Matt Yglesias

Reforming the House of Lords

Last night I caught a bit of the Queen’s Speech from the UK on CSPAN. This is an interesting tradition. It’s a bit like the State of the Union, except with more pomp and circumstance. But you’ve got the Queen, who’s a non-partisan figure, sitting up there reading what’s basically a partisan political speech written by the Prime Minister and his staff all about how “my government” is committed to doing this and that.

But one thing that the Queen told me Gordon Brown wanted to do was reform the House of Lords to create a second branch of parliament with “real democratic legitimacy.” Sounds like a bad idea to me. Pretty much the best thing about the House of Lords is that its complete and utter lack of democratic legitimacy has made it possible over the years to strip it of all its legislative powers. Now the U.K. has a de facto unicameral regime and I think it’s working just fine. Bicameralism arises for some understandable historical reasons—the legacy of aristocracy in the U.K., an 18th century political compromise in the U.S.—but in this case it looks a lot like a solution in search of a problem. Maybe Brown should ask Barack Obama about some of the hassles involved in an upper house with actual power. Watch what you wish for!

Public Mostly Holds Republicans Responsible for Recession, But Democrats Now Catching More Blame

One reason that Barack Obama has stayed in pretty good political shape despite a terrible economic situation is that the public has consistently recalled that this recession began under George W Bush and reached its highest point of crisis under Bush. But as horrible labor market conditions persist, it’s natural that Democrats are attracting more and more ire:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. In May, 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll, 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May, and 27 percent now say both parties are responsible.

I’ll just note that this highlights one important respect in which the filibuster undermines democratic accountability. It’s a good thing for the public to hold Democrats responsible for results even if the problems the Democrats are dealing with began under GOP rule. That instinct creates appropriate incentives for incumbent politicians to focus on solving problems rather than on allocating blame. But giving defeated electoral minorities veto power over large elements of national policy tends to undermine this dynamic. What’s wanted is an opportunity for the Obama administration to take its best shot at fixing the economy, followed by an “accountability moment” in which failure is decisively punished. Instead, especially if the GOP picks up two or three Senate seats in 2010, we’re likely to get a muddle that refocuses politics on blame-shifting efforts.

I Wanna Hold Your Nominee

I have a new piece for Newsweek Online about the pernicious “hold” trend that’s preventing us from having a properly staffed administration:

There is a forum in which these policy disputes are supposed to be resolved—the ballot box. After an election, the country needs a well-staffed executive branch. Putting the squeeze on an administration by holding up its appointees is a way of holding the interests of the whole country hostage to a petty agenda. When Regina Benjamin’s nomination to be surgeon general was held up through the end of October it wasn’t primarily Obama or Benjamin herself who suffered, it was the government’s ability to inform people about how to deal with the swine-flu epidemic.

If the rules allowing these holds didn’t exist, nobody would be crazy enough to suggest implementing them. So they ought to be done away with. Senators of both parties like the power it gives them, but it’s power that’s acquired not so much at the expense of the president as at the expense of effective government and common sense. The days when norms of courtesy could be counted on to prevent holding from getting out of control. Appointees confirmed by the relevant committee should be voted on by the full Senate.

I’ll probably be waiting a long time for this to happen, but it’s still true….

State Budget Deficits

I’m not really sure how the view that ARRA is somehow causing a malign delay in necessary and beneficial structural adjustments can really survive contact with this analysis of federal aid to state budgets from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As you can see here, there’s pretty clearly an awful lot of adjusting taking place even with the ARRA money pouring in. Looking at this it’s pretty clear that we should have provided a lot more money for FY 2009 and FY 2010 in order to forestall the need for mid-crisis fiscal contractions from state government. That still would have left states facing massive FY 2011 and FY 2012 shortfalls in which any positive things that you may think follow from state budget cuts could have happened.

These details aside, I can’t help but think that it would be really nice to see some work done on clever things the federal government could do on a systematic basis to prevent (or discourage) the boom/bust cycle in state budgeting. I’m not really sure what kind of constitutional limits may exist, but this poor budgetary behavior is a perennial macroeconomic problem. It’s also a kind of serious political problem, since the tendency of boom/bust budgeting is to make anyone who happens to be governor during a boom (see George Pataki or George W. Bush or Charlie Crist) look like a brilliant innovative governor while anyone who governs through a bust (see John Corzine, David Patterson) looks like a fool. The reality is that it’s easy to be a successful pragmatist as long as economic growth lets you cut taxes, hike spending, and then stick someone else with the structural imbalance when the next recession hits.

