issue: Politics

Putin Is a Threat to the Free World America Helped Build

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In occupying Crimea, Vladimir Putin has brought the Russian bear, snarling and clawing, out of its post-Cold War hibernation. An anxious world awaits America’s response.

President Obama’s challenge is three-fold. The first and most urgent task is to discourage Putin from authorizing deeper incursions into Ukrainian territory on the pretext of protecting their Russian-speaking compatriots from “fascists.” That could be the thread that unravels Ukraine‘s independence.

Sending Secretary of State John Kerry to Kiev this week is a welcome gesture of U.S. solidarity, but in truth there is little Washington can do to stop Putin from grabbing a larger chunk of the country. No one is prepared to go to war over Ukraine, and the Russian strongman knows it. Nonetheless, Obama should spell out an escalating chain of penalties Russia will incur for further aggression.

Second, Washington must orchestrate a global chorus of condemnation of Russia’s blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, reinforced by sustained diplomatic and economic pressure on Putin to withdraw his troops. The third task is to solicit economic aid to help stabilize Ukraine’s fragile new government and lessen its dependence on Russia.

Pundits are calling the crisis the gravest test to date of Obama’s international leadership. Perhaps, but there’s a larger question: Can the divided U.S. government, which can scarcely pass a budget or fill key posts, muster a coherent and forceful reply to Putin’s attempts to bully Russia’s neighbors into submission?

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but some Republicans just can’t help themselves. Russia’s aggression, they charge, is the bitter fruit of Obama’s weakness. Never mind that Putin also invaded neighboring Georgia in 2008 on George W. Bush’s watch.

Evidently, the “blame America first” mentality that Republicans used to attribute to Democrats has migrated from the left to the right of the political spectrum.

Occupying Crimea is part of Putin’s grand strategy to restore a strong Russia that’s once again respected — i.e., feared — and halts the advance of Western-style democracy into what Moscow regards as its historic sphere of influence. This complicates Putin’s plan to organize a “Eurasian Union” of compliant autocracies as a counterweight to the European Union.

The Russian leader and former KGB operative has called the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union a tragedy. But that doesn’t mean he has grandiose visions of recreating Stalin’s old empire. Instead, the wily Putin is trying to revise, not reverse, the Cold War settlement. That’s why he’s focusing on countries on Russia’s borders with large ethnic or Russian-speaking populations. Putin would like to reabsorb as many of them as possible, which is why he doesn’t want these countries to follow the Baltics and Eastern Europe in turning to the West. In championing supposedly endangered Russian minorities, and reestablishing the Russian Orthodox Church as the state religion, Putin is trying to revive the old Russian nationalism of the Tsars.

Unfortunately, he also seems bent on resurrecting the worst features of that tradition — creeping imperial expansion, stifling autocracy, paranoia about being “encircled” by enemies and resentful envy of the modern West, led nowadays by America.

This backsliding from the hopeful days of post-Soviet Russia, when Boris Yeltsin tried to put his country on a “normal” course toward market democracy, is a tragedy for Russians, not just their fearful neighbors. Fabricating conflicts with newly independent neighbors and whipping up anti-Americanism strikes a revanchist chord, especially among older Russians. Moreover, such antics distract the world’s eye from popular protests in Russia, as well as harsh crackdowns on dissent and civil society, and the ruthless stamping out of real political competition.

President Obama hasn’t paid nearly enough attention to the rising authoritarian tide in Russia. Instead, in classic “realpolitik” fashion, the White House keeps emphasizing the need to win Russia’s cooperation on what it regards as more important issues, like reaching a political resolution of Syria‘s civil war (though Moscow has no interest in Assad’s departure) and striking a nuclear deal with Iran.

More fundamentally, Obama appears to have internalized the critique — which now joins the anti-war left to the libertarian right — that America’s problems abroad stem mainly from our own moralizing and overreaching, not what bad actors elsewhere do. That’s why he has demoted freedom and democracy as U.S. foreign policy goals, and stood aloof from the Syrian bloodbath, even as the human and strategic costs of inaction keep mounting.

Let’s hope the Ukraine crisis jolts the president out of his solipsistic complacency. Russia’s resort to brute force to intimidate its neighbors is a threat to the international system shaped and sustained mainly by American power over the last half-century. Are we really too war-weary, overstretched or poor to rise to this new challenge? Not unless our leaders think we are.

This op-ed was originally posted in Real Clear World, you can read the original article on their website here.

How Season 2 of House of Cards Murders the 25th Amendment

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the nation binges on Season 2 of “House of Cards,” we have witnessed ruthless House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) maneuver for the vice president to resign and for himself to be appointed to the position. It’s no spoiler to say that Underwood clearly won’t be content to remain a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But the biggest casualty of “House of Cards” might well turn out to be the 25th Amendment, which governs vice presidential succession. Once again, the amendment has, at least in popular fiction, been transformed from a pragmatic constitutional provision into a Machiavellian route to power. And that’s a shame, because in a real-world time of crisis it could be incredibly valuable — but only if an ongoing stream of fictional portrayals hasn’t distorted its public image beyond recognition.

