Even as both sides in the fiscal fight become more categorical in their rhetoric (with Boehner and McConnell having ruled out revenue increases for the rest of eternity and Obama now reiterating a no-hostage position on the debt limit), there are countless opinions on how it will all work out. Conservatives alternate between making the debt limit vote the Mother of All Pressure Points for their foot-stomping demand that Democrats identify ways to begin repealing the New Deal and Great Society, and urging Republicans to keep their powder dry for 2014. And progressives remain wary of Obama’s resolution in maintaining a hard line, partly because he still expresses the desire for a fiscal Grand Bargain, and partly because he’s accepted Small Bargains in the past.

As Jonathan Chait points out today, the element of the fiscal puzzle that’s not getting quite the attention it deserves is the appropriations sequester that was scheduled to go into place when 2013 began, but was delayed for two months:

Sequestration is the murkiest piece of the battlefield. It’s not clear at all what either side is willing to settle for. Both dislike the automatic cuts, but each other’s best alternative is mutually unacceptable — Obama wants to replace the sequester with a mix of higher revenue and cuts to retirement programs, while Republicans want to replace it with all cuts to social spending. In the likely event of gridlock, we don’t know if the two sides would rather just turn off the automatic cuts or let them go into effect.

That’s right. We can guess, but we just don’t know, so we don’t even know if this rather important side-issue will affect the big wheels a-turning on the fiscal front.

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin has a good report on a development so gradual that its importance may have been missed: the emergence of the labor movement as a champion of comprehensive immigration reform:

SEIU is committing the full force of its 2.1 million members to pushing comprehensive reform in 2013, with plans for rallies around the country, education campaigns for members, and an inside game aimed at lobbying lawmakers in Washington towards a final vote. The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is on board as well; and the two sometimes rival groups are united around a common set of policy principles after splitting on President George W. Bush’s failed immigration effort. Both organizations identify passing a bill that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented population as one of their absolute top priorities for the 113th Congress.

Yes, the AFL-CIO opposed the Bush bill because of its inclusion of “guest worker” provisions. But labor opposition to legislation liberalizing immigration laws used to be common:

As recently as the 1990s, the movement’s official position was, as [SEIU secretary treasurer Eliseo] Medina put it, “anti-immigrant or at least anti-undocumented immigrant.”

As Sarlin explains, the great pioneer of immigrant labor and political rights, United Farm Workers president Cesar Chavez, took a hard line against undocumented works from Mexico as “an endless source of scab labor.” But SEIU went in a different direction, and by 2000, the AFL-CIO had revised its policies, “calling for blanket amnesty for undocumented immigrants and condemning immigration raids against organizing workers.”

This evolution reflects a broader development in labor’s outlook:

[A]ccording to Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at CUNY who researches labor and immigration, the emphasis on passing a bill [on immigration] does point toward an emerging focus on low wage workers that’s increasingly defining the movement. It’s not just because immigrant-heavy jobs like janitors and nurses assistants are growing the fastest. By stressing their struggles working in typically low wage jobs, the SEIU and AFL-CIO may have a better shot at winning hearts and minds outside the movement than they would by highlighting workers in industries with more generous wages and benefits.

“In that sense, the moral high ground of the labor movement unionizing efforts is in the low wage workforce and that workforce is growing like crazy even as we have high unemployment,” Milkman said. “There are jobs doing home care for sick people, restaurant dishwashing, domestic work, all expanding. Their future is in that sector — even if that doesn’t mean getting immigration reform will suddenly let them organize people.”

So this is one famous “wedge issue” that conservatives can no longer use to divide the labor movement from other progressives.

Running a little late today thanks to preoccupation with the new issue of the magazine, but here are some mid-day news snacks:

* Paul Krugman offers his take on the self-styled “problem solvers.”

* Here’s full WaPo account of Obama’s press conference this morning.

* TNR’s Jonathan Cohn provides insights on Obama’s debt limit strategy now that platinum coins and the “14th Amendment option” are firmly off the table.

* Conservative columnist Matt Lewis pursues “corporate cronyism” argument about administration’s budding alliance on guns with Wal-Mart.

