On Friday, Andrew Prokop wrote a great article over at Vox, What Could a Republican President Do With Obama’s Executive Power Theories? It deals with the argument that many people have made to the effect that if Obama can prioritize immigration then a Republican president can decide that he isn’t going to enforce the tax law. This is an argument that Jonathan Chait has made, and Prokop even quoted him, “What if a Republican president announced that he would stop enforcing the payment of estate taxes?” It’s a very frightening idea.

But I have a counter to it: norms are restrained by public opinion when it comes to the president. The reason the Republicans have gotten away with so much norm destruction is that the people (even the media to a large extent) don’t pay attention to Congress. It is all thought to be too technical and not of direct influence on policy — even though it most definitely is. And we see this very clearly in Obama’s decision. Why didn’t he just stop deportations of all 11.4 million undocumented residents? Because there are limits to this power.

Prokop discussed three areas where we liberals might be concerned about what President Ted Cruz would do: taxes, environmental law, and Obamacare. I was most impressed with the issue of taxes. So what would stop Cruz from prioritizing enforcement of tax law to incomes less than $20,000 per year? Apart from norms, nothing. The problem is that all those taxes not paid by people making above $20,000 per year would still be owed. When a Democrat (Or simply a reasonable Republican; oh, I crack myself up!) got back in the White House, all those taxes would be due — with interest and penalties.

And then there is the issue that Republican presidents have already done this sort of thing. Ezra Klein pointed out two important ones in a recent article, The Best Arguments for, and Against, Obama’s Executive Action on Immigration. Take special note of the last clause:

That’s actually the crux of the matter, which I haven’t paid nearly enough attention to. Given the the Republicans are absolutely certain that Obama brought National Socialism to the United States, they are going to push every advantage once they have the White House. Obama doesn’t need to actually do anything; the Republicans have known before he was elected that he was doing things that were totally unconstitutional.

Prokop noted that the problem of later enforcement would apply to environmental regulations. And that Mitt Romney was planning to not enforce the individual mandate if elected in 2012 regardless. I would add to this. The individual mandate is not some liberal conspiracy. It is the most conservative part of the law. It protects insurance companies, not individuals. So if the Republicans want to harm their biggest constituency:

Matthew Dickinson wrote another interesting article over at his blog, No, Obama’s Executive Action Did Not Violate Governing Norms. He started by noting that even people on the right say they like the results of Obama’s executive action, “Instead, they direct their ire at Obama’s apparent willingness to violate some unspoken ‘norm’ that apparently constrained previous presidents from making significant policy change of this magnitude absent an overarching emergency.” Before I get to his argument, I think this is interesting because of course conservatives will not want to admit that they just hate undocumented kids and their families. As discussed in Winner-Take-All Politics, conservatives always resort to process arguments when the policy arguments are too obviously vile.

Dickinson goes on to argue that presidential norms are kind of mythical anyway. The main thing that keeps presidents in check is that other branches of government push back — as they were designed to. As far as I can tell, Dickinson is somewhat conservative. Fundamentally, his argument is the same one made by John Boehner that the executive action will make the Republicans less likely to get along. But I think Dickinson in wrong about this. I suspect that Republicans won’t do much but bluster. They don’t actually care about the issue, but it does give them a lot of political ammunition. And in 2016, the executive action could be a difficult issue with the Democratic nominee having to finesse the question, “Will you reverse the executive action on immigration?”

Ultimately, politics continues on as it always has. And I don’t see any reason to think that what Obama has done is unprecedented. I discussed the biggest issue last week, Obama’s Executive Action Is a Double Win. When Republicans are already certain Obama is Stalin reincarnated, nothing he actually does will affect how the Republican Party acts.

I don’t have much to add on the grand jury decision in Ferguson. It went exactly as I expected. This isn’t because I thought the process was corrupt, although it certainly might have been exactly that. It was just that police offers are only indicted in the absolutely most egregious cases. So unless there was a photograph of Michael Brown on his knees with Darren Wilson putting a bullet into his head, I would not expect an indictment.

