The Debate Link

Surely by now you've seen the stories about GOP congressmen, in deep red districts, being absolutely swarmed by angry constituents furious that they're not standing up to Trump, Musk, DOGE, and the buzzsaw attack on hardworking federal employees.

My thesis about this will be twofold. First, there's objectively less to these events than meets the eye. And second, it doesn't matter that there's objectively less to these events than meets the eye, and we should all behave like they're exactly what they appear to be.

Start with the first. The excitement over these protests relates to the sense that anger and outrage over Trump has expanded beyond the blue bubbles and is penetrating even dark red terrain. But the mistake here is something I alluded to in my How To Tokenize with Proportions post. A congressional district where a Republican won by, say, a 66-33 margin is by any measure a dark-red district. But it also is a district where one in three voters voted Democrat. One in three is a lot of people! In a congressional district of 750,000, it's 250,000 people! It is not hard to fill a high school auditorium, particularly if that 250,000 is feeling especially angry and activated.

It's an issue of framing, if you're generous, or innumeracy, if you're not: 33% doesn't feel very common, 1 in 3 feels very common. Politically speaking, the former is closer to accurate, which is why congressional districts where one sees 66/33 margins aren't typically treated as competitive.

But what innumeracy taketh away, innumeracy also giveth. The fact is that most people see a crowd of angry constituents filling an auditorium in a deep-red district and don't start doing math about how easy or hard it is to fill up the space given the baseline number of Democrats around. They just see the crowd. Politics is often a game of perception and of momentum -- people see others in their community and in their spaces expressing anger and fear and frustration, and it validates their own nascent feelings of anger, fear, and frustration. It makes them feel like they're not alone. It encourages them that these sentiments are common in their community, and that they're not weird or outcasts or loners if they feel them too. All of that starts to build a narrative conducive to resistance. And even if it doesn't mean the deepest-red congressional districts will flip blue in 2026, it gets that permission structure going that will make life very difficult for Republicans in more vulnerable seats.

So keep swarming. Keep yelling. Keep sharing those vids. Build up that narrative that people everywhere are mad as hell, and they're ready to fight. In politics, image becomes reality before you know it.

In my congressional district, local media is now projecting that Janelle Bynum has ousted incumbent Republican Representative Lori Chavez-Deremer. As terrible as election day was on the whole, I am grateful that I'll be represented by a Democrat in Congress once again, and I'm glad my neighbors made the right choice in sending Bynum to Congress.

Meanwhile, across the river in Washington state, Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won her rematch against Republican challenger Joe Kent. This was a result that thrills and honestly confuses me. Perez's 2022 victory over Kent was one of the night's bigger upsets, largely chalked up to Kent being basically a White supremacist. But clearly the lesson of 2024 is that that's no longer any object, and if you told me ahead of time that election night would see a broad-based "red shift" compared to 2020 I would have been dead certain that Perez was absolute toast. So why exactly did this nut crack? I don't have an answer to that,* and I acknowledge that Perez has annoyed Democratic leadership before. But she seems to have some ideas of how to present progressive priorities in a way that speaks outside of our current base (e.g., her championing of "right to repair" laws, or pairing student loan debt relief with "dollar-for-dollar ... investments in career [and] technical education"), and she is a voice worth paying attention to going forward.

Needless to say, both Bynum and Perez bucked a pretty terrible national trend. As most of the country embraced the chaos and the void, the single, solitary exception was the Pacific Northwest. Here, we rejected crude reflex and base instinct. And it's not just the local congressional races. In the Portland mayor's race, we didn't pick the woman who thinks the law doesn't apply to her just because she's "progressive", and we didn't pick the man who wants to execute the homeless because he promised "law and order". Our new mayor is going to be Keith Wilson, whose major appeal in the field, from my vantage point, is that he seemed like a normal, good guy making reasonable efforts to resolve the problems in front of our city. That shouldn't always be enough, but in the field we had it was better than all the alternatives.  In my city council district, I felt like we had a plethora of good candidates to choose from, and the three winners all were among my top six picks. Here too, I'm very happy with the choices offered and choices made, and none of them seem (yet, anyway) like kooks, cranks, or gadflies. I'm optimistic that they will be diligent and attentive public servants when they enter office, and again, that's not something I take for granted anymore.

It is, of course, quite off-brand for Portland to be America's avatar of normalcy. Locally, we're more used to embracing our "weird" identity, nationally, our reputation is something like that of a post-apocalyptic drag show. "Normal" is not historically our forte.

