The problem is that while the sequester is bad, it ironically doesn’t seem to have been bad enough to serve its purpose of forcing a deal. As such, the next in the seemingly endless series of deadlines to keep an eye on is March 27. This is the point by which Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government through the next fiscal year. Both sides could try to use this as leverage with Republicans holding out for more cuts and Democrats demanding a more balanced replacement for the sequester. We’ll have to see if the threat of a government shutdown actually spurs some action.

A friend recalled visiting a man dying of AIDS at the time. A former massive bodybuilder, he had shrunk to 90 pounds. ‘Do I look big?” he asked, with mordant humor. In the next bed, surrounded by curtains, my friend heard someone singing a pop song quietly to himself. My friend joked: “Well not everyone here is depressed!” Then this from his dying, now skeletal friend: “Oh, that’s not him. He died this morning. That’s his partner. That was their song, apparently. The family took the body away, threw that guy out of the apartment he shared with his partner, and barred him from the funeral. He’s stayed there all day, singing their song. I guess it’s the last place he’ll ever see where his partner actually was. His face is pressed against the pillow. The nurses don’t have the heart to tell him to leave.”

You want to know why this became a life-long struggle? You have your answer. And I did this not despite being a Catholic, but because I am a Catholic. And I did this not despite being a conservative but because I am one.

This hideous cruelty in the midst of such shame demanded a Catholic and Christian response. This attack on people’s families, and their mutual responsibility (that man’s partner had cared for him for months, while his biological family kept their distance) was an attack on those institutions like civil marriage that are vital for a free society to keep its government in check. If that man’s husband hadn’t cared for him, the government would have had to. Why weren’t conservatives celebrating this man’s dedication rather than smearing him? Why could they not see in the gay community’s astonishing self-defense a Burkean model for social change from below – a dedication to saving our community independent of government that, if it happened in any other community, would have led the GOP to put those activists on the podium of the Republican Convention as exemplars of civil society at its best?

Democrats and Republicans have confused themselves with the word “taxes.” Typically, when we think about increasing taxes, we think about raising marginal tax rates. But that’s not what Democrats are proposing. They’re talking about cutting subsidies we give wealthier people to buy bigger homes or donate to charity or live in high-tax states or get health insurance from our employers. All of that, as any economist will tell you, is spending. But because the spending comes in the form of tax deductions, cutting it counts, in a narrow budgetary sense, as increasing taxes.

No one has worked harder to disabuse Republicans of this misconception than top Republican economists. Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s chief economist, says “the distinction between spending cuts and revenue increases breaks down if one considers tax expenditures.” Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says they should be “viewed as cuts in outlays rather than a reduction in revenues.” Greg Mankiw, who led President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, calls them “stealth spending implemented through the tax code.”

The piece was especially timely considering I'd just finished Suzzane Mettler's The Submerged State which illustrates the ways in which government programs have become less visible and transparent in recent decades. More and more public services are  provided by third parties or directly subsidised through the tax code. The problem, as Mettler explains, is that the public frequently fails to understand the benefits government is providing to them and are less capable of evaluating the efficacy of these programs.

Here we have the same confusion over taxes. Allowing people to deduct various expenses from their taxes is functionally equivalent to leaving the tax system unchanged and simply handing them the money after the fact. These aren't minor costs either. The home mortgage interest deduction costs nearly $100 billion per year and 69% of its benefits go to filers earning over $100,000. By comparison, in 2007 the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (ie food stamps) cost roughly $38 billion.*

*The program costs were substantially higher in recnet years due to the global financial crisis.

Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous. When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.

As such, it seems prison reform could appeal to social conservatives. Having 2.27 million Americans behind bars-25% of the world's prison population-is inevitably going to take its toll on nuclear families. And I guess I wasn't the only one thinking this way. A Wonkblog piece Jonathan sent me explains that a number of Republicans such as the late Chuck Colson have taken up the cause. I'm not sure how I feel about being on the same side of an issue as Nixon's Hatchet Man but politics makes strange bedfellows.

