Term Limits and Power

I'm reading a case for my Constitutional Law class about term limits. Well, it's not really about term limits; the term limits are really sort of incidental to the case, and it's really about whether states may impose restrictions on the members of Congress they elect. But the form of restriction in question is term limits, and the dissenters in the case, Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, Scalia, and O'Connor, argue that the majority, which strikes down Arkansas' term limits on Congressmen from Arkansas, were limiting the right of voters in choosing their representatives. They're wrong. Term limits do not enhance the power of the people to choose their representatives; in fact, the ability to impose term limits does not enhance the power of the people to choose their representatives. If 50%+1 of the people in a given constituency wish to impose a binding rule of term limits, they may do so, simply by exercising their constitutional right to not vote for the incumbant!!! It's very simple, really, you see. To suggest that de jure term limits are required to prevent entrenched incumbency is to suggest a certain weakness in the electorate, since they may at will impose a de facto term limit rule however they wish. If, in fact, voters do not impose such a rule, it can only be supposed that this is because they do not consider the drawbacks of entrenched incumbents to outweigh the benefits of seniority or the whimsy of partisanship or whatever. That constitutes a decision by the voters that keeping incumbents out is relatively unimportant to them. It is another thing altogether to suggest reforms of campaign finance or the Congressional mailings system or whatever that might prevent incumbents from hampering voters in their attempt to make an informed decision; those are good ideas. Perhaps even a reform of the primary system which can force a constituency to choose between an entrenched, corrupt incumbent in the party they like and a genuinely unpleasant challenger from the party they don't like. But to suggest that voters must be protected from their own desire to vote for someone who, really, wouldn't be good for them is to deny the very premise of democracy: the voters choose their representatives.

And for what it's worth, I do think that the campaign to install term limits (which has been surprisingly absent of late) is one with an undertone of voter powerlessness. There's nothing you can do, the system is too strong, we need to limit these abusive elites, we are told. But we have the power to limit those elites anyway, by voting them out, and term limits are a restriction only on the right of the voters to elect whomever they choose. Incumbent Congressmen have no right to be in the next Congress: that is a privilege that must be granted to them by the voters. Therefore the only right that term limits abridge is that of the voter. And I think the point of the push for term limits is not really to get a Constitutional Amendment limiting Congressional terms, which won't ever happen, but to reduce participation among the disaffected, since after all it's Republicans advocating for it anyway.

Confound it!

So, I was all set to use tomorrow's vote on defense authorization/DADT repeap/DREAM act (too many acronyms!) as a nice test case for my Republican Laffer curve hypothesis, which basically states that the GOP is trying to extract too much party discipline from its caucus and will eventually get diminishing returns, when a certain singer with an unfortunate penchant for perpetrating indignities upon animal corpses real and fake had to go and contaminate my data. Now, if Sens. Snowe and Collins, plus-or-minus Scott Brown, make the sensible vote in favor of the mildly-liberal policies, it will support only on of the two hypotheses:
1. The Republican Party discipline machine has become so ruthless that it is now impossible to conform adequately to the demands of primary voters and be elected in a state like Maine or Massachusetts, and these Senators are aware of this; or
2. Lady Gaga is the only force on earth that can make Republicans break a filibuster.
On the one hand, the political scientist in me much prefers the former, and since it was my idea I was looking forward to having a nice test case. On the other hand, if the latter, I suppose it's good information to have, and... may she use the power for good? In either event, though, my data have been confounded! (Though, of course, if these "moderate" Republicans continue to vote to please their Tea Party overlords, then we establish that a) Republican discipline knows no limits, and b) even Lady Gaga cannot stop the Tea Party. I'm not a fan of hers, but hell, I'd even root for the Yankees over the Tea Party.)

Unintended Consequences

Christine O'Donnell's win is reverberating around the world of Republican-dom, or so we're told. It makes sense. We had already seen that the Tea Party didn't particularly require an incumbent to be genuinely, you know, to the left of George W. Bush to run a primary challenge against them; the likes of Bob Bennett in Utah took care of that. But while Mike Castle was a genuine moderate, and thus didn't strengthen that case, his defeat did show that the Tea Partier need not be an even remotely decent candidate: O'Donnell is something of a tax cheat, and is one of these perennial loser type candidates. So now the conventional wisdom is, NO Republican incumbent is safe. Ever. From anything or anyone.

This is supposed to make Republican Senators more inclined to toe the party line. After all, even the slightest deviation might result in their being, for lack of a better word, teabagged (actually, no, there are plenty of better words, but it's the one the loonies use themselves, so whatever). But I'm wondering if there might be some unintended consequences at work here, and whether the looming spectre of the Tea Party might not loosen Republican discipline in the next Congress.

