This last week, there was big news. The Democrats got to confirm a whole bunch of executive and judicial nominees that they weren’t expecting to. It turned out that they managed to confirm 23 nominees. This is surprising because of the slow way that the Senate works. Normally, votes on the nominees must be brought to the floor where they stay for a couple of days before they can get a vote. The way it was looking, there might have been a hand-full of nominees confirmed before the end of the session. As it was, the Senate was supposed to go home for the weekend on Friday and so Reid was going to have to wait until the following Monday to bring the nominations to the floor.

Lucky for the Democrats, they have great allies in the Republican Party: Mike Lee and Ted Cruz. These two clowns decided to make a bold stand against President Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. When the Senate tried to adjourn for the weekend, it needed unanimous consent. Lee and Cruz balked. They wanted a purely symbolic vote to say that the president was a doody pants for this action. And they wanted it Saturday! This allowed Harry Reid to bring all those nominees to the floor a full two days ahead of schedule. And that meant they would all have time to get votes.

Not surprisingly, the Senate Republicans were furious. But it is hard to feel bad for them. Lee and Cruz are what the Republicans have assiduously sowed over the last several decades. Any political party is going to have a spread of opinions. There is no way for the Republicans to have moved so far to the right without having people who are even more extreme. And remember: starting in January, there will be even more extreme Republicans in the Senate. This is what the Republican Party is. It’s ridiculous for them to think that they could get all the advantages of their pro-corporate extremism without it causing them to lose some tactical advantages because many of their members are simply crazy.

Just the same, the Democrats were thrilled. As Steve Benen pointed out, they got a whole bunch out of this and they gave absolutely nothing. To start with, the Lee-Cruz stunt ended in the symbolic vote going down in flames: 74 to 22. But the vote was scheduled for the next week anyway. It isn’t clear what the dynamic duo thought they were getting. It is also likely true that fewer Republicans voted for the bill because they were so angry at these idiots.

Juliet Eilperin at The Washington Post provided a great overview of the outcome of this whole thing, Democrats Employ Strategy to Get the Most Bang for Obama Nominations. Reid has been very clear that they have focused on judicial appointments because those are the ones that have the longest effect. I’m so glad to hear him say that. Too often, Democrats do not act strategically. And, in fact, Obama was rather bad during his first term — he just wasn’t that interested in the judicial branch. But that’s changed. This Senate has confirmed more judges than any Senate since 1980.

There is some concern that the Senate has focused too much on the judiciary. There are scores of executive branch nominees that have gone unconfirmed. I think Reid’s approach was the best, however. It isn’t just that the judiciary has long-term effects. In the next two years under the Republicans, I’m sure that not a single judge will get a vote. But some executive branch nominees might, given that they will have less than two years to serve.

The truth of the matter is that there should be no reason that executive branch nominees should be simply passed through in the vast majority of cases. That’s especially true when the president is a Democrat and so the nominee isn’t being put in charge to destroy the institution he’s leading. But the situation is that the minority party will always block these nominations if for no other reason than to slow down any other work from getting done. When they get in power next year, I’m not sure how motivating this is going to be.

The next two years ought to be fairly uneventful in the Senate. I think we are going to see just how facile and rhetorical were all the claims that if Obama acted alone Congress wouldn’t work with him. There will be no working together. There never would have been any working together. And the Democrats should take any victory they can. The Republicans were never going to play nice and they won’t in the future.

I’m not sure how to take Josh Barro’s article over at The Upshot this last week, Cuba the Next Cancún? It Should Be So Lucky. It is a response to a tweet by Jeremy Scahill, “I’m glad I got to visit several times before US tourists try to turn it into Cancún.” Barro’s response it, “Gotcha! Cancún was a government created Caribbean resort!” If that were it, it would be just vaguely sad and pathetic. I mean: it was a tweet and Barro never actually proves that Scahill was wrong.

The one thing that we have seen time and again as communist countries “liberalized” is that they they don’t move to open governments with free markets. They move to corrupt governments with crony capitalism. In the United States, the first thing that set the media against Putin was what he did to the oil oligarchs in Russia. This was presented as some terrible authoritarian move. But the Russian people saw it the opposite way. Putin was just reversing a great injustice that occurred under the early Russian “democracy.” The people’s wealth was basically stolen from them. The billionaires who were losing most of their money were not great capitalists. They were just people who had the ability to work the levers of government.

