Read Stuff, You Should

Lots to get to, so no introduction. Well, except that.

1. The Civil War was about slavery, as Edward Ball reminds us.

2. Alan Abromowitz explains the lay of the land in the 112th Congress.

3. Ezra Klein is brilliant about Coke, Pepsi, and Chris Christie.  Although I'll admit that a good part of why I think it's brilliant is because I believe his version of the New Coke story, without actually knowing whether it's true.  Still, it's good.

4. Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Obama as a Tory.  Not sure if he's right, but well worth reading.

5.  I've been reading Austin Frankt and Aaron Carroll's "The Incidental Economist" more often recently, mostly to understand health care policy better.  Here, though, Carroll just has an excellent screed about Arizona.

6. Adama Serwer explains the Obama detention policy.

7. Kevin Drum nails "The Really Big Country Problem."

8. Annie Lowrey engages in Fed-watching.

9. Serwer on ACA and the Constitution.

10. Jack Goldsmith on Wikileaks.

11. And a gloomy Afghanistan update, from Fred Kaplan.

Reform!

I'm very happy to see that the incoming majority Republicans are planning to read the Constitution in the House of Representatives on the second day of the 112th Congress.

This is extremely good news.  Along with the new requirement that every bill explicitly cite the Constitutional authority under which it is legitimate, reading the Constitution out loud will guarantee that no new legislation will violate our basic charter.  After all, it's well known that the Constitution is clear and unambiguous at all points, and that previous violations of it have been caused by a combination of ignorance and indifference.  Once it's read on the House floor, that problem will be solved.

Look, this stuff is proven to work.  Younger readers may not realize it, but in the Carter and Reagan years the House was just full of treasonous subversives -- a problem entirely solved by saying the Pledge of Allegiance to open all House sessions since fall 1988.

Unfortunately, reading the Constitution on the House floor is only one excellent first step towards true reform. 

The Constitution reading is part of the new rules package to be implemented by the incoming majority.  Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that simply printing the new rules and distributing them to House offices will be sufficient to ensuring that Members of the House fully understand those rules.  The proper way to do so is to read them aloud on the House floor.  To be safe, I'd recommend reading the rules of the 111th House; the new rules proposed by the incoming majority; and the final result, after it passes, of the official rules of the 112th House.  While they're at it, they might as well read Robert's Rules of Order. 

That's not all!  I know Republicans have been quite concerned about the nefarious Democratic practice of passing bills they have not read in full, based on the belief that only a full reading of the text of the bill will reveal its true meaning.  Therefore, I'd highly recommend that the House reject the corrupt Democratic practice of dispensing with the full reading of the bill, and commence full readings.  Before they're referred to committee.  Every bill.

Moreover, the Constitution, while obviously directly Divinely inspired, does have the sad drawback of not making that inspiration quite as explicit as we'd like it to be.  A true People's House would, therefore, not stop with reading the Constitution, but plunge right in to the Declaration of Independence, paying special attention to the parts about "nature's God" and "endowed by their Creator."   And the good bits in the last paragraph, too. 

To be on the safe side, I'd also say that it can't hurt to read the Federalist Papers out loud on the House floor.  And Tom Paine's Common Sense.  I was going to say they should add Longfellow's poem, but I heard a rumor that it was subversive, so forget that one.

And...yes, everyone but a few radicals in Berkeley, Madison, and Cambridge knows that true legitimate authority is directly based on God, so I'd very much expect House Republicans to insist on a full reading of the Christian Bible on the House floor. 

You got a problem with that?

Wrapping It Up 2

Since it looks as if Congress is just about to finish up for the year, for the session, and for the 111th Congress, I figured I should say something about my previous position that it was important for Harry Reid to keep the Senate in as long as possible, in order to finish up its business and prevent Republicans from running out the clock.

You might think that I'm about to condemn Reid for quitting now -- but I'm not sure that I should.  The problem is that once Reid (quite properly) threatened to hold the Senate in for a post-Christmas session, he then began to get results.  A bunch of judges, for example, were confirmed this week and last.  What we don't know, at least from the reporting I've seen so far, is to what extent Republicans dropped stalling tactics that they could have employed in exchange for finishing up now.  In other words, it could be that Reid successfully bargained for whatever he could get from the lame duck session, and that part of the deal was that once everyone agreed on what would pass if they stayed in to the bitter end, then they all agreed to expedite that business. 

