Matt Yglesias

Institutions Matter

Reihan Salam lauds the tactical approach of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

That is, Christie’s position can be both uncompromising and bipartisan. Consider the campaign by Democratic mayors in New Jersey cities and towns on behalf of Christie’s “toolkit” for local governments. On Monday, The Jersey Journal offered the following report:

Today, Senator Brian P. Stack urged statewide support of Gov. Christie’s “toolkit.”

Christie has recommended reform in the areas of civil service, collective bargaining, employee pensions and benefits, red tape and unfunded mandates, election reform and shared services.

Sen. Stack said, “I urge both my colleagues in the Legislature as well as fellow mayors to show their support for the Governor’s toolkit, which is designed to allow New Jersey’s municipalities to operate with better fiscal efficiency.”

Gov. Christie has certainly been sharply critical of some constituencies, but he’s made an effort to build alliance with Democratic officials and with members of private sector unions who are concerned about the sustainability of demands being made by public sector unions.

Where some see tactical innovation here, I see institutional innovation. If you pay attention to what Senator Stack is saying here, you’ll note that he’s a State Senator and a mayor. Qua State Senator he’s a Democrat and probably much more sympathetic than Christie to the demands of public employees. But qua mayor he needs to make his budget add up, and thus is more sympathetic than the average Democrat to the idea of a “toolkit” that helps expand mayors’ budgetary options.

Imagine how different United States Senate debates over federal fiscal aid to state and local government would look if several Republican Senators were also state governors. Instead of Governor Christie turning down federal funding for a commuter rail tunnel because he was worried about potential overruns’ impact on the state budget, Senator/Governor Christie might have struck a deal for the feds to finance the project more generously. And of course there’s no filibustering in the New Jersey State Senate. State government is also just different from federal government. Every Democratic governor who’s presided over a recession ever has ended up cutting state spending, whereas every Republican President since Herbert Hoover has ended up increasing federal spending.

The point is simply that institutions matter. A lot. Always. Politicians matter too, but human beings are prone to be too interested in the personalities that inhabit structures of power and insufficiently attentive to the nature of the structures themselves.

Breaking the CBO

By tradition, the House and Senate budget committee chairs alternate between who gets to pick the Director of the Congressional Budget Office. So it was John Spratt who picked Doug Elmendorf, and as his term expires it should be Kent Conrad’s job to pick the next guy, and Conrad wants to keep Elmendorf in place. But in formal terms, the choice requires the concurrence of the leaders in both the House and the Senate, so John Boehner has the authority to break with tradition and block Elmendorf’s reappointment.

John Maggs reports that Boehner is inclined to do just that because he’s “still angry about Elmendorf’s role in health care.”

This seems to me like an example of a guy who doesn’t know how good he’s got it. When the job came open, there was no check on the Democrats’ ability to appoint whoever they wanted. They could have put in a strong partisan or a big-time liberal, someone who would produce CBO scores showing that clean energy legislation would boost growth or health care would generate ponies for everyone. Instead because neither Spratt nor Conrad is very liberal, they hit upon a not-very-liberal CBO Director choice. Consequently, under the leadership of the not-very-liberal Doug Elmendorf the CBO has consistently angered environmentalists by overstating the costs of action and understating the costs of inaction. The CBO also spent the entire health reform debate angering reformers by assuming no efficiency improvements due to better incentives.

Consequently, Elmendorf’s “role” in the health reform debate was to make a fair amount of trouble for Democrats. And in turn, for a brief shining moment Elmendorf and the Congressional Budget Office became the American right’s best friends. Op-eds, floor speeches, TV hits, radio spots, etc. were full of high praise for the CBO. Sing, sing, sing the praises of Elmendorf and his budget scorekeepers. Elmendorf had “proved” that the Orszag/Cutler ideas about bending the curve were false. He’s laid-bare the fallacy of the whole effort. Senator Chuck Grassley even analogized the CBO to God.

What happened then was CBO analysis in hand, congressional leaders worked to change the bill to bring it in line with the CBO’s ideas of what measures would reduce the growth rate in costs and produce deficit reductions. Suddenly conservatives stopped believing in the CBO. And now Boehner appears to have cooked up an alternate version of history in which “the White House leaned on Elmendorf and that Elmendorf caved” when what in fact happened was that Elmendorf gave the bill so-so marks and the congressional leaders caved and changed the bill.

