Justice Stevens Retires

April 9, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Presidents, Senate, Supreme Court, White House | 1 Comment 

Less than an hour ago word came from Washington that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who was selected by President Ford as William O. Douglas’s replacement in 1975, has announced that he will retire when the Court’s spring term concludes at the end of June. In recent interviews, Stevens, who turns 90 on April 20, has emphasized that he has no interest in trying to break Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s record as the oldest person to sit on the Court, or Douglas’s as its longest-serving Justice. But his announcement is still somewhat surprising.

The Justice’s decision to retire presents another challenge to the Obama White House, of finding a nominee who can be confirmed by a majority of the Senate with no more debate and controversy than that which surrounded the comparatively smooth progress of Justice Sonia Sotomayor through the nomination process. As the Washington Post notes today, the candidate who seems most favored by the President at the moment is his Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, previously the dean of Harvard Law School. Ms. Kagan was confirmed for the Federal post by a Senate vote of 61-31 in March 2009, which might seem to augur well for her appointment to the Court. But quite a lot has changed in thirteen months, and the process may well be a tougher one for such a selection now.

Thomas Mallon Looks At “The Pink Lady”

January 9, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

In November, TNN’s Frank Gannon wrote about the appearance in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast of an excerpt from The Pink Lady, the new biography by Sally Denton of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress-turned-Congressperson who was defeated by then-Rep. Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate in 1950.

Denton’s book is now in the stores, and is reviewed in the current issue of the New York Times Book Review by Thomas Mallon, the eminent historical novelist and critic. He criticizes the biography for many of the same faults (sketchy research, questionable assumptions) that Frank found in the excerpt.

What really grabbed my attention, however, is the notice at the review’s conclusion that Mallon is now at work on a novel about Watergate. His 2007 novel Fellow Travelers is an expert study of Washington during the McCarthy era, with RN as a supporting character, so I am very keen to see how he’ll write about the days of ‘72 and ‘73.

(Here, it’s worth mentioning that longtime Washington journalist Roy Hoopes died a few weeks ago at the age of 87. His best-known books are Our Man In Washington, a mystery story starring H. L. Mencken, and the definitive biography of novelist James M. Cain, but his last book, A Watergate Tape, is also the most recent novel that I know of about that affair.)

Millions For Defense. And Now Also For Tribute.

September 25, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, Senate | 2 Comments 

As reported by Bryan Bender in today’s Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON – A large military spending bill moving through Congress contains a little-noticed outlay for Boston that has nothing to do with national defense: $20 million for an educational institute honoring late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

The earmark, tucked into the defense bill at the request of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, requires US taxpayers to help the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate realize its goal of building a repository for Kennedy’s papers and an accompanying civic learning center on the University of Massachusetts at Boston campus in Dorchester, next to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

Kerry strongly defended the insertion of the $20 million earmark yesterday. He requested that it be included in the $360 billion defense budget, he said, to recognize Kennedy’s long tenure on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The institute will serve as a focal point for the late Massachusetts senator’s legacy, much as presidential libraries do. It will house Kennedy’s official papers and oral histories from the nearly half-century he served in the Senate. With a museum and exhibit space, it also will be dedicated to educating the general public, students, teachers, new US senators, and Senate staff about the role and importance of the Senate in American political life. The institute plans to host an annual “Summer Senate’’ for high school students from across the nation.

The $20 million earmark would cover as much as 40 percent of the institute’s initial fund-raising goal.

Beyond raising questions about the practice of slipping earmarks into bills in Congress, the provision also presents a potential ethical question for Paul Kirk, the longtime Kennedy aide Governor Deval Patrick appointed to fill the late senator’s seat yesterday.

Kirk, who stepped down yesterday as chairman of the JFK Library Foundation, has also served as a member of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute board and has played a key role in helping plan and raise funds for the new center. If he casts a vote in favor of the defense bill, he also will be voting in favor of an institute to which he has had close personal and professional connections.

A spokeswoman for Kirk, Stephanie Cutter, said yesterday that he does not see his roles as conflicting.

“Mr. Kirk expects to vote on every issue important to the people of Massachusetts. He resigned from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute board at 8 a.m. this morning, so we don’t expect a conflict to exist, but of course he’ll comply fully with the ethics rules of the Senate,’’ Cutter said in an e-mailed statement. She did not respond to a question about what role, if any, he played in securing the $20 million earmark.

Kirk is not running in the January special election for a new senator to fill out the remainder of Kennedy’s term. He has not yet said whether he intends to return to the JFK Library Foundation once his interim Senate appointment expires.

At Kerry’s request, Senator Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, added the $20 million earmark to the defense bill, congressional aides said. The funding would come on top of $5 million secured with Kerry’s help earlier this year in a Labor Department spending bill, which provided money for the institute’s planning and design.

The center had raised an additional $20 million in private donations earlier this year, and more money has been contributed by members of the public since Kennedy’s death last month from brain cancer, said Joe Ganley, an institute spokesman. Ultimately, Ganley said, the majority of the center’s funding will come from private donors, not taxpayers. He said many of Boston’s most influential civic leaders, including businessman Jack Connors, are helping to raise funds.

The institute’s president, and it’s only staff member so far, is Peter Meade, a former Blue Cross-Blue Shield executive who also serves on the board of the JFK Library Foundation. Meade was unavailable for comment yesterday, Ganley said.

Using the national defense budget for such earmarks is considered a particular affront by those advocating for fiscal discipline in the midst of two wars that are straining Pentagon coffers. Overall, the Senate version of the bill includes 778 earmarks worth $2.65 billion, including a number that have little or nothing to do with military matters.

A major concern is what gets cut from the Pentagon budget to make room for things like the Kennedy institute, said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Strauss Military Reform Project at the left-leaning Center for Defense Information in Washington.

“The committee did not add money to the bill to pay for its billions of dollars in pork,’’ Wheeler said.

A spokesman for Inouye declined to explain why the Kennedy institute earmark was inserted into the Pentagon budget, rather than into an education bill or other piece of legislation. In a statement released by his office, Inouye said, “It is my sincere hope that many of these students will be inspired to seek a life of public service, with the same spirit of patriotism and love of country that I saw each and every day from Senator Kennedy.’’

