Matt Yglesias

If Texas Seceeds, Don’t Mess With It

Annie Lowery took a look at the countermeasures available to the United States in the unlikely event of a real Texas secession movement:

It would be the world’s thirteenth largest economy — bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

On the foreign policy front, a seceded Texas would suffer for deserting the world superpower. Obama wouldn’t look kindly on secessionists, and would send in the military to tamp down rebellion. If Texas miraculously managed to hold its borders, Obama would not establish relations with the country — though he might send a special rapporteur. (We nominate Kinky Friedman.)

The assumption here, though, is that the United States would want to coerce the Republic of Texas back into the fold. I don’t really see a good reason for doing that. Obviously, we shouldn’t let Texas secede as part of an unpopular governor’s bid to win a primary election against Kay Bailey Hutchison by defining himself as the wingnuttiest guy around. Letting a state secede on a whim would be a bad idea. But the situation in 2009 is very different from the situation in 1860 so if a big state like Texas (or a sizable bloc of states) had a population that was showing a clear and consistent preference for secession, one should consider just letting them go. Situations like the “Velvet Divorce” in which the Czech Republic and Slovakia amicably went their separate ways are rare, but that was a much better outcome than a typical bloody civil war.

The real question is not what could we do to stop Texas from seceding, but what would be reasonable terms?

The core elements of an amicable divorce would, I think, be Texas membership in NAFTA and NATO so as to ensure that disruption is minimized and nobody is a threatening anyone else. Beyond that, you’d need to do something about citizenship. My preference would be for the United States of America to establish a rule such that anyone whose citizenship in the Republic of Texas dates back to Texas Independence Day would have an unrestricted right to move to the USA at a time of his choosing and swap citizenship. We would also need, I think, to create a time period of, say, five years in which any American citizen who wants to become a Texan has the right to become a Texan. After that, Texas may or may not want to adopt a more stringent immigration policy.

Then there’s the issue of the debt. Texas would need to assume responsibility for a portion of the U.S. national debt that’s proportionate to its share of the population. Given that this debt is denominated in dollars, it will be important in the early years for the Republic to maintain a currency that’s strong vis-a-vis the dollar and a current account surplus. Given Texas’ oil that shouldn’t be too hard to pull off, and could be further assisted by having the United States military agree to “lease” military bases on Texas territory for ten years.

One could imagine some other reactionary states choosing to federate with Texas. And I think if that happened then, over the long-run, both sides might wind up happier. Chris Bowers, who’s opposed to secession, argues instead that “the better approach for progressives is to try and connect the United States more with other countries and international organizations, rather than fragmenting into smaller countries. More connection, not more division, is the answer.”

My own view, however, is that internationalization goes hand in hand with regionalization. In other words, that the smart money in the 21st century is on the diversion of power both up and down from the nation-state level. For a more practical example, look to Europe, where the United Kingdom’s integration into the European Union has gone hand in hand with some steps to moving away from the UK’s hypercentralized political system. In a world of strong nation-states, a place like Scotland or Wales would just be a weak nation-state. But international economic and security agreements reduce the incentive for a small state to affiliate with a larger neighbor. So we’ve seen the creation of a Scottish parliament. And I believe there’s been a similar devolutionary impulse in Spain. You hear talk sometimes of a “Europe of Regions” rather than a Europe of Nations, and I don’t think it’s a crazy idea.

None of which is to say that Texas will or should secede. But I do think it makes sense to think about ways to facilitate the amicable breakup or reconfiguration of nation-states rather than assuming that every parting of the ways needs to recapitulate the Civil War or the breakup of Yugoslavia.

National Popular Vote

I missed this yesterday, but Hendrick Hertzberg reports on some additional legislative victories for the National Popular Vote movement.

As a reminder, here’s how NPV works. The constitution allows each state to allocate its electoral votes however it wants. A state that adopts the NPV compact says that at such time as a group of states that together compromise 270 electoral votes have all adopted the compact, then all the compact states commit to assigning their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Thus you can get to a national popular vote system without any given state needing to unilaterally disarm, and without needing to get the microstates who benefit from the electoral college to agree. Shockingly, however, the three states that are most harmed by the electoral college—California, New York, and Texas—haven’t joined Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, and hopefully soon Washington in adopting NPV. This is something you should really consider writing your state legislators about. They don’t hear from many people!

Great Moments in Journalism

Internet access was spottier at the conference I’ve been attending this weekend than I’d anticipated, and soon I’ll be on a series of airplanes, so I hope nobody was too upset by a weekend of half-assed blogging. The good news is that at this particular conference center, giraffes are considerably more plentiful than you usually see at a conference:

That’s The New Yorker’s Rick Hertzberg, one of our very best columnists as well as the nation’s leading advocate of the National Popular Vote. NPV is an extremely good idea and especially if you live in a non-battleground state you ought to get in touch with your state legislators and ask them why they aren’t embracing an idea that could really enhance your state’s clout.