So the WaPo has a Presidents Day editorial devoted to James Garfield because, well, why not. Or, as they quite reasonably, though perhaps hyperbolically, explain:

He was James A. Garfield, who may have been the best president we never had, or hardly had ... “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787,” he said. “NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness. It has given new inspiration to the power of self-help in both races by making labor more honorable to the one and more necessary to the other. The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years.”

There was more along those lines, and it bears reading. Moreover, Garfield appointed four black men, among them Frederick Douglass, to posts in his administration. We are left to wonder today what a president of conviction and conscience such as Garfield might have done to rouse the country and lead it against the vicious new institutions of repression and virtual re-enslavement that were taking hold in the American South, with the silent acquiescence of the North.

OK, so perhaps he was a pretty awesome guy? Also, In other news about potentially fantastic presidents America never got to experience, the footnote that is William Henry "Tippecanoe" Harrison ("I died in thirty days!") was taken out of school by his father while he was a teenager because he had taken to running around with an anti-slavery crowd. He won the 1840 election by 234 electoral college votes to 60, and also with help from a campaign chant that required the singer to periodically spit tobacco juice. The 1840 campaign was the kind of friendly one that saw Harrison and his Whig buddies give incumbent Martin Van Buren the nickname "Van Ruin" and Democrats responding with an accusation that Harrison was a coward as a general — they dubbed him Granny Harrison, the petticoat general, and said if elected president, he'd sit around in a log cabin and drink hard cider all day instead of governing the country. Harrison subsequently adopted the log cabin and hard cider as totems for his campaign, probably reckoning that voters thought such things were pretty neat. Harrison was far-sighted enough to want to introduce paper money and wanted to clean up the spoils system — that is, jobs for the boys. Then he caught pneumonia and died.

Anyway back to Garfield — but keep the spoils system in mind. The guy who killed Garfield was a man named Charles Guiteau, and though I don't mean to glorify anyone who assassinates a democratically elected leader, I'd like to take a moment to talk about how thoroughly batshit insane Guiteau was. As would-be assassins go, his madness approaches that of John Hinckley, Jr., the guy who shot Ronald Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster. (Though, according to the courts, Guiteau's insanity wasn't of the legally exculpatory kind.)

Guiteau was a big admirer of President Ulysses S. Grant, and showed it by writing a speech in his favour called "Grant vs. Hancock." When Garfield showed up on the scene, Guiteau rejigged the speech (pretty much by subbing in references to Garfield and removing ones of Grant), renamed it "Garfield vs. Hancock" and then decided that his efforts were pretty much the reason Garfield won the election of 1880.

As such, he figured Garfield should make him ambassador to either Paris or Vienna. When Garfield decided that request was not a reasonable one, Guiteau figured the best way to deal with his disappointment would be to assassinate the president.

To do so, he purchased a gun, favouring one with an ivory handle because he figured it would look better when displayed in museums as the murder weapon.

After he shot Garfield (who probably only died because doctors kept prodding his wound with their dirty fingers), Guiteau was put on trial. He insisted he was sane and spent much of the trial cursing and insulting the judge, the witnesses, the prosecution, and his own lawyers. Also, he delivered his testimony as a series of epic poems, and spent the trial period dictating his own autobiography, which ended with a personal ad seeking "a nice Christian lady under 30 years of age." He figured he would escape conviction and began laying plans to run for president in 1884.

The jury had other ideas though and he was convicted and hanged in 1882.

This criticism has largely disappeared in the wake of Obama's deft handling of the debt ceiling showdown. The President remained true to his pledge that he wouldn't negotiate over raising the borrowing limit-dismissing potential loopholes such as the trillion dollar coin-and instead staring down the Republican leadership until they blinked.

But while Obama's recent track record is encouraging his fiscal cliff strategy is yet to be fully vindicated. The sequester is still on the table and the ultimate outcome of this conflict is very much up in the air.

As I wrote last week decoupling the tax increases that were set to take effect on January 1st from the budget sequester makes the latter significantly more difficult to avoid. No one is happy  that $1.2 trillion in  spending cuts are scheduled to take effect on March 1st. But there's a very real possibility that Republicans decide that such an outcome-while unfortunate-is preferable to agreeing to any revenue increases.

