McConnell and Madison

President Obama is going outside the box on regulations and executive power.  Now his opponents are, too. Coral Davenport writes at The New York Times:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has begun an aggressive campaign to block President Obama’s climate change agenda in statehouses and courtrooms across the country, arenas far beyond Mr. McConnell’s official reach and authority.

The campaign of Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is aimed at stopping a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring states to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Once enacted, the rules could shutter hundreds of coal-fired plants in what Mr. Obama has promoted as a transformation of the nation’s energy economy away from fossil fuels and toward sources like wind and solar power. Mr. McConnell, whose home state is one of the nation’s largest coal producers, has vowed to fight the rules.

Since Mr. McConnell is limited in how he can use his role in the Senate to block regulations, he has taken the unusual step of reaching out to governors with a legal blueprint for them to follow to stop the rules in their states. Mr. McConnell’s Senate staff, led by his longtime senior energy adviser, Neil Chatterjee, is coordinating with lawyers and lobbying firms to try to ensure that the state plans are tangled up in legal delays.

None of this activity would surprise James Madison, who wrote in Federalist 51:

In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Deliberation and Collaboration in the Senate

Jason Grumet of the Bipartisan Policy Center writes at The Hill about the recent filibuster controversy in the Senate.

This latest act of brinksmanship demonstrates that our filibuster fixation confuses a symptom with a far deeper problem. While senators have chosen to hold up presidential appointments more frequently of late, the same basic rules were in place during decades when the Senate wasn’t nearly so gridlocked. What has changed is that the personal interactions that once enabled the Senate to function despite harsh ideological divides have become relics of another era. And so filibuster reform will only paper over the Senate’s need to develop a landscape that allows for honest deliberation.

Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) have seized the initiative by urging the Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to conduct joint bipartisan activities on a more consistent basis. They note that during the meeting in the Old Senate Chamber, “senators from both sides of the aisle were able to have a respectful, yet frank and open discussion about issues that substantially impact the Rules that govern this Chamber.”

Sens. Reid and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) should seize this opportunity and schedule monthly senator-only meetings. Let them do what their predecessors used to do more regularly—deliberate privately over the issues of the day. Surely some will complain about closed door meetings, but we must allow our leaders some room to govern. Moreover, no conversation among 100 people in Washington stays secret for long.

A Super PAC and the McConnell Recording

It appears that the recording of a private conversation at Mitch McConnell's campaign was the result of deliberate eavesdropping, not staff error.  At Salon, Alex Seitz-Ward discusses the likely source, and in the process offers a cautionary tale about how Super PAC activity can backfire on the causes they're trying to help.

Liberal super PAC Progress Kentucky is at the center of controversy after a Democratic strategist in the state said activists affiliated with the group bragged to him that they secretly recorded the audiotape of Mitch McConnell’s strategy meeting that was leaked to Mother Jones this week. If true, they could face criminal sanctions. The treasurer of the super PAC resigned this afternoon.

Now, it’s worth stating that we don’t know for sure that Progress Kentucky produced the tape or is involved in any way — this is just the word of one Democratic strategist, who has an interest in distancing his party from the group.

But it’s not the first time the super PAC has gotten into trouble. In late February, they made a series of offensive “jokes” about McConnell’s wife on Twitter, attacking her for being Chinese-American. Even Ashley Judd felt compelled to issue a public condemnation.

But there’s something important you should know about Progress Kentucky: No one took its members very seriously in Kentucky, even before the slurs or the secret tape. I know this because I once quoted Curtis Morrison, who was one of what appears to be only two or three people associated with the group (he resigned in March), and a number of liberal activists in the state told me to never do it again.

Bugging McConnell? Maybe, Maybe Not.

Rachel Weiner writes at The Washington Post:

The campaign manager for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s reelection bid insisted Wednesday that the Kentucky senator’s office was bugged, comparing the recording of a high-level strategy meeting to the work of the Nazi secret police.

Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, published audio Tuesday of a McConnell campaign meeting in which actress Ashley Judd was discussed. The senator has said that the office must have been bugged by the “political left.”

“This is Gestapo kind of scare tactics and we’re not going to stand for it,” Jesse Benton told radio host Mike Huckabee on Wednesday.

The FBI is trying to find out what happened.  But it's worth remembering a similar incident seven years ago, where one campaign leaked recordings of its opponent's private conversations.  As it turned out, there was no bugging or any other illegal activity.

In September 2006, The New York Times reported:

The campaign of the Democratic candidate for governor, Phil Angelides, said Tuesday that it was the source of audio files containing impolitic remarks by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those remarks were the subject of a front page article last week in The Los Angeles Times, which led to an apology by the governor.

Mr. Angelides’s campaign manager, Cathy Calfo, said at a news conference in Sacramento that the files had been culled from a Web site accessible by the public and that campaign staff members had not trespassed into a secure area of the governor’s office.

...
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Ms. Calfo called the Schwarzenegger camp’s characterization of the episode “politically motivated” and “outrageous” and added, “We believe these audio files accessed through a public Web site requiring no password are a matter of public record.”

CNET added some detail:

The controversy may center on the design of the Web server called speeches.gov.ca.gov. The California government used it to post MP3 files of Schwarzenegger's speeches in a directory structure that looked like "http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/06-21.htm.htm". (That Web page is now offline, but saved in Google's cache.)

A source close to Angelides told CNET News.com on Tuesday that it was possible to "chop" off the Web links and visit the higher-level "http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/" directory, which had the controversial audio recording publicly viewable. No password was needed, the source said.