The 25th Amendment was enacted in 1967 during the height of the Cold War, at time of hair-trigger tensions and the ever-present reality of nuclear missiles mounted on fast-flying intercontinental ballistic missiles. The need for near-instantaneous decision making and continuity of the command authority during the Cold War was clear, yet the nation had twice found itself with a vacancy in the vice presidency, for nearly 4 years after Truman succeeded to the top job 1945 and again for over a year after the Kennedy assassination.

This problem was rooted in an oversight of the founders. They had crafted a vice presidency to assume executive authority in the case of the death, resignation, or removal of a president, but had not provided a way to fill the ensuing vice presidential vacancy before the next regularly scheduled general election. As a result, between 1789 and 1967, through a combination of presidential and vice presidential deaths and resignations, the VP slot had been vacant 16 times for some 40 years in total, or nearly 20 percent of American history.

Depending upon the Law of Presidential Succession at the time, the secretary of state or the speaker of the House were bumped up to next in line to the Oval Office. But the former lacked democratic validation, while the latter was not part of the sitting administration, and might even be its vehement political enemy. The 25th Amendment was thus enacted to enable the president to fill a vacancy in the vice president position, subject only to confirmation by simple majorities of both houses of Congress.

On “House of Cards,” Underwood’s machinations have arranged for the unhappy sitting Vice President to step down and for him to be named in his stead, with various types of murder and mayhem enacted along the way. This is a far cry, however, from how the mild-mannered and upstanding Gerald Ford actually found his way to the Oval Office via the 25th Amendment in 1974.

After VP Spiro Agnew was pressured to resign due to bribery charges, Nixon looked around for a harmless placeholder until the 1976 election. Neither he nor Ford, imagined that Nixon would himself likewise be forced from office, following what Ford termed the “long national nightmare” of the Watergate crisis. A longtime member of the House, Ford had never been elected by any constituency larger than the area around Grand Rapids, Michigan, yet he assumed full executive authority, more in sadness than in triumph. Now though, thanks to “House of Cards,” what was then a constitutional lifeline is now best known as a vaguely illegitimate back route to power.

And “House of Cards” is not the only fictional outlet to rough up the 25th Amendment, which includes two other provisions addressing another oversight of the founders: what to do about a president who was not dead but was severely incapacitated. Section 3 of the amendment allows for the president to designate the VP to temporarily become acting president. This can be initiated by a still-conscious president, as has been done three times by presidents who were anesthetized for brief medical procedures. Its intention was for such short-term situations or, even more so, for protracted periods such as following Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919 or Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955.

Predictably, though, television took this sober precaution to an outlandish level on the long-running series “The West Wing,” in which the daughter of Democratic President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was at one point kidnapped by terrorists. This created an insoluble conflict-of-interest for the president, leading him to invoke Section 3 of the 25th Amendment and to temporarily to step aside. Conveniently, the vice president on the series had also recently resigned. This enabled the next in line, a boorish Republican speaker of the House (John Goodman), to briefly become commander-in-chief and thus to play havoc with the administration’s policies.

Most controversially, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment enables vice presidents themselves to initiate the power transfer, provided that they have the counter-signatures of a majority of cabinet officials. The single time this provision unambiguously should have been enacted was in 1981 after an assassination attempt left Ronald Reagan unconscious. But a mere three months into their term, Vice President George H.W. Bush was determined to create even a hint of an unseemly power grab, and never invoked the amendment despite Reagan’s manifest incapacitation. One of the indelible images of that day was mass confusion at the White House and the infamous, and erroneous, declaration by Secretary of State Alexander Haig that he was in charge while Bush was traveling back to DC.

Of course, popular culture has likewise since latched onto this scenario, most famously in the Hollywood movie “Air Force One,” in which the president’s plane has been hijacked with him aboard. Although this was hardly the circumstances originally envisioned for the amendment, it undoubtedly applied — the president (Harrison Ford) could hardly have been more incapacitated than while evading terrorists at 35,000 feet.  But the vice president (Glenn Close) stalwartly refuses to make the correct choice to temporarily transfer power to herself, despite urging from a cabinet more sensible than herself.

So, what do these fictional scenarios have in common with reality? Not very much. But they do play to an enduring fascination with convoluted Shakespearean scheming to seize the throne, such as in “Macbeth” and “Richard III.” Hopefully, the 25th Amendment will never need to be invoked in such dramatic circumstances. But, the reality is that it conceivablycould be — and in a moment of crisis and confusion, the perception of order and legitimacy may count for a lot. It certainly won’t help if the public’s most enduring impression of the mechanism  for orderly succession involves the scheming of Frank Underwood.

This piece was originally published in The Daily Beast, you can read it on their website here.

