Yeah, Bipartisanship Isn't About To Break Out

Brian Beutler has this right:

Ever since he became speaker, Boehner has been reluctant to forge coalitions with Democrats, particularly when Democrats end up controlling the policy and supplying the overwhelming majority of votes. As a rule he’s only done this when sticking with the right would send the country past some deadline or over some cliff, and even then he’s acted reluctantly. 

See also Jamelle Bouie.

The bottom-line context underlying the temporary (and it's certainly temporary) emergence of bipartisan peace in the House is the one I keep pounding on: at the end of the day, whether before or after a shutdown, John Boehner knows that eventually he and Barack Obama are going to wind up on the same side of something that funds the government going forward. That's an absolute, unavoidable fact of appropriations deadlines. Which means that at the end of the day, whatever he does on the way there, Boehner is going to be a sellout and a RINO for agreeing with the Kenyan socialist in the White House.

Given that context, a shutdown was, and is, an almost certain disaster for the Speaker (and for whatever Republicans would wind up voting for the eventual measure that ends the shutdown). I'm still not sure why the House went down that road in October, but having done it once and (believing they) paid the price, it was even more unlikely that they would do it a second time.

But there's no reason at all to believe that this means anything for those issues -- most issues -- in which there is no certainty that they end in agreement between Obama and Boehner.

Which means, for all those other issues, what matters is whether mainstream House Republicans want bills to pass (or, for GOP priorities, whether Obama and mainstream Senate Democrats want something to pass).

The rest, such as Boehner lashing out at conservative groups? It's mostly, or entirely, window dressing. This is one that fits perfectly into a story of clear incentives -- and the same incentives just aren't there on many other issues.

Catch of the Day

Kevin Drum is absolutely right in his response to Lori Montgomery's WaPo story today about budget negotiations:

There's nothing wrong with talking about the federal deficit in a story about the budget. But this entire story is framed around a sense of dismay that Congress has "abandoned" its debt-reduction goals. This is done with no mention of the fact that Congress has already slashed the 10-year deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the past couple of years. No mention that we've been engaged in this frenzy of deficit cutting despite the fact that the economy is still fragile, which means that reducing the deficit is almost certainly a terrible idea. No mention that deficit cutting of any size in the wake of recession is unprecedented in recent history.

Basically, there are two problems with Montgomery's piece. First, that she ignores previous deficit-cutting from this and previous Congresses; second, that he takes the position that deficit-cutting is unambiguously a good thing, now and always.

I'll add one thing: she uses "debt" and "deficit" in ways that obscure what's going on. So, for example, she begins by saying the prospective deal would "not significantly reduce the debt." Well, yes; that's not going to happen unless the government runs surpluses. While there are some who believe that would be a good idea, most economists, including many sincere deficit hawks (who do want both short and long-term deficits slashed), would not want the debt reduced next year.

Matt Yglesias is on this too, and he's right also: "Journalists who would never think of openly cheerleading for more people to get government-subsidized health insurance or for oil companies to secure a freer hand in drilling, regard the goodness of deficit reduction as a kind of non-ideological given."

Yglesias asks why that's the case. My guess? Reagan. Because Ronald Reagan's policies produced huge deficits, and his influence pushed future Republicans to adopt policies which produced huge deficits, the Democratic Party shifted to a mostly fiscally conservative party. And yet because Reagan's particular political genius lie in believing what he wanted to believe regardless of what was going on, under Reagan conservatives became even more rhetorically committed to balanced budgets and deficit obsession.

Which leaves both parties rhetorically, at least, committed to hating deficits and debt. And the norm for journalists is that if both parties support something, then it's okay to treat it as an unquestioned and unquestionable good thing.

Of course, there are plenty of liberals who don't always support balanced budgets, and a handful of conservatives who are honest about the effects of their policies. But on both sides, the bulk of the official messaging assumes that deficit reduction is always a good thing.

On the other hand, it's possible that reporter love of deficit reduction precedes the partisan (rhetorical) consensus on deficit reduction, in which case it's possible that one reason the parties adopted that stance is because they believed it would play better in the press. (I suppose I should note here, too, FDR's 1932 anti-deficit campaign rhetoric). So perhaps a more careful examination of this is in order.

At any rate: nice catch!

What Mattered This Week?

