• New York Democrats want to mess over New York Republicans. The New York GOP is defending several federal Congressional seats (six of the seven GOP-held seats are effectively freshmen) and its Senate majority; and New York Democrats are eager to try to winnow those numbers down. If they can figure out how to do it without eliminating a downstate district. Or two, frankly.
• New York Republicans, on the other hand, are digging in their heels until they get at least their state Senate majority preserved (note that there is precious little loyalty, on either side, between the state and national parties).
• And then there’s Governor Andrew Cuomo. He’s a Democrat… which means that he’s usually at war slightly more often with the Republican-controlled Senate than he is with the Democratic-controlled Assembly. He’s also currently stuck with a veto threat that, if not followed, will hurt his chances for later higher office. But if Cuomo does veto whatever devil’s bargain the New York legislature comes up with, then… Bad Things Happen.

And that’s why the courts are now involved. Justice Dora Irizarry (Republican, by the way*) has called for the Second Court of Appeals to create a three-judge panel that will settle this issue. State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos is noticeably nonchalant about the possible results, which suggests that either: the fix is in and the Democrats are about to get slammed; or that Skelos is going to use the threat that the Democrats are about to get slammed as a tool for getting the state Senate district maps that he wants. All depends on how cynical you’re feeling today, really.

Then again, it’s the New York legislature. Hard to be too cynical about those people.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Heck of a thing when Wikipedia spells such things out and St. Johns University won’t.

Sarah’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Trey’s site is here.

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Ted’s site is here.

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Rep. Adams’ site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Mia’s site is here.  I don’t often say this, but if I lived in this district I’d be voting for her.  Which is no reflection on the other candidates, of course.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Col. Otero’s site is here.

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Moe Lane

Said interview is below:

…and Richard’s site is here.

Moe Lane

Anyway, Dan and I talked a bit about CPAC and the race below:

Dan’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

They have tents, you see. Tents which they carry with them, everywhere that they go. For JUSTICE!

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Open thread. These goofballs aren’t even worth a full post.

Karen’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

At any rate, the Senator and I spoke briefly about CPAC.  Check out the video.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

If you’re here, stop on by Blogger’s Row and say hi. Particularly if you’re running for office, down to and including your local school board. There’s no such thing as an unimportant race.

Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO. Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO, right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa got somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal. And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans. By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it.

The bill is largely expected to pass, by the way: the real fireworks will be in conference. If the thing gets defanged, it will be there – so keep an eye out for that particular problem. It wouldn’t be the first time that a troublesomely reformist piece of legislation got revised out of existence, while out of camera range…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Politico reports that the STOCK Act’s original sponsors Louise Slaughter and Tim Walz are unhappy that the Republican majority has taken away their bill and are now busily reshaping it. Alas for Rep. Slaughter, it’s not exactly Eric Cantor’s fault that she was incapable of getting it passed in the first place…

• Bart Gordon (forced to retire, 2010)
  
• Bobby Bright (removed, 2010)
  
• Dan Boren (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Gene Taylor (removed, 2010)
  
• Heath Shuler (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Joe Donnelly (switching out to lose Senate race, 2012)
• John Barrow (going out fighting [cruelly redistricted], 2012)
  
• S.H. Sandlin (removed, 2010)
  
• Walt Minnick (removed, 2010)

In other words, it turns out that they really are a myth, now. It used to be that they were a myth because you couldn’t count on them to vote conservative when it counted; now they’re a myth because it’s getting harder and harder to find them in their supposed natural habitat. Which is a shame, but then nobody forced them to keep supporting a party leadership that pretty much hates everything that conservative Democrats supposedly stand for…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Obama hates such dinners. Some of his aides, in particular his political adviser David Plouffe, urged him not to spend an evening mingling with the 1 percent. Yet he chose to go, and attendees said it was the first time they could recall a speaker leaving before the other side had its fun. In addition, Obama’s 87-year-old predecessor was present.

Imagine the criticism five years ago if President George W. Bush had walked out on a dinner before Hillary Clinton spoke, with Bill Clinton in the audience.

But that would in fact not have happened, because George W. Bush is in fact smarter than Barack Obama. Particularly when it comes to assessing the long-term personality damage that can result when you’re the most powerful man on the planet – and you never, ever let yourself forget that. Not that I’m suggesting that President Obama’s mind is going to snap like a rubber band under the strain. Merely that he’s already taken a job that is visibly aging him… and, in his case, probably burning spare lifespan as well. These institutions exist for a reason, believe it or not…

Via Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

The Racine County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate possible fraudulent recall signatures collected by Mark Demet, a Racine man whose brother’s signature was found four times on petitions to recall Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine. His mother’s signature was also found twice.

But both say they didn’t sign, said Capt. Thomas Lamke of the Racine County Sheriff’s Office.

