It hasn’t gotten a lot of play. But when President Obama appears this afternoon at the Newport News shipbuilding yard he’ll be there with Republican Rep. Scott Rigell (R-VA). Under ordinary circumstances, it’s not uncommon to appear with a President of the opposite party when he appears in your district. But it strikes me as a pretty big deal in the midst of such a charged partisan standoff.
TPM Reader JO remembers Archibald Cox’s recollection of Robert Bork’s role in the Saturday Night Massacre, one of fabled moments of the Watergate drama …
The Bork story reminds me of a story Archibald Cox told an undergraduate class on Constitutional Law that I was lucky enough to take about 30 years ago. In the unit on executive privilege, Cox told us about the Saturday Night Massacre from his unique perspective — not only as the Special Prosecutor Bork fired, but as the law school professor whose former students refused to fire him. Here’s how I recall the way he told the story (not verbatim, but it captures the essence of it):
World Wrestling Entertainment is in a public feud with Glenn Beck. (Remember him?)
We can argue over who is responsible for the sequester — though between two co-equal branches of government, who passed and signed the legislation, the point of that seems limited. But that doesn’t take away from the clarifying moment we’re witnessing, the scale of which we likely haven’t seen since the government shutdowns of the mid-90s. Republicans have run on big across-the-board spending cuts for literally decades. Read More
About 72 hours from the sequestration order, we’re approaching the “well, now what?” chapter in this particular fight where the big Obama cave conservatives are hoping for doesn’t happen. After that, it’s my suspicion that reality will begin to set in and pressure will build on Republicans to compromise.
I’ll get to my theory of a GOP cave in a minute, but I want to emphasize, contra Matt Yglesias, that its mechanics don’t really depend on the superiority of the Democrats’ message per se. Read More
Still really amazing to me how rapidly marriage equality went from lethal wedge issue to majority opinion.
Israelis to press Obama to release convicted spy Jonathan Pollard during the President’s spring visit.
Approaching thermonuclear apostasy, Chris Christie agrees to accept Medicaid expansion under the dreaded O-B-A-M-A-C-A-R-E.
Voting underway. Basically a foregone conclusion now. But the final number will be interesting.
Late Update: Hagel now has more than 50 votes. But the vote continues, no final number yet.
Republicans charge that Obama is releasing ‘criminal’ immigrants as sequester propaganda.