House Members Parroting Lobbyist Talking Points

It’s naive to think we’ll ever be governed by angels, but norms and culture do matter for how people behave. And one of our problems in the United States is that the norms currently prevailing on Capitol Hill are not very admirable, and the culture is largely one of shamelessness and irresponsibility. Which is how you get stories like this about members of congress—from both parties—entering into the congressional record statements written by lobbyists for Genentech.

(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

Tom Shannon

Tom Shannon is a career foreign service officer. He’s also US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. Has been since 2005. Was appointed to the job by George W Bush. Five months ago, Barack Obama appointed him to be Ambassador to Brazil. He’s obviously well-qualified. He sailed through committee. And then because Jim DeMint is a bad human being, he was subjected to a months-long hold. Then DeMint relented. So now it’s Senator George LeMieux of Florida’s turn to screw things up with a hold.

Neither DeMint nor LeMieux invented the abuse of the hold procedure, but the Republican Party of the 111th congress has taken this to such new heights that it’s about time the Senate take some responsibility and start organizing itself like a legislative body of an important country and not like a country club. The ability for one senator to delay confirmation of key executive branch personnel indefinitely for no real reason has never been a good idea. At times, this power has been abused to advance policy goals I believe in. Oftentimes it’s used to advance bad policy goals. More recently, it just seems to be being used as a matter of principle—maximum feasible obstruction. It needs to be changed.

Can The Filibuster Be Reformed?

I’ve gotten a few queries over the past week asking me to go beyond mere whining about the sorry institutional set up in the United States Senate to asking if there’s anything that can be done about it. The answer is that yes there is. Key elements of Senate procedure have been altered repeatedly throughout history and there have been failed efforts to do it that might have worked had folks been a bit more determined.

What’s missing right now is any sign from anyone politically important of any interest in turning up the heat. As Chris Bowers explains here it seems to be possible in practice for 50 Senators backed by the Vice President to force basically whatever procedural move they want. Traditionally, that’s not the way things have worked. Instead, having key people talk seriously about going this route has produced a political crisis and encouraged people to cut a deal. That’s how the filibuster got pared back from 67 votes to 60 votes. And it’s also how, as recently as 2005, Senate Democrats were persuaded to relent on several judicial filibusters.

But I’ve seen no sign of a serious public campaign of pressure from Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or other leading figures to delegitimize this minoritarian obstruction.

Parliamentary Procedure Counterfactuals

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.

Coburn Single-Handedly Delaying Veterans’ Benefits

More fun with Senate procedure:

Veterans and their supporters called on U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on Friday to drop his hold and allow a vote to be held on a bill to offer assistance and improve benefits to wounded veterans and their caregivers.

Without identifying Coburn by name, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said a single senator is denying veterans improved benefits.

The White House and the Senate Democratic leadership definitely need to start doing more to turn up the heat on the rampant minoritarian obstruction. Step one, I think, would be to stop abiding by the rule of decorum that leads Akaka to not identify Coburn by name. The anonymous hold business is not a sacred element of parliamentary procedure, it’s an absurd procedural defect that there’s no reason to respect, especially now that it’s become a subject of routine abuse. At some point, senators are going to need to start putting their substantive policy objectives ahead of their narrow self-interest in preserving the senate’s idiosyncratic ways.

Target: Obstructionism

It’s good to see Harry Reid started to tackle some of the more egregious acts of obstructionism being mounted by the GOP minority in the Senate. A wise man has been trying to convince me over the past week that it’s a mistake for progressive media to focus so much attention on “tea party” antics and it would be better to focus on this issue and try to turn up the heat on it. You’re never going to get a mass public fascinated by the minutia of senate procedure, but I think people can understand that it’s a big problem when key government positions can’t be filled in a timely manner.

Congress-Centric Governance

One respect in which the United States differs quite sharply from most other democracies is in the extent to which the legislature shapes the details of policies. There’s a lot of variation from place to place, obviously, but in most democracies policies are really written by the executive branch in a collaboration between key cabinet members and civil servants. The legislature’s job is more-or-less to accept or reject these proposals. In America it doesn’t work like that. Even though it’s typical for staff talent to flow from the Hill to the White House and even though the professional staff resources of the executive branch far exceed those of the congress, the details of legislation are written by congress and then it’s left up to the White House to accept or reject the bills.