At any rate, the “rotating” system is a good idea because under the rotating system there’s always someone in a position to make a choice. If we shift to the Boehner system where the House and Senate leaders need to agree, then in the contemporary environment of polarized parties, the CBO leadership will be caught in a tug-o-war whenever there’s a partisan mismatch. This will sharply reduce the prestige of the CBO and likely result, at the margin, in a lower technical quality of legislation further driving the US Congress toward being a national joke.

Earmark Ban

A lot of the progressive commentary I’ve seen about the idea of banning congressional “earmarks” lately has some rather mocking or dismissive of the banners. And many good points have been made. Populist conservatives really do tend to drastically overstate the importance of this issue. And many conservative appear to not actually understand how earmarking works and don’t realize that there’s no particular reason to believe that ending earmarks will reduce spending at all—what matters is the size of the appropriation. Earmarking, or lack of earmarking, merely changes around who decides what the money gets spent on.

But all that said, any kind of sensibly operationalized ban on earmarks really will, in a small way, be a good thing. Since members of congress are elected to represent specific geographical constituencies, it’s inevitable that parochial interests will be overrepresented in the legislative process relative to national interests. Any procedural rule that leans against that tendency is, in my view, a good thing. It’s good not because representation of local interests is a bad thing per se, but simply because our political system is very heavily weighted in that direction anyway.

If you look at the long-term budget projections, the fact of the matter is that the aging of the population and the growth of health care costs is set to increase federal spending above a sustainable level. That means we’ll need higher taxes. And it means will need better approaches to health care. But it also means that all public spending on everything that’s not health care for senior citizens is going to come under substantial pressure. Under the circumstances, if you care about the purposes advanced by domestic discretionary spending it’s important to make sure that pot of money is spent as efficiently as possible. Curtailing earmarks should advance that goal, and if Mitch McConnell’s fear of tea partiers is making that more likely, then that’s a good thing.

Royal Wedding and the Case for Monarchy

With the United Kingdom enjoying some fun royal wedding planning and the forthcoming crowning of a new princess, I think it’s a good opportunity to re-up my case for constitutional monarchy.

The point here is that it seems inevitable in any country for some individual to end up serving the functional role of the king. Humans are hierarchical primates by nature and have a kind of fascination with power and dignity. This is somewhat inevitable, but it also cuts against the grain of a democracy. And under constitutional monarchy, you can mitigate the harm posed by displacing the mystique of power onto the powerless monarch. We follow the royal family with fascination, they participate in weird ceremonies, they have dignity, they symbolize the nation, we all talk about them respectfully, etc. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gets to be just another politician. Admittedly the one who’s most important at this given moment in time. But that’s no reason not to jeer at him during Question Time. He’s not the symbol of the nation who’s owed deference. He’s a servant of the people and people who feel he’s serving them poorly should say so.

Obviously, we can put this in the “not going to happen” file. But the people of Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands should all, I think, consider themselves lucky to have ended up with this odd yet highly functional system of government.

Nomination Fights To Come

With President Barack Obama seeking to move an ambitious legislative agenda through the molasses-like United States Senate,* it was fairly easy for Mitch McConnell and his colleagues to obstruct a given person’s nomination simply by threatening to drag things out. After all, Harry Reid and the White House had better things to do with their pressure floor time than quibble about district court nominees. But just as losing control of the House of Representatives increases Obama’s leverage over Bibi Netanyahu, with any hope of progressive legislation 100 percent dead in the House it would now make sense to dedicate much more Senate floor time to nominations.

Brian Beutler reports that advocates are making the case:

“Reid should concentrate Floor time on must pass bills, message and other votes that highlight differences and important matters that are or should be non-controversial, including confirming lifetime federal judges,” Glenn Sugameli, an advocate for swift judicial confirmations, tells TPM. “All of Obama’s nominees to circuit and district courts have had the support of their home-state Republican and Democratic senators and the vast majority have been non-controversial nominees who have been approved by the Judiciary Committee without objection and approved unanimously when they finally receive usually long-delayed Floor votes.”

“If one or more Republican senators force cloture votes on consensus nominees, they will accurately be seen as mindlessly obstructionist,” Sugameli says. “If they do not, nominees will be confirmed quickly.”

We’ll see if it happens, but it ought to.

