Currently viewing the tag: "Barack Obama"

Saturday In Local: Will Next SCOTUS Justice Be A Californian?

by Lev on 18 February 2012

Via SFist, a very intriguing notion by Tom Goldstein:

But taking all of the criteria into account, as things stand now, there is only one candidate who otherwise fits the bill of the ideal [Supreme Court] nominee:

Kamala Harris (47), Attorney General of California [...]

I do not know a ton about Harris personally, but everyone knowledgeable with whom I’ve spoken has been very impressed.  Having won statewide elected office in California, it is unlikely that she has significant skeletons in her closet.  In 2015, she will be fifty years old.  She is regarded as a liberal and death penalty opponent, but her background is almost entirely in law enforcement, and she has written and spoken in great detail about criminal justice policy.  She opposed referenda that would legalize medical marijuana and driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants; she prosecuted parents of truant children.  Like the President, she is biracial.  She has also long been well known to the Administration, having been the first California elected official to endorse Barack Obama’s candidacy.  (Her brother-in-law is Assistant Attorney General Tony West.)

He says that the timing would likely be pretty poor, that an opening would most likely occur during Harris’s campaign for re-election as AG or while positioning herself for a run for Governor. So who knows. But she’s definitely an impressive figure that I think would be confirmable. She’s light on judicial experience, but she’s qualified for the job and I like to see some diversity in background on the Court. Citizens United was the product of groupthink to a some degree, I think. Harris’s role in the recent mortgage settlement has definitely attracted quite a bit of attention, and it’ll be great for the state, we could seriously use the money (homeowners in particular will really be helped out by it, and they need it). She’d have a great roll-out, perhaps even better than Sotomayor’s since Harris is more accustomed to operating in the media limelight. Lot of positives there. And I don’t really think the death penalty has much juice in it left as a polarizing issue–her failed GOP opponent in 2010 went at that angle so ferociously, one could have worried he was going to load up a Baretta with hollowpoints and go up to SF to prove a point. But I could be wrong about that–where was birth control a month ago?

I’d definitely like to see another Californian on the Court. If freaking Arizona got two Justices for twentysomething years, why can’t we get two for a few years until Tony Kennedy infuriates both sides for the final time? Goldstein also mentions another Californian, Ninth Circuit nominee Jacqueline Nguyen, as a possibility. She is getting bumped up after being appointed to her district judge post by…Barack Obama. Pretty cool if he could push her all the way to the top, no?

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Oh, Come On

by Lev on 13 February 2012

I love TNC as much as anyone, but this does not sit right with me:

My sense from the article is that Romney actually was pro-life, in his heart, but had no hope of winning with such a position in Massachusetts. So he lied, claimed to be pro-choice, and has now flipped back again.

That seems par for the course in presidential politics. I don’t see much difference between this and the president’s “evolving” position on gay marriage.

TNC could be right on Romney being pro-life deep down (I have no idea), and I think he is right that Obama’s opposition to gay marriage is entirely political and will undoubtedly vanish around February 2013, one way or another. But Obama’s actual substantive positions are not really that different from what, say, Andrew Cuomo would promise LGBT activists were he running this year. Obama wants to repeal DOMA, which is the whole ballgame on a federal level, and he can package that whichever way he wants to so long as he does his best to follow through. What Obama didn’t do was to promise Rick Warren and NOM that he’d be an exceptional advocate for their positions, adopt a top-to-bottom antigay agenda, et al. Which is the equivalent of what Romney did as Governor of Massachusetts, adopting the substance and the label, and even attempting to be a national leader on the issue.

I think it would be great if President Obama were to favor marriage equality openly. But he favors it de facto, which makes it a somewhat smaller deal for me. Romney didn’t favor a pro-life stance in any way until 2005 or so. Obama plays with the packaging but the substance is essentially unaffected, while Romney is willing to change what’s in the box at a whim. If there’s a good comparison to be made here, I’m missing it.

