Elsewhere/L'Shana Tova

L'Shana Tova to everyone who is celebrating the holiday. And with that, I'm off for two days. First Rosh Hashanah with the oldest daughter off at college....ah well. Weekend posting should be according to regular schedule, and in the meantime I should have a column or two showing up in the usual places. At least if I get the edits done before sundown.

Meanwhile, a few things that I've done elsewhere this week:

I said that time is a luxury the House does have; everyone should stop accepting the idea that the nine legislative days they have scheduled this month is some sort of external constraint.

The "McCain Docrtrine" (that Congress should never turn down a president who wants war) is anti-constitutional nonsense.

It's important to blame Congress, not presidents, for "presidential overreach" on war powers. Congress is perfectly capable of restrain presidents; if they don't, that's on them, not on the White House.

And I stopped short of a "ignore those polls" on Syria, but I did advise extreme caution in using them to predict future opinion.

The Post-Boehner House?

Rumors are circulating, apparently, that John Boehner will retire after the current election cycle. Ryan Grim and Jon Ward report. Are they true? I certainly have no idea. I do suspect that Boehner could keep the job if he wants it for at least two more years, but whether he wants it? It's hard to get inside a politicians head. There's surely a good case to be made that the reporting here couldn't have happened unless Boehner was willing to let it happen...at any rate, that's what we have for now.

What might be more useful is to speculate about what comes next. The assumption here is that Boehner retires after a status quo election, with Republicans picking up a handful of seats in the House. Just for fun, I'll put percentages on the possibilities:

45%: The new Speaker, whether it's Cantor or someone else who currently seems like a likely candidate, basically changes nothing. Within two months, the new Speaker is widely regarded by conservatives as the "establishment" brake on "real conservative" legislation.

45% The new Speaker, whether it's Cantor or someone else who currently seems like a likely candidate, is very similar to Boehner but not as effective, leading to either a government shutdown, some other real disaster for Republicans, or at least a notable increase in floor fiascos; party/committee conflict increases.

6% The new Speaker is a real Tea Partier, and deliberately runs the House over the cliff, leading to a complete disaster for Republicans

2% The new Speaker, Cantor or someone else who seems like a likely candidate,  is very similar to Boehner but significantly more effective. The Speaker is still denounced as an establishment sell out, but floor fiascos are a thing of the past, and deals are cut more easily.

1% The new Speaker somehow transforms House Republicans, putting an end to Republican and House dysfunction, and finding a way to enact a conservative policy agenda into law while cutting deals with Barack Obama and the Senate to give them some of their priorities.

1% New Speaker? What new Speaker? Republicans split, and can't elect anyone as Speaker, leading to chaos and unpredictable results.

Iron Law of Politics? House Republican Leaders Are Always Squishes

There's a lot of good talk this morning about the GOP House leadership's current maybe-plan to trade in the possibility of shutting down the government over Obamacare for the threat of defaulting the government over Obamacare. Regardless of how it plays out, it occurs to me that there may be an Iron Law of Politics: House Republican Leaders Are Always Squishes.

John Boehner, of course, is a well-known traitor to true conservatives. He replaced Denny Hastert, who mostly was a blank slate for most people...at any rate, by the end of his tenure as Speaker, conservatives were quite unhappy with the drift of the House towards earmarks and spending.

Hastert replaced Newt Gingrich, who is sort of an unusual case; his demise probably had more to do with his overly centralized style as Speaker than about his lack of fidelity to conservative ideas. But conservatives never trusted him (and with good reason).

Gingrich replaced Bob Michel, who was clearly chased out as Minority Leader because he was insufficiently conservative and confrontational.

I'm not aware of any significant conservative action against John Rhodes, who preceded Michel. Before Rhodes was Gerald Ford, who everyone seemed to have liked.

Ford defeated Charles Halleck. According to one source I have (Richard Reeves' biography of Ford), the confrontation was along age, and not ideological lines...Halleck wasn't seen as a squish, or not sufficiently conservative, but just out of touch.

Halleck, however, ousted Joe Martin because Martin wasn't aggressive enough.

OK, that's the basic outline. The idea here isn't just about who is more conservative; it's a particular complaint that the current leader is always too accommodating of liberals, too ensconced in the "Washington" culture, not sufficiently confrontational, and other such complaints.