But for my part, I am so, so happy that this is the city my wife and I have chosen to build our life in and raise our child in. Portland is a great city. It is full of great people, great beauty, great resources, great activities, and great values. I'm under no illusions that anywhere, blue states included, will be "safe" in the coming years. But there are very few places I'd rather be than here, and if you're looking for a new place to call home, I'd encourage you to look our way.

* One thing I will say, and someone inundated with ads for the Perez/Kent race, is that Kent went 100% all-in on anti-trans fearmongering. The result was Perez likely expanding her margin of victory in an otherwise red wave year. Take from that what you will.

A newly-ascendent doctrine the Supreme Court has used to strike down disfavored executive regulations is the so-called "Major Questions Doctrine". The MQD, in essence, says that we should not assume that Congress has legislated on issues of major social or economic importance unless it does so very, very clearly. This means that even where the plain statutory text seems to authorize presidential action, courts can still nullify it if they decide that Congress' language was not "clear" enough given the magnitude of the policy at issue.

For example, in NFIB v. OSHA, the Supreme Court invalidated the Department of Labor's vaccine mandate despite statutory text authorizing OSHA to issue emergency rules when necessary to protect employees against "grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards." COVID-19, of course, is an "agent" which poses "grave danger" to employees, so it would appear based on the plain language that Congress had authorized this course of action. But no, said the Supreme Court -- if Congress wanted to authorize OSHA issuing blanket rules covering essentially all employers across the entire economy, it needed to be even clearer than that.

Many critics have assailed the MQD as the Court abandoning textualism when it conflicts with conservative policy preferences. In response, conservatives have tried to argue that the doctrine can be reconciled with textualism because the MQD comports with how ordinary readers read texts. In the student loan case, Justice Barrett made a popular version of this argument:

Consider a parent who hires a babysitter to watch her young children over the weekend. As she walks out the door, the parent hands the babysitter her credit card and says: "Make sure the kids have fun." Emboldened, the babysitter takes the kids on a road trip to an amusement park, where they spend two days on rollercoasters and one night in a hotel. Was the babysitter's trip consistent with the parent's instruction? Maybe in a literal sense, because the instruction was open-ended. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent's instruction? Highly doubtful. In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park….

Problem one with this defense is that it turns out Justice Barrett's intuitions may not be accurate. A new article actually empirically tested Justice Barrett's example and found that most respondents did not find the babysitter's actions to be unreasonable. Whoops. (Kudos to Ilya Somin for at least acknowledging that this study is countervailing evidence against his own affinity for the MQD).

But my problem with this analogy is a little different: is it really fair to characterize the President as akin to Congress' babysitter? The Executive and Congress are coequal branches of government. Their relationship is not as one-sidedly hierarchical as the parent who makes a one-off hire of a babysitter. If we adjusted the hypothetical so it was two parents, one leaving on a business trip and who tells the other "make sure the kids have fun this weekend!", I doubt anyone would find the choice of the stay-at-home parent to take the kids to an amusement park to be even remotely problematic.

Now, I'll concede a potential problem with the revised hypothetical: the relationship between two parents doesn't generally involve delegations of authority. Mom and dad both are generally authorized to make choices about the kids on their own initiative. By contrast, nominally under our separation of powers system the executive is only empowered to act upon authorization by Congress.

I'm not sure this objection fully holds, however, and in any event it can be easily traversed. It doesn't necessarily hold because -- as any couple knows -- lack of a formal hierarchy between spouses does not mean that it's impossible for there to be instructions and acrimony where they're not followed. If mom says "make sure the kids take a bath", and dad lets them get away with just running through the sprinkler -- well, woe is about to fall upon dad, and it'll be worse for him still if he comes back with "as a co-equal parent, I am equally authorized to make parenting decisions on my own initiative."

But even if we think the parent-to-parent relationship doesn't quite work, it still seems clear that the relationship between Congress and the President is still more distant from a parent and babysitter. So how about parent and grandparent. Take Justice Barrett's hypothetical, but it's grandma watching the kids for the weekend. Grandma, unlike dad, does only have delegated authority to look after the kids. But nonetheless, I think very few people would think that grandma's amusement park trip would be unreasonable or out-of-bounds. The fact that grandma is herself part of the family, and not some random acne-faced fifteen year old, makes a huge difference in terms of what should be deemed reasonable.