That said, a serious push on nominations could become yet another test of the McConnell Way. My intuition is that blanket obstruction would prompt an initially flurry of high-minded denunciations of the GOP, but that if McConnell holds firm it will turn out that a strategy of deliberately sabotaging the executive branch is highly effective. The worse conditions become in the country, the more the President and his party will suffer politically. The idea that swing voters will be able to accurately identify who’s responsible for bad conditions sounds nice, but flies in the face of all the evidence.

Finding Better Routes to Compromise

Everybody likes to talk about bipartisan compromise, but there’s surprisingly little talk about what kind of institutional structures are likely to produce it. In particular, policy elites seem eerily obsessed with the idea of the Graybeard Commission as the key to getting the job done even though there’s little evidence that it works.

To take a different stab at things, I’d say a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed are the rewards toward tactical extremism. If you had agreement on any given level of revenue that you wanted the federal income tax to raise, I think it would be relatively easy to achieve a compromise between Democrats and Republicans as to what the structure of the tax code should be. And really it should be the easiest thing in the world to find a compromise on the level of revenue. Republicans want X, Democrats want Y, so we settle on [(X+Y)/2] and get down to talking about structure. A problem arises, however, because if everyone knows that that’s how the game is going to be played everyone has an incentive to exaggerate their demands. There are some incentives to not be so over the top unreasonable that people laugh you out of the room, but fundamentally nobody wants to show weakness.

You could imagine a totally different model, one that looked more like a binding arbitration. Say that instead of appointing a bipartisan commission you appoint two partisan commissions. In January, Democratic leaders appoint the Democratic Fiscal Commission and Republican leaders appoint the Republican Fiscal Commission. Both commissions work, roughly in secret, for months. Then on Labor Day 2011, both commissions release their plans and on Election Day 2011 the American people vote in a binding referendum for either the Dem Plan or the Republican Plan.

Now you have a totally different set of tactical incentives. Yes, you want to hold fast to your core policy goals. But instead of it being the case that the best way to protect your core policies is through across-the-board extremism, now the best way to protect your core goals is to be very accommodating on everything else. Here instead of both sides taking their “real” preferences and then shifting their states position three clicks away from the center, they’ll take their “real” preferences and start shading them toward where they think the median is. The upshot won’t be a “bipartisan compromise,” it’ll be the victory of a partisan proposal at the polls. But both of the options will be partisan proposals crafted specifically as part of a serious effort to gain widespread support.

Anyways, I expect this idea will be greeted with a lot of small-minded nit-picking in comments. So in the spirit of full humility let me just state explicitly at the outset that any proposal that sketches out a major re-structuring of how the American political system works in the course of a blog post will have some holes. The point I’d like people to take away, however, is this. Many people are not happy with the outputs our political system delivers. Given that fact, we should spend less time complaining about the human beings who inhabit that system and more time thinking about how the system could be restructured to create better outcomes. Passing the buck back and forth between Congress and sundry Graybeard Commissions isn’t getting the job done.

Election of 1860 Counterfactuals

Seth Masket is doing some mythbusting with reference to the electoral college:

Lincoln only won in 1860 because the Democratic Party was fragmented. Actually, Lincoln won 180 electoral votes — almost 60% of the Electoral College. Even if all three strains of the Democratic Party had somehow unified behind one candidate, Lincoln still would have won. There were just far more voters in the free states.

Indeed, the fragmentation of the opposition had almost no impact on the outcome. Lincoln won two states—California and Oregon—by mere plurality. But those two contained only seven electoral votes at the time. He won fully 173 electoral votes by majority, more than enough to win.

The key thing, though, is that in the Unified Democrats counterfactual Lincoln is elected President even though sixty percent of the country voted for his opponent. We’re lucky that sort of extreme outcome is rare in practice, though of course a version of it arose in 2000 and we’ve been paying the price for the past ten years. In the specific case of Lincoln, we can deem his democratic legitimacy intact on the theory that the country’s African-American inhabitants would have voted Republican had they been allowed to. But the fact of the matter is that the underlying method of picking a president is ridiculous and really ought to be done away with.

Up with NPV!

What Do People Think A Third Party President Would Do?