That said...the Democrats are, and quite properly, congratulating themselves on a very successful Congress, but there really are a couple of major setbacks for the Democrats here at the end of the session.  One is their failure to pass appropriations bills for the current fiscal year.  Ezra Klein has done some terrific blogging about that...see for example here.  The one thing I'd add to what he's been saying is that this was only an omnibus spending bill because the Democrats failed to pass individual appropriations bills, and that even in the lame duck session -- even now, in fact, if they wanted to and had the votes -- the Democrats could still pass one or two regular appropriations bills.  Perhaps this is just a case in which they never did have the votes, but I'm really not convinced that they tried very hard.

The second one, familiar to regular readers, is nominations.  Peter Diamond is still waiting to be confirmed to his seat on the Fed.  Lots of judges are still waiting to be confirmed, including, as far as I can tell, quite a few who do not appear to be controversial -- and as I've said in the past, it's very possible that even the controversial appointees have 60 votes (not to mention the simple majority needed to confirm, but that's another story, of course).  And then there are the executive branch appointments, many have been cleared, but there are still plenty of them in the Senate's Executive Calendar.  Now, again, I can't say whether more could have been done had the Senate stayed in longer, because I don't know what deals were made.  But overall, it's pretty clear that confirming nominations has never been a priority for the Obama Administration or the Senate. 

I'm sure I'll have something more to say later about the historic 111th, but it's hard to believe that they couldn't have made more progress in those two areas.

Wrapping It Up 1

Yesterday, I was saying that a large portion of the opposition to New START could be explained by understanding that a portion of the GOP has generally been suspicious of all arms control agreements.  Daniel Larison argues that the Bolton-Perle wing of the GOP hasn't, previously, had much sway in the Senate.  He may be correct that this indicates a shift in the center of the GOP on security issues; or, it may be that skepticism turns to opposition when there's a Democrat in the White House. 

I've also seen arguments that Republicans erred in opposing the treaty without having the votes to win on it; as Fred Kaplan put it:

And so the Republican leadership made this a purely political battle and—fresh off what had seemed a triumphant election season—suffered an astonishingly egregious defeat.

Perhaps.   On the other hand, the "defeat" aspects of this are likely to be minimal and ephemeral; a few weeks from now, no one is going to remember or care about New START (on the political side; the substance, of course, matters, but there's no difference there between fighting and losing and just plain letting the thing pass). 

However, Republicans did accomplish something by fighting on New START.  They chewed up quite a few hours of Senate floor time, a very valuable commodity in the lame duck session, and really throughout the 111th Congress.  Now, there's really no way of knowing what exactly they gained by doing that.  However, had they agreed to a quick vote on the treaty, there would have been more time for the Democrats to confirm judges and executive branch appointments; more time for appropriations bills, and perhaps to give a more sustained effort on the omnibus appropriations bill; and more time for any of the other unfinished business on the Democratic agenda. 

So I wouldn't be quick to conclude that it was a mistake for Republicans to fight this one out, even if they took a (very minor) PR hit in losing.  Indeed, in understanding what the GOP was up to, I think one has to consider the possibility that treaty opposition was in part a deliberate -- and, I would say, perfectly legitimate -- part of trying to run out the clock.

Big House

With reapportionment in the news today, there's been some tweeting about a recurring Big Think kind of reform: increasing, perhaps radically increasing, the size of the House of Representatives.  David Dayen:

Why is increasing the size of the House of Representatives, so 1 lawmaker doesn't represent 700,000 people, just completely off the table?

And Reihan Salam:

Montana has 989,415 people and one member of Congress. We need to increase the number of House members to at least 650. This is absurd.

I think this is one of those reforms that has a lot of surface appeal -- in fact, I can say for sure that it has a lot of surface appeal to me.  However, it turns out that the case for expanding the House doesn't really hold up too well when one thinks about how it would actually play out.

There are really two major parts to this: how a Big House (I'd say Salam's 650 or more; Nick Beaudrot has floated the idea of tripling the size of the House) would affect elections, and how it would affect internal House operations.

For elections, the problem with a Big House is that, given residential patterns and assuming no change in single-member districts, we would wind up with even more lopsided partisan districts than we have now.  Indeed, all the incentives of reapportionment would work the same as they do now, which combined with good modern technology would mean that we would probably wind up with about the same number of swing districts, but far more solid partisan districts.  Meanwhile, more districts mean even less media coverage for each contested election -- and I would strongly argue that more media coverage is almost always a good thing.  Small districts with little or no media coverage are a recipe for a strong incumbency advantage, which few people see as a really good thing.

How would the operations of the House change if it had more Members?  What it would mainly produce is more backbenchers, people who have no particular responsibilities but a good forum for making noise.  At the same time, with more people to coordinate, the need for coordination grows, which would tend to make the party leadership even more important than it already is.  I'm not sure I see any real advantages in that. 

