Set a Precedent

I am basically fine with this tax-cuts deal. No, we can't pass a just-the-middle-class tax cut without Republican support; no, Republicans will not support that bill; therefore, realistically, the choice is between "cave on tax cuts, get some additional stimulus/anti-contraction now, and have a chance of passing stuff like DADT repeal etc." against "let all taxes rise and do nothing else for the rest of the lame duck session." I'll pick the former every time. But two points:

1. Let this be a lesson to us liberals: the filibuster must go. Any Senate Democrat who complains about this compromise and then votes against filibuster reform in January is an idiot; the only reason we didn't do the middle-class tax cuts, say, last year was that we need Republican support despite having 58 Senators. Go with Merkley's plan.

2. This would actually be a good occasion on which for liberals to genuinely play a little hardball. Why? Because it is the one issue in the entire world of issues where Republicans have an actual substantive desire. They really, really want to give rich people money. Like, really, really, really. So use that leverage. Have Bernie Sanders, whatever friends he can gather, and the CPC say basically the following:

"Hey, look, we'd be fine with letting everyone's taxes go up, if you can't do better than this. And we don't trust you to let us have our 50-margin votes on DADT and the DREAM Act anyway. So how about this: we'll let you have your tax cuts for the rich but only if we add in a few hundred billion in infrastructure spending, an even bigger payroll tax holiday, and we hold cloture votes on DADT and the DREAM Act before we'll agree to pass the bill."

What do Republicans do if the Democrats say this? Remember, they really want tax cuts for the rich; it's the only thing they care about. And Obama as much as said that he had to give in because the Democrats couldn't hold the line in Congress; he might very well support their efforts to make the deal even better. If Speaker Pelosi, backed by a lot of her caucus, and either 41 Senate Democrats or Harry Reid and a bunch of Senate Democrats would be willing to make that statement as above, I have trouble seeing the Republicans declining. After all, they don't actually give a damn about anything except cutting taxes for the rich. So why not take this opportunity to set a precedent: the liberals can play hardball, too.

On American Exceptionalism

Republicans like to talk about American exceptionalism. A lot. We're the greatest, strongest, freest country EVER!!! So sayeth Sean Hannity, repeatedly, and others mirror the sentiments. And they are horrified by the way that some people, say, a particular descendant of those we once held in slavery who is now first lady, have expressed the view that America, at least in the past, may not have been all that worth being proud of.

So, naturally, 52% of Republicans think America's "moral values" are "poor," the worst option on Gallup's excellent-good-fair-poor scale. Compared to just 35% of Democrats. Yeah, conservative love America, all right.

Historical Psephology

I've been spending my spare time of late, what little of it there is, compiling charts of complete U.S. Presidential election state-by-state history. The result of all of this is that I'm noticing some interesting patterns, in particular in the way states move relative to the national average. I expect that at some point, probably over next weekend when I'll have a little more free time, I'll have a bunch of posts out with some conclusions from that data. I think it's all really interesting. Some of it might even allow one to predict the relative standings of states in 2012, quite apart from the overall national popular vote.

Oh, and if I make predictions about the relative positioning of the states in 2012 using this as my evidence and I'm right, I am going to crow so much about it two years from now. Seriously.

Illusionary Discipline, an Anecdote

Apparently Mitch McConnell failed to get all his Republicans to refrain from objecting to motions to move forward on four votes on tax cuts, two Democratic ones extending tax cuts up to $250,000 and $1,000,000 respectively and two Republican ones that would extend all the tax cuts. McConnell thought he would actually be able to allow a unanimous consent agreement to work, for what feels like the first time in years. But no, some Republican objected.

Instead, Harry Reid is just filing cloture on the two Democratic proposals, and the Republican proposals can go to hell. See, this is what happens when you aren't the one holding the whip.

Maybe There Is An Eleventh Dimension?

There was recently much hyperventilating about Obama's announcement of a (desired) "pay freeze" of federal employees for two years. Reactions, predictable: Republicans liked it but said it didn't go far enough, Democrats (self included) said it was bad policy and, given that he made the concession unilaterally instead of in return for something, bad politics; and "centrist" Very Serious People praised it as the kind of tough choices and hardship-enduring we just need to do. As I said, I counted myself in the second group: giving people money is generally a good thing in a depressed economy, federal employees just as much as anyone else. And yeah, the politics were dumb, one way or another.

But wait! It turns out that this is not a moratorium on raises, just on the cost of living adjustment. Which is based on inflation, usually the CPI. Which is currently standing at... 0.6%. I.e. nothing. And it is, after all, trending downward. If that 0.6% annual inflation rate keeps up, then someone who started making $50,000 this year would, after strict COLA increases, make $50,300 next year and $50,601 the year after that. So we're talking about $901 out of $100,901 in salary, or a pay cut compared to the status quo of 0.9%. Sure, that's not great, but it's also virtually meaningless. And of course, if we hit deflation next year, which sure as hell seems likely, then the Cost of Living isn't going up anyway, so..... And there will still be raises, after all, and it wouldn't be shocking if those raises somewhat compensate for the 0.9% of non-paying that would otherwise maybe be going on.

