Matt Yglesias

Endgame

By Ryan McNeely

Can’t nobody stop the juice so baby tell me what’s the use?

– Michele Bachmann lays out the GOP agenda if they re-take the majority: “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

– Daily Caller confirms that it will not give its readers access to the source material of its reporting.

– Tough talk from Tim Dickinson on the death of the climate bill.

– Sharron Angle calls a press conference and then refuses to answer any questions from the press.

– The lesson of Blanche Lincoln’s doomed Senate campaign.

– Public option opponents have to continue to deal with the pesky fact that it’s good policy.

– Old Man and the Sea and To Kill a Mockingbird, fine. But something like Portrait of the Artist would not be materially different from prison.

Nelly, “Hot in Herre.”

Civil Disobedience

I was at a climate change panel this morning which featured wide-ranging discussion of a number of important issues. But one thing that frustrated me was that after moderator Amanda Terkel raised the issue of “civil disobedience” the panelists commenced a discussion that was focused on the idea of “protests.” That sort of makes it sound like the famed civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement consisted of earnest and well-meaning protestors standing outside segregated lunch counters holding signs about the moral wrongness of such rules.

This is, of course, wrong. There were protests and sign-holdings associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but the core of that era’s civil disobedience was, well, civil disobedience. People actually going and doing illegal stuff and forcing the authorities to come out and stop them. The idea was to (a) demonstrate the extreme depth of the commitment the activists possessed, (b) dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow in a visceral way, and (c) create an atmosphere of social crisis such that fence-sitters could no longer say “well, this just isn’t a good time to address these issues.” The movement was causing trouble, and would have to be dealt with by either crushing it with repression or else addressing its concerns.

I’m not certain that an equivalent strategy would be useful or appropriate for the climate change issue. But I think it’s at least worth thinking about. And it would entail doing something very different from simply organizing legal rallies and marches or staged phony arrests.

The Change We Need

Here’s Joe Gagnon on what the Fed could and should be doing to boost the national economy. I don’t share 100 percent of Gagnon’s confidence that this would work, but even if it didn’t work the downside risk is essentially zero. If it somehow “worked too well” and the price level became unduly elevated, you could just turn around in the other direction.

And here’s Scott Sumner with much the same points. Paul Krugman has more.

It’s very disappointing to me that we’re not hearing more about this from politicians and political pressure groups. Every progressive organization and politician I’m aware of is currently focused on the need for jobs. But virtually none of them are focused on these kinds of measures even though they provide the most practical path forward given the gridlock of the legislature and the fact that the monetary authorities “move last” in the fiscal-monetary dance anyway.

The Gingrich Plan for al-Qaeda Victory

I think the ethical wrongness of Newt Gingrich plan for the United States to deliberately imitate Saudi Arabia’s lack of religious freedom and begin explicit discrimination against American Muslims is plenty of reason to condemn it. But it is worth highlighting the catastrophic national security implications of these ideas.

Consider al-Qaeda—a relatively tiny and not especially terrifying group of people. And yet, they are able to wreak considerable havok, kill people, and disrupt free societies. This is bad. In the future, we would like to reduce the threat they pose by isolating these people and neutralizing them. They, in contrast, would like to mobilize the world’s vast Muslim population in a grand ideological battle with liberal societies. Under the circumstances, it is absolutely crucial that we bend over backwards—as even George W Bush tended to recognize—to avoid framing 9/11 as part and parcel of some broad American conflict with Muslim peoples or the Islamic religion. Our framing is that America is a diverse, pluralistic, free, and open society that we are determined to revenge. Our theory is that liberalism is an political system that can accommodate a wide array of people and faiths. To abandon that theory is as repugnant as it is foolish.

Indeed, as Jamelle Bouie observes this has been part of our strategic concept since as far back as the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

In most respects, of course, the United States has become a much more tolerant and open-minded place since the late-18th century. But Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and others are carving out an exception.

Heritage Inaction for America

By Ryan McNeely

This is very inside-the-beltway, but the Heritage Foundation recently incorporated a 501(c)(4) organization — Heritage Action for America — presumably as a right-leaning counter to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which hosts this blog.

