New England Public Radio

If revenge is a dish best served cold, in Washington it can also be served with a heaping side of irony.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request to let Senate Republicans participate in the high-profile case Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board.

The question in that case is whether President Obama abused his recess appointment power in naming NLRB members. The president claims the Senate was in recess, which would make his appointments constitutional; Senate Republicans dispute Obama, saying the chamber wasn’t in recess.

The court had initially given the lawyers for the administration and Noel Canning 60 minutes to make their case.

But McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, asked for time to present the Senate minority’s position. The court granted that, adding 30 minutes for arguments. The administration will now get 45 minutes; Noel and Senate Republicans will split the same amount of time.

And the lawyer poised to make the Senate GOP’s argument before the Supreme Court? Miguel Estrada, who argued the case for Senate Republicans in the lower court.

At the start of George W. Bush’s administration, it was Democrats who filibustered Bush’s nomination of Estrada to the D.C. Circuit. That filibuster contributed to the toxic spiral of filibusters that first caused Senate Republicans, then Democrats, to threaten using the nuclear option to weaken senators’ ability to filibuster nominations until Democrats actually did it last month.

If the Obama administration and Senate Democrats wind up losing in the Supreme Court, the Estrada and nuclear-option backstory could make the win for Republicans especially sweet.

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At one time, Area 51 was one of the most famous military installations in the world — a place widely talked about, yet so secret that the U.S. government refused to confirm its existence.

That’s why President Obama’s reference to the southern Nevada base Sunday raised eyebrows. It marked the first time a U.S. commander-in-chief has publicly acknowledged the facility that fueled countless conspiracy theories.

Obama used the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to crack a joke at the expense of actress Shirley MacLaine, one of the five award recipients, who has claimed to have seen UFOs on several occasions.

“Now, when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is ‘what’s really going on in Area 51?'” Obama said. “When I wanted to know, I’d call Shirley MacLaine. I think I just became the first president to ever publicly mention Area 51. How’s that, Shirley?”

Conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Area 51 for decades, claming — among other things — the government is holding aliens and crashed UFOs there.

The 1996 blockbuster movie “Independence Day” cemented that notion in popular culture by depicting it as a highly secure repository for extraterrestrial beings and alien spacecraft.

A year earlier, President Bill Clinton had added to the mystery surrounding the facility by issuing presidential determination declaring the site exempt from environmental disclosure laws following a lawsuit. Yet the document never actually referred to Area 51 — rather, it specified “the Air Force’s operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada.”

It wasn’t until last August that the Central Intelligence Agency confirmed the existence of Area 51, officially known as the Nevada Test and Training Range and Groom Lake.

The newly released documents said the site served as a testing ground for aerial surveillance programs, such as the U-2 spy plane first used during the Cold War.

No mention of aliens or flying saucers, though.

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The national debate about income equality and low-wage labor ramped up this week as fast-food workers across the country rallied for better pay and President Obama assailed the nation’s growing income gap as the “defining challenge of our time.”

Meanwhile, an $11.50 minimum wage bill was approved in the nation’s capital, and giant discount retailer Wal-Mart opened its first Washington stores — accompanied by a flurry of ads defending the company’s often-criticized pay and benefits practices.

(Protesters showed up outside the new Wal-Marts, but inside there were bargain hunters and busy cash registers.)

To paraphrase a well-worn weather aphorism, everybody’s talking about poor pay and the perils of a growing gap between rich and poor — even Pope Francis weighed in — but no one can agree on what to do about them.

Raise the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 to $10.10 ($404 a week), as Democrats and the president have advocated?

Impose stricter rules on Wall Street, which critics say is riding government largesse and bailouts to high-flying profits that benefit a tiny percentage of Americans?

Close tax loopholes? Rethink interest deductions? Tax financial transactions? Just leave wages, banks and money movers alone and let the market decide the path forward?

There are arguments for and against all of the above, some more persuasive than others, others not.

We turned this week to economists and financial analysts for perspective on what brought us to this point, and whether and how it should be addressed. Not surprisingly, their disparate takes mirrored the conflicted national discussion on minimum wages and the wealth gap.

Here’s who we heard from, who we’ve been reading, and what they had to say.

Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Baker, an economist at the liberal-leaning research center, pointed to Wall Street as a driver of the wealth gap.

“We have done almost nothing to rein in Wall Street, which means great fortunes will be made scamming the productive economy in various ways,” he said.

