Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions -- like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics -- while political insiders rig the game.

Continue Reading...

One thing to keep in mind is that the president and his staff have literally thousands of posts to fill. A White House that doesn’t want to get bogged down will defer many of these lower-level appointments to politicians in his party who have some special interest or expertise in a position. The IRS commissioner is usually seen as a low-level position, since the commissioner merely enforces the law and has no ability to actually make law.

When it came time to replace the retiring IRS commissioner in 2007, Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, offered up one of his senior staffers on the committee by the name of Dean Zerbe.

Continue Reading...

How seriously should Americans take Issa’s hearing and claims?

For almost four years, I worked in close proximity to him, first on the Democratic staff of the Oversight Committee (when he was ranking member) and then as legislative director for a senior member of the committee, when he was chairman. Here’s what I learned: If Darrell Issa says something – based on the record, his statements and my personal observations of him up-close – there is a strong likelihood it will be baseless and easily disproven.

Continue Reading...

Those are the accusations the #BENGHAZI coalition has been making since shortly after the attack: that the Obama administration intentionally allowed the attack on the U.S. consulate to happen, or did not do as much as it could have to stop the attack once it started, because it did not want to admit that it did not successfully destroy terrorism itself in its first term; and that after the attack, the administration intentionally and repeatedly lied about the attackers and their motivation (the "they didn't say 'terrorism'" argument), and then engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up of the fact that the attack had been terrorism.

Continue Reading...

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has it figured out:

[embedtweet id="331933173602738177"]

Yes, underperforming for a Republican in a heavily Republican district, in a special election, is definitely proof that Sanford was a superior candidate, and not merely that he had an R by his name. If anything, Sanford's victory proves that candidates matter only in terms of ideology, not biography. In a very conservative district, the Republican candidate will win, even if he's a weird creep with a humiliating past.

Continue Reading...

The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney won this district by 18 points last fall, but Sanford’s personal history made the seat competitive. Democrats poured money into the race while national Republicans abandoned their candidate, giving Colbert Busch a 5-to-1 advantage in outside spending.

Those ads, and Colbert Busch herself, made an issue out of Sanford’s 2009 disappearance to be with his Argentinean mistress, which led to an ethics investigation into his travel.

In spite of that cash and a trespassing complaint filed by Sanford’s ex-wife in the 48 hours before the election, he was gaining momentum. Throughout the race he tied Colbert Busch to national Democrats and emphasized his own fiscal conservatism, an ultimately successful strategy.

Continue Reading...

From Roll Call:

About a dozen representatives and several senators are expected to attend the event in the Rayburn House Office Building at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, organizers said. Co-hosting the event is TheTeaParty.net and helping organize it is consulting firm kellenPROJECTS.

Also, a competing tea party caucus founded this Congress by South Carolina Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney was abandoned when the lawmaker realized Bachmann would be restarting her caucus after all.

The event will focus on “how to effectively educate the public on Tea Party ideals and discuss the Tea Party’s legislative activities for the year," according to Roll Call, which obtained the invite.

Continue Reading...

Walden's move was understandable, though. He's in a bit of a predicament: On one hand, Republicans want to reform (i.e., cut) entitlement programs, but on the other, Walden needs to get Republicans elected to Congress and the public hates the idea of cutting Social Security. What's an NRCC chairman to do? Go with the poll numbers, and forget your party, apparently.

Continue Reading...

The bill passed by a vote of 288-127, with 92 Democrats backing it. The legislation will now head to the Senate, where it's prospects for success are a bit murkier - a previous version of the legislation passed the House but died in the Senate last year. Obama has already threatened to veto it if it reaches his desk.

From CNET:

Continue Reading...

David Ottenwess, an attorney for McCotter, who represented Michigan, filed a suit against Don Yowchuang and Dillon Breen on Thursday. From the Associated Press:

Elections officials discovered bogus signatures on the Livonia Republican's petitions, keeping him off the 2012 primary ballot. McCotter quit Congress in July. Yowchuang pleaded no-contest to forgery charges and was sentenced Jan. 18 to probation and community service. Breen was not charged.

In a statement, Ottenwess said the two men "purposefully submitted forged petitions in order to keep McCotter off the ballot and, thereby, denying him the opportunity to appear on the August 2012 Republican Primary ballot." The lawyer said he said he would use the subpoena power in the civil proceeding to "get to the bottom of what really happened to sabotage ... McCotter."

As Salon's Steve Kornacki wrote last May, the four-term congressman was "the first incumbent congressman in seven decades not to qualify for his party’s primary ballot."

Continue Reading...

The Hill reported that a number of amendments supported by the bill's sponsors were approved during markup, including a change that would require the government to remove personal information from "cyber threat" data they receive from private companies; and another change that would allow the government to use data from private companies for broad "national security purposes." The final text of the bill heading to the House floor has not been made public. Meanwhile the White House has yet to respond to a "We the People" petition against CISPA, which has garnered over 100,000 online signatures (the number required to demand a response from the administration.) The EFF and the ACLU are, as noted here, working in conjunction to rally further opposition to the bill.

Continue Reading...