While Kerry said using the defense budget to fund Kennedy’s institute was a tribute to his “leadership on military technology, weapons systems, and safety equipment for our troops,’’ Wheeler said he believes there is a more practical reason.

“It’s a natural for Kerry to go to Inouye on this,’’ Wheeler said. “If it’s in the defense bill it must be a good idea. And the defense bill is sure to pass. He wanted a fast vehicle to get it enacted.’’

Is It Something In The Okra?

September 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Healthcare, Presidents, Senate, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Many were shocked tonight when Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, shouted “you lie” at President Obama during the latter’s speech on health care before Congress. Wilson promptly apologized. But it certainly is the case that the demeanor of Congressmen from South Carolina, when their ire is provoked, has improved substantially over the years. Below, an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Preston Brooks, a (Democratic) Representative from the Palmetto State in the years before the Civil War:

On May 22, 1856, Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner [of Massachusetts] with his gutta-percha wood walking cane in the Senate chamber because of a speech Sumner had made three days earlier, criticizing President Franklin Pierce and Southerners who sympathized with the pro-slavery violence in Kansas (“Bleeding Kansas”). In particular, Sumner lambasted Brooks’ kinsman, Senator Andrew Butler, who was not in attendance when the speech was read, describing slavery as a harlot, comparing Butler with Don Quixote for embracing it, and mocking Butler for a physical handicap. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who was also a subject of abuse during the speech, suggested to a colleague while Sumner was orating that “this damn fool [Sumner] is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.”

At first intending to challenge Sumner to a duel, Brooks consulted with fellow South Carolina Rep. Laurence M. Keitt on dueling etiquette. Keitt instructed him that dueling was for gentlemen of equal social standing, and suggested that Sumner occupied a lower social status comparable to a drunkard due to the supposedly coarse language he had used during his speech. Brooks thus decided to attack Sumner with a cane.

Two days after the speech, on the afternoon of May 22, Brooks confronted Sumner as he sat writing at his desk in the almost empty Senate chamber. Brooks was accompanied by Keitt and Henry A. Edmundson of Virginia. Brooks said, “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” As Sumner began to stand up, Brooks began beating Sumner on the head with his thick gutta-percha cane with a gold head. Sumner was trapped under the heavy desk (which was bolted to the floor), but Brooks continued to bash Sumner until he ripped the desk from the floor. By this time, Sumner was blinded by his own blood, and he staggered up the aisle and collapsed, lapsing into unconsciousness. Brooks continued to beat Sumner until he broke his cane, then quietly left the chamber. Several other senators attempted to help Sumner, but were blocked by Keitt who was holding a pistol and shouting “Let them be!” (Keitt would be censured for his actions and later died of wounds in 1864 during the US Civil War.)

Sumner was unable to return to his Senate duties for more than three years while he recovered.

As for Brooks, he died of “the croup” seven months after the attack.

Some Politics Is More Local Than Others

September 8, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Senate | 1 Comment 

In Sunday’s Boston Herald, the inimitable Howie Carr —the longtime bane of Kennedy and scourge of Kerry— examined the odds and the consequences of Joe Kennedy running for his uncle’s Senate seat.

Apparently the former congressman has renounced the seat that would almost certainly have been his for the declaring — which, as Carr pointed out, would have been a case of being careful what you wish for.  And Carr’s handicapping of the other possible candidates is worth checking out.

You’re Joe Kennedy, and there are only three ways this whole Senate thing can work out for you.

No. 1, you run and “win” a life sentence to the Senate, and a decade from now, you’ll look in the mirror and see … Chris Dodd.

No. 2, you run and you lose, as unlikely as that now seems, and that’s the end of the Kennedy dynasty, once and for all, and it’s your fault.

No. 3, you give the race a good leaving-alone. You keep collecting that $544,792 salary from your energy companies and never have to worry about getting a call from some newspaper wiseguy about what have you done lately for Pam Kelley, the girl who wound up in a wheelchair for life thanks to your crappy driving on Nantucket in 1973.

You’re Joe Kennedy, and it’s a pretty easy decision, isn’t it, except that … you’re a Kennedy.

What would Hugo Chavez do?

More On Ted Kennedy, Nixon, And Health Care

August 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Healthcare, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

The story of how President Nixon’s plan for comprehensive health care for all Americans fell by the wayside in 1974 because Sen. Ted Kennedy thought it possible to get a plan more to his liking enacted after a Democratic President entered the Oval Office has been the subject of several previous posts at TNN, and the Senator’s death late last night has served to remind J. Lester Feder of this. His post at Newsweek.com today, in part, reads:

[T]he Obama health reform package Kennedy supported in his last days is similar to one Kennedy helped defeat when proposed by President Richard Nixon. If anything, the Obama plan is more conservative. Nixon would have mandated that all employers offer coverage to their employees, while creating a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. It would take a miracle to pass such a plan today—a public insurance plan and an employer mandate are two provisions of the proposals now in congress that are most in doubt.

But Kennedy helped kill Nixon’s proposal not only because he preferred a government insurance option for everyone, but because he believed it was politically achievable. Medicare, the government program for the elderly, was then only nine years old, enacted as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to expand the social safety net. Liberals hoped this would be a first step towards a national health insurance program that the next Democratic president could enact. That victory seemed around the corner—Nixon proposed his plan in 1974, while embattled in the Watergate scandal.

President Jimmy Carter did not make health reform a priority, however, and Kennedy later regretted rejecting Nixon’s proposal. “It was a rare moment in his senate career where he made a fundamental miscalculation about what was politically possible—a lot of liberals did,” says Yale University political scientist and progressive health reform advocate Jacob Hacker. “What was not recognized by anyone at the time was that this was the end of the New Deal Era. What would soon come crashing over them was the tax revolts” that ushered in Ronald Reagan and a conservative, anti-government philosophy.

