One fact has become sharply clear this past seven days: it is no ordinary administration that occupies Washington just now.<\/p>\n
In the face of a fiscal crisis of unprecedented magnitude, yesterday the president submitted a budget of fake spending cuts (\u201ca mirage\u201d the Wall Street Journal <\/em>called them this morning) and gigantic tax increases guaranteed, if passed, to crush investment and job creation. \u00a0Even if enacted (a political impossibility), by the administration\u2019s own arithmetic the package would barely break the trend line of the climbing debt to GDP. \u00a0It is a budget \u201cworthy of Greece,\u201d charged columnist Charles Krauthammer on Fox News Channel last night, adding, \u201cfor the president\u2026 to offer it, knowing our dire situation, is truly scandalous.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House unveiled this uncompromising budget even as it announced a compromise with Catholic bishops over mandatory inclusion of contraception in all Obamacare health coverage. \u00a0But the word \u201ccompromise\u201d usually indicates that two parties have talked and come to a deal. \u00a0In this case, it wasn\u2019t clear that the White House had talked with anyone but itself. \u00a0Presidential aides just repackaged their proposal and slapped on the \u201ccompromise\u201d label. \u00a0When a number of bishops failed to find any but cosmetic changes, their objections were brushed aside with a curt indication that discussion was over, as if it had ever begun.<\/p>\n Perhaps next we\u2019ll hear about the \u201cdo-nothing\u201d bishops. \u00a0For it is hard to see how the White House treatment of the Catholic hierarchy is any different than its treatment of Congressional Republicans. \u00a0Some have said that, when the administration talks of a \u201cdo-nothing Congress\u201d \u2013 in other words, of GOP obstruction \u2013 Republicans should reply, what you really mean is a \u201cdo-nothing Senate.\u201d After all, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has a majority, but he can\u2019t get anything out of committee and to the floor.<\/p>\n Drawing attention away from that inconvenient truth is why Senate filibusters are central to the administration\u2019s story of Washington paralysis \u2013 which is surely why its OMB director trotted it out to explain the Senate\u2019s thousand-day failure to pass a budget. \u00a0Somehow he forgot to mention that the Senate considers budgets under special rules that do not allow filibusters.<\/p>\n So the White House cries about \u201cdo-nothing\u201d Republicans at every opportunity. Nominations for offices requiring Senate confirmation have become a favorite object of this lament and judicial nominations a particular target. \u00a0How can you have order in the courts if Republicans won\u2019t allow order in the confirmation process? \u00a0Then it turns out that the facts about Republican \u201cobstruction\u201d and the inaction tell a very different story.<\/p>\n Despite the president ignoring constitutional recess appointment procedures in a manner that would have guaranteed a standoff between the branches in prior years, the process continues. \u00a0Sixty-two percent of the president\u2019s circuit judge nominees have been confirmed, about the same rate as George W. Bush enjoyed at this point in his presidency.<\/p>\n Yet the average waiting time for an Obama nominee has been 140 days, compared with 350 days for a Bush candidate. \u00a0In other words, current candidates are getting through in 40 percent the time as Bush\u2019s. \u00a0The vacancy rate on the federal bench today is comparable to the eight percent when George W. Bush was sworn in \u2013 and for half the empty seats, the president has not submitted nominees.<\/p>\n Then, too, a number of the candidates he has put forward appear intended to provoke Republican opposition. \u00a0One has bragged that, as a judicial clerk, he wrote the lower court opinion on which Roe v. Wade<\/em> was based. \u00a0Another has championed the extreme proposition that it is \u201cunconstitutional\u201d for Christian organizations to use public school property outside of school hours, even for non-school events. \u00a0Like so much else coming from the White House, these nominations appear intended not to further the smooth operation of the government but as political theater to advance the president\u2019s reelection narrative.<\/p>\n So here is what emerges more and more clearly as out of the ordinary about this administration \u2013 the absolute lack of appetite for any but faux compromise. \u00a0This is not just election year posing. \u00a0We saw it in the battle over the stimulus package and healthcare legislation early in the term. \u00a0Now in recent weeks in rapid succession have come displays of it on contraceptive coverage, the budget and nominations.<\/p>\n It seems intemperate to call this rigidity a new authoritarianism. \u00a0But whatever term you use, it feels unprecedented in the American experience \u00a0— and unsettling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One fact has become sharply clear this past seven days: it is no ordinary administration that occupies Washington just now. In the face of a fiscal crisis of unprecedented magnitude, yesterday the president submitted a budget of fake spending cuts (\u201ca mirage\u201d the Wall Street Journal called them this morning) and gigantic tax increases guaranteed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[51,61,62,60,63],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-51","tag-budget","tag-congress","tag-obama","tag-senate"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1110,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions\/1110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}