WASHINGTON -- John Murtha's death Monday has Democrats and Republicans scrambling to find candidates for a special election in the ultimate swing House district -- Pennsylvania's 12th, the only one in the nation that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008.
Funeral arrangements haven't been finalized yet for Murtha, the longest-serving House member in Pennsylvania history, and few political operatives would talk on the record about exactly how to replace him, out of respect for a local legend. But each party is looking at a few names for an election where insiders -- not primary voters -- will pick the candidates.
On the Democratic side, talk is focusing on former Lieutenant Gov. Mark Singel, of Johnstown, Pa.; state Sen. John Wozniak, who has represented the area in Harrisburg since winning a state House seat in 1980; Murtha's chief of staff, John Hugya; and possibly his son, John M. Murtha.
Party leaders -- and not primary voters -- will choose the Democratic candidate. The 56-year-old Singel, a one-time rising star who's been off the political stage for more than a decade, might be the most intriguing prospect. Running with Robert Casey, he was elected lieutenant governor in 1986, the position from which he launched a U.S. Senate bid in 1992. But in the Democratic primary, Singel fell in one of the biggest surprises in Pennsylvania political history to Lynn Yeakel. After losing to Tom Ridge in the race to succeeed Casey in 1994, Singel left the arena, ultimately settling into the lobbying world.
Hugya might be handicapped by the low profile nature of his work on Murtha's staff. Aides who have sought to replace their bosses in Congress have a spotty track record at best. In 2006, for instance, the retiring Martin Sabo's chief of staff, Mike Erlandson, lost the Democratic primary in Minnesota's Fifth District to Keith Ellison by ten points.
Republicans, who were already planning to challenge Murtha aggressively in the fall, have at least two candidates interested -- local businessman Tim Burns, a political newcomer who a GOP aide says is enrolled already in the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" recruiting program, and Bill Russell, who lost to Murtha by nearly 16 points in 2008, even as McCain won the district narrowly. The GOP nomination will also be decided by party leaders.
Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, hasn't yet announced when the special election will be; he has 10 days from Monday to make a decision. Most observers expect him to pick May 18, already the date for a statewide set of primaries, to save the cash-strapped state a little money. That might give Democrats an edge, because a contested Senate primary between incumbent Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak could drive up turnout. "It's an uphill climb in a lot of ways," one national Republican says. State laws for a special election give the power to pick candidates to party officials, without a primary, and county Democratic and Republican leaders will soon caucus to send up their choices to the state level.
Figuring out how the race will play out isn't easy. The district is fairly conservative. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up, and says Republicans generally have a slight advantage; Democrats point to data showing they may have an edge, but the bottom line is, it'll be close. Murtha was tight with labor unions, but he also opposed abortion and gun control in what remains a culturally conservative district. And all the federal projects he brought home surely didn't hurt, either.
No matter who wins the race, matching Murtha's clout will be impossible. "They start at the bottom of the totem pole -- no power," says Helen Whiteford, Democratic Party chairwoman in Cambria County, Pa. "That hurts." I asked her what kind of candidate she'd like to see Democrats nominate to try to hold the seat. "How about a clone?" she said.
One question looming is how local Tea Party groups will affect the race. The last time party officials, instead of a primary election, determined the GOP nominee in a special House election, it turned into a debacle for the Republicans. In New York's 23rd Congressional District, the approved Republican candidate was forced out of the race, a conservative Tea Party hero took over, and Democrat Bill Owens won a seat Republicans had controlled for more than a century. Republicans say they'll try to avoid that kind of mistake this time around, but it's too early to know what might happen.
Still, despite a gruesome national political environment, Democrats do have some hope. The party has won the last five special House races, in districts ranging from suburban Illinois to northern Mississippi. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has $16.6 million in the bank, compared to $2.6 million for the NRCC.
"[Republicans] should be licking their chops, but yeah, I think we can hold on to the seat," says Greg Leathers, the Democratic Party chairman in Greene County, Pa. "If we come up with someone with the ideals of a southwestern Pennsylvania Democrat, I think people will adhere to that."
WASHINGTON -- Scott Brown's arrival is already changing things. On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate blocked President Obama's nominee for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board, labor lawyer Craig Becker, when a procedural motion to advance the nomination failed to get the 60 votes it needed.
