Presidential Pantomime

Kevin Kosar at AEI:

Shortly before he left office, President Joe Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment was now part of the Constitution and “the law of the land,” never mind that federal courts and the National Archivist have said otherwise.

Similarly, President Barack Obama responded to a mass shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut school by demanding federal police trace any guns used in mass shootings. That this latter policy had no effect to prevent future shootings was no matter — it gave the appearance of doing something.

And that is a big reason why presidents so often issue toothless executive orders and memoranda, according to University of Michigan Professor, Kenneth Lowande, the author of False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age (University of Chicago, 2024).

“Presidents take action — even when it does nothing to affect policy — because our political system is not designed to let presidents solve major problems,” he writes.

The U.S. Constitution fractures governing power among the branches and assigns all legislative authority to Congress. The nation’s chief executive must operate within the powers granted by the Constitution and federal law. “Their first and most direct power,” Lowande writes, “is over the appearance of governing, not governing itself.”

Moonshot

President Obama has compared the search for a cancer cure to the moon shot.

PZ Myers writes at ScienceBlogs:

Everyone admires John F. Kennedy’s ambition in setting a specific goal for the space program, way back in the 1960s. It was smart to focus. But here’s the difference: we knew where the moon was. There it is, 380,000km away, in a predictable orbit around the planet, and we had these technologies to fire off rockets that already contained the basic principles we needed to get to the moon. It was a nontrivial effort, but getting from here to there was an already specified problem.

Where is “cancer”? Can you even define the problem? Do you see a solution that you can reach by just throwing a lot of money at it and telling a team of doctors to fix it?

No, you can’t. Scientists who study cancer will even tell you flat out that cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a multitude of diseases. It’s more like a pattern of collapse of a complex structure, and there’s a million different ways it can happen. A “moonshot” is a terrible metaphor for how to approach the treatment of cancer.

Ike Swetlitz writes at STAT:

Nixon, of course, also invoked a “war on cancer.” Decades later, with the war still not won, the Clinton administration turned again to that militaristic metaphor.

“We want to be the first generation that finally wins the war on cancer,” then-Vice President Al Gore told the Toledo Blade in 1998. He said science was on the verge of a breakthrough: “For the first time, the enemy is outmatched.”

It wasn’t.

In the following campaign, Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush returned to the space metaphor. He promised to “fund and lead a medical moonshot to reach far beyond what seems possible today,” to cure not just cancer but many ills associated with aging.

Obama and the Crusades

Evan Simon writes at ABC:

After President Obama’s remarks comparing ISIS militants to medieval Christian crusaders ignited a firestorm of criticism on Thursday, ABC News wanted to know: how accurate is that comparison?

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” the president told an audience at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.

Meanwhile, historians have been quick to discourage a link between ISIS and the Crusaders, who fought to reclaim holy lands in the Middle East nearly 900 years ago.

“I don’t think the president knows very much about the crusades,” Thomas Madden, a historian at the University of St. Louis, told ABC News.

“He seems to be casting them as an example of a distortion of Christianity and trying to compare that to what he sees as a distortion of Islam in the actions of ISIS,” Madden said. “The initial goal of the Crusades was to give back lands to Christians that been conquered, due to Muslim conquests.”

The Immigration Action and a Health Care Case

At The Los Angeles Times, David G. Savage writes of the connection between the president's executive action on immigration and the upcoming Supreme Court case of King v. Burwell.

Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer for the libertarian Cato Institute, said the immigration order is the "starkest example" of what he called the president's "pattern of lawlessness."

The question now is whether the president's immigration action will influence the thinking of the justices, and particularly of Roberts, as they consider in the upcoming healthcare case whether the president exceeded his authority.

At issue is whether the administration must abide by one provision in the healthcare law, which says subsidies may be paid to those who enrolled in state health exchanges, or whether the president can extend those benefits to include people who signed up on the federally run exchange.

The administration argues the healthcare law, read as whole, shows Congress intended to make the subsidies available nationwide. But critics are appealing to Roberts and the court's conservatives, arguing the president and his advisors have no power to unilaterally change a law passed by Congress.

