Bysiewicz’ court case is good politics: if she loses, then she wasn’t ever going to be AG anyway. If she wins, her first act on the campaign will be beating Blumenthal (charged with defending the statutes for the State) in court.
Jim Amann leaving the Governor’s race.
He endorsed Malloy in the 2006 primary, though I can’t really imagine any of the candidates looking for his endorsement this time out.
From the uncanny metaphor department, a fine quote from an article about a newly-elected Green Party Constable in New Canaan:
Stangler said he was asked by the Green Party to run for constable in June, the same month he graduated from high school.
Now that he’s studying at Georgetown, the 300-mile commute between New Canaan and Washington, D.C. could make it difficult to fulfill his duties. Fortunately, constables are able to decide for themselves just how much or how little they are able to accomplish as an elected official.
“We have had constables who, I believe, have never served papers,” Claudia Weber, Town Clerk, said. “We had a constable who lived in Germany. Out of all the offices, constable is the one where, if you choose to, you don’t have to invest a lot of time into the position.”
Weber added that, in a town with an active police force, like New Canaan, the responsibilities of a constable may be fulfilled by the police force.
“[Constable] is one of these positions that the state of Connecticut holds onto even though it really has no useful purpose,” Mike DeRosa, co-chair of the Connecticut Green Party, said. “It’s sort of like pet rocks: there’s a subjective meaning to something that has no specific meaning.”
No useful purpose, subjective meaning to something that has no specific meaning? Sounds just like the Greens to me.
As a bonus, a description of the campaign:
While Stangler admits that he didn’t campaign very seriously, he and a friend walked around Waveny Park during the annual Family Fourth celebration and tried to shake hands with as many people as possible.
“Many people didn’t want to talk to me. They thought I was delusional,” he said, who also added that he was wearing a straw cowboy hat donning an American flag. “I’d say I shook about 15 to 20 people’s hands. That was basically my only true campaigning, (besides) word of mouth and telling my friends and what not.”
Stangler’s July 4th campaigning efforts were followed by the Green Party’s Independence Day celebration on the steps of the Ferguson Library in Stamford where he joined members in playing music like Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead while 2008 Green Party candidate for Congress Richard Duffee (who Stangler also campaigned for in 2008) read the Declaration of Independence out loud.
Commentary from John Cohn:
The ritual is becoming familiar. Health care reform passes a major political hurdle. And progressives don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Last time, the occasion was a vote in the House of Representatives. Health care reform passed by the slimmest of margins, but not before conservative Democrats had extracted a major concession on abortion rights.
This time, it was a vote in the Senate–not on whether to pass a bill, but whether to begin debating one. This measure, too, passed by the slimmest of margins, but not before conservative Democrats and one notorious independent made clear they were prepared to shut things down later if legislation includes a public insurance option.
It’s no fun to watch this unfold. And yet this is the exactly the sort of drama you should expect for the next few weeks, as the Senate deliberations play out. [...]
For progressives, victories are more likely to come in the form of ground not conceded than ground gained. Every day that legislation doesn’t get worse is a day to cherish.
This was the exact problem that the healthcare advocacy community and bloggers foresaw in July – and why so many people were angry when Congress decided to wait around until after the August recess to schedule their vote. And when our Democratic Representatives lack the grasp of basic politics displayed by some blogger on the internet (all due respect), it’s easy to see why their base of supporters don’t see a good reason to come out and vote next year.
Over at MLN, tparty has been ably documenting the public statements of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation regarding the public option in health reform.
On Friday, one of my perennially-unhappy fellow DTC members mentioned a letter from Jim Himes opposing tax increases to pay for health reform, and after some gossip investigation, the letter turned up and is available here. It’s from 22 members of the “New Democrats” caucus in the House to Speaker Pelosi, and while it doesn’t actually oppose all tax increases to pay for health reform, it does oppose the consensus funding stream in House Ways and Means (a surtax on the top 1.2 percent of income earners), characterizing it as being anti-small business. It also calls for the House leadership to “reduce the overall need for revenue generation, and to propose a more equitable way of distributing the burden of any remaining needs.”
This is in stark contrast to the other letter issued by 22 different members of the New Democrats caucus a week prior, one sent to both Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, describing “a robust public health insurance option” as “essential if we are going to provide more choice for individuals and businesses, and if we are serious about lowering costs for both.” That letter was signed by Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney.
