William F. Buckley Jr. was once quoted as saying that he’d rather be ruled by the first 400 names in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty at Harvard. Apparently, most Americans feel the same way:

The public’s perception of Congress has sunk to yet another new low, with 43 percent of likely voters believing that a random name pulled from the White Pages would be better than the gang they’ve installed in Congress. According to Rasumssen polls, that is essentially equal to the worst public reading they have on record: 45 percent.

What’s more, the pollster found that lawmakers are ignorant of constituents, with 82 percent of likely voters believing that their House and Senate members listen to party leaders in Congress. Only 10 percent said that lawmakers listen to voters they represent.

The new poll is in line with others that show near historically low public approval ratings for Congress. In fact, if the ratings go down much further in some polls, it will be within the margin of error.

The phone book rating results were pretty much even across the board, with Republicans and Democrats in near agreement. In the poll, just 38 percent disagreed that a Congress made up of random picks would do better than the current group.

Sometimes, the American people get it just about right.

When the House and Senate finally agreed to pass a two month extension of the Payroll Tax Cut in December rather than work toward a year-long extension the plan was that the Senate and House would spend the ensuing eight weeks meeting to reach a deal to extend the cut all the way through the end of 2012. Not surprisingly, things aren’t exactly working out the way they were intended:

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s private assessment of the payroll tax debate is pretty bleak.

Late Monday afternoon in Speaker John Boehner’s office, the Michigan Republican told House GOP leadership that the negotiations to extend the tax holiday seem like a replay of the disastrous deficit supercommittee, according to several sources present.

Democrats are dragging out negotiations because they think it helps them politically, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) won’t let Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) cut a deal, Camp told GOP leaders, according to the sources. No one besides Baucus, Camp said, is willing to make the decisions necessary to move forward — two assessments not shared by Democrats.

The tax holiday expires at the end of this month.

It should be no surprise to anyone that in the heat of an important negotiation with a massive impact on the American public, Senate Democrats and House Republicans are at a logjam with negotiations seemingly going nowhere.

It’s unclear if the two sides even know what each other is thinking.

As recently as last week, a top Boehner aide warned that Republicans should be prepared for Democrats to push another two-month extension — and Republicans should come up with a plan to combat that. But Senate Democrats flatly deny they’re even thinking about such a plan and said they are solely focused on a yearlong extension of the 2 percent payroll tax cut.

After the meeting with Camp, Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a statement saying the Senate should focus on House-passed spending cuts because progress has not been made.

It’s all just business as usual in the dysfunctional Capitol, where neither chamber and neither party appear able to have the minimum level of communication over strategy as a tax increase looms for 160 million Americans.

Not surprisingly, the disagreements are the same ones that forced Congress to punt on this issue back in December – how to pay for for the extension of the tax cut, unemployment benefits, and the Medicare “Doc Fix.” Among other things, Republicans are pushing a federal pay freeze, which would say roughly $26 billion over the remaining course of the year. Other proposals include raising premiums on wealthy Medicare recipients, and seeking reimbursement of overpayments made by the Federal Government under the new health care law. One the Democratic side, Senator Bob Casey pushed the idea of a 1% surcharge on incomes over $1,000,000, but that idea was quickly shot down by the Conference Committee. Additionally, such a surcharge has already been shot down in the Senate when tied to other bills when it failed to make it through the first cloture vote. So, here we stand at an impasse.

If the last round of fighting over this is any indication, not to mention all the other deadline showdowns we have seen in Congress over the past two years or so, we’ll end up seeing a deal at the last minute that makes nobody happy. But make no mistake, there will be a deal. This is an election year, and there’s simply no way either party is going to risk being blamed for the failure to extend the tax cut or unemployment insurance, and the same goes for the “Doc Fix.” The only question is how they’re going to do it.  Personally, my guess is that we’ll end up seeing something that’s a combination of the pay freeze and the Medicare premium increases, but don’t expect anything resembling that tax surcharge because that’s not happening.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Former Sen. Bob Kerrey said Tuesday he will not run for the Nebraska Senate seat he gave up more than a decade ago, shutting down hopes for a bid both parties called Democrats’ best chance to hold the seat but that Kerrey himself described as a longshot.

The 1992 presidential candidate and former Nebraska governor had considered seeking the Democratic nomination to succeed Sen. Ben Nelson, who replaced Kerrey in the Senate in 2001. Nelson’s decision not to run for a third term this year came as a boon to Republicans, who must net four seats to retake the Senate and have made capturing the lone remaining Democratic seat in Nebraska’s congressional delegation a priority.

“I have given the decision of becoming a candidate for the U.S. Senate very serious thought and prayer,” Kerrey said in an email. “For many reasons I nearly said yes. In the end I choose to remain a private citizen. To those who urged me to do so, I am sorry, very sorry to have disappointed you. I hope you understand that I have chosen what I believe is best for my family and me.”

Kerrey, who moved to New York City after giving up his seat, spent nearly a week in Nebraska this month to implore friends and family for advice about whether to run in a state that has drifted ideologically away from him since he left.

Of course, Kerrey has a history of mulling campaigns he never enters. He did so in 2000, when he considered another run for president, as well as in 2005, when he toyed with running for New York City mayor. His last came in 2008, when he again stepped away from a run for Nebraska’s last open U.S. Senate seat, now held by Republican Mike Johanns.

Nebraska Democrats will likely now hold a primary to find a candidate for Senate, but given the strength of the GOP in the state it’s going to be tough for them to hold on to this seat.

Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana had some egg on his face this morning:

Meet John Fleming, the unfortunate Republican U.S. Representative from Louisiana who made that wonderful and all-too-common mistake of thinking that an Onion article was real and telling his Facebook followers to read it. Fleming’s Facebook status was posted by Literally Unbelievable, a Tumblr that collects images of Facebookers who think Onion satires are the real deal and post them on their walls.