Ben McGrath’s discussion of the endless discussion of a Michael Bloomberg third party presidential bid is appropriately arch, but still doesn’t, I think, quite get at the core madness of this talk:

Speaking at Harvard, the day before the election, Bloomberg said, “I think, actually, a third-party candidate could run the government easier than a partisan political President,” and then he went on, as he always does, to deny that he intends to pursue the position. He is, as he is fond of saying, Jewish, unmarried, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-immigrant, and pro-gay-marriage. Add to that a strong allegiance to Wall Street, a weekend house in Bermuda, and his vehemence, last summer, in defense of the mosque near Ground Zero, and it’s hard to see how he plays to the populist moment. A recent Marist poll indicates that only twenty-six per cent of New Yorkers favor the prospect of his running.

Yet the dream persists. “I think it’s a strong possibility,” Clay Mulford, the chief operating officer of the National Math and Science Initiative, and, as it happens, Perot’s son-in-law, said the other day. “The mood of the country is not ideological but more practical. The timing is unusually right.” Mulford mentioned that a Google search of his name and Bloomberg’s would reveal that the two of them met, a couple of years ago, to discuss ballot logistics. “His people put the story out,” Mulford said.

The question that needs to be asked about all these notions is what kind of legislative coalition is President Bloomberg supposed to be governing with? The version of ARRA that passed was the one Senators Collins, Snowe, and Specter were prepared to support. So what difference would it have made had Barack Obama been somewhat less liberal? I bet a third party president would initially impress people with his bold truth-telling and lack of need to cater to old bulls on the Hill. But it would swiftly become apparent that the constitution hasn’t been repealed, that the only bills that pass are the ones members of congress will vote for, and that members of congress all belong to parties. The only way you’d be able to get anything done would be to find a way to work within the party system somehow.

The point is that most of the stuff people like to decry about American politics—the venality, the small-minded partisanship, the bickering, the corrupt deals—happens in Congress. Wishing for a different president doesn’t address any of it.

How Social Security Stabilizes

Rick Perry’s odd notion that states should be allowed to opt out of Social Security seems like a good opportunity to discuss the useful role of social welfare programs in promoting “automatic” economic stabilizers.

The way this works is that 50 million or so people—about one American in six—gets a Social Security check on a regular basis. And importantly the size of the check is unrelated to short-term or localized economic fluctuations. During downturns, that’s nice for the Social Security recipients who are cushioned from the blow. During upsides, it’s bad for the Social Security recipients who tend to fall behind. So it kind of nets out. But crucially this stability is nice for everyone else participating in the economy since the fact that a certain proportion of your customer base doesn’t fully participate in short-term swings reduces the exposure of your business to those swings.

Many Floridians, for example, are getting hammered by the precipitous decline in Florida home prices. Many other Floridians are getting hammered by the precipitous decline in Florida home construction. But many other Floridians are getting hammered by the fact that their customers are being hammered by the decline in home prices and construction activity. The existence of Social Security benefits is one of the few things that helps halt the downward cycle of other people’s misfortunes becoming your misfortune. The checks keep flowing and their recipients keep buying stuff and their spending becomes your income becomes your spending becomes someone else’s income.

This is an excellent feature of the modern social insurance state that accounts of the negative impact on incentives of taxation tend to neglect. But unfortunately, in America state and local government doesn’t operate like Social Security. One of the key lessons of the current crisis should be about the importance of “automatic stabilizers” we have, but also the extent to which their gross impact is offset by very unsound budgetary practices elsewhere. This is an issue that can be fixed in principle and would leave us in much better shape to weather the next economic storm.

Time to Scrap the Filibuster

Tim Fernholz argues persuasively that January would be an excellent time for the 53 Senate Democrats and Vice President Joe Biden to come together to eliminate the filibuster and return the senate to a majority rules dynamic.

I entirely agree. There’s obviously some sentiment that the wake of an electoral defeat is a bad time to push the envelop on something like this. But I disagree. The fact that John Boehner is going to be Speaker of the House means that nobody is going to feel that the filibuster is the only thing standing between them and Barack Obama’s socialist gulag. Instead the practical import of the filibuster is that it will prevent executive branch nominees from being confirmed in a timely manner. That’s much lower stakes, and it’s an issue where the President will have a clear upper hand vis-à-vis the unpopular Senate Republicans.

The Madness of Partisan Municipal Elections

I briefly noted this yesterday, but it turns out that state legislative outcomes are highly correlated with House of Representatives elections. For example:

This suggests that swing voters are relying very heavily on some pretty unsound heuristics to decide who to vote for at the state level. The fact of the matter is that the Tennessee State Legislature and the United States Congress deal with some very different issues. To say “I’m fed up with ObamaCare/the Iraq War so I’m going to kick my state senator to the curb” doesn’t make any real sense.

