The New York Times has its Trumpiest headline ever.

Here's the article: "Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back/In a flurry of unilateral executive actions, Mr. Trump revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely."

That's by Charlie Savage. Excerpt:

"In 2010, President Obama’s participation in a similar televised Q. & A. session with congressional Republicans was so well received by politicos and the press..."

"... that it inspired a short-lived bipartisan campaign, called 'Demand Question Time,' to bring the British tradition to the U.S. '[T]here was something riveting and moving about political opponents squaring off for an unfettered and unmoderated discussion of the challenges that face the nation,' *Mother Jones’*s David Corn wrote. 'Though nothing was resolved in terms of policy and legislation, this was a moment of optimism.' Tuesday’s lively Oval Office photo op—a sit-down between the Democratic leaders, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and President Trump and a sullen and silent Mike Pence—was perhaps the closest American politics has come to a repeat of that unusual day.... Repeatedly, in the course of the photo op, Pelosi tried to rein in the discussion... 'We came in here in good faith,' she told reporters, 'and we’re entering into this kind of a discussion in the public view.' Trump, naturally, was less perturbed. 'It’s not bad, Nancy,' he responded. 'It’s called transparency.' Trump’s surliness and Pelosi’s unease aside, the participation of public servants in public discussions about public affairs does seem healthy. It’s a wonder we’ve gone so long with so few of them."

Writes Osita Nwanevu in "Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer’s Oval Office Spat Is an Argument for More Public Debate" (The New Yorker).

Here's an article from Politico from 2010, "Left, right want Obama 'question time.'"

A politically diverse group of bloggers, commentators, techies and politicos on Wednesday will launch an online campaign, Demand Question Time, urging President Barack Obama and GOP congressional leaders to hold regular, televised conversations like the extraordinary exchange in Baltimore on Friday. Original endorsers include Grover Norquist and Eli Pariser, Joe Trippi and Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas and Ed Morrissey, and many more, including Ari Melber, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ana Marie Cox and Nate Silver. The steering committee is made up of Micah Sifry, David Corn, Mike Moffo, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

"When President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012 that 'after my election I have more flexibility'..."

"...most assumed he was referring to foreign policy. It turns out Mr. Obama's ambitions weren't so limited."

IN THE COMMENTS: retail lawyer writes:

Question for Ann: How are law schools explaining this new flexibility, promulgation, the Take Care clause, etc.? How do you think they'll be teaching it in the future? Sometimes I wish I still were in law school.

And I said:

I'd quote Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case:

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

"The tools belong to the man who can use them."

It's a great line.

But sometimes you've just got tools lying around, and no one can use them too well, and some men and women try to use them to halfway build something and then they leave it leaking and creaking for some other man to whip into shape with those tools, which he's not too good at using, but he keeps tinkering away, ineptly, and everyone watches and bitches about it, and you've just got some huge hulking crappy thing that's never going to work right, but so much damned effort was put into building the thing that we just go ahead and use it anyway.

Why do members of Congress, nice enough in private, get tough on camera, when network journalists, presumably also nice in private, stay nice on camera?

In his new book, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War," former Secretary of State Robert Gates makes this criticism of the members of Congress:

During his tenure as Pentagon chief, Gates often found himself tempted to quit because of the adversarial treatment he received from members of Congress. He says that in private the lawmakers could be reasonable. "But when they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf," he says in an excerpt in the [Wall Street] Journal.

Here's the WSJ excerpt, in which I cannot find that quote, but there's additional text about Gates's dismay at congressional brutality. He says that at congressional hearings he'd often thought of slamming his briefing book shut and saying: "there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit." He complains about "the consistently adversarial, even inquisition-like treatment of executive-branch officials by too many members of Congress across the political spectrum—creating a kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when television cameras were present."

Are television cameras to blame? Yesterday, I was talking about how inanely nonconfrontational David Gregory is on "Meet the Press." He and his fellow journalists coddle administration officials. They sit back, nod, and say "okay" and "right" as these people deliver their prepared talking points. They don't seem to understand that they need us, the audience, and we want vigorous, probing questions. They're making one another comfortable, on camera, in the manner Robert Gates describes as prevailing behind the scenes in Congress.

