This time off I’m taking from presidential political commentary on my blog has allowed me to look at some other things.
I’ve enjoyed the time away. I like commenting via Twitter on these political matters, but High Plains Blogger remains my main outlet for venting, ranting and raving.
High Plains Blogger will return in due course and I’m quite certain there’ll be plenty of fresh meat on which to chew.
Until then, I’ll keep my attention focused on lots of other issues.
A single dinner involving two political leaders of opposing parties likely doesn’t signal much all by itself.
It might portend a potential thaw in relations on Capitol Hill. I reiterate … it might.
Newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., invited House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to his Capitol Hill office for a two-hour get-together. They had a meal in the office and talked a little shop and got to know each other a little better.
What does this mean?
It might be a precursor to some actual progress in Congress between political leaders who’ve been fighting each other — often using some intemperate language to describe the other sides’ motives and intentions.
Democrats and Republicans are battling at the moment over a new budget. They did manage to cobble together a five-day stopgap measure that keeps the government running … but only for a short time. More bargaining is due in the next few days for everyone to agree on a $1.1 trillion federal budget that funds the government through most of next year.
Oh yeah. It’s also an election year.
Ryan and Pelosi reportedly don’t know each other well. This meal in Ryan’s office was billed as sort of an ice-breaker.
Where do we go from here? That remains anyone’s guess.
Congress, though, needs to figure out a way to assert its constitutional responsibility to actually govern. There’s been too much fighting between the parties, not to mention between the majority party — that would be the Republicans — and the White House.
The president must share responsibility in this ongoing inability to find common ground. However, just as members of Congress want to take credit for the good things that happen, they also need to take responsibility for the negative occurrences.
Ryan and Pelosi likely aren’t going to become best friends forever — aka BFFs. A dinner, though, well might set the stage for a new working relationship that restores the concept of good government to Capitol Hill.
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is angry at Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
She’s mad at remarks that Scalia made during oral arguments involving an affirmative case involving the University of Texas. Scalia contended that African-American students might not do as well academically at UT as they would in “slower-track schools.” The statement has drawn much criticism against the outspoken justice.
Pelosi thinks Scalia now must recuse himself from future discrimination cases because of his bias.
Let’s hold on, Mme. Minority Leader.
Don’t misunderstand me. I dislike Scalia’s world view as much as the next progressive. But calling for him to recuse himself from these cases goes way too far. According to Politico: “It’s so disappointing to hear that statement coming from a justice of the Supreme Court. It clearly shows a bias,” Pelosi said. “I think that the justice should recuse himself from any case that relates to discrimination in education, in voting, and I’m sorry that he made that comment.”
Consider something from our recent past.
The highest court in the land once included two justices who were philosophically opposed to capital punishment. The late Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan voted automatically in favor of capital defendants’ death sentence appeals. If a death row inmate’s case made it to the Supreme Court, he or she could depend on at least two votes in favor of the appeal.
In fact, Justice Marshall was particularly blunt about it. He said repeatedly that he opposed capital punishment, yet he took part in those appeals.
Did he ever recuse himself? Did pro-death penalty forces make the case that he should? No to the first; and unlikely to the second.
Federal judges — and includes the nine individuals who sit on the highest court — all have lifetime jobs. That’s how the Constitution set it up. Presidents appoint then; the Senate confirms them and then they are free to vote their conscience.
Scalia need not recuse himself. He is free — as he has been since President Reagan appointed him to the court in 1986 — to speak his mind. He has done so with remarkable candor — and even occasionally with some callousness — ever since.
My pal Jon Mark Beilue — a columnist for the Amarillo Globe-News —Â as usual, has laid out a fascinating critique of a growing dispute between two highly regarded Texas university systems.
One of them, Texas Tech, just announced plans to build and develop a college of veterinary medicine in Amarillo.
The other one, Texas A&M, has fired a shot across Tech’s bow, implying it will resist the effort to build an animal doctor school in the Texas Panhandle.
Beilue, himself a Tech alumnus, has taken up for his alma mater. But he’s right on the merits of his argument to argue that A&M is better than to exhibit a petulant streak in seeking to block Tech’s entry into the world of veterinary medicine academia. A&M’s credentials as a premier veterinary medicine institution are impeccable.
But let’s boil this possible tempest down to a more personal level.
Two men are leading their schools’ efforts. They both have at least one political thing in common: They both served in the Texas Senate.
Bob Duncan is chancellor of the Tech System. He’s a Republican who left the Senate this past year to take over the Tech job after Kent Hance retired to become something called “chancellor emeritus.”
