Late yesterday, the nation’s Catholic Bishops came out with a statement that noted at least two strong objections to the revised contraceptive coverage plan unveiled yesterday by the White House:

Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.

First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”

“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

And while Obama’s new plan allows religious-affiliated employers to refrain from paying for contraceptive coverage — insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage for free — the bishops said the change doesn’t go far enough.

“It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write,” the bishops said. “At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.”

(…)

[The Bishops] made it clear that a “lack of clear protection for key stakeholders — for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular nonprofit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals — is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.”

This last part seems to be a bit of moving the goalposts on the part of the bishops. Previously the discussion was about religious institutions that run entities like hospitals, now it’s been expanded to included entirely new classes of people, some of whom arguably have far less of a “religious liberty” claim than an organization like the Catholic Church might. Should the owner of a small manufacturing company be treated the same, for the sake of this argument, as the Catholic Church? I think there’s a fairly weak case for doing that, which is why I don’t think the religious liberty argument doesn’t really work in this case. The real question, for which no answer has been provided to date that I’ve seen, is why the Federal Government should have any power at all to tell employers and insurance companies what the contents of their contracts should be. That’s the real issue here, not some culture war argument over a non-existent “war on religion.” Why the right isn’t making it is beyond me.

I noted after Tuesday’s contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado that turnout in those contests was down across the board, continuing a trend that we’ve seen since the beginning of the year in every contest with the exception of South Carolina. This has led many pundits, and especially many Democrats, to speculate that Republican voters are less enthusiastic about the 2012 race than some might have anticipated, which potentially does not bode well for November. Today in the Wall Street Journal, however, Peggy Noonan notes that there are other signs out there that there may be something else going on other than disaffected Republicans:

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it.

There’s a problem with trying to draw a conclusion based on television ratings, of course. With the constantly expanding menu of choices available on television and online, it’s somewhat inevitable that the audience for any particular broadcast will be lower as people go off in search of other offerings. Additionally, the ratings services don’t currently track people who watch cable news online or on mobile devices, which is segment of the population that is only going to grow lager. At the same time, though, something like the State Of The Union Address is broadcast by pretty much every cable news outlet, and every broadcast network so a drop off of 14 million voters over three years, and lower viewership in an election year when people are arguably starting to pay more attention to these issues may indeed be indicative of something other than Republicans who are annoyed at a crappy field of candidates.

There’s other evidence to support Noonan’s thesis that we’re looking at an electorate burned out on politics in general rather than something indicative of the only the state of affairs in the Republican Party. Public dissatisfaction with Congress is higher than it’s ever been, and the only direction that public disapproval of Congress seems to be moving these days is lower and lower. In the new Gallup poll, for example, Congressional job approval hit the lowest point it has ever been at since galup has been polling that question. Eventually, Congressman is likely to be as disreputable a profession as Mafia Hit Man, and at least Mafia Hit Men bring some canoli along.

You can also see evidence of public dissatisfaction in the bellwether Right Track/Wrong Track poll which, while off the highs it hit in November, is still higher than its been at any time in the Obama Presidency. Given the still fragile state of the economy it’s not surprising that Americans would still think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. but I think there’s more to it than that. For three years or more now, they have seen a Washington incapable of doing anything to address their problems. Three times last year, they saw Congress drag a budget dispute down to the wire because of an inability to either compromise or seriously address the issues facing the country, only to “resolve” it by reaching a deal that accomplished nothing but kicking the can even further down the road. They’ve seen a United States Senate that’s gone more than 1000 days without passing a budget and House Republicans who have embraced a no-tax orthodoxy that even their great hero Ronald Reagan would not (and did not) embrace. And they’ve seen a President who seems more comfortable being a follower than a leader. And through it all they see a stagnant economy and a world where they can’t be sure that their children will have a better life than they did. Is it any wonder that people are pessimistic about the future of the country, or that they might be coming to have a “to hell with it all” attitude about politics?

Barack Obama was elected President four years ago on a message of “hope and change” and a promise to change Washington. Those who had faith in that message were, by and large, naive in the belief that change could or would happen quickly. However, when they look around and see that nothing has changed at all, one has to wonder if they’re just going to conclude it’s not worth caring about this crap anymore.

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.

The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

There’s no word on what form this compromise will take, but it will apparently not go as far as the so-called “Hawaii Rule” that allows religious institutions to opt out of the requirement as long as they provide employees with information regarding the availability of additional coverage for contraceptives:

Sources say it will involve health insurance companies helping to provide the coverage, since it’s actually cheaper for these companies to offer the coverage than to not do so, because of unwanted pregnancies and resulting complications.

So, instead of the employer picking up the cost of coverage, insurance companies would. The devil is, as always, in the details, but this may be a way out of what has become something of headache for the Administration.

The White House may be open to compromising on a new rule that requires religious schools and hospitals to provide employees with access to free birth control, a senior strategist for President Obama said on Tuesday morning.

David Axelrod, who serves as a top adviser to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program that the president would “look for a way” to address the vocal opposition from Catholic groups who say the rule forces them to violate their religious beliefs against contraception.

