The Washington Post reports on the newest round of bipartisan kabuki:
Leading House Republicans raised the prospect Monday night that they may decline to participate in President Obama’s proposed health-care summit if the White House chooses not to scrap the existing reform bills and start over.
In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) expressed frustration about reports that Obama intends to put the Democratic bills on the table for discussion at the summit, which would be held Feb. 25.
It’s blindingly obvious to me that Republican leaders aren’t actually interested in compromise. Compromise, when you’re in the minority, means accepting that the majority has right to implement its program, and working within those constraints. Republicans clearly believe that majority has the right to implement its program, but they refuse to accept Democrats as a legitimate majority. To Republicans, there simply isn’t such a thing as a popular Democratic program because Democrats — and liberals especially — are inherently illegitimate and have no claim to popular support. Which is why Republican leaders repeatedly demand that the White House scrap its health care plan and adopt their own; by their lights, conservative governance is the only legitimate governance.
Elvis Costello — circa 1989 — performs “Veronica” for a group of Warner Brothers employees.
Damon Linker speaks truth to progressives wavering about their commitment to the Democratic Party (and I include myself in that number):
“Anything But The Other Guys” isn’t a particularly inspiring slogan, especially in comparison to the (let’s face it) exaggerated expectations for change many progressives entertained during the 2008 campaign. But the phrase captures the most pressing fact about the present political moment: Today’s Republican Party is unfit to govern and so must not be permitted to win the presidency. Everything else—including health care reform and climate change legislation—can and should be treated as negotiable. If the Democrats conclude that compromise or caution will make a Republican resurgence less likely, then they should take that path, for the good of the country. Until the Republicans come to their collective senses, depriving them of power must be the most urgent aim of progressive politics.
This annoys me to no end (via the New York Times):
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a statement that he welcomed the bipartisan meeting on health care and called on the president to begin the dialogue “by shelving the current health spending bill.”
“The fact is Senate Republicans held hundreds of town halls and met with their constituents across the country last year on the need for health care reform, outlining ideas for the step-by-step approach that Americans have asked for,” Mr. McConnell said. “And we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf.”
Not only do Republicans — and the media, frankly — act as if Democrats weren’t actually elected by a solid majority of voters, but they hold to this bizarre belief that democratic legitimacy stems from day-to-day polling. Which, you know, is ridiculous. In a system like ours, legitimacy doesn’t vanish when approval ratings dip below 50 percent; it remains up to and until the next election. That isn’t to say that public opinion shouldn’t impact the actions of the majority, but I would prefer it if we at least acknowledged that Democrats can govern as Democrats even when the public isn’t too happy about current conditions.
At the time of the last effort to curtail the filibuster, the Senate’s rules had remained static for 16 years. Since then, we’ve had 34 years of rule stagnation. Rule 22 wasn’t handed down by Moses on a stone tablet; the Senate is populated by adults who can, by consent, change it.
If you’re keeping count, this current period of Democratic control is only the fourth opportunity in a century that progressives have had to pass lasting legislation. Moreover, if you look at the first and the third periods of progressive initiative — the “Progressive Era” and the Johnson Presidency, respectively — you’ll notice that they were almost immediately preceded by an institutional or procedural change that nudged the government, however slightly, from its status quo bias.
What’s so frustrating about the current period of progressive opportunity is that it hasn’t been preceded by anything of the sort. Indeed, what we’ve seen instead is movement towards an even stronger status quo bias, in the form of routine filibusters. At this point, I’m convinced that the central progressive goal — among all others — is to reform our political institutions in such a way as to make governing possible, from the right or left.
Via Kevin Drum is a nifty graph showing how much money Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and the American Beverage Association had been spent lobbying against a proposed tax on sugared soft drinks:
What consistently shocks me is how little money industries spend on opposing or altering legislation. $37.5 million is a drop in the bucket when in the context of a tax was estimated to raise billions in tax revenue. It’s an excellent deal, and you’d be insane to turn it up. Which, to switch gears a little, is what makes the Citizens United ruling especially problematic; corporations need only spend a fraction of their profits to have an immense impact on the course of any given piece of legislation.