As someone who has made fun of the “sternly worded letter” as a tool for effecting change, my first inclination is to blow both of these letters off as just a bit of posturing. But as efforts to get our members to commit to opposing reform without a public option haven’t been successful, I think we should admit these letters into the debate as part of a “preponderance of evidence” about their negotiating positions, and what they seek to accomplish in the healthcare debate.
I’d love to do a primer on J.L. Austin and his thinking regarding speech-acts, but I’ll skip the drama and just import a description from Wikipedia:
Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. Consequently, in his understanding language is not just a passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular practice to invent and affect those realities.[...]
How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin’s most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
- First, these sentences are not true or false.
- Second, to utter one of these sentences is not just to “say” something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
These letters do things in Austin’s sense of being performative: there’s no point to quarreling with way that Himes’ letter characterizes a 1% surtax on $250,000 earners as being harmful to small business, just like there’s no point to challenging Joe Lieberman’s assertion that the Senate needs to slow down health reform in order to better understand the consequences of the bill. You could quibble over details, and I’m tempted to do so here. But their are assertions are not about communicating the most accurate set of facts, but are meant to change the debate around the policy, make their concerns appear more important than other peoples’ concerns, and restrict the actions of the institutions to which they belong.
The Himes-New Dems letter, in particular, links a group of potentially-vulnerable Freshman Members of Congress to a particular economic philosophy. If health reform comes to the floor with the surtax in place, it becomes very difficult for them to support, as they’ve put themselves on the record saying both that the surtax hurts small business and that small business interests supersede other interests. The letter-signers go so far as to suggest that failing to serve the interests (as they define them) of small businesses (as they define them) jeopardizes the economic recovery!
To have these words quoted back to a candidate in a campaign or debate setting about a bill that they actually supported would severely wound their prospects for re-election. So while the signers don’t say that they’ll oppose a bill with a surtax as the funding mechanism, this letter only just stops short of such a position, and forces the leadership into a difficult position very late in the process.
By contrast, the advocates for a public option don’t make any statement “tantamount to opposition” to a bill without a public option: they don’t claim that anyone will die or suffer if their preferred option doesn’t go through, nor do they claim that the economic well-being of the nation will be endangered without their policies. Their letter doesn’t generate any costs for them should they vote for a bill without a public option.
Insofar as the “no surtax” letter is a conservative response to the progressive “public option” letter,* it goes much further in its attempt to compel the caucus to move in their direction.
Caucus politics. In a way, it’s a small thing: the New Dems and the Blue Dogs are the right edge of the Democratic coalition, and a few lawmakers inside those tents are pulling them in different directions. Bloggers care about that stuff, and a lot of us are skeptical of those caucuses, so Murphy and Courtney deserve thanks for the effort… and recognition that one can effect progressive change from the inside of a conservative organization. Keeping track of these things are so detail- and process-oriented that there aren’t many mass-media outlets that would explore these issues in an article or series.
At the same time, it’s a huge thing: change is made possible or impossible by these machinations. And people are pretty sophisticated about these things — primary voters in 2006 were able to assemble the “preponderance of evidence” about Joe Lieberman, so even while there were very few specific bad acts you could pin on him, you could tell that he was making the country a more conservative place.
The longer I’ve been involved in politics, the less interested I’ve been in a candidate’s or elected’s positions – where they stand – and the more interested I’ve become in observing what they’re pushing towards.
* Word is that this is actually Steny Hoyer’s response to the “public option” letter, hence his not being one of its recipients. Can we call its signers “Steny’s Angels?”
In the days since Waxman-Markey has passed in the House, it’s been the object of a lot of political jockeying — fierce bromides from the climate denialists that have been terrifying the electeds, and agitation from progressives concerned that the milquetoast bill that got passed out of the House might not be enough.
The policy details haven’t been easy to find in any one place, but the Wikipedia article on the subject has a decently brief rundown:
- It sets a slightly higher target for reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases than that proposed by President Barack Obama. The bill requires a 17-percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2020; Obama has proposed a 14 percent reduction by 2020. Both plans would reduce United States’ emissions by about 80 percent by 2050.
- It includes a renewable electricity standard (almost identical to a renewable portfolio standard, but narrowly tailored to electrical energy) requiring each electricity provider who supplies over 4 million MWh to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (such as wind, solar, and geothermal) by 2020. There is a provision whereby 5% of this standard can be met through energy efficiency savings, as well as an additional 3% with certification of the Governor of the state in which the provider operates.
