Brendan Nyhan

Rick Santorum distinguishes himself once again:

Santorum said the suggestion that Republicans were trying to break the rules was “remarkable hubris.”

“The audacity of some members to stand up and say ‘How dare you break this rule’ — it’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying ‘I’m in Paris, how dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It’s mine.’ This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused.”

In early March, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W. Va., linked the threat by Republicans to use the majority to bar judicial filibusters to the Nazi’s use of majority power to push through their agenda in the 1930s.

Santorum called on Byrd to retract his remarks at that time, stating that the words lessened “the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate” and that he should ask for pardon.

Santorum issued his own clarification yesterday evening, stating that the reference to Hitler was “meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues.”

“My point was that it is preposterous for someone to trample a well-established principle, and then accuse his opponents of acting unlawfully when they try to reestablish that principle,” Santorum said. “Nevertheless, it was a mistake and I meant no offense.”

You can see Quicktime video of the speech here. And it’s worth noting that the Allies didn’t bomb Paris, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out.

(For all my posts on the nuclear option clown show, click here.)

Update 5/20: Apparently the Allies bombed a factory just outside Paris — see Jon Henke’s post at Q&O, which he links below in comments.

Update 5/25: Also see this speech (Quicktime movie) in which Santorum links the New York Times to Communists, Nazis, etc.

I want to briefly address the Newsweek Koran-flushing controversy. First, a review. The story was a disaster from a journalistic perspective. We still don’t know whether a military interrogator actually flushed a Koran down a toilet or not — only that such an incident will not be described in a forthcoming military report. Nor do we know whether the Newsweek story actually triggered deadly rioting in Afghanistan, a claim that was widely reported in the media even though it was contradicted by the chair of the Joint Chiefs.

In the end, journalists must do better. But the Bush administration’s continuing effort to use these mistakes to delegitimize the press as a political institution is even more troubling, as Jacob Weisberg notes:

[T]he problem with the Bush administration excoriating Newsweek’s insensitivity to Islam isn’t just hypocrisy. There’s a larger issue of bad faith and an underlying lack of appreciation for the necessary role of a free and independent press. With increasing forcefulness, Bush has tried to undermine the legitimacy of the media, or at least that subculture within it that shows any tendency to challenge him. When the Bushies say there ought to be more of a check on the Fourth Estate, they aren’t really asking for more care and accuracy on the part of journalists. They’re expressing frustration that they still have to put up with criticism at all.

Let me go back to Chapter 2 of All the President’s Spin to put this incident in a larger perspective:

The administration makes little secret of its disdain for the press, going so far as to openly question the legitimacy of the media’s role in American politics. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New Yorker, “They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election… I don’t believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function.” Rather than viewing journalists as performing a public service, the White House sees them as a hostile force chasing the next headline regardless of fairness or accuracy.

This viewpoint guides the administration’s approach to relations with the media… George W. Bush’s disdain for the press goes further than any president since Richard Nixon. By denying the need for democratic accountability in word and deed, the White House has subverted the notion that the government should have to answer for its actions and statements through any mechanism other than the ballot box.

Just as they did with the CBS National Guard memo story, the White House is using the Newsweek item to try to discredit all critical press reporting. And that is dangerous in a democracy.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank on the restraint and decorum displayed yesterday in the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”:

The Senate chaplain started yesterday’s judicial showdown with a prayer for “patience and peace” and “unity where there is division.” Thirty-three minutes later, the majority leader just about accused the minority of attempted murder.

The Republican leader, Bill Frist (Tenn.), was asked why he, the head of the anti-filibuster movement, had voted to uphold the filibuster of a judge in 2000. Frist at first stammered — “Mr. President, the, in response, the Paez nomination, we’ll come back and discuss it” — and then settled on an answer: “It’s not the cloture votes, per se,” he said, using the term for filibuster-breaking votes. “It’s the partisan leadership-led use of cloture to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees.”

The Democratic whip, Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), later walked into the chamber with a transcript of Frist’s accusation. “Those words should be taken from the record,” he demanded. They were not.

