Tag: Walkover

WASHINGTON — We human beings cling to dogmas long after they’re disproven. This is certainly true of our assumptions about electoral politics. Third, that Republicans and Democrats are becoming increasingly and equally extreme, so they should be scolded equally. “Over the past two decades,” he writes, “the proportion of party supporters … who have strongly negative feelings toward the opposing party has risen sharply. A growing number of Americans have been voting against the opposing party rather than for their own.” People rate their own side about the same as they used to. Polarization, in other words, is not just an elite thing. When it comes to casting ballots, “leaning independents as well as strong and weak party identifiers are voting more along party lines than at any time in the past half century.” Factoring out independents who tilt toward a party, “only about 12 percent of Americans have fallen into the ‘pure independent’ category, and these people are much less interested in politics and much less likely to vote than independent leaners.” Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers. Abramowitz’s data also makes clear that the two sides are not equivalent. The comparable figures for Republicans were 44 percent and 22 percent, double the Democratic swing. The upshot: The share of Democrats in the ideological middle is nearly twice that of Republicans.

Some say it started with Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court confirmation battle. Sure, people have strong feelings about Trump’s personality, but they also get worked up because so much is at stake. If federal spending still amounted to 2 to 3 percent of GDP, people likely wouldn’t care as passionately about election outcomes. Similarly, as the size and scope of the federal government increases, interest groups will spend more on elections in an effort to influence the levers of government. In the year 2000, I wrote a study in the Journal of Law and Economics that found that the growth of state governments could explain almost 80 percent of the increase in spending on gubernatorial and legislative races from 1976 to 1994. The Supreme Court — and the federal courts generally — are more deeply involved in our lives than they were 50 years ago. District court cases have grown over the same period from 448 to 1,252 per million Americans. Existing agencies were also granted new regulatory powers. In my 2013 book, Dumbing Down the Courts, I find that the length of Supreme Court confirmation hearings has grown with the expansion of judicial power. I thought that President Obama was continually making false statements about gun control and health care, but I never called him a liar in any of my op-eds or media appearances.

Buzz has centered on Cranley running for Hamilton County prosecutor in 2020 if Republican Joe Deters decides not to run for re-election. More PX: See why Dems' tax hike might hurt Aftab Pureval in congressional race Cranley, who's term-limited in 2021, had given serious thought to running for prosecutor. The Republicans for years have used the prosecutor's office as a farm system to prepare attorneys to run for judicial seats. • Reds, Bengals and FC Cincinnati officials aren't talking publicly about a proposal to raise the admissions tax made by Democratic City Councilmen P.G. Brinkman has raised $34,000 this year. • The Toledo Blade editorial board called for Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to re-do the investigation into a sexual harassment complaint filed against state Rep. Bill Seitz of Green Township. DeWine's office hired a private firm to conduct the investigation. Seitz, who was cleared by the investigation, left the firm in 2014. • This was a "taxing" week in Hamilton County and Cincinnati. Politics Extra is a column looking inside Greater Cincinnati and Ohio politics.

Donald Trump’s new attorney, Rudy Giuliani, would not on Sunday rule out the possibility that the president would assert his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination in the Russia investigation. “I’m going to walk him into a prosecution for perjury like Martha Stewart?” he said. The lifestyle entrepreneur was convicted in 2004 of lying to investigators and obstruction in an insider trading case. “The mob takes the fifth amendment,” Trump said. Giuliani also said the leak of a list of questions Mueller may want to ask Trump “helped” the president. “I don’t think Bob Mueller leaks,” Giuliani said after saying “first they leak the questions” and being corrected about the source of the document. I don’t know. We’re helped because it shows he has no case.” Giuliani’s latest interview came after days of conflicting statements about the investigations into the president. The former New York City mayor, who was hired by Trump last month, said he was still learning the facts of the Mueller case and Trump’s knowledge of a $130,000 hush payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Daniels has alleged a sexual tryst with Trump in 2006, which Trump denies.

After quitting Twitter late last year, Roseanne Barr is dipping her toe back into social media, but this time politics is off limits. The outspoken star of ABC’s revival of comedy hit Roseanne (Tuesdays, 8 ET/PT), announced her retirement from social media in December after getting into an online feud with people who responded harshly to tweets praising President Trump and criticizing his election foe, Hillary Clinton, and former president Obama. In response to the blowback, she tweeted: "i won't be censored or silence chided or corrected and continue to work. bye!" In the series, Barr's character also is a Trump supporter, a political perspective not regularly seen on film and TV. She fights with but still loves her sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), a Jill Stein voter. I don’t want to get anyone mad at me. I’ll try to find another way to say what is important for me,” says Barr, acknowledging she didn’t want to hurt her iconic show’s return. “I want people to watch it and love it.” Part of the problem is that many people don’t separate Roseanne the character from Roseanne the person. “I’m fine with that.