When Congress passes laws for the executive to enforce, it is not "delegating" power to some ad hoc temporary babysitter who may or may not ever be hired again for $20/hour plus tips. It is interacting with an intimate family member with whom it has a long-standing relationship that will continue across a multitude of cases into perpetuity. That sort of relationship, it seems to me, makes the MQD less feasible. That Congress wouldn't be presumed give some random stranger authorization to make "major" alterations to social or economic policy does not mean that Congress wouldn't be presumed to give the President of the United States such alterations -- particularly when we're talking about legislation that is by its nature inherently imbricated in issues of major social and economic concern (workplace safety, environmental protection, educational access, and so on).

Apparently brokered by the AJC, Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-MI) announced the creation of a new bipartisan Congressional Black-Jewish Caucus. The other co-founding members are Reps. John Lewis (D-GA), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Will Hurd (R-TX), and Lee Zeldin (R-NY). Its stated goals are to:

• Raise awareness of each community's sensitivities and needs, in Congress and around the country.
• Provide resources to members of Congress to empower them to bring African-American and Jewish communities together, combating stereotypes and hate and showcasing commonalities.
• Support stronger hate crimes legislation and advocate for increased government resources to confront the threat of white supremacist ideology.
• Support legislation and work to expand access to democracy and protect election integrity.

No comment other than to note that Justice Jackson took time off from his duties as a Supreme Court Justice to be the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials:

Executive power has the advantage of concentration in a single head in whose choice the whole Nation has a part, making him the focus of public hopes and expectations. In drama, magnitude and finality, his decisions so far overshadow any others that, almost alone, he fills the public eye and ear. No other personality in public life can begin to compete with him in access to the public mind through modern methods of communications. By his prestige as head of state and his influence upon public opinion, he exerts a leverage upon those who are supposed to check and balance his power which often cancels their effectiveness.

Moreover, rise of the party system has made a significant extraconstitutional supplement to real executive power. No appraisal of his necessities is realistic which overlooks that he heads a political system, as well as a legal system. Party loyalties and interests, sometimes more binding than law, extend his effective control into branches of government other than his own, and he often may win, as a political leader, what he cannot command under the Constitution. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, commenting on the President as leader both of his party and of the Nation, observed, "If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible. . . . His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it."

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers. 

The essence of our free Government is "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law" -- to be governed by those impersonal forces which we call law. Our Government is fashioned to fulfill this concept so far as humanly possible. The Executive, except for recommendation and veto, has no legislative power. The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President, and represents an exercise of authority without law. No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance, and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. We do not know today what powers over labor or property would be claimed to flow from Government possession if we should legalize it, what rights to compensation would be claimed or recognized, or on what contingency it would end. With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. 

Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.

343 U.S. 579, 653-65 (1952).

Daily Kos Elections has an interesting post listing those House members who represent a district whose population is either majority- or plurality of a different race (e.g., a White member representing a plurality Latino district).

I was a bit surprised at the partisan diversity here. There are, for example, 30 majority- or plurality-white districts represented by a non-White member. Of those, eight are Republican (five Latinos, two Native Americans, and one African-American). There are 21 majority- or plurality-Latino districts represented by non-Latinos, of which five are Republican-represented (four Whites, one African-American).

Anyway, it's an interesting list to poke around in. Have a look.

There are about a million and one things I dislike about Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly's recent speech on immigration policy. But there's one part that has a grain of truth to it:

[F]or members of Congress who don’t like the laws, Kelly said they “should have the courage and skill to change the laws. Otherwise they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”

Even this passage is mostly wrong. But I will say this: I'm sick and tired of members of Congress who somberly say that they don't necessarily support this or that Trump immigration policy, that we need to be humane, that we shouldn't be tearing apart families, that we should protect DREAMers and DACA recipients -- and then proceed to do nothing tangible about it. If you're in Congress, your value-added isn't what you say on a talk show. It's the bills you write, the hearings you hold, and the votes you cast. And while talk can matter as a means of rallying and crystallizing public support, ultimately, if your chatter isn't backed up along those metrics (bills/hearings/votes), it's meaningless to me.

On Syria, I have for the last several years stuck to the position that (a) it's an incredibly complicated and delicate situation with many moving parts that (b) doesn't admit to easy or obvious answers. During the Obama administration, I observed that many Republicans seemed to deal with this difficulty by waiting for Obama to tip his hand as to what he would do, so they could immediately and fervently advocate the opposite. This being a bad way to come to one's policy beliefs, I decided I would refrain from making sweeping pronouncements favoring or denouncing either interventionist or non-interventionist activities.