…One can only imagine how the Founders would have viewed yesterday’s events. While Frist spoke of killers, Kennedy spoke of “tyranny” and Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) spoke of “dictatorship.” Republicans displayed a large portrait of Owen in the chamber that made it look as though she were a missing person. And Reid, in his excitement, briefly accused the vice president of a dalliance. Dick Cheney is a “great paramour” of virtue, Reid said, before correcting himself to say “paragon.”

Classy.

David Brooks foreshadows his life as a circus animal in 2001’s Bobos in Paradise:

If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery — compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds. They know what they think and they have immense confidence in their judgments. This is not as simple as it sounds, for most people don’t become aware of their own opinions until someone else has put them into words. But a columnist can read an article on brain surgery for 20 minutes and then go off and give a lecture to a conference of brain surgeons on what is wrong with their profession.

Dan Drezner’s post reminds me to plug Robert Pape’s op-ed in today’s New York Times. It’s always good — and all too rare — to see political scientists contributing to the national debate. Here’s the key graf:

Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 – 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

Via Andrew Sullivan and Tapped, here’s Norm Ornstein (PhD in political science) with the best explanation I’ve seen of what’s wrong with the nuclear option from a parliamentary rules standpoint (see also Josh Marshall). I don’t buy all the silly arguments about the end of dissent that I’ve been mocking for weeks. But the way that Republicans are going to break the Senate’s rules in order to change the rules — which I hadn’t fully understood before — is deeply troubling:

Let us put aside for now the puerile arguments over whether judicial filibusters are unprecedented: They clearly, flatly, are not. Instead, let’s look at the means used to achieve the goal of altering Senate procedures to block filibusters on judicial nominations.

Without getting into the parliamentary minutiae–the options are dizzying, including whether points of order are “nested”–one reality is clear. To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.

Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as ‘an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.’”

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

There have been times in the past when Senate leaders and presidents have been frustrated by inaction in the Senate and have contemplated action like this. Each time, the leaders and presidents drew back from the precipice. They knew that the short-term gain of breaking minority obstruction would come at the price of enormous long-term damage–turning a deliberative process into something akin to government by the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.”

…By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order–one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.

The precedent set–a majority ignoring its own rules to override longstanding practice in one area–would almost inexorably make the Senate a mirror image of the House, moving the American system several steps closer to a plebiscitary model of government, and the Senate closer to the unfortunate House model of a cesspool of partisan rancor.

In this sense, the way that Republicans are threatening to cut off debate on judicial filibusters threatens to fundamentally alter the nature of the Senate. Regardless of the merits of judicial filibusters or a more general shift toward House-style rules, the larger point is that a change of this magnitude should not be made on a party-line vote than violates the Senate’s own procedures.

A few days ago, Howard Dean called Tom DeLay a criminal even though no charges have even been filed. And he’s not backing down:

Howard Dean, national chairman of the Democratic Party, said Tuesday that he thinks House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has committed crimes that could put the Republican in jail.

…”There’s corruption at the highest level of the Republican Party, and they’re going to have to face up to that one of these days, because the law is closing in on Tom DeLay,” Dean said in a telephone interview before heading to an appearance today in Phoenix.

“I think he’s guilty . . . of taking trips paid for by lobbyists, and of campaign-finance violations during his manipulation of the Texas election process,” Dean said.

But as DeLay’s staffer pointed out, Dean took a different tack when the subject was Osama Bin Laden:

Dan Allen, a spokesman for DeLay, pointed to Dean’s comments about due process for bin Laden.

“I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said during the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.”

Fill in the demagogic attack ad here. And when it happens, Dean has no one to blame but himself. Refusing to prejudge Osama bin Laden but calling Tom DeLay a criminal is ridiculous.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds attacks the ongoing New York Times series on inequality:

To deny progress, the Times series claims that “for most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90’s.” Could anyone really believe most workers have rarely had a real raise in three decades? Real income per household member rose to $22,966 in 2003 from $16,420 in 1983 (in 2003 dollars)–a 40% gain.

This is an obviously bogus argument. Given the well-documented surge in income for those at the top of the income distribution, real income per household member (a mean in the statistical sense) would go up dramatically even if everyone else’s wages were stagnant. In addition, real income per household member will necessarily increase as more women enter the workforce. Finally, Reynolds is comparing apples and oranges — the sentence he criticizes says workers didn’t gain much relative to inflation before the 1990s, then he uses 1983-2003 data, which includes the 1990s, to claim that the Times is wrong.