For a generation born after the “Reagan Revolution” it’s hard to describe the degree to which Ronald Reagan’s rise to the Presidency came as a complete shock to the liberal elites and intelligentsia, especially in such places as Georgetown and Cambridge. In his autobiography The Prince Of Darkness, the late Robert Novak mentions a column he wrote in 1965 after seeing Reagan speak, when the latter was still a year away from running for governor of California; in it, he compared Reagan’s style at the podium to JFK’s. Novak writes that after the column appeared, his fellow journalist Mary McGrory called him, aghast, to ask how he could possibly compare the late President to a washed-up actor. And the truth is that, as an examination of newspapers from 1976 and even 1979 shows, many pundits took it as an article of faith that Reagan, even if nominated, would meet with the same fate as Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Ted Kennedy’s Plea

August 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Healthcare, Presidents, Republican Party, Senate, U.S. History | 6 Comments 

The absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy last week from the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, followed by the death on Tuesday morning of columnist Robert Novak, who was diagnosed with brain cancer not long after the lawmaker fell ill from the same cause, has served to remind Americans that the lawmaker’s days, sadly, are numbered. Still, discussion of what is to follow after his passing, politically speaking, has been muted.

That was the case until this morning, when news came that the Senator had sent a message to Massachusetts legislators asking them to reconsider a change in the law they enacted in 2004. At that time, Kennedy’s colleague in the Senate, John Kerry, appeared to have a good chance of attaining the Oval Office. This raised the question of what would happen were he to leave his seat. It was thought by many Democratic bigwigs in the state that Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a fellow Republican as Kerry’s replacement, if it came to that, to serve until a special election could be called.

Even though no Republican has been elected from the state to the Senate since Edward Brooke was re-elected in 1972, the idea of a member of the GOP joining Ted in the Senate for even a few months was so horrific a prospect to legislators at the Boston statehouse that they enacted a law removing the power to appoint Senators from the governor and specifying that in the event of a Senator’s death or resignation, his or her seat was to remain vacant until it could be filled in a special election within 145 to 160 days – that is, about five months. As for the time in between – well, better, obviously, that Massachusetts be represented by only one person in the world’s greatest deliberative body than that a Republican should take the other seat for an instant.

At the time, neither Kennedy nor Kerry raised any objections to this line of reasoning. But now the senior gentleman from Massachusetts has had second thoughts. His statement informed the Boston lawmakers that, given the likelihood of a razor-thin vote in the Senate regarding health-care legislation, it was imperative that Massachusetts have two members at hand to help decide the issue.

There’s certainly more to this than just health care, however. For fully fifty-six years – over one-fourth of the Senate’s history – one of the two Massachusetts seats has been occupied, with a two-year interruption, by one of two brothers. First, there was John F. Kennedy, from 1953 until he won the Presidency in 1960. He resigned his Senate seat on December 22 of that year, and five days later Benjamin Smith, his Harvard roomate, was appointed to replace him. Smith remained a Senator until Ted Kennedy turned thirty and thus became Constitutionally eligible to be elected. The younger Kennedy won a special election for the seat in November 1962, and immediately after Election Day Smith resigned and Ted took his place.

The start and end of Smith’s tenure were situations where the Kennedy clan felt comfortable with having a Governor make appointments to the Senate, and now Ted seeks to have this power restored to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. So far, the Senator hasn’t specified whether he has anyone in mind to replace him; his wife, Victoria, has let it be known that she does not plan to do so.

But it has been reported that Ted wishes to see another Kennedy reach the Senate, though so far it’s been a difficult wish to fulfill. Regular TNN readers will recall that at the end of last year, when President Obama chose Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the Camelot clan attempted to stir up sentiment for Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg to take her place, resulting in a media frenzy of several weeks before Ms. Schlossberg took herself out of the running after a series of gaffes. A few months ago there was some talk of Robert Kennedy’s son Christopher, the president of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, seeking the Senate seat formerly occupied by Obama, since its present occupant, appointee Roland Burris, has said he will not seek election. But more recently it’s been reported that Christopher Kennedy is eyeing the Illinois governorship.

So speculation, after the Senator’s announcement, has started to focus on former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, his nephew, as his replacement. The younger Kennedy’s career in the House was not especially distinguished and in a contested election, were he not the incumbent, he’d probably find it an uphill battle, not least because of his ham-handed annulment of his first marriage in the early 1990s. But being appointed to the Senate would give him something of an edge when the special election came around.

But even if Joseph II makes it into the Senate, I wouldn’t bet on his seeking a second full term. By 2012, when Ted Kennedy’s term would have expired, he’ll be sixty, and, even in Massachusetts, the electorate probably prefers its Kennedys to be young and charismatic. And, by that time, four or five of the great-grandchildren of Old Joe and Rose Kennedy will be out of law school and ready for high office. (At the present time, only one member of this generation is over thirty – Robert Kennedy’s granddaughter Meaghan Townsend, a yoga instructor in Los Angeles. And just seven or eight are old enough to join their cousin Patrick Kennedy in the House.) In any event, during the next year or so we’ll find out if Camelot is vanishing into the mists of memory or is ready to begin another chapter – assuming the voters want it.

Two Anniversaries

August 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Apollo XI XLth, Healthcare, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Last month the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s historic moonwalk, was the subject of many hours of TV coverage and commentary, and of innumerable column-inches of articles and op-eds in what remains of American newsmagazines and the daily press – not to mention what was written and pictured online.  Next weekend, when Woodstock turns 40, we’ll undoubtedly see an almost equal amount of coverage. 

Back in 1969, these two events were seen by some to represent opposite, perhaps irreconcilable sides of the nation; it may be that for every mud-soaked hippie and teenager in Woodstock who was willing to grant that walking on the moon was “far out,” there were two that would have complained about all the “bread” spent on getting the astronauts to the lunar surface when there were, “like,” so many things wrong with the inner cities, and the environment that needed fixing.  (“Tricia, Tell Your Daddy,” co-written in 1969 by former Phil Spector collaborator Jeff Barry and Jay And The Americans’s Marty Sanders, and recorded by the latter’s band as well as bubblegum singer Andy Kim, presents these sentiments in musical form.)  But today, Woodstock and Apollo tend to be seen in the nostalgic mist of memory and idealism, two sides of the same cherished coin. 