Duncan’s Senate reputation is sparkling. He was named routinely by Texas Monthly magazine every two years as one of the top legislators in the state. His job now as chancellor is to raise money for the Tech System and he gets to lobby his friends in the Senate for help in that regard.
John Sharp served in the Senate quite a while ago, from 1982 to 1987; prior to that he served in the Texas House of Representatives. He’s a Democrat, who left the Senate to serve on the Texas Railroad Commission and then as Comptroller of Public Accounts. He, too, developed a reputation as a solid legislator, although he has fewer individuals with whom he served in the Legislature than his rival chancellor, Duncan.
This face-off will be fun to watch, particularly if it develops into something more than it appears at the moment.
I hope it doesn’t grow into anything more serious. Texas Tech is entitled to develop school of veterinary medicine anywhere it so chooses. That the system brass decided to bring it to Amarillo is a huge plus for the Texas Panhandle.
My hope would be that if Sharp stiffens his resistance that Duncan could call on his fellow Republican buddies in the Panhandle legislative delegation to use their own considerable muscle to make the veterinary school a reality.
As Beilue pointed out in his essay, the value of a veterinary school to any region of this state should rise far above petty politics.
Presidents serve as the nation’s “chief executive” and, therefore, have the constitutional authority that goes with the title.
An interesting graph came across my radar this afternoon. It comes with a year-old story, but it’s still rather fascinating.
Republicans have been pummeling President Obama by alleging that he’s too quick to issue executive orders, that he circumvents Congress too willingly.
The graph tells a fascinating tale of just how the 44th president has under-utilized the executive authority granted to him by the U.S. Constitution.
Take a look at the graph. You’ll see a number of interesting things.
One is an obvious point. President Franklin Roosevelt is the all-time champ at issuing presidential executive orders. No surprise there: He served three full terms and was elected to a fourth term before dying in office in April 1945.
It’s interesting, though, to look at who’s No. 2 in the executive authority rating. It’s FDR’s immediate predecessor, President Hoover, who served just one term.
A Democrat is No. 1, a Republican is No. 2, while Democratic President Woodrow Wilson is a close third.
That power-hungry and allegedly “lawless” 44th president, Barack H. Obama? He’s issued the fewest executive orders since President Grover Cleveland. (I’ll add here that the numbers of presidential executive orders are as of Oct. 20, 2014.)
So, I guess my question is this: What’s the beef with the current president’s use of the executive authority?
Donald Trump loves polls, especially when they show him leading the still-large pack of Republican presidential candidates.
Barack Obama isn’t so much in love with them.
However, the great underreported story has to be Congress’s continued miserable standing among American voters, according to those pesky polls.
I follow RealClearPolitics summary of polls. I like tracking the president’s poll standing, not to mention the candidates seeking to succeed him a year from January.
But look at how poorly Congress is faring.
The RCP polls are a compilation of leading public opinion surveys. The last one, which I have attached to this blog post, puts Congress’s rating at 12 percent.
Twelve percent!
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans surveyed think Congress is doing a crappy job of governing.
President Obama’s latest poll standing, while not great, is at around 43 percent. There’s an 8-point difference between those who approve of the job he’s doing and those who disapprove. The congressional approval/disapproval spread? How about 63.8 percent?
I’m not usually one to rely too heavily on polls. I understand their nature, that they serve merely as snapshots that capture a political moment. Polls go up and down like Yo-Yos.
However, while Obama’s critics keep lambasting his lackluster poll numbers, they don’t seem to take into account that Congress’s poll standing is far worse — and it, too, hasn’t moved much at all for, oh, about the past three years.
Obama is a member of one party; Congress is controlled by the other party.
The president’s polling isn’t great. Congress’s standing is downright miserable.
Claire McCaskill calls herself a “friend and supporter” of Barack Obama.
But the Democratic U.S. senator from Missouri has issued a candid assessment of the job her fellow Democrat has done as president of the United States.
The president’s major failing, according to McCaskill? He did not learn how to work with Congress.
The Hill reports on McCaskill’s remarks about Obama: “But one of the president’s shortcomings is that sometimes he sees the world through his eyes and doesn’t do, I think, enough work on being empathetic about how other people view things.”
In truth, McCaskill might be a bit behind the curve when critiquing the job the president has done.
I don’t think he’d mind my saying this, but a now-retired college administrator told me much the same thing during the president’s first term in office.
