Justin's Political Corner

Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis told ThinkProgress this week that they support marriage equality. With their endorsements, every living former Democratic presidential nominee is now on record in support of same-sex marriage.

Every other living Democratic nominee had previously made their support explicit.

The list includes:

• 1. Former President Jimmy Carter (1976 and 1980). Carter said last year “Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things — he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.”
• 2. Former Vice President Walter Mondale (1984). Mondale, who invoked civil rights legend Hubert Humphrey as he campaigned against last year’s proposed Minnesota marriage inequality amendment, said in an e-mail that he not both “opposed the constitutional amendment that would prevent legalizing gay marriage and I supported the legalization of gay marriage adopted this past week in Minnesota.
• 3. Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis (1988). Dukakis confirmed his support to ThinkProgress in a May 12 e-mail.
• 4. Former President Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996). Clinton announced his support for marriage equality in 2009 and has actively campaigned for it since. Clinton had previously signed the anti-gay 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.
• 5. Former Vice President Al Gore (2000). Gore delivered a “forceful endorsement” of marriage equality in 2008, saying “gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women — to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage.”
• 6. Secretary of State John Kerry (2004). Kerry told the blog Blue Mass Group in 2008 that he “absolutely” supported civil marriage equality. He explained his evolution in a 2011 Boston Globe op-ed entitled “Politicians have the right to evolve on gay marriage.”
• 7. President Barack Obama (2008 and 2012). President Obama made his historic announcement one year ago, telling ABC’s Robin Roberts: “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

Former Senator George McGovern (D-SD), the 1972 Democratic nominee, also endorsed marriage equality prior to his death last year. He told the Daily Republic last May: “I’m a ‘conservative’ when it comes to marriage. I think if two people love each other, are living together and having sex, they ought to get married.”

Follow Think Progress on Tumblr at: http://think-progress.tumblr.com/

H/T: Think Progress LGBT

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has reached an “agreement in principle” on a sweeping immigration bill that would parallel work underway in the Senate, sources said Thursday.

h/t: Los Angeles Times

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. 

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.

White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.

But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.

So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be. 

3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.

Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again.

The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself. 

And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

H/T: Ezra Klein at Washington Post

On Monday, President Obama weighed in on the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups by the Internal Revenue Service, calling for a full investigation into what he said would constitute “outrageous” conduct. That’s one way to put it. Here’s another: depressingly normal. For much of the last century, abuse of the IRS for political ends has been the rule, not the exception. Under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the IRS has gone after communists, students, black activists, young conservatives, and mainstream political rivals. Here are some prime examples:

Franklin D. Roosevelt: According to libertarian historian Burton W. Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal, Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, noted that FDR “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution”—most notably against former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. (The famously corrupt Long, in fairness, was kind of asking for it.) Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican, alleged that Roosevelt’s IRS had gone after him on trumped-up charges—and when that failed, handed the investigation over to the FBI instead. Roosevelt’s longtime Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., admitted that the administration had deliberately targeted his Republican predecessor, Richard Mellon, on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.

Dwight Eisenhower: The FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, relied heavily on the compliance of the IRS to go after members of the Communist Party. Per a 1976 Senate report, “In its efforts against the Communist Party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns; it never told the IRS why it wanted them, and IRS never attempted to find out.”

John F. Kennedy: In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy teamed up with United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther to produce the “Reuther Memorandum,” which proposed curtailing the influence of far-right groups in two ways. The first was the enforcement of the Federal Communication Commision’s “Fairness Doctrine,” to limit their use of the airwaves. The second was the IRS, through an initiative called “The Ideological Organizations Audit Project,” which explored the political activities of conservative nonprofits. The program eventually expanded to the other of the side of political spectrum, but according to the 1976 Senate investigation, that was mostly a facade of nonpartisanship.