Two other, less happy anniversaries have gone more or less unnoticed.  The Media Research Center’s website pointed out last month that on July 21, 1969, and in the succeeding days before and after Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins splashed down, coverage of the Apollo mission had to jostle for attention with the news coming out of Massachusetts, after it was revealed that Sen. Edward Kennedy, on the night of July 18, had driven off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island adjoining Martha’s Vineyard, and that while he had survived the accident, his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had not.

What happened that night – and in the following days, as Sen. Kennedy tried to explain what had happened -  ended the senator’s hopes for the Presidency, as became clear when he unsuccessfully challenged President Carter in 1980.  But two generations now have no memory of Chappaquiddick, and, in any event, with Sen. Kennedy now gravely ill, it’s understandable that last month the anniversary of this tragedy passed with little comment. (Indeed, I only glancingly thought about Chappaquiddick in late July, and I have more reason to recall it than most: on July 25, 1969, I sat with Sen. Edmund Muskie in a hotel room in New Albany, Indiana, while he watched Kennedy give his televised speech about what had happened – a speech that, at that instant, made Muskie the Democratic front-runner in the 1972 race.)

As the Media Research Center article notes, the anniversary went unnoticed on the evening network newscasts;  Bill Maher unexpectedly brought it up to his startled panelists on his HBO show Real Time, but other than that it went unmentioned on the air.  Ken Rudin devoted a post to Chappaquiddick at his political blog at NPR’s site on July 21 and was deluged with angry comments. Jeff Simon, the arts editor of the Buffalo News, was the only columnist in a daily newspaper to write about the anniversary, and Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor, spoke about it in his column in the magazine’s July 27 issue, which was mainly devoted to a long article by Kennedy about the need for comprehensive health-care legislation. 

To turn to another event, which happened thirty-five years ago this weekend: as recently as 2004, the anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation was the subject of  a fair number of articles and op-eds every five years.  But in 2007, the Watergate break-in’s 35th received much less notice than before.  Most likely this not only had to do with the passage of time, but with the fact that Vanity Fair’s unveiling of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” in 2005 removed the mystery that was the linchpin for much of what was written about Watergate in the previous quarter-century.

And such has been the case with this year’s anniversary of RN’s resignation. So far I’ve spotted three items of much significance. One is a column by Matt Lewis in Politics Daily which also reproduces RN’s August 9 remarks in the East Room in toto.  Another is a column by onetime Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein in the American Spectator, in which he reminisces, once more, about being present for those remarks, and notes that the resignation had the effect of introducing the first major note of uncertainty in his own life.  The third is an interview with Nixon’s chief of staff at the time of the resignation, Gen. Alexander M. Haig, in the Palm Beach Post.  There, Gen. Haig remarks:

“Watergate was misunderstood because people didn’t realize they had a very visionary president in Richard Nixon,” Haig said. “The only thing that kept him from office, which was his own fault probably and he’d be the first to admit it, is that he wasn’t lovable. That’s because he was preoccupied with the consequences of his acts, and he always took action only after very careful and systematic analysis.”

Haig said it was Nixon, not Ronald Reagan, who should be credited for ending the Cold War.

“He opened the door to China and that won the Cold War without a shot being fired,” Haig said. “People never understood what going to China meant.”

The Case Of The Amiable Applicant

July 18, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Senate, Supreme Court | 1 Comment 

This week marked the more or less official beginning of the Al Franken Slightly-Less-Than-Three-Fifths-of-a-Decade (Saturday Night Live fans, at least those of 1979-era vintage, will recognize the reference) and it started in a suitably bizarre way.

At the Senate hearings to consider the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the junior Senator from Minnesota bided his time, then sprang a surprise question. Judge Sotomayor had earlier said that she was in part inspired to become a prosecutor by watching the Perry Mason TV series.

It might have been a good time for Sen. Franken to ask how it was that seeing William Talman (in his role as District Attorney Hamilton Burger) losing the prosecution’s case week after week, season after season, could inspire her to follow in his footsteps.

Instead, Franken asked Judge Sotomayor to name the one case that Perry Mason lost on the show. She couldn’t do it. Another senator asked the former Stuart Smalley if he knew the name of the episode. Franken said he didn’t know.

This exchange, naturally, sent reporters to consulting the Wikipedia entry for the series and the several sites devoted to the show. There, they learned that Franken’s question was more confusing that it at first appeared.

There are three episodes in which Perry Mason loses a case. (At this point, TNN readers in Orange County can skip a few paragraphs, since I presume nearly all of them have seen these shows at least a thousand times apiece on KDOC during the last 27 years.)

“The Case Of The Witless Witness,” from 1963, which opens with Mason (played, of course, by the late Raymond Burr) losing an appeal (after his client, evidently, is convicted at trial). However, the plot of the episode does not focus on Mason’s defeat; rather, it sets up a situation where the judge who rules against Mason in appellate court is accused of murder and Perry gallantly takes his case and prevails in the courtroom.

During the show’s first season, “The Case Of The Terrified Typist” featured Mason losing a case, and discovering, on further examination, that his client is indeed guilty. However, it turns out that the name the client is using has been stolen from someone else, in a style somewhat anticipating today’s wave of identity thefts; that, and some other circumstances, enable the attorney to obtain a mistrial ruling, and at the show’s conclusion the implication is that the dishonest defendant will be tried again, with some other lawyer handling him.

The third episode, from 1963, seems to be the one that Judge Sotomayor had in mind, from what she said to Franken, but could not name. This is “The Case Of The Deadly Verdict.” In it, Mason’s defendant is convicted and it looks like Burger finally has the chance to find out what the thrill of victory is all about. But Perry, with Della and Paul’s help, looks into the matter further and finds out that his client has been withholding some facts from him. This leads him to discover the identity of the real murderer.