Hmmm...does that make an Iron Law? I'm mostly working from memory here. Hey, House historians! Am I getting these transitions right? The clear cases I see on transitions are Martin/Halleck, Michel/Newt, and Hastert/Boehner, with the current unhappiness with Boehner also a very good fit. I don't really know or remember enough about the pre-Michel leaders, though. I'm comfortable cutting it off with Martin, though.

Granted: at all times in every party, there are going to be moderates and hardliners, and the hardliners are going to find the leaders to be too moderate; that's the nature of an ideological spectrum, at least to the extent that spectrum is real. But I don't really see a similar dynamic happening with the other three Congressional leadership chains, especially within the House and Senate. Tom Foley might fit as someone regarded as insufficiently confrontational. There's a bit of that in the Senate, but I think it's mostly about complaints from outside interest groups and party actors about Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Trent Lott. I don't think many Republican Senators joined in. And it's important that the complaints are regularly personal; there are (often? usually? always?) a group within the House who believe that Republicans would get much better outcomes with tougher, more confrontational leadership.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to James Burton, 74.

Some good stuff:

1. Discharge petition talk bubbled up again recently; Joshua Huder shoots it down. Yup -- as I've said, I think it's a lot less of a problem for the leadership to endure a Hastert violation than it is to allow a discharge petition to work.

2. Seth Masket on the parties and campaign finance reform.

3. Dave Wiltse agrees about skipping Iowa.

4. Matt Yglesias on the health care cost slow down.

5. A big thing that's still underappreciated about the ACA: it's not really one thing, but a whole bunch of marginally related things all bunched together into one bill. Outside of the specific policy issue, that's the real takeaway from a good Ezra Klein post (in which he gets to bash Peggy Noonan, so there's also that).

Catch of the Day

Nice, from Sarah Kliff:

Why do Republicans keep voting to repeal Obamacare? For one thing, us journalists keep writing about it.

And she runs the numbers and finds that three repeal votes in particular seem to have generated decent publicity.

I don't think that's the whole answer, but it's not a bad one at all. Even if only one in twenty repeal votes catch the press's attention, as long as there's little opportunity cost -- and there isn't -- why not?

Not the whole answer? Well, first of all not all of these votes are exactly the same. Some are clean repeals, but some are partial dismantling, or some other clever (or maybe I should say "clever") angles on the issue. So, for example, this month we got a repeal vote which was actually calling for the individual mandate to be postponed. So part of the story here is that GOP spinmeisters come up with a new way to showcase something that sounds good to the voters they care about, and then put it into a bill and vote on it. And another part is that Democrats have decided that the large number of Obamacare "repeal" points is itself a good (Democratic) talking point, and so they are keeping a repeal vote count, which the press have picked up on. So there's effective GOP spin (coverage of the votes), and effective Democratic spin (ridiculing the repetitive votes, even when they're not actually repeating the same thing).

At any rate: nice catch!

House Budget Crack-Up

There's a lot of excellent commentary out there about the latest House Republican fiasco -- they had to pull an appropriations bill from the floor at the last minute yesterday because they didn't have the votes. As several have pointed out, the problem is that they were happy to vote for huge cuts in the abstract (in the House budget resolution) but not in the specific, in the actual appropriations bills. As I said, good analysis from several, including Brian Beutler, Greg Sargent, and Matt Yglesias.

I'll just add one bit that I don't think is getting quite enough emphasis. Remember, this is all about getting to 218. Republicans are trying to do that, essentially, with partisan bills -- which means they have to supply the bulk of the 218, perhaps all of it, on their own. And as everyone says, the big problem is that to satisfy the bulk of their conference they wind up with bills so extreme that they lose their own moderates.

But it's also true that even these bills, bills too extreme to pick up any moderate Democrats, bill so extreme that they lose moderate Republicans...also are not extreme enough to get all of the conservatives. That's what the reporting about Transportation-HUD says. See also: the vote on this appropriations bill, which lost 9 Republicans; or this one, where they lost 10. There are 234 Republicans in the House, but the cold hard fact is that on appropriations bills there are at least a handful who are probably out of reach.

At the very least, Republican whips have to focus a lot of energy on those who should be happiest with these bills. But that, presumably, could have the advantage (for the hard-liners) of moving things in their direction. To the extent they are just "no" votes, however, they not only lose whatever leverage they might have, but also reduce the effective size of the GOP majority...and make it more likely that nothing that conservatives like can emerge from the House. Let alone be enacted into law.

