This morning, Ezra Klein discussed one of the real problems with the budget negotiations. Because Obama agreed to so many discretionary cuts in 2011, there is very little to give up now. He notes that after winning the 2010 elections, the Republicans demanded that the budget deal go entirely their way. After the 2012 election when the Republicans were trounced, they demand a “balanced” approach. Let’s be honest here: if I were them, I would do the same thing. The problem is with the Democrats who think when they are trounced, they should give up everything and when they win decisively, they should meet the loser half way. But I’ve written too much about this already today. The important issue is that Obama caving last year on the budget negotiation is hurting the budget negotiation this year.

This is what I wrote about yesterday regarding Social Security: taking a temporary unemployment benefit in exchange for Social Security cuts in perpetuity is madness. So not only do we have a very bad negotiator in Obama, but even he is hobbled by the even worse negotiator he was last year. The problem is that cuts made from the current budget baseline are far more painful than equal sized cuts last year.

Think of it in your own household budget. You could manage if all of your expendable income were cut. But after that, it gets painful: you eat less, you move into your car. The same thing holds with the federal budget.

The president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Bob Greenstein, explains Boehner’s position on this:

Of course, if Obama had handled these negotiations correctly, it would have been okay. Boehner would have eventually understood that he had no leverage and that we were going to get a very lopsided deal. But even at the beginning of the negotiations, Obama was calling for a “balanced” deal. Why is it that a win for the left means a centrist deal but a win for the right means an extreme right deal? We need better politicians.

It’s beginning to look a lot like 2011. John Boehner is holding the football, Obama runs toward it, and just as he is about to kick it, Boehner pulls the ball away, and “Aaugh!” I’ve long argued that these Fiscal Cliff negotiations are all for show. No deal that Boehner gets will be acceptable to his caucus. I’m sure that Boehner understands this. Alas, Obama apparently does not.

Just like in 2011, Obama has made major concessions. In this case, they are almost unbelievable. He is willing to cut Social Security and raise middle class taxes by going along with chained-CPI. He’s raised the tax level at which he wants to raise rates from $250,000 to $400,000. And of greatest concern, he has folded on the debt ceiling, publicly acknowledging that, yes, the Republicans really can hold the American economy hostage. I don’t see how Obama walks these offers back.

Now I feel more certain than ever that these negotiations will move into January. The problem is that Obama’s last offer will be the starting point for Boehner next year. So we’ll get something like, “You use chained-CPI, raise the Medicare eligibility age, and raise the top tax rate to 37% for incomes over a million dollars. In return, we won’t fight you on the debt ceiling for a year and half. Deal?” And Obama will take it.

And Boehner will again pull the ball away. And why shouldn’t he? The Republicans can just wait a month and use the debt ceiling to force Social Security to be privatized, raise Medicare eligibility up to 90, and repeal Obamacare. What’s the president going to do? Fight? We’d all be very curious to see what that looks like.

I for one don’t think he has it in him.

It is a sad day. Robert Bork died this morning. But that’s not why it’s sad. It’s sad because of the great opportunity we missed.

One incident in Bork’s career explains everything about him. During the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon wanted Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox fired because, you know, he was doing his job. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to do it and resigned. So did his second in command, William Ruckelshaus. But Bork was willing to do it. Why? Because he’s an authoritarian.

But we missed a great opportunity to have him on the Supreme Court. Instead, we got Clarence Thomas who is 20 years younger than Bork and, more to the point, is not dead. There is really no daylight between Bork and Thomas in terms of how they rule on the cases. They both think children ought to be forced to pray in public school. Women shouldn’t have the right to an abortion. People don’t have a right to privacy.

Bork was an “originalist” (along with Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who is probably even closer in thinking). This is the theory that the Constitution is a dead document. It is an interesting doctrine when you consider that its proponents throw it aside in an instant if it won’t get them to the decisions they want. Take, for example, Bush v. Gore. In that case the originalists suddenly found that equal protection was very important: in the case of one George W. Bush, and only for the one time. They should just be honest and admit that they are partisan lackeys and that they are going to reach partisan decisions. Forget all the legal pretending.

The main point here is that Bork would have been no worse than Thomas on the Supreme Court. And had it been Bork on the Supreme Court, there would now be one less evil man serving. Lost opportunities.

