Sunday Question for Liberals

Real simple one, inspired by Chait and Sprung.

Suppose the following things are true: that as it was, Barack Obama and the Democrats got the best possible deal they could get on health care reform (and, for that matter, the various other things they passed in 2010); that they could have won quite a bit more stimulus spending had the never tried to get health care reform; that more stimulus spending would have improved the economy significantly in the short term; and that helping the economy would have saved about 30 House seats and around half a dozen to ten Senate seats in November.

I'm trying to phrase this to wind up with the following question: if the choice was the ACA as passed in exchange for the difference between a mild midterm election loss and a blowout, did Obama and the Democrats make the right choice?  I suppose I'm happy to hear from those who opposed the ACA from the left (although their opinion is obvious, and a clear minority according to polling), but I don't really want arguments that both were possible, or that a better health care bill was possible.  In other words, for the sake of this question, please accept the premises.  Not because they're true -- I'm not claiming that they are -- but because the question I'm interested in is the one about trade-offs.

Madison as an Argument

Today's flap seems to be an argument about the Senate, Madison, the Framers, and etc., all coming out of a panel at the political science meetings on the filibuster.  Since I happened to have been there* I figured I'd blog about it eventually, but in the meantime I'm always interested when people talk Madison.   Basically, I think Bruce McQuain's claims about Madison are quite weak, and fully demolished by both James Joyner and Steven Taylor.  McQuain (and Brian Darling) rest on Federalist 37 to understand what Madison really believed not only about federalism, but also about the specific role of the Senate within the system.  Of course, we know very well that, as Joyner and Taylor point out, the Constitution was the result of a series of compromises that hardly conformed to anyone's ideas, and the Federalist Papers were pieces of political propaganda, intended to sell the Constitution they had, not the one that they would have wanted.  Indeed, not only did Madison not want a Senate (mal)apportioned equally by states, but Madison wanted the national government to have a veto power over ordinary state laws, and considered is failure to secure such a veto a major defeat. 

I do believe that while Madison's arguments in the Federalists were constrained by the necessity of supporting whatever institutions were created in Philadelphia, his arguments on grounds of democratic theory were, generally, sincere (and complex and contested) -- they were consistent with his private correspondence and notes pre-Philadelphia.**  That is, I think the abstract arguments about majoritarian democracy in (most famously) Federalists 10 and 51 were what Madison really thought, but it's also certainly true that as Taylor says, "They are certainly not the reflection of what Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay thought were the most ideal collection of institutions that could have been devised" (emphasis his).  At any rate, however much we appreciate Madison and the rest -- and we should appreciate and honor them quite a bit -- their arguments, at the end of the day, must rise or fall on their own strength, not on the reputations of their authors.  It would hardly be difficult to make a disturbingly noxious stew of the odder beliefs of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and the others (did I mention Jefferson?  Oh yeah.  And yes, I know he's not implicated in what happened in Philadelphia; the luckiest thing that ever happened to the USA, in my opinion).  Indeed, there's a strong point to be made here about democracy.  Venerating the Framers of the Constitution is a terrific democratic ritual; fetishizing their every word as fully binding on us is thoroughly anti-democratic.  Americans are, of course, bound by the Constitution -- but because it is law, not because of who wrote it.

About the rest: more to come, later.


*No, I wound up not asking a question about Superbill! for the C-SPAN cameras.  I did, however, discuss Superbill! with several Congressional scholars, and I'm still convinced it's a winner, along with several other reforms -- if one's goal is, as mine is, to make the Senate less disfunctional while also retaining minority, and minority party, rights.

**Sorry, no citations...the constraints entailed in blogging from the lobby of a political science conference.  Also, there are distractions.

Train (Wreck) in Vain

Steve Benen has a really smart post up today about the logic of a GOP-forced government shutdown in 2011.  As he notes, I had previously argued that a shutdown would be a bad strategy for the House Republicans, and for John Boehner in particular; the dynamics would likely be similar to the 1995-1996 budget battle, which was widely seen as a victory for Bill Clinton. 

Benen makes two points.  First, he's not sure that Republicans believe that they lost against Clinton.  If that's the case, then they certainly might charge ahead.  Second,

Republicans have already backed themselves into a corner -- they've made the president out to be the devil; they've all but ruled compromising; and they've committed to a path that almost certainly ends in a government shutdown. GOP leaders may have even deluded themselves into thinking that they're more popular than Obama (they're not), and that if a shutdown hurts the economy, they'll avoid blame (they won't).

In other words, Benen says, it may already be too late for Boehner; he's doomed if he avoids a confrontation, and he's doomed if he looses a confrontation.  Given those options, his rational move may be to risk a shutdown, even if he's fully aware that it's a low-percentage play.

I'll add one thing to that: the even more tricky part for Boehner is that it's very possible that many conservative activists want the confrontation more than they want the underlying substantive policy.  That's a marked contrast with 1994.  No one, at least in my memory, was talking about a shutdown in fall 1994; there was a increased recognition in that fall, winter, and on into the next spring and summer that both sides were playing chicken, with a train wreck coming if neither side blinked (yes, that's a three-way mixed metaphor.  Sorry), but while plenty of Republicans talked about forcing Clinton to back down, I don't recall many who were advocating a shutdown as a positive for its own sake.  In 1995, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole were perfectly willing to take yes for an answer, or perhaps 90% of yes; the problem for them was that Clinton was unwilling to give them that much.  If this time around Tea Party activists will consider any agreement, no matter how much the Republicans achieve, as a sign that Boehner and the rest have sold them out (and if they have a solid number of allies in the House and Senate who will reinforce that belief)...well, that's an even more impossible hand to play. 

