Senator Ted may not understand what the fuss is about his citizenship, but his Teabagger superfans sure ought to

Senator Ted had his chance to speak out against the loonery of birtherism. It's only fitting that he now pay some small price.

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

-- from Article II, Section 1, No. 5, of the U.S. Constitution

"Because I was a U.S. citizen at birth, because I left Calgary when I was 4 and have lived my entire life since then in the U.S., and because I have never taken affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship, I assumed that was the end of the matter."

-- Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, yesterday

by Ken

Based on the savagely and mean-spiritedly imbecilic blather that has been issuing from Ted Cruz's mouth since he took his seat in the Senate, it would have been easy to assume that the guy is just a dope. But blinkering ideology can make people who aren't naturally dim-witted say pretty obtuse things. Which still leaves open the question of whether he's as stupid as his handling of his newly front-burnered citizenship issues suggest.

So the senator is going to renounce the Canadian citizenship he didn't think he had but is now presumed to have by virtue of being born in Canada, amid questions about his supposed dual citizenship. And he's flustered about all the attention being paid to the subject. "Given the raft of stories today about my birth certificate, it must be a slow news day," he said.
The poor guy thought he had put the controversy about his citizenship to rest by releasing his birth certificate, which seems a pretty foolish rookie mistake. More to the point, unless he's just kidding, he really doesn't understand what the issue is.

Which is ironic, because I agree with him that it shouldn't be an issue. "I was a U.S. citizen at birth," he says, and there's no question in my mind that he is. Since his mother was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth in Canada, of course he was a citizen at birth. I don't see what else "natural born citizen" can possibly mean.

There are two problems, though.

First, the question has never been put to the legal test. When the late George Romney (you know, the father of Dullard) made his run at the presidency, there were plenty of people who argued that, because he wasn't born in the U.S., he didn't mean the "natural born citizen" standard. On the other hand, Romney invested a lot in that presidential bid, and had a lot of the Republican Party behind him, and if his campaign hadn't self-destructed on the issue of his Vietnam "brainwashing," he and his party would have been pretty heavily invested in their belief that he was constitutionally kosher.

Quite possibly if that had happened, and especially if Romney had been elected, the issue would have been pressed to some legally definitive resolution. But that didn't happen.

On the practical level, you to wonder how it could never have occurred to Senator Ted, since he began being hailed as presidential timber on the basis of his bloviating, that he was going to have to deal with the citizenship issue at some point. After all, he did live those first four years in Canada, where his American mother and Cuban-borth father had emigrated to work in the oil industry. (The elder Rafael Cruz already had a U.S. green card when he and his wife moved north of the border, and at some point in the eight years he lived there he acquired Canadian citizenship, which he apparently renounced when the couple returned to the States.)

Which brings us to the second problem with Senator Ted's handling of the eligibility issue. The constituency to which he lays claim with his ignorant nativism and general far-right loonery is precisely the horde of loons who did everything in their power to destroy the country over the phony-baloney Obama birth issue. And while it's true that in their combination of psychosis and demagoguery they escalated their delusions and lies to the level of a conspiracy on Obama's part fo coneal his "true" birth in Kenya, the underlying "birther" issue was that because Obama was born in Kenya, he wasn't eligible to be president, which would be the loons' and liars' explanation for the birth of the Obama-birth conspiracy.

Now you really can't have this both ways. If Senator Ted was "a U.S. citizen at birth," by virtue of his mother's citizenship, then so too was Barack Obama. And yet, as we know, the leaders of the Right were at best criminally silent on the issue of the birthers, and at worst openly encouraging. Of course Obama was never properly subject to such considerations, having been born in Hawaii, but the right-wing leaders could have suggested that the right-wing rabble-rousers come back when they had a less transparently preposterous conspiracy to promote.