And at this point we come upon a conundrum truly worthy of the late Erle Stanley Gardner: why Al Franken would not be able to remember the title of “Deadly Verdict” when the actor playing the villain in it was his own second cousin, Stephen Franken. (Yes, the same Stephen Franken who attained pop-culture immortality as Chatsworth Osborne, the quintessential rich kid from Dobie Gillis – not to mention his role as Levinson the waiter in the 1968 film The Party, in which he displays prodigies of timing and comic skill that are to Al’s efforts what the arias of Kirsten Flagstad are to those of Florence Foster Jenkins.)

But I’ll leave it to wiser minds to puzzle that out. Right now it’s time to explain the title of this post. The Washington Post’s article about Franken’s exchange with the judge moved one of its readers to send a letter which the paper published today.

The letter’s writer, Beth Kravetz, said the colloquy of lawmaker and lawgiver put her in mind of a time in the early 1980s when she visited the offices of the National Association of Truck Stop Operators to talk to that organization’s president, former Nixon White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, about a job.

“With little in the way of general niceties” (as Ms. Kravetz tells it), Ziegler asked her to name the nine members of the Supreme Court. “I was surprised by the question,” Ms. Kravetz informs us, “and answered that I could more easily name the Seven Dwarfs, which I proceeded to do. The interview ended shortly thereafter.”

Now, it is most likely true that most Americans, at any given time since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937, could more easily name Dopey, Doc and the rest of the gang than the nine justices. But I wonder if even the enormous investigative and logical capacities of Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake would be up to explaining why Ms. Kravetz was surprised that Ron Ziegler was asking her to identify the members of the Court when she, a 1974 graduate of Georgetown University’s law school who presumably had studied cases bearing the names of most of the justices, was applying to work as general counsel of his organization.

I have the feeling that we will be seeing even greater wonders as the Franken era continues.

A Look Into The Cabinet

July 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, White House | Leave a Comment 

The death at age 93 of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, stirs up a whole host of memories for people of a certain age – as many (and as mixed) as are stirred up by the death of Michael Jackson where a younger generation is concerned.

But it is worth mentioning, as well, that with McNamara’s passing, two members are left from the Cabinet of John F. Kennedy’s administration, which ended more than 45 years ago: Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz (who is, at 97, the oldest living ex-Cabinet member) and 89-year-old Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, whose late brother, Rep. Mo Udall, was tagged with the “too funny to be President” label back when Mike Huckabee was still fresh out of college.

The living members of Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet include Wirtz, Udall, Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach (who succeeded Robert Kennedy as Attorney General), Ramsey Clark (who succeeded Katzenbach), America’s first Secretary of Transportation Alan Boyd, and W. Marvin Watson, who is the last survivor of the 53 men who held the position of Postmaster General between Andrew Jackson’s raising it to Cabinet level in 1829 and its removal from the Cabinet in 1971.

There are eleven living former members of Richard Nixon’s Cabinet. These are Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon’s last Secretary of State; Melvin Laird and James R. Schlesinger, respectively his first and last Secretary of Defense; William Saxbe, his last Attorney General; Walter J. Hickel, his first Secretary of the Interior; George P. Shultz, who was Secretary of Labor and later Secretary of the Treasury; Peter G. Peterson, Secretary of Commerce from 1972 to 1973; Frederick Dent, who succeeded Peterson; James D. Hodgson, Secretary of Labor after Shultz; Clifford Hardin, Nixon’s first Secretary of Agriculture; and James T. Lynn, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

It seems to be the case that former Cabinet members are living longer these days. James Farley, Roosevelt’s Postmaster General from 1933 to 1940 (who briefly challenged him for the Presidency in the latter year), was the last living member of his Cabinet when he died in 1976, thirty-one years after the end of FDR’s administration. Charles Brannan, the last survivor of the Truman Cabinet (in which he was Secretary of Agriculture), died in 1992, a few months short of forty years after that administration’s conclusion. On Jan. 2, 2001, eighteen days short of four decades after the end of the Eisenhower administration, came the death of William P. Rogers, the second and last Attorney General in (and last survivor of) Ike’s cabinet. (He was also RN’s first Secretary of State.)

As the years pass, one becomes aware of how whole eras of American politics seem to slip away before one’s eyes. The last person who was a prominent figure in Theodore Roosevelt’s White House, his daughter Alice Longworth, died as recently as 1980, toward the end of the Carter administration and over 70 years after her father left office. It’s now 64 years since Franklin Roosevelt died; at almost the same moment as Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett breathed their last came the passing of the 93-year-old Texan, Creekmore Fath, who, as a young Senate committee counsel, became a favorite of FDR’s and so was one of the very last figures left from the New Deal.

Unclubbable Man Joins World’s Most Exclusive Club

June 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Senate | 1 Comment 

Robert Nedelkoff has examined the mathematics of Senator-Elect Franken’s “victory.”

The Wall Street Journal today examines the ethics of the Franken camp’s found-votes recount strategy:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

In politics, as in life, you make your own luck.  Republicans tend to take a half-hearted —not to say half-assed— approach to the rough and tumble of electoral politics.  This is through excesses of timidity rather than of virtue, to be sure — but the result is the same.  And the word for the candidate who comes in second is still “loser.”

As far as the Senate Democrats who have so eagerly awaited the arrival of this new colleague — good luck to them.  I suspect that they may soon be experiencing a case of the “be careful what you wish for” syndrome.  As Robert Nedelkoff indicates, the world’s most exclusive club will now be welcoming an unclubbable man.  During my several years at Late Night with David Letterman and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, I only dealt with a handful of people who were truly  unpleasant and disagreeable.  The soon-to-be Junior Senator from Minnesota was a member in bad standing of that unappealing club.

Stanley Kutler On The Sotomayor Choice

May 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, Supreme Court, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

At the Huffington Post Stanley I. Kutler, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, discusses President Obama’s selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Professor Kutler, who was the subject of some TNN posts last year concerning challenges to transcriptions of White House recordings that he presented in his book Abuse Of Power, begins with the statement, referring to Judge Sotomayor’s rise from poverty to the heights of accomplishment, that “[l]ife narratives are compelling, and Sotomayor clearly has one, perhaps side-by-side with the President’s — and Clarence Thomas.”

