University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor "Rebecca M. Blank was a top candidate in 2011 to lead President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, but" she said a bad word.

Redistribution!

“A commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of economic resources, so that the poor and the dispossessed are more fully included in the economic system,” Ms. Blank, a noted poverty researcher, wrote in 1992....

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.

Boldface added.

The linked article is in the NYT, which does not omit the old story of Obama campaigning in 2008, running into "Joe the Plumber," and blabbing jovially about how he wanted to "spread the wealth around."

I love this sentence:

In the end, America’s political culture may have made it unrealistic to expect a smooth public reception for the law, no matter how cleverly the White House modulated Mr. Obama’s language or shaped his policy to minimize the number of losers.

Let me paraphrase that for you: Obama had to lie to get the law passed.

When we the people don't want something, in a democracy that should work to stop it. We're voters, not some agglomerated "culture" to be softened and shaped. If we didn't want it, you shouldn't have done it. It's good that cleverness and manipulation did not overcome that reality. Of course, the law got passed, because people had voted in representatives who had the grandiosity to believe they didn't need to represent us, that trickily crafted policies and rhetoric would be enough. Fortunately, those representatives were wrong, and they richly deserve all the political pain they've got to go through now.

There are 242 pending nominees to ram through after the end of the filibuster.

But what are the priorities and the politics of this drastic effort?

Top priorities for the White House include the confirmation in December of Jeh Johnson as secretary of homeland security, Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve, according to a White House official. Obama also hopes for quick confirmation of three nominees to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit....

And then?

“There is no document; there is no blueprint,” said Robert Raben, a prominent Democratic lawyer close to the White House. “In terms of a strategy, everybody’s blinking really hard.”

I guess "blinking really hard" means it was such a big surprise that they're still trying to wake up into the new reality. Or do you think it's blinking in the sense of losing one's nerve? They looked courageous, but then they blinked?

It would make more sense to say that the strategy must be to begin with the top priorities while continually observing the responses from the GOP and from the American people and developing the strategy as thing proceed. All along, the Democrats should be promoting their brand as the nominees themselves are presented as sound and highly competent, the Republicans attacks are made to seem scurrilous, and the people are manipulated into feeling as though the work of the government is going forward in a proper and beneficial way. The procedure should be used to distract attention from other less pleasant things — notably the Obamacare debacle (which itself might already be working to keep us from looking at even more unsettling matters).

If the Democrats can use this new confirmation process to good effect and they get lucky with a few Republicans looking arguably stupid or mean (not a bad bet), then more nominees can be advanced, perhaps even more advantageously as the moves of the game are learned and perfected.

How will Republicans play the game? They've already resisted confirming a bunch of "low-profile nominees by unanimous consent, as is customary in the Senate before an extended break." They can also absent themselves from committees so there's no quorum, which is needed to move the nominations to the floor. There's the "blue slip" procedure requiring each judicial nominee to get approval by both of their home state Senators. On the Senate floor, there can be up to 30 hours of debate time for every appeals court and Cabinet-level nominee and 8 hours for other nominees. I can picture Ted Cruz finding 30 hours worth of things to say about any Obama judicial nominee. If it's done well, it could help Republicans, but the Democrats and the media will call everything obstructionist and cherry-pick anything to denounce as mean, stupid, evil, etc.

Republicans have not indicated which delaying tactics, if any, they might employ, but they signaled a desire to seek revenge after Thursday’s vote. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Democrats will “have trouble in a lot of areas, because there’s going to be a lot of anger.”...

On nominations, Raben said, the change in filibuster rules means that political fights are more likely to take place at the committee level. “Background investigations, courtesy visits, hearings and committee markups around nominees take on heightened importance because once it gets to the floor, absent a horrific fact about a nominee where significant numbers of the majority won’t defend it, it’s only a matter of time,” Raben said.

It's also only a matter of time until next year's elections, and we're already more or less in campaign mode. 30 (or even 8) hours is a lot of debate when you are talking about 242 nominees. And as the nasty, fired-up game proceeds, won't Republicans refine their moves? Pick which debates you want on the floor.

Obama’s aides said the president hopes the change in filibuster rules will get business back to usual, allowing him to staff his administration and fill the federal judiciary with nominees of his choosing without delay.

