations to extend the Bush tax cuts, or negotiations at the end of the last fiscal year. Any such deal that reaches my desk will go straight back to Congress for renegotiation.

    If Congress wants a bill, they can give me one I can sign. If they want to shut down the government over tax breaks for the very very wealthy, they will shut it down, and I will explain it that way to the American people. If they want me to sign a bill, any bill, they need to understand — tax breaks for the rich can never be a part of it.

In other words, you'll never have to lobby me to not do what I said I would never do. You can spend your precious time, your precious energy, in other ways. There are many things I will do as well. Some I will do alone, using the power of the Executive Branch. And some I will ask your help to do because we need help from others. But the things I listed above, and many more besides, will never be contemplated.

I hope you agree that sparing you the constant effort to stop these wrong acts is indeed an accomplishment, and one you'll be glad, even eager, to have. It's one I'll certainly be glad and eager to give you.

Thank you.

I could have added that Sanders will never do what every president for the last third of a century as done — pardon or fail to prosecute criminal behavior by other elites, including those in their own donor class (like Jon Corzine, one donor-criminal that Barack Obama's administration failed to prosecute). 

Unlike most other Democratic candidates in the current cycle, Bernie Sanders won't just save you from Donald Trump (or any other Republican candidate who rings the populist bell), he'll also save you years of time you can spend more productively than endless trying to please-please-please-beg-and-force him not to do what Democrats like Barack Obama seemed eager do almost daily.

But this was just the first part of an imagined three-part speech.

The second part would deal with what Sanders could do — should he be so bold — by executive action alone, without Congress, without leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell reaching in to muck up the operation. There's much more possible under executive action than any Democrat will allow you to contemplate — or if you do contemplate it, they'll admonish you that it's "best to pass a law instead" (because that's what Republicans always do when they have executive power, right?).

The third part of the speech would detail how Sanders would solve problems that could only be solved with true progressive legislation despite the machinations of conservative Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi; she deserves that appellation now) and their Republican partners.

Let's hold the "How I Will Pass Legislation" topic for another time; it touches on Sanders' unique theory of change. (For a preview of that theory, listen to the first part of Sanders' interview with Joe Rogan.)

What Could a President Sanders Do by Executive Order?

Here's a sample of what Sanders will do (not could do, will do) by executive order as soon as he's elected. This is from the latest "Bern Notice" authored by Sanders campaign writer David Sirota (emphasis mine):

Here’s an open secret: right now, your federal tax dollars subsidize giant CEO pay packages as well as corporate efforts to bust unions and offshore jobs. But when Donald Trump is defeated in 2020, that will end with a stroke of President Bernie Sanders’ pen -- and big corporations like Amazon, Honeywell and Boeing will have to either change their behavior, or lose their government largesse.

At issue is Bernie’s brand new Workplace Democracy Plan, set to be introduced by Bernie today at the Iowa AFL-CIO convention. The initiative is a comprehensive package of reforms designed to strengthen workers’ ability to form unions.

One provision in the plan is a pledge to immediately issue an executive order banning federal contracts from being awarded to companies “that outsource jobs overseas, pay workers less than $15 an hour without benefits, refuse to remain neutral in union organizing efforts, pay executives over 150 times more than average workers, hire workers to replace striking workers, or close businesses after workers vote to unionize.”

If I'm not mistaken, the U.S. government is the nation's largest employer, by a lot. Just as a federal Jobs Guarantee program would set a de facto floor on wages and working conditions by directly competing with the private sector for workers and offering more than their current "junk jobs" offer (explained by Stephanie Kelton here), a ban on federal contractors who do any of a list of wrong things, a ban that can be enforced by executive action alone, would change corporate behavior immediately and effectively.

This just scratches the surface. A total ban on new federal oil-and-gas leases, with an aggressive expiry of current ones, started immediately, would immediately change the economics of the fossil fuel market. Much of the much-discussed Student Loan Forgiveness program could be executed without legislation, since the government holds most student debt.

And so on.

Who Among the Current Democratic Candidates Is Bold Enough to Act Without Congress?

Despite all this, the question one should be asking isn't, "What can be done by a bold Democratic president?" though the list of what could be done is wonderful to contemplate.

The question one should ask instead is, "Who among the current candidates would dare use executive power in this way?" Would Harris? Would Biden?

Would even Warren, with her love of the inside game and use of others as leverage, dare to act when the only leverage she had was the power of the president to simply "make it so"?

If for you the Democratic primary is more than a year-long reality game show, with contestants striving to to outdo each other in capturing the public eye, in entertaining us spectators during our once-every-four-years Survivor-like ritual cage match — if the Democratic primary is more than just that for you — shouldn't the willingness to act be a primary, perhaps the primary, consideration in choosing who will run the executive branch for the next four years?

The question, it seems, almost answers itself.
 