The other thing I'll point out is that, as always, numbers matter.  Boehner will have a lot more flexibility (assuming that he's Speaker, which of course is not a done deal, but it's what we're talking about here) if he has 235 Members in his conference than if he only has 220.  That's not just true because the 200 might include a couple of moderates who would tilt the median preference against dramatic cuts in spending, but (and probably more so) because of the larger group of potential rejectionists who might attack a compromise from, well, call it the right, although it's more properly thought of as radical than conservative. 

I should add: I think John Boehner is far more capable of handling internal negotiations within his conference, external negotiations with the president, and the public relations aspects of the battle than was Newt Gingrich.  And it's worth remembering that this is all pretty speculative at this point, since we don't even know that Republicans will win the House, nor do we know what the politics of anything will look like a year from now.  But I agree with Benen that Boehner's position may be a very difficult one.

Friday Baseball Post

1.  I hate the Dodgers.  Just saying.

2.  I fully agree with Scott Lemieux about managers.  Once upon a time, long long ago, I wrote what I thought was a terrific post to r.s.bb listing what I figured were the main things that managers did that mattered, with all of them more important, I thought, than lineup order or in-game tactics.  Alas, it's gone now, but I listed things such as keeping pitchers healthy, playing the right guys, things like that.  for example, there have been over time plenty of managers who would have been pretty reluctant to "risk" playing Buster Posey when proven major league catcher Bengie Molina was available; if Posey stays at Fresno, of course, the Giants would not have contended this year.  Of course, we don't always know whether it's the manager or the GM making these decisions, but we do know that it Bochy was quick to work Sandoval, Posey, Lincecum, and Bumgarner (among others) into the starting lineup.  And, of course, that the previous two Giants managers were a lot more hesitant.  Anyway, I think the evidence is pretty strong that management matters, including things that it seems pretty likely the manager decides.

3.  Can't quit before mentioning: I really hate the Dodgers.

Political Junkie Test

Well, beam me up: I see that Jim Traficant will be on the ballot, running for his old House seat, after all. Obsession about all things Traficant is, no doubt, the key test of whether one is or isn't a political junkie, and has been for decades now -- I'm very proud to say that I'm the owner of an authentic Traficant for President button.

So my question is: once they finally beam him up for good, is there anything or anyone on the horizon to replace Traficant's place in the hearts of political nerds?  I suppose you could test for political junkie status by checking to see whether someone could correctly sort a list of obscure Members of the House  and C-SPAN on-air talent, but that's not quite the same thing.

(And, yup, light blogging will continue for the rest of the week, while I'm on the road).

Liberal Daydream

I posted earlier today about conservative daydreams -- Al Franken comesup short, and Joe Lieberman flips.  What about liberal daydreams?  I'd recommend this one: immediately after election day, 2008, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd realize that they're endangering the Democratic agenda with the risk that one or both of them won't be available for a key vote at some point, and they choose to resign their seats then.  I guess that means that West Virginia gets an appointed Senator, same as they have now; and Massachusetts holds its special election in, say, late January 2009, with Barack Obama at around 75% approval in MA and Kennedy able to stump for the Democratic nominee.

Catch of the Day (and Harry Reid and Conservative Daydreams)

It goes to Ezra Klein, for noticing:

That seems less weird when you know that Lieberman -- an independent -- votes with the Democrats 90 percent of the time (though his apostasies tend to come on such big-ticket items as health care and Iraq). Tales of the rift between him and his former party seem increasingly overstated.

Although of course Lieberman did eventually vote with the Dems on health care; his dissent was on the public option (and expanded Medicare, and other attempted public option compromises).  Even then, his vote wasn't the decisive one against some form of public option (it's pretty clear that Ben Nelson would never have been on board, and there were probably four or five others who would have let the whole thing sink rather than voting for any form of public option). On the votes that counted, though, Lieberman was there -- at one point even walking halfway across Washington through serious snow (on Shabbat) in order to cast a key vote.

Indeed, while there are plenty of places where I think Reid could have done more to break GOP obstruction, the case of Joe Lieberman is surely something for which he (and perhaps the president as well) deserve a lot of credit.  A lot of liberals outside the Senate wanted Holy Joe punished for his (extremely vocal) support of John McCain in 2008, and the Democratic leadership of the Senate took a lot of heat for ignoring it.  It's hard to say, at this point, that the liberal critics were right -- and it's not hard at all to imagine that had the Democrats stripped Lieberman of his committee chair position, he could have walked across the aisle and not only caucused with the GOP but started to vote with them regularly as well.  And without Holy Joe, there's every possibility that there's no ACA, and perhaps a smaller stimulus, no banking bill, and an even tougher road on unemployment insurance extensions.  Indeed, I would think that "Lieberman flips" is #2 on the conservative daydream list about 2009-2010, just after "Al Franken comes up short."

Granted, one can never tell about these things from outside -- and perhaps not even from inside.  But I think it's pretty clear that Harry Reid deserves a lot more credit than he's received from liberals for holding his caucus together most of the time in most cases, and Joe Lieberman is probably the prime example.