Obama and hope, a dreary old theme, newly hollowed out.

Living in compressed time with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

"We live in an era of time compression," said Justice Kennedy. And "It’s simply stunning to me to see the changes in attitudes." He was talking about attitudes about sexual orientation.

At the same time — compressed time, presumably — he said that, in a "functioning democracy," courts should not be "resolv[ing] the most serious issues of the day."

"I just don’t think that a democracy is responsible if it doesn’t have a political, rational, respectful, decent discourse so it can solve these problems before they come to the court."

Attitudes are changing rapidly, and in a democracy, serious issues should be resolved outside of the courts. And yet he wrote the decision that struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Why not wait for the democratic process to play out?

Maybe — in the mind of Anthony Kennedy — they did wait. DOMA was passed in 1996. They waited 17 years.

In compressed time, that's what? Half a century?

"Utterly unqualified partisan politicians will look at what utterly unqualified citizens have said..."

Begins a criticism of [guess what] that could work pretty much across the board as a criticism of representative democracy.

"We've all heard the 'elections have consequences' adage many times, but let's be clear about what we're witnessing in 2013..."

"... Republicans are very clearly telling the country, 'No, actually, elections don't have consequences. We're still going to do as we please.'"

So writes Steve Benen at Maddow blog, and I just have to ask him how is it that these terrible Republicans are able to tell us these things? Seems to me they got elected.

Benen ends with a line that resonates with us the people of Wisconsin: "Democracies aren't supposed to work this way." Back in 2011, we had weeks of loud protests with chanting over a drumbeat: "This is what democracy looks like." And those were Democrats who'd lost the 2010 elections. They were making all the noise they could because they didn't have the votes in the legislature, and yet they still shouted all day and night that what they wanted was democracy. The idea — to the extent that it made any sense — was that the minority opinion also matters and free expression and dissent are part of the process, adding friction and restraint to the imposition of the will of the majority.

But in Congress, there are members who form a majority in one house and a sizable minority in the other. These people were elected, and we have a system of separated powers that was designed to slow things down, force deliberation, and prevent the abuse of power.

There was a time when Obama said "I won." It was arrogant back then, and in a democracy, that kind of arrogance invites comeuppance.

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation."

Writes Vladimir Putin... in a NYT op-ed.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

What a fine time Putin is having, repurposing American pieties and slapping our President around!

That's the very end of the op-ed, and here's a line from the top of the column: "But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together." Putin is sly enough not to be explicit, but the inference is there: Remember when the Nazis encouraged the Germans to see themselves as exceptional?

Poor Obama! Righties have been pummeling him for years for failing to manifest a belief in American exceptionalism. He throws them a sop and Putin hits him over the head.

Should respect for the initiative process have moved the Supreme Court to stretch the restraints of the standing requirement?

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Hollingsworth v. Perry, says:

We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here.

There was some argument that there needed to be a way for the results of the state's initiative process to be defended when the state's elected officials didn't like those results, as happened with Prop 8. The dissenting opinion said the majority "disrespects and disparages" this political safeguard that is part of California law. The Chief's answer was the state can have its law, but it doesn't have power to change the federal law of standing that limits federal courts.

[T]he fact that a State thinks a private party should have standing to seek relief for a generalized grievance cannot override our settled law to the contrary.

The Article III requirement that a party invoking the jurisdiction of a federal court seek relief for a personal, particularized injury serves vital interests going to the role of the Judiciary in our system of separated powers.

In other words, separation of powers beats federalism. Not always, but here, where the separation of powers is a matter of federal constitutional law, and the federalism interests are only policy concerns.

The dissenting opinion is written by Justice Kennedy and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor:

The very object of the initiative system is to establish a lawmaking process that does not depend upon state officials. In California, the popular initiative is necessary to implement “the theory that all power of government ultimately resides in the people.”...

The California Supreme Court has determined that this purpose is undermined if the very officials the initiative process seeks to circumvent are the only parties who can defend an enacted initiative when it is challenged in a legal proceeding. 

Roberts's opinion acknowledges all that, but it's simply policy analysis, and federal standing doctrine has — for a long time — rejected arguments that come in the form of if these plaintiffs can't sue, an important legal issue cannot be raised.