Regardless, none of this is about Michael Brown or Darren Wilson. This is about a “justice” system in the United States that is totally out of control. The police literally have a license to kill. I just saw a couple of minutes of MSNBC and one of their commentators said one of the standard things, “When police go to work in the morning, they don’t know if they are coming home that evening.” That’s even more true of truck drivers and cabbies. But no one holds that up as a reason we should apologize for them acting like Bernhard Goetz. The “police have a dangerous job” is not really true and is no excuse for bad behavior.

So what are we going to do about this? Nothing. We didn’t need the death of Michael Brown to point out that we have a broken system. And that broken system goes far beyond what police and prosecutors do. An arguably even bigger issue is inequality and racism. But in general, we won’t talk about them either. It is considered “class warfare” to do so. Mitt Romney claimed that we should talk about these issues in “quiet rooms,” which is just another way of saying that we should never talk about it.

Meanwhile, people are born into hopeless situations because of their “race” and the economic situation of their parents. But this supposedly is not about class warfare. We have a society in which actual class warfare is defined as just the way things are. There is neither racism nor a lack of opportunity because Daymond John! But bringing up these issues supposedly is class warfare. And the people of the United States — most especially minority groups and the poor more generally — are so beaten down that they just accept it.

And now it has been decades that we’ve been sold a kind of social Darwinian lie. And it all sounds very noble: we must reward the winners! But if you dig down just a little way, you will find fascist dogma: the weak are dragging down the nation so we must let them fail (that is: die). And we must worship the powerful because they are great. Of course, evolutionarily, this is nonsense. What a species needs is diversity. And what is unsuccessful in the current environment might be amazingly successful in a later environment. It isn’t hard to imagine a future where people who are good at trading stocks are useless and people who can predict the tides are priceless.

But fine, let’s kill the weak and worship the the powerful. Because: freedom!

Now that Chuck Hagel is on his way out as Defense Secretary, maybe we can revisit the whole question of why our New Democratic heroes are so fond of appointing Republicans to this post. It’s a really bad idea from a political standpoint. It implies that Republicans are better when it comes to the art of war. This is totally refuted by looking at how Republicans actually do manage our wars. But the people can be forgiven if they think, “Well even Democratic presidents think Republicans are best for the job; Republicans must really be better than Democrats!”

This has been going on for a while. The Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton’s entire second term was a Republican, William Cohen. And then when Obama came into office, he just couldn’t find a capable Democrat, so he stuck with Bush’s choice, Robert Gates. (Sadly, that was not the only way that Obama followed the lead of Bush.) After leaving office, he used the opportunity to snipe at the administration. Then Obama picked conservative Democrat Leon Panetta for the job. He stayed a short period of time before leaving office so he too could snipe at the administration. So Obama put Hagel in the position, again, saying to the world that Democrats know nothing about war and must depend upon Republicans. I can’t wait for Hagel’s book where he snipes at the administration.

As I wrote at the time of Hagel’s nomination, “Obama cares more about his legacy than he does the legacy of his party.” It’s always the same with the New Democrats. Their constituencies are not, you know, the people who voted for them. Those silly people probably think that electing a Democrat means they would get a Democratic cabinet and liberal governance. But instead, Obama and company care about the kind of Very Serious People that brought us the DLC of the 1990s and “third way” today. Obama explicitly wanted a “team of rivals” like Lincoln had. (Apparently, Obama had read a book.) In his immature way, Obama seemed to think that this is what made Lincoln great. Forget all the Civil War and slavery stuff. People remember Lincoln because he made William Seward his Secretary of State.

So the question is naturally raised, “Could we have a Democratic Defense Secretary now?” And I really don’t know. Will the Senate be willing to confirm any Obama appointment? I’m really not sure. But it would be nice if Obama at least was willing to nominate a Democrat. But he might try to nominate another Republican, hoping to woo Republican support. But that didn’t go all that well last time. Not that it would stop Obama. Constantly hoping that the Republicans will behave is one of his main strategies.

If the people choose a Republican President in 2016, maybe it won’t be that bad. There is, at least, a kind of truth in advertising. We can depend that at least his cabinet will be filled with Republicans. And if there is any exception, it will be something low-profile like the Secretary of Transportation. Maybe after a few elections like that the New Democrats will learn that their economic conservatism, with its “split the difference” on everything else, is not popular. Regardless, in the distant future, historians will not write Team of Rivals about Obama; they will write, “Opportunity Squandered.”

