So, there are rumors that the Tea Party types are going to try to a primary challenge against Sen. Lugar. My main knock against Sen. Lugar is that he has been in office for like a million years. Beyond that, he has a tendency to talk a moderate game before going ahead and voting the party line. But, votes aren’t enough for the right wing of his party, apparently. They’re mad about stuff like Lugar’s support for a treaty that reduces nuclear arsenals, mainly because it was something that President Obama supported. Opposition to Sen. Lugar is the sort of thing that gave rise to the Onion headline “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.”
Most discussions have Treasurer Richard Mourdock as the most likely candidate to challenge Sen. Lugar. Mourdock, of course, is most notable for his wrong-headed decision to waste millions on legal bills to challenge the restructuring of Chrysler in bankruptcy.
The fact that nuclear arms control, specifically treaties that allow the U.S. to monitor the dismantling of the former Soviet arsenal, is now a point of contention among the two mainstream parties is pretty telling. That left-right continuum sure isn’t what it used to be.
Narrowing down Lugar’s legacy to a single vote is less than fair.
Lugar remains out of touch with his conservative Hoosier base on a wide spectrum of issues.
See http://www.votesmart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=53292
Click on “Interest Group Ratings” in the right column for overviews of Lugar’s positions.
So Bart, I’m supposed to go read what special interest groups have to say to tell me what individual voters are supposed to think?
I am amused by the “anyone but Lugar” movement because it’s yet to offer someone who will be a better Senator for the state of Indiana. As Doug points out, someone who can’t read or have the bankruptcy code explained to them is probably going to struggle when it comes to bigger issues.
The “out of touch” charge is pretty laughable considering the opposition that is offered. I don’t think the “conservative Hoosier base” is exactly flying the Tea Party flag, they just sent noted lobbyist and recent Hoosier immigrant Dan Coats back to Washington. Compare the two men and tell me which one is the better Senator for Indiana.
Lugar’s the right man for the job unless you want a yes-man party line follower – in which case we could send anyone to Washington and they’d be fine.
I mean, Lugar’s supposed to vote No on the nuclear arms treaty for the sole reason Obama supports it? Buy a clue and look at the man’s record on the issue that goes back decades and crosses administrations.
And that’s just one issue.
Heck, if we’re looking for someone full of rhetoric and an inability to think for themselves, much less be a good representative for Hoosiers, someone send a search party to the golf courses of America and find Dan Burton. He’d be perfect for the job.
C’mon Doug. You’re not exactly being fair to the anti-Luger movement. Some general thoughts regarding your and Joe’s posts:
(1) You might not have liked Murdock’s bankruptcy claim but a bunch of analysts and legal scholars thought it had merit. Either way, the bottom line is Murdock was the most popular vote getter in the state in the 2010 election (3 months ago). That means he may be the person who actually has the best chance of beating Luger (which is an important reason to support him. (This also disputes what Joe said about the conservative Indiana base not liking Luger’s challenger).
(2) As Bart said, narrowing down Luger’s vote to Start isn’t very fair or accurate. Even if we limit to current bills, there is the Dream Act, which seems like terrible policy to me (at least the citizenship for college portion).
(3) Tea Partiers and conservatives alike are irritated that Luger hasn’t said no to a SCOTUS nominee in quite a while (ever?). Personally, I disagree with them there and believe that elections have consequences. However, considering how Democrats have treated the nomination of conservative justices like Bork, Alito and Roberts, it is hard to blame people for wishing Luger would play the same type of hard ball.
(4) Luger has done himself no favors with the antagonistic way he has antagonized the Tea Party folks. For an elder statesman, I am surprised by Luger’s commentary towards the Tea Party. Rather than make nice, he has basically taken a much more combatative approach. That is just plain stupid.
(5) Joe, the Start concerns don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have anything to do with Obama. Did you know there are virtually NO verification provisions in the Start treaty? So, here we are dismantling nuclear arms and defense we spent billions to produce, based upon a “promise” that Russia will do the same? Not exactly the “trust but verify” that revered President Ronald Reagan was so fond of.