And if we look at the data, we find that the Times statement is, in fact, correct. Consider this table (PDF) from the Economic Policy Institute, which lists the inflation-adjusted salaries of workers in the 10th, 20th, etc. percentile of the wage distribution from 1973-2003. And, sure enough, the distribution of workers’ wages was largely stagnant from 1973 to 1989 before rising during the 1990s. So what is Alan Reynolds talking about? Does he even know these data exist?

(Note: When speaking about wage or income distribution data, it’s important to distinguish between the changing distribution of wages/incomes and changes in wages/income over workers’ lifetimes. The Times is clearly talking about the former, and while it’s possible that Reynolds means to refer to the latter, the real income per household member statistic that he uses seems to indicate that he’s talking about changes in the distribution.)

Harvey Rosen, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today that “Policy makers now need to … take the much bigger step of permanently fixing Social Security’s funding imbalance.” So why does the President’s plan close only 30 percent of the program’s 75-year deficit? Call me crazy, but that doesn’t exactly fix the imbalance.

A reader poses a good question to National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru:

An email opens up a new topic: “The United States has been the world’s greatest inspiration to freedom-lovers and young democracy movements for over 200 years. So why is it that worldwide — including now in Iraq — new democracies overwhelmingly choose the parliamentary form of government, rather than our federalist model? Is it because other nations (particularly smaller ones) don’t have the same rigid patchwork of semi-independent states we have? Or does it have to do with placating ethnic/sectarian concerns by giving them a chance to be part of a governing coalition? Still, the latter concern doesn’t seem like it would be a factor in, say, Israel.

“I have wondered this before, but I thought of it again with today’s news that Iraq has finally formed its new government. If they had followed the American model, they would have had their government in place by mid-February. The parliamentary form of government is certainly more responsive to the electorate, but its inherent instability would seem to make it a poor choice in a place like Iraq where a stronger executive branch could deal more effectively with law and order and keep things on a more consistent and even keel.

“But I’m no poli-sci expert, so please enlighten me (and maybe the Corner readers, as well).”

Ramesh then did a rare and wonderful thing — he actually asked a political scientist, who gave him a nice answer:

“Your questioner mixes two questions– parliamentarism vs. presidentialism and federalism vs. unitary states.

“Federalism has been adopted in many successful ongoing constitutional democracies, including Canada, Australia, Germany, India, and Spain.

“What hasn’t been adopted successfully is presidentialism. This is [a result of] both path dependence and selection effects.

“1a. Path dependence: Britain is parliamentary, and lots of the constitutional democracies in the world are former British colonies. Strong royal governors who existed in the 13 colonies in 1776 (standing in for a still-strong Crown at home), and strong republican governors filled their shoes, with a strong independent president following later. But by the time Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc., framed their governments, their local administration and the Westminster system in London were parliamentary.

“1b. Path dependence: The [West] German Basic Law has been more influential and more widely-copied in the postwar world than has the US Constitution. And the fact that the U.S. planted parliamentary systems in Germany and Japan probably helped to kill off the thought that even the U.S. thought a separately elected strong president was necessary for constitutional democracies.

“2. Selection effects. Lots of countries have *tried* independently elected strong presidents. And they haven’t tended to remain constitutional democracies under that system. The U.S. political culture and underlying political conditions are very robustly republican-democratic-liberal; we could get a lot of institutional things wrong and still end up with a constitutional democracy. But where those things are more fragile, presidents seem to tend to become strongmen and dictators. Presidentialism has been a terrible failure in Latin America when it’s been tried– and it often was, in the 19th century, when the new Latin American republics took on the U.S. Constituion as a model.

“I’m sentimentally attached to presidentialism, and I theoretically like the stronger separation of powers you get with an independently elected executive. But the evidence suggests that the U.S. is unusual in being able to tolerate presidentialism and remain a democracy, and that parliamentarism is much the better bet for new constitutional democracies.

“(But parliamentarism is fully compatible with federalism–Canada, Australia, India, Spain.)”