How can we explain this difference? Why do members of Congress, nice enough in private, get tough on camera, when network journalists, presumably also nice in private, stay nice on camera? Let me offer a few answers for your assessment:

1. To put on a good TV show, you do need to get tough on camera, and "Meet the Press" is failing as a TV show. It's ratings are way down. Maybe members of Congress should not see themselves as putting on a TV show, but they are modeling how to put on a show.

2. Members of Congress have the power to force administration officials to appear and to testify under oath, but the producers of a show like "Meet the Press" can only extend invitations, invitations that will be accepted only if the invitees think it will be to their advantage. As there are more than one show, a host needs to give the best party to entice A-list guests. The real guests that matter, of course, are the home audience, but the TV show folk must think the viewers look at the guest list to decide what to watch.

3. Members of Congress face elections, and the judgment of voters exerts more pressure than the judgment of viewers. The viewers and the voters are just the American people, but each member of Congress is answerable to his (or her) constituents, and a national TV show is trying to appeal to everyone. The member of Congress has a more focused idea of what people in his state or district are going to grill him about, and the journalists involved in a TV show think more vaguely about what will make people tune in and stick around.

4. Both the members of Congress and the journalists are supposed to feel a profound sense of responsibility for the power they exercise, but actual power to legislate is different from a power only to influence people through the force of words. You'd think this difference would create more vigor in the expression of the journalists, so why would it have the opposite effect? The easiest inference is that the aim of the journalists is to lull the people.

NYT editors "perplex[ed]" by Justice Sotomayor's perception of a burden on religion in the requirement that some nuns "fill out paperwork."

The nuns don't want any connection — even a little paperwork — to contraception and seek an exemption. The source of religious exemptions is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires relief from burdens on religion imposed by the federal government (unless those burdens are needed to serve a compelling interest). What is "perplexing" here?

The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator....

The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden.

That is, the burden upon which the nuns base their claim for religious accommodation was itself a religious accommodation.

Why didn't Congress simply write an exception to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into the Affordable Care Act? The government would be home free. It wouldn't even have had to provide the certification work-around to accommodate the conscience of the nuns. The Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution doesn't require relief from burdens imposed by generally applicable laws that were not designed to target religion. The answer to the question is obvious: Congress scarcely squeezed the ACA through and couldn't bear any additional friction in the legislative process. RFRA was left as a source of future litigation, even as Congress made a show of catering to the young women who feel cared for when contraception is an entitlement.

Congress failed to deactivate RFRA, and the Democratic Party shored up power with its "war on women" rhetoric, and the result of those thoroughly political, tactical choices is that these nuns have a little legal ground to stand on.

I'm not perplexed at all.

"With characteristic contrarianness, blogress Ann Althouse speculates... It's a clever theory..."

Says James Taranto, "but not a realistic plan. There's no doubt that die-hard Democrats will respond in the way Althouse imagines they are expected to.... The Althouse theory raises another question: If Obama succeeded in electing a Democratic Congress next year, what would he do with it?..."

"How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?"

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin asked a group of his supporters back home in West Virginia.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical. “We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a banker named Charlie Houck told the senator.

That's the anecdote that leads off the NYT article "Democrats in Senate Confront Doubts at Home on Gun Laws." The article ends:

During the lunch, Mr. Manchin shared a recent conversation he had with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Obama administration’s point person on gun control.

“I said, ‘Mr. Vice President, with all due respect, I don’t know how many people who truly believe that you would fight to protect their rights.’ ”

The senator added, “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

How are we to think about rights? It's good for politicians to hear the deeply engrained American attitude: We give up our rights one piece at a time. There's a long tradition — predating the Bill of Rights — of thinking like that. Here's James Madison in 1785:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.