A New Day at the EPA

The way environmental policy in the United States is supposed to work is that we’ve set up these agencies with statutory mandates to protect the environment and staffed them with experts and so forth to do analysis of what kinds of things constitute environmental hazards that are sufficiently grave as to merit the costs of action. It’s supposed to be that those experts do their work and policy results accordingly. Of course in practice if George W. Bush is in office, policy results not according to what EPA staffers say is good for public health but according to what lobbyists say their bosses want. Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post on a new day at the EPA:

By Feb. 20, the efforts of Reifsnyder and dozens of other rank-and-file federal employees had borne fruit: After the United States voiced support for the idea of a new, binding mercury treaty, the world community embraced it in Nairobi.

The rapid policy reversal is just one of more than a dozen environmental initiatives the new administration has undertaken in its first two months. In nearly every case, the decisions were based on extensive analysis and documentation that rank-and-file employees had prepared over the past couple of years, often in the face of contrary-minded Bush administration officials.

After years of chafing under political appointees who viewed stricter environmental regulation with skepticism, long-serving federal officials are seeing work that had been gathering dust for years translate quickly into action.

This relates to one of my favorite themes—how harmful it is for the United States to have such an overgrown number of political appointees at our civilian agencies. In other countries, a given ministry will typically have one or two political appointees but the vast majority of the responsibility is in the hands of career civil servants. The role of the political appointees is to give overall direction to the agency and, in their role as a cabinet, perhaps help set overall policy for the administration. But running the government is seen as a job for professionals. If politicians want to change an agency’s mandate, they can write legislation doing so, but not just subvert it by fiat. It works in other systems around the world, and it works in the United States military where the president has some discretion about which generals and admirals fill which high-level roles, but doesn’t just bring a giant crew of people in from the outside.

Filibuster Fact of the Day

One of my new pet peeves is journalists writing about congress as if it’s always been the case that that minorities of senators would routinely filibuster every measure they didn’t like. Simple logic indicates that this is false—it used to require a unanimous vote to end a filibuster and, obviously, non-unanimous bills passed. But there are more examples. For example, before the 1970s you needed two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but the Lend-Lease Act went through the Senate on a 60-31 vote (according to the rules of the day, you would have needed 66 as there were only 98 Senators) without the minority obstructing the bill.

Thus, filibuster supporters are objectively pro-Nazi. Well, okay, they’re not. But it reminds us that routine filibustering is a new tradition and not a time-honored principle of American government.

Judd Gregg’s Reconciliation Hypocrisy

Jon Cohn notes that Judd Gregg, recently seen whining that passing bills by majority vote is dictatorial, was all for the Bush administration’s efforts to use the reconciliation process to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to exploitation by oil companies.

Of course, there’s only so outraged one can get about Gregg’s fake outrage. I argued back during the “nuclear option” fight that Democrats should try to use the moment to abolish the filibuster altogether. But it’s normal for partisans to flip-flop on the merits of minoritarian obstructionism when control of the Senate switches hands. Gregg is being a hypocrite and deserves to be called on it; media outlets who quote him complaining without noting that he’s a hypocrite are being irresponsible. But I save my personal outrage for the members of the majority party who are already hard at work finding ways to block a popular new president’s progressive agenda.

Gregg Slams Democracy as “Strong-Arm Tactics”

The country faces some large problems. Some of these problems the U.S. Senate may, but also may not, address through the budget reconciliation process that allows for majority rule. Since the congress is afflicted by a minority that seems dedicated to not working on these problems, there’s growing interest in using the reconciliation process. Judd Gregg is displeased:

Republicans are howling about the proposal to expand health coverage and tax greenhouse gas emissions without their input, warning that it could irrevocably damage relations with the new president.

“That would be the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who briefly considered joining the Obama administration as commerce secretary. “You’re talking about the exact opposite of bipartisan. You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.”

Two things. One is that it’s not at all clear how “irrevocably damage[d] relations” would differ from the status quo. This is one reason, perhaps, why it’s not customary for a defeated minority to immediately move to a posture of relentless obstruction. By adopting such a posture, you give away a bargaining chip.

Second, the idea that passing legislation my majority rule is some kind of mafia stunt is absurd. This is how bills pass in the House of Representatives, in the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada, in the state legislatures of the vast majority of American states. It’s how student council worked in my high school. It’s how New Hampshire town councils make decisions. You’re not talking about “running over” the minority, you’re talking about taking a vote in which the majority wins and the minority loses. That’s how we pick Senators! Judd Gregg doesn’t need 60 percent of the vote to stay in office.