I've heard a report that Olympia Snowe will not seek re-election. I'm also hearing that Snowe, Voinovich, Collins, Lugar, and maybe more look to support the Defense Authorization Act, which includes a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and a piece of immigration reform called the DREAM Act. If the idea is that the DelaWTF? affair will have Tea Partified incumbent Senators, how is this possible? Maybe it's because they've overreached. The Tea Party had started behaving so irrationally that maybe some Republicans with reasonable tendencies are starting to figure that they can't placate them rationally. Something like 60% of Maine Republicans want to oust Snowe. She'd be better off electorally pulling the full Specter and becoming Sen. Snowe (D-ME). Will she get primaried? Yes. Is there anything she can do to avoid the challenge or placate her state's Tea Party? I don't think so. Does it, therefore, make sense for her to tack hard right? Nope. If she ever wants to be re-elected, what makes sense is to abandon the charade of taking the GOP whip and tack left, or at least back to the good ol' center. Maybe become an Independent, like Jeffords (and if any state could elect an independent Senator, it's Maine, and the Senator would be Ms. Snowe). Maybe become a Democrat: I'd say, let's make her a committee chair! But her future does not lie with a Republican primary electorate, and it never will, so she has zero incentive to toe the party line.

The same goes for some other Republicans with a genuinely moderate record, though to be fair the only other one is really Collins. But there might be others who, at this point, might not be favored to win a primary; I doubt Voinovich could at this point, and maybe not Scott Brown either. So if you start seeing the Republican discipline shatter, especially if they have a disappointing midterm, this might be one explanation for why.

A Thought On The Enthusiasm Gap

We're told that the enthusiasm gap this year is historically large, in either direction, right? Well, this might be grasping at straws, we'll know after election day, but it strikes me that if this is an historically large enthusiasm gap, something qualitatively different might be going on. It might not be just a stronger version of the same phenomenon as 2006-08 for Democrats, 1994 for Republicans, or whatever. And if it is something different, then maybe it won't have a result that matches linearly what you would expect from the ordinary effects of enthusiasm. I don't know exactly what the mechanism for that would be; I think Democratic enthusiasm is pretty high and Republican enthusiasm is just off the charts, so maybe there's some element of diminishing returns there, or whatever. But the point is, the very fact that this measurement is *so* unusual might be an indicator that the usual rules aren't applying. We'll see, in the wee hours of November 4th.

Revised Senate Math

Just a little update on the utterly post-primary election season. There are 40 Democratic continuing Senators. I consider Democrats likely to win the following races in the fall: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, New York, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada. Of those, given the new Republicans in DE and NH, only Washington, California, and Nevada are conventionally considered toss-ups: Reid isn't losing, I don't buy Rossi taking out Murray, and quite honestly I've never been sold on Fiorina beating Whitman. That is thirteen races, which would leave us with 53 nominal Democratic Senators. And then we have Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Colorado still left. Frankly, the only one of these races that we're leading now is Wisconsin, and I hope to god Russ Feingold doesn't lose. But I doubt Mark Kirk survives in Illinois; he's a dreadfully weak candidate. And that gets us up to 55, with six races left that are reasonably in play. Now we're not talking about a Republican wave: we're talking about the Democrats doing a damned good job holding their own in a tough environment. And suppose things do genuinely improve a little, and we win three of those remaining six races: that's 58, for a net loss of... one seat. Which would be a pretty effing huge victory. Things may change, my friend, around about the thirteenth... or fourteenth, as the case may be!

Reading 1790s Congressmen Argue In Favor of Slavery...

makes me sick. "The other parts of the Continent may bear them down by force of arms, but they [Southerners] will never suffer themselves to be divested of their property without a struggle." - James Jackson, (Anti-Federalist-GA) So much horribleness. What the hell was wrong with these people? I can't even begin, really, to voice the outrage, even in the privacy of my own mind. There just aren't words. It's just truly nauseating.

Addendum to Senate Math

I took a look at the 538 projections for margins of victory in the various Senate contests. If you assume that the most likely candidates win all their primaries, which mainly means Delaware and New Hampshire, then the 50th seat, the way things currently stand, is California: in other words, if Democrats win California and all races currently looking better than California, they'd have 50 seats. We're leading California by 1 point. The 60th seat is New Hampshire, which we're trailing by 7 points, assuming Ayotte is the nominee. If we win all seats we're leading, that's only 51. A 3-point uniform national shift toward the Democrats, however, would leave us with 54 seats. And a 9-point shift would give us 62 seats; I know that isn't going to happen, I'm just sayin'. By contrast, a 9-point further shift to the Republicans would give them just 52 seats; they're currently projected to win 49. So they're really, really close to tapped out: the only marginally close races we're leading are Wisconsin, California, and Nevada. To win 56 seats, which is right about where I figure Democrats would need to be to have a good chance of governing next Congress (by ditching the filibuster), we'd need to win North Carolina, which is currently -6.