I'm really not sure this week. There's the apparently promising budget talks, but what's really going to matter is whether the radicals can once again intimidate mainstream conservatives; I don't think we know that yet. There's the presidents speech on the economy and inequality...that's certainly not apt to have any direct immediate effects, but it surely might signal the future direction of the Democrats. Even on health care, it's not really clear how and whether successful and unsuccessful fixes on Healthcare.gov will matter.

So I'm just going to leave it all to you. What do you think? What else do you have? What do you think mattered this week?

Catch of the Day

Gotta go with one for Jonathan Chait, who spots a Republican Member of the House claiming that "Congress should do everything in its power to tackle deficits" and then a few sentences later saying that "he rejects any talk of offsetting the cuts with new tax revenue."

Of course, this is familiar as the Republican war on budgeting, in which deficits are basically "unwarranted spending or taxes." As opposed to, you know, the difference between government revenues and government spending. I'm willing to be that isn't not just taxes; I'm willing to bet the Republican here, Doug Collins, would also be horrified by all sorts of specific budget cuts if they were proposed to him (I haven't read the original paywalled article -- I'm not a WSJ subscriber -- but for what it's worth the headline was about Republicans willing to cut defense).

Back in the real world in which federal budget deficits are in fact the difference between government revenues and spending, this means that (most) Republicans don't actually care very much about budget deficits at all. Indeed; I've yet to see, from most Republicans, much of anything they're willing to accept in order to cut the deficit that they otherwise would support. Perhaps that's changing on military spending, but I doubt it; I suspect instead that some anti-government conservatives are coming to believe that military spending can be as wasteful as domestic spending, rather than that they believe well-spent military appropriations which help the nation are worth sacrificing in order to lower the deficit.

Also: nice catch!

Sunday Question for Liberals

I'm curious: are there liberals out there who want to see sequestration continue because it's the best shot at cutting military spending, even though it also cuts spending on things they like? (Or to put it in the form of a proper Sunday question: is that your position?)

Elsewhere: Broken GOP, Showdown Future, AutoCR

Column time. At TAP today, I argued that we're unlikely to have a second shutdown when the current CR expires in January. The big point I've been making is that shutdowns are the result of a deliberate strategy, not the accidental effect of difficulty reaching a deal.

At Salon, I talked about the broken GOP and why that's the problem, and not institutional design.

Going with both of those: a PP post today in which I complained about one specific reform proposal: a fail-safe automatic CR at current levels. Terrible idea!

And way back on Friday I took note of one of the big issues in the TX Lt. Gov. Republican primary: the 17th Amendment.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question: what, if anything, did you learn from the shutdown showdown?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

What, if anything, did you learn from the shutdown showdown?

What Mattered This Week?

I'll be boring and just go with the end of the shutdown, along with the end of the debt limit threat.

Not sure what I have that didn't matter...I suppose I don't really think that the specific votes among mainstream Republicans on ending the shutdown mattered all that much. That is, it mattered a lot that it ended, but it's relatively unlikely that anyone will draw a primary (or a more significant primary) only because of a "yes" vote, or take a hit in the general because of a "no" vote, all else equal. It's possible, but unlikely.

That's what I have, but there was a lot going on. What did you notice? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Erin Moran, 53.

Good stuff

1. I absolutely agree with the premise of Ezra Klein's post: Democrats should give up on the goal of raising revenues. Trickier, however, is how to do that. But he's exactly right about this.

2. The latest on 2014, from David Wasserman. Very reasonable.

3. Sarah Binder's postmortem on the shutdown deal.

4. Paul Waldman is very good on the Robert Costa phenomenon.

5. And another good one from Ross Douthat on Boehner.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Michael McKean, 66.

Good stuff; not too much, since some of you are going back to work today:

1. I've said that Ross Douthat has the hardest job in America: his job is to be a representative of real conservatives but also to tell the truth as he sees it, and even in the best of times those are going to clash, and these are not the best of times for the GOP (no NYT columnist is charged with being a real liberal; the point of having Tom Friedman on the op-ed page isn't lost if liberals disown him). Keep that in mind, and this one is extremely impressive. Also this one is correct, regardless of context.