Alternative compliance payments are $25/MWh in violation of the standard, adjusted for inflation beginning in 2010.
- It provides for modernization of the electrical grid
- It provides for expanded production of electric vehicles
- It mandates significant increases in energy efficiency in buildings, home appliances, and electricity generation.
The bill’s cap-and-trade program allocates 85% of allowances to industry for free, auctioning the remainder. 15% will be auctioned, the revenue from which shall be redistributed to low-income households. 30% of the allowances will be allocated directly to local distribution companies (LDCs) who are mandated to use them exclusively for the benefit of customers. 5% will go to merchant coal generators and others with long-term power purchase agreements.
Progressive criticism has come in a couple of forms: first and foremost, that the reduction targets included in this bill will not do enough to save the earth, which is the ultimate in non-petty concerns and seems to be backed up by scientific consensus.
Another concern relates to the auctioning of the emissions permits: the fact that the bill “allocates 85% of allowances to industry for free, auctioning the remainder.” In practice, that means that a lot of money will be made from these permits being bought and sold, only that the money will not go to your Supertrains and electric windmills and solar panels and other national infrastructure goodies. Obama’s budget proposal envisioned a 100% auction, which would have the somewhat counterintuitive impact of raising a lot of federal revenue without actually charging Joe and Jane public any additional money over the alternative scenario.
The current version also offends on the grounds of moral justice: the other 85% of the revenue will go to the same masterminds that set the economy on fire these last few years – Matt Taibbi’s article on Goldman Sachs connects the last several bubbles to the anticipated windfall from carbon offset trading. Believe what you like about Goldman, but this assessment sounds about right:
“If it’s going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That’s the last thing in the world I want. It’s just asinine.”
It’s exhausting trying to defend the bill once you glean that the grand bargain sacrificed 85% of the infrastructure improvements so those trillions can sit in the trading accounts of the top .01%, collecting dust and dividends until the next big crisis — at which point there will be no money and no Supertrains. Goddamn it.
“But,” say the activists, “defend it we must!” Just because a few robber barons won’t let us save the planet without tripling their net worth doesn’t let us off the hook for actually saving the planet. Let them have their cash, because now the Senate needs to pass the bill, and the odds are that they’re going to make it even worse.
There are some post-fixes possible: John Larson, lead sponsor of a Carbon Tax bill which would have avoided this giveaway nonsense from the start (the awesomely-numbered H.R. 1337) has also in the past offered legislation regulating derivative speculation, and maybe an approach like that would work for carbon as well. If so, maybe the right time to set the dogs loose on carbon profiteering would be after the ACES energy bill goes through.
Also, Krugman pointed the way to this testimony (PDF link) suggesting that import tariffs to equalize the cost of domestic goods and those goods produced in nations with unchecked carbon emissions would be feasible, legal (under WTO guidelines) and enforceable — which could mean that the energy robber barons would primarily be picking the pockets of the cheap-stuff-for-Wal-Mart robber barons. That would allow the proposal to potentially be improved by after-passage action by legislators fearing this kind of criticism, expressed by GOP Congressional Wannabe Justin Bernier in the 5th CD:
“It will hurt our economy without helping the environment. Because only America is covered by Cap and Trade, this new tax will give corporations another excuse to outsource millions of jobs to China, India, Mexico, and other polluter paradises.”
I can’t say for sure that our delegation will engage in a little friendly carbon-protectionism to ward off this kind of criticism, but if a Republican is complaining about it then at least the incentives, to them, will look to be going in the right way. (Sigh.)
Finally, from that same link above (a once-a-week energy policy blog written out of the New Haven Register) another interesting issue is raised: how will the Federal cap-and-trade system interact with the regional cap-and-trade initiative that Connecticut already participates in?
Connecticut is one of 10 states in the Northeast that are part of a part of a cap-and-trade program. The participating states use the money generated by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) auctions to fund clean and renewable energy programs.
The RGGI auction, which was held earlier this month, produced $4.7 million for Connecticut ’s clean energy and efficiency programs. Connecticut has received about $18.7 million from the four RGGI auctions held since last fall.
