Matt Yglesias

Controlling the Agenda

Owen Rice has a series of cool charts that show optimal classification location of members of congress and “cutting lines” on various votes. The way it works is first you locate members, based on their votes, into a two-dimensional ideological space. Then on any given vote you can create a “cutting line” across the ideological space that does the best possible job of correcting sorting members into yeas and nays. That helps you get a sense of the underlying dynamic of the issue.

Here’s an example of a vote that broke down on pure party lines:

Kevin Drum wants to know why the optimal classification comes out this way:

Actually, though, I think I’m more interested in the placement of senators themselves. Democrats are almost all bunched into a single grouping, with only four outliers. Republicans, by contrast, are spread through considerably more space on both the economic and social dimensions. That doesn’t seem intuitively right to me, but it strikes me as more complimentary toward Republicans than Democrats. So tell me again why they want to defund pointy-headed political scientists?

It’s not intuitively right. What I think it is is an illustration of the importance of setting the agenda. The Democratic leadership has only brought to a vote bills that unite the overwhelming majority of Democrats. Consequently, a visualization based on votes of the 111th Senate shows the Democrats as enormously bunched-together. If you look at the House where Nancy Pelosi doesn’t need a unanimous caucus to pass bills, you see that Democrats and Republicans are about equally dispersed. If Republicans were to capture the House and pick up some Senate seats in 2010, then legislation would more often be focused on issues that split the party caucuses (education, immigration) and the visualizations would look different.

On a Budget Commission

Politicians love commissions. They love them so much that journalists have come to love cynically deriding them. So now that talk of a “budget commission” to tackle the long-term deficit is in the air, people are being cynical about it. I actually think commissions are a pretty good idea since congress is so bad at designing policy. The real question is what would a serious budget commission look like?

I think Pete Davis and Bruce Bartlett have some pretty good posts on this matter. I would say the most important thing is for congress to not entirely abdicate its policymaking role. The key is to actually tell the commission, in a real way, what it wants studied. Reduce the deficit to such-and-such a percent of GDP relative to baseline and do it this percent with tax cuts and this percent with spending cuts. That’s a real mandate, and exactly the sort of decision elected officials should be making. Similarly, if congress wants the Pentagon to get special treatment, they should say so. With that done, having a commission try to work out the details within the framework of a congressional mandate makes sense.

Women Share of CBC Membership Higher than Congress as a Whole

Tweeting about this post of mine, Dayo Olopade asked “Where are the black women in politics?”

This is probably too literal an answer, but they’re where you usually find influential African-American politicians—the United States House of Representatives. There are 74 women in the House of Representatives of whom 12 are African-American. That makes women about 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, higher than their overall representation in the House which is about 17 percent. The black women in congress are all Democrats, and the Democrats have a higher women’s share in the caucus, but even so the Democratic caucus as a whole is only 22 percent female. Since most of the people who vote for Democrats are women, this is a pretty ridiculously low ratio, but the fact of the matter is that the African-American community seems to be blazing the trail in the direction of somewhat-less-inequality.

The world’s largest share of women parliamentarians is found in Sweden where men help take care of children and there’s a robust political tradition of “feminist natalism.” In the United States, voters show no inclination to discriminate against women who run for office but women are much less likely to be recruited to run.

The Public Wants Partisan Health Care; But Will They Get It?

Public opinion is in support of harsh measures to secure a public option:

“Which of these would you prefer – (a plan that includes some form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance, but is approved without support from Republicans in Congress); or (a plan that is approved with support from Republicans in Congress, but does not include any form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance)?”

Fifty one percent said they preferred the public option; 37 percent said they preferred a bill with some support from Republicans in Congress. Six percent said neither and seven percent expressed no opinion.

“Who will tell President Snowe and the rest of the Villagers” jokes Atrios.

I think it’s important, however, to remember that legislative outcomes are ultimately determined by raw vote counts and political power, not by semiotics and control of the media narrative. There are three ways to pass a health care bill:

One: Olympia Snowe votes for cloture.
Two: Ben Nelson votes for cloture.
Three: Fifty Democrats agree to try reconciliation.

Clearly Olympia Snowe doesn’t favor the “ignore Olympia Snowe” approach.

It’s pretty clear that there are fifty Democrats who favor a public option, and if they’re really willing to play procedural hardball there’s not much the parliamentarian or David Broder can do to stop them from enacting a bill with 50 votes. But we’ve seen very little enthusiasm for that approach, probably for reasons that have less to do with public opinion than with the fact that the 60 vote senate serves the interests of individual senators qua senators.