This is, by the way, a felony: and if this guy is convicted of it then I recommend the full fine and jail time.  If that sounds overly harsh, well, nobody is out there forcing people to fraudulently sign other people’s name to official election documents.  For that matter, it’s long since past time that somebody got it through Wisconsin progressives’ heads that their petulant collective refusal to accept that they lost an election doesn’t actually give them an excuse to do whatever damage that they like to civic structures in their home state.  It’s a heck of a thing to have to use felony convictions to drive that point home, but then, if you want to train a jackass the first thing you have to do is to get its attention…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Sean makes three claims in The Lost Majority:

“First, that the 2010 midterm elections were a result of Barack Obama and the Democrats misreading both their mandate and how they had been brought to power, imagining a realignment in 2008 when, in fact, none had occurred. Second, that the emerging partisan majorities described by theorists from both parties are mirages. Third, that the entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlies much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.” (page xiii)

The first claim is not exactly going to be controversial to anybody who isn’t a Democrat; the second and third are perhaps more likely to be matters of some controversy to ideologically-minded readers. They should not, however, be dismissed out of hand; after all, there were a lot of very book-smart people advising the Democrats in 2009 and 2010 who based their opinions on the belief that long-term partisan majorities are inevitable and that alignments are possible The collapse of their models should at least be seen as cautionary.

The bulk of the book examines the American political system from the 1920s to the 2010 midterms, and in the process calls into question pretty much every commonly-believed, after-the-fact description made of it. This includes, but is not limited to: the enduring New Deal coalition (which Sean argues ended in the 1940s) ; the ‘Southern Strategy’ (although I don’t remember that the author ever formally referred to it as such in the text); and the Reagan Revolution (which Sean categorizes as marking the end of the previous Eisenhower coalition). In all of these cases, the author dives into actual voting patterns – both geographical and demographic – and generally demonstrates that said commonly-believed descriptions are at best over-simplified and at worst flat-out wrong.

To give just one example: the traditional liberal narrative of the ‘Southern Strategy’ is that LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act in 1964, and then racist Southern Democrats switched over to the Republican party en masse. Only… they didn’t. As the author noted: voting patterns in the South began to shift a decade earlier under Eisenhower; continued with organization on the local level in the Sixties that started before the VRA’s passage; and then generally chugged along until enough older Southerners (who largely remained stubbornly Democratic) died of old age, while the younger ones largely declined to vote for a party that had been calling them racist hicks for forty years (I am paraphrasing, obviously). But it’s easier to go with the existing narrative, in much the same way that it’s easier to go with the narrative that the House was under firm Democratic control for forty years… instead of the more complicated and ideologically-hostile one that Congress was divided up between Republicans, Democrats, and conservative Democrats who felt free to vote with Republicans on key issues.

Which leads to the last argument of Sean’s: that, essentially, realignments are impossible because (again, I paraphrase) there’s not really any such thing as “Republican” or “Democrat” in the first place, as they’re commonly described. The author more or less takes the position that both parties are comprised of a variety of interest groups (some voting on ideology, others on party loyalty, and yet others out of pragmatism) that can and will shift their voting patterns as necessary. Worse, from an ideological point of view: as one group is accommodated, another will likely be ignored or dismissed… and change their votes accordingly. Which is one reason why Sean Trende (and I, for that matter) is somewhat dismissive of the ‘demographic is destiny’ argument; there’s no way of knowing that a group that votes Democratic or Republican today will always vote that way.

Generally, I enjoyed The Lost Majority as being readable and logical; my major criticism of it is that I don’t think that it takes into account fully the ability of a party’s leadership to let its own ideological biases affect its thinking. I’m referring specifically to the Democrats, here: due largely to districting issues, its current leadership hails from districts and areas that are reliably liberal, and are in fact heavily so. In an environment where the basic rule of thumb for the electorate is 40% conservative, 40% moderate, and 20% liberal, this is at least a potential problem for the Democratic party… and if the Democrats continue to ignore the fact that they’re allowing their fringe to set policy then their party is at least somewhat at risk of utter collapse. And the collapse of a party is something that could cause a realignment, for quite some time.

Mind you, I am a proud partisan hack, so take that observation with a grain of salt. In the meantime, I heartily recommend The Lost Majority: particularly if you want to have a good idea how people have actually been voting for the last ninety years…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Seriously. This is an easy issue to be on the right side of: everyone agrees – now – that it’s bad to create a sting operation where you facilitate the running of guns to Mexican narco-terrorists without proper safeguards (or indeed any safeguards at all); everyone agrees that it’s bad when guns that you’ve facilitated turn up at the murder scene of a US Border Agent; and while everyone may not agree that Attorney General Eric Holder is either a blithering incompetent or a malignantly corrupt callous bureaucrat, certainly virtually anybody who will be voting in the Republican primaries does.  As Mark Hemingway notes here: this should be a slam-dunk issue for a Republican candidate.  Particularly one who, I don’t know, might want to shore up his conservative credentials?

Hint, hint.

Moe Lane (crosspost)