Their argument echoes the criticism voiced over Obama's immigration directive, accusing the president of trying to fix a broken system by acting on his own rather than waiting for Congress.

Experts say that legally the healthcare case is a close call. If so, the outcome may turn on whether the justices are inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, or whether they believe it's time to rein him in.

Obama's bold decision to press ahead with his immigration order in the wake of the GOP victories in the midterm election will not escape the attention of the court's conservatives.

Shapiro said the new immigration plan will "confirm the chief justice's view" that the court should not allow the administration to revise laws passed by Congress.

Limiting Access to Information

At AP, Erin Madigan White reports on AP Washington Bureau Chief’s list of 8 ways in which the administration is limiting access to information:

1) As the United States ramps up its fight against Islamic militants, the public can’t see any of it. News organizations can’t shoot photos or video of bombers as they take off — there are no embeds. In fact, the administration won’t even say what country the S. bombers fly from.
2) The White House once fought to get cameramen, photographers and reporters into meetings the president had with foreign leaders overseas. That access has become much rarer. …
3) Guantanamo: The big important 9/11 trial is finally coming up. But we aren’t allowed to see most court filings in real time — even of nonclassified material. …
4) Information about Guantanamo that was routinely released under President George W. Bush is now kept secret. The military won’t release the number of prisoners on hunger strike or the number of assaults on guards. Photo and video coverage is virtually nonexistent.
5) Day-to-day intimidation of sources is chilling. AP’s transportation reporter’s sources say that if they are caught talking to her, they will be fired. …
6) …Requests for information under FOIA have become slow and expensive. …
7) The administration uses FOIAs as a tip service to uncover what news organizations are pursuing. Requests are now routinely forwarded to political appointees. At the agency that oversees the new health care law, for example, political appointees now handlethe FOIA requests.
8) The administration is trying to control the information that state and local officials can give out. The FBI has directed local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology the police departments use to sweep up cellphone data. In some cases, federal officials have formally intervened in state open records cases, arguing for secrecy.

New York Times Flip-Flops on States' Rights

On May 29, 2011, The New York Times denounced states' rights.

States’ rights has been a politically charged concept for even longer. It was a basis for secession and then for years of Southern defiance on segregation. Now it is used as an excuse for rejecting national immigration policy.

Today, it embraces the idea:

A decision about what kinds of substances to permit, and under what conditions, belongs in the purview of the states, as alcohol is handled.

As we have noted before, President Obama and other Democrats have explicitly embraced the language of states' rights.

War Powers and Chad

The president has sent this letter to the House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), president pro tem of the Senate:

Approximately 80 U.S. Armed Forces personnel have deployed to Chad as part of the U.S. efforts to locate and support the safe return of over 200 schoolgirls who are reported to have been kidnapped in Nigeria. These personnel will support the operation of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft for missions over northern Nigeria and the surrounding area. The force will remain in Chad until its support in resolving the kidnapping situation is no longer required.

This action has been directed in furtherance of U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.

I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148). I appreciate the support of the Congress in these actions.

Sequestration Fizzle

The Washington Post reports:

Before “sequestration” took effect, the Obama administration issued specific — and alarming — predictions about what it would bring. There would be one-hour waits at airport security. Four-hour waits at border crossings. Prison guards would be furloughed for 12 days. FBI agents, up to 14.

At the Pentagon, the military health program would be unable to pay its bills for service members. The mayhem would extend even into the pantries of the neediest Americans: Around the country, 600,000 low-income women and children would be denied federal food aid.

Sequestration did hit, on March 1. And since then, the $85 billion budget cut has caused real reductions in many federal programs that people depend on. But it has not produced what the Obama administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services.

The Washington Post recently checked 48 of those dire predictions about sequestration’s impact. Just 11 have come true, and some effects are worse than forecast. But 24 predictions have not come to pass. In 13 cases, agencies said it is too soon to know.

