From the Hill: House GOP plots anti-reg blitz

For our look at the executive branch - and specifically the bureaucracy and how Congress attempts to oversee it.

- Click here for the article.

House Republicans next week will pass a legislative package aimed at making federal regulations more transparent and less costly to the economy.

The legislation is the GOP's latest attempt to reduce the regulatory red tape that they say is stifling job creation. Republicans have said getting Washington out of the way of companies is the best way to turn around an economy that stills struggles to create jobs more than five years after the Great Recession.

Bills to pare back federal regulations have become the GOP's response to Democratic arguments that Congress should be pushing to extend emergency unemployment benefits and raise the minimum wage. But these bills have mostly gone nowhere in the Senate due to opposition from Senate Democrats.

Nonetheless, GOP leaders next week will bring up the Achieving Less Excess in Regulation and Requiring Transparency (ALERRT) Act, H.R. 2804. The legislation combines four measures proposed by Republicans over the last year.

One piece of the bill, from Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.), would require the head of each federal agency to report each month on rules it is expected to issue, including the reason for the rule and when it will be issued. It would also have to estimate the cost of the rule and its economic impact.

Current law requires the administration to issue reports on regulatory actions twice a year, but Republicans have complained that these reports are rarely on time. Holding said when he introduced his bill that his language is needed to ensure the government's regulatory plans are transparent to companies.

A $52 billion dollar budget for spying

The latest revelation from the documents released by Edward Snowden. These has been classified for years.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

Here's a link to the document.

Health Insurance Exchanges underway in California

The implementation of Obamacare continues. California has a head start and there are indications that costs might be lower than anticipated. 

Texas - not so much.

Click here for the timeline.

Interview with Stanley McChrystal

I just heard a strong recommendation for this interview with the retired general regarding counter-terrorism policy among other things.

Worth thinking about prior to looking at foreign policymaking later this semester.

- Wikipedia: Stanley McChrystal.
- Daily Show segment featuring the general.

For 2305: Some recent stories about the presidency

For this week's look at the executive branch, a random look at some stories that illustrate different topics covered in the class material:

- Who's In, Who's Out: Here's a look at the transformations happening in the Cabinet as Obama enters his second term.

- Obama, the puppet master: Politico  details how the Obama White House is able manipulate press coverage, including skillfully using new technologies and social media to ensure that events are covered as they want to see them covered: the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting).
Presidential success has often hinged on the ability to influence what is covered and how. As you'll see in the notes, an entire section of the executive branch is set up to handle the press. Commentators suggest that Obama's White House learned a lot from the experiences of their first terms and will apply those lessons in the second. The White House seems to have a leg up on the press, which is unusual. The press is not happy about it.

- Through the lens of the White House photographers: One way to ensure that media coverage is favorable is to control the visuals. Most of the photographs of the president are produced internally - no nose picking or anything like that will sneak out. Ronald Reagan's media adviser Michael Deaver was credited with emphasizing the importance of controlling the visuals. He noted that these can negate any negative commentary that might follow them.

- David Axelrod joins NBC News: Here's a great way to influence media coverage. Have one of your major advisers join them. Axelrod was a major figure in both of the president's elections, and was a senior adviser in the first term.

- Obama's Plan Sees 8-Year Wait for Illegal Immigrants: As a way of influencing whatever plan Congress develops, the president introduced his proposal for overhauling immigration. He was criticized during his first term for deferring policy formation too much to Congress, especially in the battle over health care. Here he takes the lead. His chief of staff talked the proposal up on Sunday talk shows this past week.

- Obama Turns up Pressure for Deal on Budget Cuts: The president is also wading into the political fray over the sequester. Much of this - as with other activities - involves taking a message public. Researchers note that this is a key component of presidential power. It also means that presidents spend less time dealing with Congress than using the American people to back his proposals over those of Congress. teh president has already morphed his campaign organization into one focused on promoting policy. This is part of the concept of a permanent campaign that we cover in several points in class.

- How researchers shaped the White House's brain-mapping initiative: The White House has directly one of its policy organizations to facilitate research in neural functions within the brain. This White House is very geek friendly.

Post Office to cut Saturday mail delivery

Detail from the Washington Post. The transition to digital communications seems to have caught up with the agency - which remember has a function that is directly tied into a delegated power in the Constitution. The decision was made by the current Postmaster General and is on shaky legal ground - some argue Congress should make the decision, but the Post Office does not think Congress has the ability to make the right decision on this so is moving on its own. The decision does not save near as much money as the Post Office is losing and is upsetting postal workers - naturally.

- The postal union (the National Rural Letter Carriers Association) wants the postmaster general fired.