Luger does absolutely nothing for me, although I fully admit I’m not a longtime Luger voter. Maybe if you’ve been with the guy the 40 odd years he has been in the Senate, he did stuff for you.
For me, I ask, “what have you done for me lately”, and I don’t see much. He lost me when he voted in support of earmarks the day after the election. That was a bug middle finger to the Tea Party folks. What did he expect the result to be after that?
Paul C.,
You wrote “(1) You might not have liked Murdock’s bankruptcy claim but a bunch of analysts and legal scholars thought it had merit.”
Could you please enumerate and name the “bunch”? I need to know who they are before I can proceed to the rest of your points.
What I’m looking for, in particular, in an analysis of Mourdock’s claim ast to:
a) how you get around Indiana’s contractual waiver of its ability to object. To participate in this investment, Indiana had agreed to be bound by decisions of majority creditors, acting through an agent. (Indiana’s stake was a small percentage of the total.) That agent consented to the agreement; and
b) the scenario yielding a higher return to Indiana than the scenario in which the government funds a buy out under the terms it dictated. In other words, if there was no government money available to finance the purchase, who is bankrolling a restructuring? Or, in the alternative, the basis for concluding that liquidation of assets yields a higher return – keeping in mind that the bankruptcy judge conducted a hearing and, based on the evidence presented, concluded that liquidation would result in a lower return to secured creditors.
Paul C:
1) How Mourdock did in the general election is irrelevant. We’re talking about a primary election against another Republican. Did he even face a primary challenge for his current office?
4) Anatagonized the Tea Party how? By refusing to treat a bunch of children like the adults they claim to be? They’re a fraud and the more people who know it, the better.
They talk a big game and have done NOTHING to back it up. Claiming to be serious about the deficit lost all credibility when they almost immediately followed that statement by saying they weren’t going to touch Social Security or Medicare or military spending. You can’t solve the deficit without hard decisions on all three, and the Tea Party isn’t up to it.
5) So if you have half as many sites to inspect as you used to have when the previous treaty is signed, why wouldn’t you have less inspections? As of right now there are NO inspections of Russian nuclear sites.
Joe:
1) Disagree. You may not see any relevance between popularity in a general election and popularity in a primary, but that view is short-sighted. To put it simply, the fact that Murdock was the leading vote getter is, at minimum, an indication that Republicans were not switching sides to vote for his opponent. That is an indication of popularity.
4) Whether you (or Luger) personally believes the Tea Party has any merit or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The whole idea of successful politics is to build a coalition to your views, not alienate whole groups of people. Luger has done this not only with his votes, but with his choice of rhetoric.
As a further note regarding the Tea Party, you lose significant credibility when you refer to the Tea Party as if they have a united stance on non-Obamacare issues. Just like your Democrat party, the Tea Party has members with differeng views on almost every subject. When you state that the Tea Party has a single view on Social Security, Medicare and defense spending, you show your ignorance of the Tea Party movement and beliefs. If I were to ask 100 Democrats about spending on SS, Medicare, and defense spending, they would not all provide the same answer. Let’s not pretend that the Tea Party would either.
5) I don’t understand what you are trying to argue here, but you’ll have to provide more than three lines of text to convince me that articles like this one, by a former assistant secretary of the Defense Dept. and a former director in the Defense Dept., are incorrect. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253245/threat-new-start-keith-b-payne
Mary: I wish I could answer you, but I cannot remember which analysts said what. However, here is one such commentator:
http://www.examiner.com/scotus-in-washington-dc/illegal-chrysler-takeover-pension-funds-standing-indiana-state-police-pension-trust-v-chrysler
Paul C. – I’ll raise your “former” assistant secretary and “former” director with a rebuttal from the very site you’re quoting:
Every living head of U.S. Strategic Command, including the eight former generals charged with this critical task, support New START. Would they put American security at risk?
Stephen Young
Senior Analyst
Union of Concerned Scientists
Your ball….
Paul:
Mourdock – his opponent for SoS was a 28 year old. His next opponent will have held the office Mourdock is hoping to get longer than that.