In other words, they are putting their own purity ahead of their policy preferences.

I'm not saying that's the whole story here, but it is a part of it.

For the larger story, just remember the Boehner rule: the House can (often, not always) manage to pass party-line partisan symbolic measures, but for substance, the Senate goes first.

The Next Step on Immigration (Fun Times in the House)

Good reporting today from NR's Jonathan Strong highlights the weird dynamic on the next step for immigration reform.

Here's the deal. Most Republicans, at the very least, want to pass something -- so that they can deflect at least some of the blame for comprehensive reform failing, and at least to some extent because they really do support some legislation. But they can't pass a comprehensive bill (at least not without relying on mostly Democratic votes), or even a mostly comprehensive bill. So the plan has been to pass a series of small bills that have wider support.

The problem? They may not have the votes for those, either.

There are two things going on here. One is that the tactical play for Democrats is to oppose each of the individual small bills unless they get some assurance that Republicans will eventually allow a vote on the part of reform that Democrats care about -- the path to citizenship. The question is whether moderate Democrats will hang tight, even on small bills, such as "border security" provisions, which they actually support (or at least want to be on record as supporting).

And then on the Republican side, there's a group which just likes voting against everything, even if they support the substance. On immigration, the excuse for voting no is that Boehner could use any successful bill as a mechanism for getting to conference, and then return to the House with something like the Senate bill, which would then pass the House with mostly Democratic votes. Now, this is basically nonsense. Not that Boehner might choose to pass a bill with mostly Democratic votes; that's a real threat, or at least a real potential threat. But if the Speaker wants to do that, there's nothing to prevent him from simply bringing up the Senate bill right now. Doesn't matter; the "no" caucus just likes opposing everything.

Now, in a normal legislature with a normal majority party, the "no" caucus could be marginalized...well, they would be marginalizing themselves. If Boehner can't pass something with 218 Republicans because the loony right won't help him, he would move a bit to the center to pick up moderate Democrats.

However, that doesn't work in the House we have. Partially because those moderate Democrats don't want to play along (especially since they'll be supporting any bills which are actually intended to become law, since those bill must get Barack Obama's signature and therefore can't be GOP-only). But mostly because many mainstream House Republicans are terrified of being called RINOs and sellouts, and therefore are terrified of separation between themselves and the crazy caucus.

At any rate: border security, at least, will pass the House if either moderate Democrats or the fringiest of conservative Republicans, all of whom support it, actually vote for it. My guess all along is that they probably won't.

Maybe Boehner Should Have Tanked the Farm Bill

The Half-Farm Bill squeezed through the House this afternoon, with all Democrats opposing it along with a handful of Republicans. This is the Farm Bill with agriculture stuff only; the Republicans say they'll move a second bill with the nutrition portions of the bill soon.

The story, here, is that the original House version of the bill failed when an amendment was adopted which cut SNAP (food stamp) funding, meaning that it lost Democratic votes, while Republicans deserted the bill anyway because it was still too high-spending for them. The leadership "solved" that by splitting the bill and going for a GOP-only 218, and after (reported) heavy lobbing, they got over the bar.

What's not clear to me is whether John Boehner is better off with this thing passing. As Ed Kilgore notes, it's not real likely that anything can come out of conference that can pass. It's not really clear, right now, if the separate nutrition bill can pass. It's not clear what Boehner had to promise to conservatives about conference to get them to stick on this vote. It's not clear what the next step is.

It seems to me that Boehner did have another choice. If the GOP-only farm-only Farm Bill fails, then maybe he can push the mainstream of his conference to support a bipartisan bill, leaving the conservative fringe out entirely. It won't work on everything, but on the Farm Bill, it really might. Maybe. And if it works on the Farm Bill and there's little fallout, that might strengthen Boehner's ability to gather different coalitions on the next tough one that comes up.

Of course, having yet another Farm Bill fiasco on the House floor would make the Republican House look silly (at least to the extent anyone is looking). But so what?

Would allowing the bill to go down demonstrate to the broad (and still very conservative) middle of the GOP conference that they're sometimes better off shopping for a deal with moderate Democrats than with their own crazy caucus? Maybe not. But I'm not sure that it could hurt. And the upside in passing the Farm Bill today just doesn't seem all that impressive to me.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Kelly McGillis, 56.

A little good stuff:

1. Very interesting: a confrontation between Eric Cantor and some of the committee chairs. Great reporting from Robert Costa. Not a good sign for Cantor -- or John Boehner.

