A Summary of the Week's News 1-27-06
No big news items this week on the domestic front, but lots of little ones. I've been saving them for a single post and, since today's news coverage obliging has some good catch up pieces, this post will be kind of long. You can savor it over the weekend.
Mostly the domestic news of the week has been focused on three issues: the Alito confirmation, the White House's offensive on the NSA spying issue, and the leaks and hints about the content of the President's State of the Union Address coming up on Tuesday.
Alito
As far as the Alito hearings go, it looks like the White House has the votes to confirm. No Republicans have defected so far and at least three Democrats will vote to confirm. Other Democrats oppose his confirmation either on the grounds that they think he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which says that a woman's decision to have an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy is an exercise of the right to privacy, or because they believe that he will rule in a way to give too much power to the president (see the post on signing statements, below.)
Thursday Senator John Kerry announced that he would attempt to filibuster the vote on Alito and said he had the support of Senator Ted Kennedy. As we explain in KTR (pp. 306-308) a filibuster allows a minority of senators to halt activity on the Senate floor, but it can be stopped by a vote of cloture (which takes 60 votes.) The White House says it has those votes, and it probably does. In 2005 Republicans threatened to eliminate the use of the filibuster for judicial confirmations(a strategy they called the nuclear option) but a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement to preserve the legislative maneuver in exchange for an agreement not to support a filibuster unless there were extraordinary circumstances (KTR, p. 308.) It is unlikely that Kerry and Kennedy would seriously jeopardize the filibuster's fate here, but if they know they will lose the cloture vote they can take a stand without risking the nuclear option. The tactic is still controversial among Democrats right now. Though it pleases the Democratic base, many in the party fear that it will distract from issues where they feel the Republicans are really vulnerable. (Charles Babbington, Democrats Split Over Filibuster on Alito, WaPo, 1/27/06.) Senator Frist plans to schedule a vote to end debate on Monday and a vote to confirm Alito on Tuesday, a nice send-off for the President's State of the Union speech that night (see KTR, p. 334.)
NSA Eavesdropping
One issue the Democrats want to keep on the public's agenda is the NSA's domestic spying operation. The Bush administration has launched an offensive to frame the surveillance as necessary to keep Americans safe -- fanning out to TV talk shows and making public speeches (Bush even gave one at the NSA) arguing that only Americans having conversations with Al Qaeda members were eavesdropped on. They don't call it spying or eavesdropping they call it a "terrorist surveillance program," and they say they can't discuss it much because to do so would help the enemy. Critics of the eavesdropping dispute that and argue that the issue here is not safety, since Bush could have conducted the surveillance legally had he chosen to get search warrants, but rather the unchecked power of the executive. Nothing is new on this legally since I posted below; what has changed is the Bush administration's decision to take the case to the public in black and white terms. The political fight here is for how the issue is to be understood: If Bush succeeds in making it about security, the public is likely to support him; if his critics can make it about civil liberties and an executive power grab, they are less likely to do so. The latest New York Times poll shows this in graphic terms; 53% of respondents support eavesdropping to reduce the threat of terrorism, but only 46 % support it if terrorism is removed from the question. (Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps, NYT, 1/27/06.) See the KTR public opinion chapter for a discussion of how important question wording can be in polling (pp. 465-466) and the media chapter for a discussion of framing (pp. 659-660) and news management (pp. 666-669.)
SOTU
Finally, there is increasing coverage of the issues that Bush is likely to air in his State of the Union address. One issue that he seems sure to talk about is health care. While details of his proposal have not been revealed yet, from various leaks it seems clear that he will try to do something similar to what he attempted with Social Security last year -- focus on revamping the program to transfer more responsibility to individuals. (Peter Gosselin, Health Plan to Revive Debate, LAT, 1/23/06.) In this case, that will mean tax cuts to individuals to cover their own health care costs -- perhaps a beefing up of the medical savings account program where Americans carry health insurance only for catastrophic care, and pay for their other medical expenses out of tax-exempt savings accounts. The idea here, long endorsed by conservatives, is that if people have to pay for their care out of their own pockets (as opposed to having it covered by insurance) they will make more financially savvy decisions and be a lot less likely to seek unnecessary treatment, causing health care costs to decline. Eventually, if the health care system moved in this direction, employers would not offer health insurance packages to employees as they do now, and the entire face of health care provision in the country could change. As with Social Security, however, this could be a hard sell to the American people, many of whom are unwilling to face risk with only their own resources. A NYT piece about how the banks (who would have a central role in these savings accounts) are positioning themselves to take advantage of them does a pretty good job of explaining what's involved. (Eric Dash, Savings Accounts for Health Costs Attract Wall St.)
Other News Worth Noting
Bush held a press conference Thursday. (For a semi-humorous take on the conference, read Dana Milbank, Trying to Maintain Control of the State, in a State of Confusion, WaPo, 1/27/06.) Although as Milbank points out, his discussion was largely devoted to defending executive prerogative, he also fielded questions about the Hamas victory in the Palestinian legislative elections (complicated story, but briefly, Hamas is a terrorist organization, sworn to eliminate Israel; Bush supports democracy in the Mideast in Iraq and elsewhere, hoping that peaceful parties will win, but democracy is not an easy force to control as the Palestinian elections make clear) and the suppression of pictures taken with him and Jack Abramoff (he says the pictures are irrelevant; they seem to have been purged from existing records so they can't be used for "political purposes" but it's not clear who has done the purging). John Dickerson in Slate points out that they aren't irrelevant, they actually help Bush by distracting the press from questions about Abramoff's real influence in the WH. (Dickerson, All the President's Dodges, Slate, 1/16/06.)
The LAT releases new approval ratings for Bush -- 43%, the lowest Bush has received in their poll. This poll also echoes the NYT finding that people support the wiretapping if done to protect us from terrorists. (Ron Brownstein, Bush's Ratings Sink, but Trust Remains, 1/27/06.) See KTR, pp. 342-349; 364-367, to understand how important a president's public approval is to his ability to get things done.