Rumors are swirling in DC and New Jersey that Senator Bob “Torch” Torricelli is about to pull the plug on his embattled Senate reelection campaign.

Democratic hopes for the United States Senate have taken a real hit. It’s not so much Bob Torricelli’s decision to drop out of the New Jersey Senate race today as the revelations last week which seem to have made the decision inevitable. Torch’s decision to bail out may be a blessing for the Dems in as much as it at least creates the possibility that that seat — which really should be a Dem seat — can be salvaged.

As emails from friends have streamed in over the course of the morning, I keep thinking of the stabbing scene in Julius Caesar. Not a perfect analogy, mind you. But it’s hard to exaggerate the sheer number of people who can’t wait to slip their own private dagger into this guy now that they see the blood in the water or, perhaps better to say, the body on the ground. Former staffers, old opponents, old friends, old girlfriends, miscellaneous pols, campaign workers, donors, house pets, you name it. Torch always ran his show on fear, bravado and muscle. The denouement is going to be ugly. It already is.

A few days back New Jersey Republican Senate candidate Douglas Forrester called on Bob Torricelli to resign. Now Torricelli’s in effect done that and Forrester says it’s not fair and that no new, clean
Democrat should be allowed to take his place on the ballot. He’s complaining.
The heads of the Republican Senate committee are complaining. Everybody
with a parenthetical ‘R’ after their name is complaining.

From what I can tell, the legalities of getting a new name on the
ballot at this late stage are unsettled. But I was disappointed this morning
when I saw some people who should know better claiming that it was somehow
an outrage for the Democrats to try to field a candidate and give New Jersey
voters an actual election next month.

Election law — as we saw in Florida two years ago — is the most
vexed kind of law in a democratic society since it sets such powerful interests
against each other — the rule of law and democracy. In a democratic society,
the presumption in favor of putting significant questions before voters should
almost
always prevail. If New Jersey law is crystal clear on this point, and it
specifically bars any means of putting another name on the ballot, then so
be it. But if there’s a legal way to do it, then it should happen.

This is the advantage Democrats do have and should have in this
case. In a democratic polity, the absence of black letter law to the contrary,
the interests of democracy — having real elections — always trump procedural
squabbling.

The rather shabby truth here is that Republicans understand that Forrester could only get elected in a state like New Jersey not simply if he were facing a bad candidate but essentially no candidate.

A couple months ago I
told Nick Confessore that I doubted the Democrats would be in much danger
of losing control of the Senate come early October. An article questioning
why Democrats weren’t making more of an issue of that danger or why they
weren’t trying to nationalize the election around fears of unfettered, one-party
control of the federal government, I told him, might fall on deaf ears.

Well, chalk one up for Nick Confessore.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pessimistic about Democrats chances
of holding the Senate. But a number of factors — the crisis over Iraq primarily,
but also a number of curveballs from left-field — have really thrown the
contest wide-open.

And now Nick’s new article — which is the cover piece in the new issue of the Washington Monthly — looks uncomfortably on target and relevant.

And so after a long intermission we return to the case of Richard Perle, meddler.

As TPM noted,
almost a year ago to the day, Perle is a long-time heavyweight in neo-conservative
foreign policy circles. He is also the Chairman of something called the
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. The DPB used to be a rather out-of-the-way
affair, but Perle’s transformed it into an important advisory council within
today’s Pentagon. By any real measure, he’s a member of this administration.

Yet around this time last year he was going on virtually every chat show
there is and attacking Colin Powell for disloyalty to the president. And
he was getting unwary chat show producers to identify him merely as an ‘assistant
secretary of defense’ from the Reagan administration.

Point being, Perle was trying to have it both ways, being an administration
player one day and an outside critic the next. And the administration was
letting him get away with it.

Numerous embarrassments followed.

