Talking about the Hagel Filibuster

The Senate is taking up cloture on the Chuck Hagel nomination today, and this time it's expected to pass, most likely easily -- I haven't seen any estimates, but I'm guessing it will be around 70 votes (maybe more; again, I haven't seen anything about what Republicans will do). Some time after that, we'll get a final vote on Hagel; he'll probably fall short of 60 yes votes.

So it turns out we had not only had one or more "yes/no" votes, who were yes on cloture but no on the nomination, but quite a few no/yes/no votes: against cloture the first time, for it the second time, while eventually voting against confirmation.

The trick for reporters is how to write about and talk about what's happened.

Was there a filibuster?

Yes. Of course.

One more time: requiring 60 is a filibuster. Every Republican supports that standard. There are no Republicans who believe that 60 should never or only rarely be invoked; the only question is whether, in this particular case, any particular case, they will support the filibuster. That there is a filibuster, on everything, is both assumed and institutionalized.

Moreover, every Republican who opposed cloture on the first go-round was supporting the filibuster. As it will turn out, some of those Republicans were only supporting the filibuster for a limited time. That still means they supported it!

Also, and as obvious as this is I've seen lots of people get confused by it: the fact that a filibuster is eventually defeated makes it a failed or defeated filibuster; it doesn't mean that there was no filibuster at all (or else Strom Thurmond's record-setting filibuster against civil rights wasn't really a filibuster!).

Perhaps some of the confusion on this has to do with the motives of filibustering Senators. That's what PolitiFact gets wrong in a piece they did on the Hagel filibuster a while ago (they properly cited Greg Koger, Sarah Binder, and Steve Smith all saying that it was a filibuster, and yet wound up calling GOP claims that it was not a filibuster only "Mostly False" rather than "False" or "Pants on Fire"). It is quite true that Senators may try to delay a final vote for various reasons. They may be attempting to prevent any final vote and therefore defeat the measure under consideration, but they may also use a delay in order to make a deal, or simply to allow more time for opposition to form. Indeed, it appears in Hagel nomination that GOP opposition of cloture the first time around was a combination of all those things. Some Senators -- Inhofe, Cruz, maybe as many as 30 or 35 others -- just wanted to defeat Hagel. Lindsey Graham said at the time that he wanted to block the nomination until the Obama Administration turned over information to him. And McCain (joined by up to about 15 others) sometimes joined in Graham's argument, and at other times just said he wanted more time in case some "bombshell" was found.

Those are all different, and worth distinguishing -- but they're all filibusters!

Indeed, assuming that cloture is invoked today, the next step would be a vote, but if Republicans insist on taking up the full available hours of post-cloture time, then technically it would be proper to say that the filibuster continues. Even though at that point all the filibuster does is delay the vote further to a time certain, it's still a delay, and a delay is a filibuster.

The one thing that I'll say is a bit tricky is whether it's correct to say that "Republicans" are filibustering. In this case, for example, a few Republicans did support cloture the first time around; certainly they were not supporting the filibuster...but most Republicans were. Sometimes, however, it's harder to know, especially when the delay doesn't produce an actual cloture vote, or when Republicans are more split. It seems to me that it's correct to say that Republicans are filibustering in that all of them, without exception, support the 60-vote standard -- even for those times when they are part of the 60. But clearly not all Republicans actually support the filibuster on everything; sometimes, very few of them support the filibuster, even though they all support the concept of the 60-vote standard. Yes, it's tricky to write about that; what I think reporters should strive to do is to find language that reflects the reality of the Republican-imposed 60-vote standard, on top of language that reflects what Republicans (and, for that matter, Democrats) are actually doing on any vote.

At any rate, there's no question about whether there has been a filibuster on Chuck Hagel. What I'd say is that there's also no question about whether there's been a filibuster against every nominee; there has been. Even the ones who had unanimous support. As long as they insist on 60, it's a filibuster.

Read Stuff, You Should

So many good choices, but Happy Birthday to Alan Rickman, 67.

Also, good stuff:

1. Friends of Hamas are everywhere -- Tim Murphy reports. As does Adam Serwer.

2. Apparently the way the US does security clearances is a few decades behind the times. No surprise. John Hamre proposes an update.

