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The press is supposed to confront and challenge politicians, to fact check, to provide a service to their viewership to be informed.

Which is why I'm less upset at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly announcing that the Senate Republicans will be contributing an Amicus Brief to the case against President Obama's recess appointments than I am that Candy Crowley never bothered to mention that during the previous administration, Bush made 171 recess appointments--including Ambassador to the UN John Bolton--and Mitch McConnell never said boo to any of them.

There's nothing unconstitutional about Obama's appointments, as the Republicans well know:

The Justice Department is publicly rebutting Republican criticism of the legality of President Barack Obama's recent recess appointments of a national consumer watchdog and other officials.

The department released a 23-page legal opinion Thursday summarizing the advice it gave the White House before the Jan. 4 appointments. GOP leaders have argued the Senate was not technically in recess when Obama acted so the regular Senate confirmation process should have been followed.

Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz wrote that the president has authority to make such appointments because the Senate is on a 20-day recess, even though it has held periodic pro forma sessions in which no business is conducted. Seitz argued the pro forma sessions – some with as few as one member present – have not been sufficient for the chamber to exercise its constitutional authority to advise and consent to normal presidential nominations.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said Obama has endangered the nation's systems of checks and balances, and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch says the appointments are a very grave decision by an autocratic White House.

Autocratic? Such pearl-clutching hypocrisy. Sen. Mike Lee has promised to obstruct all further nominations as retribution for this completely legal tactic made necessary by Republican obstruction. This, of course, doesn't bother Mitch McConnell either. Because the tyranny of the minority to hold the entire country hostage against the desires of its populace is absolutely acceptable practice, if you're a Republican.

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We all know this: Republicans and their banking overlords despise the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If they could tuck a legislative nuclear bomb into a bill to kill it for all eternity, they would. Barring that, they've simply decided they will do their level best to block every effort to actually implement this part of the Dodd-Frank legislation.

But listen to Mitch McConnell blowing smoke about why the Senate blocked Richard Cordray here. Not only is it self-contradictory, but it's definitely revealing. The contradiction comes when McConnell claims the CFPB director is a completely unelected office, another czar. Of course, one has to question how this is a problem when the elected officials (aka the Senate) are responsible for confirmation of Cordray to the office. Under McConnell's logic, the entire cabinet is nothing more than a bunch of unelected czars. Surely he's not advocating for election of agency heads, is he? Surely not.

The nonsense about the agency having unlimited powers and no oversight is also just that. Nonsense. It's just that Congress can't meddle in what the agency does, and that's what has Mr. McConnell's panties in a bunch along with the rest of Senate Republicans. The CFBP is required to report to Congress semiannually, but is not subject to Congressional oversight. There are, however, other regulatory and oversight provisions that are uniquely applied to the CFBP which other bank and financial regulators escape. Again, more smoke, intended to disguise the hunger Republicans have for holding the agency's pursestrings. It was designed that way for a reason, and of course, they hate it.

But here's the key to the whole kerfuffle:

McCONNELL: There's nothing wrong with Mr. Cordray personally. This is about an unaccountable, unelected czar and we're simply not going to appoint him -- confirm him -- or anybody else to this agency that shouldn't exist in its current form.

See? It's not about Cordray. Had Elizabeth Warren been the nominee, they would have been able to make it all about her and never, ever even revealed their true motives. But now we have Richard Cordray, someone who is far less controversial and far more inside the parameters of "acceptability", by McConnell's own admission. Still, they will refuse to confirm him or any other nominee simply because they don't like the way Dodd-Frank kept the agency out from under the thumb of Congress.

Really, I think Chris Wallace should have asked McConnell to hold his breath until he turns blue. That's really what we have going on here. A Republican temper tantrum designed to weaken an agency that exists to serve the 99 percent.

Update: Steve Benen reacted even more strongly than I. He calls McConnell's declaration "radical nullification".

As a matter of legal and institutional principles, Americans haven’t seen tactics like these since the Civil War. It led James Fallows to explain yesterday, “This strategy depends absolutely for its success on its not being called what it is: Constitutional radicalism, or nullification.” Jonathan Cohn made the same point last week, andThomas Mann referenced a “modern-day form of nullification” in July.