“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” Mr. Axelrod said.

As I noted yesterday, this is a potential political landmine for Democrats so it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see the Administration try to find a way to resolve this in a manner that tones down a controversy that, in the end, didn’t need to happen.

In the meantime, the negative reaction to the decision continues to mount, with Democratic pundit Kristen Powers being the latest to call the decision itself baffling:

I’m not Catholic. I support contraception. But this is madness.

The administration wants to remind us of their benevolence: they are giving institutions with religious objections a whole year to implement a government rule that violates the core tenets of their faith. Gee, thanks!

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told The Washington Post.

If religious institutions choose to ignore the mandate by dropping their insurance plans, they will face exorbitant fines under the Affordable Care Act that could force them to close their doors. Smith tells me that for one of the Becket Fund’s clients, the fine for the first year would be more than $300,000, and for the second year, more than $500,000.

One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith. We saw that recently when Catholic adoption and foster-care services closed in Massachusetts and Illinois rather than comply with state mandates that they place children with gay parents. Who lost? Parentless children.

The administration has to know this, so why would it force the hand of Catholic institutions that have traditionally filled in the gaps in social services that the government failed to provide? The people who will suffer if they close their doors are the poor, refugees, the homeless, orphans, and the elderly.

(…)

Regardless of how the courts rule, the administration has planted its flag on the wrong side of history on this issue. The government’s disregard for the fundamental right of freedom of religion is chilling and should cause all Americans concern.

It’s reactions like these, and the fact that even people who normally support the Obama Administration are speaking out against this, that leads me to think that we’re going to see this regulation withdrawn and something else put in its place that gives Church-run organizations more latitude in opting out.

In a move that some are calling hypocritical, President Obama’s re-election campaign is signaling to donors that it will not object to donations to SuperPACs acting on behalf of the President’s re-election:

WASHINGTON — President Obama is signaling to wealthy Democratic donors that he wants them to start contributing to an outside group supporting his re-election, reversing a long-held position as he confronts a deep financial disadvantage on a vital front in the campaign.

Aides said the president had signed off on a plan to dispatch cabinet officials, senior advisers at the White House and top campaign staff members to deliver speeches on behalf of Mr. Obama at fund-raising events for Priorities USA Action, the leading Democratic “super PAC,” whose fund-raising has been dwarfed by Republican groups. The new policy was presented to the campaign’s National Finance Committee in a call Monday evening and announced in an e-mail to supporters.

“We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back,” Jim Messina, the manager of Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, said in an interview. “With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules. Democrats can’t be unilaterally disarmed.”

Neither the president, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., nor their wives will attend fund-raising events or solicit donations for the Democratic group. A handful of officials from the administration and the campaign will appear on behalf of Mr. Obama, aides said, but will not directly ask for money.

The decision, which comes nine months before Election Day, escalates the money wars and is a milestone in Mr. Obama’s evolving stances on political fund-raising. The lines have increasingly blurred between presidential campaigns and super PACs, which have flourished since a 2010 Supreme Court ruling and other legal and regulatory decisions made it easier for outside groups to raise unlimited donations to promote candidates.

The Republican National Committee sharply criticized the decision. A spokesman, Joe Pounder, declared: “Yet again, Barack Obama has proven he will literally do anything to win an election, including changing positions on the type of campaign spending he called nothing short of ‘a threat to our democracy.’ “

The President’s critics on the right, and the left, didn’t waste much time pointing out that this was the same President who took the time to openly criticize the Supreme court for it’s decision in Citizens United during the 2010 State Of The Union Address, and who called SuperPACs a “corporate takeover of democracy” during an August 2010 Weekly Radio Address. However, Obama 2012 Campaign manager Jim Messina put it this way in a post on the campaign’s blog:

The President opposed the Citizens United decision. He understood that with the dramatic growth in opportunities to raise and spend unlimited special-interest money, we would see new strategies to hide it from public view. He continues to support a law to force full disclosure of all funding intended to influence our elections, a reform that was blocked in 2010 by a unanimous Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate. And the President favors action—by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place reasonable limits on all such spending.

But this cycle, our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it currently stands.

(…)

With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.

Therefore, the campaign has decided to do what we can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA in its effort to counter the weight of the GOP Super PAC. We will do so only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law to the Federal Election Commission.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Republicans and conservative pundits are using this opportunity to hit the President for hypocrisy given his previous statements about the supposed evil of SuperPACs, but he’s is also getting criticized from the left. Jonathan Turley cites it as another example of what he calls the Administration’s lack of commitment to principles:

What is interesting is that Obama is not lacking funding. He is hauling in huge contributions. Yet, principles seem to be the first to go in this Administration when it is not politically convenient. What they have lost (beyond credibility) is a campaign issue. They could have run on the corporate influence on our political process. What is left is the cult of personality surrounding the President: it is not the principle, just the person.