To mention Justice Thomas in this context is bound to make many liberals wince. Like Judge Sotomayor, the justice was educated in Catholic schools – and he subsequently converted to the Catholic faith, whereas Judge Sotomayor was born into it. Judge Sotomayor’s views, as expressed off the bench at various academic forums, sometimes suggest some kinship to those of the late Dorothy Day, who combined social radicalism with a committed pro-life agenda, and who unhesitatingly called abortion “genocide.”

In a previous TNN post I noted that in one case concerning a challenge to the Bush Administration’s refusing to fund international organizations that advocated abortion, Judge Sotomayor decided for the administration. Her opinion in that case did not conform to the idea of abortion-as-universal-human-right supported by much of the pro-choice contingent. It makes one wonder whether she might turn out to be the Harriet Miers of the Obama era – too conservative on one or two particular issues for some in the President’s party, far too liberal in other issues for the opposition.

Another concern of Kutler’s in this article, not unexpectedly, is to wax nostalgic for the days before 1968 (and the ascension of the dreaded RN to the White House), when “Supreme Court nominations only rarely resulted in contentious confirmation battles.” He remarks that among Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nominees to the Court, only Hugo Black stirred much opposition, as a result of his brief membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Well, by the time FDR had the chance to make his first nomination to the Court, the Democrats were solidly in control of the Senate, and that remained the case until the end of his Presidency. If he had had to confront a predominantly Republican Senate over his Court choices, as RN was obliged to confront one that was Democratic, Roosevelt might well have had one or two or more of his choices rejected. Before FDR, Herbert Hoover had had one of his Court selections narrowly rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate (John J. Parker). And then again, Kutler seems to forget the titanic struggle between the White House and a Democratic-controlled Congress over FDR’s “court-packing” plan in 1937.

Between FDR and Nixon, only Harry Truman, from 1947 until 1949, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were faced with Congresses in which the opposition had a majority. Truman was not called upon to fill a Court vacancy during that time; Eisenhower’s five choices all enjoyed considerable bipartisan support. At the end of his Presidency, Lyndon Johnson met with opposition to his choice of Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice, partly from Southerners in his own party, and the nomination was withdrawn.

Since RN, the selections made by Presidents to the Court have almost always met with trouble if the Senate was controlled by the opposing party. (Gerald Ford’s selection of John Paul Stevens, and George Bush’s choice of David Souter, were the exceptions.) When the Republicans were the Senate majority from 1981 until 1986, Ronald Reagan’s selections of Justices O’Connor and Scalia, and his elevation of Justice Rehnquist to Chief Justice, went through the Senate comfortably. When the Democrats were back in control of the Senate, that chamber rejected Robert Bork. So, Kutler’s notion to the contrary, strife between the White House and the Senate over Court choices didn’t start with Nixon, and if it hasn’t ended since his time, that’s not his doing.

Kutler also muses on the subject of judicial activism vs. strict construction, that duality upon which many a debate about the Court has centered since the 1960s. He somewhat slyly remarks that whereas Nixon’s statements after the Engel v. Vitale decision of 1962, which ruled against prayer in public schools, criticized Justice Black’s majority opinion as leaning too far toward a strict interpretation of the Establishment Clause, as President he was a strong supporter of a literal interpretation of the Constitution. Kutler makes it clear that he sees Judge Sotomayor as leaning toward the activist side, and that he thinks this is all for the best. But are liberals really ready for the judge to be an activist where it might be inconvenient for them?

Harry Reid’s Day (Way) Off

May 19, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, News media, Senate | 1 Comment 

Last week, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, stumbled her way through a chaotic press conference in which she tried to explain why it was that her account of her briefings by the CIA six years ago differed so much from the accounts of others who were present.

Today, it was the turn of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to embarrass himself before the press. Speaking to assembled members of the Fourth Estate, he was asked about the absence from the Senate chamber of Sen. Ted Kennedy. Reid stated that the senator was continuing to undergo treatment for brain cancer. Asked if the cancer was in remission, the gentleman from Nevada replied in the affirmative. Reporters checking with Kennedy’s own office later were pointedly told that the office would not confirm that statement or make any other response, and even before the conference ended Jim Manley, Reid’s own spokesman (and a longtime Kennedy staffer in years past) was retracting the statement.

Reid was also asked about the status of ailing Sen. Robert Byrd. He told the reporters that the 91-year-old legislator was to be released from the hospital sometime this week – a statement promptly denied by Byrd’s own spokesman.

Speaking about President Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo’s prison and transfer its inmates to American facilities, Reid declared: “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.” As Laurie Kellman observes in this AP account, no one at the White House had been advocating that terrorists run wild around this nation – another gaffe that Manley had to clarify.

All of this brings to mind the process by which Sen. Rod Burris finessed his way into his seat after Reid repeatedly declared he wouldn’t. Can the Democrats afford to keep Reid as Majority Leader until November of next year?

Gay Marriage Reaches The Crossroads

May 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Election 2012, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Senate | 2 Comments 

The Obama Administration enjoyed a number of small triumphs this week.  The Dow stayed well over 8500. Despite an increase in unemployment, the overall economic picture has been showing signs of improvement.  The President announced some budget trims here and there, to the tune of $17 billion – just to make sure that the country understood that, when faced with an obsolete directional system, for example, he was not going to keep it around just because he’s a Democrat.

But on Tuesday an event happened that may well snowball into something that the White House, and Democrats on Capitol Hill, would probably not care to get involved with just yet. But more and more, it is becoming inescapable: after a Presidential campaign in which Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither much of a mainstream figure) were the only candidates to support gay marriage, a situation is looming in which every Senate and House member may have to declare themselves on one side or another of the issue, and very soon.

Last year, there was talk about introducing a gay-marriage bill into the District of Columbia City Council. At the time, the capital’s newspaper for the gay community, the Washington Blade, argued that such a move was premature; it urged waiting until 2009. And so the proposal went unintroduced, as the nation elected a President who expressed support for the civil-union concept for gay couples, but drew the line at marriage.

