New York Times — Governors Voice Grave Concerns on Immigration
President Obama is not a party man. His policies for enthusing the liberal Left and strongly asserting the power of the federal government at a moment where Americans are wary of Washington may help his 2012 bid, but it is killing Democrats in Congress and putting a huge burden on governors across the country, where Democrats are on track for their worst wipeout in generations, losing perhaps 30 of 38 governors’ mansions.
That gives the govs cause to separate themselves from the president on key issues. Writer Abby Goodnaugh explains that one issue is on the states’ rights lawsuit against Arizona’s new law that requires police to check the immigration status of those they detain for other crimes. The Arizona law is popular and there is a turf question to be considered, so Democratic governors were not shy about asking Obama why he has to make it harder on them in an election year.
When folks like the new head of the national governors’ association, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, feel the need to create some public distance with the president, that’s not always a bad thing for all involved.
Manchin, likely heading to the Senate this fall, can patch things up with Obama after he wins election to Robert Byrd’s seat but enjoy the political benefits of dissing the presidents’ policies now.
Obama keeps a blue seat blue, Manchin moves up the line. It’s all good.
But the long term danger for a leader perceived as passive, like Obama, is that the swats from the underlings in the party amount to a kind of generalized disrespect.
While Obama plans to let other Democrats take the heat this fall, he may find that those who survive the fire are disinclined to pay much obeisance next year.
“At the Democrats’ meeting on Saturday, some governors bemoaned the timing of the Justice Department lawsuit, according to two governors who spoke anonymously because the discussion was private.
‘Universally the governors are saying, ‘We’ve got to talk about jobs,’ ’ Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said in an interview. ‘And all of a sudden we have immigration going on.’
He added, ‘It is such a toxic subject, such an important time for Democrats.’
The Hill — Senate Democrats face critical four weeks
Welcome back, members of Congress. And, no, nothing improved while you were back in your district laying low and trying to raise money to save your job.
Writer Taylor Rushing looks at the hellish month ahead for Congress. They have one month until the August recess begins and they need to get home to start campaigning in earnest. Harry Reid may talk a good game, but with his reelection bid still mired by his low approval ratings at home, the majority leader will be hard pressed to delay the start of the recess by more than a few days to stay in Washington to finish an agenda that contains no popular items.
The first action item is to finish the long-delayed Dodd-Frank bank bill, which Democrats talk abut as a done deal, but in reality has some hard work still left to be done.
There’s also urgent action needed on funding bills for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for state supports on unemployment benefits, Medicare and other extenders. The other Democratic priority – more government worker stimulus – has to be attached to one of those items or it will never pass. It’s simply too hard to convince moderate Dems from competitive parts of the electoral map to add $23 billion to the deficit in the name of teacher pay that is a political priority only in places where Democratic primaries are the determinative elections.
There is also a Supreme Court justice to confirm, which will requires hours of floor fighting before the seemingly inevitable confirmation.
Liberals are consoling themselves with the idea of jamming through everything left unaccomplished from the first half of Obama’s term in a lame-duck session after the election. Reality has set in and they know they will have to wait to try to release their second charkas.
“Few believe there will be enough time or will for major legislative battles after the Senate recesses for a month-long break on Aug. 6, meaning some of the heaviest legislative lifting — an energy bill, immigration reform, the START arms control treaty and campaign finance reform — may get pushed into 2011.”
New York Times — Revisiting the Regulations Affecting Business
The White House recognizes that the complaints from the business community about the huge new regulatory burden coming down on employers of all sizes is creating a serious problem. Aside from keeping capital locked up while companies wait out the regulatory storm, it’s murder on the president’s message.
Obama, now viewed as a “socialist” by 55 percent of voters but trying to label himself in recent speeches as “pro-growth,” has a big problem with being seen as a giant wet blanket draped over the smoldering embers of the American economy.
The answer to this problem? A commission, of course.
Writer Elizabeth Williamson explains the president’s plan to allow business owners to fill out a government questionnaire to describe what the government is doing that is most badly crippling their enterprises. The commission will review the complaints from the bourgeois and make recommendations to the president over which ones might merit consideration. After all, the administration explains it is the “purview of the private sector” to create jobs.