What’s doubly sad about this posting (obviously deleted now) is that The Onion article shared, “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex,” is from May 2011 and is something of a viral classic, even inspiring some users of Yelp to “review” the facility described. So not only did Rep. Fleming (who calls abortion a “pernicious evil”) or at least one of his staffers believe Kansas now has an abortion clinic with “coffee shops, bars, dozens of restaurants and retail outlets, a three-story nightclub, and a 10-screen multiplex theater,” but it’s not even recent fake news. (Though it’s a fake news item that’s gotten other people who weren’t U.S. representatives.)

Even if this was posted by a staffer rather than Fleming himself, one has to wonder how there could be anyone on the planet who doesn’t realize that The Onion is fake news.

Screenshot via The Atlantic

Following up on the comments that Secretary of Defense Panetta and many Republican politicians made as long ago as November when the so-called “super committee” failed to come up with a workable debt reduction package, a group of Republican Senators is working to stop the automatic cuts to defense spending negotiated last August as part of the debt ceiling deal:

Senate Republicans on Thursday offered a plan to delay for a year more than $1 trillion in mandatory cuts – half of which would come from the Pentagon — by trimming the federal workforce and extending a pay freeze for federal employees imposed by the Obama administration.

At a news conference, the senators appealed to President Barack Obama to negotiate on the proposal, noting that it contained ideas Democrats have previously supported. They quoted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s dire warning that allowing the cuts to take effect in January would be “shooting ourselves in the head.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said Panetta “either needs to be fired because he’s so off-base or we need to listen to him and fix the problem … this is now a time for both parties to come together and fix something that has to be fixed.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called the GOP effort to undo sequestration “unfair” and vowed to oppose the legislation.

“I believe that an agreement is an agreement. I believe that a handshake is a handshake. Here we have more than a handshake – we have a law that is in place in our country,” Reid said at a news conference. “They should keep their word. That’s what the American people expect them to do, and that’s what I expect them to do.”

Other Democrats also panned the proposal, sticking to their insistence that increased tax revenues be part of the solution.

“If Republicans are serious about replacing the automatic spending cuts,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said, “then they are going to need to work with Democrats to find an equal amount of balanced deficit reduction that doesn’t simply increase the pain for the middle class.”

The Republican proposal apparently centers around using attrition to reduce the size of the Federal workforce, and keeping the Federal Pay Freeze in effect, although that by itself doesn’t amount to nearly enough money to make up the amount of the defense cuts. Of course, it may not matter at all because President Obama has said that he would veto any attempt to rollback the sequestration cuts agreed to in August unless it was accompanied by a replacement package of cuts and tax increases that would decrease the deficit by at least as much as the sequestration cuts. Before it even got to President Obama, though, it would have to get through the Senate and, based on the reaction of Senate Democrats, it really doesn’t seem like this package is going to go anywhere at all.

Of course, that isn’t going to stop Republicans and commentators on the right from assertion that these cuts are going to “gut” the military. We started seeing that argument being made before the ink was even dry on the debt ceiling deal, and it’s been repeated many times since then.  As usually is the case in Washington, though, what we’re talking about here aren’t spending cuts, but cuts in the rate of growth of spending and, in the end, the Pentagon won’t end up much worse off under the current law than it would have under the budget that was under consideration last August before the deal was made:

Rather than cutting $400 billion in defense spending through 2023, as President Barack Obama had proposed in April, the current debt proposal trims $350 billion through 2024, effectively giving the Pentagon $50 billion more than it had been expecting over the next decade.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, experts said, the overall change in defense spending practices could be minimal: Instead of cuts, the Pentagon merely could face slower growth.

“This is a good deal for defense when you probe under the numbers,” said Lawrence Korb, a defense expert at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research center. “It’s better than what the Defense Department was expecting.”

Moreover, it’s no small point that, in real terms, we are spending more on defense now than we have at any time since the end of World War II:

Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent at most $580 billion a year on defense at the height of the Cold War. In the 2011 fiscal year, the Pentagon’s baseline budget is $549 billion, with another $159 billion allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for a total of $708 billion. That total figure drops slightly to $670 billion in the 2012 budget proposal.

The total amount of the sequestration cuts amount to about $50 billion less in projected spending every year for ten years. As I noted back in November, if we can’t afford to cut that, then we’re doing something wrong:

If we cannot afford to cut $50 billion a year from the defense budget then we will never get a handle on the exploding Federal Budget deficit, and the idea that the cuts that would have to be implemented would endanger America is the same kind of fearmongering we  hear every time one weapons system or another gets questioned.  You can be sure, for example, that the defense industry lobby has been whispering in the ears of Republicans all over Capitol Hill, because their chief concern isn’t what’s best for the United States, but what’s best for the defense industry.

There’s another part to this equation, of course. Many of the Senators who have signed on to this effort to reverse the sequestration cuts and replace them with a gimmick that may or may not reduce spending are among the most supposedly fiscally conservative members of the upper chamber. Instead of coming up with a credible comprehensive package of spending cuts, they’re working to eliminate a mechanism that, although far from perfect, does impose some degree of fiscal discipline on the Federal Budget. It’s not perfect, but it was a start. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the Kamikaze Caucus in the House that didn’t want to raise the debt ceiling at all and the insane GOP insistence that taxes are never on the table when the budget is discussed, it’s probable that we could have gotten a much better deal in August than we actually did. That’s water under the bridge, of course, but when it’s combined with this obvious effort to undo a package of actual cuts in the growth of spending, one has to wonder just how committed these Senators actually are.

No, you really don’t have to wonder. Just as Democrats will never allow real entitlement cuts, Republicans (except those of the Ron and Rand Paul variety) will never allow real defense cuts. And our problems will just continue to get worse.