So many predictions fell short because, in recent months, the administration and Congress did what was supposed to be impossible: They undid many of sequestration’s scariest reductions. In the process, this supposedly ironclad budget cut — ostensibly immune to political maneuvering — became a symbol of the reality that nothing in Washington is beyond politics.

Secession?

Secession? In 2004, after President Bush won 51% of the vote, a small number of disgruntled progressives gave some fleeting thought to seceding from the Union, perhaps to join Canada.



In 2012, after President Obama won 51% of the vote, a few on the right are thinking the same thing. Voice of America reports:



At the time of liberal secession rumbles, Michael C. Dorf wrote that "it is settled law that the Constitution does not permit unilateral secession: A state or group of states cannot simply leave the Union over the objections of the national government. However, the arguments that led to this settled understanding are hardly unassailable, and the Constitution is probably best read as permitting the mutually agreed upon departure of one or more states."

Polls show that most oppose the secession of their own states, and those who say that support it are probably just venting their unhappiness with the central government. At USA Today, law professor Glenn Reynolds writes:

So what's a solution? Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do -- national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights -- and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don't like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that's more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.

Sound good? It should. It's called federalism, and it's the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."

It's a nice plan. Beats secession. Maybe we should give it another try

Privacy and Campaign Technology

Previous posts have discussed campaign technology. As the New York Times reports, the Romney and Obama campaigns insist that they respect voter privacy when using this technology.

In interviews, however, consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters’ shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems. The campaigns themselves, according to campaign employees, have examined voters’ online exchanges and social networks to see what they care about and whom they know. They have also authorized tests to see if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or a new friend would be more likely to prompt the urge to cast a ballot.

The campaigns have planted software known as cookies on voters’ computers to see if they frequent evangelical or erotic Web sites for clues to their moral perspectives. Voters who visit religious Web sites might be greeted with religion-friendly messages when they return to mittromney.com or barackobama.com. The campaigns’ consultants have run experiments to determine if embarrassing someone for not voting by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online is effective.

“I’ve had half-a-dozen conversations with third parties who are wondering if this is the year to start shaming,” said one consultant who works closely with Democratic organizations. “Obama can’t do it. But the ‘super PACs’ are anonymous. They don’t have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame.”

While the campaigns say they do not buy data that they consider intrusive, the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined have spent at least $13 million this year on data acquisition and related services. The parties have paid companies like Acxiom, Experian or Equifax, which are currently subjects of Congressional scrutiny over privacy concerns.

Vendors affiliated with the presidential campaigns or the parties said in interviews that their businesses had bought data from Rapleaf or Intelius, companies that have been sued over alleged privacy or consumer protection violations.

Racial Polarization and the Election

At National Journal, Ronald Brownstein runs the numbers on race and the presidential vote:

For President Obama, the winning formula can be reduced to 80/40. In 2008, Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority voters, including not only African-Americans but also Hispanics, Asians, and others. If Obama matches that performance this year, he can squeak out a national majority with support from about 40 percent of whites—so long as minorities at least match the 26 percent of the vote they cast last time.

Obama’s strategic equation defines Mitt Romney’s formula: 61/74. Romney’s camp is focused intently on capturing at least 61 percent of white voters. That would provide him a slim national majority—so long as whites constitute at least 74 percent of the vote, as they did last time, and Obama doesn’t improve on his 80 percent showing with minorities.

These calculations underscore the depth of racial polarization shadowing this election and the achingly slim margin of error facing each candidate. If Obama nudges past 80 percent among minorities (which seems very possible) or the minority vote share rises (also possible, though less probable), the president could gain reelection while winning only about 38 percent of white votes. Conversely, if the white proportion of the vote increases just a single percentage point (to 75 percent), and Romney records any gains among minorities, he could shave his winning number to a more manageable 59 percent of whites.

A Forecast of Romney Victory

One respected forecasting model predicts that President Obama will win a very narrow majority in the popular vote.  Another, however, predicts a Romney win. A release from the University of Colorado:

A University of Colorado analysis of state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980 forecasts that the 2012 winner will be Mitt Romney.