It’s unclear to me whether or not energy producers will need both the free Federal permits and the regionally-auctioned RGGI permits to operate: some of what I’ve been able to find makes RGGI permit-traders nervous (a good sign), like this report: (another PDF)
The current proposal allows the conversion of RGGI allowances into federal allowances in a way that RGGI bidders face no risk from paying too high a price for an allowance. This would create strong incentives for speculative bidding that would push the RGGI price much higher than its economic value. Such a price distortion would also negatively impact the federal cap‐and-trade program.
Since it’s already widely believed that the carbon market will be a hotbed of speculative trading, all this seems to mean is that while the Federal government plans to give away the store, the ten states in the RGGI program may reap a windfall of moneys directed towards their (read: our) own infrastructure projects.
Plus, if Waxman-Markey won’t decrease carbon enough to avert a climate catastrophe, I wonder if it’s possible for the RGGI-style cap to be benchmarked to a reduction based not on a historical point (i.e. “10% below 2002 levels” or some such), but rather a reduction above and beyond the Federal cap. If coal-state Congressmen can’t do the right thing, I imagine that us coastal-types might have an incentive to strengthen the policy however we can.
A followup thought on today’s signing of the Senate Vacancy bill: a lot of the Republican carping has been about how the Democrats in the legislature are undermining executive power merely because it suits them at this moment: the Republican Governor is popular, both of our Senators are old and ambitious, and the legislature doesn’t want to see a Republican stuffed into that office should a Senator find a job as an ambassador someplace. (H/T to tparty at MLN)
That complaint is, of course, completely accurate, but the hysterical tenor of the criticism obscures the fact that that’s how an awful lot of progress has always been achieved. We don’t have a system of government based on moderation or non-partisan bonhomie: we have a system of adversarial interests, between parties, between branches of government, between regional or ideological factions, and so on.
Legislative Democrats could have stuffed a same-party replacement law (like Wyoming’s, which forced a Democratic Governor to appoint a Republican replacement for Craig Thomas in 2007) through, though maybe not with a 2/3 majority. Since the partisan interests of two branches of State government don’t align — but the status quo was unacceptable to the legislature — the outcome was a bill which put the vacancy into the hands of the public.
None of that is remarkable, except in the way that it contrasts with the behavior of the Congressional Democratic majority during the last two years of the Bush presidency. An adequately confrontational Congress might not have done much to build up their own institutional power during those two years, but when it came to privacy issues, habeus, executive branch secrecy and a range of similar issues, a well-functioning adversarial position would have biased the process towards the interests of the public and away from the opposing views of the two competing branches of government.
It occurs to me that by political placing such a high value on bipartisanship, the default position in national political debates has become gridlock, when confrontation could just as easily devolve power — in the form of valuable information and decision-making authority — to the citizenry instead.
So we got a budget from the State Senate today: highlights include a progressive income tax up to 7.5% for annual incomes over $750,000, a temporary hike in the estate tax, no reduction in the $500 property tax credit, and about a billion dollars in cuts. The Senate Dems have a reasonable presentation assembled here, with pie charts to compare this budget plan to previous “crisis budgets” here. The odds of the pie charts appearing in the news tomorrow morning are pretty slim.
I have more to say about the budget, but the focus in coverage so far has been the number of Democrats that defected on the vote, taking as a foregone conclusion that Rell will issue a veto of the plan.
But a 19-16 vote doesn’t bother me in the least: I mean, I don’t enjoy that Duff and Meyer seem to be re-branding themselves this year as “conservative Democrats,” but the closeness of the vote is a sign that there weren’t any more deals made than necessary to pass the bill through.
A 24-11 budget is not going to be pretty — some of the quotes seem to suggest that the holdouts believe $400,000+ earners need more of a break in our troubled times than those seniors and unemployed residents that are still paying their property tax bills — and the other 80% of the caucus might not be willing to give enough to buy those few renegades back into the fold. In fact, I would hope that legislators from Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport would reject any attempt to stick it to their constituents by making it clear that a proposal that moves too far away from today’s deal would lose their support. (See the excellent effort to whip Congressional progressives into insisting on their own relevance a public option in health reform as a larger-scale version of this same idea.)
If Rell issues a veto — and I’m not totally convinced she will — don’t expect major changes to attract a 24-vote majority. The ticking clock is going to be what persuades either five Senators or one Governor to come aboard, not a more-regressive tax code or sweeteners for wayward Democrats.
Another new hire from after the most recent campaign finance filing: Colleen Flanagan, previously the press secretary for North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan.