John McCain Obstructing Qualified Interior Department Nominee Because He Hurt Ronald Reagan’s Feelings

There have been a lot of vaguely-worded complaints in the past two days about the dysfunctional nature of the appointments process and the Obama administration’s slow pace of staffing. Well, now we can put a face to Senatorial grandstanding—the face of John McCain, who’s threatening to hold up David Hayes’ nomination to be Deputy Secretary in the Interior Department over the fact that Hayes once wrote something mean about Ronald Reagan’s environmental policy. That’s right, a member of one political party has, in the past, said something disparaging about a prominent member of the other party. This is McCain’s objection. Seriously. How on earth would you staff an administration of people who pass that test?

The Case Against Confirmation Hearings

The other day, Kevin Drum was upset about the tawdry joke that is the Senate confirmation process:

[H]ow about doing away with Senate confirmation entirely? It wastes tons of committee time, it promotes endless grandstanding by bloviating pols, it discourages all but the hardiest from working for the government, and — most important of all — it doesn’t actually seem to produce a better class of appointees, does it? Is the country really better off with a system that confirms Alberto Gonzales but deep sixes Tom Daschle? Has the White House staff, on average, been any less competent or less honest in recent years than the Senate-confirmed cabinet staff? Does the Senate, as Ackerman would like, really make it difficult for presidents to appoint underqualified officials?

The Senate would never agree to give up its precious consent privilege, of course, but I’m frankly not sure they add much to the process these days. In the meantime, allowing the president to have a White House staff of his choosing — whether I like his choices or not — seems more important than providing yet more cannon fodder for the greatest deliberative body in the world. They’ve got plenty to chew on already.

One solution to this could be to scrap the entire American system of government and move to a parliamentary system.

Barring that, I would say that this is another good reason to rely more heavily on career civil servants and less on subcabinet political appointees. The president could have a White House of his own choosing, not subject to confirmation. Then cabinet departments and major independent agencies could have their own appointed heads with the approval of the Senate. But for the “guts” of the work of implementing White House and/or Congressional mandates, doing analysis of what program changes would entail, etc. we would do well to expand the Senior Executive Service model and rely less on Assistant Secretaries brought in from the outside. That would make it a lot more viable to reduce the number of positions requiring Senate confirmation without freaking people out about abusive or corrupt staffing decisions.

As I’ve said before, a possible model for this is the State Department where by tradition, though not by law, an administration is supposed to fill most of the “political” appointments with career foreign service officers.

Of course another possible solution to this would be for senators to stop screwing around so much with appointments. I don’t see any real evidence that grandstanding about subcabinet appointments is crucial to one’s re-election prospects.

Mismatched Governance in Metro America

Given both the landmass and population size of the United States, especially combined with the overall scale of our wealth, it’s clearly necessary to have some fairly robust intermediate levels of government between the federal government in Washington and individual lives. This is what we have states for. But just as relatively little of life proceeds on a truly “national” scale, almost nothing happens on a “California” scale or an “Illinois” scale, either. Instead, the American economy is organized around distinct metropolitan areas. Instead of things happening in Illinois, they happen in Chicagoland, which contains some but not all of Illinois and some areas that aren’t in Illinois. For most New Jerseyans it matters more how things go in Greater New York or in Greater Philadelphia (depending on where in the state they live) than on how things go in New Jersey in general. What’s more, as Bruce Katz, Mark Muro, and Jennifer Bradley observe in a new article for Democracy the 100 largest metro areas account for 75 percent of total economic output, so tending to the continued viability, vitality, and growth of our metro areas is crucial to our overall economic fortunes.

Unfortunately, even though we have a statistical definition of what constitutes a metro area, and thus can say a bunch of things to characterize metro America, our institutions of government don’t even remotely line up in the right way. In particular, decisions about transportation policy tend to get made either in state capitols or else in too-small municipalities. This winds up prioritizing the construction of new roads in undeveloped areas over maintaining and upgrading existing transportation infrastructure in more built-up areas. There’s also no way for the political process to reflect the fact that infrastructure investments in some areas have significant spillover effects, while investments in other places are of purely local interest.

Meanwhile, of course, we can’t just scrap the existing state boundaries and redraw the lines. Arguably, we should do that, but it’s not very realistic. They offer some more modest suggestions:

The federal government should lead by applying a sort of regionalism “steer” to essentially all of its activities, especially the scores of categorical, block, and other grant flows. Today, these flows often intensify local governance fragmentation. With the attachment of modest incentives for regionalization in the form of extra funding, these flows could promote more effective metropolitan governance systems and problem-solving at very low cost. Likewise, a small portion of a region’s entitlement to funds could be subtracted if it chose not to embrace regionalism.

But that’s the nudge from Washington. The nation should also incentivize localities to figure regionalization out for themselves by issuing a bold, large
challenge—call it a Governance Challenge—to localities to get their acts together and collaborate. The Governance Challenge would encourage and reward coordination across any wide swath of program areas, from social services or land- use planning to fiscal management, in exchange for modest financial rewards or (perhaps more attractive to localities) greater programmatic flexibility.