2. Scott Monje's deep dive into the shutdown game.

3. And Sarah Kliff is counting ACA applications.

And Now, Humorous Credit-Taking

Earlier I watched a truly great politician moment: "Gang of 14" Senators going to the Senate floor and congratulating themselves for working out an agreement to re-open the government and raise the debt limit. Not the agreement; the actual deal was apparently only tangentially related to the Gang's. But an agreement, nonetheless. They are immensely proud of having participated in a process which had little or nothing to do with ending a shutdown almost three weeks in, and raising the debt limit at the last minute.

There are basically two ways to take this.

One of them, and the one I try to be in favor of most of the time, is to just enjoy the spectacle of politicians being politicians. Of course they want to present themselves as full of spirit of bipartisanship, not to mention can-do efficacy. Of course they want to present themselves as part of the Good Washington. It's silly, but it's what politicians do, and we need politicians, so why complain?

The other one, when I'm in a less charitable mood...start with the Republicans. Some of them (John McCain, in particular, whatever his petty, personal motives; sorry, can't help that) have been pretty good about fighting back against the radicals. Others? Not so much. And while obviously the first blame for all of this has to go to the radicals, the truth by all accounts is that the radicals were dramatically outnumbered in both the House and Senate Republican conferences. And yet those sane Republicans too often hid their beliefs, voting to go along with most, if not all, of the craziness that they themselves said was doomed. Don't forget: these seven Gang-sters voted unanimously over the weekend, with the rest of the Republicans, to kill a clean debt limit bill by filibuster. Granted, what the Senate did wasn't very important in the grand scheme of things, but they could have provided a bit of cover House Republicans. They did not.

Then there are the Democrats. Maybe they deserve a break; one way of reading the entire thing (and Brian Beutler has been good on this) is as a process of producing tough votes for Democrats to take. Still: these moderate Democrats, by predictably clinging to whatever Republicans they can find in order to constantly prove their distance from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and all, help to enable those sane Republicans to actually act as irresponsibly as Tail Gunner Ted and his group.

The true humor in all of this was that the Senators actually finishing up the deal and how it was going to be handled were off the Senate floor because they were busy working on it; the Gangsters were congratulating each other for working together to reach a deal precisely because they had time on their hands while the real work was going on.

At any rate, as I said, pretty much this is just what politicians do, and if you want to have a functioning democracy, you're going to need some politicians, and no question about it but that even the best of the workhorses will still take the opportunity when available to show off in the winner's circle.

House CR/Debt Limit BIll Pulled

The news this evening is that John Boehner had to pull the bill Republicans had been scrambling to put together all day.

My general sense is that it's progress. If a GOP CR/debt limit bill passes the House, we're back to where we were, really; both sides have a position, with Democrats insisting that a deal amounts to paying a ransom, and so there's no deal to be had.

However, with House Republicans in disarray, the only game in town is the Reid/McConnell "deal," which is really just a GOP surrender with a minor fig leaf. Or maybe not even; there was talk at one point in the last day or so of it winding up as just a clean bill.

Or, to put it another way. From the very beginning, it's been clear that any bill to pass would need to be acceptable to both Barack Obama and Senate Democrats and also to most House Republicans. House Republicans mostly wouldn't have to vote for it, but they probably would have to accept it. So one way to look at it is that the whole game has been to get mainstream House Republicans to the point where they're willing to accept surrender, even if it means getting blamed for it by the radicals.

I'm no reporter; I only know what I read, and can guess at what seems likely. But I think it's extremely likely that most House Republicans blame the radicals, Ted Cruz, and Jim DeMint a lot more than they blame John Boehner. And I tend to agree with those who think that perhaps today was just about demonstrating to them, one more time, that the radicals who are a problem that they actually have to confront. If only by accepting a mostly-Democrats bill to re-open the government and extend the debt limit.

Maybe not! But whether Boehner actually plotted this all out this way or not, that's my best guess about where we are tonight.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Penny Marshall, 70.

Good stuff:

1. John Hudak and Tom Mann want more responsible politicians. Well, yeah.

2. Nice one from Sarah Binder on the debt limit and, more generally, Congressional rules.

3. I totally missed Ray LaRaja on the McCutcheon campaign finance case last week. I generally tend to agree with Ray on all these things, although I'm not as concerned as he is that money flow to formal party organizations as opposed to outside groups -- however, I agree that formal party organizations should at least be on equal footing.