The vote to proceed to take up Becker's nomination failed, 52-33 -- with 15 senators skipping out early, due to the snow in Washington. Aides said some vulnerable Democrats peeled off once it was clear that Becker would lose. Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln voted with most Republicans to block the nomination.
Not surprisingly, Brown, the new Republican from Massachusetts, decided to join the GOP effort. "My first priority in coming to Washington is to create jobs and put people back to work," he said in a press release after the vote. "Craig Becker’s theories about how the workplace should function, if ever put into practice, would impose new burdens on employers, hurt job creation and slow down the recovery."
Becker's "theories" basically boil down to a pro-worker outlook, partly as a result of years of work for the Service Employees International Union. Business groups have opposed him because he's suggested the NLRB -- which oversees labor-management disputes -- could make it easier for workers to join unions.
Unions blasted the Senate's refusal to act. "It is reprehensible that a minority in the U.S. Senate has blocked an up-or-down vote on Craig Becker, nominated seven months ago by President Obama to serve on the National Labor Relations Board," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "Once again, a Republican-led filibuster has put political interests over the needs of America’s working families." SEIU President Andy Stern blasted the vote, as well. "Working families across America today learned that the Republican Party and some Democrats would rather sit on their hands than serve the interests of the people who put them in office in the first place," Stern said in a statement. "This debate is bigger than Craig Becker. What we saw today was a clear signal that too many members of Congress are invested in the failure of this administration, and in turn, the failure of this country."
The vote means the NLRB will continue operating with only two of its five seats filled -- which, presumably, makes it hard to do much. Perhaps not by coincidence, Obama brought up the possibility of recess appointments during his impromptu press conference Tuesday.
"Surely we can set aside partisanship and do what's traditionally been done to confirm these nominations," Obama said. "If the Senate does not act -- and I made this very clear -- if the Senate does not act to confirm these nominees, I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess, because we can't afford to allow politics to stand in the way of a well-functioning government."
WASHINGTON -- In an obvious reference to waterboarding al-Qaida suspects, former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked in October 2006 whether “a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Cheney responded like Cheney: "Well, it's a no-brainer for me.”
Joshua Tabor, an Army sergeant in Washington state who served in Iraq, also apparently bought into that "ends-justifies-the-means" argument for waterboarding. Though for Tabor, the ends was allegedly getting his 4-year-old daughter to recite the alphabet.
Police in Yelm, Wash., arrested Tabor, 27, on Jan. 31 after allegedly waterboarding his daughter for failing to say her ABCs. "Daddy was upset because she wouldn't say her letters," according to the police report.
The Bush administration authorized waterboarding and various techniques to exploit phobias. In true Cheney fashion, Tabor employed both simultaneously -- his daughter was apparently terrified of the water. "His purpose was to punish her by putting her in the water because he knows she is afraid of it and he wanted her to cooperate," police said Tabor told them. Police told reporters that Tabor sat her on the edge of the bathroom sink and dunked her head when she failed to recite the alphabet.
As if Tabor was channeling Cheney, he explained to police that after her dunk in the water, "She said her letters after that."
Well, then. There you go. It’s just a dunk in the water, after all.
The police apparently had to coax the terrified girl out of the bathroom. She was covered with bruises.
Perhaps you’re thinking, "Well, that’s not quite fair. You people are blaming the torture of a 4-year-old girl on the former vice president. Cheney was trying to save lives."
Smart people who have actually studied the history of torture, like Darius Rejali, author of "Torture and Democracy," point out that when institutionalizing torture, government officials almost always rationalize torture on national security grounds. Despite the lack of evidence, they always insist that it "worked" because they’d look really, really bad if it didn’t.
And when institutionalizing torture, officials pretty much always try to put limits on just who can be tortured and exactly how. Both limits always fail as the torturers exceed those bounds and the brutality metastasizes throughout the national security establishment -- and beyond.
If the Bush administration had not authorized waterboarding, do you really think Tabor would have come up with that one on his own?
WASHINGTON -- President Obama made a surprise visit to the White House briefing room Tuesday -- and he kept up the pressure the administration has been applying to Republicans on everything from healthcare reform to jobs.
Just after a bipartisan meeting with leaders of Congress wrapped up, Obama strolled into the regularly scheduled (if, due to snow, poorly attended) daily press briefing -- his first extended solo time with the press since last July. He didn't mince words. "Bipartisanship depends on a willingness among both Democrats and Republicans to put aside matters of party for the good of the country," he said. "I won't hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won't hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that's rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience."