Steve Kornacki at Salon agrees:

The move calls to mind Obama’s decision four years ago to rationalize his way out of an early commitment to participate in the public financing system for presidential elections. Then as now Obama had a compelling financial incentive; by thumbing his nose at matching funds, he was able to create a massive gap between his own campaign treasury and that of his Republican opponent. The difference is that this time he’s doing it in the name of leveling the playing field.

In 2008, Obama took plenty of heat from good government-types and even from some supporters, and the same will probably be true this time. In a way, his decision is easy to justify: Given how important money is to modern campaigning and how close the November election is supposed to be, how could Obama not do everything in his his legal power to neutralize any GOP advantage? At the same time, it also reinforces the worst image of Obama — the guy who specializes in high-minded, inspirational rhetoric only to junk it the minute it becomes politically inconvenient.

John Cole takes a more practical approach:

It’s not good enough that Obama win re-election, he has to do it with one hand tied behind his back. We went through this crap in 2008 with public financing, and I imagine we will be hearing kvetching from the usual suspects for a while about this.

Look- I wish Super PACS didn’t exist. I wish politicians weren’t as beholden to monied interests and slaves to raising campaign cash. I really do. But that is the reality we live in, and I’m not going to hamstring my candidate and demand he play by different, tougher rules.

Cole, who appropriately titles his post Life Is Not A West Wing Episode, gets it absolutely right here. The idea that the Obama campaign would hamstring itself by declining to make use of a perfectly legal method of supporting the campaign is insane, and the people from the left who are criticizing him for it are guilty of the kind of suicidal purism that would doom any candidate. As long as SuperPACs are legal, why shouldn’t Obama’s supporters make use of them just like Romney’s supporters will? The fact taht some people actually would have expected the Democrats to sit on the sidelines in the SuperPAC fight is a pretty apt demonstration of the self-righteous silliness that surrounds much of the “get money out of politics” meme. Money has been a part of politics from the beginning, and it always will be. The idea that it can ever be eliminated, or that another round of regulations won’t lead to the invention of some other completely legal method to get around said regulations. Trying to fight it, or deny its existence, is just silly.

Kornacki is correct when he analogizes this to the President’s decision four years ago as a candidate to forgo participation in the public financing system despite previous statements where he said that he would. Personally, I was perfectly fine with that decision at the time largely because I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of public campaign financing. On a more practical level, though, the decision made absolutely perfect sense. Outside the public financing rules, Obama’s 2008 campaign could, and did, raise historic amounts of money that could be used to put together a massively organized campaign. Inside the system, the limitations on fundraising likely would have made it difficult to do that. Since Senator Obama had proven during the primary against Hillary Clinton that he was capable of raising massive amounts of money in short periods of time. Why wouldn’t they want to continue that through the General Election? While the McCain campaign and many of its supporters criticized the President for his decision back then, my question was why John McCain didn’t immediately follow suit. Instead, the McCain campaign tied a hand behind its back by opting into the public financing system, a decision that probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election but which still seems inexplicably stupid in retrospect.

I’ve got no problem with the President’s decision here. SuperPACs aren’t a big deal for me, other than the fact that I think the law needs to be amended to require fuller and more immediate disclosure of the sources of donations and how money is expended by the SuperPAC. As for the issue of the President going back on his word as some on the left are saying, well he never really said that he wouldn’t accept help from SuperPACs, and anyone expecting moral certainty from a politician is asking for something that never has existed.

For the second weekend in a row, Catholic parishioners across the United States were read a message from the U.S. Conference Of Catholic Bishops on the recent decision by the Obama Administration to extend to church-run institutions such as hospitals a requirement that employer-provided health insurance include coverage for contraceptives:

(Reuters) – American Catholic clergy called on the faithful to write Congress to protest new birth control rules from President Barack Obama’s administration, stepping up a campaign that began a week ago with denunciations from the pulpit at Masses across the country.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, posted an “Urgent Action Alert” over the weekend calling on Catholics to write to their U.S. lawmakers protesting the rule.

The fight is over a provision of the health reform law announced on January 20 that would require health insurance plans — including those offered by institutions such as Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities — to offer free birth control including sterilization.

At Immaculate Conception Catholic church in the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, Monsignor David E. Diamond read the congregation a letter on Sunday from Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput parishioners to contact members of Congress.

“Write them, call them, visit them – and help them understand the deep resistance of Pennsylvania Catholics to this dangerous ruling,” the letter said.

Perhaps sensing a political opportunity, pretty much all of the Republican candidates for President have been hitting the Obama Administration for this decision, with Newt Gingrich being the most vociferous in claiming that the decision constitutes a war on the Roman Catholic Church. While that rhetoric is, in a word, absurd, there’s no doubt that this decision caused more controversy than the Obama Administration seems to have anticipated, although one is not at all clear how they could have not anticipated that this would be a problem for the Church regardless of how you try to spin it. It’s an issue that has the potential to cross ideological lines as well. MSNBC host Mika Brezinski, who is generally quite supportive of the Administration but also happens to be Catholic, said this morning on Morning Joe that she thought the Administration was wrong to push this button not just with the Church, but with Catholic voters.