You can understand why a generation of Framers worried about the prospect that the President would make himself into a dictator thought this was a good way to arrange things, but it’s difficult to make the case that it improves the quality of public policy in the 21st century.

For example, here’s Congress helping the unemployed:

The bill, passed overwhelmingly by the House and headed to President Obama for his signature Friday, extends unemployment insurance benefits that were due to expire and renews an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, while also expanding it to cover many other home purchases.

In other words, to get a pretty good measure (extended unemployment benefits) passed, congress saw fit to both extend and expand the not-very-smart home buyers tax credit. Notably, the lack of merit to the home buyers tax credit is not particularly controversial in the policy domain. It’s just one of those things that a certain number of Republican members are obsessed with, notwithstanding the lack of support from conservative economists, and that Democratic members are happy to go along with, again notwithstanding the lack of support from progressive economists.

And as Kevin Drum points out things got even nuttier:

Why? Because even though Republicans were allowed to tack on a tax cut to the bill as the price of getting it passed, they decided to filibuster anyway unless they were also allowed to include an anti-ACORN amendment. Seriously. A bit of ACORN blustering to satisfy the Palin-Beck crowd is the reason they held up a bill designed to help people who are out of work in the deepest recession since World War II.

Meanwhile Tyler Cowen reports back from a meeting at the Treasury Department:

I worry less than did some of the other bloggers about the Treasury awareness of major economic problems going forward. As governmental institutions go, Treasury has a real incentive to a) worry about the fiscal future, and b) worry about worst-case scenarios, including for financial institutions. Their daily interaction with the bond market gives them a longer time horizon and a more economics-friendly perspective than most of their bureaucratic counterparts. The problem is Congress. For instance if someone at Treasury had a Yves Smith view of the banking system, they could not much act on it.

Given the system we have, one not only can but must call out individual senators and members of congress for acts of policy malfeasance. But in a structural sense, the congress is simply not well set-up to produce technically sound ways of achieving policy objectives. This is generally recognized by members of congress themselves in the abstract, who tend to suggest the appointment of outside commissions of various sorts as a way to deal with problems, but the recognition is rarely put into practice in a day-to-day sense. In principle, however, rather than an endless stream of talk about creating new ad hoc commissions you could seek some structural shift in congress’ role in policy design.

For Local Politics

New York City Hall

Mike Tomasky on the rise of Michael Bloomberg and the fall of the New York City Democratic Party:

I covered its demise as well as Bloomberg’s ascent. The former was far more gruesome to watch. In a city that’s six-to-one Democratic in voter enrolment, there isn’t really a plausible mayor among the dozens of elected Democrats who represent the city or some portion of it at the federal, state and local levels.

In the cartoon-version of the local party’s demise, the bore is chattering on not about his Bordeaux, but about a glorious past that no one remembers or cares about anymore, and a set of secondary issues aimed more at clubhouse job-seekers than regular people.

New Yorkers’ Democratic-ness is all about national politics. It’s about supporting candidates like Barack Obama and opposing people like Sarah Palin. But locally, New Yorkers believe in the old adage about there being no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage. They want what works, and they suspect that the local Democratic party can’t and won’t.

The problem with the way we do things in our urban politics is that it is largely true that there’s no Democratic or Republican way to cope with municipal issues, but it’s not true that municipal governance is all about non-ideological managerial competence. Rather, our political parties are organized around systematic ideological disagreements about the most important issues in federal politics. But lots of issues that are extremely important in city politics aren’t that important in federal politics.

For example, the federal role in K-12 education is rather modest so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that even in these days of heightened polarization the debate about K-12 education policy doesn’t break down along party lines. And of the big municipal issues, education is probably the most federalized one. One of the biggest political fights of the Bloomberg years has been about congestion pricing, which is very marginal to federal political debates. By contrast, Rudy Giuliani’s terrifying opinions about foreign policy and national security had basically nothing to do with his job as Mayor of New York City. “The budget” is important at both a federal and a municipal level, but what constitutes good budgetary policies at the two levels if very different.

In Canada, the political parties that contest federal elections are basically separate from the parties that contest provincial elections. This seems like a very sensible arrangement—it lets people have strong partisan identities at different levels in a way that acknowledges that there are very different ideological cleavages when you’re talking about governments with different kind of responsibilities.