I doubt that Scahill has thought through the situation in Cuba. It was, after all, a tweet. But the generous reading of his words is that he fears that the “capitalists” are going to descend on Cuba, find a whole lot of government officials keen to trade their power in the government for piles of cash. And just like in Russia before it, Cuba will see its people screwed of their share of the wealth generated. It will be the Batista government all over again. Five decades of the Cuban people suffering under their own government and the United States’ government. And it all comes right back to where it started.

The problem with Scahill’s tweet is that he he misspoke. It wouldn’t be the tourists who try to turn Cuba into Cancún. The idea of more and more tourists going to Cuba and spreading some money around in the local economies sounds like an absolutely great idea to me. The fact that individual Cubans would build hotels sounds great. In this regard, I suspect that Barro and I are much in agreement. But he probably thinks foreign capital flooding in is the best way to do this. On that issue, I’m sure I’m with Scahill. It would be sad if Cuba ended up looking the same as every other corporate resort in the world.

But I can’t get too upset about that. The issue is how this would all play out for the Cubans themselves. Most likely, they will be screwed the way most people are today: with a public-private partnership that allows powerful people in the government to cash out of the country, foreign money to cash in, and leaves the people with new minimum wage jobs cleaning toilets. Maybe that will be an improvement for them. But it certainly isn’t anything like justice.

Max Fisher is one of the shining stars over at Vox — very possibly the best person they have there. And he wrote a really useful discussion of the history behind Wednesday’s announcement, Nine Questions About Cuba You Were too Embarrassed to Ask. It is very much worth reading. But I want to discuss the small part of it that annoyed me. It was the seventh thing you were embarrassed to ask about, “I hear that Fidel Castro is a monster who did lots of terrible things. Is that true?” I don’t even like the question, which is prejudicial. And the initial answer just makes it worse, “Oh yes.”

Let me be clear what I am not saying. I’m not saying Castro was a great guy. But I’m not keen on the facile dismissal of him either. And that’s especially the case when George Washington, the father of our country, owned hundreds of slaves. And we haven’t exactly done ourselves proud since then. Right up to the present with Bush’s torture program and Obama’s drone attacks, it would not be hard to dismiss our leaders as “monsters.” But I know what many will say, “You are just putting the worst face on this! Washington freed all his slaves at his death; Bush was trying to keep us save; Obama is managing a war. Have some nuance, man!”

Exactly!

None of the Castro’s notable brutality took place early on in his regime. Isn’t it possible that his behavior was shaped by the fact that the United States — just a few hundred miles from his country — was trying to overthrow him and assassinate him? Of all the things I know him to have done, they were all done against people who could be reasonably claimed to be his enemies. That’s at least better than the United States has managed to do over the last couple of decades. So I have no problem claiming that Castro was an authoritarian dictator who oppressed his own people. How that exactly makes him worse than other rulers I can’t say. If the United States were signing a treaty with Saudi Arabia, I doubt very seriously that Vox would spend hundreds of words describing the brutality of that “friendly” regime.

Vox is really pushing this point. I suppose it is because they want to head off the argument that the embargo shouldn’t be lifted because the Cuban government is so terrible. So their argument is, “Cuba is terrible and that is why the embargo is a bad idea.” I get it. I even agree with it. I don’t think there is any doubt at all that if we had tried to befriend Castro (or Ho Chi Minh or many others) the situation would now be far better. But I think it comes off as extremely self-satisfied to run articles (by another great writer Matt Yglesias) like, Cuba’s Human Rights Record Is Terrible, No Matter What You Think of the Embargo.

Going through the list of things that the Cuban government did, what keeps occurring to me is that generally speaking, Cuba comes off as somewhat to much better than Saudi Arabia[1] — our longtime ally. But more than that, the biggest point made in both articles is that there is no press freedom in Cuba. This is something I think about a lot these days. What does it mean to have press freedom if you don’t use it? The Soviet constitution provided press freedom, it just wasn’t available on a practical level. Maybe the only reason that the United States doesn’t need to interfere with the press (not excessively, anyway; yet) is because the government knows it can depend upon our press to treat official enemies to a higher standard than our friends.