So you’re left with Ben Nelson—and everyone else. What does he want? Will joining with the Republicans to filibuster a health bill imperil his re-election?

Dodd is Against “The idea that people are going to be reprimanded” for Breaking Party Discipline

Systems of party discipline differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from party to party, and even from legislative body to legislative body. I seem to remember that at one point while I was in college the Massachusetts state assembly Democratic caucus had very ironclad discipline while the Senate caucus was laxer. Discipline in the United States is generally much laxer than discipline in Canada. At the federal level, discipline is tighter in the House than in the Senate, and the GOP versions of both houses are tighter than the Democratic versions. These things, in part, reflect differences in the constitutional/legal order. But in part they also reflect choices and path dependency. The extremely lax discipline among Senate Democrats is generally quite favorable to the interests of individual incumbent Democratic Senators even if it makes it difficult to advance a legislative agenda. So when it comes to getting recalcitrant Senators to fall into line, what’s needed are not only the potential tools of discipline, but the will to use them.

And then there’s Chris Dodd:

But Lieberman’s fellow Connecticut senator, Democrat Chris Dodd, who faces a tough reelection fight in 2010, dismissed the idea that Lieberman would incur any retribution.

“No, no, no. People are going to be all over the place,” he said when asked if Lieberman should be punished. “The idea that people are going to be reprimanded because somehow they have a different point of view than someone else is ridiculous. That isn’t going to happen.”

Of course there’s nothing “ridiculous” about it. It’s quite standard in legislative bodies for members who defy the party position to face various kinds of reprimands. A political party, after all, isn’t supposed to be a mutual aid society for incumbent legislators. At their best, parties are vehicles for advancing a somewhat coherent vision of national policy. It is true, however, that it would be an unusual step for the Senate Democratic caucus to engage in discipline-enforcing behavior. That, however, is because Senate Democrats are outliers in their behavior, not because the idea of enforcing discipline is somehow nutty.

Now it should be said that in the particular case of Dodd it’s probably not in his interests to pick a fight with a home state colleague in the midst of a re-election campaign. Consequently, he probably shouldn’t be the go-to guy to ask about this issue.

The Power of Thinking Small

Ezra Klein asks Olympia Snowe if there are health care ideas that she likes, but that she doesn’t think are politically feasible. Something like how many people would prefer a single-payer system or the Wyden-Bennett approach but recognize that the votes in congress just aren’t there. She says:

I don’t know that I have anything in that category. I believe we should build upon the current system. We don’t want to disrupt that. I’m traditional in my approach towards reforming health care. Given the size and the amount of money we spend on it, I think it would be far too disruptive to upend the system. I think it’s preferable to build on what has worked well in our system and change the egregious practices in the insurance industry. I think the skepticism of that industry has been understandable and I share it, that’s why we really need to look at all facets to ensure they live up to certain standards and perform. But if they don’t, I think a trigger could be a powerful lever in that regard without having the government involved at the outset.

It’s probably helpful in some ways as a practical politician to let the contours of your ambition be totally circumscribed by practicality. But also a bit sad. A relatively small number of somewhat right-of-center senators have an enormous amount of practical power at this point in time. If more of them had more in the way of vision and ambition, they might really be able to get great things done. But the tendency is for them to be much more split-the-difference compromisers than big thinking radical centrists.

Median Voter Theorem Revisited

Via Twitter, Garrett Jones challenged me to revisit out dispute from back in June about the explanatory power of the median voter theorem. He seems to feel that Olympia Snowe’s vote in favor of health reform offers strong support for his position.

To which I say . . . sure, Snowe’s vote is a reminder that public opinion has some bearing on legislator behavior. Nevertheless, I would just repeat my initial points. Richard Burr and Kay Hagan have the exact same constituents, but different views on health care. Same with Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin. Look at every state represented by senators from different parties. Insofar as the median voter theorem has explanatory power, we would expect those senators to be pulled toward the same position on health care. But that’s happening in either zero of those states or else only in Nebraska. Or consider the public option dispute among Democrats. Webb and Warner are listed with different views, so are Dorgan & Conrad, and Dodd & Lieberman.

The point is, for a first cut at predicting legislator behavior you should look at their partisan affiliation, not the views of their constituents. Beyond party affiliation, there is evidence that constituent public opinion makes a different. But legislators have a fair amount of leeway.

