Quotulatiousness

September 8, 2013

VDH on Obama’s limitations

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

A Victor Davis Hanson post from a couple of days ago, but still of interest:

How did Obama get himself into this mess? It was bound to happen, given his past habits. All we are seeing now is the melodramatic fulfillment of vero possumus, lowering the rising seas, faux Corinthian columns, hope and change, the bows, the Cairo speech, and the audacity of hope. Hubris does earn Nemesis.

1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won’t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but the world rejected him.

[…]

2) Obama thinks in an untrained manner and for all the talk of erudition and education seems bored and distracted — and it shows up in the most critical moments. Had he wished to stop authoritarians, prevent bloodshed and near genocide, and foster true reform in the Middle East, there were plenty of prior, but now blown occasions: a) the “good” war in Afghanistan could have earned his full attention; b) the “bad” Iraq War was won and needed only a residual force to monitor the Maliki government and protect Iraq airspace and ensure quiet; c) the green revolution in Iran was in need of moral support; d) Qaddafi could have been continually pressured for further reform rather than bombed into oblivion; e) postwar Libya needed U.S. leadership to ensure that “lead from behind” did not lead to the present version of Somalia and the disaster in Benghazi; e) long ago, the president could have either kept quiet about Syria or acted on his threats when Assad was tottering and the resistance was less Islamist; f) he could have warned the one vote/one time Muslim Brotherhood early on not to do what everyone in the world knew it would surely do; g) he need not have issued tough serial deadlines to Iran that we have not really enforced and probably have no intention of enforcing.

Instead, Obama relied on his rhetoric and talked loosely, sloppily and inconsistently from crisis to crisis, the only common denominator being that he always took the path of least resistance and thus did nothing concretely to match his cadences. Usually to the degree he made a decision, he made things worse with empty, first-person bombast.

September 5, 2013

QotD: An important lesson for university students

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

You could find a dozen websites offering more trenchant progressive political analysis in five minutes.

Yet Professor Penn’s lesson has value to his students. They can learn the following important things:

1. In the course of your life, people with power will act badly with impunity.

2. People with power over you will use that power to indulge themselves in droning, whether or not their droning offers any value.

3. People can be tremendously talented and knowledgeable about Subject X and be useless louts about Subject Y. Often they’ll want to talk about Subject Y.

4. People think others want to hear their opinions about politics, and think their opinions about politics are insightful.

5. A significant part of developing as an adult is deciding how you will deal with points 1 – 4.

6. Huge amounts of government money pay for absolute shit.

7. People who nominally favor freedom of expression will drop it like a hot coal when their political biases are aroused. Case in point: many angry conservative people saying that Professor Penn should be fired for a banal political rant, even though he’s a professor at a state university enjoying First Amendment protections that are rather broad. Check the comments on the sites complaining about Professor Penn if you don’t believe me.

I submit those are all valuable lessons.

I think that it’s pathetic that these students are paying to hear Professor Penn indulge himself like that even for ten minutes. I think his calling out a student in class for seeming to disagree displays low character and an excellent reason to avoid his class. But I don’t see anything that merits firing from his position at a public institution, and I am not enthused about a system in which public universities will be policed for insipid partisanship by other partisans.

But how enthusiastic do you suppose Professor Penn’s students are about faculty free speech rights after sitting through that?

Ken White, “William S. Penn of Michigan State University Teaches Important Lessons To College Students”, Popehat, 2013-09-04

August 26, 2013

Stephen Harper’s media aversion

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Michael Den Tandt seems puzzled that Stephen Harper and his staff treat the media as though they were a bunch of rancid/poisonous/radioactive zombies that would love to eat their brains on live TV:

Stephen Harper, it will sadden some to learn, is not an ogre or a troll. Nor are the members of his staff orcs, goblins, hobgoblins or cave wights out of Tolkien. They are all, shockingly, human beings.

Having spent the last week locked up with them cheek by jowl — the staffers that is, not the prime minister, more on that later — in rattletrap buses, dingy hotel basements and in the belly of a flying tank, I can attest that they work very hard. Managing a tour of the Arctic, on a very tight schedule, observed and criticized at all times by a gaggle of touchy, tired, grumpy journalists, can’t be anyone’s idea of fun. Yet I saw Harper’s staff do that, with good nature, resilience and aplomb for the most part.

