Russ Feingold

“This was a difficult decision, as I thoroughly enjoyed my tenure in the State Senate and the U.S. Senate, and I know that progressives are eager to reverse some of the outrageous policies being pursued by corporate interests at both the state and federal levels. I am also well aware that I have a very strong standing in polls should I choose to run again for the U.S. Senate or in a recall election for governor. After 28 continuous years as an elected official, however, I have found the past eight months to be an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective,” wrote Feingold.

The Wisconsinite lost his reelection bid during the 2010 elections, and announced in February that he had formed a grassroots PAC, Progressives United, which is primarily intended to push back against the U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC.

He has also been teaching law at Marquette University Law School — something he told supporters “was a joy” — and has penned a book that is slated for publishing next February. It traces how the U.S. has “too often lost our way as a nation in responding to the 9/11 attacks and related issues,” and he plans to speak throughout the nation on the topic in 2012.

“The one thing many of us did not anticipate at the outset of this year was the extreme assault on the working families of Wisconsin in particular and the nation as a whole,” he wrote. “I was happy with some of the results of this year’s Wisconsin state senate recall elections, and I was glad to be able to play a small role in supporting all of the Democratic candidates.”

In 2012, he says he’ll work for the reelection of President Barack Obama, but following the actions of Gov. Scott Walker, he says he also understands that “retaking the state governments from these corporate-backed operatives” must be a priority.

“The entire political climate is more infected by the domination of very wealthy individual and corporate interests than perhaps at any time in our nation’s history. That is why I founded Progressives United, an organization devoted not only to overturning the Citizens United decision but to challenging those involved in the political process who, for short-term political gain, are willing to seek and accept unlimited corporate contributions. This practice should be strongly opposed regardless of party and regardless of whether I otherwise support these candidates,” he said.

“In many ways, this is the overriding political struggle of our time. It is more important than whether or when one person runs for office again. That is why, at this time, I am devoting my primary political energy to this cause and this organization.”

Under one proposal, if a person does not carry health insurance from a private insurance company, they would be fined up to 2% of their income. Is this fair, or unfair?

The poll found that Snyder, already losing badly to Griffin, was four points further behind if he backed the bill.

The question, raised by Nate Silver and others: Is Firedoglake trying to scare vulnerable Democrats into retirement in order to kill health care reform? All indications point to “yes.” I’m hearing that FDL will conduct more polls in vulnerable Democratic districts, based largely on this chart of the “top 20 Democrats who could lose their seat over health care vote[s]. Snyder was at the top of that list, posted by FDL’s Jane Hamsher on Jan. 6. (One irony: Snyder is a fairly progressive member of Congress, and not a member of the Blue Dogs.)

Tension between FDL and some other progressive sites has increased since the Senate’s health care compromise took shape–Hamsher has campaigned aggressively to “kill the bill.” A month ago she predicted that “left/right populist outrage” would do so, and she hasn’t slowed down since.

An exception to this trend is Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), the former Navy admiral who has served in Afghanistan and who’s looking to oust Arlen Specter, a newly-minted Democrat, from a Pennsylvania Senate seat. Sestak is firmly in favor of both a troop increase and an ultimate exit strategy. What the congressman is listening for tonight, when Obama makes his speech at West Point, is a strategy that tamps down some of the more ambitious goals in Afghanistan and emphasizes the central threat emanating from Pakistan. “That goal must be the eradication of the safe haven that al-Qaeda has in Pakistan,” Sestak said in an interview today with TWI. “I want to hear, however, how much emphasis he has on the training of the Afghan military and police, and nation-building, because I don’t believe we can put an over-emphasis on that, because the cost may be too much.”

That’s not to say Sestak thinks such Afghan institution-building is unimportant. It’s “an effort that should be tried, but it shouldn’t be the central focus,” he said, as it isn’t “imperative [for] the success of our strategy.”  He’s concerned by recent administration statements that seem to indicate the resource distribution from Obama’s strategy might favor Afghanistan instead of Pakistan, and is waiting to hear Obama address that balance.