Here are the four things that Heritage Action has used as its launch issues to mobilize conservatives to act:

Take Action: Big-government global warming legislation will destroy jobs and weaken the American economy.  Tell your Senators to reject any energy legislation that would harm the economy.

Take Action: Senators cannot fulfill their constitutional duty of “Advice and Consent” with incomplete information.  Tell the Senators on the Judiciary Committee to delay a vote on Kagan’s confirmation until they have received and evaluated all the relevant documents.

Take Action Now: In June, Congressman Steve King of Iowa filed a petition that would force the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on repealing Obamacare.  We must repeal Obamacare, now!  Tell your Member of Congress to sign the petition to repeal Obamacare.

Take Action Now: Senators must know that America should not enter into a treaty that weakens our defensive capabilities and sovereignty.  We need to stop the New START Treaty, now!  Sign the petitionto make your voices heard.

The only thing on this list that remotely resembles an affirmative agenda item — barely — is to “repeal Obamacare,” which is unpopular and will not happen. And this is from a “think tank”! The list simply represents a stalwart defense of the status quo and an embodiment of the “party of ‘No’” philosophy. I understand that conservatives are currently out of power, so they can’t set the agenda, but maybe just promoting a single idea would help assuage fears that the conservative movement is not ready to govern?

Opposition in Search of a Rationale

By Ryan McNeely

Last April, President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which provides for mutual reductions in redundant strategic nuclear arms. It’s a major accomplishment, and while Cold War-era nuclear concerns have lost the sexiness they once had, this treaty smartly goes right to the heart of the issue of terrorists potentially obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The problem is that even though the treaty is not a significant departure from the old START (which President Reagan negotiated, George H.W. Bush signed, and the Senate ratified with a vote of 93-6), and even though it’s unanimously supported by military and security experts, some conservatives are casting about for any reason to oppose ratification simply to hand a defeat to the Obama administration. It’s politics of the worst sort.

I wanted to draw attention to comments made by former Sen. Tom Daschle at CAP, who rightly argues that this line — the line of legitimate issue-based opposition vs. simple partisan posturing — is a line that “conservatives in elected office are close to crossing in an institutionalized fashion in their desire to retake power.” He also explained that those who claim to be most “hawkish” on Iran continue to take steps that actually increase the likelihood of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon:

The administration also won sanctions from the U.N. Security Council against Iran directed at halting that country’s nuclear weapons program. Daschle and Cirincione agreed that ratifying New START was critical to maintaining international pressure on Tehran. Failure to ratify to the treaty would, they argued, lead to doubts among our allies about our commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation and strengthen Iran’s position.

“American credibility on nuclear issues would evaporate,” Daschle said, adding that problems might not be limited to Iran in the long term. “Countries belonging to the NPT would ask a very simple question: ‘If the U.S. is unwilling to live up to its commitments, why should we live up to ours?’”

I happen to think Mitt Romney’s amateur, uninformed op-ed in the Washington Post – see Fred Kaplan’s takedown here and Sen. Lugar’s comments here – ought to seriously cripple his presidential chances. But, he’s clearly concluded that Republican primary voters may actually reward the attempt to hand President Obama a defeat at literally any cost.

A Paper About Nothing

Getty images

By Ryan McNeely

Avinash Dixit (Princeton Professor, emeritus) has published a charming paper examining the economics of “The Sponge” episode of Seinfeld, where the contraceptive sponge is being taken off the market and Elaine is suddenly confronted with a finite supply of sponges. Dixit explains that “Every time she dates a new man, which happens very frequently, she has to consider a new issue: Is he “spongeworthy”? The purpose of this article is to quantify this concept of spongeworthiness.” The paper is extremely technical, but uses familar concepts and pop culture references to explain quantitatively rigorous economic decision-making functions. And here I think we can learn another lesson:

The idea for the research came about as Prof. Dixit, a fan of the show, recently caught a rerun of the sponge episode. The author of “Investment Under Uncertainty” decided to draft his paper and showed it to a few colleagues. He held off on releasing it, but since publishing it on his site says the reaction has been “entirely favorable.” Traffic on his site indicates that since he published the Seinfeld paper last month, it has been downloaded “100 times more than any of my serious work.”