It gets hard to think about these kind of long-festering issues in a time of crisis, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people working in the executive branch and there’s ample time to move on multiple fronts. This is the kind of thing that the White House’s urban policy office can be helpful in coordinating. And we now have a House of Representatives where most of the key stakeholders represent portions of metro areas and should be open to this kind of rethinking.

Obama Lobbyist Policy Doing More Harm Than Good

Ryan Grim has an excellent story in The Huffington Post spelling out in some detail what’s been a mounting problem with the Obama administration—the ban on lobbyists is having perverse consequences for staffing:

Lobbyists who for years have fought for workers’ rights, environmental protection, human rights, pay-equity for women, consumer protection and other items on the Obama agenda have found the doors to the White House HR department slammed shut. In the past, several progressive lobbyists explained, there was no reason not to register if there was a slim chance that the law might require it. Obama’s new policy changes the calculus, leading folks to deregister as federal lobbyists or consider other employment while they wait out the policy’s required two-year separation from lobbying.

Way back in August 2007 I criticized Obama’s lobbyist pledge as “meaningless grandstanding.” That turns out to have been too optimistic as Tom Malinowski and other well-qualified individuals who registered as lobbyists while working for progressive non-profits find themselves shut out of jobs, and the administration finds itself understaffed.

The problem here has always been that the lobbyist/non-lobbyist distinction doesn’t track any meaningful goals. Goldman Sachs’ lawyer, for example, is not a lobbyist, and therefore not banned from office. A “lobbyist” is just someone who talks to members of congress about legislation. You can be a corrupt special interest and not be a lobbyist, and you can be a lobbyist who only works for good causes.

But dumb as the pledge was, it’s dumber still to stick with it. Flip-flopping will look bad, but nobody will care in 2012 about an old flip-flop. By contrast, lots of people will care by 2012 if we’re in the midst of a prolonged depression. The premium has to be on getting smart, effective people in place in order to frame and implement smart, effective policy. At the moment, Obama is still floating on a positive image and the fact that people rightly blame his predecessor for the current situation being so bad. But that brand isn’t going to be worth anything in a couple of years unless he brings back growth. He should admit that the initial pledge was ill-considered and a bit cynical and that it would be even more cynical to stick with a mistaken promise merely in order to avoid the need to admit a mistake.

Bob Menendez Holds Climate Policy Hostage to Cuba Embargo

Someone was telling me about this yesterday and I didn’t quite get what I was being told, but Senator Robert Menendez is holding up two of Barack Obama’s key climate/science appointees, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, over an unrelated Cuba policy dispute:

The delay — which could end quickly if Menendez dropped his objection or Senate leaders pushed for a floor vote that would require 60 votes to pass — has alarmed environmentalists and scientific experts who strongly back Holdren and Lubchenco.

“Climate change damages our oceans more every day we fail to act,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist for the advocacy group Oceana. “We need these two supremely qualified individuals on the job yesterday.”

Kate Sheppard notes that just last year Menendez thought climate change was “incredibly important.” But apparently not as important as defending America’s insane Cuba policy status quo.

Meanwhile, I would note that even more than the filibuster, the “hold” process in the Senate is an absurd procedural bottleneck that could and should be done away with. People sometimes wonder what the hold rule is, and nobody even really knows. When I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office the idea of putting a hold on someone came up, and the office had to scramble to figure out what it means. Turns out that it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just an insane convention that Senate leaders agree to uphold and that Senators as a whole conspire to put in place. But it’s ridiculous. Irrespective of the details of one’s views on Holdren or Cuba it clearly does not serve the general interest to let random appointees be held up by random Senators for no real reason. All it does, ultimately, is feed the egomania and power-lust that seems to afflict every single senator. But it’s time for some members of the body to put their substantive policy commitments ahead of their wacky perks of office and start pushing for the kind of substantial procedural reforms that will make it possible for the Senate to tackle major issues in a serious way.

Relatedly, it’s annoying to read things about how it “would require 60 votes to pass” a resolution confirming these nominees. If you look through United States history, plenty of bills and plenty of nominees have been passed with more than 49 but fewer than 60 votes. Similarly, in the pre-seventies era of the 67-person cloture vote plenty of bills passed with fewer than 67 votes. Throughout the nineteenth century it required unanimity to break a filibuster, but that didn’t mean that bills all passes unanimously. It also “requires” 60 votes to pass things if we accept the premise that the filibuster should be used routinely. That has not, however, been the historical understanding of the filibuster. The speed with which Washington has accepted the idea of a routine supermajority requirement is a little bit frightening as it was just a few years ago that this started to be put into place.

