Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 9

Government shutdown, the (non) fine print | Michael Tomasky

It appears that the two parties are about $10 billion away from a deal to avert a government shutdown. WashPost:

The two sides have already approved $10 billion in reductions, and Democrats have identified about $13 billion more, aides said. The biggest sticking point: Democrats have demanded that some of the cuts come from one-year reductions in such programs as Pell grants and farm subsidies. Republicans have resisted because such cuts would not permanently reduce the size of the government.

To reach his new request for $40 billion in cuts, however, Boehner will eventually have to go along with at least some one-time reductions, aides from both parties said.

Continue reading...

Wisconsin supreme court election amazing result | Michael Tomasky

'Nonpartisan' but liberal-leaning JoAnne Kloppenburg leads the conservative incumbent in Wisconsin. Wow

So now, says the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

In a race still too close to call, Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg took a paper-thin lead over Justice David Prosser in the state supreme court race early Wednesday, capping a race marked by massive voter turnout, Governor Scott Walker's union bargaining plan, and record spending by outside interest groups.

As of 11.30am, The Associated Press had results for all but 1 of the state's 3,630 precincts and Kloppenburg had taken a 235 vote lead after Prosser had been ahead most of the night by less than 1,000 votes.

That one precinct would appear to be in the Town of Lake Mills, where town officials were meeting to count the last of the paper ballots.

The Jefferson County Clerk's officer reported that Prosser picked up only two votes in the electronic vote in Lake Mills and that 24 handwritten ballots were not yet counted. The results of a single township in Jefferson County should be known by about 1pm Wednesday after local officials finish examining votes from Tuesday's election.

About 220 votes were cast in Town of Lake Mills – seemingly not enough for Prosser to make up the votes he would need to defeat Kloppenburg.

As you'll recall, it's a nonpartisan election, but Kloppenburg tends toward the liberal side of things, Prosser the conservative. He is the fourth member of a 4-3 conservative majority on the state's high court. She would flip the balance leftward, as decisions surely approach having to do with Governor Scott Walker's "repair" bill. A defeat of a sitting justice, the paper notes, is a "rare" thing. One lost recently, in 2008. Before that, it had been 41 years since it happened.

Who knows how these things turn out? But recent history proves a point amply: it's one hell of a lot better to be ahead by 200 votes than behind by 200 votes. Think Al Franken, Jim Webb and, of course, George W Bush. A couple hundred votes can be surprisingly hard to make up, even when a staggering 1.5 million votes have been cast, unless there was a basic counting mistake somewhere.

In other Wisconsin news, the Democratic candidate mauled the GOP candidate for county executive, 61-39%. That's the job Scott Walker previously held. Think the people of Milwaukee County were sending a message?

It proves that there are states in this country where strong Tea Party and liberal elements coexist and success is basically a matter of which side is angrier and more motivated to vote. That's in off-year elections. In presidential years, Wisconsin is very likely a stable blue state, as I've long said. Walker is just making it more so.

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Government shutdown: two theories for Republican behaviour | Michael Tomasky

With Barack Obama and John Boehner in budget deadlock, shutdown looms. Here's why the GOP is pushing so hard

So, now the odds are that we're headed towards a government shutdown. For those of you who'll want to say it's Obama's fault because he refused to accept this new extension offer from the GOP, I note that that came with a massive string attached: cuts of $12bn more to the domestic discretionary budget. That is not parcelled out over the fiscal year. That's $12bn in that one week. And that's on top of the $10bn already cut in the two previous continuing resolutions. Finally, Obama said "enough".

No, it's definitely the GOP that's driving the shutdown. Why? On the surface, the "why" is over the size of cuts. But I mean: really, really, really why. I have two theories:

1. It's a kind of psychological thing among especially (but not limited to) the new members: they came here to shake things up, not go along and get along; and this is shaking things up. We all have these moments in our lives where we actually want to precipitate a crisis, just to see what would happen and to show observers that we mean business.

Fascinating little report in Politico today, in which a source from inside that fateful GOP House caucus meeting Monday night spilled some beans:

"The Democrats think they benefit from a government shutdown. I agree," Boehner said during a closed-door, 90-minute meeting on House Republicans on Monday night, according to several lawmakers who attended the session.