Graphic via The Fiscal Times

Over at his own place, Dave Schuler takes note of a new bill introduced by Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi that once again tries to bring back the dollar coin, an idea that Congress and the Mint have tried to make succeed three times in the last 30 years:

CASPER, Wyo. — Sorry, George, can you spare the dollar?

U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi is co-sponsoring legislation introduced Tuesday that would phase out the $1 paper bill and replace it with a $1 coin. The move, the Wyoming Republican said, could save taxpayers billions and reduce the federal deficit.

That’s because coins last far longer than paper currency. Coins circulate for about 25 years, on average, while each $1 bill has an average lifespan of 4.7 years.

The switch would save about $5.6 billion over 30 years, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued last year.

Enzi also noted in a media release that most major western countries have already switched to higher-denomination coins. When Canada moved to the $1 “Loonie” coin 25 years ago, the release noted, the country saved at a rate 10 times initial government projections.

Proposals to scrap U.S. dollar bills for coins have been around since the mid-1980s, introduced by lawmakers primarily to benefit mining interests. But with the federal debt level approaching $15.3 trillion, the idea has received renewed attention in recent months.

But it’s unclear how receptive the American public would be to replacing the greenback with a dollar coin.

If past history is any guide, it’s not going to be easy to get Americans to accept this change. The Eisenhower Dollar had some minor success in that regard in the 1970s, mostly as Dave notes in his piece because it ended up being widely used in casinos in Nevada and elsewhere, but its large size made it impractical for every day use and the program ended shortly after the Bicentennial. The Susan B. Anthony Dollar was introduced to replace the Ike Dollar to much fanfare but quickly fizzled out, in no small degree due to the fact that it too closely resembled a quarter, causing confusion for retailers, vending machine operators, and the blind. Outside of numismatic releases, there were no other efforts to introduce a Dollar Coin until the Sacajawea Dollar in the early 2000s. Despite it’s difference color and size, though, that effort too failed miserable. Finally, and most recently, the U.S. Mint ended the Presidential Dollar Series for anything other than numismatic release due to lack of interest on the part of the public.

The one difference between these programs and the efforts in nations like Canada and the United Kingdom to replace their lowest denomination paper note with a coin is that none of them involved simultaneously phasing out the Dollar Bill. Without that change, there was no incentive for retailers or vendors to adjust their equipment to accommodate the new coin, and no incentive for consumers to use it. Enzi’s bill apparently tries to solve that problem by phasing out the Dollar Bill, but that may be what dooms it politically. Just as Enzi’s push for a Dollar Coin is motivated in no small part by the mining interests in Wyoming and other Western states, so too does the Dollar Bill have it’s protectors in Congress. The paper used by the mint to print currency is made by only one company, Crane & Co. of Massachusetts. When efforts were made in past years to tie the creation of a Dollar Coin to the elimination of the Dollar Bill, it has been strongly opposed, and ultimately blocked by the state’s Congressional delegation, including Senator John Kerry who last year introduced a bill to eliminate the Dollar Coin completely. So, despite the fact that it could save the country billions of dollars, don’t look for it to ever actually happen.

House Republicans don’t want Uncle Sam paying for any more lap dances.

A bill that GOP leaders are bringing to the House floor Wednesday would require states to prevent welfare recipients from accessing or spending their benefits at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores.

Republicans included the proposal in the payroll tax bill the House passed in December, and are bringing it back up for a vote separately as part of a package of bills they want included in a final agreement extending the payroll tax cut and other measures through 2012.

Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.), the chief sponsor of the strip-club loophole bill, said in an interview that the legislation was a response to press reports that recipients of benefits under the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program were using state-issued debit cards containing the funds for gambling, alcohol and adult entertainment.

“It’s pretty rampant around the country,” Boustany said of the abuses. “This has really eroded the credibility of the TANF program in the eyes of the American taxpayer — a program that has been successful, by and large.

(…)

In one well-publicized example, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2010 that California welfare recipients were able to withdraw cash from their state-issued debit cards at more than half of the casinos in the state.

“We have an obligation to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately,” Boustany said.

Melissa Boteach, who manages the anti-poverty campaign at the liberal Center for American Progress, said that while “nobody thinks TANF money should be spent at strip clubs or casinos,” the House GOP focus was misplaced, and the problem overstated.

“It’s a decoy,” she said of the legislation. “It’s not getting at the real issue of what’s going to address poverty.”

This may be true, but it does contain the two things that garner headlines — government spending abuses and strippers.

Repeating a survey that they had conducted two years ago, Gallup reported on Friday that, based on their surveys,  the partisan gap between Barack Obama’s job approval ratings was once again among the highest it had ever measured:

The historically high gap between partisans’ job approval ratings of Barack Obama continued during Obama’s third year in office, with an average of 80% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans approving of the job he was doing.

In fact, Obama’s Year Three average 68-percentage-point partisan gap is tied for the fourth highest in Gallup records dating back to the Eisenhower administration. Only George W. Bush’s fourth, fifth, and sixth years in office showed higher degrees of political polarization. Together, Bush and Obama account for the 7 most polarized years, and 8 of the top 10.

Notably, 3 of the top 10 years coincided with presidents’ re-election years, including Bush in 2004, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Ronald Reagan in 1984. In fact, a president’s fourth year tends to be the most polarized, as has been the case for each of the last six elected presidents. Since 1953, Eisenhower is the only elected president whose fourth year was not his most polarized; his sixth year — a midterm election year — was the one with the largest gap in his approval ratings by party.