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I had never read one of Prof. Dixit’s papers until now, and I’m a student studying economics and public policy at the school where he taught. More academics should in fact incorporate references to real-world or fictional examples of the phenomena they are describing in order to enhance the interest and effectiveness of their work. Note that Dixit did not “dumb down” any of the actual economic modeling in his paper, he simply explained the models succinctly using an episode of Seinfeld.

Deep down, Dixit understands the inaccessibility of most academic work: “Sometimes, I sit and read all these academic papers…They can be extremely long, 70 pages or more. I sit there, and I think of Elaine when she was watching ‘The English Patient’ and she just busts out that it’s too long. Sometimes, I can relate.” I’m glad Dixit overcame his initial hesitancy to publish a paper that would appeal to a mass audience, because now I’ve learned something. People can’t learn from a paper if they don’t read it.

It’s Getting Hot in Here

Another excellent column from David Leonhardt. I’ll just leave you with this scary excerpt: “According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.”

The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would constitute a decent start on grappling with this problem. And you can easily imagine 50 Senators voting for such a bill as well. But you really can’t imagine 60 Senators voting for such a bill at this point. Instead, we’re hoping that maybe—just maybe—it’ll be possible to scrap something together that at least moves forward rather than backwards. It’s a sad time and a great moral failing on the part of many of the political and economic elites in the United States.

My Dialogue With Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller

I’m mentioned in Jonathan Strong’s latest exposé on how liberal pundits have liberal views on politics, with today’s edition dedicated to revealing that liberals don’t like Sarah Palin. Since Strong writes about one of my emails, you might wonder why he didn’t reach out to me for comment. The answer is that Strong actually did reach out to me for comment, and I offered to comment, but then he simply dropped the thread of our dialogue. So in the spirit of reprinting people’s emails, here goes.

On July 21 at 8:41 AM Eastern, I sent him an email with the subject line “Another day, another lack of primary source documentation”:

I wrote you about this yesterday, but I continue to be curious as to why it is that you’re writing this series of stories based on misleading descriptions of excerpts of JournoList emails where you don’t post the full text of the emails online anywhere.

best,

Matthew Yglesias

Then at 4:07 PM Eastern, Strong finally replied:

Mathew,

I was hoping to chat with you for a few minutes this afternoon regarding Journolist. If you could call me at 202-506-2027, I would appreciate it.

Best,

Jonathan Strong

So at 4:18 PM Eastern, I wrote back:

I’m on a flight to Las Vegas right now, so it’s not a good time to talk, but I can answer emails.

Then he replied at 4:30 PM:

ok.

The day McCain picked Palin, you started a new thread with the subject, “The line on Palin”.

The post said, “John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern.”

This thread came in the midst of many threads that discussed which attacks would work best politically on Palin.

What did you mean with the words, “The line on Palin”? Like, the best line to use? Your line? A line you found insightful?

And at 5:02 PM, I responded:

Before I answer, I’d be curious as to whether with this next story you plan to publish the full texts of the emails you’re reporting on or is this going to be another set of misleading paraphrases?

Sent from my iPad

Strong didn’t reply. Which is too bad, since I think his story could have been enhanced by me answering his question. And I really don’t know what harm it would have done him to tell me in advance that this would be another article that’s curiously lacking in primary source documentation. Both Strong’s lack of interest in releasing his full primary sources and his lack of interest in getting commentary from me speak, I think, to the nature of his operation.

As for my email, I think all one has to understand is that during the 2008 campaign season my blog, as a publication, was operating under various restrictions related to our 501(c)4 tax status, to our then-current understanding of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (since modified by the Citizens United decision), and by CAP/AF internal policies. Consequently, I had some opinions relevant to the campaign that were not fit for publication on the blog and that I voiced in other venues, including emails to people. One such opinion was that the selection of Sarah Palin was an irresponsible and politically motivated act. I thought—and continue to think—that the line Strong quoted is a reasonably pithy formulation of the point. I also think the basic idea is and was extremely widespread, and while I’d be happy to take credit for persuading progressive America writ large to run with the idea, it’s actually quite obvious. Palin, as it turns out, was ultimately something like the most politically damaging VP pick of all time so obviously McCain’s political gambit didn’t work out. Still, an irresponsible political gambit is what it was.

Can Anyone Play This Game?