Boehner's opinion was quickly backed up GOP lawmakers who were serving in Congress during 1995, when former speaker Newt Gingrich (Georgia) squared off with then-President Bill Clinton by shutting down the government twice. Reps Don Young (Alaska), Dana Rohrabacher (California) and Buck McKeon (California) – a close ally – supported Boehner's position. Dozens of other Republicans rallied to support Boehner as well, in a moment that one GOP insider called a "turning point" for House Republicans.

"My view is that a government shutdown doesn't benefit anyone necessarily, but if one party or the other is going to get an edge, it's probably the Democrats. I agree with the speaker there," Rep Steve LaTourette (Ohio) told Politico. "If you look at the government shutdown of 1995, it guaranteed President Clinton's re-election. And that's what this would do. If you want to cede the presidential race in 2012, you shut down the government."

But while Boehner may have backing from the old veterans in his camp, he's run headlong into the Tea Party group of House Republicans who believe that Obama and Senate Democrats would come off the worse if a shutdown actually takes place.

These hardline Republicans, not all of whom are freshmen, have forced Boehner to play hardball with the Democrats or face a potential threat to his own survival as speaker. This hardcore faction is insisting on no less than the $61bn spending cut package passed by the House in February, and they've refused to back to any proposal that includes smaller reductions […]

The split among Republicans breaks somewhat along generational lines, but even more clearly between those who have served in government – either in the state, local or federal level – and those who have never done so.

So they're being told by people with experience that they're going to hurt their party, and they don't care. And how about that LaTourette fellow, eh? LaTourette's Syndrome: saying things publicly that many people think but wouldn't even say privately.

So that's theory one: they came here to fight and they just want to get it on. Once that psychology gets in a certain number of brains, a tipping point is reached.

2. It's about economics and the presidential election. The GOP knows that if the economy keeps improving and unemployment is down to 8% by election time, their chances in 2012 are fairly slim. Now, I hasten to note that that is a big if, so who knows? But everyone understands this.

A shutdown affects the economy immediately and directly. Hundreds of thousands of people in the public sector aren't working and therefore aren't spending. Hundreds of thousands more in the private sector who depend almost entirely, or at least largely, on government contracts for their livelihoods are out of luck. This is everyone from GM to pencil manufacturers. A huge swath of the economy just closes. If the shutdown lasts long enough, layoffs come along. Two bad months slow the tender momentum that now exists.

There you are. Psych and Econ.

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Ryan and the CBO and "courage" | Michael Tomasky

The Congressional Budget Office came out with its analysis (30 pages) of the Ryan plan, and there are plenty of bullet point in there that you'll hear him trumpeting. Stuff like this:

The resulting budget deficits under the proposal would be around 2 percent of GDP in the 2020s and would decline during the 2030s. The budget would be in surplus by 2040 and show growing surpluses in the following decade. Federal debt would equal about 48 percent of GDP by 2040 and 10 percent by 2050.
By 2030, total federal spending, deficits, and debt under the proposal would all be
lower than under CBO's June 2010 long-term projections (see Table 1).

As far as the deficit goes, that's a 20-odd-year improvement on his Roadmap from last year, which balanced the budget in 2063. Still, 2040 sounds pretty far away to me. It's odd that that's good enough for conservatives.

The truth of course is that it's not good enough for conservatives, but they're not going to say that because Ryan is their hero, their man of courage.

By the way, this "courage" business. Some writers whom I respect and who are friends of mine have written of Ryan's undeniable courage, a word that seems apt at first blush because he is a) taking on sacred crows and b) doing the opposite of pandering in some ways by presenting a plan that's politically risky.

I suggest respectfully that these folks haven't yet completely thought this through. Ryan is still pandering with this plan. The question is to whom. And the answer is, as usual with Republicans, the top 1% or 2% of the income ladder. The Medicare changes won't bother them much. The Medicaid changes save them tax dollars. And the tax cut in the plan represents about 18 cumulative Christmas mornings for them. Unsurprisingly for a devout Randian, he is pandering to precisely the people he believes have earned his pandering, our John and Jane Galts who have demonstrated their "superiority" through their higher incomes.