It was Perle who invited the off-kilter, former Lyndon LaRouche follower
Laurent Murawiec to give a presentation at the Pentagon advising the US essentially
to declare war against Saudi Arabia. As we noted at the time, the real crime
of Murawiec’ presentation — which was later published by Jack Shafer in Slate
— wasn’t so much the controversy it created as the fact that it had all
the appearances of being written by a precocious nine-year-old. But, alas,
I digress …

Now Perle is at it again. According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, Perle just gave an interview to the German daily Handelsblatt
in which he said Gerhard Schroeder, the recently re-elected German Chancellor,
should resign because of the allegedly anti-American campaign he recently
ran. A Pentagon official saying something like that is a big deal.

It’s actually rather similar to the article he wrote about exactly one year ago in Britain’s Daily Telegraph derisively attacking the British Foreign Secretary.

This is foreign policy freelancing — irresponsible and often shameless
behavior. Beside the behind-the-scenes mischief Perle cooks up, these comments
of his are routinely reported in the foreign countries in question as comments
of a ‘senior Pentagon advisor’ or some similar formulation and — as Perle
clearly intends — the comments carry the impression that he is speaking
in some capacity for the administration. It’s shabby behavior and low intrigue. An administration of pros wouldn’t tolerate it.

The money quote from the New Jersey Supreme Court ballot case came from Justice Peter G. Verniero, a former Chief Counsel, Chief of Staff and later Supreme Court appointee of former Governor Christie Whitman. “Didn’t Mr. Forrester call for Mr. Torricelli to withdraw?” he said in response to a protesting Republican attorney during oral arguments. “Was he expecting to run unopposed?”

That about sums it up.

The Forrester
campaign is now headed to the United States Supreme Court, the normal recourse
of Republicans who can’t win elections with majorities but aren’t inclined
to see that as the end of the story.

I’ve received a lot of emails in the last couple of days from people
saying I’m ignoring the importance of the deadline which prescribes that
in New Jersey candidates have to pull out 51 days before an election to have
another name put on the ballot. There’s certainly a good argument there.
Just not the best argument. I’m reminded of earlier this year when Massachusetts
Democrats tried to knock Mitt Romney out of contention for the governorship
because there may have been some problem with his Massachusetts residency
status. I thought that was wrong; just as I think this is wrong for Republicans
to do. The unanimous decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court — which is
heavily stacked with Republican appointees — I think gives a lot of credence
to that view.

Some readers who have written in tell me that this is a recipe for
electoral chaos, that every time a candidate looks like he’s going down the
tubes he can just pull out and bring in a ringer. There’s a superficial
logic to the argument. But such arguments toward practical effect must withstand
some measure of logical scrutiny and this one really doesn’t. When filing
deadlines come down how many candidates do you usually see rushing to cash
out their candidacies? Right, not many. The sort of people who run for
elective office just don’t do that sort of thing. And in how many of those
cases is there another credible candidate waiting in the wings? Not often.
If there were, that other candidate probably would have won the primary.
Say what you will about what happened here, it’s hardly likely to become
a pattern.

Nothing sounds quite so tinny as self-righteous indignation. Until you come to Republican self-righteous indignation.

TPM continues to be inundated by a flurry of Republicans’ emails howling about the outrage of New Jersey Supreme
Court decision allowing a change in the election ballots. The normally sensible
Senator Bill Frist — who walked the Republicans’ appeal over to the Supreme
Court today — was ridiculous enough to charge that Democrats were trying
to “steal an election they could not otherwise win.”

(Where these gun-slingers for the rule of law were when Mitt Romney
got a pass, and rightly so, on his Massachusetts residency requirement I
just don’t know.)

Republicans have developed a lot of know-how in the last couple
years at stealing elections. But I must confess to a certain confusion about
how one steals an election by fielding a candidate. The idea seems to be
that for Doug Forrester, Frank Lautenberg is an unfairly strong candidate. And that Forrester is somehow damaged by Lautenberg’s electability.