But for the incident Friday afternoon, in which a Chinese journalist from a state-owned newspaper was prevented from asking a question of the PM and shoved a female staffer, last week’s Arctic tour, Harper’s eighth as prime minister, went off without a hitch, from a Conservative standpoint. He hit all the thematic and policy notes he intended to, appeared in a series of photo ops that reinforced those themes and policies, and avoided any major missteps. Another job done, on to the next.

That said, they — meaning Harper and the Conservatives — could be doing so much better than this. To watch the PM in action, up close, is to see repeated opportunities missed, for reasons that make little sense. Much of this appears to stem from his aversion to, and discomfort with, the national media.

Why, it’s almost as though Harper has learned not to trust the media or to allow them to get too close. I wonder how he’d have come to that conclusion? It’s a mystery, sure enough.

August 23, 2013

Putin’s newfound fans in the American conservative movement

Filed under: Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

In Reason, Cathy Young looks at the unlikely fandom for Russian President Vladimir Putin among American social conservatives:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, the career KGB officer who has presided over the rollback of his country’s post-Communist freedoms and revived Cold War-style anti-Americanism, is an unlikely hero for American conservatives. Yet the Kremlin strongman has lately found some fans on the right who see him as a defender of Christian values — most recently, in the imbroglio over Russia’s new legal ban on gay “propaganda.” It is a sad misjudgment that does a disservice to the causes of conservatism, freedom, and religion alike.

Spokesmen for several right-wing groups including the American Family Association have praised the Russian law, which prohibits any pro-gay speech or expression that could be accessible to minors. Veteran columnist Pat Buchanan has joined the Putin cheerleading squad. And, shockingly, the usually thoughtful author Rod Dreher, who blogs for The American Conservative, has added his own “1.5 Cheers for Putin.”

While condemning anti-gay violence and authoritarianism in Russia, Dreher praises Putin’s willingness to speak up for Christianity and laments that “post-Soviet Russia, for all its grievous flaws, is . . . more conscious of its Christian history and character than the United States.”

This is a truly grievous misunderstanding of the reality of religion and politics in 21st Century Russia. Russia today is outwardly far more religious than most of Western Europe, but it’s a religion of state more than church: Orthodox Christianity has taken Communism’s place as the new official ideology, with church membership an official badge of patriotism and loyalty.

QotD: Belgium as a sum of its many, many parts

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The outcome was byzantine in its complexity. Belgium was sub-divided into three “Regions”: Flanders, Wallonia and “Brussels-Capital”, each with its own elected parliament (in addition to the national parliament). Then there were the three formally instituted “Communities”: the Dutch-speaking, the French-speaking and the German-speaking (the latter representing the approximately 65,000 German speakers who live in eastern Wallonia near the German border). The communities, too, were assigned their own parliaments.

The regions and the linguistic communities don’t exactly correspond — there are German speakers in Wallonia and a number of French-speaking towns (or parts of towns) within Flanders. Special privileges, concessions, and protections were established for all of these, a continuing source of resentment on all sides. Two of the regions, Flanders and Wallonia, are effectively unilingual, even with the exceptions noted. Brussels was prounced officially bilingual, even though at least 85 percent of the population speaks French.

In addition to the regional and linguistic Communities, Belgium was also divided into ten provinces (five each in Flanders and Wallonia). These, too, were assigned administrative and governing functions. But in the course of the various constitutional revisions real authority came increasingly to lie either with the regions (in matters of urbanism, environment, the economy, public works, transport and external commerce) or the linguistic community (education, language, culture and some social services).

The outcome of all these changes was comically cumbersome. Linguistic correctness (and the constitution) now required, for example, that all national governments, whatever their political color, be “balanced” between Dutch- and French-speaking ministers, with the prime minister the only one who has to be bilingual (and who is therefore typically from Flanders). Linguistic equality on the Cour d’Arbitrage (Constitutional Court) was similarly mandated, with the presidency alternating annually across the language barrier. In Brussels, the four members of the executive of the capital region would henceforth sit together (and spake in the language of their choice) to decide matters of common concern; but for Flemish or Francophone “community” affairs they would sit separately, two by two.