It was a measure of the starkly cynical political opportunism that infects the whole of the Right that no such closure was attempted by more than the occasional Republican pol. Instead the pols chose to cast their lot with paranoid craziness, apparently thinking there would be no price to pay for it. Unfortunately, Senator Ted isn't going to pay anything like the bill that should be payable.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Willard sez: If you think it's so E-Z to be a 24/7 lying sack of doody, let's see YOU try it, why dontcha?

"Mitt Romney didn't personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,
"Off and Out With Mitt Romney"

by Ken

Today the New York Times noted editorially ("Mr. Romney Changes His Mind, Again") the embarrassing switcheroo in the Incorporated Willard's frothing declarations that the requirement that those who can afford health insurance buy it or pay a penalty -- a cornerstone of the system Willard instituted as governor of Massachusetts, now incorporated in the revised federal health-care system -- is on the one hand a penalty not a tax and on the other hand, two days later, a tax not a penalty.

Why the switch? As he has on so many issues, Mr. Romney caved to Republican conservatives who want him to campaign on the falsehood that the mandate is a vast tax increase on the middle class. The Supreme Court’s decision that the law is constitutional was disastrous to their cause, so they distorted its basic reasoning. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote that the mandate is legal under the Congressional taxing power, which Republicans took a step further, saying the mandate must now be a tax. And not just a tax, but a huge, oppressive tax, one of the largest in history.

It is, of course, no such thing. . . .

The tax-vs.-penalty debate is a legal and semantic issue that has no practical impact on the public, but making this argument says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s inch-deep position on health care. Since the beginning of his campaign, he has fled from his significant achievement in Massachusetts, hoping to attract conservatives who never trusted him. . . .

Also this morning, the Washington Post's Phllip Rucker reported ("Romney to bolster communications team amid conservative tempest"):

WOLFEBORO, N.H. -- Mitt Romney is planning to fortify his communications and messaging team by adding seasoned operatives, advisers close to the campaign said Thursday, after withering criticism from prominent conservative voices that his insular team has fumbled recent opportunities.

Romney’s advisers insisted that he would keep his inner circle intact amid growing concerns about the Republican presidential candidate and his campaign. The tempest began with a weekend tweet from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and burst Thursday onto the pages of his newspaper the Wall Street Journal, as its conservative editorial board opined that Romney’s advisers were “slowly squandering an historic opportunity” to beat President Obama. . . .

Ah, you see, it's all just a messaging problem, a communications snafu. Just get some better communications people in there, and all will be well.

Regular Willard-watchers understand that none of this has anything to do with what Willard believes, whatever that may be. (He certainly has no intention of sharing it with us.) Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily matter, because the lug has made it abundantly clear that on matters he doesn't feel terribly strongly about personally, he's willing to sign on to whatever position will do him the most personal good. This is frightening on a whole range of social issues, which don't appear to have much to do with whatever it is that makes Willard, um, what he is. Unless I've misjudged him wildly, which I don't believe I have, this is likely to go well beyond campaign rhetoric. Once he's in the White House, he's going to be utterly dependent on securing congressional Republican votes, and I shudder to think what he'll be willing to do to secure the support of "his" party.

But as we're seeing, it goes well beyond social issues. Beltway pundits have been insisting that Willard was shrewd in sidestepping the health-care issue as much as possible in the Republican primaries, knowing that there was no way it could be a winning issue for him but it also couldn't cost him the Republican nomination. The only problem with that reasoning is that its success landed him right back where he was before: having to hold together a mob of Republicans who have been bred to be the perfect mixture of ignorance and insanity. As he must already be learning, there's no talking to those people! Just imagine what it will be like if and when he's in the Oval Office. (I assume Willard's people were assuming that the Robert court would deal with the health-care issue for him by striking down the ACA. Of course then he would be under the gun to say what kind of health-care system he would support.)

Of course it's not just health care where Willard talks an unbroken stream of double talk and plain nonsense. As Paul Krugman points out in his NYT column today, "Off and Out With Mitt Romney," while "bitterly denouncing the Supreme Court for upholding the constitutionality of his own health care plan," rests "his case for becoming president . . . on his claim that, having been a successful businessman, he knows how to create jobs."