Looking just at 2011, Obama’s third year in office and one year before he stands for re-election, Gallup finds that polarization between Republicans and Democrats was higher than it has ever been in any other third year of Presidential term since they became taking measurements:

As Gallup notes, one can probably expect polarization to be higher in advance of an election year than at other times during a President’s term. Nonetheless, Obama’s polarization numbers have been high since the beginning of his term. The gap between Republicans and Democrats on job approval was 65% in 2009 and 68% in 2010, and 68% again in 2011. One can imagine that it would be that high, if not higher, again in 2012. Of course, as James Joyner noted when he wrote about the 2009 Gallup numbers two years ago, the one thing that’s most notable is that this increased (above 50%) polarization that started with the Reagan years. Consider this chart of the average partisan gap in job approval numbers for every President from Eisenhower to George W. Bush during their full term in office:

Until we get to Reagan, no President had a partisan gap above 50% during their term. Not Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam. Not even Richard Nixon. There was a slight reversal of the trend during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, but one imagines that is at least partly due to the massive spike in popularity that he received during and after the Persian Gulf War. His predecessors, though, went right back to the “new” era that started under Reagan, where a President would find himself not just opposed, but despised, by supporters of the opposing party. It’s a new development in American politics. If even Richard Nixon couldn’t get a 50% partisan gap in the 1970s, what it is that changed in such a short period time that, starting in the 80s, it was not only possible, but now, it seems, commonplace?

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake argue that numbers like this are a reflection of the hyper-partisan atmosphere of modern American politics:

We are simply living in an era in which Democrats dislike a Republican president (and Republicans dislike a Democratic one) even before the commander in chief has taken a single official action.

The realization of that hyper-partisan reality has been slow in coming for Obama. But in recent months, he seems to have turned a rhetorical corner — taking the fight to Republicans (and Republicans in Congress, particularly) and all but daring them to call his bluff.

Democrats will point out that Republicans in Congress have played a significant part in the polarization; the congressional GOP has stood resolutely against almost all of Obama’s top priorities. And Obama’s still-high popularity among the Democratic base also exacerbates the gap.

For believers in bipartisanship, the next nine months are going to be tough sledding, as the already-gaping partisan divide between the two parties will only grow as the 2012 election draws nearer. And, if the last decade of Gallup numbers are any indication, there’s little turnaround in sight.

John Harris and Jonathan Allen at Politico point out the extent to which this hyperpartisanship has made the idea of bipartisanship and the so-called legislative “Grand Bargain” pretty much a fantasy at this point:

Every time there is divided government in Washington, there is a revival — among elite journalists, think tank commentators and respectable politicians of all stripes — of a cherished idea about how business should get done in the nation’s capital:

Get the most responsible adults of both parties in one room, shoo away the cameras and microphones, and don’t let the two sides come out until they have cut a deal on the most pressing problem of the day.

Call it the Split the Difference Scenario — a dream of Washington at its civic-minded best that has flourished for decades, even as the reality of Washington became ever more snarling and contentious.

Sometimes, the dream even came true, in iconic closed-door moments: a bipartisan bargain over Social Security in 1983, a high-drama budget summit at Andrews Air Force Base in 1990, a landmark spending accord between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1997.

The striking fact about Washington at the start of 2012 is how many people, in public and private, say they have concluded that the capital is no longer a city of splittable differences.

This sullen judgment is by all evidence driving the political strategy of President Barack Obama, formerly an apostle of a grand bargain to solve the country’s fiscal problems.

He’s being joined by a critical mass of Washington influentials — witnessing the inability of the two parties to find common ground on the budget in 2011 — who are ready to discard the old ideal: Politicians huddling behind closed doors to cut deals is no longer viewed as necessarily even a desirable scenario, much less a plausible one.

“This election is built to have a fight,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican and the House majority whip, told POLITICO. “If you watch from the rise of the tea party [on the right] to the rise of the Occupiers [on the left]—in ’08, our country said they wanted a little more government. In 2010, they said, ‘Whoa, that was too much.’ I think 2012 is going to be the argument for the size and scope of what they want America to be, and that is healthy. We should have the debate of what we want this country to look like.”

We hear this about every Presidential election, of course. This year, we’ve been told that the 2012 election is about “the soul of the country,” and some on the right have gone so far as to say the very fate of America as anything other than a “European Socialist Welfare State” hangs in the balance. As I’ve noted in the past, the idea that any single Presidential election is so important as to be transformative is, just based on history, usually wrong. The 2012 elections will be important, of course, as all elections are but they aren’t anywhere near being the “most important election ever” as some  have suggested. More importantly, though, Republican paranoia over what Barack Obama what Barack Obama might do in a second term, motivated mostly by foolish notions of the President as some sort of force of evil, are largely overblown.

In all likelihood, the 2012 elections will result in marginal changes at best regardless of which side wins. On the Presidential side specifically, it’s similarly unlikely that we’d see the kind of definitive election that McCarthy, and others no doubt, seems to be hoping for. Presidential elections are seldom decided on such bright line issues. In fact, one can only point to a few examples in American history where that was actually the case. If the Republican nominee (most likely Mitt Romney) wins, it will be because voters decided they didn’t want to give the incumbent the reigns of office for another four years. If Obama wins, it will be because they did. None of the big issues dividing the parties will have been resolved by the outcome of a single election, although that will certainly be the way that the winner will try to spin things as they claim their “mandate.” As we’ve learned repeatedly over the past decade or so, though, mandates are fleeting and often fall apart quickly upon the rocks of Washington politics.