Baker pointed to the government’s recurrent “too-big-to fail” subsidies to the nation’s 10 largest banks, an annual payout that Bloomberg View has estimated at $83 billion — and that has shielded investors from losses.

“This is effectively payment from the government to the big banks,” Baker says. “The government is providing enormously valuable insurance for which it is not charging.”

That, and tax code loopholes “just invite gaming,” he says.

His top proposals to address problems he’s identified: impose a modest tax on financial transactions including trades of stocks, bonds and derivatives to raise money and discourage “flipping” or the quick reselling of assets for profits; break up the big banks so they aren’t too big to fail; and limit interest deductions to prevent private equity companies “from showing big profits by loading companies with debt.”

Says Baker, “These are all reasonably straightforward, and would go a very long way.”

Scott Frew, Rockingham Capital Partners

Frew, general partner of the Connecticut-based hedge fund, says he views the phenomenon of the growing income inequality as arising out of globalization and the nation’s response to it.

“Globalization and the various free trade agreements that have accompanied it [including NAFTA] were sold as win-win arrangements, but have proved to be a lot closer to zero-sum,” he said. “The rising standard of living in the developing world has its mirror image in the falling ones here.”

Policymakers who have attempted to stanch the flow of wealth from the U.S. to the developing world — encouraging easy credit, for example — have ended up instead exacerbating the problem, Frew says.

Their actions, he says, “most certainly widened the gap [in the U.S.] between the extremely prosperous upper echelons and everybody else.”

The wealthy have profited from the migration of American jobs overseas — from Wall Streeters selling IOU’s to the developing world, to company owners outsourcing overseas. It’s a practice Frew characterized as a “highly profitable form of labor cost arbitrage.”

He also notes that U.S. businesses additionally benefit from their reliance on the government to provide welfare benefits to working Americans being paid poverty-level wages.

Since taxes aren’t levied on businesses to specifically offset the costs of those government benefits, which help boost their profits, “these corporations and their owners benefit twice over.”

The Financial Times‘ FTAlphaville, financial markets blog

In a post this week, the blog’s Cardiff Garcia laid out the arguments for raising the federal minimum wage (job stability, less reliance on government benefits, workers spending more, etc) and those against (potential to depress employment, not clear if lower turnover a good thing, not as cost-effective as other ideas), and came up with this:

“So what’s the right stand to take on the minimum wage in the absence of a better idea that’s politically feasible? Honestly, we don’t know.”

The post prompted a spirited conversation in the blog’s comments section.

The conservative Heritage Foundation also weighed in this week with an analysis bolstering its opposition to minimum-wage increases; and the Brookings Institution’s Gary Burtless laid out the minimum wage’s depleted purchasing power over time.

Income inequality. Minimum wages. Corporate welfare. The future of the middle class. We end the week with myriad questions, elusive solutions, politics beyond complicated, but a real national conversation begun.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

When I was coming of age in the late 1970s, as an African-American high-schooler and college student, I had two certainties: Nelson Mandela would die in prison in apartheid South Africa and no black person would become U.S. president in my lifetime.

So much for my youthful powers of prediction.

Little could I have known then that I would become a journalist who would one day get to cover events I once thought would never happen, at least not during my time on Earth.

In 1994, I was in South Africa for the Chicago Tribune covering the campaign and election that led to Mandela’s becoming that nation’s first black president. Years later, I participated in that paper’s coverage of hometown politician Barack Obama’s journey to the White House. How much luckier could one kid from the South Bronx get?

I was fortunate because I was getting paid to witness history writ large. But also because I was observing history of particular significance to African-Americans.

The political triumphs, first of Mandela, then of Obama, were pinch-me milestones on the long march to freedom for many members of two long-oppressed groups — black South Africans and African-Americans — each of which saw something of its own story in the other’s.

Even blacks who didn’t belong to Mandela’s or Obama’s political parties, or black journalists who strove to maintain a professional skepticism, couldn’t help but reflect on the extraordinary history that was taking place.

Blacks weren’t alone in that, of course. But our histories as being treated at best as second-class citizens arguably made the gap between our experience, and our sense of the possible, wider than it was for many whites.

These were moments many generations of black South Africans and Americans had barely dared to imagine and hadn’t lived to see. We, the living, saw them.

While we know how Mandela’s story turned out, in 1994 when I headed to South Africa with other journalists from across the globe, it was by no means a sure thing.