This, in turn, means that however much the Romney campaign may wish otherwise, the nature of [his] business career is fair game. How did Mr. Romney make all that money? Was it in ways suggesting that what was good for Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made him rich, would also be good for America?

And the answer is no.

At this point PK inserts an extraordinarily important qualification:

The truth is that even if Mr. Romney had been a classic captain of industry, a present-day Andrew Carnegie, his career wouldn't have prepared him to manage the economy. A country is not a company (despite globalization, America still sells 86 percent of what it makes to itself), and the tools of macroeconomic policy -- interest rates, tax rates, spending programs -- have no counterparts on a corporate organization chart. Did I mention that Herbert Hoover actually was a great businessman in the classic mold?

"In any case, however," he continues, "Mr. Romney wasn't that kind of businessman."

Bain didn't build businesses; it bought and sold them. Sometimes its takeovers led to new hiring; often they led to layoffs, wage cuts and lost benefits. On some occasions, Bain made a profit even as its takeover target was driven out of business. None of this sounds like the kind of record that should reassure American workers looking for an economic savior.

"And then," PK writes, "there's the business about outsourcing."

Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported that Bain had invested in companies whose specialty was helping other companies move jobs overseas. The Romney campaign went ballistic, demanding -- unsuccessfully -- that The Post retract the report on the basis of an unconvincing "fact sheet" consisting largely of executive testimonials.

What was more interesting was the campaign's insistence that The Post had misled readers by failing to distinguish between "offshoring" -- moving jobs abroad -- and "outsourcing," which simply means having an external contractor perform services that could have been performed in-house.

Now, if the Romney campaign really believed in its own alleged free-market principles, it would have defended the right of corporations to do whatever maximizes their profits, even if that means shipping jobs overseas. Instead, however, the campaign effectively conceded that offshoring is bad but insisted that outsourcing is O.K. as long as the contractor is another American firm.

That is, however, a very dubious assertion.

Which brings PK to "one of Mr. Romney's most famous remarks: 'Corporations are people, my friend.'"

When the audience jeered, he elaborated: "Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets." This is undoubtedly true, once you take into account the pockets of, say, partners at Bain Capital (who, I hasten to add, are, indeed, people). But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations.

Why, for example, do many large companies now outsource cleaning and security to outside contractors? Surely the answer is, in large part, that outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn't represented by the union and can't participate in the company health and retirement plans. And, sure enough, recent academic research finds that outsourced janitors and guards receive substantially lower wages and worse benefits than their in-house counterparts.

Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn't personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.

In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn't good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out.

It would be helpful, as the political pundits and reporters ritually report the Incorporated Man's predictably smug response to the predictably unencouraging jobs data released today, to remember that not only does he have no history of creating jobs, and quite an extensive history of killing them, but it is, in fact, his official position that while "outsourcing" is problematic, "offshoring" is hunky-dory. It either hasn't occurred to him, or else he just doesn't care, that the people thrown out of work are out of work either way.

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The real question is: What kind of inspirational catch phrase can we expect from the new GOP president?

by Ken

"Most presidents," writes our Washington Post "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen, "have one memorable statement that -- rightly or wrongly -- seems to encapsulate their tenure." Now it doesn't exactly inspire confidence when Al turns to his "pal" David "Human Garbage" Gergen to buttress the case for the importance of pithy presidential one-liners. For the record, here's what the loathsome political superhack has to say:

The reason these phrases are important is that an essential job of presidential leadership is to give meaning to a central thrust of the presidency.

(Right, and David G. would know.)

Anyway, here are the for-instances Al has gathered:

FDR had "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," while Truman had "the buck stops here" and Eisenhower had "the military-industrial complex."