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Overplaying Your Hand, Or Why John Boehner Is A Really Sucky House Speaker

by Lev on 8 February 2012

The Administration’s employer-provided birth control policy has generated some, ahem, interesting pushback. Personally, I’m not moved by appeals to the integrity of the Catholic Church, but it really does appear as though HHS Secretary Sebelius and the Administration weren’t quite prepared for this particular tempest in a teapot. Even the liberal E.J. Dionne is upset about it, and you know what that means!

Seriously, though, I have to give the conservatives credit on this. The indications are uniform that the public (and Catholics in general, too) are not on their side. But they’ve managed to make this into a real headache for Democrats and have even managed to make it seem like it’s not entirely a partisan thing. That’s smart politics, it really is, and I’m always for credit where it’s due. But just count on this man to ruin it for them by going and pushing a bill to block it:

House Speaker John Boehner delivered a scathing attack from the House floor today on the Obama administration’s mandate that health insurers offer birth control coverage.

Escalating the already intense debate over the new requirement, Congress’ most powerful Republican called it an “attack on religious freedom.”

Conservatives have complained in recent days that the rule will force employers who object to contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs to cover those services. Catholic charities, universities and hospitals often object to such procedures.

It is unusual for a House speaker to address the House from the floor, as Boehner did today.

“This attack by the federal government on religious freedom in our country must not stand and will not stand,” he vowed.

Here’s why this is dumb. Right now, conservatives have some leverage here. The Obama Administration has famously walked the talk of trying to avoid social issue “discussions” like this one. They think they are divisive and don’t want to get into this stuff if they don’t have to, and are often literally frightened of tough criticism in this area (see the Plan B decision last year, which just reeked of panic). They don’t want to go down this road if they don’t have to, and if Congressional Republicans were to let this thing build organically, they’ll likely get most of what they want. The White House has already dropped peace feelers, and whatever your feelings about Obama’s team, this is just how they roll. They will make concessions for no reason in hopes of placating the opposition, just as they always have.

And, suddenly, here comes John Boehner, full of swagger, ready to throw down some legislation that will almost certainly turn this into Just Another Culture War Skirmish, resetting everything to normal partisan loyalties as usual. Democrats uneasy with the policy will now be able to say that it’s being turned into a political weapon, allowing them to have their cake and eat it too by saying they have their issues with the policy but aren’t going to be tools of the anti-choice right. Their pro-choice constituents and traditionalist Catholic constituents will be satisfied, I suppose. Meanwhile, this puts pro-choice Republicans on the spot, having to decide whether to support their party or…ha ha ha. Of course they’ll support their leadership even if they disagree because that’s just how they roll. And they’ll pay the price in November for having voted against making birth control more easily available. Anyone want odds that this isn’t how the situation turns out? And that, in a month, it’s nothing more than one more thing for Rick Santorum to grouse about on the stump?

I don’t know if you all have seen the old Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries from the early ’80s (if not, go watch it!), but the line where Smiley says that Karla is weak because he’s a fanatic has always stuck with me. If you’re fanatical, you’re going to go to extremes that aren’t advisable because you’re so convinced you’re right, and that is correctly classified as a weakness (at the very least, it’s something that can be manipulated). And Smiley’s line perfectly encapsulates why Republicans are losing this battle, among other things. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cleaner example of one person screwing up something politically useful more efficiently than this. I’m so glad this incompetent boob is the top Republican in the House.

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Democrats and Populism

by Lev on 26 January 2012

Interesting analysis from Noam Scheiber on Obama’s sorta-populist moment:

But there’s still another explanation, which has to do with racial stereotypes and double-standards. Simply put, a little-known African-American politician who dabbles in edgy populism risks alienating certain white voters, who will view his populism through the lens of race. However the candidate actually intends it, these voters will treat his rhetoric as evidence that he plans to take from white people and give to black people, and, needless to say, they’ll be nudged along in this assumption by the right-wing media. (Fox et al was pretty good at fanning these fears even when Obama’s rhetoric was about as far from populist as you can get).