So the eleventh dimension here is that maybe the policy isn't so much bad as just really, really trivial and pointless. In which case there isn't necessarily anything to get all that mad about, since Obama didn't "give away" anything worth holding on to, and it may have somewhat inoculated the federal workforce from further Republican attacks. It's a possibility.

ALSO, on another subject. To the left: stop concluding that Barack Obama will reach an unacceptable result before he does so. Y'all said this about health-care, remember? And it passed. Moreover, recognize that yeah, it sucks, but yeah, for the time being the Republicans have a veto over all legislation. "The time being" extends until at least January 2013. So don't blame Obama for his inability to run roughshod over them: he can't! In which case, the best result of the tax-cuts debate is a deal in which the giveaways to the rich are extended for the next two or three years and a bunch of other, much more important stuff, like unemployment benefits, START, DADT, and DREAM, get done in return. What we want him to do, given that he can't just make the Senate pass things, is cave on the tax cuts, in exchange for something good. Nothing he has yet said/done indicates that he doesn't get that fundamental dynamic, whereas much of what is said at Huffington Post and even, now, DailyKos does not get that fundamental dynamic. If he gives the tax cuts away for nothing, get back to me, and I'll start agreeing with you.

Filibusters

Mitch McConnell has just announced a blanket filibuster of everything and anything until and unless, one assumes, the Bush tax cuts are extended vote rich people. And he is going to have 47 Senators in his caucus come January, which means that he can lose a whole 6 Republicans and still block anything and everything. And he's been doing pretty damn well of late in an environment where he can lose a whole 0 Republicans and still succeed. So I think it's fair to say that he and his ilk have made it eminently clear that absolutely nothing Obama wants done will get done over the next two years.

Think about it. What do Republicans want? Health-care reform repealed. They can't get that, because Democrats control the Senate and Obama is still President. But what in the world is stopping them from saying, okay, until you repeal health-care reform, literally nothing will get done in the Senate. No substantive votes will be taken. Nothing. No confirmations, no treaties, no resolutions, no legislation, nothing. There is nothing stopping them from saying this, and there is no reason why they won't, given their current behavior.

Which makes things interesting. Jeff Merkley has a proposal to reform the filibuster, and it sounds good to me. He would ban filibusters on motions to begin debate, since, after all, the supposed point of the filibuster is to promote debate. And he wouldn't allow filibusters of amendments, since a robust and vigorous amendment process is also part of open debate. And he would also eliminate the practice of virtual filibusters, requiring an actual floor debate with at least 5 objecting members for the first day of the filibuster, 10 for the second say, and 20 from then on.

I have to say, I think this is brilliant. The point is that you cannot object to this as a power grab, since it would still be true that 41 Senators could block anything if at least 20 of them were just plain more committed than the majority, and you can't object to it in the grounds of turning the Senate into the House, abolishing the tradition of grand debates in the "world's greatest legislative chamber." In fact, the proposal would enhance (read: restore) that tradition by making the filibusterers actually debate. The only way to object is that Republicans don't actually want to stand up and filibuster things, because it would make them look somewhat bad, but they do want to still be able to defeat the will of 59, now 58, soon to be 53 Senators with only 41, now 42, soon to be 47 votes. So the only way to object to this is if what you want is for no one to be able to get anything done in the Senate as long as 41 people are opposed to it, and you don't want those 41 objectors to have to, you know, put in effort making it happen.

Needless to say, every Republican will oppose it. But the 53 Democrats? Might they realize that their chamber is quite simply deceased if they don't do something? Here's hoping.

UPDATE: This is also a good way to reconcile the behavior of the Democrats during the Bush years, when we filibustered some stuff, with opposition to the Republican practice under Obama, when they filibuster everything. The desired reconciliation is a filibuster rule that allows filibusters occasionally, on Big Important Things, when the minority party really really thinks that the majority party is overreaching/being unconstitutional/doing things so unpopular that it's worth obstructing it, but wouldn't allow routine obstruction of everything. This proposal would create an automatic institutional rule making that happen, since it would ultimately require something well over 20 Senators to be willing to actually, you know, filibuster in order to block something. It's a brilliant strategy.

The Game Theory of the Tea Party

Historically, party discipline is orders of magnitude stronger in Britain than in the United States. My theory is that the totality of the reason why this is so is that in Britain, the parties have plenary control over their nomination process (the central party just says who its candidates are in each constituency), while in the United States, we actually have open primaries in which voters can choose. The result is that it is possible for a candidate to win a primary without establishment support, and so legislators can worry a little bit less about maintaining the absolute support of their party's establishment.