And There You Have It. Bribery Is Legal in the U.S.

by Gaius Publius

Former Governor Bob McDonnell will no longer be prosecuted for public corruption and is being cleared of all charges. Bribery of public officials is now legal in the U.S. unless the perp is dumb enough to be spotted agreeing to a direct trade. From the Washington Post:

Prosecutors will drop case against former Va. governor Robert McDonnell

Prosecutors will not attempt to retry former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife Maureen on corruption charges, ending a four-year saga that rocked the Commonwealth’s political class and cut short the rise of a Republican star, according to a court filing.

The filing Thursday asks that the case be sent to a lower court, where prosecutors will formally file a motion to dismiss.

The decision is a major victory for the former governor, who has always maintained that he did nothing illegal in his relationship with a nutritional supplement salesman. It’s a blow to both the U.S. Attorney’s Office — which had recommended pressing forward with the case to Justice Department higher-ups — and advocates for strict enforcement of anti-corruption legislation.

To be clear, McDonnell was found guilty by a lower court...

McDonnell and his wife were convicted of taking more than $175,000 in loans and gifts — a Rolex watch, vacations, partial payments for a daughter’s wedding reception among them — in exchange for helping Richmond businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr. advance a dietary supplement his company had developed.

The McDonnells arranged to connect Williams with state officials, let him throw a luncheon at the governor’s mansion to help launch the product and shape the a guest list at a mansion reception meant for health-care leaders.

...but the Supreme Court (in a unanimous decision, by the way) narrowed the definition of bribery after his conviction to the strictest quid pro quo standard — if there's no proof of a deal, it's not corruption:

However, clinical tests of the product at state universities were never conducted despite Williams’s prodding. The Supreme Court ruled that what McDonnell did for Williams fell under the standard business of a public official helping a constituent.

“Conscientious public officials arrange meetings for constituents, contact other officials on their behalf, and include them in events all the time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

You can read the Supreme Court ruling here (pdf). As Chris Cillizza wrote in covering it: "The Bob McDonnell Supreme Court ruling makes convicting politicians of corruption almost impossible."

That bribery of public officials is legal in theory has now been confirmed in fact. McDonnell has been cleared of all charges and will not be reprosecuted. No smoking gun, so no quid pro quo and no corruption. Just business as usual in these United States.

(I credit my headline above to David Swanson. He's exactly right.)

Public Corruption: The Use of Public Power for Private Purposes

I've written, endlessly it seems to me, about Rule of Law and how we don't have it in practice.

In particular, it's clear that there's a circle of immunity from prosecution that, starting with the president in the Nixon pardon, widened to include not just the president and vice-president (Agnew was prosecuted before Nixon was pardoned), but all of his top advisers (the pardons of the Iran-Contra gang) — until finally a straight-up crook like Jon Corzine (a former senator, governor, Democratic Party fundraiser, and Goldman Sachs CEO) couldn't get indicted for actually stealing actual money (the MF Global affair).

You didn't see Bush indicted for war crimes (torture among them), nor any banker indicted for the obvious and blatant fraud that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, or for continuing fraud since. Now we're defining "quid pro quo" as the only standard that indicates corruption, and defining it very narrowly at that. But what is public corruption really? One of the more common definitions is this one:

Corruption is the use of public power for private purposes.

Here's how Zephyr Teachout, a law professor, author of the book Corruption in America and candidate for Congress in New York’s 19th District, put it in the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

How the Supreme Court gets corruption totally wrong

...While quid pro quo is, in fact, a Latin phrase, that’s the extent of the rightness of his argument. The phrase comes from contract law, and traditionally was used to describe a relatively equal exchange between parties to a contract. It is not historically a phrase from corruption law....

Our founding generation understood that corruption happened whenever those in public power use public power for private ends. They also understood corruption as the central threat to the survival and flourishing of our country. During the Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers debated the corruption implications of dozens of Constitutional provisions, and George Mason described their job as protecting against corruption lest the country “be at an end.” Alexander Hamilton described the convention as a project in enacting “every practical obstacle to corruption and cabal.”

We know the Founders weren’t just talking about direct exchanges of money for official action, because as Professor Larry Lessig has shown, only five of the 325 mentions of “corruption” in the debates around the ratification of our Constitution referred to what would now be considered criminal bribery. The rest referred to instances where those in public power used that power for private, selfish ends. The fact that the narrow quid pro quo definition has replaced the traditional idea of corruption is not just bad history; it’s a dangerous misunderstanding.

"A dangerous misunderstanding." (Teachout is being kind here. The Court's decision itself may be corrupt by her definition, especially if a justice was groomed and promoted by the wealthy and their political retainers to make just these decisions.) The argument formerly (but no longer) employed by Democrats and progressives against the Citizens United decision, and later McCutcheon v. FEC, was that quid pro quo arrangements were not the only, or even the most dangerous, forms of corruption. A quid pro quo, especially for money, was was formerly thought by Democrats to be among the least dangerous forms of corruption.

For example, if give you something you want (a Presidential pardon, say) and you give me something I want (elevation to the Presidency) — that's corrupt by any definition, even if a deal was never discussed. And not a dime changed hands.

But corruption can be more amorphous; it often includes just a network of mutually beneficial relationships, each passing gifts, held in the public trust, to the others. A former governor and current senator of a state, say, West Virginia, might use his public influence (a) to make sure his daughter's career saw significant advancement, and even (b) to make sure she got a state university degree to which she was otherwise unentitled. He might not even have had to make the phone call to get her the degree, so long as the university president knew who she was.

