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“If you can’t learn to compromise on an issue without compromising yourself, you sure as hell should never be in the legislative body. Every document of this country was a compromise. Go home and bitch and raise hell around the city council or something. Go haunt someone else. But you should never come to Congress. And you should never get married.”
— Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), quoted by Time.
David Wasserman doesn’t expect the Supreme Court’s decision this week on the Voting Rights Act to dramatically alter the current shape of congressional districts or redistricting in the long term. But on other matters such as voter ID laws, early voting, and polling locations, the effective end of the preclearance era could be a different story.
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First Read: “If you follow American politics day by day, tweet by tweet, poll by poll, and speech by speech, it’s easy to lose sight of the biggest story over the past five years — just how much change (both socially and demographically) this country has witnessed over the past four years. The nation has its first African-American president who won re-election a year ago. A majority of Americas now support gay marriage, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits. The country is on track to be a majority-minority nation 30 years from now. And the Senate is poised to pass immigration legislation giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Taken together, this is a stunning amount of social change in a very short period of time.”
“And all of that change helps to explain much of the partisanship and politics over the past four years. After all, when one side is pursuing change, the other side is often resisting it.”
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Just after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) “issued an order… requiring all 58 county clerks to issue marriage licenses when the ruling takes effect, which he said might take more than a month, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
“This is Massachusetts. We only have three pastimes: sports, politics and revenge.”
— Democratic operative Jim Spencer, quoted by Roll Call.
Raw Story notes Democrats “have a new strategy to use against their Republicans opponents: Just let them speak.”
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, the ‘DemRapidResponse’ channel simply uploaded a more than 20 minute long Republican press conference. The video wasn’t even edited, with the exception of a five second introduction that flashed, ‘Grand Old Party, Same Old Party on marriage equality’ across the screen.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) “said he would again veto a same-sex marriage bill if it reaches his desk, and that Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a ban on federal benefits for same-sex married couples will have no effect on New Jersey, one of a handful of states that allows civil unions,” NBC Philadelphia reports.
Said Christie: “It’s just another example of judicial supremacy rather than having a government run by the people we actually vote for. I thought it was a bad decision, but it has no effect on New Jersey at all so we move from here.”
Wired identified an 18-year-old Icelandic man as a FBI informant inside WikiLeaks.
Siggi Thordarson was a “long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000.”
Nate Silver: “With the coming resumption of same-sex marriage in California, … the United States will surpass Europe in the availability of same-sex marriage as measured by share of the population. By August, about 95 million Americans out of a population of 314 million – about 30 percent – will live in states where same-sex marriage is legal. In Europe, that number is 169 million residents out of a population of 736 million, or about 23 percent.”
However, Dan Balz notes same-sex marriage “is not legal in more than three dozen states. Many of those states have written the bans into their constitutions. It could take years to change those provisions if the battles are engaged one by one, state by state. Only the Supreme Court could short-circuit that process.”
“House Republicans haven’t yet coalesced around a strategy to counter the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, with one member of the party’s conservative wing talking up a doomed effort to amend the Constitution while leadership seems resigned to leave the issue to the states,” Roll Call reports.
Gawker: “There are, in total, 29 U.S. Senators and Representatives who changed their positions regarding same-sex marriage since it was first voted on in 1996. Of those 29 politicians who no longer support DOMA, 24 signed an anti-DOMA amicus brief earlier this year. Still in office are 43 members of Congress who supported DOMA and continue to do so, as well as 31 politicians who always opposed the measure.”
A Tennessee man was charged in a scheme involving Mitt Romney’s income tax returns during the 2012 campaign, the AP reports.
Michael Mancil Brown “is accused of having an anonymous letter delivered to the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP accounting firm in Franklin last August, demanding that $1 million in digital currency be deposited to a Bitcoin account to keep some of Romney’s income tax returns from being released. The Justice Department said Brown falsely claimed that he had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal computer network and stolen tax documents for Romney and his wife, Ann Romney, for tax years before 2010.”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has signed the Lone Star State’s new congressional map into law, “ending the state’s long and twisted redistricting saga of the 2012 cycle,” Roll Call reports.
“The governor’s approval comes one day after the Supreme Court gutted a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that forced Texas to seek federal approval for any changes to its voting laws — including its congressional maps. The state was one of several covered by Section 5 because, according to the original law, it had a history of discrimination in its voting practices.”
In the wake of the Texas Senate’s failure to enact abortion legislation before last night’s midnight deadline, Gov. Rick Perry (R) called the Legislature back for a second special session to begin Monday afternoon, the Austin American Statesman reports.
Coming soon: This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital by
Mark Leibovich.
“The great thing about Washington is no matter how many elections you lose, how many times you’re indicted, how many scandals you’ve been tainted by, well, the great thing is you can always eat lunch in that town again. What keeps the permanent government spinning on its carousel is the freedom of shamelessness, and that mother’s milk of politics, cash.”
Wall Street Journal: “The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, vastly expanding the Obama administration’s role in support of moderate forces battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in New York City finds Christine Quinn (D) barely leading the Democratic mayoral race with 19%, followed by Anthony Weiner at 17% and William Thompson at 16%.
Said pollster Maurice Carroll: “Thompson’s spurt — no doubt spurred in part by his endorsement last week by the United Federation of Teachers — is the big news in this new poll. The other news is Quinn’s slide and that’s more puzzling. A few polls ago, she was edging close to the magic 40 percent.”
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) “is emerging as his party’s leading champion of immigration reform in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Reuters reports.
“With Senate passage of a sweeping immigration bill imminent, Ryan has been meeting with House conservatives to persuade them that reform of the immigration system, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, is an economic necessity and critical to fixing the nation’s fiscal problems.”
“Those people should be shot in the balls.”
— NSA leaker Edward Snowden, quoted by Ars Technica in 2009, in response to individuals who leaked government information later published in the New York Times.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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