Hi, all, I’m Matt. You can see some of my previous political blogging at www.bulldogblue.com (a now defunct group site). I’m a senior film studies and music major at Yale, and I like good books, public art, and social justice.

I’m in the depths of a New York internship for most of the time that Josh will be in sunny Puebla, so I’m not sure how much of substance I’ll be able to post. But I can be counted on to be pithy on a regular basis. Hopefully that will be enough to satisfy you, you content-hungry vultures.

Josh Marshall on what Frist would have go down next week:

Whether you call it the ‘nuclear option’, the ‘constitutional option’ or whatever other phrase the GOP word-wizards come up with, what “it” actually is is this: the Republican caucus, along with the President of the Senate, Dick Cheney, will find that filibustering judicial nominations is in fact in violation of the constitution. (Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.) Their reasoning will be that the federal constitution requires that the president makes such nominations “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate” and that that means an up or down vote by the full senate. Nobody believes that. Not Dick Cheney, not any member of the Republican Senate caucus.

For that to be true stands not only the simple logic of the constitution, but two hundred years of our constitutional history, on its head. You don’t even need to go into the fact that other judicial nominations have been filibustered, or that many others have been prevented from coming to a vote by invocation of various other senate rules, both formal and informal, or that almost countless numbers of presidential nominees of all kinds have simply never made it out of committee. Indeed, the whole senate committee system probably cannot withstand this novel and outlandish interpretation of the constitution, since one of its main functions is to review presidential appointees before passing them on to the full senate. Quite simply, the senate is empowered by the constitution to enact its own rules. You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries. For all the chaos and storm caused by this debate, and all that is likely to follow it, don’t forget that the all of this will be done by fifty Republican senators quite knowingly invoking a demonstrably false claim of constitutionality to achieve something they couldn’t manage by following the rules.

Rick Santorum (R-Ostensibly PA) tries to outdo Trent Lott for outrageous comment of the day:

What the Democrats are doing is “the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.’ This is no more the rule of the senate than it was the rule of the senate before not to filibuster.

This is the same No.3 GOP Senator who recently said this (via Atrios):

“Senator Byrd’s inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable,” Santorum said in a statement yesterday. “These comments lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate. He should retract his statement and ask for pardon.”

Chuck Pennacchio responds:

As an historian of Holocaust-era Germany, I find Rick Santorum’s comment to be offensive, divisive, and destructive. Rick Santorum should immediately issue a public apology, and then retreat with conscience to consider the lasting damage he has done to the United States Senate and to the memory of 12 million Holocaust victims. How ironic is it that he would make such an extremist comment comparing Senate Democrats to Adolph Hitler while his own political party seeks to consolidate all governmental power in its own hands? This is embarrassing to all Pennsylvanians. Unfortunately, Rick Santorum’s hate-filled and heated rhetoric is completely consistent with the junior Senator’s past behavior.

Wal-Mart Watch on Bob Ehrlich’s slap in the face of uninsured working Americans and their families:

Today, Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich will stand with Wal-Mart Stores COO Eduardo Castro-Wright and veto his legislature’s historic bill to compel the retail giant to pay more for its Maryland employees’ health care coverage. Wal-Mart Watch has previously called upon Ehrlich to return Wal-Mart’s campaign donations. Wal-Mart Watch Executive Director Andrew Grossman issues the following statement: “I’m saddened, but hardly surprised, that Governor Ehrlich today chose the interests of his massive campaign contributor over the health and welfare of the hardest working Marylanders and their families. The governor’s celebration of corporate welfare is an insult to all working folks and a serious injury to the state’s small business community who aren’t allowed to play on a level playing field.”

In better news, Connecticut and Pennsylvania are taking up similar legislation to hold employers responsible for the health of the people who make their business possible. And Wal-Mart Monday apologized for comparing support for Proposition 100 in Arizona, which would regulate bix-box stores like Wal-Mart, to Nazi book burning. These stories are fundamentally linked demonstrations of the moral bankruptcy of the conception of “economic freedom” peddled by Wal-Mart and its allies, in which government has no more place regulating public, asymetrical economic transactions to ensure social justice than it does telling you what to read or who to have sex with. But how we ensure that workers are justly compensated and the sick get care is and should be a public concern and a matter of public policy, whereas what we read is not.

Liberal Oasis considers why the GOP is said to be waiting until next week to call a vote on the Senate floor debate begun today, and what message Democrats need to get out in the meantime:

If Republicans had the votes (and the will) to trigger the nuclear option, there’d be no reason to wait until next week. So either they don’t have the votes, or they don’t have the will. Assuming they don’t have the votes, the reason for starting the debate over the nominees (most likely the two women, Patricia Owen and Janice Brown) a week in advance is to try to shift public opinion by personalizing the issue. With poll after poll showing that Democrats are winning public opinion, it is extremely hard for Frist to tip those Senators on the fence. So having lost public opinion on the procedural argument, Frist last best hope is to try to win the argument over the judges themselves.

This should be a hard road for Frist as well, since Owen and Brown carry much ideological baggage. But Dems have not necessarily honed their messages regarding specific nominees, so it remains to be seen how that fight shapes up. It’s long past time for the Dem messaging to evolve, from the basic “abuse of power” theme to something that more clearly explains how these judges would harm average Americans…In short, the overarching messages must explain how these judges come out of an ideological movement beholden to two powerful interests: fat cat corporations and fringe fundamentalists. They seek to overrule Congress when it passes laws that would require corporations to protect our environment and the rights of workers. And they would impose the views of the fringe fundamentalists on the private matters of individuals, as they tried to do in the Terri Schiavo case.