4. Ezra Klein on the ACA rollout.

5. And Mike Konczal on the Tea Party and Wall Street.

Elsewhere: Democracy, Republicans, Shutdown links

No links post this morning with the holiday, such as it is. I'm not sure what I'll be writing here today...I will be over at Greg's place and PP.

And new columns. At TAP, I argue for Madisonian democracy against the wave of hits its taken during the shutdown (and in particular, from Dylan Matthews).

Over at Salon over the weekend, I push back against predictions of long-term doom for the GOP. As I've said before, I do think that if Republicans win the presidency in the near future that there's a good chance they'll have difficulty governing, and they're obviously having difficulty governing as far as control of the House is concerned.

One more: back on Friday, I hit Republicans over the debt limit. Remember: it's not just that they're demanding a ransom for the debt limit, which would be pretty bad -- but we're now only days away, and they haven't yet decided on what ransom to ask for.

Meanwhile...here are some links to the ones that I've written about the shutdown/debt limit fight that I think hold up pretty well. Well, mostly pretty well. I thought Boehner was a smart enough politician that he would probably have avoided it (although see the last link). Otherwise, I think these are still useful:


Not another budget apocalypse: the basic structure of the confrontation.

Extortion for the sake of extortion: how I see the basic position of the radicals.

The Day After Shutdown: how things play out if a shutdown happens (and therefore, why Boehner should have avoided it).

My five biggest worries: about why a shutdown could happen even though Boehner should have been avoiding it.

Explaining Senator Obama's Debt Limit Speech

Matt Yglesias had a fun item yesterday with a little analysis of Barack Obama's speech against, and vote against, raising the debt limit back in 2006. It's a good item:

All in all, a pretty ridiculous display. But note what Obama doesn't do—attempt to hold the country hostage in order to advance a policy agenda. To use a technical term, what Obama's doing here is bullshitting. The debt ceiling bill has majority support in both houses and is clearly going to pass. Rather than doing the right thing and voting "yes," Obama has decided to make a "no" vote and then deliver a speech denouncing George W. Bush's fiscal policy. But he's not organizing a filibuster. The fact that the bill passed the Senate 52-48 is a huge tell. Nothing passes the Senate with 52 votes if the minority party is actually trying to stop it from passing. Obama didn't demand the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts as the price for his debt ceiling vote because he didn't demand anything as his price for his debt ceiling vote. There was no negotiation, no demand, no effort to block passage, and actually no effort to do anything at all. It was just a forum for silly speeches.

All correct, but there's one bit to add to it. Well, actually two; it's worth noting that Democrats had rid Congress of these stupid votes at one point, but the Newt Republicans brought them back.

But the main thing I wanted to add is that Democrats were probably stuck with "no" votes on this -- because if they voted for it, then Republicans would have been able to vote against it. No, it's not really much of an excuse for giving foolish speeches, but that's what politicians do, and I'm not going to fault them for it. The vote itself, however? I really don't remember the circumstances, and I'm not going to look it up, but my strong assumption is that it's far more about preventing Republican "no" votes than from trying to get any mileage out of their own display.

Does that leave Obama off the hook?

Nope. Because Democrats had four years with majorities in Congress, and two of those with the White House as well, and they didn't take care of this.

There's basically no excuse. Would eliminating the debt limit (or perhaps just fudging it with some procedural nonsense) have been a mildly tough vote? Sure -- but it would have been clearly worth it to eliminate every future tough vote on it. Even if they couldn't foresee what Republicans have done with it after 2010, they certainly knew the history of it.

Indeed: I suspect that there are several of these lurking around, stuff that Democrats had the votes for in 2009 but didn't think to take care of. Stuff that committee staff know about; stuff that people at OMB know about. Things that would have been at worst mildly controversial, but that probably no one would have bothered to oppose at all. And I don't at all get the sense that anyone put someone in charge of figuring out which things they should enact, now that they had the chance.

Just to be clear: I'm not talking about massively stacking the deck in their favor. But a little aggressive tinkering? Not a bad idea, and one that really could have happened.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Bradley Whitford, 54. Wesleyan Class of '81.

Can't forget the good stuff:

1. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal on gerrymandering.

2. Andrew Rudalevige on beating the debt limit.

3. The latest on teaching creation myths, from Sarah Posner.

4. Greg Koger on the conservative record on deficits. But tell us something we don't know (which I mean literally: I'd be very interested in seeing this evidence for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s).