Republicans Run Their Political Party The Right Way

When Olympia Snowe angers her colleagues by voting yes on health reform, they won’t just be annoyed they may actually punish her by denying her the opportunity to become ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee. That’s something she’ll need to think seriously about. And it’s also something Senate Democrats should think seriously about. As Steve Benen remarks:

It often goes overlooked, but it’s worth remembering that the Senate Republican caucus, unlike Senate Democrats, have mechanisms in place to enforce party unity and discipline. When Democrats break party ranks on key bills, there are no consequences. Those who let GOP leaders down, however, know in advance that enticements like committee positions are very much on the line.

Indeed, there are widespread rumors that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shifted away from cooperation on reform and towards belligerence immediately after his Republican colleagues made it clear that his future committee assignments were in jeopardy if he worked with Dems to pass a reform bill.

It’s also worth being clear on this: The Republicans do this the right way. The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members*. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence! But it’s no way to get things done.

I would emphasize the fact that merely acquiring the means to apply discipline doesn’t require you to actually use them. Common sense indicates that Blanche Lincoln should be given more leeway to break discipline than Maria Cantwell gets and nothing about adopting a mechanism that allows for the possibility of discipline means that you’d be required to try to enforce it in a blinkered way.

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Presidents Have a Hard Time Moving Public Opinion

Brendan Nyhan observes that while you can probably see the impact of Obama’s health care speech in public opinion on the issue, what you’re seeing is a lack of any lasting impact:

This, however, isn’t some odd scenario. It’s exactly what normally happens:

I’m emphasizing this point because there’s a misperception among journalists that the president can easily move public opinion. As we’ve seen again and again over the years, it’s simply not true, but the lack of followup by the press means that the lesson is never learned. (At most, a failure to move poll numbers is blamed on some specific aspect of president’s message or strategy.) So we repeat the same cycle over and over again.

I think this is a pretty insidious aspect of our political culture. It’s not just that media commentary overemphasizing the president’s ability to shape opinion is inaccurate, it has a really detrimental impact on people’s ability to organize and effect political change. People are strongly encouraged to believe that the key to achieving policy change is to elect a president who’s friendly to their views. Then when that turns out to be insufficient they don’t move on and do additional organizing in House and Senate races. Instead, they tend to become frustrated with the president they worked to elect. But why blame the victim of congressional obstruction rather than the perpetrator? Well, people always seem to find a way to tell themselves, if only the president had fought harder he would have gotten it. He must have lost because he didn’t really care.

In the real world, presidential preference-intensity and arm-twisting and such does matter. Some. But it only matters some. And in particular, people grossly overestimate the ability of the president to unleash some kind of public opinion tidal wave that forces congress to act.

Accepting the Loss

The more we learn about how we wound up with a too-small stimulus the more I wonder about the slightly odd aversion of American presidents to accepting legislative defeats. After all, in our system of government it’s just a fact that you can only enact the legislation that congress is prepared to enact. Given that we don’t expect presidents to have views that are identical to those of the median legislator, and especially given the rise of the de facto supermajority rule in the Senate, it should be expected that the policy preferences of the White House will substantially diverge from those of the pivotal members of congress.

So would it be so terrible for the President to just say, “I’m glad congress passed this bill and I’m signing it because I think it would help the economy, but the considered judgment of the Council on Economic Advisers and the rest of the staff is that we could use hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus over and above what Ben Nelson and Susan Collins were prepared to vote for?” Why is it felt necessary for the president to pretend to believe that what congress will pass is the same as what the country needs? It seems to me to create a weird confusion about who’s responsible for what. We’ve got Paul Krugman blogging about “Obama’s Anzio” instead of “Kent Conrad’s Anzio” or whatever. It’s just not the case that the White House gets to make domestic policy unilaterally.

More Gerrymandering Heresies

I thought I might add that not only do I not believe that gerrymandering is responsible for political polarization, I don’t even think gerrymandering has played a large role in making House seats uncompetitive. For any given district and any given incumbent, there’s some set of ideological properties in a challenger that should be winnable. To think of it in a stripped-down way, any district, no matter how gerrymandered, has a median voter and a sufficiently motivated challenger can make a good shot at finding him.

The real issue, I think, is the relative scarcity of campaign funds. If every major party nominee in every House district in America were guaranteed a reasonable sum of public funds with which to conduct his campaign then I think you’d suddenly see all sorts of interesting candidates popping up in “uncompetitive” districts. This, of course, is precisely why incumbent legislators would be loathe to vote for such a public financing scheme. But that’s the real issue.