Political tactics and schemes come and go, as politicians and parties win and lose. But what Republicans are doing now does real damage to the American system of government. It is, by any meaningful definition, a serious and important political scandal.

Among the predictable differences between the Democratic and Republican members of the so-called debt super committee is this: Democrats propose to increase revenue by raising taxes, while Republicans want to increase revenue by cutting taxes. You read that right. After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again thanks in large part to supply-side tax cuts that gutted the U.S. Treasury, Congressional Republicans are once again peddling the GOP's biggest fraud that "you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase."

On Wednesday, super committee Democrats offered an initial proposal delivering an estimated $3 trillion in debt reduction by 2021. But since roughly half that figure would come from new tax revenue largely produced by modest rate hikes on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans instantly dismissed the Democratic plan. House Speaker John Boehner said it wasn't "serious." As one GOP aide put it, "It is ridiculous, nothing more than political posturing."

Instead, Republican debt panel members put forward their own plan the next day. And as the Washington Post explained, the GOP proposal went from the ridiculous to the sublime:

Republicans, instead, have offered more than $2 trillion in savings over 10 years, highlighted by nearly $700 billion in spending reductions to Medicare and Medicaid. According to lawmakers and aides familiar with the GOP proposal, it includes an offer of more than $600 billion in savings from new tax revenue. But the two sides are in deep dispute because Republicans want to count these increased receipts based on the expectation of surging economic growth -- a standard that neutral budget observers have declined to use in the past.

If that "magic asterisk" sounds familiar, it should. The tried and untrue talking point that tax cuts spur economic growth so rapid that revenues exceed what they otherwise would have been was the formula for the mountains of debt produced by Reagan and Bush.

As Reagan's OMB chief David Stockman learned the hard way, Arthur Laffer's supply-side snake oil may have been Republican orthodoxy ever since Jude Wanniski sketched Laffer's curve on a cocktail napkin, but it also happened to be catastrophically wrong.

As most analysts predicted at the time, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios" and "future savings to be identified."

Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder that, three decades after he concluded "the supply-siders have gone too far," Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

And that magical thinking - that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and "tax cuts raise revenue" and "tax cuts don't need to be offset" - dominates what passes for thinking by the Republicans' born-again deficit hawks.

For example, take GOP debt super committee panelist and second ranking Senate Republican Jon Kyl.

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"Congressional historians said Mr. Boehner's move was unprecedented." A month before Senate Republicans blocked Barack Obama’s popular jobs bill, that’s how the New York Times described Speaker John Boehner's refusal to grant the President's request for a September 7 address to joint session of Congress to present the American Jobs Act. As it turns out, "unprecedented" is apt description for almost every boulder in the stone wall of Republican obstructionism Barack Obama has faced from the moment he took the oath of office. From the GOP's record-setting use of the filibuster and its united front against Obama's legislative agenda to blocking judicial nominees and its admitted hostage-taking of the U.S. debt ceiling, the Republican Party has broken new ground in its perpetual quest to ensure that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

Even before Barack Obama took the oath office, Republicans leaders, conservative think-tanks and right-wing pundits were calling for total obstruction of the new president's agenda. Bill Kristol, who helped block Bill Clinton's health care reform attempt in 1993, called for history to repeat on the Obama stimulus - and everything else. Pointing with pride to the Clinton economic program which received exactly zero GOP votes in either House, Kristol in January 2009 advised:

"That it made, that it made it so much easier to then defeat his health care initiative. So, it's very important for Republicans who think they're going to have to fight later on health care, fight later on maybe on some of the bank bailout legislation, fight later on on all kinds of issues."

And so, as the chart above reveals, it came to pass.

