A new Pew Research survey finds President Obama is viewed as the clear political winner in the fiscal cliff negotiations, 57% to 20%, “but the legislation itself gets only a lukewarm reception from the public: As many disapprove as approve of the new tax legislation, and more say it will have a negative than positive impact on the federal budget deficit, the national economy and people like themselves.”
Selling Chuck Hagel
“The plan, according to administration officials, is to cast Hagel as a
war veteran, a Republican who still shares ideals with a party that has
largely shunned him, and — above all else — someone who won’t set
official U.S. policy,” BuzzFeed reports.
“The White House’s strategy seeks to sell Hagel as a technocrat with
an impeccable record of military service whose only sin against the GOP
in the Senate was his opposition to the Iraq war — a conflict that is
now immensely unpopular. Once that image is articulated to the public,
an administration official said, Obama will dare Republicans to vote
against him.”
Mark Halperin: “The two most important senators in this nomination right now are
McConnell and McCain. If Hagel has their support, he should be home
free. If he loses one or both of them, and even a single Democrat, the
dynamics become more challenging for the White House.”
Inaugural Tickets Sell Out Before They Were Even For Sale
A computer glitch at Ticketmaster “has created frustration and outrage among hundreds of people who wanted to buy tickets to one of President Obama’s two official inaugural balls beginning Monday, only to find all of them have been sold,” the Washington Post reports.
A GOP Civil War Looks Possible
Nate Cohn: “The Republicans could nominate a unifying candidate in the 2016 primaries–you never know–but a contested primary would probably break along geographic lines. In retrospect, the 2012 primary might have been a sneak preview. Even though Romney possessed vastly superior resources and acceded to every substantive demand of the right, the GOP primary electorate divided neatly between north and south. Southerners concerned with nominating an authentic conservative never embraced Romney: Despite the help of a divided field, Romney only broke 31 percent of the vote in one southern state, Florida. Geographic polarization ensured that the 2012 Republican presidential primary lasted until April. The fiscal cliff vote shows that such polarization is becoming the rule rather than the exception. If a blue-state Republican secures the GOP presidential nomination thanks to winner-take-all contests in blue states like New Jersey and California, Krauthammer might actually get his civil war.”
Extra Bonus Quote of the Day
“Sadly, Harry Reid has again revealed himself to be an idiot.”
— Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), in a statement, blasting Senate Majority Harry Reid’s (D-NV) comments that Hurricane Sandy last year was more devastating the Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Supreme Court to Hear Same-Sex Marriage Cases
The Supreme Court has set aside two days in late March to hear oral argument on the same-sex marriage cases, NBC News reports.
On March 26, the court will take up the fight over California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state. The next day, it will hear the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages in the states where they’re legal.
The Austere Life of Uruguay’s President
New York Times: “Some world leaders live in palaces. Some enjoy perks like having a discreet butler, a fleet of yachts or a wine cellar with vintage Champagnes. Then there is José Mujica, the former guerrilla who is Uruguay’s president. He lives in a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all. His security detail: two plainclothes officers parked on a dirt road.”
“His net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800 — the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“I want to give him the space to make his own decision. I’ve announced my intention to run, but the reality is – is we’ve got a good Senator. He’s been loyal. He’s been there for a long time. And I think that he’s got a decision to make.”
— Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D), in an interview with CNN, on Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), whose seat he wants to run for in 2014.
How Much Does Barney Frank Want to be a Senator?
The Boston Globe reports former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) “is dialing back his opposition to the pending nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, saying he is willing to look past the Nebraska Republican’s comments about gays because it is more important that his views prevail on drawing down the war in Afghanistan and reducing wasteful defense spending.”
Frank is angling for the appointment to Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) seat should he resign to become secretary of state. The confirmation of Hagel could be one of the first votes for the new interim senator.
Why the Hagel Nomination is a Big Deal
Peter Beinhart: “What makes Hagel so important, and so threatening to the Republican
foreign-policy elite, is that he is one of the few prominent
Republican-aligned politicians and commentators (George Will and Francis
Fukuyama are others, but such voices are rare) who was intellectually
changed by Iraq. And Hagel was changed, in large measure, because he
bore within him intellectual (and physical) scar tissue from Vietnam…. the Iraq War sparked something visceral in Hagel, as the former Vietnam
rifleman realized that, once again, detached and self-interested elites
were sending working-class kids like himself to die in a war they
couldn’t honestly defend.”
Andrew Sullivan: “To my mind, this is his core qualification. Unlike so many of the
lemmings and partisans of Washington DC, Hagel actually called out the
catastrophe of the Iraq War as it happened. The neocons cannot forgive
him for exposing what they wrought on the nation and the world.”