The first example could easily describe Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Did they make a deal? Did they even have to discuss it?

The second could well describe Joe Manchin's shepherding of his daughter Heather Bresch's career — including the part about the degree (my emphasis):

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch ... isn’t some ordinary greedy pharmaceutical executive. She’s the daughter of US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). She finished her BA in political science at West Virginia University (WVU) and was hired by Mylan in 1992 after her powerful father spoke to former CEO Milan Puskar. She rose through the ranks at Mylan, eventually serving at Director of Government Relations from 2002-2005, while her father was WV Secretary of State. In 2008, there was a controversy at WVU after she claimed to have an MBA. The university initially disputed the claim, but then awarded her an MBA despite only completing 22 of 48 credits required. After public embarrassment, WVU rescinded her degree and the university president, a former consultant and lobbyist for Mylan, resigned in disgrace.

Joe Manchin was governor of West Virginia in 2008, yet there's no smoking gun, so no proof as such. Just a network of relationships — Mylan, Manchin, Bresch, a Mylan lobbyist-turned-university president — and the power of public offices used for mutually beneficial gain.

See how that works? If proof of a direct connection is the only standard, how do you ever get a conviction? Answer: You don't. By that standard, you couldn't convict a shooter of murder so long as the shooter wipes the gun — even if the shooter, the corpse, the print-free gun, and a big wide smile were found in the same locked room.

Or consider this. It's now easier to be convicted of murder in the U.S. than for any form of public corruption. It's officially all for sale. Let the games begin.

GP
 

As the NJ Democratic Party shows, people who say Dems have no principles are wrong. The principle is: What's in it for me?

UPDATE BELOW: Sign on to Adam Green's pledge to find and support a progressive challenger for Steve Sweeney

NJ State Sen. Dick Codey: He was the state's most popular pol when he served concurrently as acting governor and Senate president. How did he get, first, muscled out of running for governor, then pried out of the Senate presidency? It's a nasty story, with nasty consequences.

by Ken

So in the final days of New Jersey's fiscal year Democratic legislators rediscovered a modicum of backbone, or perhaps of shame, and refused to give the state's Republithug governor everything he was demanding, to solidify the hold of the state's overprivileged elites. They passed a somewhat less inhumne budget, and the governor shortly thereafter announced that he was using his statutory line-item veto power to strike out the things he doesn't like, having already gotten the things he wanted most.

Which brings us back to the story of how important elements of the state Democratic party rolled over and played dead for him (and maybe raises the question of whether increasing public attention to the seamy machinations of the state's Dem power brokers played a role). Last night, while writing about the governor, Chris "The Stench of Corruption" Christie, I waded into the morass of some pretty stinky NJ Democratic power-brokering that goes a long way to explain some otherwise hardly scrutable developments in the politically always-swampy Garden State. I noted in particular two questions that have occupied Salon's Steve Kornakci in a pair of recent pieces, "Chris Christie's Democratic helpers" (June 24) and "The rise of the Chris Christie Democrats" (June 29). The wording that follows is mine, not his, but I don't think Steve will feel misrepresented:

Question 1: *Did Democratic State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (who engineered the breakaway of enough Senate Democrats to pass the savage-the-unions portion of the governor's budget plan) simply fold up like a cheap suitcase?

Question 2: What happened to Gov. Jon Corzine in his unsuccessful reelection bid?

Working backwards, I know we thought we knew the answer to the second question: that Corzine was understandably unpopular, between his own character, er, traits, his own blundering, the churn of the economic meltdown, and the presence of a vote-siphoning third candidate. It turns out, though, that there's a crucial element left unmentioned here: that the election of the right-wing Republican Christie suited quite well the growing power of two state "Democratic" (even though "Democratic" no longer means much, to the extent that it means anything we kind of need to be using quotation marks when it comes to these fellows) political, er, operatives -- okay, bosses, South Jersey's George Norcross III and Newark's Steve Adubato Sr. (Kornacki writes: "It's a widely held view by insiders from both parties in New Jersey "that Norcross and Adubato essentially left Governor Jon Corzine to wither on the vine in the '09 campaign, boosting Christie's prospects in the Democratic state.")

And so the answer to Question 2 turns out to have a heavy bearing on the answer to Question 1, which seems to be that -- with Corzine's reelection defeat and the ouster of widely popular Democratic Senate President Richard Codey (more about this in a moment) -- the new Senate president, Stephen Sweeney, became the state's highest-ranking Democratic official. (I would agree that NJ's two Democratic U.S. senators are higher-ranking officeholders, but they're not state officials, and really don't seem to have much input into state government or politics, which may be one of the reasons Corzine gave up his Senate seat to run for governor in the first place.) And Sweeney is Norcross and Adubato's man in Trenton.

Which brings us to Question 3, one that Steven Kornacki asks explicitly:

Question 3: How did the Norcross and Adubato camps gain so much power within the Democratic Party?