But to be fair, he's not only pandering to the top 1%. It actually gets worse.

Politicians generally do things for three reasons: 1, to pander to public sentiment; 2, to pay back their financial sponsors; 3, belief. Ryan is doing 2 and 3 here, but not 1 (in the normally understood sense of pandering to the hoi polloi). For this he deserves praise? On point 2 his proposals are utterly without shame, and on point 3 he holds views that would have situated him on the far far far right fringe even during the Reagan era. Yes: even during the Reagan era.

Now back to the CBO. Of course Ryan's plan saves money! It does so not through some miracle. He does not turn stones into IV bags. He takes costs government now pays for and pushes them onto senior citizens and poor people. It stands to reason that saves the government money.

But costs are costs. Someone has to pay. CBO estimates that:

For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, CBO estimated the beneficiary's spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark: what total health care spending would be if a private insurer covered the beneficiary. By 2030, the beneficiary's spending would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal, 25 percent under the extended-baseline scenario, and 30 percent under the alternative fiscal scenario.

Jargon key: "extended-baseline scenario" means current (Obama numbers) projections, "alternative fiscal scenario" basically includes making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and "proposal" of course means Ryan plan. The rest, I assume you can read. It washes out to a 172% increase in what insurees have to pay (68% of costs as opposed to 25%).

Economist Dean Baker ran some numbers. He used various government projections to calculate the likely cost of decent coverage for a senior in the 2030s and his likely Social Security benefit (for an average wage-earner). Result under Ryan: your average senior receives an average Social Security payment of $32,000 in 2030, and spends about $21,000 on medical costs.

For 70% of seniors in the US, Social Security is more than half their retirement income. So let's say we have a woman whose private pension, on top of SS, is $26,000 a year. (Of course, pensions are under attack too, and God forbid our poor hypothetical woman was a teacher or public employee.) She has an annual income in 2030 of $56,000. Ryan wants her to spend 38% of her gross income, or likely more than half of her adjusted income, on her healthcare.

Of course that saves the government money! And remember: all the while, the rich have their taxes slashed by about a third (Ryan says he'll eliminate loopholes, but that will never get past Gucci Gulch and everybody knows that).

This whole thing is a scam, and I say again that it's important to understand what's behind it philosophically. It's not disgust about debt. It's not even hatred of government per se.

It's revulsion at the thought of any redistribution. The reason the right hates government is not that it's inefficient or whatever; it's that government redistributes wealth. That's what Ryan is out to stop. Very important to keep this clear in your head. And once you think of things this way, it becomes pretty absurd to call him courageous.

US domestic policyUS taxationUS CongressRepublicansMichael Tomasky
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US budget: The shrinking of our society | Michael Tomasky

Without presenting an alternative of fair taxes, Democrats are playing into the Tea Party agenda

Back during the Vietnam war an antiwar senator is reputed to have said that the United States should just declare victory and go home. I've been reminded of this story watching the Tea Party element in Congress these last few days, because on the cusp of a more than respectable first-round victory, they're trying to declare defeat.

To get you quickly up to speed, the deadline for a budget agreement looms on Friday. Congress has already passed two stopgap spending bills to keep the government functioning – for three weeks, then two. Republicans say there'll be no more of those. Either there's a real deal or no deal. So, if there's no deal by Friday, all "non-essential" government operations will shut down. The museums of Washington will be closed on Saturday, for starters. On Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers will stay at home, without pay, and thousands of government functions from scientific research to community development, farming support and environmental protection will cease to be funded and carried out.

Republicans and Democrats agreed in principle last week to $33bn in domestic spending cuts and have been negotiating toward that goal, which splits the difference between the parties' starting points. But to the Tea Party-backed members of the Republican caucus, splitting the difference constitutes compromising with the socialists.

On Monday night, after meeting the caucus, House speaker John Boehner suddenly announced "$33bn is not enough". The figure would make for the largest single-year cut in what we call the domestic discretionary budget – that is, the social spending at the heart of our most heated debates – in modern history.

