The Smithian

…Combine the extreme partisanship with a series of politically motivated redrawings of Congressional district lines over the past few decades and you get two political parties who are largely preaching to their own base—with almost zero political motivation to do anything else. The ends of the political spectrum grow more populated, the middle less so. And nothing gets done—and people lose faith that government can do anything.

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Broadcast network news evening shows did not cover the new report.

No Democrat has beaten a single Republican in an election race that was about the Congressional process. It doesn’t cost Republicans politically, nor does it change it the incentives to obstruction. Nor can Democrats point to any of their legislation they enacted into law by essentially school marming the Republicans into good behavior. Democrats have been trying this for years and have nothing to show for it at the ballot box or in terms of legislative victories or nominations. So what’s the point? Why keep doing it? Democrats have to change the incentives for Republicans. That is the only way to defeat obstruction. That is the only way to defeat Republicans in committee, on the legislative floor, and at the ballot box. To make opposition costly.

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…is a political show trial designed to vilify Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. What we don’t need is a crass partisan effort to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, there are no questions of illegal acts, no secret funds, no shredding of documents and no efforts to directly circumvent a law passed by Congress. People may forget that 14  administration officials were indicted and 11 convicted as a result of the arms-for-hostages scandal. Instead, what we have [re the Benghazi tragedy] after eight months of investigation, 11 congressional hearings before five committees, 20 staff briefings and 25,000 pages of documents is exactly what we started with: a tragic situation with lessons to be learned, but not a grand conspiracy.

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…The fact that Barack Obama failed to win legislation to place further curbs on the purchase of guns—even after the horror of Newtown, Connecticut—has made people who ought to know better decide that he’s not an “arm-twister.” Ever since Obama took office, others have been certain about how he should handle the job and that he wasn’t doing it right. Yet if the health care law is allowed to work, despite continuing Republican efforts to try to make sure that it doesn’t, and if we take into account some other victories—the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the stimulus that was as large as the political market would bear, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, the largest since the New Deal if Congress will let it be implemented—his presidency could go down as a time of historic achievement. Nevertheless, when an insufficient number of senators was available to kill a hypothetical filibuster of the gun bill—a watered-down measure to expand background checks for gun sales (while opening gaping loopholes)—suddenly the word went out that the president is hopeless as an arm-twister; the assumption of course was that being a good arm-twister was critical for a successful presidency. Wait a minute.

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…awash in an excess of Border Patrol agents and oft-squandered funds dispatched to cooperating local cop shops. Then there’s the 650 miles of border fencing that seems most adept at preventing wildlife from sneaking into America…Although this…cost(s) taxpayers billions of dollars, it curiously receives little criticism from fiscal hawks in Congress, who nonetheless always seem ready to slash comparatively minuscule funding for programs aiding the poor.

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