Weiner, who resigned from the House in 2011 after he accidentally tweeted a lewd picture of himself and then lied to the press about it, told the Times that he has spent $100,000 in polling and research for a possible run in 2013. “I don’t have this burning, overriding desire to go out and run for office,” he said. “It’s not the single animating force in my life as it was for quite some time. But I do recognize, to some degree, it’s now or maybe never for me, in terms of running for something."

“Also, I want to ask people to give me a second chance," he continued. "I do want to have that conversation with people whom I let down and with people who put their faith in me and who wanted to support me. I think to some degree I do want to say to them, ‘Give me another chance.’”

Continue Reading...

Representatives from the two groups took to Reddit Monday to answer questions about CISPA and their campaign to stop the bill's progression into law. EFF's Mark Jaycox explained the current state of CISPA bill H.R. 624:

CISPA is currently at the "markup" stage. This means that the bill has been introduced and will be discussed by the full committee at a meeting. The committee will vote on amendments, edit (ie, "markup") the bill, and vote on a final version of the bill. Once the final version is voted "out of committee," it will be ready for a full floor vote where the entire House can vote on it.

Continue Reading...

Rubio sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy in which he demanded more hearings. So, so many hearings. (Rubio's letter contained the word "hearings" six times.) And open amendments, which is basically asking permission for anti-reform senators to attempt to make a series of potentially toxic votes if they want their precious reform.

Continue Reading...

I'm just going to quote myself writing in January about Broun's decision to run:

Georgia's primary election runoff rules might prevent Broun from eking out a plurality victory over a bunch of less-crazy candidates, but even if he doesn't win, he’ll definitely push the entire field further to the edge of the fringe that the national party has been trying to back away from since November.

Since I wrote that, a couple of things have happened. First, the Republican National Committee released a huge report begging the Republican Party to moderate its language and some of its policies. Second, two members of the Republican House delegation from Georgia voted against the most recent Paul Ryan budget -- because they found it to be insufficiently conservative. One of those members was Broun, who published an Op-Ed decrying the budget before the vote. The other was Rep. Phil Gingrey, who is also considering running for the Senate seat, and thus "can't let Broun get to his right," as Dave Weigel says.

Continue Reading...

This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee.

In Washington, we often witness politicians forgetting the lessons of a year or five years or 10 years ago. It takes some special obliviousness to forget the lessons of Friday. Five days ago, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., delivered a critical report and held an explosive hearing detailing the “London Whale” trades, made by a JPMorgan Chase satellite office in London. As you may have read, these trades turned sour and led to a $6.2 billion loss for the bank in a matter of weeks. More important, JPMorgan misled regulators about the nature of the trades, altered its internal processes to take on more risk, and then hid the losses by improperly mismarking the value on its balance sheet, pretending the shortfall was inconsequential to avoid oversight and present a positive financial picture to investors.

Continue Reading...

A few months later, it’s worth revisiting that supposedly triumphant moment for Obama, because it’s starting to look a lot different. The problem: The $1.2 trillion sequester, which Obama once assured Americans would never take effect, is now being implemented, threatening to drain life from an economy that’s finally showing signs of a real recovery.

Continue Reading...

And yet … the Senate still holds a place in the mythology of American democracy that the House of Representatives never has. Reporters and pundits who hate modern filibusters look longingly at the fictional Jimmy Stewart filibuster in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and are quick with praise whenever serious debates break out on the Senate floor.

The Senate does have some advantages over the modern House, but that it has potential to be a better debating society isn’t one of them, or at least not an important one. So I won’t be celebrating Rand Paul’s day-long speech this week as an example of what filibusters should look like.

Instead, I’ll celebrate it for something a little different: Paul was trying to use the leverage that chamber rules give individual senators and small groups of senators.

Continue Reading...

Jenny Sanford had run her husband's previous campaign for a House seat in 1994. But that was before Sanford was forced to admit on national TV that he had an extramarital affair. According to New York mag, Sanford went to visit his ex-wife to ask whether she would be running for the House seat vacated by Tim Scott when Nikki Haley appointed Scott to the Senate herself. On learning that she would not, the former governor reportedly asked, “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign ... We could put the team back together."

The Sanfords have "barely been on speaking terms" since their divorce, New York reported. But the man who ran away with his Argentinian mistress told his ex-wife, “I could pay you this time."

Jenny said no.

Continue Reading...

The bill, introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Ted Poe, R-Texas, "would require law enforcement to get a search warrant or some other kind of judicial approval for surveillance before using drones to investigate criminal wrongdoing," reported Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztola, adding, "It would, however, allow drone use for fire and rescue missions, monitoring droughts, assessing flood damage or chasing a fleeing criminal." The legislation would also ban law enforcement from arming the surveillance drones.

The ACLU has come out in support of the bill. "Unmanned drones must not become a perpetual presence in our lives, hovering over us, following us and recording our every move," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the ACLU in a statement. "Strict rules should govern the use of drones by the government. By requiring that law enforcement secure judicial approval before using drones, this legislation achieves the right balance for the use of these eyes in the sky."

Continue Reading...