Sestak said he thinks ultimately concluding the war on terms favorable to U.S. interests requires “a three to five-year effort,” though not necessarily at the elevated troop levels Obama will announce tonight. Yet when asked what a successful conclusion to the war ultimately looks like, Sestak described it as piecemeal elements measured by benchmarks he hopes the president will announce. “That should be measurements particularly [about] the top leadership of al-Qaeda,” he said. “We know who they are, we don’t know where exactly they are, but have we got the masterminds?” Additional elements of success, as Sestak describes it, include Pakistani action against their Taliban elements and “their efforts with our support in economic aid and other types of efforts” proceed to prevent backsliding; “neutralizing” the most-rejectionist and al-Qaeda-aligned Afghan Taliban; and “measurements of how many villages, provinces, towns have we been able to have buy-in from the local, not just the national, centers of gravity.”

Politically, Sestak concedes that maintaining Congressional buy-in will be “a challenge” that will require a “deliberate cost-benefit analysis” of the war’s fortunes and merits, as well as the end of an “open-ended commitment.” While he said that he doesn’t support Rep. David Obey’s (D-Wis.) version of a war tax, he supports “bringing it into the normal budget process” and offsetting spending with cuts to irrelevant defense programs. “Now, if that will take a tax, because we can’t find the programs — for example, the $79 billion given to oil companies, fossil fuel companies in tax cuts, incentives and those types of, I believe, … benefits that can help pay for this war — if we’re not willing to go there, then we should stand up and say, here’s how we should raise the revenues,” he said. “We should be paying for this up front.”

And what about Specter, his Senate primary rival who opposes the troop increase? What would Sestak tell a skeptical or antiwar Pennsylvania voter? “I need them to know, very, very much, that political calculation cannot enter into my deliberations on this,” he said, citing his Navy experience and the time he spent directing defense policy for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. “It’s too important for you and for Americans, and I would be giving you short shrift, at least in my experience, to take a political position rather than a national security position after I have looked at the issues.”

“I do not want to abdicate that constitutional responsibility I have in Congress, and will have in the Senate also,” Sestak added. “People did that for Iraq, and George Bush made the decision for them that it was indispensable, and they voted for that war. I won’t do that, because the constitutional requirement is for me to make an assessment whether [a war] is indispensable or not, and I have said it is, and I need [voters] to know why.” (Specter voted for the Iraq war.)

According to the White House’s experts, President Obama’s just chosen an extremely cautious, legalistic nit-picker.

“She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Paul Smith, a partner at Jenner & Block who participated in the call.

“She’s someone who cares about the craft, about the details of facts,” he said. “She’s a cautious lawyer….who was a corporate lawyer herself….She reads statutes narrowly.”

Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow described Sotomayor’s decision in a securities case that turned on the how Sotomayor read the word “buyer.” In fact, she read the law so literally that the Supreme Court reversed her, said Minow: “they said, ‘let’s be not so stingy’ ” about it.

Sotomayor’s opinions, according to Kevin Russell, a partner at Howe & Russell who writes for SCOTUSblog, reveal a “judicial modesty” that’s “very respectful of precedent.”  In a case brought by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, for example, she rejected a challenge to President George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” which prevented foreign organizations receiving U.S. funding from using their own money to provide abortions or abortion assistance.

Russell added that Sotomayor has also shown herself to be very deferential to the judgments of government agencies. When passengers were bumped from a flight by an airline and claimed it was due to racial discrimination, Sotomayor  ruled that the anti-discrimination laws are trumped by the international Warsaw Convention, which regulates the liability of airlines in international flights.

“Judge Sotomayor is not the sort of judge who sees it as her role to reverse every decision she disagrees with,” said Russell.

As a result, experts agree that it will be difficult to predict how she’d rule on issues like the breadth of the Second Amendment, gay rights, or other civil rights matters that have yet to come before her.

“There isn’t any indication that she has a broad reading of the liberty clause or due process clause,” said Minow.  “At the same time she is a master of the interpretation of law and relating of law to fact,” she said. “She would be participating in the careful application of the constitution to facts.”