Googooism in Action

Hey waddaya know, an actual example of the Obama administration cracking down on lobbyists, courtesy of Jeff Young:

Before the healthcare and education call got underway, though, an OMB staffer called out for Sharon Cohen. Cohen, as it happens, is a veteran healthcare lobbyist who works for the Podesta Group. (Sadly, because of The Hill agreed to those attribution ground rules — but mostly because it didn’t get its notes written fast enough — readers will have to settle for a “reenactment” of the incident).

Basically, it went like this:

Is Sharon Cohen on the line? [silence] Good. You’re a lobbyist. This call is for media only. If there are any other lobbyists listening in, hang up. If we find out you were on this call, we’ll be very angry and we’ll cut your budget.

The Hill emailed Cohen for her side of the story but she didn’t respond right away, which is probably understandable.

Good work. This is basically symbolic, but I think it’s good symbolism. I feel a bit bad for Ms Cohen being singled out like this, because that sort of thing happens all the time. But it really shouldn’t happen all the time.

An Easy Way to Avoid Budget Reconciliation Shenanigans: Don’t Filibuster

There’s an article in The Hill by Walter Alarkon about how legislators who actually want climate change legislation to pass are hoping to work through the budget reconciliation process to avoid filibusters, but that some moderate Democrats don’t like that idea. I’m quoted in the piece, but I think I could possibly have been clearly.

The point is that insofar as the concern of Senators like Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor is really about the integrity of Senate procedure, the holy awesomeness of filibustering, and the sanctity of the budget reconciliation process there’s an easy solution—all 59 Democrats could simply promise not to filibuster a climate change bill. They wouldn’t need to vote for it. If Nelson thinks it’s a bad bill, he should vote against it. If Pryor thinks it’s a bad bill, he should vote against it. If Mary Landrieu thinks that her constituents benefit more from a vibrant oil and gas extraction industry than they suffer from catastrophic storms, then she should vote against it. But nothing is forcing those Senators to erect procedural hurdles to prevent the bill from coming to the floor. Then it would be a question of whether or not the bill’s sponsors could get the support of one or two Republicans, bring the bill to the floor, and then pass it with more than 49 but fewer than 60 votes. And to be clear, this is how the filibuster used to work. Tossing procedural monkey-wrenches into the works was an option available to a determined Senate minority, but it wasn’t an option that was exercised as a matter of course. Discretion was applied for the sake of democracy, for the sake of one’s colleagues, and to prevent rabble-rousers like Matt Yglesias from insisting that the option needs to be done away with entirely. It’s only very recently that the understanding has been changed to one in which there’s a formal super-majority requirement for all legislation.

My preference would be to eliminate filibustering altogether. Absent that, I’m for moving as much as possible through the reconciliation process. But Senators who genuinely want to preserve the old ways could best preserve them by actually returning to the old ways; which is to say allowing most legislation to come to the floor even if you intend to vote “no” on the bill.

DC Statehood

Ryan Avent writes about the country’s abhorrent treatment of residents of the capital:

Anyway, I feel very strongly that whatever steps need to be taken to get Washington treated like its own state, in all respects, should be taken. In most instances, the District already gets this treatment, with the notable exceptions of home rule and legislative representation. And the only reason that this remains the case is because the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. Ezra says that retrocession to Maryland should be the backup plan. I disagree, because the District already has most of the institutional infrastructure of a state, and because I don’t actually think that plan is any easier logistically, than statehood. Neither DC nor Maryland wants it to happen.

What is clear is that without a much larger Democratic majority, the District will never get more than a voting House member. It’s just one of those lingering, unfixable embarrassments that pepper our political system. I just wish that more Republicans were embarrassed about denying the vote to hundreds of thousands of people who send in their federal tax payments every year. But then, I wish they were embarrassed about a lot of things.

A few points about this. To actually admit DC as a state of the union would only require a majority vote in both houses of congress. To meet the constitutional requirements, you’d need to carve out a rump “federal district” encompassing the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Mall and some of the adjacent buildings. You’d need to work out the logistics, but the logistics are not insurmountable. And the political obstacles, though serious, are basically the same as the political obstacles to universal health care or comprehensive climate change legislation. Indeed, admitting DC as a state would substantially reduce the political obstacles to universal health care or comprehensive climate change legislation. But the striking thing is not how strong Republican opposition to this idea is, it’s how tepid Democratic support for it is. You don’t hear Democratic leaders articulating this as a goal. And when the House of Representatives put it to a vote in 1993 it lost 277 to 153. Of course, even if Democrats were to support DC statehood, the GOP would still filibuster. But the filibuster could—and should—be reformed, and it’s plausible—even likely—that Democrats will pick up at least one Senate seat in the 2010 midterms. If that happens, admitting DC as a state would be both a blow for justice and also a significant means of entrenching progressive political power. It would also partially redress the structural under-representation of all urban core areas in the United States congress.