The main goal, though, will be get the large, government-dependent corporations who have been the last to criticize Obama – like Verizon and Boeing – back on the fence. It will also let those in the David Brooksian school of Obama Obama apologetics feel good that their message is being heard.
“Business Roundtable president John Castellani and Verizon Communications Inc. chief executive Ivan Seidenberg, chairman of the group, met a week ago at the White House with National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, business liaison Valerie Jarrett, and other officials to discuss ‘specific examples of regulations that were burdensome,’ a White House official said.
‘The administration responded very quickly,’ Mr. Castellani said. So far, he said, ‘they get an A-plus for reaching out, and an incomplete for policy.’”
Washington Post — Historic oil spill fails to produce gains for U.S. environmentalists
Writers David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin spend many hundreds of words wondering why the worst oil spill in American history has not produced an appetite for… global warming taxes and regulations.
Not once do they consider the possibility that the effort by President Obama to tie the spill to global warming was simply blown off by the electorate. They wonder why past disasters, like the occasional burning of the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland, helped spawn action, but there is no groundswell for cap and trade now. When a river burns, it’s a good time to get people to talk about water quality and industrial pollution. If environmentalists had sought a national tax on industry then, it probably would have failed too.
Certainly there’s a lot of interest in the oil industry and the regulation thereof right now.
Americans are watching with great interest as BP tries to fit their new cap on the gushing wellhead and read with interest the story of how the MMS failed for so long and so thoroughly.
But transferring that energy to global warming and an overall need to stop using carbon energy? Not likely.
There’s so much doubt now about global warming and the merits of the Obama cap and trade approach that it seemed like the president was using the crisis to bootstrap his way into an unpopular bill. Fahrenthold and Eilperin think the same way, but just can’t understand why it didn’t work. They focus on the audience, no the message, and end up missing the story rather badly.
Like defenders of the Iraq war who couldn’t see why terrorism or Islamic radicalism in Russia or Bali didn’t improve support for the effort in Mesopotamia, Fahrenthold and Eilperin are befuddled.
“Meanwhile, for the environmental groups trying to break this logjam, it’s hard to imagine a more useful disaster.”
New York Times — End of Census, and for Many, End of Job
The Census provides a nice lesson on how government stimulus and economic support programs work. Over the past six months, Uncle Sam has hired perhaps 400,000 (!) Americans to conduct the decennial census. The work is now done and those folks will be out of a job.
The current administration even intentionally overspent and over hired ($14.7 billion, 1.4 million total workers) for the ten-year project in an effort to put a little more pep in our economic step. And while the agency will hold on to much of its manpower under its new Obamafied budget, there are still probably 700,000 temporary workers hitting the streets.
The Krugmaniacs would say that this is evidence of what happens when a government program stops short. If the Census jobs were permanent and predictable, certainty would flow into the economy and create a private sector boost. The intellectual sons and daughters of Milton Freidman say that the tax burdens and bureaucratic peril created by having 1.4 million permanent people counters looking to validate their existence far outweighs the Keynesian benefits of government payroll. Further, the Obama decision to juice the Census as a form of welfare now creates a surge of unemployed workers, depressing real wages.
Writer Michael Powell doesn’t weigh in on this, but instead focuses on the Census office in Providence, R.I. Like much of the rest of New England, Providence is failing fast and the Census offered an out for folks looking for a decent job.
But in doing so, he reveals how good-paying government jobs – even temporary ones – keep people out of the mix. The money may not sound like much on Times Square, but $17 an hour in Providence will buy a long vacation from reality.
“‘That pattern repeats across the country. In south Connecticut, a laid-off executive for a large insurer helps coordinate the door-to-door counters. In Orange County, Calif., unemployed real estate lawyers work as counters, and the office is managed by a down-on-her-luck corporate trainer.
In the census office in Worcester, Mass., the guy who took the tech services job acknowledged quietly that he had a degree in nuclear engineering from M.I.T.
Wages vary by regional cost of living and responsibilities. A census worker might get $17 an hour in Providence, $23 in Boston or $12.25 in Jackson, Miss.”