* Napolitano to stick around as Secretary of DHS, one of the more thankless jobs in the federal government.

* At TAP, Scott Lemieux sums up the liberal case against John Brennan’s nomination to head up CIA.

And in sorta kinda non-political news:

* Andrew Sullivan goes after Jody Foster’s “narcissistic and self-loving” Golden Globe speech with a ball-peen hammer.

Back to blogging within the hour.

I’ve been reading the Washington Monthly pretty regularly since I discovered the publication a little over thirty years ago. With this background, let me say the January/February issue, released today, is one of the best ever. I’ll try to explain why in occasional posts this week, but let’s start with Nicholas Lemann’s succinct but powerful article about Reconstruction and its legacy.

Though what is still often called the “revisionist” take on Reconstruction (often associated with the work of Eric Foner) is fairly well-known and accepted by historians of the period, the popular consensus North and South probably hasn’t much changed: Reconstruction was an overreach by post-Lincoln “radical Republicans” that generated predictable resistance from a justifiably outraged white southerners and had to be abandoned as a well-intentioned failure (I haven’t seen the movie Lincoln just yet, and gather its popularity may have reopened the question a bit).

But as Lemann explains, the abandonment of Reconstruction was attributable as much to hostility and indifference in the North (not least from within a Republican Party more interested in the peaceful economic exploitation of the South than in guaranteeing political rights for ex-slaves) as to armed resistance in the South:

Most of the rest of America chose to understand black political empowerment in the South in terms that are still familiar in conservative discourse today: excessive taxation, corruption, and a power imbalance between federal and state government. These arguments were more presentable than simply saying that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and they built sympathy for the white South among high-minded reformists in the North who were horrified by the big-city political machines that immigrants had created in their own backyard. Good-government reformers hated the idea of uneducated people taking over the democratic machinery and using it to distribute power and patronage, rather than in more high-minded ways. Liberal northeastern publications like the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly were reliably hostile to Reconstruction, and their readers feasted on a steady diet of horror stories about swaggering corrupt black legislators, out-of-control black-on-white violence, and the bankruptcies of state and local government.

So it was not terribly surprising that when Republicans needed southern complicity to win the deadlocked presidential election in 1876 (in which its own nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, was on record favoring an end to Reconstruction), they quickly abandoned Grant’s brave but highly controversial efforts to maintain African-American voting rights (even as northern states were rejecting them in their own jurisdictions) against united white southern opposition.

But as Lemann notes, remembering Reconstruction accurately is not just a matter of getting the historical record right:

Once your ear is tuned to hear them, echoes of Reconstruction are all around us today. The distinctive voting patterns of the South are a product of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and the dramatic switch in the South’s political loyalties beginning in the 1960s is a direct result of the Democratic Party’s aligning itself with the original goals of Reconstruction. Reconstruction was the beginning point for most of our debates about the proper size and extent of the federal government; the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were the first important measures directing the national government to do something affirmatively, rather than forbidding it to do something. It’s no accident that African Americans are consistently the group with the most favorable view of government; essentially all of their progress toward full legal equality came as a result of government—specifically, federal government—action. Periods of greater state and local power were periods of at best no progress, and at worst more terror. And psychologically, the yawning gap that still exists between the way whites and blacks understand Reconstruction—which, unlike the Civil War and the civil rights movement, has had almost no depictions for popular audiences since the days of Gone With the Wind, but gets communicated privately inside family homes in very different ways—must partly account for what remains of the profound gaps between the races in their perception of the essential nature of the national project.

Read it all.

Monthly Editor-in-chief Paul Glastris was on the McLaughlin Group last weekend, and the host was generous enough to give his thoughts on our new issue:

In her campaign to keep Chuck Hagel from becoming Secretary of Defense, WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin has heretofore stayed on the relatively strong ground of appealing to people in both parties who share her views about the Middle East (and the related issue of Israel’s position in the hierarchy of American foreign policy interests). Yeah, she has gone over-the-top in suggesting that the one-time (and explicitly regretted) utterance of the words “Jewish Lobby” by Hagel places him in the ranks of the world’s great anti-Semites. But by and large, she’s focused on the argument that those who believe in the “not an inch of space” argument for unconditional U.S. support for whatever Bibi Netanyahu wants, and in the related claim that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel (and thus an existential threat to America) shouldn’t let party loyalty or old senatorial relationships get in the way of opposing this nomination.