Sometimes, those applications have disappointed even plaintiffs in discrimination cases, where her own comments might suggest that Sotomayor would be more sympathetic.

In 1999, for example, she ruled against a black nurse who claimed she’d been fired due to her race, age and a disability. Sotomayor allowed the nurse to move ahead with the disability claim, but threw out the other claims.

“There was ample evidence that the hospital had accommodated white nurses with similar disabilities,” Glenn Greenwald, now a Salon columnist but then a lawyer for the nurse, told The Wall Street Journal. “She rather coldly dismissed what I thought were good claims.”

So it’s starting to sound like Obama nominated a highly capable technocrat. Setting aside her personal story of achievement against all odds, is her approach to the law the sort of change that Obama’s more progressive supporters will believe in?

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Marc Ambinder runs down the list:

Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Dayton Peace Accord broker; Clinton’s chief defense adviser, Bob Einhorn, a Clinton administration veteran and non-proliferation expert, Andrew Shapiro, Clinton’s chief foreign policy adviser, Wendy Sherman, a senior adviser to Madelieine Albright and Warren Christopher, and Melaine Verveer, a former Clinton chief of staff and longtime Clinton confidante.

If this is the team, it’s a fairly progressive one. Holbrooke we’ve dealt with before, and chances are if he’s not going to be deputy secretary it’s hard for him to find a suitable place at the department. As for the others, Andrew Shapiro is probably the one that would most concern progressives, as he worked for Sen. Joe Lieberman on the 2000 presidential campaign and has been wary of setting a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq, but he’s also got the Steve Clemons seal of approval.

Einhorn and Sherman certainly qualify as progressives. Sherman, an Emily’s List veteran, did yeoman work in the Clinton administration trying to staunch North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Einhorn is a dyed-in-the-wool non-proliferation guy who’d be a bold choice for undersecretary for arms control. Melanie Melanne Verveer, I must confess, I don’t know anything about. [UPDATE: Including how to spell her name. Sorry!]

None of this is to say that progressives shouldn’t be watching to see whom Clinton places — and doesn’t place — in her State Dept. But judging from this list, they’d probably be pretty OK with several of Clinton’s top aides.

President-elect Barack Obama (Campaign Photo)

While liberal critics sound increasingly uneasy with President-elect Barack Obama’s nominations of centrist, Clinton-era Democrats to Cabinet positions, some are overlooking how Obama has also been assembling a tight progressive cadre to serve with him in the White House.

Progressive blogs are buzzing about Obama’s Cabinet picks, including big-name hires — and likely hires — such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Defense Sec. Robert Gates and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, a protege of former Secretary Treasury Lawrence Summers under President Clinton, also an Obama economic adviser.  To some irritated observers, these faces aren’t just a return to a previous time but an unwelcome move to the right of Obama’s campaign positions.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“I know everyone is obsessed with the ‘team of rivals’ idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated,” said Chris Bowers, a progressive political consultant who blogs for Open Left. “It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.”

But Obama’s recent White House appointments include progressive voices in key positions. Their views strongly coincide with those progressives who are expressing concern about the president-elect’s Cabinet choices.

Consider the people Obama has selected to be his advisers on domestic policy and national politics, as well as his communications director. Other prominent progressive players, including labor and feminist activists, also will be members of his future White House staff.

In the past two weeks, Obama has tapped Melody Barnes, of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, to serve as his domestic policy director; Patrick Gaspard, a political organizer for the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, as his politics director; Ellen Moran, of the liberal fund-raising group EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women candidates, to run his communications shop; and Phil Schiliro, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, to serve as the White House’s liaison with Congress.

As head of the Domestic Policy Council, Barnes will oversee national policy priorities. She will be responsible for developing two of Obama’s top priorities — health care and education reform.

Barnes has a history of strong ties to progressive causes. She was chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2003, working with the liberal standard bearer on civil rights and women’s health legislation. Before that, she helped craft the 1992 Voting Rights Improvement Act while assistant counsel to a House voting rights subcommittee.