3. Matt Yglesias on BipartisanThink.

4. Since I linked to the original: CAP's Neera Tanden responds to TNR on think tanks.

5. And Andrew Gelman cites Bill James correctly.

Elsewhere: 3rd Parties, Hagel, More

I've been negligent on these posts again, but catching up now. My weekend column at Salon was about the Hagel filibuster, and what it indicates about any Supreme Court nomination. It's what I've been saying for some time: of course there's going to be a 60 vote standard, although that doesn't mean that all Republicans who oppose a SCOTUS pick will necessarily vote against cloture. But most will.

At TAP on Friday, I knocked down the idea that technology or whatever will lead to a crack-up of the Democrats and Republicans.

I'm not going to link specifically to everything else, but earlier in the week at PP I talked about the GOP and symbolic politics with regard to the new push for a Balanced Budget Amendment. And at Greg's place I've been pushing the idea that Democrats should at least threaten to reopen Senate reform, at least with regard to executive branch nominations.

When the "Personal" is Party Business

One more quick one on Chuck Hagel. Kevin Drum argues that GOP opposition to Hagel is personal, based on his lack of loyalty to the party: "It's crazy and off the rails, but it's also personal."

I think it's reasonable to suspect that Hagel's turncoat actions made him a target, and I think Drum is right to say that it's been underappreciated (including by me, in my item earlier today). But if it's really exactly that -- what an article Drum quotes from lists as tacit support for Obama over McCain in 2008, and support for Bob Kerrrey over Deb Fischer in last year's Nebraska Senate contest -- then I'm not sure that I'd really say it's personal.

Parties have very strong incentives to enforce partisan loyalty on their elected officials. That's especially true, and difficult, in the US system, with it's decentralized and relatively open nomination system. Basically, it's really hard to punish incumbents when renomination has an enormous incumbency advantage.

Now, given that we're talking about McCain, it's certainly possible that it's purely personal...McCain certainly appears to be acting on personal grudges half the time, regardless of what other incentives are going on. And it's also possible that there are other things in the "personal' column having to do with Republican Senators relationship with Hagel when they were in the Senate together.

But as far as institutional incentives: when you get a chance to punish a disloyal party politician, it makes sense to do so. That's not personal; it's (party) business.

Ted Cruz and the Hagel Fight

Twitter back-and-forth caught my eye:

Philip Klein: Imagine how differently the Hagel vote would have turned out had Dewhurst won TX Sen primary.

Dan Drezner: Not an iota's worth.

Philip Klein: Disagree. Cruz was the leader of the opposition publicly & privately & his presence is has moved Cornyn to the right.

Dan Drezner: Cruz has alienated as many as he impressed. And in yesterday's vote, wavering GOP senators followed McCain's lead, not Cruz.

If the honest answer is probably "we don't know," it's still worth a bit of speculation.

Would Republicans in general decided to target Hagel if Cruz wasn't a public and private leader of the opposition? It seems fairly likely to me that they would have. Republicans really love the theme of accusing people of abandoning Israel. It works for them on many levels. Not just the almost certainly futile effort to win Jewish votes, and not just currying favor with pro-Israel Christians. It's also a rare area of foreign policy in which they can advance a plausibly popular position that doesn't actually involve advocating war or the threat of war. Without, that is, alienating the party's hawks. In other words, considering both unity within the party and popularity outside of it, ultrafanatical support of Israel may be the best possible issue within foreign policy and national security for the GOP. The only real drawback is that it doesn't actually involve differences with anyone, but that's made up by exaggerating or inventing any deviation from standard American political support for Israel. Thus, the enthusiasm of the GOP in opposing Hagel.

What Drezner says about wavering Senators following McCain's lead is probably correct, although that doesn't answer the question of why McCain supported cloture. Suppose that without Cruz we still get basically the same anti-Hagel sentiment among Republicans, perhaps with someone else grandstanding (and, as Drezner hints, perhaps in a less irresponsible way). Would McCain still have stuck with the opponents through the first cloture vote? Possibly! On the other hand -- maybe better leadership for Hagel opponents would have put McCain solidly on board with the filibuster, thus putting Hagel in far more trouble than he currently appears to be (McCain and several other Republicans who voted against cloture yesterday have said that they plan to flip and vote for cloture after the Senate recess next week).