Macroeconomic Advisors on yesterday’s monetary policy oversight hearings: “On policy, [Bernanke's] discussion seemed even less balanced than that of the minutes. It was as if he was a bit out with touch of the Committee too! The oversight committee once again mostly passed on the opportunity to pose probing questions on the conduct of monetary policy. Sadly, only 14 percent of the questions were on monetary policy.”

I think the joyous benefits of the independent central bank are failing to materialize and in Europe and Japan things are even worse. But nothing about the United States Congress inspires faith in their ability to handle this either. Only 14 percent! At the monetary policy hearing!

Newt Gingrich Calls On United States to Adopt Saudi Arabian Standards of Religious Freedom

What an odd and repellent man:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Why on earth would we adopt this standard? There are no synagogues in the Vatican City, and yet we have Catholic churches all over the place. That’s because the United States of America isn’t a small city-state run by a religious leader. In Denmark, they have a state-sponsored church, but we don’t have a state-sponsored church because in the United States we have a strong belief in a brand of religious pluralism that’s served both the country and religion well. Saudi Arabia is notorious for its lack of freedom of religion, but we don’t improve anything by mimicking Saudi Arabia’s flaws.

One gets the sense that Gingrich’s reasoning is so weak here because he actually has no idea why it would make sense to prevent mosque-construction in Lower Manhattan. He just knows that this has become a far-right cause celebre and he likes to ride the far-right wave. If the far-right wants anti-Muslim bigotry, then he’ll provide it. But he’s an “ideas guy” so he has to try to think up a reason.

“Opportunistic Disinflation”

Via Scott Sumner, Paul McCulley discusses the strange theory of “opportunistic disinflation” that was bandied about in Fed circles in the late 1980s:

Simply put, the theory said, the Fed should not deliberately induce recessions to reduce inflation, but rather “opportunistically” welcome recessions when they inevitably happen, bringing cyclical disinflationary dividends. A corollary of this thesis was that the Fed should pre-emptively tighten in recoveries, on leading indicators of rising inflation, rather than rising inflation itself, so as to “lock-in” the cyclical disinflationary gains wrought by recession. While the label “opportunistic disinflation” was a clever one, the Fed had actually been practicing the policy for a long time. Indeed, former Philadelphia Fed President Edward Boehne elegantly described the approach at a FOMC meeting in late 1989:

“Now, sooner or later, we will have a recession. I don’t think anybody around the table wants a recession or is seeking one, but sooner or later we will have one. If in that recession we took advantage of the anti-inflation (impetus) and we got inflation down from 41/2 percent to 3 percent, and then in the next expansion we were able to keep inflation from accelerating, sooner or later there will be another recession out there. And so, if we could bring inflation down from cycle to cycle just as we let it build up from cycle to cycle, that would be considerable progress over what we’ve done in other periods in history.”

In other words, maybe the Fed isn’t undershooting its 2 percent inflation target. Maybe it’s secretly decided that it dreams of reducing the 2 percent target to a 1 percent target and wants the labor market to remain anemic until this curve drops even lower. Sumner notes that the phenomenon of the “jobless recovery” starts occurring at precisely the moment when the Fed adopts this doctrine.

The Shame of the Daily Caller

I’d encourage everyone to read this Ann Althouse post on today’s bogus Daily Caller story about JournoList. Her bottom line: “The Daily Caller’s article is weak. And I’m inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.”

What’s maddening about this whole issue is that of course it’s impossible to prove a negative. The closest one can come, however, is reasonable inference. The Caller appears to have access to a very large proportion of JournoList emails and they can’t come up with anything that withstands cursory scrutiny. Nor are they willing to simply publish the full text of the pilfered emails they’re writing about, forcing their audience to instead rely on Jonathan Strong’s deliberately misleading writeups.

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct—and Andrew Breitbart’s—for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.

Clark County Parking Regulations

It will come as no surprise to learn that Las Vegas, Nevada is not a model of sustainable urban planning. After all, this is a giant city in the middle of the desert where nobody should have ever put a city. But it’s always fun to look at the parking regulations of a new place, since this is a form of big government activism that nobody ever talks about even though there’s no cogent argument that it’s necessary to curb any kind of negative externality. Thus we learn in the parking regulations (PDF) that a Clark County apartment building must contain at least 1.25 parking spaces for every one bedroom unit.