I'm particularly unsympathetic to this argument in the context of needing to defend the results of the initiative process. Long ago, the Supreme Court had a case challenging the initiative process as a violation of the Article IV guarantee of a "Republican Form of Government" to every state. In that case, Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph v. Oregon (1911), the Court said it could not reach the substantive merits of the question because of the so-called "political question" doctrine — which, like standing, is a justiciability doctrine about the power of the federal courts.

It would be ironic if reverence for the initiative leveraged these plaintiffs past the normal limits on judicial power, since it was a limit on judicial power that prevented us from ever finding out whether lawmaking by initiative — rather than in a deliberative body of elected representatives — is unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy ends his dissenting opinion saying:

The essence of democracy is that the right to make law rests in the people and flows to the government, not the other way around. Freedom resides first in the people without need of a grant from government. The California initiative process embodies these principles and has done so for over a century. 

That's interesting political philosophy about democracy, but the people also made the federal Constitution, which is superior to state law, and which has that guarantee of a republican form of government. So let's not get too sentimental about direct democracy. If we want to get back to first principles, let's talk about republicanism.

(Here's Erwin Chemerinsky's article "Why Cases Under the Guarantee Clause Should Be Justiciable," which was part of a symposium at the University of Colorado Law School in 1994, back when there was a challenge to an initiative in Colorado that barred laws protecting gay people from discrimination. I was there too and wrote a response to Prof. Chemerinsky — here's my "Time for the Federal Courts to Enforce the Guarantee Clause?" — saying that if the Supreme Court felt motivated enough about this challenge, before it would change the justiability law about the Guarantee Clause, it would find the right it needed in the Equal Protection Clause. And that, by the way, is exactly what the Court proceeded to do, in Romer v. Evans — a case written by, of all people, Justice Kennedy.)

This is what democracy looks like...

... from up inside your vagina.

"From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man."

Writes David Brooks:

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did....

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things....

Read the whole thing. This is an excellent column, and it's related to something I was trying to say here. In Brooks's list of what Snowden betrayed, there is:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

That's related to something I said in the comments on that earlier thread, here. A commenter, gerry, had said:

Humanity tends to be cruel, selfish, and morally confused and weak. If geeks save our asses from collectivists and power vampires like Obama, it likely will be an accident, with all the attendant unintended consequences.

And my response was:

See, that's the kind of thought pattern I suspect is developing out there in the minds of these computer technicians. Look at the contempt, the grandiosity, and the recklessness.

Obama was elected, twice, by the American people. We studied him. We listened to him. He is surrounded by advisers and checked by Congress and the press.

[It's absurd to think] that some self-appointed altruist of the computer-fixated kind is going to save us.

It's like those movie trailers... in a world where etc etc ONE MAN...

You think that's what will save us?!

"So why is compromise so hard in the House?"

"Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress."

But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.

Democrat, Democratic, Democratical.

Today, I encountered a word I'd never noticed before: "democratical." I was writing about the "common sense" meme and arrived at the Thomas Paine pamphlet "Common Sense" and John Adams's criticism of it as "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

The OED defines "democratical" to mean the same thing as "democratic," and it gives some usage examples going back to 1589 and continuing only to 1850:

1589   ‘M. Marprelate’ Hay any Worke for Cooper 26   It is Monarchicall, in regarde of our head Christ, Aristocraticall in the Eldership, and Democraticall in the people.
1608   D. Tuvil Ess. Polit. & Morall f. 4v,   Ostracismes practiced in those Democraticall and Popular states of elder times.
1686   in Coll. Scarce & Valuable Tracts (1748) I. 111   The Democratical Man, that is never quiet under any Government.
1791   J. Boswell Life Johnson anno 1775 I. 460,   I abhor his Whiggish democratical notions and propensities.
1850   G. Grote Hist. Greece VIII. ii. lxiv. 231   The levy was in fact as democratical and as equalising as..on that memorable occasion.