That logic continues to hold with respect to the recent airstrike launched by the Trump administration, done in response to a horrifying chemical weapon attack perpetuated by the Assad regime that yielded some ghastly images of dead or wounded Syrian men, women, and children. I don't think it is something that should evoke strong feelings -- if for no other reason than it was virtually entirely symbolic (the targeted airfield quickly was restored to operational status). In terms of actual, tangible policy towards Syria, the main differences between Trump and Obama can expressed succinctly as follows:

Trump would rather Syrian children die in Syria than survive in the US.

That's all. I suppose you could also say that Trump's wildly oscillating views on whether Assad should stay or go count as a "difference", and it doesn't strike me as implausible that the Trump administration publicly declaring that we no longer wanted Assad out is what emboldened the dictator to launch his chemical strike.

But really, this is the main difference. Syria is a complex, difficult situation, but what's incontestable is that it is producing a refugee population which wants nothing more than to escape the horrifying violence in Syria. The Obama administration wanted to rescue those civilians. The Trump administration insists that they stay in Syria and die. That's the function of the refugee ban. That's Trump's signature policy vis-a-vis Syria. Not a few rockets from a Navy destroyer.

Anyone who is chest-puffing about the toughness of Trump re: Syria who isn't appalled by the refugee ban gets a first-class ticket to my list of people whom I have no interest in listening to on Syria.

That was the main point I wanted to make, but briefly I also want to discuss concerns over the lack of explicit congressional authorization for the strike. The lack of congressional authorization is what deterred Obama from attacking Assad directly, though he did launch airstrikes targeting ISIS in Syria on a regular basis, and in any event Obama previously had attacked Libya without authorization (misgivings over the results of that action no doubt acted to stay Obama's hands when Syria proceeded to flare up). While I'm not opposed to congressional authorization requirements per se, the fact is that Congress virtually never presses the issue and it's therefore been a non-issue for every presidential administration in my lifetime -- used almost exclusively as one-off partisan attacks. Congress, indeed, seems very much to prefer not having the responsibility for authorizing military force rest on its shoulders -- the same voices crowing about how Trump is strong and Obama is weak seemed utterly uninterested in actually getting the Republican Congress to actually commit to voting to endorse such actions.

So I can't bring myself to care about the lack of congressional authorization either way. Presidents of all parties and stripes take actions like this regularly, it is not worse nor better when President Trump does it. Ditto international law issues, where (as Julien Ku wryly observes) everyone thinks the attack on Syria was illegal except for virtually all the governments in the world.

The House GOP caucus has beaten a hasty retreat from its proposal to gut their independent ethics oversight body, thanks to a firestorm of calls from angry constituents. A good example of what angry constituents can still accomplish. But also a good opportunity to start imposing a narrative on 2017.

As far as I'm concerned, the second Trump is inaugurated is the second that the DNC and affiliated organizations should start cutting ads hammering Republicans on ethics. Over and over and over again. Drain they swamp? They are the swamp! And the more quickly that narrative is established, the harder it will be for congressional Republicans to wriggle free of it come 2018. Take this script:

Entrenched corruption in Washington. Politicians in the pocket of Wall Street billionaires. Foreign states interfering in American elections. Unprecedented conflicts of interest. 

And the first thing [John Doe] did in 2017? He voted to "gut" Congress' independent ethics watchdog.

Drain the swamp? John Doe IS the swamp.

No credit for having second thoughts. Run it until they bleed.

It is a long-standing piece of advice on this blog to never listen to journalists talking about a legal issue, because they will butcher it. Badly. I would like to be able to say that this is contradistinction to listening to someone who (a) is a member of Congress and (b) has written the legal provision in question. Alas, that isn't always the case either, as the latest fiasco surrounding Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) demonstrates.

For those of you who missed out on the latest, there is a media narrative that Senator Cotton (while a House member) introduced langauge that "would 'automatically' punish family members of people who violate U.S. sanctions against Iran, levying sentences of up to 20 years in prison." In other words, the claim is that if I violated Iranian sanctions policy, Cotton's amendment would allow for my mom to be tossed in jail for 20 years ("automatically").

