Some Ridiculousness

For your consideration, some of the more ridiculous, immoderate statements and actions of the last 2 months:

• Obama nominated Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s not the ridiculous action – Cordray is actually more moderate and less divisive than Elizabeth Warren, who basically crafted the bureau from start to finish. The ridiculous part is that 44 Republican senators have vowed to block any nomination to head this agency. Because they don’t like the agency, they’re going to refuse to give it a director. This is petty obstructionism. The agency was lawfully created, Obama has the right to nominate its director, Republicans should judge that nominee on his or her capability not their feelings about the agency itself.

• Meanwhile, Republicans have also taken steps to block any recess appointments that might allow the government to function while they block the actual appointments. Since Pres. George W. Bush was the master of these things, it smacks of a particular hypocrisy. Another example of how “advise and consent” has been warped beyond all reason. My suggestion: A procedural rule that if a presidential nomination does not receive an up or down vote by the full chamber within 6 months, he gets to make a 1 year recess appointment regardless of whether Congress is in session. That should combined the necessary incentives with enough time to process nominations. Still slower than ideal, but not so fast as to shift all power into the hands of the president.

• More evidence that our campaign finance system is out of whack: The $1 million donation to Romney’s super-pac from a shell company. A corporation (with legal personhood) exists only long enough to dump money into a political fund, thus skirting some of the few remaining disclosure laws governing this whole process. I’m not always a fan of transparency (it’s no panacea), but I think campaign spending ought to be done in the open.

• Rick Perry’s “treasonous” comment. The idiocy of this should be obvious to anyone. This kind of rhetoric coming from someone who wants to run the executive branch is totally irresponsible. How will Perry govern if he wins by convincing voters that everyone in government service only acts as part of a conspiracy to steal elections? Beyond that, he needs to take the crime of treason seriously.

• Michele Bachmann’s apparently cut from the same cloth. She’s now claiming that she worked for the IRS in order to study the “enemy.” In other words, she’s claiming to have been exactly the kind of federal bureaucrat (in it for her own gain, motivated purely by partisanship) that she so frequently rails against. Why should we let her run that government then?

• As if to prove that idiocy isn’t a partisan characteristic, Obama even lost the fight over the scheduling of his jobs speech. In what I can only imagine as a partisan campaign decision, he chose the same night as a Republican primary debate for his speech to a joint session of Congress. Sure, there are a lot of these debates this month. And scheduling for Congress is tight. But it obviously wasn’t the only available night, since they’ve capably rescheduled for Thursday. Whatever he proposes, Obama is guaranteed to argue that jobs (as opposed to the federal debt, and perhaps even federal regulation) must be the government’s top priority right now. If that’s the case, why use the scheduling of the speech as a partisan power-grab? Boehner was right to reject that date. Obama should have scheduled the speech on Thursday to avoid the conflict and gone a step further by inviting all the Republican candidates to attend as his guests.

(Apologies for the month-long hiatus. I initially took a break while working on another writing project and then work got in the way. I should be back up and running more frequently soon.)