You'd think Republicans might settle for calling that a victory. But for the Tea Party faction it's a disgrace, a quisling number; and so, even after it seemed last week calmer heads had prevailed, there is again considerable doubt over whether Boehner can get enough Republicans to support any compromise. If Democratic and Republican leaders reach a theoretical deal and Boehner can't deliver enough Republican votes to pass it, Democrats will be celebrating – because Republicans will probably be blamed for the shutdown.

But before Democrats lace up their dancing shoes, they should be reminded of what a debacle this is from the point of view of progressive governance. The debate is being conducted entirely on Republican terms. It has been about whether the correct course on domestic spending is a five-year freeze (Barack Obama's opening proposal) or tens of billions in cuts. Meanwhile, a few things have been left largely undiscussed.

To begin with, the domestic discretionary portion of the budget has shrunk drastically over the years, from 22% of the budget in 1980 to 12% today. To be sure it has increased under Barack Obama – as it did under George W Bush – in raw terms, but overall it's a much smaller part of what government does. Why? First, because our entitlement programmes (social security, but especially Medicare and Medicaid) are eating up more of the budget. Second, because military spending has gone wild in recent years (turns out wars cost money, even though Bush tried to keep the wars off the books) up almost 60% over the last decade.

Third – and here's the big thing: the government is collecting far less in taxes, adjusted for inflation, than it used to. Especially from the rich. If wealthy Americans were paying taxes at the rate they did 50 years ago, says former Clinton labour secretary Robert Reich, the government would be taking in $350bn more a year: budget woes over.

But forget going back 50 years, when taxes were high even by my standards. If we merely went back to the 1980s, the days of the great conservative hero Ronald Reagan, we'd be in far better fiscal shape. Taxes on capital gains, rich people's chief income source, were 35% then. Now they're 15%. Inheritance taxes have been reduced to a fraction of what they were. All this as the super-rich have grown richer, controlling more and more wealth. And while income taxes for middle-income families have gone down a bit, they still pay a far higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes.

Obama and the Democrats must put these issues on the table. The Tea Party argument that there's bloat and waste in Washington will always fall on receptive ears in America. But the counter-argument isn't to quibble about how much to cut. The counter-argument is to say we believe in a society where the wealthy pay their share, which they plainly have not been doing. A political loser? So, for Democrats, is the coming debate about whether to slash healthcare for the poor by $4tn in a decade or a little less than that. We're on our way to a radically shrunken society, and the Democrats are helping take us there.

Tea Party movementUS domestic policyUS economyUS CongressUS politicsUS healthcareRepublicansDemocratsUnited StatesMichael Tomasky
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The meaning of "218 Republicans" | Michael Tomasky

Yesterday, in my post noting that the GOP was now demanding $40 billion in cuts, I quoted from a newspaper story that said "218 Republicans" were needed to pass a budget. And I said no, 218 yea votes total. I thought it was a typo.

Now I see that the Roll Call reporters who wrote that may have snuck a little nuclear bomb into their text. Let me explain.

Back in 2004, GOP House Speaker Denny Hastert came up with a new governing theory called "a majority of the majority." This meant that as speaker, he would not pass any legislation that didn't have the support of a majority of his GOP caucus. No matter how many Democrats supported something. If most of his own members weren't for it, he wouldn't move it.

Implications? Well, less bipartisan legislation, right? And more partisan legislation. For example, when Bill Clinton passed Nafta, he did so in the face of lots of Democratic opposition but with lots of Republican support. If he'd lived by the Hastert rule, he never would have passed it.

Hastert was attacked at the time for so naked a partisan ploy. Chuck Babington in the WashPost, November 2004:

In scuttling major intelligence legislation that he, the president and most lawmakers supported, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert last week enunciated a policy in which Congress will pass bills only if most House Republicans back them, regardless of how many Democrats favor them.

Hastert's position, which is drawing fire from Democrats and some outside groups, is the latest step in a decade-long process of limiting Democrats' influence and running the House virtually as a one-party institution. Republicans earlier barred House Democrats from helping to draft major bills such as the 2003 Medicare revision and this year's intelligence package. Hastert (R-Ill.) now says such bills will reach the House floor, after negotiations with the Senate, only if "the majority of the majority" supports them.

