Democratic Senator Research Articles

Obama's environmental policy–year one

President Lyndon B Johnson once said, “Being President is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There is nothing to do except stand there and take it”. As 2009 comes to a close, it's a good time to reflect on the Obama Administration's first 10 months and how US environmental policy has been affected. Much has been said about how the euphoria of that balmy night in Chicago's Grant Park has been transformed into, as the New York Times put it, “the daily grind of governance”. Similarly, former Congressman Lee Hamilton recently observed: “I think he [Obama] has learned that governing is harder than campaigning, and I think he's learned it with a vengeance”. President Obama's environmental visions and agenda have, in some measure, simply been put on the back burner. Readers will recall that, during the 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama included many environmental initiatives in his platform. If anything, that particular agenda has now become one among many. So…the scorecard: First, people. President Obama's appointment of Lisa Jackson as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator is seen by many in the environmental community as a vast improvement over her predecessor, Stephen Johnson. New initiatives on fuel efficiency and reduction of greenhouse gases have been credited to her. Likewise, the President's appointment of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy demonstrated the Administration's devotion to “hard” science, with a pragmatic mix of renewable energy and energy-efficiency proposals. The choice of Carol Browner, a long-time environmental administrator, as “climate czar” was an important first step in organizing White House efforts on addressing global climate change. Second, notable bills. Encouragingly, the omnibus Public Lands Management Act added two million acres of wilderness and thousands of miles of rivers under government regulation. However, the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, has drawn attention to the lack of progress on the US climate bill, which would require carbon emission reductions of 20% from 2005 levels by 2020. The Senate Bill, sponsored by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, is already the subject of partisan debate, not to mention Democratic party defectors, and seems to be in for trouble. In November, the two Senators began private negotiations with Republicans and moderate Democrats on a possible compromise, making it unlikely that a bill will be up for a vote in 2009, and suggesting that the American delegates to the Copenhagen meeting will not deliver a solid mandate regarding carbon reductions. Third, green/renewable energy. At the outset, much of the economic stimulus money has been directed toward the development of new forms of renewable energy and the means to reduce US dependence on fossil fuels. President Obama included some noteworthy environmental legislation in his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including $11 billion for an electric smart grid, $6.3 billion for state and local governments to invest in energy efficiency, and $6 billion for renewable energy. Likewise, the Department of Energy has been, in a word, “energetic”, awarding many millions of dollars in grants, guarantees, and contracts for renewable energy production and energy-conservation measures. Fourth, the nitty-gritty. Sometimes, precedent can be a difficult practice to alter. For example, while the Department of the Interior froze petroleum and gas drilling on 60 of the 77 national forest sites that the George W Bush Administration allowed in its 11th hour, the Department recently announced it will leave in place Bush-era changes to the stream-buffer rule – which was originally designed to protect streams from mountaintop-removal coal mining – until 2011. In August of this year, a federal judge rejected the Department's authority to change the rule without undertaking a full rulemaking process and inviting public comment. Meanwhile, environmental groups' hopes for quickly curbing mountain-top-removal mining shifted to the EPA, which regulates the practice through Clean Water Act permits. So far, the EPA has responded positively, freezing all 79 active applications for new mountaintop-removal mines and revoking a permit that the Bush Administration had issued in 2007. But all is not perfect. The Obama Administration, after much soul-searching, allowed oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea and timber sales in the Tongass Forest. So it goes; you win some and you lose some – eventually, the hailstorm will ease somewhat.

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

Winds of change: growing demands for transparency in the relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry

The relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States is undergoing rapid and momentous change; US Senator Grassley has alleged inadequate disclosure of earnings from industry and lack of acknowledgement of conflicts of interest by leading academics. This article is based on the premise that it is not the relationship per se that is the problem, but rather how that relationship is enacted. The influential 2008 report of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has provided detailed recommendations on appropriate interactions between academic physicians and industry (eg, proscribing receipt of gifts including travel support, and proscribing speaking at industry-sponsored educational programs). Contrary to expectations, there has been widespread acceptance of such guidelines. In Australia, details of all industry-sponsored educational events are now listed on the Medicines Australia website. Australian doctors have no alternative but to drastically improve the transparency of their interactions with industry, both in terms of the remuneration received and disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. Australian universities should seriously consider developing recommendations similar to those of the AAMC.