And while some of the particulars are NJ-specific -- there really isn't any escaping the Tip O'Neill dictum that "all politics are local" -- a lot of it seems to me of a piece with the increasing replacement of whatever principles the Democratic Party might once have stood for with the single overarching one: "Hey, rich white dudes, we can be your bitches just as good as the Republicans, or almost." As I wrote last night:

Who is George Norcross III? No, he's not an elected official, and you man not have heard of him, but you've heard about some of the South Jersey Democratic boss's accomplishments, like helping get Republican Chris Christie elected governor and swinging a bloc of State Senate "Democrats" behind him.

Kornacki takes us back to that gubernatorial election cycle.

Christie, whose gubernatorial ambitions were well known years in advance his 2009 campaign, began cultivating friendly, symbiotic relationships with two key Democratic bosses well before he even became governor: South Jersey's George Norcross and Steve Adubato Sr. from Newark. . . .

In fact, Christie's first public appearance after his victory that fall was with Adubato [above] in the heart of his political/educational/social services empire in Newark's North Ward. On the public employee benefits and public television votes this past week, just about all of the Democratic defections can be linked to the Norcross and Adubato camps.

Here's one way of measuring the clout of the Norcross and Adubato factions:

[T]he president of the state Senate, Stephen Sweeney, is a Norcross loyalist, while the Speaker of the Assembly, Sheila Oliver, also holds an $83,000-a-year job working for Adubato's protege, Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo. But if either the Senate or the Assembly were run by non-Norcross/Adubato loyalists, the past week might have played out very differently -- and Christie's benefits overhaul might have been dead on arrival.

And it all goes back, says Kornacki, to "an only-in-Jersey backroom deal that was struck at the height of the 2009 campaign -- one that dethroned Richard J. Codey, the long-serving Democratic Senate president, in favor of Sweeney and set up Oliver to claim the Speaker's gavel." From here I think we should just let Kornacki tell the story his own way, from the June 29 piece.

When news of the deal broke that fall, it marked yet another embarrassment for the beleaguered Corzine, who was locked in a tight race with Christie and facing intense voter skepticism about his leadership skills. Corzine was pleading with voters that he was focused on rescuing the economy -- but here was his party in Trenton, preoccupied with who would have what title in the next legislative session.

The deal itself was years in the making, the culmination of the rise of Norcross [right] and his South Jersey operation. A wealthy insurance executive who counts Donald Trump among his friends, Norcross has mixed business and politics to slowly build a massive, lavishly-funded Democratic machine in South Jersey.

Over the last two decades, Norcross has built a stable of thoroughly loyal state senators and assemblymen, often using truly shocking sums of cash to win over Republican-held seats -- more than $4 million in one state Senate race in 2003. As Norcross assembled a turnout machine and amassed clout in Trenton, he became a kingmaker in state Democratic politics. For instance, when Senator Robert Torricelli, his poll numbers ruined by an ethics scandal, abruptly withdrew from his reelection bid five weeks before the 2002 election, Norcross was one of a select few Democratic leaders who huddled with then-Governor James McGreevey to choose a replacement candidate.

Ideologically, Norcross is all "New Democrat," uneasy with the party's close identification with minorities and public employee unions and committed to making it marketable to suburbanites. His critics on the left believe he is philosophically aligned with the Republican Party but that he saw an opening to amass more influence by seizing and building what had been a feeble South Jersey Democratic operation.

His goal had long been to move loyalists into the three plum spots in Trenton -- Speaker, Senate president, and governor. After the 2001 elections, he took his first step, working with Governor-Elect McGreevey to oust a North Jersey Democrat named Joe Doria as the party's Assembly leader. Norcross still didn't have the numbers to install his own choice as Speaker, but a compromise was struck: A backbencher from North Jersey named Albio Sires would take over as Speaker for a term or two, at which point it would be safe for Norcross' candidate -- Joe Roberts -- to take over. Sires played along, serving two terms, then stepping aside. He was rewarded with a congressional seat, which he still holds today. Roberts became the Speaker in January 2006.

Norcross' next goal, the Senate presidency, was tougher to come by, mainly because Codey, who first came to Trenton in the early '70s, was so entrenched and skilled at self-protection. To say that Norcross despises Codey would be putting it mildly. Throughout the 2000s, he made it clear that one of his chief missions in politics was to get rid of Codey. Norcross tried in 2003, but Codey outwitted him. Then came McGreevey's shocking resignation in August 2004, after which Codey was elevated to acting governor for 15 months -- a period of time in which New Jersey residents seemed to fall in love with the self-deprecating, youth basketball-coaching, accidental governor. Codey wanted to extend his interim term and to run for a full term in 2005, but he was forced to back down months into his stint when Norcross and the state's other Democratic bosses all lined up with Corzine (who plied virtually every county and municipal Democratic organization in the state with money). So Codey deferred to Corzine, racked up a year of enviable press, and left office as one of the state's most popular politicians.

He still had the Senate presidency, though (New Jersey didn't yet have a lieutenant governor), and with his sudden fame and popularity, he was impossible to dislodge. So Norcross bided his time and waited for the right moment -- which finally came in 2009.

