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Blagojevich's Selection of Roland Burris May Be Hard to Undo
Tweet Share on Facebook December 31, 2008 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As a New Year's gift to the Democratic Party, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed former state Attorney General and Comptroller Roland Burris to the U.S. Senate—although Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White says he won't sign the certificate of appointment. Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, have said they wouldn't seat anyone Blagojevich appoints. But as I understand it, the Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that the House of Representatives couldn't bar Rep. Adam Clayton Powell from being seated. The reasoning was that Powell had been elected according to law and must be allowed to take his seat, even though under the Constitution there was no doubt that the House could vote, once he was seated, to expel him for misconduct. Is the Senate bound by different rules?
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Is Barack Obama Like Dwight Eisenhower?
Tweet Share on Facebook December 29, 2008 Comment (8)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Many writers, including me, have compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman. In my Creators Syndicate column for this week, I compare Barack Obama to Dwight Eisenhower. Apt?
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George Bush Should Pardon Scooter Libby
Tweet Share on Facebook December 23, 2008 Comment (124)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I wholeheartedly endorse the position taken by this lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal urging George W. Bush to pardon Scooter Libby. Libby was a dedicated and hypercompetent public servant who was brought down by a prosecutor investigating a scandal that wasn't a scandal. The investigation purportedly was an attempt to discover who had told Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA "operative" (Novak's word). But prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew before the investigation began that the leaker was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. It is astonishing that Armitage and his friend and boss Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't inform Bush of this and allowed two of his top aides, Libby and Karl Rove, to be harassed by Fitzgerald for months and years.
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Environmental Restrictionists Could Use Polar Bears to Get in the Way of Infrastructure Projects
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2008 Comment (11)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
In his townhall.com column, Hugh Hewitt cites my recent blogpost on Interior Secretary-designate Ken Salazar and raises the question of how Salazar will deal with polar bears. Yes, polar bears. As Hewitt points out in this column and as he has written on his blog at hughhewitt.com, environmental restrictionists want to use the threat that supposed global warming poses to polar bears as the basis of legal suits to stop economic development not just in Alaska but throughout the United States. This sounds outlandish, but it's true. No economic growth because it might raise temperatures in the Arctic, which might in turn reduce the number of ice floes that these attractive carnivores jump on.
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It's 1873 and the Great Depression All Over Again
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2008 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The model for our current economic crisis should be, economic historian Scott Reynolds Nelson writes, not the Great Crash of 1929 but the Great Depression of 1873. Read it, and see if you're not convinced. And thanks to Tyler Cowen, who linked to this on his Marginal Revolution blog. In another interesting post, Cowen argues that fiscal stimulus has never revived the macroeconomy, anywhere, anytime.
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A Moving Article on Detroit, Home of the Big Three
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2008 Comment (3)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Matt Labash has written a moving article on Detroit. Please read it all.
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On Caroline Kennedy: If She’s to Be Anything Like Clinton, Schumer, or Her Uncle RFK, She Better Look North
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (18)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Caroline Kennedy gets poor reviews on her quick trip to Upstate New York, where she met the mayor of Syracuse. The attitude of many people in New York City is probably: Who cares? Upstate is the boondocks. Kennedy can be elected to a full term because she'll carry New York City by a huge margin and can probably run about even in the four suburban counties—Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland—all of which Barack Obama carried this year.
To which I say: not so quick.
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George W. Bush Looks Back at His Presidency
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (5)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I was there yesterday morning when George W. Bush appeared before an American Enterprise Institute audience at the Mayflower Hotel. Here is the video and here is the transcript. It was not the usual format. Bush and AEI's outgoing president, Chris DeMuth, were seated on the dais and spoke extemporaneously. Bush delivered some remarks, then DeMuth asked him questions; altogether, the program lasted for a little more than an hour.
One question DeMuth asked struck a chord with me, a question about Eliot Cohen's book Supreme Command. Cohen argues that civilian commanders in chief have to engage directly and even abrasively with their military commanders, to challenge and often to overrule them, in order to produce an effective strategy in war. He cites the examples of Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion. I thought Cohen's ideas were important and should be brought to the attention of the Bush White House. I wrote a review of the book for the Weekly Standard, and its editors made sure that multiple copies were sent to the White House. Word came out later that Bush had read the book. His initial response to DeMuth suggested that the book made little impression, although his further words suggested to me that he recalled the book and its argument but didn't want to answer the question directly. Instead, he launched into a riff I've heard before in meetings with journalists where I've been present.
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The Auto Bailout Shows Bush Is a Lame Duck With Power
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (4)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Bush's auto bailout was announced Friday morning. Who wants to be the Grinch the week before Christmas? Not George W. Bush. Yet at the same time, he did not give General Motors and Chrysler a blank check. He imposed conditions, including the bondholders' haircut and reducing labor costs to the levels of those of foreign automakers in the U.S. This presumably will require negotiations on the bondholders' haircut and the UAW's contract, and the March 31 deadline means it will be the Obama Treasury Department that will determine whether the conditions have been met. This sounds to me much like the approach taken by Sen. Bob Corker in the Senate, an approach that was vetoed by the UAW and therefore by Democratic senators. It shows that there is still serious power in a lame duck White House—but also that its work is only temporary and to some extent can be undone by the incoming administration. This looks less like a solution and more like a continuing story, with lots of twists and turns available. But evidently the dire cash positions of General Motors and Chrysler prevented them from holding out until January 20, when a new Democratic administration and Congress could have voted them the money without requiring any concessions from the UAW beyond those it made (and in fairness they're not trivial) in their fall 2007 contracts.
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We Could Do Much Worse Than Caroline Kennedy and Other Dynasty Senate Candidates
Tweet Share on Facebook December 17, 2008 Comment (12)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
There have been lots of complaints in blogs, liberal as well as conservative, about the (apparently) impending appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the Senate and the impending Senate appointments in other states—Illinois, Delaware, Colorado—to seats made vacant by the election of the Obama-Biden ticket or his cabinet appointments. There’s a dynastic element in all four states. Caroline Kennedy would not, after all, be a plausible nominee for the Senate but for the fact that she’s the daughter of John and Jacqueline Kennedy. The Delaware seat is going to a longtime Joe Biden aide, Ted Kaufman, apparently to keep it warm for Joe Biden’s son Beau Biden, who is currently the elected attorney general of Delaware and is also serving in the military in Iraq. A leading possibility to succeed Colorado’s Ken Salazar (on whose appointment I’ve written about in another blog post) is his brother, Rep. John Salazar. And in Illinois, we have the delicious Blagoscandal, with the appointment still the legal prerogative of the son-in-law of 33rd Ward Democratic Committeeman Dick Mell (that would be Gov. Rod Blagojevich) and with one of the hopefuls being Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