The fact that half of the cuts come are to defence has made many liberals less worried than they should be. Yes, military spending is greatly bloated-but pushing the country back into recession in exchange for defence austerity is a really horrible trade off. And the other half of the sequester will sap funding for crucial programs such as job training and food safety.

We'll have to wait and see how this all plays out. Maybe Republicans will budge on taxes again and some sort of balanced deal to replace the sequestration cuts will be reached. Maybe the two sides will just agree to kick the sequestration down the road again or even get rid of it altogether.

But maybe not. And if that's the case it will cast doubt on the wisdom of the decision not to insist on resolving the sequestration issue once and for all back in January. 

This is not to say that Democrats should have done whatever it took to reach a deal when they had the chance before. There's worse things for the liberal cause than a dose of austerity during a recession-draconian cuts to government programs that benefit the poor and middle class being one of them.

But the Obama adminstration  really did have a tremendous amount of leverage during the fiscal cliff negotiations. And they may come to regret not utlizing it more fully to mitigate a very serious threat to the economy.  

Dworkin was a true giant in his field. He's the second most cited legal scholar of the 20th century and was best known for this theory of interpretivism which insisted that moral questions were central to the creation and justification of a system of law. 

Dworkin's work was thorough but there was always a satisfying simplicity at its heart. His comment that a son promising his father that he will always "play fair" is pledging to uphold a general principle not the father's subjective understanding of the phrase has always struck me as one of the most elegant rebukes of originalism. 

I have my disagreements with Dworkin but he always made me think, and I owe him a great debt for influencing and sharpening my thought on a number of political and legal issues.  He will be missed.

I also found the universal preschool proposal intriguing and I'll be interested in seeing how discussion around it develops. If you're looking for a thoughtful conservative take on the idea start with Megan McArdle and it's also worth checking out Greg Anrig's rebuttal over at The Century Foundation.

Don't expect a barn-burner of a speech or a pivotal political turning point. That's not the way these addresses work.

State of the Union speeches tend to be clumsy, hodge-podge affairs. They need to pack a variety of disparate things into a single address and so usually end up a bit of a mess. The president will need to do all the boilerplate of declaring the state of the Union to be "strong," then explain his priorities for the coming year (many of which won't be shared by Congress and so won't matter much), then drop in references to a dozen other interest groups who'll get upset if they're not mentioned. Climate change? Immigration? The military? Gay rights? Gun control? Foreign policy? Cram it all in so no one gets upset that their pet issue was left out.

That's not to say the address won't matter. This is the most powerful politician in America laying out his agenda for the coming year and it will be important to see what policy issues he focuses on and which he shunts to the end of the speech as dot points. (From the look of the First Lady's box guests, immigration reform, entrepreneurialism, gun control, and health care will play a prominent role.) But don't look for this to be a rhetorical feat. 

Related:

• The State of the Union response: Where next big things go to die.
• Who first declared "the State of our Union is strong"?
• I'll be live-tweeting the address from 9pm US Eastern/1pm Sydney time. Follow me at @_jbradley.

Congress resigns itself to the inevitability of the sequestration

Stop me if you've heard this one before. The US is facing an entirely self-created fiscal crisis which if not averted could push the country back into recession. But sure enough that's just where we find ourselves. On March 1st, unless Congress and the President can reach some alternative agreement, the dreaded budget sequestration will go into effect reducing government spending by $86.5 billion dollars over the current fiscal year and $1.2 trillion over the next ten. 

The cuts were part of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) which was set to take effect at the beginning of this year. However, Congress delayed its implementation by three months as part of the last minute deal to aver the fiscal cliff/austerity crisis. 

 The $1.2 trillion in cuts are split evenly between defense and non-defense discretionary spending and are crudely egalitarian in nature. All federal programs would be cut by an equal amount meaning that agencies couldn't pick and choose which areas of their budget to protect. This was intentional as the goal was to make the policy so unpalatable that both sides would be pressured to agree on an alternative way of addressing the deficit.