By that point, Codey's celebrity had faded a bit, and so had his grip on his colleagues. And then there was the Adubato/DiVincenzo factor: Norcross had waded into Essex County (which encompasses Newark and the surrounding area) to support DiVincenzo in the Democratic primary for county executive. Codey and most of the Essex Democratic establishment backed DiVincenzo's rival. When DiVincenzo won, Norcross suddenly had a powerful and grateful ally in a key county -- an ally who came through for him seven years later, when Norcross made his run at Codey. 12 Senate votes were needed to oust Codey, and two of them ended up coming from Essex: Teresa Ruiz, who also works as DiVincenzo's deputy chief of staff; and Nia Gill, who does legal work for Essex County.

That two Essex senators would turn on Codey was shocking, given that Codey is from Essex. But as part of the deal, the job of Assembly Speaker would be vacated by Roberts and given to a Democrat from Essex County -- Oliver, who also works for DiVincenzo. So it was a good deal for DiVincenzo and Adubato. Sure, their county lost the Senate presidency, but they'd never liked or gotten along with Codey, and now their lieutenant would be running the Assembly. And it was a great deal for Norcross, who was able to claim a big prize for one of his proteges, Sweeney, while still having wide influence with the Assembly Speaker. With this deal, George Norcross -- an unelected backroom player -- became the most powerful Democrat in Trenton.

And now we are seeing the results. If Dick Codey were still running the Senate, the benefits overhaul would surely never have reached the floor, and the outcome of the public television bill -- only one more vote would have killed the giveaway -- would have almost certainly been different. But instead, Codey is now a backbencher, so all he could do was vote against Christie's agenda -- and watch as some of his fellow Democrats provided the crucial votes to make it law.

Isn't that a pretty story? And see what wonderful things it's done for New Jersey?


UPDATE: JOIN THE ADAM GREEN'S PLEDGE TO FIND AND
SUPPORT A PROGRESSIVE CHALLENGER FOR STEVE SWEENEY

I don't read much, so I'm just catching up with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee's Adam Green's Tuesday DailyKos post, "Defeat the top Democrat who helped Chris Christie attack workers." (Don't try clicking on the button in the graphic which says, "CLICK HERE." The link in the post should work, however, or you can follow the DailyKos link, or go directly to the PCCC's website.)

I'm from New Jersey and I'm outraged. I don't think I'm alone.
I'm outraged that top NJ Democrats like Senate President Stephen Sweeney worked hand-in-hand with Chris Christie to pass an anti-worker bill that some say is worse than Wisconsin's -- which Christie signed into law about two hours ago.

Democrats...were the deciding votes to block NJ workers from negotiating for better health care.

Today, I'm pledging to do everything I can to help a bold progressive candidate defeat Stephen Sweeney when he seeks the Democratic nomination for governor. Will you join me? Click here.

Please pass this diary to every progressive you know. As more and more of us take the pledge, not only will Stephen Sweeney feel the heat but every Democratic politician in NJ will be on notice.

Over 1,000 2,000 people have taken the pledge on the PCCC's website so far -- that's a lot of volunteers!

I was the NJ Democratic Party's communications director several years ago. But today, I am disgusted and outraged at what some party "leaders" are doing. . . .

#

Getting the message, Sens. Hutchison and Cornyn? These nuts will drag you down. Plus final election thoughts

You might have thought there was no more unimpeachably conservative senatorial tandem than Texas's Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn. Ha! To the Lone Star Loons, they're practically socialists.

by Ken

As I've pointed out a number of times, the fact that tomorrow's elections offer hardly any races of national electoral significance isn't going to stop the Village media mavens from reading all sorts of significance into the results. And does anyone doubt that by this Wednesday -- hell, by about 9pm ET tomorrow, the Village idiots, getting their talking points from Teabag Central will be fulminating about how everything is changed and that madman Obama must repent of his wild socialistic ways?

Of course they won't spew the straight Teabag Line, which is that there is almost literally no such thing as being "conservative enough," unless you happen to have James Dobson's hand up your butt working your mouth. Which reminds me --

DID YOU HEAR THE LATEST FROM THE LONE STAR LOONS?

My God, you can't make this stuff up. The Texas ultraloons, of course, are backing that dimmest of dim bulbs Gov. Rick "A Man, A Plan, Great Hair" Perry for reelection over his expected primary challenger, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and are now in a tizzy over the, um, "revelation" that one of two men whose credentials were passed on to the White House by both Senator Hutchison and the state's other Republican senator, John Cornyn, to be the new U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas is gay!

According to Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau Chief Todd J. Gillman, Robert Pitman, currently a U.S. magistrate in Austin, "is highly regarded in legal circles. In a recent bar poll, lawyers rated him the most competent judge in Travis County."