Fair enough. But now Rubin (perhaps growing desperate) is making a more plenary argument: Hagel is obviously one of the worst presidential nominees for a Cabinet position ever, so only servility or sloth could possibly justify his confirmation!

In her latest of many long posts on the subject, Rubin executes this change of perspective via a labored effort to establish that Chuck Hegel is a moral leper, a loose cannon, and an extremist far outside the mainstream of respectable thinking. To be sure, 99% of her bill of particulars on all three fronts come back to his alleged hatred of Israel and fondness for mullahs and terrorists. But the effort to identify Hagel with the kind of kookiness that both Republicans and Democrats tend to eschew in high-level appointments is summed up in this sentence:

The elected official who most resembles Hagel’s extreme voting record and views is now former congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.).

I must have missed the moment when Hagel embraced a general policy of non-intervention or denounced the United Nations as an anti-American conspiracy. Or more likely, in casting about for any weapon with which to batter his nominee, Rubin is showing that even zealots can overreach.

In his press conference this morning the president continued making an argument about the debt limit that is simple and quite interesting if you think about it:

He objected to the characterization of a debt ceiling increase as analogous to more government spending. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has demanded a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar the debt ceiling is raised.

“The debt ceiling is not a question of authorizing more spending,” Obama said. “Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. it simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already agreed to.”

Republicans (and many fiscal hawks in both parties) are deeply in the habit of employing the false and dangerous analogy of family financing for its descriptions of America’s fiscal problems: when you are struggling to pay your credit card bills, you have to stop using them—maybe even cut them up. Holding a debt limit increase hostage to spending reduction demands—or more accurately, to the demand that Democrats identify and support domestic spending reductions so as to provide bipartisan “cover” for a strategic strike on the “Welfare State”—is analogized to this brave but necessary and above all responsible approach to national profligacy.

Obama is seeking to promote a different and much more technically accurate analogy: threatening to deny a debt limit increase, regardless of the rationale, is like refusing to pay those credit card bills altogether. And that’s difficult to characterize as “responsible,” particularly when business leaders are denouncing the ploy in steadily more strident tones.

With a ponderous condescension that ill-befits a recently failed presidential candidate and a United States Senator who has largely distinguished himself by drawing attention to the vast gulf that separates him from his own party, Jon Huntsman and Joe Manchin have penned a WaPo op-ed that announces the formation of a bipartisan band of two dozen self-described “problem solvers” (two Senators, other than Manchin, and twenty-two House members) who are in theory willing to eschew partisanship and ideology to save the U.S. economy. They believe they can, it seems, achieve a legislative breakthrough by talking to each other:

While in past years members of Congress used to interact regularly with members of the opposite party, today members of Congress interact very little with people from the other party — or even members of their own party in the opposite body. Members’ daily lives are dominated by party caucus, policy and fundraising meetings that are focused on winning elections or destroying the opposing party. There isn’t much time left over to actually govern.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with talk. And yes, it would be nice if partisans did not treat their differences as equivalent to the divisions that produced the Thirty Years War. But there are a few, well, problems with this abstract ideology of problem-solving.

One of the most obvious is the false-equivalency meme, the idea that all partisans are equally culpable for gridlock in Washington and thus must in equal measures abandon party discipline to “solve problems.” It’s understandable that any bipartisan group would accept as a point of departure this fiction, but it’s still fiction. One party is dominated by people who believe in a fixed, eternal set of principles and policies that are required of anyone expressing fidelity to the Constitution, to American traditions, and (for many) God Almighty. And the other is an unwieldy coalition of people who believe in all sorts of things, but is generally innocent of the conviction that its party platform came down from Mount Sinai or Mount Vernon on stone tablets.