And this gets worse the further down ballot you go.

Washington DC is a very heavily Democratic jurisdiction so naturally Republican candidates got crushed across the board in our municipal elections. And they always will get crushed, since people aren’t actually considering the candidates they just know that Republicans are bad. The result is that the Democratic primary is the “real” election. But if you look at the general election results, you’ll see that a bit less than ten percent of the city seems reliably Republican and a similar quantity likes to vote for the DC Statehood Green Party. The system we currently use in effect disenfranchises these people. I think it’s very possible that incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty (who snagged 22% without running or being on the ballot) could have put together a majority coalition of Republicans and Democrats if not for the fact that those Republicans weren’t allowed to vote in the primary that sealed his fate.

It would make a lot more sense for DC to do what many other cities do and hold non-partisan elections. You could do Instant Runoff Voting or a two-stage process with a runoff. In general, I’m a fan of parties and partisanship because I think they promote accountability and policy cohesion. But it doesn’t make sense to take a party system organized around congressional conflict and apply it to city government. The ideal scenario might be to do something Canada-style and simply have whole different parties at different levels of government. But barring that, I think non-partisan local elections are pretty clearly the way to go.

The Case for a King

I agree with Jon Chait about the “trouble with presidential dignity”:

On the contrary, I think the office of the president has too much dignity. The president is a citizen who serves the public. It is in the interest of the president to make himself into something exalted, a national father figure and symbol of the government. But the public has no interest in this function, which, indeed, can take on monarchical trappings with an insidious anti-democratic undertone. (It’s a little disturbing when people who see the president salute — a military signal that suggests subordination.)

Obviously, I don’t want to see presidents cutting their own rap videos or jumping into the ring with professional wrestlers. But at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, out problem is not too little presidential dignity but too much.

In some ways I would say the whole thing highlights a problem with republican government that wasn’t appreciated or foreseeable in the late 18th century. Since that time, many democracies—from Canada to Spain to Sweden and beyond—have hit upon the idea of denying the monarchical glow to their head of government by keeping the monarch around but denuding him/her of governing authority. Some countries, such as Germany, India, and Israel, try to have a powerless “president” fill this role but I think it doesn’t really work. Such people have too much democratic legitimacy and too little pomp and circumstance to adequately fill the king role.

So does America need a king and queen with the President demoted to a more drab functional role? I say: Perhaps. At a minimum, America’s Next First Couple could be the world’s greatest reality TV show.

My preferred candidate for Queen would be Princess Märtha-Louise of Norway who’s basically out of the running for succession there (fourth in line) and who conveniently already lives in the USA. She’s author of the children’s book Why Kings And Queens Don’t Wear Crowns, and the Norwegian royal family is one of the youngest in Europe. Märtha-Louise’s great-grandfather was born in Denmark and elected King of Norway in 1905.

McDonald’s Telling Employees How to Vote in Ohio

I remember when we were debating campaign finance laws around the turn of the millenium and the standard right-of-center view was that these were unfair restrictions on free speech and disclosure alone would be good enough. Then came Citizens United and the DISCLOSE Act and suddenly disclosure itself was an unbearable curtailment of free speech. Now I’m reading about this story where a McDonald’s in Ohio is sending notes in its employees’ paychecks telling them who to vote for:

I assume that this, too, is constitutionally protected free speech.

Meanwhile, looking at everything from the conduct of the US Chamber of Commerce to this McDonald’s franchise, I’m continually gobsmacked by the number of business executives in the United States who haven’t read Tim Carney’s book and don’t realize that Obama is just a patsy for the big business agenda. Maybe the White House should buy a free copy of Obamanomics for every corporate headquarters in the country.

Institutional Design Matters a Lot

(cc photo by steve snodgrass)

This blog doesn’t endorse candidates for office, but this Greater Greater Washington endorsements post raised an issue of general applicability:

When Five Guys wanted to open a patio on an empty sidewalk in an area with vacant lots across the street, [incumbent Bob] Siegel opposed the idea unless Five Guys would make a donation to other community initiatives.

GGW sees this as an error of policy analysis:

This exemplifies a common problem with ANC 6D as well as some others around the city, which don’t see new retail and sidewalk cafes as a benefit on themselves but demand contributions to other projects in exchange for permission to exist.