Gerrymandering and Polarization

Tom Friedman becomes the latest in a very long string of pundits to blame congressional polarization on partisan gerrymandering of House districts. As Joshua Tucker points out no matter how many times people say this, there’s still no evidence that it’s true. You can see this pretty quickly if you consider that the Senate features perfect partisan sorting—Olympia Snowe is more conservative than all the Democrats and Ben Nelson is more liberal than all the Republicans. Senators are responsive to public opinion to some extent—Snowe is more liberal than other Republicans and Nelson more conservative than other Democrats—but only to a limited extent. You have lots of examples of two different senators representing the exact same state, and they amass very different voting records.

More rigorously, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have a paper called “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” The answer is no:

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

Note also that historically polarization has been the rule in American politics. The times we live in are typical, not exceptional. It just happens to be the case that a lot of people alive today were acculturated to the unusual non-polarized politics of the 1930s-1970s in which the salience of racial issues scrambled partisan/ideological configurations. I think polarization is a good thing but even if you disagree the only proven way to minimize it is to have a large and influential white supremacist movement obtain substantial congressional representation.

Blame the Political Institutions, Not Political Will for Climate Action Problems

European leaders are certainly right to be disturbed by the apparently poor legislative prospects for cap and trade in the United States. And of course nobody in the world wants to move forward without American leadership.

But to blame the problem on a lack of “political will” strikes me as quite misleading. The House of Representatives has, after all, passed a pretty ambitious climate change bill with the support of the President of the United States. The difference between the U.S. and Europe in this regard isn’t fundamentally that we lack the will, it’s that the same amount of will gets more done in Europe than it does in the United States where you nowadays need 60 votes in an unrepresentative and largely ineffectual but hyper-empowered upper house of the legislature in order to pass bills. Where will does come into play is that the leadership of the Democratic Party does seem extremely reluctant to use the tools at their disposal—reconciliation and the “nuclear option”—to lower some of these hurdles. But the fact remains that Barack Obama and co. face an objectively different challenge from their colleagues operating in parliamentary systems.

In Germany, even right-of-center parties acknowledge the reality of climate change. They worry that if they didn’t, they would lose elections. Which is exactly what happened to the right-of-center party in the US. But in Germany if you lose the election, then the governing coalition that beat you gets to enact its agenda. It doesn’t work like that in America.

Senate Should Vote on a Public Option

An eminently reasonable request from Chris Bowers:

No matter what happens in the Finance committee, it is essential that there is a vote on health care reform with a robust public option on the floor of the Senate. If Democratic Senators can keep saying that their aren’t enough votes to pass a public option, and if they aren’t going to include on in their health care “reform” package, then at the very least they should have the decency to tell us which Democratic Senators were actually opposed to the public option.

Members of congress, and especially senators, have a very annoying habit of trying to avoid accepting responsibility for their own decisions. Instead of “I don’t want a public option” you get a lot of talk about vote counts and bipartisanship. And if the votes aren’t there, the votes aren’t there. But we should get a definitive view of who the people are who are making the decisions that are making it the case that the votes aren’t there.

The Social Security Precedent

An excellent point from Scott Lemieux:

I’d also be curious for those who think that the President is effectively in charge of domestic policy to explain the abject failure of Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme. Surely, this wasn’t because Bush lacked the willingness to engage in the requisite nut/ovary cutting, to shift rhetoric to the right, or to accept minimum-winning-coalition votes.

Now one shouldn’t deny the fact that the President has considerable power over domestic policy issues. In particular, the president has enormous power to protect the status quo since overcoming a presidential veto is extremely difficult. The president also has enormous power to set the agenda. To decide, “we’re going to talk about privatizing Social Security” or “we’re going to talk about universal health care.” This is an important power. And because the president is usually a widely known celebrity beloved by his political base, presidents have a lot of ability to muscle around members of congress of their own party since most own-party members will represent areas where the president is popular. But members of congress—and especially senators—also have a lot of ability to defend the status quo and at any given time there will be a number of senators over whom the White House has little practical leverage.

Consequently, you just can’t do certain things unless pivotal members of congress really want to do them. Cutting taxes for the wealthy, it seems, is something Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins wanted to do—so after scaling Bush’s proposals back a bit, they got the job done. But privatizing Social Security wasn’t really something they wanted to do, and there’s was nothing Bush could do to force them or other nervous Republicans to do what he wanted.