Time after time, President Obama could count the votes he received from Congressional Republicans on the fingers (usually the middle one) of one hand. The expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to four million more American kids earned the backing of a whopping eight GOP Senators. (One of them, Arlen Specter, later became a Democrat.) Badly needed Wall Street reform eventually overcame GOP filibusters to pass with the support of just three Republicans in the House and Senate, respectively. Last summer, it took 50 days for President Obama to get past Republican filibusters of extended unemployment benefits and the Small Business Jobs Act. As for the DISCLOSE Act, legislation designed to limit the torrent of secret campaign cash unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, in September Republican Senators prevented it from ever coming to a vote.

The one-way street that is bipartisanship in Washington was most clearly on display during each party's attempts to pass tax cuts and economic stimulus. While some turncoat Democrats (like debt super committee member Max Baucus) helped Reagan and Bush sell their supply-side snake oil, Republicans were determined to torpedo new Democratic presidents:

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Credit: Deloitte

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Judging from the furious reaction of some of the gilded-class crowd and their Republican protectors, billionaire Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his plea to Congress to "stop coddling the super-rich." Former American Express CEO, Harvey Golub and tea party sugar daddy Charles Koch were quick to protest respectively "the unfair way taxes are collected" and that "my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked President Obama's "efforts to incite class warfare."

Of course, a truism of American politics is that the side decrying the class war is the one winning it. And at a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60 years and income inequality at its highest level in 80, Republicans would still rather wave the unbloodied shirt of class warfare than ask what America's rich and famous can do for their country.

That became abundantly clear during the debt ceiling crisis Republicans manufactured. Weeks before Cantor's Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post accused President Obama of class warfare and a desire to "make it harder to create jobs," his GOP colleagues were already singing from the same hymnal. Senators Dan Coats (R-IN) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) quickly called a proposed $4 trillion debt reduction deal 17 percent of which came from new revenues "class warfare." Utah's Orrin Hatch wasn't content to lament "the usual class warfare the Democrats always wage." The poor, Hatch insisted, "need to share some of the responsibility." As for a Senate resolution asking the same of millionaires, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said that was "rather pathetic."

Of course, what is really pathetic is the declining tax burden on the small slice of Americans now taking an ever-larger piece of the economic pie.

Even after extorting in December a two-year extension to the upper-income Bush tax cuts and steep reductions in the estate tax impacting only 0.25 percent of families, Republicans refused to countenance a dime of new tax revenue as the debt ceiling debate began. First Eric Cantor and then John Boehner walked out of the debt compromise discussions with President Obama for the same reason. As Boehner put it in his national address in July, "I know those tax increases will destroy jobs."

Back in May, John Boehner explained to CBS News who Republicans would be trying to protect during the debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet after the tax cuts of George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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As the New York Times reported Sunday, within the Obama White House a fierce debate is raging about what to do next about jobs and the economy. But on the same day Americans learned advisers David Plouffe and Bill Daley are pushing President Obama to put forward only proposals which can pass Congress as part of his continuing quixotic quest for the political center, the Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg became the latest to document that it no longer exists.

Which is one more reason why President Obama not only must aggressively promote the job creation programs America are so desperate for. He should take a page from the GOP playbook while doing so. After all, the same Republicans who claimed the economy was the party's "number one priority" immediately pushed draconian anti-abortion restrictions, a stillborn repeal of the health care reform law and a disastrous balanced budget amendment they knew would never become law.

It's time for Barack Obama to start making Republicans offers they can't refuse. And if they do, they'll be on record for having said no to the economic recovery measures the American people so badly need.

1. The States' Rights Act. Republicans claim to love states' rights. Among them should be the right to get help from Washington to limit the cataclysmic budget shortfalls and layoffs now gripping cash-strapped state and local governments. The States' Rights Act would do just that.

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That all six of the Republicans selected to the Congressional debt reduction "Super Committee" are signers of Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge is hardly surprising. But the choice of Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, is an especially fitting one for the GOP. After all, Kyl didn't merely define a generation of Republican talking points when he explained earlier this year that his was "not intended to be a factual statement." As it turns out, from regurgitating bogus claims that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and spur "job creators" to his war on the estate tax, Jon Kyl has long been a leading fabricator of GOP tax cut myths. And when it comes to super lies on taxes, his fellow Republican super committeemen are not far behind.