There’s also this provision, apparently designed to encourage drunk driving:

Of course once a given metro area is built with utter car-dependence in mind, it makes perfect sense for developers to build future projects that assume utterly car-dependent clients. Consequently, these kind of regulations can come to seem like not such a big deal. But from another view that’s all the more reason to think we can get by without these regulations. In a place like Las Vegas the market almost certainly would provide ample parking. But if some particular group of people happen to think they could get by with less parking, why should the government tell them otherwise? What public purpose is being advanced?

How Bad is the DC Metro?

By Ryan McNeely

Last night on Twitter, Tyler Cowen asked why the D.C. Metro was so bad. Matt jumped to Metro’s defense, arguing that while the D.C. system is not up to European standards like Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems, it is the “second best” system in the U.S. after New York City’s subway system.

For comparison, here’s the average weekday ridership per mile of the four largest metro systems in the U.S. (while D.C. has the second highest overall ridership, its “per mile” ridership is diluted because it goes far our into the suburbs):

Now, what makes for a good metro? Well, cost for one. New York and Chicago have a flat-rate fare of $2.25 for a single trip, while it looks like Boston costs a maximum of $2.00 with several discount options. D.C., by comparison, has fares ranging from $1.75 to $4.60 (!), and you somewhat annoyingly need to swipe at the beginning and end of the trip because the fare is based on distance — though I suppose an argument can be made that it’s prudent to charge suburban commuters more than the urbanities. What about service? Well NYC runs 24/7, and Chicago’s busiest lines run 24/7 with some others closing around 1:00am. Boston and D.C. seem very similar, with stations closing between 12:30 and 1:00am on weeknights. Then there’s the matter of fatalities — I only did a cursory search, but I don’t think NYC, Chicago, or Boston has had any fatalities involving passengers in trains since 1990. Meanwhile, eight passengers died in the horrible D.C. Red Line accident last year, and there have been many other close calls (an investigation concluded that a 2004 accident at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan stop would have killed at least 79 people if one of the trains involved had not been empty).

So, I think a case can be made using these few metrics that the D.C. metro is actually the worst of the biggest four in the U.S. But, still, I really enjoy it. I find the staff to be generally friendlier than the New York staff, which is difficult given the constant delays (yet another downside of the D.C. metro, but it’s hard to find comparables). I also think the curved vaulted ceilings are beautiful and make the underground feel much less claustrophobic, and the “no food or drink” policy really does contribute to the Metro’s very impressive cleanliness. Overall, the evidence is mixed, but I don’t think the ever-present D.C. Metro haters have conclusively made their case that the system sucks in the domestic context.

Surveying the Troops

With the Pentagon prepping to survey America’s soldiers about how they feel about allowing their gay colleagues to have equal rights, my colleague Igor Volsky took a trip to the National Archives to examine the last time they attempted this charade:

Today [i.e., yesterday], I traveled to the National Archives and recovered some of the surveys the military conducted about the troops’ attitudes towards black people between 1942 and 1946. At the time, the military — along with the overwhelming majority of the country — opposed integrating black servicemembers into the forces and preferred a ’separate but equal’ approach that would have required the military to construct separate recreation spaces and facilities. One month before Truman’s order, a Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults endorsed the separation of Blacks and Whites in the military; only 26% supported integration.

These surveys show that the same attitude pervaded the military: 3/4 Air Force men favored separate training schools, combat, and ground crews and 85% of white soldiers thought it was a good idea to have separate service clubs in army camps:

Sometimes you’ve got to do the right thing.

Cynicism and Intellectual Dishonesty

By Ryan McNeely

Yesterday, Republican Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) was apparently “livid” on Capitol Hill, speaking with reporters while Democrats met to discuss their next step towards getting an energy bill through the Senate. Voinovich complained that since, in his opinion, there’s virtually no chance of passing such a bill before the November elections, even having the meeting at all was “cynical”:

“Anybody that has been in the Senate for any period of time knows there is no way, no way, that an energy bill is going to get done between now and the election or for that matter between now and the end of this year,” Voinovich told reporters. “This whole thing is very cynical.”