Obama Administration Cracking Down on Human Rights Lobbyists

I think I’m going to put this in my “I hope this isn’t true” file:

Many Democrats thought Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, would be a powerful choice, but he cannot take the job under Mr. Obama’s rules against lobbyists. Mr. Malinowski was registered as a lobbyist to advocate for victims of genocide, torture and oppression, rather than moneyed interests, but that has not earned him a waiver.

That’s really, really stupid. Let’s hope that Obama and Hillary Clinton had some other objection to Malinowski and then to be polite they decided to run with this nutty no waiver story. Or something.

Busting More Gerrymandering Myths

Andrew Gelman says that not only is gerrymandering not the cause of partisan polarization, it doesn’t even really make seats safer:

I can’t disagree with Cohen’s first sentence above, but I part company with him after that. When Gary and I looked at the data, we found that redistricting (“gerrymandering”) was not associated with a decline in competitiveness of elections in Congress or state legislatures. Legislative elections have been gradually becoming less competitive, but they are typically more competitive after redistricting.

I’m glad to learn of this empirical result, because I never really understood the theoretical basis of the gerrymander/uncompetitiveness link. Any constituency, no matter how you draw it, is going to have a median voter to whom one can appeal. The shape of the district ought to alter what kind of candidates are viable, but never make it impossible to field viable candidates. I would say that the biggest impediment to competitive elections is fundraising issues. If you had a public financing system that guaranteed a fully funded campaign to the major party nominees in every district, a lot of “safe” seats would suddenly start looking less safe, since it would make sense for both parties to do their best to find candidates well-suited to every district. And that, of course, is why we’re unlikely to see public financing of congressional campaigns.

Little Evidence to Support Gerrymandering-Polarization Link

Brendan Nyhan has an informative post up building on my contention yesterday that we shouldn’t overstate the role of gerrymandering in producing polarized legislative politics. He offers up this abstract of a new paper from Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, UCSD’s Keith Poole, and NYU’s Howard Rosenthal (a great team, incidentally, for bringing the political science to punditry-relevant topics):

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.

If you want to think about this in anecdotal terms, consider former congressman Chris Shays (R-CT), famous for several cycles for being the Republican with the most-Democratic district in the House. Given that progressive constituency Shays was, as you can imagine, a pretty moderate Republican. But nevertheless, the most serious analysis out there consistent found Shays position to the right of every single member of the House Democratic caucus, even though many Democrats represented more GOP-friendly seats than Shays’. And when you think about it, this is really what congressional polarization consists of. The fact that the congressmen with very conservative districts have very different views from those with very liberal districts is pretty uninteresting.

What makes congress polarized is when even the most-liberal Republican is more conservative than the most-conservative Democrat. And you can’t blame that on polarization. Representative Cao, for example, didn’t vote against the stimulus bill because his seat’s too safe. Neither did Mike Castle who holds the Delaware at-large seat. I don’t know what did make those guys vote no, but it definitely wasn’t gerrymandering. But the way we know the House is very polarized is that even those guys voted against the bill.

Serious gerrymandering seems like a bad idea anyway, but for a lot of people in DC the idea of changing the redistricting process has become a kind of weird idée fixe that prevents them from seeing what’s going on.

Countermajoritarianism in California

As the state of California slides into financial apocalypse because the state legislature’s GOP minority refuses to compromise even a tiny bit in the face of a requirement that a budget pass by a two-thirds vote, it’s time to ponder the perversities of countermajoritarian requirements of this sort. Say that things get really horrible in California as a result of this standoff. It’s possible that the voters will respond by throwing out the minority obstructionists. But it’s also possible—likely, even—that the voters’ sense of accountability isn’t that fine-grained. When terrible things happen, the public decides to “throw the bums out”—i.e., incumbents in general, i.e. mostly Democrats since they’re in the majority.

I’m not sure that will be the consequence, but it’s definitely plausible. And it’s one of many problems with this form of government. Given the realities of public ignorance, bounded rationality, etc. you never get a political system in which voters do a perfect job of holding elected officials accountable for their performance. But for the system to work, it’s important that they do an at least “okay” job. And countermajoritarian rules screw that up. In California’s case, it’s long past time that they find some way to scrap their existing state constitution and write a new one.

The New Filibuster

Kevin Drum raises an important point, namely that “The filibuster was never intended to become a routine requirement that all legislation needs 60% of the vote in the Senate to pass.”

Indeed, the filibuster was never intended at all. A few years into the existence of the U.S. Senate, they undertook a review of their rules. A determination was made that the motion to end debate was unnecessary, so it was removed from the rulebook. The Senators who made that decision suffered from a lack of imagination, because they didn’t see that having stripped it from the rulebook they’d created a situation in which a minority could block action on legislation. You can tell they didn’t intend to do that because there was no filibustering for a while. But under this second rule-set, in principle a minority of one could block legislation.

