A brief look at how people are positioning themselves for greatest advantage as they try and figure out what the 2014 elections were really about. I'm looking at you, Chuck Schumer.
Jim Newell:
No, Chris Christie isn’t “back”: Why he may be confident, but his moment has passed
Coral Davenport/NY Times:
The Obama administration is expected to release on Wednesday a contentious and long-delayed environmental regulation to curb emissions of ozone, a smog-causing pollutant linked to asthma, heart disease and premature death.
Jonathan Weisman/NY Times:
With negotiators nearing an accord on permanent tax breaks for businesses worth $440 billion over 10 years, President Obama rallied Democratic opposition and promised a veto.
“The president would veto the proposed deal because it would provide permanent tax breaks to help well-connected corporations while neglecting working families,” said Jennifer Friedman, a White House spokeswoman.
More politics and policy below the fold.
TPM:
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that Democrats made a mistake by setting their sights on health care reform early in President Barack Obama's first term, arguing that his party should have focused on fixing the economy first.
"Unfortunately, Democrats lost the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem — health care reform," the No. 3 Democratic senator, a leader on messaging and policy, told reporters in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
Schumer said Obamacare, enacted in March 2010, was a "good bill" that he's "proud" to have voted for, but he said it "should have come later" after Democrats had adequately addressed the woes of the middle class.
Brian Beutler:
Senator Chuck Schumer copped to something Tuesday morning a lot of frustrated Democrats privately believe.
“Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” Schumer told reporters at a press event in Washington. “We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform.”
Given the immediate context—a big GOP midterm win, the twilight of Barack Obama’s presidency, the wind up to 2016—people will understandably interpret Schumer’s comments as an attempt to turn the page—to give Hillary Clinton space to run on the promise that she’ll finally get things right, and to implore the liberal intelligentsia to get cracking on a fresh agenda. There is truth to all of that, and it’s reflected in the unequivocal nature of Schumer’s mea culpa.
But there are two important caveats to this story, both of which take a lot of punch out of his words. First, his views in this case aren’t new; and second, they are wrong—both politically and substantively.
WBAL:
Twenty-one states have asked a federal appeals court to overturn Maryland's tough gun-control law, contending that its provisions banning 45 assault weapons and limiting gun magazines to 10 rounds violate the Second Amendment right to keep firearms at home for self-protection.
A coalition led by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey filed the friend-of-the-court brief last week in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The document supports an appeal by groups whose challenge to the law was rejected in August by the U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
Morrisey, a Republican, said in a statement that the Maryland Firearms Safety Act of 2013, if upheld by the courts, would undermine a core part of the Second Amendment by banning popular firearms that can be used for self-defense.
"States must band together at times when they see citizens' rights being diminished or infringed upon," he said.
Dana Milbank:
Ferguson reminds us that we still have a race problem in America. But the face of this problem is not Darren Wilson’s. It’s Bob McCulloch’s.
Wilson, the Missouri police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, is the target of most public ire. But no responsible person thought Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown was premeditated. Even if prosecutors tried him on lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter, they might well have come up empty — and most people would have accepted that result of a fair trial.
What causes the outrage, and the despair, is the joke of a grand-jury proceeding run under the auspices of McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor. In September, I wrote that it appeared he wasn’t even trying to get an indictment; he had a long record of protecting police in such cases, and his decision not to recommend a specific charge to the grand jury essentially guaranteed there would be no indictment.
Yep. A set-up from the get go.