In June, the second ranking Senate Republican joined House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in walking out of debt reduction talks led by Vice President Biden because of their refusal to accept even a dime of new tax revenue. As Jon Kyl explained last summer (starting around the 1:20 mark above), tax cuts don't increase the national debt:

"You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

Kyl's was just the latest repackaging of President Bush's long ago debunked claim that "you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison parroted that line, "Every major tax cut we've had in history has created more revenue." Then House Minority Leader John Boehner agreed, insisting last June that the Bush tax cuts had nothing to do with the depleted U.S. Treasury, "It's not the marginal tax rates ... that's not what led to the budget deficit. The revenue problem we have today is a result of what happened in the economic collapse some 18 months ago." For his part, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed to defend Kyl's fuzzy math:

"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

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Credit: New York Times

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If nothing else, the debt ceiling crisis provided what Barack Obama is so fond of calling a "teachable moment." Hopefully, that extends to the President himself. After seeing his nominees blocked, his legislation filibustered and popular upper-income tax increases delayed by Republicans who withheld their support from his watered down stimulus and health care programs, President Obama nevertheless continued to seek common ground with those whose only goal remains his political destruction. The result was as painful as it was predictable.

As for the rest of us, here are 25 things we learned during the debt crisis.

(1) We learned that Republicans really care about the national debt, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. As Dick Cheney put it, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

(2) We learned that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, forcing him to raise the debt ceiling 17 times. Overwhelmed by the torrents of red ink unleashed by his supply-side tax cuts of 1981, Reagan raised taxes eleven times while in office. (His deficit reduction initiatives of 1982, 1984 and 1987 relied on over 75% in new tax revenue.) It's no wonder Reagan called the mountain of debt he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.

(3) We learned that George W. Bush nearly doubled the national debt, leaving Barack Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit and almost $11 trillion in debt on January 20, 2009.

(4) We learned that the Bush tax cuts were the single biggest factor in erasing the projected surpluses Dubya inherited from Bill Clinton. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the red ink during his tenure, and if made permanent, would contribute more to the debt over the next decade than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, the stimulus and TARP combined.

(5) We learned that tax cuts don't "pay for themselves" or "always increase revenues." Only in 2005 did federal tax revenue reach the pre-Bush tax cut levels of 2000.

(6) We learned that the Republicans' so-called job creators don't create jobs when their taxes are low. In fact, the data show that the far more jobs were created and the economy grew much more quickly when the top 1% of income earners paid higher - even much higher - taxes.

(7) We learned that for John Boehner, some "spending binges" are more equal than others. While spending under Barack Obama rose by about 10% from George W. Bush's last budget in FY 2009, federal outlays almost doubled between 2001 and 2009. As it turns out, the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (the first war-time tax cut in modern U.S. history) and the Medicare prescription drug program drained the U.S. Treasury. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor voted for all of it.

(8) We learned that Republicans have short memories. When Eric Cantor complained recently that "what I don't think the White House understands is how difficult it is for fiscal conservatives to say they're going to vote for a debt ceiling increase," he apparently forgot that Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt limit under President Bush. Along with John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, Cantor and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to increase George W. Bush's borrowing authority by $4 trillion. (That vote tally included a "clean" debt ceiling increase in 2004, backed by 98 current House Republicans and 31 sitting GOP Senators.)

(9) We learned that Republicans are bad at genetics, too. Last Friday, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling claimed that for Republicans, raising the debt ceiling is "contrary to our DNA."

(10) We learned that in rare moments of candor, Republicans can speak the truth. In January, Speaker Boehner acknowledged that failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause "financial disaster." And Utah Senator Orrin Hatch explained that when President Bush was in the White House, for Republicans "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

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Credit: New York Times

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"In Washington more spending and more debt is business as usual," House Speaker John Boehner declared on Monday before warning, "I've got news for Washington - those days are over." The days, Boehner should have explained, before Barack Obama took the oath of office. As Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) rightly pointed on the Senate floor last year, "We would have none of this if it hadn't been for the Republican debt orgy that they went through." Which is exactly right. As a few handy charts show, Republican presidents and the current GOP leadership in Congress presided over that debt debauchery. And now they demand Democrats clean up their mess.