The thing that impresses me about Chris Christie is how he manages to have the reputation of an brave truth-teller while being as craven a politician as there is. I still remember his big Bridgegate press conference where he was gentle as a lamb. What’s really going on with him is just the manipulation of power. He knows better than other politicians what power he has and just what he can get away with. As such, it speaks poorly of people and people in New Jersey specifically that they buy his act. When I call him a bully, I don’t say it lightly. I call him that because he attacks the powerless. He’s never stood up to a powerful person or institution in his life.

It’s interesting that New Jersey should be so associated with The Sopranos. It is a relatively accurate presentation of the mob as a bunch of thugs who feed on the weak. And that is what Christie is all about. The fact that he wears a nice suit and has a law degree doesn’t change anything. In fact, that is the traditional form that thugs take. Christie just adds the yelling and the tough guy act and the people eat it up. But we all know that if Christie were around real tough guys he’d be groveling and asking if he could polish their shoes.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo provided an update on one of Christie’s most recent acts of “tough guy” politics, More on Christie’s Ditched Ebola Policy. You may remember earlier this month when Christie quarantined nurse Kaci Hickox. It was hugely popular, because once again, the people of New Jersey believed his brave truth-teller act even though the decision was pure demagoguery.

Along with locking Hickox in a cage for three days, Christie came up with a whole plan to deal with the Ebola crisis that wasn’t happening. Big plans were made. But once Christie got credit for “being tough” the whole project was abandoned. Susan Livio at NJ explained, NJ Police Force Earned 500-Plus Hours of Overtime Guarding Empty Hospital for Ebola Quarantine. It was all a political stunt, which is pretty much all that Christie does:

This morning, Jim Newell wrote an appropriate article over at Salon, No, Chris Christie Isn’t “Back”: Why He May Be Confident, but His Moment Has Passed. It discusses a front page profile by Mark Leibovich in The New York Times magazine:

It’s nice to think that the people of New Jersey are waking up to Christie’s shtick. I’m not convinced. The people of New Jersey seem to be deluded about who they are, and Christie is very good at using that. Just the same, I’ve never felt that Christie’s act would play in Iowa where it would just be seen as nasty (which it is). Still, given a bad economy in 2016, Christie could easily become president. That would be bad from a policy standpoint, and you can well imagine him turning the White House into a Nixon-like crime headquarters. But more than that, I don’t think I could take years of Christie’s act on the national stage.

The most repetitive story in America never gets boring. You know the one. The police pick up some guy and decide he committed a murder. The guy is always poor and almost always dark skinned. So the police get someone to lie or do so themselves. And then decades later, he is exonerated. It’s so much nicer than the much more common story that is the same except for the end, “And the state put him to death despite many problems with the case.” Now we have the story of Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman — two men released from the Ohio prison system on Friday after 39 years behind bars. Because Jackson was in a bit longer, he now holds the record for the longest time spent in jail before being exonerated. I assume Bridgeman holds the record for the second longest.

This case is especially bad because the police used a 12-year-old boy, Eddie Vernon, to do their dirty work. The crime was a very brutal convenience store robbery. But as usual:

But here’s an excellent additional example of our criminal justice system. Wiley Bridgeman was paroled back in 2000. But he didn’t stay out long:

The question on my mind is why we see this over and over again, yet nothing happens. We have a broken criminal justice system where prosecutors have almost unlimited power and the police have little regard for the truth. And none of them are ever held accountable. These two men were convicted on the say-so of a child with no other evidence. That’s something more tha just laziness and incompetence. That’s villainy.

These two men also spent time on death row. I bring this up because whenever I talk to a death penalty supporter, they always think that death penalty cases are air tight. But in that, they are usually like this case: based upon almost nothing other than the fact that the defendants are poor and can’t mount a good defense.

This is justice in America, folks. It is despicable. And we do nothing about it because judges, prosecutors, and police offers have nothing to fear from being too harsh. Is it any wonder that we treat the weak as though they were animals?