Apparently this bit of wingnuttery goes too far even for Big John Cornyn, a man clearly unused to taking potshots from his right flank. Cornyn spokesman Kevin McLaughlin is quoted by Gillman commenting: ""A person's sexuality has no bearing on his qualifications for a job. ... It's just not even remotely considered." Yes, that's John Cornyn's spokesman

They're so far a little mushier in Senator Hutchison's office. Spokesman Jeff Sadosky said, "Senator Hutchison made her recommendations based on the merits of each individual's qualifications and their abilities," but wasn't prepared to say whether the senator knew that this one of her recommendations is gay.

Mind you, the senators can't even be said to have "nominated" Pitman to the job. He's simply one of two applicants they passed on to the White House with their approval. But, as Gillman reports --

Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition, a former member of the Republican National Committee – and, like nearly all prominent social conservatives in Texas who have picked sides, a Perry supporter – called the recommendation "very unusual and disturbing."

"I suspect that a lot of Republican primary voters would find it interesting that Senator Hutchison would make that recommendation," Lambert said.

RACE TO THE CENTER

So no, the Village idiots won't be going quite to the Teabag-Pure Right. No, they'll be going where they always do, reflexively: for a group hug in the magical, mythical Center, which is pretty far right, but not quite that far.

New Jersey

Of course, assuming -- as the recent numbers are suggesting -- that New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine squeaks through in his reelection bid, the lesson would seem to be otherwise, since Corzine's public values remain rather consistently progressive. Meanwhile his Republican challenger seems ever closer to indictment. Blue Jersey's Huntsu reported Saturday that something very like an evidence trail appears to be developing to back up the general supposition that as U.S. attorney Chris Christie made a special practice of illegally leaking politically damaging information about Democrats.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Anyone who's considering voting for Chris Christie, in a state that doesn't have a lieutenant governor, should insist on a clear statement of the gubernatorial succession rules covering all contingencies -- for example, if he's indicted after being elected but before taking office, and whether he's required to resign as soon as he's indicted, etc.

[CORRECTION: As commenter Devin McCullen points out, beginning with this election New Jersey voters are electing a lieutenant governor. So the person I'm suggesting prospective Christie voters should be focusing on is his running mate, Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno, their all-too-likely next next governor. (Thanks, Devin!)]

Virginia

Meanwhile in Virginia, surely the collapse of Creigh Deeds's gutless, misbegotten gubernatorial campaign suggests the opposite of the Village Conventional Wisdom. Deeds was so busy running as far right as his little legs would take him that we never got a chance to see whether a campaign built on principled progressivism would have had a better shot at unmasking the Republican candidate, Attorney General Bob McDonnell, as the theocratic right-wing zealot everything in his career tells us he is.

There is some forlorn hope that the widespread disilllusionment with Deeds among Virginia Democrats won't produce the ultimate disaster: the sweeping in of some unusually toxic down-ballot sludge, starting with the GOP candidate to succeed McDonnell as attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, an exponent of "natural law," whose idea of natural law seems to be the sum of his massive far-right bigotries and prejudices. Cuccinelli is so extreme as to have roused the slumbering Washington Post into editorial an editorial declaration that "As attorney general, [he] would be an embarrassment to Virginia."

In the case of Cuccinelli and some of the other down-ballot GOP horror shows, one can only hope that masses of Virginia Democrats can rise above their appropriate ennui regarding the governor's race, and don't wish to reward the hapless Creigh Deeds with their votes, to at least take a stand against the riffraff below.

Virginia extra-credit question

Would Virginians be better or worse off if Mr. Moneybags, Terry McAuliffe, had succeeded in buying the Democratic gubernatorial nomination? Discuss.

FINALLY, IN THE LGBT RIGHTS RACES . . .

The late numbers come in are frankly alarming. It's always dangerous to underestimate how much damage all the right-wing money and religious hate-mongering can do. There are too many people who can too easily be persuaded by propaganda that it's their civic duty to vote down someone else's basic rights -- and too many people who think it's just fun to do so.

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Will NJ voters really replace Jon Corzine with a poster boy for the Bush regime's corruption of U.S. justice?

It's the economy, stupid: Governor Corzine may have contributed to his own problems, but surely only the state of the economy makes it seriously possible that he could lose to a grandstanding sleazebag like Chris Christie.

"Once upon a time we had a concept of 'disgrace'. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media."

-- Michael Froomkin, in a Discourse.net post,

"The Threat Level Remains Unchanged"

by Ken

Luckily for most of our governors, 2009 -- being a political "off" year -- isn't a time when many of them have to face an electorate rendered increasingly angry and panicky by a year's experience of the Bush Depression. In fact, only one sitting governor is facing the voters this year: New Jersey's Jon Corzine. (The only other state electing a governor is Virginia, where Tim Kaine is finishing his allotted second term, so there's no incumbent on the ballot.)

I feel bad for not writing about the New Jersey race sooner. I guess it's just been hard to grasp that Corzine could be in trouble, especially against a political and moral nothing like former U.S. attorney Chris Christie, whose entire career reads as a majestic buildup to the great day of his own indictment perp walk.

Goodness knows, Governor Corzine has contributed to his own electoral troubles. He came into office with an arrogance that clearly put New Jerseyans off even when he had a point, as with the budget showdown not long after he took office in 2006, which led to a six-day government shutdown that has never been forgotten. Add to the brusqueness of his CEO style a trail of "rich guy"-type scandals, and it's not surprising that the governor doesn't have a vast reservoir of voter good will to fall back on.