In case Americans had forgotten that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it, the New York Times presented the helpful reminder above.

For their part, Republicans want to pretend history began on January 20, 2009. While Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling claimed Friday that for Republicans raising the debt ceiling is "contrary to our DNA," House Minority Leader Eric Cantor protested two weeks ago, "I don't think the White House understands is how difficult it is for fiscal conservatives to say they're going to vote for a debt ceiling increase."

As McClatchy showed, Republicans are as bad at genetics and history as they are at economics:

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If it appears that John Boehner is suffering from multiple personality disorder over the debt ceiling stand-off, that's because he is. Torn between his duty to the national interest as Speaker of the House and to the Tea Party caucus that put him there, for months Boehner has ping-ponged between truth and lies on the debt ceiling. Long before he breached faith with the President on Friday, John Boehner tried to have it both ways on virtually every aspect of the debt ceiling crisis manufactured by the Republican Party he struggles to lead.

As Jed Lewison documented, Speaker Sybil couldn't get his story straight on Friday's walkout. While he insisted during his press conference afterward that "we had an agreement on a revenue number," in a letter that same day to House Republicans Boehner insisted that "A deal was never reached, and was never really close."

As it turns out, John Boehner's duplicity started long before he picked up the Speaker's gavel.

In the wake of the Republicans' overwhelming triumph at the polls last fall, Speaker-to-be Boehner was his party's voice of reason on the debt ceiling. As the Wall Street Journal reported on November 18 ("Boehner Warns GOP on Debt Ceiling"), Boehner pressed his newly enlarged Republican caucus on the need to raise the debt ceiling and so protect the full faith and credit of the United States.

"I've made it pretty clear to them that as we get into next year, it's pretty clear that Congress is going to have to deal with this," Mr. Boehner, who is slated to become House speaker in January, told reporters.

"We're going to have to deal with it as adults," he said, in what apparently are his most explicit comments to date. "Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations and we have obligations on our part."

If an increase in the current debt limit of $14.3 trillion does not pass, it would suggest the country may not meet its obligations and would shake the financial system. It could rock the bond market, rattle the dollar and scare away foreign buyers of U.S. debt.

In January, Boehner echoed Paul Ryan's warning that "you can't not raise the debt ceiling" and Lindsey Graham's dire prediction that failure to do so would produce "collapse and calamity throughout the world." As Speaker Boehner put it then:

"That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on Election Day said, 'we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.' And you can't create jobs if you default on the federal debt."

But that same month, Boehner was also insisting President Obama would have to make concessions to Republicans on the debt ceiling that George W. Bush, needless to say, never faced:

The American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington.

After bringing the government to the brink of a shutdown over budget cuts demanded by the GOP in April, a newly confident Speaker Boehner made abundantly clear he would join the hardliners in the House and Senate holding the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling hostage. As Politico reported, Boehner set out to prove "there's no daylight between the Tea Party and me":

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), fresh off the budget talks, told donors this weekend that if Obama wants an up or down vote on the debt ceiling he's not going to get it.

"The president says I want you to send me a clean bill," Boehner said. "Well guess what, Mr. President, not a chance you're going to get a clean bill."

"There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it," he continued in a clip of his remarks at a fundraiser that was played during "Face the Nation."

That really, really big "something" turned out to be the draconian Paul Ryan budget. After refusing to endorse the Ryan Roadmap during the 2010 campaign, John Boehner joined 234 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators in voting for the Ryan plan. But Ryan's blueprint didn't merely privatize Medicare, slash Medicaid and deliver yet another tax cut windfall for the wealthy; it would also add another $6 trillion in debt over the next decade. As a result, the GOP's own Ryan budget not only violates the "Cut, Cap and Balance Act" spending targets they just voted for this week. It would also require the Republicans to raise the ceiling repeatedly in the future.

In a rare moment of candor, Speaker John Boehner admitted as much.

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