Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Nancy Cartwright, 56.

With some good stuff:

1. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, "The decline of union membership and what it means for politics."

2. Andrew Sprung on Tafts, McCarthys, and Cruzes. The current Taft's claim of "adult" status for Republicans is pretty iffy over the 20th century period he's talking about -- and I wouldn't have suggested it for someone writing about the party of (to put it more crudely in this context than I would in others) the part of Anglo men.

3. I found this Philip Bump post on tech and ACA helpful.

4. Rick Hasen on Posner and voter ID.

5. Yes, tax deductions and exemptions really do benefit those who benefit from them at the expense of the nation and, therefore, other taxpayers -- as Dean Baker points out in the case of Ted Cruz's health insurance.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jason Mewes, 39.

I'm still pretty far behind on everything after travel (and especially after a travel day), but here's some good stuff:

1. Matthew Cooper and Garance Franke-Ruta have some of my favorite advice during a fast-breaking story: slow down a bit; what we know about the NSA story and about Edward Snowden may still change dramatically, so no need to conclude anything yet.

2. How California's top-two primary is evolving, from Seth Masket.

3. And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard that Rich Yeselson on Taft-Hartley and the past and future of unions is this week's must-read.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to George Lucas, 69. Despite everything. Graffiti and Star Wars is still a one-two punch that stacks up with the very best, and then add his contributions to Empire and Raiders, and the good bits of the rest of his career (and I remain a big fan of Jedi)...He couldn't sustain it? Well, he's not the only one; he just did it in a way more public way than most.

And some good stuff:

1. Brendan Nyhan on the scandal(s) he predicted.

2. Fenno's Paradox and re-election, from Michael Ensley.

3. So much for rebranding, Ed Kilgore notes.

4. I think Conor Friedersdorf's continuing insistence that the War Powers Act matters is wrong, maybe even silly, but he's right about the CIA and Benghazi. The obvious answer, of course, is that Republicans don't actually care about the policy disaster in Benghazi.

5. And Abby Rapoport on the next approach for the US labor...oh, movement is too optimistic, isn't it? At any rate, the next thing they're going to try.

When Money Matters, Maybe

Bringing political science findings to the blogging world can often make me feel like a killjoy and a scold: I’m always saying that debates, or candidate foibles, or even money spent on elections just don't matter nearly as much as most pundits believe they do.

So I'm sort of happy to be able to speculate that the oodles of outside money being spent on Issue 2 in Ohio, on the ballot next week, seems to be the kind of thing that should matter. Greg Sargent has all the details; this is about anti-labor measures passed by the Governor John Kasich and the newly Republican legislature there.

The logic here is that money should matter more when partisan cues are not present (so in primaries and ballot measures), and presumably also in lower-profile elections, when there's little information available other than in TV ads, mailers, and other campaign-provided materials. It's also an off-year election, so presumably turnout should be very low (and therefore large percentages of the money spent will be entirely wasted on non-voters!); that could mean that voter intensity matter more than it would in a higher-turnout context, which again, I would think, would make campaign spending relatively more important.

However, I know a lot less about money in state and local elections than about money in federal elections, and a quick peek around didn't really support that intuition all that well -- from what I saw, money may not matter all that much in ballot measures after all. For what it's worth, the other thing I came across is that money seems to matter more on the "no" side, which in Ohio is the anti-union side (at least I think it is).

So perhaps even here, money won't matter that much -- and certainly less than some would have us believe.

What Mattered This Week?

I'm not sure about whether I'm going to stick with this item...it seemed sort of nice when there was not much going on, but with all the major events in the world this winter and spring, it just doesn't quite feel necessary, and I notice that it hasn't drawn a lot of comments lately, presumably because there's nothing much to say.

But at any rate its here this week. Let's see...Libya again, the rest of the Middle East again. Why don't people talk about Ivory Coast in the context of Egypt, Libya, and the others? Honest question: I'm no expert on that part of the world, and I do realize that Ivory Coast isn't quite in the same neighborhood, so perhaps it really isn't connected in any way, but I do wonder about it.

Of course, the events in Japan are important.

And then we have Wisconsin. I think I've said a couple of times that I think its importance is a bit overhyped, but that's not to say that it doesn't matter at all.

All that, and none of it in Washington. I'll leave the rest to comments: what do you think mattered this week?

Q Day 4: Effect of Wisconsin

Brendan Garbee:

I read this quote the other day from the state senate president in WI saying that by taking away collective bargaining, Obama will have a harder time winning Wisconsin in '12. What's your take on that? Do Republicans really think that people vote Democrat because the unions tell them to? Is there any merit to such an idea at all?

Short term effects, long term effects. Short term, I basically agree with Nate Silver: it seems like that Wisconsin is likely to matter a lot more to liberals than conservatives, and so the net effect would help mobilize Democrats. Major, major caveat, however; we're now in March 2011. Perhaps liberals will still be talking about this in twenty months; perhaps not. Even in Wisconsin, although certainly it does look as if there will be recall elections to keep it alive for a while at least. At the very least, it probably buys the Dems more leeway with labor for a while, because it's going to be a long while before union leaders think it doesn't matter who win elections.