A piece in CNN last week wondered that same point:

(CNN)-After years of bridge building with the Catholic Church, the Obama administration may have damaged some of the good will it built up with the nation’s 70 million Catholics, which could have steep consequences at the polls in November.

Some rank and file Catholics are beginning to express the same frustrations as clergy about a new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services policy requiring all employers, including religious ones, to pay for FDA-approved contraceptives, such as the birth control pill and Plan B, through health insurance plans. Churches are exempt but hospitals and schools with religious affiliations must comply. The new policy goes into effect August 1, 2012, but religious groups who oppose contraception have been given a yearlong extension to enforce the policy.

“What’s offensive is that we’re being told, our Catholic institutions which serve this nation well, are being told you who find these things offensive, you should pay for them, in fact you must pay for them,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, told CNN.

Catholic teaching opposes the use of contraceptives.  Wuerl acknowledged the clergy and the faithful have been at odds over the teachings on contraceptive use. But on this policy he said both are in lockstep over what is being perceived as a violation of religious liberties.

“This time around what people are seeing this isn’t a question of one moral teaching or another, it’s being able to teach at all. Our freedom, and everyone has a stake in freedom in this country, and I think that’s why this resonates across the board,” he said.

And yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan argues that the President has entered a battle that he cannot win:

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. Priests in an estimated 70% of parishes last Sunday came forward to read strongly worded protests from the church’s bishops. The ruling asks the church to abandon Catholic principles and beliefs; it is an abridgement of the First Amendment; it is not acceptable. They say they will not bow to it. They should never bow to it, not only because they are Catholic and cannot be told to take actions that deny their faith, but because they are citizens of the United States.

If they stay strong and fight, they will win. This is in fact a potentially unifying moment for American Catholics, long split left, right and center. Catholic conservatives will immediately and fully oppose the administration’s decision. But Catholic liberals, who feel embarrassed and undercut, have also come out in opposition.

The church is split on many things. But do Catholics in the pews want the government telling their church to contravene its beliefs? A president affronting the leadership of the church, and blithely threatening its great institutions? No, they don’t want that. They will unite against that.

(…)

There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney’s gaffes a little bitty thing.

There was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him.

Enjoy it while you can. You have awakened a sleeping giant

As Noonan goes on to point out, Catholics made up 27% of the national electorate in 2008 and Obama won Catholics at the national level 54% to 45%. There’s no reason to think that the Catholic vote has any particular loyalty to President Obama because of the outcome in 2008, Four years earlier, the Catholic vote had gone 52% to 47% for George W. Bush, and if you track the exit polls going back to 1980 you’ll see that Catholic voters fluctuated between majority Republican and majority Democratic as much as the general electorate has over that time. The Catholic vote also played an important role in many of the swing states that Obama picked up in 2008 that allowed him to score a victory that few Democrats have seen since Richard Nixon was President. In Ohio, for example, Catholics accounted for 23% of the electorate and Obama won them 52% to 47%.  In Florida, Catholics made up 23% of the vote and Obama won that demographic 50% to 49%.  The results were similar in other states and, in many cases, it wouldn’t have taken much of a switch in loyalty for the Catholic vote to have sided with McCain and, if this decision does generate the kind of antipathy that some are anticipating, then it could play a huge role in the outcome of the vote in the swing states that President Obama will need to hold on to if he’s going to be re-elected.

David Friedman comments:

On the one hand, I suspect that many, probably a majority, of American Catholics do not  accept the church’s position on contraception—are, for one thing, willing to use it themselves. One might expect them to accept the requirement, perhaps to approve of it. That might be what Obama is counting on.

On the other hand …  . Human beings have a very strong aversion to being pushed around. I can easily imagine a Catholic who would be delighted if the church dropped its opposition to contraception, who is entirely willing to use contraception, but who is badly offended by having the U.S. government compel the church to pay for services that violate church doctrine.

That, essentially, is the political gamble that the Obama Administration is making here. One can disagree with the Church’s teaching on contraception, and many American Catholics do, but if the perception becomes that this is an example of the heavy hand of the state imposing its will on a religious organization regardless, then the fact that American Catholics support contraceptive use may end up being irrelevant.

They didn’t have to make this choice, of course. They could have followed the example of states like Hawaii that grant a broad exemption on contraceptive coverage for any religious institution, with the only requirement being that they are required to provide their employees with information on where they could obtain such coverage at low cost. Another option would have been to require them to notify employees that they could provide a rider to the basic employer-provided coverage that would cover contraception provided that the employee picked up the entire cost of that additional coverage. Instead, they choose to go this route for reasons that seem inexplicable from a political and policy point of view.

As I said last week, I’m not at all persuaded by the religious liberty arguments that have been made against this decision. These claims will be litigated, however, and it will be interesting to see how they’re treated by the Courts. As a matter of politics, though, the Administration’s decision strikes me as a dumb and inappropriate one that didn’t need to be made.