2. More on health care spending...and health care employment. From Dan Diamond. Seriously, by 2050 we're all going to be some form of physical therapists, aren't we?

3. And Kevin Drum on the ratings agencies.

For Republicans, Hastert Violation Beats Discharge Petition

The latest excitement among those who want an immigration bill is the possibility that the House could use a discharge petition to bring a bill to the floor. 

There are basically two possibilities here in which a discharge petition happens, and neither is likely. Why? Because the House leadership really, really, doesn't want discharge petitions to become common. And the rank-and-file share an interest in it, too.

One is that Speaker Boehner and most Republicans really want a bill to pass, but they don't want the blame. That means the eventual floor vote would have the bill passing with mostly Democratic votes, so the only question is the path to get it there: either Boehner can bring it up despite his promises not to (presumably after some event "changes" things, such as a House-authored bill going down in flames), or they can give tacit approval to some Republicans to sign a discharge petition. He'd rather have the former. Sure, that means that he has to take the heat, but that's what you get for sitting in the big chair.

The other is that Boehner and most Republicans really oppose having something pass. In that case, the Republicans who signed a discharge petition would be seriously undermining what the rest of the Republicans want. 

The key here is that House leaders strongly want to maintain party discipline on procedural votes, and a discharge petition is a very strong violation of party discipline -- even stronger, really, than a vote against a "rule" on the House floor.

The power of the majority party in the House basically comes down to agenda-setting, exercised in part by committee chairs but most critically by control of the House floor through the Rules Committee. 

A "Hastert" violation -- putting something on the floor that most Members of the majority party oppose -- doesn't cede control of the floor. A discharge petition does.

Therefore, it's far more likely that if they want something to pass, they'll put it on the floor themselves. And if they don't, it's unlikely that rebels would sign a discharge petition. It's one thing to vote against the party on substance; it's a much bigger deal to work with Democrats to gain control of the House floor.

Granted, for supporters of the bill, using the possibility of a discharge petition to apply pressure to Republicans who support a bill makes sense anyway. But the practical effect would almost certainly be having those Republicans push Boehner to bring the bill up, not to have them actually sign on. 

So the existence of the discharge petition procedure is a lever that bill advocates can use. But ultimately, that's probably not how a bill gets to the House floor.

Five Points on Farm Bill/Immigration

Yesterday, I wrote over at PP about "What the Farm Bill says about immigration in the House." I've already linked to Greg, who had a similar view, and there were others, too. 

But Ezra Klein has a bit of a counterintuitive view this morning:

I’ll admit it: I don’t know what the collapse of the farm bill portends for immigration reform. But I suspect the answer is: not much.
[...]
Will immigration go the same way? Perhaps. But it’s not a sure thing, either. There’s not going to be an immigration bill that all House Republicans are happy with. And they’re not going to pass an immigration bill because Boehner begs and pleads. But they might, in the end, pass an immigration bill — or allow one to be passed — because they trust the basic strategy.

That’s not just the difference between immigration and the farm bill. It’s the difference between immigration and everything. Washington is acting surprised that Boehner can’t control his members. But we knew that already — remember Plan B? If you’re surprised that the House is a mess, you simply haven’t been paying attention.

I think there are a few quick points to be made here.

1. He's correct that we're not getting new information here. We knew "the House is a mess." All we had here is yet another example. So in that sense, it's fair to say that close observers of the House don't really have anything new to say after the farm bill. It's less "What the Farm Bill says about immigration in the House" than "What the Farm Bill says about immigration in the House -- if you were just tuning in." Of course, lots of people are just tuning in!

2.  I don't think it's correct to say that there's a "difference between immigration and everything." Specifically, I don't think it's correct to say that House Republicans don't care about passing a farm bill. Yes, they may be post-policy, but the farm bill? I would think that a lot of them want that to pass.

3. Which gets to an important point: it's one thing to say, as I've been saying that it may be the case on immigration that mainstream conservatives want the bill to pass but without their votes; it's another thing to solve that coordination problem. The same applies if their goal is to get something to committee and then let it die; there's still a coordination problem in actually getting that done.

4. By the way: yesterday's fiasco notwithstanding, there's still every possibility that we'll still get a farm bill this year. It wouldn't be the first time something collapsed on the floor only to be revived.

