The euro zone is in crisis! What to do?
Time for some Capitol Hill types to head over to talk to the finance ministers and central bank heads of what some call the PIIGS — Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — Europe’s most troubled economies.
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We know what you’re thinking. But Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.) insists: “No side trips. This is business.” The delegation will be moving quickly, he said, leaving Saturday and returning next Friday. About a country a day.
The delegation includes Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.). Some spouses and staff members will be on board, along with Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for Europe, Chris Smart.
There have been briefings from Treasury and CIA officials, Conrad said, and he’s meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner before taking off. The journey is important, Conrad said, because the euro zone’s economic crisis is “weakening our recovery.”
So, since Conrad and Snowe are both leaving the Senate in a few months, this isn’t what one wag called the “Retiree Junket” and another dubbed the “Swan Song Codel”?
No, Conrad said. “Important decisions will have to be made” on these issues before the end of the year.
Okay. But it’s still Europe on a miljet. No better way to travel.
Nino takes off the gloves
It was only a matter of time before Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia returned fire.
The battle was joined, Loop Fans may recall, in late June, when conservative jurist and appellate judge Richard Posner sharply criticized Scalia, saying his dissent in the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Arizona immigration case was political.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if Justice Scalia’s opinion were quoted in campaign ads,” Posner wrote in Slate, adding that part of the opinion had the “air of a campaign speech.”
Scalia was asked about this on “Fox News Sunday,” where he appeared to promote his new book, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.”
“He is a Court of Appeals judge, isn’t he?” Scalia asked. (Ouch.)
Scalia and Posner were faculty colleagues at the University of Chicago law school. In fact, in his book, Scalia cites at length a passage from a Posner text and concludes: “The analogy limps.” (’Mongst the legal scholars, this is considered a devastating shot.)
When assured that Posner was, indeed, an appeals judge, Scalia said, “He doesn’t sit in judgment of my opinions as far as I’m concerned.”
“You sit in judgment of his opinions?” host Chris Wallace asked.
“That’s what happens,” Scalia replied.
“And people wonder why you push people’s buttons every once in a while,” Wallace said.
“It’s fun to push the buttons,” Scalia said. “When Richard Posner comes out with a statement like that, I should fire back a statement equally provocative.”
So it wasn’t political?
Lobbyists and nonprofits
Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and his wife traveled to Bahrain last year, a House Ethics Committee-approved trip with a $20,000-plus tab that was picked up by a nonprofit organization.
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