Plus, it’s a Republican state in a “Republican election” (2008 was what I’d call a Democratic election). Put another way, if you’re RC Cola against a warm glass of spit, you’re going to get lots of votes. If you’re RC Cola against Coke or Pepsi, it’s a different matter entirely and “I did great against spit!” doesn’t hold a lot of value inasmuch as saying how you’ll do against Coke/Pepsi.
Tea Party – you may have not noticed, but I honestly could care less about them. If they are the future of what is currently called the Republican Party, and if the Republican Party decides to kowtow to their foot-stomping, they will have lost me as a voter.
As far as my views, I’ve voted Republican/Libertarian most of my life but voted Obama in the last election because I though the Republicans have lost their way inasmuch as they’re not truly interested in smaller government or a balanced budget and they’re far too interested in telling people how to live.
Giving citizenship to people with college diplomas? Great idea because our current schools aren’t exactly pumping out what we need to keep up with China or India. I’d go further and give anyone who graduates with a masters or doctorate citizenship.
As far as what Lugar says about the Tea Party, I suspect he’s reached the point in his life where he’s going to say what he wants and if it costs him the election, so be it. And as far as telling me he doesn’t know how to be successful in politics because he’s not letting people out of their depth tell him how to operate, that’s pretty funny once I think about it.
New START – “New START has received the unequivocal support from our defense establishment led by Secretary Robert Gates, both the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our current STRATCOM commander, as well as seven former STRATCOM commanders. It also has received the strong support of national security leaders who served in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. ” So apparently all these people are clowns?
Thanks for the link, Paul.
I note that the commenter does not describe a scenario where secured creditors would get more money in the absence of government intervention. He says that “the government says that the pension funds might have received even less in such a bankruptcy.” That’s true as far as it goes, but the more important fact he declines to note is that the bankruptcy judge determined after hearing evidence that the funds would in fact have received even less in bankruptcy.
I don’t know for sure, but as a general matter, I agree with him on the standing issue – Indiana had a claim it was eligible to advance to the court, at least at the outset. (That’s standing, as opposed to mootness or waiver or some other legal doctrines.) He does not address Indiana’s contractual agreement to abide by the decision of the majority creditors as a condition for participating in the fund in the first place.
He also does a bit of bait and switch – arguing that it might be important to challenge this sort of thing now so your bargaining position doesn’t deteriorate in future negotiations. That’s also a plausible argument. But, he then goes right back to suggesting that this decision “rips off” the Indiana funds. That’s awfully strong language for a guy who hasn’t put forth a scenario in which the funds end up with more money at the end of this particular process.
Doug: I understand your criticisms of Mourdock’s argument. My point in citing that column was to illustrate some of the commentary supporting Mourdock’s position at that time. As an attorney, you surely understand risk/reward analysis, and my point is that some analysts thought Mourdock/the State of Indiana had a good chance of winning his lawsuit. And due to the large amount of money involved, even if Indiana’s chance of success was less than 50%, the risk/reward cost-analysis would have meant it was in the State’s best interest to pursue the Claim if the claim had even a slight chance of success.
Frank/Stephen Young: Did they write an article on why they like the treaty and why the verification provisions were adequate? Please cite.
Again, the point of the Start II link I provided was to illustrate that legitamite reasons exist not to support the treaty, and bright people have written coherent arguments for and against it. So, let’s not be intellectually dishonest by agreeing with Joe’s assertion that “I mean, Lugar’s supposed to vote No on the nuclear arms treaty for the sole reason Obama supports it? ” The decision whether or not to approve of Start II has (or at least “should have”) nothing to do with Obama’s support of it.
I respect that, Paul. But, giving them the benefit of the doubt on a 50/50 legal argument (I would have put it at less), two other variables that need to be in the equation is the amount of recovery if you win less the legal costs necessary to obtain that victory.
The nominal amount of Indiana’s secured interest was $42 million. They paid $0.43 on the dollar or about $18 million to get that interest. Under the restructuring that actually went through, they got about $12 million.
The total secured debt was about $6.9 billion. Indiana’s interest represented about 0.6% of the total. Secured creditors ended up with about 29% of face value or $2 billion. So, to get face value on the bonds, Indiana had to a) win; and b) figure out a way that creditors got paid $4.9 billion more than the government was willing to pay.