5. To the extent that the farm bill and immigration have any causal pull on each other, it may well be the other way around: if Boehner thinks he's eventually going to have to pass the Senate bill on immigration with mostly Democratic votes, he may be more reluctant to pass the Senate farm bill the same way. That's assuming the Senate version of the farm bill wouldn't get bipartisan majorities; it receive a fair number of Republican votes in the Senate, but short of a majority.

And once again: I still have no idea what House Republicans actually want to do on immigration. They may well want to kill it. We'll just have to see.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mariette Hartley, 73. Much loved (as far as I know) by my generation; don't think I could explain why to anyone. Her Star Trek appearance was OK, but I especially loved her two Columbo episodes.

The good stuff:

A Dean Baker takedown of Niall Ferguson.

Excellent substantive analysis of the farm bill fiasco from Jonathan Chait.

While Greg Sargent talks to Norm Ornstein about that fiasco.

Sarah Binder on the history of the Fed and the structure of the FOMC.

Ornstein, again, on contracting out government.

And I know I had this yesterday, but more detail from Reid Wilson:

Hotline Overlooked: Between 6/3, when Lautenberg died, and 6/22, when Feinstein turns 80, there are no octogenarians in the Senate. Last time the Senate was without an octogenarian: 1/3/81, when Sen. Milton Young retired, and 8/3/81, when John Stennis turned 80.

Tuesday, or Not?

One of the biggest surprises to me recently has been the emergence of National Review as a location for some quality reporting on Republicans. I've thought of NRO as mostly a cheerleader site, but with Robert Costa taking the lead, it's now becoming a place to get information beyond what today's talking points happen to be. That's good!

That said...I'm more than a little confused about today's item, from Jonathan Strong, claiming that "The Tuesday Group, a moderate-Republican caucus long ignored within the House GOP, is quietly starting to fight back against the conference’s right turn."

The problem? There's really no evidence that House moderates are having any effect at all. In the article, I mean. Typical anecdote:

Tuesday Group members will “get up in a [meeting of the Republican caucus] and express a point of view and basically, the leaders listen to them, but everybody else sort of tunes out,” said former representative Steven LaTourette of Ohio, now the president of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership.

It goes on like that, reporting on several recent skirmishes that the moderates lost; there's really nothing at all about any successes.

So what's the deal here? Strong noticed the existence of the Tuesday Group, thought there might be a story there, reported it out and found nothing but was already committed to a point of view? Some unexpected editorial decision from NR to show tolerance by throwing a bone to moderates? There really is some sort of resurgence of the moderates -- who, after all, have just as much ability to sink a GOP-only bill in the House as the Gohmert-Bachmann group -- but Strong didn't quite come up with the stories to convince us?

I'll admit: I'm puzzled. Interested, but puzzled.

Breaking: Boehner Is Constrained By His Conference.

There's a lot of nonsense on the "Hastert Rule" going around, and a lot of nonsense on John Boehner as a "weak" Speaker.

I've talked about many times, but here's the short version:

There's just no way that a Speaker is going to habitually do things that his conference doesn't want. Any Speaker who did that wouldn't last very long at all. A Speaker isn't "weak" because he's constrained that way; Nancy Pelosi was equally constrained by her caucus, and so were Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich, and so are all of them.

That doesn't need to be incorporated into any formal rule; it's just how it is.

What's more, just as partisan context needs to be included to assess how a president is doing with Congress, so does the partisan context need to be included if we are interested in assessing a Speaker's performance. The larger, and the more unified, the majority party, the easier it is for the Speaker to appear "strong." But that's not the Speaker's strength; it's just a function of a large, unified majority. Tip O'Neill didn't suddenly get better at being Speaker in 1983; he just had a liberal majority that wasn't available in 1981-1982.

There are variations beyond simple majority size and unity. Newt Gingrich and Jim Wright both alienated Members who didn't like their bullying style (and, in the case of Gingrich, his poor negotiating record with the Clinton White House). O'Neill, Pelosi, and (I believe) Boehner have been particularly good at listening to their Members, and moving the agenda towards consensus positions when they can. But no Speaker simply dictates to co-equal Members of the House what to do, and John Boehner isn't unusually weak because he can't or won't do so.

Spurious Impeachment? Probably Not

I've been writing about possible impeachment for a long time, and I said back in 2009 that "If Republicans take back the House, the odds are very good that they will impeach Barack Obama. "

Here's the thing, though. For all the impeachment talk -- and it's been a constant beginning just a few months into Obama's first term -- the House hasn't actually done anything remotely like that.