Celebrating 120 Years of North Dakota

States of America. Given that more people live in Memphis, TN than North Dakota it might seem unfair that this large and essentially empty patch of land gets two senators. When you consider that even mighty South Dakota has fewer people than Jacksonville, Florida and that the two states combined contain considerably fewer people than live in Queens or the Virginia Beach / Norfolk / Newport News metro area then it starts to seem even stranger that there are actually two Dakotas. Why would you do it that way?

The answer, it turns out, is cynical partisan politics. The Dakota Territory was extremely favorable to the Republican Party, so the GOP made it into two states.

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.

Gerrymandering

The Redistricting the Nation website has a bunch of cool tools to let you learn about gerrymandered congressional districts. Unfortunately, the whole enterprise seems to be of a piece with the national media’s obsession with overstating the importance of gerrymandering. It’s important to recall that gerrymandering doesn’t cause political polarization. Nor has gerrymandering made House seats less competitive.

There are also real limits to the strategy of squinting at districts and deciding that the squiggly ones aren’t compact enough and therefore represent abusive redistricting. Their computer model doesn’t like the NY 8, my home congressional district. But those who know the city can tell you that the district does a pretty good job of incorporating whole coherent neighborhoods in a reasonable way. It’s not clear why the fact that some of these neighborhoods aren’t adjacent to each other is all that damning.

I think it’s definitely true that there’s something unseemly about people deliberately peering over a map and deciding “well, we’re going to make X black districts and Y latino districts.” But the compactophiles’ preferred alternative of a US House of Representatives that’s nearly all-white would be even more unseemly. The correct solution to this problem is to have larger, multiple-member districts and do elections with a single-transferable vote. But even though that would be preferable, our current system for electing House members works pretty well. A lot of the things that people think are wrong with gerrymandering would be better-addressed through the campaign finance system.

MPOs in Different Area Codes

Some time ago I was complaining that the “middle tier” of the life we actually lead—neither local nor national—happens not at the level of states, but at the level of metropolitan areas. But while we have robust state governments, we’ve got pretty rickety structures at the metro level. Mark Muro has some ideas for improving things that don’t require unrealistic constitutional changes:

For example, the nation possesses 380 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that are already empowered–notwithstanding their variable quality–to engage in long-range transportation planning. Therefore, wouldn’t one way to thrust U.S. metros farther into federalism mix be to expand the MPOs’ role and responsibilities to mandate, say, planning and program alignment across a broader array of federal and state programs? Likewise, hundreds of other increasingly robust “metro” regional councils and other entities are also active, ranging from scores of councils of government (COGs) and myriad economic development districts (EDDs) to the metro mayors’ caucuses in Chicago and Denver; the older suburbs coalitions in Kansas City and Cleveland and Milwaukee; and the scores of other regional economic, civic, philanthropic, or environmental initiatives now working on regional problems. Shouldn’t these too be sought out, utilized more by Washington and the states, and empowered? Sure they should: Washington and the states should each seek out and work with the existing retinue of metropolitan actors as core partners in investment and program delivery.

In addition, Washington and the states should go farther and seek to stimulate the emergence of new metropolitan alignments. Perhaps the best way to do this is to stimulate multi-jurisdictional regional collaboration, say through federal grant competitions that reward such activity. That will inevitably coalesce new middle-tier governance entities. So why not apply—as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does in the Notification of Funding Availability for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program—clear preferences for collaborative efforts? For that matter, why shouldn’t Washington apply a modest preference for multi-jurisdictional collaboration to essentially all of its activities, including dozens of the nation’s scores of categorical, block, and other grant flows? Such a “regionalism steer” would evoke much more metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan governance activity in U.S. regions. Such modest but clear pay-offs for cross-boundary cooperation would go surprisingly far toward producing more active “middle-tier” governance in America.

Good ideas. Another thing that occurs to me is that we could probably use more formal mechanisms for collaboration between House members whose districts all share a metro area especially if, as is often the case, the metro area crosses state lines.

Electoral Reform and the NJ Governor’s Race

Jonathan Martin writes about the crucial role being played in the New Jersey gubernatorial race by former moderate Republican Christopher Daggett’s surprisingly strong independent bid:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

Ed Kilgore observes:

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.

But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?

This is the kind of thing that makes you pine for Instant-Runoff Voting (or actual runoffs). Wouldn’t it be nice if Daggett’s voters got to actually register their second-choice preference, thus ensuring that the winner of Christie-Corzine would actually be the one the voters prefer? What’s more, right now it’s clear that a lot of New Jerseyites find Daggett appealing. And the polls almost certainly understate the true level of preference for him, since voting Daggett in a first past the post system doesn’t really make tactical sense. If people knew that a vote for Daggett wasn’t a “wasted” vote, it’s possible he could win the election.