The issue there was not guns but the use of tax money to pay for teachers of religion. In the paragraph quoted above, Madison went on to say that citizens should object to the requirement of paying even "three pence" to support a religion because a government that extracts even that trifle may go on to coerce religious conformity. The small things are not small. The small things are where the people still have the capacity to fight authoritarian government.

Democrats know this. They are part of this American culture of deeply engrained belief in constitutional rights. What is different to the Democrats is that they don't believe that the right to keep and bear arms is a constitutional right. They think the Supreme Court misinterpreted the Second Amendment when it found a constitutional right. District of Columbia v. Heller was a 5 to 4 decision, and the 5 are the 5 Justices, still on the Court, whom the Democratic Senators would love to have a chance to replace.

The NYT portrays the folks back home in West Virginia as misinformed, troublesome, and hysterical. That’s what we’re dealing with.

"Mr. Obama's was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for Republicans trying to negotiate with Republicans."

"Through it all he was confident—'Eric, don't call my bluff'—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day. They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized."

Peggy Noonan, drawing on Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics."

Also at the link: Noonan's analysis of the first debate and her basis for believing that the Obama we saw there was the "real Obama."

NYT quotes Washington insiders calling Obama “remote,” “distant” and “perfunctory.”

Link.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans say they rarely hear from the president, and members of his own party complain that Mr. Obama and his top aides are handicapping themselves by not reaching out enough.

“When you have relationships with individual members, you can call them up and ask a favor, and a lot of times, if it’s not objectionable, you can get things done,” said Representative Dennis A. Cardoza, Democrat of California....

White House officials, however, counter that Mr. Obama’s detachment from Congress could end up benefiting him politically. After all, many Americans regard this Congress as dysfunctional, with abysmal approval ratings.

So... if you're dysfunctional with the dysfunctional, you're... functional!

Despite the narrative in Washington of Mr. Obama as a loner, his friends and aides say he likes people just fine....

That's not a contradiction. You could like people just fine and want nothing to do with the particular people who happen to be in Congress. Don't you identify with that?

How Ben Nelson lost Nebraska.

"Get him the hell out of here!"

"Washington’s year of drama leaves little done regarding debt."

Newsflash from WaPo's Department of the Obvious.

"Congress's special deficit-cutting committee bowed to reality Monday and called it quits..."

"... with both sides having concluded it was easier to swallow failure than any of the possible compromise deals offered...."

Members of both parties are worried about the impact of the automatic cuts, but it would be even more difficult for them to come to a comprehensive budget agreement to supplant them in an election year than it was for the special deficit committee.

"The deficit-reduction supercommittee, stuck in a partisan deadlock, faces an almost certain collapse..."

"... raising the threat of disruptive military spending cuts and a resurgent public anger at Congress as it struggles with the basic tasks of governance."

That expected failure injects a greater uncertainty into the nation's political and economic landscape heading into a volatile election year....

Some critics, mostly Republicans, have faulted President Barack Obama for keeping his distance from the committee for months after submitting his own deficit plan. But the outcome could create a political opening for Mr. Obama, bolstering a presidential campaign strategy of running against an ostensibly incompetent Congress.

Harry Reid triggers the "nuclear option."

The "shocking development," reports The Hill, blocks Republicans "from forcing votes on uncomfortable amendments after the chamber has voted to move to final passage of a bill":

The Democratic leader had become fed up with Republican demands for votes on motions to suspend the rules after the Senate had voted to limit debate earlier in the day.

[Republican Leader Mitch] McConnell had threatened such a motion to force a vote on the original version of President Obama’s jobs package, which many Democrats don’t like because it would limit tax deductions for families earning over $250,000. The jobs package would have been considered as an amendment.

McConnell wanted to embarrass the president by demonstrating how few Democrats are willing to support his jobs plan as first drafted.

Shutdown averted.

"... more spending cuts for Republicans while giving Democrats a key win on an issue related to abortion rights..."

"For people who keep saying they don't want a government shutdown, Washington's warring parties are sure acting like they can't wait for it to happen."

"Since the policy stakes of this particular drama are so low, we can only assume this showdown is about Democrats and Republicans proving their relative political manhood."