“This Bastard New Virginia”: Slavery, West Virginia Exceptionalism, and the Secession Crisis

“This Bastard New Virginia”: Slavery, West Virginia Exceptionalism, and the Secession Crisis William A. Link In March 1858, occasioned by the dedication of a new monument to George Washington in Richmond, the Wellsburg Herald complained to its readers in western Virginia about the “insufferable insolence” of the “high toned hospitality of the Eastern Virginians.” One of the speakers at the dedication was Tidewater Virginian Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett, a member of Congress and nephew of Southern rights Democratic Senator Robert M. T. Hunter. In 1850, Garnett had published a pro-secession tract, The Union, Past and Future: How It Works and How to Save It, and during the decade before the Civil War he remained an inveterate supporter of South Carolina-style radicalism. During the celebration honoring Washington, Garnett offered a toast. Just as Virginia had resisted the aggression of England during the Revolution, he said, the Old Dominion should now oppose encroachments by the North. No state except for Virginia, no region except the South, could claim Washington’s mantle. “The South first, the South last,” Garnett concluded, “and the South at all times.”1 Located in the northern panhandle, between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the town of Wellsburg in the 1850s was a center of hostility toward eastern Virginia. The Herald’s correspondent offered a starkly different interpretation of slaveholding, power, politics, and about the structure of the political system. Much of this resentment manifested itself during the constitutional crisis of 1850–1851, when a state constitutional convention deadlocked over power sharing between nonslaveholders and slaveholders. Soon after convening, the convention remained stalemated over legislative apportionment, with competing “white basis” (which would apportion entirely on white population) and “mixed basis” (which would retain the traditional practice of weighting representation based on slaveholding). The constitutional crisis of 1850–1851 yielded a compromise in which the lower house was apportioned by white basis and the upper house by mixed basis, but a deep-seated division among Virginians remained. The Wellsburg Herald [End Page 37] expressed this resentment and often documented easterners’ slaveholding arrogance. Despite an obsession with a culture of honor, easterners had violated their own exalted political and civic values. This was, the reporter wrote, a “humiliating spectacle—Virginia had invited men from all parts of the Union to be present on a great national occasion.” Those “strangers and guests” who listened to Garnett’s speech left Virginia profoundly insulted because he had diminished the national identification of George Washington. Such was “the repudiation which the ‘fire-eating’ disunionism gave to the old fashioned hospitality of the old Dominion.”2 The Wellsburg Herald provides one of the better examples of an emerging northwest Virginia mentality—and what became a West Virginia exceptionalism. Purchasing the newspaper at the age of twenty-three, editor John G. Jacobs was openly contemptuous of eastern Virginians’ hatred of anti-slavery politicians, including those in the new Republican Party. The Wellsburg Herald was “under no obligation to any party,” disinclined “to ask for favors from anyone,” and indifferent toward those accusing it of abolitionism. Jacobs believed that it was absurd for every Virginia magistrate, “every cross-roads Postmaster,” to become a “vigilance committee” to judge what was incendiary.3 But the Herald’s commentary suggested something further—that there were momentous changes occurring in late antebellum Virginia. On one level, the same narrative of sectional conflict leading to secession and Civil War was playing out in Virginia, the South’s most populous state and home to the largest number of slaves in the Union. Eventually, in April 1861, after South Carolina’s assault on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s organization of an invasion force, Virginians would secede and join the Confederacy. On another level, however, this narrative becomes more complicated. In the late antebellum years an active struggle was waged in the commonwealth for the meaning of the republic, a struggle that centered on the role and appropriate power of slaveholders and slavery. To some extent, this went far beyond the intrastate sectionalism existing in most of the states of the Union in the Civil War Era. Uniquely, Virginia became the only state in American history to implode and to break apart through internal secession. That...

SETTING PRINCIPLES FOR LEGISLATION

ON FEB. 3, key Democratic senators put forth principles for legislation that they say will give the U.S. greater leverage in upcoming global negotiations on a new climate-change treaty. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, expects to introduce a bill based on the principles in coming weeks. Supporting the principles that Boxer drafted are the nine other Democrats and one Independent on the panel. Boxer pledged that her committee would finalize the global-warming measure by the end of the year. By having legislation in hand detailing how the U.S. will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama Administration will have a stronger bargaining position at upcoming international climate talks, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a member of Boxer’s committee. Negotiations on a new international pact to combat global warming are scheduled to conclude in December. Boxer’s broad principles are the basis for the political horse-trading that will shape ...