Now, what if Delaware and New Hampshire give us some nice surprises with their nominees? If we replace Castle with O'Donnell, and Ayotte with Lamontagne, each of those races becomes a genuine Democratic advantage. And now the math is different: the 50th seat becomes New Hampshire, +4, instead of California, +1. We'd be leading 53 seats. Only a three-point swing would be required for 56 votes, and only a 7-point swing for 60 votes. So those two states' Republican primaries will make a big, big difference in the math for this upcoming Senate race. If the Tea Party wants to make the Democrats' math a hell of a lot easier, they can be my guest!

Senate Math

So, I'm looking at 538's Senate projection map, and trying to supplement it with some subjective intuition. Democrats have 40 "continuing" Senators, so we need 10 from this election to retain a de jure majority, 20 to take back a 60-vote majority, and something in-between to have a decent chance of abolishing the filibuster come January. I count the following very likely Democratic wins: NY, NY, HI, VT, CT, MD, OR, WV. That makes 8, so Republicans would have to go 24-25 in the other races to win a majority. I count the following very plausible Democratic wins: WA, CA, NV, WI, IL, NH*, DE*, FL*. (*Both get a lot easier with a favorable primary result. I think Ayotte is beatable anyway, as the only post-Palin-endorsement non-Rasmussen poll had her up only 3 points. In Florida, I count Crist as a Democrat.) That's another eight. Then there are the somewhat less likely wins: CO, MO, OH, PA, NC, KY, and if I'm being generous, LA, though I'm skeptical there. That's another six genuine second-tier victory opportunities. Now, being quite honest, I think the Democrats will win WA, CA, NV, and IL. I've learned not to underestimate teabaggers, and a tea party win in NH or DE gives us +1 seats there. So the point is, we have, realistically, an absolute floor of 48 seats, and eight further seats where we have a very good chance of winning, and then another six seats where we have a non-negligible chance of winning. So that's 48-56-62, between definites, realistics, and possibles. I don't think that's such a bad landscape. There are, as there were a few months ago, a ton of races that Republicans are leading, but tenuously, and fewer such races where Democrats hold a marginal lead. So that leads me to think that things are really, really close to having become maximally bad, and that a slight shift toward the Democrats would shift things a whole frickin' lot.

Never Let The Data Get In Your Way

I saw the headline "Fewer Young Voters Identifying as Democrats" sprawled across the Huffington Post, and clicked on the article. Here is that article. And I scrolled down, reading the discussion of how fewer and fewer college-age voters were favoring the Democrats, presumably because of the economy. But look at the graph. There was a dramatic plunge in youth Democratic identification... between June of 2008 and late last year. Since then, the Democratic advantage among the young has rebounded considerably, by maybe five to ten net points. I saw a story about falling Dem. youth advantage several months ago, when the original plunge occurred. But it makes no sense to have this article now: if they were being honest, they'd say that the Democrats have gotten a bit of their act together with the young. And note that among the non-young, i.e. pre-1981 births, the Republicans have taken an advantage for the first time all decade (though pre-1981 voters made up a smaller proportion earlier in the decade), so the Democrats have been doing really great among the young relative to their performance among the not young. So they're just blithely pushing their narrative, despite the fact that the evidence directly contradicts it. Fail, New York Times.

Judeo-Christian

I recently happened to stumble across a New York Times piece in which David Brooks and Gail Collins debated what the Tea Partiers are so mad about. In it, David Brooks, defending them (relatively speaking, since he claims not to be a fan of the Beckheads), claimed that they just want the country to return to its Judeo-Christian ethos. He said it like it was perfectly reasonable, and not at all a form of racism or xenophobia or bigotry.

Well, sorry, Mr. Brooks, but some of us don't like the idea of a "Judeo-Christian ethos." In fact, for some of us, the idea of instituting such a principle in this country is one of the things we *least* like about the Tea Party. If you listen to Markos Moulitsas' description of what he means when he calls the current far-right in this country the "American Taliban," he means specifically that they want to enforce religious doctrines on their society, like the Taliban. It's a subset of bigotry: only about 77.2% of American adults say they are either Christian or Jewish, and if I were to be generous and include the other religious group that worships the same god and considers itself to be in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Islam, the number grows only to 77.8. And the other 22.2%, including the 15.0% of American adults who report themselves as "None," aren't necessarily okay with considering various supposedly desirable personality traits like a good work ethic or thriftiness or whatever to be "Judeo-Christian." And that appears to be something that David Brooks just isn't willing to admit as reasonable. We're a pluralistic society, and one that officially, right there in the very first part of the very first Amendment, denounces official state religions. Most of the Founding Fathers were deists anyway, which isn't exactly traditional Judeo-Christianity. So this is juts a load of bull, and a backhanded attempt to vindicate the true goals of these American theocrats. I'm not having it.