Says the Wall Street Journal, leaning on the Republicans.

"I like the president personally. We get along well. But the president isn’t leading."

"He didn’t lead on last year’s budget, and he clearly isn’t leading on this year’s budget."

Said House Speaker John Boehner today. Later, he met with the President and Harry Reid at the White House, and, per Boehner, "We made some progress... But I want to reiterate there’s no agreement."

(NYT link.)

"There is no electronic-based cause for unintended acceleration in Toyotas," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood tells us now.

Surprised?

Now, let's try to remember how much trouble the Obama administration caused Toyota. Here's an article from last March:

Ever since the Transportation Department stepped up pressure on Toyota over its recalls several months ago, two delicate questions have hung over regulators: Is the Obama administration trying to help the Detroit carmakers it bailed out last year by attacking Toyota? And, will those attacks lead to new trade tensions with Japan?...

“It’s doubly convenient for the Obama administration to hammer Toyota excessively,” [Weekly Asahi magazine] said. “By picking on Toyota, Mr. Obama wants to reverse his falling popularity.”

And from last February:

Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, was billed as the main attraction at a House hearing Wednesday into the company’s recalls of millions of cars — recalls for which he profusely apologized and took personal responsibility....

He was criticized by a representative on the committee for failing to show adequate remorse for those who had been killed in accidents involving acceleration problems.

“I extend my condolences from the deepest part of my heart,” Mr. Toyoda said.

"[Obama] was then followed by a guy who was bumming us out. I felt like I just needed a drink when I was done with Paul Ryan."

Said Rep. Anthony Weiner, who found Obama's SOTU "uplifting" and Ryan's rejoinder not so much.

Now, let's think about this. He didn't need a drink after Obama's talk, but he did after Ryan's. What does that mean? Apparently, Obama's rhetoric comes with its own high, while Ryan's is more of a plain glass of water. Is Weiner interested in reality or not? I think we deserve sober Congresspeople at this point.

What's so bad about shuffling Republicans and Democrats together for the State of the Union Address?

The Washington Times hates the idea:

A letter to congressional leaders signed by proponents of this exercise in musical chairs claims...

Musical chairs? Clearly, the Washington Times has never played musical chairs. Musical chairs would be quite funny: Make the Congresspeople scramble for what are too few chairs, and kick out everyone who can't find a seat. Where's your kinder, gentler more civil politics then?

... "the choreographed standing and clapping of one side of the room - while the other side sits - is unbecoming of a serious institution. And the message that it sends is that even on a night when the president is addressing the entire nation, we in Congress cannot sit as one, but must be divided as two." [Senator Mark] Udall is clearly focused on the wrong problem. Presumably orgiastic clapping, not sitting stonefaced, is what offends the seriousness of the august institution.

I don't know much about the Washington Times's sex life, but I think it's got orgasms wrong too. I'll bet, if you did a scientific study, you'd find that, during orgasm, remaining stonefaced is much more common than applause. But I do agree that it would offend the seriousness of the august institution if the President's admirers really acted like they were having orgasms.

Shifting the seats around will not alter the president's applause lines. Democrats, wherever placed in the chamber, will still faithfully rise and clap at the appointed times. If such demonstrations are what Mr. Udall believes are "unbecoming" to the Congress, then Democrats should instruct their members to refrain from such demonstrations, similar to how the NFL has tried to promote civility by cracking down on post-touchdown celebrations.

I think the Democrats should instruct their members to show a little more NFL-style enthusiasm:

If clapping isn't banned, the primary effect of the seating change would be to distribute standing ovations across the chamber, making it appear that the president enjoys more congressional support than he does in fact.

That's the theory that's going around, but I'd like to see how it really would look. When the cameras can't zero in on a clump of idolators and must show the President's friends next to his enemies skeptics, we will see exactly what is going on: We've got a partisan Congress. There are a lot more Republicans than Democrats these days: The disproportion may be more likely to look obvious if they are all mixed up. And the juxtaposition of fans and sourpusses will be more amusing in close-up shots.

I say mix it up!