Schumer Talks Up Reconciliation

Interesting remarks from Chuck Schumer who seems relatively enthusiastic about doing parts of health reform through the reconciliation process:

Are you planning on having an interim appointment from Massachusetts?

No, I don’t know. That would be up to the Massachusetts state legislature but I know they’re considering it. Ah, so, so the bottom line is that even with 60 or even if Olympia Snowe comes to some kind of agreement, it’s going to be hard, and I’ve always favored using reconciliation for good parts of the bill. I think that will get you the best bill, the strongest bill and the bill that will have the greatest positive effect on the American people. Ultimately, we’ll be judged not by whether we pass the bill, but ultimately we’ll be judged by whether it works. Leaving the bill as something that doesn’t work, even if we pass it, leading to hurting both the country and the party.

Is it possible that using reconciliation will produce an ineffective bill, because of procedural problems like the Byrd rule?

We’ve looked at it and you can’t use reconciliation for everything, [but] you can use it for a good number of things. There’s nothing wrong with using it for the places where you can use it and then trying to get the 60 votes on the places where when you can’t. You’d be surprised — the number of places where you can use it is larger than we first thought.

I’m still a little unclear on the actual procedural rule, but I agree on the policy and the politics here. I’ve defended what Max Baucus proposed as better than no bill (and taken a lot of crap for it) but Baucus’ bill is worse than the House bill and worse than the HELP bill and it’d be better to pass a better reform package, which is a lot easier to do if you can do some of it with 50 votes. I’m no senate parliamentarian, but it seems to me that since creating a public option leads to CBO-scorable savings, that it should be within the rules to do one in reconciliation.

Tax Reform and the Strong Treasury

Bruce Bartlett makes the case that the Obama administration should have taken a stronger role in guiding the health care debate:

Gene quite rightly points to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a model to follow. The essence of its success, he believes, was that the Treasury Department controlled the process from beginning to end. A three-volume report was prepared by Treasury staff that was critical in shaping the basic idea of tax reform and how it should be structured. This report is available online here.

One of the benefits of such a study, which would have greatly assisted the health reform debate, is that it forces the staff managing the reform effort to think it through systematically. Thus before the tax reform proposal ever went to Congress in 1985, Treasury already knew all the potential problem areas, which provisions were expendable and which ones were not. Consequently, Treasury was able to manage the inevitable trade-offs necessary to get a bill enacted without sacrificing the basic goal. [...]

This sort of process never occurred with health reform. There was never a study from the Department of Health and Human Services laying out the options, discussing the pros and cons of various alternatives, or with the sort of reference data that is essential for developing really big policy changes. In fact, there has never really been a formal White House proposal. This has made it easy for Congress to take control of the whole health reform debate, with Obama often appearing to be a mere bystander.

I think the administration would have been better served by having followed the Tax Reform of 1986 model. It would have taken a lot longer, but the chances of actually achieving something worth doing at the end of the day would have been much greater.

Maybe. But the trouble with picking one example at random is that it obscures the other counterveiling examples. The Obama administration went into 2009 dealing with the fact that the overwhelming consensus among health care experts was that Bill Clinton erred in 1993-94 by not letting congress be involved enough. Given the existence of that conventional wisdom, whether or not the CW was right it would have been extremely difficult to cast it aside in favor of an executive-led effort. The other thing is that by 1985-86 Ronald Reagan had already been president for a long time and was thus better-positioned to really deploy the executive branch. Trying to do this as a brand-new president probably wouldn’t have worked.

Overall, though, I think the missing ingredient in getting a better reform bill isn’t different presidential tactics, but different presidential will. If congressional Democrats had been determined to block Reagan’s tax proposals sight unseen, then tax reform wouldn’t have happened. As best one can tell, that’s been a huge part of GOP opposition to Obama’s health plans—they don’t want to forge a compromise, they want to deal the administration a black eye. At the same time, it increasingly looks like very few members of congress of either party actually want to dramatically transform the health care system. Ron Wyden wrote a very nice bill that picked up a whiff or two of bipartisan support that would achieve a lot of the things that people say they want health reform to achieve. But ultimately it got very little support on the Hill because, basically, members of congress don’t actually favor the kind of moves that would shift us to a much cheaper and more efficient but still privately-based health insurance system. At the same time, there are always single-payer bills floating around but they have nothing close to majority support either because, basically, members of congress don’t actually favor the kind of moves that would shift us to a much cheaper and more efficient publicly based system.