Wonk Wire: Hagel would give Obama policy cover.
Lawmaker Who Voted Against Hurricane Relief Once Sought It
Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) voted against relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy last week, TPM reports, “despite representing coastal Mississippi, one of the regions hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina and a top beneficiary of Katrina disaster aid.”
In fact, Palazzo “was deeply involved in pressing for federal dollars in the fall of 2005. Then acting in his role as a local government official, Palazzo repeatedly appealed for federal funding to help rebuild his battered coastal Mississippi community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”
Could the Voting Rights Act be Struck Down?
Jeffrey Toobin writes that “after the 2010 midterm elections, nineteen states passed laws that put up barriers to voting, including new photo-I.D. and proof-of-citizenship requirements, and restrictions on early and absentee voting. In most of those states, Republicans controlled the governorship and the legislature. The purported justification for the changes was to limit in-person voter fraud, but that claim was fraudulent itself, since voter fraud is essentially nonexistent.”
“It is against this backdrop that, next month, the Supreme Court will take up a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective law of its kind in the history of the United States. A century after the Civil War, the act, in abolishing many forms of discrimination employed by the Southern states, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, finally turned the legal right for African-Americans in those states to vote into an actual right to vote. Bipartisan congressional majorities have reauthorized the law four times, most recently in 2006. (It passed the House overwhelmingly and the Senate unanimously, and was signed into law by George W. Bush.) The question now is whether the Supreme Court will strike down the Voting Rights Act as a violation of states’ rights.”
Can Hagel Be Confirmed?
President Obama will nominate former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) to be the next secretary of defense, but many predict a tough confirmation fight as he has vocal critics on both the left and the right.
The Week has a good summary of the issues.
Jon Karl: “Senate Democrats tell me there is no guarantee Hagel will win confirmation and that, as of right now, there are enough Democratic Senators with serious concerns about Hagel to put him below 50 votes. The bottom line: He may ultimately win confirmation, but not before a bloody fight in the Senate.”
Mark Halperin: “If Hagel has a good confirmation sherpa and performs well in his courtesy calls and at his hearings, he will likely be confirmed. But/and at a pretty high cost. Expect a LOT of people to want to testify against him. And don’t rule out a filibuster of this nomination, which would, obviously, change the math.”
First Read: “What message would it send if Hagel — a decorated war hero, a Vietnam
vet, a two-term senator who served in office without scandal — doesn’t
get confirmed?”
Quote of the Day
“It’s typical of Congress, it’s typical of unions, it’s typical of companies, I guess, where a small group is really carrying the ball and the others aren’t necessarily in agreement. The NRA is another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.”
— New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, quoted by the New York Times, comparing teachers’ unions to the National Rifle Association.
Boehner’s Bomb Squad
Ross Douthat says House Speaker John Boehner “has done his country a more important service over the last two years than almost any other politician in Washington.”
“That service hasn’t been the achievement of a grand bargain with the White House, which he has at times assiduously sought. Nor has it been the sweeping triumph over liberalism that certain right-wing activists expect him to somehow gain. Rather, it’s been a kind of disaster management — a sequence of bomb-defusal operations that have prevented our dysfunctional government from tipping into outright crisis.”
Team of Mentors
National Journal: “During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for President Lincoln’s Team of Rivals approach to picking his Cabinet, referring to the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Obama later selected his No. 1 Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as his secretary of State. But what Obama is now assembling is more of a Team of Mentors, a group of old lions of the Senate who, along with Biden, helped to shape Obama’s worldview during his brief stint as a freshman senator before he ran for president.”
Battle Lines Drawn Over Taxes Again
“Republicans won’t accept further tax increases in coming budget and debt negotiations, the party’s Senate leader said Sunday, putting GOP lawmakers on a collision course with Democrats over raising the government’s borrowing limit,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Democrats are signalling they want “to raise as much as $1 trillion in new revenues through tax reform later this year to balance Republican demands to slash mandatory spending,” The HIll reports.
The Cloakroom: When everything is off the table.
McChrystal Explains Why He Resigned
Out today: My Share of the Task: A Memoir by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Reuters reports the book “offers McChrystal’s first assessment of the events that led to his resignation. It depicts a U.S. military in Afghanistan struggling to find a strategy for success at a time of Taliban resurgence and an inexperienced White House skeptical of the war and sensitive to criticism.”
“The general portrays himself as well-meaning but slow to understand the administration’s political sensitivities and undercut by his failure to grasp the dynamics of the situation. He wrote that he wanted to operate as independently as possible of political or even policy pressures.”