Responsible long-term debt reduction would also be back loaded so as to not suck large amounts of money out of an economy still suffering from a lack of demand. But there's no such prudence in the BCA. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that GDP would be cut in half if these policies remain in effect for the rest of the year.

In some respects this new threat is more worrisome than either the first fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling negotiations. It's not that the cuts would be more damaging. Luckily, we no longer have to worry about large-scale tax increases or defaulting on debt obligations. But what's troubling this time around is that there may not be the same incentives in place to facilitate a compromise. 

An inability to reach a deal to avert the January 1st fiscal cliff  would have meant the total expiration of the Bush tax cuts-something both sides agreed was unacceptable. And Republicans couldn't avoid higher taxes simply by refusing to act. As such, while it was always possible that negotiations would drag on through the early part of the year it was inevitable that some sort of agreement was going to be reached.

Similarly, thee consequences of not raising the borrowing limit would have been so catastrophic that it seemed very likely-if not certain-that Republicans would come to their senses rather than be blamed for a massive unforced error. 

But this time around the calculation isn't so clear. No one thinks that that the sequestration is good policy. But Republican leadership in Congress is saying that it would be preferable to any deal featuring higher taxes. By contrast, President Obama has made clear that he will not accept any alternative agreement that dosen't feature a 1:1 ratio of new revenues to spending cuts.

It's also an issue that could cause divsions within the Republican caucus. The GOP has long been a party that emphasises a strong defence and low taxes. The coming standoff is a test as to which they see as the lesser of two evils.

The simplest and best solution would be just to mutually agree to get rid of the sequestration all together. Republicans don't have to stomach higher taxes. Democrats don't have to worry about an anti-Keynesian shock to the economy. And we could focus on the most pressing problem-getting back to full employment-instead of the deficit which is decreasing faster than at any point since WWII. Then as the economy stabilises we can work on reducing the long-term debt in a fiscally responsible way. 

Of course things are never that easy in Washington. And Congress' idea that this is some unavoidable problem is like Homer being unable to get his hand out of the vending machine because he won't let go of the candy bar.

The 2012 elections were a fairly decisive rejection of the Republican Party platform. President Obama coasted to a second term and Democrats won the popular vote in both the House and Senate elections. However, Republicans maintained controlled of the House due to gerrymandering and structural advantages and the filibuster still provides the GOP with de facto veto power in the Senate.  As such, the legislative gridlock that's paralysed Washington over the last two years is likely to continue into Obama's second term.

Democrats' s best response is to avoid what John Judis dubs an "insider strategy" and "instead transfer the fight for their agenda..to the electorate where they hold the advantage." This means no more vague statements about priorities and then leaving Congress alone to work out all of the legislative details as Obama did with healthcare reform. Instead, the President needs to take a more active role in shaping bills and applying pressure to the legislature. Obama did this well during his  proposal on immigration reform late last month. "If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away," he explained in his speech in Las Vegas.

The President needs to reiterate this message in his State of the Union address. And he also should make a point of reaching out directly to citizens and other grassroots organisations-explaining that he needs their help in getting Congress to take action. 

It's true that political science research shows that the power of the bully pulpit is greatly overstated. The president dosen't have the capacity to bend the public or members of Congress to his will with rhetoric alone. But Obama's objective isn't to change minds; it's to marshal existing public support  for many of his policy propsoals. 

Ninety-two per cent of Americans want universal background checks on all gun sales, a figure that  includes eighty five percent of NRA households. Fifty-five per cent  support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants-a number that's almost certain to grow in coming years as the Hispanic percentage of the population increases. And sixty-eight per cent favour Obama's fiscal cliff proposal to allow the federal government to negotiate prescription prices for Medicare recipients with drug companies.

Democrats faces two conflicting realities. The public is largely receptive to many of their policies and favourable demographic trends mean this isn't likely to change at any point in the near future. At the same time, the American political system-and its entrenched interest groups-make it very easy for a determined opposition to stymie the majority and block change. The challenge for Democrats is to find ways of effectively utilizing their advantage in numbers in order to bring about legislative change. I don't have all the answers of how this can be done. But it should start with President Obama's speech tomorrow.