Former Amarillo College President Paul Matney and I were having lunch one day when Matney lamented the president’s testy relationship with congressional leaders. Matney wished that the president would employ the skill that the late President Lyndon Johnson used to great effect.
Johnson, of course, rose from the Senate to the executive branch of government, as Obama has done. LBJ served as vice president from 1961 until Nov. 22, 1963. Then he became president in the wake of tragedy.
When LBJ moved into the Oval Office, he harnessed all his legislative skill to shepherd landmark legislation through Congress. He was a master of working not just with fellow Democrats, but with Republicans.
Matney bemoaned that President Obama had not developed that kind of bipartisan rapport and it cost him dearly.
McCaskill now — near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — echoes much of what Paul Matney said years ago. LBJ’s legacy, which was tainted for many years after he left office in 1969 by the Vietnam War, is beginning to look better all the time.
He understood that he needed the legislative branch to make government work, that he couldn’t do it all alone.
As Sen. McCaskill has noted, Barack Obama hasn’t seemed to have learned that lesson.
The Texas Railroad Commission is a misnamed panel that does important work for the state.
It no longer regulates railroads. It does regulate the Texas energy industry.
So it is with some anticipation that I read today that Railroad Commissioner David Porter won’t seek re-election next year to the three-member panel.
His decision is spurring some activity among Texas Republicans. One of them happens to be someone I happen to respect and admire very much.
He is Jerry “The Gun Guy” Patterson, the former Texas land commissioner and a one-time state senator from the Houston area.
Patterson is a proud Marine and Vietnam War veteran. He also has delightful self-deprecating sense of humor; he once told me he graduated in the “top 75 percent of my class at Texas A&M.”
Patterson also was the author during the 1995 Texas Legislature of the state’s concealed-handgun-carry law. I opposed the law at the time, but my view on it has “evolved” over time. I am not an active supporter of the concealed-carry law; I just don’t oppose it.
Patterson did a great job running the General Land Office. He helped he GLO provide low-interest home loans for Texas military veterans.
I cannot speak to any expertise he might have on oil and gas issues. I do, though, respect him greatly as a dedicated public servant — and I hope he decides to get back in the game.
… The day after Christmas.
I’ve made a call on the immediate future of High Plains Blogger. I can do that, because it’s my blog.
I had pondered whether to maintain the “no-politics zone” policy on the blog through the entire holiday season. I stated it publicly here. My hope initially was to keep presidential political commentary out of this blog through Christmas and through the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
I no longer can maintain my silence in this forum for that long.
We’ve only got 15 more days until Christmas. I believe I have the intestinal fortitude to keep presidential political commentary out of High Plains Blogger through Christmas.
After that? No can do.
There’s too much material out there. Too much low-hanging fruit. Too many fish in that barrel. Too many targets of opportunity. The environment is just too damn target-rich.
I won’t name names. You know who I’m talking about.
For now, I’ll leave it at that.
I’ll keep offering brief commentary via Twitter, which feeds to my Facebook news feed.
High Plains Blogger, though, will remain a no-politics zone.
For now …
I am a strong believer in what the Founding Fathers intended by creating an independent federal judiciary.
They gave the president the authority to nominate federal judges for lifetime jobs, pending approval by the U.S. Senate. The intent, as I’ve always understood it, was to de-politicize the judicial branch of government.
It works.
Then again, politics always seems to be part of the subplot of every federal judicial decision.
U.S. District Judge David Godbey, for example, today struck down Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ban on Syrian refugees coming to Texas. Paxton cited security concerns in asking for the temporary restraining order. Godbey ruled within hours of the request that Paxton had failed to demonstrate that the refugees posed any kind of threat.
Godbey wrote, according to the Texas Tribune: “The Court finds that the evidence before it is largely speculative hearsay,” the judge wrote. “The [state] has failed to show by competent evidence that any terrorists actually have infiltrated the refugee program, much less that these particular refugees are terrorists intent on causing harm.”
So, it’s fair to ask: Is this judge sitting on the federal bench because a liberal Democratic president, Barack Obama, appointed him? No. He was selected in 2003 by Republican President George W. Bush to serve the Northern District of Texas. Paxton, let’s point out, is a Republican as well.
Does it really matter, then, whether a judge gets picked by a Democrat or a Republican? It shouldn’t. Judges take an oath to uphold the Constitution without regard to political favor. They do, remember, have a lifetime job.
But the politics of this particular issue — the refugee crisis and the political debate swirling all over it — causes one to look carefully at who’s making these decisions.
Judge Godbey appears to have put the law above his political leanings.