Senators from both parties, leaders of the Sept. 11 commission and others have sharply criticized the policy. The long-debated intelligence bill would now be law, they say, if Hastert and his lieutenants had been humble enough to let a high-profile measure pass with most votes coming from the minority party.

Well, now, the "majority of the majority" concept may be for children. This is from TPM:

Boehner and the GOP have floated a stopgap spending measure, which includes deep cuts, to buy Congress another week to negotiate -- but Democrats and the White House have rejected that plan.

A spokesman for Reid told reporters during a Senate vote that Boehner moved the goalposts in Tuesday's White House meeting. Republicans are now positing $40 billion in cuts as a possible target for a deal -- up a few billion from the range of cuts that had marked the negotiations for about two weeks. Democrats are not accepting that figure.

"They're saying they won't agree to anything unless they get 218 Republican votes," Reid told reporters at his weekly press availability after returning from the White House.

Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel flatly denied this charge.

Okay, we have Steel's denial, so let's note it. But if Reid is correct, this is truly scandalous. This means Boehner will pass a bill only if it can pass among Republicans only! Forget a majority of the majority. This is 90% of the majority (218 out of 241). He's negotiating with his own caucus. The other party means nothing. He doesn't want a Democratic vote. It functionally won't count to him.

So let's review. Boehner shook hands on $33 billion. Then he got heat from his caucus and said no, $40 billion, at the eleventh hour. Then, if Reid is to be believed, he also said Democratic votes in the House don't count. I need to pass this with 218 Republicans.

There's a name for that. Actually there are several. None of them is "democracy."

US CongressJohn BoehnerMichael Tomasky
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What Paul Ryan is up to | Michael Tomasky

I'm scrolling through Paul Ryan's budget, released today. It's a clever little document, reasonably handsomely displayed, with nice catch phrases like "the path to prosperity." And that it is, for some.

Here are some crucial numbers, from a Politico story:

The budget would slash spending by $5.8 trillion over 10 years compared with the current congressional baseline, with much of the money coming from plans to diminish the federal role in providing health care benefits. It would cut taxes by $4.2 billion over 10 years, driven by a reduction in the top rates on corporate and individual income...

...Over 10 years, Ryan envisions cutting $1.7 trillion from domestic discretionary programs, $1.4 trillion by starving the new health care law, $1 trillion from Iraq and Afghanistan, and $771 billion by turning Medicaid into a block-grant program. Between "de-funding" the new health care law and the restructuring of Medicaid, that program would see cuts of $1.4 trillion over the next decade — though the pain of that may be overstated given that the spending for the new health care law hasn't gone into effect yet. Ryan leaves Social Security alone.

Most of the media attention is focused on the cuts, specifically the rearrangement of Medicare as a semi-private venture (not unlike, ironically, Obamacare, in that it creates exchanges for people to buy into; unlike Obamacare in that it will reduce care because the real goal isn't healthcare but savings) and the block-granting of Medicaid, which will severely cut healthcare for the poor.

I'm at least as interested in the tax side, where he wants to reduce the top income tax rate to 25%. The way to think about this is not, say, your boss, who makes $250,000, or your cardiologist who makes $400,000. It's to think about the people who make many many millions of dollars a year. Ryan is saying that a bus driver who pays 25% on his dollars earned in the range of $50,000 should be paying just as high a tax rate as Glenn Beck pays on his 32nd million dollar, or as LeBron James pays on his 70th million dollar (or whatever), or as a hedge-fund manager pays on...oops, forget that comparison, because the hedge-fund guy's income is likely a capital gain, so he pays only 15% in the first place under our system.

If that's what you believe is right, well, that's what you believe is right. I don't. I think many millions of Americans don't. It's a giveaway that the word massive doesn't even begin to describe.

And the Democratic Party won't stand up and say it.

What's at the bottom of the Ryan worldview is this, put well by Jon Chait back when Ryan was unveiling the "Roadmap" last year, to wit:

The roadmap clarifies the essence of the Republican Party's approach to domestic policy issues. The essence is opposition to the downward redistribution of income. The principle first emerged under Ronald Reagan, but only in fits and starts--Republican presidents agreed to a tax reform in 1986 and a deficit reduction in 1990 that did redistribute income from rich to poor. Over the last twenty years, though, opposition to downward redistribution has hardened into the sacred tenet of Republican policymaking. Ryan's plan both codifies this principle and shows just how far the party is willing to go in its service.