Ah, the State of the Union response. Where Next Big Things go to die.

Remember Bobby Jindal, Republican up-and-comer? It's tough to remember now, but back in the early days of 2009, that kid was golden. Not like he is now: a well-regarded and influential GOP governor. No, in the dark days after President Obama had first been elected, Louisiana's Jindal was considered the future of the party, the man who would lead them out of the wilderness, and a surefire contender in 2012. A charismatic and considered politician whose Indian heritage would inure the party against charges it was becoming old and white.

Then Jindal gave the State of the Union reply. His address, filled with clumsy bon mots like "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington," was widely panned and Jindal slunk back to Louisiana. When 2012 rolled around, his name was barely in contention for the GOP nomination; when Republicans dreamed up governors who could save them from their lacklustre field, they thought of Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, not Bobby Jindal. It's only now that Jindal has started to regain some of his lustre, and that's through a combination of extremist tax policy and the winning tactic of calling his own party the "stupid party."

It's not just Jindal. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's 2010 response was awkwardly staged and awkwardly delivered, while Mitch Daniels in 2012 was at least talented enough to deliver an entirely forgettable response. (He has since left politics and is now president of Purdue University.) I suppose you could point to Paul Ryan as someone who made it through a SOTU reply unscathed — and even went on to become his party's vice-presidential nominee — but this seems more a function of his party's refusal to allow his celebrity to wilt than any particular talent he showed. And he was overshadowed anyway by the shenanigans of Michele Bachmann, who that year gave the deeply weird "Tea Party response."

And now Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a charismatic and considered politician whose Latino heritage, Republicans hope, will help inure their party against charges it is becoming old and white, is to give the 2013 response. For someone who is, like Jindal once was, considered a leading contender for his party's presidential nomination, this is a high-risk, low-reward task. At best, he'll deliver an entirely forgettable reply to Obama's speech, filled with Republican bromides. But there's also a decent chance he'll end up looking silly.

That's because the SOTU reply is a tough, thankless job. Coming immediately after the president has publicly flaunted all the many trappings of his office, delivered before the entirety of Congress, the response automatically looks cut-rate by contrast. Because it's delivered straight after the president has finished speaking, the speech is never more than a laundry list of party talking points. Much of the television audience has switched off anyway, leaving only wonks and partisans behind. There are few ways to look and many ways to look bad.

We saw the same thing this time around, with pundits quick to credit the Obama campaigns GOTV efforts or Mitt Romney's incompetence for the president's impressive showing. In actuality though, there wasn't anything too shocking about the electoral results. When the economy is gradually improving the incumbent president is generally a small favourite to get a second term. And while Obama slightly outperformed the fundamentals there wasn't anything especially odd about the final result.

And now the  release of the January job's report makes the president's re-election seem even more typical. The Bureau of Labor Statistics had previously estimated that the economy was adding around 150,000 jobs a month in 2012 but the new benchmark revisions have pushed this number up to around 181,000. And while the economy actually contracted slightly during the fourth quarter of last year due to a large drop in defence spending, job growth remained solid with 247,000 new jobs added in November.

We're a long way from full employment and the economic picture still isn't especially cheery. But all things considered this wasn't a bad climate for the incumbent to run in.

It's an understandable sentiment. It's easy to feel pessimistic when John Boehner can't exert any control over his caucus or when rural Democrats distance themselves from President Obama's positions on gun control or climate change. 

However, there's a price to be paid for unanimity, and a danger in creating some monolithic conception of party ideology over and above what its members actually support.

West Virginia Senator Joe Machin may have a different view on climate change than most other Democrats. But it's a position that reflects the feelings of his constituents. And to act like there's a duty for him to abide by party norms is to ignore the concerns of the West Virginians who voted him into office. 