 

KUOW: Is The Tea Party Over?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Raymond Smith, PPI senior fellow, was interviewed by Ross Reynolds of KUOW-Seattle on the Tea Party’s waning influence.

Smith made it clear that the Tea Party was declining, but not gone yet. He explained that in the long run, the Tea Party wasn’t a sustainable party in the U.S. two-party system, like many others fringe parties. It is more like a political movement, an anti-system party without any chance to take power:

In a two-party system, either it gets control of one of the two major parties, or it burns itself out.”

Listen to the entire KUOW-FM interview here.

Protecting the Environment for Innovation: A Regulatory Improvement Commission

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A Regulatory Improvement Commission would solve the issue of regulatory accumulation, the layering on year after year, of new rules atop old ones. The fundamental problem is not that government keeps creating new rules, but that it never rescinds old ones. As a result, U.S. businesses and entrepreneurs are enmeshed in an ever-growing web of complex rules that are sometimes duplicative, sometimes in conflict with each other, and sometimes obsolete. Like barnacles on a ship’s hull, the sheer number and weight of regulations imposes a drag on economic growth. Regulatory accumulation also raises the costs of entry to entrepreneurs, and creates big opportunity costs as the time and attention of business managers is consumed by compliance with rules rather than creating new products or better business processes.

This problem demands an institutional response. It is unrealistic to expect the same agencies that promulgated rules to eliminate or modify them. Some new entity must be created and charged exclusively with pruning old rules that inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship. PPI has proposed creation of a Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC) to fill this vacuum. It is modeled on the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), which Congress created in 1990 to create a politically feasible way to reduce excess military infrastructure.

The RIC would consult experts, business and the public to draw up a list of regulations that should be eliminated or improved, and present it to Congress for an up or down vote. As a small body that convenes occasionally, and relies largely on staff loaned to it by Congressional and Executive Branch offices, its costs would be negligible. The savings — both in terms of retiring costly rules and reducing the drag of regulatory accumulation of economic growth and entrepreneurship — could be enormous.

Like BRAC, the RIC would provide political cover to Members of Congress, who otherwise would have to vote individually on rules often defended by entrenched and politically powerful interests. The process of “getting it done” has already begun: Sens. Angus King and Roy Blount last year introduced bipartisan legislation in the Senate to establish the RIC.

The above remarks were prepared for delivery at the Kauffman Foundation’s 2014 State of Entrepreneurship event on February 12.

For recent PPI work on regulatory reform, see our latest policy memo and op-ed.

How Do Tea Parties End?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just how close is the Tea Party to its demise? Last week, Fox News didn’t even bother airing the group’s official response to Barack Obama’s speech, in which the president forcefully called for an end to tactics that prevent the government “from carrying out even the most basic functions of our democracy.” Even Speaker of the House John Boehner, who seemed so downtrodden last year, now has an extra spring in his step, and is daring to push for immigration reform over the vocal objections of the far right. All but the most extreme Republicans have abandoned their shutdown tactics, and though the GOP still vows to repeal Obama’s signature health law given the chance, the changing power dynamics on Capitol Hill are palpable.

Indeed, it’s been a rough few months for the Tea Party. Fewer Americans than at any time since 2010 now call themselves members or supporters of the group. The tactic of running far-right candidates in Republican primaries clearly cost the GOP control of the Senate in 2010 and again in 2012. Their intransigence also helped to prevent Mitt Romney from defeating the president they have so vilified. All this has sparked counter-mobilization by the GOP Old Guard too: Since last fall’s ill-conceived Tea Party-led gambit to shut down the government, defund the Affordable Care Act and potentially default on the national debt, establishment Republicans have boldly lashed out at conservative outside groups that once had them cowering in fear, while pouring millions of dollars into races across the country to bolster moderates against right-wing insurgents.

At the same time, some of the leading Tea Party figures on the national stage are now departing from elective office, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who won’t seek reelection this year, and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who left the Senate last year to become president of the Heritage Foundation. Others have consolidated their positions as national laughingstocks—most notably former veep wannabe Sarah Palin, but also the filibustering, Dr. Seuss-reading Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who seems to be following the same trajectory, only faster. Others have been busy distancing themselves from the Tea Party, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) taking a more moderate stance on immigration and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) choosing to emphasize civil liberties over more radical tactics..

There may still be plot twists, turns and even reversals ahead for the Tea Party, but the main question now is not if the group is in decline but what its endgame will be. Tea Party proponents have been quick to claim a long and victorious lineage in U.S. history, ranging from their namesake tax revolt in Boston in 1773 to the 1978 anti-tax Proposition 13 rebellion in California. It’s no surprise that the Tea Party is eager to stress such antecedents, since both led to huge victories: the American Revolution and the rise of Reaganism. Both historic episodes also share a heroic story of grassroots anti-government struggle followed by a supposed triumph of liberty.

