Lincoln Mitchell

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This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Posted in: US Politics

Does Anthony Weiner's Redemption Really Mean He Has to Be Mayor? →

Before Weiner won his seat in Congress he was also in the City Council, but during his time in that legislature he was more known for his ambition than for a progressive record or any real accomplishments. His time in Congress was defined more by his outspoken progressive views than for any particular legislative accomplishments. This, on its own, is not unusual. Many elected officials are ambitious, and there is a need for people who are strongly partisan in congress. However, they also do little to make Weiner the kind of person who is likely to be a good mayor. Since leaving the City Council, Weiner has not been involved in many local issues, other than taking the standard progressive positions. The one New York issue for which he is best known is his strong views against bike lanes. Cyclists are a contentious issue in New York, but Weiner's comment to the mayor, who for all his ample faults is a supporter of cyclists, that he wants to "tear out your f*cking bike lanes," does not seem to reflect a progressive approach to environmentalism or urbanism.

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The Lasting Impact of the IRS Scandal →

The IRS scandal that is still dogging the Obama administration may or may not do lasting damage to the president, however the impact of these events and decisions by part of the IRS will go beyond the political fortunes of a popular and surprisingly Teflon-seeming president. The IRS has never been the most beloved of government organizations. For most Americans, all they want from the IRS is to be left alone. Paying income tax is not great fun even for those who understand that a modern state needs to generate revenue from somewhere. Being investigated or audited by the IRS is, in the best case scenario, a minor inconvenience, but frequently can cost a great deal of money and time. In many cases, of course, the person being investigated has either made serious mistakes in their taxes or even violated the tax code, but the IRS also makes mistakes and creates real problems for people who have not done anything wrong.

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The IRS and Justice Department Could Become Problems for Obama →

The news this week about the Department of Justice looking at the phone logs of journalists covering the White House, and of the IRS scrutinizing the tax returns of various right-wing groups, is bad for the Obama administration. They are also much more likely to stick than the Benghazi story. The Justice Department and IRS stories make the administration look almost like a branch of the Obama campaign, putting their ample resources behind efforts to harass, or at least gather information, about the Obama administration. In a comparative sense, these are not as serious as Watergate, domestic surveillance during the Nixon administration, or Iran-Contra, but they have the potential to be solid b-level scandals, too small to bring down a president, but big enough to accelerate that second term president's lame duck status.

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Open Carry Marches and Stories of Tyranny →

The language of tyranny, freedom, oppression and the like which one hears so much on the far right today demonstrates this. Participants in this open carry march are being prodded into action by calls to fight against creeping, or perhaps more immediate, threats of tyranny in the U.S. Fighting against tyranny in the U.S. is a good and noble cause, but significantly less so when, like today, there is no actual threat of tyranny coming to the U.S. By building disagreements over policy into a story of freedom versus tyranny, manipulators like Kokesh make their supporters feel more important, as if they are motivated by a noble cause not just political and economic frustration.

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The Rose Revolution Through a Funhouse Mirror

In the 1990s, Western supported and funded democracy assistance programs, including support for civil society and rule of law, technical assistance to political parties and legislatures, and election monitoring to ensure free, fair and democratic elections, played an important role in the expansion of democracy throughout much the former Communist block, Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Over recent decades these tools have been integrated into the foreign policy apparatus of the West, but a funny thing happened on the way to the agora: The environment changed and the programs did not. - See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1421#sthash.3dkmdOrk.dpuf

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The Boston Terrorists and the American Social Fabric →

Thus, one of the central challenges in fighting terrorism is vigilantly maintaining our open societies, public events and civic life in spite of real threats. Ironically, we will become more vulnerable if this vigilance were to weaken. The strength of the social fabric in Boston was demonstrated in the hours, days and minutes following the attack. That social fabric can only exist in a place where there is trust and a sense of citizenship. One of the most striking, if underreported, aspects of the response of ordinary Bostonians is that it occurred in a time where political polarization is as high as it has ever been. The response of the people of Boston, compared to the political grandstanding on all kinds of issues in the months preceding the attack, is further evidence that the people of the U.S. are, for the most part, ahead of their elected officials.

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Background Checks Should Not Be the End of the Gun Discussion →

President Obama's time in the White House is now more than half over. Presidential aspirants from both major parties are beginning to think more seriously about the 2016 campaign. Soon speculation about what Obama will do after leaving the White House will commence. Given his temperament, intellect and background, academia might be a good fit for Obama when he is no longer president. It is not hard to imagine Obama holding a position, and occasionally teaching at a prominent law school. For young law students, taking a course from Obama would be an extraordinary opportunity. However, if he offers a course on negotiating, students might be wiser to take that particular course from another instructor.

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Mike Huckabee's Reductio ad Hitlerum →

Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerumfallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.

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The Supreme Court and Marriage Equality →

This was a hugely important week for LGBT Americans as well as advocates for equality for all citizens because the Supreme Court heard cases regarding California's Proposition 8 as well as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). It was also, however, a very important week for the Supreme Court. The Court may or may not decide to overturn both of these discriminatory pieces of legislation, but it is clear that the arc of history is again bending towards equality. LGBT Americans are winning; and those that would continue to seek to deny equality to all Americans are losing. This puts the Court in the position of either helping to bring about an inevitable, and positive, change, or of being conspicuous in support of bigoted laws and prejudices from another era.