What we do know is that he's certainly impressed parts of the GOP-aligned press -- and that he's annoyed enough Senators to have generated, say, an item by Elspeth Reeve today reporting on public and private GOP rebukes to Cruz. Careful, however: those kinds of stories are almost always meaningful, but can be tricky to interpret (that is, some Senators are almost certainly annoyed by Cruz's behavior, but that doesn't necessarily mean he isn't influencing them).

My best guess would be that Cruz himself didn't make a lot of difference on Hagel. The idea that there was a norm against cabinet filibusters followed by Republicans the last few years, in my view, doesn't hold up at all. All that's happened is that for a variety of reasons we haven't had a nomination come to the floor with solid GOP opposition, so it hasn't really been put to the test. But I'll fully admit that's a best guess, not fact.

Catch of the Day

[Updated]

Here's some good reporting: Dave Weigel digs through a claim that Chuck Hagel is "linked" to a group called "Friends of Hamas," and guess what? It's a group that apparently does not exist. Which hasn't stopped the GOP-aligned media from making a big deal of it, and from some GOP politicians -- including Senator Rand Paul -- from buying into the idea that Hagel should be blocked because of it.

Just to be clear: outside of the nonsense of phony, non-existent groups, the whole idea that a nominee should be held accountable for second and third degree "links" of this sort is absolutely reprehensible to begin with. It would be of legitimate concern to the Senate if Hagel was personally accepting money from scary-sounding (or actually scary) groups, at least in some circumstances. But to say that he should be help responsible for everyone who funds a group that in turn pays Hagel to give a talk? That's a witch hunt. And once you go down that road, there's no real limit to it; perhaps someone who donated to an organization who paid Hagel for something once had lunch with someone who sat on a board of an organization which had a donor who also donated to Hamas! Horrors!

At which point you might as well just invent a group and accuse Hagel of secretly taking money from them....oh, right, that's what actually happened.

Oh, and remember: we know exactly how information travels within the conservative feedback loop. There is precisely zero chance that "Friends of Hamas" will disappear just because it turns out to be phony; we'll be hearing occasionally about this one for years.

Regardless: nice catch!

Update: I came back in to fix the link, but as long as I'm here, I want to expand a bit on that last "feedback loop" paragraph. Assuming that Weigel is correct, here's what's going to happen. The person who concocted this thing will almost certainly will not be set back on his career within the GOP-aligned media in any way. Most of the folks who cited this thing -- Hewitt, Styles, Dobbs, McCarthy, and more -- will not issue corrections; some, in fact, will continue using it. No one within the GOP-aligned press will be any more skeptical of the next such story to emerge from the same place, or more hesitant to pick up stories from there. Nor will those who bought and spread the story be held accountable by anyone within the conservative movement, or suffer anything at all to their reputations within it.

It is absolutely not true that everyone within the conservative press are frauds, hacks, and charlatans. But it is true that all too often the incentives there do not encourage good work

Elsewhere: Hagel, VAWA

Over at PP today, I pushed for people to understand exactly what a filibuster is these days, and to do a better job of talking about it.

At Greg's place, I talked VAWA, and said that it'll be a good test for Huse Republicans.

And I suppose as long as I'm here I'll push the TAP column about what Republicans should do if they want to achieve the goals that Karl Rove has been talking about, although I already linked to that earlier.

Also: the Post finally got around to putting up a page where you can access all my stuff there (clicking my name no longer redirects to Robert Samuelson's page. No, I don't know why it was set up that way). So I've finally got around to adding links to my stuff at the Post, TAP, and Salon here, in the upper right hand column. I do try to do these "elsewhere" posts, but I know I don't catch everything, so now there's an easy way to check. Hey, if I'm getting more organized, I might even consider letting TAP know that I don't look all that much like Matt Bai. A little bit at a time, though. By the way, I always appreciate any help you give to my "elsewhere" pieces with tweets or likes or whatever. Really -- everything helps.