Giving it some thought, and considering the Supreme Court’s decisions in Bush v. Gore, it even seems possible that this might be the basis of an equal protection claim for Forrester. Forrester
entered the race with the reasonable expectation that he would only face
a candidate either equally lame or more lame than him, but not less
lame. It’s almost an implied contract he has with the state’s electorate,
right? Putting a new candidate on the ballot now violates this insufferable
chump’s right to coast into office without facing an actual opponent. But
I digress …

I looked at the NJ Supreme Court ruling
and it struck me as a liberal, though not unreasonable, construction of the
statute. The court “determined that N.J.S.A. 19:13-20 [the statute in question]
does not preclude the possibility of a vacancy occurring within fifty-one
days of the general election …”

Now I’m not a lawyer (and lawyers — though several are very dear
to my heart — rule the world and elections and so forth) so there’s really
no point in my giving you my opinion on whether the decision passes muster.
But I’d say I feel pretty comfortable with the proposition stated here a
couple days back, that election laws should be construed expansively in the
interest of holding actual elections — not just notional elections in which it’s the Republican against the Green or Socialist candidate.

Most of the substantive arguments I’ve heard to the contrary strike
me as pretty weak. One commentator says the whole switch is wrong because
it deprives Jersey voters of the right to throw Torricelli out of office.
But of course that’s just a dumb throwaway comment which means nothing.

The other argument one hears is that this decision will set off
a wave of candidates taking electoral hemlock days or weeks prior to an election
they are destined to lose. Can anyone who makes this argument have ever
spent any time around elected politicians? Not a chance. Especially these
days with weak parties there’s really no institutional force capable of knocking
a candidate out of a race. And people who run for office just don’t have
egos that work that way. To put it mildly.

The real public good question, it seems to me, is just what harm anyone has suffered through this decision. I can’t see one, save Doug Forrester being forced to run against an actual candidate. Unfortunately, the appeal the Forrester
campaign has made to the United States Supreme Court turns on precisely the
same principle which the Court’s 5-4 majority created out of whole cloth
in order to find a way to turn the 2000 presidential election to George W.
Bush. So consistency would dictate their intervention in this case too. Here consistency may be the handmaiden of travesty.

There is a chilling, even terrifying story unfolding in Washington, DC, though I don’t know how much play it’s getting outside of this area.

Yesterday morning someone shot and killed five people in the Washington,
DC suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. Unfortunately, shootouts and
other flurries of violence happen not that infrequently. So that in itself
might not sound so striking. The details tell the story …

To all appearances none of the five had any connection to each other
beside the fact that they were all out in the open Thursday morning in the
area in question. Each was shot dead with a single shot. Police speculate
that the killer used a high-powered rifle. And since police reports don’t
seem to contain any instances of people hearing gunshots or seeing the shooter,
it would seem that the shooter was firing at some distance.

So you have someone on the loose who is apparently a very
good marksman — able to kill five people with single shots at seemingly
great distances and not be seen. The mix of accuracy, stealth, and knowing
where to shoot is unsettling, to put it mildly.

Police now believe that the shooting spree began Wednesday evening
with a single shot through the window of an arts and crafts store in Washington.
Less than an hour later a man walking across a crosswalk at the intersection of Randolph Road and Georgia Avenue was shot dead in a manner similar to that of those killed the next morning in Montgomery County.

From the facts at hand it really sounds like someone who has training
as a sniper, though certainly anyone who was an accomplished marksman could
probably pull it off.

The police are obviously taking this all extremely seriously. But
they don’t seem to have that much to go on. And as you can imagine, if someone
can conceal themselves and shoot from a sufficient distance that no witnesses
can connect the shooter and the victim, it can be really difficult to catch
the guy or even know where to start. Suddenly I’m not feeling so bad that
I’m going to be home working this weekend …

A Washington Post editorial today gives Al Gore a rough slap (“Negative Al Gore“). Predictably, I guess, the Post
is the repository of this city’s most easy-thinking conventional wisdom.
In a rebuke to the former vice-president’s attack on White House economic
policy the Post writes …

President Bush’s main economic policy — the large tax cut
of last year — was not responsible for any of the current damage. Indeed,
given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the
short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously
well timed. To be sure, parts of the tax cut that have yet to be implemented,
especially the repeal of the estate tax, are unaffordable and ought to be
repealed.

Mickey Kaus chimed in with “WaPo acknowledges what Krugman won’t about the Bush tax cuts.”