The real question, though, is whether the outcome of the 2012 election would make bipartisanship and the so-called “grand bargains” more or less likely. The answer seems to me to be a rather clear no regardless of what the results happen to be. If the President is re-elected, and regardless of what happens with Congress, the odds that Republicans will find it in their interest to be more conciliatory toward the White House seem pretty low, especially given that the President would likely take re-election as an endorsement of his agenda. A compromise on tax reform between a Democratic President and Republicans in Congress? Not likely. Similarly, a  Republican victory in November is likely to lead Democrats to follow the example that Republicans set in 2009 and 2010. If Republicans manage to gain control of the Senate in 2012, Harry Reid can play the filibuster game just as well as Mitch McConnell has. So, regardless of who wins, the odds that Washington will actually veer from the course that it has been on for the past 20 years or so seems to be somewhere between slim and none.

The explanation for how we ended up here will vary depending on which side of the political aisle one sits on, but at the very least it seems rather clear that the 365/24/7 nature of our political culture has tended to increase polarization rather than bringing people together to work on common problems. That may change someday, but one wonders if it might not take some kind of existential crisis to bring it about.

Grover Norquist predicts an epic showdown between President Obama and a Republican Congress if the President is re-elected:

NJ What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Norquist is making a few assumptions about 2012 here, but I don’t think they’re all that off base. The first is that the GOP will hold on to the House of Representatives and, while there is some generic ballot polling showing the Democrats leading Republicans right now, political analysts like Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, and Stuart Rothenberg all expect the GOP to hold on to control this year. Partly, this is due to the simple advantages of incumbency, but to a large degree it’s due to the advantages that the GOP seems to be picking up in redistricting that will make it harder to unseat Republican incumbents in many states. The recently approved redistricting map in Virginia, for example, protects all incumbents quite nicely, including the three Republicans elected in 2010. In the Senate, even if the GOP doesn’t take control, they still have a fairly good shot of winning in states like Virginia, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Looking ahead to the 2014 midterms, the large number of Democratic freshman elected in 2008 gives the GOP another chance to pick up enough seats to either take control or add to an already existing majority.

Norquist seems to be suggesting that the GOP would end up with enough Senators after the 2014 elections to convict the President after an Impeachment trial. That seems slightly silly to say the least since it would mean the GOP having at least 67 Senators, which is a higher majority than even the Democrats were able to achieve after back-to-back Congressional landslides in 2006 and 2008.

But the numbers don’t really matter, let’s consider for just a second what Norquist is saying here. He’s suggesting that a Republican Congress would consider impeaching a President because he refused to extend the Bush Tax Cuts or, to put it more precisely, because he refused to extend the Bush Tax Cuts for all taxpayers. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Congress tried to impeach a President over what was essentially a policy dispute, of course; that’s essentially what the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson was all about. That doesn’t make it proper, or even rational for that matter. On some level, I cannot honestly believe that Norquist is serious about this.

Nonetheless, this would appear to be an indication of the kind of position that Norquist intends to take regardless of what happens in the 2012 elections. The Bush Tax Cuts will undoubtedly be an issue in the election, and one can already foresee a Lame Duck Congress in November and December trying to deal with this issue. It seems almost impossible, though, that a Lame Duck Congress would be able to reach any kind of agreement on the issue at all. If President Obama loses the election, he’ll have no negotiating power at all and Republicans will simply wait until after January 20, 2013 to deal with the issue. Even if he is re-elected, though, the likelihood of a deal seems small. As in December 2010, the fact that President Obama is on record as saying he wants to extend the tax cuts for people earning less than $250,000/year will lead Republicans to play the same game of chicken that they did back then, betting that the President still won’t want to risk the tax cuts expiring. It will either work, or it will lead to a stand off.

Perhaps it will be different next time. There are some Republicans in the Senate, like Tom Coburn, who’ve expressed interest in negotiating a comprehensive tax reform package. That’s really the only way this silly stand-off over the Bush Tax Cuts can be resolved, because fighting every two years or so over extending them is a waste of time and only contributes to the sense of economic uncertainty that businesses which plan further ahead into the future than two years at a time. People like Norquist don’t help the situation at all, and if the GOP continues to follow his advice the party is just going to continue contributing to public frustration with Washington. At some point, they will pay a price for that at the polling place.

As I noted yesterday, it’s been difficult over the past several months to determine exactly what President Obama means when he talks about the so-called “Buffett Rule,” or how he proposes that it be implemented. His State Of The Union Address certainly didn’t provide much detail, and neither did the five state barnstorming trip he completed yesterday. Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island has one idea, but it’s unclear if that would have the support of the majority of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, not to mention the President himself.  More importantly, though, there seems to be very little discussion from the White House about what the actual impact of the so-called “Buffett Rule” would be:

President Barack Obama has left unanswered a major question about his Buffett Rule tax on millionaires: Just how much money would it raise?

Administration officials are not releasing projected revenues from the much-hyped plan named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett. During the State of the Union address, Obama tied his proposal — which would tax those earning $1 million at a minimum of 30 percent — to cutting a deficit estimated to top $1.1 trillion for the fourth straight year.

But for the moment, the White House wants to keep the attention focused on Obama’s argument that it’s unfair to tax Buffett’s secretary at a higher rate than her boss.

“I’m not going to give you a schedule of how broad individual tax reform would break down and what impact it would have,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said at the Wednesday briefing. “The president simply believes that as a matter of principle that unfairness ought to be changed.”

Republican lawmakers — noting the absence of real numbers — attacked the plan as a political charade, an attempt to score points in the November election instead of a serious policy to reduce federal debt. One outside analysis by the non-partisan Tax Foundation indicates the rule would generate another $36.7 billion a year in revenue — far from enough to make a serious dent in a national debt of $15 trillion.

“It’s a smokescreen,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) told POLITICO. “Barack Obama just wants to pit one group against another so he can raise more money to spend on a bloated government.”

Along with Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Scalise unveiled an alternative to the Buffett Rule in October, sponsoring a measure that would let the wealthiest Americans volunteer to pay more in taxes to specifically lower the deficit.

In the State of the Union, Obama pitted the Buffett Rule against being forced to carve up government funding for education, medical research and the military, saying it was choice between tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and “investments in everything else.