Still, Corzine is a guy of substance, and in times of economic stress, his background and skills -- especially as tempered by the wisdom in matters of public service he has gained in his first term -- are good credentials for helping New Jersey survive and recover from the economic meltdown. He is a solid progressive, and would surely deserve reelection if he were facing serious competition. But when he's up against a guy whose political values seem limited to right-wing Republican platitudes ("tax cuts"!) and old-style cronyism, it goes beyond "no contest" to a matter of considerable urgency.

Of course this is a terrible year for a sitting governor to be running. In the early months of the meltdown, Americans seemed to grasp that the economy not only wasn't going to be turned around in a month, but having gotten where we were, it was going to be a long road back. I never had a lot of faith in those assurances, though. When people are feeling this kind of economic hurt, which we knew was likely to get worse before it got better, the perception of a "long road" becomes highly subjective. I think a lot of people have moved into "Are we there yet?" mode.

And governors are between a rock and a hard place. However badly the Obama administration has mismanaged the "stimulus" -- with its preposterous attempt to appease shithead Republicans who hope to dance on the administration's grave and its reliance on economic advisers who swear by the old adage, "What's good for the Wall Street gang and the banksters is good for, well, the Wall Street gang and the banksters" -- it has succeeded in pumping streams of spendable money into the economy. Paul Krugman has suggested that the large number of government-funded programs already in existence have assured a flow of cash that is likely what saved us from a full-fledged depression.

Some of that money has gone to the states, but not nearly enough, which has forced them into the position of having to drastically cut spending and raise taxes, thereby seriously reducing the amount of money consumers have in pocket and are willing to spend. But what else is a governor to do?

(There are, of course, shithead governors who came up with the brilliant idea of trying to reject federal stim funds. You know, geniuses like Louisiana's Booby Jindal and South Carolina's Mark Sanford, gentlemen from whom we will be happy to sign up for economics instruction as soon as (a) Governor Booby dislodges his head from his heinie and (b) Governor Mark apologizes for his sorry-ass existence.)

In this respect New Jersey is luckier than most states in having a governor prepared to seriously address the state's economic woes -- that is, assuming its voters have the sense to retain his services. At the moment, even though Governor Corzine's personal wealth is reportedly much depleted by recent events (leaving him badly positioned to self-finance a campaign as expensive as this one is likely to be; he has pointed out that he's not Mike Bloomberg), it's surely the case that New Jersey needs Corzine more than Corzine needs New Jersey.

I suppose we could, and should, be examining a host of policy issues, looking at what the governor has done and proposed, and comparing all of that with what candidate Chris Christie is saying. I trust that there are people doing that, and maybe at some point we'll get around to it. But for now only two points concern me:

(1) Jon Corzine has accomplished a fair amount in his first term under a panoply of trying conditions. He's exceptionally well qualified for the job and has undoubtedly learned a great deal that will make him a better governor in his second term, if he gets one, and in any case he is the only serious candidate in the race.

(2) Chris Christie is a sorry specimen of your small-time wannabe big shot, who doesn't seem to believe in much of anything but is content to spew doctrinaire right-wing ideology, and whose principal operating principle is knowing a guy who knows a guy who . . . .

I have no qualms in taking the position that Christie should never be elected to any position, should never again occupy any public office, if only for one reason: He was Karl Rove's idea of a satisfactory U.S. attorney.

I apologize for resurrecting a hoary old scandal like that of the Bush regime's purge of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with the regime's mandate to subordinate the administration of federal justice to acting as the enforcement arm of the Bush political machine. Even now, with all the testimony that John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee was finally able to extract from the apparent pointpersons of the purge, regime political mastermind Karl Rove and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, testimony that I gather from people who have ventured into it is severely incriminating with regard both to the Bush regime's political perversion of the U.S. attorneys' job and to the role played by Master Karl, the son of a bitch has the temerity to go on TV (after all, he's a "commentator" now!) and insist that he's vindicated and owed an apology by the media who have been hounding him with baseless allegations.

What will save Rove from doing time is the apparent absence of a smoking gun -- you know, something like him dancing in a T-shirt that says, "I Broke Every Law in the Book Prohibiting Politicization of the Justice Dept." (There is also, of course, the more immediately pressing charge that Rove masterminded the framing of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, which needs to be pursued relentlessly, first to restore the freedom and reputation, if not the career, of a man who was railroaded out of office and into prison, and second to establish the principle that political hatchetmen operating under cover of the White House really aren't allowed to conspire to overthrow the legally elected government of one of the 50 states.)

As the U.S. attorney scandal was breaking, and frequently thereafter, I wrote here that, next to the disastrous war that the Bush regime lied the country into, the worst of its vast array of malfeasances was its carefully orchestrated destruction of the "justice" function of the Department of Justice, and one of the principal tools was the purge of U.S. attorneys, the DoJ's regional administrators of the federal justice system, who refused to play along.