There was the very real fear of a civil war during the run-up to South Africa’s elections. And not just interracial conflict but also between different segments of black South Africans, namely Mandela’s African National Congress and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. Daily incidents of political violence were occurring across the country. Journalists were warned to prepare for the worst.

On my way to South Africa, for instance, I stopped in London to obtain body armor theoretically capable of stopping AK-47 rounds.

That the flights were far from full going into Johannesburg (and packed leaving it) just added to the foreboding. As did a U.S. Embassy briefing for journalists where a briefer outlined contingency plans for evacuating Americans by convoy if all hell broke loose.

But as Abraham Lincoln knew, there are the “better angels of our nature.” And if one man ever personified such angels and knew how to summon them from others, it was Mandela. His powers as a politician, as a negotiator, as a moral authority, kept South Africa from violently shaking itself to pieces.

Like Lincoln, Mandela is one of those world figures I wish I could have interviewed. But at least I did get to shake his hand.

It was at a pre-election church service outside Cape Town to celebrate the merging of two churches — one black, the other “colored” — a symbol of the end of the bizarre apartheid color line.

After the service Mandela stopped at each of the front pews to shake hands, including the pew filled with us journalists. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to shake hands with a world historical figure whom I had never expected to survive prison, let alone to be standing in front of me with that broad smile. It was surreal.

I recall that after I returned to the U.S., when people asked me for my takeaways from my South Africa experience, my first response usually was: “Nothing is impossible.”

Alas, it was a lesson I would later forget.

When Obama announced that he was running for U.S. Senate, I had serious doubts that someone with so exotic a name could win a statewide race in Illinois.

Then, when he announced he was running for president, like many other African-Americans I was dubious. Sure, the U.S. had progressed much since the civil rights era, but not that much.

Obama, however, clearly saw something many others didn’t. He imagined a future that looked nothing like the past or even the present, then made it happen.

On the day Mandela died, Obama recalled that his first real political activity was in 1979 when he took part in an Occidental College campus protest against apartheid. Obama noted the older man’s influence on him: “The day that he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears,” the president said.

Eighteen years after Mandela was freed, there I sat on Invesco Field in Denver experiencing a sense of the surreal similar to what I had in that church outside Cape Town. The Obama family had taken the stage on the last night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention after Obama’s acceptance speech.

I sensed it again when he was inaugurated as the 44th president.

It’s said that politics is the art of the possible. Both Mandela and Obama expanded the definition of what’s possible in politics and racial progress so much that they’ve made it harder for a doubter like me to rule anything out.

Change may come with difficulty, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It was one of Mandela’s lessons to the world I intend not to forget again.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Get ready for a bruising GOP primary battle in Mississippi.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said Friday he will seek a seventh term in 2014, setting the stage for a contentious contest that pits the Republican establishment against the Tea Party wing.

There had been speculation that Cochran, who turns 76 on Saturday and had raised relatively little cash, would retire rather than run again for the seat he first won in 1978. In October, Tea Party-backed state Sen. Chris McDaniel announced he would seek the GOP nomination whether or not Cochran ran again, and criticized the veteran incumbent’s vote to end the federal government shutdown.

Soon after, McDaniel received the endorsements of thee influential conservative outside groups: the Club for Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison Project. SCF’s super PAC arm, Senate Conservatives Action, ran a statewide television ad in support of McDaniel last month.

Cochran, the second most-senior Republican in the Senate and the top Republican on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, serves on the powerful Appropriations Committee. Before Congress banned earmarks, he was recognized for his ability to direct federal funds to his home state.

After raising $53,000 last quarter, Cochran had just over $800,000 in his campaign account at the end of September — a relatively low amount for a sitting senator. But he’s expected to have the full backing of the GOP establishment during the campaign.

Cochran isn’t the only veteran GOP senator with a primary opponent next year, but he may be one of the more vulnerable. A November survey from the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling found Cochran with a 44 percent to 38 percent advantage over McDaniel. Fifty-five percent of the state’s GOP voters said they would prefer a more conservative alternative to Cochran.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander are among the Republicans facing challenges from the right.

The winner of the June primary will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election, as Mississippi is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Like a lot of neighbors who were once close, Minnesota and Wisconsin have drifted apart over time. Their politics and policy directions are now about as disparate as can be.

That’s surprising, not just because the two states share a common climate and culture, but because neither party can claim a big majority of the vote in either state.

“We have parties that are so ideologically locked in, whenever they get in power they go in the direction of activists,” says Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist who has studied the two states’ political differences.

Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker became famous for ending collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Lately, he’s generated considerable buzz as a presidential prospect with the release of his new book.

The state is also home to Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012 and the party’s top budget negotiator in Congress, as well as national party chair Reince Priebus. Collectively, they lend a Midwestern face to a party that is dominated by the South and West.

In Minnesota, by contrast, Democrats rule the roost and they’re pursuing all the things Walker and his allies would never consider: Blessing same-sex marriage, raising taxes and implementing Obamacare.

“In two states that are pretty similar, with a pretty similar culture, even a little difference can create these really divergent approaches to public policy,” Jacobs says.

So Why The Difference?

In the two states, there are all kinds of explanations for the current distinctions in voting patterns, from the economic to the ethnographic.

Wisconsin historically has had more residents with German and Eastern and Central European backgrounds, while Minnesota attracted more Scandinavians, says Mordecai Lee, a former state legislator who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“During their working years, they were Democrats,” he says of the state’s ethnic Catholics. “Those Reagan Democrats gradually became reliably GOP voters, mobilized by social issues such as abortion, gay rights and all the other very effective wedge issues that the GOP raised over the years.”

The economic success of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, by contrast, has created suburban pockets that are considered moderate — socially liberal, while being fiscally conservative — and don’t exist on anything like the same scale in Wisconsin.

“We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies that don’t go Democratic, but they’re moderate Republicans,” says state Sen. Jeff Hayden, a Democrat who represents parts of Minneapolis. “I think we have a better relationship with them.”

No More Moderates

A generation ago, Minnesota was known not only for producing liberal Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, who both served as vice president, but also moderate Republicans such as Gov. Arne Carlson and Sen. David Durenberger.

That breed of Republican could never get nominated by the GOP in the state today, says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The state party — which has had some financial problems in recent years — is now more attuned to the Tea Party conservatism exemplified by Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“The Minnesota Republican Party has faced all sorts of problems in the last 10 years,” Schier says. “By contrast, the state DFL” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic organization is known in Minnesota — “is pretty unified and organized and well-funded.”

Some observers contend that the DFL has become insular and ossified, relying not only on the children but grandchildren of famous officeholders to seek office.

But the DFL has an advantage most state Democratic parties do not. The area around Duluth, known as the Iron Range, has a tradition of unionism and Democratic voting that has been sustained. Paired with the largely Democratic vote in the Twin Cities — home to the bulk of the state population — that’s generally enough to outvote Republicans in the rest of the state.

Two large rural counties in northeastern Minnesota voted last year against a ban on same-sex marriage, joining with the Twin Cities to defeat the measure even as 75 of the state’s 87 counties voted in support.

“There are big sections of rural Minnesota that vote Democratic,” Schier says. “That’s very unusual in any state.”

Closer Than They Look

Despite the GOP’s current dominance of Wisconsin state politics, no Republican presidential candidate has carried the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. (In Minnesota’s case, the GOP has come up empty every time since 1972.)

Wisconsin currently has one of the most conservative senators in Republican Ron Johnson, but also one of the most liberal, Democrat Tammy Baldwin.

“There’s no doubt that our statewide offices could go Democratic as much as they could go Republican,” says Lee, the UW-Milwaukee political scientist.

But for a few thousand votes in 2010, the political landscape in Minnesota might look a lot more like Wisconsin’s. Republicans won control of the legislature that year — they lost it in 2012 — and Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton won by only 8,770 votes, out of more than 2 million cast.

“On one level, the difference between Wisconsin and Minnesota is 8,700 votes,” says David Schultz, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul. “If Dayton had not won that race, we would have seen much of the same legislation as Wisconsin, including collective bargaining.”

Spillover Effects

In other words, the political margins in both states are tight enough that if a few thousand people — the right few thousand people — moved from one state to the other, it could change the political makeup of both states.

That might be happening. Communities in western Wisconsin such as Hudson, River Falls and Baldwin are booming, filling up with people commuting across the St. Croix River to jobs in the Twin Cities. Some localities have already seen growth upwards of 50 percent since 2000, with as many as 150,000 additional residents expected to arrive over the next decade.

That’s going to create a new population center in Wisconsin with the potential to affect the state’s politics. And, if enough of the people coming over are Democrats, that would weaken the party’s current advantage in Minnesota.

“We’re in the neighborhood of 50 percent of our residents commuting into the two closest Minnesota counties for work,” says Scott Simpson, city administrator for River Falls.

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