Indeed, what’s at stake is the right of individual Americans to privacy and autonomy in their most intimate choices and the freedom of the American people to work through government for social justice for working Americans.

Andrew Sullivan pleas for perspective on what some on the right seem to find more shocking than the torture of prisoners by American soldiers:

A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran? Yes, Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook. But the outrage from the White House is beyond belief. It seems to me particularly worrying if this incident further intimidates the press from seeking the truth about what the government is doing in the war on terror. It is not being “basically, on the side of the enemy,” as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism and serving the cause that this war is about: religious pluralism and tolerance. The media’s Abu Ghraib?? When Mike Isikoff is found guilty of committing murder, give me a call. Austin Bay still insists that Abu Ghraib did not constitute “deadly torture.” The corpses found there (photographed by grinning U.S. soldiers) would probably disagree. (Will Bay correct?) Three factors interacted here: media error/bias, Islamist paranoia, and a past and possibly current policy of religiously-intolerant torture. No one comes out looking good. But it seems to me unquestionable that the documented abuse of religion in interrogation practices is by far the biggest scandal. Too bad the blogosphere is too media-obsessed and self-congratulatory to notice.

Villaraigosa unseats Hahn 3-2:

After a lackluster term tainted by corruption allegations at City Hall, Mr. Hahn was turned out of office in favor of a high school dropout and son of the barrio who turned his life around to become speaker of the California Assembly and then a member of the Los Angeles City Council. With 70 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Villaraigosa had 202,861 votes, or 59 percent, to 140,416 votes for Mr. Hahn, or 41 percent…The contest was a rematch of the 2001 mayoral race, which Mr. Hahn won by seven points after trailing Mr. Villaraigosa for much of the campaign. That race featured a number of late attacks by Mr. Hahn, who repeatedly attacked Mr. Villaraigosa for a letter he had written seeking clemency for a convicted cocaine trafficker. Mr. Hahn’s campaign was similarly negative this time, even using the same slogan, “Los Angeles can’t trust Antonio Villaraigosa.” Mr. Hahn accused his opponent, a former president of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, of being soft on crime. He also noted that Mr. Villaraigosa had accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations from out-of-state businessmen bidding on city contracts…

Mr. Villaraigosa, who outpolled Mr. Hahn in the primary election by 33 percent to 24 percent, generally ran an upbeat, front-runner’s campaign. Although some of his advertisements noted the federal investigation of possible corruption in city contracting under Mayor Hahn, Mr. Villaraigosa mainly stressed what he called his ability to bring Los Angeles’s varied geographic, ethnic and racial communities together. In this he was aided by Mr. Hahn’s two most significant actions as mayor. In 2002, Mr. Hahn engineered the ouster of Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks, an African-American, which alienated many black voters who had supported Mr. Hahn in 2001. Mr. Hahn also campaigned vigorously to defeat an effort by residents of the San Fernando valley to secede from the city of Los Angeles, angering a part of the city that had provided a major share of his margin of victory over Mr. Villaraigosa four years ago…”If you look at Antonio, he would be a credible candidate from any ethnic group,” said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, which studies trends in Latino politics. “He has a liberal background, he’s an ex-president of the A.C.L.U. for Southern California, he has union credentials, he was speaker of Assembly. He’s punched his ticket in so many places.” Dr. Pachon said that Mr. Villaraigosa was also able to split the African-American vote, which had been solidly in Mr. Hahn’s column in 2001. It was the first time a Los Angeles mayoral candidate had successfully melded a Latino-black coalition to win office, he said.

With Bill Frist planning to bring Priscilla Owen’s nomination to the Senate floor this morning, this Post piece offers a good reminder of why Trent Lott dubbed it “the nuclear option”:

Republicans hold 55 of the seats in the chamber, and until now they have needed 60 votes to end debate and force a vote. But Republicans believe they have figured out how to use the chamber’s rules so that only a simple majority — 51 votes — is required to force an up-or-down vote. To get there, Republicans will have to evade a requirement that they have a two-thirds vote — 67 of 100 senators — to change the chamber’s rules. Republicans will argue that they are attempting to set a precedent, not change the Senate rules, to disallow the use of filibusters as a delaying tactic on judicial nominations. And by doing so, they say, they are returning to a more traditional concept of majority rule…

A report last month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service asserted that “the point of a ‘nuclear’ or ‘constitutional’ option is to achieve changes in Senate procedure by using means that lie outside the Senate’s normal rules of procedure.” Also, some Democrats have advanced evidence that the GOP gambit lacks support from the Senate parliamentarian, the official who typically rules on what is allowable under the chamber’s rules and precedents. Reid told reporters last month that the parliamentarian, Alan S. Frumin, had told him that he opposed the Republicans’ plan and that “if they do this, they will have to overrule him.” Frumin, who was appointed by Republican leaders in 2001, has not been granting interviews. But a senior Republican Senate aide confirmed that Frist does not plan to consult Frumin at the time the nuclear option is deployed. “He has nothing to do with this,” the aide said. “He’s a staffer, and we don’t have to ask his opinion.”