Of Ryan himself, we have his testimony from a Wall Street Journal article from 2009:

Ryan's leading role in the budget debate puts him at the center of two huge challenges facing his party in the Age of Obama.

One is the effort to craft a persuasive economic message around lower taxes and less spending after the GOP squandered its claim in recent years to fiscal conservatism.

To that task, Ryan brings an admittedly geeky head for numbers and detail. He also brings a deep philosophical attachment to market capitalism and "supply-side" economics - a world view shaped by such icons of individualism and free enterprise as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Someday, one hopes, a future American society will look back at this period and say: the guy who set the agenda openly worshiped Ayn Rand?!?

Lord help us. And give us a Democratic Party that will say some of these things, will you?

Maybe Ryan's proposal is so out there it will hurt Republicans. Surely they're worried about that. That's politics. On substance, Ryan has probably already won. Unless, you know, the Democratic Party is willing to say some of these things. Inveighing against "vicious" cuts, the standard trope, isn't enough. That will just make for somewhat smaller cuts. Changing the trajectory needs a lot more courage than that.

US CongressUS domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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March madness and Liam's mum | Michael Tomasky

As I think I've mentioned, if I'm driving in, I sometimes listen to Mike & Mike, the sports guys, if I'm tired of NPR or if the sporting world is focused on a subject of interest to me. These last weeks, they've been full of March madness basketball chatter. And here's an amazing story.

Every year, they announce their brackets for the 64-team tournament on the air. And they have some friends and other experts give theirs. Then, kind of as a joke and as a control, they have Liam's mum announce her bracket. Liam is Liam Chapman, their producer, and Mum has lived in the US since 1992 but knows nothing about basketball. She represents those millions out there across America who fill out brackets based on things like the team's mascot names, the uniform color scheme, the sound of the school's name, etc.

On the morning of March 17, the day the tournament started, they had Liam's Mum read her picks on the air. And yep, sure enough, she chose a Connecticut-Butler final. Now, here's where it gets really weird. Her final score prediction for the game was UConn 53, Butler 39. The actual final score was UConn 53-41.

This morning they claimed that a statistician did the numbers and calculated that a person had a one in 10,000,000 shot of picking those two teams and a score that close to the actual outcome. Sure enough, anybody who knew anything about the sport would not choose those two teams, and would most definitely not choose a score like that, which is ridiculously low for a basketball game and was possible only because this was the worst-played men's championship game in modern history.

On the show this morning, she said she had no idea why she chose these teams or the score, could give the last name of one Connecticut player and couldn't name a single Butler athlete. That's the way to go through life, eh? I'd love to know what she thinks the outcome of this week's budget battle will be, who's going to win in 2012, when I'll break 90 and what the odds are of Margot becoming the Mark Zuckerberg of her generation.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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The judicial election in Wisconsin | Michael Tomasky

Remember, today is the big judicial election for the seat on the Wisconsin supreme court. An incumbent Republican is defending his seat against a Democratic challenger. Well, actually it's a "nonpartisan" election, so nudge nudge wink wink and all that, but that's the deal. The conservatives on the bench hold a 5-4 advantage, so a win by the liberal would reverse that balance of power, with presumed decisions on Governor Scott Walker's "repair bill" on the way.

From the AP:

MILWAUKEE — Wisconsin's Supreme Court race could come down to one factor: whether voters in Republican parts of the state can match the passion of voters in the Democratic strongholds of Dane and Milwaukee counties.

City clerks in Madison and Milwaukee say voting interest has been remarkably high in a race Democrats have tried to turn into a referendum on a polarizing union-rights law pushed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Madison's city clerk predicted voter turnout of 60 percent, an unheard-of level for an April ballot.

Such trends would seem to favor the challenger, Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, who has presented herself as a left-leaning alternative to incumbent Justice David Prosser. For the conservative Prosser to win a second, full 10-year term, he'll likely need strong turnouts in traditionally Republican counties.