But put that aside for a moment, if you can. The other problem is the conviction that reconciliation of the two parties’ points of view is simple if politicians agree to compromise.

At the moment, the impasse that is creating crisis after crisis in the fiscal management of the country is that Republicans contend the only real problem we have is the proliferation of domestic spending, mainly in “entitlements.” Congressional Republicans are largely unwilling to identify specific “reforms” that must be initiated to “solve” this problem—in part because they have selectively championed unrestrained entitlement spending (i.e., for Medicare) when it was to their electoral advantage. To the extent a Democratic position can be identified, it is that we have a short-term economic problem that militates against deep short-term spending reductions, and a long-term fiscal problem that must be addressed with a combination of economic growth, restraints in both domestic and defense spending, a reform of a tax system that is insufficient to pay for the government Americans consistently profess to want. Democrats, moreover, typically believe the key to domestic spending restraint involves reductions in heath care cost inflation that require more, not less, government intervention of a type that Republicans have denounced in terms usually reserved for the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

A fiscal compromise between these two points of view that just “splits the differences”—i.e., the type that can be produced by Washington pols cutting deals across party lines—will not only be messy and offensive to ideologues and the two parties’ “bases” and interest groups, but will also be incoherent and internally self-cancelling to a degree that it may not solve any problem other than the most recent impasse in Congress.

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This is an old story by now, but a lot of people haven’t heard it, and Steve Greenhouse of the New York Times lines up the unhappy numbers effectively:

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide….

For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979….

From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. And since 2000, productivity has risen 23 percent while real hourly pay has essentially stagnated.

Meanwhile, it’s been a lost economic decade for many households. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, median income for working-age households (headed by someone under age 65) slid 12.4 percent from 2000 to 2011, to $55,640. During that time the American economy grew more than 18 percent.

Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, found that the top 1 percent of households garnered 65 percent of all the nation’s income growth from 2002 to 2007, when the recession hit. Another study found that one-third of the overall increase in income going to the richest 1 percent has resulted from the surge in corporate profits.

Now you can argue back and forth about why this is happening. Perhaps the incomes of most working Americans are stagnating because they in fact are contributing less than before to the growth that benefits all, as compared to overseas labor or technology or the innovative genius of the people who happen to own the economy. But we shouldn’t just assume a system that is is ever-increasingly awarded an ever-higher share of the fruits of all our labor to the most privileged among us is “natural” or “efficient,” much less just or desirable. And most of all, this rampant evidence of an upward redistribution of national wealth should put a stop to the self-righteousness and self-pity of the very wealthy about concerns over income inequality or proposals to do something about it. They are beginning to sound like their class-bound English forebears, endlessly complaining about the impudence and ingratitude of their servants. It’s downright un-American.

Next week, Barack Obama will put his hand on the Lincoln Bible and be sworn in on Martin Luther King Day, almost exactly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Yet for all the civil rights symbolism, the president is not universally praised in the African American community. Critics like scholar Cornel West — who calls Obama a “Rockerfeller Republican in blackface” — note that the president spoke less about race in his first two years in office than any Democratic president since 1961 and that people of color have disproportionately suffered economically on his watch.

What is the real record of Barack Obama when it comes to African Americans? What might he accomplish in his second term to narrow minority disparities in health, wealth, education and incarceration? How much does a history of deprivation and discrimination continue to explain those disparities? And in an age of mass downward mobility, can policies that help minorities also benefit the majority?

These and other vital questions are addressed in the latest Washington Monthly by a lineup of authoritative writers and experts, including Taylor Branch, Nicholas Lemann, Elijah Anderson, Glenn Loury, and Isabelle Sawhill.

Read the cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

It’s the coldest morning I’ve experienced here on the Central Coast. So here’s Little Feat performing “Cold, Cold, Cold.”

As your nation’s capital enters a frenzied week of inauguration preparations, I bid you farewell for now. Thanks so much for stopping by, and special thanks to the commenters.

But before I go a few things bear mentioning, most notably Colin Powell’s appearance on Meet the Press, where he told host David Gregory that in the G.O.P., there is a “dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party.”

