Tag: democrats

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York will step down from office amid intense pressure from congressional Democrats following his admission of risque online chats and photo swaps with multiple women and lying about it.

ABC News reports, you decide. What’s remarkable here is the “intense pressure from congressional Democrats” bit. A member of the GOP caucus could strangle somebody to death on the floor of the House and you’d have little more than an annoyed shrug on the part of either leadership. But let a Democrat sext somebody not-his-wife: hell to pay (though, presumably the same faux pearl clutching outrage would have been mustered if he were still single).
Meanwhile, Tom Coburn orchestrated illegal payoffs to Ensign’s cuckolded friend and, well, I’m sure he was working in the best interests of his Personal Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let’s just leave it there. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

The national debate over economic policy is way off track and the stakes are as high as can be. In every important area of economic and social policy—health care, fiscal policy (deficits, debt, taxes), public investment, retirement security, climate change, education, job growth, income distribution—there’s so much misinformation, so many false assertions, that it is impossible for anyone paying attention to evaluate the choices with which they’re faced.

[…]

Democrats lately seemed to be trapped in a position that amounts to: “sure, we have to cut and shrink—just not as much as the other guys want.”

Jared Bernstein, former White House staffer, on why he left Biden’s office. Thusly does the Overton Window move ever rightward. Bernstein claims he’s come outside to “widen the debate,” but I just don’t see how that’s possible without better Democrats and a major media outlet at one’s behest.
But: welcome to the forever drug addled world of dirty hippie blogs, my friend.

When Republicans reached basic consensus about what they wanted to do [relative to Ryan’s plan], they then delegated the details to a small group of people who fleshed out the plan, it was then presented to the caucus and within a week they had the vote. Democrats, by contrast, put their health reform plans through an agonizing months-long process of public intra-party disputes. That gave people who didn’t care about the details tons and tons of time to organize a backlash while tending to signal to low-information voters that Democrats were doing something controversial even among their own partisans. The backlash against Medicare privatization is overwhelmingly likely to grow over time, but it’s also the case that between today and November 2012 other events will intervene and crowd the agenda space possibly letting members off the hook for an unpopular vote.

Matt Yglesias on the key differences between how the GOP and Democratic Caucuses operate.

Unified Field Theory

First principles:

  1. The recently House-passed continuing resolution only makes a government shutdown more likely by both caving to perceived GOP demands to “cut” while also exhausting the supply of low hanging fruit that Obama has already come out in favor of cutting.
  2. The GOP has the media high-ground, as always, because serious people know that cuts must be necessary, and since the GOP is at dollar value X, and the Democrats are, for all intents and purposes, at dollar value $0 (spending freeze as opposed to new cuts), the serious person answer must be $X/2. That’s the “grand bargain” that Democrats wisely point out will still submarine the economy and the GOP flatly refuses to even discuss. See: shutdown and default in 2011.
  3. Serious People furthermore agitate for deep cuts to Social Security, despite its dedicated funding source and minimal deficit impact in the near future, because, well, because that’s what serious people do. Acceding to the demands for cuts to Social Secuirty is 2012 suicide for the Democrats. It just is.

With all that in mind, what the Democrats need is a concentrated, coordinated effort that steals this idiotic media high ground surrounding the (perceived) absolute necessity of “cuts and a lot of them.” Karl Rove taught us nothing if not the fact that making your enemies’ strengths into their weaknesses is a potent political tool. Think Swiftboating. That The Democrat assiduously avoids the use of this tool is why they fail.

Therefore: the GOP is talking at least $100B in cuts, and immediately. Right or wrong, that’s going to have to be your number too. However, and critically, the GOP wants those cuts to come entirely from the non-military discretionary budget, somewhere around 14% of the whole government budget. This, then, is where and how you attack them. And you’re going to do it specifically and with dollar amounts.

You go down the list of GOP hobby horses: faith-based initiatives, the military, oil subsidies, agribusiness subsidies, general corporate welfare, abstinence-based education, all of it; but you don’t stop with spending, you also target revenue: capital gains taxes, estate taxes, social security taxes (as in: uncapped), and ultimately the tax code itself, which could use a few new brackets up top.