Similarly, the rise of the Tea Party has not been a positive development in American politics, but this wasn't some unwanted change forced upon a helpless public. Voters were frustrated with Obamacare and the bleak economic climate. Conservatives were angry with a Republican establishment that they  saw as unwilling to take a hard line stance on spending. The people who showed up to the polls wanted change and they got it.

And  there's something healthy about the fact that an outside political movement could shift the political debate so quickly. That veteran politicians, with more money, name recognition and the support of their party leadership, could be ousted in primary challenges.  

Because while progressives might be frustrated by the changes in the GOP over the last several years the process cuts both ways. Ultimately the same populist  forces and electoral mechanisms that helped the Tea Party come to power also allowed a little known senator from Illinois to upset Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. And that provides a sense of hope for those outside the current system who want to change it. 

The US political system is a messy and often dysfunctional one. And there's countless changes I would want to make to improve its effectiveness. But while a government without primaries and party line votes might be more efficient at times it also sacrifices much when it comes to democratic accountability. And that's not a trade off I'd want to make.

 If applied nationally such a system would have allowed Mitt Romney to be elected president despite receiving nearly five million less votes than Obama. I'd love to hear anyone defend such an outcome as representative of the will of the people.

But even this is a charitable interpretation of what  Republicans were trying to do. This wasn't a serious attempt at national reform. Rather, Republican controlled state legislatures in some blue leaning swing states were/are trying to rewrite their own rules while leaving the current system in place for the rest of the country. Siphoning away Democratic electoral votes in Pennsylvania while maintaining the winner take all system in Mississippi is a complete perversion of the electoral process.

So naturally we'd all be better off if the GOP stops trying to find ways to rewrite electoral rules and instead focuses on appealing to voters right?

Maybe not. In fact, there's a straightforward change that Republicans could push for that would make them more competitive in upcoming elections while simultaneously improving  American democracy; get rid of the Electoral College. 

I've never found either of the two major arguments in favour of the Electoral College convincing.

1. It keeps candidates from spending all of their time in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. 

Who knows exactly how candidates would allocate their time if there was a national popular vote-although I'm fairly confident their travel schedules would be more diverse than they are now-but either way I don't like the idea of artificially increasing the influence of some areas as a means of getting Obama or Romney to pay attention to their interests. Candidates go to cities not because urbanites are special or more deserving of attention but because that's where the majority of people live. As former Chief Justice Earl Warren eloquently explained in a slightly different context; "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." The fundamental idea of American democracy is one person one vote; enshrine that system via a popular vote and let the candidates figure out how best to get as many of these votes as possible.

Besides, it's not like rural interests are underrepresented in the American political system. After all, Wyoming gets the same number of senators as California. 

2. It localizes recounts. A national recount in a close presidential election would be a nightmare. Better that it be concentrated in one or two states rather than spread out across all fifty. 

A national recount would certainly be  problematic. But so would an entire presidential election coming down to a tiny number of votes in one state. And there's probably more potential for fraud and abuse in the second case then the first. Timothy Noah makes the point well:

The national difference between Gore and Bush may have been 500,000 votes in 2000 (actually 543,895), but the outcome-changing difference in Florida was a mere 537 votes (according to the official tally, anyway). There’s no end to the ways you can massage a 537-vote plurality for one candidate into a 537-vote for another one. And there’s a powerful motivation to do so when that narrow majority can be leveraged in a populous, winner-take-all state like Florida into an outsized share of the Electoral College.

So yes, abolishing the Electoral College would be good in and of itself. But luckily for Republicans the push for a national popular vote need not be a purely altruistic endeavour.

The GOP is currently at a structural disadvantage in the Electoral College that could hurt their chances in future elections. Nate Silver outlined the extent of the problem in a November 8th column, estimating that Republicans  "may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points to be assured of winning the electoral college." 

This point may be somewhat overstated-at the time he underestimated Obama's eventual margin of victory in the national popular vote by nearly 1.5 points-but the general argument still holds.

One can get a rough sense of a party's Electoral College advantage or lack thereof by comparing the winning candidate's margin of victory in the 'tipping point state' that gave Obama his 270th electoral vote to his overall margin of victory in the national popular vote. 