I think that’s a misdiagnosis. We’re seeing an error of institutional design. Advisory Neighborhood Commissions don’t have very much power or very much responsibility. But they do have a lot of power over liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. ANC members, however, have views on things other than liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. So the most reasonable way for them to achieve a diverse set of policy goals is to adopt a very stringent attitude toward liquor licenses and sidewalk cafes, and to support very restrictive zoning rules that increase the value of variances, and then to trade permission to do business for other kinds of favors.

If a fixed portion of retail sales taxes raised in a given ANC were put into a neighborhood fund controlled by the commissioners, then I bet commissioners would suddenly be less interested in swaps of these sorts and more interested in attracting businesses to their area. But instead we’ve set up ANCs in a way that encourages them to be systematically biased against just saying “yes” to local retailers. What’s more the districts are so tiny that people don’t think about the systematic consequences of their actions. One itty-bitty neighborhood with 4 eateries instead of five doesn’t seem like a huge difference. But a citywide 20 percent “restaurant gap” encourages high prices, mediocre food, needlessly elevated unemployment, etc.

Vote Less, Judges Edition

(cc photo by srqpix)

Via Adam Serwer, Radley Balko makes the case that elected judges lead to bad criminal justice policy:

How to reverse or ameliorate the damage already done is a debate we’ll be having for decades. But there is one change that could at least stop the bleeding: less democracy. As New York Times reporter Adam Liptak pointed out in a 2008 article, America’s soaring incarceration rate may be largely due to the fact that we have one of the most politicized criminal justice systems in the developed world. In most states, judges and prosecutors are elected, making them more susceptible to slogan-based crime policy and an electorate driven by often irrational fear. While the crime rate has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, polls consistently show that the public still thinks crime is getting worse.

I agree with that, but as I’ve said before I think there’s a much broader issue of too many elected officials in America. And I don’t think this should be understood as a call for “less democracy.” The United Kingdom is a democracy. But a resident of London votes for a borough councillor, a member of the London Assembly, a mayor of the city, a member of parliament, and a member of the European parliament. A resident of New York City votes for a city council member, a mayor, a public advocate, a city comptroller, a district attorney, a state assembly member, a state senator, a governor, a lieutenant governor, a state comptroller, a state attorney general, a member of the US house, two US Senators, and the President. Then on top of all that he votes for judges!

And you have to ask yourself—is all that voting better described as “more democracy” or as “people voting in a lot of elections they’re not realistically going to know anything about”? I’m going to take what’s behind door number two. There’s no point in holding elections that just consist of ignorance punctuated by the odd burst of demagoguery.

Bruce Josten and the Chamber of Secrets

Bruce Josten, chief lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, explains exactly what’s wrong with the organization keeping its corporate donors secret:

“The major supporters of us in health care last year were confronted with protests at their corporate headquarters, protests and harassment at the C.E.O.’s homes,” said R. Bruce Josten, the chief lobbyist at the chamber, whose office looks out on the White House. “You are wondering why companies want some protection. It is pretty clear.”

The chamber’s increasingly aggressive role — including record spending in the midterm elections that supports Republicans more than 90 percent of the time — has made it a target of critics, including a few local chamber affiliates who fear it has become too partisan and hard-nosed in its fund-raising.

So there you have it. The Chamber’s political finance arm exists, in essence, to help Republicans win elections. But many people are not Republicans! Even George McGovern got 37.5 percent of the vote. So individuals, as consumers and as citizens, may choose to not support businesses that take their money and spend it on a political party they don’t like. Naturally, no sensible business executive wants to do that. Michael Jordan was famously reluctant to get involved in partisan politics because “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Anonymity is so much more convenient.

But does it serve the public interest for this to be kept secret? It seems that for all the reasons the Chamber’s members don’t want you to know what they’re doing that you do want to know who they are. Since these very same business interests successfully beat back congressional efforts to make disclosure legally mandatory, it becomes essentially a journalistic problem. It’s possible for diligent reports to find out who the donors are, which is what my ThinkProgress colleagues have been looking into and today’s Times piece sheds some further light on. For example, “Prudential Financial’s $2 million donation last year coincided with a chamber lobbying effort against elements of the financial regulation bill in Congress.”

UK Austerity Budget Highlights Nonideological Case For Filibuster Reform

I think the Cameron-Clegg austerity budgeting in the United Kingdom is excessive and very unlikely to work as macroeconomic stabilization policy. And I think it’s clear that at least one reason they’re going so far all-in in this direction is simply that the UK Tory Party is a right-of-center party that has an ideological aversion to government spending.