Secretary Gates can likely provide you with a long list of outdated or otherwise no-longer-needed military programs. Lots of them will seem ridiculous or hopelessly out of touch. Mock them and mock the GOP for continuing to support them.
Same goes for oil subsidies. These are the richest companies on Earth and the GOP wants to give them corporate welfare while asking for “shared sacrifice” from the poorest of the poor?

When you’ve run out of spending to cut from GOP programs, you go to work on revenue. That’s right, I said it. You need to too. First: revenue is revenue. Capital gains, management fees, bonuses, and everything else falls under regular pay. Next, you set about raising effective rates on corporations and the rich. The corporate side can be most effectively done by eliminating shelters and loopholes. Any country in which ExxonMobil pays $0 in taxes needs, needs corporate tax reform. Period. Still haven’t hit the number? New tax brackets. Still haven’t hit the number? Uncap Social Security. And so on.

You then pack the whole thing together and unveil it as the “alternative” plan and hoist the GOP upon it each and every day, all day. Because they are guaranteed to hate it. But will have to explain why they prefer to make these cuts on the backs of the poorest instead of the richest and furthermore call it “shared sacrifice.”

You’ve got less than two weeks to put this together. Recent history with the tax cut extension “fight” suggests you haven’t even considered something along these lines yet. But it’s how to win. That’s why it looks so strange to you. Yes, it’s simple minded. But simple minded is what works. You are the last few hundred people in America to come to this realization.

I’m not saying this bill would be what was passed, or that it would even reach the floor in a serious way…but it would drive the conversation in a way that benefits you, The Democrat, and not so coincidentally us the American people.
Currently you’re battling over the 14% that contains the most painful cuts possible. You shouldn’t be. You furthermore don’t even need to be. Change the conversation to terms that have the potential to benefit you. Right now revenue doesn’t even come up. It needs to. It needs to be the first question off the lips of the serious people. Until it is, you will fail.

Zero

That would be the number of Republicans that voted to end taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil. Companies that are enjoying record profits of ~$100 billion per year, often pay no taxes whatsoever, and receive taxpayer provided subsidies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per decade.

But, by all means, let’s cut $100 over here that just gets wasted on food for starving children. Furthermore, let’s agree not to discuss any of this. Shrill.

Zero

Texas, Our Texas

Obviously very early, but signs say that it could go for Obama in 2012…under certain circumstances:

Texas ought to stay safely in the GOP column for 2012 but with a weak nominee Obama would have a chance and these numbers are further confirmation that you’re probably talking about 400+ electoral votes for the President next year if his opponent is [redacted].

But unsaid, and what ought to scare the pants off the GOP in Texas: that any potential candidate would poll as losing Texas to Obama right now is, shall we say: interesting.

Not KBH’s Senate seat, not the 2012 cycle, but soon and for a long time: Texas will be blue. The demographic tontine that is the core of the modern GOP will make it ever more so. I think I’ll even live to see it be a fairly reliable blue. And that will be a big, big deal.

Texas, Our Texas

The Numbering Shall Be Eight

Ezra Klein relates that an array of left-leaning interest groups have signed onto a letter spelling out an eight point description of what the Senate should be doing on the first day of the next Congress:

  1. On the first legislative day of a new Congress, the Senate may, by majority vote, end a filibuster on a rules change and adopt new rules.
  2. There should only be one opportunity to filibuster any given measure or nomination, so motions to proceed and motions to refer to conference should not be subject to filibuster.
  3. Secret “holds” should be eliminated.
  4. The amount of delay time after cloture is invoked on a bill should be reduced.
  5. There should be no post-cloture debate on nominations.
  6. Instead of requiring that those seeking to break a filibuster muster a specified number of votes, the burden should be shifted to require those filibustering to produce a specified number of votes to continue the filibuster.
  7. Those waging a filibuster should be required to continuously hold the floor and debate.
  8. Once all Senators have had a reasonable opportunity to express their views, every measure or nomination should be brought to a yes or no vote in a timely manner.

