Sen. Coleman’s lawyers are pushing to include an absentee ballot from a man who voted in Pine County even though he was a resident of another county. Now they’re arguing that the ballot should be included because even though the voter lived in a different county, at the time of the election, he was in the Pine County jail.
Late Update: This commenter may see Coleman’s angle here: “Maybe he’s trying to preserve his franchise once he ends up behind bars.”
Later Policy Update: Let me clarify one broader policy point. Many states around the country have laws which take away voting rights from felons even after they’ve served their time. I’m basically against all those laws. It’s actually a big problem because it leaves big swaths of the population permanently disenfranchised. This of course seems to be the more prosaic issue of voting in a county where you don’t live, rather than civic disabilities of prisoners, though I admire the guy’s diligence in pursuing his civic rights even while he had a lot of other stuff to worry about.
One reader chimes in on the logic of the Collins-Nelson cut list …
What’s most striking about this list is that, for all their carping about this hodgepodge of a bill, the Nelson-Collins group seems to have approached their cuts in an even more haphazard fashion. They’re not offering a comprehensive or coherent approach to stimulus spending. They haven’t established a fixed standard, against which they’re measuring each item. They don’t have any sense of how big the overall package needs to be in order to work. They’re just canvassing members to find out which items it’s politically feasible to remove.
Some of their cuts are sensible – programs that belong in the standard appropriations process. Some are ideological – education aid is an incredibly efficient way to avert a huge number of layoffs, but federal funding for local education is anathema to conservatives. Some are nonsensical – why slash immediate spending on transportation
infrastructure? And that’s without getting into what they’re not pressing to cut: any number of other items particularly dear to the hearts of influential senators are left alone.It may be necessary to accept this amendment to secure enough votes for the final measure; it’s certainly not worth letting the stimulus fail over this. But Collins and Nelson shouldn’t be allowed to trumpet, with false piety, their stand against “sacred cows.” What matters most right now is averting economic disaster; the efficacy of individual programs is purely secondary. If Collins and Nelson had a shred of seriousness, they would be proposing the elimination of individual items – and then the substitution of programs they felt would stimulate the economy more efficiently. Where are the substitutes? Or, if they think the bill is bigger than necessary, they could announce a target amount and a rationale for why that lesser amount would work. Where’s the target?
This isn’t centrism. It’s not fiscal conservatism. It’s just grandstanding.
Did I mention that Neel Kashkari, the 35 year old, ex-Goldman Sachs VP that Hank Paulson put in charge of TARP, is still over at Treasury running the thing? Matt Cooper looks at who might replace him.
New Madoff SEC investigation being run by the same office (and possibly the same investigators) that blew that last Madoff investigation back in 2006 when it might have counted.
In floor debate this morning on the stimulus bill, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) accused Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) of being “theatrical.” He responded by being, well, theatrical:
Oh, the indignation.
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY): The Solis nomination isn’t going anywhere for now.
I don’t know how many people saw it. But President Obama gave a great speech defending the Stimulus Bill today at the House Dems retreat. Exactly the case he needs to be making on TV and in some events around the country. We’ll try to get full video of it up tomorrow.
Here’s the vid.
This week, out on the broad wastes of cable news drekdom and the uplands of Beltway journalistic drivel, a simple fact has gone almost entirely unreported: virtually everything congressional Republicans are saying about the Stimulus Bill wouldn’t cut it in remedial economics. Not that there aren’t legitimate policy differences and criticisms to be made of the outline plan before Congress. But to call the
Republican complaints ‘policy differences’ would be to engage in what that old president used to call the soft bigotry of low expectations, as though a political party with as legitimately proud a history as the GOP could not be expected to produce more than economic illiterates.
The ground under our feet might feel firmer if this were just standard order rhetorical abuse. But the truth of it is genuinely frightening, especially since these fellows are planted in Congress rather than on one of the sidewalk corners in Union Square ranting about Socialism and Fluoride or Lyndon LaRouche.
But now there are some flickering signs that the tide may be turning, perhaps in response to just how nonsensical the conversation got earlier this week. For instance, in tomorrow’s Post, business columnist Steven Pearlstein devotes an entire column to the fact most of Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t even seem to grasp how a Stimulus Bill is supposed to work or even more basic stuff about demand, recession economics or even how jobs come into existence. As in, it’s not a Stimulus Bill, it’s a spending bill.
Tactfully, Pearlstein doesn’t say explicitly for most of the article that it’s Republicans he’s talking about. You have to infer that from the names of the members he dings. But toward the end of the piece he can’t seem to help cutting to the chase …
what’s striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.
What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn’t being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending.
It really does approach flat earth territory.
When you step back from the immediacy of the moment and consider just what nonsense these guys are spouting and what games they’re playing while the country is legitimately in danger, it’s breathtaking. All the reporters have fallen down on the job. But maybe we can hope for more tide-turning tomorrow.