Three years into his term, by contrast, most Americans have a fairly detailed portrait of the president. He’s no longer a black man they don’t know, but a person they have a relatively intimate relationship with, at least as public figures go. Many, if not most, probably don’t even think of the president in racial terms anymore.

Which is to say, Obama may have finally embraced populism because he finally can embrace populism, whereas it simply wasn’t politically possible before.

I think this is certainly a possibility, but…it’s not the simplest one, which is that the Democratic Party has a deep disdain for populism. To know why that is, I like to think about what would happen if the Democrats fully embraced an authentically populist approach as a party. This is impossible to predict, but I think the following four things would happen in short order:

  1. Democrats would quickly increase their share of the fabled white, working-class vote by a decent margin.
  2. Democrats would probably lose some percentage of the totebagger, Charlie Rose-viewer vote off the bat, though probably less on net.
  3. The political establishment (and its political wing, the Blue Dog caucus) would go absolutely apeshit, attacking Democrats as reverting to the far-left McGovern days and such. Joe Lieberman would have a field day.
  4. Corporate donations would fizzle, putting the party at (more of) a disadvantage when it comes to financing electioneering activities. And it’s hard to see how they make it up.

Now, I’m not necessarily certain that it’s not worth taking the plunge. In fact, post-Citizens United, I think it’s really the only choice. There’s a theory of politics (Jamie Court is pretty eloquent explaining  it) which basically states that the forces of reaction and propping up the status quo are always going to be better-funded than the ones arguing for progress, so instead of playing that game, you play a different one–use anger to mobilize people for change, to basically detonate existing points of pressure and then get out of the way. And this theory has a lot going for it: it’s essentially the dynamic that gets corporations to create safer products and designs a lot of the time, driving progress in that sphere. What’s more, it would effectively force Democrats to rely much more on strengthening unions to compete, which was really where I think the Democrats went wrong in the first place, in paying them lip service to get big corporate money.

But it’s unsurprising that a simple observer and activist would say, “Let’s do it!” while the people responsible for making the party a success do not. And it occurs to me that the Democrats can’t afford to become a populist-reformist party that only occasionally holds power for short periods of time to enact rapid bursts of change, when one considers the shambles that the would-be Republican Party of governance is in right now. There is, I think, little question that populism is a vastly more effective approach for Democrats operating outside of the Coasts. The establishment favored Blue Dog-ish Iraq Veteran Paul Hackett over liberal-populist Sherrod Brown for the Ohio Senate nomination in 2006, and Brown won a surprisingly wide victory that I strongly doubt Hackett would have enjoyed. Democrats strongly stood by doomed Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010 when polls showed that the populist alternative trailed by far less. Admittely, Lincoln was in incumbent, but there was no need to spend a single penny in favor of an unpopular, damaged incumbent who was obviously going to lose by Santorum margins in November. None of this is particularly new, and I’ve written about it before, but it still stands. It is my opinion that the Blue Dogs represent mostly the worst aspects of our establishment consensus–deficit peacockery, military hawkishness, wishy-washiness on social issues–but the reason they have stuck around is because the establishment provides them with enormous cover. The Democratic Party has come to rely on this dynamic. But it’s not a very strong foundation for a reformist party, in my opinion.

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The Financial Rescue Wasn’t Obama’s Idea

by Lev on 19 January 2012

I’m a bit late to this, but I found Kevin Drum’s argument that Obama’s Administration has mostly been reacting to things instead of playing eleven-dimensional chess congenial to what I usually say, and a lot of his specific points are well taken. If anything, though, this isn’t quite fair to the guy:

Why was Obama’s reponse to the financial crisis basically pretty centrist? Again, not because of any long game. More likely, it’s because Obama himself is genuinely fairly centrist and business oriented when it comes to financial policy.

