Don't Take Anything From Republicans

So, the Republicans just spent a couple of weeks frenetically devoted to their strategy of forcing Obama and the Democrats to give them everything they've ever wanted through hostage-taking. It didn't go so well. They were never actually prepared to kill their hostage, Obama knew it, and when they could no longer maintain their willingness to do the deed without actually pulling the trigger, they caved. Completely and utterly. They got nothing. Well, they got something, extra "income verification" for the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out this just says that HHS needs to issue a couple of reports assuring people that there isn't much fraud going on. So, nothing. Republicans lose. It was a lot of fun, and it crushed the Republicans in the polls, though not far enough that they can't recover. In any event, we're back to more or less normal politics at this point, which means budget negotiations between the House Republicans and Obama.

And the Republican stance on how these negotiations should go is the same as it's ever been: Obama should just give them stuff in exchange for nothing. Not in exchange for not blowing up the economy, or for not shutting down the government; no, for now they've given up those bits of "leverage." Just for nothing. If Democrats want to get rid of the sequester, at least partially, they should replace it with... more spending cuts! Like, more in the sense of more new cuts than the sequester cuts being replaced. This, well, isn't going to work. They couldn't get concessions for nothing from Obama back when they had hostages. If this is their offer, it's really not hard for Obama to just say, um, no. And on we go, with our government so divided that nothing ever gets done except when there's a manufactured crisis. Or, as Matt Yglesias suggests, the Republicans could give the Democrats something, something other than tax increases on rich people, to sweeten the deal. Nah, that won't happen.

But is there anything that Democrats should take, if Republicans were to offer it? Specifically if Republicans offered it as part of a deal the other side of which was entitlement cuts. And entitlement cuts, mind you, suck. They're long-term, and they're deeply regressive distributionally. The basic Republican long-term agenda is that they want to keep rich people from having to pay taxes, and in order to do that they need to slash safety net spending. But that's wildly unpopular (oh, did I mention it's wildly unpopular?), and it would play right into people's entirely-accurate stereotypes of Republicans as heartless pro-rich-people bastards, so they can't do it unless they get Democratic support to cover themselves with. That's their core political goal. We should be extremely hesitant to give it to them. The thing on the other side would have to be extremely important, and it would have to be something we won't really be able to get any other way. Is there anything like that?


Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein, whom he's responding to, suggest it could be immigration reform. But I don't think that would be good enough, for a couple of reasons. Many Republicans kind of claim to favor it, at least in some form. That makes it a much less strong concession than it could be; it's not Republicans saying "we'll do something we don't like if you do something you don't like," it's them saying "we'll agree to get around to doing something we're ambivalent about if you do something you don't like." C'mon. Moreover, the political dynamic of immigration reform favors the Democrats pretty massively right now. As long as the Republicans keep blocking it, they keep alienating the Hispanic vote, especially since it's explicit that they're only blocking it to spite Obama at this point. That's a beautiful combination of callous and petty. And because of that pressure, combined with the fact that it's not as ideologically unacceptable to many Republicans as some things, I think immigration reform is the only real possibility for an actual piece of major legislation to pass this Congress not as part of some bigger deal. Maybe it won't, in which case we can just enjoy the damage that'll do to Republicans, but there's a non-zero chance the Democrats could just get this done by itself.

Another possibility that recommends itself is action on climate change. Of course, this isn't going to happen, because anti-environmentalism, by which I don't just mean indifference to ecological well-being in pursuit of economic growth but an actual gleeful joy at environmental degradation, is part of the whole conservative culture war mindset at this point. But it's really important, and if you put the culture war stuff to one side it would make a lot of sense. Carbon taxes are pretty regressive. Revenue-neutral tax reform one side of which was creating a hefty carbon tax and the other side of which was cuts to the income tax would disproportionately favor rich people. And the economic analysis is pretty unambiguous that it would boost economic growth a little bit. Business-type Republicans, in principle, should be able to get on board with that. And like I said, it's really important. To my mind, it is categorically more important than any other political issue right now. I'd take a trade of genuine progress on the climate for a genuinely worse construction of the federal budget any day of the week. But I don't think Democrats should accept a deal with Republicans where what they're getting is a carbon tax.

The reason is that we're already making progress on the climate. And by "we" I mean the Obama Administration, by executive action. Unilateral executive action, that Congress authorized back in 1970, and therefore that the current Congress doesn't get to do anything about. And the regulations the EPA put out earlier this year are pretty stringent. Now, there is some reason to think that carbon taxes are more economically efficient ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than these direct regulations, but it's pretty clear that if we're just worried about stopping the pollution itself, the regulations can do the job just fine. Replacing them with a carbon tax, therefore, is only a modest win for the next few years, if that. And yes, these executive actions depend pretty heavily on having a Democratic President, but the Republican outlook for 2016 isn't too pretty, and there are serious reasons to think that the way the Republican Party is going right now, it won't be able to win another Presidential election for a long time. If we do win the 2016 election, we'd be able to keep these regulations in place until 2021 at the earliest, by which time industry may have adjusted to them enough that they won't be as politically potent anymore. So while I would pretty much give away the store for a genuine improvement in climate policy, what's on the table isn't that. It's getting legislative permanence for what we're doing anyway, and will probably be able to keep doing anyway over the howls of Congressional Republicans for another decade, perhaps more, and maybe making modest improvements around the margins to the economic impact of these policies. That isn't worth giving away much of anything for.

And besides those two issues, I can't really think of that much I'd be interested in making a deal for. The 111th Congress did health care and financial regulation, not enough that there wouldn't be points in making further efforts but enough that there's no real reason to give the Republicans the thing they crave the most for those further efforts. Immigration reform we have every reason to simply demand Republicans cooperate on, and then rake them over hot coals when they refuse, and we're already able to do basically everything we want on climate change. What else is there? Genuine fiscal stimulus, I suppose, but they're not going to do that. The most we could get along those lines would be undoing the sequester, but avoiding some spending cuts now in exchange for much more spending cuts forever is just a crappy bargain. If I'm giving up something long-term, I want something long-term in return, and I just don't see any potential areas for Republicans to make an offer I would have any trouble refusing. So get ready for another fourteen-and-a-half months of sheer and utter gridlock, punctuated by the occasional manufactured crisis. May it bring the country to its senses and bring about the return of Speaker Pelosi on January 3rd, 2015.