Author Archives: DemetriMattox

Obama Should Let the Senate Advise Him on a Replacement for Scalia

by DemetriMattox Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Holbo has an interesting notion: President Obama should take seriously the advise part of advise and consent and give the Senate an informal list of nominees to choose from to replace Antonin Scalia. Maybe they’ll pick two or three off the list, maybe just one. Then Obama transmits his final choice for confirmation hearings.

The basic idea is that this puts Republicans in a pickle. If they flatly reject the entire list, it makes their obstructionism a little too barefaced for an election year where they need votes from more than just their base. But if they give tentative approval beforehand, then it’s harder to pretend afterward that Obama has sent them an obviously radical and unacceptable choice.

I suspect this is the kind of idea that sounds better on a blog than it does in the Oval Office, but it’s still interesting. Partly this is because the best Republican response isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. If someone on the list is genuinely moderate, what do they do? They can bet the ranch on winning the presidency and then abolishing the filibuster, which would allow them to confirm a hardcore conservative in 2017. But if they lose—or if they don’t have guts to abolish the filibuster next January—they’ll almost certainly end up being forced to confirm a more liberal justice nominated by President Sanders or President Clinton. Decisions, decisions.

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Obama Should Let the Senate Advise Him on a Replacement for Scalia

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Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

by DemetriMattox Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, once political pals, now compete for the Republican presidential nomination, one battle they will be waging with each other will be who has better neoconservative bragging rights. Both have recruited prominent policy wonks from the hawkish wing of the GOP, and they may be heading to a showdown over who gains more support from this influential cadre. (Should he enter the 2016 race, Republican candidate Lindsey Graham will take a stab at winning over this group too.)

Ever since Rubio entered the Senate in 2011, he has made a strong play for the neocons. He has reached out to some of the George W. Bush administration’s most hawkish alumni for advice on foreign policy, and he has made national security a centerpiece of his campaign. The Rubio Doctrine, which he outlined in his first major foreign policy address as a candidate on Wednesday, comes straight out of the neocon playbook, calling for a robust military and aggressive approach to intervention.

But Rubio may find that out-neoconing Jeb Bush won’t be so easy. Bush, too, has assembled a foreign policy team almost entirely made up of former George W. Bush administration officials—including Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq War who for years peddled a conspiracy theory favored by neocons that held that Saddam Hussein, not Al Qaeda, was the main sponsor of anti-US terrorism. And Bush’s ties to the neoconservative movement date back to the mid-1990s, when he became affiliated with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a foreign policy think tank established by leading neocons and hawks.

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Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

Posted in Anchor, Bragg, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?