There’s something to that. But I do think it’s worth emphasizing how one-sided efficacious minority party obstruction has been. The Bush administration wasn’t able to get its agenda through congress unscathed, but fundamentally they did achieved their main goals in terms of tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, substantially altering Medicare in 2003, and of course securing support for the invasion of Iraq and 2002. A big part of the difference here is that the post-1994 Republican Party appears to believe that, as a matter of political strategy, it makes sense to try to deal demoralizing defeats to the Democrats. Thus whereas in the past you might have a few dozen conservative pragmatists in the House of Representatives willing to say something like “I think your bill has a lot of problems; if you change in this way and that way and throw in a slice of pork I’ll vote for it” you now have zero such legislators.

From a policy point of view, this is too bad. It results in legislation that needs to cater to each and every picayune concern of each and every Democrat in an undue and inefficient manner. The problem, however, is that it’s by no means clear that the “make Obama fail” theory of politics is wrong. Had a few dozen House Republicans been willing to sign on to ACES or health reform in exchange for some substantive changes, then that would have (a) given moderate Democrats more political cover to vote “yes” if they wanted to and (b) given the Democratic leadership more leeway to permit vulnerable members to vote “no” if they felt they had to. Result—fewer good targets for the midterms while simultaneously making Obama and Pelosi look like more moderate, more bipartisan figures.

Maximal obstruction, in other words, seems to make sense. Tyler Cowen theorizes, plausibly, that public anxiety about the deficit is a proxy for a sense of public anxiety about dysfunctional politics. But if the minority can make politics dysfunctional and then turn public anxiety about dysfunction into a rebuke for the incumbent majority, then we’re going to be trapped in a cycle in which politics is dysfunctional indeed.

This from Tom Harkin is going to be music to a lot of people’s ears:

“If the Republicans want to stay here this Saturday and Sunday to read the bill, then let them stay here,” Harkin said, adding that Democrats would hold a “live quorum,” where the sergeant at arms requests the presence of all absent senators.

“I’ll tell you, we’re going to do something like that,” Harkin said. “We are planning to do something that would require Republicans to be there 24 hours a day, and if they leave the floor, we’ll ask unanimous consent to dispense with the reading, and that’ll be the end of it.”

I’ll believe this when I see it. Breaking a filibuster via attrition is more difficult than is generally realized. The minority needs to have at least one guy available at all times to hold the floor and keep talking. The majority, meanwhile, needs to have basically all its guys on hand at all times. Otherwise, the minority can “note the absence of a quorum” and everything stops until everyone can be dragged into the chamber. It’s a bigger pain, in other words, for the majority than for the minority which is why you generally don’t see it attempted.

(Genentech PR photos)

Robert Pear explains that the statements “were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines.” Basically, the House health care bill included some stuff that’s good for Genentech. So they had one version of their preferred language that was designed for Democrats who “emphasized the bill’s potential to create jobs in health care, health information technology and clinical research on new drugs.” Republicans, on the other hand, “opposed the bill, but praised a provision that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech.”

In separate statements using language suggested by the lobbyists, Representatives Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, both Republicans, said: “One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country. Unfortunately, many of the largest companies that would seek to enter the biosimilar market have made their money by outsourcing their research to foreign countries like India.”

I have no opinion on the underlying merits of this provision. But obviously the fact that congressional staff, from both parties, are comfortable copy-and-pasting emails from corporate lobbyists into official member statements is revelatory of the mindset up there. As are the statements being offered in response to Robert Pear’s article:

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” He said he got his statement from his staff and “did not know where they got the information from.” [...]

In recent years, Genentech’s political action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign contributions to many House members, including some who filed statements in the Congressional Record. And company employees have been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers. But Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.”