Again, it obviously wasn’t the intention to implement a unanimity rule for the Senate. Eventually, that was changed to allow a 67 vote supermajority and then later a 60 vote supermajority to end a filibuster. But still, even when that last reform was implemented in the mid-1970s the idea wasn’t to create a routine requirement that legislation receive 60 votes.

But as we can see in the chart on the right, there’s been over time a steady increase in filibustering. Democrats were feeling chastened after the 2002 and 2004 elections, so filibustering dipped somewhat in those congresses while still staying high above the levels that has persisted in the 1980s. The result now is that you’ve started hearing talk about how you “need 60 votes” to pass something in the Senate, rather than saying that you need 50 votes and also that a minority might engage in the extraordinary measure of filibustering.

None of this has ever been a good idea. But when it was genuinely reserved as an extraordinary measure, it was a bad idea whose badness could be overlooked. But as it’s become a routine matter, it’s become a bigger and bigger problem. It needs to be reformed. If need be, perhaps the Senate could agree to some kind of phase out. Pass a measure in the 111th congress saying that there will be no filibustering starting with the 113th congress. That would avoid the sense that the reform was a mere power grab.

Is The Country Paying a Price for Anti-Earmark Fever?

One of the odder aspects of recent American politics has been the bipartisan fervor against so-called “earmarks.” These are, it’s true, a less-than-ideal method of budgeting. But the U.S. budget process has a lot of flaws and I see no real reason to think that earmarking is high on the list. But John McCain and Barack Obama both hate ‘em and now they’re public enemy number one, so the Obama administration has made a big deal out of its earmark-free stimulus. But I wonder, has this really been a good feature on net?

As is well-known, in order to secure the votes of the handful of Republican Senators necessary to overcome the 60-vote hurdle, Obama had to make some non-trivial concessions. Those concessions have made the stimulus much less effective than it otherwise might have been and will lead to hundreds of thousands of people being unemployed who could have been engaged in productive labor. Suppose that instead of making this sort of large, substantive concession Obama had just been able to offer pointless pet projects for Pennsylvania and Maine. It seems to me that because those projects would have had locally concentrated benefits you could have made the deal worthwhile to Sens. Specter, Collins, and Snowe for a much lower bottom-line cost and ultimately better-served the public interest.

In other words, simply eliminating the most effective means of buying votes in the legislature doesn’t eliminate the practical necessity to do it. It just ensures that the vote-buying gets done in less efficient ways.

Trimming the Filibuster

If you’re interested in the subject of how the filibuster rule might be modified, check out this article from the March 17, 1975 issue of Time laying out the legislative work for the most recent update of the filibuster, reducing the supermajority requirement from 67 Senators to 60 Senators.

The Trouble With Lobbyist-Bashing

To return to yesterday’s discussion the reason the Obama administration is finding itself needing to wriggle out of some of its anti-lobbyist rhetoric is that their rhetoric never made sense. “K Street” is a synedoche for the influence peddling business, but it’s also an actual street and one you get east of 9th Street it takes on a much humbler character. Indeed, I live on a stretch of K Street primarily known for its vacant lots. At the same time, many pernicious interest groups have their offices on L Street or M Street or, indeed, somewhere in Virginia. You wouldn’t want to actually crack down on K Street, leaving out all the bad people on other streets but hitting the new Busboys & Poets coffee shop.

Similarly, when people hear about “lobbyists” what they’re thinking of is corporate malefactors. But a registered lobbyist is an occupational category with a precise meaning—it’s a license to deal with congressional staff in a certain way—that matches up pretty imperfectly with the rhetorical force of the term. Someone—or maybe more than one person—at the Center for American Progress is a lobbyist. When we lobby, it’s on behalf of our policy research. Just like when Raytheon lobbies it’s on behalf of their desire to make money by selling military equipment. Unions have lobbyists and environmental groups have lobbyists. And, of course, big business has lobbyists. But big business also employs plenty of people who don’t fit the legal definition of “lobbying” to advance their agenda. For example, here’s David Corn writing about the Center for Consumer Freedom:

No wonder some within industry are raising a fuss about Sunstein’s regulatory beliefs. They have turned to a mega-lobbyist named Richard Berman, whose firm, Berman & Company, runs a variety of front groups for big business. In one famous episode from the mid-’90s, Berman established a group called the Guest Choice Network to fight the creation of nonsmoking sections in restaurants. The group was quietly funded by Philip Morris.

The Berman-run Center for Consumer Freedom claims its mission is “promoting personal responsibility and protecting consumer choice,” but its real purpose is to push back against activist groups and public interest nonprofits. A section of its website called “If Bacon Is Wrong, We Don’t Want To Be Lite” defends bacon, ice cream, and hot dogs, saying, “There’s no real scientific consensus on diet and cancer.” An op-ed written by Berman and posted on CCF’s site dismisses a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that links soft drinks to type 2 diabetes, calling it “the latest phony food scare.” CCF attributes the American obesity epidemic not to fast and junk food, but to “sitting disease.” CCF’s latest target is Sunstein, who it claims has a “secret aim to push a radical animal-rights agenda in the White House.” The assertion appears similar to the usual alarmism that Berman peddles to further industry interests, but Sunstein has indeed made provocative statements on the issue of animal rights.