“Give me a break. This is just going through the motions, maybe to satisfy some people in your conference, but don’t kid us about we’re going to come forward with this thing and it’s going to be serious,” Voinovich said. “Anybody that’s being intellectually honest has got to say we do not have the time to do anything meaningful at this time in regards to climate change.”

The first thing to say is that unfortunately Voinovich may be technically correct that there isn’t time to “do anything meaningful” about climate change as the entire Congress gears up for election season. Certainly Senate Democrats could have pursued climate legislation before health care reform and financial regulation, but then one wonders if there would have been time to accomplish those other priorities. But the question is why is there insufficient time to deal with the most important issues facing the country?

The answer is the systematic Republican campaign to object, obstruct, delay, and filibuster every aspect of Senate business. And George Voinovich fully participated in this effort to run out the clock on the 111th Congress. Does George Voinovich believe that tackling climate change is important? If so, he could have declined to join his colleagues in filibustering the unemployment insurance extension over and over and over knowing full well that — eventually — the Democrats would be able replace their deceased caucus member and break the filibuster. Even if Voinovich doesn’t support extending the benefits (something he has voted for in the past), he could have simply declined to filibuster. But instead, Voinovich decided to go “through the motions, maybe to satisfy some people in [his] conference,” and cynically grind the Senate to a halt.

Housing Policy and the Housing Bubble

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but while it’s true that there are a lot of problems with American housing policy and also that we’re currently having a lot of problems associated with a collapse in real estate prices, I think the connection between those two facts is a bit incidental. Barry Ritholz has a smart post that makes the case for the basic irrelevance of idiosyncratic features of the American property market:

Or simply within the American context, note that we treat owner-occupied housing and commercial real estate quite differently but they had a similar price trajectory. The reason the details of housing policy don’t matter, it seems to me, is that our policy errors tended to affect the level of real estate prices whereas the relevant factors in prompting the recession had to do with unsustainable trends. Both sets of problems should be fixed, and it’s good that the recession has increased attention to the misallocation of resources involved in large covert subsidies for owner-occupied housing, but they’re pretty much separate issues as far as I can tell.

I’m on a Plane

In flight Wifi is pretty neat:

That said, hell’s going to freeze over before “I can’t complain” will be an accurate description of any commercial air travel. Isn’t there anyone in politics who wants to spare us of this absurd shoe-removing and toothpaste-inspecting?

Pie-in-the-Sky Post on Political Reform

As long as I’m prescheduling material to be published while I’m on an airplane, why not share with you my big picture pie-in-the-sky ideas about democratic political institutions? My basic thought is that places should be governed more like Switzerland which, after all, is a place that people generally think is well-governed:

People know that for electoral systems, I like ‘em proportional. And for political systems, I like ‘em parliamentary. People know that I’m not a fan of veto points. Ideally, I think legislation should be drawn up by technically competent experts in the executive branch and then accepted or rejected by a unicameral legislature. Won’t that lead to an unaccountable government? Well, I think that once we’ve filed down the legislative veto points to a minimum, it’s possible to put the people in as a veto point. Like in Switzerland, you could make it relatively easy for opponents of major pieces of legislation to force a referendum. So how a bill becomes a law looks like:

Ministry drafts bill –> Parliament approves bill –> Referendum approves bill.

Discussions of political systems often evince a tension between a desire for technocratic competence and populist legitimacy. The genius of this system, however, is that it’s both more technocratic and more populist than the current system. Things like ballot initiatives and congressional markup undermine technocracy by letting people frame unsound policy options. Meanwhile, multiple veto points and “the separation of powers” undermines accountability by blurring lines of responsibility. Parliamentary unicameralism plus referenda, by contrast, encourages policy ideas to come forward in technically sound ways while ensuring that the public has the opportunity to say “no” to their technocrat overlords.

I think it’s possible that the United States is too large to govern in this manner (I think the argument that the US is just sub-optimally big is pretty plausible) but I think more countries and sub-national units ought to explore this Swiss model. After all, as I say, people generally acknowledge that Switzerland is a well-governed place. Indeed, it seems noteworthy that Switzerland is a fair bit richer than Germany or France or Italy sandwiched between the three. The widespread use of ballot initiatives at the state level shows that there’s a lot of desire for more direct democracy, even as it’s widely acknowledged that ballot initiatives have been a governance disaster.