This week,a few days after NBC News and the Washington Post announced poll results indicating, for the first time, that a plurality of Americans favor gay marriage (49%, with 46% opposed), the supporters of this legislation made their move, and so the City Council of the nation’s capital passed a bill recognizing gay marriages from other states, by a vote of 12 to 1.

The sole dissenting vote was cast by former Washington mayor Marion Barry. When it became evident that he would vote against the bill, this caused some surprise and consternation. For one thing, long before Barry’s drug use and lackadaisical administrative style gained him notoriety, he was one of the founders – indeed, the first chairman – of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee and, in those days, fought for civil rights alongside the iconic John Lewis, who now, as a Congressman, is a vocal champion of gay marriage.

And there’s also the fact that in his early years as mayor in the 1970s and early 1980s, Barry was a friend of gay rights, and his administration’s tolerant attitude had much to do with making the Dupont Circle neighborhood as much of a magnet for gays as Castro Street or the West Village. He also was a firm supporter of the Whitman-Walker clinic in the early days of its fight against AIDS, and Jim Graham, the longtime executive director of the clinic and one of the two openly gay City Council members, pointed this out (as seen in this Youtube clip) as he expressed his disappointment with Barry’s decision against the bill on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, David Catania, the council’s other gay member, represented the no-compromise attitude of younger gays in his remarks to Barry.)

Barry had actually gone on record as a sponsor of the bill when it was introduced. In the Youtube clip he suggests that his staffers had somehow arranged for this without his knowledge, but what is more likely is that strong opposition to recognition of gay marriages from churchgoers and older voters in Ward 8, which he represents, caused him to change his mind.

The council’s vote was greeted with a furious response from several African-American ministers in the area outside the meeting room, and it took the police to restore order, as seen in the clip. But this was far from the end of the story. On Wednesday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a onetime Brigham Young University football star and convert to the Mormon faith (and also to the Republican Party – his Democratic father’s first wife, Kitty, later married 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis), stated that he and other GOP lawmakers stood ready to challenge the new law within 30 days, as the Home Rule Charter provides.

Although the District’s representative in Congress, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, dismissed the idea that Congress will overturn the law, the situation is distinctly a worrisome one for the Democrats. It seems very likely that Republican lawmakers can garner enough support from their Democratic colleagues in the South and in the more conservative areas of the Midwest to force a vote.

And if the House votes to endorse the Council’s action, the next step for gay activists and their allies is plainly to seek the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by majorities of both parties and signed into law by President Clinton. Although voters, especially younger ones, seem to be steadily shifting toward support of gay unions, opposition still runs strong in a number of House districts that the Democrats only managed to recapture in the last two years, and in states, such as North Carolina, that were essential to Obama’s victory and which he would need in 2012. Therefore, both the White House and Congressional Democrats are walking a fine line for the next 18 months.

And the gay community is now determined to keep up the pressure, as shown in this editorial by Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff. He points out that President Obama, throughout his campaign, assured voters that he meant to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service personnel in place since 1993, and this language was repeated on the White House website after his inauguration. But then, the text was altered to refer to the President’s intention to change the policy “in a sensible way.” Following protests, this text was changed yet again, to state that the Admistration’s intention again is to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” – but, to the irritation of activists, the “in a sensible way” phrase was kept. Given the eagle-eyed attention directed at the website’s statements, it’s a sure thing that every statement Obama makes about the District’s new law, when it comes up for Congressional review, will be meticulously analyzed. This may be as thorny a situation as any Obama faces in his first term.

Rude Awakening, or The Edwards Zone Redux

May 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Ethics, News media, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Senate | 1 Comment 

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon (1851)

Most of what Marx said has been proven wrong by history, but that quote still holds up with a vengeance. The opening pages of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland describe vividly the days in which Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, having seemingly vanquished the forces of the Right for all eternity, was on the verge of ushering in a second Era Of Good Feelings (as defined by Democrats and seconded by Rockefeller Republicans) when the Watts riots gave the nation a brutal slap on the face and ushered in a series of violent and chaotic events that brought about the resurgence of conservatism.

In much the same way, as President Obama’s first 100 days closed last Wednesday with Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats and David Souter’s notifying the White House of his planned retirement, the stage seemed set for the final triumph of liberalism for this century, if not millennium. All that was needed was for Al Franken’s smirk to materialize in one chair in the Senate, and all would be well.

But alas, in the preceding weeks, a distant rumble of things to come could be heard. Early last month Knopf published How It Ended, the collected stories of Jay McInerney. best known for Bright Lights, Big City. This volume garnered its author the best reviews of his career. And, in some of these, it was mentioned that one of the tales in the book, “Penelope On The Pond,” imagined Alison Poole, the heroine of McInerney’s 1988 novel Story Of My Life, as a discarded mistress of a presidential candidate, biding her time in a quiet cabin somewhere in the Rockies. The reviews further noted that McInerney has often acknowledged that Alison Poole was based on Rielle Hunter.

Rielle Hunter? Wasn’t she involved with that guy who had the most famous hairdo in politics before Rod Blagojevich came along? Didn’t he once run for Vice President or something? What was his name, um…Edwards, John Edwards, right?

Yes, John Edwards, who, in the eight months since I last posted about him, heeded the bidding of the Democratic establishment and faded into the woodwork, appearing in public only at University of North Carolina basketball games, while Rielle Hunter, the mother of an infant girl whose precocious head of hair somehow brought him to mind, was banished from her mansion in Santa Barbara (after the death of her benefactor and Edwards’s finance chairman for his 2008 presidential run, Fred Baron, in October) and exiled to a modest house in South Orange, New Jersey. It seemed a sure thing that neither would be heard from again.

But that was before it was reported that Elizabeth Edwards, the terminally ill wife of the ex-Senator, was about to publish a new book, Resilience, in which she discusses her husband’s affair. And before the Raleigh News and Observer, which has quietly followed the ins and outs of the Edwards scandal ever since the onetime Veep-presumptive bamboozled the paper’s executive editor into killing an article about his affair in late 2007 (by denying it and claiming that such a story would cause needless suffering to his wife), informed America last Sunday that a Federal investigation into the financing of his 2008 campaign was now underway.