The Popehat link above pretty conclusively demonstrates that this is untrue: the law prohibits trade with certain high-ranking Iranian officials; Cotton's amendment would have similarly prohibited trade with close relatives of these officials (so, for example, one could not evade the sanctions by giving a fat contract to the prohibited-person's wife). This is a policy that can be supported or opposed on the merits (it does close a loophole for getting around the sanctions program, but it also arguably punishes innocent people if the bad guy's grandson has no real connection to the human rights violations). But no matter what you think of it, it is not (and is a far cry from) what is described in the preceding paragraph -- jail terms for family members of those who violate the sanctions law.

The problem is that Cotton, Harvard J.D. '02, doesn't seem to know what his own law would do. In a colloquy with then-Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) (Harvard J.D., '83 -- Harvard Law really is coming out poorly here), it is evident that neither one understands how this law interacts with a mens rea requirement. Honestly, Grayson seems more confused here than Cotton does -- but since it's Cotton's language, it would be nice if had cleared things up rather than engaging in irrelevant blather about the constitutional rights of Iranian citizens. Instead we got much confusion in Congress, which, naturally, the media made far worse by conflating who can and can't be traded with with who will be punished.

In conclusion, never trust anyone about anything, because everyone is a moron.

Today I learned an interesting historical tidbit about America's relationship with Indian tribes: In several early treaties, we offered Tribes a "delegate" to Congress. A treaty with the Delaware in 1778 offered "a representation in Congress" to a potential envisioned confederation between the Delaware and other tribes (with the Delaware presumed to be the head of that newly created state). Similarly, a 1775 treaty with the Cherokee allowed them "to send a deputy of their choice" to Congress. Both of these predate the end of the Revolutionary War, but the 1836 Treaty of New Echota between the United States and the Cherokee Nation contains similar language applicable to the modern Congress:

The Cherokee nation having already made great progress in civilization and deeming it important that every proper and laudable inducement should be offered to their people to improve their condition as well as to guard and secure in the most effectual manner the rights guarantied to them in this treaty, and with a view to illustrate the liberal and enlarged policy of the Government of the United States towards the Indians in their removal beyond the territorial limits of the States, it is stipulated that they shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.

The Treaty of New Echota was the basis by which Congress justified removal of the Cherokee to present-day Oklahoma (the notorious "trail of tears"). And the delegate provision has never been implemented.

Still, it is an interesting fact of American and American Indian history that I was hitherto unaware of. The more you know!

Interesting tidbit from Justice Scalia's Windsor dissent: He seems to endorse congressional guerilla warfare against the presidency as the right way for separation of powers questions to be hashed out between the legislature and executive.

Our system is designed for confrontation. That is what "[a]mbition . . . counteract[ing] ambition,"The Federalist, No. 51, at 322 (J. Madison), is all about. If majorities in both Houses of Congress care enough about the matter, they have available innumerable ways to compel executive action without a lawsuit—from refusing toconfirm Presidential appointees to the elimination offunding. (Nothing says "'enforce the Act" quite like
". . . or you will have money for little else.").

Slip. op. at 14.

I bet I can guess his vote in Noel Canning.

All I really knew about Ackerman was that he was a seemingly run-of-the-mill NYC Jewish Democrat. So the tidbits about him in the story about his surprise retirement were particularly entertaining:

Mr. Ackerman had always baffled people on the Hill. He was hard to miss in the corridors of Congress, always wearing a white carnation boutonniere on his lapel and pulling up to work in white 1966 Plymouth Valiant.

And unlike other lawmakers who live in apartments, hotels and houses during the week while Congress is in session, he lived on a houseboat called the Unsinkable II, a 42-foot vessel with one room that was docked on the Potomac River, just miles from Capitol Hill. (The Unsinkable I sank in the Potomac in the mid-1980s.)

The district is solidly Democratic, but there will undoubtedly be some primary action on the blue side after this announcement.

I mentioned earlier that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) had threatened to impeach Colleen Mathis, the chair of the state's independent redistricting committee, nominally for relatively non-specified malfeasance, in reality because the commission produced a map that was "only" slanted 4-2 in favor of Republican safe seats over Democratic ones (with another 3 seats competitive). Well, she followed through with their threat and the Republican-controlled state senate impeached Mathis. Mathis and the commissioned then sued, and today the Arizona Supreme Court just ordered her reinstated. The order is here, with a fuller opinion to follow.