5. And Zach Beauchamp on race, Republicans, and shutdown.

Perverse Incentive Watch

Okay, it's mostly funny that Ted Cruz showed up at a meeting of Senate conservatives with a poll he himself commissioned that "shows" why his shutdown strategy is a brilliant success, especially since his poll showed that more people blame Republicans for the shutdown.

But if we want to stop giggling (Alex Seitz-Wald: I only trust polls commissioned by Louie Gohmert.) for a minute at the possibility that his colleagues might actually believe anything they saw in that poll...

The detail I'd note about it is that Cruz -- presumably his campaign committee -- paid for the poll. Which means that his pollster is profiting from the shutdown. And I'm sure this isn't an isolated instance. We also know that people have been running ads on this fight since August; that means in most cases money to people who make the ads (the exception would be in-house media people), and perhaps to people who place the ads; it also means revenue to whoever ran the ads.

Then there's how Cruz got the money to commission the poll: I'm sure his fauxlibuster was great for generating campaign contributions. Indeed: I'm sure that everyone involved, at least everyone who is getting increased visibility, is cleaning up. That's both politicians and organizations.

I haven't looked up any numbers (other than Plain Blog traffic, which is at more or less twice the normal pace), but I'm pretty confident that ratings are way up at Fox News (and MSNBC) and the rest of the political mass media.

All of which is to recognize that for most of politics-as-an-industry, the shutdown/debt limit fight is excellent business. At least, if you don't count government employees and those dependent on the government functioning properly as part of politics-as-an-industry.

Is all of that a significant cause of the shutdown and possible debt limit disaster? I don't know! But I do know that there's a direct financial incentive for a lot of people to generate high-visibility partisan fights. And people often react to direct financial incentives.

It certainly isn't the whole story. It may well be a part of it.

Drip...Drip Shutdown Update

The list of Republicans who publicly support a clean CR is now at 24, as Jennifer Bendery (who is doing a great job on this story) reports. That number has been stable for a while, but partially because four Members who were previously on the list have flipped.

As I said before, my sense of how this all plays politically is that somewhere between this list reaching 25 and reaching 60, it becomes a large enough problem for Republicans that their position likely collapses entirely, and a shutdown vote really does happen. Because of that, if the list is slowly increasing, Democrats get an additional incentive to hang tough (although, given the GOP position, that's not really all that hard anyway).

My best guess, however, is that we've seen the answer I asked earlier: will getting to a House majority make it easier for other Republicans to out themselves as clean CR supporters or will it make it harder? The answer sure seems to be: harder. There are probably two things going on. One is that as the shutdown goes on, positions held by partisans harden, which makes it harder to go against them. The other, however, is simple numbers. The eventual agreement needs at least 17 Republicans, but probably a bit more than that; those Republicans know who they are, and therefore they lose little by going public now. However, there are presumably a lot of Republicans who support ending this with a clean CR (and probably a clean debt limit increase also) but hope that they can get out without having to support it themselves.

That's probably, also, the best explanation for the four backsliders. It might be that leadership (or Tea Partiers) put pressure on, and they backed down. But a more likely answer is that they wanted the shutdown to end enough to go public, but once enough other clean CR Republicans were identified, they realized their votes were no longer needed.

The only problem with that is that it really does remove the pressure that they presumably wanted in the first place. If the list was 28 and climbing...well, it's a much larger threat than 24 and basically stable.

I'm still watching that list, but at this point I think it's unlikely that it's how the shutdown ends.

Predicting Future Spin (GOP Default Deniers Ed.)

Here's the thing: there are a bunch of Republicans running around saying that breaching the debt limit is no big deal, because...oh, I don't know, it's all just nonsense. Here's one. Jamelle Bouie had a great line about it, comparing them to the bomb-worshiping mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

So my question: suppose that there is a debt limit breach, and it in fact delivers a major economic shock.

My question is: will the GOP line be that it's Barack Obama's fault because he forced the debt limit breach by not going along with totally reasonable GOP requests, or that it's Barack Obama's fault because the breach would have been harmless but he handled it wrong? Both? Something else?

By the way, as a non-expert on this (and therefore my opinion is pretty useless), my guess is that if it happens there will be damage, and that there is severe downside risk, but most likely the worst fears won't actually happen. Incredibly irresponsible of the GOP to expose the nation to the damage and the downside risk, of course.