There are also a 3 examples of "democratical" as a noun, defined to mean the same thing as "democrat." 2 of these are by Thomas Hobbes:

1651   T. Hobbes Leviathan ii. xxii. 122   Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece.
1679   T. Hobbes Behemoth i, in Wks. VI. 199   The thing which those democraticals chiefly then aimed at, was to force the King to call a parliament.

What, you may ask, is the "-al" ending doing after the "-ic" ending? When do suffixes double up like that? This seems related to the present-day controversy about using the word "Democrat" as an adjective, when GOP types refer to the "Democrat Party," instead of the "Democratic Party." There's an insult perceived in leaving off the "-ic" ending, but, oddly, in the case of "democratical," there's insult in adding more letters — "-ic" plus "-al."

Does "-al" have any meaning? "Forming adjectives with the sense ‘of or relating to that which is denoted by the first element'" is the OED definition, which seems to say, it's just a way to turn something into an adjective. But that doesn't explain "-ical." The "-ic" already made the adjective. What's up with "-ical"? What are the other "-ical" words? Comical, radical... logical...

I know what you're thinking: "The Logic Song" by Supertramp!

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully, watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical...
I said now, watch what you say, now we're calling you a radical, a liberal, fanatical, criminal
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable...
But I'm thinking so logical ...

Am I thinking too logical? So... musical interlude over. What does "-ic" mean? It's just another ending used to make an adjective and means "in the manner of" or "pertaining to" or some such generic way to say what differentiates an adjective from a noun. So what's with the suffix pile-up in the "-ical" words? Wonderfully, magically, the OED has an entry for "-ical":

Sometimes forming an adjective from a noun in -ic, as music, musical, but more frequently a secondary adjective, as comic, comical, historic, historical. Its origin appears to have been the formation in late Latin of adjectives in -ālis on nouns in -ic-us, or in -icē, e.g. grammatic-us grammarian, grammaticē grammar, grammatic~āl-is grammatical, clēricus clergyman, clerk, clēricāl-is clerical. So in medieval Latin, chīrurgicāl-is, dominic-āl-is, medicāl-is, mūsicāl-is, physicāl-is. In French, adjectives of this type are few, and mostly taken directly from Latin formations, as chirurgical, clérical, grammatical, médical, etc. But in English they are exceedingly numerous, existing not only in all cases in which the term in -ic is a noun, but also as the direct representatives of Latin adjectives in -icus, French -ique. Thus we find before 1500 canonical, chirurgical, domestical, musical, philosophical, physical. Many adjectives have a form both in -ic and -ical, and in such cases that in -ical is usually the earlier and that more used. Often also the form in -ic is restricted to the sense ‘of’ or ‘of the nature of’ the subject in question, while that in -ical has wider or more transferred senses, including that of ‘practically connected’ or ‘dealing with’ the subject. Cf. ‘economic science’, ‘an economical wife’, ‘prophetic words’, ‘prophetical studies’, ‘a comic song’, ‘a comical incident’, ‘the tragic muse’, ‘his tragical fate’. A historic book is one mentioned or famous in history, a historical treatise contains or deals with history. But in many cases this distinction is, from the nature of the subject, difficult to maintain, or entirely inappreciable.

Adjectives of locality, nationality, and language, as Baltic, Arabic, Teutonic, and those of chemical and other technical nomenclature, as oxalic, ferric, pelagic, dactylic, hypnotic, megalithic, have usually no secondary form in -al.

That's long and complicated, though interesting as hell, but I boldfaced the bit that's most useful to understand what John Adams and Thomas Hobbes were getting at. It might be helpful to consider what it would mean to say: This political movement is not democratic. It's democratical. My sense is that democratic would refer to the principle that each person to be governed ought to vote. Democratical nudges us to worry about the chaos and disorder of attempting to let everyone decide everything.

This brings us back to why Democrats prefer the adjective "Democratic" (rather than to have the noun "Democrat" used in the combination "Democratic Party"). Presumably, they want to appear to be imbued with democratic values, rather than simply to be a party composed of Democrats.

A "Democrat" is, in the U.S. political sense, "A member of the Democratic party," as defined in the OED, beginning with this choice 1798 quote from none other than George Washington: "You could as soon scrub the blackamore white as change the principle of a profest Democrat."

There are times when all the world's asleep/The questions run too deep for such a simple man...