The key is the economy, say political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver. Their prediction model stresses economic data from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including both state and national unemployment figures as well as changes in real per capita income, among other factors.

“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” said Bickers, also director of the CU in DC Internship Program.

According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties.

“For the last eight presidential elections, this model has correctly predicted the winner,” said Berry. “The economy has seen some improvement since President Obama took office. What remains to be seen is whether voters will consider the economy in relative or absolute terms. If it’s the former, the president may receive credit for the economy’s trajectory and win a second term. In the latter case, Romney should pick up a number of states Obama won in 2008.”

Their model correctly predicted all elections since 1980, including two years when independent candidates ran strongly, 1980 and 1992. It also correctly predicted the outcome in 2000, when Al Gore received the most popular vote but George W. Bush won the election.

The study will be published this month in PS: Political Science & Politics, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Political Science Association. It will be among about a dozen election prediction models, but one of only two to focus on the Electoral College.

The Digital Campaign

Previous posts have examined the role of technology in the presidential race. The Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism reports:

On the eve of the conventions, Barack Obama holds a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters. The Obama campaign is posting almost four times as much content and is active on nearly twice as many platforms, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report, which analyzed the content and volume of candidate communications on their websites and social media channels from June 4-17, 2012, finds that the digital gap between the campaigns was the greatest on Twitter. The Romney campaign averaged 1 tweet per day while the Obama campaign averaged 29 tweets, 17 per day on @BarackObama (the Twitter account associated with his presidency) and 12 on @Obama2012 (the account associated with his campaign). Obama also had about twice as many blog posts on his campaign website than did Romney and more than twice as many YouTube videos.

The study also found that while both campaigns' digital content primarily focused on their own candidate, roughly a third of the posts from the Romney campaign were about Obama-largely attacking him for a policy stance or action. About half as many of the Obama campaign's posts, 14%, focused on his challenger during the period studied.

"As the conventions drew closer, Romney's campaign took steps to close the technology gap, and may well take more with the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket," said PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell. "But there is a long way to go before the Romney team matches the level of activity of the Obama campaign."

The report notes a gap:

Neither campaign made much use of the social aspect of social media. Rarely did either candidate reply to, comment on, or "retweet" something from a citizen-or anyone else outside the campaign. On Twitter, 3% of the 404 Obama campaign tweets studied during the June period were retweets of citizen posts. Romney's campaign produced just a single retweet during these two weeks-repeating something from his son Josh.

French Learn Voter Mobilization from Americans

At Slate, Sasha Issenberg writes about how French operatives learned voter mobilization from the Obama campaign.

The three young men monitoring the volunteer sign-up table outside François Hollande’s rally at a large arena here on Monday all hail from Strasbourg but trace their political awakening to Cambridge, Mass. In early 2008, while studying at Kennedy’s Harvard School, Guillaume Liegey learned the rudiments of voter contact through a class with Democratic operative Steve Jarding and encounters with Marshall Ganz, the legendary labor organizer whose protégés included some of Barack Obama’s top field staffers. Another Harvard student, Arthur Muller, saw their tactics at work during regular treks to New Hampshire in the final weeks of the 2008 general election to knock on doors for Obama’s campaign, masking his native accent (out of concern for Bush-era sensitivities) and pretending he was Dutch. Muller was a childhood friend of Vincent Pons, a graduate student at MIT under the tutelage of Esther Duflo, the international development economist and specialist in randomized field experiments that, when applied to electioneering, had quantified the ability of a single door knock to deliver a vote. After the election the three Frenchmen realized where their new curiosities converged. “We got interested in all the voter-mobilization stuff,” says Liegey.