I heard from my father that the Fox News ranters have been talking about our double plus good border fence. You know the one: the double fence mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The Republicans have been really mad that the fence was never completed. The problem is that the fence is estimated to cost more than four billion dollars and the Republicans never allocated money to pay for it. But that’s perfect for them. They don’t actually want to do anything about illegal immigration. They know the business community (Along with all those rich people with all those big lawns to mow!) wants those undocumented workers. So they can maintain the current situation while demagoguing the the issue on Fox News. “If the president really cared about our immigration problem, he’d build the double plus good border fence!” And that leaves the Fox News viewer outraged that yet again, Obama just won’t enforce our immigration laws!

There is a bigger problem here other than the usual Republican disingenuousness. The truth is that enormous numbers of undocumented residents did not come here illegally. Let’s start with the fact that not all undocumented people come from Mexico. The fraction is high, but probably not as high as most people think: 59%. What’s more, 15% come from five countries way across the big ocean: Philippines, India, Korea, China, and Vietnam. In total, perhaps 40% of all undocumented residents in the United States came legally and simply stayed.

Think about this. It is estimated that there are 11.4 million undocumented residents in the United States. To listen to Republicans on the subject, no undocumented population is acceptable. But if we closed down the border and didn’t allow anyone through, we would still have 4.6 million undocumented people living here. The fewer people in the country illegally, the harder it is to find them. So we are always going to have large absolute numbers of people here illegally. The only way to avoid that is to turn the United States into the kind of prison that communist China was during the Cultural Revolution. I realize that there are certain conservatives who would be all for this and that Fox News could doubtless convince a third of the country that we must do this. But it isn’t a good idea and I doubt the American people would stand for it. (But it wouldn’t shock me if they did!)

The reasonable way to look at our undocumented population is to start by deciding what we will accept. How big a population is acceptable? Currently, 3.6% of our population is undocumented. That actually doesn’t sound that bad. And that is probably why people always shout about eleven million illegal immigrants! If 1.5% is an acceptable target, then all this focus on the double plus good border fence makes a certain amount of sense. But I do not think that the immigration hysterics who rant about 11.4 million people would change at all if the number were 4.6 million. That’s why I think it is important to find out what level of illegal immigration they think is acceptable.

There will always be undocumented residents in any country that has trading relations with other countries. I’d like to see what Republican politicians have to say about this. Because I know that the Republican base is not going to think that almost five million undocumented residents is acceptable. This will be yet another case where Republicans are demagoguing an issue with no ideas as to what they would do. The demagoguing is the product. And it fits in perfectly with the Republican base’s thinking. It is a kind of magic thinking that believes that with enough will to succeed, everything will be accomplished. All we have to do is line up tens of millions of border patrol agents on the southern border and there will be no illegal immigration. What will they think when they learn this is just half the problem? Well, they will never learn that as long as we allow Republican politicians to pretend that illegal immigration is all about the US-Mexico border.

Afterword

There is one solution to the undocumented residents. We could allow our economy to become so terrible that there is no opportunity here and our citizens go to other countries looking for jobs. This is what Republican and New Democratic economic policy is bringing to the United States. So maybe it is wrong to say that the conservatives don’t have an immigration plan.

After two years of investigation with Darrell Issa hellbent on finding something — Anything! — to make into a scandal, the House Intelligence Committee released its report on Benghazi yesterday. And their results: nothing. Everything was just the same as the administration had always claimed. No political maneuvering. And certainly no “stand down” orders costing Embassy personnel their lives. Nothing at all.

Ken Dilanian at Associated Press provided all of the details, House Intel Panel Debunks Many Benghazi Theories. The House report found pretty much what the previous six investigations found. And it found what the eighth investigation by the House Select Committee will find. And that is because there is no there there.

But none of this means that the investigation was useless. The point of the investigation was the same as pretty much everything that Darrell Issa has investigated. The point is to generate a bunch of smoke so that everyone will think there is a fire. This has been the plan all along and it has been extremely effective. It keeps Issa in the news and it reduces confidence in the government. What could be better for a Republican politician?

There is pretty much nothing that Issa can do that the mainstream media won’t pick up on. And their approach is about the same as his: write a bunch of stories questioning the government; then when it goes nowhere, just drop it. The harm has been done. Most Americans don’t know much about the “scandals” regarding Benghazi, the IRS, and the Fast and Furious program. But they have a vague idea that the government was up to no good. The Republican Party could have no greater propagandists than The New York Times and 60 Minutes.