As a consequence Belgium was no longer one, or even two, states but an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities. To form a government was difficult: it required multi-party deals within and across regions, “symmetry” between national, regional, community, provincial, and local party coalitions, a working majority in both major language groups and linguistic parity at every political and administrative level. And when a government was formed it had little initiative: even foreign policy — in theory one of the last remaining responsibilities of the national government — was effectively in the hands of the regions, since for contemporary Belgium it mostly means foreign trade agreements and these are a regional prerogative.

Tony Judt, “The Old Europe — and the New”, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005.

August 22, 2013

QotD: Politicians and the world of real jobs

Filed under: Business, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Whenever I hear a politician or pundit talk about a modern economy like they understand it well enough to run it, I want to burst out laughing, or cry, or both. If you can’t even keep pictures of your dick off the Intertunnel during an election cycle, I imagine being Emperor of the Economic and Social Universe is probably well above your abilities. Politicians have to take tours of factories because to them, everything and everybody in a factory might as well be alchemy performed by men from Jupiter.

“Sippican Cottage”, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” Sippican Cottage, 2013-08-21.

August 15, 2013

Argentinian primary results may signal the end of Cristina Kirchner’s presidency

Filed under: Americas, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:26

In The Beacon, Alvaro Vargas Llosa explains why the odd primary system in Argentina may have created an impossible situation for President Cristina Kirchner:

Argentina held open primaries last Sunday whose ostensible purpose was to pick the candidates that will compete in October’s midterm elections. But Argentineans saw them as a major test of Cristina Kirchner’s increasingly corrupt, authoritarian presidency — and she was badly humiliated.

The rules make these primary elections a foretaste of the real race, which means that the president will be roundly defeated in October. More importantly, this spells the end of Cristina’s attempt to change the constitution so she can run for a third consecutive term. (Since she succeeded her own husband, who was president between 2003 and 2007, it would actually amount to a fourth Kirchner term.)

The beauty of Argentina’s political underdevelopment, if one can put it that way, is that, unlike what happens in Venezuela, where the competing factions of the dictatorship have been able to keep their differences from bringing the government down, Peronismo has a kind of built-in system of checks and balances that ensures no autocrat can rule forever. As soon as one Peronista smells electoral blood, he goes after the governing Peronista with gusto, with the result that the president is eventually brought down in large part due to internecine fighting.

This is what happened in Sunday’s primary election. A former Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers who used to be a loyal Kirchner underling, Sergio Massa, turned on her at the last moment and ran against her chosen candidate in the province of Buenos Aires, which accounts for a bit less than 40 percent of the national vote. Not to speak of several Peronista dissidents who have been in opposition for a while and also ran against her candidates in several other districts. Over all, seventy percent of the country voted for anti-Kirchner candidates, while only twenty-six percent voted for the government. Kirchner, who was reelected with 54 percent of the ballots just two years ago, has lost half of her supporters.

August 12, 2013

Replacing Tim Hudak

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Richard Anderson looks at the racing form to try to determine just who the Ontario Progressive Conservatives might look to as a replacement for current leader Tim Hudak. The pickings appear to be rather slim:

Christine Elliot — A sometime leadership candidate and long-time wife of Jim Flaherty, the federal minister of finance. Considered too moderate by the red meaters and too old by everyone else. About as close to an establishment candidate as you’ll get in any potential leadership race.

Randy Hillier — The party’s designated “crazy libertarian.” It would be nice to have a premier who uses the word “freedom” without it getting stuck in his throat. It ain’t happening. At 55 he’s getting into the “old range” in the political world. His record of activism would also be an issue. Leftists can have all sorts of activist skeletons in their closet. Right wingers can’t. Even if that activism was merely to defend their own property.

Frank Klees — While certainly the most plausible leadership candidate, having the required polish and gravitas, his 62 years and record as an ex-Harris cabinet minister are huge liabilities. His previous leadership bids, and odd attempt to become speaker in 2011, have likely generated a fair amount of bad blood in the Tory fold.