Another way of thinking about this is that Indiana would have had to increase the take for all secured creditors for about $166.66 million for every million Indiana would get in return. With a 50/50 chance of success and a $2 million legal bill, Indiana would need to expect a return of at least $4 million to make that calculation work out – so, it would need a scenario in which secured creditors could net $667 million more than the government was willing to pay out just to break even on the legal bills.
At the time of trial, the bankruptcy court placed the value of Chrysler’s assets at $800 million, down from an estimated $1.2 billion three weeks before, and down from an initial estimate of $2.6 billion.
Paul:
” The decision whether or not to approve of Start II has (or at least “should have”) nothing to do with Obama’s support of it.”
“Should have” is the core issue here. New START is used as another example of “Lugar not being conservative enough”, which is code to me for “we want someone to just vote how senior leadership tells them to”.
Doug: thanks for your points. Your recollection is better than mine, and you obviously followed the case very closely. I am not sure what you meant by “at trial” though. Did you mean the date of the objection hearing?
Even if we use that date, and agree on all the facts in your comment above, the assets of Chrysler decreased by $400 Million in 3 weeks! Which is faster than almost anyone could expect. And unfortunately our legal bills included two appeals (including SCOTUS), which added to the cost, and possibly make the litigation more expensive than anticipated, which changes the risk/reward from what might have been originally calculated.
Perhaps your next argument might be that Mourdock should have anticipated it. That argument might even be correct. However, you and I have the benefit of making this analysis in the rear-view mirror with all the facts, when Mourdock did not have ”
Joe: We agree that this issue is about “should have” . Your mistake is thinking that Tea Party types generally care what the Republican “senior leaders” want. The Tea Party is NOT the Republican party, and specifically broke away from it for a reason, and it was not because the Republican party was too nice to Obama.
Still, we have lost my main point, which was that the Tea Party is not the only ones disappointed with Mr. Luger. For example, see here (including comments):
http://hoosieraccess.com/2011/02/02/battle-of-the-richards/
Well, let me get this straight. The “Tea Party” does not like Lugar. They are disorganized as to a policy or plan.. because they have many competing views. They are going to challenge a decades long incumbent, but haven’t found the lamb to take him on — which would be political suicide within the party. And they don’t seem to be able to spell his name even with consistency — LugAr. While I fundamentally disagree with Lugar on many things, I can’t imagine what the rightwing has in store for this job. Frankly, why does the “Tea Party” get a say in the Republican primary? Why don’t they just run their own candidate in the general election? Or do they just want to be Republican wannabes?
Paul: What HoosierOne said re: the Tea Party not truly being distinct from the Republican Party.
HoosierOne, third parties suck. They just help elect the opposition (case in point: Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Teddy Roosevelt).
The Republicans are the party slightly more aligned with liberty. Much more importantly, they are wide open. An (semi) organized group like the Tea Party can have outsized influence on the Republicans, where they can’t compete against the unions for control of the Democrats.
the reason the tea party has no influence on the democratic party is because tea partiers are all right-wingers.
Buzzcut: If the Tea Party truly represents this big giant block of Hoosiers like they say they do, they wouldn’t be the third party – the Republicans would be.
Unless they’re over-stating how big/influential they are.
The decks are stacked against a third party, no matter how large. It would be a lot easier to have influence over one of the major parties than to start another one.
It seems to me that there are “Blue Dog” Democrats that would be receptive to the Tea Party’s rhetorric. But compared to the AFSCME, or the NEA, the Tea Party has very little money, and the Democrat party is all about money. Money is what gets out the Democrat vote (and union people working for a candidate doesn’t hurt either). These groups control the Democrats, and they are not liberty oriented in the least.
Re: Liberty orientation – I’d bet that if we look at decisions on provisions in the Bill of Rights by conservative versus liberal judges over the last 50 years, we’d see conservatives as more likely to vote in favor of the government and limitation of those rights than liberals. The conservatives would get a couple of recent wins on the Second Amendment, but take a beating on the Fourth, for example.