Special Legislative Session on Education

The Tennessee State Legislature holds a special legislative session this week to figure out how to fund and fix our state's education system.

Nashville Public Television will broadcast it.

Water water everywhere

Much of it frozen.

Big mess.

My morning tea bag

With the Tea Party Convention less than a month away here in Nashville, I thought it's worth chiming in with my two cents worth.

For starters, I'm a fiscal conservative. I think we should pay our bills. I share the concerns of Blue Dog democrats that money doesn't grow on trees and that we should do all we can to use PAYGO rules and not spend money we don't have.

That being said, it's worth noting that the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations were responsible for the vast majority of the national debt. Reagan's "win the Cold War through huge deficit spending" strategy might have worked in the short term. But in the long term, we're really in worse shape because of it. (Not worse compared to other nations ... worse in terms of our own national balance sheet.)

Our national debt stands at over $12 TRILLION right now. (As you see from my link, you can actually follow the national debt tracker on Twitter.)

But as Bruce Bartlett (Reagan-era economic advisor) and others have noted repeatedly over the past 2-3 years, our biggest problem right now isn't spending. Actually, we're cutting spending and waste through contract reform and other important budget reforms under the leadership of Peter Orszag and the Obama Administration's Office of Management and Budget. Countless executive branch reforms have helped to curtail out of control spending (the worst waste is in military "emergency" spending ... and no, ACORN is not responsible.). But we still have a long way to go.

What I am NOT hearing from Republicans right now is a commitment to cut or eliminate Medicare. I'm not hearing a commitment to eliminate Social Security. I'm not hearing any commitment from Republicans to cut ANYTHING significant - other than taxes.

And more tax cuts are exactly what we DON'T need.

Well, let me rephrase that.

More tax cuts for the wealthy are what we don't need. As it turns out, the middle class received the largest tax cut in history from the dreaded and much-maligned (by Tea Party activists) Obama-Pelosi agenda. The $288 billion tax cut ($500 per family) was passed without any Republican support by the Democratic Party as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

And this is what really confuses me about the Tea Party movement.

They hate the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, but they want tax cuts - tax cuts that the Democrats gave them (in spite of the fact that this increases the deficit).

And this is where I get confused about the Tea Party and its identity.

Is the Tea Party movement interested in eliminating the national debt? Or are they interested in evading or avoiding the payment of income taxes?

Because this is one of those situations where you've gotta die to live. We need to make short-term sacrifices to get our financial house back in order. The short-term stimulus will spur economic growth (already has!) and this will bring more revenue back into the government coffers. But without raising taxes to collect on our national debt, we're going to continue falling into a deeper and deeper hole.

Again - tax cuts alone will not stimulate the economy. We need smart, sustainable policies for economic growth. And we need to eliminate our debt. Spending cuts alone will not solve the problem, and spending cuts with tax cuts will actually drive us further into recession.

Analyze Glenn Reynolds Body Language

This may be the best new blog since Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle.

Background here.

Seriously, Glenn. What the hell are you insinuating?

PS - You'll love my Facebook page.

Tennessee Congress - Fiscal Discipline?

Not so much.

Basic strategy?

1. Add pork project.
2. Rail against big government.
3. Vote against the bill, which passes anyway.
4. Pass the pork around.

(h/t Southern Beale)

A New Day

Liberadio(!) has a great summary of some year-end blogging that I must have missed while on self-imposed media blackout for the past couple weeks.

Suffice to say that if you live in Tennessee, or care about Democratic politics, you need to read this.

Marianne Williamson on grief, hope, and Obama's centrism

Williamson, a contemporary mystic and ardent early supporter of Barack Obama, laments the president's failure to deliver on the promise of change. And even suggests a Green Party run against Obama in 2012.

Then:

For me personally, he had me at "Yes, We Can."

Now:

I don't know what we should do, but I know one thing that we shouldn't do: pretend to ourselves that this man is delivering on what he promised when he first won our hearts.

Speaking of online fact checking

Jay Rosen of NYU School of Journalism suggests that we fix the Sunday political talk shows by doing some actual fact checking (in real time, or through research). Right now, the talk shows (like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, etc.) don't have the kind of journalistic rigor needed to make them interesting or informative. Instead, you get politicians trying really hard not to say anything, and you get hosts who allow too much doublespeak (and outright falsehood).

