TM Lutas

Deniable-Intimidation Echoes

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Cross posted at Flit-TM

Wretchard has a good article on the Left’s habit of indulging in deniable intimidation. The use of left-anarchists as street troops to signal that one part or another of the Left is not sufficiently militant is real and well taken. It isn’t the whole story as there’s a mirror image effect on the Right. There, the less militant in the GOP use the threat of waking up the beasts on the Left to reign in more militant factions.

I have personally been warned multiple times to avoid being too strident in my own political activities with tales of past political assassinations of reformers who went “too far”. Of the ones I recall (and can anonymize), two were delivered by town chairmen, one by a committeeman. These are not generally hysterical people yet my little attempts at stirring up small-government activism were viewed with real alarm. Even though they did not show it under most circumstances, these people are terrorized.

The terrorizing of GOP party officials is a generally hidden reason why the GOP often doesn’t take full advantage of its opportunities and generally acts in more of a squishy fashion than you would otherwise expect. If retribution comes, they reason, it will come to them, personally or to their families.

The Electoral Grind I

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I just appeared before the Lake County, Indiana Board of Elections. My message was for them to reconsider their policy to not permit electronic copying of voter registration data via disk or tape and to now allow electronic copies to flow.

Electronic copies of voter registration data are one of those baseline issues that you never even think about until you run up against a situation where you don’t have them. Then everything gets slow, more error prone, and expensive.

At that point you get knee-bone-connected-to-the-thigh-bone secondary effects and the end result is poorer, less effective oversight and a persistent suspicion that something funny’s happening with the vote in Lake County. As a practical matter, until you can regularly check, there’s no way to fix that distrust of the system.

Once electronic copies become available, a lot of secondary analysis becomes trivial. Accusations of Democrat suppression of the military vote are very common in GOP circles. So what was the comparative rejection rate of military vs. civilian ballot? A few FOI requests and you have the data you need to figure out if our military is being disenfranchised.

There’s a mini scandal brewing over whether south county voters are having their vote suppressed because their precincts are so large that people just give up at the sight of the long lines that inevitably build up. It’s a simple thing to rank 561 precincts by registered vote totals and convert that to minutes needed to process one voter across the critical path to identify the county’s most vulnerable precincts for long lines and lowered turnout. It’s simple to target early voting/absentee voting calls to those vulnerable precincts (in Lake they’re all likely to be strong GOP areas) but only if you can get electronic copies of the records as the early vote comes in so you can adjust daily to trim down the vote you think is vulnerable to suppression due to inadequate voting machine provision.

Cross posted at Northwest Indiana Politics

Is Wikileaks tailoring their releases to avoid treason charges for Assange?

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Wikileaks randy revolutionary, Julian Assange, cannot be a traitor to the US, we are told, because he is an Australian citizen. This leaves him with a vulnerability in releasing documents that involve the Australian government.

Since it is highly unlikely that in the 250,000 cables there are none that involve the government of Australia there is no doubt a legal team examining Australian law for the proper way to proceed when Mr. Assange’s traveling roadshow comes to Canberra. So how many Australian related State Department cables have been released? So far as I can tell, exactly zero. That’s very nice for Mr. Assange but doesn’t do so much for Wikileaks’ reputation as an honest broker or any of Wikileaks’ non-Australian collaborators who do not get that little legal benefit.

Update: The Guardian newspaper, who has all the cables, has a CSV file which includes cable metadata from Canberra, the US’ embassy in Australia. It also has a nice cable source graphic. Australia is one of the few countries not listed as having any cables from there. This is passing strange.

Avoiding the Stalemate State

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Get ready for a lot of stories bemoaning the coming period of political gridlock in the federal government. Jacob S Hacker and Paul Pierson offer up a typical sample of the genre in The American Prospect. But it doesn’t have to be that way if the GOP in the House acts in a pro-government/small-government way.

A united GOP in the House could insist on a new paradigm for passing legislation, passing all the good stuff first. Yes, it gets less passed, but isn’t that the point? The House can, legitimately, say that it’s not shutting down the government. It can bang out funding for the essential programs in each department in the spring, pass (or not) the middle tier popularity programs in the summer, and then present the real stinkers in the fall, right before elections.

There would be no government shut down. The Parks people could not shut down Mt. Rushmore and the George Washington Monument because their operations would be funded. Programs that could not get a majority to vote for them would be shut down but that happens every year. It’s how the system is supposed to work.

The political choices for Democrats would be very unattractive. Their attempts to stuff in budget stinkers into the must-pass bill will be turned back with the reasonable explanation that the program is funded in a different bill and that it will get a vote, but not here. Once the early bills pass, government shutdown is averted.

Is the GOP going to be smart enough to create a better way to fund the government? I hope so. What concerns me is that nobody else seems to be talking about appropriation sequence passage reform.

Update:
Thanks to Bastiches in the comments who gave a pointer that led me to a September 30 speech by John Boehnor which I had not seen to now. The relevant section:

While the culture of spending stems largely from a lack of political will in both parties to say ‘no,’ it is also the consequence of what I believe to be a structural problem. As Kevin McCarthy often says, structure dictates behavior. Aided by a structure that facilitates spending increases and discourages spending cuts, the inertia in Washington is currently to spend — and spend — and spend. Most spending bills come to the floor prepackaged in a manner that makes it as easy as possible to advance government spending and programs, and as difficult as possible to make cuts.

Again, this is not a new problem. But if we’re serious about confronting the challenges that lie ahead for our nation, it’s totally inadequate.

I propose today a different approach. Let’s do away with the concept of “comprehensive” spending bills. Let’s break them up, to encourage scrutiny, and make spending cuts easier. Rather than pairing agencies and departments together, let them come to the House floor individually, to be judged on their own merit. Members shouldn’t have to vote for big spending increases at the Labor Department in order to fund Health and Human Services. Members shouldn’t have to vote for big increases at the Commerce Department just because they support NASA. Each Department and agency should justify itself each year to the full House and Senate, and be judged on its own.

It isn’t exactly what I’m talking about (the level of granularity is different and the sequencing idea is entirely absent) but it’s a very close cousin and that is much appreciated. This speech helps the tea party because even if Boehnor is not serious about the proposal now (tough to tell without actual reform legislation text), focused public pressure to support this would lead him and the rest of the GOP to run to the front of the parade. And if he is serious? We might end up with an actual small government party again under this kind of leadership. We certainly could use one.

In either case, this remains a good pressure point between now and January for small government activists to press for reform. And now it has the advantage that soon-to-be-speaker Boehner has come out on the right side.

It All Went to the Lawyers

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I do love Opensecrets.org, a good government site that makes campaign finance reports not only available but truly accessible on the web. For example, IN-1 Congressman Pete Visclosky (my congressman) raised $762,537 in this 2 year cycle (2009-2010), $290,988 from individuals according to his latest campaign contribution form. In the expenses tab, you find payments to the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. This is the firm busy keeping Congressman Pete out of jail due to that little mishap with the PMA lobbying group. Their payments totaling $353,355, added to the $22,200 of disgorgement to the Treasury (which is what you do with illegal campaign contributions) is over 40% of Pete’s total campaign expenditures. It also far exceeds the individual donations the Congressman received.

So if you’re thinking about donating to Congressman Pete Visclosky or you recently have, now you know your money’s destination, direct to the lawyers. It just gives you a nice warm feeling, doesn’t it?

originally posted NW Indiana Politics