My problem with “troubles in the administration!” stories, like Edward Luce’s recent piece in the Financial Times, is that their currency is wholly dependent on the immediate political environment. Right now, the Obama administration is in a bad place; its chief legislative priority is on the verge of failure, its allies are disillusioned, and its rivals sense weakness and are circling for the kill. With that as your backdrop, its not particularly hard to write a conflict story:
In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington — most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office — each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people — Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.
….Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”
[...]
“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”
All of this may very well be true, but how we understand it — and how reporters report it — is shaped by the political environment. You can easily imagine an alternate world where health care was passed in November, unemployment was in the single digits, and Edward Luce wrote an article praising Rahm’s tough-minded pragmatism as integral to the success of the president’s first year. Don’t get me wrong, this is a worthwhile piece. But knowing what we do about its rootedness in current political minutae, we ought to be careful about investing it — or any of these kind of pieces — with any significance beyond the most obvious (i.e. being mean to people isn’t always very effective).
Ezra Klein calls the GOP a party without grown-ups, and I basically agree:
The Republican Party is operating without a clear model for successful Republican governance. George W. Bush was a failure and his father was a heretic. Ronald Reagan’s staffers are now too old. John Boehner is no Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell is no Bob Dole. There are no grown-ups, nor anyone who looks capable of growing up. This’ll be a bigger problem than people realize when Republicans retake power.
I’d actually go further than this: that the GOP lacks grown-ups is a feature and not a bug. The modern Republican Party was built on the premise that government cannot work, and public service is less valuable than entrepreneurial spirit. Not surprisingly, it attracts people who aren’t actually interested in making government work. As the Bush administration’s stunning incompetence effectively demonstrated, you can’t staff a government with people anathema to the idea of effective governance.
It doesn’t help either that the GOP is completely wedded to a calcified and unreflective conservative ideology that doesn’t provide the space for policy experimentation. The result is a party both ideologically uninterested in governance and completely devoid of the tools to pursue effective governance. It’s no surprise then that even the rising policy “stars” of the GOP are shallow by liberal standards; Eric Cantor and Bob McDonnell are bright, but their ideological commitments leave them unable to pursue anything other than tax cuts and deregulation*.
Like Ezra, I want grown-ups in the Republican Party. But unless conservatives make dramatic changes in their core ideology, I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
*And this, of course, is to say nothing of the conservatives who are more interested in lining the pockets of the wealthy and privileged than they are with making the United States a more fair and equitable society.
This is a pretty silly poll:
While influential 20th Century economist John Maynard Keynes would say it’s best to increase deficit spending in tough economic times, only 11% of American adults agree and think the nation needs to increase its deficit spending at this time. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 70% disagree and say it would be better to cut the deficit.
In fact, 59% think Keynes had it backwards and that increasing the deficit at this time would hurt the economy rather than help.
To help the economy, most Americans (56%) believe that cutting the deficit is the way to go.
Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans, in fact, say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.
If asked cold, I’m positive that a super-majority couldn’t even identify John Maynard Keynes, much less identify his ideas and their place in the economic conversation. All this poll shows us is that most Americans understand the federal government’s budget as analogous to a household budget, and don’t understand that for the government deficit spending is possible and desirable during periods where private sector spending is on the decline.
Of course, given Washington’s has a bizarre and nonsensical relationship with public opinion, I completely expect that this poll will be taken as proof-positive that Congress ought to trim back its efforts to revive the economy, so that we don’t offend the abject ignorance of most Americans.
Gerard Alexander — who was a decent professor when I had him at UVA — isn’t happy about the fact that liberals are confident in their beliefs:
Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.
Liberals would be a lot more likely to respect conservative views if conservatives at least pretended like they were interested in making government work. It’s very difficult to respect a movement that bleats about fiscal responsibility only to cut taxes at the first moment of opportunity, and which spends most of its energy demagoguing gay people, attacking due process and pushing for endless war.
Also, what Matt Yglesias said.