Kennedy, on Day One, had "ask not what your country can do for you," and Johnson had "I shall not seek, nor I will not accept, the nomination . . . "

Nixon had "I am not a crook," Ford had "our long national nightmare is over," and Reagan had "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Bush I had "this will not stand" after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Clinton had "the meaning of is, is" and "I did not have sex with that woman" and "the era of big government is over."

Bush II had "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon," in the bullhorn speech at the rubble of the World Trade Center, and also "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Back to Al and his pal David "The Political Debauchee's Debauchee" Gergen:

Slogans such as "New Deal" and "New Frontier" gave meaning to what presidents wanted to do and what they wanted the country to do, Gergen said. One of the "great surprises" of the Obama presidency, Gergen added, is that "despite his reputation as a splendid orator, there doesn’t seem to be much that he said in his first three years in office that comes close to 'ask not' or 'fear itself' or 'tear down this wall.'"

(Well, that's not in my Top 100 Surprises of the Obama Administration, or my Top 100 Disappointments, but I suppose it could figure in the Top 500. Top 1000 for sure.)


IF YOU SENSED A LOOP CONTEST TAKING SHAPE . . .

Bingo!

Loop Fans can help! It’s time for the first "What did Obama say? What should he say?" contest.

We need your suggestion -- one per entrant, please - of some phrase or sentence that Obama uttered that might long be remembered either for its own elegance or as a symbol of his presidency.

You can also suggest -- again, one per entrant -- Obama should say that would be emblematic of his tenure. The top 10 entries in each category (you can enter both), as determined by an independent panel of judges, will get the coveted Loop T-shirts and mentions in this column.

To enter, please go to wapo.st/loopcontest and enter under the "comments" section at the bottom.

But hurry! Entries must be submitted by midnight Nov. 14. In case of duplicates, first in will win. (You may want to double-check that there’s an active e-mail address associated with your washingtonpost.com log-in. If we're unable to successfully contact the winner within three days, the prize will go to a runner-up.)

Good luck.

BUT WHAT KIND OF PITHY CATCH PHRASE
CAN WE EXPECT FROM THE NEW GOP POTUS?

Isn't this where the real, er, fun begins? (As always, it's funny as long as we ignore the likelihood that one of these, er, people will actually be our next president.) I've been working so hard to block out the craziness that I've had to throw together just a few quick takes. I'm sure you've got ever-so-much-doozier suggestions, but for starters let me throw these out.

WILLARD (ROMNEY) INC.:
"Corporations are people, my friend."

MICHELE "BATS IN THE BELFRY" BACHMANN:
"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake. We've had a hurricane."

HERMAN "I DON'T RECALL" CAIN:
"If I were forced to eliminate a department, I would start with the EPA."

RICK "SEÑOR PIÑATA" PERRY:
"The idea that we would put Americans' economy at -- at -- at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet, to me, is just -- is nonsense. I mean, it -- I mean -- and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said, here is the fact, Galileo [right] got outvoted for a spell."

[Judging from the expression on Galileo's face, one might speculate that this portrait was painted during that spell when he was getting outvoted. You can almost hear the exasperation in his voice as he rasps, "Ooh, this vote was so close!"]

Or if that's too long, we might settle for Rick's pithier and possibly even more inspirational:
"I kind of feel like the piñata here at the party."

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In Tom Tomorrow's war between Tepid Moderates and Right-Wing Nutjobs, do we even have to ask who'll win?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party."

-- Jack Balkin, in the Balkinization blogpost
"Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System"

by Ken

As of this morning, at least, the much-bruited -- in Village circles, at least -- "compromise" between the administration and congressional Republicans on extension of all the Bush tax cuts had fallen apart. But as Howie has been suggesting, given the administration's track record in these matters, it seems just a matter of time before the administration capitulates totally, or maybe more than totally, giving the R's more that they're demanding, in the name of "compromise."