Republicans had just left the meeting and scoffed at the idea that the White House was actually interested in working with them. Take healthcare reform (cue the administration saying, "please"). "It's going to be very difficult to have bipartisan conversations with regard to a 2,700-page healthcare bill that the Democrat majority in the House and the Democrat majority in the Senate can't pass," House Minority Leader John Boehner told reporters. "Why are we going to talk about a bill that can't pass? It really is time to scrap the bill and start over." Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said more or less the same thing. "Why would they want to keep pushing something that the public is overwhelmingly against?" he asked. "The obvious answer is to put that measure on the shelf, start over."
A bipartisan summit on the issue is scheduled for two weeks from now, when Congress returns from its Presidents' Day break. And the GOP doesn't have high hopes for anything productive coming from itt. "It is becoming increasingly clear that the administration does not intend to reopen the legislative process -- they seem to just want to listen to what we have to say and move on," one senior GOP aide told Salon. "Fine. But you wasted an entire year doing exactly that. By taking that approach on healthcare, they drown out any efforts, post-stimulus, on jobs or any other of their priorities. And in the process, took a president with near-70 percent approval and drove him below 50. Nice work."
But the White House has been faster to fight back on attacks like that since the Massachusetts Senate special election, and Obama picked up that same message. "'Bipartisanship' can't be that I agree to all of the things that they believe in or want and they agree to none of the things I believe in or want, and that's the price of bipartisanship, right?" he said. The healthcare summit can't just be "political theater," the president said. And he made clear he still wants to push ahead. "The public has soured on the process that they saw over the past year," he said. "I think that actually contaminates how they view the substance of the bills."
In his last session with the press back in July, a prime-time news conference that also focused on healthcare reform, Obama waded into the Henry Louis Gates Jr./ Cambridge police controversy, which led to the much-mocked beer summit -- perhaps explaining the lack of similar sessions these past seven months. But reporters have started grumbling lately, so Obama dropped in on an otherwise slow news day.
Obama also pushed for Congress to act fast on a jobs bill -- but the House has already gone on recess, thanks to the winter storms pummeling D.C. lately, and won't be able to vote on anything until the week of Feb. 22 at the earliest. In the end, the meeting Tuesday, and Obama's impromptu presser, aren't likely to do much to actually move legislation along. But the White House tone could help change voters' minds about who's to blame if it stalls.
UPDATE: Watch Obama's appearance here:
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WASHINGTON -- Republicans haven't exactly been shy about bashing the stimulus bill that passed last year. "This is spending, not stimulus," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said about it. "Rather than create jobs or stimulate the economy, this massive spending bill was a laundry list of programs that focused on states with big-city urban communities," wrote Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., in his local newspaper last October.
As it turns out, they haven't exactly been shy about grabbing cash from the stimulus programs for their districts, either. An investigation in Tuesday's Washington Times turned up letters from more than a dozen fierce critics of the stimulus to the Department of Agriculture, requesting money for local projects. Three days after Aderholt's letter was published, accusing the stimulus of focusing on big cities, he wrote Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, seeking help from a stimulus program to expand broadband services in his (mostly rural) district. Not long after Alexander bashed the law as "spending, not stimulus," he told Vilsack he wanted money for a Tennessee project that would "create over 200 jobs in the first year and at least another 40 new jobs in the following years."
That's exactly what President Obama chided House Republicans for at their retreat in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. "A lot of you have gone to appear at ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against," Obama told them. Now the Democratic campaign apparatus in Washington is determined to remind voters -- and Republican lawmakers -- that the stimulus doesn't look so bad after all when it's delivering cash to their own area.
"Not only have nearly 70 House Republicans been caught trying to take credit for recovery funding that's brought the economy back from the brink of collapse, but now it's come to light some were writing private letters lobbying for projects in their districts while trashing the Recovery package publicly," Ryan Rudominer, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wrote reporters Tuesday morning. The Democratic National Committee also sent the Times story around, as did some progressive interest groups allied with the administration.
Aides to Republicans whose letters the Times turned up told the paper they were just trying to make local lemonade out of the stimulus' lemons. "If the funds are there, Senator Grassley's going to help Iowa, rather than some other state, get its share," a spokeswoman for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who voted against the stimulus, told the paper. Still, the discovery could take some of the political punch out of GOP attacks on the "wasteful" stimulus bill -- not to mention irritate some of the most driven tea party activists in the Republican base. Expect Democrats to keep pushing this storyline as long as they can.