In 2012 Colardo was the tipping point state for the second consectuive election with Obam winning it and its 9 electoral votes by 5.4 points. In contrast, the president only won the popular vote by 3.9 points. 

In other words, it's easier for Obama (and probably other Democratic candidates) to get to 270 electoral votes than it is to win the popular vote.

This trend may become even more pronounced in the years to come. Republican candidates have been running up record margins in already solid red states while simultaneously losing ground in swing states like Colorado and Virginia. Such tradeoffs wouldn't matter as much in a national popular vote scheme but it's an especially harmful trend in an Electoral College system. 

Historically conservatives have tended to favour the current system while progressives have been more sceptical. As such, a GOP committed to abolishing the Electoral College could probably find a lot of allies on the other end of the political spectrum.

It also wouldn't be as difficult as one might think. A Constitutional Amendment is always a difficult sell; but the easier option is to simply get states to assign their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote once enough other states agree to the proposal. If a group of states with 270 cumulative electoral votes signed off on this idea it would effectively create a direct election. So far eight states and the District of Columbia have done just this leaving them 138 electoral college votes short of 270.

Ths wouldn't be a long term fix for the GOP. But it would increases their chances somewhat in the next couple of election cycles. And with so much at stake every little bit helps.

So how about it Republicans? Ditch an anitquated system of voting and give your presidential aspirations a boost.

President Obama’s second Inaugural Address offered a lot for progressives to like. There was the spirited defense of gay rights; there was the equally spirited defense of the role of government, and, in particular, of the safety net provided by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But arguably the most encouraging thing of all was what he didn’t say: He barely mentioned the budget deficit.

Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse. And that’s a very good thing.

"An era has ended," Krugs triumphs. Let's hope so. Krugman is (not suprisingly) right on the economics. But the politics? Well, I've rarely seen him this cheery about anything short of Arcade Fire... 

No one doubts her grit and determination. In June she broke two ribs but kept the injury private while serving out the rest of the term. In all likelihood though, an Obama loss in November would have given Romney the chance to appoint her successor.

Liberals no longer have to worry about this counterfactual as Ginsburg will almost certainly retire during the next four years. But we're not past the point of elections playing an important role in determining who replaces her on the Court.

Any Obama appointee would need to be confirmed by a majority of the Senate. Right now that shouldn't be a problem. Democrats control 55 seats so barring a filibuster, which has only been used once for a Supreme Court justice, Obama could get his nominee seated. But after the 2014 midterms all bets are off. 

Due to retirements and their success in the 2008 Senate elections Democrats will be facing an extremely unfavourable map in 2014. Barring the retirement of Susan Collins I can't find a single Republican Senate seat which Democrats have close to a 50-50 chance of winning. In contrast, I count four Democratic seats where Republicans likely start out as favourites (Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana and West Virginia) and roughly ten others where they have a legitimate shot of a pickup.

We'll have to wait and see how the midterm landscape shapes up, but at this stage there's a very real possibility that Republicans will reclaim control of the upper chamber in less than two years.

The type of justice Obama could get through the confirmation process could be very different then than now. There would be intense pressure on Republicans senators not to cast the decisive yay vote that would get the president's nominee confirmed. GOP senators could reject moderate liberals in the mold of Elena Kagan and instead pressure the president to appoint someone even more centrist.

We may be heading for just this sort of standoff. Ginsburg has stated that she wants to serve as long as Justice Louis Brandeis, which would slot her for retirement in 2015 at the age of 82. Ginsburg is fully entitled to step down on her own terms whenever she sees fit. But, if she is concerned about ensuring that her replacement on the Court continues to uphold her legacy, there's a strong argument that it would make sense to retire after the next term. 

In any case, this issue speaks to the importance of Obama prioritizing all judicial appointments during the next two years. The president did not spend much political capitol on nominations during his first term and consequently vacancies on the district and federal courts rose 51%. If you're going to address this failure now is the time do it. 

There's still legislative tactics that Republicans can use to slow down and block nominees but it's obviously much  easier to get judges through the Senate when your party controls the upper chamber. Democrats have a lot they want to accomplish over the next several years, but they shouldn't let judicial nominations fall off the agenda. 