So how does the Tea Party’s story end? Consider a wider lens, one that includes comparable movements in other democracies. The Tea Party is but one example of a common form of political insurgency—one that almost always loses in the long run. This kind of counter-establishment movement is common enough that comparative politics has a term for it: the “anti-system party”—a group that seeks to obstruct and delegitimize the entire political system in which the government functions. As explained by Giovanni Sartori, the Italian political scientist who coined the term in 1976, an anti-system is driven not by “an opposition on issues” but “an opposition of principle.”

“An anti-system party would not change—if it could—the government but the very system of government,” Sartori wrote. “[A]n anti-system opposition abides by a belief system that does not share the values of the political order within which it operates.”

Sartori had foremost in mind the various communist parties active in Western Europe during the Cold War, but the concept has been applied to movements as varied as right-wing nationalists, radical libertarians and ethnic separatists all across the world.

Without adopting the phrase itself, the Tea Party in both words and deeds has positioned itself as America’s newest anti-system party. Claiming the mantle of patriotism, Tea Partiers say they love the United States while hating the U.S. government—its practices, its rules and especially its procedures for achieving compromise and consensus. The litany of anti-government Tea Party efforts is by now familiar. In Congress: shutting down the government, abusing the filibuster, threatening a default on the debt. During elections: suppressing the minority vote under the guise of fraud prevention, undermining the Voting Rights Act, aggressively gerrymandering for partisan advantage, challenging the citizenship of the president. In political rhetoric: vilifying the “47 percent” who are “bribed” by the welfare state, denouncing Republican-inspired and market-based health care reforms as socialism, lamenting the passing of the white Christian conservative hegemony of “real America.”

The Tea Party’s rhetoric and actions may be bold, but they are not sustainable. While anti-system parties’ ideal outcome would be to take over and re-make the political system entirely, this rarely happens—it requires a full-blown revolution, not mere incremental change. To the chagrin of most Tea Partiers, the world’s preeminent anti-system party was undoubtedly the Bolsheviks during the late tsarist era in Russia.

More typically, anti-system parties are seduced into becoming a part of existing structures of power, such as when the French Communist Party joined Socialist-led governments when they came to power the 1980s and 1990s. More often, however, anti-system parties bring political ruin upon themselves through their own excesses and then dissolve into political irrelevance, which is increasingly the trajectory of The Tea Party.

This process is well underway not only in the United States but also in several other Western democracies in which anti-system parties emerged after the global financial meltdown of 2008-2009. One telling example is Britain, where in 2010 the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) launched a challenge to the Conservative-Liberal coalition government. The party has been rallying behind a leader, Nigel Farage, who has been dubbed “the British Ted Cruz.” But under Britain’s winner-take-all electoral system, the UKIP now seems likely to swing the next general election back to Labour by siphoning votes off in regions that would otherwise be Tory strongholds, thus ensuring the UKIP’s own political irrelevance.

In Italy, the anti-system Five Star Movement had a robust third-place showing in the 2013 national elections, winning one in four votes. But the group then refused to join a new government, instead maintaining what they deemed a principled unwillingness to compromise. Similarly, in Greece, the radical-left Syriza Party placed a strong second in 2012 elections but decided not to join a broad coalition, instead becoming the country’s main opposition party. In both Italy and Greece, the political system has already begun to move on and forge fresh political alliances and new majority configurations—all without the participation of the anti-system parties, whose members preferred to remain obstructionists rather than part of the solutions to their countries’ crises.

Although such self-defeating behavior usually seals the fate of anti-system parties, a more hopeful endgame suggested by Sartori is that of “reciprocal relegitimization.” In this scenario, both sides of the conflict accept the basic legitimacy of the other, and the perspectives of the anti-system parties become integrated into a new consensus. Think of nascent democracies such as post-apartheid South Africa and post-Pinochet Chile. Some bitterly divided former communist countries in Europe, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, have also been able to reconcile forces of both right and left and to refashion themselves as model European states. Those unable to do so, notably Ukraine today, face ongoing strife.

Although the United States is generally not as polarized as these societies, the U.S. government has been bitterly divided in recent years. Fortunately, the basis for reciprocal relegitimization in the United States has, in fact, already begun to come into focus, coinciding with the Tea Party’s weakening. The eleventh–hour vote last fall to reopen the federal government and avert a catastrophic default offered the faint outlines of a centrist governing coalition. The measure passed the Senate 81–18 and the House 285–144, with support from the leadership of both parties in both houses and from the president. The subsequent budget deal, struck between Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and passed into law in December despite Tea Party laments, rolled back the mindless cuts of the 2013 sequester and promises to avert future crises. In the House, as throughout much of the nation, Republicans have begun to move beyond the Tea Party’s thrall.

So what happens next? Asked about oppositional “third party” movements in American history, the historian Richard Hofstadter famously said they are like bees—“once they have stung, they die.” The Occupy Movement, the Tea Party’s ostensible left-wing anti-system counterpart, already had its day, made its mark and has expired as a political force. The Tea Party has most definitely stung. Now there can be but one last stage ahead.