Of course, in return for all this "compromise" the administration will in return get . . . well, nothing. You have to laugh, or maybe cry, at the GOP's dire threat to allow virtually nothing to pass Congress while the matter of the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts is dealt with, meaning of course dealt with the way they want it dealt with. Not that I doubt the Rs' sincerity. I'm prepared to believe that they'll make good this threat. What's left unsaid, though, is what happens after the capitulation. Exactly what legislation do you suppose the Party of Nonono is considering allowing to pass?

Of course, the question remains to what extent the Administration is uncomfortable about the policy result. I specify policy result to distinguish it from the political result, which you'd like to think the folks in the White House can't be happy with. The usual justification for icky policy choices is that they're necessary to achieve desirable political goals. This administration has the distinction of having produced basically right-wing results in a wide range of policy areas while while getting the political crap beaten out of it. Well done, Master Rahm!

Howie has been pointing out, this is a crucial calculation in figuring out why so many of the Obama administration's policies -- once we separate out what appear to be actual policies from stuff that just happens -- turn out to be wholly consistent with what one might expect from a right-of-center Republican administration. (You could certainly make a good case that the Nixon administration was a lot closer to the actual center, at least on domestic issues.) The evidence has become pretty overwhelming that these policy outcomes are what the president actually believes in. Like the so-called health care "reform" package that so studiously preserves the prerogatives and profits of the insurance and drug industries. Oh sure, during the campaign he said a lot of stuff that could have been interpreted to mean that he was really offering us hope and change. But that was, you know, during a political campaign. During a political campaign people say stuff.

A "PARLIAMENTARY" PARTY IN OUR PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEM?

By now this is all old ground for DWT readers. Goodness knows, Howie and I have both railed endlessly about it. Tonight I want to throw in a case offered by Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale, where he also directs the Information Society Project. My attention was just today directed -- via a lovely post by Digby -- to the piece from which I quoted at the top, on the "Balkinization" blog, so I'm just now directing your attention to it.

Balkin's suggestion is that the American government has fallen victim to a disconnect between our "presidential" system of government and the realignment of our political parties into something closer to a European "parliamentary" system.

Parliamentary parties can work well in parliamentary systems with proportional representation; majority coalitions are formed by bargaining between parties to form new governments. In parliamentary systems ideological coherence and relatively tight control over individual members may actually help coalition parties make credible bargains to form successful governments.

But parliamentary parties are not well designed for the particular forms of give and take that are generally required in a presidential system. In a presidential system, members of different parties are expected to regularly cross party lines to form coalitions on particular questions (rather than on the formation of a government as a whole). Ideologically coherent and politically polarized parties do not perform these functions particularly well. Indeed, the most recent example of the rise of parliamentary parties in the United States is the party system shortly before the Civil War, in which political compromise increasingly became impossible.

In Balkin's terms, it seems clear that the Republican Party has completed its "parliamentary" transformation. We made fun of the R's while they were (a) jettisoning everyone leftward starting from what was once the political center and (b) enforcing strict party discipline on everyone left behind. But the result is a party capable of maintaining strict ideological discipline. (All they have to do to take power is con enough voters to go along with them.) Oh sure, Susie Q. Collins and those few others who like to make believe they're not party hacks are allowed to talk about the possibility of voting contrarily, but it will most always be under conditions that won't ever exist in our real world. When it comes to voting time, they'll vote right.

Professor Balkin does note that the Democratic Party hasn't been quite so completely transformed. This seems to me to be understating the case. True, the party has shed, or lost, its most extreme right-wing elements. The old Dixiecrats have long since migrated to the party of Lincoln (ha!). But the reason the Democrats are so woefully unable to stand up to the Republicans seems to me precisely because it has steadfastly refused to stand for anything, the better to maintain the ideologically wide-ranging coalition it is.

Why does it matter that the R's have transformed themselves into a parliamentary-type party?

In a parliamentary system, the party out of power has no obligation to govern, since the majority party (or coalition of parties) controls the levers of power. Instead, the main goal of the party out of power is to destroy the party in power's coalition and take over control of the government. The party out of power hopes to win a vote of no confidence or force the majority to call for an election in a disadvantageous political climate.