Just think, to pick a famous example (and one that the Rove and Miers testimony seems to confirm happened exactly the way we thought it did), of David Iglesias being fired for refusing to bring bogus indictments against New Mexico Democratic pols threatening the reelection of New Mexico Republicans like then-Sen. Pete Domenici and then-Rep. Heather Wilson. Is it really so hard to see how direct and immediate a threat this is to American democracy?

From what we already know based on the reporting and piecing together that has already been done regarding the U.S.A. firings, behind almost every one lies a story -- some similar, some different -- so ugly, so unlawful and anti-constitutional, and so dangerous to our most basic American values that it should by itself have constituted an impeachable offense. I'm sorry, but this is another of those things we can't "just put behind us." That isn't going to neutralize the threat to our electoral system. I think for that it's necessary for some people to spend a chunk of time in a federal penitentiary, or the next time we have a U.S. administration that's inclined to repeat the abuses of the Bush regime, those people are going to feel free to do so.

Nevertheless, as important as this, it isn't anywhere close to the most important issue at stake in the U.S.A. firings.

This is another point I first encountered thanks to Paul Krugman, though I'm sure many other people made the same connection. Okay, this line of thinking goes, we've learned about some of the kinds of things that could get you fired from the Bush DoJ. But what about the 84 U.S. attorneys who weren't fired? What did they have to do to retain the favor of Karl Rove's White House political operation?

For starters, I hope no one has forgotten the study undertaken by Donald Shields and John Cragan of Bush DoJ prosecutions undertaken in the years 2001-06, which found:

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

Beyond that, well, we know of some individual cases, as in Alabama's Middle District, where U.S.A. Leura Canary apparently served as pointperson in the Rove conspiracy against Governor Siegelman. But since we're apparently never going to get a proper investigation into the reasons for the firing of the Bush U.S.A.s who were fired, we have even less chance of learning what exactly the un-fired 84 did to keep their jobs.

Possibly many of them did nothing more than avoid doing anything to offend the White House political operation. And surely it would be a shame to tar them all with the same brush. Or would it? This is what happens when you pervert the Executive Branch the way the Bush regime did. All of its actions become suspect. And rightly so, I think.

Certainly there's plenty of indication that in the District of New Jersey Chris Christie was very much Karl Rove's kind of U.S.A., never shying from political prosecutions and doing all the influence-peddling and cronyism you expect from a Rove-certified U.S.A. That's without the so-far-acknowledged two conversations that Christie and Rove had while Christie was still in office about his running for New Jersey governor. You don't have to have the blazing insight of a political mastermind to see that Rove recognized his kind of political hack and was only too happy to send him out into the world to do Satan's work.

But one thing I don't think should happen is the seamless reintegration of Rove's Rogues into civilian life. I am taking a serious liberty in quoting the following splendid paragraphs from a post today by University of Miami Law School Prof. Michael Froomkin on his Discourse.net blog, "The Threat Level Remains Unchanged." Michael was writing about former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who apparently writes in his forthcoming book something he actually acknowledged as far back as 2005: that he at the very least suspected that the Bush regime was using the famous multicolored terror alerts for political purposes. And yet he went on uncomplainingly with his business.

We don't have any admission of culpability from Chris Christie, of course, and in the good professor's evidence-based world, I doubt that he would accept my guilt-by-association condemnation. However, I do know that Michael was and is profoundly concerned about the abuses of the Bush DoJ, including the U.S.A. firings, and so with that proviso -- that I'm not presenting legally sufficient evidence to link Christie to the following paragraphs -- I am nevertheless taking the liberty of quoting them in this connection:

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it’s time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won’t have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don’t ever put anything their way. Don’t give them a visiting gig. Don’t invite them on TV. Don’t buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won’t happen. Not because there’s always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won’t happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I’m beyond angry. I’m tired of angry.

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Jon Bon Jovi Rocks The House For Jon Corzine

Bon Jovi has been a real stalwart for progressive causes and for Democratic candidates, so it's no surprise that he jumped right into the fray when New Jersey Republicans nominated an anti-choice/anti-gun control freak to run against Governor Jon Corzine. Thursday, just two nights after the primary, one of New Jersey's most beloved native sons played an acoustic benefit for the campaign. It's great that over $2 million dollars was raised-- especially when every special interest in the country is going to be pouring money into Chris Christie's attempt to turn back the clock on the Garden State-- but something else struck me about the way Jon Bon Jovi approached this endorsement.

It was anything but perfunctory. He knows the governor for years and he's worked with him for years. He knows he's good for his word and that he's a straight shooter. The race pits a progressive fighter against a knee-jerk conservative hack. Watch the clip and listen to how Bon Jovi handles the endorsement; it's rare that a musician goes as far as he did to push a politician. The first song he played at the sold out New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark was the anthem of the state's tourist board, "Who Says You Can't Go Home?" a few weeks earlier Bon Jovi had been in the same hall to be inducted-- along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Guglielmo Marconi, Phil Rizzuto, Paul Robeson, Carl Sagan, and Walt Whitman-- into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. The photo up top is Gov. Corzine presenting Bon Jovi with his award.