This op-ed was originally published by Politico Magazine.

Keep Nuclear Energy On The Table

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Tuesday, President Obama’s State of the Union address touched briefly on the all-of-the-above energy strategy that his administration has made a priority for the past few years. However, one thing missing from his remarks about energy was nuclear power. Nuclear energy production must remain an important component of any successful U.S. energy strategy and part of the global climate change solution.

As President Obama rightly noted, “[America’s] energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet.” Nuclear power isn’t the only answer to American energy needs, nor should it be. But it is an important part of the well-balanced solution. The United States is leading the way to safer and more economical plants and the sector continues to innovate and improve the technology for the next generation of nuclear energy facilities. Progressives must not run from supporting nuclear energy and should continue to consider it a viable clean energy alternative as part of a comprehensive energy plan.

Financial Times: Barack Obama battles a sense of drift on State of the Union goals

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Barney Jopson writing for Financial Times quoted Michael Mandel, PPI’s Chief Economic Strategist, this morning.  Jopson’s article reflected on the President Obama’s accomplishments of 2013 in an effort to project the substance of tonight’s State of the Union address. The article discusses the President’s successes and failures at passing legislation since his last address, Mandel comments that:

Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, says the president should get credit for the result regardless of how it was achieved.

Read the entire Financial Times article here.

NY Times: New York, the Silicon City

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all the talk of New York’s “tale of two cities” economic divide, last week Mayor Bill de Blasio took charge of a local economy that has far outperformed the rest of the country since the financial collapse — and not just in a small corner of Manhattan, but across the city. Driven by the expansion of the technology and information sector, New York City today has more private-sector jobs than during the 2007-8 peak of the finance-driven boom years.

New York has, over the last decade, become a tech city to rival San Francisco, Boston and Seattle. And it has done so by moving away from its old reliance on the finance and legal sectors, and the industries like hospitality that rely on them. The challenge for Mr. de Blasio is continuing that trend, and making sure all New Yorkers benefit from it.

Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, can justifiably boast about New York’s rise to prominence as a “digital city.” On his watch, the technology and information sector has become the city’s second-most-powerful economic engine, after financial services. New York now has 10 percent of the country’s jobs in the “Internet publishing and web search portal” industry, up from just over 6 percent in 2007.

Surprisingly, over the past couple of years, the city’s minority populations have been among the main beneficiaries of this boom. Since 2010, the number of blacks working in computer and mathematical occupations — the Census Bureau’s term for tech-related jobs — in the city has risen by 19.7 percent, based on a preliminary analysis of new census data.

Continue reading at the New York Times.

 

Washington Monthly: What If the US Had a Multiparty System Like Germany’s?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the U.S. still barely recovered from to al partisan gridlock and political dysfunction, Germany has once again formed a “grand coalition” bringing together the two main center-right and center-left parties, which collectively won more than 70% of the vote in last September’s parliamentary elections. The biggest sticking point? Figuring out the best mechanism for determining the country’s minimum wage.

How do the Germans manage to produce such cooperation and consensus in a system of five parties – and what might politics look like if the U.S. had such a multiparty system? Part of the answer in Germany lies in the intricate construction of its electoral process which, for obvious historical reasons, was designed after World War II to decentralize and disperse power.

Members of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, are chosen through a process in which each German citizen has two votes. The first vote, as in the U.S., is cast for an individual person to represent a specific electoral district. The second, and ultimately more influential, vote is cast directly for a political party and determines the overall party composition of government.

Such use of a proportional representation system almost guarantees that Germany will have a multiparty system. But in order to avoid chaotic hyper-fragmentation among parties (as found, for instance, in Italy) Germany enforces a threshold of 5% for a party to enter into the Bundestag. Essentially, any party that fails to gain at least 5% of the national vote is excluded from parliament, a provision that has proven useful in promoting centrism and marginalizing extremes, including both neo-fascist parties and the remnants of the old Communist Party in East Germany.

In all, the German system has tended to yield parliaments with about five parties represented — which is also roughly what the U.S. political system might produce under similar rules.

Consider first the Democrats in the U.S., who have long been a loose coalition between classic “blue collar voters” (who have a strong interest in issues like labor rights and the social safety net) and socially liberal voters (who are focused more on themes of multiculturalism and diversity). Of late, the two branches have been cooperating well. But the old fault lines can still turn up, such as in the debate over immigration, in which one wing is mostly concern about domestic wage competition and the other side places more emphasis on the civil rights of minorities. It’s not hard to imagine the blue-collar Democrats and the socially liberal Democrats forming separate parties under a proportional representation approach.

The Republicans, it’s now evident, are much more fragmented, consisting of a rump of “Establishment Republicans,” a Tea Party cohort maniacally focused on reducing the size of government, and a religious right that prioritizes “traditional values.” Clearly these groups do overlap, as perhaps best illustrated by the fondness of Michele Bachmann both for overturning Obamacare and for heralding the arrival of the Rapture. In a multiparty system, these various branches wings would likely sort into three separate parties – thus totaling five parties across the political spectrum, as is usually the case in Germany.

