Wall Street Journal — Court Challenge: Replacing Stevens
The Obama administration wants Justice J.P. Stevens to retire, but it would be a big help if he could hang on until the president gets a little more of the country transformed first.
Stevens, 90, and Democrats on the Hill and in the White House are having a very public negotiation about when the liberal icon will get his gold watch.
Stevens has not hired enough law clerks for the coming term and talks with great longing in interviews about the day that he will lay his burden down. He’s done everything but pack his steamer trunk and wait outside the building.
But the White House would like to wait a bit before having to endure another political battle. Replacing the most orthodox liberal on the court would make the effort to put Sonia Sotomayor on the bench seem like picking a fourth for a Sunday round of golf. The administration wants to talk about bank bailout rules, global warming and economic recovery, not why it’s good for the country to have an enthusiastic liberal on the high court.
Writer Jess Bravin explains.
“Senate Democratic leaders hope Justice Stevens delays his exit to postpone a bruising confirmation process so soon after the divisive health-care fight.
‘I think the gridlock in the Senate might well produce a filibuster,’ Sen. Arlen Specter, (D., Pa.), a member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told ‘Fox News Sunday.’ ‘If a year passes, there’s a much better chance we could come to a consensus,’ he said.
The Senate’s No. 2 Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, wouldn’t rule out filibustering an Obama Supreme Court pick. ‘It will all depend on what kind of a person it is,’ Mr. Kyl said on the same program.”
New York Times — Drones Batter Qaeda and Allies Within Pakistan
This morning, another bombing aimed at Americans in Pakistan – this time at the consulate in Peshawar. It’s part of a deepening conflict inside Pakistan as foreign Islamist militants and their Taliban allies find new ways to bedevil the U.S. and the U.S.-backed government in Islamabad.
One of the causes is the ever-escalating U.S. military presence in the western region of Pakistan. With their old havens under constant attack, the baddies are branching out in more densely populated areas – easy to find in a nation of 170 million – and using more brutal methods.
Writers Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah look at the effort to shut down Al Qaeda in the tribal regions on the Afghan border with drone aircraft. Locals constantly hear the buzzing overhead, the body counts are high (90 in the first six weeks of the year) and the frequency of the strikes keeps going up – strikes every other day.
“In public, the Pakistani government opposes the drones, citing a violation of sovereignty.
Under American pressure, however, the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, has provided important intelligence for targets, American and Pakistani officials have said.
But increasingly the Americans appear to have developed their own sources, the militant said.”
Washington Post — Former PAC chairman fined by D.C. is hired as GOP fundraiser
In his first interview since the Republican National Committee’s expense scandal broke, Chairman Michael Steele played the race card again.
He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this morning that being black left him with a smaller margin of error than a white chairman would have.
I can’t imagine that any chairman would be able to survive having booked $30,000 worth of charter jet service to keep up with a schedule crowded with his personal book tour and speaking engagements. The spendthrift, incautious nature of Steele’s RNC has shocked donors and given rise to embarrassing expenditures like a staffer’s $2,000 bar tab at a risqué L.A. nightclub.
Steele, though, is still playing the victim.
If he wants to be frank about race, Steele should first admit that Republicans backed his candidacy for chairman in a typically ham-fisted effort to play identity politics in the wake of President Obama’s election.
Over the weekend, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., put a shot across Steele’s bow, suggesting the RNC would lose contributions and declining to express confidence in Steele’s continued tenure — a stronger public articulation of displeasure that previously heard from any of the party’s elder statesmen.
Each past error has produced some grumbling from critics and vague promises of reform. But, as writer Perry Bacon shows us today, the promises are usually followed by another round of errors.
This time, Steele has selected as his top man on fundraising a D.C. politico who got slapped for misusing PAC money from a group trying to bring a baseball franchise to Washington. The baseball scandal cost him a gig at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. His current job is as “director of institutional relations” for the Washington national Opera.
This cycle looks to become more vicious – Steele can’t get good candidates for jobs anymore, so he is falling back on those he knew from his days in Maryland politics.
“In 2007, the District’s Office of Campaign Finance found that [Neil] Alpert improperly spent $37,670 on items that were not authorized by the D.C. Baseball PAC, which he chaired, or the D.C. Baseball Association, a nonprofit group that the PAC created to raise money for youth programs. He was asked to reimburse the groups, which were dissolved after Major League Baseball authorized a Washington franchise, and was fined $4,000.”
Washington Post — How Congress can get a smart climate-change bill passed
The Post’s editorial heaps praise on Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham for a plan to introduce “carbon pricing” (aka a carbon tax) as a replacement for the president’s “cap and trade” plan.
If you believe in anthropogenic global warming, there’s lots of reason to prefer a straight carbon tax to the more-corruptible vagaries of a new carbon market. If you think that global warming has been over hyped, it amounts to an unnecessary tax on the very energy that runs the economy, but it would at least be simple and predictable.
But what the Post’s editors like is the worst of both worlds – a hard cap on emissions with a convoluted system of exemptions and rebates to engineer an economy to Democrats’ liking.
My column for today explains how the administration has selected energy as the next target of transformation. The idea of a cap with rebates is likely to be at the center of that push.
“The Senate triumvirate’s carbon-pricing mechanism probably would not auction all of its “allowances” — securities that give the holders the right to pollute a certain amount, the price of which should increase as the cap tightens and the allowances become scarcer. Rather, it would probably distribute many of these allowances to groups that the legislation affects so that, among other things, electricity prices would be lower than they would be otherwise under the cap. Sounds nice. But it would be more efficient to allow prices to rise, sending a strong and clear signal to consumers that encourages energy conservation, one of the least onerous ways to cut back on emissions. Though energy prices would rise, the 100 percent auction option need not hurt most Americans’ budgets; Congress could rebate most of the revenue from allowance auctions directly to Americans, making the vast majority of them whole — or better. Cutting a check to every one of your constituents: Now there’s something lawmakers straddling the fence on climate-change legislation should be able to cheer.”
Washington Post — Jobless rate may rise as many are drawn back to labor force
The recession has wiped out many categories of careers as businesses adjust to doing more with less. And a deeper safety net of expanded unemployment benefits has allowed more people to give up looking for jobs. That means that the jobless rate is going to be a stubborn thing. To get things moving, the nation needs to add 250,000 jobs a month. The 162,000 of March is only enough to keep treading water at 9.7 percent.
Writer Dion Haynes takes a helpful look at the long-term unemployed, underemployed, and generally discouraged.
“Even though the number of jobs has grown, there are still about 5.4 job seekers per opening, according to economists. That number has declined from 6.2 in November, but it remains much higher than in earlier recessions. In September 2003, for example, it was 2.8….
Long-term unemployment has reached record levels in this downturn, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, about 44.1 percent of the 15 million unemployed people across the country were out of work 27 weeks or more, up from 40.9 percent in February. The previous peak of 26 percent was reached in June 1983. About 20 percent of the people on the unemployment rolls have been out of work a year or longer, economists say.”
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