I think I was wrong, and I think the chances of a spurious impeachment are a lot lower than I thought, and a lot lower than a lot of liberal bloggers now think (see Jamelle Bouie today, for example).

Two things. One is that I think Republicans, or at least the Republicans in House leadership, really have learned a lesson from the Bill Clinton impeachment. The question, really is which lesson they learned. There's the one from 1998 and 1999 --  spurious impeachment helps the president and hurts the other party. And then there's the one from 2000 -- spurious impeachment, whatever the apparent immediate effect, helps the out-party eventually. I'm fairly confident that John Boehner learned the first of those, which is also (for whatever it's worth) far more likely to actually be true.

The second is that I'm not really sure that the incentives run towards impeachment, anyway. I thought they did...now, I'm not so sure. Scandal-mongering, obviously, is very lucrative within the conservative marketplace, and works well for Members of Congress who seek publicity (that's nothing new, of course). But it's not entirely clear to me that actually moving towards impeachment does anything great for most House Republicans. Among other things, and assuming they're not going to start impeaching Obama as often as they vote to repeal Obamacare, actually finishing an impeachment presumably ends whatever scandal they are mongering. It might be better to just keep the witch-hunt going.

On the other hand, it's certainly possible that the thing develops its own momentum and becomes difficult for them to stop...House Republicans aren't exactly known for resisting the more crazy impulses of talk radio hosts. Still, on balance I think the final word on this is likely to be John Boehner's demonstrated ability in guiding House Republicans past their worst self-destructive instincts. Would it shock me if there's a spurious impeachment? No. And I certainly expect impeachment talk to continue, whether or not there's any actual evidence of administration malfeasance. But overall, I think I've overstated the chances of the House really going through with it.

Elsewhere/Housekeeping

At Plum Line today I talked about Benghazi, GOP laziness, and the Republican-aligned press.

Yesterday at PP I argued that House Republicans seem to care more about getting to use the debt limit for extortion than about any particular policy goal.

And I have a new column at the Prospect taking some exception with idea that all that matters in Congress is party affiliation.

Meanwhile, here at Plain Blog world headquarters, there was a very loud BOOM outside and we lost power...and then when it finally returned, it appears that some of the machinery was fried. So until everything is up and working properly, posting may be erratic. Stay tuned...

Catch of the Day

Okay, it's just as much trivia as CotD, but Reid Wilson deserves something for noticing one thing -- really two things -- about the newly elected Mark Sanford:

Mark Sanford will join 10 other members of the class of 1994 in Congress when he's sworn in

Weirdly, Sanford will be the 3rd member of the class of '94 to return this Congress after taking time off (Stockman and Salmon, too) 

I've written about Newt babies vs. Watergate babies before (and also sparked by a Reid Wilson item; I guess we share an interest). I don't think this late-in-the-day revival for the '94ers will really do much to change the overall verdict, which is that it's not a class that has much to be proud of.

I'll finish by stealing my conclusion from the last time I wrote about the class of 1995, as I called it:

Of course, any similarity of the class of 1995 and Newt Gingrich in wild but unfocused ambition, lack of interest in the substance of governing, and/or scandal in private life is surely a coincidence.

Eric Cantor's Dilemma?

Ross Douthat is a fan of the ill-fated House health care initiative last week, which was torpedoed by a faction who decided that voting for a program to carry out a GOP talking point would, in this instance, count as supporting Obamacare. Douthat had previously bashed Republican politicians for not fighting for the policy ideas that some conservative wonks support, but now decides that Cantor deserves credit for trying -- because, Douthat believes, in his position he couldn't do more:

Because the Republicans are a minority in the Senate, because senators represent broader constituencies than congressmen, and because the structure of the upper chamber is designed to make compromise a necessity in any case, there’s a lot more room for Paul to be entrepreneurial on foreign policy (or for David Vitter to be entrepreneurial on banking reform, or for Marco Rubio to entrepreneurial — even if I think it’s in a mistaken cause — on immigration) than there is for a House leader charged with managing a fractious caucus to do the same.

Yes, but. The problem here isn't so much House vs. Senate, or even leadership vs. rank-and-file (although that is a real consideration), but an absolute, self-imposed bright line against working with Democrats. Douthat says, correctly, that "the House runs on partisanship." And yet: it doesn't have to, at least not always. The mechanisms that allow the majority party to get its way whenever it is united are very real and important, but they do not, in fact, preclude cross-party majorities from potentially succeeding.