It’s true that Obama had input into the initial response to the financial crisis as Senator and President-elect, as many of the books on Obama’s tenure have recognized (i.e. The Promise, etc.). But the shape of the response was shaped by Wall Street crony Henry Paulson and the Bush Administration, and Obama was pretty much tied to that approach. Sure, he could have handled things differently/better around the margins–perhaps by attaching more strings to the money, pegging it to tougher financial reform, etc., but my guess is that those would only have had small effects on the public’s perception of the thing. And let’s not forget that the strategy favored by some progressives–outright nationalization of troubled banks–would have been an exponentially larger political and policy headache. FDR refused to do it under far worse circumstances and I don’t blame Obama for not doing it either. I do wonder if Obama would have come better out of the situation by taking a more overly antagonistic tack toward the finance industry from the start, but that was just never going to happen with Tim Geithner in the Administration (or with a re-election campaign to run). But the simple fact is that Obama took office in the middle of this thing. Had it occurred closer to his tenure in office starting, the response perhaps would have been much better designed. We’ll never know.

The larger argument, though, is hard to dispute at this point. Obama’s tendency toward indirect and muted confrontation make it irresistible for sympathetic observers to think he’s up to something. But that is (was?) really just his style, not necessarily evidence of any deep and convoluted plans. In a lot of ways, things have worked out in such a way that you can make the argument for a deliberately constructed scheme a la the final act of The Usual Suspects. Sullivan, of course, makes that case. But these sorts of elaborate long games don’t pop up too often in politics because (a) there are too many variables to control for all of them, (b) many of those are unknown/unknowable, and (c) the situation is entirely fluid. It’s not like chess, where the great masters think twenty moves ahead–in politics, constructing grand plans like that typically leads to elaborate failure. Successful politicians are typically the ones who are highly intuitive and most able to adapt to changing situations, to reinvent and present themselves to the public as something they want, not the ones who construct elaborate, Rube Goldberg-like traps for their political opponents.

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Go, Obama, Go!

by Lev on 18 January 2012

Glad to hear that the Keystone XL pipeline is not going to happen. Bad ecologically for about five different reasons, and Republicans got what they deserved:

At the time, the White House said forcing an expedited decision would almost certainly squash the likelihood that the pipeline will be built this year, arguing that it needed more time to study the environmental impacts and alternate routes for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline.

Republicans dismissed the notion, saying that it has passed the needed stages of approval and the President has the authority to move forward with it. And Speaker John Boehner’s office blasted the decision moments after it was reported.

Oh, I’m sure that the leader of the 8% Congress’s disapproval will carry a ton of weight. Whatever Obama’s New Year’s Resolution was, I’m liking it a lot.

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Time For Dr. End The Wars

by Lev on 12 January 2012

You’ve probably heard the news that the Administration is negotiating with the Taliban to end the Afghan War. On the whole, I think this is a very good thing. Yeah, they’re scumbags. We all know that. But thanks to a number of reasons (read: seven years of ineptitude from the Bush Administration), they’re there and they’re not going away, and we can’t defeat them without a WWII-level deployment (and probably not even then). I truly wish Bush had been happy with his one war and had focused like a laser on wiping out the Taliban back when he could, but he didn’t and here we are. And given these parameters, the best case scenario is some kind of negotiated compromise to end the fighting. The media doesn’t seem to know what the big issues are–apparently the Administration has insisted on a few preconditions related to human rights and accepting the Afghan Constitution–and so it’s too early to tell if the ultimate agreement will be any good (or if it’s likely). Still, the prospect of ending the war quickly is tempting, and I could see it being a sleeper issue against Mitt Romney, who has argued many times that we should basically stay in Afghanistan forever. Talk about a good possible contrast for November…

This, though, is another interesting step:

Iran has said it has agreed to talks with six world powers on its controversial nuclear programme, days after the UN confirmed Tehran was producing 20% enriched uranium.