Update (19 December 2012 3:38 pm)

Jeffrey Rosen at The New Republic makes the laughable claim that the difficult Senate confirmation hearings turned Bork and Thomas into fierce partisans. This doesn’t explain Scalia, of course. And then, he takes his argument further saying that presidents learned the lesson and decided to nominate more moderate justices that weren’t “Borkable.” Justices like—Wait for it!—Samuel Alito, that bastion of open mindedness and non-partisanship. Rosen has it all backwards.

Update (20 December 2012 10:52 am)

Matt Yglesias tweets the following which is exactly what I’ve been saying:

Strange thing about Bork is that his influential work on interpreting the Sherman Act is totally indefensible on originalist grounds.

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 20, 2012

I was talking to the president. It seems that Malia wants to learn to play guitar. I offered to sell him my American Stratocaster. He asked me how much I wanted for it. It’s worth about a thousand dollars, but I didn’t want to tell him that. “Make me an offer,” I said. He looked it over carefully and then said, “How about $2000?”

That was a great deal. Just the same, it was his opening offer. I frowned. “I had really hoped to get more,” I said.

“I understand,” he responded. “How about $5000?”

This was a deal that was hard to pass up. But I had a thought. I own a Mexican Stratocaster that I’ve never really liked. It cost me $300. “You know, Mr. President,” I said. “I don’t think I want to sell that American Stratocaster. But I have this Mexican model that I could let you have if you’d be willing to go up to $7000.”

“Sold!” he replied eagerly.

And the leader of the free world gleefully left $7000 lighter with a guitar he could have picked up at a pawn show for $100. It was a good thing we weren’t negotiating over anything important.

This is a speech by Pete DeFazio from last year during the debt ceiling debacle. It explains the chained-CPI pretty well. DeFazio does make some statements for effect, but it is all fundamentally correct:

H/T Digby

I found this on Brainy Quote

Frank Conniff of Mystery Science Theater 3000 has written and directed a radio musical, The Wonderful Pundits of Oz. It is quite a polished production with songs that are definitely better than anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and a very good cast. The problem with it is that the script could be tighter. A lot tighter.

I don’t mean to be too critical. The truth is, it is still damned funny and I have little doubt that you will spend the next hour and fifteen minutes doing something worse than listening to The Wonderful Pundits of Oz. I mean, you’re reading this, right? But whenever I enjoy something like this radio play, I can’t help thinking about my own work. The fact is, I am extremely jealous of Conniff. Clearly, he can take a script that is “only” pretty good and get a lot of really talented people to work on it. Since no one is interested in producing any of my scripts, I have the advantage of being able to polish them. A lot. Until the end of time.

Last night, I returned to the second episode of “The Post-Postmodern Comedy Hour.” When last I left it, I thought it was in a good state. So good, in fact, that I thought that all I had to do was a little copy editing and that I could send it off to some friends to get comments. Alas. It has lots of problems. But these aren’t big things like the structure is all wrong or the characters don’t work or it isn’t funny. The problems are more around the edges: awkward bits of dialog, scenes that fall flat, momentum problems. And that’s what’s going on in The Wonderful Pundits of Oz. But frankly, much, much more.

Now I feel like David Mitchell in the wedding speech skit from That Mitchell and Web Look[1] The truth is, the radio play is a lot of fun. My problem is that I think it could have been a whole lot better. People often question me about my compulsive rewriting. It can’t really be getting better, diminishing returns, blah, blah, blah. But I always come back to one of my favorite scenes in All That Jazz. Joshua Penn is complaining to Joe about the editing of “The Stand-Up” taking too long. Joe has him sit down at the moviola and watch a scene. Staring at the screen in frustration and admiration he says, “It is better. Oh, God, it is better.”

So I wish that The Wonderful Pundits of Oz were better: quicker, sharper, funnier. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good or even quite good. And I bet it is better than anything on TV tonight. And where else can you see Emo Philips play a psychopathic Toto? Nowhere else, that’s where!

[1] Here is the skit. It is very funny.

I was bothered all last night after seeing somewhere (The Ed Show?) that a two year elimination of the debt ceiling might be part of the Fiscal Cliff agreement. What happened to President Obama’s resolve that he wasn’t going to allow the Republicans to extort the United State in this way in the future? Apparently, I was taken in when I wrote, Why the Debt Ceiling is No Problem. He seemed so convincing. But it appears that he was just bluffing and we have the usual Democratic Party president: limped dick and badly in need of a belief system.