Photo via Politico

The birther movement suffered yet another totally predictable setback yesterday when a Georgia Administrative Law Judge ruled that President Obama was eligible to be President under the Constitution and would appear on Georgia’s ballot:

President Barack Obama’s name will remain on the Georgia primary ballot after a state law judge flatly rejected legal challenges that contend he can not be a candidate.

In a 10-page order, Judge Michael Malihi dismissed one challenge that contended Obama has a computer-generated Hawaiian birth certificate, a fraudulent Social Security number and invalid U.S. identification papers. He also turned back another that claimed the president is ineligible to be a candidate because his father was not a U.S. citizen at the time of Obama’s birth.

The findings by Malihi, a judge for the State Office of Administrative Hearings, go to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who will make the final determination. Last month, at a hearing boycotted by Obama’s lawyer, Malihi considered complaints brought by members of the so-called “birther” movement.

With regard to the challenge that Obama does not have legitimate birth and identification papers, Malihi said he found the evidence “unsatisfactory” and “insufficient to support plaintiffs’ allegations.”

A number of the witnesses who testified about the alleged fraud were never qualified as experts in birth records, forged documents and document manipulation and “none … provided persuasive testimony,” Malihi wrote.

Addressing the other claim that contends Obama cannot be a candidate because his father was never a U.S. citizen, Malihi said he was persuaded by a 2009 ruling by the Indiana Court of Appeals decision that struck down a similar challenge. In that ruling, the Indiana court found that children born within the U.S. are natural-born citizens, regardless of the citizenry of their parents.

Obama “became a citizen at birth and is a natural-born citizen,” Malihi wrote. Accordingly, Obama is eligible as a candidate for the upcoming presidential primary in March, the judge said.

As I noted when I wrote about this last month, there was no legal merit to the claim that the President isn’t a natural born citizen because his parents were not both citizens when he was born. That’s not now the Constitution works when it comes to citizenship.

There are only two classes of citizen under the Constitution, people who are citizens from birth and people who become citizens through naturalization. It’s rather obvious from context that when the Founders used the term “natural born citizen” in the Constitution, they did so to limit eligibility for the Presidency to those people who were citizens from the time they were born. The first Congress clarified this matter even further when it passed the first naturalization law, which provided that “”The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.”  This is why someone like John McCain or George Romney was eligible to be President; McCain was born to American citizens in the Panama Canal Zone, Romney’s parents were American citizens who had fled to Mexico and stayed there until the Mexican Revolution in 1912.  The 14th Amendment further clarified this by providing that anyone born in the United States, other than the child of a foreign diplomat, was a citizen from birth regardless of parentage. In 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the Supreme Court definitively stated that people born of immigrant parents in the territorial United States are citizens from birth, in other words they are natural-born citizens. All Judge Malihi had to do was applied this law and history to the facts, and the finding was rather straightforward. Barack Obama was born in the United States, his mother was a U.S. Citizen. Therefore, under at least two legal theories he is a natural born citizen. Any argument to the contrary is simply utter nonsense.

There is some significance, I suppose, in the fact that this is the first time that a Court at any level has ruled on the merits of the birther’s idiotic claims and rejected them as the nonsense they are. However, I doubt that’s going to deter them. Already, the same group of people are making similar arguments about Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal, both of whom were born in the United States to immigrant parents who had not yet become citizens. Much like the people who believe that the 16th Amendment was never actually ratified, or that history has suppressed the passage of an amendment that makes it illegal for lawyers to serve in Federal Government positions, this is a legal conspiracy theory that’s likely to be around for as long as the tin-foil hat brigade is around.

Here’s Judge Malihi’s decision:

Farrar-Welden-Swensson-Powell v Obama – Judge Malihi Final Decision – Georgia Ballot Challenge – 2/3/2012
 

Many conservative blogs picked up yesterday on a Gallup report that shows President Obama’s job approval rating below 50% in 40 out of the 50 states:

PRINCETON, NJ — In 10 states plus the District of Columbia, a majority of residents approved of the job Barack Obama was doing as president last year, according to aggregated data from 2011. His greatest support came from District of Columbia, Maryland, and Hawaii residents, while Utah and Idaho residents gave him his lowest levels of support — below 30%.

These results are based on Gallup Daily tracking data from 2011, which include interviews with just under 180,000 U.S. residents and no fewer than 500 residents in any state (the sample for the District of Columbia was 356). State samples are weighted so they are demographically representative of the population of each state. Full data for each state appear on page 2.

Eastern states largely make up the list of those with the highest approval ratings of Obama — those above majority approval. Eight of the top 11 are from the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic areas of the country. The exceptions are Obama’s birth state of Hawaii, his home state of Illinois, and California.

The states with the lowest approval ratings are more regionally diverse, with the greatest number — five, including Alaska — in the Western part of the United States.

Overall, Obama averaged 44% job approval in his third year in office, down from 47% in his second year. His approval rating declined from 2010 to 2011 in most states, with Wyoming, Connecticut, and Maine showing a marginal increase, and Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Jersey, Arizona, West Virginia, Michigan, and Georgia showing declines of less than a full percentage point. The greatest declines were in Hawaii, South Dakota, Nebraska, and New Mexico.