It's no secret that Boehner has had serious problems controlling his caucus in recent years. In 2011 he and Obama were close to reaching a grand bargain on debt reduction when he abruptly walked away from negotiations after it became clear that Republicans would reject the agreement. The ultimate embarrassment came this past December. Boehner, in an attempt to gain leverage in the fiscal cliff negotiations, introduced a bill raising taxes on those making over $1 million. The Speaker said he was confident his party would support the measure but it turns out he'd miscalculated and was forced to quickly pull back the bill.

It's worth sayings bit more about the 2011 failed grand bargain since I don't think my characterisation was entirely fair. According to Matt Bai of The New York Times Boehner and the Obama administration reached a preliminary agreement on debt deal that would have raised  $800 billion in new revenue in exchange for about $450 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years and larger cuts to these programs and Social Security down the road. However, in response to liberal backlash the Obama administration went back and asked for about $400 billion in new revenue. Boehner initially seemed open to a new deal but then facing intense push back from within his own party abruptly broke off negotiations. 

I don't think there was ever any real chance of this getting done-it would have been almost impossible to get Tea Party Republicans to sign off on any bill that raised taxes by any amount. But the reasons for the deal breaking down were more complex and bipartisan than I made it seem.

Regular readers will know the importance I attach to filibuster reform. The government simply cannot function if the minority party requires the majority to get 60 votes to pass virtually any piece of legislation. Consequently, itt's disappointing to see only minor tweaks to a major problem.

At the same time, none of this is that surprising. The Senate is an old fashioned institution filled with 100 people who think that they should be president; regardless of political preferences it's hard to get any group like that to agree on anything that might limit their own individual power and prestige. 

Greg Sargent gets at the heart of the reason that the Reid-McConnell deal is so inadequate. 

Norman Ornstein, an observer of Congress for decades, literally wrote the book on GOP obstructionism. So I asked him what he thought of the disappointing filibuster reform deal reached today between Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. His reply:

“To avoid disruption right now, they opted for greater efficiency in the operation of the Senate, rather than providing a much higher hurdle for obstructionism. They are going to make it easier to move things, but they are not extracting a price for bad behavior right now.”

This is exactly the problem. Today’s reforms do nothing to discourage, or extract any price whatsoever for, precisely the type of unprecedented and destructive party-wide obstructionism that launched the push for reform in the first place.

The package of reforms doesn’t include the “talking filibuster,” and it does not include the provision that would have put the onus on the minority to come up with 41 votes to sustain the filibuster. What’s more, the threshold remains 60 votes both to end debate (which was probably never going to change) and for the motion to proceed (which was supposed to change, but in the end was only tweaked). You can debate endlessly how effective the talking filibuster and the 41 vote requirement would have been in discouraging concerted obstructionism. But those were at least efforts to try to address the problem. The current reforms don’t try to address it at all.

And Gregory Kroger provides a nice overview of the changes and some reasons for optimism.

I expect that this package of reforms will be criticized for what it is not. It does not lower the cloture threshold or set up a realistic process for forcing filibustering senators to hold the floor. Nonetheless, it does address some of the worst problem areas: nominations, conference committees, and redundant filibusters as the Senate debates about what to debate. What I do like about these reforms is that they focus on an under-discussed source of Senate paralysis: the time lags built into the operation of the cloture rule. It's not just the cloture rule's supermajority threshold that retards the Senate; the time required to wait for a cloture vote and the 30 hours of "debate" time after the Senate votes to limit discussion are extremely costly in a chamber with a limited budget of floor time. They force the Senate to waste its days and nights, to remain in session but empty, and allow individual senators great power over petty issues. Senator Reid will doubtless be blamed for selling out the true reformers of the Senate instead of attempting a grand confrontation with the Republicans. Reid has a persuasive if indelicate answer: there probably weren't enough Democratic votes to push through more drastic reforms, and the short-term payoffs for any major change would be limited by the Republican majority in the House.