I’m not the only one to notice this. Matt Yglesias wrote earlier today:

If I could depend upon allies like the president, I would become a Republican. Then I might get the policy I want!

Let’s say that President Obama and Speaker Boehner agree on a deal that allows $1 trillion of the scheduled tax increases to take place over the next decade and cuts $1 trillion in spending over the same period. Most Republicans will view that as a deal with a 1-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, and a lot of them will consider that ratio inadequate. But Democrats will look at the same deal and think about it differently. They believe that they don’t need any deal to get large tax increases. If they extend only the middle-class tax cuts, either before or after January 1, they get $800 billion in revenues. So from their perspective, the deal makes $1 trillion in cuts for $200 billion of extra revenue: a 5-1 ratio. It would be hard enough for both sides to agree to the same ratio; it’s even harder when they aren’t calculating that ratio the same way.

—Ramesh Ponnuru
An Obstacle to a Deal

[Part of this is wrong. Initial Social Security benefits are based upon wages. They aren’t set and then adjusted upward by the CPI. Sorry for this error. -FM]

I’m getting sick of having to talk about this stuff. The chained-CPI change is even worse for future retirees than it is for current retirees. According to Greg Sargent at The Plum Line, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is willing to go along with the chained-CPI madness “if it is offset with a small increase in Social Security benefits for longtime beneficiaries.” Remember: the CBPP is a liberal group. But does that also mean that they are brainless?

If we use chained-CPI for Social Security, it will mean that the cost of living adjustments will be at least 0.3% too low every year. For current retirees, that means that in ten years, they will see about a 3% reduction in their real (inflation adjusted) benefits. This comes to roughly $100 per month. This is important and we should not accept it. The CBPP is suggesting that we adjust very old retirees’ benefits up. There are two problems with this.

First, if we know that the chained-CPI is wrong—that it won’t allow benefits to keep up with inflation—why are we doing it? The answer, as I’ve already discussed, is that those in power in Washington want to cut benefits. But they are cowards and don’t want to be seen as doing so. So they use this convenient backdoor to gut Social Security.

The second problem is that this will affect future retirees even more. Think of the poor sucker retiring 75 years from now. His Social Security check will be worth about half what a current check is worth. There is nothing that the CBPP is proposing to fix this.

Can it be possible that Democrats don’t understand that not increasing Social Security benefits with the rate of inflation is just a long term plan to destroy the program? The Republicans have tried for years to destroy the program in other ways. They have failed. This way is sure fire, it just takes a long time. Accepting chained-CPI is like a time bomb that conservatives want to put into law.

And note: this doesn’t just affect Social Security. It affects everything. In particular, it will push people with low incomes into higher tax brackets. So it is (yet another) regressive tax increase. This is madness!

Yesterday, the long time senator from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, died. He was 88 and had been in a wheelchair for the last year. So it is not of much surprise. He was a good guy—a reliable liberal voice in the senate. The most famous story about him—which to some extent informed his career—took place after returning to San Francisco, after having lost his right arm in World War II. He walked into a barber shop with his lieutenant’s uniform on, and was told, “We don’t serve Japs here.”

Most obituaries focus on Inouye’s war record, his work with Kennedy, civil rights legislation. But Matt Yglesias focuses on Inouye’s position as president pro tempore of the senate. It meant if the president, vice-president, and Speaker of the House were all killed, Inouye would have been President of the United States—at least until last Money. Now it would be Patrick Leahy. Yglesias is very bothered by this.

There are problems with Presidential Succession Act of 1947. One thing that he mentions is the fact that in a time of crisis the administration could switch parties. For example, if the president and vice-president were both killed, the administration would suddenly be Republican. That would be the last thing we need to deal with in a moment of crisis.

But then Yglesias goes into how the president pro tempore is just a title they give to old senators who are usually inches away from death. This is true. Yglesias writes, “Strom Thurmond served as president pro tempore even after voluntarily relinquishing the right to chair a committee out of recognition of his advanced age and declining capacity for work.” Which, all things considered, is kind of a tacky thing to mention the day after Inouye’s death.

He’s right though. We should do something about this. But is it worth a thousand words? Is this really what the death of Daniel Inouye brings to mind? I don’t want to be one of those people saying it is too soon to talk about the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. But really…