This led Conn Carroll at Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential  to create an Electoral College map in which Obama only wins the states where he’s job approval numbers are at a net positive:

Much like John Hinderaker, I’m skeptical of the work that Carroll has done here. For one thing, the approval numbers that he’s relying upon are averages of Obama’s job approval over all of 2011, not a realistic assessment of what his current state-level job approval number might be. For another, there is not necessarily a correlation between Presidential job approval and electoral outcomes, except in extreme cases. Even in states where the President’s numbers are upside down right now, it’s still possible that he’ll be winning come November. For example, there is no realistic chance that a Democratic nominee is going to lose in a state like Oregon. Similarly, the Republicans have been chasing the dream of winnin Pennsylvania again for almost 30 years, but haven’t done it since 1988; it’s not likely they’ll do it in 2012. Finally, these Gallup numbers reflect polls of adults not likely voters, not even registered voters. Trying to hypothesize election results from these numbers is really just a waste of time.

Notwithstanding that fact, as Jim Vandehai at Politico notes, there are a number of reasons that the President should be worried about 2012 that go beyond the polls:

To hear Democrats (and much of the media) tell it, President Barack Obama is a man on the rebound. The president turned in a strong State of the Union speech, picked a smart political fight over taxing the rich and authorized another heroic Navy SEAL mission in terrorist territory. Sounds like a recipe for reelection, they say.

There is a big problem with this Pollyanna punditry: There are a bunch of real-time numbers coming in that tell a much different tale.

In short, there’s a new Congressional Budget Office report that shows unemployment likely to climb to nearly 9 percent by the election, there’s polling data showing Obama tied or trailing Mitt Romney in the most important swing states (and doing only marginally better against Ron Paul), and there is mounting evidence that the assumption of a decisive Obama fundraising advantage for the fall might be flat wrong. All of this is happening while Republicans are at their worst, with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich spending millions of dollars and using all of their air time explaining why the other is untrustworthy, deeply flawed and eminently beatable by Obama.

Those swing states may be the most important factor:

Gallup, which both parties praise for its detailed appraisals of voters’ moods, just crunched the numbers in the 12 states that can authentically be called swing states. The results were hardly great news for Democrats.

Romney and Obama were tied.

Heck, Ron Paul is running only a few points behind Obama, and he’s yet to win more than 23 percent of the vote in a GOP primary or caucus.

So, notwithstanding the GOP’s confusion at the moment, things aren’t necessarily peachy for President Obama either. And if, as we learned, yesterday, the economy really does continue stagnate and unemployment remains high all the way through November, then I would recommend that my Democratic friends check their overconfidence at the door and settle in for a long and bruising battle.

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

If you thought that the birthers went away after President Obama released an official copy of his “Long Form” Birth Certificate in April, after having released a Certified copy of the same all the way back in 2007, boy were you wrong. It hasn’t gotten much national attention, but there is a currently proceeding making its way through the administrative hearing process in Georgia seeking to have Barack Obama excluded from the Georgia General Election Ballot. Their arguments are the old familiar ones, of course. They allege that the President’s birth certificate isn’t real, and that even if it is, he isn’t a “natural born” citizen because one of his parents was not an American citizen at the time of his birth. The legal authority they offer in support of this particular claim is an old, obscure, Supreme Court case called Minor v. Happersett which makes certain statements not central to its holding about what a “natural born citizen” might be. It wasn’t until 24 years later, though, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the Supreme Court definitively stated that people born of immigrant parents in the territorial United States are citizens from birth, in other words they are natural-born citizens.

In any event, the usual cast of characters, including our old friend the lawyer/dentist/real estate agent Orly Taitz, filed a Complaint with the Georgia Secretary of State who, following the applicable law, referred the matter to an Administrative Law Judge . The President’s attorneys had attempted, without success, to kill the case on procedural grounds but it would appear that the rules are slightly different in administrative hearings so matters are still going forward. Yesterday, a hearing was held:

A hearing on whether President Obama should be removed from the November ballot in Georgia ended Thursday without a ruling — and also without Obama.

The president’s lawyer boycotted the proceeding — triggered by citizenship challenges brought by a group of so-called “birthers” — calling it “baseless, costly and unproductive.” Lawyers for the challengers said the president should be held in contempt for not complying with a subpoena.

“This court has authority to take appropriate steps to punish him in contempt,” said state Rep. Mark Hatfield, a Waycross Republican who represents two men from Duluth and Morrow who filed challenges.

Judge Michael Malihi, who recently refused to quash the subpoena summoning Obama, never addressed the request. He cut off another lawyer when he began to complain that Obama’s no-show amounted to “contempt for the judicial branch.”

“I’m not interested in commentary on that, counselor,” Malihi quickly interjected during the hearing, which drew about 80 spectators and members of the media.

Obama’s name is on the November ballot, put there by the Democratic Party under standard practice. The challenges were filed last year with the Secretary of State’s office, which referred them to the State Office of Administrative Hearings. Malihi will now make a recommendation to Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Kemp’s decision can be appealed to a Fulton County judge.