Incumbent justices typically have a large advantage over their generally lesser-known opponents. However, Democrats have tried to tap into the anger and discontent that flooded Madison in February and March as Walker pushed his plan to strip most public workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights.

It's been an usually high-profile race, which I've followed a bit from a distance. There've been televised debates, and a recent controversy over a third-party ad made against Prosser for his decision not to prosecute a Catholic priest back when he was a local prosecutor. The priest was later convicted of molesting two young brothers. But one of the brothers says now that he backs Prosser's decision not to prosecute. Kloppenburg has refused to denounce the ad. I'd say the ad sounds pretty scuzzy on the face of things. Any of you living out there, has this been a big issue, or just more noise?

As a rule of thumb, incumbent judges are difficult to beat, and I suspect it may be difficult for the anti-Walker forces to make a straight "a vote for Prosser is a vote for Walker" argument. Like all off election, it depends on turnout.

Overall, even though there are no more protests right now, things haven't really calmed down in Wisconsin. In fact Democratic recall drives against GOP state senators seem to be picking up a little steam. This is one of those rare situations that will not just fade away, at least for a pretty long time, methinks.

US politicsWisconsinMichael Tomasky
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So now it's $40bn | Michael Tomasky

Who do you think leaked this to Roll Call?:

House Republican leaders are privately warning Speaker John Boehner that they may not have the votes to pass a six-month spending bill with significantly less than $61 billion in cuts, and they are chafing at his closed-mouth style of negotiating.

Boehner, Senate Democrats and the White House are zeroing in on $33 billion in spending cuts. But the Ohio Republican is finding significant resistance from his top lieutenants, who have repeatedly warned they cannot sell that number to rank-and-file Members, insisting on at least $40 billion in cuts.

According to sources close to the issue, during a leadership meeting this week Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) reiterated their concerns with Boehner's handling of the talks. According to these sources, Boehner's fellow leaders are concerned that a smaller deal will not muster the 218 Republican votes needed for passage. In fact, several sources said that at one point McCarthy bluntly warned they would lose a significant number of GOP votes if the deal is based on $33 billion in cuts.

Um, first of all, for the record, the budget won't need "218 Republican votes" to pass. It'll need 200 votes. Assuming roughly 90 or so Democrats support it, based on Dem levels of support for the last two continuing resolution, it'll need about 130 GOPers, or roughly 54% of the GOP caucus. That's not terribly heavy lifting, and it's why I still think a bill will pass even after all this sturm und drang (note: could Democrats flee the deal in an attempt to put more pressure on John Boehner to round up the votes from his caucus? They could, but they don't usually play that sort of hardball.).

Now before going further, let me say that despite what some of you say about me, I am not sitting at this blog all day concocting Democratic rosy scenario. If the Democrats are facing disaster, I usually say so. Just this morning I wrote a post about the ways Obama could lose the next election.

So when I say I think the Republicans may be in for trouble, I'm not trying to spin. I actually think it. They may be in for trouble.

Right now, the $33 billion figure is probably seen by most middle-of-the-road people as "fair" in that it splits the difference. The R's wanted $61 billion, the D's wanted $0 billion. Okay, so 30-something. Cut a deal and get on with it.

The side that departs from that deal risks trouble. If the two sides come to an agreement on $33 billion in actual cuts (which hasn't happened yet), and if that budget vote fails, and if more than half of R's vote against it, and if the government then shuts down - lots of ifs, but a plausible chain of events - then I think it ought to be pretty easy for the D's to paint the R's as a bunch of extremists who walked away from a handshake, and Boehner as a guy who can't handle his caucus.

I can hear the newscasts: "Speaker Boehner had an agreement in principle with Democrats, but it wasn't enough for his tea-party members, and he couldn't deliver their votes. And so now we have the spectacle of a budget with the largest cuts in a single year in modern history blocked...by the Republican Party." And your son's eighth-grade class coming to Washington can't visit the Smithsonian.

Am I wrong here? Seems a slam dunk. Not that the Democrats haven't missed their share of slam dunks.

Speaking of basketball: Connecticut 77, Butler 71.

US CongressRepublicansMichael Tomasky
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