On Pascrell’s part, you see a kind of narrow effort to evade blame for a slightly embarrassing story. But you don’t see evidence that he, personally, is anything close to shocked and outraged that this is how his staff has been conducting itself. Similarly, Morris is just clarifying that there are no illegal bribes happening here. And obviously it’s not his responsibility to uphold a higher standard of ethical conduct by members of congress and their staff. And one way or another, this is the kind of thing you’re never going to eliminate with formal rules. It’s a question of individuals’ own sense of what’s acceptable conduct, and what will be seen by friends and colleagues as acceptable

Dana Goldstein reviews some Monday morning quarterbacking of the abortion in heath care issue:

“Maybe we should have” created a more threatening pro-choice coalition earlier on, said [Eleanor] Smeal. She continued, “Here we are playing nice guy again, we didn’t want to make a fuss, we agreed to a compromise that was already over-generous. And then, bango! These guys go in there like gangbusters. Pelosi was held up, like by bandits. Now the women are saying, ‘That’s it, it’s enough.’”

It’s hard to know for sure, but I’m inclined to agree with this second-guessing. A persistent liberal failure in terms of legislative tactics seems to me to be the repeated belief that if you try to make a compromise proposal, that the compromise will be adopted and then you’ll get half a loaf. The reality of the way the legislative bargaining process works, it seems to me, is that you make a proposal and then a bloc of moderate legislators demands concessions. Whatever you propose, you then have to make concessions since the moderates wouldn’t be moderate if they didn’t make the liberals make concessions. So you might as well have had the bill start with a sweeping expansion of abortion rights—require that all Exchange plans offer a full suite of reproductive health services. Then you start bargaining.

Would that have worked? I don’t know. But the public option example strikes me as encouraging. It looks like if there’s a public option in the final bill, it’ll be a shadow of its original self. But had the proposal started with something like the “level playing field” public option then there’d be nothing left.

From Bryan Curtis’ profile of Rick Hertzberg:

With Obama in office, Hertzberg says he will turn his attention to another of his long-time obsessions: the byzantine structures of American government. Triumphant Democrats have discovered that big victories in 2008 haven’t instantly led to policy outcomes like, say, health care reform. In the British system, the public option would have been a fait accompli; in what Hertzberg calls our “ridiculously undemocratic” Senate, health care can be single-handedly dynamited by a Max Baucus or a Joe Lieberman.

“Right now, we have a situation where the human occupants are about as good as we’re going to get,” Hertzberg says. “So my attention goes back to the structure they’re trapped in. That’s what Obama and the Democrats are in the grip of now. And that remains to be fixed.”

Hertzberg is the inspiration for my own fixation on these issues, so I completely agree with him that this is where the temperature needs to be raised. That said, I think the particular counterfactual should be specified more precisely. One of the less remarked-upon consequences of our nutty system of legislation is that presidential campaign promises exist in this kind of odd state, mixing memory and desire. Some promises look back at presidential actions not taken—an EPA endangerment finding, signing SCHIP expansion, signing Fair Pay Act, signing minimum wage increase—and promise to do them. Others constitute a vague pseudo-promise to gin up legislative support for ideas that don’t have the votes needed to pass the Senate—EFCA, a public option with Medicare rates, a 100 percent auction of emissions permits.

Precisely because sophisticated observers understand that these “desire” promises aren’t really promises, interest-groups and voters who have strong feelings about these things don’t need to act on those feelings during a campaign. Consequently, candidates can make unrealistic promises to interest-groups or ideologues without fully facing the wrath of the other side. Ultimately, I think this not only breeds worse policy, but it breeds an unnecessarily childish political debate. If we knew in advance that election-winners would be basically able to implement their agendas, then it would be more necessary for party leaders to campaign on agendas that they think are compatible with electoral victory and governing success. One thing you see in Britain is that opposition parties with a realistic chance of winning tend to put forward relatively modest platforms full of explicit commitments to not change certain aspects of the policy status quo. Precisely because you can have wild swings in policy, leaders who want to win can’t just kinda sorta promise their base that they’ll get everything they want.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

* Speaking of which, it’s interesting to speculate under which circumstances Senator Snowe might switch parties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.