I’d only say that the amount of delay on a cloture motion should be reduced all the way to zero: you fail to produce people on the floor 24/7 then regular order begins immediately; no waiting, no marinating, no anything. Put up or shut up. Same goes for “reasonable opportunity” in point eight. Spell that out and ratchet up the required population of Senators needed to uphold the filibuster; cap it with a very brief interregnum between filibuster-broken and vote-held: as in less than one legislative day. Otherwise, I agree completely.

Perhaps the involvement of these non-dirty-fucking-hippy interest groups combined with the letter from the opposition (in which the GOP duly promised to filibuster everything forever; and if you think they’ll stop once the millionaire tax giveaway is sealed, you really are out there on drugs) will in some way nudge the feckless idiots that run the Senate into doing something. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

Right on, Kevin Drum. Implicit here is what nobody ever seems to say: if your taxable income is $250,001, you will see tax increase only on that last one dollar. You still get the tax break on the first $250K, just like every single other American. Compare that to the GOP plan (red portion of bars). Utter and indefensible lunacy.

And yet The Democrat is absolutely getting his clock cleaned on this.

I don’t see any possible repercussions to this fecklessness and timidity in the face of a fight on which you hold the economic, moral, and public-opinion high grounds once we get to the real fight early next year on the debt ceiling.

Filibuster Reform

Democrats have exactly two chances to see filibuster reform: The first comes in a few weeks, when they can reform it in any way they see fit and pass said reforms with a simple majority; preserve what they think is good, eliminate the parts they think are choking the system currently. The linked proposal is the best I’ve seen, really. It preserves the notion of unlimited debate but makes it punishing for the minority to keep the debate going: they have to have more and more members on the floor as the debate extends. This setup would work perfectly well if you were, say, defending Social Security; not so well if you were throwing a one-Senator temper tantrum and secretly holding all nominees…there’s simply no way you’d reach the ratcheting floor requirement in the absence of a truly objectionable nominee or bill, so why even bother. And it removes the ridiculous current requirement that the majority be there 24/7 to defeat repeated quorum calls by the sole minority Senator who needs to be there to push the debate ever onward. Likewise you’d lose the foolish “marinating” process that the GOP deftly uses to extend debate without actually, you know, extending debates.

The second “chance” at altering filibuster rules comes the instant the GOP next is in control of the Senate, maybe as soon as 2012. The filibuster will be the first thing they eliminate. And eliminate it they will, at least for Democrats.

Filibuster Reform

GOP: Party of Compromise

Greg Sargent talks Bush tax cuts and GOP/Democratic comity and compromise:

There is a way a one-year or two-year temporary extension could represent a compromise of sorts: If Republicans signal a willingness to at least entertain the idea of letting the high end cuts expire after that temporary extension. But many of them aren’t doing that. Their position is that the high-end cuts need to be made permanent. Full stop.

Exactly right. The GOP idea of compromise here is permanent Bush tax cuts. I suspect they might be willing to dump the tax cuts for the bottom 99% of America, but that top 1% isn’t going anywhere and they don’t want some two-year fix, they want it made permanent.

Democrats need to get through their heads that losing the entire Bush tax cuts package is actually the best long-term policy outcome; that this is also the “no deal, time expires” outcome makes it all the more powerful as a bargaining chip. Always be willing to walk away from the entire thing, and always make clear that all blame rests on the GOP by making clear that full-extension is their position, so partial repeal is the compromise position. Yes, walking away means short term harm to everyone making below $250k/yr, but if that’s what it takes to roll back the tax cuts for the richest of the rich: so be it. Only from that position of relative strength do you get the GOP to even approach the table. And, I’ll let you in on a secret: they still won’t.

This is why it’s the perfect issue for the Democrats. It’s important, easy to understand, and directly pits the hyper-rich against the interests of most Americans. Swing for the fences. You’ve got nothing to lose. If you force the GOP to accept short-term, top 1% cuts, it’s a win. If you force the media to face the fact that the GOP has zero interest in compromise on anything, it’s a win, and if you force the true compromise position of time-limited cuts for 99% of Americans and an immediate roll-back to Clinton-era rates for the top 1%: it’s a giant win of the sort that could redefine the terms and dimensions of exactly how policies do or don’t get done over the next two years. So why not try?