There is something of a master narrative of the early Obama administration currently emerging into view, issue by issue. It goes like this: A given situation is in a disastrous state of disarray when the new president and his staff take the reins. A rough and unsteady policy consensus forms among area experts and crucial political actors about how to move forward. At this point, the administration starts pushing a course of action designed to hold the political center. Those to the president’s left are consistently disappointed, but only sometimes outraged. While many Republicans are initially responsive, the party’s more conservative arm rallies its grass-roots base against cooperation.
The GOP then, like Lucy in "Peanuts," yanks the football away: Party leaders denounce the centrist compromise as radical and dangerous, and employ procedural tactics to stall while building their case with the electorate. By this point in the process, the compromise stance begins to wilt in the face of hardening public opinion. The emboldened opposition intensifies its attacks, the administration retreats, and whichever disastrous situation is being debated -- the job market, say -- continues to deteriorate. The administration, appearing ineffectual and counterproductive, loses much of its remaining purchase on public opinion on this particular issue.
This story is an obviously recognizable one on many of the signal issues of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far. The healthcare fight is the one that fits this pattern most tightly -- and painfully -- but conflicts over stimulating the economy, slowing climate change, and stabilizing and regulating Wall Street have all looked more or less like this. A bit more surprisingly, so has the increasingly vicious debate on what the legal response to terrorism ought to be.
Politico today reports that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, ever a sly political fox, has found his wedge issue for the midterm elections: the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the president and administration’s incomprehensible (partial) commitment to the rule of law. He's launching what is described as a "relentless, blistering" attack on the administration. Says McConnell, "The core question is whether the attorney general of the United States ought to be in charge of the war on terror. And the answer is no."
This is the end stage of the process. In an excellent article in the current New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer traces the whole unpleasant business up to this point. When Obama came into office, there was widespread, if not universal, agreement that President Bush’s legal approach to terrorism and detention had to change. Washington wise men like former Secretary of State Colin Powell had largely turned against the administration’s harsh methods, which were of questionable effectiveness and dubious legality. The Supreme Court had rebuked Bush and his aides several times, and even Bush himself said of the prison at Guantánamo, "I’d like it to be over with." Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., repeatedly called for closing the base while running for president. (However, foreshadowing what lay ahead, then-candidate Mitt Romney responded to McCain by saying Guantánamo should be doubled.)
But once the president and Attorney General Eric Holder tried to implement the plan they thought had gained the consensus position, everything came apart. The efforts to transfer detainees to the United States provoked a "not-in-my-backyard" backlash in Congress. Then a pair of attacks on Americans, at Fort Hood and on a flight to Detroit, unnerved politicians and, apparently, voters. The parallel idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan -- a location chosen because of its high security -- caught fire in the Massachusetts special election for Senate, and according to a consultant for eventual winner Scott Brown, became the most potent issue the Republican had to run on. Moderates like New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, once supportive of the idea of trying Mohammed in New York, got the willies. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who had once pledged his support to Holder, called the idea of moving the trial away from New York "obvious."
Even within the administration, attacks on Holder have mounted as he’s pursued an agenda that seems to be weakening the president politically. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as always concerned with keeping a friendly majority in Congress, accused the attorney general of endangering his relationship with key Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. Said Emanuel, "If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!"
The rule of law is different from, say, healthcare, in that the attorney general doesn’t have to -- and isn’t supposed to, bow to political necessity. Holder seems to believe that he can just push through what is, by his judgment, the best legal course. He told Mayer last month,
This is something that can get a rise out of me, the notion that somehow Eric Holder and Barack Obama, this administration, is not tough. We have the welfare of the American people in our minds all the time. We’ll fight our enemies, and we’ll do that which is necessary, and we won’t turn our backs on the values and traditions that have made this country great. That is what is tough.
Maybe, over time, heat from the public and from the Republicans will dissipate on this, as it did slowly over the course of the last decade before resurging this year. For the moment, though, the GOP is planning to score every point it can. Don’t take it from me -- take it from McConnell: "I’d be the last one to suggest that absolutely everything the administration does is incorrect. When we think that they’re on the right path, they’ll find Republican support." The minority leader continued, "Would I love to have the election tomorrow? I sure would. Early signs are that this could be a good year, but we have a long way to go."
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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