This year in Germany, the 5% threshold led to this exclusion of the small, free-market oriented Free Democratic Party, which has served as the junior partner since 2009 in the government led by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. This forced Merkel to turn to the Social Democrats to reach a governing majority.

Naturally, each major party would prefer to have unilateral control over government, but the decision to form a broad governing coalition between the German center-right and the center-left is hardly unprecedented: the same situation prevailed from 2005 to 2009, a period during which Germany weathered the global economic downturn far better than most countries. Just as the American two-party system has led to sharp polarization, the German multiparty system has pushed them towards greater accommodation.

“Grand coalition” governments are not panaceas. Most notably, they often suffer from an inability to offer more than incremental changes and a tendency to fracture under stress. In the longer run it’s also problematic not to have the government in power checked by forceful opposition from a major party outside government.

Still, such arrangements promote broad consensus and enhance the stability of a political system , given that the governing coalition incorporates parties supported by 7 in 10 voters. The last time the U.S. had anything remotely like such a grand coalition was in the period after 9/11 when leaders from both parties coalesced around President George W. Bush and Democrats made little attempt to use their one-vote Senate majority to obstructionist ends.

The 11th-hour vote on October 18 to reopen the U.S. federal government and avert a catastrophic debt default also offered the faint outline of a centrist governing coalition: the measure passed the Senate by 81-18 and the House by 285-144, with the support of leaders of both parties in both houses and of president. The more recent Ryan-Murray budget deal also offers prospects of reasonable compromise. This makes it all the more intriguing to imagine what American government could accomplish with the four years of the sort of sensible, centrist politics and policy making that seems likely to prevail in Germany thanks (at least in part) to its multiparty system.

This piece was originally published by Washington Monthly, you can read it on their website here.

Restoring Regular Order

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Murray-Ryan deal sailed through the House yesterday, raising hopes that Washington may be returning, however fitfully, to “regular order” when it comes to the federal budget.

At a time when fiscal brinksmanship and 11th hour continuing resolutions have become the new normal, it is easy to forget the years prior when passing an annual budget was something that lawmakers were eager to undertake. They looked forward to their budget debates and hearings, as these events allowed them not only to engage in their oversight duty, but also to perform their theater. These were their stages to affect policy and gain public recognition.

What would it mean to restore regular order on budgeting? Although Congress has the ultimate responsibility for passing a budget, the process actually begins in the executive branch. The first step is for the President to submit his budget early next year.

For decades, federal agencies have submitted initial budget requests to the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) for review in the early fall. Budgetary decisions are then made by the OMB Director and are passed back to the agencies. The agencies may appeal these decisions, but have a short window of time to do so. This process is presumably happening right now. Continue reading “Restoring Regular Order” →

Ungrand Bargain

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For years, fiscal hawks have been urging elected officials to “go big” on debt reduction.  But as yesterday’s House vote on the Murray-Ryan budget showed, budget minimalism is the art of the possible in today’s Washington.

It’s an exceedingly modest agreement that temporarily repairs some of the damage done by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Nonetheless, the Senate ought to pass the two-year budget too, because it would accomplish three important things:

First, it would prevent another government shutdown in January. With the recovery finally gaining steam, it’s essential that Washington refrain from the kind of fiscal brinksmanship that has repeatedly torpedoed economic confidence. Yet the GOP could yet force a fiscal crisis over raising the debt ceiling, which has to be done again early next year.

Second, the agreement blunts the impact of the sequester, at least for the next two years. The deal would replace about half of the sequester’s cuts to domestic and defense spending in 2014 with savings elsewhere in the budget. And because those offsets take effect in future years, the deal also would reduce fiscal drag on the economy. Still, it’s just a temporary fix, and in any fiscal reform worthy of the name, the sequester must go.

Third, the deal could signal a “return to normalcy” in budget politics. In a rare moment of bipartisan accord, it passed the House with roughly equal numbers of GOP and Democratic votes. And for once, House Speaker John Boehner forthrightly criticized the Tea Party bitter enders and right-wing pressure groups who oppose on principle even tiny compromises with Democrats on fiscal matters.

The Murray-Ryan agreement has one really egregious flaw: It failed to extend unemployment benefits for 1.3 workers stuck in long spells of unemployment. Senate Democrats say they will try to rectify that Grinch-like omission next year.

All in all, however, the deal strikes a small blow for fiscal sanity and against the extremists who have held sway over Republicans since the 2010 election.

Our Odd Upper House: The U.S. Senate’s Peculiarities Don’t End With the Filibuster

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The filibuster is back in the news, but that’s just one of the peculiarities that make the U.S. Senate perhaps the world’s oddest legislative chamber.