Her first quote to the press came out today in a statement on Simmons’ endorsement by Fred Thompson:
“While attempting to burnish his so-called ‘moderate’ credentials for the U.S. Senate race, this endorsement by a conservative, radically anti-choice, George W. Bush Republican shows where Rob Simmons’ ideology truly lies,” Colleen Flanagan, spokeswoman for Connecticut Democrats, said in a statement. “Those values may fly in Tennessee, but they’ll get you nowhere fast in Connecticut.”
An interesting discussion on minor parties influencing major parties from potential Senate candidate Peter Schiff, speaking at the Libertarian Party of Connecticut convention:
What is going on in the Republican Party is there’s a group of people who say that the Republicans need to move to the left, and be more like Democrats. Well I don’t even know how they could move any further, I can’t distinguish them myself already! (Laughter, applause) And I know that that strategy can’t win. Because theoretically if there’s two Democrats in the race, then you may as well pick the real one.
And the other group says we need to move more to the conservatives, to the right, but again, what does that mean? What is the right of the Republican Party anymore? They can’t win an election. What we need is a move towards the Libertarian wing, to the Ron Paul wing, because that’s the only way we can win.
The only way we can get Libertarian principles into government is to bring ‘em in through that party. I don’t think we have enough time to try to get the Libertarian party in office, we just need to get Libertarian-minded people in office. And I think the way to do that now is through the Republican party, because I think the Republican Party is very vulnerable right now. Instead of fighting them, just take them over, and infiltrate the party, and then influence the direction that it moves. [...]
As Libertarians, it’s never going to happen, you’re not going to win anything, but in the Republican Party you have a shot. And the best way to run is to criticise it, and if you’re running in the party and you’re criticizing the party, you’re likely to get a lot of support from the independents. You might even get some Democrats that were stuck in the Democratic Party because they were so divided on the social issues. [...]
Q: The Republican Party is poisoned, it’s nothing more than the opposite side of the coin in the Hegelian dialectic from the Democratic Party, they are the two parties who own power. The money powers behind the Republicans aren’t going to line up behind Libertarian candidates, I don’t think, because they like the control that they have. How do we break that stranglehold?
Schiff: The only way to defeat them is to do it from within. We’ve already shown, after 40 years, that we’re not making any headway, trying to break into it. The media is not going to take a Libertarian candidate seriously anyway, they never have, and they won’t. If you’re running as a Republican, then they’re going to take you seriously. [...]
Because look, I mean when Ron Paul ran as a Libertarian, and he ran for President as a Libertarian, I know, I voted for him, right?
Nobody knew him, he didn’t get any media, he didn’t get anything. He ran as a Republican, and everybody knows who he is now! And he actually got votes! He didn’t win, but you know what, he was in the race ’til the end. Look at all the other ones that dropped out. Look at Mayor Giuliani, a lot of these guys dropped out really quickly, but he had support to the end.
The video for this quote comes from around 1:25 (that’s 85 minutes in, not 85 seconds) through to about 1:40, and it actually reminds me of how us Dean folks used to talk about the Democrats back in 2003 and 2004. And Schiff sounds like he’s pretty pumped about Ron Paul’s example of staying in the race through the end.
The questioner in the video didn’t really take well to the suggestion that he abandon the minor party strategy that Libertarians have stuck to for so long, and I might suggest to him that he consider using the fusion laws to gain some leverage over the process and change the electoral calculus for those who will be voting in the 2010 primary. (And, since I suspect there will be some search engine visitors to this post, I should mention that this strategy is already being used on the progressive side to good effect by Working Families — and that I’m someone who’s eager to see a Republican party with some level of principles, even if I elect to spend my time improving the Democrats instead).
In any case, this is being billed as Schiff’s first political speech, and it’s always interesting to see where a politician starts so you can see how he or she grows over time. And Schiff, to his credit, seems to be the one Republican starting out with something to say apart from how lousy Chris Dodd is – he hardly mentions Dodd at all in the speech.
Also, from the end of the Q&A period:
Personally, the change coming from the third parties, it’s just so difficult given the way we’re operating. So I think we’re going to have to change one of those two parties. And I think it’s more likely we’ll change the Republican Party because they’re the ones that aren’t in power, the Democrats are. And it’s going to be difficult to change the party in power, it’s easier to change the party that’s out of power.
I tend to think this isn’t the case: looking back, Al Gore was more progressive than Clinton, and was followed by two candidates that were more conservative than he was. It’s hard to negotiate from a position of weakness or desperation.