Lisa Macleod — Young, feisty and reasonably photogenic. Not too well known outside political circles, she could probably hold her own in a debate with Andrea Horwath. She might also be able to hold the slippery Kathleen Wynne to account. Downside: She sometimes comes across as shrill and is, how to put this delicately, a tad overweight. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, but unfortunately larger women are considered slovenly in our culture. There is also, of course, a double standard. An equally well insulated man would probably curry somewhat less disfavour. Visuals matter in politics, even when their stupid.

Jim Wilson — A Mike Harris-era retread, it’s likely that the unions recall his efforts as Health Minister in the mid-1990s. It’s also likely that they recall those efforts in an extremely negative light. The last of the relatively senior ex-Harris ministers in the legislature, now that Elizabeth Witmer is comfortable ensconced over at WSIB, Wilson would likely be dismissed as a relic..

While Hillier would be a fascinating choice as replacement leader, I doubt he has much support in caucus. Elliot is my local MPP, but I don’t know how her chances stack up either. The others are pretty much unknown to me. Anyone whose political career includes any kind of association with former Premier Mike Harris is automatically a media pet-hate. The Toronto Star and other media outlets have spent a lot of time and energy painting the Harris years as our local experience of brutal dictatorship, famine, plagues of locusts, and all the horrors of Revelations.

August 10, 2013

Counter-productive attempts to ease the housing crisis for the very poor

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Sometimes the very tools employed to solve problems can make the problem worse:

Progressives routinely deplore the “affordable housing crisis” in American cities. In cities such as New York and Los Angeles, about 20 to 25 percent of low-income renters are spending more than half their incomes just on housing. But it is the very laws that Progressives favor — land-use policies, zoning codes, and building codes — that ratchet up housing costs, stand in the way of alternative housing options, and confine poor people to ghetto neighborhoods. Historically, when they have been free to do so, poor people have happily disregarded the ideals of political humanitarians and found their own ways to cut housing costs, even in bustling cities with tight housing markets.

One way was to get other families, or friends, or strangers, to move in and split the rent. Depending on the number of people sharing a home, this might mean a less-comfortable living situation; it might even mean one that is unhealthy. But decisions about health and comfort are best made by the individual people who bear the costs and reap the benefits. Unfortunately today the decisions are made ahead of time by city governments through zoning laws that prohibit or restrict sharing a home among people not related by blood or marriage, and building codes that limit the number of residents in a building.

Those who cannot make enough money to cover the rent on their own, and cannot split the rent enough due to zoning and building codes, are priced out of the housing market entirely. Once homeless, they are left exposed not only to the elements, but also to harassment or arrest by the police for “loitering” or “vagrancy,” even on public property, in efforts to force them into overcrowded and dangerous institutional shelters. But while government laws make living on the streets even harder than it already is, government intervention also blocks homeless people’s efforts to find themselves shelter outside the conventional housing market. One of the oldest and commonest survival strategies practiced by the urban poor is to find wild or abandoned land and build shanties on it out of salvageable scrap materials. Scrap materials are plentiful, and large portions of land in ghetto neighborhoods are typically left unused as condemned buildings or vacant lots. Formal title is very often seized by the city government or by quasi-governmental “development” corporations through the use of eminent domain. Lots are held out of use, often for years at a time, while they await government public-works projects or developers willing to buy up the land for large-scale building.

August 8, 2013

A brief moment of sympathy for Thomas Mulcair

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Richard Anderson finds a drop of sympathy for the unexpected plight of the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition:

It must be galling to be Thomas Mulcair right now. A decades long career spent climbing the greasy pole of Quebec politics. A quick ascent to the federal level and then, by the oddest stroke of luck, an unexpected death places you into the leader’s role. It seems that with a bit of luck your old nemesis the Liberal Party might be finished after the next election. Happy days to be leader of the Official Opposition.

That is until the MSM started following around the latest bright shiny thing: Justin Trudeau.

While the Once and Future King is touring the sumptuous beauty of British Columbia, poor Tommy is wandering through the backwoods of Northern Ontario. The region is horribly neglected. An afterthought to provincial administrators in downtown Toronto. The area above the French River, sadly, has always failed to capture the imagination of Canadians.

The settlement of the West is one of the great romances of Canadian history, if not the greatest. The charm of the Maritimes is irresistible. The North’s terrible majesty demands admiration. Quebec is Quebec. Southern Ontario is the center of English Canada, Toronto commanding the region like, well, an Imperial Capital around which all else revolves.