All along, the linchpin of the Republican case was the most pathetic thing: Susan Rice’s “talking points” when she went on the Sunday news shows. The outrage about this from conservatives was palpable. And the more information that came out, the tinier their argument was. In the end, it really came down to the fact that Rice had said that the attack came out of a protest over an anti-Muslim film. This turned out to be wrong. But somehow, conservatives were outraged that the American people had been misled for a couple of days. This went along with conservative outrage that Obama said the attack was an “act of terror” rather than a “terrorist act.” This is a good indication of just how vacuous the conservative movement has become.

But now even Darrell Issa’s committee has to admit that Rice’s talking points were not part any nefarious plot:

But what will Issa himself say? Well, the release of the report on a Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving should give you some idea. But I’m sure that Issa will now claim that this was always about the intelligence failures. But that isn’t true. The investigation was always political. Issa’s idea was that he could use Rice to show that the administration had manipulated the talking points to assure Obama’s re-election. (Note: Republicans still think the election was ever in any doubt.)

This morning over at Washington Month, Martin Longman wrote, What Fair & Balanced Would Look Like. He suggests that after the media spent two years pushing what was always a farcical scandal, they should spend the next two years falling over themselves to explain that there was no scandal. I like the idea. But it would never work. Regardless of getting the people to understand that there was no Benghazi scandal, the damage has been done. People have been given more (but fake) evidence that says that governments are incompetent and corrupt. No amount of counter-evidence on a single issue will reverse that.

Darrell Issa-1; Democracy-0.

Digby wrote a very interesting article yesterday, Power and Process. It follows off a statement of concern from Rand Paul about President Obama’s executive action on immigration. According to Paul, “[T]here are instances in our history where we allow power to gravitate toward one person and that one person then makes decisions that really are egregious.” And his example, “The president issued an executive order. He said to Japanese people ‘we’re going to put you in a camp.'” Rand Paul is a classic subgenius: he is smart enough to be dangerous, in part because he greatly overestimates his intelligence.

Roosevelt wasn’t acting in a vacuum. Congress wanted the internment and passed a law to enforce it. The people wanted the internment. If it had gone for a vote, it would have passed. And when the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, they upheld it. So how exactly would collective action have helped? How was “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” and its mentally retarded brother the House of Representatives going to make this situation better? Digby rightly noted that Paul’s concern here is all about process. So his statement is really vile. The problem with the internment of ethnically Japanese citizens was wrong not because it represented the majority oppressing a minority, but because it wasn’t done the right way.

I realize he didn’t put it that way. He is claiming that when everyone is involved, such things don’t happen. History shows otherwise. Jackson was one of the most popular presidents in history and he oversaw the Trail of Tears and numerous other outrages. The truth of the matter is that like all conservatives, Paul just hates Roosevelt so he wants to put the whole thing on him. Because only Democrats are tyrants. The bottom line is that Paul has the causation wrong. All that was necessary to intern the Japanese-Americans was an executive action because it was hugely popular.

And in the case of Obama today, the executive action was finely crafted. As Greg Sargent noted yesterday, “[I]t shows that the proposal’s legal rationale is tightly circumscribed to reflect that Congressional intent [to relieve humanitarian hardship endured by US citizens].” So the idea that the president is just doing whatever he wants is ridiculous. But that won’t stop the Republicans from screaming about it.

Digby noted that a big part of Rand Paul’s claim here comes from the fact that he simply wants the government to get nothing done. In this way, he is no different from other conservatives. Boehner’s pleading to allow the legislative process to do its job is just another way of saying, “Let us block anything getting done!” And that is another aspect of Mitch McConnell’s plan to make Obama a one term president: stop everything possible until the Republicans are back in power.

Arguments about process are always arguments about policy. We know that Paul would be much more understanding of executive action if a Republican were in the White House. And he would be entirely in favor of it if he were that Republican. So we should forget about these arguments about the right and wrong way to do things — at least so long as we actually do have democratic institutions that set limits. These process arguments are just a cover for people to argue against policy they don’t like but can’t be seen as attacking. Digby put it well:

Roosevelt’s executive action was wrong because the policy was wrong. Obama’s executive action is right because the policy is right.

Afterword

To be clear: the argument here is not that process never matters. It is just that in almost all cases, process arguments are disingenuous. Ultimately, the question is policy.