I wonder if the Founding Fathers envisioned that this sentence (highlighted in bold, courtesy of Harold Meyerson's column in today's Washington Post) would become so commonplace:

The civil rights leaders who have called this march don't doubt that if Obama could enact immigration reform by executive order, he would. In his meeting with them last Thursday, the president affirmed his commitment to the cause. Whether it will become his legislative priority is another question: Congress is waiting to see what Obama does, even as Obama says he needs to see some GOP willingness to enact reform (and this is certainly a cause that some leading Republicans, most notably John McCain, have supported in the past).

Why should Congress wait to see what Obama does?  Congress should do.  Obama should sign, or not.  When you march on Washington, you should be facing east from the Washington Monument, not north.

Earlier this month, Nancy Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Government and Chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, visited the Rockefeller Center and delivered a public lecture on the moral distinctiveness of political party identity.  She is both contrarian and clever in the way she takes apart self-styled "independents," who let their self-styled independence of thought remove any consequence they might have in electoral politics if they remain independent from their fellow voters.  She makes the affirmative case for ambitious political parties as sources of morality in politics.

The video is definitely worth your time.  For more, see her full explanation in On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.

I am all for eliminating earmarks to for-profit companies and for extending it to non-profits as well.  All discretionary money should be awarded on an open, competitive basis, with oversight of the executive branch agencies by appropriate Congressional committees.  Earmarks have no place in federal spending, as a matter of principle.  From The Washington Post:

"It ensures that for-profit companies no longer reap the rewards of congressional earmarks and limits the influence of lobbyists on members of Congress," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, linking the move to earlier decisions to ban gifts from lobbyists and forbid privately financed travel.

Democrats made the move to bar earmarks for for-profit entities despite fierce resistance from many rank-and-file lawmakers who rely on them to spread federal money around their districts and consider them crucial to their political fortunes.

Republicans responded immediately by proposing a moratorium on all earmarks, even those for nonprofits such as universities. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said voters would reward Republicans in the November midterm elections for taking on special interests.

It's not the $20 billion hit to the budget -- federal spending may not even go down if special interest projects are replaced by meritorious projects.  It is the lack of transparency and the potential for corruption that is the problem.  I don't think this ban alone will be enough to stop the corruption -- Congress must do its job to oversee the federal agencies running the competitive processes. 

Elizabeth Green has a must-read feature in this weeks' New York Times, "Building a Better Teacher."  There are several worthwhile parts focusing on effective techniques, but I particularly enjoyed the discussion of what makes teaching different from learning:

Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

Read the whole thing.

Freshman Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado takes his new institution to the woodshed:

He doesn't go far enough, but at least he's headed in the right direction.  Read more in this dialogue with Ezra Klein.

Yesterday, NPR ran a segment on Diane Ravitch and her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.  Once a proponent of school choice and testing, including the way they were supposed to be implemented in the No Child Left Behind Act, she now regards them as threats to our educational systems.  From the segment:

"She says one of her biggest concerns is the way the law requires school districts to use standardized testing."

"The basic strategy is measuring and punishing," Ravitch says of No Child Left Behind. "And it turns out as a result of putting so much emphasis on the test scores, there's a lot of cheating going on, there's a lot of gaming the system. Instead of raising standards it's actually lowered standards because many states have 'dumbed down' their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are."

I don't disagree with her yet.  High-stakes testing is a means to an end -- the ultimate end is evaluation and assessment of school performance.  But there are plenty of ways to evaluate and assess that don't include standardized testing, let alone the strange mix of non-standardized testing that we have observed with NCLB. 

But then she picks the wrong fight. 

I think this op-ed, "Reconciliation on health care would be an assault on the democratic process" by Orrin Hatch has appeared 30 days ahead of schedule.  Reconciliation is not the assault on democracy -- the Senate is the assault on democracy.  Senator Hatch may like the way the Senate requires supermajorities and other obstacles to the simplest version of majority rule that most of us think of when we hear the word "democracy," but he shouldn't go redefining words on his own. That's not what language is for.

And the fun doesn't stop there.  Here are three more offenses against language that jump off the page:

1) Hatch refers to the reconciliation process as "arcane."  I don't think so.  The filibuster that reconciliation would circumvent is arcane. 

2) Hatch again takes some liberties with the definition of democracy:

This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. 

Readers of the blog know I am no particularly fan of the health care bills, but if a majority of the elected representatives in both houses and the elected occupant of the White House all support the bill, then I think that "against the will of the American people" is a pretty tough sell.

Leave aside the broader health care reform debate and what the Democrats want out of this process.  Why are the Republicans not using their elected offices to advance policies that serve their own supporters?

Their main voting constituency is middle class (or higher) white families in the suburbs, particularly the husbands and fathers in that constituency.  They don't face the raft of problems that others do in our society.  But one big problem that they do face is that something beyond their control happens to someone in their family.  Medical catastrophes have to rank high on that list -- they certainly do for me.  If a member of my family were to be afflicted with an expensive medical condition, then I am financialy viable only for as long as I stay insured with my current employer.  Put simply, there are gaps in private insurance markets that leave such families exposed.  This is plain to see and should be the focus of Republican efforts on health care reform, along the lines that I have discussed over the past six months (most recently here).

Macroeconomic Advisers has a blog.  I became a huge fan of their work during my year at the CEA.

If I were giving awards for the most self-interested suggestions for fiscal stimulus, this one from the American Benefits Council would be among the finalists.  From the Council's president, James Klein, in its most recent press release:

"Immediate relief is essential to the preservation of thousands of American jobs. Every day that goes by without a solution means more facilities will close, more layoffs will be planned and economic growth slips farther away. One recent survey found that cash contributions to pension plans will be 400 percent higher in 2010 than in 2009 and another survey found that fully 68 percent of employers reported that unexpected cash outlays for pension plans would cause cuts outside the plan including hiring and workforce training. Do we really need any further evidence that pension funding is a jobs issue?" Klein said.