“If we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both,” the president said.

The President is right on this particular point, of course. I’ve said numerous times here that serious deficit reduction has to include spending cuts, entitlement reform, and comprehensive tax reform. That tax reform may well mean changes that lead to someone like a Warren Buffett paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes, but it shouldn’t just be done by grafting yet another Alternative Minimum Tax scheme like the one that Senator Whitehouse proposes, or some change to the way Capital Gains are treated for people at differeing income levels that leads to the addition of a few hundred pages to the Tax Code. Or at least that’s how things should work.

Leaving aside the “class warfare” arguments that Republicans will assuredly make, there are other unintended consequences that could result from simply grafting a new rule on top of an already overly complicated, loophole-filled Tax Code, and how much it would actually contribute to deficit reduction:

On a broad level, the Buffett Rule on its own would only contribute to the complexity of the U.S. tax code, says Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a D.C.-based think tank.”The problem with the Buffett Rule is essentially [it's] saying we don’t like the outcome of our basic tax system … So let’s make parts of it we don’t like better.”

Lawmakers have long enacted fixes like this in order to level the playing field between classes, says Williams, pointing to the Alternative Minimum Tax for an example. The result is a byzantine tax code that tries to do far more than just raise revenue. A tax code overhaul, while requiring a strenuous effort on the part of lawmakers, could likely be a better use of their time than enacting another add-on.

If a larger tax reform policy were to be enacted, could the Buffett Rule then be effective? If revenue-raising is the primary goal of the Obama administration’s new tax policies, it does make logical sense to aim for the rich. While the U.S. median income has fallen in recent years, the rich are making more and more money, as the CBO pointed out in an October report.

Williams says at a certain point, there are diminishing returns on levying tax increases on the wealthy. Even the rich don’t have unlimited wealth, and Williams adds that, “to close the budget deficit by half, you’d have to raise top rate to about 90 percent from current 35″—a politically untenable rate, to put it mildly.

(…)

Of course, it is difficult to tell at this point exactly what effects the rule might have, or even what it might entail. It could make some headway toward “fairness” in high-income tax rates, but when it comes to deficits, the gains would be modest.

Logan adds, for example, that the tax deductions the White House has said it would eliminate for millionaires in areas like housing, healthcare, retirement, and childcare are “extremely minimal” for people making over $1 million. All told, he estimates the Buffett Rule would raise about $36.7 billion in revenue in its first year. That’s roughly 3.8 percent of the estimated federal deficit for 2012.

Another estimate, by the admittedly left-leaning Center For Tax Justice estimates that the “Buffett Rule” would garner an addition $50 billion in revenue per year, slightly higher than Logan’s estimate, but still just a miniscule percentage of both the Budget Deficit, not to mention the $3.6 Trillion in total outlays in the Fiscal Year 2012 Budget.  On it’s own, it’s perhaps a start, but hardly sufficient to address the magnitude of the fiscal problems that we face and, in the long run, unlikely to really accomplish much of anything. Does anyone really believe, for example, that the additional $50 Billion (let’s go with the CTJ’s estimate just for the sake of argument) that this new tax would supposedly bring into Federal coffers would go toward deficit reduction? It wouldn’t, of course. The President and Congress, regardless of which party they belong to, would look at it as “new money,” and would find something new to spend it on. Absent a comprehensive deficit reduction package that includes all of the elements I outlined above, the “Buffett Rule,” or any other stopgap measure, isn’t going to accomplish much of anything in either the short or the long term.

In fact, all we have to do is look at history to see what is likely to happen:

The Buffett Rule would not be the first time the government demanded the well-heeled pony up their fair share. Congress passed the Alternative Minimum Tax in 1969, after then Treasury Secretary Joseph Barr testified that 155 Americans earned more than $1.2 million in today’s dollars and didn’t owe the government a dime in income taxes.

The AMT’s pull weakened with each edit of the tax code. Some have jokingly called it the “Bethesda tax,” since it now hits the upper middle class living places like the D.C. suburbs instead of those with extreme wealth.

After the State of the Union, Linda M. Beale, a tax law professor at Wayne State University in Michigan, blogged about that the Buffett Rule sounded familiar.

“Funny,” she wrote, “that is what the original Alternative Minimum Tax (for individuals, and one for corporations) was supposed to achieve.”

Of course, it’s rather apparent that the “Buffett Rule” has much more to do with 2012 election politics than it does with putting forward a responsible plan to fix our fiscal problems:

The White House, however, maintains that to focus purely on Buffett revenue is to miss the point. White House press secretary Jay Carney stressed to reporters on Wednesday that there are “millionaires and billionaires who pay taxes at a substantially lower rate” than poorer Americans. “The President simply believes that as a matter of principle, that unfairness ought to be changed.”

This may be smart politics. The polls would seem to indicate that it is. However, it’s not necessarily smart fiscal policy.

Photo via White House Flickr Feed

Greg Sargent reports that some Senate Democrats are considering trying to force their Republican colleagues to take a vote on President Obama’s so-called “Buffett Rule,” which he described in his State Of The Union Address as a guarantee that no person earning more than a million dollars a year would pay taxes at a rate less than 30 percent:

Picture this scenario. The Senate holds a high-profile vote on a proposal focused directly on implementing the Buffett Rule, one that would bring the current tax rate for millionaires paying lower rates on investments up to 30 percent. This, at at exactly the moment when the GOP is picking a nominee who is worth $250 million and is personally benefitting to an enormous degree from the current rate — one that’s lower than many middle class taxpayers pay.

It could happen. I’m told that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is set to announce a proposal to do just this. The Senate Dem leadership is not commenting on this idea, but Dem leaders are looking for ways to hold votes on the agenda Obama laid out in his State of the Union speech. This would accomplish that perfectly.