But does the Post‘s remark even make logical, let alone substantive, sense? The Post
begins by saying that the Bush tax cut — which must be what they mean by
his “main economic policy” — is not responsible for any of our current economic
situation, by which they mean, in large part, the rapidly ballooning federal
deficit.

With respect to the deficit, this is largely true. This year’s
deficit is caused to only a fairly limited degree by 9/11 or (as opposed
to the deficits for the rest of the decade) the Bush tax cut. The culprit
is a flagging economy and what one must imagine is a virtual surcease in
the fat capital gains tax revenues which floated the federal budget through
the end of the last decade.

So far so good.

But then the Post says that “the short-term stimulus created
by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed.” This makes
no sense. Very little of the tax cut has even been implemented yet. That’s
why the White House — and the Washington Post — can accurately say that the administration is not responsible for this year’s deficit. Is the Post talking about the stimulus which Republican flacks sometimes claim comes from the expectation of future tax cuts?

It’s true that some of the tax cuts have kicked in — largely the
middle-class rebate checks foisted on the president by Senate Democrats,
which are rather small. But, in any case, one can either have real stimulus,
which might get some credit for buoying the economy, and also ballooning the deficit. Or one can have neither. The Post picks and chooses to sustain the logic of their editorial.

It’s an example of the crying sin of much recent political journalism
and commentary — not bias of the right or the left, but reflexive special-pleading
on behalf of the Bush White House.

It’s sometimes difficult
to fathom what ridiculous hypocrites Republicans are when it comes to election
law and the courts. It turns out that back in the primaries Douglas Forrester, rule-of-law crusader from parts North, had his own problem with a last-minute ballot change. Here’s a few grafs from today’s New York Times …

Mr. Genova [the Democrats’ lawyer] also uncovered a legal memorandum from Mr. Forrester lawyer written in April, when State Senator Diane Allen, one of Mr. Forrester
opponents in the Republican primary, was trying to block him from taking
the ballot position of James W. Treffinger. Mr. Treffinger, the Essex County
executive, had resigned from the race because of scandal three days earlier,
or 40 days before the primary.

Senator Allen maintained that moving Mr. Forrester
name to Mr. Treffinger’s place on the ballot would come too late under Title
19 of the state election law, which sets a deadline of 51 days before an
election for ballot substitutions. It is the same argument that Mr. Forrester
lawyer, Peter G. Sheridan, made before the State Supreme Court on Wednesday,
opposing Mr. Lautenberg’s placement on the ballot. The Democrats said that
the deadline was merely a guideline.

In April, Mr. Sheridan read the law the way the Democrats do today.

“Strict compliance to statutory requirements and deadlines within
Title 19,” Mr. Sheridan wrote, “are set aside where such rights may be accommodated
without significantly impinging upon the election process.”

It first seems worth pointing out that if the United
States Supreme Court is inclined to throw Frank Lautenberg off the ballot
they would appear to be obligated to throw Forrester off the ballot too, since his primary candidacy was also a violation of state election law.

Now, I had heard about this issue before but I hadn’t realized that the
comparison was that spot-on. It’s the same 51 day deadline. The Times
asked Sheridan about the seeming contradiction and he replied that the two
cases were not similar because “no primary ballots had been issued” last
April when the earlier controversy took place and today 1600 absentee ballots have already been sent out.

But this argument only shows that Sheridan is dull as well as hypocritical.
He seems to be arguing that the relevant issue is not the inviolability
of the deadline but the practical effect of allowing a change after the deadline
takes place. He says that in April it was okay to make the change because
no ballots had yet been printed and thus no harm — nothing “significantly
impinging upon the election process” — could come from listing different
names on them when they were printed. In other words, the deadline is simply
an administrative guideline and if changes can still be made after that date
passes, then they should be.

What Sheridan doesn’t seem to realize is that this argument is already
taken. The Democrats have it! And by embracing it, he tears his own case
to shreds. The county clerks in New Jersey all said that they could make
the changes in time. They could even reissue the absentee ballots. So if
the issue is the practicality of making the change and not the inviolability
of the deadline then Sheridan has no case.

Forrester has no case.

Even the lickspittle commentators who embraced their case have no case.