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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The Trouble With States

The other day Reihan Salam opined that “I think we need to do a far broader rethinking of state and federal responsibilities.” I tend to agree. But a big part of the problem here is that it’s difficult to think of what kind of issues are actually well-suited to be dealt with at a state level. It’s easy to think of kinds of issues that Arlington County, Virginia should address on its own without input from people who live in Norfolk, VA or Montgomery County, Maryland or Boise, Idaho. These are your local government responsibilities. And it’s also easy to think of issues that should be decided in common between Arlington and Norfolk and Montgomery and Boise. These are your federal responsibilities. But it’s very hard to think of what kinds of things should involve Arlington and Norfolk, but not Montgomery County. Conversely, it’s pretty easy to think of things that should involve Arlington County and Montgomery County but not Norfolk or Boise. These would be metropolitan region issues.

But we don’t have any level of governance that addresses metro area issues. And we don’t really live our lives “at the state level.” And insofar as co-residents of a single state do have idiosyncratic issues in common that tends to be because important fiscal and regulatory powers have been allocated to state government rather than because it actually makes sense for them to have been allocated this way.

There’s not a ton that can be done about this. The constitution doesn’t let us appoint a “commission on middle-tier governance” to redraw boundaries. But the boundaries we have don’t follow any real economic or social logic. And the states themselves are a ludicrously mixed bag. California is giant, with the population of a medium-sized country like Poland. And nobody lives in Wyoming. The state of Florida contains eight separate MSAs that contain more people, including places I’ve never heard of like Palm Bay/Melbourne/Titusville.

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.

Does Nationwide Fundraising Combat Parochialism?

I haven’t thought about it in detail, but it’s long seemed to me that restricting politicians so as to make it that they can only raise funds from people who are actually their constituents would be a reasonable idea. Ezra Klein offers some doubts:

But it would also increase one of the system’s other problems: Parochialism. Baucus might represent Montana, but as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he’s legislating on behalf of America. If he wanted to anger some of the conservative interests in his state and take a more national view, he could, in theory, raise national money to fund his reelection campaign and defend himself against state-based interests. Removing that option seems likely to ensure total capture by local powerbrokers, which may indeed be worse, or at least more incoherent, than capture by national interests.

I guess I just have some doubts about that in practice. It’s very hard for me to think of a legislator who’s anything less than 100 percent responsive to local business interests under the current system.

The main impact of the rule being considered would, it seems to me, be to make House incumbents much more electorally vulnerable. Most House members would simply find it very difficult to raise a great deal of money from in-district contributions. That would necessarily tend to level the playing field between incumbents and challengers. Which is probably why we won’t see it happen. But it would also probably be a good idea.

Fun With Multi-Party Politics

The latest polling I’ve seen:

If we ignore the undecideds, this seems to make it quite likely that the Tories will secure a majority in parliament even as more voters prefer left-of-center parties. In Canada’s 2006 election a majority of people voted either Liberal, New Democrat, or Green but the Conservatives wound up with the most parliamentary seats and they’ve been running a minority government ever since even though it’s pretty clear that the median Canadian was supporting the Liberals. Most countries with strong multi-party politics have a substantial element of proportional representation in their system which helps iron out these kind of bugs. Canada and the UK, however, do first-past-the-post elections in single member districts.

The Hammer

(wikimedia)

An awful lot of what you need to understand about American politics is embedded within an offhand remark Senator Jay Rockefeller made on Friday talking to Ezra Klein:

What about Olympia Snowe?

I think the world of Olympia Snowe. She’s got incredible courage, and the Republican leadership is brutal in the way they apply pressure. Much more so than the Democrats.

How so?

For example, when Clinton was elected president, and George Mitchell was majority leader, [Clinton] came to our Democratic Caucus, because he thought it would be nice to break bread with us. Mitchell told him he had to leave. They were part of different branches of government. And so Clinton and his Secret Service had to turn around and walk out. It was a historic moment. On the other side, there were very few caucuses that Dick Cheney didn’t attend himself. That’s why whether it’s intelligence or environment or elsewhere, they bring the hammer down in a way Democrats aren’t good at, which I’m sort of glad about.