- Is this the beginning of the Post Office's death spiral?

- The Post Office apparently has plans for becoming more fiscally disciplined, but claims that Congress is preventing them from doing so. They are going around Congress and hoping members of Congress will eventually see things their way and get behind this changes later.

- Esquire Magazine features a long article on the post office in its current issue.

- The US Post Office is the best in the world at delivering mail - which is what it's supposed to do right?

- Here's the Wikipedia entry on Postmaster General - and here's a link to info on the most famous Postmaster General the US ever had - even if he held the position primarily during colonial days: Benjamin Franklin.

Meet Richard III

DNA evidence has confirmed that this skeleton once help up the body of Richard III (note the curved spine) who was killed in battle in 1485 - the last British king to die that way.

2305's will note that I like to spend time looking at the development of legislative, executive and judicial power over the course of British history in order to understand why our Constitutional looks the way it does. I don't spent much time discussing Richard III who history has not treated kindly. He was not the nicest person, and did not treat his nephews well. But perhaps he can serve as an example of the type of monarch a meaningful system of due process is meant to contain.

His death marked the end of an important historical event, the War of the Roses. As I've read it, this was a war between houses of the nobility - the HBO series Game of Thrones is loosely based on it. One consequence of the war was a reduction of the power of the nobility - they had killed each other off - and a decrease in the power of the House of Lords. This allowed the House of Commons - which was composed of increasingly wealthy merchants - to increase in power and stature. In another 120 years they would be composed not only of merchants, but of Puritans, who would lead the revolt against the idea that British Monarchs ruled absolutely, and under the authority of Divine Right.

With that in mind, this photograph documents an interesting historical transition. Had this battle not occurred, the process of separating powers may have taken longer, or at least a different course.

From the Atlantic: Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program

A few days back was the 50th anniversary of JFK's speech in Rice Stadium announcing his goal of sending a man to the moon (and bringing him back alive).

Apparently not everyone was in favor of doing so, a majority was actually against it. Beyond that a great deal of mythology has been built up regarding what was and was not accomplished as a result of the program:


Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, a process began that has all but eradicated any reference to the substantial opposition by scientists, scholars, and regular old people to spending money on sending humans to the moon. Part jobs program, part science cash cow, the American space program in the 1960s placed the funding halo of military action on the heads of civilians. It bent the whole research apparatus of the United States to a symbolic goal in the Cold War.

Funny how perceptions of historical events change over time.

The US Secretary of State cannot attend a political convention

This is news to me I have to admit.

Federal law -- the Hatch Act of 1939, amended by Congress in 1993 -- specifically prohibits secretaries of state from attending political conventions, and the State Department's own ethics guidelines also rule out political activity.

A senior administration official, speaking on background because the official is not authorized to speak on the record, told CNN, "The law carved out the State Department as having a unique position in the government in that foreign policy, by its nature, must remain nonpartisan/apolitical."

"So State Department officials -- specifically those who are presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate (i.e. the secretary) -- are far more restricted than, say, someone who works at the Education Department."

The Hatch Act was designed to restrict the ability of executive branch officials from engaging in political activities - which is difficult if you consider that top level executive branch personnel are political by nature - not so lower level personnel though. Its one of many laws passed over history dealing with, and attempting to curtail, political corruption

We'll discuss these further in various parts of each class.

- Wikipedia: Hatch Act.
- From the Office of Special Counsel: List of Permitted and Prohibited Activities.
- National Archives: Hatch Act and Political Activities.

RegBlog

I justr became aware of this website. Should be useful for our look at the executive branch and regulatory agencies. Its affilitated with the university of Pennsylvania's Program on Regulation.

One area of interest: Romney's regulatory proposals.

Independent Payment Advisory Board repealed in the House Subcommittee

A bill repealing the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which was designed to curb growth in Medicare spending passed the Energy and Commerce Health subcommittee in a 17-5 vote.

Story in The Hill.

Should prisons be privatized?

Texas - and a handful of other states - have been privatizing prisons for many years now. Private providers of services are assumed to be able to do so more efficiently then the public sector. But some argue that private organizations should not be granted the coercive power that properly should only belong to a government whose powers rest on the consent of the governed.

Here are thoughts about that issue.

The author points out that: In 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that prison privatization violates “the constitutional rights to personal liberty and human dignity of inmates who are supposed to serve their sentence in that prison. This is because of the actual transfer of powers of management and operation of the prison from the state to a private concessionaire that is a profit-making enterprise.”

This is likely also applicable to the increased tendency of private entities to carry out military and security functions.

2301s: we can talk this out next week when we start in on federalism.
2302s: this applies to our discussion of the ever expanding power of the executive.