But I do hope that American conservatives will look at the UK and recognize that even though they may have enjoyed the filibuster in 2009-2010, the extremely cumbersome nature of the American political process will make it forever impossible to enact these kind of sweeping cuts in the United States.

From where I sit, the system they have in the UK where you can simply sweep opposition objections aside is actually the right way to do bipartisanship. Call it bipartisanship by alternation. When Labour wins the election, Labour has the chance to implement a bold agenda creating and expanding programs in a way that they think will make Britain a better place to live. Then when the Tories come in, they’re able to be brutal in their efforts to pare back or eliminate things that they think aren’t working. Over the long term, you get a trajectory where programs survive if and only if they’re so widely regarded as successful that no mainstream party would dare abolish them. In the United States, it’s hard to do anything but then once anything’s been put in place it’s almost impossible to scrap or alter it as long as any non-trivial constituency is willing to back it.

The net result, it seems to me, is government that’s “smaller” than what you see in most other democracies but also much more focused on bad or poorly designed programs.

Why Politicians Can’t Compromise

(cc photo by Aidan Jones)

Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak report for the LA Times on Ann Quinn’s unhappiness with the ability of Washington politicians to put partisanship aside, roll up their sleeves, and get down to work:

In 15 years of marriage they have never agreed on anything political. When she put a John Kerry sign on the lawn in 2004, he ran out and got a George W. Bush sign to plant right next to it. But when it comes to the important things — Patrick, improvements to their two-story Dutch colonial house, which car to buy — they put their differences aside and did what needed to be done. If they can figure out how to make it work, why can’t Washington?

Kevin Drum is peeved:

Eh. If Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner only needed to agree on a maintenance schedule for the Capitol Dome or how big the House motor pool needed to be, they’d get along fine too. But Ann Quinn and her husband, in 15 years of marriage, still don’t agree on anything political even though they love each other and live a wonderful life together. Shouldn’t that tell us something? If 200 Anns and 200 Johns had to decide whether to raise taxes, they wouldn’t do any better at it than Pelosi and Boehner.

I think Drum’s got this wrong. It’s not that Ann & John can agree on things because they’re less important than politics. Instead, as the article states they disagree about politics but do manage to agree “when it comes to the important things.” That’s because though policy disputes are substantively important, whether or not Ann & John reach consensus on policy issues is totally unimportant. When it comes to home renovations or raising their son, there are large gains to be made by compromising whereas when it comes to politics there’s nothing at stake so they just disagree.

The problem in congress is that though policy is a positive-sum game where it’s possible for people with sharply divergent viewpoints to forge compromises, electoral politics is a zero-sum competition for seats. Historically, members of congress were subjected to weak party discipline and thought of themselves primarily as entrepreneurial figures charged with cutting deals with one another to advance their own interests. But we’ve shifted in recent years to a different paradigm in which discipline is tighter and lawmakers—especially on the Republican side—see themselves as footsoldiers in the battle for majority control. That becomes a game in which there’s very little incentive for anyone to compromise, so you don’t see a ton of compromising happening.

In the UK, parties never compromise on anything and the parliament operates by pure majority control. Except suddenly the most recent election created a large incentive for Tory-LibDem cooperation and lo and behold compromise turned out to be possible.

Department of Obsolete Laws

Apparently in Austria it’s illegal for a member of the royal family to run for the largely ceremonial office of president.

That’s via Robert Farley who (rightly) thinks the rule should be repealed. Of course in the annals of bad rules about eligibility to run for president, this has nothing on our rule against letting an immigrant run.

Demographic Foundations of the Roosevelt Revolution

A very odd historical episode I learned about only from reading Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is the congressional reapportionment following the 1920 census. Or, rather, the lack of reapportionment. They just didn’t do one, part of an effort to dilute the franchise of Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

One consequence of this is that I’d never understood before is that the Roosevelt Revolution of the early 1930s was powered by what must have been an incredibly dramatic redrawing of the electoral map. Consider that in 1910 the US population was 92 million and by the time they redistricted 20 years later it had grown to 122 million. And the change wasn’t even distributed. Kansas went from 1.69 million to 1.88 million (11% increase) while Chicago went from 2.19 million to 3.38 million (54% increase). Redistricting is always important, but when you manage to skip a decade the results get really wild.