Like David Nir, I am a bit surprised by this decision -- not because I didn't think the move by the Arizona state senate was a reckless abuse of power (it was), but because I thought this could easily be considered a non-justiciable political question. The Court concluded that it was not (not being particularly knowledgeable about Arizona state law, I have no idea whether they are correct or not), and found that the letter Brewer sent to Mathis spelling out her "allegations" did not rise to the level of offenses warranting impeachment.

Shocking news out of Arizona, where Gov. Jan Brewer (R) is threatening impeachment proceedings against the state's non-partisan redistricting commission because it failed to sufficiently gerrymander the maps for Republicans. The map it released has 4 safe GOP seats, 2 safe Democratic seats, and three competitive ones -- hardly something Republicans should be bawling over.

But Arizona politics have of late taken a decided step towards the lawless, with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio leading the charge by issuing indictments of his political opponents (where "political" here includes judges trying to curb his reckless abuses of power). So far, it hasn't seemed to dampen Sheriff Joe's political popularity amongst Arizona Republicans; so why not take a page from his book by threatening to impeachment independent commissioners as a suasion mechanism?

It's been awhile since I took high school civics, but I think I recall the basics: The House and the Senate both have to pass it, and then the President signs it. There are some wrinkles involving vetoes and conference negotiations and whatnot, but the basics aren't too difficult.

Unless, apparently, you're the GOP Majority Leader in the House. Then a bill becomes a law solely upon action by the House, regardless of whether the Senate and President like it or not:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said at a press conference that Republicans would consider the Government Shutdown Prevention Act on Friday. The bill would make H.R. 1 law if the Senate fails to pass a measure “before April 6” to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. H.R. 1, which passed the House but has gone nowhere in the Senate, would fund the government through the end of September and seeks to cut $61 billion in spending.

Despite GOP claims to the contrary, the Government Shutdown Prevention Act would not become law unless the Senate also approves it and the president signs it into law, neither of which is expected to occur.

In other basic checks-and-balances news, the Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General says that the state's new anti-union law is "absolutely" still in effect despite a state judge's restraining order blocking the law from going into effect (a temporary measure while the judge determines whether the passage of the law violated the state's open meetings requirement).

While I understand the impetus for mixed-party seating at the State of the Union after Tuscon, and I even think it is, all told, sweet, I do think that the "statement" it makes regard a new era of bipartisan cooperation is, well, overstated. Hence, I was amused to read this statement by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on the event:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, asked reporters covering Tuesday's State of the Union address not to spend too much time focusing on prom-like questions about where Republicans and Democrats are sitting, but instead to concentrate on the content of President Obama's speech.

"It's like going to the prom and who's wearing what dress," Murkowski said. "And to a certain extent this has been a little bit of a dating show. You know, who are you going with? Reminds me a little of 8th grade."

That is, in fact, exactly what it reminds me of, and I thank Senator Murkowski for giving words to my inchoate senses on the subject.

I understand folks are disappointed that Bill Halter lost his bid to unseat Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AK). But the news wasn't all bad yesterday. Marcy Winograd -- best known for advocating the dissolution of Israel and implying that Henry Waxman had dual loyalties -- was soundly defeated in a primary challenge to Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA). Harman won by nearly 18 percentage points -- roughly in line with her 2008 results against Winograd. Contrary to what GOP talking points might have you believe, rabid anti-Israelism will not, in fact, get you elected in a Democratic primary (in fact, all the evidence shows that it turns Democratic voters off).

Check out this Gallup poll on the most trusted institutions in American life (or, more precisely, the ones we have the most "confidence" in):


That the military is at the top doesn't surprise me at all (though I think some founding fathers might choke). But when did the Supreme Court dip so low? I always thought a persistent feature in American politics was that the Supreme Court tends to receive consistently high ratings?

Meanwhile, there is something dysfunctional when, in a democratic system, the most democratic branch only has the confidence of 17% of the populace.

Via

The final tally was 344 in favor to 36 opposed (22 "present"). Among the nays were three Republicans: Charles Boustany (LA), Geoff Davis (KY), and Ron Paul (TX), with two more GOPers voting present (Walter Jones (NC) and John Duncan (TN)). All the folks who have represented me in Congress (Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), John Kline (R-MN), and Bobby Rush (D-IL) voted aye (full roll call here).

I blogged about the resolution here, but since that time the resolution was altered mildly to clarify Judge Goldstone's efforts to get the mandate expanded, and his relative lack of success in doing so.