Morning Must Reads

It’s getting pretty crazy down in South Carolina, even by local political standards which include two attempts to secede from the Union and a goodly number of duels.

Mark Sanford, who vowed to keep his job because he shouldn’t take the easy way out after playing Wild Bull of the Pampas, seems to be beyond dignity and unable to be silent for even a moment.

In the wake of Sanford’s Tuesday interview in which he was compulsively confessional about his relationships and personal failings, Sanford Wednesday became suddenly secretive, withdrawing a promise to release records about his trips to see his mistress on the state dime.

Writer Philip Rucker explains that as the always eccentric governor grows more and more erratic, pressure on the local and national level mounts for onetime GOP presidential hopeful Sanford to leave or be thrown out.

“‘What we saw in that interview was just him being irrational,’ state Sen. Larry A. Martin (R) said in an interview. ‘The very idea that he would be that candid, that frank, that brutally honest about his feelings for the woman in Argentina versus his wife versus the other girlfriends, I just find that incredible. Rational people don’t do that.’

‘He doesn’t need to be talking to reporters,’ Martin added. ‘He needs to go find him some professional help. That’s just the facts.’”

Wall Street Journal — Sotomayor Helped Push Minority Cases

As the rest of the document’s from Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s long career come trickling into the Senate, her lifelong commitment to retributive racial justice becomes clearer and clearer.

When her decision in the case of New Haven firefighters who were stripped of their promotions because no black colleagues passed the test was rejected by the Supreme Court this week, Senate and White House defenders said she was acting to uphold the statutes – Pat Leahy’s version of a strict constructionist.

But as writer Jess Bravin shows, documents reveal that as a legal adviser and board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund for many years Sotomayor was working to expand the notion that no racist intent is necessary for racism to be present – that lowering standards or changing the rules for public safety jobs is ok, if it means opportunities for protected groups. Rather than bowing to the statutes, as Leahy suggested, Sotomayor’s group was looking to push the envelope.

“The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund filed several lawsuits on behalf of minority employees alleging that promotional examinations were racially biased, obtaining judgments or settlements that guaranteed their promotion, sometimes ahead of white employees with higher scores.

In one case against the New York City Police Department, “we obtained quota promotions for Latinos and African Americans to the rank of sergeant,” the group said in a May 1992 report.”

New York Times — What’s So Super About a Supermajority?

Writer Carl Hulse walks readers through how the first supermajority since the Carter presidency will work – or not work. After getting Sens. Byrd and Kennedy up and around, Democrats then have to appease the few centrists who are likely defectors on many votes. And with Majority leader Harry Reid facing choppy electoral waters at home, he is none to happy at the idea of having all of the liberal grievances dredged up by activists who demand action rather than the traditional self-serving palaver. Supreme Court votes and other things will be easier, but the real controversies will remain controversial as the Senate returns to it’s traditional role as a body fractured by regional loyalties.

“This is a rare moment in the Senate. Since senators in 1975 lowered the number required to cut off debate to 60 from 67, there has only been one stretch when a party controlled a supermajority, with Democrats holding at least 60 votes from 1975 until 1979.

But the Senate was then divided more along factional lines, and votes to cut off debate, or cloture votes as they are known, were much less frequent than in the current Senate era, when pure party divisions are more dominant and such votes are almost a routine part of the legislative process.”


Financial Times — Obama Enters Decisive Phase of Presidency

Thus far in his presidency, Barack Obama has exert his political will in a dramatic fashion only once, and that was in pushing a cap-and-trade bill that barely passed the House. The special interest hodgepodge of a bill also infuriates the kinds of conscientious liberals who helped give Obama his victory over Hillary Clinton last year.

Writer Edward Luce takes a insightful look at the end of Obama’s long campaign, which lasted five months into his presidency, and the beginning of the governing phase.

Luce argues tat if Obama accepts a similarly pale compromise on his healthcare plan as he did on global warming, the president’s base will start to leave him. After running a campaign against cynicism and about changing Washington, Obama is instead governing in the kind of pragmatic fashion that so pleases political journalists and Washington tastemakers who sneer at idealists.

Luce’s assumes Obama wasn’t always a cynical pragmatist who learned in Chicago politics that what you say on the South Side and what you do in Springfield often bear little relation to one another. Did Obama ever intend to honor his promises on transparency and ethics? Probably only as far as they were convenient.

Obama’s image as a reformer is at stake and to preserve it, Obama is going to have to start spending some political capital with moderate middle voters. If he doesn’t, he may lose his brand.

“‘We are entering the post-declarative and post-positioning stage of the Obama presidency,’ says David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official. ‘How he handles healthcare in practice will be a defining moment.’ White House officials say they want to enact all of their priorities in 2009 – including cap-and-trade, financial sector reform and healthcare.

From next January, electoral calculations in advance of the mid-term congressional elections in November 2010 are likely to dictate caution.”


New York Times — To Critics, New Policy on Terror Looks Old

In a helpful analysis piece, writer Charlie Savage tries to answer the question of whether the Obama and Bush policies on surveillance, war and detention are substantially different.

What he finds is that while Obama has complained often about the methods by which the Bush administration carried out its policies as well as some of the former president’s aims, he is supportive of the policies themselves.

The net result is that Obama is keeping the Bush equipment, but using it in his own way. This makes conservatives, like those unsettled by Obama’s positions on Honduras and Iran, a little queasy. But it makes liberals violently ill.

‘”In a signing statement last week, for example, he claimed a right to ignore five sections of an appropriations bill related to international financial institutions. Such statutory limits, he said, ‘would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations.’

In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.

‘What we are watching,’ Mr. Balkin said, ‘is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices.’”