Julia Ioffe:
Today is not a good day to be Vladimir Putin. A game that the Russian president was winning so deftly in the spring has turned on him in summer: The Ukrainian military is bearing down on the pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, and there’s word that it’s on the verge of splitting the rebel-held territory in two and that two major rebel leaders have fled. Putin's supporting these guys because of a position he staked out months ago, even though they’ve just gotten him into a whole lot of trouble by mistakenly shooting down a plane full of Dutch people. Which is why the Europeans have finally stopped allowing Putin to divide and conquer them, and announced their toughest sanctions to date, slamming his finance, defense, and energy industries. That's unfortunate, given that Europe is Russia's biggest energy market and that Russia depends on Europe for some 40 percent of its food and medicine. And, in case that wasn't enough, the United States piled on, too, sanctioning three major Russian banks.
And yet, there’s very little Putin can do. He's trapped by a propaganda apparatus that has primed the Russian population to want blood and victory, so there’s not all that much room behind him to beat a retreat. Even if it weren’t for the media, he's spent his entire 14-year tenure establishing Russia as a counterweight to American and European foreign policy. Has he been pushing back on Western righteousness and lecturing all these years just to back down now?
The thing is, Putin's been given lots of "outs" but hasn't taken any. So what happens now?
Karen Tumulty and Wesley Lowery:
President Obama is not being impeached.
But for several years, Republicans have been indulging and even encouraging that fantasy on the part of the far-right edges of their party’s base.
Conservative backbenchers have told their constituents that the House has the votes to impeach the president. High-profile figures such as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have called for it. The new House majority whip, Steve Scalise (R-La.), in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” declined to rule it out.
And now Democrats are raising millions off the idea that the GOP is serious about doing it. “I would not discount that possibility,” presidential adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Friday.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Matt Dickerson:
But there is a more fundamental problem with Cillizza’s focus on Obama’s managerial competence. It feeds the inaccurate belief that the president is the nation’s CEO who has primary responsibility for managing the executive branch bureaucracy. This frequently voiced belief, however, flies in the face of both the Constitution and empirical evidence. In fact, the Framers allocated the primary levers of managerial control – particularly the ability to create, define a mission and pay for a government bureaucracy – to Congress, not the president. The managerial powers the president does possess, such as the ability to appoint senior officials to head the bureaucracy, is usually shared with the Senate. In some cases presidents can “manage” unilaterally, as when firing officials, although the cost of doing so is often politically prohibitive. But, as Obama discovered when debating options regarding a potential surge of military forces in Afghanistan, even a president’s “commander-in-chief”-related managerial powers are more limited than is commonly recognized. Journalists, in their reporting, often exhibit a blind spot to this constitutionally-mandated sharing of managerial powers, as Richard Neustadt noted more than half a century ago in his classic study of presidential power: “Even Washington reporters … are not immune to the illusion that administrative agencies comprise a single structure, the ‘executive branch’ where presidential word is law, or ought to be.” In fact, as the news that Congress is taking the initial steps to fix the Veterans Administration reminds us, when bureaucracies fail, we usually ought first to start with Congress rather than the president when seeking solutions.
More on that topic in
APR yesterday.
Fox31, Denver:
Tom Tancredo isn’t trashing Bob Beauprez, but he’s demanding one of his biggest benefactors, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to come clean about the Republican Governors Association’s influence on Colorado’s GOP gubernatorial primary.
On Monday, the Denver Post reported that a campaign finance watchdog group discovered that the RGA, which Christie chairs, funneled money to help Beauprez through the Republican Attorney Generals Association despite its public pledge not to attempt to influence GOP primaries.
In June, Beauprez’s 31-27 percent victory over Tancredo came as a huge relief to establishment Republicans who worried about Tancredo’s nomination giving rise to higher voter turnout from Hispanics this fall and, as a result, hurting the GOP ticket.
On Tuesday, Tancredo, who has pledged to help Beauprez however he can, took aim at Christie, who was just stumping with Beauprez in Colorado last week...
“Governor Christie was previously accused of using political power as governor of New Jersey to block bridges as an act of political retaliation. So I’m sure he will relish this opportunity to ‘come clean’ and to ‘clear the air’ to avoid new allegations of using his elected position at RGA to carry out a political vendetta in Colorado.”
Of interest because Tancredo is a Republican.
IGM Forum (expert economists) :
Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on February 15, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.)
Justin Wolfers:
Here’s a simple case study making the point that our political debates about economics have become largely unhinged from those among actual economists. Take the Obama stimulus plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If you took your cues from the political rhetoric in Washington — or even from the occasional virulent debate in the economics blogosphere — you would think the whole question of fiscal stimulus is highly contested.
But it’s not. There’s widespread agreement among economists that the stimulus act has helped boost the economy.
NY Times:
A federal appeals panel on Tuesday blocked a Mississippi law that would have shut down the only abortion clinic in the state.
The three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, ruled by 2 to 1 that in closing the state’s sole clinic, Mississippi would have shifted its constitutional obligations to neighboring states. Closing the clinic, the court said, would place an undue burden on a woman’s right to seek an abortion.
Added:
Greg Sargent on a
Halbig deep dive:
Senate documents and interviews undercut ‘bombshell’ lawsuit against Obamacare