Pure Delay

Requiring 60 votes rather than 50 to pass legislation in a body with 100 members is a terrible idea. It’s always been a terrible idea. Nobody would design a legislature that way. But lately, filibustering has been used for even newer and more terrible reasons, like simply slowing bills down to be annoying. For example, Annie Lowrey reviews the Unemployment Insurance aftermath:

Yesterday, Senate Democrats cleared the 60-vote cloture hurdle to restoring federally extended unemployment benefits for 2.6 million American families. The bill needs a final majority-rules Senate vote, a House vote and President Obama’s signature to become law. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, had hoped that Senate Republicans would waive the procedural 30-hour window between the cloture vote and the final vote — giving Democrats consent to move on. The GOP refused.

The practical upshot of this kind of foot-dragging tactic is to make it impossible to staff the executive branch in a timely maner. It also makes it impossible to legislate about important issues through any mechanism other than these lumbering comprehensive packages. Instead of addressing the variety of problems with the financial regulatory architecture through a variety of different bills, it all has to be done through one mega-bill.

Texas Fried Conservatism

By Ryan McNeely

Chris Cillizza notes that over the weekend in separate television appearances, the two Republicans in charge of House and Senate elections this fall went out of their way to claim that the employment situation was better under President Bush and that Bush himself is on the verge of a popular resurgence:

“People had jobs when Republicans were not only in charge but George Bush was there,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program that “Bush’s stock has gone up a lot since he left office,” adding: “I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush’s administration, and I think history will treat him well.“

Sensing that it may not be a good short-term electoral strategy to tell people that “history” will prove them wrong, Ramesh Ponnuru tries to downplay these statements as simple home-state niceties: “Cillizza is a savvy guy, but let’s not forget that both John Cornyn and Pete Sessions are from Texas.” Indeed, let’s not forget that the GOP has chosen two Texans to lead their national election campaigns during a cycle when they are supposedly attempting to break from the presidency of Texan George W. Bush, much like when they replaced Texan Dick Armey with Texan Tom Delay as Majority Whip in 2003.

Texas is a big state so it’s not necessarily strange to have Texans in a party’s leadership positions. But the fact is the Republican Party leadership is dominated by southern white men, some of whom belong to a state Republican Party that advocates – in 2010 – criminalizing sodomy, revoking American membership in the U.N., and a variety of other nutty, destructive, and unconstitutional ideas. The simplest explanation for Sessions’ and Cornyn’s defense of Bush is that they believe that the Bush presidency was successful. But even if you chalk up their comments as some sort of harmless regional solidarity with the former president it just bolsters the case that Republicans are still the party of Texas-style southern radicalism.

New Made Up JournoList Scandal

It seems that someone has leaked a vast number of “Journolist” emails to The Daily Caller, and that now that the Caller has the emails in hand and its staff can see for itself that there’s no story here they’ve resorted to making things up. Today, for example, the Caller has a piece entitled “Liberal Journalists Suggest Government Shut Down Fox News” that doesn’t cite any examples of a liberal journalist suggesting the government shut down Fox News. In Strong’s writeup, however, it tries to make it seem as if Michael Scherer from Time Magazine favors this measure:

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air.

The reality is that Scherer, though agreeing with the point that merely subjecting Fox to fact-based criticism wouldn’t deter it from inaccuracy, sent a message chiding non-journalist Zasloff for suggesting any such thing: “You really want political parties / white houses picking and choosing which news organizations to favor?” The story here, in other words, is the reverse of the one Strong reported. Some liberals were complaining about Fox News on an email list. The idea of FEC action was raised, and no working journalists embraced it because journalists believe in free speech. Another “revelation” from this discussion is that British people tend to think the British approach to libel law is good, whereas Americans tend to prefer the American approach.

(Net) Roots Radical

I’m off to Netroots Nation today, so for the next couple of days the blogging will be happening on a somewhat diminished schedule.

Endgame

Kids get high and make out on the train:

— The Obama administration’s handling of this Shirley Sherrod business has been shameful.

— Andrew Breitbart’s conduct is also shameful, but that’s to be anticipated.

— The costs of 2009.

— The American aristocracy.

— University of Phoenix becomes the first university to get $1 billion in Pell Grants.

Going back to the well with “Cry When You Get Older”.