Long term effects...unions as institutions strongly tend to support Democrats, and if the policy is successful in Wisconsin and elsewhere in harming public employee unions, then it will hurt the Democrats -- but more clearly, to the extent that unions are a smaller portion of the Democratic coalition, then Democratic politicians are going to be less interested in representing them. My guess right now, however, is that the public employee unions will win enough of these fights that it's not going to matter nearly as much as people hope or fear.

The Dangers of Semi-Symbolic Politics

First of all, I want to direct everyone's attention to a guest post over at the Monkey Cage by Katherine Cramer Walsh, a political scientist who has been conducting qualitative interviews with citizens of Wisconsin since May 2007. In other words, long before the current blowup. Her main finding, as she describes it in the item, is that "outstate" residents saw a symbolic divide between Madison and Milwaukee, on the one hand, and where they live, on the other -- and that they lumped public-sectors unions with those two cities, all of which they saw as leeching off of the hard work of the rest of the state.

That's a good lead-in to a Kevin Drum post highlighting polling showing that union members in Wisconsin have shifted their opinions dramatically since the fight over unions began.

What strikes me about the Wisconsin fight, and about the federal budget fight, is that there's an odd mix of symbolic and non-symbolic issues involved, in a way that in my view at least is likely to work out quite badly for Republicans.

This relates back to the point I made last week, that most people don't pay very much attention to most of the things that happen in politics and government. What I didn't say is that some people do pay quite a bit of attention to one or two issues -- the issues that affect them personally. What Republicans are risking through their attacks on public employee unions, and through budget cuts in state and federal governments, is to...well, to get them to pay attention. It's not that union members previously were in favor of GOP plans about unions and have now changed their minds; what's almost certainly happening is that people who may previously have thought of themselves primarily as outstaters envious of Madison, or as right-to-lifers, or as any one of their other possible political identities, are now thinking of themselves as primarily union members. And, of course, as union members they oppose attacks on unions.

You can see, I hope, how that relates to the federal budget. If you cut funding for even totally useless government spending (say, a military contract that the Pentagon doesn't want), the people who lose jobs as a result may well know exactly why they lost their jobs, and hold someone responsible. That goes, too, for someone who finds her Planned Parenthood clinic boarded up, if it were to come to that.

Let me put this another way. This is basically "us" vs. "them" politics. But because the benefits for most of the GOP "us" are symbolic (cutting spending,, or, hypothetically at least, balancing the budget), it's unlikely to produce lopsided Republican voting majorities. On the other hand, if the costs are very tangible and specific, the groups in "them" are apt to produce very large and energized Democratic votes.

(And yes, of course, there is a group in the GOP "us" receiving very tangible benefits from Republican budget priorities -- rich folks, who get substantial tax cuts -- but they're a very small group, and as much as they may matter in terms of money in politics, they don't have that many votes).

I'm not exactly making a prediction here; there are lots of things that go into voting, and we'll have to see exactly how this works out in practice. I'm just saying that there's a real danger here for Republicans, and it's related to the normal political behavior of individuals and groups.

What Mattered This Week?

Another week in which some obvious things take the forefront: Libya (and etc.) and Wisconsin (and etc.). I suppose I do think that some of the commentary on Wisconsin is a bit more apocalyptic than the events can justify, but yes, it's a legitimately important battle, I think.

What else? I'm not sure what I have, so I'll just send it to you: what do you think happened this week that matters?

Sunday/Labor Day Question for Libertarians

Let's see if I have anyone who will bite on this...my question is: how do you, as libertarians, understand the half-century of labor agitation preceding the New Deal? 

Unions Smell Blood

This afternoon's health care news were the statements by Andy Stern of the SEIU (reported by Jonathan Cohn) and the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka, via Chris Good.

Here's Stern:

We know we will fight. We will continue to fight for everything we know is important. We will fight to make care affordable. We will fight for real health insurance reforms. We will fight for employers to provide their employees with coverage.  And, we will fight to pay for all of it responsibly without a tax on your benefits (his emphasis).

It ain't Churchill, but it gets the point across.  The operative sentence, I'm willing to bet, is the last one (an item that also appears as one of Trumka's demands). 

It's hard to see how they don't get their way at this point.  As far as I know, no marginal Senator has the Cadillac plan tax on his or her must-have list, so this one should be attainable pretty easily by simply accepting the House funding mechanism (taxing rich folks) instead of the Senate version.  It's hard not to see that as win-win for the bill; it puts labor back in the solid support camp at a time that Obama, Reid, and Pelosi could use a little help with the left, and taxing rich people usually polls well.  The policy wonks say that the Cadillac plan tax is important, but right now the fight is to get the thing passed, not to get the details right.  And, like the public option, the Cadillac plan tax could be pushed through reconciliation in the future, whenever actual deficit reduction happens. 

I doubt if they'll bother doing it in the manager's amendment (that is, before the bill leaves the Senate), although I suppose it's possible that Democratic Senators might want to do it as a separate amendment...either way, my guess is that the Cadillac plan tax died today.