On Thursday, lawyers raised two arguments for why Obama should not be on the ballot. One contended an 1875 Supreme Court opinion says only a “natural born citizen” — someone born in the U.S. and whose parents were U.S. citizens — can be president. (Obama’s father, who was from Kenya, was not a U.S. citizen.) The other alleged Obama’s birth, social security and passport records are forgeries.

California lawyer Orly Taitz, a leading proponent of challenges to Obama’s candidacy, made the latter argument. She turned and faced the gallery — and the TV cameras — during her opening statement, prompting Malihi to tell her: “Counsel, please address the court.”

During closing arguments, as Taitz began referring to documents that were not in evidence, Malihi pointedly asked, “Counsel, are you testifying?”

Taitz abruptly halted her arguments, took the witness stand and began testifying. Malihi soon cut her off.

The claims raised Thursday have been brought in courts across the country in dozens of cases, all of them dismissed. Obama released his long-form Hawaii birth certificate last year, quieting but not extinguishing the challenges. Malihi’s ruling earlier this month that Obama should appear gave renewed hope to undeterred “birthers” and made Georgia the latest battleground.

Marietta lawyer Melvin Goldstein, who has practiced extensively before the court, called Malihi a “very fair and very reasonable” judge. “But this issue has been adjudicated and then dismissed so many times, I can’t imagine his decision would be contrary to decisions in the other cases.”

Even if Malihi were to rule against Obama for some bizarre reason, though, that would hardly be the end of the process. The Secretary of State would have the discretion to accept or reject Malihi’s findings and, presumably, even after that there would be recourse to the actual court system for further appeal. The idea that this is going to prevent the President from appearing on Georgia’s ballot is simply absurd. These arguments have failed in every Court before which they have been made and they are going to fail again. It’s really a pathetic display, and an embarrassment to the legal profession. Of course, Donald Trump is probably enjoying it immensely. In short, I wouldn’t sweat this one very much if I were the President, which is likely the reason that his attorney didn’t even bother to show up yesterday.

It doesn’t necessarily add very much to what we’ve already heard about what happen, but the Associated Press has released video of President Obama’s arrival in Arizona yesterday, and his encounter on the tarmac with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. Unfortunately, the  President’s limosene was between the cameraman and where the President or Governor were standing when the encounter took place so we don’t get to see anything more than what the photograph shows:

Nonetheless, it brings to mind Brewer’s description of the incident:

“I was trying to be very gracious to [Obama] and he just reacted in just a very negative manor of which took me back – kind of left me breathless to tell you the truth,” Brewer said Wednesday night.”I had written a hand-written note to him to deliver, welcoming him to Arizona and to thank him for being here and gave him the letter and he immediately took umbrage if you will with the book that I wrote ‘Scorpions for Breakfast’ and was somewhat disgruntled.”

For whatever it’s worth, when the President emerges from behind the limosene he does not exactly look like a man who took “umbrage” at much of anything. It’s rather obvious that there isn’t exactly a good relationship between the President and the Governor of Arizona, partly because the President apparently feels that Brewer misrepresented their Oval Office meeting in her book. At the very least, it’s clear that the comments about the meeting in the book were very different from the comments she made after she actually met the President.

Judge for yourself, I suppose, but it should make the election interesting, because the Obama campaign has made no secret of its intention to treat Arizona as a state they believe they have a chance to win in November.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was on hand to greet President Obama when he landed at the airport in Phoenix today, then things just went badly:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer traded words with President Obama after she greeted him at a Phoenix airport Wednesday.

Brewer and Obama “spoke intensely for a few minutes” after he landed at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, according to a White House pool report. At one point, the GOP governor shook her finger at the president.

“He was a little disturbed about my book,” Brewer told a reporter after the incident, referring to her political memoir, “Scorpions for Breakfast.” In the book, Brewer depicted Obama as “patronizing” during an earlier meeting.

“I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president,” Brewer said. “The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt. So.”

Brewer said Obama told her “that he didn’t feel I had treated him cordially.”

“I said I was sorry he felt that way but I didn’t get my sentence finished,” Brewer said. “Anyway, we’re glad he’s here. I’ll regroup.”

(…)

During Wednesday’s encounter, Brewer handed Obama a handwritten letter asking him to sit down with her to discuss the “Arizona comeback.”

“I thought we probably would’ve talked about the things that were important to him and important to me, helping one another,” Brewer said of a potential meeting with the president. “Our country is upside down. Arizona was upside down. But we have turned it around. I know again that he loves this country and I love this country.”

More from Politico:

The pool reporter, POLITICO’s Carrie Budoff Brown, said the scene was far from the norm. Aside from the pointing, they appeared to talk over each other and he appeared to walk away from her while they were still talking.

Brewer said the president brought up the book.

“I thought we probably would’ve talked about the things that were important to him and important to me, helping one another,” she said, appearing flustered. “Our country is upside down. Arizona was upside down. But we have turned it around. I know again that he loves this country and I love this country.”