It was an unlikely area of fascination for three foreigners in their first encounter with American politics. Most of the foreigners who made a trans-Atlantic pilgrimage to examine Obama’s campaign up close fixated on the cosmopolitan candidate or the avant-garde trappings of his communication strategy, and reduced it to a series of easily mimicked gestures, like the Israeli website whose design was filched nearly entirely from Obama’s despite the fact that the candidate deployed the American as a foil. Such slavish copying eventually exhausted itself and the marketing slogan “Obama-style campaign” lost its novelty, in large part because few of the copycats actually understood the complex infrastructure that made Obama’s innovations possible. “A lot of people look at the U.S. and see the poli-optics of it but never look at what’s behind it,” says Julius van de Laar, a German national who served as Obama’s Missouri youth-vote director in 2008 and has since opened a Berlin new-media consulting firm.

...

“Campaigns take a different shape in Europe,” says Marietje Schaake, who observed the Obama campaign as a consultant working in the United States and was inspired by his victory to run for the European Parliament, where she has served since 2009. “The money is not there in Europe—on the scale people are doing it in the US would be considered corruption in the EU.”

No members of the Obama diaspora, however, have been moved to reimagine their country’s politics as boldly as the three Frenchmen who met in Cambridge. By latching on to that “voter-mobilization stuff,” they stumbled into the most enduring recent shift in American electioneering, one not exclusive to Obama but exemplified by his campaign: a renaissance of individual voter contact, boosted by new tools that allow it to be keenly targeted and its effects clearly measured.

Contributions and Access

Campaign contributions do not necessarily buy policy decisions, but they do help contributors gain access to polilcymakers.  At The New York Times Mike McIntire and Michael Luo report:

Although Mr. Obama has made a point of not accepting contributions from registered lobbyists, a review of campaign donations and White House visitor logs shows that special interests have had little trouble making themselves heard. Many of the president’s biggest donors, while not lobbyists, took lobbyists with them to the White House, while others performed essentially the same function on their visits.

More broadly, the review showed that those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times.

Most donors declined to talk about their motivations for giving. The reporters did find one candid contributor:

But Patrick J. Kennedy, the former representative from Rhode Island, who donated $35,800 to an Obama re-election fund last fall while seeking administration support for a nonprofit venture, said contributions were simply a part of “how this business works.”

“If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine,” he said. “At the end of the day, I want to make sure I do my part.”

Mr. Kennedy visited the White House several times to win support for One Mind for Research, his initiative to help develop new treatments for brain disorders. While his family name and connections are clearly influential, he said, he knows White House officials are busy. And as a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he said he was keenly aware of the political realities they face.

“I know that they look at the reports,” he said, referring to records of campaign donations. “They’re my friends anyway, but it won’t hurt when I ask them for a favor if they don’t see me as a slouch.”

No Silver Bullet

Like most people, presidents have favorite phrases.  One of President Obama's is "silver bullet."  In a Monday interview with KABC-TV's Marc Brown, the president said of rising gasoline prices: "The truth of the matter is that there's no silver bullet." On at least forty other occasions since 2009, he has said that there is no silver bullet for one or another policy issue.  Some examples:

• On the stimulus, February 13, 2009: Almost to a economist, there was a consensus that we needed a large stimulus package not as the silver bullet to solve our economic problems, but as a necessary component to solving our economic problems, and in terms of scope, that we were going to need something between $600 billion and $1.3 trillion.
• On energy, February 19, 2009: I think the clean energy dialog is an extraordinary beginning because right now there are no silver bullets to solve all of our energy problems.
• On health, March 2, 2009:  I don't think anybody has a silver bullet when it comes to health care.
• On the Islamic world, June 1, 2009:  And, you know, there are misapprehensions about the West on the part of the Muslim world, and obviously, there are some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West. And it is my firm belief that no one speech is going to solve every problem; there are no silver bullets.
• On postsecondary education, July 14, 2009:  Now, I know that for a long time there have been politicians who have spoken of training as a silver bullet and college as a cure-all. It's not, and we know that.
• On secondary education,  July 24, 2009:  Now, there's no silver bullet when it comes to turning these schools around.
• On aviation security, January 7, 2010: Now, there's no silver bullet to securing the thousands of flights into America each day, domestic and international.
• On the Gulf oil spill, May 28, 2010:  Sometimes there are going to be risks and unintended consequences associated with a particular mitigation strategy that we consider. In other words, there are going to be a lot of judgment calls involved here. There are not going to be silver bullets or a lot of perfect answers for some of the challenges that we face.
• On jobs, September 21, 2011: So as President Clinton mentioned, that's why I put forward the "American Jobs Act," not as a silver bullet that will solve all our problems, but it will put more people back to work.
• On manufacturing, September 28, 2011: So there's not going to be one single silver bullet. We're going to have to keep on investing in research and development, making sure technology is developed here.
  