Visiting Turkey, parliament speaker Ali Larijani said he had accepted Ankara’s offer to try to restart the talks.

Negotiations have stalled since a meeting in Istanbul a year ago.

I’m absolutely certain that this will bring up another round of Republican hawks spreading alarmism, accompanied by the public roundly ignoring them and favoring negotiations 2-to-1 in the polls. Still, it’s an interesting situation, and it’s possible that Iran might actually want a deal. Now that they can produce 20% enriched uranium, they have some amount of leverage to get a deal to their liking. And they have some things they definitely want, like lifting of the embargo. Of course, if the hawks are correct and Iran really cares for nothing more than wiping out Israel, they wouldn’t trade anything for their ability to have nuclear weapons, though if that were the case why waste time on discussions? I guess we’ll find out if Iran hawks know what they’re talking about (who wants odds?). In any event, after the recent threats against the Strait of Hormuz, it’s a much better sign, and since both sides have things that they really want and have leverage over the other, who knows?

It’s too early to tell if any of this will go anywhere, but it’s something to hope for. And it’s worth remembering that nothing would come of either in a Romney Administration. I can only hope his obnoxious hawkishness wears poorly with the electorate, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it diminishes once the primary contests are over. I hope Obama makes the most of these chances, and successful diplomacy would help build on one of his strengths, and whatever risk needs to be taken is worth it.

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Fast Food Crumbs: More Obama Awesomeness, Equality? and Mitt Romney.

by Lev on 4 January 2012
  • Obama makes a few more recess appointments, and thus proves me even wronger (and happier!). Quoth Steve Benen: “Indeed, I hardly recognize this combative, confrontational Obama, who seems comfortable antagonizing Republicans when they deserve it.” I quite agree. In fact, he’s almost completely fulfilled my wish list on the topic aside from giving poor Caitlin Halligan a recess appointment for the D.C. Circuit job she was wrongly rejected from. (Though new Federal Reserve board members would be nice as well.)
  • Will Washington be the next to join the marriage equality club? We’ll see. I’m pulling for California to rejoin it with an overturn of Prop 8 soon. And supposedly Maryland is going to try again early next year. Let the race begin!
  • Kevin Drum’s post on Romneyis a bit mistaken in that I wouldn’t bet on Romney getting a cakewalk the rest of the way. Up until this point, everyone’s been under the assumption that the race will come down to two people:
    • Romney
    • The anti-Romney

    and everyone (except Huntsman) has been attacking each other to be the anti-Romney. Now, though, since Bachmann is gone and Perry’s not long for the race, things have shifted. Now you’ll have Romney and three guys who have strong incentives to tear Romney to pieces–Santorum because he probably is the anti-Romney by default, Gingrich out of spite, and Huntsman because he wants Romney’s spot. That’s bad, bad, bad for the Mittster. Actually, that sounds so entertaining I might just have to watch the next debate!

  • On the other hand, though, Drum is right in that the smart strategy for Obama is to paint Romney as just another wingnut in the fall. The public doesn’t know Romney that well, so you could pretty easily introduce him that way and make it stick. After all, what’s he going to do, remind everyone that he used to be moderate? Republicans would love that. And I think the public would hate a garden-variety wingnut more than his just being a flip-flopper.
  • Just watched Eight Men Out on Netflix over the break, and I highly recommend it. Good movie even if you’re not a baseball fan, the story itself is quite interesting and layered, and the cast alone makes it worthwhile.
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Obama Shows Some Fight, Recess Appoints CPFB Chair

by Lev on 4 January 2012

TPM:

On Tuesday, they believed Obama could take advantage of a precedent set by Teddy Roosevelt, and filled those vacancies with the stroke of a pen and the blast of an email in the seconds-long window between sessions of the 112th Congress.