I think to blame this on the White House is ultimately short-sighted. If anything advocates for more serious reform ought to blame ourselves as it turns out we’ve done a pretty bad job of convincing people that the health care system ought to change pretty dramatically. Thus even if we pass the ideas currently on the table, I think we’re going to find five or ten years out that the system is still pretty unsustainable, still creates perverse incentives for the delivery of unnecessary care, still costs tons of money, and still saddles people with vast quantities of paperwork. And we’ll have to pop open the hood again.

The Gettable Republican

If you’re going to get any Republican votes for health care reform the logical place to start would seem to be not orthodox conservative Chuck Grassley or far-right Senator Mike Enzi, but rather Maine’s Olympia Snowe, who has a record of sometimes voting for progressive bills. If you can get Snowe you have a shot at her somewhat-more-conservative colleague Susan Collins, and if you can’t get Snowe then you can’t get anyone. So where does Snowe stand on health reform? Suzy Khimm has a useful rundown that basically puts Snowe to the right of most Democrats—and certainly to the right of me—but not necessarily to the right of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate.

That said, there is one crucially important difference. Democrats hand out committee chairmanships by a blind seniority rule. Republicans do not. Chairman need to rotate out of their positions after fixed terms, which then gives the caucus as a whole input over who takes over next. Consequently, the Senate leadership has some meaningful leverage over Republican Senators—even Senators from liberal states. If they’re really determined to make Snowe (and Collins) vote “no,” they have tools at their disposal to make that happen. By contrast, the Democratic leadership heads into tough fights basically disarmed with no real tools of discipline and leverage at their disposal beyond the vague risk of a primary challenge. One day perhaps the Democratic caucus will decide that it wants to be an effective legislative party and it will adopt some principles that equalize the playing field. But until then, it’s going to be extremely difficult to overcome truly determined Republican opposition even with a large majority.

Unlikely Committee Scenarios

Sleepy Hollow Farm, Vermont (cc photo by snapstermax)

So far this year, Chris Dodd has been basically double-fisting as head of both HELP and Banking, but with Ted Kennedy now dead he needs to choose between them which sets off various musical chairs scenarios. My understanding is that he’ll almost certainly take the helm at HELP, since he wants to distance himself from some of his work on bank regulation and score a legacy-building win on health care. But if not:

If Dodd doesn’t leave Banking, then HELP would go to Iowa’s Tom Harkin, who would have to give up his post as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee to take it. The next most senior members of the Ag Committee are Leahy, Conrad and Baucus, all of whom chair more important committees. So Ag would probably go to Blanche Lincoln. If Harkin stays put — and he is an Iowan, so chairing Ag is worth something to him — then HELP would go to Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski.

Not only will Dodd probably leave Banking, if he did choose to stay Harkin would almost certainly not give up Agriculture. And even if Harkin did give up Agriculture, Leahy probably wouldn’t give up Judiciary. But in the unlikely event that all this did happen and Pat Leahy became chair of the Agriculture Committee, the results would be potentially hilarious. After all, we’re used to agriculture policy being completely dominated by the interests of the big midwestern corn producers. But what if we instead redirected all that money into massive subsidies for maple syrup and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? The public health consequences could be dire. At the same time, I believe Vermont is a major center of artisanal cheese production and the results of more subsidies for that could be delicious.

Part of the larger moral of the story here is that one of the perverse aspects of the committee system is that it encourages progressive politicians to maximize their power on the issues where they take the least-progressive stands. I agree with Tom Harkin about almost everything except agricultural policy. And Chris Dodd has a much better record on all the issues that aren’t financial institution regulation than on the issue he has the most power over. If you just reassigned everyone at random, you’d probably improve outcomes.

Taking Yes for an Answer

I appreciate the points that the Great Orange Satan and Glenn Greenwald are making about Jon Chait’s flip-flops on the subject of Joe Lieberman and ideological purges. But this strikes me as a time when it might be a good idea to just take “yes” for an answer. If you make groveling apologies your price for admitting converts, you’re going to find yourself running a small church.

That said, I don’t think it’s been generally acknowledged how much damage the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to aggressively back Ned Lamont in the 2006 general election has wound up doing to the cause of progressive politics. The issue has less to do with the specific malfeasance of Lieberman than with the consequences for party discipline. If you can go so far as to lose a Democratic primary and run against the Democratic Party’s nominee and still not get kneecapped by the leaders of your party, then of course you’ll feel no compunction about joining opposition party procedural obstruction and all the rest. The only way for a party to transform election results into policy outcomes is via some mechanisms of discipline, and the Democratic Senate caucus operates with no such mechanisms. And it does so because even the more liberal Senators—including, in his day, Barack Obama—show no inclination to make the kind of personal sacrifices that building an effective caucus would entail.