[1] Interesting, both Fisher and Yglesias discussed the treatment of LGBT rights in Cuba. Cuba has indeed been horrible about this. But no mention was made of the fact that the country has made major progress in this regard over the last two decades. The same cannot be said for Saudi Arabia.

I don’t mind that elections are largely determined by people who don’t know anything about policy. Democracy isn’t pretty, but it is the best way I know for governance to muddle along. But what I most definitely do mind is when these ignorant people are held up as the best, most open-minded voters. They aren’t. They are just ignorant. As should be clear, I am not talking about conservatives. I may disagree with them and consider them intensely confused. But in general, they at least follow politics. I’m talking about the vaunted “moderate” or “independent” voters.

Back in May, my favorite political scientist, Lynn Vavreck, wrote, The Power of Political Ignorance. In the article, she reported on some research she had done. She gave voters a quiz to see what was going on in politics. It was nothing hard. It consisted of multiple-choice questions like, “What jobs does Joe Biden have?” She found that the less people knew, the more likely they were to split their votes between President and Senator. People in the bottom third of knowledge split their tickets three times as much as people in the top third of knowledge.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Why would people vote for two different candidates who are pushing opposing policies? In general, it is because they don’t know this. They are just voting for personalities or other whimsical criteria. The only world in which splitting a ticket makes sense is one in which political parties aren’t ideological. And that really has never been true. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Democrats had bizarre regional coalitions. But it was still the case that a Democrat in any given area was a Democrat.

As I indicated, I don’t have a problem with ignorant voters. For one thing, ignorance is a relative thing. Certainly someone could have great insights and not know that John Boehner is Speaker of the House. My problem is elevating such people to the status of the good. And this is done by those in the pundit class who fancy themselves as independent truth tellers. This would, of course, require that the candidates running have random policy positions, which is absolutely not true.

My favorite example of this kind of pundit is William Saletan. Two years ago, I wrote, Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness. In that article, I discussed how Saletan, who considers himself a “moderate Republican,” is actually not a moderate. Just like almost all those professionals who use that moniker, he is a liberal on social issues and a conservative on economic issues. What’s more, the social issues are secondary to the economic issues — as they are with most people. So these professional moderates are really just conservatives.

So what we have are regular ignorant voters who truly are independent because they just don’t know any better. And we have professional “independent” writers who trump up the split ticket voters as a way of giving their own nefarious machinations the sound of reasonableness. In the end, the call for “open-mindedness” is just a call for more conservative economic policy, or at very least the same status quo that works great for the oligarchs. We’ve seen how great divided government works in the United States these last four years.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page just figured out that King v Burwell might be bad for Republicans, A Post Obamacare Strategy. As you may recall, King is the latest in a torrent of lawsuits against Obamacare designed to kill the law by any means possible. In this case, it takes a single phrase from the bill — one that conflicts with many other phrases in the bill and the bill itself — and uses it to claim that the government cannot provide subsidies on federally run healthcare exchanges. It is the kind of lawsuit that would have been laughed out of court forty years ago. But now with people like Scalia, who spout right-wing talking points from the bench, anything is possible. I often wonder if a lawsuit mightn’t get traction if its legal reasoning was simply, “We don’t like it!”

What The Wall Street Journal is concerned about is that suddenly throwing over five million people (it might be as high as 13 million) off their health insurance might be bad politics. They noted that even though it is all the fault of Obama and the Democrats “the public may not notice the difference once the press corps discovers a cancer patient or two who can’t afford her Obamacare plan without taxpayer support.” Meagan Hatcher-Mays at Media Matters is a little optimistic, however, when she wrote, WSJ Just Realized the Anti-ACA Lawsuit It’s Pushing Could Be Ruinous for Americans — Including Republican Voters. The conservative paper only thinks that it will be a temporary problem and soon people will see how much benefit they get from not having insurance. (The people at The Wall Street Journal are amazing: they are so insulated from most of America that they actually believe this dreck.)