He didn’t do it. That meant the Senate went back in “pro forma” session, lackadaisically gaveling in and out every three days to avoid a technical “recess,” and thus prevent a recess appointment.

It’s customary for Presidents to heed this defensive tactic. But there’s nothing that says they have to. And Obama concluded he could move ahead. According to the Wall Street Journal the administration’s own attorneys don’t think they do — the Senate’s “pro forma” sessions are meaningless and Obama retains the Constitutional right to recess appoint whomever he wants until session begins in earnest.

This creates a significant new precedent — a bold power play in the face of an unprecedented act of GOP obstruction, but also something to which Obama (and Democrats more generally) have been pretty averse. Given that aversion, it’s hard to figure why Obama would choose to create a new precedent rather than avail himself of an existing one — unless you imagine he’s daring the GOP to make a big stink about it, and thus loudly side with Wall Street against him and middle-class consumers. It’s a safe bet that’s part of his thinking.

I’m very, very happy to be wrong on this. And I think it’s a very smart move. Congress’s approval rating probably can’t move any lower–it’s pretty much in the margin of error already–so I don’t think he has too much to worry about from the yelling of a bunch of wankers that Americans hate anyway. And in a battle between keeping Wall Street under control on the one hand and senatorial privilege on the other, I just don’t see how Obama loses the PR battle. I’m positive that the David Brooks types will gnash their teeth about it, but that’s easily ignored.

More of this, Mr. President. There’s hope for you yet!

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Toward A Grand Unified Theory Of Obama

by Lev on 1 January 2012

Kevin Drum wrote this a few days back:

Is Obama likely to [make recess appointments aggressively]? Pundits and bloggers love to chew over these kinds of unconventional possibilities, but Obama himself has shown little appetite for them. There are probably two reasons for this. First, he’s afraid that Republicans would become even more obstructionist than ever if he went down this road. Second, he’s unsure how the public would respond to this kind of hardball. The former has probably become less salient over time, given that there’s not an awful lot more obstructionist that Republicans can become at this point. But at the same time, the latter has become more salient because there’s an election coming up. So although the liberal base would love to see Obama show more spine on the appointment front, he probably won’t. Obama has consistently ignored his base in favor of the independents he needs to win reelection, and he’s consistently demonstrated that he thinks independents are put off by partisan confrontation.

This has some truth to this, and I’ve argued it before, but I’m now wondering if there isn’t a bigger explanation for this. Obama is and has always been perfectly willing to be confrontational rhetorically, and the payroll tax fight has made me think that I was missing some aspect of the man’s operation. That was largely a partisan confrontation, though near the end it did morph into something else. Obama didn’t seem to have much of a problem with it, though, so far as I could tell. Sure, he had more leverage than at other times, but he had some pretty strong leverage in the climate change debate that he didn’t use (hasn’t used?) to bend the outcome in his favor. A contradiction? Maybe, but there is an explanation that I can see.

I don’t think Obama minds partisan confrontation, I think he greatly minds being seen as the aggressor in that confrontation. For what reason I’m not sure, but there it is. Imposing a cap-and-trade system by another name under the EPA would have been great leverage to get a bill, but it would have been unavoidably aggressive, so he didn’t do it. In the payroll tax fight, he was able to put pressure on Republicans without seeming aggressive at all. That’s the key, I think. Obama likes to set the conditions and then hang back and let the dominoes fall, ideally making his opponents destroy themselves without his having to get his hands dirty. This was exactly how he comported himself in his 2004 US Senate race, in which opponents ranging in formidability from Blair Hull to Jack Ryan to Alan Keyes were felled by Obama’s indirect style of confrontation and their own shortcomings, and it worked brilliantly. It was also exactly how he comported himself in 2008, where again he defeated a number of strong contenders using this style of confrontation. And it worked brilliantly in the payroll tax cut fight. So, clearly, this strategy has its uses.