Harry Reid has spoken positively about the general idea of a vote on the Buffett Rule, so it seems likely that Whitehouse’s idea will get serious consideration.

Whitehouse’s office shared some details of the proposal — which is called “Paying A Fair Share Act,” and will be introduced by Whiteouse next week.

The bill would ensure that taxpayers who make over $1 million would pay at least a 30 percent tax rate on all their income, Whitehouse aides say. It would do this by requiring millionaires to calculate their overall effective tax rate under the regular system — by taking into account all their sources of income and the various rates they are taxed at.

Those taxpayers whose effective rate is under 30 pecent would be required to pay taxes on all their income at the 30 percent rate. (Charitable contributions that are deductible under the current system would be exempt from income calculations.)

This answers one question that neither the President, nor any other Democrat, had been able to answer until now. Namely, what form the so-called “Buffett Rule” would take and how exactly they propose to implement it. Whitehouse’s plan appears to be yet another version of an Alternative Minimum Tax, although one would think that the extent to which the current AMT has evolved over the years into something that applies to far more than just “rich” people would cause Capitol Hill to pause before doing it yet again.

In any event, Ed Kilgore likes this idea:

The idea is to offer this pointed and very popular measure as part of a series of Senate votes designed to implement major presidential initiatives from the SOTU address. But it would be a separate vote. It would also presumably require a great deal of sustained publicity to make it clear a filibuster is a vote against the substance of the measure.

If they hurry, Senate Democrats could perhaps get this vote scheduled for the day the Beltway Pundits crown Mitt Romney, who would be a direct party of interest in this initiative, the putative GOP nominee.

In other words, it’s pure political theater, which I suppose is what one might expect in an election year. There’s just one possible problem with Kilgore’s idea, it appears that it would be unconstitutional. Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the Constitution says the following:

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

What this means, of course, is that all bills that include a tax increase must originate in the House of Representatives. A “Buffett Rule” bill that originates in the Senate would not meet Constitutional muster under this provision and would therefore be invalid. It’s possible that there’s a House-passed revenue bill sitting out there that the Senate could “amend” and turn into the “Buffett Rule” Bill, but unless that’s the case this would be an utterly pointless, and totally political, act. Of course, that’s what it is anyway so I suppose the fact that it might also be unconstitutional doesn’t matter, does it?

Barney Frank is marrying a dude, further proving just how gay he is.

The Hill (“Barney Frank to marry longtime partner“):

Retiring congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will marry his longtime partner, Jim Ready.

Frank and Ready plan to wed in Massachusetts. Frank’s home state is one of six states, in addition to the District of Columbia, that permits gay marriage.

Frank announced in November that he would be retiring from Congress after 16 terms to pursue other opportunities. In 1987, Frank disclosed that he was gay, becoming the first openly gay member of Congress.

Ready and Frank have known each other since they met in 2005 at a fundraiser in Maine, and began a relationship in January of 2007 after Ready’s partner died. Ready works as a photographer and has a small buisness doing custom awnings, carpentry, painting, and welding according to Frank’s office.

Frank’s coming out of the closet in 1987 created a huge firestorm. At this point, though, this is really noteworthy only as a human interest story. Good luck to the happy couple.

After the incident in Nashville this morning, Senator Rand Paul made it back to D.C. on a later flight and talked to The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle:

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul told The Daily Caller that being “detained” by the Transportation Security Administration at the Nashville airport Monday was a major ordeal that underscores flaws in TSA’s procedures that affect tens of millions of passengers every year.

“It was a big headache,” Paul said in a phone interview. “I missed my speech here. I was supposed to speak to the Right to Life March, probably the biggest audience I’ll get to speak to, and I missed it.”

The White House, through spokesman Jay Carney, defended the TSA’s actions during Monday’s press briefing by arguing that Paul wasn’t technically “detained.”

“Let’s be clear,” Carney said. “The passenger was not detained. He was escorted out of the area by local law-enforcement.”

But Sen. Paul told TheDC that he certainly felt like he was detained. “If you’re told you can’t leave, does that count as detention?” Paul asked.

“I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle!’ So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”

“For an hour and a half, they said ‘absolutely, I would have to [accept a pat-down],’” Paul said. “And, because I used my cell phone, they told me I would have to do a full body pat down because you’re not allowed to use your cell phone when you’re being detained.”

“It’s like, well, I can’t call my attorney? I can’t call my office to tell them I’m going to miss a speech to 200,000 people?”

“In the end, after two hours of this quarreling,” Sen. Paul explained, “they did let me walk through the screener [machine] and it didn’t go off. So what the TSA is not telling you is the screeners are being used as random devices as well. The [mechanical] screeners will go off randomly, and the [agent] screeners don’t know that it’s a random call but it has nothing to do with what you’ve done.”

Interestingly enough, the test for Miranda purposes of whether or not someone is in custody essentially boils down to whether they felt free to leave. If the answer to that question is no, then the person is being subjected to a custodial interrogation and the Miranda Warning must be given before questioning can continue.  In that sense then, it seems that Paul was in fact detained under the facts as we know them regardless of how the TSA chooses to characterize it.

The TSA is denying Paul’s assertion that there are randomized alerts in the full body scanners, but Paul says he’s been told by two TSA officials that this is the case. Additionally, he notes the fact that he went through the same full body scanner twice and the alert went off once but did not go off again an hour later. It certainly does make one wonder if there is a randomizing process at play here, or if the machines themselves are giving off false positives, and more importantly false negatives.

Paul also made some of the same criticisms of current TSA procedures that we’ve heard from others:

Paul doesn’t think the Nashville TSA agents were singling him out because he has been critical of the agency.