Of course, this develops a self-perpetuating culture. Because everyone knows that in Britain party discipline is roughly-speaking absolute, in that the parties can simply refuse to renominate any MP they tire of, the voters know that they are not really voting for so-and-so, MP; they are voting for the party. Conversely, in the United States the party establishments realize that voters are actually voting for legislators, not parties, and that therefore they can win in unlikely places by nominating (which establishment support can often accomplish) a "maverick." So in the United States, we have a self-perpetuating political culture in which our Congressmen know that they can theoretically win re-election without establishment support and the establishment knows it has something to gain by supporting idiosyncratic candidates in unfavorable territory, and so we have "big tent" parties that often don't vote particularly cohesively. Of course, establishment support is usually essential to nomination (though not always), so in fact the parties' knowledge of the advantages of this 50-state-style strategy is what keeps our parties ideologically diverse.

But two recent developments on the Republican side are changing the game. The first is that the party has become convinced that its best strategy for future success is total opposition to the Obama Administration. The calculation is pretty simple: they think that they have enough power in the Congress to inflict substantial policy failures, especially economic ones, on the Obama Administration, and that the result of these policy failures, especially the continuing poor economy, will hurt Obama more than the appearance of obstructionism will hurt the Republicans. Given that Mitch McConnell only has 41 Republicans to work with (now 42), and needs 41 Republicans to be able to block Democratic policies, that means his caucus can't be very ideologically diverse and still make this strategy work. He can't lose a vote. A single vote. One, that's all it takes. And there are plenty of Republicans with incentives to be moderate in the Senate: Snowe, Collins, Brown, to start with, plus the retiring-and-usually-sensible Voinovich. And the number of Republicans who would naturally vote for, say, cap-&-trade, or a Romney-style health care bill, is much larger; they are, after all, Republican policies. So Mitch McConnell, if he wants to sustain his strategy of total opposition, needs really scary levels of party discipline. And I said earlier that massive party discipline requires establishment control of the nomination process, right?

Well, the second development is, of course, that the Republicans have lost control of their nomination process. To wit: in the 37 U.S. Senate elections, 8 featured a Republican nominee who was not the establishment choice, including two defeated incumbent Republican Senators. And only a handful of other Republican Senate primaries featured actual challenges to the establishment choice. And we can add in Arlen Specter, who was forced out of the party (!) by the threat of a successful primary challenge from an insurgent type. Of course, he was out of the party early enough that Pat Toomey became the establishment candidate long before the primary itself approached. So I think it's clear that the party establishment has no control of its nominations process. (By contrast, only two races featured an establishment Senate Democratic candidate losing the primary, Arlen Specter and Alvin Greene's surprise victory in the sleeper race of SC.)

So this ought to mean that McConnell lacks the discipline ability that he needs to pursue total obstruction with only 42 votes, right? After all, the party is completely out of control of its nominations, so Senators have no incentive to follow McConnell's dictates. And I speculated, back when Lady Gaga was trying to convince the Maine Senators to vote to repeal DADT, that in fact McConnell's discipline might be waning. Well, of course, McConnell's discipline of late has been a fearsome thing to behold: once-reasonable Senators like Ms. Snowe are now indistinguishable from Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn in their voting tendencies. Party discipline is in fact absolute. So what gives?

Well, of course, the answer is simple, and you probably already knew what it is. The Republican establishment has lost control of its nominations process to the Tea Party, which is if anything even more committed to total obstruction and zero compromise than the establishment is right now. So McConnell's fearsome discipline right now is really not McConnell's at all: it is the Tea Party's discipline, and it just so happens that the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell have the same interest in disciplining Senate Republicans right now. So for the moment, it looks like they're just running a good old-fashioned three-line whip on every single vote, and succeeding.

But the truth is somewhat different, because in fact the Republicans have lost control of their nomination process and that means that they can't steer their own ship. For now they are making the calculation that everything the Tea Party wants will benefit their party medium-term. But that could change; indeed, it is certain to change. At some point the GOP will have to realize that in a very good election year it is losing non-whites by 50%, and that if non-whites become 35% of the electorate, that makes them uncompetitive. Even before that, it may soon be true that in, for instance, Massachusetts or perhaps Maine, there is no overlap between what a Tea Party primary will nominate and what the general electorate will elect. In that case, forcing Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins to vote strict party-line will simply give us three shiny new Democrats, as Christine O'Donnell gave us a shiny new Democrat out of Delaware this past year. So at some point the Republicans might realize that just allowing the Tea Party to steer for them is no longer going to work.

And at that point, they are screwed. Really, massively screwed. I don't know when this screwedness will manifest itself; I don't know how it will manifest itself; I only know that they are in deep trouble in the long run.

Unfortunately, in the long run...