Tag: Polarization

Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Why ‘Fix the Debt’ Just Can’t Quit Paul Ryan

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I concur with Jonathan Chait here: “Fix the Debt” has lost its way, and does not look like it will ever be able to find it again. People funding it and working for it should be well advised to go and find something else more productive to do with their money and time…

Jonathan Chait: Why ‘Fix the Debt’ Just Can’t Quit Paul Ryan: “Last week, House Republicans released a plan for a gigantic, regressive tax cut…

…Since gigantic tax cuts increase the budget deficit, you would think an organization devoted to the singular mission of reducing the deficit would oppose it. But no. The anti-deficit lobby Fix the Debt released a statement of qualified praise, which I ridiculed. Fix the Debt responds with a new, brief defense of its position. What its argument actually reveals is its denial about the state of the Republican Party. Here is the relevant portion of Fix the Debt’s response:

We don’t endorse the plan, but we do welcome it because it puts tax reform on the agenda in Washington. It also moves in the right direction by eliminating or limiting many of the tax breaks that complicate the tax code and shrink the tax base. Tax reform should contribute to deficit reduction, and definitely not increase deficits. We hope that the new plan will spur discussion and bipartisan negotiation on reform that will simplify the tax code, make the country more competitive, and help to fix the debt.

The nub of the argument is that the Republican plan, while admittedly imperfect, ‘moves in the right direction.’ But if you define the right direction as reducing the debt, then the plan doesn’t move in the right direction. It moves in the wrong direction. The Republican plan is for massive cuts in tax rates, including the complete elimination of the estate tax. It is true that the proposal gestures vaguely in the direction of closing loopholes and expenditures, but it does not define what these would be. What’s more, the plan’s authors have made clear that the proposal will be a net tax cut.

So how can Fix the Debt claim that a plan to increase the debt can ‘help to fix the debt’? It can only be understood as an extension of the organization’s dysfunctional enabling relationship…. During President Obama’s first term, anti-deficit activists came up with a plan that they hoped would induce Republicans to abandon their fanatical opposition to higher tax revenue. First, they would get Democrats to support cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of the trade. And second, the higher revenue would come not in the form of tax-rate increases but instead by reducing loopholes and [tax] expenditures…. In reality, Republicans refused to go for this deal. They didn’t just refuse once. They refused time after time. In 2010, the Simpson-Bowles commission came up with a plan that traded revenue-increasing tax reform for cuts to retirement programs, and leading Republicans like Paul Ryan all rejected the deal. Then, in 2011, Obama tried to strike a similar bargain with House Republicans when they held the debt ceiling hostage, but they rejected it again. That standoff led to the creation of a ‘supercommittee’ that was tasked with creating another version of the revenue-increasing tax-reform-for-retirement-cuts deal, which predictably failed again. And then, when the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of 2012, the Obama administration hoped the pressure of an imminent tax increase would force Republicans to make some version of the deal, but once again they refused, instead using their leverage to minimize the tax hit on upper-income households…. The debt-hawk theory on how Republicans could be induced to give up their fanatical opposition to higher revenue failed….

Conceding that this is the Republican position would subvert Fix the Debt’s entire theory of change. So instead the group continues to reside in a fantasy world where the GOP can be coaxed into doing the thing it has proven extensively it won’t do. In this fantasy world, a Republican using the words ‘tax reform’ means a step toward ‘discussion’ and ‘bipartisan negotiation’ and, ultimately, a result that would be the precise opposite of what Republicans actually want to do.

Must-Read: Scott Lemieux: Why Did Obama Do so Well at the Supreme Court?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Scott Lemieux: Why Did Obama Do so Well at the Supreme Court?: “The last week of the Supreme Court’s last full term of the Obama era…

…was a microcosm of his administration’s relationship with the Roberts Court…. In a one-sentence opinion, the Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling that the president’s DAPA immigration program… was illegal, meaning that it will almost certainly not be implemented before President Obama leaves office. Still, the news… was good. A surprising majority opinion upheld the University of Texas’s affirmative action program, and a somewhat less surprising majority opinion struck down Texas’s draconian abortion statute…. Looking at the Supreme Court’s major decisions during the Obama administration as a whole, the story is similar. The last time a Democratic president successfully passed an ambitious progressive agenda with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, the result was a constitutional crisis…. [But] the Roberts Court left Obama’s domestic agenda mostly intact, while delivering the Democratic coalition some major victories it would not have been able to win any other way, most notably on abortion and LGBT rights.

One interpretation of the Court’s behavior is that it is isolated from the pressures that have caused the other institutions of American politics to become cripplingly polarized. This interpretation, however, is probably wrong. The relative moderation of the Roberts Court is likely the last gasp of the previous partisan order…. There have been plenty of… major conservative judicial victories during the Obama era, most notably the gutting of the most important civil rights statute since Reconstruction in the 2013 decision Shelby County…. Even worse than the result of the case was the shoddiness of Roberts’s opinion…. Since then, many Republican-controlled states have wasted little time passing discriminatory voting restrictions, undercutting the Court’s conclusion that the strong enforcement of the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary. While the Roberts Court has permitted the states to engage in a wide array of vote suppression tactics on the one hand, it has prevented state and federal governments from passing campaign finance restrictions on the other. And in lower-profile cases, the Court has consistently ruled against the interests of consumers and the rights of employees when interpreting federal law….