  
  
  

Obama, Catholics, and Contraception

Our chapter on civic culture lays out the breadth and depth of religious influence on American life. Our chapters on parties and campaigns explain how religious affiliation influences political behavior and how faith groups play a role in electoral politics. Such topics are especially relevant in light of the administration's controversial decision to make religious-affiliated universities and hospitals offer insurance coverage for contraception even if they object on religious grounds.

At Bloomberg, Mike Dorning and Margaret Talev report:

President Barack Obama ended months of internal White House debate by siding with a group of mostly female advisers who urged him not to limit a health-care law mandate to provide contraceptives, even at the risk of alienating Catholic voters in November, people familiar with the discussions said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and a two-term governor of Kansas, was joined by several female Obama advisers in urging against a broad exemption for religious organizations. To do so would leave too many women without coverage and sap the enthusiasm for Obama among women’s rights advocates, they said, according to the people, who spoke about the deliberations on condition of anonymity.

Vice President Joe Biden and then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley, also Catholics, warned that the mandate would be seen as a government intrusion on religious institutions. Even moderate Catholic voters in battleground states might be alienated, they warned, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

At Politico, Scott Wong reports:

President Barack Obama’s contraceptives edict has handed Republicans an election-year gift. But now, the president may have a problem with his own party, too.

A handful of high-profile Catholic Democrats are bailing on the president and joining the GOP chorus of critics. They’re arguing that the rule needs to be significantly softened if not, as Republicans want, scrapped altogether.

At this point, the Democratic defectors are few in number but tall in stature. They include two swing-state pols on the November ballot — Obama’s former DNC chairman, Tim Kaine, who’s running for Senate in Virginia, and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey — as well as House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson.

At The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne writes of the president:

His deservedly celebrated 2006 speech on religion and American public life was a deeply sophisticated and carefully balanced effort to defend the rights of both believers and nonbelievers in a pluralistic republic.

Obama’s speech at Notre Dame’s graduation in 2009 was another tour de force. His visit to South Bend was highly controversial among right-wing Catholics. Yet his address temporarily silenced many of his critics because it showed an appreciation for the Catholic Church’s contributions to American life — particularly through its vast array of social-service and educational institutions — and an instinctive feeling for Catholic sensibilities. 

...

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.

Controversial Recess Appointments

Our chapter on the presidency describes the chief executive's power to make recess appointments, that is, to fill positions temporarily while the Senate is on recess.  Controversy has sometimes surrounded recess appointments, as a current case illustrates.

The New York Times reports:

President Obama touched off a fierce election-year confrontation with Congressional Republicans on Wednesday, defying their deep opposition to appoint Richard Cordray as director of a new consumer protection agency and fill three labor board vacancies.

The decision to install the four nominees without Senate approval under the constitutional provision for making appointments when lawmakers are in recess was a provocative opening salvo in Mr. Obama’s re-election strategy of demonizing Congress. It threatened to ignite a legal challenge and left Republicans fuming that the president was abusing the recess privilege.      

Roger Pilon writes at Cato:

All of Obama’s appointments yesterday are illegal under the Constitution. And, in addition, as too little noted by the media, his appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is legally futile. Under the plain language of the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB, Cordray will have no authority whatsoever.