Northern Ontario is kind of just up there. Somewhere between Barrie and Winnipeg. What small romance that region conveys is from faded memories of the great mineral boom a century ago, and the twangy recollections of Stompin’ Tom. Only he could make Sudbury Saturday Nights memorable. At least Hamilton has the virtue of being between Burlington and Niagara.

Poor, poor Tommy. There isn’t a major media outlet that gives a damn about his “listening tour.” Leader of the NDP shaking hands with a miners union representative doesn’t make for great copy, especially not when competing with Justin’s adorable family.

Canadian think-tanks

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

An interesting article in Forbes charts the rise of Canada’s distinctive collection of think-tanks:

Think Tanks in Canada have been developing policy analyses and advocating market oriented solutions for decades. Some of the oldest think tanks and advocacy groups, such as the C.D. Howe Institute, founded in 1958, and the National Citizens Coalition, NCC, founded in 1974, are still active. The idea for NCC developed from the success of newspaper advertorials.

The first one published by Colin M. Brown in 1967 pointed out that despite not being engaged in the Vietnam War, Canada’s federal government spending in the early 1960’s rose at a faster rate than government spending in the U.S. Canadian civil society took notice and reacted. The Fraser Institute was founded in Vancouver, B.C. in 1974, and its success and generosity in sharing its expertise led to a gradual but almost steady investment in think tanks across the country. Lest we forget, Canada is a big place. It is the second largest country in the world. The longest distance from east to west is 5,514 km — similar to the distance from New York City to London, or from New York City to Lima, Peru. Canada has six separate time zones and its provinces have considerable cultural and political diversity which call for a multiplicity of regional think tanks and policy efforts.

The “2012 Global Go To Report” devotes a section of its think tank rankings to institutes in Canada and Mexico. A growing number of Canadian free-market think tanks are appearing among the top.

Fraser Institute takes the lead. It received more mentions (10) than any other Canadian think tank and ranked first in Canada and 25th in the world. It is well known for its motto: “If It Matters, Measure It.” Many of its products, like the “Tax Freedom Day” and its economic freedom indices, have been replicated across the globe. Think tanks all over the world look at Fraser’s research as a guide in developing their own programs.

Brian Lee Crowley, the co-author of The Canadian Century, founded the Ottawa-based Macdonald Laurier Institute in 2010. It ranked third in the world in the category of best young institute. As it hit the ground running with great policy products, it also managed to rank ahead of other older think tanks, including the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) in Nova Scotia, founded in 1994. Crowley was also the founding president of AIMS. AIMS itself an organization that produces interesting work on market reforms in Canada’s maritime provinces — a part of the country that typically prefers big government as opposed to market-oriented solutions.

The Montreal Economic Institute deserves special mention for working in one of the most challenging cultural environments. It publishes in French and English, and is the only think tank in Canada to focus its efforts entirely on Quebec. The institute was founded in 1985 but became consolidated when Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a talented intellectual entrepreneur, became its leader in 1999 and restructured the organization. Kelly-Gagnon’s expertise is in high demand also outside Canada, and his team has produced tremendous materials advocating specifically for reforms to government-controlled health care.

August 5, 2013

Political symbology

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

L. Neil Smith in the latest Libertarian Enterprise:

Author Robert A. Heinlein once observed: “The American eagle eats carrion, never picks on anything its own size, and will soon be extinct.”

Benjamin Franklin wanted our national symbol to be the turkey. He regarded it as a noble creature and didn’t mean it as a joke. It was one of the few times the good Doctor Franklin was wrong. I knew a farm family once, who tried raising turkeys. If it rained they had to get them under cover, fast. Otherwise, they’d look up, gaping, to see where all that water falling on their heads was coming from, and drown.

By the thousands.

On second thought, maybe Ben was onto something, symbolically. That turkey behavior sounds very much like the American electorate today.

The libertarian movement seems to have chosen the porcupine as a symbol. It never starts a fight but always finishes it. Problem is, the porcupine has a brain about the size of a pinto bean, and can be accurately compared to a slow-moving pointy rock. At that, I suppose it’s a lot better than the Hollow French Woman in New York Harbor that the porcupine-bright National Libertarian Party has adopted as its logo.