Rational Judicial Behavior: A Statistical Study

This paper analyzes the connection between ideology and voting of judges using a large sample of court of appeals cases decided since 1925 and Supreme Court cases decided since 1937. The ideological classifications of votes (e.g., liberal or conservative) are dependent variables in our empirical analysis and the independent variables include the party of the appointing President, the relative number of Republican and Democratic Senators at the time of the judge‘s confirmation, the appointment year, characteristics of the judge (e.g., gender, race and prior experience), and the ideological make-up of the judges on the court in which the judge sits as measured by the relative number of judges appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents. We have a number of interesting results, including how a judge‘s voting‘s is affected by the voting of the other judges he serves with. We find a political-polarization effect among Justices appointed by Democratic but not by Republican Presidents; that is, the fewer the judges appointed by Democratic Presidents, the more liberally they vote. With regard to court of appeals judges, we find a conformity effect: if the number of judges appointed by Republican Presidents increases (decreases) relative to the number appointed by Democratic Presidents, all judges in the circuit tend to vote more conservatively (more liberally).

Prenatal Testing and Disability: A Truce in the Culture Wars?

In politics and policy-making, many speakers claim a commitment to finding common ground with their adversaries, but in end, partisanship tends to trump collaborative commitment. In a rare exception, however, pro-choice, pro-life, and disability advocates joined to support a 2008 federal law called Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Awareness Act. (1) In an unusual alliance, Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy cosponsored bill that led to legislation. In last fall's presidential campaign, both Barack obama and John McCain endorsed bill. A surprising array of organizations--including National Women's Health Network, Disability Rights and Education Fund, and Christian Coalitio--applauded its passage. Much of Brownback-Kennedy bill's success can be explained by its focus on information disclosure. The Law and Its Aims The law seeks to improve quality of information that pregnant women and new parents receive about children with disabilities. The law names Down syndrome as a particular concern, but it also covers any health diagnosed during prenatal period or up to one year after a child's birth. It authorizes U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to and collaborate with states and expert groups, including disability organizations, with aim of producing and distributing information about prenatally and postnatally diagnosed conditions. That information should include timely and factually accurate descriptions of the range of outcomes for individuals living with diagnosed condition, including physical, developmental, educational, and psychosocial outcomes. It should also include links to information hotlines, resource centers, support groups, and other organizations serving relevant populations. The law encourages secretary to fund cooperative projects involving disability advocacy groups and organizations of health professionals. Brownback-Kennedy arrives at a time when prenatal testing is on rise. In 2007, American College of obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended that prenatal screening and testing be offered to all pregnant women, regardless of age. (2) With this recommendation, more women will undergo screening and testing, and more will receive a prenatal diagnosis. Now more than ever, it is essential that prospective parents be given accurate and balanced information about what a diagnosis could mean to them and their child. Brownback-Kennedy responds to evidence that women and their partners often fail to receive up-to-date information about capabilities and experiences of people with conditions like Down syndrome and spina bifida, and about services available to assist children and their families. Critics say that genetic counselors and obstetricians at times convey unjustifiably negative attitudes about life with a disability. (3) Critics also think clinicians' negative attitudes about Down syndrome could be a factor in estimated 85-90 percent abortion rate among women whose fetuses are diagnosed with condition. (4) Although ACOG recommends that physicians refer women to advocacy groups--such as The National Down Syndrome Society and National Down Syndrome Congress--and to local support groups, many patients report not receiving this information. In one survey of women who continued their pregnancies after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, most said their obstetricians failed to provide sufficient up-to-date material about condition or contact information for organizations that could put them in touch with parents raising children with Down syndrome. (5) The expanding ability to detect prenatal genetic variations also raises separate concerns about accuracy of some prenatal diagnoses. With a new technique called microarray comparative genome hybridization, scientists can analyze fetal DNA to identify at least twice as many harmful variations as are identified by customary prenatal tests. …

Guilt by association

Given that the effectiveness of genome-wide association studies for finding disease genes is being debated, an alternative would be to look for diseases linked to inherited metabolic disorders.

