Tag: wapo

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?

Comfort the Afflicted

This is almost too obvious to point out, but this type of story is great for [former half-term governor Sarah Palin]. It feeds her narrative about how she’s the prey of pointy headed coastal lamestream media elites who have nothing but disdain for her and all the real Americans she speaks for. Having unnamed Republicans express concern about her presidential candidacy only sweetens the deal, allowing her to position herself in opposition to GOP elites in addition to lamestream media ones.

Indeed. What’s worse is that fools like Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are likely looking at her silly “they’re jokes” line and congratulating themselves for afflicting the powerful and furthermore likely see any pushback on the part of Greg Sargent or others as yet more evidence of “complaints from both sides…so we must be doin’ our jobs!” So sad.

Comfort the Afflicted

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

Since 1980, it’s been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, it’s been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined – going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich – the super-rich in particular – have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America’s wealthiest 1 percent rose from 9 percent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 percent in 2007.

Looking at these numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the Tea Partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America’s woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, working in the shadow of the even more sinister Woodrow Wilson, imposed on an unsuspecting people.

In fact, the New Deal order produced the only three decades in American history – the ‘50s, ’60s and ’70s – when economic security and opportunity were widely shared. It was the only period in the American chronicle when unions were big and powerful enough to ensure that corporate revenue actually trickled down to workers. It marked the only time in American history when, courtesy originally of the GI Bill, the number of Americans going to college surged. It was the only time when taxes on the rich were really significantly higher than taxes on the rest of us. It was the only time that the minimum wage kept pace (almost) with the cost of living. And it was the only time when most Americans felt confident enough about their economic prospects, and those of their nation, to support the taxes that built the postwar American infrastructure.

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

There’s a trap, and it’s the same thing that happened with fiscal stimulus. You do something in the right direction that’s inadequate, and then people say, well, that didn’t work, and instead of increasing the dosage and proving it right, you give the thing up altogether.
All of this is very familiar if you studied Japan in the ‘90s. In fact, we’re doing worse than the Japanese did. Our monetary policy is a bit more aggressive, but our fiscal policy has been less aggressive. We have a larger output gap than they did, and we’ve had a surge in unemployment that they never had, and our political will to act has been exhausted much faster than theirs was. On the current track, we’re going to look at Japan’s lost decade as a success story compared to us.

Paul Krugman bringin’ the optimism.

Obama and National Security

This excerpt from Woodward’s (sigh) new book is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier:

In Woodward’s account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.

Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options — two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn’t agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.

In the end, Woodward reveals, Obama devised his own alternative strategy and personally wrote out its terms in a six-page, single-spaced memo that he made his top civilian and military advisers read and sign on to.

Recall that this same group of generals and their proxies were simultaneously waging a press-based war using damaging leaks against the President in the hopes of forcing his hand towards their preferred outcome(s).
Now flip that to an entity that you can’t engage publicly in any way. That only the smallest subset of your advisers can even know about. And that issues you memos each and every day telling you “They’re coming!”, any one of which may turn out to be your “bin Laden determined to strike in US,” so you can’t just shut these folks out, distrustful though you may be of both them and their data, spiteful as you are of their heavy handed and blowback-inducing approaches: they own your ass. That’s what it is to be President. Even when you’re one who knows his Constitution well enough to recoil at the thought of the very extra-judicial extermination of inconvenient citizens these folks are pitching.

The only real option seems to be to contain this apparatus everywhere you can, wait for the excess and overuse to explode, and then try to ratchet this thing down. Or another large-scale attack occurs that ratchets it up even further. Or a military coup when the economy utterly collapses. Whichever.

What business should want, in theory, is a Republican Party that advocates for its interests. That is to say, a Republican Party willing to send 20 senators and 50 House members to the table when Democrats are writing a huge health-care bill that has the votes to pass. The Democrats would’ve given anything for some votes from across the aisle, and whatever it is that business wanted, it could’ve gotten. But since the Republican Party wasn’t interested in governing or negotiating, business didn’t have that leverage. Insofar as the GOP is the party of business, they failed their constituents: They neither stopped the bill nor – with the exception of Olympia Snowe – fully participated in the process behind it. Or take the stimulus bill, which major business groups like the Chamber of Commerce supported, but which the Republicans abandoned.

Ezra Klein describing some mythical GOP that’s actually interested in governing; the one we haven’t seen in this country in a decade or two.

To the Mondale-Phone!

Ezra Klein, 2010:The argument for taxing people who make more than $250,000 isn’t that they’re bad people, and it isn’t that they won’t notice the tax increase. It’s that we’ve got a very large budget imbalance, and we’re going to need to do a lot of things to correct it. Taxes on the rich have dropped even as the incomes of the rich have skyrocketed. So one of the obvious things to do is update the tax code to correct for that drift. But eventually, we’ll need to do much more than just increases taxes on the rich, and though politicians have tried to sell this one as a change that most Americans won’t notice and needn’t worry about, eventually, they’re going to have to start talking about changes that people will notice, and should worry about.
Walter Mondale, 1984: By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.
Lemkin, 2010: Oh for those heady, brutally honest days of the first Mondale administration.

There is no policy that President Obama has passed or proposed that added as much to the deficit as the Republican Party’s $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, if you put aside Obama’s plan to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts, there is no policy he has passed or proposed that would do half as much damage to the deficit. There is not even a policy that would do a quarter as much damage to the deficit.

Ezra Klein – Putting the $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts in context (via southpol)
Yep. And, if you’re The Democrat, you shall never speak of this. Ever. Too complicated, apparently.
Source: Washington Post