In the American system, with fixed terms for the president, it is not possible to call for a vote of no confidence. As a result, a parliamentary party in a presidential system will do the next best thing. It will attempt to force the wheels of government to grind to a halt and make the populace sick of the president's party, reasoning that if the voters become disgusted with government, they will take out their anger on the party associated with the current Administration.

The key point is that even though cooperation from the minority party may be necessary to govern effectively in a presidential system, the minority party does not have sufficient incentives to cooperate if voters will not punish them--and may even reward them at the next election--for making things worse instead of better. An opposition parliamentary-style party in the Senate can also seek to prevent the president from staffing his Administration or appointing new judges. An opposition party in control of either House can use the appropriations process to defund policy initiatives, undermine efficient administration, and hinder legal enforcement. Finally, an opposition parliamentary-style party can attempt to harass the President through investigative hearings and (as in 1998) through impeachment.

Balkin summarizes very nicely, I think, the fix we're in:

The original goal of separation of powers was to create incentives for deliberation and compromise. With parliamentary parties, deliberation and compromise are not taken seriously, because they do not assist the opposition party. Equally important, the opposition party can use its various forms of intra-party control to keep individual members from defecting and making too many deals that would advantage the president's party. The goal of the minority party is decidedly not to reason with the President's party, or to enable a series of deals between moderate factions for which the President might take credit. The goal, rather, is to make governance impossible so that the voters will punish the President's party and the minority party can take over.

This is what our current system has come to, and in my view, it is both pathological and unsustainable in the long run. Not only will it will produce ever more bitter and more polarized politics, it will also produce bad and ineffective government that will harm the national interest.

So how does the good professor see this playing out?

One should not assume that Congressional Republicans are acting this way because of bad faith or some set of personal failings. Rather, given the evolution of the Republican Party into an ideologically coherent parliamentary-style party in a presidential system, the Republicans are acting rationally. The Democrats, conversely, need to understand that they must work hard to break the Republicans' united front. They will not be able to do this simply by being nice to Republicans, or by attempting to meet the Republicans half-way, for if the Republicans are smart, they will not be assuaged by compromise. Their best strategy is to make Americans thoroughly disgusted with government in general, so that they will throw Barack Obama out of office in 2012. If the Democrats want to achieve anything legislatively in the next few years, they must create strategic problems for individual Republicans, causing them to break ranks despite the best efforts of the Republican leadership. The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party so.

The next time the Democrats become the minority party, they will have abundant incentives to do precisely what the Republicans are doing now, precisely because the Republicans have shown these strategies to be effective in a climate of ideological polarization. The Republicans fully developed many of their current tactics before the Democrats for three reasons. First, the failure of the Bush presidency and the tarnishing of the Republican brand made the development of these oppositional strategies more urgent for the Republicans following Obama's 2008 victory, when the Democrats controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress. Second, the Republicans became a more ideologically coherent party more quickly than the Democrats did because they continue to be driven by a powerful conservative social movement. Third, the Republicans have learned how to use campaign finance to discipline their members more effectively than the Democrats have. (In fact, the Democrats, eager to regain power, had recruited a more ideologically diverse group of candidates in 2006 and 2008). But there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power.

To which Digby (here's the link again) adds an eminently sensible take:

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don't want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing --- the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate.

Read the whole piece, it's not long and it explains how we got here and why it's a problem for a presidential system. (For instance, you can't call for elections when gridlock makes it impossible to govern.) And although he doesn't mention it, it's also why silly centrist notions like this are destined to do nothing but split the same party that's already outmatched by the hardcore Republicans, thus ensuring that the lunatic fringe of the GOP will continue to have the upper hand.

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Supreme Court in surprise Saturday session rules Obama ineligible for presidency, awards office to Jefferson Davis

Former Mississippi Sen. Jefferson Davis was designated
U.S. president today by the High Court.