When viewed from an international perspective, three other features — the extraordinary scope of its powers, its drastic misapportionment, and the exceptional weakness of its leadership structures — make the U.S. Senate a true global outlier. Further, each of these features has a significant (and often negative) impact on American democracy, politics, and policymaking.

The Senate is an Exceptionally Powerful Upper House: The Senate shares full legislative, budgeting, and oversight authority with the House; it also has additional powers to confirm executive nominees and to ratify treaties. However, among legislatures in the world’s established democracies, the norm is for upper houses to be decisively weaker than lower houses. Besides Italy, no other member of NATO, the European Union, or the G-8 has an upper house whose power matches that of its lower house.

Indeed, of the 23 countries that have been independent and continuously democratic since 1950, only three besides the U.S. have powerful upper houses. The remainder are either unicameral, and hence have no upper house at all, or apply a version of the so-called “one-and-a-half house” approach. Under this approach, weak upper houses play a role by reviewing legislation, voicing minority opinions, and suggesting amendments. But they rarely initiate major bills and, most importantly, they can be overridden by the lower house in cases of disagreement.

Such constitutional arrangements greatly streamline the legislative process and facilitate the creation of coherent public policy. In contrast, political systems with two equally powerful chambers, such as Italy and much of Latin America, are much more prone to ineffective governance of the kind we’ve been witnessing in Washington D.C.

The Senate is Extraordinarily Malapportioned: If the concept of “one-person, one-vote” is the modern gold standard for the allocation of political power, then the Senate is easily one of the world’s least representative legislative houses. Wyoming’s population of 576,000 is 66 times smaller than California’s 37 million — yet both have two US Senators. Likewise, North Dakotans have 38 times the per capita influence of Texans in the Senate, and Vermonters have 31 times the Senate clout of their neighbors in New York.

When translated into votes on the Senate floor, the nine most populous states represent just over 50 percent of the population but have a mere 18 Senators. The 26 smallest states have a majority of 52 Senators, but include only 18 percent of the national population.

The small-population states have repeatedly benefited from their outsized representation in the Senate by receiving disproportionate funding in such policy areas as food and nutrition, community development, environmental quality, disaster relief, and homeland security. Although some other democracies also have malapportioned upper houses, those upper houses tend to relatively weak and thus their policy impact is much less pronounced.

The Senate is Largely Leaderless: Although the Senate Majority Leader is often equated with the Speaker of the House, by comparison the power of the Senate’s top figure is ambiguous and diffuse. Unlike the Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader has no Rules Committee and few other tools to determine the flow of legislation or to limit the amount of deliberation, debate, and delay on the floor. Senator Robert Dole once opined that he was not “the Majority Leader, but the Majority Pleader.”

The major difference between the houses, of course, is that individual Senators can and do make creative use of that chamber’s expansive rules of debate and amendment — including, yes, the filibuster, which was only partly reformed by last week’s actions by Senate Democrats.

Virtually nowhere else in the world can a single rank-and-file member of a legislature so easily bring the work of the entire legislature to such a halt. And as a consequence, few other legislative chambers have leaders who are so weak relative to the average member, and thus so unable to set coherent goals or to move the institution beyond impasses. Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott got it about right when he termed his autobiographyHerding Cats.

So can any of this be meaningfully addressed? Reform of the Senate has been discussed for almost as long as the Senate has been in existence, and change does not come easily. However, last week’s events show that incremental reforms are achievable. The year 2013 also marks the centennial of the 17th Amendment, which ushered in huge changes by mandating the direct election of Senators — and also made it clear that sweeping reform of the Senate is indeed possible.

These debates are sure to continue, but in the meantime it’s valuable for Americans to understand our unusual upper house as it really is, and not as we may assume it to be.

The Huffington Post published this article by Raymond Smith, a PPI senior fellow.  You can find the original article here.

MSNBC: What’s Bill Clinton up to on Obamacare?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

MSNBC’s Zachary Roth recently quoted Will Marshall, PPI President, on Clinton’s recent push to modify the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) in Congress.  Marshall was asked to interpret Clinton’s support for a legislative fix.

“Not sure how helpful that was,” Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, who worked closely with Clinton in the ‘80s and ‘90s to move the Democratic Party toward the center, told MSNBC.

“Practically speaking, it’s hard to see how to get a legislative fix through Congress,” Marshall said. “One has to think about the means not just the good ends of policy in this context. And I don’t know what [Clinton’]s theory for that is.”

Read the entire piece on MSNBC here.

 

Is Tea Party Tide Receding?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans won some and lost some in last night’s off-year elections, but the results were an unmitigated disaster for the Tea Party.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie’s thumping reelection victory thrusts him into the forefront of the GOP’s 2016 nomination race. Christie is the Tea Party’s nemesis, one of the few prominent Republicans not cowed by its demands for ideological purity. In demonstrating cross-over appeal in a resolutely blue state, Christie shows Republicans how to regain their competitiveness in presidential elections. His approach, of course, collides headlong into the Tea Party’s formula for maximum political polarization.