With the admittedly crucial exception of Sebelius, the liberal victories of the Roberts Court were due to one man: Anthony Kennedy…. Since early in the Nixon administration, the median vote on the Court on the most politically salient issues has been a Republican, but a moderate, country-club Republican: Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, and now Kennedy. The issue going forward is that this kind of Republican is rapidly going extinct…. Future Republican nominees are going to be in the mold of Samuel Alito and Roberts….

The Supreme Court has historically been a centrist institution… [because] elites—from whose ranks Supreme Court justices are generally chosen—tend to have less polarized views than ordinary members of the party…. A decade from now, the Supreme Court will almost certainly not be controlled by either a moderate Republican like Anthony Kennedy or a heterodox liberal like Byron White…. The median vote on the Court will almost certainly be a conservative in the mold of Alito or Roberts, or a liberal in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsburg…. This polarization is not symmetrical…. Alito is further to the right than Ginsburg is to the left…. Could anything stop the Court from becoming as polarized as the rest of the political order? If current party polarization persists, probably not…. In the short term… whether the Court will be controlled by a liberal Democratic faction or a conservative Republican one… means that the presidential and Senate elections in November will be high-stakes contests indeed.

Must-Read: Nancy LeTourneau: What Happens When One Party Doesn’t Care About Governing?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I want to play the bipartisan-technocrat policy game.

The old conventional wisdom was that playing that game was productive and fun. You see, members of the Senate and the House. Thus, and so the two houses–everybody in them–shared the goal of trying to arrange things so that they each looked good to their local constituents. And good technocratic policies were an effective move in that win-win–or mostly win-win–game.

But now? The political-economy and political-structural questions are:

  1. Has this changed–is the game now to make the president of the other party look bad?
  2. Did the game change with the Democrats under Richard Nixon–who was genuinely bad–and have Republicans just been playing tit-for-tat since?
  3. Did the game change with the accession of Newt Gingrich–and his strange and false belief that he would have a better and longer career as a partisan bomb thrower than as a statesman?
  4. Did the game change with George W. Bush–and his decision that Democratic members of the House and Senate who supported him on policy would not be cut any campaign fund-allocation breaks at election time?
  5. Did the game change with the election of a Black man?

And how do we get back–if we can get back? And do we want to get back?

These are all the questions that I wish political scientists were trying to answer for me. Yet few are–save Tom Mann, Norm Ornstein, Rick Perlstein, and a very few others…

Nancy LeTourneau: What Happens When One Party Doesn’t Care About Governing?: “Over the course of the Obama presidency, we’ve watched as Republicans have thrown out many of the norms…

…[Not] just things like shouting ‘You lie!’ in a presidential address… not just a requirement that basically any vote (including presidential nominations) get a super majority… includes… overtly undermining the executive branch during complex negotiations with other countries… failing to give a Supreme Court nominee a hearing… threatening to not raise the debt limit…. These are the kinds of things a party does when it doesn’t care about governing…. I am reminded of something a blogger named mistermix wrote back in 2010 during the height of the budget negotiations.

As Tim F. posted earlier, Ezra Klein thinks that Obama’s a bad poker player…. The analogy isn’t helpful. Poker is a win/lose game. Negotiation is a win/win game…. Republicans aren’t playing poker or negotiating. They are playing another game, call it ‘You Must Lose’. They’re happy with win/lose, if they win, but they’ll tolerate lose/lose as long as Obama loses. The only analogy that springs to mind when I look at the Republicans’ recent behavior is a bad divorce…. Bob is so hell-bent on hurting Lisa that he doesn’t care about their kids or their bank account. Bob will deploy a hundred variations on the same tactic: put the Lisa in a bind where she has to choose between damaging the children and losing money. Lisa will lose money almost every time in order to save the children….

That caught my eye because, as a former family therapist I know the analogy well…. It actually becomes calcified and intractable when both parents buy in–which ensures that everyone always loses. Think about that next time you hear a liberal suggest that Democrats should employ the same tactics as the Republicans…. Here is how Mike Lofgren described it back in 2011:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

So what are the Democrats’ options in a situation like this? First of all, they shouldn’t take the bait and join in a guaranteed lose-lose game….At some point, voters have to decide if it is in their interest to elect politicians who are simply using them as their pawns in a power game. I know that as a family therapist, when I saw that a divorce wars situation was intractable, I would eventually go to the kids to begin the process of empowering them to make good choices (luckily in my practice they were adolescents)….

The old conservative vs liberal arguments aren’t much in play this election. That is obvious in the presidential contest. But it is also true in House/Senate races…