Yesterday, Professors John Yoo and Richard Epstein, writing separately, made it crystal clear that the president, under Article II, section 2, may make temporary recess appointments, but only when the Senate is in recess. Add in Article I, section 5, and it’s plain that the Senate is presently not in recess, just as it wasn’t under Senate Democrats when George W. Bush wanted to make recess appointments. The difference here is that Bush respected those constitutional provisions while Obama — never a constitutional law professor but only a part-time instructor – ignores them as politically inconvenient. Attempts by Obama’s apologists to say the Senate is not in session are pure sophistry and, in the case of Harry Reid, rank hypocrisy, as this morning’s Wall Street Journal brings out.

But clear beyond the slightest doubt is the language of the statute (itself unconstitutional on any number of grounds not relevant here). As my colleague Mark Calabria wrote yesterday, “authorities under the Act remain with the Treasury Secretary until the Director is ‘confirmed by the Senate.’” A recess appointment, even if it were constitutional, is not a Senate confirmation. There is simply no wiggle room in that language that gives Cordray any authority, as litigation will soon make plain.

White House press secretary Jay Carney says:

The fact is, the President firmly believes he has the constitutional authority to act as he did. And they can make a lot of process arguments about it. We feel very strongly that the Constitution and the legal case is strongly on our side.

But more importantly, this isn’t about process, this isn’t about whether or not Congress is in session. And if I could digress for a minute, I think all of you should run up to Capitol Hill, check out the House and Senate and see if you can find a single member of Congress, and then tell me on this working day for most Americans whether or not Congress is in session.

But what it’s really about is the absolute urgency to install Richard Cordray as our consumer watchdog so that he can get to work today, as the CFPB has already announced, protecting middle-class Americans, protecting seniors from dishonest non-bank mortgage brokers, the kind who took advantage of that elderly couple the President met with yesterday in Cleveland, or to help students not get taken advantage of when they’re dealing with their student loans, or folks who deal with payday lenders.

Youth Opinion

A release from Harvard's Institute of Politics:

A new national poll of America’s 18 to 29 year olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, finds more Millennials predict President Barack Obama will lose his bid for re-election (36%) than win (30%). The new survey also shows former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney fairing best among potential Republican challengers in a general election match-up against President Obama, trailing the President by eleven percentage points (Obama: 37%, Romney: 26%).

Thirty-two percent of Millennials say they are following the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations either very (6%) or somewhat closely (26%), with 66% not following the demonstrations closely. Only twenty-one percent (21%) said they supported the movement. A detailed report on the poll’s findings is available on the Institute’s homepage at www.iop.harvard.edu.

“Our new polling data clearly shows Millennials are growing more concerned over the direction of the country and effectiveness of Washington, D.C. to solve problems,” said Trey Grayson, Director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. “The opportunity exists for all political parties and campaigns to re-engage this generation – those who do can maximize results in 2012.”

Obama and TR

Presidents often invoke their predecessors, as President Obama will do today. AP reports:

President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit unfriendly political territory Tuesday and deliver what the White House bills as a major speech on the economy, addressing a small eastern Kansas town in a state that seems certain to again vote solidly Republican in next year's presidential election.

But Obama's trip to 4,400-resident Osawatomie, located about 50 miles south of Kansas City, gives the Democratic president a chance to invoke political symbolism and try to link his views with those of a past American icon, political scientists said. The White House notes the town was the site of a 1910 speech by former President Theodore Roosevelt, promoting a "New Nationalism" and a government active in society and the economy on behalf of the disadvantaged.

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Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, said Roosevelt's speech in 1910 represents a "gold mine" for a Democrat trying to get his core voters excited again.

"It makes perfect sense politically in terms of his re-election strategy, especially when you read Teddy Roosevelt's speech," Beatty said. "He wants to stand where Teddy Roosevelt stood. The Democrats, from where they stand in 2012, couldn't write a better speech."

In his 1910 speech, Roosevelt decried the influence of large corporations in politics and called for "a more substantial equality of opportunity." He quoted former President Abraham Lincoln, saying, "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Our text has a boxed feature titled "Pledges and Promises." A passage from the Roosevelt speech is relevant:

A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life.