A some random stories regarding the federal bureaucracy

Three stories for 2302 students to chew on:

1 - The Food and Drug Administration eases rules in order to deal with the shortages of two cancer drugs. Key part of the story:

There is a years-long backlog of applications for new generic drugs at the F.D.A. because the government does not have the money to hire enough reviewers to analyze the applications or inspectors to visit the facilities, many of them abroad. The generic drug industry tired of waiting for Congress to fully finance the F.D.A.’s generic drug office and this year proposed providing the agency with $299 million in annual fees to finance the review process.


- The Food and Drug Administration (Wikipedia)
- From Wikipedia: History of the Food and Drug Administration.
2 - The Securities and Exchange Commission is worried that energy companies are over estimating their natural gas reserves. Recent rules changes loosened the process companies used to claim how much natural gas they were able tap into. Since these affect the value of a company's stock, there is an incentive to over estimate. Some would like those rules reversed.

- The Securities and Exchange Commission (Wikipedia)
- History.

3 - Is Obama preparing midnight regulations in case he is defeated in November? These would be ways to preserve programs he has passed while in office. Somethimes these are more difficult to rescind than you might think.

4 - The Economists argues that Ameica is both over and poorly regulated:

America needs a smarter approach to regulation. First, all important rules should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis by an independent watchdog. The results should be made public before the rule is enacted. All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, ten years unless Congress explicitly re-authorises them.

More important, rules need to be much simpler. When regulators try to write an all-purpose instruction manual, the truly important dos and don’ts are lost in an ocean of verbiage. Far better to lay down broad goals and prescribe only what is strictly necessary to achieve them. Legislators should pass simple rules, and leave regulators to enforce them.

Two stories related to equality

1 - The Justice Department has expanded its definition of rape to include sexual assaults of men.

2 - A major player in the battle against school segregation died recently.

How Obama's Initial Economic Team Dealt with the Financial Crisis

Ezra Klein walks us through what happened in the early months of the Obama Administration and how they responded to the ongoing economic crisis.

From Slate: Republicans may not like it, but the law says the Federal Reserve can do whatever it wants

The author provides a reminder that the Fed is designed to be immune from political pressures. Congress designed it that way.

This applies to both 2301 and 2302.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, as amended by both parties, created an independent central bank that could operate outside of politics—i.e., it could do things frowned upon by Congress and the public. The act, as amended in 1977, commands the Fed to promote "the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." The message going out from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Jon Kyl, and Eric Cantor was: Don't do as you're told.

"You don't want to turn over monetary policy to the whims of political and maybe even populist views of the time," says Tony Fratto, a spokesman for the Treasury Department in the George W. Bush administration. "This criticism from Republicans is way off-base. I think it's evidence of some misunderstanding of the Fed's statutory mandate."

Bureaucratic Drift and the CIA

When we begin - in 2302 - to look at the executive branch, we will note the concept of bureaucratic drift, which refers to the tendency of the mission of an agency to shift gradually over time from what it was originally intended to do, to what the agency - or the president - would prefer it to do.

Here are a couple of stories which show hos the CIA has been transformed since 9/11 "from an intelligence-collection and -analysis operation into a shadow military force."

- An Army in the Shadows

- CIA shifts focus to killing targets.

From the NYT: Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules

We can consider this when we discuss elections, interest groups in 2301 and the executive branch in 2302:

President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The White House announcement came barely an hour after another weak jobs report from the Labor Department and in the midst of an intensifying political debate over the impact of federal regulations on job creation that is already a major focus of the presidential campaign.

If I Were President ...

The NYT has a fun piece where they asked different people what they would do if they were president. It's worth a quick read, but as you do, its worth wondering whether what they propose is actually feasible. While we tend to think of the president as one of the more powerful - if not the most powerful - positions in the world, we forget that the office exists within a system of checks and balances. Presidents do not have magic wands they can wave and make things happen automatically.

Its also worth remembering that before one can be president, one has to have the political skills - or connections - to become president.

The Constitution and the Debt Ceiling

Here are a few links touching on the different issues raised regarding the constitution, the national debt and presidential power. It's worth considering whether the Constitution is internally contradictory. Example: We are supposed to honor debts, but no entity other than Congress can borrow money, which means that there is no entity that can force Congress to honor debts.

- Under What Circumstances Can The President Ignore the Debt Ceiling?

- The Legislative History of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.
- More on the Original Meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.

- Laurence Tribe Responds to Secretary Geithner.
- Is Section 4 Alive?

- The Debt Limit Debate and the War Powers Debate
- A Ceiling We Can’t Wish Away