The selfishness per se isn’t all that surprising, but the Republicans actually operate under different rules so it’s not impossible for things to change.

Ted Kennedy: Getting Things Done

Ted Kennedy endorsing Barack Obama at American University (cc photo by diggersf)

Mark Schmitt has an excellent small anecdote about Ted Kennedy, illustrating the difference between a Senator who’s there on the Hill to get things done, and a Senator who’s just there to kill time and feather his bed:

As an example, early on in the period when I was working for Sen. Bill Bradley, Bradley decided to get involved in reform of the student-loan system. He wasn’t on the appropriate committee (Kennedy’s Education and Labor Committee, now known as HELP), and he had never been involved before. But as a member of the Finance Committee, he saw a way to sneak student-loan funding into a tax bill, and pay for it. While other Democrats on Education and Labor brushed us off as if we were encroaching on their domain (we were, shamelessly!), Kennedy saw it as just another opportunity to get some good accomplished.

Before we knew it, Kennedy had pulled everyone involved into his maritime-themed hideaway office (perhaps the most awe-inspiring physical space in the entire Capitol) to figure out how to get it done, and he threw himself into it — at one point calling me from the Senate floor to dictate the precise flattering language of a letter we would need to send to Sen. Robert C. Byrd to persuade him to give his permission to the unorthodox move. In the end it didn’t happen (the first President Bush vetoed the bill), and it’s not even a footnote to his legacy. It was one of hundreds, thousands of tiny moments of opportunity to make some progress, and if 99 out of 100 of those opportunities failed, he knew that the one that didn’t would at least make a difference in someone’s life.

The Senate is a strange place full of weird rules and impediments to action. The people who make it work are the people who, like Kennedy, understand what they want to do and then try to figure out ways to get it done. Congressional procedure is a real impediment to doing a lot of things, but the effective legislators are the ones who see those obstacles and start finding ways to remove them or work around them. Most folks, however, seem to just shrug and in many ways be happy to have a reason why they “can’t” do the hard work involved in changing things.

The Price of Seniority

US Capitol Building

Timothy Noah opens his Ted Kennedy profile on this note: “Talk about inauspicious beginnings. At the tender age of 30, the youngest sibling of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy seemed pathetically unqualified to enter the U.S. Senate.”

The point is to highlight the irony that Ted went on to become the greatest of the Kennedy brothers. But it’s worth being clear about the fact that he had such an impressive career in part precisely because he initially got a job he wasn’t qualified for. The Senate operates largely on the basis of seniority. A guy who can enter his fifth term and only be 54 years old is a guy who’s going to be able to wield some major influence for a long time. And yet Massachusetts must have had many better-qualified potential senators who, had they gotten the gig, never would have acquired Kennedy’s legacy not just because they would have lacked Kennedy’s skills but because they would have been too young.

This winds up having some odd systematic effects. It’s nice, for example, to see a veteran progressive legislator like Bernie Sanders get a “promotion” up the Senate. But the man’s 67 years old, so he’s never going to amass tons of seniority and we’re never going to hear about “powerful Energy Committee Chairman Bernard Sanders of Vermont.” And yet Vermont is a reliably liberal state. If some other, equally progressive but much-less-qualified man had won that Senate seat instead, the cause of progressive politics might have been much better served in the long run. In large part, I think this is just one of several reasons why both houses of congress ought to reduce the significance of seniority (and also of committee chairmen) but given the system we have in place it’s something savvy political activists should keep in mind. When you’re looking at a fairly safe seat, it’s very good to find a young candidate.

Chuck Grassley Feeling the Heat

Ezra Klein reminds us of how a real political party operates:

The more plausible argument is that Grassley fears his fellow Republican senators. I’m hearing that Grassley is getting reamed out in meetings with his colleagues. The yelling is loud enough that staffers in adjacent offices have heard snippets. But the real threat isn’t the yelling of his colleagues. It’s their capacity to deny Grassley his next job. Ruth Marcus hints at this in her column on Chuck Grassley today, but it’s worth explaining in a bit more detail.

This is the final year that Grassley is eligible to serve as ranking member — the most powerful minority member, and, if Republicans retake the Senate, the chairman — of the Senate Finance Committee. His hope is to move over as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, or failing that, the Budget Committee. But for that, he needs the support of his fellow Republicans. And if he undercuts them on health-care reform, they will yank that support. It’s much the same play they ran against Arlen Specter a couple of years back, threatening to deny him his chairmanship of — again — the Judiciary Committee. It worked then, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work now.