Richard Nixon: The godfather of “Nixonian tactics” believed he’d been a political target of the agency in the Truman administration—not that he needed an excuse to use the Internal Revenue Service as a tool with which to dispatch “enemies.” Under Tricky Dick, the IRS created the Special Services Staff (SSS) to investigate thousands of perceived enemy groups and individuals. (Nixon aide Pat Buchanan feared that groups like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution were acting essentially as Democratic organs.) White House counsel John Dean testified that the administration pushed the IRS to audit reporters who wrote stories critical of Nixon, such asNewsday’s Robert Greene. Nixon himself wanted the SSS to focus on political adversaries like 1972 presidential challenger George McGovern, student groups, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP. When the IRS audited Billy Graham, a Nixon ally, the president responded with force: “Get the word down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they’re going to do in our friends.”

Jimmy Carter: Republicans accused the born-again Christian president of an “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta” against religious institutions after his IRS director, Jerome Kurtz, introducednew regulation to end the tax-exempt status of Christian schools. Kurtz ultimately had to retain Secret Service protection after a wave of death threats from supporters of religious education.

Ronald Reagan: This one hit close to home. Mother Jones had been around for six years when, in 1981, Ronald Reagan’s IRS tried to shut it down. The agency concluded that the magazine was not living up to its tax-exempt motives and instead functioned like any other publishing house, with the goal of making as much money as possible. That was weird, given that Mother Jones had to that point never made a profit. The timing was also suspicious—a half-dozen or so other left-of-center publications came in for the same scrutiny by the agency. MoJo eventually won—but not until it had burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Bill Clinton: The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which filed a string of lawsuits against the administration centering on public records, alleged that it was in the crosshairs of the Clinton White House—along with a dozen other groups and individuals that had gotten on the president’s bad side. The list of of audited parties in the Clinton era included Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Documents later released by the IRS during the Bush administration revealed that high-ranking Democrats, including a half-dozen members of Congress, had written to the IRS requesting an investigation into Judicial Watch’s nonprofit status. One IRS official allegedly told the group, “What do you expect when you sue the president?”

George W. Bush: The NAACP experienced an unwelcome case of Nixon Nostaliga in 2004, when it found itself under IRS scrutiny after the group’s chairman, Julian Bond, told attendees of its annual convention to oust Bush. (The president had been invited to the convention but declined.) After a two-year investigation, the IRS backed off.

h/t: Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

WASHINGTON (AP) — It seems like a simple proposition: give employees who work more than 40 hours a week the option of taking paid time off instead of overtime pay.

The choice already exists in the public sector. Federal and state workers can save earned time off and use it weeks or even months later to attend a parent-teacher conference, care for an elderly parent or deal with home repairs.

Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that would extend that option to the private sector. They say that would bring more flexibility to the workplace and help workers better balance family and career.

The push is part of a broader Republican agenda undertaken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to expand the party’s political appeal to working families. The House is expected to vote on the measure this week, but the Democratic-controlled Senate isn’t likely to take it up.

“For some people, time is more valuable than the cash that would be accrued in overtime,” said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., the bill’s chief sponsor. “Why should public-sector employees be given a benefit and the private sector be left out?”

But the idea Republicans promote as “pro-worker” is vigorously opposed by worker advocacy groups, labor unions and most Democrats. These opponents claim it’s really a backdoor way for businesses to skimp on overtime pay.

Judith Lichtman, senior adviser to the National Partnership for Women and Families, contends the measure would open the door for employers to pressure workers into taking compensatory time off instead of overtime pay.

The program was created in the public sector in 1985 to save federal, state and local governments money, not to give workers greater flexibility, Lichtman said. Many workers in federal and state government are unionized or have civil service protections that give them more leverage in dealing with supervisors, she added. Those safeguards don’t always exist in the private sector, where only about 6.6 percent of employees are union members.

Republicans and business groups have tried to pass the plan in some form since the 1990s.

Democrats say the bill provides no guarantee that workers would be able to take the time off when they want. The bill gives employers discretion over whether to grant a specific request to use comp time. Opponents also complain that banking leave time essentially gives employers an interest-free loan from workers.

h/t: TPM

President Obama on Friday at a Planned Parenthood gala in Washington said the women’s health organization is “not going anywhere,” despite GOP-led efforts to defund it. 

President Obama’s right on.

h/t: TPM Livewire

A Republican state representative in New Hampshire posted a video by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Facebook last week suggesting the Boston marathon bombing was a “false flag” operation carried out by the US government. 