Oregon Voices: Oregon Democracy: Asahel Bush, Slavery, and the Statehood Debate

3 OREGON VOICES Oregon Democracy Asahel Bush, Slavery, and the Statehood Debate by Barbara Mahoney AS EDITOR OF the Oregon States man, Asahel Bush guided Oregon's political leaders through the greatest challenge of the times ? successfully negotiating statehood within the tense national debates on slavery that led up to theCivil War. Bush's use of his newspaper as an overt political tool was not so uncommon for the times. The Dean of theGraduate School of Journalism at Columbia University recently wrote of the nineteenth century as a time when journalism was a "branch of politics."1 Another journalism scholar states the case evenmore strongly: "The newspaper press was thepolitical system's central institution, not simply a forum or atmosphere inwhich politics took place. Instead, newspapers and their editors were purposeful actors in the political process linking parties, voters, and the government together, and pursuing specific political goals."2 Through the territorial period and into statehood, Oregon demonstrated precisely that reality.Editors identified the issues, set thepolitical agenda, and dominated the players. Because of its distance from the power center of theUnited States, one might assume that the controversy over slaverywas irrelevant toOregon. It was, however, inextricably bound to Oregon's move toward statehood dur ing the 1850s.The question ofwhether Oregon would be a slave or free state was widely argued and divided the political leadership of the territory. After settlers in theOregon Territory had voted to seek statehood, admis sion to theUnion was delayed because thepro-slavery faction at thenational level feared thatOregon's entering the Union as a free statewould affect the balance of power in Congress. The newspapers and private correspon dence of the era paint a vivid picture of the dispute and its consequences and demonstrate Bush's central role in itsoutcome. The institution of slavery was well established by the timeAmerica achieved independence fromEngland. 202 OHQ vol. 110, no. 2 ? 2009 Oregon Historical Society Asahel Bush (picturedhereas an olderman) came to Oregon in 1850,at age twenty-six, to found the Oregon Statesman. As itseditor,he became a powerful voice in thepolitical lifeof theterritory and thestate. He sold the Oregon Statesman in 1863and went on tobecome a prominent bankerand businessman.He died in 1913. As the country grew, the question of slavery's expansion shaped thedebate over the admission of new states and spurred a series of congressional mandates. The Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the newly acquired Northwest Territory,which included the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part ofMinnesota, effectively setting the Ohio River as the northern bound ary for slavery. In 1820, theMissouri Compromise set a boundary between slave and free stateswithin the lands Mahoney, Asahel Bush, Slavery,and the Statehood Debate 203 of the Louisiana Purchase. Similarly, Congress applied the painstakingly constructed Compromise of 1850 to the landswon by theUnited States in theMexican War. Finally, theKansas Nebraska Act of 1854, fashioned by Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, abolished theMissouri Compromise and established "squatter sovereignty,"whereby the inhabitants of a territory or state could decide whether or not to allow slavery. When American settlerscreated a provisional government in theOregon Territory through theOrganic Act of 1843, they approved an anti-slavery law on the basis of theOrdinance of 1787 and its prohibition of slavery in thenorthern territories.3 Meanwhile, the allure of the north Pacific coast attractedmore and more immigrants. As the population grew, theBritish andAmerican governments reached an agreement, in 1846, ending their joint occupation of the area. In 1848,theCongress established Oregon as a territoryof theUnited States. By 1850, approximately twelve thousand people had immigrated to Oregon from the East, mostly from theOhio and Mississippi valleys.4 They shared common life experiences and aspira tions and differedmarkedly from the California pioneers in that they sought promising farmland rather than gold. Their ambitions were addressed in a provision of the Organic Act, giving anyman in the territory the right to 640 acres without having to pay for them.While successful in attracting new settlers, the provision created numerous uncertainties until itwas confirmed by the Oregon Donation Land Law, passed by Congress in 1850. The key figure in the passage of the 1850 legislation was Samuel R...

Ambitious Health Reform Plans Take Shape in Senate

Ambitious Health Reform Plans Take Shape in Senate

Do Voter Surveys Underestimate the Impact of Racial Bias?

Some social scientists think that many voters who say they support Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama in fact may be uncomfortable with the prospect of an African-American president or that polls have failed to reach Democratic voters most likely to harbor such prejudice, and that some fraction of those people may vote for Republican Senator John McCain--or not vote at all.

Climate change and the US election

While dealing with one of the worst economic crises in decades, the next United States administration will also face an early foreign-policy test over the moves it makes – or does not make – towards a new international treaty on measures to combat global warming. Both main presidential candidates, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama, have taken much stronger positions on climate change than the current administration, so the US will almost certainly be a more positive force in negotiations at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen

Black Politics, the 2008 Election, and the (Im)Possibility of Race Transcendence

When Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was well on his way to claiming the open U.S. Senate seat once held by the only other black Democratic senator since Reconstruction, Carol Moseley-Braun. Although mostly unknown, the self-professed “skinny guy with the funny name,” made a lasting impression. Secure in his own Senate race, Obama, a rising political star, spent much of the fall traveling the country as a surrogate for Democratic candidates.

Participatory democracy and Hillary Clinton's marginalized fandom

After the drawn-out, heated contest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and Senator Obama's victory over Senator Clinton, a segment of Clinton's supporters are threatening to leave the party rather than fall in line behind the nominee. This essay argues that the battle between Clinton's and Obama's followers is best understood as a war between fan bases, with Obama enthusiasts constituting as the dominant fandom and Clinton voters occupying the position of marginalized fandom. Marginalized fandoms tend to blame the opposing fan base, intermediaries, and The Powers That Be for their fan campaigns' losses, and Clinton's fans are adhering to this pattern. However, the Clinton marginalized fandom's complaints can be regarded as valuable critiques that, if noted rather than dismissed, could greatly strengthen participatory democracy in the United States.