Personally, I’ve always rather liked the skunk as a national or party symbol. They have a negative reputation they don’t deserve at all. Skunks are highly resourceful organisms, and very, very smart. And they carry the ultimate means of self-defense, something that even wolves and mountain lions respect and give the widest possible berth to. My favorite mental picture is the little guy standing on his front paws, his back legs and tail high in the air, letting the enemy have it.

Nepotism … you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Government, Japan, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Steve Chapman makes a case against nepotism in the modern world:

It would be silly to make Caroline Kennedy the White House science adviser: She’s not a scientist. It would be silly to name her fire commissioner of New York City: She has no background in public safety.

The standards are different in other fields. Kennedy has no previous known interest in Japan, Asia or international relations and is not a diplomat. But Barack Obama has chosen her to be the next ambassador to Japan.

Liz Cheney, likewise, is not inhibited by anything she lacks. She went to high school in northern Virginia, college in Colorado and law school in Chicago, before taking up residence in the Washington, D.C. area. Under George W. Bush, she held a couple of State Department jobs for which she had no obvious qualifications. But now she’s running for the U.S. Senate from Wyoming.

You could pick a name out of the phone book and find someone with better credentials. But these names are not random. They are household names, made famous by their fathers: John F. Kennedy and Dick Cheney. So the daughters carry an aura of expertise and gravity.

They benefit from “branding” — their association with the genuine accomplishments of famous relatives. But the logic behind that appeal only goes so far. Just because you wear Nike shoes doesn’t mean you’d buy a can of Nike beans. A Cheney’s virtues, if any, may not be present in another Cheney.

July 28, 2013

It’s not surprising that they can be bought – it is surprising for how little

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Cory Doctorow posted at BoingBoing:

A detailed analysis on Maplight of the voting in last week’s vote on de-funding NSA dragnet spying found that the Congresscritters who voted in favor of more NSA spying received more than double the defense industry campaign contributions of their anti-NSA-voting rivals. They were the winners in the industry’s $13M donation bonanza leading up to the 2012 elections.

The remarkable thing is how cheaply these empty suits sold out their vow to uphold the Constitution. On average, the pro-spying side got $41,635, while the anti- averaged $18,765 — a difference of $22,870.

Contributors and the NSA amendment

July 26, 2013

Justin Amash and the attempt to rein-in the NSA

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Dave Weigel looks at the unexpectedly close vote in congress that would have forced the NSA to “walk back” some of its current domestic surveilance operations:

For a few minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Justin Amash thought he might have killed the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program. He’d optimistically expected maybe 90 Republicans to back his amendment to the Department of Defense budget. Ninety-four of them did. But he ran out of votes eventually — the Democrats didn’t come through — and by a 217–205 margin, the House killed his amendment.

Amash loaded the confetti cannon anyway. “My friends and colleagues stuck with me on my NSA amendment and changed the dynamic of the debate with tonight’s close vote,” the Republican congressman tweeted. “What an amazing staff I have. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are awesome.”

[…]

Defenders of the NSA program are furious that Amash even got that far, and are working to undermine him. According to Politico’s Jake Sherman, Amash started this process with an “unworkable amendment” that would have failed easily, until staffers “held his hand” to fix it. That’s their story, but it doesn’t reflect what led up to the amendment. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, every member of Congress who’d been sitting on some security state reform picked it back up and reintroduced it. In the Senate, Utah’s Mike Lee (a Republican) and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley (a Democrat) brought back the Ending Secret Law Act that they couldn’t pass when FISA was reauthorized. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, both Democrats, introduced legislation to restrict NSA data collection unless the material contained a “demonstrated link to terrorism or espionage.”

At the time, the lack of quick action on those bills suggested that the Snowden story had been a blip. Privacy advocates in Congress now refer to those bills as the first wave, part of a strategy of attrition that will make the current policy politically untenable.

Amash proved the NSA will have to concede some ground when his amendment moved quickly from obscurity to reality to being under attack from the administration. On Monday night, before the Rules Committee voted on which amendments to bring up, Amash was told to meet with Speaker of the House John Boehner on the floor. He returned from that meeting convinced (and surprised) that he’d get a vote after all.

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