From Huffington Post’s recap:

“What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities,” Powell explained.

Powell specifically pointed to October 2012 comments by former Alaska Gov. and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

“When I see a former governor say that the president is ‘shuckin’ and jivin’ — that’s a racial-era slave term,” Powell said, referring to Palin’s words on Obama’s response.

A couple of more things worth your attention:

* Writing at Hullabaloo, digby is not buying the notion that the administration is playing tough by giving up the idea of taking unilateral action to raise the debt ceiling:

Sooo, either the administration is going to hold on with more steely-eyed grit than they’ve ever shown before to try to get the Republicans to blink (which considering past negotiations, one could not blame the GOP for scoffing at) or they are eager to engage in more high stakes deficit reduction “negotiations.”

Golly, I wonder what’s going to happen?

* Miss America v. Wayne LaPierre - Salon reports that Mallory Hytes Hagan, newly crowned Miss America, is not down with the idea of arming teachers.

I leave you with this brilliant, beautifully shot video of the great Sinatra, going all existential. (Ignore, momentarily, his friendliness with Nixon; you’ll be rewarded with a few minutes of entertainment bliss.)

When President Barack Obama began floating the name of Republican Chuck Hagel, the former U.S. senator from Nebraska, to replace Leon Panetta as secretary of defense, the Washington punditocracy scratched its collective head, asking why would Obama pick a fight with Republicans over SecDef, when he had more important fights looming over the sequester and the debt ceiling?

But, really, isn’t that just the point of the Hagel nomination?

In nominating the iconoclastic Republican, loathed as he is by the Republican right and the Iraq-warmongers known as neocons, Obama guaranteed an unseemly drama that will unfold before the American people, just as machinations get underway on the nation’s fiscal future.

Republicans will be seen attacking one of their own, one whose name was put forward by the president, bless his soul, as a gesture of bipartisanship. And the beauty of it is that Hagel is a war hero, wounded in Viet Nam, who still has shrapnel in his chest from an attack that earned him one of his two purple hearts.

The Hagel wars increased in intensity today on the Sunday morning talk shows, where former Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a spirited defense of the Nebraskan on NBC’s Meet the Press, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., himself a former prisoner of war, took to the airwaves of CBS, to argue against his former Senate colleague on Face the Nation.

Then Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., popped up on ABC’s This Week to intone darkly about Hagel’s temperament. From a recap by Brian Knowlton at the New York Times Web site:

Mr. Corker, who is not on the Armed Services Committee and said that he did not know Mr. Hagel well, offered little elaboration. But he said that there were “numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them.” He was speaking on the ABC News program “This Week.”

Mr. Corker’s seemed to suggest that he considered Mr. Hagel - who has a reputation for speaking his mind - overbearing or erratic.

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That splat, splat, splat you hear is the sound of a thousand tears hitting the surface of lattes in the coffee dens frequented by Washington, D.C., liberals upon hearing the news that the Administration is ruling out the minting of a $1 trillion coin to prevent a stalemate on allowing the federal government to borrow enough money to service the nation’s debt.

And congressional Democrats are no doubt crestfallen to learn that the president has no intention of claiming the constitutional prerogative of the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling on his own, as both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi implied he should do in a joint letter delivered on Friday.

As reported by the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman:

In a joint letter that served as a warning to congressional Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and his leadership team encouraged Obama to “take any lawful steps” to avoid default — “without Congressional approval, if necessary.”

(Politico has the letter, here.)

The White House wasn’t biting. From Annie Lowrey’s NYT report:

“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

This would seem to lend credence to the theory about which Brother Kilgore wrote earlier this week: that the White House expects Republican leaders, presumably chastened by public opinion, not to allow the U.S. to default on its debt. Of course, that opinion piece by AEI’s James Capretta, referenced by Kilgore and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, seemed to signal an avenue of strategic retreat, as Kilgore described it, for the G.O.P. The retreat would involve a form of water torture, with no grand agreement, but rather monthly extensions of the debt limit. As Kilgore describes the plan:

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