The problem is that it’s not infinitely useful. Obama badly miscalculated the politics on healthcare by not getting out front on it and driving the process more directly, preferring to hang back and let Congress hash out its conflicts on its own. Generally, I think it tends to be much less helpful when it comes to pushing forward an agenda–you really need to take the initiative on that, otherwise it can go in unpredictable directions. And with respect to the debt limit fight, it’s impossible to imagine a worse strategy Obama could have picked than this indirect confrontation thing. Giving up the flag and letting your opponent run it right off a cliff is a strategy that really can be effective, and Obama has gotten far with it and can play it well. But sometimes a direct assault just is the best strategy is all I’m saying, and unless he develops a feel for the direct attack he’s going to have a quite limited toolbox for the rest of his time in office. And doing this all the time (a) makes it less effective, since it becomes predictable and/or stale, and (b) can appear to people as a lack of passion/interest/control, which was pretty much the outcome of the debt ceiling debate. I think this is where the “Obama’s Playing 11-dimensional Chess” meme comes from, which is correct in that he’s playing a long game, but incorrect in that it’s not an inherently complicated strategy Obama pursues. It’s just giving the other guy enough rope. Which is fine, but there has to be a balance is all I’m saying. Perhaps giving the Consumer Financial Protection Board a chairman is a good place to start finding it.

And since I used a variant of “give ‘em enough rope,” I just can’t help myself:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6UTZb-_vI

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2011 Could Have Been Much Worse

by Lev on 23 December 2011

Ezra Klein:

The debt-ceiling debate was a mess, and it probably did real damage to the economy. Some of the deals that Obama offered Boehner — which would have taken the Bush tax cuts off the table, and raised the Medicare eligibility age — would have dragged federal budget policy far to the right. But Boehner didn’t take those deals. And, in the end, the debt ceiling was lifted in return for $900 billion in discretionary spending cuts and the establishment of the trigger-backed supercommittee — a deal that ended up dragging federal budget policy far, far to the left.

The key here was that the supercommittee failed. That left two major events on the budgetary horizon: the spending trigger, which cuts $1 trillion from the budget, half of which comes from the Pentagon, and none of which comes from Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare beneficiaries, or assorted other programs for low-income Americans; and the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which would raise taxes by almost $4 trillion. Both events are scheduled to happen simultaneously and automatically on January 1, 2013 — a dual-trigger nightmare for the GOP. And taken together, they are far to the left of anything that Democrats have suggested over the past year [...]

Finally, there was the scheduled expiration of the payroll tax cut and the expanded unemployment insurance benefits. On Thursday, Democrats and Republicans agreed to extend both for two months — and the expectation is that, after another ugly round of negotiations, they’ll both be extended through the rest of 2012. If that holds true, then in the 2010 tax deal, Democrats got about $4 of stimulus for every $1 of upper-income tax cuts, rather than, as it seemed at the time, $2 in stimulus for every $1 in upper-income tax cuts.

So, in 2011, there was no government shutdown, no default on the debt, and no contractionary spending cuts passed for this year or next year. In addition, 2010’s stimulus measures were extended into the beginning of 2012, and unless Congress and the White House come to an alternative deficit-reduction solution over the next year, the dual triggers will go off and we’ll see a deficit “deal” consisting of a bit less than $4 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts — and half of those spending cuts will fall on the Pentagon.

This may not be how the White House hoped the year would close out. They wanted a big deficit deal with the Republicans, and a more collegial, compromise-filled relationship. But the reality is, they begin 2012 with vastly more policy leverage than they had in 2011. And at this point, what does Boehner have to show for the brinkmanship of the last year, save for the discretionary spending cuts from the debt deal?

Funny how things work out, isn’t it? Republicans managed to stumble into a much worse (for them) status quo because of their inflexibility. Funny thing is, I suspect most Republicans are perfectly fine with endless CONFLICT that costs them tactically. After all, FOX News doesn’t tell them about what they lost.

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