Against that I can see two advantages.  One, a real one, is that any shakeup of the House (well, I suppose any shakeup except a GOP landslide) is apt to be good for demographic change in that body, especially in accelerating the growth of women in the House.  In my view, that's a good thing.  The other I think is mostly a mirage -- with a larger House, constituents might feel closer to their Member of Congress.  The problem here is that even with an extreme reform -- tripling the size of the House -- we're still not going to get fewer than 250K people per representative.  In practical terms, there just isn't really much of a difference between sharing a Member with that many people and sharing her with several millions; in any district larger than, say, one hundred thousand, it's hard to believe that anyone is going to feel he has the undivided attention of his Member of Congress. 

I've blogged on this before...as I said then, I do find this reform idea intriguing, and I very much understand the vague sense that House districts are just too large.  But I'd send everyone back to James Madison, and Federalist 10, in which he has the conceptual breakthrough that large politics are actually an advantage to democracy, even though up to that point in history everyone had always assumed that democracy was only possible in very small polities.  Madison's insight had to do with plurality, and the idea that as a nation gets very large, no single interest will have a natural majority, and so the danger of majority tyranny that had always undermined that form of government would be at least partially solved.  Now, that doesn't mean that individual representatives should have millions of constituents, but I think it also suggests that such a situation isn't as much of a problem as we might intuitively believe.  After all, what (rightly!) bothers people about the Senate is the malapportionment, not the idea that there are only 100 Senators.  And note that most of us feel a lot closer to our Senators than to our Member of the House -- because our Senators get so much more publicity than do Members of the House.  Increasing the size of the House would, alas, only make that problem worse.

Conservatives and START

I think I'm going to defend conservative Republicans against the charge that their opposition to New Start is nothing but raw partisan politics.  See for example Adam Serwer's claim that treaty opponents are "manufacturing controversy over Democrats adopting policies Republicans once embraced," which Patrick Appell over at the Dish summarizes as "Anything Obama Supports = Bad."  This is generally followed by citing the GOP Secretaries of State who support the treaty, as Max Bergmann does here.


There may indeed be some of that disingenuous opposition going on, but really: do these people ever listen to conservatives?  It seems to me that what we're mainly hearing here is the wing of the party that considered Henry Kissinger (and Richard Nixon) near-traitors, that considered Ronald Reagan a sell-out when he shifted from giving speeches about the Evil Empire, and that spent eight years of the George W. Bush administration trashing every treaty from ABM to Geneva, of all things.  Is it really a surprise that they aren't convinced by Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and George Shultz?  Nor is it news that this wing of the GOP has considerable support in the Senate; hasn't that always been the case? 

(That's the real lesson of Jonathan Chait's gotcha on Richard Perle: that wing of the GOP didn't roll over for Reagan, either).

Now, it's of course possible that a Republican president would find it somewhat easier going in finding Republican votes, although as I write this it looks as if Barack Obama is going to have the votes, after all..  And it's surely interesting to see the current support level of the Perle-Bolton wing in the Senate.  Moreover, I do think it's likely that some Senate Republicans did deliberately draw out the debate in hopes that it would crowd other items off the Senate agenda -- which is, as far as I'm concerned, a perfectly legitimate tactic. 

But that's about it.  I see no reason to attribute conservative opposition to New START to anything other than conservative opposition to all treaties.

The Name Game

Oddly enough, the discussion of what to call the health care law has produced some quite good blogging.  James Joyner argues that "Obamacare" is politically neutral, and argues against "propagandistic bill naming," citing "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" as a prime example of that style.  I think that's generally a good point (and I forget: does the bill give the exchanges a fancy propogandistic name, or are they just "health care exchanges")? 

On the other hand, Aaron Carroll makes the excellent point that Barack Obama didn't do this by himself:

The more specific reason I don’t use “Obamacare” is that it implies that the law is the work of one man.  It wasn’t passed by fiat.  It was created by three committees in the House, two more in the Senate, was voted on by a majority of Representatives and a heck of a lot of Senators before being altered in reconciliation.  Then it was signed by the President.  President Obama neither gets all the blame nor all the credit.  It’s not his and his alone.  

Ezra Klein has more, and singles out Max Baucus.  Again, fair enough, but radically incomplete; if we're going to name this one for people, it's gonna have to be (in no particular order, and non-inclusive) KennedyObamaWaxmanDoddBaucusPelosiReidHarkinMillerRahmSchileroDeParlethousandsofactivistsdozensofinterestgroupsCare.  Barring that, I've adopted ACA, because whatever the origin of the letters, calling it by the supremely bland "ACA" sounds about as neutral as one can get.