Professional courtesy not withstanding, Sessions is a douchebag

Senator Leahy makes a point.

MICHELE NORRIS: You know there are facts and then there are labels that sometimes can follow people, and when you have a sitting senator basically saying a nominee is lying before the committee, does that harm her as she goes forward, regardless of what happens with the confirmation?

PATRICK LEAHY: I suspect this will depend on the credibility of the senator.

MN: And are you questioning the credibility of Senator Sessions on that?

PL: You asked a broad question and I, uh, I responded to it.

Blog post headline of the day

Mint Juleps To The Rescue

Greatest deliberative body ever, Pt 364

Good for House Democrats.

WASHINGTON — House Democratic leaders on Wednesday banned budget earmarks to private industry, ending a practice that has steered billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to companies and set off corruption scandals.

The ban is the most forceful step yet in a three-year effort in Congress to curb abuses in the use of earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to award financing for pet projects to groups and businesses, many of them campaign donors.

But House Republicans, in a quick round of political one-upmanship, tried to outmaneuver Democrats by calling for a ban on earmarks across the board, not just to for-profit companies. Republicans, who expect an intra-party vote on the issue Thursday, called earmarks “a symbol of a broken Washington.”

Whatever.

But this is getting increasingly ridiculous.

Both parties are seeking to claim the ethical high ground on the issue by racing to rein in a budgeting practice that has become rife with political influence peddling. So far, though, the Senate is not joining in. House Democrats had tried to reach an agreement with their counterparts to ban for-profit earmarks, but the senators balked, Congressional officials said.

Senate Democrats can never be accused of trying to claim the ethical high ground. Sheesh.

Egregious

We, the taxpayers, are subsidizing money managers for hedge funds.

In a typical private-equity fund, the managers get paid two per cent of assets as a regular fee, plus twenty per cent of the fund’s profits. They pay regular income tax on the two per cent. But on their share of the profits, which is called “carried interest,” they usually pay only long-term capital gains—even though they put up hardly any of the fund’s actual capital, most of which comes from outside investors. The difference in tax rates saves private-equity managers billions of dollars a year, and means that they pay taxes at a much lower rate than, say, your average lawyer. It also means that their taxes are lower than those of people who do the same kind of work, or get the same kind of pay, as they do. A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others. But the carried-interest tax break upends this rule. If you manage money for a mutual fund or a public company, you pay regular income taxes; do it for a private fund, and you pay capital gains. Similarly, when a corporate executive gets stock or stock options as a bonus for a job well done, it’s generally subject to income taxes; carried interest, which is also performance-related, isn’t. Like the rest of us, fund managers are being paid for their labor, but, unlike the rest of us, they get to pay taxes as if they were capital.

You would think it would be easy -- and excellent politics -- to close this loophole created in 1954. The House, after all, has passed legislation. The Senate -- not so much.

Hold this

Ezra Klein thinks the nakedly sleazy hostage taking that Richard Shelby is doing right now is a good opportunity for Democrats to show how Republicans have no desire to run a responsible government.

But Shelby has likely overplayed his hand. The reason holds work is that they're small enough, and rare enough, that they never rise to the level of something the majority can't live with. Shelby, in putting a hold on all pending nominations, just made holds very big indeed. And he did it for the most pathetic and parochial of reasons: pork for his state. If the Democrats have any sense at all, Shelby's hold is about to become as famous as Nelson's deal.

I'm not sure it's going to work for Dems, even if they did have the stones to actually kick up a fuss and the servile Washington media tribe has any interest in pursuing Shelby's kidnapping of the U.S. government in service to his client, Airbus. To prove my point, I give you...Ezra Klein.

But I'm a bit less taken with his belief that the "dynamic is unlikely to change until the voters get so disgusted that they are willing to indiscriminately turn out all incumbents, irrespective of party and ideology." We're there, and have been for some time. The House has been more competitive in the past decade than in the four decades that preceded it. Every couple of years, the voters toss the majority party out of office. Americans hate how Washington works, and they keep trying to punish the people in charge.

But that just rewards the scoundrels. The people in charge aren't in charge of this. What Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole proved was that minority could make the people angry at Washington if it could bring all business to a halt and deafen voters with the partisan bickering. If Americans were dedicated students of Congress, they might respond by punishing the people who're responsible for poisoning the process. But only a quarter of Americans can identify 60 votes as the number needed to break a filibuster. Another 25 percent think it's 51 votes, and the rest don't really know. When people are angry at Washington, they do the logical thing and take it out on the folks who're putatively running the place.

That congressional rules give the minority the power to decide the success of the majority's agenda is so unintuitive that it's pretty much impossible to run elections based off the concept. Even when the voters do turn on incumbents, the majority of the incumbents come from whichever party holds the gavel, so the election is looks like a repudiation of the majority. Voting against Washington looks functionally the same as voting against the party in power, and that's why the minority acts the way it does, and will continue until it loses these tools.

Republicans are much more effective in the minority than they are in the majority. They can't run a government, but they can lock up the government any time they so choose, knowing that voters will be angered by the "partisan bickering" and level their rage on the party in "power."