There is really only one way that King would hurt the Republicans: the presidential election of 2016. It is likely that if the court decides to strike down the subsidies to those who get their healthcare on federal subsidies, the Republicans will be blamed. People will wonder why Republican controlled legislatures across the nation don’t do something to help the millions of people they are harming. This will be far worse than these same legislatures rejecting the free money of the Medicaid expansion just to thumb their noses at the president. Taking something away seems far worse than never giving something in the first place. The nation as a whole will look on this and be reminded just how awful the Republican Party is.

But other than the election of the president, I don’t see any problems for the Republicans at all. Let’s start with the fact that most governors are elected on off-years. So they can already depend upon a conservative electorate — older and richer and unlikely to have been negatively affected by this. But most of these states have Republican legislatures because the people (stupidly) support them. Just look back at Kansas this year. Sam Brownback has pretty much destroyed the state and yet he still won re-election by over 3.5 percentage points. So where the Republicans are strong now, they will continue to be strong. Harming millions of middle class Americans is the sort of thing that has gotten them elected in the past and it will continue into the future.

So sure, King might give the Republicans a little bit of bad press. Of course, even it won’t be the bad; just look at how the country has moved on from the torture report. It might hurt them a little bit in Congress and will reduce how well they do in the run for the White House. But it’s not even significant, much less catastrophic. And let’s not forget: if the economy tanks in the first half of 2016, our next president will be a Republican. It doesn’t matter how much the party actively harms the nation.

Stephen Walt is a smart guy, but he isn’t a political scientist. So he was wrong about Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba, “See what presidents can do in foreign policy when they no longer need to get elected & therefore worry less about special interest groups?” The main problem with this assertion was pointed out by Jonathan Bernstein yesterday in, Obama, Cuba and Politics. This decision didn’t come out of a vacuum. There are lots of people across the political spectrum who have been calling for exactly this change. And it isn’t just voters, “Obama’s statement and actions today echo what Hillary Clinton said about Cuba in her recent book, which was written mainly to further her presidential campaign.”

I feel the same way about Cuba and Iran. We just don’t get any benefit from not having diplomatic relations with these countries. It strikes me as more like a middle school tiff than the behavior of adults. And behaving this way doesn’t cause the leaders of these countries to think, “You know, we ought to be more like them!” It makes us look petty and is hardly a good advertisement for joining the “free world.”

The other aspect of this that always struck me as strange was that we would have nothing to do with Cuba while we did have complete diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union. What was up with that? As far as I can tell, it all comes down to Kennedy and his overwrought reaction to Cuban. Garry Wills wrote an excellent article about this back in 1982, Did Kennedy Cause the Crisis? The answer is: yes; Kennedy created the mess and then dealt with his own mess fairly badly — in a way that ought to appeal to Republicans today:

Stuff like this is shameful. But of course the country has never come to terms with it. In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis — the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war — is one of the crowning achievements of Kennedy’s presidency, as far as most Americans are concerned. Lost in all of this is the fact that Cuba was always a small and weak country that shouldn’t have bothered the United States at all — except that as a people we are neurotically insecure.

From an electoral standpoint, I don’t see the problem with normalizing relations. There are some people who absolutely hate Cuba. But as far as I can tell, they are mostly Republican voters anyway. And, like most Republican voters, they are quickly dying off. What’s more, they are mostly just people who are angry because they lost a bunch of money and prestige under the corrupt Batista regime. Is that what our national goal should be: to get rid of the Castros and replace them with another dictator? People don’t think about it that deeply, but clearly Cuba hasn’t been an exporter of terrorism these last fifty odd years. In fact, it has been the opposite. Regardless of what you think has gone on inside Cuba, it has been the United Sates that has export terrorism to the island nation.

So it is about time that we normalize relations with Cuba. We ought to do the same with Iran. But we won’t do that. And I suspect that Stephen Walt knows very well why that is. The pro-Israel lobby in this country is far more powerful — especially with the Democratic Party — than the anti-Cuba lobby. And Israel would find it frightening if we were to treat Iran as just another nation. Even though it is.