Yes, like the most evil genie imaginable, the Edwards Zone, with all its many mysteries involving campaign operatives with a taste for high-stakes gambling (and a propensity to claim parentage of babies whom they then completely ignore), trial lawyers who send their private planes on round trips from Texas to make hour-long stopovers in Caribbean islands noted for offshore banking, and nonprofit foundations that manage to channel millions to LLCs that abruptly vanish, has come back.

In a column to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd articulates the frustration that many liberals in the media must feel. It’s been long understood that John Edwards’s narcissism was close to uncontrollable; it took all the weight of the Democratic establishment to prevent him from touring college campuses last fall and to quietly go back to the Tar Heel State.

But what drives Elizabeth Edwards to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show, as she did today (for a taping that will be broadcast on Thursday), to speculate on how much or how little young Frances Quinn Hunter resembles the man who might have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in Ohio four and a half years ago? What is going to happen when Andrew Young (not the venerated lieutenant of Martin Luther King and former UN Ambassador, but the aforementioned operative) goes before a grand jury and is asked to explain why his own mother told a reporter she does not believe his claim, made through a lawyer, that he fathered Rielle Hunter’s daughter? Or when such a body ponders the question of why the chartered plane carrying Ms. Hunter and her daughter from California to the US Virgin Islands would make a quick stop in Mobile, Alabama, to acquire a passport for the infant – a passport not needed for travel to those islands, but necessary for, say, a visit to the Grand Turks and Caicos, to which the aforementioned private jet traveled for an hour during Ms. Hunter’s sojourn?

Last year, I wrote a dozen posts on this subject, and posed the questions that I think need to be raised by diligent Federal prosecutors to a grand jury. Some more have arisen, notably regarding the three million or so dollars donated to a nonprofit affiliated with Edwards by Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, the 98-year-old heiress who, until now, has been best known for providing her nation with the beautiful landscaping design that the South Lawn of the White House has had since the Kennedy Administration. (The nonprofit then paid an equivalent sum to an LLC – with the same address as the nonprofit, and which vanished from the records at the same time the nonprofit closed up shop in 2008 – for “consulting” work.)

If the Democrats have any luck, sullying Ms. Mellon’s legacy of Camelot will be the worst that John Edwards will do to the liberal tradition. But I have the feeling that there’s a considerable chance that the true dimensions of the events involving Edwards and his associates between 2006 and 2008 will  emerge, little by little. The question is how many journalists will follow the lead of the News and Observer (and some other North Carolina media) in looking into the scarifying revelations in the heart of….the Edwards Zone.

The Minnesota Senate Race: Read It And Weep

April 14, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Senate | 1 Comment 

Today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports the latest judicial ruling regarding the contested Minnesota Senate race.

Three judges soundly rejected Norm Coleman’s attempt to reverse Al Franken’s lead in the U.S. Senate election late Monday, sweeping away the Republican’s claims in a blunt ruling Coleman promised to appeal.

After a trial spanning nearly three months, the judicial panel dismissed Coleman’s central argument that the election and its aftermath were fraught with systemic errors that made the results invalid.

“The overwhelming weight of the evidence indicates that the Nov. 4, 2008, election was conducted fairly, impartially and accurately,” the panel said in its unanimous decision.

The panel concluded that Franken, a DFLer, “received the highest number of votes legally cast” in the election. Franken emerged from the trial with a 312-vote lead, the court ruled, and “is therefore entitled to receive the certificate of election.”

Last week Powerline’s Scott W. Johnson wrote an analysis of the race and the results —and the now all but inevitable outcome— for National Review Online.  The long and detailed article deserves reading.  Its bottom line is discouraging but pretty darn definitive: Al Franken will won, and not least because Coleman waged such a dismally incompetent post-election battle.

I admire Coleman’s public service and believe he has been an outstanding senator. But since the election, the Coleman campaign has put on a performance that conveys a strong impression of complacency and ineptitude; the Franken campaign outhustled and outsmarted it. 

Al Franken is a man with political views as ugly as his jokes are unfunny. He may also be the first U.S. senator to have joked about his past use of cocaine. In the 2002 oral history of Saturday Night Live assembled by James Miller and Tom Shales, Franken talked (pages 119–120) about using cocaine while pulling all-nighters writing for the show: “I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh heh.”

And I don’t think it can exactly be said that he won the election fair and square. Indeed, I can’t find a single good thing to say about him except that he didn’t steal the election.

The decisions that will have to be made henceforward will have more to do with the future of the Republican party than the past of  the (soon to be former) Senator.  Governor Tim Pawlenty is about to experience  a crustacean-like realization that  the ambient temperature that has been slowly rising around him by almost imperceptible degrees is suddenly about to reach the boiling point.  As Manu Raju recently reported for Politico:

The loser before the Minnesota Supreme Court could seek a review from the U.S. Supreme Court or file a whole new case in U.S. District Court. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has said that such a legal challenge could take “years” — and that he’s OK with that if that’s what it takes to ensure that all of the votes have been counted.

Democrats accuse Coleman, Cornyn and other Republicans of stalling — denying Minnesotans their second senator so as to deny Democrats their 59th vote in the Senate.

Several Democratic aides and senators said Wednesday that Senate Democrats would probably try to seat Franken if he gets an election certificate even if Coleman seemed likely to keep pursuing his challenges. But the aides and senators said that, without a certificate, Democrats are unlikely to try to seat Franken since the GOP would probably attempt to filibuster such a move.

That leaves Pawlenty in the hot seat — and whatever he decides could have implications in 2010 and 2012. Up for a third term next year, Pawlenty risks angering Minnesota Democrats and independents if he refuses to sign an election document for Franken — and a loss if he runs in the governor’s race would imperil a presidential run in 2012. But if he signs the certificate and Coleman seeks a federal appeal, he risks infuriating conservatives who despise Franken — and thereby imperiling his chances in the Republican presidential primary.