“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “They’ve usually treated me pretty well in Nashville. But the problem is the rules that are coming out of Washington. We’ve been 10 years and we have no frequent flier program, we have no ability for people to go back through the screener, [and] one-size-fits-all, everybody-is-a-potential-terrorist rules waste a lot of time on people who are not terrorists.

“So, resources, I think, could be better devoted to looking at who’s flying and where they’ve been flying and knowing more about the passenger list rather than spending all this time doing these random screenings of elderly people, young people and frequent fliers.”

Paul has dueled with TSA administrator John Pistole during Senate hearings about why travelers are required to consent to mandatory full body pat downs if scanners beep when they walk through. Paul argues that passengers should be allowed to choose to go through the scanners again rather than being forced to undergo a physical pat-down.

“The TSA has got a lot of problems,” Paul told TheDC. “There are a lot of people who are insulted and their dignity is compromised by what the TSA does to them. Really all I’m asking for is when you go through the screener [machine], you ought to be allowed to choose to get a body pat-down or choose to go back through the screener.”

TSA procedures, he said, ultimately waste time and resources. “So, if you try to comply, if you take your shoes off, you take your glasses off, you take your wallet out, you take everything out of your pockets and try to comply, it still goes off randomly.”

“But then you’re made to think that, ‘Oh, there’s a problem. We have to look at this,’” Paul said. “But, they’re wasting time, I think, by doing this. Instead of targeting people who meet a risk profile for terrorism, what they’re doing is they’re just doing these random things. But, I think it’s a waste of time and it’s insulting to put people through a body pat down when they have not shown any risk.”

Makes sense to me, to be honest.

Photo via Politico

CHICAGO (AP) — Sen. Mark Kirk has undergone surgery to relieve swelling from a stroke that affected his left arm and leg and face, but surgeons said Monday he appears to recognize those around him and is responding to commands.

The Illinois Republican is in intensive care at Northwestern Regional Medical Center, and it’s unclear how long his recovery could take or whether his full movement would be restored, doctors said.

“We are very hopeful that when we get through all the recovery, all those functions will be intact,” said Dr. Richard Fessler, the neurosurgeon who performed the surgery. “This morning, he is doing quite well. I am very happy with his current status.”

Kirk, 52, checked himself into Lake Forest Hospital over the weekend before being transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where tests showed he had suffered a stroke.

Kirk’s office said he had a tear in the carotid artery on the right side of his neck. Carotid arteries carry blood to the brain; carotid tears are a common cause of strokes, which can involve blood clots traveling to the brain and causing bleeding there.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said he was shocked to learn of Kirk’s stroke because kirk appeared to be a picture of health.

“I want him to get well and come back to Washington as soon as possible,” Durbin said Monday.

Sen. Joe Manchin, with whom Kirk planned to sit during Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address, issued a statement calling Kirk a “dear friend and truly a great American.”

It was more than 5 years ago that South Dakota Democratic Senator Tim Johnson suffered a stroke himself. He managed to recover well enough to return to the Senate just over a year later, and run for re-election in 2008, when he was overwhelmingly re-elected. Hopefully, Kirk will recover soon himself and be back to work in due time.

There are multiple reports that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has been “detained” by the TSA at the airport in Nashville:

Sen. Rand Paul told his communications director this morning he was being detained by TSA in Nashville.

@moirabagley, the Twitter account associated with Paul staffer Moira Bagley tweeted around 10 a.m., ET, “Just got a call from @senrandpaul. He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville.”

A spokesman for TSA said the agency was looking into the matter but could not immediately comment.

Paul apparently set off  an airport security full-body scanner, “on a glitch,” a spokesman in Paul’s office told ABC News.

The Paul staffer said TSA agents would not let Paul walk back through the body scanner and were demanding, according to the staffer, a full body pat-down.

The Paul spokesman said his office had called TSA administrator John Pistole about the incident this morning.

The Senate is back in session today at 2 p.m., with votes scheduled at 4:30 p.m.

That last point about the Senate voting today raises an interesting Constitutional point. Article I, Section 6 states the following regarding Members of Congress and the Senate:

They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same;

Of course, momentary etention and arrest are two different things.

According to multiple statements from Congressional reporters on Twitter, the TSA was pushing back against the idea that this was a “detention,” but a local television station in Tennessee quotes an airport spokesperson as confirming that this is what took place. More details to come soon, I’m sure

Update: Further information from the Associated Press, including statements directly from Paul:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Rand Paul says he was stopped briefly by security at the Nashville airport when a scanner found an “anomaly” on his knee.

The Republican who frequently uses the airport about an hour from his Bowling Green, Ky., home told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he asked for another scan but refused a pat down by airport security. He said he was “detained” at a small cubicle and couldn’t make his flight to Washington for a Senate session.

So at the very least it would appear this detention was long enough to cause Paul to miss his flight.

Ed Morrissey makes a good point about all of this:

No one thinks a Senator should get different treatment than anyone else, but that proves that the security theater we experience at airports isn’t designed with flight security as its primary goal.  Besides, let’s not forget that TSA is already working on programs for clearing frequent travelers on an expedited basis who they know through prior investigation won’t pose a security risk on commercial flights.   Who in their right mind thinks that Senator Rand Paul represented any kind of real security risk on board an aircraft?  Anyone? Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?

This is largely correct. Yes, the rules are the rules and nobody’s exempt from them, but the rules are stupid and designed more to create the illusion of security than anything else. I think that’s a good part of the reason that so many people have raised objections to the TSA’s procedures over the past year or so. It’s not the idea of security that they’re objecting to so much as the absurdity of the current system.

Senator Paul had one memorable exchange with the head of the TSA during a Senate hearing when he brought up the case of a 9 year old Kentucky girl subjected to a TSA pat down. I’ll be the next hearing will be just as interesting.