Especially stinging for the Tea Party was Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat in Virginia, now a key swing state. Some conservatives take solace in Cuccinelli’s late surge, which they attribute to his decision to make the race a referendum on Obamacare. It’s just as likely, however, that the close finish reflected shallow support for his opponent, political neophyte and Clinton pal Terry McAuliffe. In fact, Cuccinelli may have hurt himself by injecting the ideologically charged issue of Obamacare into a governor’s race, which usually turns on more prosaic, state-level priorities like transportation and education. Some analysts think the GOP-engineered government shutdown, which evidently drove enraged federal workers to the polls, may have been a bigger factor in the McAuliffe’s win.

Nonetheless, some conservatives complain that Republicans “betrayed” Cuccinelli by investing little in his campaign, allowing McAuliffe to outspend him by a significant margin. And in an ominous sign of a widening fissure within the GOP coalition, some key business allies also declined to put much money into Cuccinelli’s campaign.

However they spin their loss, Republicans know Virginia is a state they should have won. They faced a weak opponent and enjoyed a strong tailwind from President Obama’s drooping approval rating, as well as Virginia’s well-established habit of voting against the party that won the previous year’s presidential election. Had they nominated a more mainstream Republican, like Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, they likely would have held Richmond.

Finally, the Tea Party also was rebuffed in another closely-watched race in Alabama. In the Republican runoff for Alabama’s First Congressional District, business and party leaders rallied behind Bradly Byrne, who beat back a challenge from Tea Party favorite Dean Young.  From the standpoint of the civil war erupting within the Republican Party, this was the most telling result of the night. It showed how thoroughly disenchanted the GOP establishment, including business, have grown with the Tea Party’s radical rejection of compromise and the normal give and take of governing.

It’s one thing for a certified extremist like Cucinnelli to fall short in purple Virginia. But when Tea Party heroes start losing primaries in crimson Alabama, it’s a stronger signal that the GOP’s extremist tide is receding.

This piece is cross-posted at the Washington Monthly.

How Belgium Survived 20 Months Without a Government

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you think a few days of “government shutdown” in the U.S. is bad, consider that in 2010-2011, Belgium had a political crisis that prevented formation of a government for 589 days. What may be most surprising, though, is that the Belgians found a way to keep their government programs and services running without serious interruption.

Belgians are far more divided than Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., split between a wealthier Flemish-speaking north with 60 percent of the population and a less prosperous French-speaking south. The cultural distinctions, linguistic antagonism, and regional separation between the two halves of the nation have long made it difficult to create a coherent majority in a parliament full of multiple small parties split along communal lines.

But the nation’s long-running divisions hit an all-time-low when the prime minister resigned in April 2010 and no new parliamentary majority could be established. Round after round of fruitless negotiations went on for the rest of 2010 and most of 2011. No faction or party was willing to compromise, nor could any single politician emerge as a unifying figure.

So what happened to the crucial work of Belgium’s government? Nothing much at all – things mostly went on as usual. The prior government stayed on in a “caretaking capacity” and the bureaucracy continued to hum along. As a report in Time put it: ” the absence of a government makes little difference to day-to-day life in Belgium…. Belgium deftly helmed the presidency of the E.U. in the second half of 2010, and the caretaker government last month headed off market jitters over its debt levels by quickly agreeing on a tighter budget. The country is recovering well from the downturn, with growth last year at 2.1 percent (compared with the E.U. average of 1.5%), foreign investment doubling and unemployment at 8.5 percent, well below the E.U. average of 9.4%. ‘By and large, everything still works. We get paid, buses run, schools are open,’ says Marc De Vos, a professor at Ghent University.”

Continue reading at the Washington Monthly.

Democrats Must Avoid Republican Economic Anarchism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Economic calamity begets radical politics. America’s worst financial panic and recession since the 1930s gave birth to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Now Occupy seems to be fizzling out, but in Week 2 of a government shutdown, it is looking more likely that Tea Party Republicans could plunge the nation gratuitously into a new economic emergency.

The GOP’s surrender to fiscal anarchism is bad for the country. But it does give President Obama and his party an opportunity to seize the high ground on jobs and economic growth — the issue uppermost in Americans’ minds. For that to happen, however, Democrats will need to abandon their ritual business-bashing, embrace the productive forces in U.S. society and honor companies that are investing in America’s future.

Why? Because the nation’s job drought is really an investment drought. With gridlock in Washington and financial troubles at the state and local level, real government spending on productive assets from highways and bridges to computer equipment is down by half compared with the average level of the 2000s.

Private sector investment is doing better but still falls well short of what the country needs to generate “breadwinner” jobs and raise middle-class wages. Although corporate profits have rebounded lustily, many companies are still hoarding cash — about $2 trillion worth — or spending it on stock buy-backs. U.S. business investment, outside of housing, is still 20% below its long-term trend.

Continue reading at USA Today.