Berman is a lobbyist. And one of the things Berman does is fund a non-profit front group to defend his clients from criticism coming from public health advocates. But the guys who work at his front group aren’t “lobbyists.” And yet, I’d much rather have a registered lobbyist for public health organizations serve in a public health regulation job than have a non-lobbyist with a CCF background. Similarly, better to have a lobbyist for environmental groups working at the EPA than to have a non-lobbyist from the emissions-loving, corporate funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.

UPDATE: The article I credited to David Corn was actually written by Jonathan Stein. I apologize for the error.

Presidential Trouble

Garrett Epps has a very interesting article in The Atlantic making the case that the presidency is simply a poorly designed office as currently conceived. I really recommend that you read the piece. It’s main flaw, I think, is that it partakes in the brand of solipsism that’s all-too-common in the American media. When the Founding Fathers put the constitution together, they made their best effort at canvassing the historical experience of republican governments in finding models and cautionary tales about what to do. But they didn’t have all that many examples to consider. These days, we can do better. There are lots of republics and constitutional monarchies to survey. And my view is that surveying them reveals that pure parliamentary systems (UK, Netherlands, Germany) with an essentially symbolic head of state are superior to presidential (US, Mexico) or semi-presidential (France, Russia, Afghanistan) ones.

Needless to say, though, that’s not very practical. Epps offers, instead, some incremental proposals for reform. One—the biggest no-brainer of the bunch—is to change the electoral system. Another provocative thought is that we ought to formally divide the execute. An odd feature of the US political regime is that at the level of state government we (except for New Jersey) tend to divide executive authority among multiple independently elected officials even though it’s not especially plausible that the governor of North Dakota is going to seize dictatorial authority. But when it comes to the federal government, where abuse of power is a very real fear, we have only one elected officer. Epps suggests establishing the Attorney-General as an independent figure, elected to four-year terms during the off-cycle years—2010, 2014, 2018, etc. Since this resembles the way most states (and, indeed, many counties) work it might go down smoother as a proposal than would a shift to a Euro-style parliamentarism.

Not, of course, that I have any real hope that any of this will be done. The American public and political class are both strangely complacent about institutional issues. There’s a tendency to become really unhappy about political outcomes and processes, but to give almost no thought to the idea that changing the rules that govern our institutions might be a potent way to relieve this unhappiness. Instead, we believe that a change of personnel will eliminate our unease—that George W. Bush will “change the tone” or Barack Obama will restore hope. Obviously, it really does matter a great deal who occupies our public offices. But on another level, if you want to change things you do need to look at the system in which people are operating.

By Request: Filibusters

Jason asks:

Are there really any strong reasons for the 111th Senate to adopt Rule 22 (60 votes for cloture)?

I don’t really want to do an analysis of the short-term of the short term politics, spin, and ethics surrounding this issue beyond noting that back during the “nuclear option” fight I took an anti-filibuster line. Instead, I think it’s more useful to think in broader and more abstract terms.

The book that’s been most influential on my thinking in this regard is George Tsebelis’ Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. One of the points he makes (no idea how original this is to him) is that one of the best ways to characterize different types of political regimes is in terms of how many veto points exist at which legislation can be blocked.

In a Westminster regime such as they have in the UK or Canada, there’s just one. The cabinet formulates a proposal, and then it needs to be voted on in parliament. And thanks to tight party discipline, things are basically never blocked. One variant on that is a system, such as they have in Israel or the Netherlands, that combines a unicameral parliament with cabinets that are invariably formed by coalitions. In a system like that, the threat of a parliamentary veto is more real and you can see government crises and collapses. In some countries, there’s an elected president who can veto legislative actions, which adds another veto point. And in some countries there’s a second legislative house whose concurrence is necessary to pass legislation.

The United States has all three of those things. It also has a system in which a bill generally needs majority support on relevant committees and subcommittees in order to pass. All told, that’s a lot of veto points compared to what you see in most democracies.

So that’s the context in which to ask whether or not it makes sense to have a supermajority requirement for many Senate votes. I would say “no.” Even absent the filibuster, our system would still feature an unusually large number of veto points, especially when you take our unusually robust system of judicial review into account. The supermajority requirement is at odds with our basic democratic norms, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with an example of it ever actually being used to protect the interests of some kind of put-upon minority, and I see no empirical reason to think that our systematically larger number of veto points is producing systematically better results than you see elsewhere. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that the large number of veto points makes it easier for narrow interest groups to block public interest reforms.