If all goes well, there should be more Watergate later tonight.

The Filibuster and Hagel

This is getting interesting.

The reporters on the scene -- Dave Weigel today, Josh Rogin yesterday, and others -- believe a filibuster is unlikely in the Chuck Hagel nomination; they believe that if a simple majority support Hagel, he'll be confirmed. By this standard, Hagel is pretty safe; not a single Democrat has announced opposition, there's one Republican (Thad Cochran) supporting him, and so Hagel only needs to hold all but six of the unannounced Democrats. Barring anything new happening, that appears pretty much certain. 

Indeed, the reporting has been that way from the beginning; once key Democrats agreed to support him, reporters (at least those I've read) have assumed Hagel was a lock.

I have no inside information at all; all I know is what's been reported. But I've been assuming the opposite all the way that it would take 60 votes, which means that Hagel is going to need at least five Republicans. 

Basically, it comes down to how to interpret nominations in the last two Congresses. Weigel, Rogin, and others are treating simple majority as the normal process for cabinet selections, so that the GOP would be doing something extraordinary if it used the filibuster. Weigel notes, "If Republicans can hold 41 of their 45 members and oppose Hagel, theoretically, they can block him. But there's very little precedent for that, and Democrats may already have 57 votes." 

But is it true that there's very little precedent for requiring 60 votes for a cabinet selection? It's true that Republicans didn't force a cloture vote for any of Barack Obama's choices in 2009, but it's also true that all of them cleared 60 votes; the closest was Tim Geithner, who was confirmed 60-34 with three Democrats missing the vote. Forcing a cloture vote in those cases would have been a purely symbolic act, so the fact that there was no cloture vote tells us more about Republican communications strategy than it does about GOP willingness to filibuster nominations they oppose. 

Again that, we have plenty of examples of Republicans requiring 60 votes for both (other) nominations and legislation, and almost no examples in which fewer a nomination was confirmed with fewer than 60 (just going from memory, I believe there were none in the 111th Congress and perhaps two in the 112th Congress). 

Indeed, I think it's more accurate to say that every one of Obama's cabinet selections was subjected to a filibuster -- they needed 60 votes -- than to say that none of them were. But I will say that we're in the realm of interpretation here.

Remember: cloture votes are simply not a perfect measure of filibusters. They're really not even a very good measure.

It's possible that Republicans in fact simply want to oppose Hagel, but for whatever reason don't want to defeat him. It's also possible that Hagel will have 60 votes, and that if he has 60 Republicans will not want a cloture vote. 

It's also possible that Republicans really do oppose him and would like to defeat him, but they consider the use of the filibuster to be an extraordinary move, and don't actually oppose Hagel enough to do it. It's possible. But I find it very unlikely that any of them feel that way, and almost certain that most of them do not. I can imagine a cloture vote that passes with a handful of "no" votes on final confirmation peeling off and supporting cloture...I suppose I can even imagine a scenario in which the Republican conference sees that result coming and backs off of requiring a filibuster vote. But I think those stories are unlikely. 

I guess we'll see. But if we do get confirmation by fewer than 60 votes, I'm going to be heavily inclined to believe it was because they didn't have the votes (because of a handful of cloture/don't confirm Senators) or that they wanted to oppose but confirm, and not because they really think that 60 should only be used in rare cases.

Going With Their Strength

I'm mostly over a Greg's place today, but I'll do a quick post here based on a twitter exchange...it's in reference to Ted Cruz's questioning of Chuck Hagel today, which featured a bunch of dubious Hagel quotes.

So I said: "GOP takeaway from 2012 seems to have been: wow, we need more campaigns built around out-of-context quotes"

To which Matt Yglesias had the sensible reply: "It’s a kind of hammer/nail issue, right? They’re really good at drawing attention to out of context quotes."

Yeah, that's just about right.

I suppose I can also do the "elsewhere" stuff here, since it's relevant: at Plum Line I said that the hearing won't matter much but that the question is whether Hagel will have 60 votes; oddly enough several people are treating the possibility of a filibuster as if it was 1990 and that Republicans might just let him win with 55 votes. And at PP I talked about what confirmation is supposed to be for.