On the issue of expanded access to high-quality affordable health insurance, Jay Rockefeller is a really solid progressive. And he recognizes that the differential level of party discipline is a major factor in how the debate is unfolding. But nevertheless, he says he’s glad that he’s a member of the party with weaker discipline. This is a recipe for endless progressive frustration. If the more progressive political party is deliberately organized so as to be less effective as a caucus than the more conservative political party, then it’ll always be very hard to enact progressive legislation. And if even the members who are fully aware of this dynamic and who don’t like its consequences nonetheless support maintaining the status quo because it maximizes their personal self-interest, then we’re a long way from changing things.

What If They Gave an Election and Nobody Came

Outgoing Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau

Lying at the intersection of two bad aspects of American governance—partisan elections for local offices in essentially one-party jurisdictions, and the overabundance of elected officials—comes today’s New York City primary:

Tuesday is primary day in New York City, but don’t feel bad if it slipped your mind. As few as one in six enrolled Democrats are expected to vote, despite competitive races for two citywide offices. [...] The most consequential contest is the three-way race to succeed Robert M. Morgenthau, who has served as Manhattan district attorney since 1975. Because no Republican is running, the winner on Tuesday is all but assured to be the next district attorney. [...]

Voters have been inundated by television and printed advertisements from the four Democrats seeking to succeed Mr. Thompson as comptroller and the five vying to succeed Betsy Gotbaum, who is not seeking re-election as public advocate. If no candidate garners at least 40 percent of the vote in those races, a runoff between the top two finishers will be held on Sept. 29. [...]

Nearly 3.2 million Democrats are eligible to vote on Tuesday, but the turnout “will be low, possibly the lowest in recent memory,” said Prof. John H. Mollenkopf of the City University Graduate Center.

The purpose of having elected officials, as opposed to a self-perpetuating oligarchy like China, ought to be to enhance accountability. But elections only work as an effective accountability mechanism if we can reasonably expect the voters to monitor the elected officials and have some understanding of what they’re responsible for. A resident of New York City is responsible for electing a mayor, a city comptroller, a district attorney, a city council member, a borough president, two state legislators, a member of the U.S. congress, two U.S. senators, a governor, an attorney-general, and a state comptroller along with various judges. It seems to me that very few people actually know the name of all the different people who hold those offices, which I think we can take as a sign that they’re not monitoring their performance. It would make more sense to just eliminate some of this stuff (unicameral state legislatures would work fine, the “borough” level of government is obsolete) and make some of the offices appointed.

Meanwhile, having partisan elections in a place like New York City (or Washington, DC) manages to semi-disenfranchise the city’s registered Republicans while basically obscuring the issues at stake in the elections. I’m a big defender of partisanship against David Broder style whining. But that’s because partisanship at the federal level is a useful tool for clarifying policy issues and generating a measure of coherence and accountability to legislative operations. That’s because the parties are coherently organized around the main issues in national politics. The issues in local politics are pretty different. It might make the most sense to just have different parties at the national and local levels (like how Canada’s provincial parties are different from the federal ones) but barring that it would make sense for New York and DC to do what many other cities have already done and just shift to non-partisan elections.

The Vetting Nihilists

Fun with subcabinet vetting:

Lael Brainard, nominated in March as Undersecretary for International Affairs, is the latest Obama appointee to be tripped up by the Senate Finance Committee. Of particular concern is Ms. Brainard’s use of a home-office tax deduction, according to people familiar with the inquiry. [...] The delay in Ms. Brainard’s nomination is especially noteable because her husband, Kurt Campbell, was confirmed by the Senate on June 25 as Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs. If the couple filed a joint return, any errors would be his, too. State Department nominees are under the jurisdiction of the Senate Foreign Relations panel, and they are not subject to Finance Committee vetting.

To me there’s something very striking about the basically nihilistic impulses underlying the minority’s quest to dig this stuff up. It’s not like the cases of Dawn Johnson and Harold Koh where the nominees are somehow ideologically provocative. Both Brainard and Campbell (whose work I know better) are probably unusually conservative for Democrats, and these jobs are not exactly hotbeds of ideological contention. There’s just no way that Chuck Grassley or whomever else genuinely thinks that the national interest would somehow be advanced by spiking Brainard’s nomination. Now that the investigation’s been done, if there’s some problem with her back taxes obviously she should pay what she owes. But the fact that the investigation was even happening is ridiculous. Everyone thought she was well-qualified for the job, and it’s an important job that ought to be filled. She should have been confirmed swiftly and routinely soon after her name was sent to the floor. Institutionalizing a tradition of months-long delays in confirming subcabinet appointees is going to be incredibly destructive over time.