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Conservatives Can Learn from Rob Portman →

Perhaps learning that his son is gay forced Portman to rethink his views about gay people, leading him to question things that in the back, or front, of his mind he had believed: that being gay is a lifestyle choice, that gay people are unfit to raise children or that they are not capable of establishing enduring loving relationships. However, believing these things today can only be the product of a mind that is deliberately closed to the mountains of scientific, personal and anecdotal evidence around us. In fairness to Portman, and conservatives generally, many progressives had also been notably silent on marriage equality until very recently.

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Paul Ryan's Road Back to Relevance →

It must be springtime. The weather is finally getting warmer, baseball season is almost here and Paul Ryan is presenting a budget proposal which, despite his assurances that it is innovative and reflects new thinking, is little more than a right-wing economic program seeking to balance the budget by cutting expenditures for poor people while doing little or nothing to ask wealthier Americans to do their share.

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Ashley Judd Could Be a Problem for Mitch McConnell →

Over the next 20 months, the campaign for Senate in Kentucky will undoubtedly become very nasty as Judd will seek to expose McConnell as a right-winger who has spent most of the last decade working for interests that are distinctly not those of the people of Kentucky. McConnell, in turn, will try to overstate the extent to which Judd is an outsider and a creature of the liberal Hollywood elite. The campaign due to Judd's celebrity and McConnell's position will become a national campaign with very high stakes.

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Fiscal Ultimatum Fatigue →

During the last several years the American people have become increasingly familiar with this kind of government blackmail, where the politicians tell us that if they cannot make a deal, one kind of fiscal calamity or another will hit the country. Congress seems to no longer debate spending or propose budgets, but rather they lurch from one spending related crisis to another, each with more dire consequences. Debt ceilings, defaults and sequesters have replaced rational, or even irrational, discourse about how to raise and spend that revenue.

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Fighting Over Blame in the Republican Party →

In the last few weeks, the buzz about the internal battles inside the Republican Party has been growing. The Roveites hate the Libertarians, the Libertarians hate the mainstream Republicans, the mainstream Republicans hate the Tea Partiers and everybody hates President Obama. It feels more like a Tom Lehrer song than the plight of a serious political party facing a serious struggle.

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Did the 2016 Republican Primary Season Begin Last Night? →

The two Republican speeches in response to President Obama's speech were more interesting, because they offered a preview of some of the divisions and debates that will inform Republican Party politics between now and the 2016 election. The lasting image from Marco Rubio's speech will likely be one of him awkwardly reaching for a bottle of water to slake his suddenly devastating thirst, but the speech was also an attempt to present Rubio as the new face of the Republican Party. Rubio's speech was characterized by the same tired, and unsuccessful, attacks on the president that the Republicans have been making since Obama became president. Rubio's speech was not meant to present a new Republican philosophy, but a new Republican face and backstory. Rubio's appeal is that he is comfortably in the new far right Republican mainstream while coming from humble immigrant origins, and that as a Cuban American he can help the Republican Party win more support from a diverse Latino population. In this respect, Rubio has Mitt Romney's politics, but without Romney's wealth and upper class affect.

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Why Hillary Clinton Might Want to Run →

Should Clinton run, it would mean that it is possible that the Democrats, for the first time since the early 1950s will occupy the White House for 12 or more years in a row. This is part of the reason so many Democrats are excited about a potential Clinton bid for the White House. There is another reason, which should have particular resonance for Clinton, why she should consider running. If Clinton runs, she will be uniquely positioned to deal a potentially devastating blow, above and beyond a simple electoral defeat, to the Republican Party in its current extremist and intolerant iteration.

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What Are the Republicans Talking About Now? →

In the aftermath of the election, the notion that the Republican Party was facing what might delicately be called an uphill demographic battle was frequently raised. This was made evident by the age and ethnicity demographics in the U.S., and by President Obama's decisive victory in his bid for reelection. Since the election, the Republican Party's demographic problem has manifested itself in another significant way. Because of their narrow demographic and ideological base, the Republican Party and its leadership, inside and outside of congress, has proven itself to be increasingly out of touch with the citizenry it seeks to govern.

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The Filibuster and Electoral College Reform Game →

A goal for progressives should be to dislodge these debates around the electoral college and the filibuster from their partisan and temporary foundations and make them into broader discussions about American democracy and its future. In that discussion many different things should be considered in addition to the filibuster and the electoral college, including the role of money in politics, how legislative districts are drawn and limiting restrictions local officials can put on voting. The need for structural reforms in our system is substantial. Filibusters and the electoral college are just the beginning, but they may open the door to more ideas and perhaps even action.

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Obama and the NRA's Waning Influence →

Although there are several different dynamics surrounding the coming fight over the president's proposals, one significant way this is being framed is as a fight between the Obama White House and the NRA. The NRA is an extremely powerful interest group in Washington, but like many interest groups it's power depends heavily on keeping a low profile and maintaining relatively strong popular support, or more accurately, drawing only limited opposition. Accordingly, the NRA is much better positioned for a behind the scenes strategy where policy decisions are made at congressional committee hearings and various regulatory agencies than a legislative fight involving the media and mobilized citizens groups.

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Avoiding the Fiscal Cliff, but Not the Steady Decline →

Although it is probably good news that congress and President Obama managed to start the New Year by avoiding going over the fiscal cliff, it is hard not to get a sense that, now that we have avoided that, we can go back to the steady decline that has characterized our economy in recent years. Moreover, while avoiding the fiscal cliff is evidence that our elected officials are not completely unable to work together or govern, there is still reason to believe that congress is not capable of governing the country in a serious way or of addressing any of the myriad problems facing the U.S.

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