Capitolism

This Week on the Hill

By Christopher Hayes

Greg Kaufmann gives a run-down of a busy upcoming week on Capitol Hill:

The Rest of the Week

The House and Senate negotiated a final budget resolution Monday night and will vote on it this week. It includes "reconciliation instructions" which would allow healthcare and education legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than the filibuster-proof 60 votes. It should be fun to watch the histrionics of Republican Sen. Judd Gregg as he does a 180 from his days in the Majority and claims that reconciliation will basically bring down the Republic. (Jon Stewart had a blast with this earlier this month -- worth checking out at the 05:05 mark.)

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April 28, 2009

Is Obama Our Nixon?

By Christopher Hayes

My final weekly 100 Days column is in the magazine this week, and up on the web here. For the foreseeable future, we're going to convert the column to a biweekly one, so I can do some more feature reporting. (We'll have to come up with a new name. Suggestions welcome in comments.)

I've had some interesting exchanges with readers and friends about this Notes on Change column, and wanted to expand and clarify one of the points. A number people have said they found my tone somber, even pessimistic. But while I've found much of the last three months frustrating, I've also started to come around to a view about Obama and his role in the story of American progress that's a bit different, I think, than the prevailing CW among left-liberals in the District.

The standard view I encounter is that the left has a once-in-a-generation (maybe once in a century) opportunity to enact its agenda, and if we don't do it now, and quickly, we're sunk. I'm sympathetic to this view because it's true that crisis really does create opportunity, because conservatism really is as discredited as its been in decades, and because the American constitutional system is so unruly and hostile to change that electoral alignments like the one Democrats currently enjoy are rare.

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April 27, 2009

The Nefarious Al Gore

By Greg Kaufmann

Scalise, Sleaze, and the Nefarious Al Gore

Al Gore was on the Hill to endorse the House climate bill at an Energy and Commerce hearing. He was armed as always with the latest science, opening by announcing that new data shows the Artic ice cap may be about to completely disappear "if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution. For most of the last 3 million years, it has covered an area the size of the lower 48 states."

Republicans, no longer able to argue with Gore on the merits -- even the New York Times revealed that an association of Big Polluters buried its own scientific report affirming man-made global warming fourteen years ago -- desperately tried to cast aspersions on the Nobel Peace Prize-winning messenger.

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April 26, 2009

Whitewashing Torture In Front of the CIA

By Christopher Hayes

Ok, I understand these are hard-working civil servants. A lot of them do wonderful, conscientious, vital work, etc. I understand the importance for a new president to show he supports them, "feels their pain," etc. But his whitewashing of the past was pretty disgusting. He said something to the extent of "mistakes that were potentially made in the past." Sorry. That's not good enough. Not at all. Forcing water down someone's throat to trigger the drowning reflex six times a day every day for a month is not a "mistake potentially made in the past," and no degree of euphemism, spinning or wanting to "look forward" makes it anything other than a war crime.

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April 20, 2009

This Week On The Hill

By Christopher Hayes

Congress is back from recess today and so is Capitolism. Greg Kaufmann previews what's on tap:

Recess is over, some big fights ahead -- like the budget, healthcare, and energy policy -- and we'll see some of that playing out this week.

For starters, there's the FY10 budget. The House passed its version, so did the Senate, and now negotiations for the final bill begin. Expect to hear continued talk about whether to include "reconciliation instructions" which would allow the Senate to pass the bill with a simple majority, instead of needing 60 votes. Another issue will be whether to include an absurd Senate amendment to cut the estate tax for the wealthiest Americans.

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April 20, 2009

21st Century Imperialism?

By Christopher Hayes

Laura Dean asks:

Secretary Gates tells us: the 2010 defense budget cuts will "profoundly reform how this department does business." Well alright, but whom do we look to to help usher in this new era of military responsibility?

At the Middle East Institute last week, David Kilcullen, the widely discussed "counterinsurgency theorist" presented his book, The Accidental Guerilla. On the face of it, David Kilcullen and his ilk seem a welcome alternative to the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney. An anthropologist by training he advocates (convincingly) for "large scale civil military assistance" with the military serving primarily to protect the population while living among them to allow for more informed and targeted deployment.

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April 17, 2009

Why Is Goldman Paying Back The Government?

By Christopher Hayes

A reader emails to make a very interesting point about Goldman's plan to issue $5 billion common stock in order to pay back its TARP funds:

You've probably seen the news about Goldman Sachs: The investment bank, after posting $1.7 billion in profits, is planning to pay back its TARP money so it can escape from compensation restrictions.

Last fall, Goldman also raised capital from Warren Buffett, who got a sweet deal: $5 billion worth of preferred shares paying a 10% annual dividend.

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April 15, 2009

Paper Industry Panics

By Christopher Hayes

My column in this week's issue of The Nation -- about the paper industry exploiting an alternative fuel tax credit -- has gotten some attention in the blogosphere. Today, I recorded an interview for the NPR program Living on Earth, which should be out tomorrow.

It also seems like the paper industry has taken notice. Check out the memo forwarded to me by a source:

Subject: Help Needed: Alternative Fuel Mixture Tax Credit

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April 8, 2009

The Senate is Broken

By Christopher Hayes

Over the weekend, during a drive to and from New York I listened to Steven Johnson's enjoyable and stimulating new book The Invention of Air. It's about a British scientist/preacher/philosopher named Joseph Priestly who, among other things, discovered oxygen, invented soda and was good friends with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Any time I revisit the Founders, their writing and their thinking, I'm always struck by the streak of Burkean conservatism that ran through many of them. Their fear of the mob (and, well, democracy) and their desire to keep power broadly distributed, but also out of the hands of the riff raff. In many respects the arc of American political history is more and more democracy, wider circles of enfranchisment, preserving the founder's belief in checks and balances, while jettisoning their distrust of the ability of people to effectively self-govern.

The massive exception to this is the United States senate, which has only grown more undemocratic and more minoritarian over the years. Since population distributions have grown more unequal (California has 68 times the people of Wyoming), the imbalance of representation has also grown. Filibusters have gone from being a relatively rarely invoked tactical gambit, to a de facto super majority requirement for all legislation. And the evolution of the "hold" means that each individual senator can more or less bring the body to a halt.

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March 31, 2009

Week In Preview

By Christopher Hayes

From Greg Kaufmann:

Now that Obama has announced his Af/Pak strategy there will be a whole host of hearings about it this week.

One that was already in the works was the Congressional Progressive Caucus' second forum in a six-part series. (You can read about the first forum here.) Wednesday the CPC will explore the question "Will the policies and goals of the Obama Administration serve our strategic interests?" Speakers include Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell; Joanne Trotter, Director of Programs with the Aga Khan Foundation, USA; and Abdulkader Sinno, professor of political science and middle eastern studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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March 30, 2009