In fact, Douthat gives away the game: "obviously House Democrats aren’t about to go along with a measure designed as part of a larger strategy to pick apart Obamacare." Well, yes. If, however, Republicans were trying to improve health care...that's something that House Democrats, Senate Democrats, and Barack Obama might well go along with. So it's not being in the House that's the problem, and that's forcing Cantor to win almost every single Republican vote; it's that we're talking here about an explicitly partisan strategy, with the only question about whether Cantor's tactics are better than those of other House Republicans.

That's not what Paul is up to on foreign policy, or Vitter on banking, or Rubio on immigration. They're trying to get something substantive done (or, at least, get a reputation for trying to get something substantive done), and none of them are, apparently, terrified of being pictured with a Democrat. And, presto, they can find Democrats willing to work with them.

It's probably true that Eric Cantor can't follow that course if he also wants to be Speaker some day. But that's not inherent in the House, and it's even possible that Cantor (and Boehner, and other House leaders) might try to persuade the rank-and-file that there are real policy gains available through some sort of bipartisanship. Unfortunately, there's little sign that either Cantor or the House Republican conference in general are very interested in real policy gains. And that, and not anything else about the House, is why Cantor doesn't actually deserve much "credit for the effort."

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Dave Edmunds, 69.

The good stuff...and by the way, I have no idea of the blogging schedule for this week, thanks to, yup, jury duty. Meanwhile, there's this:

1. More in an excellent series of posts from Sarah Binder on the House, John Boehner, and the Hastert rule.

2. Kevin Drum on words.

3. Steven Taylor on the Gosnell flap.

Safe Seats Do Not Mean Gerrymandering

I guess we're not explaining this well enough.

Dave Weigel:

I enjoy the new, #slatepitchy argument that gerrymandering is overrated as an issue, and that it doesn't influence whether members moderate their votes or not, but sequestration's putting that to a test.

Kevin Drum:

Hold on a second. Who's saying that? The argument I've heard making the rounds lately is that gerrymandering is probably responsible for a fairly modest change in the number of House seats Republicans won last year...But who's been saying that gerrymandering has no effect on whether members feel any need to moderate their votes or their rhetoric? What have I missed?

What both of these normally astute writers are missing is that gerrymandering (drawing district lines for political reasons) is only one reason for safe seats.

Why are there safe seats? Lots of reasons, including:

* Geographic distribution of partisans. If Democrats and Republicans live in different neighborhoods, or different cities, or are differently drawn from urban, suburban, and rural areas, then you're very likely to get lots of safe partisan seats unless districts are very specifically drawn to prevent it.

* Partisan voting. As voting by party increases, any Republican in a Republican seat becomes safer, as do Democrats in Democratic seats.

* Incumbency. Even Republicans in Democratic districts can be safe if incumbency advantages are strong enough.

* Information. To the extent that, say, Republicans get most of their political information from the GOP-aligned partisan press, they're very likely to support their current Republican Member of Congress. Note that the old "neutral" press tended to be extremely incumbent-friendly to their Congressional delegations.

* Gerrymandering. Be careful, though. The kind of gerrymandering that tends to create safe seats, especially for the majority party, is bipartisan gerrymandering -- the kind in which incumbents from both parties cooperate to draft lines that protect all incumbents. See California, 2002-2010, for a famous example. Partisan gerrymandering tends to yield more seats for the majority party at the cost of each of those seats being relatively less safe. However, partisan gerrymandering, to the extent it's successful, should make the "victim" party have safe seats; the idea is to pack as many of the minority party into as few seats as possible, but to use majority voters more efficiently.

So: yes, gerrymandering has effects, although they're less impressive than many think. But when it comes to safe seats, gerrymandering on the whole won't be a major factor, and partisan gerrymanders in particular shouldn't (overall) produce more truly safe seats for the majority party. Of course, it may produce some; one of Weigel's example is a Member whose seat was made safer through partisan redistricting. On the other hand, however, perhaps without that gerrymander (and I haven't looked into what happened in this case) the seat wouldn't have been a safe Republican seat at all; maybe it would have been a Democratic seat.

Generally, this reminder: for whatever reason, people really, really, really like attributing effects to gerrymanders. So if you come across one of these, by careful: it's very possible that something else is really at work.