EXCLUSIVE TO DOWNWITHTYRANNY

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Supreme Court ruled today by a unanimous 5-0 vote that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president and therefore was never legally elected.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said: "There seems to be a lot of question as to whether Senator Obama was born in Hawaii, or wherever, or indeed whether he was born at all, and in the absence of proof -- and his birth certificate wasn't 'proof' of anything, since how could we know it wasn't forged? -- we had no choice but to rule that his so-called election didn't mean squat."

According to the opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony "Candy Ass" Kennedy and Sammy "The Stoolie" Alito, Vice President Joe Biden's election was also overturned on the ground that "the Democrat ticket was fatally flawed by association."

Justice Clarence Thomas joined in the ruling but not the majority opinion. He said through newly appointed Supreme Court Communications Director Skip Skipperly that he had written a concurring opinion but that his dog ate it. "Besides," he was quoted as saying, "it's really none of your [expletive deleted] business anyway."

Replying to the question of who would now be president, Chief Justice Roberts said in a conference call with reporters from conservative media outlets across the country, "You mean Nino didn't mention that in his opinion? I suppose one of us really should have read it. I just hate it when he writes opinions while under the influence.

"Believe me, we kicked it around for a long time, I'll bet a good 20 minutes. The choice seemed pretty obvious, but after first receiving phone approval from U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who is now the country's official top legal authority, we decided it's gotta be Jefferson Davis."

The onetime U.S. senator from Mississippi was considered by most experts consulted by DownWithTyranny an unexpected choice, but one that, in the words of Fox News commentator Karl Rove, "could unite all factions of the Republican Party, not to mention finally healing the rift left by the War Between the States and the ensuing Reconstruction period."

As to whether Senator Davis's death in 1889 might affect his availability to assume the presidency, the chief justice laughed and said, "Oh right, like Al Gore and John Kerry were the life of the party. Look, I'm not saying Democrat Party members can't ever be president, just that they won't be."

The way the ruling was reached, as much as the ruling itself, surprised many longtime observers of the High Court. One legal and constitutional expert, who asked not to be identified on the ground that "those nuts might burn my house to the ground," expressed himself "deeply, deeply surprised" by the departure from precedent involved, first, in holding a Saturday session and, second, in holding it without, apparently, so much as informing their fellow justices.

"No, we, I mean they, didn't actually tell those other people about the meeting," said a source close to Chief Justice Roberts who declined to identify himself and was granted anonymity on the ground that he's afraid to identify himself. "Actually, it wasn't so much a meeting as a conference call. Well, no, really, by the time we had the conference call we'd all seen the paperwork faxed by Justice Scalia and we were in agreement, so the phone call was just a formality and a chance to say hi to the colleagues we value."

Asked whether he was saying that the five teleconferencing justices don't value their four other fellow justices, Chief Justice Roberts quickly said: "Oh no, we value them fine. Actually, we didn't want to disturb them is what it was, especially since we had 'Candy Ass' Anthony on board, meaning they were just going to lose anyway. And I know one of them is Jewish, so a Saturday powwow would have been bad for her, and did I mention she's a woman? And there's another one who's a woman. And one guy who's so old, you wouldn't believe it. Shouldn't he be at home resting?

"Then there's that other guy, Stanley something, I think it is -- Stanley, Stu, Storm, something like that. Frankly, I never used to pay much attention to him in the old days back when we all deliberated together. But don't tell him I said that. Stan's a heckuva nice guy, and really not all that secure."

None of the four justices not included in today's ruling were available for comment. New Court spokesman Skipperly said at first, "Hmm, sorry. Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor? Nope, those names just don't ring a bell," then allowed, "My updated information is that they may have gone away for a long, long time."

Recently retired Justice David Souter, reached at his home in New Hampshire, declined to comment, except to say, "I'm not surprised. It's sort of what I expected."

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