Regardless of what words the two actually exchanged, though, there’s just no way you’re going to come off looking good when the White House Pool Photographer takes a picture of you pointing your finger at the President of the United States.

Photo via Associated Press

One of the most powerful moments of President Obama’s speech last night came when President Obama evoked the memory of SEAL Team Six, the unit that hunted down Osama bin Laden and, as we learned this morning, rescued two civilians from Somali pirates at nearly the same time that official Washington was gathering in the Capitol Building for the President’s speech. It framed both the beginning and the end of the speech, actually. Unusually for a State Of The Union, the President started with foreign policy:

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world.  (Applause.)  For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq.  (Applause.)  For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.  (Applause.)  Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated.  The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces.  At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.  They’re not consumed with personal ambition.  They don’t obsess over their differences.  They focus on the mission at hand.  They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.

And then, at the close of the speech more than an hour later, Obama said:

Which brings me back to where I began.  Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops.  When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian, Latino, Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight.  When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.  When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden.  On it are each of their names.  Some may be Democrats.  Some may be Republicans.  But that doesn’t matter.  Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates — a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary — and Hillary Clinton — a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission.  No one thought about politics.  No one thought about themselves.  One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission.  It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job — the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs.  More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other — because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America.  Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes.  No one built this country on their own.  This nation is great because we built it together.  This nation is great because we worked as a team.  This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.  And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard.  As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

As James Joyner noted in his SOTU Post Mortem this morning, this is fine rhetoric and great speechcraft but it’s unclear what it actually means in the real world. At some point in their Presidency, every President has made this kind of an appeal to national unity and called on Americans to put aside partisanship for one purpose or another. Then, they fly out of Washington the next day giving a serious of stump speeches to sell their SOTU message during which they take as many shots at the opposition as they can. Obama is doing that himself starting today with a speech in Iowa that starts off a three-day, five state (all of them swing states of course) tour of the country to sell his message. This is not to mention the fact that it is more than a little amusing to kick off a Presidential election year with a speech that derides partisanship. Good luck with that one, Mr. President.

More broadly, though, Max Boot expresses concern over the use of analogies to military service in arguments about domestic politics as well as the President’s Tom Brokaw-like nostalgia for the post World War II era in American history:

[N]ostalgia should not mask the fact that the “Mad Men” world is not one most of us would like to live in today. It was, after all, a world where big institutions-whether big government, big media, big business or big unions-had far more power than they do today. The downside of this arrangement was captured in numerous contemporary critiques such as “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” and “The Organization Man” and “The Lonely Crowd” that were a touchstone for Baby Boomers rebelling against the conformism of the 1950s.

From our standpoint today, there are some good aspects of the 1950s-the hard work, the sense of common purpose-but also much that we would reject, especially the pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and other social attitudes-not to mention the pervasive drinking, smoking, and other bad habits. America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.

(…)

Make no mistake: the military works well. But that’s because it’s comprised of volunteers with a mission-defending America. Members of the armed forces are willing to accept privations and hardships, and respond unquestioningly to orders, in a way that civilians will not and should not. Let’s temper our admiration of the military: For all its virtues, it is not a model for the rest of society.

Boot’s first point is self-evident I think. Notwithstanding the praise that the World War II generation has deservedly received thanks largely in part to Tom Brokaw’s books, it’s worth remembering that the 1950s weren’t necessarily the nirvana that they are sometimes portrayed as, especially if you were a member of a minority group. It was odd to hear a Democratic invoking this kind of nostalgia only because it’s usually something you expect to hear from a socially conservative Republican who bemoans the breakdown in “the family” that has supposedly occurred since the halcyon days of Leave It To Beaver. In either case, though, it’s a rather myopic view of the era that papers over the many flaws that Boot points out. In most ways that matter, America is a better place than it was in the 1950s, and that’s partly because we don’t have the kind of mindless “unity” that a culture of conformity creates.

It’s Boot’s second point, though, that I think is most important. Barack Obama isn’t the first President to invoke the qualities that we all admire about the military, the qualities that allow it to get its job done, and argue that the civilian population should emulate it in some respects. For one thing, in the military orders are strictly followed and dissent is unheard of, is this really a model we want for society? Well, maybe if you’re a politician in Washington frustrated by the fact that the messiness of domestic politics makes it difficult to get your agenda enacted you might see the advantages in that, but it’s hardly the kind of society a free individual should want to live in. It would be much more convenient if dissent would just be quiet and everyone would just “work together” to achieve all those important “national objectives, ” wouldn’t it? Perhaps, but that’s not the kind of political system we have, nor is it one we should aspire to.

Of course, much of this is just flowery rhetoric, just as the vast majority of any State Of The Union Address is largely flowery rhetoric. Perhaps it shouldn’t be taken quite as seriously as Boot does. Nonetheless, as I’ve noted before, the prevalence of militaristic rhetoric in American politics is something that helps reenforces the imperialistic view of the Presidency that has come to dominate American politics, and that alone is reason to be concerned about it.