No, Sen. Hatch, they ARE constitutional.

Jack Balkin says Hatch is wrong about mandates.

Will the House play ping-pong with Senate health reform bill?

Word from Capitol Hill sources via Sam Stein at HuffPo is that the House will not try to reconcile its bill with the Senate bill, which leaves little to no hope that the public option will be in the final bill. Instead, the House will add amendments to the Senate bill.

Much of this is procedural, but in the end, the problem is political. House members like John Tanner, Bart Gordon, and Jim Cooper have already used up considerable political capital by voting on the House version of the bill - a version that included the controversial Stupak Amendment on abortion and the controversial public option. Gordon, in particular, took tremendous heat for his vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee (passing the bill out of committee to the floor) and for his vote against the final version of the House bill.

After spending time, energy, and political muscle, the House is now in the awkward position of having to vote for the Senate's version of the bill. This is a little like building an SUV - you can use a truck chassis or a car chassis. But now that the Senate and House versions are using different ways to achieve similar goals (the Senate uses the tax on high-premium insurance plans, while the House uses a surcharge on the wealthiest 1% ... the Senate uses individual mandates and penalties, while the House uses the public option to lower costs and increase competition), it's time to choose one version or the other. And the Senate's greater power to say no (through filibusters and procedures that require 60-vote majorities) puts the House in a much less powerful position.

The real losers in this whole situation are the people of Tennessee, who are caught between the do-nothing GOP and the Blue Dog Democrats. Governor Bredesen hasn't been very helpful either, as his concerns about increased Medicaid burdens on the state budget have been used by the GOP to block reform, rather than fix the bill.

New Year - And a look back at 2009

Micah Sifry has a great post up at Tech President on what might have been, had the Obama campaign been more deliberate and decisive in how to take the MyBO platform and move it into what is now Organizing for America.

Having met personally with Tim Kaine to discuss this, I think it's worth noting that this has been the #1 priority (by far!) of the new Democratic National Committee. And while the President could have been more effective in using the OFA and MyBO movements to push a policy agenda, I think it will actually be much more powerful in the long term to move OFA under the DNC umbrella.

First of all, the White House needs Congress to pass its agenda. This has been especially evident in the Senate's holds on appointees like Dawn Johnsen, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and the healthcare reform debate among Democrats this year. And while outside pressure is fine (i.e., pushing from the grassroots to Congress while the White House calls the shots), it's even more powerful to push the agenda in collaboration with Congress. We've seen how one or two intractable Senators can block the entire process. And while it would be nice to have a "post-partisan" organization to support the movement, I think it's naive to imagine that the Republican Party would respond to the pressure of OFA in any other way than to triangulate the President and congressional Democrats.

Second, there is a potential conflict of interest between OFA as an independent political movement and OFA as the President's personal lobbying team. It makes more sense, ethically, to put OFA under the DNC umbrella as long as the DNC is willing to change and accommodate the revolution that made Barack Obama (and not the Clintons or Howard Dean) the leader of the Democratic Party. Without the White House leading the movement (and bear in mind that David Plouffe had already said he was stepping back to focus time on his family, as Plouffe details in his book), and with Obama now serving as Commander in Chief (not just a candidate in a campaign), there was a leadership void. All of this needed to be handled delicately, carefully, and ethically.

Third, there were unanswered questions about the continuing role of Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, and others (like Democratic Governors Association top dog Brian Schweitzer) in the Democratic Party's leadership. Would Dean continue to run the DNC? If not, who would succeed him? As it turned out, Tim Kaine became the chair of the DNC (while still governor of Virginia) on January 21, 2009. Of course, Obama had the opportunity to handpick his chair, but this still needed to be ratified and confirmed by the DNC members.

Sifry is right to note that things might have been very different if someone had addressed this issue earlier. At the same time, the transition team did an admirable job to keep some of the momentum moving from the campaign into the administration, and used the web very effectively to do so (from posting job openings to sharing information about nominees to providing contact information for key departments and staff). And while the opposition was free to organize its own movement outside any party apparatus (this may be the hidden wisdom of an otherwise laughable effort by Michael Steele to change the Republican Party), it's harder to effect political change than to oppose it.

It's always cheaper and easier to say no. But Obama has never been one to put expediency ahead of excellence. In the long term, the combined muscle of the DNC and OFA should continue to build the base and support an effective campaign in the House and Senate.