In 2004, Barnes made her mark at the Center for American Progress by creating a program called the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative, which seeks to identify the moral and ethical underpinnings in policy and develop progressive stands around them. She also founded the Women’s Health and Rights Program, which works on reproductive health and poverty issues.

As vice president of policy, Barnes went on to oversee all the center’s policy programs, including those related to poverty, the environment, energy and national security. Sally Steenland, a former colleague of Barnes at the center, described Barnes’ time overseeing these policy projects as a “perfect warm-up and dress rehearsal for what she will do at the White House.”

Steenland explained that Barnes’ ability to give all these wide-ranging projects adequate attention is a skill that will be critical at the White House, where she will have to juggle many policy priorities.

Those who have worked with Barnes say it’s unlikely that she will go into the White House with pet projects in mind. “She sees the connection between all the issues,” said Jessica Arons, director of the Center for American Progress’ Women’s Health and Rights Program, founded by Barnes. “All of those in some ways become one priority.”

David Sirota has been a member of the angry progressive chorus complaining about Obama’s Cabinet appointments. But when asked in an interview about the president-elect’s recent White House picks, he conceded that Barnes will be a strong progressive voice in the Obama administration.

Even so, he’s not convinced that these appointments carry the same heft as Cabinet jobs. Sirota contends that the White House responsibilities are more like selling policies than developing and implementing them.

“Whose job description is political salesmanship and whose job description is making and executing policy?” Sirota asked.

To underscore his point, Sirota pointed to the job of White House political director, which Gaspard will hold. Sirota contends that, most likely, his political job will not be that instrumental in developing and carrying out policies.

Gaspard, however, is a well-known grass-roots organizer who has worked on many progressive campaigns. As such, he could play an important role in an administration that prides itself on its bottom-up presidential campaign.

Before serving as Obama’s national political director during the general election campaign, Gaspard worked for the largest local union in the country, the 1199 branch of SEIU, an influential union representing thousands of health-care workers in New York. Local and state campaigns would “borrow” him from the union to run their ground operations.

“I think one of the reasons he came to work for the union is it definitely had a long-standing reputation for not just being an advocate for low-paid health workers,” said Jennifer Cunningham, former SEIU political director, “but a tradition of progressive issues outside of bread-and-butter union work.”

Cunningham said the union has worked on many campaigns for progressive candidates, as well as causes like global warming and affordable health care. In 2007, Gaspard lobbied for the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, that provides about 5 million children of low-income families with health-care coverage.

There’s another reason why Gaspard may be a power as White House political adviser. President George W. Bush’s chief political aide, Karl Rove, was instrumental in shaping key policies of the Bush era. Rove helped build the administration’s case to go to war with Iraq and played a pivotal role in politicizing the Justice Dept.

Gaspard will be joined by other long-time progressive activists, like Moran, the new communications team head. She was executive director of the  EMILY’s List, which seeks to elect pro-choice women Democrats to office. A long-time Democratic player, she also worked on Sen. Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run and oversaw a $50-million campaign for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2000.

“[Moran] deserves tremendous credit for leading EMILY’s List this election cycle,” said the group’s president, Ellen R. Malcolm, in a statement, “as we elected the second-largest group of Democratic women in American history.”

Schiliro, another key progressive figure in the White House,  will act as the go-between with Congress. Like Barnes, he worked for Daschle, who is expected to serve as Obama’s secretary of health and human services. Daschle has a liberal voting record in the Senate, particularly on health-care issues.

Schiliro also has strong ties to important members of Congress. He worked for Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who was chairman of the House oversight committee from 2006 through this year. Waxman’s committee was instrumental in shaking out a number of embarrassing and politically damaging scandals in the executive branch, including the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, the politicization of the Environmental Protection Agency and corruption at the government’s main contracting agency, the General Services Admin.

Waxman recently unseated Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) to become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Key progressive voices within the halls of the White House are piling up, but whether the picks will satisfy progressives is yet to be seen.

“It’s not a total shutout,” Bowers wrote this week, “but it isn’t enough.”