I’ve emphasized the fact that progressives have very little leverage over key stakeholders like Kent Conrad and Max Baucus. That, however, is because whereas the Senate Republican caucus operates like a political party, complete with rules designed to hold senior members accountable to the rank-and-file and thus to the party’s policy objectives, the Senate Democratic caucus operates like a somewhat boring social club. Committee chairs don’t face term limits and assignments are handed out in blind order of seniority.

I’ve mostly encouraged people to focus their ire on Senate moderates rather than the White House, but this is one of the few areas in which the White House could be making a difference. Surely they can find at least an ally or two up on the Hill to float the notion that Democrats need to adopt Republican-style rules about this. When both parties operated in a discipline-free manner, lack of discipline may have worked. But the current asymmetry in the organization of the parties basically means that progressives do legislative fights with one hand tied behind our backs.

Yesterday’s Compromise Is Tomorrow’s Triumph

Ed Kilgore makes the excellent point that what look today like the great progressive legislative triumphs of yesteryear look more like squalid and disappointing compromises at the time they were enacted:

As for Medicare and Medicaid, the idea that LBJ came up with a bold set of proposals and ram-rodded them through Congress is wrong by all sorts of measurements. It’s important to understand that however important these health care entitlements became, they were at the time clearly major compromises from the progressive commitment, first articulated by Harry Truman, to enact national health insurance. Medicare, obviously, was offered only to retirees, not all Americans–a distinction that is cherished as a matter of principle by those Medicare beneficiaries who today oppose universal health coverage. Medicaid was even more of a compromise, eschewing national health coverage for a crazy quilt system in which the states would largely determine eligibility and benefit levels, with coverage generally limited to low-income families with children.

Medicare and Medicaid also did not spring fully formed from LBJ’s head or his White House, and weren’t enacted via royal disdain for Congress and the petty fiefdoms of the committee system. Federal health insurance for retirees was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1960 and in 1962. It finally passed the Senate in 1964, only to succumb in the House when Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills refused to support it. It was finally enacted in 1965, but only after Mills shaped the legislation, and also added Medicaid, intended as a sop to Republicans and the AMA, which had long proposed health care subsidies for low-income families as an alternative to national health insurance.

One point here is that substantive policy outcomes are highly influenced by America’s political procedures. There was almost certainly enough progressive sentiment in public opinion and congress in the first half of the 1960s to have enacted a real national health plan if we had a system with fewer veto points. But thanks to the large number of veto points—sometimes you lose in the Senate, sometimes a powerful committee chairman beats you—the opportunity couldn’t be seized. Had we enacted universal health care in the 60s, Ronald Reagan would have no more undone it in the 1980s than he undid Medicare. But we didn’t. So you reach our present situation.

The other point for today is that you need to judge legislative outcomes relative to the status quo, not relative to what you enact in utopia. Medicare & Medicaid (especially the very stingy version of Medicaid that was initially created) were really pretty pathetic compared to what Harry Truman proposed. But they’ve done enormous good for a lot of people over the decades.

The Secret History of the Filibuster

When most people are introduced to the idea of a filibuster, it’s as roughly the concept illustrated in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—the ability of a small group of Senators to indefinitely delay action on legislation as long as they can hold the floor. The present-day version of a de facto supermajority requirement for most legislation is something very different. How did we switch from rare filibusters, defeated through attrition, to near-constant filibustering defeated (or not) by cloture votes? Greg Kroger explains the findings of his research:

So why did the Senate change? The stock answer is that the chamber’s responsibilities grew with the size and scope of the federal government, so it became more costly to sit around watching obstructionists kill time. There is some truth in that explanation. Also, however, senators’ work habits changed. The introduction of railroads, cars, and (especially) air travel made sitting around in the Senate chamber so…boring. Tedious. Totally lame. During the mid-20th century, the Senate increasingly became a Tuesday-Thursday club, and individual senators began insisting that major legislation be kept from the floor to accomodate their travel schedules. A serious attrition effort would mean cancelled speeches in Manhattan and Chicago, no trips to the Delaware coast, and waiting longer to return to the ranch back in Texas.

Abandoning the attrition path in favor of routine cloture votes, in other words, is more convenient for senators of both parties even if it’s bad for the majority’s policy objectives.