No "Country" for Just Old Men

No "Country" for Just Old Men

The Health Care Crisis in the United States: The Issues and Proposed Solutions by the 2008 Presidential Candidates

The United States has state of the art technology and world renowned expertise in medical treatment, yet in terms of healthcare it shows a dramatically poor performance in relation to the other industrialized countries. This situation is surprising, since one would expect that a free market system run almost entirely by the private sector should show a much better performance. This issue has reached the point of being one of the most important national concerns and the subject of serious political and economic arguments - not only regarding how the system should be improved, but also whether it should remain being run by the private sector under a free market approach or whether it should be run by the government and made accessible to the entire population. The first option is supported by the arguments that public initiatives often perform poorly and that free-market competition should prevail. Contrarily, the other side claims that the system is only nominally a free market, that empirical evidence shows it's not working as it should, and that other successful healthcare systems are mostly government operated. As is stands, the health care issue acquired national importance and is presented as a major component of both presidential candidates programs, yet each favoring a different approach to improve accessibility and lower healthcare costs. Republican Senator McCain relies on improving the system by maintaining its current private enterprise, free market characteristics, while Democratic Senator Barrack Obama favours providing universal coverage and lower costs through a higher government intervention in the system. This paper examines the approaches proposed by both candidates and analyses the potential impact their plans may have on the health care system. While the lack of more detailed implementation details makes difficult accessing the effective result of each policy, the comparative review of the alternative approaches presented in this paper will help the reader to to judge for him or herself which could be the more appropriate to upgrade the system and attain a higher performance level.

Rational Judicial Behavior: A Statistical Study

This paper analyzes the connection between ideology and voting of judges using a large sample of court of appeals cases decided since 1925 and Supreme Court cases decided since 1937. The ideological classifications of votes (e.g., liberal or conservative) are dependent variables in our empirical analysis and the independent variables include the party of the appointing President, the relative number of Republican and Democratic Senators at the time of the judge's confirmation, the appointment year, characteristics of the judge (e.g., gender, race and prior experience), and the ideological make-up of the judges on the court in which the judge sits as measured by the relative number of judges appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents. We have a number of interesting results, including how a judge's voting's is affected by the voting of the other judges he serves with. We find a political-polarization effect among Justices appointed by Democratic but not by Republican Presidents; that is, the fewer the judges appointed by Democratic Presidents, the more liberally they vote. With regard to court of appeals judges, we find a conformity effect: if the number of judges appointed by Republican Presidents increases (decreases) relative to the number appointed by Democratic Presidents, all judges in the circuit tend to vote more conservatively (more liberally).

Obama Questions NASA Programs

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) says that NASA “needs to be redefined.” That may be cause for space scientists to cheer. Answering a question 11 April from a high school student in Columbus, Indiana, Obama said he was “a big supporter of the space program” but

Issue Ownership in Congressional Campaign Television Spots

This study investigated issue ownership patterns in 602 U.S. House and Senate Democratic and Republican political campaign television advertisements from 1980–2000. First, the themes in these ads were about equally split between policy and character (unlike presidential TV spots from the same time period, which are roughly two-thirds policy and one-third character). Candidates from each political party addressed their own party's issues more than issues owned by the other party. However, unlike presidential spots, congressional ads discussed Democratic issues more than Republican issues (59% to 41%). Although candidates from both political parties discussed their own issues more, winners tended to discuss issues from the other party more than losers. There was no difference in issue ownership emphasis between the House and Senate ads in this sample.

Senate Republican Leadership in Tough Times

The US Senate is a diffuse and individualistic body that is notoriously hard to lead. Somewhat ironically, the job of the Senate Minority Leader on Capitol Hill today is probably easier than that of his majority counterpart, since the Minority Leader is largely absolved of the expectation that a party policy agenda can actually be passed through a chamber where it is far easier for the minority party to obstruct legislation. During the 110th Congress Mitch McConnell proved quite a successful Minority Leader in terms of unifying his party, command of Senate procedures and using those procedures for party advantage. Despite his successes in frustrating the Senate Democrats, McConnell was unable to overcome the deep unpopularity of his fellow Republican, President George W. Bush, and of the Republican Party in general. As a result the Senate GOP appears certain to suffer further losses in the 2008 elections, thereby demonstrating the disconnect between effective leadership inside the Senate chamber and electoral success.