Rep. Stella Tremblay (R), a member of the state’s 400-person House of Representatives, posted the video on Glenn Beck’s Facebook page on April 19 with an accompanying message:

Just as you said would happen. Top Down, Bottom UP. The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops “terrorist” attack. One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak. Drones and now “terrorist” attacks by our own Government. Sad day, but a “wake up” to all of us. First there was a “suspect” then there wasnt. Infowars broke the story and they knew they had been “found out”

Reached by phone, Tremblay told the local Foster’s Daily Democrat that she had suspicions of some kind of plot involving Secretary of State John Kerry, Saudi nationals, and “black ops” soldiers at the scene of the marathon. Several of these elements have popped up both in Jones’ work and various Internet fever swamps since the bombing.

Tremblay has a history of spreading conspiracy theories. Last year she e-mailed out a video claiming President Obama was not a citizen, according to the Huffington Post, promptiong a Democratic colleague to label her “an embarassment to us as a chamber.”

The state’s Democratic Party condemned her latest episode on Tuesday. 

“[E]ven for the New Hampshire Republican Party, which has become synonymous with the Tea Party and radical extremism, Representative Tremblay’s claims are a new low,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Communication Director Harrell Kirstein said in a statement. 

h/t: TPM LiveWire

A firestorm appears to be brewing in North Carolina this week after state Senator Tommy Tucker (R-Union County) uttered thirteen now-infamous words to a North Carolina newspaper publisher: 

“I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”

The story of what lead up to these fateful remarks begins in the North Carolina legislature. Tucker (and several other conservatives) just pushed an egregious piece of legislation through the State and Local Government committee that would place severe limits on government transparency. According to the Charlotte Observer, “The legislation, Senate Bill 287, would allow certain local governments to stop notifying the public about crucial government activities in the local newspaper. The governments could instead just post legal notices in the bowels of their websites, where few people are likely to see them.”

Throughout most of our national history, requiring the government to notify citizens of major changes to zoning, projects, etc. has been a common sense measure to add checks and balances to government. The mere notion that a government official would attempt to halt this measure - to reduce the methods and ease in which it’s citizens can obtain vital information - is shameful.

The Observer continued, “A check of 20 N.C. cities in 2011 found that the local newspaper’s website attracted audiences 65 times larger than the local municipal website. In Charlotte, the Observer’s website attracted an audience 16 times bigger than the Charlotte-Mecklenburg government site. That’s not an insult to the government websites. But it is a reminder that newspapers and their websites are in the mass communication business; municipal governments are not.”

After the hearing, those potentially affected by the legislation decried the bill sponsors’ efforts to “break the back” of local newspapers. According to the the Raleigh News and Observer, this happened next:

The committee passed the measure by voice vote. Bussian, the press association lobbyist, said the committee voted 6-5 to reject the measure. Tucker, the chair, rejected a subsequent appeal for a show of hands and declared the meeting adjourned. 

At that point, Hal Tanner, publisher of the Goldsboro News-Argus, approached Tucker. He told him he thought the vote was handled in a manner inconsistent with Republican stands for open government. 

“I said, ‘We just got through dealing with Jim Black,’ ” Tanner later recalled, referring to the former Democratic House speaker jailed on corruption charges. 

“I’m not Jim Black, I’m not Jim Black,” an angry Tucker replied. Senate rules prohibit roll call votes in committee.

Later, in an email to members, the press association quoted Tucker telling Tanner: “I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.” [emphasis mine]

It seems that Tucker - besides having a temper and a problem with government transparency - also has an issue following simple rules of order in conducting congressional business. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he had to repeatedly verbally disassociate himself from another legislator convicted on corruption charges. That’s just speculation though. It does make you wonder why a politician would go to such great lengths to keep his constituents in the dark though, doesn’t it?

If you’d like to let Tucker know transparency is vital to effective government, you can contact  him through his Facebook page, via his office phone at (919) 733-7659, or via email at Tommy.Tucker@ncleg.net.

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) debuted his newest campaign bumper sticker in a tweet on Friday.

The sticker combines Stockman’s pro-gun and pro-life beliefs.

h/t: Huffington Post